TEQUILA AND TEARS 

by Cameron Irving

 

To mark the final event at HOTEL GARDEROBE, I set an unrealistic goal to keep the party going till sunrise. So,I set up a bar serving Tequila Sunrise cocktails. To add sickly melancholy, each cocktail would include a single tear. I managed to extract the tears from some locals and added them to the mixture. I sold maybe five cocktails and gave twice as many away.

We packed up around 2AM, and I cycled back home feeling like a mobile bar with my grenadine substitute, two bottles of San Juan tequila and two or three cartons of orange juice. I’ve never liked tequila anyway, I don’t think it even gets me drunk though I knocked back a few at the event to cope with my fatigue and a general unease at flogging anything to my friends or their friends.

So, I’m edging my way back towards home on my bicycle with heavy cartons of orange juice in my rucksack and a bottle of something I thought would suffice as grenadine. I’m aware that I have my laptop in the rucksack, and that the liquids might be seeping into my computer I took with me. I get home and open up the bag. Sure enough, the orange juice, the grenadine substitute and the San Juan has leaked into the laptop. I panic. I open the laptop and turn it on. It flickers, and to my surprise the screen has filled with the liquids at roughly the same ratio of the Tequila Sunrise cocktail. The liquids swim behind the screen forming an orangey screensaver or wallpaper or whatever the term is.

I have this habit of squeezing liquid crystal/plasma screens. I think I have always does this. I did so as a kid with digital calculators. I would squeeze  – sometimes with my teeth – any ubiquitous liquid crystal screens I would come across. I do it with my iPhone. That night, watching my best cocktail of the night miraculously form in front of my eyes, I couldn’t resist, and gave the screen a good long squeeze with my thumb and forefinger. Sure enough, I got the desired effect. You know, when the illusional space disperses and you’re left with a rippling aura effect where your thumb was. Except this time, I was being heavy handed and really went for it – like when you’re on E and you have to really grip something to remind yourself of a physicality that the drug is overriding. Anyway, I wasn’t high, just a little tired, and maybe a bit tense. So, I pressed it really hard, near the bottom of my new orange screen (complete with red sediment) and let go. Rather than disappearing after a few seconds, the smudgy liquid crystal aura remained.

Another thing about liquid crystal/plasma screens is that they get hot. I could already feel my thighs getting warm from the computer’s battery, but placing the back of my hand on the screen I felt the smudgy aura to be even hotter than the rest. I worried that the laptop would be ruined now that it was full of cocktail, but I was also horrified to feel the smudge getting hotter and hotter, and instead of dispersing which would be the orthodox entropic route it started to increase. Getting larger and hotter by the second, the aura began to dip into the sediment and dissolve into the liquid effect.I became anxious, not because my laptop was fucked, but at the nauseating sublime moment that was happening behind the screen.

At about 4.30 A.M my bedroom starts to get lighter. The grey light pours through the blinds, and I look out at another overcast morning, and then back to my laptop, the smudgy aura reducing, the grenadine substitute and orange juice getting darker – blood red. Then my Mac does that thing when there has been no activity for a while, and dulled the screen. My fingerprints and dust now visible, and that little beach ball of death begins to whirl. So I grab the lid and slam it. Some orange goo oozed from the USB socket and dabbing it with my finger I noticed how sweet and metallic it tasted.