After Jens Lekman's The Linden Trees Are Still in Blossom
This party sucks. There’s no guacamole and they keep playing Macklemore. You would hate it here. I can hear you complaining about the fake Rothko’s hanging in the toilet. I’m crouched in between an orgy-in-progress where everyone is wearing pleather and an old episode of A Current Affair where Tracy Grimshaw is talking about a guy who is afraid of the hoodlum dogs in his cul-de-sac. The orgy-participants are trying to find glow in the dark lube in an array of muslin totebags strewn across the threadbare Persian rug that was bought from one of those carpet stores that are on the brink of closing down.
I’m writing on a discarded napkin which used to have a sausage roll on it in the hopes of one day getting this message to you. I know you would appreciate this because you’ve always had a love of things that are kitschy and romantic – like sandwiches served on picture frames or engagements in the middle of train stations. This party just got me thinking – that out of all the ones I’ve ever been to – the best ones were with you.
For example, Rome 2018.
I’m drunk and I might not remember everything, but I do recall the puffy pirate shirt you wore to that nightclub attached to our hostel. We were on a Contiki pretending to be a couple while you were checking out the hot private school guys who on a lads trip. You called them NSYNC because one of them looked like Lance Bass and he was your favourite because he wore crop tops. On the night, we bought lipstick at a pharmacy and you painted over your stubble with drug store concealer. While NSYNC slathered Calvin Klein across their pecs and armpits, you borrowed my Kim Kardashian Eau de Parfum which smelt like cinnamon and a hint of paracetamol. Your denim shorts barely covered your balls as you danced to a nightcore remix of Cascada’s Every time We Touch. You waved at all the boys who gave you eyes because your pirate shirt and short shorts made you look like a muse out of a Mapplethorpe photo. My head was pounding from the tenth vodka cranberry and I held on tight to your skinny waist as you ribboned through the crowed, trying to wave to the DJ so he would play Spinning Around again. In that moment, I was so afraid of losing you in the darkness and sea of bodies, that I grabbed so tightly onto your pirate shirt that it ripped and left a gaping hole in your back.
There was a David Bowie tribute concert going on in the next room. Starman was being sung in Italian. The older patrons of the club – respectable fathers off-duty from the kids for a night – wore flat caps and chequered shirts. David, or Davido, sang to us while we waltzed amongst middle-aged libido and fresh white sneakers. You kept telling everyone about your Bowie tattoo but no one could understand you because your Australian accent was so thick. Contiki, you explained, I’m here on Contiki, while they laughed and admired your torn shirt. You begged for cigarettes, though you didn’t smoke, but in Rome… well you know how the saying goes. We hid in a toilet cubicle when the air seemed to get thinner and the room started to turn on its head. Are we in hell? I asked as the graffiti on the doors squiggled and swirled around my head. No, babes, this is heaven. You laughed and played with the hole in your shirt, admiring the sheer porcelain brilliance of your lower back. I have an idea, you said, laughing with your eyes shut. What? Without answering, you pulled a black mole from your shoulder and watched it bleed out into your shirt into an alarming red mass. BDOML you texted me, despite the fact that I was standing right next to you. LOL, I replied.
Adelaide, 2017.
Hey, remember the first party I ever had at my house where you bit into an onion as if it was an apple? You were wearing an Akubra and Doc Martens and said you looked like a hot colonial baddy. We pumped Pop 2 from the Bluetooth speakers and spoke to our uni classmates about police brutality and the MeToo movement. I was too drunk to answer anything coherently, so I begged you to teach me how to French kiss in case the guy I liked turned up. To conjure up any sort of arousal, we both thought about seeing Heath Ledger’s bare ass while he bent over in leather cowboy boots in Brokeback Mountain. Your tongue swelled around mine and tasted like jello shots and potato chips. You said I kissed like a Chinese schoolboy and that I would need to practise in the mirror like teen girls do in those high school dramas. You said you first learned to kiss after realising you were gay after watching Glee for the first time. You related to Kurt – not because he sung showtunes and loved Evita – but because he wanted to sleep with the quarterback. Same.
Damn, was it really that long ago where you locked yourself in the toilet after we stopped playing Reputation on the speaker? I’m in my snake era, you shouted while people jangled the door knob, desperate to piss. You finally let me in when I said that Darren Hayes had just arrived. Gotcha! We sat together in the shower and screamed Truly, Madly, Deeply on the top of our lungs while everyone outside vommed out all the Absolut and Jacob’s Creek shiraz out on my petunias. I WANNA STAND WITH YOU ON A MOUNTAIN, you shouted. I WANNA BATHE WITH YOU IN THE SEA, I slurred. I WANNA LAY LIKE THIS FOREVER, you. UNTIL THE SKY FALLS DOWN ON ME, I slurred, falling asleep on your shoulder, feeling the cold drops of water from the showerhead pelt down on my shoulder.
Edinburgh, 2017.
Whiskey and haggis is my drag name, you said, eating your sheep’s stomach in the middle of Grassmarket. The 31st of December was the biggest night of the year for Edinburgh because it was the only time youths could set off fireworks in their Mams’ council flats. I swear someone put an E in my vodka orange – you thought you were high because you tongued a guy with a tongue piercing that looked like a pill. Was this how Trainspotting started? Do you still get high? You don’t have to answer that if you don’t want to.
Princes Street was full of people carrying old thermoses what I could only imagine would be boiled Irn Bru. You said that the castle wasn’t camp enough like the ones in Europe. Hogwarts, she was definitely gay, you said, OH and don’t get me started on Versailles! I had never thought about the intersection of queerness and architecture before. You opened my eyes to the strangest things. Before you, I used to wear athleisure to uni and listen to Oasis while crying in my room over mediocre white men who loved to do nangs. Now, I was open to a world of dandy Hugh Grant types who liked to talk about poetry and thought Kate Bush was the Lord and Saviour reincarnated. I never knew life could be so interesting.
The Human League was the headlining act of the festival and we snuck in to see their set behind a gaggle of women in tube tops who confused them for the Petshop Boys. I wanted to get closer to the stage, but you were happy to dance at the back with a plastic beer bottle in your hand (glass was no longer allowed at Hogmanay after someone was glassed for saying that Biffy Clyro was shit). You did a jig in your dirty Converses and looked like you belonged on the stage more than the old guys in sparkling silver kilts. When they played Don’t You Want Me Baby we screamed on the top of our lungs till our voices completely disappeared into the freezing wind of that Saturday night. I tried to record the performance on my phone, but it died so I have to close my eyes and remember the hoarseness of your singing, the deep breaths you’d take between each line, the way you said my name and asked me to sing louder.
Berlin, 2018.
Have you ever been more breathless than we were in Berlin? The Corrs were your staple when we were staying at that hostel in Kreuzberg. You wanted every moment to be like we were in a 90s music video and The Corrs were the soundtrack. In our room, where Katie from Melbourne and Carlos from Brazil had just thrown up after playing spin the bottle, we blasted Breathless on our phone speakers. This is a Sofia Coppola movie, you laughed. And I could see it – if I ignored the scent of disinfectant and powdered body wash – if Katie and Carlos became Catherine and Charlie, two liberal arts students from Greenwich Village – if the room was perfumed in that hazy pink melancholy that always hit me when I think about you.
Remember that club in Berlin where they only let you in if you’re cool? I wonder if the posers with mohawks and neck piercings have 9-5’s now. They wouldn’t let us in because I wore a men’s corduroy jacket from a charity shop and you said that you didn’t like Kraftwerk. We spent the night in Tiergarten and I swear to god we were floating. I don’t remember ever stopping to take a breath. You wanted to be Rudolf Nureyev in The Idiot then George Michael in Careless Whisper and disappeared amongst the trees to only emerge as a new character. Who are you now, I wonder?
The pretzel we bought from the guy in the middle of the jungle tasted like cardboard, but our stomachs were so full of Pilsner, we needed something to absorb it. The stars seemed to burn the brightest I’d ever seen – or were they the street lights? Was there a symphony playing or drunk stragglers singing Tubthumping? I can never be sure.
In Alexanderplatz, on the stop where Hitler burnt books, you said he was dickhead. Duh. I felt sick from the pretzel and threw up next to a stop sign. HALT it screamed in red and white. A man in the square played piano on the public use Steinway, softly turning the hardened street of businessmen, homeless and public servants into a drunken brushstroke of a Rubens painting. Do you miss Berlin? The linden trees are still in blossom, or so I’m told.
Adelaide 2021.
When I saw you at that book launch after all these years, I wanted to know if it was okay to still say hi. Losing a friendship is worse than a break up. It’s like a perpetual episode of Girls. I didn’t know if it was okay to still talk about the things we rambled on about when we were drunk at five am. There’s no guide on how to approach someone you shared your whole heart with, so I’m sorry if I came across aloof. Book launches are the worst kind of parties because you have to pretend to care about tedious stuff when you just want to talk about The Bachelor. You were wearing a long cotton flannelette and cut your hair in a mullet. Seeing you then, I could no longer imagine the guy in the torn pirate shirt. You looked cool, like really cool, like one of those people who would know heaps about Proust and Foucault. One of the people we’d hoped we would grow up into if we gave up the vodka cranberries for craft beer. You were surrounded by similar types who sipped champagne and asked you for your opinion on a chapter about bell hooks. Were you about to eat an onion? Do a dance? Compare yourself to a gay icon? No, you answered coherently, intelligently, enough so that that learned professors in tweed coats came over to shake your hand. It was over for us, but just the beginning for you. I wanted to cry – maybe out of sadness, maybe because our memories were slowly fading away like an old Polaroid, or perhaps because you had become the person you were finally meant to be.
I’ve run out a paper on this napkin and the last Uber is here to take someone home. They’ve turned off A Current Affair and replaced it with the morning news. My pen has no more ink and I think it’s time to go sleep. I’m walking back to my house and I’ve already chosen the playlist. I think you’ll like it. I’m shit at goodbyes, so I’ll copy one down from a song I was listening to the other day:
I know all stories have an ending,
But if you’re out there somewhere listening,
Send me a postcard just if you want,
No hard feelings I don’t you don’t,
Your old friend…