In the bathroom, I found Leo sobbing on the white tile floor. I rushed over to him.
“Are you OK?” I asked. He shook his head. “What’s wrong?”
“I’m not exactly sure, I guess ... I just ... it’s that I’m so rarely bothered by my own work, like upset by it. But for some particular reason The Beach feels different, almost like it’s this narrative for a career I don’t really want, from androgynous objet d’art to streetwise tough guy, a little fucked up by the world, yah, but still a real strong guy, if that makes any sense. Like do I want that? It gets under my skin with an energy that makes me feel so fucking strange.”
“That is strange,” I said. “I hadn’t meant it that way.”
“I know,” he said and began to cry again.
I held Leo for a few minutes before I asked him if he wanted me to call his driver. His red and tearstained face lit with real gratitude. “Could you?” he said. “I need to go home.”
I pulled out my cell and called his driver. I pulled Leo up and helped him out of the bathroom and into the lobby, where we waited for his driver. Tilda emerged from the theater and rushed over to us.
“Is everything all right?” Tilda asked.
“Everything is all right,” I said. “Leo isn’t feeling well, so I’m sending him home.”
The driver appeared in the lobby and Leo went to him. Tilda and I followed them outside, to the corner of the street and the avenue where the driver double-parked the car.
We watched Leo get into the limo, waved goodbye, then returned to The Beach, just as, on screen, our star jumped off the waterfall, into the river that would take him to Tilda.
In Apocalypse Now, US special operations officers reverse the geographical trajectory of The Beach by going away from it, into the jungle, where they meet the tribe where Kurtz has installed himself as an unflinching, totalitarian leader. In a moment of extra-literary affinity, Brando quotes T. S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men,” which has an epigraph from Heart of Darkness. On a micro-level, the US special operations officers are tasked with the same objective as that of the greater US military in Vietnam: intervention in an emergent political order so that its potentially harmful aspects are neutralized and non-Communist leadership is restored. Despite their small number relative to Kurtz’s slaves, they succeed; however, in killing the American and setting the Vietnamese free, they pre-stage the eventual failure of the American invasion of Vietnam, the Vietcong’s defeat of the imperialist overlord and its acid-bombing campaigns across the landscape. The Beach defuses the imbalances of competitive polities, entraps the unraveling plot to reincorporate disambiguated bodies into a tribe of limitless potential. Great spray of light across Thailand. The beaches were untouched before my film crew arrived; we destroyed the landscape to create paradise. The dunes were removed as were many of the palm trees in order to create the site of bliss in the audience’s mind. I saw the film, I went down to the beach, I removed my shoes. A little crab walked in front of me. I watched as it scuttled by slowly until it buried itself in the sand.
Once, when I was writing my novel, I went into one of the very last dive bars in lower Manhattan and met a veteran from the Gulf War. It was after Halloween, the hurricane had passed, and the power had been restored to the city. I sat at the bar drinking a whiskey on the rocks when he approached me from behind and asked if I wanted to have sex with him in the bathroom. He had a massive, muscular figure shaped like an inverted pyramid. He wore fatigues and was covered in tattoos so worn down by exposure to the sun that they looked like Rorschach blots on his skin.
Swaying, he slung his arm around me and said, “You’d have fun.” I told him no and asked where he was from. “Virginia. But I was stationed here after Iraq and I’ve never left.” We talked about the war, and I wondered if he had been responsible for the deaths of children. “If you won’t sleep with me,” he said, “I’m going to just go jerk off in the toilet. Do you want to join me?” he said. “I’ll be in the toilet.”
I watched him disappear into the back. Thirty minutes later he was found soaked in his own urine, passed out between the toilet and the wall. The bouncer dragged him out into the street while the bartender called the police.
Leonardo DiCaprio directed his driver to take him to beach. When they arrived at Far Rockaway, he asked him to wait while he went down to the water to think. The sky was the color of steel, the mottled gray of New York in winter, generalized and monolithically opposite the lightness of coming spring, when Leo would finally be at play. The dunes had been mostly destroyed by Sandy, replaced by Christmas trees lying in neat rows along the coastline. The branches caught the sand flying up from the water toward the streets and homes. Eventually they would be covered up, restoring the dunes to how they once were. Leo took his headphones out and stuffed them into his coat pockets. He walked down to the waterline and looked at the ocean. It felt like nothing, only the huge swelling of the absence of things, present for him but at the same time annihilating—a vector in a dream he slides down into oblivion. Damage is unplanned obsolescence that contradicts the order of things. Katy Perry in Budapest, Leo at the beach. Damage is a reminder that glamour is contingent on its destructibility. He placed his hands in his coat pockets and thought about what to do next, whether he would return to the theater or fly home, back to Los Angeles. Despite how cold it was, he felt warm, and the moment of seeing a piece of cardboard fly into the sea generated in him the weird desire to say to the accumulating waves, “I haven’t told you of the most beautiful things in my lives, watching the ripple of their loss disappear along the shore, underneath ferns, face downward in the ferns my body, the naked host to my many selves, shot by a guerilla warrior or dumped from a car into ferns which are themselves journalières. The hero, trying to unhitch his parachute, stumbles over me. It is our last embrace. I have forgotten my loves, and chiefly that one, the cancerous statue, which my body could no longer contain, and against my will, against my love, become art. I could not change it into history and so remember it. I have lost what is always and everywhere present, the scene of my selves, the occasion of these ruses, which I myself and singly now must kill to save the serpent in their midst.”
YOU ARE MY DUCATI
Between the wars, Antonio Ducati and sons founded Società Scientifica Radio Brevetti Ducati in Bologna to produce radio parts. Repeatedly bombed and later reformed as a manufacturer of motorized bicycles after the defeat of the Axis, Ducati is recalled by R&B artist Ciara sixty years later in a one piece wrapped in fur, “You are my Ducati,” a motorcycle more theory than vehicle, you whom I ride are my everything. Also, Ciara of Fantasy Ride, the never-too-real always glistening at the edge of the sparkly ethos of forward motion she calls “love sex magic,” what she says she’ll “drive her body around.” Middling production of second-rate bikes for a time, yet eventually love sex magic seized in the automatic transmission, the desmodromic valve. Ducati finally distinguished itself by means of speed with the Mach 1, a motorcycle that could travel at 100 mph (its lightweight frame the color of the bill of Ciara’s Atlanta Braves baseball cap), exceptional in its design, now a collector’s item. (It doesn’t ride.) List of objects that appear in the video for Ciara’s “Ride”: a car, a mechanical bull, a chair. The Ducati Multistrada 1200, a bike of such sophistication that it rides like a breeze out of some future world, doesn’t appear in the Ride video, but its presence directs the trajectories of these objects in their collision with Ciara: “All up on your frame, baby say my name.” Everything around her rises to gossipy transcendence. Ducati’s founding mission was to manufacture the radio, a point now echoed in Ciara’s music of objective romance, constitutive in its mysteries, but perhaps only a kind of body glue, like that which secures the one-piece.
Since first listening to Ciara’s “Ride,” her 2010 chart-topper about the reversal of expectation, gender trouble loosened in the declaration that her man is her Ducati, the mobilizing object parked in the garage that begs you, slick with rain, to take hi
m for a spin, I’ve become obsessed with the Italian motorcycle company, specifically their Multistrada 1200. Ciara repurposes the bike as an interpretative tool: You are my Ducati, she sings, converting the male body of her rapidly shifting attention into the mobilizing figure of European racing sports. Where does Ciara want to go? Most likely she wants to leave you behind, lonely in the sunset as she flees with luxury trailing behind her. Her perfectly manicured fingers grip the handlebars. You are my Ducati, utilizing the rhetoric of sex to mechanize her partner into the process of love as engine of speed, you make me want to ride, glassy body exteriorized into a system of gears hieroglyphic in their trippy gorgeousness, building into a complex of metaphors a second life more exhilarating in its imitation of how well, and fast, she dances, than the first—even at the risk that it might circle back to collide with you. The song has really become rather important to me.
Ludacris, in his interlude toward the end of “Ride,” tries his best to retrieve Ciara from her liberating theory by integrating her into a series of confusing sports metaphors that situate the male in the consummate exclusionary field where he might feel most at ease, soft wet grass under the stadium lights: the football game—hurrahed by cheerleaders, the only women on the field. Their presence in the game doesn’t interrupt the play of male athletes, it cheers on the spectacle of their bodies beneath heavy equipment. In football, Ludacris can finally assert himself by forcibly removing Ciara: “I put her out like a light ... Call me the Terminator ... I gotta put her to bed.” Sports, for Ludacris, reestablishes his active, rather than passive, mobility, patching his name onto Drew Brees’s in order to “score” with a woman. He tries to capture the energy that would exempt him from becoming a Ducati, supercharging the song with his own flittering agency in the third-person: “I throw it in / touch down / he scores.” But together, Ciara and Ludacris are totally out of sync—“you better cc me,” he sings, to which Ciara replies, ignoring his call for office etiquette in order to restore her own wish: “He love the way I ride it. He can’t stand to look away.” But where else might a Ducati look?
She mounts the bike—not quite the Multistrada 1200, not quite Ludacris, but rather a dreamy, pulsing confluence of object relations, a paralyzing network of competitive masculinities, each sinking under the weight of its indebtedness to a rule of social law—luxury epitomized in the exemplary technology of speed, derived from an upper-class music of leisure transported from Italy to New York—suddenly foiled in its power by its own controlling interests. She rides it.
When I listen to Ciara, I think about what it would be like to rent a Ducati and joyride up the West Side Highway, onto 9G, toward upstate at the start of fall. I think about how fast I could go—and at what point up ahead I might permanently lock myself into the moment between ride and accident, the twin poles I imagine a motorcyclist, weaving between cars on the narrow roads of the Catskills, pivots between with a glee that accelerates toward a death indistinguishable from life. As for me, I’m transfixed by the moment speed hits a wall and the totalizing event that both binds and unbinds us to it (what I want to drive my body around), an accident breathtaking in its approach, arrives at last to slow me way the fuck down. Ciara’s dancing speeds up and slows down the known world in its claim on global time, New York’s autumn
splashed against this life
measured out in miles
per hour, to say nothing
of its explication in gallons
of oil. To ride breezily against the backdrop
of huge cost, to endorse its rush as you
fall into it, to drop low like Ciara,
below the adoring skies
of the Hudson Valley
on a Multistrada 1200 the color
of Ludacris’s sunglasses in the Ride video,
tempering agency via a touchdown
at the 2009 Super Bowl
yet smashed into the wall
of Ciara’s poetics of speed
he is hurled toward,
incapable of seeing it
before him. Listening
to Ludacris, I feel flung at her, too,
like we’re riding a Ducati into fall,
and, suddenly, we slam
into the season’s shifting weather
and are released
into the beige, yellow, and red
of autumn, pastels that sunset over us, foundering in a haze at the horizon veering from greenish blue to purple like money burning in your hands.
Later, Ciara and I meet in a semidarkened vacant mall and wander through various shops until we find a somewhat new JCPenney, swept up in creamsicle light. When we enter the department store, it turns out that Ciara and I are together the 10,000th customer and have won a Ducati motorcycle of our choice. It’s a spectacular moment, one christened by confetti as Ciara leans over in her fur to accept the hand of the JCPenney employee who congratulates us. Muzak elaborates the celebratory atmosphere of the empty department store, where no one is celebrating, at the moment of our win. I blush as I realize that here I am, with Ciara, pop star unfixed to a music that would determine her, like really it’s all pretty plastic in its one-size-fits-all quality, and though she’s in love with her beau Future, she’s in love with me, too. The JCPenney manager greets us and leads us to the back lot of the department store, into the cool breeze of a late October night, where there are ten bikes lined up, each glinting in the street light. Ciara selects the Multistrada 1200 and says, “This is the one.”
“I love it,” I tell her. The manager smiles and removes a contract from his suit pocket. He unfolds it and hands it to us. I don’t spend any time reviewing the endless pages of terms and conditions and sign immediately. He hands over the keys and the deed to the Multistrada 1200.
Ciara mounts the bike, which, at that moment, doesn’t not feel like me, and asks me to climb on. Where should we go? she asks. I can hardly speak. This moment becomes a second dream in which I imagine where I might go, out of here, so that even when I do shake myself out of it I can’t let go. I remember seeing a Ducati two falls ago on Canal before joining my friends below a moment sparkling in the presence of the Goldman Sachs employees who toasted our protest
as the actualized politics
of community eroded
downtown’s teary sense
of its ensconced
kingdom, like
we got it, OK,
you don’t want this to end,
but we do, even though in a sense
the end brought about a separate
conflict anterior to its original:
how to continue
and still be friends. On Canal,
I spotted a man on a Ducati motorcycle,
perhaps a banker or some other agent
of wealth beyond reproach,
and thought of all gross injustices served
us this, the rich white guy on his bike,
was some reminder of the fault line
that might eventually open up
to swallow him down. If histories
go fast they go faster when compelled
toward an inevitable terminus
made finally realer
in the earnest wish for its sudden
arrival, this delicate
egg of relations I’d like to hurl
at a riot cop’s helmet. The Ducati
looped in steel a black, cold ring
I would place on my own finger
but can’t because I make
pretty much nothing
and can scarcely afford the rent
of my Crown Heights apartment
let alone a motorcycle for $15k. Ciara is right: we are each our own Ducati, molded into the steel frame into which we can lean, one night in fall, to ride you, all the bodies upon whom one rides, impaled by such disasters as the sudden recognition that you can’t stand to look away, caught in the remaining sunlight, and yet must.
The cop, egg dripping from the visor lowered over
the helmet, runs forward with his club.
“Catch me in the mall, I can do this, however you want, I can do it up and down, I can do it in circles,” Ciara sings, articulating a body I cannot call my own, but might locate somewhere close to it a secondary body in which he love the way I ride it, impounded by the desire to manipulate and be manipulated into the shape of others, to become with others yet another who might race back with a club of my own, the shape of the fastest motorcycle we can find. Sleek in the discourse that describes us as the inimitable technology designed to destroy one another, I love to ride it.
Outside the JCPenney, Ciara breaks my concentration and asks if I want to go. I hesitate to ask her where, knowing the location she might suggest would be essentially absent everywhere except where it televises itself semirandomly, against the bark of a tree in the woods upstate or in the champagne glass at evening or the broken visor of the egg-soaked cop, now falling back. You make me want to ride it, Ciara sings to Ludacris standing under the street light as he debates whether or not to mount the Ducati. At this, he atomizes into the moment his appearance is rendered nostalgic, a translucent memory that hardly registered at all yet for a time was all-controlling, an event that is replaced by another in a cycle of replacement too rapid to isolate the particulars of.
Actuated methods in a cluster of instruments, loss of the self in the attenuated seams of biopolitical production, blue-faced for the fallen world dropping even faster: Tell him I’m a gymnast, tell him I’m a Ducati, tell him to get off the street, tell him to ride, tell him to step back, tell him to find me later, tell him to check
his phone, tell him to replace
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