This week's episode of Girls is one of the most enjoyable television episodes ever, especially if you're a cokehead. The writers of this television program about young girls in Brooklyn decided to treat cocaine usage in a very adult-type way. The drug is just portrayed as a devilish, incoherent muse. There are no concerns about unstoppable nosebleeds, flukey heart attacks, or its illegality. Disregard the plot point to how Hannah goes about procuring coke (from her downstairs neighbor, Laird, beanie-wearing junkie) and coke's downsides are minimal. Instead, it focuses mainly on the yayo's ability to consummate relationships with truth.
The primary focus is on Hannah, Elijah, and Marnie, and the inevitable great reveal that Elijah and Marnie had unremarkable couch-sex the night of the party. Hannah finds out this information while high on cocaine for the very first time in life after she gets a freelance writing assignment from a women's publication called JazzHate edited by a woman named Jamie who tells Hannah to call her "Jame," which makes one wonder why they just didn't call the site "OXJame." The show's dig—if you can call at that—is that the site's fictional editrix believes true creative genius can only be mined through oversharing. Jame suggests some story ideas for Hannah to tackle for $200 a pop. "How about you have a threesome?" or "Just do a bunch of cocaine all night and write about it" because the road to $200 payment for struggling female writers goes through Bret Easton Ellis' vagina. Jame points to a wall inside her office. Above one circle it says, "this is your comfort zone" and outside of it to the far left is a small black dot that says, "this is where the magic happens." Hannah has decided that a threesome is not where the magic happens. Cocaine is where the magic happens. Wise choice.
Once Hannah has gotten "the scary part over with" (procurement) she and Elijah decide to start snorting lines during daylight hours because this is an assignment which requires the utmost vulnerability to your own self-destruction. Here come the nonsensical ideas from their brain and out their mouths, rattled off with intensity and zest for the power of those ideas. Elijah insists that Hannah start to write down all their lofty life goals about raising show dogs and wanting to visit a prison. This should be chronicled because the cocaine-fueled writing experience is meaningless unless you paint it inside a cave. Hannah agrees and scampers into her room looking for a pen and paper. Elijah stops her and scolds her for thinking so small. Write it on the wall, man, write it on the wall, ON.THe. WaLl.
ROCK.
Hannah begins to scrawl "Raise Show Dogs" in black magic marker across the pink wall above her bed in beautiful Danny Torrance-like penmanship.
I first saw this scene as over-exaggerated for effect, done to accentuate the triviality of cocaine's artistic inspiration and then remembered that one time I decided to paint the wall in my room in a similar state of mind. (This was waaay back sometime between 2002 and last Friday night, mind you, but whatever.) There was blue paint. There was orange paint. I then dipped the roller into the blue paint first and leapt off the bed, paint dripping while flying to make sure I landed sponge-out as I smacked myself against the wall. This shit looked wicked. Then I did it one more time with the orange. Then I finger-painted some vertical lines because that's what it needed. But you know what else would just make these colors jump off this fucking wall? Metrocards. Like, a zillion of them all pasted on the right side of the blue-orange streak stains.
I managed to Scotch-tape five Metrocards on the wall before I figured out that I would need a lot more coke to finish this project. Instead I went out that night and just left the wall that way until I moved out of the apartment two years later. But Magic Happened that night and then I was hired by Gawker Media and now look at me? XO, A.J.
Meanwhile, back to fiction. This episode also focuses on Marnie, who's still hot-pantsing her way through a hostess job until something better comes along. The Something Better in this episode is Booth Jonathan, the pint-sized alpha artist from season one whose attempts at seduction through rape-staring and pheromone-coated facial scruff caused uptight Marnie to run to the bathroom to pleasure herself via ravenous bean-flicking. This time, however, the run-in produces an actual sexual encounter between the two of them back at Booth Jonathan's super-awesome loft space. Booth knows he's got Marnie's libido begging for mercy and he goes in for the killshot. We see an odd, obelisk-type contraption made of televisions. It's his masterpiece at this very moment. He opens a small door at the bottom of the TV tower and invites Marnie to step inside. She hesitates, but then again, YOLO. "Don't lock me in!" He locks her in.
Inside the masterpiece all the multiple TV screens show flashing images of maggots crawling and dead animals decomposing, the types of imagery you'd find in baby's first Trent Reznor video. Only the sounds being pumped through the TV towers are not NIN but the easygoing alterna-radio strummy-strum of "Barely Breathing" by Duncan Sheik. Booth leaves her in there just long enough to make her scared but not long enough to make her too angry to be DTF right after she comes out. Marnie acts freaked out and gets all "What the fuck!" in his face and then Booth gives her a hug. She hugs back. "You're amazing!" she says. From there, their next scene together will show Booth on top of Marnie as she's facedown on his big bed as he squeezes her wrists and vigorously pumps her like she's a pretty corpse. This is a sex position Booth Jonathan probably learned from the Tantric Pussy Annihilation Methods class he took during a weeklong pick-up artist seminar. Thrust, thrust, guhhhh, magic. Still, Marnie's in love with this chaos because she's stupid.
Back to Hannah and Elijah who have escaped their apartment with lots of cocaine left and have managed to make it to a nightclub. Here we see how the dull, rusty batteries of their lives have been jump-started by Brooklyn's finest rat laxative amphetamine spice. Now they're gorgeous superheroes ready to dance themselves clean. Hannah goes first, as quixotic movements brought her to the dance floor. Elijah is still up top on the rail, watching below, talking nonsense to no one until he realizes Hannah is gone. Elijah looks down, finally, and there is Hannah dancing, dancing, dancing, yay, Hannah, hi! They finally reunite on the dance floor, Hannah has switched shirts with a man who was wearing a mesh tanktop and her breasts are exposed, finally, because there is never a party like a tit-showing party and those tit-showing parties tend not to cease. Then they want more cocaine because that's what makes cocaine so fun.
When Hannah and Elijah hit the stalls for their cocaine refuel session they decide to dice-up chunky lines on the toilet lid like seasoned first-timers always do. But it's still a social drug to them and they love shouting at each other up close. Here comes the portion of the experience where everyone projectile vomits sentiment all over each other: "I love you!" "NO I LOVE YOU!" "WE'RE SO GOOD!" WE ARE!" That.
It's okay to state the status of your BFF-ness to a person with whom you're sharing a super-intense drug experience because too much information is never enough. Yet, somehow, cocaine always manages to push it too far.
"I FUCKED MARNIE!" Elijah reveals, so happy to get that off his chest as he cuts more lines.
Oh no. Hannah didn't hear it the first time but she did and out comes the rage.
The night is ruined. The night can only be saved if they confront Marnie right this second. Hannah finds out via text that Marnie is at Booth Jonathan's and LET'S GO ELIJAH NOW. But first, let's stop at the local 24-hour pharma-dega and get some stuff we don't need and do need, like water, perhaps. Hannah and Elijah have another confrontation about why he fucked Marnie. Hannah kisses him. "When did you have jerky?" Elijah says. No Boner Yes Homo. But wait: Hannah's distracted by her downstairs neighbor, Laird, the junkie who gave her this blow and started all this. "Are you following us?" Hannah yells at Laird. Of course he is. He's a lonely junkie, you see. Anyway, bring Laird along to Booth Jonathan's so he doesn't feel ashamed and stops sobbing in the juice aisle.
They arrive at Booth's super-awesome loft and Marnie is not happy to see them. Laird goes one direction in the loft, Elijah heads another way, and Hannah is right in front of Marnie, ready to kill Marnie with the truth, anger engaged. Hannah rambles and rambles and Marnie tries to take her at face-value, ducking-and-moving the whole time until Hannah turns her voice's volume up to 12 while her eyes go big and wide to finish this once and for all:
"THAT IS WHAT MAKES YOU A BAD FRIEND!"
Hannah wins. She's already presented enough factual accuracy to prove this point to Marnie not through the petty snipes found in typical girl-on-girl disagreements, but with a surgically precise counterpoint to force her best friend to prove otherwise. Marnie can't. She felt awful before Hannah knew all this but now she's been gutted. As she sits there wrapped in a blanket at Booth Jonathan's countertop the hollowness creeps in so just walk away from this reality over to another room in the apartment because these tears are coming from a different place.
Hannah's still on coke, though, so you're next Elijah:
"AND YOU ARE MOVING OUT!"
Elijah bites back at first and says he didn't even come/cum after he fucked Marnie but then it dawns on him as well that the maniac in front of him is making too much sense to ignore. Remarkably, this is the type of super-power cocaine brings out of those who try it for the first time. It's amazing how much sense you can make so loudly without any real effort or fear of consequence. Hannah's RIGHT, right now. But at some point, if she doesn't quit while ahead, she'll start to engage in arguments much more meaningless with cokehead friends. This is my favorite:
"YOU ARE A COKEHEAD!" [snorts line]
"FUCK YOU! YOU ARE CRAZY!" [snorts line]
"BUT YOU ARE! A COKEHEAD!" [snorts line]
"YEAH WELL IF I AM WHAT ARE YOU, HUH?!"[snorts line]
"NO I AM NOT A COKEHEAD!" [scrapes plate for last line]
"YEAH OKAY! GOOD LUCK SCRAPING THAT PLATE!" [Licks and eats empty baggie which contained cocaine]
"FUCK YOU! Hey can we still get more this late? Your guy deliver?" [sits down, stares into space]
"HAHAHA YEAH WHATEVER. Let me just check." [texts dealer]
Fin.
Hannah summons Laird, because he's the only non-asshole human being left in this apartment right now. They go back to their apartment complex. They shake hands goodnight. Then Hannah, still on coke, does the old let's-make-out-if-you-want-to handshake but realizes that Laird won't take the hint. She kisses him on the mouth. He stands there like a junkie and asks permission to kiss back.
"Sure, "she says, "But it's just for tonight [kiss] and it's for work." Out comes her tongue.
Image by Jim Cooke