The Discreet Charm of Amiability
Leila Gastil and Chris Parker in Permanent Vacation (1980)
I always knew friends were family. I was never sure of exactly how it was true, but I knew that it was. From the time I left my friends behind to drive across the continent and returned a decade later to find our bond unchanged, to a sorry night sleeping on the floor of an Athenian hospital while E – a brother among many – had a not-so-useful organ removed, to a more recent moment where my short-lived central American brothers and I embraced in a circle and cried each other goodbye, knowing years – maybe even decades – would run amok before our next encounter.
These were not moments of friendship as it is commonly perceived, but of the most nuclear family, bound together by roughshod experience, innocent love, and a profound concern for each other's well-being.
I always knew that friends were family and now, more than ever before, I feel the tightening grip of the Gordian knot that connects us all, and that only Death can slice apart.
***
I've spent a myriad lazy afternoons wondering what made it all (them all) feel so familiar, wondering what principle underlay us young platonic lovers? Again, I found myself supine and both hands grasping onto grass, wrapping my mind around roundness with not much coming out the other end. Then, as an asteroid flew over Manchuria and a sister from another life wished that I was well, my conception of friendship crystallized within a caoutchouc daydream – slightly drunk, just barely stoned, always in good company.
Lisa Rosen in Permanent Vacation (1980)
I went home that that night and came out of this summer feeling that I'd figured out a simple truth that lets me be happy more often than not, and that my purpose in life had irrevocably become to repackage that truth and offer it to the world at large, so those who might want it may find it and those who don't know they need it may stumble across it. Whether I manage or not, only posterity will ever know. One thing, however, is certain, no one drowning in their own misery wants to read abstractions about another's unshackled glee, so my truth must be real, and come in a story.
***
There's a faint memory lurking in my hippocampus, I'm sleeping in an orange tree orchard leaning on a shoulder to my right, a head leans on my shoulder from the left, the morning dew is suffocating, swimming fully clothed and drenched, we run into the darkness of the undergrowth as policia sirens wail from where we just were, I've infiltrated a cow pasture looking for magic one thing or another and now the bulls are on my tail, he hurriedly drags me under the flaky wiring, printing a dark star on our chest and breathing our restless, we're marked by fire, I'm inching ever closer to the twig flame as frostbite ambushes us from Fiesole, we've only eaten red wine as we sit and talk for months at a time.
Such trivial little memories once powered my conviction that whatever we chose to do, no matter what it was, felt like the right thing, the rightest thing, and choosing to do anything else, without their company, would be sacrilege. Now, thinking back, my heart fills with glee just knowing that I’ve lived them. A feeling akin to ol' Hunter's epigram of maybe it meant something, maybe not, in the long run… whatever it meant... there was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning.
***
Leila Gastil and Chris Parker in Permanent Vacation (1980)
That night, as I rolled around in caoutchouc and mulled our options over, an overwhelming sense of liberty overcame me as I realized that we could get naked and make love in the gravel, or swap clothes and walk in opposite directions until we met on the other hemisphere, we could listen to Wagner from a make-believe phonograph or swap hugs and Camel cigarettes, pulls out each other’s hairs one by one ‘til the next Ice Age came to say hello, fossilize ourselves in amber to humor some future archaeologist, or even just do nothing at all.
Anything, anything felt right, so long as we caused no harm and preserved our wonder of the insignificant. That was the key. We’d learnt early on to be wary of the grand and cautious of the many. Most modern things are grandiose but offer no salvation, which remains hidden in the small, the trivial, the poor, and the neglected. As our world becomes more complex than either psyche or soma can handle our truths turn inside out, further eluding us, it won't come from the machine but from bench odes and sand dune manifestoes.
***