THE BALLAD OF JOE GILLIS
Chaos grows like a fungus. So goes the last line of a novel my good friend Tommy lent me over the summer as part of his languishing efforts to make me more cultured.The novel, Slowly Going Nowhere , I forget who wrote it, was a peculiar little book, the tone of which constantly shifted from Salinger to Kafka in the space of a paragraph. Anyway, it took me a mere day to read it, enjoying the simplicity of the narrative and the generously short length. Then I read the last line, and I was reminded of a bizarre hallucination I experienced all those nights ago at Jack’s party. It’s an evening that will forever be embedded in my memory. Everyone was there, all conforming to their own stereotypes; the jocks were inanely shouting, the girls dancing and pouting, the nerds uncomfortably sipping at their drinks and I was succumbing to the charms of a sublime all-rounder named Jane. Every cliché of every high-school movie was playing out at Jack’s monstrous house that night, until, at about nine thirty, when the party was really hitting its stride and the alcohol had eradicated any unwanted awkwardness lingering in the air, the outsider meandered in. Feigning nonchalance, Joe Gillis entered the living room, but all his confidence seemed to drain from his body and he barely even managed a ‘hello’. Clad in a long brown coat with his hands in his pocket, he was indisputably handsome, but a tarnished handsome: his slanted nose was out of proportion with the rest of his face and he had a pale, miserable complexion. He reclined into an armchair and lit a cigarette. Jane and I were becoming more and more, how should I put this, intimate as the evening went on, if you get my drift. I was in a spectacularly jovial mood. I would relentlessly quiz her, searching
27 17
Made with FlippingBook - Online magazine maker