The Angel of History Read Online Free PDF Page A

stood next to you, as close as I could get, shoulders almost touching,hips almost conjoining, on your face sprang a line of a smile that didn’t wish to appear too eager.
    It’s not a gay book, I said in a voice just above a whisper, wanting to keep my options open in case you rejected me—I wasn’t speaking to you, no, truly, I wasn’t. Foxlike, your eyes glittered and darted, expressed false surprise—yes, even then I knew you were mocking me. How many fucks did you wait, weeks later you finally admitted that you used Didion’s book because you thought I was just the kind of boy who might be a devotee. You joked that the book was about aging Jewish gay lads heading to the old city of Bethlehem, then you mentioned something about an original that I couldn’t decipher because my dick was so hard. I wondered whether you were talking about “The Second Coming.” Your thin nose twitched, your face lit up. Oh, I’m going to make you come a second and a third and probably a fourth time, you said, and dragged me home. I have to tell you that was a horrid come-hither line, just horrid, but it worked, and now Joan Didion has written memoirs for Oprah. It didn’t bother me, I mean, we’re all getting old and sentimental, nostalgia overwhelms our defenses, floats over our moats and scales our walls. She’s not the writer she was when younger but few are. Don’t allow your prose to reach forty should be the motto of every writer, commit Mishima.
    A few weeks ago I was going to have dinner with my roommate, Odette, and her girlfriend, Sue, and as was my wont, I arrived early at the crowded restaurant, aggressively trendy of course, one of many that were popping up like noxious mushrooms in what used to be our old haunts. This one was sparkly new but meant to look old—the walls,everything had an unnatural tinge of gray, which was supposed to be the faded trace of some earlier lost color. I was on edge, the music was thumping loudly and it wasn’t disco, and the restaurant was pretentious like everything in this drippy city that brimmed with self-congratulation, and the waitstaff were obnoxious and the customers more so and I so hated San Francisco. Oh, I live in the city by the bay, so I must be cool, I live in a cretinous provincial dump surrounded by pretentious superficially amicable cretins, so aren’t I wonderful?
    As the maître d’ manqué led me into the bowels of the establishment, I felt a tug at my hand, a diner held my wrist trying to slow me down as I passed. I didn’t notice at first and my shoulder was almost dislocated from its customary socket. I was stopped by two young gay writers—two rude writers, both remaining seated in the deafening cacophony, a Tom Something and a Something Bernhard was all I could remember of their names, two artistes of the nouveau-bland movement whose manifesto consists of defending the rights of white gay boys to have dating anxieties and live homohappily ever after. Tom Something with his pink, studiedly pleasant face called me Jake, asked how I was doing, and, without waiting for a reply, proceeded to inform me that he had finally fulfilled his lifelong dream of visiting Burning Man, and no, he wasn’t burned at the stake, ha-ha, but he had problems with ubiquitous sand in his underwear so he dispensed with bottom clothing altogether on the second day. I was first confused, then bored, then annoyed, and he must have noticed since he abruptly segued into the fact that he had also recently fulfilled his more important lifelong ambition of being interviewed by Terry Gross. His voicewas coloratura irritating, and I couldn’t understand why he was talking to me, let alone regaling me with such trivia. He was gleefully enjoying his rather small turn as one of those writers who accidentally happen to get acknowledged during the short literary cycle.
    If all that wasn’t upsetting enough, his tablemate, Something Bernhard, had a tickle in his throat that needed clearing every