Things I Learned at Art School by Dunn Megan

Author:Dunn, Megan [Dunn, Megan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Random House New Zealand
Published: 2013-04-08T00:00:00+00:00

Nights

The gallery had a window box that we liked to sit in; the original sun-bleached, grey-chequered linoleum still present, warped at the edges, a box of cask wine between us, as we watched the four lanes of traffic not going our way.

People who sit in a shop window will be stared at indiscriminately by passers, as though random merchandise. A young peroxide blonde in a leopard-print top and a black petticoat, and a young dapper man with a crescendo of slicked-black hair and a silver piercing through his septum. The cask wine in free flow.

Our conversations often returned to Less than Zero, the seminal eighties film starring Robert Downey Jr as a wealthy drug addict.

For David it was the title that held significance.

‘The temptation is to do zero,’ David said. ‘Because zero is always perfect.’

I agreed, though I’m not sure I ever understood. The movie was based on Bret Easton Ellis’ novel but I hadn’t read it then and I’m not going to start it now. I already know more about Less than Zero than I should.

The film gave us much to consider: Jami Gertz’s yuppie wardrobe, and curly shoulder-length hair; the irony of Robert Downey Jnr’s own career trajectory, the actor merging with the part; the gluttony of one’s twenties, youth like the udder of a cask wine waiting — practically begging — to be misspent.

Night sank the window box in its haze, the traffic lights blinked red, orange, green. The silver spike through David’s nose gleamed and he adjusted it with a finger, like Salvador Dalí fixing up his ostentatious moustache.

One question dogged the characters in Less than Zero. ‘Are we having fun?’ Andrew McCarthy hounded Jami Gertz, as she got out of their sports car and stalked along a tunnel in her tight black dress, looking immaculate … but alas, not having fun because by that point in the movie Robert Downey Jnr had become a rent boy to support his drug habit, which had spiralled out of control.

As for Fiat Lux? We could only aspire to that level of depravity. And we did. The cask wine was sunk.

‘Are we having fun yet?’ David asked.

Time to go out and find out.

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