“As a fuck song, you sucked.” – Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs (2003)
“We’ll buy some jewelry for your mama” Yeasayer (2007)
The bedroom was quiet. The cats hadn’t begun to howl their displeasure at the coming day. The morning sun filtered through the tree’s leaves into the giant window, naked without curtains. It had been something that bothered him: not having curtains. He was James, artist extraordinaire, musical genius, poet of the highest orders, and failure at life. The latter was utterly unassailable, while the rest was easily arguable. The only real genius he’d ever expressed was his ability to fool the world into thinking he was something great, and that would usually be corrected, eventually. The only one who hadn’t seen past the charade was James, himself.
One eye open, he saw it was day. He closed it again and attempted to recount the night before – a kind of “How did I get here,” anthology. Nothing was ever obvious at this hour. The dreams had escaped recall, but the feelings they inspired lingered on: sadness, despair, a pinch of humiliation. For James, the morning was a confusing and damnable experience.
He’d been dancing the night before – no one else at the party was dancing, but James wouldn’t let that impede his drunken happiness. He’d grabbed the hand of Cassandra, pulling her into the open space where she obliged and spun slowly to the music, her hand held high by his, until she turned into him, their bodies pressed together. She was rather proud to be dancing with him – it seemed everyone was enthralled by his antics: a quip interrupting someone else’s conversation, an exit as unexpected, dancing to and fro, rolling over the backs of chairs, picking up glasses and taking a drink from them – no mind who they belonged to. He was (if little else) graceful, going through life as though it had been made for him: he was always the main character, such was his conceit.
He spun Cassandra away from him, delivering her to her boyfriend, Andreas, standing with 2 others, Eve and Missy. They had been watching, commenting on form, on the arrogance of such genius, ignoring the obvious: Cassandra desperately wanted to be wanted by James, happily disconnected from her man. As he let go, he effortlessly moved away to a larger group of 5, mired in discussion of the current Wohnnot: it was impossible to find a place to live in Zurich, anymore. Lucia lamented that she couldn’t leave her husband due to the housing crisis. Amin declared that a scandal, expressively suggesting the local government should all be unhoused and left to find their way on the streets. It was a widely appreciated sentiment. Lucia’s niece, Leah (pronounced Lay-uh), a young and uniquely beautiful woman of 25, complained of having to live with slobs and brutes due to the Wohnnot, “and to pay for the punishment makes it even worse!” she was saying.
James sidestepped behind her, offering his hand, separating her from the herd. Somewhat embarrassed, she’d taken his hand and followed him to the center of the living room where he shoved the coffee table aside with a straight push-kick, offering her the same spinning opportunity he’d given Cassandra, who watched jealously with her mouth curved downward in disapproval. “Why would Lucia bring someone so young?” she asked, “Isn’t it past her bedtime, already?” Andreas appeared oblivious to what was going on, replying, “Come now, Cassie, she’s not a child, is she?” Cassandra held her tongue.
As he pulled Leah into him, their faces nearly touching, he slid his face to the side of her head, nearly into her ear, saying “This scent drives me wild! I should be locked up for my desires!” Leah blushed, leaning into him as though she were an offering to the gods. Her short dress climbing up her ass as he pulled on the small of her back, nearly lifting her off her feet. She wanted to know if he was as a good in bed as he was on his feet, but shyness wouldn’t allow such a forward question. He pushed her away, still holding her by the hand, so that she was forced to twirl in front of him. His eyes ate her up in one bite. She resolved to know him behind closed doors, tonight if possible.
James returned Leah to her aunt, politely thanking her for the dance, before spinning away to flop onto the couch, leaning over to return the coffee table, while pulling a bag of weed out of his front pocket. It was all so graceful, thought Leah. James rolled a spliff of mostly cannabis. The scent drawing eyes and curiosity from around the room. It required hardly any effort on his part. Cassandra appeared in front of them, holding a book.
“James?” she added a feminine lilt to his name. “Do you know Elliot’s ‘Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’?”
“Of course! One of my favorites!” he blurt out, excitedly.
“Would you read it for us?” she asked, childlike.
“It should be my pleasure!” said he, as he reached out for the book. His voice boomed, resonating across the room. James could not talk without everyone hearing what he was saying. It was both a gift and a curse, he often thought. It was not rare for someone to ask him if he worked in Radio or some kind of voice work. He was often complemented on his voice – women said they found it “safe”, and “alluring”. Such descriptions were meaningless to him – he was, after all, a man, and he couldn’t fathom how a man’s voice might be alluring. Though he wouldn’t admit it, he often thought there might be some kind of father issues at play.
Lighting his spliff, dragging slowly, he peered over the pages in front of him. He began, using his choir voice learned in 8th grade as Mr. Harmony pressed on his belly as he bellowed a low C. “Deep breath, James, deep breath. Let your breath come from your belly and your voice from your chest! Let your breath do the work, James!”
“Let us go then,” he paused, “you,” another dramatic pause, “and I.” Elliot spoke slowly, James knew, slowly and thoughtfully. “I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.” Obviously Elliot was thoughtful. A thoughtless idiot would never consider how they should wear anything, let alone the bottoms of their pants.
He went on, bellowing and whispering at the moments he felt it appropriate. He lingered on the self-reproach: “I am no prophet —“, pausing to look around the room, meet each listeners gaze for a few milliseconds. He went on, quickly, as though providing context to the poem, “and here’s no great matter;”, an admonishment of what was to follow. He lurched into, “I have seen” with an exclamation mark, and a near whisper, slowly, something difficult to admit, “the moment of my greatness…” James looked down, hunched his back and shoulders into shame, and said finally in a sigh, “flicker”. It was all the Shakespearean affect he’d stolen from William Shatner. But it was not all show – James identified with Elliot’s man of the streets, humble in his conceited acceptance of his own greatness, and for James, that greatness indeed flickered.
As he finally came to the end, having lit and re-lit his spliff several times throughout the reading, he pushed the butt into an espresso cup sitting on the coffee table, and looked up. Cassandra had tears streaming from her eyes, Amin showed an obvious annoyance at not being the main character, Leah held her hands clasped between her breasts, Lucia holding Leah, half offering her support and half using her as a support. Andreas still appeared oblivious, smiling and raising his hands to clap. The others alternately sat stupefied or stood somewhat dumbfounded: this was only supposed to be a dinner party, what might they be expected to do?
The night continued on with all the self-importance of any gathering of intelligentsia. His false humility and gratitude for being allowed to read for them all permeated the apartment until it had become awkward for him. Andreas was congratulating him on such a spectacular reading and asking where he’d trained for it. Mr. Harmony hardly seemed an appropriate response to such a sincere question. Andreas was Swiss, and as the Swiss are wont to do, he ascribed all accomplishment to education and training. Andreas’ question was laced with other questions of the academic sort – what is your diploma in, do you earn a living doing this, and most importantly, what are your credentials? James had none, and was ashamed of this fact, acutely.
As he recalled all of this, laying in bed wheezing from smoking too much the night before, it was the shame that lingered. One might wonder why the feeling of greatness, or being desired, or any of the other multitude of feelings weren’t those that lingered, but, instead, the shame of being an uneducated drunk. It had been terribly fun, he thought. It was more likely the shame lingered not for being an uneducated drunk, but for carrying on a timid affair with Cassandra under the nose of Andreas. Andreas was, after all, a decent fellow – generally kind, overly-polite, unassuming and, let’s face it, naive. James had, on several occasions, been the backdoor-man, and had excused his skulduggery with claims of “Freedom” and “no one is the property of another”, dipping into his Anarchist leanings: love is not a resource based on scarcity. Though the words sounded high-minded and intellectual, it was counter-factual: love is, in fact, very scarce and rare, indeed. For James, all things could be rationalized with enough thought on the matter. This did not, however, remove the truth of whatever matter James was rationalizing. He knew, innately, that Andreas would have a broken heart soon enough. It would not be because of James, of course; James would not allow Cassandra enough access to feel safe in leaving the comfort of her partnership. James was not one for partnerships. But Cassandra would leave, desperate for purpose and desire.
The cats had begun to howl, demanding their breakfast. Lenny licked the inside of James’ ear, the rough tongue tickling him into an upright position. “Ok. Ok, boys. Let’s get some coffee.” James said to the cats staring at him intently. They were no fools, they spun round, taking a few steps, then looking back to make sure James was doing what he said he would. The cats knew James was easily distracted, and not often true to his promises.
He collected their bowls, put them on the counter, measured out the dry food, split a can of wet food into each, all the while chattering on about how the cats would have enjoyed the party last night, how there were so many beautiful people there, how it was an artistic gathering – a thing too rare in Zurich, where bankers overtook everything, in search of an artist’s phone-book, contact lists, potential wealthy clients … the worst kind of prostitutes. He said, “You guys are the bankers of the cat world, way too focused on breakfast!”
As the cats ate, he loaded up the moka maker and snuck off to pee. The cats were still munching away when the moka maker sputtered the last of the coffee into the top part. He poured it, somewhat shakily, into his giant mug with “FARM COFFEE” written on it in green, along with a line-art drawing of a New England farm house. A mug with a crazy story and even wilder cast of characters. With plenty of space left, he added a healthy shot of Baily’s and a healthy shot of Four Roses bourbon. ‘Hair of the dog’, he thought, pushing down the shame of being a drunk once again. He took a large swig of the elixir, bent down to stroke one of the cats still eating, and headed into his dining room.
The table was loaded with paper and art supplies and paint brushes and markers and one side was stacked with works-in-progress and/or finished. He’d never sold a single piece of art, or had any of his writings published, but that didn’t dissuade him from believing in his own greatness as an artist and a poet. His theory was, one couldn’t sell the creations of one’s own soul. That had to be done long after one was dead, and the soul was only the memory left behind in those still living.
He’d recently been working on a series he was calling “A Fish Out of Water”, which consisted of various ocean dwelling creatures oddly positioned on the page with a kind of Martian landscape in the background. He looked at them, again, becoming nearly giddy. This series was tremendously entertaining for him. He couldn’t articulate why – the thought was simply hilarious – a kind of DaDa-ism and Surrealism married and having children with no purpose and a nearly impossible-to-interpret symbolism. He thought the next painting should be a Blow-Fish on Mars. He walked around the table looking at everything, with thoughts being beamed from the objects to his mind – the paint brush suggested he should paint an octopus, in glorious colors, the markers asking for eyes or caricatures of shitty humans he’d already met. The bartender at Kasheme came to mind – he should be a jaundiced yellow, with beady red eyes – a rat, if you will. Or that awful ratty-haired bartender-in-training at the Xenix, who’d thrown out foamy beer instead of giving it to him for 2 Francs. There was a watercolor bloc begging for fields of purple flowers, it even had music to go with it.
He thought of the documentary he’d recently watched on Otto Dix, who had declared that art had explored, already, the domain of the beautiful, but that it hadn’t adequately explored the domain of the ugly and the wretched. He decided he would head back to those bars and sketch some studies of the ugliest people possible. It was, after all, a Saturday in the city and there would be plenty of ugly creatures out-and-about.
He went back to the night before, drinking his coffee and smoking a rolled cigarette. He recalled how Leah had tried to tag along with him, but Missy had edged her out. 7 or 8 of them had left at the same time, following him out. It wasn’t too late, but it was too late for a bus or a tram. The others were putting forward ideas for the next place to go – Amin suggested a reggae party, the others bemoaned the idea. James saw a taxi and wanted out – the night had become burdensome with Cassandra’s guilt complex and Leah’s groping hands. Missy, who’d been quiet most of the night was next to Leah as she was complaining of the sexism at the reggae parties. James threw a hand out and waved the taxi over, looked at the others and said, simply, “I’ll see you guys later!”
As he jumped in and went to close the door, Missy grabbed it and said, “I’m going in this direction. We can split the ride.” Leah looked dumbfounded and sad. She shut the door and said to the taxi driver in Swiss-german, “We’re going to the Hardplatz.” The black Mercedes lurched forward and Missy looked intently at James. Her stare made him uncomfortable.
“What if I’m not going to Hardplatz?” he asked her.
She ignored his question and asked her own, “How did you become you?”
James was baffled. This was not reasonable small-talk for a taxi. He quickly said, in a mock serious tone, “Well, I’ll tell you. When one person loves another person, they will get together and make a baby.”
Missy waited, silently looking into his eyes. Now it was even more uncomfortable. She didn’t laugh at the joke, she was serious, this was a serious question.
James said, “Honestly, I have no idea. I’m not even sure I understand the premise of the question. How does anyone become who they are?”
Missy said, “You dance when no one else is dancing, you sing when others are talking, you speak like you’re reading a poem – like tonight, that’s how you speak!” She paused, perhaps thinking a bit. James took these statements as compliments, and still didn’t understand the question. She said she remembered a party he’d had at his house. “Nina climbed onto your coffee table to dance and all you did was remove all the glasses and make room for her to dance on your coffee table. I thought, at the time, that might be the purest love I’ve ever seen.” James was not making the connection. For James, it was the only reasonable thing to do – ‘who needs broken glasses all over the floor?’, and ‘when someone is dancing, you don’t interfere.’ He had loved Nina, even though it had been a broken, distorted and difficult love. He continued to look at her inquisitively. She continued, “People aren’t supposed to dance on a coffee table!” she almost giggled as she said that.
“Why not?” asked James. He was serious. It seemed inherently wrong to tell someone how and where to dance.
“Didn’t your mother teach you not to dance around on furniture?” she asked him.
“No. In fact, when she didn’t want to hear our complaints about each other, she made us dance out the complaint, the story….” he paused, lost in memory, “I used to dive from the couch, head first, to do the worm in an effort to express what a lying snake my sister was!” He chuckled out loud. “Did you ever dance on the coffee table?”
“God No!” she said. “Such things were definitely not allowed! I didn’t have to do it to know it wasn’t allowed.”
“Wow,” James said sadly, “that’s really sad. I’m really sorry you had to go through that.”
Now it was Missy who didn’t understand. “What do you mean?” she asked.
“I don’t know – it sounds like you had a real authoritarian upbringing. Kids shouldn’t be so stifled – you’ve got the rest of your life to be directed, managed, controlled. Why shouldn’t a kid get to be expressive?”
Missy thought for a moment, smiled and said, “I like your brain.”
James blushed. It wasn’t a declaration of his beauty, but it was still nice to hear. He thought that it was good she wasn’t complimenting his voice, a compliment he still didn’t understand. “Well, that’s very kind of you to say. I wish my brain was as kind to me as you are!” It was dawning on him that Missy wasn’t actually in the taxi to share a ride, but was actively hitting on him. He wasn’t sure he could handle her. She was a buttoned up, high-performing career woman who took life quite seriously and rarely laughed, except when she was confused. On the other hand, she was quite attractive – slim, always well dressed, with sharp features, an angular nose, deep eyes, delicate but well defined lips, high cheek bones, well done hair and long delicate hands with fingers that looked like they might trace lines so lightly one might not even notice them moving over one’s body. He wondered how she made love, how she fucked, and more importantly, how she kissed. Did she want control, or to be controlled? Did she like it rough or smooth and slow? It was clear she knew what she wanted – if only she would just spit it out and tell him. These kinds of guessing games were not his forte. Anticipation was good, but it required desire and waiting, neither of which were the case in the taxi. In that taxi were confusion, and shame.
He was sitting on the balcony drinking his loaded coffee and smoking a cigarette, replaying last night, as Missy came out. She’d put on one of his T-Shirts and was wearing lacy, pink underwear that hugged her ass cheeks in such a way as to stir desire in James. They were not the ones she’d had on last night. Before he noticed her, she asked, “What’s up with you and Cassandra?”
James looked up. The sun wasn’t on this side of the building yet and her nipples were erect, allowing the T-Shirt to fall along their contours. Sing-songy, he said, “Good Morning!” He’d not finished recalling the entirety of the evening yet, and was somewhat surprised. “I wasn’t sure if you weren’t a dream!” He didn’t want to divulge anything to Missy about he and Cassandra, so he ignored the question. As far as he was concerned, he barely knew her; a veritable stranger. And besides, a man with any class doesn’t kiss and tell, he’d always thought.
He continued, “Can I offer you some coffee? Are you a breakfast person?” He hardly paused to hear her answer before he asked, “Or Tea? Can I, perhaps, offer you some tea?”
“Coffee please. Black.” she said, as easily as if he were a waiter at any diner in America. She’d come out to the balcony, her ankles seeming to command the very floor of the balcony to be stable. Her feet touching, she stretched her arms up and out into a bend to the right, lifting the shirt off her ass; he had visions of her as a ballerina as he stood to make a coffee for her. He stared at her as he walked by, a kind of Venus posing for the only visitor in the museum. While making coffee, her back to him, he strained to see how she sat, and more, how her ass connected to the balcony’s wooden-slatted folding-chairs.
Whatever the night had been, this morning was nearly glorious, thought James. He’d not concerned himself, yet, with whatever may have happened and his performance therein. She was simply beautiful – still angular, but this morning, paired with curves: long upside-down tear shaped calves, into a dainty knee, into an adolescent Willow tree thigh, into the apple-bottom ass they write songs about, without any vertices to be found. James thought she would be so wonderful to paint – the very experience of moving one’s hips to push their shoulder up and around to capture such mathematical precision would be very likely tantric. He decided he should ask her if he could paint her. While he made the coffee, she’d rolled a cigarette and was smoking it like she was Audrey Hepburn in “Breakfast At Tiffany’s”. ‘What an amazing persona,” he thought. He called out to her, “Audrey Hepburn could have been you, in a past life! Have you ever seen, ‘Breakfast At Tiffany’s’?” She couldn’t hear him over the city’s noise: the bells were ringing, a siren in the distance, children yelling and running, someone was vacuuming with the windows open, trams were squealing around corners. It was a kind of white noise that James found comforting.
He brought the coffee over, setting it in front of her. He stood for a moment longer, before sitting down across from her. A pair of women were walking down the street near by, holding a loud and engaged conversation. Missy drank her coffee with both hands. It seemed she was thinking about something, and given her greeting, James didn’t especially want to know what. Before he could bring up Audrey Hepburn, she asked, “Why was Cassandra crying last night after you read that poem?”
“‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’,” James said, with a question mark on the end, challenging her reference to “that poem“. He found her intonation to be somewhat anti-intellectual. He also didn’t want to talk about last night until he’d had the time to properly go over it backwards and forwards until he regretted everything he’d done and not done. “I don’t know. Perhaps she was just moved by the way I read it, or, I don’t know,” he said flippantly, “maybe she’s got some strong attachment to Elliot and I screwed it all up for her.” He smiled, hoping there was a joke in there. He knew Cassandra and Missy had known each other for years, maybe they had even been flat-mates at one time, he wasn’t sure, either way, he was trying to make light of it and move on. “That T-shirt has never looked better. You could be a giant sunflower who children have put a T-shirt on.” Her eyes betrayed an undecided look, while her mouth instinctively smiled. She wasn’t really sure what to make of the statement – was it good to have children putting clothes on you? was it good to be a sunflower? OK, sure – that part is good. He might have been making a statement about her weight, though.
None of that was obvious to James, as he was too caught up in avoiding anything about Cassandra or Last Night. He wanted to be around Missy, but he didn’t want to discuss much. Despite that, or maybe because of that, he asked Missy, “When was the last time you were at the Botanical Gardens?”
“I’ve never been,” she said, matter-of-factly.
“Do you have plans for today? I imagine you do … people always have plans for their free time. But imagine if this time, we go to the Botanical Gardens, because I’ve never been either, and I’m pretty sure you’re a flower.” James had pulled his salesman voice out and gesticulated broadly.
She thought to herself, ‘No one has ever called me a flower. How does he think like this?’. She said, “Let me have this coffee and think about it.”
“Can’t ask for more than that, can I?” James said, knowing the sale had been closed. He smiled, wondering what the hell he was thinking, and where on earth had the Botanical Gardens come from? ‘Straight out of left-field,’ he thought.