What we are Now - Part 1

The other night I dreamt of Anne Heche (of course. Of course you did. Who doesn’t dream of Anne Heche from time to time except for everyone but you?). We were on a boat, escaping to Mexico from the zombies who had taken a hold of America; it was made clear to me that it was my job to keep Anne happy – to keep her calm and stop her from losing her mind. I do not know why everyone was so concerned with Anne’s mental health when there were surely more pressing issues at hand (zombies! Boats! Mexico!) but they were. It was the job of up most importance to make sure Anne was alright and it was a job that was my responsibility. Everyone made that clear – I was the only one with the power to do this job well. Despite a couple of dodgy moments I fulfilled this task with aplomb just by listening and laughing and understanding. I woke up and had this very real, visceral reaction that went thusly: ‘what the fuck was that?’

Later: we sit in a mid-priced Italian chain restaurant. Somewhere that has wicker chairs and candles in wine bottles. It is the kind of establishment that just aches for upper middle-class snobbery to slobber all over it, all the while the peons enjoy their reasonably priced and delicious mushroom pizzas (or ‘pizza di mushroomi de la formaggio’ or some such faux Italian sounding schtick that makes the aforementioned upper middle classes snort with derision and the lower middle classes feel like they are eating something more special than, what is essentially, just a delicious mushroom pizza. I tend to deal with this dichotomy by employing all the middle-middle classness I have at my disposal: playing up the name when ordering with a fake/cute cute/fake Italian accent and putting a little pizzazz into the proceedings. Servers either find this charming and funny or think I’m a dick. It’s never easy to tell which way the wind will blow on that score. It’s usually the former – I have a habit; when I am in the right mood, of being able to charm just about anyone. It’s effortless when I can be bothered. Indeed, even in the rare cases I’ve convinced myself it’s the latter they’ll return to the table and place my latte down with a flourish of the hand and a notable accent on the ‘tey’ bit of the latte (dry humourists are always difficult to read but particularly when they are writing down drinks orders.) There is a table to our left full of the oddest selection of characters ever assembled to break bread together. Balloons and comedy sized badges indicate a 21^st birthday is being celebrated. On my 21^st birthday I was corralled into going to a rock/goth club (the antithesis of everything I stand for: black tulle mini skirts and black lipstick. I tried for a while to be big booted and heavily eye linered, a step or two away from the world of goth, but it never stuck. I enjoy sunlight and unicorns and daisies too much. Now I embrace the idea of actually looking nice rather than a fucking mess. For the most part anyway) with a bunch of people I didn’t know who were aquatinted with my mentor/best friend at the time. At the stroke of midnight which welcomed my anniversaire into existence I had one puff on a ‘proper’ cigarette (as opposed to the rollies I was taught to smoke) and spent the next hour being sick into the club toilets. Anyone who has ever been to a club, let alone a goth club, will tell you one thing and one thing alone: the last place on earth you want to spend upwards of 47 minutes is in the toilets of those types of establishments. The birthday boy (it may be girl) turns round as we shuffle into the wicker seats round our designated table and tries to engage us in conversation. We make a telepathic decision to engage as little as possible back. That is what we are now.

I sense the birthday boy/girl girl/boy is playing up to her/his ‘wacky’ persona. I too once thought my affected eccentricities were the only things that made me interesting: the smoking, the drinking, the drugs, the sex. All these things added shading and colour to what was otherwise dull and asinine. It was only later that I found out everyone adds these skills to their CV in order to make them more marketable for general consumption. All the things I tried to hide; my shyness, my lack of knowledge on carnal matters, my bizarre love of tidying and lists – these are the things I learned to like about myself and, because of this, these are things that matter. I tried on the hat entitled ‘crazy fuck up’ but it was never part of me, not a marker on my DNA, just an identity that a thousand others have tried at some point – to wildly differing degrees of success. Losing these attributes wasn’t so much me giving them up, I just shed a skin I never felt entirely comfortable with anyway. Had anyone told me this at 21 I would have told them to fuck right off. As I sit in the restaurant nodding sagely at the knowledge of what this youth will have to endure in their journey of self-actualisation to come – a patronizing sense of having seen it all before encompasses me and I experience a brief sensation of feeling ‘grown up’. This is how we know I will, sooner or later, get taught a lesson of my own.

The morning after the engagement party I wake up and finally, after 27 years, really truthfully understand the meaning of the word ‘hangover’. A throbbing pain in my frontal lobe threatens to bash my brains out from my skull and a queasiness makes its way from the bottom of my stomach up to my gullet. I manage to hang my head over the toilet just in the nick of time and watch as yellow liquid is expelled with great, passionate force into the bowl. None of this compares to the embarrassment radiating through every atom in my being. I wipe my hand across my mouth and slowly stand up, careful not to move my head around too much for fear of offending the great dragon of unending pain that has taken up residence within my skull cap (it subsides after 2 hours but takes 48 hours to pack its things and leave for good). I am finding breathing difficult now, not because of the alcohol poisoning which, after near on 10 months of celibate, straight edge living, is something I never thought I’d experience again but because I am having flashbacks of conversations from the night before. Holding James in my arms and telling him he’s not his dad and is good enough for my friend. A hug that bordered inappropriate but never crossed that border. I think it probably only looked that way to an outsider anyway, him and I knew there wasn’t anything sexual about this conversation but maybe that’s what everyone else freaked out about it. Anyway, today I am sure of one thing: I hate myself.