Andrew Durbin - Mature Themes

in butter, crusted black with red pepper on toast I can’t stop

Guy Fieri brought among us angels fine dessert from New York

cheesecake exceptionally chilled you can spot icicles

forming each one crusted in graham

crackers topped with

whipped cream

and sea-

sonal

fruit draped

across a bed of NY’s

finest cheese encased in a deep-

dish cookie dough pie smothered in walnuts

you’ll be knee deep in it for weeks baked in a sugar crust with a

mountain of ice cream on top leaving me in some fever of cake

in a bed of malted chocolate buttercream and Belgian

chocolate ice cream draped effortlessly

over double chocolate

layer cake

left

me

totally transfixed

urgh I can’t stop Guy I could

pass out on a beach of fried ice cream $9

swimming in hot fudge sauce could you imagine

living forever, Guy, in heaven among angels frothy with delight?

After dinner, my Tamagotchi angel vibrated in my pocket because it was hungry. This was the fifth or sixth time it had done so in three days. I pulled it out and looked at its distressed, pixelated face, squared by a universe wired to hunger and a desire for my attention. “Please feed me,” my angel chirped. After the feast we’d just had I thought it would be full for life, but apparently not. The angel Guy Fieri’s fried ice cream left it only craving more. My angel continued to bounce up and down; its wings molted and folded behind its back. Long, silken feathers littered the bottom of the screen where it rested in a final malaise. I suggested to my angel that it eat and satisfy itself with the meat of Christ, but my angel shook its head and said, “It isn’t enough.” Around me, Chinatown froze at the still point of summer, the air held quietly over us, submerged in the complimentary aromas of duck, dried fish, roasted chicken, and pork buns, a disassembling zone of modes of commodity exchange amid weird silence. It was too hot to speak.

The summer my Tamagotchi died was the hottest on record. Its intensity relaxed by July into an oppressive norm I finally surrendered to. Shift in climate, fewer clouds, the trees do nothing. I missed my Best Western days, long before Paula’s rise and fall, when air conditioning was a given. The summer my Tamagotchi died, it gasped before its personality self-deleted and said to me, “The difference between us is I can reboot whereas you cannot, you are evil, you surf mindlessly, you cannot PROTECT against bedbugs, you cannot reach your weight loss goal for just $4 a week, you cannot have infinite moments of intimate pleasure, you cannot congratulations you have been chosen for this special offer, get $10 and 6 months financing, work-at-home, you cannot make $7,487.00 per month without selling anything, it’s brand new, and just about the most awesomest thing I’ve ever seen, the #1 easiest system ever for creating floods of cash from home, No Google, No Hard Website Code, no SEO or any of that other stuff, something totally different, you cannot start immediately, you cannot understand why this mail came to you. We have been having a meeting for the past three months that just ended a few days ago with the secretary to the United Nations, This email is to all the people that have been scammed in any part of the world, the UNITED NATIONS IN Affiliation with WORLD BANK have agreed to compensate them with the sum of $600,000. This includes every foreign contractors that may have not received their contract sum, and people that have had an unfinished transaction or international businesses that failed due to Government problems etc. Dear Sir/Madam, There is an issue with the WESTERN UNION MONEY TRANSFER PROMO in the amount of One Million Eight Hundred and Fifty Thousand United State of America Dollars $1,850,000.00 directed in cash credited to file UNP/90663/12 as 2012 payment, at the owner of this email address. This is from a total cash prize of $200,980,000.00 (US$ Two Hundred Million and Nine Hundred and Eighty Thousand US dollars) shared amongst the first fifteen (15) lucky winners in this category all over the globe. We found your name ANDREW DURBIN in the list of those who are to benefit from these compensation exercise and that is why we are contacting you, this have been agreed upon and have been signed. You are advised to contact Rev. Paul Jefferson of BANCO CAJA ESPANA of our paying center in Spain, as he is our representative in Spain, contact him immediately for your Cheque / International Bank Draft of $600,000. This funds are in a Bank Draft for security purpose ok? so he will send it to you and you can clear it in any bank of your choice.”

At dinner, Katy Perry cried into her napkin. “It’s no big deal,” she said, waving away her personal assistant, who retreated to the corner of the room. “It’s really no big deal.”

“Why are you crying?” her current boyfriend demanded, turning to her. He forced a smile at all of us around the table, his first and only gesture toward anyone else at dinner besides Katy. She looked away from him. I thought the current boyfriend should chill, but he repeated himself, putting his hand on her shoulder: “Why are you crying, Katy ?”

She shook her head. “I’m fine, OK?”

“ Surrrrrrrre ,” he said, lowering his head toward his plate. He poked at his Isle of Gigha halibut. “Whatever.”

I looked at Katy, who stared blankly across the table, just past my shoulder toward the shadowy hallway that led to the kitchen. We were at a dinner hosted by [REDACTED], a well-known record producer who had recently terminated his contract with Virgin Records and moved back to the city where his parents had raised him, where he had attended Bronx Science, and where, in college, he had listened to Madonna’s “Vogue” and decided he wanted to produce other people’s sound. A wax candle separated Katy and me. It had been dripping onto a plate of white asparagus all night and was nearly gone. The room was dark and the apartment evoked — at the muted end of the Bloomberg Administration, with its sleek, glassy high-rises — the sillier vibes of a haunted house, an older, vaudeville New York, gauzy with cobwebs. We could hardly see the food on our plates.

The producer’s old Upper East Side flat had gone unchanged for sixty or so years, he had told us at the start of dinner. His parents died there and he “took over” shortly thereafter, among rumors of a breakdown in Aspen.

Katy wore what looked like several dead flamingos wrapped around her from ankle to chin. The birds’ necks had been twisted to form a high collar finished in gold thread and little tufts of green fur. She had described it to me as “romantic couture” when we took the elevator up to the apartment together. Perry is gorgeous by nonspecific design, accumulating color and fabric without ever fixing a permanent look, except perhaps vague kitsch, itself somewhat chic. I tried to find the heads of the flamingos among the pink feathers, but if it ever was a flock of birds those heads were long ago removed, thrown away in the garbage, the necks stuffed and sewn up, tied and fitted to form the collar of the dress.

Katy Perry had just released her third album, Prism . It was, at the time of our dinner, number one and showed no signs of slowing down.

[REDACTED] returned to talking about his friendship with the boys of One Direction. (We had been discussing, among many things, American vs. British pop.) We all leaned in, Katy too, as he recalled the time he swore he saw two of the boys, Louis and Harry, enter the same bedroom after a party in Tokyo, holding hands, even though the boys had been booked separate suites. When [REDACTED] asked a member of their security detail about “the sleeping situation” the next morning, he said Harry never left Louis’s room. “They can’t keep their hands off each other, you know.”