Page 268 - A Little Life: A Novel

By his age, you had met all the friends you would probably ever have. You
had met your friends’ friends. Life got smaller and smaller. Jackson was
stupid and callow and cruel and not the sort of person he was supposed to

value, who was supposed to be worth his time. He knew this. And that was
why he kept at it: to dismay his friends, to show them that he wasn’t bound
by their expectations of him. It was stupid, stupid, stupid. It was hubris.
And he was the only one who was suffering because of it.
“You can’t actually like this guy,” Willem had said to him once. And
although he had known exactly what Willem meant, he had pretended not
to, just to be a brat.

“Why can’t I, Willem?” he’d asked. “He’s fucking hilarious. He actually
wants to do things. He’s actually around when I need someone. Why can’t
I? Huh?”
It was the same with the drugs. Doing drugs wasn’t hard core, it wasn’t
badass, it didn’t make him more interesting. But it wasn’t what he was
supposed to do. These days, if you were serious about your art, you didn’t

do drugs. Indulgence, the very idea of it, had disappeared, was a thing of
the Beats and AbExes and the Ops and the Pops. These days, maybe you’d
smoke some pot. Maybe, every once in a while, if you were feeling very
ironic, you might do a line of coke. But that was it. This was an age of
discipline, of deprivation, not inspiration, and at any rate inspiration no
longer meant drugs. No one he knew and respected—Richard, Ali, Asian
Henry Young—did them: not drugs, not sugar, not caffeine, not salt, not

meat, not gluten, not nicotine. They were artists-as-ascetics. In his more
defiant moments, he tried to pretend to himself that doing drugs was so
passé, so tired, that it had actually become cool again. But he knew this
wasn’t true. Just as he knew it wasn’t really true that he enjoyed the sex
parties that sometimes convened in Jackson’s echoey apartment in
Williamsburg, where shifting groups of soft skinny people groped blindly at

one another, and where the first time a boy, too reedy and young and
hairless to really be JB’s type, told him he wanted JB to watch him suck
away his own blood from a cut he’d give himself, he had wanted to laugh.
But he hadn’t, and had instead watched as the boy cut himself on his bicep
and then twisted his neck to lap at the blood, like a kitten cleaning itself,
and had felt a crush of sorrow. “Oh JB, I just want a nice white boy,” his ex
and now-friend Toby had once moaned to him, and he smiled a little,

remembering it. He did, too. All he wanted was a nice white boy, not this