Category: Uncategorized

There’s this Instagram account called Mothers Before. I started following it because I liked the concept: Snapshots of women before crossing that threshold. But now, each photo I come across—warm faded images of young smiling faces—makes me feel sad. It’s like looking at an obituary. The person in the photo no longer exists.

My mother has always said that she didn’t want children. Not until she met my father. And when she did want them, she didn’t want girls.

When my brother and I were young, Mom dressed us up in primary colors. I remember being in Nordstrom, in the children’s shoe department, staring up at a pair of sparkly pink Mary Janes.

When I was older, she told me I scared her then. She was scared I would be a girly girl and she wouldn’t know what to do with me. I was in middle school, into sports, and wearing my brother’s clothes. I thought I understood. I hated girls too.

Growing up, my father was the parent at home and the usual driver to school and sports. On Sundays, when there were no swim meets or soccer games, early meetings in the East Bay, Mom and I would go downtown or to Corte Madera to shop. 

One Sunday afternoon during my sophomore year in high school, Mom and I had a date to go downtown. She was in the car with the engine running when I came out of the creaking wooden gate. Behind the wheel, she was painting her nails.

“Can you not do that in here?” I asked annoyed. “I fucking hate the smell.” 

Here I must have said something else but we both can’t remember. Something about my brother maybe, or worse, her relationship with my father. 

“You’re PMSing, aren’t you?” she asked.

“Don’t say that!’ I screamed at her. When my mother had her period, she bled and that was it. For me, the bleeding was the easy part, the relief after two weeks of bloating, boobs aching, and the feeling that the world was going to crash in on me.

“Well,” she only ever said it once, “you’re being a bitch.”

One break from college, my period was late and I thought I was pregnant (I always thought I was pregnant.). I told my mother and said that I would get an abortion if the decision had to be made. We were in the living room, alone in the house with all the doors open on a summer afternoon. She was curled up on the big red cushioned chair.

“No, you will not,” she told me.

“Yes, I will.” I wasn’t use to my mother telling me what to do. She was my shopping partner and my brother’s smoking buddy.

“I won’t let you,” she was standing now. “I won’t.”

“Don’t pull that Catholic bullshit,” I said. Mom was raised Irish Catholic and went to an all-girls Catholic high school in the city.

I could tell by the way she looked at me, still and jaw clenched, that I went too far. Like the time I was ten and called her a pig.

Her voice low and eyes locked on mine, she told me, “You don’t know me.”  

My mother was married before she married my father. It was a giant secret my father told me while driving across Nebraska in an ice storm when I was twenty-three. Not his secret to tell.

I sometimes imagine meeting this first husband. I looked him up on Linkedin once. Says he lives in New Jersey. Maybe he could tell me who my mother was. They were married for eight years.

“Am I talking too loud?” Winona laughs and rests her chin against her forearm, which she lays atop the plastic folding table that Jonathan told her he’d replace once Kyle was born. When Winona’s nose gets this close to the surface of the table, she is usually repulsed by the scent of Clorox wipes and pizza bites, but she is now on her third glass of wine and is unbothered. “I always forget how far my voice carries when I’ve had a little too much.” She motions her hand toward the bottle in front of her, which she has gotten for eight dollars at Trader Joe’s that morning. “I got this for eight dollars at Trader Joe’s this morning. Isn’t that incredible?”

“You said that already, Winona.” Jonathan gets up to drop his plate in the sink. Annie gets up to put her plate away and when she notices Jonathan’s dirty dish, she turns on the tap.

“No, no.” Jonathan waves Annie away from the sink. “I’ll get to that later. You just relax. You’ve had a long day.” Annie smiles and sits back down, moving from the dining table to the couch.

“Annie, have you ever noticed that when Jonathan says, ‘I’ll get to that later,’ what he really means is, ‘someone else will get to that later and I’ll forget about it in an hour?’” Winona laughs. It is a sweet laugh, almost childlike. Her cheeks are red, but neither Jonathan nor Annie is able to tell if this is from the alcohol or the humor. Neither Jonathan nor Annie laughs.

It is now 9 o’clock, which means Annie has been at Jonathan and Winona’s house for just about 12 hours. Annie’s parents always tell her that she should ask for compensation on nights when she is asked to have dinner with Jonathan and Winona, but Annie generally enjoys their company. She thinks Winona is funny when she’s drunk — she is what her mother would call a “loose cannon” — and Winona is always drunk on evenings like these.

Jonathan notices Annie looking at the clock. “Don’t feel pressure to stay, Annie. I know it’s getting a little late. I’m sure you have plans with friends tonight.”

“I don’t, actually. My parents came back from Sicily last night, so I’m supposed to go over and see them early tomorrow morning.” As silly as he knows it sounds, Jonathan always forgets that Annie has parents. Neither he nor Winona has ever met them. After 8 months of her watching Kyle, Jonathan likes to think that he and Winona have successfully integrated Annie into the family. Sometimes Jonathan thinks of Annie as an older daughter. Other times, he thinks of Annie as a younger mother to Kyle.

“How was the trip?” Jonathan sits across from Annie on an orange loveseat. It is the kind of loveseat that should really be marketed as a chair because it is so small. Winona sits beside him. Jonathan looks uncomfortable and crosses his legs.

“It’s Sicily, Jonathan,” Winona says. “Obviously it was spectacular.

“They did have a great time.” When Annie smiles she shows off her gums, which she has been told by Jonathan is her best feature. “Although they found it difficult to get used to the jet lag. Not that the time difference is even that significant — I guess they’re just getting old.”

“How old are they?” Winona asks.

“They’re 55.” Winona says nothing, although she is struck by how young they are, only 15 years older than she. Winona’s friends always warned her about having Kyle so late because of “geriatric complications.” Winona knew plenty of people who had had children at 40; she thought her friends just didn’t want her to feel bad about looking old at Kyle’s gymboree class. Which she does feel bad about, now that she thinks of it.

“Did you miss them, while they were away?” Annie begins to nod, quite emphatically, when she is interrupted by a soft thud in the direction of Kyle’s bedroom.

“Should I go check on him?”

“I’m sure he’s fine. He probably just dropped one of his toys.” Winona thinks Annie’s ears must be supersonic because of how easily she is able to pick up on every noise Kyle makes. It is impressive, if not slightly annoying. “My parents always wanted to go to Sicily.” Winona rests her hand on Jonathan’s knee. She tucks her fingers underneath her fist. They are still swollen even though it has been months since she had Kyle. She thinks they look like burnt sausages, which is her least favorite breakfast meat.

“My parents have compiled a pretty extensive photo album from the trip, which I’m sure they’ll subject me to tomorrow.”

“That’s sweet. They want to impress you.” Annie nods and fiddles with her hair. Winona watches her from the loveseat. She is petite, only just over five feet, but her short blonde hair makes her neck look long and elegant. Winona doesn’t understand how someone with breasts small enough to be unaffected by gravity can whisper nauseatingly sweet nothings into the ear of an infant so instinctively. Winona always tells Jonathan that Annie would make a perfect girl-next-door typecast, and Jonathan agrees.

“A trip to Sicily must have been expensive.” Winona takes a sip of her Trader Joe’s wine.

“It was. My father is an oncologist, but we also inherited quite a bit from his parents, who died before I was born. So we’re very lucky.”

“Were they good parents?”

“They were, actually. I mean, it’s not like my mom made home cooked meals every night or anything” –Winona glances at the microwaveable pot sticker resting on a napkin in her lap– “but I always knew they really enjoyed being parents. Which I think is kind of a rare quality to be conscious of all of the time.”

Jonathan nods and looks suddenly very serious. “That’s really beautiful, Annie, honestly.”

“I am very confident Kyle feels the same way about you both. Or he will, when he gets a little older and can make sense of his thoughts!” Annie laughs. “You both actually really make me want to be a parent. I know I’m still young”– Annie is 22 but looks all of 16– “but I just really want to love someone like a parent loves a child. I have no idea what that feels like — to have love for someone who weighs less than 15 pounds consume every fiber of your being.”

Jonathan is quiet for a moment. Winona guesses he is gathering his thoughts.

“I don’t mean to sound cheesy or anything, but love for a child really does fill you up. It’s almost an obsession. You don’t realize how weighty love is until you hold your kid and realize how that feeling has taken up so much physical room in your body.”

“I don’t know if Kyle filled us up in quite the same way.” Winona gestures to her stomach.

Sometimes when Winona rides the subway she wears especially tight tank tops to see if she will still pass as pregnant and someone will offer her a seat. She is usually successful.

“I didn’t mean Kyle the person– I meant the idea of Kyle. And the notion of human creation, and human creation of the tangible and intangible, and how frightening and wonderful it is that we not only have breathed life into a little boy, but also into ourselves and into this house.” Jonathan looks pleased by his intellect. “Sorry. I get carried away.” Annie looks moved, and cups her hand beneath her chin, looking at the couple with admiration.

“Does anyone want more?” Winona has begun pouring herself another glass of wine, her teeth having long since turned a muted purple.

“One of the perks of ending breastfeeding so early,” Jonathan laughs. Annie does too. When Jonathan decided to hire a nanny, Winona’s friends told her that they wished their husbands were as attentive as her own. Jonathan noticed that Winona was perpetually tired. Jonathan noticed that Winona could use help around the house. Winona isn’t quite sure if she appreciates how much Jonathan notices. “I can’t get away with anything now!” Winona always jokes to Annie and Jonathan when she feels them watching her with Kyle or watching her make dinner or watching her watch TV while she should be watching her son or the stove.

“I didn’t end it so early. It was six months. And everyone says that there’s really no difference between formula and breastmilk babies anymore anyway.” Annie nods. “Besides,” Winona continues, “my tits fucking hurt. I kept trying to get Jonathan to wear clothespins around his nipples so he would know what it felt like when Kyle’s teeth got in the mix.”

“That sounds awful!”

“For Jonathan or me?”

“Well, you. But I suppose also Jonathan, if he had been subjected to the clothespins.”

“Thank God I got out of that one!” Jonathan says.

“I guess there will be more opportunities to give him a frame of reference whenever you guys have another.” Jonathan and Winona are both quiet. Annie is embarrassed. “Oh, shit, sorry! I didn’t mean to presume there would be another, I was just–”

“Don’t apologize! It’s not presumptuous– I’m sure there will be another one at some point. We just haven’t talked about it yet.” Winona removes her fingers from Jonathan’s lap.

“I mean, it is a bit presumptuous though, isn’t it?” Winona turns to look at Jonathan. “Not that it’s Annie’s fault. But it’s a bit presumptuous of you to have such confidence in a two-child household.”

Jonathan licks his lower lip aggressively and his mouth curls into a half smile that either means

I’ve really dug my grave now or I do wish she would shut the fuck up.

“I didn’t realize that we had such different visions for our family trajectories.” “And what might your trajectory look like?”

Jonathan looks at Annie, who looks at the floor. She notices a spare pacifier that has rolled underneath the couch and reaches for it.

“Don’t get that, Annie. You’re off duty.” Jonathan touches her forearm as a gentle signal for her to sit back. Winona watches him touch her and moves her eyes to the pacifier, which is covered with a layer of dust that she planned on cleaning this morning. “We can have this conversation another time.” Jonathan moves from the loveseat onto the couch and sits beside Annie, who has begun toying with her short blonde hair again.

“I’m sorry. I feel like I made things uncomfortable” Annie says. Winona turns her eyes back to Annie. Sometimes Annie can feel Winona watching her, but she never says anything. She assumes it’s a maternally motivated thing, as if maybe Winona hopes that if she has a daughter she’ll wind up like Annie. “Should I go check on Kyle now?”

“I can do it.” Jonathan gets up from the couch, leaving Winona and Annie alone. It is silent for a few moments, aside from the labored breath of Winona, whose nasal passages always get blocked after her fourth glass of wine.

“Do you want to feel something weird?” Winona asks suddenly. “What is it?”

“Here. Come here.” Winona beckons Annie over. Annie moves to the loveseat, and Winona directs her to sit beside her. Winona can smell Annie’s lotion– it’s Jergens Cherry Almond. Winona uses Jergens Ultra Healing for Extra Dry Skin. Annie’s skin is never dry.

“What is it, Winona?”

“I wish that someone had shown me this when I started thinking about having kids.” Winona lifts up her shirt and reveals her stomach to Annie. Annie sits back, although there are no extra inches with which she can distance herself from Winona on the loveseat. She looks at Winona’s belly. It is pear shaped, and the lower half of her torso puckers out along the lines of her jeans. They are a size 27, even though Winona knows that she is now much closer to a 30. Her skin is wrinkled around her belly button, which looks sunken into her midsection. “Touch it, Annie.”

“No, thank you.”

“Come on, Annie. Please.” Annie watches Winona grab a fistful of flesh.

 “Don’t you want to know what motherhood feels like?” Winona nods toward her midsection. “This is it. This is what you’ll feel every time you put on a pair of jeans or run your hands over your body with soapy fingers in the shower. This is what your husband will feel every time he’s fucking you.” Annie thinks it must be painful to squeeze one’s skin so tightly and wonders if she should tell Winona to ease up so as not to cause any bruising.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Winona, honestly. You look great.”

“So feel it, Annie. Feel it and tell me I look great.” Winona shakes her head.  “I wish someone had offered me the opportunity to hold maternity between my fingers when I was your age.”

“Really, Winona, I’d rather not.” Winona’s gaze, which was not unthreatening to begin with, has turned into eye contact so imploring that Annie realizes she must either look away or reach a hand below the folded line of Winona’s shirt. She decides to go for the belly. As she lightly touches Winona’s flesh, Jonathan emerges from the bedroom. Though Jonathan has often wondered other things about Annie, he has never wondered what she might look like touching his naked wife.

“Winona, what the fuck?”

“What, Jonathan? It was normal for people to do this when I was pregnant, wasn’t it?” Winona turns to Annie.

“Winona, put your shirt down.” Jonathan looks at Annie apologetically. Jonathan had noticed Winona examining her body in their mirror earlier that morning but had decided not to bring anything up because he didn’t want to start a thing. Winona was an expert at making things out of everything.

Jonathan often felt like he was responsible for un-thinging Winona’s things. When they were first going out, Jonathan described this as Winona’s flair for dramatics.

Jonathan yawns. “I am exhausted,” he says. Annie yawns, too. “Me, too.” She says. Winona rolls her eyes.

“You know what’s worse than sleep deprivation? The fact that I literally don’t own my body anymore because it belongs to a creature who can’t even feed himself. That’s exhaustion.”

Annie feels sorry for Winona. There are some people who just don’t want to be happy, and end up reveling in their unhappiness, but Annie knows that Winona isn’t one of those. Annie thinks Winona is just unhappy. “I could always spend a night here if you want to take a night off. You guys could stay at my place, if you wanted. I have a spare room for when my parents come to visit.” Annie is so nice it sometimes makes Winona want to vomit. “I think I’m going to vomit.” Winona leaves the living room and sounds of retching can be heard from the living room, where Jonathan and Annie now stand with their arms at their sides.

“I should probably go.” Annie gets up. This is not the first time she’s felt tension between Winona and Jonathan, but it is the first time she’s seen Winona’s stomach. She’ll never say anything, but it does gross her out a little bit, seeing the way Winona’s stretch marks form a sort of ghoulish face against the brown of her skin.

“I mean, of course. It’s tough for every new mother. All of the hormones and everything… it’s a lot.” Annie has no idea what hormones are or aren’t released after pregnancy, but she likes to sound smart in front of Jonathan. Annie often finds herself trying to sound smart in front of men she finds attractive, but if she thinks about this too hard she feels rather unfeminist. She reaches for a strand of her short blonde hair and pushes it behind her ear. Winona emerges from the bathroom.

“Sorry about that.” She wipes her mouth, suddenly incredibly self-conscious. “At least I don’t have to worry about anyone suspecting I’m bulimic anymore.” She laughs her sweet, tinkling laugh and smiles hard enough to make her cheeks block her eyes. “Are you headed out?” She watches Jonathan retrieve Annie’s coat and help her put it on.

“I think so. I’m getting pretty tired.” Annie gives Winona a hug. She wonders if Annie will give Jonathan a hug goodbye, too. Annie does. Jonathan returns to the living room.

“Are we going to talk about that?” “About what?”

“That episode?” Winona ignores Jonathan. She is good at selectively hearing him. Jonathan is quiet for a while, but Winona cannot tell if this is because he is angry or hurt or humiliated.

“I think that you should be happier than you are.” Winona does not know what to say to this except, “I am happy.”

Sometimes Jonathan worries that Winona might leave him. Jonathan doesn’t love every part of Winona. Jonathan is the type of person who hates the scene in When Harry Met Sally where Harry lists all of Sally’s horrifically annoying habits as reasons why he actually loves her. Jonathan dislikes a lot of

things about Winona, and has no trouble admitting it. But Jonathan is sure Winona dislikes a lot of things about him, too, which is why he likes her. She’s no bullshit. She’d never pull a Harry.

“I bet Annie looks just like her parents.”

Jonathan doesn’t know how to respond to this, so he doesn’t. Winona walks to the fridge and fingers a wallet sized photo of Kyle at gymboree. “He looks nothing like me.”

“What are you talking about? He doesn’t look like anyone. He barely has a face. He’s not even a year old.”

“He doesn’t look like me, Jonathan. He spent nine months in me. He ruined my body. And he doesn’t even look like me. He’s so…”

“He’s so what, Winona?”

“No one thinks I’m his mother. He ruined my body and he looks nothing like me and now all the proof I have of producing him is my disgusting stomach and my swollen fingers. Motherhood is supposed to be the greatest thing in the world. If this is the greatest thing I can expect from life, then–”

“Then what?” Jonathan hopes Winona doesn’t try to kill herself before Kyle is out of the house.

Winona gets up from the loveseat.

I’m going to bed.” Winona goes to her bedroom and undresses. Winona’s throat feels like she is near crying, but Winona doesn’t want to cry, so she shuts her eyes instead and slips under the covers.

When Jonathan comes to bed about 20 minutes later, Winona opens her eyes and turns to him. They have sex, but it is nothing spectacular. It hasn’t been in what feels like a long time, but Jonathan will never say anything to Winona and Winona wishes so badly she didn’t notice that she doesn’t say anything to Jonathan. While Jonathan is on top of Winona, he makes sure not to graze the soft flesh around her navel with his hand. He thinks that if he does not touch her, she will forget that Kyle has ruined her body and he does not look like her and she is tired from living for him alone and she can never go back. Winona sees that Jonathan’s hands do not leave the pillow from behind her head. She wonders if, behind the faint fluttering of his eyelids, he is imagining she is Annie. If he tries hard enough, can he picture Annie’s short blonde hair grazing the nape of Winona’s neck?

________________ 

The sun has not yet risen but Winona is awake. She has found herself in Kyle’s room, which she often does at 3:30 in the morning. It is dark, but she can just make out the outline of Kyle’s chest moving as he sleeps. She has the urge to rest a hand atop his silky belly and feel his sweet warm breath tickle her fingers, but she does not touch him. Winona watches him instead, because she’s always thought that beauty is best left undisturbed, and boy, is he beautiful.

An artist is always alone—if he is an artist. No, what the artist needs is loneliness. – Henry Miller 

Ella is sitting on her couch with her iPhone, researching venues for her show before finishing more than one painting for it. There’s no excuse why she can’t do more. Work has been light at the boutique media agency in Soho where she acts as Head of Sales. She’s in her living room taking up space, “working” from home. The blank canvases are right over there, leaning against the modern glass coffee table with an abstractly shaped oak base. There were lines of coke on it last night, which could’ve been used to fuel her creativity. Instead she opted for the routine paranoia trip: staring through the peephole in the front door every ten minutes to check if someone was outside—cops or some sort of sexual predator. With sweat-soaked straight black hair and bulging eyes, she sustained her manic watch till the wee hours of the a.m., which resulted in zero home invaders, per usual.

This has been going on for months, dare one say years. The Boyfriend learned long ago to refrain from protesting his girlfriend’s temporary schizophrenic actions, let alone trying to comfort her physically. Like he did on countless other weekend nights, he simply sat on the couch thumbing through Instagram (and, occasionally, secretly sexting a coworker, having once been too loyal to act on it in person) till daybreak when the coke was gone and Ella had no other choice but to come down and eventually fall asleep beside him.

Ella, now in her late thirties, realizes she can no longer blame anyone but herself for her bad habits and creative block. When she was in her twenties, she covered the familial inspiration in her raw, visceral paintings. The uncomfortably personal themes of her shows (with decent reviews and nonexistent sales) came from stories about her alcoholic dad who’d been imprisoned for murdering her mom and her older brother who’d been killed attempting to break up a drunken brawl, as well as the escorting years, an endless string of bad relationships and an assortment of mostly self-inflicted abuses. Nothing in her present life is inspiring her, but she still feels compelled to paint… something, anything.

During weeknights after work and every weekend, she can only focus her tired and/or hungover body on the couch, what’s new on the good ol’ Fire TV Stick and which Grubhub meal to complement it. Or when the next cycling class is scheduled at Flywheel, offsetting the overeating and keeping her body lean and toned. Or whether she has enough funds left to buy yet another pair of shoes from Vetements or Off-White (her favorite designers) after paying her quarterly dues to Soho House and the monthly fee for an all-access membership to Equinox, among other bills and whistles. And cocaine. She loves cocaine more than she cares to admit to herself and others.

FRIDAY

The Boyfriend already left for work, and Ella is waking up again from another micro-nap. Moseying into the kitchen, she pours herself a hot cup of coffee—he makes six cups: four to fill his to-go mug and two for her—cooling it with a healthy splash of almond milk. Holding the cup in her left hand, she sips the lukewarm drink while perusing Instagram on her phone with her right. She fingers the profiles of gorgeous male models William McLarnon and Matthew Noszka and influencers into extreme sports such as Dylan Efron and Jay Alvarrez, wondering if she’d be happier with a man like one of them: otherworldly sexy, superhero strong and Insta-famous. I’m still beautiful, she tells herself in the mirror, checking to see whether the Botox that’s been hiding the wrinkles in her forehead is wearing off (not yet, thankfully). If I were in some sort of social setting with these guys, I’m sure I’d catch their eye. She considers the fantasy for a few more seconds, an even mix of the familiar guilt for superficial, adulterous thinking, an always-on ache for what she can’t have and the growing unsurety of her love for The Boyfriend (very good-looking, much younger than she and great in bed when she’s in the mood) overwhelming her physically like the freezing Peconic River on Shelter Island in early June—their first vacation nearly three years ago (they stayed at the very chic Sunset Beach Hotel).

On the kitchen counter lie a bunch of bananas spooning each other inside a clear plastic bag with the Chiquita logo. Dressed in perishable goods, Miss Chiquita smiles festively, ready to perform the calypso dance leap. Once vibrant yellow, the fruits’ skin is now dull and freckled, foretelling their rot. But The Boyfriend’s ask via text remains unfulfilled: Would you do me a big favor and peel the bananas I left on the counter and put them in the freezer? That way they’ll keep for his weekday (and semi-weekend) smoothies. The making of which are an ongoing, unwelcome wakeup call for Ella prior to one of Amazon Echo’s more appealing alarm sounds. That unnerving jackhammer noise of a “Magic” Bullet Blender pureeing assorted fruit, ice and almond milk is anything but enchanting to her ears.

They live together in Williamsburg in a two-floor loft with two bedrooms and two bathrooms. The luxury building includes amenities such as a state-of-the-art gym with indoor rock climbing, simulated golf rooms (plus a mini-golf course on the roof), a bowling alley, two pools, three hot tubs and much more unlisted here. Some of their neighbors have children and dogs, both of which The Boyfriend wants too. Ella doesn’t think of herself as motherly and has never been a big fan of animals. This isn’t to say she’s a bad person, just selfish, and at least she knows it.

But lately she’s been struggling with her somewhat lavish, arguably heretical lifestyle, thinking she should be spending her money and time with The Boyfriend in healthier ways. Perhaps it’s biological; her birthday is around the corner, as is her body’s inability to make babies. Despite The Boyfriend’s smoothies and other behaviors that only annoy her because she’s irritable from the coke comedowns, he’s kind and understanding of her idiosyncratic, addictive and neurotic personality. Lovers of the past provided an obsession and coinciding rush similar to the drugs (a TV actor, a banker, and a lawyer, all of whom were a year or two older and a zero or two richer than she), while never showing her love, which is what she thought she wanted for oh so many years. But when The Boyfriend came into her life unexpectedly and gave her just that (after hitting her with his bike as she ran into the bike lane rushing to the office one sultry afternoon), she accepted it begrudgingly and has been battling herself from rejecting him ever since.

She finds herself more preoccupied with the fear of his imminent departure now that she’s hungover again, nearing old age and getting crazier by the nanosecond. Moreover, her name is the one and only on the lease and other legal agreements tying her to this time and place financially. He could just get up and go anytime. A slice of her, the demon inside, craves this, as it’ll allow her to fully revert to the life of the manic art slut: hard-working by day; partying with a different “date” every night; painting her lonely paintings during tear-soaked, suicidal in-betweens. But the rest of her is well familiar with how that old song and dance eventually ends. Peeling and slicing The Boyfriend’s bananas, she prays un-denominationally that she can sustain her current commitment to him. She stores the mushy fruit in a plastic container and tosses it in the freezer.

SATURDAY

The Boyfriend keeps three tabs of acid in an empty dental floss case on the bottom shelf of his gunmetal nightstand. Each piece is the size of Ella’s pinky nail and advertised by the dealer as extra strength. Flashbacks of her goth-girl-teens arise whenever The Boyfriend tries convincing her to trip with him; while hallucinating, she’d learned her life’s vocation is to paint, accepted the deaths of her immediate family, fallen in love for the first time and realized her best friend was anything but (swiftly thereafter ending their toxic relationship). Consequently, she’s fearful of an LSD-laced epiphany that their relationship isn’t for the long haul. But her intensifying self-reflection is prompting her to finally discover the truth her own way.

She rises early on this sun-drenched Saturday morning, slipping out of bed softly to avoid rousing her recovering lover. He spent last night drinking with old college friends till the wee hours of the a.m. anyway, so it’s unlikely he’ll wake easily. These circumstances are usually flipped: traditionally she’s the one sleeping off a night of indiscretions while he’s already up and at ‘em, starting the day right with a smoothie and two-mile run to the waterfront and back, then gently nudging her conscious at about 3:00 p.m. with three Advils, a tall glass of ice water and no questions asked (her last time out was less than two weeks ago). But lately he’s been gradually assuming her behavior. Seems the end may have begun, and she needs to act now to ensure their best possible future, whether that’s together or not.

Once soft, the bananas are hardened when she pulls them from their cryo-slumber along with a bag of generic-brand frozen berries and two handfuls of ice, placing them on the crowded, coffee-stained kitchen counter. A collection of half-eaten takeout and countless empty beer bottles dominate its marble surface. Shaking a near-empty gallon of refrigerated almond milk, she’s pleased there’s enough left for two smoothies. She tosses everything into an oversized blender cup and switches on the “Magic” Bullet Blender with its familiar, unnerving jackhammer noise that’s anything but enchanting to her ears.

As she pours the mixture in two glasses and tops off each with one-and-a half tabs of acid, she hears sheets rustling, a snorty mumbling and the creaking bedframe. The door to the bedroom slowly opens, The Boyfriend emerging naked with a yawn (he overheats at night, no matter how high the AC), his average body exposed and dirty blond hair disheveled. Hey hon, he greets her in a throaty voice. Whoa, you made us breakfast?! Thanks, sexy. Just what I needed. He gives her an alcohol-and-rotten-fish-smelling kiss on the cheek. She stirs each glass with a bent spoon (they’re in dire need of new silverware), allowing the secret ingredient to fully envelop their healthy meal. Yeah, well, I didn’t break up the fruit enough in the blender, she white lies, handing over one of the glasses. Drink up! It’ll help with the hangover. Take these Advils too. He chucks the pills down his throat and chugs the smoothie. A burp, then he’s off to the bathroom for a shit.

Quickly slurping down her serving with a stainless-steel straw (plastic ones are hard to come by nowadays, and the cardboard kind on her lips gives her the chills), she uses her pointer finger to pull out the soggy tabs stuck on the side of the glass. Sucks them off and swallows. The only thing left to do is wait, so she flops down on the couch and ignites the good ol’ Fire TV Stick and the latest episode of Euphoria.

The faint sound of a toilet paper roll rattling around the holder means he’s finishing his business. Materializing again, he lets out a deep sigh, dragging his body next to where she lies, bringing with him a waft of Febreze and the stench of a hangover shit. He burps again and chuckles. There was this homeless dude inside the bar begging everyone for money, so weird, he shares randomly. Oh, I’ve been thinking we should go to Portugal…

SUNDAY

An impressive Sunday sunrise. Life has already moved on from yesterday’s trip, but Ella’s certain she never will (not completely, anyway). Via the bedroom window blinds (she desperately needs to buy blackout curtains), the 6:00 a.m. daylight bleeds into her eyes like a vampire’s worst nightmare. Sleep is always brief for her the night after taking LSD; the overwhelming visual effects she experiences while high never disappear when it’s time for shut-eye. Instead they’re more intense. For an hour or two before dozing off half-conscious till the a.m., she’s stuck watching a cartoon of Dante’s Inferno on her eyelids, starring characters from The Simpsons.

She rises unconcerned with the sound of sheets rustling and the creaking bedframe. The reason to keep quiet has been eliminated with her relationship; The Boyfriend left her yesterday. He didn’t take too kindly to her dosing him. At first, he found it arousing, achieving perhaps the biggest erection she’d ever seen him have. He was giggling uncontrollably at the second episode of Euphoria, during which Nate (played by the gorg Jacob Elordi) beats a guy to a pulp and rapes him. As the visuals kicked in, so did her libido and the realization of how much she loved this man, how passionately generous and unconditionally accepting he’d been with her for years. All her bad habits and emotional baggage, the bold selfishness, ignored. While he looked the other way on countless occasions, she was searching for fulfillment in every direction but his. How insanely mistaken you were! she scolded herself. Rushing to her knees, she yanked down his sweatpants and devoured him. The howls he made as she orally coaxed him to completion were magnificent.

Holy shit, hon, oh my god. That was so wild. What’s going on, everything is vibrating. Barely pulling on his sweatpants, he darted for the bathroom and knelt over the toilet puking. She walked to the sink beside him and rinsed her mouth. Checked herself in the mirror. Watched as the wrinkles in her forehead became white worms, slithered off her face and flew away. Feeling beautiful and perfect, she finally divulged she’d dosed him.

We’re on the acid, hon! I put it in our smoothies. I’ve just been so horrible lately, pushing you away. You know I’ve been scared to take it because of the revelations I have on it. But it was worth the risk! I now know I love you so much and I’m so sorry. I’m going to be better to you, to us. He looked into her with incredulous eyes. You did fucking what?! Are you kidding me, Ella! My parents are coming to the city today for my dad’s birthday. What the fuck is wrong with you?! 

And that… was that. A few more harsh sentences (one of which was We’re done for good, you crazy bitch!), a packed bag, his snubbing her pleas not to go out in public high or leave her there alone and on drugs, an exit with a slammed front door. Sobbing and hallucinating, she texted him nonstop for hours (but never called for some reason). Eventually the blue iMessages turned green, which meant he’d blocked her or shut off his new iPhone (he’d just gotten the 11).

Ella enters the living room overcome with sadness and regret. She glances at the blank canvases leaning against the modern glass coffee table with an abstractly shaped oak base, then texts her coke dealer.

THE END

These remarks were written for a memorial service for Kevin Killian, which took place on August 19, 2019, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. — Robert Glück

I suppose I have known Kevin longer than anyone here except for his siblings.  But 40 years turns out not to be such a long time.  I am older than Kevin by five years, and it was fully my plan for Kevin to speak at my memorial, rather than my speaking at his, which still is shocking and unreal to me.  Like most of us, I have been rereading Kevin’s work in the light of his death, amazed that a consciousness of such splendor and exuberance has been stilled.  The death of a loved one strips us of the notion that our present life is a dress rehearsal rather than the one and only performance, though I think Kevin was always aware of the shape of his own life in his grand gestures and also in his scrupulousness, like his attention to archives.  

I spent the most time with Kevin during the era of my workshops at Small Press Traffic, where he met Dodie.  He says he joined them in 1982.  Of course he must be right, though it seems a little late to me.  In his vast generosity, he proposed other projects through the years.  He offered to edit my collected essays for example, and he offered to work on my archives.  He did come to help me with it just three weeks before he died.  We went to Office Max.  I had to say Enough, he would have worked on them forever.  Another time he said Bob, I have an idea—let’s write a story together, both of us completely naked in a room.  The most pressing of the insecurities that proposition called forth was the awareness of how slowly I write.  It seemed like a very long time to be without any clothes.  

Through the years, Kevin would sometimes say with a wave of his hand, “Bob taught me everything I know about writing!”  It created in me—as it does in this moment—the feeling of anxious hilarity.  “God bless you for your enormous, skilled, intuitive intervention into my life.”

Did I ever teach him anything?  Or, more to the point, what did he mean?  In the workshops, I would make a few comments and suggestions about some brilliant poem or story.  (For Kevin, pleasure and safety were opposites, and his work turned on the moment when our hero sees the broader perspective of someone who wants to damage him.  Then he gains, not value, but lack of value.  Sexual invasion and danger are accepted and the little that remains is ready to be entertained by death or romance.)  The next week, Kevin would exclaim, Bob I followed your advice exactly, but the improved piece, equally brilliant, would be totally different from the one he’d read a week before, unrecognizable.  Was this sincerity, ridicule?  Where is Kevin coming from?—I often asked myself.  In fact, I used to say Kevin was the only person I ever knew who possibly could have come from a different planet—an enigma who possessed superhuman knowledge, baffling productivity, and later, super-human kindness.  He seemed to possess the secret of happiness—maybe that’s the meaning of his work: that meaning is not in short supply—there’s meaning everywhere, everything is somehow connected to everything else, and you must surrender without restraint to the matter at hand.  Even that is too prescriptive—because Kevin delighted in possibility and the penetration of all kinds of barriers, including the body itself, the mind itself, and our culture itself.  

A few sentences from “Santa,” my favorite story.  “I’m content enough, like a bubble envelope.  I lie down on my back and my hands are taped with black stickum gum, “relax now.”  I tell them where I live and how I used to watch Santa Barbara every day.  On the ceiling there’s some famous stars or windows of the far night.  I’m breathing in, not breathing out.  The air’s a faint blue, the color of speed and peace.  I did not write this, this was my life, or vice versa.”

First, I’d like to define what I mean by style. Or rather: what style means to me: The expression of an author’s subjective truth within the framework-truth of his time.

Usually an author writes

a) about what interests him. (i.e. about something he likes    hates    fears, etc.)

b)    hopefully    about what he knows.

(No one can write successfully about something he doesn’t know. & by this I don’t mean phantasy. But you’ve got to know something about nursing, about hospital administration, if one of your characters is to be a nurse. About sickness and its horizontal helplessness, if the character is the patient.)

The author’s subjective truth is already to some extent expressed by the selection of his material & by the angle from which he presents it.

His objective    or collective    truth is the validity of the selected material within the context of his time.

(Of another time, if he chooses to write about historical events or characters. But they must be relevant to the truth of his own time as well. As for instance Brecht’s Mother Courage or Arthur Miller’s Crucible.)

(Personally, I like to write about anonymous often nameless people. He/She/The Woman/His mother’s sister’s husband/ etc. By remaining nameless they become more prototypical of their specific situation or relationship. They grow from the inside out, their world ripping around their thought of themselves.    —I’m forever fascinated with the ego-image & its outward reflection, or projection.—    I have tried to render the ‘essence’ of a Mother/Daughter stalemate    in a play Breakfast Past Noon    by putting the dialogue into the past tense…)

Every thought    or situation    has its own heartbeat. Its own breath cadence. Its own organic page-duration. The very choice whether a thought    or situation    should become a short story     a novel    a play    & of what length    is already part of the style. Or form.

To me, even a potentially exciting thought or situation is dulled & becomes irrelevant if the form    or style    is not the perfect mirror of the content.    (Perhaps this is why a finished stylist like Flaubert never quite succeeded in realizing his great ambition: to describe boredom without boring; in Sentimental Education…)     Kafka    Gertrude Stein    Beckett    Borges    Nathalie Sarraute    Robbe-Grillet    Claude Ollier    & many other recent Americans like Stephen Koch & Joseph McElroy    are all masters of mirror-description, in a my opinion.     Usually through repetition with a slight variation; an almost hallucinatory groping.

(By repetition I do not mean: writing on after one has nothing left to say. Letting a story    or play    run on & on, like a beheaded chicken running around a courtyard. As I’ve said before: the length of a story is an organic part of what the story wants to say.)

The inseparable bond between style & content becomes particularly evident when one tries to translate a work. (& I’m not only thinking of translating puns.) Each language has its own recurrence of vowels; its own sound associations. When influence    slant    direct    an author’s thinking whether he realizes it admits it or not. A language is, after all, the expression of character & thought pattern of the people who live in it. & vice versa. & the grammar that regulates the sequence & importance of the different words within a sentence is the psychological key to the character & thought-pattern.

—The same applies to the slang, that constantly changing language within a language. That changes: as to like; switches from cool to heavy; that blows your mind & freaks you out.—

Nothing reveals a discrepancy between content and its expression as blatantly as the attempt to express that content in another language. (Which is another reason why plot stories that place little emphasis on style are more popular export articles.    —Why an author like Günter Grass, with his Tin Drum, is a lot more popular in America than his compatriot Uwe Johnson, a stylistic innovator, with his also bulky Speculations about Jakob, or his Third Book about Achim.—    A faithful rendering of STYLE requires the self-effaced patience of a translator of poetry.

Truth & reality    at least the interpretation & expression of truth & reality are as subject to fashion as our concepts of what is beautiful & what ugly. Which no one will deny are subject to constant change. Yet, many people do deny that their points of view aesthetic as well as MORAL follow trends of fashion.

When pointed shoes & spike heels came back, replacing previous rounded flatness, many people said: God! How can anybody walk in that! Until many of those many people began walking in them… Because they no could longer face themselves as ‘clodhoppers’.

& when flat-heeled roundness made its first reappearance, just as many people regretted the days of gracefully tip-toeing helplessness… Until many of the many began feeling that: ‘Only prostitutes willfully reduced their mobility…’ & descended from their pointed heights to the respectability level of comfort.

When hemlines went up, so did eyebrows.    For a while.

Now, the same heads shake their regret of long-legged liberty at the sight of a maxi-coat, climbing into a bus. (Paradoxically enough: older women who might have more reasons for hiding their legs & seek additional winter warmth besides, do not go in for maxi-coats;    At least not yet.)    Etc.  Etc.  Etc.

Or, on another level: when the Renaissance introduced perspective into 
painting belying painting’s basic truth: 2-dimensional flatness    it introduced a new way of seeing. A new & different pictorial ‘reality.’ That eventually went to extreme in trompe-l’oeil reality or Campbell soup cans. & every time, people’s vision adjusted itself. & the memory of previous visions was effaced. Until the landscapes around Arles began looking like Van Gogh’s paintings…etc…

Every taste    every moral indignation    every life & death sentence    has its lifespan of truth & reality. Until it is superseded by the next. & every time, we speak of: progress. & look back upon the immediate past    over fashionably padded or drooping shoulderlines    with a condescending smile for our childhood follies.

While annotators annotate.

& analysts analyse

(a recurrence of fashion in clothes not so unlike what people wore during the bloody days of the French Revolution. A cut of coats not so unlike those worn during the civil war…).

& prophets prophecy doom & subsequent enlightenment.

& historians mutter about: history repeating itself.

& tired cynics take refuge in the triteness of proverbs. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose…

& prophets prophecy doom & subsequent enlightenment. & subsequent doom.

& critics criticize, & shake their heads…

& all are safe. On the safe side of basic absolute truth & reality. On the premise that human life on earth continues to pose more or less the same basic problems    of survival    individually as well as collectively. From one millennium to the next.

Granted: primitive man running from a dinosaur was not so differently motivated from a jaywalker in city traffic. By a similar mixture of imprudence & fear for his life. But the FORM of his imprudence has changed.

An author attempting to describe the jaywalker’s feelings cannot borrow imaginary retrospective fear-drama from the dinosaur contemporary. & yet, certain authors try to do just that. It is not so uncommon on television or in the movies. & certain critics applaud. & recommend them as examples.

Or, on a psychological level:

The jealousy    outrage    possessive indignation    that prompted Othello to smother his loyal wife may still be felt by a husband/wife/lover party to a wife-swapping club of bridge-bored suburbanites in search of release. He might even be prompted to act in Othello’s old-fashioned fashion.

But an author describing    or inventing    or reinventing such a drama cannot justify the righteous indignation    the concern with shame & honor    that was the fictional reality in Shakespeare’s days.    —Which was perhaps equally unreal, untrue to life even then. Today’s author would at least have to touch upon the mixed-marriage problem somewhere along his storyline. Go into housing discrimination, etc. Nor could he blithely reuse the handkerchief evidence, in this Kleenex-age. Unless he made a special point of his heroine’s using a handkerchief, rather than Kleenex. Which would give the lady a different character, setting her off as something of an original among her fellow suburbanites.

Still: there are many readers    & networks; & especially certain critics    that cling to this bygone fictional reality. & have nothing but scorn & yawns    if not outright hatred    for an anti-novel like Robbe-Grillet’s La jalousie which is    to me    a perfect modern— (& timeless) reality portrait of jealousy. Of suspicious spying & speculating from behind half-closed shutters. & no more ‘an unnecessarily repetitive complicating of a banal incident’ than somebody’s varying stages of degrees of jealousy.

But to certain critics who are looking for past centuries’ fictional reality in contemporary writing    (& it seems to me that the tendency to look back oriented certain of these critics in the choice of their profession)    La jalousie is a failure of a novel. A bad boring book. Because it does not offer a clear-cut plot, elaborated according to the standard: beginning-middle-end prerequisite by an omniscient author. Who makes his characters behave as though there was no such thing as multiple motivation. Or a subconscious. As though each knew on page 1 where he’d have to be at the end. After a detour-conflict in the middle.

As though truth & reality were stately unshakeable absolutes.

There is perhaps a deeply rooted psychological reason behind this attitude. Behind this distrust of style. Especially of stylistic innovations; unconventional punctuation or spacing; lists; ampersands instead of spelled-out ands; figures not spelled out; varying indentations of paragraphs, etc.etc. A distrustful moralizing attitude that feels    at best    that form should not be noticeable, in a work. (I think that it is the effort involved in creating the form that should not be noticeable.) That style    or form    should be totally subordinate to the content & not an integral indispensable part & aspect of the work, as important as the content.  —A soul without a body is a ghost.—    That a work cannot be successful, if the style is noticeable. That a noticeable style obstructs/obscures the content. Or    the most common accusation    that it is used as a screen behind which to hide a lack of content…

It seems to me that the psychology behind this ‘formophobe’ attitude is the same that attaches a value judgement    a moral evaluation    to the basic differentiation of:

positive & negative

active    & passive

light      & dark

white    & black

right     & left

& finally, to sum it all up & get to the crux of the problem of

male     & female

masculine & feminine.

At the risk of being accused of blatant feminism and prejudice    (men have opinions, women are opinonated) , I’d like to point out that form is a feminine, a female concept.

Which explains perhaps its dubious reputation. & the constant attempt, on the part of certain    usually male critics    to keep    or to put    form in its subordinate place.

Whereas the concept of content is definitely male.

All of life around us    all of nature    electricity    the kabbala    all teachings of wisdom    show that one cannot exist without the other. That content & from shape one another. Feed one another. That they are originally bound to each other in never-ending interdependence.

Why speak ill of the surface. Only the void has none…

(& already each of you who may be drawing a picture of the void in his mind is giving it a form. A different form in each mind…)

The striking, Borgesian death of Wren Cartwright is the forgotten story of East Village lore. Precisely because the neighborhood has experienced seismic tumult, from the crack epidemic to the AIDS crisis to rapid gentrification, it has left few witnesses to such an eccentric lifestyle and its improbable end. Thus separating reality from anecdote is that much more difficult.  

While alive, Wren Cartwright was but one among a veritable platoon of tatterdemalion book scouts who threaded the New York City subway systems, slouching subterranean travelers who emerged into the light of day only to plunge into musty, outer-borough second-hand stores, or to canvas estate sales upstate for first editions or bundles of Civil War letters that had, until then, been rotting in attics. Chelsea flea-markets were frequent battle grounds as this horde of hustlers possessed sharp elbows and shrewd, encyclopedic knowledge of literary arcana. They were known to screech at one another if they happened to reach for a fine, embossed copy of Treasure Island at the same time. Auction houses, book collectors, and the less-esteemed bookstores of the Upper East Side all purchased their wares (some shopkeepers met these grubby shades at the back door where they were paid for their pickings off the books and in cash). They were always men, mostly middle-aged or wizened, be-speckled bachelors on the march, daily circling New York City, moving just enough books to survive at a subsistent level. Most wore a laminated copy of their independent retailer’s license on a thread around their neck to silently signal to timid clerks that they didn’t have to pay sales tax. All were on the hunt for that elusive white whale in book form to lift them from poverty. That paper Moby Dick would surface on the horizon during blazing sunsets of rent-fueled desperation at the end of every month—a first edition Fitzgerald that, at a glance looked to be signed by the infamous alcoholic, only it was the scribbled name of the book’s previous owner.  With an exhausted sigh the volume was slung onto the counter for purchase as the fog of false hope swirled anew. 

Except for Wren Cartwright. He miraculously scored. 

As the story goes, told and retold among scouts, collectors, and retailers, one humid July afternoon he found himself at a Brooklyn Heights church rummage sale. There, within a box of old newspapers and coverless paperbacks secreted within a battered, stained and nearly unsalable copy of Leaves of Grass was a cache of yellowed letters from a young Bram Stoker to the master himself. They nearly slid out and onto the dirty gray sidewalk. Words unread for a century.  Even better, drafts of Whitman’s appreciative replies were tucked in as well. Scribbles of his poetry reached for the margins. Wren clutched the parcel to his heaving chest with one hand while thrusting exact change at the salesperson, lest they, in breaking a dollar bill, had time to inspect the item, declare it a treasure and set it aside as no longer for sale. He stuffed the receipt into his greasy billfold and fled down into the subway. These feral booksellers were a shrewd bunch, and Wren knew that the letters were going to lift him out of poverty like bat wings. For at that moment, the revival of Dracula ruled Broadway. The black etchings of Edward Gorey’s poster for the play were plastered all over town. As his discovery was just a few years after the Stonewall riot, gay culture was on the rise and as such letters of this nature were quite collectable. Wren’s whale had surfaced in a perfect confluence of trend, popular culture, and exclusivity. The faded book plate declared the owner of this volume to have been the sexton of the very church where Cartwright had made the purchase. Whitman had famously lived in the area, so provenance was not a problem. He knew not to take the letters to the bookstores; they would preemptively dismiss his find, outright devalue it, begrudgingly offer a pittance and sell the letters in the window at a criminally high mark-up. No, treasure such as this was destined for an international seller, likely for auction to the highest bidder. Bypassing Manhattan’s big-name auction houses and their byzantine approval processes, he shakily made the rare long-distance call to a London firm that dealt only in books and manuscripts and they immediately set an appointment for their New York representative to inspect the letters. In short order, the sale was made to an anonymous collector with a standing order to pay top dollar for items relating to a short list of favored authors. The buyer went public after the sale with the intent of gifting some of the letters to Trinity College Dublin. Biographers for both writers cawed to the press that this was the literary discovery of the decade. Within a fortnight of his find, a large amount of money was wallowing in Wren Cartwright’s bank account. And with this, some of his habits began to change: not his dress, he still took the subway, he still ate miserly in out-of-the-way diners; though he continued to move books around town, for the first time in his mostly unrecorded life, Wren began to acquire for taste, not profit.  

While little is known of Cartwright before his windfall, more is known about the years leading up to his dramatic demise. Public records offer up a birth in Delaware, an unfinished degree in English from Stetson University in Florida (it’s speculated that he left as a result of a campus-wide purge of homosexual students and staff. There’s no evidence for this except the explicit timing of his hasty move north). Tax returns show a variety of low-paying clerking jobs until his obsessive love of literature eventually translated into a peripatetic existence of selling books while living in a variety of SROs up and down the outskirts of Manhattan. It’s worth noting that the majority of his early residences were always within walking distance of major gay cruising spots on the city’s Westside, though any connection is purely conjecture. As far as we know, Cartwright left no journals, and lived a friendless life outside of his connections to the book trade. He disowned or was disowned by his family (they refused to collect his corpse, which was cremated and buried on Hart Island, a potter’s field off the Bronx so overfed with the bodies of New York’s forgotten that skulls roll ashore on Orchard Beach after strong storms). His drift into a hermitic existence is hard to trace, though money from the Stoker-Whitman sale fueled an unstated resolve. He immediately moved to a large, ground floor studio in the East Village at a time when it was a cheap and dangerous neighborhood. The Bowery was blighted, muggings common. Since he could have afforded safer, more luxurious housing, in hindsight it is tempting to surmise that he chose this apartment neither for thrift nor location, but the singular rarity that his front door both opened to the street and was equipped with a mail slot.   

There are many different types of bibliomania. Beyond the typical affinity for genre, there are literary manias that, oddly, have gone unrecorded. At the time, Wren Cartwright’s death received little notice outside a curt, riddle-like headline in the August 5th, 1998 edition of The New York Post: Porn Addict Chokes To Death on Smut. His peculiar story has gained more attention in recent years as hoarding, the compulsive collecting of things, has moved from an obscure concern among social workers and into the public sphere via reality shows and social media. While the tapestry of New York City is stained with countless lonely deaths, none have ever been as articulate or as unusual as Wren Cartwright’s suicide. 

With the Stoker-Whitman sale, his focus shifted entirely onto gay erotica and pornography. The mass of gay pulp produced during prior decades was, at that time, unwanted and unappreciated. These steamy sex romps from the fifties and sixties were discarded as more emboldened, celebratory gay pornography followed the sexual revolution. Cartwright not only purchased every available copy of gay pulp that he could get his hands on—he also acquired large quantities of Bob Mizer’s pictorial magazines and any and all lewd apocrypha. Bookseller and original member of New York City’s Gay Men’s Chorus Ben McFall reports that his reputation among the other booksellers was someone who paid well and in cash for any and all gay material. “I also saw him at the bars, drinking alone, always reading, never socializing. I never saw him at the baths. Most of the book scouts were straight, so I expected he’d have been pleased to see a familiar face but he never made small talk.” Similarly, Glenway Wescott biographer Jerry Rosco, a longtime resident of the East Village, knew Cartwright by sight. “He was just one of those characters you saw around town, always lugging a bag of books with him. I heard he got banned from The Oscar Wilde Bookshop for haranguing a customer who bought the last copy of some porno mag he lusted after.” Cartwright also subscribed to every gay publication of a sexual nature. Among his known magazine and chapbook subscriptions, from the popular to the obscure (this is far from an exhaustive list), were Black Inches, Blueboy, Bound and Gagged, Drum, Drummer, Freshmen, Guzzler Magazine, Honcho, International Barracks, Latin Inches, Mandate, Mister, Playguy, Samson, Stepson Quarterly, Straight To Hell, Urge and Vulcan. 

He is known to have quarreled with Straight to Hell editor and fellow curmudgeon, Boyd McDonald. Cartwright accused McDonald of withholding several early issues of STH simply to spite him. While McDonald was known to play or trick or two, he was also famously cash-strapped and would have benefited from Cartwright’s largess, so it’s likely a minor dust-up in some Times Square porn store has transmogrified into legend. It’s an interesting juxtaposition: Cartwright, as the consummate consumer, frequented the same haunts as editor Boyd McDonald and science fiction and fantasy author Samuel R. Delaney, writers who explicitly recorded the erotic adventures Wren coveted, and was in turn consumed by; a sexual Ouroboros of gluttony. One can’t help but think that, though Delaney and McDonald were the risk-takers, desire triumphs obsession as at least desire can be spent. With obsession, accumulation occurs until somewhere a dam breaks, either psychically or otherwise.  

From the limited information we can gain from the police report, there was no furniture in Wren’s apartment with the exception of a spent mattress on the floor. Every inch was given over to his burgeoning library. Even the refrigerator had been removed some years prior; his corpse was described as emaciated, so at some point his collecting trapped him/entombed him. His rent was paid far enough in advance to guarantee mummification before his body was discovered. So much is unknown, including whether the mailman who made the fateful delivery was aware that he or she had inadvertently caused the death of another human being. Nor was it possible to know which magazine delivered the fateful blow, enforcing a seppuku of centerfolds and tan lines down Cartwright’s open mouth, choking him to death. No photographs of the scene, quickly ruled a suicide, survive. (No photographs taken of the reclusive Cartwright while he was alive have to come to light, either). What was apparent, however, is that the abundance of books and magazines, and likely rare manuscripts and letters, were arranged in such a way as to act as gears: each conveyance of pornographic material in anonymous brown paper wrappers during those final days set a domino-process in motion. At some point, Cartwright could no longer rise from his bed. Enthroned on piles of pulp as mail was pushed through the slot, prior deliveries were propelled forward. Think of the dark architectural designs from the great eighteenth century illustrator Piranesi come to life. The meticulousness of this paper clockwork meant that, near starvation, Wren Cartwright was able to purse his lips and receive one final delivery, extreme unction, possibly in the form of a California surfer, nude, looking over his sun-kissed shoulder, a wave about to break that never will. 

The complexity of this machination cannot be overstated. The singularity of the design is overwhelming: the entire apartment and all of its contents were arranged to act as a slow-moving guillotine, his obscene library serving double duty as a deadly apparatus, a contraption the creation of which required an outré imagination and nearly fiendish planning. It’s likely models were built and tested, attempts failed, plans revisited; the investment of time, the sheer determination, is unfathomable and augments Cartwright’s suicide to a new form of self-expression, surpassing the mere politics of immolated monks and all their ilk. 

It is now considered culturally criminal that such a vast collection of pornography, one that likely represented the entire erotic output of gay America up until his death, was unceremoniously hauled to the dump. This loss was described by poet and Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Merrick Community College Philip F. Clark as “The burning of our Library of Alexander. Or more likely our Library of Bagoas, Alexander’s boy-eunuch lover, for those magazines were in their own way love letters. The men pictured had the bodies we all coveted; the stories were ones we could only tell each other.” Likely somewhere within the now defunct Fresh Kills landfill, this buried museum quietly rots. Glossy buttocks, mimeographed cocks, page after page of torrid encounters and anatomical descriptions are blindly churned to soil by innumerable insects. Was Wren Cartwright’s collection a suicide note or a paean to beauty, an example of mental illness unchecked or a singular act of deviance: one of carnal images and lurid letters, a cut-up like no other, designed to make the ghost of William S. Burroughs stew in jealously within his bunker, just a few blocks away?  On the tenth anniversary of his death, painter and performance artist Lorenzo De Los Angeles launched a one-night art installation at the East Village experimental theater, La MaMa, symbolically recreating Wren Cartwright’s moment of death. Inspired by the erotic artistry of Surrealist Hans Bellmer, works of gay pornography were connected by an intricate web of strings to a plastic skeleton being force-fed images via an elaborate series of funnels in a room created by cardboard boxes. Every time a viewer plucked at one of the strings, another image would slide into the skeleton’s unhinged jaws, filling the fishbowl ensconced within its ribcage, making the viewer complicit in Cartwright’s demise. Outside of De Los Angeles’s moving sculpture and a passing mention in Gary Indiana’s autobiography that he suspected Cartwright of swiping the original manuscript of his first novel, Horse Crazy, New York City’s culture commentary on Cartwright’s bizarre demise has been surprisingly minimal. Only singer Dean Johnson of the Velvet Mafia is known to have consistently memorialized the compulsive collector.  After Wren’s passing, he frequently dedicated shows to him. (Johnson’s own 2007 death is shrouded in mystery.)  

The methodical premeditation of such a suicide surpasses the typical diagnosis of hoarding, which is based on the fear of letting go. With Cartwright’s death, we have the creation of an Egyptian tomb, replete with homoerotic hieroglyphs. The mailman was merely a servant laying the last brick, sealing the sepulcher, as it were. Or is his death a mystery we will never solve? Should we avoid reflexively painting it as a tragedy? For if his actions were a thanatological embrace of the erotic life society had tried so hard to evict him from, then Wren Cartwright can be said to have built not a tomb, but a cathedral of desire, one whose collapse he himself orchestrated, as all religions eventually implode as sacrament begets sacrifice.

“I felt it myself, and made others feel it.”  –Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“For the first time in motion picture history, members of the audience – including you – will actually play a part in the picture. You will feel some of the physical reactions, the shocking sensations experienced by the actors on the screen.” So warned 1950s horror maverick William Castle, as he introduced his 1959 camp classic and deliciously sadistic Vincent Price vehicle, The Tingler. Both enticement into never-before-seen-or-felt terrors and warning of the physiological danger of sitting and watching, the film announced the arrival of the latest innovation in cinema technology: PERCEPTO (a close cousin of the oft-lampooned Smell-O-Vision, the immersive Emergo, and early 3D), a sleight of hand through which audience members would become “living participants” in the “actual shock-sensations” and “physical reactions” of their screaming on-screen counterparts. Imagine the gall and genius of PERCEPTO and its conspiring theaters: Here, in this theater, no one is safe from experiencing real sensation. Here we are all participants.

The so-called King of Gimmicks, Castle outfitted theaters to make moviegoers directly feel on-screen action: he provided PERCEPTO instruction manuals and kits to install vibrating motors under seats to shock and surprise – and remind audiences of what their bodies already knew. Built on a fusion of early 20th-century amusement park immersive spectacles (Coney Island simulations of the San Francisco earthquake, Pompeii eruption, and other historic natural disasters) and 1950s marketing of new technologies to fill seats in an era when livingroom television threatened to eclipse movie theaters, PERCEPTO called out its audiences and their comfortable viewing distance. Promotional posters and advertisements invited audiences into real bodily experience, the movie-going version of a game of Chicken, baiting: “DO YOU HAVE THE GUTS TO SIT IN THIS CHAIR?” 

PERCEPTO also strived to make “real and powerful” for audiences what phenomenological approaches to cinema take for granted. Equal parts gimmick and revolution in cinematic empathy, this new technology understood that the experience of watching a film activates physiological and cognitive response beyond our eyes and ears. It also ventured beyond a two-dimensional understanding of movie screens to underscore how, as art historian and curator Catherine David has described, “projected images have been overflowing the flat, frontal limits of the traditional screen and moving into the bodies of spectators ever since the origins of cinema itself.” It grasped film as a medium that engages multiple senses simultaneously, impacts blood pressure and nerve response, the movements of muscle and bone, the complex result of “mysterious electronic impulses” relayed in the central nervous system. Castle insisted that audience members would “actually take part in” and “feel” what hitherto seemed simply a two-dimensional image plane: a Chicago-area advertisement promised “YOU actually FEEL real physical sensations as you shiver in fright to its FLESH-CRAWLING ACTION!” Sign me up.

While his films are often dismissed as B-movie body horror, Castle was exploring embodied and participatory spectatorship in a way that resonates with Vivian Sobchack’s understanding of “embodied perception” and “lived-body experience” in film viewing. A central voice in the phenomenology of film and sensory responses to cinema violence, Sobchack provokes us into taking cinema seriously as an enterprise connecting bodies and not just minds: “more than any other medium of human communication, the moving picture makes itself sensuously and sensibly manifest as the expression of experience by experience,” an encounter structured by the relationship between consciousness and carnality. Perhaps unlikely bedfellows, Castle and Sobchack share a belief in the sensory experience of images, particularly those that bring us closer to others’ bodies in pain or poses of death, extending our mechanisms of witness beyond the realm of the visual and intellectual into the physiological and carnal. Whether in a darkened theater or interacting with various screens, this is a voyage beyond voyeuristic pleasures into empathetic encounters we can feel in our muscles, nerves, bones. Blood pressure rises, palms sweat, we grab onto our seats and prepare for a physiological ride.

Castle’s Vincent Price vehicle The Tingler is self-aware (dare I say meta-cinematic) in its exploration of the bodily consequences of viewing; on-screen characters and the theater audience alike are, like Sobchack, “achingly aware” of their bodies as “sensuous, sensitized” physiological entities. Price portrays Dr. Warren Chapin, a pathologist and coroner for the State prison who performs autopsies on executed prisoners and studies the physiological effects of fear in his own theater of death (not unlike the surgical theater captured in Eakins’ 1875 painting, The Gross Clinic). Through the magic of PERCEPTO, The Tingler translates its on-screen camp-horror into actual sensations the audience feels in their seats, making manifest the bodily experience of cinematic perception: the film’s central monster-baddies – parasites who feed on human fear and enter characters’ spinal cords (those command centers of sensation) – enter the theater as back-lit projections and shock-vibrations on filmgoers’ spines, synchronized as audiences come face-to-face (and spine-to-spine) with scenes of attack and death. A primal scene: As we sit and watch, we feel the danger of viewing scenes of violence inflicted on other bodies. Our sensorium activated, we experience physiological responses to on-screen sensations that extend into the theater aisles, under our seats, vibrating within our skin. 

The Tingler refused passive viewing and wanted audiences to understand how watching can be a dangerous enterprise, one in which our bodies (not just our mind’s eye) are impacted. This recalls the notorious surrealist montage that opens Un Chien Andalou (1929 silent film co-conceived by Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel), a cinematic primal scene that climaxes in an act of sadistic film editing as a single razor blade slices through the moon and then an eyeball, a proxy for our own eyes – an enticement and warning that seeing is never purely about vision; it has real physical effects. Whether viewing an extreme close-up of a finger penetrating a seething bullet wound in one of many interrogation scenes in Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (2009), watching Alex sit in “the chair of torture” with eyes clamped open and forced to “viddy” films of rape and murder in Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971), encountering the ritual crosscut slaughters at the climax of Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979), or witnessing the dry heaving of a former leader of Indonesian death squads as he returns to the site where he killed hundreds in The Act of Killing (Dir. Joshua Oppenheimer and Anonymous, 2012), as members of the audience we flinch, take part in, and feel pain at the sight of others’ experience. We check our limbs to feel for wounds, our eyelids hurt, we feel nauseated. This is more than alienation in the face of spectacle violence; this is participatory, embodied empathy in action.

In July 2013, hip hop innovator, artist, actor, and poet Mos Def (rechristened Yasiin Bey) “starred” in a video reenactment of the standard operating procedure for force-feeding hunger striking detainees at Guantánamo Bay. Released by the British human rights organization Reprieve and initially posted on The Guardian online, the video went viral within hours and circulated to an audience of millions via international media websites. On one hand, this was a film with a lead actor in the role of orange-clad detainee, a cast of Guantánamo “guards” wielding handcuffs, “medics” outfitted in green scrubs and plastic gloves, and a director (British filmmaker Asif Kapadia, later lauded for his 2015 gut-wrenching documentary Amy, is never on screen though audible as he shouts “Cut!”). Yet Bey did not merely inhabit a fictional role or function as an artist engaged in activist performance art, but his was a real body actually experiencing the force-feeding procedure. As a stamp of documentary authenticity, the film announces “This is what happened” as prelude to Bey’s entrance on screen. The Guardian described how “There was no rehearsal: after all, no acting would be required. In an instant, he was no longer Mos Def – rapper and Hollywood star – but a powerless prisoner, experiencing what hunger strikers in Guantánamo Bay endure daily.” 

In the central reenactment sequence lasting two and a half minutes, Bey wears the requisite orange jumpsuit metonymic of detainees in the War on Terror, the most widely recognizable postmodern prison uniform, and steps into the bodily experience of a hunger-striking detainee. The camera cuts quickly between close-ups on Bey’s exposed wrists and ankles, as guards handcuff and chain together his hands and feet, all strategically framed so we can see neither the faces of “guards” nor “detainee.” Everyone is an incomplete body, the manacled limbs and administering hands standing in for a whole set of prison relations – the spectacle of race, discipline, and state violence visible in the contrast between Bey’s blackness and the white tattooed arms of guards. (Such details quietly recall the 2001 death-row drama Monster’s Ball, which Bey costarred in alongside Sean “Diddy” Combs and Halle Berry, and similarly features a chair of discipline and torture.)

In the guise of detainee strapped to restraining chair, Bey gives form to both a physical site (Guantánamo Bay Prison) and physical experience (force-feeding procedure, nasogastric plastic tubes forced up the detainee’s nose, down throat, into stomach) that are so often representational black holes outside comprehension, seemingly impossible to access via empathetic engagement. Yet at the same time that the film allows us to “see” Guantánamo, it is highly stylized and readily acknowledges its status as a staged reenactment. Bey the individual (not yet detainee) first walks on screen and enters a stark white minimalist soundstage reminiscent of a modern art gallery or site for a performance action (think: Marina Abramović or Joseph Beuys). Upon closer inspection, we notice this is a heterogeneous space containing the equipment of both a film set and medical-prison discipline: key lights on tripods stand next to towering bags of IV fluid, all positioned around a single restraining chair, doubly suggestive of an electric chair and canvas director’s chair (an actual director’s chair appears following the reenactment sequence). Dressed in head-to-toe designer black, from modified fez to wing tips, Bey speaks out from the screen and directly addresses the audience as a prelude to the performed reenactment. The entire video is shot on this soundstage, a decontextualized blank slate that feels far from the store of images we associate with “prison.” Yet this is a different kind of prison than exists in the American popular imagination. We’re not inside recognizable cell blocks popularized in films Escape From Alcatraz (Dir. Don Siegel, 1979) or In the Name of the Father (Dir. Jim Sheridan, 1993); the blankness of the space is fitting for the decontextualized site of Guantánamo and undisclosed detention centers throughout the world that remain black sites invisible to public eyes.

As threefold spectator-voyeur, proxy detainee, and performer-activist, Bey exists in complicated relationship to actual detainees, as do we as spectators viewing this video reenactment. Although he temporarily steps into the role of detainee and experiences a procedure similar to those on 2013 hunger strike, he still retains agency as a performer and American citizen whom has “volunteered to undergo the procedure,” a privilege not permitted the 44 detainees “force fed against their will.” Dismissed by some as propaganda spectacle and “publicity stunt,” hailed by others as an act of protest and “legitimate performance art” that draws immediate attention to the ethical trespasses of Guantánamo allowing audiences to engage viscerally with detainees’ experience, it functioned both as media event and reenactment art with ethical intent. Bey’s performance also evoked connections between force-feeding of detainees and violent policing of African-American masculinity, the reenactment video distributed online via YouTube and Vimeo alongside Facebook livestreams of police-involved shootings. 

More than an ethical wake-up call and indictment of the Department of Defense under Bush and Obama, the reenactment also raised questions and provoked provisional answers on the role of art in generating communities of empathy and catalyzing political change: How might we attach not just an image to the representational void of Guantánamo but also a physiological experience that we can feel in our bodies? While disclaimers that accompanied online postings of the video believed this was dangerous physiological business – “Warning: the video is hard to watch and extremely upsetting” and “Some viewers may find these images distressing” – are there limits to what we can feel as viewers in the face of “distressing” or “upsetting” images? Beyond purely affective or emotional response, it’s impossible to deny the “hard to watch” physical consequences of watching Bey undergo this procedure as a reenactment of what the 44 force-fed detainees actually experienced. Yet are there limits to what Bey can claim to experience through his voluntary participation in a dramatically truncated force-feeding procedure (his two and a half minutes vs. the typical two hours it takes to administer to detainees) and because he can tell his “captors” to stop or the director may step in and call “Cut”? And finally: though wildly different in tone and intent than The Tingler, the audience to Bey’s reenactment similarly becomes a community of “living participants” who “actually feel real physical sensations” – a community of feeling both on and off screen, collapsing the point-of-view of experiencing subject and viewing audience into simultaneous first-order bodily experience.

One last set of questions – a challenge to film viewers, artists, and critics to scan their senses and confront how bodies-that-watch feel, experience, and desire what happens on screen: How do sadistic spectatorship, masochistic participation, and human curiosity fuel the relation (and collapse the distance) between viewer and performer, or between Bey and the Guantánamo detainees? How does viewing Bey’s painful experience of force-feeding – his gagging, flinching, and difficulty breathing, the low-angle shots capturing his flared nostrils and neck muscles tensed, a series of bodily events “happening” yet also strategically staged – expose the impossibility of separating the aesthetics, ethical-ideological, and complex sensory-erotics (senserotics) of empathetic encounter? This is not a matter of diagnosing film experience as sadistic or ethical or transformative or perverse or life-affirming or life-destroying (it is surely all these things and more), but of being human and living inside a sensing body.

Whatever your specific response to viewing his reenactment-performance, likely some combination of recoil and perverse fascination with scenes of prison discipline usually hidden from public view, there’s no escaping that watching Bey’s body “actually” undergo the procedure makes the viewing body feel something. We all enter the prison simulacrum and inhabit a shared body of sensation and suffering. We are then faced with a choice about whether to keep viewing, sensing, participating in what’s experienced on screen (what Sontag dubs the ethical challenge of “co-spectatorship”). Ultimately the audience is confronted by the same question that Tingler posters posed as a taunt and a dare to be more human, to stop merely looking at screens but to participate in what we see: “Do you have the guts to sit in this chair?” 

Do you?

Sam Goody was a haven set across from a broken decorative fountain in the dimly lit mall I grew up near, a shop where misfits and bankers, smokers and jocks, single mothers and next-door neighbors found themselves assembled by a shared desire for music. It was a place for discovery, a place where unearthing a musical gem, by force or by accident, could help a youth from a small Southern town carve out an identity. An open mind and some disposable income could lead to a treasure that might alter your life.

If, like me, you didn’t have any disposable income, then a Christmas gift certificate from your cooler, older cousin would suffice. On this occasion, the winter of 1994, the deck, was stacked against me. When you’re on the cusp of the awful in-between years of adolescence the world is a confusing place. None of your choices matter but, to you, every choice carries the weight of the future. It never once occurred to me that choices were reversible or even inconsequential in the grand plan. Choosing between albums to purchase? You may as well ask me to select an organ to remove.     

I knew what I was supposed to listen to, what I was supposed to choose. Radio and social pressures pushed me toward acceptable, popular music of the day: alternative rock bands like Nirvana and Pearl Jam; pop stars such as Paula Abdul, Janet Jackson, and Boyz II Men; contemporary country by the likes of Garth Brooks and Billy Ray Cyrus. I loved it all and I wanted to opt for the biggest status-achieving album I could afford. I knew that my choices on that day in that Sam Goody would forever elevate my social status and transform me into a wise, sophisticated trendsetter within my church youth group and my inner circle of friends—both of them. God willing, it might even grant me a silent nod of approval from the store employee with the spiked hair and nose ring.

None of that happened. Instead, I chose poorly.

As desperate as I was to have my musical choices accepted, there was a small pang in my head imploring me to do something drastic: to expand my musical horizons. With a world of music at my fingertips, my burgeoning adult consciousness vetoed every decision my adolescent heart came up with. That’s how I ended up with two, bargain-priced CDs: Lead Belly’s Greatest Hits and Bob Dylan’s Slow Train Coming. I may as well have opted to open a 401k with my change jar. 

At home, both records sounded awful to my nascent, underdeveloped ears. ‘Awful,’ however, at age 13 really meant, “These songs don’t sound like the other songs I like on the radio.” Even in “CD quality sound!” they sounded hollow and muddled, like a warped picture broadcast to an ancient television. Worse, they sounded like the past, and it was a past I wanted nothing to do with. Yet, here I was, the new owner of two relics from music history.

The Lead Belly CD made for rough listening as it sounded like a copy of a copy of a copy from some ancient field recordings. Out of tune and barely audible even at high volume, I didn’t even make it through once. Like any other proud member of the Alternative Nation, I listened to “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?” twice and then watched my (bootlegged) VHS copy of Nirvana: MTV Unplugged in New York, knowing that Nirvana’s unchained closer, a cover of Lead Belly’s “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?”, was superior in every way to the original recording. Nirvana’s version was loud, unhinged, and very, very cool. Lead Belly was exactly none of those things.

Dylan’s Slow Train Coming was equally unlistenable, albeit in a different way. Around 1978, Dylan converted to evangelical Christianity, recorded several Christian-themed albums, refused to play his prior secular material in concert, and routinely prophesied to audiences onstage. He was a man transformed and Slow Train Coming was the first recorded output from this “born again” period. It’s an album rife with Christian allegory, sermonizing, and pointed religious imagery. The album’s cover art is an extension of this theme, a literal image of a train moving (slowly, I presume) across tracks being built, one by one. In the foreground, a man holds a pickaxe that resembles a none-too-subtle cross, ready to wield it with power. Dylan fans are not always keen on this period of his career, to put it mildly. I will, however, go one step further: Slow Train Coming was fucking awful to listen to. It was painful, burdensome, boring, and very much the opposite of a religious experience. I just wanted it to end.

I made it through all of Slow Train Coming in one sitting, but it was 46 minutes of my young life I’ll never get back. When I was done listening, I turned right back to my (bootlegged) Nirvana video, and, as the opening chords of “About A Girl” rolled out from the television speakers, I remember thinking, Thank God—thank GOD—I have some real music to listen to. I needed to wash the sour sounds of Dylan’s holy visions out of my ears.

Dylan’s transformation from revolutionary poet and songwriter to Christian evangelist happened unbeknownst to my young self. All I heard in the music (all two times I listened to it) was gospel backup singers, big brass horns, noodling, non-grunge guitar, and a man whose voice can best be described as unique. The lyrics read like they were ripped straight from Wednesday night choir practice (e.g., “For all those who have eyes and all those who have ears/

It is only He who can reduce me to tears”). Worse, I was being preached to on (what I thought) was a rock and roll record. At a time in my life when I was actively attempting to rebel against those same ideas Dylan embraced, I had just blown what little musical capital I had on albums that were brutally out-of-step with who I wanted to be. The adult choices I made that day in Sam Goody delivered unto me some adult consequences. This was music that my parents might enjoy, and I had to eliminate that evidence with a quickness.

I trashed both CDs. I dropped them in the garbage bin and hauled it to the curb. It didn’t occur to me to try to return them, and the nearest place I could have tried to sell them off was at least 100 miles away. I don’t even think I knew selling used CDs was a thing until I was 16 or 17. Besides, drastic times call for drastic measures. Or so I reckoned. 

I know what I’m supposed to say: “I was young then, I’m older now and learned a valuable lesson about life. I realized that there’s more to music than the first listen and I wish I still had those CDs.” But, no. I’m not sorry I got rid of them. They were useless to me at the time, a form of musical currency I couldn’t cash in and they would be equally useless to me now, I suspect. In the time I’ve devoted to discussing, writing about, and dissecting music, I never once thought, “Man, I still wish I had those CDs.” Not once. I’ve gone back to listen to Slow Train Coming and most of Lead Belly’s recordings. They are perfectly fine documents that I understand are culturally important. I acknowledge their value, but they did not have the intended consequences of a Dylan-esque conversion. Not the way I hoped they might, anyway.

I’ve encountered music since then that has transformed my mental faculties, my listening habits, and my understanding of music’s role in our culture. I’ve had moments when my young life was altered by music’s more holy qualities, times when it felt like music could unlock knowledge of my identity. I suspect you’d be hard-pressed to find someone who hasn’t been transformed by at least one song or one musical moment in their lives. Being transformed by music, however, is a lengthy process. It is full of false starts and terrible choices along the road to enlightenment. No listening experience remains the same from month to month, let alone year to year.

What strikes me about that moment, what keeps that memory encased in my hippocampus, is how much I tried to force a transformation to happen that day. I believed that if I sacrificed momentary indulgence for lengthier gratification, if I played the long game and opted for a slow train rather than the fastest method of arrival, I would be better off; I could even win at life. Not only would I achieve lasting happiness by shunning those immediate urges to pick up a copy of Throwing Copper on CD, eschewing trends and current cultural commodity and elevating the status of my capital-S Self, but I would also be recognized and rewarded for my intelligence. Instead, it all ended up the trash and I was out $30 in Sam Goody gift certificate cash.

Forcing a musical transformation left me broke and broken, unhappy and unfulfilled. I didn’t learn any lessons after being burned by my choices. At the time, I was just mad and disappointed with the unfairness of it all. Still, remnants of that 14-year-old holding a Soul Asylum album in one hand and a Velvet Underground album in the other, knowing which one I want and opting for the other, still exist every time I make a musical selection. I’ll never outrun these choices—the ‘should’ and ‘should nots’—so I’ve learned to work around them and to choose whatever works for me in the moment.

By the time I was old enough to revisit Dylan’s catalog, the entire mall and the Sam Goody from my youth was wholly abandoned. As shoppers migrated to Best Buy and Target, the interiors stayed empty and unrented until one day, without celebration, the entire mall, and the world of music it once contained, was leveled into a flat piece of earth.

Almost ten years after that regrettable Sam Goody experience, on a visit home, a passing train forced me to stop my car outside of town, a few miles from the spot where the mall once stood. I watched as train cars creaked along slowly, covered with graffiti and littered with odd, disjointed images, artist tags and colorful tableaus. I looked up from my CD wallet in time for one oddly familiar image to roll by. On a train car in black spray paint, a man with a floppy hat and cross-shaped pickaxe, similar to the man centered on the album cover of Dylan’s Slow Train Coming, was poised mid-swing. “This slow train is bound for glory!” was spray-painted above his head. Maybe so, maybe it was headed to that destination. But I wasn’t on that train. Instead, I rolled over the tracks after the last train car disappeared from sight. I had some other destination in mind. Somewhere very similar but also very different.