'I WAS THE LAST TO LEAVE THE PARTY..'

BOOK EXTRACT: 'I Was The Last To Leave The Party' by Neal Darken Trellis

I was the last to leave the party. This is the opening line of my fourteenth attempt at this novel, a novel I began writing back in High School. It was, I remember, the Fall of 1982, September, my favourite month of the year, as it began to fade, the leaves turning not brown but bright pink, green and yellow in the imagination I used to escape when permanent physical escape as an option was still two years away. It was evening, not yet dark, when my Father burst into my room shouting “I’VE GOT A GREAT BIG BOX OF PORN FOR YOU!”

“What?” I’d yelled back – the bubbles of my bedroom jacuzzi, my headphones and the distance between us in the cavernous room all obstacles to understanding. He slid the box across the floor, hopped on my skateboard and scooted over. I took a headphone out of one ear in preparation. “I’ve got a big box of porn for you” he said when he arrived. I put the headphone back in and nodded my thanks but we’d already had this conversation – three years earlier when he’d shoved Playboy magazine in my face and I’d ignored the centrefold and read a super cool article about a hot new author I liked. “What’s wrong with him?” he’d demanded of the psychiatrist he’d taken me too. “I like guys, Dad” I’d exclaimed. “You’re fired” he’d screamed at the psychiatrist who’d promptly billed him five thousand dollars. My Father had peeled a roll of C notes and bounced it off his forehead before driving me home in boiling silence.

We did not speak again for a year.

At College I pumped myself full of booze and drugs, each night telling myself it would be fun this time and for a long time it was – sitting strung out in group tutorials, the Professor challenging me with questions, my slurred answers long since passing into legend.

“What did Beckett mean by Waiting For Godot?”

“I don’t know. But they should fuck each other at the end.”

My Father visited just the once, arriving outside my dorm un-invited one cold November afternoon to frogmarch me to the College Gym, insisting I hang out at the squat rack, chewing gum and hi-fiving jocks. I hid a dumbbell in my room in response – doing upwards of 500 hammer curls a day on just one of my forearms, ballooning it to twice its normal size and sending endless photographs of my now absurdly mismatched arms to my Father.

He never once replied.

I read everything. I fucked everyone. Three years passed in an instant. I did not want to leave.

Neal Darken Trellis

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