Williamsburg Gothic
The woes of fucking hipsters in 2011
I feel bad for 2011 Brooklyn girlies because their dating pool were guys who wore plaid shirts to ironically countersignal their reverse white flight. Overcome with an increasing anxiety that their suburbanite upbringing makes them an outsider they start doubling down on their past. The Brooklynite girlie, after being thoroughly impressed with their date's ability to ride on a unicycle, is brought to an apartment adorned with signifiers of a man who is trapped in a masochistic nostalgia.
"It's ironic," he says, "like what if a guy was actually this obsessed with his childhood but also knew who David Lynch was?" His walls lined with advertisements that have plausible deniability for being posters. Super Mario Bros, Rocky, Nirvana - so committed to the bit he has even framed them behind glass. A table still encrusted with stains from the last house, apparently "baked in", sits in front of couch that equally looks picked up from the street. She walks past the living room and into the kitchen, the man opens the fridge and it's filled with Pabst Blue Ribbon and lunch meat. He asks if she wants something and she declines for some reason he doesn't understand.
He grabs a beer and brings her to his bedroom. The pinstripe stained bed sheet hangs off his bed and rests on the floor, the off-yellow mattress is dotted in black fuzzies in an inverse of the night sky. His blanket, a comforter, is styled in a dark blue tartan. There is a beauty in his carelessness, an ease of anxiety that the Brooklyn girlie has never known. To her existence has been a struggle of self-actualization: to become beautiful, to become intelligent, to speak onto the world have it speak back. This man, so true to himself, rolls around in dirt and grime and proclaims himself a king. She wants this more than anything, to be free of the consequences that come with wanting to be known.
He grabs at her blouse, the cheap silk-like plastic glides through his hand in a slight chill. "This I like" he says, following an arc up her top to a necklace that rests gently on her collarbone. "Is it vintage?" "Um, no" she says, looking down and letting out a forced laugh, "it's um, just a beaded necklace, I made it myself actually." The man already looks bored by the conversation. "Cool, good to have hobbies." He says in terse obligation.
He leans closer to her on his bed, his face a mess of lines contorted into an puckered lip that erupts like a mountain from the forests of his scratchy facial hair. His hand presses down into hers, pinning it to the bed. She matches his motions and their tongues begin to dart in and out of each other's mouths.
Tracing, tracing every arc and contour on the girl's body, the uncomfortable scratchiness of the never-been-washed sheets distracts from the whole session. She's absent but he doesn't seem to mind.
They fuck and it's pathetic, clumps of frayed fabric from the mattress scrapped into the women's back in metronomic timing to the rhythm of the man's thrusts. He took her boobs into his hands like a child grasping Playdoh. He raced along her body in obligation. There was no sex, just masturbation. Men always seem to get off much more easier than she does, she wonders if it's a failing on her part.
He lights a cigarette and asks if she enjoyed the sex, maybe another ironic impulse. She looks out the window wondering about the lives of those whose lights are still on. Do they have pathetic sex? Do they search for meaning in the other?
There's a feeling that only arises inside during nights like these, a true essence of herself, that she is nothing, that she does nothing, that she cannot point to a single thing about herself that makes her anything more than just some girl.
She scans the room. Mess. T-shirts pile the floor, always t-shirts, never pants. A small laptop sits on his desk next to a copy of Infinite Jest, it has no bookmarks. Is this it? Is this her life? To be a toy that's fucked by a guy who embodies such middling mediocrity? And if it is, what does that make her?
Her train of thought is disrupted by the man tracing circles on her hip. She turns to him and notices that the man's face is wet with tears.
"I'm sorry" he says, in uncharacteristic vulnerability "I, I didn't want to have sex with you." The girl is shocked but her face doesn't move, she stares through him, through the tears. "I have different reason I brought you here." The man gets up from the bed, his cock is there, he puts on pants and his cock peaks out from the waist, he adjusts himself. "I just. I don't think it's fair that I have to grow up. I didn't ask for this life, I didn't ask to be an adult. It.. it all made sense when I was a kid, you know? You watch TV and eat cereal. Your friends are people who watch TV and eat cereal. Now I have to pretend to like Kafka, I have to pretend to like Pynchon, I have to act like I get Ingmar Bergman. I want to watch bullshit, you know? Garbage, I like garbage, I hate art. I fucking hate it." He gets off his bed, tears held in glittery desperation to his eyes. He looks at the girl and turns quickly to his nightstand.
He reaches into a drawer and rifles around, the girlie, thoroughly high, looks on at the spectacle. It's like a car crash, but she's no Samaritan let alone a firefighter. She wonders if the man will draw a gun, if he will point it at himself or her, and what she would even do. He presents her with a polaroid - not a pastiche photo taken recently but a genuine artifact from the early 80s. She doesn't know if it's the weed or the atmosphere but the photograph is a woman that bares a strikingly resemblance to herself. Pointed nose, brown hair, eyebrows that draw attention to themselves, a crooked smile. She looks up from the photo and the man is real close, she could count the pores on his face if she wanted.
"That's my mother." The man says, his mustache saturated in a human soup of sweat and snot. "That's my mother and, and, I knew I had to have you." He swipes the photo from her hand and looks at it intently "I didn't even want to fuck, I don't know why I did. It just feels like I needed to." He looks back to the girlie "I want to go back, I don't want this life, I don't want this apartment or to date or to fuck. I want to eat cereal and, and, and, I want to watch cartoons, and..." He grabs the woman by her wrist and pulls her off the bed. She feels more like a mother being brought somewhere by a kid than a woman being forced somewhere by a man. Maybe there's no difference. He takes her to closet, she can hear steady whirrs coming from it. "I've been working on a project and, when I saw you. Well do you believe in fate?"
He opens the door and there's a blinding green light that gives way to form, a human form, a desiccated man whose artificial lungs hiss in a stilted cadence. Tubes run in and out of his leathery skin, connected to machinery that extend upwards in Escherian non-linearity. He lays down with one arm bent over his chest, his eyes narrow slits that fall into a deep darkness. His mouth slightly agape, jagged canyons extend like roads outwards from it. "Look," the man says with tears running down his face "I brought my dad back he- he was dead but I brought him back, and you, you can be with him again! You both can take care of me and love me and buy me McDonald's and let me play Zelda." The father looks at the woman, there isn't a distinct physical movement but she feels the psychic presence of being looked at.
"And I, and I won't be a failure anymore, I won't have to worry about striking out with the ladies or putting on a personality or being in a band or being a poet or being funny, I can just relax, I can finally fucking relax." The man continues "You can make me whole, you can fix my life, I'll finally be me again. Wouldn't you like that? Wouldn't you like to be my mommy? Wouldn't you like to be with dad? We can be happy again, it never had to end we don't have to make it end." The artificial lungs wheeze, the machinery whirrs, the heart monitor beeps, a symphony of struggle.
The woman steps back, unsure of what to make of the situation. "I um, you know that's nice of you and everything erm, like really I'm happy that you thought of me but this is all so sudden..." The man approaches her, inching closer and closer, until a sigh is heard from behind him. The father lifts his arm, "girl..." he says, his voice an airy sputter. "Leave, forsake this place, find solace in your youth while you have it and not a second more." The machinery starts going wild, a disjointed and chaotic rhythm. The man desperately attends the machinery, muttering something that can't be heard.
The woman watches, transfixed on the man. There's a guilty feeling that sits with her, one that wants to help, to be with him. Maybe that's her purpose, where she can find herself, helping this man become who he wants. He stares back at her, it's a terrifying look. Everything in his life rests in her hands, he says "m-maybe we can watch a movie instead. We don't have to rush into things. I have um, have you seen Seventh Seal?" His father jerks wildly behind him. "It's so essential if you haven't."
She can't help but stare. "I um, yeah okay. I just need to use the bathroom first." She says. The man turns back and she leaves. She runs. She can't stop running, the Brooklyn night life a swirl of neon and random faces. She's stopped by a man "hey hey calm down, are you okay?" She begins sobbing, people pass through her. The man continues "I don't know what you're going through but it will get better, just try not to take everything so seriously." He's in his late thirties, maybe forties. He's wearing a dark navy beanie and a jacket that looks twice thrifted. "I just. Sorry I'm new to the city and I feel lost." "Feeling lost and being lost are two different things, people come here to feel lost all the time." She looks at him "Sorry, I just thought um. I just thought it was something I should say. Do you need help? I can point you in the right direction." "I don't think you can, I just feel. It's a spiritual thing." "Oh I see." He pauses then continues, "go home, drink something warm, just be with yourself for a bit. That'll help." "Okay thanks." She says moving past him. "Bye" he says, growing increasingly distant.
She walks home in the brisk autumnal night unsure what to make of the situation, except that maybe Williamsburg isn't her scene, and maybe she'd be better off in Seattle or Portland. She gets home and lays in her bed, staring at her ceiling while the TV plays New Girl ambiently in the background. She cries and cries and cries, screaming into her pillow that is stained black with clouds of mascara and eyeliner.
She lifts up her head and look at the TV, Zoeey Deschannel is dressed in polka dots and is talking about being adorkable. "Fuck this." She turns off the TV and goes into the kitchen. There's no alcohol except for a half empty bottle of wine. She grabs it and a half-ironic 'I hate Mondays' mug from her cabinet and begins pouring herself a glass. Chugging it, desperate to escape this feeling, desperate to get out of here. Sanguine rivers pour down her neck as she repeatedly fills the glass and cries. She sits down, then lays down, then falls asleep.
In her dream she watches herself as an adult in her late 30s, living in a small suburb outside of Milwaukee. Her husband reclining on the couch looking at his phone "I'm really hoping the Chiefs win tonight, it'd be good for my FanDuel team."
She wraps her arms around him and kisses him on the cheek. Her child toddles over with a vague plastic shape in hand. "Zaxton what are you doing with that." her husband asks, laughing as he takes the toy from the child.
The floor is grey, the walls a slightly different shade of grey, the trim a third shade of grey, all of which are different greys than the couch which is a fourth shade of grey. Pictures of memories hang on the wall, apparently documenting her marriage. "Hey hon," her future self asks, "which dress should I wear to church on Sunday?"
There is a ringing in the girl's ear and she can't hear the rest, the couple laughs while their son tries to climb up the couch. The girl feels a deep pain in her chest. Is this really her? Is this where her life leads? She begins weeping, a preemptive mourning for herself. She wakes up in a cold sweat and vomits.
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