vertigo78
09-10-2012, 06:08 AM
Hello. I've browsed quite bit around these forums but never really posted.
This is the first chapter of a novel called Analysis Paralysis. I have shown it to a few friends but they never give much constructive feedback. I once tried another forum but their taste was mainly science fiction so I didn't get any replies.
The setting starts in college but I plan for the characters to graduate halfway through the novel.
I would appreciate any feedback. Thanks.
Start:
They drank and talked of revolution like two kids eating ice cream and complaining about lines at Disneyland. They talked of corporate greed and how the hell they could get things done, quoting Marx and speaking in proper nouns. The American zeitgeist was willful ignorance, they both agreed before Jake’s girlfriend sneered at them for being so boring. And after a look around at eyes behind too much mascara, under baseball caps, inside heads that thought the same, Jake suggested a round of shots with a quick syllable, a placating look at his girlfriend, and an apologetic pat on Benny’s shoulder.
They weaved through the crowd towards the solitary light that hung over the kitchen and spilled out from an eddy of bodies to huddle around a plywood bar that tilted precariously and would topple by the end of the night in a shattering of shot glasses with college witticisms and martini glasses used for everything but martinis. The only thing left unscathed would be the plastic handles of vodka that Jake started pouring into the momentarily intact glasses. There was an obligatory click of glass and the liquor went down with the sting of an open wound. The girlfriend called for a second round and more ammunition for the larger circle she was inviting because the prevailing wisdom in those days called for the drinking of ten dollar paint thinner to include the maximum amount of people available, all wailing something resembling a war cry, with something approaching religious fervor.
Their faces imploded on themselves in strange patterns and feeling properly medicated the group dissipated into the dark side of the room with a few still chanting: shots, shots, shots. The girlfriend was led away by the hand of a friend and Benny watched her tight round denim shorts fade into the dark as he realized he should learn her name before they noticed he hadn’t.
Benny and Jake were left standing beneath the naked bulb that swung to the vibrations of a subwoofer shuddering against a nearby wall and they talked of what happened last night and what they hope would happen tonight, how bad they felt this morning and how they’d keep it all down this time, what they remembered and how much they had forgotten. Having too much of last night in black, Benny didn’t want to stay to hear it filled in and took advantage of the girlfriend coming back to make a blind exit.
Outside he paused to look at the tumultuous crowd of debauchery prowling the street and it seemed to him they all had somewhere to go. Some lucky few had even found their party on the street. These were the screamers, the most inebriated, perhaps, the best pretenders. Moving as a herd under a sepia filter of streetlights and the ubiquitous but ignored supervision of a police patrol, they were separated into the two lanes of traffic not by the ranch hands with guns but by some innate urge for order. As they crossed paths they studied each other, envious of what they may be missing, disguising their insecurity through smirks they hoped would say, “You fools are going the wrong way. The real party is this way.” Benny walked besides the auspicious without their smirk or the sense that they shared his strong desire to feel nothing.
He walked through the penumbra of the burnt yellow street, the plains of shadowed lawns that were breached every two to three houses by rays of incandescent light showcasing a scatter of beer cans from grass to pavement. If Benny had cared to look, framed by the luminescent windows, in full technicolor, were white balls thrown at red cups from across closet doors, clusters of the strangely and scantily clad matched to cliché but in practice indistinguishable party themes, and pulsating bursts of popsicle purple blaring a monotonous array of electronic sounds.
Benny’s house neighbored a suburban jungle in which Carl Bulbous appeared banging at the window attempting to catch his attention and after doing so waved for him to come in. A gesture Benny intentionally misunderstood and responded with his own telling Carl to come next door. Benny entered his house, sat on the couch, and lit a joint while waiting for Carl who ran in saying, “I’ve been . . . looking for you,” out of breath from jumping the fence, jittery in annoyance of a sound in the room, with his head swinging this way and swerving that way trying to locate the source of the white noise, and when he found the abandoned stereo he traced its jack to connect it to his phone. “Why?” asked Benny, ending a long drag and passing the joint.
Carl, failing to conceal a smile then not trying to, revealed a full set of yellow teeth before taking a draw of marijuana and Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds began to drift in the air as if the blast of smoke had triggered it. “Guess,” he said, when Benny took notice of his eyes for the first time as they pulsated erratically and followed the invisible notes of The Beatles fly out the window on a cloud.
Jake was gregarious to a fault. He had the special quality of making everyone in a crowded room feel that he was especially concerned that they were entertained. But he never failed to make them feel inadequate whenever they happened to find themselves alone with him. He was still performing, only now to the audience of one. One who could not escape the suspicion that Jake felt he was wasting a routine. An empty room was a source of anxiety that he would compel you to solve by asking where everyone was, what they were doing, when they would come back, and if you had anything better planned besides this. In this new light people saw that the magnanimous performances he gave to crowds were in fact quite sad. What at the time seemed to be his need to make everyone feel as well liked and at ease as he was, in hindsight, was his insatiable taste for attention and validation in disguise.
This quality made Jake victim to people he could never please. Whether Bethany recognized this or not is unclear, nevertheless, their relationship was a sick thing to watch. The kind that became a favorite subject of their friends when they were out of the room. An easy source for a punchline or a demarcator they told each other they would never approach. The calamity of their romance reached the heights of the grotesque so often that their friends were obliged by their gilded piety to remark on their annoyance at each encore as they savored the mayhem with commentary. We join Jake and Bethany at the threshold of their first week together:
“I hate this music,” said Bethany.
“I can try to change it,” said Jake
“I want something to dance to, I can’t dance to this.”
“We are dancing.”
“This music sucks.”
“Do you want me to ask them to change it?” asked Jake. “I know this house.”
“Let’s go somewhere else.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know. Who were you texting earlier?”
“Benny. Want to go hang out with Benny?”
“No.”
“Come on, he’s funny. You just have to get to know him. You’d have fun,” said Jake. “They’re smoking.”
Bethany squinted and tilted her head up at him, making him aware she was skeptical, but said, “Alright, let’s go,” and put on a cutesy face that was meant to say she’d do anything he wanted. A face that melted his heart but would inspire anybody else to smash it with a really large instrument.
They stepped outside and Bethany put her arm around his and this made him happy. It was cold but he didn’t feel cold because he loved walking through this street, this crowd, on nights like these. Years later when she would no longer place her arm around his, these walks would be his clearest college memories. Now as they reached a thin area of the crowd and the noise died down around them, he closed his eyes and listened for the beat of the surf that climbed up the cliffs lined with dilapidated houses towering over an ocean dotted with oil rigs. When he heard the waves crash, he lifted his head to the sky, opened his eyes to the stars overhead, and said, “I love these stars,” because he thought she’d like a guy who said things like, “I love these stars,” and was deep because he talked about things like metaphysics but she didn’t give a **** about metaphysics and neither did he.
Twenty seven minutes after the acid dripped down his tongue and into his mind, Benny’s phone lit up and the abstraction of global communications cleft his head, more than once, and his mind clung to his skull while it flew through images of satellites floating in oblivion and expanses of oceans and deserts being crossed by cancerous waves in units of time too small to define or even perceive. They scared him. The apartment seemed so small and vulnerable to a world of dangers, represented by the flashing lights of the cellular symphony. It was portentous, he thought, because that was a word he’d recently learned. But of what? He imagined a satellite crashing down on them and he wanted to leave but didn’t want to look like a fool so instead he read the text from Jake, Where’d you go? and it all changed. The network of towers and signals rearranged themselves to him, yes to him–what a strange word. The universe revolved around him and not him to it. The smallness of the apartment compared to the world instilled him with a sense of power and he begun writing a reply. He commanded the machines, LSD at home, changed his ringtone from the Psycho theme to The Office theme, and sat back to marvel at the control he had of the world from this small room.
Carl had been talking uninterrupted for the last hour, divulging Beatles trivia before the talking heads on a documentary he had watched before. Benny wasn’t listening while Carl explained that Dylan introduced The Beatles to marijuana. He started writing Jake another text—come over—in case it wasn’t clear the first time that he was welcome to the show and then asked Carl if Jake could have a pill and probably his girlfriend too.
“I haven’t met her.”
“She’s a bit of a ditz.”
“She’s hot?”
“Yea.”
Benny’s paranoia alternated between anticipated annoyance at the irritating twin mannerisms of new couples and being flagged into a DEA database. He began to suspect that government agents were listening to them through his phone. In a few chapters we will learn, when Benny visits a psychiatrist, that he has an anxiety problem. The current scene will be used, by said psychiatrist, to demonstrate that he uses drugs both to numb and indulge his anxiety, but Benny will have already known that and consider the whole thing a big waste of time and stress.
Besides his cartoonish paranoia involving government suits with dark glasses, Benny did not put much thought into what they were doing as being illegal. This was not an effect of the drugs. The normality of it all was the effect of college and most importantly, Carl. Carl Bulbous had the contagious tendency of imbedding criminal activity with the nostalgia of the moment. To him, any weekend they weren’t criminally intoxicated was a waste. He wasn’t self-medicating like Benny, he was manufacturing memories, often styled after movies, tv, and the side careers of rock musicians. He was under the pressure that these nights were supposed to be the greatest of their lives. But most of all, Carl wanted to prove that laws weren’t real.
In a dangerous combination for an adolescent in high school, he had read Machiavelli when his favorite movie was still The Godfather. This was common enough for your average teenage pseudo-intellectual except that Carl approached the genuine article, as close as a twice a day masturbating teen could get, the kind with no friends and years of free time to build his own internet music search engine that was valued at half a million dollars before it was taken away by Microsoft in a patent lawsuit. Since then–while pseudo intellectuals everywhere lamented the meaningless of life, the nonexistence of god, and the question of truth in the words of greater and more decomposed men–Carl Bulbous forged a philosophy that, while no man may come out of life a winner, there were definite losers and he was in danger of being one of them.
Thus, Carl was perhaps the only flag burning collegiate that had a legitimate gripe with the Man and he was intent on evening the score between them in what ever form it took. A fact that goes to explaining how Carl and Benny first met on the eighth floor of the university library. Benny was in the stacks, on the floor, reading a book of Barthelme stories when Carl walked into the aisle. He read the spines across the shelfs until he pulled out a book.
“Barthelme?” asked Benny.
“Yea. . .I mean. . .no,” answered Carl. “Barthelme but not the one I’m looking for.”
“What are you looking for?”
“40 Stories.”
“Here. I’ve already read it.”
“Are you sure? No, you had it first.”
“It’s ok. I’m sure. I’ll get it later.”
The back and forth went back and forth a few times until Carl looked over both shoulders and admitted, “Actually. . .I was going to. . .steal it.”
“How?” asked Benny.
“You know the self-checkout machines in the lobby? Just check out a paperback but run a hardcover through the demagnetizer and walk out with both.”
Benny pulled out a small blue metal box from his backpack, ran it over the spine of 40 Stories as it made three mechanical clicks, and handing it over said, “This is easier.”
Benny and Carl argued passionately but believed in nothing they were saying. Jake was having difficulty recognizing the most popular opinion in the room so he could attach himself to it. Bethany was continually swayed by the last person to speak.
“I’m tired of arguing about this,” said Benny. “Let’s change the subject.”
“Let’s change the channel,” said Carl.
“Let’s play some music,” said Jake.
Carl grabbed his phone and hopped on Jefferson Airplane to search for the illusive rabbit. “Vietnam has the best soundtrack of all the wars,” said Benny and they agreed.
“Do you think the hippies won the revolution?” asked Carl.
“What revolution?” asked Benny.
“Reagan stopped the uprising,” said Jake.
It was past three when someone mentioned Mexican food because it was the only place open and they went on a journey across town which was their real craving. The street was quiet except for the drunkards gliding by in giddy nirvana and the shellshocked recounting the fist fights, the regurgitated Manhattans on bathroom floors, and the friends that had disappeared together into the night never to be heard from again.
Benny walked wide mouthed, scratching his head and leaving his hair in an Einstein fashion. Carl lectured on the effects of LSD and brought out his phone to document his personal experience. Bethany dreamt of a future where burritos had no calories and clung to Jake, who was vocally panicked that he had a paper to write the next day but gathering none of the sympathy he was seeking.
They arrived to a long line. Carl and Jake went to use the bathroom, leaving Benny and Bethany waiting in line. Bethany waited a few seconds then asked, “Why don’t you like me?” casually as if it had just popped into her head instead of banging around in there the whole night.
“I don’t know you.”
“I’m Bethany,” she said. “I’m dating your best friend.”
“It’s not like I dislike you,” he said. “I’m just indifferent.”
“As long as you don’t dislike me. That’s fine for now. But I want you to like me ok.”
“Why?”
“Because Jake really likes you and I really like him. So it’s important to me that you like me because me and Jake might have something good and long going on.”
“Ok.”
They resumed waiting quietly for a few minutes until he asked, “How do you feel?”
“Good. . .You mean. . .from the stuff we took, right?” she said. “Yea, great actually except. . .I’m afraid I’ll lose this feeling because I don’t know how to describe it.”
“That’s the problem.”
“What problem?”
“Loneliness. The problem with everything,” said Benny. “We all experience the same emotions, thoughts, and instincts but only a few of us will ever be able to share them. Express ourselves enough to escape our isolated consciousness.”
“You mean through your writing, right? Jake always talks about you saying stuff like that,” said Bethany. “He thinks you’ll be one of those people.”
“No. I just read and repeat.”
When they all returned to the house, Benny rolled a joint, lit it, and passed it on. As it went around the room, he played “Blue on Green” and followed the length of Bethany’s legs up and down to the rhythm of Bill Evan’s piano, up and down the tight and smooth and definite lines of her thighs from the end of the denim just inches from her waist to the tip of her naked feet until the abrupt wails of Miles Davis trembled the speakers, manifesting a yearning for a place the four of them would never reach.
This is the first chapter of a novel called Analysis Paralysis. I have shown it to a few friends but they never give much constructive feedback. I once tried another forum but their taste was mainly science fiction so I didn't get any replies.
The setting starts in college but I plan for the characters to graduate halfway through the novel.
I would appreciate any feedback. Thanks.
Start:
They drank and talked of revolution like two kids eating ice cream and complaining about lines at Disneyland. They talked of corporate greed and how the hell they could get things done, quoting Marx and speaking in proper nouns. The American zeitgeist was willful ignorance, they both agreed before Jake’s girlfriend sneered at them for being so boring. And after a look around at eyes behind too much mascara, under baseball caps, inside heads that thought the same, Jake suggested a round of shots with a quick syllable, a placating look at his girlfriend, and an apologetic pat on Benny’s shoulder.
They weaved through the crowd towards the solitary light that hung over the kitchen and spilled out from an eddy of bodies to huddle around a plywood bar that tilted precariously and would topple by the end of the night in a shattering of shot glasses with college witticisms and martini glasses used for everything but martinis. The only thing left unscathed would be the plastic handles of vodka that Jake started pouring into the momentarily intact glasses. There was an obligatory click of glass and the liquor went down with the sting of an open wound. The girlfriend called for a second round and more ammunition for the larger circle she was inviting because the prevailing wisdom in those days called for the drinking of ten dollar paint thinner to include the maximum amount of people available, all wailing something resembling a war cry, with something approaching religious fervor.
Their faces imploded on themselves in strange patterns and feeling properly medicated the group dissipated into the dark side of the room with a few still chanting: shots, shots, shots. The girlfriend was led away by the hand of a friend and Benny watched her tight round denim shorts fade into the dark as he realized he should learn her name before they noticed he hadn’t.
Benny and Jake were left standing beneath the naked bulb that swung to the vibrations of a subwoofer shuddering against a nearby wall and they talked of what happened last night and what they hope would happen tonight, how bad they felt this morning and how they’d keep it all down this time, what they remembered and how much they had forgotten. Having too much of last night in black, Benny didn’t want to stay to hear it filled in and took advantage of the girlfriend coming back to make a blind exit.
Outside he paused to look at the tumultuous crowd of debauchery prowling the street and it seemed to him they all had somewhere to go. Some lucky few had even found their party on the street. These were the screamers, the most inebriated, perhaps, the best pretenders. Moving as a herd under a sepia filter of streetlights and the ubiquitous but ignored supervision of a police patrol, they were separated into the two lanes of traffic not by the ranch hands with guns but by some innate urge for order. As they crossed paths they studied each other, envious of what they may be missing, disguising their insecurity through smirks they hoped would say, “You fools are going the wrong way. The real party is this way.” Benny walked besides the auspicious without their smirk or the sense that they shared his strong desire to feel nothing.
He walked through the penumbra of the burnt yellow street, the plains of shadowed lawns that were breached every two to three houses by rays of incandescent light showcasing a scatter of beer cans from grass to pavement. If Benny had cared to look, framed by the luminescent windows, in full technicolor, were white balls thrown at red cups from across closet doors, clusters of the strangely and scantily clad matched to cliché but in practice indistinguishable party themes, and pulsating bursts of popsicle purple blaring a monotonous array of electronic sounds.
Benny’s house neighbored a suburban jungle in which Carl Bulbous appeared banging at the window attempting to catch his attention and after doing so waved for him to come in. A gesture Benny intentionally misunderstood and responded with his own telling Carl to come next door. Benny entered his house, sat on the couch, and lit a joint while waiting for Carl who ran in saying, “I’ve been . . . looking for you,” out of breath from jumping the fence, jittery in annoyance of a sound in the room, with his head swinging this way and swerving that way trying to locate the source of the white noise, and when he found the abandoned stereo he traced its jack to connect it to his phone. “Why?” asked Benny, ending a long drag and passing the joint.
Carl, failing to conceal a smile then not trying to, revealed a full set of yellow teeth before taking a draw of marijuana and Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds began to drift in the air as if the blast of smoke had triggered it. “Guess,” he said, when Benny took notice of his eyes for the first time as they pulsated erratically and followed the invisible notes of The Beatles fly out the window on a cloud.
Jake was gregarious to a fault. He had the special quality of making everyone in a crowded room feel that he was especially concerned that they were entertained. But he never failed to make them feel inadequate whenever they happened to find themselves alone with him. He was still performing, only now to the audience of one. One who could not escape the suspicion that Jake felt he was wasting a routine. An empty room was a source of anxiety that he would compel you to solve by asking where everyone was, what they were doing, when they would come back, and if you had anything better planned besides this. In this new light people saw that the magnanimous performances he gave to crowds were in fact quite sad. What at the time seemed to be his need to make everyone feel as well liked and at ease as he was, in hindsight, was his insatiable taste for attention and validation in disguise.
This quality made Jake victim to people he could never please. Whether Bethany recognized this or not is unclear, nevertheless, their relationship was a sick thing to watch. The kind that became a favorite subject of their friends when they were out of the room. An easy source for a punchline or a demarcator they told each other they would never approach. The calamity of their romance reached the heights of the grotesque so often that their friends were obliged by their gilded piety to remark on their annoyance at each encore as they savored the mayhem with commentary. We join Jake and Bethany at the threshold of their first week together:
“I hate this music,” said Bethany.
“I can try to change it,” said Jake
“I want something to dance to, I can’t dance to this.”
“We are dancing.”
“This music sucks.”
“Do you want me to ask them to change it?” asked Jake. “I know this house.”
“Let’s go somewhere else.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know. Who were you texting earlier?”
“Benny. Want to go hang out with Benny?”
“No.”
“Come on, he’s funny. You just have to get to know him. You’d have fun,” said Jake. “They’re smoking.”
Bethany squinted and tilted her head up at him, making him aware she was skeptical, but said, “Alright, let’s go,” and put on a cutesy face that was meant to say she’d do anything he wanted. A face that melted his heart but would inspire anybody else to smash it with a really large instrument.
They stepped outside and Bethany put her arm around his and this made him happy. It was cold but he didn’t feel cold because he loved walking through this street, this crowd, on nights like these. Years later when she would no longer place her arm around his, these walks would be his clearest college memories. Now as they reached a thin area of the crowd and the noise died down around them, he closed his eyes and listened for the beat of the surf that climbed up the cliffs lined with dilapidated houses towering over an ocean dotted with oil rigs. When he heard the waves crash, he lifted his head to the sky, opened his eyes to the stars overhead, and said, “I love these stars,” because he thought she’d like a guy who said things like, “I love these stars,” and was deep because he talked about things like metaphysics but she didn’t give a **** about metaphysics and neither did he.
Twenty seven minutes after the acid dripped down his tongue and into his mind, Benny’s phone lit up and the abstraction of global communications cleft his head, more than once, and his mind clung to his skull while it flew through images of satellites floating in oblivion and expanses of oceans and deserts being crossed by cancerous waves in units of time too small to define or even perceive. They scared him. The apartment seemed so small and vulnerable to a world of dangers, represented by the flashing lights of the cellular symphony. It was portentous, he thought, because that was a word he’d recently learned. But of what? He imagined a satellite crashing down on them and he wanted to leave but didn’t want to look like a fool so instead he read the text from Jake, Where’d you go? and it all changed. The network of towers and signals rearranged themselves to him, yes to him–what a strange word. The universe revolved around him and not him to it. The smallness of the apartment compared to the world instilled him with a sense of power and he begun writing a reply. He commanded the machines, LSD at home, changed his ringtone from the Psycho theme to The Office theme, and sat back to marvel at the control he had of the world from this small room.
Carl had been talking uninterrupted for the last hour, divulging Beatles trivia before the talking heads on a documentary he had watched before. Benny wasn’t listening while Carl explained that Dylan introduced The Beatles to marijuana. He started writing Jake another text—come over—in case it wasn’t clear the first time that he was welcome to the show and then asked Carl if Jake could have a pill and probably his girlfriend too.
“I haven’t met her.”
“She’s a bit of a ditz.”
“She’s hot?”
“Yea.”
Benny’s paranoia alternated between anticipated annoyance at the irritating twin mannerisms of new couples and being flagged into a DEA database. He began to suspect that government agents were listening to them through his phone. In a few chapters we will learn, when Benny visits a psychiatrist, that he has an anxiety problem. The current scene will be used, by said psychiatrist, to demonstrate that he uses drugs both to numb and indulge his anxiety, but Benny will have already known that and consider the whole thing a big waste of time and stress.
Besides his cartoonish paranoia involving government suits with dark glasses, Benny did not put much thought into what they were doing as being illegal. This was not an effect of the drugs. The normality of it all was the effect of college and most importantly, Carl. Carl Bulbous had the contagious tendency of imbedding criminal activity with the nostalgia of the moment. To him, any weekend they weren’t criminally intoxicated was a waste. He wasn’t self-medicating like Benny, he was manufacturing memories, often styled after movies, tv, and the side careers of rock musicians. He was under the pressure that these nights were supposed to be the greatest of their lives. But most of all, Carl wanted to prove that laws weren’t real.
In a dangerous combination for an adolescent in high school, he had read Machiavelli when his favorite movie was still The Godfather. This was common enough for your average teenage pseudo-intellectual except that Carl approached the genuine article, as close as a twice a day masturbating teen could get, the kind with no friends and years of free time to build his own internet music search engine that was valued at half a million dollars before it was taken away by Microsoft in a patent lawsuit. Since then–while pseudo intellectuals everywhere lamented the meaningless of life, the nonexistence of god, and the question of truth in the words of greater and more decomposed men–Carl Bulbous forged a philosophy that, while no man may come out of life a winner, there were definite losers and he was in danger of being one of them.
Thus, Carl was perhaps the only flag burning collegiate that had a legitimate gripe with the Man and he was intent on evening the score between them in what ever form it took. A fact that goes to explaining how Carl and Benny first met on the eighth floor of the university library. Benny was in the stacks, on the floor, reading a book of Barthelme stories when Carl walked into the aisle. He read the spines across the shelfs until he pulled out a book.
“Barthelme?” asked Benny.
“Yea. . .I mean. . .no,” answered Carl. “Barthelme but not the one I’m looking for.”
“What are you looking for?”
“40 Stories.”
“Here. I’ve already read it.”
“Are you sure? No, you had it first.”
“It’s ok. I’m sure. I’ll get it later.”
The back and forth went back and forth a few times until Carl looked over both shoulders and admitted, “Actually. . .I was going to. . .steal it.”
“How?” asked Benny.
“You know the self-checkout machines in the lobby? Just check out a paperback but run a hardcover through the demagnetizer and walk out with both.”
Benny pulled out a small blue metal box from his backpack, ran it over the spine of 40 Stories as it made three mechanical clicks, and handing it over said, “This is easier.”
Benny and Carl argued passionately but believed in nothing they were saying. Jake was having difficulty recognizing the most popular opinion in the room so he could attach himself to it. Bethany was continually swayed by the last person to speak.
“I’m tired of arguing about this,” said Benny. “Let’s change the subject.”
“Let’s change the channel,” said Carl.
“Let’s play some music,” said Jake.
Carl grabbed his phone and hopped on Jefferson Airplane to search for the illusive rabbit. “Vietnam has the best soundtrack of all the wars,” said Benny and they agreed.
“Do you think the hippies won the revolution?” asked Carl.
“What revolution?” asked Benny.
“Reagan stopped the uprising,” said Jake.
It was past three when someone mentioned Mexican food because it was the only place open and they went on a journey across town which was their real craving. The street was quiet except for the drunkards gliding by in giddy nirvana and the shellshocked recounting the fist fights, the regurgitated Manhattans on bathroom floors, and the friends that had disappeared together into the night never to be heard from again.
Benny walked wide mouthed, scratching his head and leaving his hair in an Einstein fashion. Carl lectured on the effects of LSD and brought out his phone to document his personal experience. Bethany dreamt of a future where burritos had no calories and clung to Jake, who was vocally panicked that he had a paper to write the next day but gathering none of the sympathy he was seeking.
They arrived to a long line. Carl and Jake went to use the bathroom, leaving Benny and Bethany waiting in line. Bethany waited a few seconds then asked, “Why don’t you like me?” casually as if it had just popped into her head instead of banging around in there the whole night.
“I don’t know you.”
“I’m Bethany,” she said. “I’m dating your best friend.”
“It’s not like I dislike you,” he said. “I’m just indifferent.”
“As long as you don’t dislike me. That’s fine for now. But I want you to like me ok.”
“Why?”
“Because Jake really likes you and I really like him. So it’s important to me that you like me because me and Jake might have something good and long going on.”
“Ok.”
They resumed waiting quietly for a few minutes until he asked, “How do you feel?”
“Good. . .You mean. . .from the stuff we took, right?” she said. “Yea, great actually except. . .I’m afraid I’ll lose this feeling because I don’t know how to describe it.”
“That’s the problem.”
“What problem?”
“Loneliness. The problem with everything,” said Benny. “We all experience the same emotions, thoughts, and instincts but only a few of us will ever be able to share them. Express ourselves enough to escape our isolated consciousness.”
“You mean through your writing, right? Jake always talks about you saying stuff like that,” said Bethany. “He thinks you’ll be one of those people.”
“No. I just read and repeat.”
When they all returned to the house, Benny rolled a joint, lit it, and passed it on. As it went around the room, he played “Blue on Green” and followed the length of Bethany’s legs up and down to the rhythm of Bill Evan’s piano, up and down the tight and smooth and definite lines of her thighs from the end of the denim just inches from her waist to the tip of her naked feet until the abrupt wails of Miles Davis trembled the speakers, manifesting a yearning for a place the four of them would never reach.