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Out of context: Reply #2410
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- kingjulien0
A professor in grad school took me out drinking the night of my thesis review. I had just read his most famous novel the week before, about a writer with dreams of becoming a bullfighter who juggled his time between four very different mistresses. Because the location of each affair was so vivid, I was amazed that night when he brought me to a location from the book, a studio he shared with an abstract expressionist from Mexico City. After a bottle of wine, my professor lined up four rails of coke and blasted off, which was crazy to me in that I had finally been allowed access to his secret world, while I wandered through the rows of canvases, admiring each work. Suddenly he called me over and showed me this little cigar box. Inside was a pair of panties, a video containing one of his sexual encounters, and a beautiful blue vase that contained a dark red liquid. At first I tried to play it off like I was unimpressed, that is until he told me that inside the vase was the blood of one of his mistresses - a fellow student of mine and a girl I had once taken out for drinks, which mirrored probably the best chapter in his novel.
How do you look at one of your heroes again after a sconversation like this? Of course we all have our eccentricites and obsessions - I take photographs as a I way to remember things like this - but he had crossed a line in my comfort zone that made him a caricature some people had always thought of him as: this Mexican writer with slicked back hair and a small ponytail, a black Armani suit, a suitcase of notebooks with poems about tattoos and vampires, and now a cigar box with a vial of blood from his most gothic lover.
It's been three years since I've spoken with him, and writing this now reminds me why I haven't kept up: I feel uninteresting by comparison.