Mr. Rose And The Cosseted Girl

We partied mostly for the simple pleasure of partying. There were pretences; there always are. But when I retreated to the relative seclusion of Harry's kitchen to hit up the rum bottle, I wasn't thinking of Lebanon. I wasn't thinking of Lebanon or Emil Jackson or any of that crap.

Harry's kitchen in Bethlehem was a familiar place; I've ended up there more times than I expected to, curled up on the floor, staring sideways at the fridge magnets that spout mysterious philosophies at me, hoping his parents weren't going to get home. Years after all that crap, with us cast in the role of responsible intellectuals, I didn't have to worry about his parents getting home. Had they shown up, they would've surely downed a shot with me and welcomed Harry home with open arms. They might've disapproved of Emil Jackson and the whole Baby Woodrose debauchery that was occurring in the basement, but that was beside the point.

When I walked back into the room Harry was sitting in, that bastard was surrounded like he was F. Scott Fitzgerald dug up and put on display, meat still hanging haphazardly from the bones, wicked small member dangling loosely between his legs. That was Harry--F. Scott Fitzgerald's ugly corpse rotting, until a few weeks ago, in the fiery hell of Lebanon. That image of Harry forced me out, away from the crowd, onto the back porch.

I remember honestly being glad for the Lebanese boys. I remember, before the last delirious night in Harry's Bethlehem residence, keeping constant, speed-of-light e-mails flowing back and forth between my place in upstate New York and Harry's Lebanese skunk hole, and we'd idealize the kids and talk about how the Cedar Party was the next Hungarian Revolution and the rest of that kind of bullshit that streams out of your mouth when you're watching something but not taking part in it. Even Harry was too far away from it to really understand it, but he told me some interesting and flashy stories about college kids with determination in their hearts and sand in their teeth.

I was glad that the kids there, who had set aside the differences between being Muslim and Christian, being rich and poor, being whatever and whatever, and just done what they thought was right, had gotten what they thought they wanted. I was glad Syria left Lebanon like it probably should've. I was glad about it, but I wasn't partying for it. And I wasn't partying for some God-damned hippie guitarist named Emil Jackson who thought he was the next Keller Williams and happened to get a gig opening at the first commercial Bonneroo. I was partying, for Christ's sake, I was partying to party. That's something we seem to have lost in modern times; we have placed too much meaning behind all our actions.

My flaw is the precise opposite. I, Luke Rose, king of Dionysian excess in the modern age, never place any meaning in any of my actions. One slip of the lips whilst drunk, and I wake up without a girlfriend, without a shirt on my back, without a car to drive, or without a license to drive it. There's a happy medium somewhere; balance is possible for those with stamina and some kind of heroic quality mere mortals like myself don't possess. I've met those who do possess it, but none of them were at the April 23 party at Harry's place.

Maybe it's selfish of me, and it does go against most of the journalistic philosophies I had skull-fucked into my brain at NYU (also known as Yuppie University), but I feel the only way to righteously explain this thing is to explain about myself. I am precisely the kind of boy who would skip past the looking in the mouth and go right to stabbing the gift horse in between its ribs. I've never been able to hold on to anything for too long, except for the skin I've got glued to my muscle. One day, yeah, I know that too is going to peel off and drift away like dust in the wind, like Kansas-style, like I've read too much existential poetry or maybe just seen Bill and Ted too many times. That's another key trait about myself; I have, in fact, seen Bill and Ted too many times.

I would really groove to being a writer, but it seems every single one of my friends out-classes me tremendously in that department; at the time, Harry had just gotten back from Lebanon where he had been putting in regular dispatches to the Christian Science Monitor, Jann was in New Mexico profiling race conflicts and eating home-grown peyote while writing the Great American you-know-whatzit, and I, there I was, sitting on the back porch while gazing in through the lighted window of Harry's living room, watching him play spin-the-bottle with a harem of undergraduates, except there was no bottle. That should've been me. I should've been sitting in there, too drunk to even stand, getting kisses rained on my neck by demanding fans, but I had no demanding fans, I had no work worth demanding, and, I distinctly remember being drunk enough to feel like, I had no neck.

A short walk away from Harry's house and you end up at the brook we used to float paper sailboats with hairspray coating the bottom. It's where I generally ended up drunk, and I decided that April 23 ought to be no exception.

There was a time when, on the other side of the creek, there was a small forest, and then farmland. It was dirty, gross, drained land that never seemed to grow anything, and when Emrick and her lot sold out to the housing developers, that land got developed pretty much overnight. One time, Harry lived on the edge of the world. We got drunk one night as children, passed out in the hard lawn chairs dotting his back porch, and when we woke up, his house was on the edge of yuppie hell.

That's not true; they spent enough time constructing those houses for us to sneak into them as fourteen-year-olds and draw crude pornography and what we thought were scary, demonic sayings on the walls. Somewhere, there's a Nascar dad whose house, just under the thin layer of white paint, is telling him, every day, to go fuck himself with a blender.

Those were the days that inspired Jann to go to New Mexico and write beat poetry on the adobe walls in violent, red spraypaint. Somehow, while he was there, he got serious and devoted himself to work instead of mindless violence. What a pity; but I suppose it happens to the best of us sometime.

Those thoughts consumed me while I sat down by the brook and stared across it at the yuppie houses with gleaming lights. They did have one thing in common with Harry and I; they, too, were awake this late on Saturday nights. I wondered if there was some drunk yuppie brat sitting on the other side of the creek, where I couldn't see him, maybe pissing beer into the still waters, but then dismissed that as madness.

I