White Mike was a thinker, his teachers said. This is what he was thinking as he watched his mother's coffin being lowered into the ground.
You will not be remembered if you die now. You will be buried and mourned by a few, and what more can you ask for. But you feel so tremendously alone, because you fear that your blood is not strong or good and your friends are few and embattled too. But so what. That is the answer. So what so what so what so what so what so what so what. The world will spiral out from underneath you, and you will find nothing to hold on to because you are either too smart or too dumb to find God, and because what the fuck will Camus ever do for you? Just ideas. You are not an artist, you will not leave something behind. Maybe you are angry only because the way out is through love and you are horny and lonely. And she's dead, of course. Maybe this is the way it is for everybody, only you are weaker, or less lucky, or have seen something they all have not. You have seen that before you lies a great stretch of road, and it is windswept or blasted by the hot sun or covered in snow, or it is dirt or concrete or shrouded in darkness or bright and clear so you have to squint, but no matter what, it is utterly empty.
That was what White Mike was thinking.
"I think I know why you don't drink," said Alice. They were in a bar on Second Avenue that served kids. She was drinking a cosmopolitan; he was drinking coffee.
"Why?" asked White Mike.
"You like the power you have from being sober all the time around people who are fucked up."
He wanted to be far away. Just way the fuck gone from this whole city. This place where people chewed off their own hands while the people next to them sipped champagne in tuxedos.