from Hella Down
The gingerbread kicks in around 25th. I’d scooped it from Bogey’s friend, the one with the sick swords mounted on his wall. Normally dealers will talk your ear off about their psycho interests, but this guy wasn’t a dealer. It was some kind of hobby for him, growing, and he didn’t talk at all. He can’t, Bogey explained weeks later. The guy’s voice is fine, but when he talks it sounds all backwards. Bogey is sitting on the kitchen island, munching on kimchi straight from the jar. I’d forgotten the gingerbread in the back of the freezer so now it’s encrusted with frost and smells like ruined ozone. Microwaving it would be too logical, so I shatter it under the butt of the only knife in the woodblock, making big ugly gems that are fun to crunch into snow but taste like potpourri and dogshit, so I give Bogey half. He sounds fucked up but he’s a genius, the sword guy. He invented a new kind of math when he was 14 and now he’s building robots in Sunnyvale and practices kenjutsu. It’s all on his blog. He says the singularity already happened, but we don’t have the neural connectivity to recognize it. He’s crossbreeding a special strain to help us close the gap. The edibles are just so his failed experiments don’t go to waste.
So now the bus is almost to the laundromat on 34th, and, by my calculations, the experiment is a runaway success. The plastic of the seats is too orange. The advertisements for injury lawyers and online degrees and dental work are extremely compelling. Why are there so many smells? My only ally is the Asian lady with the giant green visor. At least one of us is ready for tax season. Her grocery cart is like a forcefield protecting us from the clique of skaters. I can tell they skate by their floppy beanies and BO, but also their skateboards. The artwork and stickers have scuffed off in all sorts of cool ways. One is of a radioactive skeleton grinding the lip of a UFO. The best trick I ever landed was an ollie unless you count Tony Hawk Pro Skater. Please don’t. The skaters already suspect I’m a major poser and the Asian lady’s grocery cart bangs into my knee and I look down and I’m wearing boat shoes, no socks. What am I a fucking cockswain? Thankfully, I’ve also got a Believer tote and a Hawaiian to hedge, but still. You can never be too careful.
The Asian lady is getting off so I do too. The bus pulls away to reveal the Egyptian restaurant with the crazy mural. Ten blocks to go, maybe more, but first I have to answer the riddle of why would the artist make the guy in the fez look so horny? Why are Sobek and Horus guarding the plaque with the Zagat score? I’m pretty sure they governed more consequential domains, but my knowledge of Egyptian mythology is mostly based on Stargate (1994) and I don’t want to argue. This is supposed to be Nicky’s no-thinking day. This is supposed to be fun. We’re having fun. We’re going to the beach. We’re almost there. Breathe.
The walk there does me some good, but by the time I get to the parking lot, I’m sweating through the polyester in blotches that stick to my back and chest. It’s not a particularly nice day, same as always, but the beach is mercifully empty, even more so with the tide out. Mostly wiry tan guys running in the surf and doomed first dates exploring the coves. A few dogs running off leash, their owners trying to get a bonfire started. They’re using the log cabin method so one of them is on his hands and knees, blowing, while his friend pretends to buttfuck him in long, passionate strokes. They’re all zipped up in the same Patagonia, but with different corporate logos on the breast, making them a formidable coalition of assholes, and one of them looks like my nemesis from AutoMagic, so I retreat to the dunes and find a divot between tufts of sharp grass, wiping away the cigarette butts before I plop down. From up here, I’ve got a good view of birdshit island and the surfers bobbing nearby, waiting for just the right wave. Maybe I should get into surfing. Learn patience and watchfulness. When to go with the flow and when to bail. Pick up some stoner koans and throw the shaka. Call beer cerveza. Teach at the community college. Live in a winnebago. Just live, man. The winnebago will have a woman’s name, something fittingly midcentury. Shirley. Betty. Janice. Midge. Okay, not that one. Is Peggy too obvious? What about Barbara? Barbara, Barbie, Babs. Beverley. Betty—no I did that one already…
When I wake up the fog is still holding the sun hostage, but everything is brighter somehow, the light diffracted, if that’s even the right word. An inventory of my tote reveals the wishful thinking of late morning. A few books to choose between, one too many to make a decision. A banana and a Nature Valley bar, most of which will crumble into the sand. The one vice is a sweating tallboy, some kind of imperial IPA with a reprehensible pun that tastes like an air freshener. It leaves me thirsty and I immediately want another, an idiot in a Greek myth. I am trapped in this labyrinth of a city, cursed to be so blessed. This makes me want to try out the Calvino, but the whitespace is too bright and my gas station sunglasses are back on the bus, I now realize. The sun peekaboos out from the fog, but never long enough to dry my sweat. There is always a but, but here I am.
I squint back out over the beach. The Patagonia bros have given up on their fire, plenty warm with wine sloshing in their stomach and a game of two-hand touch that has devolved into tackle. The surfers have packed it in and the couples have retreated to the safety of their cars. All I want is to see a beautiful woman and briefly fall in love with the idea of her. She walks with unfashionable sandals looped in her fingers, a rascally dog circling her. She is wearing an oversized hoodie and cutoffs that show off her legs. The legs of an ex-athlete, still carrying that line down the outside of the thigh, coming into perfect definition when she pushes off of the loose pack of the sand. She doesn’t have any agenda in particular and this is the point, to flow.
Her dog is on a mission though. First to catch a seagull then smell the mermaid purse and then he’s sprinting towards me, climbing the dune, bathing me in psychotic licks. She jogs over to apologize and soon she’s sitting and I find a secret beer in my tote. We talk about what breed we’d be if we were dogs, how fucked the traffic is compared to when we were kids, essential YouTube videos, the weird thing washed up by the lifeguard tower. It’s probably just a bag of trash, but this can’t stop us from hypothesizing. The bladder of a humpback whale ripped apart by sharks. A Louis duffel full of heroin the traffickers had to dump before the coast guard showed. A mutant seal, escaped from a secret facility on the Farallons. She snorts when she laughs too hard, but this one makes her quiet and our eyes turn back to the gray postcard of the Pacific. The waves are endless. The sunset, theoretical. When it’s time for her to get her dog home, we don’t exchange numbers, that would break the spell. Maybe we’ll see each other around. For sure.
Instead the cosmos greets me with the travesty of a homeless guy jacking off beneath a tarp, though not out of any sense of modesty. He’s singing a song at the top of his lungs, a melody I can sing too, though I don’t know the lyrics. Neither does the guy it seems, but this doesn’t stop him from finding the right words. Words that mean nothing to us and everything to him. He is the one free man left in the entire world. All it cost him was his mind. He is staring directly at the sun, his googly eyes clouded with cataracts, the blue beneath murky. It roams in this soup like the answers of a Magic 8 Ball, demanding to be shaken.
Hey, guy. Can you not?
Without a doubt.
If I give you this banana will you go do your business somewhere else?
My sources say no.
And who might that be?
Better not tell you now.
Who are you then?
Try again.
So you’re just here to torture me?
Signs point to yes.
Is this punishment for something I did in a past life?
Most likely.
Then tell me one thing.
Very doubtful.
I’m going to be okay, right?
Outlook not so good.
Then when is it going to end?
Cannot predict now.
So now what?
Concentrate and ask again.
So now what?
Concentrate and ask again.
Denise is here from New York on business or traveling there, it’s tough to make out as she alternates between me and her bluetooth. Whoever it is on the line, she’s talking down to them in the usual ways. Asking obvious questions to make sure they’re listening. Repeating simple instructions. She asks if I take cards. When I say no she asks, what about Amex? No, Timothy, creative said sans serif. Am I going to have to sign a makegood? Alright, signing off now, the delivery guy is here. Buh-bye.
Denise rubs her temple as she looks around for her purse. Is this it?, I ask pointing to a leather bag hanging from the handle of an exercise bike. She makes a face like duh and fishes a checkbook from the bag. She makes it out to who, exactly? Ben’s Dry Ice? Even as she says this, she’s reeling it back, asking questions about temperature, how long it will last. What are the optimal storage conditions? She is sure to let me know she knows the word sublimate. I give her the usual caveat that it’s all online, but she’s relentless. It’s not for her, it’s for her newborn. In six days shy of three months. She read that even bottles made from plant cellulose retain chemicals from the production process that can leak over 24-72 hours, otherwise she’d be happy pumping before she flies and, besides, shipping overnight isn’t that expensive anymore. What about cash, is cash alright?
I fold the twenties into my breast pocket and go to work, lugging five 10-lb slabs to a travel cooler that fits them perfectly. When I’m done, I don’t say anything so she thinks I’m lingering for a tip and pretends she has another call coming through so I should just see myself out. She could feed her baby artisan organic freerange cruelty-free BPA-free whatever and he’s still going to turn out an ADHD terrorist. Her baby is going to grow up to hate her for raising him in a fearful bubble. Her baby is going to be gay in ways she will pretend to accept. Her baby will make mediocre art with his expensive degree. Her baby is going to panic his way into a coke problem. He will test her in ways she is convinced she is prepared for because she read the books. What else is there to say?
It seems unlikely we’re going to talk about writing in this month’s writing group. Manuscripts are conspicuously fresh, the lone mark the corner creases made on the stoop before ringing the doorbell. Fiona sells it best, rifling through her messenger bag to make it look like she’d left it at home. She can see exactly where it is, sitting on her breakfast table between her mug and a pouch of American Spirit. The turquoise one, obvi. So what if that makes her basic? You wanna know what’s really fuckin basic? Her phone buzzes. It’s Jake, texting to say something came up, but he’ll be there next time. Nobody bothers to check in with Raf. Instead we meditate on important topics like who’s going to see Wooden Shjips at Hemlock and where Jen got her tote. Sixpacks circulate, then a joint. For the record it’s from Afterlife, the tote, which is to say it’s wildly overpriced.
This group had set a new landspeed record, going from initial optimism to patient flexibility to slack and ennui in just a few sessions. Last time, Scott stormed out because we couldn’t recognize the genius of his ecosophical space opera, which, to be clear, is nothing like Dune. Aurora and Johnny are fucking. So are Aurora and Dani, at least that’s what Allie heard, whispering loud enough for Tosh to hear. She is still drunk from bottomless mimosas at Dear, Mom. Her sister is visiting from Portland and is a total bitch, but Allie loves her, don’t I believe her? She grabs my arm and doesn’t let go, looking down at the papers rolled in my hand. I feel like an asshole with my typed-out notes for Boone’s Twin Peaks knock-off. We get it, you wish you were blue-collar Americana because you grew up in Atherton. Hilary’s parents are loaded too, it’s not a big deal.
The silence has legitimate mass. Jaws scrape the floor. Eyes dart around the room, wondering, what the fuck now? Even Allie, though no one will meet her gaze and then it dawns on her. Oh fuck, she said that out loud, didn’t she? How could she be so stupid. She’s such a stupid fucking cunt. She knows everyone hated her cicada story. We think we’re being all subtle and shit, but she sees right through us. Especially you, she points right at me and then pukes onto her shirt, just a little though. It pools over her breasts, clinging a little to her striped shirt. She stares at it, bemused by its modest, sudden presence and, finally recognizing what it is, begins to sob.
Dani is hosting so she helps Allie to her room and when Dani’s back everyone starts to wheeze with laughter. A room of teakettles finally allowed to whistle, but not too loud. Don’t want to wake up the vomit laureate. Most everyone cringes at this one, but it does the trick and a few minutes later it’s like nothing had happened. It’s obvious we’ve had our last workshop and the mood is like a grad night, giddy and sentimental. We’re free from all the homework. Next up, more homework. Might as well get fucked up. Maybe someone will make out in a closet. Someone’s already puked. We list our grievances mostly to wave them off. What a joke, “workshop.” It was basically a monthly pity party. Allie’s free therapy.
Wait, Nick, weren’t you looking for a new guy? Fiona’s friend Taylor started seeing this burner chick who tells everyone they’re ADHD and prescribes hella Addys. I’m good, I tell her, but take her friend’s info anyway. Just in case, she says, winking. A big, drama-kid wink, but that’s just Fiona. Or is it? You tell me.
The cum trees are in bloom, bewildering all the transplants. Jackson used to be one of them, but it’s been over a decade, so we make a sport of it, drinking on stoops in nouveau neighborhoods so we can watch noses wrinkle. Guys of all ages doing double-takes, checking their clothing instinctively, unless they’re in a group and then they slug each other on the shoulders and pluck blossoms to shove in the most virginal face. Most girls wince, but a woman with straight, brown hair cut at the shoulders of her suit jacket gifts us a glimpse of a personal smile.
Baris shows up as she’s passing by, his expression even more mischievous than hers. He’s coming straight from lab and looks the part, his backpack slung over one shoulder, bedhead starting to settle and matte with sweat. My mom likes to joke that he’s studying to save her life one day, imagining him with a scalpel when he’s mostly coding and when he’s not coding he’s surfing or flirting with baristas. He’s not here for the schadenfreude but the sundresses and so are we, at some level. Leaving the Whole Foods on Franklin with our six-pack we almost trampled a woman who could only be described as feline. The girls playing tennis at the park are on stilts. It’s a fraternal vocabulary, endangered the moment one of us spots a future ex. Someone who doesn’t have a type, though of course this is just another type. The exception to the rule. A shock of color on a black and white photo.
Breaking her spell is one of Jackson’s club friends, a guy with Encino man hair and a full grill. He spots us on our perch and respects the format. He is so fried he looks like a lizard basking, eyes only ever half open, but any superiority I feel collapses the moment I realize this is how the normies see us, up on our stoop. He’s playing an afters this Friday if we wanna fuck with it. He hands us a poster that looks like it was made in Kid Pix. F I R E S T A R T E R, it says, child actress Drew Barrymore with spiky green hair and a studded choker drawn on. A speech bubble advertises the number to call for the location, but the guy tells us it’s at the Foundry, lowering his shades and looking around before whispering this sensitive intel and then he’s moving on.
That guy is a national treasure. He should be in a museum. No, Jackson says, patting down his breast pocket. That guy is faking the funk. When he moved here he told everyone his name was Mitch but it’s really something preposterous like Wellington or Xavier. Inside the breast pocket is Jackson’s lighter. Dude is from Connecticut and his dad is a banker. His older sister has an oxy problem and is always in and out of rehab so they’re glad he’s doing his art in San Francisco or whatever it is he tells them. Jackson flicks the lighter and the poster burns. His parents will bankroll anything. He dropped out of Tisch to follow Animal Collective around and they ditched him here. He crashed with Caleb for a while, that’s how Jackson knows him and it’s why the guy got into techno. His whole thing now with the stupid Photoshops and the tracksuit, he stole that from Primo and now he’s doing parties with Noah. He’s doing a week in Berlin in October. Jackson wants to hate the guy but respects the grift too much. He watches the paltry flame dance, but I’m watching the lighter. A white lighter.
A birdfaced woman, too proper to tell us to get the fuck off her stoop, tiptoes between us up the steps. The smell of cum is fainter with the sun setting. It’s not too late to pop back into Whole Foods and figure out dinner, but a burrito is calling my name. Not the one I really want, but the one closest to my house. Tomorrow will be spent on the toilet. After that, I don’t know.
How was the powermom?, Ben asks, not really asking. This time he’s got another fun one. The woman lives above Molotov’s. She wants to donate her dead dog to a veterinary school, but they won’t accept it unless she gets the thing on ice within 24 hours. Do I accept this mission? I mean, I guess. Car insurance doesn’t pay itself.
The woman who answers the door is not Jess. Neither is the one lighting tea candles. There is another woman in the same flannel + undershirt combo tending a pot of lentils, also not Jess. Eventually she finds me politely declining a cup of whiskey. She is dressed in a variation on theme, her own flair, the cuffed jeans and horn rim glasses. It’s her derby team, she explains. The Butch Bombers, I read off a patch. They’re trying to get her to sit shiva, but she is all business. She shows me to the cooler Davis specified. We have only fifteen minutes to get this puppy on ice, no pun intended, she slugs me in the ribs.
The veneer starts to crack when we unroll the quilt. There is Rita, a sixty-pound bulldog with a monstrous underbite, all four legs like those of a chair, the old girl’s so rigored. The Bombers take turns patting her on the back and the tears come. I’ve already broken up the ice, so it’s just a matter of shoehorning the dog into the cooler, really a glorified styrofoam takeout box. It’s like notching a bow, getting the joints bent into place. Something snaps, not just a feeling inside the animal but a sound audible throughout the room. More tears, more conciliation. The horn rims fall to the carpet. The cooler groans, unhappy to be working overtime, so I wrap it with duct tape to make sure it all stays together. God I’m glad I didn’t blaze before this one, but I still have the brief delusion that the sublimation at the edges of the cooler is the dog’s soul, escaping into the axiom of air.
I write this down later, at Waziema, mouth chalky with cheap wine. In the movie version, I do the right thing and tear up the page. Throw it in the trash, light it on fire, something dramatic. In real life, I order another drink, this one a blotch in my memory, and click the nib of my pen in and out. In and out. Out and in. The truth is, I don’t have much to offer. I don’t know where this is all going. What is more potent than another person’s pain? If you know the answer, text me.
It’s been six months since I left Swerv and I never bothered to switch my prescription to a closer Walgreens and Herr Doktor is off the clock on Sundays so I have to take the 31 downtown while my skin is crawling with bugs, though I guess this should help me fit in. Recently the TL has been a warzone, more than usual, and when I text this to Max, he tells me there’s no heroin so the junkies are smoking crack and corner store salvia and synthetic weed and it’s turning them into Tasmanian devils. Like straight Looney Tunes shit, dudes spinning into blurry tornadoes. Last week he saw a guy run out into the street, get flattened by a truck, and bounce back to his feet, whistling like nothing had happened.
Today, the bus is quiet, too quiet, and sure enough the second we cross Van Ness, it disentangles from its line and the driver can’t lance it back on, leaving me to weather the elements. I stop in at L&G to fortify myself with mystery meat before braving the minefield of shit and needles, but the reality is I enjoy the entropy. Hotel neons, dead during the day. Bootleg copies of most if not all of the Jason Statham oeuvre. A woman leaving Cadillac Grocery swipes at me. Calls me a tall glass of milk, gives me a big slurp, and carries on with her day. The usual. Reagan’s legacy, thinks high school Nick, righteous with patch-jacket punk. Data analyst Nick wants to believe it’ll go away if he listens to enough NPR. Medicated Nick doesn’t believe in much of anything. My current incarnation is a bewildering ordeal, but if I stick it out I will be reborn as something unthinking and noble, a tree or boulder maybe. I’ll settle for a newt or a centipede if they’re out of flora. As if bardo is a Jack in the Box, a confusing glut of choice.
This is where I am now, sitting with my Dr. Pepper. I ordered a small but the cup dwarfs the pill bottle. The guy next to me is eyeing it, wondering if it’s worth the trouble of a grab and dash. He squints to make out the text. Paroxetine Tablets, USP. 20mg. I twist the cap and offer it to him, giving the pills a tempting rattle that has the opposite effect. Horrified, he collects his bags and heads out, crossing Mason back towards Union Square, not where he panhandles but where he’s staying. The bags had been from Lacoste and Burberry and he’d left his tray of food in disgust. Another tourist mistaking the Jumbo Jack for a good old-fashioned all-American hamburger. I can only imagine what that makes me.
I take the pill, as calmed by the ritual as the flattening that will come. Not a sensation so much as a realization weeks from now that things have been okay for a stretch I can’t bookend. This time it’s a woman and her two young boys, the mother exhausted by their hyperactivity, their special needs, the mess, but smiling still. She reminds them to stop and look both ways before crossing the street and they do, snapping into an earnestness I know all too well. If I could cry I would, but the welling inside me is modest and respectable, so I return this smile that isn’t for me and the light turns green. Green means go. Some things are that simple.
The city is approximately seven by seven miles, a neat fact notable to people who still buy magazines. Seven by seven is forty-nine, the name of our football team that will soon be relocated to landfill over the salt marshes of the South Bay. Far from the murals of Kaepernick kissing his biceps painted on liquor store shutters. The 49ers, so named for the year suckers first bumrushed the town hoping to strike gold. As legend has it, it wasn’t the prospectors who made off, but the locals who sold picks and shovels, a moral so beloved the Sand Hill crowd made it into jargon. On Thursdays they head up to the Rosewood for what’s come to be known as Cougar Night, though the crowd is a mix of divorcées and escorts, usually Ukrainian or Russian, and all the bridge-and-tunnel types looking to bag a seven-figure buck, though this is on the low end. We’re all entrepreneurs, each in our own way. In a past life I was a premium outlet, but now I’m a junk shop in a neighborhood that is rapidly gentrifying. If people notice me, it’s to wonder when I’m even open. How I haven’t been pushed out yet. To press their faces to the glass, shielding their eyes, and squint into the permanent twilight at the old maps and banjos and broken pachinko machines. Sitting atop of a stack of vintage nudie mags is a cat, staring back. Is it alive or is it stuffed or does it even matter? Soon you’ll be on your way. A new beer garden just opened and the sun is rumored to make an appearance this afternoon. Enjoy it, whether it does or not. There are only so many days, though they’re working on an app for that.
∩
Nick Greer is a writer from Berkeley. Current projects include essays on trend and postmodernity, a collaborative erotic comic, and a novel inspired by giallo, the conspiracy thriller, and other ’70s Eurosleaze.