by Alina Simone
“I’m sorry ma’am—” she began, sounding not sorry at all. But it didn’t matter; lunch was already over.
12
“Hope used to live in bookstores, in record stores,” Taj was saying. “Now people think hope lives in a fucking URL.”
Anna simply nodded, following him up the subway steps.
“But that’s not true,” he continued, waving a hand. “This is where hope lives. It lives right here.”
She found that a little hard to believe. They had just surfaced at the Halsey Street station in Bushwick and were now making their way past a series of ambitiously named but depressingly shabby buildings. Roman Court. Wyckoff Manor. Without bothering to turn around, a man peed in a doorway.
“Careful!” Anna said, pointing to a dog turd on the sidewalk. Taj barely managed to skip over it.
“I saved you.” Anna smiled.
“You are my turd GPS,” Taj said, squeezing her shoulder. Serving as her guide to all things Bushwickian had apparently put him in a good mood today. The sun hit the cheap clapboard siding of the row houses a little harder and she felt a shiver of pleasure. They stopped at a deli where Anna got a coffee with skim milk, Sweet’N Low, and a banana—what she liked to call her “poor man’s banana split.” Friday had rolled around slowly, with many uneventful days in between. Her mother had lingered for an extra day, demanding to be taken to tedious museums, which had prevented Anna from getting back to J&R to return the AVCCAM and the sound equipment. Brie had also vanished again, responding neither to texts nor calls. Despite herself, Anna couldn’t help but wonder if this had anything to do with the growing stack of unopened utility bills on the table. Their A/C bill, in particular, had been recklessly high all summer, owing much to the fact that neither of them understood the symbols on the remote control.
“Sunflower isn’t working,” Brie would say, helplessly prodding the buttons. “Should I try tiny droplet?”
Frustrating though it was, Anna found herself missing even this stupid ritual. The apartment had been lonely and still all week, inducing mid-afternoon naps and late-night existential crises.
Two guys were carrying a sofa left outside for curbside pickup into a heavily graffitied doorway. They both nodded at Taj, letting him pass by first. He steered Anna inside with a light touch to the small of her back. She was eating her banana, which somehow made her feel like a child. A man was asleep in a La-Z-Boy in the hallway. It seemed like he had been there since the night before, as he was still wearing a coat and his face was mashed directly into the cushion. He didn’t move, not even when the strap of Anna’s backpack trailed across his bare arm.
“Who are these people?” Anna whispered.
“Members. It’s a co-op.”
Later Anna would realize that the Compound, whose basement served as Taj’s studio, was basically a metaphor for the lives of its denizens: a former warehouse in an endless process of “conversion,” lightless corridors leading to nothing, not zoned for residential living. A squat, in other words. But now she just nodded, feeling the simple thrill of the new.
Open doorways revealed microuniverses of hipster aspiration. One bathroom had been repurposed as a DIY brewery. Band gear, camera equipment, and unfinished canvases clogged the hallway like dust bunnies. The lone window was covered with so many stickers, it achieved a kind of stained-glass effect. Taj led her down a staircase lit by a series of caged lightbulbs. They emerged into a large windowless chamber where a stage had been set up against the back wall. In the middle of this subterranean piazza stood a giant plywood box. A room within a room. Its glass-cube windows glowed a warm yellow. The plywood door practically flew open at Taj’s touch, and as Anna stepped inside, she couldn’t help but feel like they were animating a giant dollhouse.
Inside, Lauren, Sasha, and two hoodied guys—one of whom Anna recognized as the guy from Café Gowanus—were sitting around a small table on chairs vomiting stuffing from assorted wounds. Everyone “Hey”ed one another, and Anna offered a small wave to the guys she didn’t know.
“This is Fifteen and Sixteen,” Taj said, indicating the guy from Café Gowanus and the other one. The two men nodded at her, their eyes glittering darkly from within their hoodies. If the horsemen of the apocalypse were to ride today, Anna thought, this is what they would wear—matching black hoodies.
“So, Anna,” said Taj, “after reviewing your materials, we’ve all agreed. You’re in.” Anna felt a warm flush spread up her neck. “You’ll be engaged in all stages of production, starting today.”
Lauren, who had been chipping the blue nail polish from her thumbnail onto the table, flashed Anna a look. Sasha raised his eyebrows at her, not unkindly.
“Thank you,” Anna said. A chorus of “Cool” sounded around the table.
“And just in time,” he added, “because today is totally fucked.”
“The band will be here at ten,” Lauren said, consulting her iPhone.
“The stage should be ready by eight,” one of the hoodied guys said. “That’s when we’re getting the PA from the sound-rental place.”
“Sasha, Anna? We need that room completely covered in tinfoil by eight,” Taj said, making a few furious notes in his Moleskine.
“Sorry, what is this for?” Anna said, feeling a bit bolder now that she was to be “involved in all stages of production.”
“We’re stage-setting the future. Tonight we’re shooting a live show in here. But it has to look like the future.”
“Tinfoil looks like the future?”
“On camera it will,” said Taj.
“All that foil will never fit in my Civic, Taj,” Lauren said.
“Yeah, we will need truck for Costco.” This from Sasha, whose Russian accent made everything sound like a cattle call to the gulag. Like Stalin himself were calling to announce you’d just won an all-expense-paid trip to Dudinka.
“Is there a script for this movie that I can maybe look at?” Anna said.
“Anna,” said Taj, “you need to find us a truck.”
“I don’t know anyone with a truck.”
“Think like a poet,” Taj said, rising to his feet, “thrive within the constraints.”
“We’re late,” said Lauren.
“OK, gang, chop-chop!” Anna was the last to stand. Lauren, Taj, and the two hoodied men filed out, leaving her alone with Sasha.
“Do you know anyone with a truck?” she asked him.
“No,” said Sasha.
“What’s the budget for this stuff? Can we just rent one?”
“Zero budget,” Sasha said.
“Shit.” Why had she been stuck with Sasha when Sasha was clearly useless? Then she had a sudden epiphany. Anna took out her phone and dialed 411.
“New York,” she said. “Brooklyn. Home Depot.” A moment later, she was connected.
“Yes, hi, I’m calling from Habitat for Humanity and we were hoping you might have a rental truck available for donation this afternoon? We have a load of Sheetrock we have to get up to Sunset Park for a house we’re working on … uh-huh … Krestler. Anna.” Anna hung up.
“Wow,” Sasha said. It sounded like “Vow.”
“I used to volunteer for Habitat in college. If no one was using the rental truck at Home Depot they’d let us have it for free.”
“You are very wily,” he said. His smile revealed some seriously sketchy bridgework and a gold incisor.
“Thanks,” Anna said, not at all sure this was a compliment.
* * *
On the way to Home Depot, Anna asked Sasha how he and Taj had first met, expecting him to name a URL. But Sasha told her they’d met two years ago, at an amateur film-screening night Taj used to host at Quantum, a now-defunct venue in Williamsburg. Anna tried to realign this new information with her image of Taj. Because wasn’t hosting an open-mic night for amateur filmmakers kind of loserish? Less loserish than actually participating, but still. She pictured the clientele with their sad, outsize dreams, tossing back beers laced with the
backwash of failure. But maybe she was being overly harsh. Anna remembered the box by the door and considered what it would be like to make a movie as raw and unadorned as Gilman’s, to sit unseen among a crowd of strangers as they devoured it in the dark. A little shiver raced down her back.
“It sucked, this thing,” Sasha said. “It sucked very much. The movies people brought were terrible. They had a lottery system. You arrive and they give you a number. Sometimes you wait only half an hour to screen your movie. Sometimes four hours. I would have many different feelings about myself at this time, sitting and waiting.”
“Why did you do it, then?” Anna asked.
“In Russian we have an expression—to soak in one’s own juices. And I did not want to sit home with my movies, soaking. I had ambitions but nowhere to go. When all doors are closed to you, when you have no connections, what can you do? Quantum took everyone, so I went to Quantum.” In this, Anna had to admit they had something in common. “He gave me award one night. A coffee mug,” Sasha continued, “for best movie. That night we talk, very late, at the bar. The next week we talk again. Soon, he hired me.”
“He pays you?”
Sasha shot Anna a look from the corner of his eye. “A little.” And then the question Anna had been dying to ask finally slipped out.
“So, then, what does Taj do, you know, for money?” She suspected family money, of course, figured that shame of his own privileged cushion was what fed his bitterness toward Gilman. It was only human nature.
“He has a poetry scheme,” Sasha said. Then, seeing Anna’s uncomprehending look, “SAP. The Society for the Advancement of Poetry.”
“Taj runs a poetry society?”
“Once a month, the society holds a competition and the best poem gets an award.”
“Whoa,” Anna said. This was truly unexpected. Though, if she stopped to consider it, the distance between the experimental film and poetry worlds was probably small, and both involved the same sorts of very intelligent people working hard to ostracize a vanishingly small audience.
“So what else does the society do?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing? It’s just a contest?”
“Taj started it. He judges competition for fee.”
“How much is the fee?”
“Thirty-five dollars.”
“Well, what’s the award?”
“You get tweeted.”
“And?”
“Taj has very good business sense. He studied economics.”
“Wait, your poem gets tweeted and that’s it?” Anna said, unable to keep the incredulity from her voice.
Sasha shot her another look. “The SAP has more than seven thousand followers, you know.” Thirty-five bucks for a chance to get tweeted? Didn’t contests usually involve more tangible prizes: money, a trip somewhere, a crappy Lucite plaque? “Is only one winner per month,” Sasha continued. Then, perhaps concluding that math was not her forte, added, “Twelve winners per year.”
Anna mulled this over. Taj’s exhortation to “think like a poet” now took on a new significance. So he earned his money exploiting some sort of loser economy, generating and profiting from an artificial scarcity of poetry prestige? Then again, it wasn’t as though Taj were like Brie, trapped in some interminable intern feedback loop with no clear endgame. He was a real artist with clear-cut goals, just prebloom. Once he became successful like Gilman, the money would cease to appear ill-gained. It would become a necessary investment. Just another of those endearingly quirky schemes artists resort to in order to fund their dreams. Thus Anna reasoned all the way to Costco, where they filled five shopping carts with three hundred rolls of tinfoil.
At the checkout counter, Anna was relieved when Sasha pulled out a platinum AmEx. She watched him sign for the tinfoil, wondering why, if there was some kind of budget, they couldn’t have just rented a truck to begin with. Was she still being tested, pitted against the invisible “everyone”? And if that was the case, then Sasha must be a coconspirator only pretending to be useless, which brought him up a notch in Anna’s regard. Either way she supposed it was fair enough, manufacturing a minor crisis to see whether Anna mustered a response or folded under pressure. And she had managed, hadn’t she? The knowledge that she had somehow “passed” gave her a boost, and when they arrived back at the Compound, Anna strode back and forth through the scabbed hallways carrying armloads of tinfoil with a new measure of confidence.
Now, Anna thought, she was finally living in Brooklyn. Not just residing here—taking the subway to work and back, traversing the four short blocks that reliably delivered her to pharmacy, supermarket, and coffee shop—but really living. She remembered a recent night when Brie had come home breathless from a party she’d attended at someone’s penthouse loft. There had been a miniature carousel on the roof and a fountain filled with absinthe. Famous artists were there. OK, not famous famous, but New York famous, like the artist whose resin-cast penis had been included in the New Museum’s “Younger Than Jesus” show. And as Brie recounted her evening—the starfucking, the dancing, the making and unmaking of ephemeral friends—and shared her Instagrams, Anna couldn’t help thinking, This city is wasted on me. Right then she swore to herself that she would turn this period of forced inactivity into an opportunity to explore. The next day, when Brandon called to see if she wanted to go gallery-hopping in Chelsea that weekend, she’d eagerly agreed. But come Saturday, she found herself calling Brandon to cancel. It was too hot out. Chelsea was an hour away. There were no good, cheap places to eat in that neighborhood. Et cetera. What was wrong with her if it wasn’t depression? Agoraphobia? Claustrophobia? Lifeophobia? Whatever it was, it seemed to have lifted since she’d met Taj. She felt an almost helpless gratitude toward him.
“Crinkled or flat?” Sasha asked Lauren as he unspooled the first roll of tinfoil at the base of the stage.
“As flat as possible,” Lauren replied, not looking up from her phone.
And for the next five hours, Anna and Sasha tinfoiled first the stage, then the rest of the room. They wore canvas gloves, which helped with the sharp edges and securing each sheet in place with silver pushpins. Someone put LCD Soundsystem on full blast. Someone else ordered Thai food delivered. Anna ate pad kee mao with crispy tofu from a paper plate and joked with the hoodied guys while Taj spray-painted the ceiling silver. Taj was going for the Gugg; this she learned from Fifteen. The Guggenheim Fellowship. And they were steering him capably toward this goal, one purring engine of productivity. Sixteen even started a sing-along: “He’s going for the Gugg, he’s going for the Gugg. Hi-ho, the derry-o, he’s going for the Gugg.” For the first time in a very long time, Anna felt happy.
When the room was done and the band gear deposited onstage, the crew slumped down on a decomposing sofa for a PBR break. Confident that she had already burned a Pilates session’s worth of calories hanging tinfoil, Anna didn’t even bother to check the nutrition information on the bottle before knocking one back.
“This is totally craptastic,” Anna said, looking around the room in awe.
“It’s like a million disco balls exploded,” one of the hoodied guys seconded.
“Or a Lady Gaga video,” said Sasha.
“The band will be here soon.” Lauren, who, Anna had noticed, had scarcely touched her Thai food, was still in business mode. “Guys, sorry, but we need those lights set up.”
There was a reluctant shuffling as the men rose and stretched, revealing the hair on their lower abdomens and the worn elastic of their boxer shorts. Then it was just Anna and Lauren.
“Anna, we need you for something,” said Lauren. For once she wasn’t looking into her phone; she was looking straight at Anna. And she hadn’t called her Thirty-seven, which Anna took as a good sign.
“Sure. What?”
“We need you in the test shoot—we’re blocking the scene.”
“OK,” Anna said, whatever that meant, though she had half-hoped to loiter behind the camera with Taj.
“Great. You’ll be wearing this.” Lauren bent down and retrieved a plastic bag from under the sofa that said “Have a Happy Day.” She handed it to Anna. Inside was a red, tubular, glossy one-piece suit, made from some kind of rubbery material. It was exactly the kind of clothing that would delineate every roll of Anna’s back fat, mercilessly cast her arm flab into high relief, and generally reveal her lightbulb shaped figure in the least-possible flattering light.
“Um…”
“Have another drink,” said Lauren, producing a potent stout from the bottom of the cooler. “Don’t worry about it. You’ll look great.”
And because she both badly wanted Lauren to like her and didn’t want to ruin such a good day, Anna found herself taking the bag and heading back toward the office to change. While Anna was coaxing her abundant flesh into the red unisuit, the band arrived. Three men, all dressed in black. They had already taken their positions onstage by the time Anna emerged from the office, their fauxhawks slicked up and pointing in different directions, like cartoon road signs at an ominous crossroads.
“What do I do?” she shouted out to Taj, who was staring into the viewfinder of a camera set up by the stage. The room was so huge it seemed to swallow her words as soon as they left her mouth.
“You look great,” he yelled back. “Get up there. Take the mic.”
Anna made her way across the room, highly conscious of the fart-like squeak emanating from the nether regions of her unisuit whenever her thighs brushed together. There were no stairs, so she was forced to clamber awkwardly up onto the wooden platform. Once she was onstage, the band suddenly began to play a dissonant and highly aggressive sort of postpunk samba. They moved jerkily as one in some kind of choreographed dance.
“Loosen up,” Lauren yelled up at her. “Improvise!”
“I don’t know how,” Anna yelled back. But reluctantly, she began to sway from side to side—the standard lame, white-girl dance.
“Where am I supposed to look?” she called out into the darkness. The lights flashing off the tinfoil had blinded her completely. She could no longer see Taj, Lauren, or the camera.
