Friday, August 09, 2002

The room was dark and

The room was dark and throbbing.  I knew some of the faces drifting past my own but not well enough to ask any of them to help me, to extricate me from my dim sense of responsibility.  There were maybe 3, 400 people in my living room; the walls looked unfamiliar and the toaster I’d hung from the ceiling was an artifact from some archeological expedition, not a basic tool from my kitchen.  The basic tool was me.  I stood staring into the industrial plastic trash can, down into the depths of where the punch used to be.  I figured someone had taken it somewhere; my mind feverishly tried to imagine how it could have been carried out past such a crowd.  The floor was bouncing alarmingly; the music was familiar but the hearing of it was not.  People started gathering around me, “he lives here, he’ll set up the punch...” I was starting to have trouble with the concept of punch, and even the idea of “party” was beginning to get away from me.  I hadn’t been there when the punch was made; I think someone sliced a bit of his thumb in it but I didn’t think that was what people wanted from me.  I didn’t know what they wanted.  My clothes were floating over my skin.  Larry the dangerous freak was at my side; we took French together and attended each other’s parties.  “You look like you need this, buddy,” he smiled, and handed me a cigarette.  Gratefully, hungrily, unthinkingly I took it from him and placed it in my mouth.  It felt unfamiliar.  It was unfamiliar.  I handed it back to him.  “Dude,” I told him, “I don’t smoke.” There was still no punch.  Later on we learned that the floor beams had split and we all could have been killed.  The house was razed after we moved out.