“No, this is very unusual. I feel like Britney Spears.”
“Are we Britney Spears?”
“I think we are now.”
“Are we famous now?” Jason said.
“What does that mean to be famous?”
“I think it means, hmm, that people notice you. You are like walking down the street and people are like, 'look, that's so and so.'”
“I don't know if we'll achieve that level with this magazine.”
“The magazine is pretty big.”
“I've never heard of it. I was in a music magazine in England and it didn't cause any sales.”
“You don't think it will cause sales.”
“The only thing that causes real sales is if you are on the tables at Barnes and Nobles and Borders,” I said.
“I don't think my writing will land on those tables.”
“Neither will mine. I don't think it matters, though: I mean, from writing I've released a lot of emotions. People send me emails telling me that it entertained them. I've met people like you and the other people in there. When I come to New York City people buy my meals and beer. I mean, for a fuckass from Youngstown, that's pretty cool.”
“It never occurred to me to be a big writer. When I was in high school I remember really liking the story of Emily Dickinson. I didn't care much for her poetry. It was all right, whatever, Emily Dickinson. But I remember walking around my neighborhood thinking about Emily Dickinson walking around lonely in her house. Nobody was around. She was wearing white walking around her garden being scared and nervous about everything. I always imagined her sitting outside looking at a slug slowly making its way somewhere. She had the time to watch the whole thing, so she did. She would watch caterpillars and when a mosquito landed on her arm she wouldn't kill it. She would stare at it instead in wonder. I would ride my bike into the woods and be alone and stare at things pretending I was Emily Dickinson. Sometimes I would imagine Emily Dickinson was hanging out with me. I would think if Emily Dickinson only met me, she would have had a friend. I didn't think that about Stephen King. I didn't imagine I was attending a movie premier of my book, or doing long signing tours across the world.”
“I liked Emily Dickinson too. I read everything by Kerouac in high school. I liked the idea of a man traveling around working odd jobs and having relationships with random women. I liked that even though he never got money for writing until the end, he wrote all those books without ever considering he would get famous. He just wrote without concern for anyone. It was like a hobby. I mean, now, I don't even read his writing anymore. It all seems disjointed and sloppy at times and I've realized I'm not that kind of person. I'm not the kind of person that goes out drinking every night. Hell, I barely drink at all, this is the first I've drank in three weeks. I don't like drugs. I don't even think people should do drugs. I don't even think weed should be legalized. I like to travel but I don't sleep in my car. I get hotel rooms or sleep in well-ordered camp grounds in a nice new tent. I'm not like those old school writers like Hemingway or Pound who traveled all over the world and lived sweet lives. America has two wars right now; I haven't attempted to join the military. I don't care about fighting in a war. I don't find wars sentimental or romantic. Maybe they were back then, who the fuck knows, but right now the military seems like a giant corporation that requires a lot of exercise. I like comfort, I'm used to it. I like security; I want things to be normal. I mean it, it isn't like philosophical. I don't have any philosophical Kantian reasons for these feelings. These are just reflexes. I grew up in a normal little house on 5 acres of land in a rural part of Ohio. But it wasn't like we were in the country. I was ten minutes from a city with malls and shopping outlets. We had indoor plumbing and heating. My parents made enough money I never had to worry about lacking the necessities of life. I could say philosophically that it would be better for Americans to put down their cars and their excess and go back to the land, of outhouses and fireplaces. But I don't want that. I don't even know what that is. I don't know how to live a simple life. I like to go to work and go back to my house and check my email, turn on the lights at night and read a book. I like being warm in the winter. I don't even like working odd jobs. I didn't mind sweeping floors and doing stupid shit before. But now, I'm getting older and want to be respected and have some sort of authority in the world. I don't really care about impressing other people. But I don't feel like being shit on by idiot managers anymore. I think that is why I started reading Richard Wright and Richard Yates. Their characters are always trapped in the modern economy. Beatnik characters never have to work, they are always out, running around, having a good time. Even Bukowski is like that, his characters do work. But they are always having a good time also. I hardly ever have a good time.”
“Neither do I.”
Jason and I crawled through the window into the room. The photographers were taking single pictures of us. Everyone stood around and waited for their turn. John got his picture taken first. He stood smiling a huge goofy smile. He looked like a maniac. Then they went to the two girls I didn't know. The little white girl snarled and the Asian girl gave a pretty smile. Hu went and did funny things and made the girls laugh. I went next and pretended I was nervous and weird like I didn't want my picture taken. The photographers smiled at me to show that it was okay. I walked away and Jason went. He looked absolutely fucked but they took his picture anyway.
During all this Petra was taping it with her digital camera. It was very important that it was documented on digital film. She said she planned on putting it on Youtube.
The photographers put their stuff away. Hu, Jason and John looked on the Internet for stuff that didn't matter to me. I walked over once, looked and didn't care. I went back to the couch, sat down and drank a beer. Hu Chin's apartment was very bare. Nothing was on the walls. The walls badly needed painted. There was no carpet. The kitchen was small, the oven and refrigerator were old and ramshackle. His bedroom was a lonely little place with books on the floor stacked very orderly. Hu Chin lived with another writer named David Lexmark. David Lexmark wrote articles for The Believer and got his stories in popular hipster magazines. He had gone to a prestigious MFA program, attended a shitload of writer's workshops, and now taught English composition classes at a local NYC university. David was obsessed with new writers and reading all of their books. The man was on top of it. He had ambition and the will to succeed in the world of NYC literature. David Lexmark was always very outgoing, courteous and charming. He never frowned or acted weird or considered suicide. He wasn't that type of person. Hu Chin lived with that person.
Hu Chin kept talking on his cell phone, trying to arrange a meeting place with the woman who was supposed to be interviewing us. Her name was Margo. No one told me her last name. I didn't want to be interviewed by anyone named Margo. But they notified me it was my destiny. I liked email interviews, the person sent me the questions and I answered them slowly taking my time. Doing things in person, with people, I did not enjoy.
Everyone finished their beers and we left. They told me we had to go to Manhattan, which meant more subway.
Seventeen
We were all on the subway. There were no subways in Youngstown. Getting on a little train underground seemed absurd to me. In Ohio you drive cars and buy gas. No one owns a car in New York City. They don't pay car insurance or buy gas. They buy Metro Cards. Petra sat next to me. We sat close but we didn't kiss or hold hands. We didn't show any physical affection for each other. I was never the type of person that was wild and showed sexual affection in public. I never jumped out of planes or scaled cliff walls. I was boring. I was a little minuscule man that sat in his house and read books. Petra knew that. Why she would enjoy being around such a boring man? It confused me. Petra and I didn't talk on the subway. There was nothing to say. Jason hung on to a pole and said nothing either; he was as confused by the subway as I was. There were people everywhere, none of them speaking to each other. There was no community in New York City. Half of the people in New York City at any given time weren't actually New Yorkers. The only real New Yorker I had encountered on this trip was the little white girl pretending she was Leslie Heaney. Nobody was an actual New Yorker. Nobody on the subway cared about each other. Everyone was a nonhuman machine to each other, each traveling to a destination that didn't matter to other people. It was completely alienating and frustrating as a human to live through such an experience. To be surrounded by so many other people and not to care about any of them. New York was a strange place. Over 8 million people living together in close proximity. Ohio only had 11 million and that was over a much wider space. There were 250,000 in ancient Athens, and ancient Rome at the height of its power had a population of 500,000. The people of Athens and Rome were alienated and emotionally disfigured with much smaller populations. Athens and Rome were much different though: or not really. Instead of slaves titled slaves New York had Mexicans titled cheap labor employees. Instead of disenfranchised workers New York had Harlem, Bushwick and Queens. Instead of drunken symposiums out in the open sunshine, New York had drunken symposiums in bars with expensive liquor. Unlike the ancient cities that grew their food right outside the city walls with slave labor. New York City ships their food in from all over the world and gets all its oil and natural gas from thousands of miles away. Instead of Socrates being a blacksmith, it was an economist named Paul Krugman who graduated from MIT. No one in the city produced anything; everyone was living off the entertainment and finance sectors. You either met someone who worked for a television station, a publisher or magazine, or you met someone who did IT for Morgan Stanley, did accounting for CitiBank, or worked on Wall Street. You met people that walked their dogs, cooked their food at fancy restaurants and cleaned their houses. It was a strange way of life to me. I was from Ohio where there were factories where people worked building products. I grew up around farms that were producing food. There were natural gas wells with people working on them all over the area. There were no offices in Youngstown. Everyone was producing and working to survive. People from Youngstown referred to writers and office workers as people who “sit on their butts.” I was on the subway surrounded by people who “sit on their butts.” I was terribly conflicted about who I was: I could see Amanda's father Charlie working ten hours standing up working a press, pumping out parts sweating in a 120 degree factory in the summer. There was my brother who drove truck twelve hours at a time trying to make money. There were my friends who had done construction and helped build houses with the strength of their bodies. There were all the strippers, landscapers, and dishwashers, all there in my mind, with their strong bodies, working, and struggling for money. There was my father who carried huge cow carcasses from meat lockers to the cutting table, with his arms bulging and his face wincing. There was my mother working in the GM plant for 33 years. The people on the subway were not my people. I felt no hostility towards them. They had grown up somewhere different, with a different set of labor and world views offered to them. They had to take it. I had to take mine. It was our fate.