June 24, 2024 First Person Swallowing: I Was Mike Mew’s Patient By Gabriel Smith Francisco de Goya, Out Hunting for Teeth, 1799. Public domain. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. I named her Holy Jemima when I was nine, or thereabouts. I liked the way the words sounded and it was meant cruelly. Holy Jemima was two years older than me, and her family—her mother, father, two sisters, and brother, making six—were in a cult. I did not know they were in a cult. I just thought they were crazy Christians. The turbo type. I was forced, occasionally, to interact with Holy Jemima, because her little sister, Jessica, was friends with mine. The whole family had this shark-eyed stare. Holy Jemima would fix me with it and tell me that Harry Potter was evil, that they did not celebrate Halloween in their house because of Satan, and that the school church was getting it all badly wrong. “You’ve got to come over,” she told me once, “and watch these videos. You have no idea about the world. The school is not telling you about the real miracles that are happening. There is a preacher in Africa, a Black guy, and he is curing people. His name is TB Joshua.” “You watch videos of church?” “He has cured AIDS. On video. Exorcisms too. Have you ever seen a demon leave someone’s body? They go like this.” She rolled her eyes back in her head and waved her arms about as if having a seizure and started going aghnaghnahgnghgnghgnhgnhgn. A thing about growing up: you do not know what is strange until after. This was suburban England and the Holy Jemima’s hobby seemed about the same, to me, as my parents’ doctor friends’ African masks mounted on the walls above their CD towers of world music. Six streets down from them was Bellybutton Man, whose hobby was watching us leave school whilst silently smiling and lifting his blue T-shirt to finger his navel. And Bellybutton Man seemed about the same as Andy, eight minutes across town, who ran a pub and was a chess savant, who showed you newspapers and explained where the grandmasters were making mistakes. And Andy seemed about the same as Jake, whose hobby was that his parents let him drink as much Sunny Delight as he wanted. When you’re a kid it’s all just flora and fauna. You learn prejudices slow, like which plants are poison. Read More
June 20, 2024 First Person RIP Billymark’s By Sophie Haigney Photograph by Nikita Biswal. Billymark’s West was a normal bar. That was its greatest virtue, probably. It had a pool table, a jukebox, booths, a beer-and-shot special. It was a little dingy and dark. There was a TV and, somewhat oddly, a lot of Beatles-themed memorabilia. The prices were not so bad, by New York standards, though drinks weren’t as cheap as they could have been, either. There was graffiti in the bathroom. It was in some ways the Platonic ideal of a bar, such that it might seem familiar to you even if you’d never been. It had its own story, of course: it opened in 1956 and was taken over in 1999 by two brothers, Billy and Mark, one of whom was usually at the bar. They were the kind of guys you would describe as “characters” in part because they were playing a well-worn role. Billy—whom I saw more often—would call me “honey” and then charge me a price for my Miller High Life that seemed, each time, to be made up on the spot. Sometimes he was gruff, but mostly he was jovial, and it appeared as though he knew everyone in the bar, in a vague sort of way. The patrons of Billymark’s filtered in from the odd mix of places nearby: Rangers games at Madison Square Garden, galleries in West Chelsea, trains at Penn Station, and the offices of The Paris Review a few blocks away. I liked going to Billymark’s for a drink after work, though I didn’t go all that often. Still, it was always a place to go, a place in the neighborhood that stood out mostly for how normal it was. When I found out the bar had closed a few weeks ago, I was bereft. I understand that there are many people who are not always asking themselves, How can I get it back? But I am. Sometimes in fact this question feels like the animating force behind my emotional life—where did it go and how can I retrieve it? No one knows what it is, least of all me. Not long ago I was taking a train north toward Poughkeepsie and I was overcome with the memory of a previous train ride, on a Friday in July several years ago, toward a house in the woods where we stood one night on the porch and watched heat lightning and fireflies rise off the grass in the steam of a recent rain. Other more and less important things happened that weekend, but that is the image that came to me as I stared out the train window, along with the feeling that I could never get it back, any of it. I am speaking of what is generally called nostalgia, though I think the word is overused such that it conjures the gentle, moony feeling you might get listening to a second-rate James Taylor song. No, the feeling I am trying to describe is totalizing, characterized by sharp, surprising loss wrapped up with something like pleasure. That day on the train, I was so overwhelmed that I had to lie down. Read More
June 17, 2024 First Person Rented Horrors By Kathleen Alcott Illustration by Na Kim. I was a fairly unsupervised child, living like a rat on the crumbs of adult culture, its cinema in particular. 1976’s Taxi Driver I saw for the first time at eight—rented and shown to me by a housemate of my mother’s—and what I remember most is the gamine Jodie Foster at a diner’s laminate tabletop: her cheer, and her will, her fistfuls of prostitution money. The relieving and misguided lesson I absorbed, likely because I felt particularly attuned and exposed to adult violence, was that childhood could be short-circuited. Soon after, thanks to a few errant adults in my life, I was renting the most obscene things I could find, studying the horror aisle of the Silver Screen Video in Petaluma as though it were the Library of Alexandria: containing and promising and threatening all. Unusual to my experience of these films was that their one-dimensional and sex-warped predators did not seem so different from the world reflected in my actual life. A few years before, the month I turned five, my neighborhood had been infested by the FBI, who were searching for traces of the just-kidnapped twelve-year-old Polly Klaas. She was abducted in October of 1993 from a sleepover at her house, which was around my literal corner. What Polly became, in the child’s simplistic understanding, was the greatest celebrity: her face on every magazine and national news segment, the vigil always lit for her in town looking like an ancient shrine to the cruelest gods. It took almost two months to find her body. When the guilty man was finally tried, he famously declared in court that Polly had pleaded: Just don’t do me like my dad. Her ruined father lunged for him. Read More
June 5, 2024 First Person I Cannot By Lucy Schiller Licensed under CCO 4.0, Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Last year, a formal tone that sounded nothing like my speaking voice started to sputter out from my cursor and onto the page: “I cannot think about it now,” “I journeyed back to my abode.” Words elongated, and phrasings—strange ones—appeared. I watched the sentences extend, and noticed they were saying very little, but that they were saying this little in very mannered ways. “At the shore, attempting to reel in my kayak amidst the smooth stones and locally famous sea glass, I suffered a gigantic spasm of the muscles in my back, so painful I could not speak but to scream,” I wrote—not a terrible sentence, and not describing nothing, but when have I ever spoken the formulation “could not __ but to ___”? Or the word “amidst”? When, last year, I saw in my prose that falseness and false formality, I wondered where it had come from. I seemed to be a few minutes away from using whence. I seemed to be searching for a rhythm that wouldn’t come, and reading over tatters of drafts later, I realized I was attempting to write prose in what was basically iambic pentameter, as if this classic formal constraint contained within it the key, the one key, to a sense of writing well, a sense so rare that year for me to find at all. From whence this sense of language-pressed-through-sieve? From where did it first flow, that impulse toward the cannot instead of the can’t, I wondered, and the immediate answer that occurred to me was, strangely but also obviously, the internet, which supplies phrases like “I am deceased” and “I simply cannot.” I thought to myself that I do not, anymore, use the internet to read very deeply. Read More
May 30, 2024 First Person Feral Goblin: Hospital Diary By Kate Riley Hospital corridor. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, public domain. When I entered the emergency room at 3 A.M., I knew only that the fragment of crab shell in my throat could not be swallowed, extracted, or solved with marshmallows (the glottal escorts recommended online). The actual solution was morphine and emergency surgery; up until I recovered consciousness, my visit to the hospital represented some of the most pleasant hours of 2024. When I woke, it was to a body with several new ports of entry, established so that my most tender innards could be tethered directly to the hospital bed. My gown was essentially a garrote with modesty bib attached, and mysterious things had been taped to my arms and legs; a tube to nowhere emerged from one nostril. I spent what felt like multiple twilit days wriggling up and down the bed, orienting myself by proximity to beeps, until my exovascular system got so tangled the nurses (themselves attracted to beeps) came running. I had been out of surgery half an hour. The nurses unwound me, retrussed me, and stupefied me with fentanyl just as a pack of surgeons materialized to deliver complex and consequential information about my health. A total of six surgeons comprised my “team,” and all six could have played background Kens in the Barbie movie. I remember humming to myself to drown out their talking; I do not remember repeatedly whispering “I’m asleep” while making eye contact with the lead surgeon, but I defer to his sober account. They summarized our morning: After extracting the fragment of crab shell in my throat, they found several smaller shards in my stomach, which they took for good measure. Then they glued shut the centimeter-long tear, as esophageal tissue is too fragile for stitches. They had pictures on their phones. Read More
May 21, 2024 First Person Wild Desire By Pedro Lemebel Abstract 2 from Awash by Will Steacy, a portfolio published in issue no. 177 of The Paris Review (Summer 2006). “Pedro Lemebel, one of the most important queer writers of twentieth-century Latin America,” writes Gwendolyn Harper, his translator, was “a protean figure: a performance artist, radio host, and newspaper columnist, a tireless activist whose life spanned some of Chile’s most dramatic decades. But above all he was known for his furious, dazzling crónicas—short prose pieces that blend loose reportage with fictional and essayistic mode. … Many of them depict Chile’s AIDS crisis, which in 1984 began to spread through Santiago’s sexual underground, overlapping with the final years of the Pinochet dictatorship.” The Review has published several of these crónicas, newly translated by Harper, as part of a brief series in recent weeks. You can read the first installment, “Anacondas in the Park,” here, and the second installment, “Hot Pants at the Sodomy Disco,” here. Fording gender’s binaries, giving the old sepia family photograph the slip, and above all picking the pockets of scrutinizing discourse—exploiting its intervals and silences—halfway and half-assed, recycling oral detritus like excreted alchemy: wiping, with a gossip rag, the pink smudge of a sphincteral kiss. I abide the unpleasant aroma to appear before you with my difference. I say in my minoritarian way that some groove or marrow etches itself into this constrained micropolitics. Cramping from camp, disassemblable in stripteased faggofication, reassemblable in straight obliques, politicizing toward sissy self-knowledge. I expel these excess materials from a doughy imaginary, dolling up political desire in oppression. I become a beetle that weaves a blackened honey, I become a woman like every other minority. I yoke myself to its outraged womb, make alliances with the Indo-Latina mother, and “learn the language of patriarchy in order to curse it.” Parodying patriarchy’s rectitude, obliquing myself once again inside the haunts and hair salons of travesti sisterhood. Plucking from our feathers any inky quills that tried in vain to explain us. So that at least we wouldn’t get depressed feeling utopia’s breezes. Because we never participated in those liberationista causes, doubly far from May ’68, submerged in a multiplicity of segregations. Because the sexual revolution that today is stuck back inside the status quo was a premature ejaculation in the third world’s back alleys, and AIDS paranoia threw the homosexual’s progress toward emancipation out the window. That wild desire to assert yourself in a political movement that didn’t exist—it got stuck between the gauze of precaution and an economy of gestures dedicated to the sick. Read More