Work Text:
2023
An emaciated girl is lying on top of him. Her gangly legs are gathered between his. He heard her speak long before he knew what she looked like. That’s what set her apart from the rest. She looked how you’d imagine she would look from listening to her talk. For money. Before that she used to lay on men professionally. At a Vegas karaoke bar as a girl of just 20. He guessed it was one of the sleazier places given they’d hired someone under the drinking age. Just above his navel her phone was hovering precariously in her right hand with TheRealReal open. He tried to pay attention to when she paused her scrolling with the intention of buying her a birthday gift. If he could remember her birthday first. Had he known she was a pisces he would have realized without thinking that they were astrologically incompatible. He had no faith in the efficacy of zodiac seasons whatsoever but after half a lifetime spent around metropolitan waifs you tend to learn some things.
Cultural consensus on the ‘dirtbag left’ seemed to have calcified on it meaning nothing. Less than nothing, which if you think about it is an achievement in and of itself. But this was a ‘cope’, in his opinion. Everyone knew what it meant. It was a style, not a politic. Probably why the moribund woman he was currently providing mattressing for was allowed to keep the term for herself. She was the face of it come to think, because she had the most stylistic power out of all its hanger-ons, regardless of how ‘left’ she really was. His read was that she was moderately so, if they were to line up all her countrymen in a Peele-esque fashion. No one wanted to admit to knowing what ‘dirtbag’ meant because they envied her style. Her proven yet accidental capability to spark excitement, desire, on the nonflammable surface of internet politics.
For all he knew she still sold sex. Even if she wasn’t a typical NYC microcelebrity-cum-high-end-escort, can a woman like her sell style without selling her body? Maybe that was why she always claimed all women are whores. Every accusation something. But she would argue that she wasn’t accusing, merely observing. It was the way things worked for her. Or for all? Is noticing misogynist phenomena unfeminist? He debated asking whether Peter Thiel was really putting up money for their timely right-wing heel-turn. But the afternoon he had just spent with her had convinced him of the affirmative, and he wouldn’t want to put her on the spot (or inform her that he was awake thinking creepy things). He at least never subscribed to the Patreon. That just would have made him feel dirty.
He found it difficult to understand what it was she was shopping for through the haze of noticing the intricacies of gender dynamic. Everything she opened in a background tab seemed like something she would never wear. Truthfully they didn’t know each other well enough to warrant birthday gift giving. Or even birthday remembering. What drove the final nail in his plans was the embarrassing realization that he felt much closer to her having listened to her podcast regularly for over a year than she felt to him. She definitely hadn’t heard his music before that unsexy DM (by nature DMs are unsexy). He had read somewhere that there’s a certain cutoff in age where people stop listening to new music. He wondered when the last time he hooked up with someone who wasn’t familiar with his band was.
2022
The upholstered private room was dimmed by scarlet drapery even though it was lunch time. Back then a discussion like this — on tour plans — would have happened in a basement. A server brought in yet more temaki filled with unidentified crushed seafood. Charli's choice, as was the restaurant. These days it was impossible to catch George without her accompanying. Not that he didn't enjoy her presence; he liked her in a genuine way. It couldn't be said they were like brother-and-sister though, not just because he found her extremely pretty, but because he thought she was like him to an alarming degree. Siblings — no matter how similar they appear — have to be completely different. It's probably impossible to compete with someone younger or older if you're both playing the same game. He wasn't in competition with Charli. Not musically, and not for her boyfriend’s attention. Sometime in childhood Matty realized he'd always have George's time. It was a nice thought: certainty in the love of your friends. And he knew what competing looked like. His mother probably didn't have a favorite son, but every moment under her roof felt like a battle to be it. Charli was an only child of a university professor. She stopped going by her full name around the time her parents started driving her to raves. The continental and old-fashioned ’Charlotte’ wasn’t going to fly for the fourteen-year-old DJ. Matthew kept on using the diminutive essentially for business reasons. ‘Matty’ would stick in people’s memories. It would also make him seem slightly magical, since there weren’t any other grown Mattys around. It also compelled people to think of him as a friend right away. Charli had the same black frizzy hair he did, a novelty in England when they were growing up. Part of her family is from Gujarat; what was his parents’ excuse?
He told them about how they should build a rudimentary model house to be taken apart and reassembled at each venue, one lined with cathode-ray tube televisions like Lou Reed’s. It was Charli who got the reference. She asked what would be on the TVs when that wasn’t really the point. Usually the screens would be off, but what they weren’t getting was that this wasn’t just a backdrop — it was a set for a conceptual play-like concert. What, like The Wall? George thought it didn’t make sense to perform it like a rock opera when it wasn’t. Matty was trying to explain how Being Funny is a concept album, a kitchen sink drama about the dissatisfaction of the modern man. But wasn’t all their stuff about that, it’s not kitchen sink if it’s about you — a rich fuck, etc. He understood all that, they just weren’t seeing the vision. It was also about ‘online’. This didn’t help his case with GeorgeandCharli. Maybe the TVs could play sensational clips of current affairs during little intermissions. What, like Kendrick?
2023
Matty had always hoped to be the one. The singularity that bound it all together. But in adulthood, the harsh realization that singular people don’t hope to be things had set in. Some people are just the axis on which their worlds turn. Before he knew all that he had made himself a documentarian of such aberration. Many ‘notables’ have been in this apartment: Phoebe Bridgers, FKA Twigs, Sam Levinson, and most recently of course, Taylor Swift. The luminary lounging on his (ex-girlfriend’s) Scarpa couch today was Nick Mullen. With Adam in tow, like some 20th-century vaudeville troupe. Adam was profusely apologizing for the fiasco that was his appearance on The Adam Friedland Show Retro Style Podcast. He didn’t sound sorry at all as he went through the motions of working out the kinks in his hour: the Swifties are going to stuff him in the ovens, they’re threatening to push him in front of a moving train on Twitter, etc. Even Hitler, even Hitler himself, had the decency to put the jews on the trains.
They were talking about drugs. Matty had seen Reddit users talk about how Cum Town was like a surrogate friendship with minimal shame. To mitigate his own, he had been thinking about it as a sort of uni simulator. Three guys on stimulants dying over the stupidest jokes imaginable. But that wasn’t really fair. When style reaches its precipice it can itself become substance. Twigs’s Didion paperbacks taught him that. When depressants meet alcohol you get Nick Mullen. Matty had never met anyone more Irish, and he’s from Cheshire. Nick told him how he stopped drinking through the power of kratom. Like any other all-American substance it started out a tea drank by the indigenous populations of a precolonial agaria. But once the all-Americans (AAs) got their hands on it they, as usual, had to raise its potency: enter 7OH. 7-Hydroxymitragynine: an isoprenoid indole alkaloid isolated from the kratom leaf. 50 times stronger than its organic form, 13 times stronger than morphine. Its natural habitat the breast pocket of Nick’s uncharacteristically on-trend Carhartt jacket. He explains that he got it from a former roommate before the well-funded urban youth jacked his look. As the blue Xanax looking pill dissolves in his mouth, Matty asks if the end of Cum Town had anything to do with their changing drug habits — Burroughs style. He accented the ‘style’ not the ‘Burroughs’, unconsciously by way of Adam. Nick answered kind of, if he counted drinking. Why, tired of singing? If Matty could pull a John Cooper Clarke — talk into the mic and have it be called rock and not radio, he would do it. Three guys nearing middle age, looking for the new thing then. Nick asks if ‘podcastistas’ were eating into his market. Once one of you dies of anorexia, hounded by British paps, maybe. Many have said Nick is sort of the Kanye West of podcasting, Adam offers. A real Lauryn Hill. Have you met him by the way, Kanye? Yeah, here and there at parties. Wow. How did that square with your Taylor Swift loyalties, sorry to keep bringing her up. Yeah no it’s cool. Didn’t even cross my mind, to be honest. They don’t exist in the same world, I guess. They just happened to meet once that one time. Nick and Adam went into a whole spiel about Kanye and antisemitism that’s clearly played out: Adam on the side of unstable genius, Nick of retirement. The cloying effect of watching two people run out of material having already had every conversation it is possible for two people to have creeped up on Matty. Along with that of the blue Xanax looking pill. You’d love heroin. Nick feigns surprise.
The real Kanye debate, in Matty’s opinion, was form v. content. Preternaturally gifted in the former, unduly desirous of the latter. It probably didn’t help that the world (or, you know, AA) wanted him to be a black messiah. Whose fans are worse do you think, yours or Kanye’s? Ours. Nick was fidgeting. But not in the normal rote way where you pick at the hardness on the edges of your cuticle; he was making amphibious and arbitrary circular motions as if he was handling an endangered insect. He had a way of triggering the maternal instinct in people in whom that instinct appeared previously nonexistent. Never love me for my weaknesses, he seemed to say. Never take the blame for me. Never think it is your fault when I am the one. I am always the one.
Little eve of drunkenness, holy! were it only for the mask with which you gratified us. We affirm you, method! We don’t forget that yesterday you glorified each one of our ages. We have faith in the poison. We know how to give our whole lives every day.
Behold the time of the Assassins.
2024
“I know you think your life is some episode of the library is open but I am not the one.” - Matty Healy, to Azealia Banks