I’m sitting on a fume couch with ashtray legs, counting the khaki strands in the beaded curtain that dices the hallway up into barcodes. The table by the fridge is a cable spool lead- painted to match the molding. Around it is a mesh-back lawn chair, a SoCal fold-out from a SoHo dumpster, a spill-trayless booster seat, and a bottle cap barstool. Everyone’s wearing second-hand sport coats with seam stitches as loose as telephone wires tacked up with undersized lapel pins.
**** Capitalism. **** Disco. Bathe Avant-Garde. Eat Paint. Bleed *******. Smoke Local. Espresso, Or Genocide. Dresden Was A Lie. Shrink-Wrap It All.
Everyone is clustered around the cinder- block stand record player, grooving to the pops, looking like a rag-tag tide change beneath the broken-oar ceiling fan. Everyone’s wearing ironic scarves tight like corporate ties to keep their throats from popping ten-cent parasols, loose tobacco, and *******. Amid their rubber flower talk, I can pick out San Pelicano, someone critiquing Keats’ “Politics,” and a rant regarding some guy downtown’s stab at post-contemporary Pointillism in some gallery I’ve never heard of.
They’re flipping between topics like a Moleskine notebook while I skim through a copy of the Onion, teasing the edges with a lighter I found on the floor.