Batten Down the Hatches: Hurricane Irene, Saturday a.m.

[Update 7:34 a.m. Saturday]  I wake up and stare out my window at a tableau of suspiciously still trees.  Not a leave moves.  The gray sky is brooding some yet-to-be-seen horror.  I hear a bird chirp and think about what might become of these poor little chickadees when the storm hits.  If they were pigeons, I wouldn’t much care; the pigeons in New York just look like a bunch of worthless fucked-up chickens that somehow survived the fallout of the A bomb.  If Hurricane Irene wipes out the pigeon population of New York City, I’ll be fucking stoked.  The rats, too.  Dear sweet Jesus, take the rats.  No, I’m thinking about sparrows and other avian charmers that likely had cameos in that scene in Cinderella where they’re waking her up out of bed and singing duets with her.  Those kinds.

[Update 7:57 a.m. Saturday]  I eat breakfast, the last meal I might have in my apartment while it is still one piece.  Afterward, I make a salad out of all of the fresh vegetables I stupidly purchased yesterday that are now going to go to waste while I’m holed up at the St. Regis, finding refuge in foie gras and flutes of champagne.

[Update 8:37 a.m. Saturday]  I consult my mother’s emails from the previous night.

Fill some water containers (your Brita and any big things like a big pot or container and maybe the bathtub ½ full in case).  Pack a small bag too and leave it by the door just in case you have to run.  Tennis shoes, snacks, a clean toothbrush and thong (hehe) and a jacket and hat.  Think elementary school emergency backpack.  Also, have some small bills ($1 and $5) and some change in a bag in case the electricity goes out.  Nobody will be able to charge anything.  Are you really prepared?  Now I am getting concerned.

This one no longer applies, being that I am going to be staying at the St. Regis, though I am happy that my mother so kindly cited $1 and $5 bills as being my Small Bill Options, as I had contemplated getting a ton of $2 from the bank the previous day.  And opposed to my clean toothbrush, I was thinking about bringing my dirty one.  Phew.  Crisis averted.  I scan through to the next, hoping to procure some more Mommy Wisdom.

The emergency backpack still applies [at the St. Regis], AND know where all the emergency exits are (in the dark) and don’t stay high (fire safety).  Take water     and snacks, small bills (could be a big tipper gets the best food and water             situation) and tennis shoes.  The staff will want to be home not there so plan to take care of yourself just in case.

My mother should work for Mayor Bloomberg.  Effectively terrified, I am now envisioning scenes from The Poseidon Adventure – the original one from the 70s, not the shitty remake – as well as the last two hours of Titanic, an analogy not lost on my St. Regis friend, who is actually able to quote a snide remark Billy Zane’s character makes regarding how half of the passengers will not be saved.  “Not the better half,” she says in a later reenactment.  We laugh, evil and victorious.

[Update 9:08 a.m. Saturday]  I take this time to renew my renter’s insurance online.  I had been pondering switching over for the last week, hoping to find a more competitive rate, but, hey, who’s got time for price shopping when your trees are about to get bashed in by the broken limbs of trees and 100 mph winds?

[Update 9:21 a.m. Saturday]  I move all of my notebooks and journals to what will be the safest, driest place in my apartment if the hurricane is get in through broken windows.  I hide a laptop in a closet, put books away in my dresser, and tie up my kitchen cabinets with black hair elastics, which might just be the knee-jerk reaction of a Southern California native used to earthquakes, not hurricanes.

[Update 9:39 a.m. Saturday]  I pack for the St. Regis, which ends up looking more like I’m going on a delightful little vacay to the Hamptons than preparing for Armageddon.  This hurricane requires one Philip Lim tunic, a Stella McCartney skirt (to be paired with a gray silk top), a leather jacket, some gym clothes, my passport, and my mother’s necklaces.  I put on my outfit for the day: Stella shorts, white button-up tank, Alexander Wang leather vest, and a Jenni Kayne trench.  If the ship’s going down, I’m at least going to look good.

[Update 10:15 a.m. Saturday]  What was once such a grand idea to fill my fridge up is now a potentially smelly situation if the electricity is to go off while I’m on holiday uptown.  Soymilk will be fine.  Kale I can live with if it wilts for six days.  The cheeses might be questionable.  Yogurts will contain themselves until I can throw them away upon return to the homestead.  My freezer, however, poses different problems: frozen salmon and frozen apple-chicken sausage, artifacts from moments when I actually envisioned cooking at home some months back.  I call my mom.

“Hey, Mom.  You think I should throw away the salmon in my freezer just in       case the power goes off?  That could be really gross.”

“Just leave it in the freezer; it will stay cold.”

“But what if it defrosts?”

“I think it’s going to be fine.”

“Whatever.  I’ve had it for four months and haven’t used it.”

As an adult, I compulsively ask for my mother’s advice and then refuse to take it. The salmon, chicken sausage, and an icicle-encrusted tube of polenta get tossed into my garbage bin.  I think about chucking the eggs in my fridge but decide against it – a fortuitous decision if there ever were one.  Kind of like the time I realized that I had been putting money in a Roth IRA for the better part of 3 years without investing it – naively assuming that someone else was in charge of doing it for me.  In the depths of the recession, after having heard my friends discuss their decimated mutual funds on multiple occasions, I went online only to realize I had been funneling money into what was essentially the underside of Fidelity’s proverbial mattress, at which point I invested all of it at rock bottom prices, proving that sometimes sometimes being a complete moron pays off.

[Update 11:02 Saturday]  I tape my windows up with blue painter’s tape, smugly proud of the responsible adult I have become.

After the Rain

Crazy from an afternoon spent hunkered down in my apartment, I take a ride around the neighborhood, wet and newly cleaned.  I make my way down to an empty concrete park with basketball courts, a baseball diamond, and some caged area likely for handball, though I don’t know if that’s a game that children play any longer.

Puddles stand still in lake shapes, reflecting back Brooklyn trees and the Manhattan skyline and the sky turns purple and pink within its grayness just for a moment, a singular effort on behalf of the sun to say goodbye as it leaves, though it is really us turning away, I suppose.

A man comes to play his dog while I ride around in circles, like when I first learned how to bike as a child, half my height and naturally blonde.  Around and around and around I went on an asphalt loop – a moat of black surrounding sea grass and a few trash bins – unattached to the training wheels I had become used to, aware of my wobbliness, enthralled by the possibilities of success and failure.

I ride away and down the street and I find a pier and I ride down that, too.  Couples sit on green metal benches, talking, leaning, kissing, enamored with their own affection.  Old men who have long given up on charming women stand side-by-side, talking pointedly in a foreign language.  Some young boy in a uniform of black picks at a guitar, the breeze sweeps my hair lovingly in front of my face, and all of a sudden I am in my very own Woody Allen movie – a romanticized version of reality that doesn’t exist, though tonight it does.

The wood on the pier is damp.  I sit down in my shorts, my bike leaning on the fence in front of me, Manhattan beyond that.  Sometimes it feels as though I’m staring at nothing – some beautiful Hollywood backdrop with painted-in lights and a fog machine, too wonderful to comprehend, too vast in scope.  A city built, brick by brick, light by light, not at all at once but over time.  The overwhelming achievements of man all crammed into one tiny island.

The boy finishes, puts his guitar in his case, and then walks away – with no fanfare, no clapping – and the pier becomes so silent all you can hear is the water lapping at the crumbling shore and the sound of hushed conversations built for two.  Manhattan stands there, big and seemingly silent, belying the frantic buzzing inside of it, a beehive with a concrete shell.

Hipster Love Stories: Tina and Jared

Manhattan Avenue lived in perpetual spring, selling fake flowers year-round in violent shades of neon.  Hot pink, tangerine, cobalt.  Valentine’s Day cards and candies sat propped in windows.  “50% Off” the signs read.  Tina scoffed, wondering why anyone spent money on that garbage to begin with – preconceived affection, a consumerist vision of what love is supposed to be, corporations making money on something that didn’t exist.  “Love,” Tina mused.  “Bullshit.”

Tina walked in the cold, hoping the fresh air would cure her bad humor.  She had been bitter and angry for the better part of two weeks, cooped up in her apartment thinking of Jared the boy who told her he loved her and then took it away like a cruel magic trick.  Before today, it had been too cold even to venture outside and take a distracting walk.  And so Tina just let her malaise brew.

People waited outside Five Leaves for brunch, the sun glaring off of their Ray Bans and shiny, unwashed hair.  Tina didn’t understand people who waited in line for brunch.  In her opinion, nothing was worth the wait.  Eggs were just eggs – you could get decent enough ones down the street at Eleanor’s.  And aside from that, Tina was quite capable of just cooking eggs at home.

Love and brunch were probably similar in that way.  All of these people willing to wait for forty-five minutes while hunger ate away at their bellies likely thought that Five Leaves was the be all end all.  These people were steadfast in their love for its coffee, its granola, its pancakes, whatever.  The truth was, you could get good food anywhere in New York, at any hour of the day.  Five leaves was just another restaurant.  There were six hundred more within a half-mile radius.

The same went for love.  Love had this way of making you think you needed one specific person.  That this person was “It.”  No one could make you feel like this person or laugh like this person.  This, of course, was a lie.  In a world filled with millions of people, thousands of whom Tina walked past on a daily basis, there had to be more than one person in this world for each person.  But, in the throws of blinding, brain-numbing love, that’s how Tina had felt about Jared.  Now he was gone.  But it was okay – Tina knew that in three months she would feel the same way about someone else.  Anyone could service these fuzzy love needs if we convinced ourselves enough.  It was all just projection, anyway.

Tina walked past laughing friends and judged them all – less because they were waiting in line for brunch and more because she had fallen into a miserable little hole that she was trying to claw her way out of.  None of this was about them; it was all about Jared.

I’m falling in love with you…

Bullshit.

What made Tina the most angry was she didn’t believe him to begin with.  In the back of her cynical little brain – the one that she had cultivated over the course of her twenty-five years here on this earth – she knew he would take it back.  They always took it back.  “I’m falling in love with you,” he said to her, and she said nothing at first because she knew what a person risked when they responded to statements such as this.  She gave him nothing and he said he didn’t mind and for a week, Tina managed to feel in control of her feelings.  Next time she knew just to leave it at that.  There, on the corner of Bedford and Lorimer, Tina vowed never to tell another boy that she loved them.

The park was filled with people with children and people walking dogs.  Obligations.  Tina was happy her only obligation was to herself.  She didn’t need anyone or want anyone.  The thought of a child or a dog or a boyfriend for that matter filled her with the overwhelming sense of self-sacrifice.  Tina took a seat on a bench next to another woman, sitting alone and sunning her painfully white face.

Tina watched planes pass in the distance, moving at a pace that belied its true speed.  They came in rows, one after another after another, at three-minute intervals – huge pieces of metal casually traveling behind one another at four hundred miles per hour.  Tina wanted to be in one of those planes, coming and going, preferably to someplace warm.  Miami, South Africa, Melbourne.  After Jared told her he didn’t love her anymore, she booked a flight to Spain but then cancelled it after looking up the weather.  She’d rather just be depressed in her apartment at no extra cost, then be holed up in some hotel in Barcelona with a day rate in euros.

A couple walked past, holding hands.  Tina cringed.  There should be a moratorium on public displays of affection, if only to maintain her sanity.   She wondered if she would ever hold Jared’s hand again.  Probably not.  Still, she wondered.  If he came back, there would be no reason to put stock in him, aside from her own foolishness.  “Hurt me,” she would say, tying herself down to the tracks and feeling the rope burn at her wrists.

Fucking boys.

Tina was done with them.  All of them.  There was something refreshing about her current frame of mind.  Her brain was unclouded by love.  The excessive happiness she had felt over the last few months had numbed her to the outside world.  Between December and January, all Tina thought about was Jared, which, she imagined, had likely retarded her brain.  Now, she saw the world again with fresh eyes.  Cynical and bitter, but fresh nonetheless.

Hipster Love Stories: Gina in a Corner

Gina stood against the wall of the apartment, debating whether or not she should drink, pretending to listen to the girl next to her ramble the inane musings of a ridiculous human.  The conversation veered into I Know This Celebrity, Do You? territory and Gina was about to excuse herself to drown her agony in a bottle of Jack Daniels or cheap red wine or rubbing alcohol.  Fucking anything.  In a way, Gina felt bad for her, like she would feel badly for a three-legged dog hobbling down the street.  The girl was missing some integral pieces of her brain and had about as much substance as the surface of a dirty window.  And not even a really dirty window – a window with water stains and a very light film of dust.

“How did I get cornered here of all places…with her?” Gina thought to herself, looking around the room in desperation for other people she knew, people she liked, people that could talk about things deeper than pedicures and trips to European beaches in private planes.  Gina was not a girl’s girl by any stretch of the imagination; she found their humor to be dull and witless, their conversation to be reserved and withholding.  Girls allowed themselves to be emotional concubines, reigning in their personalities for fear that they might push people away.  Gina, however, didn’t care about pushing people away.  If they liked her, they liked her.  If they didn’t they could go fuck themselves.

To make things worse, the girl spoke with an uncalled for volume, projecting statements such as, “He didn’t even offer to pay for my dinner,” at an audible pitch that easily reached a ten-foot radius.  Gina was horrified at the prospect she might be judged by association with the logical deduction that anyone who listened to bullshit like this cared about bullshit like this.  Gold-digger Dee and Gold-digger dumb, standing in the corner.

Gina wondered how men even put up with girls like this and Gina used the word “men” in her head because that was the client base for girls like this – pretty girls with perfectly curled hair and long eyelashes and breasts that pushed forward out of tight dresses.  They were the prizes for men who had endured decades of rejection from girls exactly like this.  Rich guys were the nerds who were lucky enough to be saved from the horrors of narcissism and vanity and any other fleeting time suck that kept you from doing real things with your life.  Instead of fucking hot babes through their twenties, they were building Fortune 500 companies and writing computer software.

What drove Gina even crazier was that these men, these intensely smart and creative and ambitious men, were keen on settling for idiots with mouths full of drivel.  It was though they just wanted to come home from a hard day of work and not have to engage any further with the world.  Girls like this would never challenge them intellectually and maybe that was the point.  They were two steps above the anatomically correct dolls you could buy at the Hustler store on Sunset Boulevard.  Barely.

The girl kept talking and Gina felt her brain flicker on and off like a broken TV, the kind with the knobs that reminded her of old microwaves with windup timers.  She had started telling Gina about her audition that day and how the casting director told her she shouldn’t wear heels to commercial castings because she was already too tall as it was and isn’t it hard to be tall and beautiful sometimes and people just don’t understand and she was tired of being ostracized for her looks and sometimes she just wished she was a little less attractive.  Gina felt like she was back in Professor Waxon’s Conversations of the West class, her cheek propped up on an open palm and nodding off to sleep and jerking awake and nodding off to sleep and jerking awake again.  Gina was going to offer to break a bottle over her head to alleviate the burden of her perfection, but she was nervous she wouldn’t be able to deliver the joke without sincerity.

Gina thought about these girls and their boyfriends and wondered if they found such vacuous chatter charming.  She imagined this girl in the arms of some rich man with a nice apartment, laying together in his king sized bed with white sheets cleaned by the bi-weekly maid, petting her hair while she talked about how depressed she was Celine didn’t have the pants she wanted in her size.  According to Cosmo and Elle and every other stupid woman’s magazine touting the benefits of icing your fat cells and giving advice on how to make the perfect roasted chicken, they – women as a species – were supposed to care about things like this.  Pants and aging and animal prints and firm asses and the attention of a man.  It was a wonder why there hadn’t been a woman president yet; for hundreds of years we were too consumed with achieving the perfect hair and churning butter.

Not all women were like this girl; Gina knew that.  But she knew a depressing amount of them that were.  Her smart friends – the most quick and educated and charming of the bunch – were, and had always been, single.  Their kind was an acquired taste, one that required an appreciation for depth and complexity.  They were beautifully layered women, women who felt the world in ways that other people could not express.  They knew things about themselves that made them difficult, an awareness that brought pain and suffering along with the things that made them fascinating.

Gina thought they could be best compared to gourmet delicacies: oysters, truffles, caviar.  They were polarizing items – things you would either travel to the ends of the world for, paying a premium for their scarcity, or things that left a taste in your mouth for days, an intense flavor that you cared not to ever try again.  She thought about the truffle oil French fries at the beautifully lit café down the street from her house and how its scent filled the room in a most potent way.  She had friends who refused to dine there on account of that aroma; they would prefer to eat in a less perfumed environment.  She looked at the girl next to her, whose lips were still moving to no real consequence.  She was a French fry – the most beautiful, most boring, tasteless French fry in the universe, one served plain with a bottle of Heinz Ketchup and nothing more – and all of the boys in the room were staring at her.

Hipster Love Stories: Gillian and Seth

He met her at a dinner party where they served only vegetarian courses.  It was supposed to be vegan but people complained.  When the quinoa with pomegranate seeds, roasted cubes of butternut squash, and crumbled feta came out, Seth looked across the table at Gillian, a then-stranger, and directed (accidentally) a look of disgust her way, which she (purposefully) reciprocated.

Later they would discuss growing up in corn-fed, Middle America households where the bread was always white and the meat was always red.  They were both true blue, dyed-in-the-wool Americans that had somehow managed to escape.  Here they were now, a thousand miles and a world away from home, sitting down to a civilized dinner in a modern loft they would never admit to anyone but each other about feeling uncomfortable in.  This was and would always be the glue that kept them together.

Having accepted the fact that he wouldn’t be eating tonight, Seth downed glass after glass of expensive Chardonnay, a choice he regretted then because he found it grotesquely effeminate and one he would regret later on account of the wretched, godforsaken hangover he woke up with the next day.  He yearned, pined, prayed for a beer all night.  Something light and wheaty.  That’s how he liked his beer.  It was a prayer that would go unanswered until some three hours later, half slumped over in the badly lit dining area of a place everyone knew as Lonely Pizza, sitting across from Gillian as they both devoured countless slices of greasy, sausage-covered pizza, less so because they were famished (the excessive drinking that had occurred before the food-run had managed to dull most of their senses) than in rebellion of the last six hours.

The hosts of the dinner party were mutual friends of Gillian’s and Seth’s.  They were in their mid-thirties, collected mid-century furniture (the real deal), and had been married for nearly three years.  Seth had known the husband since the days they would scrape each other off the filthy bathroom floors of New York bars.  Gillian knew the wife during quite a similar stage, though most men would never admit to marrying a woman capable of such behavior.  “DJs and BJs.”  That was their inside joke.  They had shirts made.  They were those girls.

Their friends had changed drastically since that time, morphing into Responsible Humans, moving away from the party and into DUMBO, where the streets were covered in level cobblestone and nannies pushing someone else’s baby.  Gillian and Seth – in their own thoughts, respectively – wondered if they had changed.  Both still lived in the same apartment they had for the last countless years.  Gillian was still a bartender and Seth was still in A & R at a suffering record label.  They sat at the sleek twelve-person table eating off of unchipped dishware, drinking out of glasses with thin stems, wondering if this was what they were supposed to want: a two-bedroom loft with refinished hardwood floors and clean paint, a bathroom that never ran out of toilet paper or its constant supply of fig-scented soap pumped out of fancy glass jars.  They were the same and they didn’t know it yet.  The knowing came later.

Gillian had excused herself from the train wreck bore of a man sitting next to her hell bent on engaging her in a conversation about his collection of Italian motorcycles and walked into the bathroom.  It was a lovely bathroom with a big mirror reflecting everything about Gillian that didn’t fit in here.  Everything was orderly and the counter wasn’t wet; each person who had used the bathroom must have wiped the counter down after they used it, which Gillian found collectively odd.  She washed her hands – that’s when she saw the fig soap.  She remembered getting the same one as a gift once and when she had gone through all of it she refilled the glass with a cheaper version of the same scent by a different maker.  It wasn’t the same by any means; the cheaper stuff dried out her hands and left her stinking of potpourri.

She told him that later, Seth, that is, over her second piece of pizza.  He laughed and told her that his mother always kept three bars of soap in the guest bathroom, next to an ugly floral towel and miniature porcelain cows.  It was a dangerous thing, boys telling stories, because it endeared the listener to them.  Stories were how people fell in love.  They laughed and they were drunk and they kissed later, somewhere in between the parked cars outside Gillian’s apartment filled with broken furniture and wool blankets from back home, both feeling temporarily safe living in the thought that they had possibly found their matching piece.

Hipster Love Stories: Beth

She had already sat down to eat her breakfast when she noticed that the snow from last night had stuck.  It pooled around the base of each tree in the backyard below and rested gently on the stretching boughs above.  Beth sat, chewing mouthfuls of a homemade omelet with soy cheese and locally made wheat toast, knowing that though beautiful, it would be a miserably cold day outside.

Making breakfast was a new habit, one that required time she ordinarily did not care to give herself.  Most often the meal was had in the form of lukewarm, burnt coffee from the deli on the corner and half of a green algae bar.  Being single had been hazardous to her diet.  She used to cook all the time.  Now, she barely had more than two pans in her kitchen.  One of which she bought last week, specifically to make omelets with.

Beth brushed her teeth with a minty toothpaste that came in a cool metal tube but tasted like hell.  She felt like a sucker for having fallen for their clever campaign that appealed to aesthetes such as herself.  That was her punishment for being superficial, she supposed, and though she hated the acerbic taste it left in her mouth, she couldn’t bring herself to throw it away; it had cost just shy of $15, a hefty ransom compared to Crest, which had suited her just fine all these years.

It was a Monday.  Fucking Mondays.  She wished that the whole city would call a snow day, though the meager half-inch of powder dusting the sidewalks hardly qualified as a national emergency.  Reluctantly, she pulled on a pair of pants, fastening the belt that was already in place.  Wearing the same thing every day had become extremely convenient, though equal parts boring.  Beth was beginning to feel like a tired, forty-something divorcee, not a broke kid in Brooklyn.

Beth thumbed through her messy piles of shirts, the result of not wanting to purchase a dresser, which was the result of never having enough money to buy what she wanted, though she willingly spent what little money she did have on expensive toothpaste, apparently.  The new year was approaching and Beth vowed to change her habits.  In 2011 she would love herself more.  The omelets were a preemptive stride in the right direction.

Wrinkled.  Too bright.  Wrinkled.  Ugly.  She dug her hands deeper into the darkened expanse of her closet in attempt to find something decent to wear.  Her regular standbys were at the Fluff and Fold down the street.

There, back behind her shoebox filled with rolled socks, Beth found it.  It was a shirt he had given to her when she was moving out, after she had thrown all of her own belongings into trash bags she would sort out after she stopped wanting to kill herself, an impulse she imagined would subside in three weeks time.  It was his shirt, one that she had commandeered early on in their relationship.  It was soft and torn at the neck, weathered in a way only a boy was capable of doing.  That shirt was him.

He had left it for her on the kitchen table, accompanied by a note that said something like “Blah blah blah you’ll use this more than I will.”  If he had been there Beth would have assured him that she would never wear this shirt.  She would have told him that she didn’t want to keep anything he had ever given her or anything that reminded of him, period.  She would have said all of these things and she would have wrapped up the speech telling him why: how hearing him say the words “I don’t love you anymore” had ripped her in two and that even seeing a picture of him made her want to vomit.  She looked down at the shirt that was staring up at her, a testament how emotionally charged a two-foot piece of cotton could be, and then shoved it into her purse.

Beth looked at the shirt, wondering why she still held onto it.  The sadness it brought her was abating.  Soon, she thought, she might even be able to wear it without thinking of him at all.  Eventually, she might even forget that he had given it to her at all, that it had ever been his.  Someone would ask her where she found a shirt so soft and she would grab onto its hem, assessing it from above, her chin lowered, and honestly be able to muse, “Hmmmm…you know…I can’t remember.”

But that time was still a ways off, and Beth crammed it into a ball and buried into her sock box, knowing that she would forget she had placed it there and hoping that the next time she discovered it, she wouldn’t care anymore.

Hipster (Anti) Love Stories: Chad

He was in a remarkably terrible mood, an incurable irritation that occurred for no reason in particular other that he was awake.  Chad walked down the stairs into the Bedford station.  Chad.  Even his own name bothered him.  “Chad” was for high school quarterbacks with cheerleader girlfriends that would be hot until they graduated, afterward doomed to live out their twenties with beer-bloat and the life of an ordinary prettiness.  Chad, himself, was the awkward nerd who had managed to survive his adolescence, coming out on the other end more attractive and successful than the peers of his youth.  Still, he was stuck with this fucking name.  Chad.  He could kill his parents.

For the last ten minutes he had been enjoying some new techno hardcore tracks he had illegally downloaded the night before. The thudding baseline perfectly complemented his foul demeanor at present.  But then, over the RAT TAT TAT of his righteous tunes, he heard it – that bloody awful trumpet player who insisted upon using this station as his stage on a near daily basis.  Chad turned the volume on his iPod up, attempting to focus on the pulsating misery of his own morning but the one-man brass section to his left insisted on infiltrating.  Aggressively, Chad plucked his ear buds out and thrust the chords into the canvas satchel he had just scored from a sample sale last week.  But even that couldn’t make him happy.  Not today.

Chad sat down, his legs stretched out in front of him.  He didn’t care that passerbys had to walk around his circumference.  Go fuck yourselves, he thought.  New York City had pushed his buttons plenty; it was time for him to push back.  The “musician” kept playing, completely out of tune with the tape-recorded orchestra playing on a portable radio.  The man’s efforts came in and out, starting, stopping, and then starting again as though he were a six-year-old attempting to learn, but with no teacher to offer guidance.  He just played away.
The couple sitting next to Chad picked at each other like monkeys.  Sick.  He had seen another couple do the same thing the day before and it made him yearn for the days he could afford to take taxis everywhere and always.  Then he could simply ignore the world that was so violently jammed down his throat every waking second in this goddamn place.

Chad decided that when he had a girlfriend – correction: if Chad ever wanted a girlfriend – they would not preen each other in public.  He despised that sort of intimacy.  He didn’t want a girl picking his zits or commenting on the stray hairs that were merely indications of manhood.  Leave me alone, lady.  Go get a dog.

In the last two weeks, all of his best friends had hunkered down with chicks, none of whom Chad particularly liked.  Typical.  But it was getting cold and his friends were notorious pussies, craving something or someone to watch movies with as the temperatures dipped closer to zero.  They would never admit to this, but they lazy and, more importantly, they wanted to cuddle.  He could just imagine his friend Tim right now, lying in the arms of that not-so-attractive chick he had been introduced to the other night, calling each other “babe” and peeing with the door open.  Puke.

The platform loaded up with more people, all of whom Chad could find nothing to like about.  They guy breathing heavily as he walked past, his cheap yellow windbreaker crumpling and crunching like nails on a chalkboard.  The douchey guy with the piggy pink face and gray cowboy boots, under creased and under worn, a scarf tied around his neck and wearing MIA glasses underground.  Even above ground, it wasn’t a sunny day.  Chad wanted to punch him.

The train rocketed past and then slowed.  The doors opened and pinged and Chad got on, taking a seat next to an obese woman picking at the chapped skin on her hand.  He looked down at his fistful of leather gloves.  It made him – and everyone for that matter – look like serial killers.  American Psycho.  OJ Simpson.  The associations were unavoidable, especially considering his age.  Both left indelible impressions:
1). Always wear a poncho.
2). Use nice business cards
3). Get a good lawyer.

These rules were generally applicable to life, not just in murders.

Murderous.  That’s sort of how Chad felt.  He wished he could process the rage inside of him; he knew that he should probably be in therapy for a great many things but could never justify the cost.  At one hundred dollars a session, he would rather hit the bars all week, which was probably something he should get analyzed as well.

Chad wished he could just curl up in his girl-less bed, snuggling with nothing more than the flannel sheets his mother sent him for his birthday last month, waiting for the day to end.

Hipster Love Stories: Penny

Penny sat in the coffee shop, drinking coffee and scribbling dinosaurs into her Moleskin with a red pen.  At least she thought they looked like dinosaurs.  One looked more like a small dog, but oh well… Her mind drifted off into thankful nowhere, listening to the hissing of the milk steamers behind her and the grinding of beans beyond that.  She caught her reflection in the large window onto Berry Street, already dark at 5 p.m.  She looked pale.

In the middle of her peaceful, mindless reverie, Fleet Foxes came on.  “White Winter Hymnal.”  Fuuucccckkkkkk.  Penny watched her face in the window twist into something pained and uncomfortable.  The song reminded her of someone in Los Angeles.  It was his favorite song on the album and he played it over and over again.  Penny didn’t mind because she loved it just as much; it brought to mind Appalachian panhandlers falling in love on a river somewhere, though the reference probably only made sense to her, kind of like the dinosaurs staring up at her from her notebook.  That part of her was already two years old and long dead, but it could have been yesterday.  He played this song and it filled his apartment, wall-to-wall, the noise hanging above them like stars, living in an atmosphere all their own.

Penny silently groaned through the whole two minutes and twenty-seven seconds of it.  It would end soon, she told herself, pulling on the sides of her hat, attempting to drown out some of the noise tapping into the part of her brain that controlled pain and memory.  The track stopped, momentarily filling the room with a blissful second of relative silence.  Penny breathed a deep sigh of relief, picking her pen back up to finish a T-Rex.

Then she heard the first two chords of the following song.  No, no, no, no, she thought.  They were going to play the whole goddamn album.  People kept walking in the door, not aware that Penny was reliving the entire summer of 2008 while sitting on her wooden stool, wrapped in a black jacket and wearing a white hat that had begun to pill horribly in the last week.  She was just another girl drinking coffee and pretending to be doing something productive at 5 p.m. on a Tuesday.

Instead of running away, which Penny was a huge advocate of, she sat through the entire hour, stiff and paralyzed, wishing that she didn’t have ears and that she didn’t appreciate quality music.  After five songs, Penny made a promise to herself: she was going to stop making out and having sex to hipster music, starting effective the next time anyone was interested in doing either with her.

She knew the last track was the last track and Penny felt that she had exorcised some sort of demon, or at least had the wherewithal to endure her own agony, which was a first.  She had always thought she would be more of a grownup at twenty-eight, but then again she had thought she would be a lot of things already.

As she placed the mouth of her intensely strong cup of coffee to her lips, Bon Iver began to play.  It was an album that she listened to for the first time earlier that same year while under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs, compelled to spend the evening dancing alone on the beautiful rug of a stranger’s living room.  She fell asleep in the king-size bed belonging to that same stranger, filled not with him, but she and her two friends.  She kissed the one to her left, riding the rollercoaster high together and holding hands.  The friend to the right was asleep, she thought, because he had stopped talking about how his stomach hurt, giggling, and talking about his stomach some more.  When she and her friend who was temporarily more than a friend kissed she saw rainbows under her eyelids – the kind Lisa Frank would shit over, minus the unicorns and creepy bears.  At least this memory was just weird, not overtly depressing.

Penny reminisced on the days when she wasn’t so cool, when she didn’t read Pitchfork on a daily basis and wasn’t so well versed in the Minutia of Hip.  She was thankful for those simpler times, times when she made out with aspiring actors living in shitty apartments off of Sunset Boulevard to Coheed and Cambria or whatever bullshit they had on their iPod.

What might have been lost…

What might have been lost…

What might have been lost…

Justin Vernon’s voice softly crooned all of her failings back at her.  See?  Why did she know the name of the lead singer?  Was that useful?  Did that help her in any way except allowing her to connect to some other pretentious nerd one day? Penny grumbled audibly into her cup of coffee on accident and then looked around to make sure no one had seen her.

If she had a remote she would flip rapidly flip through these songs in a desperate search for Katy Perry or Beyonce or anything that brought to mind weaves and pink wigs, hot pants and other images created for us by art directors and not past experiences.  The indie music market had been wholly confiscated by her past relationships with men.  The different mouths, different hair, different hands.  All of them similarly gone, leaving her with a catalogue of music she simultaneously loved and loathed, sort of like the boys themselves.

Next time, she was going to Starbucks.

Hipster Love Stories: Karen and Ben

It was the cold season.  They held hands through thick gloves and forgave each other the dry, winter-cured skin they knew lived underneath.  Every morning, they took the train into work together from Karen’s apartment, which was nicer than Ben’s in both size and quality.  Her furniture was a tasteful combination of mid-century designer pieces she had inherited from her grandmother and more gauche accessories that reminded Ben of Wonderland.  Karen made a good living, earning more money than Ben did, and though it didn’t seem to bother either of them now, it was something that would likely make Ben feel emasculated and inadequate if the roles never reversed.  But they were young, and things that like that were the thoughts of grown ups.  Now was the time for heart, not head.

Karen and Ben had only been dating for a few months, but it seemed like forever, not only to them, but to their friends as well.  “Karen and Ben” had become an inseparable entity, so much so that Karen wondered what would happen if they were to break up.  She had never met anyone before that was worth giving up so much for.  She had routines and appreciated her private time, but for Ben, for Ben she would give up everything.  This thought was terrifying.

Back when she was single, Karen used to wake up at sunrise, down two cups of black coffee in a mug given to her by her best friend, and go for a run around ten square-blocks.  Every day.  This is what she did.  When she and Ben began seeing each other, Karen would wake up at dawn, finding herself trapped under the affectionate weight of this new and strange boy and she watched, from bed, the sun change the apartment building across the street more brilliant shades of red.  At first, Karen was anxious about altering her schedule for someone else, especially a boy.

She, like any smart girl making her way to the edge of her twenties, had become wary of giving anything to a boy – love, time, affection.  Your heart is my piñata.  Karen read this line in a Bret Easton Ellis novel some years back and it had stuck with her ever since, because, often, that was how it was.  Bang!  Bang!  Bang!  Bang! For years, she watched the boys she had mistakenly loved and lusted over whack at her heart until its contents spilled forth – secrets, sex, kisses.  And when they were done with her, she was left, hung from a rafter, her beautifully colored paper coat bent and ravaged and swinging in the breeze.

After two weeks, Karen had nearly forgotten about running entirely, her shoes crammed in her closet underneath vintage sandals with gold buckles and leather straps.  And even after she gave her heart to Ben, he didn’t leave her.  This is how a relationship starts: One person doesn’t leave.

Ben had taken to her immediately.  The way she covered her mouth when she laughed, her ability to make strangers feel comfortable within mere moments, her refusal to give up white bread.  Before Karen, he had never noticed the minutia of a girl, mostly because he didn’t have the patience to just watch.  None of them had ever deserved further study.  Karen, however, was endlessly fascinating.

In the mornings Ben would watch as she got dressed for work, digging through her closet for approximately three-and-a-half minutes before deciding on a rotation of four outfits she always wore.  Following this, she walked into the bathroom, shutting the door behind her with her left hand, coming out ten minutes later looking like a tired person trying to look awake, her lips slick with Chapstick and her eyeliner from the night before have made its way down below her lower lashes.  He liked her best when she had just gotten out of the shower, smelling of rosemary mint shampoo and her cheeks burning red, her blonde hair turned a sopping brown clump.

They had met at the apartment of a mutual friend.  Ben was standing near the kitchen, his hair unkempt in a fashionable way.  Karen saw him from across the room, beyond two girls holding glasses of wine and interpretive dancing, their arms passing in front of Ben on occasion and blocking the view.  She looked at Ben and she felt so many things, but what she felt most deeply was the sense that they had met before, in some previous life, if one were to believe in such a thing.  Once, in college, she met a girl who had been told by a psychic that she had been a French prostitute during the Revolution; strangely, this suited the girl and Karen was happy to accept it as truth.

Karen, when toying with the idea that they actually had met some time ago, felt that they had been farmers in Ireland, sometime during the 1700s.  Karen, though her name wasn’t Karen then, made a lot of broth-based soups and tasteless bread from scratch and Ben sheered sheep.  They lived in a house made of stone that always smelled of dirt and burning wood.  There was nothing to justify this theory – neither Karen nor Ben were even Irish by decent – and Karen never told anyone this because even she thought it sounded a bit odd.

“Have we met before?”

Karen had made her way over to the kitchen, where Ben was now standing alone, rattling the cubes of ice against the glass holding his drink together.  Ben looked at her for a length of time that existed somewhere in the realm of creepy or romantic, depending on how it was perceived.  “Ben,” he said, not answering the question, extending his hand made of slender fingers and a soft palm and wrapping it around her own.  How nicely they fit together, Karen thought.

Hipster Love Stories: Anna

Anna was beautiful, that much was obvious – not necessarily to Anna, but surely to everyone else.  To Anna, the idea of beauty was something other people pointed out to you and you eventually became aware or accepting of, and so the only reason Anna thought she might be attractive at all was because people had been telling her so since she was a small child.  “What a beautiful little girl!” they would say.  Strangers, distant relatives, family friends.  The phrase was often accompanied by the uninvited patting of her head – which, of course, was covered in beautiful black curls – or the touching of her cheeks – which, needless to say, were always the most beautiful shade of pink.  She remembered those times and how she stood there, begrudgingly accepting attention, wishing her parents would stage an intervention.  They never did; they were proud of what they had created.

Over the course of her life as a Beautiful Person, Anna had become accustomed to tuning out the world.  It was awkward to be on display all the time, which was how she felt when she actually paid attention to her surroundings as they passed – eyes filled with lusty curiosity and desire.  She was the type of girl that men sidestepped for on the subway platform, as though her beauty commanded more space than mere mortals.  Men held doors open for her even if it were inconvenient.  Sometimes she wished chivalry were dead, that way she could feel invisible for a day.

From an aerial vantage point, watching Anna move through bodies on a crowded sidewalk was like watching the proverbial parting of the seas, a stage perfectly set for Bette Midler wearing a sequin jumpsuit and belting out queeny show tunes.

But none of this mattered.  While it was easy for boys and men to watch her as she moved down the street, her raven hair bouncing behind her like a frame from some absurd TV commercial for expensive shampoo, they often balked at coming any closer.  At a bar, no one ever offered to buy her a drink.  If she caught the steely glance of a boy on a subway, he looked away and never looked back.  And dating – if she ever actually got a boy to date her – that was another story entirely.

The girls she knew that were married or living with their boyfriends or generally appeared happy in a relationship, were all women who seemed like they needed taking care of.  Broken women, crazy women, softer women than she.  But Anna didn’t want to be taken care of.  She loathed the idea of being some boy’s prize or salvation project.  She had her own life and her own dreams and she just wanted someone to…well, she wasn’t sure why she wanted a boy.  It was perhaps the notion of company that sounded nice, or that she wanted someone to touch her hair and not just watch it fly behind her on a breeze.  It was the human connection she craved, not a car or a ring or expensive dinners.  She just wanted someone who would treat her like a woman, not a doll.

This was perhaps what threw off the few boys she dated.  It was possible she was too beautiful to be opinionated or funny or anything else resembling normal human personality traits, though this thought irritated her and made her feel shallow and arrogant and filled with self-importance.  But many of her male friends preferred dim girls who just laughed at their jokes and gave them decent blowjobs.  In a way, she understood: she once dated a man who was extremely intelligent – literally a rocket scientist – and it was generally tiring to keep up.  Stupid people were easier because stupid people were content to just be.  This thought also bothered her because it made her feel judgmental, which she probably was.  She was beautiful, not flawless.

Every relationship Anna had ever managed to squeeze out of a man had lasted no more than a few months at the most, and usually ended without explanation.  Phone calls dwindled, strange excuses filled the places where invitations used to be accepted, she watched her insecurities come to a fever pitch.  And one day, she would realize she had been sleeping alone in her own bed for nearly two weeks.  That was when she knew whatever she had had with that person was over.  These were what Anna’s relationships were like.

In her estimation, she was becoming well versed in the Laws of Revulsion.  She thought about writing a book on the subject.  Its subtitle would be “Tips to Make a Boy Run for the Hills.”  It would be filled with advice on how to contact someone too frequently, how to not be the bitchy girl that boys were supposedly attracted to, how to wear your heart on your sleeve.  She would come out with a sequel some years later and comically document her life as an aging spinster – that way she could at least profit from her misery.

And so as she walked down the street today and saw a young boy looking at her, she wanted to grab him by the shoulders and tell him, “Let me love you.  Let me love you so you won’t love me.”