The Revelers in Obscurity, a Short-Story

Acknowledgments: for Trump who could you do my mom and me a favor and cruise missile our aging dachsund who’s driving us ballistic? Never mind I’m not sure even Seal Team 6 could take it down; for anyone who despite, depending on attention in any degree, loathes it; and for everybody who wants to run away from society like other people let alone the masses were the embodiment of Covid or venereal disease or throat cancer; for my late big-hearted uncle Rob, who lived in the mountains, hunting deer sitting in trees for hours, alone for periods, who had been in the navy for a time, who liked to read Hemingway and was one of the coolest guys in my whole family, whom I’m so sad had to die when I was young of esophageal cancer so we never got to get properly close, who always made a big entrance on Christmas and got us all these big presents, Rob who taught me how to shoot when I was about twelve, and whose reclusive hardcore lifestyle I envied right away; everything I write is for you, Rob; Rest in Peace.

Author’s Note: I don’t really know where I’m going to end up in life, but this is how I imagine it going. I have sought to establish myself as a personality use it to ignite my career, but because I hate attention I shall endeavor to live remotely in nature, giving few interviews, traveling rarely and avoiding the public. I do not like writers like Hemingway or Norman Mailer who reveled in their personas and adulation of the masses. Anyway the reclusive writer’s work is enhanced by the silence of the man. Not that I’ll never talk about it or myself. There’s really nothing more that I love than discussing it with everyone close to me. I just don’t like public attention and I’m not an extrovert. I’ve always been a home body if I’m a momma’s boy which explains my obsession with moms in my writing, like the womblike feeling of intoxication is why I like whiskey so much. When I was very young I cried when people sang happy birthday for me. And as I grew up I would hate my birthday, and I still hate my birthday because the attention is overwhelming and repulsive to me. Then they try and make you feel bad for hating the attention when they’re trying to be nice. But you didn’t ask for the attention any less than you asked to be born. So why intrude on my privacy by celebrating me! You will not succeed in making me feel bad and guilt-tripping me for being private shy mean or good looking or arrogant or quiet or loud or obnoxious or obsessive or smart or callous anymore. None of you. I really loved writing this one. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. This is really some of my most beautiful work so far in my opinion.

“Hell of a bedside manner, you got Rust. You’re like the Michael Jordan of being a son of a bitch. Every time you just keep raising the bar.—Woody Harrelson in True Detective

“This is a bar it ain’t a fuckin’ bedside,” Matthew Mcconaughey in True Detective

“I have had my fun if I never get well no more,”—Howlin’ Wolf

“Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius!"—Nietzsche

“The great man disdains to be familiar”—Nietzsche

“Hell is other people.”—Sartre

“I’m not mister friendly. I’m not what your friends think. If you tempt me I’m liftin’ you ten feet in the air I don’t care.” —Eminem, “The Way I Am”

“Kathleen was sitting down in little Red’s Recovery Room in her criminal underwear bra, I was naked to the waist with my fierce black hound, and I’m cookin’ up a filipino box spring hog, cookin’ up a filipino box spring hog”— Tom Waits, Filipino Box Spring Hog

My friend Kevin O’Rourke describing my writing to me, “It’s gritty. It’s funny. It’s-in-your-face.”

The Revelers in Obscurity, A Short-Story

by Jay Burkett

What was so maddening—the essence of what was so maddening, like the essence of the essence of the essence of it essentially—essentially the inessential, invaluable, inviolable essence of it was—he wasn’t exactly a bad guy…

He was just an absent withdrawn and quiet guy. A silent, reclusive and reserved and private and solitary, secluded hermitic guy who craved shelter. Sanctuary in whatever peace and independence and freedom whatever vestiges of it he still found and could hope to scrounge in silence isolation and whatever warmth those bottles he still put away still offered.

If nothing else he was an isolated guy. Isolated in his mind, walled off in his heart, closed to access not by his friends or anyone, let alone his wife. And he hated his friends.

Retreating to this room this office, this incommunicative, and uncommunicable inaccessible, unreachable not living space but more like a final resting place, what was more and more like in spite of all—he had the temerity, too, to label— his pathological temperamental study—if his marriage and family were a war, at least they were winning, because as he aged he was staging more and more retreats here, he perhaps more afraid of them than they were afraid of him—his withdrawn and unapproachable study, where and in which he dwelled, he convalesced, he coalesced, by either sitting spread-eagled in a web in the corner on the floor or he hung from the ceiling upside down, because sometimes it could be pitch dark, though the light was sometimes on in the middle of the night, the midnight oil that was actually midnight oil—he disdained electricity— and this was more of an animal than a man, an animal that liked cool dark spaces like a spider or a bat (the only thing that might still qualify him as an animal were the strange wild nights where he would stumble around the house find his wife and suddenly make terrifying inspired love very fast to her that she was not always in the mood for and never knew when to expect and she could not prevent in the dead of night, he on all fours on the floor of her bedroom leaping up like a panther and throwing the covers back…), the island, the desert, the captain’s cabin of a ship in a hurricane, where he ate and slept and took long loose shits occasionally in the adjoining bathroom, the toilet which once in a great while you could even find him passed out and sitting on fast asleep bottle in hand. He was increasingly menaced by his irritable bowel disease if his bearlike wolfish, serpentine libertine, turpentine spirit was nearly conquered by that temperamental reclusivity like a brown recluse spider (he making love to that writer’s wife as deadly as that spider’s bite)—his insides infinitely and indefinitely for all time til the end of time exacerbated to the breaking point of morbid highfalutin exaggeration by his chronic heavy to the point of heavy-heavy smelly binging, proper benders he used to go on still few and far between because as he got older it was nothing like the even more wild youth he was when he was in his thirties when she met him and she began to know the man she would NEVER really know because he wouldn't let you he wouldn’t let anyone know what was ever really on his mind which attracted her even as it repulsed her, and attracted her again and repulsed her again, he to this day having that maddening anguishing effect of being unreachable and unknowable inaccessible, which he liked to argue in his defense isn’t all that strange, because all people have secrets, no one is that simple or straightforward; it was only that he was just a little bit or he was quite a bit more complicated and more secretive, why because he was more of a man, he was more human more mortal having the courage and strength to be flawed and frail and imperfect and unfinished, he not giving a damn who knew how fucked up and impossible and intractable he was more of a bigger man than the ninety-nine-point-nine-nine-nine percent of humanity, more human by being less human less average, less stable, less secure, deeper profounder, high-flying, uncatchable unattainable, unobtainable mystery to himself in proud, to the point of enraged, cold disdain of anything and everyone in life that was easy to understand and easygoing and not hard and hot and cold and ruthless and unrelenting and difficult and twisted and complicated as he was; it was said to make him livid the simple folk afraid to be as big and tough and proud and knowing by not knowing as he was, as he were even if it made a mess of him physically it destroyed all his relationships, and no biographers could say he was a good father or a good husband, because great things come at great cost, immense sacrifice, and no proper artist ever made it by being nice and putting anyone else even himself before his work and his need to achieve and go deeper and further and push the boundaries, because you didn’t want to be contained by anything or controlled by anybody, you just pushed and pushed and pushed, heedless of money, of love, of happiness, heedless not like when she intimidated-as-hell met him on a wintry rainy bleak November day on his birthday as it happened in a Massachusetts fish store, and she knew right away unbelievable though that this and this alone was the author in the flesh, always running, always hiding always ducking out from underneath the stormy of pretty women not just chasing him but stalking him, whom he caused such marital disruption by making the fragility of domesticity the break-out subject of his early work, though the later work was arguably superior, and he was the most hated man by other men because of how he did this, even though as he said men would hate me anyway, no matter what I fucking did.

He became such a sensation so fast that he was fast reduced to hiding out at the time in a little house in Martha’s Vineyard, and hanging around strange desolate New Bedford dive bars and dipping in and out of seafood shops, subsisting on a strong thin diet of seafood and chowder and beer and French fries and burgers and wings and bar food like an animal like a lonely but fierce and sad stray dog a handsome rescue.

“Oh my God!” she said holding back an embarrassing gasp that she knew would have revolted him. Awestruck. Thunderstruck. That was his effect on you like a thunderclap in hell. “Leave me the fuck alone,” he said ironically gruffly without looking at her, and she knew he said this to tease and tempt and taunt and flaunt his imminent implacable desirability in her gorgeous face. He liked to openly insult and disrespect pretty women to make them chase him, ones he fancied; this was how he worked. By denial and self-repression. It was a way of weeding out the strong bold women like the weak timorous self-doubting ones who didn’t know what they want for whom he really did have no respect at all. He didn’t respect men or children for that matter or anyone who wasn’t quite as confident as he was, confident because doubt got you nowhere except the avoidance of accidents when getting into as many accidents in life as possible was the whole fucking point. You think I’m not human? You’re not human.

“Leave me alone,” he sneered.

This was how Gloria Hellwater would know and come to understand he liked her. Especially when he came to learn her name was Hellwater and that she wasn’t some Hollywood actress or someone well known. He hated celebrities wanted to kill them even, even though he was a celebrity, well he hated his own celebrity and wanted to kill himself if he couldn’t kill the celebrity. That was what all the running was about too.

He hated her so that meant he loved her right away. And she loved him. Like a lot of women even if they hated him like he hated them—because his strategy which was an accident, but accidents were the point was paying off handsomely, as handsomely as he was still vigorously illustriously dashingly swashbucklingly handsome, distortedly, extortionately handsome—she read all his damned obnoxious ridiculous books and short-stories and reread and reread and reread them and let her marriage collapse because she didn’t waste a moment with not reading him, and it was making her possessive jealous husband jealous which was like a foregone conclusion. He was not enough for her. He was inadequate. She made more money than he did. And he was not an artist or handsome or virile enough for her. Because of this, he would leave her so she didn’t have to leave him in feigned contempt for her, when it was himself he knew was unable to please her—Gloria making the mistake of marrying a man to have some leverage and control over him, she unaware that what she really wanted was a man like her you had to fight and struggle to control knowing that you never would the struggle the battle of the sexes being the whole point of a fun and rocky and tempestuous stormy rickety marriage.

He was not as successful, her husband not having as much as she did as she was a model for a while, let alone without even trying and rather failing his way to success, the way the author did, the way he became a writer like falling down a massive flight of spiral stairs in a lighthouse and smashing your head on every step of the way down to fame. He was not virile or competitive or savage or beastly enough. And real women like real men who were savage wild animals and not even people.

When she read his work he opened her unconscious fantasy that she should marry a beast, a devil, a God, a sage, a saint, a myth, a personality, a character, a legend. She was not interested in realistic men like most women. She was no realistic woman. She was an unrealistic woman who desired no less than an unrealistic man who defied reality who spat on reality who despised everything taken to be held “fact” by the “scientific community” and all “communities” and clubs sororities and fraternities and he just wanted to burn it all down in a bonfire of illusion and magic, and sorcery and witchcraft and voodoo.

Anyone who wasn’t on his level of radical independence, a radical individualist like himself, he just violently despised.

Men were so effeminate and vain and metrosexual and kempt and clean and healthy and gross with tight shirts and tattoos and jewelry and wearing jogger sweatpants everywhere and hoodies and took care of themselves so much these days in this grotesquely increasingly interconnected advanced cosmopolitan unromantic contemporary unreality. They still were even after his aborted effort to redeem and rescue it absurdly ironically because he hated the world. It didn’t really deserve to be saved. Technology and obsessive grooming would destroy authentic existence, and this was not a battle he was fated to win. He had arrived too late, and now it was he who needed rescuing. Not the world. It could all go to hell.

Onto new battles.

There they were, here he was, having retired after making much more than just a splash, and making a violent fiduciary killing, not retired from writing or being crazy, but retired to retreat to get away from the world that now was more after him than he was ever after, now he couldn’t keep up with it any less than the world was accelerating ahead of him, unmarried a bachelor; he still couldn’t hold down a relationship and proud of it, because they couldn’t hold down him, and he liked that, uncompromising and unapologetic, unvarnished, wild and savage and vicious and alone, tall and big and robust and giant, a bachelor but without even one miraculous mistress, except for all the endless Only Fans ones of course, sitting and crouching in Martha’s Vineyard and sometimes Nantucket bars in the dead of winter, and living on the poisonous berries that killed that guy in the Jon Krakauer book and that movie Into the Wild whatever his name was, the name escaped one the kid was so elusive more even than him now, the Alaskan woods in the summer, unreachable and uncatchable beyond appeal, beyond saving, living in the wilderness on poisonous berries and whiskey he found by hacking into trees with just his raw clean short fingernails with enough force to wrench them off, but they didn’t come off because they were so affixed so brutish and adhesive like the world’s Kraziest Krazy Glue in the winter in New England in dimly lit sports bars watching hockey and football and Fox News with tears in his eyes and laughter in the passion of his cheeks, gaunt and tall and lean and mean, a machine among blue collar types, men who worked with their hands and fished for whatever was left in the sea not women fish, whatever was left because the US ceded the sea to China that gobbled up all the fish so the fishermen were starving and life was harder and nastier than ever here, fishermen who lived and worked there there whole wide undivided lives, the aging wealthy scoundrel he was determined not to become, he associating only with grizzled hardened experienced people who weren’t letting the natural life go or the natural world who could eat seagulls and drink gallons of bourbon for breakfast and then go to work. Amazingly. He was a very amazing very astonishing indefatigable young man.

It was too bad how he drank so much too much so risibly hilariously fast and could still stand and win games of billiards with his eyes closed and shooting around the back and holding cue sticks clutching them tight and playing with just his penis and never lose a game, poker he played with his eyes closed too, seeing better with them closed the expressions on the faces of these fellow unreadable cloistered, isolated secretive men.

When she met him she could tell immediately he was perhaps very hung over and probably most likely still drinking like the damned seawater, if he couldn’t get his hands on any whiskey fast enough or maybe because some deep dark and depressing days he preferred seawater and bird poop. He smelled like sea brine and alcohol. Briny sea brine. Sea salt vinegar and fish and chips and pan-fried bacon, skirt steak and rib eyes. He and it were disgusting but it was his profound and trivial trifling frivolous felicitous weakness that was of the essence of his inessential unnecessary charm. His allure. His appeal. Always had been always would be.

Like a woman the right woman not the wrong one or maybe the wrong one too could change his beastly nature and reform that godlessness cure him of sin and the joy of sinning and living on the run in darkness and light, put him on the proper course the right path of the woman who sinned more deeply better than he did, who would be his envy and redeemer. To redemption or to hell. Because who cared wherever you went whatever the world made of you. Go where you had to go, because there was no changing anything or any of it.

His favorite subject in his outright twisted books, his topsy turvy upside down and right side up books with his incorrigible unsleepable unspeakable bedside manner: those books that turned everything not least conventional inherited Western moral value on its head, including commonsense, the collective commonly agreed-upon common courtesy and everything common he took one of his IBD dumps on, and truth—the truth will not set you free, it chained you and it didn’t even fucking exist, didn’t it?—and she had to be with this guy she had to go to war with that self-destructive talent that descended into violent rages where he punched holes in windows and burned his own books and smiled watching it and drank whiskey after whiskey in warm livid silence, peering into the flames for meaning to ascertain the meaninglessness of it all which was the meaning after all, that it was all just a big struggle a competition a contest to see which would prevail man or the beast virtue or sin, heaven or hell.

She just had to be with him. She couldn’t explain it. How else was he supposed to escape himself?

Women never know why they were either terrified of him or just had to have him or both.

Gloria blocked the exit of the fish store with her long slightly tall elegant model body.

“You’re crazy” he gloated and sort of boasted in his reserved complimentary grumpy way.

“You can’t go” she spurted without thinking squirting. Apparently she would reward him with lots of female ejaculation that fascinated him. He would collect it in jars and admire it in his downtime and then mix it with his alcohol.

“Why can’t I?” He grinned at her through his perpetual incessant ponderous unshaven face, his dark whiskers, not shaving ever for days or weeks or years, centuries.

“Kiss me,” she wavered between pleading and demanding, commanding.

Muscles and oysters on the beach you couldn’t open he crowbarred open with just his big toe in the most violent gesture in the history of mankind—why to slurp the juices up and then the smash the shells on the rocks. Little horseshoe crabs, some of the dumbest but oldest most enduring creatures even acquired the wits when they saw him coming to flee to the water, but they couldn't get away. He picked them up and tore into them with his teeth and not even sparing the shell or its lifeless-looking eyes, the shell of a horseshoe crab like pizza crust he never spared and preferred to pizza. He could just have a pizza that was all crust as the only food he would ever eat for his whole entire livelong life.

“What if I don’t?”

“Just kiss me for Christ’s sake.”

“What if I don’t?”

“I’ll hit you.”

“But if you’ve read any of my books, you’ll know I like that.”

“I know. You only like bitchy cunty women who boss and push you around.”

“They are resistance.”

“I hate all that. That’s what’s so annoying about you, how proud—”

“She went diving into a diatribe and he kissed her deeply. Later she would compare it not to being kissed by God but a God.

Like Poseidon. Prometheus. Narcissus. Adonis. Zeus. Artemis. Hades.

Dionysus.

There was so much uninhibited abandon in it. That was what was so longitudinally alluringly attractive about him. And everyone had to fall like falling off a building in love with him. There was this self-abandoning reckless abandon. This wild abandon that women simply had to have. But they didn’t just have to have; they would be damned if they didn’t possess, and if they couldn’t shoot every fucker who got in her way of possessing.

“What was that about?” Gloria asked recovering.

“It was for nothing. You’re not the same,” he told her.

“Why? How?”

“I don’t even know.”

“But how?” she demanded and this time she kissed him aggressively. Then she licked up with her tongue all the raindrops on his oilskin jacket. The fish store piece-of-shit guy was jealous and disgusted and envious. Like America’s great artist didn’t care. He crumpled up a fifty dollar bill or a hundred dollar bill and hurled it like a snowball at the piece of shit, self-loathing monster; because a jealous man, an envious man, a bitter person, a resentful life-negating uncreative shallow person a superficial person was a weak person and they all deserved to be buried with unhurried snowballs full of ice. Ice and rocks and piss and shit and cum.

He pelted it like the rain decimated the windows and cut their throats.

They made rapid rapacious voracious cretaceous love in his 80’s black Jag like possessed people and then they shared a cigar because it was one of those old cars with a cigar lighter built into it. Her name was Gloria Hellwater like Bathwater. The “baby with the bathwater.” She was a model who was done with it or through with it or it was done with her. Because she left it all to live on the rainy Massachusetts seacoast with this guy for however long it lasted.

Because this chick was different. She was not like the others. Not afraid to have her heart broken or to be misled or led on or whatever. Not too intimidated to attempt to tame the untamable unnamable Great Man.

Because she was a woman of Greatness they had a big wedding at the New York Yacht Club in Newport, and he was so shy and drunk and busy writing to save his untethered sanity he hid from the guests somewhere, while she a socialite attended to the charming and coaxing of all the insufferable wedding guests. Because Great Men hate their guests. And Great Women accept it and take care of the task of socializing on their behalf because women are more sociable and real men can’t and disdain to be that way.

She knew he would make a mediocre husband, a lame one, and she didn’t care. He was an alright father if he spent any time at all with the kids. He was distant, unreachable and unapproachable and unassailable but beyond reproach, reproachfully, he was repellent, he was disgusting, he was maddening and sickening but—he was a bad, like a very bad liar! So that was one thing she could hope to tame the beast with. Don’t lie to me.

“You’re falling off the wagon again!” Tonight she accused him. Because though he always drank, sometimes he had periods of too much, and they had an agreement not to let him fall off too hard, so here she was, and she might be successful or not, but here went another intervention. Which was pointless. Even when he didn’t descend into drunkenness he was unapproachable; healthier but no happier and above all unapproachable.

She couldn’t believe how much he wrote and churned out like a charnel house full of clam chowder. Because she hardly heard any clicking and tapping and scraping and clacking and shellacking of laptop keys or his scribbling wiggling fiddling pen like a fiddle or a harmonica. Half the time she came in to check on him he was in a stone drunk unwritten stupor.

But his books were all overwritten and just plain crazy.

“No, I’m not,” he said quietly.

He put the bottle frantically frenetically kinetically symphonically in the drawer, a synecdoche of sensation and muse and idea, and shut it.

Sometimes he was proud of his debauches sometimes ashamed. He wasn’t sure if he liked masterful control or it was superior to embrace and surrender to the chaos! Gloria was unfazed by it though. They had a couple of servants to take care of their five kids, and let’s talk for a moment or at great length about this fantastic woman’s magical golden tanned withdrawn Madonna-like appearance.

Gloria Hellwater was a silky golden brassy leggy blonde with ideal smooth skin that was a perpetual deep tan without her even going outside for anything, not even to sit in book stores and libraries and movie theaters by herself that she did if she ever went outside for anything so the tan made no sense; because like him she was good looking and full of spirit, so much so that she didn’t even like other people; she liked to be alone. She loved herself and she loved peace and quiet to be alone with the storm inside her soul that had been with her her whole life, and she didn’t know why she had it but she had always been a stormy unreachable woman. Boyfriends became frustrated with her independence almost at once and all broke up with her. She had had a sum total of five million boyfriends and they all broke up with her either in stunned fascination curiosity high dudgeon but usually a mixture of wonder and anguish and rarely rage.

By the way her eyes were big and luminously lasciviously cunningly green, but green of a deep kind like wetted refreshed rejuvenated grass on Irish hillsides on very overcast days, a green that was deep but burned scorched through and shocked you with the implacable ferocity of its spirit. Her mouth was a dreamlike surreal unreal metareal, metaethical squiggle. Her hair and her skin it can’t be said enough was remarkably smooth and soft. She was tall like five-nine or five-ten if she wasn’t seven foot five or nine. Everything about her screamed smooth and soft. She was a labyrinth too, and her body was like that of girls in old noir movies. Yes she had a mysterious smoky beauty like Greta Garbo or Lauren Bacall or Grace Kelley. Sort of. Except she never wore redlipstick. It wasn’t her style. She liked lip gloss. Hmm. Gloss. This was the perfect exceptional word for her to describe and portray a very exceptional woman who stood out by not standing out, by standing against the wall arms crossed in silence, and walking on air through rooms down halls down streets up streets and up halls upstairs, she drifted ascending and descending around like a glossy raunchy ghost—she had a glossy mossy faintly vaguely evanescently mossy beauty.

No, not Kate Moss. Even though she was just as and no less cool not in your nightmares and all the fantasies you ever had and ever would have. No Gloria Hellwater was like Redwoods Forest moss. Green lively and vital and full of life, vivacious and contumacious with verve swerve velocity and panache. She could have easily passed for a shy serene and reserved and innately inordinately powerful Vanessa by high decree if she didn’t have to be a big tall sweeping fantastic awesome inglorious Gloria. One hundred degrees or two hundred Fahrenheit, a woman like this made you tremble and fear to approach her she inspired and fed that much stimulus. Like Romulus and Remus she could have had empires built in her image. She was today’s Helen of Troy that a hundred billion men went to fight for because she was the hottest one, the beautifulest woman.

In the entrance of their tiny mansion there was a diamond chandelier and a big portrait of the family with his tweeds and his pipe, their little girls complete with bows and ribbons in their hair who feared and ignored their dad because he was inaccessible and unresponsive to them, all their big shaggy dogs, and even his collection of old cars he hadn’t destroyed by driving them all into the ground yet, and the horses he didn’t kill himself riding yet. If he ever would because it was sublime how deeply carefully he lived in reality, despite the persona—his literature made a romance of destructive behavior, resurrected it from the dead. Because the only great artist was an out-of-control one. And he didn’t want to be good. He wanted to be great and that involved being a somewhat bad person if not just an indecent or disreputable or dishonorable figure with poor hygiene, who had the courage to be sublimely negligent and psychologically and spiritually massive.

Sometimes some nights he would race raging off on a black stallion or a pale white noble horse, depending on whether he was the white knight or the dark one. I’ll leave it to your imagination because you could already guess which he preferred. Indeed good and evil are in perpetual struggle in the souls of all men, and if you have taste you like it that way. There’s no point in living without battling evil and good alike. His mood was everywhere and he was everything.

Every woman who had ever been abused by a man he was known to send hounds from hell after. Like men as soon as they hit a woman or otherwise failed to treat them well, he was known to send Birds like The Birds from the Hitchcock movie—he sent big black vicious American ravens after them, yeah and hounds big mean vicious dogs. It was central to his life and his art that bad men meaning weak ones were unforgiven were punished; he despised cowards, liars, and cheats. And he contrived a way incontrovertibly to make them all pay just for not being as confident as he was. He despised the self-loathing the jealous the envious the anxious the men who couldn’t look themselves in the mirror. Nothing was more contemptible in the entire universe than the spectacle of weak men. Even though he was the weakest one. Weaker than anyone could imagine. That was the source of his strength. Anyone who lived in denial or ever repressed anything he just wanted to kill or he did kill, because it wasn’t bad to lie to other people necessarily but if you hid anything from yourself… because no one should be afraid to have regrets— they were all pussies!

He was a drunk avenging angel, and his secretaries editors publicists and lawyers were all only beautiful women who were probably all his mistresses too tailoring exquisitely suits for him and arranging and managing his drunken appearances for him sending random girls his dirty underwear and snot and semen-filled tissues.

And Gloria Hellwater was so strong so relentless such a tiger in her own right, a lioness she not only put up with it but basked in it all in his destructive vindictiveness and self-obliteration, the poor health and the mess, the lawsuits the broken hearts, the disaster he fomented like a revolution. Because she had her own dirty seedy stockpile, a sock and panty drawer of conquests and lovers, because she was the writer’s wife so every man had to have Gloria too and they had the right to this because she and her husband were utterly insatiable, sensual and sensational…

What she only did not like was how he was aging and not talking. He went for months without talking and saying nothing at dinner, months when not years of muteness, nor in the morning, it was creepy. And weird and strange. He was so so so absent and locked away and locked up in his walled-off cerebral sodden reserve. Cigars ashing the invisible wordless smoking with puffing soundless cheeks. Gruff grumbling, moody snappy shrugging.

You never saw or heard him writing, yet those books came out somehow and he won fifty thousand National Book Awards and Pulitzers (a day) when they started giving them to extravagantly toxic cartoonishly most of all enraged straight anglo Saxon men again, who loathed nothing more and nothing else or less than contemporary life.

Secretly she liked it, she loved it. She wouldn’t tell anyone least of all him her husband. A Good Wife can’t tell a great big bad husband how much she actually doesn’t disapprove of it. It would kill her role for her to try and attempt to tame him, even if it killed her. Because you better not because he was genuinely untamable unnameable, let alone controllable. Matchless. Peerless. Indomitable, a bull, a bear a lion, as impossible to win against in an argument as Margaret Thatcher. They couldn’t let him on Jeopardy because he would win every time and too easily. Because she was a great big woman with a great big heart she vented her repulsedness slamming the door and repairing stonily to the bedroom in superficial indignation, and she tore into her vodka. Grey Goose. She didn’t know why.

Because if she was a great woman then that also made her an undeniable unbeatable damnable damned damned damned damnable self-declared “vodka girl.” And every time he retreated into himself, she withdrew into herself. Misses Gloria Hellwater in her glossy prissy bossy beauty, and her ideal skin and her heavenly golden hair sat on their bed alone as usual and she felt the vodka loosening her up, and she smiled and she had one drink for every excuse she made to let their servants take care of their kids for her, or let the kids take care of themselves, whatever they were doing, whether they were boozing, or cruising for a bruising too or just losing losing at life, losing hard losing beautifully, jealously, gloriously enviously losing at life losing at being a wife as her husband was losing at being a man and a husband, because anyone worth anything was too much for the world, because the world was first too much for him or her. The world would win, but in the world’s victory was humanity’s was these people’s victory. Because you wanted to be no less than the world that you came from.

This was because the blood of their children ran cold and warm with the blood and isolated, self-isolating love of their parents. And everything was going to work out fine.

And it would be the same with their kids and their kids’ kids, and kids’ kids’ kids’ kids, and on and on and so on and on until the end of the end of the end of fucking time.

For all time.