i want someone to kill me

how to get to new york, part three

A red line train rumbled overhead and away. I made a motion with my hand and said “shooop, into the night!”

One train then became three and Louis and I began yelling at them passing. When we eventually fell back to normal speaking voices we continued our conversation about our aimlessness at the sidewalk patio table outside Prost in Lincoln Park.

“Like what,” I said to Louis, holding my cigarette up like a french girl. “I think you’re so cool. You’re so very aware of who you are. I love that in a person. There are so many people out there who don’t know who the hell they are, like most people don’t.”

“But it’s so hard knowing who you are. It doesn’t help anything. All it does is create pressure. And,” Louis pointed towards Prost, “I’m the only one in there who’s unemployed.”

“Yeah but at least you’re not working some stupid accounting job.”

Louis rocked his head back and forth. “But they have money,” he said.

“You know I think about it sometimes that twenty years ago you and I would be able to find some place at a publishing house, some sort of work as an editor or a copywriter and we would’ve killed. We would have killed.”

His eyes lit up. “Yeahh,” he said, and then he deflated.

I shivered slightly.¹

“I just wish that I could meet someone,” he said after a moment, navalgazing off into the June air. “Someone to put me over their shoulder and carry me along with them.”

“I feel that,” I said, after a beat. “I’ve been looking for like romance but it’s um, well you know it’s hard to come across. Sometimes I worry about, you know, not being able to love someone the way I want to be loved. That feels real. That feels like a real feeling. I don’t know..”

“I think about that a lot too, yeah.”

“Like we’re all walking on those powerlines and if you fall off,—and it’s easy to fall off,—you just fall to the next one down and I can keep doing walking the lines without shocking myself more or less, I think, but wouldn’t it be nice to have someone’s hand to hold? I don’t know.”

We finished our cigarettes and walked back inside where above the bar the presidential debate raged like a very mild, mildewy wind alongside a widescreen rerun of Ed, Edd, and Eddy. Everyone in the group was enraptured in the debate but talking mildly outside of it while Jason, with long sparkling earrings, poured us free draft beers and chimed in occasionally.

On the far left of the bar was Maddie, who kept pointing to Trump on the screen and saying “Ahh,” or, “oh my god he sucks, he’s so awful,” or, “Guys, guys, He’s going to destroy the country.” She’s probably right about this, but anyways..

To her right sat Chris, quiet, bearded and drinking. Louis sat in the middle and I sat to Blake’s right. I’d been talking to Blake about music earlier, both of us are into songwriting and production and all that nonsense,—”nothing gets white people dancing like LCD soundsystem,” he said. He also said they had the best live show he’d seen anywhere. Blake performs in a now-defunct Chicago EDM group at a local comedy club with throughlines like My leg is not a clit, stop rubbing it, repeated over and over again to an increasingly complex rhythm line. The music’s actually quite good, I think. It hits.

Every once in a while Biden would make a face on the screen, stare off into the distance, look generally like he was about to die at any moment, and as a group we would say, “Oh nooo, genocide joe,” or a simple “ew.”

Emma joined and we left the bar after a bit and walked to the apartment where Chris and Blake were in the process moving out; while we walked we were an amorphous moving group singing out the lyrics to some song that i don’t know and can’t remember the name of but whose chorus was easy enough to sing along to in the moment,—funny how that happens,—and across the street in jonquil park, two outfielders in an adult game of kickball started singing along and pointing up towards the melodies we were singing. Blake accused Maddie of being so goddamn straight in how she sings and Maddie started singing “straight pri-ide.” Laughter, eye rolling, etc.

The apartment was half moved out but a projector and speakers is enough to sing karaoke so we sang a couple of Lana songs and one LCD song.

Maddie began to curl up next to Blake and kept kissing his face and I thought to myself, isn’t Blake gay? He didn’t seem all that into what was happening here.

What’s up? by 3 Non Blondes played next and everyone sang together and i tried to go as high as my voice could go to hit those heyeyey’s and i asked Louis if i was hitting those notes right and he said absolutely, then i asked emma if i was hitting those notes right and she said “are you trying to harmonize? it’s a low song. The song is sung in a low voice.”

I felt genuinely pissed about this in the moment,—I know it’s wrong, they sing high in that song— but who am I to argue, so I crossed my arms and sulked.

Meanwhile Maddie was dancing on Blake’s lap and making out with his face while he just more or less sat there on the couch.

I asked Louis if he wanted to go smoke a cig on the back porch and he said yeah, absolutely.

We talked for a while out there in the night air. Louis took one step and collapsed against the wood of the balcony, his back against the rails. I sat in a lawn chair chair with my shoes up. Slumped down against the banister, his head spun back and forth once. ”I think you’re really cool,” he said. “I just- I just think you’re really cool.”

“Um thank you,” I say. Louis says this to everyone when he’s drunk.

“Can I be- can i be honest with you? Can I,—”

“Yeah what’s up?”

“No no no. Never mind.”

“Hey what?”

“I wish you would be more mean to me.”

I looked at him and asked, “why would I be mean to you? I don’t like being mean to people? I like you, Louis.”

A breeze came through twinkling through the porch, lighting up the hairs on my legs. The thick ropes of power lines just beyond the wood of the porch swayed ever so slightly; and across the alleyway wax-leafed hedges surrounding a whitewashed fence on a second floor patio sighed, rustled.

“I want someone to be mean to me,” he said.

“What?”

“I want someone to hurt me. Break my nose and love me.”

I said nothing.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“Man you’re just needing some dick,” I said.

“Mann,” he said. “It’s not like that.”

I regretted trying to make a joke. “I don’t know… I mean like there’s a healthy way to channel that you just have to figure out what all that is.”

“I know, I know,” he said.

“Like there’s like, I don’t know, bondage stuff you could get into, there’s—”

“I’m not talking about that. I just want someone to kill me and like throw my body over their shoulder and carry me along with them.”

“Yeah. Yeah I get that.”

And the breeze came in like a wave. And a train car rustled by in the distance. An unseen motorcycle flew down Lincoln.

I finished my cigarette and took another sip of my beer, and Johnathan and Maddie came out and said wassup and I said wassup, but Louis said I need to get up, and he tried his best to get up but very nearly fell ass first through the massive hole in the railing before Maddie and I grabbed his arms and pulled him to his feet. “I’m fine, I’m fine,” Louis said. He went inside. Soma came walking outside and stood upright smoking a cigarette. We talked for a bit about her quitting her foodrunning job and paying bills by working as a freelance concert photographer.

Chris came out a bit later with a beer to his chest and we talked about literature and his work as a playwright. He’s moving back to California when the lease is up here at this apartment in three days while Blake’s going to Yale for production design in the fall but he’ll be bumming around Chicago until then.

The night swirled around and when I walked back into the dark, neon colored living room I found Louis, Blake and Maddie all sprawled out, seeming bored. Soma said she was going to smoke a joint if I wanted to join. Louis said, “you should.” And I did.

I sat talking with Soma on the wood porch connecting her apartment building with Blake’s,—her cat came out from their apartment and looked at the two of us outside smoking,—and we passed back and forth a joint she had rolled this morning. I felt, honestly, wonderful. I took a picture of Blake and Chris’s apartment.

spooky

Eventually Maddie and Chris comes out of the apartment. Maddie’s exasperated, throwing her arms up, saing “I saw his whole butt. I saw his wholeass butt.” Then, after she calmed down, she said, “I walked into Blake’s room to say here’s your phone, I found his phone in the kitchen, and Him and Louis were already having sex,—I was only out of the room for five minutes and Louis’s whole butt was already out and they were already going at it. Oh my god. I hate the gays. Not all of them. But only one of them. Only Blake because he’s my mine, he’s my man, he’s my man.”

“Oh honey,” Soma said, standing, lightly touching Maddie’s shoulder. “Blake’s gay.”

“I know. I know,” Maddie said quietly.

And we stood outside a moment or two longer. Chris rubbed his eyes and looked down at the ground. Maddie said that she was going to leave. She hugged Soma, hugged Chris, shook my hand and we both said nice to meet you, and we laughed I think because chances are strong that we won’t ever see each other again,—Chicago’s a big city². I didn’t want to overstay my welcome and it was clear Louis wasn’t coming down to say goodbye, so I stepped down from the porch, said my goodbyes to everyone, and stepped out into the alleyway.

Feeling that opening my phone would ruin the precious way I felt in that moment, I instead used the streetsigns to triangulate my way home and I took shortcuts through the cobblestone alleyways connecting the streets, filled with trash cans, grass, garage doors, alley cats, rats scuttling, with a soft breeze permeating it all, and everything felt new and fresh and and green and profound, and everything breathed in its own way.

While I walked I sung to myself, “and I awoke, vaguely bouncing ‘round the room,” thinking about what Louis had said earlier, I want someone to kill me. What I couldn’t quite bear to admit in the moment is how i also quietly yearn for that, for someone to end me, to carry me with them over their shoulder into a future i don’t myself need to decide, i want someone to wrap their legs around me so tightly that i can no longer breathe, i want someone to snuff the life out of me so that i don’t need to face the pressure of living it, i want to smoke something so strong that i enter into a dream,—and they say that when you smoke a cigarette, a joint, whatever, it’s really the joint that’s smoking you and there’s the appeal,—deep down, i want my train to leave the station into the night, to that final unknowable destination whose name we know too well.

anyways,

goodnight everyone,

xoxoxo

briffin

//

what have i been reading, you ask? Wellllllll

• The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker

• Kindred by Octavia Butler

• One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

• The Power Elite by C. Wright Mills

what have i been watching?? you’re full of questions, sheesh

• Hundreds of Beavers

• Twin Peaks, duh

• The Bear the Video Game

1. I had been shivering a little as I walked down lincoln avenue to get to Prost, also. Louis invited me to his friends’ moving away party and said to keep things lowkey. The breeze had been slight but it was enough to shake my hands while I had walked over. Holding my phone up on the walk, I watched a bit of the presidential debate and i laughed to myself whenever either old man spoke. A middle aged woman walking her dog passed me on my left, also watching the debate on her phone.

2. Funnily enough, though, I ran into her and Blake again three days later at the Sur de Lac exhibition in the Loop where a mutual friend of ours has been designing clothes and woodworking. Here’s a picture of our mutual friend, Ollie, and Momo in one of Ollie’s chairs, getting their impressions taken by the event’s characture artist.

ollie and momo sitting in ollie’s chair