Mature Themes (6 page)

WARM LEATHERETTE

1

LIL WAYNE RUINED DEATH.

In spring 2013, the rapper near fatally overdosed on sizzurp, an hallucinogenic mixture of fruit soda and cough syrup, fortified with codeine and promethazine. He seized up onstage and shook in his leopard-print tights till almost electric departure from stage and world, was rushed to the hospital and emerged alive, but not before nearly disappearing forever into a fizzy, pharmaceutical afterlife.

Lil Wayne's “Love Me” describes women as agents of disappearance. The song not only privileges the male subject position in the various strata of intercourse, it valorizes the female as the necessary yet problematic participant that disrupts sex by her intervening consciousness. The female is an amnesiac object and the silent, organizing principle that enables Lil Wayne to proceed in the bliss of unthinking until he comes and forcibly “comes to his senses,” at which point he abstracts the woman into the multitude of frictional figures who oppose him. His bitches who love him obliterate his need to maintain absence of responsibility with regard to the milieu of differing relationships that constitute his socio-sexual life. It's only when they actively engage that he returns to himself, to everything, wasted on sizzurp in the AM.

WOMEN RUINED THE RETURN.

In summer 2008, two NYPD officers accompanied an intoxicated East Village woman as she made her way home from a local bar. They entered her apartment with her, left, and returned several times throughout the night to rape her while she was barely conscious. She sued the NYPD, but the court found neither the surveillance tapes, which showed the police officers entering and leaving her home multiple times, nor her testimony sufficient cause to convict the two men of rape. The NYPD nevertheless dismissed the cops in an effort to placate the mounting tensions between it and the public it “serves and protects.” Shortly thereafter, the two police officers left the city, the woman disappeared from the media that followed her, and I was detained in Fort Greene after I asked the police officer who had stopped me for an open container violation why he wasn't in the East Village raping women.

PRESSURE RUINED PROCEDURE.

Ten years after 9/11, the NYPD conducted numerous illegal operations against the occupiers camped near the site of the World Trade Center. I think you might remember this time, when we stood together in general assembly for hours and, later, waited for free pizza. What was, at first, a simple act of communalization became the far more mysterious idea, lurking around us, of the possible futures shooting up from the ground everywhere to form or demolish prisons, depending on your perspective. The NYPD dragged the protesters from their tents and into a mild winter. During the next year, the courts dropped the charges against many of the students, teachers, union workers, unsheltered people, and other activists after they became overburdened by the numerous legally-questionable cases. In those days, it was “fuck the police” and nothing else.

THE OVERBURDENED RUINED SYSTEM.

The poet Joan Retallack's poem “AID/I/SAPPEARANCE” makes language disappear in a procedure that virally decomposes the found jargon of scientific inquiry, mimicking the fracturing of the body's defensive mechanisms by the AIDS virus. One time, I had tea with a friend my age living with HIV, and he told me he was struggling, over tea he was looking at me while a fire engine got stuck in traffic next to us and he said, though I could hardly hear him, he was struggling with. Rivulets of clouds formed in the sky above us. It is never summer anymore, it is only the eroded time of atypical weather. I was sitting in the café, reading a poem by Joan Retallack while Lil Wayne's “Love Me” played so loudly in someone else's headphones that I could hear the song several tables away. I thought (forgetting what my friend was struggling with), this song sums up some degraded feeling of the promoted self, jet set and breeze in the mix of medicinal waste, all to get the fuck back, as another poet, Lawrence Giffin, once put it, into that burning (private) plane.

MY PRIVATE PLANE RUINED JARGON.

In an extract of a paper on Retallack's poem, the academic Bryan Walpert, whose work I don't know, writes, “Retallack uses two connected lines of the postmodern critique of science—linguistic slippage and paradigm-dependency— not to subvert or to critique science as an end in itself but to return,”

summer in spring

winter in fall

spring in winter

fall in summer,

“but to return,”

spring in summer

fall in winter

winter in spring

summer in fall

“but to return attention to the human subject, specifically in the context of AIDS,”

fall in winter

spring in summer

summer in fall

winter in spring

“but to return” to the plane that had been set on fire by Lil Wayne's retinue of sociopaths (a celebrity is someone who desires to tell a joke that ends in the death of the entire world external to himself/herself) after they poured sizzurp all over the aisle seats and dropped matches onto the soaked leather.

2

You could say that by this point the night was in an advanced state of decomposition, illuminated by the flaming jet the local fire department could not put out. We stood by the runway, near the tall security fence, and drank Four Loko in the cool breeze.

SOMEONE RUINED ANONYMITY.

To return to my friend in summer, which was a kind of spring, he was telling me he was struggling with paying his bills while remaining an artist. What's become a cliché reverts to a very powerful reality when it's married to economics. We both have no money and as long as we've known each other (almost ten years) that has been the case. When we first met he was addicted to crystal meth and loved volcanoes. He liked to text me quotes from his favorite songs, sending the lines over and over again: “Hear the crushing wheel / Feel the steering wheel”; “You are my Ducati”; “I love the way you lie.” He struck me as a thoroughly original person who would go much “further in life” than me, into and scaled by whatever indices of success, progress, and attention art could offer him in ten years. He's still addicted to crystal meth but has gotten over the volcanoes. In following his interest, I learned that volcanoes have a paradoxical effect on their environments, temporarily deadening life and disrupting fragile underwater ecosystems after they erupt. Later, these affected areas often become hotbeds of life, islands in the sea, and return with more force than before.

VOLCANOES RUINED SEASONS.

In 1816, the eruption of Mount Tambora eliminated that year's summer, resulting in very cold temperatures for June, July, and August; reduced crop yields; increased sickness; and general malaise. In July 1816, “incessant rainfall” during that “wet, ungenial summer” forced Mary Shelley, John William Polidori, Lord Byron, and Percy Shelley to stay indoors for much of their Swiss holiday. They decided to have a contest to see who could write the best horror story, leading Shelley to write
Frankenstein
, or
The Modern Prometheus
and Lord Byron to write “A Fragment,” which Polidori later rewrote as
The Vampyre
—a precursor to Bram Stoker's
Dracula
. Byron was also inspired to write a poem, “Darkness,” at the same time. Those days were like a magic show, each manipulating out of their occupants curious events in literature that created entirely new acts of expression via the arrival and dismissal of certain ideas they harbored about one another. Dracula ruined horror, but not before betraying his first author by finding another.

3

DEATH RUINED THE RETURN.

According to Wikipedia, the last member of any species is called an endling. The entry names five individuals who occupied this final slot in their respective evolutionary chains: Martha (Passenger Pigeon), Incas (Carolina parakeet), Booming Ben (Heath hen), Benjamin (Tasmanian tiger), Celia (Pyrenean ibex), Lonesome George (Pinta Island tortoise). Recently, I've started to say their names to myself before I go to bed, chanting and rechanting them like a nursery rhyme: Martha Incas / Booming Ben / Lone-some George / Cel-i-a and Ben-ja-min.

ENDLINGS RUINED DEATH.

Tim writes to me to say that an endling triumphs over extinction because it is literally the death of the death of its species. When they disappear or are stuffed and mounted in the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., they take with them the demise of everyone who might have survived them. I love these endlings and hope that love, within its power, can restore them to life. Or it is love, I think, that allows the future to finally emerge out of linear time in order to bring us back to the starting point. Or love is an engine that reroutes the disappeared and returns them to their rightful place in the hierarchy of things we've lost but which will soon reappear in the present more alive than they were before. Or.

Repeat yourself a few times, say goodbye, listen to Selena Gomez, look at Tumblr, take a shower, read the news, play “Love Me,” say goodbye, love me.

Repeat yourself a few times, read Dennis Cooper, text a friend, go home, say goodbye, drink coffee, buy a chair, listen to Selena Gomez, look at Tumblr, say goodbye, go to bed, wake up in the middle of the night, say goodbye, listen to Selena Gomez, look at Wikipedia, read the endlings, say goodbye, love me.

SELENA GOMEZ RUINED LIL WAYNE.

Selena Gomez's “Naturally” is a counterpoint to Lil Wayne's “Love Me” in its radical affirmation of the other as an animating agent within the self and suggests a status update in terms of the relationship between her and the subject of love. I stand on the roof of my apartment on Park Place and Nostrand Avenue, looking at Crown Heights in early spring, waiting for the rain promised by my weather app, listening to her unravel the logic of pure, scattering desire as she channels the voice of another, a voice which she internalizes to express in her own stunning hit the maximizing effect of listening to someone you love speak, a lover we do not hear, but who invigorates us, too. “How you choose to express yourself, it's all your own, I can tell it comes naturally.” The act of speaking as one would “naturally” speak takes her breath away, supernaturalizing her romance into the compatible forces of thunder and lightning. She is nature. Pink sheets, fluttering skies, summer noon, drawn shades, lava lamp, flaming jet, purple light, server crash, shadowed face, smudged dark, my home, your islands, Martha, Incas, sure thing, August palette, hands held, lips, lipgloss, Benjamin, new job, smoking weed, Lonesome George, as it was, Booming Ben, yes of course, Crown Heights, Celia, flash drive, sleep well, cab ride, good night, forever forever, forever certain, it comes naturally.

TRACK STAR

all day I dream about
my Adidas tracksuit

*

I wrote this fragment in my notebook a few weeks after I had fallen in love with the tracksuit. My obsession began when a friend wore an Adidas jacket and black pants one night to drinks at a bar. In the dark, I misread his outfit as a full tracksuit—a surprise choice for what I had (wrongly) thought of as a date. Later, when I told him that I thought he looked good in athletic wear, he said he wasn't wearing a full tracksuit, just the jacket. Still, I really thought he looked hot in his imaginary tracksuit and after that night I often fantasized about boys wearing the semi-form-fitting synthetic fabric—in bedrooms and soccer fields, subways and dive bars. The tracksuit defines enough of the body to describe its shape but not enough to reveal the higher definition of its contours. The tracksuit, like the plastic it's made from, works for different people in different ways, and this difference diversifies its social use. The tracksuit evokes the English, English skinheads but also the London riots of 2011, when thousands of impoverished Londoners exploited by shitty economics and ignored by the stewards of that decaying system took to the streets to smash windows, overturn cars, and set houses on fire. In the YouTube videos of these riots, many of the men are wearing tracksuits. The tracksuit evokes soccer players at the World Cup. It evokes NYU students who are too lazy to wear normal clothing when they walk down University Place to their ugly library on Washington Square South. Russian men can be seen wearing them while they beat up gay rights activists, who themselves are wearing tracksuits. The tracksuit is ageless and fits anyone for any moment. In this regard, the tracksuit is an image for an emancipatory politics that might emerge from the ecological wreckage of our moment as a flexible, evasive, even nonspecific opposition to the current economic configuration of “the world.” One size, more or less, fits all. Also, not. It's a certain gay look I currently like. My friend really did look hot when I thought he was wearing a tracksuit. The tracksuit is versatile: its synthetic fabric is optimized for comfort and durability, meaning it can withstand varying weather conditions and climates. Wearing my own Adidas tracksuit and jogging through Central Park in the fall, beneath the changing leaves, I think about the autumnal blur canopied over me that I never really stop to parse. Leaves change via a complicated process I look up and can say happens because of the presence of chlorophyll in the leaves, a pigment held in an organelle called a chloroplast. When chlorophyll is abundant in the leaf's cells, as it is during the growing season, its green color dominates and masks the colors of any other pigments that may be present. As daylight decreases and the days and nights cool, the veins that carry fluids into and out of the leaf are gradually closed off as a layer of special cork cells forms at the stem. As this cork layer develops, water and mineral intake into the leaf is reduced, slowly at first, and then more rapidly. It is during this time that the chlorophyll begins to decrease and the color begins to change. The leaf slowly lowers its green mask. I circle Central Park as the light shifts back and the evening takes on the sharp, clear air that carries the city light toward me, swamping the trees with the bright, urban night. I finish my run and stop at the edge of the park, near 59
^th
Street and Broadway. A man selling pretzels and wearing a tracksuit looks at me and shouts, “You need water?”