Category: Uncategorized

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.

Kroll’s hands lay slack on the table as if he meant to abandon them there. I wondered what an investigating judge was obligated to do about a man like Kroll, and whether, in calling me to this cafe, the judge now shirked her duty or bent to it. 

The cafe was still shuttered against scorching daylight, now dimming. Soon the night markets would open: divining beetles, sea-petroleum, delicate bottles of attar of orange. A skink without a tail darted up the wall. 

“You’re very quiet,” the judge said. “Have I mistaken myself in you?”

The judge needn’t have worried; my autobiography of Kroll would not lack color or incident. Kroll had traveled, and that could go into the book, as could the melancholy of the packet-boat, and waking cold and disconsolate in grimy pensions. A stranger here, Kroll had been overcome by “a disease of the will,” as Kroll had called it. I wondered whether there still issued from Kroll some few of those small, threadlike goings-out which could be called hopes but are actually something subtler and more various, largely hidden, hardly coming up to the bearer’s awareness; we are all of us burred with them; they lend to our souls a kind of slubby nap against which others stick or glide with pleasure or aggravation, other people, also projects, objects, events of a certain order. This napped or ridged surface of ourselves is delicate as the flanged underside of a toadstool. It is subject to collapse, in certain lives. It is crushed.

 “You appear to have depths,” the judge said. “But don’t wear them out. No one likes talking to someone who doesn’t like talking.” 

“I am new to this city,” I said. 

“That can’t be helped, can it?” said the judge. “Immerse yourself; recollect; report.”

From outside came the shouts of water-sellers and lottery-foreseers working the knots and queues of stalled autobus traffic. 

“We know where you’re staying,” said the judge. “You’ll be contacted about payment.”

Kroll rose from the table. 

“Am I expected to begin now?” I asked. “How?” 

We kept pace, Kroll at first wavering as if to consult my pleasure in choice of paths. Then he struck a tangent off the ring road, uphill from the harbor and the nighttime souk, along a narrow street lined with corrugated-metal shacks and dead-fronded jacarandas. The book could begin here, with Kroll marching uphill as toward a destiny, perhaps to perish in some strange and somber way. Or let it begin later, on the downslope, as I followed Kroll along a dirt path that ended on a litter-strewn canal-bank. 

The open secret of the so-called sparrows’ meeting place was in all the guidebooks. Some of these particular sparrows looked runty or otherwise plain, as if in flagrant spite of their legend. I hoped this meant the bar was low enough for Kroll to join in—I so wanted to see him hailed or even merely slapped—but he lingered on the edges of the group. The sparrows had come here to play a complicated game. There were no monomaniacs among them; instead, the sparrows had inherited a picture-language, a dramatics, which they wielded with scorn. What mattered was not to declare oneself, nor to lose oneself, but to be seen to operate the picture-language with disdainful ease, the better to gesture to still other schemas, other contents: rich, inexpressible, well known. By twos and threes sparrows would depart for the dark. Gravel skittered down the scree. 

Kroll lingered, forcing me to linger, too, in appearance even more furtive than Kroll. I looked down at a puddle; I thought about fetid water’s integrity as a body, its durable skin. I could not stand to look up from the puddle and see Kroll: his dumbshow of awkwardness, his further dumbshow indicating that this awkwardness was only a costume, that underneath lay passions like anyone’s, like everyone’s. Most painful to me was Kroll’s apparent pride in having concealed from the sparrows what was in truth not at all concealed: that his awkwardness was hateful to him, that he himself was hateful to himself, and that he hoped—in this he was still young—to be proven wrong. It was not sophistication that separated Kroll from the sparrows, or not only. 

Kroll edged closer to a group standing around a trash-barrel fire. Like Kroll, I braced myself for his rejection. How could the sparrows not notice his incompetence, his shocking lack of address? I watched instead their indifferent tender welcome, Kroll’s dazed and beaming gratitude. I told myself that what the sparrows seemed now to give would soon be withdrawn, proffered just this once and then no more, that Kroll did not see this but I did: one day soon he would find it difficult to recall this happiness, though he would never forget it so thoroughly as would the sparrows. To recall happiness is to realize that you are without it, bereft. 

Kroll opened his wallet. He held out a folded bill or maybe a visiting card. I came closer.

“I am not a mystic,” Kroll said.

No one replied. 

“I am not an adventurer,” Kroll added. He shrugged his shoulders and spread his hands wide in demonstration of his innocence. One sparrow snatched at his hand and another took Kroll by the arm. In the dark, Kroll and the sparrows took up the customary poses. Was the picture-language really as limited as this? I stretched myself out on the ground next to Kroll; at once the posture yielded me its idiot thrill but it seemed to say nothing to anyone else. No one engaged me; no one stepped on my head. And yet a convention of the autobiographical genre requires me to furnish this account with sensations. Gravel pricked my palms; I shivered; the earth smelled vegetal, marine. Nearby, a soft sound, as of a nightjar’s rustling wingbeats. Listening to Kroll shriek and mewl, it seemed to me I could stay like this always, in Kroll’s noisy proximity, envious and grateful, when one of the sparrows leaned down and whispered in my ear, “Enough for you.” I stood up and tried to brush the filth from my clothes. Kroll was gone. I thought of asking the others if they’d seen which way he’d been headed. Ship’s horns sounded in the distant harbor. Someone lit a pipe of dense and crumbly kif and we passed it hand to hand, cupping the ember. 

The next morning, as I came out of my hotel, I noticed several men loitering across the square. All were men of one type, Type Kroll: indrawn, bowed, dressed in serge despite the heat. I was sure I recognized Kroll among them. With a single glance back at me, the man who must have been Kroll set off down the twisting street, toward the casbah or the funicular or some other vista as yet unknown to me. 

I watched him go. 

I bought myself a tiffin of boiled cashews and returned to my room. Let Kroll look to himself today. Much of the autobiography would consist of scenes à faire: Kroll pays the asking price for pirated video cassettes in the bazaar; Kroll, at the butcher’s stall, stands mesmerized before a flayed sheep’s head black with crawling flies; Kroll goes to the pier to watch the divers plunge down and bring up lumps of sea-petroleum (the water sluicing off their seal-slick bodies, the shock of their ulcerated hands); Kroll lingers in an ancient and desacralized temple, gazing up at the bone-white vault of the ceiling. These pleasures of travel initially disappoint, but, considered autobiographically, each reveals an edifying mortificant: the bitter lure of novelty, the picturesque immiseration of the global south, the hollowness of the self. This much was as good as written already. 

I worked until the shadows had long since lengthened and the lottery-foreseers were again calling out in the street below. Of the projected scenes and their accompanying skein of aperçus, something less than I’d hoped had written itself: Butchered head. Vault. Slick body, black with flies. I was not disappointed. I read the words as Kroll would have; I felt Kroll’s delight on recognizing his own story.

My room had no proper desk; to write, I had slouched in the only chair, a wicker throne woven in the local style. Now my back ached as if I’d been beaten. Everything in the room, even the latticed wicker, radiated heat. I stood at the window, hoping for the cool of evening to come lapping in. Above flat rooftops of staggered heights, the last remnant of the gloaming had taken on a humid, chemical radiance, a darkness tinged with green and violet, as if malevolent spirits had botched the granting of a childhood wish: to breathe the air of distant planets. I touched my forehead to the windowpane. It was warm as blood. Out there, a figure hung from the glass: conjoint, pendant, peering in at me. I raised my hand and I felt a shudder, a lag, in our doubled motion. 

There was a knock at the door. Before I could answer, a woman swept into my room, dispelling phantoms. She had with her a pair of snorting, gasping dogs; their eyes bulged and their tongues lapped the humid air. 

“I am Ndidi Morchiladze, daughter-adjutant to the judge,” the woman said. 

“Daughter-adjutant?” I asked. 

“Don’t let’s stand on ceremony,” she said. “Show me what you have so far.”

“I haven’t written anything yet,” I said. 

“Have you not?” said Morchiladze. The dogs flopped down at her feet and lay panting. 

“The judge mentioned payment,” I said. When a lie is not ready to hand, I temporize. The Kroll-book would have to arm itself. The weak exotica I had concocted—sorrows, vistas, subtle perceptions—all this could lend Kroll only so much cover. Then too, it was not lost on me that the judge knew only one verdict. How else would a judge judge? It might be best to set Kroll loose in the book as nothing more than a plurality of positions, a series of discontinuous Kroll-functions. 

“Don’t overestimate your faculties; you are not tasked with prophesy,” said Morchiladze. “Your memoir has only to fill in some forensic gaps; let us see events from the perspective of this ‘Kroll.’” 

But why always Kroll, I wondered. I might just as well write about somebody named Schropf, or Dozhd. Or Majeroni. 

“Your book will be a dagger in the head of anyone who thinks they can wait the judge out.”

Morchiladze yanked her dogs to their feet. To the accompaniment of a strangled wheezing, she stalked from the room. 

I believe that Schropf must have foretold his own death, often, and not only boastfully and foolhardily. Dozhd and Majeroni would have recounted the expropriations and the liberations, the sheltering for weeks on end in borrowed apartments in the ugly new-rise blocks. The flight under assumed names, the beginning of the long wait here in this tropic land. And then Schropf would say that he’d seen another of their countrymen today, another today, as if following them. Schropf had foretold, too, the un-worlding pain of it, and the quailing irrectitude of his murderers, the police. He’d known that he would have to prop them up at the last, hew them to their duty as executioners while they larked and giggled and pitied themselves. 

Schropf had been mistaken in much: there had been no extradition, and consequently no long walk through fog-shrouded streets of home; no eerie quiet in which to gather the necessary equanimity; no faint scent of the city market (salt-cod and cut flowers); no face glimpsed at a slate-roofed gable window, eyes downcast in scorn or love. 

The death of Dozhd had gone without saying: as Schropf, so Dozhd, all their life.

Just before he bolted I made Majeroni promise never to tell anyone how I let him escape: loping, zip-tied and bloodied, over the garbage-strewn plain, unaware how his white shirt shone in the van’s headlights; dragged back, stumbling and sobbing, laid down among them, face-down, like them. How the vault of the sky must have wheeled above them all the long night through; like sleepers, they could not know it; like dreamers, they only thought they woke. 

Kroll and I walked along the canal. Snake-birds perched on fence-palings, drying their outspread wings. Kroll had broken cover just after dawn, sauntering out the doorway of a shebeen. I could have caught up to Kroll right then, or at any point since. I hung back. The gravel towpath became a broad cobblestone causeway; we were nearing the city proper. 

The morning was already hot. I had gone without sleep, keeping watch for Kroll’s emergence from the shebeen. Outside, I had had to imagine the scene within: the conviviality of submerged hostility, the slow and fumy self-poisoning from wood alcohol, the dancers and the sharpers and the barman all wrecked on kif and shine. 

By dawn I felt leached of life, parched and hollow. 

“Kroll,” I called out. He might be prevailed on to slow down. 

The morning air was close. Sweat dripped down the small of my back. I felt, rather than saw, a slackening of my perceptual field, followed by a suffusion of dreamily parti-colored spots. I lurched; a wall of ground rushed up at me. 

“Kroll,” I said again, but it came out softly, murmured into the ground. The mud beneath the paving-stones smelled vegetal, marine. By the time I had struggled to my feet once more, Kroll had put quite a distance between us. To gain on him, it seemed to me I had to command my legs with an undue deliberateness, inwardly telling each in its turn, “Go, go.” This effort of mine was registered by that steadfast inhabitant of the pilot-house we all carry high in the crown of our head; he took up residence there the moment we learned to speak; he is no pilot at all, he has merely been on watch all this while, aware of all that comes and goes within the dome spread out beneath him. Thoughts and feelings have been the least of it; he is keen; he registers all subtle, all barely detectable motion: faint tremors, ghosts of abandoned longings, pale shadows that flit by. Now, after long years, he knows us so well he can predict what we will do next, and what in turn will happen then, but he never intervenes; he will not so much as issue a timely warning; he is like a doorman who neglects to tell you that you have had a caller. If only we could prise him from his stronghold.

I shouted Kroll’s name. He seemed to hear me, even at such a distance; he halted without turning around. 

I called out again: “Kroll! I know you, what you are. Confess your aberrant tendencies: mysticism and adventuring.”

I did not know Kroll, what he was. But what other gambit did I have, what appeals did I know how to make, other than imprecations? Perhaps I was the judge’s creature after all. 

Kroll walked on. The canal passed under a bridge and Kroll vanished in darkness. Traffic streamed over the bridge under a brightening mackerel sky. I could see nothing in the darkness beneath the iron vault of the bridge, and nothing beyond that. Kroll might have already walked on. Soon Kroll would make himself part of that rushing world, lost to me for good. Soon, or already, lost to me for good. I hurried. 

“Kroll,” I said as I came into the shadows. I stood still. It was cold in the sudden dark; the air smelled of canal-borne pollutants and whatever ichorous algae survived them. I was afraid I might not be able to resist the temptation to hurl myself into the black water that sluiced and rushed in the dark. I made ready to enjoin Kroll once more to confess to mysticism and adventuring. 

“Kroll,” I said again.  

“Kroll,” said Kroll’s voice in the dark. 

I took faltering steps toward the voice. Space pressed in on me. 

Now I saw how to write Kroll’s book. It would not in the least resemble the one the judge had commissioned of me. To attain the greatest dispersion of Kroll-functions, to array them in unforeseeable constellations, I would have to seize the inhabitant of pilot-house in his stronghold. What he knows, what we will know as soon as we take hold of him, is the discontinuous: the ghosts of urges and recoilings (pale shadows); and how people pressed themselves on your mind and even your heart, before they revealed themselves for what they had been all along, phantoms, nothing but phantoms; and the way we used to sense, while in the grip of fever, that there was another schema behind the schema to which we thought our thoughts appealed. And more than that, the Kroll-book would be written in the language of the pilot-house, which shares not one word with our own.

Kroll did not see the ground rush up at him this time. Gravel pricked his palms; he shivered.

Excerpts:

 11/13/2012

Dear Professor,

I just got out of the doctor’s office:

they wanted to scar my face and kill what’s inside me.

I ran out and did not pay.

Jacob A.

12/5/2012

Dear Professor,

Things on the streets have been really crazy. I have been very distracted watching and listening to what is going on, it is somewhat out of my control. But, I miss you and class. I will be in class on Monday.

Thank you,

Bye

Sandra

5/29/2014

Dear Professor,

I have registered for your [Course Name] starting June 4th and very much look forward to these sessions. Unfortunately two weeks ago while in the Sahara desert I fell off a camel and fractured 4 ribs. I am in Paris recuperating but as you probably know only time and pain killers are the treatment. I will not be able to travel in time to make the first session on 4th June but hope to be in New York in time for the second and subsequent sessions.

I would appreciate your input on the following:

–venue as to where to meet at 3:15pm stating on June 11th

–should I obtain any reading or other materials needed or desirable for the course

–would you have an outline or any notes you could let me have on the material you will cover (and I will miss) for the first session.

I look forward to meeting with you.

kind regards

Paul C. 

4/18/2015

Dear Professor, 

I am very sorry about the lateness of my assignments. And my absences during the semester. I am graduating after this semester and I found myself swamped with a ton of work I was not expecting. All of this piled up with vet visits, caring for my new puppy, and other things getting in the way I lost a lot of my energy this semester. I’ve attached all the assignments in this email. And if there is anything else I can give you please let me know. 

Thank you for a great semester and for understanding,

All the best,

William

12/7/15

Dear Professor,

Excuses section: I’m sorry that I had to leave early on Tuesday last week and was additionally unable to attend on Thursday. On Thursday something came up and I was sadly unable to attend any of my classes. For Tuesday I do not have such a good reason, if I am honest I left 20 minutes early because of a beautiful girl (the only and last time I would use this reason and I apologize, I let instinctual hedonism take over for better or worse!)

Interesting section: I have been working on this piece “To Fear with Love” and thought you might appreciate it as per our earlier discussion about writing. It is attached below for your enjoyment and I would love any feedback/criticism! 

Best,

Abraham

I

Ask anyone connected to the legal system, from the circuit court clerk tucking motions into folders to the convicted gangster paying off guards to mule Marlboros: there’s no one more reviled than a sex offender.

Most prisons and jails have “protective custody”—use of solitary confinement as a safety protocol—for sex offenders: in “general population” they’re easy pickings for stabbing and beating, which is why the Federal Bureau of Prisons operates low-to-medium security penitentiaries devoted mostly to their incarceration, with some prisons having a sex offender population of up to 85-90%. Even for a convict with the ethical compass of Whitey Bulger—wherein robbery, drug peddling, and cold-blooded murder are fair game—taking a child’s innocence is one step too far.

But a child molester is not a monster: he (they’re almost always male) is still a human being. In her debut true crime book, The Fact of a Body (Flatiron, May 2017), former attorney and writer Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich delivers this point—no matter how heinous the crime, there are few monsters, just men who commit monstrous acts.

On Feb. 7, 1992, 26-year-old Ricky Langley, a twice-convicted child molester, strangled Jeremy Guillory inside a home in the small town of Iowa, Louisiana, a town so small, the streets have no names. Even the Law had trouble finding Guillory’s address when his mother reported him missing. After Calcasieu Parish Sheriff’s investigators found Guillory’s corpse stuffed in Langley’s closet, the recently paroled sex offender confessed multiple times to the homicide and was convicted and sentenced to die at the state’s notorious Angola Prison.

It’s debatable whether or not Langley sexually assaulted Guillory prior to the crime—a minor point Marzano-Lesnevich brings up, but never tries to resolve, in her work. Instead, she leaves it up to the reader to decide, just as three Louisianan juries would decide throughout Langley’s appeals process.

Fast forward to 2003, and Marzano-Lesnevich is interning at a law clinic strictly dealing in death penalty appeals. The daughter of two New Jersey attorneys, Marzano-Lesnevich has been opposed to capital punishment since she was a child. The clinic just overturned Langley’s death penalty conviction, knocking it down to a lifetime bid. With the practicing lawyer of the clinic absent from the interns’ orientation due to an appeal in Texas, the clinic shows the aspiring attorneys Langley’s confession tape.

At this point, the book takes a turn:

        “I came here to help save the man on the screen. I came here to help save men like him. I came here because my ideals and who I am exist separately from what happened in the past. They must. If they don’t what will my life hold?

          But I look at the man on the screen, I feel my grandfather’s hands on me, and I know. Despite what I’ve trained for, what I’ve come here to work for, despite what I believe.

            I want Ricky to die.”

Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich is a sexual abuse survivor. As the memoir moves forward, the author reveals that her grandfather molested her during childhood—how her family handles it, well, that’s her story to tell.

Interweaving Langley and his clan’s past, along with her own, Marzano-Lesnevich explores not just the crime, but the human condition. Ricky Langley didn’t want to molest kids, but he did nonetheless, almost like a drug addict who cannot resist a dose of heroin; he tried to seek help for his pedophilia, but was turned away prior to going into the system. Marzano-Lesnevich tries to make amends with her family, but she never quite gets there. Unlike Ricky, who grows up in poverty and is subsequently at the receiving end of the justice system, Marzano-Lesnevich’s background allows her to flee the bad memories by attending college and later, Harvard Law School.

Despite this blind spot about her own privilege, which I’ll address later, Marzano-Lesenvich’s juxtaposition of a predator and a victim shows the difficulty of achieving salvation—both Langley and herself are caught in a struggle to save their futures from their pasts, to prevent repeating the sins they either perpetrated or suffered. Yet they come up short each time.

What’s impressive about this work is not just the subject matter, but the true-crime vibe: fast-paced storytelling; hard deep looks into the lives of the prosecutors; the sheriff’s investigators; and the victim’s and perp’s families. But unlike the seminal true crime work, Vincent Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter, this memoir does not read like a lawyer’s prose. While Bugliosi delivered a truly genre-defining work, trudging through his account of the Manson Family murders is almost akin to reading a primer for a first-year law student, weighted with explanations of legal procedure and law. Marzano-Lesnevich doesn’t fall into that trap—if anything, she writes more like Joan Didion:

          “With only two days left in Louisiana, I know what I’ve been avoiding. In the tens of thousands of pages I’ve gone through, the transcripts and serology reports and bodily fluid reports and the documents from Ricky’s life, his mental health records from Lake Charles and then from when he was imprisoned in Georgia, the only photographs I’ve seen of Jeremy are the ones in which he’s alive.

          But that’s not how his story ended. I have been driven all along by the belief that there is a knot at the heart of the collision between me and Ricky that will help me make sense of what will never be resolved. The way my body is evidence, yet I will never fully know what it contains. I carry what my grandfather did in my body. I carry it through my life. All the records I’ve seen have made me imagine Ricky, imagine family, begin to empathize with him. I can’t not know—I can’t not face—what he did. I can’t allow even any part of myself to think that Jeremy remained the boy in his school photo. Unchanged and alive.”

For The Fact of a Body, the crime is the frame; the story’s in the raw emotion Marzano-Lesnevich delivers across the page, much like Didion’s exploration of the Patty Hearst case in California Notes. As with Didion’s work, Marzano-Lesnevich uses the great gift of empathy to explore her subject, instead of only relying on rhetorical flourishes. The facts in this work provide a vehicle for a deeper exploration of human emotion in the aftermath of an evil act—indignation, forgiveness, fear, resentment, understanding, etc.

What the average reader might not know about The Fact of a Body is that the murder of Jeremy Guillory, and the author’s own experiences with sexual abuse, are tragically mundane—take it from me: a burnt-out small-town newspaper reporter. Marzano-Lesnevich’s judicial aspirations petered out after one summer at a death penalty clinical; it took two years covering car wrecks, homicides, and child rapes for the toll to catch up with me, and I’ve been paying the emotional price ever since. Like Marzano-Lesnevich, I view the legal system as a necessary evil, one that sorts out the facts well, but fails to address the circumstances that lead a human being to commit crimes in this world—circumstances that often take years to develop.

When I read this memoir, I could feel the pain Marzano-Lesnevich went through—I’ve seen that pain too many times, when a child placed on the stand confronts his or her abuser. I’ve since taken a hiatus from newspaper reporting.

II

Here’s how the murder of Jeremy Guillory would go down in my newsroom experience. First article: the reporter flips a press release about the missing boy, maybe goes to the scene and interviews neighbors and relatives once the search truly gets underway. Second article: our reporter writes up the arrest by dropping in a few quotes from the sheriff’s small-town press conference—along with dirty little details about the homicide contained in the criminal complaint submitted by the investigator to the local judge. Then comes the victim profile: a sympathetic write up about the victim’s life, accompanied by a front page spread of his grieving mother, clutching his framed picture while sitting on a front porch. If the victim is even somewhat innocent, a jury will be sworn in to determine not if the defendant is guilty, but to what degree.  Most murders aren’t “who dunnits” like on TV; they’re “why dunnits” or “just how bad they dunnits.”

After a year of small “briefs”—250-word articles updating the case—one day the courtroom is filled with 100 citizens. It’s trial day, and somber justice is in the air. For a crime reporter, the case will finally be resolved, after a long season of sitting on wood benches and scribbling away in a notepad, hands cramping. Perhaps it will last a couple days, maybe a couple weeks. Either way, the crime reporter worth his or her salt will be there from gavel to gavel, from selection to verdict. Tears will flow and tension will hang in the air until the foreman reads, “Guilty.” And because it’s murder in the first-degree, the crime reporter knows there isn’t going to be a sentencing hearing—the judge will send the defendant up that night.

There’s an old adage in the news industry that “if it bleeds, it leads,” referring to the typical reader’s inability to prevent themselves from consuming horrible, horrendous content. We’re repulsed while drinking our morning coffee, but we can’t seem to fold up our newspaper and put it down until we’ve read the full article. But in the small towns that dot our land, where one can’t wear jeans to church without catching an earful from an aunt the following Monday, the murder of a child takes on a different tone—the readers buy the paper to read about the crime because they’re bleeding, too. No matter whether they’re bleeding with despair, hate, anger, pity, or curiosity, the reader bleeds nonetheless. And the crime reporter with a heart bleeds as well. I recognize that feeling in Marzano-Lesnevich’s memoir.

The murder of Jeremy Guillory, if it made the Associated Press wire service, would be about 250 words, pure filler for the papers around Louisiana. As for the crimes committed against Marzano-Lesnevich, that type of sexual abuse is sadly about as typical as jaywalking. The public’s perception of the ski-mask-wearing rapist waiting to jump a female jogger in the park after dark is pure BS—it’s the uncle, the step-dad, the father, the boyfriend, or in Marzano-Lesnevich’s case, the grandfather.

And that’s the hugest tragedy of all: it’s someone we trust who harms our children. Marzano-Lesnevich explores this idea, with pain and hurt I could never imagine resonating from the page. Maybe she wouldn’t like to hear this, but I’ll say it anyway—by sharing her experience, and humanizing it from all sides, she gives voice to the voiceless, one of the highest virtues of journalism and nonfiction writing. She is a hero. When it comes to child molestation, there’s rarely a “pedophilic monster,” a ghoul lurking in the shadows of playgrounds waiting to trap children inside a windowless van. Instead, the perpetrators are seemingly well-adjusted gentlemen, generally without criminal record, who have one compulsion. Marzano-Lesnevich appropriately humanizes Ricky Langley for the reader, but in the same breath reminds us that Jeremy Guillory is dead, and Jeremy Guillory had a life, too. In a world with Serial and Making a Murderer, Marzano-Lesnevich pushes true crime to the next level—she humanizes the perpetrator, without turning him into a hero, or still worse, a victim.

III

In this proud Southerner’s opinion, Marzano-Lesnevich does a good job not “othering” the South when she describes the struggles and trials of the Langley and Guillory families. Descriptions of gun racks on pickup trucks and “welfare motels” in Iowa, La., are a little on the nose. The Southern reader might throw the book across the room at that point, but I would urge them to pick it back up; she doesn’t dwell on these details, nor does she poke fun. She also doesn’t caricature Southerners as toothless hicks, white trash. Marzano-Lesnevich instead treats them like people, although at times I felt she stretched herself when relating her own experiences as an upper middle-class Northerner with the lives of poor Southerners: pain is pain, but the pain of poverty will never be understood by the wealthy. Struggle is struggle, but no matter how much empathy Marzano-Lesnevich expresses, she makes the jump a little too suddenly without checking her own privilege.

This becomes evident in the closing third of the book, when Marzano-Lesnevich begins to tie up the two main strands of the memoir, her struggle as a survivor and Langley’s struggle as a perpetrator. However, in her effort to link these ends, she reveals a hole in her perception; Langley and Guillory were both poor, while she came from privilege. The fact is, Marzano-Lesnevich can, and to a large extent, has exorcised her demons because she has the resources to do so. While sexual abuse transcends class, Marzano-Lesnevich had the opportunity to escape her condition and put her past in perspective, a reprieve afforded to Ricky only in a Georgia prison. Somehow, with all the empathy Marzano-Lesnevich displays throughout the memoir, she seems to miss this point.

Ultimately, The Fact of the Body isn’t just true crime, and it isn’t just memoir: it’s Gonzo-style journalism at its finest. Unlike Dr. Hunter S. Thompson’s chemically induced rants and ravings, Marzano-Lesnevich uses a writing aid much deeper than cocaine, LSD, mescaline, and Wild Turkey—she uses the ghosts of her past.

by Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin

I loved you once, and this love still, it may be,

Is not extinguished fully in my soul;

But let’s no longer have this love dismay you:

To trouble you is not my wish at all.

I loved you once quite wordlessly, without hope,

Tortured shyness, jealous rage I bore.

I loved you once so gently and sincerely:

God grant another love you thus once more

June 25, 1939

by Arseny Tarkovsky

It’s frightening to die, and such a shame to leave

This captivating riffraff that enchants me,

The stuff so dear to poets, so very lovely,

I never celebrated; it somehow wasn’t to be.

I loved to come back home at the break of dawn

And shift my things around in half an hour.

I loved the white windowsill, and also the flower,

The carved faceted glass, and also the water,

And the heavens, greenish-azure in their color—

And that I was a poet and a wicked man.

And when every June came with my birthday again

I’d idolize that holiday, bustling

With verses by friends and congratulations from women,

With crystal laughter, and gay glasses clinking

And the lock of that hair, unique, individual

And that kiss, so entirely inevitable.

But now at home it’s all set up differently;

It’s June and I no longer have that homesickness.

In this way, life is teaching me patience,

And turbid, my blood now is stirring this birthday,

And a secret anxiety is tormenting me—

What have I done with my great destiny,

Oh my God, what have I done with me!

by Aleksandr Blok

Night, avenue, street lamp, the drug store,

Irrational and dusky light;

Live another decade, two more—

It stays the same; there’s no way out.

You’ll die, then start again, beginning

And everything repeats as planned:

Night, the cold canal’s icy ripple,

The drug store, avenue, and lamp.

Vladimir Mayakovsky’s Last Poem

Note: Vladimir Mayakovsky’s final poem before his suicide. The Oka mentioned is a tributary of the Volga. “Cloved” is an attempt to translate VM’s pun on ischerpen (“exhausted, finished’) with the neologism isperchen, (“peppered up”). 

It’s after one. You’ve likely gone to sleep.

The Milkway streams silver, an Oka through the night.

I don’t hurry, I don’t need to wake you

Or bother you with lightning telegrams.

Like they say, the incident is cloved.

Love’s little boat has crashed on daily life.

We’re even, you and I. No need to account

For mutual sorrows, mutual pains and wrongs.

Look: How quiet the world is.

Night cloaks the sky with the tribute of the stars.

At times like these, you can rise, stand, and speak

To history, eternity, and all creation.

Anna Karenina: #MeToo

Ah, Merezhkovsky: to you I was a mare

ridden badly by a man; and because of him,

his error, I had to be destroyed. And Lev, my dear:

You never gave me my own voice, you didn’t dare.

What did I talk about when I did talk, after all:

Abortion with Dolly? Every damn thing

Vronsky did, that I did better? The problem

was not that I was sexual: (Men, you

count on that.) The problem was that

I was smart. But sexual women must be killed;

All the books attest to that.

Merezhkovsky permeates the consciousness

of Slavic scholars, is the Anna story, still,

but I fault you most, Lev. You knew, soon

that the problem was not one woman

and one man; it was all women, all men. You had

Vronsky climb in society, while I—damn, I even

knew more about horses than him!—I was

the scarlet woman, though our offence was the same.

Did I abandon my child? Or did a martinet

bar me from him? Ah, she holds Vronsky back!

Ah, the guilt!

Oh, there is no talking to you.

You sent me the dream

that haunted your ruling-class sleep,

a peasant with an iron,

the proletariat that said, fuck you

and your landlord’s way of life.

You killed me with the railroad that they built

for you. Because you “had to.”

Where was your Resurrection then?

You repudiated Karenina, it’s true,

but you abandoned me to my fate.

And so, Lev, I still struggle,

a century and a half later,

to have my story told.

They’ve renovated the Gates of Hell since the last time I was here, some four years ago. Now when you come in the front door—the glass broken, replaced with stained, graffiti-covered plywood with a dangling steel pull-ring—there’s a bigger living room than there used to be, full of filthy couches and grubby lay-z-boys broken in the recline position.

I get here late enough that the place is already packed. Crust punks are sprawled out on the couches, gathered in groups against the walls, and pushing their way to and fro through the crowd. A few dogs follow them, trailing ropes. It’s the dogs here that always bother me—given how little care they’re willing to give themselves, I worry crusties (gutterpunks, scumpunks, squeegee kids, oogles: whatever you prefer to call them) don’t seem capable of taking responsibility for the animals they adopt. My friend Renée, whom I meet as I come in, agrees with me.

“I bet they don’t get walked very much,” she says sadly. I concur, adding the deafening music and air thick with cigarette smoke can’t be good for them either. After all, the Gates of Hell does not comply with city regulations banning smoking, assumedly because they’re not going to bow to what The Man tells them to do. You expect an unhealthy atmosphere coming out here, though. As always, the air is choked with smoke, accented by the smell of cheap beer, dirty hair, armpit, and because it’s raining, a hint of wet dog.

A fellow with a rat on his shoulder ducks in through the plywood door, removing a rain-drenched hood. He’s a friend of a friend. I comment that his is a nice-looking rat and he says, “Put out your hand: you can hold him.” I do; the rat lithely ascends my arm, circles my neck, and finds a comfortable spot in the shoulder of my sweatshirt. His small body is warm and his fur is soft: he’s like a tiny cat, except for the leathery tail, and I can feel him breathing. The cavorting dogs are on the other side of my head, so I try to shield the rat from their view, though the guy tells me not to worry, saying, “Some dogs are cool with him.” We talk for a while, the rat relaxing on my shoulder, then determine it’s time to move into the closely packed crowd.

They’ve been having shows again at the Gates of Hell for the past two years—at least, shows that outsiders might have heard about. Whoever lived here three years ago spread the word they’d stopped putting bands on due to hassles from police. However, a friend tells me, they never really quit having gigs—just stopped advertising, knowing enough of the east-end punks would find out anyway.

The Gates of Hell is a former shop of some variety turned into a kind of loft in which various rooms, big and small, surround a larger central chamber where bands can play and practice. It’s part of a sort of krusty komplex nearly a half a block long, consisting of squalid lofts, storefronts, and apartments inhabited by a legion of punks. The most well-known loft, the Loud House, is next to the Gates of Hell and connected by a doorway. Though they haven’t had shows there in a while, a lot of people still think of the entire krusty komplex as being “The Loud House.”

The first time I visited the Gates of Hell, in 2002, the bands played in a centre room with concrete walls and plywood floors. Halfway through the evening’s six-band bill, the floor was already slick with beer and spit and whatever else makes plywood slippery; many in the crowd were making it worse by shaking quart-bottles of Black Label and spraying their friends. By the end of the night, crusties confounded by PCP or just bull-doses of alcohol were staggering around to the lightning throb of headliners (Saskatchewan’s superlative thrash band Destined For Assimilation [D.F.A.]), slipping in the half-inch of beer on the floor, falling on one another, being pulled to their feet, and falling over again. One short-haired guy in his mid-30s, shirtless beneath his patched and studded denim vest, came careening across the room, tripped, and slid on his belly with surprising force headfirst into the rim of the bass drum. Then he lay still. His friends lurched forward and hoisted him upright; he looked perplexedly at them for a moment, then some spark ignited in his blank eyes and, raising his fist in time with the charging music, he rejoined the fray.

Later still that night a small mob besieged the singer of one of the earlier bands, who were from Vancouver. During that band’s set, the singer bowed to the demands of a group of shouting women in the crowd and admitted onstage to having raped one of their friends. (Years after the fact, a friend told me he had heard second-hand that the accuser had later recanted and said publicly that singer had not, in fact, raped her. Because I did not hear this from the woman herself or anyone closely connected with her, I had doubts. I frankly have no way to determine which parts of the story beyond those I witnessed myself were true. The whole situation was and remains totally mystifying.) As I was leaving, the group had the singer loosely surrounded and, joined by other members of the crowd, were debating what to do with him. One person asked, perhaps rhetorically, why they shouldn’t just take him to the river and drown him. The members of D.F.A., who were staying at my house, insisted I get in their van and we left without seeing the issue resolved. Years later someone showed me the singer’s Myspace page, whose existence attested only that the mob ultimately decided against drowning.

I find my way through the crowd in the changed layout of the space, looking for the inside room where the bands play. Between the front and the show space, there’s an antechamber that’s both a hall and someone’s bedroom: by the door there’s a chest-height loft bed, its linens in a twisted pile. Next to it there hangs a defiled mannequin and some piles of assorted crap. Beside one of these someone’s set up a distro table and punks are pensively flipping through records, many of which are black and feature white images of atrocity and/or drawings of skulls (some depicted with punk hairstyles, some without). Graffiti covers the walls of the room—band names, vaguely intentioned messages, and in-jokes between friends. At the end of the hall is a door with a large sign on it reading “RAT POISON IN THIS ROOM!! NO DOGS, EVER!!” Just before that, there’s a carpet-and-foam-covered door into the show-space.

Beyond it stands a guy who looks like Neil, the sad hippie on British sitcom The Young Ones. He’s got long, bluish dreadlocks and is wearing a shirt featuring a circle-slash through a swastika, stating a position that—like being opposed to child molestation or tainted food—most feel is a basic prerequisite to humanity. The line takes a long time because every person who passes him has to listen, as they pay, to him complain about how he wasn’t supposed to be working the show, someone else was organizing it, they asked him at the last minute if he could help and he said he would, but only if he didn’t have to do the door, and now here he is, doing the door.

I finally get to the front of the line and ask how much it is. He says it’s five bucks and I say, “Priced to move!” But he only looks at me a second with confusion, then says, “Well, it’s two out of town bands, right? And gas is cheaper these days, but it’s still pretty expensive. Gotta support the out of town bands.” I nod in lieu of explaining that $5 is pretty cheap for a five-band show, especially since five-band crust punk shows have remained $5 since I went to my first in 1993, when $5 was just less than you’d make working an hour at minimum wage. (Now you can practically get two crust shows for an hour of flipping burgers!)

Inside, I take up a position near the front of the stage but away from the centre, hoping to avoid getting badly knocked or sprayed with beer. I’m holding onto my jacket, in part because I’m never sure it won’t get stolen, and otherwise because leaving it somewhere is an invitation to have it puked on, or to have beer spilled on it, or for it to improbably pick up an infestation of fleas, bedbugs, or, god knows, fire ants or something. Nathan, a friend, more bravely leaves his bag, though not before conferring with me as to the place to best avoid vomit.

“Put it high,” I suggest. “People are going to puke straight ahead or down; nobody really pukes up.” He puts it on top of a pile of crates and I leave my umbrella with it, but even with jacket in hand, I’m sweating already, watching the band set up.

In contrast to the filth and neglect throughout the Gates of Hell, there’s at a few thousand dollars’ worth of musical and sound equipment on stage. Beyond that, the room is a wretched shithole. Soiled mattresses of different sizes are lined against the back wall to baffle the noise, while the side walls are covered either in foam insulation or graffiti, some of it just insults and other bits advertising promising acts like the Dead Hookers. It actually makes the eponymous Loud House next door look classy by comparison with its all-black walls decorated with large white images of skulls wearing German army helmets. Two spotlights, on either side of the stage, dangle woozily from loops of wire that don’t look like they’ll hold. These lights are plugged into open outlets half-way up the wall and pointed at the ceiling, which is a sheet of transparent plastic holding in layers of yellow insulation. The surface of the plastic is mottled with pocks of dried sputum and fresher amber droplets of beer. Above the stage, someone has spray-painted THE GATES OF HELL in red across the wall. They’ve continued onto the wall on the other side, adding BURN THE RICH in similar-sized letters near the ceiling. Farther down they’ve appended BLUDGEONED, which I learn is the name of the band belonging to the sad door guy, who lives here and runs the space.

The guiding emotion of this particular brand of hardcore punk is utter hopelessness from which one may be distracted only by the most extreme inebriation and chaos. The bands sing about atrocity, war, slaughter, injustice, oppression, evil, etc., but do so from a position wherein it’s impossible to do anything at all about it. There are lax nods to the idea of revolution from time to time, as most here would identify as “anarchist,” but only to the moment of revolution when punks fighting cops in the street actually win for once—not to the months of gruelling decision-making by consensus on issues like replacing capitalism with advanced barter, establishing a system of mediation for solving disputes to replace courts and police, and the rest of what would follow an anarchist revolution. It’s hard to write really ripping songs about that stuff.

Surveying the gathering crowd, I notice that the Gates of Hell punks are, now more than ever, sporting primarily dreadlocks—usually in the form of the dread-mullet, a combination of close-cropped hair with a few dreads sprouting like udon noodles from the back. Some have longer locks, a few have long hair or shaved heads, and a handful have traditional punk cuts like mohawks or spikes, but really, there isn’t much variation. No one, for example, has jolly pigtails; there’s nothing bouffant and nothing carefully combed that hasn’t been combed into a point. Many sport hairdos that bespeak time and effort, but only the time and effort to make the statement—in accordance with tradition—that one doesn’t care.

Likewise, most in the crowd wear identical crust punk uniforms: black jeans covered in black band patches; black band t-shirts featuring images of atrocity and/or drawings of skulls; black ballcaps with black patches sewn on the front; and black denim vests with several hundred studs covering collar, shoulders, flanks, etc., and patches in between. Inevitably featuring images of atrocity and/or drawings of skulls, these patches seem chosen to advertise the obscurity of one’s tastes. A few people endorse bands popular by crust standards, like Sweden’s Totalitär and Wolfbrigade and Australia’s Pisschrïst, but most opt instead for groups that only those committed to a life of crust would have heard of. That is, except for Discharge: throughout the room, logos of British hardcore/metal band Discharge are everywhere, on patches, on t-shirts, and painted on the backs of leather jackets. If the crowd was naked, god forbid, I’m sure there’d be a plenty of Discharge tattoos as well. Gates of Hell/Loud House punks wear Discharge paraphernalia the way Italian Catholics wear crucifixes—no one would ever doubt they believed, but true faith demands a constant display of devotion.

Most here come to hear d-beat bands—that is, bands that play the driving, non-melodic hardcore punk with insistent double-downbeat drumming pioneered by Discharge in the late ’70s. The fashion and décor are also in line with Discharge’s view of the world—a monochrome apocalyptic nihilism that assumes that either capitalism or nuclear war is going to destroy humanity very shortly, and there’s nothing to be done except to get wasted and live in filth, listening to music reminding one of the necessity of doing so by underlining the inevitability of the coming end.

The two chief attractions to this life, as far as I can tell, are a supposed total severance from the “conformity” of “the mainstream,” and the freedom that comes from living very, very cheaply. At various points when I was younger, I considered making choices that might have found me living in some variation of the Gates of Hell. Imagine: freeing myself from the tyranny of work by finding a room that cost $75 a month, decorating it with whatever furniture I found in the street, and eating from the vast bounty of unspoiled food squandered in supermarket dumpsters! Imagine not having to pay to be alive anymore! Imagine cheating the system by simply dropping out of it!

The other attraction to the lifestyle is that being “punk” is about separating one’s self from the evils of consumer society, and being extremely punk means doing so extremely. The more fashion has taken up the aesthetic of punk over past years, and the more pop-punk bands have found their way to mainstream fame, the farther crust punks have pulled into the obscurity of fanaticism. Few punk lifestyles are more extreme than those lived around the Gates of Hell and the Loud House. Surprisingly, many who live and congregate here are into their 30s and 40s: some are missing teeth, and while others’ tattoos have gone blue and smudged with age. Old enough that I wonder why they haven’t been struck by the contradictions and failings of this lifestyle, they are, in both senses of the term, lifers: they’ve committed themselves to this life, sure, but it’s hard to imagine them being able to escape from it now. Or, as a couple have said to me, they do recognize the structural failings of crust punk, but they can’t see an alternative they find less ethically conflicting, so they’re stuck with it.

What brings people here, and keeps them here, is the emotional draw of the lifestyle. A small minority of people actually feel it, but some years ago I was one of them. Product of an erratically hostile divorce, bullied by peers (and, occasionally, teachers) throughout my childhood, disquietingly aware of the global rush of the 1980s toward environmental or nuclear holocaust, my circumstances and upbringing made me a perfect candidate for punk rock. Kids with such a background who discover the lifeboat of punk cling to it desperately, and I was no exception. In my adolescence, punk rock and our culture made sense of the evil of the world for me and provided a position from which I felt empowered enough to stand up for myself and respond to it.

To me and many others, the music, mindset, and community were a stupendous revelation: we were all astonished, after years of isolation, to discover a whole scene full of people like us and places we could congregate together. Naturally that congregation carried with it an almost religious sensation of salvation. We had been saved, after all. The rooms of punkhouses like the Gates of Hell were virtually consecrated: there, we were aligned with hopeless weirdos all over the world finally escaping from the devastating bullshit of normal life, refusing and resisting it together and somehow building something new and better.

So, for a while, as a teenager and into my twenties, I took pleasure in ugliness and filth. I was done pretending that the there was a future, that the end wasn’t coming, that personal hygiene and grooming weren’t symbolic of our consumer selfishness in the face of imminent annihilation. Or something. And I felt as though my natural revolutionary state was to be among the punks, an allegiance to which I clung even as it seemed increasingly that most of what many punks wanted to do was get trashed.

The majority of the crowd at shows—comprising­­­­, for better or worse, “punk” as I experienced it_­­­­—didn’t seem like they were drawing the same deep inspiration from the music at all times to fuel the active resistance I’d always believed punk was supposed to represent. They wanted to get shitty (really shitty—punks aren’t believers in moderation), hear some bands, and socialize. To some extent, they wanted to do so in an atmosphere that perpetually reminded them of the brutal truths of existence—bombs, war, slaughter, injustice, oppression, evil, etc.—expressed in images of atrocity and/or drawings of skulls. Yet in the absence of some serious challenge to those brutal truths, punk’s statement seemed to diminish to the same thesis argued at nightclubs, taverns, and sports bars the world over: “Shit’s fucked up: let’s get wasted.”

The medium by which the Gates of Hell expresses that statement is different, however. Despite the clammy sorrow of a sports bar or nightclub, those places at least play upon some kind of novelty. The central premise of the Gates of Hell is regurgitation, literal and cultural—it shapes itself in the image of what’s come before, the futureless boozing-rioting-barfing edifice of chaos that defines punk for some, but which mainly consists of intoxicated people maybe breaking the law a bit—while accomplishing almost nothing. That would be fine for a nightclub, except that some of us who arrive at places like the Gates of Hell in search of social revolution discover instead a scene that offers no solutions at all beyond the continual restatement of the alienation that brought us all there in the first place. And most of us don’t even live there full-time.

Reaffirmed often enough in an atmosphere otherwise devoid of thoughtfulness, that alienation begins to decompose into its constituent elements of loneliness and despair, which become all the more acute the more the punk catechism of “no future” stretches farther into the unanticipated, and surprisingly degrading, future. Yet as the future’s end becomes more remote, punk’s true believers have shifted focus to underline instead the agony of “normality,” imagining the mechanistic hollow lives of the masses that long for the mercy of a mushroom cloud that will never come. If the future won’t end soon, then at least the veneer of normality is susceptible to the aesthetic attack from those willing to live in squalor even more miserable than the sadness of normality—a misery made worthwhile by the promise, never quite fully achieved, of total freedom. This tortured desperation, then, is what the crust punk lifestyle expresses loudest and most overwhelmingly to me, and what prevented me from ever giving myself completely over to it. My own despair is claustrophobic enough, but living inside someone else’s hopelessness—particularly that of the Gates of Hell crusties—is totally suffocating.

Transient, dirty, and hopeless, a lot of crusties here borrow their aesthetic, whether on purpose or by accident, from the film Mad Max, living as though that film’s apocalypse has already happened. My friend Simon once reported seeing, at a Loud House show, a one-armed punk he described as a “road-warrior crusty” wearing a prosthetic arm he’d embedded with studs “as though through sleeves of an actual jacket,” which he’d remove and swing around “mace-like” when the crowd really got going. It’s hard to imagine this scene being profiled in the New York Times Sunday Styles section.

Which is the point. Part of the draw of music like that at the Gates of Hell is that “normal” people will never want to hear it. Yet even the desire of the Gates of Hell punks to embrace that which the mainstream could never love has failed—one of the past two years’ most vaunted acts in the music press has been Toronto’s Fucked Up (recent winner of the 2009 Polaris Prize!), a hardcore band that’s carved its own style within the genre, and who played several packed shows at the Loud House over the years. One can imagine the Loud House punks disgustedly watching last year’s buzz-video of Fucked Up trashing a bathroom while performing on MTV, or, later in the same week, performing a Ramones cover with Moby. Certainly, some would be quick to brand Fucked Up (or, as they were called by MTV, F’d Up) “sell-outs,” but what I suspect would offend them most would be the realization that even the extremity of the Loud House isn’t inviolable—that forging a lifestyle so repellent it repulses marketability is far more difficult than it seems.

Unmentioned in discussions of groups like Fucked Up “selling out” is the notion that bands who pursue financial gain might do so because the underground—and particularly the extreme underground—can’t sustain them economically, yet all the same requires large financial investment. Many can’t break even on tour, instead sinking hundreds or thousands of dollars into the endeavour. Making music and touring without the support of adequately paying gigs therefore becomes an astonishingly expensive hobby when one factors in the cost of equipment, upkeep, a van, gas for the van, monthly rent on a practice space, etc.—making punk touring precisely the sort of bourgeois pastime to which crusty punks like to imagine themselves in opposition.

The complexities of that issue don’t come up in discussion, the same way the complexities of other issues like “burning the rich” (and doing what with their money?), “ending all war” (how?), and “smashing capitalism” (replacing it with what?) don’t get thoroughly discussed. After all, these slogans exist simply to attest wealth, war, and capitalism are harmful, but not to say anything much about the nature of the harm they do. In the same way, crust punk, as it appears at the Gates of Hell and elsewhere, exists just to express rejection—rejection of what’s perceived as mainstream, as conformity, as whatever now constitutes the world beyond the aural, aesthetic, and olfactory fortification that punks have built against “normality.”

There is no exploration of these adversaries, little interest in what normal people do or why they do it, and still less consideration of how life among crust punks might mirror, in its own way, the precise structures and problems of the society the punks oppose. These subjects never come up because many assume them to be solved already: normal people are robots controlled by the media and corporate interests, punks have pulled the wool from their eyes to see that capitalism and war are the enemy, and revolution and rioting is the solution, which, if they happen, we’ll figure out the logistics of when we get there. Until then: more rejection.

“Fuck, fuck, fuckin’ asshole, fuck, shit,” slurs the singer of the first band, by means of a mic check. A couple of his friends give him the finger, and the gesture seems as empty as his cursing. Almost every experience I’ve had of the Gates of Hell and the Loud House has been empty of wit and humour, save maybe the time Martin, the singer of ripping Toronto hardcore band Career Suicide, offended the crowd during their set by remarking, “Can we get a body count up here?” as several lolling, blue-lipped punks were dragged out of the bathroom and into the street to wait for an ambulance. For the most part, the shows here are free of humour. As the band launches into their set, the guitarist announces, “This song’s about dicks!” which is as close as we’ll come to funny. Then it’s d-beat, as promised, only sloppier, with the lead singer grumping hoarsely over two guitarists playing the same power chords and a drummer (wearing sunglasses) going through his paces. Someone tells me the name of the band and I instantly forget it, the same way I’ll forget the band itself. D-beat can be done better or worse, but it never amounts to more than what it aspires to be. Simon once told me that in developing an affinity for d-beat he’d cauterized his tastes, which is, in a sense, true—to devote yourself to such a repetitive and atonal branch of hardcore, you have to forego subtlety. But you also have to be willing to be bored, since d-beat by definition doesn’t do anything new.

By the end of the first song, the room has filled up. A considerable contingent of punks has stumbled in, king-cans of beer loosely in hand, dim eyes half-closed and mouths hanging half-open. Enjoying the music, they shake their fists at the band (the Gates of Hell’s most popular dance move) and knock into one another, spilling beer. Once it’s clear that the crowd’s beginning to get excitable, a blue-haired guy pulls himself up onto an amp and half-heartedly stage-dives into an area where there aren’t enough people to catch him; those beneath struggle to toss him backward onto the crowd behind and he ends up tilting headfirst into the floor. But it’s OK, he’s up and knocking around again soon enough, just in time for some other guy to make the same desultory leap off the amp and land it more successfully, only to be carried around by five or six people for a second before being deposited on the ground.

I watch one of the carriers, a smaller guy with short dreads. He’s got one of these vests just covered in shiny studs: little round nubs over the shoulders, pyramids on the back and flank, stars and pointier studs to accentuate the edges. It must have taken hours to put them all on; I try to imagine him spending the evening on a dirty sofa, in front of a stereo blasting In Darkness, You Feel No Regrets by Wolfbrigade (or a TV playing a rerun of Everybody Loves Raymond), pliers in one hand, bag of studs in the other, slowly crimping them on one by one in a careful pattern as though doing a home-ec project. It’s easy enough to picture—I’ve been there myself, have studded articles of clothing and sewn patches onto my shorts and hooded sweatshirts. There’s a strange tenderness in the moment between a punk and his or her favourite patched hoodie. But now he’s thrashing around the floor in his vest, colliding into friends with his shoulders. They’re drunk or dusted or high on whatever, and seem to be enjoying themselves, but I’m bored of the crowd and the band.

I’ve often wondered how many here really enjoy this music. I have more extreme tastes than most people I know and appreciate a certain sound in raging hardcore—namely the swift-and-loose variety, influenced by bands from the early ’80s like Detroit’s pissed-off but succinct Negative Approach, or Portland’s ferociously nihilistic Poison Idea. That’s why I bother coming here from time to time: bands that sound like what I like are more likely to play this sort of venue than elsewhere. But the crowd at the Gates of Hell goes for music often even more aggressive than I like it: while I can enjoy shouted vocals, they often prefer singers scream themselves hoarse, or grunt, or make that croaking barf popular in death metal. Likewise, I’m partial to fast drumming, but they’re far more open to the hydraulic noise of “blast beats,” drumming so fast it comes out in solid sheets with no apparent rhythm. This has no musical value to me, but many things I listen to don’t sound like music to a lot more people.

The d-beat band, whose name I’ve forgotten, goes on longer than it should, leaving me shifting my weight from leg to leg to keep my feet from falling asleep. When the set’s finally over, I talk with friends about tonight’s headliners, three bands from Texas. It turns out that the one I wanted to see, the difficult-to-pronounce but promising Deskonocidos, who play lo-fi garage-punk at hardcore speed—and in Spanish!—got turned away at the border because one of them had a criminal record. There are two other Texan bands but I’m not as interested in them. Nathan assures me I’ll like the next group of locals, who are not d-beat, but just angry hardcore.

Then we talk about how unlikely it is that a revolving door of hundreds of strung-out punks have lived in the lofts and apartments of this building for ten years, rebuilding and rewiring it, shooting heroin and snorting PCP, heating apartments with open ovens in the winter, and the place has never caught fire. I lived in my last cheap apartment for a year and it caught fire twice: what kind of justice is that? People have OD’d here, and maybe some have died; one guy got killed out front staggering into traffic after a show, but no one liked him. I gather he was the long-haired Neanderthal with fierce, dead eyes who I once interrupted smoking crack outside a show by trying to give him a flyer for another show. He just stared at me, wordless, with an expression of homicidal rage, until I moved along. I didn’t like him either.

The people that fall into this lifestyle don’t generally come from the wealthy families against whom their detractors accuse them of rebelling. For the most part, the people I’ve known who’ve ended up living like this come from terrible families, many of them reporting physical and/or sexual abuse. (A member of a well-known Montréal punk band has the word “abuse” tattooed on his penis. No one does that for a laugh.) If you want to escape from “normality” so badly that you’re willing to live in filth, with rats and roaches, drunk or strung out, allowing your teeth to give way, it’s probably a sign those representing “normality” did something pretty bad to you from which you’ll do anything to distance yourself. It’s true that the apartments upstairs from the Gates of Hell/Loud House can be nice enough—people can clean them up, paint the walls, pin up show fliers and movie posters, bring in some plants and books to put on shelves made of discarded bricks and wood and it’s home, suddenly—but to make a home amidst the noise and waste and misery nonetheless signals a genuine desire for escape that goes beyond any form of twisted vanity.

It’s a strange kind of escape, though: it casts itself as the ultimate rebellion, the apex of nonconformity, yet necessitates that people know what a punk is and what a punk belongs to. People on the street, agents of normality, see punks and recognize them as “punks,” and punks encourage that by adopting the traditional dress and hair and attitude of punks to make the game easier, because they want to be seen and understood as they understand punks to be. For the most part, they are. No one expects, at the Gates of Hell, to see someone wearing only a bathrobe, or a speedo, or a sweat-sock on their head: that would be formless, unscripted non-conformity that’d indicate madness. The uniformity of this lifestyle says, “Follow these rules so that we can present a united front of nonconformity against the forces of normality,” and it makes a bit of sense, but not really enough, especially given crust punk’s lip service to anarchy.

The second local band, Ilégal, gets started, and Nathan’s right: I like them. They’re short-hairs, which I sheepishly admit makes them easier to like, and they play fast, pissed off hardcore powered by a boyish, blond drummer with a perfectly erect back. Someone tells me that he used to be the drummer for the Finnish band Selfish, who I can’t remember if I saw or not, but that he moved here. I wonder why he’d do that, why he’d leave Scandinavia for this life. Anyway, it’s our gain, because he plays fast and hard, better than most drummers in the city. The band’s sloppy, but I’m into, snapping my body and my head like a whip in time as the crowd gets rougher and crashes into me a bit. There’s more stage-diving and the jumpers get caught and handed around. When the band is good, I don’t care that I’m surrounded by blank-eyed fuckups who could barely talk to me even if they wanted to. Earlier, Renée, a transplant from Newfoundland, cocked her head at the crowd and said, “This is what I always imagined punk shows in Montréal would be like before I moved here.”

“You mean you wanted to hang out with people like this?” I asked.

“I don’t want to hang out with them,” she said. “I mean, I never talk to them, and they don’t talk to me. But the shows are pretty crazy.”

They are, and when the band is good and going I feel impermeable to the filth and hopelessness of this life, or I flirt with it, charmed by nihilism and chaos and letting it win me over for while when I don’t care if I get showered with beer or puke and there’s only that moment of bristling extremity. I’m there again, so charged up with the rage of the music and the unruly energy of the crowd that I could almost float above it all.

But then the band plays too long again, and I lose interest. The sad dreadlocked door guy realizes the spotlights are pointed too close to the plastic sheeting holding back the insulation and he gets irritably nervous about fire. Climbing, cursing, up the amps while the band starts another song, he unplugs one light to leave us in near-darkness, and plugs in a large fan in its place. The breeze is welcome.

The band’s last song is a cover I can’t make out. Introducing it, the guitarist—the same as for the last band—says, “This song is for those fuckin’ pigs at the border, the fuckin’ fascist border cops! Fuck them all!” Someone told me earlier that some of the members of Ilégal were in the country illegally—hence the band name—but this is assumedly also a reference to the people who’d kept the Deskonocidos from coming up because some member had been convicted of driving drunk (an offence I happen to think is brutally at odds with anarchy’s demand of personal responsibility, but whatever).

The crowd knows the number and sings along, fists in the air, as I recognize I’ve had enough, that no matter how tight and angry the last two bands are, they won’t divest me of the feeling of aching futility at which I always arrive here. That uniform, alien hopelessness encircles me again and begins to tighten about me. I look around the room hoping that someone else is feeling it too, but the room is crashing into itself, or hanging back with half-lidded eyes, or talking among itself about nothing. I’m pretty sure I’m alone in whatever this is. When the last song’s over, I take my as-yet-un-puked-on umbrella off the pile of crates in the bedroom/antechamber, squeeze my way through the drunken crowd in the front room, and begin the long walk home in the rain.