Dear Friends,
I’m sharing a short story called A Songbook — each story is tied to a different piece of music.
At the partner site
, there’s a post by on drugs, imagination, an unfinished novel. It’s been really nice to discover Eleanor’s writing on Substack — a bracingly honest, heartfelt writer.Best,
Sam
ME GUSTAS TU
1
A hostel in Amsterdam — Jake is in one of the beds. He’s less surprised to see Devin’s group than one might expect, but, well, that’s part of the etiquette of these things, a certain swagger Jake has.
“Yeah yeah. There then here,” he says. He doesn’t bother getting up. He seems a bit haggard — mushrooms, weed, the initiation they’re all putting themselves through; a woman, a bit matted, a bit hippieish, he introduces them to. “Too bad we’re heading out later today,” he says.
When they’re back on campus, they become fast friends. He’s shorter than Devin, less attractive than Devin. He’s funnier than Devin. It’s understood that his brain works faster — not necessarily that that means he’s smarter, but Devin, whose secret belief is that he is superior to everyone, the most special person in the universe, feels that he has to play the long game — keep some sort of emotional equilibrium, since Jake has a way of spazzing out, let time, let some test of character do its work. They have everything in common. At some point Jake mentions a movie and they wander off campus to a theater and they pay the ticket and they sit there for the entirety of the movie and they walk back to campus and discuss it — no girls, no romance, no agenda anywhere obvious, and this is what it’s like, Devin thinks, this is what it’s like to have a friend, and the kind of friendship that can unspool unendingly.
***
An apartment off campus — and it shouldn’t be so exciting but for some strange reason it is. Brick walls — embarrassing as that sounds, that’s what Devin finds exciting. All groups have a center — in this case, it’s Gabe, who graduated the year before, and now the apartment is held in a kind of trust by Rita and a like international consortium, the Greek shipping magnates who found a pipeline through the admissions office, a mix of Middle Easterners, Singaporeans, people who were checked into the International Students Alliance the day they arrived on campus, checked out again as soon as possible, were committed to being as snobby and aloof as they could manage. Not so easy in college! — Devin knows what they’ve been through, the orientations, the enforced double rooms, the cafeteria food, the trying-to-blend-in, most of them had the good grace to do that, at least for a bit, and, now, masks down, brick walls, an apartment that they can move seamlessly in and out of, a healthy sideboard, and they don’t have to pretend to bob along any more to the Ding Dong song or Numa Numa Yay. In the apartment they always seem to be playing Manu Chao — Me Gustas Tu, many, many times.
Devin suspects that this isn’t a particularly great song, suspects that this is just some kind of EuroTrash — he’ll see through it in about a week-and-a-half — but, whatever, he’s impressed, proud to be brought into this, the standing invitation of the apartment seems to apply to him as well. Once, he’s up all night, some kind of a retreat involving the society he’s part of, and in the morning they go off campus to have eggs at everybody’s favorite greasy spoon and he watches kind of glossy-eyed while Araya, who’s the richest and most mysterious member of the group, whose father is supposed to be an arms dealer, unless that’s just a sideline for some business that touches everything, plays backgammon with the proprietor of the café, neither of them having to discuss it, the proprietor just coming by mid-breakfast with the board, and the two of them playing ferociously all morning, and, sometime after the first breakfast, Devin orders a second one of the exact same thing, and then, why not, around midday a third breakfast, and when they’ve finally finished, the proprietor shaking his hand as he goes back to keeping accounts, a wandering-off to the apartment and Manu Chao is playing, Devin is sure there’s other music as well, but that’s pretty much the point of it, the Spanish he can string together, I like marijuana and I like you, I like coffee and I like you, I like cocaine and I like you, and, whatever, there’s just something about the music that makes you happy, you trust it, and, in the morning, after he’s stayed up all night again, he turns to Jocelyn, his best friend at the time, and says, “I think that was the best day of my life” — and part of their vibe is to be overstated about things while being completely cool underneath, that’s the irony the whole group is built on, and he’s gratified when Jocelyn, in front of her dorm, nods like she’s giving that surprising weight and says, “Yeah, yeah, for me too.”
***
He and Jocelyn have been in a very nebulous place for a long time — that’s her word, which he finds annoying, but does not press, because he likes Jocelyn. They were in the same dorm freshman year but didn’t take much notice of her — in part because she carried a parasol around everywhere, which he found ridiculous. And then they were in the same society and she was, in a certain way, hard to take — she had this loud laugh that just seemed to show up out of nowhere and completely related to its own private joke — but she was definitely cute, there was no disputing that she was cute, and had a style that was distinctive and forceful and could justify unexpected things like parasols, and she was smart and had read and had opinions on a whole bunch of people Devin hadn’t read, Bourdieu and Baudrillard and Deleuze and he’d heard from a mutual friend of theirs who was a blabbermouth that she’d wondered, “You know, he and I have a lot in common, maybe we should be together.”
And somewhere in the depths of their friendship, and in mild violation of society etiquette, they’d started hooking up. This isn’t very glamorous or very romantic. It’s a kind of habit at this time for people to fall asleep at the end of parties on couches or on comfortable spots on the floor, and sometimes people find themselves sharing the same blanket and throw-pillow. And in one of these nights he and Jocelyn are under the same blanket, he has his arm wrapped chivalrously around her waist, they wake around the same time in the middle of the night, to be honest he’s woken a little bit ahead of her, is petting her, trying to put on no extra pressure, and when she does wake, he kind of searches her out with his eyes and mouth and she puts a hand against his chest, says, “Ohh.” But she’s not completely discouraging, and he does have the blabbermouth friend as a kind of guidance, and, in different nights, same general idea, their working in the same room, their debating, their falling asleep in each other’s arms, different layers discreetly disappearing, he finds his way to running his fingertips over her breasts, to pressing his hand against, more or less, her clitoris, her eyes closed when he does so. “Would it be a bad idea if we had sex?” he says and she shakes her head in a way that makes it feel like she just hasn’t heard him accurately, makes him drop the topic. One night, in a similar kind of mood, he says, “I love you,” and is suddenly aware of his own voice, hears it the way you do when there’s unexpectedly an echo on a phone and she pushes at his chest the same way she did when he first kissed her mid-sleep, the same private laugh, says, “No, you don’t.”
***
But they are good together, there’s something that everybody notices about it, “oh yeah,” says Araya, who’s jaded about all things, “it’s perfect — nobody can understand either one of you – you’re the only ones who’d get each other.”
And it does seem very natural for her to wander over to his room to sweat over an essay — they’re in all the same classes — or, post-essay, to buoy each other through the sleepless day, cafeteria food, and the chain of parties that leads inevitably to the off-campus house and the well-stocked bar and people with accents and Manu Chao and all the things that he likes anchoring every playlist.
And, one evening, when they haven’t seen each other in a while — they seem to be having some sort of cooling-off, this is not too long after he’s told her he loves her — she texts him what he’s up to, and he’s proud to be off-campus and to tell her that the party’s getting going and she should join him there. Jake’s there and he and Jake are having a kind of running argument about whether it’s a good idea or not for anybody in their cohort to join the military, it’s interesting to talk about, whether it’s some kind of noble sacrifice, and Araya talks about being late for something, how she keeps missing class, and Jake says, “You just needed time to rub one out — that’s alright, we’re all friends here,” and Araya laughing like they’re habitués of the same gossip column, like they’re ancient friends, and everything they say to one another is completely in-bounds, and Devin has literally never heard a man talk to a woman about her masturbating before, let alone someone he’s not dating, but, whatever, the thing to do is not to be surprised about anything. And Jocelyn appears, looking a little forlorn for some reason, and Jake’s deep in it at this point and bets that he can race with Jocelyn on his shoulders straight across the apartment, and nobody is willing to take the bet, and Araya says, “I mean, I’m glad you’ve picked on someone your own size,” and that incentives Jake and he goes tearing back and forth with Jocelyn on his back and pretends to be a bucking bronco, and actually is very drunk and nearly tips her over, once into the sideboard and another time into a crowd of Greek smokers, but stays upright, and Devin and Araya are careful to remain perfectly indifferent while this happens, drinks at rib-level. Araya says, “Do we need to get their parents to send them home?”
And then, wandering ramshackle-like together, Devin takes a beer from the fridge, drinks as he walks down the street, which people don’t do, which actually is, like, a crime, but he’s trying out different ideas of himself, like he’s a yahoo on the Vegas Strip, like he’s some kind of German burgher returning from a night of drinking with his friends — he wouldn’t be surprised if they all straight breaking into song or something, he’s never been good at friendship, doesn’t really know what that’s like, all sorts of things seem possible.
They pass by Jake’s and Jake invites them up. The sense of possibility seems to recede. Student room, Klimt and Mao on the wall, although Jake, it must be said, keeps things neater than he, for example, does. Finds himself lying down, passing out, something familiar, the night’s gotten uneasy, he’s finding himself both drunker than is exactly dignified and with less to say, sleep as a good trick to just switch off everything, a nice thought, the three of them like dogs in a pile, maybe the backgammon café in the morning.
But this is naïve, he knows it, his suspicious brain keeping him up, the sound of rustling on the bed next to him, the sound of lips pressing, muffled for his sake. Eyes tightly closed, a bit to play along in the part assigned to him, a bit to wish it away. And then another kind of rustling, voices, muffled footsteps off to the common room. Devin sitting up. Can hear her laughter, can hear her sigh. It’s a funny feeling when something that you’ve come to crave is like a weapon against you. Trying to think about what to do here, what the Devin he’s in the process of creating would do in this situation, and Jake solves the problem for him. Comes back for something — probably a condom, Devin reflects later — and Devin lurches up, hits him on the side of the head, kind of temple and cheek, the sound of it is satisfying, a certain finality in the ringing tone that creates, satisfying too the way Jake goes sprawling. Lurches up, finds Jocelyn coming out of the bathroom, more unsettling news, some kind of pre-fuck pee, some feminine primping, and this is the hard decision, who Devin is going to be, all sorts of voices chorusing around, the cool jock in middle school declaring, surprisingly, with solemnity, that he would never in his life hit a woman, certain ironclad ideas about chivalry, well, too late for that, he doesn’t exactly hit Jocelyn, just wraps his hand around the top of her head, shoves her away from him – not dissimilar, he thinks, to the way she’d press against his chest.
***
Pacing around his room, turning back and forth, the way the dog he had growing up would try to shake itself back to the reality it wanted. Calls Araya, which is crazy — four in the morning — but she picks up, tells him to come over.
And the evening maybe not so wasted after all, she’s camped out in the apartment, Rita gone for some study abroad, this crowd always apartment-swapping, endlessly charitable towards one another. The empty bottles of whisky and ouzo that will be dealt with sometime this week. Araya taking him into her bed. They’re both very superior — they are the right size for each other, they agree re Jake and Jocelyn. Maybe this is love, have to consider that, maybe that’s his role, inadvertent matchmaker to something lifelong. Has to consider how he’d feel about that. Trying out new roles as well. She holds his right hand. “So this is the hand that hit Jake,” she says and inspects it, like looking for welts, callouses. Her watery accent, the amalgam of boarding schools, the English language itself seems like a big joke to her, trying out phrases from every possible era, walk of life. Nobody’s gotten to know Araya at all, that’s like a big topic of discussion, and there’s some real progress here, here she is talking in a sleepy voice, here she is in her sweatshirt pyjamas, it might be interesting to be an arms dealer’s son-in-law, but when he tries to kiss her — tries twice, in case she misunderstood the first time — she turns her cheek crisply to one side. Oh well. A lost night after all.
2
Rita had been in and out of the apartment through college. Devin gets in the habit of telling people he has a crush on her. He’s not sure he means it — he doesn’t fantasize about her, for example, but there’s a thrill every time he says it to somebody, tells them his maybe secret, like he’s willing something or other into existence. In this period all women seem to have a designation in his mind like a caption attached to a photograph — this was, to be honest, kind of the heart of his friendship with Jake when it worked, the way they would name the home truths of things. Jocelyn with the parasol, the loud laugh at the private joke; Rita with the wry, squeaky voice like the love interest in a cartoon. The kind of girl you’re supposed to end up with — that’s the book on Rita.
They see a movie together, Valentino: The Last Emperor, about the fashion industry. God knows why — he’s thought about the fashion industry maybe two times before that, but, who knows, maybe his life will take some kind of a swerve, maybe the fashion industry will turn out to be important in ways he can’t even anticipate right now. At some point, there’s a character on, angular features, smart, obviously smart, he leans in, says, “You remind me of her.” Well, whatever, his moves could use some work. “Why is that?” she murmurs in the theater and he doesn’t know how to explain himself.
But she does turn out to be important, kind of just as he anticipated. They both end up in, of all things, documentary film — he has no idea why, the whole genre seems to be a good catch-all, adjacent to whatever it is that people really want to do. Five years later he’s being considered for a job as an Associate Producer, and, in the greatest good will, messages Rita to let her know that Producer positions are available and when she kind of flunks that interview she passes along the message that she’d be willing to take an Associate Producer position instead.
And calls him up to have him commiserate with her when she doesn’t get that either. “That’s really too bad,” she tells him. “I feel like we would have made such a good team.”
She turns out to be unexpectedly important later on as well. He goes to India to find himself — right on schedule, it’s his Saturn Return, as he discovers once he starts to get into these things, and runs into an ayahuasca group on a beach in Goa. And after he journeys to astral planes, leaves his body, etc, etc, he friends all the people from the group on facebook, and the one person they have in common, he and these psychonauts on a beach in Goa, is Gabe, the sort of patron saint of the off-campus apartment. So he becomes facebook friends with Gabe and Gabe sends him a perplexed message, like, do we know each other, and you’re like occupying a very unique place in the Venn Diagram of acquaintances.
And that opens up a whole new phase of Devin’s life. A coffee shop in New York, Gabe turns out to be extraordinarily handsome and smart, like a creature from a higher plane — that’s what he’d been warned, actually it was Jake who told him, about Gabe, that “he’s always about three jokes ahead of you,” and it emerges that all Gabe cares about is spirituality, he’s not interested in talking about college, he liked Rita, they were like completely intertwined at one point, but, other than that, he’s pretty done with that whole way of viewing the world, that was all about rationality, materialism, and he’s interested in magic, reenchantment — and, as it transpires, so is Devin, Devin is interested in all of the same things, happy to do a psychedelic weekend, happy to throw himself into plant medicine.
And this is a longer story. Devin pushing through all these blocks in himself, Devin connecting with his higher self, Devin as ecstatic as he can imagine a person being, in his white aurically-attractive outfit, sobbing under a tree, feeling that somewhere on the other side is his inner child, is a completely different way to orient himself to life. And it’s not just some ceremony, the burring of the plant medicine, Gabe up on a makeshift stage answering all possible questions, it continues past that — Rita, as it turns out, talking him up to this famous documentary director, the flight cross-country, the working-for-her, the project exactly something he would be interested in, the sense of things, incredibly enough, aligning — like maybe such a thing is actually possible, life adding up in exactly the way you want it to.
Well, what’s to say. For some reason or other, it doesn’t work out like that. The famous documentary director — a narcissist. The spiritual community — an e-mail disinviting him from future ceremonies, the politics of it too internecine even to get into. Gabe saying: “This is painful for me to write. It’s been a pleasure to see you grow as much as you have. I wish I knew why it hasn’t worked out better between us than it has. Please know that, while we are severing this cord, there are no hard feelings, at least on this end.”
3
He’s back in California, a couple of years after that. He has a new girlfriend, Dina. She’s very low-status, works as an admin and, before that, at a front desk. She’s had some trauma, had a rough life, as far as he can tell, she says that what’s most important for her for work is to interact with as few people as possible, and he tries to press her on that, tries to reform her in the first enthusiastic stages of the relationship and then lets it go. Whatever. Why would he know anything better. Lets it all go. They visit her father. It’s difficult there. She seems anxious to get out of there. He proposes driving around for an afternoon — somewhere out towards the desert.
They talk as they drive. They’re still, ostensibly, in the getting-to-know-each-other phase of the relationship, but it hasn’t worked out like that. Earlier that weekend she took him to a Chinese restaurant near where she went to school. He was full of questions — what did this place mean to her, what was going on in her life at the time when she came here a lot — and she looked at him like he was really crazy: she was in her first marriage at that time, what was happening was whatever was happening in her life.
But, here, the car, the desert, open up a certain sense of confession. She tells him about the time she let herself be roped in as a receptionist for a Scientology front. She tells him about how she was slowly drawn into it, took new hires into the back when they’d screwed up, read to them from the dictionary to try to identify the ‘misunderstood word,’ a core principle, apparently of Scientology, and he laughs and tells her about the time he’d said to Jocelyn “would it be a bad idea if we had sex” and was convinced for a long time afterwards that she’d thought he’d said “wouldn’t it be a bad idea” and had responded based on that — but, even as he’s saying it, he’s realizing how stupid he’s sounding and how stupid he had been at the time. Everything he’s saying seems stupid; Dina’s very jealous, very loving and very dedicated but very jealous, she doesn’t at all like hearing about different women from his past, it was a whole thing when he met up with Rita — now in L.A., he’d had a drink with her and with her husband, her baby toddling around, the husband, a horror movie writer now working in advertising complaining to Devin, “I have a body of work I can be proud of and it’s very hard for me to deal with what’s rewarded by the market and what I feel like my real value is” — and the very thought of Jocelyn, like Rita, seems to destabilize Dina. They get a bit confused on their aimless drive, the idea had been to visit some out-of-the-way caves but, when they get to the turn-off, they realize that the caves are only accessibly to off-road vehicles and, in the passenger seat, Dina curls foetally into herself and clutches at her hair, it’s really impossible for her to come to any kind of decision about anything, and Devin flips around and starts to drive back, and, just as he’s doing so, Manu Chao comes on to the playlist and it seems perfect, synchronistic, although he knows by now not to say a thing to Dina. It’s great music, cheerful, easygoing, it seems to pacify Dina, still clutching her hair in the seat next to him, although the way he thinks about it is completely different — the apartment off-campus, all the things that that time was supposed to lead to, these memories that belong nowhere, these fragments of the life he wanted.