The wooden motorboat slides through a tight quiet canal of Venice. Nicola, one of the three men on the boat places a pair of large frameless sleek and futuristic sunglasses on the head of Danny, a transsexual ex-back-up dancer for Grace Jones who he has hired for the night. She has very pale skin and quiff dyed white-blonde, gelled back into a sort of biomorphic ripple, her eyes though are strangely contemporary - they have the eerie effect of seeming to belong to another version of her, the banally sensitive version of her that reveals her origins, so typically of their time.
But Nicola places the sunglasses on her face and covers these strange eyes. The effect of the enormous frames on the dancer’s head (they look a bit like a sort of aggressively hard-bodied homage to Peggy Guggenheim), is not at all surprising to him - the look is more or less identical to that which he had imagined when he purchased the glasses a month ago in a sleepy town just outside a bigger city, a place where he’d found a strangely gifted artisan, a bedroom artisan (a kid, basically, who still lived at home but had found some way to dream with his hands, short circuiting, like the internet, one culture to another geography with a dangerous cool) who could make up these sorts of things according to his particularly articulate requests.
He was right to cover her eyes, he thinks, but without any sense of surprise – he doesn’t really make mistakes with these kinds of things anymore.
He, Nicola, is bald-headed but the youngest and obviously the most powerful of the three men on the boat. After finishing placing the sunglasses on Danny’s head he walks back and stands near the photographer, a little behind him, pretending to not notice exactly what is going on though he occasionally discretely checks the screen of the photographers camera to make sure the images are coming out as he wants them.
You can imagine it took him a while to figure out how to style his hair after it started falling out. He was used to being a long-haired student, probably, wrapping his hands around his head as he studied endlessly in the library - he used to be the kind of student people called a wunderkid - when he thought he thought feverishly. Those days are brutally long gone now though, or so it appears. Now he has learnt how to wear it, the balding scalp, in an almost mildewy not-crewcut version of very short, maybe only cut with scissors to keep the acerbic edge off it, in the art of the non-statement, or the statement which if you’re good enough at making it can become entirely irrelevant, and in doing so give you the freedom to do whatever you want. He usually dresses the same way, with a kind of snobbism so extreme it can’t even manifest itself in dress, a defeated all knowingness, an extremely expensive defeat, with a particular expertise in fabrics, in the kind of details which guarantee nothing to the inexpert eye. A strange speed-bump remains about the hair though, as if him losing it was disproportionately difficult, completely unlike the ease with each he discredits everything but the most cunning logic now - he always has something to say about a friend’s haircut.
“How much do they make you pay for a job like that?”
“€20”
“You can get sucked off for that money.”
“Yeah and I can jerk myself off for free.”
The hair of his face, though, is still spikey and razored, there is not much he can do about that, and his chest is broadly hairy, from one end to the other.
He looks at his absolute best that night at his party in Venice.
He’s wearing a white suit, it probably cost a million euros and is the only one he has and he probably wears it every time he feels it’s a special occasion. At least that’s the impression it gives. Underneath he is wearing some sheer white t-shirt cut very deep in the chest and with a watercolour-like pattern, something designer, innocuous, expensive, unreal (in so much as it’s the kind of the thing you only buy for a night like this and nights like these are barely known to exist), it matches his suit perfectly. Around his neck he has a necklace made of many rings of extremely heavy raw-looking steel of different thicknesses, the way he wears it, makes one wonder how his expertise can be so vast and all encompassing. His eyes are done in a thick smoky blue.
He put this make up of his on earlier, by himself, in a private hotel room he hired just to get dressed in.
He arrives with a small tube-shaped nylon gym back. In it he has his suit, gently rolled to avoid wrinkles, his t-shirt shirt, jewellery, new shoes and cosmetics. Even though the heavy curtains were closed a little bit of light seeped in, that sadly impersonal light of hot mid-afternoon, a few minutes before 3 when everything is about to re-open.
Standing near the bed he took off all the clothes he was wearing with the exception of his underwear. Then he went to the bathroom with his make-up. The bathroom was large and with a heavy marble sink. Everything in there was either brown or cream or pinkish red; it almost made him drowsy and momentarily he thought about sleep with great pleasure even though the evening was still very distant.
Then he did what he’d gone in there thinking to do; he looked at himself in the mirror and smiled first with his eyebrows then with his mouth, the smile, though pre-meditated, had the effect of making him want to continue smiling, he tried various different effects, his eyes shone ever so lightly, he filled them with their colour even more so they seemed like stones.
Then he started to apply his make-up, meticulously, slowly – already knowing the effect he was after – it had occurred to him a few days ago as he slowly arrived at this outfit in his mind, as if working in a metaphor (for what he didn’t know) he had begun to layer one part of the look on another, as if coming home again, arriving at this image which he knew he wanted to live in that night.
He applied a light foundation of grey underneath his eyes, then an ultramarine blue, then a light electric blue, gradually creating the depth he sought, the slightly oily one-day-old feel he wanted to give it.
When he’d finished he put all his other clothes and toiletries into the gym bag. At the reception he gave the bag to the man behind the counter who was a sort of friend, or at least somebody willing to do him a favour, and told him he would be back tomorrow morning early to pick it up.
He arrived at the dock empty handed and entirely prepared, as though he was an image rather than somebody on a night out with friends.
The other men in the motorboat, the men with which Nicola has decided to surround himself, are both dressed with a similar sense of occasion, old hands at putting on a show, confident in their ability to incite a spectacle in a few hours when the party starts.
Both men treat Nicola familiarly, as though he was an old friend even though they can’t have known each other much longer than a year, year and a half at the most. In fact, though it’s almost imperceptible, definitely to the untrained eye, there is something a little too fast about the quality of the familiarity, as if it’s afraid to really settle on its object. When Fabio, the photographer for the evening and the jumpier of the two men, says something to Nicola regarding the photos he’s taking of Danny at the rear of the boat, he seems to rush his comment past Nicola, to make it wilfully imprecise, as though fearful of what might happen if it directly hit its target. Nicola smiles back allowingly, though he must certainly have noticed Fabio’s nervous conceit.
The other man, a little older, a little more dangerous looking, with a head like one which you might find atop the shoulders of a Greek sculpture representing some wicked and eternally boyish mythological character, watches on. He is dressed in a manner that seems to use the stylistic tropes of homosexuality as a threat, to other men, heterosexuals mostly, of rape. He is wearing a sarong-like designer piece, perhaps originally for women, with a blazer jacket, on his head he has a platinum blonde wig tied back into a pony tail and 70s-style gold wire framed glasses.
The motorboat eventually exits the narrow canals and cruises to the dock on the Riva degli Schiavoni where the boat on which the party will be held is waiting. They board it immediately even though the party won’t begin for another few hours and go straight to the open-air top floor. A couple of tattooed men are setting up the bar behind the counter at the fore of the boat, next to the small open cabin. Nicola and his friends greet them familiarly with a series of more or less jokey handshakes. Inside the small cabin there is a thin young man checking the sound system. Nicola goes over and greets him as well, shaking the boys hand and softly gripping his forearm with his other hand at the same time, as if happy to have him in his hands, quite literally, then he smiles and says:
‘Play just as if it were a normal night for you in Mexico City, I want the same atmosphere, ok?’
He doesn’t describe what he means in any more detail though the Mexico City he wants hear in the music is a specific one, a city potted with hills with castles on the top of them and multi-coloured night monsters trawling the lowlands between the hills.
The kid, who is young and smooth skinned and wearing a black t-shirt with white gothic drawings and Spanish text, smiles mischievously, touching his mouth with the back of his hand, as if he thinks Nicola is a real joker but he doesn’t mind right now –he’ll tolerate it this time because the guy paid for his flight over, though maybe in other circumstances he wouldn’t put up with it. He responds:
‘Mexico City… yeah yeah yeah no problem. Just like Mexico City, ok, heh.’
Nicola laughs a little to himself as he notices the kid’s need to express, somehow, even if just for a fraction of a second in the corner of his lips or eyes, his independence, his freedom of will. Nicola laughs because that’s fine, in fact he likes it, it’s perfect, it’s exactly what he expected and wanted, that guy shouldn’t like him.
The men who were setting up the bar finish and seem to say something to one of Nicola’s friends who proceeds to help himself to a drink, the night’s first. Gradually the others notice as well and also go prepare themselves some simple cocktails. They all stand together, talking quietly and enjoying the feeling of their nerves mixing together in the air, recognising the sense of anticipation like a familiar friend; they’ve done this a million times before because it’s they’re favourite thing to do.
-
He’s only the hype man for the party that night but Nicola steals the show. After about an hour, after the first effects of the vodka can be felt on the crowd, Danny, specifically hired for this, steps up onto the bar table and begins an aggressive striptease, she is then joined by a girl who also begins stripping and sexually engaging Danny.
The crowd, a mix of bored rich people who pay, with base hunger, to have cities’ protective layers penetrated (because they have no other tools for breaching the horrifically deadening sense of never being anywhere specific, no matter what city they’re in) and the best-looking creative kids from various Italian cities, has enough of an innate sense of entitlement to leer at the show without scruples when they feel like it, and act as if it weren’t happening at all when they don’t feel like it.
Nicola stands directly behind the dancers entreating the crowd to engage with the performance, shouting at them to ‘lose themselves’ amongst other similarily self-evident exhortations. He continues to repeat them, rhythmically, like a chant, with greater and greater force – his intensity is hard to believe, disproportionate to his cunning intelligence, his face is a spectacle of incredibly intense sensations, passing through it one after the other; hatred, power, fear. It’s impossible to understand what his face means to him in those moments. It’s impossible not to look at him.
Occasionally he takes a break from his exhortations and comes downstairs to the aft of the boat to see a woman, his wife (though he never uses the term). She is tall, with extremely short hair and face that seems as though it’s been beaten before (but her eyes are so calmly assertive that they make this observation seem like a deliciously fantastic paranoia), it has a slightly irregular puffiness, a little bit out of shape in unexpected areas. He smiles at her with what appears to straightforward sincerity, kisses her briefly on the cheek then goes back upstairs to continue his performance.
He gets behind the bar and begins to shout again. He is sweating a little, not a lot, not as much as you’d expect, but enough to cake his make-up in an even more glamorous sheen, it makes him look like he’s at the tail end of a bender, that he’s been wearing that painted face for four days straight – that he’s already passed through one of those nights where you stay up through until dawn and when dawn comes you realise that sleep won’t be coming to you that next day either because the situation demands vigilance, you’re on the cusp of something, if you keep watching you’ll catch them or it, one of those periods without sleep, basically, where you finally decide to leave a city or country or oppressive situation, where regardless of the fatigue you can even begin to rest easy because you know both vaguely and exactly at the same time what you’re going to have to do.
Even though he acknowledges the crowd, and in a way entirely relies on it for whatever feeling he is trying to achieve, his satisfaction remains deeply private, darkly so, disconnected from the performance and disconnected from what he’s giving the audience. You can tell from the look of his eyes, he’s not anybody’s friend. The look seems to be saying ‘you’ll never know the origin of this desire’, he’ll never ‘share’ anything with you - and this adds to the flavour of the thing, that he’ll never tell anybody about what it meant to him. It’s a kind of secret literature in action, one that people refuse to write anymore, one that here, seemingly, nobody ever talks about.
