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want to achieve higher consciousness? It had to be that because he certainly couldn’t want to lose weight unless he wanted to be a hunger artist and fade away into a disembodied voice, rocking to broad daylight. I decided to make mixed salad with lots of olives. Thank God for the wonderful local olives.
    Notes on dinner menu: Monster will not eat peanuts or olives, and he doesn’t care for tomatoes or lemons or lemon juice.
    Fuck the local olives, they weren’t that good anyway.
    JUST A DAY BEFORE Monster’s birthday party an incredibly expensive events catering company arrived in convoys of semis that polluted the air so thoroughly with dust and diesel that I thought the festivities would be disastrous. But like clockwork they assembled a Disneyfied bedouin camp with elegant tents arranged along the extensive grounds outside of the Lair proper. My job was to oversee the caterers, but there was no need; the hospitality crew, the food and liquor, the entertainment were all top flight, seemingly superhuman, and as far as I could see weren’t doing speed or coke. My menu wasn’t discarded; worse, it had been improved on. I milled around pretending to be busy while they slaved to make everything work seamlessly with skill and determined purpose.
    How much did these people get paid? I thought as I tried to stay out of the way and tried not to look totally useless. Finally I gave in and watched the stars arrive—the Saudi royalty, and the Eurotrash, and the handsome quarterback who had a triumphant Super Bowl two years ago, but more recent play had resulted in his being traded to the dregs of the league where he became ensnared in a scandal involving an Instagram indiscretion. The woman he had with him, a blonde who had to be at least five foot seven but still wore six-inch heels, stood nearly at his height but rail thin with such a ridiculous purchased rack that she looked as though she might pitch over at any moment. Always, these couples were the most likely to be the unhappiest diners at my restaurant. The men were always uninterested in the women and the women either hung on to the men as if they might get away or were like this one, trying to get as much juice out of a temporary situation as possible. She stood at the bar and immediately began throwing back martinis and when sufficiently sauced tottered over, with the grim-faced quarterback lagging behind, to the burning-hot new singer with the dangling earrings and Yakuza-like tattoos who had the habit of beating up his boyfriends in public. The tattooed singer–bad boy ignored them and rushed away to witness the arrival of the Jesus, Buddha, and Gandhi of hip-hop with his cruel empress wife whose assistants elbowed clear a space near the pool and maneuvered them to where their best angles were the only angles available. They posed like glamorous store mannequins for the official paparazzi to immortalize them, but they were lost in the typhoon of Monster’s arrival. Not just wearing a tight black suit, he wore the blackness of the abyss, a glittering light-eating material of a suit. The power couple of the moment tried to approach Monster as equals, joking and back slapping, with the assembled luminaries reduced to witnesses to the spectacle of their celestial brilliance, but Monster’s aspect was rising; he wasn’t just a star, he was transcendent.
    I wanted to hit up tattooed singer–bad boy to share some of the cocaine he was snorting openly, but I decided against it, thinking that detached amusement was the way to go. The JBG of hip-hop and his empress gestured for one of their assistants to hand Monster a box that shook as though something was alive inside of it. Monster’s assistant took the box away and I hoped that whatever was in there didn’t need to breathe much. Monster swept them both up in his thin arms and kissed them like long-lost children. Everyone was delighted.
    I thought I saw David Bowie—he