surfacetoday
11-07-2008, 01:21 AM
They edited the profanity. Those mother****ers.
Chapter 1: Everything About New York & the Country
1993-5
There were miles and miles of strange green fields in the country. There were cows and funny smells and there was no traffic. There were no good bagels – Dad said this. Maybe I would miss the bagels, but I already missed my loft more, the blankets and the warm cubbyspace above my room where I could lie wrapped up and spy on my parents cooking dinner in the small tiled kitchen. Adjoining the kitchen was a small livingroom with one wicker chair, where my grandmother sat when she visited once and I told her a story about something assured, when I was too young to be self-concious even though then I still tucked my shirt into my pants because I hated a mess and wrote how it looked in a mirror because I didn’t want my parents to know what my drawings meant. I wanted to be the best older brother, I helped feed him and carried him as soon as he arrived like a little rumpled red sack from the hospital. I wasn’t disappointed by the fact that he cried all the time or smelled like old laundry, but when I was five and a half and he was almost a year old I tried to shave and cut my face into ribbons over the gray sink. I cried and my father was frightened until he realized the honest mistake and then he smiled sweetly, told me not to try that strange trick again.
The mornings in Brooklyn were not blue, they were gray when my mother had pneumonia and stayed in bed all day and night. The traffic woke us all up, made us all hate the city for getting us so early out bed with its bustle. I was a kid and I loved the energy. I lived down the block from John Tuturro’s kid, who must have been a genius because I don’t think I could understand a single word he ever said.
In Brooklyn I discovered my favorite word – bull**** – and it had something to do with the Marlboro ads at the time which sported the enticing slogan ‘No BS’ and I remember one red morning wandering around with my mother’s arm encircling me repeating bull****, bull**** like it was my personal mantra. A large biker came up to me, broad promethean face, handlebars, pitchdark glasses and all. He said kid you shouldn’t say that but I did because it felt good and I liked feeling good, good and free, making Mom smile slowly at my inappropriate words, cuss words my dad liked to call them.
Dad liked to get southern when he got angry, sass backtalk and boy were his favorite words. Cussin’ too – and he liked to string them all together when his face was red as the red ballon in that little movie about balloons that my mother liked and showed me, and I liked because it reminded me of after my birthday party when we let all the balloons out of the hot kitchen window to float up like little dots against the sunset.
I loved my parents more than anything in the beginning. I loved my brother too and his funny gapped teeth which I was so scared were going to happen to me.
1998
A swell of flame comes up the the street between two rows of tall buildings. It is perfect cylindrical chaos, an entwine of blacks, oranges and reds pulsing and rupturing the smooth concrete. The windows breaking as it continues sound like pistol-shots. It is coming towards my small house, to my tiny room where it will devour me in an instant and return the bodies of my family members to patterned ash. Inside the carpets and windowsills will ignite first; then the curtains; then thick ember will push through the walls and make them breath and expand like a set of lungs. For a few moments, my house will be alive in its ruin.
I will be inside, lying in bed with a cool washcloth across my forehead, sweating in feverish anticipation of this fire. I do not want it, but my thoughts cannot unthink it – and at the same time I want to know what this end will be like: having sent myself home from school with chills and a headache (the last time I will see my friends I’ll be pale and monosyllabic, filled with delusions and unspeakable fear; the kind of fear that loosens one’s bowels, that pulls every limb into a tight hard center, that makes it hard to swallow) to rest in bed watching daytime television on Cartoon Network.
The show on will be violent with lots of fists and explosions. Big men bound by larger muscles wearing orange uniforms punch each other through mountainside after mountainside. The territory of the planet they are on is alien and covered by round rocks with little mop-tops of a thick aqua grass. The dialogue is practically nonexistent.
I have the alarm clock near my bed set for five P.M. This is when things are supposed to happen.
Downstairs my mother is painting on the dining room table, making samples for work. I can smell the oil through the floor. The stink will last through the next day, and it makes my headache worse. She’s been up here once or twice in the past hour to check my temperature and bring me tea. I haven’t yet told her what happens when I close my eyes and I see the flame growing and plunging closer. I don’t know why this is – I want to save her; I want everyone to be saved. But for some reason I can’t bring the words to my lips. It feels like I’d have reach down with one hand into the recesses of my throat and pull and pull until something ripped so strange chords, tendons, veins and the truth could pour out in a bright crimson flow… but even then I’m not sure that I could even reach what I was looking for in that hot, dark space, because I’m still not entirely sure what it is or how to describe it – I could start from the beginning, say, “Mom… mom Jordan told me that, today, at five something awful is going to happen…” but then I might trail off and grow even more pale because the thought makes me nauseous and I might also wet the bed, and that would be embarrassing. So I am stuck.
Right now it is four o’clock.
I am staring at the cracked ceiling with its white sloping pitch and small beads of sweat are dripping down my chin and from my forehead into the corners of my eyes. They sting badly, but I dare not wipe them. I have decided that I will sleep. I will not wake at five – I will go to sleep and what happens will happen during my dreams. So my eyes close. The dark of my lids pulses with splotches from the retinas’ memory of sunlight and I drift off.
Jordan in art class: Soviet missiles, that’s what they’ll be. Hydrogen warheads that blow everything up. Everything.
Jake drawing: Really, no way.
Jordan: Yeah they’re coming today and I’m gonna blow them up with my F-1s.
Jake: What?
Jordan: Yeah they’re coming here and I’m going to blow them away.
Jake, drawing, serious, scared: What time…
Jordan lining up for lunch: I don’t know. Five o’clock maybe.
Jake: Oh. Ok. Oh…
Chapter 2: Where I Am Now… November 2008
In November, The Election Year I Lost My Head And Found Myself
Two Thousand Miles Away From New York Walking Behind Houses Of
A Minnesota Suburb The Day After Halloween,
People Excited In The Early Afternoon For The First Black President –
I Cannot Have Any Say In This Election, I Have Not Registered To Vote,
Because I Forgot To Go Into The Beacon DMV In That Last Week Home.
Instead I Lost My Sanity To A Handle Of Whiskey And Spent The Day Shaking,
Convulsing In My Lover’s Room Watching The Hours Slip Past
And Ignoring The Frantic Phonecalls From My Parents
Which Meant That We Would Decide Where I’d Next Be Sent Very Soon
And No Amount Of Love Or Desire By Emotion Could Keep Me Put
In The Place I Was Which Isn’t Very Much – I Spoke To You Yesterday
You Were Decorated In Feathers And Spoke Neutrally
Said The Phone Wasn’t Good, **** Its Static And Disconnect
I Sudied Your Body From Where We Lay And Sweated On The Covers
The Plastic Bedspread, We Were Too Drunk To **** And This Is Good
Because I Convinced You Of My Good Intentions Then,
Even If I Had None And Only Got Them Later When I Realized How Good You Were
And How Little You Cared About The Things I Try To Do For Effect,
Got Me Labeled Crazy By The Populus At A Sad, Severed College
Where No One Really Gives A **** Or Understands What They’ve Got,
But I Could Not Have Then And I Cannot Blame Them For Just Scraping The Pit
Passing The Things That Need To Be Done And Ignoring Each Threat
There Are No Wake Up Calls, In The Morning There Is Just A Bitter Realization That
What Happened Was Probably Not A Very Wise Decision And Even If The Decision Is Made To
Never Do It Again, The Action Has Been Completed And Now Work Is Needed
To Get The Lost Something Back. It’s Not Here Anymore; It’s Not Anywhere.
November 1st, 2008, 6:02 p.m.
The bridge across a highway into Minneapolis is rushed with bitter wind, and complimented by the vision of every make and shape of wheels and metal imaginable – the curve of barred cage above the concrete embankment to keep the suicide jumpers at bay or even those who might have the desire to lean over the bridge to hear the whistle and feel the thrill of wind rush through the eyelids, ears, hair, pores, crisping the skin and burning it a dull red is across from a large apartment complex which is in a different world. A more sleepy, country world where the inhabitants are from all over the country and can be heard from their respective rooms but often will live for months and months inside the brick never to be seen, only sneaking out sometimes at night to smoke a cigarette. Lincoln does not know the roomate living across the hall from him in the bed next to where I sleep, yet he has been in that room, breathing its air and talking to me – he is strange and I cannot figure out what he wants. The communication with the people inside a program is interestingly stunted: talking we are all like children learning how to walk. I make comments about a football game that I cannot fathom to a man balding, wearing a Notre Dame sweater lying on a couch who only grunts. But then the wash of words opens like an emotional flood when any subject concerning hardship or addiction or the past is brought up and I learn of the good natured fat girl’s mother who died of a flesheating bacterial disease due to her diabetic, weakened immune system. “They carved out most of her leg and her gut,” she says like she’s reading the ingredients from a box of cake. I know this is a simple way of moving forward, of containment, but the grafic imagery in those words disturbs me – did they leave those cavities of flesh hollow? flapping like heavy blooded sheets, or did they inject them with hydrogen, fill them up like scarred pink ballons stung with crisscross puncture marks from the little scalpels of surgery, and this is all while I sit in the room, king of the hill blaring from the TV and I am afraid even to lift my cigarette, breath the relaxing smoke and let this haunt fade.
November 2nd, 2008. 4:11 p.m.
Andrew wasn’t invited home for Christmas last year. He was finally expelled from college for starting a fight with a monk, bong in hand. This I learn outside the apartment complex rife with stories for the mine last night at one or so a.m. last night, leaning on my knees in a drowsy pitch while he tells his story. He reminds of my friend Zack – his speech is strangely slow and deliberate; it could be the product of too many downers-uppers-alcohol in combination, like what I thought it was for Zack, but now I’m thinking that it could just be evidence of a personality type. Extravagant in its focus – the eyes black and unblinking, he seems to consider every word I say, then dimiss it in the next moment.
But where I am now. I am rolling this on my tongue, trying the words out for effect – I am a resident of Minnesota, a suburb no less; maybe a suburb of a large bustling metropolis called Minneapolis, but a ****ing suburb.
I am at a comfortable wooden lacquered table now, refilling my coffe on the sly because I’ve only one dollar left to my name and I am writing: this is the present. A healthy unremonstrative look at the here and now. Surrounded by moving shapes and legs, the cacaphony of coffemachines, telephones, discourse on subjects that seem to range in importance but are all carried with the detachment that arrives from speaking in a public place, concious of all the other bodies and listening heads surrounding the small seclusion you’ve picked out for yourself – yourself and your partner (your listener or your talker it doesn’t matter which). The sound of a brittle laugh arrives, stray words – “all’vethe sudden” – wrap me and make me comfortable. Like I can feel the sound of that exhausted bus outside spewing its carbon monoxide contents on a fresh batch of worn, thin and bumpy pavement. The music is horrendous, but strangely it soothes me – I would never, never give this kind of stuff a chance if I was alone, but here in these public energetic places it is exactly appropriate. it creates a sense of motion; here one loses the complacency of an isolated room. Even if I don’t talk to anyone, even if the only small course of interaction is with the kind-eyed woman who sold me my coffee cup, the fact that all of this is happening breathes a new energy into my chest. The swollen clamp the expands through it and my shoulders disappears because finally after sleeping for much of the day, for three hours between twelve and three, I am doing something. Maybe not something profound or particularly adventurous – it is after all a coffeeshop in walkable distance from that particular bubble of the apartment complex where I reside – but that doesn’t matter. What is grand, what implies adventure and sure footing will come as I continue to venture out of my seclusion, out from the strict perameters of my fleshy (and yes, intelligent, but **** there are all sorts of intelligence and my over-analytical thought ridden spew collecting like so many popped partitions on the walls of my skull – little dreamy pink bubbles of blue candescence – is good for only so long. It needs breath. oxygen. exhaust…) lugubrious head.
I began something on the plane here that turned into a thinly veiled self portrait of the high school Jake Harms, the one from eleventh and twelfth grade, the one who had almost no notion of the way he was perceived (he still doesn’t in many ways, but at least he knows this. Ha.): “Zachary Milton didn’t say much; kept to himself or opened his mouth in a superior fashion that implied his was to be the final word and sometimes it worked like that, but often it was a louder rebuttle that again turned him quiet and what seemed arrogant.
“He called himself a writer but at his age one could call oneself anything and appear plausible because of the time yet to be had and the amount accomplished thus far in this seventeen years, which was a sizeable amount. Two novellas, three ‘lyric books’ – a creation of his own devising that sounded better than that over-simplistic moniker ‘album’ – a short film, countless pieces of short (and for the most part half-finished) fiction, and hundreds upon hundreds of journal pages, self-analytical and often abusive (only in the most pity-inducing manner) biography that explained everything about him if only one could read around every word and look instead at the author whose hand had put those letters in place.
“In short what Zachary Milton had was obsession – he became so utterly focused on things and people that capacity for rational thought evaporated and that set, toothsharp blindness of obsession became all that swelled in the void of his chest; the object controlled him utterly and completely; so utterly and completely, in fact, that if it was a person – especially a woman – he could not bear to even speak to them for very long, though he desired to do so all the time. Most recently he was swollen with the liquid of his disease, whiskey by the liter, and this had taken over all other things.”
Z.M. is a parody, an exaggeration of my focus. But here I am proving that Milton obsession, riding the beat of café music, coffee grinding in a dull roar, caffeine tipping my fingers with an extra bolt of precision and depicting myself as a savant-hero, alone and with everyone; at once removed from the cloth and grime of humanity and at the same time so thoroughly wrapped, coated and smothered by it that I must claw and fight the suffocation to bring myself back to normal standing with my world. The largest problem with this fight (“swimming upstream,” as my father so quaintly puts it) is that the suffocation is myself. The depression, the hopelessness do not lead to things happening. I understand now why Max has chosen to open his room up at Hampshire aside from just a constant swirling good time: it will lead to new insights, however idiotic he may consider them to be at the moment, they will at least have been put there and put there again by each stray wanderer who stops by the room and ends up staying for a drink or a round of beer-pong.
November 3rd, 2008. 11:11 p.m.
I am moving from the purgatorial apartment to a different place because of my drunk last week.
I am a drunk. My name is Jake. I am an ungrateful alcoholic.
I am eighteen years old, and I am an unbalanced drunk.
I consider myself important.
I believe this absolves me from any normal rules and obligations.
I am a free thinker. An artist.
Artistic tempermants need special attention, a special allowance to learn and **** up.
We are all ****ing crazy. We are also ****ing narcissists.
November 4th, 2008, 5:32 p.m.
It is election day, the black man and the war veteran at odds and the world in turmoil. Near the apartment that I am moving out of (transitionally they call it. Jesus.) there are people with signs from both sides on the overpass vying for the attention of passing cars, waving their American flags and hoping for just one honk from the enthusiastic motorists. The black man’s side is receiving far more of a chorus, its highway lane is lit up with blaring horns so the racial divide is now kaput in the country, right? We can see our black man as translucent and it is simply his winning grin and majestic poise that the public appreciates – no voters will be going to the polls and the boothes to tack in their digital word based just upon the color of his skin. This country may be making tracks… but it seems a subtler aspect of racism; we feel as privileged whites, liberal priveleged, college educated and graduate bound paleskins that it would be in our best, cleanest interest to do the right thing and get this giant of a five-foot-seven tall man on the podium. Boiling blood aside, tension and antipathy displaced, this man is the one and the only one who can put us right again, solve the never ending war, cure the cultural ambivalence, breathe life into the passion drive that has vacated the souls of the young: make me, intellectually astute elevated being that I is, understand what has to change and that I must fight and strive for something newer, fatter and stronger. Lap the fat I say, it’s all we’ve got anymore. I do not dislike Obama (and I see McCain as a hapless old phony cracked up on his glory days from thirty years ago trying to raise his stiff scarred arms above his head, craning his wrinkled stubby neck to look Presidential for the crowds swimming before him in a sea of streamers – last vestiges of glory… it brings to mind the old men in my town living through their sons exploits on the little-league teams, spitting Big league Chew instead of the real stuff, the juice black and tinged with white flecks of torn skin from each inner lip. No, McCain won’t be the one to really help us now…) but I think the question of practicality moves beyond race or skill. A leader who becomes contentious will divide us again, worse than Bush, worse than those ****ers behind the scenes drawing his puppet strings. If Obama were assassinated in the first month – as I’ve heard the rumor go – then Biden would be all that we’ve got: a contentious Jew from New York who resents everyone even more than I do, if that’s possible. And if an assassination attempt happened and failed? That would be a true test of Obama’s character: would he curl up and become a recluse? would he re-emerge strong and now tough from his brush with death? or would he simply become another susceptible puppet, relying on others’ ideas and opinions to do the right thing and save his valuable skin.
The bus is a bubble. Another partition from the world with an asian man at the helm quickly… speaking street names into his microphone, a handheld little black radio transmittor. I get off in St. Paul and wander around for a bit. This is a corporate city, never far from a mall strip – and they all close by five o’clock. It is a strange country when one cannot find an all-night McDonald’s. But the air of corporation means that the architecture is new and it feels new, menacing in its big-ness, grand and expansive. All the stores are all-in-one affairs: the coffeeshop where I sit is coupled with an optrician’s and part of a large complex of condos that leer over the monolithic block.
When I ask questions here, I feel that I am speaking a different language, a strange New York language where one expects things never to quit their collective whir; maybe slow down for a bit, but never shut down entirely.
And here in this coffeeshop where I chosen to sit because it has wireless and I have the overwhelming urge to visit the internet, it is the same dissonance of steamed milk machines, the capable hands of the offbeat pretty counterlady making lattes – which by now have become an international affair. I know latte is either French or Italian, but with the advent of places like Starbucks we may as well stick it in the ****ing dictionary, call it American and call ourselves gourmet because we already think we are. At least, I do. Now I just want to spit poison. This is why I am a drunk.
So say this is only a cynic’s simple take – well, let the path be open for sincere longing.
In downtown Minneapolis it’s like New Years in New York, like Christmas in Cold Spring. Everyone is out and alive, yelling and whooping up and down the street. The black population joyfully exclaiming OBAMA nigga and the whites honking their horns and yelling a variation of the same. Obama swept the electoral vote, pulling in somewhere in the 330s to McCain’s 155 and it seems like it could be the start of a New beginning. I haven’t seen groups of people completely unknown to each other so happy in public in a long time. I regret all my negativity because this is beautiful – this is what we live for through hunger and fear and selfishness: we want unity and pride, and here in this Downtown night I feel like I’ve got it. It pulled me up out of myself, smiling and trying to yell along with all the cars passing blaring their horns like nothing in the world matters for this moment. Now I am glad I am here. Just to see the frenzied joy in everything, to watch and love with everyone else, because everyone has time for you tonight and the possibilities are endless.
November 6th, 2008. 3:54 p.m.
There was a bruise in the sky this morning, flowering from the left of Bill Tresh’s nondescript white Chevy as we rode around parts of St. Paul and Minneapolis that I still cannot project into a map as a whole city. Nothing about the geography makes any sense to me, so I am riding the bus until it does – but the sky was brewing a dark pit to our left, rose on its fringes and white after that like the soft underside of my torn fingernail. It is a displaced feeling that ruins me here. The sense of knowing what there is to do but not knowing how to go about it. I understand the general principle of living: to eat, one must work, to have shelter, one must have money, to make friends, one must be friendly and avoid acting withdrawn… but it is something about the city and the disconnected warmth of the Bus that creates the void near my throat. There isn’t tension, but the absence of passion. During the two hours or so I spent with Bill, someone outside of AA, a family friend, ex-New York loft owner I grew more and more panicked – filled with the desire to be away from him and his comfortable attitude (“So here’s the Dome… why do you hate AA?”). I don’t want to judge him, and I couldn’t begin to call him unfriendly but I have trouble trusting him because he doesn’t know about having an addiction, which is entirely ironic because I have spent so much time complaining about only being able to speak to people also within the Program.
How to describe where I am right now… the first objects to catch my eye are the billboards, which are vibrant in oranges and reds and covered in graffiti; then it is ethnic restaurants, a panadera y pasteleria called San Miguel where we are currently stopped, a coffeeshop called Dunn Bros. with a miral on its outer tan brick where I sat and spoke to Jordan – but the fact is that I have no idea where I’m going, riding the bus until it runs out of stops. Bus 21 supposedly heads toward my destination, which is downtown St. Paul, I think, though it could be something entirely different. Sticking to the original plan I find important, so I will and we will see where it gets me.
Minneapolis and St. Paul are strange portals for midwestern sprawl. Too kind to their customers, too supportive of (extremities) superfluous beacons like the bridge that collapsed here last year, whose debris still lays on a bank of the Mississipi like twisted turquoise snakes of steel and painted rust. And the streets are peopled with grotesque faces, bloated and windburned from too many winters spent walking from houses to cars. I feel physically ill here.
9:32 p.m.
I thought about suicide: a silver gun, the feel of steel pleasant and cold in my mouth. One finger wrapped around a trigger to pull. A little to the left and I will be a vegetable forever, drooling with a tube into my arm so I can drink water. I passed a Bus Cubicle. The wind blew and stung me through my jacket.
Chapter 3: Where I Was: Years 2007, 2008
10/31/07 8:37 p.m.
Down at the river, decide you want to die,
down at the river, decide to drink instead,
4/29/08 2:34 a.m
I Can.
I can’t sleep I won’t go to class tomorrow
I’m tired I’m I I’m forgetting about this numbache
in the center of my chest below the breastbone
that makes my stomach seem like it’s full of black water
and I want to hit something except I have cuts on my right hand
and a swollen knuckle on the left
I’m done I want to be exciting
I will never do anything exciting
I write only sad music that plays for happy people who listen
and tell me I am a genius that makes no sense
I was high when I wrote all that
wrote all what? all my music.
I need this. I am cool, so are you.
We get emotional together, I punch things, she cries
and forgets about it.
I’ve never been so tender.
I am learning about love with the aid of an internet
dictionary that has ten million pages
they are blurry and indistinct I am obsessing about
the subject of Waking up! I wrote this for you.
August __, 2008, 10:30? p.m.
We are not speaking, her and I, though we are sitting so close that I can smell her perfume across the three concrete steps seperating us and I am so drunk that I didn’t notice her at first, the – the world is a slow swirl of hazy orange lights and in this catatonic place the movement and pitch of each of my friends’ voices seem absurd and for all their caterwhauling, utterly indifferent. But the importance is not in this realization or my rumination because who knows if such a thought has any sway at this point in the evening? I am too ****ed up to stick up for myself or to speak to her and the truth is I would not mind such aggressive interaction if I wasn’t so frightened by the fact that she is close enough that the sickly sweet smell of her perfume is flooding me.
A Bit About Her: the delusion and realization of one time after twelve a.m. some date in June.
• She kept remembering, then forgetting – at this moment in the night sentences would only stay for a few moments until she suffered amnesia and asked the same question over. Her hands would grow restless later and wander over some soft-jeaned body soon enough, soon as she figured out where she was going – but she was also smarter than this knowing; smarter than the body she will wrestle and bind and hurt and open herself to… because she can make them all move: this one and this one and looking at that one all the while, she knows what they all are and what they all want. To bruise, to soften, to keep, but her secret is that they can never keep her, they will spoil as she keeps them to display and turn attention to her sharp little thin lipped smile and careful accusatory brown eyes. I tried to keep her when I was in the process of a dream, an unfolding un-memory that involved action and motion and intent but only on the (basest) level of subconcious – my breath was stung and filed hot by liquor and my eyes only the purest white lattice of bloody veins. It was a pure blank lust that found my knees straddling her sides, my hands pinning her arms and my unconcious tongue slipping between her ivoried, thin lips. She rolled me off easily, but no sooner had she when I tried to control her again.
• Then she leaned into me on the blue, mosquito screened porch, a cigarette perched in her lazy sexy grin and she said would I like to try again because if I wanted it I’d have to take, take and like a dog I did and lifted her up against a cold tile of the bathroom bathed in natural blue light and she pressed her hips to me, spun my senses and made me claustrophobic and violent so I thumbed her white stomach drawing her hands and thick white fingers to my back choking on a sound in her throat she did not want out, and the whole time I was reminded of milk, fluid and creamy soft – a slight sour smell and a hot warm taste, not unpleasant, not ecstastic just strange as I moved hard through the pale, downy skin and down to the floor where I burned my knees on the carpet.
• And it was here I noticed she had dime sized nipples… because I was drunk and distracted I took to long to finish; she didn’t like boys who took to long – she liked the initial motion. After that it was just a sickness. It made her bored and sick of the dress she covered her stomach with.
– 10:35? p.m.
A kid, in a burst of magnificient energy which seems unfathomable at this late hour has jumped upon someone’s windshield fifty feet down the street from where we sit and cracked the translucent glass down its middle. He perches up there a moment, poised and dazed, eyes sweeping our crowd with a defiant brilliance before jumping down and landing his cheekbone into a full swing of the car owner’s fist. The vandal sprawls and convulses as the owner hits him again, this time just above the stomach in the solar plexus. He gasps making a wretching torn sound and lies prone while the owner kicks his shins. One of the vandal’s eyes is swollen shut but the other is bright with fear, pleading to the crazed thirsty shadow above him; his mouth still works and he begs the owner, a boy far larger than him to please please stop it was just an accident, a mistake; I wasn’t thinking but the owner moves his foot to the vandal’s stomach and presses hard so the boy squeals and keeps pressing as the boy who is tiny now, almost microscopic and profuse with blood gurgles, and despite the distant sounds of police sirens – for somebody has to have called the police by now; none of us, but someone, right? – the owner leans down over the boy, pinning his arms with his knees and starts whispering to little bastard about what he’s going to do to him and it’ll take a whole ****ing lot more than some money to replace that glass, it’s going to be a flesh payment, pound for pound with the glass and the vandal, a little child now, a babe underweight at birth, even tinier than an ant, like a dribble of **** out his mother’s womb is silent but for the occasional sniff and shaking beneath the gargantuan Titan’s weight of the owner. The owner crosses one finger down the boy’s face, smearing some blood from the flattened nose and then lays into him. The boy screams, his blood collecting on the owner’s knuckles, because won’t anyone help? please, oh God he’s gonna kill-kill me; me here in the ****ing str-oh please oh oh it just repeats and I felt like I was watching a dream unfold as the pile of blue limbs flooding from the brilliant vermillion bathed cop car with whistles and billy clubs to subdue the owner and force him to the ground, breaking his chin, cut short the whole furious display that had been the high point of our night, and my head hurt so I asked someone to drive to the diner, and we sat there until two or so, drinking coffee and playing a boardgame.
June, 2008, 7:15? p.m – a phonecall outside graduation dinner.
I am on the phone with the woman in my life who is a homeschooled Jewish girl named Cassie. I call her a woman because she can claim that distinction by the mark of her age, which is eighteen. The view from where I am sitting is expansive and grand – a lush sweep of the Hudson valley’s mountains and the river pulsing at their shores, and it is because of this emerald elegant beauty that I am distracted from the current conversation, most of which is coming from Cassie’s end, and most of which is about why she is breaking up with me. She is distressed about the fact that I have changed; about the drugs which permeate my life that she had no prior knowledge of (except that sometimes, maybe, when she saw me I was high as a cherub assailing heaven with gold-plated curls and a holy ****.)
I am done with Cassie, before this conversation.
I was moving onto to bigger and better things and a grander title weeks ago – but I seem to have forgotten to tell her this. I am going to be debauched and depraved I have decided, no more virginal homeschooled girls to deal with extracting simple things like a blowjob in the bedroom fretting all the while because her parents, a doctor and a healthfoods woman are downstairs wondering why we have secluded ourselves in the bedroom – no, now my time for women is the early hours, and they are not girls, they are women with a sense of propriety about their sex drive and more of an idea of what is to **** and hurt and leave lips bleeding from strayed, passionate teeth.
But of course I say none of this to Cassie. I keep a cool restraint; a cool restraint to compliment my new ****ed up attitude and ignore her as best I can.
“Do you have anything you want to say? Because I’m going to go now.”
“Not really. I’m sorry.” I offer this half-hearted attempt at solace but it is met by an ungrateful receiver click and Cassie is out of my life forever. (Well, not forever, because I saw her best friend a month or so later – another precocious Chatham actor-playwrite-zany girl who wants to do everything at once and meet everyone at the same time; who is going, eventually, to be knocked by life in the teeth – and I asked her how Cassie was. “Fine,” she said, “She’s making lots of t-shirts.” “Cool.” I didn’t know what else to say so I drank another beer – I’d just been fired from my job for drinking, so I thought it would be appropriate.)
August, first two weeks 2007. All hours
The city was a rush – traffic pulsing my blood and the subway rumbling my feet. I stood on its grate across from Barnard University where I had spent the past four weeks living and waited to lose my independence from an excessively happy mother coming to pick me up. She was so happy and glowed with such a bright smile when she walked in. My little mother, I could only think – my little mother as she bought me coffee and asked me how it was and how I am and you look so skinny and was content to prattle until I began to speak a little about the time down in the city and the people I’d met. How wonderful they all were, how many girls – how all the girls liked me, ma, I wanted to say, but instead and true to my character I kept mostly quiet and replied noncommitally to her questions, giving her the impression that in four weeks I must have done nothing but a lot of pills. That was probably why my sleep schedule was turned around and I had lost the weight that found my knees loose in the skinny black jeans made of some stretchable material (“They look just like spandex! Oh Jake… they’re way too tight…” “Yeah ma.”) which were strange and alien.
My mother kept looking at me, squeezing my arm as if to make sure I was still all there, that I wasn’t somehow coming apart or leaving her alone; she looked at me with a squint like I was an unfocused photograph and regarded me as such – she seemed tentative to press my skin, like pressing too hard might ruin the gloss.
At home was a hike with friends from California, their strange eyes wondering why I did not sleep at night anymore, why I was hesitant to call anyone from home. I looked skinny – I was thin, had lost fifteen pounds down there living off little good food and cigarettes. I met a girl named Rebecca, who was a hesitant model. Her mother was a famous photographer, and Rebecca was a minor celebrity in France I think. I could never really pin her down. She seemed to be of many places, more places than I could imagine, but she liked me and that made me feel important. We talked and walked together before ever doing anything.
• This is the next two weeks after those four in the city; they happened all at once, too fast and too slow at the same time, spinning my head. I am in love with a girl named Faye. She is so perfect that I am afraid to touch her. She frightens me more than she could ever know, and my time is strangely spent between talking with her in her kitchen and getting high with the twin she is involved with. He is a giant.
• I buy sixty animal tranquilizers from a kid driving a golden pickup truck. The days are translated into seperate visions with luminous pupils engorged by the drugs: there was a night in the city, there was a night at home in an armchair with the world collapsing about me in diagonals and I realized how Godless I was. And no one knew. It was beautiful. In an Indian restaurant at the end of New York city with my father I stared at the laughing people with growing fury as they laughed, drank and drank some more, red lights swinging like gleaming vines all about and it was smaller than a hallway at home and I love the panic of motion. A beautiful motion.
• I wake up on the couch in my house with all my clothes but I have lost my writing pad, the one I was marking down these last two weeks with and I squint up at the sun which is too bright to understand at the moment so I lean my head back down to the dull ringing pillow and close my eyes again…
…the bathroom tiles are hot with summer and I am naked but for my underwear which is soaked through in a clammy sweat and the bathroom door is just slightly open to the tired eyes of my father whom I feel nothing but love for, my own love – no one elses, I keep reminding myself of this but my throat is parched, no, parched cannot possibly describe this absolute dry that no liquid will solve, not the water I keep splashing idly about my limbs in the bathtub, not the cold blue I push down my throat, not the oxygen from the fan, not the sweat on my skin. And I am big but my father still picks me up, heaving my dumb shocked body into bed beneath the strange covers and I am gone.
• Now in bed, my father sits down in a chair near the bad to see if I am alright while my eyes do not meet his and I focus on the movie on the computer. His chicken neck and green eyes look small and insignificant. At this moment I can label him with the obvious fear and judge him for not detaching from the feeling of emptiness at his young son who wants simply to watch the movie and deal with his pisser of a hangover.
Chapter 1: Everything About New York & the Country
1993-5
There were miles and miles of strange green fields in the country. There were cows and funny smells and there was no traffic. There were no good bagels – Dad said this. Maybe I would miss the bagels, but I already missed my loft more, the blankets and the warm cubbyspace above my room where I could lie wrapped up and spy on my parents cooking dinner in the small tiled kitchen. Adjoining the kitchen was a small livingroom with one wicker chair, where my grandmother sat when she visited once and I told her a story about something assured, when I was too young to be self-concious even though then I still tucked my shirt into my pants because I hated a mess and wrote how it looked in a mirror because I didn’t want my parents to know what my drawings meant. I wanted to be the best older brother, I helped feed him and carried him as soon as he arrived like a little rumpled red sack from the hospital. I wasn’t disappointed by the fact that he cried all the time or smelled like old laundry, but when I was five and a half and he was almost a year old I tried to shave and cut my face into ribbons over the gray sink. I cried and my father was frightened until he realized the honest mistake and then he smiled sweetly, told me not to try that strange trick again.
The mornings in Brooklyn were not blue, they were gray when my mother had pneumonia and stayed in bed all day and night. The traffic woke us all up, made us all hate the city for getting us so early out bed with its bustle. I was a kid and I loved the energy. I lived down the block from John Tuturro’s kid, who must have been a genius because I don’t think I could understand a single word he ever said.
In Brooklyn I discovered my favorite word – bull**** – and it had something to do with the Marlboro ads at the time which sported the enticing slogan ‘No BS’ and I remember one red morning wandering around with my mother’s arm encircling me repeating bull****, bull**** like it was my personal mantra. A large biker came up to me, broad promethean face, handlebars, pitchdark glasses and all. He said kid you shouldn’t say that but I did because it felt good and I liked feeling good, good and free, making Mom smile slowly at my inappropriate words, cuss words my dad liked to call them.
Dad liked to get southern when he got angry, sass backtalk and boy were his favorite words. Cussin’ too – and he liked to string them all together when his face was red as the red ballon in that little movie about balloons that my mother liked and showed me, and I liked because it reminded me of after my birthday party when we let all the balloons out of the hot kitchen window to float up like little dots against the sunset.
I loved my parents more than anything in the beginning. I loved my brother too and his funny gapped teeth which I was so scared were going to happen to me.
1998
A swell of flame comes up the the street between two rows of tall buildings. It is perfect cylindrical chaos, an entwine of blacks, oranges and reds pulsing and rupturing the smooth concrete. The windows breaking as it continues sound like pistol-shots. It is coming towards my small house, to my tiny room where it will devour me in an instant and return the bodies of my family members to patterned ash. Inside the carpets and windowsills will ignite first; then the curtains; then thick ember will push through the walls and make them breath and expand like a set of lungs. For a few moments, my house will be alive in its ruin.
I will be inside, lying in bed with a cool washcloth across my forehead, sweating in feverish anticipation of this fire. I do not want it, but my thoughts cannot unthink it – and at the same time I want to know what this end will be like: having sent myself home from school with chills and a headache (the last time I will see my friends I’ll be pale and monosyllabic, filled with delusions and unspeakable fear; the kind of fear that loosens one’s bowels, that pulls every limb into a tight hard center, that makes it hard to swallow) to rest in bed watching daytime television on Cartoon Network.
The show on will be violent with lots of fists and explosions. Big men bound by larger muscles wearing orange uniforms punch each other through mountainside after mountainside. The territory of the planet they are on is alien and covered by round rocks with little mop-tops of a thick aqua grass. The dialogue is practically nonexistent.
I have the alarm clock near my bed set for five P.M. This is when things are supposed to happen.
Downstairs my mother is painting on the dining room table, making samples for work. I can smell the oil through the floor. The stink will last through the next day, and it makes my headache worse. She’s been up here once or twice in the past hour to check my temperature and bring me tea. I haven’t yet told her what happens when I close my eyes and I see the flame growing and plunging closer. I don’t know why this is – I want to save her; I want everyone to be saved. But for some reason I can’t bring the words to my lips. It feels like I’d have reach down with one hand into the recesses of my throat and pull and pull until something ripped so strange chords, tendons, veins and the truth could pour out in a bright crimson flow… but even then I’m not sure that I could even reach what I was looking for in that hot, dark space, because I’m still not entirely sure what it is or how to describe it – I could start from the beginning, say, “Mom… mom Jordan told me that, today, at five something awful is going to happen…” but then I might trail off and grow even more pale because the thought makes me nauseous and I might also wet the bed, and that would be embarrassing. So I am stuck.
Right now it is four o’clock.
I am staring at the cracked ceiling with its white sloping pitch and small beads of sweat are dripping down my chin and from my forehead into the corners of my eyes. They sting badly, but I dare not wipe them. I have decided that I will sleep. I will not wake at five – I will go to sleep and what happens will happen during my dreams. So my eyes close. The dark of my lids pulses with splotches from the retinas’ memory of sunlight and I drift off.
Jordan in art class: Soviet missiles, that’s what they’ll be. Hydrogen warheads that blow everything up. Everything.
Jake drawing: Really, no way.
Jordan: Yeah they’re coming today and I’m gonna blow them up with my F-1s.
Jake: What?
Jordan: Yeah they’re coming here and I’m going to blow them away.
Jake, drawing, serious, scared: What time…
Jordan lining up for lunch: I don’t know. Five o’clock maybe.
Jake: Oh. Ok. Oh…
Chapter 2: Where I Am Now… November 2008
In November, The Election Year I Lost My Head And Found Myself
Two Thousand Miles Away From New York Walking Behind Houses Of
A Minnesota Suburb The Day After Halloween,
People Excited In The Early Afternoon For The First Black President –
I Cannot Have Any Say In This Election, I Have Not Registered To Vote,
Because I Forgot To Go Into The Beacon DMV In That Last Week Home.
Instead I Lost My Sanity To A Handle Of Whiskey And Spent The Day Shaking,
Convulsing In My Lover’s Room Watching The Hours Slip Past
And Ignoring The Frantic Phonecalls From My Parents
Which Meant That We Would Decide Where I’d Next Be Sent Very Soon
And No Amount Of Love Or Desire By Emotion Could Keep Me Put
In The Place I Was Which Isn’t Very Much – I Spoke To You Yesterday
You Were Decorated In Feathers And Spoke Neutrally
Said The Phone Wasn’t Good, **** Its Static And Disconnect
I Sudied Your Body From Where We Lay And Sweated On The Covers
The Plastic Bedspread, We Were Too Drunk To **** And This Is Good
Because I Convinced You Of My Good Intentions Then,
Even If I Had None And Only Got Them Later When I Realized How Good You Were
And How Little You Cared About The Things I Try To Do For Effect,
Got Me Labeled Crazy By The Populus At A Sad, Severed College
Where No One Really Gives A **** Or Understands What They’ve Got,
But I Could Not Have Then And I Cannot Blame Them For Just Scraping The Pit
Passing The Things That Need To Be Done And Ignoring Each Threat
There Are No Wake Up Calls, In The Morning There Is Just A Bitter Realization That
What Happened Was Probably Not A Very Wise Decision And Even If The Decision Is Made To
Never Do It Again, The Action Has Been Completed And Now Work Is Needed
To Get The Lost Something Back. It’s Not Here Anymore; It’s Not Anywhere.
November 1st, 2008, 6:02 p.m.
The bridge across a highway into Minneapolis is rushed with bitter wind, and complimented by the vision of every make and shape of wheels and metal imaginable – the curve of barred cage above the concrete embankment to keep the suicide jumpers at bay or even those who might have the desire to lean over the bridge to hear the whistle and feel the thrill of wind rush through the eyelids, ears, hair, pores, crisping the skin and burning it a dull red is across from a large apartment complex which is in a different world. A more sleepy, country world where the inhabitants are from all over the country and can be heard from their respective rooms but often will live for months and months inside the brick never to be seen, only sneaking out sometimes at night to smoke a cigarette. Lincoln does not know the roomate living across the hall from him in the bed next to where I sleep, yet he has been in that room, breathing its air and talking to me – he is strange and I cannot figure out what he wants. The communication with the people inside a program is interestingly stunted: talking we are all like children learning how to walk. I make comments about a football game that I cannot fathom to a man balding, wearing a Notre Dame sweater lying on a couch who only grunts. But then the wash of words opens like an emotional flood when any subject concerning hardship or addiction or the past is brought up and I learn of the good natured fat girl’s mother who died of a flesheating bacterial disease due to her diabetic, weakened immune system. “They carved out most of her leg and her gut,” she says like she’s reading the ingredients from a box of cake. I know this is a simple way of moving forward, of containment, but the grafic imagery in those words disturbs me – did they leave those cavities of flesh hollow? flapping like heavy blooded sheets, or did they inject them with hydrogen, fill them up like scarred pink ballons stung with crisscross puncture marks from the little scalpels of surgery, and this is all while I sit in the room, king of the hill blaring from the TV and I am afraid even to lift my cigarette, breath the relaxing smoke and let this haunt fade.
November 2nd, 2008. 4:11 p.m.
Andrew wasn’t invited home for Christmas last year. He was finally expelled from college for starting a fight with a monk, bong in hand. This I learn outside the apartment complex rife with stories for the mine last night at one or so a.m. last night, leaning on my knees in a drowsy pitch while he tells his story. He reminds of my friend Zack – his speech is strangely slow and deliberate; it could be the product of too many downers-uppers-alcohol in combination, like what I thought it was for Zack, but now I’m thinking that it could just be evidence of a personality type. Extravagant in its focus – the eyes black and unblinking, he seems to consider every word I say, then dimiss it in the next moment.
But where I am now. I am rolling this on my tongue, trying the words out for effect – I am a resident of Minnesota, a suburb no less; maybe a suburb of a large bustling metropolis called Minneapolis, but a ****ing suburb.
I am at a comfortable wooden lacquered table now, refilling my coffe on the sly because I’ve only one dollar left to my name and I am writing: this is the present. A healthy unremonstrative look at the here and now. Surrounded by moving shapes and legs, the cacaphony of coffemachines, telephones, discourse on subjects that seem to range in importance but are all carried with the detachment that arrives from speaking in a public place, concious of all the other bodies and listening heads surrounding the small seclusion you’ve picked out for yourself – yourself and your partner (your listener or your talker it doesn’t matter which). The sound of a brittle laugh arrives, stray words – “all’vethe sudden” – wrap me and make me comfortable. Like I can feel the sound of that exhausted bus outside spewing its carbon monoxide contents on a fresh batch of worn, thin and bumpy pavement. The music is horrendous, but strangely it soothes me – I would never, never give this kind of stuff a chance if I was alone, but here in these public energetic places it is exactly appropriate. it creates a sense of motion; here one loses the complacency of an isolated room. Even if I don’t talk to anyone, even if the only small course of interaction is with the kind-eyed woman who sold me my coffee cup, the fact that all of this is happening breathes a new energy into my chest. The swollen clamp the expands through it and my shoulders disappears because finally after sleeping for much of the day, for three hours between twelve and three, I am doing something. Maybe not something profound or particularly adventurous – it is after all a coffeeshop in walkable distance from that particular bubble of the apartment complex where I reside – but that doesn’t matter. What is grand, what implies adventure and sure footing will come as I continue to venture out of my seclusion, out from the strict perameters of my fleshy (and yes, intelligent, but **** there are all sorts of intelligence and my over-analytical thought ridden spew collecting like so many popped partitions on the walls of my skull – little dreamy pink bubbles of blue candescence – is good for only so long. It needs breath. oxygen. exhaust…) lugubrious head.
I began something on the plane here that turned into a thinly veiled self portrait of the high school Jake Harms, the one from eleventh and twelfth grade, the one who had almost no notion of the way he was perceived (he still doesn’t in many ways, but at least he knows this. Ha.): “Zachary Milton didn’t say much; kept to himself or opened his mouth in a superior fashion that implied his was to be the final word and sometimes it worked like that, but often it was a louder rebuttle that again turned him quiet and what seemed arrogant.
“He called himself a writer but at his age one could call oneself anything and appear plausible because of the time yet to be had and the amount accomplished thus far in this seventeen years, which was a sizeable amount. Two novellas, three ‘lyric books’ – a creation of his own devising that sounded better than that over-simplistic moniker ‘album’ – a short film, countless pieces of short (and for the most part half-finished) fiction, and hundreds upon hundreds of journal pages, self-analytical and often abusive (only in the most pity-inducing manner) biography that explained everything about him if only one could read around every word and look instead at the author whose hand had put those letters in place.
“In short what Zachary Milton had was obsession – he became so utterly focused on things and people that capacity for rational thought evaporated and that set, toothsharp blindness of obsession became all that swelled in the void of his chest; the object controlled him utterly and completely; so utterly and completely, in fact, that if it was a person – especially a woman – he could not bear to even speak to them for very long, though he desired to do so all the time. Most recently he was swollen with the liquid of his disease, whiskey by the liter, and this had taken over all other things.”
Z.M. is a parody, an exaggeration of my focus. But here I am proving that Milton obsession, riding the beat of café music, coffee grinding in a dull roar, caffeine tipping my fingers with an extra bolt of precision and depicting myself as a savant-hero, alone and with everyone; at once removed from the cloth and grime of humanity and at the same time so thoroughly wrapped, coated and smothered by it that I must claw and fight the suffocation to bring myself back to normal standing with my world. The largest problem with this fight (“swimming upstream,” as my father so quaintly puts it) is that the suffocation is myself. The depression, the hopelessness do not lead to things happening. I understand now why Max has chosen to open his room up at Hampshire aside from just a constant swirling good time: it will lead to new insights, however idiotic he may consider them to be at the moment, they will at least have been put there and put there again by each stray wanderer who stops by the room and ends up staying for a drink or a round of beer-pong.
November 3rd, 2008. 11:11 p.m.
I am moving from the purgatorial apartment to a different place because of my drunk last week.
I am a drunk. My name is Jake. I am an ungrateful alcoholic.
I am eighteen years old, and I am an unbalanced drunk.
I consider myself important.
I believe this absolves me from any normal rules and obligations.
I am a free thinker. An artist.
Artistic tempermants need special attention, a special allowance to learn and **** up.
We are all ****ing crazy. We are also ****ing narcissists.
November 4th, 2008, 5:32 p.m.
It is election day, the black man and the war veteran at odds and the world in turmoil. Near the apartment that I am moving out of (transitionally they call it. Jesus.) there are people with signs from both sides on the overpass vying for the attention of passing cars, waving their American flags and hoping for just one honk from the enthusiastic motorists. The black man’s side is receiving far more of a chorus, its highway lane is lit up with blaring horns so the racial divide is now kaput in the country, right? We can see our black man as translucent and it is simply his winning grin and majestic poise that the public appreciates – no voters will be going to the polls and the boothes to tack in their digital word based just upon the color of his skin. This country may be making tracks… but it seems a subtler aspect of racism; we feel as privileged whites, liberal priveleged, college educated and graduate bound paleskins that it would be in our best, cleanest interest to do the right thing and get this giant of a five-foot-seven tall man on the podium. Boiling blood aside, tension and antipathy displaced, this man is the one and the only one who can put us right again, solve the never ending war, cure the cultural ambivalence, breathe life into the passion drive that has vacated the souls of the young: make me, intellectually astute elevated being that I is, understand what has to change and that I must fight and strive for something newer, fatter and stronger. Lap the fat I say, it’s all we’ve got anymore. I do not dislike Obama (and I see McCain as a hapless old phony cracked up on his glory days from thirty years ago trying to raise his stiff scarred arms above his head, craning his wrinkled stubby neck to look Presidential for the crowds swimming before him in a sea of streamers – last vestiges of glory… it brings to mind the old men in my town living through their sons exploits on the little-league teams, spitting Big league Chew instead of the real stuff, the juice black and tinged with white flecks of torn skin from each inner lip. No, McCain won’t be the one to really help us now…) but I think the question of practicality moves beyond race or skill. A leader who becomes contentious will divide us again, worse than Bush, worse than those ****ers behind the scenes drawing his puppet strings. If Obama were assassinated in the first month – as I’ve heard the rumor go – then Biden would be all that we’ve got: a contentious Jew from New York who resents everyone even more than I do, if that’s possible. And if an assassination attempt happened and failed? That would be a true test of Obama’s character: would he curl up and become a recluse? would he re-emerge strong and now tough from his brush with death? or would he simply become another susceptible puppet, relying on others’ ideas and opinions to do the right thing and save his valuable skin.
The bus is a bubble. Another partition from the world with an asian man at the helm quickly… speaking street names into his microphone, a handheld little black radio transmittor. I get off in St. Paul and wander around for a bit. This is a corporate city, never far from a mall strip – and they all close by five o’clock. It is a strange country when one cannot find an all-night McDonald’s. But the air of corporation means that the architecture is new and it feels new, menacing in its big-ness, grand and expansive. All the stores are all-in-one affairs: the coffeeshop where I sit is coupled with an optrician’s and part of a large complex of condos that leer over the monolithic block.
When I ask questions here, I feel that I am speaking a different language, a strange New York language where one expects things never to quit their collective whir; maybe slow down for a bit, but never shut down entirely.
And here in this coffeeshop where I chosen to sit because it has wireless and I have the overwhelming urge to visit the internet, it is the same dissonance of steamed milk machines, the capable hands of the offbeat pretty counterlady making lattes – which by now have become an international affair. I know latte is either French or Italian, but with the advent of places like Starbucks we may as well stick it in the ****ing dictionary, call it American and call ourselves gourmet because we already think we are. At least, I do. Now I just want to spit poison. This is why I am a drunk.
So say this is only a cynic’s simple take – well, let the path be open for sincere longing.
In downtown Minneapolis it’s like New Years in New York, like Christmas in Cold Spring. Everyone is out and alive, yelling and whooping up and down the street. The black population joyfully exclaiming OBAMA nigga and the whites honking their horns and yelling a variation of the same. Obama swept the electoral vote, pulling in somewhere in the 330s to McCain’s 155 and it seems like it could be the start of a New beginning. I haven’t seen groups of people completely unknown to each other so happy in public in a long time. I regret all my negativity because this is beautiful – this is what we live for through hunger and fear and selfishness: we want unity and pride, and here in this Downtown night I feel like I’ve got it. It pulled me up out of myself, smiling and trying to yell along with all the cars passing blaring their horns like nothing in the world matters for this moment. Now I am glad I am here. Just to see the frenzied joy in everything, to watch and love with everyone else, because everyone has time for you tonight and the possibilities are endless.
November 6th, 2008. 3:54 p.m.
There was a bruise in the sky this morning, flowering from the left of Bill Tresh’s nondescript white Chevy as we rode around parts of St. Paul and Minneapolis that I still cannot project into a map as a whole city. Nothing about the geography makes any sense to me, so I am riding the bus until it does – but the sky was brewing a dark pit to our left, rose on its fringes and white after that like the soft underside of my torn fingernail. It is a displaced feeling that ruins me here. The sense of knowing what there is to do but not knowing how to go about it. I understand the general principle of living: to eat, one must work, to have shelter, one must have money, to make friends, one must be friendly and avoid acting withdrawn… but it is something about the city and the disconnected warmth of the Bus that creates the void near my throat. There isn’t tension, but the absence of passion. During the two hours or so I spent with Bill, someone outside of AA, a family friend, ex-New York loft owner I grew more and more panicked – filled with the desire to be away from him and his comfortable attitude (“So here’s the Dome… why do you hate AA?”). I don’t want to judge him, and I couldn’t begin to call him unfriendly but I have trouble trusting him because he doesn’t know about having an addiction, which is entirely ironic because I have spent so much time complaining about only being able to speak to people also within the Program.
How to describe where I am right now… the first objects to catch my eye are the billboards, which are vibrant in oranges and reds and covered in graffiti; then it is ethnic restaurants, a panadera y pasteleria called San Miguel where we are currently stopped, a coffeeshop called Dunn Bros. with a miral on its outer tan brick where I sat and spoke to Jordan – but the fact is that I have no idea where I’m going, riding the bus until it runs out of stops. Bus 21 supposedly heads toward my destination, which is downtown St. Paul, I think, though it could be something entirely different. Sticking to the original plan I find important, so I will and we will see where it gets me.
Minneapolis and St. Paul are strange portals for midwestern sprawl. Too kind to their customers, too supportive of (extremities) superfluous beacons like the bridge that collapsed here last year, whose debris still lays on a bank of the Mississipi like twisted turquoise snakes of steel and painted rust. And the streets are peopled with grotesque faces, bloated and windburned from too many winters spent walking from houses to cars. I feel physically ill here.
9:32 p.m.
I thought about suicide: a silver gun, the feel of steel pleasant and cold in my mouth. One finger wrapped around a trigger to pull. A little to the left and I will be a vegetable forever, drooling with a tube into my arm so I can drink water. I passed a Bus Cubicle. The wind blew and stung me through my jacket.
Chapter 3: Where I Was: Years 2007, 2008
10/31/07 8:37 p.m.
Down at the river, decide you want to die,
down at the river, decide to drink instead,
4/29/08 2:34 a.m
I Can.
I can’t sleep I won’t go to class tomorrow
I’m tired I’m I I’m forgetting about this numbache
in the center of my chest below the breastbone
that makes my stomach seem like it’s full of black water
and I want to hit something except I have cuts on my right hand
and a swollen knuckle on the left
I’m done I want to be exciting
I will never do anything exciting
I write only sad music that plays for happy people who listen
and tell me I am a genius that makes no sense
I was high when I wrote all that
wrote all what? all my music.
I need this. I am cool, so are you.
We get emotional together, I punch things, she cries
and forgets about it.
I’ve never been so tender.
I am learning about love with the aid of an internet
dictionary that has ten million pages
they are blurry and indistinct I am obsessing about
the subject of Waking up! I wrote this for you.
August __, 2008, 10:30? p.m.
We are not speaking, her and I, though we are sitting so close that I can smell her perfume across the three concrete steps seperating us and I am so drunk that I didn’t notice her at first, the – the world is a slow swirl of hazy orange lights and in this catatonic place the movement and pitch of each of my friends’ voices seem absurd and for all their caterwhauling, utterly indifferent. But the importance is not in this realization or my rumination because who knows if such a thought has any sway at this point in the evening? I am too ****ed up to stick up for myself or to speak to her and the truth is I would not mind such aggressive interaction if I wasn’t so frightened by the fact that she is close enough that the sickly sweet smell of her perfume is flooding me.
A Bit About Her: the delusion and realization of one time after twelve a.m. some date in June.
• She kept remembering, then forgetting – at this moment in the night sentences would only stay for a few moments until she suffered amnesia and asked the same question over. Her hands would grow restless later and wander over some soft-jeaned body soon enough, soon as she figured out where she was going – but she was also smarter than this knowing; smarter than the body she will wrestle and bind and hurt and open herself to… because she can make them all move: this one and this one and looking at that one all the while, she knows what they all are and what they all want. To bruise, to soften, to keep, but her secret is that they can never keep her, they will spoil as she keeps them to display and turn attention to her sharp little thin lipped smile and careful accusatory brown eyes. I tried to keep her when I was in the process of a dream, an unfolding un-memory that involved action and motion and intent but only on the (basest) level of subconcious – my breath was stung and filed hot by liquor and my eyes only the purest white lattice of bloody veins. It was a pure blank lust that found my knees straddling her sides, my hands pinning her arms and my unconcious tongue slipping between her ivoried, thin lips. She rolled me off easily, but no sooner had she when I tried to control her again.
• Then she leaned into me on the blue, mosquito screened porch, a cigarette perched in her lazy sexy grin and she said would I like to try again because if I wanted it I’d have to take, take and like a dog I did and lifted her up against a cold tile of the bathroom bathed in natural blue light and she pressed her hips to me, spun my senses and made me claustrophobic and violent so I thumbed her white stomach drawing her hands and thick white fingers to my back choking on a sound in her throat she did not want out, and the whole time I was reminded of milk, fluid and creamy soft – a slight sour smell and a hot warm taste, not unpleasant, not ecstastic just strange as I moved hard through the pale, downy skin and down to the floor where I burned my knees on the carpet.
• And it was here I noticed she had dime sized nipples… because I was drunk and distracted I took to long to finish; she didn’t like boys who took to long – she liked the initial motion. After that it was just a sickness. It made her bored and sick of the dress she covered her stomach with.
– 10:35? p.m.
A kid, in a burst of magnificient energy which seems unfathomable at this late hour has jumped upon someone’s windshield fifty feet down the street from where we sit and cracked the translucent glass down its middle. He perches up there a moment, poised and dazed, eyes sweeping our crowd with a defiant brilliance before jumping down and landing his cheekbone into a full swing of the car owner’s fist. The vandal sprawls and convulses as the owner hits him again, this time just above the stomach in the solar plexus. He gasps making a wretching torn sound and lies prone while the owner kicks his shins. One of the vandal’s eyes is swollen shut but the other is bright with fear, pleading to the crazed thirsty shadow above him; his mouth still works and he begs the owner, a boy far larger than him to please please stop it was just an accident, a mistake; I wasn’t thinking but the owner moves his foot to the vandal’s stomach and presses hard so the boy squeals and keeps pressing as the boy who is tiny now, almost microscopic and profuse with blood gurgles, and despite the distant sounds of police sirens – for somebody has to have called the police by now; none of us, but someone, right? – the owner leans down over the boy, pinning his arms with his knees and starts whispering to little bastard about what he’s going to do to him and it’ll take a whole ****ing lot more than some money to replace that glass, it’s going to be a flesh payment, pound for pound with the glass and the vandal, a little child now, a babe underweight at birth, even tinier than an ant, like a dribble of **** out his mother’s womb is silent but for the occasional sniff and shaking beneath the gargantuan Titan’s weight of the owner. The owner crosses one finger down the boy’s face, smearing some blood from the flattened nose and then lays into him. The boy screams, his blood collecting on the owner’s knuckles, because won’t anyone help? please, oh God he’s gonna kill-kill me; me here in the ****ing str-oh please oh oh it just repeats and I felt like I was watching a dream unfold as the pile of blue limbs flooding from the brilliant vermillion bathed cop car with whistles and billy clubs to subdue the owner and force him to the ground, breaking his chin, cut short the whole furious display that had been the high point of our night, and my head hurt so I asked someone to drive to the diner, and we sat there until two or so, drinking coffee and playing a boardgame.
June, 2008, 7:15? p.m – a phonecall outside graduation dinner.
I am on the phone with the woman in my life who is a homeschooled Jewish girl named Cassie. I call her a woman because she can claim that distinction by the mark of her age, which is eighteen. The view from where I am sitting is expansive and grand – a lush sweep of the Hudson valley’s mountains and the river pulsing at their shores, and it is because of this emerald elegant beauty that I am distracted from the current conversation, most of which is coming from Cassie’s end, and most of which is about why she is breaking up with me. She is distressed about the fact that I have changed; about the drugs which permeate my life that she had no prior knowledge of (except that sometimes, maybe, when she saw me I was high as a cherub assailing heaven with gold-plated curls and a holy ****.)
I am done with Cassie, before this conversation.
I was moving onto to bigger and better things and a grander title weeks ago – but I seem to have forgotten to tell her this. I am going to be debauched and depraved I have decided, no more virginal homeschooled girls to deal with extracting simple things like a blowjob in the bedroom fretting all the while because her parents, a doctor and a healthfoods woman are downstairs wondering why we have secluded ourselves in the bedroom – no, now my time for women is the early hours, and they are not girls, they are women with a sense of propriety about their sex drive and more of an idea of what is to **** and hurt and leave lips bleeding from strayed, passionate teeth.
But of course I say none of this to Cassie. I keep a cool restraint; a cool restraint to compliment my new ****ed up attitude and ignore her as best I can.
“Do you have anything you want to say? Because I’m going to go now.”
“Not really. I’m sorry.” I offer this half-hearted attempt at solace but it is met by an ungrateful receiver click and Cassie is out of my life forever. (Well, not forever, because I saw her best friend a month or so later – another precocious Chatham actor-playwrite-zany girl who wants to do everything at once and meet everyone at the same time; who is going, eventually, to be knocked by life in the teeth – and I asked her how Cassie was. “Fine,” she said, “She’s making lots of t-shirts.” “Cool.” I didn’t know what else to say so I drank another beer – I’d just been fired from my job for drinking, so I thought it would be appropriate.)
August, first two weeks 2007. All hours
The city was a rush – traffic pulsing my blood and the subway rumbling my feet. I stood on its grate across from Barnard University where I had spent the past four weeks living and waited to lose my independence from an excessively happy mother coming to pick me up. She was so happy and glowed with such a bright smile when she walked in. My little mother, I could only think – my little mother as she bought me coffee and asked me how it was and how I am and you look so skinny and was content to prattle until I began to speak a little about the time down in the city and the people I’d met. How wonderful they all were, how many girls – how all the girls liked me, ma, I wanted to say, but instead and true to my character I kept mostly quiet and replied noncommitally to her questions, giving her the impression that in four weeks I must have done nothing but a lot of pills. That was probably why my sleep schedule was turned around and I had lost the weight that found my knees loose in the skinny black jeans made of some stretchable material (“They look just like spandex! Oh Jake… they’re way too tight…” “Yeah ma.”) which were strange and alien.
My mother kept looking at me, squeezing my arm as if to make sure I was still all there, that I wasn’t somehow coming apart or leaving her alone; she looked at me with a squint like I was an unfocused photograph and regarded me as such – she seemed tentative to press my skin, like pressing too hard might ruin the gloss.
At home was a hike with friends from California, their strange eyes wondering why I did not sleep at night anymore, why I was hesitant to call anyone from home. I looked skinny – I was thin, had lost fifteen pounds down there living off little good food and cigarettes. I met a girl named Rebecca, who was a hesitant model. Her mother was a famous photographer, and Rebecca was a minor celebrity in France I think. I could never really pin her down. She seemed to be of many places, more places than I could imagine, but she liked me and that made me feel important. We talked and walked together before ever doing anything.
• This is the next two weeks after those four in the city; they happened all at once, too fast and too slow at the same time, spinning my head. I am in love with a girl named Faye. She is so perfect that I am afraid to touch her. She frightens me more than she could ever know, and my time is strangely spent between talking with her in her kitchen and getting high with the twin she is involved with. He is a giant.
• I buy sixty animal tranquilizers from a kid driving a golden pickup truck. The days are translated into seperate visions with luminous pupils engorged by the drugs: there was a night in the city, there was a night at home in an armchair with the world collapsing about me in diagonals and I realized how Godless I was. And no one knew. It was beautiful. In an Indian restaurant at the end of New York city with my father I stared at the laughing people with growing fury as they laughed, drank and drank some more, red lights swinging like gleaming vines all about and it was smaller than a hallway at home and I love the panic of motion. A beautiful motion.
• I wake up on the couch in my house with all my clothes but I have lost my writing pad, the one I was marking down these last two weeks with and I squint up at the sun which is too bright to understand at the moment so I lean my head back down to the dull ringing pillow and close my eyes again…
…the bathroom tiles are hot with summer and I am naked but for my underwear which is soaked through in a clammy sweat and the bathroom door is just slightly open to the tired eyes of my father whom I feel nothing but love for, my own love – no one elses, I keep reminding myself of this but my throat is parched, no, parched cannot possibly describe this absolute dry that no liquid will solve, not the water I keep splashing idly about my limbs in the bathtub, not the cold blue I push down my throat, not the oxygen from the fan, not the sweat on my skin. And I am big but my father still picks me up, heaving my dumb shocked body into bed beneath the strange covers and I am gone.
• Now in bed, my father sits down in a chair near the bad to see if I am alright while my eyes do not meet his and I focus on the movie on the computer. His chicken neck and green eyes look small and insignificant. At this moment I can label him with the obvious fear and judge him for not detaching from the feeling of emptiness at his young son who wants simply to watch the movie and deal with his pisser of a hangover.