Grand Union Read online

  I really hate it when goyim use the word Zionist because

  okay let’s talk: i’m writing this because 1) i don’t mind being blunt, and 2) i’m more than a little sick and tired of seeing others get taken advantage of or be made anxious.

  so today i’m yelling about

  UNCOMFORTABLE WRITING TRUTHS

  The Top Ten Worst Things to Say to an Autistic Person

  Oh Hell No . . . ..

  WE NEED TO TALK: Just because a character is showing emotions and they are portrayed sympathetically or they do something relatable or “human” does NOT automatically translate into = “Redemption”

  You are all terrible, you know that?

  Okay so . . . here’s the part where I explain to people who don’t understand how WORDS work . . . .

  First of all . . . .you can try and put words into my mouth ALL you like . . . .You can fuck off too . . . .I’m an AMERICAN I’m calling out the hateful people I see all the time.

  The letter Ricardo wrote to his girlfriend for Valentine’s Day 2018, the day he was murdered.

  Part of me fighting my constant self hate shit was stepping back, realizing I was comparing myself to other people and that it was unhealthy, and then sitting down and listing out the things I thought were cool about the other person without judgment.

  I’ll give you a tip about adulting: you don’t have to adult the same way other adults adult.

  Tall bottoms are the most oppressed members of the gay community.

  You’ll never be bored again.

  You’ll never be bored again.

  You’ll never be bored again.

  Absurd Modern Mood

  “And the crazy thing is,” said the Professor of the Philosophy of History to the Professor of the History of Philosophy, “how difficult an easy life is! I mean, imagine what a difficult life feels like!”

  A nearby graduate, Zenobia, presently assembling a sly dinner out of Philosophy Department canapés—while simultaneously trying to disguise the look of actual hunger in her eyes—took a moment. Suddenly she was overcome by the sense that none of this was real. Not the canapés, not the professors, not the Philosophy Department, nor the whole city campus. (Zenobia has ninety-six thousand dollars in loans. She is studying Philosophy, period.)

  Medieval Moods: Blood, Black Bile, Bile, Phlegm

  To leave Monrovia while six months pregnant and lightly spotting, and then to head to Libya, reaching its coast when you are eight months pregnant and bleeding more steadily, where you then launch yourself out to sea, in a small dinghy, stuffed with eighty other people, heading for Lampedusa—in that situation it will certainly help to be bloody, and therefore sanguine, though with a touch of black bile, which will make you goal-oriented and determined.

  * * *

  • • •

  To separate an un-potty-trained four-year-old from its mother at the border and place it in confinement, with several other children of similar age, and a crate of Pampers, as if you hope the children will figure out how to change themselves, and then to walk past the visiting nurse and social worker with lowered eyes as you three pass each other at the tent flap, because none of you can quite stand to look at each other—to perform this action it is essential that you have phlegm and are phlegmatic in general, so that you can be good at generalizing ideas or problems in the world and making compromises.

  * * *

  • • •

  If your great-grandparents were sharecroppers, and you’re the first of your clan to attend university, and you are interested in the philosophy of the self, and your dream is to be a photographer, and you are studying in the hope of achieving your goal, but by graduation you will owe a hundred and thirty thousand dollars in student loans—in this case you will develop a melancholy strain of bile, which manifests itself in a strive for perfection, which other, less sensitive people, like your roommates, will experience as irritating, and diagnose as OCD, citing as evidence your tendency not to be able to leave the apartment until all the knobs on the cooker are facing north and the cheap, plastic blinds are partially raised to the exact same height to let the light through.

  * * *

  • • •

  When a beloved parrot dies? Melancholy, forsooth, only melancholy.

  Roberta and Preston (A Dialog)

  Roberta (reading from the paper): They’re saying it’s made almost no difference.

  Preston: That’s a laugh!

  Roberta: It doesn’t matter what he does, because it’s not rational, it’s emotional.

  Preston: That’s a laugh!

  Roberta: Except it’s not very funny.

  Preston: Twenty-ee-ee-five hours to go! I wanna be sedated!

  Roberta: I’m being serious. They’re still behind him. He makes them feel good. They want him to just go ahead and shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue like he promised.

  Preston: I wanna be sedated! I wanna be sedated!

  Roberta: Okay, okay, okay . . . Did I feed Edie? Did you see me feed Edie? Did Edie already eat?

  Preston: That’s a laugh!

  Roberta (closing the paper): Well, if we’re lucky maybe one of us will drop dead off our perch before 2020.

  Preston (under his breath): Lord, let it be me.

  All the Moods vs. the Individual

  Zenobia was dog-sitting for the photographer lady downstairs, who had traveled to Pennsylvania to bury her parrot in a famous pet cemetery. It was an opportunity to see the apartment. What was amazing about the apartments of long-standing adults was the accumulation of incidental texture. Not: I went and bought this lamp and this poster so I would have a lamp and a poster to furnish my life. But just stuff, so much stuff everywhere, somehow the consequence of a certain amount of time on earth. For her Tumblr (entirely unfollowed), Zenobia photographed:

  36 DVD cases of old movies two thirds of which were empty

  A gypsy shawl hung over a lamp waiting to burn down the whole building

  A large black dildo standing proud on a side table and signed in silver Sharpie by someone apparently un-Googleable

  Four pairs of red silk Chinese slippers, very beautiful

  A little pyramid of dog hair on the windowsill

  All around the apartment were photographs taken by the tenant, extraordinary photographs of old punks when young—stylish, smart, daring, strikingly composed photographs, taken on a real camera—but Zenobia found herself unable to photograph them. Just looking at them was hard enough. She fed Edie, remembering to hide the pill in the wet food and separate wet from dry. She lay on the floor. Her new Liberian twists fanned out around her head. She tried to muster the energy to lift her phone to her eyes and thus locate herself in the online DSM. Edie shuffled by, paying Zenobia no mind. For half a century, “feeling unreal” was known as DPD (De-personalization Disorder), but has recently been renamed and recategorized as DDD (De-personalization/De-realization Disorder), which refers not only to the feeling of personal unreality but also to the sense that the world around you likewise does not exist. Near-sighted Edie—who like many pugs of her age suffered from retinal damage—moseyed back round the way she’d came, paused at Zenobia’s face, and licked her right in the nostril.

  Locate the Self II

  Find a Grave . . . . . search name

  West End, Section 36, plot B71

  Name: “Preston”

  Breed: Parrot, African Grey

  Headstone: Preston 1970–2019 “Everybody has a Poison Heart”

  Mood Memory

  The phone book was an annual April excitement, arriving in bound stacks of four, bright yellow. You looked up kids you fancied, or notorious bitches and bullies, and sought out tragic last names—Cock, Bumstead—to see if any such people existed and where they lived. One trickster of a teacher swore to us that his real first name was Rov
er—his parents had wanted a dog—and everybody laughed and no one believed him, but then he said go on and look it up in the phone book and that’s what we did, me and my brother, and there it was, Rover! Magic. That’s what everyone’s looking for down those stupid mail chutes but it doesn’t come again, or not quite in that form.

  My father was always threatening to unlist us, because he shared a name with a famous jockey and strangers would periodically call the apartment to ask him which horse they should bet on in the Grand National. We begged him not to unlist us. We wanted to locate ourselves. We flicked excitedly through the pages, thin like onion skin, yellow, easily torn, and landed with delight on the most common surname in England and said oh there we are there we are there we are there we are there we are

  ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK

  It had been a very long time since he’d been responsible for another human. Never had he organized travel for himself or anybody. But it was his fault they were all three in the city, and so it fell to him. There was perhaps even something a little exciting about discovering, for the first time in his life, that he was not useless, that his father was wrong, and in fact he was capable. He called Elizabeth first.

  “I’m in a state of terror,” Elizabeth said.

  “Wait,” Michael said, hearing a beep on the line. “Let me bring in Marlon.”

  “The world’s gone crazy!” Elizabeth said. “I can’t even believe what I’m looking at!”

  “Hi, Marlon,” Michael said.

  “So—where are we?” Marlon said.

  “‘Where are we?’” Elizabeth said. “We’re in a state of terror, that’s where we are.”

  “We’re all right,” Marlon grumbled. He sounded far away. “We’ll handle it.”

  Michael could hear Marlon’s TV in the background. It was tuned to the same channel Michael was watching, but only Michael could see the images on the screen replicated simultaneously through his own window, a strange doubling sensation, like when you stand on a stage and look up at yourself on the JumboTron. Elizabeth and Marlon were staying uptown; normally Michael, too, would be staying uptown—until five days ago he’d almost never set foot below 42nd Street. Everyone—his brothers and sisters, all his West Coast friends—had warned him not to go downtown. It’s dangerous downtown, it’s always been that way, just stick with what you know, stay at the Carlyle. But because the helipad near the Garden had, for some reason, been out of commission it had been decided he should stay downtown, for reasons of proximity and to avoid traffic. Now Michael looked south and saw a sky darkened with ash. The ash seemed to be moving toward him. Downtown was really so much worse than anyone in LA could even begin to imagine.

  “Some things you can’t handle,” Elizabeth said. “I’m in a state of terror.”

  “There are no flights allowed,” Michael said, trying to feel capable, filling them in. “No one can charter. Not even the very important people.”

  “Bullshit!” Marlon said. “You think Weinstein’s not on a plane right now? You think Eisner’s not on a plane?”

  “Marlon, in case you’ve forgotten,” Elizabeth said, “I am also a Jew. Am I on a plane, Marlon? Am I on a plane?”

  Marlon groaned. “Oh, for Chrissake. I didn’t mean it that way.”

  “Well, how the hell did you mean it?”

  Michael bit his lip. The truth was, these two dear friends of his were both closer friends to him than they were to each other, and there were often these awkward moments when he had to remind them of the love thread that connected all three, which, to Michael, was so obvious; it was woven from a shared suffering, a unique form of suffering, that few people on this earth have ever known or will ever have the chance to experience, but which all of them—Michael, Liz, and Marlon—happened to have undergone to the highest degree possible. As Marlon sometimes said, “The only other guy who knew what this feels like got nailed to a couple of planks of wood!” Sometimes, if Elizabeth wasn’t around, he would add, “By the Jews,” but Michael tried not to linger on these aspects of Marlon, preferring to remember the love thread, for that was all that really mattered, in the end. “I think what Marlon meant—” Michael began, but Marlon cut him off: “Let’s focus here! We’ve got to focus!”

  “We can’t fly,” Michael said quietly. “I don’t know why, really. That’s just what they’re saying.”

  “I’m packing,” Elizabeth said, and down the line came the sound of something precious smashing on the floor. “I don’t even know what I’m packing, but I’m packing.”

  “Let’s be rational about this,” Marlon said. “There’s a lot of car services. I can’t think of any right now. On TV you see them. They’ve got all kinds of names. Hertz? That’s one. There must be others.”

  “I am truly in a state of terror,” Elizabeth said.

  “You said that already!” Marlon shouted. “Get ahold of yourself!”

  “I’ll try and call a car place,” Michael said. “The phones down here are kind of screwy.” On a pad he wrote, Hurts.

  “Essentials only,” Marlon said, referring to Liz’s packing. “This is not the fucking QE2. This is not fucking cocktail hour with good old Dick up in St. Moritz. Essentials.”

  “It’ll be a big car,” Michael murmured. He hated arguments.

  “It’ll sure as hell have to be,” Elizabeth said, and Michael knew she was being sarcastic and referring to Marlon’s weight. Marlon knew it, too. The line went silent. Michael bit his lip some more. He could see in the vanity mirror that his lip looked very red, but then he remembered that he had permanently tattooed it that color.

  “Elizabeth, listen to me,” Marlon said, in his angry but controlled mumble, which gave Michael an inappropriate little thrill; he couldn’t help it, it was just such classic Marlon. “Put that goddamn Krupp on your pinkie and let’s get the fuck out of here.”

  Marlon hung up.

  Elizabeth started crying. There was a beep on the line.

  “I should probably take that,” Michael said.

  At noon, Michael put on his usual disguise and picked up the car in an underground garage near Herald Square. At 12:27 p.m., he pulled up in front of the Carlyle.

  “Jesus Christ, that was fast,” Marlon said. He was sitting on the sidewalk, on one of those portable collapsible chairs you sometimes see people bring along when they camp outside your hotel all night in the hope that you’ll step out onto the balcony and wave to them. He wore a funny bucket hat like a fisherman’s, elasticated sweatpants, and a huge Hawaiian shirt.

  “I took the superfast river road!” Michael said. He didn’t mean to look too smug about it, given the context, but he couldn’t help but be a little bit proud.

  Marlon opened a carton he had on his lap and took out a cheeseburger. He eyed the vehicle.

  “I hear you drive like a maniac.”

  “I do go fast, Marlon, but I also stay in control. You can trust me, Marlon. I promise I will get us out of here.”

  Michael felt really sad seeing Marlon like that, eating a cheeseburger on the sidewalk. He was so fat, and his little chair was under a lot of strain. The whole situation looked very precarious. This was also the moment when he noticed that Marlon wasn’t wearing any shoes.

  “Have you seen Liz?” Michael asked.

  “What is that hunk of junk, anyway?” Marlon asked.

  Michael had forgotten. He leaned over and took the manual out of the glove compartment.

  “A Toyota Camry. It’s all they had.” He was about to add “with a roomy backseat” but thought better of it.

  “The Japanese are a wise people,” Marlon said. Behind Marlon, the doors of the Carlyle opened and a bellboy emerged walking backward with a tower of Louis Vuitton luggage on a trolley and Elizabeth at his side. She was wearing a lot of diamonds: several necklaces, bracelets up her arms, and a mink stole covered with so many brooches it looked like a pin c
ushion.

  “You have got to be kidding me,” Marlon said.

  A logician? A negotiator? Michael did not usually have much call to think of himself in this way. But now, back on the road and speeding toward Bethlehem, he allowed the thought that people had always overjudged and misunderestimated him and maybe in the end you don’t really know a person until that person is truly tested by a big event, like the apocalypse. Of course, people forgot he’d been raised a Witness. In one way or another, he’d been expecting this day for a long, long time. Still, if anyone had told him, twenty-four hours ago, that he would be able to convince Elizabeth—she who once bought a seat on a plane for a dress so it could meet her in Istanbul—to join him on an escape from New York, in a funky old Japanese car, abandoning five of her Louis Vuitton cases to a city under attack, well, he truly wouldn’t have believed it. Who knew he had such powers of persuasion? He’d never had to persuade anyone of anything, least of all his own genius, which was, of course, a weird childhood gift he’d never asked for and which had proved impossible to give back. Maybe even harder was getting Marlon to agree that they would not stop again for food until they hit Pennsylvania. He leaned forward to see if there were any more enemy combatants in the sky. There were not. He and his friends were really escaping! He had taken control and was making the right decisions for everybody! He looked across at Liz, in the passenger seat: she was calm, at last, but her eyeliner continued to run down her beautiful face. So much eyeliner. Everything Michael knew about eyeliner he’d learned from Liz, but now he realized he had something to teach her on the subject: make it permanent. Tattoo it right around the tear ducts. That way, it never runs.