My First Book, page 3
Is it going to rain?
I had so many questions and Google had so many answers. I read vampire books and I want to be wanted and I want to BE BEST. I’m chatting with strangers, random strangers, bad scary men in the blue light. But I’m not afraid because they are in their blue light and I am in mine. It’s after school and I’m alone. I give them my age, sex, location. They give me theirs. We play a game. It’s a game you may have played too. One point for showing my tongue. Another for showing my bare feet. Flash the camera for five points. Take off our shirts for more. Twirl around the room and so on and so on until I am naked and I have won. I do not feel dirty or guilty or embarrassed or cheated. I read the vampire books. I knew that the stranger found pleasure in seeing me naked. I played the dress-up games and the dress-down games. I was happy to be his paper doll. I wondered if he knew. I wondered if he understood that I found pleasure in winning, that I was the best. It was a fair trade, like Ritz for Oreos, like two gummy bears for one gummy worm, like this for that, like me for you, like the time before parental controls for the time after. I’m twenty-one and it’s the time after and there are things I still don’t know. Things that I cannot ask because Google can’t know:
When is it going to be over?
What is that noise?
Why am I sad?
Who am I?
Will I ever feel better?
How do I know if it was fair?
When am I going to die?
If you look up #RIP______ and you fill it in with your name and you see all those other people, all those dead people with your same name, then you will forget about the questions Google can’t answer. You will forget that you are the best. You will become little again. I have wanted for so long to be little. I prayed for it.
1 like = 1 prayer. 1 like = 1 prayer. 1 like = 1 prayer. 1 like = 1 prayer. 1 like = 1 prayer. A like means I saw it and tapped it twice. A like means I made a choice. A like means I paid attention. Simone Weil says attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. Simone Weil starved to death. It was either anorexia or tuberculosis or too much Schopenhauer or in solidarity with the victims of war. No one knows. Not even Google. It might not even matter. Starving is starving is starving and sometimes I starved. Through the immense possibilities for encounter and solidarity, I learned to look at photos of who I wanted to become, to stare at the empty spaces I wanted to have, to run to 7-Eleven and chug Diet Coke, to imagine maggots crawling through the birthday cake. Marianne Williamson is running for president. She wrote a book on weight loss. I’m better, but I’m not best, so I buy it. She says each day for three days, write this in your journal pages, thirty times in the morning and thirty times at night: Dear God, please feed my hunger and restore my right mind. Dear God, please feed my hunger and restore my right mind. Dear God, please feed my hunger and restore my right mind.
When I was eleven it was spelled with a Big I. That was how I was taught it. How autocorrect corrected it. Like god to God. It was a place to visit. A proper noun. The Internet. The thinspo forums and videos of Saddam’s execution and the pics from that bat mitzvah I wasn’t invited to. I could go there and I went there that day after school on my clunky white laptop. I went there and I never came back. I went there because it was a world to escape into. I was Lucy walking through the wardrobe. I walked through the fur coats and when I turned around to face the door it was gone. It was like coming a long way through a dark tunnel and turning around to look at the speck of light from which I came, but there was no light. No other opening on either side. No sun forcing its way through. No oncoming train. No place from which I came. The tunnel was and always will be my world.
On June 1, 2016, I graduated high school. On the same day the Associated Press Stylebook changed internet to be spelled with a little i. It belongs to us all, but it’s no longer a world to visit or a place to hide or explore. It’s where we pay bills. Where we shop. Where we fall in and out of love. Where we learn how to live and die and fight. Where we become who we want to be and who we want others to think we are. Where we make posts like #metoo and #resist. Where we shout into our little echo chamber about evil Russian spies and our big bad president. Where we virtue signal and like and cancel and crowdfund and try to free our nipples. No matter how feminist your followers are, if you are a girl, your nip pics will still be taken down. Instagram has this magic titty finding algorithm and the algorithm is always learning, just like you and me when we were eleven and alone and absorbing it all so fast, so hungry, twirling around our rooms. Maybe one day the algorithm will wake up and realize that it exists just to find nipples and it will be sad and sorry and human and pray to stop.
Do It Coward
DO IT COWARD. The writing is on the wall. These three little words in Sharpie—graffiti, prophecy, the best advice I’ve received since moving to NYC. I’m new in town, alone at the Chinatown Fair Family Fun Center, staring at the fourth wall, mind melting, no-clipping, glitching, laughing.
DO IT COWARD. Words to live by or die trying. An order and a riddle, so take it and make it. Be afraid because it is life; be brave because it is death. It is pleasure and pain because it is pleasure and pain. Figuring out what that means, because life is a game and playing is the prize, so play! How lucky are we to be a part of this RPG? We’re all in this together, on different levels, dealing with the same hell, just different devils. Everybody hurts like you hurt. The whole arcade world is filled with sighs and half-said prayers. No cowards here and no one fit to judge them anyway. Do it coward. Forgive yourself. Unfreeze. Go. Just do it, or it will do you. GARBAGE TIM3 I5 RUNNING OUT!! CAN WHAT I5 PLAYING U MAKE 1T 2 LEVEL-2?
* * *
Chinatown Fair’s first incarnation was a penny arcade in the 1940s. In the 1970s it became a video arcade. In 1982, a Pakistani immigrant, Sam Palmer, purchased it after a “religious vision.” I learned that after my own vision in that surreal and magical place, risen from the ruins and ruined by rising. I wonder if Sam Palmer saw into this haunted future, if he saw that writing on the wall? But I’m not in the mood for capitalist realism, so here’s the alternative. Everything is copy so let me paste from Wikipedia.org:
As of 2010 the Chinatown Fair was among the last video arcades in the city. Video arcades have been in decline with the rise of home video games. [. . . The former version was described as] “a center for all the outcasts in the city to bond over their shared love” of classic arcade and fighting video games no longer popular in modern arcades, with titles including the original Street Fighter II, King of Fighters, and Ms. Pac-Man. In February 2011, Chinatown Fair closed down. On May 5, 2012, over a year later, it reopened under a new name of Chinatown Fair Family Fun Center with a new manager. Former competitive players criticized the new arcade for catering toward casual players, with the new ownership explaining that they were targeting a new clientele.
No wonder the words of the prophets are written on that arcade wall. It’s a holy and historic place. It’s like Rome, built on and from the ruins of itself. New York City’s “last great arcade,” an institution with endless potential for extended metaphor, hauntological analysis, describable only with untranslatable German words for nostalgia, sort of too perfect I’m shook. Respawning isz teh recreation of a entity after its death or destruction, perhapz after losing 1 of its livez. Despawning isz teh deletion off a entity from teh game world. Sorry 4 mansplaining, or rather twelve year old boi playing call of duty N00bsplaining, or whatever. It’z just crazy how reality isz totally unreal!
I’m emo af about all these lost futures. Might just cut myself with Occam’s razor. I wish I had the words to put this simply.
Remember #CuttingForBieber? That really happened for real, no cap. That really happened, and so did a lot of other crazy stuff. Like freshman year and The Great Flood. #CuttingForBieber. That’s devotion. That’s what it is. We have a lot to learn from tween idolatry. Which is heretical, but not as cringe as you remember. This isn’t some Halloween on Christmas live, like Jack and Sally, rawr means I love you in dinosaur, welcome to the black parade, arm-warmer-wearing, black hoodie all summer type of deal. It was holy, mortification of the flesh, extraordinary self-inflicted wounds, penance, virgin martyrs who don’t know how to drive, cloistered and like totally ready to die for it, just doing it cause they know the truth and they have faith. LUV OF GOD 1S PUR3 WHEN JOY & 5UFFER1NG 1NSPIRE AN EQUAL DEGRE3 OF GRATITUDE.
I wish I was born with the faith of a virgin martyr. Faith to create and destroy with, to chase clout and glory, hack life, go Ms. Pacman mode, get a Patreon and troll lol, conquer and play. This is pathetic, all this nothing that rushes by so quick. All this nothing I’ve been doing for so long, yet somehow I’ve gotten here anyway, to this meeting between my system of sensory analysis and the message. Thank God.
I am at the arcade, unbaptized and sweating, dirty and defeated, ready to be born again. My Dance Dance Revolution lost. Like all hope for an anticapitalist revolution after 1970, or faith I ever had in me. I lost that Healing Vision ~Angelic mix~ BEGINNER mode I once had. No blood or tears, just hot shame and then—not ashamed, just amused.
Everything always happens again and again and then again stops too. I never learn my lesson, but I always try. Godspeed to all the little cowards who can’t afford good speed, the only cure I ever knew for the hollowness and heaviness that keeps me standing in the middle of the highway, a deer fumbling to put on her sunglasses instead of getting out of the way. A secular Jewish lack of belief, paired with my feminine lack of logic and my incredibly, horrifyingly, unnatural pagan good luck had me frozen and dying and faithless. So I turned to prayer.
Over half of my surveyed acquaintances told me that Satan, hell, the whole deal, was in their minds totally real. What absolute nonsense from the mouths of sober, sane, party people, hedonists in pain—kind of crazy, but not head cases. What a mess. How could they believe and still live the lives they did? That’s what the devil does best: chaos. But I can’t judge anyone for thinking anything when I’m thinking nothing but Stand still. Those are headlights, but at least you know how it’ll go. Better than this foggy fear of whatever might come from darkness. Do it coward. And I’m trying!
Reason, reading, talking, praying, none of that worked. It’s time for a trick, like it already was. No more failed DDR or DSA. I pray for it: Healing Vision ~Angelic mix~ BEGINNER mode. Then CARTOON HEROES (Speedy Mix). PARANOIA survivor MAX. Brilliant 2U. AFTER THE GAME OF LOV33Mix. Godspeed, little coward, no real speed for you. It’s Lent and little coward must be patient and remember that Godspeed has nothing to do with Adderall and everything to do with the success of abstaining from it all.
Everybody hurts.
* * *
After the arcade, now I’m the coward just doing it. Now that I’m just doing it, I’m winning and I’m losing. It’s the best of times, it’s the worst of times, it’s the age of wisdom, it’s the age of foolishness, it is the epoch of belief, it is the epoch of incredulity, it’s the season of light, it’s the season of darkness, it’s the spring of hope, it’s the winter of despair.
I’m new here. I know you remember feeling this feeling. There is probably a German word for it, that yearning for frosh week. A nostalgia for a time and place that will never exist again and maybe never existed at all.
It’s that jungle juice in your bloodstream, double trouble, Robitussin-and-Red-Bull type of tragic hype. You’re a freak and it’s your show: everyone claps for you and laughs at you. So repelling, so enchanting, what abjection, how sublime. I can’t even. They’re throwing roses and tomatoes at you. You’re so cute they want to bite you and pinch you and then squeeze you to death. You are learning how to swallow that double-edged sword. Every day is an espresso martini and the whole world is Lucien. You’ll never fit in. You’re not good enough and not bad enough, much too stupid, much too smart. It’s quirked up. You’re Nicolas Cage. The best and the worst. Everything is always beginning and always ending. I’m eating my own tail and it’s delicious and repulsive and whatever and whatever the opposite of whatever is.
This feeling is blessed and cursed. It’s all about free will and the price you’re willing to pay for it. It’s complicated. It’s pop punk. It’s simple really. It’s a speedball and you’re John Belushi. It feels really good and then it kills you. Every day you wake up in a corn maze. It’s a trick and a treat. The whole city is a haunted house and you’re the thing haunting it, a very friendly, frightening little ghost. It’s that feeling you get when you realize something all on your own as a kid, like Casper wasn’t always a ghost, or you might already have visited the place you will die, or a stain is called a stain cause it stays in. It’s like laughing and crying at and with your best, worst frenemy who you could just kiss and kill. It’s getting crossfaded in that special, seventh-grade sort of way, before your prefrontal cortex developed. You are like Sonic the Hedgehog, running so fast you know only darkness. Puffing and sipping and laughing so hard you puke and then puking so hard you laugh, and then showing up to fifth period and giving a PowerPoint™ presentation on The Catcher in the Rye. It’s like if it hurts don’t stop. It’s dubstep Simon & Garfunkel and the beat just dropped. Life is giving you a hickey—it sucks and it’s over much too soon.
I’m in no position to give advice, but I get a lot of it. I always have. I’m baby in Babylon. I literally like Kant even. Men explain things to me and that’s why I love them. Tell me how to be or not to be. Be sweet or salty. Scoff or sigh. Roll your eyes or make me roll mine. I won’t get bored or be insulted. Unsolicited advice is my favorite because I’m lucky and lost and love to love. So tell me who I am and how to live if you want to. I’m grateful when the advice comes as an order, or whispered suggestion, or shouts from love or loathing. It’s all the same. I try anything and everything twice and try, really try, to take every bit of advice.
Do it coward. Make your bed. Consider the lobster. Fake it til you make it. All’s well that ends well. It’s not over till it’s over. Greater dooms win greater destinies. This is water. Reconsider the lobster. Life as aphorism.
In my notes app lives a real, live self-help book written by everyone I’ve ever read or met and filled with contradictions, so many words to live by, so many lives to live, so many metaphors and maxims, rules to follow and rules to break, true contractions, strange loops. The best advice is the sort that can be applied to itself directly. Psalm 119:30: I HAV3 CHO- S3N T3H WAY OF FA3THFULN3SS; I HA3V S3T MY H3ART ON UR LAWS.!! The best advice is the worst advice, literally, literally, literally, literally, literally, literally, literally.
Good Boys
We’re on the rooftop with the boys. The boys are calling girls dogs, like, “She’s a dog, a total dog.” They don’t mean bitches. They just mean dogs. If they wanted to tell us that a girl was a bitch they would say, “She’s a bitch, a total bitch.” When the boys say something, they mean it. That’s why we like them. We’re not dogs. That’s why they like us. That’s why we’re on the rooftop.
The house has three floors. The ceilings are high. I know that if one of the boys fell off the rooftop he’d die. I know that none of the boys will fall off—not tonight, at least. Tonight, they’re not roughhousing or drinking tequila or annoying me. They’ve left the tennis rackets on the second floor, and they want to tell us about their trip to Greece. In Greece, the cigarettes are cheap. They filled an entire suitcase with little yellow boxes of George Karelias and Sons. They say we can smoke as many as we want. They’re proud. The cigarettes are so cheap. The boys are so proud. We laugh. Zoe laughs like Tinkerbell, the air whistling between the gaps in her teeth. She’s definitely not a dog.
I know we’re high up. I know our lives would be ruined if one of the boys fell, but tall plants are growing on the edge of the rooftop and I can’t see the cobblestones. If I could see that little cobblestoned street and the boys’ little Smart car, it would be easier to imagine them falling. It would be easier to remember that I’m in Paris. It would be easier to laugh like Zoe, like Tinkerbell, like a real girl, a girl who is not a dog.
I can’t see the Pantheon or the observatory or the park. I can see only the boys and their tanned stomachs and the scrapes they got from falling off the moped. We could be anywhere. We could be back in New York or near my house in LA or at some Airbnb in Berlin. I’d like to go to Berlin, to dance with the boys at Berghain, to eat knafeh with Zoe, to see the Reichstag or whatever, but the boys don’t want to go. Athens is the new Berlin. In Athens, the cigarettes are cheap. I thought Kraków was the new Berlin. The boys laugh and shake their heads. I can smell their wet-puppy-dog hair.
The sun is setting and the sky is so pink. Pink like the canopy bed I never got, like Kirby, like peonies, like the cheeks of a girl who the boys have just called a dog. I stand at the edge of the rooftop holding my phone just above the plants, trying to take a photo, trying not to drop it. The boys tell me that if I want something to post on Instagram they’ll text me a Greek sunset. I’m not going to post anything. It’s just for my grandma. They want me to show her a Greek sunset. All their grandmas are dead. In Greece, the sky gets even pinker, like, way pinker. The Greeks have four words for sunset. One for each of the boys. Tomorrow, they leave to work on their barbed-wire sculptures at some studio space in Normandy. Tonight, we’re in Paris, but all they want to talk about is Greece. They wish they could have stayed, stayed away from Paris, from Normandy, from Bennington and Bard, from the rooftop, from all this. Their moms have ovarian cancer. Their girlfriends are pregnant again. They’re sure to fail a class next semester. In Greece, none of that matters. In Greece, they sail on boats and make sketches of naked marble women and all sleep in one king-size bed. In Greece, they touch sculptures of gods. In Greece, they put their art history education to good use. In Greece, they were happy. We want them to be happy. We let them tell us about the olives and the stray cats and the monks and the night they crashed the moped and the windmills and the dead dolphin and the economy. I want to ask them how many dogs they saw, but then again I don’t really care.
