by Jess Arndt
“Is she coming?” I ask.
We’ve used this excuse before to end up exactly here, so we know how it goes.
“No.”
We enter the half-moon of the stripper pit. Each dancer gets three songs. The first is a warm-up, the second is more athletic, kind of a talent showcase, the third is the real deal, the song she picks. Songs like Rihanna, “Pour It Up.”
In the video the hem of Rihanna’s fur coat is soaking, the light a murky green. She drags the fur onto a throne.
“They’re all lesbians, right,” I say.
I know this to be true. When I lived here my friends worked at the Lusty Lady and the Hustler Club and they were lesbians.
I would never have used that word in those days. I’d tortured myself with it as a kid. Invoking it like a mantra inside the privacy of my skull, hoping I would gag each time the word appeared or, better, because it was more extreme and therefore more convincing, actually puke. But now that I lived in New York somehow the word was okay. Upcycled even; everyone used it. My girlfriend said it, my girlfriend fucked men, even if my girlfriend fucked men and then fucked me and didn’t tell me about it I still was not at risk, I was that safe. I was a lesbian.
The stage is industrially clean. Men sit in wads along the arc, holding large glasses of something vodka-like. The lights glare purple then black then purple again. My buddy leans in. Whenever we are in strip clubs like these we put our shoulders up and wear the physiognomy of underdeveloped teenage boys.
These clubs have become kind of an issue. Lately we’ve been meeting in Vegas or Atlantic City—or she visits me in New York. Then we go to exotic rooms of the worst kind: Pumps, Sugar-
daddy’s. Even in metropolitan Queens there’ll be oversized trucks parked outside with pit bulls in the back of them—chunky sad dogs whose black leather harnesses are covered in spiked metal cones, their owners lubricating themselves from plastic cups, bare-chested, muscles slathered on in the droopy four p.m. light.
It’s similar to the way we once did drugs. A boundary existed, we put ourselves near it magnetically. If someone offered shots we’d dump half out; if someone palmed us a tiny plastic bag we’d smile, pound their shoulders no thanks, thrilled for them that they were on the road to a good time. Then somewhere in the ditch between the beginning of the night and last call, the “no” would shift positions. We weren’t interested in judging or withholding from those around us—we were good people with capacious lives, if we had to spend the next five hours locked in a bar blowing cheap Outer Mission coke with so-and-so to make them feel more human, we could do it, we had that to give.
In the morning we’d lurch awake, sweatily call each other: we felt fine! Agree that despite so-and-so’s oversensitivity and those few last shots everything had been tidy and right: bar inventory overstocked, the doors locked—chain and padlock and gate with photo on phone to prove it—all okay, presentable, all good.
“I’m still trying to understand,” said the clinician. “Let’s give it one more try. Why exactly are you here?”
I reapproach the bar, give a too-big smile, feel a kind of cool blade of exposure when the bartender looks at me. I’m not sure what I want except for her to see me entirely, which I hope means myself but also, somehow better. “Two beers, two Cazadores.”
“We only have Jose Cuervo,” she says.
I seem to have large clumps of cash jammed in all of my pockets. A phone.
I fumble with it. Texts everywhere, eight or nine of them.
I shove it in my jeans, beams of diffuse meaning pouring at her from the backs of my eyes.
In the bathroom my face is pale. Exudes a kind of drippy pouch-like quality. The toilets are empty, still I rehearse at the mirror:
Big smile. Where else should I pee? The bar floor?
Outside, I stare through the drizzly crinkle at Columbus Avenue and North Beach. A few guys trolling the corner bodega. Two bouncers insulating the door with their woolen coats. Even before Siberia, the whole book is sweaty and freezing. Like when Raskolnikov spends three days jammed up under one measly blanket, his teeth jackhammering. Of course his body had caught something—but didn’t even know what it had caught???
I scroll through the texts.
Baby it wasn’t a thing.
When you act like this it makes me WANT to fuck other
people.
I can hear the curated hip-hop where she must be, the jizz-sprayed booth of some Chinatown/L.E.S. club like Jing Fong, the complete shittiness of it all.
It’s like you’re in your own stupid world?
Back inside, my buddy is in the same place, same smile. I slide into the seat beside her. The dancer we unanimously
think is hot—by which we mean the girl who we think understands us—is on the pole mid-routine. Her legs are muscly,
tattooed with black roses. Six-inch heels.
“How’s it going,” I say to my buddy.
I see a small bale of ones in front of her. Whenever men are near us we try to outspend them, peeling cash from every financial obligation, our rent, car insurance, whatever, all of it, dumping each bill shyly down.
“I’m not sure I can come to New York,” she says.
“What?” I say over the blasting speakers. This next trip was going to be an Atlantic City plus NYC extravaganza, a ridiculous double feature.
“It’s just getting kind of . . . you know?”
I try to smooth the mass of dollars from my pocket. The dancer bends over the gap where the stage ends, slowly miming an upside-down over-the-pants dick suck to a disease-riddled Governor Christie–looking dude. She comes our way. I adjust my lap. Work to meet her eyes. Take a breath, look at my crotch, think: mound instead of hole.
We’re sharing some kind of trembling second. I know it’s stupid to believe this but I do. It says something like life is excruciating but says it prismatically—holding the completeness and incompleteness both. Then, when she’s nearest to me, with the lights zapping her nipples and everything gorgeous and breathless between us, she balks, veers back to the pole.
“What the fuck?” my buddy mouths, pouring out more ones.
“I can’t even fucking get AIDS,” I say. “Can you believe that?”
My lesbian friend who danced at the Lusty Lady liked to meet us in the bar after work. She was always chipper, always the same. The night had been great, she’d made $$$ money, of course there were ASSHOLES but there were assholes everywhere, on BART, at the Laundromat, men gumming up the street touching you whenever you walked by.
We’d laugh about it, it was funny, hysterical even.
Then there was that time in the swimming pool. Her eyes fixed on us from the bottom.
My hands are clammy. Back up at the bar: “Two Cazadores.”
“I told you before, we only have Cuervo.”
In Crime and Punishment it wasn’t the real Neva he was standing over that night, anyway, it was just the Obvodny Canal, the city’s sewer.
“Can you deal?” the bartender wants to know. “Sweetie?”
I’m nodding up and down. But doesn’t his mother come? But doesn’t his mother come?
Containers
Everyone wanted to go to Pates et Traditions like usual. It was de facto becoming the only place we hung out. “It’s et not and!” I was always being told, like currently, by Jim, at the L train’s exit.
“Nah,” I said, begging off. I was getting a pate gut. Then it was only Pilates Pilates Pilates, Pilates for days. At night I breathed the Reformer. In the morning I breathed ujjayi-style like Darth Vader. But the stubborn water wing around my belly wouldn’t deflate.
“Suit yourself,” said Jim. “It’s Monday, I wouldn’t miss the carrot pate.”
Instead I called my dealer. “What’re you doing?” I said.
“Umm, is this rhetorical?” she said. I shrugged. Tiny spring goose bumps were running up and down my arms.
“Where are you?” I
continued. I stared at an icy clump that had a stroller sticking out of it and by this point in the season was never ever going away.
“Why are you breathing like Darth Vader?” she said. “I’m at Pates et Traditions with everyone, come over.”
At length, I said I would.
She laid the product out next to the pate boards.
“Get that one,” said Jim. He poked a Captain Caveman–looking bud with a paint-spotted finger.
“Martha Stewart, good choice,” my dealer said. She put some orange goo on a fork.
“Martha Stewart?” I said. “What happened to, like, Strawberry Kush?”
“Martha Stewart’s actually a huge pot activist,” my dealer said. “I can’t believe you of all people don’t know that.”
“Yeah,” said Jim, eyebrowing me incredulously. “M. Diddy! She radicalized in jail.”
In New York, when spring finally comes, you atomize. Your sense of containment, a survival mechanism in winter, dislodges, melts. At least, this is what I thought as I walked down North Sixth. I was sad, but the sadness had a wet, loose quality that broke my chest apart as I inhaled the weed. I stepped between the sidewalk’s gray meringues and stubborn plow-made bergs. And Traditions? Et Traditions?
Under my down parka, new scars wrinkled from each armpit to sternum. Their ley lines red and tight.
I’m worried once you do it, I won’t be attracted to you anymore.
I mean what if I’m not?
I mean, what if?
I approached the river. A wind gurgled up. I breathed deep and sith-y. Luke, I’m your father. Was that what he’d said? I’d never actually seen any Star Wars movies. It was one of a vast number of childhood shames. But I did know that the moment had something to do with encountering the dark side. Now I heard a strange whistle coming out of the back of my throat, or near it.
“M. Diddy,” I said. Sure enough, she was whistling. Her platinum-ness enveloped.
We stared at the old Domino Sugar factory. Battered excavators, banana yellow. A traffic-smeared bridge.
“You can’t unboil an egg,” she said.
“It’s really good pot,” I wanted to tell her.
Beside Myself
Under the sheets I was beside myself. Every way I turned, I was there. It was hot twisted up in my IKEA Cal king. Desert towns like Flamingo Heights and Morongo sprawled beyond my windows darkly. I’d been drinking beer again, despite the new study saying hops are full of estrogen. They’d snuck it in somehow. The micro-brews, IPAs, and “hop-ocalypses” were even worse. I touched above my scars. Was the tissue regrowing?
Flax, hemp, soy all had it too. Back in LA my girlfriend knew this—too much estrogen made it hard to have a baby. I swayed at the bathroom’s doorway. She was two hours east. Hard to have a baby, together or apart.
In bed again, I spent some time Instagramming, reviewing my follow requests. Every name almost 100 percent familiar. I’d narrow in on an image. Can’t. Trying in the shock of blue light to sleuth out whose Tecate can had just been tossed onto which gallery floor, whose taste in succulents evinced real sensitivity, whose carefully composed meals were being held out for my approval. Was that who? Wasn’t that? No. Yes? I didn’t know. Casualness was key. Better to let them sit on the dock unaccepted but also unrejected.
I pulled over a desert mag from the bedside table. I was halfway into an article on the Mojave green rattlesnake. They had a neurotoxin most snakes did not. More armed, they maintained powerful enemies. The king snakes and milk snakes, namely, what the article called “other royalty.”
Other royalty also bothered me. In junior high my best friend and I had performed a less-than-consensual role-play. The friend was Queen Elizabeth. I, more flawed so more passionate, was Mary, Queen of Scots. We dropped daggers through the grates in each other’s lockers. “Mary.” “My Dear Elizabeth,” the notes read. The fight was about loyalty. How my body had sworn allegiance to something fatally perverted—gym-teacher-like—which everyone knew permanently consigned me to the two-way mirrors in the locker room, stuck with whoever was also sitting behind them, eating microwaved food and looking.
“My Dearest Mary.”
“Elizabeth.”
Living on borrowed time, I took solace knowing Mary’s dogs poured out from under her skirt, biting her executioner after her head rolled.
Outside it was mute for miles. I reached up and adjusted the bedside lamp. To protect themselves, Mojave rattlesnakes performed something called “body bridging.” Hiding their heads, they rose up from the sand in flat racket-like loops. Now each snake became larger, morphing into multiple bodies or a new composite body—made up entirely of obfuscating bends. Refusing to be consumed, each snake-self produced another, more terrifying self. I flung the magazine and turned off the light, at ease.
Drift in a new place long enough and you no longer feel your adopted world in such sharp, euphoric relief. That abandoned pinky-hued cinder block shack whose emptiness, a few days ago, was so significant? I no longer saw it, I let it enter me: we were joined. Everywhere boundaries blurred as if from out of the windows of a moving car. I was always driving anyway. Covering great distances, speeding from place to place.
There were more sex offenders in the desert than anywhere else. Everyone knew this, apparently, the same way everyone knew about the ubiquitous marines and hippies who covered the landscape or popped up from what seemed like surprising holes against the otherwise lunar flat. Was it a universe-made law—some bodies needed more space? The thought returned to me as, on a morning trip to Sky Village Swap Meet, I swerved over for a couple huddling against a scraggy creosote tree.
“Hi,” I said, zipping down the window, feeling the air-conditioning rush away.
“We’re coming from the dentist,” she said. “They unscrewed four of his teeth.”
She gestured to a wrinkled paper bag he, in an outsized Lakers jersey and oily jeans, was clutching. There was no town in any direction, at least not for miles and miles.
They couldn’t be dangerous because she was there. Or was it, I was not ever in danger? No one looked at me with letchy thoughts. No one tried to touch me in the grocery line at the Vons. I wasn’t given things, or not given things, because of my attention-soliciting bulges. I twisted the radio back to full decibels. There was a female component in every equation that either made things safer or less safe.
“We’re from Texas,” she shouted over the blare. They dutifully climbed into the back, preserving the passenger seat, I noticed, for the other me.
He nodded. “Never seen the desert! Or the mountains. Came for a funeral and just stayed!”
I surveilled the hazy glow of the road ahead. Part of him was in a bag and the rest of him was also contained by something, now my car and the white Mojave heat writhing across the jagged valley I’d likewise crammed myself into two weeks ago.
“Where to?” I shouted, gunning ahead. Newspaper headlines, six p.m. TV reports like: “Sickos masquerading as ‘a couple from Texas’ . . .” suddenly mixed with the throb of the stereo. Out here I listened exclusively to dance music, it was the only thing big enough.
Never seen the mountains? Never seen a desert? I fastened them with the rearview. What if the funeral hadn’t happened yet?
Because the death hadn’t happened yet?
“Pull over here,” the woman said, perhaps sensing my edginess.
I reclamped the wheel, we were in sight of the Valero anyway. She unbuttoned her lock. But the bag bugged me.
“Open up!” I said, craning my neck as they got out.
He shrugged and held it to me. The contents were a raw red color, having just been wrenched from his mouth.
Sky Village Swap Meet was behind the Yucca Valley Arco station; you turned into it from Old Woman Springs Road. Old Woman Screams, I always said in my head, but now I didn’t notice it, just made the matter-of-fact substitution. Old women did scream.
I parked.
/> Recently I’d been gripped with a phobia about places. It seemed to me that places were inevitably marked by their future potential. I was at Sky Village Swap Meet now. But I might also be here again. And who knew under what conditions?
I wound in among the stalls of rugs and chipped ceramics, crunched hats. This future visit scratched, waiting to humiliate me. Being beside myself made it harder. As if I were twinning and the twin of me twinning and them too, twinning again.
In LA I was trying to get my girlfriend pregnant with my brother’s sperm but his sperm had a morphological quirk that meant it wouldn’t enter the egg. Each time we tried it was beautiful, portent with signs—I woke in the middle of the night in the grip of huge white birds, I heard voices, somewhere fatherhood had started. Then nothing. This produced a rage so deep I thought I’d never be free of it, until the next month, when I begged that we try again.
I loved those aberrant microscopic shapes. Given the chance, I knew they could do things others couldn’t. Plus they seemed to prove, even more definitively than the fact I’d seen him emerge grayly from our shared mother, my brother was related to me. There was something in our mutual code that refused the dictate form as function. He was related to me; my nonworking body set the terms, enforced the relation. He’d always been mine—my responsibility, above all, not to hurt. But had my coming out so misfitting like this, years ahead, already hurt him?
I touched a stain-blotched blanket.
“Fifty bucks.”
The vendor, tanned, black cheek-scruff, was hot and loose. Fuselage, I felt, staring. I wanted to be that way. Could I, also as fuselage, jerk him off behind the dingy bathroom block, hold his junk in my palm, drive the 10 West one-handed whispering procreation songs?
I’d arrive. His sperm would shuttle through my psyche, exit my invented spigot. It had to be okay, we were on a biological deadline. Time, in this regard, was panting.