by Julia Scott
The following year, I enrolled at UC Santa Cruz, pursuing a degree in psychology. But the role of tortured artist is difficult to shed, and poetry remained a strong focus. The bacchanal of college life provided yet another agar for purple verse.
Reading back over these poems today, it seems they share a theme of love-torn angst—the overarching mind-set of my twenties. I wish I could say they embarrass me, but I sort of envy that obsessive young writer. He threw himself into matters of the heart so urgently, so shamelessly. But much of him is still familiar to me, after all these years. I may have shed my illusions about the mystical power of washing machines, but I never outgrew my fascination with marine mammals.
—J.G.
JULIA SCOTT
TEN MINUTES TO MIDNIGHT
JULIA SCOTT is a radio producer, journalist, and essayist based in San Francisco. Her work has been collected in The Best American Science Writing. Her stories have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Modern Farmer, Nautilus, Salon, and on PRI’s Marketplace and the BBC World Service. Oh, yeah, she also edited this book. No regrets there. She just wishes you weren’t about to read on.
At ten minutes to midnight on October 26, 2000, I walked out on the balcony of my dorm room in Paris with a notebook. I was living in Paris for my junior year abroad, and I remember the streets were quiet and dark—the perfect setting for what was to come.
In ten minutes, I would turn twenty—a birthday I had been waiting for for so long that the moment itself felt too momentous to ignore. (I was also in the midst of a full-blown existential crisis—very Parisian—and had been awake, tossing and turning, on each dark night that year.) So feel free to picture me as I was that night, a virginal nineteen-year-old in a flannel nightgown, alone and shivering on a balcony with a notebook and facing the last night of her teenage years. Here is what I wrote.
—J.S.
10/26/00
11:50 p.m.
I am about to write a paragraph of HYPOCRISY, because although I am about to write that I attach no significance whatsoever to my 20th birthday, this is belied by the fact that I am desperately writing about it in the last moment of my “adolescence.”
But it’s true—I could care less about my birthday. Birthdays themselves are as arbitrary as the dates and hours that were invented to hold time in the hot hand of humanity.
The number “20” is as meaningless as the hour I fixed at the top of this entry. And any significance I attach to it is socially constructed. This fact was reinforced by the sudden realization, while standing by the window and waiting for midnight to arrive, that my birthday had already begun in North America!
If I MUST attach any significance to an artificial number that indicates neither a “phase” nor a “milestone,” I would say that, taking it at face value, it indicates a new set of experiences to be had. To use the term “the twenties”—the twenties have GOT to be better than the “teens.” That is why I am happy to age, to definitively (at least from the point of view of OTHERS who attach importance to “20”), say that those years are behind me.
Why not use “20” as a jumping-off point for a happier, healthier Julia?
At the same time, in contemplating the fact that I have been on this earth for twenty human years, I become unbelievably hopeless. Twenty years, within the course of nature’s history, is dust. It’s dust on dust.
It’s atoms on dust on dust.
And yet, for my “20” years, I feel as though I haven’t yet read enough, haven’t thought or felt enough. I should have a chef d’oeuvre to show for it by now, shouldn’t I, or at least be very, very wise?
I feel like I’m not SEEING enough. Where are the moments of absolute suffering and joy that complement each other in a cycle of happiness and pain, love and hate?
I want to experience LIFE viscerally, but at the same time step back and think about it all. Most of all, I’m afraid that in the coming years all my midnight scribblings will come to nothing, and are just the self-centered scratches of someone who knows of no other way to lend significance to her life.
NATHANIEL RICH
2 DEAD MOO: AS SICK AND PERVERTED AS THEY WANNA BE
Nathaniel Rich and his friend Charley.
NATHANIEL RICH is the author of two novels, Odds Against Tomorrow and The Mayor’s Tongue. His essays appear regularly in the New York Review of Books, Harper’s, Rolling Stone, and the New York Times Magazine. He lives in New Orleans.
My grandfather’s generation had Glenn Miller; my father had John Lennon. I had Luke Skyywalker. Not the character from Star Wars—the Miami rapper best known as the frontman for the 2 Live Crew. In 1989, the year that As Nasty As They Wanna Be was released, I did not know what “Put Her in the Buck” meant, but that song, along with such chestnuts as “My Seven Bizzos,” “Bad Ass Bitch,” “The Fuck Shop,” and the single that elevated 2 Live Crew to national notoriety and double-platinum record sales, “Me So Horny,” mesmerized me. Those songs, and their lyrics, were unlike anything I had ever heard before. In retrospect this is not particularly surprising because at the time I’d just turned nine years old.
My parents did not allow me to buy the album. I had to settle instead for the bowdlerized version, As Clean As They Wanna Be. (A sample lyric change: “Sitting at home with my dick on hard” became “Sitting at home watching Arsenio Hall.”) But my friend Charley Stern—who that year had become something of a celebrity at our elementary school for appearing on Reading Rainbow, where he recommend Ezra Jack Keats’s The Snowy Day, a picture book about a boy named Peter who makes a snowman—had somehow obtained a samizdat copy of the explicit version. Charley brought it to school one day, hidden in a Yanni case. We were good kids, angelically behaved, adoring of our mothers and teachers, and just the act of staring at the cassette—in the boys’ bathroom, the door locked—felt illicit, forbidden, and more than a little dangerous. We pledged to listen to the album together, in its entirety. We asked our parents to arrange a sleepover at his house for the coming Friday night. When the day finally arrived, we locked ourselves in his bedroom and listened to the album straight through six times in a row in the closest thing to a narcotized daze that is possible for a pair of nine-year-olds.
Over dinner, in a fit of inspiration and giddiness, we had a revelation. We would make a tribute album. Charley had everything we’d need: a Casio synthesizer that could loop keyboard and beats; a Playskool turntable and an EPMD album that we would scratch during rap breaks; a blank cassette; a tape recorder. We called ourselves the 2 Dead Moo.
We spent about six hours writing the music and lyrics for sixteen songs, in which we tried, to the best of our abilities, to match the porno-crazed deviance of the Crew. (There was one exception: our song “Me So Boring” was more satire than emulation; it was about a guy who, instead of picking up girls at strip clubs and having sex with them like Luke Skyywalker, stayed at home and ate peanut butter sandwiches.) As nine-year-olds who had never imagined trying to kiss a girl, we knew it would not be easy to outdo lines like “She’ll climb a mount, even run the block / Just to kiss the head of this big black cock” (from “Dick Almighty”); or the frenzied call-and-response of “Do You Believe in Having Sex?” (“All the ladies say, ‘Eat this pussy, eat-eat this puss-say.’”) But we’d try.
We didn’t sleep that night; it was the most feverishly creative twenty-four hours of my life. We practiced a song until we had it down, then we’d record it in a single take. When my mother came to pick me up the following afternoon, we had just completed the album, As Sick and Perverted As They Wanna Be, including liner notes and cover art. Not that I told her about it.
I’m proud to say that, twenty-five years later, the lyrics still have the power to shock—to shock my wife at least. This is why I’m withholding, for instance, the lyrics to our opening track, “Buttfuckin’.”
As you read these excerpts, keep in mind that they were per
formed by two boys with falsetto voices. Please don’t show this to my mother. Or yours.
—N.R.
OPENING SKIT:
Mother’s voice: Tony, what are you listening to?
Kid: Oh, it’s just the New Kids on the Block.
Mother: What sweet boys. OK, I’ll leave now.
Kid: Enough of this bullshit. It’s time to listen to the 2 DEAD MOO.
“We Is Who We Am”
We is who we am
And that’s who we want to be
If you call us dicks, that’s okay with WE
We talk about pussies
Dicks and asses, too
If you think that’s crazy
We’ll throw you in a zoo
“Get Funky”
When you listen to the Moo, you get busy
You dance so much that you’re dizzy
You get horny after every show
You go to the whorehouse
And you get yourself a ho
You lick her tits and start to chew
And you shout out loud,
“We’re the 2 Dead Moo!”
“Ain’t No Sucka”
Don’t try to impress me
’Cause you’ll wind up having sex with me
Your pussy, it ain’t good
Please don’t treat it like it’s wood
Oh my god, you’re a hooker
Well, I ain’t no sucka
Remember, I’m on the mic
And I’m the right kind of guy to
Fuck with, yeah, me and you
Hand in hand, in and out
Fuckin’ all night and I’m gonna shout
Oooh, he’s just a fucker
What was that?
I ain’t no sucka
“Da Ho”
Oh shit
I was at a whorehouse, watching a show
DA HO
Up in my attic, looking down
I saw one horny ho in a gown
I said, “Yo, ho, come to your bro.”
She said, “Fine! Is there wine?”
I said, “Yeah, we can dine.”
She came up and had a 7UP
And then—she threw up
Even when she was sick, she really could go
Then she left and now I miss . . . DA HO
She sucks a good dick!
“How to Eat a Pussy”
A little bit of trouble, but it’s worth the wait
When she comes, it will go all over your face
The first time I did it, I was 29
The girl really liked it and so did I
It tastes like apples; crunchy and mushy
That’s the first time that I ate a pussy
CHUCK PALAHNIUK
DEAR MR. POL POT
CHUCK PALAHNIUK is the bestselling author of Fight Club, Choke, and a dozen other books, the most recent of which are Doomed and Beautiful You. In 1975, his younger sister, Heidi, became a celebrity at Columbia Middle School in Burbank, Washington, when she received a tersely worded letter from the Pinochet government, banning her from ever entering Chile.
In 1972, when I was ten years old and my sister, Heidi, was nine, we both joined Amnesty International.
Each month the group sent us a newsletter describing then current human rights violations, focusing mainly on the people being tortured as political prisoners. The newsletter also gave the names and mailing addresses of their captors and encouraged us to write in protest. It was the golden age of the letter-writing campaign.
Our family had a typewriter our mother had bought in the 1950s and used so sparingly that it still had its original ribbon. We also owned a complete set of the World Book Encyclopedia, which was chockablock with fancy-pants words, useful facts, slightly out-of-date movie star photographs, and maps. A few of them printed in color! Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was the last political detainee to register on our mother’s radar, and since he’d won the Nobel Prize in 1970, she encouraged us to write in pencil like her hero. Besides, typewriter ribbons were too costly for kids to waste. My sister took it a step further and wrote in purple crayon. Heidi wrote as a nine-year-old girl in fourth grade, attempting to shame whatever dictator with her child’s superior sense of morality.
I, on the other hand, knew the truth: coldhearted fascists couldn’t be shamed.
I was in fifth grade and was well acquainted with bullies. “Baby Doc” Duvalier, Augusto Pinochet, Francisco Franco, or Mobutu Sese Seko would only laugh coldly while reading my little sister’s erstwhile plea and then sip a refreshing draught of human blood out of a cup fashioned from a skull before immediately going back to lashing some trussed-up, half-naked ideological opponent.
This was the 1970s, the era of détente, but wily diplomacy and clever statecraft could only get a person so far with pen pals like Nicolae Ceauşescu. The sole thing bullies understood was power. This was my chance to be a letter-writing James Bond. The number two pencil was mightier than the sword. What follows is typical of the arm-twisting correspondence I fired off to cutthroat despots around the world.
—C.P.
Dear Mr. Pol Pot,
Perhaps you’ll recall our last meeting, perhaps not. Wistfully, I trust you do. It was many years ago lounging on the rooftop terrace of the Hotel Le Royal in the fashionable heart of Phnom Penh, a city of so many, many charms. There, among a distinguished crowd of international jetsetters, we raised our glasses to the sunset over the Mekong River, and you delivered a hilarious bon mot comparing the rapturous eventide spectacle to Henry Kissinger’s rather louche eyewear.
For many years, your rapier wit has held a special place in my memory.
Alas, imagine my dismay upon hearing from Amnesty International that you’ve been conducting a wholesale slaughter of your own innocent citizens. To say how deeply I’m disappointed in you . . . well, words fail me.
Fully known to you is that fact that I’m a billionaire industrialist with my fingers in many a lucrative pie. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention my plans to build a humongous manufacturing plant in your country, bringing boatloads of American dollars into your fragile, struggling economy. But, on second thought, investing capital in a nation that neglects basic human rights seems a tad unwise. Your actions compel me to rethink the option of sitting my state-of-the-art eight-track-tape assembly line in a more peasant-friendly environ.
Until this matter of the butchered multitudes is cleared up to my satisfaction, please consider my factory-building plans to be on hold.
Oh that this were my only change-of-heart.
Strictly as a divertissement, I also produce big-budget Hollywood epics, and it had long been my dream to remake “From Here to Eternity” on location in your lovely semitropical clime. No less an actress than Gina Lollobrigida was set to play the female lead. Needless to say, Gina is heartsick to hear of your genocidal preoccupations for she has harbored a fantasy of making your acquaintance and indulging you with her world-renown qualities.
And while it was not my original intention to dangle the luscious Jill St. John like an enticing bauble just beyond your reach, she has also secretly craved an introduction. That said, you must realize that these western beauties will not think highly of a man, even a virile, charismatic world leader, who turns perfectly good rice paddies into killing fields. Being a gentleman, I’m not at liberty to divulge the glorious sexual favors such ladies can bestow. Suffice to say that you staging large-scale pogroms hardly acts as Spanish fly upon the comely likes of Ursula Andress and Linda Evans.
If you’ll permit me to say, we’re both gentlemen of the world. Let’s call a bribe by its proper name. If you can see your way to sparing future victims, I could make certain delightful assignations possible. Pharmaceutical-grade “party favors,” included. Wink-wink.
As for myself, personally, I prefer to recall you as the jovial, Kissinger-baiting goofball. Judging character is my forte. It saddens me to discover I could be so mistaken. If you have anything to say in your own defense, please do not hesitate to ring me up. At present I reside at the Viceroy Hotel in Mozambique. I am registered under the name Latimer Keegan for purposes of privacy while outlining additional film projects with Ms. Lollobrigida and Ms. St. John.
P.S. You might also be receiving an indignant missive from someone named Heidi Jeanette Palahniuk, who claims to be my younger sister. Please do not take what she says lightly. It’s not without good reason that she writes like a moron. Neither is she, as she claims, a lithe young fourth-grader. She is in fact my deranged older sibling. A thyroid condition has rendered her the size of a Silverback gorilla, and she boasts the physical strength of ten men. Like me, she was very dismayed by the tip-off from Amnesty International. Please be on the constant lookout for her for she will not hesitate to savagely rend you limb from limb.
Ciao bello,
Charles Palahniuk
AMY TAN
JUGGLING JAKE
AMY TAN’s novels are The Joy Luck Club, The Kitchen God’s Wife, The Hundred Secret Senses, The Bonesetter’s Daughter, and Saving Fish from Drowning, all New York Times bestsellers and recipients of various awards. She is also the author of a memoir, The Opposite of Fate; two children’s books, The Moon Lady and Sagwa, The Chinese Siamese Cat; and numerous articles for magazines, including the New Yorker, Harper’s Bazaar, and National Geographic. She is also the author of the short story “Rules for Virgins,” published in ebook format (Byliner Originals). Her work has been translated into thirty-five languages. Her most recent novel is The Valley of Amazement.