Sunday, August 23, 2015

Final Crumb of X Redux

"This Place Is Romantic In A Way That Would Best Be Shared"

August 10, 2015

Mollie came over around noon, she had been waiting to hang out with me since 9 and had apparently woken up at 5 or 6, but I needed a few hours to draw before seeing her. I spent most of the hours between 9 and 12 lying naked on my bed, looking at my drawing, and pacing the first floor in my housecoat, relating the story of a love affair I'd had several years ago to myself in my head. I drew approximately 200 tessellating hexagons in wobbly perspective and made myself cry twice. I was excited for Mollie to see my drawing. After she looked, she sat down on one of my footstools while I sat on my floor cleaning out my one-hitter. Immediately, I told her that she should move to New York City. She is currently staying with her father outside of Boston, panicking about where to live following a three-month artists' residency in Venice, and is in Philadelphia for several days trying to decide whether or not to live here. I hadn't heard anything about her life yet and have not talked to her in about three months, but as soon as I told her what to do she decided that she was moving to New York. "I understand you," I told her. "I'm only telling you what to do because all I want is for someone to tell me what to do." "YES!" She exclaimed. We high-fived. For us, untethered from the Earth by jobs, pets, or lasting romantic relationships, ever trawled by nets of narcissistic mania, lack of money, and shitty trysts, this was a serious conversation. Maybe we're both gonna move to New York sometime in the next few months.  "We can't stay in Philadelphia. It's beautiful, but it's too lonely here."

I am listening to my new roommate have sex with a different woman than the one she introduced me to this morning. I am on Molly, the drug. I bought it from Laura two days ago when Laura showed up to a show having taken two pills, complained that it did nothing, then spent a large portion of the night gyrating on the grass we were sitting on, strangely cross-eyed, growling "Doesn't fucking matter." My roommate is fucking very loudly. I was very afraid of the drug, so I waited until the next day to do it. Me David and his boyfriend went to a place called "Devil's Hole," a small waterfall behind a grocery store in New Jersey, and I unscrewed the gel cap of the Molly and ate tiny dabs of the powder several times throughout the day. The Devil's Hole had a used tampon in it. I don't think the Molly did much to me.

 At midnight, the boys dropped me off at the train station in Newark, and I spent three hours getting home with a huge backpack and my bicycle. Many of the people on the trains, including a conductor, were visibly drunk and disheveled.  On the SEPTA from Trenton, an incredibly beautiful 23-year-old woman who I instantly identified as a stripper sat down across from me trying to charge her phone and told me everything. I couldn't stop staring at her, I immediately gave her what was left of my water and she took out three dollar bills and left them on the seat next to me but I still had to beg her to drink all ten gulps of it. She was dehydrated from shots, her phone was dead, and she needed to take a cab home from her stop. She had peach skin, freckles, and strawberry blonde hair, and looked so beautiful and also, like a child, talking into my cellphone to the cab company and mouthing, "Do you want to come home with me?" I absolutely had to say no.  She told me that she had wanted to be a Marine, done two weeks of training, but then her ex got out of jail, so she quit everything and moved in with him. He's gone. But meanwhile, she has broken her ankle and got a really bad burn on her left elbow from setting off a firecracker on a tennis racket, so the Marines are no longer a possibility for her. "What I really want to do," she told me, lighting up, "is build airplanes. How are they up there? It's all physics. The weather is all physics and that's how it happens. I want to know how to do that." Laurie. She wanted to hang out today, but I hung out with Mollie. 

I listened to Mollie talk for almost thirteen hours. I talked, too, for at least an hour or two of that, but mostly it was she. Or so it seemed to me, who is usually the one talking that much. At the end, she read me her diary as we sat in a bar, not drinking, because neither of us can afford more than one drink, and in fact, she had to help cover my four dollar Evan Williams and bitters on the rocks. We began on our walk from from my house to Center City, taking turns monologuing about our romantic situations.  In the last ten days, Mollie spent 20 hours then 30 hours having sex with a man who is now vehemently apologizing (via text message) for "sexualizing their friendship" and "ruining something pure." This man is 36. I know so many stories about men like this, but somehow, they still shock me. It was funny to me that Mollie (my roommate is cumming very loudly after a minute or so of quiet), when telling me the story and then, 11 hours later, when reading what she had written about it the night before - her diary a tiny notebook where the letters range from 3 to 5 millimeters tall, tiny pages of microscopic letters that she hopes are smaller than Walser's - she said the same thing as Saramax said to me about the boy she's sleeping with, when I was with her a week ago, at Coney Island. "You made me feel disgusting about my body and my sexuality."  (My roommate is cumming again. The Text doc keeps autocorrecting it to "cumin.") "Well, I'm happy for you that you got to have sex!" I told her, both jealous and sincere. "I know!" she said. "In two days, I had more sex that I've had in a year." 

Mollie was as afraid of Molly as I am, and just as eager to do it. Rushing west after eating Chinese, seeing her friend Sinead's art show, and stopping by Dick Blick to buy 10% warm gray colored pencils, which they were out of, we stood on the South Street bridge, having inhaled expensive iced coffees, and did our first dab. Mollie was mesmerized by the reflection of the skyscrapers sidewinding over the skin of the Schuykill in the wake of a motorboat. Later, as she was telling me about watching scrambled porn as a child, I remembered and realized that these two things look similar. Oh, and at "lunch," the only meal either of us ate today,  she told me about a night in Venice when she ended up with alcohol poisoning, being taken to the hospital in an ambulance boat. She had met a man on a bridge, gone drinking with him, and then he wouldn't leave her alone, followed her home and took the keys away from her before she grabbed them back and ran from him into an alley, where she passed out in a doorway. Gallantly, he called an ambulance and, as far as she can tell, did not rape her. In the course of this story, she told me about the women artists in their fifties who were also at the residency - one happy, with a family in Bologna, the other the head of the design department at the University of Honolulu and deeply difficult and depressed. I interrupted her to make her promise that if we crossed paths when we are fifty and found each other to be bitter and resentful, we would make a secret gesture. I am so afraid of that - haha, if I live that long. 

I wanted to take Mollie to Bartram's Garden, where I spend my time  in Philadelphia. Stoned, lathering myself into ecstatic states in a very earnest attempt to connect with myself and make myself happy, out of a lack of anything else to do in the hours between when I translate and when I draw, especially since Mollie left town and I don't know anyone else in this city except my roommate. Who is a nurse at Planned Parenthood and does not spend her evenings talking to herself, pacing a path in the imaginary forest, trying to learn how to move through space like a stingray. Making videos of herself falling down. Telling herself stories about her adolescence. Trying not to talk to her crush in her head and always just talking to her crush in her head. Telling him every detail of everything she sees and what she's thinking and doing while also fighting hard to be thinking and doing those things and not "telling him," trying to believe that he can't hear her thoughts and is not enchanted with her and with her, loving her. Sometimes I try to tell myself "I love you," and otherwise address myself directly, but it's hard.  It's hard to spend so much time alone and in your head. I want to be alone, sure, but I want someone there in my head with me - an audience. Something like that. I haven't figured it out yet exactly. As we walked toward Bartram's Garden, the sun low in the sky, I was astounded at how much Mollie had been talking all day and how she was still talking and how there was more and more for her to say - it felt so good to walk and listen, I love when women talk. 

We ate more Molly in front of the frog pond. "As long as we don't get trapped here humping the grass for hours," Mollie said.  Mollie told me about the Albino African frogs she had had as a child, which she thought resembled "water-logged bread," and whom she hated. "I even had a dream about them where they fell apart like water-logged bread." I remembered but didn't tell her the line Nadia once wrote me in an email, about how she was so anxious that when she tried to masturbate, she couldn't cum and lay there trying like "A white lady with her mouth full of bread." On the forest walk, I showed Mollie the movement I invented to try to resemble a stingray. She told me about kinetic ceramic sculptures of stingrays her father had made - he's an artist, too. The sculptures'  tails moved side to side - demonstrating, Mollie waved her arms. All of this is bound to have a serious impact on how I will attempt to impersonate stingrays from now on.

"Remember how stingrays look in Dutch paintings, when they are turned so that you see the faces on their bellies?"
"Yes! Have you seen the Soutine one?"
"YES."
"YES." 

The sitting rock was taken, so we stood at "Vista Point," which I decided (in my head) to rename "Scenic View" after taking Mollie to my other spot which was more like a point. We walked past the place where "The groundhog I always hang out with" lives and startled the groundhog into the bushes.Then we stood at Vista Point under undulating clouds of gnats, staring over the river at the rusted, egg-shaped silos and the factory chimneys breathing fire into the twilight. Little silver fish jumped at the mouth of the marsh. I wanted to take Mollie to "Bat Field," which I discovered ten days ago, before leaving for my trip to Boston and New York. To see my friends, especially Ainsley, to meet Ainsley's baby. In the field over "Fruit Tree Slope," bats swarm under the rising moon, swooping to eat fireflies. It was getting very dark, and the cicadas had long been replaced by crickets. Mollie told me the story of a vicious seagull she'd seen in Venice. It had been intentionally drowning a starling.  It was so beautiful there, we couldn't tell whether the drugs were working or not. 

"Either way, the good thing is," I was telling her as we walked out of the 'forest,' "I haven't thought about that boy in like three hours." I tried to remember if that was really true, and decided that flashes of thinking about him were different than really thinking about him. 
"And I haven't thought about [that man], either! Maybe the secret is being with bats." I know for a fact it is not.  

We went home and finished the rest of the powder in the capsule, leaving behind a "large crystal" for me to take on another day, drank cans of seltzer, and smoked weed before heading to the bar, where neither of us could afford the cocktails we had allegedly come for. We talked for another two hours, during which I monologued about my relationship with the book I am translating, how it informs the book I am trying to write, part of which I had emailed to Mollie while she was in Venice and which I listened to her praise at great length, contrite and gratified (I.) I told her about the book I had translated with Ainsley, and performed a poem to her from that book, a visual poem. She stood with me outside the bar and listened to me click my tongue 64 times - my sound interpretation of an 8 x 8 square of dots. Then we went back into the bar and she read to me from her diary. 

From a description of a residency on Cape Cod she did last summer, where she was living alone on the beach for two months: "This place is romantic in a way that would best be shared." She was describing carrying a cod's head up the beach toward the hut where she was staying, forgetting to breathe as she drew thousands of tiny lines (on what became an incredible drawing of her, alone among obsessively uniform ripples broken by coves of reeds, finding the head of a cod and carrying it through the dunes.) We'd talked about this before, when I saw the drawing; we'd talked about how both of us forget to breathe while we're drawing. I stopped her so I could write the phrase down in my sketchbook. "This place is romantic in a way that would best be shared." I had just been talking about that on the phone with Matt a week or so ago, drinking and getting stoned alone on a roof in Queens under a full moon. I told her what I had told him, "I am afraid that the feeling of wishing there was someone here to make out with me is just me complaining." It was so beautiful there, I told her, why wasn't I just happy to be there? I wanted her to affirm this notion, that we are not lonely, or don't have to be lonely in these worlds. She said nothing. I can relate. 

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