I began to think of people not as individuals but as destinations, as map points across this inhospitable desert, like an oasis of flesh, a port of spit and smell, and sometimes I would breathe it in, you know, with my legs spread in the back seat of a car or in a nightclub or in some bushes next to a train station and it would smell so bad that I would say to myself give me my own rotting corpse over the death in life of a suburban marriage, stick a glass bottle up my ass before you slide a ring onto my finger.

It was like a walking frame or a wheelchair, a crutch, which when you think about it is what most writing is, something to support the figure of the writer, so that he doesn’t fall back into the primordial soup of everyone else, which is no one.