“Isn’t that just TRAGIC?”
She was standing over me, handing me another drink. I was on the floor, sitting with two people I barely knew trying to fake my way through a conversation. I was the odd man out – I knew Dorie, whose party it was, but I didn’t know anybody else. She and I were friends practically by accident, and even though I didn’t really fit in with the usual crowd of Oh-So-Cool-Tragically-Misunderstood-MTV-Kids, she still liked having me around. I think I made her laugh; though I was never sure why she thought I was funny. I never tried to be.
“Is what tragic?” I was grateful for the break in the conversation. I looked up at Dorie. She was clearly in her element. The small living room of her basement apartment was filled with cigarette smoke and the sounds of meaningless chit chat. There was a guy in the corner that looked suspiciously uber-intellectual, who was trying to explain Kierkegaard and existentialism to a slack jawed, wide-eyed, and clearly underaged chick who would undoubtedly end up using her mouth for more than making confused sounds and odd clicks. Another small group of three or four people was taking up the couch and recliner, trying to work out what Miro had to do with the poetry of Thomas Gunn. The potheads – there were about five of them – were in the back bedroom wrapped in smoke, coughs, and the occasional cackling laughter. My little group – comprised of me, a graduate student in mathematics, and a wannabe filmmaker – were trudging through a conversation about what the filmmaker referred to as “the vapid heart of Hollywood movies.” The math graduate student was defending his statement that there hadn’t been a solid movie from Hollywood since RETURN OF THE JEDI. That was when Dorie saved me.
“Oh,” she cooed. “You didn’t hear?” I was hoping that she was going to sit down and join us and maybe I wouldn’t have to listen to the geek explain why Princess Leia is the ultimate woman. Dorie didn’t sit, though. I looked up at her. She was smiling, and a little buzzed, or she would have been careful not to bend over and give me a full view of her tits. She typically liked showing off for other guys; but I was always excluded from her batch of boy toys and the ogling entourage. I focused on her eyes. “The lead singer from PJXO died.”
“Oh.” That was one of those bands I was supposed to know because everyone else did. Mostly I listened to the radio, and never top 40. I couldn’t remember the last time I bought an album, though it was certainly before the CD revolution. “How’d he die?”
“Oh my God,” she said, still not sitting down. “You HAVEN’T heard.” She looked up and smiled wide at the wannabe filmmaker and the math geek, both of whom were focusing on her the small mole on her left tit. “He choked to death.”
“Enraged fan?”
“NO,” she breathed. “He died from auto asphyxiation.”
“Huh?”
She slapped me on the shoulder, causing a little of my drink to spill. “You KNOW. When people hang themselves when they masturbate.”
“Why do that?” I asked. “Seems like a lot of trouble for something every 13 year old boy picks up without much hassle.”
“BECAUSE,” she smiled, “it’s supposed to make it feel better. You know? It’s like, you cut off the air to your brain and it makes the orgasm more intense.”
She was careful to articulate the words MASTURBATION and ORGASM. I looked over at the math geek and I was fairly certain that was as close as he’d ever gotten to sex with a woman. The wannabe filmmaker was smiling and laughing, trying to be all cool and cynical.
“Oh,” I said.
“But, I mean, isn’t that just tragic?”
“Why?”
“Because,” she slapped my shoulder again, “I mean, he’ll never make music ever again. He’s gone. I mean, isn’t that just WEIRD?”
“You’re telling me that the guy hung himself jacking off, and that’s supposed to be tragic?”
“Well…”
“I mean, come on. OOO, the poor bastard HAD to jack off? Come on! He was a rock star for fuck’s sake! Girls probably threw themselves at him on a regular basis. He probably didn’t to touch his own meat ever – not even to take a piss or clean his balls. And it’s TRAGIC?? What, he was so lonely and nobody understood him? What the fuck? If he was so miserable, why didn’t he just get a regular job and be a normal, boring, desperate guy like the rest of us? At least then he’d have an EXCUSE to wack off.”
The math geek was stunned and the self-styled Scorsese interrupted me, trying to make a point. “It’s like Cobain, man,” he said. “He couldn’t handle the fame and look what happened to him. Real artists are just too fragile for…”
“Art?” I cut him off. “Art? Are you shitting me? You’re telling me that the thing that defines an artist is how thin skinned and “misunderstood” they are? That’s a whole lotta bullshit. If they can’t handle it, they should get out of the way and let those of us who want the money and girls and to not have to work a miserable goddamn day job have all the fun. Fuck-ing Chr-ist!”
At this point, I looked up at Dorie. Normally, she enjoyed my tirades. She wasn’t enjoying this one, though. “I was just making conversation,” she said, pointedly. “I wasn’t sure if you’d heard and I THOUGHT you might be interested.” She leaned in a little more. “You don’t have to be such a fucking ASS all the time, you know. You’re always so DEPRESSING. People like him are HEROES to some people. Who the fuck are YOU?” She stood up and kept walking, heading back towards the bedroom.
Heroes, I thought. Who the fuck needs heroes, anyway? I tried to think of any heroes I had. I used to have them. John Wayne. Humphrey Bogart. Superman. My Dad. Dad was dead; Superman should’ve died after the fifth Christopher Reeves installment. Bogart was a coward in real life. John Wayne helped blacklist actors he thought were communists. Sigh. But that wasn’t the point, I guess. What Dorie said made some sense. But still? Some poor little rock star getting hung because his right hand wasn’t enough? He’s a hero?
And did she have to jump on me that way? She knows how I am. I looked around the party. The temporary disruption caused by my little speech was over and everybody was going back to whatever conversation they’d been engaged in. The uber-intellectual was whispering in his chickie’s ear and running his fingers through her pink-dyed hair. I wondered who his hero was. Kierkegaard? Nobody picked dead philosophers for heroes. Everybody there looked like they stepped right out of Rolling Stone or Spin Magazine. Even the math geek had an absurdly cool sense of style. I was dressed the way I normally dressed. Which one of these is not like the others? That was pretty obvious.
I felt like going back and telling Dorie not to invite me to cool kid parties if she didn’t want me to be me. She was always different around different people, but I never really thought about it much. She and I were the best of friends – as long as there wasn’t some piece of man meat around that needed to be impressed and flirted with. We went to the movies together. We talked about books. We exchanged ideas on current events and we laughed at all the stupid shallow people we saw wherever we went. At the time, she was in between fuck buddies – so we’d been hanging out a lot. Just then it occurred to me that when she told me about the party and I said I’d show up, she never actually ASKED me to come. So, not only was I not supposed to act like myself, I wasn’t even supposed to be there.
The wannabe filmmaker went back to talking about some indie movie or another that nobody saw because the Hollywood system was corrupt and anti-art. The math geek was getting prepared for a break in the monologue so he could engage in his well-thought out defense of Star Wars. I looked at my drink. She’d given me some concoction or another. I downed it without bothering to taste it. When the glass was empty, I looked up and Dorie was walking back into the living room. She breezed right by me and over to the couch crowd, who were at that point discussing the ins and outs of Gap outlets. She didn’t even bother to look at me when I stood up and left.
