RED-40
I’m thinking about the best way to write this friendship like prayer because thumping my Bob Glück that’s all I really know about tenderness.
Haven’t been writing. Got drunk and e-mailed myself job applications from Instagram. One time, at school, in the main gallery, Logan asks to follow me on Instagram. Logan is a sculptor who works mainly in glass, but he is also a performance artist, and a brilliant writer, and the person who, in the ridiculously suburban-gothic situation of drunkenly shattering a Pyrex full of roast vegetables, I immediately thought of. Sitting in my slip on the kitchen floor and gathering pieces of the Pyrex into a brown grocery bag, I thought, will Logan want these Pyrex pieces for his art? And then I replaced that thought with, oh shit! The soup! Which I also replaced with, oh shit! I’ll be late to Taix! I never considered that I could eat soup at Taix instead. I wanted to make my own soup, being in the suburbs and a woman.
Standing in the main gallery, feeling glad and successful, coveting this ultimate act of friendship— the Instagram follow— I open to the “explore” page (where we are not ever exploring; we are being advertised to) and hand Logan my phone. Every photo that the Instagram algorithm has placed on my page is of dinner. Recipe upon recipe for cold noodles, vegan mushroom sandwiches, zucchini pasta dishes, cookies with miso in them, macaroni-and-cheese with kimchi, and yes, soup. Logan says something like, it’s all food. I say something like, yeah. I’m hungry. Generally.
I don’t mean to write off the Pyrex like it was no big deal. I was really moved by the shattering of the object into hundreds of sharp, translucent pieces. I must have stared for ages, I think I even teared up. When was the last time you watched something shatter? I mean when was the last time you witnessed a shattering?
Bronwen is writing about the excellent novel Ice by Anna Kavan. Really she is writing about ice, the object. Like, solid water?
Solid water.
Ice, the novel, is about this guy who is obsessed with “saving” this girl from an encroaching nuclear winter which is threatening to destroy the world, except actually he’s obsessed with sexually possesing the girl, who seems to evade him and all her various male would-be savior-captors in material and non-material ways. More or less blithely, but in any case quietly, she’s always ending up at hot parties in the tropics. (I loved this part because of the hook in that Naomi Elizabeth song— heaven is hot like the tropics…) She is not a very real character, at times existing and at times existing only as a figment of the narrator’s crazed psychosexual hallucinations. The girl is completely translucent, a “glass girl,” and this is maybe why I recommend the book to Logan. For Kavan, “glass”; “ice” was also Heroin, which she was addicted to for most of her life. Living and writing during the 1950s, she was institutionalized for this addiction, and I suppose for being a woman. Kavan named herself “Anna Kavan'' after one of her own characters, and multiple accounts of her say that she dyed her hair platinum blonde to match. She was a glass girl, I guess she was heroin, I guess she was ice. But all anyone ever talks about when they talk about Anna Kavan is heroin; she was reported at her death to have had enough of it in her system to “kill the entire street”-- a fact repeated line-for-line in the introductions to nearly every single one of her short story collections. Really what makes her a darling of the cyberpunkers is that she wrote herself— a postmodern woman; a cyborg; more or less, in how she was made of all these discrete space-age materials, heroin no more than peroxide— into the modern world of literature. In the afterword to the most recent edition of Ice, Kate Zambreno writes:
Kavan portrayed female characters with a desire to fall, to luxuriate at the bottom: shattered women who harbor the hope that someone will come and save them, but who always, in the end, return to the struggles of solitude.
I was assigned Ice in this class I took at the New School that was called something like, The Apocalypse And The End Of The World And This Anthropocene And How We’re All Gonna Die. Or something. Every class I decided to take in the Master’s program was like this because I didn't want to read Hegel (AND I STILL HAVEN’T, HATERS!!!). This also happened to take place during a strong bout of my own depression, I remember sitting across from Bronwen at the diner with our coffee and pie like she had taken the train into the city just to make sure I was alive. And maybe she had. Her advice then and even now is the same as my advice to her, then and even now: we are actually better than other people. It’s amazing advice, kicks the depression right out of you.
But I’m still thinking about Kate Zambreno, who is Bronwen’s mentor at Sarah Lawrence, and whose Heroines I stole from Rocco while I was staying at her house. The new edition, bright and clean with a new introduction by Jamie Hood, sat heavy in my hands with the morning sun and the idea that I will be a woman and a writer and maybe a wife. Of course I love to be in my lover’s house. “All the time now I dream of being married, of having children, of being wifed up, of caring for people who are, finally, mine.” writes Jamie Hood in Fucking Like a Housewife. On the floor I almost wish to cut my hands on the Pyrex; to see the blood; to cut my knees; to arch my back in my black slip like a blacker cat. To be watched, chided, laughed at, fussed over, fucked. “I can’t help myself”, writes Jamie Hood, “I want to be undone by love. I would give my whole life for this.”
Yasemin, being in the city, was the first of our friends to volunteer for the Kate Zambreno babysitting job. Kate’s kids are young. Bronwen and Yasemin and I, on occasion, dream lazily over glasses of orange wine at Molasses about when we will become mothers. Bronwen seems convinced that I will have a girl, but she’s the only one with this opinion. Boy Mom. I think they will both make excellent mothers; I often fantasize that there is another girl in our friendship group but she is a child. She is one of our daughters. She is our daughter. We take turns holding her hands when we walk. She is in the groupchat. We work on pieces for workshop and she works on her social studies homework while music plays. I know it doesn’t work like that. But doesn’t it?
Bronwen is writing about ice, the object, solid water, but Bronwen is actually writing about us, these girls who are in each other's lives and novels, who make up this brilliant friendship and youth and womanhood and literature and the world, meaning New York, where we all, over the past few years, have fallen in love with eachother.
I was on so much ketamine at the Suzanne Ciani concert. Bronwen and I, umbrellaless and wearing pearls, were waiting outside the church when Kelly— the most physically transient groupchat member and rarest to see— bounded up to us like a psychedelic googly-eyed fisher-price steamboat invading the rough waters of a Hemmingway novel. We were uptown and Bronwen had been contemplating her childhood there. Our uber driver grilled her on if she was going to break-up with her boyfriend and who had really killed princess Diana and Jeffery Epstein. I had a bad UTI and to go back to California soon. My girlfriend was somewhere reading Proust. And then Kelly came up to us with the exact demeanor of a bubble wand.
“I have ketamine!” Said Kelly, maybe even before or instead of “hello.” Bronwen and I literally squealed.
I was telling a hilarious story to my new friend Summer (this is one of the best things about having an awesome girlfriend: you get to meet her awesome friends) about my ex-boyfriend who loved pills so much— particularly Ambien— that he would do odd things in the middle of the night, and then I’d be up in the morning getting ready for school and he’d be blissful and heavy-lidded like a monk or a baby deer in bed and I’d recount all his actions to him. A few times they involved electronics such as rewiring a lamp from the thrift store. Thrilling! Summer, amazingly sweetly and without any judgment whatsoever, said, “you seem to date people with drug problems”. It was so funny. We were all on ketamine, Summer and Rocco and me.
In a pinch— meaning in the time in-between when one knows she has a UTI and when she decides to drag herself to Callen-Lorde to piss the exact color of an aperol spritz (“the aperol spritz perfect color” reads the label of the bottle of aperol I buy at Trader Joe’s, “NO” to the left and “NO” to the right of “OK,” this color of my piss after popping half a pack of AZO pills) into a cup and be prescribed an antibiotic— ketamine is an excellent treatment for UTI pain.
I say this anecdotally. I happen to know, from hours of paranoid research, that excessive ketamine use can actually lead to chronic UTIs. Another thing that leads to chronic UTIs is falling asleep in the drunk orgasmic wonder of trying desperately to keep a recently-soft cock inside of you, plunging the cooling cum in friendly spasms of borderlessness, drooling, frozen like a reptile in sunshine. The wringing of an absolute closeness. Ends, beginnings, their demolition. I suppose a oneness with a lover is always a oneness with bacteria.’
In Harry Dodge's lecture we’re reading another book about what he refuses to call Object-Oriented-Ontology, opting for the less divisive “New Materialism”. He is saying, “I recently read that every person has their own entire ecosystem of bacteria,” something like that, I am half-asleep and texting the groupchat on iMessage, open over the PDF of the book we’re reading on my laptop. “Did you guys know this??” (He is always saying things with two question marks). I blink into the projector light. In front of my own students, at nine A.M: my petty castration when I look into the projector light because I require audience. They are eighteen. They compliment my outfits. I pass them when they ought to fail.
In Harry’s class, the conversation digresses into something about the hand which presses the spine of this book into the scanner. “He’s married,” I say, looking at the ring on the left hand’s finger. “I suppose he is,” Harry responds, glad as always to explore the breadth of our conversation’s tangentiality. “Or is that me?” Harry blinks into the projector light, because he requires audience. “Years ago, I guess. Before I got my tattoos and stopped wearing my ring”.
Laying my head on Rocco’s calf muscle which I love and which is amazing and which sustains the weight of my head, staring at nothing in her dark room which is blurring. The last thing I said, forty-five minutes ago, was “I used to listen to this bullshit all the time. It’s fun on drugs.” It is a CCRU lecture. “Your first SoundCloud like,” she said. I don’t remember exactly how we were sitting for those minutes, but it was very comfortable and it seemed impossible. The invention of a self is desperately easy in this position. A joke, even. Easy in that way, like a girl is, sexually. “It’s desperately easy to regard our past selves and recognize only the most shameful parts—” writes Jamie Hood in the New Inquiry, “the needful obliviousness, the searing good faith, the overexposure, the hyperfragility.” That expansiveness of vision, however, has its function.” I don’t know, while I’m standing in the Californian projector light, texting Rocco did you know Jamie Hood wrote a follow-up essay to Fucking Like a Housewife?, that she and I will break-up. And we will get back together and we will break-up.
And we will get back together. And I will nap in her bedroom. She will go to a party. I will feel her move around me. I will dream myself into her returning. And she will return. I will ask her to promise and I will ask her to pretend. And she will say Yes. “Why shouldn’t we want every pleasure?” write Jamie Hood, “Why shouldn’t we dream a sea change?”
Rocco’s blind grace towards me. I’m always sighing into her and saying things with only one question mark— and then what happened? How are you feeling now? Can I come over? We keep texting eachother videos of wildlife animals who are monogamous. On a particularly hormonal day, a stork bends her neck in an extravagant u-shape towards the ground to look, in a disbelief so intense that I can read it as disbelief despite her nonhumanness, at the egg she’s just laid.
Anyway, like I said, I haven’t been writing. I’m in California and Rocco is in New York and Bronwen is in Philadelphia. In California my father drives me to the nursing home we’re touring for my mother. We’re not supposed to call it a nursing home even though that’s what it is. I don’t want to write about this, I think. This experience, my mother’s experience, the one I worry about so much and form these foamy opinions around and theorize down to its ancient histories and play-act having power over. On the tour, before the arguing starts and while everyone’s in a trance-state not believing that it’s actually happening, I take notes on my phone in case I will write about this. They are: “Fingernail”. “Squeak”.
In a suburban-californian dive bar at midnight on a Thursday Maya and I flirt with two random bartenders we have kidnapped from the singular other dive bar in town. I am very drunk, and the situation is evil but maintaining an aspect of Archie Comics in that one of the guys is for Maya and one of them is for me. To avoid the evil, I am looking at my phone. My “explore” page on Instagram which used to be all food is now all “we’re hiring!” Ad after ad for gallery assistants; graphic designers; interns. Maybe I will be a professional person. I send the ads from instagram to my email.
Once, during the year I now understand as “the year I was drunk,” but on paper was “the year I worked at the nightclub,” Bronwen texted the groupchat: I kept telling my therapist I want to have a ‘Zoey Summer’ and ‘Zoey Summer’ has become part of her vocabulary. I asked Bronwen what “Zoey Summer” was and she said “Zoey Summer is when I am an uninhibited party girl like Zoey”.
La da di da di. We like to party. Dancing on molly. Doing whatever we want. The problem with Zoey Summer is that Zoey doesn’t remember everything about Zoey Summer so well. Maybe this was always the intention— to leave a Zoey-shaped mark on the world so precious and pure that it cannot even be touched by memory. One time, during workshop, I end up in a half-argument about whether or not it’s fashionable to remember things. Of my cohort, I’m the authority on what’s fashionable. “Forgetting is in,” I say, pointing to a line of my own poetry: Actually time’s/limited. Rohypnol: I reach/ the nascent, hip ownership/ of forget.
“Zoey only calls me when I wanna get high…” sings Bronwen in her stoned Lana Del Rey on Facetime. We laugh a lot and I eat Skittles, crunching them into the cavities in my wisdom teeth and flicking them out with my tongue. “What is your favorite Skittle,” I ask, sitting back in my chair and reveling in the wide openness of my stoned friend, thinking about her beauty, how I can see it all the way through, and how I can hold her from so far away; how I love to watch in this tender way of watching her squeeze and trip and purse and pucker around this young-girlhood we’re all doing. I’m also thinking about the best way to write this friendship like prayer because thumping my Bob Glück that’s all I really know about tenderness.
Bronwen likes blue raspberry and green apple, neither of which are Skittle flavors.1 I like probably also blue raspberry and green apple, maybe also lemon, because it is the most sour. But cherry can’t be discounted because of Red-40. “I love Red-40,” I tell Bronwen, “it’s just so red”.
We are actually better than other people. Bronwen, I like you more than I like other people. Zoey, I like you more than I like other people. I hate to write about people who aren’t the people I love. Me too. I love you. I love you.
I leave Harry’s lecture quickly, crying, I gather my laptop and notebook into my bag and march in my heels straight out of the room. I don’t want to cry in front of class, it wouldn’t make for productive conversation. But I need to express, with my body, that I don’t want to talk about sickness. I don’t want to talk anymore about caring for the sick. I hate literature and I hated abstraction. I want flesh.
I flop down on the cool floor of Logan’s dark gallery. He is leaning his entire body against a Logan-sized pane of clear glass. Ambient sounds flood the space. I cry silently or else lean my own body against the wall, or else watch Logan’s body move against the glass. This happens for two hours.
Later, I recount this event to the group chat, how as soon as I pull open the large, loud metal door of the gallery, Harry’s right there in front of me, a look of deep concern on his face. “I almost ran after you,” he says. I stumble around a quiet sentence managing just enough energy to convey to him that I am OK, and that I am going to take the rest of the day off. Bronwen responds in the group chat, “that’s hot”.
In the groupchat, Yasemin had been trying to put to Kate’s children to bed. And Harry’s kid, whose birth was written into The Argonauts, is having trouble spelling. Draws a globe and writes, “Earf”. This happens lots of times, everywhere. I’m thinking about Rocco, too, whose birth was written into a book somewhere. On a stage at the Cookie Mueller reading, Max Mueller reads aloud the story of his own birth, written by his mother, who’s not here. I wake up and I have sex and I shower and I drink coffee and I say, “I have to read a Bernadette Mayer poem”. I try to find the one with all the babies but I can’t.
Sometimes, especially in grad school, there is “writing advice” that assumes a certain dynamic between a reader and a writer. Writer writes for reader who reads. But actually the equation’s more complex. In this one, there is a reader and a writer and a lot of writers who are readers and there is also a written and a read. The writer who is a reader has read a lot of other writers who are and have been readers and the reader, yes, has read the writer but the reader is also the written, and the written is also the read which is also love, birth, sex, tenderness. They are each other’s mothers and they are each other’s daughters and they are each other’s lovers. They are also each other’s best friends and babysitters and bartenders and sisters, I suppose they are each other’s students, though this is less important. Maybe at some point in the future we will say we were students before we were writers, babysitters before we were writers, bartenders before we were writers, partygirls before we were writers. But of course this will not have been true. “Before”.
I miss my friends and I miss my lover. My writing, since being in grad school, is worse. But there is more of it. Everybody watches it grow and get different. “Calmer,” they say.
My advisor, a poet who is one half of a very lesbian relationship, is saying something about publishing my work, desperately convinced that I should try for Nightboat. I am only half-listening. Her beauty lands gracefully into this windowed classroom, sandwiched in-between the cafeteria and the heavy concrete balcony which displays another wild hallucinogenic sunset crashing into the valley. I watch her gold Cartier Love Bracelet slide down her wrist as she speaks. Under my sleeve, I have one, too. Mine’s fake and it keeps falling off. My sister found it on the beach a few months ago and gave it to me when she realized it wasn’t real. There are still grains of sand lodged in some of the diamond settings.
friendly spasms of borderlessness....
Every time I confront the chipped but not yet broken Pyrex measuring cup on the top shelf of my kitchen I will think of this and of Logan. Love the movement and circling in this piece.