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missmimesis

age:

	23

location:

	Manhattan

looking for :

	adventures, and people with whom to have them

more about me:

	I just moved to NYC, and already I never want to live anywhere else.

6.248

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11/4/2005 5:09:11 AM

DISCLAIMER:

All entries in this blog are works of creative writing. As such, any and all parts of their content may or may not reflect, to a great or lesser degree, the "real" experiences of the author.

Enjoy.

(7/24/06)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

In the fall of 2006 MissMimesis underwent a psychotic break, the result of rampant stimulant abuse and the stress of preparing for her oral examinations. She spent two “lost years” in Berlin addicted to heroin, working as costume designer for several German daytime TV series, and reading Sigmund Freud’s entire oeuvre in the original German while working on a (never completed) semi-fictionalized history of the psychoanalytic movement. She eventually returned to the US after the spectacular failure of her reignited romance with The Mogul, who had become disillusioned with his capitalist pursuits and devoted himself to the radical agendas of a small Communist independent film collective. She completed her dissertation, “Queer Desire and the Imagining of Victorian (Cyber)Space,” and taught English Literature and Gender Studies at a prestigious Boston university for several years until, disenchanted with academic politics, she quit and moved back to New York, where M. had established himself as a successful though controversial psychiatrist specializing in the combination of MDMA and Freudian psychoanalysis in the treatment of bischizophrenic pre- and post-traumatic disorders. After several unproductive months living in his basement she rediscovered her voice, published a surprisingly successful first novel, and quickly became one of the leading figures in the 2020s revival of three-volume Victorian novel. They now co-edit the influential journal “Postnarrative Postmedicine” and are completing their manifesto Sexuality After the Disembodiment of Gender. They have three children and four boyfriends, and split their time between an apartment in upper Manhattan and a villa on an island off the coast of Spain which they share with N. (the renowned shoe designer widely credited with the redistribution of the stiletto heel to men’s footwear) and C. and Josh Epstein (who as a playwright/critic team have promoted the revolutionary theoretical paradigm known as “legalistic socialist-historicism” based on the completion of rediscovered fragments of Shakespeare’s courtroom dramas), famous for their semiannual Orgies for Multipartner Marriage Rights.

They are all very, very (but not too) happy.

---

But until then…

You can find an incarnation of me at repetitioncompulsion [dot] blogspot [dot] com.

Goodbye; and thank you. (And you, and you, and you. But not you.)

It's been fun.

[Halloween 2005]

[I am excited to get my face back, but I will miss seeing it here.]

xoxoxo,
missmimesis

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for those who will miss me
11/4/2005 3:41:58 AM

...a final story.

---

untitled (on sex, drugs, and money)

In New York City, there is this world of money that, as a graduate student living on a minimal stipend but with unminimal tastes, seems to me to float just above the accessible world; like a fascinating known secret, like a movie. It’s all around: the two men walking up the stairs at the Burberry store on 5th Avenue, world-wearily clutching bags full of cashmeres and gold for their undoubtedly lovely wives, saying, “I just finished up at Barney’s…”; the people who always call cars and have never once set foot in the dim tunnels of the subway; the apartments high up overlooking the park with windows through which a golden seductive glow and the shadow of heavy beautiful furniture is just visible from the street; the $800 haircuts I read unbelievingly about in the Style section of the Times; the beauties in designer jeans who crowd the swank lounges and at 3 in the morning on Tuesdays sip $15 cocktails and smile their flawless smiles at one another. The cocaine, back in style, apparently, and in (it often seems) everyone’s pockets.

We all drink too much and don’t study enough; the recklessness of nightlife seems infinitely more interesting than the library, which smells like old books and stale blueberry muffins. It’s easy enough to forget that we can’t afford any of it; and also easy enough, with a bit of charm and pointy boots, to get boys to buy us drinks or to share their drugs. Nights start at midnight and end at 5 or 6; the blurry days afterwards start at noon. It all seems unreal, and on one level we know it’s all meaningless, maybe even dangerous; but then, somehow, it’s also so shining and beautiful.

One night I’m out with a boy who’s at the law school, whom I’ve drank with a few times and kissed once or twice, but it hasn’t gone past that; he’s a snob but he’s funny and sort of lovely and we like to speak French together. His father is the CEO of some major media corporation and he lived in Paris before; it’s not hard to imagine him there, in one of those grand old apartments, in the 7th arrondissement maybe, or the 16th. Here in New York, a gay friend of his tells me, his family lives “in one of the best properties on the Upper East Side”; of course they do. And of course on this night, for some reason, I can’t hold his apparently fickle interest; at a club downtown he starts dancing with this eighteen-year-old, this college freshman whose smile is pretty but moronic, who says that she voted for Bush – something about her mother and her inheritance. That kind of thing, even among the trust fund set, is shocking, unacceptable; only the law student seems unconcerned by such a brutal reminder of the impact of money, or maybe he is just blinded by the gleam of her long legs under the reflections of the disco ball on the dance floor.

I stand on the sidelines watching with a bit of a smile, too amused to be really annoyed, sipping the glass of champagne that he bestowed on me before I lost him, thinking how it probably cost more than all the food I’ve eaten all week. I don’t like to dance that much, anyhow. When one of the boys who’s there wish us, a boy with dark hair and perfect light brown skin and an oddly shaped nose that only makes him more attractive and a definitely expensive shirt comes over to me and says, “You’re just observing things, aren’t you?” I can’t help laughing, because that’s so exactly what I’m doing, right then and in fact much of the time these days: peering into this shameless careless world, fascinated and anxious, finding it all so strange and sometimes so stupid and yet also so desperately sexy.

We talk for a few minutes and then I pull out the my little trick - you just say with a yawn or a sigh, “Oh, I’m so tired, I could really fall asleep right here…”, and someone will usually hand you an amphetamine pill or a little bag of coke and send you into the bathroom to wake up – and it works, as almost always. Then some of us, led by my new friend and leaving behind the law student and the freshman, cross the street and go up to a room in what is – so they say – one of the hipper hotels in town, where an imposingly large man who plays professional soccer in England, is staying.

Sometimes I think that I have some kind of pathological relationship to myself. Not just because I do stupid things and dangerous things and things that could end up hurting me, like most everyone I know does; but because I feel, somehow, distant from those things. I look at myself doing theses things, afterwards, or even during; and I am weirdly unable to recognize myself. It’s this disjunction, this cognitive dissonance (which is a term whose meaning I don’t precisely know, but I think that it applies). Still secretly thinking of myself partly as the girl in high school with no friends much less boyfriends who never touched a beer much less a drug, I find that as I go around doing these things that that girl never would have even imagined possible, there’s a little bit of me that watches the other part of me with titillation and disapproval, with surprise and uncomprehension.

For example, here: as the dizziness of the champagne is lessened though not eviscerated by the lucid rush of the drug, they combine, insidiously and pleasantly, to make it all – the hotel room with its huge bed and big mirror, its windows with a gorgeous panoramic view of the city and the river, the coils of smoke from the cigarettes of the three boys and two girls gathered around the table – seem even more surreal than it would in sobriety. I look at the scene and I look at myself and I wonder what I’m doing there; if there’s been a mistake, a miswording of the script.

“I was supposed to go P. Diddy’s birthday party tonight,” says the British soccer player, “but I don’t like P. Diddy”; as he opens a bottle of champagne, one that probably did not (as most of the “champagne” I drink does) cost $9.99, and passes it around; nothing like glasses needed here, apparently.

“Can we please have a shopping day tomorrow?” says a girl wearing pearls, rolling up a dollar bill and going over to the dresser, where shimmery lines of coke are waiting; “I know that you want to go to Gucci.” I think about the label inside the shirt I’m wearing: H&M.

“God, you know, my mom says I can’t just keep relying on my trust fund, but, like, I don’t know…” I hear; and I want to laugh and I think about money, and what a strange thing it would be to have it like these people do. I am in the same place as them, taking the same drugs and seeing the same room and hearing the same words; and yet I cannot imagine what it all would look like, taste like, to someone to whom there is simply nothing extraordinary about it.

The coke makes me want to talk but I find it hard to think of what to say. I look over at the dark-haired boy and he smiles at me; kind of sweetly. But also as if he has something in mind.

Eventually and inevitably – it’s hard to tell if things are moving faster or slower than normal - one by one most of the people in the room, the two other girls and one of the boys, take their last swigs from the dwindling bottle of champagne and make their way out, leaving me alone with the dark-haired slender odd-nosed boy and the large athlete. As I watch one of them pick up my foot and start to massage it I feel like I know exactly how this scene is going to go – I could write it out – and yet I still can’t quite believe that I’m in the middle of it.

“You’re…much more interesting than those other girls,” says the dark one, smiling slyly again. “It’s like, obviously you have something to say.” It’s true that I have things to say but I haven’t in fact been saying all that many of them, so this strikes me as funny: I wonder, do they just want me for my lack of money? “Oh, do you think so?” I tease, and we laugh, and he kisses me, as his friend cuts out yet more thin lines of white powder and hands me a bill. I’m at that point in the high where my sense of the possibilities of the world are vertiginously expanded. Out of the window the city glitters and blinks and, as they say, does not sleep.

“You’re cool with this, right?” the soccer player whispers into my ear.

Am I “cool” with it? If “coolness” connotes a blasé unsurprise – then yes, I am “cool” with it, and at the same time, that’s the last thing that I am. But I say: “Yeah, sure.”

By now we’re on the bed, all three of us. The sheets, like nearly everything else in the room, are white, clean, bright, redolent with the subtle evidence of their cost. The stage could hardly be more flawlessly set. I look in the enormous mirror on the wall next to the bed and see our reflections: three bodies, me with my shirt off, hands and mouths moving in all sorts of directions. The British one brings a vial of coke over to the bed and spills some of it out onto my stomach and the other one leans over, pushing his hair back from his face, and snorts it off of me: I think, how incredible – how terrible, how exciting - that things like this actually happen! That there are people who spend their nights like this. That I’m with them. I wonder for a minute if it is all too much and too horrible and if I should leave, go back to my normal unhazy world; and then I decide that opportunities for this kind of fabled decadence do not come along often and that I might as well go for it and so I take my turn and do a line off of his of course perfectly formed beautifully light brown stomach. And then the soccer player, who has by now entirely undressed himself, pulls his friend’s pants off and we are all naked and, looking into the mirror again as I run one hand over the legs of one of them and one hand over the chest of another, I momentarily do not recognize my own face: my eyes are immensely wide and my hair looks blonder under the dim lights than usual and there is an strange expression that is at once fear and anticipation and detachment and desire. My mouth is open and I think what a strange – part awful, part spectacular – performance this is.

A threesome, two guys and me, was always one of my fantasies; but it always seemed that translated into reality it would probably be awkward and painfully inelegant, people bumping into other people at the wrong time in the wrong places. But here – maybe it’s the cocaine, working its artificial empowering magic; maybe it’s that this could hardly be called “reality” – I think that if we had an audience, watching from the closet or through the windows - which for all I know, I guess, we do – they’d think that everything was going with opulent ease: each body and each act flowing into or over or under the others. Almost like it’s choreographed. Or, scripted. The soccer player is going down on me, seems like he has no interest in stopping that, and it feels good; and I am kissing the dark-haired boy and I grasp his dick and then I pull him on top of me and take it in my mouth.

Another few moments, or hours, who knows; another few lines. The dark-haired boy and I kiss each other intensely, constantly; the soccer player and I do not kiss once. One fucks me; the other fucks me. They do not fuck each other – but I think about what it would be like if they did. I think about what it would be like if one sucked the other while he fucked me. Fantasies, when they become realities, need further fantasies built up on top of them. I think about how strange it is to take a drug that makes you feel acutely in control of your actions yet at the same time aware that you are doing things you would never, most likely, do without it. I think about how distant my life is from the lives of the two people I’m in bed with. I think about what a preposterous cliché this is and yet how at the same time it is unlike anything that has ever happened. I think about how hard it is to tell if pleasure is located in the body or in the mind, or somewhere else entirely – in the ways that things are composed and viewed and reviewed, even as they happen? I think too much.

Stories like this, I think, are supposed to have lessons. Things like this, self-indulgent and rash and not very safe at all, carry with them insinuations of immorality, and should be followed by revelations of morality: about how pleasures like this come at too high a cost; or, maybe, about how pleasures like this are not really pleasurable at all. At six in the morning, after all, when the sky is sickeningly tinted with that early morning yellowish haze, when the drugs have run out, when I realize that my body is sore and my nose is running and that my eyes don’t want to be open any more, when I tell them that I need to go home – at six in the morning it wouldn’t be hard to recast this whole decadent dream as some kind of degraded nightmare.

We all embrace each other tiredly but not untenderly. I wonder, as I leave, if I will ever see either of them again. I wonder if I will ever see anything like this again.

And I realize – in the cab on my way back uptown, back to my tiny overcrowded room where there are piles of books on the floor and a computer on the bed, thinking how far from that darkly bright white hotel room these hundred blocks will take me and how this night is already starting to crystallize as a memory in my fractured addled brain – I don’t want to think of this as something wrong. As something never to repeat, perhaps, but also something never to regret. Something unreal, terrifying; gorgeous.

(January 2005)

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ba.x: the (belated) finale
11/3/2005 4:46:11 AM

Does anyone remember that once upon a time I went to Buenos Aires for a month? Probably not; I hardly remember it myself. (But then again, my memory is a little sketchy these days.) It did, though, happen, and I documented it here – obsessively, hyperverbosely – but I never got quite to the end. And I think that if I fail to ever write down and post the narrative of my last few days in BA, I will be pissed off at myself someday, in ten years or ten days, when my memory is even sketchier.

And so we go back to the southern hemisphere, to the end of July, to a Monday afternoon in a little unclean apartment off of Avenida de Sante Fe where C. and I are dragging ourselves out of bed although we’d like, having been out until 6am or so the night before, to stay there all day…

It was a Monday and that meant that most of the museums in the city were closed, but Malba, the sleek stunning collection of twentieth-century Latin America art that M. and I had been to a few weeks before, was open, and that was one of the things that I had told C. she absolutely must not miss; so we headed down there and had lunch in the café – wine and sandwiches and a long impassioned conversation about the ethics and aesthetics of cultural appropriation – and then we browsed the galleries, and I was even more in love with the place than the first time. In the gift shop I finally managed to acquire some posters of paintings by the incredible artist/occultist Xul Solar, and C. bought a purse that looks like a silvery spiderweb exploded into art and then sculpted into fashion.

For dinner that night – earlier we had gone through our tattered Time Out Buenos Aires magazine and agonizingly scheduled our few remaining meals – we went to Desde de Alma (From the Soul) in Palermo, a tiny place whose Romantically rendered white tablecloths and fireplace and slender tree branches contrasted strikingly with the self-conscious minimalisist chic of most restaurants in the vicinity, and there I ate some lamb which was among the most sublime dishes of the entire month. We talked about what to do that night; we had tentative plans to meet up the Boyfriends, Hernando and Alexandro, at a gay bar for a drag show. C., who never likes to admit that she doesn’t love anything, seemed happy with that plan, but then she said something like, “Those boys…I really like them…but they’re so nice that it’s almost…oppressive.”
This was true; they’d been calling us a few times a day to make sure we knew things like how to take the subway.
“You don’t want to hang out with them tonight?”
“No, no, it’s fine…”
“Dude, if you don’t want to hang out with them, we don’t have to!”
“No, we can!”
“We have seen an awful lot of them.”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah you know, I kind of would rather try to find Herman tonight.” (Herman – the waiter I’d fallen in love with who turned out to be gay and my double.)
“Yeah he’s way more fun.”

So with a tiny bit of guilt about ditching our other friends we walked up to Sante Fe to find a phone and call Herman, and when we were passing Mondo Bizarro, a bar that M. and I had tried to go once but been scared away by the suffocating density of BA hipsters, we heard someone calling our names. Surprised, we turned around and saw Herman, in torn jeans and an orange sweatshirt, running after us.
“Oh my god hi!” I said, “we were just going to call you?”
“Yes…do you want to come to the bar?”
We followed him back down the block. “How was last night?” I said; I’d been wondering all day about his liaison with the Screecher.
“It was…ok…” he said, hesitant, resigned; “It was…how do you say…the opposite of funny.” Boring, he presumably meant, or unexciting, or just not fun; but we loved “the opposite of funny” – the best descriptor ever of unimpressive sex.

In the bar, which was considerably less crowded on this Monday night, we met Herman’s companions: a girl who worked as a chef at the Moroccan restaurant and was considering moving to New Jersey to make pizza in order to be with a boyfriend; and one of Herman’s fellow waiters at the same place, a scrappy skinny guy named Elijah who looked, with his greasy long hair and his truckerish hat and tattoos and tight jeans, like a veritable caricature of a hipster. I chatted with those to a little but I was mostly interested in Herman; and C. went to the bathroom and came back half an hour, as the bar was closing, later with a tall American DJ named Steve.

We all piled into a cab, Christine and me and Herman and Elijah and Steve (the chef had departed early), and went to Elijah’s apartment in the outskirts of the city, a big messy place with two sweet cats, a lot of fancy music and computer equipment, and a toilet that didn’t really flush. Until 6am or so we blew lines off of CD cases and we talked about the same kinds of things that we’d talked about with most every other porteño we’d interacted with but that never got uninteresting: Buenos Aires nightlife, the glories of New York City, Argentina’s economic and political traumas, the Bush administration. I asked them, as usual, what they thought about Evita Peron; Elijah said that she was a monster, while Herman thought she was misguided but well-intentioned – “she is the only one that has ever cared about the people.”
At some point, as usual, the conversation turned to the war in Iraq; we gave the usual assurances that we were anti-Bush, anti-war, and Elijah (who spoke English remarkably well; speedily and colorfully) said, “Yes, I saw that movie, what is the name, the movie by Michael Moore…”
“Fahrenheit 911?”
“Yes, that movie, and you know it makes us all think that Americans love the war.”
“Well,” one of us said, “there are lots of Americans who don’t.”
“There is that part, you know, where there are those American soldiers riding on the…on the tank…and they are, you know, singing some song or something, and it makes me think, American soldiers just love to kill people.”
C., who is more politically and patriotically impassioned than I am, got really pissed off at this: “No! Ugh. I hate that. This is why I kind of hate that movie…it’s not about individual American soldiers wanting to kill people…I mean, I’m sure there are some who do, but that is not what this is about…” She was really worked up and having trouble speaking; but between the two of us – or the three of us, with Steve pitching in a bit – we managed to explain to them that most Americans soldiers are from politically and economically marginalized groups, that many are there for education or money, that it’s not them to blame but the fucked-up political and military systems that exploit them along with everyone else.
Elijah and Herman listened and finally they said, “Yes, that makes sense,” and so we felt good about that.
That whole thing left C. a bit pissed off, though, so we said goodbye before it got to be a really outrageous hour, and made plans to meet up again the next night; and then despite his entreaties C. gave Steve only a little kiss and we dropped him off at his hotel.
“Maybe I’ll sleep with him tomorrow night,” she said.
“Yeah might as well, it’s our last night.” That was hard to believe, and I didn’t want to believe it. “I should definitely hook up with someone tomorrow night too.”
“Yeah, for sure!”
That was the first time that it occurred to me that I’d been hanging out for hours with a very cute, if slightly dirty, and ostensibly straight guy – Elijah – and that I hadn’t even considered that I could probably sleep with him; hadn’t even flirted with him. I thought that maybe I would do something differently with that the next night.

Tuesday night after dinner – and, earlier, visits to the Museo des Bellas Artes and Museo Evita, and walks down favorite and now-familiar streets, each moment and each block choked with the sadness of imminent loss – we reconvened with our new friends at the Moroccan restaurant, and when Elijah and Herman had finished cleaning things up we all headed to a club in the city center that, according to Steve – who seemed to know these things – had a good drum and bass night on Tuesdays. Herman and Elijah didn’t seem to have slept at all since we’d seen them last. They were a little cracked-out; alternately frenetic and depleted.

The club, underground and lit red, was full and loud and seemed fun. C. and Steve threw themselves into the crowd and started, with inspiring energy, to dance; Herman and I gave it a half-hearted try, but our uncanny kinship revealed itself again:“I don’t really like to dance,” he said – or shouted, rather, close up against my ear.
“Me neither.”
So we sat down and watched things, and I looked around for Elijah, who had disappeared somewhere. I was feeling kind of erotically determined and I’d been trying to provoke his interest – interest which may or may not have existed; C. had been assuring me all day that it did, but I had no idea – with smiles and glances. Eventually he reemerged, sparkly-eyed and sniffing from a trip to the bathroom, with a friend of his and Herman’s who had a sort of mullet/ponytail combination – hair so bad it was almost spectacular – and braces.

He also had a car – which, we agreed after not too much longer, we should drive in back to my apartment and hang out there. M. and I had agreed long ago that with all of the stupid and potentially dangerous things we were willing to do, one thing that we would avoid was bringing people back home with us; I thought of that as I made my way out of the club with three boys, having left my friend with another boy and an agreement that we’d meet back up at home in the morning and no cell phones and a flight to catch the next day – but I didn’t revise the plan. It was my last night in Buenos Aires and I was feeling crazy and sad and adventurous, and besides Herman was there and I trusted him deeply.

We got in the guy’s car, and the first thing I noticed was a carseat, a carseat for a little kid – and I learned that not only did he have awesomely bad hair and braces, but also, at nineteen, a baby. Everyone seemed to find that entirely unremarkable. I was glad that the baby, who was with its mother at the moment, had a carseat.

It was late already but until much later the four of us sat around the glass table in the apartment and talked and took funny photos. The mulleted babydaddy left first, and then eventually Herman – worn out not only from his adventures the past few nights but from trying, valiantly, to keep up with the much more advanced English of his two friends – said he had to go home. I walked him downstairs and gave him a long hug and said how happy I was that we had met and we promised to email, and as I watched him walk down the street in the chilly grayish early-morning air I kind of wanted to cry, thinking how many strange and improbable – though not impossible - turns life would have to take for us ever to see each other again.

But Elijah was still upstairs waiting for me to come back; and, I figured, there was really only one reason why he was still there. It took a while, though, for anything to happen: gradual pointed moves over to the couch and then closer next to each other, a massage, awkward silence and then stupid things said to fill it, until finally he blurted out: “You are so pretty, I would like to kiss you.”
“Ok.” I smiled. I was pleased.
And he kissed me, and then suddenly the pace of the whole thing veered from frustratingly slow to alarmingly fast: it had taken two days to get to a kiss, but it took two minutes to get from a kiss to his hands down my pants.

We’d wondered for weeks whether the desperation, the grasping biting frenzied desperation, that all of us had experienced whenever we made out with Argentines, that we’d half-jokingly theorized must be tied to their economic woes, would extend into sex.

It did, apparently.

Within a few manic minutes we in were the bedroom and naked and he was asking me if I had a condom. I had wanted this, and I wanted to keep wanting it, I really did, but with this guy – this guy who was 29 years old and had lived with a girlfriend for three years – perspiring and pawing away at me like a 14-year-old virgin, sputtering things in a combination of English and Spanish that didn’t seem like they would make sense in either language, pleasure became impossible to hang on to, and shifted into shock and dismay and a perverse dissociative fascination. Not to mention a lot of physical discomfort. It was so the opposite of funny; and yet it was also kind of hilarious.

This was Really Bad Sex. And I say this as someone who, in certain cases at least, likes sex that would be frequently called “bad”: who finds a certain delight, sometimes, in sex that starts too fast and ends too fast and is frantic and unpolished and palbably fraught with its own lack; who feels oppressed, sometimes, by the hypergendered privileging of “foreplay” and “endurance” and things like that. This, though, was just bad sex. And we hadn’t even gotten to the sex part.

I could, of course, have stopped the whole thing, and I faintly considered how to do so, but it seemed too difficult; less traumatic to everyone involved to stop, instead, his hand’s chafing contact with my genitals. So I repositioned us and put my mouth to work on his genitals, and – thirty seconds later – before I could even process what was happening – “Oh my god oh my god” he said and he came.

Then I had to pee so I got up and went to the bathroom and I came back a minute later and he had all his clothes on; his socks and shoes and even his stupid hat. I looked at him, confused. “I am sorry…I have to go for a minute…” he said.
“Um…”
“I have to pay my phone bill.”
“What?”
“I have to pay my phone bill right now, it will be cut off.”
It was 8am. “Umm…ok…”
“I really want to sleep with you though. I really want to. I will come back ok?”
“Uh…”
“I will call you. Half an hour ok? I will call you, I will come back.”
“All right, um, see you…” And he kissed me and was running out the door.

I lay down but I couldn’t sleep so I started to clean up the apartment; I threw away all the little empty drug packets and I transported, two or three at a time, the stunningly large collection of wine bottles that had amassed in the kitchen over the month to the trash closet in the hall. It took a very long time.

At 8:40 the phone rang. I knew it was him, it had to be; he was actually calling. I couldn’t begin to think what he had been thinking when he ran out the door or where he had gone – maybe he had actually gone to pay his phone bill – but now he was calling.

And I didn’t pick up the phone. I couldn’t pick up the phone.

I sat at the table and chain-smoked and started to feel like shit: because I was exhausted and because I was being assaulted with a nasty coke crash and because I hadn’t picked up the phone.

And then ten minutes later it rang again. I let it ring and I thought that I could let him come back over and we could fuck and it would probably be unpleasant but he was cute after all and I was leaving in a few hours so maybe it was worth it; I could talk to him and tell him that I was too tired now and I was happy to have met him and maybe someday I would see him again; I could just say it wasn’t going to work and goodbye have a nice life. But instead I just let it ring and ring until it stopped ringing.

Until C. came home – radiant and exhausted from her own adventures that night - I sat there at the table and chain-smoked and drank coffee and cried a little bit or at least wished that I could, for me and Elijah and for things – good and bad – that had happened and the things – good and bad – that might have happened if I had picked up that phone. And because I was leaving Buenos Aires and I was never going to get to sit at that table at a degraded hour in a degraded condition, with M. or C. or Herman or Elijah or Kevin or Gonzalo or any of the other various strange figures we’d met, and cry, or laugh - or blow lines or drink Malbec, or eat olives or empanadas, or peruse guidebooks or listen to Evita, or prepare for or recover from a night out, or come up with psychotic theories about ourselves and other things in the world - again. And because in two days when the kids across the courtyard had their weekly Thursday night dance party to the “Dirty Dancing” soundtrack we wouldn’t be there to hear it, faintly, through our broken window, and sing along.

[hello, and goodbye, buenos aires]

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