two failures

Corduroy and Sam arrived. Arriving not being very important, they’d been arriving for years now, not knowing anybody or at least hoping so. The house was charming, if I can say that, with a terrace in the back like a secret garden and so well-lit and inviting Corduroy thought he’d rather come over for a sandwich in the afternoon than to a house party after eight or ten hours of drinking. But they weren’t really drunk, really. Maybe body-drunk but sharp brained enough. Starting the ritual. Hide coats, find the bathrooms, look for friends and old enemies, babes, escape routes, fire hazards. The envy thick enough to breathe. He was tired of doing things like this. Lizard was there, an ancestor from the shadowland, still brown and loud but with her voice a lot lower than he remembered. Corduroy dated her friend and roommate for a year, after her. He hadn’t really considered the consequences of this until now beyond a basic ethical inventory considering revenge and pettiness and that stuff, until she was there as much as she could be in the yard. Corduroy and Sam slinking like two black cats looking for somewhere to hide from everybody, Lizard with her friends and the poor bastard she’d chosen to dance attendance on her for the night in a circle, with a look of dumb ecstasy on his face. Corduroy was reminded of himself having a similar look, and even after drinking a fair amount of the Comrade he still had a uniquely bad case of The Screamer. The Screamer being seasickness followed by a pure sharp wave of terror that one feels upon encountering an old girlfriend. Months and years and girls had passed but Corduroy still got The Screamer even through the amniotic protection of the Comrade. He relied on the Comrade a lot, these days.

Sam was trying to figure out how to talk to a girl he liked, who had open round melting eyes, a princess of the blood maybe, swilling Four Loko and chatting up the gays. Another part of the ritual, Corduroy thought, was remembering that nobody actually talked to who they wanted to talk to at things like this, you had to sneak looks and figure out who was eyeballing who. Going out and getting drunk had ceased to be fun a long time ago. It was field research or a puzzle or a simple distraction. They were in the courtyard, if I can use that word, when Lizard walked by. Corduroy got The Screamer real bad, and then he loved her, a lot more than he actually had when they were dating, and he loved her more because he knew it would only last for an hour or two and then he’d stop. Mouth shut, mouth dry, staring and dropping his cigarettes. Unable to talk to her beyond hello. Going into the bathroom, which was another thing he often did, to be by himself and try to aggregate the psychic data. There’s always a lot of it in Southeast, which was principally why he loved it and needed to leave so much. Above the toilet somebody had written “SWAMP FOOT STRIKES AGAIN”. Corduroy looked at himself in the mirror for three or four minutes without blinking. There was an empty tub of Long Islands. He went to the smallest room of the house, because that’s where the oldest person at the party always is, feeling uncomfortable, he went to the smallest room because he always liked to talk to the oldest person at the party for a long time because he knew that Lizard knew this habit about him and eventually she’d wander into it and talk to someone else, ignoring him completely. All girls do this. It happened immediately. Her presence in the room was warm, narcotic almost, another part of the inebriate love-feeling he was having for somebody who egged his house and left him twice. Not that he was anywhere near innocent about the whole thing. “The whole thing” just kept on getting more fucked up. Corduroy, having a facile conversation with the oldest person, who was way too fucking old to be there, thought he should probably be depressed by knowing and acting in this dumb sketch but was fairly porlocked by the Comrade, and also had a new shirt on, and also liked going out regardless of the heavy emotional cost. He was also very afraid.

One habit of Lizard’s was when she dressed to go out she’d never let him be in the room, or within two rooms of her. She flew into rages while she was dressing, so by the time she was finally ready all of her clothes scattered her room and her bathroom, dressed now and calmly sipping a vodka and Sprite. Corduroy, a quarter in the bag, asked her if her tantrum was over. She stuck out her tongue and they’d leave. Not talk all night. Lizard was a big one for cruelty. Corduroy admired the honest and open quality of it. Having not learned it until he dated her, the honest and open kind of cruelty. Vindictively, with her purse-holder there and the older man with the goatee talking about chemistry, two meaningless conversations happening. The various subtexts were so weighty and adolescent that Corduroy decided to check on Sam, but Sam had made no progress, so Corduroy went into the front yard with the Comrade and wondered if it was worth the effort to chat up one of the birds of paradise on the veranda, if I can use that word. I imagined girls and boys in radiation suits, doing their goddamnest not to bump into each other, faces covered while Ratatat and Notorious BIG played, getting decontaminated before they left so as not to spread the disease beyond the neighborhood.

Lizard left before Corduroy could talk to her. Sam didn’t talk to the sloe-eyed brunette. Two corpses walked home and listened to Kicking Television much quieter than they preferred to, respecting as much as they could the other people around them.