Ian Johnson

So, it was me, Bella, Frieda, Alice, Tom, and Jay in the bedroom where they kept the coats at my cousin’s twenty-first birthday party. That’s a lot of potential horny masterminds to plow through, but forget Frieda. She was away with the fairies when it started—that floaty, dewy-eyed vessel of the world sweet spot; a confluence of whatever was on offer, by which I mean weed and brandy—this was Idaho, not Gomorrah. Just to say, Frieda was incidental to any can’t-start-a-fire-without-a-spark revisionism. She was the clickety-clack of the track, not the engine. She was ‘there’ but not the ‘let’s go there.’