Hello to the small group of individuals who read my substack. I have decided to restart Dogface from the beginning. When I started posting it on here, I was only on Welbutrin and had way more motivation to write. Now, I am on Butrin and Zoloft and I feel a lot better day to day but it's hard as shit to write fiction. I remembered that there are some 40 pages of this book from before I started posting it. I'll leave what I've posted up, and I'm going to put hyperlinks on every section so you know you're reading them in order (Experimental Humanities, anybody? Intro to Media? Right?). Sorry about not posting over Christmas; I had a mental health episode of sorts. I installed Thug Pro on my gaming laptop. Have you guys seen Station Eleven on HBO? I've been watching that. It's fucking beast. It's the walking dead for us nonbinary people or whatever. Himesh Patel is based. Mackenzie Davis is really good when she gets to kill people in stuff. She's really good in Blade Runner 2049; check it out.
chapter 1. chapter 2. chapter 3. chapter 4 part 1. part 2. chapter 5. chapter 6. chapter 7.
I'm not closing today, so I clock out at 4 after taking a dump at 3:40. I slip quickly from the docked iPad behind the counter through the back of Donnie’s and out into the alley. I’ve been texting my mom a ton today because we’ve gotta pay rent on our apartment soon and I just sorta found a subletter for my room here in the city for the semester. It’s barely July and the humidity over Mott Street feels worse than the block looks, clean besides the gaggle of my fellow fashion industry wage-slaves and beard guys outside the Milk Bar over here. I skate by them, realizing they are mostly the ladies from the rag & bone. I round the corner. I carve left onto Houston, make similar projections about young people walking and standing by the REI, the adidas store, the Angelika and Miss Lily’s. I beat a cab through an orange light. Rolling into the little park on 6th Avenue, I read a text saying Bart wants kombucha and is a couple blocks away.
There are no skateboarders, but a schoolyard’s worth of children play an unsupervised game of soccer on the unpainted blacktop and I push from my tote bag and try to warm up my legs, clad in the quick-dry shorts I threw on after my shift.
Bart is here now, sticking a little camcorder in my face and offering me ‘kombucha’ - what he calls mass-market import beers - from his rucksack. We pull a garbage can over and take turns trying flip tricks over it. Bart says he’s got a switch front shove, so I take the camera and squat by the fence to film him.
“It doesn’t matter if I get it,” he says. “This is b-roll.”
“Riiiight.”
He gets it anyway, and after a Modelo each, we skate to Washington Square to skate the monument ledges, but it’s mobbed with people so we ride over to Papaya King, passing the IFC Center and Bart’s old middle school, LREI. “You talked to Dana?” I say at a stoplight, about an old classmate who’s been home since leaving Springer in the middle of last semester.
“Barely, dog. But she seems to be doing alright.”
“Yeah, of course.”
“She’ll be at Brendan’s party!” he shouts, his urethane wheels roaring on the disparate patterns of asphalt on West 4th.
At Papaya King, Bart, loose white t-shirt, black denim fit for a Ruff Ryders video, and Jordan 1s cut down two eyelets, one leg atop his setup, griptape reading “XCX” in white spray paint, looks over at me and says “I fucked a girl I met here once.”
“Oh yeah? On this corner?”
“Yeah, NYU chick. Fucking, the worst person, but it was 2am and I was home on break just bugging, man.”
“You treat her good, though?” My voice cracks.
“Of course, dog. I mean, she was alright, just like, careerist, fucking garbo. We were talking about Tracy, right - like we had been talking about this girl’s friend who’s in a band and grad school for music engineering and mixing like the new Sunflower Bean album - and I was like, ‘My friend’s in the industry, too, she’s got a little label going, t-shirts, cassettes, all that,’ you know?”
“Yeah, Dogface?”
“Girl says, ‘Well, you can’t say your friend’s in the music industry if she’s not making any money from it. She’s not an “artist” like that.’”
“Gross,” I say. “I hate girls.”
“So gross, dog. She worked for fucking, like, Vice, too. Like, your bosses swallow these people alive, these people who are like, all we have. Disgusting.”
“I heard on a podcast that everyone sells out when they get a corner office," I say, “though I guess they don't have those anymore.
“Intern. Vice intern. 23 year-old intern.”
“Well, it’s hard to get into media,” I say.
“Sure.”
“Are you gonna get anything?”
“No,” Bart says. “Just remembered this place sucks.”
Bart zips his cell phone into his backpack and pushes down the sidewalk, daintily kickflipping before he rolls off the curb into the street. I carry a tote bag, and meekly ollie, my wheels squeaking as I land in all the bitumen of the road. He's explained to me that he cannot skate with his phone in his pants pocket due to his "wrestler's thighs." I understand. I retired a phone in 9th grade after slipping out of a crooked grind at the skatepark. I fell right on my hip. We stop to pick up Mena, who’s getting off from serving coffee at a spot called Rust further into the West Village.
“You work right by my psych,” I say, spotting her on the sidewalk.
“‘Hey, Mena, how was work?’” she says.
“Ugh, okay, ‘how was work?’”
“It sucked and I don’t want to talk about it,” she laughs. “Bart, hello.”
I met Mena through Bart, some hazy weekend senior year of high school. I think they hooked up at a hasbara summer camp three or four summers ago.
“How you doing?” he says.
“Oh, y’know. How was Donnie’s today, Joy?”
“Same ol’, same ol’. Shipping boxes, taping boxes. Surprised so many people want these fucking t-shirts.”
“Have you printed anything yourself?”
“Nah,” I say. "I helped do orders one time-"
“You really should, it seems, uh, so fun.”
We walk slowly back to Broadway and Lafayette. Mena, remarking on our sweat-soaked shirts, says she doesn’t want to be dripping before this party. “Let’s find something indoors for dinner.”
“You got reservations?” Bart says.
One halal cart stop later, we’re back at that park on Houston and watch a mixed ensemble of professional and amateur skaters skate the empty space. We greeted them with head nods when we arrived, but it’s hard to ask adults you respect so much for any more than that. Bart is fanning out a bit; he’s pushing me to ask a guy about an upcoming video.
“No, you do it.”
“Which one is it,” Mena says.
“Shirtless guy. Man-bun.”
“Oh… geez, he’s cute.”
“I thought you said skateboarders were finished,” I say. Then, to Bart, “Does Pierre even speak English?
Mena makes a face. “No, well, broke skateboarders definitely. These guys are older, and European, and you said, like, get Nike paychecks.”
Bart groans and cracks a beer. "Bands are back, right?"
“Can I get the camera,” I say. I stand back and get a shot of the two on that park bench.
In the warm summer light I record Mena asking Bart, “Didn’t Joy fuck a girl in a band last year?”
Bart smirks, cheats to the lens a little and says, “Yeah, dog, uh, Tracy.”
“Being in a band must be hot, then. Right, Joy?”
I can’t respond because I don’t want to fuck up the footage.
“Are you gonna grow your hair out again?” Mena says, rubbing the fuzz of Bart's fresh buzz.
“Thinking about it.”
“I’ll do it if you do.”
We stick around a little longer. Pierre rolls over to us and asks if he can move the garbage can from earlier over. “You got it,” Mena says, with an uncharacteristically bright smile.
I head home to take a shower even though Mena offers hers and on the train I look over what I’d written in my little journal that morning. I am suddenly reminded why I don’t return to my journals. My 10AM thoughts look like the scrawlings of a serial killer. The 5 lurches out of a station and my skateboard unseats itself from where I’ve propped it under the bench. A older black woman looks up at the sound, giving me a weird look before returning her gaze to her book. I underline You have the potential to be bad.
My mom and my brother aren’t home so after I shower I try and watch TV. Viceland is rerunning Intervention so I put the Roku on and let the screensaver run while I look at Instagram. Bart’s put a video of some friend of his getting thrown out of a bar on his story. Then there’s footage from today of me doing a back heelflip on flat. Marie from Bard saw the guy from Clueless at her work. Some old fashion guy died. Skating. Skating. @jack did something and the practicing artists I follow are mad about it. A guy fell off the Manhattan Bridge into crosstown traffic. My old roommate Yura sends me an image macro from a page that’s blocked me. I say “haha lol,” though I can’t see it. The kettle’s boiling and I let it run a little because no one’s home.
You doing anything tn? do you wanna go to this party, I say. Its this kid from my high school’s thing.
Skater party? Yura says.
Nah, i wouddnt do that to you.
Im up at school lol.
I start rewatching a skate video, a ten minute tour clip featuring a cavalcade of Nike/Converse riders and Central Europe’s Soviet plazas when I remember I need to buy beer for Brendan’s thing.
I roll off the sidewalk of my duplex lined street, the sky golden, and skate through the intersection to the corner store. From the fridge I swear for a moment that Miranda Greene, who I haven’t seen since graduation, is ordering a sandwich, but it’s probably some other white person. I’m at the counter handing Dave my ID when she taps me on the shoulder.
“Joy,” she says, “Hey! You live up here?”
“Heeey! With my mom, yeah. You just sign your… you just move in, or…”
“Yeah, I've got a little sublet until I find a place.” I look down at her white button-up probably from Aritzia and her big blue track pants and her Docs.
“In the Bronx, huh? - Yeah, just those and a pack of, yeah, you know what I want, Dave. Thanks, dude. - How’s it been since school?”
“I’m so glad I ran into you.” Miranda pays for her chopped cheese in cash and quarters and we step outside.
“Yeah.”
“Gimme one?”
“Sure,” I say, fiddling with the packaging on my Golds. Everyday the walls close in a little. I don’t even really live up here anymore. I don’t really eat deli sandwiches, I’m a chicken over rice guy. I don’t get up to much that looks like living at my mom’s. I eat and I sleep and skate a little. I don’t do all this weird I-love-New-York shit people from Springer or Bard or Vassar do when they move here. It fucking sucks here. I just say hello to my neighbors.
I don’t phrase my classist cynic spiel to Miranda, but I do walk her to the stoop of the apartment and give her a beer. I’m still alarmed that I've run into her.
“You know, I always meant to say sorry about Spring Fling,” she says.
“It’s fine, I figured you were on something.”
“Was it that obvious?” Miranda says, her snaggletooth revealed as she laughs. She’s placed the cigarette behind her ear, where it swims in her wavy brown hair, pinned back. Her eyes are green, I’m reminded, and her nose has a pugilist’s twist.
I think Miranda and I used to flirt. As an underclassman a couple times I’d stay late after parties and do poppers with her housemates. There’s definitely a forgotten Tinder interchange between us. I liked the photos at her senior thesis show, but I can’t remember much about it; I got pretty drunk pretty early that night.
“Hey, this thing is a little messy,” she says, beckoning with the sandwich she’s gripping daintily, as if her hands were claws. “Could I get a napkin or something?”
“Totally, we’ve got some upstairs.”
Spring Fling I am blanking on. I remember they had like, a chillwave headliner after 3 DJ sets and a lot of people dipped. I was like raging or raving or rolling or whatever with Bart and Yura not on any drugs but Red Bull and New England lagers and a child’s dose of molly then they went home and said they’d come back and I went into this gaming truck and played NBA 2K12 on an Xbox 360 with Chet from my sculpture class and then tried to get into the beer garden for maybe 20 minutes because I left my ID somewhere.
“This is uh, the living room,” I say, pointing, “and this is my room and my mom’s room and my brother’s. The kitchen-”
“Can I see your room?” she says, so I show her my room, wary of the cut-outs from Thrasher and Pilot scrawlings that line almost every open patch of wall.
I think I got a ride into town with Greg who had just played a set - I helped him load the DIY club’s CDJs and mixer into his Civic - and maybe Miranda was sitting shotgun. Miranda was sitting shotgun and she heard I had misplaced my ID and she climbed through the open car window and darted off in the dark towards the beer garden. She came back, with two plastic cups of froth, but stopped before she handed me one. Miranda spit in both beers, and, gesturing with one, said, "we're dating now," and Greg groaned and told us to drink quick so we could get past the police checkpoint on the tip of campus. I grabbed my beer and said, "alright."
“Gosh, it’s so quaint in here,” Miranda says. “16 forever.”
“Yeah, you’d think I didn’t have, like, any interests besides skating. I definitely don’t do that well, uh, enough to not have other interests.”
“But you’re good, like, at skating,” she says, casually falling back on my bed. “Y’know, I played hockey in high school.”
“Why’d you stop?”
She sits up and points to her nose. I nod. “Puck. You should see my senior photos. It's so fucked.”
“You wanna see my skate footage?” No, Joy!
We went back to Greg's and I then watched them do lines - maybe? - and then we walked to Bart’s house.
“We were making out and I spat in your face? You don’t remember?”
“A little,” I say softly, squirming on the living room couch as I watch myself fall head over heels down an 8 stair in Battery Park.
“Bart makes these?”
“We do them together.”
Onscreen I slip out of a noseslide and my board barrels toward a woman a little older than me. The scene cuts forward and she reaches into her billowing tote bag, unlocking her phone and handing it to me. It cuts again and Bart has zoomed into my hand and her iPhone as I enter my number. All the while we talk and laugh, she pulls at the fabric of my boxily-fit Ben Sherman pants, with a leg opening wide enough to swallow my shoelaces, and I poke at her baggy t-shirt.
“You take that chick out,” Miranda says.
“We saw that Alex Wolff movie, with the decapitation. I dunno, I blew it.”
“Ah…” says Miranda. “Do you like, fuck a lot?”
“Not a lot,” I say, stammering.
“I figured you did,” she says. “You were, like, pretty big at Springer.”
“Really? I mean, I get around, I guess. That doesn’t amount to much. I kinda hate the shit.”
“What about it,” Miranda says, leaning in. My mom might be coming home soon.
“I'm nearly a senior and my only skill is laying girls." Oof. "But once they get to know me… and I’m not… treating them right, it gets bad. And everyone’s always, like, buddy-buddy after, while I’m like an emotional disaster trying to convince myself I’m not in love, or too mean.”
“Sounds like boundary issues.”
“How do you… set boundaries?” Talking, you talk about it, but that’s always miserable and makes me want to leave.
“Well, you say, like, ‘I’m making a pass at you, Joy Davies. I think you have my number. Let me know if you’re interested.’”
“Well, uh, yeah, but that doesn’t answer my question."
A selection from my journal, penned the day after my 21st birthday.:
february 14 EVERYONE HAS THESE DOODLY TATTOOS NOW, BUT YOU CAN’T JUST POINT THAT OUT BECAUSE THAT’S MISSING THE POINT.
AND YOU WOULD LIKE TO BE PALS WITH THESE PEOPLE - AND PROBABLY WILL BE, THE REST OF YOUR STINKING LIFE
WHAT A DISGUSTING LIFE THE PLATFORMS HAVE HANDED US WHOLESALE, I SAY BEFORE A SLICK AND UNSEXY DM FROM A BUDDING FILMMAKER AND WAITRESS WITH A-CU C-CUP TITS AND OBSCURE INDOOR HANDBALL SHOES
MY MOMMY SUGGESTED I NOT DO THIS ANYMORE
BUT TO BE MADDENED BY WOMEN FOR WHAT LIFE HAS DEALT IS RIDICULOUS
AND I WOULD LIKE TO SEE HOW THOSE BREASTS HANG IN THE LOWLIGHT OF THE WINTER MORNING AND PERHAPS COMPARE THEM TO THOSE OF OTHERS
AND MAYBE THIS PERSON WILL FORCE ME OUT BEFORE THEIR ROOMMATES AWAKEN AND MAYBE I WILL TRUDGE TO THE HOME OF FRIENDS AND FALL BACK ASLEEP ON THE COUCH
"What are the chances that I've completely forgotten what she looks like," I say to Mena. We are on the 3 train going south to Clinton Hill for Brendan's party. "I uninstalled Insta and everything."
"Dana? I dunno," she says, not looking up from her book.
"I'm joking, of course..." I shut up, pull my phone out, remember my lie and do not open Instagram. Miranda is texting me now, saying she'd missed me and asking if I'd want to go out next week. Some night spot where she knows the booker. I say Just come by fora coffee and it was really fun to run into you today and you seem to be doing alright. She says Ya and Mena is now looking over my shoulder and poking me in the thigh.
"What's that," she says.
"Literally, tonight, I fucking ran into Miranda Greene, remember her? From Springer? She went to Riverdale and she dated that kid, um, Jeffy Matthews in the year above you at LREI. She lives in my hood now."
"Ya, Joy, isn't she bad?"
"She punched her boyfriend in the face once, 'cuz, well I wasn't there. I just heard about it but it was after he had pushed her down a hill in front of like everyone."
"Oh no..."
"Well, anyway, she's trying to have sex with me or whatever. I think she doesn't have any friends down here."
Mena uncrosses her legs. The lights of our train car flicker off for a second. "I don't like how that sounds."
"Yeah, me neither. But she's really beautiful. Not like, everyone says she's beautiful so your brain sorta decides for you because you're a weak person, but actually, like, beautiful."
Mena groans. "Joy, I don't want to make you do or not do anything but I sincerely think you should not get involved with this person."
"She seemed fine when she came by."
"I don't think it would be fair to her."
We're not talking when we emerge from the train station until Mena bumps a rat with her Hoka One One and screeches. Waiting to be buzzed in on Brendan's stoop I wonder how she would have fared in the caveman days.
"Hi, who is it," a dainty voice says, fuzzily through the intercom.
"It's Mena and Joooy," she says.
"Who?"
"We're Brendan's friends."
"Sure, okay."
I haven't taken photo portraits since the night I started drinking again. Like smartphone, flash photography. It was the winter before the last, the week before the end of the first semester of sophomore year and I had spent 4 and half miserable months not drinking and taking child-size dosages of different ADHD medications and soberly punching myself in the eye every weekday night as I came down from the Concerta. I took three courses, because I wanted to dedicate more time to a Latin class, but also because I had not made an effort to seek out a fourth after a scheduling conflict. I would skate alone or with Bart and watched myself slowly lose tricks. I lived on campus, and rededicated myself to binge-eating in the dining hall without alerting the suspicion of my friends and a Marlboro Gold in a shower robe every morning, as byproducts of my sobriety. I had one Tinder liaison go south, as I could not get it up. I had a slow-burn, DIY show hookup go south, as I could not get it up. Pearl was sweet to me and we exchange hellos - once recently at the Parsons Beacon's Closet with her hotter-with-worse-tattoos older sister. On Halloween, I got fixated on high-concept costumes and one night I railed diet Cokes in a bandana-ed tennis getup I called David Foster Wallace and people didn't get it or got annoyed at the frivolity with which I portrayed the postmodern great. Actually, the latter was one person - Dana Sproule - and that night I soberly tracked alongside her and Todd, a friend of ours, to his house in town and we hung out and wrestled and prat-falled and then I took the last shuttle to campus and a month later my friend Yura told me they'd fucked that night. I was pretty bugged out about the whole thing.
On the day I started drinking again, though… the specifics, as quaint as they were, do not matter. There was a Facebook event for a snowball fight, there was a snowball fight, there was music, I split a rack of Milwaukee's Best with some people, my first drink in 4 and a half months and got wasted and slept on Dana’s couch. In the morning, Sunday morning, before the first shuttle back to campus, a posse of the underclassmen who'd slept over and juniors who'd stuck around gathered to plot out brunch or something. I didn’t have any more money. Bart and Dana led a few of us down to the train tracks on the river that borders Dealership's west end. Sleet soaked through my Tennis Classics into my socks and I stayed mostly silent. The river was huge and ice chunks sailed down it and the sun was high and tight in the sky and I wanted to not be there, but not to be home either. I looked at Dana and Bart and really wanted to leave but it was too cold and I didn't want anyone to ask how I was doing if I ran off in a huff. The train went by, huge machine, symbol of the earth's destruction, or globalization at least, or the easiest way to get out back to the city, and so on, and on the bus back to campus I contemplated heading back down there alone as another train came by and throwing myself onto the tracks.
I'd forgotten what a hangover was in that moment, in the twenty months since, what a mood changer that sorta thing is. I wanted Dana to like me and I wanted people to get me and I wanted love to feel like anything in my life and I wanted to die.
I can’t remember telling anyone that story so I’m shocked when Dana asks me in a hushed tone if I’ve been “suicidal at all” since the semester ended.
“What?”
“You play squash at all since you got back?” We’re standing in Brendan’s kitchen, sequestered by the sink from everyone in the front room. She is tapping a cigarette over that sink, running water over the ashes periodically. It turns out that she has not been "bugging out." She finished her semester hours at Hunter, got some shit together and got a summer gig at GQ.
“No, uh, I’ve been skating. I’m trying to film a part for Bart’s video.”
“How’s that going?”
“Hard. Very frustrating.”
“Uh-huh.”
“How’s your summer been,” I say.
“Hard, like you said. Uh, frustrating." She tilts her head. "Why don't I see you around anymore?" she asks, her voice lower.
"I've, well, I haven't really been hanging out a lot."
"Ah. Work," she says, chopping a hand through the air, "skate," another, "chill."
"Yes."
"Me too, but no 'skate.'" There’s someone in the doorway, a girl. “Hey, you fucker. Haha, no, I’m not going to Union Pool again! Sorry, Joy, oh my gosh. You know what I experience there? Dread. And straight guys in gay leather jackets. Like, whose side are you batting for? I mean, whose team?"
“Yeah, hah, that place…”
“Look, I gotta figure out what this brat is doing, I’ll get back to you.” She drops her butt in the sink and leaves to talk to Eve Greenberg in the hallway. I nod at Eve - she goes to Springer, too - and pick at the tab on the top of my beer can.
“‘Your baby bangs are retarded, R-E-T-A-R-D-D.’ Wait.”
“Dana's your friend, Bart.”
“She is," he says, "I’m doing an impression of you.”
I rear my arm back to wack Bart in the arm. He flinches.
“Hey! You wanna meet my friend Myra?”
“No,” I say.
“Come on, she’s a scholar in foreign film and she soundtracks indies. Israeli.”
“Stop trying to breed me with your work friends.”
“But mostly she works with models - Hey! She’s not a work friend - Brendan and I met her at a fucking Barcade.”
“I don’t need more friends. I have enough. And I just ran into Miranda and she lives in my neighborhood now.”
"What?" Bart throws his arms out in surprise. “You’re fucking with me.”
“She came over, dude. She was in my house.”
“What? No, dog!”
I meet Myra and she seems alright. She’s got big eyes, with three whites like JFK, and I’m not so much lost in them as I am woefully stuck, reminding myself periodically to look away. Her voice is low and steady, her face inexpressive but smiley, maybe a bit Southeast Asian or something, her navy pants literally police-grade Rothco cargo pants. Acting naturally as Bart disappears, I remain on this white leather couch in Brendan’s dad’s apartment besides this woman who says she’s from Queens by way of British Columbia. I ask if she’d like a cigarette. Myra says no and beckons to her e-cig. I say something about secret killer chemicals and she laughs. Myra has got an energy about her, but when we discuss hobbies and she says she’s into shooting handguns and I bring up producing rap music on a cracked copy of Fruity Loops and skateboarding and she jokes that those are ‘whorish activities for a man,’ I do a little laugh and don’t think she’s that cool anymore.
“I rode my bike here,” Myra’s saying. “I’ll have to come back for it in the morning.”
“You’re like a health person.”
“Yeah, I mean I come from a fat family-oh, not a fat family but diabetes runs on both sides and my dad’s Samoan-”
“Like The Rock?”
“Sure, yeah-so I bike a lot and watch what I eat but it’s not crazy, it’s just normal stuff.”
“Normal stuff. Do you fuck with clubbing?”
I get up to pee and grab a drink and when I’m back with my red cup Diet Pepsi Vodka Myra’s somewhere else so I walk back to the sink for a smoke. Miranda has texted me hey you hear the grimes album. I say No is it good and she says not sure yet you should come by to listen and I say is that a come on and after a moment of an ellipsis bubble she says yes and I’m typing hot maybe Ill be around later when Bart walks up.
“You wanna play Rage Cage?”
“Yeah, gimme a second.”
“How’d you like Myra?” he says.
“She’s alright.” I lean in and whisper, “Maybe on the spectrum or something?”
Bart nods.
Over by this pretty granite counter set-up for table games I run into some old buddies from high school I haven’t kept up with and feel pretty weird that I probably won’t keep up with them after tonight. No one wins Rage Cage but someone always loses and I have to down a cup of Beck’s, cig butts and what is apparently guinea pig poop. I opt out of the next game and head upstairs to the roof.
Outside, Mena’s by the door and she sways a bit as she walks over. She asks if it ever feels weird to be surrounded by wealth all the time.
“Joy, I just looked up this place on Zillow and it cost 1.5 million in, like 1999.”
“Wow.”
“What the fuck, you know? Who allowed this to happen.”
“Ronald Reagan,” I say. “Michael Bloomberg.”
“Uh-huh”
“Where is everyone,” I say.
“Downstairs.”
“Listen, I just wanted to say that you said something about Miranda and me earlier that sorta hurt my feelings.”
Next chapter’s under the paywall. Pay me if you want to read it right away. Or just pay me if you’d like. Maybe a few bucks.
2
I notice once I’ve sat up that Miranda’s kicked the covers off the bed. Both sides of the bed are ‘her side' of the bed but on the side she's on right now, her skin’s in the open air. I can hear someone moving about in the hallway and front room of her apartment and try to remember where the bathroom is as I recover my Umbro polo from a stack of clothes on the floor. When I come back, Miranda's on her back, propped up on her elbows, looking out her open window. She's clad only in the Supreme boxer briefs she claimed were from a “lover” as a “gag gift.”
Miranda grunts as I stand sheepishly by the door. “Come on,” she says, motioning me to join her as she takes a swig from her Nalgene and looks out onto the street. “What time is it?”
“8:47,” I say, looking at the digital clock on her bookshelf.
“I think this guy who walks by every morning is gonna be here any second. Down there, I mean.”
I move in a little closer to see the street corner Miranda’s pointing at and she wraps one arm around one of mine and grips my hand.
“Hi,” she says.
“Hey.”
Out from an alleyway emerges my uncle Jamie, limping in Puma slides behind two small Malteses. He’s smoking a Swisher Sweet and on the phone with someone, probably my mom, heading in the direction of my apartment.
“I love this guy,” Miranda says, with a glowing, if absent grin. “Every Sunday morning, he’s out there.”
“Jim! Ey, Jim!”
“Joy? What’re you doing up in there?”
“I’m with a friend-a girl-I’m with a girl.” Miranda giggles.
“Oh, aight. You stay safe out here, Joy. They got all types of new diseases-”
“Alright, Jamie, I’ll see you at home!”
“I wanna meet him,” she says, quietly.
I lean back on my haunches. “I’ll introduce you sometime.”
“They don’t have new diseases. They’ve been mostly the same for a while.”
We sit in her breakfast nook with the kettle on and I wave hello to her roommate Katie who is leaving for work. I study the pinboard on the wall by my head. There’s a receipt from Turntable Lab, a letter from someone’s mother and a cat-themed calendar that’s still in June.
“You like being home for the summer?” Miranda’s saying, spreading butter on toast.
“It’s better than being up there,” I say.
“You gonna visit? I saw you up there last summer-”
“For the 4th. I’ve done that twice, to see a girl.”
“Who?” Miranda looks over at the kettle, to her hands on the table and back to me. “Sorry, I’m just curious.”
“Um, I was seeing Olivia Hirsch on and off.”
“Hmm.”
“What’s that mean?”
“I mean, I’d see you guys around… I thought you guys were dating,” she says through egg and toast. “Someone, someone told me you guys were dating.”
“Sorta.” We quietly evade each other’s eyes for a moment, before she catches me and snorts.
“That’s not funny, sorry,” she says.
“No, I don’t care, it wasn’t really a thing.”
“Is that the longest you’ve been, well, involved with somebody?”
I took a literature class with Olivia Hirsch my freshman year, but we officially met on Tinder, I guess, a semester later. She had green hair and asked me one night if I wanted to 'play Mario Kart.' As a one-time serious Mario Kart Wii player, I figure at the least I could get in some laps. I was drinking some tall boy IPA across campus and as a frequent underage drinker on a campus well-policed by a security team roving about in decaled SUVs ready to write somebody up, I did not take my time getting over there. My friend Tracy was there for a bit when I got to Olivia’s room and they were actually playing some arcane board game and I got really invested in not saying something strange. I desperately wanted this sort of attention. After Tracy left, Olivia showed me all of her knickknacks and this video she’d been working on and told me where her rug and wall tapestries were from and she talked about declaring photo as her major but not really wanting to do it. We left her dorm, the substance-free one, and walked north, up to the empty field behind my dorm that leads down to the river. I can’t remember what we talked about, but I remember being unnaturally easy, going along with everything. I’d look at her eyes and her white legs, sturdy, out of thick-soled combat boots and when I asked to kiss her and she said yes I put a hand on her ass and she pulled back and laughed at me.
Katie leaves and Miranda admits to me that she hopes the two of them can get close as roommates.
I soon find that I like Miranda. This is uncharacteristic of me. Once I cross the threshold of sex before marriage with someone, the mystique wears off and I find myself attached to a friend I fuck, or, more often, fucking someone I don’t want to spend any time with. But I like her. I like that she uses Dr. Bronner’s for everything and smells great anyway, that she swears by mushrooms for depression, that she drinks coffee any hour of the day and still sleeps well. That she cooks by putting away each ingredient the second she’s done with it, and that she mostly watches independent movies about middle-aged men finding themselves. I envy her work as a DJ, lost in tones and low-end, in crowds and listening rooms. I watch her organize files for hours, digitizing vinyl records and punching up Youtube rips. I watch her FaceTime her mother, with whom she has a healthy, normal relationship. Last night, she showed me photos of her from high school, of a scrawnier, bandage Miranda, and I thought she looked reserved. Not like I know her now. I watch her look at me, and I don’t doubt that she sees something like that past self in me. But you can never really know. That’s why British royalty invented the prenuptial agreement.
I’m out back at Donnie’s waiting for a delivery and Bart and I are texting about internet crushes from the past. i think chloe lmao uses they/them pronouns now, he says.
Good for them. isn't Mike ma like a nazi
Accelerationist raw milk gun guy. Surfer. i read his book
This courier rolls up and hands me a box of garment printing ink. I bring it inside, walking by a couple of the guys I work with skating flat in the back. Trevor asks what’s up and I tell him I’ve been checking out Antiwar.com, because “it’s pretty wild what’s going on in Yemen.” I sit by Rachel in the front and watch a woman and her skinny, box logo t-shirt-wearing son unfold Donnie’s wares. Rachel leans over and quietly says, “I think that’s Uma Thurman,” to which I can only say, “Oh, yeah?” because I’m no good at whispering and don’t want to be rude.
After work, Bart and I sit on stairs at Washington Square Park, smoking cigarettes as we wait for the crowd to thin enough so that we can skate the two steps underneath one of the statues. He continues our conversation from earlier.
“And then I find myself, on the Playboi Carti subreddit, of all places-”
“Uh, huh,” I say.
“Telling these kids that, no, “Pretty Girl” was not written by industry professionals. She made it in Garageband.”
“Yeah, sure.”
“What’s up with you, dude? You down on something?”
“I fucked Miranda. On Saturday night.”
“Miranda Greene?” Bart’s face contorts.
“... Yeah, Miranda Greene,” I sputter.
“Of course you did. Dude, you are dumb.”
“Ha ha, whatever makes me feel better, Bart.”
He sighs. “I think you just gotta play it safe on that casual stuff. It’s no good for you.”
“I know.”
“We got to take your dick away from you somehow, like it’s rehab,” he says.
“They have that,” I start. “I don’t need to go to rehab.”
“Anyway, you hear about Yemen,” he’s saying as I spot two women in Allbirds and those destroyed-hem skinny jeans walking towards us.
“Hey, you guys skate,” the taller one says, in a German accent.
“Can we borrow a couple cigarettes,” says the other one.
“Sure,” Bart says.
“You guys like New York,” I say.
“Ya, I like it. The girls so beautiful, but the men are so ugly.”
“Yes, haha.”
“Ah, thanks,” I say.
“Oh, not you. The black men are very beautiful.”
“Oh, thanks, yeah,” I mumble. Bart chuckles.
Later, on the bench outside Rust, Bart is telling me about getting clocked skating a nine-stair handrail in Miami. I’m looking inside and watching Mena mop the floor behind the counter. I don’t care so much about this trick - I’ve seen it on video a hundred times - but I like hearing Bart recount anything
“The girl I was staying with was like why is the ass of your pants drenched in blood-”
Now Mena’s hugging this guy and she looks happy for once and I realize she’s got work friends. Maybe I shouldn’t worry so much about her. Not that I do. I’ve never had a work friend. I’ve fucked as recently as two days ago, but I’m still bugging. Touch starvation is a thing I learned about on Tumblr and not from a licensed mental health professional but I’ve constantly felt pangs. I wonder if she feels pangs too.
“I did go back and get the trick though.”
“Is Mena still seeing that guy from Israel?”
“Nah.”
The next morning I eat a bowl of cereal as my mom buzzes about the apartment getting ready for work. She’s trying to get my brother out of bed for his internship so she’s going to and from the bathroom to his room, calmly cooing “Roger.” Today is July 3rd. I’m going up to Springer to hang out for the 4th, maybe try to barbecue at my house up there. Tracy’s subletting my room to some music kid. And I guess Yura will be there, and that transfer Michael, and Jimmy and Miranda - Whedon, not Greene - and Olivia who I haven’t spoken to in maybe 4 months.
Michael and Miranda W. pick me up at the Metro North station in Poughkeepsie. They’re listening to a Ween single and as we roll out of the little pick up area, Miranda turns around and leans into the backseat, putting a hand on my knee. “How’s your summer been, guy?”
“I’m doing alright, I guess.”
“Do anything fun?”
“I saw Alex G again.”
Michael lights a cigarette at a stop light and says if I want to smoke I should ash out the window. Miranda holds his hand and gazes up at his face. Isn’t love cool?
“I heard you’ve been getting with Miranda Greene,” Michael says.
“What? Joy’s having ‘s’ with Miranda Greene?”
“Yea, we’ve been hanging out.”
“Why?” Miranda, squinting over sunglasses into the rearview mirror.
“What is this, a deposition? She moved in by my mom’s. I ran into her.”
“Weren’t you seeing Olivia Hirsch?”
“I thought it was Olivia Franz,” Michael says.
“No, it was Hirsch,” Miranda W. goes on, “I was talking to her about it at the bar the other night.”
“Oh, so why’d you ask him, then?”
“I wanted Joy’s side of the story.”
I’m looking out past the barrier of the highway, at a general store marked “Marky’s” in neon lettering that’s whizzing by when I turn and say, “Oh, uh, we were seeing each other and then we weren’t.”
“That’s… interesting,” Miranda W. says.
“Knock it off, dude,” says Michael. “Dude just got here.”
“You brought Greene up… Look, Joy, I know stuff was going on in your life but it’s a little fucked up what you did.”
“Can I at least get an hour before we talk about my suicide attempt?”
“We’re not- that’s not what I meant-” I can see Miranda W. wince in the rearview mirror. Michael gives her a look of disapproval.
They leave me outside my house with a see you later and I encounter Tracy and a woman I’ve never met in the front room, watching a Michael Douglas movie. I put my skateboard and bags down by the kitchen and Tracy looks over.
“Joy! I thought you were Zack.”
“What’s up?” We hug and she points to her friend. “This is Jane," Tracy says. "They’re from LA.”
“Hi,” they say. “Just visiting. I go to Sarah Lawrence. ”
“Oh yeah? Cool.” They look at me a little long. “Nice to meet you,” I say.
“You too.”
“We’re gonna swing by the lake later,” Tracy says, “if you’re interested.”
“Yeah, just lemme know when. I’m gonna go to the bakery.”
I begin the walk down the road into town and call Dana because it’s her birthday.
“Thanks,” she says.
“You good?”
“Ugh, well, I’ve been thinking about stuff.”
“What sort?” I say in a tight breath.
“I just don’t really know what I’m doing this summer.”
We should hang out. “What did you think you'd be doing?”
“I figured my internship would be a bit better, and I dunno, I’d like spending time with like, my family or whatever. And this’ll sound childish, but I wish someone would come out, and like, sweep me off my fucking little feet.”
Ok, alright, alright, I get it. Sure. Whatever. “Dana, you’re 22 today, right?”
“Yeah, why?”
“Well, I think that uh, when you’re young, we’re young and sometimes things can be boring or even bad but they’ll be worth it sometime soon. But that it’s also alright to be, uh, dissatisfied, I mean, because shit can suck! But you can make a lot out of shit that sucks.”
“Of course, yes, yes.” Business, all business, that Dana. “Do you want to get a coffee or something?”
“That’d be real… nice. I’m at Springer for like, the holiday but I’ll be back in the city this week.”
“I think I need your insight, or whatever.”
“That’s really cool.” I notice a red Toyota - Olivia’s car driving by and there’s a dog leaning out of the window and it barks at me. Olivia doesn’t look in my direction; she’s listening to “Sittin’ Sidewayz,” so she’s probably occupied.
“You there? I gotta go, but let’s hang out sometime.”
“Alright, happy birthday, bye.”
I walk back over to my place and Todd is on the porch with Jimmy. I greet them both with a handshake and a let's get a beer and step inside.
“This isn’t even one of his ‘fucking’ movies,” Tracy says.
“God, you know he fucks like a mad man,” Jane says.
“You’d fuck him,” says Tracy.
“Shut up, you bitch!” They laugh.
I feel like a robot as I sit down by the coffee table. “What’s this one,” I say, crossing my legs on the floor.
Jane perks up. “So, Kathleen Turner, her sister’s been kidnapped. And, uh,-”
“Chandler’s mom… Oh, fucking, uh, Romancing the Stone?”
“Yeah,” they say, sorta wistfully, which I find confusing.
“You like this movie a lot?”
“Yeah.” Jane pushes their hair back with one hand. "Yeah, I really like it."
Tracy drives us to the lake in Livingston which I’m thankful for because it’s only ever locals and Bard kids over there and I don’t want to run into anyone from Springer.
“His name was Gunther Verner and he was racist, Tracy,” Jane is saying, about some dude they know from art camp.
“That’s like, not even a German name.”
“What does that have to do with him being racist? And it so is.”
“No, if it was like, a German-German name, it would be at least three names, stuck together.”
“You didn’t say that, you just said German.”
“I hate you sometimes.”
“You said Yura was here,” I say, looking out the back window over the lake, looming behind blurring trees and other cars.
“Yea, she is,” Tracy says. “Hey, can you play that song?”
“What song?” Jane says. “I need a name. You’re like my mom.”
“The Chameleons side project song you played for me when I picked you up.”
“Oh, yes, I remember,” and now they’re scrolling through a playlist on their phone.
Once Tracy’s SUV is parked, Jane leaps out, hanging halfway out of her bathing suit, skipping down the hill with a bundle of towels. Feels kinda dark to write but she's got a druggy vibe, or maybe that's what white kids from LA seem like. California has like 80 different groups of white people who came over at different times and they all hate each other and then pass that on to their children and their children. Tracy turns around, pulling her seatbelt off. “You should fuck Jane,” she says, like it’s a secret. “If you want.”
“They seem-”
“They’re down.”
“… Cool, I guess.”
One morning junior year I woke up to a weepy FaceTime from Olivia Hirsch. Through that compression artifacted videostream, she turned her phone to her laptop and showed me something I’d posted on a forum the night before. This forum, dedicated to a podcast this celebrity NYU kid does, often delved in issues facing its few dedicated users. She herself would post sometimes. Bart and I got into it freshman year. In a thread about relationship troubles, I’d related to another poster, who complained that girls he dated were “maybe beyond repair” by describing my relationship with Olivia with a BBS-formatted table:
Pros:
PTSD pussy
they love you
Cons:
PTSD pussy
babysitting an adult woman
She was heartbroken that I’d treated her utmost secrets with such nonchalance. She’d trusted me. I was just posting, I said, but I knew that didn’t mean much. That it was an insane excuse. She said she’d thought about bringing it up earlier, issuing some ultimatum, but had reasoned against it because she’d trusted me. I was mostly mad that people from my personal life were reading my posts. I would later find out it was Tracy who told. It took me nearly a week to fully fathom how insane I was being. The internet helps you not think about people if you’re already not thinking about people. Olivia wouldn’t talk to me at a party so I took the bus home and bought whippits and a six pack and tried to hang myself from my closet doorknob. I was listening to the first Adult Mom record on earbuds and after a couple tries I pulled the belt from my neck, doubled over and cried.
Apropos to that situation, I stopped posting, and turned all the way into my journal to record my thoughts, as people have done since writing's invention. That did not end the bad times with Olivia; I went on to make a series of bad decisions.
Yura and I walk down Broadway, towards the west end of Dealership and the river. Ahead and behind us are groups of other Springer students, trading in newly discovered ‘hard seltzers’ and a tested batch of cocaine that’s new to town. We do not dwell on how our Junes were; instead, we discuss a sex scandal at LREI, a K-12 we know some kids from.
“Where should I finish,” I grunt.
“Anywhere,” Jane whispers. We’re on a couch Yura’s mom gave us so I pull out and try to aim for their stomach. “If you wanted it in my mouth... let a bitch know first! Christ.”
“I’m so sorry, it’s been a minute. I'll go get some paper tow-”
“Nonononono, wait, stay here a minute.”
“Okay.” I try to curl up beside them and watch as they lick semen from around their lips.
“You were… backed up, it seems. Do you want to lick it off my tits,” Jane says. “My yiddies?”
“Huh.”
“What, ‘yiddies?’ It’s a colloquialism.”
“Okay.”
We lie beside each other, steadily breathing in the cool air of this early morning, the AC chugging quietly. I know why I did this. Coming up to school in the summer with nothing lined up made me really anxious. Not pit-in-my-stomach, ugly-cry scared, but uneasy, unwelcome. There’s never much to do. Jane is nice. Druggy? What an asshole I am. Clearly just a depressed person. They're really gonna hate it out here. They know Michael from when he went to Sarah Lawrence. They like Sarah Records bands and other things, also. We didn’t get that far. I thought the skull-and-crossbones tattoo on their stomach was interesting. I realize now that it’s the Death in June totenkopf and I don’t remember if that’s Nazi stuff or just some weird pagan thing. There’s a Celtic cross on the hanger of my skateboard’s trucks. I can make out Jane’s grin in the muted glare of the streetlight through the curtain, their face dappled with my jism, and can’t help but grin myself.
“You can go grab those paper towels, if you want.”
“Sure,” I say, rolling off the couch.
“You didn’t take too long, if you were worried about that.”
“I mean, I wasn’t,” I say, kneeling.
“You weren’t too fast, either. Like, I didn’t mind it. Don’t feel bad, you’re alright at this stuff.”
“Yeah, I mean, you said you like, didn’t want to come.”
“Yeah, and I was so gracious you even asked.” They cup my chin and look at me with doe eyes.
"Something funny happened to me on the subway- or I guess I noticed something funny," Bart is saying. We're out in front of Brooklyn's Borough Hall, eating meatball subs. It's a midsummer Thursday afternoon, and as such my shirt is stuck to my back and stomach, my suede Converse plimsolls are probably emitting noxious fumes, and the soles of my fresh white dollar-store socks have probably been blackened with sweat in the 6 or so hours I've spent skateboarding. I woke up early, for a day off work putzing about my apartment as I dirtied probably every pan in the kitchen making a paint-by-numbers omelette. The wifi speaker my younger brother caterwauled my mother into buying on her Walmart credit card is frustrating to use, but I got it to play a mix Miranda sent me a few nights ago. "I recorded this right off the mixer," she said, detailing over the phone how her set had gone at a club I can't remember the name of right now. "I can come play it for you, if you want."
"Um, I think I have to get up kinda early, but I'd like, love to hear it," I said.
"So, there was a cat in a bag," Bart says. He's put his sandwich down, leaning back against a metal fence with a look of satisfaction, which I figure must be an expression of some sort of self-fulfillment. He called me this morning, and among other things, like, "I think Mena made a pass at me," and "My parents have been working on this movie in Australia for like a month and it's getting lonely, just me and Tanya" [his maid, old babysitter, and friend of my parents], said he'd crook shuv one of those lime green metal chairs some enterprise puts out at Borough Hall in some sort of nasty High Line-esque public/private effort. I figured, sure, dude, whatever it's a nice day and my therapist rescheduled I'll come out skating with you. And when I emerged from the green line station and rolled up the hill, he was already trying, and sticking it. It took him like four tries on camera, and then he spent like a whole hour egging on my varial heel on flat, nollie backside heel down a curb (which became a nollie back 180 as I grew frustrated later on), and switch ollie a little flat gap line. I felt pretty supported and he seemed just stoked to be doing all this. "The cat is softly meowing, dog, and I swear to God, smiling at me."
"That sounds really cute," I say, gazing at a white Brooklynite walking with a bundle of packages, I guess from the Post Office. A luxury sedan is easing its way through the plaza, and an assemblage of skateboarders part to allow it by. An older man smokes a cigarette right by his kid.
Later, as we roll down the hill towards the subway station, off in different directions, me to a date and Bart to a show, he strings three sloppy nollie flips together, before looking back at me for a second. I give thumbs-up and wonder what movie his parents are working on.
"There's nothing wrong with having depression," Jane's saying, poking through the user interface of the digital jukebox of a Bushwick dive bar, in context of the Elliot Smith song they're searching for. "I just don't think just anyone should just get to die like that. Save early death for firefighters, cancer patients, pet monkeys who've learned too much about human society."
"Why should they get the privilege?" I say.
"Sacrifice. Suffering."
"What sacrifice does a pet monkey make?"
"You think they don't know they could just tear off the next human face they see and get tossed in a sanctuary? They're insanely powerful. They turn 6 and figure out they’re being patronized.”
"I don't think it's that simple... And depression is suffering."
"Sure," they say, turning back to the LCD screen. I swig my Brooklyn Lager and think quietly.
"The lowest I've been in a while," I say, "was somehow the quietest month of life so far, probably."
"Uh huh?"
"And I thought about it-"
"Who doesn't," Jane says.
"Not sure what side you're on anymore."
"..." They look up at me, eyebrows tilted, tongue placed between lips as if my next words were a problem to solve. But I don't think they're listening, really.
"But I figured I might feel better some other time, and people, like, loved me and shit. And I heard a joke," on a podcast, "proposing, like, fucked up Make-a-Wish wishes, like smoking a pack of Reds, or eating someone's pussy. Like a dying kid's dream being, like, a Tuesday for an non-dying adult. And I thought, man, if I stick around, I can see a whole lot of Tuesdays."
"Geez, Joy," Jane says, after a beat.
"You know, you're, like, not an empathetic girl," I say.
"Not a girl, and trying to kill yourself is bad shit."
"Sorry. That’s why I don’t want to," I mumble.
“What song do you want to hear?”
“The only Elliot Smith song I know is 'Coast to Coast.'”
Jane leans into the tall LCD screen of the jukebox, grinning. “That one’s almost upbeat.”
I go back with Jane to their mom's apartment, a two bed in Chinatown rented during a messy divorce. Jane's mom was transitioning from film finance stuff to good ol' finance stuff, and moved across the country. Proximity to Sarah Lawrence lends Jane convenient visits, often after club nights reach mid-morning or Tinder dates go sour.
"I'm sorry I said that stuff," they're saying, slicing a lime for their G&T. "I wouldn't like it if you died."
"That makes me feel a little better."
A photograph of Central Park in winter hangs over in the hallway right outside the kitchen.
“Do you still want to hang out?”
“Yeah, Jane.”
“Do you still want to fuck me?”
“Actually, no.”
“Was it something I said.”
I laugh. “That’s a joke.”
“Oh, you’re rude.”
We then sit in silence for a moment, Jane's got their legs curled up on my legs and I am absentmindedly poking at the hole in their chinos.
“You know,” Jane starts. “Tracy warned me about you.”
“Really? That’s surprising. What about?”
“Well, I don’t know why you’d be surprised, like, you know what you did.”
“Ugh, no, well, yes, I just thought Tracy was backing us hanging out.”
“Not really.”
I am a little surprised.
“Tracy isn’t, uh,” Jane starts, “the most upfront person. She said you have a penchant for, what, oh - casual cruelty.”