Hey dudes,
I don’t know if I ever showed this to you. I showed you a kind of prequel, about two guys playing pool in Seattle, but I don’t think I ever showed you this. As I wrote maybe pretentiously in my cover letter to Black Bird Review, more than any one writer, Jean-Luc Godard had a big influence on this piece (and every piece I’ve written since I saw Masculin, Feminin).
Banality fascinates me; boredom is political.
(And Obama is our president elect. You guys: fuck yes)
Wishing everyone well. Still working on the thesis TTL, but I am reading it, and actually really enjoying it. Will comment soon.
JoPo
“Hipster,” or, “How He Could Not Go Home”
HOUSE
The house is on the slope of a very steep hill, at the corner of 28th Avenue Southwest and one of the broader streets of West Seattle, and its affect on people is that of making them jealous. Staring covetously up at the house from the skinny one-lane road at the hill’s base, those passersby prone to jealousy often curse the unseen inhabitants. Conceivably, at some point two criminals might drive by in a gray van and murmur, “That one!” One of the criminals would be tall and stupid and the other would be Joe Pesci. Though slightly smarter than the tall crook (an existential kind of gloss to his eyes) Joe Pesci would always fall prey to the ingenious and painful (though never deadly) traps lain by the young boy (McCauley Caulkin) who might conceivably be guarding the house vigilantly for his parents, who have forgotten him.
Although, the house is more like a pioneer’s log cabin — a humble pioneer’s four-story log cabin. Its wood floors shine like Indian-head pennies, its tables have been made cleverly with elk antlers, watercolor paintings of braves on horseback dot the walls. The house is decorously furnished, well-maintained, and tasteful in certain circles. And that’s not to mention the yard, with its three terraces, jutting aquiline along the slope of the hill, with their roses and rhododendrons and their beanstalks and their tomatoes and their abortive little plum trees. In other words, the yard is very nice, too.
Not that she is ever really home.
CHAD AND MARC
“You’re mad,” Chad is saying. “You’re disappointed.”
“Well,” says Marc with a sigh, “we could have talked about it a little.” Chad thinks of “it” now: he turned and called to his manager that he was quitting. “Hey, Susan,” he called, almost cheerily, “I’m giving my two weeks’.” The customer, a forty-something man with a ponytail, stared at Chad, nodding: “Yes,” he whispered, “yes.” How could he possibly explain all this to Marc? He heard the words and the sound of the steam and the dead steel against his hand — it was over, he’d realized suddenly — his soul was dying.
Chad sighs, “You don’t understand.”
“I do understand,” says Marc, who has paid for the past four or five dates (he can’t remember), and who is a corporate lawyer whose parents in Salt Lake City don’t know that he likes boys better than girls.
“How can you understand?” asks Chad. He has been making coffee for nearly 6,000 hours. That is, full-time for three years in a tiny nook of a vast, steel-and-concrete strip mall in South King County. He is 25 years old, wants to see Brazil.
“I understand wanting to quit sometimes,” says Marc, who in May paid Chad’s electricity bill. Not that he minds, exactly. “You could have waited until you had another job for one thing.”
The two are sitting on the couch of Marc’s bungalow in the Central District, which Marc has furnished politely in grays and whites and blacks. The chairs are all pearl, the couch is midnight, in the kitchen his refrigerator stands like a space-aged coffin. Here and there are little shocks of color: an enormous poster of L’Embrace on the south wall; on the plain couch an incongruously florid, hand-woven pillow from Guatemala; along the mantle two carvings from Oaxaca, an electric-green doll from South Africa, and a miniature bicycle made from bicycle spokes.
“I’d just had enough,” says Chad, shrugging.
Marc says, “Enough.”
“Why are you so worried about it?”
“I’m not worried.”
“Is it because my lease is up next month?”
“Yeah, that’s part of it, sure - ”
“I wasn’t going to ask if I could stay here, so don’t worry,” says Chad, who was about to ask Marc if he wouldn’t mind, you know, Chad staying here for a little while.
“That’s not fair,” says Marc, standing up and walking to the coffin-fridge, where he removes a beer. “You know that’s unfair. My parents will be here in three weeks.”
“Sure,” says Chad. “Well, I wonder how I’ll pay rent at my new place? Maybe I could find a job at the firm? Would you like that?” He feels slightly drunk — mean and bold.
“Shut up,” says Marc; his beer doesn’t taste very good.
“I could finally meet all your friends from work.”
“Shut the hell up, Chad.”
“We could all of us go out for drinks,” says Chad. “You know, watch a basketball game or something.”
Marc doesn’t answer, and instead drinks with long, steady strokes, as though painting a room’s trim. Chad gets up from off the couch and walks to the fridge, and, giving Marc a wide berth, removes a jar of pickles.
He leaves the door slightly ajar and Marc walks slowly and silently to the fridge and closes it: “Electricity, Chad,” he says, his voice far-away. “I have to pay my bill.” It goes on for another hour or so like that. And then Chad rides his bike back to his studio where, because a Buddhist, he meditates furiously for the rest of the night. A few blocks away Marc can’t sleep, either, so he pages through the paper. Through the explosions in Palestine and Bogota and Iraq, through the weather, through the sports, through a movie review and through the comics, until he reaches the classifieds. And that’s when he finds the advertisement.
ROBYN
It is a couple of days before everything gets sorted out in the right way between Marc and Chad. Marc has apologized without saying for what, exactly, meanwhile insisting that “the situation at work is incredibly complicated,” complicated in ways that Chad wouldn’t and couldn’t understand. And Chad has conceded that, yes, he doesn’t understand. They’re both sorry in different ways. But they both have a sense that they will discuss everything again, later on.
Marc is considering this as he says, “Look at this,” handing Chad the paper with the classified he has circled:
HOUSE-SITTER NEEDED WEST SEATTLE HOME CONTACT ROBYN
“It’s perfect, right?” says Marc. “No rent.”
“Sure,” says Chad. “I guess it is.” Objectively speaking, it is perfect. It is July, his lease is up in August, now only some two weeks away. But as he stares at the advertisement Chad thinks for a single, dangerous, cruel millisecond that he hates Marc for finding this thing.
Still he calls her, ROBYN, the following morning. Because in a sense he must.
She has a voice like an antique record being played on an antique record-player, a voice like a life spent in basement jazz clubs. After a few attempts at friendly banter, for Chad it eventually begins to feel as though Robyn’s eyes have been sucked into the telephone and traveled through the wires to stare at him; and never one to have thrived in silence, Chad explains about the recent loss of his job.
“I see,” she replies, her voice rising and falling like a gavel.
Chad’s heart drops, he’s thinking vaguely of homelessness and joblessness on the streets of Beltown, hell the CD, when Robyn announces flatly that she will meet him two days from now, at noon.
So two days later he’s sweating and balling his fists and kneading his legs when Marc drops him off (exclaiming as he drives away, “This place is beautiful!”) — it’s a little too warm and the air feels as though pulled taut. He rings the doorbell once, hears for a moment the kissing sound of feet on wood floor, and then the door swings open. Robyn is tall, her frame coated lightly with the ragged muscles that come with a lot of exercise and plenty of cigarettes. Her hair, which she wears down, is about shoulder-length and could pass for blond or white. She has the same skeletal, utterly joyless grin as Cindy McCain.
“Hello,” she says.
“Hi, Robyn.” She stands aside to let him in and they pass through a foyer and into a cavernous great-room. At least a dozen succulents and lilies and cacti cobweb along a pair of immense windows. When they’ve taken seats on a couple of overstuffed armchairs, Robyn sighs deeply, the light gray-green across her little nose and her sharp chin.
“Chad, I would like to know something.”
“Okay.”
“Don’t lie to me, though.”
“Okay.”
“I would like to know if you have any experience gardening.”
“All right.”
“I want to warn you — I can always tell when someone is lying to me. Don’t lie because it won’t help you.”
“Oh.”
“So, what is your level of comfort with gardening? I would like to know.”
Chad considers this for a moment: “On sunny days my mom used to make me and my sisters weed her garden. Also, I’ve mown lawns.”
“I see. So — hardly any experience at all, I’d say,” she says. “Well, at least you didn’t lie.”
“At least that.”
“You know,” she says, “many of your responsibilities here will involve gardening.”
“Okay.”
“Do you want a drink?” she asks. And he realizes, yes, he does want a drink: mouth feeling as dry as dust, Chad asks for a Diet Coke in a small voice.
“A Jack-and-Coke it is,” says Robyn, grinning, who may have misheard. She walks to the bar and adroitly makes a Jack-and-Coke and a martini. Some drunks are subtle and some drunks are just dying to be discovered, for fear of drinking alone; it is hard to know which kind is better to be. When she hands him his Jack-and-Coke, Chad spies a band of white gold on her ring finger, and it is in a certain light more porcelain-looking.
For the next half hour, the two make something like small talk in the great-room. Everything Robyn mentions has to do with the true workings of reality, life in the abstract, the universe, things in general. Their conversation finds a curious conclusion with this statement: “I mean, if you go around asking people how they’re doing — I mean really doing — most of them are utterly miserable.” She looks intently at him, in a way that is inquisitive but doesn’t necessarily invite a response. And then she stands, her arrowhead chin tilted slightly upward, and heads for the stairs.
A tour ensues: the rest of the house is equally cavernous; Chad has a feeling of smallness that is accentuated by the lonesome watercolor landscapes along the walls. He is lonesome. The house could be an Eddie Bauer store or the summer home of a cattle baron. There are plants everywhere, and they are flooding the confines of their pots and reaching out their mindless tendrils for light. Strangling one another. It takes nearly two hours to explain the maintenance of the building — there are plants that need varying amounts of water depending on how sunny it is outside, there are plants that must not be watered very often but must be rotated, there are plants that ought to be drowned, and there are plants that may need to be re-potted.
“And it goes without saying,” says Robyn, “that you’ll need to vacuum and keep the kitchen tidy.” Chad only nods. “I also have a great stereo, fyi. Right now I’m listening to Gone With the Wind on tape — as read by John Voigt.” Again, Chad only nods: in this great house, it is possible to listen to Gone With the Wind as read by John Voigt on the first, second, and third floors, simultaneously.
Before she takes him outside to explain the watering of the garden, Robyn changes into a pair of shorts and a white tank top. When they walk out to the patio and the light hits her, Chad realizes that the tank top is translucent and that her nipples stand out as dark as a pair of moths.
“Hold on a moment,” she says. “I need something to drink.” She goes inside and Chad studies the terraced lawn and everything and the Sound slithering beneath them. He has a sense that inside — he doesn’t know how to explain it, but — she is making not one but two drinks. He feels a ticklish little pressure on his chest, a sadness, and that feeling is accompanied by the sound of a huge crash from the general direction of Robyn’s bar. When he ducks his head inside, Robyn is on her hands and knees, surrounded by shattered glass and red liquid.
“I’m fine,” she says.
“I know you are,” he says after a little while. “Are you okay, though?”
“Yes.”
“Should I grab anything?” She groans, stands up, walks to the room that serves as her office, returns with a set of keys and a stack of papers. She hands all this to Chad.
“This explains everything,” she murmurs. “You’re hired.”
JP
On the night of the 1st of August, after he has watered Robyn’s plants carefully for some three hours, Chad meets his friend JP in a dingy basement bar. That night there is some technical glitch on the jukebox so that all you can play is the album that Bob Dylan and Emmy Lou Harris did together.
“How’s Marc?” JP asks after a few minutes, innocently enough.
“He’s all right.”
“Hmm,” says JP. “Did something happen?”
“Well, we had a kind of fight.”
“What kind of a fight?” JP’s eyes flicker — they are the eyes of a man who hasn’t dated anybody in four years.
“It’s a fight — I don’t know — one we’ve had a couple of times. I don’t really know how to describe it.” Chad attempts to convey a disinterest in talking about it, and maybe he succeeds because JP says:
“Your new house is big?”
“Hmm,” says Chad, knowing where this is going. “Four stories if you count the basement.”
“You know, I insist on not counting the basement when describing a house. It’s just something that I do.”
“You do what?”
“I insist on not counting the basement when I’m talking about a house. Basements are so variable and varied. You know, it’s really not fair.”
Chad furrows his brow: “You’ve devoted thought to this?”
JP begins to answer but doesn’t, fixes his eyes on Chad. JP has changed a lot since they graduated together three years ago, the fissures in his mind growing in places into cracks; his thoughts, though less abstract, make less sense, somehow. JP is a man sullen at bars, under lights with an imperfectly white skull shining through close-cropped hair, a man in the transition from thin to gaunt with a $3,000 set of teeth now nightmarishly large in his head. His pants and t-shirts have grown tighter; his cigarettes are hand rolled.
“I haven’t devoted thought to it until just now,” says JP.
“I thought so.”
“But I think I’m right, still,” he says. They’re quiet together, JP’s eyes scanning the bar.
“But honestly,” JP says, “it’s a big house? A good house for a party?”
Just as Chad suspected.
“It would be,” says Chad. “But there won’t be any parties.”
“No? Not a little one, amongst a few close friends?”
“No, it’s too nice,” Chad says, adding, “The whole thing feels breakable.”
“We can have a careful party.”
“Like a party where the theme is ‘Be careful.’”
“Yeah, people can wear hardhats.”
“We could all tiptoe.”
“Yeah, and I’ll take seizure medication, just in case I’m epileptic.”
“I’ll wear depends,” says Chad. JP laughs, nods. And so the idea is born.
Over the next week, Chad decides by miniscule degrees that a party should be thrown at Robyn’s house “amongst a few close friends.” It’s not that JP convinces him, exactly — it’s more like Friday rolls around and there has generally been talk of a party, “a little one, amongst a few close friends.” Which sounds innocent enough.
Of course the party has a fatal flaw: on Friday night the close friends bring their close friends, who in turn bring theirs. A party like a mustard seed, soon it sprouts a pony keg and shrimp cocktails. Marc, who sensed danger from the get-go, and who would be a decade older than the youngest of the attendees, has declined to come. An elk-antler nightstand is tipped over accidentally, mineral water spilled on an oriental rug — these are tense, sweaty moments, people grumbling.
Miraculously, though, there is no visible or permanent damage. It is a night for celebrating the occasional lack of disaster or distress. Everybody is having a good time and soon dancing to Michael Jackson’s Thriller. Everyone is dancing and having a good time, except, of course, JP. JP thought that people had been making fun of him in some wordless way, left at ten o’clock, and walked the nearly ten miles to 3rd and Union.
At 2 am Chad gets a phone call.
“I’m at 3rd and Union,” comes JP’s voice. “I walked.”
“That’s great,” says Chad.
“I felt social anxiety.”
“You must be in good shape.”
“I do my best,” he says. “Bon soir, monsieur.”
“Good night.”
CHAD, MARC, JP
JP’s basement flat south of downtown has cheap rent. The building has been constructed on a hazardous materials dump and you get used to the smell but the eyes smart when it rains. The three men are there.
Chad says, “It’s honestly a bit of a relief to get away from the house.”
Marc says, “That beautiful house, if I lived there I’d — God, I don’t know what I’d do.”
JP says, “Sell it. Move to Mexico. Live forever. You haven’t seen the inside of this place, Marc, but it’s evil.”
Chad thinks, He hasn’t seen the inside of the place; says, “You know, I think I probably would sell that house if I owned it. The house has some strange — I don’t know the word — energy.”
Marc says, “Far out, man.”
Chad frowns, “No, I’m serious. It’s not like, you know, an Indian graveyard or anything. It feels more like a strip-mall.”
“You know,” says JP, “I can’t even wrap my mind around somebody owning a house like that in this town. It just doesn’t compute. It’s impossible.”
Chad hasn’t wondered up until now, but now he’s quite curious: “It must be worth — I don’t know. There would be no real reason to work. To do anything,” Chad says — and the notion is lovely. They are quiet a while. JP takes off his work shirt and underneath he has on a Che Guevara shirt that he bought at an Urban Outfitters in a Denver suburb.
“In a way she reminds me of Sarah Palin,” says Chad. He thinks of how she invited him over for lunch twice in the week before she left, and how she has called three times since her departure “to check up on things.”
Marc says, “Who? Robyn?”
“Jesus,” says JP, eyes flickering. “Sarah Palin. I wonder if we’ll ever get to meet her?”
“Maybe,” says Chad. “But I doubt it. She’ll want me to leave as soon as she comes home, no doubt.” Right after he says this, Chad realizes that it is totally untrue and that he could probably stay for as long as he wanted. For all eternity.
JP says, “We should throw her a welcome-back party.”
Chad says, “I’m not sure that she’s the welcome-back-party type.”
“Wow,” says JP. “What a great idea. I can make salmon.”
Chad says, “You’re not a very good cook and we’re not throwing her a welcome-back party so you can satisfy your morbid curiosity about her.”
“It’s not about curiosity,” says JP. “Besides, this way she’ll think of you fondly.”
“I’m curious about Robyn, too,” says Marc, “but I’m not that curious. This is a stupid idea, JP. If it happens then I’m not coming.” He looks at Chad.
“That’s fine,” says JP, as though things have been settled. Conversation curdles. They have drunk two bottles of wine in JP’s basement flat. It begins to rain and they hardly notice the stinging in their eyes. But around ten or so they get a little restless.
“Let’s go meet some ladies, huh?” says JP, winks.
At the bar they don’t meet any ladies. It’s the same bar with the same busted, Bob-Dylan-and-Emmy-Lou-Harris jukebox. JP speaks about the welcome-back party like it’s a thing they’ve already agreed upon, and the event becomes in Chad’s mind as inevitable as some ancient ritual; it will be a burnt offering. He can recognize a thing off there, in the distance, like a piece of the night itself.
CHAD, JP, (MARC), ROBYN
The remainder of August passes too quickly. Chad applies for a job as a bellhop, applies for a job in a bookstore, applies for a job as a waiter, and can not explain a feeling of utter hopelessness. He tries to tell Marc about it, but Marc is “working on a big case.” Chad spends a few days riding the bus aimlessly, a few more writing a letter to a cousin he was once close to. The hours and weeks blur together, become abstraction, there’s no such thing as time. Even so, it passes.
One day Chad wakes up in the little twin bed in Robyn’s house where he sleeps, and he just plain decides to get drunk. When he’s done so, he rides his bicycle down to the beach and drinks more at a Cuban restaurant. There is $376.48 in his savings account. By 2pm he is sleeping on the beach and it begins to rain. It starts out as warm summer drizzle, but the cowardly Puget sun ducks behind a thick bank of clouds and it becomes a cold, toothy rain. He stirs at 4 or so, shivering, with his lungs feeling like they’re congealing into something. A dull ache threads itself along his bones. He returns to Robyn’s house and collapses into his bed, quaking between the thin cotton sheets.
A dream comes to him, as though from the thickness of the clouds themselves. In the dream it is Dia de los Muertos — JP is there, drinking Mézcal, the little street urchins are calling him el mézcalito. Marc is there in a three-piece suit, and Chad clings to him not out of love but because Mexico is fanged and nightmarish in the dream. JP’s walking with someone, too: it’s his wife. Chad sees the two coats of eye shadow and the grotesque harlequin’s smile and two nipples like a pair of moths: Robyn. The four of them are stumbling and frantic along the cobbled streets, night falls and someone screams: Marc turns to Chad out of a black void and says it, “I didn’t mean to.” He’s talking about Robyn. He’s been screwing Robyn.
Somewhere a doorbell rings, dragging Chad from the vision: when he awakens his breath comes to him as though from a draining sink, with spit and phlegm in with the air. His head hurts him so bad it feels like the end of the world. Or else it’s just him, a tiny and insignificant part of a vast, dying world, and he’s dying in the small bed in West Seattle. His skin is wet to the touch and he is uninsured.
And then the knowledge drops on him like fifteen pounds of dark matter: today is the day that Robyn comes home. Achingly he sits up and looks around. Half-dumbfounded and half-furious with himself, Chad takes in his clothes and duffel bags scattered over the ground, along with the books and the odd little scribbled-on pieces of paper that collect around Chad in times of depression and/or unemployment. In a far corner is his disassembled bookshelf, which he was unable to fit into the storage space he rented for the month of August.
The doorbell rings again.
Outside, in the dull rain now turning to mist, it is of course JP. When Chad has shuffled to the front door, he finds his friend has trimmed the blondish pseudo-goatee that clings precariously to his face. JP sports a baby-blue leisure suit and effeminate, white hushpuppies, a thick, brown roll of paper tucked under his arm. The sinister, big teeth split his lips in a smile as he hands Chad the package (“A fine cut of salmon,” he says), and enters.
“JP — what are you doing here?” Chad asks. In a sense he already knows.
“Robyn’s coming home today,” says JP. “Remember?” Chad sits down and hears a sickening little rattle from his chest or stomach.
With a groan, he says, “I didn’t think you were serious about the party.”
JP doesn’t answer, walks through the foyer and into the great room, and sits on one of Robyn’s couches. In a way that is casual but weirdly ostentatious, JP picks up his hushpuppied feet and puts them on Robyn’s coffee table, looking around as though he’s never seen the place before.
Chad says, “I’m not sure she’s even coming home tonight.”
JP stops his study of the room, stares blankly at him: “Jesus, you look horrible,” he says. “What’s the matter with you?”
“I’m sick — a cold or something,” says Chad, now feeling the tonsils in the back of his throat like something that didn’t go down.
“Huh,” says JP. “I could do something — make a cup of tea — I think I want a cup of tea.” He sets water to boil in the kitchen.
In the bathroom, Chad rubs his throbbing limbs and hacks and spits. He presses one nostril and then the other, the sickness leaving him little by little, taking some of Chad along with it.
“Do you think it might be allergies?” calls JP from where his water boils.
“No, JP,” Chad says, the chill in his bones, now. “I don’t think that it’s allergies.” He goes to his room with a vague notion of getting in touch with Marc. But at the sight of his bed he can only think to ball himself up, shaking again beneath the covers. Sweat pours from him but he’s never been colder, and the thought that he might be very, very sick is almost as bad as the sickness itself. Because if he’s sick he won’t know how to leave and if he doesn’t know how to leave he’ll forever be at Robyn’s house with her and her cocktails and the Day of the Dead, Mexico, baked salmon and capers, and JP’s nightmarish and $3,000 smile. Chad remembers with perfect clarity a moment three years earlier: holding a notice from the Utility Company in one hand, with the other he scraped a thick, caterpillar-like fungus from some leftover tomato soup. He remembers the moment until sleep is on him again, this time dreamless.
ROBYN, JP
And when Chad awakens it is night and there is music (ominously, Emmy Lou Harris and Bob Dylan again); somewhere sharp, feminine laughter and a raspy, nasal, sing-song voice are clawing at one another. Chad walks with heavy steps to his room’s door, opens it, and steps into the great room with a plasticine smile on his face. Yes, Chad is thinking, I’m sick. I’m very sick.
He can not go home.
The night will continue on the trajectory of the sight that greets him: on the dining room table there are plates and silverware and two empty bottles of wine. A half-drunk bottle of Riesling, also, is on the counter. The coffee table has been moved to a corner of the room, and JP and Robyn are dancing very close, smiling without joy or sorrow; JP’s hand is on Robyn’s collar bone and an expression on his face seems to say, “Is this it?” And so it goes: the three will make their odd hellos-and-how-do-you-dos?, Chad will become sicker, feel even more a stranger in the vast house. For the remainder of the night Marc will not answer his phone. Later on Chad will spy, as he stands totally alone on the porch, a big ship anchored in the middle of Puget Sound like an enormous, fluorescent pickle in the darkness.