Without Remorse

Triangle steals a car.

Brute says this, then tosses me the Playstation controller. Already I'm starting to regret asking him to explain the controls to me.

We're all sitting in Matozzi's dorm room, stoned, watching Brute decapitate police officers with a chainsaw in between bong rips. When I tell him to teach me how to kill without restraint or remorse, he cracks up. "You'e joking, right?" he asks.

He waits for me to respond. I don't. I just look him in his bloodshot eyes.

The smile leaves his face.

"Oh, oh," he says. "You mean in the game." His stoner smirk comes back.

Sitting on the other side of me, Matozzi hits the bong, exhales, passes it back to Brute in silence. Brute flips me the controller before setting the bong on the table. As he packs fresh pot into the slide of the bong, without looking at me, he says, "Okay, I'll show you the basics."

My character, a man on the television screen that I can manipulate like a marionette, he' standing on a street corner after the cops he was slaughtering shot him down in a hail of gunfire. He's in one piece again, though he no longer has the chainsaw.

"The left-hand joystick controls your character's movement," Brute tells me. "Under your right thumb are four buttons. Each is marked with a geometric symbol."

I look down at the buttons, and he's right. One button has a square on it. One, an X. Another, a circle. And on the top button, a triangle.

"The X button," Brute says, "makes you run. Pressing square makes you jump. Press circle, and you will, punch, kick, shoot, stab, or commit some other act of violence. And triangle, triangle steals a car."

The way he says that last line, it's hard to forget. Since I'm high, I almost laugh.

Of course, Brute isn't Brute's real name. His birth certificate says he's Brent, I think. We call him Brute because Brent is a dipsomaniac. Dipsomania is a psychological craving for ethyl alcohol so intense it drives a person to consume anything that has alcohol present, regardless of whether or not the substance is fit for consumption.

Brent ran out of vodka the first night we moved into the dorm in Swiss Cottage. Brent ran out of vodka, so he took a whole bottle of Brut aftershave and drank it.

After that, he wasn't Brent anymore. Not to all of us.

Once our first day of classes was over, Brent put down two bottles of rubbing alcohol and was detained by campus security after they found him puking blood on the hall director's door.

Even for this offense, they still didn't kick him out of our campus' Study Abroad Program, on the condition that he agree to keep his mouth shut. If our gracious English hosts found out the program administrators back in New York sent a potential suicide case over, they'd pull the plug on these little foreign exchanges. Neither institution could afford that kind of negative press.

So Brute, he's still here. We just have to hide all our perfume.

Some people, they confuse dipsomania with potomania. The medical community defines potomania as an intense and persistent desire to drink alcohol to excess.

Potomania. What a crock of shit.

Wanting to be constantly blotto isn't some medical condition. It's not some disease you contract like leukemia or AIDS.

No, we've all made a conscious decision to be plastered at all times because all we want is to be numb. None of us wants to feel anything. Really, emotions can be such a damned drag.

I have been in London for going on four months now. In three days, finals will be over and I will go back to New York. In four months at the Central School of Speech and Drama, all I have learned is that Hans Christian Andersen might have been a fag, I am about to lose my scholarship, this city seems to be shrouded in a perpetual cloud of gloom, and now triangle steals a car.

Brute coughs more pot smoke into the room. He offers me the bong and goes, "When's your stagecraft final?" I take the bong, still playing the video game, and tell him, "Less than an hour."

When I press triangle, my character rips a paramedic out of an ambulance.

"Oh yeah," Brute says, "that's hot."

Pressing circle again and again, I beat the paramedic to death with a golf club.

"Happy birthday, I think," he says.

Since I'm busy trying to light the bong and crash my stolen ambulance into a city bus full of people at the same time, I don't bother to say thanks.

Matozzi asks me if after my final, can he take me out for drinks. You know, to celebrate being another year older. Matozzi, who I think is in love with me, who I can't stand, I tell him nope, sorry. I tell him I already have plans.

"Yeah?" he asks. "With who? A boyfriend?"

"An Israeli prostitute," I say casually, not even looking at him.