Running From Somewhere Is The Best Way To Stay There Forever
every party brings me closer to my tragically-driveable hometown
i might have to go back to ohio to lick my wounds. my credit score is satanic so my ohio might be my fate. at least for now. i’m not resigning to anything but im trying to do everything. kyle said he’s trying to do everything. a few nights ago, kyle and i grasped each others hands and openly wept at the opening of expensive imagination. we’re both grappling with very different journeys that lead us back to our hometowns. if i had a nickel for every time i was uncomfortably and accurately represented in a piece of scene media, id have two nickels. which isn’t a lot but it’s weird that it’s happened twice.
in expensive imagination there’s a girl with wild black hair in black lace and broken platforms and hosiery strewn on the walls and a dead brother. she falls asleep naked and drunk and is in the middle of losing her apartment. there are people who take care of her in ways she doesn’t recognize. in my black lace slip and taped-together platforms, with fishnets flung on my pipes and a missing best friend, i cry off all my eyeliner. matt tells me to get some from the open palate on the set.
in sillyboy there’s an asian tattoo artist girlfriend who went to nyu and misses the guys she used to skate with. the first time i met all those friends i used to skate with was when shawlin commissioned me to tattoo him in the park. at catie’s reading. peter poem’s me, saying “i deleted everyone who wasn’t the inspiration for chloe in sillyboy so if you’re reading this you’re izzy capulong now.” he pauses long enough for everyone to turn back to me and for me to yell “fuck you” in that way where you could tell i was joking — unlike his actual heckler. something so homoerotic about being a heckler. why are you yelling at men. why do you want his attention. did your father not hug you? #summeroffreud.
ronen accidentally makes a girl spill her drink on herself. marina drops her vape. we’re a mess. we’re giggling in the back but we do this enough. sometimes a poetry reading is just the popular girls giving class presentations, unable to stop laughing through them.
i read after peter and people are getting up to go. i preface and say “if more people leave before i read i will kill myself.” immediately after two people get up to leave. damn. (i later find out this girl had been switching between sucking on a stuffed animal and sucking on her boyfriends tongue, so i decide to not take it as a commentary on my writing). i haven’t posted either poem on substack but you know me. i’m like allen ginsberg if he had more sex. i’m like richard siken if he didn’t cyber harass me when i was 17. im like if patti smith was worse and asian.
peter yells at people to shut the fuck up while i read. the aggression flatters me. he does his onomonopoetia laugh some more. two people tell me that peter and i were the best readers, but between page’s 4chan weeb impression, the mentions of the bleaching effects of discharge, and juliette’s line “some women will never learn to throw darts, some will never learn how to not get thrown against the wall,” it’s understandably tough to pick a favorite. you’re everyone’s favorite when they’re talking to you.
the parasocial relationship-havers write unironic poems about their own fame. i decide to save my disses for poem form to avoid direct and identifiable confrontation. i’ve already gotten canceled once. we’re all too old for the way the first time went down but whatever.
is it gauche to be a fan? only if you’re weird about it. sidney gish plays with ashley on joe’s roof where, a few months before, i had been pretty baller at beer pong. sidney says gifted kid burnout is old news. she’s right. you’re not a gifted kid burnout you’re just in capitalism. sidney riffs for a while. “what a summer. charli drops brat. biden drops race.” bars. in high school i grew up teaching myself guitar by learning sidney gish covers and now im in front of her while she does the band kid meme stance in front of people who beat the 600-person waitlist. people sing along as her backing vocals because they just want to hear her. strangers gently pick bugs out of each others hair. there is no new york on this rooftop tonight.
under the airplane-parted clouds she sings persephone and im reminded of leah — me and leah skating in the fountain, me and leah watching boys skate in the fountain, and leah taking me to a lucy dacus show where she sends me her own rewritten version of persephone lyrics. i stop reminiscing when sidney makes another brat joke: “should we have a little purse should we do a little phone.” im trying to have fun before im resigned to a non walkable city. sidney sings songs she wrote when she was 22: “everyone says your brain stops developing at 25, so i was 3 years away from having my personality decided for me. i locked myself in my room trying to make the most fun girl from scratch so i could submit her to culture and win.” i don’t have anything quippy to say about how important that quote is to me.
she closes with indian summer by beat happening and i think of the first summer i spent in the city. the summer i spent working at the commie bookstore til midnight and listening to nothing but beat happening. cash payments. no ac. the summer brie larson’s version of black sheep got put on spotify and i had sex to it on repeat. the summer i drank all that vodka. the summer i grew my hair out. the summer with the roach problem the summer with the marlboro reds box taped to the wall the summer where there was skating in the olympics and we watched it like men. the summer where i went to connecticut and bought that $20 record player and gave it to cedar because they liked the color. the summer where i almost got fucked in the trans pecos bathroom. im having the same summer four years later. having sex again. still growing my hair out. yuto takes gold after going from 7th to 1st with a single nollie 270 noseblunt.
i end up at peter’s and teach him and adeline how to twerk. nate does something reminiscent of twerking. “oh my god! you’re such an avant garde mover!” there’s a funny bruise on my back under the weird hopefully not cancerous spots in the same place where i got hit with a riding crop by this guy a few years ago. this wasn’t a sexually traumatic injury i just fell off the back of peter’s couch after having been there for ten hours. i wake up sweaty in his bed and repented by sweeping all the cigarette butts off the floor. there’s a note on my phone presumably written by me before i passed out:
“The girl with the problem
sleeps in my bed”
that she does.
i find harrison that same night. “guess where i was for 20 hours.”
“prison?”
“no”
i think being on camera brings out the worst in people. the desperation of wanting to be seen coupled with the perceived competition of the allegedly finite pool of new york clout. we came here to party (pretend to party) but at the snack table i hear someone complain about how “they were just filming the same five ugly bitches.” but i got to take home the hummus. at the richard kern gallery opening, someone signs the book with their height (5’10”) and number. i tell richard this. he asks if it was me. “i couldn’t lie about that,” i say, gesturing to my shoes. richard tells me his son has shoes taped up like mine. kyle tells me 5’2 is a popular height for the new york famous girls. but i tell him those are also the waifish girls. those aren’t the girls who take home hummus from shoots.
ive been spending a lot of time with bravo. serge dj’s a weird caviar party that georgia throws — it’s a great party, but weird because im drinking nice wine and licking caviar off of georgia while having nothing but rice in my fridge. serge only spins music that sounds like the disney channel hannah montana transitions because of copyright. “bravo beats.” i wear that dress that serge said makes me look like i would poison and kill american GI’s in vietnam. the real housewives are there and some real rich men are there too, so that’s kind of the vibe im going for. im trying to find someone feeling generous enough to pay my student loans and finance my stay in the city. if not that, then im trying to find someone to buy me groceries. everyone acts different around bravo. i think everyones trying to make themselves into archetypes. i think everyones overestimating how much screen time they’re gonna get.
something about being in front of a camera makes people cartoonish — i see it the most when people are in front of matt and mark. matt’s NEW YORK IS exhibition opens and closes within the week and people get mad when they dont see themselves. people get so mad that they forget our friend is opening his first solo exhibition. so much of partying is just making it look like you’re having fun and then immediately going back to being on your phone — stonefaced and looking for a place that will make you have as much fun as you look like you’re having in peoples’ film prints and online archives. half the party is looking for the next party. half the party is consciously and neurotically trying to recreate some skins party montage for whoever might have their cameras out.
bravo is at the drink more water show. we’re in this church / classroom that brings me back to catholic school. im wearing that fuck ass little suit that everyone says gives schoolgirl (i was trying to have it give celine) but im glad im fitted because on the train i see the most beautiful girl i’ve ever seen, with silver eyeshadow and blonde braids in a semi racially ambiguous way. shes tatted all over. her face is that of a browner, gother amy winehouse. my outfit makes ana ask if im walking in the show. “no. i just dress like this.” one of jean luc’s old friends from school tells us about how he used to hide in the bushes to get out of doing track workouts. at the closing, georgia and serge walk out triumphant and holding hands, like they’re the two district one tributes in the hunger games.
theres a real haunted vibe. a room with faces all over the wall. a room with all the tvs. the room with the clocks and the roses and the altar. a 1983 jehovahs witness yearbook. some empty notebooks with pages torn out. i leave a message: im from the future. find me on instagram. page tells me they use this place for a shoots, so i guess it’s purposefully weird. im oddly disappointed.
there are fruit flies in my red solo cup moscow mule. “fans of the show will refer to this episode as The One With All The Bugs.” while all my beautiful friends are getting naked (changing for the runway), someone comes up to me and asks, “aren’t you the one who read that one thing about cocaine?” probably. if i go back to ohio, ill have no drugs to do. what will i write about then?
im in wisconsin. i used to live here — my earliest memory ever is in my family’s old apartment in wisconsin, my aunt pregnant with twins, a toddler-aged me putting two stickers on her belly (one for each kid about to drop). law and order on our box tv.
on my first night i end up alone at target at 10pm. how it’s always been. i spent the night of my 13th birthday with my friends dicking around in the bike section of walmart because in ohio there’s nothing else to do other than go to the nearest superstore or its parking lot. press trips bring me back to my childhood. writing for harley davidson brings me back to the place of my first memory. writing for the renaissance society brings me back to london, a trip i only remember through pictures. i cant help be a writer. everything has a past.
theres a bathtub in the hotel room. the bed is nice and i dont know whose cum is in the sheets. it’s the morning im supposed to leave and go back to the city and deal with my responsibilities — housing, jobs, loans, and the tragic inevitability of my return to ohio with my tail between my legs. in wisconsin i catch a glimpse of my life back in ohio. meet a boy at a show who asks me for my now-defunct snapchat. flirt with him because i dont remember whether or not he was cute. drive around in his car and get high on the side of the road. if this were a few years ago i would’ve brought him up to my room but i dont (he was cuter when i was drunk and in a crowd of old bikers. new york has spoiled me with its cute androgynous boys). and i feel a little bad he drove all this way but his joking(?) passive(?) aggression at being disappointed at not being brought to my room dissuades any guilt. this is the shit i used to do without hesitation — fuck strangers, get in strangers’ cars, end up in strangers’ hotel rooms after only knowing them for half an hour online. but after enough missed turns and us somehow ending up on the highway even farther from the hotel, im scared. is it a sign that im growing up that im finally sensible enough to let my fear of kidnapping overtake my horniness?
it’s a colorless sunrise the morning im supposed to leave. i should’ve slept — i have to be at the airport in four hours and at work in eight. but im in the bath now pretending that all i have to do is take pictures of rock bands and wear leather vests. everything is romantic plays when i stick my head underwater. eyerollingly cliche. but everything is romantic. even in wisconsin. even in ohio. im resigning. the olympics on the tv. the colorless sunrise. simone biles and the way that that the white announcer over-enunciates “snoop doggy dog” and “simone biles goat.” the emphasized ending consonant from the white voices in the speakers. the watered down hotel shampoo that smells beautiful but i otherwise wouldn’t use coming out in the shape of a heart. baptizing myself in wisconsin. i think about it all the time under water. if you spend your life running from something do you ever get away from it? or is it still as with you as it was before you started running. im getting period blood on the hotel towel like that one time on our class trip to dc. only difference is that this time, no one is here to tell me it’ll be ok. but thats ok because i know just to wash it in cold water.
i dont spend any time at home. i go from the airport straight to work. i close. i go home just to sleep for a few hours and then wake up and go to the shop and eat breakfast (a burger at 8pm). at the shop i have to cry quietly in the basement while on the phone with someone i have to say goodbye to. but i cant keep crying because in the other room, matt says something about someone’s clit falling off. i have to go investigate. he’s talking about a yonic-looking burger.
i go from the shop to jack’s satanic apartment. coincidentally im wearing what i wore the first time i went to his apartment. the first time i go to his apartment i go to forgive him. this time im coming to say goodbye. hes leaving the city for at least a year. probably forever. new york is not a victimless crime. it’s sending him back to his hometown. im in that situation too, i say. in his trashbags i find the pair of jeans that he had drawn all over — he wore these a bunch whenever we’d hang out. they’d end up on my couch when he’d sleep over. i tell him he cant throw these out. im sentimental and on my period. he shows me that clip of jake from adventure time throwing out his favorite mug. hes being very buddhist about everything. jack cant afford to be attached to material objects right now. he only has two checked bags. i fish the jeans out of the trash and remind him that jake goes back for his mug. i put his jeans in his suitcase.
at 8 he has to go to the airport. i hug him and leave with a defiantly flippant “later.” if theres something i left at his im not getting it back this time. i go back home to my bed, where i know whose cum is in the sheets. for the most part. “that’s funny” jack says. “you’re in there too” i say.
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