1582 c/o Richard Chiem


1582 love in the club


There is an interesting way the water gathers on the window from the rain outside, where a young couple is kissing and pressing their bodies against the windowpane, and a small insect drowns against their passion. Little squirms and it dies easy. The water droplets make the shapes of boobs. Outside the sound of traffic grows hallow and faraway, just like how Los Angeles would sound years later in the future. Girls drink to see into the future. Hernando is very tired. Love feels like a thing people eventually learn to live without, like tonsils or god. The bar is not a bar. The bar is a place with a big mouth with some big teeth and a smart tongue and if you are willing, everything is willing, the bar will touch anything if you would like. Will do more, if you would like. The people that come here are terrible and angelic, and so the place is a void, somewhere imaginary to fuck or be existential, to be away. People come to come. Here is heaven. Here are angels with genitals. Here they sit, half delirious, on platinum dance floors, and the room fills with people in tight clothing, fancy shoes and serene faces so to talk and talk and come hither. Opium in syringes. Scotch and ice and thin saliva, swirl inside glass cups with lipstick. The halogen light is yellow and thick and alien enough to make you feel nauseous or invincible. It depends on how the girl looks at you, he thinks. Hernando returns from the dirty bathroom back to the dance floor, after vomiting out an entire universe. He wipes his mouth. His body aches. When he woke this morning, all Hernando could feel was his head, all big and pulsing like a tumor, and there is nothing left to do but to stare at himself in the mirror, until breathing became an art form, until art becomes bullshit. Someone pretty and perfect is asking Hernando if he would like to dance but he doesn’t say anything to her and he pushes her away, and she falls down over easily onto the beating crowd behind them. If someone doesn’t react quickly and retrieve her from the floor, there is a cold fear that she could be trampled to death or maybe punctured alive by dancing queens, or the latest craze of the latest pop song. The beautiful pop song. Hernando waits too long before he finally feels guilt, like true guilt, and when he does turn around to apologize to the girl, she has already gone away, departed for someplace else. Some place better maybe. Sound vibrates through Hernando’s body like echoes in a tunnel and despite everything, Hernando cups his hands together and screams out sorry into the crowd, but no one can hear him. He screams and screams at the top of his lungs, standing there, but no one can hear him, because the music is playing so loudly and the DJ is very hot tonight. He asks about what time it is?