“Oh, the Klieg Guy,” she said. I swear I could hear the capitals.
“The Klieg Guy?”
“The Klieg Guy,” she repeated, nodding gravely, looking down at the mug she held firmly wrapped in her hands.
“You see,” she continued after a moment’s quiet contemplation, “he had this thing about light, about how we can only truly appreciate the world that surrounds us if we can see it in all its glory, bathed in bright, color-balanced, biorythm-synchronized eye-searing brain-frying light. He probably got some new age shit mixed up with some stuff from the surgeon general and there you go, instant light junkie.”
She paused to sip her double-macchiato-whatever.
“So one day, he decides that Home Depot just can’t cut it, goes to an auction somewhere and buys second-hand Kliegs off some dot-com porn outfit recently gone chapter eleven. Drives them home to his trophy suburban villa in his trophy Lexus, mounts them up in his trophy bedroom and proceeds to shag his trophy girlfriend’s brains out. Sarah what’s-her-face—hot little number, and smarter than she lets on, too, though I don’t expect he ever paid much attention to anything above her shoulders.
“Anyway, a couple of nights later he’s having this party, and at some point during the evening, when everybody is good and tipsy, to say the least, he and Sarah are showing a friend around the trophy house, and they get to the trophy bedroom and of course he has to show off his trophy Kliegs, going on at great length about every famous porn star whose butt they’ve shone upon. And while he’s going through his spiel some bozo downstairs finds a Marilyn Manson CD and yanks the volume on the Klieg Guy’s trophy stereo up to eleven and between that and the Kliegs the breaker trips, though the people downstairs don’t seem to mind much. So Klieg Guy fumbles his way through his trophy house, zero night vision as you can imagine, finally finds a flashlight, yanks out the power to the stereo – no-one seemed to have much use for it anyway – resets the breaker and goes back upstairs, to find his trophy girlfriend sixtynining his old college bud on his own trophy waterbed, under the glare of twenty kilowatts of genuine, accept-no-imitations, made-in-America, once-used-for-a-Pamela-short Klieg lamps.”
I couldn’t help but laugh. “You were there?”
She grinned. “I always had a weak spot for Marilyn Manson… But you know what?” she asked, wetting her lips, “I can’t really blame them. If it’d been me alone up there with Sarah, I’d have done the same. That girl is a dish.”