![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mallorys_camera
Sex in the time of coronavirus…
1. Wear a condom at all times. If you’re actually thinking about sex, wear two.
2. Avoid having sex with your grandparents or other old people.
3. Tell your partner, you love him/her—comorbidities and all!
4. Stay six feet apart.
5. Remember—don’t breathe!
###
I see that Peter Beard has died. He was someone I, uh, consorted with back in the day, and a genuinely nice guy, very bright, very sympatique. It was hard to reconcile my one-on-one experiences with him with his party animal portfolio—Christie Brinkley X-husband, Lee Radziwill lover, Andy Warhol BFF. We dropped acid together once; he babbled for eight hours straight until I could practically see the open-air fruit markets and dirt lanes of this one part of Nairobi he was obsessed with at the time.
His death sounded pretty awful. He had dementia, and he somehow wandered away from his Montauk compound to a nearby state park and was found there, dead, several days later.
Or maybe it wasn’t so awful. I am told that hypothermia, past the initial 15 minutes or so of discomfort, is actually a pretty nice way to go (although I don’t know how the people who told me that would know since they didn’t go.) Peter did love to be out of doors.
His death made me flash on a theory I postulated long ago, which is that people who sign up for great fame or great success also sign up for at least one horrifying tragedy. Those are the terms of the contract they sign in Bardo. Think of The Most Beautiful Male Human Being of All Time, John F. Kennedy Jr., dying in that plane crash; think of the fear and the panic and the horror of those ten minutes as the plane stuttered and plummeted.
Would you want to go through that? For any amount of pleasure?
All magic comes with a price.
Rest in peace, Peter.
###
Maybe this isn’t happening to people who haven’t had the same phone number for 30 years, but my phone is ringing off the hook—there’s an anachronism for you—with people I haven’t talked to in a long, long time.
Mostly they leave messages. I never, ever answer my phone if there’s no caller ID.
And after I listen to their messages, I never call them back. There are reasons why I haven’t talked to them in a long, long time, after all.
Last night, my old boss from People Magazine called me.
I’d actually run into Hala at the Culinary Institute several years ago. She had decided to reinvent herself—as a chef! She always did like to cook.
We’d exchanged phone numbers and murmured about getting together. But, of course, we never did. That’s just the way those things go.
So, I was a bit surprised to see her number on my caller ID. But I’d always liked Hala, so I picked up the phone.
She was very, very drunk.
She was calling me because she wanted to redeem the Internet—and she’d decided I was the person to help her do it.
“It’s just so awful now!” she kept ranting. “Nobody’s really communicating! It’s all about brands extorting attention!”
I started laughing. “Well, Hala. You’re one of the people who made it that way.”
“What do you mean?”
“C’mon, Hala. You were Time, Inc.’s brand strategist. And People was one of the first big brands to utilize the Internet effectively—“
“Thanks to you.”
“Well, yes, Hala. Thanks to me. But I was following your orders. I mean, you were really one of the original architects of what we’re looking at now—“
She started to cry!
“Hala!” I said, feeling really awkward.
“We’ve got to save the young people from it! You’ve got to help me, Patrizia!”
I told her I would.
She told me she would call me back today.
But I doubt that she will.
###
It occurs to me that the juxtaposition of Peter’s death and Hala’s phone call would make a brilliant, high-literary short story in a New Yorker-ish vein if only I could organize the beats right.
###
Then it was time to talk to Eleanor B. who is a nurse in Oakland and who told me all about the incompetence on the coronavirus wards there.
“Explain to me what this fixation on ventilators is all about,” I said. “Since 80% of the covid patients who are put on them die.”
“Well. That means that 20% of the covid patients who are put on them live,” said Eleanor. “But I get your point. Remember, though, we’re both economists. We see things as cost benefit analyses. Most people are too sentimental to use that particular grid.”
