I’ve been absent from this blog due to college, and this will continue until I learn how to balance homework with this kind of thing, which will likely be never. But there are poor hapless souls who may want to read some of what I’ve been doing in my Fiction Writing class at Columbia, and they must be served. Some selected pieces:
“Reaganomics” (Currently Unfinished):
I can’t really say where the idea came from, but it was a pretty dumb fucking idea.
It started on a Saturday in the park. The trees were shaking at the breeze and it was nice and warm but I was hot because of my thick green army jacket. It wasn’t like I had anywhere to put it though. I took a long drag off of a cigarette. This was what I did on Saturdays, I sat in the park with Jones and we talked, conversed about whatever and what have you. Jones was a good listener but he never had much to contribute, mainly because I never had any idea what the fuck he was trying to say. Jones was an old black guy with a stubbly, droopy face, always behind his Rayban sunglasses, looking like a schizophrenic Ray Charles.
“Hahzit?,” Jones shouted at the air to no one in particular.
“Do you understand what I’m getting at?,” I said.
“NawnawnawnawmahIsayhahzitgowhatchudowhatchudo.” The words had a way of hurrying out of Jones’ mouth in messy but single-file order, like antsy kindergarteners on their way down the hall from home room to P.E.
“Exactly, you get it. What I’m trying to say is that we’re invisible. The homeless, I mean. People care about us as long as they don’t have to look at us. They donate to charities and act all Christian-like and compassionate and like their making a difference and shit but they take a look at me and they think I’m about to rape them and take their wallet so they avert their eyes and keep walking.”
“IsawBahmananhewasgon’,” Jones interjected, jangling the coins in his Dixie cup.
“Totally, totally. I mean, look at all these sad fucks.” I gestured dramatically to the people milling about us: a woman with olive skin and long black hair pushing an unseen toddler in an expensive stroller, two girls in too-big sunglasses and too-short shorts chatting and absent-mindedly sipping at cups of coffee, a bald man in a dress shirt and tie rolling a heavy black bag behind him and thinking about the stock market or his fantasy football picks or some boring thing like that.
“Hypothetical,” I say.
“Hippozetical,” Jones parrots back.
“Hypothetical. Say that big shot nine to five asshole was sitting here spouting the crazy shit you say. Five minutes time, there would be cops here, paramedics maybe. ‘Sir, are you alright? Sir, do you have any prior medical conditions? Sir, Sir, Sir. Let’s get you to a hospital sir, let’s get you some help.’ But look at you, nobody notices a guy like you. This, my friend, is the foundation of Reaganomics.”
“IknewRaygun,” Jones blurted out.
“Right, then you know how much of a dick he was. Reagan didn’t invent trickle-down economics – that’s what it’s technically called – he didn’t invent it, mind you, but he made such a big deal about it that they put his fucking name on it. Trickle-down theory says that if you help out the rich, everyone else benefits. Of course that’s bullshit, but people believed it because it appeared to work. It was an illusion, an economic magic trick. Reagan was fucking David Copperfield disappearing The Statue of Liberty and everyone was going ‘Ooo’ and ‘Ahh’ and thinking it was real. Like I said, the poor are invisible, but the rich are so visible that you can’t help but see them. If the rich are obviously doing better, than everyone else will become convinced that the whole country is doing better. That’s how it works. Donald Trump is doing pretty well so I guess the economy is going good.
“But there are benefits to being invisible, ya know? You can get away with shit, if you want to. That’s where this idea came from, what I’ve been trying to get to. I’m gonna make my home right here in this park, and as long as I stay out of people’s direct line of sight, I could stay here for my whole friggin’ life.”
“…..Hahzit?”
I got started that day. I walked up and down the whole park, scoping out somewhere to set up camp. Most of the trees I found were too short or too tall or didn’t look like they’d support my weight. (Plus whatever I decided to bring up there with me.) As I got deeper in to the park, I ducked under a strip of yellow tape without thinking about it (See, that, that was dumb.) and was presented with my dream tree, a real beauty. She was a good ways off of the ground but not too huge to climb, a big strong pillar of a tree, I couldn’t tell you what kind. The boughs exploded off of the pillar and left a big wide space for me to set up, with a thick roof of foliage overhead.
I yanked some sheets of wood from a construction site while the workers were stuffing their faces with fast food, a tarp too. I’d been collecting other shit too, for weeks. I’d spent a week putting together a little rope ladder with planks of scrap wood as the rungs. I was proud of it though I knew I’d probably fall off of the damn thing and break my neck at some point. I’d even managed to “procure” a nice sleeping bag. Luxury. I got Jones to help me haul all of it up there, using some rope as a crude pulley system. It took forever because Jones kept tying everything up with fancy little bows.
“Gottabepretty!” he’d yell up at me as I goaded him to just tie a simple knot. I set up the sheets of wood as a flooring that rested on the branches. It was flimsy, but it worked. I tied the tarp up into the tree to make a tent, which was also flimsy but also worked. That night I made a trip down to see what I’d made from the ground. It was actually quite inconspicuous. The tree gave just enough cover that a passer-by probably wouldn’t notice that there was a guy fucking living up there. And there didn’t seem to be many passers-by in this part of the park anyways. I climbed back up and got to sleep in my grown-up tree house in no time, basking in my own genius.
I was woken the next morning at about eight in the morning by the faint smell of weed and the unholy sound of a Phish song playing. I’d been to enough music festivals in the nineties to recognize what this meant. I emerged from my tent to see a crowd of maybe a dozen kids, long-haired and sign-holding, a couple body-painted with words that I couldn’t read from that high up. Fucking hippies.
“Hey, there he is!” a girl in a green bandanna shouted, pointing up at me. The kids erupted with applause and cheers. Jesus Christ, it was too early for this.
“What the fuck are you people doing here?,” I yelled down to them.
“We’re here to support you, man!” someone cried enthusiastically.
“Oh god-what? What is this? Look, let me come down there – ”
“No, man!” the same voice interrupted. “You can’t give up the cause!”
“What fucking cause!?”
“The trees, they’re going to cut them down. Those damn Nazis who run this city are going to disrespect the inalienable right of these trees to exist. But not if you have anything to say about it, eh!” The crowd cheered at that.
“What? No! You jackasses are gonna ruin everything.”
“No, no, don’t worry, the cops should be here within a few hours but we’ve got it covered. We’ve all been practicing our non-violent resistance techniques and Sebastian here has some awesome protest songs that he’s gonna jam on and – ”
“Gah! Fuck off! All of you! Right now!” I stormed back into my tent and got back in my sleeping bag. A few minutes later, the sound of acoustic guitars and chanting wafted up to me. I angrily zipped the sleeping bag up and sealed myself inside, my little cocoon blocking out as much of the noise as it could.
I awoke a few hours later at the slight vibration of my haphazard floor. I unzipped the sleeping bag and crawled out of it to see a little basket sitting in front of my tent, attached to a rope. I crawled over to my tent’s opening and looked out. They’d devised their own pulley system using an overhead branch and lifted the basket up to me. It was adorned with flowers and I opened it to find more food than I’d had at my grasp in years. Homemade sandwiches, little baggies of trail mix, cookies, a bottle of water. I peered out over the edge of my platform and looked down at the crowd of dirty kids, beaming up at me and waiting for me to react. (There must’ve been twice as many by then.) I gave a grateful little smile and a wave. I leaned back and dug through the basket some more. I felt something at the bottom and pulled it out. It was a bag of weed and a little green glass pipe. Hmm.
I got to my feet and raised my fist in the air, proclaiming “NO ONE’S GOING TO CUT THIS TREE DOWN TODAY!!” Raucous cheers all around.
- – - – - -
“9/11″ (Journal Entry):
At that time, when I was in the sixth grade, I would get woken up by mom before she left for work. I’d get ready and then I’d sit and wait until it was time to start walking to school. The cartoons at that time were never very interesting to me at eleven years old so I preferred to watch the morning news shows. On all the shows they were talking about how a plane had hit some building in New York and they were showing footage of the building, with the other tower sitting next to it unharmed. There was a big hole in the side and the smoke was pouring out and climbing the sky like bubbles underwater. They were talking to some scared sounding woman who was on her cell phone. She’d been there when the plane had hit and was talking about how the ground had rumbled. I couldn’t figure out why she sounded so scared.
Then something glided nicely across the screen and turned into a ball of fire on the side of the other tower. The woman let out a small scream and Katie Couric and Tom Lauer suddenly stopped talking and everyone got silent for what felt like a long time. For the first time ever, it seemed like no one on TV had anything to say. Then they came back, calm and composed as ever. That was the way that I really knew that there wasn’t anything to worry about. I was thinking about this logically. I’d seen Michael Bay movies before. I knew that one of those jets filled with lots of people would’ve presented you with an explosion worthy of a record-breaking summer release, not the messy, smoky little holes I was looking at right now. The buildings would have collapsed immediately. No, these must have been very small planes, those ones that celebrities fly in. The buildings must have been evacuated. This must have been a small and insignificant tragedy, one that the news cycle will forget and discard a week or two from now. Besides, if this were truly something to worry about, that long silence would’ve been followed by screams and cries of panic, shocked and terrified voices. I suppose that at that age it never occurred to me that news anchors are likely trained for this kind of situation, taught how to be devoid of emotion in the face of all things.
I went to school, unaffected. It was a strange day, though. They announced early in the day that no student was to use the computers that were in every classroom. The teachers did though. They gave us our work and then rushed off to bury their faces in their computer screens, talked in secretive whispers in the halls, made quiet phone calls. When they released us at the end of the day, that was when it sunk in that something was indeed wrong. All the parents were waiting outside, more than I’d ever seen in one place at once. They stood separately, anxiously, as if they were all waiting for the mother ship to land. The curb was so choked with cars that it looked like someone was having a party down the street. My mom explained to me what had happened and I listened and tried to discern how I was expected to react. On the ride home, I thought about the one kid there must have been who’s parents maybe didn’t think to show up and had to walk home all alone, and it made me sad.
When we got home, my dad and my cousin were sitting out on the deck on the back of our house. They worked in the same building at the time, and they’d both been sent home early when they evacuated Chicago. They were sitting there smoking, watching the news reports on a TV that they’d brought outside, something I can’t remember my family ever having done before or since. It was actually a really nice day, not a cloud in the sky. It had been the same in New York. We sat on the deck and stared at the TV and talked and sometimes didn’t talk.
When it got dark my cousin went home and we went inside. I asked my mom if I still had to do my homework and she said yes and helped me with it on the couch. That night, we kept watching, soaking up ever bit of detail because we were too far away to do anything else. And that night the news anchors kept talking and didn’t sign off, and the talk show hosts never came on to say good night.
- – - – - -
“Wedding Night”:
In extreme body modification culture, the term ’subincision’ refers to a procedure in which the underside of the penis is cut open from head to base, effectively exposing the urethra, which is then left exposed. I underwent this procedure about eight months before I met Rachel at a John Mayer concert. The subincision had been carried out by a skinny pale twig of a guy who I’d known since I first got into body modification. His name is Elijah. Everybody knows Elijah, there’s no one else in the state who really does this kind of thing.
Elijah’s apartment is a ratty shithole in the south suburbs and it looks like a meth dealer lives there or something. (Considering how little anyone really knows about Elijah, that’s probably true.) The carpet’s filthy with dirt and dust and bits of food and shit and the furniture is bad and outdated and it looks like it would break if you sat on it. You go there the first time and you’re all scared and you’re thinking ‘why the fuck did I come here’? You’re wondering if this creepy guy is about to knock you out and you’re going to wake up in a dumpster at midnight, minus your wallet and your sneakers with a mysteriously sore asshole. You’re thinking about how hard it’s going to be to tell the doctors that you got AIDs because you let some perv drug you and cut your dick open on his piss-stained bed with a dirty steak knife.
Then he takes you into his garage and all that goes away. It’s not really a garage, not anymore. There are bright fluorescent lights on the ceiling and stainless steel cabinets on the walls. There’s a clean sink and a sort of metal gurney in the middle of the floor. It’s a standard operating room, basically. Thinking reasonably – as if you’d even be doing this kind of thing if you thought reasonably at all – this shouldn’t make you feel that much better. So the place looks nicer than you’d expected. It doesn’t make what you’re about to do any safer or this guy any more sanitary, but it works, ya know? The sterile chrome look of everything, the smell of disinfectant and latex gloves. It makes you feel as if you’re in safe hands, as stupid of a feeling as that might be. And before you know it, your pants are off, you’re on the table, the anesthesia or whatever Elijah gave you is putting you under, and he’s taking out a clean little scalpel from a drawer. Elijah always talks about how he did a bunch of years of medical school and dropped out, but how do you know to believe him?
Elijah tells you about the recovery process on the phone before you come over. You’ll be wrapped up tight with ice and bandages for a couple of weeks and it’ll hurt like hell at first. It’ll always hurt like hell but you’ll get used to it. That’s kind of the point. Come back in a few weeks and he’ll take off the bandages and check it out. You’ll probably have to invest in some kind of special undergarment to keep your dick in place and to keep it from getting infected too easily. Maybe even a good jockstrap would work. The point is, you don’t want it shifting around a lot down there. Sports or any kind of physical activity that involves running will be out of the question for a while. Keep the incision as clean as you can. Your urethra will let out at the base now and you’ll probably have to piss sitting down from now on, so say goodbye to the old urinal. Depending on how the procedure works out, you may experience spraying when you urinate from now on, meaning that it might come out as a messy spray rather than a uniform stream. That didn’t happen with me though.
Like I said, all this was about eight months before the concert. It was my third John Mayer show that year. You could barely hear him over the chorus of screaming girls but that was far from the point. My friends from the modification scene would laugh their asses off if they saw me at one of these concerts and they’d probably never speak to me again if they knew the real reason why I went. I saw Rachel for the first time after forty-five minutes of searching my way through the crowd of girls that surrounded the stage. She had long blond hair almost down to her ass at the time and was in a pair of blue jeans and a tight but cautiously not-too-tight pink t-shirt with a picture of a fairy on it. That’s actually kind of how she looks, like one of those little fairies they print on notebooks and diaries and t-shirts for girls like Rachel. Long hair and an upturned nose, wide-eyed and petite.
I can’t tell you exactly what it was that separated her from the swarm of similar girls who were mobbing the stage at the moment, but it was just something in those big green eyes of her and the way she stood there smiling in the dark. I sidled over to her and pretended like I was really feeling whatever nice thing John Mayer was strumming on about on his acoustic guitar. The awkward part is starting up a conversation. It’s not like the girls who come to these shows are looking for guys. I knew I’d caught her eye though. I was in my sky blue polo and khakis, clean cut and whitebred. My eyes were clenched shut and I was swaying gently. I looked like I was about to cry. That totally worked. Rachel taps me on the shoulder and asks me if I like this song and I tell her that it practically changed my life. She believes me. God bless her.
I suppose I look like an asshole right now, eh? Well, you’ve got to understand the position I’m in. I grew up in the most conservative and evangelical of households, a household that I left at eighteen in search of wilder times. The body modification thing started right away with piercings and such, which a lot of people are into, but I’m a part of that rare group that can’t help but take it further and further. It’s not easy to explain it to other people. I suppose we just see perfection in the things we do, like your body should represent how you feel. I’m sure the psychoanalysts would have a party if they got a hold of a guy like me.
We tend to congregate, my kind, because it’s good to know that there are people who feel just as strange about being human as you do. And in my group of friends I’d been presented with every kind of mutilated beauty you could imagine, with their labial piercings and split clitoral hoods. None of them held any appeal to me. My type of girl is more – shall we say – “vanilla”. The girls in the fairy shirts. The girls like Rachel. The girls like my poor, dead mother who I left behind and never got to say goodbye to. Seriously, Freud would love me. It’s just a sweetness, that kind of unconditional warmth and kindness that so many people lack. A respite from pain that I usually seek.
My taste in women obviously clashes with my lifestyle. I learned a long time ago that you have to lie your ass off if you ever expect to be happy. Pretend. Fake. Be a poseur. I started off cruising Christian rock concerts. ‘Cruising’ sounds like such a dirty term to use but that’s basically what it was. Anyway, that’s how I started out, but the girls were just too…into it. Fists pumping in the air and eyes filled with righteous passion. If these girls hadn’t been raised in churches they’d be blowing rock stars backstage. That wasn’t what I was looking for. No, it was the adult contemporary guys that attracted all the right girls. John Mayer and James Blunt and Jason Mraz and all those other pussies. It was slow going at first. It took me a while to learn how to work things, how to start talking to these kinds of girls. After that, the relationships never lasted long. I was always too scared. Scared of how they’d react when they found out about me. I wasn’t ready to give up my little fetish. I got too much out of it and it was too much a part of me. I knew it would take really falling in love to make me give it up. Yeah, I know how lame I sound right now.
A few months after I first started going out with Rachel, I was sitting next to her in the car on the way back from seeing some romantic comedy that she was excited for and I’m looking at her and I realize that I’ve got to give it up. That was when I made my choice. Within a few weeks, I’d pretty much dropped out of the scene. All my friends told me that we’d still be cool and everything, but I haven’t spoken to most of them in ages.
I gave it all up, but in a way, it was too late. The subincision procedure is often the first in a line of procedures that accelerate towards a particular goal. A few months after my subincision, Elijah said it was fine for the superincision, if I wanted it. That’s where they cut the top part of your dick open too. If you’re already subincised, they basically just split the thing down the middle, so that the head is still one piece but the shaft has a big space down the middle. There’s all kinds of places you can go with this stuff, sexually, if you’re into the pain. A month before I met Rachel I got the head split, too. Full genital bisection. With the full split, it basically gives the impression that you have two penises. Having surgery to get what others would pay to have fixed if their kid was born that way. It’s not easy to explain it to other people.
At this point you’re probably starting to wonder how I spared Rachel from my fucked up little buddy up until this point. Another unintentional benefit in a guy like me dating girls like her: she’s a virgin, and she’s saving it for marriage. I always figured that if it got to the point where she was going to see it and I was going to have to come clean, she’d love me way too much to let it affect her. I didn’t worry about it.
Fast-forward. It’s a few years since me and Rachel met and I did a crazy fucking thing and asked her to marry me. I still regret it to this day. I kept saying to myself that I was going to tell her beforehand. I was going to tell her everything about who I used to be and what I’ve done to myself, but the problem is…that’s really fucking hard. I never realized how much of a coward I was until I was faced with this and I couldn’t do it. I knew this was going to be terrible. What would it be like for her? Terrible. Terrible, terrible, terrible. I just couldn’t get the words to come out of my mouth. Every time I tried it was always came out wrong. Something like this:
“Rachel?”
“Yeah?”
“I’ve got something to tell you.”
“Okay.”
“I, um . . . my, uh . . . well, ya know I used to . . . it’s just – I really love you.”
Such a pussy.
No, believe me, it really went that far, all the way to the wedding. That week was agony. I could barely focus on anything. I have no idea what the ceremony was like, I was too preoccupied with shame and embarrassment and horrible thoughts of what the look on her face was going to be when she saw it. And then after the wedding I got strangely optimistic. I was sitting there at the reception thinking about how much she loved me and how much I love her and how love can overcome anything and all that, and I felt good. I felt like we could make it though this.
Jesus Christ, what was I thinking?
The night came and we went up to our hotel room, a real swank place that her parents paid for, with a jacuzzi and champaign. And boy did she want it at that point. Before I knew it we were in the bed, rolling around in the sheets and fooling around and somehow I’m so overcome with happiness that I’ve forgotten all about my disgusting fucked-up dick. And then Rachel reaches undoes my belt and reaches one soft hand down the front of my pants, feels around, and stops fucking dead. I swear to god that neither of us said anything or moved for eight hours. It couldn’t have been any less than that.
“…What is that?” she asks. She has this terror and disgust in her voice that I’ve never heard before.
“What?” (yeah, like I don’t know what she’s talking about.)
“What is-…it’s your-…it’s not…right.”
It’s at that point that I decide to sit up and start trying to explain myself. I give her every sordid detail of my secret life and how I’ve been lying and she sits there and stares at me with the iciest look on her face. She doesn’t even twinge like everyone else does when I describe my procedures. Occasionally she interrupts me with questions in a cool monotone. “How do you pee?”, “Can you still get an erection?” I finish and I start laying on the pleas of forgiveness.
Rachel stands up and turns her back to me. “I married a freak,” she says. My heart sinks. “Jesus, I can’t believe I did this.” She just keep repeating that as she goes into the bathroom and changes, and as she packs her stuff, and one last time before she turns and looks at me and shakes her head and walks out the door.
Our divorce was surprisingly speedy. She wasn’t weird around me, but her family totally was. They just looked so disgusted. They must’ve kept thinking the same thoughts the whole time. I can’t believe we had him over for dinner so many times, that we hugged him and shook his hand. I’m scum, basically. I might as well have turned out to be a sex offender.
A month after our wedding one of my old modification friends calls me up out of the blue and tells me to come over to his place. He’s got the computer on and he’s brought up some crazy fetish site and he goes “Either I’m really fucked up right now or that’s Rachel in this video.” In the video, Rachel walks around a hotel room and she licks stuff. Seriously. Doorknobs, dressers, the TV, the Bible in the bottom drawer, the friggin’ toilet, you name it. Running her tongue up and down whatever she can get her hands on and looking into the camera with cold, sexy eyes that I never saw in all my years with her.
We meet up at this restaurant after the divorce hearings are all over to say goodbye one last time. In a way, even after all this, I still loved her. It’s not easy to explain it to other people.
But I ask her about the website anyway. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t wanna watch her squirm.
“That is not any of your business,” she hisses at me. She drops her voice low and ducks her head, as if she suddenly expects someone she knows to be sitting in the next booth. “It pays good and it’s not like I’m taking my clothes off or doing anything sexual.”
“God. Do you just do it for the money or do you actually like that kind of thing?”
When I say that, she looks at the table and then she looks to her side absent-mindedly and never says anything in response.
I get up and put my coat on. I’ve got to go, I tell her. “Maroon 5 is playing tonight and I’ll be late if I don’t leave now.”
And that’s about all that’s worth posting. Now back to ignoring this thing and trying to force myself to type this paper I have to do for Monday.
- Sean, toiling in the depths of academia, or whatever.
OCT08
