unknown legend
as ever, a greyhound crashout
The tulips on Park Ave have since been ripped out.
I take 11 comped cars that week. I have a yeast infection, headaches across the Brooklyn bridge from the hard whirr of cracked windows, shyly farting and aggressively swerving drivers, thick vanilla smell of a backseat, a Little Dipper of pimples across my left cheek, including one atop my lip. I’m hosting Isabel this week though I have no groceries and just one towel left. On Wednesday, I have blisters so painful there’s nothing to do but go home and take my shoes off. They’re so bad I really think about walking to the subway barefoot. My feet are bleeding even at a showing at The Invisible Collection uptown. The women are so French I can’t understand what they’re saying except “raffia” and “Chanel.” I keep saying “totally” and “cool.” I eat one mini croissant and literally bite my lip going downstairs to the third showroom because of my shoe sliding across my weeping feet.
They show me long slips of fabric with dense embroidery made to look like a coral reef. It’s gorgeous, but I instead think about how Lilly Pulitzer has ruined coral reefs by printing them all over her garish skorts for 30 years. In English I can’t follow, this woman tells me about Jacques Doucet and Lesarge Interiors. Totally, cool.
When I go home at lunch to sign for a package, I fall asleep halfway through a burrito at my dining room table. I wake up and realize I’ve slept through an event and am an hour late to another, which means I’ll be over an hour late to the next, getting there just 30 before it ends and I’ve told three people I’m going to that last one and they’ve bought tickets. I spend 30 minutes trying to find shoes that I can stand being in before taping gauze around my feet, putting on two pairs of socks and slipping into my Tigers. My roommate comes home and when I walk out of my room, doesn’t acknowledge me, unpacking ground chicken from a grocery bag and singing quietly to Sierra Farrell.
It’s 3am and I’m wide awake. Grief hours, Leah told me. I spend an hour resisting my phone, then pick it up and check it for the first time since it died at 9:30pm. 48 emails. I send Quinn an Instagram reel of someone making a Reba cookie. I count up everyone who I think might hate me. It feels like a lot. I take a lavender pill. I do the mental math of another failed relationship, how much closer to 30 I’d be if I do my 18 months thing again.
My driver to an event downtown is a woman named Tinatin. Her voice is a growl. I look so beautiful, she tells me, so beautiful. The gauze bandaid on my left foot comes off in her car and I slide it in my bag with a plastic tub of pineapple I forgot about. Two glasses of Pinot Grigio make my throat hurt and the new builds across the Hudson in Jersey City make me feel like I’m floating in space. At a stoplight, a man alone on a bench makes me feel peaceful, and then pity. A rolled down window on the highway in any kind of warmth makes me feel like I’m in the backseat of a rental in California with my parents driving.
Again, when I get out of the car, she says: so beautiful. I look like shit.
I have one free night that week—Monday. He meets me at The Fly, and afterwards we see Irish music at Hartley’s. I talk about my life as destined to a 5-figure salary and high APR lifestyle. He seems relaxed. He says I’m always bringing up “my three kids.” When we kiss later, he doesn’t feel like a random person anymore. I walk him to my door late that evening and he turns around twice to kiss me again before leaving. His mouth tastes like how your room smells when it’s sunny in there all afternoon.
Later that week he’s in my bed singing “Turn The Car Around,” and insists I sing the harmony to “Linger” when he plays it. Seventh down in his liked songs on Spotify is Paramore’s “Ain’t It Fun.” I like all his tattoos and I don’t have to lie about that. When he gets dressed I notice he’s not only wearing jorts he made himself but also he’s cut his button-down so little threads hang off the bottom.
In the morning, I woke up early, pressed my face to his arm and fell back asleep like that. When we walk outside, the weather is beautiful. He says so loudly: “GOD. TODAY RULES.” I use it as an anecdote when I’m trying to explain him. I say also that he’s a “chatter,” “so hot,” and that when I mentioned “that artist who lived in a glass box for 100 days or something,” meaning Marina Abramovic, he said: David Blaine??
He has literally no sense of the macabre. We spend Sunday in the park together. I punch him in the arm when he abbreviates nature to “naich.” Every time we pass someone in the park playing Spanish hip hop, he knows all the words. We sit on a tree trunk for an hour. He says to me: you’re always seeing dead birds.
I get a Pilsner and he gets a Michelada. I mispronounce Michelada. The bar has printed out the Sunday crossword and for one of the clues he says: okay, I know it’s misdemeanor but I don’t know how to spell that. I ask if the US has its own soccer teams and he says: that’s an insane question. I tell him he has a surplus of joie de vivre and he says so do I, which I think is such a nice thing to say because I kind of think that but expect other people not to think that. When he speaks Spanish I try to guess what he’s saying and when I get it wrong he laughs and kisses me.
You’re finally experiencing a dynamic of: black cat to golden retriever, Maureen says, and not: Mom to whatever fucked-up cigarette you’re dating.
Downtown I can tell Gimaguas from Siedres but uptown I can’t tell Valentino from Banana Republic. I spend another event talking to the publicists, who always feel like the people with the least agenda anywhere, though I then remember they’re paid to be friendly. Delicate 6’3” 21-year-old boys offer me champagne from a silver tray. I walk softly among green marble floors and color-coded perfumes. Grilled cheese bites break the illusion of wealth. This is midtown, America.
Upstairs, the listening room is cloaked in heavy velvet curtains. A silken-faced boy, a model, surely, has a mop of brown hair and wears an embroidered velvet shirt. It’s at least 78 degrees in here, and smells like champagne dry mouth. His friends, squatted on the floor, take his picture next to the sound system with a film camera. The way everyone is sitting is so like children spilling out on the floor in anticipation of something—only these are wearing sparkling Valentino heels. One person crawls forward on his knees to get a shot of Lea Bertucci. Me and the bearded man behind me stand there like we’re better than the others, here for music, our skin rippling, screaming for someone to witness that we know the artists, actually, we’ve seen Laurel Halo before actually, we’re here for the sound, the champagne, the narrative. We’re not here for content, we’re here for work.
Valentino is everywhere, draping from every wrist and neck and ankle. You can tell most of these people have not come from work, they have come from home, or a comped dinner. Black hair is purple in this light. I’m shoved by a girl with short curly hair and bandaids where her slingbacks meet her ankles. When she leaves, her friends exchange glances of annoyance.
Phones obstruct the view mostly but I feel the consciousness of other people, not wanting to be the person taking photos. Lizzi knows this, too, in red lace tights, a leather peplum midi skirt with large ruffles, a high-neck lace long sleeve and a thick, gold chain bracelet with tassels on her left arm. She plays us a Greek ballad I’ll never find again, and Sun Ra, and one of her own that sounds like MIA and Kate Bush and Blondie. She says if she had to describe her voice in one word it would be raw. I think—respectfully—everyone would say that about themselves. Everyone thinks they’re raw, and an over-thinker, type B, a moderate, alone in their type of hell.
On the train, a woman in tight gray sweatpants with very little hair pulls out an entire tooth. We walk three blocks in the same direction, down Broadway street, which always smells like funnel cake, or vapes that smell like funnel cake. When I turn into a gallery event, I hope she doesn’t see me, with all my teeth, getting food for free and a dirty martini on arrival.
On West 4th, I see ugly dogs, claw clips, every table crowded with Aperol spritzes; the Mobil Mart station with TVs crowning the outside on 8th Avenue, Manley’s lit up with Christmas trees above the awning. Swole tech guys running at dusk, going home to air fry dinner and swipe. The crowds pouring from Corner Bistro, and a high top of two people who, it seems, are just trying to Have A Beer, rethinking their lease in this neighborhood. Black Uber XL traffic on cobblestones, not a reservation within miles or weeks, and among it an old guy emerges from his garden level apartment with a bag of recycling, wearing a fedora. Slacks abound, untucked oxfords, really straight dates. Sant Ambroeus, Lume, a guy that looks like Billie Eilish’s brother in the window. Maybe it was Billie Eilish’s brother. The hostesses wear halter tops and cargo pants. I come to this part of town only to get drinks with women I don’t know who DMed me on Instagram to hang out. Everyone that doesn’t smell horrible smells amazing.
On Sunday, I take a Greyhound to Atlantic City. It occurs to me I haven’t done this sort of thing in so long—taken an early-as-shit bus to somewhere weird—because I’m too old for it. No, I think, actually, I was too young for it when it was happening. Now I’m old enough for it. Now I know to pack water, a proper sandwich and a sweater and tell people off when they’re getting creepy. Bring headphones, a book, a Xanax, take an aisle seat next to a normie instead of going window and risking a nose-picker or a foul-smelling pervert or someone eating ground beef out of a Doritos bag with their hands.
I watch our bus driver turn away the girl in front of me while boarding: “You’re showing me the wrong ticket.” No, she says, I arrive at 1pm. “In Hartford. I’m boarding Atlantic City. Your bus left 10 minutes ago.” WHAT? She says with her pink Bose around her neck and plush bag charms smacking her lavender suitcase with a jingle as she darts toward another gate, crying “THEY TOLD ME GATE 80” to no one. 10D she says to me, sit in your Assigned Seat. On the bus, no one is in their assigned seat.
I forgot my headphones which means 3 hours of Greyhound sound. That’s a lot of wet coughing, Tik Toks, a low-volume argument between two seniors wearing N-95’s, long diatribes about expected behavior from the bus driver, the rattle of the bus’s interior plastic, its sputtering, tired engine. An announcement to buckle up because “WE GOTTA WIND ADVISORY OUT TODAY, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN. THIS BUS WILL SHAKE AND QUAKE AND SWERVE.” My dad calls while she makes her long-winded announcement and with one ear pressed close, I try to chat with him about Tangier Island. A small woman behind me pokes me—hard: You’ve been on the phone for so long, she says. It’s been 9 minutes. I don’t begrudge her at all. I can tell from her haircut she doesn’t have a Xanax.
We pass “Epic Church,” a Secaucus water tower, long, wheaty grasses that shimmer in the wind of oncoming traffic and late morning light. Cows, abandoned barns, fences that seem to belong to no one. Sometimes I really miss America.
An accident on the Garden State Parkway holds us up for about 5 minutes before our bus driver barrels across the meridian behind a Porsche doing the same. The bus does in fact shake, quake, and sway in the process.
I’m headed to buy my little brother’s Hyundai Tucson for $10, 190,000 miles on the odometer. He’s moving to Petaluma next week, taking his convertible Miata cross-country for the next phase of training to be a rescue swimmer. Sam is 19, and regularly drops out of a helicopter into the Atlantic. His Tucson has been sitting untouched in the driveway of his Jersey rental for several months. It’s covered in pollen, there’s a bag of trash in the trunk, several motorcycle parts, a box of toxic waste. The console is full of Monster and Honey Stinger Energy Waffle trash. You can’t roll down the passenger seat window. There’s a sticky brown drip on the steering wheel that’s “always been there,” and the back of the driver’s seat hangs limply on the floor behind it. It’s full of sand, and the backseat is folded down “for your surfboard,” he tells me. Before coming to pick it up, he warns me: the brakes don’t work. How bad? I ask him. “Fine if you stomp,” he says. When I get there, the car roars and creaks and he lets me know that’s just rust, and an exhaust leak. “The most scared I’ve ever been driving was taking this down to Virginia,” he tells me. He’s had multiple motorcycles, the last of which “blew up.”
On the bus, I watched Youtube videos about what anti-lock braking systems are, and read the Quora on what to do if your brakes stop working on the highway. Pull the emergency brake, be prepared to skid.
I am empirically not a bad driver but essentially a terrible one. I feel free and disappearing when I’m driving, like the car drives itself and I inhabit the space and it’s all very liminal and outside of my control. Like I’m having a dream of driving a car. I don’t know most road signs, I notice red lights or stop signs a little over half the time, if I had to guess. I’ve been in no accidents, I’ve been pulled over three times, all for not having my headlights on in the dark. I’ve had 0 tickets. I failed my driver’s test twice, but really three times and the instructor gave me the okay anyway because on my third try I had the trunk open and didn’t notice. I guess she was tired. I can’t eat or drink or talk while driving, or really use Google Maps or change the song. I feel very shy when fueling, like I’m not really sure this is how to do it. On my grad weekend I accidentally spilled gasoline all over my dress, went home and had to change before my grad party that wasn’t really my grad party. It was like a performance for friendships that were mostly over, for people who will Instagram DM me over-familiarly in the future for networking purposes.
I tear up just twice on the drive—once driving away from Sam, who gives me an only slightly ambivalent “I’ll miss ya” as he slaps the driver’s seat windowsill, and again hours later, somewhere outside Newark listening to Neil Young’s “Unknown Legend.”
I drive with the windows down the entire time because the AC reeks and because I like to drive that way. I sit with my left leg up and squished against my body, and the volume maxed so it crackles in the speakers from its spare bluetooth mechanism. I get the sense, as I always do when I’m driving, that I’m with a dozen iterations of myself remembering and recalling ahead—myself as a kid in the backseat is myself as a 17-year-old sneaking the car out is myself a few years ago driving a rental down from Maine knowing I’d left the last young summer of my life, is somehow myself now and later, too, a much-wiser and peaceful version of myself that already lives in my body. I try to look up what this is called by Googling “concept of everything existing at once.” Eternalism, Wikipedia says: all moments in time exist equally and are not subject to the subjective experience of time passing. No—what’s the subjective version of that, where it’s somewhere between spiritual and delusional and self-soothing? Where you feel protected in your life primarily by the sense that you existed before, during, and after this, and always with yourself?
At a panel in the Longchamp store in SoHo, I drink a weak coffee from a cup and saucer. The architects of the store have returned 19 years after its development to talk about their origins as designers. One mentions the first bag he made, which he created from what he calls “rolls of zip.” I couldn’t believe you could buy a roll of zip, he says, that you could buy openingness—openingness that opened into nothing, into itself.
You are required reading
Mouth that tastes like bedroom and shyly farting are two of my new favorite most evocative word portraits ily