The label reads Katie Kennedy. Vicoden Hydracodone. Take one pill as needed for pain.
I am not Katie Kennedy. But Katie knows that I like Vicoden and she doesn't. She picks wine. I pick wine too. But sometimes, I pick Vicoden.
Taking the pill helps me to rest, eyes open, for hours. It justifies why. I lay there because I'm exhausted from jumping up and down on the bed in my underwear. I take the pill because it means I don't have to dress. It means wearing a cut off wife-beater and a favorite pair underwear with the Virgin Mary peering from the front. Everything really is this glamorous.
This is the sound of someone losing the plot. Making out they're okay when they're not.
I turn over, and lay on my stomach. This is her pose. My blonde hair doesn't fall around my shoulders quite like hers does, but I manage. I pretend that if I pose like the naked woman on the cover of This is Hardcore, everything else will be just as seductive. My boyfriend opens the door to my apartment and he knows. He ignores me. He walks around the bed and turns off the stereo. He hates Pulp. He hates this album. He hates Vicoden.
I pull myself to the edge of the bed. My body feels light, but it's hard to move close enough to the nightstand to turn the stereo back on. My arm stretches as far as it can toward to black button. My fingers wiggle and strain in mid-air. I reach. I push. The drums echo. They are thick and weigh heavily on the keyboard parts. I prop myself up, look out my window into 13th Avenue and watch the cars pass.
Jarvis paints this picture of a glamorous life in the city. The windows are wet inside from a nightlong session with a woman who is not his wife. He practices on his wife, but she isn't involved in his hardcore life. I want this hardcore life, so I put on the record. I take Vicoden. I hope that for once, he will want it too.
He sits in the living room, still ignoring me. He has closed my door. Why doesn't he get it? He has to get it. He has to get me and see that this is glamorous. This, this is hardcore.
You are hardcore. You make me hard. You name the drama, and I'll play the part. It seems I saw you in some teenage wet dream. I like your get up, if you know what I mean.
I'm not in my own room anymore. I'm in his. He is different, and there is no Vicoden. There is wine, however. That is how we got here from the couch, if I remember correctly. I try not to remember with him though. He attempts to have sex with me. I say no. I decided a while back that I don't have sex with people that aren't my boyfriend.
He tells me it is a turn off that I like him so much. I ignore him. I ask him coyly to play me some Pulp. Pulp always takes the edge off of my sexual awkwardness. And if I'm lucky, maybe it will ease his emotional disconnect. There is something about sexually exploitative lyrics that make what I do in his bed easier. He tells me he's not ready for anything like this at all. He doesn't want to date me, that this isn't a relationship. Then he takes my shirt off.
I've seen all the pictures. I've studied them forever. I wanna make a movie so let's star in it together. Don't make a move until I say action. Oh, here comes the hardcore life.
We are finished now. After I swallow my heart, I lay there for a minute, staring at the ceiling. I think about the last time I had done this to myself. I was much younger, 18ish. I see myself lying in bed with my first emotionally disconnected boyfriend for hours while he came down from rolling. This was before Vicoden and before This is Hardcore had come into my life. This was before I was alienating my partners with my own drug abuse, instead letting him alienate me with his. This was before I had the security blanket of the album to justify drug-fueled, emotionally disconnected sex.
Sometimes I would cry. He would lie there, passed out, and I would stare at the plaster and cracks and wonder what I was doing there. He had no idea what he did to me while he was resting. I had no idea what I was doing either. Maybe I was just waiting to grow up.
In the meantime we try. Try to forget that nothing lasts forever. No big deal, so give us all a feel. Funny how it all falls away. When did you first realize? It's time you took an older lover, baby. Teach you stuff, although he's looking rough. Funny how it all falls away.
Now lacking emotionless sex, and being sober and domesticated, how does it feel? How does This is Hardcore feel? I find myself listening to the album often. I fantasize about being in that state again. I miss cigarettes. I miss Vicoden. I miss wine. I miss the way Jarvis's voice made me feel satisfied in a way that even bad sex couldn't ruin. But now, I'm on to something new. A relationship with love that isn't unrequited and the knowledge that he does, in fact, want me feels better than Vicoden and Hardcore. And it's no longer Jarvis, but Damon Albarn who can say how I feel now.
Sex on the TV. Everybody's at it. The mind gets dirty, as you get closer to thirty. He gives her a cuddle, glowing in a huddle. Good night, TV. You're all made up.