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14 months to go
Friday, February 9 2001
"Hi Gus, you know, I've been thinking it over and I've decided, yes I would like you to come by some time and lick my pussy, but only if you promise not to fucking write about it!" Somehow I can imagine that phone call happening back in Charlottesville, Virginia, but it's just not going to happen here in Los Angeles. I just don't wear the right shoes, and the lack of a late-model German car beneath my ass has been repeatedly noted. For all its pretensions of forward thinking and wackiness, for all its tantric goddesses and Pamela Andersons, this place is even more straightjacketed than deepest Redneckistan. And still I serve my sentence. Another 14 months to go.
What the fuck am I talking about; I don't know anyone who is in any position to make such a phone call! That's the problem in this town; there's no mechanism of community. If I was a savage in the jungles of Brazil I'd regularly experience more community than I do in this town.
Community. What is that? My team at the dotcom where I work was called the community team. Our job was to create communities around one of the largest groups of music fans on the web. Suddenly, though, the emphasis was changed, and everyone from the team was fired, laid off or quit. I am, in fact, the sole survivor of the community team. And I miss community, the place, the ideal, the workplace team, the thing that ecstasy forces you to view as the ultimate organizing principle of the universe. We members of my workplace's erstwhile community team, we might have been cynical about lots of things, but we honestly believed in community. We still have reunions and commune over tall glasses of beer. But Los Angeles is no friend to community. You can build a civilization around the automobile, but you can never build a community around it.
Women and African-Americans in my workplace during tonight's drinking extravaganza. Don't be deceived. Non-males and non-Eurasians are uncommon.
At 5pm though, a bunch of people got together in the first floor kitchen on the floor of my workplace to do something other than work. We'd all been organized by the least satanic of the HR-types to chip in on beer so we could unwind at the end of a particularly stressful week. It's not like the halcyon days of 1999 when dotcoms were rolling in dough and notion of employees having to pay for anything, let alone beer, was ludicrous. Still, it doesn't take much effort or money to bring a little good cheer to a workplace, even after a week as fucked up as this one. In these troubled times, simply being allowed to drink booze in the company kitchen feels like a perk.
We sat around having light conversations and consuming a variety of beverages. The girls (amazingly, girls actually work here!) were mostly drinking something called "hard lemonade" and the boys were tipping back beers and/or margaritas. A couple fat non-technical guys talked a lot about sports and I did my best to tune them out. Later they were amazed to learn that Julian is only 19 and never attended high school and yet is "director of something or other." They looked at his drivers license and fake ID in wonder. To be honest, as they fussed over Julian, I started feeling kind of jealous. And with these meatheads I didn't even feel like concealing it. So I attempted to show them my old drivers license from Virginia, minted when I was only 20 years old and featuring me with a spectacular mane of hair. The license was so wrinkled, discolored and tattered that they refused to touch it for fear of contracting an illness. These, I quickly decided, were not my people. They talk about sports and won't touch my old driver's license. Mother Jesus, Father Earth, take me back to where I belong.
Julian took me back to my place in his rust red 1965 VW Beetle. We were hoping to meet up with John to make an arrangement, but he was nowhere to be found. So I ended up doing the solo Gus on a Friday night thing, wherein the only social interaction is via AOL Instant Messenger. At least I'm doing AIM these days. I used to not even respond to my email.
When you're past 30, you realize life is too short for romantic games. There's no time to dick around and act like you could fuck anyone you wanted to. Time is precious. I want to fuck you. Let's fuck. Please, let's just fucking spend the rest of our lives together. I can't even imagine who I'd say that to. This is the first time in my life in which I've had no script prepared for the one person with whom I wish to get lucky.
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