20080108
UV index
Once you realize the hills of Malibu are ascending to a point you can never reach, the only thing to do is start following their slope downward to some other point equally unreachable but vastly more interesting because vastly more unimaginable to our culture as it now exists.
20080107
MEMORABLE lacuna
could always, owing to the accident of her sex, start squeezing out young’ns. Her 35 year-old architect husband, Phil, would love nothing more, in fact. When they married at St. Bridget’s in Alexandria, he was 32 and between between 87 and 92% positive he’d never want yard apes. Now, three years later, his wife conveniently unemployed, often literally barefoot and in the kitchen, he heard his biological clock ticking. Hence the pug he’d bought her. And hence the robot – the Baka 3000. Clearly he was trying to rouse whatever maternal impulses lay dormant in her. But the wall-eyed pug sulked and cried all day till Phil came home. And the bucket-sized Baka – a Neiman-Marcus frivolity whose price tag Sharona trembled to contemplate – laid it on a little thick. In thunderstorms it scurried into the master bedroom, making the pug howl, squealing “Mommy!” with its synthesized voice. She and Phil would lie there with it between them on the mattress, all three of them staring at the ceiling, the Baka actually shaking in terror at each flash and boom. And Sharona would wonder if Phil had had it specially programmed to speak that creepy word.
20080106
SARTORIAL bolus
This friend of mine, for instance. She and her fiance go grudgingly to this party in Manhattan, the theme of which is everyone has to dress and act like some celebrity. For an hour or so it's utter tedium, as you can imagine. But then something happens. The cocktails start working; the shimmering cityscape outside the eccentric hostess's windows bestows its blessing. Suddenly everyone's into it. They're becoming these celebs. They couldn't stop if they tried. Their drab workaday selves are dissolving, falling away like unfashionable clothing. Mel Gibson is twitching nervously, denouncing the evils of birth control. Sean Connery is sipping champagne, explaining in his Scottish brogue why it's sometimes okay to slap a woman. Shari Lewis lurches by, silver wig, head-to-toe sequins, conversing animatedly with the sock on her hand. Though generally curmudgeonly, my friend and her fiancee are swept up in it, too. She, thin and beautiful, is a famously underfed actress. He, spiky-haired and Harley jacketed, is a dead punk legend.
But here's where things get interesting. The evening ends, the party winds down, but my friend and her beau find they can't bring themselves to knock off the act. The prospect of returning to our drear Pennsylvania rust-belt town is suddenly more reality than they can bear. Instead they find themselves down on Delancey Street, slipping around in a wet snow, hailing a cab to take them to Laguardia. Next thing they know they're on a plane to Reno, behaving badly, she blowing kisses at stewardesses, he spilling drinks and cursing filthily in a bad Cockney accent. A scant two weeks later they're in a motel room in the Mojave, staring at each other in a cracked bathroom mirror, crusts of cocaine around their nostrils, every credit card maxed out. There's a loaded Glock underwater in the sink. They're trying hard to remember each other's names.
But here's where things get interesting. The evening ends, the party winds down, but my friend and her beau find they can't bring themselves to knock off the act. The prospect of returning to our drear Pennsylvania rust-belt town is suddenly more reality than they can bear. Instead they find themselves down on Delancey Street, slipping around in a wet snow, hailing a cab to take them to Laguardia. Next thing they know they're on a plane to Reno, behaving badly, she blowing kisses at stewardesses, he spilling drinks and cursing filthily in a bad Cockney accent. A scant two weeks later they're in a motel room in the Mojave, staring at each other in a cracked bathroom mirror, crusts of cocaine around their nostrils, every credit card maxed out. There's a loaded Glock underwater in the sink. They're trying hard to remember each other's names.
DON'T forget
18. Trent and Xavier, at a show at the Trocadero in Philadelphia, standing at the edge of the stage, taunting and flipping off the guys in the local band that opened for us that night. And the bottomlessly crushed looks on those guys’ faces.
20080105
ON the three
3. An indignant L.A. Times reporter rising unsteadily at the end of a strained and drunken restaurant interview, telling Xavier, our frontman, who kept mimicking her, that she didn’t give a shit what NME said: He wasn’t fit to suck Mick Jagger’s dick.
4. Glimpsing the five of us, scrawny and hirsute, in torn jeans and thousand-dollar jackets, conscientiously vapid expressions on our faces, cigarettes dangling from the corners of our mouths, on the cover of a British music magazine on a Heathrow newsstand. And being achingly, crushingly jealous of myself.
5. The look of horror on my graying parents’ faces when I informed them, in the sun-filled great room of their Long Island McMansion, that the White Devils had signed a three-album deal with a record label so huge they’d actually heard of it. And that I’d be quitting Hunter in the spring to start touring.
6. A blonde Ms. Porter’s type, eighteen at most, spreading her legs in the back of a limo to show the Devils (and her two friends) that she really wasn’t wearing underwear. And that she didn’t color her hair.
7. Sitting in the stark white dressing room of a Fifth-Avenue Gucci store, passing around a bottle of warm Tanqueray with Xavier, a hot CBS intern named Mirielle, and a busboy from some Burmese restaurant we’d just been to uptown. This last comprehending not a word of English.
8. Kissing Trent, the Devils’ other guitarist, over a lit-from-below tabletop in a Soho nightclub called Increase, a half-dozen cameras flashing around us.
9. My first ever $500 haircut, which began, and essentially ended, with my bangs being lifted and chopped unceremoniously an inch from my forehead.
10. Receiving in the mail, with no explanatory note of any kind, a photograph of myself propped up unconscious on a nightclub sofa, a penis dangling inscrutably next to my right ear.
11. Vince, at the Devils’ first-ever Manhattan gig (the Wild Boar, East Village) vomiting up pure triple sec all over his snare drum. Randy ripping, bloody fisted, an untunable string from his Fender bass. Trent tumbling backwards over a stage monitor, breaking a tuner off his Gibson. Me bouncing frenetically in Chuck Taylors, wrist pistoning, smoke from the cigarette in my mouth making my eyes clench involuntarily shut. Xavier clutching fistfuls of his own hair as he sang at the edge of the stage, staring psychotically, pleadingly into the crowd’s eyes.
12. Jerry, one of our three roadies, a Dartmouth dropout, informing us backstage at our only CBGB show that he'd seen four people engaged in an unnatural act downstairs in what he was pretty sure was the women’s room. Me wondering: What the fuck was Jerry doing in the women’s room?
13. Snorting cocaine, for no other reason than to say I’d done it, off an Elite model’s narrow white ass.
4. Glimpsing the five of us, scrawny and hirsute, in torn jeans and thousand-dollar jackets, conscientiously vapid expressions on our faces, cigarettes dangling from the corners of our mouths, on the cover of a British music magazine on a Heathrow newsstand. And being achingly, crushingly jealous of myself.
5. The look of horror on my graying parents’ faces when I informed them, in the sun-filled great room of their Long Island McMansion, that the White Devils had signed a three-album deal with a record label so huge they’d actually heard of it. And that I’d be quitting Hunter in the spring to start touring.
6. A blonde Ms. Porter’s type, eighteen at most, spreading her legs in the back of a limo to show the Devils (and her two friends) that she really wasn’t wearing underwear. And that she didn’t color her hair.
7. Sitting in the stark white dressing room of a Fifth-Avenue Gucci store, passing around a bottle of warm Tanqueray with Xavier, a hot CBS intern named Mirielle, and a busboy from some Burmese restaurant we’d just been to uptown. This last comprehending not a word of English.
8. Kissing Trent, the Devils’ other guitarist, over a lit-from-below tabletop in a Soho nightclub called Increase, a half-dozen cameras flashing around us.
9. My first ever $500 haircut, which began, and essentially ended, with my bangs being lifted and chopped unceremoniously an inch from my forehead.
10. Receiving in the mail, with no explanatory note of any kind, a photograph of myself propped up unconscious on a nightclub sofa, a penis dangling inscrutably next to my right ear.
11. Vince, at the Devils’ first-ever Manhattan gig (the Wild Boar, East Village) vomiting up pure triple sec all over his snare drum. Randy ripping, bloody fisted, an untunable string from his Fender bass. Trent tumbling backwards over a stage monitor, breaking a tuner off his Gibson. Me bouncing frenetically in Chuck Taylors, wrist pistoning, smoke from the cigarette in my mouth making my eyes clench involuntarily shut. Xavier clutching fistfuls of his own hair as he sang at the edge of the stage, staring psychotically, pleadingly into the crowd’s eyes.
12. Jerry, one of our three roadies, a Dartmouth dropout, informing us backstage at our only CBGB show that he'd seen four people engaged in an unnatural act downstairs in what he was pretty sure was the women’s room. Me wondering: What the fuck was Jerry doing in the women’s room?
13. Snorting cocaine, for no other reason than to say I’d done it, off an Elite model’s narrow white ass.
FOUR ignoble truths
"There's a man who lives in my stomach," she said.
His expression didn't change. But his pen stopped moving. "What do you call him?"
"He won't tell me his name."
His expression didn't change. But his pen stopped moving. "What do you call him?"
"He won't tell me his name."
20080104
MY car is gay
How can any of us ever really be happy knowing all those teenagers are out there laughing at us?
FRIED green tomorrows
Or: another crowd. Memorial Day. This time we're fully an hour and a half from Reading, our odd little proxy hometown, in the proverbial sticks west of the Appalachian trail. We're at a friend's parents' house, a big, rude pre-fab affair on ten or more acres, nothing to look at but hills and mountains and circling hawks. It’s blindingly bright. It’s needlessly, stupidly hot. A quintessential American landscape. Again: Memorial Day. We’re sitting drinking expensive imported beers, sweating onto white plastic furniture, squinting at each other beside the flashing swimming pool. Our friend's brother, visiting from Sweden with his Swedish wife and kids, has procured, seemingly from thin air, a bottle of Absolut. This is trouble. Suddenly he and his wife, blonde and freakishly beautiful, are teaching us all a Swedish drinking song. The words and gestures become very intricate indeed. We fake them, singing nonsense syllables, throwing back our sweating shot glasses, grimacing and coughing extravagantly. Two chubby blonde children splash in the pool, screaming at each other other in Swedish. "Fleegplon, fleegplon!" the female child hollers, pointing at a vapor trail inching across the cloudless sky. "Look," says our friend Gary to my boyfriend Alex, pointing down a long grassy slope to the neighbors' emu ranch, five hundred yards away. "They're out!" Several of the big awkward birds are loping around, kicking up little dusty dirt clouds behind a tall wire fence. The cell phone by the Absolut bottle starts ringing. The children, stoned on chlorine, start singing. "They're basically like beef," Gary is saying.
WHAT nick said
as past i the sat into there ceaselessly brooding back on borne the current old the unknown against world boats i on thought beat of we gatsby’s so wonder morning when fine he one first and picked farther out arms the our green out light stretch at faster the run end will of we daisy’s tomorrow dock matter he no had that’s come but a then long us way eluded to it this us blue before lawn recedes and year his by dream year must that have future seemed orgiastic so the close light that green he the could in hardly believed fail gatsby to night grasp under it on he rolled did republic not the know of that fields it dark was the already where behind city him the somewhere beyond back obscurity in vast that
20080103
QUANTUM pornography
There was only one other customer in the deli, Fitz saw: a guy in a camel-hair jacket, wafer-thin Movado glinting on his wrist, Johnston & Murphys creaking on the tiled floor as he rocked in place, watching the high-school or maybe community-college girl behind the glass counter make his sandwich for him, just like Mummy used to. A real Big Honkey, this one. The sort all too indigenous to this and all beach towns, Fitz knew. He tried concentrating on the newspaper rack to distract himself, telling himself, "Easy, boy, take it easy...." But then, of course, the sort of thing that apparently had to happen every time Fitz shared air with one of these dickheads happened again: Mr. Member, within twenty seconds of Fitz's arrival, was smiling bloodlessly at the girl on the wrong side of the cash register (“You have to be firm with these people, Junior,” Fitz could hear him telling his kid), saying, "How about making that again, and putting it on rye like I asked you the first time, hmm?"
Oh...boy! Fitz, adrenaline stoned, followed The Man, once his new and improved luncheon was made, to the door, imitating his constipated walk, hoping to draw at least one ugly glare before they even made the sidewalk. He didn't, though – so he started in next with the harrumphs and coughs of a fat-ass capitalist behind an oak desk in a ’30s political cartoon. Seeing, though, his as-yet implacable target, who was either really smooth or really scared, making a move for a gold Lexus gleaming on the curbside, pushing a button on his keychain that made the thing yelp like a scared dog, and threatening escape generally, Fitz, who would not be ignored, decided to be still more direct.
"Hey there, fucko," he called to the yuppie, who was lifting the handle on the car door, making a soothing ping emanate from the space within. "Seems to me that, uh, talking shit to people behind counters is pretty easy sport, wouldn't you say?"
The guy stared at Fitz, more confused, it seemed, than anything. So that Fitz, his hangover wreaking havoc on his brain, suddenly wasn't too sure himself what he was doing, why he was wasting this poor bastard's time, keeping him here to suffer these inanities when he almost certainly had more important things to...uh...do? Better keep talking.
"What I'm saying," he said, “is, if you wanna talk some shit, why don’t you try me out?"
The guy smirked. And, car door open, started ducking down into his private world of Billy Blass leather, only to be stopped by the crazed Fitz yet again. "Look, pal-o-rooni" – he was really getting nuts now; nobody was gonna smirk at him, man! – "what I'm getting at is, maybe you and me should just go at it."
He didn’t mean fist fight, of course. He had no idea how. He went instead for his zipper, slinging forth, momentarily, a not-so-little something that should be good for putting a less-fortunate bourgeoisie in his place. Why else drive that absurd penismobile?
The guy, though, having taken a long look, only smirked wider, making Fitz bark, "Nuh-uh. You know your smirking days are through when you take this challenge!" Apparently oblivious to the fact his dick was swaying in the breeze on abandoned wintertime Ocean Boulevard.
The yuppie, more cautious, looked up the street to the right, down the street to the left.... Then, beaming now – the balls on this guy! – loosed from captivity, bringing it up one handful at a time, this...trouser snake – some grotesque, uncircumcised python that hung there, a dumb animal between his knees.
Fitz, horrified, zipping and spinning, shuffled away down the sidewalk, wringing his hands, glancing back at the yuppie who was now cackling like the drowned lady who comes out of the bathtub in The Shining. Back in the deli, heart knocking at the front of his chest, not feeling his feet on the floor, he groped his breast pocket for his cigarettes, put one between his lips with shaking fingers, muttering to himself, "Had to be some kind of...party novelty...." But then, looking out the front window, he saw Mr. Holmes out there using his party novelty to hose down the right front tire of his tired old Corolla.
"God...damn!" Fitz choked, turning his back on the scene, lighting his cigarette.
"Hey," said the girl behind the counter, "you can't, like, smoke in here?"
Oh...boy! Fitz, adrenaline stoned, followed The Man, once his new and improved luncheon was made, to the door, imitating his constipated walk, hoping to draw at least one ugly glare before they even made the sidewalk. He didn't, though – so he started in next with the harrumphs and coughs of a fat-ass capitalist behind an oak desk in a ’30s political cartoon. Seeing, though, his as-yet implacable target, who was either really smooth or really scared, making a move for a gold Lexus gleaming on the curbside, pushing a button on his keychain that made the thing yelp like a scared dog, and threatening escape generally, Fitz, who would not be ignored, decided to be still more direct.
"Hey there, fucko," he called to the yuppie, who was lifting the handle on the car door, making a soothing ping emanate from the space within. "Seems to me that, uh, talking shit to people behind counters is pretty easy sport, wouldn't you say?"
The guy stared at Fitz, more confused, it seemed, than anything. So that Fitz, his hangover wreaking havoc on his brain, suddenly wasn't too sure himself what he was doing, why he was wasting this poor bastard's time, keeping him here to suffer these inanities when he almost certainly had more important things to...uh...do? Better keep talking.
"What I'm saying," he said, “is, if you wanna talk some shit, why don’t you try me out?"
The guy smirked. And, car door open, started ducking down into his private world of Billy Blass leather, only to be stopped by the crazed Fitz yet again. "Look, pal-o-rooni" – he was really getting nuts now; nobody was gonna smirk at him, man! – "what I'm getting at is, maybe you and me should just go at it."
He didn’t mean fist fight, of course. He had no idea how. He went instead for his zipper, slinging forth, momentarily, a not-so-little something that should be good for putting a less-fortunate bourgeoisie in his place. Why else drive that absurd penismobile?
The guy, though, having taken a long look, only smirked wider, making Fitz bark, "Nuh-uh. You know your smirking days are through when you take this challenge!" Apparently oblivious to the fact his dick was swaying in the breeze on abandoned wintertime Ocean Boulevard.
The yuppie, more cautious, looked up the street to the right, down the street to the left.... Then, beaming now – the balls on this guy! – loosed from captivity, bringing it up one handful at a time, this...trouser snake – some grotesque, uncircumcised python that hung there, a dumb animal between his knees.
Fitz, horrified, zipping and spinning, shuffled away down the sidewalk, wringing his hands, glancing back at the yuppie who was now cackling like the drowned lady who comes out of the bathtub in The Shining. Back in the deli, heart knocking at the front of his chest, not feeling his feet on the floor, he groped his breast pocket for his cigarettes, put one between his lips with shaking fingers, muttering to himself, "Had to be some kind of...party novelty...." But then, looking out the front window, he saw Mr. Holmes out there using his party novelty to hose down the right front tire of his tired old Corolla.
"God...damn!" Fitz choked, turning his back on the scene, lighting his cigarette.
"Hey," said the girl behind the counter, "you can't, like, smoke in here?"
20080102
YARD party
There are three events, she sees now, that conspired to fuck Gary up. The first was his getting his uncle’s money. The second was his spending two weeks in L.A. last summer with his old college buddy Parker, the screenwriter. The third was his hearing from her that she wants a baby.
THE sybarite
Those struck by aneurisms, infarctions, things so sudden they never know what hits them. Maybe strangers walk up to them at basketball games, in supermarkets, at work, thin old Russian men carrying weekly news magazines or middle-aged black ladies pulling reluctant nephews or nieces behind them, and they smile politely, or maybe even slyly, and they say, That's it: it's all over. You did it. It's okay. You just died. And the diers wrinkle their brows in amusement as they walk by, thinking how weird to run into a crazy person at the basketball game, at work, in their own bedrooms. But then it dawns on them, even if that's not the right phrase: that would explain why it's been so dark these last few seconds, minutes, hours, and why so utterly, utterly mindless.
20080101
INDENTURED servant
Art entices because whatever it depicts is suspended in time and space, granted a wholeness and deathlessness the world outside its parameters can’t ever aspire to.
The pain of life for most people is that it happens outside the frame of art.
For about nine months there my life was art. I was inside the frame. The frame of the proscenium, the magazine cover, the TV screen, the stereo speaker. I was limitless in this boundedness. I marked the site of another world’s intrusion into this one. I was already in every room I entered, recognized myself in every stranger I met. With my leather racing jacket and fuck-you hair, I was what the rest of humanity looks at and sighs -- in envy, in love, in disgust. Whatever.
Then came the morning Xavier woke up dead. It seemed so unfair. The Devils were so much an imitation of a rock ’n’ roll band that the realness of the deadness seemed absurdly harsh punishment for a little too much fun. It was clear someone had very badly misunderstood us.
Just like that, my bandmates and I faced the grim prospect of a return to life outside the frame. Of spending fifty or sixty more years in lives that had already peaked, in which all the best stuff had already happened.
The day after Xavier’s funeral, a kid in a SPAM sweatshirt skateboarded up to me in Tompkins Square. “You poor bastard,” he said.
Clearly I had to leave New York. Expulsion from the Garden would be easier to take if I didn’t have to look at it every day. Plus I harbored a dubious notion that if I’d stumbled into so perfect a self once (I don’t mean a moral one, or an articulate one, but an eternal and unruptured one), it could possibly happen again somewhere else. But not where it had happened before. That self was dead -- dead as Xavier. Trying to resuscitate it would be a joke.
I had to leave not only New York but everyone in it. Everyone who knew me and could drag me back to that dead, expelled self. Everyone who could revel at my being cast out and made to join them in the line to the cemetery.
I flew to Palm Springs, California. I couldn’t really say why, except the name appeared in my brain during the bus ride to LaGuardia. Maybe I’d heard it recently on a TV show, seen it in a Travel+Leisure article.
I arrived there on a January afternoon, 27 days after Xavier’s demise. It was disorientingly sunny and warm. The airport was essentially outdoors, great canvases stretched over bone-white concrete walkways. Out front of the main terminal the mountains jutted up, rocky, Martian, dotted with 1950s movie stars’ retreats. The desert beyond the airport’s manicured lawn was sunbaked and white. A guileless landscape. A place to strip away layers, get back to elementals. I felt enthused. The air was totally odorless.
I took a furnished apartment above a Thai restaurant on Palm Canyon Drive, the main commercial drag. I gave Mrs. Aung, the restaurateur, four months’ rent in cash, and there were no questions asked. The apartment had dusty matchstick blinds, dusty hardwood floors, dusty paper lanterns. Mornings I sat on the concrete balcony outside smoking Camels in the cool air, sipping a Heineken, watching leather-clad gay guys trod home from their boyfriends’ places. Afternoons I walked the flat mile and a half to the low-slung public library, read Henry Miller, read emails from my stockbroker informing me of my money’s expansions and contractions. Almost exclusively the former.
Three times I went to see the bungalow where Marilyn Monroe’s body was found.
Four times I slept with a young novelist who had an apartment across the parking lot from mine, refuge from her husband and child.
Seven times I test-drove cars with six-figure price tags.
Months went by. It was easy to forget in Palm Springs that it wasn’t summer already -- hence my mild surprise when it became insanely, stultifyingly hot. Too hot even for the walk to the library. I sank into an expansive ennui, almost never knowing the day of the week. I spent afternoons on the couch, studying patterns of sunlight on the hardwood floor, hearing horseflies knock against the windows, listening to the throb of the window-unit air conditioner. I sat for hours with my thumb on the TV remote, waiting to see if I’d press the power button. (In eight months I never did.) I had no particular confidence that some revelation lay on the other side of a brain-baking boredom, but I thought I’d better make sure.
Is there any such thing as an ironic mathematics?
At our fourth rendezvous the young novelist, perturbed at my failure to slash her husband’s tires or kidnap her daughter or make some equally obsessive gesture, inquired, sitting fetal on her bed, smoking in the dark, “Is there anything that would make you feel something as a human being?”
“You’ve made,” I said from my chair by the door, “a fundamental category mistake.”
One night Trent showed up. He just walked into my apartment without knocking while I was sitting on the couch, blowing my nose. “Trent,” I said as he cocked a hip, “I want you to tell me something, and I want it straight and true. Is it possible to catch a cold through your dick?”
His pose as he regarded my place, moving only his eyes, informed me he was still clinging to the last vestiges of life inside the frame, still trying hard to feel the camera’s gaze.
“Here’s the wise man,” he finally said. “The wise man in the desert.”
“Oh now Trent.”
“People work together for months. It could be construed as commitment. Maybe friendship even.”
“Oh now Trent.”
“A certain right to privileged information.”
“I have learned much here in the desert. Sadly all of it ineffable.”
“Do you have any idea how wrecked your family is?”
“I keep meaning to send a postcard.”
We rode to a classic Googie-style lounge once frequented by the Sinatra-Martin-Davis coterie. At the boomerang bar, Trent informed me that he and Vince had been practicing with Jack Hatter and Billy Quill from the Panties, a Minneapolis band recently kerplewied when their lead guitarist held up an Exxon. They were no fucking around, those guys. Trent told me, flicking ashes at me, that there were calls from club owners, agents, prospective managers. There were rumors of
The pain of life for most people is that it happens outside the frame of art.
For about nine months there my life was art. I was inside the frame. The frame of the proscenium, the magazine cover, the TV screen, the stereo speaker. I was limitless in this boundedness. I marked the site of another world’s intrusion into this one. I was already in every room I entered, recognized myself in every stranger I met. With my leather racing jacket and fuck-you hair, I was what the rest of humanity looks at and sighs -- in envy, in love, in disgust. Whatever.
Then came the morning Xavier woke up dead. It seemed so unfair. The Devils were so much an imitation of a rock ’n’ roll band that the realness of the deadness seemed absurdly harsh punishment for a little too much fun. It was clear someone had very badly misunderstood us.
Just like that, my bandmates and I faced the grim prospect of a return to life outside the frame. Of spending fifty or sixty more years in lives that had already peaked, in which all the best stuff had already happened.
The day after Xavier’s funeral, a kid in a SPAM sweatshirt skateboarded up to me in Tompkins Square. “You poor bastard,” he said.
Clearly I had to leave New York. Expulsion from the Garden would be easier to take if I didn’t have to look at it every day. Plus I harbored a dubious notion that if I’d stumbled into so perfect a self once (I don’t mean a moral one, or an articulate one, but an eternal and unruptured one), it could possibly happen again somewhere else. But not where it had happened before. That self was dead -- dead as Xavier. Trying to resuscitate it would be a joke.
I had to leave not only New York but everyone in it. Everyone who knew me and could drag me back to that dead, expelled self. Everyone who could revel at my being cast out and made to join them in the line to the cemetery.
I flew to Palm Springs, California. I couldn’t really say why, except the name appeared in my brain during the bus ride to LaGuardia. Maybe I’d heard it recently on a TV show, seen it in a Travel+Leisure article.
I arrived there on a January afternoon, 27 days after Xavier’s demise. It was disorientingly sunny and warm. The airport was essentially outdoors, great canvases stretched over bone-white concrete walkways. Out front of the main terminal the mountains jutted up, rocky, Martian, dotted with 1950s movie stars’ retreats. The desert beyond the airport’s manicured lawn was sunbaked and white. A guileless landscape. A place to strip away layers, get back to elementals. I felt enthused. The air was totally odorless.
I took a furnished apartment above a Thai restaurant on Palm Canyon Drive, the main commercial drag. I gave Mrs. Aung, the restaurateur, four months’ rent in cash, and there were no questions asked. The apartment had dusty matchstick blinds, dusty hardwood floors, dusty paper lanterns. Mornings I sat on the concrete balcony outside smoking Camels in the cool air, sipping a Heineken, watching leather-clad gay guys trod home from their boyfriends’ places. Afternoons I walked the flat mile and a half to the low-slung public library, read Henry Miller, read emails from my stockbroker informing me of my money’s expansions and contractions. Almost exclusively the former.
Three times I went to see the bungalow where Marilyn Monroe’s body was found.
Four times I slept with a young novelist who had an apartment across the parking lot from mine, refuge from her husband and child.
Seven times I test-drove cars with six-figure price tags.
Months went by. It was easy to forget in Palm Springs that it wasn’t summer already -- hence my mild surprise when it became insanely, stultifyingly hot. Too hot even for the walk to the library. I sank into an expansive ennui, almost never knowing the day of the week. I spent afternoons on the couch, studying patterns of sunlight on the hardwood floor, hearing horseflies knock against the windows, listening to the throb of the window-unit air conditioner. I sat for hours with my thumb on the TV remote, waiting to see if I’d press the power button. (In eight months I never did.) I had no particular confidence that some revelation lay on the other side of a brain-baking boredom, but I thought I’d better make sure.
Is there any such thing as an ironic mathematics?
At our fourth rendezvous the young novelist, perturbed at my failure to slash her husband’s tires or kidnap her daughter or make some equally obsessive gesture, inquired, sitting fetal on her bed, smoking in the dark, “Is there anything that would make you feel something as a human being?”
“You’ve made,” I said from my chair by the door, “a fundamental category mistake.”
One night Trent showed up. He just walked into my apartment without knocking while I was sitting on the couch, blowing my nose. “Trent,” I said as he cocked a hip, “I want you to tell me something, and I want it straight and true. Is it possible to catch a cold through your dick?”
His pose as he regarded my place, moving only his eyes, informed me he was still clinging to the last vestiges of life inside the frame, still trying hard to feel the camera’s gaze.
“Here’s the wise man,” he finally said. “The wise man in the desert.”
“Oh now Trent.”
“People work together for months. It could be construed as commitment. Maybe friendship even.”
“Oh now Trent.”
“A certain right to privileged information.”
“I have learned much here in the desert. Sadly all of it ineffable.”
“Do you have any idea how wrecked your family is?”
“I keep meaning to send a postcard.”
We rode to a classic Googie-style lounge once frequented by the Sinatra-Martin-Davis coterie. At the boomerang bar, Trent informed me that he and Vince had been practicing with Jack Hatter and Billy Quill from the Panties, a Minneapolis band recently kerplewied when their lead guitarist held up an Exxon. They were no fucking around, those guys. Trent told me, flicking ashes at me, that there were calls from club owners, agents, prospective managers. There were rumors of
20071231
EMPIRE-state suicide
He’s sitting alone at the bar in the international airport in a place like Bhutan or Myanmar or Sri Lanka. He’s got a three-thousand-dollar watch on his arm and five-hundred-dollar sunglasses on his face, but these things don't distract us from the fact he hasn’t showered or shaved in five days. And it’s hot, mind you. A woman who may be a prostitute stares at him unabashedly from the other side of the room, into which orange sunlight pours through windows set way up high, amongst steel rafters, where wobble the ancient ceiling fans. He’s what we might call impossibly good looking. Even through the grime. He checks the Rolex. Gestures vaguely at the empty glass in front of him. The bartender, sixty-five and fatless unto ropiness, fills it halfway up with J&B. No ice. No water. A bereted soldier with a Kalashnikov ambles in, does a slow circuit of the place, examining the might-be prostitute, the rattan furniture, the chrome ashtrays, the polish of the red concrete floor, the CNN broadcast on the ’80s-era Trinitron behind the bar. Everything but the foreigner.
First you destroy all documents whose belief it is you exist. Birth and marriage certificates, apartment leases, gym memberships. You take a hammer to the cell phone, then drown the remains in the sink for good measure. You cancel all credit cards and have the bills forwarded to a P.O. box in a megalopolis like New York or L.A. A month later, you change the forwarding address to a different city. A month after that, change it again. Pay all balances in full. Then start weaving the perfunctory web of bullshit. Go to Duluth, say, and apply for an apartment rental. Go to Sarasota and apply for a loan at the local Cadillac dealership. The credit checks show up on your credit report, so it’s to Duluth and Sarasota they go looking. Or, if they’ve got the I.Q.s of baseball bats, even, everywhere else. Which is a lot of places to look. Next, open new bank accounts on several different continents, places where you’ve got, as they say, people. Get said people to make ATM withdrawals on your behalf from each new account. Have a sibling or close friend call the same number the same time of day every day for three weeks, a pay phone, maybe, in Liverpool, St. Petersburg, Messina. Anywhere you’re not. They’ll see this, of course, when they get to rooting through your siblings’ and friends’ phone records. In the final stages things get more abstract. You need no fewer than two but preferably four or five dummy companies where you can hide the money that’s all that’s left of you. And you’ll naturally want to incorporate in countries whose banks are in the habit of giving the finger to foreign governments and police departments. Finally, choose a new home. A politically troubled region, maybe, that no one really wants to travel to. Stupidest would be the island paradise any jack-booted thug would be happy to vacation in anyway. Don’t give them any more reasons. Arrive at your destination via stops in four or five major cities, paying cash for airline tickets at each one.
You’d think we spend our whole lives trying
First you destroy all documents whose belief it is you exist. Birth and marriage certificates, apartment leases, gym memberships. You take a hammer to the cell phone, then drown the remains in the sink for good measure. You cancel all credit cards and have the bills forwarded to a P.O. box in a megalopolis like New York or L.A. A month later, you change the forwarding address to a different city. A month after that, change it again. Pay all balances in full. Then start weaving the perfunctory web of bullshit. Go to Duluth, say, and apply for an apartment rental. Go to Sarasota and apply for a loan at the local Cadillac dealership. The credit checks show up on your credit report, so it’s to Duluth and Sarasota they go looking. Or, if they’ve got the I.Q.s of baseball bats, even, everywhere else. Which is a lot of places to look. Next, open new bank accounts on several different continents, places where you’ve got, as they say, people. Get said people to make ATM withdrawals on your behalf from each new account. Have a sibling or close friend call the same number the same time of day every day for three weeks, a pay phone, maybe, in Liverpool, St. Petersburg, Messina. Anywhere you’re not. They’ll see this, of course, when they get to rooting through your siblings’ and friends’ phone records. In the final stages things get more abstract. You need no fewer than two but preferably four or five dummy companies where you can hide the money that’s all that’s left of you. And you’ll naturally want to incorporate in countries whose banks are in the habit of giving the finger to foreign governments and police departments. Finally, choose a new home. A politically troubled region, maybe, that no one really wants to travel to. Stupidest would be the island paradise any jack-booted thug would be happy to vacation in anyway. Don’t give them any more reasons. Arrive at your destination via stops in four or five major cities, paying cash for airline tickets at each one.
You’d think we spend our whole lives trying
SWEATY equity
"You don't know what good sex is till you've slept with someone you hate."
Har har.
What was there before this?
Har har.
What was there before this?
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