On my lunch break, I go to the mall to buy a black fur coat to wear to Richard Hell’s book launch tonight. It’s 80% off, costs $80. I saw it yesterday and didn’t buy it for some reason. Now it’s finally mine.
Everyone’s ditching the reading. Jane, Jon, and Colette are all bailing. Katie isn’t really up to be my +1 anymore. I invite Matt. The highways aren’t bad, not much traffic, which is a relief because I really have to pee. I literally just peed and my bladder is about to explode from a few sips of La Croix I take while smoking cigarettes and listening to Yung Lean’s Warlord. It’s now that I think maybe I should write about tonight. I’m looking cool as fuck smoking cigarettes and listening to Yung Lean’s Warlord in my black fur coat. I wish someone could take a picture. But I can write about it instead. I think: I will make the title a play on A Year On Earth With Mr. Hell, a book by one of Richard’s former lovers that Richard condemned and called “revenge porn.” I only got through a few pages then never looked at it again. Whenever I see the red paperback on my shelf I scowl. The prose was painfully stale and prosaic, almost like in that awful Substack essay voice before that was a thing. How do you date Richard Hell and write about it so uninterestingly? Richard, I would never do that to you. At one point I have to pee so badly that I come up with a story idea: A girl who masochistically holds her pee for hours just to feel the euphoria of finally releasing it.
The guys at the parking garage let me use the bathroom. Only $16 for a few hours in the Lower East Side. On my walk in my black slip and fishnets, a man on a bicycle asks if I’m okay. Obviously I’m okay. He starts saying he wants to know where I’m going. He thinks I look good. He says he has yayo, k, addys. I only know what yayo is because of the Yung Lean song “Yayo.” I’ve loved the Lana Del Rey song “Yayo” since I was a teenager, but I never knew what the word meant. I thought it sounded pretty.
I meet Matt on the corner of Attorney and Stanton. First we go inside the bar but it’s pretty empty and we’re confused. Then we see the door all the way in the back. Private party, it says. We get a stamp on the wrist, a matchbox with the title of Richard’s book on it, and a raffle ticket. Matt and I wait on line for the open bar, though I’m not getting anything; I’m armed with four La Croixs in my bag. I hit my vape for the first time since Grace’s Valentine’s event on Friday. It tastes fresh. There’s Richard in front of us, the man of the hour, looking dapper in a cherry-red suit. The first person I run into is David. He asks why I didn’t accept his poem for publication. He thinks it’s next-level stuff, a work of genius, but no one will accept it. I ask if he can introduce me to any DILFs tonight. The place should be crawling with them, but it’s not.
I run into Cath. I show her my La Croix. She asks how long it’s been. Almost sixty days. She’s proud. Then I run into Carrigan. I introduce Matt and Carrigan and the three of us hang out. The room is packed to the brim; it’s almost impossible to move. We make our way toward the stage and I say hi to Car Crash Collective icons Erin and Britt, who are the night’s wonderful hosts. A couple years ago they asked me to do a reading and I was honored, and then I found out I was reading alongside Richard and felt crazy. My uncle gave me his first pressing of Blank Generation to congratulate me. I run into Madelyn and it’s somehow our first time meeting. When I ask if she works at a specific magazine she says she only writes for them sometimes and she has eighty-seven fake jobs. Weren’t you on Jeopardy, I ask. Yes, she says, that’s when I was super unemployed. I’m still looking for DILFs. I point one out to Matt, then the DILF starts talking to Richard’s girlfriend. That’s good, Matt says, get into the inner circle—the inner circle of Hell.
When Richard takes the stage, he’s endearingly self-conscious, says he’s strung out from the book rollout and can’t say something off the cuff so he wrote a page and a half. He reads from it, saying he’s honored to have Godlike reissued by NYRB, it feels like he’s in the Olympics—or Olympus. He says he thinks the book deserves the honor and everyone laughs, charmed. He calls Erin and Britt “the Car Crash sirens.” A true poet. He is somehow seventy-six yet looks two decades younger. Erin and Britt host a brief trivia game. The questions are based on The New York School of Poets. No googling allowed or they will get mad at you. The prizes, Richard explains, are acid blotters. But they don’t have acid, so he pissed on them to make them special. There’s also one sans piss. Whenever someone gets an answer right, they’re posed with the question: You want piss or no piss?
Richard insists the reading is only five minutes, apologetic that it’s happening at all. But it’s not the typical routine of an author relaying passages into a microphone—Richard is reading as the narrator while Erin and Britt read the dialogue of two characters. In the four pages, there’s a threesome and a poem. I like these lines of the poem: I know the taste of light / Red: cock head, Blue: asshole / (clean) Green: eyeball, White: blood. It’s engaging and makes me want to read the book, though I’m offended I didn’t get a galley. To be fair I hadn’t asked for one. I didn’t know who to ask. Afterward there’s a raffle. All there is to say about that is that I didn’t win, which made me sad. For some reason I’d felt luck in the air. Like maybe I could be the kind of girl who wins a raffle. I am not. Not yet. Then there’s a signing. Everyone’s wondering whether the books are free. Well, at least Matt and I are. They’re treating us all like royalty with the open bar, now we’re having high expectations.
More mingling. I run into Vivi, Nicole, Kennedy. I hear the books are in fact not free. I spot a DILF. Well, not a DILF. Just the weirdest-looking man in the room. I don’t know what to say, I complain. Just ask him how heroin was in the ’70s, Matt says. David taps the guy on the shoulder and says something like, This young lady wants to talk to you, her name is Danielle. He approaches me and I see he has next to no teeth. He leans into my ear when he speaks. He lives in Queens, plays bass. From Long Island, like me. I don’t know what to say. I’m terribly awkward. He asks about my writing projects but I can’t talk about them—I’ve been stumped with them lately and I don’t want to think about them. I escape the conversation by saying I’m going to smoke a cigarette. Matt surprises me—because I brought him as my +1 he got me a copy of Godlike.
Carrigan, Matt, and I go out to smoke and we run into Ryan. Ryan and I talk about how we were both just in a New York Magazine article about nightstands. He says he thought it would be a variety of people, not just writers, and he thought he would be the cool lone writer. He says the journalist did him dirty, telling him to emphasize the Bataille book on his nightstand when a bunch of other people in the article had it on their nightstands as well; the people in the Instagram comments made fun of all the Bataille readers. I realize I’m low on cigarettes and Carrigan says he’ll buy me a pack if I give him some. Well, of course. A brass band is playing around the corner in front of the bar—we can’t see any of it, but the horns boom exuberantly, invisibly. We start talking to an old homeless lady who’s having problems with the city. Her name is Francine. She says she used to be so happy, she used to play softball, she used to sing in glee club. She used to play clarinet, she always thought the sound was similar to that of an oncoming train. She calls me a young queen. As she’s saying goodbye to us she recites a prayer.
One more drink inside. No more open bar. Not many people left. Richard lingers. Erin and Britt want to introduce me to him but I’m too shy, don’t know what I’d even say to him. Carrigan says he’s giving up drinking and smoking for Lent. I finally discover what Fat Tuesday means and why everyone’s saying Happy Fat Tuesday. I kind of liked not knowing what it meant. I supported it without having a clue. I consider asking Richard if he’ll piss on my book but I’m still too shy. I ask Matt if he’ll walk me to the parking garage. I make him chug his beer. Then he and Carrigan both walk me to the garage and I feel like I have two bodyguards. On the sidewalk there’s two copies of Halloween by Ken Werner. Black-and-white street photography. Carrigan and I take them. On the drive I start writing about the night in my head. Before I know it, I’m home.
