Audible through the fluorescent strobing party light-hued fog machine murk were huddled shapes chinwagging over the psyche of David Lynch's oeuvre while passing around Trevor's vaporizer, joints and a pizza box. Their diarrheic jabbering over the parallels between Manson (Marilyn)'s Mechanical Animals and Lost Highway was arrhythmically punctuated by constant misuse of "bemused" over "amused," more "you-know-what-I-means" and "likes" and hellos to partiers who had just burst through the front door than Myles had ever thought he would hear in a legitimate-grade collegiate filmic roundtable.
He wondered if maybe the unsightly furry baja hoodies they all wore were indicative of a personality type totally opposite than what he initially gleaned from all the boys in the living room woolly-huddle. Maybe they weren't the enlightened, no-longer-preoccupied-with-the-superficialities-of-trends-and-fads, highly-evolved types he thought they were. Maybe he wasn't picking something up. Maybe the drug-rugs, the thumb-rings, the patches of hair around their throats and ski-lodge memberships still dangling from their belts denoted a certain lack of attention to everything, especially the sub-layer intentions and thrusts of big-budget art movies.
The downstairs toilet gurgled and roiled like a carcass-filled cauldron and emitted its searing odour through the whole house. Most people in the house looked grossed out any time they caught a sniff of the air. Trevor was intensely rodent-faced, sweaty and sniffling too, but that was related to his own activities. Any time Alex passed by him at the party he whispered, "Don't do anything stupid tonight," to which Trevor replied between grimaced sniffles, "My day hath cometh, my day hath cometh, Alexio." Through the front doors burst the city's Shriners with their red hats and small scooters.
From across Not The Hoople's performance in the kitchen, Myles watched Trevor nervously rubbing his hands together. Trevor watched Leland and Will. Will watched Welnot, who was watching Alex, who was watching Trevor.
Alex leaned into Trevor, who was against the kitchen wall like plasterwork, with a severe case of post-cocaine teeth grinding bruxism, "What song is this they're doing right now?" Trevor leaned, still staring at Lee and Will, clicking his tongue against the roof of his baked mouth, "I think it is Mott's version of 'You Really Got Me.' A cover of a cover."
Myles tried to listen to Trevor and Alex's conversation, while continuing to try and keep an eye on Welnot, as well as Leland, and almost everything else in the room all at once. He felt like he was roaming a crowded museum, being pushed from one room into the next by the swells of people behind him before he could digest the surroundings. He felt alien still. He wanted to know more about everyone, but now that he was in arm's reach, the roommates seemed all the more thorny and difficult to grasp. Alex was ambling through the party, not at all with the phony confidence he had heard Welnot regularly whining about in his room late at night over his illegible journal. Welnot seemed less psychotic himself, too. Sarah was smoking a joint in a corner with four other girls while a movie projector in the corner cast images from Cannibal Holocaust over their profiles.
Myles decided to journey upstairs, crawling up on the heads and shoulders of all the people who sat on the stairs, talking, drinking, snorting. He passed Twin Tyler, one of Will's friends who has claimed he's his own twin named Kenneth. "Hey kid, how old are you, like 13?" "Fifteen!" Myles yelled, with a concerned face trying to determine whether he was heard at all or not.
"Cool," said with a certain neutrality that suggested he hadn't heard and didn't care. "I'm Kenneth. Want a beer?" And he handed it up to Myles instantly. Myles was on all fours with his forearms and shins supported by the necks and shoulders of three people seated alongside Tyler. It felt oddly similar to how he crawled in and around the house's basement.
Myles decided to slide his way into a spot on the carpeted stairs by the guy who was calling himself Kenneth at the moment. Holding Kenneth's cold can he took a nervous sip and felt his anxiety drape over him.
He had no idea what to say.
"So, do you do beer often?"
"What?"
"I mean, do you, uhh, do you watch the 0330am ADTV Network nightly summer movies too?"
"Hey!" Someone wearing all seven of Alex's watches shouted from the bottom of the stairs, "There's a fight outside!" before being trampled by about 20 of the invited guests.
