Let me tell you these muscle relaxers are working some magic shit on me. The invisible vise is loosening its hold on my skull and I can look all the way over my shoulder for the first time in years. It makes me wonder—how many of my problems that I assume are psychological are actually physical? It’s my fucking faulty genetics, man. I've always suspected that it's my bad blood and brittle, weak ass bones that are holding me back from true happiness.

Thank god for drugs. Of course there are side effects to popping over 2 grams of this shit a day. My pee has turned an unnatural fluorescent yellow. It smells like crab apples taste. Also, there are permanent pins and needles tingling up and down the right side of my body. I can’t feel my pinky and ring finger unless I rub the hell out of them. I play a game on the tram in which I stare and stare at my hand in my lap until I convince myself that it’s not mine. I look objectively at the fingers, the curves of the nails and the shape of the knuckles, thinking, what a weird ass looking hand that is.

Another effect of the pills is a feeling of temporal displacement. I’m out at sea, lost in the past and the future, while real life plays out in real time on the distant beach. I grip my icy elbow and close my eyes.

(I see the shoreline, I see those whitecaps)

When the floating is really deep I find myself thinking about Fitzcarraldo. Not so much about our recent fight, when he hacked into my system and snooped around my files and fucked around with my blog shit. Rather, I’ve been thinking back, way back to seven years ago when we met at Oxford. It was October, the day of the fog. Fitz and I happened to be standing next to each other on Magdalen bridge when it descended from the sky. It was a thick-ass cloud, threatening as hell, unfurling in banners glowing yellow and gray in the hot pink light of the setting sun. We watched, dumbfounded, as the fog tendrils uncurled around steeples and spires and fell across building facades like locks of hair loosened from a bun. The bridge emptied out as people scurried this way and that. I was rocking an old school Jets varsity jacket--I remember looking down and seeing that the white leather of the arms were completely soaked. The busses and the cars slowed down to a stop as the traffic lights blinked a faint turquoise through the haze. People stumbled down the narrow streets, holding one arm out for balance and swatting at the air with the other.

At one point I took a few steps to the side, not seeing that a person was still standing there, and stopped just short of crashing into him. I looked up and saw a shock of white blonde hair. Hands pressed on my shoulders.

“Hello there,” the apparition said. His accent was American with a hint of something else.

I tried to say hello but to my embarrassment I ended up sneezing instead. Not once or twice but five or six times in a row, quick and hard.

“Goodness! Poor Dear!” he exclaimed, and pulled a monogrammed handkerchief from his suit pocket. I noticed a large ruby ring on his pinky finger. His nails were impeccably manicured. His wide forehead was furrowed with concern.

“Let’s get you inside,” he said. “There’s a small boite just around the corner. I was just headed there for a pint.” He motioned to the other side of the bridge, already obscured by a wall of white.

“What’s that smell?” I managed, as I fought the urge to sneeze. “The fog smells like some kind of chemical. Something familiar,” I said, and then I sneezed again as I allowed him to put his arm around me and steer me through the nothingness.

“It’s a sort of acidic humidity,” I said, pressing the handkerchief over my face.

“Yes, I was just thinking the same thing,” he said. I looked up and saw a mischievous, knowing look in his eye.

He gave me a half-smile, the first of thousands that I’d receive over the years.

“It smells like men’s cum--the same smell concrete gives off just before it’s going to rain.”


groovy-apple

post-atomic

Last night, Jules announced that we should leave Amsterdam with a bang. “We need to get on the tear it up trail,” she declared. We were in a secret café called Luckymothers. I slumped in the seat like a rag doll. It was eight o’clock and I’d already taken my entire ration of drugs for the evening. Jules squeezed open the top of the stiff, lime green German envelope and saw that all of the pills were gone.

“You’ll have to learn how to save, my darling,” she scolded gently, as she tapped the envelope and sprinkled the remaining pill dust into her koffie verkeerd.

“The world’s cookie jar doesn’t have a bottomless pit.”

“Fuck the world,” I said, slobbering on my new nylon jacket.

audblog audio post

I skitter around the big media news.

Shit makes me nervous. But once and awhile you find one of these dazzling, iced-out moments:

part of the particular speed,

of a larger passing of time

(like in a rap lyric)

This is from CNN. It's about a wounded American soldier:

His wife, Susan Villafane, spoke to CNN via telephone from Fort Benning in Columbus, Georgia. She relayed her husband's account of how he sustained his injuries and the extent of them.

"When the rocket grenade hit his Humvee, it blew him out and a lot of shrapnel went into his left arm," she said. "On his forearm there is a big chunk of skin missing. They had to remove tendons and nerves to replace in his hand, and hopefully he will have the feeling and movement of his pinky and ring finger. I want to be there so bad... to touch him."

Their conversations have been wonderful, she said. "A lot of 'I love yous' and 'I miss you.' 'Give the children my love' 'I'm doing fine.' 'I'm okay.' 'Don't worry about me.' And he wants Taco Bell."

junkiebikes

Party People,

I need to get fucked up when I want to write some of this shit for you guys because it’s too fucked up to think about for that long otherwise. Deep down I’m a slow, thoughtful person; I’d be a little Buddha if not for all the shit that leaves me shaky shake like a beetle pierced through on a silver pin.

A flurry of emails from Sterling. Here’s a piece of one:

“Hey TRUE, remember the epiphanies of last summer? Remember all those things you decided? What happened to not getting drunk anymore? To getting yourself onto a schedule? I thought you were going to start by doing 45 minutes of rigorous reading a day. Remember, we were in the garage and you had The Phenomenology of Spirit under your arm, and you were saying, ‘I finally feel old enough for this.’ We went upstairs and listened to Young and Hungry lay down some Tricky vocals over that looped Neptune snippet he was obsessed with—the one that was like the satisfying click of a car door closing. Over and over, images of luxury cars, shiny, shiny, shine-on. I was messing around by the window with the bandanna on my head, being thuggish, rapping in Spanish--and shouting ‘Colors! Colors!’ like Ice T...”

Last summer was a thousand years ago, old girl. All the cells in my body were different then.

Here in Europe I don’t have time to “do rigorous reading” or “concentrate on a text”.

This is the New Age, Sterling, just like you wanted…

A new age in which I wake up and there’s work to do, straight away. I’ve got to wolf down a runny egg and toast and maybe a sip or two of Pernod before stripping naked and ensconcing myself in the bathroom with the scale and the baggies. Then it’s time for the car to pick me up and take me to Oosterpark to sell some {“that’s that shit”}, then I come back via tram, checking on the women in the sunlight with their shopping bags and purses. I push play on a mix and stand in the bathroom door for hours while Jules puts on her makeup, then I have to go around taking my pulse because I think I’m having a heart attack, then I’ve got to stumble around making a t-shirt and getting dirt and tea stains all over it in the process (sorry, whoever that ends up going to!) not to mention the cookie crumbs on the hardwood floor, the one I keep sweeping in a maniacal act of complete futility. Gingerbread cookies and toast with cream cheese—that’s my diet these days. That which escapes the garbage is eventually ground down into a fine layer of dust, like the bits and pieces of skin we shed all over, invisible except to dogs, who can see it through their noses.

Thesedaysthesedays.


anti

i'm disgusting when i drink

For a short while there, in England, Fitzcarraldo and I were best friends. He was gay but we started fucking anyway. This was right before he got his name, but I’ll refer to him as Fitz, to make things easier. Our first fuck was on December 5th 1995, in Oxford. Sterling was still in the States. She knows about this but not everything. She knows something's missing, she's been knowing that. Anyway, the student house where we lived threw one of its impromptu parties. We blasted Orbital and Annie Lennox remixes and got plastered on Victory Gin. I was so drunk that I came up with a theory that gin was originally a secret weapon developed by British spies. It went down as easy as water: you could drink an entire liter and it wouldn’t hit you until three hours later, at which point you unceremoniously said everything that came to mind before the lights went out. The last thing I remember I was sitting on the flat red carpet of my little room upstairs having a terrible argument with Fitz over the meaning of the Monkees’ “Daydream Believer”. When I woke up he was in my bed lying next to me. We were both naked beneath the comforter. I’ll never know how we got there. The shade hadn’t been drawn: gray light streamed through the window. There were at least thirty condoms scattered across the floor, none of them opened. The shiny wrappers made streaks across my vision. My eyes were burning; the lids were puffed and sickly smooth as they get after I’ve been sobbing. I made out an overturned CD in the corner, its silver surface covered with cigarette butts. Outside the morning bell began its flat, melancholic whine. What happened? I wondered, absurdly recalling the last scene of Kids, when Casper faces the camera, bleary eyed and hung over, and asks the same question. My hangover hadn’t hit yet but I knew it wouldn’t be long. I started to wiggle over to the edge of the bed when I felt a warm arm drape around my waist, gently tugging me back. Fitz muttered hello and pressed himself against me. I waited, stunned and frozen, until I felt him getting hard, then I said something about needing to get up and the bubble was broken. The morning bell ended its whine. I dragged my underwear and t-shirt into the bed and pulled them on under the comforter while Fitz rolled over and searched for a cigarette on the pile of plastic crates that served as a bedside table. I realized that in all the time I’d stayed in the room I’d never before woken up without the shade drawn, and the overwhelming brilliance of the gray light turned the place bleak and foreign. It gave everything I looked at the appearance of being forced out and exposed.

"What happened?" I whispered to the mirror over the dresser, which must have seen it all.

Something for the weekend

gapingvoid

I like the fast ones.

The ones who make the hours fly by like minutes.

I like the ones that manage to be cheap and fake and radiant at the same time. On Saturday, I went home with a girl I met at a village bar, where I’d sat for an hour against the frosted glass wall, bored out of my mind and sipping an oily coffee. I left a fiver on the bar every time the butchy Aussie bartender gave me a refill. In return, she informed me that the girl’s name was Angie and that yes, she thought I was cute. Angie wore a thick layer of powder that made her face noticeably lighter than the deep mocha of her arms and hands. Her hair was a thousand shades of store bought blond. There was some kind of oil in it that made it look wet; individual strands took turns flashing in the bar light. She wore low cut jeans and a short-sleeved variation on one of those ubiquitous peasant blouses. Her earlobes were weighed down with some old school gold doorknockers that I guessed weren’t being worn ironically.

I wordlessly bought her drinks, telling the bartender to make her anything she wanted. I bet correctly that she was young enough to go for that kind of style.

We took a cab all the way uptown. She leaned against the door and stared solemnly out the window. I thought about making a move on her but suddenly the vibe was all wrong. She looked tired in the glare of the passing streetlights.

My heart sank. I’d wanted so badly for her to be impressed and thrilled.

By the time we got to her place I felt so lonely that I half thought of calling it off. She seemed to sense this as she sighed and reached for my hand. I offered her the left, ungloved one. I heard what sounded like a cat scamper across my path as she led me down a narrow hallway and into a tiny dark bedroom. She bent over by an outlet and switched on what appeared to be a night light.

“I didn’t want to put on the big light,” she said. “I can go and find some candles.”

“That’s OK,” I said, looking around. There were children’s toys and games everywhere. She saw Blue from Blue’s Clues and a pile of slightly chewed up Golden Books. There was the smell of laundry detergent.

“My daughter’s with her Daddy,” she said, matter-of-factly. She led me backwards, her hands on my shoulders.

“Watch out for my daughter’s bed,” she said, as she kicked the day bed poking out from under the larger bed. They sleep side-by-side like this, I thought, peering behind me. The room wasn’t anything like I’d imagined. The walls were mostly bare, and the few decorations that were up were small, vaguely religious cartoons of angelic looking children kneeling to pray, pet an animal or plant a flower.

“Where’s the telescope?” I found myself asking.

Angie giggled. Whatever she was on had swollen her eyes into slits, making her look Asian.

“What telescope?” she said, coming closer.

“I imagined you’d have a telescope,” I said, sadly. I felt myself taking a step back, away from her.

“How could anyone use a telescope in the middle of the city?”

“Right, I know, I’m just playing.”

jennyeah

A Bred Buy Torn

Importance : normalhighlow
To: Address Book
CC : Address Book
BCC : Address Book
Subject:
Save copy in SENT folder

Fuck this shit, Sterling:

I miss you

I keep listening to “Letter to Memphis” by the Pixies:

“I’m sending a letter, I’ll send it right to you. I’ll send it to Memphis. I know that someday everything I needed, and I wanted—used to be that my head was haunted.

And all these sorrows, they make me mad. And all this violence, it brings me down.

I feel strong; I feel lucky.

(Trying to get to you, said I’m gonna get to you…)”

I stand on a bridge in this little city and imagine you somewhere way out there beyond the clouds on my horizon. Sterling, oh, where are you when I can’t lift my aching head, when the room is spinning and the color of the air is deepening. Demons fill the space all around me. I feel like I’ve lost my true north, I don’t know if I’m making the right choices anymore. I don’t know if I should be where I am, getting ready to go to London with a person like Jules. I’ve never met a more focused individual. Maybe this won’t make sense, but she manages to be completely single-minded about a wide variety of things. That is to say that her energy is like a light saber—she’s got concentrated laser powers, slashing through anything in her way.

It’s possible that she’s on crystal. I never see her eat anything except an occasional protein bar, and she only sleeps (at most) for two hours at a time. And then it’s not like she ever “goes to bed.” Rather, she passes out for a little while in the middle of doing something.

When awakens, she sits straight up and immediately announces to whoever’s around that she wasn’t sleeping.

We’ve never seen each other completely naked. That’s OK by me, it leaves something to the imagination, and you know how important the right fantasy is during sex. She tends to fuck me doggy-style. I’m on all fours with my underwear wrapped around my ankles. She keeps my t-shirt draped over my ass. I think that what’s even more pertinent than seeing as little of my “girl parts” as possible is that she’s also prevented from seeing the thick ass cock sprung from her hips.

She calls me dirty names.

Our act of fucking seems to be in contradiction to everything she’s trying so hard to be, but I guess that’s what adds the sweetness to it, the slight tinge of desperation that comes out. She starts moaning pretty soon into it, like she’s been waiting for it, dreaming about it. You know how it goes—it’s always the ones who make a big display about being in charge that need it the most.

I was thinking about it the other night when I was smoking and the funny thing is, when her dick is rammed up inside of me, it’s as good as disappeared. That’s probably the most opportune moment for her to picture herself without one.

(yeah, I know, not the first one I’ve castrated, hahahaha)

it kind of thrills me to see how much effort she puts into tucking her dick away, out of sight to the world, and yet she won’t get it cut off. Here in the city of sliced off dick, too.

She’ll let me touch it with her hand, but not suck it, which is fine by me.

(we get her friend’s car and find places to park, by the factories and buildings)

and since I know you’d want to know, I’ll mention that I like undoing the tuck and watching her erection spring out against her dress. I get hot I don’t know. You’re going to say it makes me gay, but fuck you. I like how big her hands are, how the tips of her fingers feel. I like when she grabs my wrists

(restaurants and bars, for later in the evening)

she’s like Shakespeare, she so fucking smart. A big crowd forms around her when ever we go out. She peers over their heads to keep an eye on me, standing all wallflower-ish in the corner. Everyone loves how she’s so together but at the same time falling apart.

The Black, Dutch, tranny Raymi.

Brand trueboy acronym? (check the site)http://www.wordsmith.org/anagram/index.html That's where I got the subject for this email. we could use it to send secret messages, or set up sites that are acroym's of BRANDTRUEBOY but having nothing to do with us.

galaxies of sites.

Should we do a post called btb presents tbt. BRANDTRUEBOY presents TRUEBOYS TITS. Jules took these pics that I think might work. I could cover my face. What do you think? I guess you have to see them first.

I feel like it’s all going to end badly, whether I do or do not go to London. The same as how it’s all going to end badly whether or not I come back to New York. Everything’s fuck, shit, death, ghetto of the mind. We’re all going to be dirt in the ground, no matter what decisions we come up with.

The thing is, it does matter. It matters how far away from you I roam. Fuck, I’m mostly sober and I still can’t say it. How at the same time I love and hate the idea of going home and seeing you again.

(I can feel it in my bones.)

I don’t need you to validate me.

I don’t want to be your slave.

I don’t want the going up and going down. The Elevator baby, maybe baby maybe shit

I don’t want you to give your dirt to me, all the broken things you think you are.

It’s not about America or Europe.

Countryside or cityscape.

It’s about having a place to call home.

I’ll have to settle down sooner or later. I can’t drive on this road forever, so to speak.

The truth is, Sterling, that I feel so evil when I’m near you. No, not evil. I don’t know. Lascivious. Like I’m posing for an ancient king on his throne. You lord it over me. You watch me with eagle eyes. You make me self-conscious. Everything rushes to the surface. I turn red, like blood to a wound.

I don’t know if I can take it right now; I’m so tired you have no idea

In the doorway I hear you sing.

(you can fix me up, girl, we’ll go a long way)

I play for you. I’ve written books for you. I’m your Dog on Wheels, like Belle and Sebastian.

(it took time that I found you)

You and I are like rock stars without the music.

I need to get over my phone phobia.

TRUE






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so punk

commandosolo

Hey man, thanks for the war.




It's really going to influence my art.

disastersofwar

saying goodbye to amsterdam.

jules and i arm and arm under harbor lights.

satellites.

something in the way

jamie

I’m waiting for the day…

The day of the New Age, the one they keep promising us.

I remember ten years ago, staring up at a poster for Nirvana’s Nevermind in a carpeted Sam Greedy’s in New Jersey.

I hadn’t even heard any of it yet, but just the sight of that naked baby swimming towards the dollar thrilled me to the core.

So I bought the tape and kept it in my school locker with my walkman. If my father had found something called “nirvana” in my possession, I would have gotten the pipe until my tailbone turned purple and green.

I listened to that shit, over and over, until I knew every last note. I carved symbols in my flesh and screamed in the woods along with Kurt until there was a chance that maybe (just maybe) I was on the verge of feeling something myself. His agony was bringing me to the brink, the shoreline between the conscious and the repressed. I don’t have the reference, but Lacan talks about a scene in a film (I think it’s Fellini) where a large, dark object is dragged out of the sea in a fishnet. What is it? A dead whale, a boulder, seaweed, a body? Something was there but I couldn’t make it out. It was pushing at my brain but I wouldn’t let it in. Meanwhile, I went to stupid high school house parties where it was played and I looked around, bright eyed and expectant, waiting for something to happen, I don’t know what exactly, but just something that wasn’t dull, but instead everyone just got more drunk and high, breaking shit and projectile puking.

Here was the message, here was the fucking communion wafer—the ticket to a brand new era of non-corporate rock. I waited and waited, thinking, “Yes! This is the shining moment!” but nothing changed, no one cared. The music industry did a flip-flop and the old boss became a new boss and all of us small time stoners thought, yeah man, now it’s our time, our thrift store clothes, REM listening time, but the new boss turned out to be the same as the old boss, just like the song taught, and millions of CDs were packaged into shiny plastic cases by Korean slave workers chained to their spot on the assembly line and subsisting on an eighth of a cup of rice drool a day so that half a world away some American jock asshole could blast Kurt’s voice from an Aiwa 6 CD changer MegaBass system bullshit while he raped an underage girl on a pretty green cul-de-sac named after John F. Kennedy.

(it’s a brand new era, it feels great, it’s a brand new era but it came too late…)

I totally stole this....cheers, Mr. Jasonlung

I've got a great idea that's fashion forward and very NOW. I call it "Peace Face", an all in one face mask, hands free cell phone. There could be a small tube that runs into a supply of oxygen contained in a matching backpack. The key will be to get a designer label on board. I was thinking Burberrys, perhaps?



I can picture homeboys with iced-out black silk over their faces, strutting throught the subway, free from the danger of a biological attack and tres chic at the same time.

What do y'all know-it-alls think? Can I get some capital, please?



FMU...soundtrack for the end times.

You Don't Watch It and You'll Turn Out Just Like Her

hardcutpublishing

What up Party People,

Time to set it straight, this Watergate: I don’t’ sleep around. Try as I might, I don’t have flings, I have partners. I went out of my way the other week to have a random, one night stand with a drugged out tranny who I was certain I’d never see again and here I am, helping her pack up the contents of her orange Dutch apartment. We’re blowing the ‘dam. London’s calling. My horoscope (I'm a Leo, don't ya know?)says I’m ready for the big time, baby. Bright lights, big titties. Jules—my tranny fuck-- is a tremendous editor. She’s helping me finish my film. We chopped up that shit into little pieces of sushi noir. Raw and dark. I’ve been using her Vaio to create psychedelic montage sequences.

Being with Jules is a little like going back in time. I dress and act like a boy for her. I sit perched atop the brown Formica of her kitchen counter, in shorts, my unshaven, hairy legs swinging like the kid she wants me to be. Meanwhile, she tries her hardest to play the part of the forward thinking girl...a budding analyst, spouting Freud and collecting matchbooks. She needs someone elusive in her life. A Don Quixote, someone to hammer down his point without hammering into her.

We try our hardest to have sex without touching. I think we’re both afraid of getting to know each other. Instead, we put our energy into imaginary scenarios: like the one where we dim all the lights in her living room and pretend we’re at the ball, and I’m the boy with a taste for blood, scarves and pinched countenances.

I gaze at her seriously from afar, until finally I get up the nerve to offer her a banged up Silk Cut that it takes two tries to light because her hands are shaking.

My hands are shaking too.

I wear a tuxedo jacket and my worn out blue jeans. There’s a formidable brass buckle hanging over my stuffed crotch.

I’ve written all over my right thigh with purple ink. It’s mostly illegible, except for the following:

“I’m the boy, who’s learned to enjoy, invisibility…”

(The Gulf War, Iraq)

memoryhole

Fuck, I think I’ve got my finger on the pulse.

Of what exactly I don’t know

Yesterday, I had the strangest sensation,

as I walked past the Grace Building

on 42nd, between 5th and 6th.

I had intended to take the B or the D

Jogging down the steps and then pushing through the turnstile,

With my usual half-robotic gestures

But instead I kept walking west

as if pulled by a mysterious force

into the heart of Times Square’s eternal,

pulsating daylight.

Something was unfolding, dividing over my head.

(the magic number itself?)



fish talks, town buzzes

I don’t care that it’s been cleaned up for years; the only time that I feel like I’m back on drugs is when I’m at Times Square. That was doubly the case, last night. The overwhelming blue-white glare washed the warm shade of safety off the surface of things. Digitized signs and logos and news clips appeared on gigantic screens and floated upwards, as though carbonated. Tides of people rushed this way and that, it seemed to me the crowds were even larger than usual. I was trapped on blocks filled with tourists, jammed so tight I could hardly move. Faces were white caps, around me bodies suddenly switched directions--long arms and darkened feet acting like hooks and anchors. They carried cell phones and shopping bags and made all the stereotypical gestures and expressions that you’d expect, based on whatever race and class they’re from.

I’m sick and tired off all the tiny epiphanies I’ve been having. Are they real or are they power of suggestion? Are things really coming into focus or is that just my imagination?



I drifted over to a man wearing shades and a ragged wool coat. He was sitting on an overturned plastic bucket, the kind a kid might bang a beat on in the subway. There was a worn out quilt bunched up around his ankles and some coins and bills in a brown shoe box. He had a wrinkled cardboard sign exclaiming, “Tell me off for $2.00!” in bold black magic marker. I slipped a five into his cup.

“Hey,” I said, and I turned up the collar of my Avirex. I didn’t do it in a snotty way, but I got a feeling that maybe the man thought I was doing it in a snotty way. He didn’t move, he just sat there, with his head cocked, as though listening. “I’m a pawn,” I said to him. “A pawn to women and a pawn to the buzz.”

“What’s the buzz?” came the ancient voice.

“You know—a buzz--getting high. Off religion, off sex, off drugs or even fucking exercise—you name it, I seek it. I spark it.”

“Some of those things is healthy.”

“Not the way I do them.”

“To excess?”

“No, the contrary—nothing I do is sustained.”

“Yeah?” he said, suddenly sounding like some blaxploitation era gangsta. “Well that’s because nothing these days is. Sustained. You got all the countries in the world and you’ve got a sea change going on out there.”

He folded his hands neatly on his lap.

“Nothing is safe or free."

He cocked his head to the other side, like a leather skinned child.

"Cigarettes are especially hard to procure, if you catch my drift, little soldier,” he said, a note of hope in his voice.

“Sorry, but I quit a year ago.”



I’m like Ishmael and Ahab and the white whale himself all rolled into one. And on top of that I’m a chick. I stare out at the horizon, obsessing and clenching my fucked-up hand. I wear a black glove, like Luke Skywalker. I call out a litany of questions to the empty lecture hall in my head.

"Why am I here?"

"Why do I have this unsatiable need to be famous?"

“Is it me who raises this arm?”

“Do I dare disturb the universe?”

Huched over my desk, trying to be invisible.

I’m going to write a letter to my chiropractor, by way of being busy.

Dear Doc:

Lately, when I’m riding the train, my hands feel like fish fins in my pockets, like the wrists are fastened on the wrong way. I’ve got pins and needles in my neck, obviously the blood flow’s getting cut off.

What can you do for that?

What can you do to make me go back to the way I was?

Before the smack chewed all the flesh off my bones

Leaving me with ribs like rungs,

Shoulder blades like broken wings

No more baby fat for me,

No more cherub round face.

Now my skin’s taut,

Pulled back like a trap.

when the big man sits down at the piano, nobody feels a thing…

Hey Doc,

I’m ready for the rush,

as I lay flat on my stomach

Your healing hands placed strategically on my neck.

The push from behind.

The afterlife.

freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose

Hey bitches,

Stayed up all night partying with Pearl, who’s billed as a Janis Joplin Female impersonator but is in actuality channeling the dead icon. Pearl crosses over like John Edwards, that fag. No lie. It’s not just an act: give my girl a super size push-up bra, a bottle of Southern Comfort, a stage, a spotlight, the opening chords to Bobby McGee and it’s on. Close your eyes and you’ll swear it’s the pill-popping, wide mouthed, white trash diva herself—in the flesh. Never mind that her apartment is in Bay Ridge, Pearl lives those flat out in Baton Rouge blues 24/7, drinking like a fish and bruising every inch of her body with her infamous fainting episodes.

Pearl’s the only person I know who has the honor of being 86’d from Kokie’s, in Williamsburg. The bartender told her to take it down a notch, at which point she went headfirst into the wall, crawled across the floor, pulled herself up to the bar and tossed that pitcher of water that’s always up there in his greasy-ass face.

This morning, Pearl and I ended up at 7a, where we had pancakes and a pack of Newports. I had on my bomber jacket and Persol shades. Pearl wore a gigantic sunhat that she had just bought in Chinatown, along with blue “leather” stilettos. They were under the table between our legs, a half-full bottle of cognac slid into one of them that we kept topping off our coffee with when no one was looking.

I asked Pearl how it was for her to be famous within a certain strata of NYC nightlife. It’s the same question I find myself asking all my friends, as each one of them happens to be well known for something.

As the years go by, however, they answer with less and less enthusiasm, as one by one they give into the jadedness of the city.

“Fame is what you make it,” Pearl insisted. “Just because people know who you are doesn’t mean you’ll be rich and never have to worry about making rent again. Fame is its own kind of currency, and you either have it or you don’t. You can’t buy it with money. A person can have a better job and a better car than you but it doesn’t mean that they inherently deserve any kind of special attention. You can really see this at work in a place like New York, where a waiter can be the big star and get into a club before the CEO of a top corporation. There are no nobles and there are no peasants. It’s one nation, under God, indivisible--just like the pledge says, and everyone wants the same things. While a vassal never got to eat as good a piece of meat as a knight, President Bush can’t buy a Diet Coke that’s better than mine. I might put out spliff ends in my empty can and he might not, but just the fact that we both have the same can is proof that we share the same ideology and the same relationship to that completely unwieldy, unrepresentable notion of America. We also watch the same movies and the same CNN ‘Headline News’.”

"And the Osbournes," I said, "Don't forget the Osbournes." I burped and blew my nose and thought for a second.

"Is that show still on?"


I want to be there when this one comes bursting out of the closet...

on 13th between 1st and A

interpol

rats in the city mazes

(some late night girl shit)

The black girl was all over me in the back seat of the Lex. Nibbling my neck, brushing her soft palms over my nipples. Just barely touching, making me crazy. I curved my back to press my chest against her hands.

Suddenly, the pale blond up front gave her some kind of a signal in the rear mirror and the girl stopped what she was doing and slumped back against the door, the wiry edges of her hair drawing little zig-zagged lines in the fogged up window.

"That's it?" I called out.

"That's all there is, you poor little princess," cooed the white girl. A cloud of cigarette smoke covered her face. She pulled the car over and put it in park.

She put her cigarette out and quite suddenly and unexpectedly pulled herself over the gear shift and part way into the back seat. Her face was positioned directly in front of mine.

"Oh, my sweet baby. Don't be nervous." She ran a dark red fingernail filed to a perfect round tip across my forehead. In the unbearable proximity, I could see every imperfection of her face--a hook-shaped scar over her eyebrow, strands of bleached hair over her top lip, the shine of blemished skin in places where the powder had come off.

hoo-ha

rock tragedy

Sterling Fassbinder says: So you obviously have this thing for Raymi

Yerbluetoy says: yeah, just like anti

Sterling Fassbinder says: huh

Yerbluetoy says: whatever

Sterling Fassbinder says: so what’s the deal

Yerbluetoy says: why, are you jealous?

Sterling Fassinder says: always

Yerbluetoy says: you’re such a romantic

Yerbluetoy says: anyway, the best love stories are about two people who are in love but never get to do it.

Sterling Fassbinder: that so?

Yerbluetoy says: yeah, they pine away for each other across glowing electronic superhighways of communication

Yerbluetoy says: trying to crawl across the other’s back, stuck together in this snakepit of souls

Sterling Fassbinder says: is that what we’re doing

Yerbluetoy says: I don’t know about you but I’m not doing a damn thing

Yerbluetoy says: bless me, I don’t have a thought in my head

Sterling Fassbinder says: somehow I doubt that, maestro

Yerbluetoy says: maestro, that’s right

Yerbluetoy says: I think I’m dumb

Sterling Fassbinder says: do you want to meet her

Sterling Fassbinder says: is your next stop Toronto, to that multicolored Romper Room of hers?

Yerbluetoy says: doubt it

Yerbluetoysays: I still can’t pull it together enough even to call

Sterling Fassbinder says: you’d seduce her, and together you’d become the next dynamic duo

Yerbluetoy says: maybe in the spring. That seems like the right time to go to Canada, if there is such a thing.

Yerbluetoy says: I don’t know how to seduce someone. That’s all you

Sterling Fassbinder says: well, it never worked with you, now did it, darling?

Yerbluetoy says: that’s because you thought I was for sale

Sterling Fassbinder says: you always say that, what are you talking about

Sterling Fassbinder says: maybe you’re just too scared to admit you’re gay.

Yerbluetoy says: that’s the thing about Europe.

Yerbluetoy says: nobody really has these sexuality discussions. It’s a relief.

Yerbluetoy says: they’re lame. I mean, who cares

Sterling Fassbinder says: who cares? Every kind of religious fanatic, for one.

Sterling Fassbinder says: some of whom would burn our asses down

Yerbluetoy says: couldn’t we just view the gay rights movement as the prequel towards a “fluid sexuality” movement, where there aren’t any determinations, just characteristics.

Sterling Fassbinder says: so at what point does a person like me, who’s got almost entirely gay characteristics for all possible descriptions of her swing over into being gay.

Yerbluetoy says: well, I guess with you all meters would be broken

Yerbluetoy says: Listen, I’ve gotta take off.

Sterling Fassbinder says: can you please come back to new york now.

Sterling Fassbinder says: isn’t enough enough

Sterling Fassbinder says: I’m getting a place uptown. You could stay there.

Sterling Fassbinder says: no rules.

Yerbluetoy says: where uptown

Sterling Fassbinder says: I don’t know, I’m thinking the Boogie Down or maybe Washington Hts.

Yerbluetoy says: so you don’t actually have a place yet.

Sterling Fassbinder says: this Williamsburg scene is so over.

Yerbluetoy says: I’ve got puffy red shit on my wrist

Sterling Fassbinder says: say you’ll think about it

Yerbluetoy says: like I’m getting a bad reaction

Sterling Fassbinder says: c’mon, darlin

Yerbluetoy says: I’m going to make a sculpture. I want lipstick containers, lots of them. I want a whole mound of the MAC ones that are shaped like silver tampons. Alongside this central shape, I want satellite mounds made up of cigarette butts. I’ll have them piled high, like lies and excuses.

Sterling Fassbinder says: talking to you is like watching a flower bloom on high speed film.

Yerbluetoy says: emphasis on ‘high’.

amstersam

Sterling Fassbinder says: …OK, but from this point on...

Sterling Fassbinder says: why are you in Europe?

Sterling Fassbinder says: oh, I bet you’re going to feed me some of your ‘I need to be in Europe to make art about America’—how the distance allows you to conceptualize the country in a way that is impossible when you’re within the so-called belly of the beast.

Yerbluetoy says: wow. I’d never refer to America as a beast—that implies something alive—organic in the sense of being an organism. I wouldn’t use a metaphor describing America as any one thing. A whole or all of America—no way, doesn’t exist.

Yerbluetoy says: America is in pieces. I say, fuck America.

Sterling Fassbinder says: OK whatever. I’m asking if you think that America is a hyperpower that’s eating up everything in its path, like Pac-man.

Yerbluetoy says: America is an inanimate, indeterminate thing, like the glow of fluorescent light on aluminum siding. You can’t call it an object but you can’t not call it an object.

Yerbluetoy says: America is obviously something.

Sterling Fassbinder says: 'Ineffable America'. Would make a good brand name.

Yerbluetoy says: America is in the details. It’s the way a pair of mid-range, 40 dollar blue jeans get better looking the more you wash them. Try that with fur or leather or silk. America is the way it feels to hear a really great soundtrack from a really great movie that you haven’t seen for years.

Sterling Fassbinder says: America is the secret interior pockets on a hiking jacket. The mesh lining. The thin Velcro straps, all perfectly utilitarian.

Yerbluetoy says: I say, god bless America.

Yerbluetoy says: ‘Hyperpower’…you’re referring to the term Hubert Vedrine used, the former French foreign minister.

Sterling Fassbinder says: yep.

Sterling Fassbinder says: a power so frenetic, it’s always already outside of itself.

Sterling Fassbinder says: I was going back over Zizek’s take on the symbolism of the Twin Towers collapse: he claimed, that by virtue of being two, the towers already contained their own Other—their own outside. They encapsulated the competitiveness of contemporary markets--the towers stood for the center of the VIRTUAL capitalism, of financial speculations disconnected from the sphere of material production.

Yerbluetoy says: Twins rule.

Yerbluetoy says: So do Dopplegangers, repetitions, reflections…all that Edgar Allan Poe, Borges, Hitchcock shit.

Sterling Fassbinder says: Is that why you bit my style? You wanted to be my twin...(-;

Yerbluetoy says: YOUR style!

Yerbluetoy says: give me a break your Japanese James Dean look was a copy of a copy of a copy.

Yerbluetoy says: about as derivative as you can fucking get.

Yerbluetoy says: your style was like listening to a copy of a copy of some black market CD—listen close and you can hear shit warble in and out of earshot. A swishing sound like a light saber cutting through the air. It’s the sound of things falling apart, digital entities losing their shape like elastic panties.

Sterling Fassbinder says: so by you sporting my look you give it a shape again?

Yerbluetoy says: I fake it so real I’m beyond fake.



Yerbluetoy says: I’m the blur in the photograph, the splotch on the canvas that turns into a face the more you stare at it.

Sterling Fassbinder says: for the benefit of Mr. Kite

Yerbluetoy says: I bring that rock n’ roll bleeding edge shit

Yerbluetoy says: my style’s like going bananas. Like losing your language.

Sterling Fassbinder says: there will be a show tonight on trampoline

Yerbluetoy says: I want to talk to horses with my eyes. I want to free all the animals of the world.

Yerbluetoy says: from the male, white corporate oppression.

Sterling Fassbinder says: Have you become a vegetarian yet?

Yerbluetoy says: Um, my negative behavioral training hasn’t taken adequate hold yet.

Yerbluetoy says: I haven’t reached my target goal as of yet! Ha!

Sterling Fassbinder says: Is that what you said in your e-mail to Raymi, about living off of Pizza Hut Meat Lovers Pan Pizza.

Yerbluetoy says: Word. It’s the Atkins’ diet with a crust.

Sterling Fassbinder says: I can hear your arteries hardening across the ocean.

Yerbluetoy says: Yeah? But who among us eats Doritos for fucking breakfast?

Yerbluetoy says: I’m so stuck here, Sterling.

Sterling Fassbinder says: yeah, those were some low ass times. I’d wake up, get fixed up, and drift over to the couch with a handful of chips. Celluloid dreamland.

Sterling Fassbinder says: Come home.

Yerbluetoy says: Cool Ranch. That was the flavor.

Sterling Fassbinder says: Please?

Yerbluetoy says: I can’t.

Yerbluetoy says: not yet.

Sterling Fassbinder says: Why? What happened? Why did you leave?

Sterling Fassbinder says: you were fucking Fitz.

Yerbluetoy says: I don’t want to talk about that.

Sterling Fassbinder says: I don’t have to post this.

Yerbluetoy says: No, you should.

Sterling Fassbinder says: so I’ll edit it, what the fuck

Yerbluetoy says: you were going to anyway

Yerbluetoy says: that’s not it; I don’t want to talk about it no matter what.

Yerbluetoy says: k?

Sterling Fassbinder says: You talked about it before.

Yerbluetoy says: So then why do you need me to talk about it again?

Sterling Fassbinder says: because you never told me.

Yerbluetoy says: what

Sterling Fassbinder says: what happened between you and Fitz that made you run away?

Sterling Fassbinder says: I know there’s something.

Sterling Fassbinder says: C’mon, I’m your oldest friend, you know you can trust me

Yerbluetoy says: I don’t know what I know about anyone, word is bond.


acid logic

favorite flavor

getunderground

slower

go slower,

till your heart stops

and you go leaping off the edge

I spent this weekend making things for my friends

(they're in my head)

i lived out the swell of a synth chord

something beautiful and cinematic

something by Air

or Echo and the Bunnymen

some 'why can't i be you?' shit

party people

a pattern is emerging. a way out through the labyrinth:

there are knowing looks on the sneltram,

my url's scrawled on bathroom walls

like a dirty name

(i'm bout it, bout it)

some anonymous someone hung pix from the website on the supermarket help wanted board

where they stuck out like psychotic postcards,

lovingly printed on pink and blue paper,

run off on a cheap laser jet

homemade, yo.

pinned with tiny silver pins.

i couldn't think of something better--a more apropos dissemination of the message.

free clothes

Maybe some of the people who sent me their addresses for the drunk/junkie zine will also be getting shirts that look something like the one above: ghetto, fresh and clean.

And maybe, just maybe, one or two of you will look really cool in said shirt and get laid a bunch of times and I'll clear some karma points.

Those of you who didn't send me your address, oh well, fuck-you.

Before she has a hissy fit let me admit up front that I deleted a post from Sterling. In it she's just going off about my sexual and psychological health and well being and how it's played out the way I'm "riding Raymi's brastrap" and how I should keep the blog hardcore and dial-up friendly (less pics), you know for the kids, blah, blah, blah, and all this other fucking dogma that just brought me down.

No, I'm not going to ever ask for money like Tony Pierce, not because of some outdated punk ethic but because that shit doesn't work. Even the man himself only has enough right now for a halfway decent spoiler on the car he's trying to cop.

There's another way to make money off this shit, party people. Don't think for a second that I'm not workin on it. No matter how fucked up I might get, no matter how low I go, I can still see the phrase through the halycon haze.

Can I help it if Drugs Rule Everything Around Me?

D.R.E.A.M.!

get real funny

(have another beer y'all)

This one goes out to you and you and you...

you could have been anywhere in the world, but you're here with me...

kill yrself

4real

I'm on my knees on a wet floor, stealing tiny gasps of air to avoid choking on veiny dick. The ace bandage around my chest constricts my breathing even under normal circumstances--now it's making it nearly impossible to get any air in.

I don't dare take it off, though, as it might give the impression that I think I can enjoy myself. He's already warned me about not getting wet, so that my "fishy female insides" don't stink up the place.

splinter

La Capital

I made my way through crowds, across squares, with rain clouds over ahead, to get to strangers and give them money. I got in and out of cars. I was given my cut and a kiss on the lips. They wanted me to stay and party with them. Strangers. I bummed a smoke and said OK.

I was alone and cold inside.

I’ve been trying all day to put the pieces back together, but that was some Spanish Fly minderaser shit we were drinking, so those memories aren’t coming back. All I know is that afterwards, I stumbled beneath shafts of early morning sunlight to bang on the chrome plated door of an after hours hole with an open palm. Ostensibly, it was for that one last drink. I ended up propped against the wood paneling by the bathroom instead, begging for drugs. The place was a mix of drag queens and underage trash, although I guess in Europe there's no such thing as underage. A fetus could walk up to a bar and buy a drink.

A beret wearing Sudanese lady led me into one of the stalls. She spouted pop psychology platitudes in French and called me her “little peach fuzz boy” in English while sticking coke up my nose and unceremoniously rubbing it on my clit.

“I don’t care for your nihilism,” she informed me. “There is such a thing as a depth of soul. If the conditions are right, I can see down a person’s interior passage—that never-ending hall of mirrors. I can see all the twists and turns; I know all the decisions they’ll make before they make them, like a master chess player.”

I sat on the toilet with my legs spread and my arm slung across my face, trying to argue with her, trying to make her see that there were certain things that people did which could never be explained.

My points got fucked-up though, as I became breathless thinking of the big black cock hiding beneath that cheap cotton dress.

“How does it feel,” I asked—indignant even as I pressed myself against the queen’s wide, lipsticked mouth—“how does it feel to always be right about everything?”

U.S. leaflets dropped on Iraq

Fog Warning

It’s the17:15 Intercity Train from Brussels to Amsterdam; I’m wearing a grey pinstripe, Dolce & Gabbana Suit with fishnet tights and $300 cowgirl boots. They’re black, with an ornate, Mexican Day of the Dead-style red rose on the front. The stitching on them is so intricate it’s pornographic.

I’ve got my leather attaché beside me on the orange seat. It was full of drugs when I left from Amsterdam in the morning.

Now it’s full of cash—stacks and stacks of tacky Euros.

My hair is neat and combed. The tightly packed train regards me with shy smiles and pardons. A couple of men try to talk to me, but that’s nothing out of the usual.

The Visine is making my vision blur, but other than that, I feel a breezy sense of accomplishment.

Then, at Leuven, a town of particular, personal interest to me, as I used to live there, the train stopped and a man got on and sat across from me. He was wearing hospital blue pants and a thin black leather jacket that couldn’t have kept him warm. He unzipped it to reveal a flimsy pajama top that failed to cover his handsome, scarred chest. I couldn’t stop staring at how the tufts of brown hair contrasted with the baby pink surgery slash marks.

He was nervous and uptight. He pulled at his hair and held his face in his hands. We got to the outskirts of town, where the Stella Artois brewery takes over the scenery and the train tracks cluster together to intersect and change directions, before separating again a few meters later.

He waited until we came into the clearing and picked up speed. The fact that we had officially left town seemed to fill him with confidence, because at that moment he started talking and wouldn’t shut up.

Of even further interest was that he spoke in English with a London accent. This immediately confirmed another quality about him—with his fine features and good hair, he was some kind of an aristocrat.

He talked about his girlfriend, “a right cunt” who’d taken off with his kids and his money. He talked about his boss who fired him, and his friends who abandoned him, the pub which had sapped his health, and the hospitals that had robbed him. It seemed that his whole life was one, drawn-out tragic event after another.

“But don’t feel bad for me,” he kept repeating, “I’d be Emperor of the universe if not for all the plastic shit in my body.”

plasticbag

From: "TRUEBOY *" [Save Address] [Block Sender]
To: rawkrawk@hotmail.com
Cc:
Subject: some jingle jangle morning when i'm straight
Date: Fri, 28 Feb 2003 00:50:02 +0800

REPLY | REPLY ALL | FORWARD [As Attachment] Previous | Next | Delete | Done
heyheyhohey,

can i get a witness? ok, then how's about a klonopin? you wrote a
while back about starting a pill blog. i'd be all over that shit a
zagats for pharmheads...sorely needed in this flatlined, black and
white world with the constant cloud cover behind which the spy jets
criss-cross, silver, silver jets' flames...anyway, currently i'm
spying on the dutch lower middle class, sleeping on a little orange
bed in a little white apartment that is one of many in a socialist
building that is itself one of many in rotterdam, which is a city
that is mostly an industrial wasteland. wait, my nose keeps running.
there. ahhh, i feel like i'm back in the town in jersey where i grew
up....only everything's much more convienient...take the concrete
stairs down to the dreary glassed-in lobby with its fake plastic
trees and turn an immediate left to the inhouse bar, then step
outside into the yellow air and cross the courtyard...voila, the
neighborhood coffeehouse. they know me, i buy one bag at a time like
a miser.

americanmiser

there's a mini pizza slut by the esso station. i'm on a steady diet
of ground beef and bacon slices. pan crust. it burns my stomach and
makes my breath smell like death. i swear i'm turning me into a
vegetarian ...meat is disgusting me, slowly but surely...so i go for
the nastiest meat possible. it's like licking a dirty ashtray to
quit smoking. if i keep going like this it's only a matter of days
before i'm fucking gandhi, shit.

(trouble every day)

i'm with the masses out here, drinking shitty ass beer, wearing last
year's gear...i've decided it's time to leave the netherlands, to go
where i don't know, somewhere healthy where i can get some shooting
(filming) done. but my buckets are dry, there's no euros in my
wallet, just a strip of tram tix and someone's credit card and your
phone number that i can't call but will call. i'd be raped and run
out of town if i tried to get into dealing blow in this city, so
nothings going on, financially.

electronically, however, everything is bright and clean and well-lit.
i'm writing a lit agent. he's going to put us on, raymi i know he
will,i feel it in my bonez. i used to hang out at his office, eating
soup and stocking the library under the warhol.

it's going to happen. did i tell you i'm psychic? but only when i'm
high.

fuck, come here and do a fat rail with me. i made a set of train
tracks going across the table...a train going nowhere, fast.

TRUE

--
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honkytonkasscakes

Inspired by TRUE's post below...

"To me, she was cooler than Wonder Woman."



Damn, that's pretty fucking cool.

I wonder how divas like Linda Carter, Donna Summer, Pamela Anderson, Cher, Diana Ross, etc feel about the fact that every night, all over the City, men spend hours getting ready so that they can go out looking like them. Has anyone ever asked? You'd think it would come up in an interview.

I need a full body wax before I could even think of doing drag again. Plus, I've gained weight. Plus, I haven't had a pedicure all winter. I don't have feet. I have hooves.

queen mother, y'all

Babydyke Sterling

TRUE-B-boy,
Yer blue toy
Never to forget me...

What up, my people if you with me where you at?

(to the front—to the back)






(NYPD stops photo-ops)

Sterling was the O.C.—Original Cunt. Wild at heart from the mother fuckin’ get go, too bad now she’s aged and melancholic, flaking out at the edges like a yellow wedge of cheese that’s been in the fridge too long.

She only wants to tell you about all her sad, beaten moments, like a washed-up cowboy farting on the porch and scratching his distended ball sack.

Fuck that. Back on the block she used to be the shit. In grade school she was the only girl rockin the shell toe Addidas, the only girl allowed in the back of the bus. I’d sneak awestruck looks back at her from the front. To me, she was cooler than Wonder Woman.

I liked the way her blonde hair was shaved on the sides and pulled into a tiny
ponytail on top, like Bam-Bam.

I liked how she wrote all over her jeans in purple and red ink.

I tried to duplicate the blue rings under her eyes with my mother’s frosted Maybelline eye shadow.

She carried a handful of yellow Number 2s in her jeans—sharp ass points sticking out of her pocket like needles. It made me squint just thinking about them. The sides were dented from pencil fighting—another field in which she was the only woman.

The two of us have talked plenty since about what she thought of my nerdy ass back in the day. Not much, to be sure, although she liked that I watched her. I had heavy glasses, a runny nose and shitty bangs.

I had Strawberry Shortcake on my lunchbox, given to me by my mother despite my protests that all I really wanted was a plain brown bag.

God forbid Sterling caught me looking at her; out of all the things she could pick on me about, that SS lunchbox was her favorite prop.

“Heeeeeyyy, old buddy, old pal!” she cooed, as she sauntered up the aisle.

“Please don’t,” I said, as she reached for my lunchbox.

“What did Mommy pack today?” she said, in a sing-song voice.

“OOOOHHH!” she exclaimed, pulling out my sandwich wrapped in wax paper. Then the apple, then the pretzels. Last but not least, the hated Strawberry Shortcake thermos.

“You don’t mind if I have a sip?”

“Please,” I whispered, as I felt the whole bus lean over.

“What is it, baby?”

“Please stop.”

“Stop what? I just want one sip? Come on, we’re friends, right?”

“Uh…”

“Right?”

Her eyes widened. I pushed at my glasses and sunk back in my seat.

“Go ahead,” I muttered.

“Great, thanks. Just one sip, I promise.”

Sterling popped open the thermos, brought it to her lips, and threw her head back. In the relative silence that followed, I watched, transfixed, as her Adam’s apple bounced up and down.

“Chug! Chug! Chug!” the boys in the back shouted, while I dreamed in vain of an abyss opening up in the road and swallowing the bus whole.

“Chug! Chug! Chug!”

(This would be a skill that would serve Sterling well in the years that followed.)

She gave a satisfied, “Ahhh,” when she finished. She wiped her mouth with her sleeve and burped. Then she hacked up a mouthful of backwash and spit it into the thermos.

“Here you go, tell your mom I said thanks.”

One time—just one out of many—I snapped and said something back to her.

“Fuck-you,” I said, my voice shaking.

“What? What’s that?! Ohhhhh boy! What language! No, no, no. Fuck you. You know what? Fuck your mom. Yeah, that’s right? Fuck your mom. What are you going to say now? Come on!”

I concentrated on the window. My cheeks were on fire.

“Come on! You heard what I said. Your mom.”

I huddled against the corner of the seat, as though trying in vain to hide.

“Whatever,” Sterling proclaimed. She sauntered back down the aisle.

“Your mom,” she said.

“Your mom. Your mom…ye-our maaahm…no wait, your mom, your MOM, YOUR MOM, hold-on, I’ve got it…your mom, no—your mom, your mom…”

She didn’t stop, even after everyone stopped laughing. She went on, like a crazy person.

“Your mom, your mom, your mom…”

All the way to the goddamn school.

diminished responsibility