by Jack Sullivan
Why do you expose people who sin in broad daylight?
Names of people who didn’t do anything wrong in the paper.
“Sex pests,” my mother said. “Freaks.”
Cereal coating the roof of my mouth.
I didn’t realize I was choking.
My father turned to the sports section, shaking his head.
“Disgusting.”
How could I tell them those men looked like me?
***
It’s hard to question authority without believing in it a little.
Maybe it was uniforms.
The blue of our dress shirts, their starched collars.
The white sheen of the priests’ garments.
Yet what really fascinated me was Jesus on the cross.
How skinny he was!
How each rib bone seemed to protrude from his torso.
I used to get a hard-on imagining him standing in front of me, gradually loosening the loincloth over his crotch.
When the priests caught me in the rectory bathroom, I told them I was thinking about a girl.
***
Work that refuses to soothe us when we need to be smacked awake.
Standing in front of the Seurat painting in Chicago, high off my mind on mushrooms, waiting.
My idiot friends giggling behind me.
At first I didn’t see it: how the tiny dots of color broke apart, then coalesced.
I just saw a bunch of people standing around a lake.
Then the painting began to move, every atom inside gyrating with ecstatic abandon.
I don’t know when I started crying.
But, contrary to my friends’ claims, that wasn’t the reason we were asked to leave.
***
The time of all forgotten things is at hand.
I sit in front of the computer, ringing my mind for memories I’d do best to forget.
Just the other day, my therapist said: “You are the source of your unhappiness.”
At two hundred dollars per hour, I’d beg to differ.
Wasn’t the point of growing older to put this stuff behind me?
But the magazine asked for something ‘memoir-ish,’ or at the very least “in the realm of auto-fiction.”
Everyone reads those books – Knausgaard, Cusk, Ernaux – and creams.
Ah! the primacy of personal experience.
The editors had gushed over my work at lunch, though it’s clear they had never read it.
(Though I did enjoy bleeding them for a few G and T’s…)
***
It was already tomorrow in Paris.
When you landed, I mean.
Or was it already tomorrow when I decided to call?
Anyways, I sat on my bed, ignoring the sounds of a person screaming outside, trying to imagine your apartment.
The dark, cool, wood-paneled hallways.
The bedroom: furniture artfully arranged, mattress soft to the touch.
I wasn’t going to let you go there without me, so I invaded every single space.
In my mind’s eye – or was it for real? – I walked around naked, taking a break to piss on your rug.
I used to aim for your mouth, until you said you didn’t like that.
You told your friends I was obsessed with excrement.
***
The righteous tumult of the world never stops.
In the time it has taken to type this, another thousand or so people have died.
Every time I turn on the TV, or look out the window (really one and the same), I see people marching in the street.
A radio DJ once asked if I thought my work was political.
I replied that I thought I was a political writer, but with a lower case instead of capital p.
“I write about subjectivity, the experience of being in this world, with a certain body…”
“I’m more interested in writing our relationships with our minds, our bodies, and our friends and family, rather than the machinations of the state.”
The DJ, obviously some sort of ex-hippie, cocked his head at me and frowned.
“I don’t see the difference.”
***
When standing outside a courthouse, you can tell the serious lawyers by the way they dress.
Sharp suits with silhouettes that cut through the air.
Women more liquid than matter, whose outfits seem to eddy forward in place of bodies.
My brother is not one of them.
But he is a good lawyer, and my friend, as much as any brother can be.
Whenever I do a bad thing, he agrees to defend me, though for a price.
“Let’s see each other more often.”
We are sitting on a bench outside the court, having hot dogs for lunch.
Ketchup stains the sides of my brother’s lips, his sad smile blooming like a flower.
Why does everything have to be related to something else?
As I thought this I didn’t realize I was also speaking out loud.
***
Once and a while they give up the search.
The little boy and his mother, lost in the lake.
I knew her tangentially.
She was an actress on a television show I interned for when I was young.
Younger than now, I mean.
My job was to keep her from taking too many pills, and when she didn’t have enough pills, provide them.
Sometimes, when she wasn’t having a breakdown, she’d invite me into her trailer for a drink.
We’d sit on a ratty shag carpet listening to Nina Simone records sipping cheap whiskey out of plastic cups.
***
Have you ever taken so many uppers you got tired?
I have to ask my doctor to change my prescription.
***
A phantom rules these rooms.
What is the point of telling you something you already know?
My friends and family search my stories for clues about them.
Or do they search for me?
Why do I use their lives for material, squeezing them dry like tubes of paint?
There’s a difference between the first brushstroke on canvas, and when the paint settles.
***
I’m just really tired. I’m just really exhausted all the time. And I.
***
Deep down the blue persists.
My therapist says I can stop this project whenever I want.
“Not stop,” she says. “Revise.”
She implies I have a fear of revision.
“Not fear,” she says. “Anxiety.”
Though she’s unsure what I’m so anxious about.
I tell her the power to change things would only give me a God-complex.
I already have a big head.
“Sometimes, though, it’s ok to let a little light in the room.”
***
My mother told me I would never go to heaven.
But I don’t want to tell you that story.
I want to tell you about the time she said I would.
I broke my arm after tripping on my way to the bus.
It was because of a crack in the concrete, though my Mother told everyone I was clumsy.
“Oh Mr. Clumsy,” she said as I cried in bed later that night.
She took me downstairs and turned on a Lubitsch film she insisted I have to see.
I don’t remember much about it, other than a man was forced to recount his life at the gates to Heaven.
St. Peter was unsure whether to let him in, but changed his mind when the man recounted the story of his great love.
“Oh,” my mother cooed. “I love Gene Tierney!”
“Mom,” I said, groggy with sleep. “Will I ever get into Heaven?”
“Only if you marry a movie star.”
***
If you don’t have vision, does the world exist?
I stand in front of the Seurat painting with a friend of mine who is going blind.
I ask him what he sees.
“The same as you, but different.”
“How different?”
The painting is less impressive than when I was a kid.
There is something stiff and academic about it now.
“I think you mean scientific,” my friend says.
He explains how Seurat was interested in exploring the scientific qualities of light.
Later, over cocktails, he lists all of the things he’s going to miss:
the first light of day
the muslin quality of a humid summer morning
the harsh fluorescents on the train
professional women’s butts swaying down Madison Avenue
a child’s gap-toothed smile
the carbonation rising to the top of a fresh pint of beer
the way people watch dumbfounded as a tragedy unfolds in front of them
his boyfriend’s face on his computer screen
“But you’re not dying,” I say, motioning for the waitress to refresh our drinks.
“I might as well be.”
***
Such quests are not for gold, but victims.
A target on someone’s back.
Or so I told the editors when I informed them I would not be turning in the piece.
A rose is a rose, there is no other word for it.
Unless we deem it otherwise.
I didn’t really need the money, anyways.
But I kept these notes, written on 3×5 index cards, in a drawer at the writing desk you once bought me.
Sometimes when I’m bored I like to take them out and shuffle them.
Deal myself a hand, see if I can’t beat the house.
Seurat was not just interested in the scientific quality of light, but also color.
Breaking down the image into sub-atomic particles.
Willem de Kooning, though his paintings were completely different, was interested in the same.
How to represent the world through shape, form, light, motion, color?
***
Days are long yet years are short.
We have no control over any of this.
Jack (he/him) is a queer writer and visual artist living in Brooklyn, NY. His prose, poetry, and pencil clippings can be found in JAKE, BODEGA, GHOST CITY REVIEW, OROBOROS, and THIMBLE LIT.