Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been: The Merits of Dancing On Bartops
Ed. Note: Sometimes, Lauren Rodrigue gets wild ideas about life and writes them down. We like to publish them and you like to read them, so for the love of god just click here.
When you are denied as a writer in many ways, very quickly – say, swift as a bite through a layer cake of six months of resume - sending and idea-pitching into the vacuous ether, and so-called freelance projects evaporating before you can even really sink the pads of your hungry fingers into their foamy abstractness – you naturally begin to think you are not a writer. People can be wrong with compliments, or, rather, compliments can be lies – mothers are supposed to say those things, after all, and that teacher you had junior year of high school, well, that was junior year of high school. An honorable mention in the Maine Young Writers Fiction Contest does not a writer make, nor a $2,000 check-holder make. The check, rather, went to a wealthy girl whose parents were college professors in my hometown. She’s a writer. I am not.
You create a list, arriving here, at not being a writer. “Things I could be,” you title it, and then there they go – electrician, pilot, matador, chef, architect, supermodel – and then with a flamboyant click of the wrist, they disappear – too scatterbrained, too shy, too scared, too stupid, too so-so looking, check, check, check checkcheckcheck…
Not to mention, it’s a bit too late.
So then I must be of the bar-top dancing variety, plucked from the young women’s movie cliché – all leg and mouth, but nothing much else; I must be destined for the brainless arts. I’ll admit – and I’ll be damned if this isn’t a sign that I am absolutely correct about myself – that the idea of it is attractive to me. No more of that loneliness of the empty page, no more staring unblinking into a screen waiting for the letters to organize themselves for you, into the perfect word. No more words! Imagine it? No more “oeuvre,” “lascivious” and “sanguine” burdening you with their incessant pleas – “use us, use us!” – no more trying for metaphors to delicately and subtly describe the act of fucking, no more flashing your unsolicited and not-very-good-anyway ideas to editors near and far, like stolen watches offered from within a filthy coat. And of that most horrific mystery, which coils in the bowels of the non-writer and grows and grows – “Will they read it? Will they like it? Will they share it?” – gorgeously, no more of that either.
It would certainly be nice, to be exactly what present company wanted – for in a bar full of unemployed middle-aged men and drunken foreigners, a large nose doesn’t matter when there is a body and it is showing and it is burgeoning beneath swatches of hot Spandex, nor does a brain, nor what it can or cannot do – and so I would be perfect. I would be good at what I did, as explicitly as an erection. There would be no doubt in my talent (because it takes little of that, to swing in a way quite simian in its simplicity, while gripping an overhead water pipe, from the part of the bar where an overweight German man is craning his neck to see between your legs, over to the part of the bar where an under-aged college student is high-fiving his friend, as if to congratulate himself on finding you). It would be nice, to dig your cowgirl-boot heels into the soft, wet wood, and feel it give, and watch them watch, and let that be your craft, and the money piles up, because literary trends come and go, but no one will ever stop drinking.
No thinking at all, just bending your limbs as they are meant to be bent, and making sure your stomach stays flat, and fishnets, of course, acrylic nails, spray tans, Adderal, push-up bras, lipstick, leopard prints.
What a gas, when they’d say (the regulars, their eyes bright, their laughs creaking through their nostrils), “And Lauren used to think she was a writer!” as I used the heels of my hands to bend a man face-first over the edge of the bar, then sucked on some tequila as I slipped off his belt, then straddled his neck, feeling his spine move between my thighs, then rapped him with the leather, as everybody whistled and yee-hawed, as he thought about his wife at home and his annual salary, rap, rap, rap – check, check, check.
Are You There, Whoever? It’s Me, Some Bitch.
Ed. Note: Lauren Rodrigue is very happy most of the time. She has extremely positive emotional responses to such things as sunshine, nice footwear, baked goods that feature molten chocolate cores, success and compliments. Sometimes she has off-days, so what, who cares? If you’d like to read more from Lauren’s column, click here. Get happy.
I prayed the other night, splayed supine in bed, fingers knitted and not sure why, ankles crossed, blankets drawn up high, well past the clavicles – didn’t want God to know I was naked.
It has gotten to that point, now – prayer. I have tried crying, yelling, whining, fucking, calling, texting, sexting, writing, running, eating, not eating, lying, laughing, drinking, blowing, whistling, smoking, dancing, and still – nothing. This is why people turn to God, after all – when nothing else works.
I began, coltish and shy, reluctantly pulling my eyes up from under their lids, eyebrows lifting too, but of their own skeptical accord, and the three of us (my two eyebrows and I) scanned my ceiling for Where God Might Be –
“I know I haven’t talked to you in, like, fifteen years—” and it was weird, to think I had been alive long enough to have not done a thing in 15 years. I continued, whispering (but I thought about, in the back of my mind, the last time I remember being in church, when I confessed to the priest behind the screen, “I did not do the dishes, even though my mom told me to.”) –
“I haven’t thanked you enough, I’m sure. Wow, my parents do not have cancer. Just, wow. Incredible. They are still married, and do not have cancer. Fucking, no one in my family has cancer! Just so great, thankyousomuch. How do I thank you for letting us not have cancer for this long? I don’t even know how,” and I continued on this tangent for a while, to bide my time, to build up the courage, to ask my ceiling, for a favor. “And the dog… she has survived… surgery.”
I had already embarrassed myself. Praying is not easy for the full-of-hate, the casually sexual, the dead-inside, the crop top-wearers. You don’t realize it till you actually give it a strange, sloppy go.
I stayed quiet for a while, wilting in my sheets. I waited for His Divine Fingers to reach down from the ceiling tiles and pull my top and bottom eyelashes apart, in a Pagemaster-style event heralded by lightning and blaze and noise. I waited to be summoned by His Divine Outstretched Foot, for His Divine Toes to reach, elegantly and gently, as His Divine Hand did in “The Creation of Adam,” toward my chin, and nudge it upward, help me focus. I wanted the light bulb on my ceiling to suddenly flash on and then explode, with His Divine Power, so I could be like, “OK, jeez, chill – I’ll tell you what’s up.”
“Just let me get a job,” I said, finally, in my head. “Can you hear this? I mean, read it. Or like, sense it? I hope not, actually, because I think some pretty sordid shit most of the time.”
And so I whispered, “Just let me get a job?”
Jhhawwwwwwwwwwwb – the single syllable decomposed and drifted back down from the ceiling like upset dust – the “j” landed softly, as if strung up in a parachute, on a pile of dirty laundry, the h’s and o’s and w’s involved in pronunciation flitted floorward and scattered there, sparkling like confetti, some into shoes, some slipping into ripped-open envelopes, some settling on spines of overturned books. The “b” thudded at the foot of my bed, rolling then, on its rotund end, off the edge. “Just let me get a job.”
I backpedaled to my ceiling.
“In truth, I have a job, and it is satisfactory, but it I might lose it at the end of February – the cruelest month, God! God.”
God knows this.
“I try so hard… I know I drink… and stuff. But I try so hard,” I said, gesturing to the invisible stack of approximately 600 resumes I had sent out throughout the past few months. “Can’t you just help me a little bit?”
And then I waited for a response (like an idiot). I didn’t allow myself to turn to my side, or flip over on my stomach, because I felt like, for whatever reason, He would pay attention to me if I stayed there and stared at him for a while. I imagined St. Whatshisface, whoever sits to His Divine Left, nudging Him, all, “Who’s this bitch, what’s she lookin’ for, a fight?”
“A Hurts Donut,” I whispered.
Silence. Then the heat began to gurgle forth – any moment now there would be a cacophonous racket of pipes, and steam, and whatever else makes my radiator work the once, maybe twice weekly it decides to work. So I started to panic – will He hear me over the din?
“I’m not asking for a lot, ok?” I started getting bitchy. “I’ve been working since I was fuc—goddam— goshdarn 16 years old. Day of my 16th birthday I clipped into the local Sears and had an interview with a woman named Maureen and now, here I am, 23, educated, eating vegetables, paying my fuc—crapping bills, being nice to people, going to the gym. Give me a break. Thanks for no cancer, but seriously just a fucki— just give me a little help.”
“I’m going to die here,” I said finally.
The radiator bursts, at last, with its familiar sounds of enormous snapping elephant bones and small popping cannons. Steam sounds, water sounds, hot, harrowing sounds – I imagine rats inside the pipes, their little skulls smashing against the metal tunnels with the force of the incoming pressure, ping pingping. Pop—
The whole apartment comes alive to it now, each radiator rattling its own dissonant melody of pops and smashes and bangs. Enough to send the cat reeling down the hall, hind legs overcoming front ones, in terror, enough to wake my two sleeping roommates, enough to shake the roaches from their perches on trashcan ledges – a presence to acknowledge.
I turn to my right, folding shoulder over shoulder, pulling knees up to chest, to watch the plume of steam erupt from the radiator in the dark. Next time, I think at it, closing my eyes, I will pray to you.
Where are you going, where have you been: A Case for Lana in a Storm of Shit
Ed. Note: You were sorta punk rock, Lauren Rodrigue grew up on hip hop, but you fit her better than her favorite sweater, and she knows that love hurts, and love is mean, but she still remembers that day you met in December, oh. If you want to read other installments of Lauren’s column, click here — you will love them till the end of time.
I knew I would love her the moment I saw her face. Those dead, unblinking eyes. That dream nose, like pinched into her flesh by the thumb and index finger of God Himself. Those lips – sneering while simultaneously evoking no emotion whatsoever. Blood-red and curling. That hair, whipped below her clavicles as if squeezed like frosting from a pastry bag.
And the voice – emanating from a throne in a castle among a pastiche of indulgent themes (Victorian, Byzantium, Pen and Tellerism, Americana) – what a voice! What an arousing and dangerous voice, especially to be trilling lines from Lolita and lyrics about “putting on a show for you, Daddy” and exhaustively detailed descriptions of acrylic nail art, down to the last diamond-studded palm tree.
But after the proverbial glow of the flashbulbs fades and you get a listen to the entirety of Born to Die, released Tuesday (hereafter referred to as “Lana Del Day”), you find out for yourself that even though you have no usable knowledge of music and tastes that fall into the category “generally questionable,” not to mention, an affinity for thinking that a person’s beauty ultimately determines her talent, the album is… sigh… not that great.
Don’t get me wrong – pre-Lana Del Day leaked demos will never stop being wonderful to me. Grandiose ballads “Video Games” and “Blue Jeans” will be, for years to come, in the running for musical background to the climactic scene in the movie about my life (a scene in which I gallantly pluck a dropped Cheeze Ball from the floor and eat it), while cheeky pop ditties like “Diet Mtn Dew” and “You Can Be the Boss” anchor a welcome jolt of girly joy to my morning commute soundtrack. It’s the deeper cuts that bore me, filler songs like “Dark Paradise” and “Summertime Sadness,” arriving on Born to Die overproduced and underwhelming, lacking any of the kitschy charm and saccharine wit of “Blue Jeans,” et al, and just about confirming the billions of volumes of criticism already developed about her by my more-informed peers.
But I don’t want to hate Lana. I want to love her – I mean keep loving her. I want to love her with the pureness and innocence and raw desire with which I loved her the moment I heard the first few febrile bars of “Video Games.” How do we save Lana for ourselves – I mean, me? – and keep her around for a bit longer, based on the way she made us – I mean, me? – feel when we first met her? What can stay, of all that Lana’s given us?
What people hate is her voice, most notably in her live performance on Saturday Night Live that fateful evening. What people also hate is her fakeness – lips about to burst with Restalyne, nymphet behaviors, aloof eye-rolling, inauthentic grins; all of it a great departure from her former bleach-blonde self, Lizzie Grant. People hate that she talks about trailer parks when she is the daughter of a millionaire. What does that leave? Lyrics – and hers are inarguably decadent, albeit inconsistent and sometimes nonsensical. Standing alone, pieces of them are beautiful confections, rising three-dimensionally from headphones and building themselves into direct representations of the clichés we all are loving, wearing, drinking, driving, doing with our friends. With her lyrics, regardless of whether her voice is always the appropriate vessel, Del Rey carries the sentiment of our generation and paints pictures of everyone’s favorite version of life: Old-fashioned Americana, riddled with modern influences, broken-down cowgirl-esque appeal, a touch of Appalachia with a glamorous, nail polish patina, all through an Instagram lens. Scatterbrained, unsure and occasionally inauthentic? Sure, but we all are, too – seen an Urban Outfitters catalog lately? Read Vice magazine lately?
Analyze the lyrics piecemeal, and you have a feast of us-ness. What do any of us want more than to be told we “taste like the Fourth of July,” or that when we “walked into the room, we made [someone’s] eyes burn”? Don’t we all want this to be what we look like and what we see on a Friday night out in Brooklyn: “I do my hair up, all high and wild / white flowers tied high / green swimming pool, pink flamingos, high Christmas lights / blue base spreading, silver tinsels”? And don’t you think “let’s take Jesus off the dashboard, he’s got enough on his mind” could be our very own Millenial motto?
I’m serious – as a writer, I admire these lovely turns of phrase, the scenes they set, Del Rey’s craftiness. You’re lying if you say you don’t. So what does Lana do best, then? Tell stories. Are they fantastical, a little weird, sometimes a bit plastic? Sure – but since when does that make for bad writing? Not to mention – since when do we turn our noses up at the subversive?
And like phoenixes from the flame that is the burning fuselage of Del Rey’s post-SNL career, so rose from her own pretty, mismatched words a host of critical insight with prose poised to match, as if music writers felt they had to step it up a bit, when it came to assessing our Queen with the Hydrangea Crown. When was the last time an artist got critics so riled up that they actually tried to make their reviews creative and beautiful, as if to compete? Like, fucking never. I mean, but I hardly read music reviews.
From Chris Richards at The Washington Post, we get this gorgeous summation: “So let’s remember this collective blush on our cheeks. At worst, this music is a black hole that’s swallowed far too many keystrokes and listening hours. At best, it’s a wide-open slab of meaninglessness — a space for us to project our anxieties about what pop stardom means to our shrinking attention spans.”
“The big theme: femininity as a scam, as lost girls preen for the gaze of imaginary sugar daddies,” Rob Sheffield writes for Rolling Stone, and it’s a statement oozing truth. Whether being a lost girl preening for the gaze of imaginary sugar daddies is a bad thing, though, I am not so convinced – sounds like a nice life to me, but then, I’m weaving my own hydrangea crown as we speak. And what an image to give us, Mr. Sheffield – sort of recalls a certain someone singing, with equal loveliness, “Sweet sixteen and we had arrived / Walking down the streets as they whistle, “Hi, hi!” / Stealin’ police cars with the senior guys / Teachers said we’d never make it out alive.”
“It is an island, this album, part of no movement,” begins Jon Caramanica of The New York Times, beautifully. And we then get to imagine Miss Lana on an island in the tropics, in the perfect dress, writing poetry, not an album, maybe humming to herself now and again, but letting that be enough. And then she rolls each piece of prose up and, not before kissing a lipstick stain onto each one, slips them into bottles and floats them off the shore, “in the tiki-lounge way of overemphasizing noir culture.”
And in his endlessly humbling review for SPIN, Rob Harvilla coins the phrase “Miley Cyrus noir” just for our girl, and chides us, “This record is not godawful. Nor is it great. But it’s better than we deserve. We broke her; we bought her.” Chills!
So what, then, has Lana given us in the end that may last beautifully? Some relevant writing, a bible of verse for us 20-somethings, a few gleaming sentences to slip into our canon – even for the ones who are too cool to admit that they love the idea of someone tasting like the Fourth of July. Better yet, she gave us a lot of interesting writing for critics to write interestingly about. From her oeuvre sprung of the most insightful and most engaging music writing we’ve seen in a long time. Is she a champion of feminist theory? Is she a brilliant musician, an icon, a role model? Jesus, God, no. But she is a writer, in a sense, and she gave us all something to write about. That makes her an industry darling to me – just one who chose the wrong industry.
Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been: What time of what month?
Ed. Note: Lauren Rodrigue is just a writer living in New York City, learning lessons on life, love and shoes with the help of her three closest friends: a mild-mannered WASP with a hankering for a husband, a cynical, sharp-tongued lawyer and a vivacious, sexually liberated minx with a heart as big as her ego. To read more, click here.
Oral contraceptives have been around for over 50 years now so I can understand how lackluster they may seem, still more or less unchanged, still arranged in those lovely little pink clamshell cases, still twistable and conveniently chronological just in case you ladies forget that Wednesday always follows Tuesday. Especially when you think of how dramatically other things have changed in 50 years – cell phones (which now not only exist at all but also stream serialized television shows), the Internet (Kubrik is like OMFG VIDEO PHONE CALLS) – it’s a little disappointing to think that no steps have been taken to make birth control seem prettier, more feminine, more modern, happier and better and more discreet!!!
That is, until Ortho Tri-Cyclin Lo unveiled their newest TV ad (the same Pill purveyors who gave us the strangely jointed ballerina dancing around to that song “There She Goes” by Sixpence None the Richer? That ad is a whole ‘nother story. I’m just wondering how that tiny sticklike ballerina even fit a uterus under that twee leotard, but whatever) and it has taken oral contraception to a refreshing new level FINALLY, after 50 long years of IT JUST BEING ABOUT WOMEN CLAIMING THEIR SEXUAL INDEPENDENCE!
In the ad, which you can see by clicking this link, a wispy redhead who might not actually be of menstruating age yet, but who cares, the kids are starting so young these days, wafts through her coastal cottage/city suburb hybrid home, all befreckled and tip-toed and fresh, and she is so, so happy. She is the happiest woman on earth. Why? Because every morning, over a breakfast of fresh berries, cold milk and unadulterated sunshine, she takes a pill that alters her hormones so dramatically that the entire process of ovulation and human gestation stops in its tracks. After that she floats through her home and drifts into the backyard where she finds herself – feigning surprise! – in a panty wonderland! A wonderland of lovely, lacy, girly panty delights! Oh panties, there you are! I love you so much, you clean, crisp, lavender-scented little things, hanging here in my backyard, dried by the balmy zephyrs of this verdant countryside, warmed by the gilded sunlight, so untouched by the devil that is her own menstrual cycle! She is so happy because she takes a pill that makes it so that she doesn’t have to worry about starting her period spontaneously in her favorite pair of underwear!
“Birth control?” She chuckles, “What birth control! This is my once-daily oral pantyliner!”
“Don’t spare your best pair,” trills the voiceover, in a warning that transmits both maternally forbidding yet honeysuckle-gentle. “Fifty years later, and we’ve finally mastered a way to make you forget your own sexual liberation and prevent you from starting your monthly period in your $13 Victoria’s Secret lace-edged hiphuggers,” she might as well be spitting. “We’ve done it, ladies!”
And it’s true – what is sexual about our little starlet here, skipping through her 5,000 pairs of panties (can never have too many, ladies!), greeting them with childlike wonder? “Hello, daisy-printed cotton boyshorts! Good morning, satin bikinis, Battenburg lace briefs, other non-offensive, full-coverage, hyper-feminine underpant styles!” Nary a thong or crotchless teddy in sight – this woman is not having sex. She’s not even holding hands! Yet she takes an Ortho Tri-Cyclin Lo every day, because this commercial told her to, because as a modern woman, she has blown past suffrage, like, three sexual revolutions, an academic renaissance, Hillary Clinton running for President and almost winning, Hermoine punching Draco in the fucking face, and now, like, ew, my underwear might get ruined by this thing? This period thing? Ew.
What consequences does our waify heroine face by swallowing her Panty Ruination Prevention Pill?
The birth control pill has been hotly contested since its inception, and never before has the contention been a matter of spotless panties. If our girl gets the generic brand and is lucky enough to have health insurance, she will spend a minimum of $4,000 on the Pill over her lifetime, not to mention the costs of related gynecologist visits (and the emotional costs of her gynecologist making Golden Globes small-talk whilst wielding a speculum and peering between her legs). Side effect-wise, the Pill strains her blood vessels a little bit and makes her more at risk for heart attack and stroke; it makes her nauseous sometimes, gives her headaches sometimes and might even cause a blood clot deep in the lower muscles of one of her legs that stops the flow of blood to the heart before she even realizes it exists. It’s a pill so important and iconic that it has earned itself a place in the book of pronouns, with a steadfast capital “P” – and rightly so, having been at the crux of congressional, social, sexual and medical dissonance for over half a century.
Regardless of what the Pill means for women, and does for women, and does to women and has done for women, though, this little kitten of a woman, our girl, practically prepubescent, flat-chested, aloof, and sadly, somehow representative of the tens of millions of other American women who take birth control, swallows it every day, diligently, with such graceless, swollen entitlement that she has the gall to praise the voiceover in this Ortho Tri-Cyclin Lo commercial for its most benign gift – clean underwear.
Clean underwear that she, doubtless, keeps firmly latched to the skin of her hips, because, sex? Casual sex? No, not me, no, never. That’s not what the Pill is for.
Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been: It Is So Easy, And Everyone Loves You
Ed. Note: There are many subtle issues and interactions that come with living in a city, and some of them are easier to deal with than others. Luckily, our writer Lauren Rodrigue is pretty adept at describing them. This is the first installment of her weekly column on city livin’ from the woman’s perspective.
There is an overwhelming, almost paralyzing wash of satisfaction that flows through the body and the mind of a young woman who, while walking down the sidewalk, gets a wink or a nod or a greeting from a man. One of those who hang out outside the deli, or the bus drivers, the construction workers, the married Times-readers pushed up against you on the train, the neighborhood fathers who sit out on the stoops every night.
Even though the man is usually a restaurant cook dragging a trash bag out of a bulkhead , emerging as if out of nowhere from underground and addressing her from her ankles upward, and even though she, the young woman, is wearing what she calls her ‘conceptual coat’ – a floppy, woolen thing that gives her the effect of a sleeping, loosely wound bat – and even though her hair is knotted at the top of her head like a schoolmarm, they both still find common ground in her unequivocal womanness.
He licks his eyes up her, from the ankles, like I said, and up her shins, over her knees, up thighward and into her skirt, and lingers, lingers, then up more, dragging across the stomach, then tinkering with the ribs, the chest – the chest, the chest – then a slow slip into the little depression created by the clavicle, then up the neck along the side, then cresting the jaw, and landing on the lips, his eyes, her lips, which she’s painted red on the subway, for no reason other than to attract a wink from men like him.
It’s a popular topic to address, the “difficulty of living in New York,” the tired metaphor of people being chewed up and spit out, or whatever consumptive metaphor might be in fashion these days. Consider the even more banal tales of The Primal, Warrior-like New York City Woman, the Oversexed, Over-stressed Monster, The Carb-Counting, Mascara-Wand-on-the-Express-Train-Weilding, We-Will-Either-Fuck-for-a-Night-or-Get-Married-in-Six-Months-Because-I-Have-a-Fucking-Career-to-Think-About Bitch who looks lovely, feels cold to the touch and eats birth control for lunch.
That is not my experience so far in New York City. In fact moving here has almost made me feel more classically feminine than I ever have – this morning a man on the opposite side of the subway platform waved at me – at me – as my train sped off! One night last week as I was swinging along on the sidewalk, drunkenly swathed in faux-fur and smiling at nothing, a man told me I was pretty, and asked whether I was Scottish. For no reason! Scottish! In this place, where there are men everywhere, so many men!, there are, by matters of sheer statistics, so many more men who think you’re lovely. And because all the electricity in Manhattan and in some parts of Queens is powered by the pure, unadulterated CRAZY that courses through the veins of everyone who lives here, there is so much crazy, that the mildly crazy – like a wink, a greeting, a Scottish suggestion – doesn’t seem so crazy at all.
In fact it translates so much the opposite – to gorgeous, gentle, halcyon, Dickensian flirtation. Daily infatuations, avenue by avenue, tiny novels scribed into your short term memory, ten-second bursts of self-adoration, the shortest love you’ve ever had (but so many in a day)… You end up daydreaming these Evita sort of fantasies, in which you’re standing out on your fire escape wearing nothing but a clever arrangement of marabou feathers, and it’s morning, and the sun is curling down your block, and the men are walking by, and they’re all saying good morning, and you’re saying it right back, a czarina for no reason.
Sometimes you find yourself at a bar in Williamsburg, and things begin in a more worldly way, in which a random guy, with a sort of feminine face, kind of pinchy at the center with a modest excuse for a 5-o’clock shadow, horrifically blonde and soft looking, perches next to you on a bench outside, lights your cigarette, tells you things about himself. You can’t start listening; you can’t stop looking at his tartan scarf. It looks like acrylic. It’s an acrylic tartan scarf, and he’s telling you he studies holograms – he’s a holographer – he’s going back to school for holography, he’s lived in Chicago, he thinks you’re Jewish, because of your nose, which he cleverly reminds you is large; it’s an acrylic tartan scarf. He wants to take you on a date.
You end up just nodding, laughing when you feel like you should, looking past him, feeling drunker. Over his shoulder, you’re looking for the restaurant cooks, the men who hang out outside the deli, the bus drivers, the construction workers, the married Times-readers pushed up against you on the train, the neighborhood fathers who sit out on the stoops every night.
You love being a girl. It is so easy, and everyone loves you.
Chick’n
Different chicken pieces soak hot into the cardboard like spit into a sidewalk, bone-in and skin-on, crispy different chicken pieces promising warmish flesh of the breast-and-leg-and-thigh variety, three very risqué regions of lady but perfectly eatworthy regions of fowl. Watch the way the crispy landscape of the coating for which you paid extra, to be more crispy, shines with the strangest combination of dry and wet – a sodium desert with the occasional jagged mesa here and salty plateau there, a topographical please-touch map that’s been shellacked, for reasons related to tonguetaste and mouthfeel and toothlick.
I’ll have the leg.
No—yes.
I’ll have the leg.
That iconic little bonestalk, the most concrete chicken piece by far (recall the last time you attempted the breast, with its tricky two-dimensionality, planes of meat not rational for forks and less so for mouths) – not much left to think about with a leg.
A finger’s length of bluish bone. A blossom of gray meat, and raw grease stretching like bubblewater from a rogue tendon to the knuckle of what once was a knee, reflecting light, perhaps a wink, a flirtation – and then with a swipe at it, that rogue reddish sinew, with the tip of the tongue, like the bounce of a bow against a stringed thing, comes beautiful food-flavored music, and finally, after the spend, the take, the open, the smell , the choose, the think, the lift— the bite.
([And a rush of soaking fleshlust to make up for the bloodlust that you have that you know different chicken pieces can’t really sate.])
Then a sticky film across the tongue and teeth, and that which you just chewed (a squishy petal of muscle tissue, crowned with a bit of that gritty gilded crust) then drips like pink crude oil back across the two brothers Pallet – Hard, Soft – throatward, tonsilward! And then down, and then lower down still, slipping into some different system that will out-bully the former, while you start to chew a different chicken piece, fast forgetting all of the firsts.
You’ll want to thank your saliva, for making all of this possible.
