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Small Cruel Party
summer1
There's some kind of lounged out ambient remix of an Inxs single on the stereo when I walk into the bedroom. The curtains are pulled across open windows and outside the white noise of the street drifts in. I look down on the bed and see her lying naked on her stomach, a cigarette in one hand and the latest issue of something large enough to be the Heat Sheet open in front of her. Around her knot of black hair I can see a picture of a head bent over a mirror and a couple of little white lines.
"Hey love. How's the day?" I check my profile in the mirror and quickly smile at myself. Thank God I didn't shave this morning. I've got kind of a Milan Vukmirovic thing going on. Even though I don't really like what he did with Jil Sander's summer line, too much tan, I can still respect his personal style. This is, I think, a measure of how open minded and progressive I am.
"I thought you were going to be here a half hour ago."
"Yeah, sorry 'bout that. Stuck late in a meeting."
She's still not looking at me, but I wonder if this is because she's genuinely pissed off or if it's because the girl blowing lines in the picture looks suspiciously like an ex-girlfriend of hers. I think the latter, and sit on the bed next to her, casually shaking a cigarette out of her pack and shooting a jet of smoke at the ceiling.
"What kind of meeting?"
"A business meeting. Leveraged buyouts, hostile takeovers, short selling stock, junk bonds. Jesus. You're not even ready yet. I had to spend two fucking hours personally calming down Mr Bar Owner that we're not going to have five hundred kids ready to bust up the joint if they don't get in. And then I had to go halfway across the fucking town to double check on the PA because fuckup Bliss couldn't get her shit together after a night of blasting coke to do the job that I'm overpaying her for. And my car got a damn parking ticket for being in a no parking zone that wasn't even marked.
I swear to God there was no sign. Probably some thugs from the fucking ghetto ripped it up. And who do the cops hassle? Bin-fucking-go."
"All I have to do is throw on my dress. See? Hanging on the closet door? I thought you were going to be here earlier is all. Don't get bitchy with me." Hanging on the closet door is a black dress with a wide skirt and two inches of black tulle peeking out underneath. Underneath the dress, on the floor, is a very polished pair of black combat boots. I'm wearing a black Donna Karan suit, an immaculately starched white spread collar shirt from Brooks Brothers, a black and grey tie from Burberry, and black driving shoes from Tod's. I'm thinking of photographer's flash bulbs and sparkling eyes and maybe I'll break the scowl tonight. But probably not. There's still too much to worry about between throwing a good launch and looking for something new, there's still an unfinished class or four, and there's a lingering concern that bad news is on its way. There was a muttered aside last night with the words "cocaine," "problem," and my name placed in uncomfortable proximity. I take a long drag from my cigarette and think about where muttered asides come from and why they bother me when I've been working steadily for the past six weeks on this project that's shaping up
to be... what? Probably to be maybe a great big nothing, or maybe something good, something great, something to redistribute wealth from their trust funds into my personal accounts. Something fun and new and I know because I've been hearing people talk about it for the past couple of weeks and without any kind of paid-for advertising at all the voice mailbox that Bliss is supposed to keep an eye on is always full and people who hate me are suddenly beginning to acknowledge my existence and all of a sudden I was back in the game and it felt good to be so respected and wanted for sitting there and doing nothing.
"Did you hear me?"
"What?" No. Did you say something worth hearing? Then that's why I didn't.
"I said are you going to keep sitting there doing nothing, or are you going to have some kind of conversation with me while I get dressed?"
"Oh. Are you going to get dressed now?" Finally?
"Since we're already at least a half hour late to a cocktail party being thrown for you, I thought I might do my part to, you know, speed things along."
I'm looking at the picture in the magazine now, thinking it really does look an awful lot like her ex-girlfriend, and speed? no, I think it's really coke because Emily really never had the balls to stay up for weeks straight like a good girl, but I don't want to seem jealous or anything so I try not to let her see me squinting at the caption and trying to make out what name is printed in impossibly small Garamond.
"That's good. I mean, yeah, I guess we should motor along. How was your day, kitten?"
"Fine. Jayne and I had lunch at Domino, then I had to go and yell at my actors for three hours while they stood around and pouted at me. Finally I let them go because I had to get to Industry to get my hair done and I was almost late because the stupid fucking cab driver didn't know his way around one way streets. And then I came back here expecting to find you waiting for me and ready to go to this damn thing but you weren't here and you didn't call so I didn't know what was going on and all I really want is a drink and would you please stop staring at that picture and make me something. And yes, it is Emily, and yes, I am happy that she's probably very pissed off that this ran just when her new play is about to go up. Conceited little bitch. I don't know what we ever saw in her."

"...well, see the thing is that I don't know how we can convince the school to let us have events like this on a regular basis because of the sorts of drugs and drinking and god knows what else goes on whenever you throw a party, and they're definitely not forgetting a certain six figure settlement with a sorority girl from the Upper East Side, I can assure you. Have I expressed that clearly enough? I'm being serious here, because I want you to know that all concerned are really not very amused by your demands for this whole thing, and are reminding me to remind you that you have
signed an exclusive contract with them for a certain number of events that you are dangerously close to breaking, and that breach of contract is not an activity that they feel entirely comfortable with,and particularly not when you are the party in question. I want you to know how we feel, and I want you to think carefully about what you're asking me for and what you'll probably wind up doing anyway regardless of what I say. Because it's a fucking nightmare over here on my desk and the calls and the faxes and you've got me chewing fucking Lithium like it's fucking popcorn or something.
Jesus. You look like shit. What have you been doing lately? And oh, hey, I think you should know that some people are talking about you and the Bolivian marching powder. I think you should be more careful, you know, if you want to stick around here. Remember the contract and that sort of thing."

Rule Number Three: Take the Stairs. You wake up as early as possible in the morning and you're probably dehydrated from the night before and so you pull yourself out of bed and stumble into the bathroom and bolt a glass of water. Do the shower thing, the hair thing, the skin thing. Only natural products, organic, not tested on animals, products that make you smell more feminine than the (maybe too young) girl still asleep in your bed. Kitchen for another glass of water, a quick bowl of something natural and crunchy, seven grain toast with Maine blueberry preserves. Bedroom for
cigarettes, keys, lighter, wallet, watch, bag. Hope girl isn't awake and that she'll split before you get back. Run down the two flights of stairs to the garage and hop in the car. Drive to the trendy but still fiercely independent coffee shop owned by the cool gay guy who must spend twenty hours at the gym doing his upper body. Or someone else's lower. Buy a large cup and fill it with one small scoop ginseng and as much black tea as it will hold. Antioxidants fight free radicals at the cellular level, which is important because free radicals attack cells and destroy them and create more free radicals in the process and the whole thing spirals out of control until you get Parkinson's and can't do anything but sit there and drool at the nursing home television. Tip your change. Walk to the gothic revival building and climb the four flights of stairs to the department where you work. The stairs are important because some days are just so totally booked solid that you can't even squeeze out an hour at the gym, and four flights of stairs at a moderate pace kickstart the metabolism into eliminating whatever you did but should not have done last night and get it ready for the blast of caffeine you're about to hit it with. Taking the stairs is a good workout, and if you wind up taking the stairs four or five times a day, you can maintain a nice definition in your legs without even trying, and your ass will be invitingly firm for whoever's hand finds its way there in the course of a given day. Take the Stairs.

I'm all of a sudden looking up into a pair of ice blue eyes with tight pupils. Something in the back of my head explodes and I blink a few times and set my jaw. Clench it, morelike. I look around for a cigarette and something to drink. I grin at myself in the mirror in front of me. My smile looks good, and I have the interesting novelty of being able to see myself smiling from both the front and from below, except that the view from below is partially obscured by a small pile of cocaine that a few of us are trying very hard to get through. Someone hands me a joint but I take a pass and let it continue its way around the room, knowing that pot is the least desirable thing in the world right now and I am the most. I give myself another grin before I turn my grin on the girl sitting to the left of me wearing some kind of designer hippie gear that repulses me, but I feel better when she skips the coke and goes for a big pull off the joint instead. It's nice to know when someone's genuinely dumb. Depeche Mode is playing in the background in between blasts of New Order and the new Cult CD and Bukem and I get up from the couch and wander over to a darker corner and crouch in front of a refrigerator.
Someone calls my name and I turn around and see a guy I did a DJ night with a couple of months ago waving me over to where he's got a flock of pleasantly not too young looking girls around him. A change of pace is always good. A beer appears in my hand when I glide over to them and introductions are forgotten before they're made. A very good looking redhead wearing a Burberry miniskirt and white button down lights my cigarette and takes me by the arm, leading me back to the traveling mirror on which the pile of cocaine has grown seemingly larger. We take a refreshing pause and she takes my hand and leads me out of the room and down the hall into a fire stairwell. She tells me to call her Alison just before she sinks to her knees and expertly gives me head. When a long nailed finger slides around and slips into my asshole I dutifully half shout the name "Alison" into the stairwell and she pushes her finger deeper into me and then gives me another one and I'm just moaning "AlisonAlisonAlison" over and over again and when she slides my dick all the way down her throat I close my eyes and groan and make a halfhearted attempt at an orgasm but she comes up smiling anyway and bangs out into the hallway.

I tried to ignore him when he was being a jerk, I tried to keep focused on the play and keeping my shit together and staying out of his way. I tried hard, but the only way to get through to him was to piss him off enough to fight.

Rule Number Seven: Date smarter than you are, but fuck anything that moves. Relationships are fleeting and love is an illusion and there's always the excuse that you don't really know what you want and you've got all the time in the world to figure it out so you might as well enjoy yourself while you can. The old standby is the drugs, but to rely too heavily on the drugs is to not be able to handle real life. Which is a drug in and of itself, and is not to be taken lightly. A quick fuck, however, is. Because whoever winds up bending you over the bathroom sink and ramming you between pints at the bar is not the sort of whoever you'd want to spend much time talking to in the first place. Doubly so if you're the one doing the bending over and ramming of. Maintaining a relationship takes as much time and effort as trying to find one worth maintaining, and without a surprise and a challenge and a spark, it takes more time to get out of than it did to make that initial mistake. A smarter partner is more fun in and out of bed. A smarter partner will teach you and make you feel good and convince you that you can do anything, anytime, no matter what. The cute brunette in the too designer outfit has a mouth for one reason only. The brilliant and sexy blonde will make you who you want to be. Date smarter than you are, but fuck anything that moves.

It's midafternoon and I'm lounging in the shade underneath the chapel at one end of the quad watching a group of girls sunning themselves and sipping Diet Cokes. In one hand I've got a Lucky; the other hand holds a sweating bottle of Corona (sans lime) from a cooler J.P. filled with ice and beer and dragged out here a couple of hours ago. There was an abortive meeting earlier in the day that should have resolved the lingering fear I have that we won't be able to get the bouncers from the rock club downtown to work and we'll have to use the part time Vietnam vets that the bar normally
has, and I don't know what kind of a reaction these guys are going to have to what I'm planning. Somewhere in the back of my mind it strikes me that I'm taking the usual down-the-nose look at the townies, but in this case I think I'm completely justified and, at any rate, there's no way in hell that I'm going to let something like this get fucked up because some ex-Marine sees strobes out of the corner of his eye and thinks he's back in the Delta or something. I'm wearing a very pale tan linen suit. I wasn't happy about the way the cloth was rumpling earlier, but now I think it looks pretty good. I wonder what the girls watching me think, and then I wonder why I wonder. These are the best days of someone else's life?

"Not that I'm not really having a good time, of course. Because when I think about it, I guess I am, but everything seems so fast paced and hectic and like, here I am doing all this shit and I never really have time for myself. Not that anything really stops me from doing anything I want to, you know, but more like it's so hard to be alone anymore." Did I just say that? Without a valley girl accent? Christ, I am fucking insane. I don't like this woman, particularly, but then I don't think I've liked any of the shrinks I've been going to on and off since junior high. Though, admittedly, this one has pretty nice legs and a penchant for short skirts... I wouldn't mind. But then there's this whole other doctor patient thing, which seems to me as strictly enforceable as the professor student thing. On the other hand, if I were listening to people talk about how their fathers raped them when they were six, I doubt I'd be getting a lot of action at the office either. So, though I would fuck this woman and she would love it, I settle for embroidering the truth in hopes that she'll keep writing out the scripts.

In the midst of all of this sometimes I remember that someone's paying an awful lot of money to someone else for me to be here and doing pretty much the opposite of what I'm expected to do, but sometimes I slip into an old jacket and play make believe. It's during one of these increasingly rare blackouts that I'm in Barnes and Noble looking for books that neither bookstore on campus carries for Sociopolitical Language and it's not going very well at all because all I can find is Shaw's Pygmalion in an edition published by the normally respectable Penguin Classics that has been set in what looks like 5 point Photina Bold that I just know is going to give me a headache when I squint at it for hours on end when I notice that the three girls working on the floor are incredibly good looking in a sexy geek kind of way (dark glasses, long skirts, self-consciously scuffed boots) and for some reason I can't make eye contact with any of them even though all three smile at me during my various circles around the store. Everyone else in the store is middle aged and overweight and faux-intelligentsia and I begin to feel panic set in as I realize that the book I need for the assignment due in two days is not in stock and may, in fact, be at one of the university bookstores, which are both closed by this time. I contemplate searching out the bathroom and throwing water on my face since I don't have anything useful on me but the better idea is to find the magazine rack and stare at the May issue of Wallpaper* until I feel sufficiently comfortable and calm to pay for my one book out of five and speed back to my apartment wanting nothing more than to sit in the dark and try to fall asleep or at last pound half a bottle of vodka and wait for to call who I can abuse or maybe get a Xanax off of.
No one calls as I'm walking through the door and maybe this is because I unplugged the telephone during the paranoid part of a cocaine binge a few days ago but my cell phone is on and the signal meter reads at full, four bars, but apparently I'm the last thing on anyone's mind this afternoon. Even my cat is asleep, not that she would acknowledge my presence to begin with, but the point is still made and I drop the plastic bag on the hall table and wander into the kitchen trying to think of something to calm me down but there's no liquor in the house so I settle for a sole Guinness and pour it into a pint glass. The act of sitting and watching the beer turn a deeper shade of black makes me feel a little bit better and I begin to feel the tension in my neck and shoulders fade away. This continues through the course of the pint of beer and by the time I finish that and a Lucky I feel like I should go back to the bookstore and ask all three of the girls what time I can get them off. I don't so much reject the idea as I refuse to do anything with it and watch abstractly as it floats away and is replaced with the idea of going out to buy a bottle of Scotch and maybe a cigar, but the sun is already beginning to set and I'd need to hurry and the last thing in the world I want to do right now is hurry, so I pick up my cell phone and scroll down the speed dial list until I come to the "Uni" category and hit send when the first feminine name runs across the display.

Rule Number Two: Respect your Elders. Because everything really has been done before and there's nothing new that you can contribute to the world because, let's face it, the whole thing is a pile of shit and it's never going to get any better... the Earth is Dying and you're not Helping so you might as well start Living and Enjoying and fuck it all anyway. So respect your elders because they've done it before you, and if you want to have any fun before you get hit by a bus or blown up in a terrorist attack or die of cancer (one in three Americans, so you'd better get resigned to that fact now), you should take the parties they threw and throw them yourself. Rent out a bar, or try to start up a new club night in a town where there's nothing to do and everyone's rich and beautiful and you'll make a name for yourself soon enough. If you want to. I highly recommend looking at the huge parties from years past, and skip anything that ever happened at Studio 54 if you want to have some shred of self-respect in the morning. The 70s were bad enough to begin with, there's no need to repeat them. I recommend reading The Great Gatsby and checking out stories about Truman Capote's Black and White Ball and listening to a lot of punk rock and new wave and throwing it all together and giving discounts for people who come dressed to kill. Skater kids and ravers get thrown out immediately, anyone in Armani gets a comp drink. But look back through the ages, and see how the coolest people have thrown the swankiest parties, and realize you're never going to do anything original, so you might as well beat history at its own game. Respect your Elders.

There are four other couples at this dinner party and maybe a half dozen people flying solo, and looking around the table I can't help but think that this is the most incestuous gathering I've been to since a Kennedy cocktail party last summer but that doesn't seem to register with anyone else so maybe it's just me and I'm carefully studying the expressions on the faces of the girls and a few of the boys seated around me and more carefully trying to see who Sara is talking to and who she's snubbing. This, I hope, will give me some kind of clue as to whom she knows I've slept with and am
on good terms with, and who I should stay away from tonight even though I haven't in the past just because I want to go home and fuck her without an argument for once. Just sex would be a nice change, I'm thinking. I'm thinking that the soundtrack, Amon Tobin, is trying a little too hard for tonight. Jorge Castro, I'm thinking, or maybe something from Iceland (but not Bjork. Overrated cunt.) would be nicely ahead of the curve but accessible enough for the people who don't really listen to music until I realize that Jayne, who's throwing this in honor of me because I finally might
have gotten a good club night going in this hellish little town, doesn't really listen to music and is probably relying on Bliss for more than just sex and recipes. I wonder if Jayne and I have anything else in common and then I realize Sara, but Sara is so obvious that I wonder if maybe the two of them have slept together since, after all, they are best friends, and I decide there must be a way to get both of them in bed together and, at the very least, watch. Which leads me back to my original plan of setting up little closed circuit cameras in the bedroom, bathroom, and living room of the apartment that Sara and I share but someone next to me is talking about something I know about so I stop thinking and start listening and soon I drop listening in favor of pounding this poor shit into the ground with my superior knowledge of decibels, white noise, and spontaneous mass vomiting.

By the end of the week I couldn't tell you how I managed to function at all. Let alone in society. Each night was a blur of coke, cigarettes, whiskey, a spiraling, destructive, panicked train of thought. During those long nights I rattled around the empty apartment like an asylum inmate. I flinched at shadows, those imaginary people of my mind. Bugs crawled over me and I mumbled to myself, lurched into furniture, sat and stared at blank walls. Darkened windows. No thoughts. The disorientation at night was bad, anyone who tried to talk to me could have told you. During the days, stretching out interminably towards the summer equinox, I felt so short on any rational human qualities that I trusted myself to neither speak nor put myself in a situation where I would have been forced to carry on a conversation. A conversation would have betrayed my crumbling mask. I don't remember much of it, mercifully. What did I do aside from try to get fucked out of my mind? I said it. Spent hours babbling incoherently at Sara over the telephone and wishing I were dead or at least on Valium. I lost interest in the club. Told Bliss to take care of anything. Was surprised when she listened. Nearly shat myself when she started putting some of her own money up for things. Everything seemed like it was on track and the autopilot of intertia had taken over. There wasn't much to do anyway aside from guest list and spreading the word to generate interest from all sides.
"She's good at that," I thought. "At least, I've always been interested in taking her from all sides."

Rule Number One: Fuck You. Given the opportunity, any person will attempt to use any other person for personal gain. Therefore, the appropriate protective measure is, at all times, a preemptive Fuck You. If it follows, and it does, that anything worth doing is worth doing well, then it also follows that no one will ever do it as well as you could have done it yourself once you find that they've fucked it up and fucked you over. Take initiative, take no shit, take charge. Arrive on the field early. Stack the deck to your advantage. Coerce and circumvent and control. A blank stare will freeze anybody out: don't be afraid to use it. Silence is always better than an insult. If you can make someone feel useless, if you can belittle them, if you can put them in their place, you need to do so immediately. Because they are angling for you. Your best defense is a nuclear holocaust. Anyone that stands between you and your goal is an enemy. Fuck You.