So Many Ways to Sleep Badly by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore

Author:Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: City Lights Publishers

THE NEW TOASTER

I play Diamanda’s “My World Is Empty Without You” for Rue, and I keep having to rewind it to the point where Diamanda goes from a growl to softness. I close my eyes and yes, I think of Rue dying—and whether my world will be empty without him. I know that’s dramatic, but we are listening to Diamanda. Then I play David Bowie’s version of the Jacques Brel song “Amsterdam,” because I’m a sucker for any ridiculous song about hookers. What’s the line? Something about giving up their bodies for a thousand other men.

Rue says a thousand—I think I’m up around five thousand. And five of them were fun. Later, there’s a report on NPR about tourism, 17 million visitors to San Francisco is down to 13 million, seven billion dollars is down to under six. Did they really just say seven billion dollars? I go to see Party Monster, where Macaulay Culkin plays club kid Michael Alig chopping up Angel the drug dealer and dropping him in the East River. It’s supposed to be the early nineties, but they’re playing Stacey Q and Miss Kittin—fuck that shit, I want club kid realness! Plus, we only get a few shots of the outfits—it was all about the outfits, right? And drugs, of course, which of course I start to crave, even with some of the worst acting combined with a script written by a not-so-creative ten-year-old.

My trick at the W wants me to stay over—when I tell him I’ve got to go, he says what, there’s someone else? That’s the funny part—play-acting—but then his personality suddenly changes, he says: you’re stupid. Why am I stupid? Because you’re not staying here, in the Heavenly Bed. That’s the bed’s official name, I remember that from another trick. The trick starts patting the bed, he says come over here—you haven’t done enough for me to pay you yet.

It’s a totally different culture out there in the East Bay, luckily Jaysen picks me up at the BART and we go to New World Vegetarian. There are two burn-outs from Burning Man counting out six hundred dollars in ones at their table. They got spotted by the feds smoking pot, and were issued a four-hundred-dollar ticket, but then they made six hundred in an hour of panhandling. Jaysen says he’s been working all the time, but he’s still broke. And since he started doing massage at Eros, his sex life is totally tied up with work, since he meets guys in the steam room on his break—he doesn’t like it. I say: I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.

I come home and my whole apartment is filled with flies—where did they all come from? Ralowe scans the BAR and spots a new sex club—333 Linden—the ad shows a guy with his clothes on! Ralowe thinks that means it’ll be extra-bourgie, but I’m just looking for any new place where I can have bad sex.

Ralowe calls me in the morning—he actually went to 333, there was no one there, but the guy working sucked him off.

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