Wednesday, November 25, 2009
Andy
As I walked around my food co-op in Williamsburg searching for my favorite organic granola to no avail, a man caught my eye from down the aisle of locally grown vegetables. His crumpled thrift store tee looked unwashed in a way that made me begin to sweat through my Tom's of Maine natural deodorant and my ironic onesie. Our eyes locked as he lifted an organic frozen meal, his lanky arms and tousled unwashed hair made Radiohead start echoing through my mind. I gave him a look that said that I had no interest in him, he returned it twice as hard, harder than the thing creating an outline in his tight worn-in chords. I could see the ironic moustache tattoo on his finger, we matched! I raised mine in a nonchalant salute, he returned it, I knew I had him. From there it was a short ride on the handlebars of his fixed gear bike back to his cramped Bushwick studio, I had been hoping he was a squatter but this was nearly as good. There was a stained mattress on the floor and Passion Pit echoed from the speakers in the corner of the one room he shared with his five roommates. I knew they must share this one mattress, nothing could've made me hotter. We were standing so close that my breath was fogging his thick-rimmed glasses. I heard a crunch beneath my Metropolis boot and looked down to see a crushed Arrested Development DVD, "Sorry" I muttered momentarily losing my cool, "Don't worry about it, I don't care about material things," he purred. He couldn't have been more perfect
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Woah yerr story blew me away dood. Unlike other peoples' stories your story had two uber super cool cats. Nice work Lillian!
ReplyDeletehi lillian,
ReplyDeletethanks for sharing the link to your story.
it reminded me of one i read in my only reading of "Bust" magazine once, also featuring a fixed gear.
great example of narcissism pretending to be love - i guess the breaking of the Arrested Development CD (my favorite is Zingaladumi) intends irony - since the characters have been not only arrested but maybe even imprisoned in this stage as signified by the permanent handpainting.
i'm not sure about your stylistic choice of demonstrating the protagonist's relentless objectifying and superficiality. lines like, "nothing could have made me hotter" make me wonder if there might be missed opportunities for giving some flesh to your characters - some backstory, some motivations, something other than the relentless flatness of cartoon. but maybe you're right, maybe a character like this really would be as cartoony and unconscious as this?
a merely technical suggestion - there's a tracking issue - they're in line at a food coop and then suddenly she's on his handlebars. anyone who's been in a food coop will know that they had to make conversation for at least 15 minutes - you need to have a sentence or at least a phrase to get them from one scene to the other.
finally, i would be interested to read a translation of this story into a chassidic or mennonite subculture.