Lurid & Cute (7 page)

HIS COURTIERS OR FLUNKEYS

Well wow you just dozed off there for a moment, sir –

but the prince still in his heart knew that something, like definitely, had taken place. What happened therefore next is that he ordered the whole court entourage to go out driving with him in a minor motorcade, and sure enough when the SUVs entered the plastic outskirts of that giant city, with hotels and other details, he recognised a street. Calmly he left his limousine, where in the road a woman came up to him. And she said:
Zezette, where've you been all this time? Like what, you got arrested?
– How should he put it? the prince would say, years afterwards, telling this disturbing tale.
– Imagine that you are the enfant terrible who wakes up to discover that he is in fact the creation of some pen or quill or keyboard that he cannot see. That's how I would put it. It's not a good feeling at all. But enough of me. What this party needs is more negronis.
And so the story ends. I mean, it was like that, sure – this bloodstain: just back to front, or upside down.

 

2. UTOPIA

 

THE WATER PISTOL

at which point his double Hiro

— Why did you get married if you're totally unhappy? said Hiro to me some time later in this neon epoch.

— I never said unhappy, I said. — I never used such a word.

— Talk to me, said Hiro. — Explain yourself.

— I had a vision, I said.

— What did the vision say?

— The vision told me not to get married, I said. — So I got married.

— Totally logical.

— It's not easy to get visions right.

— Maybe, said Hiro. — What kind of vision?

— A kind of voice? I said.

I did mention other complications of hospitality. As deftly as some tapas stooge presents you with a dish of chicharrónes without you knowing that you'd ordered, or a djinn appears in one of the old fables, Hiro had suddenly appeared in what you could comically call
my life
, and there he stayed.

is revealed in the suburban panorama

Everyone who describes anything has this problem of what stays and what doesn't. Walt Disney had this problem and so do I. In this little murder ballad there are some things which already exist that will play a part in its future – like Candy, and Romy, but some things do not yet exist, like firearms or the time since I have last seen any of the people I am describing. Some things have just arrived, like Hiro. And some things exist and will still exist, like the setting. The setting is the one permanent phenomenon. At night, Candy would say, I almost like it here, when there's just the street lights and the citrus smell of the garbage trucks, but in the grey days it can be very hard. Don't you think so, chico? I knew the lyrical problem she was describing. There's nothing less homelike than the place that is your home, a place of memories, of dejection, of pettiness, of shame, of deception, of misuse of energy, however much you try to feel affection for it. I think a lot of the difficulties some people have with life are caused by the fact that you only come from one place – or maybe that's only a problem if you grow up in this panorama, with autoroutes and quilted plains, but since nearly everyone grows up in a place like this the problem must be almost universal. Take your pick wherever on the globe you like, in Kabul or Santiago, the same landscape is there before your eyes. Because in fact most inhabitants of Kabul do not live precisely in that city but instead on its edges, where Kabul disintegrates into vast light and vacant streets, the kind where the pavement is listless and there are only a very few street lights, maintained by random generators in concrete huts. That's where most people are nowadays, and it means that when you travel to any city of your choice you can find yourself at home, just so long as you get out far enough, not too far but just enough. I think these places are the most beautiful in our time: the tennis centres, lorry depots, chain restaurants, and also the hypermarkets and wholesale units. But whether these places are good for happiness, I do not know, if you consider how much suburbia is also a kind of absence, without a focus or a centre, like the verdant So-Cal foothills, just a succession of high streets and outer roads. It's basically grass, or lichen, the way it spreads to fill in all the gaps between the rail lines and the autoroutes, just spreads itself with multi-lane parkways, burger kiosks, banks, pharma stores, crematoria, temples for various religions and other faiths, insurance offices. In such a place, it's only natural if the boredom tends to expand like cookie dough and stay there, a sort of sense that you cannot connect all the pieces of your life together – like when you're in an endless security queue at the airport and therefore have no way of going either forward or backwards, but must just simply submit. And if in particular what you want is people to live together, to live together and adore each other, which is always my ideal, that suburban vagueness is maybe not so good as a locale.

with his utopian instincts

In this story I have to tell, people try to live together, but mostly they're apart. In this story people try not to be separated by money or love but mostly they are. And yet we did try, after all. To take Hiro as an example: when he got a side of turnip dumplings in the Thai cafe by the tram terminus he shared them, and with enthusiasm, for not only did he talk utopia but he tried to make the world as charming as he could. Whenever we walked down the street, Hiro took my money and gave it to any tramp we happened on. And I was always very impressed by this because me, I give very little to the poor, not out of any selfishness but just because I find it difficult to know how to interact with the less fortunate. It tends to go badly when I do, because I cannot talk with the free abandon I employ when I'm alone. Like only recently I had been in a burger place at whose counter a woman was being asked by her many small children to buy them fries, and it was very obvious she was embarrassed by this problem that she could not afford to buy them all food, so she bought one miniature portion for the horde of them. And therefore when I came to purchase my own fries and chocolate milkshake, proudly I added the appropriate number of multiple fries to my order and brought them over to her table, where she looked at me in hatred.
They've already eaten?
she said with that total disgust intonation. So I retreated with my many fries and in my shame I ate them all, then hated myself for eating them. Utopia, I just mean, is not so easy to recreate, and it maybe showed in a certain manic quality also to Hiro's thinking – his letter-writing scheme to aid prisoners in the west, or a mobile kiosk for granitas, in flavours ranging from lavender to chilli. On one day when we had maybe drunk too much beer iced with imported orange soda, we even had a dream of an office for these schemes and went so far as to investigate one, in a building whose other occupants included any number of other businesses, like opera newsletters, foreign-language lecture bureaus, highly specialised travel agencies, small-time currency speculators, perhaps a private detective or two, because it's never good to be isolated from the world. Had there not been such difficult matters as rental payments, or insurance certificates, perhaps we would have taken it. I was thinking very often in this manner, as if really you could do anything you wanted if you only tried. Weightlessness was the element in which I lived – whether I considered Romy, or Hiro, or my basic unemployment. That's what I mean by these suburbs being a problem. A landscape like this tends to make the world as flimsy as those old movies where you see the hero romancing the heroine while driving, and behind them unwinds the pre-recorded road. And the further problem is that when you enter such an existence it's like when you return from a million miles away and are jet-lagged, and all the things you thought were important just seem to have been not removed entirely but just slightly rearranged, like life is some espionage officer who enjoys playing with your mind – reordering the books when you're at the supermarket, taking out your garbage, until eventually you start to doubt your own reality.

& manic tone

Even if very possibly such unreality does perhaps improve your moral code, in that it makes things possible that other people might be inclined to ignore, like forming this gang that we then formed, this trio of Candy and Hiro and myself. Especially for instance my father and my mother did not quite understand, perhaps because for them the only desirable group was the very definite family. At home, there was one constant conversation –

MY MOTHER

And when do you think that Candy will be wanting children?

In this way my mother would sit down and just very casually discuss things with me, mainly in our favourite floating restaurant by the docks, eating pockmarked old woman's bean curd, and pickled duck's eggs with ginger sauce. And sure, if I could please anyone, I wanted to please my mother. She was always my best confidante, to whom all my secrets could be entrusted. But in no way had Candy and I begun to think about this possibility of children at all. We were beyond such usual thinking.

MY MOTHER

But of course you should do what both of you think is right.

ME

Uh-huh.

MY MOTHER

Talk to me. I am just trying to understand. You want to find yourself?

ME

Not quite.

MY MOTHER

So what then?

ME

What are you, Ma? Chang Apana?

MY MOTHER

Don't muddle me. Don't make your jokes.

The people as old as my parents – they understood nothing! Because there are in fact many other ways of being together that are not a family at all, but something more like a troupe. And a troupe I think is a lovely and elastic thing. Those who have never been in such a troupe have missed one of life's most desirable experiences. It makes you feel like nothing is ever boring because there's suddenly always someone to talk to, it's absorbing like that, which has as one consequence that you spend more money in general at coffee shops and/or brasseries because the sitting in such places becomes a total treat, the way you develop conversations and just generally consider the world situation, so that the money you might spend is easily recompensed by the amount of ennui that gets destroyed. That's how I tried to explain things to my mother, even if according to her such reasoning was only anxious or hysterical, and in retrospect I can understand why she might have thought that. I could sometimes think too quickly or impatiently – not that thinking in itself is such a bad thing but it does matter when it occurs. If you do it too much before an event, then either nothing gets done at all, or what does happen is in some way too loopy or inflated. But I only learned that later. For to have turned Hiro away, as I explained to my darling mother, would not have been possible according to my moral code. And after all: Hiro and I had
past
. We'd known each other since the smallest of infants, then throughout the stages of our education he had been my comrade and accomplice. This was partly because in these suburbs and sylvan idylls we were similarly prodigies, but also because to us mathematics or chess teams were equally dismally boring (— But don't you
want
to join in with something, sweetness? my mother had asked, when presenting me with a turquoise satin tracksuit as a corrupting bribe). Instead we were much more into the pharmaceuticals and narcotics. It brought us, as they say,
together
. I was basically Hiro's double. Although admittedly Hiro had more charisma. If we were a commentary duo, then I was the play-by-play and Hiro was the colour guy. But still,
double
was no exaggeration. Especially if you also considered the way we talked, all quick and chancy with a polyglottic drawl. So together we had planned our entrance into the adult world. I would say that this entrance had gone differently for both of us. Hiro flew out to the skyscraper districts of various harbour cities, in the manner of the success story. While me, I remained in these horizontal environs. Sure, I sometimes called Hiro my crazy friend but I didn't always know how seriously I meant this. (— All your friends are your crazy friend, said Candy to me once. — Dat's because they
are
crazy, gringolette, I replied.) Like I knew that he took the various drugs from weed to coke but this didn't mark him out as unique in this generation, just as I knew the rumours that swirled around him like winds blown from the trumpets of naked cherubim in the ancient pictures, that he'd eventually left his job out east because he'd spent some time at a rest cure or nervous retreat, like a nobleman with syphilis, but that didn't make me doubt him. Me too I had my periods of melancholy and stabilisers, but did that also make me crazy? And since Hiro was the person who had known me for longer than anyone except my mother and my father – who do not count as people who know you, being parents, and therefore existing in an orbit of knowledge and obscurity known only to them – and since such childhood friends are the ones you cannot say no to, they are the ones who when they want to re-enter your life you cannot refuse, I therefore did not refuse Hiro. As much as possible you must try to be
appealing
, is what I'm trying to say, and be as likeable as you can. Just as anyway: always Hiro had been as energetic as a dot-matrix printer. If his chest had been adorned in wool-knit jumpers with intarsia penguins I don't think anyone would have been surprised. Even when he was five, Hiro was inventive, and now that he was fully grown he was as loaded with wishes and plans as a musket is with grapeshot. I find that kind of personality just totally seductive. So one monsoon day Hiro arrived with a suitcase and installed himself in our spare room, and from then on we spent our days together – in the local dim sum cafes, the afternoon cinemas. Against the blank horizon, Hiro's silhouette stood out, like a cowboy in his ten-gallon hat doing tricks with silver pistols at the very far end of Main Street.