Exquisite Mariposa

by Fiona Alison Duncan

  Tracy says my vengeance is good: “That’s a lot of what art is—resistance.”

  “No one out there wants us loving ourselves,” I’ve heard Alicia say more than once.

  For years, I hated that I read and wrote because it felt like evidence of my inability to connect. When I left a party because I was anxious, the book was the fallback, not the choice. I tried making writing—my job: arts journalism—less lonely by only writing about what I love for an imagined audience of those I love, but what I made was never as beautiful as the reality it reached toward. The writing was like the bird your cat mauls dead and delivers to your bedside with a pleased, evil look on her face. But eventually, by doing it, and doing it, and doing it more, reading and writing delivered bouts of transcendence. (I imagine this happens with anything you study long enough.) Learning its components, its infinite resonances and limits, words became the material of the world, and now and then: I could rewrite it. Make believe my Real. Edit, change, surrender. God comes through. Fingers moving without deliberate intention: that’s the best writing.

  When I got us caught in the reality show deal, I was still reveling in fantasies. My writing was like advertising, beautifully crafted received ideas projected onto reality. I was deep into astrology, New Ageisms, and Lucien, more Real obsessions, at least, than my previous year’s—science fiction, romances with known con men, and a conviction that I alone could bring about the dissolution of capitalism from the confines of my bedroom.

  “That’s what you should write about,” Susan and Kimia, two of my adopted (not that they consented) mentors, were always telling me. That was always after I’d tell them a real-life story, like how I treated the yeast infection I got from using a zucchini as a dildo (I was desperate!) with a clove of garlic and a little organic yogurt.

  “Get out of the stars, Fi,” Kimia kept advising, while seeing me struggle on Earth. Neglecting realities like the body, I was always getting sick and ending up in crappy emergency-care clinics I couldn’t afford.

  At the exact midway point—the peak, as they say—of my Saturn Return, I was in Oaxaca City for an artist residency. There I met a young woman named Teresa, half Oaxacan, half New York Jew. Teresa’s mother was from Juchitán de Zaragoza, part of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec region of the postcolonial state. Thanks to its mountainous and therefore isolationist topography, the region’s indigenous cultures have managed to maintain something of their unique history even after Spanish colonialism and US imperialism. Hundreds of local languages are still spoken around Oaxaca. In her mother’s culture, Teresa told me, women are revered. They’re responsible for making the main export, this beautiful embellished clothing, a regional craft, like what Frida Kahlo wore.

  Juchiteca women are “tall, broad, expressive, and in charge,” Teresa told me, “and there are also, in their culture, boy-girls, beloved femme men, kinda trans, but not—it’s a fluctuating identity they call ‘muxe.’” Some muxe present as women their whole lives, dating men, while others flow in and out of the feminine.

  Teresa is superfemme, like Mama Matrix most mysterious. Curvy and curly-maned, she salsas snapping her hips and heels like she could a neck. She also, when I met her, was twenty-five and experiencing dysphoric depressions and anxiety. Teresa had just moved back to Oaxaca from Texas and New York to “recover” and “reset.” It seemed like a majority of my girlfriends were doing this: Miffany, Clara, and Morgan were; I had the year before; and Alicia and Susan would the next year. We retreated and dropped out, to read, smoke, introspect, and feel closer to being safe, or invisible.

  In college, Teresa told me, she once tried to be a sidewalk. Or, she decided she was the sidewalk. Being steady as concrete seemed wiser to her than rushing between classes during finals. She lay down, stiff as the ground in winter, on her favorite spot in the quad, where the afternoon light shimmered golden, next to an old oak whose bark reminded her of her father’s beard. She got still—very, very still—still as stone, and she was stone, so of course she didn’t hear her peers when they asked her what was up. Nor could she hear the dean when he asked her to move, and when her friends Hollis and Sean picked her up and carried her back to her dorm, she didn’t soften, but rather stayed steady, steady stiff. They called that a depression. It seemed perfectly sensible to me. Hilarious, even though I know it must’ve been painful for Teresa.

  I wish they hadn’t medicated her. I wish I’d met people like Teresa and those of La Mariposa when I was younger. It would’ve saved me a lot of time and anguish; I thought I was crazy too.

  When I was college-age, my party-happy friends would tell me, “Get out of your head,” and “Think less.” “You’re neurotic.” “Just do you, girl,” they’d say.

  “But I don’t know what that means!!” I’d exclaim.

  Then there were the brainy peers, intellectual-identified types, like my boyfriend at the time, who seemed to judge my vacuity. I like feeling empty. Like nothing. Receptive and worldly. Open to being filled up. I also love surface. Glamour. Beauty. Fashion. It’ll be laughably anachronistic soon to think emptiness and surface and depth and intelligence are at odds.

  I witnessed four panic attacks during my stay at La Mariposa. Four different souls willing themselves free from prisons of ego, trauma, debt, and fantasy. Five if you count me.

  Joelle had just lost her job. Her best friend, Darya, had moved into Morgan’s room after she left for the Bay, so Joelle came over to feel less crazy. Joelle’s a delicate creature. She likes a set schedule and a steady paycheck, the security of “a real job,” ideas Darya (who’s an actress) and I have never entertained. It was midafternoon on a weekday. Darya suggested she and Joelle smoke a little weed to relax. I tuned in when the paramedics busted in. Two young jocks, hate-fuckably built, were responding to a call of, “I’m dying!” Joelle, in a panic, had locked herself in Darya’s bathroom and called 911. It’d been almost an hour since she called, two since they smoked the roach, but the boneheads put it all on the drugs.

  “Make it stooooop,” Joelle said. Her naked torso flailed as if possessed. She was in Darya’s bed looking like Regan MacNeil in The Exorcist, with pallid, sweaty skin, green around the edges.

  “Have you girls been smoking marijuana?” one of the medics asked.

  Darya explained it’d been a mellow indica, hours ago. Meanwhile Joelle whined, “No, no, no. Make them go, make this stop, I’m sorry, no.”

  Darya covered Joelle’s bare chest. We rubbed her back with open palms and I made my breath audibly oceanic, a trick I had learned from Simone five years earlier, when our friend Phillip, whose estranged mother had just died, tripped as if to hell to find her. Simone had lured him back to our Montreal apartment with her double-Piscean ocean breath.

  “It’s all in your head, sweetie,” one of the medics (they really were indistinguishable) said.

  “We see this all the time.”

  “It’s a bad strain, they’re very common.”

  Right, it’s our state-regulated top-shelf medicinal marijuana that’s bad, Darya mouthed back. We both knew what it was—a panic attack. Classic.

  “Tell her it’s just in her head.”

  “It’s just the drugs.”

  “We see this at least twice a week.”

  (I knew it was an epidemic! Anxiety is rampant, and bro-holes are getting paid to come into our homes to tell us it’s not Real.)

  The paramedics’ cocky incompetence was only increasing Joelle’s hyperventilating.

  “You should go,” Darya commanded, and the men walked away, convinced of their authority.

  We made Joelle tea, got her in the shower, and then she took a nap. Thirty minutes later, she was present again.

  “I’ve never had that happen,” Joelle said.

  She told us she was embarrassed. I replied she shouldn’t be. In fact, a guilty part of me was relieved. Right before the medics stomped in, I had been fire-breathing in my room, trying to tame my own crazy-angry madness. It was a new moon, rent was due
soon, and I felt trapped between an empty checking account and a thick uterine lining. Joelle looked light, almost radiant. Her anxious sweat had chilled to a glow. We hugged, and Joelle went home. The emptiness she left me with reminded me of the feeling I had after painting Kimia. Sometimes the tensions build and build and build, nations of toxic thoughts populate your assumed solitude; a claustrophobia inside your own skin, stressed the fuck out. The body is wise though. It’ll make change happen, even if it’s with a fit. Anything to clear the cache. The sensitive ones, I’ve noticed, tend to implode. It’s Lucien curled in on himself crying onto my floor. It’s Alicia wearing a mask of cool togetherness so no one will be burdened by her unraveling insides.

  Alicia and I spent a lot of time talking about “healing.” Except for Max, whose performative self-destructive rock-star habits kind of worked for him, all the residents of La Mariposa thought they needed “healing.” Nadezhda sought to heal sexual trauma so she could experience penetrative sex again (a PTSD pussy will go on lockdown, and bar entry like a safe). Miffany sought to heal her relationship to God and “the gaze,” and Morgan to stillness (she wanted to sit and make things, but could only find the courage to run, bike, and move), while Alicia wanted to not want—after the littlest conflict with the one she loved—“to go out and suck twenty cocks.” Ha ha. I could relate. She also wanted a career—the confidence to work in the Real World. We didn’t get it. How did people do it?

  I loved listening to Alicia. I remember being intimidated, before I met her, by her persona, her social media and party presence; immaculate, potent, aggressive. At home, in sweats, she was soft and intelligent. She could quote Ren and Stimpy, Kanye, and William Blake in swift succession. Her half-a-room was a cocoon of fuck-me heels, shredded clothes like fallen armor, ruby-red blankets, and books: Urban Tantra, Weetzie Bat.

  I remember one Sunday, listening to Alicia talk about her family history. I was on the floor, she was on her bed, makeup-free in sweats. With her shaved eyebrows, incisive gaze, and regal posture, she looked like a Sphinx—I kept getting goose bumps.

  “I recently realized I’m very prideful,” Alicia said. I’d just asked, “What’s new?”

  “When I really need help,” she continued, “I keep to myself. I get determined to do it all on my own, too fearful to reach out. And that’s when I’ve gotten really sick.”

  Sick like so many of us are. We get dim. The world around us spins. It feels like we’re running for our lives when we’re sitting still. We self-medicate with whatever’s near: media, carbs, sex, drugs, jobs. Escapism. We feel worse. Deserving of it. Or we pretend it’s all good. We strive and strive and strive toward goals we’re indifferent to. Act so fabulous people get jealous of us. Validation. More escapism. Sleep twelve hours a day, or never. Reality gets dreamy, and we—vacant, numb, or meaningfully volatile, entertained—watch it stream. Irresponsible. Pretending not to care safeguards us from real feelings. Complaining is almost like doing. It’s all their fault. Or it’s all ours. We suck. Might as well We cut for release. Walk around screaming inside. Hurt ones we love. Deny, deny. Some of us control the trap we feel we’re in by shaking it up. Our snow globe’s in a flurry; agitation, glamour, distraction. Or we get very, very still. Hold our breath. Play dead.

  It didn’t occur to me to ask what Alicia meant by “sick.” It’s all around us. Instead, I asked, “What helped?”

  “I started looking to my ancestry,” Alicia replied. “From the origins of my name to my parents’, grandparents’, and tías’ lives, family secrets and generational struggles. I always made a point of listening to family stories, so I won’t make the same mistakes, so they didn’t go through it for nothing.”

  Alicia’s mother’s father, I learned, is from the Philippines. Her mother’s mother was from Tennessee. She was black. He worked in asparagus fields. She waitressed at a diner. They met in California in the late 1930s and had five kids.

  “There was a lot of violence around,” Alicia said. “My mom’s mom was taken away by the cops once when my mom was a girl. No one explained why, they just showed up. My grandma was gone for two years for mental shit. Nobody knows what she was diagnosed with, but she came back with no teeth, and she didn’t talk much after that. I know that was a huge event for my mom. More shit happened too. It’s just a lot of trauma. A lot of pain. I just want to understand. I really would like to know what the hell I’m here for besides watching all these people I care about be sad about things they should not have to be sad for.”

  That’s the plaguing question.

  “Maybe I’m so obsessed with this history stuff,” Alicia continued, “because if I can break through and do things differently, then others can too, and then collectively . . .”

  In my fantasies, I’m the leader of an interstellar feminine rebellion. “Buddhist, psychedelic, green, feminist culture,” my hippie character croons. “It’ll save the world, man.” Trees are our allies. I communicate with them. Wiser than men, one touch of a trunk and I’m Real again. Of course trees are wise—staying in one place teaches you a lot. Being broke, I do this often. I’ll set myself up at a fancy hotel pool (“My boyfriend’s staying here”—I relish lying to big business), or at a public park, a library, a café, Venice Beach, and I watch. The blocks around MacArthur Park are as wild as a Glendale mall or Beverly Hills or South-Central. I like watching humans move, the paces of different classes and our clothing styles. (You know why high fashion’s obsessed with derelict chic? Hobo style? It’s because the homeless wear their God-given wares like they don’t give a fuck. That’s what “cool” is in fashion. Disaffection.) Most of us out here in America, I’ve learned from my neighborhood watch, are bent on survival. In Santa Monica, survival is clothed in yoga tights—all the kept white women. Around MacArthur Park, we depend on social services, camaraderie, God, and other drugs.

  Trees apparently communicate underground. Through root networks, they share news of water sources and viruses. The Internet runs like roots underground too. My father, a computer engineer (he builds the hardware the Internet runs on), explained this to me once. After that, I started fantasizing about digging up and sawing through the cables our interconnection depends on.

  I’ve loved the Internet. Without it, I wouldn’t have met La Mariposa or Susan, Kimia, Ana, Clara, Amalia, Asher, Alexa, Stefan, or Misty. The Internet delivered me my interiority: multivalence, confidence. It was my playground, a training ground. Circa 2012–15, my full-immersion years, I loved the Internet like my life depended on it. Now I’m not suggesting we break up, more like it’s time to transition to an open relationship.

  This is in part what I wanted our reality show to be about. I saw how my new Mariposa friends were, like I’d been, so committed to being online. We spent years cuddled up in bed with it, like the first spell of romance. But the magic of the medium we loved, I was convinced, had expired, become rotten, poisoned by corporate interests and competitive language viruses (like “likes”). Said another way: Our souls had outgrown it. If we stayed in as we’d been, we’d get sick. Sicker than we’ve been.

  Episode 09—“Angels Flight”

  I LOVE LOS ANGELES. I walk it convinced I am the place. I am the parched palms. I am the Bank of America sign, sun-bleached pink. I am every storefront psychic. I am homeless, Hills rich, and delusional. I’m a faithless aspiring actress. I’m sex on the beach. Dogtown, Downtown, Blade. I am longing, I am meth, I am porn and a press pass. I’m the Boomer in a blue Mustang blasting the Indiana Jones theme song on a residential street in Hollywood, and I’m the guy in a pearl minivan who jerked off as I gave him directions to the Beverly Center. I am Dennis Hopper, Angelyne, Thom Andersen, Jaden Smith, and Norma Jean Almodovar, LAPD’s finest. I am my retro drug dealer, Justin Moonbeam, and his two fat cats, Raymond and Chandler. I’m fresh-cut pastel flowers perennial at the Beverly Hills Hotel. I’m missing the bus that only comes every forty minutes. I’m parasols in Chinatown, a Spanish church service, a plastic surgeon, a power lesbian, a
nd the energy healer who recommended I read Walt Whitman. Nihilism, Zen wisdom, Café Gratitude, jacaranda, sunshine, and secrets. I am screenwriting at Intelligentsia and introduced as an intellectual as if that’s novel. I’m a true story. I can’t write fiction.

  I am love.

  Nowhere have I felt so happy to have stereotypes confirmed. When the unsurprising surprises, I think, That’s love. Every day delightful. When the sorrow is meaningful. I love the raggedy drunk I bought mermaid art from on the Venice Beach boardwalk. I love cruising skater boys, the folds of their socks. I love hiking as a slightly inclined walk and girls doing it in full faces of makeup. I love hippie bumper stickers. I love grocery stores with valet. I love being surrounded by my friends! Celebrities, I grew up watching you. Screens and magazines were my extended family. Tim Robbins smiling at me from his beach cruiser. Bruce Willis’s girls. Willie Nelson’s son. Jennifer Aniston. Of course I feel at home in LA. Everyone’s lit like a star under our sun. Even our trees look like stars! Bursts precariously swaying on a thin shoot or mopped atop a thick pineapple trunk. Lucien calls it Hell A. He compares rush-hour freeways to clogged arteries. Heart attacks and heartbreak.

  My mom said this of baby shit: that it smells almost sweet when it’s from your own born. I would have been a fifth-generation Californian if my parents hadn’t left LA with me eight months in utero. Is that why the sight of blond surfer locks and that violet blue my parents painted their garage door—which made no sense in Ontario, but then, when I moved here, I saw it everywhere—why these tones wow me so? Why I walk around this town crying? Salty tears watering my feared-barren heart to blossom. I love the love loves to love love graffiti that spoils our city. It wouldn’t be all over the place if we didn’t need it, I know that. LA is dark. A portal to the underworld. Full of rapists and liars. Neptune’s net.