The Yelp

by Chase Compton

  I remembered the day I did “the purge.” We had been planning it all week, and he was dead-set on doing a full-blown overhaul of my disgusting apartment. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a disgusting person. All of my things are placed carefully in their rightful places. However, there was clutter and dust that was so artfully hidden that one would never notice it until they got on their hands and knees or (God forbid) looked under the bed.

  Just beneath the surface of my slumber, tucked haphazardly away, were at least a dozen paintings I had done that would never see the light of day. Some pieces were unfinished and would stay that way for eternity, and others were just plain hideous and born from a very strange abstract period that I went through both literally and emotionally. It would be a full day’s worth of work to eradicate all of the dust, scrub all of the corners, and get rid of all my pointless paintings that were hidden away.

  We scoured the floors, mopped every surface, and toiled over a bucket full of murky dirt-water. It was still hot out then, and we were caked in grime and sweat within the hour. I had to keep telling myself that this was all for a good purpose: I was going to make room for Him. Living in the West Village, you know that the apartment is the size of a very luxurious shoebox. It was small, yes, but a shoebox that was meant to house some very chic Louboutins. That and, of course, our love. How was I going to squeeze all of our love into this one tiny apartment?

  The paintings had to go. They had been terribly important to me at one point or another, and any artist will tell you that their work is like their own flesh and blood. However, I had grown out of whatever place I was in when I painted them back in the day. I was a new man! I was reborn! Like a phoenix from the ashes (of the cigarette variety, to be precise, in every single corner of the room), I was changing into something more. I was getting rid of all the filth of my former life as a sad and lonely painter. Now I had become the artist who had love and order and cleanliness of body, mind, and soul in his life. I was ready to embark upon my greatest work of art that I had ever hoped to paint: the one of Him and me.

  As we sat there on the couch and ate our well-earned Uncle Ted’s Modern Chinese food, I was the picture of happiness. I was fresh, and I was new, and I was completely and utterly his. He didn’t care that I was caked in dirt, or that I was slurping lo mein feverishly, sending sauce flying. We were just two guys in love, building a home together, and eating Chinese.

  To this day, I still keep the little piece of paper from the fortune cookie from that day on a shelf beside my bed. For months afterward, each time I looked at it, I could feel my heart breaking because he wasn’t there anymore.

  It read: “Cleaning up the past will always clear up the future!”

  Then on the back, it taught me how to say the word “Christmas” in Chinese.

  Polish National Home

  Categories: Music Venues, Dive Bars, Venues & Event Spaces

  Neighborhood: Greenpoint

  Our entire courtship was a delicate dance around a minefield of red flags. Although the signs said “stop,” I couldn’t help but throw myself headlong into the midst of a raucous and volatile affair that would forever change the course of my life. Looking back, I considered what a blatant warning it was that Courtney Love was the person who saved our relationship from burning out too early. Courtney was the reason he fell in love with me, and perhaps one of the reasons why he grew to dislike my raison d’etre. It was a hodgepodge of contradiction, but then again, wasn’t everything about us? Of course, we had “our song.” It was called “Dying,” and it was as devastating as it sounded.

  Within a month of meeting Him, we had established that we had the potential to become Sid and Nancy. Meeting Him was like a collision of two emotional freight trains running down the same track without brakes or a conductor. It was the summer that I learned to just let go and let my heart speak for itself, even if it was in a reckless and dangerous way. He, of course, was a bit more reserved in his way and kept me at a distance. He’d push me away, we’d fight and yell, then I’d pull away, and he’d grow cold, and I’d tell Him he was wrong, and he’d meet me in the park and we’d just stare at each other from a distance as we inched closer, only to fall into each other’s arms and wonder what we were fighting about to begin with. We fought. We fought for a while. But it was never intended to be that way. That’s what happens when you put two of the most emotional people in the world, who are extremely similar, in a bag together and drop in the firecracker of one’s first summer in New York City. Shit explodes.

  I had bought us tickets to see my idol, Courtney Love, perform a show at Warsaw in Greenpoint. It was the venue of my dreams—small, run-down, rustic, oddly Polish, and a little off the beaten path. We had gotten into yet another passionate row the night before the show, and he had sworn me off like he tended to do so easily. The day came, however, and I found myself at Warsaw standing next to Him with a beer in my hand and a crazy smile plastered across my face. No matter the issue at hand, I could just never say no to Him. He was everything I had ever wanted. I looked at Him like I looked at one of my rock idols: I felt in the presence of something that was timeless and legendary that one day I would write songs about.

  As the lights lowered at the Warsaw, we pushed our way to the front of the stage. I’d been to many a rock show in my life, but I had never felt such electricity in the air before. I imagined this was what it felt like to be a sixteen-year-old girl at a One Direction show. I couldn’t tell if it was Him or me or Courtney that was raising the stakes to a new high. My heart beat like a locomotive, and my temperature rose until my forehead was damp with anxious sweat. I looked over at Him standing next to me and saw that heat had taken Him over as well. His beautiful mane of dark brown hair had fallen from its glorious coif and into a pile of sweaty tendrils. I’d never been so attracted to Him before, and I never expected this side of Him to exist. The cute boy from the park and the coffee shop and the West Village was standing next to me at the rock show to end all rock shows. I grabbed his hand and began to scream wildly as Courtney took to the stage and hoisted her guitar like only Courtney could.

  The show was an epic mire of beer and screaming and sweat and moshing. Every so often I would catch myself turning to him like a child at Disneyland would turn to his parent as if to ask “Did you see that?” about some sparkle, or firework, or character. The best part of the entire night was that he saw, for the first time, who I really was. And from the looks of it, he really liked it. His smile spoke volumes—it pushed me to scream even louder, to jump higher, and to push harder into the frenzy that enveloped us.

  As time wore on, eventually he would come to criticize me for the person he met there on that night at the Warsaw. He grew harsh and rigid when I raised my middle finger to conformity and a life of structure. My life was a mosh pit, and at times he wished it were an office cubicle. He worried that I would forever be that sweaty hellion that would never clean up enough to make it “in the real world.”

  The real world was overrated, and I knew it from the start. I wanted to live in that moment at the Warsaw, basking in the greatness of rock and roll royalty forever. There were still aftershocks of that night for months after, and I could close my eyes and remember how I turned to Him as Courtney began to sing “For Once in Your Life.” I looked Him dead in the eye and began to cry tears of joy because I’d never been happier in my life. I’d never come close to something so perfect and so rare as this, and I held it in my hand and kissed it on the mouth.

  “Please stick around and I’ll build you a world,” Courtney sang.

  I vowed to do just that.

  Minetta Tavern

  Categories: French, American (New), Breakfast & Brunch

  Neighborhood: Greenwich Village

  The West Village is the most romantic place on earth. This is an undisputed fact for anyone who has been here in the springtime with a person they love. I sometimes have a hard time putting into words exactly why, but I’m pretty sure it has something to
do with the way the sunlight filters through the leaves on the tree-lined streets and onto the flesh that has been newly kissed by sunlight after a long winter of melting into the color of buttermilk. It has a lot to do with that feeling of rebirth.

  I’ve lived on what I consider to be the best street in all of Manhattan for almost four years now. Minetta Lane is the most pristine, quiet, quaint, and tree-lined block in all of the West Village. Save for a few occasional drunkards stumbling over from Macdougal Street, it’s always completely bare of traffic by both foot and car. It’s been the backdrop for many pivotal moments in my young life. In the summer, I walked down it arm and arm with Him, giddy with laughter and excitement til we literally fell into the middle of the street to lie there. We just laid there in the middle of the street and kissed. He lay on top of me and pressed me down hard into the asphalt to the point of it almost hurting and stared into my eyes between passionate kisses and laughter. It must have been a sight to see for the tourist groups that sometimes walk down the street. “And on your left, in typical Greenwich Village fashion, we see two homosexuals in their native habitat performing their elusive courting ritual: the middle-of-the-street make-out.”

  In the winter, it was the scene of what I assumed would be the last time I ever saw Him. He had fallen to the ground amidst the fallen leaves and curled up into a tiny ball of hysteria. So many times he sobbed how sorry he was and how he didn’t want me to leave. I was going to California the next day. My heart had been broken, and my trust betrayed. As beautiful as it was and no matter how much I adored it, Minetta Lane would be the death of me were I to stay. I wouldn’t be able to walk down my very own street without thinking of Him and all that he had meant to me. I would always think of the summer, and not the winter that I found out that he was a liar and a cheat and didn’t want to commit to being in love with me. I had to get the hell out of there.

  On the corner of the street is Minetta Tavern, another backdrop for one of our many passionate rows. I had picked Him up from work; he was starving as usual. It was raining out, and in tow I carried a small jade plant that I had bought Him for his apartment, which was desolate and completely barren of life. Naturally, the jade plant ended up living at my place anyway, as he was never even at his own apartment. We were inseparable. Yet somehow that night, over a deliciously decadent Black Label Burger for which they are so famous, we came to blows over the same issue that we always did: his need to see other people. As always, it crushed me. I couldn’t, for the life of me, understand how he couldn’t see that the person who went shopping in the rain for a beacon of joy for his life was, in fact, the person that he should be with. Call it addiction to the attention from other men, call it selfishness, call it cold, call it what you will. I just couldn’t wrap my head around it. I wanted to be the one so badly.

  So we ate our burgers angrily just to get out of there as soon as possible. It was everything they say about the famed Black Label Burger. It was luxurious and rich and satisfying—just like my decadent little street in the West Village. As he fumed at me from across the table and spat out his standard criticism about my puritanical ways for needing a commitment, I sat and thought about what was going on outside. My back began to ache with a phantom pain of being crushed beneath his weight in the middle of the street, and my lips began to chap as his kisses suddenly dried and withered away.

  Chapter Three

  IT WOULDN’T HAVE HAPPENED with anyone else. All of these rose-colored daydreams and adventures wouldn’t have happened with an ordinary man. There was something about Him that drove me wild, and I struggled every day to put my finger on exactly what it was. This freak, this weirdo, this walking funhouse of a man did something to me that made me lose control over my rational mind. Sure, I’d loved before—largely and intensely, with no holds barred. There was something different about loving Him that made all of the insanity seem to make sense.

  The whole business of love was a skewed concept to begin with. I had been led to believe that it would happen in a very specific way that had been depicted in fairytales since the dawn of time. I had learned to look for love through my upbringing, which, the more I thought about it, seemed increasingly like a stretch from reality. I thought of my parents, who were still married and wildly in love. They never had to think about each other emailing pictures of their buttholes to ex-lovers at the swipe of a finger just because they felt like it. There was something much simpler about how and why they decided to stay together and form the bond that had kept them as partners for all of these years.

  When one thinks of fairytales, one doesn’t tend to think of all of the bullshit that came along with forming a relationship in 2013. This modern love—it had to deal with all kinds of deal-breakers: cell phones, social media, apps. These “breakthroughs” in how we related to each other had changed the way we experienced this so-called “real life.” We see each other’s lives through a carefully curated kaleidoscope of selfies, pictures of coffees, and suggestive poses that best capture every angle needed to stir a desire.

  The world was becoming more and more deeply entrenched in the vast nothingness of the Internet. This was of course proven as even I, once a shy and private person by nature, began to splatter my love story on the forum of Yelp. Once I had begun to expose myself, it became like a drug to me. It was an almost instantaneous catharsis, as quick-hitting as heroin and just as numbing. Our private lives, although anonymous and hidden in plain sight, became suddenly “real” as I put them into words. The cups of coffee, the walks in the park, the kissing under flickering streetlamps—all were no longer the precious and private moments that I wanted to remember forever in my mind. Now they were something “concrete” that I could conjure into the forefront of my memory at the click of a button.

  Before all of this, there was a time in our history that was simple and quiet. In the first week of our courtship, he lost his iPhone in the back of a cab as we were drunkenly buzzing around the West Village in full swoon. After we returned to my apartment, cloudy with Negroni-haze and infatuation, he just stared into my eyes as we lay in my bed caressing each other and kissing. He said it didn’t matter that he lost his phone. I was the only person he ever called anyway, and I was right there in front of Him, on top of Him, and inside of Him every minute of every day. He had no need to capture every stupid and beautiful moment we shared in a sepia filter to share with the world at large. We existed in real time, rarely apart long enough to consider the notion of missing each other.

  He ended up going more than a month without a phone, and it was a dream come true. By instinct, he would know where to find me at any given point in the day, like when I would be done with work and he would be waiting for me patiently outside, smoking cigarettes and fidgeting like a dog waiting for its owner to come out. During this part of our relationship, we did not capture our intense and insane love, and we did not share pictures and status updates on our respective social medias. It was private and real and only our own. It belonged to only me and Him, and this was the happiest I would ever be in the entirety of our relationship.

  Time passed, and he eventually got a phone again. Eventually, he used his phone to reconnect with a digital world that was far beyond the boundaries of the little love-bubble we had created together. We both did. He would download Grindr while I was at work and talk to his fans and admirers on Facebook and Instagram, and I would tell the world of Yelp why I had loved Him so madly. He would contact his ex-boyfriends and tell them he missed them, and I would gush about how my heart filled with limitless joy watching Him eat pastrami sandwiches. It was a tough pill to swallow when I eventually learned that it was not the Internet itself that was to blame for the downfall of our love but how we as individuals chose to use it.

  Our love story existed in a strange and ultra-modern way. Perhaps it was a sign of the times, and this was how love was to evolve for all of us. I struggled to recall what it was like before all of the mess that technology made of the heart.

  On o
ne particular day, he was having one of his regular fits of panic while we were taking a walk through the village. I held his hand as we walked and tried to calm his nerves with my standard brand of idiocy that usually made Him relax or at least smile or laugh. It was springtime, and the trees in the village were bursting with big bouquets of pink fluff. Releasing his hand, I ran up to one of the pink clouds that was shedding cotton-candy–like confetti on the sidewalk beneath it. Giving little care to the fact that I knew that it would make me filthy and covered in dirt, I lay down on the sidewalk and began to roll around in the petals. His face lit up with that smile that I lived to conjure, and he stood above me. He laughed and took pictures of me surrounded by the pink and posted them on his Instagram with some stupid little caption about being in love or in spring or something. Of course he would delete it from his feed within days after one of his typical eleventh-hour breakups, and my stain on his cyber life would be only a distant memory. But I still had pink petals showing up in my laundry long after the fact.

  Even though I knew I was delete-able from his life, I struggled to find a way to keep what had really happened between us in my life. We got tattoos that would forever mark our bodies with the memory of the beautiful disaster we curated with the brilliant backdrop of New York City. On his forearm he got a tattoo that memorialized the day we spent at the aquarium in Coney Island, eating hot dogs and ice cream and feeling alive. I got mine on my arm, too, to commemorate the special days we spent together in Tompkins Square Park drinking coffee and existing in unison. These were the things that could never be deleted or hidden from our timeline. These were the permanent stories our skin would tell even after we tried to forget that they ever happened. As foolish as it may have been, I wanted it to be known that I wanted it to be forever. I never wanted to forget that before all of the lies and cheating and blame and tears and hunger and hurt, there was something between us that had lit my life on fire.