Outings
To the Gallery:
I came looking for Nan Goldin photographs in a sea of graffiti and acrylic cartoon. There were only three. One for every dollar I paid in admission. Trixie on the cot is my favorite. A beautiful sort of ballerina junkie whore sits near passed-out in her 80’s party gear. Tulle and neon shoelaces against cigarettes and beer, amidst the butts and cans they shed. Our herione (maybe she’s on herion) is all slender wrists and tight angles.
All around are transvestites and glitter. On one screen is Karen Finley, safely behind earphones performing a one-woman reenactment of being finger-fucked on the subway. The bastard left her hangin’. On another, hidden in a corner, a woman is raped by many hands while calm and flute-like eyelash-batting geisha music plays sweetly over her shrieks. A crowd gathers to watch as a breast is shaken in a long nipply wiggly close-up. I stand up.
There is free beer in the lobby.
On the Subway:
A tall white man and an even taller black woman are hugging around a hand-hold pole. He kisses her softly and an asian youth wearing headphones while leaning against the door you’re not supposed to lean against makes a face.
A French couple smooshes up their vowels over a map of Manhattan. An MTA employee asks them if they’re visiting and they say yes, then he asks them where they’re from and they say France the French way. He says, France the English way? They nod. He disappears into his little room at the end of the train, then comes back after the next stop and asks them if it’s their first trip to New York, very slowly, as if he’s talking to children.
To the Reading:
I am pushing down my pink legwarmers in a sweltering chain bookstore, very early for the reading. The old floor creaks as hipsters trot by, toting tomes. My latte gets cold by my side. A girl with cottoncandy hair passes.
On the way here, I ran into a friend I hadn’t seen in three years. We stared at each other for seconds, then hugged in the sidewalk. I said “I still have your copy of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius” and we exchanged e-mail addresses. When I gave him the two second recap of My Life Up Till Now, he said “You’ve done interesting things.”
Stephen Elliott is a somewhat timid reader. As he leads up to the lines about childhood anal rape, his forehead gets shiny. The bookstore is even more sweltering than before.
To the Thai Place:
These is a virtual revolving door of couples on first dates at the two tables two inches to the left and to the right of Leigh and me. They are talking about something. We are talking about something. I picked the restaurant, but I did not think. The music is too loud, the temperature is too high, the mod decor is too mod. The smell is so overpowering I’m already envisioning myself vomiting on the R. Puking on the subway, like abortion, is a fate one really shouldn’t have to suffer more than once.
The lefthand couple gets up to leave. The girl has a lip ring and dyed-black hair but somehow avoids looking sixteen. She says one thing she’s not used to is this constant layering-up. Perhaps she’s a recent transplant from California. Her date is clean-cut, unpierced and blonde. He says laying is essential, otherwise you’re fucked.
They’re replaced almost instantaniously.
Down the Street:
Walking down 22nd, one first sees houses and houses, expensive residential, and then auto garages and diners, somewhat menacing in the dark, and all of a sudden the street breaks into song - gallery spaces with green and blue windows, a warehouse door vibrating with the club music it struggles to contain.
The snowpiles leak snotty lakes out over the black street, spreading the Terror of Falling Down. Metrocards float along in the muck. The sidewalks are pockmarked by long-blackened chewing-gum buttons - moles from the mouths of a century’s smirking adolescents and bubble-blowing girls in miniskirts.
My breath, too, is thin and white.
To the Theatre:
I imagine all the ticket-checkers look up to me a little, with my second-hand front-row-centers.
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