I write—press #2 lead to lined paper, refill an blotter pen, feed a roll of cashier’s heat-transfer into a Remington, watching as the return carriage backtracks, position its acrylic window, a crosshair of creeping shadows and keys between hands smeared, smudged with coffee grounds flopping limp on an elevated desktop—because of hubris. I write mainly because of dread. Because of fear.
Because of the way that I thumbed through the roll of quarters that banked up in my pockets, the aftermath of rounds of half-noon arrangements with stale bagel sandwiches and the strands of chow mein, pitched dry from a plastic bag into an open wok, a steam tray growing dim under heat lamps and curved one-way glass, smeared, frosted with fingerprints and the sugar from lattes and strawberry preserves. Or maybe it was ego. The mantra to write on a daily basis, trying to describe the way that some line forked over in my head while the vending machine sucked, tore away a dollar bill from between my fingers, all in exchange for a pearl matcha tea tasting like eighty grit sandpaper beneath a tongue.
Because of pride. Because I had no choice. Because I became so reckless one afternoon in 2013 and kept the craft skimming along ever since, trying to squeeze out all memory of the sludge, missteps—botched sentences and salvos the consistency of confetti instead of phosphorus and magnesium packed tight with a rammer that trail, tax themselves after they fall like plasticine beneath the baseboards—because it was my fault—or not, with what I otherwise could had been—those slivers that I catch, scroll past like bioluminescent kelp—a effigy of stagnation dragged, tussling against instinct into the halogen lamps—depravity, stagnation—some second rate MMO player condemned to pounding keys while taking periodic shots of concentrated Mountain Dew, haunted, like the 24hr feed leaking from the television set upstairs with limited-time items and points for the next armored gauntlet, the next fiber optic armored cape.
Because I grew tired of picking a fire button and playing one-sided games of Adventure and River Raid on my cousin’s Atari 2600, or habit watching the lone VHS copy of Lady and The Tramp, photocopied celluloid and hardwired video quaking, tectonic plates slicking off the rattan walls. Because I thought I was tired and going insane—staggering down a stairwell in the old east philosophy wing—before the excavator rippers and M80s and two-for-one paint pens arrived, gothic eyes and a vision muddied like the scales of smelt trying to glue themselves with the little sharpie portraits of Marxes and King Henrys and Aristotles and some passing mass that was a crucified Mortimer Mouse—kid gloves and wrists striking over stairwell railings in the old philosophy wing. Trying to steady myself with static-charged feet.
Because I’m broke. Because I wasn’t around to buy those accordion Sears Roebuck Foldex cameras and a roll of Eastman Kodak autochrome and one of those genuine WWII Ray-Bans while they were fifty cents and being burned off by the hundreds in backyard trash fires or being smashed with croquet clubs—the spoils of pickers and countdown digits incisioned across cash-out scripts and matchbooks creasing between the vacant dip—those ridges dictating the Minuteman arcs—a concave line: Holstein pastures and suborbital maneuvers to St. Petersburg and Pyongyang chiseled square into the enamel. Because the college kids, squatting on the brownstone breakers extending into the Pacific, swapping white lies and clucking their tongue while trying to shotgun Budweisers—told me to get lost. Because of the empty silicon digits that wrack, burnish themselves like a dry transfer decal, the surface of a lost JCB credit card growing dark with the silver medallion of Sun-Yat-Sen that the weathered groundskeeper passed off, cool and smoothed over with chops, sigils into my palms while fishing with a shoelace in a koi pond. Watching the sunlight strike, smooth, like cobalt powders splotched, almost like the aftermath of silly-string onto cardstock and asbestos panels and fiberglass over the saffron scales twitching beneath flecks of lily pads, the faces of apartment blocks and stockbroker’s skyscrapers rising like capacitors above Yangpu Park.
Because I feel something whenever I gaze, fix my attention to cross sections diagrams of pagodas, ballrooms, cathedrals—quarters of tempered steel, marble and rhythm rising up against weeping matchsticks razed to the ground with only a Starbucks and half-bashed plaque in its place.
Because I wanted to feel something, find something. Tried to root out the way that my senior English teacher always threw back, lodged a gaze to a magnified poster of the painting of Monsieur Lantin's late wife from our English textbook every time he peeled out of his desk to close tight the vinyl tension shades and would stoop over, batting around in the frail shafts of sunlight that leaked, bowed around as the air conditioning drafts took hold. Because I tried to leap–spring down entire flights of stairs three weeks before graduation in one try, a free hand reeling back for my belt loops as elbows swept out, braced for impact right-side-up on the landing, etched out in a unified smear of flesh and flannel angling with legs for a halved curtsy as faces emerged from the railings, impromptu balconies and outcroppings streaming up with brick the way that mosaics of old gods did—tumbling down from heaven, an mariner’s crossbow bolt speared through their golden armor, their stomach. Falling, falling with petals and sunlight gone, molten teflon tearing down through the skylight as the world seemed to broil, burst itself open—sutured and puttylike and viscous like a clock radio in a pressure cooker.
Because I forgot—because I lost—tried to allemande with a cyclone of learning management systems and turnitin checks and slammed face first into the earth—the way to feel—before Epson projectors and Epsom salt essays crusted the ridges of fingertips, tapered and translucent with blue light and dead men walking, hands clasping for wallets and meal plans it was the backside spine of bleachers flooded in the hues of dawn breaking over, muddied pastels like a beaten chocolate box or caviar tin between chain link seams and pennants swinging limp, primary colors receding between steel columns folding inwards. They had backed the stern—one unified V of chrome and taillights bared—flush with the draining shadows.
“We’re going,” the driver says, pudgy legs nearly skewing the steering column sideways, “we’re going—gunning the entire thing for the hills, the sea. And…aw hell, we’re gonna be gone.” His hair—parted back with cheap Walgreens pomade coupled with leather jackets, Hawaiian and Eddie Bauer polyester dead stock circling around, lashed down as a bundle to a ragtop in tatters—was slicked damp, the moisture, wax, sticking with the windshield angling upwards to pinch the thin halo of a Parliament cigarette—drooping low, down the creases edging a chin. The rubber stem of his boardwalk wraparounds goes slack. Slings off just enough for the whites of his eyes–iridescent and bloodshot. Almost reptilian. No matter. You don’t know how long since you’ve hungered for the hills rising up, lymph nodes against the horizon, pulsing, blackened and fumigated with refrigerant and discarded Anchor Steam and Heineken caps, ridges like flattened sequins—or that one button that you lost that needed to clasp together your shirt all flush and level clicking beneath the whitewalls as you intersect another turn, watching in the rearview mirror the trailing Chrysler Town and Country admit defeat, dropping back behind the beveled stern as the Swift truck ahead veers off—the wind leeward now—blasting straight into my face and chapping your lips, turned upwards in a thinned grin. Hands clasped firm over the wheel. The manual stick shift. Not some eviction notice. Not some bare-faced assertion. Because this wasn’t your room for once, eighties impala print wallpaper bubbling off the drywall, underwear and quarter-pounder boxes stacked up like little cairns. Because this wasn’t some sports betting parlor, Big Gulp and tobacco dip juice smearing over recessed cathode ray tubes. Because this wasn't how the dice landed. Because this wasn't what I expected. Because this was what I could have seen—sixty-five in a forty mile country lane, grains of sand sticking all over a interior tapped flush by the motion and a GPS gone feral raking through pinhole towns. Pescadores. San Martino. Loma Mar. Our skin rendered raw, gridlocked by neoprene and fiberglass and rust from the cross bolts where the steamship landing crumbled, shot off into the incoming tide—unadulterated by an inlet, a lifeguard's beacon or anchored sailing yachts. Because just last night, the drainpipe failed. Bled single servings of burning drink. Baijiu and India gin. Because on the final leg as two snowbirds, your rendition of Tyler Durden kicked my jaw in. Because the snuff ended up all wrong, too mushy and roundabout like boiled lint. Because the rolling papers failed to seal right. Because this wasn’t what I wanted to picture you, position you—cutting a mummified brick of weed and then hacking your guts out, all muscles shaking and pupils dilated with cheeks, branded and sallow and stumbling at the tail end of the PE conga line in the heat.