And all of the passages shortlisted for the Bad Sex in Fiction Award were exclusively heterosexual.
Clearly, the pretentious passage for which I had been nominated was a stand-in for the pretentious passage which contained a description of actual sex.
I was weighing this in my mind while I waited for Arafat Kazi to get off his plane.
Everyone else in the airport terminal waited with anticipation for the arrival of their friends, lovers, and family.
And I was there too, and I was trying to decide if the liberal intelligentsia believed homosexuals are incapable of having bad sex.
With Arafat crashed out, I fell asleep around 3AM after beginning to write Chapter Twelve.
When I woke up at 10AM, he wasn’t in the apartment.
I checked my email and found the following:
Fri, Nov 24, 2017 at 9:18 AM
From: Arafat Kazi
To: Jarett Kobek
Subject:
Hey dude, I couldn’t sleep from friction of excess skin on floor, so I got a hotel. About to go to sleep for a couple of hours. It’s 9:18 am.
Sent from Arafat’s iPhone.
We met for a late lunch at Musso & Frank, which is the oldest restaurant in Hollywood, and also the setting for a short story that I wrote about the film director Wes Anderson using a urinal. The story is titled “Wes Anderson Uses a Urinal.” You can find it in a recently published anthology called Mixed Up: Cocktail Recipes (and Flash Fiction) for the Discerning Drinker (and Reader).
Before I left for lunch, I checked my ticket on the website from which I’d ordered it, and discovered something that I hadn’t noticed before.
Despite tickets to the pit being General Admission, my purchase had been assigned a seat.
The reason I’d adopted a soft belief in both tickets’ validity was on the basis of General Admission. Why would any General Admission ticket be assigned a seat number?
Ipso facto, one ticket couldn’t replace the other.
But now my belief was shattered. It was clear that there was only one seat.
Ergo, one ticket.
A sensation of dread crashed on me.
I’d made Arafat Kazi fly out to Los Angeles and bought his plane ticket and we’d been talking about this stupid concert for months and now he was staying in a hotel because the empty skin which draped his body had made it impossible to sleep on my apartment floor.
And he wasn’t getting inside.
Before I left, I made a vow to the universe: if Arafat Kazi got into the pit to see Guns N’ Roses at the Staples Center, then I would stop worrying about the outcome of my life.
I would take it as a sign that everything would be fine, even if my last novel had commanded a high advance and turned out to be a commercial failure.
I’m not sure why I made this vow.
It happened while I was urinating.
Shades of Wes Anderson.
I went to Musso & Frank. I ordered a hot turkey sandwich. Arafat got a French Dip sandwich. Then we ordered dessert.
I had a piece of key lime pie.
Arafat had something called the Diplomat Pudding.
I had, and have, no idea what’s in a Diplomat Pudding.
It looked disgusting.
We left the restaurant and walked for a few blocks.
Arafat used his smartphone to hail an Uber, which was a private car operated by a company that’s single-handedly set back the American labor movement by about seventy years.
The car brought us to his hotel. We sat around his room for an hour and a half, talking about Muslims in America.
Arafat’s a Muslim.
I’m half a Muslim.
Break out the misspelled placards!
“Dude, I know people, you know,” he said, “who have jobs as bank managers, who are nice when you see them, and then you go back home and see that ten minutes after you parted, they’ve posted about Sharia law on Facebook.”
“I read about this poll a few months ago,” I said. “They asked people of every possible demographic how they felt about people from every other demographic. And, dude, Muslims polled worse than anyone else in America. With every single demographic. When they asked Muslims about other Muslims, dude, they still polled worse than everyone else.”
“Well, dude,” he said, “I think you’ve got to realize that even though people express a public opposition to the rhetoric, when that rhetoric comes from the top, it still seeps in.”
Then I convinced him to change his clothes.
He’d packed an outfit that he wanted to wear to the concert, but earlier that afternoon, he’d decided against it.
We argued, but I won the day with the following thought: “If you’re dressed like a circus performer, there’s a better chance of them letting you inside.”
This was the outfit: hot pink pants and a striped multi-colored psychedelic shirt.
Arafat also had a cap which matched the shirt.
He changed his clothes.
It was incredible.
He really did look like a circus performer.
We took another Uber to the Staples Center, which is a circular-shaped venue where the Los Angeles Lakers play basketball and imbue the city’s cocaine addicts with a sense of regional superiority.
The driver parked across the street from the venue.
We got out of the Uber.
We walked over to the Staples Center and discovered that there was a special line for people with General Admission tickets. It was much shorter than the normal line, which was full of sane people who hadn’t paid $550 to see middle-aged men perform thirty-year-old songs.
I gave Arafat one of my tickets.
“Let’s see how it goes,” I said.
At the front of the line, a pleasant woman tried to scan the barcode on my ticket.
It didn’t work.
“What about his?” I asked.
She scanned Arafat’s ticket.
It worked.
We tried to convince her that she should let us both in. She said that she couldn’t. We’d have to talk with the box office manager.
We walked away and then she called us back.
Because she’d scanned Arafat’s ticket, and it worked, one of us would have to go inside.
I took Arafat’s ticket.
I went inside.
He said he’d go talk to the manager.
When I got inside, there was a table for General Admission tickets, and the young woman working at the table was checking barcodes and names against a list of people authorized to be in the pit. If your barcode matched an entry on the list, then she’d put a purple leopard-spotted paper bracelet on your left wrist.
The bracelet was your pass into the pit, and even with that, you still had to get through about four more security checks.
I got down to the pit, which was about five feet from the stage.
Arafat would have loved this, I thought.
It’s awful that he isn’t here, I thought.
Everything’s ruined, I thought.
There were fifteen other people in the pit. They were pressed up against a railing that separated the pit from the stage.
I was the only person standing in the middle, not pressed up against anything.
It felt awkward.
I went back to the round concourse of the Staples Center.
And then I did what all pathetic writers do.
I found the bar.
With a bloodstream full of overpriced vodka, I texted Arafat.
I wrote that he shouldn’t worry, that he should just get a scalped ticket on his smartphone, and I’d pay him back.
At the very least, I thought, he could get a ticket in the cheapseats. It’d be a shared memory even if we were apart.