Has any of this carried over into adulthood, I ask him, my tape recorder offered up in a light way, a plate of cherries, a spit dish.
I like a shaved chest, he says. And I like to lick around the heart, to feel those vibrations. It’s never quite Chop, but maybe the slurred beat of Puree. And that’s nice.
I record myself, too. If we are growing into Americans, as is only logical, because we are growing, and in America, as citizens, then what are we growing into Americans from? It could be from nothing, from no country known, but what if we were French? We were so avante then, with our objects that we met up with, little dates under the bed, over the kitchen that clinked in tandem with parental clash, our crass unabashed experimentations, we were practically in league with Godard, or his puppets, and, if not him, Louis Malle, before our realization of realism began to kick forth, and real love relationships, for what it’s worth.
I have a friend who was passionate toward the family couch. He dipped himself into it while his father smoked in the bathroom just yards away, ashing and flushing. Tom, who’s now an artist out in Wyoming, told me he even named the couch, and wept, frustrated, when his father sometimes, after being abusive, slept on it, drool sublimated into paste by morning. As an artist, he’s tried to recreate the ash in the toilet with a blow that started from his wrist I saw, and a handful of pepper like dead fairy dust.
I ask him in a phone conversation if, in all of Wyoming, he doesn’t own one couch. I hook up the recorder to the phone and read the instructions, that I should inform him of what I’m doing, like a mattress tag that informs: don’t sever: but you do, tritely (mattress tags all over the galleries in New York, I’ve seen, something about breaking inane rules). Like the mattress tag, I don’t tell him I’m recording him.
I don’t have a couch here, he says. Just chairs.
How Ionesco of you.
What kind of research is this? He asks, all of the sudden, obviously, ashamed.
He doesn’t get my Ionesco reference.
As an artist, I say, it’s your job not to feel ashamed of anything.
This shames him more, because he’s remembering now that he’s failing as an artist, out in Wyoming.
Writers are condescending, and you’re condescending, he says too softly, as if he were really that sensitive.
It’s important to be a specific person, I tell him. You shouldn’t say things that already hang in the air, and that anybody could pull down.
Her name, he says, for your provocative research, was Claudia. He says Claudia with a tenderness that twists a spigot in me, and jealousy fills my stomach, and I could pee through my skin. I could wet the bed from the top of my head.
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