Excerpt
I majored in biology back at school, or started out majoring, because I wanted to study people like they were animals at the zoo. But as it turns out I was not, and still am not to this day, temperamentally suited to the priapic sciences. I fled to the humanities. I got my degree, finally, in Gothic miasma.
I don’t have a job in the traditional sense. Because, truly, my vocation is that of the writer. For work—for avocation—for remuneration of rent, for subsistence, every fulfillment of which costs money—one job is as good as any other; again, because I am a writer, and my duty is beholden not to any job, but indeed towards, ever towards, a higher realm.
I have a dream that these two essential facets should merge—vocation; avocation. I’m always writing, that’s my real work, so I would like to get paid for it. Even just some freelance stuff. Enough to keep up my half of the studio in Harlem. I used to broach the subject with Julia a lot, but the conversation always goes something like this (not exactly, but roughly):
“You gotta have a friend at some other journal that needs an editor, right?” Even though being an editor entails more reading than writing, it’s still close enough that I can swing it. I read a lot, too. And I’m especially interested in gauging contemporary fiction writers, so one of the trendier journals would definitely be a place I’d be interested in.
“Not any that would pay.”
I know she has a few friends that work in local rags—journalism, one utters, with the recalcitrant locution of a spat of acid reflux—in Brooklyn. “What about journalistic work? Do you know anyone that can set me up with an interview, for a column? Or even just a beat?”
“No.”
I’ve looked around myself, too. Obviously, with Julia’s connections, and an introduction from her, I’d have a much better shot; but I figure that if I manage to find a place, I can always ask her post facto to put in a good word for me.
Sometimes she’d tell me that my desire to work as a writer—as a critic, or a columnist, or even a journalist (which she says is unrealistic, since I’m not trained as one—as if writing is a trainable impulse, or “craft”—because that’s what writing becomes, in the journalistic milieu: ceases from being art, rendered into “craft”)—was misguided, and that if I started writing for work, it would hinder my “real work”—what I called my vocation—which is to say, my fiction writing—my “novel,” which she was more obsessed with than I was past a certain point. She would tell me I should hate my job—which I did—so that I have more vigor when I get home to write, and escape it through my writing. I would tell her it was easy for her to say because she had her rent paid by a trust that her parents allot to her. She would get angry and tell me she was a Bohemian artist-type, and that she couldn’t help who her parents were, and then she would get all cold towards me.
Our relationship was already in the sepulcher by now and had been for at least six months. She still held on to me for some reason, though, as if to cruelly stress a point—what point she was making, however, I have no idea.
Oh yeah, I should tell you that my book deal had gone the way of the dodo by this point. My publisher-apparent’s in-house editor told me the first draft of my manuscript I sent in “wasn’t working.” Then I pivoted, and adapted the manuscript into a collection of short stories—which I’m currently still shopping around, by the way, although it’s been rejected by three publishers and four or five agents—which the editor said really “wasn’t working,” (not least because I had “agreed upon” a novel, and they already had a full slot, so they said, of short-story works, and needed a novel in particular, and nothing else, from me, as per our arrangement) and that they, they meaning the publishing house, had decided to “no longer go forward” with the project, but to drop a line if I ever wrote “anything else.” I didn’t bring up the advance because I was kind of hoping he would forget it—which is why it stung when in fact he, my editor and my main (nigh only) point of contact with the house, had not forgotten the advance: he told me I could keep it.
So that is what I had been reduced to, I though. A sunken cost.
For Julia too. I could tell she resented me when I tagged along, with her and all her friends, and she always had to pick up the bar tab. That’s partly why I did it, at a certain point—I hated all her friends, all my friends—I went along just to spite her. Look at the monster I’ve become, as if to say. Look at what you’ve made me.
Around this time too: at first I thought that our miscarriage was what was acting like a weight bearing down on us, a specter that haunted every interaction we had. But then around the time my book deal got dropped and I began to notice her condescension and overall spleen towards me, tainting our every interaction, I started suspecting a much darker—and at this point, unfalsifiable—timeline.
Frankly, I suspected she had had an abortion.
By this time we were spending less than every moment together, a degradation of how the relationship used to be. This gives her the opportunity—while away, she had every opportunity to not only schedule an appointment at Planned Parenthood, go in—even over the course of several weeks—for several checkups and informative consultations, and then proceed to the operation itself—that of the removal of our child from her fecund womb. I will admit, shamelessly, that I was a little surprised in the first place when she told me about the purported “miscarriage” because of her undeniable fecundity, which nearly breathed off of her. More apposite, however, to a potential validation of my theory, is a Freudian slip I couldn’t help but notice a friend of mine making—or, should I say, rather, a friend of Julia’s, out at lunch a couple weeks ago, that’s stuck in my mind like a festering nest of cockroach eggs ever since.
Walt, his name was, was sort of a constant periphery figure at parties I had attended, and less inclined towards literary pursuits than interested in, I guess, fashion. Apparently, however, he was straight. I had run into him out at Hangover Square and he was out for a bite, and I could stand to eat so I went along. This is how it all started: “Are you upset about the situation with Julia?”
I assumed he meant in general: “I’m not gonna lie, man. It’s bad,” I responded.
“Shit man, I’m really sorry. I didn’t really hear everything but it sounded like you were really excited about it.”
About what, pray tell?
“The baby, you know.”
I told him, what could you do.
“So it was her then?”
Maybe he was telling the truth: maybe he really hadn’t “heard everything,” and was just speculating, postulating—as, I admit, I am now; so it is a position I wholly commiserate with. But I could infer, from the connotation—the insinuation, of how he said it—You mean it was her then?—that to Walt’s understanding, a decision had been made—not, in other words, a lofty pseudo-“decision” from on high, the will of God or nature, as normally dictates the process of a miscarriage, but an eminently human decision, namely, one made by Julia and, namely—as per his insinuating timbre, not by me. The only such decision that fits this scenario is that of an abortion. But again, I could be wrong. I don’t think she and Walt are especially close, but he is especially close, however, to Julia’s best friend, Nadya—he might even be Nadya’s “best friend,” along with Julia. This places him close enough to surely know the details—it is conceivable, in other words, that he would surely know—but also, yet, so far, from the situation, as to duly justify his ignorance. I think they might have gone to college together too?
I responded with a simple hum-grunt quasi-affirmation, then I deftly changed the subject. I went home, the implications of what Walt had inadvertently revealed to me not fully sunk in yet—the numb staggerings of the victim of a car-crash, his abdomen gashed open but still too high off adrenaline to notice.
I’ll admit, the thought has been eating me up inside. It’s all, in my weaker moments—which are frequent, mind—all I can think about.
What’s most cruel, most cruel in a vicious and inexplicable way, is that she, Julia, would—assuming my crackpot theory (hoping that’s all it is) is true—proffer, to me, a child—the baby, so much, I can take or leave, but it’s the gorgeous and staggering promise implicit in the baby—of a life spent, blissfully (so blissful is the thought to me that, looking back, of course it couldn’t be true, so incompatible are ecstasy, reality), together—when she told me she was pregnant (and of course I was much too hasty, but still), I imagined in that moment the rest of my life unfolding as if it were irrevocably true. So even if she didn’t get an abortion, I’m mad at God—at nature, fine, if you insist, for revoking that promise. The promise, in other words, of a life spent in union, where even if she left me, she could never leave me, because we’d always have that baby. I imagined the shared joy of raising it together. I imagined all my fears of advancing lonely into old age, boredom, decrepitude and apathy—apathy received from the world that I take to heart and emanate back out, too dejected to counter—having been for nought. I imagined having Julia as my friend and companion, and sure, my lover, forever.
Forever, or until one of us died. For me, her dying, either of unnatural, like being hit by a bus, or natural causes, would be the precisely exact same—or maybe “accurately” the same, I forget the difference—pain as her miscarrying. I couldn’t blame her—like I could were she to have aborted—but the pain, of having lost that future so blissfully envisioned, would be exactly the same. But, on the other hand, if I could blame her—no matter how rightly, let’s say, and just keep that out of this for now—that is, if she had gotten an abortion, than she is, truly, the most cruel woman to ever walk the earth, and any woman who has ever or who will ever do likewise is just the same. To make a promise that—that deep, as in, that profound, only to, by your own volition, renege… Quite simply, it’s to commit a murder. Is what I think. I almost think, if she did it, that is, that she committed murder onto me. She has killed my life of bliss and no-more-loneliness.
It’s not so cruel that I want to murder her, don’t get it twisted, if that’s where you thought I was going with this. Of course it isn’t and of course I won’t and of course I wouldn’t. It’s just that… it would be so cruel that I have been stunned, not even beaten—like I’m detached from the situation, and even though by aborting that baby, she would be slamming me with a cudgel, I am not actually the one being cudgeled, but instead someone looking on, an objective bystander, who is stunned by the cruelty of her deed, by what she’s doing. It’s so cruel that I am in a relentless state of catatonia. Of always looking for the words, hiccuping over them, to express my disappointment, over the deferral, the thwartation, of my love, and my feelings towards her, and “us,” the abstract quantity of “us”—and to question her directly, How could you do this to me?
A pitiable stammering—of which I am ashamed, but which the power of the promise was so great that I feel empowered to press on with—that is better to withdraw into, alone, then to allow her to bask in for too long…
In any case, with my manuscript there out in the woodwork somewhere—sitting in various inboxes, ready for inevitable rejection—I’ve been forced to spend my free-time, away from my various jobs, which I’ll get into in a minute, sending in proposals for various freelance projects; both to local rags and national brands alike. If they don’t accept it, they let you know by not replaying; a sort of honesty by omission.
The crafting, the sculpting, of an article proposal, is something of an art in and of itself. I am reminded of a great French painter—the studio of whom was covered floor-to-ceiling in half-finished paintings—who decreed, They tell me which ones they want to buy and those are the ones I’ll finish. First, you need, naturally, a very juicy subject to write about; one rife with human interest but, more importantly, human passion. Now, I don’t want it to sound like I’m writing trifling little pieces for housewives—when I say “human interest” (and that’s why I actually prefer the term human passion) I simply mean a subject that appeals to the human element; nothing too grandiose or abstract. Something you, the reader, and I, the person who actually has to write the fucking thing, can really sink your (or my) teeth into; and something that will claw you right back. This is the only way I can describe what I think I mean.
Next, you need to show a little bit of flair in the proposal—as I do not, as of yet, have a very comprehensive portfolio of non-fictive work (let alone fiction work—what, a couple impotent short stories in Gainful Employment is gonna impress anyone?), I’m coming in blind with these emails. Or, more precisely, the rags I’m submitting to are blind; they have no reason to take any proposal just because it revolves around an interesting concept, not from a virtual nobody like me. No, I need to shine, to show them what they’re getting if they choose to greenlight the project and for our relationship to move forward. Honestly, I can’t say there’s any secret sauce to coming across in a way that will attract an editor you’re pitching to, and keep them glommed on to not just your ideas—which tend to be purchased by the pound, in all honesty—but you, you the writer, but mostly you the personality. For me, I usually use a punchy, kind of hardboiled, staccato style that, in my experience, really drags people in—it worked in my fiction, it worked to land me my bookdeal (honestly, the fact that they withdrew my book deal was probably mostly due to the fact that I, for whatever reason, abandoned this style and tried to “experiment”), and if it ain’t broke—don’t fix it! Is what I say.
Now, here’s where it does get a little “housewife-y.” Earlier, I described how the subject matter you choose should be passionate—it should dig its nails in. But at the same time, a little bit of local interest never hurts, especially at the rags I’m pitching to—they’re New York based and read by fucking New Yorkers, after all. That’s my third and final piece of advice for crafting the perfect writing proposal. Know your fucking audience. It almost reminds me of the old analytical philosophers, or systematic theologians, who are so anal and punctilious that they will start their proofs, or their tractates, by stating the most obvious and banal facts-of-the-matter. It’s trite to say, in other words, but it needs to be said. Know your fucking audience: I know the publication I want to publish me is read by New Yorkers, so I write about what interests New Yorkers: namely, New York. Duh. If you want the goods to sell, make sure you’re selling goods that sell. It’s really that simple—so simple as to be mind-numbingly obvious—but it’s worth stressing, probably at the top of every project, so you don’t go untether yourself and float away into no-man’s-land, where your submissions will remain like sitting ducks.
Yup, writing fucking proposals. For articles, for “party reviews”—of which I’ve written a couple, much to Julia’s embarrassment—she says people don’t want her to invite me to things anymore because of it. I say fine, don’t invite me—I got paid for those party reviews! It was writing, that I got paid for. That’s all that matters to me at this point—I’ve reached a time in my life where it’s not worth the effort otherwise; not unless they’ll pay me for the work, that is.
“How can you get mad at me for writing party reviews? You’re friends with Nathaniel”—I pronounce his name drippingly, oh-so-condescendingly—Nathaniel is a fellow writer; a fellow contributor to Julia’s journal. He writes in the “clean,” “rugged,” “masculine”—but overly detached, trying to be ironic but never genuinely funny—style that’s popular nowadays; he draws his array of characters from his own life—but instead of the jaded farmhands and soldiers that were the emblems of authenticity of yesteryear, Nathaniel’s stories are about the rich children of rich parents of rich Manhattan—they do a variety of drugs at a variety of parties and the characters all talk to one another about such things very detachedly and ironically. “You’re friends with Nathaniel and his fiction is basically the same thing.”
“No it’s not. He’s a master of the contemporary short story.”
He’s a master of nothing. He’s a jackoff-all-trades. He writes party reviews, just à clef. But I digress.
And then, there’s pitching proposals for album and movie reviews, which is a little bit trickier—what can you say, right? I want to review this album. Period. Because that’s all there is to it, right? That is the pitch, in effect. This is where it takes a little bit of that flair I mentioned. OK, you’re writing an album review, but what’s your angle? That’s where you can really stick out—come at the editor with an interesting critical lens; say, if there’s a new album from a beloved indie group, you can say you’re going to compare it to some old and forgotten outsider-rock record. Say that it’s an uncredited influence. (It’s not even necessarily a negative thing—a glowing review, that lauds the band for “rediscovering” an old record—even if they, in point of fact, have no idea that record even existed—is a great little piece of literature, and a lot of magazines will jump on the chance to have the “scoop.”) For movies, I like to peruse the listings for weird experimental retrospectives, and little-known indies from directors I’ve taken to following on Twitter. In that case, it really is that simple—a pitch which reads, I want to review this movie—because the movie in question itself is so bizarre and random, chances are no one else has thought of pitching a review of it yet. Although, as it stands, I haven’t been commissioned for a single review yet. One little zine out in Brooklyn offered me a “test run,” unpaid of course, to be published in their next issue, but at this point, I’m out for the real deal only. But this does represent a general trend, my sending in twenty or so pitches to review various movies and albums—I probably spend about twenty times more writing fucking proposals than I do fucking writing at this point.
But again, this is all in my free-time. The writing. I do, as I mentioned earlier, work—as in, work a job. Three jobs, actually—my first “real” jobs procured since throwing in the towel (no pun intended) as a dishwasher.
All of them are app-based gigs, which I prefer, because you get to keep your own schedule—and to quite a radical degree. By which I mean, I can “keep my own schedule” for months—just not do any work whatsoever—and the job will be waiting for me when I need the cash. For a bohemian artist-type like myself, it’s the ideal setup. Also because they’ll hire you sight unseen, all you need to do is sign up, present yourself. No resumé required. They call it “precarity labor” but, at the risk of sounding glib—is not all labor precarious? At least this is a precarity that requires no thinking, none of this effort, on my part.
The rent is an ever-burning presence. The rent. I see it carved into the wall. I worry if that will hurt my chances of recovering my safety deposit. I realize that my roommate’s constant science projects have already scalded four-out-of-four of the walls in the bathroom, and that that, along with the scuffs all over the wall above his bed, where he seems to be tallying the days since he’s lived here—as a prisoner might—and also writing a manifesto on the drywall, is what will ruin my chances of recovering my safety deposit. I also realize that it’s not actually carved there: THE RENT. It’s only metaphoric, right? It’s carved into the walls of my psyche instead, which is worse—truly I tell you there are walls there; it is here I am confined, here and nowhere else. Maybe it’s just the sutures of my skull—like a vision of the Virgin Mary, or Christ himself, appearing in a burnt piece of toast, or a tortilla chip—that happen to spell out THE RENT, and subliminally my mind can read it from where the synapses of my brain press against the jagged outdents of bone—always, all the time, rent, rent, rent, rent. I haven’t paid the thing in three months, and every knock on my door sends nervous spasms down my entire vertebrate column. Could it be the landlord? No, it’s just some more of Marcos’s friends. They always are wearing all black and look violently angry. If Marcos isn’t there I tell them and they look at me in an angry fashion. If Marcos is there, he answers the door, and after he invites them in they all stare at me, angrily, until I leave.
I think Marcos has upwards of six or seven guns—very large ones, automatic weapons with large, long clips, perhaps rifles as well—and at least two pistols, one small and snub-nosed, one absolutely fucking massive—under his bed.
“You like guns?”
I had just received my provisionary pistol from the Haüs app. It came in a silver protective briefcase, exactly how I would have imagined a gun-case to look. I was sitting on my bed, case bewitchingly open like a clamshell, admiring the piece of machinery, fresh out of the mail. It smelled like a new laptop; ultimate-ly clean, and metallic, and fumigated. I popped it out of the case—indeed, it made a satisfying pop, the gun, when unlatched from its indented silhouette in the foam inside—and felt the heft in my hand—not without (and I say this somewhat trepidatiously as an erstwhile pacifist and bleeding-heart liberal on measures of gun control) immense pleasure—swung it around the berth of my wingspan a couple times, staring down the sightline of the weapon.
I was now a designated soldier, I told myself, mischievously and self-mockingly but also quite, quite giddily. I am the protector. Fear me. I am the designated soldier.
I will protect you.
The protector, I am.
In a robotic-sounding voice in my head: Soldier designation—I made gear-whirring noises, again, just in my mind—activated.
The gun felt very severe and eminently cool. I felt like the protagonist of a French New Wave film. I felt like a gangsta. I held it to my head and looked in the mirror.
Marcos was in the kitchen looking at me. In response to his question, I thought to myself how though I didn’t explicitly like guns—like, it wasn’t a hobby of mine or a deep interest in any capacity—I did like this gun, in a neutral and detached, very-much way. I had wondered if, when I was first signing up to work for the app, Marcos would in fact think that I had actually signed up client-side, and that the gun was for protecting our house, which I was self-conscious of, because I thought that this misconstruance on his part would make him think I was lame, and overly security-conscious. Fortunately, however, it appeared that he had never heard of the Haüs app and thus was not cognizant of the distinction between the introductory Haüs package for users, which includes a gun, and the provisional gun provided by the app for its employees, who operate in the place of higher-level app users. He just thought I had got a cool-ass gun. I took no pains in explaining my procurance of it, then, and just noncommittally replied that, yeah, I guess I like guns or whatever, and then I cleared my throat inconspicuously—like I had meaning to do it for a while and then just, did it.
“Check this out.” He fingered me towards his person as he made his way to his side of the room, despite the fact that I was only a foot-and-a-half away from him and there was no need for me to, say, follow him, or for his fingering me as if he was actually going someplace, say, more than a foot-and-a-half away—and crouched down. When he emerged from under his thin metal bedframe, he was holding a red cardboard box I would often notice whenever I happened to look upon that sublectulian area of our shared space. He reached in and pulled out the biggest gun I had ever—well, what must have been a military-grade weapon, to my best knowledge, which is admittedly scant. I knew my gun was unloaded when I was waving it around—a Haüs-branded leaflet inside the packaging informed me of this fact in large bold lettering (bullets would apparently be supplied to me on the day)—I had no such assurance, however, regarding Marcos’ massive gat, rendering his performance of the swooping of the gun around the room much more scintillating.
Sitting on my bed—which was on the floor, so—I didn’t have the best vantage point to see all the other goodies inside that red cardboard box of his; but I could see a swarm of black that rattled when he put the gun back and slid the whole affair back in its place under his bed.
“Yeah, man,” he told me in an easy, laughing manner. “Me? I really fuck with guns.” He kept on chuckling, again, rather good-naturedly. Truth be told, I was very pleased to have bonded with Marcos in this regard and finally felt a frictionless banter and comity between us in that moment. I was quite pleased.
My half of the rent, after all, isn’t so so much. Let me put it this way: it’s not so much money that if I scammed that amount out of Marcos, he would kill me; but it’s enough money that he allows me to stay alive since, by providing half of the rent, my living lowers the cost of his. This is another reason, besides that dreaded knock on the door harking at last the visit of the rictus-glimmering landlord—that I know is coming any day now—that I feel life-affirmingly compelled to scramble up the dough and even out my missing-rent balance. If I can’t pay rent, what good reason does he have to keep me around any longer? He has all the leverage. I have no friends to replace him, but he’s got like, three friends (each bigger, scarier, and angrier than the last, mind), all who would be happy (assuming, that is, that happiness is an emotion to which they have access) to take my place. My name being on the lease, I imagine, means nothing to him.
He’s begun screaming in his sleep, then cackling all of a sudden, then going silent again. (I can only hope he’s asleep, and that these unsettling locutions are involuntary.) It happens almost every other night and it wakes me up; after he does it I always have trouble getting back to sleep again.
Laying in bed my eyes just kept drifting over to that box under his thin metal bed frame. My mattress was on the floor so I had a great vantage point to just ponder it and ponder it.
I don’t even want to be remembered as a writer. I hope I’m remembered as a failed stand-up comedian. If there’s one thing I truly believe it’s that if you don’t tell jokes with words you tell them with your life.