620 PM Adam
There was a photo booth on the opposite side of the dance floor. On their way to table seven, Richie asked Adam to make a detour.
“Do we have to?” Adam said. “I’m actually pretty hungry.”
But Richie was already pulling back the booth’s curtain.
“Come on,” he said. “It’ll only take a second.”
It was hot, much hotter than it was outside, and lit by a bright white light.
Adam squeezed onto the bench next to Richie and pulled shut the curtain.
In front of them was a screen, advertising different filters for whatever pictures they either were or were not going to take.
Black and white, sepia, rose-colored. If they wanted, they could add little pixelated sombreros.
“Here, have some of this,” Richie said. He was holding out his hotel key, a black plastic card, on the corner of which he had gathered a tiny mound of cocaine.
Turning his feet toward each other, Adam tried his best to get comfortable.
He didn’t really want any cocaine. Lately it had been difficult for him to do drugs without letting a preemptive worry about a hangover get in the way of whatever pleasure or transcendence the drugs promised.
Sometimes he wondered if that meant he was getting older; other times he wondered if he was simply bad at doing drugs, in the same way that other people were bad at Scrabble, or making omelets.
Recently he’d tried explaining all of this to Richie, and Richie had told him to grow up—he said that Adam was only saying that he didn’t like drugs, because saying that he didn’t like drugs was the morally and ethically acceptable position.
Adam should have expected this—it fit into the dance that they had created for themselves around topics like this one.
The dance went something like this: If Adam did not do the drugs, Richie would become defensive and would accuse Adam of acting superior and judgmental.
He would call Adam boring, and to make himself feel better would end up doing double the amount of cocaine that he originally intended to do, as if the answer to both of their problems was (always) to get mind-blowingly high.
Adam would then feel guilty, particularly the next day when he was watching Richie wallow around with a hangover, and he would start to wonder if Richie was right—if he was, in fact, boring, and if it would have been easier for everyone if he had done the drugs.
But in this case, Adam was pretty sure of his reasoning.
He wasn’t trying to be morally superior, or boring, or any of the other things Richie typically accused him of being.
Instead, he was trying to be pragmatic. Last night at the rehearsal dinner, Richie had gotten a little too messed up and had made a scene.
Adam could identify the exact moment when things started to turn—he had become adept at that.
What happened (what always happened) was that Richie became very talkative, even more talkative than usual, and then abruptly went dark.
(This was what Richie called it—“going dark”—which always made everyone, with the exception of Adam, laugh.) Once darkness was achieved, Adam then watched as Richie floundered, trying to regain some state of mental symmetry or stability.
Last night that quest had involved four more prickly pear margaritas, a cigarette, a trip to the bathroom with Mitch Reynolds, and a fully clothed dip in the hotel’s swimming pool.
This morning, Richie didn’t remember any of it.
He’d asked Adam why his shoes were wet, so Adam told him what had happened, recounting each event as if he were giving a traffic report on the local news.
“Wow,” Richie said when he finished. “The pool?”
“The pool.”
“Did I at least have good form when I dove in?”
“I’d say it was less of a dive, and more of a fall.”
Richie frowned, then winced at his headache.
He said, “Well, that’s too bad.”
So, Adam thought within the photo booth, there was that. There was also this: tomorrow they had a torturously early flight back to New York. He didn’t want to stand outside an airport Margaritaville in Cancún, feeling his soul leach from his pores.
He did the drugs.
Richie said, “Just to get me through dinner, I promise. I’m running on fumes. Also, this is good stuff, there’s, like, zero hangover. I got it from Jackie Miami.” Richie wiped his nose and loaded up a second bump for himself. “Have I told you about Jackie Miami?”
He had. She was a drug dealer, and her name was Jackie Miami.
Or at least, her name was Jackie. Richie had first been put in touch with her when he was searching for cocaine for a trip to South Beach.
His normal dealer had gone AWOL, so a friend suggested he reach out to Jackie.
Over drinks in Chelsea, the friend had given her number to Richie, who, while saving the contact in his phone, added the surname Miami so as to differentiate this Jackie from his cousin Jackie, who lived in Minnesota with her three children, and who—insofar as Richie knew—did not deal cocaine.
The name stuck, and spread. As a businesswoman, Jackie was professional and efficient, and Richie, ever the believer in paying good fortune forward, was happy to help her grow her client base.
He’d shared her contact information with his closest friends, who in turn shared it with their closest friends.
Now, two years later, half the gay men in New York City were buying their drugs from Jackie Miami.
It was one of Richie’s favorite stories. Adam had heard it eight times.
“Have just a little more,” Richie said.
Adam had a little more.
Someone passed by the photo booth and the curtain swayed in the breeze. Sweat dripped down Adam’s cheeks—he heard a pair of women’s voices, ushering people toward dinner.
“Should we take some pictures?” he said.
Richie ran his hand through his hair. He’d slicked it down earlier, working a handful of expensive cream through it so that for the entire evening it would always appear a little bit wet.
“I don’t see why not,” he said.
“Great.” Adam reached forward and touched the screen. “But first—Richie?”
“Yeah?”
“You’ve got a little something on your nose.”
The camera above the screen flashed and for a second the world disappeared.
“Shit,” Richie said, “I wasn’t ready for that one.”
“What should we do for the next one?”
“Make a face.”
“What kind of face?”
“I don’t know. A funny one.”
Adam made a funny face.
Richie kissed him and said, “That’s cute.”
A second flash illuminated the booth, and a moment later a picture filled the screen. Adam’s tongue wagged from his mouth; Richie was blowing out his cheeks.
“That one’s good,” Adam said. “For the next one, let’s just smile.”
But Richie was already reaching over him to pull open the curtain. The flash went off again. On the screen was the blur of another body passing in front of Adam’s.
“I’ll meet you at the table,” Richie said. “Also, thanks for volunteering to sit next to Nina.”
“I didn’t.”
Two more flashes went off in quick succession.
Richie jogged toward the dinner tables, little flicks of sand kicking up from his heels.
The photo booth made a groaning sound, which quieted to a short, constant hum; a moment later a plastic slot spit out a strip of five pictures.
Adam blew lightly on each of the tiny squares.
Then he slipped it into the pocket of his jacket and followed Richie to their table.
Nina Guzman had finished her first year of business school at Northwestern and it was the only thing she seemed capable of talking about.
It didn’t matter what Adam said—whatever it was, she redirected it to something related to Evanston (“so cute”), or a case study she’d read about Walmart (“illuminating”), or a group project she’d done where she had to come up with an integrated marketing plan for some new kind of Tibetan bottled water with her classmates (“my cohort”), or the clever name the school gave to the romantic partners of future MBAs (“joint-ventures”).
He didn’t really care about any of it—if there was a way to negatively care about something, then this would probably be it.
The problem was the drugs, which were just now reaching their buzzy crescendo.
He kept nodding involuntarily, and shaking his leg, and raising his eyebrows until they felt like they were on the crown of his head, all of which must have been giving Nina the impression that he was extremely interested in what she was saying, so she kept on going, stuffing her face with chicken enchiladas as she talked.
Listening to her, Adam found himself imagining a future where the world ended, and this was how he died—a future where an asteroid came hurtling down from space, its rocky surface erupting into flames as it lit up the night with its apocalyptic glow.
As he gazed up to marvel at it, he would still be listening to Nina Guzman talk about an orientation trip she took last summer.
“I didn’t even know where I was going,” she said.
“They just told me to be at the airport at a certain time, and to bring my passport. They also gave me a packing list, but it was tricky—like, they told me to pack a ski parka and a bathing suit. It was a special program, and really only for people who have a genuine sense of adventure, which, I mean, you know me: I’ve got that in spades.
Everyone else knew exactly where they were going, and all the destinations were these boring, super-cliché places like Patagonia and Australia. ”
Adam heard himself ask: “So where did you end up?”
Nina took a monstrous bite of enchilada. Red sauce dribbled down her chin.
“Ibiza,” she said. “It was great. Oh my God, there was this game that we played when we were there. It’s so funny, I have to tell you about it.”
“Okay.”