Roxy

 I sat across a young man at a table a week or so ago. I was with d and we ran into a group of his friends outside a restaurant. We sat there and smoked a couple cigarettes. The young man was very tall and thin. He was already drunk. The blazer he wore swung back and forth from his shoulders. We walked to the bar and he walked either very far ahead or behind us. When he noticed he fell behind, he would shoot up again, though shot after shot he would miss. He didn’t seem to know how to work this long body of his yet. 

He ordered one or two drinks at the bar and talked to just about anyone. People approached him and he approached others. He smiled and laughed easily and his long hair flapped in the stale bar breeze. He sat back down with us, a table made up of the boys he went to prep school with— and me.

He sat cross-legged and called himself a poet, but other than that said nothing else. Around his friends, he seemed depressed. He crumbled inside the costume, Slouched over, the blazer looked hopelessly bigger than him. He began to fall asleep on himself. 

If I were to tap him with a spoon, I thought to myself, he would crack, maybe shatter. If he were older, I would wonder. But he was my age, so I pitied.

I asked him what he was drinking.

He said whiskey.

Straight? I asked.

I dated a gurl named Roxy, he said. When we broke up, I stopped taking it on the rocks...

How to beat the heat... sip sip sip

 Summer is a vulgar season, and that redeems it. Bride and groom sit at the end of the bar. They sip their drinks sullenly through straws. They stare down at the oak. Occasionally they look up and smile into her phone camera. 

She is Korean. Her white dress is short and her veil made of nylon. He is Italian. His tuxedo is traditional. I watch them and feel sorry, because they seem unhappy on their wedding day. But people in New York become not so much people, but impressions of them… so I’m only a little sorry. Heat is a confusing sedative. People cannot think or speak properly, so they scream out loud or in their melting subconscious. Bodies burst out of clothes. People don’t bother to wrestle them back in. Man and woman are sweating at the end of the bar. But yes, stay just as you are. sip sip sip

This week my emotions were like bombs. I saw them in front of me, popped them in my mouth, swallowed them naively, and they burst inside of me. I rode the N from les to the edge of astoria, drawing a horse, and then back to les and into Brooklyn, drawing a lady. I got off and took buses back to queens, smoking cigarettes at transfers and crying uncontrollably behind big sunglasses. sip sip sip

While cold makes me sink deeper into my body, heat makes me want to escape it. Summer heat makes me feel as if I’m on the brink. My skin feels too tight, my hair too thick, my time too long

Sometimes New York gets me in a tizzy. I can find the people in it bleak and belonging to a world that is offensively small. And I don’t mean small, like, the barrier of entry is too high, or exclusive, or impenetrable. I actually think it would be somewhat easy to penetrate; so many of those inside want so badly for love by someone halfway attractive, talented, or with some professional potential. I mean small as in spoiled, unimaginative, repetitive, and predictable. It happens. I understand. I’m sure it’s livable from the inside. But watching it has depressed me. As has the heat. sip sip sip

lamb

 I roasted a leg of lamb because I felt like I needed to. I lived with my grandparents on their sheep farm when I was growing up, twice. First for three years when I was a child, then for a few when I was a teenager. Every spring lambs would be born. Some ewes birthed three or four, others only one, a few lambs were born still. My pépère showed me how to clip their tails off with a contraption that looked like a nutcracker. You insert their tails into the slot and squeeze the handles closed. The tail falls to the ground and you plunge the nub into a chemical that sterilizes the wound. As a child I preferred to just hold the lambs in my arms as he did the chopping. I squeezed them very tight and they became still. I nuzzled them against my cheek and whispered to them so they’d be calm. When the cleaver closed, they jolted and mewed and often writhed out of my small arms. I played with them afterward.

My pepere sheared sheep expertly. He has since he was 16. He wrestled them into a position in which their shoulders were against his knees, and their back hooves and legs perpendicular to his legs. In this position they fell limp, like dummies. Their bellies fell over their thighs. They understood now was not the time to fight, but be taken. He sheared up and down with a razor, until their wool was short and groovy. Fluffs fell on the cement slab that was at the entrance of the barn. I would play with them in my hands, stretching them apart, padding them together, pulling them into shapes. The rest he swept up into a pile.
The lambs would stand close to their mothers in the field. They’d play, kick their legs up. They’d also lay and nuzzle against their mums’ new haircuts. The girls would grow up and most boys would be picked up and brought to slaughter. We would get some of the meat back and eat it for supper. Lots of stews and curries. On more celebratory occasions, my mémère would cook a roast.
I'd never cooked one myself. My birthday is near and I deeply wanted to cook a hunk of meat and serve it to people I love in a beautiful way. Providing in this way is very romantic to me.
I bought 6.5 pounds from Akropolis Meat Market. They weighed it in front of me, and I asked them to keep the bone in. I brought it home and dropped it on the counter and unwrapped the paper. It looked very much like a muscle. Pale ligaments stretched beyond its deep redness. Snow white fat fell in thick lines. 

I made a dozen incisions in the meat. 

I ground up anchovies, garlic, and rosemary and 

I stuffed it inside them with my fingers, heavily dosing the little cavities. 

I squeezed anchovies into butter with my hands and 

I smeared the paste atop the whole surface, covering it completely. 

I licked off every remnant left on me. 

I placed it on the oven rack at 325° for 20 minutes per pound, per memere’s instruction—

she likes it bloody and so, 

I like it bloody. 

I put a pyrex pan underneath it to catch excess drippings, and 

I used that to season the potatoes I roasted afterward, along with olive oil, salt, pepper, and more rosemary. (Next time, 

I will roast the potatoes underneath the lamb simultaneously.) 

The lamb is such an innocent thing, a famous beacon of purity. But there is something so vulgar about the act of cooking it. What a delicious contradiction I served on a silver platter

sophomore

a and I likened our twenties to high school. 20-22 is freshman year. 23 and 24 is sophomore, 25-27 junior, 28 and 29 senior. As a freshman you try and flail. I flailed up right center. We were babies, learning how to walk, and still we feel like crying. I tried a lot on and most nothing fit, but that which did: delicious, really [New York, writing fiction]. Now we’re rising sophomores. 

Summers have always been hard for me. I am and have always been with Lana. Summertime sadness is the greatest one. I reread blog entries from last year; it’s all there. [I can get so tired of reading writing. Voice, style, it can all be so embarrassing. Clarice stands above all in her deployment of style, but it’s the absence of Voice in her work that makes it great. She writes automatically (a method I am partial to), one can tell. Can someone send me My first book. I’m curious.] 

All I want to do is take a roadtrip, though not now.

Sometimes I think I’m running in circles, sometimes in an upside down cone and that's terrifying: the thought of running in circles, lap after lap after lap after lap, at a downward tilt. Not spiraling, I must make that clear. My fear is that it’s gradual. It's far harder to correct that way.

I’m not sure yet what sophomore year is about. Digging your heals in? Realizing the path? My prediction:

filtration

Clarity

Greater quality (minor but meaningful)

Probably more flailing

 

Ah, another year. I’m pretty tired, excited for my birthday to be over, but desperate to be loved on it in all the familiar ways. I will cook a leg of lamb in celebration. Renewal, redemption!!!!!!!!!!!!

wood wool paper

I’ve begun to worry about my upstairs neighbor. At first his hacking was annoying. It reminded me of the Chinese woman and man I rented from and lived with in Chinatown. They used their whole body to clear their throat, always, after they brushed their teeth. The man living above us makes the same noise but to the nth degree and all day long. I first called him our bulimic neighbor. Now I’ve begun to suspect he wakes up every morning wanting to kill himself. He swallows a lethal dose of some poison you can find in the cupboard—a thousand apple seeds, a cup of holly, some herb—and then changes his mind. He spends the day sticking his fingers down his throat in an attempt to live. The hacking slows down around 3 and picks back up at 8, though to a much lesser degree. This is the final round, a final clearing, just to make sure—and perhaps this is more a survival instinct than a conscious decision, because when—he does indeed wake up the next morning; he curses every finger he put down his throat the day before, every single one of yesterday’s hacks. The torment. Hopefully he’s just a drug addict trying to get better. Whatever his marathon hacking is a product of, the sounds disturbs me. I play music to drown him out from a playlist called sci-fi scapes. But his chest must be deep shades of purple and blue, and his teeth eroded half way to his gums. 

Sometimes, most of the time, maybe only sometimes actually because these moments tend to be transcendent, I think that things are the only way they could be, and these moments the way they are were destined ever since, well, I could never know. For example:

Yesterday I bought a table. I woke up in the morning and decided to bike, and because we are furnishing our apartment I decided to bike to a used furniture store. I walked around the warehouse a few times in circles, and then saw the table. It was stacked atop another one in the middle of the store, and it gleamed. I ran toward it, and for maybe 30 minutes I traced its legs with my fingers, fingering the peels and dents in the wood and becoming more and more nervous... I become apprehensive when I like something very much. After too long of my perverted groping an Eastern European grabbed the table's pretty legs with his big hands and said I think I’m gonna take this one. My face fell and I gasped. He took his hands off and said good. You’ve made your decision. I hugged him tightly.

I can’t describe the table to you. All I can say is its round, the movers took its legs off to get it in my apartment, and I’m sitting at it now as I will every day from here on out. Each day I don’t I will be sad, but still I will thank it (God?) for letting me look at it and choose it and bring it home with me. I feel this way about people I love, loads of things I keep in my room, and the job I found on craigslist. I like to think I can tell when a thing is placed firmly.

I dream each night of sagas, and the characters are the people I miss most. My dad, a, s, i. But life is very good. So good c and I went to breakfast, to a hotel, which is my favorite place to eat breakfast. A woman drank a latte and ate a salad alone and slow, and we talked about what material our husbands would be. I said wool. She said steel. The man upstairs, from what I can tell, is made completely of very, very fine paper.

cracked

I’ve been kind of without a home, but now I have one. At the same time a is going to spain for 2 months, and she’s become something of a home. Goodbye lovely! I almost went with her, but I decided to get on top of my credit card bill. 

My new apartment is the most beautiful place I’ve ever lived. The floors tilt in every direction. There are checkered tiles in the bathroom. There’s a crack in one of the windows. Classical music flows through. We have a big mirror, 2 chairs, and a stereo on top of a tv tray. I can see the whole city from my bus stop. 

I feel like I can finally breathe. I can read again. Maybe I can write again. We are testing this out.

The last few months have been day-to-day. I scraped by. The skin of my teeth wore thin. It was grim. A dungeon with a fluorescent light around which moths swarmed. When I started to stay with a, life started to brighten., glowing things seemed to fall around me in slow motion, and they drifted in a way that felt right, and I didn’t worry because I knew that when they landed, they’d land safely and fit together. I started sleeping hard and heavy. My dreams were deep and warm. 

I’ve been in many such situations, that deform your nerves and shave years off your life, but I tend to remember them fondly. In dire straights, you’re cracked wide open. You're dramatically present. You bleed. And the wonderful come along to patch and infuse you with all sorts of light. I’ve experienced quite a bit of that recently. I am lucky

confession

Yesterday I talked to d, the guy who always has brunch with Someone Famous on Sundays. I remember the first time I talked to him: It was brunch, about a year ago. Death had come up somehow, and I mentioned death doulas. I had volunteered for Sundance a few months ago, where I’d watched a documentary about one. This I wanted them to know. The death doula was Jewish and a woman, a type the pair seemed to have some experience with. Before d went on about the subject, he raised his eye at me, precautionarily—You’re not Jewish, are you?

d likes to mention how old he is. Someone Famous does not. Someone Famous looks like he listens to Andrew Huberman and has regular chemical peels. d looks like a writer who’s lived in Brattleboro 40 years. I told him about the four months I lived there when I was 19. He told me about the friends he has who pathologically lie and live more or less on the street. His substack subscribers love them. I told him about the walks f and I took at night after probably two bottles of wine, during which we took a stray cat home and once coaxed a guy off his proverbial edge. He was down by the train tracks and his girlfriend had just thrown him out. He was drunk in a can’t-talk-straight, slurring-his-steps kind of way. We talked to him for awhile and f did most of the comforting—I’m not so good at that sort of thing, and I used to be worse. I probably said something like yeah, she seems like the worst. Eventually he agreed to sleep it off in his truck, and we kept walking. 

I told d about my blog and lied about how often I post. Lied, or rounded up. I wrote my email on a piece of receipt paper and gave it to him before he left. Hi, d. Sorry I lied.