The Last Party by Anthony Haden-Guest

Author:Anthony Haden-Guest
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781497695559
Publisher: Open Road Media

In the studio she poured a Baggie of heroin into a spoon, bent so that the bowl would sit flat on the table. I inhaled two lines, then watched carefully as she poured water into the bowl of the spoon, then heated it with an eighteenth-century silver candlestick, one of her few belongings of value not to have been stolen by Dodo. “You have to be careful about getting fiber into the system,” she said, holding a wad of cotton and drawing the stuff into the hypodermic. “You can get a disease. Cotton Fever.”

She tied up her arm with a piece of rubber tubing and looked for a place to shoot. “I don’t have any veins left,” she complained. “Now I find myself looking at other people’s. It’s rather a nasty habit.”

The needle slid in. “Shit! I skin-popped,” she said. But blood began welling out, dribbling over a copy of Bazaar. “I must have hit something,” she said more happily.

Jeff shot up.

I, until then a needle virgin, did likewise. The bluish tip slipped in like a sharp fruit knife into a peach. The liquid went pink, and red. Erica swabbed the puncture with isoproypyl and cotton. I felt no emotion whatsoever; neither fear, nor anticipation, nor regret, not even curiosity.

“Should we go dancing?” Erica said suddenly.

“Dancing?”

“You can do whatever you want. It adapts.”

I sat down. Somehow a great warmth was stirring inside, a friendly beast, nuzzling, like a puppy. “It may or may not grow up to be a Doberman pinscher,” I said very clearly, but to myself, and smiled at my acuteness. I began feeling a tremulousness, a shortness of breath. This seemed strangely momentous. I imagined expelling my soul through my mouth, and watching it float up up and away, a puff of blue cloud.

“Are you having a good time?” Erica asked a few seconds or maybe an hour later in her society voice.

Why? Did I look unhappy? Surely I was a porcupine, bristling with light. Erica looked clear, but distant. It was like looking at her through thick glass. “Fine,” I said, and meant it. Not terrific, fine. I did not have a halo. I did not have horns. The surprise was there was no surprise. I began scribbling notes to myself. They were fearfully important.

“I know Jeff and I are going to stop,” Erica said suddenly.

Jeff bestrirred himself for the first time. “Do you know that?” he asked.

“I’m going to stop out of boredom,” she said. “Being a junkie is like having a nine-to-five job.”

Much later, I reread the brilliant notes.

They went:

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