"Andy"
OK, I said I wouldn’t touch on the women yet, but I did just mention trans-women. OK: they did not, in fact, hang out with us—with the men. OK: they didn’t hang out with me, at the very least. (I am never above suspecting large-scale festivities thrown bereft of my knowledge, perhaps even in celebration of their happy bereavement.) For the most part, they seemed alright—perhaps even the most “alright” out of everyone there. Very respectable, very genial, very cool; but also very kind, tactful, decent people. Approachable, just, I never had reason to approach them; approachable, but generally not approaching. They seemed inured by a lifetime of castigation, perchance even emboldened, some overly so. Actually, after all—on this topic, I think, the fewer words said the better. And I won’t even touch—won’t even think about touching, the topic of “the transgender question,” whatever that means.
It’s not the most graceful segué, but one of the key groups I did come to associate with during my time as a literatician were the seminarians. No unction here. The seminarians and their lot came onto the scene an embodiment—a manifestation, incarnation—of friction; grating, gratifyingly so.
True, they didn’t like trans people; just the first in a series of frictions and gratingnesses, to pick one at random; but it wasn’t a matter of “not liking,” really, just a difference in worldview, in lifestyle preferences. To the seminarians, any sustained and overarching concern with sex—be it one’s gender or the thing one then does with it, usually in stairwells; the biological, and the physical: usually, forswearing the former, immersing oneself in the waters, fluids, of the latter—denotes unhealthy sublunary absorption; a devotion in the wrong thing. Now, is a devotion, instead, in God—necessarily the “right” thing? Many of the more trend-hopping Downtown Catholics might say yes. But the seminarians—as a rule, well-read—being as they are philosophy students with a cowled robe—actually might surprise you with their well-rounded take on the matter. The fact remains, however, that they’ll say that inordinate (inordained, which is not to say nondenominational—though the trans stance on the subject of sex could rightly be classed as such; or perhaps as “conversion”) devotion to sex constitutes the “wrong” thing. Transphobic, OK, if you insist, but when taken in context, they make the exact same argument towards ardent capitalists, militant leftists, gays as well as straights, consumerists of all stripes, all breed of drug or alcohol addicts and abusers, all creed of internet-dependents, video-game obsessives, hardcore Downtownies—a little hypocritical, even they will admit, given their frequent “proselytory efforts” (if one was to be generous in their categorization) in the Lower East Side—dyed-in-the-wool academics, visual artists as well as writers, dating-app utilizers, who are really casual-sex-app utilizers, health nuts, speed freaks, and Protestants. And then, yes, trans people. Really, they’re just caught in the crossfire, but I digress; personally, I’m not in the business of making moral judgements on the lives of others, even those with aberrant sex lives or avant-garde sexual identities one way or another—that’s the seminary’s business. I just leave them to it.
“How go the sublunary pursuits?,” they’d ask me, every time I’d see them—all males, naturally—nunneries fell out of fashion as well as favor sometime around the turn of the century, the nineteenth one.
To be fair, seminaries weren’t exactly a hot commodity in this modern age either, and hadn’t been for quite some time. Around the time I started writing in earnest, however, and for a few years preceding, religious piety, especially of the Catholic variety, became something of a rage, up to and including the attainal of the status of priesthood. All in all, a good bunch—a great bunch. My favorite of the literary scene by far: I think it was in how they made literal the literary dream of being, existing as, a living anachronism. They weren’t Amish, they still used phones, and rode the train—and they could get down with the best of them, they drank non-consecrated red wine like it was water—and, there you are, sure as God rested on the seventh day and Christ rose from the dead on the third one, there at every Downtown literary party could be found two-to-half-a-dozen postulants, in the flesh and partaking in the pleasures thereof. (Never did they stoop so low as to attend any non-literary parties, however, to their credit.) But that doesn’t mean the effect wasn’t just the slightest bit odd, seeing them there.
The usual consternation, though, was a few steps back still from such considerations of, whether it was not indeed a peccadillo, of sorts, for a priest (even a priest in training) to go gallivanting with the nymphatic and nubile hedons of Downtown, with all Downtown represented—the first question on most people’s mind, when catching wind of, or meeting, this small, stalwart group of seminarians was, Why become a priest in the first place? Why—in this day and age—this modern day and age—chain yourself to an ancient, superstitious, backwards practice like religion?
These are men, men like you and me, who look like you and me, who talk like you and me (who say “yo” and “OD” and whatever else), who were born, like you and me, into a world of the internet, and vast knowledge-bases, and all the comforts and indulgences of a modern world. Sometimes they even seem perfectly normal up close, too. Men who, despite it all, enlist in the seminary. It tends to stump your average New York City, self-proclaimed “creative,” or, what’s worse, self-proclaimèdly “intelligent” type.
Why—and this foremost—why renounce sex? You’d have to be either crazy or, that eternal ammunition against the Church, a pedophile. Well, maybe I could get accused of wearing my tonsure myself on occasion but I have to say that this line of questioning against the seminarians, besides being a little tired, was exactly what they mean when they’re talking about—I’ll keep using trans people as an example for convenience’s sake, but if it’s grating to you, replace “trans” with “emotional eater” or “date rapist” or “Protestant”—what-they-would-call the “problem” with trans people: if your infatuation with sex swells to the point where you would not be relieved, indescribably relieved to be over and done with it—and not only this, but that you’d be so quick to call someone a pedophile just because of the fact they are so relieved—that seems to me to be the mark of an obsession. Or seems to them, rather. Your mind’s in the gutter! A cathedral might do you good, with its oh-so-high steeples. Maybe the desire that a priest suppresses isn’t pedophilia but good old-fashioned, regular desire, for regular, age-appropriate women. Or men. Whatever the case may be. If only the rest of us could suppress our own desire as readily, it’d do a lot of good for the world. And I’m not afraid to say it. I wish I could renounce sex. I’d do it in a heartbeat. I can’t, but I would.
Just such a waste of time. I’d rather be doing other things, like—well, just something else. They always say that with all the money you’ve wasted over the years on five-dollar coffees from East Village gourmet espresso joints, you could’ve bought something productive instead, like a down payment on a small apartment in the Lower East Side; with all the time over the all the years you waste thinking about sex you could’ve probably done something commensurately productive, something surprisingly grand or lavish, like—I’m not sure, but something better, something amounting to more, than some disempowered bath tissue and the objectification, the bereavement of agency, on the part of your ideational feminine archetypes—maybe you could’ve become a grandmaster in chess or have memorized something, something byzantine and edifying or something, like the Upanishads—or you could become a priest, with all the byzantine and edifying things they do.
But here I’m speaking with my most noble impulses at hand. Take me away from my pulpit… Well, I mean, you only have to just look at me. I’m a weak, weak man—weak spiritually, weak physically, morally, socially, writerlily. Put me in a room by myself with a blowup doll and a marshmallow and fifteen minutes later I’ll have moved on to the marshmallow, and won’t that be a sorry sight. I’m even weak optometrically, but unfortunately, I can’t really afford to make an appointment right now. Let alone any pair of glasses. So let me stand here and tout and tout all the virtues, all the virtuous virtues, of the Downtown seminarian—who we’ve already established is a bald-faced hypocrite in the best of times—and decry all the base, very abasèdly base sublunaries—even if I include myself in with them, who am I to drag anyone else down with me? No, you live your life, and I’ll live mine; may never the twain shall meet—I wouldn’t come out of it standing. Put my soul up for auction and I’d be right there to the left of the seminarians like the robber on the cross, only this time the whole chopping block’s a bunch of robbers, and not a Christ in sight.
Back to the original question: why become a priest in the first place? To be honest, it stumps me a little too. Really, most of all, there was just no need for it. They could have gone to any old regular school for, however many years it took to become a priest. Instead of devoting their lives to some anachronistic institution, forcing them to renounce sex and cloister themselves away—even if they do have the opportunity to hit the LES every once in a blue moon for the odd soirée or two, the salon of a generation, the building, building, impending excitement there accompanied—the promise of being included, even as the literary equivalent of a footnote, a tossed off paragraph or two in a New Jazz Age novel—instead of going to all that effort, and putting on all those ever-so-heavy airs of piety and priestlihood and fervor and illumination—well, they could have done anything else. Maybe they were pacifists and they didn’t want to go the military route (another easily attainable, impossible-to-be-fired mode of sustenance). Maybe they actually were pedophiles, and they had some serious praying-away to do.
Frankly, the God’s-honest-truth of the matter is that they probably were putting on airs. Once upon a time you’d want to go catatonic and release yourself from your responsibilities in the world—nothing so responsible as the act of feeding, sheltering yourself (these aren’t war-torn refugees, for God’s sake, but blue-blooded New York State residents), but responsibilities nevertheless—and your family’d send you off to the cloth; then for a while there that stopped, and they got sent to insane asylums instead; now, history moving as it does in cycles, as we know, the option of the seminary is back open again. That’s the thing about anachronistic people though, people who like history and like old-fashioned things: you don’t like the past because it’s different, you like it ‘cause it’s exactly the same.
Release yourself of all responsibility, obligations, the siren’s call goes, and become warm and ensconced in the warm, smug satisfaction of not being a coward, but a man of God. You could dress up in your cowl and your tonsure and be well and satisfied with yourself, how interesting you are. If a conversation ever starts running out of steam you can just start chiding the other person. Or start speaking in Latin or something. Sometimes upon encountering a seminarian in the wild I’m reminded of the words of another writer: “Thou art reverend touching thy spiritual function, not thy life.” (I always hate it when people cite what someone else said, instead of just expressing their own thoughts and reasonings on a matter—as if the pretended “authority” of, someone else having said it, was support enough for the claim they’re trying to make. But look at that, there I go doing it.)
As I said, I’m speaking of the kinds of people I took to calling my friends; by which I mean, were I to be put on tribunal and called upon to adduce some number of men to prove the fact of my having friends—a thought experiment, somewhat trivial in form but the meat of which seems very real to me, haunts me, even, to a pathetic degree—these would be the witnesses I’d call to the stands. Would the first people I’d ask to give testimony be the real powerhouses of Downtown cool? Absolutely not. It would be an indiscreet proposition and would promise to lead only to embarrassment for all parties involved. The very first people I’d ask to stand forward, as my friends, would be men, first of all; and men not only of a similar stature to mine, but of a lower one—whom I couldn’t be said to be embarrassing or importuning or inconveniencing in any by so asking—men, to put it simply, with nothing better to do than to come to my tribunal and hang out for a few hours on any given day, and who I know have nothing better to do. Safe choices, not “reach” friends who I only see on preordained occasions like parties, and who I can imagine squirming and becoming withdrawn if they ever overheard me deeming them “my friend.” I will say, everything’s gotta be so preordained these days: if you want to meet people, “have friends,” your safest bet is never to “Put yourself out there,” or whatever other boilerplate advice you always tend to hear, but rather to establish yourself as a player in some sort of preordained system, so that there’s always a good excuse for communing with others and the reason for your all meeting, having a good time, is, importantly, never your reason—your fault—even if everyone is having a good time—but rather the fault of a vague and all-seeing, all-preordaining system. If I were to walk up to someone on the street—who for some reason, let’s pretend, I know to have perfectly aligned interest and temperament to mine, our potential-for-becoming-friends-wise—and strike up a conversation, this would be the ultimate faux pas; what would need to take place is for me to somehow arrange, or hope one day to chance upon, some preordained, anonymously-planned event that both this person and myself have eminently good reason for attending, and only then may I strike up a conversation, only then may they be amiable to it, and only then may the two of us develop a relationship where one day I might feel comfortable calling the fellow my “friend”—but again, only if the fellow in question is of a stature where I wouldn’t feel weirdly invasive (upon their domain of comfortable disassociation and free-floating-ness) or weirdly presumptuous (rising above my station, as it were, “cool-ness”-or-whatever-else-wise) in so doing.
That’s not to say I didn’t like these people—of course I did! I’m not the kind of person who takes on friends just for the sake of it. I’m merely speaking of the pragmatics of such a nomination—which weren’t to be taken lightly.
The seminarians were the perfect match for such a “friend.” If one of them did make a stink-face over my calling them such, hardly anyone would deign to notice, me especially. These were nobodies on the scene hierarchy—on the matter of friendship-tribunals, they acted as social scape-goats: even if you didn’t know them at all you could feel safe calling any of them your good friends; you’d thus be certified as someone who indeed has friends, isn’t a lonely outcast; and their opinion wouldn’t even ever be checked up upon. If it was, and they denied you—well, what a seminarian said about the social workings of the scene never held much weight, so you’d still be fine.
These were men of mealy complexions and slovenly neck-beards; mealy-mouthed, too, not out of diffidence, but born from an intellectual faculty so fastidious, but more than this, so generous, it tended to border on ignorance; more literally, in the strictest sense of timbre and quality, their voices were mealy, in a tactile, very physical sense, incongruously boy-y sound waves gravitating from fat, enormous bodies like already-past-prime apples dropped, immediately bruising, upon a city sidewalk. The very definition, in other words, of the self-proclaimèd “intellectual” set, of who you’d expect to find among the ranks of such a set: what God didn’t give them in terms of looks, he damn well better’ve given them in terms of brainpower.
They were better then the rest of the conceited types, though, in how, as the rest of them sat around scratching their chins on the quizzical matter of Why would anyone become a priest?, the seminarians took their masturbatory intellectual pursuits to the next level by just—eating shit, and enlisting. Why? Well, any profound thinker knows that every time you ask why, you may as well ask why not? So to the monasteries and the cloisters they went. If you can’t beat ‘em, join the convent.
“How go the sublunary pursuits?”
I never had an answer for them. Even though I knew they were being ironic, dreadfully, drippingly so—I never had a response, a quick quippy one or something. Only a seminarian would ask such a penetrating question so directly, even if it was ironically; and it was a mar on the pride, to be asked it so directly—partly because only a seminarian would just as lief hear out your sacramentary, open and honest and in-depth response; as take your quippy response in stride and the two of you carry on your merry way.
They failed to remark upon the divinity of a writerly vocation. Of course, they were all writers too, but still, they failed to remark upon it. What they wrote was for God and kingdom. What I wrote was pulp—even if it was Proustian, Dostoyevskian, Fitzgeraldian, Millerian (the non-pulpy parts of Miller, I mean), Bukowskian (OK, maybe I’m pushing it to a strain, the point I’m trying to make)—even if it was Flaubertian, Shakespearean—well, to them, to the seminarians, Proust and Dostoyevsky and all the rest were all so many hacks, pounding out pulp by the pound. Yes, even Shakespeare. Pulp writer. Not pious enough.
They were all writers too! They wanted to be writers! These seminarians, I mean. Why do you think they came to all the oh-so-literary parties in the first place? The same reason we all did. To meet a Julia. If not to sleep with her, to fall in love with her and have her fall in love with you—then to establish the relationship, the purely professional relationship, and to get published. The first time I met Nathan, it was at a reading, and he was reading there: Nathan, with barely a story to his name, and only that on some no-name, online-only, once-a-day-publication-schedule indie site. I asked him, holding in my incredulousness at the prospect down somewhere near my esophagus and letting it fester into a white-hot zeal of jealousy that somewhat inflamed the tonsils—I asked him, how did you ever come to be featured at a reading such as this one (a relatively high-profile, good attendance one—some high-profile people in attendance)? Turns out, he had happened to meet the guy who was running the thing! A small-press publisher! It didn’t matter if the story was any good—it was good enough, the guy was doing Nate a favor! It was the Downtown literary dream! Nathan Burnette had caught lightning in a bottle!
On the other hand, Nathan is not even a seminarian… I’ll return to the task at hand. And try to rein in the exclamations for a little while now.
But don’t ask me, don’t ever ask me, how my writing is going—please. It’s a gentle request—a supplication—so you can be sure it’s from a small and delicate place in the heart. Don’t ask about my little “sublunary pursuits.” I like the way the French put it—and because I like the way the French put it, most will call me pretentious (not the seminarians, though)—they ask, Ça va?—is it going? Nevermind what “it” means, just all of “it.” And you answer, why yes, ça va indeed. No need for deeper delvance or investigation. No need to go into detail. If the writing is going, it’s going, and you can be sure you’re asking about it—even, my answering about it—won’t help a goddamn thing edgewise.
“How goes the sublunary pursuits?”
It was Andy this time, a short, cheeky little chap—cheeks festooned with roses, always, an Irish complexion—always with a two-month old beard and one of those baseball-caps with fluffy ear flaps that tie up on top of it—who was asking. He’d invited me to a reading at a bookstore in Greenpoint and we were meeting up beforehand at a nice corner pub a few blocks away. I came early and was on my second vodka-soda when he waddled in trembling like the proverbial aspen tree.
“They’re going… sublunarily.”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“OK.”
Dark beer for the man in the floppy hat. Did I want another (vodka-soda)? Not yet.
“Julia?”
Actually, I’ll take that vodka-soda now. Thanks. (Andy always paid our tab, anyway; always with cash, always in the form of crisp, crisp bills—he must have kept two-hundred dollars on his person at all times, in an fat old leather wallet of the kind that I always think of as Irish, that will forever in my mind be associated with Irishness, because of Andy. Again, these seminarians: living anachronisms. It wasn’t enough to be a priest, and it wasn’t enough to pay with cash—no, he had to pay with cash out of a wallet he probably inherited from his “granda” or whatever from back in the old country. He’d distribute the bills as priestly—priest-in-training-ly—alms to anyone that asked, out walking on the streets; if they asked for twenty cents [well, they wouldn’t ask for twenty cents, but anyway], he’d give them ten bucks; five bucks, he’d give them twenty. There but for the grace of God… And he’d always pay our tab. Andy was the real deal, as far as I’m concerned.)
“She’s good.”
“Good.”
Andy was always reliable for the ol’ invite to any and all readings from Bushwick to—well, not very far, actually. Usually from Bushwick to maybe Greenpoint; sometimes the East Village, Lower East Side, what have you. You’d think I’d know about more of these readings—from Julia, or from Ant, my other perennial inviter, tag-along-er—but really, my plugged-in-ness oscillated quite wildly over the course of my trepidatious, toe-dipping career, “career”—the only time in my life I could ever have been said to’ve been “plugged in,” and even then—well, even then I really just wasn’t. Anyway, I actually had heard about the reading Andy hit me up about, but it was nice to be given an excuse to actually go; usually, I just skip them. Can’t be bothered. They’re only fun—for me, for my temperament—though I can’t imagine the temperament that would have fun unequivocally at one of these things, these intolerable, either intolerably pretentious or intolerably scene-y and braced-in-irony and overbearingly self-referential, readings—they were only fun for me if I had someone to tag along with; with Julia, especially, they would always be fun—would always be good for a good drunk. But it was nice to tag along with Andy, too, he’d pay our tab and he’d ask about my “sublunary pursuits” and, a few drinks later and with the topic less freshly-broached, less sensitive (like a flesh wound), we’d talk about writing, we’d get into the real nitty-gritty.
Andy, you see, wrote too. Again—they all did. Andy, by the way, could also be counted on—not just for the, like clockwork, perennial once-ever-two-month text inviting me to a literary reading—to bring along one-to-three of his closest seminarian friends to introduce me to and for all of us to engage in a good and hearty chat, good and hearty like the consecrated loaf of rye that’s the Lamb Himself come down from heaven. That evening, two of them were following behind Andy in one of their cars, from a seminary way out in Queens somewhere; by the time they got to us, Andy would be a few notches more erythemic and I would be good and sauced, but I’d be holding it rather well. In any case, until they got there, we’d shoot the shit; I’d talk about Julia—you know, the preliminaries, the constant preliminaries, in perpetuity; you just gotta get through them, in order to get to the good stuff; you just gotta get through them—and he’d talk about monastic living, and, hopefully, within a quarter-hour we’d be full blown, full-mast, fully erect, full of bluster, talking about what we really came to talk about: the mutual-masturbatory fantasy that was writing, and the writer’s life, and living as a writer and, one day, hope against hopes, finding success as a writer.
His short stories—well, first off, he was published everywhere, he was a Wunderkind—nearly forty, but a real Wunderkind, I’d call him, nevertheless. If you wanted a good, adequately robust listing of every minor and major online literary publication from that decade, I’d point you no further than Andy’s CV. He was a workman, he was a machine: I don’t know what he did more, write, or submit—or pray, or celebrate mass or whatever, or what. He submitted and submitted and I guess soon enough they just had to relent—not to say his writing wasn’t good, even great, immensely enjoyable or at least, worth a glance, but just: damn, he was just fucking published everywhere, and he must have just submitted so goddamn much, and to so many fucking places; some relenting must have been involved, the numbers don’t work out any other way; I’ve done my fair share of submitting, too, and I can only say that my efforts must have paled in comparison; he must have submitted every measly, thousand-worder short-story he ever took the measly thousand-word effort to fucking compose (or whatever other pretentious word like “compose” should be à la mode at any given cultural moment) to every college and university journal in the country and every independent publisher in the city; some relenting must have been involved; or maybe it’s like the shotgun scatter-effect, that aims true by decimating that which one aims at as well as everything in a ten-foot radius around that which one aims at; and so, technically, does indeed aim true.
Unfortunately—perhaps somewhat unfortunately, they were written in the, again, à la mode, Nathaniel style: terse and yet wordy. Monosyllabic. With the cadence of side-mouthèd grunts in between guzzles of warm chowder and warmer beer. They told the story of his preseminarian lifestyle: an abject one, proto-seminarian, you could say, in his rigorous adherence to the principle behind the parochial vow of poverty, long before actually taking it. Living in cercueilesque apartments in the Bronx and other places like the Bronx. Living: the writer’s life. Working as a precarity laborer for food-delivery apps. The man—his protagonists, they never had a name, only ever, the man; their love interest, the damnèd the woman, a cruel mare by any name, but especially by that of the woman—dislodges his bicycle from the brambles. Fuck this, the man thinks. The man gets his bicycle out but he gets a thorn in his paw. He leaves it in. He wishes he had a whole crown of them. And on and on in that vein. Protoseminarian, what did I say. Pro-to-seminarian, alright. Somehow, in every story the guy’s written—and it must be said, he’s written quite a damned few fucking short stories—the man’s bicycle will inexplicable get caught in some brambleberry bushes. In every story. He’ll be out delivering food on his bike, and the next thing you know—Fuck this. One almost wants to think it’s an allegory for something—it has to be—but I can’t imagine what. Besides, knowing how writers are—specifically, knowing how writers like Andy are, but also just in general—I’m sure he would utterly repudiate any notion that his beloved brambleberry bushes are anything but brambleberry bushes. He’d consider it a desecration to impute them with any means, motive, or aspirations towards the transcendent. Really I just think that in the final analysis he’s bad at writing conflict: when the story calls for tension, the man hits the brambles and it’s—Fuck this. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it; and it’s worked for Andy, he’s been featured in some highly reputable literary magazines.
And OK, I didn’t hate them—didn’t hate his stories. Andy’s. He’s the voice of a generation, just not this one. Maybe, what I attributed to Nathaniel’s officious good fortune could also work in reverse—if you like someone, you’ll generally like their prose—or otherwise for yourself to like it, for their sake—but, alternatively, if you don’t take to a person, they could be Shakespeare reincarnate and you’d brush it aside with all the grandeur of the man brushing aside a brambleberry bush in a quest to retrieve a bicycle. Well, needless to say—I think I’ve already covered it—I fit into the latter category—up to and including my proserly talent commensurate with the Bard’s. I might be one of the few writers for whom it’s actually beneficial to their careers not to attend literary readings, not, no, never to network. Best and worse case scenario, I network so well with the publisher or industry magnate in question that we enter into an entrenched and torrid love affair lasting upwards of a year together, and no one else but them ever bothers to publish me again. Sure, they’ll connect me, to some good connections, what have you—ach, but the well always dries up. I wish I had the work ethic of a guy like Andy, I really do. My work ethic is usually just, step one: get drunk; step two: hope for the best. And when I submit, it’s an intense twenty-four hour period of submitting and submitting, and writing proposals, and doing nothing but submitting and submitting, and writing the occasional proposal—and then two months of not submitting a thing.
“Have you read this author?,” Andy might say to me.
“No.”
“OK.”
“Hm, what about you—have you read this author?”
“No,” Andy might then say to me in return.
“OK.”
And on and on like that. Tonight, however, was different: the reading in question was going to be featuring—not as the “headliner,” so to speak, but as one of the “opening acts”—a seminarian friend of Andy’s! And of his two friends’s! Andy, along with, he promised me, those two, were beside themselves, just, absolutely beside themselves with excitement. If it could happen to him… It was a guy—a kid, really—or at least, that’s what Andy would call him, “a kid,” him being around my age, maybe a year or so my senior—named Nick, Nick something-or-other, and a self-published pamphlet of his had gained some minor traction in the various Brooklyn and Downtown-adjacent literary scenes that Andy and I usually found ourselves in bed with (after a manner of chastely, very allegorically speaking). The thing had been passed around like wildfire—Andy, just for one, dealing it out to all his friends, eventually, to me, like it was some secret alt-lit (“alternative literature,” a portmanteau for the scene; as in, as an alternative to writing real literature you could just go to parties and give readings of your shitty poetry there) ambrosia—had been passed around like wildfire, and, in its rapturous coda, Nick himself actually entreated his reader to burn, like wildfire, the not-at-all fire-retardant leafules of the very pamphlet itself; a rhetorical flourish of sorts, meant to give the impression that if he, the author, couldn’t end the thing on a fiery note (and he couldn’t), then at least you, the reader, could. Andy, of course, didn’t take the coda literally—and the way he talked about this little pamphlet—which was written, by the way, in iambic pentameter (because if you couldn’t write like Shakespeare, sometimes it’s good enough to just write like Shakespeare) and was all about the literal rapture, and how when it happened, it would happen in Uptown (a little on-the-nose, methinks)—the way he talked about it, you got the feeling that Andy would take burning the thing akin to someone burning the Bible itself. And we all know how much Andy loved his Bible.
I, for one, thought Nick’s suggestion displayed real intelligence. I took a page out of Mao’s book, however, and instead of burning the pamphlet Andy had lent out to me—eminently flammable, though, ironically, not inflammatory in the slightest and actually a little bit “safe,” formally as well as content-wise (Nick’s antagonists are a rich cult who eat babies as part of a sacrifice in some Satanic ritual—not exactly brave territory, taking aim at the such-like)—I opted to criticize it.
Emboldened a little by the liquor, me and Andy got into it. He said Nick’s style was eclectic; I said I knew it was eclectic, because, for some reason, his pamphlet had a “works cited” addendum, and that Nick wanted us to appreciate his eclecticism if he wanted anything at all; and that this wasn’t true eclecticism, but eclecticism for eclecticism’s sake without rendering the proceedings any more well-rounded or broadly considered—just rendering them with a “works cited,” no thought whatsoever as to how the works thus cited bore upon his pamphlet save for how eclectic the “works cited” was.
Andy said Nick, by self-publishing, was showing, by example, how to exist as an independent artist in today’s landscape; I said what would have been really brave was to actually get it published. (What Andy was thinking was, Beat them by doing the same thing they do—“they,” the major publishing houses—but do it your way, do it better. The way I saw it was, Nick did in fact do it his own way out of disdain for the major publishing houses, but a disdain only as deep as them not granting him access to their floors of power—not a fundamental disdain for how those floors of power ever operated. In other words—and this is a common refrain among the Downtown literary scene—sorry, the alt-lit scene—in other words, if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em; but since you can’t join ‘em, self-publish.)
Andy said the pamphlet was rich; I said it was stingy.
Andy said it was smart; I said it was stupid.
Andy said I was being overly critical; I said he was being sentimental.
It was around this point that Andy’s two friends got there—both of whom named Matt.
“What are you two arguing about?” It was Matt who asked this.
“Andy thinks your friend reading tonight is a great writer; I think he’s a dilettante.”
“OK. Hey, how goes the sublunary pursuits?”
Like that, the night went into full swing, our party being doubled and good cheer and drinks abounding. I liked “getting into it” with Andy, with the seminarians—they dug in, they really did; they never let the conversation end with, You’re being overly critical. Instead it was, You’re being overly critical, but I fear I’d be being overly critical of your being overly critical were I to criticize your overly critical, so instead let’s keep spinning our wheels for a while. Now that is how a conversation should go, in my opinion—that’s how you get to the really fun parts, the dark and fantastical parts, of one another’s psyches. Booze and delve, booze and delve, until eventually—and eventually it always does—the conversation delves to the point where both of you are discussing not so much any subject or object, but discussing yourselves and why you think you might think certain ways and certain things on certain subjects or objects, and eventually the answer delivers itself: that one or both of you needs Jesus.
And then there was Father What-a-Waste, known to me only in legend. Nadya had the scoop on him: sometime in the decade previous, a late twenty-somethings seminary student who, like our friends, took to hanging around the Downtown literary scene—whatever was Gainful before there was Gainful. Got around to being called “What-a-Waste” as a reference to his mannequinesque good looks pace vows of chastity. Behind his back, of course—but only half-jocosely. What a goodman waste…, some of these literary-scene girls used to think to themselves—some young, invariably gorgeous scene-girls who, by the way, probably could’ve had any man on the isle of Manhattan they so chose. But they just had to have the one who was already spoken for, in this instance. Again—this is all coming third- or fourth-hand: I heard the tale of Father What-a-Waste from Nadya, who heard it from someone else who probably heard it from someone else. But eventually, to make a long story short, one of these young scenesters—ever prone to efficiesize waste and wastefulness as a whole—finally managed to seduce the young man; like a solar panel that renders the sun’s rays no longer wasteful by capturing them before they can fall clumsily to the earth. The young seminarian—a father, truly, only in nickname—fell madly in love with the young woman, just as she had left her conquest for dead on the “checked” side of some sort of sexual to-do list; but he had broken his vows, his life’s work, and for her, so he wasn’t to be written off so easily. Needless to say he had completely absconded from the seminary by this point, leaving the warmth and safety of his room and salary behind, and so was essentially homeless on the streets of Lower Manhattan, raving mad, looking all over for the girl, suddenly nowhere to be found… He never did find out that all it was was she had taken a trip with some friends down to Mexico, just for a casual “getaway”—not from him, obviously, but the sort of “getaway” wealthy city-kids take to grant credence to their see-through “hatred” of Manhattan in the Downtown areas of which they, clear for all to see, galavant so freely and gaily. He never found out because by the time she returned (it was a two week trip), the young Father What-a-Waste had jumped into a hole in the ice in the East River. What a waste indeed…