It’s late and I can’t sleep because Ben’s messaged me. “Are we having a catchup this year, or should I wait until 2025?” He wants to go out for a drink, and I’ve been avoiding him for months. It’s only the second day of the new year and I reply by saying that it will soon be next year. I once loved him, but now he annoys me.
I try to rid myself of the guilt by staring at the books stacked beside my bed.
Jarvis, who grew up in a house that is less than a mile from where I am now, and who went to school with my friends. A nerdy genius who made something of his life and that makes me envious because he’s rich and successful and has a smart apartment in Paris. I’m not particularly fond of Pulp but he fascinates me, and I think he’d be good to chat with over a pint.
Noel, who wrote twee plays and witty songs like Mad About the Boy that people had no clue about its meaning. Being gay meant something entirely different then. I don’t suppose he’d have been good to chat with over a pint because it would have been gin and tonic and chilled champagne. And that plummy voice would have irritated somebody with a northern accent like mine and I would have punched him in the face. “Oh darling, I am bleeding from the nose, it is most inconvenient.”
André, who once wrote a book that I thought could be a wonderful movie and my friend said I was silly. All I shall say to my friend now is… Call Me by Your fucking Name. André’s essays wobble between lustre and mundane. As such, he makes me feel inadequate because his lengthy musings bore me, and I realise that I’m not intelligent enough to understand these scholarly thoughts.
“I live in Paris. I am a pupil at the Louis-le-Grand. I am sixteen. People say: what a beautiful child! Look at him, he really is magnificent. Black hair. Green, almond-shaped eyes. A girl’s complexion. I say: they are mistaken, I am no longer a child.”
If I’d been a member of the Brat Pack, I would have wanted to have been Rob Lowe. But I was more like Andrew McCarthy.
He wasn’t handsome, nor was he a good actor. I wasn’t handsome either, or ever been an actor.
Underneath that cute shyness he was an outsider, not liked by his contemporaries, and he was resentful, and probably not a nice person.
“Early on in The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald describes the character Tom Buchanan as a ‘national figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savours of anti-climax.’”
Now we know the truth.
McCarthy thought he could deal with fame, but wasn’t able to, and lived by the bottle. And this meant that once he’d peaked at a young age it was downhill. And then, by his own choice, it ended.
“Maybe you didn’t want it,” Alec Baldwin said to him on the Here’s the Thing podcast without realising he’d come closer to the core than McCarthy ever had.
I’m not sure I liked him after reading this, but he writes clearly and honestly, and afterwards I realised that we were alike after all.
He might not have been a nice person, but I suspect he might be now.
Perfectly Hard and Glamorous 