Читать книгу MacArthur Park - Andrew Durbin - Страница 10

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After Miami, I returned to New York. Fall progressed to unremarkable winter. At a party someone said, “What do you do?”

“I don’t know.”

“Right.”

Nearly everyone I knew asked everyone they didn’t know, “What do you do?” This is one way to account for the days, by what you do, and everyone seemed to want to know what I did, whenever they met me. The truth was not much.

In the waning intervals of winter daylight I retreated to my windowless room in my railroad-style apartment to read and write, lounge bored with books I couldn’t finish, fiddle with sex apps and chat with strangers whom I’d meet after several vodkas, wait for spring, the spring that would force some change, whatever that might be, though that January and February were warmer than usual and everyone was always out, elsewhere, and so it was always a kind of spring, and no change ever came about other than the weather. I sometimes temped at an academic publisher near Central Park and spent my lunch breaks eating near Columbus Circle, on the rocks just past the memorial tower to the merchants who guarded the southwestern entrance. With time, the subway returned to reduced service. One tunnel would be closed until the following year.

Except for work I rarely went out during the day. I tried to write a novel—my first—titled The Shopping List. It was no good, and mostly concerned unappealing losers who scammed rich uptown families by shopping on their behalf, and eventually I consigned it to the trash bin on my laptop. I didn’t know if I could write. The Shopping List suggested that I couldn’t.

I climbed into bed with anyone. Climbed into bed with too many friends, too many strangers, and two different men in my building, one of whom had a boyfriend who was always away, though I suspected, finally, that there was no boyfriend and that he was just lonely but incapable of admitting it to strangers. Climbed into bed with a poet who was married and who later divorced his wife because he realized he’d liked men all along. I wanted to climb into bed with her, too, or at least with him while she was there, but neither of them would have the ruin I wanted to make of their lives. Their separation was amicable, though its spirit was greatly improved by an agreement, brokered a month into their separation, that I had to go from the poet’s life, and in their goodbye to me they both said how much they loved each other. I was another matter.

Went to poetry readings at night, tiny gatherings of the culturally dispossessed in the back of outer-borough bars with cheap beers and sometimes long-winded poets, each more hopeful than the next that their otherwise private genius might finally captivate an audience of ten to fifteen that, should the night be a good one, might also include a friendly small-press publisher who would print their first, second, or perhaps third chapbook.

Fourth reader of the night: “Hi, I’m going to read from a manuscript I’ve been working on, a project about …”

I loved it, that we would come together and not only listen to but believe in poetry as a real thing, as a thing worthy of all our inexhaustible gossip, hook-ups, friendships, the poems usually being somewhat secondary to all of this, an excuse to get drunk, extraordinarily drunk. I often stumbled home from the readings alone because I couldn’t afford the subway, cab, or bus back, and, in any case, I wanted to see who I might run into on the street. We were not so great at what we did—or at least I wasn’t—and I liked it that way: that no one seemed to care about the quality of any of this, any measurable greatness. We were tiny people, but our tininess was at times formidable.

I rarely read my own work during these events and lost confidence in what I did bring to the microphone as soon as I rose to whatever stage was available that night.

Fifth reader: “I’m going to read … it’s this new poem. I think I’ve. It’s.”

I didn’t go far. Often jobless or between jobs, I assisted Chris in his slow accrual of art when I could, moved expensive things between his lavish homes, until finally that became too much as the steady stream of these objects, what I had thought I loved, rendered art a gray, administrative task, one devoid of feeling. After a friend introduced me to another “patron of the arts” in need of someone to help him write a collection of stories, I took up ghostwriting in addition to temp office work. I wrote for other people: the unpublished collection of short fiction; grants; ad copy; two science-fiction stories (both about mutant abortions) for an anonymous client, a pervy right-winger from Oklahoma, whose only encouragement was to “get more graphic re the details re the MUTANT ABORTION,” which I did, happily, all these alien guts bursting from women and men (in the much more complicated second story the narrative required that a cruel man be impregnated by a gentle, kind alien female, his rejection of their child being some kind of nonsensical statement on baby life as an issue of universal importance, and not strictly a “women’s issue”); and about thirty exactly eight-hundred-word introductions to policy papers for an NGO in Lower Manhattan. All of it amounted to an anti-poetry that made poetry better when I heard it.

We, and by we I mean everyone I knew then, poets and artists, nightlife people, itinerant fags and whoever else wandered between clubs at night in search of a social and chemical fix, used to dance at 59 Montrose Street in Bushwick where there was an illegal nightclub called the Spectrum on its first floor, in what looked like an old dance studio. I never knew what it was or had been. I only knew that someone named Gage, who was from San Francisco, ran it as a “platform” for queer performance and dance. Was that the word they used, platform? I can’t remember, but that was the word people often used to describe these alternative spaces, at least in the thinky, jargon-littered prose of the occasional writing that emerged about this side of New York, usually in arriviste art publications: a platform, to balance upon. What did we call it? Mostly, it was for dancing. It had no word.

From the nondescript entrance of the building, which you couldn’t queue in front of in case the police came by to break up the illegal bar, you followed a long hallway that opened at its midpoint into what passed for a bathroom, or at least the remnants of a bathroom, semi-flooded with piss and mud, a room that stank of those two fluids as they combined into a shit-colored estuary on the tile floor, with two ceramic artifacts to urinate into on either end of this quite literal water closet, both broken and perhaps once workable toilets, and then on to the larger room, where people danced. Rank with the strong smell of human musk, sweat, spilled beer, two of the room’s walls were mirrored, and covered with finger- and hand-prints from all the dancers who had been pressed up against the glass at some point in the middle of the night or who, suspended in a turbulent and self-reflexive high over some subjective vacuum, had pressed their faces to the glass and had, in that same high, traced their features with their fingers on the mirror in an attempt to reorient themselves upon the permanent axis of their faces. The glass was always condensed with sweat. Scratched, scuffed, it was a recombinant mirror where the stains of others overlaid one’s reflection.

You could smoke inside so everyone loved it, a rare place to do so under Bloomberg’s anti-smoking sanctions, and by everyone I mean radical faeries, non-gender-conforming performers, women and men of color, trans people, some artists, a few writers, loners, the ignored, poor, thrifty, otherwise-didn’t-fit, all of them cute or beautiful or strange, mostly strange, which itself represented a category of the beautiful more important than any other I knew then, and while the Spectrum was only open every other Saturday or so in the early days, in 2011 and 2012, that is, it ran the clock from ten p.m. to the afternoon the next day. I’d dance, get drunk, occasionally take ecstasy offered by strangers, do whatever with strangers, “whatever” being, for a long time, this operative performance of any number of listless actions, sexual or otherwise, which I would mostly forget because “whatever” usually occurred on the extreme end of some befogged blackout, the wobbly edges of any capable vision of “whatever” usually involving the confused closeness of bodies, mine and others’. There was nothing very romantic about this place, romantic in any downtown sense of a New York retrieved from its wilder past and reconstituted among a newly fashionable set. I liked it because it was near my apartment, I knew people who went every time it was open and who DJ’d there, and, importantly, it was very easy to find someone to take home.

I often met people on a torn couch near the bar.

(Eventually, this couch would disappear and a new wing of the club would open in the back, greatly enlarging the available space for hanging out as crowds grew larger by the mid-2010s. In the end, we crowded ourselves out—and the Spectrum closed, though a newer, but quite different version later materialized in Ridgewood, Queens a few years later. But we’re far from then right now. At this moment, let’s say it’s the very narrow moment right after Sandy and before I meet Helen Hunley Wright, the Spectrum is still very small, tight-knit, without much attention from the coming retinue of curators, gallerists, and European art tourists from Berlin on some kind of cocaine tour of how the other side lives, not so many straight people, and few if any pretensions to anything other than its own convenience as a place, or perhaps a platform, to dance and do what you want among others like you.

You, and by you I mean me, could also not dance: you could sit on a couch, smoke a cigarette, and wait for someone to talk to you and tell you what they wanted to do with you.)

A hot cloud of cigarette smoke hung in the air, up near the paneled ceiling, and the room had grown stuffier as we clocked past three a.m. People, mostly shadows that assumed brief human form between rotating lights, had begun to undress. They stuffed neon mesh shirts, things hung together by plastic or leather straps, faded jeans, shorts, anything they were wearing into corners, beneath tables, wherever you could hide your clothes, and these piles began to accumulate like soft sculpture. I was already hoarse from the smoke and alcohol, a bit dizzied from a joint someone had passed me in the half-light, at least three bumps of cocaine, and my head rolled on my shoulders.

“Hi,” a boy said. He dropped onto the couch and wrapped his arm around my shoulders like he knew me. He was handsome, thin, a little tattered by whatever he had done that night, with faint gray rings around his hawkish eyes, and a long, ovular blotch of red skin where someone must have sucked on his pale neck.

“Hey,” I said.

“I think we’ve met before?” He was shirtless, and he tightened his modest chest muscles as we spoke, drunkenly admiring his skinny body, his long, brown hair hanging over his shoulders. He wasn’t someone I remembered, but I would have had we met.

I shook my head: “Maybe?”

“No, for sure.” He was barely audible over the bass of the speakers behind us. At the other end of the room, the DJ blared driving remixes of songs by artists I didn’t recognize into a pulsating throb that shook the walls and floor of the club. I shook, too. “Definitely did,” he insisted.

“Yeah, maybe,” I said. “My memory’s terrible.”

“I’m Zachary. Do you want to dance?” I said sure.

He escorted me to the dance floor a few feet away by hand. The Spectrum was close to capacity—whatever capacity was, since no one enforced any clear rules governing the space. Most had worked themselves into a heavy sweat that, in the un-air-conditioned hotbox of smoke, drugs, and dancing, soaked everything, flooded down into the world itself with the run-off of all these friends and strangers so that the only remedy to the near-unbearable heat was to take almost everything off, as Zachary did, and what that slippery world wanted me to do, too.

He pulled my shirt off, threw it into a corner behind the speaker system, and then shimmied out of his pants, into his briefs before trying to unbutton my jeans. He slid his fingers under my waistband, but I pushed his hand away and said, “Later.”

“Later, OK.” He smiled and nodded. He glowed in the neon light, his sweat beaded in a band across his forehead like a liquid crown. The lights changed, from purple to blue to yellow to cold white, then back to purple, blue, yellow, cold white again. I glanced at myself in the mirror: my vision refused to sharpen into a clear view, but I was recklessly drunk. In the blur my features swam up in the smudged glass—my large, slightly hooked nose, full lips, cleft chin, green uneven eyes, with the skin around the left one’s lower lid a bruised, sleepier shade than the rest of my face. My short brown hair was slicked back. I was not so far gone that I didn’t recognize my own reflection, but I wanted to refuse it, give it back to the mirror, to whomever had appeared there. The dancers around us organized their clutter into a second portrait behind me, one that my face eased toward as Zachary tugged me back into their embrace. Maybe I was too stoned, too high on coke to dance with someone, I thought. Or it was too late.

“I’ll hold you to that ‘later’ later,” he said.

We went along with the crowd, sometimes with others who joined us, sometimes alone. I went and got us beers, then came back and found him making out with someone else. I turned to retreat to the couch, but Zachary caught me and dragged me over to the front of the club with his new friend. I opened the beers, handed one to Zachary, but he waved it off. The three of us started to make out while I held the two PBRs awkwardly behind their backs, fumbling with the cans while moving with the new boy, who shot his tongue into my mouth as soon as I arrived. Eventually, I managed to untangle myself from them long enough to set the beers down on the floor, before their four hands ferried me back to our threesome.

We were locked in a flat, endless no-time in the growing throng that swelled on the dance floor, distorting space and any sense of the hour. With the crowd, we pushed toward the right wall, up against the glass, into a pit of other dancers who closed in around us, tightening into an iron maiden.

In this we had no choice but to go at it, at one another, our mouths in hungry competition for attention, with Zachary’s hard-on pushing up against my stomach while the new boy, who was already just some other boy and no longer very new now that I’d been on the inside of his mouth with my tongue for what felt like a half hour, pushed his hand down into my pants and began to play with my cock. Out of the corner of my eye I could see our reflection in the mirror up close again, Zachary’s thin profile and the other boy’s darker eyes, which clicked into mine as he looked over, too, and together our features arranged and rearranged themselves in a collage of flesh tones lit in brief by the colored lights before plunging back into shadow. In the dense cloud of smoke, I felt this big, wolf-like hunger hound up my spine with each kiss.

Zachary abruptly dropped away. “Should we follow him?” I asked the other boy.

“No. Take this,” he said. His features were briefly illuminated as he opened his palm to offer me a pill, and I could see that he was handsome, with a square jaw and bushy eyebrows that he had studiously trimmed, before we were sunk back into blackness. He told me his name was Simon, though I couldn’t make out anything he said except an occasional “How are you?” as though that question mattered at all, could be in any way answered to a satisfying degree in the swamp of our surroundings, goodbye, I thought, goodbye, and slipped further into myself, away from him, “It’s molly, is that OK?” Perfectly OK. I’m fine, into it, I said, I’m always fine. He had thick, curly black hair that I kept running my hands through. I looked at the pill in my hand. I hadn’t taken it yet.

“Then do it.” I did it.

I woke up naked, rolled over to cover my face with a pillow that wasn’t my pillow and shield my eyes from the sunlight that poured into the room like concrete, burying me in the thick sludge of day. Remembered almost nothing, but noticed when I’d come to that the window across the room from me was not my window, didn’t look out to Brooklyn, but instead to Manhattan.

It was snowing. Or it was not snowing.

My head ached, and words refused to form into coherent sentences when I opened my mouth. Move your jaw and tongue, talk, what, where am I, but even the simplest question, what time is it, halted—and directed to whom, anyway? no one was in bed next to me—at the what that crept up on my tongue and stopped there like a nervous child standing at the deep end of a pool. (After the no-time of the Spectrum, time always re-enforces its regime with characteristic force: all that remains the morning after is the clock, ticking through a hangover like a wagging finger.) Where was I? Not home, but somewhere else, Zachary’s maybe, whoever Zachary was, or perhaps I was at the other boy’s place. That was where I was, at this boy’s apartment whose name warbled back as … Simon?

“You were pretty fucked up last night,” he said.

I pulled the pillow away from my face. Squinting, I could see his outline opposite me, the sunlight behind him. He was fully dressed, with a big water bottle in his hand. “Water?”

“Yes … Is this … Where is this?”

“We’re at my apartment,” he laughed. “We went back … to my place.” Recognizing my puzzled look: “Oh, well, maybe you don’t remember. I’m Simon. We came back here after the Spectrum. You wanted to. You said your place was a mess.”

“Yes. Right … right.” Simon. The boy with the pill who lives on Ludlow Street and who must be rich, as I had said to him in the cab ride over the Williamsburg Bridge. “Do you obsess about other people’s money?” he’d asked. “I just want to know, well, your politics,” I said, the last of the molly still coursing through my blood in a supercharge of emotions. We’d paused mid-make-out to watch the sun rise over Lower Manhattan as the car clipped along the empty bridge until we met a brief wakeup snarl on Delancey Street. It might have been snowing. All winter I kept thinking that it was snowing, though it was often too warm to stick or seemingly too cold to snow, and so the silver-gray clouds, like the underbellies of fish, kept their close, mindful distance, always refusing to break out of their steady overhead stream into an event. The weather did not like to make itself understood.

“I’m not rich,” he had said, though he was. That was his politics, to the extent that he had any. I said sure and went back to kissing him. My hands, on their own journey across Simon’s body, found their way into his pants as the driver eyed us in the mirror, neither offended nor interested but something else, a twinkling, passing curiosity that I thought meant he might want to join.

“Simon, right. Right. I’m sorry. It must be so late.”

“It’s four.”

“In the afternoon?” I couldn’t believe it. “Oh, god.”

“I know. You were out. It was like you’d died but you were breathing so.”

I grunted, tried to laugh, went into a coughing fit, then managed: “I definitely died.”

I leaned up in bed to look around. The room was small and oddly shaped, with the bed pushed up against the wall near two doors—one that opened to a kitchen with a shower in it and the other to a bathroom (or, really, to a closet with a toilet but no sink). From the bed, you could see the entire apartment.

My eyes finally adjusted to the afternoon. It was snowing. This was Manhattan. Simon extended the water bottle to me. Tangles of his curly hair hung across his forehead, down nearly to his eyelids. I could see him better, finally. He had serious, cold eyes set in a thin, serious face and a nose that was scarred at the tip, like it had been cut. “So,” he said.

I slid the comforter off. I was naked, and my arms were marked with dark bruises. I ran my index finger over the blotches, unsure of how they got there, and then looked up at Simon. “Last night was crazy?”

“Yeah.”

Simon. I rolled this name around in my head. Simon from the Spectrum.

“What do you do?”

“I’m a stylist,” he said without much confidence. I knew several stylists but never knew what they did.

“Oh OK,” I said.

An uncomfortable silence fell over us. He broke it with a funny smirk: “You should come up to my house in the country. We’ll have more fun.”

“Up where?”

“Upstate, duh.”

“Do you live upstate?”

“No. Well, yes, my parents have a house there. But you were telling me last night you went to school near Kingston. You apparently love going upstate.” He laughed.

I couldn’t remember what he seemed to recall effortlessly: whatever conversation we’d had, in the last few hours at the Spectrum, hadn’t produced any strong memories through the blitz of drugs and booze that had erased nearly everything else in my head save a few flickering seconds of the cab ride, jump cuts of us kissing, stripping, my hips pressed against his rear as my cock found his ass, his right hand reaching back to grab my thigh, squeezing it tightly, before he ejaculated all over the sheets and apologized for it as though we were at my place and it was my mess to wash out. My confused, “No, no, I’m sorry, actually.”

I wanted to dip my head in the fountain at Washington Square Park. I wanted to jump in the river, stick my head out of a cab, scream off the headache.

Simon turned to look out the window as I struggled out of bed and began to search for my clothes in the pile of his laundry on the floor. As I leant forward to pick up my socks my brain imploded between my ears. “Worst. Hangover. Ever,” I said. I felt slugged, maybe still drunk, maybe even a little high. I waited for him to say something but he kept quiet.

“But sure, I’d go upstate one day,” I told him, not recalling our conversation about it.

I would like that, he told me, “Let’s hang out again soon.” Sure, definitely. We will. My head throbbed. I should stop doing this, I thought, in what passed for a fleeting acknowledgment that I needed to course-correct in my life, though I knew I didn’t mean it, not yet at least, and that I’d be out again later that night, at some party, having already forgotten the brutal hangover of the afternoon, which, when I stood up in Simon’s room, fully seized me in its awful grip, like it would never let me go. “I’ll see you later,” I said, trying my best not to throw up. Do I have your number? I did.