about last night

Friday, October 28, 2005

So there he was again, wearing a dark fedora and still without any hair. His sweater seemed pulled from the depths of his grandmother’s trousseau. It was Annabelle’s birthday, yesterday, and among the many strange things, he was one.

There was also the boy who looked like a young Axl Rose, who I had met earlier at a fashion shoot. Apparently from Switzerland, I wasn’t sure if he was artist, designer, model or actor. He even had Axl’s hair.

I had bought Annabelle a plastic mouse that runs inside a transparent plastic bubble. The thing was cheap. The thing never stopped running. It was horrible. An ugly present which provided endless hours of distraction for weary party bombed minds, or a cat. Chinese people are slowly taking over the world with these plastic geegaws. They don’t even do tests to find out if people will like mice running around in bubbles. They just know it’s going to work.

I was dressed in a pale lace jacket, over a black unitard and Audrey flats. At some point, all the lights went off and some man, it might be Otto, crouched down to caress my ankle. All the while my husband stood talking to Austrian architecture students. I yelled “Concrete! Concrete!” The lights came on.

Hendricks had hit his head on the shelf and had bled so much he had to take a shower. Kim and I discussed how people seem to mix us up, which is really funny because we don’t look at all alike. Cecile screamed that I was out and Kim was in, at which point I screamed for her to clarify, and she said, Kim guards her inside. I open towards the outside. It was, all in all, a remarkable recovery.

All the men love my husband. All the women too, but they’ll never say it in front of me.

Eventually we left for the Rex, after stopping at the Pearl, and kissing Alfredo to get some pictures, yelling at scooters, cyclists and other motorists. I told some guy on a bicycle to go take a shit. It goes downhill from there.

Eventually as I’m leaving Pulp I see him again, the one with no hair. He’s in the lineup, by himself. I tell him that the party is terrible, that’s it’s not worth the bother. I can barely control myself I’m so tired. He walks me home and we stop at what must be the only place to eat choucroute at 4am. We confess secrets. Bad secrets. The dinner goes cold.

Then he walks me home. We stop at the cross-section. He tells me he likes sad people. I tell him that I’m not sad. That anger is my primal emotion. My husband is someone who’s primal emotion could be sadness. And that’s how the night ends: with me telling him that’s why he likes my husband, and not me.