Meow Meow

Image: sunshinecity via Flickr

I stopped taking so many pills all at once! This is probably not medically advised and I certainly wouldn’t recommend it but sometimes you just do things, I guess?

The pharmacy claimed my birth control prescription ran out and even though that wasn’t the case, I just didn’t feel like fighting it. And I’m not sexually active and birth control pills probably make me crazy anyway. I mean, I think they do? I started taking them when I was 13 because my period never, ever, ever stopped and I don’t remember that they made me moody or prone to crying jags or anything like that. Because I was a teenager and everything mattered so much but nothing mattered at all. I gave up on them at some point and just dealt with having my period forever.

At some point in my early 20s, I decided that I should probably start taking them again because even though I was using condoms when I had sex, it was probably a good idea to know when my period would start and stop, you know, just in case. Also, there are a whole lot of intimacy issues that come with having a never-ending period, such as never feeling comfortable during any below-the-belt activity. The first couple months were a bit rocky and I got all puffy and I remember crying over the tiniest things like what to eat for lunch. You know, as one does.

Evan turned eleven on Groundhog’s Day. Berch, his after-school and summer babysitter, gave him his beat-up copy of the Rolling Stones’ Hot Rocks double LP. Berch, who was sixteen, told Evan that he had lost interest in the Stones on New Year’s Eve, when he heard the Sex Pistols for the first time.

There were black-and-white photos on the inside spread. “That’s Bill,” Berch said, pointing to a man wearing what Evan thought was a ladies’ jacket. “He hasn’t said a word to anyone since the day he joined the band. That’s Brian.” Berch pointed to a blond man with bangs in his eyes. “He was murdered. And that’s a bad shot of Charlie, and those are Mick and Keith.” Berch wagged his finger between two men: one was lighting a cigarette; the other had long hair and a lady’s face. “There too.” He tapped a photo of a guy who had hair that stuck up and out.

“Mick with the hair?” Evan said. He hadn’t heard the name before.

“Keith. Keith.”

“How does he get his hair to do that?”

“What, spike up? You have to have men’s hair to do it. It gets stiff when you’re an adult. Like a head beard.”

Berch brought the photo of Keith a few inches from his own face. Now Evan couldn’t see. He noticed how big the space was between Berch’s nose and top lip. He wondered if this was what made Berch so ugly. Or maybe it was that his mouth was usually open. Berch talked a lot, especially about drugs, women, and music. Even if Evan wasn’t interested, he listened to be polite. His dad said that he had to have a babysitter until he turned twelve, and Evan didn’t want Berch to quit. Two years ago, Berch was the only person to answer the ad that Evan’s dad had put up on telephone poles in the neighborhood. If Berch quit, his dad would have to find someone else. That would be a pain in his dad’s ass. And Evan could get stuck with somebody worse than Berch.

Image: Thomas Leth-Olson via Flickr

May 2011

I visit my parents for the last time and the entire trip I bat away a suspicion that my dad feels left out. I have a new boyfriend, Mark—he’s the purpose of the trip—and I’m so in love with him I sweat with it. My legs and only my legs get sunburned at a Giants game and Mark calls me “watermelon thighs.” My mom insists he sleep in my brother’s room and makes him sing along with her to Elvis Costello. But my dad, even while sitting beside me, always seems to be in the next room.

Two weeks later, he packs a duffle bag with the binder labeled “Stout Family $” and some clean shirts, and leaves. There will be no negotiating the choice. My mom calls me at 5 on a Tuesday, crying, and I take the call in the alley outside my office.

Everything I do in the days that follow, I do by phone. On the first night, I beg my dad to reconsider. He sits in his car at the top of his old driveway, a pizza on the passenger’s seat. I bargain. I demand he hand over evidence against himself for crimes of husband and fatherhood I am certain he’s committed. I insist he tell the truth, as if it’s some static thing I can own and refer to in the coming years. I might as well be storing fog in a jar for later study.

I realize he hadn’t felt left out, because he’d already left. My thighs are still darker than the rest of my legs.

June 2011

My roommate has a friend in town who stays up all night making beans so we can eat them “a la carte” throughout the week she’s here. In the morning, she sees an empty wine bottle and a roll of toilet paper forming a tableau of feminine sadness on the coffee table, and asks me what’s up with that. I tell her about my parents. She nods and puts her hands together as if she’s about to pray. “Mmm” she says, and tells me that there’s a reason for all this: Mars has just entered Taurus. She offers me beans to take to work.

Konrad Kujau with one of “his” paintings in 1992. Photo: Wikimedia user Telephil.

Konrad Kujau was born in 1938 in Löbau, Germany, in the midst of a burgeoning NSDAP-mania. His parents were proud Nazis and he, too, would grow up idolizing Adolf Hitler, even after the war was over. As any neighborhood Hannah Arendt will tell you, Nazi idolatry was more common in postwar divided Germany than anyone wanted to admit at the time—the flourishing black market of memorabilia on both sides of the Berlin Wall was proof positive just on its own. And that is how, in the late 1970s, Konrad Kujau—by this time an experienced small-time grifter and semi-talented handwriting imitator who was already selling fake Nazi memorabilia in his Stuttgart shop—decided to write a sloppy, poorly researched fake diary of the Führer and see who would be interested in it.

He taught himself the old Gothic script that Hitler favored, and then he used watered-down ink on modern paper that he stained with tea and whacked against furniture to age. He bound the whole mess up with a Nazi-era ribbon and a red wax seal, and as a final detail he had Hitler’s initials stamped on the cover in gold. Well, he tried to, at least. In addition to teaching himself Gothic script, he’d also taught himself to read Fraktur type—poorly. Apparently when he was buying the Hong Kong-made Fraktur printer’s type, he mistook a Fraktur “F” for an “A.”

Image: Shari’s Berries via Flickr

My first real job was scooping ice cream at a little artisanal ice cream store in Chicago. I say “real” job because this is the first job where I was supporting myself, where my paycheck went to rice and internet and whatever else I needed to survive at the age of 22. The phrase “artisanal ice cream store” sounds cacophonous in 2017 of all years, but keep in mind this was a little while ago, and honestly? It was heaven. My coworkers and superiors were predominantly women, predominantly working (if only part-time or for no money) in the arts. A lot of us were queer! It was a happy and accepting place to be where we scooped and ate ice cream a lot.

What was interesting about working in an ice cream shop was that a significant amount of time was spent discouraging customers from feeling bad about themselves. “I shouldn’t do this,” they’d mutter, looking over the flavors. They’d ask about calorie counts (I had no idea) or fat percentages (beats me). “I’m gonna have to skip dinner,” they’d say. Sometimes they’d look at me and say, “if I worked here, I’d just eat ice cream all the time.”

“Oh, I do,” I’d tell them.

★★★ The frozen matter falling in the night had put a festive whiteness onto nothing but the cushions of the rooftop furniture on the luxury building. The sunlight shone into uncluttered and tastefully empty apartments. The wind played its flute notes on the building. Down below, sparse traffic and sparser pedestrians cast shadows toward uptown. The lowering sun scattered pink among the clouds. Outside the night air hissed through the shrubbery. Idling engines made pained ticking sounds. Bare skin could still withstand the cold, for now.

Image: Christine Vaufrey via Flickr

There is a fake restaurant around the corner from my apartment.

It pretends to be a restaurant, oh sure. It has tables and chairs, waiters and a bartender, dressed in neckties over white shirt. But no one ever eats there. Occasionally, a passerby might see a solitary guy at the bar, or a pained-looking couple, marooned in an inland sea of deserted tables.  It is under-attended, suspiciously so.

It first opened a couple of years ago, splashy: big American restaurant, lots of meats! Many martini glasses! We welcomed it. It seemed to be a counterweight to the artisanal whatever, to the gift shop that sold greeting cards made by hand, to the hip retailers from Williamsburg. Shrimp cocktail! Ribeye! It was not ironic, thank God.

We went a couple times in the beginning. It is a large room, twenty or so four-seat tables, big plush booths along a wall. The food: fine. There was a pianist once, on a New Year’s Eve, when the only other party was the family that runs the tavern up the street, all dressed up and messed up. The plates were square, and the food was fine in that way that the first time you eat it, you reassure each other that it’s really good! And the second time, you start to realize that you are lying to each other, and that the food is edible. We wanted to like it. We wanted to have that restaurant around the corner become part of the family.

Image: bunnicula via Flickr

From ages eight to 16, I was part of a not-that-unusual but mostly ignored type of church: the one-off, non-denominational church with one man in charge. When most people think “non-denominational,” I think they imagine “Oh, how nice: they welcome all denominations and possibly even religions“, but no, that’s not it at all, at least in the case of my church and every other non-denominational one I know of. My fundamentalist church in Florida could not have been less tolerant of anything but strict conformity to it and its leader. I remember we were regularly told that our little 150-member group was the “only one that is actually close to God.”

Almost every family lived in the new suburban development surrounding the church, and everyone socialized together. All the kids went to the same school, too, which was basically a homeschool co-op in the church basement where our teachers were mostly the moms of kids who went there.

Like many non-denominational churches, ours cherry-picked traditions and doctrine from other denominations, primarily the Pentecostals. Like Pentecostals, we were “charismatic,” which means that we believed in speaking in tongues. We also believed in sacred dance, which would manifest itself in women spontaneously (or, looking back, and considering their ballet slippers, maybe not-so-spontaneously) running up to the stage during the worship service. Overcome with the Holy Spirit (or the Holy Ghost), they would dance with their eyes closed to the mix of traditional hymns (“How Great Thou Art”), contemporary worship music (“Our God is an Awesome God”), and songs written by church members.

I have the palate of a non-discerning, rather fat child. If left to my own devices and removed from the judging eyes of peers, family members, or society at large, I would eat Kit-Kats and pineapple chunks for lunch and never, ever use a plate. This is the reason why I didn’t learn or realize until maybe one week ago that American cheese—a perfect cheese, the best cheese, a cheese for all ages—is fake.

Considering the evidence presented, it’s surprising that it took me this long to realize; perhaps I’m not the brightest bulb in the string of festive fairy lights, or maybe I was existing in a state of willful, blissful innocence. Regardless of why, now I know. American cheese—gorgeous, plasticky, gooey, and unctuous—isn’t really cheese. It’s a cheese product, which means it includes some actual cheese with a bunch of other stuff meant to give it that nasty, dirty texture I hold so dear. Those who wish to be fully informed can read this guide, but for the rest of you nerds who’d rather sit with this knowledge, we can press on. Even if American cheese, of the Kraft individually wrapped slices and Boar’s Head-from-the-deli variety, is fake, that doesn’t matter. It’s still the best cheese—a statement I stand by so staunchly that I will fight for its honor to the death.

Screenshot: F for Fake

The film bores like Citizen Kane, the trolls study War of the Worlds, the nerds won’t stop going on about the opening shot of Touch of Evil, and the weirdos are still pining for the real version of The Magnificent Ambersons. That’s all fine, to each their own, but the best thing Orson Welles ever made was the 10-second clip nestled at the midway point of his 1974 film, F for Fake:

The entire movie is an oddity. It’s Welles’ final fully-realized film—he died 11 years later, after sputtering on a number of unrealized projects, and also Transformers: The Movie. And while F for Fake is technically categorized as a documentary, it’s more a fast-paced film essay. It begins with Welles telling a story about art forger Elmyr de Hory, so talented he sold over 1,000 forgeries to art galleries around the world, and Hory’s biographer Clifford Irving, who’d later be infamously caught fabricating an “autobiography” of the reclusive Howard Hughes. It’s a path into a broad examination of topics such as ownership, translation, reality, theft, magic, art, and fakes. (At one point he promises, “For the next hour, everything you hear from us is really true and based on solid fact,” purposefully neglecting to mention there are 77 minutes left.)