Charlotte Grimshaw: Taking one for the team

I’d read reports of the buildup, when Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu had arrived at the White House with an Iran war proposal that military advisers called “farcical”, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio described as “bullshit”. Vice-President JD Vance was against; no one wanted it, but Netanyahu persuaded Trump, and Trump decided to unleash hell. Why? He liked the idea of bombing, liked it bigly.

In scathing mood, I had cast an eye over my biographies of Albert Speer, Hitler’s armaments minister. Having been entranced by Hitler, Speer fell out of love in 1944. Realising the war was lost and they had engaged in evil, Speer looked at the Führer and asked himself, “Who is this man? How could I never have seen how ugly he is, his sallow skin, his broad nose?” The spell – the mesmeric love generated by power and the demagogue’s freakish charisma – was broken, too late.

I was about to launch full blast into the cowardice of enablers who surround powerful people, who don’t dare argue, who allow evil and stupidity to triumph – and then my cellphone rang. My phone rang, and instead of ignoring it, I answered. I spent the next hour working my way through the call.

There were laughs, there were long stories. There were swerves into mundanity: the high food prices in New Zealand, a trip to the GP, news of elderly parents. There was some moderate-level drama: a night of dancing, drugs (did you know it’s all the rage these days to mix cocaine and ketamine?), an MDMA-fuelled encounter with a “beautiful woman”. There was poignancy, a pervasive sense of wistfulness, discontent, emptiness even: “I’m looking at a beautiful landscape, but I just want to get the hell out ... all these million-dollar views, but I don’t feel happy.”

Propping it up was a large, loose scaffolding, a rickety structure made of justification, hackneyed explanations and elaborate rationales. Sometimes you want to dance all night. We would never have made that connection if we hadn’t. I can’t get together with the old gang if I don’t.

Thirty minutes in, I interrupted. “Shall we cut the bullshit?” I said. My mind had strayed back to Trump, to Epic Fury, and all that remonstrating and denouncing and comparisons to the Nazis I’d intended to unleash. I refocused, softened my tone. “Shall we cut to the chase?” I said.

My dear old friend was drinking again. After years of sobriety. He was doing drugs. But not much. Only when the situation demanded it. Socially, that is. He’d been press-ganged into it by friends. (Some of them “overdid things”.) Duty had called. He’d taken one for the team (the adventures with MDMA, cocaine and ketamine) when she’d demanded he be more fun. He didn’t want to be the boring one.

I listened, my mind turning over words: “farcical”, “bullshit” and occasionally, “clusterfuck”. I got a word in edgewise and said, with affection and exasperation, “Do you know how many times I’ve had this conversation?”

How many times with another one who gave up quite often but could never get to the thing that would make him stop. The one who kept calling my cellphone to let me know he was alive, until he wasn’t.