Celia and Rose followed the crowd inside.
They found two seats to the back right of the theater.
They watched the movie.
Chapter Six
Willkommen im Dschungel
Around the time when I started writing Chapter Twelve of this book, right between two paragraphs in which I insult George R.R. Martin and Game of Thrones, I underwent an unexpected religious experience.
To make sense of this: at the beginning of June 2017 AD, I decided that I should go see the band Guns N’ Roses perform live at the Staples Center.
What can you say about Guns N’ Roses?
Back in the 1980s AD, they were total Hollywood scumbags, the dregs of the dregs, homeless trash who became the most famous people in the world.
It’s the greatest faery story ever told.
The band carried on for about five years before flaming out.
Lead vocalist Axl Rose was left in control of the name, but all of the other original members quit or were fired. A period of twelve years followed.
This period included the album Chinese Democracy, mocked because it took forever to be released, but which is actually pretty good.
Anyway, they were a great band, and their iconography haunted my childhood and is about 70 per cent of the reason why I live in Los Angeles.
In 2016 AD, three of the original members reformed the band and ventured out on a reunion tour.
I saw their August 19th, 2016 AD show at Dodger Stadium.
Because 2016 AD was a year in which I had made a significant, but not substantial, amount of money, I bought a General Admission ticket to the pit.
It cost about $280.
I was way in front.
I was next to the stage.
The whole thing was filmed by a professional camera crew.
If there’s ever a live DVD, you’ll see me. I’m the guy with no hair looking very uncomfortable as he stands next to a group of models who are younger than the songs being performed.
When a second American leg of the tour was announced for 2017 AD, with the Los Angeles dates in late November, I decided that I should buy another ticket.
Because 2017 AD was a year in which I earned an even more significant, bordering on substantial, amount of money, I bought a General Admission ticket to the pit.
It cost about $550.
Which is manifestly insane.
But I have a lot of disposable income.
This is because I don’t spend any money.
In the twenty-two months following the release of my novel I Hate the Internet, I made just under $200,000, net, pre-tax, pre-agents’ commissions, and the only things I bought were a cemetery plot and two tickets to see Guns N’ Roses.
On June 30th, 2017 AD, I purchased a General Admission pit ticket to see the Guns N’ Roses show at the Staples Center.
The show was scheduled to occur on November 24th, 2017 AD.
Because I like useless ephemera, I paid an extra $5 to have a physical ticket.
The ticket arrived about a week later.
It was sent via postal mail.
Then, in August of 2017 AD, right around when my novel The Future Won’t Be Long was published by Penguin Random House, ensuring that I made significantly less money in 2018 AD than I did in 2017 AD, I found a surprise in my postal mail.
I’d been sent a second ticket.
I compared the two tickets.
Except for the barcodes, they were identical.
Barcodes are bits of black ink and numbers printed on every ticket. Whenever you try to enter an event, someone’s there with a device that scans the barcode and ascertains the ticket’s validity.
The tickets had different barcodes.
There were two options: (1) believe that the second ticket supplanted the first or (2) believe that both tickets were valid.
I opted for a soft belief in the second option.
I now had two tickets to see Guns N’ Roses at the Staples Center.
Which meant that I had to find someone to come with me.
I called Arafat Kazi.
Arafat Kazi is my best friend.
He used to be the fattest man in Bangladesh.
Now he’s an American citizen and had recent gastric bypass surgery. Hundreds of pounds of fat have melted off his body, but their absence has draped him in a suit of empty skin.
He’s also a drummer.
We met in 2001 AD, when he was an undergrad at Boston University.
One of the very first things that we talked about was his taste in music, which in those days was almost entirely Heavy Metal.
He was into Iron Maiden and Judas Priest.
The worst bands of all time!
One of our few overlaps in taste was Guns N’ Roses.
We built a friendship talking about the band.
“Dude,” I said into the telephone. “I have this extra ticket to see Guns N’ Roses that was mailed to me by mistake. You’ve got to come to Los Angeles for Thanksgiving.”
“Okay, dude,” he said. “I’ll do it. Can you pay my plane fare?”
Fast forward to November 23rd, 2017 AD.
Thanksgiving Day! Celebration of genocide with disgusting food!
Around 9PM, I picked Arafat up at the airport and brought him to my apartment.
I suggested that he sleep on the pull-out, but he insisted on taking the floor.
He passed out around midnight.
About twenty hours before Arafat’s arrival, an astonishing thing happened: somehow The Future Won’t Be Long was shortlisted for the Literary Review’s Bad Sex in Fiction Award.
The Literary Review was a London magazine for, quote, People Who Devour Books, unquote.
The Bad Sex in Fiction Award was an award that, quote, honoured an author who has produced an outstandingly bad scene of sexual description in an otherwise good novel. The purpose of the prize is to draw attention to poorly written, perfunctory or redundant passages of sexual description in modern fiction, unquote.
The shortlisting of The Future Won’t Be Long generated more emails than any other thing that had happened in my life.
When I woke up that morning and examined my inbox, it was flooded.
Draw your own lesson, reader.
Here was mine: people remain unbelievably primitive.
The emails had a 50/50 split.
Half of the people felt bad for me and wanted to make sure that I was okay.
The other half understood the shortlisting for what it was: absolutely fucking awesome, even if it did produce a moral compromise.
The moral compromise emerged from the fact that I am a hopeless case.
I loathe human attempts at establishing status.
I object to the general idea of awards and literary awards in specific.
But.
The Bad Sex in Fiction Award?
For the first time in my life, there was something that I wanted to win.
I knew that I wouldn’t.
The shortlisted passage wasn’t a sex scene.
It was an absurd, pretentious character describing her reaction to sex in a manner that was absurd and pretentious.
There was no way that it fit the bill.
My novel does, in fact, contain an actual sex scene.
It’s two pages long. It’s disgusting. It’s redundant. It’s perfunctory. It’s so pretentious that at the moment of climax, it mentions James Boswell, a writer from the Eighteenth Century AD.
So why wasn’t it nominated?
Here’s my theory: the actual sex scene in The Future Won’t Be Long is the description of a down-and-dirty homosexual encounter.
Major league assfucking!