The straight man is showing clips on his phone from a gay porn film he directed in which three guys fuck each other while another guy, lying in the shot’s lower third, merely shoves a large rock up his own ass. We’re at a bar where those things from the front of boats—you know, the busty lasses, what are they called?—hang from one slanted wall. Yes, 169—sue me.
I dreamt that in my bathroom a small, angled window patterned with frosted circles opened into the red-lit backroom of a karaoke venue. I dreamt of punishing hair loss. I dreamt of Indiana, where I’ve never been.
“Can you tell I’m the artist?” asks Maya Martinez at the launch of her book, Theatrics. She wears a dark turtleneck and light-wash jeans. “Where’s my beret?”
She finds her beret, which is red.
She performs four of her theatrical works, her play-poems—“Stage Directions for a Car Crash,” “I Lived How I Died,” “God Sized,” and “Prayer for Money.” This is the first time that I’ve seen her use props, other actors (including her parents), so on. It’s hilarious and heart-wrenching—ego-death with your mom on stage, pleas to god, the director pausing you mid-speech to reapply your fake blood (a result of the aforementioned titular car crash). The AC is off or at least struggling at KGB so A— turns on his portable fan, which everyone can hear. To turn it off, he must set it to its maximum. Which everyone can hear.
My interview with Martinez is forthcoming (I think—the editor is MIA), so I won’t delve too deep.
I’ll delve deep into re-reading “Hole Play,” one of seven theatrical works collected in the book, although not one performed that night. In it, the protagonist (named GIRL) walks into a Florida strip-mall parking lot after buying Halloween costumes at Party City and discovers a bottomless pit next to her car. No one seems to care. She’s on the phone with her friend Janine (the entire play takes place on this phone call).
“Nooo I didn’t smoke Salvia again! Janine, it’s not even a shallow hole! That’s what I’m trying to say! It looks deep as fuck!” “I know right! But that’s beside the point! I’m not on acid! I’m not on any kind of drugs! I’m just stoned! I swear! Janine, I’m in this parking lot, it’s Halloween, and this hole is real! Google image sinkhole and tell me what you see.” “Don’t you see now? A gaping hole, a seemingly endless hole! Are you scrolling through the hundreds of images of these agape tragedies!”
Maya is a genius. Never have I attended a book launch where so many people rushed to purchase the launched book, nor the thematic T-shirts.
Last week I went to a different book launch where I was shocked by the longevity of people’s vocal power and for a bit we heard the seemingly sourceless sound of a fiddle stopping and starting, which the hosts thought was glitching through the speakers (during the evening’s opening monologue, CDJs had been used to trigger various sound effects), and which the reader, Lynne Tillman, said made her feel as if she were in an Irish pub. Quite disorienting until from the backroom of this basement bar exited a woman, wearing black, who held a fiddle.
“You could fall into a hole on the face of the earth, be lucky enough to peer into it, be lucky enough to witness some sweet hot light. Lucky enough to glimpse hellfire before you weld with the asphalt consistency, melting, wet, rock, my magma coffin.”
I fell into an Instagram Reels pit on the Tuesday it reached 101 degrees and one content-nugget so-witnessed was a screenshot of a Google AI response reading “No, the rectum is not a grave.” The response thereupon explained the definitions of each term (a part of the body, a place for the dead). I forget what track someone had set the screenshot to.
In another clip the straight man at 169 shared, two guys fucking each other stood atop two guys fucking each other as they, all four, leaned toward a boulder, the lower two guys’ feet in a stream. “Seems very slippery, an occupational hazard,” I said—imagining somebody falling and smacking their skull—coming across anal as always (the psychological orientation, not re: a part of the body).
“Do you think the pressure inside the rock could push me into the shape of a marble? / A tiny hot smooth piece of glass. / A fragile toy.” Martinez’s subsequent stage direction: “Losing it enthusiastically.”
I am reading Luke Goebel’s forthcoming novel Kill Dick—about churches to money and murders of opioid users—and the pill-addiction narrative is not fully dissuading me from requesting an early refill of benzodiazepines: I love fixating on health and safety until it means I must occupy some clarified reality. I’m easily beholden to mistaking my own life for fiction, or better put, vice versa, but I swear I’m not boofing any tusi for at least a month. I can negotiate some limits, or at least acknowledge the possibility of choice. Anyway, empathogens may make me too honest.
S— and I sit outside drinking (she: absinthe, I: gin) and a woman jumps on a chair in front of us and yells, “The light!” Walks away.
At a soon-closing burger place, someone says, “I hated AA because everybody there was in a terrible mood—they obviously showed up when they most needed to party.”
“My former sponsor saw me drinking a martini the other day,” says someone else.
“Why was your sponsor at the bar?” I ask.
We drink miniature mezcal negronis at the launch for a new textile line by Mark Grattan hosted by PIN–UP, in a penthouse showroom with roof access on Fifth Avenue. A long-haired dog keeps trying to gnaw on me with its human-like teeth. I spill a slice of cold steak on the carpeted floor.
We drink gin and tonics (one of two drinks on offer) on the penthouse terrace of some gay guys’ apartment in Hell’s Kitchen. The clouds slide through the sky pearlescently, brightly, pale gray despite a waxing crescent moon, thanks to the Times Square light pollution. Maybe those are NFTs on the 70-inch TV inside? They’re kind of good illustrations, whatever they are. Someone earlier today had brought up the “I’m so bored I could die” episode of Sex and the City, which I re-remember as I look toward the over-lit Midtown views, but even at the textile party people smoked cigarettes—although several people had said they felt as if they were in an episode of And Just Like That…
What was it I wrote above about living life through fiction?
Gay guy dinner, gay guy music video night, gay guy “pre-pre-pregame” featuring an entire gay basketball team. I guess it’s pride? Does pride get a capital P? Am I proud? Three nights ago I dreamt a giant leak burst through the back of my closet from the apartment of the always-fighting heterosexual couple next door and I was like, “My clothes!” and only later, after several hours awake, was I like, lol, a flooding closet…
I don’t make it to all of these gay things, because I do other gay things, like go to a rooftop party with literally zero women(?) where people say “I can’t find the moon,” which I can’t either, and go to a p/Pride rave where the only people making out are straight couples(?), and go to friends’ art studio in the building with the Bushwick private spa(?) where we discuss cul-de-sacs since they, the artist duo, have adhered some fiberglass schematics of suburban roads to their paintings, and one of the artists keeps wondering aloud, Why is it the “ass of the bag” if by definition a bag’s bottom features no holes?
I never thought of the hole as the defining feature of the ass, rather I thought of the ass as the positive shapes of its two arcs (yes, I have been doing squats), but I suppose this hole-iness is obvious. A cul-de-sac is not a dead end, it is a loop, and the loop rings a center—I mean cul-de-sac as in the road shape, not the figure of speech, which I guess means a “route to nowhere,” per Google.
“Or maybe I am an orchid,” a talking lamb says in another of Martinez’s plays, called “The Play.” “A wet orchid. I’m rain on the window and a palm in the breeze. A true vortex. A true sucking hole. My fantasy is that people come to see me and get lost in the image and become infected by me.”
I am infected by a fantasy where my life can come in any order—where the tenses slip and shift and I renounce my anal-retentive attention to impeccable syntax, where I no longer say things like “whom” or “than I” and thus am a human and not an image. Unfortunately, I can’t see myself but in a mirror, so always already I’m infected by what I’m not. This line of thinking is probably nihilistic and a cul-de-sac, but such is the nature of a hangover. The other thing, everyone agrees, that’s annoying about AA is the whole bit about god.
“What do you believe in?” someone asks me as we wait for our chicken sandwiches.
I relay incoherent phrases about humanity and possibility and change.
“So you’re hopeful?”
I’m not on empathogens, but I decide to be honest: “Yes, I’m committed to hope.” I hope to get through this day, and the next, and the next, and on the other side realize there is no other side, that I can loop and loop around a hole-less center because the hole has been the world all along, that any other side is not for me but for everyone, not because I’m a political “utopian,” but not because I’m not, or, I mean, because why would you bother going on living if you’re deluded enough to think the world conjures itself for you alone?
I felt no unity on the dance floor; I felt no unity on three different rooftops; I felt no unity half-asleep on the train; I don’t care because, IDK, today I’ve decided my vibe is kinda smooth-brain coexist sticker, and I love my friends, plus also everyone I’ve never met. That’s why hippiedom is not a real political project—you’re not meant to be one-with-all, you’re supposed to be in solidarity amid difference. Anyway, I’m dizzy. I’m innovating new mental illnesses by drinking half a Diet Coke before “restorative yoga.” I’m re-reading the sentence “I listen to the howls that issue like gusts of wind from the mouth of the chasm and by God I make an effort to understand their language but I can’t, no matter how hard I try.” I looked away from the criss-crossed pit of streets below, looked for the moon, but it was not there—in the sky I saw more sky, wrapping the earth.
