Okay, Gina, I’ll play along; my favorite color is orange, though I don’t wear it, so if before our three-month anniversary you find yourself staring at the Uniqlo sock wall, stick to your grays and your browns, maybe a green or a blue. I say my favorite movies are by Buñuel or Fellini but I end up watching Snatch and Inglorious Bastards and anything by Pixar. Dream vacation is tough, but I guess I’d like to spend some time at the beach. A real beach, like I just saw blue for the first time and it made me weep, beach. We can call that Tahiti. But just so you know, I’m not really into seafood, by which I mean I don’t like seafood at all. I know this isn’t one of your questions, but foods I do like tend to be wrapped in other foods. Not like bacon-wrapped dates or chocolate-covered cherries, more like burritos, tacos, kebabs, gyozas, or ravioli. I mentioned what I don’t like, but the weird thing is the exceptions: sushi and ceviche, love them both. You would think that a fish’s primary offensive quality, i.e its fishiness, would diminish the longer it ceases to be a fish but I find that it increases when cooked.
‘Dream dinner guests’ may at first sound troubling. I’ll just say they’re Adolf Hitler, Roberto Bolaño, and Larry David. To a few choice people who really, I mean really know me, there is no need for explanation, but I better elaborate before you think I’m a member of the Proud Boys and block me. If, say, you’re a basketball fan, dining with MJ, LeBron, and Magic would be a good story, but would any good stories emerge from it? Nothing you can’t see on Netflix. Now imagine the formalities of my dinner party. I promise you won’t find that on any streaming platform.
I can guess from your profile that Larry David wasn’t the deity in your house that he was in mine. To me, he is the embodiment of Adolf’s failure, and his mere presence would be infuriating, so much so that I could envision Adolf becoming enraptured with Larry. Bolaño’s inclusion is due to him being, in my opinion, the greatest writer of the 20th century, though I can see how you might prefer Pizarnik, Poniatowski, Saer, or someone else entirely. In your second picture, you’re perusing bookshop shelves, though I can’t see what you’ve got your eye on. If you’re willing to concede Bolaño’s greatness but inclined to categorize him as a 21st-century writer, I might urge you not to take such an Anglo-hegemonic approach to canonization, and also to consider the possibility that the “best” 20th-century writer came to us as a result of standing on the shoulders of those other names. Another draw for inviting Roberto is that he wrote extensively on fascism and nazism and to put it nicely, was not a tremendous fan of either. Plus, he and Larry looked quite similar in their younger days, slim build, unkempt hair, and nearly identical wireframe glasses to the ones in my third picture. With Larry being a health nut and Hitler a vegetarian, right off the bat, we have an unexpected connection. Bolaño would eat anything, as he said, “She tasted of cigarettes and expensive food. I tasted of cigarettes and cheap food. But both kinds of food were good,” and since it’s my dream dinner, we’re going with tacos. Frijoles for the veggie boys and al pastor for me and Roberto. Imagine Adolf trying to eat a taco without splattering salsa on his Hugo Boss or Larry and me quietly debating about the cilantro leaf stuck to Adolf’s doormat of a mustache; good dinner etiquette would have us discretely alert him, but it’s Hitler. Anyway, another reason for the tacos is that they require no silverware. Bolaño wasn’t beyond a drunken knife-fight or even a duel, at least on the page, and though I wouldn’t mind seeing him slice into Adolf, one thing you should know about me, Gina, is I don’t have much of a tolerance for blood, and as it’s my party the cleanup would inevitably fall onto me. Speaking of intolerance, Roberto would most likely chain-smoke cigarettes and I can see Larry hacking into a balled-up fist in lieu of speaking out, then waving his hand through a cobalt blue plume while airing inane grievances that go over both Adolf and Roberto’s heads.
I can’t say for certain where the evening would go, and that’s part of its beauty, its appeal. You’re no doubt familiar with the preface to Roberto’s book Between Parenthesis, which recounts a dream he had where Josef Stalin and the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas had a drinking competition at a bar in Mexico City. Especially considering the linguistic barrier the four of us would share, I think there’s only one way for the evening to go. After the plates were cleared I’d set out two shot glasses (Larry I don’t think is much of a drinker and I would prefer to watch). In Roberto’s glass, Los Suicidas Mezcal, and for Adolf, I’d hesitate, then pour him a glass of schnapps. He rarely drank either, only on special occasions, but perhaps he’d share my view that meeting Roberto was special?
And so it would begin, the two of them going shot for shot.
Unable to sit still, Larry might ask Adolf if he’d seen any Woody Allen movies, hoping to elicit either an overtly anti-semitic or vaguely praiseful response while Roberto, who shared a narrative affinity for meta and autofiction with the troubling filmmaker nodded, perhaps interjecting with thoughts on Alejandro Jodorowsky. At a certain point, Larry would finish the one taco he’d been working on for two hours and wipe his face before making the observation that the three of them were all writers. This would intrigue Roberto and surprisingly enough, Adolf, whose artistic failures would surface in search of validation from successful colleagues. And I think that for a moment, just one moment, they would stop drinking and look at one another, Roberto through a cloud of smoke, Larry with his scrutinous eyes nearly shut, and Adolf scowling like a mad dog. Then for the first time, Adolf would ask Roberto a question, perhaps about where he lived. He would respond, Spain, and Adolf would light up and say, like my favorite book, the Quixote, and Roberto would smile and say, the original savage detective. And though he didn’t get the reference, Adolf would try his best to smile back and Larry would chime in that he was sort of a sitcom-ish Quixote, and for a moment, the four of us would simmer in a pleasant silence.
Writers, Larry would say, what is it about us? And Adolf would shrug and look to Roberto who would repeat an answer he once gave when asked about the ecstasy of poetics:
I think that all writers, even the most mediocre, the most false, the worst writers in the world have felt the shadow of that ecstasy for a second. Without a doubt, ecstasy they haven’t felt. Ecstasy like that burns. And for someone who feels it for a second and later returns to their existential mediocrity, it’s apparent that they haven’t experienced ecstasy, because ecstasy is terrible, it’s opening your eyes to something difficult to name, and difficult to bear. *
And that, Gina, in answer to your final question, I suppose is what I’m looking for on Tinder.
*Translation by author
Sam Simon is a writer and translator from Oakland, Ca. He is an associate editor for the Barcelona Review and teaches creative writing at the Institute for American Universities. He is a co-founder and managing editor of Infrasonica.org.