“What the fuck?” asked one of the ersatz punk rockers.
“Hи хуя́ себе́” said one of the drunks.
Then she went back to her drink.
Fern met Anthony in the Year of the Baroque Promise, which roughly corresponded to 1990 AD, 1411 AH, and 5751 AM.
After the love connection made its audible sound, Anthony talked to Fern about the Krautrock band Amon Düül II.
He said stupid shit like: “I found Yeti at Bleecker Bob’s and I had no idea what it was. ‘Archangels Thunderbird’ was one of those moments, you know? It fucking changed my whole fucking life. My God, those drums, that guitar.”
This was the surface babbling of a human being who knew, on the cellular level, that he stood before the firestorm which would consume years of his life.
As his mouth spoke, so too did his subatomic particulars cry out: Fuck me fuck fuck me fuck me love me love me I am yours fuck me fuck me flesh of my flesh burn me burn me my soul is boring a hole this second hole is penetrating the hole of your face the skull of your bone look at me here I am yours and yours alone and you are mine touch me I am the one for whom you have been waiting please please please please please. Kiss me, my darling, for I too am like you, I am a kinder from Bahnhof Zoo.
Unlike the love connection, the crying out of Anthony’s subatomic particulars happened on a level of quantum physics that was inaudible to human ears.
Not even people who had passed the Cash Horizon would have heard.
But in their case, the inaudibility was irrelevant: the rich are incapable of love or its recognition.
Fern was neither human nor past the Cash Horizon.
She was from Fairy Land.
She heard every word.
They talked, they hung around the East Village, they fell into bed, they wandered through the city, and because they’d both consumed endless amounts of media, they were imbued with the photogenic qualities of New York City, and these qualities freighted their wanderings with cultural weight.
Everything was ridiculously romantic.
On their third date, Anthony and Fern were walking in Washington Square Park. They were in the park because they were headed to Jones Street. Anthony had talked Fern into seeing some folk singers at Caffe Vivaldi.
The folk singers in question were absurd historical anachronisms. They were as bad as the people who wrote novels and poetry in the Twenty-First Century AD.
One of the folk singers was a woman named Bianca.
She was in Anthony’s Philosophy program at the New School for Social Research, and she was doing a doctoral dissertation on Spinoza.
“Why don’t you ever talk about your family?” Anthony asked Fern as they passed the statue of Giuseppe Garibaldi.
“What do you mean?” asked Fern. “You don’t talk about your family,” said Anthony. “Do you have any brothers or sisters?”
At Caffe Vivaldi, they sat through an assortment of folk singers who sang 1930s AD ballads about the coming wave of international socialism. Then Bianca got on at the microphone against the back wall.
“Hi,” she said into the microphone. “My name’s Bianca. I’m going to sing a few songs, but while I’m setting up I thought my friend James could do a song. James is a folk singer. He moved to New York last week. I don’t think he wants to do this, but if you give him a round of applause, I’m sure he’ll come up. Let’s have a warm welcome for James.”
Bianca handed James her guitar. He put his mouth too close to the microphone.
“Uhm, hello people,” James said, popping his p, “I’m, uh, I’m pretty nervous. This is the, uh, the first time I’ve ever performed in New York. I’ve never been in the city before, not before Thursday. I’m from Columbus, Ohio. Don’t judge. We all, uh, have to be from somewhere and Columbus is pretty much just as good as pretty much anywhere. Well, kinda. Uhm, you know, sometimes back in Columbus my stuff doesn’t really go over. I thought I’d play a classic from 1935, maybe one you haven’t heard before. Someone played it for me last night on reel-to-reel. So, uhm, can you please be gentle? Kindness never killed anyone.”
Fern thought about the simplicity of music on Fairy Land. Music without filter, music as in ancient times, the voice and the instrument, a holy sound in supplication to the divine.
The purity of what humanity had lost in its era of machines and computers and cars and airplanes. The lost society, the fallen dream, the missing kindness.
James looked so innocent, begging for mercy.
I know how he feels, thought Fern. Oh, please, please, please, let him be good.
James cleared his throat. He checked the guitar’s tuning.
He played his song. This is what he sang:
Long before the Year of the Unspoken Promise, Fern’d concluded that there was nothing new to experience, that all her future years would feature repeats of previous days.
She was like a sexy vampire in a novel by Anne Rice. She was bored by eternal life.
And then, in a bar in the East Village, surrounded by Ukrainian drunks and terrible black leather jackets, she discovered something new.
Meeting Anthony was like being in San Francisco in 1965 AD prior to America’s construction of received drug experiences and dosing with high-grade Owsley lysergic acid diethylamide.
Unexplored territory.
It was insane love, l’amour fou, sex magick, the post-coital sparkle of two souls in unison wandering through a fluorescent-lit grocery store at 11:30PM, stoned, drunk, lunacy born of a shared experience, tongue in the mouth as guns fire overhead.
More Bad Sex in Fiction!
Nomination forthcoming!
The vast suburbs of Long Island were built with a specific and exact purpose: to isolate their residents from the perceived chaos of New York City, which was conceptualized as the presence of racial minorities.
In Anthony’s youth, he’d sensed vibrations beyond the vast suburbs, and grasped on an intuitive level that the very experience of the suburbs, and their pretense of isolation, were the byproducts of an economic scheme over which he, and everyone he knew, had no control.
America was a prison for the young: a person either went runaway and threw themselves on the lusts of strangers, or they integrated into the sorting mechanisms of the haute bourgeoisie and hoped that a natural gift would carry them into one of the economic scheme’s higher echelons.
Anthony chose the latter.
He smoked too much pot, he read too many books, he drank too much beer.
He dated a vegetarian girl who wore Malcolm X glasses, had a Siouxsie and the Banshees poster above her bed, and owned an ill-tempered ferret named Pumpkin.
He did well in high school.
After earning an undergraduate degree at the University of Chicago, Anthony ended up in New York City, on the island of Manhattan, doing a Philosophy PhD at the New School for Social Research.
Which is where he met Fern.
During those ridiculously romantic wanderings around New York City, Fern’s thoughts were haunted.
She’d met Anthony at an inopportune time.