October 2003
27 October 2003 | Fantasy
I have this fantasy about bad people. They’ve taken us captive and are probably going to rape you. I act totally passive, pretend to be terrified, whimper, look down a lot. I can’t risk telling you what I’m really up to, for fear you’d give it away. Looking into your eyes, I watch your idea of me collapse. You had believed me strong and brave, but here I am a pathetic coward. So it’s a double blow for you: first that the bad people have gotten us, and second that I’ve failed you.
Luckily my act works: one of the baddies lets down his guard for a second, and I spring into action, stomping on his foot. As he jerks forward at the waist, I kick him in the face. The motion is almost exactly like a punter punting a football, including the little skip beforehand with my off foot. Lots of blood goes flying and I grab his gun which he drops and shoot him in the side of the head, twice. This next part I’ve never filled in, but the upshot is that I kill the second baddie using some super-clever misdirection stuff. Then it’s over and I’m holding you and you’re really upset because I shot the first guy twice in the head when maybe I could have just shot him once in the leg or something. (I know all this without you having to say it.) I want to tell you that I had to do what I did because otherwise the first guy would have warned the second guy, only I know this won’t matter to you because you saw my face when I shot the first guy, you saw that animal part of me, the part that wanted to blow the fucker away, and it’s going to change how you think of me forever. This is the main thing. I save your life and kill the baddies but in doing so destroy any chance of you ever loving me.
Sometimes I try to end it differently, with no one dying and you being able to love me afterwards, but for whatever reason that always ends up feeling hackneyed. Even in my fantasies I prefer the sort of ending Bergman would write, despite what this means for me personally, or for the people I love, and even sometimes for all of humanity.
25 October 2003 | Balloon
As R and I walked along the south side of Washington Square Park, we passed an enormous vehicle that looked a lot like a blood mobile but was actually a mobile police station. The door was open and a cop was standing inside, holding a large pink balloon in the crook of his left arm. With his right hand he was writing something on the balloon, using a black magic marker.
I don’t think R saw any of this because he was on his cell phone at the time, talking with his wife, whose birthday it was.
When we reached the corner, I looked back and watched the cop, now standing outside the mobile police station, release the balloon into the sky. Rising quickly, it was soon high above the trees and drifting south. As it rose, I pointed to it for R, and together we watched it disappear behind the NYU student center.
What did it say?
I thought of going back and asking the cop, then thought better of it.
20 October 2003 | Plastic
I had a date last night with a woman wrapped in plastic. Or at least I think it was plastic. What it looked like was super-thick cellophane. What is that stuff they wrap little boxes in? This was like that, only thicker and less shiny. When she turned her head, it looked like her cheek had an extra, translucent layer of skin.
Shrink wrap. This looked like extra-thick shrink wrap. It covered everything, including her clothes, and seemed to be just a single piece all the way around. It was as though she’d been put through a shrink wrap machine.
Of course that couldn’t be what really happened, because how would they have gotten the material all the way around her arms and legs and even between her fingers? Instead she must have been dipped into something, the way strawberries are dipped into chocolate.
Suffice it to say, I didn’t know she was going to show up wrapped in plastic. We met through an online personals site, nerve.com, and she didn’t mention anything about it in her profile, nor in any of the emails we exchanged. I’ve since gone back and looked through her profile again. It turns out that she’s covered in plastic in all three photos. At the time, though, I assumed that that was some kind of arty Photoshop effect, given that she, like half the women on Nerve, is a graphic designer.
I base a lot on these photos. I’m speaking generally now. A woman doesn’t need to be gorgeous (I actually find myself biased against the ones who are), but I must get the sense that I would find her attractive, or rather, that I wouldn’t find her unattractive. It’s really more the latter: I use the photos to weed out the definite no’s. Everyone else becomes a maybe.
The woman last night (I’ll call her Megan) looked plenty attractive in her photos. Plenty. And she got extra points for coloring one in with what looked like day-glo paint. I’m a sucker for that. Nerve is a cut above other such sites, but you’re still faced with a slew of insipid, quasi-flirtatious questions like, “What is your favorite on-screen sex scene?” and “What celebrity do you resemble?” and “What song or album puts you in the mood?” Any attempt at creativity gets my attention.
Megan also impressed me with she how dealt with Nerve’s one fill-in-the-blanks question: “Blank is sexy; blank is sexier.” I have a file where I save the best answers to this, and hers is at the top: “Jesus is sexy; Oh Jesus is sexier.”
But it wasn’t the day-glo paint or the Jesus answer that sold me; it was her answer to the final question, the very worst of the bunch: “What are you looking for?” Women usually respond with a list of desirable characteristics and traits, a list more or less like every other woman’s list. But Megan skipped all that and wrote: “Someone who can levitate. Or at least have fun trying. Okay: ready, set, go!”
I wrote her an email that took me maybe five minutes to write; it just poured right out.
I’m bumming. There was this genie a while back who gave me three wishes (long story), and I thought of asking for the power to levitate, but instead I choose x-ray vision. Like, what was I thinking? It’s as though I channeled my six-year-old self, the self who was obsessed with seeing what people look like naked. A totally wasted wish.
In my defense, the genie stood there with a stop watch and said I had to decide in 30 seconds or the wish was gone. They don’t mention this in any of the genie stories, and frankly I think it’s deliberate. They figure the unexpected pressure will get people to screw up and ask for ridiculous things like x-ray vision.
Anyway, it would have been cool to levitate for you and have you be all, “Whoa, what else can you do?” But alas. Would you settle for me knowing what’s in your refrigerator without having to open the door?
I probably didn’t need to quote that whole story, but it’s charming, no? I was inspired. More to the point, Megan liked it. We exchanged three or four emails, then talked on the phone. I should have realized what was up right then, because I could barely hear what she was saying. This was because of the plastic of course, which goes over her mouth and makes it sound like she’s, well… talking through plastic. Of course that was the last thing I would have imagined. Instead I just figured it was a bad connection.
When she approached me outside the café and asked me to tell her what was inside her bag, I was too flustered by the question to really notice what she looked like.
“A picture of Jesus,” I said finally, and we both laughed.
Then we went inside and sat at the table in the corner, and I saw right away that her hair seemed too flat and that her nose was scrunched in.
The thing is, you want to be totally cool in that moment, you want to act like everything is fine and normal and that you don’t notice that the other person has some terrible problem.
That’s what I thought this was: a problem. But then I saw the extra layer on her cheek and hands, and pretty soon it became obvious that the problem was an illusion and that she was simply a normal-looking woman—in fact a rather beautiful-looking woman—wrapped in plastic.
Looking back, I regret not saying anything about it. I guess I was in a kind of shock. You try not to make up stories about the women you meet online, you try not to allow yourself to fantasize about who they might be based on a little day-glo paint, but it’s hard to stop yourself. Megan seemed really special in her profile—funny, smart, creative—and I couldn’t help imagining that we would really hit it off and quickly fall in love. I knew it was silly to think this, I knew I didn’t know her, but still I couldn’t help myself.
It’s interesting how one deals. When I realized she was wrapped in plastic, my first thought was that maybe it was some sort of conceptual performance piece, one in which she was commenting on the way we “package” ourselves. Nerve is very much about that, with cutesy user names and catchy profile headlines (Megan’s headline was Temptress in a Teapot; mine is More than this). Were this true, were this really a performance piece, I would have fallen in love with her on the spot, but it wasn’t true. Just to be sure, though, I asked if she liked conceptual art, and she made a face, a real face, and I knew I was wrong.
The rest of the date was excruciating. Einstein said that two hours spent with a beautiful woman is less time than two minutes spent on a burning stove, but Einstein never mentioned anything about plastic.
Megan had nothing to eat or drink, I assume because she couldn’t get anything into her mouth. I had green tea and a scone. Without thinking, I offered her a bite. She gave me the same look she gave me when I asked about conceptual art.
We talked the way you talk when you have nothing to say. I asked her questions and she asked me questions, and then we both asked follow-up questions. After a time, we would get to the end of a particular subject and then one of us would think of another subject and we would ask each other questions about that. I learned, for example, that she has two brothers and that her oldest brother is a transvestite and that her youngest brother has a business making chakra tuning forks.
The worst part was the parting. I never know how to handle these things. I want to be nice, being a nice guy, but I’m loathe to give someone the wrong idea. How do you tell a woman that you like her but that you wouldn’t want to see her again because she’s totally wrapped in plastic?
That’s a rhetorical question. You never actually say that you wouldn’t want to see her again. Instead you thank her for a nice time and leave it that. By saying nothing about the future, the message is clear.
The absolute worst, and this is what happened yesterday, is when she fills the empty space with an offer to get together again. At this point, your only options are to state outright that you’re not interested, or to give a weak yes and tell her you’ll call her. The former requires a kind of courage I don’t possess. I told Megan that a film sounded fun, but that I needed to check my schedule to know when I could do it.
My plan, my real plan, is to email her and tell her the truth, without of course mentioning the plastic.
She’s bound to know, though. How many men have rejected her, for how many supposed reasons, while each time she knew the real reason?
When I got home, I went online and looked at her profile again. Partly this was to check the photos, but partly I just wanted to remember the person I had imagined her to be. Everything was the same, the same words and photos, but it didn’t have the same effect. It was a lot like the feeling, or the absence of feeling, after coming. You wonder what the hell had just seemed so compelling.
Even her levitation bit didn’t seem so great anymore, although I still laughed at her answer to the sexy/sexier question. That just cracks me up. Jesus, Oh Jesus. I can’t help loving that.
19 October 2003 | Sentence
I wrote a new story for the reading I did a few weeks back. I’ve been meaning to share it with you, only I wanted to make some minor changes first. Problem is, I’m unable to read past the first sentence.
It’s not that I don’t like the first sentence. In fact I think it’s a fine sentence. A bit flat perhaps, but not in a bad way. Factual-seeming. Modest. Like a song that begins with a simple bass line. Or like the beginning of a roller coaster ride, when the track is flat and you’re hardly moving.
This is in contrast to the sentence I had there originally, which was way more dramatic and “hooky.” My friend Anne convinced me to change it. She said I should give my readers a chance to settle in and figure things out for themselves. I think she was right, and I’m pretty happy with what I came up with.
But like I said, I’m unable to get past that sentence. I read it and think, Oh shit, this again.
It’s partly because of how I wrote the story. What I did was, I made myself crazy. I turned off my phone and email and lowered the shades and played the same two songs over and over for hours at a time.
Now I can’t listen to those songs and I can’t read past the first sentence.
The thing to do, obviously, is to let it sit for a while, maybe even a year, and come back with “new eyes.” This is my plan. In the meantime I’ve formatted the story for the web (without reading a word!) and have added it to my other longer stories. It’s called End of Story.
I hope you read it and like it, but whatever you do, please don’t send me any emails in which you quote passages from it, not even as a joke.
Also, if you happen to have a party and you happen to invite me to that party, I’d be much obliged if you didn’t play Trailer Trash by Modest Mouse or Else by Built to Spill.
Thanks in advance.
Listen, I didn’t really stuff my new cell phone inside four pairs of athletic socks and stick it at the bottom of the hamper and then call it on my regular phone to confirm I couldn’t hear it ringing. I only said that because it made a better story. I’m not interested in telling the truth here unless the truth makes a better story.
Sometimes I think of writing all the lies in a special “lie” color so that everyone will know what’s true and what isn’t. But then it gets complicated because what about exaggeration? Is exaggeration a lie? Or what about the things I change to disguise who I’m talking about? That I do all the time. And what about the things I leave out, or the things I’m not sure about?
I’ve even thought of making each form of deception its own color. Red equals lie, blue equals hyperbole, yellow equals obfuscation, and so on. Only what about the things that combine several forms of deception? Do I mix the colors together?
Half a lifetime ago my friend Ross wrote a “From the author” piece for a play of his. You were given a copy when you entered the theater. All the words were in quotes. I mean individually. “What” “it” “looked” “like” “was” “this.” Ross will probably wince that I remember this, but I found it interesting. “It” “made” “me” “think.”
Anyway I apologize to anyone who is upset to learn that I may not have lost my orange juice or gone out with a lunatic named M or gotten beaten up or created an ill-fated snowperson. I may not have. Or I may have but in a different sense than I said I did. Does it really matter? The way I see it, it’s like what Norman O. Brown said: “Everything is only a metaphor. There is only poetry.” These stories are meant as a kind of poetry. Failed poetry, perhaps, but poetry.
Still, I really was beaten up. In fact there’s some weird thing in my nose—a piece of cartilage, I guess—that hasn’t felt quite right since. It makes a clicking sound when I push in on the side of my right nostril. Sometimes I sit around and absently click it.
Also, I’ve never really thought of making the lies different colors; I just liked saying I had. I’m totally sticking with black for everything.
11 October 2003 | Train
I hesitate to mention this, it’s such a small thing, just a bit of passing landscape seen from the window of the train. It’s about paid advertisements on independent websites and how much I hate them and how several people I respect are putting such ads on their sites and how this saddens me.
I know, paid advertisements on independent websites, who fucking cares.
It’s just that I feel oppressed and sickened by the avalanche of billboard ads and subway ads and magazines ads and newspaper ads and radio ads and television ads and product placements and Internet ads and ads on the bus and subway and in cabs and on clothing (how did they fool us into that one?) and sometimes even ads written across the sky.
I won’t try to convince you that capitalism is death. Either you believe this or you don’t, and in any case the sun will still rise tomorrow and capitalism will remain death.
Instead I want to tell a story.
Four years ago I read Paul Ford’s Ftrain for the first time and fell in love. What amazed me about Ftrain, aside from Paul’s writing, was that it was free. In fact the whole web was free, and not all of it sucked. People as gifted as Paul Ford were publishing online with no other motive than to be read and perhaps convince a few unsuspecting souls to want to sleep with them.
It seemed a sort of paradise. Nothing to buy, nothing to sell. Of course it’s become a muddled sort of paradise over time, as Paul Ford now uses Ftrain to advertise his availability for work. I do the same, and it’s at the point where most of my clients learn about me via Oblivio. Is my “Hire This Man” link an advertisement? Yes, and yet I consider this quite different from the paid Google ads that have been showing up on popular independent websites of late, the sort of ads that bring a dollar or more per click.
I talked about this recently with a friend who edits such a site. He said what I expected him to say, which is that it takes a lot of time to produce a decent website and that no one is paying him to do it.
It’s hard to argue with this. I average about twenty hours a week on Oblivio. I try to make it good. No one is paying me. If someone offered me money to write it, I’d take that money in a heartbeat.
But paid ads, however you cut them and for whatever reason you accept them, are gross. It’s gross to see ads appearing in places where none had existed. It’s gross to be served up “targeted” links to products and services you have no interest in, to put it nicely, and to know that what’s driving this supposed bit of helpfulness is money.
My friend pointed out that no large-scale print publication could survive without advertising revenue, and that, like it or not, this is the direction the web is going. Again he’s right. But being right doesn’t make it right, nor make me like it.
When people say the Internet is maturing, what they really mean is that it’s opening its legs to capitalism, or that capitalism is finally figuring out how to make it into a thing with a hole and legs that spread.
I don’t mean to call my friend a sell-out. Selling-out is at best a matter of degree these days. But this particular loss runs deep for me because of what these sites, and this form, have meant to me.
Like I say, just a bit of passing landscape. Take it for what it’s worth.
The train rolls on.
09 October 2003 | Thanks
I’d like to thank everyone who attended my reading this past Sunday. I’m told it was the first time they exceeded the maximum seating allotment at the Bowery Poetry Club, so thanks again to everyone who chose to spend part of such a gorgeous day indoors, listening to me read.
I also wish to commend everyone on how they handled the evacuation. New Yorkers are known for the way they pull together in a crisis, and this was no exception. Like everyone, I saw the flames shooting out of the smoke machine, but I don’t think any of us realized that the curtain would catch fire as quickly as it did, nor that the heat would cause such panic among the chorus members. I had imagined that zen monks would behave with greater self-restraint than that, but this just goes to show that inner peace is more than just a matter of shaving one’s head and memorizing a few chants.
Also, I’d like to take this opportunity to state that I did not shout, as some have claimed, “Let me out first! I’m the featured reader!” The person who shouted this was my co-reader Jack Haskell, a notorious practical joker and ventriloquist. You crack me up, Jack.
I’m reading a new story this Sunday at the Bowery Poetry Club, so if you’re in town this weekend, please come. The story is called Sentence, I think, and it’s almost done. Right now I’m convinced it’s either a work of genius or simply not very good. In either case, my co-reader Jack Haskell is certain to amaze and delight.
As part of my research for the story, I just read synopses of all 254 episodes of Bewitched, none of which helped solve the problem I’m having. The experience was redeemed, however, by a passing reference to something Samantha says in episode #3, “Mother Meets What’s-His-Name.”
Endora threatens to turn Darrin into an artichoke. Later Samantha expresses her love for Darrin by announcing that if Endora had done so, she would also have turned herself into an artichoke.
There you have it: Love means being willing to turn yourself into an artichoke.
