Skincare Routines and the Key to My Bullshit

I’m at the usual Saturday night blowout. Same old jokes that stopped being funny. Same old faces, now with better skincare routines and worse underlying sadness. We’ve known each other for so long there’s not even anyone to flirt with. We’ve all seen each other vomit, piss, or both at the same time, and that tends to kill libido.

I’m in the kitchen that has one of those refrigerators that costs as much as a car. I’m making my usual three-finger cocktail, the kind of drink that announces you’ve given up pretending to care about things like liver function or appearing competent in the morning, when Lula taps me on the shoulder. She’s wearing something expensive that’s supposed to look cheap; the usual 40-something bohemian aesthetic.

“You gotta cigarette, cowboy?”

The cowboy thing is from some movie we watched together in 2012. I don’t remember which one, but I believe we were sort of “together” then. Time doesn’t work for me anymore….it no longer arranges itself into years or seasons, only into two great territories: the world before cell phones and the world after. Everything else bleeds into everything else.

I hand her a rollie and she sparks it with a novelty lighter where, once tilted, the clothes slide off a woman exposing her tits and bush. Very tsk tsk. She told me she bought it in Tokyo or claimed she did, but everything has a story attached to it now, or at the very least a psychological narrative.

“You bored?” she says, exhaling smoke that mingles with her perfume and my knock-off Dior Sauvage.

“Lately I’ve been enjoying conversations that aren’t constructed on anything reality based,” I say, though even this feels rehearsed. The truth is we’re just apes that want to fuck someone but have to pretend we’re interested in each other’s lubricated yapping about documentaries or, god forbid, conspiracy theories.

The music was aggressively mediocre; that shitty indie music everyone pretended to like fifteen years ago but had a shorter shelf life than raw seafood. Lula touches my arm like she’d read about flirting in a manual, and I curl my finger in her pant loop because that’s what you do when someone touches your arm.

We stood there doing our little dance, both knowing exactly where this was headed, both pretending we didn’t…

She whispered that we should “blow this joint” and go to my art studio a few blocks away. I had always thought of it as a place of solitude, but she was welcome there. She had always been welcome, and to my surprise, she still had her own key. In the past, she used to organize little film parties, projecting movies onto the wall, gatherings that served as pretexts for mingling with artists who were more local celebrities than serious professionals.

I would wake hungover in the morning and walk to the coffee shop a few blocks away while she slept in, daydreaming as I went, and it was during those walks that ideas would come to me. Ideas for paintings, or essays, fragments of thought that seemed to arrive from nowhere.

These were good times, perhaps the best times, and yet I had never spoken of them until now, had never tried to put them into words. There was something about the silence surrounding those days that felt necessary, as if speaking would somehow diminish what had been. But memory insists on its own schedule, and now, years later, the words come anyway.