###### A Return

In the empty house, in the evening,
I turn the lights on. Outside, the blue
deepens and spreads.

No boundary holds for long.
Smoke pours from a chimney
across the lake. Below me,

a star expands, sheds itself as wind.
There is a thin layer of dust on the piano.
I go to an upstairs bedroom

and hold the door shut.
A moth hurls itself at the window.
I keep asking the same question.

&nbsp;

###### I’ll Never Learn

Remind me again, again, that nothing
belongs to me. What I’ll get in the end is
 	        nothing.

For now, cracked branches,
muck, a darkness
 	        preoccupied with fish, my name, silt-soft hair.

You take
what I give you. You could always
 	        take more.

The lake gleams
like a scar, the sky
 	        like a thin porcelain cup.

Thank you
for taking my father slowly.
 	        It is so painful, I can no longer

distinguish
between love and pain. Today he did not
 	        call for me, and I answered.

&nbsp;

###### Tending

In the kitchen, he offers toast and I refuse.
I stir my tea. When he offers again, I take it.

It’s getting late. The clouds are high and bright
and the two black dogs have wandered to the lake.

They follow me inside to the worn-down rug,
the hissing radiators. The cold gets in

wherever it can. Sometimes he can’t say my name
and I wish I didn’t need it. But the fire

needs kindling and I need to wash the bread knife,
return it to the drawer. Nothing disappears, only becomes

unrecognizable. Smoke pouring from the chimney.
I always miss the exact moment.

&nbsp;

###### Myth

As what can be sensed only by its taking
as light circles an absence,
I do not know it

but I know
it’s close. The trees
are shaking, darker silvers

folding into sky. The rain will come
in almost-dark as swallows
low in the field

forget me.
Already I am a memory
of myself and I know I will be lost

along with the rest of him, lost like time
or light, not gone from the world
but buried

more deeply inside it.
Tonight, deep in the spell of the field
at night, planetary wind, swallows tracing the dark, the rain in my mouth.

Four Poems

You were sitting by the window in the afternoon

and it was snowing. I knelt on the floor.

No matter what I said, you wouldn't stop trying

to get out of your chair. I said, she'll be back soon, 

she had to go downstairs but she'll come back.

You had a hand on each arm of the chair

and you pushed as hard as you could, hunched over, 

your arms shaking until you collapsed.

You couldn't lift yourself at all.

I bent forward so you would see my face

so like your own, so you would know you knew me

and that I was with you in the room. 

Your eyes were blue and blank. 

You were looking into another world. It was quiet

except for the sound of you trying to get out of the room

to find your wife. Except for my voice

saying we only have to wait a little longer,

not much longer. You didn't stop trying to reach her

and I stopped trying to reach you. I knelt on the floor

watching you try over and over,

your shirt damp with sweat.

&nbsp;

*

&nbsp;

It might be selfish to want to tell you 

what happened when you were gone 

from your body, to want you to know 

what it was like, but you were there 

in the room and it's strange 

for you not to know. I want to say I'm sorry

I was sometimes afraid of you 

because when I believed you weren't there

in your body, I didn't know. It was impossible

to know. Today I went into the room 

and it was empty. Every room is empty of you.

In every room, I know you by your absence.

&nbsp;

*

&nbsp;

Twenty-one days after you died, I wrote:

I will give the world back to him, 

the empty sky, the small cold river 

running into a grate at the edge of the road.

I will give him back to the world. 

&nbsp;

*

&nbsp;

I don’t know where that certainty came from 

or when I lost it. Today is two hundred and ninety-eight days.

I wear your old shirts and listen to your radio shows,

take care of what you would want taken care of:

I clean the kitchen, try to get her to eat. 

I go into your workshop and open 

the drawers of your father’s toolbox 

as you might have done after he died. 

I turn the thimble of a small silver micrometer 

and look for something to measure. I sit in your chair

at your table and try to understand how everything

outlasted you. I listen to your voicemails.

There is one you left when you thought I’d left for good 

without saying goodbye. I had only gone to the store.

&nbsp;

*

&nbsp;

Last night, the clouds were carried off in a current 

and the sky broke apart, and you already know

the light that came through, 

otherwise I couldn’t tell you. When I came inside, 

I saw myself in the mirror

as if I was you, and you looked at me,

and it was the first time I saw my face

after nearly a year apart. 

&nbsp;

*

&nbsp;

Today I sat on the steps and remembered you

patiently digging a grave for my rabbit.

Its body lay in a shoebox near the trees

and it was raining. You dug a deep grave, deeper

than necessary. You wanted to do it right.

But once it was done, I sat at the window 

and stared at the edge of the yard, imagining 

the cardboard dissolving in the damp ground 

and the rabbit unprotected. You tried to tell me 

why I shouldn’t be afraid, that he wasn’t there in his body 

in the shoebox in the ground

but I was still afraid, so to put me at ease

you went back into the rain and dug up the shoebox 

and took it to your workshop. You built a small pine coffin, 

measuring and marking the wood 

with your pencil, sawing exactly along each line.

You let me stroke the cold soft ears again

then nailed the lid shut.

&nbsp;

*

&nbsp;

I throw myself against each day I’m trapped in.

I go for walks and try to figure out if you still exist: 

if you exist in my memories and each memory

is a world that still exists, then somewhere 

we’re sitting together on a train 

through a cold marsh, the cattails rustling 

in a burning blue sky, and I don’t know if you can hear me 

when I turn to tell you that sometimes I miss you so much 

I can’t keep walking. I watch branch shadows 

wave over the ground like a net.

&nbsp;

*

&nbsp;

We were sitting together by the empty fireplace. 

You were on the phone. You said, “I’m here with—” 

and looked to me. I couldn’t say it. You were the one 

who gave me my name. Outside it was dark, and I imagined

swimming in the lake, in the silence pulling at the center of you

into which you disappeared, slowly 

at first, then all at once.

&nbsp;

*

&nbsp;

I never got used to it. By the time I could account 

for what was lost, I had lost more.

Loss that didn’t seem possible. 

A storm already overhead 

and moving faster. At a certain point, 

we put a lock on every door. I slept with a key 

around my neck and sometimes woke to the sound 

of my door rattling in its frame.

Now I look to the door and imagine you 

on the other side, and I want to let you in.

&nbsp;

*

&nbsp;

Early on, we were walking down the driveway

and you told me there were people in the shadows

at the edge of your vision, sitting on the steps.

You said they always disappeared 

when you turned to look. When they came into the house,

you couldn’t figure out what they wanted, like the morning

you came into the kitchen and found them

waiting for you. They would only say

that they had been waiting for hours.

You were afraid. You tried to tell me 

what was happening, but I could only understand 

parts of what you said. They’re angry with me, you said.

I don’t know why they’re angry with me.

&nbsp;

*

&nbsp;

You forgot that the house you were in

was your own. You forgot how to walk, how to eat.

In the end, lying on your bed, your hands were clasped

and you were mouthing words to the ceiling. Your voice, 

when it came, was like wind. We lifted you upright 

and fed you. You were in pain. We arranged pillows 

and blankets, tried to make you comfortable. We told you 

you were safe. Slowly you looked at us 

and whispered. We couldn’t understand

but we bowed our heads to listen.

One night, I asked if you could hear me

and you nodded. Now, I look to where 

you were, and I don’t need to know 

if you can hear me to keep repeating 

what I need you to know.

&nbsp;

*

&nbsp;

Early in the afternoon, in the hallway

she said, I think he’s gone

and I followed her into the room.

We sat with your body for hours. 

Your wife, your son, your daughter. 

I wasn’t afraid. I held your hand. 

I looked at your hands. I tried to prove to myself

that I had you memorized.

We sat with you and talked to you

and looked at you, and looked at you

until a man and a woman arrived 

from the funeral home. 

They wrapped you in your bedsheets 

and lifted you onto a stretcher. We carried you 

down the stairs of the house.

Carefully, they put you in the car 

and shut the door. We watched 

as the car pulled out of the driveway

and turned into the road.

&nbsp;

*

&nbsp;

Sometimes, suddenly and briefly

you appeared, though it happened less 

towards the end. Like a few seconds of music

in relentless static, a clear familiar phrase.

Only weeks before you died, I heard you 

calling for me from the next room

like you were trying to wake me from a dream.

Your voice was strong and clear.

I heard the voice I remember calling my name.

From an Empty House

Author_SmallLeftAlignedTitle

Woebegone is not getting married today

but a person I loved just did

&nbsp;

Woebegone is not eating corn on the cob 

because I shucked it in my salad

&nbsp;

Woebegone does not go to the park

but I fantasize about toting her 	

&nbsp;
					   
She has never eaten tofu cheesecake

nor dined at a restaurant that would accommodate

&nbsp;

Her dietary preference: fish. Nor does Woebegone

know about appetizers when I drink blush wine

&nbsp;

On the couch Woebe grooms her tail

with her tongue, she licks my nose

&nbsp;

In the morning, I am feeding her dry

food that purports crude protein

&nbsp;

For her growth, I give thanks

When I meditate, Woebegone heats

&nbsp;

Sometimes I say prayers aloud:

May she be free from suffering

&nbsp;

May she be protected

May she be at ease

Woebegone Is Not Getting Married Today

<h6 class="exempt-from-text-fit-calculation" style="text-align: center;">from The Claire Bitch Project</h6>


 *


 Too bad in the sun the story is the same

 over here they try it again

 That’s all alright
 perfectly the same
 old time
 twice on the wind
 Outside
 the plane silently overhead

 What are you doing? this swing is
 Warm

 prick the old fire

 This space all over is
 Quiet for some reason

 fast over there

 Come back
 Don’t stop in the

 At the same time i’m leaving

 How to accommodate this
 big as ever
 Expand
 to fit you

 and you are all the space
 There was never

 Outside i’m waiting for help

 Your hand over my mouth
 My head
 Next press into me

 I’m on the only road I’m some
 monster
 I’m about to run out
 into the dark
 I’m a dark top

 And the talk is the problem
 Once around
 twice


 The pressure suspends on
 what freed it


 the sound goes somewhere


 *


 somewhere and it’s back

 cover your hot head
 The sun
 on the outside of your room
 the sky in disarray
 The rock on the roof

 you’re some
 other Creature

 distant sin

 Sane now the red spirit
 moves faster

 Wind picks up
 Face together the wind

 And i said on the other side
 i’m red
 and i’m waiting for to grow

 I’m a brick in the distant weather
 you don’t want to change

 You don’t want to say you said that
 but it comes back

 As you move you move so slow
 you move So much more than me


 *


 at the end you start
 to move Forward
 and he’s back in the white car

 In the dirt on your road
 before we never had enough time
 and now the spirit is moving to the other side

 That’s a little rabbit on the road
 That’s a little bit more that you expected

 The morning on the other
 Fasting getting small
 in your eye
 Getting small before bigger
 things come out to get it

 The other little special other
 on the road to your home

 That i can feel you behind me
 the reason you check over your shoulder

 and the light comes on
 you’re here

 take this hand
 against my mouth
 my face
 a little wider than expected
 Than expect we come together too often
 not breaking
 things out my window

 My widow on the mend
 in the bend in the river
 that’s an elbow
 On the shoulder
 And my left eye can look back

 I think you don't expect me
 and i’m here

 On the other hand it’s getting later

 The thing i stop having
 to my pleasure

 bad things
 on the other end
 And bad little creature
 my head

 I can’t hear you anymore
 I can’t hear where you’re moving to

 But i feel the whole place shake again
 under my feet the grass grows
 even through dirt
 Even in the white light and the landscape
 is always the same

 The static coming
 Louder Phone
 and book
 after book about time

 Water was toxic and dust
 was kicking up
 and the town left for another town

 and we are here now
 Making a little image of it

An excerpt from *The Claire Bitch Project*

AuthorTitle

Late to dance class I kicked off my shoes

among the other shoes outside of the studio

it was a pole dancing class and I had signed up for

&nbsp;

two classes back to back two hours the first

hour was choreography and the second was tricks

by the end of the second hour I was very dizzy

&nbsp;

and weak but I had accomplished a new trick

wearing my black vinyl lace-up 8-inch pleaser boots

and I got a good video to prove it I took off my pleasers

&nbsp;

and headed toward my brown Birkenstocks

which I had kicked off outside the studio but what

I found in the place of my Birkenstocks were

&nbsp;

someone else's much older much less cared for

Birkenstocks in the same size same color same style

left in the same location but definitely not mine

&nbsp;

I was crushed I immediately took a picture

of these Birkenstocks and sent them to the studio

owner asking her to send a message to the other

&nbsp;

dancers to notify them that someone with the same

shoes as me had accidentally taken mine and left

theirs behind then I went back into the studio

&nbsp;

and told the instructor what had happened

she said I bet it was Christine since she smoked

a whole blunt before class and she started texting

&nbsp;

other girls to see if she could locate my Birkenstocks

when I got home the owner of the studio had been 

looking through the security footage she sent me

&nbsp;

a screenshot of me taking off my Birkenstocks

before class “Is this you taking off your shoes?”

she said Yes I said and another one of me putting on

&nbsp;

the same Birkenstocks after class That's me I said

but those are not my Birkenstocks you can see

the sole is dirtier on those ones mine are newer

&nbsp;

“I understand” she said she told me that she did not see

anyone else wearing the same Birkenstocks as me

to class in the footage and that the only time

&nbsp;

my Birkenstocks moved was when the studio door

opened and pushed them aside but she promised

she would look through the footage again meanwhile

&nbsp;

I had eaten lunch and laid down on the couch

and was replaying the video of my new trick which

was an aerial ballerina I edited the video and put a

&nbsp;

Doja Cat song over it so it looked really good 

I looked again at the footage sent over by the studio

owner I saw myself staring down at those old dirty 

&nbsp;

Birkenstocks I did not recognize my boyfriend

came home and I told him what happened he was

sorry I lost my Birkenstocks I told him I bet she thinks

&nbsp;

I'm crazy she being the owner of the studio looking

through the footage Do these look like my shoes to you?

I asked holding up the old brown Birkenstocks “Yes”

&nbsp;

he said and then it dawned on me what I had done

&nbsp;

&nbsp;

![image1](/assets/images/issues/issue4/posts/ClaireDougherty-NotMyBirkenstocks/1.png)

&nbsp;

![image2](/assets/images/issues/issue4/posts/ClaireDougherty-NotMyBirkenstocks/2.png)

Not My Birkenstocks

###### Lucky Park

The brick is red
The green grass
The picnic rabbit is
crying on my cheek
My cat and I bleed
from the ear
It’s all so colorful
You are a clown
I’m bending backwards

&nbsp;

###### Now We Meet Over the Phone

A light breeze runs through the house
and you turn on the TV
to find out where you are.
Purple is setting over the mountains.
Don't be purple, you’re so
normally easy, though not always
loving. You remember what I say
when I say it loudly
and I am three inches tall,
sharing everything with you
until the space around us
diminishes and we have more of a reason
to say hello. It’s the perfect website.
My background image is of a fire
I drove past. It was active.
It’s still happening now.

&nbsp;

###### Star Person

The town is dressed in dawn, dressed like a dog
In a blue sweater. The blue sweater barks
At the dawn and the people just wake up.
Consider how this might look on another
Species of animal. I am a deer
Separated from his mother, dressed in
Virginal pink because they have this idea
About deer. No I’m a woman, a person
And because of the moon I cannot sleep.
From another room I hear my sister call me
“My sister,” which sounds truer than my name
And stranger. I’m a stranger in this town where
The people have come to watch me answer
But I need to find my mother before I forget.

Three Poems

###### **It is**

difficult to be a chair
and be likeable
She can’t feel her arms
How does she
How does she read a book
Read a book

    *

The house we went to
was not ours but we stayed
because it was sturdy and nobody
else was there

Most of the furniture looked fine
though there were still pieces inexplicable
to me and I liked
to take pictures of myself naked

We waited for raccoons
to reveal themselves in the cypress
proving that everyone has a home
like this and knows
about furniture
Art, how to decorate, and
History

From there we went
through each day as if
Thursday
and eventually stopped
at a new place like I said before
but hoping it would be better

All the houses look the same
I forget how to read
I used to say I miss you and now
I’m sorry I was so mean
and that you’re displeased with
my green curtains

I didn’t want this to happen
for this one reason
which is the chair told me
she whispered to a stranger
don’t turn around
I’m naked so of course
he did and they fell in love

    *

Is anybody house?
Is anybody roof?
Is anybody window?
Is anybody wall?
Is anybody desk?
Is anybody chair?
Is anybody bed?
Is anybody lamp?
Is anybody clock?

    *

And now you are leaving!
This place looks like an Apple Store!
Marry me!
I scratched and sniffed myself bare!
Sit down I decorated!
Over and over!
Watch me be filthy in a glass-walled house!
I might have come!
So I didn’t hear what you said!
My house is full of strangers!
But it’s so easy not to feel!
Trying to find an outlet!
I had two thoughts like two eggs!
I want to be perfect for you!
October took so long to get here!

&nbsp;

&nbsp;

###### **Slushy**

Cool cherry do you think about me?
When I bite my tongue it’s cherry
Crude childhood games
Fall and found us all
Spring
I blame her
The wife
That’s where we came from and
Our father’s age
Was entering heaven
Washing hands incessantly
Looking at you and there are openings
There are
Cherry
Keep quiet
My voice I see now
On the other side is garbled crow
Crows feet laugh lines power lines crow
And the cat who licked my lips
Your assumptions are interesting to me
I’m trying to come
Close my eyes and
Imagine you alone in a foreign place
I want to be overwhelmed
Lose for a moment
Nobody on the streets I like
The fantasy not the product
The time of day the light
And we’ll live in a big apartment
A house it snows
Photos overlap become
Cherry
It’s not that early it’s
Not that early to catch a train the ocean slams
Against my window this makes me nervous
There is space to hide everything
Works out I hope
If I’m never with I’ll never
Be without you
And all the fish rush up to
Nibble on my white ankles

Two Poems

Let life lay
on top
of life, falling asleep
texting you
next to you
please don’t do it
without
me, while I sleep

I am abandoning
my own
permission, like I think
you know how
I mean.

Can’t sleep without
the light
of my phone
on your face,

rolling in
a trance
I had to start
to watch
Episode 9 all
over again.
Robes in

a cavern
underground. I
could write it
all down
I could
write it all
over that
internal experience
like that. “Yooo I hope
when I die
I hope that
it’s forever.”

Texting that
to you
to fall asleep
next to you for me
not to, to
still abstain, I think how
you know.

iPhone in my
own hand like
the obligation to
live life
as its
own
placebo heaven
like a heavy planet
like the
light of the
phone on your face
at night.
I text you
“content addiction.”

I’m trying to move
past it
I think how
you know what
I mean
when I
write that.
Trying to go on
outlasting myself
after it
already as if.

Surviving the
gates
every survival
must say
I’m sorry
always
the face of survival
the face of apology…
I’m sorry
I’m vibing
not surviving
I’m survibing
this feeling I get
when I
text you back

immediately, scrolling
pictures of us
I saved
like I remember
how I love you
only in words.

I love when
we text
each other crying.
Yeah keep that
like that
life of its own
placebo light
on my
face
mirrored
from the
phone
as I write your
numbers on my leg
to count
I start to
music
videos instead.

I started
loving you
forever just now

as I lost my
place in the song
the video
is about. If I start it
over again, the
video about
the song
about you sleeping,
reading in
like sleeping
through
the way of reading.

I read too fast like
holiday.
It’s so beautiful
to read

forget
like hate
scrolling
votes or counting prayers
for the end

another phone
to take
a picture of me
on
the phone with
this phone. Watch
my desktop save
the files
that save me from
the nothing
I’ve become. Love
survives itself
as misreading

a cat
gnawing my USB
I forgot
as sharing and
saving
are just
metaphysics.

 
             *for Alan Darth Gilbert*

ASIF THIS IS IT 1

An exchange of two surfaces
both dosed high with hormones.

Policies, mine, prevent myself
from committing malpractice.


Surviving a grand opening, myself takes in
patients, providing the most basic.

            *Dying is so scary and bad.*

Myself was made to make difficult
the possibility of dying. How, in the face
born of intention, maintaining biological
life, could the desire to die make sense.

            *You should leave your phone at home
            and go out for a walk. It is fall. The leaves
            are still red, and it isn’t too cold. When light
            from sun is set at such an angle, things are
            so gorgeous outside. This will remind you
            of how gorgeous things are inside.*

How in the face: desire is the proliferation of exchanges.

Myself, bearing bottomless sex organs suitable for affection,
becomes a welcome site for any other that looks me over.

            The mouth of my lover’s hospital
            produces spit. My hospital’s opening
            mouth makes room to receive the spit.

            By way of a glance, my hospital demands
            my lover’s hospital to coil, grasp
            around my throat. The hospital
            responds accordingly.
                                                              Is there anything
            I cannot internalize. I have

stopped going to the doctor’s since a misdiagnosis.
My teeth hurt, and I will keep them. My headaches,
occurring more and more frequently, hurt. I will
keep them. When reconstruction seems impossible,
one must be willing to feel lots of pain. I do not
like pain. I want for the grip of my lover

                        to hold, even tighten, in order
                        that I might be held. My desires
                        slowing in order that I might

                        part unperished, biologically
                        refuse destruction. Displaced grip
                        instead arresting my quick belly.

How All Spit in the Place

Forgot what I was

supposed to tell us

as much as I stress

spill myself a phrase

letters describe words

that interrupt snow

the light it lands on

like my dim vision

that writes an update

as more of the same.

New Poetry

That it is great poetry
is as published as it’s written
when I’m the editor to write off
how it’s great to stake decisions
hedging that poetry poorly asks
to pose the stakes so low it reclines
under it to pass as publication
that poetry is just as great a decision
I’m free to pose in myself
as writing published poetry.

POETRY 6

###### Spa/Croissant

Velvet and her friend Mel were in the gravity sauna.  They hung in silk mesh hammocks twelve feet above sage embers, and Velvet was almost at her limit.  She tipped her tongue as a drift of ash flew towards the ceiling ventilation, melting like a snowflake.  Mel looked serene, though her limbs were quite pink.  She had Big Mama Boobs, nipples like doilies.  She had slender legs, enormous feet, and a Hawaiian toe ring she was unable to remove. 

“I just started a business,” Mel said.  “It's called The Chorus. You pose a question to the Chorus like, 'what should I spend five-hundred-dollars on, paying off my credit card or new boots?' and give it a time limit, like fifteen minutes, and users can vote. At the end of your time limit, the Chorus has made your decision for you!”

“But what if people say something mean like, 'Just kill yourself instead'?” Velvet said. Her mouth felt like it was coated in sand. 

“No comments. Just the two choices you're caught between.”

“It's just for little things, or things like, 'should I break up with my boyfriend, yes or no?'”

“I imagine people will use the Chorus for all sorts of things, but the Chorus only really works for specific and well-posed questions.”

“OK and what about when someone asks, 'I'm really depressed and have no will to live, should I kill myself, yes or no?'”

“You're making me uncomfortable, I'm setting my boundary,” Mel said. She drew a square in the air. It framed her face. 

Velvet rocked in her hammock, kicking off from the baking stone. “Jesus, Mel. Do you really think that total strangers know best?”

“No, not me,” Mel said. “People. People love this stuff. People are so stupid.”

“People are so stupid,” Velvet cooed, content that they were getting along again.  Her heart slid from where it had been.

Both women looked to a crack in the stone wall, widening to a crevice of blinding light.  Mel shielded her eyes with her hand.  Through the sauna door, a woman emerged with a stiff haircut in black basketball shorts and a black bra.  She took the cord wrapped around an iron loop, and lowered Mel's hammock to the platform. 

“Lash and scrub,” the woman confirmed, lifting Mel with surprise strength to her feet. 

“Mew,” Mel said.  She wanted to leave the sauna too, but she was too weak to gesture to the attendant.  Her time would come, she knew.  A similar woman would lower her hammock and peel her from the cedar boards of the platform.  Velvet didn't get lashes like Mel. She could picture it— Mel on her belly, her neck propped like a cobra, while the antennae of butterflies were glued to her lash line.

Velvet waited in the polar tub for Mel to finish her treatments. She treaded water, fluttering her arms so she didn't have to rest her feet on the icy bottom, her legs were as tight as boards, and she dragged them heavily.  Fresh snow carpeted around the tub.  Velvet's footprints disappeared with each snowflake; they were now just the slightest scoops in the snow.  She tried to concentrate on the cherry tree beside the pool, lift up the trunk, up the black branches, through the rice paper blossoms, and past the painted sky.  She was unsure how long she'd been in the tub—somewhere between one minute and one hour.  A dove satisfied its gleaning from the cherry tree's base and flew to a top branch, knocking snow into the tub. 

“Fucker!” Velvet growled, her breath fogged, and the bird tucked its beak, its rosy belly like a blush. 

Mel emerged from the back room.  The sauna sweat had dried in her hair and it fell in crunchy mermaid waves.  She skipped over the snow and lowered herself in the polar tub, sucking air through her teeth.

“So about The Chorus,” Velvet said.  After a few moments, recognition hit Mel. 

“Who's gonna make it?” Velvet asked.

“Oh, you just pay someone,” Mel shrugged, and started telling Velvet a story about a mean woman at work. 

Velvet tried to listen, but her gaze was drawn to Mel's eyes. Her lashes moved like waving wheat.

“You should go to my gal,” Mel said pointing to her eyes.  She was used to hypnotizing people. “I can't believe you go to the spa and don't get lashes. That's like having a croissant without butter, honey, and a cup of tea.”

“Do they pull the antennae off the butterflies in front of you?” Velvet asked.  Her nailbeds were indigo. 

“I don't know,” Mel said.  “They tape my eyes shut.”

&nbsp;

&nbsp;

###### Airport/Fast Food 

Velvet was waiting for her friend Murph to pick her up from the airport. On her flight there had been a weather disturbance on the middle leg of the journey, and for four hours the airplane had turned in a series of slow looping spirals like a child's roller coaster, making it impossible for beverage service. Velvet had felt so dehydrated that she had licked the airplane's window in hopes of condensation. Now on the curb, she was still reeling.

Murph pulled up in his brown car. He was hunched over the steering wheel in a coat made of teddy bear hide. Murph looked like a fifties milkman. He had a chin that pointed upwards, a puffy jaw, and a good hairline. He heaved himself out of the car, put Velvet's suitcase in the trunk, and told her to buckle up as they speedbumped out of the airport roundabout.

“Next time, I'm coming back as a woman,” Murph said. “You have no idea how good you have it. Who paid for your flight?”

“My mom,” Velvet said. She wanted to hold something in the car for support, but the leather strap in her eye line made her suspect she was in an ejector seat, and so she seesawed in Murph's car.

“See what I mean?” Murph said.

“Can we get something to eat?” Velvet asked.

They stopped at a fast food place near the airport. Everyone inside the restaurant had a suitcase; the wheels of their rollerboards squeaked and squealed like a mouse chorus on the red and white checkered tiles.

Velvet really just wanted a water and to sit down, but she felt pressured and so ordered a coffee. Murph paid for it along with his food. She followed him to a table by the trash can.

Murph got a burger between two flappy lettuce slices that he dipped in ketchup with each bite. Velvet put her coffee to her nose, but still smelled gymnasium. 

“I took my girl out a few nights ago. Just to get into the club it's $20. Then we had two beers and two tequilas—$75. You don't realize it when it's not your cash.” 

Murph ate his burger, wiping ketchup from his fingers onto the printed paper placemats. 

“My girl always wants to go out, so I say, 'Fine, this time it's your treat.' We get dressed up. We go to a nice dinner. We split an appetizer, get two entrees, two beers, no dessert. A hundred bucks with tip. Then we go to the club, she pays $20 for me to get in. In the club we get two beers and two tequilas—$75. After that she says, 'Baby, I can't take it anymore!' So we go home. One night and she had enough. That's why we don't go out anymore.”

Velvet waited behind a child to fill her water cup.  He was wearing shoes with hidden wheels in the soles, and slid back and forth as if he were hovering slightly above the ground while he depressed the lever for ice, filling his cup one ice cube at a time. 

An employee in white pants, a white shirt with pearline snaps, a white sailor's cap, and a checkered red and white cloth folded into an apron and secured with a kilt pin at his sacrum, dipped his mop into the yellow plastic basin.  He swirled the mop in the opaque gray water, in which several drinking straws bobbed.  He wrung the mop and slapped it onto the red and white tiles, mopping down the sloping edges of the sinkhole.  It was about three feet in diameter with three orange caution cones alerting patrons to its danger.  Down Velvet looked into the sinkhole, exponentially blackening to the bottom of the pit that she couldn't see, its depth intuitive, and her breath catching, reluctant to send it down the sinkhole.

A single glittering ice cube slipped to the floor. The child tilted back his head and slurped from his cup.  Lemonade spilled in two streams, meeting in a river at the pit where his Adam's apple would be. He finished the drink and “ah”-ed stickily. Rollerboarding away from the soft drink fountain, he dropped his cup into the sinkhole.  The mopping employee frowned as the sinkhole expanded another inch. 

Velvet gave up on her water and sat.

“Can I have a fry?” Velvet asked Murph.

“Sure,” Murph said, pushing the cardboard boat to her, “You can have the rest.”

&nbsp;

&nbsp;

###### River Snake/Haircut

Velvet and her friend Mel walked across the bridge to exercise class. The river was a dried cement slab, a trough of gray water cut through. Plastic bags bobbed like bullfrogs. An overturned shopping cart, dried algae witch's hair, the bent cage of the cart the rib bones of a dinosaur. Under the bridge there was a snake, an escaped reticulated python. Velvet had seen it once, orange scales, overlapping lavender circles on its spine like ∞ repeating forever. The snake lay in the trough with its mouth open, waiting, ready to eat anything that came down the river. 

Indian summer, hot October evening, car exhaust and woodsmoke and Mel's shampoo made the air murky apple cider. 

“That's what I want my armpits to look like,” said Mel, and she pointed to the concave joint of Eucalyptus tree branch, where the bough met the trunk. The bark was stripped from the branch, the branch plastic gray-white, the arm of an android.  

Later, Velvet smelled the tree, like soil, slightly mentholated, smelling nothing like skin.  Skin smelled like spiced bread, or condensed chicken noodle soup, or sour cut grass.

“I want my arms just like that,” Mel said dreamily, looking at the tree branch that looked almost like an arm. 

Exercise class was in a white room with slippery white floors and walls. The ceiling was one big mirror. Velvet and Mel and the other girls lay on their backs with a pea-green ball the size of a schoolroom globe between their thighs. The instructor, with her wet ponytail and threatening tan, yelled over the music, and Velvet tried to bring the ball to her nose, keep her shoulder blades cemented to the ground, keep the natural curve in her lower back, keep her neck swan-like, tuck her chin and tuck her hips. She could do maybe two of the commands at once. Velvet sneaked a look at Mel, who struggled too. They completed the set with the globe-sized ball, and then were given a ball the same shade of green, this one the size of a pommelo, and had to do the whole thing over again. Velvet's palms slipped on the floor; she flipped them up. In the mirror, she looked crucified. The instructor yelled at her. The next ball was the size of a jawbreaker. A shooting pain spread from Velvet's hip crease, and she wondered if it was constructive pain or if she was doing it wrong. The instructor demonstrated the new move. She held the last ball, the size of a pea, between her knees, shot it into the air, and caught it between her thighs like a Venus flytrap. The ball was actually a pea. The instructor used a towel to wipe the mashed pea, and told the girls to get to work. Velvet held the pea between her knees, but could not hurl it into the air like the instructor had.  It rolled into her shorts.

Coming out the door of exercise class, Velvet was so fatigued she crashed into the wall, scraping her shoulder on the stucco, the stucco leaving a tic-tac-toe scratch.  She heard the honk of a horn. A man in a brown car had pulled up to the curb in front of exercise class and he seemed to be waving at Velvet. 

“Is that Murph?” Mel said. It was Murph— now barely recognizable, his hair buzzed, shorn close to the scalp. He looked like a de-loused waif. He looked so different that his car looked different.  His face appeared larger, head larger.  His ears pink nautilus, like hotel soap in a hotel dish.  She could see the ridges of his skin stretched tight over bone. Velvet, embarrassed, knew exactly what he would look like skinless, his skull a seashell. 

Velvet and Mel approached, and Murph leaned on the passenger seat peering out at them from the dark interior of his car, a cigarette smoldered in the ashtray. 

“Your head,” Velvet said, though she had tried to say something different.  

“I stopped going to the barber since we moved, so my girl tried to cut my hair. She did all right at first but then she got cocky.  What are you girls up to?”

“Exercise class,” Velvet said.  “We hate our armpits.”

“Huh,” Murph said.  “Need a lift?”

“No thanks,” Mel said before Velvet could reply, and Murph drove off.  

“He's such an asshole,” Mel said.  Blue now, her face a yellow moon under the streetlight, a bat breeze taking up her sweaty black ribbon strands of hair.  She looked angry.  

Velvet watched the taillights of Murph's car disappear over the bridge, her weary legs, arms like they were wrapped in bunting, she felt wound-up to the point of spinning, and had the sensation of being in the wrong space, that this moment with Mel in front of exercise class could exist without her presence, that her body belonged in Murph's car, carrying over the bridge, the long muscle of the river snake stretched in the dark below. Almost seemed easier, to be one muscle without anything else to worry about. 

&nbsp;

&nbsp;

###### Winds

During the winds, Velvet lost her driver's license and had to ride her bicycle. She jimmy-rigged a flashlight to the top of her helmet, put the flashlight on the strobe setting so the street jumped out at her in hot, white bursts.  She rode on the sidewalk too, coasting the slopes and falls of the driveway dips, her fingertips kissing steer horn handlebars. The strobe flashed on the tawny underbellies of magnolia leaves, their green shells, and white confectionary petals tossed by the wind. 

A dust devil spun into her path. She pulled a black bandana over her lips and nose, and shut her eyes as the blast hit her. Dust, debris, whipped her face, Velvet wobbled on the bike. Unable to balance, she opened her eyes. A cinder from the dust devil shot into the caruncle of her right eye. She back-peddled to stop, and jumped down, her crotch spared by the rocking chair curves of the cruiser.

“Jesus fuck,” she said behind black bandana, and shielded her eyes from the winds with her forearm. She tore off her helmet, left the bike on its side, and crawled on her hands and knees, feeling her way to a hedge. 

The cotoneaster was trimmed mausoleum-sized. Velvet pushed her way into the hedge. Inside the hedge-box was a red water pump on a cement plank.  Free of the winds, she picked the grit out of her eye, resting on the carpet of dried leaves. She pulled the bandana from her face and breathed in, not deep, pure breaths, the air not overly fresh, but rather like the old air of a dry cave. Much better than the winds. Regretful about the abandoned bike but didn't have the inclination to move, luxuriating on the leaves beneath her, the crushed leaves released the fragrance of almond. The red pump was cheery, meters at its base with spinning red arrows, a slow drip of water. She could use the pump as a table, or to line-dry her clothes. The cement slab would be good for food prep, correspondence. She could sleep where she was, her legs straight before her, back resting against the hedge, sinking into the hedge slightly, stems like acupuncture at the nape of her neck and along her spine.  As soon as she closed her eyes, she could sleep right there.  She picked a berry from a cluster, not quite pink, but green in places like rainbow sherbet.  She bit in with one tooth, the teeniest nibble. Astringent, parched her mouth, she immediately spat.  Velvet rose to her knees and lowered her head to the drip.  It took a few moments to get a mouthful, taking in the water drop by drop, the droplets dissipated on her rough tongue, every drop delicious. When she was done, she rolled back into her previous position, not quenched, but sustained, liminal. She could stay here for quite some time.

“Velvet?”

“Yeah?”

“You OK?”

Through the break in branches, Velvet saw Murph lift her bike from the sidewalk. She pushed out of the hedge. The kickstand of her bike squeaked as Murph booted it into place.  The winds had died down, a hot breeze picked at individual follicles on Murph's coat made of teddy bear hide. He handed her the helmet, strobe flashing, and she fastened it onto her head.  He wore a pair of red framed welding goggles, the dark lenses flipped up, the elastic yellow and black striped band constricting his head. 

“Why are you walking?”

“My girl's got the car, she's working tonight.”

Now, Velvet saw the squat pale house behind the cotoneaster shelter, dry grass fenced in with pickets, a shake roof, a light not in the front room, but seen through the front window, back in the further reaches of the house, the glow a kitchen light. 

Attracted to the strobe light, an Idia moth, wing pattern like wood grain, floated beside Velvet's ear. Murph scanned the empty street, took a pack of cigarettes from his coat pocket, and offered one to Velvet. She blinked. She hadn't had a cigarette since the winds. Last week cleaning her apartment, Velvet had found a butt, and sucked on it, pulling scorched tobacco through the filter, tasting like the walls of an old hotel.

“I'll put it out before the winds start back.  Got a light?”

Velvet found one in her backpack, a gold foil lighter shaped like a gold brick, on one side the design of a four leaf clover and the word “lucky,” on the other side, Roman lettering like a headstone that read “GOLD” and “999.9” beneath it.  She handed it to Murph.

“I'm not worried about starting a fire, I'm worried about the fines. $5,000 between me and my girl last year.  They make all their money during the winds.”

Murph lit his cigarette, the smoke dusting the air. 

“But now my girl doesn't smoke anymore because she wants to have a baby.  I told her, 'Yeah, but who's gonna watch it?'  That's why she's working tonight, to get into the Union.”

“I'm going to lie down for a bit,” Velvet said.

“In there? There's bugs and shit.”

“I'm fine. Can you put my bike next to that magnolia tree?”

“Sure, no problem,” Murph said. 

Velvet moved towards the cotoneaster. As she backed into the hedge, she watched Murph, cigarette between his teeth, push the bike by its steer horn handles, the tick-tick-tick of the wheels as he pushed, the strobe on her helmet reflecting in his goggles so she could see the dark hollows of his eyes only in flashes, the strobe turning his goggles into mirrors, his eyes into mirrors. 

Velvet awoke to apple cider.  She knew it was a fire, but was slow to react, stiff in her hedge-box, she was unsure if burning wood smelled like apple cider, or apple cider smelled like burning wood.  She climbed out of the hedge-box on all fours. 

The house's roof was on fire, smoke on the winds.  In the distance, she heard the scream of a fire engine, and rolled her bike from the magnolia tree, getting her bearings.  Embers from the burning house floated up on the winds to the house next door, licked the frayed shingles as tinder.  Velvet watched the bud of a flame bloom beside the weathervane, and another roof began its surrender to the blaze. She pulled the black bandana over her mouth—the whole neighborhood would soon burn.  Wood cracked, smoke scratched her eyes.  The whole neighborhood would go up soon, houses into ash. She needed to move, she couldn't move. She could always just wait there, in the bush.  It wouldn't be so bad to just wait.

Four Velvet Stories

*She*                            
*who knew boats*
*and ropes*   
*no longer played* *

&nbsp;

Algae sat on Lake Chetek year round, a layer of clotted cream sponge-like and lime green. As a kid I remember sitting on its frothy lip, feeling like a fly on the edge of a cauldron. Looking out, I thought how perfect it was for our family reunions to be held on this rank body of water. Even plants on the shoreline slouched and slumped towards the lagoon, futureless, sediment leaching through their weak roots. I watched trees fall in one-by-one like born again baptists in a failed ceremony, bodies left floating while their clothes rotted off. It was the saddest lake I ever saw.

A few intrepid pontoons tried their luck on Chetek most July Fourths. Dads with red skin from the sun (or the beer) helmed their metal inchworms, lugging along athletic, drunk children on innertubes. Jampacked under the awning like Hawaiian buns, moms and aunts in tankinis bristled with chubby uncles, sausage arms dangling off the boat’s padded edges. I was jealous of these kids. They had the type of parents who could swallow their pride and dress up on Halloween, or countenance the gauche life of a blow-up Grinch in their front yard. Maybe it wasn’t a matter of pride, maybe they even liked it, the perennial childhood of it all. My parents were adults through and through; my mother thought holiday decorations were vulgar. Our lone Christmas display each year was a towering tree, sparse as Charlie Brown’s and at one with our home’s endless angularity. The branches wore elaborate origami ornaments that she spent hours making in the months leading up to Christmas, spread out in our breakfast nook with her Earl Grey and sliced pears looking half-Japanese, serene and papery and thin. To this day I recoil at anything minimal. With his skimpy tree, Charlie Brown may’ve rejected  Jesus’ birthday as commodity, but my mother was in my mind embracing darker forces: the puritanical, the controlled. I always thought she was a bit of a tyrant. In her poem *Daddy*, Sylvia Plath writes that *Every woman adores a Fascist*...well not if they’re your mother, I’d like to say back.

Our reunion was held on the grounds of Salvation Park Bible Retreat, the northern Wisconsin camp my mother had attended as a kid, skinny as a rail and soft spoken. During the summer that most girls her age got their periods, she got chased around by rowdy boys chanting *Flatsy, flatsy two-by-four!*, an easy dig at her underdeveloped chest. Even my mother’s body was unadorned. She finally menstruated at age 18, technically an adult and ready to ship off for college. The night I first spotted blood in my underwear at 11, a relatively common age, I looked down at the rusty patch and began to cry: I was dirty like everyone else.

Unlike mother, my dad was a real stranger to Northwoods white trash, not a Wisconsin guy at all. The rural poor could never tug at his sympathy, an emotion reserved for those he saw as acutely at risk: Black city kids, urban immigrant communities. He was himself a postwar refugee who grew up in a rundown part of Chicago’s South Side, and the space afforded to poor people in places like Chetek was its own kind of luxury in dad’s view. He got in trouble making jokes to his students at the university about the lives to be lived in conservative, white working class enclaves: "If you fail this exam you can say hello to flipping burgers in Rhinelander! I hear Arby’s is hiring!" He thought this was hilarious and didn’t much examine the fact that most of the kids in his classes were from little farm towns like Chetek and Rhinelander. I was taught to be pretentious in the strangest style, to rebuff rural kids and nurture soft spots for communities I was not even a part of. This contradiction rubbed me the wrong way, especially when I stared at boats. The same way Republicans launch attacks at the welfare state when its beneficiaries purchase cell phones or sneakers, liberals shake their heads at house poor motorheads. I wanted to be a motorhead. I wanted to pop onto one of those tubes with a gropey baseball player and get whiplashed. I wanted a fat mom who knew how to party.

As a 2-for-1, our reunions were always held around July Fourth, a fact that nicely inlaid resentment for me approaching the event as I would be missing celebrations with my own friends back home. We certainly didn’t go every year, but the ones we made it for were preceded by weeks of arguments, tantrums, and ultimatums spearheaded by yours truly. Sitting around eating flavorless snacks with Protestant moderates was my worst nightmare. Mother’s extended family was a grim net of risk-averse Holy Joes and Maries, pale and sickly aesthetes who said doilies were "too fancy." If you were going to be religious and conservative minded, I thought you should be the *fun *kind, the messy and drunk kind. Chetek’s impure waters swirled like the collective id of mom’s family, the flipside of moralism and lean meat. The lake sustained poor folks who had the audacity to revel in their bad luck. Watching them honor life’s various dishonors while I hung around clinically reserved men without boating licenses made me sick. As my great uncles nodded off in adirondack chairs, I longed to tip them over like sleeping cows. I pictured myself shoving them into the green muck of Chetek, where the slime would swallow them up like some fifties horror flick.

The summer before eighth grade juts out in my memory—a long straw that itches my cortex when I think about those Hansen Family gatherings now and again. The slower I pull on that straw the stickier it gets with old information. Names and smells emerge in oily puddles, ready to be stepped in and resented and washed off.

At the time, I was one of those preteens who fancied herself precocious without having any actual information. It is in a young girl’s nature to refute realities with intuitions, and I suppose you could say I didn’t excel at anything concrete. My dad still played records back then, and I became entirely attached to Joni Mitchell’s *Court and Spark*, the song "Twisted" in particular. The lyrics unleash the genesis of Mitchell’s art, centering herself as a little girl. The child gets drunk and knows she is a genius at three. She refuses to ride in a double decker bus because there isn’t a driver on top. Vodka helps her sleep. I thought this was both very cool and completely relevant to my own stature as misunderstood prodigy. In our living room I’d listen to Mitchell brag and boast over and over, giving myself rug burns as I writhed on the floor like an epileptic. That year in school I had learned about Pentecostals, a kid in my class was one of them, and I was so jealous I could feel my heart boil everytime he described their church services. Speaking in a language whose meaning and accuracy you and only you could confirm seemed to me the most sublime expression of self, practically tailor made for my instinct-laden, jittery tongue. Mitchell got this, I thought, and had the confidence to relinquish herself as a vessel for something—or someone—else. *Instead of one head I got two, *she sang. *Exactly! *I thought.

I piled into my parents’ Honda Odyssey the morning of July 4, 2004 lost in my own jokes, knowing that I would be utterly incapable of acting present with my mother’s eerie family. Our van’s interior was coated in dog hair and had the middle seat removed so that I could lay on the carpet during longer trips. If I didn’t look out the windows I could pretend that I was in a moving room. My dad never questioned this desire and had happily dumped the row years prior. He and I were not "seatbelt people" anyways. New cars and their lousy beeps have stripped this preference from our kind.

Driving due north only to land in the armpit of Chetek bummed me out. If we kept on rolling towards Canada we could go to Lake Superior, my favorite summer spot, where you can see clear 60-feet down and swallow the water if you so choose. Our arrival in Chetek, rather, was cued by the abrupt proliferation of unnecessarily long driveways and "wood for sale" signs. Every house in the area had a flagpole fit for some kind of state department and a thousand wiry messages about our troops. I myself didn’t know any active military men. "The troops" was a tidy abstraction that kept people from asking too many questions. You either supported them or you didn’t, I guessed. Throughout the hour ride up my mother badgered me about my lukewarm attitude towards the Hansen’s; she didn’t see why I couldn’t be nice for one day.

"Why can’t you be nice for one day?"

I told her I was nice to people who earned it.

"I’m nice to people who earn it!"

I figured that the Hansen’s deserved a taste of their own reticent medicine, and I was happy to give it to them in the form of adolescent hostility. They weren’t even immediate family, not by any stretch. These reunions were a tenuous hodge-podge of locals, people who basically lived within a 100-mile radius of the lake. Our most recent common ancestor may as well be Ghengis Khan, I thought, once again envisioning my great aunts and their moth ball auras. I knew my mother had herself hated these people as a child, and her newfound amnesia paired with a last minute sense of duty that my dad and I saw straight through. In fact, my dad was the only one who authentically got along with the Hansen clan, even if it was in a sociological capacity. He got a kick out of their fucked up foods and emotional shortcomings. (In an exemplary Christmas celebration, he was the sole dinner attendee who finished his plate of the Nordic fish jello known as *lutefisk*.) The Serb in him felt like he was at a zoo, and the father in him felt proud of his acerbic daughter idling there, so clearly the product of *his* genetic contributions.

As we turned onto the long dirt road that led to the Salvation Park cabins, the smell of sulfur and cheap fertilizer seeped into the car. *This is basically Chernobyl,* I considered, dramatically, though the plot of land did objectively look bereaved. The grounds hit my soul every year like a poorly maintained memorial, to what I didn’t know, but the marks of disaster, death, and disuse were omnipresent. Felled trees dotted the forest with moss-covered axes resting on their stumps. Juiced up on chemicals, the overactive earth swallowed acts of human intervention in every direction. I was unsettled by such futile landscaping efforts and quietly spoke to myself about this while my dad looked for a spot to park in the lot. By the time we pulled up it was close to full with practical, unflashy vehicles: Hyundai Sonatas, Kia Sorentos, and Ford Foci in particular huddled together like nervous, milquetoast children. The most conspicuous vehicle in the lot was a Honda Element, a model that possessed my dad with visions of a revolutionized family dynamic.

"Now that’s a goddamn car," he said, walking up to the comically geometric SUV. "What have I been saying about this car? I’m going to win the lottery next week and get one of these. Hook a pop-up tent camper to the back of that and you can go anywhere, we’d never have to stay in a motel again."

"When do we ever stay in motels?" I asked. Our family, like most midwestern stock, rarely flew and on multi-day road trips dad drove through the night.

"Well we don’t but with the Element we wouldn’t even have to think about it."

While he and I litigated a hypothetical future, my mother, eternally tardy, fiddled with her purse in the front seat, re-folding her hankie and making sure she had enough soy-free soy sauce and sunscreen for the day’s activities. Finally getting up to go, she murmured an esoteric comment about the weather and signaled for me to help carry her pot of gazpacho. There was about a 2% chance that any of her relatives would eat this. In bringing a dish she knew they wouldn’t enjoy, she was participating in some kind of experiment in confirmation bias. This was of course passive aggressive, her bread and butter, however, that style of conflict was something she had plainly inherited from the same people she was about to punk. I loved to unwind this mire of quiet revenge and subterfuge, it was so alien to my own mode of confrontation, yet so essential to Hansen family politics.

I eventually took the lead and started walking to the park’s mess hall to drop off the food and begin the merry-go-round of stop-and-chats. The first person I caught sight of was my mom’s cousin Gary, a terrible omen. Gary had a Boss Tweed belly that he chose to emphasize with atrociously tight, grey t-shirts and belts pulled so snug I thought he’d explode. He wore shoes and cargo shorts from wholesale grocery stores and saw it fit to pull my ponytail every time I saw him. On the one occasion I encountered him with my hair down he gathered it himself, thinking it best to stick to the routine he conceived as ours. I didn’t want to have any kind of routine with cousin Gary. To top it off his face was blighted by psoriasis, a condition needlessly spotlit in contrast by a jet black mustache—that thing could clean a grill.

"So-feeeeeee-a," he said torturously, reaching for my hair. I let him have a yank or two.

"Hello Gary," I said, looking around hoping my parents would catch up. "Where are the girls?"

"They’re by the pool already. Did you bring your swimsuit?"

*Wouldn’t you like to know, *I thought but just nodded. The girls in question were Gary’s three "daughters." A handful of years ago, he and his wife adopted them in Atlanta as full-blown teenagers. They brought the girls back to the Wisconsin Dells, a chlorinated shithole if there ever was one, and enrolled them in private schools that taught intelligent design. I thought the whole arrangement reeked to high heavens of Gary’s own "intelligent design." Whether it had to do with taxes or something more deviant I didn’t know, but even as a middle schooler I could tell there was something fishy about the adoption. The girls all jokingly referred to it as the "abduction" which made me laugh though it strikes me at the moment as deeply unfunny. When I saw the film *Dogtooth *years later in high school, images of Gary’s family unexpectedly visited my mind. As the adult daughters fooled around in their father’s pool on-screen, I thought of Gary’s poor girls swimming laps whenever I saw them, desperately simulating something like freedom. To this day domestic bodies of water connote little for me beyond familial perversion—sexual and financial.

"Honey that thing is heavy, keep moving," my mother interjected, timidly approaching her older cousin. Neither of my parents were big fans of Gary and for this I was grateful. They made brief business of saying "hello," courtesy of my dad’s fine-tuned ability to never completely stop walking. This trait drove me nuts as a kid, I thought it was rude. I know now that it’s totally brilliant and have adopted the technique for my own purposes.

The mess hall sat near the lake, unassuming in its dark brown paint and ranch-style layout. A pair of screen doors marked the entrance where comings and goings were made known by a springy wood slap. Bare-legged children with see-through skin circled the building playing sheltered-kid games. Jacks, cards, Yahtzee. My brain shutdown like a computer when these distant cousins tried to explain their contests. I was plenty social, but my interests were prematurely horny and unfit for such a lawful scene. I primarily liked to loiter with my friends until something bad happened. Before one of these homeschooled cranks could corner me, I thankfully spotted my third cousin Anna and her brother Al. They were from Chicago and half-Italian, meaning funny. Our dads and the three of us were the only people in sight without a cock and bull "sun poisoning" story.

"Hey sweetie!" Anna hollered, approaching me with her new boobs and vacation braids. She’d been wearing halter tops sans tits for ages and I was truly happy to see her filling one out finally. Anna was about to be a freshman, she had earned it.

"Someone normal!" I joked, gesturing with my head for her to follow me. "I have to drop off this retarded soup somewhere."

We broke off from my parents and went inside. Hobbling down three carpeted steps to the main room facing Chetek, I paused briefly to observe the cliques of stiff-limbed retirees, supposedly my elders, pace the buffet area, perusing the fare silently as though at an art gallery. Somnambulant nods betrayed their most vivid concerns in life: hunger and patience. I created a small space for my body to squeeze through and took a moment to scan the offering myself. By and large I already knew what I would be up against for the next eight hours, digestively speaking. Most grotesque was always the tray of hors d'oeuvres known to many as "Wisconsin sushi": a snickerdoodle-like roll-up of pickles, ham, and cream cheese. Fully deranged. I set down the gazpacho (shockingly the plastic table didn’t buckle), snagged a piece of *lefse* (simple and sublime), and went out the back door behind Anna (staring covetously at her emerald booty shorts the whole way).

Anna’s grandpa Ben, my grandmother’s sister’s husband, intercepted us en route to the pool, eager, I was sure, to show off his latest duck sculptures. This was his great passion. He photographed birds in the pond behind his cabin and carved out their likeness from walnut. The old guy even painted them, they were pretty good! To this day I have some respect for him.

"Don’t you two make the prettiest pair in Chetek," Bill beamed, ensnaring us both in an airless hug.

"Not much competition," I accurately observed, causing Ben to smirk as he stepped back.

"That’s not very nice Sofia!" he "scolded," visibly entertained by my little attitude.

"I guess not."

Hours later, a certain incoherence had picked up around Salvation Park. It was subtle at the start.

I first took note as I pulled myself out of the pool, my skin all pruned and light pink. I grabbed a towel off the ladder’s railing and became aware that nearly everyone on the deck had passed out. It had been a long day in the sun, but this was mighty uncharacteristic for a group of adults whose work ethic Max Weber would have gladly studied. With the exception of one or two light beers they were practically teetotalers.

I fetched my bag from the cement and went to sit down on the edge of the shallow-end with my book, I think it was some YA emo dreck about self-harm. I read for a little, maybe 30, 40 minutes, until I realized how starving I was. As though they could hear my need, the sleeping relatives began to stir. In the midst of them I saw Ben. Reclined on his pool chair with ham in his lap like some drunken Silenus, he was slowly and methodically eating the butts of cigars from an ashtray. He smiled at me, teeth covered in charcoal.

It was suddenly cold.

I badly wanted my dad, but he’d left the reunion early to catch my brother’s soccer game. In his absence disquiet set in, blunting my perception and making my ears ring. There seemed to be an hourglass inside me, depositing sand in the far reaches of my limbs, making them heavy. My brain pushed on my skull like a baby, trying either to get out or tell me something. I threw on a hoodie with some basketball shorts. I needed to find my mother.

I left the pool area and made my way towards the overnight cabins nestled at the western edge of the park. Jogging the wooded perimeter, I scanned the grounds as best I could. Noisy birds and frogs kept my agitation at a fixed buzz. Hearing a twig snap,  I stopped and zeroed in on my great aunt Dierdre: crouched like an animal and swaying. She was a rigid woman, a closeted dyke I’d been told. In her sixties, she had married some truck-driving oaf and the pair made a late life together in financial ruin, senselessly upgrading trailer homes every five years. Dierdre was always mean to me. To her I was as profligate as a movie star blonde just for wanting to take ballet. My mother said that she didn’t like little girls and had acted the same way towards her as a kid, and here before me was that same callous lady, reason dethroned, chucking herself about like Goody Proctor dancing with the devil. She usually wore western shirts shoved into stiff Wranglers and faded leather belts, really macho ones about four fingers wide with buckles bigger than my fists. Now she was ass naked with cream cheese on her face and a towel around her neck. She refused to register my voice. I knew I should give her a hand but my spirit that day was petty. Diedre was normally so impervious to pleasures of the mind, perhaps I was doing her a favor. I backed away from the forest, until I hit the open field.

It was green all over.

At least it felt that way. I swear I saw the color shed from the trees, filling the air like hookah smoke. The mossy rocks that flanked each cabin seemed to pulse rhythmically, ridding themselves of some prehistoric toxicity. The environment and the people in it were betraying each other, like some moralizing Edward Abbey story, I thought. Maybe it was just the weather, or maybe I was just hungry.

I continued to dart around and yell my mother’s name. Peeking inside an old stave church near the mess hall, I found my eldest great uncle instead. Walter had thrown himself off of his expensive wheelchair and was army crawling, dragging his distended legs along the chapel aisle by slow degrees. His proportions were horrifying. Bits of pickle stuck to the floor behind him in a ribbon of opalescent entrails.

"Walter?" I stammered. He looked insane. "Should I get some help?"

The fat man stared through me with vague, regardless eyes, blushing strangely like a schoolboy. His veins bulged and I pitied him. A Norwegian slug on Norwegian wood. With his pants sagging like the markets he watched so closely, I left him there, gesturing the Orthodox sign of the cross on my way out.

When I got to the mess hall’s main room I made my way over to the buffet table, thinking that I might grab more *lefse *to sustain my search. Not a drop of mother’s gazpacho had been consumed. Next to it, the tray of Wisconsin sushi was empty. Someone was approaching. I spun around with caution, terrified of which delirious relative I might face.

It was mother. Her linen shift was the only clean fabric in sight. A light above us flickered and she glared at me, taciturn as a tenured principal. Pointing to the vacant tray, her unnaturally skinny arm tensed with emphasis.

"Tell me right now did you eat any of that crap?"

"No ma’am," I assured her. Gun to my head I wouldn’t have touched that shit, she had trained me well. I was her orthorexic soldier.

"No one would be sick if they had eaten my gazpacho," she ruled, dropping her arm. Tension quelled for a beat and I grabbed her hand.

All around us, sweat-soaked Hansen’s shifted languidly between couches, melting down from their gassy illnesses. Tracks of peat streaked the linoleum and clustered near cracks and corners. We ran out the back door. It had begun to rain and Chetek’s foul-smelling waters were steadily closing in on the mess hall. On the makeshift shore I waved wildly for one of the rednecks out there to pick us up. My feet were doused in algae and mud and I was chilled to the bone but determined. I didn’t care that we looked like a couple *X-Files *victims, I had made up my mind: it was the health nuts’ turn to surrender.

A speedboat in the middle distance clocked us (more likely my mother, a very elegant woman) and beelined our way. I squinted to make out the boat’s name. Airbrushed on the side was the phrase "Any Given Sunday" in black-and-blue cursive lettering. It was in fact a Sunday. A sexy teenage boy wearing six or seven titanium bracelets and white-rimmed shades sat cockily at the helm. The shirtless captain, unmistakably the boy’s dad, let the engine tick over. Drifting with the waves, I could hear them yell over the motor’s rattle.

"You ladies want a lift?"

My mother drank three Coronas that day. They’re randomly gluten-free. I even got my baseball player and sat on that pitcher’s lap until my butt hurt. Between drinks he lit Roman candles into the dull, diseased sky. I felt framed in my young aloofness, fastened in place by the affection of strangers. Rendering their services to women, they too were pleased with themselves. The dad looked so sincere standing there in his puddle of seaweed and sand, I decided to call him Rick the Skipper. We were the only beings that day undiffused by hammy pinwheels and Chetek’s miasma of stink.

As these things go, Rick the Skipper got blasted. To the nth degree. Tequila, vodka, at least six Bud heavies. When the rain cleared up, he convinced mother and I to go tubing with an unadorned "are you chicken?" threat. Putting the boat in neutral, he stumbled over to the stern and reeled in the rope hand-over-hand until his tube was close enough for us to climb on. I stupidly asked for a couple life jackets and he looked at me like I was a census collector.

"Don’t have none of those around here," he promised.

I inched onto the bright red disc and my mother followed. We awkwardly arranged ourselves and gave Rick a nod. He threw the boat in drive. Chetek’s surface was as green as roulette table felt—our tube glided like a chip between hands. We looked at each other and burst out laughing. Her family was still rotting on the shore. We had almost forgotten. I watched her breathe freely for the first time since she was young, or so I imagined. She looked proud of me for some hardwired, maternal reason. We were happy.

Without warning, Rick the Skip throttled his boat to the right, swinging us with abandon towards the thick wake of another rig. I screamed. We hit the tangled crest and went flying.

In the air all went quiet. I cocked my head and watched my mother tumble like a little girl, suspended upside down in the mist, prisms tattooing her skin. I could see she was still laughing.

&nbsp;

&nbsp;

&nbsp;

***Title and epigraph from Lorine Niedecker’s "Paean to Place," written between 1968-1970 on Black Hawk Island in southern Wisconsin.**

And the place was water

I couldn't work for the Lonely Planet, I knew that much. For starters, the name made no sense to me and I didn't care to find a way in which it would. I supposed it was a reference, Jacques Cousteau or Ponce de Leon could have said *It's a lonely planet!* in a journal while writing at sea or something like that and then the phrase took off, but references are only useful if you get them right away. Looking up a reference is pathetic, like doing 23andMe—it's better to feel the answers in your bones. One of the clowns running for Branch Manager (BM) of the country recently got in trouble for her own DNA results, I mean, she never should have done the test, identity lives in the shadows of myth, why prick a finger unless you have diabetes or need to do blood brothers with a cousin? Don't get me wrong, I don't like this potential BM, she reminds me of my preschool teacher who accidentally murdered all of the baby chicks our class was raising by turning up the incubator too high (foolish, utterly), but I don't think our BMs should be running around proving weird shit and doing tests like that. I really don't.

&nbsp;

If I could find a job maybe my headache from yesterday would go away. The interview with Lonely Planet was pure shit, I kept bringing up this picture

&nbsp;

![image1](/assets/images/issues/issue1/posts/SofiaMajstorovic-Fearless/1.png)

&nbsp;

and repeating the male founder's name, over and over again, to his face: *Tony Wheeler, Tony Wheeler...Tony....Wheeler*. I couldn't stop, it was one of those tics, I mean when someone's got a really good name, I mean really good, like Tony Wheeler or

                Hella Jongerius
                               I. M. Pei
                                                Rem Koolhaas
                                                                Walter Gropius
                                                                                Eero Saarinen

&nbsp;

I just can't get enough. Wheeler was dressed like ass and visiting New York for the weekend from Melbourne. We were in the West Village having a latté on top of a gay bar that had become a monument, then a coffee shop, then a coffee shop monument. He had the waddle of someone who doesn't understand the concept of home and said "Melbourne" in the worst way possible, you wouldn't believe it, *MEHL-LA-BOW-NUH*, a place he described as *a livable wine city* before bullishly switching gears to blab about the process behind the Lonely Planet's first guide book, *Across Asia on the Cheap*, co-written in 1973 with his *stunning Irish wife*, Maureen. When he finally exited memory lane I looked him dead in the eye and said *No sooner does man discover intelligence than he tries to involve it in his own stupidity*. He thanked me for my time and declared the interview over. That quote's Cousteau. That one's definitely Cousteau.

&nbsp;

*It's for the best* I told my mom on the phone afterwards. She said I should treat interviews like sampler platters, *sometimes you need to order one to figure out what you don't want*, and I told her I understood. Tony Wheeler was the pig anus calamari—not for me, not this meal.

&nbsp;

It was February and brutal outside. I had to scooter home to Chinatown so I was pissed off. The sky was acting like the cement and I hated using labor-saving devices to travel, but I was still enslaved to a free trial with SCOOTLE; if they found out I was walking during the gratis period I could get arrested. There were some real cretinous fucks at SCOOTLE.

&nbsp;

Mounting my SCOOTLE, I also told myself the failure of the meeting was for the best, but I knew it wasn't. These days I was dead from the neck up everytime I entered an interview and it wasn't a joke anymore—I needed to land something soon.

---

The next morning I was woken up by a shrieking neighbor, wishing life was like this

&nbsp;

![image3](/assets/images/issues/issue1/posts/SofiaMajstorovic-Fearless/2.png)

&nbsp;

or this

&nbsp;

![image3](/assets/images/issues/issue1/posts/SofiaMajstorovic-Fearless/3.png)

&nbsp;

but it was definitely more like this

&nbsp;

![image4](/assets/images/issues/issue1/posts/SofiaMajstorovic-Fearless/4.png)

&nbsp;

How do people do it? Five of my six friends had girlfriends and each of them a job. I was jealous of them all but refused to admit it and instead texted stuff like *how's jail?* and *enjoy your pottery class lol* when they had date nights planned. The last time we all went out, I was asked to go home before midnight because I told Garrett's infernal girlfriend that natural wine was an illusion. She started going to great pains to explain "skin contact" and I had downed just enough poison to say *when's the last time you gave Garrett skin contact* and she understandably lost her shit. Garrett told me to go to bed; I SCOOTLE'd home. Garrett hasn't called me since.

&nbsp;

I sneezed three times, molted my sweaty sheets, and surfaced from my bedroom groggy and wan. My bathroom-kitchen smelled like wedding soup again and I remembered that I ran out of coffee a day earlier. Before I could get my coat on to go buy beans from BEAN, the new spot across the street, my phone rang and it was my mom whom I always answer on the first try. *You won't believe who I saw last night* she said. I asked who and she said *your old hockey buddy Kyle McCracken*, a dude the girls called "Stallion" in high school. The last time I saw him was about a year ago when he dumped himself right next to me at this dive bar where I grew up in Altoona. Kyle was a specimen back in the day, 6'6" and perennially tan from his family's timeshare in the Caymans. His build was busted now from boozing too much, but his face still held the vague charisma and good-cop authority of a vice-principal. Altoona's a small place, the kind of town with jerks that think the state of a lawn reflects the homeowner's spiritual integrity. And if your brothers play hockey you really ought to as well unless you want your dad to kill himself or something. Real predestination crap if you ask me. Anyways, you can't go anywhere in Altoona without running into everybody, so I think I ordered a Leinie's and some beer cheese soup from Tanner, the owner's son, and I remember getting out my book—this depressing memoir by Mary McLane. She spends about 200 pages just disemboweling Butte, Montana, which isn't so bad a place if you know what to look for. There was this one line that really stuck with me, still does, where McLane announces *I have in me the germ of every crime*. I loved that. It's a bit childish but I even wrote it underneath the bill of my Packers hat, and I wear that thing a lot. It smells like ass. For all the callous stuff I say about the goings on back home, our football team can play, I mean really play, and those boys are class acts especially when you consider the athletes we're dealing with across the border, not only west of us but to the south too. Anyways, Kyle had initiated with *Well isn't this a blast from the past* and I wasn't in the mood so I just went ahead and asked if he was still putting tobacco between his toes. You see the whole hockey team used to cut up their feet and put chew in their skates to keep a buzz going on the ice. *I'm actually working at Royal Credit Union, you dickhead* and he meant this to impress me on some level, I recall that really bummed me out, so I had to adjust my tempo. *That's cool, Kyle. Was just giving you shit* I cleared up and took a spoonful of my soup, which is basically just hot, salty Velveeta if you've never tried beer cheese soup before. He said *You would be reading at a bar* and I told him he would be drinking at a bar. *Well I'm off Tuesdays and it's dollar pitchers*. I remember launching into some kind of diatribe about the dignity of affordable living in Wisconsin compared to New York and Kyle started ignoring me, coolly, moving his attention to the front of the bar where a former gymnast had walked in. Her name was Allie Kristen and her knees were as hyperextended as the day we graduated. Fortunately, her pecs had finally turned to tits. I did not like the way gymnasts' joints bent the wrong way, especially in public, it made me sick. They all had these bone diseases with German names by the time they were fourteen or fifteen so you almost felt bad for them. It made my beer cheese soup lose it charm, it's one of four foods that get cold on you quick from my experience. Chai tea lattes, sautéed mushrooms, and scrambled eggs are the other three. I asked for the check, paid, peed, fist bumped Kyle, then Tanner, and left. Allie didn't fist bump me but blew a kiss without puckering, moving only her hand toward her mouth and away again like a *thank you* in sign language. I wasn't too mad because she never was one for major emotions, even her gymnastics coach, whom she loved and had sex with I think, had to slather Vaseline on her teeth to keep her smiling during meets. So that was the last time I saw old Kyle. *Lucky you mom* I replied, and told her I couldn't talk at the moment. *Okay sweetie pie, keep on keeping on...*

&nbsp;

It was past noon. My apartment hovered above a store called The Golden Shower that sold bathroom appliances and I had to walk through the place every time I left the house. The proprietor, Ken, wore a chubby face with an excellent sense of humor and always said stuff like *The king emerge!* when I walked past him in the mornings. I liked Ken, he knew a lot about porcelain and shower heads and that kind of toilet and sink thing. My dad never taught me any of that.

&nbsp;

Outside the wind was coming off the East River making it about another twenty degrees colder than the existing zero. I hustled over to BEAN and was pleased to see the news on, a rare pleasure as domestic usage of cable had been banned last August. Manhattanites were strong-armed into patronizing businesses to watch cable news; streaming services now only hosted one network with godawful pundits, "Lizz n' Justin," these totally zestless losers whom I privately referred to as "Jizz n Lustin" or, more abstractly, "Jizz Eruption." On the television, the current BM was discussing his most recent plan for New York, Make the West Village Sexy Again, which would force NYU to accept only the children of actors and models. The screen flashed

&nbsp;

"The West Village used to be sexy and now it's no fun. Not a single g-string in sight. No frills, no seduction, just BORING. Changing things after a perfect conversation with the reasonable NYU dean."

&nbsp;

and then

&nbsp;

**STUDENT INTERVIEW: SON OF BOBBY CANNAVALE MAKES STATEMENT**

"The area around NYU was expensive in a cool way when I was growing up, but now things have gotten expensive in a bad way, not hot at all. I can't explain it, but I want to see more of my parents' friends' kids and fewer randos when I go to the library to drink. Thank you to our BM for understanding this."

&nbsp;

Cannavale's son was incredibly handsome which made what he was saying kind of digestible. It probably would be nice to blackout and read *Heart of Darkness* with good-looking classmates. NYU was kind of shit anyways so I decided I didn't care. Let the celebrity children be. I picked up my beans and made a pact with myself as I crossed the street: only one game of Fortnite before applying to more jobs.

&nbsp;

Upstairs, I got situated with my PC and fresh-brewed joe. The apartment now smelled like wedding soup and coffee, which was discretely more disgusting than it smelled before. It didn't matter; no one came up here anymore except for myself and sometimes Ken to recommend movies. I hadn't slept with anyone in about a year, not since my ex left me for someone in Critical Chain Project Management at SCOOTLE. *Those are just words strung together* I had told her as she picked up the last of her things. *You're a monster* she responded, *enjoy your games*.

&nbsp;

I was settling into some building warm-ups when an email notification lit up the corner of my monitor: *New Message, Benji Hartman*. It took me a second to place the name. I repeated it out loud and ere long recalled it was the guy I had interviewed with weeks ago for the Editor-in-Chief position at the *Fearless Flyer*, Trader Joe's circular. I hadn't completely bombed that meeting, Benji was also from the Midwest so we were able to connect over the Minneapolis hardcore scene, but I never heard anything back. I paused my game and opened the message.

&nbsp;

*Dear \[redacted\],*

&nbsp;

*I'm so sorry for the delay. There was an outbreak of salmonella caused by our Organic Coleslaw Kit that did not leave us in a good position the last couple weeks. I don't want to lie to you, our first choice candidate, a real enterprising writer and strict thinker named Teddy, bailed. So you are our second choice. Don't focus on that. I think you could be great.*

&nbsp;

*Can you come by our LES location this afternoon around 3 pm to get the ball rolling? The Fearless Flyer needs a new image, can you be that person?*

&nbsp;

*As warm as can be,*

&nbsp;

*Benji*

&nbsp;

*Vision Consultant*

*The Fearless Flyer*

*Benjihartmanvibes.com*

&nbsp;

I was shocked, offended, confused, curious, and replied that I could be there at 3:00.

---

I rolled up to Trader's a few hours later, maddened by my journey's psychological toll. Every fifth ride with SCOOTLE, you were required to listen to a trip-long promotion for their pioneering ergonomic stance, throughout which the app strobed this soul-stirring image

&nbsp;

![image5](/assets/images/issues/issue1/posts/SofiaMajstorovic-Fearless/5.png)

&nbsp;

across your helmet's plastic shield. It was impossible to determine how many accidents this had generated, SCOOTLE is excellent at burying bodies. I alone had killed two pigeons because of that Quasimodo and her optical insurgencies. I dismounted and looked down at my shitty henley, its dizzying pattern of vaguely Navajo signifiers, and wondered how I chose such a thing, how I chose anything. I began to question my motives for taking this job at all. The *Fearless Flyer* was an elevated coupon book with recipe suggestions done in the tradition of home-ec instruction, the core principles being ease, efficiency, and grace. A year ago I was writing shit I actually knew about for SHAWKER and talking about marriage with my ex. SHAWKER got absorbed by the BM's son's friend's uncle and his media conglomerate last April and my ex could be dead for all I knew. I had to keep my cynicism at bay, I didn't want to pull another Wheeler. No Cousteau quotes, no bullshit. I zipped up my fly and entered the store.

&nbsp;

When I got off the elevator, I quickly realized I didn't know exactly where I was going. Benji and I had met our first time at BEAN. I crept up to the customer service zone, manned by three Hawaiian shirted helpers, and asked where the *Fearless Flyer* office was. *We SO get your confusion* the tallest of the three said, *It's in the basement*. I joked that they looked ready for a Jimmy Buffet concert, but the jab was somehow too adjacent. *How do you figure!* the youngest employee practically screamed, her septum piercing doing a complete 360°. These people were nuts. How could you wear a Hawaiian shirt every day yet not know about Parrotheads? The tall helper insisted on accompanying me downstairs and I was too out of my element to argue.

&nbsp;

The *Fearless Flyer* headquarters turned out to be one windowless room reminiscent of the offices assigned to nascent, but obviously sinister investigations on TV shows about the FBI. Three desks were arranged in the center of the room, a hackneyed rendition of the coworking pod, and one dumpster loomed in the far corner. Benji got up from his desk and strode toward me, while the other staff member, presumably one of my writers-to-be, remained pecking at her computer. *How do you do good sir!* Benji asked, approaching me hand outstretched, raising his eyebrows up-and-down in a remarkably imprecise impersonation of some sort of old-timey actor. His hair was piled on top of his head, gauges poking out on either side, and I thought to myself that he was a pretty handsome guy despite the insane vibe. He apologized for the offices and we flipped through the basic geography of the space, the expectations of the position, and the Trader Joe's way of life. Having done editorial work in the past, there was little need to dig too deep into logistics, and so we spent most of the afternoon talking about my new ideas for the publication. He seemed open to shaking up the branded content and recipes with more essayistic food writing, and I was relieved to find that he was someone who could be persuaded easily by a thoughtful proposal. Less settling was the third employee who hadn't yet been introduced. She hardly moved and used her long, black hair to create a parasol around herself and her screen, furtive and cooky, Allison Reynolds style.

&nbsp;

Apart from her, the most urgent snag was Benji's impending absence the following day. *You have literally one day to get the February issue done* he admitted anxiously. He was leaving early that very evening for a silent day retreat in Montreal. *I need this, I trust you* he lobbed rather prematurely. It was true, I could handle the administrative side, each issue of the flyer used the same template, and all of the promotional pieces had already been written and uploaded. I had two slots to fill, but Benji wouldn't be available for final approval. The issue had to be sent to print by the end of the next day, and the words would be on flyers, ready for distribution, the morning after that. *Kind of thrilling, no?* I obligatorily agreed that a tight turnaround could be a rush, and Benji beamed with performative faith. *I'm off!* On his way out, he turned momentarily, walking backwards, flushed with the shame of someone with something better to do. *I never introduced you to Megan! Megan, come! You'll have to do it yourselves, I'm sorry* he feigned and got on the elevator. *And don't forget your Hawaiian shirt!*

&nbsp;

Megan rose from her desk slowly, exaggeratedly, and I saw that I'd misjudged her look entirely. Under the skirt that hid her bottom half when seated, were comely, excessively pale legs atop a pair of metallic Pleasers. She wore a rose-patterned button down, a daring interrogation of the Hawaiin shirt genre, with a tightly pulled, black bustier peeking out beneath. Her every feature was caricatured; I felt my gaze darting between them, unable to choose the centerpiece. Drawing closer she rolled her eyes, offering a French manicure to...shake? Kiss? I was hurtling toward a weird remark when she saved the day. *Benji is such a tool sometimes. I'm Megan*. I gathered my boyish thoughts, my braindead impulses, and strung together a pleasant version of myself to submit.

&nbsp;

It was nearly time to go. Before we parted ways, Megan told me she was recently struck by a sign on a telephone pole in her neighborhood, showing me this photograph of it

&nbsp;

![image6](/assets/images/issues/issue1/posts/SofiaMajstorovic-Fearless/6.png)

&nbsp;

to which I responded *That's an interesting theory*. I asked her what she made of it. *It's not a theory* she replied, *You should trust me*.

&nbsp;

I told her I did and that I'd see her tomorrow.

---

The next morning, I flew around the house trying to piece together something reasonable to wear. It was useless. I concluded that I owned nothing, a sentiment I remember my ex repeating every weekend before we attended dinners and parties. Luckily, I could focus on the bottom-half, as my Hawaiian shirt had arrived that morning courtesy of SCOOTLE's overnight delivery service. The teen that fulfilled my order was yawning when I opened my door. I handed him a five-dollar bill and he told me it was against SCOOTLE contract to collect tips. *So wack* I offered in its place.

&nbsp;

Descending into the *Fearless Flyer* basement, I mulled over Benji's truancy, wondered why he saw me fit to hold the reality of this world in my hands. The day had invented a plan for me but I was not yet willing to accept it. I felt acutely then that a study had been designed for me to blindly enter as variable: as capuchin, prisoner. It was better to be aware of the test than not, I concluded, accumulating some semblance of oversight by way of paranoia. Elevators had this effect on me. I got off and walked to my desk.

&nbsp;

Megan had beat me to the office. Sitting in a flattering ankle cross, she seemed to be enjoying herself too much on the computer to be working on anything *Flyer*-related. She let out a big snort, took a swig of coffee, and I asked what was so funny—a stupid in. *Okay narc* she joked, thumbing a tray of Trader Joe's milk rolls with newly painted nails, now Ferrari red and filed into points. The rolls looked like yellow-fever victims spoiling under the prods of a sadistic new nurse. I swatted her hand to stop. *Don't play with your food*. The familiarity I intuited in her name-calling was making me bold. She pulled back her hand. *Bossy* she said with a wink, throwing her hair into a loose bun. I had read in some pick-up artist book, a joke, sort of, that women fiddling with their hair signaled emotional vulnerability. Following Tucker Max, it was time to neg Megan, to criticize her strategically, but something about her cracked this model. Her forceful expressions, amplified by cartoonish dermal fillers, suggested a will too pliant to insult into affection. I wasn't good at it anyways.

&nbsp;

By early afternoon I had finished writing the first of the two submissions for the February *Flyer*. I landed on an op-ed about Valentine's Day and its austere cuisine, the nearly punitive nature of its non-indulgent indulgence. I argued that candy hearts were at best tortured Altoids, and chocolate boxes a dangerous guessing game of gooey entrails. I wondered on the page who could possibly be enjoying these unpalatable candies, and proposed that the holiday's culinary tradition undergo a radical transformation. I asked Megan to proofread it.

&nbsp;

*I like it* she said after a round of line edits. I could tell she was holding something back. *No seriously, it's nice* she doubled down. I pressed for an honest reaction. *It's just* she hesitated, *don't you think people are sick of reading about food?* I agreed, but didn't think Trader Joe's *Fearless Flyer* was necessarily the right content platform to disrupt. *Think about it,* she continued, *the* Flyer *is one of the last physical publications in New York, sure it's lame as shit, but I, I don't know. I have so many ideas for this stupid place*. I wanted to hear about them; I suggested lunch. *Sure* she agreed, *there's an Italian spot down the block*. I followed her lead out the basement's emergency exit and into the bright, bitter day.

&nbsp;

We took a three hour lunch. It was completely inappropriate. Megan spoke fluent Italian, a language she taught herself in order to read *The Name of the Rose* in its native tongue, and ordered three main courses for us to share: gnocchi with clams, spinach and ricotta ravioli, and a caper capellini. She believed deeply in the intertextuality of all words and references and stories, and said so crazily between spoonfuls of sauce and sips of soda. I told her I understood, had also read Eco and Borges, that I loved those guys, but she said *reading them in English is pointless*, so I hung back, yielding to her vocalized reverie. She told me about her poetry, a practice she had gotten into after experiencing a certain psychic death, I guess, from concurrently seeing so many wealthy men—guys who happily bankrolled her in return for what sounded like very little effort. She had worked part-time at the *Flyer* throughout to maintain a writing credit on her resumé. Her big idea for Trader Joe's was a kink section called Trader Hoes. *It could be massive* she insisted, *look at all the freaks in line at that place on any given afternoon, look at the fucking staff*. I couldn't argue. There was definitely a squirrelly aura to the Trader Joe's consumer. Maybe she was onto something. I asked if she'd show me some poems and she got out her bedazzled iPhone, pulled up the Notes app, nails clicking appealingly, and handed it over. I scrolled through a few pieces, lurid but undeniably eye-catching, and told her she should email me the one called *THIGHBROW*. I didn't want to fawn. *It has a strong motor* I cleared up, immediately embarrassed by my long gone knack for workshop language. *Oh no shit! I recently performed that one at a stripclub in Midtown.* She took her phone back and sent the poem to my work email.

&nbsp;

It was dark out when we left the restaurant. Stopped at a light and looking at traffic, I felt the night sky to be awake in its own way, lines of cars seeming to dodge its advance rather than the other, usual way around. I told Megan that I never felt the Butterfly Effect anywhere so acutely as in New York, where the mistake of a person miles away could haunt the trajectory of your entire day. *Oh sick, you smoke weed?* she joked in response.

&nbsp;

Arriving back at our pods, I told her I appreciated her edits and that she could take off an hour early if she'd like, I could handle the final slot on my own. She thanked me. *I'm off on Fridays, let me know how things go with Benji tomorrow*. She handed me her number and asked what neighborhood I lived in. I told her my apartment was across from BEAN in Chinatown. *Cool* she virtually breathed, *Hope to see you around this weekend*. I contained my delirium.

&nbsp;

Beating with adrenaline, a pressure I noticed in that moment had become alien to my soft, shitty body, I pulled up the *Fearless Flyer* template, uploaded Megan's poem and pressed send. I repeated to myself: *You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star*. Nietzche said that I think.

---

Friday morning I walked into the store, not quite triumphant but not altogether humiliated: a small feat for me on any given day. Through the windows outside, I had seen a crowd gathering by the registers. It felt good to know that the commotion might have something to do with me.

&nbsp;

*May I read what our good man, he who has just graced us ten minutes late with his presence, thought might be appropriate to put in the *Fearless Flyer*? No no, not *Playboy*, not *Maxim*, but our *Fearless Flyer*: a family publication, a wholesome publication* Benji roared from the helm of his ship, if you will, surrounded by the unswerving crew and dependable mates that constituted the store's colorful staff, gesticulating wildly, summoning the strength he'd need to share Megan's poem aloud. He opened up the paper with unthinkable gravitas, as though leading chautauqua, and drew a deep breath: *Thighbrow*...

&nbsp;

**THIGHBROW**
Megan Michelle Mitchell

&nbsp;

Burrow in them, curl not, your brow and mine
Tangle me up again
  	                              "get me a comb caddy"

&nbsp;

I don't want to grow up
                                 I just want your $$$ daddy

&nbsp;

Keep it real with me, Chief, are you Sad
Can we, I mean me, be here
	        This apartment makes me
	        Want to die
	        Who did this?
  	                                     Where's your Miss?

&nbsp;

I don't want money I want ________
		                 I lied

&nbsp;

Emulsify the fillers, don't mind just bill ‘em
Intermix and coalesce, dot dot, kiss kiss

&nbsp;

Squirt
	        Water	Pee?                   Or jizz
:(

&nbsp;

Hello, I'm dancing up here
Ballet flats weren't in the cards
		               SCORPIO ARIES SAG
	            Where's your fuckin BADGE

&nbsp;

Always kiss me goodnight

&nbsp;

You get Sunday Scaries
	       I get Friday Fright

&nbsp;

I thought it was pretty good. A couple people clapped. I looked up at Benji, shrugged my shoulders, and started to laugh. His glare said *I trusted you*, but his audience-driven charade necessitated a bloated final scene, a "To be, or not to be." Taking center stage once again, Benji activated every inch of his figure to mime zipping his lips and throwing away the key, followed by two rounds of an umpire's "HE'S SAFE" gesture, landing finally, brilliantly, with a stiff arm and trembling pointer finger directed at the store's sliding glass doors.

&nbsp;

I was too ambivalent to retaliate and waited until I got outside to toss my Hawaiian shirt in a garbage can.

---

It was fittingly my final day of the free trial with SCOOTLE. As I parked across from my house, my phone prompted me to leave a mandatory review. *SCOOTLE is freedom* I wrote, *Four Stars and Feeling Nubile*.

&nbsp;

Feeling somewhat dissociated rather, I walked towards home replaying Benji's expansive soliloquy. As I got closer, I saw a tall girl vaping outside. Dressed in a leather skirt and blood red corset, I couldn't believe it: it was Megan. Eyes twinkling knowingly, she had seen the issue. It was all for Megan. She apologized for her pussing lip injection and I said she was perfect. I grabbed her hand, led her through The Golden Shower, and up to my apartment. For the first time in years I felt like myself, like someone with a living sex drive, with untaught predilections and needs. A rare midwinter sun shot through cracks in my walls making Megan look like a deity and I didn't even apologize for my mattress on the ground. As I eased her onto my bed she looked up at me with total candor, an unabashed and earnest abandon like that of an orthodontist praising you for completing simple instructions. *You were fearless for publishing me* she whispered, *my fearless flyer*.

&nbsp;

*We are living in an interminable succession of absurdities imposed by the myopic logic of short-term thinking* I quoted with a smirk as I entered her. She smiled: *I love Cousteau*.

Fearless

Today I poke around your throat
and laugh at jokes you steal.
At night I search for the remote,

amid the couch, our home’s trench coat,
I pat and scrounge, reveal.
Today I choke around your throat

a scarf I found inside my tote.
(Bones, they squeak, then heal.)
At night I search and feel remote,

the more I know, the less I vote
and turn my steering wheel.
Today you spoke around my throat,

hid words I had, hid my gloat.
(Our pillows kiss and squeal.)
That fight and search for our remote

may have sucked my last grace note.
Cross-leggéd, lost checks, loose meals,
some okay coke inside my throat,
*It’s white!* (I lurch for our remote.)

House Poor

###### Prime Rib

&nbsp;

There is room in your stomach

again so you've come to me,

head blooming with greasy ideas

of meat and how it should look.

Of course I know your preferences 

before you do, just as I know your

name before you register mine

(why must I continue to have one?).

This gridlock of tables is my 

little rat maze and you fancy

yourself a scientist of the first degree.

A charred letter of loin could save

this Thursday, you're convinced,

and I'm not unconvinced this is the case

for you, Large Man with Family. A dire

thing, these matters of big foods

and Thursdays. Still, I take myself with 

a grain of salt, the same sort rimming 

your margarita like gutters after

a snowstorm. It rarely snows here.

When it does, your Thursday has 

something in common with mine and

finally there is something to talk about.

&nbsp;

&nbsp;

###### Table 4

&nbsp;

“Yucca fries side of chipotle aioli, table 4.”

&nbsp;

Vinny hands off the plastic bowl to Curtis, who moves it down the line to me. I look at the potato knock-off, inured to its charms. The food here has taken on object status, its smells no longer commune with my autonomic reactions. The bitchy white light of the kitchen furthers such feelings of sterility, the cooks pace in it like nurses. Apron-clad, well-trained. I leave their operating room and re-enter the clubby atmosphere of our bar. A real shock to the system. Every restaurant has to be a party, no one dines in peace anymore. Even breakfast hours have been infiltrated by hungover disc-jockeys and their milk crates of archival treasures. Quiet mornings destroyed. Plates of savory crepes shifting and swelling to the bass, as if to acknowledge the pudgy dancing boys of night to come. Fleetwood Mac has become mimosa music.

&nbsp;

Table 4 is occupied by a wholeheartedly ambivalent duo, expensively done up but hunched over. Undoing the work. I often want to tell pretty young girls to sit up straight. Quasimodo TikTok necks, incapable of responding to me on the first or even second try. Their eventual attention makes me feel even worse, as though I'm distracting them from the real work of research elapsing on their phones. I do not wax poetic on the dignity of small-batch anything, but I can tell you how many plates you and your friend need, and I believe that making eye contact with strangers makes your day more specific. A new type of invisibility emerges, watching them have their food questions answered from reviews when I am standing inches away, full of insight, no matter how insipid. 

&nbsp;

&nbsp;

###### Girl Smooth

&nbsp;

It's me against the music. I know I suffer but I don't know why. Taking on the zone, I'm almost there. Lean in for a kiss with a girl-smooth face. It makes a difference. You say you want to lose control. Step outside, here comes the showdown. Take a little piece of my mouth and spit it out. For instance, we could dance all night. Comparing feet, crunk with Britney. Check this out. How have I loved this room every morning? Daylight. Boom-boom. Lick a pencil behind my back. Get on the floor and shake that ass. Heads bob and lean, busted goggles. Syncopated, no need to even touch me. That's also a sin. Yeah. Doubled over with clownish glory. Mennonite purse. Slit the plastic and stir. Don't know where I've lived for a long time. Blow. Breathe. Take over. 

&nbsp;

He's enough, the Israeli DJ. Thank him. No service, short bartender. Call some friends, it's pretty good. Turn where cars are. Bingo. New black lace, internet hair. It's all around, I can feel it now. Move forward. Machinated, let's go. You sort of walk in heels. Expensive pole lessons paying off. Propped cell, little traffic cone. The collected stories of your weekend. Look at her. Practiced sex drive, outrageous. Lost the beat. Didn't have it in the first place. Nobody's going to get the chance to look down on me. Bring the heat, dumb industry. Problems in the corner of course. Underage wishes. It's all forgiven, even fast fashion. I could go places but I won't. Self-care composites, hands clapping in emoji. I can't argue with small offenses. Grab my waist for real, moldy and irrelevant smile. Fade-in. The club is full of butt, you could still come. Political bouncers, reasonable giants. Scene hasn't collapsed yet. Bathroom line, tactful. Go ahead, cut. Compliments from a stall. I sort of do everything. Brave girl. Toilet girl. Sip a sip in that baby tee. Emerge. Last song of the night. No requests, capsule collection. Back-off Grindr grimace. It's all good. Lost your lip gloss but found a bag. Circle of life. Close out the devil's cup, patience for a weak pen. Fucked the signature, no cash ever. Stole your free time, tidal fortune. I can drive the whole group nowhere. Wasted tension, more dreadful laughter. Sometimes I just like to have it all. 

Restaurant Fragments

The profound uncoolness of R.E.M.’s 1994 album *Monster* was placed in sharp relief earlier this year in David Robert Mitchell’s thriller *Under the Silver Lake*, in which the callow, self-styled private eye played by Andrew Garfield invites a much-younger girl to dance to "What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?" It’s Oldies Night below Hollywood Forever and Garfield’s Sam is feeling his age. "I don’t know this song," admits his date, popping a red balloon as if to literally burst his bubble. Their exchange could be a millennial update of Steely Dan’s comically Nabokovian "Hey Nineteen" except that they definitely can dance together. We cut to a fish-eye lens to watch our thirty-something hero peaking to a nameless drug, abjectly and shamelessly pogoing away to Peter Buck’s chunky power chords. It’s more than a feeling when he hears that old song they used to play.

 "I’d studied your cartoons, radio, music, TV, movies, magazines," sings Michael Stipe amidst the stream-of-consciousness wordplay of *Monster's* lead single.  In a movie whose pop cultural signifiers have been obsessively curated, "What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?" pulls double duty as an I-Love-the-90s punchline and also an aural corollary to the protagonist’s paranoiac headspace. Stipe  famously derived the song’s lyrical hook from the mantra of a mentally ill man who physically assaulted CBS anchor Dan Rather on the streets of New York; the assailant was allegedly in search of some grand unified theory to tune into, the frequency of those in the know.  The track’s symbolic utility in a thriller tethered to an unreliable, impulsively violent narrator is readily apparent; the query "what’s the frequency, Kenneth?" is unanswerable, even as it suggests some deeper conspiracy to be untangled, or some subliminal wavelength to hang ten upon.

 Hitting radio in the wake of *Automatic For the People’s* majestic, empathetic anthems, "Kenneth’s" buzz was like a fly in the one-song-heals all ointment R.E.M. had been rubbing all over everybody’s hurts. The second verse quotes Richard Linklater’s hipster-ethnographic classic *Slacker* (1991), observing that "to withdraw in disgust is not the same as apathy." Translation: just because you hate everything doesn’t mean that you don’t care. In lieu of communion, its narrator opts to marinate in his own hallucinatory confusion. "I never understood," he confesses in the final line; "don’t fuck with me." Hold on: was that an F-bomb from America’s most huggable rock star? "Oh no, I know a dirty word," Kurt Cobain snarked three years earlier on "Smells Like Teen Spirit," as if anticipating his future pal’s enfeebled stab at profanity.

*Monster's* uncoolness, then and now, was and is a byproduct of its attempted coolness, an approximation that makes it an outlier in a catalogue mostly unconcerned with such superficialities. R.E.M.’s grand narrative in the 80s had always been a coercion of the mainstream to meet the band on their own oddball terms; even by the time of "Losing My Religion" the foursome was still cultivating a Southern Gothic sensibility (stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but that title is just a little bit of Athens slang for catching feelings). The bleak, gorgeous, death-tinged folk of *Automatic For the People* slotted in nicely alongside Seattle’s various flannel-clad complainers, and was also a natural outgrowth of the more mid-tempo austerity that the band had developed while under contract to Warners with *Green and Out of Time*.

*Monster's* louder, riffier approach was intended as camouflage and commentary on the nascent grunge movement, a cycle whose leading lights dutifully evinced admiration for R.E.M.’s work ("they’re the greatest," fawned avowed fanboy Kurt) while encroaching significantly on their market share. The story was that the group had embraced a harder, amped-up sound organically, but there was clearly calculation in the record’s contents and rollout. When asked about the inherent goofiness of "Shiny Happy People" or "Stand," Stipe would say that they were experiments in R.E.M. playing a "cartoon band" like the Archies or the Banana Splits, yet he wouldn’t cop to such motives with *Monster*. Instead, the album’s startling visual and sonic metamorphosis, beginning with the singer’s newly shorn scalp and extending to more eccentric, aggressive physical postures and wardrobe choices across the board (i.e. Mike Mills’ Nudie Suits) demanded to be taken at face value.

At literal face value circa 1994 — let’s call it at least fifteen bucks a CD and ten per cassette in the U.S.— *Monster* was worthy enough to sell four million copies, less than *Out of Time* or *Automatic* but still a lot. The joke goes that that probably two million of them were eventually stranded at used-record stores: all those blurry orange-and-black bears staring out forlornly from resale racks and bargain-bins like Cordoroy, forming a metaphor for the hardcore fans accrued and alienated as their college-rock heroes crossed over into hockey arenas once and for all.  (When you literally sell out Madison Square Garden, it means you’ve sold out figuratively — that’s the math.)

It’s not that people thought the record was *bad*, exactly, but even the reviewers who got what Stipe was doing with all that posturing had to point out that there was, for the first time, something to get with a band whose very name implied the unconscious, involuntary, revelatory quality of dreaming. *Monster’s* thoroughly received aesthetic, a glam pastiche layered over grunge thunder, represented something new and unwelcome: a dread self-consciousness. "I don’t sleep, I dream," Stipe insisted, a bit too coyly. Those fluttering eyelids were now frozen in a wink, the musical equivalent of sleeping with one eye open.

There are a few unguarded moments on *Monster*, and at least one deep cut is open enough to signal permeability in its title. During interviews, Stipe spoke with uncharacteristic directness about "Let Me In" as plea "to, for, and about" Kurt Cobain, whose suicide serves to contextualize the song’s every aspect: the murky guitar; the desperate lyric sheet; the choked air of despair. In terms of tempo and melody, the lovelorn "Strange Currencies" is *Monster’s* sequel to "Everybody Hurts," a blue-eyed soul shuffle with a sing-along chorus that works equally well when addressed to God, your girlfriend, or a ceiling mirror.  But it’s "Let Me In" that revises the earlier hit in a meaningfulway, concluding that sometimes reaching out to touch somebody is not enough. It’s futile for everybody if the somebody who’s hurting won’t reach back. "He gathered up his loved ones and he brought them all around to say goodbye/nice try," Stipe mumbles in the tone of a detached depressive; later, on the final chorus, he adopts a keening falsetto that cuts through the album’s almost uniformly deadpan vocal performances and elevates the song’s careening melody into the stratosphere.

It’s fair to say that *Monster* as a whole is haunted by Cobain, and so is *Under the Silver Lake*. Sam’s love for Nirvana is such that it actually compels him to commit murder. In Mitchell’s most inspired scene, he comes face to face with a mysterious, ancient composer who claims to be the secret brains behind countless top 40 hits — a spectre modelled on Phil Spector who tickles the ivories with the Invisible Hand of the Market. His story insinuates that the pop music that’s catalyzed the most radical individual and collective revolutions has only ever been industry formula, including the Gen X rallying cry of "Smells Like Teen Spirit." "That song was not written on a distorted guitar... I wrote it, here, somewhere between a blow job and an omelette... there is no rebellion, there’s only me earning a paycheck." Mitchell’s conceptual gambit is cleverly rooted in Cobain’s own self-deprecating claim that he nicked the riff for "Teen Spirit" from Boston’s "More Than a Feeling," a song that is explicitly about the visceral, full-bodied joy of hearing a beloved melody on the radio. What Sam has for Nirvana is more than a feeling, but the Composer is telling him to eat crow. "Smells Like Teen Spirit" isn’t an homage, or even a copy. It’s a forgery. Oh well, whatever. Nevermind.

"Exploding Head," R.E.M. thought of calling *Monster*. If they had, then the gory, fatal money shot of Sam’s meeting with the composer could have been another in-joke in the most reference-infested American movie in years (comparisons to *the Big Lebowski* and *Inherent Vice*, themselves hugely allusive works, only scratch the surface of *Under the Silver Lake's* exhaustive annotations). When our hero bludgeons the pop-industrial Moloch with a replica of Kurt’s own electric guitar, it is an act of vengeance to subsume Stipe’s gesture of mourning in "Let Me In"; it provides a righteous gross-out giggle that catches in the throat. Does his this-machine-kills-fascists gesture re-inscribe significance to Nirvana’s signature song, or does it suggest something more bathetic, a murderous fury wielded on behalf of an ersatz anthem?

"Let me in" could be Sam’s mantra as he cruises through the Valley like a fuckboi Philip Marlowe, and so could "what’s the frequency, kenneth?" What he wants is access to a hidden world (and its spoils) as a salve for the existential pain of being on the outside looking in, which presents here asaging out of coolness and so clinging to the idea that the things he loved as a teenager actually *mean* something. As a parody of male savior-narratives in which the missing femme fatale doesn’t actually want to be found or rescued by her shady one-night stand, *Under the Silver Lake* is a swing and a miss, attempting the old Lynchian trick (and this is the only way in which its mostly bland surrealism is actually Lynchian) of being about misogyny and female exploitation while indulging in it. (See also: *Eyes Wide Shut*, which Mitchell probably has a billion times. I’m guessing mostly on VHS.) Where it’s sort of revelatory anyway is in its timeliness as an Epstein movie (the secret global sex cult is real and only the super-rich need apply!) as well as its Reddit-level understanding of how desperately we narrativize our experiences and seek synchronicity. The search for meaning in entertainment becomes jaggedly double-edged.  In the end, "Smells Like Teen Spirit" *does* mean something, just not what Sam thinks. It’s not a gesture of resistance, but the byproduct of a music-industrial mind control project flattering every generation into thinking their own personal heroes invented rock n’roll. (Here we are now, entertain us.)

The issue of whether or not the Composer was behind any of R.E.M.’s mid-90s hits is never raised in *Under the Silver Lake*, and that’s fair enough. There’s nothing epochal about *Monster*, which may have been the first R.E.M. record 1) to seem anything less than, and 2) certainly the last about which anybody would have even tried to make the claim. (Actually, 1996’s focused, greyscale *New Adventures in Hi-Fi* is 1) better and 2) a masterpiece, but that’s an essay for a different 25th anniversary.) There’s also probably nothing epochal about *Under the Silver Lake*, which won’t likely stand the test of time alongside other cult classics because 1) it’s literally the end of the world as we know it and 2) it’s already been fully reclaimed, a beneficiary (or is it a casualty?) of an ever-accelerating cycle of hype, backlash and explanation. To give Mitchell credit, it’s these very same topics —i.e. incipient apocalypse and the yearning for something that’ll endure — that make the film impossible to dismiss (compared to the Coens and PTA, the director is all thumbs, but he’s got at least one on the pulse). If nothing else, the sensation of being seen as Garfield lip-syncs with eyes wide shut to Stipe’s nonsense poetry, briefly luxuriating in a coolness that’s long gone and was also never really there in the first place, will stick with me like something out of a horror movie. Turns out that there’s a *Monster* at the end of this essay, and it’s me.

Oldies Night: *Monster* at 25

There is a line in Woody Allen’s *Hannah and Her Sisters *where Frederick, a crusty, hermetically shut-in intellectual played by Max Von Sydow (clearly standing in for his crusty, hermetically shut-in creator) cites professional wrestling in a litany of all of the horrible things he sees when he turns on his television. 57 channels and nothing’s on, as Bruce Springsteen might say, except that Frederick probably doesn’t listen to the Boss. (Also that song wouldn’t be written for another six years. I’m not an idiot, I’m just trying to make a point.)

"Can you imagine," he asks his live-in-mentee-slash-fuckbuddy Lee (Barbara Hershey), "the level of a mind that watches wrestling?"

*Hannah and Her Sisters *goes out of its way to savage forms of cultural expression other than Cole Porter: "[they] look like they’re going to stab their mothers," observes Allen’s onscreen surrogate about a punk group at CBGB’s. Frederick’s criticism of wrestling is a rhetorical throwaway, lent extra gravitas coming from a guy who was smart enough to play chess with Death (a scenario parodied in Woody’s 2005 play *Death Knocks, *which substitutes gin rummy for chess and Kew Gardens for Medieval Sweden). In truth, it’s not that Frederick (or Woody Allen) can’t imagine the level of a mind that watches wrestling; they just don’t *want *to.

This aversion is a missed opportunity for guys whose fondest wish would be to lord their intellect over everybody else. Being demonstrably smart about supposedly stupid things is a fundamental tenet of contemporary academia, which is forever trying to strip-mine the superculture for rich ore of meaning. When I was in grad school at the University of Toronto, I had a film studies professor who, in addition to publishing work on race and representation in American cinema, edited a collection of essays called *Steel Chair to the Head: The Pleasure and Pain of Professional Wrestling. *I went and bought it as quickly as I could. It’s a pretty good book whose contributors take pains—and precious little pleasure—to be as thoughtful and erudite as possible on their subject, writing not as fans but detached chroniclers thinking through the implications of an entertainment form that obliges its patrons to check their brains at the door. ("Arguments that swell over the simple fluff and shallow violence and pry deeper into the wet, sticky blood of the antagonists," promises one notable blurb,"...an unparalleled look at the cultural interaction wrestling has with history and the world.")  Not only can this well-tenured roll call of writers and deep thinkers imagine the level of a mind that watches wrestling, they can sympathize and even identify with it.

There is a long tradition of writing about sports from a cultural or sociological perspective, but because sports are unpredictable—because they’re competitive and uncertain in terms of their actual outcome—they tend to be more interestingly handicapped or reported on than analyzed in terms of their "deeper" meaning or themes. ESPN’s recent MJ hagiography *The Last Dance *is an example of trying to imbue sports journalism with mythic significance. I liked seeing Gary Payton talk shit but on the whole, it did not get there.

*Steel Chair to the Head *features a piece by wrestling superfan Roland Barthes, whose 1957 essay "The World of Wrestling" is ground zero for an intellectual approach to the subject, unfurling its argument with speed and clarity. It argues that professional wrestling—as opposed to amateur wrestling, with its direct links to ancient, Olympian tradition—is a craft integrating athletics and theatre. In the late 1950s, as pro wrestling migrated onto television, it was easier—and more urgent—to consider its popularity and presentation as narrative spectacle. Barthes’ essay is filled with talk of heroes and villains, victory, defeat, each as a form of specialized ritual; of expectations set up and fulfilled, or else cruelly dashed so as to whet the spectator’s appetite for a more satisfying finish in the next match, or on the next card. "Wrestling," Barthes writes, "presents man’s suffering with all of the amplifications of tragic masks." This rather epic conception sounds pretty good to my adult self even as it describes what I know I was responding to more naturally—and maybe more honestly—as a seven-year-old dragging my Dad to Maple Leaf Gardens to watch Demolition defend their tag team titles against The Colossal Connection: a desire to to see the good guys win.

There are a lot of ways to "win" in professional wrestling. (I am excluding from the following inventory any kind of "moral victory," which could be the subject of a completely different essay should *Steel Chair to the Head 2 *ever become a thing.)  The most common and decisive "finish" in a wrestling match is a pinfall, whereby one wrestler pins the other’s shoulders to the mat for a count of three (or incapacitates him/her so that getting up before the third count is not a possibility). There are also submissions, where one wrestler applies a hold that compels the other to tap out (in an "I Quit" match, this humiliation is made mandatory). Less definitively, a match can end in a count-out (a wrestler is stranded outside the ring for 10 seconds), or a disqualification (a wrestler breaks the rules). These two outcomes can also be doubled to affect both participants at the same time and are generally considered to be disappointing.

Within the staged, scripted reality of professional wrestling—a reality commonly referred to in the business as "kayfabe" for reasons that have rarely been well elucidated in terms of etymology—these rules are inviolable and administered by officially appointed referees. Barthes famously writes  that wrestling, like theatre, is based on a sign system, and that every wrestler does his part to signify within it; their physiques, their gestures, and their characterizations must be precise, they must (literally) embody "absolute clarity, since the spectator must always understand everything on the spot." And this is no less true—and arguably even more crucial—in the case of referees, since they must embody that same clarity in the service of seeming like they understand nothing. A lot of the time, the confusion of the pro wrestling referee is what lends absolute clarity to the drama unfolding around him.

Within the context of kayfabe, pro wrestling referees are worse at their job than any other group of employees imaginable. Their incompetence is so predictable, in fact, that professional wrestling in all its iterations, from the mainstream spectacle presented weekly on television by the WWE to the independent bingo-hall circuit dramatized in Darren Aronofsky’s tragicomic film *The Wrestler *(2008)*,* is unthinkable without it. Professional wrestling referees make a habit of missing things that their jobs should require them to catch. All the time. At the beginning of some matches, the referee will theatrically search the grapplers’ tights for foreign objects or other verboten items. This only happens when one of the wrestlers is hiding something, and only ever ends with the revelation that the referee’s search failed to discover the item in question—call it Chekhov’s roll of quarters.

When the referee’s back is turned—which happens a lot, in a lot of different ways, some more credible than others—or when he is unconscious (which also happens a lot, in a lot of different ways, some more credible than others)—the object will be used to gain a decisive advantage for the cheating party. And then the referee will turn around just in time to obliviously render a tainted three-count. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of variations on this basic, dramatic irony drenched scenario, and each of these has its own counter-variations (the cheating is discovered; the signs of cheating are wrongly attributed to the wrong wrestler and he is disqualified), but it remains the primal scene of modern professional wrestling. Something happens that is outside of the rules of the match, and everybody in the arena—ninety thousand people in the Pontiac silverdome or 250 people in a public-school gymnasium—knows it. Except, of course, for the referee, whose job it is to know, and who apparently has learned nothing from his past failures.

In reality, the job of a professional wrestling referee requires a high degree of physical skill. Many wrestling referees are initially trained in wrestling schools, and if their bodies are comparatively less well-developed, look closely at their physiques: they’re stocky or wiry, carrying themselves with the subtle grace of athletes. Or else they’re so comically shrimpy that they’ve clearly been cast under the sign of *typage* (a word that I guarantee you Woody Allen knows) and then trained to take the "bumps" that so often leave them fallen in the line of duty. Like wrestlers, referees are performing precisely choreographed routines while also indicating things with their hands, their eyes, their mouths—the same instruments as any actor; even if they’re watching the moves instead of performing them, they’re just as deftly playing to the camera and the rafters, both at the same time.

If, pace Barthes, wrestling is a drama, then referees are, ideally, supposed to be supporting players: nobody ever bought a ticket to see a ref.  But the ostensible power they hold over the actual stars and the outcomes of the stars’ matches makes them something else. Sometimes, the referee appears as a deus ex machina; he runs to the ring to either replace a felled comrade or to reverse an incorrect decision: in the 1980s, the latter was known as a "Dusty Finish," after the corpulent southern champion-slash-promoter Dusty Rhodes, who loved to tease crowds with definitive endings and then unwrite them by having a second referee upend the verdict. Sometimes, referees suffer the fate of messengers in Greek drama and get beaten up for delivering the bad news to a wrestler that he’s lost or been disqualified, which is either a cue to cheer (if the wrestler is a good guy unjustly screwed over) or boo (if he’s a bad guy throwing a tantrum).

Occasionally, referees become leading players in the drama, too. In an angle (angle means storyline) that upset me deeply as a seven-year-old in 1988, senior WWF official Dave Hebner inexplicably counted Hulk Hogan’s shoulders down for three in a nationally televised championship match against Andre the Giant when it was clear—to me, to the announcers, the crowd, everyone—that Hogan had "kicked out" of the count at one.  Was it a mistake? It turned out that it was the kickoff to a great soap-opera story in which Hebner—a familiar face to fans, though never gifted with a backstory or character development—had been locked in a closet by the heel known as The Million Dollar Man, Ted Dibiase, and replaced for the match with his twin brother, Earl Hebner, who had been paid off to count the decision for Andre, who in turn sold the ill-gotten championship belt to Dibiase, thus negating the need for the latter to ever beat Hogan fair and square (because of course he couldn’t).

"How much did they pay for the plastic surgery?!" Hogan blubbered backstage in the aftermath to interviewer "Mean" Gene Okerlund, trying to wrap his mind around such a vile conspiracy. For fans sick of the Hulkster’s repetitive hero act, seeing him humiliated on national television was a form of subversive pleasure; ditto for those who enjoyed DiBiase’s venal-playboy act, which was widely understood by insiders as a combination tribute-parody to the WWF’s real-life owner/television figurehead Vince McMahon, a million-dollar man who reshaped the business by throwing money at problems and opportunities alike. From concept to execution to presentation, the Hebner Affair was a great angle, close to the apex of "Golden Era" WWF booking, not least of all because it addressed something that all wrestling fans felt unconsciously: that decisions were at the whim of referees whose motives could easily be clouded and whose authority could be corrupted. The angle was also notable, historically speaking, because of how it finally put a referee front-and-center and made us admire his skill as a performer. Rushing in from the back after breaking free of his dressing-room prison, gesturing wildly at the good guys and the bad guys alike in a pantomime of indignance, Dave Hebner, all five-foot-nothing of him, cut as dynamic and dramatic a figure as the Hulkster and the Giant. Meanwhile, his identical twin Earl, skulking in cowardice in the company of the villains, appeared as a physically indistinguishable and yet somehow utterly alien vision of corruption and collusion and moral rot. Two brothers; two referees; two sides of the same coin; I guess pain and pleasure, if you wanted to get academic about it.

Ten years later, Earl Hebner—the "bad" Hebner, for the record—participated in what was to that point (and maybe still is) the most audacious reshuffling of the kayfabe-real life dynamic in wrestling history. In his capacity as a WWF employee, Hebner presided over the infamous 1997 match in Montreal where Canadian World Champion Bret "The Hitman" Hart was placed in his own signature sharpshooter hold by his hated rival Shawn Michaels, and then, in a moment so amazing it had a whole feature documentary made about it, called for the timekeeper to ring the bell. Hebner claimed that Hart had "submitted" although that was not the finish that "The Hitman"  had been expecting, or had consented to—consent being the commodity that makes wrestling work.

Hebner’s actions were ordered by McMahon as a way of writing Bret out of the company’s storyline and humiliating him before he departed for a rival promotion, and ensuring that he didn’t take the company’s championship belt with him (a forbidden act with some precedent in a bitterly competitive era where live television ratings were the greatest measuring stick for success).  "The Montreal Screwjob'' was a genuinely ignoble, corrupt, and unfair ending that went against Barthes’ dictum of absolute clarity because for the people in attendance, as well as those watching on television, as well as at least one of the stars in the ring, there was no absolute, or even partial clarity. By exercising actual, powerful authority in a situation that everyone watching and participating were expecting to be cozily predetermined, Hebner lived up to the "evil referee" role in a way that was authentically, instead of ritualistically, shocking.

The Montreal Screwjob was a turning point for North American pro wrestling. It introduced the very real possibility of very real life intruding on the safely bracketed fantasy reality of kayfabe, opening the product up to scandalous and exhilarating new dramatic possibilities.  In the decades since, wrestling has gradually and at times ingeniously embraced these contradictions in a way that has arguably improved the product. The popularity of censor-baiting, anti-authority loudmouths like Steve Austin and C.M. Punk—characters who deliberately called attention to their status as players within a drama and raged at the wizards behind the curtain, including McMahon—emanates directly from this fissure, as did 2020’s multiple, Covid-inspired forays into "cinematic wrestling": conflicts unapologetically shot and edited like action or horror movies, cutting out the middlemen of a live audience and athletic plausibility once and for all. (The best of these was a surreal, self-reflexive "Firefly Funhouse" match pitting the masked psychological terrorist The Fiend against WWE poster boy—and would-be Hollywood movie star—John Cena, probably the closest thing to avant-garde storytelling in wrestling history.)

 Even if wrestling’s dramaturgy is no longer as clear cut as it was at the time of Barthes’ essay—or even the Montreal Screwjob, which has since itself passed into the rarified air of myth, the same basic dynamic persists: the vicarious enjoyment of watching oversized, fantasy projections of ourselves work out their differences in ways unavailable to us in our daily lives. In this sense, I find professional wrestling referees incredibly suggestive in terms of how they fit into Barthes’ proposed sign system. If wrestling’s heroes and villains —and more recently, its antiheroes, subversives, rabble-rousers, and sociopaths—suggest a wide gallery of human types, the referees, in their obliviousness and rank corruptibility, signify the unlikeliness that any of these combatants are ever going to get a fair shake, skill and determination notwithstanding. What’s far more likely, in fact, is that every wrestler, whether face, heel, or somewhere in between, will get screwed over at some point or another because the people charged with upholding the rules are deaf, dumb, and as blind as the statue of justice holding her scales (sound familiar?). Incompetence is inevitable, and in its way, fair enough—the great leveller in a cosmic screwjob.

Screwjob

###### 1. Tom Cruise is playing himself

Right: Tom Cruise always plays himself. He has been playing himself since *All the Right Moves, *a movie about how his character has them. Every so often, Cruise plays himself in ways that strike a chord or scrape the zeitgeist or result in Oscar nominations: the ass-wiggling ingénue of *Risky Business; *the beautifully rumpled white-collar striver of *Jerry Maguire; *the bewildered, speculative cuck of *Eyes Wide Shut. *In *Edge of Tomorrow, *he plays a guy who’s so determined to get his intergalactic mission right that he keeps killing himself, over and over again—the performance of a lifetime, and maybe the ultimate Cruise-ian allegory, except of course for the *Top Gun *duology. No Cruise character feels more like self-performance—and self-revelation—than Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, who in 1986 was in the exact same position as the guy playing him—an ascendant, Nautilized hotshot turning figure-eights in the sky above the rest of us. Maverick remains tethered to his actor twenty-five years later, a figure simultaneously commanding respect, deference, and a bit of bemusement at his steadfast refusal to change—with the times, to act his age, etc. The basic message of *Top Gun: Maverick *is the same as *Interview With the Vampire, *which is that Tom Cruise is eternal, but now we don’t need makeup, special effects, or supernatural pretense.

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###### 2. Tom Cruise is a great actor

Tom Cruise is not a great actor in the sense that he can “disappear into a role”—a critical cliché that doesn’t really apply to too many actors, especially not recognizable ones of above-the-title stature. (I’m hard pressed to think of one, anyway.) Rather, in conversation with my first point about Tom Cruise always playing Tom Cruise, I’d say that greatness here is more a matter of always keeping himself visible, which in turn contextualizes the roles in surprising and emotive ways. In one of the best scenes in *Top Gun: Maverick, *Pete goes to an Air Force bar and tenderly observes a gaggle of hardbodied younglings clowning around the way he did in his own cocksure youth; the formula works because we can’t divorce the character’s mix of yearning, envy, and melancholy from what I imagine to be Cruise’s own as he stares down his sixtieth birthday. Cruise isn’t really historically a Method actor, and he doesn’t talk about sense memories or Stanislavski or technique. It may be that the similarly self-mesmerizing precepts of Scientology do the same trick for him. Some of his best performances have been for obviously great directors, like Stanley Kubrick, but Joseph Kosinski isn’t Stanley Kubrick and Cruise is still great in *Top Gun: Maverick. *Credit where it’s due.

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###### 3. Joseph Kosinski is a good director even if he’s not Stanley Kubrick

Tom Cruise keeps directors as pets these days. For the *Mission: Impossible *series—all good to great movies, and examples par excellence of how Cruise has finessed his obvious suicidal ideation into an on-the-job ethos and an onscreen alter ego—he’s employed the one-time Oscar winner Christopher McQuarrie. McQuarrie also did *Jack Reacher, *which was less successful at fusing star and character together because as anyone who’s read the Jack Reacher books knows, Jack Reacher is, in a fashion, relaxed; he’s a hulking, nomadic killing machine but he’s comfortable in his own skin and doesn’t need to be liked. Tom Cruise is not relaxed and needs to be liked like Tracy Flick did in *Election *(he could have played Tracey Flick to great acclaim). McQuarrie, who is not a particularly gifted director, knows his job, which is to hone, refine, and benignly weaponize the ruling tensions of his friend’s self-image. He has figured it out, and his reward will be generational wealth for himself and his family. Joseph Kosinski is more of a pure action director than McQuarrie, and because he isn’t the steward of a single running character like Ethan Hunt, but rather the facilitator of a more free-floating Cruise persona, he has a bit more freedom to show off his chops. His *Tron *remake, which did not feature Cruise, was a sleek, beautifully designed exercise in legacy aesthetics that re-created the original film’s imagery (and characters) while pulsating with serene confidence. *Oblivion, *starring Cruise as humanity’s last hope against alien invaders and their high-tech drones, elegantly incorporated color schemes and hardware from *2001: A Space Odyssey *as if giving its headliner another, posthumous opportunity to work with Kubrick. *Top Gun: Maverick *is filled with nods to the “warnographic” style of the late Tony Scott, but its clean, precise physical and aeronautical blocking is recognizably Kosinski’s, and so are its coolly adoring, contractually obligated Cruise close-ups. Admittedly, it has not been a great year for new American movies, but if I were voting for the Oscars right now, Kosinski would get Best Director.

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###### 4. Miles Teller is actually pretty good

The first time I actively enjoyed Miles Teller was in Nicolas Winding Refn’s insane, hypnagogic Amazon Prime crime series *Too Old to Die Young, *where he played a sullen, possibly fascistic LAPD officer who comes to a spectacularly brutal end. *Top Gun: Maverick *is the second time that I have actively enjoyed Teller, who plays the son of the late, lamented Goose from the original *Top Gun. *Having never had any reason to think about whether or not Teller resembles Anthony Edwards, I did not see the brilliance of this casting coming, but while Teller is physically very different than the erstwhile Dr. Mark Green—a thick-lipped, broad-shouldered, dead-eyed hulk—the combination of Navy whites and a beautifully considered mustache complete a seamless illusion. The relationship between Maverick and Rooster (the perfect callsign for Goose’s son) recalls the displaced paternal pathos play of *Creed, *which is the movie *Top Gun: Maverick *most resembles, even more than the original *Top Gun, *which, being a slick, superficial piece of opportunism conceived and financed by coke fiends, had no emotional component to speak of, and certainly no metaphysical dimension. The metaphysical dimensions of *Creed *and *Top Gun: Maverick *pertain to the conjoined durability and fragility of American institutions, icons and intellectual property. When Goose dies in *Top Gun, *it’s a plot point; when Maverick saves Rooster’s life in *Top Gun: Maverick *it’s mythic retribution, as well as a hint that Miles Teller can’t replace Cruise so much as be his hand-picked wingman. The fact that these events are completely obvious and mechanical somehow only heightens their effect. It helps also that, as I said, Teller is very good in the part, and if we’re being honest, he was the one who made me cry.

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###### 5. Jennifer Connelly is very good

The character that Jennifer Connelly plays in *Top Gun: Maverick *is probably the funniest thing about the movie, insofar as she’s been manufactured to give Pete an age-appropriate, long-suffering romantic partner who *feels *like a carryover from Scott’s movie but isn’t. Because Kelly McGillis is now 60 and has aged like a normal person, there was no chance of her returning; Connelly, who at 51 is virtually indistinguishable from her younger self, matches perfectly with Cruise as a resident of the flesh-and-blood uncanny valley and is also a gifted, resourceful light comedienne who can parry and deflect his innate ridiculousness. Her Penny is your average, flawlessly preserved American small business owner, smilingly presiding over the aforementioned Air Force bar and its revolving door constituency of wannabe flying aces. When Pete shows up at the bar, there is a five-minute dialogue scene in which it’s revealed—with the same flat, expository affect as stereo instructions—that Penny has been the great love of his life since precisely the moment *Top Gun *ended, and they’ve had all kinds of exchanges and experiences over the years, and she has a teenage daughter who dotes on him, and it’s only a matter of time before he has to choose between what’s left of his career and a life piloting yachts and picking up tabs with her. As the movie goes on, she proves that she’s worth it by always being in the right place at the right time, which is about twenty yards from Pete, in flattering beachwear, bearing sympathetic witness to every phase of his self-actualization, including, of course, shirtless touch football on the beach. This all works in the same way that almost all of *Top Gun: Maverick *works, which is via a grateful suspension of disbelief that, inasmuch as it’s possible to earn such a thing, is earned by the skill and professionalism of all involved.

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###### 6. It’s better that we don’t see Tom Cruise have sex

Many reviewers and social media commentators have singled out the scene—or rather, the lack of a scene—in which Pete and Penny rekindle their love affair. Pete drives Penny home on the back of his motorcycle; she walks into her perfect little cluttered beachside house and pointedly leaves the door open; he follows her in; and then Kosinski cross-fades into an ostensibly post-coital shot of the two of them laughing and talking (silently) in bed. It’s hilariously chaste, but it’s ok because Cruise is so supremely narcissistic at this point that watching him have sex would be difficult, like looking directly into the sun. Kubrick understood this in *Eyes Wide Shut, *which is at its core a comedy about Tom Cruise *not *having sex, sometimes due to circumstance, sometimes due to his own cowardice, and always in a perpetual rhythm of *coitus interruptus *that only humourless, Paulette-style critics could fail to laugh at (which explains the film’s lousy reception in 1999, when humourless, Paulette-style critics had most of the staff jobs in American media). Note also that in *Eyes Wide Shut, *Cruise is plagued by mental visions of Nicole Kidman—who, as if you need reminding, was not only his onscreen wife but his *actual *wife, once again cinching the idea that he was playing himself—fucking a guy in Maverick-style military dress whites. I am fairly certain that this, like every other funny thing in *Eyes Wide Shut, *was intentional.

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###### 7. John Hamm is a TV actor

Speaking of intentional: the CO who most wants to bust Maverick’s ass is played by Jon Hamm, who became famous too late in his career to be the next Tom Cruise and is also widely considered to be a “better”—or more “nuanced”—actor than Cruise owing to the Emmys he won for *Mad Men *(a show I have not watched all the way through). Whenever I see Hamm in movies, I see, fairly or not, the Face of Prestige Television (which was not true of James Gandolfini, a great actor regardless of medium), and so his scenes with Cruise are rife with subtext. Other people have analyzed *Top Gun: Maverick *as an allegory in which Pete Mitchell is not only the only guy who can fly Mach 10, train a team of pilots to blow up an Enemy uranium stronghold, and tame Jennifer Connelly, but he’s also a symbolic figure holding the line against the dronification of warfare, which is to say, the dronification of moviemaking itself. When he stares down Ed Harris, it’s a reference to the latter’s performance as John Glenn in *The Right Stuff; *when he stares down John Hamm, however, he’s defending the honor of old-fashioned, self-contained, money-at-the-concession-stand movies—which Tom Cruise loves—against the luxurious, insidious passivity of serialized, longform, visually drab Prestige Television. Eventually, Hamm’s character sees the light, but he’s not one of the film’s many heroes; he’s an avatar of an inferior entertainment-delivery device who gets put in his place; Tom Cruise, who supposedly goes to every new release in disguise in order to sample the wares, doesn’t even own a TV. This is what gives him his edge.

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###### 8. Giorgio Moroder > Lady Gaga

I cannot hum “Take My Hand,” Gaga’s torpid, strangely hookless contribution to the *Top Gun: Maverick *soundtrack. The Instagram photos of Gaga with “big fan” Tom Cruise are of course remarkable. I can hum—and sing, credibly— Berlin’s “Take My Breath Away,” and will be able to do so for years to come. One of these songs has already stood the test of the time, and the other one won’t. Some other sub-observations about the soundtrack here. The original, neo-Wagnerian *Top Gun *theme by Harold Faltermeyer, interpolated into Hans Zimmer’s new score, owns in a way that bypasses I-Love-the-80s-irony. The deployment of “Danger Zone” for the opening overture is lame—a cheesy example of I-Love-the-80s-Irony— but at least it’s the original song and not some nu-rock cover, like Nonpoint’s non-essential version of “In the Air Tonight” in *Miami Vice. *

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###### 9. *Top Gun: Maverick* is fascist

Oliver Stone called the first *Top Gun *“fascist,” and so it stands to reason—assuming you believe good old left-hook-throwing Oliver Stone, last seen hagiographizing Edward Snowden—that a virtual replay of its contents would be the same. (In 1986, *Top Gun *made the most money of any US movie at the box office while Stone’s *Platoon *won Best Picture, powered by a performance by Charlie Sheen, who went on to impersonate Cruise in *Hot Shots.*) Both *Top Gun *movies exult fetishistically in shows of American military power and hardware, supplied pro bono by the weapons manufacturers themselves; the same script approval granted to the Navy in ‘86 applies here, which may be why nobody mentions Iran or Russia, only “The Enemy,” which lends the narrative an absurd, Orwellian dimension. (We have always been at war with The Enemy, and we always will.) Kosinski’s rapturous, great-man-of-history angles on Cruise only add to the delirium. (If it wasn’t so tasteless to call him Cruise’s Riefenstahl, I would, and I guess I sort of just did, though I’m also sure Kosinski voted for Biden.) In her recent Cannes roundup for *Film Comment, *the excellent critic Devika Girish described the movie’s “American-exceptionalist fervour,” and noted its below-the-line complicity with the Navy, before concluding—adroitly, I think—that “[*Maverick*] isn’t ‘a good film *but *with bad politics’; it’s a good film in part *because *of its bad politics, and it requires that we interrogate what we experience, often in spite of ourselves, as ‘good’ art.” The only thing here to take issue with, hypothetically, is that this movie even requires interrogation, since the bad politics are put across with the same cheerful grin that Cruise uses to sell everything. The last thing that this very smartly engineered movie is is oblivious: rather, it’s confident, and shameless, and it deserves to be, because it puts its—again, fascist, while also, paradoxically, strictly apolitical— agenda across without any hesitation, bashfulness, or compromise.

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###### 10. Tom Cruise only wants the best for us

Cruise is the engine of the film’s confidence, and the starting and end point for how to think about what the film is, and what it means. I have thought a lot about it—and him—in the days since, and whether it’s possible to square an affection based on his being the Last Real Movie Star with my suspicion that he has almost certainly condoned slave labor in his various palatial homes. The extent to which one of the more consistently mud-slung celebrities of my lifetime has gone clear, PR-wise, in the last few years is genuinely astonishing and while it can’t all be due to him delivering the goods onscreen, that’s gotta be part of it. (If Mel Gibson came back with *Lethal Weapon: Riggs *instead of mouthing anti-woke talking points for S Craig Zahler, I think people would go for it.) Cruise appears in promo bumpers before *Top Gun: Maverick, *as if personally welcoming us to the theater and thanking us for our time and hard-earned money, money that could have gone to gas or groceries or opioids or whatever else. Tom Cruise knows the value of a dollar. I’m pretty sure that if you could prove, under oath—or under the influence of sodium pentathol—that you were somehow not entertained by *Top Gun: Maverick, *Cruise would privately scourge his flesh with barbed wire, *First Reformed*-style, as penance. It would sting, but not as much as the idea that he failed to deliver the goods. I won’t perjure myself here, however. I had a great time.

Ten Observations About *Top Gun: Maverick*

There's no obviously epochal music on Warren Zevon's 1995 studio album *Mutineer*, a collection of self-produced home recordings released to little fanfare on Warner honcho Irving Azoff's vanity label Giant. Not that anybody had high hopes for that particular record; in the year of *Jagged Little Pill* and *To Bring You My Love*, with grunge holding steady and bicoastal hip-hop ascendant, middle-aged male singer-songwriters were not an industry growth sector. Instead, Zevon's greatest pop-cultural exposure of the era came on an episode of *The Larry Sanders Show*, where he glumly played himself (and the piano) through a half-hearted rendition of his 1977 novelty hit “Werewolves of London,” a song whose picaresque lyrical brilliance (“little old lady got mutilated late last night”) and third-power catchiness—abetted by the rhythm section of *Rumors*-era Fleetwood Mac—effectively wrote the royalty checks that Zevon would cash for the rest of his career.

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“Werewolves of London” was a monster; enough of an earworm, in fact, that Martin Scorsese used it as Tom Cruise's theme music in *The Color of Money* (1986). (It was an ideal choice for a young movie star on the prowl; one whose hair was *perfect*.) In 2008, Kid Rock—a lesser artist than Scorsese, but still an auteur of sorts— released the brain-dead coming-of-age anthem “All Summer Long,” which heedlessly mashed up “Werewolves” with Lynyrd Skynyrd's “Sweet Home Alabama,” tickling confused Boomers' pleasure centers while inadvertently squaring the circle on a long-ago lyrical feud. In 1974, on “Sweet Home Alabama,” Skynyrd frontman Ronnie Van Zant had called out Neil Young for his supposed anti-redneck slander on the song “Southern Man” (“now your crosses are burning fast”); a few years later, after Van Zant and several of his bandmates had been killed in a tragic plane crash, Zevon released “Play It All Night Long,” which imagined a hillbilly clan straight out of “Southern Man”—or maybe *Deliverance*—blasting “Sweet Home Alabama” in between bouts of banjo-picking, Bible-thumping and incestuous sex. “Play that dead band's song” cries the song's narrator; the line was shocking, mean-spirited, gratuitous and, in a typically Zevonian way, provocatively and productively double-edged. Was he really mocking an act of God, or suggesting—correctly, as it turns out—that Skynyrd's legacy would live on after their deaths, like a “Free Bird” rising from the ashes?

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Meanwhile, over on *The Larry Sanders Show*, the joke was that, professionally speaking, Zevon was a dead man walking. Nobody, from Garry Shandling's David Letterman-manesque title character, to the in-universe studio audience, to the actual folks watching the show on HBO, wanted to hear any of Warren's new shit. Instead, they all howled for “Werewolves of London,” and, having frittered away any residual goodwill (and actual residuals) over two decades of bad behavior, Zevon had no choice but to oblige. The only thing more humiliating than being a one-hit wonder is being a great musician—a “musician's musician,” in the words of admirer and sometime collaborator Bob Dylan—that most people only know as a one-hit wonder. When Warren asks Larry if he can play his 1976 masterpiece “The French Inhaler,” which name-checks Norman Mailer, the host's disinterest is devastating. The mandate is to play “Werewolves of London,” and that's it. *Turn those speakers up full blast/ play it all night long.*

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****

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On the very enjoyable 2004 Zevon tribute album *Enjoy Every Sandwich*—named for the tributee's famous last-ish words when he went on actual late-night TV with the actual David Letterman to commiserate about his impending, terminal mesothelioma diagnosis —“Werewolves of London” is covered by Adam Sandler, who gives it a good karaoke-night treatment. Like Letterman, who provided guest vocals on Zevon's tragicomic ice-hockey murder ballad “Hit Somebody,” Sandler is a fan who's found ways to incorporate his idol's music into his own work—e.g. the inclusion of 2002's tender, death's-bed love song “Keep Me in Your Heart” in *Funny People* (2009). Meanwhile, the most enduring song on *Mutineer*—the nautically themed title track—is covered on *Enjoy Every Sandwich* by Bob Dylan in a live performance that bristles with an ornery, deep-seated respect. “There might be three separate songs within a Zevon song,” Dylan once told an interviewer, “but they're all effortlessly connected.” Back in 1987, Dylan had played harmonica on “The Factory,” a rollicking Bruce Springsteen pastiche written for Zevon's studio album *Sentimental Hygiene*, which also featured contributions from Neil Young, Don Henley, George Clinton, and relative (at the time) newcomers R.E.M.: musician's musicians all, not that their collective presence helped their comeback-minded pal dent the Top 40.

&nbsp;

“Reconsider me,” Zevon sang on *Sentimental Hygiene*, a song whose apparent sincerity, buoyed by a gorgeous, soaring chorus worthy of Jackson Browne, belied a wry recidivist guilt. Between his myriad, self-destructive run-ins with various producers and power-brokers—including *Rolling Stone*'s Jann Wenner, who made him *persona non grata* in the magazine's pages—and his Three Mile Island-level-disaster area of a private life, there didn't seem to be a promise, vow, or habit that Zevon couldn't break. His trajectory was always twelve steps forward, one giant leap back; “way up on rehab mountain, we learn these things by heart” he snarked on the self-satirical AA fable “Detox Mansion.” Hence the beautiful-loser fatalism of later, stripped-down records like *Mutineer* and 2000's *Life'll Kill Ya*, whose characters—as ever a collection of sociopaths and lowlifes, thinly veiled surrogates for their creator—can't help but bemoan their station. Taken together, songs like “Life'll Kill Ya,” “My Shit's Fucked Up,” and “Don't Let Us Get Sick” suggest various stages of grief (denial, bargaining, anger, acceptance) on shuffle. A couple of years later, Zevon did get sick. He issued his reminder about sandwiches and the enjoyment thereof, got off a few more good lines about death and dying, and basked for a few months in the glow of multiple Grammy nominations for his valedictory 2002 album *The Wind* before succumbing to cancer at the age of 56—old enough to definitively reconcile with friends, partners, lovers, and family members, and to witness the birth of twin grandsons.

&nbsp;

The booby-trapped meaning of “Reconsider Me” sprang to mind earlier this year when Billy Joel tried to play sentimental hygienist by campaigning for his fellow piano man to enter the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame—a place where our antihero could finally be ensconced alongside competitors and collaborators living and dead. Despite his two decades of posthumous eligibility, Zevon had never made the short list of potential inductees, allegedly because Wenner, who carries a big stick with the Hall, had issued an over-his-dead-body edict about even considering his long-time *bete noir*. The idea of Zevon as an abject figure even by the standards of the Los Angeles music scene has endured as one of the truly twisted behind-the-music myths, consolidated by Crystal Zevon's scarifying 2007 memoir *I'll Sleep When I'm Dead: The Dirty Life and Times of Warren Zevon*, which, as a reviewer for *Slant* put it, tests a fan's devotion. There is, simply, no reconsidering Zevon after reading his ex-wife's exacting, almost forensic account of their time together (and apart), and no excuses proffered—by the author or her vast chorus of commentators—for a rap sheet including (but not limited to) drug and alcohol binges, domestic violence (verbal and physical), and personal betrayals ranging from penny-ante to unforgivable. The Widow Zevon's frustration, disappointment, and almost cosmic exasperation with her late husband is palpable: she was the official addressee of “Reconsider Me,” and though charmed by the gesture, she didn't buy it, not least of all because while serenading her in the recording studio Warren ignored his young daughter Ariel, who sat quietly in the corner waiting for the singing to stop.

&nbsp;

Nearly every page of *I'll Sleep When I'm Dead* contains some kind of similarly mortifying episode. And yet there isn't an ounce of hatred in its three hundred plus pages. Instead, beneath its scabrous and bruised surfaces, the book vibrates with the contradictory but passionate affection its subject had once described on “Accidentally Like a Martyr”: mad love, shadow love, random love, and abandoned love. If Zevon was a martyr, it was to his own cause—and hardly an accident—but the blend of voices, Crystal's included, singing his praises alongside his faults contradicts that song's belief that “the hurt gets worse and the heart gets harder.” Zevon's deathbed insistence that his ex-wife tell his story unredacted smacks a bit of bad-boy narcissism—a degenerate's last wish to get everything on the record—but it also betrays the voracious emotionalism of the man who wrote “Reconsider Me” and also “Keep Me In Your Heart,” with their plaintive unspoken subtext that the singer knows he might not otherwise be welcome in such a tender organ. *I'll Sleep When I'm Dead* duly inventories Zevon's various rivalries (including a fractious encounter with Billy Joel) and vendettas (he briefly considered not having a funeral just to keep Don Henley from attending), while also alluding to the deep, devastating fears that shadowed his final days: the suspicion that spending his life in step with the distancing effect may have succeeded all too well.

&nbsp;

For all her candor in *I'll Sleep When I'm Dead*, Crystal Zevon never comes out and says the obvious: that death effectively domesticated her lycanthropic soulmate for listeners and loved ones alike—the monster humbled and redeemed in the revelation of his own frailty, like David Naughton, splayed and naked at the end of *An American Werewolf in London* (1981). For some, that terrible vulnerability could be interpreted as a form of existential penance—the “Bad Karma” Zevon worried about on *Sentimental Hygiene*. For real dyed-in-the-wool moralists though, the good press and good vibes around Zevon's battle with cancer signified something more insidious—the unearned redemption of an abuser. 

&nbsp;

“What do we do about the terrible people in our lives?” asks Claire Dederer near the end of her new book *Monsters*, an incisive, open-hearted study of Pablo-matic virtuosos from Picasso to Polanski, with cameos by Miles Davis, Raymond Carver, and Doris Lessing—but not Warren Zevon, who doesn't rate a footnote. Her answer paraphrases no less than 2021's Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductees REO Speedwagon: “mostly, we keep on loving them.” She's right, of course: the book's thesis is that when it comes to artists, as with our families, friends, and ourselves, emotional attachment is an involuntary and hypocritical impulse. We love whether or not we want to, or whether or not we can justify it on some moral/intellectual axis to others, or to ourselves. In a nifty act of rhetorical jiu-jitsu expanded from her 2017 *Paris Review* essay “What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men,” Dederer slyly invalidates her own line of inquiry by taking the weasley implications of “we” out of the equation. “We is an escape hatch,” writes Dederer. “*We* is corrupt. *We* is make-believe. The real question is this: can I love the art but hate the artist? Can you? When I say ‘we,' I mean I. I mean you.”

&nbsp;

I love Warren Zevon, which is probably the only thing I have in common with Billy Joel, and if I'm being honest, from where I'm sitting—in Toronto, at a distance—it's a pretty uncomplicated love. I love him for his humor, his intelligence, and his talent: in other words, for all the things that he, as a ranking monstrous artist of his generation, used (or that were used by others) to contextualize, justify, or apologize for his abhorrent behavior. In Zevon's case, the rationalizations were even trickier insofar as his best songs often seemed to be inspired—or channeled—by said abhorrence. What's that they say in fiction workshops? Write what you know? That'd be boozing (“The French Inhaler”); addiction (“Carmelita”); satyriasis (take your pick). Poor, poor, pitiful him. “Zevon imagines his tricksters, blackguards, and flat-out psychotics as individuals,” wrote Robert Christgau in 1987. “In fact, he fucking inhabits them, for better and worse.” But let's be honest: that sense of inhabitation, of possession (demonic or otherwise), was always for the better, because Zevon's art was reckless abandon and collateral damage. The episode in “Exictable Boy” where the (anti)hero rubs pot roast all over his chest was autobiographical; the bit where he rapes and kills the homecoming queen before building a cage with her bones was not. But, crucially, it didn't sound like he was telling tales out of school.

&nbsp;

That potent, toxic cocktail of excess—spiked, but not diluted, by drips of poetry—is Zevon's signature; that it ultimately proved too strong for the Rock Hall is just as well. In the end, despite Billy Joel's eloquent advocacy, the voters kept their hearts hardened towards Zevon, excluding him from a class that featured Kate Bush, Sheryl Crow, Willie Nelson, George Michael, and Rage Against the Machine. Rather than suggesting which of these admittedly diverse (and, in their own ways, meritorious) acts should have been left off to make room for Zevon, I defer to my own favorite track off *Mutineer*, “The Indifference of Heaven,” which, as per Dylan's observation, unfolds as three separate songs in one: a crime-scene confessional in which the singer contemplates his own endless, existential rap sheet; a lament for a lost lover (maybe Crystal Zevon, or maybe another woman who was too good for him); and, in between, a pithy bit of music criticism targeting the Top 40 superstars peddling life-affirming platitudes on his radio: 

&nbsp;

*They say “everything's alright”*

*They say “better days are near”*

*They tell us “these are the good times”*

*But they don't live around here*

*Billy and Christie don't*

*And Bruce and Patti don't*

*They don't live around here*

&nbsp;

“Billy and Christie,” of course, are Billy Joel and Christie Brinkley, and “Bruce and Patti” are Bruce Springsteen and Patti Scialfa. “Around here,” in Zevonian terms, is a lonely place, far from the primo real estate occupied by his peers. It's the Hollywood Hawaiian Hotel of "Desperados Under the Eaves” which the narrator fully expects to remain standing, even as California slides into the ocean, until he's paid his bill. It's the fatal Graceland of "Porcelain Monkey,” where The King, “left behind by the latest trends,” waits out his own obsolescence in a fugue state of fried chicken and despair. It's a purgatorial stint in "Detox Mansion," a sweaty stint in “Prison Grove,” and a majestic exile in "Splendid Isolation.” I'll go to my grave wondering whether the phrase “the vast indifference of Heaven” is meant to evoke a universe in which crimes and misdemeanors—including Zevon's own—are calmly judged by a higher power, or one where there's nothing over the horizon. If there is a Heaven, I doubt Warren Zevon is there; if he finally went to Hell like so many people advised him during his lifetime, it'd be fair enough. Either way, he isn't in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame with Billy and Bruce and Bob and everyone they know; he doesn't belong there anyway.

The Indifference of Heaven: Warren Zevon

![image1](/assets/images/issues/issue4/posts/SPaul-Sestina/1.gif)

Sestina

                   *For Andrew Kenower*

&nbsp;

*Friday Night Lights* is a cool show about

teens that play football and the

people who have relationships with those teens. 

It's a cool show. 

It centers around the football coach, Coach Taylor and his

wife and school guidance counselor Tami Taylor.

They're the Taylors.

Coach Taylor is a molder of men. 

During the series he molds many teens into men, like Tim Riggins, 

the local beer-drinking, and sorta philosophical heartthrob. 

Tim gets laid often and is so cool that he doesn't even have parents. 

There's also Smash Williams, the most talented guy on the field, until 

he messes his knee and becomes the manager of Alamo Freeze,

a local dessert restaurant, sort of like Baskin Robbins.

But then Coach Taylor gives Smash a great pep talk and 

his knee heals and Smash then plays football in college. 

Even this guy named Landry gets low-key molded. 

Landry's character arc is interesting, to say the least.

He's kind of a nerd, but then the writers have him murder a man.

But you can tell they regretted having him murder a man,

so they resolve it pretty quickly and never bring it up again.

Landry also hooks up with Tyra, and he plays in a band. 

He's the lead singer and guitarist. 

After Tyra goes off to college, Landry hooks up with Jess. 

Both Jess and Tyra are way out of Landry's league. 

But somehow, he scores. 

He also scores when he becomes the kicker of the football team

and kicks a really great ball for the win. 

I was excited when I saw the ball sail

between those two things that the ball is supposed go between for the team to score. 

“Good job, Landry!” I said to myself quietly while watching the show.

There were tears on my face, as I said this.

Because watching fictional characters play sports usually makes me cry

The Taylors also have two daughters. 

One is a baby, and the other is Julie Taylor. 

Everyone hates Julie. I even think her own dad,

Coach Taylor hates Julie. She’s just incredibly annoying.

She dates Matt Saracen, who is maybe my favorite 

character on the show. Matt is so sad all the time. 

I'm sure his character has the sun sign of cancer. 

Matt also doesn't have parents, but 

he has a grandma that he takes care of. 

One cool fact about Matt is he is the quarterback of the team.

Another cool fact about Matt is that he's an artist. 

Like me. He draws and I write poems. 

I recently wrote a chapbook called *Inflatable Ball*,

And Matt throws an inflatable ball,

And my chapbook is available for sale

At bottlecap.press, not bottlecap.com

Or bottlecappress.com

But bottlecap.press

It costs $10 plus shipping and is worth every penny.

I bet Matt would like my chapbook, since we have so many similarities.

Matt's sadder than me though. And more athletic. 

We are both cancers. I don't have to take care of my grandma, 

because my grandma died and 

I don't have to date Julie Taylor.

I date Lindsey Boldt, who’s a hottie and

has a terrific book of poems 

out now from Dogpark Collective.

So it all kind of balances out. 

*Friday Night Lights* is a really good show and 

I would recommend it even

if you don't like football, which I personally don't. 

But I do like *Friday Night Lights*,

which, in my opinion, is 

a really good show.

Friday Night Lights

The elevator smelled like piss.

I looked over at the real estate agent and he shot me a nervous smile. “One of the women must’ve peed,” he said, moving his hand over his crotch while making a wavy motion with his fingers. I laughed. Maybe living in an old folks’ home would have a certain charm. I pictured a future version of myself, greeting an elderly neighbor as she passed by me in the hallway. She’d bow her head towards me, deeply. Then she’d wet herself. Liquid would pool into her rubber clogs, the urine dark and stormy.

As we rose to the 8th floor, the real estate agent explained how the building provided coin-operated washing machines but no dryers. The tenants preferred to air-dry their laundry from a clothesline. “You’ll find that most of the residents tend to stay confined to their rooms. They only come out when absolutely necessary.” He played with a crack in his plastic phone case, avoiding my eyeline. “No one here wants to be a burden.”

&nbsp;

Room 807 was the only available unit for non-geriatrics. A torn piece of caution tape hung from the door knob. The transom window above was browned with soot. “Go ahead,” said the real estate agent. “It’s open.”

The apartment appeared sterile underneath its sole fluorescent bulb. It brought to mind a hospital food court. Aluminum bars covered the floor-to-ceiling windows, drilled firmly into the walls. “For safety reasons,” said the real estate agent, tapping his knuckles against the bars. “So that no one falls out.” 

The windows in my university dorm had been similarly bolted shut. Plexiglass walls had covered the library’s atrium. A student once climbed over the barrier and jumped to his death, seven stories below. They raised the plexiglass ten feet higher for the following semester. There’s a city proposal to gate off New York’s subway stations, to prevent people from jumping. They’d put barriers at every platform edge, with electric doors that would open when the trains arrived and then close when they departed. The Tokyo metro had this system installed a few years back. People still jump on the tracks there. It just requires a bit of work. 

My ex once told me about these two thirteen-year-old girls in Tokyo who held hands as they leapt in front of an oncoming train. I’ve since been unable to get them out of my head. I’ve replayed the imagined death scene over and over again, so much so that the teenage girls have become 3D renders in my mind. Well, not in their entirety. Not with an exact likeness. Parts of them are left unfinished, purposefully so, leaving space for personal projection. But more minute details are all filled-in, made glossy and pristine in my 4K daydreaming. Their tartan skirts billow in the subway airflow. Their tiny fingernails turn florid when squeezed. Their pale legs smear in the motion blur.

I see the pair’s final jump as a gentle act. Not abrupt. Not in any way violent. Like a child’s careful release from a playground swing, they fell soft and easy upon the tracks. But I always get stuck on the *hands*. I can’t help but zoom-in tight on this point. It’s as if their clasped hands held the secret message behind the whole thing. Because what it says to me is this: these girls did not go at it alone. They clung to each other. Their last act was not a jump, but rather, the holding of a position. The irreducible position of two girls, side-by-side, with their hands intertwined.

The real estate agent cleared his throat. “And can I ask about your credit score?” I lied and told him I had a guarantor. He nodded. “I’ll send you the rental application. It’s a competitive listing.”

&nbsp;

On my way down, in the elevator, I tried to focus on the pee smell. But my thoughts kept going back to the two girls. What happened to them when they were younger? I needed to know the exact point in which the seed had been planted. When the ideation took root.

Is it possible that, on some late winter day, when the girls were about six or seven on their way home from school, carefully watched over by their parents, huddled at the edge of the platform, covering their ears as the train screamed into the station, watching the evening commuters shuffle in and then out, the screen doors opening and then closing behind them, as the crowded passenger cart lurched forward, as fathers gripped their daughters by the shoulders, do you think, in such a moment, the girls might have asked themselves: *just what are they holding us back from?*

Incontinence

My mother always had a guest over when I came home from school. Sometimes it was the next-door neighbor. Other times my aunt, or a co-worker from the hospital. Her constant shuffle between the neighborhood, the family, and the workplace appeared to be methodical, a calculated keeping-up of appearances. It was as though she needed to maintain a foothold in each social sphere, or else run the risk of losing her context. And yet, somewhere along the way, this anxiety dulled. By the time I entered junior high, my mother’s round robin had come to a complete stop, the array of guests narrowed down to just one person: Mrs. Russell, an old friend from the PTA book club. They would sit on the back patio with a glass of wine and crackers and I would give a quick “hi” as I got my snack, then make my way upstairs to do my homework. Or play videogames on mute.

One day, at the tail end of seventh grade, I came home to the sound of Mrs. Russell crying. My mother stopped me in the kitchen before I could get my snack. She told me to go to my room. I ran upstairs and listened to their conversation from the back window. Mrs. Russell had found a flyer for a “gay party” in the backseat pocket of her husband’s car. When she asked him about it, he told her that he no longer loved her and wished to file for divorce. My mother kept repeating “what an asshole” under her breath.

That night I sat in bed and tried to picture what a flyer for a gay party would look like. The scribbles of funny men danced in my mind; they faded away when I tried to focus on any individual figure. I could see the flyer. It was printed on yellow paper. The color, I felt, had to be yellow, for some unknowable reason. And in the front seat of a car, the shadowed figure of a man. Mr. Russell, void-like in his unloving. He crumpled the flyer in his fist. His face was all scratched out. I’d never met him before.

I gave up on sleep and went downstairs to the garage. My bike, long since out of commission, lay hidden behind the rusted weight rack. The back tire flat, but still rideable. And I knew how to get to Mrs. Russell’s house. I’d been there a few times with my mother, when I was younger. Just a few blocks away, behind the community golf course. I could make it there in ten minutes, maybe less.

Mrs. Russell's house was much smaller than I remembered. A prefab duplex in a low-cost housing development. The surrounding street was quiet. No dogs in the side yards. No sighs from late-night joggers. No crickets. Only the sound of my tire as it flattened against the pavement. I stopped, stuck in the driveway, unsure of what to do next. Inside, the lights were still on. I could see a man at the window, bent over the kitchen sink. He ate what looked like ornamental candies from a jar. Glass bon-bons cut up the inside of  his mouth. The shards got caught in between his teeth. I probably saw this all wrong. But I think I wanted to see the wrong thing.

The sound of plastic scraping concrete came from the side yard. I kept still. Mrs. Russell walked toward the curb, a trash bin pulled behind her. She stopped and looked at me.

“It’s late,” she said.

“I know.”

We stood there on the cracked blacktop and waited for a release.

On my way back home, I walked my bike up a hill. A set of sprinklers came on, dousing the grass from both sides. My knees were soon wet. Worms stretched themselves onto the sidewalk. They wriggled in the sudden spray, like disembodied limbs, an image that made me nauseous. I attempted to step on every worm as they emerged. I wanted to still them. To stop their squirming. But there were so many—I couldn’t help but miss a few. As I walked to school the next morning, I found the worms dead, all dried up in the hot sun. They were nothing but bloody flakes now, little red bits plastered to the pavement. A few splotches on my sneakers.

Lamprey

![image3](/assets/images/issues/issue3/posts/RyanPetersen-Twitch/1.jpeg)

The priestess fell to the floor and choked in a fit of static. *There is another prison…a shadow prison…built within the ruins. Go there, my pilgrim.* The neural connection short-circuited. Her body tensed upwards and disintegrated into a thousand micro-spheres.


“Another nanobot cluster down the drain,” said Mateo. A running theme throughout the game was the inorganic world attempting to replicate the human form. Collectivist clouds of lesser robots came together, so that they could pose as a single, cellular being. Within the in-game universe, these characters often met a tragic end. A body without organs was a difficult thing to sustain.

*And she said nothing about the golden figure,* I typed. *Untrustworthy?*

I watched my message enter the chat. Mateo looked up at the camera and pointed his finger in affirmation. “When you’re right you’re right Crono.”

Crono, my username—the sensation of being seen gave me a jolt of libidinal energy. And then a pang of worry. I began to question what I was doing. Me on my computer, watching a kid who plays video games on his own computer. Why didn’t I just play the game myself? Because there were layers to the streaming experience, that's what I told myself.  It was the complexity that compelled me.

I knew I was attracted to Mateo. He was beautiful, and I tried to take in as much of his face as possible. My eyes gravitated toward his lips. Plump pouty things that were always wet with a slight glaze of saliva. Or was it a gloss? I found it hard to believe he’d wear makeup. And yet his lips appeared so unreal at times, as if his cam footage itself were processed through a beauty filter. Or a deepfake app. I imagined what it would be like to kiss him. Soft fruit pressed against my philtrum. The weight of his tongue in my mouth. An earthen taste to his spit, like water from a deep well.

But if I allowed myself to peel back this surface-level attraction, I found there to be a deeper appeal hidden beneath, one inherent to the streamer setup. I entered into a theoretical framework, one in which I saw Mateo as my own player avatar, within a separate game. A diagram was sketched out in my head.

> *Fig. 1* was me: I was at my keyboard. I held sway over Mateo through the chat.
>
> *Fig. 2* was Mateo, streamed onto my computer screen: he held his own controller. Mateo played as the avatar in the game.
>
> *Fig. 3* was the unnamed avatar: he looked down a shadowed corridor. A derelict spaceship lay ahead of him.

This mental diagram clearly illustrated a field of play much larger than it appeared at first glance, with at least three degrees of possible remove (*Fig. 1-3*). Through the chat interactions, I controlled Mateo. Or rather, there was group control, along with the other users in the chat. Mateo excavated the open world of the game. And in turn we excavated Mateo.

There were several personal details one could glean from Mateo’s streams, if close attention was paid. He was of Puerto Rican descent. He lived in Southern California, but I remained unsure of where exactly. A few location tags on his Instagram pointed to Chino Hills. That would place him only about forty-five miles from my parents’ house. Mateo lived with his mother in a small condo. He was the youngest child of three. His two older brothers moved out a few years ago. He had just turned eighteen. He was an Aries. He dropped out of high school last year. He was studying for his GED. He worked part-time at Starbucks. His best friend was a girl named Madison. He made no reference to dating. No stated preference for boys or girls. He was six-foot-one. He had a map of the world pinned to his bedroom wall. His favorite drink was Glacier Freeze Gatorade, from which he took large swigs during his streams.

I signed up to be a Tier-Three Subscriber for his channel, costing me about twenty-five dollars a month. The perks included a monthly private stream and privileged chats. This was the reason why my comments always rose to the top, above the non-subscriber riff-raff. A private stream for premium subscribers was scheduled and rescheduled a few times since I had signed up. Mateo canceled the most recent one the day of, a few hours before it was scheduled to start. He cited a family emergency. I didn’t mind; I knew the private stream would happen at some point. The contours of his personal life would slowly come into focus. I carved the stray details he offered me into a mental high-relief.

Mateo’s avatar walked through a large torture chamber. Tubular devices made of green chrome were laid out in a tight grid, like terracotta soldiers. Skeletal remains protruded from one of the coiled appendages. I imagined the machines sucking the life out of prisoners. But there was no given lore to explain how they had once been used. No obvious practicality as instruments of torture. There was a lull in the game. Mateo had gone quiet. The chat fell off. An opening for true connection presented itself. I began to type.

*Have you ever heard of those empty property developments in China? The Chinese ghost cities? This level reminds me of them.*

“No, I don't think I have. What are they?” He scratched at the razor bumps underneath his chin.

*Giant urban projects erected at the edge of the Gobi desert,* I typed. *Built in the hopes that the country’s economic growth would soon reach Inner Mongolia. Residential buildings left empty, a construct-now-and-find-the-residents-later approach. They were the mirror image of the game’s abandoned cityscapes. An urban environment that existed in-waiting. Shopping centers and plazas untouched, save for the powdering of the desert sand, their utility left in waiting. A temple made for a god without followers.*

“Ok wow.” Mateo's eyes darted over the screen as he read. I could make out my chat log reflected in the glow of his iris. “Spooky vibes. China’s kinda wild, huh?”

I nodded along in agreement, as though he could see me. China *was* kinda wild. I had read an article earlier that morning about an iPhone factory worker who jumped from his employee compound roof, only to get his head caught in the suicide prevention netting. He stayed there for hours, still alive but his neck fully broken. Middle management couldn’t figure out the best way to cut him down. The factory continued its operations that day, without pause. A true horror story. And yet—my desire to visit the country remained strong.

I saw myself boarding a high-speed train, an express liner to the remote ghost city. There was a phantom companion at my side, a shadow puppet with no discerning features. I wore a bucket hat and tiny-frame sunglasses. We arrived to find the city in the midst of a dust storm, half-finished towers swaying in the wind. We walked through a large shopping mall. Every store was empty. The elaborate water fixture had gone green with algae. I asked my faceless partner to take a picture of me, in front of the cinema multiplex. I made a peace sign with my right hand. The phone flashed. I looked at the picture and studied its composition. My slight figure, surrounded by a landscape of overwhelming pathos. I saw that the space’s hidden potential had finally been realized: a staging ground for compelling content. At the edge of the world an aesthetic oasis springs forth. A bounty of potential images, all imbued with an elegiac aura.

“You know, it's funny that you mention those ghost cities.” My ears perked up. I reemerged from my dissociative state. He’d been thinking over what I’d just said in the chat. He was giving me a considered response. “I’ve always pictured all of my work shifts as little bricks being added to a giant skyscraper. But it's just like you said. The building is for a city that nobody lives in yet. Big luxury apartments that are all empty. Sorry, I don’t know if I’m making any sense with this.”

I typed out *you are*, despite not understanding his leap in logic. How did the hours at his dead-end job become the building material for an unpopulated housing project? Did I miss some connective tissue? Then again, I’d never held down a nine-to-five. Maybe I just couldn’t relate.

“What I mean,” he continued, “is that things don’t really matter much, outside of your job. And then your job, it turns out, doesn’t matter much either. So the only thing I’ve found that really matters, for me anyways, is gaming. Because even when I’m not playing a game, I’m still in the mental mode of *not-playing*, like I’m thinking constantly about when I will get to play the game next. Love and friends and money, those are all great, I get it. But they can also start to bore you. Gaming stands outside of that. Outside of the boredom. There’s the world of gaming in here.” He pointed to the screen. “And there’s the world of boredom out there.” He pointed to his bedroom window. “My personal heaven and hell. Staying in the game for as long as possible—that’s my key to survival. Everything outside of the game is just no longer useful. Or whatever use it may have had, like back in my parents’ day, that's over you know? Like out there…that’s the real ghost city…” Mateo trailed off. He clicked on the trigger buttons on his controller. The reanimated corpse of an executioner approached him with a giant axe.

I replayed his monologue a few times over in my mind, extracting a sense of satisfaction from every word. An intuitive conclusion from Mateo, derived through my direct involvement. The proverbial joystick pulsed within my hand. And the dichotomy of our interpretations—that contrast had some real torque. I wanted to travel to the ghost settlements as a gonzo tourist. Mateo saw himself already a resident, longing for escape. There was a dialectic there, one that could propel us forward into new configurations. Sexual and intellectual stimuli synthesized into the sublime.

Mateo was decapitated. The executioner held his head by the helmet and thrust it down a stairwell. A LOST TRANSMISSION banner scrolled across the screen. *The excavation ends here. NEW GAME?*

“Godammit,” said Mateo. It had been a particularly long run. Almost four continuous hours and all without a bathroom break. He usually didn’t survive that long. “So what’re you guys thinking?” The Glacier Freeze sloshed in the back of his throat. “ I could go one more round. Or I can call it a night. Let’s get a yes or no poll going in the chat.”

I looked at the time. 2:00 AM. I felt a strong pull to get to bed so that I’d wake up at a decent time. The days had begun to lose their shape, I was sleeping-in more and more. Signing off was the sensible option. But just before my exit from the browser window, I stopped myself. What exactly did I have to wake up in the morning for? Tomorrow held no obligation. The morning and afternoon exhibited no discernable difference to me. Not anymore. What value did “fully-formed days” hold within a shapeless life? The only thing left to lose was time with Mateo. I re-entered the chat.

*Yes. Let’s give it another go.*

Mateo laughed. “Don’t know why I even do these polls. You always tell me to keep going.”

&nbsp;

&nbsp;

*Illustration by [Daniel Levya](https://www.instagram.com/wordofcommand)*

Twitch

&quot;An activation.&quot;

&quot;Activation? For what?&quot;

&quot;A new kind of whole-grain pita chip. Super healthy. And gluten-free. I think. Come in and I&#39;ll give you a few free raffle tickets. You could win a car.&quot;

I followed his lead into the astroturfed parking lot, a temporary branded zone.

&quot;International School of the Hague, right?&quot;

&quot;Wait. Yes. I went there. Do we know each other?&quot;

&quot;Was only there for third grade. Military family, moved around. Thought I recognized you.&quot;

I looked at him. He didn&#39;t seem familiar at all. His face kept changing, as though in a dream, a pair of oaken eyes the only constant.

&quot;Ok, yeah, I think I remember you,&quot; I said. &quot;We were in different classes, right?&quot;

&quot;Yeah exactly, I was across the hall.&quot;

I didn&#39;t believe that school had hallways—I was envisioning separate portable classrooms, trailer-like, plopped down on asphalt, each a self-sustaining pod, where eager volunteers had to rough the outside chill in order to ask the teacher next door for a dry erase marker. But what would you call those demarcated alleyways in between the little elementary houses? Hallways? I didn&#39;t think so. All I could recall was the tall brick building reserved for the middle school and the long shadow it cast upon the lower grade encampments, an insistent reminder that a place of true halls and gymnasiums lorded above us.

&quot;I&#39;m Gavin.&quot;

I stared at his outstretched hand, slender fingers with nails left slightly long, a hint of chaos. I squeezed his palm firmly, the disembodied voice of my mother reminding me &quot;no dead fishes.&quot; But I was holding on for too long and jerked back my arm unnaturally. He smiled. The late afternoon was fading. Amber light mingled with his teeth, his eyes, his olive skin—he had strands of long hair that he habitually stroked back behind his shoulders, with every other fidget. Black bile was beginning to mix inside me with something unknown, metallic in taste, a liquid akin to mercury.

&quot;You live around here?&quot;

&quot;Kind of. Was on my way home from work.&quot;

&quot;Huh. Seems like no one in this city walks anywhere. You have a car though?&quot;

I paused, searching for the lie and coming up empty.

&quot;Well. I recently got a DUI so my license&#39;s been revoked for the next 10 months. Not my best moment.&quot;

&quot;No shame in that. We&#39;ve all been there.&quot;

&quot;Have we though?&quot;

I looked at him in mock-puzzlement, a bit too performative for the conversation&#39;s current tone. I saw a snapshot of myself: cocked head, face pinched, mugging for the invisible camera. My face went slack.

&quot;Well, I&#39;ve personally been there. Got pulled over in high school. It sucked.&quot;

He told me what he was doing (temp gigs, trying to become a model slash actor), I told him what I was doing (internship at an agency, trying to write spec scripts), he told me where he lived in the city (some art collective&#39;s loft), I told him where I stayed (on my cousin&#39;s couch), he said he liked living here (laidback attitude, positive vibes), I said I hated the people here (emotional vampires and grifters). This comparing of notes lulled briefly and a man, looking to be Gavin&#39;s supervisor, took the opportunity to make eyes at him from across the pita chip sample tent.

&quot;I should probably get back to soliciting on the sidewalk. But what&#39;re you doing later? I get off in like, forty-five minutes.&quot;

What was this exactly? A pick-up; a friendly gesture; a professional connection; a grasping for Dutch nostalgia lost? Like his face, his intentions seemed ever-morphing, always on the verge of articulating themselves. A more forward, solid person would nail down these grayer details, would motion to define the dynamics at hand. But I was someone else, a different beast. I&#39;d make my settlement here, upon this ambiguous mound, embracing the indistinct until evicted into clarity.

&quot;I&#39;m meeting my friend for a drink a few blocks away. You should come join us after you&#39;re finished here.&quot;

&quot;Great. I&#39;d love that. Let&#39;s meet there.&quot;

&quot;Can I still get those raffle tickets though? For the car?&quot;

&quot;What do you need a car for? You wouldn&#39;t be able to drive it anyways.&quot;

We laughed at this and shook hands again. Before leaving, I surveyed the parking lot, unable to find any reference to the car or raffle tickets, no real marketing to speak of at all, save for a large inflatable bag of pita chips in the corner of the mini-mall, its body rippling upward in the air, finding and losing its form, constantly re-asserting its existence.

I met Alisa at the back of the bar, twenty minutes later than our agreed upon time. She looked at me, smiled, and rolled her eyes.

&quot;So where&#39;s this boy that made you so late?&quot;

&quot;He&#39;s going to meet us here.&quot;

I had texted her on my walk over, summarizing the encounter with Gavin. She&#39;d only responded with a clenched teeth emoji, the meaning of which eluded me. I was beginning to realize my disdain for our relationship, this hold-over friendship from high school that had been briefly rekindled post-college and was now souring into something like a bitter rivalry. Her small head, pygmy-like, those inwardly bent teeth, the metal band tees she always wore, her job as assistant to a high-profile video editor, the droning on about work, as though it were her only tether to the world—I listed these personal affronts in my head as I drank my beer and nodded along to her venting, unlistening and bored. A basketball game played on the TV and I watched it fade into a Geico commercial, the glow of the LCD reflecting upon the lacquer of the bar, the winter dusk outside making every illumination in the room heavy, exaggerated. A melancholy, sharp and acute, pawed at my left lung—I would soon have to respond to Alisa, her speech pattern moving toward a concluding tone, and a pin of anxiety also formed, this time from the right flank; it was becoming a full-pronged attack. I was there, in the bar, but tenuously so, my membrane on the verge of rupture, if not for Gavin placing his arm on my shoulder, introducing himself, dissolving the previous interaction and holding me firm in a new one.

&quot;So you guys know each other from school?&quot;

&quot;Yeah a long time ago. Elementary school in Holland.&quot;

I listened to them talk to each other for a long time, barely speaking myself, enjoying Gavin&#39;s genuine interest in Alisa&#39;s work, her own fascination with his acting career. He recounted for her a recent student film he was in, describing having to get naked for a sex scene while a tungsten light dangled precariously over him, the temperature getting so hot that his pubes began to singe. The teenage director, who was shooting the movie &quot;on precious 35mm film stock,&quot; had to beg Gavin to finish the scene while his crotch was slowly burning. Alisa was laughing, close to crying. I winced. Part of me questioned the story, his skin would be blistering into third degree burns if the heat were really so intense as to ignite human hair, but my less cynical side believed the story, or more, believed its mythic value, this image of a fire raging on this man&#39;s lithe body while he finishes the sexual act, a gif of his ejaculate extinguishing the surrounding flames, reanimated over and over again, action, cut, action, cut. I carried on with this train of thought until I realized Alisa&#39;s voice had shifted to a lower register.

&quot;But is it, I don&#39;t know, more relaxing for the girl in the sex scene, knowing you&#39;re gay?&quot;

&quot;Oh, I&#39;m not—&quot;

&quot;Oh my god, I&#39;m sorry. I just assumed—&quot;

&quot;No, no, it&#39;s totally ok. I get that sometimes.&quot;

He smiled at me widely, amused without agitation, as though beaming with a newfound confidence. There was something of an expectant reflex I felt I was meant to give, a mournful moment for the desire, once excessive, now energy trapped, without egress—but I felt hollow. All these previous fluctuations along the axis of despair and intrigue—they fell into nothingness, theatrics for an absent audience. I was bored again. Maybe a little angry. Not being able to listen to another industry story, I got up abruptly to close out my tab. Upon my return, Alisa and Gavin were arranging for him to take care of her cat when she went on vacation to Brazil next month, a job typically reserved for myself.

&quot;You said you needed odd jobs to support yourself, so this could be perfect for you. If you think you have the time.&quot;

&quot;Wow, yes, that would actually be really helpful.&quot;

I stared at them both blankly. I said I was exhausted and needed to head home. Alisa gave me an unconvincing look of concern. Gavin, on the other hand, seemed startled, the emotion foreign on his facial features, as though things were going off script for the first time since our meeting earlier that day.

&quot;Wait, give me your number. I want us to hang out soon.&quot;

I handed him my phone and almost flung the thing across the table, barely catching it between my index finger and thumb. I bugged my eyes out, into the middle distance, as if to communicate a &quot;yikes,&quot; or possibly &quot;yeesh,&quot; though at that point my aims were operating on a different plane than my actions, so who can say what I was doing. He put his name into my phone.

&nbsp;

hey gavin, nice (re)meeting
you today
see you around


Yeah man! Was so nice!
Lets hang out again really soon :)

Been good! Just crazy busy with work.
Auditions keep piling up, plus a new restaurant gig.
How about you?

been ok, busy with work as well
intern life is not all its cracked out to be

so what&#39;re you up to this weekend?


hey oh

Hey! So sorry I went MIA
Been swamped with rehearsals for this new play I&#39;m in.
Lets grab a drink this week though?

oh cool—what&#39;s the play called?
and yeah sure, just hit me up with a good day/time
&nbsp;

What&#39;re you doing this weekend?
I have a film premiere on Sunday.
Student film of course, nothing fancy.
But you should come! Free food and booze.

ahh that sounds really fun
but I&#39;m actually out of town this weekend
for a family thing
lets meet up soon tho?

No worries! Have fun with the family.
And yes, let&#39;s definitely set something up for next week.

Hey
Can I ask you a big favor?
Kind of in a bad situation at the moment.

I&#39;m at Alisa&#39;s right now.
Taking care of the cat.
And I think something might be wrong...

It&#39;s being a bit weird.
Not moving around much.

you should take it to the vet
maybe call alisa?

Could you come over and help me?
I feel really uncomfortable with this.
And you know Alisa and the cat.

Can you take a break and come here
Just need someone to help me sort this out
Won&#39;t take long.

you really can&#39;t do this alone?
or ask alisa for help?

Would like to keep her out of this.
If possible.
Because maybe it&#39;s nothing?

ok
ill take an early lunch
be there in about 20 mins

Oh my god thank you.
I owe you big time.
It means a lot.

its cool
im doing it for the cat, not you lol

Vespid

There is something that happens to me in LA that keeps happening to me in LA. Most recently, it was at the Beverly Center. Not my favorite mall but big enough to accidentally spend a day in. I was in Forever 21, which actually went bankrupt in 2019, closed 200 stores, and now goes by XXI Forever.

“Yo,” he said, thumbing a white belt that held up white jeans way below his ass. Way above his ears sat a beanie, all rolled up like a flattened condom. He was pretty like a lesbian but not one I wanted to talk to. Plus, I needed to go home and write my movie.

“Hey,” I offered, “Sup?” God. My sleeper impulse to be a chill girl had activated. 

“You got some fine ass…” he paused, rubbing his hands like a fly, “shoes.” 

“Oh,” I stammered. He shook his head devilishly, beanie barely holding on. “Thank you,” I smiled. “I like your… hat.” He laughed so I laughed. Then he stepped closer and I backed up to look at my watch. “Oh wow. I didn't know the time is *that*!” 

I started moving like a cartoon, pointing at my watch face, shrugging and aw-shucks-ing. “Sorry, oof, I gotta—” then finger-gunned toward the exit. 

“You really gonna leave without letting me get your number?” It's amazing when people actually talk like that. 

“Oh, well,” I blushed, “You know, I…have a boyfriend.” I did, at the time. For the most part. 

“Aight,” he muttered, adjusting his rimless shades. “I see you, I see you.” Not missing a beat, he rebounded, “Well, listen, I'm an artist. You should follow me on Instagram. My name's—” 

****

“Yo! Yo! Yo!” A middle-aged white man shouted outside a CVS in Hollywood. It was day 62 of a particularly long Adderall shortage. Without it, I have a hard time with time. The pharmacist had said something about the “supply chain.” On hold with insurance, I'd purchased two pairs of glasses on a BOGOHO sale. I really needed to go home, work on my movie. Maybe outline that script. But this guy was yelling at me across the lot. “What up chica!” He wore a wife beater and was blasting rap music. “Bet I can guess yo' favorite color!” Leaning against his car, he nodded at mine. Burnt orange like my sweatshirt, and also my hair. 

It was my boyfriend's car. He bought it off Craigslist after doing something with an NFT which, like the supply chain, is a thing I do not understand. I was fiddling with the keys. He had two, only one of which worked. Why have a key that doesn't work? I'd stopped questioning after all his recent success. Clearly he'd figured something out that I hadn't.

The CVS guy thought I hadn't heard him. “Bet I can guess your favorite color!” 

“Yup,” I half-shouted. “You got me there…” 

“Ayy!” he yelled, gesturing into his backseat, thrusting his hips. I quickly tried the other key. 

He was still yelling and thrusting when I finally unlocked the car. As I got in, he begged.

“Hey! Hey wait! I'm an artist!” I paused, door open. He pointed into his car. “This is me! This is my music!” He smiled so proudly. “You got Insta? You should follow me! Yooo, c'mon! My handle is—” 

I shut the door. That wasn't even the first time. 

The first time happened right after I moved to LA. My boyfriend and I had decided to go bowling in Highland Park. This was after he came to visit from Miami, developed a severe phobia of planes, and consequently moved in. He wanted to take me out that night, do something fun, an *activity*, but was blindsided by the lane rate. I assured him we didn't need to bowl, it was overrated. This was B.NFT. Pre-crypto cash out, after which he would move into a house in Silver Lake with central AC, a massive flat screen, and both his twenty-seven-year-old creative business partners. Lucky for us it was Sunday, which meant free karaoke at the bar next door. Inside, a short woman in bootcut jeans was finishing a boisterous rendition of “Lady Marmalade.” Everyone in the crowd, all seven of us, cheered like it was a real concert. Out of breath, she climbed off the stage and I leaned down to shout, “That was awesome!” She beamed and I felt good for complimenting her.

“I'm an artist! Singer/songwriter!” she said, pointing to my phone. “You can follow me!” I smiled like I couldn't hear her. But she got up on her tiptoes, “Here! I'll put my name in.” With that, she snatched my phone, opened Instagram, and typed her username. Jessica underscore music underscore a series of random numbers had way more followers than me. She wasn't *that* good at singing. Plus, I was prettier. I atoned for these thoughts as she smashed “Follow” on her profile from my phone.

“I just moved to LA! Nothing on the books yet, but you can come to my shows!” She waved at me like you would a fan, and left with her posse of three gays. The bar got quiet. She left before I could tell her that I'd also just moved to LA, I was also an artist, and I had this great idea for a movie I hadn't written yet, so yeah, she could follow me also. 

I imagined what it would be like. Saying that out loud. “Follow me.” You're not supposed to do that. You're supposed to *plant the seeds* of a seemingly chill relationship that can maybe, weather-permitting, *bloom* into a mutual respect that can then one day, hopefully, *blossom* into a “Follow.” 

Weeks later, script untouched, I was shopping again at a store I only go to alone. Brandy Melville. Just ‘cuz when I'm there, I have to act younger than I am. Otherwise I feel like a pedophile. All the shopgirls are in high school and the clients are middle schoolers. But they make a great basic tee. I was trying one on when a girl asked if I needed help. The dressing room was packed, so for the sake of time I'd thrown it on over my shirt. But it was tighter than expected; I couldn't quite get it off. I complimented the employee's makeup to distract from my situation. 

“Thanks!” she said, “I did it myself.” *Yeah*... I thought. 

“No way!” I exclaimed.

She nodded, “I'm an artist, actually.” The shirt was stuck at my neck. By the time I ripped it off, her phone was hovering in front of my face. “Most people follow my TikTok but I post more art stuff on Insta. You can follow me!” I gasped at the screen. 

“Oh my god, yeah! Totally.” I'd be one of hundreds of thousands of her followers. “So fun, I will.” I did not. 

Later that very same week I was avoiding my script at Daiso in Hollywood, when I heard a familiar voice. Through the sticker aisle, I saw her. Brandy girl. She was recording her friend. They looked super cute and I regretted not following her like I said I would. Maybe I should say something, I thought. Maybe they want someone else to film, so they could both be in it. I could shoot a little, I have some time. Not a lot of course, I still have to write my movie…but female filmmakers should uplift one another. 

Rounding the corner I waved. “Hey!” She turned. 

“Hiii!” I was about to ask how she'd been when she said, “Sorry, we're just finishing something for my TikTok. Is it ok if we film in here?” She batted her long fake eyelashes until I realized she was asking me for adult permission. 

I wasn't wearing a clerk apron. Did she not see my basket full of stationery? All the index cards I was going to pin to my wall to visualize my outline to write my script to make my movie? Did she not remember me at all? 

“Oh, yeah,” I said. “It's all good. You girls have fun.” They thanked me and I abandoned my cart. 

Fleeing next door, I consoled myself inside the chaos of Ross: Dress for Less. I don't usually buy anything there. They've got good deals but the line is always endless. More security guards than check-out clerks. Everyone on edge. Someone always yelling. But it can be soothing, I've found, to watch other people freak out. 

****

After promoting every single one of his social media pages, beanie boy smiled. 

“So you got the boyfriend. I gotchu…you on Insta then? Can I at least look from afar?”

I thought about my Instagram. My page isn't exactly what he'd be looking for. It was more for work, and I hadn't posted in a while. Too busy not writing. I really needed to write this script to make this movie so I could post about it. The storm cloud of every unfinished project hovered, and the mall darkened. 

“I don't really post that much,” I explained to the top of his head. 

He nodded, sliding his phone out of his pocket. “That's ok. You an artist, huh.” 

Oh my god. I blushed. Yes! I wanted to scream. He continued. “Lemme get your @.” 

Hands shaking, I typed into his outstretched iPhone until my page came up. I turned the screen around. It was up to him. He didn't have to do anything with it. He looked at his screen for a long time. I watched my videos in the reflection of his glasses. It was hard, watching him watch them, without any volume on. He was silent for a long time. 

“You're sort of an underground artist. Quirked up vibe. I like that. That's dope.” I watched his demeanor shift away from flirting. 

I began to tell him that those were just silly videos. Nothing compared to this movie I wanted to make. “You know,” I began. But before I could get into it, he cut me off. 

“On God, when I was sixteen, I was in an accident that left me paralyzed. Couldn't move from the waist down for almost a year. Thought I'd never walk again. I flatlined for twenty seconds. So, I'm one of the rare people who can say they died and came back.” 

“Oh my gosh,” I said, “wow.” 

“Yeah. I rap but I also got a lot of stuff cooking, you know?” Sure, I thought. “We should collab. When I couldn't move my legs, the only thing I could control were my thoughts. So I became very emotionally in tune. I feel that's why my art connects. You might have that too. You know, since I got this following, all these people reach out. I usually don't respond. But there's this team, they really want me to make a movie. About my life and everything. For kids maybe, I dunno. But I could use a vibe like you.” 

“Wow,” I said again. I would do anything for somebody to want me to make a movie. Any movie. 

“I'll have my team reach out.” I nodded as he began drafting the DM. Holy crap. It was happening. Finally happening. This is why you go to the mall. This is why you move to LA. “Ima DM you - so we don't forget.”

“Totally,” was all I could say. And, “Thank you so much.” 

He smiled again, “Bet. Glad I met you. But I actually gotta dip. We'll be in touch!” I watched in awe as he did all these things I couldn't seem to, like exit the mall. 

Alone again at XXI Forever, I checked his page. 375k followers. A perfect grid layout. A checkerboard of motivational speech, black text on white background, motivational rap, black text on white background. They're his own quotes, the text. Watermarked. I clicked on one. Three days ago he'd posted: “Don't let yesterday use up today.” Woah. 2,971 likes. Ok. Another one: “Never run away from problems. Let problems run away from you.” I had to leave the mall. Face my problems! Or maybe I should DM him about the movie. Maybe he could help me, career-wise. He had all those followers. Then I noticed a fresh post on his feed from seven minutes ago. Hadn't we just been talking then? Black text on white background. 1,756 likes. “Girls with regular jobs and natural bodies still winning. Don't let this social media sh*t fool you.” 

I closed Instagram. Put my phone deep down in my purse. Finally walked toward the exit. What was it that I had to do again? Write more? Post more? I knew I had to go home. And so, I crossed the street to Old Navy. I heard they have some great new stuff.

Follow Me

My husband came back one night. He told me he was in love, that they'd hit a rough patch but he was hopeful. I almost couldn't believe he was alive. 

He showed me slide film from his archive on a little light table—of beach scenes, dandelions and fireworks, microscopic bacteria, cranes, bridges, and boats, Renaissance-era medicine. He played records and we drank cocktails. He didn't ask any questions, only wanted to know if I would like more ice. After we kissed on the roof, I descended the ladder and my skirt blew up to my elbows. He fed me a wedge salad. When we kissed in bed, I wanted to say I loved him again. When we slept, I dreamt that we attended a ten-hour screening of a slide film about Jesus Christ. Then, dreamt of near-fatal accidents in an Olympic swimming pool. The olympians were rescued from the deep end by paramedics, one by one. They were strong, beautiful, almost dead.

***

In another dream, my husband crashed family Christmas on some mysterious cocktail of substances. He had been writing art criticism and publishing small pamphlets with secret messages for me to find. He looked like shit, wouldn't whisper, wouldn't leave. He melted into a chair and made inebriated pronouncements from the back of the room. He was wearing an old, favorite sweater. My family went on celebrating, but with restraint and even a measure of politeness. They pretended not to see or hear. My husband had recently returned from our old vacation spot, he told me, where he had meant to die alone. Something about a gun. He looked up at me from the chair he was melted into and said, “No one should ever travel further than New Jersey.”

***

Once upon a time, I was up all night next to my sleeping husband, wondering how my body could be so full of goo.

I suspected the culprit was my husband's work. The cycle of crisis, resolution, celebration. He had been explaining the psychology of the market, its emotional turmoil, the zero sum game, etc. when one particular emergency hit. The market rewards strong stomachs, he was saying. Around 5am, I tried to locate a free PDF of the Truman Capote story in which the author follows his maid around for a whole day of work. “A Day's Work.” The author and his maid get high together at the end. I couldn't find it, so I read scraps of articles and poetry on Instagram until I became so agitated, I had to leave. “I think I'm leaving,” I told my husband, and he said, “Are you disturbed?” “I'm upset, but we can't talk about that now.” 

Another day, the culprit was a painting in my husband's studio. I didn't recognize it. The portrait was so striking, so alive with personality, that I worried about its subject, who must have once been a real, full-bodied person. She was intelligent. She was impenetrable! Her staring was frank, calculating, rudely personal. I couldn't exactly relate to her, though she might have been my more beautiful cousin. It could have been a matter of taste and age that separated us. She would always be just a bit older, taller, and more expensive. She might have been European. 

She stared and stared one morning, all day and all night once, out of her one dark eye and her other misty gray one. The gray eye was flat, focused. Her blonde-green hair matched the strip of wallpaper above her. She knew exactly where to sit. She understood Downtown People and the big deal about getting dressed. She was amazing in bed, or she hardly ever had it. Both possibilities were devastating.

***

I was startled by my husband's strangeness. I loved him more than words, and I was jealous of this love. 

My husband addressed my nose like a person. He prepared the coffee, and when the coffee got cold, he made it hot again. 

Meanwhile, the live demo of the cyber truck failed when the shock-proof glass shattered. The hopped-up commentators enjoyed donuts, milkshakes, chicken wings and barbecue sauce. It all streamed like poems. 

To be so certain of my husband's sweet mysteries was to leave this world behind; to say there was an otherwise; to be so moved, disturbed, or anything at all.

What used to thrill me: the way my big husband made language flip over itself. Him pacing the room, full of ideas and experience. 

My husband thought he was exceptionally handsome, but his pants were down when it didn't count. He didn't have the bandwidth for oceanic feeling. Even if I telegraphed it, he'd say I was making “demands.” He was responding to other messages. 

Then, he was a park full of deer at night. What happened when I was young or a story my mother told me. A big dog. Good habits. A genius who called himself eccentric. Cold like a star. He pretended to eat my nose and he explained the market to me. He was a big baby. He was blonde.

I appreciated him musically, aesthetically, synesthetically, athletically, and historically-speaking. He should have appealed more to my senses than anybody, but my senses had nothing to do with myself.

Of course, there are other problems — what happens to children, what happens to produce. The baseboards. The thesaurus. And I'm afraid there are words too expansive to be employed. The ones I want to use.

*What is the point of all this,* asked a friend recently. *The whole market is only refuse and leftovers. The poem isn't salable.*

I almost give up on poetry. Like travel, groceries and voting. I anticipate my expulsion from the realm of poetry and still, I suppose myself over and over.

***

Some feel more desirous when they are alone. Some are patiently curious in their longing. With readerly intent, some enjoy peace, even intimacy in solitude. It's delirium for me, alone with my visions. 

I take up nasty arguments with myself to stave off solipsism. Such problems of mind simulate matters of ethical concern. 

For years I thought I had panic attacks. Then the doctor told me I was throwing emotional tantrums. I needed to practice getting a grip.

I'm not interested in information. I'm afraid of my own happiness all laid out like berries in summer. 

Somehow, I still consider myself steady. I'm an efficiency expert, alert to my choices and to leaps in quantum time. 

Now and then I am lovely, lovely, lovely. I am sweet and kind with a clever shard of ice in my heart. They say I'm a kissable fox. They speak it all over my body early in the morning before they go.

My Husband

###### Monologue

&nbsp;

I am in a husk of what my life used to be, which I only felt a part of four years ago, for a few months after graduating from college, working on a comedy-related research endeavor and my art. It depresses me, and I often find myself in a depression during my days and feel very little sense of relief, though I enjoy making my girlfriend laugh, maybe in part because she is often crying, which I think of as a unique quality in a person. I've never met anyone capable of immediately expressing their emotions like her; it is something our couples therapist refers to as her “superpower.” My girlfriend and I agreed not to have children together, despite my anxiety of missing out on feeling deep love for a child, which may be a valid anxiety, though being a parent is not a great reason to be alive, as your child can always die and, should that happen, you would probably have to kill yourself as a result, which my mother told me she might have to do if my brother and I both died before her. My mother does not believe in quitting, generally, she forced me to stay enrolled in swim team for a long period, which did not convert me to the sport or earn me a social circle. That only happened with theater, which I now regret joining, as that space was a violent one where repressed males created an uncomfortable alternative to a sports locker room where we demanded various forms of nudity from each other. As a high schooler looking to get into acting school, I did a monologue from the perspective of a teenager who ran over a toddler with his family's car, and I practiced the monologue constantly with my mother, who supported me, but said the way I was performing made me “look constipated,” which was true, I was heaving and clenching, trying to work up an anxious energy that parallels the tension I feel when I try to shit and can't. I didn't make it into most of the acting programs I applied to with this monologue, despite having starred in many school plays in which acting came easy, where I was an ebullient and charming comic performer praised by many, so I am not sure why that changed, and other people got accepted while I was rejected. I believe my mother was honest about my looking constipated because she loved me deeply and wanted me to succeed, which I recently recalled to a friend who found that funny, so we both laughed. He told me that seeing the popular film *Scarface* in a movie theater the week before was a “religious experience” for him, which I found surprising and made me question if I've ever had an artistic experience akin to a religious one. I am not spiritual, though I meditate sometimes, but not rigorously, so I am more anxious than I was raised to be.

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###### Play Fragment

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Once, as a child, I scuba-dived with my dad and sang the entire time, using up all my oxygen, so I needed to use his emergency oxygen to reach the surface, which was fine for me but scared the shit out of my dad, who couldn't believe I *sang* the whole time, but I firmly denied that I did, and even today only smile and shake my head when he brings it up, never confirming our reality. I always choose silent refusal over physical or verbal aggression, and the only fights I ever got into as a child involved me pinning my little brother down as he would try to punch me, possibly for good reasons, I can't remember; today, my brother is a much taller and stronger person than me, and the one time we fought during the COVID-19 lockdown, he grabbed me by the collar and lifted me up in front of our parents, which of course upset them, and I started screaming, so he let me go, and my whole family was surprised to find that my scream came out as a feminine, high-pitched shriek. I only feel protected by the women in my life, like my mother and girlfriend, and I mostly read books by and about women, and am friends with many. When I'm not in the presence of women, I become a sweatier, more nervous person with less to say, and have ever since I was a child, when my dear friend, Lisa, saved me from falling out of a tree we'd been hanging out in. We never kissed, and we were never boyfriend and girlfriend—we were so young—but I do think I fell in love with her when she saved me, and I realized that this little girl, maybe six years old, two years younger than I was at the time, was my protector, and my friend, my equal, and men had never saved me. I've loved men too, but I've never had a boyfriend, even though there was a time in college, as an incel at a large state school, when I really wanted to love a man or boy, which never really happened. I would take acid with my five male roommates, Chris, John, Rick, Jackson, and Jaco, and one time, I held John and listened to his heartbeat while *Animal Planet* was playing, and I fell in love with him then, mostly in a sensory way, feeling a world open up through his ribs, then opened my eyes to a polar bear eating a penguin, and said “oh no” at the sight of blood, though I did not throw up—I had done that on a different drug trip on different drugs, where it seemed that garbage made up the world, and humans, animals, buildings, and nature were all built from the same junk, which made me feel closer to a few different moody artists whose work had felt impenetrable before then, which I was grateful for. I fell in love with art partially due to my experiences with drugs, but I don't do them anymore, instead I sneak art into my days at work, listening to albums, watching videos, and reading articles. Most true pleasures are secrets, tucked away from life, even the conscious mind. I believe my girlfriend keeps secrets from me, though not large or hurtful ones, just normal ones, or small pleasures she may have developed as an only child. Sometimes, this concept brings me so much comfort that I want to cry and do so while we hold each other, which makes her cry, usually in our new apartment we just moved into together, in front of a huge open window between our beautiful new bookshelves to a street full of strangers, who may look up through the trees at us crying and see a sort of small film, which makes sense since we are both former theater kids who quit acting for writing, in part because we had had enough of the rejection, even though today we find that our article pitches get rejected all the time, though it's good that we're putting ourselves out there, despite how suffocating it is to work in a medium where we are still constantly refused, so sometimes, to soften the pain, I will sing to her about how whichever editor rejected us is a lying, perverted creep, projecting my voice to the world in a large, natural baritone, and she'll laugh then join in, calling them an abuser, filling the room with her surprisingly clear, classically trained mezzo soprano.

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