Molt arrived at the party under strict instructions not to tell anyone about the time he’d seen Bill Murray partially naked. Wendy had made this explicit.

Wendy smiled as she told him it was a boring story without a point the way that he told it. Normally when she smiled, Molt felt happiness stir. But when she smiled while saying this, her mouth looked a weary chameleon who’d lost the desire to communicate real human emotion. The story, she said, has no point. At the end of it, people merely come to an understanding of one thing: that you’ve seen Bill Murray partially naked.

Molt talked their way straight into the kitchen, interrupting conversations in order to give strangers high fives. This, he reasoned, was not unlike hiding the letter in plain sight. No one suspects the guy who’s so open and friendly with everyone. And the worst you could say about what he was doing was that it was impolite.

Molt believed that every house that hosts a party puts out whatever swill liquor they do — Smirnoff; Absolut; Grey Goose; vodka, in short — in order to distract the guests from the good liquor the benefactors don’t want them to have. Molt believed that during a party, all the liquor held in a house was game. You simply had to find and liberate it, with the same verve as Che’s Guerilla army.

“It makes me feel my South American heritage,” Molt once told Wendy.

“You’re German,” she said.

“That,” he said, “is a sad truth.”

Continue reading “Bill Est Veritas” →