The Deep Whatsis

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“Cool,” I say, “that’s awesome, but I’m not going to that shoot.”

“No?” he says. “I thought you were.”

“Why would I waste my time with that shit?” I say.

“Because the account is in trouble.”

“Not my problem,” I say. Then as I am closing his door he says, “By the way, she’s uploading some spots to the FTP, I’d try the dub room. I mean, assuming you want to find her.”

“I don’t, actually,” I lie. “I want her out of here by EOD.”

“Right,” he says. “Will do.”

I walk out of his office and down the hall I hadn’t walked down before, hoping for a random encounter rather than having to actually set foot in the dub room which would be too obvious. I end up circling the floor two times but I don’t see her. I probably would have kept doing it all afternoon except my phone rings and it’s Seth Krallman, my old friend whom I hate.

“What up, gangsta?” I say into my phone as I head toward the elevator. “Why’d you stand me up the other night, dog?” One of the reasons I hate Seth Krallman is because he talks like he’s from the ghetto when actually he is from Greenwich, Connecticut, and I tend to talk that way when I’m with him just to mask the fact I dislike him so intensely. I’ve hated Seth Krallman ever since he got clean and became a yoga teacher and changed his name to Hanuman or Ganesh or something. No, the truth is I always hated him; we shared a big house together at Brown and he thinks this means we have some kind of Special Bond. He’s a pretentious idiot, a so-called avant garde playwright who had twelve or thirteen seconds of notoriety in the East Village in the late ’90s when he chained himself to the stage of a tiny theater for a month as some kind of protest slash performance, peeing in a crystal bowl and mixing it with champagne and drinking it every night at precisely midnight, while reciting some poetry. I avoided him for years but he friended me recently and keeps wanting us to hang out, I’m pretty sure that he’s gearing up to ask me for a job. He comes from a rich family, as I alluded, but his father invested badly and lost most everything in ’08 so Seth’s monthly automatic deposit has dwindled away—he has to work now to pay his rent and his medical bills, because he is bipolar, and without his meds and his therapy the man is useless. So he wants to invite me to this really cool opening and after-party in the ’wick and maybe, I’m guessing, that’s when he’ll ask me if I can help him get into advertising. I have nothing to do tonight and need to take my mind off myself and maybe talk to people so I say yes. Then I immediately regret it but he doesn’t know that yet. So he starts to ask me how work is going and I pretend that the elevator is killing my reception even though I am not in the elevator.

1.8

I get to the opening before Seth does. It’s at a storefront gallery on an industrial section of Johnson Avenue; the space used to be a skateboard shop and now it’s rented out by the three guys who started Rodney magazine, and they show art in it. Rodney is considered the epicenter of cool in Bushwick right now and since Bushwick is the epicenter of cool in New York that makes Rodney the most boring thing on the planet. Normally the thought of the Fucking Rodney Scene would send me into an uncontrollable rage and thus I would avoid it entirely, but I am here to see the hateful ex-junkie yoga master and hang out with him and listen to him go on about how avant garde theater is dead, seriously, it’s a tragedy, I mean Heiner Müller wouldn’t even get his work seen today. His shtick is really one of the saddest things ever and maybe that’s why he cheers me up so easily.

The art space is packed and the kids are spreading out into the street like a fungus. Never before have I seen so many people in one place who are exactly the same: the same age, the same race, the same wardrobe, the same facial hair, the same taste in music, socioeconomic background, college experience, shoes, political beliefs, and hair; but I suppose what really unites them is the shared fantasy that they are rebels, subversively unique individuals creating their own style for themselves.

I make a quick spin through the crowd and can’t find Vishnu. He’s always late anyway, it’s one of the many things I can’t stand about him. I squeeze inside the storefront past a girl wearing a Shepard Fairey Obama Hope T-shirt in which she’s sliced his eyes out, showing her nipples through his empty eye sockets, and I can’t tell if she means this ironically or if she means anything by it at all, maybe her nipples doubling as the POTUS’s eyes is just a coincidence. I then get it, I make a connection to the concept behind the art show, which is called “Show Us Your Tits!” and it features lots of photos (taken, it seems, by anyone who can push the button on a camera) of girls flashing their breasts in bars, at parties, on the street, and so on, the pinnacle of art world cool reappropriating bad TV from over a decade ago, and with unicorns.

All in all it’s a pretty good show. A lot of the pictures are so lo-res they look like they were screen-grabbed off YouTube or at best shot on old phones. The whole thing must have taken at least an entire Saturday to curate and hang, affixed to the wall as it all is with duct tape; perhaps it took the whole weekend if there was any marijuana in play. The truth is I’ve never liked art very much, and I can’t decide if I like this show because it’s not really art at all, it’s just stupid, or if maybe I hate this shit because it’s trying so hard not to be art and there’s nothing more arty than that. I try to think of another profession in which people do something all the while claiming they aren’t. Would a doctor do that? Anyway, I begin to feel sick to my stomach so I go to the one makeshift bathroom at the back of the space but there’s a long line of drunk girls and so I head back outside for some so-called air.

That’s when I see Gandhi talking to two black guys in the middle of the street, and not the kind of white black guys you normally see at these sorts of things, the kind of white black guys who can stomach us like the white black guys in the band TV on the Radio seem to be able to. No, these were actual black guys, they really stood out, they did not even have semi-ironic Afro picks in semi-ironic ’fros and they did not call each other “Negro” or wear bow ties or read James Baldwin on the subway. Seth introduces them to me as P-Mouse and Grain or something like that, it’s hard for me to hear because a faux–hair metal band is playing out of the back of a Budget rental truck parked on the street.

“Hey, did you guys see the art? What do you think?” I ask. Titmouse and Plain are in the music business, Seth is telling me, and they don’t give a shit about art.

“We don’t give a shit about art,” D-Louse says. “It’s stupid.” He then says he doesn’t think this crap here is art anyway, it’s just some bad pictures of some like dumbass rich girls flashing some of their rich-ass skin. I start to say something about the art being about a subversive, if not downright gangsta, appropriation by the highbrow culture establishment of a lowbrow pop icon, and Plane says “Who gives a fuck?” which kind of makes me want to hug him. Then Seth says these two guys wanted to meet me because they have just started a music production company, they’ve been producing some tracks out of the back blocks of Crown Heights, they are going to blow up any second, and, wait for it, they were thinking of getting into commercials. I could, see, get in on the ground floor, get a good deal on some demos before they were snatched up by the likes of Nike and Diesel.

Ten minutes later we are sitting at a rusty metal table in the back of a place called Midnight Drab on DeKalb Avenue. It has no sign and not even much of a door and nobody is even sure if Midnight Drab is really the name of it, it’s just what the place is called, at least by Seth. The blacks are ordering gin and juice and so I order one, too. I’d already had the better part of a bottle of red wine at my apartment before coming to the art show, and for a moment I fear the dangerous combination of grape and juniper, as it’s not something I’ve experimented with before, but we’ll see. An hour later the conversation turns to all these great commercials that people have been seeing on ESPN, the one where the guy runs up the side of a building and explodes, the one where the car comes out the guy’s ass, I have no idea what they’re talking about. But as I am thinking about excusing myself and going home to masturbate to the pictures in some French fashion rag, B-Louse, or is it Painboy, unfurls a one-hit bumper in his enormous hand. Alright, maybe I’ll stay for another G&J, even if it does mean enduring the kings of alt-garage hip-hop pressing on me their sampler CDs. I grab the bumper and lean down under the table and pretend I dropped something and do a hit; when I arise the guys are chuckling while Ravi Shankar makes some kind of face.

“No worries, I bought it from the bartender,” says Louse, meaning it’s all good here. I do another hit, left nostril this time, without attempting to disguise it. Seth gives me a micro-look like, That’s cool, you do your thing, and I can be here with you, because I’m a superior being now, I’ve reached this higher yogic plane of sobriety, I am but a mute witness to the fog of human sadness here before me. I try to hand the vial to Seth as a joke and he waves it off, not getting me. But to my surprise, Louse and Jane wave it off, too.

“All you, dog.”

So now I’m drunk and high and sitting with three idiots, guys who finish sentences with “dog” or “yo” or “fag”; unfortunately this constitutes the most satisfying social event of my week, not including the sexual encounter of four-point-five days ago.

We decide to leave and go to the after-party for the opening, which is at a loft in Ridgewood. Seth still has the Range Rover that his parents bought him as a birthday present back when they were flush, and he hasn’t sold it yet even though he can’t afford the upkeep; I think he may have said something about the insurance having lapsed and what a pain in the ass alternate-side parking is. After we are at the loft party for a few minutes, which is packed with the same people who were at the opening, and our hip-hop friends are still the only African-Americans in the crowd, some guy with a waxed mustache and an eye patch comes around holding a bucket collecting money to pay for the keg of Milwaukee’s Best that is already gone and that’s when I realize I made a mistake in coming out tonight at all. Seth and the guys are talking to a couple of young girls; Seth thinks he is getting somewhere with them because of how Street his friends are, and how this confers status on him, but really the girls are not paying attention to him, they’re just thinking about the possibility of hooking up with Louse or Pain for the tweet of it.

I take out my phone to call the car service to come pick me up when I see there’s a text I didn’t know I had.

turn arownd !!!

Fuck.

I make a point of not looking around the room, I just stuff my phone back in my jacket pocket and watch Seth and the girls and black guys standing in a little circle. One of the girls is wearing a diagonal-striped Diane von Furstenberg dress from the ’80s. She has the wrong body type for it, but she doesn’t seem to care. In my mind I’m just getting into this heavy critique of her because I don’t want to look around and let Intern think I am looking for her. After a minute or two I realize I forgot to call the car service, but that will entail taking my phone out again, which Intern, if she is indeed watching me from somewhere in the big crumbling warehouse of poseurs, will interpret as my caring.