Note to Self: A Novel

by Alina Simone

  “This is where I keep my collection,” the man said. Two eyeholes had been punched into the bag, also a slit for the mouth, through which wet lips and a swatch of mustache were visible. “Under the bed.” He bent down, felt around, and pulled out a large plastic bag.

  “Does it matter which one we start with? No? OK, so this one is Penthouse Forum,” he began, taking out a magazine and laying it on the bedspread. “It’s, like, just letters about celebrity fantasies and shit like that. It’s not that interesting, actually. It’s kind of a joke. Look at this. Every letter always starts out with the same horseshit line. ‘I never thought these letters were real, until I decided to write one myself,’” the man mimicked in a low, husky voice, then laughed from inside the bag. “Almost like parodies of letters, you know? And the celebrities are … where is it…” The man started flipping through the magazine. “Yeah, man, check this one out,” he held up a page and the camera zoomed in on a photo of Andie MacDowell wearing a red dress, smiling hard. “Who’s gonna jerk off to some has-been MILF that’s not even showing her vah jay jay, right? Who’s gonna jerk off to Andie MacDowell? Would you, man?” he snorted. “I think I saw this same photo later, too, in a Campari ad. I guess it doesn’t matter, though. If I’m already horny almost anything will work. It’s like I’m just looking for that final, uh, you know, push.” The man put the magazine back in the bag. “So that’s Forum. But they have ads for these nine-hundred numbers, too,” he said. “Sometimes I use those. OK, next.” The man reached in and grabbed a bunch more magazines. “So then I got some of these multipacks. Why? Because they’re cheaper. They’re, like, old issues of things that’re combined into different groupings. Like, ‘butts’ or ‘dildos’ or whatever. And I have a thing for, you know, the young ones. I mean, you can’t sell any images of girls under eighteen, but these girls are total jailbait, I bet. I like this one.” He held up the cover of a magazine with a young girl whose mouth had the permanently doughnuted look of a blow-up doll. “L’age légal.” The man began turning the pages, this time slowly and deliberately, and the camera moved in close. There were pictures of hairless girls, wearing an inch of lipstick, their lingerie pulled to one side so their tits could pop out. Page after page, they kept moving their panties aside and looking perpetually shocked at the discovery of their own business. It was kind of amazing. Anna couldn’t help but think, I mean, don’t they get bored? It could be, like, their eighteenth shoot of the day and they still have to be all, Whoa! What’s this…? Well, hello! Look who’s here? Unbelievable. I would make the crappiest porn star ever, Anna thought, as she shifted the laptop, which was now burning the tops of her thighs, to the pillow next to her head.

  “I’ll be your tampon any day,” the man said to a cherubic blonde who happened to be going down on another blonde, who was busy plunging a dildo into a brunette whose entire face had been swallowed in the gutter of the two-page spread. He flipped through the rest of the magazine quickly, until it was done, then tossed it aside.

  “Purely Anal,” the man announced, shaking his head with what might have been delight. His head made a loud rustling sound inside the bag.

  “This one’s kind of embarrassing. See this lady?” The man flipped the page. There was a picture of a disembodied white cock squirting onto the face of a black woman. “She’s always wearing sunglasses. See? Every picture.” The man turned the page and there was the same lady, giving a blow job, indeed wearing the same sunglasses. “It’s kind of cool, though. Almost a cult thing. This is a good one, actually, this issue. I think this is the one that, uh, deserves a reading.” The man hesitated. He stuck one of his hands up the bag to scratch his face, then reached down and readjusted himself. “Now I’m supposed to read this, right?” He stood up on the bed. For a second the camera zoomed in on his athletic socks, which had blue and white stripes at the top, then tilted queasily upward. The man was shifting uncertainly from foot to foot on top of the bed, his head close to the low ceiling, holding L’age légal away from his face at arm’s length with one hand.

  “Halt!” he bellowed suddenly, in a labored Shakespearean baritone. “In this enseamed Greyhound station bathroom? But it is so dirty here, dear lass! Nay? Perchance, you cannot wait? My hot throbbing cock is bursting its seams and your loins cannot withstand it! Kneel then, by the porcelain throne yonder, as my hands caress your rock-hard nipples, as you take me unto yourself and my hot foaming jizz rushes like a cresting wave over your fair brow. Forsooth, your knees be raw, but thou art fucking me like a crazy bitch, a deeper and harder banging I hath ne’er imagined. Thy pussy, so wet, so fucking wet and—” The man, overcome with laughter, sat back down and bounced awkwardly a few times on the bed.

  “Sorry, man. I couldn’t help it. I know I promised, but the writing in these things is pretty ridic, you know? Porn mags aren’t really about the writing. Sometimes I’ll be reading and, like, notice that I’m going along, correcting the grammar in my head? I’ll be like, ‘What the fuck?’ Psht.” He crossed his legs and went back to flipping through L’age légal. “Anyway, the other weird thing about this magazine? It totally isn’t purely anal. Look. Blow job. Fucking. Head. Head. Three-way.” The man kept flipping. “Anal. Only now we get to anal. The whole thing’s supposed to be anal and there’s, like, barely any butt action at all! But I kind of like the weirdness of it, like they’re tricking you into thinking it’s all anal. Even though,” he added, sotto voce, “I am really into anal sex.

  “God, we have a lot to get through, man. This is a lot.” He paused, pulling another handful of porn out of the bag. “This bag is totally gonna rip soon, too. Want to know something weird? I bet my mom knows I have this stuff. She cleans in here. She must have found them by now. When my brother still lived at home, he kept his pornos under the bed, too. He’s the one who showed me. I could move them, I guess. Hide them better. But I like to be able to just reach under the bed, you know? It’s all about the easy access. And, OK, this is gonna sound really fucked up, but sometimes? Sometimes I think about my mom finding this stuff as I’m jerking off. Like, I picture my mom finding it and it gets me off that she pictures me getting off or something. Isn’t that fucking sick? You should bleep that out, dude. I can’t even believe I told you that. OK, but here are two more: Tight and Young and Tight. Young and Tight sounds like it would be good, right? But I actually like Tight better. It’s pretty disgusting.” He opened up an issue of Tight and flipped through it in silent contemplation. “I haven’t actually bought porn for a couple months, so these are all getting kinda stale. I mean, it’s not like I’ve squeezed everything I can out of every picture or anything. But I definitely could use another hit, you know? Whoa—I love this one. Check this out, man.” He held the magazine out to the camera, reading the title out loud. “‘The fragile beauty of young anal lesbians.’” He shook his head laughing again. “Hilarious.”

  Then the man stood up but the camera stayed where it was and Anna could see only his midriff, his khaki shorts, and a roll of fat.

  “Hey, do you want some cheese?” a voice asked from above. Then the midriff walked off camera and there was just the bed, the pile of porn, a lonely tentacle of ivy snaking down the wall. The sun hacked at the edges of the shades. The camera jumped to the ceiling, then cut out with a stab of static.

  The scene reopened with the man’s ass backlit by the refrigerator. Asslit, Anna couldn’t help but think. He emerged holding a wedge of cheese on a plate, then made his way over to the sink to grab a cutting board. As the man rummaged in a drawer, the camera drifted around the room until it settled on a milk crate of empty beer bottles in the corner. The milk crate was set on top of another milk crate, also full of empties.

  “Hey, you want some of this, man?” The camera swung back to the man, who was holding out a piece of cheese stuck to the flat end of a knife. “It’s Emmentaler. Good shit, seriously. I got it at the farmers’ market fresh. These two guys have, like, some kind of artisanal cheese farm out in Ashby and they truck it in on t
he weekends. Try it, man. It’s straight outta the sheep or whatever.” He waved the knife in front of the camera again. “Come on, man. It’s been all day, you must be hungry. At least have a glass of water or something…? OK, right. I forgot your whole thing.” The man snorted. “Who’s gonna watch this movie anyways? Me and cheese and butt fucking. Not exactly Avatar, man. You gonna have this in 3-D, too? Charge like sixteen bucks?” The man stuck the cheese into his mouth hole and chewed. “That’s not a bad name, by the way. Me and Cheese and Butt Fucking. You should remember that.”

  He started walking back to his room and the camera followed.

  “I was thinking of getting one of those pictures of the black lady in the sunglasses custom framed,” the man called over his shoulder. “With, like, a backing and glass and a really, really nice wood frame? Just as a joke. That’s only for when I get my own place, though,” he added. “Not while I’m still living here.”

  Back in his room, he sat down on the bed and crossed his legs. “Back to work, right? OK. This one’s just, like, a catalog. They have a lot of ads for, you know, toys and videos. The place I go is basically a video store, by the way. Sugar’s. I remember going in there for the first time. It’s actually not far from here. You probably drove past it. Right after that Sunoco station at the exit? I was kind of scared. I walked in, looked around, and was like—whoa, these people are gross. Every time I go in, I’m thinking to myself, I’m definitely the least gross guy in here.” The man paused for a moment. “I almost got a toy for Kylie. But that was right before things got weird with us. We had butt sex once. Well, kind of…” The man trailed off. “Anyway, if you want to see that other stuff, it’s up in the closet. I’ve got some vintage, too, where it’s not all girls with Barbie doll parts—”

  Then the camera suddenly swung to the door. A voice was calling from just outside.

  “Snickers just left skid marks on the kitchen floor again,” a little girl yelled. “You better clean it before Mom gets home.”

  “You clean it,” the guy barked from inside the bag. Then, to the camera, “Fucking cat.”

  “I’m gonna tell Mom you told me to walk to my lesson—” the girl’s voice called back.

  “Get outta here, Kay. I’m busy doing something.”

  “—and she won’t let you have the car on weekends anymore.” The door opened and a girl who looked maybe eight or nine walked in. She had lank brown hair and was wearing a long black robe, plastic glasses, and a maroon tie over a flowered tank top. A Harry Potter costume, Anna realized. The girl held a wand in one hand; the other hand stayed on the doorknob.

  “Shit, Kay. I told you, don’t come in here.” The man began frantically pushing the magazines off the bed and into the crack between the wall and the radiator. Kay’s eyes went wide.

  “Why are you wearing that thing?” she asked, stepping into the room.

  “It’s just a game, Kay. Get out.”

  “Who is that man?”

  There was the metallic clung sound of magazine spines hitting the radiator on their way to the floor. Kay turned and pointed her wand at the camera. “Are you the one who called last night and hung up?”

  “Leave him alone, Kay.”

  “I could hear you breathing, you know,” she said to the camera, moving the wand in slow circles. “I command you—answer me!”

  Having finished with the magazines, the man now stood and walked over to Kay.

  “Answer me.” Her voice edged up, high and shrill. “What are you doing? You’re in my house. What are you doing in my house?”

  “Hey, movie over, man. Movie’s over. Cut!” The bag was crooked on the man’s head, slanted to one side so that only one eye lined up with its hole.

  “Silencio!” Kay screamed, whirling around to face the man with the bag on his head. She was crying now.

  “Hey, turn that thing off, man,” the man said to the camera. “C’mon, Kay.” He got up and went over to the girl. “It’s just a friend.”

  “W-what’s the bag on y-your head for?” Kay was really sobbing now. The man kneeled down. He put a hand on Kay’s shoulder, then twisted around to face the camera again.

  “I said turn it the fuck off, man. Now. Can’t you see it’s fucking scaring her? C’mere, Kay,” the man said. He pulled Kay stiffly into his arms and the camera zoomed in on Kay’s face, tears leaking from her eyes, which were squeezed shut. It zoomed in on her mouth as she licked the tears and snot from her upper lip.

  “Why wond ee s-say s-someting?” Kay sobbed. But her face was invisible as the camera jerked over to the man’s fingers on Kay’s shoulder. You could see the hair on his knuckles and the back of his hand. He squeezed her shoulder. And then the camera moved to Kay’s flowered top. To a single purple flower with a yellow dot inside. Closer and closer, until its pixilated center filled the screen. Until the whole screen was just one raw, hideous, quivering pixel sun.

  “It’s just a friend,” came the man’s voice from somewhere, a little hoarse. “It’s just a friend.”

  Then the screen went dark and the word FIN appeared. As if from a great distance, the sad strains of an acoustic guitar struggling to stay in tune could be heard. A Will Oldham song. Anna realized that she was crying. She read the credits, which were short and consisted mainly of Gilman. Later she would try many times to explain this Road-to-Damascus moment to herself, but would always come up short. All she knew was it felt as though she’d slipped a hand between the sofa cushions to find a new world among the lost coins and the unsightly crumbs. An underworld you could traverse unencumbered by the opinions of anyone else, where you could just be yourself. The opposite of pop culture. Unpopular culture. A place she might just belong.

  It felt like a significant discovery, even though she didn’t really know what it meant. And she was suddenly very tired. The lights were already off. The cars going by on the street below sounded like rain, like waves, like the soundtrack to some Gilman movie about the impossibility of sleep. She pushed the computer out of kicking distance, off to one side, then turned around and shut her eyes.

  The laptop battery would die overnight, but she didn’t even care.

  4

  Anna emerged from the subway to find that a new public art exhibit had been installed in City Hall Park. A tourist stopped in front of the same sculpture that stopped Anna. He was wearing flip-flops and holding a bag from the 9/11 memorial gift shop.

  “What kind of fucking shit is this?” the man said, more to himself than anyone else, as he held up his iPhone and took a picture. It was an inadvertently accurate question—the sculpture honestly did look like shit. Anna found a plaque over by the water fountain that explained the installation, which was called Seiri, Seiton, Seiso, Seiketsu, and Shitsuke. The artist was a Japanese sculptor by the name of Mitsuri Yagihashi.

  “I have always been fascinated by rituals of hygiene,” Yagihashi was quoted as saying, “and the relationship between purity and paranoia. In Japan, one’s cleanliness is considered a reflection of one’s inner state. These five shrines were cast from the dung of macaque monkeys indigenous to Japan, then covered in gold leaf. I consider them ‘taboo’ structures.” Yagihashi’s quote was followed by a lengthy paragraph by Joseph Fierhoff, the director of the New Museum and chairman of the city’s Arts in the Parks Fund, who described Yagihashi’s work as “drawing on his country’s rich folk art traditions” and “a response to Japan’s famous ‘toilet culture.’”

  On the whole, Anna had to admit, the sculptures didn’t seem to really transcend the raw materials they came from. They didn’t look much like shrines to her. They looked like enormous gold-colored turd balls grouped in random clusters. Which wasn’t to say that the park didn’t seem kind of cheerful, improbably strewn with golden turd-ball clusters. But what was most impressive here, Anna couldn’t help thinking, was the fact that they had been installed in City Hall Park at all. The sculptures sucked, true, but Joseph Fierhoff found the shitty shrines or whatever impressive and so did the Arts
in the Parks commission and a number of other top-tier cultural institutions. They almost became, in a sense, monuments to artistic ambition. Monuments to themselves. This was Gilman and Yagihashi’s great trick, Anna realized. They had figured out how to make a job out of simply being themselves, turned their perverse, narcissistic, possibly enlightened selves into marketable commodities. Maybe this was all art really was—being yourself. Seen in this new light, the turd balls lifted Anna’s spirits considerably as she cut through the park toward J&R, dispelling any final misgivings she still had about buying the camera.

  Brandon, had told her it didn’t matter what camera Gilman used, that nowadays it didn’t make sense to invest in anything but HD.

  “Why hamstring yourself with technology?” he’d asked. “You think your Gilman guy doesn’t convert all his crap footage to HD before he screens it at Cannes or whatever? Everyone does. That’s why I’m right, right? Look, if you want to go analog, then go all the way. Real film. Super 8. But for fuck’s sake, don’t half-ass it.”

  Anna didn’t want to half-ass it. And she trusted Brandon, who had studied film for a year at USC before transferring to Hunter. So she got back online right away after talking to him. The cheapest HD camera she could find on CNET reviews was a Panasonic HDC-TM700 for $794.29, but when she sent the link to Brandon, he’d immediately shot that option down as well.

  “A big NO on the HDC-TM700!” Brandon replied in an e-mail. “It does have some nice features. But mostly it’s just a cheap piece of junk. It lacks external audio inputs and all you really need (are you paying attention?) is GOOD AUDIO. It’s amazing what a professional soundtrack can do even for shit footage like Gilman’s. In your case, I would actually recommend a camera with two mic inputs: one for a boom and one for a lavalier. You might try the VIXIA HF S10 or JVC GZ-HD6.”