Friday night, tryna make it into the city

“They tell you read this, eat this, don’t look around,” Nathan said.

“What the fuck are you talking about?” Fred asked, sitting down with a steaming mug of coffee. Fred wore gold-rimmed Ray-Bans and his golden biceps bulged out from beneath his white crew-neck t-shirt, which had the word PFIZER printed in blue across the chest. “Good morning,” he said.

“I’m just saying, we don’t get to think anymore. We can’t say what’s on our minds, we’re all just condensed into a generic mass,” Nathan responded.

“Dude it’s literally the opposite. You can do whatever you want, say whatever you want. No one cares. Nothing matters anymore. You can lie, no one checks. You can literally walk into a store and steal hundreds of dollars’ worth of products, walk out, assault someone, drop all the products on the sidewalk, get in your car and drive off. There’s more surveillance now than ever, but nothing will happen.”

“Yeh okay, sure. Whatever. I don’t care that much, I don’t care about any thing enough to argue about it,” Nathan said. He stirred the teaspoon in his coffee mug then brought it to his lips. He took a great big sip.

The two boys sat in silence for a while, sharing a smile and both reflecting on the party the night before.

“Hey, you want to hear a funny story?” Nathan asked.

Fred shrugged. He really wasn’t bothered. His head hurt.

“Alright I’ll tell you anyway,” Nathan said.

Fred was happy not to be the one doing the talking. “Just make it funny and I don’t care if it’s true.” He slid a pack of American Spirits from his pocket and lit one. Nathan reached across and grabbed one for himself. The burn crackled gently into his ear, and he closed his eyes to the warm smell, tipping his head back.

Smoking made him happy.

Smoking was nice.

Smoking was yum.

Nathan and Fred sat across from one another, either side of a wooden table on the back porch behind Nathan’s apartment building. A small sycamore leant across and threw down some shade, protecting them from the morning sun.

A vintage ceramic CAMPARI ashtray was smattered with the lipstick-stained ends of Camel Blues and two newly smouldering Spirits. The ashtray was a pit, and the boys threw all their tensions into it.

Nathan said something about the story he was going to tell Fred being about this one time, back when he was at Oxford University.

Fred sometimes forgot that Nathan had a whole life in the UK before he came to LA. “Okay,” said Fred, indicating that it didn’t sound like it would be funny.

“Just wait and listen,” Nathan said.

But Oxford isn’t funny. Nothing about it is funny. It’s a place where people go to get an education and take themselves seriously.

W.B. Yeats once asked whether anyone at Oxford does anything aside from “dream and remember.” Fred recalled that quote from a book he’d read. He told this to Nathan who dismissed the idea. Nathan said now it was more like art kids from private schools and weird control freaks who wanted to get into the AI space or operate within some strange start-up incubator group.

Nathan said those guys were liars, those guys just competed to find the best excuse to justify their obsession for money and capital. AI and entrepreneurship is just masterful storytelling with a god complex.

“So which one were you?” Fred asked, “art kid or money crazy?”

Nathan was in LA working for a museum and trying to write stories—so I bet you can guess which type he was.

“I spent three years drinking Fosters, taking acid, and trying not to kill myself,” Nathan said.

“Oh, so you were an art kid then. Okay.” Fred had a tongue as sharp as a razor blade.

Nathan continued talking about Oxford. The scariest guys were the money crazy guys who had rich parents. Art kids all already had money—how else did they become art kids? That means the realest guys were the art kids who didn’t have money.

English rich is suffocating. European rich is unsubstantiated.

“Art kids covet cultural capital just as much,” said Fred critically, “and it’s nasty to see.”

Nathan agreed, and it made him sick. He knew he was just as bad as anyone else at Oxford—vapid and lazy—but at this point he just wanted to get on with the story.

Fred put his head on his hands, slumped heavy against the table. He turned to the side so he could pop his cigarette in and inhale, but otherwise he looked like a daydreaming schoolchild. Nathan went ahead and told his Oxford story.

It was about a girl and a boy who were studying the same subject. They were the two best students and always competed for the highest grades. Until one day the girl, she went totally bonkers.

“She lost her marbles mate,” that’s how Nathan put it.

Fred was really annoyed at this point; the story wasn’t funny at all. He lit another cigarette before his first had even gone out.

Anyway, the boy student disappeared one day. There was this whole big search, everyone was looking for him. He’d done some work with some huge American companies in the summers, he wanted to create a safe alternative to opiates, he was a bio-medical genius. His ambition was to create the next great painkiller empire—nobody would feel a single thing.

So, he goes missing and there are all these rumours, people are saying that it was the Sackler family who took him, or big pharma did it. People are really worked up about this guy who’s gone missing because he was meant to be the next Great British entrepreneur, and the Brits don’t make many of those anymore—not since they stopped getting rich off Caribbean sugarcane and south Asian spices.

Nobody ever heard from him, nobody knew what happened. For months they were searching far and wide. Rescue divers were dipping into the Cherwell River in Oxford, hoping to dredge up a body. The newspapers were ready with a story about tragic genius, about flying too close to the sun.

ICARUS

Which, coincidentally, was the name of his painkiller start-up.

It would have been a classic English tale, a warning never to do anything other than pursue mediocrity.

“That’s the thing about Brits,” said Nathan, “they love dragging other people down. They hate ambition.”

“Like Amy Winehouse dude,” said Fred, barely looking up, his head still in his hands. “I could use some of his meds right now.” Fred was really nursing a dogshit hurtful hangover.

Anyway, Nathan was so animated he just got on with his story. Fred had to admit though, it was encapsulating.

So, eventually the search for the missing guy dies out. This girl gets the best grade ever for her bio-medical exams, she’s got a job lined up working for a chemical-weapons manufacturer, everybody is happy. Until, two days later this boy appears. He’s standing outside Trinity College, in Oxford. Emaciated. Bald patches. Protruding collar bones. Shaking in the Oxford summer sun, with blotched skin and eczema like a prisoner of war. It turns out the girl kidnapped him and held him captive in her dorm room. Nobody ever worked out why he didn’t shout for help. Her tiny room was surrounded by others on both sides. She forced him to do all her exams for her then set him free on a vow of silence—if he ever uttered a word she’d come and kill him.

Nathan is really animated at this point. He looks like an animal.

“So what happened to him?” Fred asked.

“I don’t know,” Nathan said.

“You went to college with this guy, how do you not know?”

“I don’t know,” Nathan said.

Fred shrugged. “That’s a crazy story anyway, I guess. D’you think she abused him? Like sexual favours?”

“Oh. No clue,” Nathan said.

“Is this even a true story?” Fred asked.

It wasn’t.

Nathan looked disappointed. Fred had heard it all, nothing excited his turbo-electrified mind anymore. Oxford stories were just small-town blues, odes to conservative Britain.

“You wanna hear something actually funny?” Fred asked.

“Go on,” Nathan said. He was keen to change the subject.

Fred sat up, heaving his heavy head off the wooden table. He leant forward, his body aching with effort. “I used to think Hilma af Klint was Gustav Klimt’s wife. I thought they were spelt the same and he just made her famous because he felt bad for her.”

Nathan smiled then lit a cigarette of his own. He finished his coffee.

At this point it might seem like this morning was somehow unique, but it wasn’t. The two boys had a routine going. Get shit-faced blackout drunk at a party on Friday, go back to one of their respective apartments (unless either of them got lucky with a lady), then wake up and shoot the shit over a protracted morning coffee.

Nobody was better at being hungover than Fred, which made sense—he had so much practice. Nathan had a Jewish stomach so sometimes the next morning was a challenge. But on this particularly sunny day he felt good, sweet-spirited and relaxed.

They both knew that this morning, this routine, would someday become a story. It would be a tale that Nathan felt compelled to tell. Fred shook his head, suddenly realizing that all he was to Nathan was a fucking story. It all made sense, the weird greeting, Nathan’s performative nature.

“Oh, wait a second. Did you greet me with a Kanye lyric as I sat down just now?” Fred asked.

“Oh, yeh I did, how did you work it out.”

“Did you name this story after a Kanye lyric?” Fred asked again.

“What story?” Nathan wondered. He had an angelic look—cheeky, earnest, innocent.

“The one you’re writing right now in your head, about this morning? I can see it in your eyes. It’s probably going to end up in an LA magazine or something.”

“Oh, yeh, how did you know?”

“From his verse in No More Parties in LA?”

“Yeh. That’s how I felt heading to the party last night.”

Fred looked furious. He ruffled his hair. “So, you’re still using Kanye as inspiration? Even now. After everything he’s done?”

Nathan’s eyes narrowed. “Why not?”

Fred thought that Kanye was evil, but Nathan disagreed. Nathan thought that Kanye was a martyr and that what he was doing was highlighting how stupid the whole thing about absolute free speech was. Either way, none of it really made any sense. None of it was taking place in the real world. None of it was done by real people who knew what it felt like to wake up and live a normal life.

“No, reason,” Fred said.

Life was ending rapidly for Nathan. He lived with a constant awareness that there was a finite amount of time, that the sun was always setting, that one day he’d leave and never come back. It made him a tough guy to spend time with, he was always in a hurry. There was a lingering sadness within him.

Nathan decided that life was too short to respond to Fred’s antagonism. He loved Kanye, especially that song he did with Lil Pump in 2018.

“Would you like another coffee?” he asked Fred.

“No. But hey, let me ask you this though. What’s the matter? Why’d you always gotta be so sad all the time?”

“What do you mean?” Nathan asked.

Fred threw his hands up, his muscles tensing and his forehead wincing with the effort of last night’s 80-odd Budweisers. “The sun’s streaming into your apartment, up there.” Fred took his Ray-Bans off so he could lock eyes with Nathan and really connect with him.

“The sun’s streaming through the curtains, you’re sipping a coffee on the porch. Today we’ll go to the beach, or we’ll hike. We can sit here and smoke ‘til you’re content—which will be never—or we can go and watch a movie. If you wanna get sushi we’ll get sushi. I guess all I’m saying is life doesn’t have to be so heavy all the time, man.”

Nathan didn’t respond, but the two of them shared a look. He reached deep into his pocket to check that his lucky charm was safe and sound.

There was nothing left to say.

A car alarm echoed through the hills. Palm leaves bristled. Somewhere not so far off a woman wept and a man laughed. Children threw caution to the wind while a cat got mauled by a coyote and a man shot and killed another man in cold blood.

Fred’s head still hurt like a nasty bruise.

Nathan still wished he was never born.

“I don’t care man. I’m hungry for breakfast. Do you wanna blow a bag at Erewhon?”

“Hell yea.”

Dylan Kaposi - Friday night, tryna make it into the city