With everyone talking to him and he dizzy and jumpy, listening to this contaminated music that fuses everything without asking permission, he starts to dance and the others dance with him and then they all go into the bathroom and smoke marijuana and he feels like his chest barely inflates the gelatinousness it contains, a chest with two little raisins that aren’t quite nipples, and he laughs at himself, at his and the others’ chests, and the others roar with laughter with him while they drink in a Yugoslav bathroom, the year 1989, chipped blue tiles, mirror with cracked glass that reflects long hair and cocks that every now and then leak urine. Later they’ll go to a party where he’ll kiss a large-breasted Croatian woman named Mila with whom he’ll lose his virginity several months later. He won’t touch her breasts, he doesn’t touch (this has to do with the modesty his hands contain), but he will lick them devotedly and tenderly. At dawn he’ll silently walk home with his neighbor, feeling closer to him than he’s ever felt to anyone, a silence that, with the sunrise, will take hold of the street, the houses, the whole landscape and, of course, it will take hold of the dew still throbbing in the grass of the yard the two houses share and that now throb in his fingers that fascinatedly stroke it. Like the guitar, he says to himself. And caressing the dew, his friend watches him with watery eyes and then says goodbye and leaves him there, sitting on the grass, and the two of them will roar with laughter while they wave goodbye. Each will enter his house, and he’ll feel like something has changed and he’ll feel around in his pocket and find a pick that one of the band members gave him in the climax of the night, surely in the bathroom, a black pick he’ll always carry like an amulet and that he’ll lose in a hotel in Thailand where he’ll work as a house musician twenty years later. After a few days, the band will be invited to play a concert, a big concert, with important bands, and he’ll panic and tell them he doesn’t know how to play well, that he’s just starting, and they’ll say please. The one who gave him the pick will even give him a threatening look that very well could mean what the hell, I gave you my pick, asshole; or that could also mean come on, jerk, we’ll be shit if you don’t; or that could also mean I’ll never see you again, and it was this last one that made him tremble, not because the Yugoslav was strong or scared him, but because he could lose the only thing that felt like his that wasn’t exactly the pick but something else related to the heat in his gelatinous thorax, something related to friendship, to what happens to bodies when they discover the power of complicity. Then he’ll say OK, I’ll play.