At the Indianapolis airport, going through security, the scanner flagged my bionic penis, and a strange bland man in a starchy blue shirt felt me up and down, his gloved hands all over my groin, finally determining that the mysterious mass in my pants was only my freakish mechanical wang and not a hidden explosive device, a routine occurrence for me when I fly. (If this sounds cryptic for lack of context, you can read all about it in my recently released book.)
My girlfriend and I landed in New York City at 9am. We got in a taxi driven by a Middle Eastern or Southeast Asian cipher and I couldn’t look away from the rising fare, the wallet incinerating uptick of the blazing red digits; we rode for an hour on clotted roads to our lodgings in Bushwick, where the armored anthill traffic jams thinned out and the pace slowed a bit and the breathing was a little easier, though the air was still rich with stale piss and garbage. The Air bnb smelled of ancient body odor, a lost and buried civilization’s worth of sedimented armpits mixed in with other inscrutable vapors, the fumes of an otherworldly outhouse, and the walls gleamed with the ghostly on demand imprint of a thousand odd passing bodies, with the latest layer added by our own desquamation.
One toilet downstairs in an old woman’s apartment, though each time I went down there I met a different person in the kitchen. The bathroom was narrower than a tollbooth and the toilet was caked with dirt and hair. Orange hued cockroaches scurried across the floor and sink, and I almost felt rude for interrupting their usual dark and disgusting perambulations (hey, I’m scurrying ova here). Only 150 dollars a night. You can barely buy a meatball sub for that price.
Months of unbroken blue skies and scorching sun finally relented, the summer of skin cancer and boiling anger beaten for the time being, and we walked the squalid streets under a blanket of grey clouds, walked for miles and miles to bookstores and coffee shops, buying more books than I could hope to sell, what with that stimulating New York City selection, row after row of promising titles and the soothing smell of decaying paper, spending money I don’t have on illusions of energy and knowledge; just like Indianapolis, only with a bigger bouquet of all the finest flowers of a developed society: noise, putrid gas clouds, ethnic chopping blocks, the streaming and coagulating crowds, thousands of hearts beating on top of each other, tripping each other up with their out of pocket rhythms, a million one man bands banging cymbals and stomping kick drums, stores barfing people out and sucking them in, outrageous expenses, the dry flapping of pigeon wings.
That evening we took the subway to Sovereign House, the site of the reading. My pals Manny and Gianni helped me set it up. My thanks to them, gratitude pouring out my ass and so on. From what I’ve heard, Sovereign House is a hub of literary fascism, possibly funded by Peter Thiel or some other shady overlord, a house with hate to spare, one of the propaganda organs of the emerging neo-trad accelerationist Judeo-Christian vitalist movement, and has hosted such fringe luminaries as Steve Sailor and Delicious Tacos. The venue of my dreams.
(Not quite, but for my book release I wasn’t going to read in Indianapolis. The progressives who dominate the literary scene here are especially insular and reactive. Credentialed nitwits and cartoon entertainers, a real Fat Albert after school variety hour, not all that different from anywhere else, any coastal hive or supposed vanguard, but with a little more front porch expanse in their brains and a behind the times striving to embody the moral code of today. Plus, I see too many of them in my day-to-day life; I’m not going to read from my book about how I want to smash chairs over the heads of people drinking lattes at their laptops and then serve those people the next day.)
Met my friend Matt for the first time in the flesh, a truly hilarious and kind man; he brought his friend Zach, a young man I’m already old enough to say reminds me of me at that age, a reader of uncommon ambition. A philosophy club event was booked over the original timeslot of the reading, so we waited for that to finish, people showed up, the sky went greyblack and streetlamps greased up the sidewalks and stone facades. I met many other sharp appreciators of the arts, as was only fitting.
Six of us read, everyone kept it short, my cohosts did a great job. I believe I performed to a high standard. (It’s not hard to read well, all you do is read as if the words are coming out of you, not as if you’re peeling flat lines from a sheet of paper.) The night rushed along, I sold a few books and meant to talk to people more, but I have the social stamina of a Nordic shut-in right now, and by 1:30 in the morning my girl and I were on the subway, heading to a cramped apartment and a moldy mattress as beer battered our vital organs.
Four and a half hours later we were up and back at the coffee shop that roasts beans brewed by one of my old shops, this spot in Bushwick with a leafy green and open interior, one in a long series of post-industrial breakrooms in a continuously expanding urban office grassland, where wildebeests graze on wifi, and for the next two days the two of us marched through Brooklyn and Manhattan under the cover of a drained clay sky, floated in and out of the usual haunts, ate and drank and talked of what we wanted and what we’d do when we made it home.
(I can’t imagine another companion for this kind of trip. She’s a loving person who can handle logistics, and it turns out I need both of those things. Naturally enough, she possesses many positive qualities in her own right (sense of humor the one I might cherish the most), but love binds through active service, not through constant admiration of individual charms. Those who balk at the idea of working for another person and complimenting their needs out of love commit the gross mistake of imposing economic standards on a noneconomic sphere, and they tend to be the same people who think of economic logic as oppressive; they betray an unconscious association of sacrificial labor and degrading interchangeability, as if what should endear us to each other is a set of unique traits, preternatural attractiveness, and not steadfast and helpful action that can be theoretically copied by anyone.
The narcissism that now incubates a great many people, that forms a damp climate clinging to the skin, inclines us to a fruitless cultivation of power and influence and a galling competition for overspent attention, so that whatever doesn’t feel like idolization, gold tinted mirroring and breakneck magnetism, hot air balloon swelling and soaring above the sod clumps of the average everyday, can only be felt as lifeless, inadequate, a humiliating compromise or a sordid defeat.)
Two days of gripping handrails and shooting out of subway cars, drinking beer and thumbing used books and rifling through unaffordable shirts in vintage clothing stores. Shortly before leaving for the airport I had a rushed lunch with Ross Barkan, a novelist and journalist. After a pleasant chat my girlfriend and I were off, and just like the last time I came to NYC we sat in the plane on the tarmac and the pilot told us the flight was cancelled. The trailing winds of Hurricane Helene, having wrecked southeastern cities and destroyed settled lives, were now swirling about Indianapolis, far less violently but with enough force to prevent plane landings.
And so the same punishing gusts and menstrual wrath of mother earth or righteous blowing anger of God the father, that in one place rips siding from houses and crushes skulls under collapsing girders, in another place disrupts travel plans, manifests as no more than an inconvenience, and in yet other places appear as a sad story affecting those we don’t know to whom our hearts go out. Yes, everything is connected, but not equally, and not in a way that matters. A home ruining hurricane for one man is the breeze from a butterfly's wings for another.
A taxi ride back to the Air bnb for an extra night, but the room we’d stayed in was no longer available, and all the man had left was a lofted space in a woman’s apartment. About three feet between the bedding and the ceiling. I couldn’t sit up, I slammed my hands into the walls several times; I tried to break up the stagnant heat with a rusted oscillating fan, but the squeaking sounded like cemetery gates. Midnight and the people in the apartment above us were doing wind sprints and line dancing in Dutch wooden clogs. Cockroaches crawled over my legs and back. A nightmare scenario, as if I’d been dropped into a three-dimensional version of a Stephen Gammel illustration from those Alvin Schwartz collections of scary stories.
It was among the worst sleeps of my life, and it’s not easy to claim the top spot in the category of restless nights. The next day we went to the airport again, and once again a man patted my penis down but this time we flew home, and I had less than a full day to recover before going to work at Willie Wonka’s syrup factory, the post-adult playground, where I need to quit, need to be fired again, driven out of town by pitchfork wielding mobs. I have a box of my books I could sell; but more urgently I need to find a new job. I’m thinking it’s about time I work for the post office.
Border Patrol is also hiring
Heyheyhey New Yaawk Ciddee where the roaches never sleep and there's no shortage of cultural venoos and stuff.
Just checked up on Sovereign House and it does indeed seem to be infested with Thielites and Jesus Freaks with suits, so sez the meeja at any rate.
But I won't get into the woke vs unwoke debate because a) I'm not American, and it seems like a special anglo hobby, like sports with bats; and b) I do real politics and don't care about what colour people's hair is, or indeed if they have none at all like you, nor am I interested in their genital disposition, even if said genitals are intriguingly bionic like yours. Hey, you do your hairless, bionic-todgered, dark enlightement you, mush.
I only care about your economic class baybee, and everyone in New Yaaawk must be straight up bourgified if they accept them prices, matey. While you and I, CC, are certified precariat with all the cool benefits that this implies - authenticity, heaps of cynical cred, monotonous life experience, etc, etc. Hope you get another precariat gig pronto and all your dreams come true-ish.