If there was an ocean in Brooklyn, wouldn’t someone have tipped me off?
I wasn’t going to spend time making sense of Coney Island that day, not before I had slept properly or had at least gotten a cup of coffee. I turned to wait for the D train to take me back to Manhattan, but since it was the end of the line, the train was still there and the doors were still open.
Initials carved into a tree scheduled to be chopped down, lucky pennies dropped into sidewalk cement at construction sites, undiscovered suicide pacts, lost manuscripts, perfectly imagined gold medal attempts, cracks in wine glasses that spell your name after you throw them out, walkie-talkies with nobody on the other end.
When I got home, Derek was leaning over the TraceBox™, scrubbing Wink’s shell with a toothbrush.
“Hey,” I said.
“Good morning.”
I fixed myself a breakfast of Red Bull, bagels, and wasabi cream cheese. I looked around for paint smudges, smeared palettes, a full ashtray—any kind of evidence that Derek was being creative, and that I was being a good muse and delivering my half of the deal. Instead, I saw the piles of magazines that he had apparently begun to sort by title.
Hmmm.
“Maybe I forgot to tell you that you could sleep here as well,” Derek said, polishing Nod with a squirt of Colgate.
“I got a modeling job last night at the club.”
“Good for you.”
He was scrubbing like they teach you, in little circles.
“Derek, you told me to go there,” I said.
“I know.”
He turned and smiled at me.
“I’m happy for you. I was wondering when you’d move up in the food chain.”
Even if he was being sincere, the rest of my bagel and cream cheese tasted like paper and mud. There are some things you just don’t say.
“What did you think of Jason?” he said.
“You fucking set us up?”
“Please don’t swear so much. I wanted you to get a good gig, but—”
“I can’t believe you.”
“—but I was expecting you to come home last night. That’s all.”
Because graffiti is among the most expensive art forms, because art matters, because movies aren’t called movies, they’re called films, because the rats underground are bigger than most dogs on Central Park West, because you can fall asleep on a Brooklyn-bound D train and wake up at the ocean.
I wasn’t surprised when I walked into alt.coffee and saw Chase screaming on the floor, re-enacting his famous scene for an audience staring indifferently over their cappuccino foam.
“Aaaaaaaggghhhh! Just gimme back my legs so I can walk to school!”
A rush of keyboard clicks from the counter. Forest was surfing the Internet, proving that being earthcore didn’t exclude you from the wonders of 90s technology.
“Listen to this,” she said. “According to this fansite, when you feed Chase’s scream into an oscillograph—”
“Aaaaaaaggghhhh! I promise I’ll run to school!”
“—and turn it into a sound wave, it has the exact same sonic peaks as an earthquake after fall equinox.”
She turned to Chase and melted. “Baby, you’re like, totally seasonal.”
“No, I’m not. I’m Hollywood. Hey, mister writer.”
I helped him up.
“How’s the novel?” he said.
That diamond-cut smile. I could tell he was trying.
“It was a short story, and it got rejected.”
“Was it a form letter?”
“It got pretty personal.”
“That’s fantastic.”
“Don’t humiliate him,” Forest said.
“I’m being serious,” Chase said. “It wasn’t a form letter, so it means they love him, sort of.”
“They like you,” Forest said to me. “Almost.”
Chase clapped his hand on my shoulder.
“You’re one step closer to making a movie. Isn’t that why you write, so they’ll make a movie out of it?”
As Chase carefully repositioned a strand of hair, I drank the bitter grinds of my coffee and wondered why I hung out with these two. They were like the residual flashes that followed a lightning storm—in your face, but superfluous.
Forest was being quiet and weird. She glanced at my crotch, gave me a smirk, then tilted the computer screen so she could be alone with it.
Something was up.
I suddenly felt like I was back in the Williamsburg elevator—light and unreal.
“Show it to me,” I said.
She turned the screen that changed my day from mediocre to rotten:
I recognized the La-Z-Boy, the Lego coffee table, my kink of pubic hair. Images, frames. Everything was backwards. Someone had rearranged time, shifting events around like they were Post-it notes.
I piss in a glass.
I drink the liquid.
I give the world my saddest face.
The website was called Forced to Guzzle.
Holy tit-clamping Mother of God.
“Dude,” Chase said, “if you’re into drinking your own piss, then you have to make a movie.”
And suddenly there was a photographer out there I wanted to murder. I think his name was Brent. Or maybe Raoul. And Derek was going to get it, too.
I got another envelope today.
The return address was Zoetrope All-Story magazine, the brainchild of Francis Ford Coppola, a fifty-pager that made careers. Getting published in Zoetrope supposedly made you famous and got you catered luncheons where the wine had a cork, not a screw top.
The envelope was crisp and done up in Helvetica letterhead. I didn’t open it right away, wanting to savor the letter before it could hurt me.
But I was feeling pretty confident about the latest submission. I had taken my time to flesh it out, then deconstruct it and put it back together, checking to see if the character was strong enough to rematerialize intact. I spent many afternoons in Barnes and Noble (yeah, now they let me in) poring over writing guides, learning what malapropisms will get you rejected at first glance, what kind of dialogue will make a character sound hollow, the importance of interior monologue, and how to avoid pulling punches that need to hit hard.
I tightened my grammar, plotted my story arcs for effective buildup and release, and memorized successful query letters word-forword. I did my homework.
Oh, but that was not enough.
You cannot lay genius to paper, page fifty-two of The UnFrustrated Writer says, if you are not in a suitably controlled environment.
Tompkins Square Park in the East Village was ideal, specifically because of the maze-like layout that disoriented me just enough to get me lost in the story, and because I had to hop a fence and disobey a Parks Department sign to get to the shady patches of grass.
You cannot write heroically if you live a take-no-chances, conventional life, page thirty-nine says.
I found solidarity in watching other writers disappear into their notebooks. We kept each other in check, stopped each other from floating away to the distractions of spring.
I wrote my story.
The kid was sick of being force-fed Ritalin, coerced with pills into moods that overwhelmed him and followed him around like cloud cover. Nobody had the right to control his interior weather like that.
He decided to strike back.
He learned how to fake taking his pills, and built up a secret stash that he gradually introduced into his parents’ food supply. Noodles were the perfect camouflage for pills because he could noodle them in, and so was hot soup because they melted. The kid now cooked breakfast, lunch, and dinner for his parents, and did it with pleasure.
While they floated through the world in a forced state of being “with it,” the kid got back to the business of living. He discovered other ways of focusing, treatments that the adult world didn’t recognize. He found that by sneaking close to his sleeping father and palming one of his huge testicles, turning it aro
und and documenting its shape, color, texture, and smell, he could plug into the realities of life.
Then he would put it away and try to imagine it. On good days, his brain could turn his father’s testicle into a 3-D egg bobbing in his head. The wormy tubes, the pubic dusting, the filigree veins. It was pleasurable to wrap his mind around something so tangible. He found other objects to focus on, not all of them in his father’s underwear.
Perhaps he had fed his parents too much Ritalin, because they began to vomit, convulse, soar through euphoria, drool through delirium, and experience heart palpitations.
By the time his parents realized what was going on, the kid had built up such an arsenal of useful and comforting objects in his mind that when they shipped him off to reform school, he knew he would be able to cope.
Dear Mr Marshall,
Thank you for submitting your story, Cerebral Immunity.
After careful consideration, we have decided not to publish it. The story is well written, but doesn’t seem plausible enough to justify the level of intimacy you encourage between the reader and the protagonist. We need to be absolutely convinced that this really happened to the character.
Also, we do not publish paedophilia.
Feel free to send us more of your work, and best of luck with your writing endeavors.
The Publishers
The envelope was, but the envelope is no more.
It is unlikely that you will become a published author, page seventy-five of the UnFrustrated Writer says, if you hold on to your failures.
“I notice you’re not too interested in paying the rent we agreed on,” Derek says.
“Forced to Guzzle,” I say.
“I didn’t know he was going to do that.”
“Can’t wait for the sequel. Any other friends of yours I should work with? Anyways, it’s not like you need the money.”
“That’s right,” he says. “Turtle paintings are all the rage right now.”
“I hate it when you’re like that.”
“Pulling your own weight. That’s all this is about.”
“You should talk. I see the checks your mom sends.”
“That’s different,” he says. “We have an arrangement.”
I wouldn’t have learned how to ride the subway for free if they hadn’t revealed the secret in the Daily News. There was this guy who had figured out how to bend MetroCards in just the right place, creasing a mysterious point in the magnetic strip to romance the turnstiles forever. He hadn’t paid a fare in years. When they finally caught him, he was wearing a brass knuckles-type ring that fit across all four fingers, with the word TRANSIT spelled out in diamonds. Paid for, supposedly, with the money he had saved on subway fare.
The day I read the article, I scavenged a stack of old MetroCards, sat in the corner of a subway entrance, and put them through a fork until I bent one just right.
Ka-ching.
I was supposed to change trains downtown to go see this photographer guy (the back of the Village Voice is a goldmine), but I dozed off. I dreamt about someone sitting me on a dinner table and bending me different ways through a fork until my services were indefinitely free. I remember squeezing through the metal prongs, escaping just in time, though I couldn’t see who had been doing the bending.
“LASTSTOPLASTSTOPLASTSTOP, everbodyouteverybodyout.”
By the time I pried my drooling jaw off the Dr Zizmor ad (dermatological celebrity—you don’t want to know), I was the last one left on the train. I ran for the doors and dove out just as they were closing.
The ocean. Although it’s always in the same place, Coney Island is always a surprise.
The ocean ended at the sand, and the sand kept Astroland Amusement Park from sliding into the water.
The Cyclone: A screaming rollercoaster bristling with arms, hoisted on termite-eaten stilts the width of matchsticks. All bend and creak, this death trap. Perhaps it changed you by displacing your center of gravity to outside your body, to the top of the track where you took your last breath.
The Wonder Wheel: The Ferris mothership, spinning like a giant hamster wheel, offering you the freedom of the open sky, a place to make out and puke while locked in a cage. Perhaps it changed you by giving you infinite power that you could do nothing with.
The Astrotower: The best place to watch carnies scamming dollar bills, moms rifling paintballs at clowns, vendors trawling the beach with cotton candy and Heineken, New Jersey prom queens noshing hot dogs, and kids riding mattresses lost at sea.
Perhaps the rides only changed you when they broke down and stranded you, hanging there, high above nothing you’d care to return to.
The best rides, the ones that didn’t move, were gone. I could hear echoes of Dreamland, where the world had come so many years ago to sway motionless, ogle the million light bulbs, and marvel over the wonders of electricity. When the bulbs shorted out and the wonders of electricity set fire to the zoo, these people ran screaming from the flaming zebras and tigers that were escaping into Brooklyn.
Running from lions with manes of fire.
I left Astroland and got lost in the noise of Surf Avenue, past a newsstand where Russians were screaming at soccer on TV. I came to a sign that said Shit and Ephemera and ducked inside, and by the time I figured out that they did tattoos, a woman had handed me a white towel.
“Trash it.”
“I don’t work here.”
“Who says I’d hire you? Anyways, what do you want? Let me guess, the Ramones on your ass.”
“Actually, no.”
I examined the towel.
“Tell me this is blood.”
“Crucifixion Crimson, made to look like the inside of Christ on impalement day. You want some?”
She held her tattoo gun over the empty chair.
“I’d like to see a catalogue, please.”
She rolled her eyes and gave me a black binder spilling with images. It didn’t take me long to find something I liked, something representative, a tattoo that chose me as much as I chose it. Something to remind me of Coney Island when I was trapped in the city.
“Hmmh,” she said.
She wrapped the flames around my waist, lick by lick. Fire cannot be counted, and neither can animals when they swarm you. Orange, yellow, and red melded in infinite measures. That’s how it is with life. With pain, I mean.
Every day I look at my tattoo and it reminds me that whatever I do below the waist usually causes me pain. The shitty part is that no two burns are the same, so I can never steel myself beforehand.
At least I didn’t return to Manhattan the same boy.
I found myself on the sixth floor of a Tribeca walk-up, out of breath and staring at the door, wondering what this address I had culled from the wanted ads was going to make me do.
He opened the door. Fifty-five, fifty-six, a wizened man with eyes of blue crystal, white goatee and hair buzzed short, a body that had grown comfortable with itself. I usually get hard around these daddy types, but this one had a different vibe.
“Right, I’m Richard Rorschach, so you’re here, so tell me about yourself.”
“I don’t do Internet shoots, and I don’t drink piss,” I said.
He gave me a hurt look.
“Don’t worry, we’re not going to do that, so I just want you to relax. There’s no pressure, right? Tell me about your day.”
I figured he was just pulling a chatty routine to get me to shuck, so to save us both some time I gave him the merchandise right off. I had already developed a little stripping act: flex my biceps and toss my bangs, unfurl my T-shirt over my head, stare into space like I was reconsidering, then insolently kick off my Fiorucci sneakers like I’d rather be at the dentist. They crash-landed into an aloe vera plant in the corner. I had yet to perfect the finer points.
“What are you doing?” he said.
“Just wait.”
I cocked my head, gave him the Jaeven lip sneer, undid my belt buckle, and let my jeans fall to the floor. I t
urned around and spread’em. I spread those cheeks so wide that if I had farted just then, it would’ve been a sigh.
“Come on, you don’t have to do that, it’s not you.”
“You don’t know anything about me.”
“If you were a plastic go-go boy, you would’ve checked yourself in the mirror by now. Like, come on, right? So go get your shoes and show me the real you.”
I fetched my sneakers, bent an aloe tentacle back into place, and returned to Richard. He led me into a pale blue, nearly empty living room, though it was big enough to be a studio.
I watched my hands as they began to move, tying and untying the dirty shoelaces. I had walked this city inside out in these shoes, picking up scuffmarks and lessons along the way.
“Look at you, that’s it.”
“What?”
“Whatever you’re doing. You’re being you.”
“Who else would I be?”
“Right, yeah, well some people can’t be themselves.”
And in that moment, I felt naked for the first time in my life, as silly as that sounds. I had never felt so vulnerable before, or so beautiful. My tattoo was oozing, and it hurt me tender and deep.
It felt like I had just bumped my head against the wooden walls of my TraceBox™.
Richard had become a lens, the lens of a boxy Hasselblad camera mounted on a tripod. It was an old-fashioned clunker that hid him quite well.
“So tell me your story, tell me about the shoes. I like to sniff around old stuff. You know, I’m a goat. But I promise not to eat them.”
I felt stupid for not having noticed their condition before. The white leather high-tops had been worked supple and raw, and so had the textile inlay with the Fiorucci logo. I had missed a shoelace eyelet on each one. The soles were worn down unevenly and made me wonder if I had a limp I didn’t know about. There was bubble gum stuck in the treads.
It was painfully quiet in the room.
With Richard, there was no music.
“Tell me the story,” he said again.
“They came with my first apartment.”
Shuck Page 4