a lower consciousness

THAT FIGHT CLUB THING

I am Jack’s wasted inspiration. 

Some mornings, I wake up too soon. If there were any roosters left to crow in this city, they wouldn’t be crowing at that hour when it’s too early to do anything and even brushing your teeth seems premature. I’m too lazy to make coffee, too lazy to cook any breakfast, there’s no papers to read, no sunrise to watch, no cigarettes to smoke slyly in my verandah, no morning boner to play with and the streetlights are still leaking in through the dirty windows of my home, soft and orange and depressing. I hate it. I think of Ritwik Chaudhary when I get caught up in moments like these, probably because the boy was always good with handling depression. That is to say he’d get high off his balls, and then a little bit higher, enabling himself to act upon vaguely humorous impulses just short of suicide which would fritter away every last vestige of our mutual sadness. Poof. Gone. Just like that. Let’s smoke another joint of that lovely hash you’ve got there, bruv.

We were drunk, once, like we always were. We might have been studying different subjects in different schools and making our moves on different girls but mostly we’d be together at the same places, smoking, drinking the same things, listening to the same music, spewing the same weird, half-assed, pseudo-existential, pseudo-revolutionary, post-modernesque crap that we hoped would justify our social failures and our inability to get along with our mothers or give up cigarettes. Many people won’t understand why we did that. Fuck those people. Our level of irresponsibility isn’t something that the Moral Majority can be trusted with, anyway.

So, coming back to the story, we were drunk, once, always, the two of us, somewhere outside Andheri station in the middle of the night returning from some concert at Sathaye College and Ritwik said “I want you to hit me as hard as you can.”

Ok. I know where this is going. What the flying fuck is happening? I do not like this. I’m supposed to be Mr. Tyler Durden around here. Not my cheap, reckless, unshaven friend who looks a little too much like a junkie for his own good. No wonder he doesn’t get laid. Ok. Let’s forget I said that.

“Why?” I asked him. Tyler Durden would’ve said he doesn’t want to die without at least a few scars. Ritwik said “I don’t know. I guess I just want to see if this Fight Club thing works.”

Stupid bloody idea. Nothing could be surer. But what the hell, I was pretty curious to see how ‘this Fight Club thing’ was going to shape out. And I was too high to care, so I hit him, as best as I could through the hazy cloud of alcohol and bad judgment that had settled over my brain, swinging my right arm – or maybe it was my left, maybe both. I may have been smoking some weed – in Ritwik’s general direction. Whichever arm it was, he was expecting it. I was aiming for the jaw. I think I got him somewhere near the shoulder. I must have clobbered the bastard pretty hard because he immediately went “OW FUUCK!”. And then he smiled.

“Don’t even think about hitting me back, you dumb cunt.”

“Yeah, you fucking dickless shitbag. That was nasty. We should stop. Got a cigarette on you?”

And so we did. Stop fucking around, that is. I’m not the kind of guy who likes to punch shit. The last proper John Woo-style scuffle I had with anyone was a catfight back in 7th grade in which Mahika Verma and I practically scratched each others faces off because she called me ‘gay’. Or something equally ridiculous. We were just bored twelve year old virgins. But that is a vicious tangent to stray on to. Amen.

We went home instead, Ritwik and I. We ate a fuckload and went to sleep and woke up the next day and drank a lot of chai and watched Harmony Korine’s Gummo. No one hit anyone, which is kind of sad, in retrospect. We can’t even handle inspiration very well. But that’s ok. There’s worse ways to embarrass yourself. Like a bad haircut or farting in public. Even the Pope wouldn’t want to fart in public. Hallelujah.