April 20, 2023 First Person The Birder By Maisie Wiltshire-Gordon Bird lore, 1906. National Committee of Audobon Societies of America. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. I knew a birder once. I liked him—it’s pointless to deny it and in any case I don’t think I can write about him without it being abundantly clear—though we redirected early enough that friendship seemed possible. For him it always was a friendship, anyway. Still, the birding excursion was definitely a date. Perhaps he was curious about whether he’d discover feelings for me among the pines—whether what psychologists call the misattribution of desire might be prompted by seeing a rare bird in my presence. We only saw regular birds, though: grackles, goldfinches, a great blue heron. He was a birder but he was mostly a musician. I would have found it satisfying to discover that these were two sides of the same coin for him: it’s nice, after all, when people cohere, when you can discern a uniform purpose or a set of underlying values across their various pursuits. But the truth, really, is that people are more than one thing, and for most of his life, birds were an inconsequential if benign presence. It wasn’t until the 2020 lockdown that he discovered how far he was willing to go for their sake: a tundra swan in Pittsfield, a Pacific golden plover in Newburyport. Read More
April 10, 2023 First Person On Fantasy By Sophia Giovannitti Photograph by Iflwlou (拍攝), via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0. Steak is like sex, is like art: bloody; gets you high; is disgusting if you think about it for too long. And blue steak, then, is like sex work: a carefully crafted artifice that allows for the presentation of something ostensibly raw to the consumer, without the risks of actual raw consumption. The person who orders blue steak feels it as real, and animal, though it is sanitized, and carefully so. In SoHo, there is a boutique hotel whose rooms are blue. Blue carpet, blue ceiling, blue-patterned sheets. I met a client there several years ago, when I still had short bangs. I wore a vintage skirt-and-top set—black, with colorful flowers—and black lingerie from l’Agent, the now-defunct, less expensive little sister brand to Agent Provocateur. My client wanted our time together to feel like a movie. He didn’t say this, but his behavior made it clear. He booked me for only an hour but wanted an experiential arc: he sat me first in the small living room area of his suite, presenting liquor he had put on ice for me. Music played softly through the room’s sound system: “Nothing’s Gonna Hurt You Baby” by Cigarettes After Sex, a song that I’d only ever heard as the background of a bad television show. He moved me into the bedroom, bantering, as though he had to charm me. I have absolutely no recollection of what he looked like or what his name was. This isn’t because I was seeing so many clients I couldn’t keep track, but because it’s useless information to retain after the fact. I remember how he behaved—the only salient thing—which was annoying, and also standard, fine. I overstayed our appointment because the sex refused to end, as happens often with older men who want to paw at a young woman but don’t quite care whether or not they finish, and certainly not in the allotted time. “Nothing’s Gonna Hurt You Baby” returned to the playlist; it was looping, as was the experience. Read More
March 6, 2023 First Person On Novocain By Michael Clune From the collection of the State Library of New South Wales. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. I’ve been clean for over twenty years. Let me give you an example of the kind of problem addiction is, the scale of the thing. In April 2019 I went to the dentist. I had a mild ache in a molar. He said the whole tooth was totally rotted all the way through, that they couldn’t do anything more with it. It was hopeless. The tooth was a total piece of shit and would have to be extracted. He gave me the number of a dental surgeon and I called and made an appointment. I talked to my dad, who’d had many teeth extracted, and he told me it was no big deal. When I got to the dental surgeon’s office I told him that I’m a recovering addict, and that I wanted to avoid opiate painkillers. He looked in my mouth and when he got out he said, “You’re going to need opiate painkillers.” Then he shot me up with Novocain and he went in there with a wrench, and I realized that dentists have soft, delicate hands and seem like doctors, like intellectuals, but when you really need dental care, you go to a dental surgeon and their main qualification is brute physical strength. This guy had white hair and arms the size of my legs, and he put the pliers on me and wrenched and wrenched and wrenched, and despite the Novocain, the pain was like a hundred Hitlers gnawing on my nerves, gnawing them right down to the roots and then just sinking Nazi teeth up to the hilt in my brain. There was blood everywhere. I was making horrible sounds out of my throat, and the dental surgeon was saying just hold on for one more second, saying it through gritted teeth, and I was writhing in my chair with tears pouring out of my eyes. Then it was over and he was wiping the pliers on his white coat and I thought, I never knew something like this could happen in America, and he said, “I’m going to write you a prescription for Percocet.” Read More
February 21, 2023 First Person A Hall of Mirrors By Gary Indiana Gary Indiana with Ashley Bickerton, circa 1986. Courtesy of Larry Johnson. Do Everything in the Dark was the last of three novels I wrote while mostly living in houses in upstate New York or at the Highland Gardens Hotel in Los Angeles. It began as a collaborative book project with a painter, my extraordinary friend Billy Sullivan: I was to write very brief stories to appear beside portraits of his friends and acquaintances, many of whom were also friends of mine. The stories would not be directly about the portrait subjects, but fictions in which some quality or characteristic of a real individual was reflected, stories about characters they might play in a film or a theater piece. This project was never entirely certain, the prospective publisher having had an opacity comparable to that of Dr. Fu Manchu, and somewhere in the summer of 2001, Billy and I realized our book was never going to happen. By that time I had written most of what appears as the first third of this novel, though, and in this instance I had written past Kafka’s “point of no return” much sooner than I normally did. (I have abandoned many more novels than I’ve ever published, usually realizing after 50 or 60 excited pages that they were heading nowhere I wanted to go.) Read More
February 14, 2023 First Person The End of Love By Merritt Tierce Illustration by Santeri Viinamäki. Wikimedia Commons, Licensed under CCO 4.0. I’ve had a hell of a time with online dating. I haven’t had much fun, and I haven’t found a mate. I hadn’t been able to understand fully why it “wasn’t working” until I read Eva Illouz’s book The End of Love: A Sociology of Negative Relations. Illouz has studied the relationship between love and capitalism for twenty years, and in this book she describes the ways that consumer culture has shaped social bonds. She focuses specifically on what she terms “scopic capitalism”—how the modern free market creates economic value primarily through images. On practically every page I underlined some insight that matched my own experience; my personal travails began to make more sense. Choice—sexual, consumer, or emotional—is the chief trope under which the self and the will in liberal polities are organized. In the fall of 2016, my second marriage ended in spectacular concert with the presidential election. My second husband was running for office, and we couldn’t tell people we were splitting up until after the election because it might have disrupted his campaign. He lost anyway. The night of the election, I was at home alone with our dogs, mourning the end of my marriage but thinking At least at the end of this horrible night we’ll have a woman president. In April of 2017, I started dating. I was thirty-seven. I had moved from Texas to Los Angeles, where I knew almost no one, so online dating seemed like a promising approach, especially in a metropolis of ten million people. The pool of prospects would be both deep and wide. Read More
January 4, 2023 First Person Nightmares of a Shopaholic By Adrienne Raphel Shoes near Covent Garden. Licensed under CCO 2.0. I’ve never been married, and I’ve bought my wedding dress. It was a skin-melting summer day. K. and I were going to this perfect vintage store, we have to go, I really want to take you. But she couldn’t remember its name, or whether it was off Columbus or Amsterdam, so we kept stumbling into these half blocks, asphalt shimmering under our sweating shoes. Suddenly, sure as a homing pigeon, she wheeled around a corner to a gated sliver of silver and pressed an anonymous black button. Then K. pressed her hand to the double-barred iron door, and it yielded. The store was a riot of color. Every corner had multiple layers of stuff, so you couldn’t put your eye down on one thing without it landing on five more: golden silk handkerchiefs, tallboy cabinets draped with ropy silken tassels, iridescent velvet slippers, a bristly thick, glossy black, lancelet fur capelet, gumdrop earrings that might have been rhinestones or Tiffany. The accessories had their own accessories: there were opera glasses with an eyeglasses chain on which dangled an opera-glasses charm. My molars ached. Oh! K.’s feathery exclamation snapped my vision into focus toward a dress form. The dress was white with the faintest tinge of seafoam green, beaded and stiff through the torso and then releasing into a tulle storm cloud that gathered barometric pressure above the ground at thigh height. It was the worst dress. This dress is amazing, said K. It’s so good. It would look so good on you. Read More