The Idiots

All of the white idiots are deeply tan. I am a white idiot so I am deeply tan. Exfoliation, tanner, oil, sun. Because I am a “thinking man’s” idiot, my tan is amber, not umber. Sometimes I wear glasses, but the lenses are just glass. They frame my eyes without fucking with their perceived size, an advantage. Still, some hunks here rage at me for reminding them reading exists.

There are two Black idiots and there is one Southeast Asian idiot and they focus mainly on moisture and sheen, going so far as to apply sunblock to avoid a deeper shade. I am thinking jealously how they will not stain the fabric of the outdoor couches with the self-tanner needed to encourage the expected hue. Often I find myself thinking of the outdoor couches because it is one of the few things production will hassle about.

Previously, I’ve heard, there was catering in a hidden part of the villa, but these days we are given only a full fridge and kitchen implements in a covered, outdoor kitchen that is more flirt station than galley. Some of us cook and some of us can’t and I am in the “can’t” column, which is how I find myself, two or three times a day—if I cannot scam another’s cooked snack—urging a blunt butter knife past the alligator skin of a ripe-ish avocado into its boring, lipo flesh. As a kid my little sister called avocado a “butter vegetable” and I think that’s brilliant but she doesn’t exist anymore because nothing exists; brilliance doesn’t exist; war and pain and the stock market don’t exist; nothing besides the idiots exist, not if it’s outside the flood-lit spread of bristling turf and stucco spans of nouveau mission-contemporary walls: smudged plastic drinking glasses in gem tones and oily barbells and shoes by the upper deck piled like in the Holocaust Museum; and a nervous style of sinuous A/V cords taped down to the floor, running under rugs, up the wall at the seam; and the heavy mic fanny packs that spoil the lines of the flammable fast fashion outfits we have been paid to wear at appointed times, not to be repeated because when we repeat, we hear, the fans complain—I’m rubbing the avocado across some untoasted white bread, a slice corseted neatly by a tight crust. The bread tastes like cotton candy but bread, nothing I’d eat at home, and it dissolves against the wax fat of the avocado and was this something I am meant to enjoy? I am supposed to fall in love. Who falls in love, with food like this? The counter of the outdoor kitchenette is crummy and butter-loved; we do the washing-up, but poorly. No one is awake but me and my mouthful of bad food, my sensitive white-white teeth clicking through the mess. I’m not meant to be up yet but production can’t stop me. Rising early isn’t against the