Speaking with Mary when she was drunk was uncomfortably similar to being given the third degree. On a public level her drunkenness drove her into a reticence and courtesy even more marked than usual. If others were around they were easily reduced to paranoia at their own inebriation, assuming that her diffident attentiveness was some cruel and subtle form of mockery.
Alone with another person however, and she simply asked a lot of questions, of such a specific and digressive nature that she managed to convey more information in her role as interrogatrice than she received.
On the occasion of her first big speech she and Dion were in the back seat of Alastair’s car. The Billets Doux had just finished up their second gig, in a dive that was remarkable only for its frequent name changes, from Otto’s Bar & Grill, to Gudrun’s Hottspott to Bondage Boudoir to its present No Ferns No Frills. Alastair was inside, waiting for the haggling over money to begin.
Mary had been in particularly good form that night, terrorizing the rest of the band by lunging into rabidly violent ten-minute guitar solos in verses where solos had never appeared before.
Now she was seated beside Dion, knees drawn up to her breast, chin resting on her knees, her hair hanging in wet strands down her cheeks. She was attempting to break one of her undiagnosable fevers by swigging straight from a bottle of Takaa and alternating unfiltered Gauloises with generic menthols. It was a foolproof cure, she said. No wonder her little coughing fit had left her shirt cuff lightly speckled with red.
She had begun to ask him a question but had digressed farther and farther away from her central point. In the past five minutes she had informed him of a childhood ambition to draw animals for a living, of an eleven-month addiction to heroin when she was fourteen, with dark, laughing hints as to how she had paid for the habit, of her part in a terrorist bombing of the RCA headquarters, that she had never been to California, and the color of her favorite pair of socks.
Dion popped another beer and waited for her to resume.
-What I started out to ask you was about your perception of reality, I mean, well, let me explain … you know how reality sometimes appears absurdly complicated? Even when one’s daily life is fairly simple, and to find complexity is to start looking at things through the wrong end of an opera glass, the detail is oppressive but the distance is so great that you can’t get a proper grip on things, no purchase, no foothold, when even the most trivial, random, and accidental things appear to be so obviously part of an ongoing pattern and that’s when my problem manifests itself which is trying to determine whether that pattern is self-imposed by some unconscious impulse of mine to resist chaos, but it’s not even fear of chaos so much, because I can handle that, even loss of control I can deal with, but meaninglessness, that’s what troubles me but by the time I go through the whole conceptual sequence it’s like going up eighty flights of stairs and when you get to the top fatigue rules out either elation at the view or fear of looking down so I guess I’m feeling that my main motivation … I’m sorry, am I boring you? No? Okay. Well, my main motivation just to go on living really, is to try and resist the order of biological and mental destinies, yeah, I know, I’m a bit of a pompous motherfucker, but at least I don’t know any of the proper philosophical terms or we’d all be in trouble, ontological, phenomenological, signifier, bzzzt bzzzt, and this isn’t a heavy feminist rap or anything, I’ve never felt frustrated on a social, victimized level, or not at any level I would choose to acknowledge in that way, because it’s much more basic, like when I don’t eat it’s not cause I’m trying to starve or even because I’m not hungry, nothing like that, it’s more like, eating is such an obvious thing to do, and the fact that it’s also important to eat if you want to live, well I can’t make the sort of psychological leap to even understand that, which begs the question why do I start up those stairs in the first place, I mean mentally, and I suppose I could say my family, and I’ve thought about this one a lot, my family’s hereditary traits are almost exclusively mental but it doesn’t come out in terms of, say, a gift for languages or algebra, but in inbred neuroses, quirky things, an inability to dream in color, for instance, or a sudden sort of basic sexual confusion, I mean, sometimes I’ll be in a crowd and my identity just evaporates and it takes about a minute for me to remember what sex I am and maybe a woman will walk up to me and start talking and it’s like ‘oh yeah, I’m one of those, just like her’ so everything’s cool, everything’s gonna be all right, so I seem to have spent the better part of my life deliberately courting chaos, upsetting rituals, being suspicious of the most banal habits, simply out of fear of becoming neurotic, when, of course, the joke is that my existence then becomes one immense hymn to hyper-neurosis …. Oh, fuck, now I can’t remember what my question was.
-It doesn’t matter, Dion said, just ask me another.