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These Rooms Alone

Illustration by Stephanie Kubo

Jill Talbot | Marcia Aldrich | Longreads | June 2019 | 10 minutes (2,531 words)

 

Interested in more by Jill Talbot and Marcia Aldrich? Read their collaborative essays, Trouble and Someone Called Mother.

I knew I was pregnant the moment my boyfriend fell back onto his side of the bed. I pulled the blue blanket over my naked body, willing it not to be so.

In elementary school, when we were bored in social studies or math, we’d play MASH, but only the girls. We’d write the letters for mansion, apartment, shack, and house at the top; 1, 2, 3, and 4 (for number of children) on the bottom; the names of four boys (for the men we might marry) on the left; and four types of vehicles on the right. Then we’d draw a spiral in the center, count the lines, and begin moving around the square. Our future in pencil. I don’t remember enjoying the game or trusting in it the way the other girls in fifth grade did, their hushed giggles. Most girls didn’t like it when I added a 0 to the children, RV to the housing, a category of careers instead of men. That’s not how you’re supposed to play.

We were raised to follow the narrative of life — college, marriage, career, children — as if this were the only story. In my 20s, I started checking off items like I was playing MASH. I didn’t get far. During my first semester of graduate school, I listened to a nurse on the phone tell me I was pregnant, and when I told my boyfriend of four years, he proposed. This is an odd detail, but that afternoon he had bought a new watch. I remember staring at the black band and feeling the spiral tighten, my choices being crossed out. I said no to all of it. This was not the story I wanted.

***

It took me a long time to realize I was pregnant, to realize I was carrying something inside me.


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Unlike most of my girlfriends in high school I had never dreamed about a future filled with children. I did not make lists of possible names for those children or talk about whether I wanted girls or boys. My friends knew they wanted two boys and two girls and what they would name them. Not for a single second did I look ahead and see myself with a child. Was there something wrong with me, something missing — did I lack the maternal gene? I felt I was supposed to want children and look forward to that day when they would arrive. It was the culmination of my two older sisters’ desires when they became mothers. It was assumed I shared their desires, but I did not. In my fantasies I had multiple lovers but remained unattached to any. I was a singer, an actress, and finally a writer: my essential solitude the common thread. Never was there a child waiting in the wings for me to hold.

***

Everything I wanted, I wanted alone.

After reading your words, I went on a walk to think about what it was I wanted in high school. I went back to my mind at 16 , at 17, those years when decisions were made for me, when I didn’t think beyond the borders of Texas because no one else did, and my parents never offered it as an option having never left the state themselves. I didn’t grow up in a small town, but it felt that way. On my walk, I remembered, clearly, how I had hoped for one thing — to be far away. The rest of my yearnings I don’t remember, not really.

I’ve always felt the pull of elsewhere, somewhere I don’t yet see. How that desire perplexed me at a young age because I couldn’t name it, just fought against all those who tried to warn me against myself. And there were many. You think you want this now, but you’ll see. By the time I finished college, most of the people I knew were still living in my hometown or returning to it, having children, buying houses, choosing color schemes. I respected their lives, I did, but I didn’t see that for myself. What I wanted was still far away, and it wasn’t until graduate school — when I sat in professors’ offices listening to them tell me I must keep going, I must pursue a Ph.D. — that I recognized my secret self, ambition. Everything I wanted, I wanted alone.

***

About a great many things, I was unsure; about my unsuitability to be a mother I was certain.

I don’t know exactly when I got pregnant. I can’t say what I might have felt at the time of conception except to say the last thing on my mind was making a baby. It was not a momentous occasion. I’ve read about sex being enhanced because the couple thought they might be making a baby — that thought never touched me. It only finally occurred to me I might be pregnant because my symptoms couldn’t be explained by anything else. You see, the father had been told after undergoing tests that he was sterile. Until those tests I had dutifully used a diaphragm, carrying it around with me in its blue plastic case with the accompanying tube of spermicide. I hated the thing, but I used it because I knew the worst thing that could happen to me was to become pregnant. At 19 I had nothing about me to recommend I become a parent. About a great many things, I was unsure; about my unsuitability to be a mother I was certain.

***

I was surprised by the crowded waiting room, all ages and races, the way we tried to give one another the privacy we had surrendered in the parking lot.

My boyfriend and I met in college and dated, off and on, for a total of four years. He followed me to graduate school, to Lubbock, where he got a job teaching history at one of the middle schools in town. I was 23. I was following the narrative of life. Begrudgingly. Our relationship felt weary, obligatory at times, something I’d try to break free from every few months, but here we were, together. Here we were, in a gray sky bearing down without the deluge. And here we were, driving to a nondescript building one morning in October, the day after I sat through a counseling session with a nurse, who told me about my body and what it carried in an office that looked like a craft area for a kindergarten class. I restated my choice, my decision, my certainty, then I listened to the steps of the procedure, how long I would bleed, when to call a doctor. Did I understand? Was I sure? If so, come back in the morning at 7:00. Don’t eat anything after midnight. We’ll give you a Valium. I remember my only worry: how we would pay for it. The next morning, I wasn’t surprised by the gathered protestors outside the Women’s Clinic on 67th in their coats of indignation, their posters of blood and Bible verses. I was surprised by the crowded waiting room, all ages and races, the way we tried to give one another the privacy we had surrendered in the parking lot. I slumped down into the Valium, considered the affluent couple in the corner, their gray hair and look of shock, as if their bodies had betrayed them. I remember the numbing shot in my cervix and a painting of blue flowers on the wall and the sound of the vacuum and the way I trembled in the recovery room, sipping Sprite from a plastic cup and throwing up into a trash can and being told it was time to leave.

***

When the father was pronounced sterile, the outcome did not surprise him though it surprised me. I had never considered not being able to get pregnant since I lived in constant fear I would get pregnant. According to the doctor, there was some minuscule possibility I could conceive. The word miracle was used. I remember that. After receiving the doctor’s prognosis, I stopped using birth control, secure in the medical knowledge I couldn’t get pregnant. In late September, I was beset by all manner of physical symptoms I couldn’t explain. Without telling Bruce, I went to the health clinic on campus where I described what turned out to be morning sickness and was told I must be pregnant. I protested but took the test and sure enough six months after the doctor’s declaration of Bruce’s sterility, I was pregnant.

I did not run home to share the good news with Bruce. I called it a mistake, the latest in a long line of terrible mistakes I had been making or that had befallen me since I had met Bruce. It never occurred to me that this might be the only child he might conceive, his one chance at parenthood. Picture a young woman, more like a teenager, who finds herself pregnant and all she can feel is a desperate fear. Perhaps she isn’t a sympathetic character, perhaps she should have felt maternal stirrings, but she did not. There was nothing but the sense that with each passing day she was losing more of who she was, and she had already lost too much.

***

It was the years after, for me, when I lost myself — in drinking, in danger — but it wasn’t the aftershock from that October morning. I am sure of that, though the years with Dean had something to do with what became a recklessness in me. When I left Lubbock to pursue my Ph.D., I learned to act as if there were no rules except the ones I ignored.

What I did, I understand, I did alone.

Dean and I get back to his apartment, and I crawl into bed drowsy and queasy. I pull the blue blanket over me while he paces the hallway, his athletic figure darting back and forth in the door frame. The air conditioner clicks on, because this is Texas, and 20 years from now in 2013, the House will close the clinic we just left, along with half of the others in the state. I begin to doze off, hear the jingle of keys, and call after him, a question. “You have to stay with me, in case I hemorrhage,” I say, but he looks toward the front door and mumbles, “Call the school.” I hear the key turn in the lock and shuffle to the bathroom. Make sure. What I did, I understand, I did alone. I want to be kind, to say Dean couldn’t handle what he had seen that morning, but he saw only a waiting room and fists pounding on his truck when we pulled out of the parking lot. We stayed together out of some perverse, young person view that if we had gone through such a thing together, we had to honor it. When he proposed again that next spring, I said yes. Surely there’s a word other than mistake.

***

In 1970 the state of New York led the way, offering legal abortion on demand through the 24th week of pregnancy. The U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Roe v. Wade wouldn’t legalize abortion nationwide until 1973. Unlike one of my high school friends who had to fly to Mexico for an abortion and another who was secretly admitted to a high-end clinic, I made an appointment over the phone with Planned Parenthood.

It was a cold day when we drove to Syracuse. The day was gray, the waves choppy with small white caps, foamy, spraying when they rolled to the shore of Lake Cayuga, the wind biting. There was nothing fresh about the day.

We left early in the morning to make my appointment. The drive was silent. The decision had been made. There was nothing further to be said and we didn’t say the nothing that was. We parked in a lot by the nondescript building. I checked in at a small metal desk, filled out forms, verified I was 18, then was taken back to the medical part of the clinic. Bruce stayed in the waiting room, empty or nearly so except for him.

I was treated kindly. I had a vacuum aspiration, and I remember the noise of the suction and the pain of the contractions. Then I was moved to an empty recovery room and lay on a narrow bed. It was as if the clinic had been invented and staffed just for me.

***

My recovery room was a row of chairs against a wall in a very small room, more like a hallway. All I remember is white. Maybe it was the white gowns or the white trash can or the white cup I trembled in my hand. We were lined up, not looking at one another, huddled into ourselves until a nurse asked if we could stand. I wonder about the difference between the solitude of your narrow bed in the 1970s and a chair among many in a hallway 20 years later, but nothing’s that different, not really, not even now, because we still shoulder these rooms alone. I told only one person back then — a long distance phone call — a friend who responded by naming girls who snuck away for abortions before we even graduated high school.

One month before the wedding, Dean called to ask, “Ph.D. or me.” I flew from Dallas, where my mother had bought me a white dress, and I sat in the Lubbock airport bar sipping wine when Dean walked in, resignation on his face. I understood — I could chase ambition or I could stay in Texas. I had to cross one of them out. I left Dean in the parking lot, then wandered the empty corridor of the airport in a daze until morning. I got on a plane, and I got on with my life. Later I would come to understand how I sidestepped a story I didn’t want to live. Now, it’s a story I tell.

***

I didn’t tell anyone about the pregnancy and the abortion. It wasn’t the sort of thing I’d share back then, and I had no one to share it with. Did I feel any regret? The girl I was felt relieved. I felt spared from a great calamity. And I felt grateful above all else that abortion was legal, that Bruce could afford to pay for it, and that I had someone who shared my feelings going forward with the decision. I felt lucky my life could resume. I held onto the idea that my getting pregnant wasn’t my fault and that I had been given incorrect assurances I couldn’t conceive. It was Bruce who felt guilty about what he put me through because unbeknownst to him he had passed along the doctor’s false assessment and I got pregnant, I bore the consequences, I had to make the decision and I had to undergo the procedure. It was me, not him, who would have to say I had an abortion when I was 19. He wouldn’t have to admit a thing. I would have to reveal this piece of information for the rest of my life on medical forms. I would have to count myself among the countless women who had abortions. I would not stand apart, unscathed.

***

Jill Talbot is the author of The Way We Weren’t: A Memoir and Loaded: Women and Addiction, the co-editor of The Art of Friction: Where (Non)Fictions Come Together, and the editor of Metawritings: Toward a Theory of Nonfiction. Her writing has been named Notable in Best American Essays for the past four years in a row and has appeared in journals such as AGNI, Brevity, Colorado Review, DIAGRAM, Ecotone, Fourth Genre, The Normal School, The Paris Review Daily, The Rumpus, and Slice Magazine. She teaches in the creative writing program at University of North Texas.

Marcia Aldrich is the author of the free memoir Girl Rearing, published by W.W. Norton. She has been the editor of Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction. Companion to an Untold Story won the AWP Award in Creative Nonfiction. She is the editor of Waveform: Twenty-First-Century Essays by Women published by The University of Georgia Press. Waveformessays.wordpress.com. Her email is aldrich@msu.edu.

***

Editor: Krista Stevens

Copy Editor: Jacob Gross

How College Professors Are Fighting for Their Lives

Amy Roh/The Hastings Tribune via AP

A PhD might help land someone a teaching job, but it does not afford them a livable wage. Rather than a respectable salary, professors at many universities and private colleges earn a small hourly wage, often less than the legal minimum wage. They have no health insurance, have to float classroom to classroom, receiving their semester schedules right before the term starts, and teach at multiple schools, often racing between campuses, to cobble together an income. Others sleep in their classrooms or cars, unable to afford rent on their adjunct wage. For Splinter, Hamilton Nolan spends time at Miami Dade College, one of the largest colleges in the US, to see how their dedicated adjunct educators have unionized, and whether their efforts can earn them and adjuncts around the country any financial and emotional stability.

…The long term trend in higher education has been one of a shrinking number of full-time positions and an ever-growing number of adjunct positions. It is not hard to see why. University budgets are balanced on the backs of adjunct professors. In an adjunct, a school gets the same class taught for about half the salary of a full-time professor, and none of the benefits. The school also retains a god-like control over the schedules of adjuncts, who are literally laid off after every single semester, and then rehired as necessary for the following semester. In the decade since the financial crisis, state governments have slashed higher education funding, and Florida is no exception. That has had two primary consequences on campus: students have taken on ever-higher levels of debt to pay for school, and the college teaching profession has been gutted, as expensive full-time positions are steadily eliminated in favor of cheaper adjunct positions. Many longtime adjuncts talk of jealously waiting for years for a full-time professor to die or retire, only to see the full-time position eliminated when they finally do.

So what do adjuncts’ daily lives look like?

“I would work morning, noon, and night. That is my problem—to be able to make a living, that’s what I had to do,” says Renee Zelden, who adjuncts at both Broward and Miami Dade Colleges. “I teach more than full-time faculty.” Indeed. This summer, Zelden is “only” teaching five classes at two schools—fewer than her usual six to eight classes at three schools per semester. Most schools cap adjuncts at four classes per semester, hence the multiple institutions. The gas money Zelden spends to commute from her home to Miami can eat up more than the $50 she is paid for a single hour of class, so she must be sure to get multiple classes on the same day just to make teaching worth her time. Fifty dollars for an hour-long class sounds decent, until you break down the time it takes to prep for class, commute, teach, and then grade papers for 25 or more students. “If I figured it out, I’d be afraid I’m only making like five dollars an hour,” says Zelden, “so I don’t want to figure it out.”

She needn’t be so negative. Other Florida adjuncts who have figured it out told me that, factoring in all of the time they spend on teaching and related work, they make as much as seven dollars an hour—less than Florida’s minimum wage.

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How I Became ‘Rich’

Illustration by Homestead

Stacy Torres | Longreads | June 2019 | 11 minutes (2,629 words)

On my first two trips to Hawai‘i I photographed things people who live there might consider mundane: red dirt along a paved road, sunlit hibiscus draped over a parking lot wall, blue-faced Zebra Doves so calm I almost tripped over them because they didn’t skitter away like the nervous pigeons back home in New York City. The only palm trees I’d ever seen before appeared on postcards, television, and luau-themed party decorations. In Hawai‘i I wasted no time filling my camera with pictures of real ones: swaying palms against a light-filled morning sky, baby palms trees in the midday sun, and full-grown trees wrapped in twinkling lights under an aspirin moon.

The first trip, in 2009, happened by accident. At least it felt that way. My then-boyfriend wanted to go somewhere tropical. I wanted to go somewhere interesting, though I had no inkling of the plan he was hatching when I mentioned Hawai‘i. I figured this discussion was just another of the fantasy trips we often took in our heads after watching the Travel Channel. Neither of us had passports or much money. But my boyfriend’s job as a New York City public high school special education teacher had wrecked him. For the past few years, half the teachers at his school left by year’s end. C. stood on the verge of quitting too. Instead, he started drinking on the train ride to work in the mornings. Then he took his tax refund and booked us a trip to paradise.

At first he refused to tell me where we were going. “Block off a week,” C. said. I’m going to need you not to be interrupted.” I pressed for details. After about age 12, I’d stopped liking surprises. By then I’d learned they could herald sudden bad news, such as when I awoke to find my mother applying antiseptic to a knife slice on my father’s temple after he got mugged coming home from work. Worry grew about some emergency lurking behind his request, a not unreasonable idea given the last few rocky years. Only after several days of persistent badgering, he divulged, “We’re going somewhere.” I grew more fearful. Where were we going? Why?

We didn’t go places, except the occasional day-trip to Philadelphia on a $10 round-trip Chinatown bus ticket. Sometimes we hopped an Atlantic City casino bus out of Port Authority. We got most of the bus fare back in a cash voucher to be redeemed at Harrah’s, but we dumped that and a few more bucks into the penny and nickel slots. Lucky Lemmings was our machine of choice. We always fooled ourselves into believing riches lay just one more pull away, and cheered when we hit a bonus game. The cute animated lemmings delighted us when they dived from the cliff, or trampolined off a lavender walrus’s back into caves marked with different credit amounts. If we got really lucky, the machine rewarded us with a lemming stampede, and they continued jumping in and out of the caves, green bills swirling and swooshing in their tracks, and manic jangly beeping ramped up as we racked up more credits. We never knew when to stop and usually returned home losers.
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School for Girls

Illustration by Xulin Wang

Jasmin Aviva Sandelson | Longreads | June 2019 | 28 minutes (7,121 words)

 

I loved being one of your girls. I wasn’t your favorite, but I didn’t need to be. What we had was different.

I found you on that hiking trip to the Spanish mountains. At first I was wary — at our all-girls’ secondary school you were never alone. But in the thin air we climbed together, lotioned each other’s backs, and hand-washed our socks side-by-side. By the end of the week we felt joined, invincible. Remember how we made those campsite boys pitch our tents? That’s not character-building, the male teachers sneered. We just laughed. We were girls: 13 and power-thrilled. While the others hauled their packs up the dusty hill, we lay together on sleeping bags. Your hazel eyes beamed noise and mischief, and I had found my place.

Back in London, I came to you each day, bounding to your classroom after lunch in the cafeteria. The others were with you, but that didn’t stop me. It made me want you more.

Before all the danger, we dashed about, frantic. We sprawled on desks or piled in a corner. You whispered about our classmates — plain girls, weird ones — and the four of us laughed in sly peals. It was both cruel and loving.

Five sounds like an unstable number, but it wasn’t. It was safe. Maybe because there was one of you, and four of us. We gathered at your house each Saturday, and I passed the journey — the bus, two tubes, and the uphill walk — listening to those songs you liked that I’d Limewired onto my iPod: Death Cab for Cutie, The Arctic Monkeys, Coldplay.

The others lived far away, too, some farther than me, but we all hauled our clothes and makeup across the city to get dressed in your bedroom for whatever we had planned: Smirnoff Ices in the park, a lax-bouncered bar, a house party with boys from our brother school.

We shook out our stuff on your big bed, which had space on either side like an adult’s bed, like my parents’ bed, not like my bed, pushed against a wall. We tried on each other’s things and crowded your full-length mirror as Jack Johnson sang through your iPod speaker.

“Pass the panox!” Ashley said, and you tossed the thumb-sized tube of medicated zit cream that you could only get in America, where your mom was from, and where you went every year. In the drawers that pulled out from under from your bed, you stored the things you brought back from New York: moisturizer with fake-tan, spray deodorant, and panoxyl.

We called it panox because we abbreviated everything.

“Emma, your skirt looks beaut,” I said, as you smoothed the white denim.

Oh em gee, totes,” Ashley said, dabbing her chin with the pad of her pinky.

We all spoke the same way, rhythms charged and exclusive like an electric fence.

Ashley was your best friend. She didn’t need panoxyl. Her skin was clear and framed by gold hair that reached the lean arcs of her waist. But even though she had all that I didn’t envy her. She didn’t crackle and sparkle like you did; she couldn’t combust into cackles like you and me.

As Ashley capped the cream, I sprayed the air around myself with your perfume and pulled on your leggings. I’d liked my legs covered since I was 6 or 7, back when my friends in gymnastics learned back handsprings while I was stuck with walkovers. In the cool gym, my thighs stayed pink when chill laced theirs with that wine-colored mottle. Mine touched all the way up. Theirs didn’t. To practice, I wore shorts over my leotard.

But you didn’t need leggings. Your legs were firm, cut with muscle down each thigh and behind the knees. I liked your legs. I also liked your straight white teeth — American teeth — and your full, flushed cheeks. I liked your honey-colored hair, the way the thick drape glinted in the light like amber. You were insecure about your stomach and hips — a little bigger than mine and the other girls’ — so I pretended not to notice when you tugged your shirt off your skin so it didn’t cling. To me, all parts of you, hard and soft, were lovely.

Once we were dressed, spritzed, and painted, the five of us — you, me, Ashley, Kat and Kay — trooped down three flights of stairs. In your kitchen, we piled around one corner of the wooden table that could seat 12, and ate whatever your mom cooked, something like pasta with tomato sauce, because she, like you, was a vegetarian. Your mom perched as we ate, not eating herself, but watching you chew with bird eyes, hard and blue. I was usually still hungry because she didn’t cook that much, so I’d buy a chocolate bar from the shop at the station. I always shared it around, but you never took any. Neither did Ashley. The two of you linked arms as Kat and Kay and I ate it up, square by square.

We also bought drinks at the station shop. Kat was 4’10 and looked even younger than 14, but she flashed her older sister’s passport and heaved our low-shelf vodka onto the counter. Glenns or Kirov tasted fine with enough Diet Coke. Kat and Kay bought regular Coke — “full fat Coke,” we called it. You glanced at them and clutched your own bottle closer.

At house parties, we’d flirt limply with whoever, but then you and I would run off. We peeked in bathrooms, jumped on boys’ beds, had swordfights with baguettes grabbed from bread bins, and gave each other hickeys. We looked each other in the eyes and laughed — laughter like a fist around our stomachs as we shook with devilish synchrony.

When we left one party for another, staggering down the sidewalk and dodging the cracks, I wanted to walk all night instead of going to some boy’s preened Hampstead house. I liked the in-between times best, and the befores and afters.

The afters looked like this: when we’d banked enough fun to last the school week, we all turned to you. We caught the last tube or you called a cab from Addison Lee, which we called Add Lee or just Add, and we lay our heads on each other’s shoulders as we waited to pull up at your front door. At the top of your house, in the “upstairs living room,” we flopped on those couches big enough to sleep four. The fifth, usually Kat, who was small and unfussy, lay on the carpet so thick she didn’t even need a sleeping bag. At home it took me hours to fall asleep. But beside you, my body unclenched and I slept deep and dreamless.

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Don’t Come Around Here No More

Chris Radburn/PA Wire URN:20884959

Rebecca Lehmann | Copper Nickel | Spring 2019 | 11 minutes (2,188 words)

 

I rediscovered the music video for Tom Petty’s “Don’t Come Around Here No More” in the fall of 2015. My son was less than a year old, and I’d just returned from maternity leave to my job as an English professor in upstate New York. On Fridays, I’d put in my headphones, walk to campus, keep the light in my office turned off so nobody knew I was in, and write poems.

Sometimes a song I listened to on my walks would get stuck in my head, an earworm, playing over and over. This was the case with “Don’t Come Around Here No More,” and watching the song’s accompanying music video on YouTube only pulled me in further. The video, like many of Petty’s music videos, has seemingly little to do with the song. The song, from the 1985 album Southern Accents, tells the story of a breakup. Petty croons about a relationship gone bad, imploring a former lover to stay away, leave him alone: “I don’t feel you anymore. You darken my door. Whatever you’re looking for — Hey! — don’t come around here no more!” A creeping sitar riff repeats throughout the piece.

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Bearing the Weight of My Grandfathers’ Old Clothes

Illustration by Homestead

Aram Mrjoian | Longreads | June 2019 | 13 minutes (3,320 words)

The first time I was mistaken for my father on the phone, I feigned annoyance. It was around 2004, I was 14 or 15 years old, and my family’s main form of communication was still the cordless phone mounted to the wall at the threshold of the kitchen, important numbers listed in thick pencil on a faded pad of yellow paper taped to the inside of the neighboring cabinet door. My mother and father also had cell phones, single-function dull silver models with green calculator screens and pixelated numbers, but these devices were strictly for work or emergencies. I was too young for my own phone, which was still an uncommon luxury among my friends, especially those still without a driver’s license. At home, the majority of calls we received were from telemarketers, and by my adolescence my parents had trained me to decline the onslaught of polite, prodding inquiries from unknown numbers, so that once or twice a day I hung up on an unfamiliar voice the moment they butchered our last name.

This time, though, it was a number I recognized, from a family member, someone who knew both my dad and me well enough to identify the distinct tones and cadences of our voices. She confused us anyway. I remember the static over the line, my momentary pause as I tried to make sense of this error. How could I be mistaken for my father? How could there be any confusion given the unsure wavering in my adolescent voice? Even as a teenager, I understood one distant moment of misidentification was neither some portentous sign of manhood nor a hint that I had matured in a more physical sense of the word. At least, I didn’t see it that way. Today, the feeling of being lost in adulthood is as constant as ever, like I am still an anachronistic version of my younger self, winging it day to day, uncertain of who I am and what the hell I’m doing. This mood was intensely magnified in my adolescence. My conceptions of masculinity and adulthood were out of whack with my perception of myself. It wasn’t simply that I wasn’t a man yet, but a larger question of how could I ever be half the man my father is, at all?
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William S. Burroughs and the Cult of Rock ‘n’ Roll

Paul Natkin/WireImage

Casey Rae | William S. Burroughs and the Cult of Rock ‘n’ Roll | University of Texas Press | June 2019 | 28 minutes (4,637 words)

 

Naked Lunch is inseparable from its author William S. Burroughs, which tends to happen with certain major works. The book may be the only Burroughs title many literature buffs can name. In terms of name recognition, Naked Lunch is a bit like Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue, which also arrived in 1959. Radical for its time, Kind of Blue now sounds quaint, though it is undeniably a masterwork.

Burroughs wrote the bulk of his famous novel Naked Lunch in Tan­gier, Morocco between 1954 and 1957. During those years, Burroughs was strung out and unhappy, living off of his parents’ allowance and getting deeper and deeper into addiction. He had friends but rarely saw them, preferring to spend days at a time staring at his shoes while ensorcelled in a narcotic haze.

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Caught Between Borders

Illustration by Eric Chow

Malia Politzer | Annie Hylton | Longreads | June 2019 | 25 minutes (6,991 words)

 
The first time his father tried to kill him, Ismail* was 15 years old. By the time he turned 19, he had escaped four attempts on his life: Once, he was outside an asylum center in South Africa, where he’d hoped to find safety; other times he was in Somalia, the country from which he fled. His father was intent on killing him to protect the family’s “honor.” No matter where he went, it seemed, his father had enlisted Somali immigrants to mete out his execution. Ismail’s crime? He is gay.

Slender and tall, Ismail dresses sharply, favoring bright colors and tight cuts. He wears a signature mixture of ladies’ perfumes, and carries a silver-chain necklace and anklet in his backpack that he longs to wear but is too afraid to put on. From a young age, Ismail displayed traits that he said were “woman things” — his walk, the way he spoke, how he moved his hands — mannerisms that were not “normal” and provoked his father’s ire. His father forbade him from school and kept him under house arrest.

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Demonology: A Woman’s Right to Fury

Hulton Archive / Sarah Crichton Books

Darcey Steinke | Excerpt from Flash Count Diary: Menopause and the Vindication of Natural Life | Sarah Crichton Books, an imprint of Farrar, Straus and Giroux | June 2019 | 17 minutes (4,557 words)

I walked up the Q train station steps, pushed through the turnstile, and headed out into the stormy fall night. Even as I left the station, anger swirled in my chest, severe and combustible. I moved away from the dark trees of Prospect Park down toward Flatbush Avenue. Some people say fury makes them blind, unable to see the world around them. I felt the opposite. Rage focused my attention. The wet asphalt reflected a red ATM sign. In the market on the corner, I watched a policeman buy a coffee in a white paper cup. Down Flatbush past the nail salon with the wall of multicolored polish, then past the vegetable stand, lemons and limes shining just inside the glass door, and left on Midwood, where I walked under wild trees, as different from trees in calm sunlight as a living person is from a zombie. Branches moved frantically in the greenish streetlight.

I had my worries. I wasn’t sure I could get the money together for my daughter’s college, and I’d developed a mysterious skin condition, with hives rising up under my bra strap and at the waist of my jeans. Those were on a back burner. In the forefront that night was a rage with a singular focus directed at my husband.

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It’s Like That: The Makings of a Hip-Hop Writer

T-Neck Records, 4th & B'way, Jive, Profile Records, Ruffhouse Records

Michael A. Gonzales | Longreads | June 2019 | 45 minutes (7,644 words)

 

Recently a friend told me, “When I was a newbie at Vibe magazine, I always thought, Mike looks like what I always imagined a real writer looked like, with your trenchcoat and briefcase and papers … and your hats. I can’t forget the hats.” Though he did forget the Mikli glasses and wingtips, I had to confess my style was one I’d visualized years before when I was a Harlem boy hanging out in the Hamilton Grange Library on 145th Street, looking at Richard Wright, Chester Himes, and James Baldwin book jacket pictures.

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