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The Virtues of Underwear
Modesty, Flamboyance and Filth
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British Comics
A Cultural History
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THE LARB QUARTERLY No. 43 FALL 2024
Publisher: Tom Lutz
Editor-In-Chief: Medaya Ocher
Managing Editor: Ellie Eberlee
Senior Editors: Paul Thompson, Rob Latham
Poetry Editors: Elizabeth Metzger, Callie Siskel
Art Director: Perwana Nazif
Design Director: Ella Gold
Copy Desk Chief: AJ Urquidi
Executive Director: Irene Yoon
Social Media Director: Maya Chen
Publications Coordinator: Danielle Clough
Ad Sales: Bill Harper
Board Of Directors: Albert Litewka (chair) , Jody Armour, Reza Aslan, Bill Benenson, Leo Braudy, Eileen Cheng-Yin Chow, Matt Galsor, Anne Germanacos, Tamerlin Godley, Seth Greenland, Steven Lavine, Eric Lax, Tom Lutz, Susan Morse, Sharon Nazarian, Lynne Thompson, Barbara Voron, Matthew Weiner, Jon Wiener, and Jamie Wolf
Editorial Intern: Margaux Bauerlein
Cover Art: Lida Abdul Clapping with stones (2005) 16mm film transferred to video
Copyright: © the artist and hopefulmonster editore
From Lida Abdul, hopefulmonster editore, Turin, 2007.
The Los Angeles Review of Books is a 501 (c) (3) nonprofit organization. The LARB Quarterly is published by the Los Angeles Review of Books, 672 South La Fayette Park Place, Suite 30, Los Angeles, CA 90057. © Los Angeles Review of Books. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the Los Angeles Review of Books. Visit our website at www.lareviewofbooks.org
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Hilton Als and Melissa Seley
Jenny Fran Davis
Christina Wood
Brontez Purnell
Enzo Escober
Charlie Clewis
Charley Burlock
Arielle Gordon
Grace Byron
Evan McGarvey 94 WITCHES OF FRESNO
Venita Blackburn 98 PIGFOOT
Venita Blackburn
Brady Brickner-Wood
126 THE AFOREMENTIONED JOURNAL
David Hollander POETRY
42 SRDIČKO BOLÍ
Claressinka Anderson
63 HAS YOUR SPIRIT DRIED UP?
emet ezell
74 I HAVEN’T HEARD MY BROTHER’S VOICE IN TEN YEARS
Douglas Manuel 112 MONTAUK
Connie Voisine
137 STRAINING FOR THE NOISE
Jenny Xie
A spot-on guide to how and why Americans have become so bloody keen on Britishisms—for good or ill
The untold story of South America’s most interesting beverage How medieval-inspired racial feudalism reigned in early America and was challenged by Black liberal thinkers
Dear Reader,
Ours is a particularly sticky time. We can’t let anything go. So much of what used to be ephemeral is now fixed. Even our most boring and benign thoughts are eternally preserved online. This makes our era particularly well suited for those inclined towards fixation. Obsessions are encouraged and easily accommodated—you don’t need a psychoanalyst, you just need time and a search engine.
Let’s be honest, this can sometimes be fun. Who hasn’t enjoyed a rabbit hole or two? It can also be utterly hellish, as the recent election might attest. As far as politics are concerned, we seem hopelessly stuck, if not actively regressing. There’s the daddy worship, the insistence that the past is somehow more desirable than the present, the same decrepit cast of clowns. This is all made worse by the fantasy that our fixations will somehow save us.
This issue of the LARB Quarterly Journal explores the different ways that fixation manifests itself. Jenny Fran Davis writes about care in contemporary queer literature. Brontez Purnell breaks down his obsession with Madonna and Desperately Seeking Susan. Christina Wood writes about how we’ve used time capsules to curate the stories and histories we’d like to tell about ourselves, and Charlie Clewis reports from a forgotten military base in Syria. Enzo Escober profiles the model and activist Geena Rocero, while Charley Burlock writes about grieving the death of her brother. And much, much more.
This is our last issue of 2024. We hope it allows for some perspective on what it means to be fixated. I would look at Lida Abdul’s beautiful stills, featured throughout this issue. Are we tied to the ruins or are we pulling them down?
Yours, Medaya
A PRECISE EXCAVATION OF THE SOUL
A Conversation with Hilton Als
by Melissa Seley
Hilton Als is not an easy man to pin down. His writing tends to simultaneously defy and define the limits of nonfiction. A longtime New Yorker staff writer and the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of three hybrid nonfiction books—The Women (1996), White Girls (2013), My Pinup (2022)—he’s also a renowned curator. Over the past three decades, Als has staged shows in galleries and museums around the world, hopscotching from Berlin to New York to Los Angeles.
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Near Strangers
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Deep & Wild
On Mountains, Opossums & Finding Your Way in West Virginia
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Terminal Maladies
“This thunderous collection considers the space between attention and abstraction, between life and death. Which is another way to say love.”
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Als’s work defies categorization, but it might best be framed by a phrase he has used to define art criticism: a “generosity of seeing.” At the opening of his most recent show, At Home: Alice Neel in the Queer World at David Zwirner Los Angeles, Als used the same phrase to describe Neel’s radical humanism. And yet, both Neel and Als shy away from calling themselves portraitists. For Neel, the word “portrait” rang elitist. She preferred to say she painted “pictures of people.” To Als’s mind, Neel’s oeuvre represents nothing less than “a gorgeous, outrageous, precise excavation of the soul […] one of the true pleasures of anyone who’s interested in painting, and anyone who is interested in humans.”
Als agreed to have lunch with me, except I was in Los Angeles and Als was in New York. But where Als goes, you follow (with a cheap last-minute hotel room and a red-eye return ticket). The morning of the appointment, it turned out Als couldn’t meet after all. He was, again, on the move. We talked on the phone instead—about the way he looks at art, the way women look at men, and his latest thoughts on Alice Neel.
My first encounter of Neel was looking at her Whitney catalog and being amazed by the number of people of color in them. This was in the 1980s—I was a student majoring in art history at Columbia. At first, at that party, David didn’t respond. He seemed to disregard it. Two years later, he called me. He explained that things had been complicated technically with her estate. He asked, “Would you still like to do a show?” Then, at some point in the making of the show, he asked me why it was only in one room. This was his gallery. I said I didn’t really know. He said: “Take two rooms.” He hadn’t forgotten in all these years what I’d said to him at a party. Now he was giving me even more space than I thought. I was so moved.
MELISSA SELEY: Your first Neel show, Alice Neel, Uptown at David Zwirner New York in 2017, made such an impression on everyone I know. How did that originally come about?
HILTON ALS: The first Alice Neel show happened because David called me. I’d met him at a party and asked him, “Why hadn’t anyone done a show of Neel’s portraits of people of color?”
Then, when the show got picked up by the Met, which they acknowledged came from us, and as the Uptown show went to Zwirner London, I approached Victoria and said: “I have this other idea about Neel and the queer.” Later, when the Neel show went up at the Met, I reapproached David. He said: “Let’s do it in L.A.” There were delays. There wasn’t even an L.A. building for the gallery yet. But I think it worked in favor of the show. People were ready. This was after Trump, after all the many recent natural disasters. People are hungry for it.
How did you fall into curating?
How I got started … Many years ago, I started doing shows with a friend: Hudson, at Feature Gallery. I was working at The Village Voice at the time. I wrote a letter to him. Can you imagine? I said, “I want to do a show.” My mother had just died. We
Alice Neel, Richard Gibbs, 1968
© The Estate of Alice Neel
Courtesy The Estate of Alice Neel and David Zwirner
Alice Neel, Kris Kirsten, 1971 © The Estate of Alice Neel
Courtesy The Estate of Alice Neel and David Zwirner
Alice Neel, Ballet Dancer, 1950 © The Estate of Alice Neel
Courtesy The Estate of Alice Neel and David Zwirner
called it I Only Want You to Love Me. My mother was a hairdresser. I hung hair from the ceilings. I hung Lorna Simpson paintings on the walls. Around that, we made an atmosphere.
Other things came of that. We did a show at Simon Watson’s gallery. We did a window at the New Museum. Things were much looser then!
Peter Doig, the painter, asked me to do something with him at Werner in Berlin. I titled it Self-Consciousness. Then I got a letter from Jenny Jaskey, now at the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Back then, she had this gallery space in the Lower East Side. It was kind of like
a basement; then they opened a space at Hunter College. She had me do three shows. I did one for a trans friend who’d recently died—paintings of Jackie Curtis and Candy Darling. A show about my sister who was ill at the time—Cheryl Sutton’s paintings. And one about James Baldwin and queer men. Each of these shows was about a larger theme, nested in the intimate idea of biography and memory.
Then David called about that first Neel show and gave me visibility outside the art world. Now I have a curatorial portfolio! David didn’t have any reason to do that— he’s a visionary. I’m immensely grateful to him for his foresight.
So many portraitists among the painters you gravitate to. Much of your work— The Women, White Girls—could be considered essay-portraits. I wonder, do you consider yourself a portraitist, because I think maybe I do?
I’m moved that you see that of me. I don’t feel as a writer that I’m any particular thing. It never feels one way.
Let’s talk about Neel looking at men, if you don’t mind?
I don’t!
Who should we start with—Richard Gibbs? When did you first come across that astonishing painting of him?
I hadn’t seen Richard Gibbs until we started choosing works. I feel that there’s a lot of energy in Alice’s paintings. They give me the shivers. The psychological energy is so profound that if you don’t have a visceral response, there’s something wrong with you.
Richard. He’s so big but the painting is so gentle. There’s an awkwardness in the pose because she was doing something women don’t usually get to do. Men are usually the ones doing the looking. If we do it— look at a man like that—there’s a weird awkwardness. They’re not used to being objectified. She’s not objectifying them but there’s something I find completely radical in her work, and in her looking at men as subjects. She finds them very sexy, like the pianist (Robert Avedis Hagopian, 1971) with his legs spread. There’s a way a woman doesn’t look away when she finds a man
sexy. You can feel this amazing energy in Neel’s work about the male form—sexuality, attraction, eros.
That’s rare. Usually, a woman looks away. Diane Arbus didn’t turn away. Neel didn’t turn away. Celia Paul, when she’s painting men, doesn’t turn away.
When I came upon Richard in the Zwirner archives, I was happily startled to see his discomfort. It was nice to see, and it made me laugh!
Kris Kirsten, the man in the fur coat—a painting of one of Alice’s acquaintances. Can we please talk about him?
Oh, yes. That man scares me! He’s the kind of man who really upsets me. A really mean kind of queen. He’s an incredible figure in terms of self-defense. The fur coat is one form of self- defense. The other is himself. There’s something almost repellent about him. I look at him, I’m scared.
Frank O’Hara?
That painting is so moving to me in terms of how Neel is saying something about language. First of all, he had terrible teeth. She said he had “teeth like tombstones.” She’s saying something [with the painting] about a gay style around irony, injury. The painting becomes about his eyes and his mouth. The muck of not just his teeth but his mouth. The muck of bitchery.
He was a visionary. And he was the kind of man who’s going to talk about you the moment you leave the room.
Martin Jay, the communist publisher of poetry in the black turtleneck?
I love Martin Jay. He’s like a little Russian icon. I find his spiritual quality to be so touching because he’s so quiet. A lot of men in the show put a lot of energy into behavior. He’s a person who doesn’t flinch from Alice. He’s lovely because he’s looking directly back at her. The self-possession is real. I find him to be a little saintly. I find comfort in him because he’s neither for nor against Alice. His self-possession is beautiful.
Before you go, how have we gotten so lucky to have had so much of you in L.A. lately?
You know, that’s a great question. It’s really been by happenstance. Who knows. Maybe I’ve proven myself in L.A. now and I can come back. I’d love to do more in your city. Maybe we could drive around next time I’m there looking at paintings …
MEAN MOMMIES
Care in Contemporary Queer Literature
by Jenny Fran Davis
“Mother me meanly,” Helen begs the couple she’s trying to seduce over text. They’re lesbians, a bit older, and when they fire back that she’s using the word incorrectly, Helen is thrilled by the scolding. Further, she muses: “Which word they meant—mother or meanly—was never made clear to me.” Ultimately, of course, it doesn’t matter. Helen wants only to be reprimanded.
Mother and meanly are terms that animate Marissa Higgins’s excellent debut novel, A Good Happy Girl (2024)—words at either end of the continuum of care and neglect. These concerns stalk the novel from its first pages to its very last. The story begins with Helen, a Boston-area lawyer who live streams fetish videos of her feet from her law office’s bathroom stalls. Trauma-addled and cough syrup–addicted, Helen arranges a preliminary meeting with the older lesbian couple, Catherine and Katrina (a.k.a. “the wives”), at a coffee shop. There’s a New England chill in the air; all three sip coffee with alternative milk (the wives are vegan before six p.m.) and size each other up in unspoken assessment. The wives seem to be willing to do what Helen needs them to do: to take care of her, and to hurt her. Sometimes both. What Helen mostly wants, though, is for the wives to pay attention to her. To care about her enough to understand the type of love she’s seeking, which may or may not be the type of love she needs.
•
Are throuples really connecting in coffee shops all around us? They must be, if recent queer literature is any indication. The coffee shop scene at the start of A Good Happy Girl calls to mind an early encounter in Lillian Fishman’s Acts of Service (2022), in which Eve, a young woman dating a dependable butch doctor(!), enters a dalliance with a straight couple consisting of a brash male feminist and his tenderhearted, painterly mistress.
In A Good Happy Girl, as in Acts of Service, a narrator seeks something specific yet amorphous from the couple she
courts over coffee. In Helen’s words, what she wants is for “the same wom[a]n who abandoned me to repair me.” Not literally the same woman, of course, but one who shares the designation, the patron saint of care and caretaking herself: Mommy.
Mommy. She’s a therapy punch line, a camp queen (see gay guys singing “Mother!” at sexy, powerful actresses), an all-encompassing enigma whose influence looms large—so large that it’s easy to lose sight of her actual, physical body and abstract her into symbolism. Mommy’s eroticism is too obvious to be genuinely transgressive (the cast of Monterey women duking it out on HBO’s Big Little Lies is a good example of catty but ultimately declawed mommies) but still packs a visceral punch (Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 novel The Price of Salt contains the unforgettable image of fur coat–wearing Carol locking eyes with mousy Therese at the store where Carol has come to buy her daughter a Christmas present). In books, particularly gay ones— take Cherríe Moraga’s Native Country of the Heart (2019), in which she fixates on the life of her mother, Elvira—Mommy is never far from the page. How could she be?
From 20th-century psychoanalysis (Freud, Lacan) to pop memoir (I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy has sat on the bestseller list for almost two years straight), literature has long been preoccupied with mean mothers. By now, we know that mothers structure; mothers shape. Their influence weaves through a life like a threaded needle, puncturing and sealing the choices we make and the partners we seek.
We have also, in the past 10 or so years, lived through a literary moment during which women have wrestled with
ambivalence surrounding motherhood— namely, do they want to be one? These mothers aren’t mean, but they are committed to troubling, in writing, the choice to mother in the first place. On the nonfiction shelf, we have Sheila Heti’s hydra-headed indecision on display in Motherhood (2018); Rivka Galchen’s meticulous observations about the weirdness of babies in Little Labors (2016); and Maggie Nelson’s genre-breaking exploration of queer family-making and maternity in The Argonauts (2015), in which she describes her intellectual mentors as “many-gendered mothers of the heart.” On the fiction side, Rachel Yoder’s protagonist turns feral in Nightbitch (2021), Torrey Peters’s characters navigate trans parenthood in all its heartbreak and complexity in Detransition, Baby (2021), and the so-called “bad mother” comes in for keen critique in Jessamine Chan’s The School for Good Mothers (2022). These books run the gamut from cultural criticism to speculative fiction. All of them—and many more I haven’t read, I’m sure—are important entries into the literary canon, which is vastly underpopulated by mothers and dispatches about the experience of motherhood: namely, how it actually feels to be someone’s mother, and what happens when that feeling isn’t uniformly positive, or easy.
•
In the intro to their anthology Mommy Wound (2024), Katie Brewer Ball and Vick Quezada write that “[m]aybe mothering is another word for the project of care and stewardship.” I think so, and if Mommy is a state of mind, an energy, an aesthetic, even a politics surrounding care, what might literature teach us about mothering today?
Undeniably more so than fatherhood, motherhood’s unique cultural status renders it capacious, all-encompassing: not just a job but also an identity; not just a privilege but also a responsibility; not just something one does with one’s days but also a life purpose. It makes sense that Mommy is ripe for metaphorizing; she’s so vast and mutable that she can be or signify almost anything. It’s this symbolism that, as a reader and as a writer, interests me the most.
As someone who is not (yet) a mother to anyone but my pug, I enjoy virtually any account of motherhood, in all its ugliness and beauty; I fear, however, that I’ve come up against the limits of what I can write about the literal physical or emotional experience of motherhood. As a reader, though, I’m particularly fascinated by the radical potential of motherhood on display in contemporary queer fiction and the frameworks it draws upon or elicits, which expand Mommy further than her literal limits, gesturing at alternative models for care and romance and asking what we can be to each other when what we are to each other transcends immediate recognition— in other words, what it means to Mommy without precisely mothering.
“Mommy is your world,” I often tell my pug, and in doing so, something powerful and wickedly delicious swells within me. The sheer power of such a statement! It’s enough to take your breath away. I’m a potent demon in these moments: the world spins on my finger; my presence fills the frame of my pug’s existence, eclipsing everything and everyone else. Anything I say is law, any choice I make sacrosanct. I am high on control yet brought back down to earth by solemn responsibility. My
mommy ministrations are few but detailed: keeping my good, happy girl fed, clean, cool, and entertained.
The Mommy-Baby/Serf-Tyrant framework, which the scholar Julia Golda Harris first wrote about in her newsletter Dyke Domesticity, and which I’ve heard no fewer than three people reference organically (“You know the Mommy/Serf thing?”), provides an important model for understanding how maternal care structures contemporary queer relationships. Basically, the chart has two axes: Mommy-Baby along one, and Tyrant-Serf along the other. Each person can locate herself in one of four quadrants depending on how she identifies: as a mommy or a baby, a serf or a tyrant.
“Mommy-Baby is primarily about care-taking,” Harris writes:
A paradigmatic Mommy is watchful, attentive to the needs of the other, and perhaps uncomfortable being taken care of. Meanwhile, a paradigmatic Baby enjoys or needs to be taken care of. […] Mommy Tyrants and Baby Serfs are often drawn to each other, as are Mommy Serfs and Baby Tyrants.
Alongside caretaking, at the heart of the Mommy-Baby/Serf-Tyrant continuum sits the issue of power: who desires it—and who desires only to give it up? We might say that Mommies and Tyrants desire power, that Babies and Serfs desire only to give it up. But the possibility of being a Baby Tyrant highlights the mutability of power within all relationships, maternal, romantic, or otherwise (sometimes, the “weaker” actor actually holds more power than the “stronger”). Power is a seam
that joins two people; crucially, it belongs to them both, if at different times and in different ways.
Care and power are distinct yet related things. While the Mommy-Baby axis perhaps deals more explicitly with acts of care, and the Tyrant-Serf axis attends to acts of power, there’s also the question of service—a term that unites the two concerns. Thomas Grattan’s novel In Tongues (2024) follows a young gay man named Gordon, who flits in and out of the lives of two older, wealthier gay men (“Daddies”). Gordon is at first hired help, the wealthy men’s dog-walker. Yet his youth, which positions him—if not characteristically then at least literally—as Baby, enables his Tyranny.
•
In a letter dated 1870, Emily Dickinson requested the editor Thomas Wentworth Higginson to “tell [her] what home is,” adding, “I never had a mother. I suppose a mother is one to whom you hurry when you are troubled.” To whom do you hurry when you’re troubled? In recent queer literature, young people hurry to their elders. In Michelle Hart’s We Do What We Do in the Dark (2022) and Bronwyn Fischer’s The Adult (2023), those elders are lesbian professors, confusing as they are wise. In Higgins’s A Good Happy Girl, Helen hurries to Katrina and Catherine.
Psychology’s attachment theory holds that the way we were cared for as infants creates infant attachment patterns, which in turn shape how we love later on, as adults. “Secure attachment” is the bestcase scenario; most of us are stuck with either “anxious” or “avoidant” attachment styles and their attendant consequences.
In theory, Donald Winnicott’s theory of “good enough”—as opposed to, say, perfect—mothering (1953) relieves some pressure on Mommy; at the end of the day, though, we all know whom to blame for our issues.
“The core issue at the center of women’s empowerment is the Mother Wound,” writes the therapist and self-help blogger Bethany Webster, whose website I stumbled upon after googling “what is mother wound.” “The taboo about speaking about the pain of the Mother Wound is what keeps it in place and keeps it hidden in shadow, festering, and out of view.”
In one of my all-time favorite books, Christina Crawford’s Mommie Dearest (1978), the author—Joan Crawford’s daughter, adopted as an infant—details her mother’s abusive behavior, ill-fated dalliances with men and women, and insane, thrilling, narcissistic antics. Of course, the 1981 film adaptation’s portrayal of “Mommie dearest” soon became a camp icon, Faye Dunaway’s shrill warning about clothes hangers (“No wire hangers ever!”) and face slathered with cold cream a predictable figure in drag performance. Christina Crawford paints her mother as a dizzyingly cruel tornado of violence who vacillates between abject neglect and physical abuse.
Festering and out of view. For the cameras pointed at the mother-daughter duo in the 1940s, of course, everything looked perfect: the matching mommy-and-me outfits and sweet domestic scenes. The disparity between how things looked and how things felt was a reason that the public was so shocked and outraged—at Christina for puncturing the perfect image, at Joan for her alleged behavior—when the book
was published. The feeling of looking at the photos of Joan and Christina and remembering the sinister dynamic in which these two were actually enshrined is much like the feeling of watching tradwife videos and remembering that she, this nice mommy, usually exists in a fairly scary family unit in which religious fundamentalism mingles with white supremacy.
•
Why are we so taken with narratives of deceit, abuse, and neurosis that involve Mommies? When Gypsy Rose Blanchard arranged for her boyfriend to kill her mother after years of medical abuse, including unnecessary surgeries, we couldn’t look away. Munchausen syndrome by proxy is maybe the meanest thing Mommy can do: exploit her power in such a twisted way that it distorts reality and makes her children sick, all so that she can hold on to her power—the power of care and caretaking, the power of administering treatments, the power of making all the decisions. Perhaps it’s because we already understand, implicitly, that mommyhood always contains both care and brutality; every time I read Mommie Dearest, I do so in a thrilled trance, hungry for every violent, disturbing detail.
After all, if Mommy is a wound, she’s a rich and fertile one. Mommies raise good girls—or bad ones. Growing up in the early 2000s, I saw copies of The Curse of the Good Girl: Raising Authentic Girls with Courage and Confidence (2009) on many bookshelves; the book’s thesis is that the expectations placed on girls to be “nice, polite, modest, and selfless” are detrimental to their growth and well-being. I’m on board with the gist of the book’s message, I guess,
Copyright:
Lida Abdul White house (2005) 16mm film transferred to video
© the artist and hopefulmonster editore
From Lida Abdul, hopefulmonster editore, Turin, 2007.
but I’m scared to think of what might have happened had my parents indulged my monstrousness instead of eliciting niceness, politeness, and modesty. Would I have anything to agitate against now? What would my life be about, if not trying to reconcile my inner tyrant with my genuine care for those around me?
You also have to wonder what it would actually be like for a good girl to mother you. Mommy isn’t really a girl, though; maybe she once was, dressed and done up in coquettish pink, but now she has reached the flip side of girlhood, knows the score. You might look at her and think, Is this all there is?
In the final pages of Emily Ratajkowski’s essay collection My Body (2021), the model gives birth. Finally, we watch her come into herself and her body; finally, she understands her body’s limits and power at the same time. For Ratajkowski, giving birth is both an escape from endless fascination— her own and others’—with her body and the beginning of a new relationship with it. •
I’ll address the elephant in the room: the unavoidable fact that the trope of the Mean Mommy and her particular brand of care is explicitly sexual. Mommy nurses and spanks; she administers medicine and doles out warnings. Everything she does and says is for your own good; she has high expectations of you, higher standards than you have for yourself. Crucially, she’s sexy. Punishing, in a hot way. Don’t disappoint me. She’s not vicious or vindictive; she does have your best interests at heart—think girlboss, but make it sexy. She may be brutal, but she’s brutally honest, brutally loyal.
“It obviously helps to be wearing lipstick,” a friend explained to me when I asked how they would define Mean Mommy. Of course, she usually has ample cleavage too— all the better to milk you with.
Is it too obvious to say that the figure of the Mean Mommy in adult relationships, particularly gay ones, irritates and soothes, in equal measures, the wounds left from our actual mommies? It’s just—Mean Mommy cares so much. She’s not mad, just disappointed. She knows you can do better! Mean Mommy is a femininity that weaves together maternal diplomacy and girlish sex appeal.
Another friend compared the “frightful but titillating” meanness of Mommy to the “genuinely terrifying” meanness of Daddy: “Mean Mommy isn’t going to kill you,” they said, decisive.
Navigating care in contemporary queer novels often happens along lines of power: age, class, race, social status. The characters in these novels reproduce, resist, and react to these agitating discrepancies by acting within the mother/child framework.
Susan Choi’s groundbreaking and iconic My Education (2013) was the novel that launched a thousand Mean Mommies. In the book, Regina is a graduate student initially taken by her hunky professor; when she meets his beautiful—and still breastfeeding—wife Martha, though, everything changes, and she becomes the object of Regina’s sexual and emotional fixation. There isn’t a ton of tenderness between Regina and Martha: their sex scenes are brutal and thrashing, all hard elbows and passionate clawing.
In Couplets: A Love Story (2023), Maggie Millner’s narrator leaves the care and consistency of a long-term straight relationship for the seesaw of care and neglect with a new lover, this one gay, in a spellbinding and cross-genre excursion that also has, at its periphery, the specter of a throuple in which the narrator’s lover’s ex is embroiled. In Olivia Gatwood’s Whoever You Are, Honey (2024), an intergenerational friendship between a young queer woman and her older roommate is layered and rich—one of the best representations of an older-younger friendship I’ve read. In Ellipses (2024), Vanessa Lawrence’s narrator falls into a confusing dynamic with an older girlboss who leads her on, tries to give her business advice, and taunts her via text for the entirety of the novel.
Kiley Reid’s Come and Get It (2024) introduces us to Agatha, a 37-year-old white writing professor, and Millie, a 24-year-old Black resident assistant at the University of Arkansas. The two begin a torrid affair. In Anna Dorn’s Perfume and Pain (2024), a lesbian novelist pursues a relationship with an enigmatic artist 20 years her senior with Mommy energy. In her debut novel Please Stop Trying to Leave Me (2024), Alana Saab sets up dialogues between her protagonist and her new therapist, including ones that verge on maternal. In Knife River (2024), Justine Champine’s protagonist, Jess, loses herself in older women who take care of her. (At the book’s outset, she’s living with her dermatologist homeowner girlfriend in Queens; soon, though, she’s off to a remote corner of Upstate New York to revisit her mother’s murder.) In Mrs. S (2023), K. Patrick’s narrator falls for the headmaster’s wife, the beguiling Mrs. S, who is a bit of a Mean Mommy. A Good
Happy Girl’s Helen, too, finds herself with “the wives” in a romantic dynamic that’s far from a one-way street. Helen seems to be what the wives want, or need: a supplicant, a lubricant, a willing victim.
Each of these narrators seeks care, but they’re in search of neglect too. Older lovers offer a cast with which to play out childhood scenes of care and neglect. Who better to do the work of abandonment and repair than Mommy? •
If it seems like Helen of A Good Happy Girl is trying to heal a specific wound—well, she is. The novel is set against the sinister backdrop: an 86-year-old “woman left to rot.” This is Helen’s paternal grandmother, whose care was in the hands of Helen’s now-jailed parents, selfish and troubled people whose abandonment and neglect touched Helen’s childhood deeply. When Helen’s grandmother is discovered, she has abscesses on her feet from sitting in her own excrement for weeks. When Helen goes to visit her grandmother in the nursing home where she has been placed to recuperate, the two play with dolls, dressing them in various outfits and fretting over their care. Both, it seems, are damaged, demented Mommies, struggling to reenact scenes of maternal comfort.
I suppose a mother is one to whom you hurry when you are troubled. Mommy is an imaginary creature, one we reach for when looking for how to treat and care for each other.
For Helen, care is always tinged with brutality. Much of her inner world is occupied by speculation about what violent things might happen, fantasies about
ripping out her lovers’ nose hairs and ramming hands into underwear, visions of the wives ripping out her spine and vertebrae. Sometimes she’s the assailant, and sometimes she’s the victim. The specificity of these brutalities feels almost compulsive— they’re presented neutrally, as fantasies that come and go for the narrator without much fanfare.
As they get to know each other, Helen issues a series of tests for the wives: What would you do if the heater toppled over, caught fire? What would you do if I inhaled propane? Peed my leggings? It’s never totally clear what she hopes they’ll say. Save her? Let her die? It’s probably both.
The wives’ attention—the details they remember about Helen, the ways she wants to be used and abused by them—is the thing that delights Helen most of all. If this all seems rather abject, it is. But A Good Happy Girl finds its footing early on: there is nothing warm and fuzzy, or particularly comforting, about anything the wives do to (or for) Helen. Unlike Melissa Broder’s funny and tender Milk Fed (2021), in which a woman with an eating disorder falls in love with a zaftig Orthodox Jewish ice cream scooper and gets sweetly mommied by her, forming a relationship tinged with care that approximates mother love and begins to patch up the Mother Wound. If Broder’s novel is about healing, Higgins’s is about Helen picking at the injury and seeing what she finds. Higgins’s novel is not about achieving any sort of comfort or serenity. Instead, it is keenly aware of the mundane violence that happens in intimate relationships—but more than that, it’s about a woman who doesn’t seem to want any of the warm-and-fuzzy
caretaking on offer in other mommy-issues novels. By being mothered meanly, Helen’s issues come into focus.
A surface-level reading of A Good Happy Girl stops there: Helen seeks to play out her feelings about her parents with the wives (after all, she quite literally begs them to mother her meanly). But Higgins smartly diverts our expectations: what Helen wants isn’t simply to heal from her parents’ neglect but instead to punish herself for it. After all, Helen’s parents love each other and profess undying loyalty to each other yet continue to use Helen as a pawn, coercing her to write a false character reference to help get her father released from jail. Helen isn’t just a new member of the wives’ relationships; she’s a member of her parents’ relationship too. And it’s because of this that she fears she is tainted, undeserving of the wives’ care: “If I came from such stock, who was I if not a brimful of evil to be moved away from with careful steps?”
Family abolition outlines the radical potential of rearranging traditional family structures—transcending old kinship models and actively imagining new ways of care and affection. In “Communizing Care,” M. E. O’Brien writes:
In place of the coercive system of atomized family units, the abolition of the family would generalize what we now call care. Care of mutual love and support; care of the labor of raising children and caring for the ill; care of erotic connection and pleasure; care of aiding each other in fulfilling the vast
possibilities of our humanity, expressed in countless ways, including forms of self-expression we now call gender.
What would happen if we abolished Mommy? Do we want to? Or are we all really just looking for someone else to call the shots? To off-load the obligations and agonizing decisions and stupid quandaries of our unruly imaginations? In psychoanalysis, Mommy is the root of desire, pain, and, ultimately, imagination: Lacan identifies the moment at which we’re first denied our mother’s breast as the same one in which language is born.
If Mommy’s first refusal ushers in the birth of language and imagination—the ability to wonder why we’re being denied— then we also must contend with the ocean of projection that Mommy engenders. If Mommy is everything, the fertile wound from which language and imagination spring, what gets worked out for narrators who seek Mommies in queer relationships?
In All This Could Be Different (2022), Sarah Thankam Mathews explores what it actually takes to practice care: for self, for friends, for community. Attending to friendship and romantic partnership as equally complex and important relationships, Mathews avoids the blasé tone affected by other recent novels, entries into the “sad girl” canon that often feature a dry, ironic, and deadpan—and often, it should be said, hilarious, misunderstood, and wounded—narrator who makes increasingly ill-fated decisions, who is too dissociated to admit to caring about very much. But there’s a limit to what an ironic disposition can weather. Care is an earnest emotion, so much so that it’s synonymous, in its verb form, with attention, want, love. It’s
active, not passive: care and its pursuit, its compromises, and its ethics require carefulness itself. In A Good Happy Girl, Helen cares, and cares so much that her desires take on an almost cartoonish sheen. She wants, more and more, to ratchet up the stakes and the emotions of normal life to unlikely degrees. To express care, to want care, to actually care. What if what we were to each other could transcend immediate recognition?
Lida Abdul Bricksellers of Kabul (2006) 16mm film transferred to video
Copyright: © the artist and hopefulmonster editore
From Lida Abdul, hopefulmonster editore, Turin, 2007.
OUR AMBASSADORS TO THE FUTURE
Relics of—and for—ourselves
by Christina Wood
When I was 13, I wrote a letter to my future self that was meant to be read 10 years later. I imagined who I might then be, telling myself, “I’m sure you’re married and have a house and a couple of kids by now.” I used a chatty, casual tone— the kind of writing you might kick off with a “Hey, girl.” I remember picking this tone because I thought it made sense to have a friendly, easy relationship with all versions of myself, though I was 13 so of course that relationship was anything but easy.
It was a school assignment, and I remember feeling silly writing it—I had no idea what might be important to say. I told myself I had a frog named Cassie and my favorite subjects were language arts and Spanish. I told myself that Eve 6 was on the radio a lot. I mentioned that it would soon be the year 2000, but I wasn’t able to communicate why that might be momentous. I told myself that Mark McGwire hit 500 home runs that year. In my life I had watched perhaps one baseball game and would never have been able to distinguish one Padres player from another in a lineup, but I heard other kids talking about McGwire, so I thought I ought to include him too.
The teacher told us the letters were like a time capsule. He would hold on to them and then mail them in 10 years. And he really did. When I was 23, the letter arrived at my parents’ address. Reading it felt like a reunion with someone very familiar whom I had never actually met. I’ve never kept a diary, so this return of my voice from the past was an unprecedented run-in with the uncanny. I laughed at all the things I assumed I would always want, at my total misunderstanding of the life of a 23-yearold, at all the things my chatty tone suggested would come so effortlessly to me.
Now I am 37. I do not have children or a house and have never tried to have either. I’m not anymore, but I was married for a long while. I still can’t name a single player on any baseball team. I wonder: what was the purpose of that letter? To communicate something about who I was at 13 or to imagine who I would be at 23? Even as I wrote to myself, I made assumptions about my audience, about what would be of interest and value to me 10 years down the road.
It was total guesswork—an act of imagination and expectation and hope. I tried to conjure the future, and of course I failed.
In late 2020, in the midst of the pandemic—the part of it when I still pulled up my mask anytime someone passed me on the sidewalk, the part when I was still washing all my fruits and vegetables with dish soap—I became obsessed with time capsules. This must have been my way of processing the strange reality of being caught up in a global catastrophe, a historical event in real time. The historic nature of that moment was widely recognizable. Just six months into the pandemic, for example, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History was already thinking about how the time should be captured for posterity. In December 2020, they asked the public to “share a story with the future” for their Stories of 2020 digital time capsule project. They offered a series of questions contributors could respond to:
How did you experience protests in your town?
How was your daily life changed by the pandemic?
What does the “new normal” at work look like?
What memory of quarantining with your family will most stay with you? How did the events of this year lead you to see your community differently? What object will always make you think of these times?
What do you think will happen next?
We knew 2020 was historic: the quarantine, the rising death toll, the Black Lives Matter protests, the presidential election— we knew it would all end up in textbooks.
If we were lucky enough to survive the pandemic, we would have to decide how to remember and record it. What would we tell our future selves? What would we tell future generations? I channeled my energy into poring over long lists of objects buried inside time capsules all over the globe. I was, at the same time, splitting up with my spouse and moving toward divorce, bumpily shifting that relationship from present to past.
buried in Osaka, Japan, in 1970 contains an extensive span of more than 2,000 objects: Japanese literature and work in translation, seeds and animals (including a pair of dead houseflies), electronics and medical devices, standardized tests in math and Japanese classics, tea sets for everyday and ceremonial use, and photographic records and surviving evidence from the atomic bombs, including “charred earth” and a “black nail” from a survivor of the United States’ 1945 Hiroshima atomic bombing. The second capsule is set to be opened for the first time in 6970 AD.
We ask a lot of the future, and nothing communicates the burdens we place on it so well as the time capsule.
In June 2008, the International Time Capsule Society, then based at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta, estimated that there were between 10,000 and 15,000 time capsules worldwide. This figure comes from an archived version of their website. Their current site, perhaps wisely, ventures no estimation (for how can you estimate a number of hidden things?).
The oldest known time capsule unearthed in the United States was put together by Paul Revere and Samuel Adams: a box hidden in 1795 in the Massachusetts State House. It was opened once in 1855, transferred to a brass container, and bestowed with new artifacts before it was rediscovered again in 2014. The box contains a coin from the 1600s, a page from the Massachusetts Colony records, a medal with an image of George Washington, and a silver plaque anointing the building— objects that hold historical value but no surprises.
An enormous pair of identical time capsules sponsored by Panasonic and
A time capsule buried on-site at Oglethorpe University claims to be the oldest and largest millennial time capsule (meaning, a time capsule that is not meant to be opened for thousands of years). It was sealed on May 28, 1940, and is not intended to be unearthed until May 28, 8113. According to Oglethorpe’s project info page, Dr. Thornwell Jacobs, a historian and then-president of the university, dismayed by the dearth of information on ancient societies, conceived of this capsule as a gift to future historians. Buried under two feet of stone, “lined with porcelain enamel plates embedded in pitch,” and locked away behind a welded stainless steel door, it is filled with over 640,000 pages of microfilmed books “on every subject of importance known to mankind,” hundreds of newsreels and recordings, and various totems from the time, such as a pair of binoculars, a Kodak camera, a pair of lady’s stockings, mannequins illustrating the shapes of our bodies (should our species happen to evolve), seeds and papier-mâché fruits and vegetables (in case our favorite produce should cease to exist), recordings of bird songs and a plastic bird, a piece
CHRISTINA WOOD
of aluminum foil, a Donald Duck stuffed animal, a toy airplane, and “1 Negro doll.”
The “Negro doll” is a clear tip-off that this capsule was created by a white man during the Jim Crow era, a man who chose to include an object—a child’s toy—to represent Black people rather than art, music, or writing. The website for the capsule says, “No, you can not go inside; but you can visit the sealed stainless steel door!”
Jacobs called his capsule “The Crypt of Civilization”—a morbid name, but one that acknowledges something truthful about time capsules. Like the crypts of ancient pharaohs and emperors, time capsules lay out a plan for after we’re dead. They carry the objects that fill our lives into the future and ask the future to value them and, by extension, to value our lives, to value what we value.
•
In her 1954 essay “The Concept of History: Ancient and Modern,” Hannah Arendt explains that the project of historymaking in the Western world originates with Herodotus, who understood that the task of history-making was a project of saving human deeds “from the futility that comes from oblivion.” It was a fight for immortality, and immortality was then seen as a thing that only nature possessed. To the Greeks, nature was endless and ever-renewing. Both chicken and egg, it came into being entirely of its own volition and even the Greek gods on their Olympian thrones were not above it. They did not create the world; it sprang inexplicably from nothing. The Greeks did not foresee our ability to destroy nature. They did not see humans as one small link in our networked world of
animals, plants, microbes, elements, landmasses, and atmosphere. Human life was linear and marched toward death, whereas life in nature was cyclical and eternal because each tree, each rabbit, each cow, existed “only as members of their species and not as individuals.” All human acts were “infected,” Arendt writes, “by the mortality of their authors.”
So how then could humans rise above mortality? The Greeks thought that, if they could, as Arendt writes, succeed “in endowing their works, deeds, and words with some permanence […] then these things would, to a degree at least, enter and be at home in the world of everlastingness, and the mortals themselves would find their place in the cosmos, where everything is immortal except men.” If nature should wish to forget us, the key to immortality is not just to be remembered by our loved ones but also to leave our mark upon nature itself. Across the globe, ancient cultures sought to establish permanence in nature through the manipulation of natural resources: stone, marble, clay. Enter the Acropolis and the Temple of Apollo. Enter the Egyptian pyramids and the Great Sphinx. Enter the Pyramid of the Sun and the Pyramid of the Moon at Teotihuacán. Enter the Great Wall of China and the terra-cotta army of Qin Shi Huang. Enter Humayun’s Tomb and the Taj Mahal.
In the modern world, in our strivings for immortality, we mostly seem to prefer information to edifices. Perhaps we’ve learned that edifices are a little more vulnerable to destruction. Enter paper and the printing press. Enter libraries. Enter the phonograph and the photograph. Enter microfilm and digital archives. Enter the time capsule. Each is designed
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to preserve what is otherwise ephemeral, merely mortal.
The time capsule, though, seems to be the loudest hearkening back to the ancient Greeks’ fixation on intertwining with nature. We bury them underground, like corpses we hope will never decay; we insert them into nature. Like so many ancient cultures, we place an imprint of ourselves on the Earth. We hope they’ll last hundreds, if not thousands, of years. But unlike the ancient Greeks, we in the West have come to see ourselves not as less than nature but as greater than it. We see that nature operates in cycles, but what are those cycles—a bee’s lifespan, the bloom and drop of a spring flower—to us? We see that nature can often be easily disregarded or used for our own ends and destroyed. Our goal now is to last not as long as nature, but longer. We have, of course, ensured that by creating plastics that won’t degrade for millennia. But burying time capsules is a more intentional way of flaunting our permanence, our resistance to nature, even when immured in earth. We can be immortalized when nothing else is. •
It is not a revelatory statement to say that a lot of things change when you go from being married to being unmarried. I’m sure you can imagine: a new apartment, a new bed, a new sofa, dinner alone (so many more leftovers), dinner at a different time, dinner with other people, waking up alone, waking up with new people. New television shows because the old ones remind you of your former spouse, long walks in the mornings, long walks in the evenings, even on muggy and oppressive summer
days, because there is so much time now, whole hours of a day you never noticed before because they used to be wrapped up in marital routines. There is longing, there is crying, there is dancing, there are trips to Target and thrift stores for a new frying pan, for huge plastic storage tubs, for silverware, for a shoe rack, because half your shit is gone.
It’s curatorial work. You collect, you organize, you curate a new life.
For a long while after the split, I had dreams about going back to the apartment we shared and packing it up. But each time, it was different. In one dream, we had a vast collection of beautiful ceramic vases that needed to be wrapped in paper. In another, the furniture and decorations were the same, the light that came in through the windows was right, but the apartment was laid out in a strange way, the rooms wider or longer and in the wrong place. In another, the walls were pink and everything we owned was pink. It was fun. In every dream, a mountain of cardboard boxes to fill up.
In reality, I had already filled my cardboard boxes. I took some of my things when I first left. I went back later for more. In reality, the work was over and done. But in my dreams, I kept going back to that home to box up all the stuff that now belonged to me instead of us.
•
We ask time capsules to serve as our ambassadors to the future, to speak for us, but what do they actually communicate? The recording of bird songs and the plastic bird in the Crypt of Civilization are not standins for actual birds. They are manifestations
of our appreciation of birds and our technological ability to record them, to separate them from their home in nature. The particular birds recorded for the Crypt have been dead for nearly a century, their songs now not much more than a haunting. They represent our ability to represent them—to speak for them and value them as we seal up their images and voices for posterity. It is, as Timothy Morton phrases it in his 2007 book of the same title, “ecology without nature.”
So many scholars and philosophers have told us that the only way to save our world is to move beyond our anthropocentrism. The ecologist David Abram, in The Spell of the Sensuous (1996), asks us to see ourselves as embedded within a “morethan-human world” rather than as a triumph of evolution around which all other species orbit. In Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing (2012), Ian Bogost wonders why we imagine that only humans have agency, and not animals, plants, or things:
Why do we give the dead Civil War soldier, the guilty Manhattan project physicist, the oval-headed alien anthropomorph, and the intelligent celestial race so much more credence than the scoria cone, the obsidian fragment, the gypsum crystal, the capsicum pepper, and the propane flame?
We’re so fixed, Bogost argues, on our conviction that humans are central, that “all existence is drawn through the sieve of humanity, the rich world of things discarded like chaff.” It’s not just that we have invented a hierarchy of living and nonliving; it’s also that we place even imagined
beings and deceased humans above animals, plants, and things. We assume everything on this planet exists for us and in relation to us, but if we shift our thinking and decenter the human, if we admit that even inanimate objects—apples, televisions, cups, pebbles—have their own standing in the world unrelated to our needs, then we will see that “all things equally exist,” and that they all have their own importance beyond the values we assign them.
Deboleena Roy, too, in Molecular Feminisms: Biology, Becomings, and Life in the Lab (2018), asks us to shift the way we consider and approach the world by reconceiving a blade of grass as being capable of love, as having the capability to scream, and as holding “equal footing with the sunbeams and stars.” Questioning assumptions about the passivity of nature, Roy argues, can help us reframe our notion of agency as we apply it to humans as well. Reconsidering the way that we other nonhuman species and entities opens a channel to understanding the way we other human beings. One problem with time capsules, then, is that they do not even attempt to decenter the human. Even when they are filled with bird songs, dead flies, and seeds, everything inside a time capsule is meant to tell a story about us.
Another problem with time capsules lies in the narrowness of their storytelling. The large, comprehensive time capsules, such as the Osaka capsule and the Crypt of Civilization, purport to encapsulate a whole era, a culture, a people. But history, written by humans, is not neutral. These capsules, created and curated by individuals and institutions, are storytelling devices designed to allow a few to speak for many, a sample to speak for a species.
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Each object sealed up within the Crypt of Civilization, for example, was personally selected by Jacobs. As journalist Glenn Fleishman noted in a 2018 article for The Atlantic, the doctor’s memoirs express his desire to use the Crypt to “preserve the culture of the American South,” by which Jacobs meant a segregated South in which whites held dominion. Jacobs was a committed researcher who embraced theories of evolution decades before they were universally accepted by biologists, but in his memoirs, he looks back at history and “laments that Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation freed ‘4 million half-savage negroes, not only, but also gave them the ballot.’” Aside from the single “Negro doll,” the Crypt contains a copy of Gone with the Wind’s original script and a mysterious “Negro yearbook 1937, 1938.” It contains six titles that focus on yoga, which is surprising for 1940, along with recordings of speeches delivered by Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini, but offers hardly any acknowledgment of slavery in the United States, the history of African Americans, African American literature, or the African continent. We don’t need to read Jacobs’s memoirs to understand that the project of the Crypt of Civilization is a racist one. Jacobs’s subjective notion of what constitutes history is made clear by everything it includes and excludes. He called his time capsule the “Crypt” of Civilization because, for him, a desegregated US that acknowledged the humanity of Black people was the end of civilization itself.
When I think of the charred earth and black nail collected from the aftermath of the atom bomb and placed in the Osaka capsule, it becomes obvious that there are events too dangerous to forget. But will
future generations be able to correctly interpret elisions and omissions? Will they understand that our ambassadors speak in partialities if not outright obfuscations? That they speak only for themselves?
Ideally, in the year 8113, the archivist tasked with describing and recording the contents of the Crypt of Civilization will do so for a world in which racial difference carries no baggage of hierarchical value. In the catalog entry, the archivist will describe the Crypt as “a relic of white supremacy,” a tomb for a world best left sealed up in the past. But we really can’t be sure of that, can we? Time capsules are intended for an audience we can’t accurately imagine, and we can’t know how our true audience will interpret our artifacts.
The real trip I made to pack up the things I’d left in our old apartment was not much like my dreams. It was a 10-hour drive to get there, and I didn’t want to see my ex. I asked them to leave for a few hours. I came in the night, like a burglar.
Even before the drive across many states, even before we began emailing to nail down the date, I knew I would get rid of everything from our wedding. The guestbook I’d made, the copy of our invitation, the cards from guests, the little chiffon fastener I’d worn in my hair instead of a veil. I didn’t want them. I figured, why keep things from your past that you hope will have no bearing on your future? But more than that, I wanted to spare my ex the work of having to throw these things away themself. I imagined them crying while they cleared those things out of the closet. I imagined it would be harder for them than
it would be for me. That it might be too painful to bear.
I don’t know why I thought that. It’s very possible that I was wrong, of course. Maybe they wanted to keep some of those things. Or maybe they would have been happy to throw it all away. Maybe they were planning to stack everything in the fireplace and light it on fire. They might have danced before the flames.
I don’t know. But what I do know is that I felt a duty to manage the artifacts of our marriage. I needed to be the one who decided where they went, who got to see them. I gathered it all up, carried it downstairs, and tipped it in the bin.
• The truth about time capsules is that most of them are forgotten or not wanted. Paul Hudson, an Oglethorpe alumnus, co-founded the International Time Capsule Society in part to save the Crypt of Civilization from obscurity, according to the university’s publication The Source—-at least 80 percent of all time capsules are forgotten due to “thievery, secrecy or just poor planning.” I can’t imagine how one might go about accurately estimating what has been forgotten, but I suppose we can trust that ITCS has found some way to do this.
In Remembrance of Things Present: The Invention of the Time Capsule (2019), historian Nick Yablon characterizes time capsules as a burden to those who open them. Depositors might imagine “dramatic scenes of jubilation and gratitude” when their capsules are opened, celebrations that echo the pomp and circumstance of the ceremonies that shepherd the capsules into the ground. But through his research, Yablon
found that time capsules, once opened, more often “appeared to place a burden on the present, making time-vessel openings an occasion for soul searching rather than celebration.” Much as I did when I wrote the letter to myself at 13, capsule contributors tend to assume a trajectory of progress, success, and growth of the world to come—that future recipients will look back with fondness on the ancestors who tilled the fields for the harvest that present citizens now reap. But Yablon points to the stark gulf “between predictions of the limitless economic and demographic growth of cities and the realities of urban decline.”
Century boxes buried in Kansas City and Detroit at the onset of the 20th century, filled with letters detailing their citizens’ hopes for a booming future, were opened in 2001 to find their cities depopulated by “deindustrialization and ‘white flight.’”
Contemporary time capsules also struggle to find audience and purpose. One contemporary capsule project, Future Library, was designed by Scottish artist Katie Paterson. “A forest in Norway is growing,” a video on the project’s website tells us. “In 100 years it will become an anthology of books.” Constructing a capsule that will only include literature, Paterson has planted many trees and commissioned writing from well-known writers such as Margaret Atwood, David Mitchell, Han Kang, Ocean Vuong, and Karl Ove Knausgård. One book is contributed to the project per year, each is kept hidden, and then, in 2114, all the books will be printed on paper made from the trees planted in 2014. A printing press with instructions will be included in case the people of 2114 lack the knowledge and technology needed to produce the books.
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There’s an environmentally conscious component to this capsule, and as an art project, writing for an imagined audience of people you’ll never know is an interesting prompt. I like that Future Library invests in the future of literature and insists that novels will still be relevant 100 years from now. I like, too, that it does not assume there will be paper or trees in the future without our intentional effort. But I wonder who gets to decide which writers are included? And there’s something sad, too, about the way Future Library withholds. When I read books from centuries past, I like to think of all the readers who came before me—all the other eyes that have scanned the lines of Don Quixote and Emma. But we won’t have Paterson’s curated books in common with our future ancestors. The famous authors who contribute will have lived alongside us, but we won’t have shared their words. And what, I wonder, are they choosing to tell the future?
Another contemporary capsule project in the works, The Lunar Codex, has plans to send seven capsules of visual art and writing to the surface of the Moon (three of the missions have been completed so far), hitching a ride on SpaceX, United Launch Alliance, and NASA spacecraft. Organized by scientist and speculative fiction writer Dr. Samuel Peralta, the capsules include creative work from 35,000 people from 252 “countries & territories” and “Indigenous nations.” This amount sounds like an amazingly wide-ranging sample of art and writing, but when you look closer at what’s included, the frame grows narrower. Peralta has chosen to include back issues of a small handful of arts-and-letters magazines such as Lightspeed, Fine Art Connoisseur, Gravity City, and O Muse! He has included stories
from a 21-volume anthology he edited and art catalogs from museum exhibitions he curated. A curatorial note explains that Fine Art Connoisseur was chosen because, in 2022, the magazine “commissioned a profile of Dr. Samuel Peralta and his wife’s collection of realist art.” There’s cultural and ethnic diversity in the collection, but Peralta’s Lunar Codex is transparently full of stuff he is personally involved with, stuff he likes. Nearly everything included is speculative or science fiction, and perhaps unsurprisingly, he has also included his own writing. What The Lunar Codex doesn’t acknowledge are the implicit imperial underpinnings of shipping a box of our stuff to the Moon. It isn’t so different from planting a flag. It suggests that the Moon—a celestial body, a hunk of rock and metal that happens to orbit Earth, another hunk of rock and metal—is ours, another vessel destined to carry our stuff.
•
I wonder about other visions for the time capsule. There are possibilities I’d like to imagine. What would a decolonial time capsule look like? An anti-racist capsule? An intersectional feminist capsule? Can we conceive of an object-oriented capsule? A more-than-human capsule? A nature-made time capsule? An honest time capsule? Our landfills are perhaps our most honest time capsules, but I think we are capable of more. Can we create a time capsule that is organized democratically, one to which anyone who wishes can contribute, one that solicits stories and objects that signal more than progress and success—one equally interested in receiving evidence of our suffering, our shortcomings, our loss?
And what about the smaller, personal capsules? The letter I wrote to myself when I was 13. Messages in bottles, set adrift in the ocean. A coffee can filled with family mementos. An actress’s fully furnished Parisian apartment left sealed for 70 years after she fled Nazi occupation. An empty whiskey bottle buried in 1944 with a single penny inside and a note apologizing for having drunk all the whiskey. A company called Not Forgotten will, for $399, store a 30-minute, professionally produced video heirloom of you for 300 years. In one of the testimonials on their website, a woman named Sheila says she is creating a capsule because she wants to “come across as a real person to [her] descendants.”
And that’s the crux of it, right? It may be nice to receive certain things of sentimental value from the past, particularly from loved ones and direct ancestors. It seems profoundly important to take time to make memories and reflect during a global pandemic that has altered our lives in unimaginable ways—in ways that we have barely begun to be able to understand and articulate. But the reality is that to create a time capsule is to be concerned with the present, without actually addressing the present. It is something we do to console ourselves, to make stories for ourselves, to make our inevitable return to nature and our passage into obsolescence easier to accept. To make a time capsule, to want to be remembered as a real person, to worry about death—could there be a more human longing?
Time capsules don’t relate history; they belong more comfortably in the realm of fiction, and, like all stories, they are individual, subjective, and creative. With time capsules, there’s a particularly deep
chasm between teller and listener. The charred earth and blackened nail in the Osaka inventory, the personal stories from the pandemic, the novels inside Future Library—these are parts of our living world, and it’s a loss to hide them away for many years, to not consider and share what they mean to us now. If the proliferation of time capsules tells us anything, it is that we are desperately longing but given very few chances to pause and reflect. Why speak to the future when we could speak to our time? What would we discover if we reconceived the idea of time capsules and came to see them not as gifts for the future but as opportunities to reflect on the world we have already built?
I spent a long time online recently, searching for the outcome of the Smithsonian’s Stories of 2020 digital storytelling project. The links on their website are broken, the web page dead. I ran a number of search terms through their digital archive, but nothing came of it. The list of questions the museum originally asked were unanswerable to me when I first read them in 2020. They’re still unanswerable to me now. But I think reading the stories people submitted—whatever answers they were able to come up with—would be of great use to us now.
•
I packed the things I wanted from our apartment. I left behind the rest. I wish I could say that all the other curatorial work has been as easy. It’s easy to throw things away or to keep them sealed in a huge plastic tub. It’s harder to know what to do with all the memories.
Some fade on their own. Like the now-blurry pandemic years, it’s strange how much I’ve forgotten. Thirteen years together pared down into a handful of snapshots.
There was a time when I needed all the memories. I needed to keep a record of all the rights and the wrongs, to examine and weigh them, so that I could see when the balance tipped, when it was time to leave. For a while after our split, I needed to keep examining, reminding myself why leaving was the best choice. For a while, I was cataloging a whole museum of wrongs.
But that time passed; the work grew sparse. The memories sorted themselves, grew simpler, and became a story, a single archive I could stand beside and look at. And what could be more natural than to let the past become the past? I see no need for a time capsule. It’s okay for obsolescence to devour my memories.
As for the 10,000–15,000 currently buried time capsules, my fantasy is that the person or critter or alien or sentient flower who comes to find them millennia from now won’t be able to or won’t be interested in learning English or building a printing press. Perhaps then, in our own obsolescence, the eyes of another will encounter the capsule’s metal shell, and the roots, worms, and dirt that have crept their way in through its seal, and find them just as important as the Donald Duck stuffed animal, the books, the long-dead flies, and the unplayable recorded bird songs. Perhaps then, through the eyes of another, we will at last be decentered from the history of Earth.
SRDIČKO BOLÍ Claressinka Anderson
I hear a voice, small & interrupting— the irritation in me rises as I talk over it, but the words are incessant, a current— pulsing. I am talking to his father, trying to be heard. He tells him: your mother is talking,
I am listening to your mother. I take a sip of water, & still,
I do not hear him, but then slowly I do, his sounds come into view:
Srdičko bolí, srdičko bolí.
My son has translated my words into the only language he knows, his 2-year-old face, furrowed. His father (who does not speak our language) notes my expression, the change it takes. I explain: he is saying your heart hurts, your heart hurts, & the small voice repeats it, frowning, pointing at my chest.
THE ONLY GIRL IN THE WORLD
On Madonna and ‘Desperately Seeking Susan’
by Brontez Purnell
The very first gay bar I regularly attended in San Francisco was this little holein-the-wall called Aunt Charlie’s. In 2003 (the literal second I turned 21), I began to attend their Thursday night party (a party that went on for 20 years, mind you). It was all post-disco freestyle, Hi-NRG, urban—the span of music was from about 1978 to 1982. To paint a picture, the songs would be shit like Gwen McCrae’s “Keep the Fire Burning,” Carol Hahn’s “Do Your Best,” Erotic Drum Band’s “Touch Me Where It’s Hot”—you get the idea. One day, the resident DJ
pulled out the 1983 single of Madonna’s “Everybody,” with the iconic collage cover done by Lou Beach. At the time I was in an electroclash band—electroclash being an era of 2000s music that imitated the ’80s. I danced to this Madonna song that I had heard all through my childhood. Now I was an adult, drinking in bars, wondering how a song from 30 years ago felt more like “the future” than anything my friends and I were currently doing. This here is the magic of Madonna. All classics defy time. Every time “Everybody” is played, I come alive on the dance floor.
I will be very clear about how I feel about Madonna at the top of this so we get it from the jump. “Controversial,” “culture vulturey,” “appropriative” are some of the lower-blow critiques thrown at her these days. I mean, sure, what pop star isn’t? Commercial art by very definition is carnivorous: remember that. That said, what you could certainly never call her is boring, and that alone is worthy of celebrating. Madonna’s Lower East Side of the late ’70s–early ’80s was the peak of stylistic creative fusion. Punk and disco were mingling to wild effect. When “Everybody” was released, some believed Madonna was a Black artist, if for no other reason than at the time the average white girl pop sensation bended toward the arc of Olivia Newton-John. Madonna had that defiant eclectic feel that would soon be the landscape of all pop. These days, for all our identity pageantry, there are few things that we can truly call “groundbreaking.” What I mean is, it’s easy to try and diss Madonna. I have loved her ever since I was a little boy. I would sit on my great-grandmother’s porch and practice Madonna’s classic over-the-shoulder “come hither”
stare. The one she did on the gondola in the canals of Venice in the “Like a Virgin” video. At the ripe age of 41, I still hold a soft spot for her. She raised a generation of faggots, in a world where most people pretended we didn’t exist. Hell yeah, I tip my hat.
Of all of the many-headed hydra of Madonna’s artistic output, the thing that remains the strangest is her film career. Desperately Seeking Susan (1985) was one of those movies that played every night at two a.m. on the late-night movie station throughout the ’80s (Fox 54 for me in Huntsville, Alabama). It also played nearly weekly on any given channel. It was so elemental to my childhood that I just remember always having a bowl of cereal in front of me and watching it.
Recently, it occurred to me that I only remember certain iconic scenes but couldn’t tell you what the actual movie was about. I finally watched it again, after not seeing it for over some 25 years. Holy shit, that movie is a goddamn mess. Let me just get some of the plot out of the way: Madonna plays Susan in her signature Lower East Side art girl garb, Richard Hell dies in the first 10 minutes, there’s a subplot involving a pair of stolen ancient Egyptian earrings (??????), and it seems like one of those movies where the script was still being written as they shot it. Susan’s stalker (this Republican housewife from Jersey, mind you) gets amnesia and then somehow flawlessly assumes Susan’s identity. It’s a movie from a time when there was a clear line between the normies and the counterculturalists. These days, in a world where you can buy Nirvana shirts at any Target, the lines are so blurred that it would be impossible to remake.
The true beauty of the movie is the part halfway through where Madonna is in a Lower East Side post-punk dance club standing by a jukebox dancing to her own song. The movie was clearly only meant to be a vehicle for her hit “Into the Groove” (my favorite of her songs, by the way). The absolute vibe—that this movie was built around this one scene. It’s the only part of the movie that has deep catharsis or makes any real sense. Madonna was the multi-hyphenate of the ’80s—and around her there was always this swirling chaos, punctuated by moments that could be described as nothing less than magical. This scene alone is triumphant, and it sums up Madonna perfectly.
Rewatching it, I was reminded of all the underground warehouse parties I’ve been to, how maybe I wanted to be Susan too. I remember being in my twenties surrounded by freaks and dancing. Sometimes my own band’s song would play in the club and it just felt so singular—like I was the only girl in the world. I can only imagine Madonna feeling this feeling but on a whole other godlike level.
I’m always dismayed at whatever 20-year-old is dissing Madonna, when their investigation of culture comes from half-hearted internet research. Certain artists defy any modern critique. Madge was a Midwestern girl who came to New York in the 1970s, took classes at Martha Graham, played in punk bands (like who was that hot Black dude who was the drummer for her band the Breakfast Club?!). Keith Haring was her gay best friend and she was fucking Basquiat. There’s no real way to understand the urban fairy tale/fever dream this woman inhabited unless you were there. The contemporary critiques that Madonna
was “always chasing the culture”? Like no, sweetie, you chase the culture on TikTok. Mother was from that hyperspecific portal of time where she simply had to walk down the street to the culture. Do you understand what I’m getting at? Take, for instance, her most critiqued hit, “Vogue”—a white girl from the Midwest, landing on the underground scene of Ballroom culture. Even I’m obsessed with how problematic that is; it’s truly unparalleled. But these days, hell, who isn’t voguing? Dear God, you even see them voguing in Hallmark movies these days.
In all honesty, the thing that I think I have always admired most about Madonna is her work ethic. This conveyor belt of constant work and conviction—maybe not always perfect, but goddamn, so unstoppable. In a canon, Desperately Seeking Susan is up there with the Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night (1964) or the Village People’s Can’t Stop the Music (1980). It showcased and capitalized on Madonna’s image and her fame, but it also reimagined what an It girl could be. Sultry but aloof, all-American but worldly, downtrodden but deeply glamorous. She touched every point on the grid. You couldn’t ignore her. Desperately Seeking Susan was basically new wave Breakfast at Tiffany’s (if you threw in a murder mystery, diamond heist B-plot). It is a total trainwreck, and yet there she is in the middle, dancing to her own song, the light that makes it all worth watching. We sit a little too comfortably in this “kill our idols” era of the internet, safely tucked away behind our phones. But for all the hoopla spent tearing Madonna down, I have to say: You can’t murder that which is immortal.
Lida Abdul
The black and white wheel (2001) 16mm film transferred to video
Copyright: © the artist and hopefulmonster editore
From Lida Abdul, hopefulmonster editore, Turin, 2007.
Children populate Afghan artist Lida Abdul’s works: pulling at ruins with ropes ( In Transit , 2008); watching the sky from a roofless home ( Dome , 2005); waiting in ostensibly eternal lines to sell bricks, shirts pulled up against a wind we cannot see ( Brick Sellers of Kabul , 2006). For Abdul, children survive war best—they forget without difficulty. The interviews and texts included in her 2007 monograph published by hopefulmonster editore, Lida Abdul , repeatedly refer to this resilience.
The distillation of essence—loss, in this case, as a condition—to the immutable and bodily, is mediated by ancient architectural sites and landscapes in Abdul’s works. These range from the Bamiyan Valley, scarred with relics from the destruction of the sixth-century Bamiyan Buddhas, to bombedout buildings and a bullet-covered Soviet airplane. While her works are replete with
loss and iconoclasm, Abdul does not present Afghanistan as a war-torn land that is perpetually devastated. All has not fallen into total collapse. (The ropes the children pull could be holding the ruins together.) Amid catastrophe, there are rituals that remain, surpassing disaster. Perhaps there are new monuments to be built, if not reconstructions of what once stood.
This reconstruction takes place in memory, enduring by way of the unconscious. Abdul’s work locates endurance everywhere: in the endurance of children, in the sense that performance itself represents a kind of endurance, in the body’s endurance as witness, upon the vectoral wings of Paul Klee’s angel of history, and both with and against currents of melancholic fixation.
On Lida Abdul by Perwana Nazif
Lida Abdul Bricksellers of Kabul (2006) 16mm film transferred to video
Copyright: © the artist and hopefulmonster editore From Lida Abdul, hopefulmonster editore, Turin, 2007.
BRIGHT
by Grace Byron
I picked up a copy of the new brightly colored book for women. The back was splashed with quotes by other famous women authors—and one man of color— about the purpose of words. I put it back down, decided against playing into their slick marketing hands. Not that I didn’t want to read it. Part of me thought about sliding it into my tote bag behind a bookshelf.
Turning a corner, I discovered an old nook full of used art books. Tattered from use, sliding over one another as if an avalanche had just come through. I started picking them up and stacking them. Monet, Warhol, the usuals. Then Goya hovered before me like a grotesque vision. He wasn’t my favorite painter but his work often came to me as I was walking around town.
Only once had I seen Goya in person. During my junior year I studied abroad in Madrid, pacing around museums and drinking until well after the sun came up. I used my time to travel all around Europe. Now at thirty I hardly drank. I listened. I spent my days grading papers for professors too lazy to do it on their own, walking other people’s dogs, and volunteering at the library.
I picked up the thick hardcover book and stared at the cover. Witches’ Sabbath. A group of haggard women dancing around Satan in the form of a goat. His eyes blank slits, a perverse halo of leaves around his head. The cashier didn’t look up, just rang me up and went back to his phone. I walked out of the bookstore and bristled at the bright day. Students brushed past me as I tried to light a cigarette under the oppressive summer sun. I wished I was sitting in the air conditioning, watching the humidity ruin someone else’s hair.
A text from Ryan bubbled up on my phone. I hadn’t heard from him in a few months. The words didn’t register at first, like the first early morning clouds across a barren sea.
Even though I enjoyed punk music, I found myself listening to it while cleaning rather than going out into town.
In October I got a message from Ryan. He told me I was very beautiful. I thanked him and said he didn’t look so bad himself. Demure, protract, wait. As I was eating cold cereal and lukewarm coffee, he messaged me back. He wanted to be honest with me: he had a girlfriend. “Okay,” I typed back. Usually I didn’t go in for couples but he was cute and I was withering away, my smooth skin wasted by long walks in graveyards. Good morning, I said to my nonexistent pets and left for the day, heading across campus to the English Department. Blasting music in my headphones and imagining what kissing his whiskery beard would be like. Would he hold me down, would I straddle him against the bed as I took my top off? He was slim. Maybe he was submissive. I don’t like playing games.
I started sleeping with Ruth and Ryan when I moved back to town. Careful to avoid the gay bar, I only ended up chatting with people online. Fishermen blended into veterans and polyamorous men with mustaches. Other women never interested me, but perhaps now having a vagina myself opened up a new avenue. Mostly I wanted the days to pass by pleasantly. I had nothing to demarcate Mondays from Tuesdays and spent the weekends reading.
Emel was in the office. I decided to show her the messages while I poured myself a fresh cup of coffee and looked in my staff mailbox to see if there were any new papers to grade. The medieval English seminar I was TA-ing had a paper due. Every few days a new essay trickled in. MLA, size 12, all with different margins. No one could write 5,000 words on Arthurian literature.
“He messaged again,” Emel said. Maybe we could all have a glass of your favorite wine together?
“Should I message back for you?” She smirked.
“No. Please don’t.” She didn’t push. We weren’t close enough for that. I just wanted someone else’s input. A few weeks ago she told me
not to date someone who wrote about their felony in their dating profile. I adjusted my maxi skirt and sat down across the table from her.
“My boyfriend and I are going to visit my grandparents in Turkey in a few weeks. Can you cover my classes while I’m gone?”
“Sure,” I said, still staring at the message on my phone.
how about tomorrow night?
Glossing over the paper, I saw another trite comparison between Parzival and Mallory. No one wanted to write about Chrétien de Troyes’s adulterous Knight of the Cart
can’t tomorrow … how about tonight? too soon? hahah
•
Sex was supposed to initiate a new start. Wipe my slate clean and void my past experiences. Not that I was trying to start something, I just wanted to feel the edge of an experience. To be cut by it.
I walked to the bus around eight o’clock, chain-smoking the whole way, glad to be out of my apartment. Leaving Emel behind had felt oddly painful. I realized she was sometimes the only human I talked to for days on end. The professors I worked for mostly emailed me. I went grocery shopping once a week, buying bok choy and eggplant and spinach that wilted or I ate raw by the mouthful. Cooking felt like a chore, something the living did. I hadn’t felt alive since college. My junior year, while I was studying abroad, my best friend Ali went missing. A campaign started to find her. People canvassed, protested, sang punk songs. But no one ever found out what happened. My parents begged me to
move away after college but I stuck around anyway. Not because I think she’ll come back but because I couldn’t let go of the soil we shared. We’d planned on moving away together. When her parents gave me her notebooks, I found out a lot about her. She had a whole life planned for us. She was going to be a painter.
By the time I got off the bus, we were on the outskirts of town. Past the graveyard and Buddhist temple and little coffee shop that held chaste poetry readings. Dying irises lined the apartment complex. I was wearing a leather jacket to ward off the chill. It was a starless night. I could feel my body sinking into the ground like a stack of bricks. Gathering myself, I rung the doorbell and awkwardly stepped back from the door.
Ryan came to the door in shorts and a T-shirt. He was a pale, lanky guy with a buzz cut. His long limbs flew out in all directions like Silly String. He was trying to be suave, not goofy, but it endeared him to me. Best behavior. I hid a smirk and replaced it with a sly smile.
“Hey, hi, welcome. How are you? Come on in,” he said breathlessly, rushing to get everything out in one go. If I was quiet, I would have the upper hand. I learned that early on. Seductive womanhood didn’t always require compliance but it did require withholding. If he wanted my approval, he would soon want me.
I smiled and followed him up two flights of stairs. He opened his front door with an oddly chivalrous flourish and motioned for me to go first. Ruth was sitting on a fuzzy green couch in front of a glass coffee table. She was smiling, halfready to get up, half-ready to stay seated. I spotted an unopened bottle of Merlot
and three clean glasses. The kitchen was spotless. Light acoustic music was playing through the TV. A wilting pothos and some kind of a tree stood in the corner.
She was more plain-looking in person. A long, matronly green dress covered her curves. My breasts were bigger than hers. Embarrassing. I hadn’t kissed a woman in years. I forgot about the comparison game. Meeting her in person only made it worse; I thought I’d simply find her sexy and move on—instead I wished she was somewhere else. Easier to be the other woman. Though perhaps I still was. It could’ve been his idea alone. She could have been placating him.
Eventually she stood and came over. I got worried she was going to shake my hand. She seemed to think better of it and merely stood up. Carnal obsession was already slipping away. The mundane art of greetings was bludgeoning us. Still, I hoped that the sex would be pleasant.
“Sit, sit,” Ryan said.
The couch didn’t seem big enough for the three of us so I sat down in a rickety wooden chair.
“That was my grandpa’s,” he said.
“It’s nice.”
“It’s horrible,” Ruth cut in. “We should get rid of it and get something more comfortable. We never sit in it.” She shot him a look and then cracked a smile.
I felt the “what do you do” question coming.
“How long have you two been open?” I asked instead.
Ryan looked down at the floor. “Uh, we haven’t done something like this before. Have you?”
“Yes,” I said.
“A lot?” Ruth asked, cocking her head.
“A few times,” I shrugged. “Maybe we
should have a glass of wine.”
Ryan laughed and went to the kitchen to get a corkscrew. I watched his ass as he left and I turned back to Ruth.
“How long have you two been in town?”
“We got here a month ago. I’m in the MFA program. Poetry.”
“Oh, nice,” I said, deciding to be honest. “I grade papers for the English Department. I’m working on this King Arthur seminar right now.”
“Graduate students?”
“No. Sadly. It’s a freshman class. No one can really write yet so I end up either marking all over their papers or just giving up hope and randomly picking a letter. Don’t tell the dean.”
She laughed as Ryan poured the wine. The deep burgundy shimmered through the crystal glasses.
“Those are nice glasses,” I said.
“My grandparents’,” he said.
“Are all of your things from them?”
“Almost,” Ruth said.
“They passed away last year,” Ryan said.
I made my apologies and shifted gears again. Every few topics, a small land mine appeared and I maneuvered us back into the open sea. Sometimes Ruth seemed like the one to impress and sometimes Ryan acted like the leader. They were both following my lead. I just wanted us to stop talking about death and taxes.
Sufjan Stevens came on. Gentle acoustic guitar strumming and low humming. That was when Ryan made a move, when he said, “Shall we go to the bedroom?” I mumbled “Sure,” caught off guard, and followed the couple into their dark bedroom.
Ruth made short work of her clothes, piling them neatly on the floor until she was just in lacy, mint green panties. I despised
them. They weren’t flattering. Her lipstick was too orange. She hadn’t put any effort in. Or she was just Midwestern, never having to learn the deeper lures of womanhood. Ryan slowly fingered her left nipple as he let his pants drop. I prayed he wouldn’t make me take off whatever embarrassing boxers he had on. They wanted me to walk over to them and join of my own volition. Their initiation was invitation enough. I walked over and the smell of wildflowers overcame me. It was her perfume. She must’ve spilled the bottle all over herself. I swallowed a cough and looked her in the eyes. She had to feel included, like she had deference. My mouth engulfed her breast as I closed my eyes and choked back the sickening sweetness. My eyes watered but I kept going until I heard her moan. Maybe she liked women more than I’d assumed.
The left side of my body went numb. I thought I was having a stroke until I saw Ryan behind me pulling down my black stockings and kissing my leg like a trophy. He was too tender. But I couldn’t escalate too quickly. I drew back from Ruth and pulled off my cheap tight dress, putting my lingerie on full display. My breasts were out, held up by black wiring and lace. I hadn’t worn a garter in a few years but I fingered Ryan for the type. I was right. I could feel his jaw drop as I pushed his head down to Ruth’s crotch. I licked my fingers and pressed them to her body, letting them circle her as he watched. Then I kissed her. Deep, my tongue searching for hers until she relented. All I wanted was him inside me. All this work was exhausting. They were the only ones getting oxytocin, dopamine, pheromones. They wanted to be toys in my hands.
It all came back. I thought it would take a second to get into the swing of things but their bodies were like remotes, predictable inputs and outputs, no real turnoffs, no surprises. She shrieked, he groaned. I just wanted to feel something. Eventually after I’d gotten her wet and he was hard from watching, he pushed me onto the bed. He kissed me and Ruth got nervous as he pulled down my silk underwear and I smiled, trying to look inviting instead of bored. It was all I had wanted and already I wished I was driving home, getting a milkshake in the all-night drive-through. I heard another sad song come on in the living room. This one had strings. Someone was singing about not wanting to talk. Better to drown, the voice moaned. Ryan picked up a bottle of lube after spitting on his hand; I was glad he rethought that one. I didn’t notice if he slipped a condom on or if he was just trying to get harder before he jolted in. He went slow. I motioned for Ruth to come over, I tried to kiss her on the lips to give her something to do. She withdrew and fiddled with something I couldn’t see.
She put her hand inside me. Since Ryan was already inside, her hand filled me out; I could feel her fingers rippling around his cock in my hole. I let out a cry and she smiled above me. “Harder,” I yelped. And they obeyed.
•
After Ali disappeared, I started having panic attacks. In movies, being a single woman is romantic; in life, it is mundane. Being alone without mate or friend was terrifying. I oscillated between making my coffee slowly and meditating and
lying in bed all day. Since I lived alone, no one asked me any questions. I didn’t have someone coming to check up on me. Emel and I only ever talked at work. If we didn’t cross paths for a week or so, it wasn’t out of the ordinary. I watched people live normal lives. Productively going from one social event to another, going out to bars, moving from one city to another, but that’s all I did: I watched.
When I studied abroad my junior year, I tried to expand my horizons. But there was no one to enjoy Venice with. The Caravaggios and Goyas and thin nibbles of cheese cut from a fresh wheel of parmesan. I was haunted. I wanted to go back and help with the search—maybe I was the only one who knew where to find a vital clue. We were like sisters. Ali and I used to platonically share a bed. Sleeping in a cold European bed reminded me of her. Waking up and sniffing her hair. In college I’d taken a few lovers, but never nested.
I needed space from the grief, the kind only found staring out at the Mediterranean while drinking overpriced cappuccino. There was no one to go back to anyway.
Of course, in Italy I was worried about the homophobia. Even though I mostly dated men, I wondered if I passed enough to wander the streets alone at night. But I was in bed by ten watching British detective shows dubbed in Italian while sipping tea and eating cheap biscotti. Sometimes someone from home texted me, asking me how I was or coveting pictures of the sights. I sent something of the sublime back, marveling at a Michelangelo or gondola or crumbling infrastructure. In ruin there was possibility. Or at least a sense of wonder. Time stopped after Ali left. Ever since, I
was wandering around purgatory, letting the thin strands of life evaporate. There was nothing to hold on to.
•
The co-op was where all the weirdos and oddballs got work. A lot of my old friends used to work there. Nick was the only one who still did. A lifer, probably. He drove shipments back and forth across town and coordinated shipping. His hands often smelled like dirt even though he wore thick work gloves when handling the vegetables. He and his girlfriend went birding on the weekends, and every so often when I saw them out, they would invite me. I remember the times we used to black out together. His girlfriend Liz was nice; she worked at the Montessori school near the state park.
I made small talk with them next to the coffee bar, reeking like cigarettes, dressed in a long black skirt and an oversized gray sweatshirt with ironic cursive text. A poem of some kind a classmate wrote. My wardrobe was still swathed in college nostalgia.
“When are you gonna fucking come birding with us?” Nick said as he flung around bags of cucumbers.
“I don’t know,” I stalled. “It’s been a weird week.”
He was starting to get the hint. My hermitage, his exasperation. Our little comedy routine. Those interactions kept me afloat, even if they didn’t push me toward the shore.
“I’ll text you. You can bring someone.”
I nodded and left them, staring at indistinct tubes of granola. The sign said fresh but I didn’t believe that. Crusty brown crystals clogged dried berries and nuts. I almost went back to ask Nick for
help but decided to just grab cereal instead. One without too much sugar, something nice for my tummy in the mornings.
The one year Ali and I lived together, she begged me for sugar. She was trying to go on a semi-raw, sugar-free diet, the kind college girls thought would make all their immune issues go away and maybe as a side product get skinny. Neither of us was skinny. I complained but she always stopped me, telling me she was the one who had to look for sizes most malls didn’t carry and wear ugly sack-like dresses. Bitterly, I wondered if she was skinnier, more like one of the sorority girls, if she would’ve been found. Ali wasn’t like that though she always joked about the body positivity movement years before it blew up. Some days she performed biting commentary on wellness culture and some days she teetered on self-denial. I wish I would’ve told her to cut it out. She always told me to stop reading the tea leaves on the wall. It made no sense. I think she just knew I worried even before bad things happened. One therapist suggested I loved her.
I laughed again, turning a corner right into the refrigerated aisle.
There was Ruth, staring at the ice cream section. Her eyes didn’t move toward me. Maybe she didn’t want me to say hi. I started to back away, knowing we would certainly run up against one another again in the small grocery store—the small town. The smallest little oasis. State bird: the cardinal. State flower: peony. State tree: tulip.
“Hey,” I said. “How’s it going?”
She retreated from the freezer and spoke in a low, controlled voice. “I’m good, trying to figure out what ice cream Ryan meant. He sent me a list of options in a preferred order but they don’t have half the
brands or flavors he mentioned.”
“How many flavors are there?” “At the co-op? A lot. Organic versus local versus … I don’t know. I’m debating just getting him vanilla out of spite.”
“You should,” I said. “He deserves some spite.” Ruth bristled.
“I should get going. We’re going to a family barbecue tonight.”
“Oh, nice,” I said. “Have fun.”
“You too,” she said. But I wasn’t sure what she wanted me to have fun at.
We met in the bathroom at the dive bar on the west side of town a few days later. I’d texted him something cryptic, hoping he would at least shower before driving over to meet me. While I waited, I downed a tequila soda and watched old men play pool. I kept to myself, hoping no would notice me. Jake’s was the bar I met trade at. Ryan wasn’t exactly a trick, but he wasn’t someone I was dating either. Better to keep him in the dark. Fuzzy dad rock oozed out of the speakers like sludge. Something from the seventies. When Ryan texted me he was pulling up, I downed my drink and walked into the bathroom. My one pair of heeled boots clicked against the warped wooden floor. Something smelled like tomato soup and liquor. The taste of lime stung deep in my throat.
I was quiet when he opened the door. He mumbled something about not expecting to see me again. Already I worried he wouldn’t be able to dive into the deep end like Ruth did. Maybe I should’ve texted her instead. But I wanted something from him. Something less than validation but more than attention.
“Does she know you’re here?”
“Yes,” he whispered. My hands were behind me, propped up on the sink. I sunk down a little, not wanting to tower above him. He was five eleven. Tall enough. I let my head hang against his chest staring down at the scummy gray tiling.
“I want you to annihilate me,” I whispered.
“What does that even mean?”
“Make something up. Then do it.”
He was smart enough not to ask any more questions. Instead he dragged a finger across my back, under the loose-fitting black dress, skin to skin until he found the nape of my neck and yanked me back, my head above the sink, his face scowling above me. His eyes shot me a tentative look, glazed with fear. I wondered if I looked so empty to him, just a woman begging a man to do something vile to her. He swigged a beer I hadn’t seen and poured the tiniest bit on my face. I stifled a laugh and kept my mouth open as he unzipped his pants.
That’s when Ryan hit me. Open palm across the right cheek. I saw red. I wanted him to tear me open. So he did. Every bad thing spilled out. Something sharp and vicious, hard and wet, the limits of pain rolling back the stone in front of the tomb. God give me a break. God give me a little vampiric fetish as a treat.
•
Even though he told me he was only sleeping with me and Ruth, I went to the free clinic to get STD testing a week later. I hadn’t messaged him again even though the thought of his touch made me shiver. A student’s essay on Tennyson lay in front of me but I couldn’t get filthy images of Ryan to stop flitting through my mind.
Brainrot, I thought, and tried to focus on different depictions of Guinevere. In some stories she was a woman without agency, an unlucky woman befallen by bad circumstance. In others she was a willing participant in her downfall, committing adultery with Lancelot and forsaking Arthur despite his patriarchal power. In some stories he was already a powerful man and in some he was still rising through the ranks, so we saw how his happy ending unspooled, how his death wasn’t inevitable.
The nurse called my name and I went back without hesitating.
On my way out I lit a cigarette and started walking home. The bus wasn’t coming for forty minutes and I had a lot to think about anyway. I needed to keep moving, to keep myself from texting him again, asking him to meet me in another bar.
While I was waiting by the burger place to cross the road, I felt a twinge of lust. Remember when she was splayed open to you? When she panted as your tongue circled her?
I was surprised Ruth was the one who came back into my mind. After Ryan fucked me, I went down on her until she came while he watched slack-jawed. She came quickly, it hadn’t been a big ordeal. Brightness and a crash in miniature.
•
We kept seeing each other periodically that summer. Sometimes all three of us but most of the time I had Ryan meet me somewhere. A bar, in a parking lot, in the woods, only twice did he come to my apartment. His presence there felt like a violation somehow.
I kept asking him to go farther. To consume me. Ruin me.
He needed a little pressing, but when I took off my clothes, he was all mine. I could make him do anything. Slap me, spank me, spit on my face, pinch my nipples, call me foul things. The further he went, the more I opened for him. I taught him about needles and restraints and begged for hickeys and welts.
I wouldn’t let him fuck me in the ass even when he asked. I thought of her when he entered me, wondering what she thought about when he was inside her. When he pulled my hair, I imagined him ripping Ruth’s bangs off like the petals of a flower. I didn’t want to think about her— not unless it caused me pain. I got off on my internal cage fight. I wanted Ryan to want to destroy me. His heart just wasn’t in it.
The very first time he came to my apartment, I made him draw blood, scratching my back with his short nubby nails. It took too long. I brought out a knife.
“Gently at first,” I said as I walked out of my kitchen.
“I don’t know,” he said. I opened my knees and let the straps of my slip dress fall to the ground.
“Turn me around. Kiss my neck.”
“You’re so beautiful.” I could feel him sucking his teeth in.
“I’ll be more beautiful when you make me bleed.”
I couldn’t get a period but I could still make him eat me out while I was gushing red. The thought excited me, pulsing through me like electricity; I bucked as the knife traced my neck. He couldn’t get it up. I didn’t receive a wound. I turned around and slapped him suddenly.
“Hey,” he jerked. “No.”
Immediately my face flushed with shame. He grabbed my wrists and turned me around against the kitchen counter, pushing my stomach hard into the stone. His fingers found me and went deep inside until I moaned.
“That’s right.”
•
As the King Arthur class wound down, I started grading more papers for Emel while she was in Turkey. She referred me to a few other TAs. That’s how I got gigs across departments. Ethics, Spinoza, art history. Some things I knew nothing about. Whenever I wasn’t fucking Ryan, I was grading papers. I started to have a savings account. I liked the art history class I graded that summer. After reading Arthurian romances it was nice to see lust depicted in ornate visual detail.
It was only a 101 class, so most of what they learned were things I already knew. I wasn’t an expert but I’d taken a class or two while I studied abroad. Learned about the greats, went around Europe, saw the Tate and the Louvre and walked around Rome. Reading students’ essays about chiaroscuro reminded me of Ali.
One of the last things I wrote her was an email about the art in Florence. I felt so lucky, I said, to get to experience such beauty.
Of course she never responded.
•
The last time, or one of the last times, the days blur together now, was on my shot day. I’d been crying all day, raw for no reason. I
asked Ryan to come over. He said he was with Ruth. Instead of saying that never stopped him before, I said bring her. We could all be together again.
They walked in quietly like sheep to the slaughter. It felt like a bad dream. I had a bottle of tequila on the table. They both saw it at the same time.
“Really?” Ryan laughed, nearly coughing in disbelief.
“Let’s take a shot,” Ruth said before smiling and walking toward the bottle and taking a swig. My apartment was much smaller than theirs. The sparse living room looked straight into the dirty kitchen piled with dishes and half-eaten boxes of Wheat Thins. I had my two IKEA lamps on. A Goya reproduction hung above the couch, framing the two lovers like they too were religious icons.
I didn’t want to take them to my bedroom so I took a pull of tequila and walked over to Ruth. I kissed her fiercely until she pulled me back by my hair. “Whoa, whoa. Slow down.”
I straddled her as Ryan watched, clearly already hard and nearly pissing himself. She took another pull of tequila and spat it in my face.
“Down,” she said. I didn’t move so she struck me. My face went red and I felt myself wanting more. Ruth was my queen now. Fuck Ryan. He was background noise. Maybe he always was.
I guess he’d told her what I liked. Not that any of them asked. I had to spread myself open for them.
When her lips found mine, she nearly fell off the couch. Then she whipped up and pressed me into her crotch even before taking off her clothes. She waited until I gasped before bringing me back out in the
open. I could feel she wanted to go farther but didn’t know what to do. I pulled her pants off before slowly edging my tongue inside of her. The rough play had slicked her open but only a little—this wasn’t entirely her idea. She was just as lost as Ryan even if she came in with the big guns. I felt Ryan’s hand go to my ass and then I heard a slap. I started to pull back but felt hands pressing me deeper. This was payback, I realized. This was a scene. The cuck, the fool, the errand servant boy. I heard someone drink more tequila. It sounded far away enough to be Ryan. Then I felt something sting on my backside and felt fingers feeling their way in my ass.
“No,” I said into her pussy. But she didn’t seem to hear me. I tried to tap on her thigh but she didn’t know the signs. She wasn’t really a dom, I wasn’t really a sub. This was something else.
Without lube, pain flooded my system. The liquor stung. I tried to wiggle out of her grasp but she pushed harder. Ryan was talking but I couldn’t make out the words. Slowly, Ruth pulled out and I felt Ryan’s pelvis behind me before feeling his dick enter my pussy. Quick. Efficient. He thrust as I tried to eat Ruth out. Eventually she pulled away and I saw her empty gaze look down on me.
“Did you like that?”
I was dizzy. My eyes watered.
“No,” I said.
“Sorry,” Ruth mumbled and turned to the door as Ryan was mid-thrust. She didn’t look back at our miserable lot.
“Ruth?” he said as he rammed into me again.
“Hit me,” I said quietly. “Hit me …” I could feel a wail climbing up through my throat as he pulled out of me, leaving
me empty and half naked on the ground, caught by the cheap wooden table. He tried to step over the table but instead fell backward over it, falling across the top. He cursed as he stumbled up and found his pants.
“No,” he barked. Then he whispered it again, his lips moving toward my forehead before thinking better of it. He withdrew. Exeunt.
•
I stopped fingering the expensive art books and tried not to think about the text from Ryan. It’d been so long since the last time he entered my mind in any concrete way. I continued flipping through the large, tattered book in the dimly lit store.
Goya didn’t paint many birds. Most of the ones he depicted were dead. Still lives neatly arranged to illustrate decay. In Goya’s etching The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, owls and bats swarm over a distraught man. I stared at that one in person for a long time. I loved bats.
Ali and I used to obsess over cute little animals when we were younger. We played Nintendogs and Pokémon. We found little stickers of cute things to put on our binders. She liked deer. She told me she wanted to go to Nara and feed the friendly ones. I liked birds. I wanted to go to Madagascar. Neither of us ever made it out to see the things we wanted. I studied Spanish and took the easiest program abroad and Ali never took Japanese. She said maybe one day—after college or something when she had more time. She was premed, all skin and bones and guts and brain. When I went to Spain, I didn’t go birding at all. There didn’t seem to be a point. As a kid
the only kinds I was interested in were the fantastic ones. I stared at Google Images results for scary-looking bats while Ali showed me pictures of tourists feeding the deer in Japan. •
After walking around the bookstore, I met up with Nick and Liz. They finally convinced me to go birding with them. I wanted to get Ryan’s message out of my mind. I knew it would’ve been easy to go back to him. He told me he and Ruth had broken up. Not—he made clear—over me. He wanted to see me again if that was something I was interested in.
“Are we going to see anything crazy?” I asked.
“Like what?” Nick said.
“What’s the weirdest bird you’ve ever seen?”
“In person?” he clarified.
“I used to like bats,” I said.
“Well, it’s too early to see bats but we may see some songbirds, grackles, or cardinals.”
“I saw a titmouse the other day,” Liz broke in. “Sometimes a junco.”
“I love the juncos,” Nick said, reaching for her hand.
After an hour or so, we reached the lake. Liz took out some fruit and granola and offered me some. I took a few dry bites and chugged some water. We’d long run out of things to talk about. I was trying to imagine myself getting up early to do it again in a week. Maybe.
Ryan’s text was still on my screen when I reopened my phone. There was a world where I reached out and told Nick and Liz about everything. They would’ve been
shocked. Told me to start over, told me to stop letting my trauma hold me back. They would tell me buzzwords pulled from bestsellers and Oprah-wannabes and try to hug me. They would tell me to let Ali go, to let her sink to the bottom of the lake. Date again. Meet someone I could spill my guts to. But that would be wrong. They were wrong. It wasn’t about that. Things weren’t one-to-one like that. I wasn’t a damsel in distress, Guinevere waiting to be redeemed after her failed affair. I looked in the mirror and saw Goya’s Madman. “Hey,” Nick said to snap me out of my rut.
“What’s going on?”
“Nothing,” I said. “Nothing.”
“Do you want to get in?” Liz said.
“Are you going in?”
“Yeah. I didn’t bring a suit or anything but …” she shrugged and took off her sweaty gray T-shirt.
Her breasts fell out. I had to stop myself from saying whoa. She took off her black running shorts and started over the pebbles and sand, motioning me to come.
“Are you getting in?” I asked Nick.
He shook his head. “Go on though.”
“Are you worried about me seeing you?”
He went red and threw a small pebble at my feet. I collected the tiny rock, gripping it hard in my fingers as I took off my tank top and jeans. I placed them next to him and met his gaze. We laughed at the sudden lack of tension.
“Hurry up!” Liz yelled from the water.
By the time my legs hit the edge, I felt a little lighter. Liz splashed me and pulled me in deeper. We frolicked like deer, awkwardly finding our footing on the weed-covered floor.
“I don’t see any fish,” I said.
“We’re scaring them away.”
“It’s freezing.”
“What did you expect? Summer’s over.”
We were a little more than knee-deep when I felt a hunger pang.
“Do you still have anything to eat?”
“Yeah,” Liz said. “We do. Let’s go back.”
I looked at my phone when we got back to the shore and smiled at Nick. I put my shirt back on as quickly as I could. I preferred shame.
Liz took a bite of a large peanut cluster and offered me my own. “I hate the stuff at the store so I make my own while Nick’s at work. Not that I’m a tradwife. I hate that shit. I’m so glad I don’t live in New York. It’s crazy watching people try to imagine what living in the Midwest is like.”
“I guess it’s how some people here do live,” I said. “Or want to, anyway.”
“Weird,” she said. “Yeah. I guess you’re right.”
“We should bring coffee next time,” I said.
Nick raised an eyebrow. “I mean—”
“We’ll bring coffee,” Liz said definitively, cutting us all off at the pass.
“Do you guys go camping ever?”
“Sometimes,” Ryan said. “A few times in the summer, maybe once or twice in the fall. I like it.”
“We bring coffee when we camp,” Liz said dryly.
“Liz is really good at ghost stories.”
“Do you like ghost stories?” she asked, turning toward me.
“Sometimes,” I said before pursing my lips.
Copyright:
Lida Abdul Painting the ruins (2004) video
© the artist and hopefulmonster editore
From Lida Abdul, hopefulmonster editore, Turin, 2007.
HAS YOUR SPIRIT DRIED UP?
emet ezell
darts and divots—wild javelina in the pit he tusks the grass when it rains, clumping up
mud and dirt. most people hate javelina: they are looking for a guru, for a god. but here is
pig. hello pig! pig is perennial and covered in hair. prickly pear cactus
blooms on his back. yellow petals. blood and honey. pig bolts across field. pig is
bird without wings. most people want to be lied to.
my mommy loves me. sometimes my homeland is pig.
HOMESPUN TIARA
A profile of model and activist Geena Rocero
by Enzo Escober
The woman in the fantasy image has come out of the water. Her hair crisps into salty flicks; her skin is already dry. As she bakes in the sun like a finely formed clay figurine, it never seems to occur to her that she has left her swimsuit on the clothesline. Instead she plays, sweetly, with a pair of bunny ears on her head. She is in Playboy, and this variation on the magazine’s signature accessory is made of palm leaves. It glints in the light, a homespun tiara vested with the fraught provenance of American fetish.
On the surface, there is nothing new about the erotics of these pictures, their oblique exoticism and splendor. The woman is animating familiar configurations, a series of sex dreams about the East: concealing herself behind a banana leaf, beached on the glistening shore, posing in a bikini assembled from thin string and quartered pineapple shells. Only, she refuses to be a type. In a few frames shot on a Super 8 camera, she pierces through the stagecraft, imbuing the images with a particular storyline. She is determined to make us look as intently as possible.
Desire is among the United States’ most enduring global exports, an industry as profitable as war. As a 10-year-old child in the Philippines, Geena Rocero, the woman in the centerfold, snuck into her father’s bedroom to flip through his collection of Playboy magazines. Poring over the glossy pages, she grew enamored with the bodies on display. Smooth, bosomy emissaries of the American libido, they gave a young trans girl an education in comportment funneled through an imperial pipeline. In 1898, the US purchased the Philippines from its former colonizer, Spain, for $20 million and, after killing about 20,000 revolutionaries, held dominion over the islands for close to 50 years. To this day, it is the United States’ most secure sphere of influence in the Far East, a society where stateside cultural products emit a mystic gleam.
For many Filipinos, the US itself is a place of imports—a country one loses parents to. When Rocero was a teenager, her mother left Manila to take a job as a factory worker in San Francisco, sustaining her family on the power of the American dollar. The care packages she sent back were
as redolent of excess as Playboy spreads. “I smelled the United States before I ever set foot in it,” Rocero writes in her memoir Horse Barbie, describing an aroma familiar to countless Filipinos. “I cared almost as much about getting a whiff of the box itself as I did about what was inside. […] It smelled like possibility.” •
On the Monday morning I met Rocero in July, it was 90 degrees in Manhattan— sweltering for anyone raised on the East Coast but standard for two immigrants from Manila. She had made a reservation for us at the Smith, an easy, light-filled brasserie in NoMad. I was there 30 minutes early, eager to ensure we got the quietest booth. She arrived like an undercover Miss Congeniality, her all-black outfit contrasting with my all-white one. When she took off her shades, her face appeared just as it did in the photographs I’d studied: small, lambent eyes; a strict, triangular nose; and lips like those of a conch shell. Shortly before our meeting, I had opened Rocero’s Instagram story to find the words “Vagina BDay” typed out in big Partiful letters, so I surmised that the day was a special one. She told me that it was the 21st anniversary of her bottom surgery, a procedure she underwent in Thailand. Rocero had two engagements planned today: our interview and a gathering with friends.
A waitress came to the table, clearly enthralled by her new customer. Leaning in, Rocero ordered herself a shrimp cocktail and a glass of champagne—she would be cooking a Filipino feast for the party later and wanted to save her appetite.
Unwilling to let her toast alone, I requested champagne with my cheeseburger. When the waitress asked what we were celebrating, Rocero smiled giddily: “It’s my vagina birthday! She’s 21, so she can drink!”
This winsome candor is part of Rocero’s baseline disposition, though she can just as easily slip into a serious, more evidently controlled register. It’s the performative range of a seasoned beauty queen: a capaciousness fostered by her expansive, pluralist upbringing in Manila. In the Philippines, pockets of the surreal flourish—though omnipresent, Western legacies begin to warp and atrophy at their point of saturation. When she was 15, Rocero started competing in the transgender beauty pageants that formed a fixture of Catholic fiesta culture. Often, these were held in front of the town church; there, for a brief moment onstage, Rocero and her peers appeared alchemized into the saintly icons they were celebrating. One of her favorite costumes, she remembered, was a billowy dress paired with a blue veil, just like Our Lady of Guadalupe.
In a few short years, Rocero became one of the most accomplished queens in the national trans pageant circuit. She had never truly known the closet—both of her parents accepted her identity, and she was doted on by the Garcias, a house of trans women who became her chosen family. When her mother secured her a green card in 2001, Rocero was hesitant to leave it all behind—that is, until she was told she could formally live as a woman in the States. The prospect spurred her to move across the Pacific, overriding every competing interest. Trans people in the Philippines cannot change their legal names or gender markers. They also have
poor access to gender-affirming care—very few medical facilities are equipped to offer such treatments, leaving many people with no choice but to create their own hormone cocktails via unregulated markets. Rocero herself first gained access to estrogen through over-the-counter birth control pills. Throughout her press tour for Horse Barbie, which was released in paperback earlier this year, her most recurrent refrain about trans people in the Philippines is that they are “culturally visible” but not “politically recognized.”
Migration is a gamble, and those who cast the dice are often consigned to lives in which relief and disappointment are bedfellows. To her surprise—and despite the promise of legalized womanhood—Rocero landed in a US that seemed to invert the status quo of its former colony. Though trans people were afforded certain political freedoms, on-paper approval didn’t extend into broader social sensibilities. Soon after she corrected her identifying data in San Francisco, Rocero realized that she was now prone to bodily violence, to the peculiar sexual dynamics of the West and the supremacy of its binaries.
She also discovered she could pass in a way she couldn’t at home. “Back in the Philippines, I had grown accustomed to shouts of Bakla! anytime I walked down the street,” she wrote, using the Tagalog word for gay. “Transness was hypervisible there in a way that it wasn’t in the United States of 2003.” And so, after being scouted by a model at the Macy’s makeup counter where she worked in San Francisco, Rocero entered the New York fashion world with a secret. None of the brands she worked with were aware she was assigned male at birth—nor was her agent. Horse Barbie
details the paranoia of those years—the pressures, familiar in different ways to trans people and immigrants, to assimilate. Rocero stayed closeted until 2014. She came out in a TED Talk, cold-pitched to the organization under the name “Why I must come out.” It was a moment that fit conveniently into the narrative structure of the Obama era, a period that purported to vanquish old demons domestically even as it continued to spirit them abroad. Rocero went viral, and soon she took on the mantle of advocate, speaking at conferences, the United Nations, and the White House. When she met Barack Obama, she joked about the speed with which he was approving new trans policies. Online, there’s a picture of her making him laugh at the DNC LGBT Gala. Hers, it seemed, was shaping up to be a good life: a life of prestige, of performance. •
From our corner of the Smith, I contemplated Rocero’s inborn poise. Even as she relaxed, speaking to me as though we had known one another back home, she appeared held up, always, by invisible strings. Drawing her flute to her lips in one, velvety motion, she explained that her roots in pageantry continue to inform her way of life. Her memoir’s title is a reference to the dark skin and equine features her rivals once mocked her for. It was her trans mother, Tigerlily, who reclaimed the insult on her behalf, birthing the Horse Barbie persona. Today, Rocero thinks of it as a spirit, an elemental force that allows her to capture the sublime in her work. But while she enjoyed selling those kinds of loftier fantasies back home, where she strutted
on stages for collective morale, she was often frustrated with the work she got in the States. For Rocero, modeling was about art, theater. In New York, she was a mere mannequin, in service of profit: “My image was only going to end up getting flattened anyway, consumed on a page instead of a stage,” she writes. “The viewer would be so many more steps removed from what I was doing; their gaze would be distant enough to keep my secret safe but too far to really see me.”
The need to be seen is a running theme in Horse Barbie. There is a humility to Rocero’s prose; you feel as though you are wandering through a foreign land alongside her, attempting to pass in adopted spaces, and figuring out how things work— realizing that, often, they don’t. “My favorite thing to hear from people who read it is, ‘I never for one moment felt like I was being preached to,’” she told me in July. “That’s what is expected of this trans narrative. And I was subverting that, even subverting this whole ‘America promising freedom’ concept.”
I’d been drawn to Rocero from the moment her TED Talk started trending on Filipino social media. But what distinguished her in my eyes, especially after I moved to the United States in 2021, was her insistence on critiquing empire. Most trans advocates who walk red carpets and appear on magazine covers aren’t first-generation immigrants. “The precolonial grounds me,” Rocero said. “It’s what guides my point of view.” For a long time, she wanted nothing more than to blend into the American abstract. Her world was upended when she read a history of the babaylans, ancient Filipino shamans and healers who were either female or gender-fluid, but who
always adopted feminine dress. Classed alongside nobility, they were often consulted by tribal leaders for spiritual matters and could freely marry men. Their reign began to decline with the arrival of the Spanish, who enforced Catholicism and relegated women to secondary social status. By the time the Americans arrived 300 years later, the babaylans had been erased from the collective memory. But their ethos persisted, an unmoored shard of native identity hidden in plain sight.
The discovery vindicated Rocero. Here, at last, was an explanation for the trans pageants that were such an organic feature of religious life back home. “I’m really proud of that kind of unapologetic queerness, that unapologetic expression that does not need to be defined,” she said. “Gender fluidity is so ingrained in our culture … So whether I was conscious of it or not, history says it. History is the teacher. In a way, it led us to the future.”
This revenant energy is captured, quite remarkably, in Rocero’s favorite image of herself. It’s a photo from her very first pageant, where she won Best in Swimsuit. Standing in a black-and-white striped bikini similar to the one worn by the firstever Barbie, she somehow looks both lush and stately. On the stage behind her is the name of the fiesta, conveying to the viewer that this event is religious. Below it is the name of the government sponsor, an indisputable stamp of establishment approval. “I understand the tendency of people to compare trans pageants in the Philippines to the ballroom scene in America,” Rocero told me. “And I tell them, this is in the mainstream. We were not underground. It’s literally on the street where the whole family is watching, with babies.”
I sometimes find myself on the receiving end of such observations about the home I left behind. Invariably, I am unable to offer anything by way of affirmation. I pointed out to Rocero that while queerness in the Philippines might be more normalized within the Catholic majority, there are spaces where it is unthinkable to express such identity even in sublimated forms. In the small, evangelical milieu I was raised in, panic was the defining mood, gender its favored object. Constituting just 11 percent of the population—as opposed to the Catholic 80 percent—evangelical Christians tend to hold fast to notions of scriptural purity, regarding any kind of religious syncretism with scorn. The faith is a distinctly American import, brought by colonial missionaries. To this day, most evangelical institutions in the Philippines take their stances and protocols—even their sermon styles—directly from megachurches in the United States. The theology I’d received was the gospel of Billy Graham, of Joel Osteen, of Rick Warren. I lived in a province of red-state conservatism, a stronghold of its ideals. We did not go to fiestas; never in my life had I seen a trans beauty pageant. When a bill protecting queer people from discrimination was proposed in government, my church pastor decried it as a measure that would incur the wrath of God.
In 2014, Rocero flew back to the Philippines to campaign for that very bill, which was first filed in 2000 and continues to get rejected every time it is presented in Congress. When I asked her how she dealt with religious critics, she said she would usually give them a history lesson, pointing out that Filipino languages are constructed around gender-neutral pronouns. He and
she are nonexistent words; there is only the catchall, siya, which is used to denote not anatomy but essence. “You cannot be more mainstream than that,” she said. “It’s in our very language. It’s just there’s this other colonial structure that’s more dominant, that’s tied to power, that’s tied to capital.”
By this point in our conversation, the champagne was gone; one last shrimp hung, limp, from Rocero’s platter. She prodded it with her fork. “I am sure you experienced this—I don’t want to make this assumption,” she said, eyeing me. “I certainly experienced it when I moved here. I would confuse all my he /she /hers. And I used to get shamed for that. But now I know that the ancestors were speaking through me.”
Rocero was aware that I was still somewhat fresh off the boat, a newcomer to the country she had migrated to more than 20 years ago. I had moved in pursuit of a place where my gayness didn’t need to be so suppressed. Now, in this room of white tile and dark wood, frothy with the chatter of weekends being recounted, I reflected on how uncanny it felt to be seated across from Rocero 10 years after I’d first encountered her speech, a vision of what migration could offer. But she was wrong in assuming I’d had difficulty with English pronouns— my mother was particular about grammar, and gently corrected my errors when I was growing up.
The person Rocero shared more lingual kinship with was my father. A man for whom gray areas were not worth examination, he harbored a special aversion toward queer people, conjuring them up unprompted as the foulest contortionists of
order, attackers of the Christian family. He was also a native Tagalog speaker, one who had mastered English only in his teens and thus was always in the habit of switching his hes and shes. It was a tic that frustrated my mother but amused me. Those small moments of slippage were islands of solace in the otherwise unyielding sea of his rhetoric. I never once corrected him, dazzled as I was by the irony of a man who constantly flubbed the basic terms of his belief system.
Rocero’s own father, who died in 2001, affirmed her transness at an early age, and her mother, who remains a practicing Catholic, accompanied her daughter to her bottom surgery in Thailand. But Rocero’s anthropological convictions remain a source of tension in her family. “I was not afraid, obviously, to talk about transness and pageants and all that,” she said when I asked what most intimidated her about writing Horse Barbie. “I was really afraid to
share my decolonial process. Because if I share my decolonial journey, I feel like I’m more directly challenging my mom and my grandma.” The admission alludes to a thorniness underlying the serene familial relationship portrayed in her book. “To this day, my mom hangs up the phone when I talk about precolonial stuff, when I challenge her Bible.”
Rocero was naturalized in 2006. She could have kept dual citizenship but was too distressed by the male gender marker on her Philippine passport to maintain it. “There was guilt and shame in that complicated choice,” she wrote in her memoir. “At first, I felt like I was letting go of my heritage. But then I realized it was my home country that was trying to erase its own heritage, suppressing knowledge of my gender-fluid ancestors.” It is perhaps the most stunning idea in the book, a line that made me pause to reach for my highlighter. The suggestion—that Rocero was in fact more Filipino than conservative lawmakers loyal to church dogma—reversed the narrative that transness was somehow a corrupting influence of the West.
And yet something about her words gnawed at me. After paying our respective bills, I walked Rocero a couple of blocks down Broadway toward her friend’s apartment, where she would make pancit and barbecue for the party. We said our goodbyes, and for the next hour I ambled through the rigorous streets of NoMad, where high-rises and prewar buildings regarded one another uncertainly. The interview was over; the requisite tedium of life came traipsing back in. I remembered deadlines, documents, the fees due to my immigration lawyer. For the past few months, I’d been in the process of applying
for an artist visa, the next step to gaining the US citizenship I so ardently craved. This city had become my own; I felt New York’s pulse in my marrow. But just as I reflected on what I was escaping, I thought about where I had chosen to flee. The United States was as much the root of my church’s malignance as it was the North Star that had led me to grace. There was a time when I walked through Manila imagining it was Manhattan. Now, as I sank down the subway stairs on 28th Street, I thought about the strange determinism of my newfound freedom, the extent to which we buy the dreams we are sold.
•
To mark the 10th anniversary of Philippine conquest in 1908, Americans in Manila decided to host a carnival. Bread and circuses were crucial in those fragile first days, preventing any further uprisings. The initial plan was to abduct Indigenous Filipinos from the mountains and put them on display in the city. Instead, a more benign kind of exhibition prevailed. Filipinas across the country submitted their pictures to a board of judges, and the winner was named that year’s Carnival Queen. The messaging was clear: if Spain had raped its former subjects, the US would exalt them. Filipinos embraced the custom, parading each favorite daughter like a bride bejeweled for her new master. It was in this climate of coercion that women of the Philippines learned to make a sport of beauty.
In 2015, five days before Christmas, my family turned on the TV to watch 80 glamazons compete for the title of Miss Universe. The annual pageant is the object of intense frenzy in the Philippines, a global spectacle
that recasts diva worship as a patriotic duty. All of the country’s major news outlets cover the broadcast, and our delegates often place in the top five. Many Filipinos take pride in the allure of our women, their crossover appeal, their ability to field questions without an English translator. But we hadn’t taken the crown since 1973, and I had never seen a Miss Philippines win in my lifetime.
On that day, I first saw Pia Wurtzbach walk. She was ethereal, a saint stepped out from her alcove. And she triumphed in the most dramatic fashion—Steve Harvey, the host for the evening, had mistakenly announced Miss Colombia as the winner. When he reemerged onstage to bashfully correct himself, it became the Moonlight moment of international pageantry, immortalizing the instant a Filipina was crowned the most beautiful girl in the world.
I revisited Wurtzbach’s performance while writing this piece. I had forgotten many of its particulars. Like the Olympics, Miss Universe changes host countries every edition, and on this night the pageant was broadcast from a casino in Las Vegas. During her question-and-answer segment, Wurtzbach approached Harvey at center stage, wearing a dress whose blue was a nod to the color in the Philippine flag that signifies peacetime. He read from the card that had been handed to him by the judges. “Do you think the United States should have a military presence in your country?”
It was a topical question. The previous year, the United States and the Philippines had entered into an agreement allowing American soldiers access to local bases. Many Filipino politicians and pundits decried the decision, worried about the
consequences of such thinly veiled powermongering. Around the same time, a US marine stationed in the Philippines had been convicted for the murder of a young Filipina. He had taken her home that night and was shocked to discover she was trans.
Wurtzbach had a split second to consider the stakes. Only five women remained in the running: Miss USA, Miss Colombia, Miss Australia, Miss France, and Wurtzbach. All the judges were American, and she was on their home turf. To win Miss Universe in the Philippines is to be guaranteed a lifetime of lucrative brand endorsements and show business opportunities, not to mention sociopolitical clout. Wurtzbach had been working toward this stage her entire life. She had been her family’s breadwinner since she was 11 years old, through her work as a child model.
Wurtzbach gave an answer she would later regret: “We were colonized by the Americans and we have their culture in our traditions even up to this day. And I think that we’re very welcoming with the Americans, and I don’t see any problem with that at all.” The best beauty queens prevaricate better than politicians. Instantly, the auditorium erupted into deafening applause. “That’s pretty good,” Harvey muttered. Later, it was reported that the judges had voted for Wurtzbach unanimously.
•
Two years into her role as spokeswoman for a movement, Geena Rocero began to get the odd feeling that she was playing somebody else’s game. She had been doing everything from working with Obama’s State Department to appearing at the
World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland. “In the majority of these spaces, I was the only trans person speaking,” she told me over Zoom three weeks after our brunch. She wore a loose black T-shirt; the room in which she sat was all white wood. Yet though she was calling from home, I got the sense that she was more comfortable at the restaurant, where there were no screens between us.
“I had to speak about what I had gone through while at the same time retraumatizing myself,” Rocero continued. “And I felt like two years ago I’d left the closet of being trans, and now I’d entered the closet of respectability politics.” Alone in high-ceilinged rooms, Rocero shook hands and smiled. She had become a muse of the liberal establishment, asked to wear her identity like a sash.
“It was obviously tokenizing,” Rocero said. “I felt like there should be other people speaking about this, people who have more experience on the ground.” She continues to abide by the Filipino concept of “kapwa,” where one encounters the other as an extension of the self. But in the individualist US, efforts to liberate entire groups of people often end up becoming—occasionally reductive—showcases for just a few voices within. These few are expected to be grateful, unthreatening, charismatic.
I asked her if she regretted compromising herself in this way. “I think I was just a product of my time. We’re the product of the context in which we live,” she cackled, referencing Kamala Harris’s oft-memed koan. Rocero, after all, had just come out after years in hiding, and overnight she had been catapulted into real, potentially change-making halls of power. As exhausting as the work was, she was determined
to gauge what her community could gain from it. But being on her best behavior took its toll, and soon enough, she disqualified herself from the race.
When Playboy came to her with an offer, she seized the opportunity. The shoot, the one in which she frolics, seaside, in the nude, took place in Costa Rica, though the beach is clearly intended to evoke the Philippines. Rocero is quick to clarify just how granular her involvement in the creative decision-making was. She wanted to be in nature, a newborn goddess. She wanted to climb a tree—it reminded her of her childhood back home. The pineapple bikini was inspired by her Instagram feed; Rocero had created swimsuits out of fruit in the Philippines before. In many of the photos, she is occupied, undeniably, by the necessary project of seduction. But in others, she is merely a girl at play, awed by the earthly paradise around her. “I wanted to combine joy and sensuality,” she told me. “That was an expression of my truest form.”
Though it might seem irreconcilable with her advocacy work, Rocero’s Playboy shoot is, in fact, one of the most concise distillations of her message. In an era that will be remembered as a boom both for the personal narrative and the discourse of the body, she has worked out that her body is her story, and that the tale is best presented unabridged, unadorned, denuded. “I am many things,” she told me. “And I can be the things that I choose to be, not what the media expects me to be.” It’s a philosophy she sees as a rebuttal to the United States, a nation of binaries.
Rocero makes such statements with humility, having long since learned that a single perspective is not enough. To that end, Rocero’s current focus is on expanding
her platform. In 2021, her production company, Street Pageant Productions, released the documentary series Caretakers, which followed Filipino health workers and community figures as they navigated the pandemic. More cinematic projects are forthcoming. (One of them, a 20-minute sci-fi film that Rocero is writing, directing, and acting in, imagines a world of trans women as Stepford wives.)
The elephant in the room had become impossible to ignore. I asked Rocero how she felt about the upcoming election. Needless to say, the Trump era was a period of regression for trans rights, upending what little progress had been made when Rocero was a newly minted ambassador of her community. But she believes that Trump is only a symptom of a larger problem—the United States’ deep-seated commitment to normativity, sameness, and one-man myths. “They know that they can home in on that fear, because it’s rooted in ignorance,” she said. “They don’t see us as full human beings.”
Our Zoom call ended. I clicked through images of Rocero on the internet. After a few minutes, I looked down at my phone to find a text from her, a screenshot of a James Baldwin quote from Notes of a Native Son (1955): “I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.” I kept it in mind as I perused photos that spanned hundreds of miles, several lifetimes. Rocero’s freshly powdered face on a runway of women moving swanlike through the Manila heat. Her glassy and distracted smile at a New York gallery opening in 2006. Her focused expression on the TED main stage. Together, they formed an American coming-of-age story,
a journey from outside to inside, to someplace fertile in between. Here was a body that sought to elude capture, a woman who’d discovered how to answer for herself.
I HAVEN’T HEARD MY BROTHER’S VOICE IN TEN YEARS
Douglas Manuel
1. sullied in plaits brother call me
my true name i remember so much strewn across where winter scrapes my face when i say winter here brother i am wasn’t looking
to mark this silence glowed halo candlelight my own brother what are you called now
2. again robed in royal blue back-to-back brothers the other not there the brother is peering up as if praying time will try to make you
clothed in this wound how to live without cleansed ourselves with salt forgetting is a luxury we can’t afford costs too much for us so rich in loss
3. wear gold chant in unison brother brother where are you the eye of loss nothing more than a needle why not forget why not let light ripple across the crown of your head
FINISHING MOVES
by Evan McGarvey
Weeks before the plane, when I accidentally walked into Old Mann Winter’s personal locker room and saw how bad the burns were on his hands, I thought I was going to be fired. He never took the gloves off, not in the ring, not around the other wrestlers. Never. He’s dead now, so I feel okay sharing this: the burns were awful, his fingers were stiff and mottled red, and his hands, my god, the flesh looked like wads of wet paper running from his knuckles up to his elbow. I didn’t blink, didn’t pull a face, just apologized and got out of there.
I had seen one of the holy mysteries. You know, not counting the girl wrestlers, we had four women in the whole company—two seamstresses, the ring announcer, and me—and it would have been easy for them to get rid of me. I knew where I stood in the wrestling business. I was told when I got in that it didn’t matter that I had been the only woman working a camera at WFAA, I was still going to be around men who cut themselves and dropped each other on their heads.
Winter sees me backstage a few days after and tells me:
“You’re on the Japan trip.”
I didn’t know then if it was a thank you for not saying anything or a shut up about what you saw, but I knew that I would never see Japan without the company. So I already felt beholden to Winter, like a child might to a distant uncle. I know now that his sternness was inseparable from his generosity. Standards and secrets, that’s wrestling.
The whole company flew over in a charter 747. The coach cabin was like business class with huge seats and more room and had a bar in it. Never seen anything like it. Whoever thought that putting wrestlers in a plane with a bar for 12 hours was okay might be the dumbest person in history.
We worked the shows in Japan. I couldn’t believe how silent the crowds were. Respectful, like they were watching opera or something. After a good sequence, like when Chief Apia threw Winter off the top rope, the crowd would stand and clap. Then they’d sit and watch in reverence, quiet again. The lighting was all different too: I saw so deep into the crowd, faces, people wiping their glasses, the shape of front teeth. You could hear a cough in the eighth row.
I thought that I had been given this gift, and I started taking shots of the crowd for myself that I’d have the guys edit and slam onto a VHS for me to keep. Princess Fumiko was the women’s champ, and for her the crowds would pop, I thought. They, her people, would ripple with sound. And they did. They stood and clapped like it was a graduation, and even behind all Fumiko’s paint—she had made her gimmick a bit more demonic in ’97, green glitter around her mouth, pancake white around her eyes—you could see her trying not to smile, not to break.
The fight started over the ocean on the flight back to the US. The boys were half asleep or were wasted or pilled out. The first round of drinking on the plane had been terrible: Longview & Lubbock, the tag team, grabbed bottles of scotch for themselves and the two stewardesses raised their hands up in protest and walked to the galley. After a while, a few of the office people come back to the coach section and this corporate exec gives a speech about professionalism and travel. The guy dares to say “like any other businessman flying international for work.” Someone whips an open beer can at him, beer arcing out of the can and splashing a half dozen people. The people who got wet are up and pissed.
Old Mann Winter was close to the front of the cabin. He could have sat way up in first class with the bosses and the other main event guys, but he’s the locker room leader. He needs to be in the right zone. He needs to be seen. Winter turns back and glares at the wrestlers who got splashed. Everybody complies. For a moment, I think the world will be calmed. Winter’s hands are in the gray leather gloves he wore when he traveled. He’s got
them at his sides. The wrestlers who got streaked with beer sit down.
But Norma Lee Rooks stays standing.
Norma was one of the first girl wrestlers in the TV era. Her nose had been broken a few times, and her teeth were new: big white veneers like shields on top of whatever the years had whittled down. Norma had real forearms and a few fingers broken. Nothing past her wrists laid straight, no different from a few of the guys. In the ’70s, she put out a cigar on her own arm to show a promoter she was for real, then covered the scar with a tattoo of a mermaid. Every time one of the new girls got a tattoo, she’d make a whole stink and say they needed to pay her a royalty: “I did that. I invented that. Girl, you owe me.” And she would really make it tough, haunting the new girl backstage in Fresno or Sacramento until she gave Norma Lee a few hundred bucks. Which worked. Until Norma came asking for more the next time that she saw you a few weeks down the line.
Fumiko wasn’t sitting close to Norma Lee on the plane. Fumiko still acted new, and stuck close to the two Japanese male wrestlers we had at the time. They were sitting a few rows ahead of me. As Norma started running down every young wrestler to the corporate guy, I saw in real time that she knew she could not cuss the office out the way she wanted. Her face slowed down. She’d be fired. But her anger kept her, for that night at least, from becoming another broken-down, busted-up old wrestler.
“You’re all punks. Flying on a jet. Meals paid for. Bar in here like its fuckin’ Caesars Palace. And you think you’re a draw, you think people are buying tickets to see you. And then wasting the fucking beer to whip it at somebody from the office …”
She spins and sees Fumiko. Eyes narrowing, some electricity coming back to her cheeks and jaw, Norma Lee starts cutting into her, starting with the insults she’d always throw at a new-to-her girl wrestler:
“Not pretty enough to not be tough and not tough enough to not be pretty and only has the belt to keep her people happy while we were over there, and I’ll tell you that a lot of the fathers of American men on this flight wouldn’t appreciate having a …”
I don’t think I need to share the slide into common ugliness. I learned how swiftly Norma Lee’s list-making of grievances careened into skin and language. It struck me then as abnormal, but at my age, I understand that it’s a matter of convenience for many.
Fumiko, bless her, she doesn’t know what Norma Lee is going on about. She’s chatting with the two other Japanese wrestlers that we had with the company at the time, cruiserweights who occasionally tagged together.
Old Mann Winter stands up again. Hell, everyone in the cabin turns back to look at Fumiko. Norma’s sewage continues without pause at the front of the cabin. Winter is staring holes through her, waiting for her promo against the world and the Japanese to finish.
Finally, Fumiko catches on, looks at Norma for a moment, then gets back to chatting with the Japanese guys. They laugh and Fumiko hits one of the guys on the arm. Norma sees it.
Winter calls out something in Japanese. A few guys had worked Japan like Winter had, doing the evil American foreigner gimmick like a cowboy or an Olympic bully in a tracksuit. Winter says the phrase again, this time looking at Fumiko, and she looks back at him and nods.
I’m sitting there, trying to be cool, but already I’m imagining how I would shoot this. If you operate a camera, you know how a falcon or hawk would feel when they are about to dive off the branch. You become an instrument for something bigger than yourself. My first boss at WFAA told it to me: moments. But I hate that, hated it then and hate it now. Moments. That’s someone spilling juice and you shoot that and you call it a story about a family or even a story about a morning. No, you only got juice dripping off a countertop. The audience deserves more than that. In wrestling, that would mean getting only the finishing sequence and the pin. Wouldn’t that be awful?
Winter walks down the aisle, stops and greets the Japanese crew, says something else to Fumiko. Then Winter walks up to me. He was one of the top guys and the oldest of the top guys: he had power. He also had beautiful, open eyes like a fawn’s. His breath was clear—he only drank with a few guys and in tucked-away bars only he knew about—and of course he’s tall and with those long arms, but he’s looking at me like a peer, a colleague, which of course I am, and he says:
“Can you get a camera ready?”
“They are packed away. They are all underneath,” I said.
“Anything closer?” he said.
I thought of my territory, what I was responsible for, what I had in my carry-on, what the other camera people on that trip had with them.
“I think another camera guy might have a little DV camcorder with him in his bag,” I said, pointing back at the guy.
“DV?” Winter said.
“Sorry, yeah, digital video,” I said.
“Does it make a tape?”
“Not really. You don’t load a VHS into the camera and record directly onto that”
“But could you make a tape? Eventually?”
“Eventually I could, but I’d need to go into the studio at the office.”
Winter gestured with his chin toward the guy with the camera, nodded to me, and went back to his seat. The guy with the camera slept like the dead. I feel bad for not remembering his name, and I wish I could sit here and run through everyone I worked with then, but I do remember his face: trim mustache, big ears, and the kind of ski-jump nose I was taught was beautiful. He had the camera right at his feet in his backpack. I took it.
Norma Lee’s husband Billy Rooks had been dead for years. Shot in a truck stop near Springfield, Missouri. Everyone hated him on account of how he and Norma trained new wrestlers. Billy taught people how to make out a check, then put you up in a literal barn, then nothing, then he’d beat the piss out of you for weeks before you learned that wrestling was work. He and Norma were worse on the girls who wanted to wrestle. A few girls, after they got injured, Norma and Billy would give them drugs for the pain, keep feeding them the junk after, and get them hooked. There were a few girls who wanted to get into the business and went to see Billy and Norma and then were dead two years later, needles in their arms, dying alone and higher than the telephone wires.
I could not sleep. In the middle of the night, someone sang “Tennessee Whiskey” on the intercom and someone threw another beer can and this time it hit Norma Lee square on the back of her head. She explodes, yelling: “I know it was
you, I know it was you!” She’s storming into the dark, tripping over someone’s leg, and now more people are up and Fumiko is up because she never fell asleep and has been steadily drinking beer with her people. Norma Lee barks at Fumiko to “stand up and fight face to face, which is more than I can say about your people … ”
And Fumiko lays into her like a tide. She takes the edge of her hand and chops it across Norma’s chest, knocking her back. Like a slap but with the blade of the hand. And Fumiko hits Norma again. And again and again until the people who are awake are counting the chops. I can hear Fumiko call her “old pig” and Norma won’t let herself drop to a knee because it would kill the last threads of her reputation. Norma tries to grab Fumiko’s hair but Fumiko kept it short—a lot of the Japanese girls did, they thought women pulling each other’s hair in matches was demeaning to them as athletes.
I’ve framed it perfectly. I got right in the aisle and shot them from below, real superhero angles. I hold the midrange because I want each of Fumiko’s chops, the backswing and the slap and Norma’s flail. I know why I got this job. I know why I do this.
Finally, Norma Lee cries out, and looks like she’s trying to say something to Fumiko, leaning forward, not begging but trying to explain something. Norma Lee’s face isn’t warm. Her brow is knit, her lips thinning as she’s drawing her face back. I zoom in a little.
Fumiko reads her face, looks back at Winter. Fumiko smiles at Winter, gestures to Norma and then chops Norma even faster. Later I learned that Fumiko’s hero when she was young was Lady Blaze.
Blaze—a motorcycle stuntwoman gimmick—had worked with Norma a decade ago and Norma treated her like an animal, took liberties in the ring. Billy threw out her gear in the locker room while Norma was beating her in the ring. After the show, Lady Blaze ate in a Waffle House, still dirty, wearing spare clothes from another girl, makeup still on, trying to hide her face and protect her gimmick. That’s the image that every girl in Fumiko’s era had in their brain.
The pilot comes on the loudspeaker, says they are going to call the FAA, the FBI, whomever, and boys in blue will be waiting with cuffs if we don’t stop this instant. That slows the chaos. But when Winter put his hands on Norma’s and on Fumiko’s shoulders, that was what really ended it.
I didn’t stop rolling. I could see Norma Lee smiling a little after, like the fight had become a match. In that way, Norma Lee was fine losing. She had made a career of it. Fumiko lifted Norma Lee under her arms, dragged her back to her seat, and set her down with a hand across Norma’s chest, like she was trying to stop something that had been spinning. I kept rolling, capturing guys settling back down, Longview & Lubbock going to the galley where they had locked up the liquor. Fumiko stood in the aisle for a bit, catching her breath. I stayed on her as she leaned on the bulkhead, breathing deep, smiling, a little blood on her hand. Then I cut and closed the camera.
Everyone started to split up once the plane landed. It’s always the same: one crew starting the L.A. to Vegas to Phoenix loop, while another—the jobbers, the guys on the fringes—works a few months for a Mexican promotion. The lights were coming on. Fumiko and the Japanese guys
sat and waited for everyone else to file out, whether for self-protection or so that everyone could see them sitting unbothered. Norma Lee was ushered off, sunglasses on like a rich widow would. I never saw her again. She had spoken with me once months before the plane, told me she couldn’t believe that girls were working the cameras now but what did she know, she didn’t understand anything about the business anymore. I felt nothing when I heard that she died.
I was one of the last people on the plane. I was looking for the other camera guy whose camera I lifted, and Winter approached me. His eyes were even softer than they were when he asked me to shoot the fight. He held his hands out to me. This time, they were in different suede gloves up to the forearms and with fringe, like a lady’s.
“Thank you,” he said with his hands out. Then he took the camcorder from me and held it like an egg.
“How much are these?” he asked.
“Not cheap. But they are coming down. Give it a year and they’ll be 400.”
Winter bent the screen off and tried to rip apart the solid core of the camera, crushing what he could, looking for some kind of tape or disk or some proof. He slammed it against the bulkhead. He stomped it into the aisle. The plane was nearly empty. When he finished, he tucked the offering of metal and plastic under his arm and left.
All photos by Charlie Clewis
SYRIA’S FORGOTTEN ISLAND OF OPPOSITION
A report from the al-Tanf military compound
by Charlie Clewis
Within al-Tanf Garrison, a military compound strewn with rubble in the Syrian desert, a fountain murmurs in a peaceful courtyard. Cages of canaries overlook American soldiers eating baklava, sipping Turkish coffee, and sharing cigarettes with fighters of the Syrian Free Army (SFA). The two forces inspect their weapons and conduct a course prior to live training in the hot afternoon to come.
The base takes most by surprise. Built atop the M2 highway running from Baghdad to Damascus, the SFA headquarters sits within the 55-kilometer Deconfliction Zone (DCZ). Those who have grown accustomed to sprawling military installations across Iraq and Afghanistan, equipped with state-of-theart gyms and Burger Kings, often arrive at al-Tanf expecting an airport terminal, only to find desert austerity.
For the SFA, the DCZ is a desert island. The southern border with Jordan remains inaccessible to all except American military supply convoys. Similarly, the al-Waleed border “crossing” with Iraq contains no crossing of any sort and is, for all intents and purposes, sealed shut. To the north, Bashar al-Assad’s forces and Russian advisers operate out of over 100 small combat outposts situated sporadically along the entirety of the DCZ border, just kilometers from SFA forces.
While on a patrol with Americans and the SFA in July 2022, I stood on the unmarked border, staring directly at a Syrian outpost less than three kilometers across the unmarked line. We watched the silhouettes of regime soldiers scurrying around their outpost. Then we got back into the armored American vehicles and the SFA’s white Toyota pickup trucks, with mounted Soviet-era DShK machine guns, and drove back 55 kilometers through the desert. The SFA have been holding this land for eight years and they know the terrain. Over steaming hot tea, they share hand-drawn cardboard maps revealing features missing from the laminated versions produced by American intelligence officers.
The 2011 revolution against Assad, Syria’s dictator, and the subsequent civil
war fractured the country. Opposition militias emerged in the dozens, battling regime forces and capturing swathes of territory. The power vacuum enabled the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and other radical Islamist groups to enter Syria and seize cities throughout the country, terrorizing civilians and establishing the caliphate. Syria became a quagmire of US-backed Arab and Kurdish rebel forces, international jihadists, and forces from Turkey, Iran, and Russia—all with differing motives and objectives. Vladimir Putin’s support for the Assad regime substantially aided in its survival, but rebel forces still maintain control of nearly one-third of Syria today.
The SFA emerged in 2016, out of dissolution of the New Syrian Army, a militia formed to counter ISIS. With Coalition special forces and air support, they helped seize al-Tanf in March 2016. At the time, the Deconfliction Zone had yet to be established and the area surrounding al-Tanf remained open to movement in and out of the desert region. Al-Tanf was repeatedly attacked, first by ISIS and later by Russian forces, whose cluster munitions killed several SFA soldiers. The necessity of a Deconfliction Zone only became more apparent with time, since Russian aircraft targeted the base on multiple passes, despite nominally supporting the mission of the soldiers there and despite the potential presence of Coalition forces. The DCZ was eventually established by diplomatic means and originally seen by US Central Command as a method to “reduce the possibility of misunderstanding, miscalculation, or unintended conflict” with Russian and Syrian regime forces.
Al-Tanf’s rubble tells its history. Many of the buildings are crumbling or collapsed, products of the initial expulsion of ISIS and the Russian airstrikes shortly after. An empty plot of land is labeled “Zombieland,” because it is rumored to be a burial site for deceased ISIS militants. Craters dot the ground from Iranian drone attacks. The clinic formerly featured an entryway with the face of Assad emblazoned in tile on the floor. SFA soldiers took pleasure in stepping on it.
Unlike many of Syria’s early revolutionary militias, the SFA fighters don’t hail exclusively from one city or single tribe. Much of the militia’s senior leadership formerly served in Assad’s military and intelligence services prior to defecting, but many others were civilians who took to the streets during the Arab Spring or joined the rebels in the early fight to overthrow the regime. They have all suffered. “You can’t find any Syrians where the whole family lives under one roof,” one fighter told me.
had served on “attack teams” designated to quell protests, and took pride in doing so, the anger of the Daraa citizens was palpably different. In retrospect, al-Hassan told me, he never truly grasped the full picture of the regime’s cruelty. “They prohibited us from watching Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya,” he said, “I swear to God, sometimes when I would go home on leave, and I would hear the music starting the news on Al Jazeera channel, I would get upset and an uneasy feeling.”
In March 2011, during the uprising’s early days, Alaa al-Hassan, then a soldier in the Department of Anti-Terrorism in the Syrian Army, flew by helicopter into the Syrian city of Daraa and touched down on a field in the municipal football stadium. He was then loaded into a bus and driven to the nearby eruption of civil protests with the instructions to “capture and detain them, then take them away.”
Daraa was the heart of the revolution. Protests against the Assad regime ignited after a number of children were detained and tortured. Though al-Hassan
Upon arriving in Daraa, he was appalled to hear a lieutenant colonel say, “I know the nature of these people. They only understand this way. Shoot towards them.” This was a turning point for al-Hassan, as well as for a number of his fellow intelligence officers. He began to supply the revolutionaries clandestinely with ammunition and conspired to sabotage future regime attempts to kill protesters. When civilians at home would ask al-Hassan how he could still serve the regime, he didn’t have an answer. Eventually, a colleague, still loyal to the regime, informed on him. He spent the next eight months in Assad’s infamous prison system. “You can still see the abuse on my wrists from the zip ties,” he told me. “I cannot describe the treatment. Not human.” For eight months, al-Hassan lived in an 11 x 1 meter cell. As al-Hassan demonstrated to me, the width of one meter was about the size of a single square of tile. “No sun. No medical care whatsoever. Not even a bar of soap. They would provide an adult male with one or two olives. For the whole day, maybe a piece of pita bread,” al-Hassan said. He was, of course, one of many. The atrocities of Assad’s prisons are well documented. The Syrian Network for Human Rights
reported that over 250 civilians were killed and nearly 1,500 arrested in the first month of protests alone.
As the civil war progressed, Syria splintered and ISIS began to metastasize. After eight months in prison, al-Hassan appeared before a judge, who ordered him to be released. Soon after, he officially defected from the regime and joined an armed faction of the newly formed opposition—the Free Syrian Army.
•
Another soldier, Mohammad al-Tadmuri (a pseudonym), tells me a similar story, but from the angle of the revolutionary. In 2011, al-Tadmuri took to the streets to protest. Encouraged by the protests across the Arab world, particularly in Tunisia and Egypt, al-Tadmuri continued to demonstrate, even after Assad enacted a state of emergency allowing protesters to be shot on sight.
The knock at his door wasn’t a surprise. Al-Tadmuri was arrested on charges of terrorism and faced similar conditions to al-Hassan’s. “You might get one piece of olive and bread, then they would cut off all food and water,” he said. “Just starvation. They would starve me for four or five days, then give me a piece of rotten bread.” Al-Tadmuri was eventually brought to a “security branch,” a facility notorious for inflicting sadistic methods of torture on prisoners. Al-Tadmuri described the method widely known as shabeh—the act of hanging a prisoner from the ceiling in a variety of positions over the course of many hours. He witnessed guards administering diuretic pills to increase urination and then tying the prisoner’s penis with a string in
order to cause extreme bladder pain and, eventually, kidney disease. “Darkness, no water, no electricity. Some people lost their minds. They went insane. This was all systematic. They knew what these methods would lead to.” Al-Tadmuri was among four protesters arrested together; he was the only one to survive the security branches.
Al-Tadmuri eventually hired an attorney to negotiate his release, which also required payments and bribes to the regime. But by the time he returned home, Tadmur had become the site of intense bombing, scarcity of goods, and the threat of ISIS. “Our only options were death; either death from the regime’s shelling or death by ISIS,” al-Tadmuri told me. To escape the violence in Tadmur, he and his family traveled north to Raqqa—the heart of the caliphate. While living conditions improved, the viciousness of ISIS’s rule was inescapable. Walking down the streets of Raqqa, al-Tadmuri would pass severed heads lodged on poles, bodies strewn with signs stating their alleged crimes, and Islamic State militants questioning civilians. “It was truly a horror movie,” he said.
ISIS was also arresting and punishing citizens for activities labeled as forbidden under Sharia law: watching television, sporting unfit attire or a shaved beard, and walking during times of prayer were all justifications for apprehension. Al-Tadmuri was arrested and detained for three days after he was found carrying cigarettes.
Soon, Raqqa was besieged by a Kurdishled and Coalition-supported armed opposition group. Coalition airstrikes during the offensive are reported to have killed over 1,600 civilians, while leaving much of the city decimated. As the bombing on Raqqa
intensified, civilians snuck out of the city, crossing the bridges above the Euphrates River. Al-Tadmuri’s family left everything behind in their apartment to avoid raising suspicion: “Everybody crossed the bridge, then the bridges were bombed.”
Al-Tadmuri and his family traveled south, taking dirt roads and hiding under tarps. They eventually arrived here. Al-Tadmuri joined the SFA at al-Tanf and his family relocated to an IDP camp in nearby Rukban.
•
The isolated desert outpost has enabled the American forces and the SFA factions to foster a distinct connection. On Thanksgiving Day, fighters from the SFA entered the American side of al-Tanf with a live turkey. When the US forces admitted that they didn’t have a soldier who knew how to properly kill and cook the bird, the Syrians offered to do it.
US troops are expected to maintain their professional appearance. Once a week, the SFA barber sets up shop in the shade of a crumbling building and issues haircuts to American personnel. On Sunday evenings, a ragtag team plays soccer against the SFA. In my months at al-Tanf, the Americans lost badly in every match, often not even bothering to keep score. Despite the circumstances, the atmosphere is lighthearted and relaxed, with the US soldiers playing hip-hop and country songs through portable speakers, making sure to pause the music during the evening call to prayer. But there are constant reminders of the protracted conflict: during the conclusion of one match, a US F-16 fighter jet screamed across the sky, flying fast at low
altitude and shaking the ground below.
Despite their lack of recognition in American newsrooms and security offices in Washington, DC, al-Tanf and the SFA have taken dozens of drone attacks from Iranian-backed militias, and the SFA has been targeted directly by Russian warplanes. During the early morning of August 15, 2022, I was awakened by what one soldier called a “flying weed-whacker,” an armed suicide drone, followed by an explosion. The war in Gaza has accelerated attacks on al-Tanf. Israeli military strikes on Iranian-aligned militia groups are often met with retribution visited on the base by Iranian drones. A mid-October 2023 drone attack left 19 US soldiers with traumatic brain injuries.
Russia, meanwhile, has continued to engage in a propaganda campaign, largley through state news and social media, to label the SFA as a terrorist militia or simply as synonymous with ISIS. In raw numbers, al-Tanf and the SFA are trivial—the SFA is roughly the size of a traditional infantry battalion and accompanied by fewer than 500 US troops. Still, the Kremlin and Tehran have used the 55-kilometer region as a punching bag to express their anger and remind the United States of their willingness to reach into the Deconfliction Zone. •
In the face of the looming aerial assaults, the men of al-Tanf spend much of their time trying to alleviate the humanitarian crisis nearby—an IDP camp in Rukban, characteristic of a situation that the United States barely acknowledges.
The Rukban refugee camp is the bleeding wound of the DCZ: it both unifies the SFA and serves as its greatest vulnerability. Comprised of thousands of Syrians who fled the civil war, Rukban sits along the Jordanian border, a short ride from al-Tanf, and is within eyesight of the joint US-Jordanian outpost Tower 22. American soldiers deploy solo to al-Tanf for ninemonth tours. The families of SFA members, however, live just miles from the base. The conditions in the camp remain dire. The central well in Rukban receives water pumped from across the Jordanian border and is under the administrative control of the Jordanian NGO Better World, which receives direction from UNICEF regarding the daily water provided. The camp is often subject to water shortages, with no explanation as to why the supply is being limited. The lead medic of the SFA team told me, “When I go to Rukban, I see people waiting in line to get water for their children. They start at 6:00 a.m. [and wait in line] until 3:00 p.m. just to get a jug of water. That image says a lot about this place.”
Blocked by the Syrian regime, the UN has not delivered humanitarian aid to Rukban since 2019. The Syrian government also severely limits any shipments from regime territory—a tactic the US has labeled as the “starve-and-siege” campaign. Ahmed, the former head of the SFA Civil Affairs team, lamented, “We are still paying our debts to Assad.” In September 2023, without access to a hospital, Ahmed died from a liver condition. His brother, also an SFA officer, messaged me on WhatsApp: “He passed and no one helped him.”
Despite effectively controlling the 55-kilometer zone, which Rukban lies
within, the US has maintained that the camp is the responsibility of the Syrian regime. The flow of Kalashnikovs and RPGs, not to mention broad military support for the SFA from the United States, has been virtually limitless, yet government humanitarian assistance for the camp is nonexistent. In a reverse of traditionally orthodox roles, the American military officers at al-Tanf appear to be pushing the hardest for the US government to intervene in Rukban, while policymakers at the State Department and USAID have avoided the issue at all costs.
American officers at al-Tanf often find themselves sitting across from SFA leaders during meetings, listening to updates on the camp, unable to offer much besides sympathy and empty promises. SFA leaders understand that the US forces at al-Tanf are far removed from policy decisions in Washington, but constant rotations of new American units that repeat the same rhetoric have become palpably frustrating. An SFA intelligence officer lamented to me: “Moving to Rukban is simply escaping one suffering to enter another. We are still expats. Expats in our own country.”
In September 2022, I joined an American platoon as they entered Rukban, an unprecedented event for conventional US forces. Residents, celebrating their arrival, offered to slaughter two sheep for the soldiers as they unloaded from their vehicles to visit a local clinic. After we returned to al-Tanf, I read a text from a member of the SFA: “I saw your guys in the camp. So many people welcome that.”
In 2024, US patrols have continued to travel deeper into Rukban to engage with civilians, but American policy remains unchanged.
The past year, however, has offered hope for the residents of Rukban and the SFA. Out of a small office in Washington, DC— about the size of two cubicles—the NGO Syrian Emergency Task Force (SETF), led by executive director Mouaz Moustafa, has worked to deliver humanitarian aid to Rukban, including the SFA and their families. Through the use of vacant space on military aircraft, SETF’s aid deliveries have temporarily made Rukban “food secure”. But, Moustafa admitted, “That will run out in 100 days.” With the Assad regime intensifying the starve-and-siege campaign, the camp has become wholly reliant on SETF’s operation, which is contingent upon international donations and, most importantly, an ongoing American presence at al-Tanf.
•
The Americans and Syrians occupy separate sides of the al-Tanf base, but it is not difficult to differentiate the two spaces. Where the Syrians have planted trees and foliage around their compounds, the American side remains completely barren. The transitory nature of American units, coupled with the uncertainty of the future, serves as an explanation. Why plant a tree if you won’t be there to watch it grow?
The official mission of the US forces in Syria, titled Operation Inherent Resolve, is to support regional partners in the defeat of ISIS. Yet, during my eight months serving as a US Army officer at al-Tanf, there was no trace of terrorist activity within the 55-kilometer zone. Though this fact remains unspoken by US officials, the forces at al-Tanf have become a pawn on the regional chessboard—if the Americans
didn’t occupy the space, it would be open for the taking by regime forces, Iranian militias, and Russian advisers. The US presence is a de facto peacekeeping force. How long will the Americans stay, and what will happen when they finally leave? “The regime has my name, face, and a bounty on my head,” an SFA fighter, Khaled al-Homsi, told me. For many like him, the bridge with the regime was burned long ago. There is no option to return safely to their former homes. The Syrians in the DCZ feel a mix of hopelessness and entrapment. As al-Tadmuri lamented, “A child who was eight years old arriving at Rukban is now 14. What has this generation seen?” Yet, as I was leaving, the soldiers there had begun preparing to build a new gym and dining facility to replace the crumbling structures and tents that had served these functions in the years prior.
The contours of recent American military history in Syria are different than in Iraq and Afghanistan. There was no formal invasion to topple a regime, the conventional troop presence remains consistent and low, and, other than the occasional special operations raid or drone strike, kinetic operations have ceased. Many Americans citizens are only vaguely aware of US operations there.
Birds sing from their cages in the al-Tanf courtyard. The stalemate continues, 13 years into the war. “The whole world showed up here,” said al-Hassan. “Because we have a cause. We have an idea. The revolution is an idea that will never die.”
WITCHES OF FRESNO
by Venita Blackburn
When you meet a witch in Fresno, you’ll be just past the high note of your latest tragedy. Witches of Fresno drive cars with failing transmissions and loose hubcaps. Witches of Fresno smoke Black & Milds and fear dental care. Witches of Fresno are born with talents spectacular and rare but are unable to monetize them. Witches of Fresno can see all of your dead, the recently buried, the ash and wood, the murdered and the drowned and those that still breathe but are about to be lost.
They see them clear as red caterpillars on the green leaf of your body, small, bizarre, and beautiful things that crawl over your skin.
You will meet your Fresno witch at a house party in Old Fig, someone’s grandaunt’s home occupied by two cats and an immense collection of jade flowers. The house will smell like sweat, nutmeg, and termites. Your heart will palpitate like a struck bell, something you’ve been told happens at your age and the proposed surgery is often unsuccessful.
Witches of Fresno play bingo at the casino on Sunday afternoons and always win. Witches of Fresno take their bingo winnings to play the lottery and always lose. Witches of Fresno are kind alcoholics who chew sugar free gum before breakfast.
At the party, one witch will play a guitar and sing with a voice that strokes your bones while her face reminds you of a tarantula. She will make you feel sad and fortunate and sad again to the rhythm of your unsteady heart. When she smiles at you, the need to pretend to be fine vanishes like a fart blown through a window and you laugh then laugh some more. She will nod and you will drink and drink and drink.
Witches of Fresno have bad credit and many friends. Witches of Fresno walk in a hundred-degree heat to get $5 pizza at noon because they can’t afford gas. Witches of Fresno always share their food.
A voice to your left will say, I can see your mother all around you. You were loved. The witches on the sofa and in the hall will sip Everclear and margarita mix from used beer cans and grin at you with awe and envy. One witch will vomit uncontrollably into the night.
Witches of Fresno have old chihuahuas and Yorkies, hella old like 19, they declare. Witches of Fresno donate to charity when they are hungry. Witches of Fresno grow tomatoes and basil in plastic pots and give the seedlings to neighbors.
When you begin to sober up, you will want to ask questions. You will want to talk to your dead. You will begin to lose the inclination towards freedom and want that feeling back again. You will seek out the tarantula face and demand she smile and know your soul one more time. You will listen to the silence for her voice and find less than the memory. You will want to hear confirmation that you are not alone in the same words as before but you don’t know who said them. You will feel the skin of your lips begin to slough away from dryness, so you’ll bite bit by bit and begin to stress eat your own mouth. The witches will be in various states of drunk and disorderly. They will not remember your name or your loss or how you came to them or where you will go after. They will look at your face like you are the whole moon and ask if you’re sure this was the plan all along.
Witches of Fresno die with no debts and no property. Their belongings are scattered to the nearest hands like soil overturned.
What we saw upon awakening (2006) 16 mm film transfer to video
Copyright: © the artist and hopefulmonster editore From Lida Abdul, hopefulmonster editore, Turin, 2007.
Lida Abdul
PIGFOOT
by Venita Blackburn
I visited my grandpa in hospice when he told me about Pigfoot and the murder. I forgot you aren’t supposed to ask old people questions, especially about things people don’t talk about on purpose. The body landed and everyone got confused, grandpa said. It was August when I visited so I thought about how summer makes the air heavier at your feet than at your head. I imagined my uncle’s head bouncing on that air, no sound, no rocks moving, no leaves crunching, everything wet and green and growing since they were all country folks.
We knew what to do way before our brother walked into the woods with us. We knew he wasn’t leaving.
All I did was ask why people call my aunt Pigfoot.
She used to talk all the time about the things she learned at school or in her books. I took a book out of her hand once and her mama slapped me on the chin hard enough to leave a mark; it was as high up as she could reach being so short. Let her read, she said.
We ain’t the kind that scrap like that, so I knew grandma was big mad. According to grandpa, Auntie Pigfoot got her name the day her mama put some pointy mary janes on her that made her clop around like a goat on a deck.
Goat?
Pig. Don’t matter, it stuck from then on. I gave him some water out of those pink plastic cups that suck the happy right out of you upon touch. He rolled over half frozen to sip.
I’m not dead yet, and if there’s any justice on the earth, I’ll live long enough to have more than this in my head.
Auntie Pigfoot used to be this talking wiry thing whipping through the house only stopping to tell grandpa some horrible something she learned. Did you know this and did you know that about some octopus that changes color or that the catholics drink real wine in church.
That should’ve been her name: Did you know? Daddy, did you know plants eat light? Daddy, did you know people dance with corpses?
What?
She said they pop ’em out of the graves every few years to just hang out, sit the bones around the house, at the dinner table, on the patio, and then have a ceremony where they
dance with ’em. She said mmmm-hmm and went back to reading leaving me and her mama looking at each other like damn. Her mama told me first. I didn’t think it possible. Had to hold me back with that weird small woman power she got when she put her hand right on my sternum, and I couldn’t push past her. We needed to talk about it. Her eyes were red and watery and her voice steady and I saved my hammer. We talked with my other brothers and one of my cousins and our only sister. Some of ’em we didn’t trust. We sat like crows in a circle. Pigfoot was almost five months in when she told her mama why she wasn’t bleeding and had gone so quiet and who did it. When all of us stood together after, we didn’t talk about the law or God or forgiveness or forgetting or how most of those things didn’t care much about Pigfoot and her baby and how small they both was in the end and how her voice stayed locked up inside for a long time. We talked about tomorrow and when tomorrow came who would be in it or not. It doesn’t change you as much as the preachers say. Food still tasted fine … except in here.
You like the Jell-O.
I like that it’s cold. The cold is nice.
Yeah. I like the green one.
I took a deep breath with this pocket of something ballooning in my back. I wondered if it was always there or I just noticed for the first time, this work we have with family and how much there is to manage.
And the green ones are alright.
Grandpa turned to me with his stiff neck from the stroke and his watery eyes wide like I was about to fall down.
Don’t worry now. It’s more like paying a big bill and there’s not anything leftover to work with but you don’t have the payment no more. We all knew we could be fine with that.
BEDROCK
On gravesites literal and not
by Charley Burlock
We have become accustomed to figures disappearing from our landscape. Does this not lead us to interrogate the landscape?
—Richard Rodriguez, “Late Victorians”
You can’t bury your dead in San Francisco. In 1900, all new internments were banned within city limits. By the next decade, the land was too valuable for corpses. All existing cemeteries were evicted, the bodies dug up and sent 13 miles south to the town of Colma, where the dead population now outnumbers the living 1,000 to one. Most of the bodies ended up in mass graves. Private reburial cost a premium. The tombstones that were recoverable after the massive
dig, and which families did not repurchase from the city, were ground and used in public works. They now line rain gutters in Buena Vista Park, make up the breakwater in the Marina, and are used for erosion barriers at Ocean Beach.
Every few years, the land tries to shudder itself free from the city. I’ve felt dozens of these trembles, all of them weak, the seven major fault lines that cut across San Francisco grinding against each other, mindlessly and mildly, like teeth in the night. But seismologists and street-corner doomsayers alike agree: the Big One is coming. Those who survive the initial quake will face tsunamis, landslides, flooding, and fires. Thousands will die. Skylines will crumble. Warning shots of this inevitable destruction punctuate our days yet rarely wreak too much havoc because of the city’s generally well-planned disaster infrastructure, much of it repurposed from the tombstones’ marble. These hand-medown headstones are our defense against the unquiet and highly marketable land we uprooted them from. My city is nothing if not resourceful.
Both the house I grew up in and the house my mother lives in now are built on top of these evacuated gravesites. Our neighbors uncovered fragments of headstones while planting fresh rosemary— Born, Mrs., Died, Erected, and Catheri fully legible within the marble shards. I don’t know what they did with the pieces, but their garden is still growing, healthy and pruned.
I do not live in San Francisco anymore and the last time I did was by accident. I left the city for college and returned in March 2020 to shelter in place and, so it turned out, to scatter my brother’s ashes.
He had been dead six years by then and it was time. It would never be time.
Ben always felt mythic to me. He was six foot four but seemed taller. He was handsome and acted handsomer. He was never alone if he could help it. He could always help it. People stuck to him like flypaper, and he, inexplicably, stuck to me, inviting me to tag along to parties and smoke sessions and night walks with friends who were confused by my presence—that of a girl three years younger, freckle-faced and contagiously anxious. Ben did not seem to notice, bragging, loudly, that I was his “mini-me,” telling the older boys I could hang. He insisted that we thought alike and acted identically. I aped him until it was true.
The long delay in spreading his ashes was logistical as well as emotional. Grief is many things, one of which is inconvenient. Ben died when I was 17 and he was 20. For a couple of years, his remains played a morbid game of musical chairs between the basements and attics of relatives. When, finally, they settled into my mother’s reluctant possession, I was already 3,000 miles away at college, returning only for extended school breaks during which I was deliberately hard to pin down. My mother was eager to get the ashes out of her closet. I was eager to keep them there: contained and out of view. I did not have time to tend to expired grief. The loss had overstayed its sympathy but not its ability to shred my intestines to ribbons if provoked.
It was provoked often, especially in San Francisco. I never stayed in the city long. I missed it constantly.
The West—San Francisco specifically— is often described as a place to run away to. It’s imagined as a land without history, rootless and fluid and free from the kinds of legacies that throttle so much of the rest of the country, the rest of the world. It’s the red horizon at the end of an old Western and the sparkle of gold in a dark, aluminum pan.
The 1960s cemented San Francisco’s reputation as an asylum for the restless and flighty. Hordes of teenagers fled their neat, square homes, coaxed out and into the city by the cries of Janis Joplin and Jim Jones. It’s hard to imagine those flower children growing up. Many of them didn’t. Some of them did and they are old now, returned to their neat, square homes where they went on to raise children or write books that lured others to a party that had already ended. Others are still alive and in the same place. In high school, we paid them to buy us fifths of Royal Gate and strawberry Swishers. One woman with arms like spruce roots and small teeth told us that she remembered it all, that she cried for 18 hours in the rain, that she knew the names of people sacrificed—sacrificed in this church basement right here, still standing, still bringing in worshippers who had no idea—that all of the bands sounded the same and that she missed them and that she had seen bodies hanging limp over the cypress branches of Golden Gate Park. I don’t know if there were ever bodies in those trees, but I know that she saw them. I could see their outlines rippling in her pupils.
From a safe distance, I loved telling stories about San Francisco to people who
didn’t know it. With words, I animated a place I didn’t always myself remember. Like every beloved city, San Francisco has been dying as long as it’s been alive. Compared to most other beloved cities, however, San Francisco hasn’t been living all that long. It’s easy to mythologize the young—perhaps because the less time a person or a place has existed, the less evidence they have accumulated to contradict the stories we’d like to tell. San Francisco has only been San Francisco, in name and reputation, for a few generations. The loss of each version of the city feels profound; there have been so few. Always, the young are mourned diligently.
•
On New Year’s Day, a few years before the pandemic hit, my mother caught my 19-year-old elbow as I returned home in the morning, my legs scored red from sleeping in fishnets, glitter matted into my hairline. She told me, brightly, that she had an idea. Grab the plastic scoop from the oatmeal bin and meet me in the car.
The date was auspicious. I was home. I was never home. It would only take an afternoon, and I wouldn’t need to change— what I had on was fine.
That morning, I slipped out of my responsibility with excuses I had used before and would use again. I was not ready. It was a holiday; there would be crowds everywhere. And, as always, I needed more warning. I needed more privacy. I needed more time.
Four years later, I was ejected from my East Coast liberal arts school with nowhere to go but home and nothing to do but wear a mask, keep my distance, and wait. Seated
on a SFO–bound plane, I realized that privacy and time would likely never be more abundant, and as we took off, it occurred to me what would be waiting when I landed. I watched New England’s winter melt beneath the wings—tidy, black-and-white networks of little farms and roads made increasingly illegible by distance—and knew I was screwed. I sanitized my hands. I missed my brother.
•
I found out that Ben was in the hospital over Facebook. I was attending a high school arts program a couple of hours outside the city. He was a sophomore at Tulane. I woke up to a message from one of Ben’s friends who had been trying to contact my parents, through me, at three in the morning.
By the time I was awake, it was nine and my uncle was already speeding down I-80 to retrieve me. My parents were both in the air.
•
My mother picked me up at the airport on the Ides of March, 2020—Lysol on the dashboard, two clementines and a can of seltzer rolling in the passenger seat. As we braided our way around Teslas and Priuses on tottering streets, I watched San Francisco appear in the windshield as it never did in my memory: a city of Walgreens, parking meters, rain gutters. When I imagine my city from a distance, I conjure a space that is not walkable. The San Francisco in my mind is constructed not of continuous pavement but of isolated images. Some of these are sourced from
memory yet oversaturated and harshly filtered—appearing more like stills from a film than from my own past. Other images are film stills, or sketched secondhand from the anecdotes of relatives, or from the lyrics of songs. All appear equally gorgeous and equally flat, as though trapped under the same museum glass.
Driving with my mother over the impossibly sloped pavement, I felt ashamed for turning my city into a collection: highly stylized, overloved, and artfully posed. The ducks hanging by their necks in the window of Wing Lee Bakery do not glisten like caramel—they glisten like ducks.
In March 2020, the city before my eyes stopped being “San Francisco” and started being home: a fragile, tender, inarticulate thing. A nesting of griefs, too big and too small to name. •
I began grieving Ben before I knew he was dead—which is to say, I started fracturing my brother into a collection of pieces even when he still inhabited a whole body. Cows and vineyards blurred beyond car windows while my uncle and I drove to SFO. I flipped through photos on my iPhone. When I arrived in the ICU and pulled back the curtain, I was shocked by the boy in the bed. Not by the tubes or the gauze but by (despite these) how much he looked like Ben, my brother, and how little he looked like the composite boy I’d been building in my brain from my most cinematic memories and glossy Christmas-card shots. Before me was a human being: complete, imperfect, and intimately known. Knowing surgery couldn’t save him, my mother had refused to let the doctors shave Ben’s head.
His lip protruded stupidly, the way it never did when he posed for photos but always did when he was deep in concentration or sleep.
I knew I would need to remember him like this—close-up, alive—but didn’t know yet that I wouldn’t be able to. One of grief’s many brutalities is that it can force even the sanest and most literal among us to become desperate mythologists of our own lost pasts. “A child dies twice,” my mother often tells me, “once when he breathes his last breath and again when his name is spoken for the last time.” My mother tells me she got the quote from one of the many “death and dying” books that, for years, have piled atop her desk, around her bedroom, in the space beneath the bathroom sink. The internet tells me she got it from Banksy and that she got it wrong: you die twice, not your child. But I like my mother’s version better: it has higher stakes. It’s only the living who care when the dead are forgotten. It’s our responsibility to keep that second death at bay, to extend our loved one’s memory beyond the places and people they encountered in life. It requires brilliant stories to fill the mouths of strangers with the names of our beloved dead. It requires embellishments, omissions, lies.
•
My belongings had been carefully boxed in my absence, moved out of my room and into the garage. My mother apologized frantically for this as she helped me heave my duffel bag up the front stairs in March 2020—she had not known, she kept repeating, that I would be back.
Deep in piles of outgrown jean jackets and souvenir piggy banks, I found a
Williams Sonoma peppermint-bark tin full of condolence cards, all unopened. It was my first day of lockdown and I sat on the floor in pajamas in the late morning, reading them all, back-to-back. My mother made poached eggs. I refilled my shelves and hangers.
•
We never considered burying Ben. I say “we”; I shouldn’t. My parents signed all the papers, made all the decisions, and—when they divorced less than a year after his death—divided the ashes evenly between them. When my father returned to his home state of Maine, I assume he brought his half with him, though I am not sure. We speak frequently and openly, but the question is hard to ask.
I do know that we—my mother and I—were wary of putting too much of him in any one place. We discussed it, after she first received the impossibly small box; though we liked the idea of dumping all his remains in the planter of one of his favorite restaurants, we didn’t like the idea of a physical location that we would need to navigate around the way we do the hard and immutable dates of his birth, the beginning of his death, and, two days later, the end: March 27, November 8, November 9, November 10. We didn’t want a gravesite.
•
Two weeks into lockdown, I began going on long walks, aimless but determinedly fast. Powering through the Presidio one afternoon, I came up against a wall of hard, white stone. Its blankness is obsessively and furiously maintained, a mosaic
of alternately sun-bleached patches of the same shade of institutional paint. Underneath are layers of nicknames, confessions, insults, initials, and declarations of love. One of these layers, as I then recalled with a contraction of shame, is my own.
In advance of the 2016 Super Bowl and in response to quality-of-life complaints, the mayor at the time, Ed Lee, installed a municipal “fix-it director” to oversee a team of 40 city employees. The idea was simple: disgruntled residents could take smartphone photos of human feces and etchings of “die yuppie scum,” and fix-it team members would arrive in a matter of hours to do what their titles promised. The data collected from these reports helped the city turn disparate and anonymous tags into civil cases, and civil cases into examples. In February 2016, the city of San Francisco billed Cozy Terry $217,831.64 in damages, penalties, and legal fees for branding the city over two dozen times with variations on her first name. Later that same month, I left my first and only intentional mark on the city: my brother’s full, legal name and death date, four feet tall and in the untrainable child’s scrawl he and I shared.
I didn’t know that I was writing it until I was done, and I didn’t know I was embarrassed until I saw the regret in the eyes of the skater boy who had handed me the can. The memory of that night still pulls at my intestines with a peculiar, hope-tinged shame—shame at the unruly baldness of my grief, hope that what it left behind had witnesses. I hope that strangers saw those letters and internalized their anonymous shapes, their contours and heft; that, like me, they carried those letters for a while even if they didn’t know the extent of their weight. A crueler part of me hopes that
someone saw them and, recognizing my brother’s name and handwriting, the neatness of their world trembled for even an instant before the team came along to fix it.
San Francisco’s land itself seems to reject the formation of roots. Millennium Tower, the tallest residential building in the city, is currently leaning 14 inches northwest due to what I’ve seen formally referred to as the “sinking and tilting problem.” On news programs, owners of the multimillion-dollar apartments place marbles in the middle of their hardwood floors and watch with closed mouths as they roll steadily into the wall. Apparently, the issue lies with the foundation: the building’s 58 floors balance atop a soup of young bay mud and packed sand from the Colma Formation. In other words, it isn’t anchored to bedrock.
Millennium Partners (and most every San Franciscan with any sort of grievance to voice) says Salesforce is to blame for the problem. The latter’s own tower, unveiled in 2018, sits just 300 feet away from the Millennium and dwarfs the rest of the skyline. When measured floor-to-ceiling, Salesforce Tower is the tallest building west of the Mississippi. Its enormity, so the argument goes, compromised the integrity of the very land upon which it rests, sinking and tilting the earth itself and threatening to topple everything around it. I want to believe this. Still, I know that, if the skyline was really secure, one building, even one exceptionally, unnecessarily big building, couldn’t have threatened all the rest. I know that the foundation was shot from the start.
Perhaps the best way to stake a claim
on San Francisco is not with a stake at all. The land seems too shallow and fluid to build—or bury—anything you want to last. Perhaps we endure in this landscape not through rooting into the earth but through accumulating over its surface. Spreading ourselves thin.
•
It wasn’t until I left home that I learned to introduce my brother and his death in the same breath.
San Francisco is a small city; what roots do manage to grow here inevitably tangle. Everyone I knew in San Francisco had known Ben—or at least had known of Ben, understood he’d been a person before he became a tragedy. When I left the city my brother and I once shared, I learned that death inevitably obscures the details of faces and hands, or else makes them gigantic and far too beautiful. I wanted to bring him down to size, stories that would tally toward the humanity of Ben rather than towards the enormity of a funny, promising 20-year-old’s loss. Over time, I realized that I didn’t have any of these stories left to tell. The clean shells of narrative I had picked over so many times—for my eulogy, for his obituaries, and for those meandering conversations when I, suddenly terrified and intensely awake, found myself falling in love with someone who never met and so could never love Ben—began to feel eerily vacant.
In the face of his death, I scrambled to collect all of the pieces of my brother that I could carry. Those I ended up with I loved recklessly. I held them too closely, recounted them too often. Time and repetition have done to these moments what
the bay does to glass: worried down their sharp edges and left them lovely and impotent. Several years out, the shards are too smooth to puzzle back together; they cannot convincingly reconstruct, much less hold together, their source. My brother is gigantic and beautiful to me too, and I hate this gigantic and beautiful boy for taking the place of my favorite person.
•
Sometimes, I am terrified that the only story I can tell about Ben that is actually about Ben is this one: Ben leaned too far over the railing of his sophomore dorm building, landed on his head, and eventually died.
•
Over time, my walks got longer. One stretched 14 miles, twice the length of the city in any direction. I went mostly in circles. I passed the neon-lit shops where Ben and I exchanged the profits of our baby teeth for Usagi Yojimbo comics and Big League Chew. I passed the bus stop enclosures where we warmed our fog-bitten faces over Styrofoam boxes of dim sum and streaked excess finger grease onto the folding plastic seats. I passed places where I remembered nothing except secondhand stories gifted by friends, family. Occasionally, I passed places that, thanks to some rare tide, washed back fresh, yet-uncollected memories of Ben, their edges unworn and sharp enough to cut. On those walks, the entire city was a gravesite. I’m still grateful. Eventually, my mother joined me in my wandering. Walking with her, the borders of the city felt tighter. My mother had
CHARLEY BURLOCK
lived in San Francisco all her life. From an early age, her life was marked by death; her own mother died when she was 17 and then her son and sister too—a sister who was also her best friend. This small city is crowded with my mother’s ghosts. I get claustrophobic walking by her side, along streets where she used to live with people who are no longer alive. I tell her to leave, start fresh. She tells me to come home.
Walking, my mother insisted on smelling every flower. I insisted that they were full of germs. She did not laugh but squeezed my hand and then smelled them anyway. Where grief has made me shrewd and ambitious, it has made my mother earnest and bold. She spends hours collecting heart-shaped rocks at the beach with a raw enthusiasm that makes me terrified for her. In moments like these, she seems too soft, too ardent for the world. Then I remember that it’s the world’s roughness that made her this way—scored yet strong, like the wood of a blackened dock after years of salt and wind and pummeling waves.
Walking, my mother and I made our way through the Presidio to the bench that bears Ben’s name and an inscription: “I thoroughly enjoy keeping it real.” My mother told me that she came there often, that once she found a key card from a Las Vegas casino. Once, she found a joint. Then, as now, heart-shaped rocks crowded around the plaque. Most, but not all, of them come from her own collection. Often, she sees little kids playing with the offerings and park rangers filling black plastic bags. She doesn’t mind. She always has more to leave behind.
•
That spring, certain views in certain lights made my mother stop. She’d close her eyes, hold her breath before carrying on. I found myself doing the same. That spring, together, we hit bedrock.
•
We spread the ashes on his birthday. Though we were locked down in the same home, a room apart at any given time, my mother texted me to suggest the idea. March 27, Ben’s 26th birthday might be a good day to consider scattering …
I composed a tentative list of places we wanted to hit on what I was referring to as “Ben’s Birthday Apocalypse Ash Spreading Tour.” My mother found the title only slightly funny. It began at Mount Sutro, which is not a mountain but a forested exaggeration. Mount Sutro is a hill, a 900-foot blue-green blister of eucalyptus, named for the man who, at one point, owned 10 percent of the city and enough imported seeds to transform the landscape irrevocably.
Before we set out, my mother made her own box to hold the temporary urn provided by the crematorium: a shoebox, plastered with carefully collaged photos. Ben at 11, with spiked green hair. Ben at 15, boxers puffed over the lip of his skinny jeans, a fake diamond glinting in his left ear. Ben as a toddler. In each, he was smiling. He was also pixelated. The pictures had been spat out of my mother’s mobile printer that morning while I slept. Looking at the box, I imagined the scene: my mother’s face lit by her computer screen as she dragged each image to a Word document, the sun rising as she trimmed their edges and carefully applied the glue. The box sat on my
lap as we cut across the city. On the lid, my mother had pasted a photo of Ben and me on the last day the two of us spent together. In it, we’re posing in front of the sign for my new art program—although posing is a funny word. It’s clear that my mother wanted the picture and we didn’t. We both look startled and goofy, captured in midstep and carrying sweating iced coffees.
Ben and I didn’t look much alike. It’s strange to say but impossible to ignore: he was always plainly more beautiful than I was. But we insisted on our total equality— no secrets, no distance between us. When we inevitably spoke in unison or discovered yet another bizarre, private tic we shared, we would throw our heads back, flash our hands in and out of fists, and cry, “We’re the same person!” in a communal gurgle that fell somewhere between Kermit the Frog and Gollum. I cannot remember now where this ritual began, but I remember repeating it often.
Only after he died did I learn that Ben knew about my parents’ impending divorce and hadn’t told me. He wanted to protect me, believed he could fix it. I was more hurt by this omission than by the divorce itself. He’d been three years older than me for the entirety of my life, but where his life stopped, mine kept going. I was 23 when I sat in my mother’s passenger seat, my brother in my lap, smiling and 20, our age difference perfectly eclipsed. For the first time, he looked to me how I must have always looked to him: young.
As we neared the peak, I began to understand why Sutro was called a mountain. The city grew miniature and illegible as we drove up its winding road. I could obscure both Salesforce and Millennium Tower with a single finger. The cypresses
of Golden Gate Park and the rain gutters of Buena Vista and the erosion barriers of Ocean Beach were all invisible from that height, but they were all there, contributing, materially but indistinguishably, to the view: anonymous shards of texture and color, pieces of a whole that, at such a distance, didn’t look like pieces at all.
We parked the car and wrestled our way, on foot, to the highest point of the highest point, a sandy mound with balding grass and a panoramic view of the city that was hard to see through the smarting wind. My mother left the shoebox in the car. We would burn it later that evening, at sunset, by the sea. We nodded guiltily at joggers in face masks enjoying the pristine day as their eyes fell on our black box and red eyes. We quietly agreed that this was the place, that we wouldn’t need the plastic scoop after all—that we were emptying it all right there. My mother pried open the box and I watched as its contents puffed into the wind and carried like snow over the winterless city.
Copyright: © the
Lida Abdul Dome (2005) video
artist and hopefulmonster editore
From Lida Abdul, hopefulmonster editore, Turin, 2007.
Lida Abdul Clapping with stones, (2005) 16mm film transferred to video
Copyright: © the artist and hopefulmonster editore
From Lida Abdul, hopefulmonster editore, Turin, 2007.
MONTAUK
Connie Voisine
On a small screen, while I folded clothes, a couple was having sex in the morning and then at night when she was asleep and then more and more, in a school or a changing stall.
I always fold at night, the smaller clothes wrinkled from the line, some inside out and all by now cool from the darkness. A marriage was ending and how his wife figured out
after 25 years was the part I was watching. Why did she not know sooner? I remember that pain, telling a man to stay away from my daily places.
I hated in him what I lacked in myself. During the show, the point of view changes from husband to his lover, more sex, we all want sex like that, and then drugs, the sea, the grief that drives lovers into it. The lies were crazy-making, and the lover, she had lost a child, an awfulness no one can truly imagine, that biggest love lost, or at least the purest.
Once, in our park, a young father told me his child’s mother had vanished, drugs, and that sweet Desiree, at 6, was already trouble. Most of the time, he texted in the gazebo
as she roamed the play structure and threw sticks at birds. In a grand gesture, my daughter gave her scooter to Desiree, for a sadness she could sense but couldn’t bear. A police detective’s voice-over steered us, godlike, questioning the two lovers, where, when. It was all important but why? what crime? and the officer lied
to each during what seemed to be an interrogation.
I got sadder, folding. The knees of my daughter’s pants were full of holes. They lasted hardly at all. In the show there were horses and a boy let the new one named something silly, let her loose to see what would happen, loose in Montauk as summer ended. Does it matter that he was the husband’s son? A screwup who faked his suicide by hanging which was an act too cruel for him to understand yet.
Is any of this important? The girls next door to us lost their intermittent father to cancer; grief counseling is on Mondays, though it’s the grandmother who takes them. I don’t ever match the socks (why bother?) and the towels were stiff from winds that whipped the neighborhood all day. The detective spoke from the future,
I see it now, from when the worst had already happened, something so bad there is a law against it. Once we know the worst, which I still do not, all we remember glows with significance.
THE GOOD LIFE
by Brady Brickner-Wood
I encountered the flyer by chance, saw it pinned on a bulletin board and decided to call. Cleaner needed. Experience required. There was a phone number and no name. A woman answered the phone and I could tell right away she was pretty, her voice sweet and warm. I couldn’t stop from smiling as she talked. Her name was Louisa Baxter and she asked me if I’d ever cleaned houses before. I lied and said of course. She asked how old I was and I said 16, which was true. She made a comment about how 16-year-old boys had better things to do than clean houses. “Yeah,” I said. “I’m sure you’re right.”
The Baxters lived out in Kershaw, about an hour bike ride from where I lived in Larkin. The ride was long and hilly, made up of badly paved roads bordered with live oaks. Motorcyclists and old men in pickups occasionally passed me, waving with two fingers as they did. When the road sped out from beneath the trees and opened into plots of yellowed grass, a mailbox marked a thin dirt road, which led to the Baxters’ house. A half mile up the driveway was a coded gate. I had to click a call button and wait to get buzzed in.
Each time I arrived at the front door, shirtless and slick with sweat, Mrs. Baxter was waiting for me. She had hay-colored hair and a long slender face that always seemed to be smiling. She wore silk tank tops and denim shorts, flip-flops that smacked her heels when she walked. Her nails were painted the same color as her tops—peach, mint, lavender—although sometimes they were painted black. That summer, Mr. Baxter was always away at work and the kids were off at an overnight camp in the Hill Country. For two months, it was just her and me.
As I scrubbed the floors and dusted the windowsills, Louisa would sit on a stool at the kitchen island, drinking lemon water and paging through a magazine. Sometimes our eyes met and she’d smile. There was so much to clean and I didn’t have a clue what I was doing. The house was high-ceilinged and wood-paneled, with large round windows overlooking the backyard. The living room was walled with bookshelves, two flat-screen TVs, three leather couches, and wood cabinets with liquor bottles and lamps meticulously arranged on them. Above the couch was a large portrait of George H. W. Bush.
After a few hours of cleaning, Louisa would ask if I wanted a break. She’d pour me a can of beer, rip open a bag of chips, and talk about her life. She spoke about the prospect of sending her kids to prep school in New Hampshire, where they would learn Latin and French and trigonometry. Her son had the makings of an opera singer, she said, and there was no good opera in East Texas. She herself was a talented singer, she claimed. Before she met her husband, she almost moved to New York City to record an album at a famous recording studio with a record producer whose name I didn’t recognize.
When it was my turn to talk, I lied. The truth was a dark, dangerous thing, and I didn’t like thinking about it, not even when I was alone. What was there to even say?
My mom does drugs and has sex with random men. I can’t read so well, and probably won’t pass the 11th grade. I don’t think I’ve ever had a friend, at least a real one. I love fighting; the pain sort of feels good, you know? If I drink too much sometimes I think about hanging myself. I’m not afraid of dying. Did I say I don’t know my dad?
Back then, though, a not insignificant part of me believed that this truth didn’t have to be so. Couldn’t I create a life of my own? What would that look like, actually believing in something beyond the facts of my sorry situation? With Louisa, I pretended to be a person worthy of attention, and this meant lying. I considered myself a good liar, able to easily manipulate my voice and facial expressions. I lied about my family, my grades, my athletic abilities, my popularity. When Louisa first asked about my parents, I drew my dad out of thin air.
“A real cool cruiser, that motherfucker,” I said. “Rings on every finger. Always wore
a white T-shirt and blue jeans, cigarette sticking from his mouth. But he was nothing special. Would drink until he puked. Brought me to bars and I’d watch him fight with men twice his size.”
In truth, I didn’t remember much of my father. I hazily recall our two-room duplex in Reno with the tiny television and the black ashtrays spread like spiders around the windowsills. My father shirtless at the table, smoking and holding a mug of coffee, his buzzed head streaked blond under the overhead light. Even now, I wonder who he is, where he is, what he wanted from life. Marty Flats, his name. I wonder if we are alike. I wonder what tethers us together beyond blood.
I became so comfortable lying to Louisa that, midway through the summer, I invented a new lie: that I wanted to star in a big Hollywood movie, like Steven Seagal in Hard to Kill or Bruce Willis in Die Hard. The thought simply entered my mind and I spoke it. But after the words left my mouth, I grew embarrassed. Louisa would know I wasn’t cut out to be an actor. My lies had limitations. I flashed a deprecating grin, looked into my lap, and said, “No way that’ll happen, though.”
Louisa feigned outrage, lifting her hands over her head and shaping her mouth into an O “If you really want to become an actor, Robby, go for it,” she said, “I mean, my god, look at you. I see a touch of Marlon Brando in those eyes.”
I didn’t know who Marlon Brando was, but I imagined he couldn’t be very attractive if he looked like me. Maybe Louisa wouldn’t have been so supportive if she knew I’d never acted before. But her enthusiasm for my lie made me want to believe her. And so in that moment, on the stool,
chewing chips with Louisa’s hand on my knee, I decided I would move to Los Angeles to become a Hollywood star. It was an inspired thought, and it instantly filled me with hope—yes, I would go to Hollywood. I’d rot in Texas, probably keel over before I turned 18. But California? I could be someone there, where no one knew me, where I could lie as freely as I wanted. I envisioned L.A. as a golden city by the ocean, filled with beautiful people in search of a single, soul-consuming thing: the Good Life. What the Good Life entailed, exactly, was unclear to me, but it seemed like the Baxters were living their own version of it, as were the men in the movies—their shirts unbuttoned, their facial hair full, beautiful women begging for their attention. No one disrespected them. The world molded to their every desire. And acting, I thought, seemed like a fairly arbitrary skill. Do enough pushups and smile wide and you were golden. Besides: I could lie. And what really was the difference between lying and acting?
I hoped that by summer’s end I’d have enough money saved to move to Los Angeles. Three-hundred was the number I had in mind, enough for bus fare and a few nights at a hotel. I kept my money hidden in my bedroom. I checked on it every night before bed. I was paranoid that a dopehead would break in and ransack my room, so I changed the hiding spots often, made it so no one could find it on a first try. I figured I’d have enough money to leave when I was ready, and maybe Louisa would help me too, give me extra cash and put me in touch with important people. She seemed like someone I could count on.
Here’s a memory of my mother from that summer.
She’s home late from work, say 1:00 a.m., wearing all black, her musky brown hair tied back with a rubber band. I’m sitting on my bed, reading a magazine Louisa gave me, People or Time. Or maybe I’m holding a mirror, fixing my face to look like the men in the magazines: fierce eyes, cocked brows, puckered lips. Through my barely open bedroom door, I watch my mother slump onto the futon and put her face in her hands. When she looks up, I see her sunken cheeks, the hollow holes of her eyes. Then she starts crying. First quietly then loudly, like she’s swallowing mouthfuls of water.
“Robby,” she calls. “Robby.”
So I get up and sit next to her and put an arm around her without asking what’s wrong. I don’t even look at her. She leans into me and we sit like this for a long time. The window over the TV is the size of a large envelope and shows a sliver of violet sky. The light from the sky gives the trailer a warm, velvety feeling. Finally, after her crying’s quieted, she reaches into her purse and hands me a cigarette. We pass it back and forth, in silence.
Of course, this is no single memory. It’s one big memory where my mother’s always wearing black and she’s crying and I have an arm around her pretending not to feel anything. Sometimes the memory changes. Sometimes she apologizes for who she is, for fucking me up. She says, “All your problems, your outbreaks—I’m to blame, I know it.”
Sometimes we fall asleep on the couch, our heads leaning against each other’s, waking only after sunrise. Some nights we rent a VHS from the movie store in
town and laugh at Tommy Boy, grip the cushions during Die Hard, impersonate Schwarzenegger in The Terminator. On these nights, my mom picks up cheeseburgers and we unwrap them and lodge fries beneath the bun. Sometimes we watch the credits all the way through and wait until the tape cuts and the screen becomes static.
My mother grew up in St. Louis, as did my father. He was a talented halfback in high school, fast as any white boy in Missouri. My mother was apparently a gifted writer who could have gotten a scholarship to Saint Louis University, but she and my father moved to Nevada before finishing school. In Reno, my father worked as a carpenter, my mother as a waitress. She was 19 when she had me. My father beat her with his belt when she was pregnant. Once, my mother stuck a loaded pistol in his mouth while he slept. She told me these things when she was strung out. Even after I left the room, she kept talking as if I was still there.
My mother and I left Reno when I was six. We drove southeast to Texas and stopped in Laredo, where she found work as a receptionist at a Super 8. For a while, she was happy. On the phone, I heard her tell a friend about wanting to study journalism so she could report stories about Cuba and space travel. When she got home from working late nights at the hotel, she sat at the kitchen table and wrote deep into the morning. I have no idea what she wrote about, but I doubt it was about Cuba or space travel. In the afternoons before work, she did jumping jacks and squats. Not to attract a husband, she said, but to better herself.
My expulsion from the sixth grade came a few days after my mother was fired
from the hotel. That same weekend we drove south to San Benito, where one of my mother’s friends owned a beauty salon. A year and a half later, after I got expelled from the eighth grade, my mother and I loaded several boxes of shampoo into the back of her Ford Taurus and took off for somewhere new.
Larkin is a forgettable town in deep East Texas. I probably couldn’t point it out on a map. It’s north of Lindale, I think. We moved into a trailer park pressed up against a set of train tracks, where graffiti-covered freight cars clunked by day and night. The park had a few full families, moms and dads with a mess of little kids. But mostly junkies populated the park, sitting on upside-down paint bins and shooting up right out in the open.
At school, the unspoken consensus among my classmates, even the other trailer park kids, was that I was a particular kind of fuckup. On the first day of school, I entered the cluster of lockers and watched a sea of people part around me, their small whispers worse than anything they could have said to my face. I went a whole year without talking to most anyone. My only friend was Larry Sanders, a quiet kid from the park who’d show up at my door and gesture me outside with the flick of his head. He had soft blue eyes and always carried with him a mason jar full of his father’s moonshine. He called me Flats, my surname at the time. Usually we’d walk around town and split the liquor, not talking.
I fell into fighting. Not because I was tough or good at fighting—I was thin and frail and fearful, a withdrawn and scattered kid—but because it made me feel something I’d never before felt. I’d walk up to a boy five inches taller than me and
call him a bitch, watch his pupils dilate as I became the sole object of his attention. Fuckin’ pussy, I’d say, flinging my arms into his chest. I once broke three ribs and lost six teeth, got two shiners that didn’t heal for months. The worst was when I couldn’t hear out of my left ear for two weeks. Still, I craved the sweat, the locked eyes, the circle of people watching, the potential for something big to happen. The football players must have felt this way on Friday nights when the whole school came to watch them play. But I didn’t have football, didn’t have anything to call my own. I spent all my time wandering around Larkin smoking cigarettes, nursing bruises, hoping for something in my life to change. Because it was unbearable to be around my mother. She was sober or she wasn’t. I didn’t think about why she was so different from night to night. I chalked it up to her “moods,” ignoring the crushed beer cans all over the trailer and later the syringes in the trash. She no longer wrote. She didn’t talk to old friends on the phone. She hadn’t done squats in a very long time.
But I didn’t blame her then and I don’t blame her now. None of this is about her. She was desperate and wanted not to be desperate. Not that it was right. But that look in her eyes, that farawayness in her face—I knew she was possessed by something outside of herself, something neither of us had any words for.
•
I didn’t know I would be leaving the night I did. Maybe I could have avoided the disaster if I had prepared a proper goodbye like a scene in a movie: a boy boarding a bus, his mother looking on. And maybe by loading
these memories one by one like bullets in a chamber, I’m trying to make them into something different, give them a meaning they don’t have.
It was a late night in early August, a week before school started. I was with Larry, gathering rocks. Beneath moonlight, we built slingshots with V-shaped branches and rubber bands. Larry kept snapping his branches and stuttering out curses. I wasn’t drinking much, but Larry was. I was on my second pack of smokes and making my fourth failed slingshot when he began puking. The cicadas in the field drowned out his heaves. I shined a flashlight on him and saw that he had vomited onto his jeans.
After walking the perimeter of the field, sucking on a cigarette, I came back and found Larry passed out in a watery puddle of his own vomit, his lower lip pouting out, bubbling spit. I nudged him with my foot, told him to get up. I closed my eyes and was surprised to find myself wishing that Larry was dead. Eventually I grabbed his wrists and dragged him through the tall grass back to the trailers. When we reached the park, I left him lying face down at the foot of his trailer. He grunted as I lowered his head to the ground. It was then I noticed three crumpled dollar bills protruding from his front pocket. I bent down and took the money, figuring it was the least he owed me.
The door of our trailer was locked. Lights were on inside. Through the small kitchen window, I saw my mother’s shadow skirting behind the blinds, heard her ruffling through drawers. I knocked on the door with the back of my fist, but she didn’t let me in. I called for her to open up, shaking the handle, but the door wouldn’t budge. Finally, the lock clacked open and
my mother’s small voice squeaked through.
“Robert?”
“Yeah, it’s me,” I said impatiently. I pushed my way in despite my mother’s hands pressing against the door.
A fat naked man was unconscious on the floor. The right side of his face was bruised. His clothes were in a pile by the door. I stared at his small, limp penis, which was no bigger than a baby carrot.
“What the fuck?” I finally said, looking up from the man at my mother. She was shaking. Her skin was pale and pricked with goose bumps. She brought her hands to her forehead and then lowered them.
“He’s dead, I think,” she said.
I looked at her for a long time.
“He’s dead,” she repeated.
“What happened?” I asked.
She said when she asked him to leave he wouldn’t. He threatened to hurt her. It was all blurry, she said, but after he put his hands on her, she hit him over the head with a cast-iron. He staggered to the floor and dropped after she hit him twice more.
I asked if she’d felt for a pulse. She shrugged her shoulders.
I walked over to the man and knelt over his body. He smelled like sardines, his skin slimy with sweat. I refused to look at his face for fear I’d recognize him from town. I brought two fingers to his neck and felt a slow pulse pumping. I could even hear a pinch of hoarse breathing.
“He’s alive,” I said.
“Probably should bury him somewhere way out. Kershaw or Delmore.”
“You didn’t kill anyone,” I said, registering how high she was.
“I’m sure I can find a shovel somewhere around here.”
I didn’t want to call the police. I didn’t want to put my mother to bed or visit her in jail. I didn’t want to listen to her crying. I didn’t want to wake up in the morning, in the trailer, stuck in myself, stuck with her. Staring at the limp, lifeless shell of my mother, a cold, urgent clarity came over me: if I didn’t leave Larkin soon, I’d die before I had the chance to. She would keep dragging me down with her, drag me so low that we’d have to move to another small, pathetic Texas town, enroll in another school with kids who hated me, where I’d fight and drink and slowly get broken down until I had no drive or desire for anything left.
“See, if we don’t move quick,” my mother said, pacing the kitchen, “sunlight will come and then it’s no good.”
I walked to my room and slammed shut the door, jamming a chair under the handle. I wasn’t ready to leave, but when would I be? It would always end like this: messy, broken, without cause or care. The truth then felt definitive. There was and would be nothing for me here, yet there was something for me out there, in Hollywood, a place I could finally begin my real life. Without thinking of what to do or where to go, I stuffed T-shirts, jeans, a sweater, an empty canteen, a notebook, a few magazines, and several loose cigarettes into a backpack. My mother was knocking on the door, calling my name.
I went to gather my money from the hiding spots. I felt for the crack behind the bed, but my fingers only grazed carpet. I scrambled up and walked to the closet, where I reached for the money above the ridge. Nothing. I went to the dresser and retrieved a white sock from the bottom left drawer. Inside were seven one-dollar bills.
What should have been over 400 dollars had disappeared.
The clock beside my bed read 3:04 a.m. I watched the numbers blink until the time turned 3:05. Then I swung my bag over my shoulder and flung open the door. My mother stood several steps away, itching her cheek.
“Don’t have much time, Robby,” she said as I walked past her. “Only have enough gas for 30 miles.”
I grabbed the handle of the front door with trembling fingers. A high-pitched sound slashed through my ears.
“How could you?” I said, my voice breaking slightly, the way it always does before I cry.
She pulled at the roots of her hair and began making noises, somewhere between panting and crying. I opened the door. She lunged at me, but I shook her away and went outside. She stood in the doorframe, light from the kitchen kicking out against her.
She said, “Where are you going? Please don’t, Robby. Please?”
This may have been the first time I ever saw my mother as someone other than my mother. Linette, shrouded in kitchen light, everything she ever wanted, dead. Of course I loved her. I still do. But staring at her then, all I managed to mutter was, “Take care of yourself.”
I grabbed my bike and walked it past the trailers and onto the road. I thought I heard a long drawn-out Robby, but maybe not. Maybe it was just the sound of my own hammering heart. •
Lida Abdul
War games (what I saw) (2006) 16mm film transferred to video
Copyright: © the artist and hopefulmonster editore
From Lida Abdul, hopefulmonster editore, Turin, 2007.
I took my time biking to the Baxters. In the Larkin town square, storefronts were barricaded shut and the streets were empty. It was not yet four in the morning. I was tired and hungry, but I would have to wait to replenish myself. I needed to say goodbye to Louisa, but mostly I needed some cash.
Drenched in sweat, I arrived at the Baxters’ before sunrise. I couldn’t call on her this early, so I sat on the edge of their driveway, waiting for the sun to crest over the trees. When it did, I left my bike in the brush beside the road and walked to the entrance gate, where I buzzed a black box. No one answered so I buzzed again.
Finally, a voice I presumed to be Mr. Baxter’s sounded through. “What is it?”
“It’s Robert. The cleaner.”
“No cleaning today.”
“I need to come in.”
There was a pause. A minute passed, then Louisa came over the speaker.
“Robby?”
“I need to come up.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Please.”
The gate opened and I started toward the house. When I got within view, I saw two kids playing outside in the front yard, a girl and a boy. They were chasing each other with plastic swords. They stopped running to watch me walk to the door. I watched them too.
After knocking, Louisa hurriedly opened the door. Her hair was frizzy, her face free of makeup.
“Robby,” she said, “this is unexpected.”
When I entered the kitchen, I saw a man leaning against the marble countertop, drinking from a mug of coffee. He must have been more than six feet tall and 250 pounds. He wore a crisp white T-shirt
tucked into boot-cut jeans, fastened tight with a large silver belt buckle. Most notable, though, were his tall leather boots and big cowboy hat, both stiff and shiny and looking as if they’d never before been worn outside.
“So you’re the cleaner boy?” he asked.
I nodded.
He looked at Louisa for confirmation. “He’s been cleaning my house all summer?”
She said yes.
“Lou,” he said. “This here is a park boy.”
Of course I must’ve looked like shit. Odorous and filthy, sleep-deprived and deranged. I cleared my throat and tried my hand at sounding smart. “I’m surely sorry to bother y’all,” I said. “I thought I was scheduled for today.”
Louisa said, “But you never clean on Sundays.”
“Well, hold on,” Mr. Baxter interrupted, setting down his mug. “I could use the kid for something. Wait right here.”
He departed down the hall. I didn’t hesitate. I grabbed Louisa’s hand and led her to the dining room. When we turned the corner and reached the table, I said in a breathless mush, “Listen, that L.A. thing? The acting? It’s happening. I’m leaving. Today. But I—”
I paused. She wasn’t looking at me. Her eyes were glued to the floor.
I said, “I need money, Louisa. Three hundred dollars.”
“Three hundred dollars?” she said, looking up at me. “What about the money I’ve been paying you all summer?”
“It’s a long story, but it was stolen and I need to leave today. It can’t wait.”
Louisa eyed me up and down. “Looking like that? Where are your bags? What bus even runs from here to L.A.? You think you can buy a plane ticket?”
“I just need the money,” I said. “I’ll figure the rest out. I promise.”
“There’s nothing to promise,” she said, exasperated, almost laughing. “You’re 16. What, you’re going to drop out of high school?”
Mr. Baxter entered the room brandishing a handgun. “Louisa, let me borrow the boy for a moment.” He beckoned me forward with the gun.
“The answer is no, Robby,” she said sternly. Our eyes met, and I tried to convey something desperate in my stare. But she shook her head and looked past me. I realized then that the relationship I thought we had was a lie. I was just the cleaning boy, someone to play make-believe with. Louisa turned abruptly away and left the dining room. I listened to her flip-flops clap against the hardwood as she walked out the front door.
Mr. Baxter’s gruff voice interrupted my thoughts. “Roland, is it? Come on.” He motioned me to the side door and out into the yard.
The sky was a blue field above the trees. We walked through the backyard and onto the dirt-trodden ground. There, in the middle of all that brown, stood a wolf in a metal cage, surrounded by bushels of short grass. It wasn’t a grown wolf, but something small, a runt or a youth. It was growling and tucking its tail, baring its teeth, watching us approach with its yellow eyes.
“Bought this bitch from a friend,” Mr. Baxter said, fingering a pouch of snuff into his lower lip and halting 20 or so feet from the cage. “Kids were askin’ for it. Thought we could domesticate it. But no use. Tried to kill us last night as we were fixin’ to let it out. Called my buddy this morning askin’ for my money back but he’s no good for it.”
The wolf anxiously paced back and forth, as if she knew we were talking about her.
“I’ll need help carrying it to my truck,” Mr. Baxter said. “For the help I’ll let you shoot it.”
He handed me the gun. It felt like a cinder block or a human head in my palm. I had never shot a real gun before, only Larry’s BB gun, which he and I occasionally fired into puddles beside the train tracks.
“You park boys know how to use these things, don’t you?”
I nodded and walked toward the wolf. As I got closer, she bucked against the metal bars, nearly moving the whole cage.
I’m not gonna hurt you, I telepathically told her.
Her grayish fur was tinted red in the morning sun. She was beautiful, I thought. Gorgeous.
“I recommend you get close enough to hit it between the eyes.”
I wasn’t having fully formed thoughts. I felt drunk, dizzy. Think, I told myself, think I had zero dollars to my name. If I returned to the trailer, I’d be an accomplice to my mother’s crime, or, if she somehow managed to get the man out of the house, I’d have to reconcile with her, offer her help. More likely, though, I’d step back into that trailer and continue on as normal, commence another year of school, drink moonshine with Larry on weeknights, get in fights just to feel something. I knew I’d die if I returned to Larkin. I didn’t know how, but I knew I would. Think, I told myself again, think. I didn’t believe in God, still don’t, but holding that gun in my hands felt like some sort of a gift from somewhere far beyond. You only had so many opportunities, I thought, to take control of your life. I
closed my eyes, as if in prayer. I no longer needed to think. I’d made up my mind.
I wheeled around and pointed the gun at Mr. Baxter. I heard myself say in a voice I did not recognize, “You have five minutes. I want cash and jewelry.”
He cocked his head and wrinkled his brow, as if he hadn’t heard right. “Oh yeah?” he said. “Or what?”
“Or I’ll kill you.”
“You put down my fuckin’ gun right now.”
The fact that he wasn’t scared of me scared me. Was this a real gun? What did he know that I didn’t? I considered handing it back to him and taking off into the woods. But then that dizzying feeling returned and I widened my eyes and tightened my grip.
“Cash. Two thousand,” I said, trying to channel Steven Seagal’s toughness. In a way, it worked. If I wanted to kill Mr. Baxter, I could have. Hell, if I wanted to kill myself, I could have. I could’ve blown the house to smithereens, shooting wildly into the windows, making a mess of the world around me. Was I lying, saying I’d kill him? Or was this the truth? Where did the truth, after all, begin and end?
I stepped forward. “I’m counting to 10, motherfucker.”
“You even know how to use that thing?”
“Don’t fuck with me!” I yelled. I held the gun high. Suddenly, the gravity of the situation seemed to hit him. Fear flickered across his eyes. Maybe he could sense the desperation and panic in my voice. Either way, he turned back to the house and I followed behind, pointing the gun at his back. Inside, through two large windows overlooking the front yard, I saw Louisa playing with the kids in an inflatable swimming pool.
“You’re a damn fool,” Mr. Baxter said, leading me down a hallway and into a room I had not cleaned before. He walked to a closet and fumbled with a shoebox. From behind, I watched for a gun or a weapon, but instead he pulled down a thick wad of cash wrapped in a wide blue rubber band. “Fifteen hundred bucks,” he said.
“Put it in my pocket.”
He looked at me disappointingly, like how I imagine a father might look at his son. He divided the stack of bills into two wads and stuffed them in my front pockets. As he did so, the muzzle of the gun touched his gut. The money felt cool against my thighs. I backed away with the gun held high.
“You gonna call the cops?” I asked.
“What’s it matter to you?”
“Don’t call the cops,” I said. “Don’t even think of it.”
He grinned. “Cops is the least of your worries, boy.”
Alone in the hallway, a wave of fear rushed over me. Out of sight, I imagined Mr. Baxter grabbing a gun of his own and coming after me or picking up the phone and dialing the police. I fled the hallway and out the front door.
Louisa and the children were playing in the kiddie pool. Her hair was wet, and she pushed it from her eyes as she noticed me standing in the doorway. She quickly put a hand over her mouth and gasped. I stood there shaking, holding a gun, bills peeling from my pocket.
“What are you—Robby? What’s going on?”
The kids were quiet and still, like little figurines; I wonder if they were too young to be afraid or just old enough to know. Louisa was speaking but I could no longer
hear her. I heard sirens in the distance—or was I imagining this? I stared hard at an open-mouthed Louisa, her lips pink and full, her pupils dilated. In memory, Louisa and I calmly gaze at each other, longing to speak our familiar lies. Aren’t you proud of me? I want to ask.
But then the memory zags and Louisa vanishes, forever. I sprinted down the driveway, craning my neck to see if anyone was behind me. I threw the gun as far as I could into the woods, then got on my bike and tore down the road. After biking for what felt like hours, blisters burning on my heels, I pulled over and crept into the trees. I crouched behind a pine and cried. I felt for the wads of money in my pockets and withdrew one of the bills. I had never before held a hundred-dollar bill. I stared at its blurry green body, hearing red-tinted wolf cries blare in the distance.
My acting career has not panned out. The several casting calls I’ve been to have gone poorly. I don’t know how to do what they ask me. In this way I’ve learned that lying doesn’t make you a good actor. You have to know how to do other things, like cock your eyebrows or cry on command or break someone’s heart with a smile. Things I never learned, and probably never will.
I spend most days doing odd jobs around the motel—cleaning the pool, painting over wall stains, fixing broken locks. When the workday is done, I sit in my first-floor room, which I get at a reduced rate, and smoke joints of Mexican brick weed. In the summer, I sometimes take the bus to Dodger Stadium and loiter in the parking lot, smoking, listening to the crowd cheer and the announcer recite statistics. I watch families in their royal blue T-shirts and ball caps walk into the stadium, arms around each other. I don’t resent them. I just watch.
It’s been a little over 10 years since I left Larkin. When I fall asleep at night, I still sometimes see the wolf bucking at its cage, desperate to get out. Sometimes in these dreams I shoot the wolf; sometimes I pistol-whip Mr. Baxter or strike a bullet through his head. I guess it doesn’t really matter what I dream. I did what I did and it’s over.
I work maintenance at a motel in Pasadena. This morning I did 75 push-ups without stopping and did so many sit-ups that my back bled. Then I snagged a bottle of tanning oil from the front desk’s lost and found, lathered myself up, and sat out on a lawn chair in the parking lot, covering my eyes with a black tube sock.
At night, back in the motel, I turn on the TV and crawl into bed. I watch whatever movie is on cable. I smoke a joint. I sort through memories like I had the ability to change them, like if I intervened now, I could alter the outcomes. I’m happy, more or less. But sometimes I wonder why things turned out the way they did. I wonder if the Good Life was ever achievable for people like my mom and me. I wonder if it was even a possibility, something that under the right circumstances we could have inserted ourselves into. These questions can drive you crazy. Was the Good Life just a mirage in the desert, a fleck of sun fading from the sky, something that I should never think of again? I can’t help but think it’s all still waiting for me somewhere, barely out of reach.
THE AFOREMENTIONED JOURNAL
by David Hollander
I’ll admit my expectations were modest. I’d already been to half a dozen of these overblown and often excruciating elementary school sing-alongs to find myself sequestered among the other parents in rickety folding chairs arranged in vaguely militaristic patterns—I seem to want to use the word “phalanx” here— atop a dusty hardwood floor that, in the especially bankrupt post-dismissal afternoon hours, served as the athletic arena for our little hamlet’s overprivileged middle school youth. Which is to say that I entered that gray Wednesday’s musical event
without any substantial emotional investment, even if I did, as the saying goes, have a horse in the race, the equine in question being my seven-year-old daughter May, whose welfare and happiness I was at that time working three jobs to promote, even if she greatly preferred the more nurturing-slash-entertaining company of my spouse to my treat-refusing stoicism—a preference that was made all the more frustrating or aggravating by its total rationality because, after all, I would have preferred my spouse’s company to my own too.
Suffice to say that on the day of the sing-along I was not exactly in a “good place.” I had been thinking of my domestic situation as basically untenable in the longterm, and had thus been running nonstop, metaphorical sprints between the two options on the tarmac of my ruin: I was determined that I would either a) have to die soon or b) become divorced, though the divorce (I suspected) would kill me anyway and, wise consumer that I was, I endeavored to cut out the middleman. Sitting there in my folding chair I must have given off an air of brooding distraction, though I was in fact only one tiny input away from all-out sobbing. It’s sort of amazing to consider this from my current vantage point … to realize that I had lived on a razor’s edge between rage and despair for many, many years, and that on the day of the sing-along I had been considering my own end for months while also endeavoring to take care of my children and to live in a way that did no damage and to show love to all of my sorry fellow human beings no matter their flaws or their repulsiveness. It is difficult to be simultaneously fixated on dying and on living forever, as any feudal kingdom’s ruler must surely have been aware. We had good
seats, by the way, my wife and I. Second row, just left of center, with a perfect view of both the empty, pre-showtime bleachers and of the blond-hued acoustic guitar on its black stand that the elementary school’s music teacher—an upstart whose name was almost certainly not Mr. Cornish Hen even if that’s what its pronunciation evoked— would soon be strumming with conviction while the second graders crooned, fidgeting in their traces. By the time the principal—a handsome, square-jawed superhero type whose Belief In The System was total and filled me with an inexplicable rage— appeared before the still-empty bleachers to make his introductory remarks re: the excitement of the children, the hard work they’d “put in,” the school’s dedication to Music Education, et cetera, et cetera, I was sweating under my thrift store polyester collar and eager to put the event in my rearview mirror so as to return to my work, which (if I recall correctly) on this particular day involved polishing up a fundraising proposal written on behalf of a filmmaking team whose passion project was an imagined documentary titled Skin Deep, which would explore the history of tattooing and skin-piercing throughout the phylogenetic development of our sad little species. I don’t know if they ever got the thing made. I do know I’d spent years puzzling over my wife’s tattoo, an inked outline of a door barely cracked open in its frame that she had always blown off as a “stupid sorority dare,” not so much with any genuine interest in its “meaning” but rather mystified by the contradiction it revealed. Everything I knew about my wife—her indecisiveness, her aversion to pain, her fear of even this ersatz “permanence”—would seem to rule out a tattoo. And yet tattooed she was, on
her shoulder, just above a small birthmark shaped like a half-moon.
I remember that Handsome Principal Square Jaw had a small, horizontal cut on his cheek, maybe from shaving or maybe he’d had some minor cancer excavated from his gleaming epidermis. As he was addressing us parents and music-lovers, the cut seemed like a second, smaller, less sanguine mouth that frowned disagreeably at the principal’s promises of a better world through the Arts. This was maybe the first real sign that this second grade sing-along contained something unwholesome in its belly, something waiting to emerge up through the gullet of auditorium protocols and into our half-slumbering midst. I watched the cut—maybe an inch long, pinkish in aspect, tapering to a deep rouge—purse itself like lips preparing to kiss, and imagined (or at least I thought I was imagining) it speaking to me in a gruff voice, saying “Prepare for the worst,” to which I chuckled inwardly, though the chuckle nearly forced its way through my tear ducts in the form of visible PAIN. Beside me sat my wife, whose beauty still stunned me every day; she was one of those women who was growing more beautiful as she aged, her experience and accumulating strength all written on her skin and rendering her basically irresistible to yours truly, which was horrible given that we were not, at this point in our personal history, touching one another (in fact, she had recently conveyed to me that my touch was basically awful, that my hands were always too hot, that the heat of those hands was to her an indication of my lust and that my lust was disgusting to her), but I nevertheless reached across the gulf dividing our folding chairs—a lacuna of yellow air filled with
the off-trickles and emanations of several hundred elementary school children—to put one lava-hot hand on her upper back and to pat her there once, twice, three times, with all the grace of an estranged uncle. My hands really were hot, I could feel it myself, and shame filled the rusty cistern of my heart.
Principal Square Jaw relinquished the stage to Mr. Cornish Hen, who thanked us all perfunctorily and then ordered the second graders to emerge from backstage and take their positions on the four-tiered aluminum bleachers from which they would regale us all with song. The song about a sunny day. The song about the spider. Applause, applause, applause for the entering children, my heart turning in my throat as they strutted into the proverbial spotlight, dressed—by and large, according to requests made of us parentals in something called “the daily email”—in black pants and brightly colored shirts, though one child—not my own little girl, May, whom you might have, understandably, assumed would claim ownership of this little story, but in fact another child altogether—was wearing all white and had fastened to her back a pair of plastic pixie wings that shook in decent pantomime of living tissue with each step the little girl took en route to her assigned spot. I found myself suddenly transported by this visual appurtenance to my own elementary school, circa 1978, and the second grade classroom of Mrs. Burnside, whose black hair had a single white stripe dyed skunk-like down its center and whose cat-eye spectacles might have seemed (it occurred to me much later) seductive or at least coquettish in the world outside our urine-yellow classroom, assuming that she actually existed beyond
DAVID HOLLANDER
its cinder block perimeter, but in any event there had been a small statuette on Mrs. Burnside’s desk of a pixie or faerie garbed in silver and white and posed with wings spread and one leg bent at the knee with the other thrown back as if the little sprite had been frozen in mid-takeoff via some dark magic endemic to her faerie environs, this pose being more memorable than, say, the facial expression of the statuette or the dimensions of its wingspan or the exact pigmentation of its flesh. In fact I found myself attempting to superimpose the statuette, which I had not consciously thought of in decades, upon the entering figure of the second grade girl in white garb and faerie wings, actually trying to will the real and present girl to strike the relevant pose, so overwhelming was the cognitive dissonance of this incomplete déjà vu. The idea consumed me. In fact I must have made some sort of pain-noise—a groan or a sigh or something—because my wife at that very moment turned to me with a half-smile whose meaning was clear: Please refrain from exposing all those present to the embarrassing and iconoclastic tableau that is YOU. And then, with a slight shiver of her shoulders, she furthermore indicated that my burning hand was still basically Velcroed to her back and could I please remove it immediately so as to avoid further gestures, glances, and other silent communications conveying her disgust. Before embarking for the sing-along, I had asked her, “Would you like to do something this weekend? Get a babysitter?” To which she had responded, “Do what?” Which might, in some other context, have been a celebration of choice but here only served to emphasize (I thought) the fact that there was no conceivable activity that would be
enjoyable as a couple and that the moment I miraculously did conceive of such an activity I might go ahead and telephone her agent.
Mr. Cornish Hen strapped the blond guitar to his chest as if attachment-parenting. The auditorium collectively held its breath. I inwardly begged the faerie-girl: Strike the pose. Principal Square Jaw cleared his throat. Cornish Hen counted quietly, nodding: One, two, three, four … Would you believe me if I told you that the moment Mr. Cornish Hen struck that first A-major chord on his sprucetop instrument, the auditorium began to vibrate? It seemed as if the 440 Hz was not ringing from the guitar, but rather was being sucked into it from the scarred and dim-lit gymnasium, as if Mr. Cornish Hen had plied some ancient musical arcana to reveal, however briefly, the ordinarily invisible musical substructure of space-time. I saw the air vibrate, the hardwood undulate, the bleachers bend, the little humans opening their mouths to erupt into song shivering like ribbons of silk in a breeze. I gasped and quickly regretted it, because my wife placed her hand on my knee and squeezed, which in some alternative idiom might have been an indication of affection but, in the context of our decaying marriage (or so I thought at the time) was one of the most severe rebukes in her arsenal. In any event, the vibration seemed to fade and subside along with the chord and I attributed my momentary delusion to my aforementioned lack of sleep and to the extreme anxiety and sorrow that rode on my back like a manta ray. I shook my head rapidly, as if to “clear the cobwebs,” and my glance again fixated upon the white-clad faerie-winged child who, just before Mr.
Cornish Hen brought his pick hand down again to strike the strings above the sound hole of his bargain-basement acoustic guitar, smiled in a way I can only describe as knowing before striking the pose—yes, the precise pose!—of the figurine that had once held dominion over the teacher’s desk at the front of Mrs. Burnside’s 1978 second grade classroom, always ready for takeoff.
The A chord rang out again. This time, the vibration ripped the air in two. It was the light itself that was vibrating, I realized, and into this now-shattered light and air— the visible world coming apart before my eyes as easily as political ideology—the little faerie-girl herself took to the air. I would later learn that the fugue state I had apparently entered is consistent with certain kinds of brain embolisms, and that in fact I had only been unconscious for 30 seconds before—in a miracle of physiological serendipity—the brain-clot broke to pieces via the forceful thrust of arterial blood. I could hear the chord ringing out through the universe and summoning my own past, present, and future into the auditorium. I glanced toward Principal Square Jaw, whose smile was belied by great beads of sweat that coagulated at his temples before rolling ball bearing–like down the bronze flesh encasing his boxy skull. Several seconds later—in my experienced time, that is—that puckering gash on his face began to flap upward like a flag in strong winds, and out from this flap poured demons. Yes, demons. I don’t know what else you could call them. I cannot remember what sounds my body was making, or what pantomime I was performing, but I could again feel my spouse’s hand squeezing, this time at my bicep, which I knew was the final status-declaration in her personal
DEFCON system, after which it was onto Mutually Assured Destruction. Demons poured from the dark interior of Principal Square Jaw, emerging first as a viscous red liquid and then taking form upon the sneaker-scuffed hardwood. Raw and simian and covered in plates and scales, they grew to the size of second grade children, seeming, even, to take on the various features and compunctions of those second grade students we were gathered on this day to witness in the holy communion of song, as if to represent some mirror-world concert of the damned. Principal Square Jaw was screaming, dissolving beneath the liquid river that originated somewhere within his face.
My wife smiled. The demons came for me. In an instant I was in their arms (if that’s the right noun—they were protoplasmic, tallow-like) and we were warping through a tunnel of milky dimness, fractal patterns of light etched into its skin like tattoos or cave paintings, and up ahead of us the faerie-winged girl soared, our figurehead cutting through space-time to deliver us to whatever damnation I alone had apparently earned. The A chord’s vibration was still with us, humming and crackling, jagged strings of lightning attending to its minor wobbles and fluctuations as if to keep the frequency true. The demons held me up by my arms and shoulders. Even in my disorientation I could see that the one nearest me—despite having no mouth and sheer, liquid black eyes—bore an uncanny resemblance to my father, whose crimes against my mother I still did not forgive though the old man had been dead for nearly a decade. So many crimes, so many grudges, so much pain. Was Mr. Cornish Hen still playing the guitar? Were the
DAVID HOLLANDER
children still singing? Was my wife still squeezing my bicep, in the only reality I had ever known prior to this sudden breach of space-time decorum?
The tunnel suddenly pivoted downward to enter a steep vertical descent, and then I was in free fall, an experience I remembered from my postcollegiate days, which I don’t mean merely metaphorically—for I, like most young people, had once thought of the Life Project as a sort of collecting reservoir for experiences, and in an effort to fill that cistern I had engaged in any number of foolhardy and ultimately empty pursuits that included skydiving, bungee jumping, scuba, hot-air ballooning, and hang gliding (among other feats of descent), which I realize only now were united by my own apparent desire to take flight, an observation that hearkens back to my childhood among wolves and my efforts to fly from those who would destroy me, a cast of characters including the aforementioned violent father, an abusive older brother, a drunken high school physical education teacher who had once cornered me, half naked, in the school’s dusty green locker room beneath the cold death-glow of fluorescent tubes.
But again I seem to have digressed further than I intended. Again I have nearly made this about me, when in fact the entire journey, at first in the arms of Principal Square Jaw’s face-demons and ultimately here to my current vantage point (from which all is substantially clearer, if a bit harder to wrangle into English words) has been a beeline from a default egocentrism to a compassion and love of which I had never, not even alone at night kneeling beside my only daughter’s bedside with the pinkish glow of her butterfly night-light
painting her flesh seraphic, thought myself capable. The fact is, the tunnel turned and emptied me downward, I flailed through space screaming, and then I was deposited intact here, in the then seemingly empty classroom of Mrs. Burnside (circa 1978), upon the checkered tile floor amid the pint-sized desks and chairs, the still-remembered reading rubrics printed neatly in black marker on thick poster boards affixed to the cinder block walls painted in pastel pinks and blues.
I took a moment to simply stand in the center of the classroom, breathing in the silence, the afterglow or imprint of demonic talons still buzzing the nerves on my arms and shoulders though they had left no physical evidence, basically recovering myself before doing the inevitable thing, the heels of my boots clunking as I traversed the tiny classroom that had over all of life’s intervening years swelled to ten times its actual size in the dank basement of my imagination, moving purposefully for the teacher’s desk at front center where I knew I would find the figurine of the faerie girl who had been my compass back to this place. Mr. Cornish Hen’s A-major chord was still ringing faintly or else it was simply trapped now in the deep canals of my inner ear like a permanent sonic tattoo. I was halfway to the desk when I realized the two Wrong Things. First, the faerie frozen in mid-takeoff was not on the desk of Mrs. Burnside despite the fact that everything else was precisely as I remembered it. Second, above the faint but ubiquitous ring of 440 Hz, I could now hear another sound, a sort of squeaking that recalled for me the raccoons that occasionally scavenged our curbside trash cans, and it was coming from a door that, if memory served,
opened onto a supply closet where Mrs. Burnside stashed the primary-hued phantasmagoria of our elementary education. A framed door, cracked open to create an inky interplay between light and dark. The door, I now realized with a shiver, that was tattooed on my wife’s shoulder.
I instinctively turned to locate my wife but of course she was not there beside me, and if she had been, she would (I then thought) have been unlikely to allay the dread I felt, having already (as previously noted) performed the Bicep Squeeze Maneuver that indicated her expiring tolerance for my high crimes and misdemeanors. I looked back to the desk. No faerie. I looked up to the ceiling, as if to summon the tunnel’s return, and the consequent return of Mr. Cornish Hen and his troupe of tiny troubadours. But no, I had not yet consummated this moment. I would have to open the supply closet door. I would have to push beyond skin deep and see, for the first time in my pathetic life, something more lasting than what the world was willing to show me at first, cursory glance. I was going to have to see the truth, and the truth—should I ever completely capture it in these notes—was going to set me free.
I approached the door with the understanding that it was both an actual door in an actual classroom—into which I had somehow plummeted with foolish disregard for the limitations of space-time— and a metaphorical door to which I had been given unwanted (but, one might argue, badly needed) access. The sounds coming from whatever space the door concealed began to make sense to me, resembling as they now did the sounds that my own second grade scion, May, made in times of stress or sorrow. (Like, for instance, when
her favorite stuffed animal was lost forever, dropped from the stroller to be trodden upon by ten thousand callously perambulating Brooklynites—or when she learned that her grandma, my wife’s mother, was dying, and concomitantly that everyone dies, everyone without exception, that sobering lesson all children must absorb and be destroyed by.) The sounds behind that door were, simply put, dear reader, the sobbing of a child in need. I placed a hand on the door’s handle. It was hot. Or perhaps the heat from my hands was transferring to the steel handle. My hot, horrible hands.
The little girl I found behind the door was instantly familiar to me, even if her face was buried in her hands and thus not visible. She was not May, but there were echoes of May in the shape of her body, her posture, the curve of her spine. I thought I could hear Mr. Cornish Hen’s A chord ringing again, somewhere in the vast distances of an infinite universe, as if perhaps to summon me back (or else to provide the power necessary to keep me here). The child, the little girl, was sitting in what was indeed a supply closet, hunched over at the waist and sobbing. On her back was a pair of faerie wings, identical to those worn by the child presumably occupying the real world of the gymnasium that I had left behind to experience this unexpected contretemps, crisscrossing straps affixing the appurtenance in place. I began to reach for her, tentatively, thinking of placing my hand on her back, between her shoulder blades, right at the point that the fabric holding the wings to her torso came together and intersected—only to stop, mid-gesture, by a shock of recognition.
There was a half-moon birthmark over the right shoulder blade. I knew that
Lida Abdul Bricksellers of Kabul (2006) 16mm film transferred to video
Copyright: © the artist and hopefulmonster editore
From Lida Abdul, hopefulmonster editore, Turin, 2007.
birthmark. This crying child in the closet of Mrs. Burnside’s classroom was not my daughter. She was my wife.
Furthermore, I realized that the winged faerie-girl I had seen in the auditorium, the catalyst for this journey that I continue to endure or experience or be blessed by, was also my wife. But there were bruises on this rendition of the child—that is, of my wife, my child-wife, the child who would one day become my wife, et cetera, et cetera. This all sounds weirdly perverse, I know, but maybe all excursions into nonlinear dimensions have that quality. I was feeling a feeling that I had thought was long dead and buried within the scorched interiors of my … well, my soul, I suppose. On the child’s fragile arms and her thighs, bruises glowed purple and yellow. She seemed to notice me there for the first time, as I stood paralyzed in this doorway that is not a doorway. (You see, I am still standing here now, even as, in some other idiom, the performance of the second graders has run its course and we’ve all drifted back into our lives, changed in real but imperceptible ways by the sing-along and all of its attendant, inexhaustible variables.) Newly aware of my presence, she looked up at me and, with tears streaking down her cheeks, said simply: They hurt me. It took me a moment to stammer out the most obvious response: Who? She pointed around my body, back through the doorway (that was not a doorway, that is not a doorway) that I then/now blocked, behind me and into the classroom. When I turned, it was no longer empty. Instead a silent and motley congregation filled the chairs that seemed to slowly orbit the five round tables. There were children among them, sneering children who I could only assume had been
my wife’s childhood tormentors. But there was also a man who looked like her father (though young and fit and with a full head of dark hair), an adolescent girl with dyed black hair in a black dress, and an older couple wearing funereal clothing and smiling senescently. These people had caused her pain, I realized. My wife—the grown wife I had left in the auditorium where Mr. Cornish Hen was strumming his guitar and the tiny people were singing their trite off-key medleys—was the living receptacle of all of this pain.
The faces in the classroom began to melt and morph and run as if made of hot wax, again becoming the demons that had accompanied me on this unusual voyage. When they retrieved me to take me back to the auditorium, I split into two selves. One was snatched up in their talons and lifted into the vortex that would return me, over a chorus of their laughing, sneering malice, back to the world as it was. But the other remained there, or here I suppose, in the classroom with the little girl, with you. For you, too, dear reader, have been led by your own obsessions to this moment of shared pain, of communion in pain, though what you will do with the experience is beyond my ken.
Back in the auditorium I woke to a nearly silent crowd that had gathered around my twitching body, the so-called embolism having been shattered to pieces by a particularly forceful heartbeat, the children grown silent and Principal Square Jaw—the shaving cut still on his face but no longer an entry point to whatever netherworld had claimed me—about to begin some variety of cardiopulmonary resuscitation. And my wife, holding my hand, my hot, horrible hand, assuring
me that it was okay, that it was going to be okay.
“I love you,” I said to her. A tear filled her eye and rolled down the beautiful hill of her cheekbone.
Would you believe me if I told you that our love was real and enduring? Would you believe me if I told you that my fixation on that figurine and its highly specific pose was, in fact, an awareness of the spontaneous appearance of a window few of us are ever shown? A window into my wife’s childhood suffering, into the depths of her pain and her being? Would you believe me if I told you that I had been given that rare glimpse into another human reality, into the vast stores of meaning and feeling and experience that we hide from each other and ourselves every day?
Perhaps if you read it in writing. If you consult the journal next to us, just to your left on Mrs. Burnside’s desk, you will find a transcription of this unnecessarily prolix monologue. Take your time, we’re in no rush here. It begins: I’ll admit my expectations were modest. It ends with my wife squeezing my hand tighter, lowering her lips to my ear, and whispering, Please don’t leave us.
Lida Abdul War games (what I saw) (2006) 16mm film transferred to video
Copyright: © the artist and hopefulmonster editore
From Lida Abdul, hopefulmonster editore, Turin, 2007.
STRAINING FOR THE NOISE
Jenny Xie
Exhaustion is simple: subtract and keep subtracting.
White from eye-whites interiors from openings, sight out of yet another recursive dream reel.
West Houston slowing to fine syrup mashed with Europeans, loose English and leather billfolds.
How walking through a crowd yields no blaze, only a sense of one pronouncement moving in a path toward another.
What is there left that isn’t repetition and revision, now that meaning has no skin and the unfamiliar arrives more or less at the same temperature?
That’s how it goes. And what are you? You’re a part of speech, little sturdy assemblage of letters insisting on the syntax.
See how your head turns when you long for the dark to grow a suede head when you peel film off the names things assume during day hours?
They don’t take, lately—the faces of these things, tamed and neat.
And neither do you. Though here you are still out of focus, while the transparency of plain things begins to retreat.
AMERICAN BLONDES
Are we having more fun yet?
by Arielle Gordon
I never know how to react when someone tells me I “don’t look Jewish,” but at this point I have come to expect it, even in New York, even in 2024. I usually say “thanks” because it makes my charming conversationalist feel uncomfortable. They then say it “wasn’t meant to be a compliment,” or they simply look at me very nervously, waiting for the moment to pass. I guess maybe they expect me to respond, “Oh, my father is Irish, actually,” or “I was found in a basket on the banks of the River Nile and taken in by the pharaoh’s daughter, actually.” But my aunt Leslie took a DNA test a few years ago and it turned out she was 99.9 percent Ashkenazi Jewish. The disappointment in the air as she read the results was uneasy and thick; I think we all secretly wanted her to say that we were one-quarter Irish, actually; that we weren’t like the other families restlessly fidgeting in the pews of our shul; that we were in fact rescued from the River Nile.
I never ask, but maybe I should: what about me seems goyishe? Perhaps it is my ability to name the towns going up the crook of the shore in Barnstable County. Maybe it’s because I am of the belief that the nation-state of Israel is a settler-colonial project, or that I dated several gentiles in my early twenties (though both facts, to me, scream “Semitic” and “very cool”). I won’t entertain schnoz talk, but to clear the air, mine’s somewhere between pre-op Jennifer Grey and the American Girl doll Molly McIntire, so it’s impossible to tell if that’s the culprit. Instead, I think strangers often assume I believe Jesus Christ was the son of God because I am blonde.
So I am in fact Jewish, but something I have really come to appreciate about the Christian faith is the concept of hairshirts. They’re kind of a shade of blonde (somewhere between “sandy stone” and “butterscotch”), but mostly the hair is meant to be unseen, worn under clothing so that the fibers can scratch your skin all day and remind you of all the bad things you have done. I learned about them while writing, for this magazine, about the 15th-century Christian mystic Margery Kempe. She wore hairshirts and wept pretty much constantly; in the few paintings that do show her hair, she appears to be sporting a lovely shade of “honey” blonde—get me her colorist! Repentance was already on my mind because I had sinned during the period of עשרה ימי תשובה, the 10 days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur when you are supposed to throw bread that represents your evildoing in the water so that the ducks can eat it. I couldn’t wear a hairshirt, though, because it would mess with my whole no-bra look. I searched for contemporary analogues. I decided to
watch all of the movies of the film actress Tara Reid.
Tara Reid is not Jewish; she is of Irish, Scottish, Italian, French, Hungarian, and English descent, actually. She’s from Bergen County, the part of New Jersey where Meadow Soprano grew up. She is my height, and she is a Scorpio. She briefly dated the frontman of an Israeli psytrance band called Infected Mushroom. But mostly, Tara Reid is blonde. As a child, Reid acted in commercials for Jell-O and the Australian telecommunications company Dodo Services, so it’s easy to tell that she is an actual factual, dyed-in-the-womb blonde. It’s also easy to tell she is a natural blonde because in most of her movies, she acts very dumb. In Josie and the Pussycats (2001), there is a moment where we hear the internal monologue of the titular pussies in a moment of crisis. Here is Reid’s: “If you’re happy and you know it, clap your hands” (in the fan fiction I’ve written where I’ve inserted Margery Kempe into the Pussycats, Kempe looks up, looks at her hands, and continues weeping). I watched The Big Lebowski (1998), where Reid plays Bunny, an adult film actress living off of the titular Lebowski’s largesse. She is painting her toes when we first see her, and she asks the Dude to blow on them, because she “can’t blow that far.” A few minutes later, she offers to suck his cock for a thousand dollars. Somehow this feels like a step up. In Van Wilder (2002), Reid’s character is actually supposed to be very smart, but I really can’t recommend that movie to anyone.
I was hoping, through Reid, to find a reflection of my own experience. To me, blondeness has always felt like both a special power and a strange curse, a fountain of
youth and beauty from which I once happily drank in greedy gulps, but which now runs drier each year. In pictures from my early childhood, I sit shrouded by a mess of golden threads wrangled into a butterfly clip or a hair elastic, beaming with my Chiclet teeth, eyes huge and searching and slightly glazed over with an undiagnosed astigmatism. In later photos, from around kindergarten, I am posed uncomfortably in my chair, mouth pursed tight like a scar, tiny metal eyeglasses akimbo, eyes searching desperately now, begging for a future where the pain I was already experiencing as a six-year-old reject would amount to something. I can’t look at many pictures from the years beyond that. I see the girls at school telling me to keep our after-school playdates a secret; I see myself screaming bloody murder, tripping up the stairs to my bedroom to avoid open palms on bare asses. Somehow the blondeness protected me from the brunettes—my school bullies, my terrifying mother. Somehow it lent a moral certainty to the whole situation, a Cinderella narrative that fortified my brittle sense of self. Surely, someone whose hair reflected the sunlight like that wasn’t meant for this stupid, provincial bullshit. Surely, it would all sum to something immense. Surely, there was a holiness in me manifesting through the expression of recessive traits atop my oversized head. Have you seen Sharknado (2013)? The premise is pretty interesting: a tornado (actually, in the movie, it’s really a hurricane and then a tornado) full of living sharks terrorizes Santa Monica. The best way to kill these sharks is to shoot them with a high-powered gun. In all six films in the franchise, Reid plays April, the nagging ex-wife of bar owner and local surf
legend Fin (Ian Ziering). When we first meet her, she is so stupid that she insists that she and their daughter live “100 miles” away from the ocean even though they live in Beverly Hills. When the sharks take to the city sewers, Fin comes to rescue her and brings his flirtatious barkeep, Nova (Cassie Scerbo), who is beautiful and has perfect aim. We are meant to understand that she is April’s foil, practical and loyal and 10 years her junior. And brunette.
Gentlemen prefer brunettes, actually. When I was at Jewish summer camp in 2005, I read a copy of Seventeen that said men responded in a survey that they wanted to sleep with blondes but wake up next to brown-haired women because they were “more sensible.” I wanted to cut my hair off after that, but the only girl who would talk to me at camp told me I’d look like a lesbian if I did, which was even worse than looking like a bimbo. I read Betty and Veronica and let out a big sigh of relief. Blonde Betty was a sweet and generous angel, while brunette Veronica was a privileged bitch! I didn’t fully understand why these two queens couldn’t get along, but I knew it had something to do with hair color.
Do you have a special talent? Mine was being blonde. When I walked into hair salons as a little girl, I’d always hear the same thing: “My clients would pay top dollar for natural highlights like yours!” The neighborhood ice cream truck guy, a really sweet old man of Slavic origins, always greeted me the same way when I ran up to his window to purchase a Choco Taco: “Hello, Blondie!”
Twenty years later, I’m doing my other special talent, hogging the spotlight at karaoke singing “Fuck the Pain Away,”
originally made famous by a fellow blonde, the Canadian electroclash artist Peaches. Everyone looks pleased as punch as I wow everyone with my animated Sprechgesang: “Calling me all the time like Blondie / Check out my Chrissie behind.” What else is in the teaches of Peaches? Reinvention, perhaps—from Merrill Nisker to Peaches, from brunette schoolteacher to blonde bombshell. Perhaps she knew that in crossing the bleach-lined Rubicon to blondeness, she’d be cast aside as a floozy, a sidepiece— might as well embrace it, babe.
Sydney Sweeney cried when she went blonde. She wasn’t getting roles as a natural brunette, but her hair couldn’t handle the heat, and it immediately recoiled to half its length when the hairdresser removed all the layers of tinfoil. In a recent interview in The Strategist where she recommended items such as Kit Kat ice cream cones and an antioxidant drink with her face on it, Sweeney said she was no longer dying her hair, that she was “on a hair-health journey.” But who is Sweeney when she’s not blonde? Is she a bombshell? Is she a ditz? Is she an all-American girl? As if to preempt an inevitable slip from prominence, she wore a black wig to the Met Gala this year, and she did, indeed, look “unrecognizable.” Maybe sensing the negative reaction, her current shade is a well-blended blonde, her roots fighting a losing battle against her agents. For now, at least, she’s the everygirl—not so blonde as to enter into the “edgy” territory occupied by Debbie Harry or Amyl and the Sniffers’ Amy Taylor or Peaches, not so brunette as to fade completely from view.`
This isn’t why we broke up, but my ex-boyfriend was the first person to break the news to me that I was not blonde,
actually. “I don’t know—like a light brunette?” I was horrified. I hadn’t been struck by such an existential threat since I learned that my family descended from poor, petty peasants, and not some grand lineage of German intellectuals as I’d originally thought. Instead, I was common: hair like dirt, built for the shtetl, destined for an average life. To be blonde is to be American. To be blonde is to be a woman. To be blonde is to be loved. I got my friend’s colorist. I made an appointment the very next day. Bleach, tinfoil, bleach, tinfoil. The hairdresser took off my wraps. I looked at the sunshine reflecting off my strands and I thought about my Slavic ice cream man. Blondie. I cried.
Lida Abdul (Kabul, 1973) is a video and performance artist. She received BA degrees in both political science and philosophy before completing an MFA at the University of California, Berkeley in 2000. She was awarded the Prince Claus Award in 2006. Her work has been exhibited widely, including at the 2005 Venice Biennale, Kunsthalle Vienna, the Museum of Modern Art Arnhem, MoMA New York, Frac Lorraine in Metz, the Fondation Louis Vuitton, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. She has also participated in festivals in Mexico, Spain, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Afghanistan. In 2006 and 2007, she participated in the Singapore, Gwangju, São Paulo, Gothenburg, Sharjah, and Moscow biennials.
Claressinka Anderson was raised in London, England, where she was born to Czech and American parents. Her poems and essays have appeared in Best New Poets, Boulevard, Pleiades, and elsewhere. Winner of the Michelle Boisseau Poetry Prize, she is the librettist for the opera Sentinel.
Venita Blackburn is the award-winning author of the story collections Black Jesus and Other Superheroes (2017) and How to Wrestle a Girl (2021), as well as the debut novel, Dead in Long Beach, California (2024). She is an associate professor of creative writing at California State University, Fresno.
Brady Brickner-Wood is from New Hampshire. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, The Fader, The New Yorker, Texas Monthly, Alternative Press, and elsewhere.
Charley Burlock is a writer in Brooklyn, New York, and the books editor at Oprah Daily. She holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from New York University, where she also taught undergraduate creative writing. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Atlantic, Electric Literature, Hyperallergic, AGNI, and elsewhere. She grew up in San Francisco.
Grace Byron is a writer from Indianapolis based in Queens, New York. Her writing has appeared in The Baffler, The Believer, The Cut, Joyland, and Pitchfork, among other outlets.
Charlie Clewis is a writer and photographer from Virginia. He served four years as an officer in the US Army. He now lives in the UK and is a master’s candidate at Oxford University.
Jenny Fran Davis is the author of Dykette (2023). She lives in Brooklyn, and is at work on a new novel about love and betrayal.
Enzo Escober is a writer and critic from the Philippines. His work has been published in Guernica, Slate, The Drift, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among others. He also co-hosts Diva Discourse, a podcast about Beyoncé. He lives in Brooklyn.
emet ezell is a poet and typographer living in Berlin. Their work spans themes of devotion, dispossession, ruin, and return.They are the author of the chapbook Between Every Bird, Our Bones (Newfound, 2022), and the guidebook to Liberation Tarot (PM Press, 2023). ezell is a recipient of the 2021 Gloria E. Anzaldúa Poetry Prize and a 2024 Literature Stipend from the Berlin Senate.
Arielle Gordon is a writer based in Brooklyn. Her work has been featured in Pitchfork, The Ringer, The New York Times, and Stereogum, among other publications.
David Hollander is the author of the novels Anthropica (a finalist for the Big Other Prize for Fiction, 2020) and L.I.E. (2000). His work has appeared in McSweeney’s, Conjunctions, Fence, AGNI, The New York Times Magazine, and The Rumpus, among other reputable and disreputable publications. He lives in New York’s Hudson Valley and teaches writing at Sarah Lawrence College.
Douglas Manuel was born in Anderson, Indiana, and now resides in Long Beach, California. He received a BA in creative writing from Arizona State University, an MFA in poetry from Butler University, and a PhD in English literature and creative writing from the University of Southern California. He is the author of two collections of poetry, Testify (2017) and Trouble Funk (2023). His poems and essays can be found in numerous literary journals, magazines, and websites, most recently Zyzzyva, Pleiades, and the New Orleans Review. He has traveled to Egypt and Eritrea with the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program to teach poetry. A recipient of the Dana Gioia Poetry Award and a fellowship from the Borchard Foundation Center on Literary Arts, he is an assistant professor of English at Whittier College and teaches at Spalding University’s low-res MFA program.
Evan McGarvey’s work has appeared in GQ, Slate, The New Republic, Vice, and Pitchfork. He is the co-author of 2pac vs. Biggie: An Illustrated History of Rap’s Greatest Battle (Voyageur, 2013). He lives in New Jersey.
Brontez Purnell is a writer, musician, dancer, filmmaker, and performance artist. He is the author of a graphic novel, a novella, a children’s book, the novel Since I Laid My Burden Down (2017), and 100 Boyfriends (2021), a collection of stories. The recipient of a 2018 Whiting Award in fiction, he was named one of the 32 Black Male Writers of Our Time by T: The New York Times Style Magazine in 2018. Purnell is also the front man for the band the Younger Lovers, a co-founder of the experimental dance group the Brontez Purnell Dance Company, the creator of the renowned cult zine Fag School, and the director of several short films, music videos, and the documentary Unstoppable Feat: The Dances of Ed Mock (2018). Born in Triana, Alabama, he has lived in Oakland, California, for more than two decades.
Christina Wood is a fiction writer with short stories in The Paris Review, Granta, McSweeney’s, Virginia Quarterly Review, and other journals. She is a PhD candidate in English and creative writing at the University of Georgia and a graduate editor for The Georgia Review.
Connie Voisine is the author most recently of The Bower (University of Chicago Press, 2019), begun during a Fulbright Fellowship to Northern Ireland. Her writing appears in Poetry, The New Yorker, and other magazines. She is a professor in the Creative Media Institute at New Mexico State University and also teaches in Warren Wilson’s MFA program. She lives in New Mexico and Chicago and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2021.
Jenny Xie is the author of Eye Level (2018) and The Rupture Tense (2022), finalists for the National Book Award for Poetry. She teaches at Bard College and lives in New York City.
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How Wales Conquered the ‘90s Charts
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Abandon All Hope
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Essays, Moments and Refl ections
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Poems From the Soul
Twelve of the Great Hymns of Wales
Illustrated by Ruth Jên Evans
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“There is both clarity and subtlety in Lopate’s insights . . . My Affair with Art House Cinema is a dynamic book, encouraging the reader to seek out unseen cinematic ‘truffles’ and to revisit and reappraise familiar territory.”
—Times Literary Supplement
“A deeply researched account of not only the remarkable life of an early Hollywood screenwriter and organizer, but of Hollywood itself before and after unionization, a story of particular interest today amid the film industry’s current upheavals over technological change and declining working conditions.”
—Jacobin
“Holy.”
—Sonia Sanchez, poet and author
“[This book] is the beautifully written, inspiring, compelling, and transformative account of the living journey of a spiritually evolved human being. He (like I) has faced demons and realizes that in this existence there is no place for the burdens of fear or anger; only forgiveness and hope can sustain humanity. His iconic music testifies to that sentiment. Hannibal, thank you for it.”
—Dr. Kim Phúc Phan Thị, UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador for Peace and “the girl in the picture”
“What a magnificent and original novel, introducing the reader to a dreamlike world where the nature of India plays a major role.”
Maryse Condé, author of Segu and I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS
“Short, breathless, tinged with humor, The Talnikov Family is a horror show, a litany of cruelty, anger, and violence . . . An eye-popping historical curiosity plumbing the depths of domestic dysfunction.”
—Kirkus Reviews