My Body At KGB My Body On The Big Screen
my last 24 hours. check to see if you got blurbed. it's the first time i write about my friends. not the first time i write about my body issues.
6pm. “charlie baker spotted in dimes square.” angelina and emily are at cassetta writing summer trend reports. jean luc is at le dive. sarosh and serge are at le bain playing chess next to a pitcher of a bright orange drink. “yall used to go to war” i say. this receives one laugh reaction and one emphasis. “Not me I guarantee no matter the time period my ass was not marching to war,” says serge. spoken like a true draft dodger. sometimes i wish i had a penis for tactile reasons and because i want my clothes to fit like boys clothes fit them, but then im happy i dont have to get drafted.
allyson talks about a potential second source of income and i say “r u working at a grocery store bc thats what i call double bagging #w.” this receives two laugh reactions and an emphasis. “all these laugh reactions feel like crack cocaine.” two more laugh reactions. im on fire. “keep going im almost there.” radio silence. “Ayo” from serge. the knowledge that i make my friends react enough to laugh react to a text of mine has to feel like opiates. i shouldn’t even have to make that comparison. i grew up in ohio. there was nothing to do other than get addicted to opiates.
it starts raining out of nowhere. “God taking a massive piss” says charlie. “I’m scared. But if I could die anywhere. It would be at le dive.” i dont think i need to write who says that.
7pm. theres a bootlicker pride billboard on the way that says “freedom is having my identity affirmed by the law” and while i agree about the overall benefits of gender-affirming documents, real freedom is freedom from the law. fuck that other shit. i dont want cops knowing my pronouns.
the last time i was at kgb for a reading i was waiting for one of the matts (weinberger or donovan) to arrive because i didn’t know anyone there. this time im here for britt’s parasocialite release party and another car crash reading. this time im texted to come and know to make a beeline to the back corner. im soaked in sweat and rain, bracing myself for the smell of wet white people but it never came.
i fear i’ve insulted brett and taylor because i initially don’t remember our extended conversation at gonzo’s. but also i very rarely remember what happens at gonzos. we piece together the night. they fill in my gaps from gonzos, i fill in their gaps from toad hall. symbiosis. britt starts reading about how she once protested the chopping down of a tree by chaining herself to it, but it turns out she chained herself to the wrong tree. “journalists still came.” thats an allegory. peter chuckles like an onomatopoeia. like he’s pronouncing every syllable in ‘hahahaha.’
anika talks about right wing dating apps and a white couple next to me starts making out. right wing love is weirdly on topic because we were swapping other peoples’ sex stories — friends of friends whose first girlfriend had their mom’s name, friends of friends who lost their virginity to someone with their brother’s name. i start asking people if they’d sleep with someone with their name. brett asks if i’d sleep with someone who had a swastika tattoo. i don’t think any neo nazis would want me to be under their shirts lest they risk tainting the purity of the aryan race. i can’t play in that hypothetical because it’s just too unrealistic. some right wing incel had told anika you have to be young enough to wear a pleated skirt. i am wearing a pleated skirt right now. i also may be in the minority of people who weren’t alive during 9/11. this is my second time at a kgb reading thinking about 9/11.
peter says hes a good second string reader. i think he means pinch hitter. i played softball. he reads from sillyboy after i spent the week texting him my reactions to all the weird parallels. nothing too profound, just me going “bruh.” fiction is fiction but sometimes it isnt and sometimes that isn’t a good thing. life imitates art and sometimes that isnt a good thing. if you relate to knives chau from scott pilgrim, you probably didn’t have the best time. or if you can compare a friend to bojack horseman, you definitely didn’t have a good time. to be seen is brutal. peter brings a few copies of sillyboy. “i’m selling them at triple the price,” he explains —“but i’ll write something in them which will raise the resell value.” “is that true?” someone asks. “no” someone else responds. he reads and people laugh and i don’t have a meme to compare him to this time. i dont want to write too much about the novel yet. let us cook.
ben “was sick now isn’t.” like a zombie, i think. everyone here has a novel but also everyone here is old enough to rent a car. peter holds his phone like a dad and i watch ben through the hole between his thumb and pointer finger. “poetry ended before summer.” damn. “somewhere a desert is crying for a car to drive through.” double damn. “the freeway is full of cowboys.” it so is. i remember when i crashed my car while eating a sandwich because a construction man jumped into traffic and my dad had picked up the sandwich off the ground and threw it out. maybe because it was gross. maybe becuase he didn’t want me incriminated as a distracted driver. i wonder if he’d help me hide a body. i dont know. i still remember the song that was playing when the airbags deployed and when i hit that certain time stamp i can feel in my arms and teeth the vibrations from the impact. the roundabouts are full of cowboys.
erin is missing. ben surrenders his phone so britt can read lauren’s artist bio. britt apparently lived on lauren’s couch for a week and slept through two fire alarms and a domestic dispute. lauren says things like “wrists are for girls. i’m slitting my own throat” and i think back to the time i tried to [REDACTED] with the belt from a fuzzy pink bathrobe. and then i also think back to the time i mentioned it in the unpublished poem that i read at sov house on my mom’s birthday (heres the other one). i hope she doesn’t read this. i think the one thing stopping me from releasing a book is the idea my mom might read what i write. that and also i have no money no publisher no gods no prospects etc. “all i wanted was a motel scene starring the coke on the dresser” says lauren. in that case, my life really is a movie. she mentions mothman and i’m brought back to high school when luke kim was my secret santa and got me those books on conspiracy theories and cryptids and my friend and i planned to take a trip to virginia to go on a mothman sightseeing tour. lauren reads a poem about an irish boy from queens who didn’t want to get poemed. can you doxx someone without ever saying their name? what happens when i substack the substackers?
substack? more like domstack.
but in my case it’s definitely substack.
mara’s hair is almost blue in this light. she says something about “a congress of psychological terrorism” and i’m like, bars. i end up thinking a lot about terrorism in kgb. 9/11. incels. school shootings. “everything is a remix,” she says and i think back to something i actually learned in undergrad about bradshaw’s theory of bohemianism, and how all manifestations of west village bohemianism are self-conscious replication attempts that are the antithesis of the thing they’re trying to recreate. the “let’s do a silly one” of artistic revival movements. (i write about that here here and here maybe it’s time i flesh this shit out). funny how i think of that reading poetry in a dive bar. sometimes people are too busy trying to recreate something that they dont realize they’ve made something. sometimes people are too busy trying to document the creation of something to even make anything.
britt comes back up and reads a story called “animal abuse.” she opens describing this character as 100 pounds and im wondering what that’s supposed to signify. because i’ve heard a lot of people describe people as 100 pounds and i can tell it’s supposed to imply something and maybe because im about 100 pounds i don’t know the implication. i remember the first time i noticed my weight — it was sometime in high school because i had driven to a doctors appointment. i saw i only weighed 95 pounds and got freaked out because i thought i lost a lot of weight, but my mom and i went through my records and apparently i’d never been over 100 pounds. and i remember the first time i hit triple digits and felt weirdly fucked up and ruined. which doesn’t make any sense because that’s like. normal weight. whatever. im not thinking about my body right now.
britt writes about “scrolling through linkedin seeking feeling” and i remember the time i was living in paris, coming off a bout of mono and definitely less than 100 pounds. i remember being in the shower feeling my hip bones sticking out further than my stomach and getting happy and then sad because i realized the first time i truly loved my body was when i was unable to eat solid foods for over a month. but conveniently, i had been trying to model so i worked with this photographer. but after he kept telling me to take my clothes off and then said something about how he’d love to bring me to a beach so he could see me in a swimsuit, i ran off and blocked him on everything. he tried to add me on linkedin. much worse has happened to me since then but there’s a weird french guy walking around out there with pictures of me with my top unbuttoned. hes shot some of my friends during fashion week. britt says something about how being a sociopath makes you good for either customer service or a childporn censor. something about the innocence of a naked body yakking after watching an isis beheading video. the reading is over.
9pm: during her q and a with erin, britt talks about her thesis on incels and school shooters. i write love letters to the people in the audience. it’s titillating to think we’re in a picture together, looking the same way so intently to make it not obvious we’re focusing on each other in our peripheries. i love the way the blue light of your not-on-night-mode iphone casts an upward shadow on your post-lip-flip cupid’s bow and gives you a little mustache. i love the way the air from your nose hits my knuckles. i hope you think i laugh like bells when we talk about columbine. thank you for keeping the seat warm with your butt heat. i hope sharing butt heat isn’t the closest we get.
erin says we live in an auto fiction world and britt has to clarify what parts of parasocialite are real. the only fiction piece i’ve ever written is funny and sorta true in some parts but after reading people always ask me if i had sex with a homeless woman or if i met a man who had never had an orgasm. the first part hasn’t happened yet. the second part probably has. eventually, everything comes back to richard hell and the phrase ‘diy spirit’ or ‘diy ethos’ or whatever. in kgb before the jazz, they play blur and piece the veil but no one else is shaking ass to the song about the girl who was bullied so bad she killed herself. i’m eating cake and listening to jazz and feeling like maybe i don’t need to do all that party stuff. im eating cake and feeling a little guilty because i didn’t even read but someone makes an anorexia joke about how no one’s eating the cake so i eat all the cake and convince everyone else to. we share spoons. that’s the closest many of us will get to kissing each other. some of us will get closer.
allyson shows up and when we hug my cross necklace breaks. hm. we’re not making it to chess club. we check the time and my phone in military time freaks her out. “it’s french” i say like that clip from fleabag. i’m not a tankie i just believe in armed revolution and also miss living in europe, ironically. a guy walks past with bondage shorts below his knees, so baggy he has to hike them up like a princess. lacy hems of slip dresses hit right at knobby bruised knees. paramore comes on. allyson and i talk about how, had we went when we were younger, we would’ve been groomed by the warped tour bands.
it’s funny that tonight was about parasocial relationships. sometimes people are weird about my friends. sometimes people are even weird about me but im not famous nor have i done enough to be unattainable to anyone. once a reply guy did flat out say that he was ‘fully parasocial at this point.’ i think theres a layer of delusion that reply guys have that people on the giving end of parasocial relationships might not. maybe the longing is evidence of a solemnly realistic mindset — the giver of affection knows that all they can do is give.
peter enlists me and erin to help him sell the remaining copies of sillyboy. “go push the book,” he says to me. “go tell them it’s about you.” the fucked up part is that he’s not even lying. the girlfriend in sillyboy is an asian tattoo artist who went to nyu. erin grimaces out of sympathy. peter laughs apologetically for accidentally writing my biography. im an archetype. im not seeing heaven. they know this.
10pm: parkside. i take the kgb heads to the dirty mag party and it’s a weird mixing of the two writing circles i run in. serge gets real fratty behind the booth. robbie asks me where i go to school. “nyu,” i say the way i always do — cringing a little. him and peter share a knowing look that makes me yell at them because they’re right to share that look. “it all makes sense now” robbie says. god dammit it does.
we watch porn on the big screen. no one has boners and everybody cheers. serge is still behind the booth, comically close to the screen, looking very intently. apparently he had been alerted by the director, “this is the best part,” right before someone started squirting. everyone hollers and claps the way that dads watch football. im yelling TOUCHDOWN but the field goal is a vagina or some shit. we talk about the cinematography and the plot holes (lol). plumber guy in a lesbian porno whose entire purpose is actually just to fix the pipes but maintains a masculine presence in the film as we all wonder when he’s gonna get in on the action. maybe it was ironic now that i think about it. was it a commentary on the male gaze in porn? in everything? were we made to think that or did i just get out of undergrad? a suspicious amount of people leave right after the screening that makes me think some people got boners. no shame. congrats for being effective, “PIPES.”
2am: i break my platforms (already taped together. i will tape them together some more) and fall running after the bus. it’s really funny in a pathetic way. something that would’ve happened to an endearingly unfortunate white girl in an indie movie. i try walking home but get followed by these guys who keep yelling at me for the time until one of them goes “i dont give a fuck if she’s 15 ill beat the shit out of her.” women definitely cant have anything. time to call a car from a deli.
9am: i wake up for work. i had a dream about levi’s and the apocalypse. i take my pills on the subway with an iced coffee and croissant that i make sure to chew longer than usual because i’m in a tight shirt. this entire public journal entry reeks of pre-eating disorder signs. preating disorder. whatever. i pass a running club which im now told is where the horniest people are going to meet people, but no one is running next to each other or talking. no one’s connecting because theyre all too busy trying to look sexy and not out of breath.
3pm: im writing about how good of a day i had and how surprised i am about it. maybe it’s because im cafinated and fed and medicated and slept at a reasonable hour. today i sell jeans like a god and it’s all coming up izzy. i’m such a good wage laborer even if levi’s isn’t my fate. should i go to the beach? should i buy a lotto ticket because i can lowkey do that now. as i’m texting maura for beach plans, this a guy comes up to me and at first i roll my eyes thinking it’s another man trying to hit on me on the way home from work. but he goes “hey sorry i know you’re in the middle of texting but i just wanted to say i love your fit it’s major 80s rock vibes you stand out from all the tourists you look like a real artist and i work in film blah blah.” i fist bump him like i did the last guy who hit on me on my way home from work and i don’t even need to eat anymore. the high of being seen is fulfilling enough. i do get a chipotle and finish it in one sitting and think i’m too bloated for the beach now i guess ill go home and write.
the 6 is running weird. drops me off on the wrong side of the wrong platform and maybe that’s where my luck is coming from. i’m exploding with ideas. punk rock lives on in my writing and the music i’ll eventually make. i am finding a band again and getting my guitar fixed and liking how i sound. there is no chipotle line and they dont skimp on portions. im gettng paid to write and i am reading at kgb and beyond and people are talking about me and my writing. people who aren’t my friends and even people who are my enemies are realizing that im not just good for writing about parties. people are inviting me places and wanting to sleep with me. im at a job i dont hate. my butt is getting bigger and my waist and arms smaller. my stomach is taut and flat. every picture of me is be beautiful and i am mewing in each one. either all of this will happen or i learn to love myself without it. i’ll spit up that chunk of apple from the wisdom tree that made me notice all this neurotic shit about my body.
this had me on the edge of my seat
devoured this like a spicy novel more pls more pls