INFINITYBOY

i loved my little studio out in the industrial park of north Brooklyn. i used to sit dreaming at a huge wooden table with a tiny black laptop that a friend of my mothers nabbed from deutsche bank. Or else I’d drag out the ancient typewriter and bang out slogans in the bygone font. There were two huge windows covered by long sheets of white gauze that were strung up to a metal runner on top. They made the most satisfying sound when you ran them across, either to cover or to reveal the jagged skyline of smokestacks and water towers and long brick buildings that were dropped here and there in uneven rows like filthy toy blocks.

I felt like I was stationed on a far off, forgotten post, where animals and children and people in severe, religious dress went roving through the darkened streets.

I loved when the rain came down and pitter pattered against all that metal, making it slick and shiny with rainbowed pools of water and oil.

The mirror on the door echoed with reversed and reflected light…

I burned incense to cover up the cat piss smell from upstairs and i listened to music and stared at the floor to ceiling high drawings made by the daytime occupant of the studio—portraits of naked men with huge erections and hair being blown back. He had a stack of carefully preserved gay porn magazines from the 70s and 80s which is where he found his often mustached, feather-haired models. I’d stare at their cocks, at their ab and arm muscles, at their hands at their sides—the fingers slightly spread as though ready at any second to grasp the object of their desire.

It was in this studio…this place I’d come to after dinner, armed with my notebooks and big ideas and leaving every nite with next to nothing to show for it, by way of a story or a poem or an article…where it first dawned on me that perhaps I would NEVER be able to finish a proper story that had a beginning middle and end, and that instead of being mortally depressed by this, as I had been before, I could try and see it as an opportunity…as a freedom from thinking about writing in the OLD way…

…it was upon having this realization, that the end of my career as a normal writer was the beginning of something else—that I took the first step on the path that had been waiting for me all along…

There among the naked men and the music and metal and mirrors--- TRUEBOY, Fitzcarraldo and Sterling Fassbinder were born.


happy birthday, jamie