B O N D P H O N E.
Words and pictures by Chris Lamb.

It's hot, hotter than outside and twice as humid, as if all the spilt beer and mixers and sweat vaporized on contact. Steam blends with cigarette smoke and other things, forcing people to spill out into and down the stairwell outside. I meet a thirty-ish woman in black who introduces herself as the Consenting Neighbor. We live, we wretched souls, among saints.

There are too many people scrambling for the last of the booze in the kitchen and not nearly enough in the sweltering living room or too bright "smoking room." Hands are every where, clawing, grabbing, patting and pushing through. It's that precise instant of momentum peak, when there's not enough wall to stand against and not enough liquor but no one has noticed just yet. I'm sort of leaning-standing, supported by forces unknown and sweating, breathing straight second-hand smoke as Benjamin introduces me to dozens of similar faces I'll never manage to tear apart. I'm trading on borrowed time, filtering as much of my dumb through the last of the contraband gin from earlier as I can in hopes of ending up with pure clever. And well, there's this girl, with brown eyes that just go on and on, and she's talking at me about literature, and about editing the Oxford English Dictionary for a living but really just wanting more time to write, and I'm just praying I can keep the pace up long enough to leave gracefully. I'm thinking in Costello lyrics, in sincerity shot through a sneer, imitation pearls and staying the night.

My exit comes with the momentum snap, when the drinks-to-unrelenting-heat-death-of-the-universe ratio becomes dangerously one sided. There's the Moment, the sacred looking at each other too long good-bye that only properly happens in Cusak films, and I turn to leave. It's hardly a surprise when I collide forehead-first with Drunk Blonde #2, reeling from the awkward glory of it all. The eyes of the world focus on me then, all their attention focused on my hand rubbing the spot of impact. A thousand past generations roar at me from Beyond, wailing about how my lack of grace has doomed our line to extinction.

Except that I shrug at the dictionary wrangler, and through the grace of the departing Tanqueray manage to communicate that running headlong into the drunken, giggling neon sign that was blondie's face was entirely her fault. She smiles, and I leave as quickly as possible, confident in the fact that my dumb luck is at least ten minutes into the red.

I'm at a party, apparently.

posted by chris  # 10:24 PM 1 comments