Imposter!

2008-02-13T04:45:42Z

    The problem with Mr. Connuck is that he never meets any of his deadlines. When I ask him whether he hasn't finished the piece he was working on last week, he waves his hand dismissively at me, and tells me about his idea for his next story.
   I am getting more and more frustrated with Mr. Connuck. For the past year or two, his stories have mostly been tragi-comic love and lust stories with pathetic male protagonists caught halfway between their biological imperitives and progressive attitudes about not objectifying women. It is not that I am not sympathetic with these characters, but I am getting bored of hearing the same story over and over again. They say a writer must write what he knows, but it is getting ridiculous.
   Write a fantasy, I say, something with a plot. An epic, with dragons and knights in shining armor if you need them, but something that makes readers turn pages. Something that's more than an autobiography with the protagonist's name changed.   He tries to listen, I'll give him that, but when he does, he falls back into the same rut. I keep telling him that no one wants to read stories where the prince slays the dragon, then respectfully returns the maiden fair to her father and declines to marry her because of the coercive nature of the situation.
   Anyway, he's an alright guy. Doesn't get out too much, something of an introvert, reserved. We don't have a lot in common, but there are some things, like a fondness for irony. Chocolate's another one. Neither of us works particularly hard, and we both like talking too much.
   I drink coffee in the mornings, but Mr. Connuck likes to drink tea when he writes. I'm not sure exactly why. He tells me it's relaxing.

It's been a strange couple of hours.

2007-12-23T17:53:47Z

   You stayed up all of last night, and you know exactly how you're going to play it off: "Dali would stay up for three days on end," you will say, "and he just painted what he saw on the third day." You're fairly confident that the story is true, but who knows? It certainly sounds like something he would do. Not that you're really a devotee of Dali or surrealism, but mentioning him will lend you some pedigree of culture among the young and clear-eyed social circles you run, full of kids like you who are sophisticated enough to know Dali, and reckless enough for such stories not to be stale and plunky. The perverted allegory of staying awake for three days on end still impresses your friends, smart, real smart, but they haven't been around long enough to realize that twisting the Christ tale around isn't shocking anymore. In any case, you'll tell it, and if it falls flat - well, it won't be so bad.
    But no, the real reason you were up all night (check your e-mail, the voicemail again, yesterday's newspaper just in case something you hadn't seen there before) was because of a girl.
    Eight in the morning is time to stumble out of bed and pound bravely into the kitchen for two cups of coffee, three pills (depression [you tell people "anxiety"] and ADD [you tell people "ADD," but reluctantly]), and a clementine. Hours earlier you crept in like a thief to sneak away with a glass of water without waking your mother, who is an extraordinarily light sleeper. Tiptoes, tiptoes.
    Your coffee comes with you into the bathroom. It is polished off, your boxers are un-self-consciously stripped from your waist, and you stand in front of the mirror naked for maybe twenty seconds. You spit last night's phlegm and this morning's coffee into the sink (a horrible muddy mixture), and look at yourself. "Hey," you think, puffing out your chest. "Not so bad after all." But you relax and poke your stomach, the fat there wiggles readily, and you step into the hot water of the shower before you can dwell on how far you've let yourself go.
    You wonder when she will call. It strikes you - what if she never does call? It would be too much.
    You feel cleaner; the shower wakes you up, but the shampoo and soap that gets stuck under your armpits look like pus or very, very pure vomit. Maybe drool. The lighting in the shower is unnecessarily dramatic, and you wonder if maybe the story about Dali is not just a crock of shit that your neighbor told you last summer when you smoked Turkish cigarettes and marijuana on his roof. One year older than you, and apparently one year wiser than everyone he came across, you two got along well, but you think he might have had some issues - probably a complex of sorts, you'd like to think. That sounds like a good name for his condition. You should be a psychologist. You smile, the soap washes off. You feel less sick than you did the day before. Maybe this builds character. You turn off the water, step out of the shower, dry off, deodorant, brush your hair, do you look thinner? No need to shave, you'll never be able to grow facial hair (you are resigned to this). You take your coffee cup to the kitchen to clean it out, your hair still damp, your boxers still left in the bathroom.
    You will dress later. Right now, you are still preoccupied with the girl. She lives in Queens, she's a friend of your friends, you met her once before, three or four years ago, briefly, but you both remembered each other. That's almost twenty percent of your life so far (you are seventeen, lucky you!) but you met her serendipitously at a party on Friday and you two got along great. You gave her a massage and talked with her friends. She asked you to call her. You're having lunch on Sunday.
    Somewhere on the seven train coming back into Manhattan, you started romanticizing. It has been a long time since you've had a meaningful relationship, and you know just enough about your new favorite person to think that maybe she'll like art and writing and will be impressed by your stories about Dali and your hair-brained nervous insomnia. You're fairly confident that you remember what it feels like to have your arm around the small of someone's back like that, what skin feels like, what another person feels like. You suppose sex is fun and all, but it's really the touching that you miss, that you've missed for a long time. You hope she'll be the kind of girl that likes to go to movies at the Sunshine, and the kind of girl that wants to be very emotional (whatever that means). Actually you know exactly what that means - it means being physical without being crude. You're not sure if things have ever really been that way for you before. A couple hours ago, you had to calm yourself down because there was a chance that this might be what you were looking for.
    It probably won't be, these things never are, you tell yourself. But people can still dream, and dreaming never hurt anybody, except for cynics. You never really felt comfortable as either a dreamer or a cynic, though - you're too insecure for either. Being cynical means being alone, and you're not strong enough to face the world without believing in something, but being a dreamer means these restless nights and inevitable disappointments: fractured egos, and the part of your brain that you take "anxiety" pills for telling you, "I told you so."
    It's not that you're needy. You've done fine for yourself without someone like this Girl for a while. It's just that it would be nice.
    But like you know, it's all a question of whether this Girl is the same as the girl you met at the party, or whether she's just a construction, some abstract you can take home to your parents. You saw her in Queens two days ago, not even forty eight hours ago. She smoked, she drank. Good, you do too! But the side of you that wants to have your arm around someone is the mature side, the side that's reading The Confessions of Saint Augustine and wondering if it isn't time that you grew out of having fun. But through a fact of biology (happy or sad), these are your restless days. You wonder if she is feeling restless too, or of she bothered staying up all night. You realize she didn't, and this almost breaks your heart.
    You have the day planned out. She's going last-minute Christmas shopping near Astor place, which is maybe ten or fifteen minutes from your house. She's not buying clothes, who buys clothes for Christmas presents when you're seventeen? Does she even know what sizes her friends are? Maybe, actually. You've always been somewhat feminine in certain respects, but you don't really know if that's something that all females share - an ability to purchase clothes for others that fit and fit well. It's certainly possible. In any case you don't have that gift. You're guessing that the shopping will be for miscellany, little plastic toys or bits of irony.
    You have suggested an Indian food place that will serve you beer (expensive and bitter but large and available) and reasonably priced food. The owner knows you and shakes your hand when you visit. The waiters are familiar, the old man in the kitchen smoking a cigarette in the back garden has seen you, but you don't know his name and you don't know if he speaks English. Everyone in the restaurant refers to you as "my friend," and you love them for it. You suspect that the girl is a vegetarian, and this is something that you will have in common. Making progress. You plan to pay for the meal, to be gentlemanly and impress her for one, and to show her that you have money that you are willing to burn - dangerous tactic, maybe she's the frugal type, and it seems so horrible to calculate like this but you just want things to turn out right so very badly. You don't have all that money anyway, who are you fooling? You cross your fingers and hope it's her.
    It's still early in the morning, she won't be in Manhattan for another three hours, you guess. You de-rind the clementine and stuff it into your mouth piece by piece, still not dressed, still damp. You wonder if you are presentable, and swell with a sudden confidence that seems to come from nowhere; you are presentable. Today will be a GOOD DAY.
    You will ask her if any of her friends need drugs, and say that you have purchased too much, having expected to throw a party yesterday. Instead, you did nothing, killed time with your friend, went uptown, killed time with your friend and another good friend. One of your friends left, and before you knew it, it was ten o'clock and there were six people in your friend's apartment, ninety fourth street and second avenue. It's been an alright day, all told, but nothing special. Maybe a waste, maybe a disappointment, but it didn't seem that way. No, it wasn't a waste. But it was all just killing time. If tired personifications were as powerful as you thought they were, you'd be on death row by now. Your life, at this point, is a shuffled deck of mixed metaphors that isn't about to get untied or decoded any time soon.
    In short, you are hoping that she is Just Like You, the same mixture of uncertainty, loneliness, debauchery, and hope. You start to sound like a lost soul, and you realize that you could write a song about this and sell a million records and get rich forever, but it's too terrible to even think about and you don't want to reduce her or yourself to cheap teenage love when you're really a pile of quivering young nerves that's hoping and praying that you've finally met someone who is just as "anxious" as you are; moreover, you're praying that somehow, when and if you crash together in that awkward way you know you will (if you ever do), you'll add up to more than the sum of your parts, specifically your reproductive ones.
    You cross your fingers and look at the clock. Nine thirty. Despite Einstein and all your patchwork knowledge of physics, time isn't ever going to move any faster. There is no express train to closure. The day is just really beginning, even though you've been up for twenty four hours, and it will either end in unspeakable bitterness or a happiness that you're not sure you're capable of.

Go Rest, Young Man

Imposter!

It's been a strange couple of hours.