Absinthe Minded

If only I could make my way home to my sofa bed. Instead I head over to Cabaret Balzac and go downstairs to where the real party’s at. All the gang are here. We sit around in a circle on upturned boxes and drink the green fairy and smoke Metazeal spliffies while soft rock plays in the background from some hidden and perfectly tuned radio. All the gang are here — Bex and Jonah: Jonah doesn’t say much but Bex is full of bizarre little absinthisms. Like last week she turned to me and said, I want to be reincarnated as the silkworm whose silk’s used to make Scarlett Johansson’s stockings.
Bex and Jonah drink the same amount of absinthe every night. They intend on dying at the same time before they’re thirty to subvert the notion that husband and wife should grow older together.
— Suicide pacts keep a couple young and hip forever, they say.
Jonah and Bex’s matrimony is Valentinian. Together they form a syzygy — a term referring to the union of complementary qualities called aeons to form a whole, called a plemora, which is the highest level of reality. Bex and Jonah came across all this gnostic stuff in an old MTV cartoon called Aeon Flux and both of them really dug it.
Hideo: who hasn’t been quite the same since his run in with what he calls the horror feminae. No one can get him to explain what on earth happened to him, but it must have been serious because he ended up with a prosthetic tongue. What wonderful biotechnology that is. He can speak as good as you or me, you know. Shame he stays so quiet. We just leave him sit in the corner and let him try to drown the torment of the horror feminae with an inundation of absinthe down the gullet.
Balthasar: a sex-addicted PI who hasn’t had a case in months. I’ve seen a lot of hardboiled eggs, but he’s twenty minutes. He just broke up with his mistress [who gave him food poisoning last week], as well as his girlfriend, and of course his wife is currently filing for divorce. He’s taking steps to get his life back on track, attending SAA meetings and coming by the absinthe club for a dip in the green fairy.
Gravity Rainbow: Gravity identifies as androgynous. Like Bowie when he was cool, she says. Gravity claims that gender is so arbitrary we should treat it as such. Her blog has been the source of much internet brouhaha, especially posts like the satirical piece Do Chicks Masturbate? Gravity has the most interesting sense of dress. Anachronism is her trademark, and tonight she’s looking more feminine than usual in an iron corset [although that could be construed as…butch?], a tutu [in parodic homage to the opening titles of Sex and the City] and knee high boots made out of egg cartons [which was a la mode among both guys and gals of the Madchester scene some years ago].
And finally there’s Monty Montgomery. He used to play Cliff Perseus on the controversial cult TV series Testosterone [for which I wrote and directed an episode]. Featuring an eclectic mix of ultraviolence and pitch-black comedy that could rival any Coen Brothers flick, as well as graphic scenes of female undress and sapphic intimacy, it explored such risque topics as Amerikan nihilism, Metazeal addiction, tentacle erotica, and tax evasion. The show was cancelled in the middle of the second season after one of the episodes caused mass hysteria amongst a number of viewers [experts blamed the outbreak on the episode’s use of a Disney Acid Sequence — a term referring to a deranged animation segment featuring music]. Monty was devastated to leave the show behind. After becoming the first actor to win an Oscar in a non-human role [playing a sentient robot in the avant-garde sci-fi masterpiece Human Clockwork], Monty was ready to follow in the footsteps of his estranged mentor Kevin Spacey and take the TV industry by storm. But having completely changed his image to portray Cliff Perseus, the troubled black billionaire with a pet octopus called Cthulhu, it is now impossible for Monty to break away from being typecast as that guy who made his girlfriend have sex with an octopus [rumoured to be a snuff scene {spicy!}]. So Monty just drinks absinthe and forgets about what could have been.

They mistakenly credit Cliff Perseus instead of Monty Montgomery, although this may have been a play on the fact that he essentially plays a robotised version of the character.

Tonight everyone’s full of merriment despite the overwhelming and inevitable despair of existence.

We employ the French Method to prepare the absinthe:

1. Pour a measure of absinthe into a reservoir glass.

2. Place an ice cube on a slotted spoon [mine’s shaped like the Eiffel Tower] and let the spoon’s lip rest on the rim of the glass.

3. Pour cold water over the ice cube and allow the opalescent louche to cloud the glass.

Hideo, Balthasar and Monty are already ziztled by the time I get there. They spent the day drinking Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon. That’s where you use champagne instead of water. Nasty stuff. I’ll stick with the water for my green fairy. Apparently Hideo didn’t like the idea but as soon as Balthasar said, just do it you pussy, he went insane and downed seventeen glasses in under an hour.
Jonah rolls me a double spliffie and I tell him about my wonderful night while Bex and Gravity dance hyperkinetically ironically on the iron banded kegs.

Thanks for reading. If you’d like to read more, check out some criticism on Shakespeare here, and over yonder there’s a really, really disgusting and disturbing horror story I wrote for Halloween.