A MAN IS NOT — !

WAIT, R U FABRICATING?

— 1 .

WHERE DO U GET UR STORIES? —

. . . I spent all Sunday alone, walking aimlessly around Manhattan; at some point, U think: profound thoughts will drop on my head like pigeon shit; but I should’ve gone to work . . .

— I woke up at 7AM, left the house in the same outfit I wore the night before & slept in: my yellow Brasil jersey¹, loooong black shorts, & two different colored socks. — I didn’t wanna put on my sneakers; my toes were blistered because I had been walking so much lately, infected by my reading of all W.G. Sebald’s novels,

“and I cannot say whether I would ever have come out of this decline if one night as I slowly undressed, sitting on the edge of the bed, I had not been shocked by the sight of my shoes, which were literally falling apart.”

So I put on my birkenstocks. . . every morning, on the way to work, I pass the same homeless guy on 48th & Broadway; most days, I avoid him because he infuriates me so badly. . . He stands there wearing a neon construction vest, holding a plastic cup; he accosts U individually in a sonorous BOOM:

“HELLO SIR, CAN U PLEASE SPARE SOME CHANGE, JUST A LITTLE CHANGE FOR THE HOMELESS”

somedays I wanna scream at him,

“I’M BROKE, HEADED TO WORK AT 5AM AND UR ASKING ME FOR MONEY?!!”

once, I spitefully gave him the “little change” he was asking for, putting the lone quarter that was in my pocket in his cup. I actually expected him to thank me. Instead, he took it without looking at me, scornfully, like a rotting banana he needed to not starve. I felt pitiful. . . .

Today, for some reason, I felt like I finally owed him money for all my rancor; I had $10 in my hand, ready for him. I came up to him from 48th street, rather than passing him on Broadway; he spotted me and started his spiel half a block away; capitalizing on knickerbocker-fervor,

“LET’S GO KNICKS! SPARE SOME CHANGE!?”

He wasn’t wearing his usual vest; instead he had on grey sweatpants and a grey t-shirt which was soaked thru with sweat; he was already stultified by the morning heat: a fern in an oppressive hothouse. I handed him the $10; he took it like a bus driver taking the fare. He said,

“LET’S GO KNICKS! Last time they was in the Finals it was 1999! We were just kids!”

I said, inexplicably, “Not me, I wasn’t even born yet!”

And walked away. — I was born in 1997. Why the fuck did I lie? Troubled by my knee-jerk response, I texted all my clients, “i’m so sorry but i woke up sick as fuck” and rescheduled them, and I began to walk, with no direction in sight. . .

— 2 .

ARE U A LIAR? —

. . . I didn’t have a backpack; my loooong black shorts were sagging with the weight of O Negro no Futebol Brasileiro (1947) by Mario Filho which was stuffed in my back pocket; I was pulling my pants up with every third step, lamenting I didn’t put a belt on, my only belt, which I stole from an H&M in Edinburgh because I’m a thief. . .

— when I was in 2nd Grade, I stole another kid’s Yu-Gi-Oh! card; it was far from my first theft. I was a kleptomaniac. We were on the bus; Drew Sullivan was sitting behind me: older, cooler, bragging about his new awesome card (it was my absolute expertise between 7 & 10, now I can’t even remember the card. . . Obelisk the Tormentor? . . . what do those words mean to me now? how much of what I love now will I completely forget?) and I asked him to see his deck. I flipped thru it, dropped the expensive card in my backpack, — handed back the deck.

I don’t remember if he noticed right away, or if he only noticed later. . . but he knew I stole his card. I went home and hid it in a shoebox deep in my closet. For the next three months, him & his parents (his dad was a cop) went full onslaught, trying to get me to admit I stole the card, — they called every single night. It was one of the most stressful ordeals of my childhood, looking right at my parents, every day, and LYING to them. . . the worst part: my mom completely believed me. Months later, when I finally admitted it, she was heartbroken. . .

I don’t think she ever completely trusted me again.

*

In Death of a Salesman (1949), Willy Loman’s sons are thieves ; they steal little things their entire lives with no consequence but a winking reprimand from their proud father; what’s it matter if U steal a football from the locker room, or lumber from the construction site next door, or somebody else’s wife: — water & time on the steel of Ur integrity; one day U wake up & realize Ur soul has rusted,

“I’ve always made it a point of not wasting my life, and everytime I come back here I know that all I’ve done is to waste my life.”

My Sunday client, who I cancelled on, got me & Gaby tickets to see Death of a Salesman. I had never seen or read the play, but it felt like a close-up catharsis of my biggest foibles. . . — the Loman men ruin their lives thru dishonesty, the desperation to be “WELL-LIKED” & the ridiculous dream of being NUMBER ONE,

“A man can’t go out the way he came in, a man has got to add up to something!”

what really had me crying was the end, when Biff & Willy have their big confrontation; Biff says, “I’m a dime a dozen pop! And so are you!” and Willy says, “I am NOT a dime a dozen! I AM WILLY LOMAN!” and then Biff cries in his father’s arms; when he pulls away and walks off, Willy, tragic as King Lear, says,

“Loves me. [Wonderingly] Always loved me. Isn’t that a remarkable thing?”

and why can’t U rebuild from there? They had this moment, it could’ve been the beginning of a new phase of their life but Willy had to go and kill himself. . . —

— I was thinking so much of Sebald while watching the play. I had just finished The Emigrants & Vertigo that week; Nathan Lane with his big moustache, looked exactly like Sebald. . . and Willy Loman dies in a car crash, just like Sebald. . . and they were both supreme fabricators; Willy, who always inflated his earnings to his wife even though she knew the truth, can’t bring himself to tell her he’s not earning anything now,

“And what goes through a man’s mind, driving seven hundred miles home without having earned a single cent? Why shouldn’t he talk to himself? Why? When he has to go to Charley and borrow fifty dollars a week and pretend to me that it’s his pay? And you tell me he has no character? The man who never worked a day but for your benefit? When does he get the medal for that?”

But Biff knows his dad is a FAKE. We find out why at the end of the play : when Biff was 18, he pulled up on his dad in Boston, caught him drunk, with a naked woman in his hotel room. . . his dad isn’t the paragon man he spent his whole childhood thinking he was. . . he looks at the sturdy edifice where he always saw VIRTUE, and now he sees only the ABYSS; his response to a world suddenly devoid of values is, rather than to BECOME the values he always believed in, a spiteful nihilism. . .²

The world is PHONY: fuck everything!

The problem with FABRICATION: people believe U. . .

— Sebald was a fabricator of a very different sort: he was a life thief. . . he would steal people’s stories, transmogrify them into whatever he wanted, then insist on the TRUTH of his accounts, even in interviews. . . he used his neighbor’s likeness in The Emigrants to create Dr Henry Selwyn; Selwyn’s daughter,

“When we found out he had used Papa for a character, we were completely shocked. Yes, it was my father, but it was nothing like him! This Sebald fellow (whom we barely knew), made it seem like my parents had a bitter marriage, and that Papa’s closest companion was some mountaineer who died when he was a teenager. It couldn’t be further from the truth. The only thing that was completely true was his method of suicide. . .”

Willy Loman & Sebald both use their fabrications to create a sort of dreamworld: a liminal space where they can be more than themselves. . .

— 3 .

ARE DREAMS DANGEROUS? —

. . . it was almost nightfall, and I hadn’t gone anywhere; the most interesting thing that happened to me all day: I was looking up at the Hudson Yards Edge, trying to have a profound thought, and the wind blew my hat off: I had to chase it for several blocks, nearly creamed by the careless traffic.

I decided to walk up 9th Avenue, back toward my house, —

a man was walking my way, in a dead-straight line, neck stately like an alpaca; I suddenly noticed he was spitting on the people in his way, so perfectly in stride nobody even noticed until there was spit on their face. . . I stepped out of the way; he hit one dude who was looking down at his phone: the guy wiped his face and looked at me dumbfounded. . .

I passed Local 42 where I knew Ethan was with his parents; I had promised to meet him there, but I was finding it impossible to speak to anybody; instead I bought a pre-roll on the corner and kept moving. . .

— Willy Loman always imagines he’ll have a grand funeral,

“That funeral will be massive! They’ll come from Maine, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire! All the old-timers with the strange license plates—that boy will be thunderstruck, because he never realized, I am known! Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey—I am known! He’ll see what I am! He’s in for a shock that boy.”

Willy doesn’t realize what his ride-or-die wife tries to tell him,

“You have enough to be happy right here, right now! Why must everybody conquer the world? You’re well-liked, the boys love you, and someday —”

But on the day of the funeral, there’s only four people in attendance: his sons, his wife, and his neighbor. . . they wait around until dusk and nobody else shows up, and his neighbor reads a eulogy,

“Willy was a salesman, out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine. Nobody dare blame this man. A salesman is got to dream, boy. It comes with the territory. . .”

Willy was mad, failed, & forgotten; like so many of the men who Sebald paid witness to, however they were fictionalized, — our whole lives are invented narratives, anyway; narratives that will be appropriated by others, who, when speaking of our past existence, gone & never known, will render us fictitious. . . but still, the invention preserves something of the truth, passes on something of their memory, —

Can we discover something thru fabrication? . . . Sebald was trying to learn about himself, — he was trying to CONFESS, by telling stories about other people. . . which is why his novels are suffused with dreamy mystery, subterranean heft. . .

— like Arthur Miller with Willy Loman. . . he wrote a play that seems to be a lesson against being a philandering bum, yet Miller continued to be a philandering bum for the rest of his life. . . do we ever learn the lessons we teach? —

. . . on 48th & 10th, I walked into the bodega I don’t usually patronize; I was really high; I grabbed a Modelo tall can and a pack of gum. As I was checking out, a tall jittery white dude storms in, grabs a couple bottles of water, chips, tries to bolt out the door; the cashier goes, “HEY! HEY!” and the terrified snaggletoothed shelf-stocker puts himself in front of the door, trapping the thief; the cashier hops over the counter, the thief’s yelling, “THIS IS MINE! THIS SHIT IS MINE!!!” it seemed like violence was a very likely outcome: I wanted to get the fuck out of there.

I told the petrified clerk who was foolishly blocking the door with his life, mouth agape in medieval horror, to let me out. He shook his head. I said, “LET ME THE FUCK OUT OF HERE!” the cashier grabbed the shit from the thief, pushed him; the guy went tumbling outside. Outside, standing in front of the door, he did an inverted sign of the cross and started bestowing a complex curse on the bodega.

I walked passed him; I was genuinely SHOOK, the whole event seemed like a perfect conclusion to everything I’d been thinking about. . . the thief believing his own fantasy, knocking up against the bodega clerks’ reality, but if someone had a weapon it could’ve gone horrifically. . .

but I couldn’t figure out what any of it meant. I walked away, the thief’s bodega-hex fading into the night, and I walked right passed my apartment, completely bewildered, and continued to wander. . .

---

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1. Me, Gaby, & my sister went to a “rooftop Baile Funk Watch Party” at some LES bar to watch Brasil’s friendly versus Egypt. Everything about the event was instantaneously unpleasant: navigating the crowd was like swimming thru mud. . . — I was wondering why NOBODY seemed remotely focused on the game, but then I realized: all these fools in green & yellow were FAKES! They were American men: surreptitiously here to shark for some Brasilian pussy.

2. Biff is so much like Darius in Humpty Dumpty, which is extremely thematically related to Salesman.