Our Dear Dead Myrtle-Broadway: on Instagram someone has made a bikini like the Praying bikini that says “father, son, holy spirit”, but instead it says “Checkers, Dunkin, Popeye’s”. It’s an inside joke between a large group— maybe a cohort— of insufferable twentysomethings. Kids a few years older than me lean in real close and laugh and say, I remember my Myrtle-Broadway days. In this situation I am either about to have sex with them or we are at Nowadays. I love when a twenty-six-year-old claims to be free of something that is in fact running or arguably ruining both of our lives. I grab a slice from Norbert’s and run to the club where I’m late for my shift. Today’s drama is someone got fired for cutting lines behind the bar instead of in the bathroom like everyone else.
Give me one margarita imma open my legs. Give me two margaritas imma develop a crush on a dude who looks like AG Cook. Give me three margaritas imma move to Los Angeles. Give me four margaritas imma make a burner Twitter account to tell my rapist that his haircut is stupid. Give me five margaritas imma cut my hand open climbing onto the roof to scream-sing PUMPED UP KICKS during sunrise. Teach a man to make a Long Island and I’ll fish for days.
All of America is stoned or alcoholic and all of America has a limp dick. Maybe there was an undrunk America before capitalism got this bad but I doubt it. Now there’s dicks that are half-hard because of pills and because of modern medicine which does also include and circumscribe America’s immense drunkenness. The best and maybe the only good modern invention has been the strap-on dildo. I remember a psychiatrist telling me about this pill for high blood pressure that actually also ends all nightmares. She gives it to men who are shell-shocked. I only do coke and ketamine in the bathroom and I don’t sleep and I write and despite my whimsical investment in western culture and literature I am a woman.
It’s Sunday and my choice to tuck a white tee into my 501s has nothing to do with last night, when I was blasted running around the club and a tall dark man came up behind me in my bra and skirt and with his mouth to my ear asked, “how much”? Now hic I don’t hic think anyth hicing of it. I’m going through my camera roll trying to be sexy for people who already think I’m sexy because I put out. Somehow I’m also failing at this. Okay some grace for my teenage self: she was brave because it takes bravery to believe in the Romantic or rock music or America or friendship or belief. Really what I want is to be in a very fast car. That’s what I mean by the digital projection of this image of me in leather. Grace for my teenage self and not anything to do with you. And not anything to do with cock. And not anything to do with your cock. That’s how I want it to be. But I have already been corrupted by whatever comes after youth.
Sky calls me from Geneva, depressed because in youth youth is always fleeting. Sky says those who are not in New York are missing something of youth, which is friendship and stupidity. Switzerland: I’m blasting Sonic Youth in my headphones like any good American boy set on breaking the hearts of a few gorgeous blondes this afternoon. Maybe my methods are strange but that’s exactly what this is.
Sometimes around lesbians I am ungendered and prepubescent. The most beautiful lesbians smoking or adjusting their shirts or reading sci-fi novels smiling with their lips talking breezily I want it all over me all the time, I am a kid. I want them with their sweet fizzy nonchalance. I want to mobilize something absolutely impossible and ridiculous; I want to win the stuffed octopus in the window of the toy store so bad. So I buy astronaut ice cream and enter the raffle.
Yasemin grew up in Turkey, where there was space camp but no astronauts. And I grew up in America, where space travel remains ignoble. My belief is that a nightclub is the noblest form of spaceship because it is what I am piloting, and I who was born into the internet do not remember a time when western literature was plagued by memories of total warfare. And anyway, men cannot have quirk as a character attribute because men have only been medicated and not actually institutionalized for their nonviolent hysteria. What I am saying is I think you’re all massive dorks. I cannot think of a single person I know who is not a massive dork.
Everybody; every twenty-seven-year-old white dude with a special, curated set of quirks; every djay who is “making friends” with the booker right now; every kid who is shopping for a harness to wear on the outside of their clothes; every drunk girl who is down for anything but going home; everybody is so desperate for a scene.
As units like the nuclear have been disintegrating for some time in favor of the unitless and ever-redistributing digital, it is natural to think I will find something new and newly meaningful in drug time, which is and has also been disintegrating and redistributing. When people speak of “community” they so often are speaking of the tethers they reach for most immediately when overtaken by a certain shock: the shock of realizing that disintegration (of a body, a social unit, a place, or time itself) is actually a feeling and not a phenomenon.
I DON’T WANT TO HURT HER! Tell her it’s a fear of fentanyl or bad acid or seeing my ex or something. Tell her I want but. Tell her I only want. Tell her I want so bad. Tell her I can’t afford rehab either. At the end of the day I am a twenty-two year-old girl who thinks my thirty-year-old male dork of a random brooklyn subletter roommate is obsessed with me and so I walk around the house in my lingerie. But when I find an ID on the floor of the club you say oh I know that person. You love a girl next door type, my wage-labor manager at this ghetto-ass nightclub that I live down the block from and I don’t ever leave.
STOP DROP AND ROLL
OUT OF MY UBER. Pray for New York’s forgiveness, I’m missing Juliana. There’s no lovers anymore I am running to sweet keyboard and sleep. That car through the sunrise was a chariot because I was so brave and proud and alone to myself. Somewhere at the end of the party there’s a cowboy to be had. Not everyone makes it but I do. I will. I did. I will. I have. I did. I do. Sweet street pussycats I carried myself to the beyond so many times when it was beyond me. Darling honey kittens I carried. A slice of night to myself so luxurious it’s disgusting. How funny you are today New York. One day not unlike this one I will really be truly alone to myself and remember this time when I was permanently wrested. One quiet solitary day I will remember this labor. Shhhhhh. Alone I undress. Oooh baby. Oooh baby. We love.
OOOOH BABY! She said next week you’ll just be back on it again and she was RIGHT! Mila kunis Mila kunis bitch! I look like a rockstar and also a Batman villain. Really I am a girl who is in college?? And wearing the wrong shade of lipstick. Who has read so many Michelle tea novels and believes in a pre-internet beauty like supermodels before weird-looking supermodels were a thing because I’ve seen so many beautiful people. I’ve held against me, wet, whimpering, faltering, flushed, so many beautiful people. I’m a person who believes in beautiful people. I hold a CVS greeting card against my chest on my twenty-second birthday. I just love youth. I’m eating every inch of it. It’s not a fetish it’s actual love. What do you know about that.