That Was Something by Dan Callahan

Author:Dan Callahan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: romance, hollywood, gay, obsession, photography, silent film, film fanatic, nyc 1990s
Publisher: Handtype Press

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VI

So yes, Paradise lost. I’m not going to go too deeply into that. I was here in the city. I hate reading about it. I hate when anybody writes about it. So let me suggest it quickly. The smell isn’t really describable, and it lasted for months. There were several occasions on the street and on the subway when I heard viciously anti-Semitic free-floating hostilities. There was a man with a Jamaican accent who preached hellfire and just desserts on the subway who would follow you from car to car. Fear and paranoia and dismal fantasies of revenge soaked into everything.

I lost my job and couldn’t find another one. My money dwindled. By the beginning of 2002, I was at the end of my tether. Jeanne Moreau called me. She still had my number. She asked if I was all right. I told her yes, yes, I was fine, but I wasn’t. When even Jeanne Moreau is looking outside of her splendid self, you know that something is wrong. “If you come to France, I will cook for you,” she offered. If I’d had any money, I would have gone, but when you have no money, you’re stuck, and I was stuck in Doom City.

I was still living in my hallway in the East Village, going to Kim’s Video every day. I didn’t have money for food, but I always had money for a film rental. Ben was in Europe with his drug posse. He had gone there after the silent comedy party, and he hadn’t returned after the disaster. I wondered if he’d ever come back. We hadn’t even properly said goodbye. He sent me short letters and short emails and asked me to look after Monika, who was difficult to reach then even when you did reach her.

I love the wistfulness of a first name and a last name. That comes, perhaps, from being so marked by the television show My So-Called Life when I was in high school. Everybody said and used a first and last name on that show, for extra 1990s woebegone oomph. Angela Chase. Jordan Catalano. Rayanne Graff. Brian Krakow. Rickie Vasquez. All of those names are magic to me. What’s in a name? A rose. I wonder what became of those people on that show. They’d be my age now, or just a little older. I doubt Angela wound up with either Jordan or Brian. They were in high school, after all. I have a feeling Rayanne isn’t doing well. And that Angela doesn’t talk to her anymore and has repeatedly ignored her Facebook friend requests.

Here’s a name of mine: Heinz Laranthal.

We were halfway into 2002. My money was almost gone, and I couldn’t hang on much longer. So I took a job. One of those times where you “take any job.” It was a rude awakening. I was paid to pick up the phone in a real estate office. There were about twenty lines, and sometimes three or four of them would

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