Edna and me, the critics. I miss my hair. This is from before I was a mom, and also it’s a wig. But lately I want to grow my hair back.

Even if you don’t make it to the end, don’t forget to hit the heart at the bottom and share a lot. Comments are so nice too! Also, feel free to skip to the topic that most interests you. I may have written about Summer Carley before, so definitely hop down to my reading and viewing wrecks, if she sounds familiar.

Summer Carley

So a few years back, I invented a persona or a part of me called Summer Carley. Anyone with much-needed time off in the summer (teachers mostly I guess) might have done this too. Summer Carley is Carley, but well-rested and not teaching anything or maybe just a few short things. She rides her bike around Brooklyn, goes to the beach, has more sex, and is more impulsive and less anxious.

She usually has time for other kinds of exercise like yoga, walking, and lately lifting weights. Summer Carley is me without the demands of capitalism. Maybe she goes on a trip somewhere. Summer Carley also does a lot of medical stuff she can’t do during the school year. She naps. She’s game. She sits outside in the backyards of Brooklyn bars with her friends. She will be getting a new IUD, gum surgery, a colonoscopy/endoscopy, and has already had a colposcopy. It’s not all fun for Summer Carley.

As I seem to have no libido of late, Summer Carley doesn’t have any sex, even with herself. I find this so strange and peaceful, I don’t know what to think or write about it, except to notice it.

This Summer Carley who is not teaching and has no Writing Boss clients is brought to you by her union, who won their first contract, including substantial raises. I’m almost always doing some kind of extra teaching or freelance, so this is a real gift. Get yourself a union if you can! If you need help, tell me and I will help you or find some people who can. It’s also likely I’ll need to teach in the summers going forward to cover college costs (see below) which are bigger than we planned. Is this the normal way of colleges?

So yeah, my kid is going to college in August and I’m so excited for her! I’m excited and a bit scared for myself, and so I’m trying to remember what I used to do before I was a parent. I used to go to the movies a lot, and I want to return to this movie-going self. About a month ago, I joined Metrograph, which is an art house theater on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, that screens an incredible trove on international classics and some current indie and international films as well.

They also do that great thing of curating a whole bunch of movies from one director. Lastly, they have weird series(s) too, like “The Dog Dies,” (movies in which a dog dies) and “The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters” (movies featuring famous painters). Upstairs there’s an excellent bar and restaurant, where all of the wait staff is very kind in that New York actor way that I love. What a skill! Says the Carley who could not carry a tray of dishes or greet a table while smiling. My favorite order is steak tartar, fries, and a coke with ice. Not a diet coke thank you very much. I swear I don’t work for Metrograph, but I do love that place.

I also love Nighthawk (and I know the workers have unionized and are bargaining for their first contract, which is going slowly because management is dragging their feet). Sign their petition and give them some money if you can.

Okay getting to it!

Movies and TV Shows (mild spoilers or no spoilers)

Couples Therapy (watched solo but discussed in depth with who turned me on to the show)

I watch it because I love the therapist Orna. I also love therapy, and though I only did couples therapy once in my life (for several awful, heartbreaking, and in retrospect useful sessions), I like watching couples try to work through their shit. This show gives me hope that there are people out there who want to do the work of repair, and I’ll admit sometimes I watch with a very space alien feeling of Wow, what must it be like to have a partner who is willing to do that? I especially love it when Orna gets tough with a couple who won’t stop fighting or she asks a straight cis man to try again to do something he doesn’t want to do.

Favorite Orna phrase, “Do you want to argue or do you want to do therapy and let me help you.” I especially loved Shane, a trans woman and super successful plus-size model, and Maeve (who went by a different name at the time of the filming) who is an autistic, Black gamer. Though their story didn’t go as they had planned, they worked through some very difficult shit to come to a healing place. Closure is so important in romantic relationships! Unless someone is in physical danger, don’t just dip forever without a word of explanation.

Ghosting and refusing another person a chance to share their feelings is frankly cruel, and it’s a big problem out there in dating America, where we largely have no training in conflict resolution. Take space, sure. Work on yourself, of course, but if you cared about this person as a human and a friend, offer up some closure, even if it is painful.

I also continue to appreciate the queer, trans, and now neurodivergent representation the show offers viewers.

Hoppers (watched at Nighthawk with and Sarah)

I think I demanded we see this because of Tom, the Lizard, who is another one of my alter egos (the one who can’t stop sending Instagram reels to her friends). If you don’t know Tom, check him out. He’s a star, though he needs a better name. I expected more from this movie and I’m not buying the friendly MAGA turnaround at the end, but the animals were funny, especially Tom and the beavers. My favorite thing about this movie was the mom next to me who really loved it and made a lot great sounds. Also the queso at Nighthawk is great.

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Aloïse (watched at Metrograph with Matt), 1975

Directed by Liliane de Kermadec, and starring a young Isabelle Huppert and Delphine Seyrig, Aloïse is about a Swiss outsider artist named Aloïse Corbaz, who was born in 1886, and committed to a mental asylum in in 1918, where she died in 1964. Seyrig is perhaps best known for her starring role in Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, which I still haven’t seen. I adored this spell-binding movie which hopped from scene to scene without explanation (as it should be world! I have a brain and I like to hop with it!) about an outsider artist I’d never heard of and now love. The second half of the movie is an asylum and I love movies set in asylums (Francis, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and Girl Interrupted).

There’s nothing particularly dramatic happening in the asylum, but in some ways that’s the point. These institutions were for warehousing, and not healing. The place is far from the horrors of Willowbrook, but there was no good medication at the time and no individual or group therapy. The nurses are not mean, but they’re not kind either, and the patients have nothing to do but sew and iron.

The women act out by screaming and crying, and once or twice shredding their nightgowns, but not at all in a sexy way (thank you de Kermadec). The composition is brilliant and my favorite scene involves a dance between the male and female patients which causes a few manic outbursts but is mostly still and honest, while the useless nurse cranks the phonograph.

The pacing and stillness reminded me a bit of Frederick Wiseman’s Hospital, another beautiful, devastating favorite. Side note: I’ve long been obsessed with a French teaching smock I saw in the movie Small Change (more on that in a bit), and the patient garments in this movie were some of the most beautiful denim uniforms I’ve ever seen. I will covet them until my death. Amy started calling them Asylum Denim after I spent an hour texting her and Sarah about them.

This photo isn’t denim and doesn’t have the sleeve and collar details, but it gets us closer.

What Time Is It There? (watched at Metrograph with Matt), 2001

Directed by Taiwanese New Wave master Tsai Ming-liang, who I’d never heard of (but hey I’m new to a lot of East Asian cinema). I was super depressed that day and almost didn’t go, but Matt checked on me, and I’m glad I saw it. Matt and I shared Junior Mints, some organic jerky, and Yuzu soda. I loved this movie set in Taipei about a young street vendor who sells watches. His father has just died and his mother is slowly unraveling because she believes the father is haunting them.

When the vendor sells a watch to a woman who is traveling to Paris, we go back and forth between Paris and Taipei. There are a couple of wonderfully surprising queer scenes, and a gorgeous, desperate masturbation scene, like nothing I’ve ever seen. The coldness of being a foreigner in Paris is palpable and devastating and reminded me of my last trip to Berlin. Lastly, there are the clocks. Remember those? We used to put them on walls and on our wrists. There were entire stores devoted to clocks! Watching this movie now, gives me clock nostalgia. I miss having a sense of time that was outside of me, and sometimes lost.

Small Change (watched alone on You Tube), 1976

Set in the small French town of Thiers and directed by Francois Truffaut, using many children from the town as actors, this near perfect movie explores the lives of kids, teachers, and parents as they navigate first kisses, going to the movies, eating at restaurants, getting haircuts, and going to school. The adults in their lives go on dates, have babies, take care of and ignore their kids, and go to work. This movie is also a story about child abuse. There’s one boy who always wears the same clothes, sleeps in class, and steals so that he can buy his mother and grandma wine. He’s discovered when a routine physical exam at the school reveals his bruises.

If the movie sounds like an after school special, it’s not at all. The kids are mesmerizing because they are regular French kids from the 70s and it's Truffaut, who made the perils and joys of childhood one of his best subjects. The title comes from the abused boy who collects change underneath the amusement park rides, and also the small change of intervening in his life. I first saw this in my late 20s, likely when I first watched Truffaut’s masterpiece, 400 Blows. I’ve always liked this film more. This second viewing began because I was looking for the French teaching smock I’d told Amy and Sarah about, and I got sucked into watching the whole thing.

The French are especially good at setting movies in classrooms, (The Class, To Be and To Have, Blue is the Warmest Color, what else?) and this movie’s classroom scenes are my favorite. This time I was especially struck by the male teacher’s talk to his boy students after the police take Julien from his abusive family. It’s such a raw, beautiful conversation about teaching, unionizing!, and taking care of each other as best we can. It reminded me of all of the “small change” moments that happen in our classrooms, when we pick of the detritus of the world and try to make something out of it. Small change! Small change! These intimacies are so important for art making and life.

Back Rooms (watched with Malka at Nighthawk), 2026

I didn’t know any of the lore around this film until afterwards when Malka told me. Created out of internet slop and then turned into a You Tube series by now 20-year-old director, Kane Parsons, who also directed the movie, I wasn’t sure I could handle this one. I used to be horror adverse to the point of nausea, but my kid has taught me all kinds of incredible things, and one of them is how to watch and enjoy horror.

Deeply creepy and unsettling, this movie is about the unconscious, the horror of the late 80s and early 90s, American suburban dead space, how AI unfolds, childhood trauma, and the ways in which straight cis men refuse to take responsibility for their actions. Spending time wandering through yellow sub-basement board rooms full of the horribly styled furniture of my childhood was a trip unto itself, but what if you couldn’t find a way out? What if something dangerous lived there too? The movie is weird and refuses closure, and that alone means you should see it because Hollywood is churning out so much dumb, boring shit, and this feels like art. Malka had a smashburger with fries and a ginger ale and I had a kale salad, queso, and a coke with ice!

Obsession (watched with Malka and Megan at Nighthawk), 2026

Sitting between these two for a bloody horror movie is my preferred scenario. Both horror aficianados, they got me through Weapons, which to this date is the scariest thing I’ve ever seen. If you haven’t seen Weapons, you should, but bring a friend to clutch. Directed by another youngster, Curry Barker, this movie is about a “nice” guy whose granted a wish and gets it. The gore in this movie is hard to see, but watching actress Inde Navarrette contort and conform to fulfill the wish is riveting and disturbing. I hope the Oscars continue their trend of honoring horror actresses, as they did with Amy Madigan because Navarette should win.

This is a movie that pushes us to think about codependency, rape, consent, and toxic masculinity in clever and surprising ways. It’s deeply political, but gets away with it because horror movies can do that. It reminded me of Don’t Worry Darling, which I still think got short shrift because it was directed by a woman. Malka saw Obsession twice which speaks to its power. I had to not eat for some parts of this movie, but Megan had a smashburger and fries and so did Malka, and I once again had queso and a kale salad with chicken. I didn’t really like the chicken.

Rupaul’s Drag Race All-Stars (watching with Malka on Paramount), 2026

I love this show and will probably watch it until the franchise or Ru dies (sorry to even type that). I don’t love the bracket formula because I’d like more time with my queens (Morgan McMicheals, April Carrión, and Vivacious there’s still a chance!). I can’t really get into it about this show. It’s consistently funny and stupid, and showcases some of the least represented people on TV. We also like Untucked and The Pit Stop.

Paradise (watching with Malka on I don’t know), 2026

We liked it, but both of us don’t love dystopian futures so we stopped. The main dude is great though, and if you like that genre, you should go for it.

Love Island, Season 8 (watching on Peacock with Malka and solo), 2026

Somebody on Instgram reels (are you noticing I have an addiction yet?) said this is our Hunger Games and that person is correct. If you would have told me I’d be watching this, I’d have laughed at you, and yet here I am. These contestants are kids, like a few years older than my child and students, and so when they do sexy things, I feel mildly barfy. Gabriel’s kissing makes me want to hurl myself into space and die.

The whole premise is wrong and deeply compelling, and it’s reality TV so there’s no intimacy coordinator and it’s unfolding over the summer. AND I like the communication, like these kids are trying to talk to each other and sometimes they’re good at it, and sometimes very bad. Surprisingly, this show has made me have more empathy for young straight cis men, and that’s a good thing. They get a bad rap (for good reason some times), but they also have feelings and struggles and they even cry and it’s good for me and us to see that.

I miss Sean, an ex-cop. See the show made me like a cop?! I love Bryce though I’m concerned about his idea last night. I actually love all of the women, though I worry deeply about Melanie. I also worry about Sol. She is very open about her past and feelings, and seems dangerous. Bea is kinda checked out, but I love her a lot and her disability jokes are the best, though that humor is lost on the abled people around her. I love Kenzie even though she might be a Trumper. I kinda love them all, except Gabriel who I’m not sure about at all. Corbin needs to visit a BDSM dungeon and then he’ll be fine. Victoria is a too young for this, and I don’t want anything to happen to her. KC is good, but I don’t trust him fully. Aniya is also too vulnerable and believing to be on the show. Kayda I worry about, but she’s very savvy. Zach I worry about a little and also find deeply boring. It would be great if Bryce and Zach could fulfill their bromance. There are a few other people I can’t remember.

It’s on every night (except Saturday and Wednesday) and I like watching with Malka because we can talk about relationships and that’s always good. There’s voting, but I refuse to vote because I’m 53 and that would be wrong of me. No shade to anyone voting.

NBA Finals (watching on the big projector on ESPN at and Elke’s with Satiya, Meaghan S., and maybe Darwin and Aquila)

Knicks in five! I didn’t watch the last game because my nerves were shot. I’m going to watch on Saturday. I don’t really pay attention to sports except for at the big moments, though I never watch American football or baseball. It feels really good for NYC and hey, I’m for that. I was a basketball scorekeeper in middle school so I could stalk a boy I liked, and I did actually learn a lot about basketball. I also used to watch a lot of basketball with Matt when I was younger. It’s a beautiful, fluid, fast game, where people do things that boggle the mind.

Okay, gotta go get groceries.

Please heart it and share it even if you don’t read it all! Enjoy the typos! Leave a comment! What are you watching right now?

xoxo

Carley

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End of Semester AI Thoughts

Americans aren’t very happy with ChatGPT, LLMs, and AI in general. In a recent poll, 7 out of 10 people say the costs of AI outweigh the benefits.

The most visible figures working in AI are also facing a strong backlash. Elon Musk has long been hated, especially after he dismantled critical government offices with DOGE. Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz’s recent investigation into Sam Altman for The New Yorker, revealed a troubling pattern of lying and conflict avoidance issues. Even if you don’t read the article, the opening image of Altman trying on different versions of his own face, feels perfect for a moment when it’s hard to trust anyone, especially tech bro billionaires.

From Farrow and Marantz’s reporting we also now know how OpenAI moved from a non-profit to a non-profit with an embedded for-profit LLC. If that sounds paradoxical or even just confusing, you can look at their website language, which I spent the last five minutes trying to figure out.

I love it when Ronan Farrow does a deep dive into something nefarious, which is becoming his specialty. He’s also the rare journalist who has also been a Drag Race judge.

Last semester, I created a more explicitly spelled out no-AI and LLM policy in my classes. I borrowed some of my language from who shared theirs on Facebook as a crowd sourcing, syllabus-making gesture, and then I added to it. I also front-loaded my first-year writing courses with reading about AI and learning outcomes, AI dependence, and a few positive articles. We spent the first week discussing those articles.

I’m not naive enough to think I stopped my students from using it all together and though I had some hunches about a few of them, I didn’t accuse anyone because there’s no accurate way to know except for what the kids call “vibes.” The vibes were off a few times because the writing became smooth and a bit dull, and lacked the wonderful messiness of a brain on the page trying to untangle a knot (I’m paraphrasing some of Philip Lopate’s language for what essayists do).

In the middle of the semester when my union of contract faculty went on strike and we were fighting admin for some basic AI protections, I became a bit more dystopian and doomy in my conversations with my students. In one exhausted teaching moment, I said to one of my classes, “If you’re using AI, I can tell, and your giving your brain away for free to entities that don’t care a bit about you or your learning.”

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On our class blog one of my students wrote honestly and bravely about how AI has become an addiction for him, and how much he wants to learn without it. He was also a bit of slick customer, so I have a tiny bit of cynicism about the post, but I believe he wrote the dang thing because it sounded like he was talking on the page and it was a lovely mess.

This is what I want from my students—make a lovely mess, and then we can revise it and make it gorgeous. If you’re reading this post for the first time, I’ve spent the morning revising it because in my excitement and zeal to be done yesterday, I hit publish far too soon. Sorry, early readers! Maybe I’m modeling going from mess to not such a mess.

So much of my work as a first-year writing professor is getting students to believe they have something valuable to say and write outside of the confines of the five-paragraph essay and the some of the more rote assignments they’ve endured. I don’t blame anyone for this. High school teachers are amazing, but they are often forced into corporate education packages and state testing that allow for little authentic writing instruction.

At NYU, I also have many students who come into my classes totally ready for the kinds of writing challenges that real essays can provide.

But do we convey to students that we want their messy brains on the page? Do we invite a voicy disaster? Because college professors are remarkably resistant to innovations in pedagogy, I would say no.

At this point, I don’t think it’s fair to simply ask our students to resist ChatGPT and Claude. When I’m in Google docs, every time I want to make a comment or write a sentence, this stupid little magic wand pops up and says “Refine? Refine? Refine?”

No Google Docs, I don’t want to refine my comment or sentence. But that wand is always there (if someone knows how to get rid of it let me know), and if I weren’t vigilant, I could easily type myself into refining a sentence or a whole paragraph that was already great or I could “refine” later. Refine is such a sneaky word. It means “To improve by making small changes, in particular make more subtle and accurate.”

Refining is not revising.

We need to regulation and rules for how we and our students use AI. Many universities are already partnered with tech companies, so it’s on departments, programs, and unions to step up. I’m hoping to get together with other writing programs and faculty across campus next year to create some shared policies.

I’m open to changing my mind about LLMs when the data comes in that shows us that it helps students actually learn. I also hear form very high up admin that I should get students ready for the “real world” and share with my students how I use AI.

I don’t use AI and if I were to try to publish something that is AI generated I would be cancelled, and to tell my students that they could use AI when writing for publication would be a lie. But most of them do not write for publication.

I also hear my Bard colleague in my head, telling me things that make a lot of sense. Here’s something from his Substack:

What is almost entirely missing—from both the article and the commentary—is sustained attention to how AI is actually used in everyday classrooms: in K–12 settings, in community colleges, and in places where students are balancing work, family, and school. There is little discussion of metacognition, transparency, student choice, consent, or access; little sense of AI as a dialogical partner rather than a replacement; almost no acknowledgment of the constraints under which most teaching actually happens. The conversation skips over pedagogy and lands instead on verdicts.

What he writes is important and if our students are already deeply engaged with AI, isn’t the job of writing/comp teachers and professors to accept this and meet them where they are? Historically, writing/comp teachers and professors have embraced new technologies. One of the things we maybe do best is to acknowledge the realities of students’ lives.

We also care deeply about authentic voices, meta-cognition, and student agency (to name just a few of our obsessions). For some of us, the stories students tell and the conversations they have with other texts, us, and other students are deeply political.

I don’t want to give those conversations to AI. I don’t want to be in dialogue with machines that stole the work of every novelist and essayist I’ve ever loved. I also don’t want to feel like a hysteric.

There is so much happening too fast right now, and without our consent. As we speak, we are in a war that over 70% of the country doesn’t want. Our leader is convicted felon and a rapist whose narcissism is only outmatched by his dementia. In the last ten years, tech companies have gone from supporting the Democratic Party and resisting authoritarianism to funding white supremacy, genocide, and a massive coverup of a child sex trafficking.

Six Supreme Court Justices (four white men, one white woman, and one Black man) have given corporations the right to be treated as individuals and thereby donate vast sums of dark money to candidates that do not speak for or listen to the majority of this country. They have taken away our reproductive rights and bodily autonomy and most recently they have destroyed the single most important piece of legislation in this country, The Voting Rights Act.

It boggles my mind some days that we do what these six reactionaries tell us to do.

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Sometimes I try to understand the tech guys who have made AI. Maybe they made machines to do the things that they don’t want to do or find boring. Or maybe it’s just he excitement and ability to create a machine that can learn that drove them to keep going in spite of many dire warnings.

Maybe they only ever experienced writing as a task to get through. Maybe they never wrote anything that they loved or that gave them joy.

We have not consented to these machines. In our current rape culture, LLMs are another violation.

I saw a reel on Instagram this morning of one smart guy saying to another smart guy, “I wouldn’t use AI to write anything because it’s like paying someone to have sex for me.” First I thought, Yeah, that’s how it is! And then I thought No, writing is not fucking! They both can create some exciting chemical reactions in our brains, but sex is far more animal than writing is (for me anyway). Sex is orgasm and loss of control for some glorious bit of time. Writing is deep presence and thinking.

What is writing for you?

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If writing were actually like sex, I bet we’d be far less likely to give it over to some machine. Wait, I’m wrong about this too. I’ve read my Paul Preciado.

How many women and moms especially have begged for an AI to vacuum or do the dishes or take care of the mental load?

Writing either has no value or it’s value is so vast that we have to be coerced into letting it go. Feminist me says Don’t take away my body and my brain. Don’t take away the one or two things I’m very good at because you’ve decided they are just tasks.

Moby Dick

In tenth grade Mr. Pritchard assigned Moby Dick. He was an amazing English teacher. I loved all of my English teachers in high school. I still remember in 9th grade, Mrs. Warner, telling us the story of Oedipus. Consider my mind blown. I read all of the novels and plays my English teachers assigned, but Moby Dick stumped me. I hated it. It’s one of two books I’ve thrown across the room. The other one is Eat, Pray, Love. I had a toddler, and I was married, so I was not in the mood for that journey.

After seeing a somewhat baffling rock musical of Moby Dick by Robert Wilson at BAM, a few weeks ago, I decided it was time to try Melville again.

True story, I love it. There are many stupid jokes about returning to this book at age 53.

That Melville guy sure knew how to write a story!

I’ve heard this a thousand times, but wow, that book is gay!

Not a joke, but Ahab is disabled. Have a bunch of scholars already been writing about him in Disability Studies? I need to do some research.

Have you ever re-approached a book you couldn’t read when you were young, and now you love it? Tell me about it in the comments.

Travels with Slimmy

My new favorite Substack is , written by a cat named Slim about traveling to Alaska with two humans he doesn’t like very much. Here’s a favorite moment:

Slimmy: My nights on the streets of Kingston were the most formative part of my life, and the only time when I was truly free. My colleagues and I spent many nights reading aloud from the work of Ferlinghetti, Kyger, Burroughs, and Ginsberg while we passed a jug of cheap red wine amongst ourselves. I suspect I would have become a poet.

Someone became a Supporting Member last month and I know who you are and thank you so much and I’ll be reaching out soon for your Writing Boss session. I realized I have a few super sweet paying supporters who keep me in some grocery money. Thank you! It means a lot to me and does help me keep going.

Enjoy the typos!

xoxo

Carley

I begin with this selfie by my dear friend and union comrade, Maria Rosa. I love it because she’s in it, looking so happy, and it shows another union bestie, Jean, and me leading the picket line around the newly constructed 1.2 billion dollar Paulson Center at New York University. One of the reasons we chose to picket in front of this building was to demonstrate how much money NYU has and how little it has paid more than half of its full-time faculty.

We picketed for two days, and each day we grew to nearly 400 picketers. When Maria Rosa took this photo it was early morning on the first day, March 23rd. We didn’t quite have enough folks to surround Paulson, which is massive, but we had fun trying. Jean and I led some chants and it was an early moment of empowerment. My voice dropped into a lower register and it felt almost spiritual. Maybe I was channeling the voices of strikers long since passed or my mom when she marched for ERA in the early eighties. I can yell when I need to, and my body realized it was time to get loud.

The steps we took to get strike ready were huge lifts for all of us on the bargaining and organizing committees (hereafter referred to as the BC and the OC). Matt R. likened it to playing a video game that never ends—there was always a new level to conquer. From bargaining sessions to phone banking to getting folks across schools to sign a strike warning letter, to calling a strike authorization vote, to choosing a strike deadline, and finally to organizing the strike itself. At every level we needed a majority of our unit to agree. They stepped up every time.

Most of us who were on the OC and BC were in contact with 20-50 people a day. The BC met for hours every week to draft proposals, strategize, and then sit across the table and make demands without ever losing their tempers. The BC and OC met together weekly, sometimes even twice a week to share information, report back from our turfs across the university, and make important decisions. We then had to share that information with 950 people and make sure everyone was kept up to date.

For me, getting information every where it needed to go, something I started calling “bridging,” was often the most exhausting part of organizing. I also realized I was good at it!

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Bargaining emails alone took up hundreds of hours and were mostly drafted by the BC, with editing from whoever was available. BC and OC members were part of several WhatsApp groups that we’re active for most of every day and sometimes into the night. We had a main organizers group, a communications and social media group, and a facilitators group. The BC had their own group.

I was in a Phonebankers Whatsapp and a Liberal Studies WhatsApp because that’s my home school/program. I was also in a Tisch organizers email thread because I’d volunteered to work in that turf. Those WhatsApp threads were fast moving and we often had to make important decisions very quickly. We also laughed and joked a lot because we needed the stress relief and because we all got very close. The threads are much quieter now, and I kind of miss them.

We had hoped that our majority strike authorization vote would get NYU to bargain with us more seriously, but it didn’t. We hoped that NYU would come to the table in meaningful ways in the three weeks leading up to our strike deadline, and they didn’t. We did get a few major wins before the strike like presumptive renewal, but we were very far away on big issues like cost of living wages, compression adjustments, childcare and eldercare paid leaves, international faculty visas, academic freedom, and shared governance.

We were prepared to strike because we’d created committees: picket logistics, accommodations, food and drinks, strike fund and money issues, and a few more I don’t remember. We also arranged for a roster of speakers every day, a hot lunch with snacks and dessert and coffee, places for people to sit and rest, drummers, student supporters, and comrades from other unions on and off campus. Brad Lander and Susan Sarandon visited us and students held Freedom Schools.

Above is BC member, Jacob Remes, speaking at the end of the first day of the strike. BC members had been bargaining for over 24 hours, and they were exhausted, but we wanted to cheer them on and make sure they were okay. You can also see other BC members, Heidi White and Elisabeth Fay, who is blowing kisses to the audience. I jokingly called Elisabeth and Jacob, Mom and Dad.

Heidi has been one of my closest colleagues for years, and has done more to protect contract faculty than anyone I know. I remember pulling Heidi by the hand through the crowd so that she could be up front with her fellow BC members.

Above is most of our BC (not pictured Heidi White, Fanny Shum, and Chris Chan Roberson) at the picket line.

When I got serious about doing union work a few years ago, I began with “walk throughs” (going to other departments and schools and literally walking through the halls of people’s offices to talk to them) and phone banking to get union members to show up for bargaining, either in person or over zoom.

We had two giant T.V. screens on the back wall of the bargaining room. Imagine those two screens filled with 50-200 faces sitting in their little zoom squares, with the union logo as all of our backgrounds. There were days when we could tell we’d rattled them, and others when we seemed to have no effect at all.

About eight sessions in, I started going to every bargaining session, and for reasons that still aren’t entirely clear to me, I became obsessed with the proceedings. Listening to and seeing our BC of twelve of the smartest people I know (along with our brilliant UAW staffer Dan) present reasonable and fair proposals, make use of data we’d recently gotten access to because we unionized, and gather members to give testimonials about how difficult our lives had become, felt necessary and empowering. We finally got to talk to admin and they had to listen, or at least pretend to.

Because of my attendance at bargaining sessions, I started to be able to answer a lot of questions that came up for members. I also began facilitating meetings, talking to the media, and arranging phone banking sessions so none of us would have to feel like we were calling alone. I got very invested in creating teaching materials so that we could make sure our students knew why we’d formed a union and might strike. These were not activities I’d done in the past, but they were important now and sometimes really fun. I also liked that I was learning new skills.

We don’t talk enough about how much fun organizing and protesting can be, and I loved getting to know new cool people in different parts of the university, who were as political as I am. The union in many ways gave me a second home, which I very badly needed.

Union work became a bit of an addiction. Turning people pro-union, sharing facts, assuaging deep fears and anxieties, working in a part of the university where there were deep anti-union factions—all of it gave me a lot adrenaline, cortisol, dopamine, an/or serotonin, and I didn’t want to stop until we’d won.

I also want to note that there are so many things I didn’t do: I didn’t do walk through anymore because my disabled body couldn’t really handle those, I didn’t create social media or do a lot of our communication because we had an amazing team of super-skilled people and I don’t know Canva, I didn’t do outreach to other union organizations and other faculty groups, and I wasn’t on any strike committees. I point this out because one thing I learned in organizing is that there is so much to do, and picking a lane and an focus really helped me be of use and not completely burn out.

Beloved comrades serving lunch. I hadn’t realized how important this would be for our picketers (which duh!), but it felt very magical. It reminded me of The People’s Kitchen at Occupy Wall Street, though we were a much smaller operation.

There’s been a new chant, or at least new to me, in protests and in social justice circles of late. “We take care of us.” It’s community-minded and encourages mutual aide, solidarity, and collective safety. We’d known for years that the administration wasn’t going to take care of us, a point made even more clear when admin called the NYPD, arresting faculty and student protesters who had occupied spaces around campus to protest the genocide in Palestine.

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I learned in those two picketing days that we could take care of ourselves, and that’s also what a union does for its members. I hadn’t anticipated how much we needed to be together on the picket line chanting, singing, dancing, and talking. As faculty who spend the majority of our working lives with students in the classroom, we often don’t have the time or energy to be with our colleagues.

Here’s my new Tisch School of the Arts buddy, Gwendolyn, hanging out with Scabantha the Rat. Scabantha came on day two of the strike, and we all loved her and took photos because she’s a celebrity, and what New Yorker doesn’t secretly love a rat?

More of our members, drumming and being the best. I don’t know the names of the drummer on the right and the woman on the left, but that’s Maria H. in the middle, who is a third generation union member.

Much to our surprise, after just two days of striking, we won a great contract. Because of the strike, we got a 14k raise across the unit, our salary floors went up significantly, and we addressed compression so that those of us most affected by it, gained even more significant raises. Each year moving forward until the next contract, we get a 3.5.% raise.

We won academic freedom protections, better retirement plans, and some protections against AI. We won presumptive renewal which means after two contracts we no longer have to reapply for our jobs. Some folks are calling it “soft tenure,” and it’s a life changer. Everyone in our unit will now have a $2500 annual research fund and the right to file grievances. There’s a lot more, click here to see.

The last photo is our UAW staff—Caley, Dan, Alex, Annie Lee, and Nathan and Anila who were hiding. These six people are the most talented, level-headed, strategic, tough, kind, funny, and brilliant organizers I’ve ever met. They inspired me and made me feel like I mattered. We wouldn’t have won anything without them.

I worked most closely with Alex and Caley. Alex, who I never saw lose her temper at whatever bonkers thing someone said, and who usually answered with something like, “Let’s think more about this, but I’m sure we can figure it out.” Caley, who made me laugh when folks hung up on me, shared her life with me, and made sure that I’d slept enough. We could never have organized Tisch without Caley.

Contract faculty at NYU started working on forming a union nine years ago. I have always been pro-union but like many people, I didn’t get that I am the union, that we all are, and it wasn’t until the last two years, that I got involved in organizing. I’m so glad I did. There’s so much more to write about what I’ve learned, but I haven’t yet figured out the containers that will hold all of that. These last two posts have been a start.

I’ve seen a couple of headlines lately that the beloved show, The Pitt, set in the chaos of a Pittsburgh Emergency Room led by a traumatized, brilliant doctor, is so earnest sometimes that it borders on what the kids called cringe. I’ll take earnest cringe over cynical passivity and grift any day of the year. Becoming a member of the OC, relieved me of my passivity and fear that nothing would ever change.

Being in a union taught me that people need community and organizing can only happen face-to-face and over the phone when we can actually talk to each other. I learned how hard it is to galvanize people and change their minds, but listening, asking genuine questions, and providing people with the truth are the ways to do it.

As a union we have so much work ahead of us, and I hope to get as many people involved as possible. If you’re reading this and in you’re in my union, don’t thank me (thought that’s very sweet), but join us in the fight ahead.

We’re in a critical moment in this country. Authoritarianism has taken hold in less than two years, and we need every weapon we can find to fight it. Unions have saved us in the past and will save us again. Collective action protects individual workers from the ravages of unfettered capitalism. If a group of 950 risk-adverse professors, whose median age is 53.7 can do it, so can you!

Strikes work, and they show us that a better world is possible. I’d love to hear in the comments anything you want to share about unions, collective action, and striking.

Enjoy the typos!

xoxo

Carley

P.S. Scroll down for more photos.

Anne and Carley on the picket line.

Carley and Susanna on the picket line.

David and Brad Lander.

Noel and Carley on the picket line.

The picket line. Another new friend of mine in Tisch, cari ann said to me the other day, that the magic of the picket is partially because it’s a circle and circles are always a part of sacred rituals. I love that!

1

Even if you don’t make it to the end, don’t forget to hit the heart at the bottom and share a lot. Comments are so nice too! This one was hard to share. I posted, took it down, and posted again.

I’ve been trying to write something real for a while now. By real, I mean, something that feels honest and good. We might call that art.

I’m also so tired, I feel hysterical.

Last night I went with a few new union friends, cari ann and Gwendolyn to see another new union friend’s dance performance at LaMama Theater. It’s called “Center for Fiction: This is Not May ‘68” directed and choreographed by Patricia Hoffbauer. Five years in the making, it was a joyous, hilarious examination of what it’s like to teach, dance, and try to make social change while holding onto and critiquing some of the most important theorists of our time (Lacan, Freud, Charcot, Preciado). It runs through Sunday and you must see it.

I felt very seen while watching because it’s about teaching and so much of the theory that we Gen X academic creatives were brought up on, and yet it was entirely new and thrilling because it has the wild, constructed chaos that performance art and dance can under the direction of a genius woman. Pat (as I’ve come to know her) danced and performed with former students, dancers closer to our age and older, and made use minimal and surprising costuming, music, and found footage. It was freeing and thoughtful, and zany in the best way possible, and it spoke directly to the difficulties of being an aging woman teaching and making art.

Pat was one of the first people I connected with when I started organizing in the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU. At the time, Tisch was considered a tough turf, and anti-union. With the help of a crackerjack team of other organizers (cari ann, Gwendolyn, Chris, Anne, and Caley), we eventually broke through the few bullies and liars and found that we had far more in common than we’d thought. It turned out that many of the Tisch women were burned out, underpaid, and overworked.

They’d been lied to for years about the nature of their jobs and the union. In the beginning of this organizing all I did was call and text people who mostly ignored me, but eventually Pat texted me back, and we started talking about our lives as single moms and artists working for NYU. Pat turned pro-union pretty quickly and she started to talking to her colleagues. I would have likely given up if it weren’t for my early connections with Pat. She was also willing to publicly speak out too, which is always a big ask, and scary to do.

Seeing her performance last night (and even getting a union shout out at the end) was a full circle moment for me. In deciding to dedicate the last year or so to a lot of union work, I’d consciously set aside any big writing projects because I knew I couldn’t write a book and do union work while teaching and being a mom. Though I’m starting to think of organizing as it’s own art form, I’ve missed writing essays and making art. Pat’s performance was a call to me to return to myself and art making in general. She inspired me last night to be wild again and to tell the truth in all of its bodily complexities.

2

My body is in various stages of collapse. My eyes are so dry and unresolvable, that I tried a cure I found on Reddit. I put my testosterone cream on my eyelids. So far, not so good. Now my eyes are more irritated. This dry eye thing has been going on for maybe five years at this point, and I’ve been to ten ophthalmologists, who have offered many expensive quack remedies that don’t work.

The guy I have now is not a quack and even though he’s considered the dry eye guy, he’s stumped too. Last time I visited, he offered up new prescription drops that mostly don’t work and I can’t wear with contacts, and mused about how much better my eyes would be if I lived in the Caribbean. He suggested a cranial x-ray to see if I have sinus obstructions. Dry eyes are a serious problem for menopausal women, and guess what nobody has solved it. I haven’t had the energy to arrange the cranial x-ray.

Other chronic ailments of mine include Dopa Responsive Dystonia, bad cervix cells caused by HPV because my insurance wouldn’t pay for me to have an HPV vaccine because I was over 47 when I asked for one and apparently you have to die from having sex after 47 because you are a hag whore. Now I have to get a colposcopy which is not a colonoscopy but that will maybe have to happen soon too because I’m having an IBS flare which means I’m farting the worst smelling farts and I feel queasy every day after I have coffee.

My shoulder hurts, and my left arm still won’t fully extend from elbow dislocation, but I was able to lift weights this week for the first time since it dislocated in December so that’s nice because I need the endorphins.

My flesh feels like jelly. My brain forgets so much, I wonder if I have ADHD and if I’ve always had it or if this is just menopause. I need to have gum surgery because I have a hole in the back of my mouth.

Like most disabled and chronically ill people know, figuring out one’s body, going to doctors, scheduling appointments, and figuring out insurance is another whole job. It’s also incredibly boring and artless. Or maybe I’ve yet to find the art in those procedures. I do like many of my doctors, and I don’t mind the strange places new doctor’s offices sometimes take me, but this work is frictionless against the institution and has little joy to it.

3

My boyfriend of a year and a half recently broke up with me over the phone a week after we said we loved each other. He’s a cis bisexual poly Park Slope dad my age, who was very good at giving me orgasms, buying me food, and getting high with me. I can’t decide if this was a high or a low bar for making me happy. Food I didn’t have to make or buy, orgasms, and pot. Seems not too hard, and yet he was a rare person who was willing and diligent about these tasks. Also, he was not stupid.

In exchange, I offered hot takes, a lot of jokes (I can really make you laugh if you’re catching what I’m throwing—not the right phrase but that’s what my brain just told my fingers to type), incredible smarts, an aging but flabbily hot squish body, and great sex. I wish we could talk more openly about being great at sex. It’s subjective to a certain extent, but it’s also a skill—a way of giving, caring, playing, and working that we don’t value enough. If we did, we’d probably legalize sex work.

I might have maxed out on this whole dating thing and I admit (evidence above) I do see the whole system as transactional.

Anyway, what he was throwing I was catching and I did allow myself to eventually feel something like what I remember to be a love adjacent, but no longer have access to because I’m on SSRIs and so my highs and lows are blunted. As many of my SSRI people know, this is good because you don’t want to kill yourself every day, but also not as fun because you can’t be manic and feel like you’re falling in love and you will explode from the excitement and fear of it all.

Also, I let him meet three of my friends and I told my mother about him, which means the break up was inevitable. Usually about a week after I tell me mother about something good in my life, it goes to shit because then she can say something helpful like, “Well, your brother is not going to die,” or “You never know what’s going to happen.” I haven’t told her about the break up, because we’re in good place, and I’m trying not to rage bait myself as the GenZers like to say.

My ex-boyfriend’s (let’s call him Mario) beefs with me were “not poly enough,” “wanting more than he could give,” and sending grouchy texts after a night of fun. I think these are all true, though I don’t think there’s anything that wrong with my actions.

My beefs with him were, and I’ll express them here like a normal person and not a personal essayist:

He wasn’t a good communicator, though he seemed like a good communicator. We talked about quite a lot feelings (mostly mine), which he said were totally fine to have, and even encouraged in me. He was always like, “No let’s talk about your feelings. Your feelings are valid.” I can’t believe at age 53 I still fell for this cis man trick.

Live and don’t learn. Put it on a pillow.

A somewhat narcissistic obsession with making me come. Like you know when you’re in the middle of something and you realize I think he’s getting off on this way more than I am, which is fine. He’s closing the orgasm gap for all genders all over BK. Pleasure doms amiright?! Thank goddess for them, but there was something mechanical about it sometimes that made my heart hurt, which probably led to me to get stoned and eat a lot in his company. Or those are just the fun things to do when you’re dating and old.

Didn’t read the existing literature on being poly/ENM. I have this complaint about almost every poly person I’ve been with in the metropolitan area. There are books and if you read them, they are quite useful. Like it’s actually not true that if you’re poly you should never feel jealousy, and only compersion.

While some people feel joy, compersion, and are turned on by their partner having sex with other people, other people may feel a complicated mix of jealousy, compersion, and wanting to be involved in some way even if they aren’t actually involved.

There’s a big problem on Feeld (for the luckily uninitiated this is a poly/ENM dating app) and in the likely limited poly worlds I inhabit, which is play people just want to have fun and fuck and do what they want to do without feelings attached and then there are maybe a smaller group of people who want to play and fuck and have feelings, and never the twain shall meet. Or I can’t get them to meet up.

In retrospect, Mario is maybe a long-term play partner person, while I’m a long-term play feelings person. I’m mostly too tired to have sex with more than one person or at a time unless it’s the summer and I’m not teaching and Summer Carley (TM, TM) comes alive. I’m probably what the older gays call mononogamish. Dan Savage coined this term and not to be a cunt about it, but I’ve read the literature, and he did name what lots of gays have been doing forever. As in We’re completely together and we fuck around sometimes, what’s the big deal.

Which leads me to another paradox I’m in. I’m poly mostly because I believe in everyone’s right to be free with their bodies. I don’t think women in cis het relationships (or any relationships but this is where I’ve seen it most) should feel like they’re going to be murdered (just ask a straight married woman what would happen if her husband found out she cheated) for stepping out.

Everyone should be allowed to have sex with who they want to if it’s honest and agreed upon. I’m an anarchist feminist in this way like one of my favorite people in the world .

And/but I also don’t believe in hierarchical relationships because I think they are inherently unfair, like why should one person be first and the most important and everyone else second or third and less important. That feels wrong to me, though this is such a long standing debate in poly worlds I’m loathe to even type it.

So, if I ever have the energy to date again, I will probably try to be monogamous.

You know when you’re such a radical, you become almost normal? Pillow it.

Which leads me back to my old therapist Josh, who was honestly the hottest person I’ve ever dated, I mean been in therapy with, who once said to me, “I think for you to have most of your emotional needs met, it should probably be through monogamy.”

At the time I thought he was so wrong and the stupidest, did I say hottest, therapist I’d ever had, and why couldn’t we just accidentally meet up at a bar one night and have our therapy sessions there?

But/and in my experience of deep codependency, which I learned from my very traumatized parents and everyone around me growing up, monogamy is very hard too.

I GUESS ALL OF THE THINGS ARE HARD, EXCEPT WHEN THEY’RE NOT.

It’s also taken me so long to learn how to basically love myself and be on my own and I quite like being single and living my life the way I want. I like my own company too, but I do usually miss touch and sex.

Back to Mario, my only remaining two beefs are I wish to have not been broken up with over the phone, and I wish I would have had a chance to work on or even talk about what was going on for him before he decided to split.

For myself, I wish I could have been less grouchy in my texts and more trusting in my time with him. But/and I was kind of right not to trust him. Also, every one has the right to leave when they want to leave, and we don’t always handle everything in the most ideal ways, and if he were writing part of a substack about me, he would likely have his own beefs and they would be valid.

There’s also this whole manifesting issue which I loathe because it tells broken people that you get what you got because you’re too messed up to manifest a good thing. It also shuts out all systematic and structural problems that are making it so hard for a lot of us to be in loving and satisfying relationships.

The morning that Mario broke up with me was so shocking, like we’d literally never spoken of such a possibility, and we’d been having so much fun together and there was the I love you stuff. So I had the worst thoughts, which I’m not going to name but if you know you know.

I’ve done enough therapy to recognize the patterns, so I texted my friends, the most amazing support network and queer fam I’ve built for myself and they helped me through it. Because I knew I couldn’t be alone, and I so I went to Jason and Elke’s and Amy, Lex, and Megan texted me all day long. Jason and Elke wrapped me in blankets, fed me, hugged me, let me sob, and we watched TaskMaster which is a pick me up like no other, because it’s British, mean, funny, and has a just the right amount of BDSM energy.

I miss Mario. He brought a lot of joy into my life, and I’m sad that he didn’t feel he could communicate with me before he decided to end things. I miss that he checked on me a lot, and had so much candy in his apartment that I called him the Hansel and Gretal Witch. I miss going over to his apartment and getting high and having great sex and watching stupid TV. I miss laughing with him and the way he teased me, and I teased him.

I also don’t miss the feeling that maybe I’ll always have in romantic relationships, that the other shoe is going to drop. I don’t miss feeling confused about how many partners he had (not because it was wrong for him to have the partners he had, but because I just wanted to know because it made me feel more secure). I don’t miss the feelings I sometimes I had that if we weren’t stoned we might not have enough to talk about. I don’t miss feeling a little sad that he never read a thing I wrote or seemed to care about me as an intellectual. I don’t miss feeling like if I upset him too much he would leave.

Thankfully, I have a new therapist I really like and she looks like Emma Roberts who my daughter and I adore from Scream Queens and American Horror Story. Also, her level of care is different than what I’ve experienced before and we’re going to do EMDR, which I think will be good for me. Her name is Sarah, and I’ve never met a bad Sarah. Last week, when I was freaking out about a medical form, she said, “Don’t worry. We’ll figure it out together,” which are magic words to any stressed out person.

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4

I’m feeling happy today and I’ve learned to enjoy these happy days or happy hours. I wrote an honest thing. You’re almost done reading it. Thank you for reading this far if you made it. I’m sending you 100 hundred puffy stickers through the imaginary mail system in my head.

My union won a historic strike and we changed the lives of almost 1000 people for the better. We stood up to one of the most powerful university corporations in the country and we won, and we did it through organizing that has changed the way I think about the world. I’m on the radio with Gwendolyn Alker (yes that one from the beginning) talking about our strike and what it means for academic freedom and universities everywhere. We come in at about minute 32.

I have new union friends! I have new ideas about what I want to write about next!

My kid and I watched several excellent new girl pop videos this morning. I have decided not to go to Manhattan today, and I get to meet some friends for a frozen outdoor drink later. While there, I will likely smoke a small amount of a joint which will lessen my pain and we all need less pain don’t we? The season finale of Drag Race is tonight, and I’m hoping for Darlene to win, but I love all three queens, so any winner will be great.

In a strange reversal of fortune, my cats have switched their dom/sub roles, and that makes me laugh several times a day because even they seem confused about it.

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Last night I was lucky enough to see brilliant art, and I’m convinced more than ever that A.I. must be stopped, unions and person-to-person organizing are the way to make change, and when we fight, we win!

Next up, I promise to write about the strike. That was the plan this morning when I started this post, but I let the writing be what it wanted to be.

Enjoy the typos!

xoxo

Carley

I wrote this a few weeks ago, when I was feeling maximum frustration with my employer and teaching and learning home, New York University. As some of you know, I’ve been a very active member of my contract faculty union, CFU-UAW, for the last few years.

When I wrote this, we’d been in bargaining for the last 15 months, and after a series of escalations, were preparing to strike. I’ve never been in a union before, or gone on strike, and though I have come to love organizing, I was sick of the administration’s stalling and breaking the law. I was also tired, grouchy, and surprised by how hard it had been to bring together 932 academics to one common cause.

How many professors does it take to change a light bulb?

CHANGE?!!?

Like many New York City transplants, I came here by way of graduate school. At the naive (stupid?) age of twenty-two, I was accepted* into NYU’s Creative Writing Program. Though I knew it was a big deal to study with Sharon Olds, Galway Kinnell, and Marilyn Nelson, to name a few of my professors, these were not my favorite poets, though Sharon would come to be. I loved Muriel Rukeyser, Elizabeth Bishop, Ruth Stone, and Milton Kessler. The last two had been my poetry professors at SUNY Binghamton.

Accepted doesn’t fully get at the complexity of the situation. On the same day I received an acceptance letter, I also received a rejection letter. I can’t remember which letter I opened first. Picture the tragedy and comedy masks. Confused, I called the Creative Writing Program and spoke to someone on the phone, maybe eventually the director, who assured me there had been a mistake. I was accepted, not rejected.

Talk about giving someone imposter syndrome. Later, I asked Sharon Olds, who became my thesis advisor about this, and she too assured me that I’d been accepted. Obviously, I felt weird/bad about how it had gone down, but I told it to new friends as a funny story, and I forgot about it until writing this post.

To be honest, I hesitated to include that part because Little Carley piped up with her leg braces and fear of falling and quavered like a cartoon hobo mouse, “What if people think you’re a fraud?”

But then Big Carley said, “People can think whatever they want.”

From that clerical snafu, I learned that if you get into something, even by mistake, you’re in! I have used this ethos to weasel my way into bathrooms, restaurants, parties, and the minds of resistant union colleagues.

When I think about those of us in my cohort who have gone onto publish books, I feel like I was meant to be accepted, and also nobody knows who is going to publish books in the future, because publishing is a crap shoot and an endurance test. Also, who cares? Also also, don’t ever let anyone tell you to leave a field because what do they know about future you? Also, also, also, let’s believe Sharon Olds.

In my young poet’s mind, New York was the only place to be an artist and a writer. I fantasized about bumping into Blondie on the Lower East Side, going to Saint Marks Books whenever I wanted, finding cheap Fluevog knock-offs on 8th Street, and reading the Village Voice the hour it came out. I suppose I fell for the same NYC fantasies that have brought thousands of my students to NYU. I mean, I was once them, just a few years older.

NYU didn’t offer me any fellowships, so I took out loans and got a work study job. I got hired in the campus Writing Center office, working under an avant-garde literary theorist from Poland, who loved Derrida and her shaky-legged Italian Greyhound. How I adored this woman, with her burgundy hennaed hair, and laugh that carried across a sea of cubicles.

By accident, I wound up hanging out with Ph.D. students who were learning how to teach while getting their degrees. I made copies, brought undergrads to their appointments, and found myself at the center of an intellectual hive of teaching and learning. Our office then was on top of The Bottom Line, and at night, the music filtered up through the ceiling.

In the final semester of my M.A. program, I was offered one section of Intro to Creative Writing. I’d never taught before, but I put together a syllabus and hoped for the best. I remember standing around the corner from my classroom on the first day and willing myself not to throw up. I was only a few years older than most of my students, and terrified they wouldn’t listen to me.

To my surprise they did, and I learned that I loved teaching more than anything I’d ever done in my life. I loved it as much as I loved writing poetry, which was my first artistic and intellectual romance. Something clicked for me after those first few jittery days in the classroom. I knew what I wanted to do with my life.

After one rootless year in the Ph.D. English Literature program at NYU, I realized I wanted to study the way people learned more than literary theory, so I applied to the Ph.D program in English Education, also at NYU, where I finished my doctoral degree.

I’d also landed one of the teaching fellowships, that were part of the Writing Center where I’d been a work study. Now I was a graduate instructor, teaching a three/three load (I need a fact checker on this, it might have been two/two). The fellowships were competitive, so to be hired was a relief and a reward. It meant if you were unfunded you could still get a doctorate without taking out any more loans.

It was 1997, and I was elated to be making thirteen thousand dollars a year.

The graduate students at NYU were beginning to organize, and I wish I could say that I was one of those early radicals. In a lesson that’s not lost to me now as I call on my contract faculty colleagues to prepare for a strike, I was the one who needed reassurance.

I had no idea what collective action meant, and had so much financial trauma in my life, I was terrified the university would stop paying us. I remember one of my fellow graduate students, Ben Stewart, talking me down in the decrepit teaching lounge where we re-heated our leftovers and shared one communal phone.

I applied for my current job, on a whim, mostly as practice for the job market. I was ABD, but I got the job, and I’ve had this job for twenty-five years. Like all contract faculty positions, it was the standard grueling process of a preliminary interview, a job talk, and a campus visit. I was hired by a committee of expert faculty in the fields of composition and creative writing–aka my future colleagues. Shared governance (faculty make the academic decisions, not administrators), something the union is fighting to hold onto, was central to my hiring, and it has been on every single hiring committee I’ve served on since then.

My title then was Master Teacher, which confused students and friends outside of NYU to no end. “Do you work in a Dojo?” was a common quip. When I left to teach literally across the street, I’d been making twenty-one thousand a year. The rise from thirteen thousand to twenty-one thousand was because of the graduate student union.

When the then Dean called me to tell me I got the job, I cried with gratitude. No one had taught me how to negotiate for my salary or other possible benefits. I might have stammered, “What is the salary?” as my then-husband, jumped up and down in the background.

“42,000 with benefits.”

It was double what I was making at the time. There was no such thing as Glassdoor then, and I’d been trained like many women my age that it was shameful to talk about money. I was mad at myself for years for not negotiating, though now that I’m in a union, and we talk openly about salary and compensation, I know that the women who tried to negotiate for a higher salary were not successful. We all started at somewhere around forty two thousand, and now most of us, even after twenty-five years of service to the university, make between 75-105k.

I’d heard that some Master Teachers had faculty housing, so I pushed the Dean on that. He said I wasn’t eligible. but added, “I’ll get you into housing, if you teach in Florence for a year.”

I did that, and it was amazing and difficult. I lived on campus with my then-husband, in an apartment which overlooked an olive grove. My students came to my apartment to drop off papers, ask me questions, and say hello. It was lovely at times, and intrusive at others, but above all else it was a job that was presented to me as a perk.

I was also too anxious to really enjoy myself there. I missed my friends and Florence turned out to be kind of lonely for a newly-wed couple with no friends and no ability to communicate. We also ate some of the best food of my life, and saw art that changed me forever.

When I returned my dean did not give me faculty housing. He left, we got another dean who was much more difficult, and then another, who was beloved by our faculty, but left last year with two years to go on her contract. I’ve taught a three/three load for the last twenty-five years, and usually a course or two in the summer so that I can support my daughter and myself. Because of the good work of our Faculty Assembly, I’ve had two semesters off to write and research.

There are other promises the university made and broke. After ten years of teaching I was supposed to get a 10% raise, which never happened. When I was promoted to Full Clinical Professor, I was also supposed to get a 10% raise, which also never happened. The excuses were always the same. NYU doesn’t have the money, there is this crisis or another one, and/or I already make more than most of my colleagues.

In these same twenty five years, I gave birth to and raised my daughter who is now seventeen, and headed to college in the fall. I’ve published five books–two novels, an essay collection, a poetry collection, and a young adult novel. I’ve published peer-reviewed articles, essays, and poems, and I’ve attended conferences in my field, and conducted research in libraries and archives. I’ve chaired my concentration and served on committees almost every year.

I’ve lost count of how many students I’ve taught. Thousands! I love my students. They are smart, creative, engaged, and determined humans who are just beginning to learn how the administration exploits their professors. They don’t like it.

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Mostly I’ve taught essay writing in our first-year two-semester writing sequence, but I’ve also taught upper level courses called City as Text, Experiential Learning, and Youth in Revolt. I’ve revised my curriculum and pedagogy more times than I can remember, and my evaluations are consistently high even though evaluations tell us little about how or what students learn and are biased. In these last twenty-five years, I’ve re-applied for my own job seven times, putting together a portfolio package that resembles a tenure application in both its requirements and scale.

I catalogue all of my achievements here, not because I’m special, but because so many people I talk to when I’m organizing, especially women and women of color, share this experience with me. We have done years of tenure-track level work, much more teaching than our TT colleauges, and almost never at a living wage.

This is how universities and colleges across America have come to function, and parents and students, through no fault of their own, don’t know it. My union and all of the faculty unions across the country are fighting back, and I believe that we will win.

When my daughter was four, I applied for a Faculty Fellow in Residence position and got it. I’d applied three times before, and the process consisted of three interviews, an elaborate cover letter, and extensive curriculum and programming planning. I felt like I was on the job market. My then husband and I accepted because our financial precarity was eroding our marriage, and we wanted our daughter to go to a good public school.

I lived rent free for eight years in a nice faculty apartment in a residence hall. It was not opulent or even particularly big, but I had a dishwasher and I lived on campus. My then husband and I separated after just a few months after we moved in. Still it was a rare time during my employment at NYU that I had enough money to live a somewhat comfortable life. I saved nothing because I still had bills, loans, and expenses, and I had become a single mom. But I sometimes went out to dinner, I took my daughter to Maine on a vacation for a few years in a row, and I paid off my credit cards.

It was another job that was presented to me as a perk and an honor, on top of my already existing full-time one. The administration made it clear to me I should be grateful to have been selected.

My residence hall was part of what’s called the Residential College, a special intensive experience for students who wanted direct engagement with their professors. During those eight years, I planned and led four to six events every month, hosting anywhere from ten to one hundred students in my apartment and around the city for each event.

My apartment opened out onto a dorm room floor, I said hello to every student I saw in the hallways, laundry room, and elevators. Students came to me when they were stressed out, needed someone to talk to, and at least once or twice every year when they wanted to commit suicide.

The residential life staff I worked with became some of my favorite people in the university. The RA(s) who have just unionized and won their first contract, were the funniest, hardest working, smartest young people I’ve ever met. They ran those dorms.

The security guards we knew treated us with kindness and respect, but sometimes a new guard would make my daughter cry by insisting she didn’t live in her own apartment. Security kept track of my movements in and out the residence hall and asked inappropriate questions about my dating life. When I was dating a trans woman, the guards harassed her about her I.D. so much, she stopped wanting to visit me.

I spent eight years living in that residence hall, welcoming a new class of first-year students and their parents every year. It was a lot of turn-over, and sometimes I felt so anxious I didn’t want to come home. I also loved the community of excited 18-year- olds, and the places we went together.

My favorite event I created was “Get to Know Your Indie Bookstore.” We went to an indie bookstore, I gave everyone a twenty dollar bill (really their own tuition money funneling through the cogs of NYU right back at them), and we talked about and bought books.

I still worry that writing about these “perks” makes me sound ungrateful and privileged. I’ve had opportunities many people haven’t, and of course I have quite a bit of privilege as a white cis woman, teaching at a wealthy university. It’s also important to write about the ways in which second, third, and forth jobs are presented to contract faculty as rewards for good behavior, and that I might not have taken these extra jobs if I wasn’t always so underpaid.

Now I live in Flatbush, Brooklyn, and I run out of money by the 15th of every month, after paying my mortgage, maintenance, and other bills. I’m in tens of thousands of dollars in credit card debt. But it’s my apartment and I don’t have to talk to anyone in the halls or elevator. Though I do! My building is full of interesting people! But I love that it’s not my job.

I’m part of the Organizing Committee for our union. I support the Bargaining Committee, and I phone bank and talk to people from all over the unit. The administration claims that our data about salary is incorrect, but my conversations across the union confirm what we all know to be true.

NYU has been underpaying us for decades. Women and especially women of color make ten percent less than men for doing the same job. Compression for women in our unit is so bad that we joke that I’d make more money if I were hired ten years ago as a man.

We make up more than half of the faculty at NYU, and we have been poorly treated for years. The difference is, and having a union gave us this, we have each other now. We have solidarity and community, and finally we have power.

As I sit in bargaining session after bargaining session and watch my colleagues and friends on the bargaining committee put forth reasonable proposal after reasonable proposal, only to have them ignored or countered with university proposals that are disrespectful to us as human beings, I think, I’ve Given My Whole Adult Life to NYU, It’s Time for NYU to Give Back.

In my next post, I’ll tell you about what happened when we went on strike.

Enjoy the typos and if you made it to the bottom of this long post, say hello and tell me about what’s pissing you off or delighting you about America today.

Carley

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We’re deep in the HORRORS, but I’m not going to write about that today. There’s plenty to read, from very good writers about America’s slide towards authoritarianism and all that we’re doing to fight it. A few of my favorites are and .

I used to write books now I don’t do anything.

I’m making a techno song reference here, which is maybe too niche, but its a favorite song lately because it’s about getting older and not wanting to do anything but dance. Here’s the video by Lekota called “I Used To.” Apparently it’s popular on the reels so you may have heard it there. My replacement lyrics feel accurate, though I made a conscious choice a year ago to take a break from writing novels and maybe try to be a person who doesn’t have twenty different plot possibilities —both in real and novel life—swirling around in her head.

None of that explains why I haven’t written a subby in so long. On December 15th, just as the semester was ending and I was almost done with grading, I went outside to move my car (yes, NYC alternate side of the street parking this is partially your fault), and I slipped on a patch of ice about a whole seemingly abandoned building long, which belongs to the nearby hospital. Yes, I have a lawyer and we’re suing, though I don’t really expect much. I couldn’t go out into the street to avoid the ice because my street is super narrow and hostile to walking in the street, but I I wish I would have.

I went down hard, and I was in instant screaming and crying pain because I knew I had broken my arm and maybe my wrist and the pain was shockingly worse than the three other times I’d broken my arms. I feared if I took off my coat and shirt, my bone might have pushed through my skin (like the character who dislocated his shoulder on The Pitt).

But there was no taking anything off because the pain was so excruciating I couldn’t even move my arm. I got up somehow and walked to my apartment, sobbing and wailing through the front yard and into the elevator. My dear seventeen-year-old opened the door to what sounded like the poundings of a monster in a cursed village at night.

“Call Daddy! Call Daddy!” I wasn’t super coherent, and I also wanted to reassure her I was okay, so I added ridiculously, “Mama is okay! Mama is okay!” I don’t know where this referring to myself in the third person comes from—early parenting and sometimes weird, jokey teaching moments, but out it came.

Daddy is ofc, my ex-husband, father of my child, colleague, and super close friend, Matt, who is still often my emergency contact and mental breakdown person. I knew he would drive me to the NYU emergency room, which is where I wanted to go to because and they are the best and fastest ER in the city.

I could already tell my bones were really messed up (see x-ray above!!) and I wasn’t about to go the hospital down the street that was responsible for my fall. I’d gone to NYU for my last broken bone and for my kid’s broken wrist when she was ten, and it was a really good experience as far as ERs go. Also, I work at NYU, I went to graduate school there, and I can’t seem to escape its orbit.

“Should you call an ambulance?” Matt asked through my daughter’s phone.

“No! ” I said through whimpering and snot.

I probably said some other stuff. The pain was making me queasy. My kid brought me Tylenol and I took four, and then she brought me my Klonipin (which is for my movement disorder), and I took three and waited while crying and saying to both of us, “I’m okay, I’m okay.”

Matt came and we got to the hospital, which was super crowded. As soon as we were through the doors, I said to every hospital person who came near me, “I’m in terrible pain, I need drugs, I’m in terrible pain I need something! My arm is broken and maybe pushed out of my skin, I need help!” Years of disability and doctors have made me very good at speaking up and asking for medicine.

It worked and it was a serious. I went back with the doctors, nurses, and Matt and they cut my favorite shirt off of me, and I kept saying to myself to make it all feel better, I’m on The Pitt, I’m on The Pitt, it’s going to be just like The Pitt and I’m going to have cute, competent doctors and I’ll be okay.

Because what is my life if I can’t turn it into a story? Because writing on the page and in my head is how I make sense of what’s going on around me and inside of me, and I don’t really know how to cope unless it’s through narrative.

This fear/feeling was one reason why I’d taken the big writing break. I was also tired and kind of fed up of the publishing world. I couldn’t and still can’t find a home for my third novel, Paramour. I’ve been through this with two other novels that never found homes. I’ve also got various half novels and almost finished novels, probably six or seven of those.

One of the totally finished ones that was rejected everywhere big and small, Live at Roseland, I recently published on my Substack. This amount of unpublished books is very typical for writers. I’ve also been fortunate enough to publish five books. I was beginning to feel I could quit and feel fine about it.

By the time I got a shot my first shot of morphine, I’d been living without writing novels for almost a year. I was out of story.

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The morphine did nothing, so I begged some more, and got an IV with more pain medication, maybe Dialudid which helped a little more, but still not enough. I had to have two sets of x-rays because it was a complex situation in there—my elbow was dislocated and my wrist was broken, but they couldn’t see the wrist fracture at first.

There was an older woman next to me, maybe she was 65 or 70, and she was crying out in so much pain, maybe more than me, so I got some perspective, while we waited for the orthopedic surgeon. Matt hung out and made me laugh and pushed the hospital staff to do things faster for me. We all need advocates, thought we often don’t get them.

The orthopedic surgeon came and he was handsome because he was going to save me. He was a former football player (Matt googled) and that’s the kind of doctor you want if you have to have your elbow manually put back in its socket. There was a lot of discussion (I had two doctors now and an amazing nurse) about whether or not I would be awake for this procedure.

I begged to be under, and we had an exciting conversation about ketamine, but Dr. Max (as he called himself) said it would be a lot faster if I was awake. I’d get extra pain meds, but not ketamine and no going under. He believed he could put my elbow back in its socket in one to five minutes, likely one to three minutes. If we did that, I could also leave the ER soon after. We’d been there for almost ten hours. I wanted to go home.

Would I try this? Being awake?

I said I would.

He spent an hour (time had stopped being a thing, I lived in the ER now) gathering the ingredients for my splint, and then residents came to watch because I always have to be that patient—the one with the weird problem that can be used to educate.

I kind of enjoy being that special.

It was time. Dr. Max had one part of my arm, and a resident had another. I couldn’t watch. There was an incredible amount of fast and strong pulling, and I heard the bone pop back into its socket. Gross, right? Matt said he’d never heard me scream so loud, and we’d been in a delivery room together.

Dr. Max did it in a minute.

Not Dr. Max, but that’s a stock photo for “cute doctor.”

Those hours of pain were worse than labor, but I had an epidural then because I believe in not suffering more than I have to, and I’ve had plenty of pain in my life.

This is probably why I don’t get tattoos.

I was in a splint for 10 days (heavy, itchy, hard to sleep in) and then a robotic looking arm brace and a plain looking wrist brace. I just got out of the braces last week, and I’ll have OT for three to six months. I may never be able to straighten my left arm again and that makes me sad. But I also might be able to, and that makes me want to try!

Long story long, I can type again. Hence, a subby for you.

While I couldn’t type, I read books, watched TV, felt sorry for myself, complained to my friends, saw my friends, and did the holiday things which were quite nice for me this year.

In a way, this messed up arm time, was a deeper plunge into my not writing life. During this time I finally started to miss writing a little, though I still love not writing.

I phone banked a lot for my union and I got others to phone bank. I convinced many union siblings that it was time for us to have a strike authorization vote. I finally learned what it means to organize, which is not saying something loudly or in writing (those things are cool too), but having individual conversations with many different people and listening to them, and then telling them the facts, and the talking or texting for however long it takes.

It’s been almost sixteen months of bargaining with NYU and what they have offered us is pretty insulting. They’ve made no significant movement on our most important issues: salary, equal pay for equal work, compression, academic freedom, shared governance, childcare benefits, retirement, and presumptive renewal.

Because we cannot get them to move, we’ve decided to call a strike vote authorization. It doesn’t mean we will strike, but if the vote is high (and goddess knows we’ve been working towards this), it may force NYU to come back to us with offers that reflect our contributions to the university.

You can read more about why we’ve reached this point here. You can also follow us on Instagram and our website for daily updates.

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I found out that I like this kind of work. I haven’t liked and been good at a new skill in a few years. Maybe riding my bike was the most recent. I like organizing almost as much (maybe more?) than writing novels. Writing novels is solitary and has no rewards along the way except for the pleasures of writing, which is nice ofc. Organizing is social and has a lot of praise built into it. I get a lot dopamine hits along the way.

I thought I’d try this new thing I see doing which I think is cool. These are all things I’m loving!

Currently reading: Mega Milk by (A collection of essays like no other, so smart, so wildly inventive, so sexy, and so well-researched that even though I’ve read it once, I’m reading it again).

Movie I just watched: Pillion, a gay BDSM rom com directed by Harry Lighton (I’ve been waiting for this movie for six months and it didn’t disappoint. Cried a lot, loved the chemistry between Alexander Skarsgård and Harry Melling, and thought about how one’s first queer love affair is often not right, but it’s close, and it opens you up and changes your life. Also, it’s really funny and sad at the same time which I love).

Recently baked: Rice Krispie Treats (hey they’re so easy and it’s not even baking)

Favorite pop song and video: “Pretty Ugly” by Zara Larsson (Excellent evil cheerleader vibes and recent Ru Paul’s Drag Race lip sync song

Favorite dance break: “Gnarly” by Katseye (my daughter has been teaching me about dance breaks and they give me so much joy!)

Favorite techno song this week: “Double Dip” by Anna Lunoe

Okay, I gotta go respond to student drafts! Enjoy the typos!

xoxo

Carley

Ross got me thinking about how I ruined my workplace and I decided to share these ways with you in case you too would like to ruin your workplace. The real crisis (among at least hundred a day) is that 300,000 Black women have lost, left, or been pushed out of their jobs since Trump took office.

Side Note: Does anyone else have tiny gnat like bugs flying around their apartment or house who aren’t many, but like to go up your nose and also cause you to wonder if you are Pig Pen? Like are they coming from my body? The cats? The couch? The plants? The subway? My vagina?

Here’s How I Ruined My Workplace

I did a home birth in my the lobby of my school and I didn’t drain the pool until I returned from maternity leave a week later.* When I finally drained it, it left blood everywhere, and I never cleaned that up because it made a pretty pattern on the industrial gray carpet.

I asked if my office could not be a broom closet.

I wondered out loud if I could have a marker.

Before that I asked for a piece of chalk.

In the time of letters, I asked for an envelope.

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I went to another classroom and stole one marker. I left a working marker behind because I am a Top Lady Ruiner.

I asked the gods, my students, why their tuition dollars couldn’t be used to buy working white board markers. They were like, “You only ever write three things on the board anyway, so why don’t stop talking about markers and give us our essays back?”

I returned my students’ essays at the end of class instead of the beginning.

I giggled.

I never made a good power point.

I asked for a raise four times and then gave up.

Every month I bled for five to eight days onto some cotton I’d stuffed up my vagina and I didn’t talk about it.

I asked for a lamp.

I didn’t help rewrite “the guidelines.”

Once every couple of weeks, against my will, I pooped in the office bathroom.

I never used the office microwave.

I farted in an empty hallway and it was louder than I hoped it would be.

I gave unclear directions.

My prompts were vague.

I sent a girl boss email.

I said I was sorry.

My boobs got too big for the office, but I kept going anyway.

I wore bad pants.

I wore maternity pants.

I wore jeans.

I wore Anne Taylor Loft dresses that at the time I thought were cute.

I talked about having a baby to some other people who asked me about having a baby.

I took my students to the library.

In the time of copy machines, I made everyone’s copies and was the only person in the office who could fix a paper jam.

I said please too much.

I ate a stinky soup.

I told a racist he was racist.

I was on committees.

I wasn’t on committees.

I didn’t take my students to the library.

I was a bad breast feeder.

I bled onto my chair while I was teaching, and I stayed in the chair until every student left, and then I cleaned up the blood.

I tired to teach too many new courses.

I taught the same course over and over again.

I told my students not to use AI.

I didn’t use AI.

But the worst thing I ever did to ruin my work place was joining a union!

What have you done to ruin your workplace (and homes are work places too!)? I’d love to know in the comments.

Enjoy the typos,

xoxo

Carley

• I actually had a rather long parental leave, especially for America.

Remember, it’s super helpful if you heart this (even if you don’t read the whole thing), share favorite sentences, and re-stack. My subscription price is also super low, just 40 bucks for a whole year of original, honest, often funny Carley writing. If I know anything in this world, I know there’s no one like me. AND I know there’s no one like you! If you don’t have the money you can always send me a note and I’ll give you a free subscription. If you can’t do that, there’s the tip jar/buy me a coffee. I’m excited to get a even dollar because that equals two eggs, and two eggs are breakfast! Thanks Pedo-in-chief!

I grew up in Western New York, Jamestown to be exact, an eight hour drive from New York City. Jamestown borders Pennsylvania, and almost all of my mom’s family lives or lived in Pennsylvania, a short drive away.

Last time I checked there are seventeen Jamestown(s) in the United States, so sometimes when I say Jamestown, people think of the most famous one, Jamestown Virginia, home of the first English settlement (occupation?) in America, founded in 1607, nearly destroyed by famine and fire, and the seat of the colonial English Empire.

Jamestown, New York, founded by James Prendergast, on unceded (I’m pretty sure) Seneca land, is the home of Lucille Ball, Roger Tory Peterson, and the 10,000 Maniacs. It was once a thriving hub of furniture manufacturing, but is now part of the Rust Belt.

My Pennsylvania family is from towns called Sugar Grove, Chandlers Valley, and Warren. Since my grandma died a few years ago, I’m almost completely cut off from this part of my family. I suppose by choice, distance, and political estrangement.

Jamestown is a small city (about 30,000) surrounded by rural farms and woodlands. Alleghany National Park is close by. My brother and I once got lost in that park for a few harrowing hours, and I understood how scary the woods are when you can’t find your way back to your Dad’s office picnic.

Buy Me Some Eggs!

I grew up around cabins in various states of standing up and falling down. My Aunt S and Uncle M (my mom’s sister and brother-in-law) were ever-present in my childhood. We saw them almost every week—in the summer to float down the Alleghany river, for picnics and cookouts, and when they stopped by to visit and we all went to Taco Hut, our local , much-loved, maybe not-very-Mexican restaurant.

My best friend R and I often went there after school for chips and queso or guacamole, which wasn’t really all avocado, but some sort of addictive concoction that I can taste now as I write about it. Everyone had a set order at Taco Hut. Mine was a combo enchilada with meat sauce, which came with an extra taco shell for dipping, beans, rice, and sour cream. How I loved that dish!

The waitresses at Taco Bell were amazing. They all seemed to work there my entire childhood, called everyone hon, and likely survived on tips. I believe most of them were single moms. I wonder what it was really like to work at Taco Hut? They carried huge trays of super hot dishes, and I never saw one of them loose their cool.

My Aunt S and Uncle M lived on the Alleghany River in a small cabin-like house that smelled like the woods, fire, and motor oil. The ceilings were low, and the house was full of stuff I wanted to explore. My uncle had two entire junk rooms he routinely pulled stuff out of—camping gear, kittens, guns, bicycles, pots and pans, and board games.

My Aunt S’s kitchen had a giant refrigerator, full of things I wanted to eat, mostly picnic food. Jello salads, Hershey’s chocolate for S’mores, homemade relish, hot dogs and chicken for the grill, and potato salad. She also had a set of dishes I loved, which reminded me of the plastic records on my Fisher Price record player—that same kind of plastic, but oatmeal colored with an orange or turquoise edge.

When I was a teenager, they finally renovated, which was something my Aunt had wanted since they moved into the cabin. She was a partner in an accounting firm and we’d all decided the house was beneath her, and it was time. They kept the little house, but renovated the kitchen and added a vaulted living room with a loft and a new porch. The bedroom and junk rooms stayed the same, and probably still have that same amazing smell.

The final five miles or so to their house was a roller coaster of a twisty dirt road that my brother and I demanded be driven fast and called “The Hills!” because its ups and downs made our stomachs drop. The road followed the Alleghany River and passed by some split-level ranch houses, which we considered to be very nice, a lot of small cabin-like houses, and at least one trailer park.

My mom’s half-brothers, who were kind of her first kids because she was thirteen when they were born and loved taking care of them, had trailers for first houses. We never considered these trailers to be trashy. They were new and had giant bathtubs. I don’t think we really knew the word trashy or “white trash” then, and if we did, we never would have considered ourselves either of those things.

If we wanted to float down the river, something we did many times in the summer, my uncle patched and then blew up with a generator inner tubes he kept in the bigger junk room, loaded them into the back of one of his pick-up trucks, and then we either got into the pick-up truck or one of my aunt’s, mom’s, or grandma’s car.

We drove to my uncle’s Aunt Elsie’s cabin a few more miles up the narrowing and even bumpier dirt roads. My uncle always did “The Hills” for us, and my brother and I screamed with delight until someone felt barfy.

Elsie was fat, gorgeous, and gray-haired in an aquamarine one piece. There was another aunt there too, I can’t remember her name. Maybe Kay, less fat, but stylish too. Their cabin was giant, set back from the river and facing it diagonally, with a diamond shaped top. It looked to be made of real-life Lincoln Logs, and had several giant dogs lounging on the porch, who barked ferociously until they saw my uncle or Elsie and Kay told them to stop.

I was inside of that giant cabin once. It was dark and beautiful with a wood stove, woven rugs, and rocking chairs. Maybe what Cracker Barrel was trying to imitate.

Elsie had a shallow spot along the river, easy to launch from, although there were often hilarious tube tippings because getting onto the inner tube required a jump from the shore or shallows onto the tube back or butt first.

For little, old, or people new to floating, my uncle tied a long rope around the tube to make sure nobody got stuck or floated too far away from the group. The trip down took about two hours, and there was one little rapids part that was pretty mild but still offered a thrill, and also were we might scrape our butts.

“Butts up,” someone yelled.

The river was slow and cold, even on the hottest days. Mostly, I couldn’t see the bottom, except for large, what I imagined, were prehistoric rocks. Sometimes we brought snacks, and other time we saw snakes which made my mother scream. She has always hated snakes.

We paddled and changed positions in our tubes so that our arms and heads were the only things above water. My aunt and uncle wore flippers so they could go fast if anyone needed help. We floated alone or hooked onto someone with feet or arms.

My uncle was a trickster and a lot of other bad things, but also a maker of childhood dreams and except for tickling, very good to me. He could have his own book, if I ever wrote it.

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My mom and step-dad have a cabin in the woods, built by the Amish, who are a big part of rural life in Western Pennsylvania. It’s also at the end of a dirt road, next my cousin’s house. Their cabin is a big rectangle with a front and back porch. They put in a toilet before COVID, but we have to bring your own drinking water. If we walk down the dirt road, we’re in the deep woods pretty quickly.

Growing up, one of my mom’s best friends Jeannie, had a cabin on Chautauqua Lake. We spent a lot of time there, especially on Friday afternoons. My mom left work at four, we’d drive to get ice cream at the Super Duper, and then to Jeannie’s cabin. Also, ramshackle, and with its own great smell, maybe beer, dog, and fire.

Jeannie loved and drank a lot of cans of beer, and had fiery red long hair and freckles. Her husband might briefly appear, but on those nights it was mostly her, Sylvia (my mom’s best friend,) my mom, me, my brother, and Sylvia’s boys, Jason and Brian who were our best friends growing up. I was probably in love with both Jason and Brian in that kid way of proximity. They were also really funny.

The kids fished. The boys used worms, and I used corn because putting the worms on the hooks made me gag. We had contests to see who could catch the most fish with corn or worms. Sometimes Brian used corn with me. We caught only sunfish. Sometimes we cooked them in butter and ate them that night. Often we threw them back in.

I mostly liked to throw them back because when they flapped on the dock and looked at me with their beautiful eyes I felt something yucky in my stomach. Maybe that they were at our mercy and were too beautiful to be eaten. Maybe guilt. Maybe I felt helpless like they did when they flopped around on the dock. I was really sick then, and prone to my own flopping.

I couldn’t bear to take them off the hook because it made them bleed, so one of the boys did that for me.

“Throw it back in!” I might have said. Sometimes we kept them in a bucket to decide their fates later.

I’ve been thinking about cabins and the deep woods because I’m watching Task on HBO Max. I’m going to try not to spoil it, but it’s set in Delaware County (Eastern PA, not my Western PA), but they look the same to me, and involves an FBI Task Force investigating house robberies and murders.

Mark Ruffalo is the head agent, and of course he’s amazing. One of the “bad guys” is named Robbie (played by Tom Pelphrey) and he makes me cry a lot because he is like so many men I knew growing up—an incredibly smart fuck up, abandoned, and a father who did his best with a lot of anger issues. His accent in the show is perfect. There’s also his niece Maeve, who reminds me of myself a very long time ago.

Here’s a tiny bit of dialogue (spoiler in bold here, so please skip if you don’t want that):

“What was that bird you fucking called me?”

“A vagrant. You can still go home Robbie.”

“Even if I wanted to go home, I don’t know the way no more.”

So much of the show takes place in run-down houses, falling apart cabins, a quarry, and the deep woods around rivers. The landscape of much of my childhood.

It’s show about whiteness and white male masculinity, how fragile and brutal that can be. There are three Black characters who play somewhat important roles (though I don’t think this show is there yet with these characters). The women are complicated and smart overall, so that’s good, but their lives are determined by the violence and mistakes of the men around them, which also feels especially right for the hellscape that is 2025. This is the writer who created Mare of Easttown, so I guess I’m not surprised.

Remember this hilarious and genius essay about whiteness and femininity by Sarah Mesle called “Mare’s Hair.”

Watching Task on a recent morning made me want to write about my woods and cabins. I miss my brother and my uncles, but we are divided people now, like so much of the country.

Enjoy the typos!

xoxo

Carley

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I had a dream last night that I was back at my old job, teaching writing in the Expository Writing Program (EWP) at New York University. I taught in that program for six years when I was a graduate student and met some of my closest friends there. Now I teach in another program at NYU, where I’ve been for the last 24 years. Sometimes when I’m walking down Mercer Street in the Village, I think, I can’t believe I’m still here. This can be both a good and bad feeling.

In the dream, one of my then mentors, and the Director of Faculty Development at the time, Darlene F., was passing out some binders with new writing pedagogy in it, or maybe it was an anthology. This image overlaps with my teaching in the summer program at Bard College for incoming freshmen, where we used anthologies in binders of texts collected by faculty and directors, usually under a shared question. One year it was, “What does it mean to live a good life?” The questions were always pretty good, and the texts were also quite beloved by faculty and students.

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Anyway, it was that black binder from Bard. My dear friend Nicole W. was there too, and a few other teachers I don’t remember or didn’t know in the dream. We were at a long table (not unlike the iconic center table where so many EWP folks began their teaching careers, shared ups and downs from our classes, figured out new prompts and texts, problem solved, chatted, and ate lunch).

I miss the center table. We even have a Facebook Group around it, though no one posts much lately. It was fun and it built community (not in the forced way we so often come together at universities these days), and it helped my teaching almost every week. We also gossiped, flirted with people (it was the 90s and graduate school, so yeah), hung out with friends, and made plans for the weekend.

I also remember there were people who didn’t like the center table and found it oppressive, chatty, and in-crowdy. I wouldn’t deny that either. But it was an open table in the middle or a floor full of cubicles. Our directors offices lined one wall (looking out onto Mercer Street), and the Writing Center cubicles lined another wall. There was also a lounge, with a small fridge and a microwave. Maybe there was a counter? My brain tells me there was a bright orange couch and a round table, on which, sat the…

PHONE.

It was a old school phone maybe with buttons and not a rotary dial, and all of the graduate student teachers got their phone calls there. Not yellow, but black. You could also call out there. If someone called you, the receptionist at the time (I remember Eva and Ingrid especially) paged you over the loud speaker/intercom for the whole floor, “Carley, you have a phone call in the lounge.” While you leapt or jogged over to the lounge (we were in our twenties then), they transferred the call and you had it right there on the on the old orange couch.

My friend Philip (who I met in graduate school and still teach with in my second NYU program), and I often joke about that lounge phone and the wild conversations people were having there. I remember screaming at Sallie Mae on that phone. According to another friend, Madeleine, she met Philip because he was on that phone with the company that makes Craisins demanding a refund because “the Craisins didn’t taste like cranberries.” They started talking I guess after he got his refund, and knowing Philip, I’m sure some coupons too.

Back to my dream and the best part of it. It turns out Nicole had put together these binders and they were full of new texts, but also in the middle, she had somehow managed to include a 8 x 11 and 1/2 shaped pumpkin pie. It had a full fluted crust, and that yummy sheen that pumpkin pies have.

In the dream, everyone was like, “Oh my god Nicole, how did you manage to get this pumpkin pie into the anthology?” Nicole was super chill about it (in the way she often is in times of crisis and innovation), but also very excited that we could now have pumpkin pie in our anthology.

We ate our pumpkin pies out of our black binders. In the dream I was briefly worried the pie would get on the paper, but I let it go. The pie was delicious.

Some thoughts about this dream. Pumpkin pie is my favorite pie. My mother is an amazing pie maker. She’s an all around good baker, but pies are especially her thing. Nicole is also an excellent pie baker and cook. I am also very good at making pies though I hardly do anymore because time and also I can’t eat very much gluten, and I guess exhaustion. It’s easy to buy a pretty good pie in NYC.

When I’m feeling particularly sad about the country lately, I will go to the new Wegman’s at Astor Place and buy a gluten free pumpkin pie. It’s really good, and pretty much tastes as it should, except the crust isn’t like a regular crust. I can’t do this very often though, because if I buy this pie I will likely eat the whole pie in a day or two, and that hurts my stomach. Also, it’s 20 bucks.

A pie fail comes to mind here. When I had first moved into my faculty apartment in the dorm and Matt, my co-parent was coming over (maybe for a holiday or maybe for a hang out). I’d made a strawberry rhubarb pie with a Crisco crust (sorry everyone but that’s how I was raised) and it was cooling on a rack with these little legs.

Somehow the legs collapsed and the pie slid onto the counter and down onto the floor. I may have cried. Matt says my face was one of utter despair. I was probably crying about the pie as a metaphor for the end of our marriage or thinking about the Donna Summer song with the lyrics, “Someone left the cake out in the rain! I don’t think that I can take it! Because it took so long to bake it! And I’ll never have that recipe AGAINNNNNNNN!”

My obsession with that song at age seven or eight, should have alerted me to my queerness because it’s the gayest disco song aside from YMCA. The drama of that song spoke to me so intensely when I was a kid, and the lyrics were such a puzzle.

Who was that idiot someone who left the cake out in the rain? How could he be so stupid? And yeah, I’d be pretty upset about it too because baking is labor and it does take a lot of time. Followed by the utterly baffling wail of never having the recipe again. How can that be? Recipes are either written down or in your brain, so what’s the deal?

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I know “McCarther Park” isn’t written by Donna Summer, but I don’t have the time to Google this morning because I have to teach soon, and also you can use AI if you want and tell me about it.

So the pie was on the floor steaming hot and Matt scooped it up and put it back into the glass pie dish and we ate it anyway. It was totally yummy. Malka was five then and only ate seven beige things so she didn’t eat the pie.

This summer she had pie and liked it!! Don’t let the food nuts scare you. Kids will eat all kinds of things that they never would once eat! Just keep eating your non-beige foods in front of them!

I sometimes make a pumpkin pie at Thanksgiving. I buy the frozen gluten free crusts, the pumpkin puree, and the condensed milk, which gets harder and harder to find because what is condensed milk (milk with pounds of sugar in it)? Also, not googling that. You tell me down in the comments if you know.

As part of my house antics (voices, songs, puppets, sayings, jokes) I regularly imitate Cartman from South Park screaming, “We were to understand there’d be punch and pie!” South Park is having a renaissance as a Trump troller and I’m so glad for it.

What I call house patois is one of my favorite things in the world, that is the weird, insular, little slangs, jokes, voices, made-up words, or abbreviations, like all the ways we communicate in subcultures and families.

The word patois comes from the West Indies/French Creole and was considered by racist white colonizers to be a sub-standard or “broken” form of English. Oxford Languages defines it as “the dialect of the common people of a region, differing in various respects from the standard language of the rest of the country.” e.g. “The nurse talked to me in a patois that even Italians would have had difficulty in understanding.”

Why does that seem shady to Italians?

It’s most often attributed to Jamaica, which might have the richest, most elaborate, funniest, and intricate patois. I now live in a mostly Caribbean neighborhood and hear this patois quite often. It’s beautiful, and completely unknown to me.

Sometimes someone from the Caribbean or with Caribbean ancestry will ask me why they like me and/or why we seem have an affinity, and I will say, “Well my grandma is from Cuba.” The response is sometimes, “Oh so the islands are in you then.” It’s such a beautiful phrase.

I am often told by people I’m dating that I have a fat ass because my grandma was Cuban. I have no real response to this, other than, “Maybe.” I do have her body, pretty much from head to toe. Sadly, my ass is more flat than fat lately, but I keep doing my squats. I guess my cake has been left out in the rain.

I also recognize myself as an early white gentrifier of my neighborhood, and I know like most neighborhoods of color in NYC, this one could be/will likely be ruined by white people.

My uncle and grandma were brown. But for the unexplainable ways of DNA, my father came out pretty white, and he married a woman of Swedish descent and hence his white, albeit freckly children. The freckles also seem to come from the Cuban side of my family.

When I was born, according to my parents and photos, I was briefly olive-skinned and had a whole lot of super dark almost black hair on my head and also down my back. My child was born with jaundice, and quite yellow, so what is my point? I don’t know honestly. Wow, do I have some stories to tell.

Anyway, I love all forms of “broken” or subverted languages. I love the languages people share in their homes and communities. I love Gen Z slang because it is basically a whole new language. Linguists are starting to write about this. When I was hanging out with , , and Amy’s wonderful girlfriend Sarah last week, while I was a little loopy from an edible, I asked them to talk about favorite weird things/house patois they all say in their families. That was super funny and interesting.

Race is the most ridiculous construct. Whiteness is a category that must also be interrogated. ICE is disappearing Black and brown people into concentration camps, and we can’t seem to stop it. If my grandma and uncle weren’t dead they would be targets.

I’m safe in my whiteness, though less so in my queerness and disability. I’m in a constant state of anxiety about what’s happening in this country. I am so disgusted by the White Christian Nationalists minority who have taken over. They’ve always been here of course, but wow do I hate them.

BACK TO THE DREAM. I guessed if I had to interpret it, I’d say I’m really stressed about teaching writing in this nightmare we’re now in, or teaching really anything political. If you’re doing your job, it’s often political, especially if you work with language. If you’re teaching essays, often by women of color and queer people, and also a few white people, it’s going to be political. I feel lately, like I’m going to get caught at any moment, teaching my “DEI” texts, talking about genocide, or letting my students have a very brief and heated conversation about Charlie Kirk.

Maybe I’d like my old and new teaching friends to give me some pie, aka, some new texts or new ideas about to teach in this moment. My political views are obvious in the texts I choose, the way I organize my classroom, and written onto my body, especially my hair. I’d love a binder full of new teaching ideas and pie.

I miss collaborating about teaching with other teachers. I think this is why my union colleagues have come to mean a lot to me, we collaborate a lot on things that feel important, and I’ve needed this. I’m also by a total fluke of over-enrollment getting to co-teach with my colleague Amy W. (not be confused with Amy Shearn. I have three Amy’s in my life, how lucky is that).

It’s so lovely to have another adult in the room or on a field trip. If you would have told me when I was first teaching, that most of the rest of your working life you will be alone with 18-year-olds and very few adults, like ever, I couldn’t have imagined it. I love that we can compliment each other’s teaching too. I haven’t known I’ve needed that, but I do.

I want pumpkin pie and maybe will buy it today at Wegman’s.

I miss Nicole and Darlene.

The pressure to use AI is also so extreme right now. I feel it from the tech people in my program (no shade, I know it’s their job), my students, and other faculty. I keep hearing, “Well if you don’t teach them how to write with AI, then you’re not preparing them for the real world” or “They’re using it anyway so you might as well bring it into the classroom.”

I keep saying no, the research about learning and AI is not good. Also, I don’t use AI to write, and I don’t ever want to. I like using my brain. My brain is very smart, and I don’t want machines to think and write for me. I trained and worked for years and years (my whole life) to be a writer and a teacher and I don’t want to lose that. I don’t want a machine to do if for me, because this is a rare labor that I enjoy.

I feel old. I am old. My students so far are lovely, scared, dysregulated, smart, overwhelmed, sweet mad, excited, happy, checked in, checked out, very affected by the death of Charlie Kirk even if they hated him, and just trying to go to college and learn what they want to learn. They are also afraid, like so many of us are.

I love you all! Thanks for reading this far!

I gotta get ready to teach. This is a very messy one, so please be kind.

Enjoy the typos!

xoxoxo

Carley

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I Did a Reels Dance

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This morning I feel in deep like with an Instagram Influencer (that’s a thing right?) because he’s cute and dances to Addison Rae’s song “Diet Pepsi.” I know this song because my kid likes Addison and I love pop songs in a way that only a Gen X woman who spent most of her late teens, twenties, and early forties dancing with gay men at clubs can love them. Though it’s possib Gen Z loves pop stars even more than we do.

Britney, Miley, Beyonce, Solange (not super pop but my absolute fave), and now Sabrinka, Doechi, Pink Pantheress, and Charlie XCX. I like lots of other bands, genres, music, and singers, but pop is special because it’s for the girls and gays.

I’ve always said my sexuality is gay man. I sometimes still don’t feel bi or queer enough. I find bi and straight men the easiest to date (bi men are actually my fave because we get each other in a profound, we don’t really need to talk about it, but if we do it will be in a nice way).

Often when I date queer people, it doesn’t work out. I could go back in the closet if it mattered at all. Yes, I hear people yelling bi-privilege at me, but it’s also depressing to have your sexuality misunderstood and made fun of your whole life by straight people and queer people. Younger people are much better about this. Thank you sweeties. my close friends too ofc, queer and straight.

If I had to describe my sexuality lately, I’d say a I’m tired slut, and I mean that in the most sex-positive way.

So back to my parasocial love this morning. Here he is doing the dance! I’m not alone in my feelings because he has 155k followers. What’s that like? Prolly hell, but maybe awesome. I’ll never know.

This morning I was getting dopamine hits off of Instagram reels. First I looked at brothers getting surprise hugged by their sisters (they are so weirded out by it, but mostly end up really needing the hug), and that made me miss my brother, who is not dead thank god, but also not speaking to me. Then I watched a bunch of families being re-united for various reasons (good and bad), and I wondered what it would be like to run screaming and crying into the arms of someone in your bio family. I can’t really imagine it. Then came the dancing guy and I lost at least a hour on his page.

After that (I hadn’t taken my meds yet, so wanting this might have something to do with it) I tried to get two people I’m dating and a few who I’ve been thinking about dating to do learn the “Diet Pepsi” dance and I’ll do it too and we can send to each other. That’s it. No posting anywhere.

One person said yes, but later when I see you in person. One person said, I think I can do that, but you’d probably be better at it. The other three said some version of no way, are you crazy?

So nobody was like “Yes!” or “Yes, and!” which comes from improv and stand-up comedy, like if you’re improvising, you’ve got to be open and say, “Yes!” to whatever crazy thing has just come out of the other person’s mouth, and then “And” to add the next wild thing.

A quick Google reveals that Viola Spolin, often considered the mother of improv came up with the idea in the 1940s and 50s and wrote about it in her book, Improvisation for the Theater. Second City performers like Amy Poehler and John Bulushi ran with it.

Long story short, I learned and performed the dance by myself this morning. You can see my three best versions on my Insta (please heart a lady for taking risks and showing you her definitely not perfect body). It was a lot of fun, and quite hard for me. I’m can’t do many choreographed dance moves (neuro disability stuff) and even though it’s a pretty easy dance, I had a hard time with the little twerk in the middle and getting full hip rotation.

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Also, I did it with less clothes on because even though social media, advertising, and shit people will tell you all the time that your body is a garbage bag full of lint and sadness and not right in thousands of ways, most great people love all kinds of bodies. If we could just get out from under capitalism’s ideology about fixing every last thing about ourselves, we’d probably be a lot happier.

EASIER SAID THAN DONE. ME TOO BB. I’ve also got a stand up show coming soon and so why not shame myself a little bit now and then I’ll be extra ready.

But I did it, and I laughed (at myself) a lot, and dancing is really good for everyone’s heart and mind, even if we aren’t good dancers. Also, my kid learns these wild Tik Tok dances all of the time, and it’s something I love about Gen Z, among many, many other things.

I yes, and(ed) myself.

I was thinking about yes/and(ing) because I went on a meh date with someone and I was grouchy about it because it felt like a waste of our time, and the person was a “No,” person for the most part. I texted my about it and I was complimenting her GF’s “Let’s Go For It” ways, which Amy has too and most of my close friends, and she was the one who said to me, “I really need a ‘Yes/And’ person in a partner.

SAME GIRL, SAME.

I’m not talking about sexual consent. That’s a whole different situation. People should always say no when they don’t want to do a thing, I get it. They are just mostly, not going to be my people. On my date, I’d suggested we sit in the most beautiful room I’ve ever seen in New York City, in a building we were already in, for a few minutes and have a beverage (alcoholic or non-alcoholic). They were not into this idea at all, and I decided I hated them forever lol.

I’m a person of extremes, I know this. We then had a very expensive (that’s okay!) dinner of tiny things, which if you know me, you know I like to eat not tiny things. I will spend money on food for sure, but I want it to be yummy and enough. I had a glass of wine, which seemed to irritate them, and then we parted. So be it, I’m sure I did annoying things too. I can be very annoying.

America is so bad right now, it’s hard to say yes/and to much of anything. Our government is at least half responsible for an ongoing genocide, our president is a convicted felon and as of now, un-convicted pedophile, our beloveds and neighbors are tackled on the street and taken to swamp prisons by masked cowards, and everything at my grocery store costs ten to fifteen dollars.

So maybe we give each other a little more Yes, And?

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I Saw the Movie Weapons in the Theater (No Spoilers)

had the idea of going with my kid. They are both huge horror fans and I love it when my friends want to do something with my kid and me that my kid is also into (note to everyone’s non-parenting friends, I know kids may not be your jam, but also parents need you). I’ve come to appreciate and even enjoy a lot of horror movies because my kid taught me how to watch them and also prepares me for jump scares and let’s me have my feelings. She is the best person I know, truly.

Anyway, I thought I could handle Weapons. I could not. It was so fucking scary, literally second by second, and while I loved the movie and think it’s amazing, I was literally sick with fear the entire time. There are to me and excessive amount of jump scares, and images that are seared in my head until my death.

I’ve written before about how when I was eleven I convinced my parents I could and should watch Poltergeist, and I was traumatized for the next ten years. I didn’t sleep well for two years because I believed the TV would eat me, there was a clown living underneath my bed ready to kill me, and my house, especially my closet was probably a portal to hell.

My working theory (considering my daughter and my own childhoods) was that I was terrified because I didn’t really live in a safe house growing up, and the movie showed my unconscious that I was right to be afraid. My kid has grown up in safe, non-violent households. We’re not perfect ofc, but in general she knows her parents are not mad and angry all of the time, so maybe horror movies are fun for her.

After Weapons, I decided to do some research. My theory isn’t wrong, but it’s not the only reason some of us can’t handle horror movies. In the article, “This is Why Some People Love Horror Films—and Others Can’t Stand Them,” Emma Ledger points out:

Research shows there can be biological reasons behind our loving or loathing of fear. A study from the University of Bonn reveals that fear can act on people at a genetic level, specifically via the COMT gene, which directs how signals are transferred between nerves.

The study found that people who had two identical COMT genes had higher anxiety levels and were more susceptible to being terrified. Whereas those who had different versions of the gene were more likely to enjoy, say, a scary movie and even laugh at the most ‘terrifying’ parts.

So it’s also genetic. Even wilder, my rare neurological disorder, Dopa Responsive Dystonia, is a condition in which signals between nerves do not always reach other. My dopamine uptake is slow, so I take synthetic dopamine.

There’s also something in the article about adrenal glands and people who hate horror movies having a hard time distinguishing between what’s happening in the movie and real life, on the glandular level.

Interesting huh? If you see Weapons, let’s chat about it because while I hated watching it, I still think it’s brilliant and I have theories.

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I Revised My Novel For the Fifth Time!

I didn’t enjoy this one bit, except for at the very end when I felt like Neo in The Matrix when he can bend his body backwards to dodge bullets. For a few days, I was the Neo of my novel. I knew where everything should go and I could move parts and pieces around with ease. But that was maybe two days out of a month of revising.

Books are hard! Sometimes when a client says to me, “Okay so we did the first draft, we’re done right?!” I have to very kindly say, “You poor sweet genius, we have at least two maybe, three more drafts to go.”

Speaking of NEEDING A WRITING BOSS!? Hey, that’s me and I’m looking for two or three clients to work with this fall. Is that you or someone you know? Spread the word. Times are tough, and if I can revise a book five times to get it to a pretty good place, so can you! I also help people write from scratch, stay on track, and feel like they’re not alone.

Enjoy the typos! If you were going to do a Tik Tok or reel this week what would it be? Or what scary thing (big or small would you like to do this week? Tell us!

xoxoxo

Carley

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The heat has been in New York City has been unmanageable. We’ve had many days of 95 to 100 degree weather with high humidity. My friend Jason says it’s all about the dewpoint, and he’s right. On the hottest, most unbearable days, the dewpoint is above 60 degrees. I just looked at my phone and though we’re in the middle of a rain storm and a flash flood warning, the dew point is 72.

I’ve spent so much time indoors this summer, in my two room apartment (the rooms are pretty big, but still) with the air conditioning on, reading, writing, scrolling, lifting weights, scrolling, scrolling, texting, playing with my cats, watching TV, lifting weights, eating, eating, writing, writing, napping, napping. I don’t like being inside so much in the summer. It’s boring. It feels like winter.

Because my back has been so fucked up this last year, I got some of the giant sneakers that everyone has now (not Hoka, but Brooks), and when it gets cooler, like lately after 7 pm, I go for walks. I’m supposed to walk fast. I try to, but I will always probably be a slow walker, but the sneakers do help. It’s like wearing big soft barges on your feet.

Also, for my back, I’ve started lifting weights. Apparently, we all have to lift weights now and also do the walks or some kind of cardio. Younger people probably already lift weights and do cardio, but the weights are new for me and I feel very much in my 50s. My friend Matt told me last night that Amy Pohler says people in their 50s are the youngest old people. How true and cute. I’ve long been inspired by ‘s weight lifting (and all of her writing too). She recently lifted her entire body weight. Go Mona!!

I lift five pound weights, but I have my dreams. I do squats and various other exercises I find online that I forget the names of because it’s more about the movement than the name for me. Or else I’ve already started calling it something else in my head.

Some exercises I do, named by me or some weight lifting god: butt lifts of many sorts, some of them lying down, curtsies (good practice for when I finally meet King Charles), step backs, around the world (the barbell travels around my upper body and I try never to hit my own head), various arm lifting things, oh and snaps (when you lift the barbell from the floor all the way over your head in one motion and then switch sides).

I only have one barbell, but it’s a really nice adjustable one that my friend Elke bought for me. It’s good that I’m lifting weights. It does help. Getting a cortizone shot also helped my back a lot, though the doctor poking around in my lower spine with whatever he was poking around with to find the inflammation, was one of the weirder, more uncanny sensations of my life. It didn’t hurt, but it also felt like I had a bug squirming around in the top of my butt.

I know. Gross.

There’s something called “Dead Butt” which I’ve come across while searching for exercises, but never click on because I’m pretty sure I have dead butt. Not going to lie, I’ve always really liked my ass. It used to stick out and up in such a cute way, but now the muscles in my butt are weak, and in general it’s harder to keep a butt up in your 50s. I could accept the butt flattening though it’s tragic to take this away from me and my lovers, but weak butts are not good for your back.

Big flat butts are super too. Butts are great in all of their various sizes and ways of being.

Squats. Hard but satisfying.

I want to take a weight lifting video every day and then after a year have like the whole montage of how my body has changed. But (ha) the weight lifting is new and sometimes bodies don’t change, and also I don’t feel like doing the videos unless I could get one of my cats to film me.

Lotta cat time. I stepped up the toy game and we have a bird on a wire thingie, a rotating feather thing that laughs like a maniacal clown all through the night, and more Vegasy feathers on sticks. Marina also watches cat TV now which is like dull video games for cats. Her favorite is various animated bugs, mice, and snakes scurrying around the screen to hideous sounds. My daughter calls her an IPad kid.

I also got cat pheromones that plug into the wall and supposedly make cats calmer and less fighty.

The pheromones are not working. Every day there is the most absurd swatting. They both do it, though Pippi the Elder likes to pretend she’s always the victim. My main takeaway is that cats are dicks, but we know that. Also I love them so much. They are so weird and crazy.

I went to Berlin again in June. I felt pretty attached to someone there and I did not love that feeling, but it was also good to know I can feel that way. I feel that way about someone in New York too, but there is something about the distance that makes everything seem very intense.

My research this time was a lot of walking around, Stasi Museum obsessions, trying to pretend that I lived in Berlin, figuring out that speaking Spanish is sometimes okay instead of English, drinking Rhubarb sodas and even pronouncing Rhabarber correctly.

Mostly, I learned to just kind of live in my neighborhood as if I were in me living in Berlin and working on a novel, but not yet actually writing the novel, but keeping a diary for the future writing of the novel, which if you know my books, was kind of the goal. I also got very deep into East German history and tried to understand how surveillance became such a daily part of life for East Germans.

I fell epically in Berlin. On a boat. From the second floor to the first floor, down like seven or eight steps that were kinda steps but also a ladder, on my butt and back and arm. It happened super fast, and while I was sliding down those stairs I thought, “This could be the end of Carley,” and also, “My back is really fucked now,” and also, “How is this happening?” and also, “Wow, I bet my wrist is broken,” and also, “Jesus, this hurts!”

My romantic friend was with me, though he could do nothing to stop the fall, and I cried for at least an hour after because I have a lot of falling trauma from my childhood of being very disabled, and also it hurt a lot. He was really great during the whole thing, and we talked about a lot about our lives while I tried to pull myself together.

While I recovered we listened to perhaps the most boring narrated boat tour information I’ve ever heard. It became kind of a joke. We’d pass the most fascinating looking commune/techno park and instead of talking about that, the recorded narration would tell us that the adjacent building was made of steel, wood, and iron in the year 1993.

The fall made me somewhat timid in my traveling and adventuring. I’d wanted to go to a lot of lakes, but I also was like hey you might fall again so maybe not. The squats are for stability too.

While in Berlin I got to go to Prague for a faculty retreat and to say goodbye to our dean who is leaving. Prague is a bit of a blur because it was so fast and I’ve never seen so many drunken young people in one place. Also, it’s a town of marionettes, so I had to get one of course. His name is Corn Pudding.

My arm was still fucked up and so my dean made me go to the doctor in Prague to make sure it wasn’t broken and I got to see an old Communist Hospital which ofc I loved. My arm wasn’t broken! I had the worst bruise of my life for like three weeks, which I used to scare people.

In Prague I had time with beloved colleagues and I did a presentation of some of my Stasi/East German research and what it means for us to experience “living museums.” I made slides which I hardly ever do and it went well and I was proud of myself for doing a more traditional academic thing.

This summer I’m doing what I hope is a final revision on a novel that’s in it’s fifth revision maybe. I don’t love this work, but I think the book is getting better. I will try to find a home for it, and then give up at some point if I don’t.

I didn’t teach because I had enough money from Writing Boss work to have the summer off of teaching. I also wanted to have a summer off because I feel like I’ll be teaching for the next four summers to pay for college.

My IBS has returned or is having a flare. The last year was full of yummy gluten so I guess it was a matter of time.

I’ve read like fifteen books. I will maybe write about them, but there’s also something lovely about just breezing through books and then saying nothing about them, other than “I loved it.”

I’ve done a lot work with my union, which gives me some hope and solidarity.

I’ve seen my friends a lot.

I’ve spent a lot of time alone too.

Every day, I’ve looked at Substack, Instagram, The New York Times, and Facebook in a manic loop to see that Palestinianas are still being murdered and starved after two years of unyielding cruelty. I’ve watched Trump and his fellow Republicans create a deportation machine complete with masked thugs who disappear people.

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I have been surprised at the speed at which he’s dismantled and destroyed so much, but then again he did say he would do most of these things. I didn’t think it would be so easy to do. In this way, I’ve been naive. I thought Democrats would fight harder, but I shouldn’t have thought this.

I know that Trump rapes women and children. We all know this. We have the testimonies from his victims. More evidence leaks from his mouth every day. I don’t need a list. If Ghislaine Maxwell is pardoned I’m going to have to punch a wall and/or scream for a year, but it wouldn’t surprise me. It’s weird that this is MAGA’s line in the sand. I don’t really believe it will be, but who knows? Every day is newly bizarre and disgusting.

I don’t believe that unregulated AI is going to do anything good for us, and even though I keep getting told at work that I have to adapt and learn how to use it in the classroom, I’m not going to. It’s no fun to be called old and naive because you don’t want to teach students how to use AI, but I’m going to keep resisting until the research shows me anything positive about how it makes us better thinkers and writers. So far the latest research from MIT says heavy AI is a threat to learning.

My colleague and friend has a great essay over at The Matriarchy Report about not falling for the AI hype.

I’m hugely excited for Mamdani to become NYC’s next mayor, though I know what he’s up against which will be billions of dollars of attacks from corporate interests and conservative Democrats. He’s a fighter though, and we have to help him win.

Watching resistance unfold is heartening, but I long for a general strike. Americans do not really have a history of doing general strikes, but to take someone down you need a lot more people in the street for many days in a row. It doesn’t need to be violent, but we need more people. I know this because I taught a class called Youth in Revolt for ten years, and we studied how revolution and resistance works. Also, lots of people know this.

Lastly, I have enjoyed the things that judges have said to Trump and his lawyers when they have struck down executive orders and other illegal acts (it’s a gift article so I’m hoping you can open it). It’s just the truth, and I want to keep reminding myself to tell the truth as best I can. A few favorites:

“Nazis got better treatment under the Alien Enemies Act than has happened here.”

“I am not going to abide by government officials saying one thing to the public — saying what they really mean to the public — and coming in here to the court and telling me something different, like I’m an idiot. ... I am not an idiot.”

“I have never seen government racial discrimination like this.”

“Come on, that’s a sham. It upsets me. I want you to know that I’ve been practicing or serving in this court for over 50 years. And I know how that we get at the truth, and you’re not helping me get to add to the truth. You’re giving me press releases — sham documents.”

Click on the whole article for citations.

What have you been up to this summer? From the mundane to the radical?

Leave a comment

Enjoy the typos!

xoxoxo

Carley

Copyright 2025 by Carley Moore

ISBN: MALKAPIPPIMARINA

Here is the final installment, the ending, of my novel, Live at Roseland. Thanks to everyone who has been reading, re-stacking, commenting, and sending along sweet messages. This has all been an experiment for me—publishing a whole older novel of mine on Substack, one that never found a home—and at some point soon, I’ll write a post on what the process has been like for me as a writer.

I’m making a PDF of the whole book of Live at Roseland for a contest I’m entering, so if anyone would like a PDF because it’s easier to read on an e-reader, just let me know and I’ll email it to you.

If you read even a little of the book, please hit the heart way down below, re-stack, and share widely. I know some of you have been waiting patiently for the ending, so here we go!

Enjoy the typos!

xoxo

Carley

Part 4 - The City

21

Annie

The space was more cave than club. We walked down a set of stairs from the street, got a nod from the bouncer, followed a winding paint-splattered hallway, and emerged into a gray cavern with a stage wedged into one of its rounded corners. I ran my fingers along the back of my head. That afternoon, in a fit of clipper excitement, I let Jeb shave the lower half of it. The skin behind my ears felt particularly soft and new.

“Do you want something to drink?” Jeb leaned over me and whispered into my neck. We’d used the clippers on him too, but a much bigger blade, and I’d even trimmed his sideburns. He looked well-groomed compared to the last couple of days on the bus.

“Shot? Beer? Both?” I unzipped the sweatshirt I’d nicked from his closet and tied it around my waist. It was too big and the club already felt sweltering. I looked around as Jeb receded into another realm of the cave to get our drinks. I’d been to hardcore shows before, usually with Julian and sometimes Willow. I was used to being one of ten women at any given show. I’d worn my combat boots and I was prepared to throw an elbow or two if I had to, but mostly I was resigned to standing off in the corner and looking on as the guys in the pit beat the shit out of each other.

In a couple of years, when I started going to Riot Girl shows, I’d learn about the politics of mosh pits, and I’d become incensed that I’d spent years of my music-loving life fifty feet away from the stage because of all of the guys who controlled the venues and the audience with their bodies. But then I didn’t care. I was at a club in New York City! I wanted strange guys to bump into me and rub up against me and I craved the attention that comes from being one out of just a smattering of devoted female fans. I got off on the same testosterone rush everybody else did—the one that made me simultaneously feel like throwing a punch and running away.

The room was crowded, but nobody had staked out their places yet, except for the devoted line of hardcore fans pressed up against the stage. There were guys in beat-up leather biker jackets, rolled up jeans and suspenders, combat boots and Dr. Martins, and other hardcore band t-shirts like The Dead Kennedys, Social Distortion, and Black Flag. They had full or partially shaved heads, short and long Mohawks, and the occasional set of dreadlocks. I noticed a small circle of women sitting off to the side of the stage. Each wore a different version of a long hippie skirt with combat boots and a concert t-shirt. I craned my neck to read their t-shirts—Husker Du, Fugazi, and The Pixies.

I smelled him before he got his arm around my neck—a combination of his favorite weed and Miller beer and B.O.

“Annie!” He pulled me backwards with one arm and into his chest, wrapped his other arm around my waist, and sloppily kissed the side of my face. “Surprise!”

His body felt perfectly and alarmingly the same—the right fit, the best smell, pheromones and Darwin, animal genetics, and all of that shit. Fuck, I thought, hadn’t I changed at all?

I squirmed out of his hold and turned around to face him. “Julian!” His face messed me up even more—his too big nose, his red, red lips, those deep tile-blue eyes, the pale skin and the stubble around his mouth. He leaned forward and pressed his forehead against mine. “My Annie.” His nose brushed against the tip of mine—our lips were an inch apart. I breathed in, got lost for a second in the space around his mouth, and then pulled away. Julian grabbed my hand. “Not so fast rabbit.” I stared down at my feet. I couldn’t look him in the eye; and I was aware of Jeb somewhere off in this cave, getting me a drink, coming back to find me, and maybe, just maybe caring.

“I know your boyfriend’s here.” Julian squeezed my hand tighter.

“Where’s your?” I paused, still not able to bring myself to call the girl who I’d seen on the mattress months ago and then at Willow’s funeral, what I knew her to be. Girlfriend, I willed my tongue to form the word. Say girlfriend.

“Girlfriend? She’s in the bathroom.”

“What’s her name again?”

“Stephanie.”

“Right.”

Julian rubbed his thumb along the top of my hand. I looked up at the low gritty stucco ceiling which was covered in gum and down at the concrete floor, anywhere to keep from looking him in the eyes. He took a step closer to me to let a giant guy with a pierced nose in a red flannel shirt pass behind him. His chest was pressed up against mine. The room was starting to fill up, body next to body. Everyone was six feet tall.

“Why are you here?” I shouted into his neck.

“You don’t own New York City.” Julian shouted back down into my ear, his lips just inches away from being able to kiss me. I felt an animal surge, a desperate wish for him to stick his tongue in my ear and run it up and down my neck. I leaned forward and into his chest. “You know I try to see the Buttholes whenever I can, and Stephanie has this crazy gay uncle who lives in Soho, so we’re crashing there.”

I wanted him to say, I’m here to see you. Or, I came for you. Some romantic comedy bullshit that Willow and I had always pretended we were above. I wanted to hear his voice soften for me the way it did the other day on the phone. I wanted a getaway car and a birthday cake, a la Sixteen Candles.

The Butthole Surfers began to project movies onto the back wall behind the stage and the crowed shuffled a foot closer to get in a better position. Julian pressed his body up against mine, wrapped his arms around my waist, and gave me a squeeze. I leaned back into him—I couldn’t help it—his cock pressed against my stomach, and for one glorious minute I forgot that anything had changed. I was with Julian at a show, just like before.

There was no Jeb or Stephanie, no Twig or Merilee, and maybe, just maybe if I didn’t think too hard, Willow was somewhere in this same crowd, trying to chat up the prettiest most confused looking girl she could find. And then the movie footage kicked in, and I remembered that I liked The Butthole Surfers more in theory than in reality. I stared at images of butchers sawing in half the carcasses of cows hanging from giant hooks, a surgeon cutting into the shaved chest of a man and prying it open with some gruesome looking forceps, and a field of sunflowers sped-up to bloom and die in an endlessly decaying loop.

I turned away from the screen and Julian’s breath on my neck just as Jeb pushed his way towards us from the back of the crowd. He had my shot in one hand and a beer in the other, and I my heart beat faster for all that he’d given me. I felt Julian slide his hands off of my waist, as Jeb inched closer. “He’s too old for you,” he whispered into my ear, and I knew that he was probably right.

Jeb handed me my shot and I drained it. He looked over at Julian and smiled. “Aren’t you from Lamott?”

“Yeah, I’m Julian.”

“Jeb.”

It occurred to me that I hadn’t told Jeb much about Julian. The bus had been its own landscape—a time capsule of sorts, a deep middle, during, but no before or after.

The projector came to abrupt stop and the band pounced onto the stage. Gibby Haynes ran out to the front of it and spit a giant stream of water out onto to us. His long, stringy brown hair flew around his head like a dark halo. He had on some kind of Lederhosen—weird embroidered felt knickers with matching suspenders—and nothing else. He grabbed the mic and howled something incomprehensibly at us. I searched the crowd for the circle of girls I’d seen before and saw them pressed up against the back wall. Some guy in front of me surged forward and into another guy in front of him. I held out my hand to steady him and to keep him from getting hurled back into me, but I could tell it was pointless. I sighed and turned to Jeb and Julian, who backed up to make a shield for me with their bodies.

“I gotta hang in the back.”

“Gotcha.” Jeb shimmied out of his leather jacket and held it out in my direction. “Would you mind holding this?”

I took the jacket, draped it over my arm, and inched my way through the crowd towards the wall of girls, bopping and nodding quietly in the back. I found my place against the wall, spaced out as Gibby kicked off his boots and danced a hearty bare-feet exposing jig, and remembered my messy arrival in the city earlier that day.

***

I’d barfed into the gutter, looked up, and wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. Merilee handed the cab driver a wad of cash while Jeb wrestled my duffle bag out of the trunk. A line of homeless men and junkies snaked around the corner. One guy fixed his pale blue eyes on me.

“It’ll make you sick,” he muttered and kicked at a scrubby little tree. His pants were cinched tight with a makeshift belt he’d fashioned out of tied together plastic bags. I stood up straight and stepped back into the street, closer to the taxi, and to Jeb and Merilee, who had been, since our plane touched down on the steamy runway in New York, acting like the responsible parents I’d never had.

“Just come to my apartment.” Merilee walked over to me and put the back of her hand on my forehead. “Twig said he’d meet us there. I’ll make dinner.”

“She just needs air. I’m going to take her to the park.” Jeb said and I felt like a dog.

“I’m okay. I’m just carsick.” As shitty as I felt, I was too excited to have finally arrived in New York to admit that there was anything wrong. The cab sped off. My first taxi ride!

Merilee put her arm around my waist. Since we’d confided in each other by the pool, I’d felt her pulling me closer—watching me, trying to take care of me. I didn’t know how to respond, and I still wasn’t sure why she’d told me that she was pregnant.

“Come on Annie, let’s stretch our legs. I’ll show you Tompkins.” Jeb slung my bag over his shoulder and held out his hand impatiently for me to take. He had the same look in his eye he’d had in Little Rock when we went to look for his “friend.” Still, I was desperate to walk around the East Village and to see it through the prism of album covers, song lyrics, and daydreams that I’d cobbled together in the last few years.

“She’s got a fever.” Merilee looked through me and at Jeb. Since her solo interview with Kurt Loder in Dallas and since Jeb and I came back from the zoo in a sweaty, heaving pile, the band’s interactions had hit an all-time low. No one in the actual band spoke that night or on the plane the next day, which left Twig, the crew, and me to run interference.

“She’s a little pale, but that’s our Annie.”

Jeb strode off down 2^nd Street, and I gave Merilee a tired good-bye wave. She pressed a scrap of notebook paper into the palm of my hand—her address in New York written in red-felt tip marker in girly, loopy cursive. “I’ll see you at Roseland, tomorrow night,” I said.

“I’ll be there, center stage, probably in a new dress.” Merilee squeezed my hand. “But come by if you need anything. You’ll like my place.”

I ran after Jeb to catch up. He walked quickly up Avenue A. The sun was hot and bright. We passed bodegas, bars, and restaurants. Each one looked to me like it might be the most interesting place I’d ever seen, but I couldn’t stop. I wanted more than anything else to look like I belonged—so I kept my eyes down and took in Jeb’s occasional comment as if it was something I’d already innately intuited.

“That’s the gate of a community garden. Some metal worker fashioned it out of used car parts.”

“Uh, huh.”

“Odessa—they have great fries and shakes.”

“Yep.”

“All of the waitresses there are drag queens.”

“Of course.”

“There’s the anarchist’s bookstore.”

“Sure it is.”

“Jim Jarmusch lives over there.”

“I read that somewhere.”

Jeb and I walked through the iron gates of what looked more like a makeshift city than a park. I couldn’t see much grass, but it was tree-lined, even shady in places. There were tents, tarps, and lean-to(s) every couple of feet. Some looked elaborate—with milk crates out in front like rocking chairs on a porch—while others were more make-shift; a tarp draped on a clothesline between two trees or hung over a giant refrigerator box. Some of the tents were fastened at the bottom—tied up tight—while others had their tarps off to the side to expose the contents of whatever their owner had managed to accumulate. I saw small generators, pots and pans, books and magazines, boom boxes, clothing, bottles of wine, and food. The open tents looked like elaborate bird nests, with their owners sitting in the midst of all of their worldly possessions.

“Don’t stare baby,” Jeb grabbed hold of my hand and pulled me towards the brick buildings in the center of the park.

“I’m not,” I said, but I had been. The whole scene reminded me of the Hoovervilles I’d read about in high school; the elaborate makeshift tent cities that tramps and beggars made for themselves during the Great Depression on the outskirts of cities. Every summer growing up I went camping with my grandma in the Alleghany forest, so I knew too that every little campsite becomes a country unto itself with its own customs, delicacies, and personalities. But my grandma camped with senior citizens the occasional visiting grandkid. This campsite had a mix of people—shirtless young men reading from beat-up copies of Marx’s The Communist Manifesto, runaway teenagers with dirt under their fingernails and smudged faces, homeless men and women, and drug addicts nodding off on nearby benches. “It’s like a little utopia.”

“Come on, Small Town.”

I shook my hand free from Jeb’s, annoyed. “I’m just going to sit on this bench, while you do whatever it is you have to do.”

Jeb barely looked back. I watched him disappear behind a squat brick house in the center of the park. I sat down and used my t-shirt to wipe the sweat off of my forehead and upper lip. I stared off into the distance at the small enclosed playground and the empty pool off to the side of the park.

“Smoke, smoke, smoke, smoke.” A dealer in a Ramones t-shirt walked by my bench. I ignored him. I remembered a Cheap Hits story about Keith’s night alone in this park. I could see how intense it might feel, and that I might not want to be there at night. My stomach still felt weird, and I leaned over to put my head between my knees. Maybe Merilee was right. Maybe I was sick. I breathed deeply and closed my eyes so that I wouldn’t have to look at what was under the park bench; dried up pieces of dog shit, candy and condom wrappers, and a several small empty plastic bags.

I sat up again and looked over at the blanket someone had strung up between the two trees behind me to make a tent. There were several large holes in it and I could make out a lone figure in the triangular shadow of her fort. She stuck her head out the side of the blanket and looked up at the sky. It was her hair that got me first. The same shade of bleached-out blonde as Willow and the same ten inch Mohawk. She had a mole on her neck too, like the one Willow always talked about getting removed, and the same long earlobes. My heart skipped forward, and for half of a second I thought the thing I’d been secretly believing and hoping all along. It’s Willow! She’s alive! My visions were real! Somehow she managed to trick us all and run away like all of the other twenty-year-olds camped out in this park.

“Willow?” I turned around on the bench and leaned over the back of it.

The woman turned her head and stared at me. She wasn’t Willow at all. She had an entirely different face—brown eyes, thick eyebrows, and a long sharp nose with a couple of piercings in it. Her hair now that she was facing me looked wholly unlike Willow’s too—the shaving was uneven and patchy, with dark black roots. I felt stupid, tricked by my own hope.

“That’s a fucking hippie name. This is an anarchist scene.”

“Sorry, I thought you were someone else.” I put the back of my hand up to my forehead. It was hot and clammy.

“You shouldn’t stare into peoples’ houses,” the wanna-be Willow huffed and drew her head back under the blanket like a hermit crab backing up into its shell.

I sat there, slumped on the bench, stunned by the depths of my own longing. Grief, I was starting to see, had its own vision and logic. And yet I wasn’t entirely convinced that the mean anarchist cocooning in the tarp hadn’t been Willow for a split second. She wouldn’t entirely give up on me. She couldn’t just let me go, could she?

Jeb came out of the brick house practically giggling. He speed walked us to his apartment and hid out in the bathroom for so long that I fell asleep in front of the TV. When I woke up at dusk in a crabby stupor, he was waving concert tickets in front of my face and frying up eggs and bacon.

**

Gibby Haynes bent over behind the drum kit and re-emerged holding a giant bullhorn. He shouted into it, and the roiling mosh pit sped up. Several guys thrust their fists into the air. The two guitarists wandered around Gibby and created an anti-rhythm, more dissonance than melody. Gibby dropped the bullhorn, pulled a bottle out of his back pocket, and smashed it theatrically on top of his drummer’s head. It must have been fake because the drummer didn’t even flinch. The theatrics, I decided were the best thing about the show. The Surfers made a show about a show, rather than a fun performance on it’s own.

I knew from Julian who’d been to other Butthole shows, that sometimes if Gibby liked the crowd, he’d take off his clothes. Maybe that would catapult the back wall of women into caring. I looked down the row at us; Stephanie had joined the line at the other end and was holding a Butthole Surfers album up into the air. Her breasts strained against her too-tight t-shirt. Was she for real? Had she seen me? Did she care? Jeb’s jacket was heavy and pissing me off, so I stashed in on the floor next to one of my fellow wallflowers and wormed my way over to the bathroom. I felt feverish again at the memory of the near-Willow and the very real possibility that I might have to hang out with Stephanie and Julian or at least talk to them together. I needed to splash some water on my face.

The bathroom was a dark mess of caked on graffiti and piss stench. There were two stalls, one with a door and one without, and a naked light bulb dangling from the ceiling. I tried to lock the door behind me, but the doorknob was loose and ineffectual, so I stood in front of the chipped bathroom sink and stared into the shard of mirror that was still affixed to the wall. I saw a sweaty looking girl with a raw expanse of newly shaved head and dark circles under her eyes. I leaned in to read the graffiti next to the mirror. “Anarchy in the UK!”; “I wanna blow you!”; “Fuck God!”; “The revolution will not be televised.” Someone had drawn a bunch of cocks and balls around the perimeter of the mirror, and along the bottom, he or she scrawled in thick black marker, “Suck it!” I turned on the tap and watched as a slow stream of water trickled out.

The door opened and Julian came into the bathroom. His hair was plastered back onto his head and his t-shirt was soaked through with sweat.

“This bathroom is legendary.” He said it like he was conducting the official Lower East Side punk tour, and then went into the stall without a door. I heard him undo his belt and then the sound of his piss hitting the side of the toilet. He zipped back up, fastened his belt, and stood at the mouth of the stall, his hands up on either side of it. With the gross, graffiti-packed background, and his sweaty, lean body, he looked like an album cover for a really cool new band. “So why did you ditch?”

“Jeb asked me to go on the road.”

Julian rolled his eyes. “He’s thirty-five, you’re twenty, how is that real? And last time I checked you were still in love with me.”

“You’re such a narcissist.” I leaned against the sink, but I knew he wasn’t entirely wrong.

“You left that party and you bolted from Willow’s funeral because you couldn’t handle me.”

“So?” I felt the current of electricity between us.

“So?” Julian said in a girly voice.

“I keep seeing her.” I needed to tell someone who might understand.

“What do you mean?” Julian reached for my hand and pulled us both into the stall with the door. He closed it and turned the latch.

“In the park today, in mirrors, sometimes I think she’s behind me on the street or in the room.”

“She cheated by killing herself.” Julian put his hand on the back of my head to feel my stubble. I had that same feeling I had the night when I was tripping—that I do anything with him, anywhere. I thought of Stephanie earnestly holding up the album like she was at a Rolling Stones concert. He was mine first, I thought. “I can’t forgive her for that.”

“Why didn’t she tell us?” I leaned in and rested my cheek on Julian’s chest. “I saw her that day, wading by the river. I could have saved her.”

Julian stroked my hair. His heart beat fast against my ear. I closed my eyes. I wanted to savor him. “Annie, you couldn’t have. She was way too stubborn.”

Gibby Haynes howled from deep within the bowels of the club and I felt that animal thing in me finally in me snap. I pushed Julian back up against the wall of the stall and kissed him. He put his hands underneath my t-shirt and up my bra and I slid my hand down the front of his jeans and rubbed his dick. He groaned, undid the front of my jeans, and pushed them and my underwear down around my knees. I unfastened his belt and pulled him out of his boxers. I put one foot on top of the toilet seat for leverage while he pushed up against me and then inside of me. I gasped.

“Does he feel like this?” Julian picked me up and I wrapped my legs around his waist. I pressed my arms against the stall walls for support.

“No,” I breathed into his ear as he moved slowly back and forth.

“Do you miss me?”

“Yeah.”

“Turn around.” I pressed my face against the stall wall and squeezed my eyes shut. Julian pushed back inside of me and wrapped his arms around my chest. As he moved in and out of me, I flashed in and out of images—the graffiti around the bathroom mirror, Twig’s mouth against my ear in the bus, Merilee pressing her address into my hand, Jeb’s beautiful chiseled chin, and then I started to see light and white, to move into a tunneled-out version of myself; hollow, the core.

I saw me and only me, splayed out on the mattress at that party, touching myself. The stall went red and I squeezed my eyes shut. I felt like a parachute opening, a kid sledding down a steep hill, and a trombone slide all at once. I don’t know, I probably cried out, I don’t remember. I pressed my cheek up against the hot stall wall and Julian started to move faster and faster. He used one hand to pull at my hair and kept the other wrapped tightly around my waist. “Oh Annie,” he groaned, pulled out, and came on my back.

The bathroom door outside of the stall creaked open and Julian and I froze. Someone giggled.

“My stuff is pretty good.” It was Jeb.

“Do you have one of those little spoons?” Stephanie asked.

Julian turned his neck and mouthed into the side of my face, “Stephanie.” He put his index fingers to his lips. I shot him a dirty look. Duh, I wanted to shout.

“Let’s just use your pinky nail.” I could picture Jeb leaning over her, with his little bag of cocaine and her pressed up against him with her tight t-shirt and long blonde hair. I felt a pang of jealousy, but I knew for Jeb it was always more about the drug than the girl.

Julian shifted back on his feet and attempted to pull up his jeans, but his belt buckle clanged against the side of the stall. We both froze again. Julian rested his chin on my shoulder.

If Stephanie and Jeb heard anything, they didn’t let on.

“You can just wipe it on your teeth too.” Jeb inhaled.

“Uh, it tastes gross, but it makes my nose all tingly.”

I thought back to the after-party on the road outside of Nashville, the joy of that night and of talking, the way blow makes you feel like you can say anything and it’s smart and clever and fitting.

“You should come to one of our shows.” I imagined Jeb leaning against the sink. Casual, confidant, no big deal.

“Can you get me in for free?” I saw Stephanie looking up at him, flattered by the invitation.

“Sure.”

The both inhaled again deeply and then the door opened and they left. Julian let out a big puff of air. “Fuck.” He was still draped over me, his arms wrapped around my neck. He kissed the shaved part of my head, and I pressed up against him. We stayed that way for ten more seconds, and then Julian took a step back and grabbed a wad of toilet paper from the dispenser to clean off my back. I pulled up my underwear and jeans and turned around to face him. My nose tingled and I eyes felt watery. I wanted more than anything not to cry, to let him know that I was just as far gone as I was when he dumped me at Denny’s. Who knew what this was? Or what it meant?

Julian knew I was vulnerable. “Maybe this is going happen from time to time.”

I felt unlocked, whole again for a moment, and I didn’t want to go back. “Is that enough?”

Julian kissed my mouth and then the tip of my nose. “It’s more complicated now.” He draped his arms around my neck and I leaned into his chest. The floor felt wobbly, and I didn’t know what to say. The stall was a time capsule or a telephone booth, a place for time travel or transformation; I wasn’t sure which. But I knew I felt different—unhinged or broken open, definitely exposed. My two weeks on the road with Jeb felt now like a carnival, a shot of adrenaline for a mourning girl, a cover up.

“What should we do?” I listened to his heart thump against his chest. I’d been here before. I’d asked him this same question in the booth at Denny’s when he was breaking up with me.

Julian shrugged and kissed the top of my head. “I dunno Annie. Maybe we’ll find each other when we’re forty and settle down, but I can’t get locked into anything right now.”

“I’m not a lock,” I took a step back and folded my arms defensively. “And I’ll be totally different when I’m forty. I’ll have everything figured out.”

“I know you will, Annie, I know.” Julian turned the silver latch on the stall door and broke the spell. I walked out into the rest of the bathroom, out the second door, and into the steaming cave of the club. Julian squeezed my hand one last time and hurled himself back into the center of the pit. I saw his hair fly up over his head and his fist up in the air, and then I lost sight of him. Gibby’s Lederhosen suspenders hung around his knees, and the waistband had fallen down to expose a dark mass of pubic hair. The cave smelled like two hundred sweaty guys. I stared into the pit. I knew it had something to teach me about entropy or chaos, bodies in motion, collision, and accident, I just couldn’t figure out what.

I looked over at the back wall of women. They were still there, lined up, all tidy and neat. Stephanie was at the far end, scanning the crowd, no doubt for Julian. I looked back at the pit for Jeb, but I couldn’t see him. I put my hand in my pocket and fingered the torn edges of the scrap of paper Merilee had given me. It was warm against my body. I hadn’t yet looked at the address, but I knew it was close by. I pushed through the crowd near the back and made my way out into the hallway and towards the mouth of the club. I felt with a kind of certainty I’d never known before that there was nothing for me at that show, and that Jeb and Julian each in their own way, would always be just out of reach, an inch or two beyond my fingertips, no matter how far out I managed to stretch my arms.

When I got outside the August night air was humid and thick, but there was way more of it on the street then in the club. I breathed in deeply and puffed out my chest. You don’t need Julian and you don’t need Jeb, I told myself as I pulled the address out of my pocket. “93 Saint Marks Place. Vegan paradise.” Merilee had drawn a doodle of brick building with large windows. In one window, she’d even made a heart.

“Which way is Saint Marks?” I asked the bouncer, who was smoking a joint, and staring off into a traffic light.

He waved his hand in the direction of up, and exhaled a wall of smoke into the space between us. “Walk up the Bowery, stay right when the road forks, and you’ll hit it.”

“Thanks.” I started walking. I kept my head down and my eyes a foot in front of my feet. I took in the street trash—the cigarette butts with pink lipstick around the filter, the crushed beer cans, and piles of deli coffee cups and slice plates cascading out of the garbage cans on each corner. When I glanced up at the clusters of people, the New Yorkers, who had no idea I’d just landed here, and that this was my first time walking on a street alone, and who probably couldn’t have cared less, I felt a deep awe—at their beautiful indifference and total self-absorption. It was something to aspire to, a badge that said that you were real. I wanted their independence and what I saw that night as their deep commitment to self hood.

There were groups of teenagers in cut-offs shorts and permed hair, couples holding hands, a gnarled-looking squat woman in a flowered house dress and flip-flops whose wild hair reminded me of a troll doll, and several shoeless, nattering men, who called out to me for spare change and food. I didn’t want to admit it, but I was scared. I’d never walked alone in a city, the city, at night. I knew too, that I was making a break for it, running away for real this time and doing it alone, and that I had the guilty look of someone who was hoping to get away without getting caught.

I slowed down when I turned onto Saint Marks. It was the mosaics that caught my attention—on every corner the streetlamps were covered in shiny beads, shards of mirrors, and broken china. I stopped on the corner of Second Avenue and Saint Marks to run my fingers along the surface of the tiled lamppost. Whoever made them—years later I’d find out it was a Vietnam veteran named Jim Powers, aka, The Mosaic Man—also used words and images. There were several nutcrackers and Japanese cats, a picture of Jerry Garcia, and the words, “Neither more nor less,” and “Theater 80.” It looked like colored Braille—turquoise, fire engine red, cobalt, yellow—a coded message, a sign that I was in the right place and on a street that either once did or might still belong to artists. I walked past the head shops and sunglasses kiosks until I was in front of the address Merilee had given me. It was a small white brick building with a high iron gate around the stoop. I pressed the buzzer and waited.

“Look Ma! Our orphan came back!” Twig swung open the door and stood at the top of the stoop. He had his long hair tied up in a high ponytail and wore his usual uniform of a dirty jeans and a browning V-neck Hanes t-shirt.

“Annie!” I heard Merilee call out faintly from inside the building. I squinted and saw her silhouette in the screened window on the second floor.

Twig padded down the stoop stairs to unlock the gate, and pulled me for a sweaty hug. “Couldn’t hack it without me?”

I held onto him for too long, breathing into his neck and chest. I had a lump in my throat—some weird delay from processing what had just happened with Julian and Jeb. How could I explain that I’d gone back in time, and I’d gotten something that I once wanted, and I still wasn’t right or whole or even remotely content.

“You okay, vagabond?”

I let go of Twig and looked up into his deep green eyes. He squinted back down at me, winked, and pulled me through the door of the building and into the beautiful pressed tin hallway that led to Merilee’s apartment. “Yeah, better now,” I managed to croak.

“Did you hear that I’m going to be a daddy?” Twig whispered at me over his shoulder.

I shook my head, unsure if I was supposed to let on that I already knew. My head felt hot again and too big for my neck.

“Can you believe it? Me, a dad?”

I noticed an extra kick in his walk, some kind of ultra swagger that made it clear that he was happy.

By the time we got to Merilee’s door, I was holding the walls of the hallway for support. Merilee greeted us, all tiny and pretty, in a long black skirt and a red tank top. She was holding her black and white cat up to her face, but when she saw me, she put him down and took me by the elbow.

“Bed, now,” she said, pulling me towards the back of her apartment. “Jeb’s already called here twice,” she added. “What do you want me to say?”

“I guess you were right about the fever,” I said, staring up at the ceiling, as Twig unlaced my Converse and peeled off my socks. I pretended I didn’t hear the part about Jeb looking for me. The bed felt soft and cool—there were candles lit on the windowsill and an oscillating fan moving air back and forth across the room.

“I’m right about most things.” Merilee stared down at me from the edge of the bed. I looked up at her chin, at the way it jutted out into the world, all present, all confident. I wondered how she got that way. “Where is Jeb anyway?”

“I left him.” I paused and let the room spin a couple of times. “At the club,” I added in a whisper.

Merilee and Twig’s faces faded out and I fell asleep. Several times in the night, I heard Jeb’s voice floating down the hall from the answering machine. His voice, that longing, reminded me of the messages Willow’s mom had left for me before I ran away. At first he was gentle and calm, and then he sounded sadder and more desperate.

“Hey Annie, not sure if you’re there, but I just want to make sure you’re not lost out there in the big city.”

“Not sure why you left, but call me back, okay?”

“Back at my apartment. Miss you babe. I’ll wait for you here.”

“You gotta let me know what happened. We can fix it. I promise.”

When I woke up in early in the morning, it was still dark out. I tried to absorb the sounds of the East Village. I heard someone rummaging through the garbage downstairs and the crush and clank of beers cans getting thrown around. A siren wailed down Avenue A and a woman shouted, “You better learn how to love me!” Her high heels clicked angrily off down the street. I fell back asleep sandwiched between Twig and Merilee. We’d kicked off the blanket and sheet. Merilee turned and rested her hand on my hip. Twig pulled me into the crook of his armpit. “Triptych,” I thought as I drifted back off to sleep. “It’s called a triptych.”

22

Willow

We all had our collections. My dad loved—no shitting—stamps. He used to take me down to the Lamott post office when I was a kid to get the special issue ones. We’d stop at the drugstore for licorice, drive home all giddy, and sit at the dining room table with the lights as bright as we could get them. I must have been about eight and I loved to use the magnifying glass to stare into whatever tiny landscape each stamp held. I imagined I was Encyclopedia Brown or the Hardy Boys, looking for clues. My favorite was a series commemorating ancient Egypt, which had the pyramids, a desert sandscape, and mummies all on one tiny stamp. When we finished staring into those miniature worlds, we’d use my mom’s tweezers to glue them into photo albums.

My mom collected apples, well, anything that was a representation of an apple—she had apple figurines and tchotchkes, apple towels and potholders, apple earrings and necklaces, and apples on t-shirts, pillows, and blankets. When I was younger, I thought it was cute, and it made buying her presents easy. But when I became a weird, angry teenager, it struck me as a strange perversion, a block to thinking, too simple. What did the apple mean to my mother? Why did she love them so? And what deeper, more unnameable love was it hiding? I never got to ask.

I had my albums, all of us at Cheap Hits had our music and our concert t-shirts. Louder than Bombs and Horses still felt dear to me, and I would give anything to be able to slip my neck through the torn collar of my first Jesus and Mary Chain t-shirt. But it was my military shirts that I missed the most. By the time I died, I’d probably amassed at least twenty-five different ones. You could buy them everywhere. Most Salvation Army stores had an entire rack of them. The trick for me was finding the shirts with the soldier’s nametag still affixed to it, and in a small size. At first I didn’t think too much about military clothes—I liked the obvious subversion of it—punks re-purposing government issue clothing, saying, “Fuck you!” to the system that killed and discriminated. Later, I realized that I liked the idea of a dyke in some tiny male soldier’s uniform. Somehow or other, we were trying each other on.

The living became my newest collection. Turns out, I took to haunting. I had a passion for it, considered it a calling. I’d never had a real job before, unless you counted working part-time at a record store a career—which I didn’t, and once they saw the size of my paycheck, my parents didn’t either. I loved Cheap Hits because I could hang out with my friends and control the music, but there wasn’t any heat for me there. I didn’t matter then and I couldn’t make a difference. I didn’t shape thought or change convention.

Annie, well, she was easy to follow. Confused enough to let me in and guilty enough to see. Her headspace was a jumble and her desires so unthinking, that sometimes she felt like a pulsing portal. I missed her because even though I’d never been in love with her, she was the girl I knew best and the one I’d loved the longest.

Then there was Merilee’s baby, that opening in the seam of the living world. I saw a hole, a rip on the horizon, and I wanted to crawl back into it. You see, even the dead have desires. I wanted bodies and warmth and sometimes I wanted out of the water.

At first, Annie and her friends—Twig, Merilee, and the rest of the bus—we’re all I needed. And then we got to New York, and the water changed. The East River was full of muck and garbage, the hardiest whiskered fish, and the bottoms of giant boats, dredging and channeling. The streets, it turned out, were wet too with puddles and piss and full of the remains of the day: food, cast-off clothing, old sewing machine tables, records, picture frames, stained mattresses, and people.

People, it turned out, could be garbage too. I mean, that wasn’t a surprise, I’d been treated like garbage for a lot of my life. God knows, I often felt like shit. But this was different. They were invisible, smelly, and thrown out, and yet they were making a go of it, holding on and getting by. Refusing to go away. Pitching a tent, staking a claim, marking territory in piss and a blue tarp. Pretty soon, I began to think of myself as a garbage collector. If I had a body, I’d have wanted to wear the garbage man’s standard issue green shirt. Garbage men, or sanitation workers, were an order, a clan. They had a code, a uniform, something I could subvert.

I began to love my (not) life among the oily ruins.

The East Village turned out to be the best place for passing and parlor tricks, and I found with time and concentration, I could leave the water. I found a home in the park. I liked picking through the garbage and eavesdropping on conversations about junk and evil landlords. I quickly mastered the art of impersonation and drag. I made temporary homes out of tattooed girls and dirty boys. I squatted in skulls and chests. I fashioned a nest out of newspapers and bird droppings. I ran with the anarchists’ dogs. We chased rats and sometimes one of us caught one in our teeth, and we shook it to death, and then nosed it with our snouts and walked away bored.

I read over the shoulders of the NYU and Parsons students who dared to sit in the park. One girl, with earrings up the side of her ear and freckles on her shoulders, was reading Leaves of Grass. I stared into her cleavage and managed to re-absorb a couple of lines from “Song of Myself,” a poem that had been nearly ruined for me in high school by a football player who decided to read Whitman out loud to the class in a mincing, prancing, sing-song voice once he found out that Whitman might have been gay.

Listener up there! What have you to confide in me?

Look in my face while I snuff the sidle of evening,

(Talk honestly, no one else hears you, and I stay only a

minute longer).

Do I contradict myself?

Very well then I contradict myself,

(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

I breathed in the smell of the girl’s neck and I realized that when I was alive the poem meant nothing to me. Now it made sense to whatever animal, vegetable mind I possessed. In death, I became democratic, erotic even. I contained multiple bodies and selves, and I contradicted myself, because I had no one self anymore. I became large, so that I could house movement and flux. What’s more contradictory than water and air? I became the many shards and beads of glass affixed to the lampposts on Saint Marks Place. Or maybe I wore the beads and glass like a necklace over one of my military shirts. It was one of the few good choices my mother made in those last two years. She buried me in one of my favorite shirts, somehow finally from the other side, she heard me. Maybe finally, I’d become that shaman.

In the park, I learned to talk to the other ghosts. I took them in, we mingled, and I ate their stories, like a communion wafer. They were all laborers and immigrants—people who made sense to me because I came from Lamott and because I died in a factory river. They rioted over bread and Black people. They clashed over drafts and the English. They trampled the trees and grass. They worked in slaughterhouses and got drunk in beer gardens. The police attacked them on horses. Eventually there were children and hippies, playgrounds, a Boys Club, and a band shell. The Grateful Dead came and Abbie Hoffman tried to make peace.

I don’t know, I wasn’t there for long. Eventually, I caught up with Annie. I followed her fever. I may have been the one who made her sick. It was too much to ingest maybe, but we tried our best.

Julian used to be mine too, but he shut himself off. I watched them in the bathroom, but then I turned away. Cocks disgust me. Hetero fucking. I’ve seen it all before—in movies and in pretty much every book I’ve ever been made to read. Boring.

I got out of there. We got out. And the street smelled like shit and sweat. We walked fast, Annie and me, and it felt good and right. Just us chickens, my mom used to say when my dad left for work in the morning. Just us rats, I used to say back.

23

Jeb

“How do you all feel about endings?” Merilee had a new dress on—it was red and white striped with a big collar and a fitted skirt. She wore it with a matching top hat. It made her look like a sexy peppermint ringmaster.

The crowd booed and whistled. We were halfway through our encore. I was sweating out of my eyeballs, and we’d just finished playing an old song, “Indian Summer,” from our first album. It was for our most devoted fans and a pain in the ass because I had to learn the guitar parts all over again, but I liked it. It was a different era, a younger Band of None. We didn’t write ornate, opaque songs like that anymore. Fuck if I even knew what the song was about.

“This is the last show on our tour!” Merilee purred into the mic as if nobody knew.

The crowed cheered wildly and I stared down into the front row. I was looking for Annie, who I missed far more than I thought possible.

Merilee took the mic off of the stand and turned her back to the audience. She looked across the stage at each of us—me, Terry, Bobby, and Ian—and grinned. Whirling back around to face the crowd, she coo-asked into the mic, “Do you want to be the first to know?”

The crowd roared, “Yes!”

“We’ve had an amazing time on tour! Some of us even fell in love!” Merilee looked over at me and winked. “But even the best things have to end, don’t you think?”

The crowd booed some more. I looked over at Terry, who was clutching his drumsticks. Bobby shot me a “WTF?” look. I strummed out a couple of chords to our next song in the hopes of distracting Merilee and moving back into the music.

“These men taught me everything I know—how to sing, write songs, dance, and love. And I was just fourteen when I met them.” She glanced over her shoulder in our direction, walked to the very front ledge of the stage, and knelt down. She did this every so often, usually to tell our fans some pretend secret or funny story about one of us. It made me nervous as fuck—she looked like she might fall of the stage or get devoured by our fans. A couple of girls in the front row stretched their hands out to touch Merilee’s shoulder and knee.

“But sometimes a girl gets restless and runs away.” Half of the crowd cheered, but the other half stayed quiet. “I grew up with one of those moms who lived in the kitchen. She hardly ever left our house—that 8 x 11 square of linoleum was her kingdom. The phone was in there, she made us lasagna and cookies, and the neighborhood ladies came over.” Merilee paused to sit down completely on her knees. The crowd leaned forward. “When she died I started to wonder if she stayed in there because she was afraid, you know?” I saw the front row of fans nod as if they knew what the fuck Merilee was talking about.

Bobby stepped out from behind his keyboard. He looked like he might barf.

“Or maybe she didn’t know how to make anything else?” Merilee wondered out loud to the crowd. She stood up, brushed off her dress, and walked back towards us. She looked deep in thought, oblivious to us, her band, and how we might feel. “And I gotta admit, she made the best eggplant parm and Italian wedding cookies of anyone in our neighborhood or family.”

“Well, I have some new recipes and I really want to try them out.” Merilee spoke still with her back to the audience. She looked over at me and I saw that her eyes were wet. I smiled back in spite of myself, probably because she was the first musician I ever got to love in person and I already felt nostalgic for us and for the band.

“We all have our own projects. Jeb’s starting a hardcore band with his friend Denny from New Orleans. They’re calling themselves The Sick Bastards. Ian’s going to play bass on Letterman for a while.” I looked over at Ian who shrugged at me and mouthed, “I just found out.” “Bobby and Terry are figuring out their next moves, but I know no matter what, you, our fans will support us all.” Merilee turned towards the audience and stared out into the bright lights. She was talking to everyone and no one, strangers and her family, but most of all she was talking to me. “The Band of None is breaking up,” she said loudly into the mic as if volume could make it stick.

Terry threw down his drumsticks and stalked off backstage. Bobby walked over to my mic and grabbed it. “Fuck you, Mer, fuck you.”

“And there’s that too,” Merilee said out to the audience as if she were tattling to a teacher.

My face felt too hot. I needed to finish this set, smoke a bowl, fuck Annie, and forget. We, the band, were, I knew, chumps. Now that it was out, in public, and my nostalgia wave had passed, I remembered that I wanted it done differently. Everyone in the band and our crew knew we were over, but I wanted each of us to write our own endings. Fuck, my new band wasn’t called The Sick Bastards. We were between names.

My heart sped up and my eyes went blurry and fuzzy. I’d never had a panic attack on stage before and I wasn’t about to let myself pass out like a pussy for what would turn out to be The Band of None’s last show. I lifted my guitar strap over my head, handed my guitar to Bobby who took it he was a roadie, jumped off the stage, pushed through the crowd, and out the front door. The fans, God love them, parted for me. They looked just as stunned as I felt. They made way, and for once they were quiet.

I walked into the lobby, past Toby and Tabitha at the merchandise table, and kicked open the front door to the club. I was greeted by one of the bouncers, Joey, a 250-pound Italian guy who grew up in Bay Ridge and liked to talk about fretwork and pussy. I swear he’d worked at Roseland since it opened in 1965. He’d seen a lot of band baggage spill out onto the carpet in front of the club.

“You okay man?” Joey fussed with the buttons on his giant pin-stripped suit coat. He opened the jaw of a pack of Marlboro Reds, shook one out, lit it, and passed it over to me.

I took a big drag off of it and shook my head no. I smoked it down to the filter and said, “You heard?”

Joey shook his head. “I’m out here. All I hear are screaming fans and couples drunk fighting about who is a bigger asshole.”

“The Band of None is history.” The nicotine went straight to my addled head. I felt jittery.

“I’ve seen a lot of bands break up and get back together.”

“Maybe we’ll get a new lead singer.” I took another drag. “One who is a less controlling bitch.”

Joey laughed and smashed the butt of his cigarette under the heel of his enormous loafer. “Maybe one you’re not so in love with.”

I motioned for him to give me another cigarette. I lit it and inhaled as deeply as I could. “It’s not like that, I mean, yes, I love her, but it’s complicated. A band, especially one that’s been around a while and achieved something is like a dysfunctional family. You meet a girl when you’re fifteen and you fall in love and then you spend every fucking waking moment together until you feel related.” I smashed the cigarette under my boot. “It’s like your girlfriend turned into your sister and business partner. Incest, basically.”

“You sound like you’re in Fleetwood Mac.” Joey flicked his butt in a long arc into the gutter and guffawed. “Now that is a miracle—the shit they’ve done to one another—but they keep writing songs and touring.”

We stood there under the awning of the marquee and stared out into the thin rain. I remembered Travis Bickle’s famous line from Taxi Driver. All the animals come out at night - whores, skunk pussies, buggers, queens, fairies, dopers, junkies, sick, venal. Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets. I thought about saying it out loud to Joey but aside from a far-off ambulance wail, 52^nd Street was quiet and empty, and the lines seemed suddenly like archeology, an artifact from an older, more fucked up New York.

“Don’t you live by Tompkins Square Park? Did you hear about that wackjob who killed his girlfriend, cooked her in a stew, and fed her to the squatters?” Joey pulled another cigarette out of the pack and offered it to me. I shook my head no.

“Urban legend.” I felt resistant to this particular story. It was too ridiculous.

“The police nabbed him. He confessed and there’s even a witness who saw a finger floating in the soup.” Joey burned through his cigarette.

“Fuck.” It was all I could manage in response to something gruesome that really had no effect on me, and wouldn’t alter anything I ever said or did. I thought of my mom sitting in front of the police scanner like it was the goddam radio, her swollen ankles propped up onto the round hassock she kept in the kitchen near the dining room table I’d bought her, calling her friend Kay on the phone whenever another old crone had fallen changing a light bulb or the volunteer fire fighters had to use the jaws of life to pry somebody’s mangled body out of his own car.

I got used to that shit—the endless cataloging of gruesome details, the morbid talk that made up much of small town gossip, and was always spoken in a concerned hush. Sometime during high school, my mom stopped listening to Elvis and James Brown and switched over to the scanner. She traded in music for crime and she became my own personal police blotter. “Did you hear about what happened to Gladys Maycomb out on Route 9?” “I heard on the scanner, an ambulance had to be called to the Tuttmayers, cardiac arrest.” “A woman, over on 62, hit a deer and it flipped into the air and went through the windshield of another car.” Hmmm, really, shit, oh my god, that’s awful.

My mother still thought of violence as Biblical, everywhere, affecting mankind at every turn. I only cared about the stuff that happened right in front of me, to me, to my person or my little circle of friends. Was this how I’d become a New Yorker? Even the butcher of Tompkins Square Park didn’t feel close enough to scare me, though I felt some twitch in my shrunken urban heart for his girlfriend. I’d heard she was studying ballet at Julliard and working as a topless dancer at a bar. She sounded like Annie. Beautiful, but confused. Down on her luck, but hopeful. The ones that were walking around on the edge of the cliff, and maybe gonna trip and fall, the saving kind.

“I heard she was a dancer.” I played along.

“A stripper.” Joey cracked the knuckles on his left hand and winced. “Arthritis,” he said into the humid air underneath the marquee.

I should have known Merilee would blindside me. The day was all off. I’d spent it alternately miserable and angry about Annie, that she hadn’t called me, and that she’d just disappeared out of the club the night before without so much as a smoke signal. As I lay on the couch in my apartment, staring at the giant suitcase-carrying roaches who paraded across the counter tops even though I paid for an exterminator to come every fucking week and tasted the bitter coke hangover in the back of my throat, I imagined the newspaper headlines that would turn me into the next famous dirty old man.

“Small town sweetheart disappears into city’s music underworld.”

“Young upstate woman goes missing after less than 24 hours in the Village.”

“Tompkins Square Park eats another kid.”

“Top Forty Indie Guitar Darling’s young girlfriend is kidnapped.”

And then I took a nap and a shower, I picked up the phone when it rang and instead of hearing Annie’s high, sweet, off-pitch voice, telling that she missed me and wanted to come back, I heard the nasally wine of some desperate teenage fan, who’d never met me but was threatening to use her mom’s credit card to fly in from for the last show at Roseland. I talked her off of her ledge and called my dealer.

And when I finally got to Roseland, I felt tired and sad. Annie had been gone for less than a day, but I already missed her. I’d gotten used to seeing the road through her. She’d never been anywhere, so every new landscape and story I told made her those big green eyes pop out of her head. I loved how excited New York made her—even the garbage cans and the homeless guys were fascinating to her. I hadn’t felt that way in years. Maybe I needed more of that vision. Maybe I needed her next to me.

Backstage, I saw her standing next near the food table, cutting into a block of cheddar like nothing had ever happened, like we were all just back on the bus.

“Sorry, I disappeared.” Annie broke her slab of cheddar in two, and put one piece in her mouth. “I forgot that I hate the Butthole Surfers.”

“Where did you go?”

“I just walked. It’s a big deal for me to finally be in New York, so I headed north and I hit St. Marks Place and I got mesmerized by the lampposts and then I remembered I had Merilee’s address in my pocket.” She stared down at her cheese. Twenty-year-olds are shit liars—shifty-limbed, weird-eyed, bad alibis, you name it. “It was crazy, but when I took the scrap of paper out of my pocket, I was actually just two buildings away from hers.”

I weighed my options. “Well, the fucking stars were aligned,” I wanted to say. She looked up at me and blinked. I felt the tug of my dick against my pants. The skin around her eyes was wrinkle-free, like a baby’s. The sexy, smudgy thing she did around the edges was hot, and her lips were red and full, parted, as always.

“I was still feverish, so I passed out there.”

I had the mature, intellectual thought that I had no right to be jealous or territorial. She’d never agreed to be my girlfriend, and truth be told, I’d taken her for granted. Still, I thought of Annie as my girl, my project, mine, all mine, and I had the pissed off sensation that Merilee and Twig had stolen her from me, poached her when my guard was down.

I’d gotten used to her weird animal, oddly intellectual presence. She was always around, drawing something or leafing through some book one of the crew had left backstage. I got off on seeing her read Notes of a Dirty Old Man by Bukowski or looking over her shoulder as she tried to fix some old drawing of her dead friend. I guess I liked that she made things, had her own projects even on the road with the band. And Jesus, did I miss fucking her.

I pulled her into my chest, but she stiffened.

“It’s still a dangerous city,” I said and pawed at her hair.

I remembered the fifty odd times she’d melted into me since I met her—the way she pressed her hot little body up against my dick, no matter who we with or where we were.

“I was totally safe.” She took a tiny step back away from me and my dick fell. She’d never pulled away from me before.

Twig pushed out of Merilee’s door and past us. “Gotta go wait on a friend.” Annie smiled at him and turned her head a little to the side, like she was trying to get the movie-screen version, to fit him all in. “I was thinking I might stay with Merilee and Twig for a while.”

“You breaking up with me?” I felt like making her say it. I wanted to see her squirm, and to know where I stood.

She dropped her remaining piece of sweaty cheddar onto the food table. Her eyes roamed around my chest and towards my elbows and wrists, anywhere but my eyes. “It’s such a confusing time. I can think better at Merilee’s.”

Merilee stuck her head out of the door of her dressing room. “We on?” she interrupted us.

“Five.” I flexed my fingers a couple of times, willing my eight Tylenol to do their job and loosen my joints just enough so that I could start the first song.

“Righto.” Merilee slammed the door shut and Annie continued, “Being with you on the bus, traveling like that was the most amazing interlude, but now that we’ve landed in New York, I realize everything’s a mess in my life.”

“I can help you figure it out.” I looked over her shoulder at Velvet, the twin brothers, whose names I still couldn’t keep straight. They’d cornered a pretty girl with magenta hair and big tits. She was pointing in our direction, but they’d made a fence around her with their long legs and boring English accents.

“You’re confusing. I can’t think straight around you.” Annie pushed her hair behind her ears and looked up at me. Our eyes locked, and I sensed that about this part, she wasn’t lying.

“You know in The Odyssey? Odysseus is traveling and trying to get home and he keeps getting detained and waylaid. I’m not trying to get back to Lamott, but I am trying to get somewhere else, New York I guess, anywhere really. I see that now. You’re like a drug, no your like one of those women he meets on an island, Circe or Calypso, so tempting and so beautiful, but ultimately dangerous.” Annie took another baby step back away from me. She had a bright-eyed Eureka! look on her face, like the literature bullshit she’d just laid out had helped her finally say something right and true about me.

“I’m not dangerous.” I knew if I could just get her alone, away from the band and backstage, I could convince her otherwise.

“You’re incredibly persuasive. You are the only person, like ever, who got me out of Lamott.”

“But that’s a good thing,” I reasoned. “Just come over tonight, after the show. We can figure this all out.”

Annie shook her head no and her eyes shifted off of me, my face, our conversation, and towards Twig who had just skipped back in with his delivery. Maybe later he’d give me some.

I imagined her pussy, slick and tight, her slender twenty-year old waist, and mound of soft pubic hair that I could sink my dick into and maybe my face. I kept staring, settling into the fantasy as Annie and Twig turned away from me, from the entire room, and made a glowing halo of conversation around themselves. Such a beautiful angel, I thought to myself. You were lucky to get this time with her. I knew even at that moment, that it was going to be hard to be without my Annie, that she’d been different, special. Fuck, I was already feeling nostalgic, and she was ten feet away from me.

The double red doors of the club opened, and Twig stumbled out onto the sidewalk.

“Hey brother.” Joey extended a huge arm to catch Twig.

Twig mumbled something I couldn’t understand, grabbed for Joey’s arm like it was some kind of trapeze bar, and missed it entirely. He fell face first onto the dirty red carpet in front of the club.

“Easy fella.” Joey bent down to help Twig up and I looked on. I was used to Twig being falling-down drunk. Twig didn’t take Joey’s hand. Instead, he rolled over onto his back. I saw a thin trickle of blood streaming out of his nostril and onto the top of his lip. My heart sped up and I kneeled down next to him. “Twiggy?” I pushed his sweaty hair off of his forehead. “Twig!” I leaned over and shouted into ear.

He smiled up at me and whispered, “Daddy, I’m gonna be a Daddy.” And then his body started to convulse.

24

Twig

I was, in my addict way, happy. I died fucked up and at the center of it. Spectacle. Plain and simple. Everybody staring at me. Sure, the blood trickling out of my nose was nasty, and the convulsing made me look like a spaz in the midst of an epileptic fit. But the crowd, as all crowds do, did something for me. Jeb kneeling at my side, panicked and for once, totally present. The rock god humbled! Annie, Tabitha, and the rest of the band, in a shocked tight semi-halo of concerned light at my feet. Merilee clutching at her stomach and sobbing. I knew then, that I mattered to her, that she loved me, and that even if I did die; I’d have a legacy, someone to carry my ego-fueled DNA into the next generation. I was even on a red carpet when I kicked. You can’t beat that.

Like all scenes, mine had a frame around it. A police car followed the ambulance to the hospital, the paparazzi set up a campsite outside of the emergency rooms doors, and the news vans lined up and down 7^th Avenue. For a week or two, my story ate all of the other stories, so nobody cared that The Band of None broke up and that Merilee was starting a solo career. There was no big press push to find out who was to blame or what each band member planned to do with his future. No sit down with Kurt Loder. No big article in Rolling Stone. I won. Movies beat music.

I didn’t have much time to think. I needed air. My heart was full of junk. I stepped outside, I opened my mouth, and I fell down. The street was wet and slick, like someone had put Vaseline over the camera lens and then took a long, panning shot. I was the cameraman, I decided as my frame closed in, narrowing eventually to a pinhole. I saw the lights underneath the marquee. I tried to focus in on one lone bulb, but they blurred together into a head-exploding brick of bright white sunlight. I was the star of my own movie, but the sun eclipsed me and whited me out.

I wished suddenly and desperately that I’d made more movies. I knew then that whatever tadpole was swimming around in Merilee’s stomach would never know me, and that they only way she’d have access to me was through the movies I’d made. She was luckier than some kids I guess. She would have a celluloid dad.

It was Annie who came forward, who for a moment blotted out the sun with her pale, worried face. She pushed my hair off of my forehead, rested her palm there, and squinted down into my eyes. Her mouth moved, but I couldn’t hear the words. I knew she’d seen her fair share of ghosts. The pinhole expanded for a second, and I saw Tabitha crouched down near my legs, pulling my stash out of my front jeans pocket, so I wouldn’t get caught with it. They were both good girls, and I felt the warm wash of something like luck. They were my angels, I decided—two runaways helping me home.

Annie kept her hand on my forehead, but Tabitha stood up and moved back into the crowd. I immediately missed her warm hand next to my dick. She’d always been efficient and determined, and now she was gone. The pinhole opened a little more, and I stared through legs and ankles to take in the gutter. A couple of taxis whizzed by—I saw streaks of yellow and the rust off a hubcap. My heart surged and I felt my legs and arms twitch and twist.

The pinhole closed in again until my screen was all black. You poor fucker, I thought, this stretch of sidewalk, this midtown nowhere, is your grave. I thought of my father and all of the cheesy things my relatives said to me when he died. He’ll be waiting for you on the other side. He’s with God now. He’s watching over us. I remembered the last movie my father took me to before the cancer really set in, and made it impossible for him to breath or walk.

We were all in Los Angeles then, and it was a matinee of Poltergeist. I was seventeen and making a lot of money. I felt like an adult, finally—I was supporting my parents. But I came out of that movie scared shitless. The clown doll under the bed, the closet portal to another realm, the kitchen chairs stacking on their own, defying gravity, the brother who was nearly swallowed alive by the tree outside of his window, the hysterical teenage sister who refused to stay, and the littlest sister, Carol Anne, who got pulled away from her family and into the T.V. The family’s split-level ranch, their whole matchy-match subdivision was built on top of a cemetery. The house was eventually swallowed up by the ground, crushed like a boat in a massive storm of bodies and decay.

I’d heard from a friend who’d worked on the set that they used real cadavers in a couple of scenes. My dad and I smoked a cigarette underneath the marquee in the bright L.A. sun. He hacked his way through two Lucky Strikes, and called me a “chickenshit” for being scared. I stared at him through my big Hollywood sunglasses. He already looked yellow and shrunken. I knew he’d been dead in a month. Everything that’s underneath must come up. What’s beneath finds a way out. You can’t bury the dead, I thought. Subconscious. Subterranean. Submarine. Submerge. Subdivide.

Annie’s hand slipped off my forehead and my body fell away from me. I crawled out from underneath my rock and out of my primordial ooze. I became sidewalk gum and street dirt. I ate New York.

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25

Willow

Air pocket, cosmic burp, deft chamber, and black hole. The universe was slippery. There were chutes and ladders everywhere. Seams, rips, rents, rifts, and tears. I don’t want to get all twenty-sided die and say portals because that would be too easy, too human.

I was good at finding these rips. The horizon exposed itself to me like some girl flasher, all pink, all red, all pearly. It was sunset and she wanted me and so I passed through. I grew up in Lamott, which is basically a crack in the sidewalk of New York state. I’d hid out at Cheap Hits. I loved back staircases and obscure bands. I was antechamber, vestibule, and garret. Sideline, I did. Marginal, I knew. Way to the left, I loved.

It was a bloody show. I get now why it’s called an operating theater. Merilee squeezed Annie’s arm until she left a mark. She panted and she pushed. And then she stopped and we waited. And then it started all over again—this cycle of breathing, of pushing, of grunting, and of waiting. And the intervals became smaller and the pushing and grunting was more intense, more and more like an animal alone in the woods, doing the one thing nature believed it should do. The nurses were kind, not like any of the assholes at the free clinics I’d gone too, and the doctor was this petite Indian woman in surgical clogs, who had delivered thousands of babies.

“One more push mom, just one more,” the doctor had her hand in Merilee’s vagina. She had a hold of the baby’s head.

The nurses had already dismantled the lower parts of the bed so that the baby could more easily slide out. It’s like a spaceship, I thought. This being, her, us, we, come from outer space!

Annie wiped a strand of hair off of Merilee’s sweaty forehead. “This is it,” she said. “It’s her birthday.”

Merilee turned away from Annie and stared out the giant window at the New York skyline. It was three am and full of squares of light—each window a trapdoor into a whole other life. She groaned and sat up on her elbows. “She’ll be a New Yorker,” she said in the direction of a tallest building and she turned back to look at Annie.

“It’s going to be amazing!” Annie opened her eyes wide and locked them into Merilee’s. I saw, for the first time in a long while, the cat-like green intensity of her gaze. For these last nine months, since I’d died, I’d been in shadow. I’d come up to her from behind. I’d been playing tricks. I’d had my fun. I remembered from the withered once alive remnant of what I’d been, Willow instead of the ghost of Willow, that I loved her and that she was a fuck-up, but one of the good fuck-ups. She meant me no harm. She’d loved me as best she could, and even though she didn’t understand me, she’d wanted me alive. She’d wanted me next to her—breathing, dancing, and kicking. She wanted me so much that she could see me even when I was dead.

“A slow and steady push mom, here we go,” the doctor smiled up at Merilee through the triangular frame of her legs.

Annie pressed the side of her face next to Merilee’s and squeezed her eyes shut tight. I felt a deep vibration in the center of whatever it was that I had become. I saw eyelashes fluttering open and closed, a pitchfork struck against the side of a bookcase, a hummingbird dipping in and out of bell of a purple fushia, and the steady drone and buzz of a hive of bees. I was quivering. I was leaving. Good-bye, I thought for the first time since I’d died. Good-bye Annie.

And then Merilee pushed—harder than she’d ever pushed for anything—me, us, Eva, out.

Epilogue – 10^th Street and Avenue C

Annie

The landlord didn’t speak English and when he showed me the closet that I could live in for $300 a month, his only words to me were, “Don’t burn.”

“Excuse me?”

“Don’t burn.”

“I don’t really smoke.” I shifted the weight of my duffle bag off of one shoulder and onto the other.

He sighed loudly in the direction of the armpit of his gray t-shirt and looked up. “Last girl. Big fire.”

I nodded and offered, “No candles, I promise.”

“Good,” he said and handed me the one key to the deadbolt. I watched him walk down the hallway and then I shut the door and turned the lock. It was the first and last time I ever saw him.

I’d found this place through a friend of a friend at Pratt where I’d started taking classes part time. She said that technically, the space wasn’t legal, which was why it was so cheap, but that it was safe enough and it could have it to myself. I’d been living with Merilee and Eva for the last year, and though I felt utterly devoted to them, I needed my own space. I’d never lived alone. I had to give it a try. Even if Merilee referred to it as my studio and insisted that I keep sleeping at her place, I’d hoped it could be a foothold, a way to cast a net, and to catch myself before I got too comfortable.

I wanted to live cheaply and artistically on my own terms. I wanted something of my own. Later, once I’d settled into the squalor of the space, I’d make a mantra for myself. “It’s all yours!” I’d chant as I watched the seventeenth mouse of the day scurry across the floor and out underneath my door. “It’s all yours!” I’d whisper as I inched past the junkie who regularly snoozed on the stairs between the 5^th floor and mine, the top. “It’s all yours!” I screamed at no one when a cockroach cascaded out of the box and into my morning bowl of raisin bran.

I walked across the room to the one window facing the street. I set my duffle bag down and squinted out into the August sun. I had a view of the community pool across the street, which was packed with kids and their parents in brightly colored swimsuits. I squinted even more, so that the aquamarine of the pool and the gumball machine assortment of colors and patterns blurred together. I wanted to turn the view into a painting—to make it suddenly modern-day Impressionistic. Monet does the ghetto. I’d pay money for that.

The sound of kids screaming and the lifeguard blowing a whistle rose up to my sixth floor window. Before I lived in New York, it never occurred to me that the city would have swimming pools—and the pools’ sounds still struck me as weird, too country for Alphabet City. I could see myself swimming in that pool—in the red vintage fifties bikini I’d bought at a thrift store in Ithaca with Willow. I’d bring Merilee and Eva too, and we’d float around on our backs with the bright New York City summer sun on our faces—the three of us, in some way, all haunted.

Merilee and I talked often in those early months of Eva’s life about what it was like to carry another person’s death around with you. I came to think of ghosts as memories more than anything else, and haunting as a kind of active remembering. But I knew that Twig didn’t haunt Merilee in the way that Willow had haunted me. Twig was gone. Willow, was, well, somehow, in Eva. Not that I told this to Merilee. It’s not something you can explain to a new mother, especially not to one that’s depressed and overwhelmed and completely obsessed with every facet and finger of her new little baby. Besides, Eva was Eva too. I knew too, that objectively, when it came to accepting Willow’s suicide, I might always be crazy.

I stared past the pool at the complicated mash of power lines, pipes, and steam that made up the Con Ed plant at 14^th Street and then I craned my neck to look East towards the river. Williamsburg was just over the horizon—low slung and still gritty, clueless about its own impending gentrification and high rises. I can do this, I thought. Because of the view.

I squatted down, pulled three albums out of my duffel bag, and propped them up on the windowsill. In the chaos surrounding Twig’s overdose, and my leaving Jeb to live with Merilee, I’d found a used record shop in the basement of a building on Spring Street in Soho. It was air conditioned and the owner let me browse for hours without buying anything. He was an aging gay hippie who wore Hawaiian shirts and spoke with a gentle voice. His whispering reminded me of the Lamott librarians I used to work for and sometimes he set aside records for me, and we’d listen to them when I was in the store. He learned not to ask me too much, and in my fantasies I imagined he was my New York city father, an older man, who took the time to learn my likes and dislikes, who somehow in his laid-back store owning way, managed to know me better than my own father ever did.

I took a step back to stare at the three records that had come to most define my past and my future—Prince’s Purple Rain, Patti Smith’s Horses, and The Band of None’s You’re With Me. Purple Ran has been the first record I’d learned front-to-back, and Prince was my first rock star crush. I was twelve when Purple Rain came out, and Willow’s father took us to see Prince and the Revolution in concert that year. Our seats sucked, and we mostly stared at the Jumbotron as Prince strutted across the stage, but I’ll never forget the screaming. I’d never heard so many girls screaming at one time, for one person. I loved the hysteria of that show—the way even twelve-year-olds like me and Willow could feel something animal and sexual.

After that, going to shows became our mission, and as Willow and I got weirder and more punk, the crazier the show, the better. Patti, well, Patti was just Patti—the androgynous poet, with the powerful voice, who had a VISION, and who Willow loved more than any other performer. In some ways those two album covers were similar. Prince and Patti both had an androgynous style, and a frank, sexy way of staring into the camera, but Prince’s steamy pin-up stare seemed all marketing to me now. Patti’s was entirely her own—etched onto her face and brought forth by desire.

The cover of You’re With Me was of an old photograph of kids from the 50s shooting bows and arrows in formation—on the back of the album was a blow-up of one of the little girl archers and blurry black and white pictures of the band. This was the album that made The Band of None famous—it came out when Willow and I were sixteen. I decided when I re-bought the album a couple of months ago that it was because of this particular record that I left Lamott with Jeb. That girl archer was me or thousands of other girls like me—fans who were ready to take aim, to shoot an arrow, and dream of its trajectory. I guess, we were hoping to be that arrow.

I rummaged around in the front pocket of my duffle bag for the rest of my charms and arranged them on the sill in front of the albums: a cerulean blue tube of oil paint, the smooth pieces of three purple shells I’d found at Coney Island, and the mythological deck of Tarot cards I wanted to learn how to read. I pulled the Tower card out of the front of the deck and propped it up in front of Patti Smith. In it, Poseidon swims, trident in hand towards a castle, while lightening rained down on his muscled back.

A fortune teller on St. Marks near Merilee’s apartment told me that this was in important card for me—and that I had to learn how to “be with the Tower energy.” I had no idea what this meant, so I decided to treat it literally, to keep the Tower close to my body and to hope for the best. My future, I knew, was mythological at best—bound up in images and stories I couldn’t decipher.

I didn’t yet know that my tube of cerulean blue would move from the East Village to Williamsburg to Astoria and eventually dry up during graduate school, and that the same junkie who slept in my building’s stairwell would eventually become one of my clients. How surprised we both were to figure out that I used to step over his body on my way to class, and that he’d made a conscious decision never to rob me because I looked so freaked out and young.

I didn’t know that Jeb’s second band would be more famous than The Band of None, and that often in the midst of some drunken Lamott/Band of None connect-the-dots party talk, I’d meet other girls who’d slept with Jeb, and who had even been on the road with the band for a show or two. I didn’t yet know that I’d come to think of us as a special kind of club—Jeb’s archers, little groupies flinging ourselves forward and into whatever bull’s eye we could hit. I didn’t know that none of us could keep him alive because I didn’t yet know that fucking wasn’t really an antidote to anything. I didn’t yet know that sometimes fucking was just fucking, and it had its own animal logic and a pure and simple joy.

I didn’t know that it would take me two hours to decide what to wear to his funeral because even dead I wanted to turn him on, and that Merilee would sob uncontrollably into the lap of my black lace dress in the taxi ride back to her place. I didn’t yet know how much they loved each other, and that even though I couldn’t admit it at the time, I had loved him too. I didn’t know that every neighborhood I lived in would become too expensive for me to stay in it, and that I too would become obsessed with artisanal cheeses and fair trade coffee.

I didn’t know that the buildings would fall and that once after a hurricane, the lower half of the city would go dark for a week. I didn’t know how bored we’d all be without the lights. I didn’t know that I’d spend years backsliding with Julian and that I liked sitting in a small room with someone and talking about their problems. I didn’t yet know that the stories people told themselves about their lives were fascinating and confusing. I didn’t know that this was myth making at its best—the moment when humans took something of their own from the gods and tried to refashion it. I didn’t yet know which stars would fade and shine and which ones would fall and rise.

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Copyright 2025 by Carley Moore

ISBN: MALKAPIPPIMARINA

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ISBN: MALKAPIPPIMARINA

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