Prosopopoeia

#13

Sam — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 17:52:24 +0000

I miss writing down ’2008′ when I record the date on things. Not because 2008 was a good year for me–it was one of the worst, actually–but because two thousand eight has that wonderful character ’8′ at its tail. ’8′ has so many good qualities. It’s perfectly symmetrical. It has no beginning or ending, flowing fluidly and endlessly into itself. It could be a racetrack, or an electrial circuit, or the orbit of an eccentric star. If you stand it on its side it becomes the symbol for infinity: ∞

It’s the endlessness of the character that makes it so attractive, that made writing the date so pleasing. ’2008′ looked like a year that might not ever end. At times I felt I would never end, that my moment and everyone in it would stay the same way forever. I would smoke pot and have sex and listen to music and go out dancing, and it would never stop. Not any of it. I would pick a calling, any calling, and work towards it without ever having to reach it. I would be childishly in love with you.
And I would never grow older. It was not possible. The days fell through us, and meant nothing.
I wish I’d taken more photographs that year.

#12

Sam — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 11:15:32 +0000

But last week I felt fine. More than fine. Actually, last week was pretty much the best week I’ve had since I got back to the States.

SUNDAY: Phone call from prospective employers asking if I was available to interview on Wednesday. (Yes! Of course!) Also: the Super Bowl.

MONDAY: Dinner party with old friends. There was lots of fancy red wine. Also manicotti. Also there was a trampoline! I jumped up and down on the trampoline. I didn’t fall off!

TUESDAY: I moved most of my stuff over to my new apartment. (I have a new apartment! In San Francisco!) My friend helped me. When we finished I took her out to lunch in Alameda. I had the tuna melt. It was terrific.

WEDNESDAY: The job interview. It went fabulously. (Or did it? Am I delusional? I think I’m really charming.) That evening I went to a bar with a few friends. It was deserted except for a single big fat guy, who bought us all drinks. We played pool and, as if by magic, I was incredibly good at it. I sank seven balls in a row. I was as mystified as everyone else. This must be how Clark Kent felt, I thought, the first time he had sex.

THURSDAY: I took the train all the way to the end of the line, Fremont, and my friend picked me up and we drove to San Jose, to a parking lot, and we smoked weed from a tiny glass pipe, there in his car. Then we got out of the car and walked inconspicuously across the parking lot to the nickel arcade, Nickel City, paid our two dollars’ admission and bought a sack of nickels each, and then pushed through the turnstile and went inside.
A video arcade at two p.m. on a Thursday is generally a deserted place, and this is a wonderful thing. I can’t stand being surrounded by children at a video arcade. I feel watched. I worry that I look like a pedophile, or like one of those friendless retarded persons who appears every afternoon in certain establishments in his hometown, friendly but incoherent, sporting a three-day beard but mentally ten years old. It’s horrifying to imagine being confused with such a person. But this afternoon it didn’t matter. The arcade was completely empty. I dragged my friend to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles console on the ‘free play’ wall and we started in.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Copyright 1989 Konami. I hadn’t thought about this game in years. In another time my brother and I had spent countless hours (and tokens) trying to beat it, but we’d never even come close. Probably our motor skills were insufficiently developed.
Where had this occurred? I couldn’t place the memory. Some other arcade, obviously, but which one? And how long ago? It didn’t matter. As I stood there playing the game, my memories of this other arcade and my actual surroundings, this physical space I actually existed in, conflated and then became one. And the noises of the arcade–the blips and the chirps, the confusion of a dozen different MIDI theme songs playing on top of each other–joined with the remembered noises of all the arcades of my past, and the two became indistinguishable, and I experienced a sensation of lightness. I felt as if I were growing, expanding to fill the entire space of the arcade–or perhaps the space was shrinking to fit me, growing smaller and smaller until I and it were inextricable, one and the same. I felt I was integrally and completely a part of this space. I was no longer an individual, but a component of the arcade. I could not be said to be playing the game any more than the game could be said to be playing me. I was part of the machine.
Is this what Billy Mitchell felt like as he pursued his perfect game of Pac-Man? It was an attractive thought. But my friend and I didn’t come close to beating the Ninja Turtles game. I don’t think either of us really wanted to. We lacked the fortitude. Besides, the high had turned on us. Already we were drifting towards another console. . .

FRIDAY: Who cares?

#11

Sam — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 19:00:36 +0000

These days I feel as if I am disintegrating. I drink or I smoke and afterwards it’s like there’s a big hole inside me. I can’t fill it with anything.
There are moments when I am driving my car and I wonder, Am I dying, and I reach under my shirt and touch my stomach and when I pull my hand back I almost expect to see blood on my fingers. A secret wound: a knife slid under my ribs, unfelt at the time; or an arrow that had been protruding from my stomach all along. It would explain so much. But there is no blood.
What it would it be like to drive the car straight off the road, into a guardrail or another car or off the edge of a cliff? It’s easy to romanticize that image, but when I slow it down and imagine the trauma my body would suffer, my bones snapping and shattering, my insides turning to jelly and squirting from me, I am filled with indescribable revulsion. I know that I’m going to keep driving, that eventually I will get home, that I will put my things away and change clothes and sit in my chair, and that I will then have to do something with myself. All roads lead to the end.

I’m glad I am moving to a new city.

#10

Sam — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 13:04:38 +0000

In the dream the girl was draped across the bed like a discarded dress, as if she had been lying there for hours. As if she’d come over to waste the afternoon getting high with me, and now the sun had gone down and neither of us had shifted or spoken since she put the record on, and the record had ended a long time ago, the sound now coming through the speakers the palpable sound of nothing happening, of the vinyl rotating thirty-three times a minute, not a recording of a band now but simply a thing rotating, and the two us simply things, too, warm and breathing but completely void inside. The scene had that kind of feel, that kind of heaviness. But nothing had actually happened before this moment, because there was no before. This was the first moment of all.
Then the next moment happened: she sat up. She said something like:
–I’m paying you this visit to reassure you.
–You mean that we’re going to be together?
–Right. I am yours, you are mine. From now on. There’s no getting around it.
–I’m ok with that.
–I had to come here to tell you because I can’t say it when we’re awake. But the next time we see each other our eyes will meet, and we will both remember this conversation.
–Isn’t this exactly like that Miranda July story?
–Yes, but this is better because it’s actually happening.
–But this is a dream.
–Right, but it’s a real dream.
Then she took off her pants and rolled around on the bed like a girl in a commercial for one of those late-night singles hotlines. She was wearing white cotton panties. She made eyes at me and struck provocative, over-the-top poses. She made horrible faces and stuck out her tongue. I knew the only reason she was vamping like this was because she had the opportunity to, because it was the sort of performance that can only occur in the dreams of dumb, infatuated boys, and I felt embarrassed. At the same time, it was kind of hot. I tried to stand up and join her on the bed, but I couldn’t; I didn’t seem to exist physically. Then I was being tugged away, up towards the morning, and she waved like a woman waving from the deck of a departing cruise ship, and I knew that it really was just a dream, that telepathy is physically impossible, even for lovers, and then that moment ended, too, and I was awake.

#9

Sam — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 19:53:47 +0000

Very few things in the tapestries of our dreams are as idiotically blissful as the sex–that great bottomless humping of radiant sluts conjured by our sleeping brains. If every dream was a dream of fucking, I would never leave my bed. I’d starve to death. And yet there are pleasures deeper still. Dreams of heaven. In this one I am sitting on a bus. I am traveling somewhere exciting, and I have an enormous roll of hundred-dollar bills in my hand, and I am counting the bills. I am counting them slowly and theatrically. I have no desire to know the exact amount of money I hold; I am counting because peeling bills away from the bankroll feels really, really good. I have never felt as powerful as I do holding this money. The movement of the notes from my left hand to my right is the movement of the universe. No tomorrow comes unless someone buys it, and I can afford every tomorrow and every yesterday, too. The money is in my hands, and the money is endless. No matter how many notes I peel from the roll, it remains the same size. It can never run out. It is a bankroll touched by Christ, and like the basket of loaves and fish it provides until the multitudes are satisfied–and the multitudes are never satisfied. Perhaps the notes feature Christ’s portrait instead of Franklin’s. I do not look closely. I am simply counting the money. A hundred thousand; two hundred thousand; a million. I know there is no end figure but the counting continues, senselessly, and the bus drives on. A hundred million; a billion; a trillion dollars. . .

#8

Sam — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 17:34:11 +0000

Today makes thirty days since I returned from England. Thirty days sounds like a long time, a period during which one could get all sorts of important things done, but it isn’t, and I didn’t. The days rolled by like something that rolls. They are rolling still. They roll well, these days that are circular, that end and begin in the same place, my bed. Christmas rolled, New Year’s rolled, my ex-girlfriend’s birthday, January eleventh, it rolled, too. I called her to wish her a happy birthday, but she didn’t answer her phone, which makes sense. I don’t think we’re speaking anymore. If I called her right now I do not expect she would answer. If she did answer I would be so surprised I probably wouldn’t be able to think of anything to say. Really, there wouldn’t be anything to say, because I wouldn’t be calling for any reason other than to confirm that we aren’t speaking. And we aren’t.

But for most of those thirty days we were. In fact, if I were to make a list of the things I did most frequently during that time, talking with her would be at the top:

#1. Negotiate end of relationship with ex-girlfriend

That was my month in a nutshell. But the rest of the list, if it existed, would read something like:

#2. Drink until obnoxious or catatonic, at

a) cave-like dive bars

b) scenester clubs in San Francisco

c) home

#3. Watch football on TV

#4. Read about obscure historical events on Wikipedia

#5. Put on “Mars” by Fake Blood and dance around my bedroom

But such a list does not exist, could not exist, because it fails to account for the things that really happened to me over the past month: things that are beyond physical, that took place in the country inside me. My heart has been breaking for half a year; see it splitting; now it is broken. And the days roll by, and I can’t see how any of it matters.

#7

Sam — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 07:00:53 +0000

On Monday my father’s vast collection of vinyl records, antique paperweights and science fiction novels completed its eight-week journey from Oakland and arrived at the docks in Tilbury. On Tuesday it was loaded into a moving can and freighted to a warehouse in Basildon, and on Wednesday we collected it in a convoy of vans and wagons and brought it to the house in Staines. The days since have consisted of little but the purchase and construction of bookshelves, and the endless unpacking of the mammoth collection.

While much of the collection is quite cool–immaculate leather-bound editions of Neuromancer, The Martian Chronicles, and Shadow of the Torturer; oodles of 45s from San Francisco’s early-80′s punk rock scene–and some of it is probably valuable–several mint, first edition Heinleins–most of it is worthless, and crumbling. And sweet Jesus is there a lot of it. Fifty-two boxes’ full, which cost my father five thousand dollars to ship from California. I watch him put it all on the shelf, standing tottering at the top of his step-ladder, and I wonder if this will be my patrimony: an enormous collection of inscrutable and rotting sentimentalia, most of which will lose its meaning as soon as the man who cares so much about it dies. As we unpack he stops frequently to point out particular books, to discuss specific authors, to play records, or to tell stories of his childhood, and I allow him to engage me in this way for hours, because who knows when I will see him again, and who knows if I will ever have time again to spend with him like this? As soon as he dies this collection, and along with it his own sprawling, unfinished science fiction novel, pass into my possession, and what will I do with them? Sell them? Make a space in my own life for them? Finish the novel and publish it?

It was my fear of becoming my father, among other things, that led me last summer to get rid of most of the books I owned, and it is my fear of becoming my father that will not allow me to ever stop writing.

#6

Sam — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 07:00:54 +0000

One enters the Ikea in Croydon via an enormous revolving glass door, wide enough to admit an elephant, and as the contraption swept me towards the showroom floor I thanked God I was still a little bit drunk. There is no way to accurately the describe the feelings of horror the Ikea showroom arouses in me. The labyrinthine windings of its passages create an illusion of endless space, and within its honeycomb of interconnected, immaculately staged rooms it is easy to grow nauseated and disoriented. The showroom is synthetic in every sense of the word. It is is almost totally void of the objects and structures that we typically use to make sense of our surroundings, and spending hours roaming across it loosens one’s hold on the distinction between reality and simulation. It is an entirely virtual space. The only real things it contains are other shoppers, and as they drift from room to room, sitting on the couches and on the beds and pretending momentarily that they are in their own homes, they seem more like ghosts than other people.

The only thing I was given to hold on to was a song by the Scissor Sisters, murmured over the store’s public address, which pulled me so violently back to the Fall of 2006 that I had to sit down. When the song ended I was sitting in a very pretty living room. It looked well-dusted and seldom-used, a real museum, and it was filled with glass cabinets stacked with Swedish books. I saw the armchair with attendant lamp, where one would read, and I saw the coat rack and I saw the fireplace, full of plastic logs. I saw the doorway where the front door might go, and for a moment I made believe that I could step through it and find myself outside, in front of my own house, in a new life.

#5

Sam — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 07:00:09 +0000

Being from California, I have a very skewed perception of what constitutes “good weather” and “bad weather.” I’m accustomed to wearing tee-shirts and sandals six months out of the year, and regard anything under 70º F as call for a sweater, if not a wool coat and a scarf.

This isn’t a good place for Californians. If London is, as reputed, the fairest and most mild of British cities, I shiver to imagine what lies to the north. Autumn here is so gloomy, so colorless, so wet, so–pardon my English–blustery, and, most of all, so dick-shrivelingly cold that most days I can scarcely muster the courage to step out for a cigarette. It seems unthinkable that people elect to go outside in such weather–but they do, and in force. They’re all insane. I’ve been considering several Halloween costumes, but necessity may force me to go out as Captain Caveman.

The weather, and the fact that I am lately out of a job, have driven me to succumb to the worst of my hermit instincts. I haven’t left the house in several days, and I’ve been up to no good. I loathe to think of what the winter will bring.

Pula

Sam — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 07:00:46 +0000

I arrived in Pula on a Tuesday morning. When I stepped from the tarmac into the airport terminal, the place was completely deserted. Mine was apparently the only flight arriving that morning. When the first passengers cleared customs and entered the arrival hall, the blinds on the information booths and rental car kiosks began to fly up, as if the employees had been powered down in their chairs and then activated by a motion detector.

I caught a bus to the central bus station, a grim, smoke-filled box, then boarded another bus headed towards the beach at the south end of town. I didn’t know which stop I wanted. I got off as soon as I saw water and set out for the hostel. Only, when I found Valsaline #4, it wasn’t a hostel, at all, but someone’s house, with a huge, padlocked wrought-iron gate. Across the street a delivery driver was smoking a cigarette in front of a pizzeria, and I asked him for directions. He ended up offering to drive me there in the delivery car, a decaying ’80s hatchback covered with pizza decals.

In the car he apologized for the wet weather and told me it was usually beautiful in Pula. He sounded embarrassed. After a couple of minutes he steered the pizzamobile onto a single lane road that wound through fields of scrub, then pulled onto an unpaved trail. Just I began to feel uneasy, we arrived. The road dead ended at the hostel. I got out and he sped off in reverse.

(the Pula Youth Hostel)

The Pula Youth Hostel is literally right on the beach. I could almost have rolled from my dormitory straight into the water. There was only one other guest staying in the room, but he was nowhere to be found, and after I stashed my bags I decided to go for a walk. On the beach I met a veterinary student from Oxford who had just arrived that morning from a conference in Rovinj on dolphins. She was so relieved to meet another native English-speaker that she immediately asked me to sit with her, and proceeded to regale me with stories about researching in dolphins in Mexico and swimming with them in the Aegean. Later we ordered a pizza for delivery at the hostel. I thought I might see my delivery driver again, but it was a different man, and he roared in on a motorcycle. The pie was gigantic and only cost about £4.

By the next morning the weather had improved considerably, and I woke up early and walked into the city center in search of the Roman ruins for which Pula is famous. In three hours I saw the colosseum, the amphitheatre, the gate and the temple, and afterward I felt melancholy and strangely empty. It was a national holiday and most places were closed, and for some time I wandered in circles around the center, looking in through all the windows and smoking cigarette after cigarette. The low feeling dogged me the entire way. I decided to look for a place where I could drink some beer.

I found a bar and had a late, sudsy lunch, then walked back to the hostel, where I passed out for several hours. When I awoke it was dark out and the hostel seemed to have been taken over by some sort of Croatian youth group. The courtyard was full of hollering, squealing teenagers. I went to reception and arranged for a ride to the bus station the next morning, then returned to my room and spent the rest of the evening reading. The next morning I got up at four and met the hostel’s janitor out front of the building. We drove to the bus station in the dark, in complete silence. When we arrived I gave him seventy kuna, then stepped out into the twilight of the station. I was the only person around. I sat down on a concrete bench and waited for the bus that would take me to Venice.