I’m Like Jack Kerouac But Instead Of Heroin It’s Red40
77 hours on the road. taking america in ironic stride. how stylishly unamerican new york feels to me in this moment and i miss it. jack kerouac never needed a bushwick sublet.
Sunday, 5pm. Hour 4. Stage 1: Denial
mentally, i am still in new york. physically, i am somewhere on a highway between cornfields. waking up and not knowing where i am isn’t too different from how i was living in the city. except this situation is a little more dignified. only by a little bit.
the meme pages are coming at me but i still have enough data to engage with them. i use it unflinchingly. my friends talk about how they’re sad i’m gone, and in return, they receive status updates: “i’m like jack kerouac but instead of heroin it’s poppers.” im bouncing that around as a potential title. i say i’m over people only seeing me as someone who gives party favors but i realize these quippy titles aren’t helping.
theres an emptied carton of camel blues. someone with taste was here. im taking all this americana shit in striding irony. my gatorade stained legs. the adult superstore billboard that, in my astigmatism, i had mistakenly thought read “FEET NOW” because it was paired with a sensual picture of legs. my bad for thinking middle america would be open about their fetishes. but it’s not like feet are even that weird of a fetish. i will bring kink positivity to the midwest. on every lamppost next to every missing dog poster, next to every LETS GO BRANDON sign, i will leave educational zines: ‘Foot Fetishes Are Actually Pretty Normal Because The Feet Part Of The Brain And The Other More Conventionally-Accepted Erogenous Zone Parts Of The Brain Are Next To Each Other, So The Neurons Easily Misfire All The Time And The Brain Gets Horny At Feet Because It Thinks It’s Supposed To. So You’re Lowkey Allowed To Be Into Toes: And Other Sex Ed Things They Didn’t Teach You In Catholic School.’ it’s a working title.
Monday, 10am. Hour 23. Stage 1 Part 2: Denial Cont.
my data persists. the group chat perseveres. i used to dream about having the friends i do now. equally enthused to be in touch with me, equally enthused to send everyone stupid shit and call each other gay over the phone. i want to bring my friends with me through america. desperately trying to not be alone in the midwest, i post this on my close friends:
michelle calls me poetic so i say her name somewhere in illinois. i dont think im poetic. i think i just love her. i think the roscoe camping world deserves to know her.
Monday, 6pm. Hour 27. Love(s) Across The Country, Despair Introduces Itself
somewhere in wisconsin im still doing my cosmopolitan jokes. at the gas station i consider posting “do you guys think they have poppers here?” loves (the truck stop franchise) is the only constant throughout this trip. i wish i could say the same about love (the feeling) and love (the action). but they allude me because ive been skipping my meds because i forgot to get my prescription filled. i thought i lost my sunglasses so i drop $20 on a new pair. repenting for all those years of free sunglasses (gifts, thefts, etc) only to leave them at angelina’s so she can sell them for $6 at buffalo.
a first responder gets marlboro golds. serge ask the groupchat how late some party is going. im in a cornfield when i answer “til the cows come home.” it’s funny because i know nothing about this party. except im me, so i know everything about every party because thats all i do and that’s all ill ever do and college was for nothing. i write a few good lines for an angst that hasn’t fully formed yet.
i wish i could indulge in the analogue romance of writing everything by hand but my brain works faster than my wrist. except for when i’m jacking off. i wish i could write a book and write the way i do in something chic and leather-bound, or maybe cutely throughout napkins and envelops. but id lose everything before im able to write it down. im confined to typing on my phone and looking like im texting or dming or doing other unromantic twenty-first century things. i promise im writing poetry. i promise when i look at the skyline and move my thumbs frantically without looking down, im not tweeting or talking to anyone other than the typewriter in my mind.
im listening to music that makes me think i’ll never see any of you ever again. despair writes itself a name tag. page is sick. im sick. nikole is in boston and georgia is in london. jaki went back to la and took herself out of the group chat even though the manhattanites title became defunct the moment we all started moving to bushwick. jean luc is in spain or italy or somewhere less depressing but he misses new york. charlie is somewhere on the coast. a few of the guys are up at serge’s beach house in jersey presumably to do gay things. it’s like when all my cleveland friends went to college before me. maria went to new york (upstate to sarah lawrence, so definitely doing gay things). abby to columbus. ian to georgia. matt to vermont. and i had to stay behind without all of them for two years. and then i went to the city and became The Girl Who’s In College.
Tuesday, 2am. Hour 35. The Supermoon A Decade Later.
the open road and horizon have me listening to songs i used to only listen to in high school whenever i’d get high. they sounded better then. maybe it was the weed. maybe i just make more music now. matthew is talking to immortals now. nothing is keeping my company other than the telephone pole or the ufo blinking steadfast along the tv. it’s a pole. i wish it were a ufo. i saw one of those once. im doing everything by the light of the supermoon, reminded of that first piece of fiction i wrote that recently got published in dream boy book club. we’re at a love’s in north dakota to get some food. the mcdonalds is closed (there are mcdonalds that close). customer 3’s shower is ready. the gas station guy likes my hair. the mullet is well appreciated in its area of origin.
im sleeping upside down and moving backward so i can look at the moon. i want it to be the last thing i see before i fall asleep. very rarely do i get to see the moon over a field like this. like a cow being sent to pasture. i say that because i mean the cow is being sent to die. but isn’t that also where they just chill and eat.
in perhaps the riskiest move of my career im sticking my phone precariously out the window to get unhindered shots of the moon. im brought back to my childhood home in twinsburg, where id stay up, head against the cold window not unlike now, watching meteor showers and unsure whether or not i was willfully hallucinating shooting stars. whatever. i was seeing movement either way. like then and now, a shared coldness of my sweaty face pressed against the window, craning to see something i think would be really special.
the pictures of the moon remind me of everything. the last photos i took of a supermoon were on my grandma’s (now scrapped) camera, that i once used for its very fast shutter speed, which was very useful when you’d all dance the way you do. these phone photos remind me of that summer i spent in jersey, posting grainy iPhone 4 pictures of blurry car lights that were supposed to make me tumblr famous. working out alone in my cousin’s spare bedroom. my art hoe phase. all mustard yellow before i wore any black. the acrylic paint recreations of starry night. vampire weekend. breezeblocks by alt j. the badlands album. my old meme page back when we used to call them “niche memes.” the text from my best friend that read “i found your sad meme page and then you blocked me.” maria’s ukulele demos. voltron. the selfies that would get 40 notes from strangers on the internet who weren’t obligated to call me cute but still did.
Tuesday, 10am. Hour 43: Red40 Is My Fate.
im drinking sun-heated red gatorade like herbal tea. between the gatorade, cheetos, and cough syrup, my system is more red40 than actual water. my sweat? red40. my piss? red40. my blood? still red but also 40. now i know why we say ‘red blooded americans.’ the red40 and our militant rage. i understand why all the extremists are in middle america. this is an anger only the american landscape could foster. this was an american-made anger.
i officially decide to change the title from ‘jack kerouac but with poppers’ to ‘jack kerouac but with red40.’ it’s more fitting. im not doing poppers on this trip. call it a tolerance break. the gas station swag is comforting, but i miss the city. it hasn’t even been two full days but im longing for even the feeling of when id scan a room from a staircase, hoping to see someone who had no reason to be there. i miss combing a crowd for someone, like a lifeguard does a drowning kid.
Tuesday, 5pm. Hour 50. Welcome To America. You Are 22 Years Late.
there’s a canyon behind the rest stop. at any point in the distance, my new york legs could get me there by sundown. theres something romantic about not going by hours but by the sky. dusk. dawn. they urgency of natural time set above the world’s stillest landscape.
small talk in truck stop bathrooms. solidarity with the harley davidson heads. something that looks like roadkill that reminds me of the little prince’s snake-that-ate-an-elephant / adult hat. the sexual tension between me and the other twenty-something whose shorts are as baggy as mine and in a similarly bushwick way. me and the middle americans aren’t really different on paper. harley tank tops. aviators. mullets. we both eat unknown berries off of strange bushes. tattoos. docs. hatred of liberals. not that different.
this is the america i hated. in high school, this is the america i thought i was forever prohibited from, so this was the america i refused to identify with. but maybe i am american. maybe im the most cosmopolitan cowboy ever. i am tom robbins in doc martens. allen ginsberg in my personal references. im more like an american man than american woman. what did mitski say about cowboys and asian women.
I would always kind of jokingly say to myself, “Be the cowboy you wish to see the world,” whenever I was in a situation where maybe I was acting too much like my identity, which is wanting everyone to be happy, not thinking I’m worthy, being submissive, and not asking for more. Every time I would find myself doing exactly what the world expects of me as an Asian woman, I would turn around and tell myself “Well, what would a cowboy do?”
i long for an ironic kinship with america. maybe im not that different from my father. in high school, back when i was a lesbian, my best friends were the frat boy adjacent types. ironic kinship. they said slurs and i made instagram posts about how you shouldn’t say slurs but we’d still chest bump and theyd catch me before i hit my head on the table because i was not built for chest bumping. ironic kinship. i’d give queer-inclusive sex ed lessons to my bio class, enthralling the boys who seemed like the type to not want me to get married.
once, i gave my bio class an impromptu lesson on internal condom usage. i had one on me because i was working at planned parenthood and handing out condoms to coach’s kids behind stairwells. (i was embarrassing like a mother. “do you know how to use that, young man?”) i also had an empty LifeWater™ bottle on me (do you guys remember when we’d add ™ to everything to make them memes?) but yeah, empty water bottle as a demonstrative vagina. anything can be yonic if it’s empty enough. after that, i returned to my seat in the back of the classroom next to the republican boy where we’d giggle at the funny entries of tim x moby fan fiction on wattpad.
this kid’s dad was the english teacher who gay-adopted me, as english teachers tend to do. once, we were walking together and we came across his dad. “oh look, it’s my two kids,” he said. which would’ve been funny if he didn’t already have two actual sons, the second of which might have developed a complex from being essentially replaced by some random asian chick.
re: ‘anything can be yonic if it’s empty enough.’ (that was such a bar. i will revisit that). i wrote this essay about ana mendieta’s 1976 ‘untitled,’ something about the woman as a void. (i wrote this freshman year after getting assaulted, can you tell?)
The image is clear in its story - there was a woman with her arms raised, flat on the bottom of the ocean, either looking up at the sky or with her face down in the sand. After her body is removed - either by herself or by a corpse-extraction team, red pigment was splashed into the indentation.
The silhouette itself functions as a conversation from one third world woman to the others who see the piece. Mendieta’s choice to not use a three-dimensional, protruding subject was strategic. The use of the female body as an impression establishes the female subject - and therefore woman herself - as a void, as a hole to be filled, and as the absence of something. Upon seeing the piece, I immediately understood the meaning of ‘woman as an indentation.’ The subject is not that which leaves an impression, but that which is left behind in its wake. Personally, Medita’s claim was immediately understandable - a brown woman is a hole to be filled - literally and figuratively - literally in the sense that her womanhood subjects her to sexual violence and the inevitable pentration by men, and figuratively in the sense that she is not enough - because her brownness negates her femininity and therefore her desirability to the white audience.
i was only 18 but i was a budding insufferable art writer.
Tuesday, 8pm. Hour 53. The Official Middle Of Nowhere.
i dont know where i am but ive been here in a dream once. pink sky. plains. the only buildings are a super church and a casino. we stop for water. not knowing the type of people to expect, i harden myself and prepare with the kinks in my headphones. im getting ready to walk in like i own the place. except a wasp chases me all the way from the car to the entry of the gas station. all hopes of looking cool are lost.
theres a woman behind the counter who reminds me of one of the girls from orange is the new black. im prepared for her to give me a semi-racist side eye but she gives me a sweet toothy smile. maybe im the aggressive one here. it’s nothing personal, it’s just self-defense. but what did lorde say. i soften. the woman behind the counter says we’re in The Official Middle Of Nowhere. it’s the least populated and most isolated town in all 48. we won’t hit a walmart for 3 hours. did cowboys reciprocate the surprise sweetness they received?
Tuesday, 10pm. Hour 55. Racial Diversity Brings The Flood.
heat lightning. the tv shakes. this isn’t the storm to dance in. this is a shelter in place storm. so much for joie de vivre. the dead butterflies the bumper has been accumulating are washed off. the faithful among us would call this biblical. we must seem like a bad omen. racial minority strangers roll into town after everything’s closed. looking for chinese food and bringing a flood and the type of silent lightening that will down great oaks. to understand me, you have to take me as some sort of omen.
right before i shower i wipe a mosquito off the floor and it explodes because it was filled with blood. there’s a metaphor in here but it’s too hot to be poetic right now.
Wednesday, 10am. Hour 67. Stage 2: Realization.
i had to say goodbye to the platform heels that got me through paris. while moving out, i realized i didn’t wear them enough to keep and didn’t have enough room in my bag to keep them for posterity purposes. i left them with angelina hoping shed be able to get some secondhand buffalo exchange for them. some cute naked wolfe knockoffs. size 5.5. adds about 4 inches. buffalo didnt take them. presumably the ended up on the street. my blood, sweat, and tears are in those shoes.
once in paris, i wore them for 48 hours straight during fashion week. party like you dont have a pain tolerance. my big toenail turned black from this ordeal — walking from the vivienne westwood show to ellie saab to hermes to ann demeulemeester to this rave in the basement of palais de tokyo to the morning after where i saw that guy get beat with a pipe. at that party, i made a new friend named yuka who grabbed my hands and yelled THIS IS THE END OF THE WORLD! the world didn’t end that morning, but we did discover that we all accidentally did speed, and that i was doing 6’2-man-sized-bumps of something that turned my snot blue and made me feel oddly productive.
i wrote about that night later (the same dream boy book club fiction piece about the moon). i got papped for the first time in these heels. i felt beautiful for the first time in these heels. they’ve taken me to so many odd dates — a makeout session on the steps of the french police station, a french hostel that i had tagged a few weeks before i ended up getting fucked there. a date where i first had fries with mayo. a club where i had to piss against a lambo and probably pissed on the heels a little bit. a date where, in a drunken make out session, a boy tried to feel me up and accidentally grabbed a handful of my bad, to which i had to learn that to say “im on my period” in french is to say “j’ai mes regles.” why would buffalo exchagne turn all that down? heels that first got me onto getty images, harpers, a few of the vogues, and my most-liked hinge photo. sorry i couldn’t get you more cash, ang.
Wednesday, 3pm. Hour 72. Am I The First Person In Montana To Text The Manhattanites Group Chat?
i wrote down a bunch of lyrics that make me insane. i wrote them down in all caps too because oh my god.
FIRST TIME YOU LET ME STAY THE NIGHT DESPITE YOUR OWN RULES YOU TOOK OFF EARLY TO GO CHEAT YOUR WAY THROUGH FILM SCHOOL YOU LEFT A NOTE IN YOUR PERFECT SCRIPT STAY AS LONG AS YOU WANT AND I HAVENT LEFT YOUR BED SINCE
THE LOOK OF LOVE THE RUSH OF BLOOD THE SHES WITH ME THE GALLIC SHRUG
sometimes im mad that it feels like all the good songs have already been written. there are so many songs that i wish i had written first but someone smarter and better beat me to it. it’s for the best, i guess. what if i left to go sing in a cover band, out of the country but only a greyhound away from you?
in an empty red gatorade bottle, i manage to trap one of the mosquitos that had been getting fat and terrorizing us. i try to drown it in the drops that are still left in the bottle but it’s not enough to drown it, so really im just doing what they did in guantanamo bay.
i send a meme to charlie and the rest of the groupchat from that girl who does the insufferable-yet-unfortunately-accurate indie movie impressions. am i the first person in montana to think of charlie baker? i dont have anyone else ask me to say their name in other states, and that’s fine. for some of you it wouldn’t be as important or profound. some of you are famous and have wikipedia pages. people in montana have already thought of you.
now we’re in canada. ashley’s music has been getting me through the plains. am i the first person in canada to listen to big dumb baby? probably not. am i the first person in canada to be able to text her about listening to her song about dogs? am i the first person in canada to owe big dumb baby money for drinks? am i the first person in canada to almost sublet her old room?
the next sentence i write makes me sound like a fan. my friends’ unreleased demos burn holes in my files app. but before i join their ranks and put out music of my own, i want to ask all my musician friends what song of theirs they think would be my favorite. i love knowing what people think of me. logan made a uquiz (superior and most esoteric-accommodating personality quiz forum) about Which Of Their Favorite Musical Numbers Would We Be. before i sent my results, i was like, “which do you think is the most me?” their guess matched up with my results. it’s cool when people know me. it’s like that time sophomore year when, in order to avoid doing our homework, david and i took personality quizzes as each other, answering for what we thought the answer, and then taking them for ourselves, and then comparing what-we-thought-the-other-would-say to what-we-ourselves-said. we were surprisingly accurate for each other. it was really nice to know that my friends know me as well as i know them.
Wednesday, 8pm. Hour 77. What The West Promised Me.
high school superlatives are the most american thing ever. i got class rebel. outwardly, i scoffed at the irony that everyone missed — having an institutionally-legitimized “rebel” defeats its purpose. it’s like liberal forms of acceptable protesting. “that’s such a class rebel thing to say,” all my friends told me. i despaired publicly. it was gauche! it was beside the point! but i still got my picture taken for the yearbook, and i still wore my favorite out-of-dress-code ripped jeans. i was angry at myself for being was secretly happy that people thought of me. i like to think that i didn’t “win” that title just because i kept breaking dress code and eating outside the cafeteria — i was leading walkouts to protest the fact that there were known rapists in our class. i was the reason the zoom comments got turned off in online assemblies. i got into a bit of administrative trouble for posting a picture that the school had up of a 1930s student in blackface — something they overlooked, but something they “wished i’d gone to them first.” thats when i had resolved to go west and never look back.
that didn’t happen, obviously. for as often as people tell me i seem like im from california, and for as often in response i shit on LA, i’ve never been to LA. i went to the californian suburbs once, but have no memory of it. i just remember my aunt’s box tv where we watched lebron, still with the cavs, make that really sick halfcourt shot. if i were older, i’d say something charmingly embarrassed, like, “oh, that ages me.” but i have no memories except sports fanaticism. what is younger than that.
eventually on this trip, i’ll hit california. it’ll be my first time, conscious, on the west. the final frontier. i used to want to go to school in california. for the cultlure and for the filipinos and to escape the god forsaken ohio winters. all the schools i applied to were west coast schools. but then i walked through the west village once, not even on a college tour, and got asked if i was a student at nyu — this was before i had been there enough to consider it an insult. i wasn’t meant for the west then. imagine how i would’ve turned out. id probably be vegan by now. west coast izzy would’ve tried to cancel east coast izzy.
“izzy’s headed west” is what they’ll say about me, when i haven’t shown up for work or parties or readings. something so romantic about saying the direction im going instead of the location. beautiful hitchhiker sissy hankshaw a la tom robbins. but we cant all be uma thurman or sexy outlaws. some of us have to be the weird little guys she leaves behind in new york. at this point, id kill to be that weird little guy. at least he’s in the city. canada is funny. all the storefront signs are in calibri. everyone on the highway is united in bug-spatter-covered-windshield solidarity. it’s so slow here. i wish i was someone who could chill. i wish i was chill. it’s not something im proud of, but i always considered myself someone who knew how to relax. maybe a little too well. i always looked at my friends, always doing things, and told them they need to take lessons from me and sleep until 5pm sometimes. but im learning that, less in practice and more in mindset, i am not chill. maybe my version of new york chilling isn’t realm chilling. this entire trip, i have needed a fantasy to be able to cope with doing nothing. im on this rv for extended periods of time not because im going on vacation, but because im on tour. blu asked me if im on a tour bus, but no. im in my dad’s rv. but i’m in my dad’s rv because im on the run. (quite literally, fuck this city im moving to seskatchuwan or however you spell it). im fleeing the country. doing something more noble than hanging out with my family, which is a sentence i will regret writing but an honesty i will admire myself for having. even in my dreams im running from something. maybe that is my dream. i dont have any goals, i just know what i dont want. and in my dreams that’s enough of a reason to do things.
what america am i showing you all right now? i write down every nice thing i’m told about my writing. dickfarrwlr said i should be a director, that i write vignettes. i was a painter first. maybe i write like a painter and put together all the best parts of the scene. the gas stations. the bugs on windshields next to republican propoganda stickers. the moon that usually controls the tide and the tide-less landscape. that’s the scene. maybe i write like a photographer. maybe i write like the photos i take. really silly little photos where you dont get to choose the pretty details to make the best tableau. i wouldn’t call myself a photographer. i literally just have a camera and ball my way through it. what the fuck is an ISO. everyone is ISO a roommate or room but no one has money or guarantors or apartments. thats why im writing across america. and thats how you bring it all back.
goddamn i had this saved for a long ass time and i finally sat down to read it all and i lovedddddd it!!! you are so damn talented.
this was a really wonderful and beautiful read