I wake inside a sublet in the lowest, most eastern edge of the Lower East Side. In LA I flitted around the edges of many scenes and watched them all swell, crest and collapse. What drives scenes? What attracts so many artists and dreamers, graspers and grifters to them? Their one similarity: I spend many nights watching poets and sex freaks doing drugs in their bathrooms.
After the reading at Village Works, everyone goes to Scratcher. Even my friends The Poet and the Sex Freak tag along. Sometimes I worry that everyone I know is either a poet or a sex freak. Meanwhile Nylon reporter Sophia June and her gang are partying in the back booths and invite us to another bar. We meet there and soon we are trading numbers, Instascams, everyone asking about the upcoming readings. Two days until the Ritz CE.
Instascammers and sub slackers harass me for the addy. Something criminal about it. I love The Drift. I subscribe and submit and get rejected. But even I give away free booze at CE. Readingsβeven transcendent ones full of talented, hot writersβare still trench warfare.
Obliteration is the only way to survive. While dancing a debonair lit agent asks for my manuscript. Yet among the pantheon of shitposting deities, Bernstein lives lower down on Mt. Will Fry join the fray? We trail Fry to the afterparty, but she melts away faster than the ice in my soda water. What can a broken shoe portend about the fragile nature of scenes? I wonder as a friend jerry-rigs the platform back together with plastic grocery sacks. Sex workers, Semiotext e dolls, and one Paris Review editor cram into the room.
Poet Matt Starr recounts sucking off hotdogs and Mackenzie Thomas reads teenage sexcapades. Crumps does crumps and poets Sul Mousavi and Zoey Greenwald salute mothers and youth. Maddie Vasquez weeps while memorializing a fallen poet. Reclining across the bed, Lily Lady closes out the night and tells everyone to leave. But before the room clears, a pillow fight erupts, Lady and a bunch of poets jumping up and down, bashing each other, ecstatic, euphoric, electric.
