[Veronica Skripka (Classics/Dance) literally disrobes amid an auditorium of hundreds at the crest of applause already destined for her. Self-consciously, the clapping ceases. It was fomented by The Dean’s announcing Veronica’s speech, but is quickly sputtering out lest it be misprisen as having commenced anent the clothing’s fall. Beneath the rapidly cascading store-rented billows, Miss Skripka, V., 23, and ballerina virtuosa of the Nashville Dance League, sports a scarlet cotton sash along the ceinture line of bright, brocade dancing attire clearly inspired by sarafans from Russia’s severe north—the which she bore in perfect arabesques throughout the springtime’s Мёртвые души (Gogol’s story Dead Souls, but Konyechka’s ballet), while ex-KGB/ex-Bolshoi director Alyosha Saburov, who spoke exclusively in swallowed Peterbourgeois Russian, pressed a dittany of foreign words that sounded like “Whoreshow,” “Plowhard,” and “Lost! No V!” in the ears of she who played Улинка. For all Veronica’s lexical skill, she possesses no Cyrillic, and still believes the personage portrayed (Ulinka) is pronounced “Wiley K.” Dacy Sellers (Mineral Science) is just really disappointed he didn’t get to see any titty. Veronica adjusts her once hidden kerchief of tulle.]
“To the Vanderbilt Class of 2042: Those of you I know and love, vale! I wish you peace beyond the veil. Those of you I know and hate, get dicked.
[The Dean’s personal rule, post 32 years of service, is that he will forgive up to three curse words in a valedictory speech before consciously submitting to apoplexy. Regarding the sexual nature of the insult, though, Veronica’s squandered her grace, in his eyes.]
And in meeting right now the unknown majority, the pleasure will truly be all mine, through this introduction—especially knowing how little many of you will listen.
[Kelsey Sassenach (PPE) is squeezing felty, glittered letters on her mortarboard of black voile how impatient teens do pusstuffed comedones.]
I have been called for 13 years Veronica Skripka, but my birth name is Sesseleigh-Lucreesja Dunbar-Cartoffal, which is, put kindly, as nasty and prodigious a worm to pass through my mouth as it is an earsore to slither through your incudes. I would have kept this yestername buried in the vales of memory had I been able to think of a better topic for my valedictory speech but…fuck it. Seeing as how this valediction marks my farewell from Nashville, Tennessee, and probably America writ-large, I figured examining the beginning would bring this to a close. Like an ouroboros, or human-centipede, or the idiosyncratic way my mother does whip-its.
[Nippy chuckles braise the air. The Dean is perturbed by the fuck-word, and keeps metatarsal time through his duotone brogues.]
Long since faded, long since gone—Now, my prior name may offend only in aesthetic— unless you’re of that Southern set that enjoys bizarre concatenated names—
[Anna-Bella-Caterrina-Dagobah Parasol Loganthorpe is tweezing wan stuffing from an abscess in the upholstery, like Kelsey Sassenach does mortarboard letters.]
—or you’re a student of local history. I can see some of your eyes have gone glassy with the search already.
[Stray gasps, the lenses activated with cursory searches.]
There we go. You all can gasp now. I was the famed “Party Baby of Broadway.”
[No one else in the crowd gasps, save a couple faculty. The students wonder if this was a recent occurrence. Veronica’s notes susurrate.]
My father, Harley “The Ladymaker” Cartoffal, was born in Chattanooga, where he attended the quaint, Hogswarthy private school with a zero-profuse tuition known as Baylor. Whether he was born stupid, nursed stupid, attained stupidity by playing football, or feigned stupidity for his own amusement, one can only postulate. In any case, it wasn’t his intellect for which he was selected by Vanderbilt to come and play Strong Safety. He became something of a phenom, a football savant, for his bestial frame and barracudic movements. Based on the footage I’ve seen, one might compare him to a darting barracuda. To this day, he holds the NCAA record for most Intentional Grounding Penalties inflicted on quarterbacks in the history of the game—an occurrence called the “The Belmont Runs.” In 2017, Dad impacted the genitalia (like two stepped-on water balloons) of University of Tennessee, Knoxville’s wingback sub Tiberius Crocker with a truly brutal boar-charge helmet spike.
[everyone encoded with a Y chromosome immediately shifts their thighs together.]
This was when Cartoffal’s fame was assured. Crocker’s girdle looked like someone’d launched a rotten tomato at his crotch.
[some “oof’s!” from the aforementioned. The legs recross in catholic consonance.]
My dad’s meerkat aspect began to incite his team to fear him themselves. Coach Mason conspired with how to nurture this further. They began to just let him run wild. They’d switch his position, offense, or defense, or call Time-Outs where the coaches would pretend to calm him down, and the other players would form a milling hoop around him, like circus viewers while he gormlessly surveyed the stadium. Vandy won a bowl game every year for four straight seasons.
Harley coasted by on Belmont’s then-new “Tendential Entrepreneurship” major: a means of manipulating psychology and mass market. I don’t know how much of the Hobbesy-Malthusy-Machiavelly side of things my dad picked up on, but there was one lesson he never forgot—be as audacious as possible. While dad was a force of nature on the field, there seemed to be tacit agreement between him and NFL officials that his brand of scariness would be just too much for family.
[Several TE majors are nodding toward the stage with genuine pride.]
So straight out of college, Dad wrangled as many sponsorships as possible. He had a commercial with Hochbahn Chicken, holding a breaded filet in the Heisman Pose where the ball usually goes:
“We tenderize our schnitzel as if this guy’d pulverized your pelvis!”
written below in Jokerman Font.
He’d sign the jock straps of high-school hopefuls who congregated under his studio apartment in Green Hills. He even became the face of an Elzabett-based Estrogen Pill firm, until they fell off. Money had to be secured by other means.
We’ll come back to him in a bit.
[Coriander Albuquerque III (Sports Phys) is thrall to a cataclysmic hangover, having last night ingested a nameless cocktail with an Everclear suspension. Cori’s wondering why three broads with the same haircut are all giving the same speech onstage. Is this the convocation?]
My mother, Lynnaea Dunbar-Cartoffal, née Dunbar, was oft at odds with her beauty. She was as quick in painting her face with rouge to which she knew she was allergic, as she was lodging a complaint on Twitter for a perceived “conspiracy to deny her retweets.”. My mother feathered her hair in the traditional Nashville fashion, excuse me, manner. She dyed her red hair platinum, and sapped the color from her cheeks with stanching, chafy powder that leant her the aspect of a blood-hungry revenant.
Lynny D was born in Sacramento, and later matriculated to University of California: Leñoso Mundo, where she became a member of the sorority Tau Rho and graduated in 2017 with a degree in Communications. By then she was a world-traveler, too. Surely, the high schoolers of Tik-Tok knew more of cuisine and culture than that foolish Argentine who taught her Spanish 203. Certainly, lingual gymnastics with a cherry stem must have given her an Akashic knowledge of France! In other words, my mother was a true cosmopolitan. Surely, since that’s all she drank and all she read.
[Someone is burping without cease. Every couple seconds, they even arpeggiate.]
One sorority sister, Nelly Rook, perhaps the smartest among them, now happily a single cabineer up in the Walder Woods of Laudika West, put forth the plan to venture into Nashville to celebrate coming high-time matrimony between her and P. Cornelius Seacole. This trip included pictures with the Nashville Wings (since demolished by God for our hubris, evened along with the entire Nashville Predators team, the Batman Building, and the rest of the Gulch during 2030’s EF5 “Hickory the Twister,” resulting in the naming of damaging tornadoes the way we do hurricanes and tropical storms.), trips down Broadway, and then of course, the erotic epiphany, during which she touched a chippendales’ hair-curtained navel. Lynn had an episode.
“It was, like, as if,” she later said, “my finger went in that cave and spent forty years in there and when it didn’t come out, you know, like, bath-wrinkled, it was like that Booty guy in Asia, the one that lived in a Sycamore Tree, and I just knew that Nashville was magic!”
So Lynnaea had a plan. Lately, the LA influencer scene had started to teem with actrices manquées, the kind that in the morning mirror practiced every kind of face they’d make throughout the day. And though she was a patent narcissist, she still was capable of taking an honest inventory of her bonuses and faults to effect the necessary steps in ensuring optimal results. If she came out here, to this sparser outpost of unending parties—she could bracket the range of possibilities. Like royalty fostered far away that sometimes returns to reclaim its right, she would style herself the very Queen of the Nashville Scene, and then make all America yield its citied knees.
[More and more of the audience are becoming engaged. Some out of anger, some out of interest.]
They met at the opening event of my father’s first venture, Harley’s: a steak-and-craft- beer place—the thrust of the restaurant being that my father would personally headbutt, diddle, rub, finger, punch, lick, or knead every comestible ordered. “You’re in His Hands!” was the primary slogan. There was a local ad of him spiking a football into a diner’s checkerboard floor and then getting on all fours, revealing a congealed cheese sauce oozing through the laces, which he promptly sipped like a hummingbird with a pituitary problem. Investors hoped that football fans across the country would flock with the dream of finding a hangnail or knuckle hair or bacillus of salmonella in their Caesar salad. He’d keep you guessing if the islet of spume in your Feldgeister Sour was just fizz from the tap, or some of his skim-suspended (HPV & Oral Thrush-steeped) spit.
[Quinn Crim (Psychology) has just remembered she needs to take her Canesten, Loestrin, and Latuda or she’s gonna start clambering through the crowd, screeching and clawing, like a monkey with bowie knife.]
Already establishing herself in the Nashville Influencer scene like a louse in a cilice, Mom had snagged an invitation by having posed with all manner of soufflés, patés, artichoke dips, and roe in eateries owned by the Harley’s parent company. As she would often dreamily recount to interested parties and co-influencers, she did her best to attract his attention the entire night.
And after an evening of attempted elbow-touching, glances askance, and 120 dB/C#6 “YUM!”’s, imagine my mother’s surprise to find her tartare aller-retour came out looking as if it’d been found at the bottom of a Laconic cliff: the meat was scattered like microwaved hamburger helper, each giblet bow-wrapped in a piece of Harley’s smoke-dark hair, the capers embedded with fingernails like pins in a pincushion, and the catsup imprinted with the loophole of his ring finger. Lynn looked up toward the kitchen window, where my father stood smiling. She smiled back, and ate raw meat off a wooden fork she brought from home.
They were married in the week.
The restaurant was shut down a week after that. Prions were found in the hot dogs on my Dad’s day off.
Thus passed some years of relative bliss, despite my father’s unemployment. Mom and Dad had news of both the matrimony and the prions suppressed, making verity their junctured plaything. They thrived off the confusion. Had Lynnaea Dunbar gotten the restaurant shut down? Were she and the football player linked? At rumor’s apogee, she posted a somber, monochrome photo sans caption and hashtag of my father looking out from her Oriel Window, an unruly beard coverlet to his bowed chin. Oh wow! How pensive is he, how melancholy! Is Harley racked with regret over his geld-happy past? Is he seeking wisdom now, over violence? Nah. He was just watching a couple of the summering Botoxites molotov a homeless camp outside Poindexter Coffee on West End Ave.
Mom was always careful never to post any photographs of herself with anybody else. Her page was a solipsistic page, and while one might stumble into it by the hyperlinks of her city set, you are beset by segmentations of her being—body, hair, breast, soul, and soles—the bright murk of solitude, the oneness of vision in knowing that when she bluely lumes the cracked screen of an incelar [sic] undergrad: she was and is the momentary god of thought.
[The burpist, Carter Cardieu (Business) now in the midst of a brave of necessary virtuosity comparable in the leaps of pitch and speed to Giuseppe Tartini’s “Il trillo del diavolo” has been escorted from the auditorium by a coterie of faculty and students. He swallowed a party balloon, and an ambulance is being called. The burp grows higher and higher in pitch. A couple of distracted auditors give a standing ovation, which Veronica ignores.]
Mom became the preeminent influencer of Nashville, and my dad, usurping truth, became her bauble. She hosted salons, and such, for other enterprising model hopefuls. And for about a year, all went well. I can still hear the halting, false chuckles with which she lulled and gulled all lolling tongues. She courted the attention of several sponsorships, and my father’s status as sinewy accoutrement begot awe from her immediate circle. He was relegated to the corner, like some perennial holiday bower. They were even able to mask his continual unemployment as a “Vision Quest (i.e., he went down to Chattanooga to stay with his parents for six months and ate at Taco Mamacita’s every day) + residual mentation.”
But Mom’s statistics grew stagnant and her audience grew wiser. Suddenly, folks began to comment asking where her husband was. Is that a crimson root we see? Curious…Well, what else was there to do? She was “over the hill,” in internet terms—already 25! She had to have a baby, of course!
When my mother first found out she was pregnant, Lynnaea’s first thought was abortion. She told me so, after all: she felt so gross, the refuse of another being wriggling around inside her. She compared it to having eaten bad sashimi. What’s more, a belly like that could hurt the revenue, she feared! Those young Belmont studs would turn their eyes and goads to fillies else, newer models, french-tipped guitaristas corvetting out of Knoxville, those stylish Jewish heiresses (all peacoats and foulards) from New York City, those French, Italian, Spanish meufs,‘gazze, y chavalas who forded an ocean, and set beauty in their brows with a most effortless sheen! Oh, how our rustic men wished their wide foreign mouths would warp their names on any Tennessee night!
Just as much as one stands in splendor of the Taj Mahal and, with indolent vision, the fruits of past toil are refracted by the crystalline seen—the filthy act of making is forgot. The vision of a pregnant woman for these young men was almost hyper-pornographic. The only impulse stronger in any promising Don Juan than snatching a girl’s virginity, is cuckolding the man that took it. They perceive it as a life-long game of King of the Hill. Or, Mound. Sour grapes make sickening wine. I am no fan of my father’s, but to see those messages, those comments, those disgusting innuendoes—it would upset anyone…
[pique needles the mind of Serra-Banda Hemisike (History), who has received several messages regarding her (admittedly comely) elbows from a cadre of British Columbians here in Nash’ on scholarship, offering luxurious vacations for one glancing admission of having tickled her funny bone…]
Never for those nine months did it occur to them that she could have taped a cantaloupe to her belly, or bought a baby of the same means through which she would later attempt to sell me.
And the only reason I didn’t end up with the dipless philtrum of FAS was her obsession with Montellier Carbonated Mineral Water. She drank so much of the stuff when we were at home that it seemed as if her sentences were end-stopped with the coloraturate burps that resembled yelps more than eructation. Thank God she didn’t discover White Claw until after I was born.
When I finally escaped my cell, I was given the same treatment as my father—photos exclusively of me, not held or supported by anyone—more the tincture of a child observed than offspring. Dad would often watch me with an odd sort of empty cogitation. Sometimes I wonder if he feared as all animals do, that I was not his own. My memory is stellated with fireworks, most likely the blinding flash of the camera at such close quarters for those incipient years. According to the doctors, that’s probably what fused my lacrimal ducts shut.
[Heath Chambourg (Classics), not having known any of this for the five-odd months he dated Veronica-Sesseleigh-Carful-Whatever suddenly feels a bit bad about calling her an “ἑταίρα,” and a “bad-kissing, heartless shrew” and that “it doesn’t matter how hot [her] legs are when [she has] a face that busted” when she tearlessly broke up with him for filching her dancing stipend to buy more Gacha Crystals for Final Fantasy XXXIII Online.]
You know, the sad thing about her is she had a kind of uncanny genius for statistics. Her ease with mental math, to me, was like a dance—the way she could ride trends like a wave, and adjust to always end up viral somehow. But unfortunately, her titrations were focused on determining the optimum fall and angle of a thorough-gold nosering with regards to lighting, locale, filter, and angle. And she was a regular Archimedes with the eye makeup! Noli turbare circulos tenebrosos meos!
[a sole, solemn whoop from the projector booth on the second floor, where Darnell Hummingsby (a major in math and a minor in Latin) feels seen. Looking down at her notes, Veronica greets him with a Horatian hand.]
And by my Mother’s calculations, she was more excited about the effects that pregnancy would have upon her body than any other project. She had perfected the aesthetic that—in both Nashville and LA—would in former years have been termed Draupadic or Helenate, but now as girlhood ceded to a certain age, she nearly wished she would be disfigured somehow! If pregnancy would bring corporeal lassitude, bring it on!
Alas, she almost cursed the elasticity with she she was blessed—the boon that, in a cinch, most women’d kill for!
In keeping with this theme of fearing metamorphosis, it is a trade secret that my mother would often augment and deface her body—stuffing her undergarments with one of her sponsored products, Jumbo Goo-Goo Clusters (perhaps inspired by the puellic onomatopoeia for which those paps are usually used) she purchased with such frequency that the obese proprietor, one Jorge Gambol (remember him), who shuttled about the store on a fleet of motorized scooters, and began to swap bisoux from below while bestowing on her the boxes she bought with an expired coupon that Harley had ripped from the bag of an issue of MyNashville and presented her for their anniversary. Every time we left he’d rest a perspirant paw on the crown of my cranium, and palpate, grinning, intimating:
“Wouldn’t you look cute covered in chocolate and nuts?”
And I would squirm, and Mom would jerk my arm near out of socket while he licked the opisthenar area.
“Hoo-weee, Say-Sale-Leeeeee!”
She habitually brayed in an affected drawl, even more unintelligible than my father’s monosyllabs or parroted cant. If you’ve never heard the mix of vocal fry with a southern drawl, I wouldn’t recommend it. Kind of like combining soda and milk.
[Fans of White Russians quail.]
Some of my earliest memories would be my mother sitting, half-reclined at (and in) her vanity, her flighty frame draped with taglia-lace lingerie, stuffing the rough, uneven, nougaty medallions in the cups of her brassiere. It was always easy for her to locate them: her body heated them so that they often melted, and two doo-doo brown targets pigmented the white, like fertile humus from which her hopes would grow.
There was the cochineal illusion of an areola where the paper naturally tapered, on which she smooshed maraschino lipstick like how I drew ladybirds with Crayola crayons in the room adjacent.
She feared the gym would make her “mannish,” so she devised an interlocking system of ad-hoc crash diets so wild you’d think her body was at the epicenter of an arena of bumper cars—alternating and colliding in an Eschery tessellation only she could comprehend. If her butt got too big, she’d start to starve. If it got too small, she’d break out the spandex, or the tape and the Hochbahn (to pulchritize her pelvis, you see).
[This pun takes wing like a bullet from a water-gun. Most students either weren’t listening when she said the Bahnhof slogan earlier, or forgot. And if they do remember, they’re thinking she said “puckerize,” are confused, and internally begin to denigrate this so-called valedictorian. How’s that?—Elisa Rampf (Pure Math) thinks—Puckerize? What a moron! Skin doesn’t do that. Dance and Classics aren’t even real majors. They just feel bad for her because she’s a dyke. And she’s only a dyke because she’s traumatized. And I’m traum—]
With her foiled Goo-Goo’s half exposed “accidentally,” hatched with eyebrow pencil to give the illusion of “relatable” stretch marks, she’d angle her selfie from on high. Too perfect and you inspire jealousy. So many women paid a subscription just to make a chimney of her ass, or tell her how courageous she was to grunt a baby out. Tell me, listeners, would you consider me half as brave for drinking several beers? After all, just as many girls have done that as have known a man, and both will end with one hunched over come morning, puking where the other waste floats. Is one brave for eating a Shut The Cluck Up 1/2 Bird from Hattie B’s? Or drinking nothing but Sweet Tea and Cheerwine? Won’t either have woman or man crying and huffing, and passing something child-sized?
The internet has within every user inculcated not only the notion that they must be renaissance folks, but that they will indeed be the unique genius of their art, every art they essay. We are all Dunning-Krugerized in this regard. And while no small narcissism inhabits any act, those on the modern internet are even worse. They’re given the option for anonymity. But no! We must have Bodybuilders for Philosophers, and Coders for Painters.
There’s the pretense of totality will fulfill—as an empty vessel courts water fill it.
Meantime, my father was looking for a new job. He never quite understood the fermentation process at Harley’s. Their local brew probably came out worse than Brushy Mountain Pruno, but most people ignored it out of the hope that their pint was the chosen receptacle of some of The Ladymaker’s beard hairs (it wasn’t; that was mold.) But somehow, he figured a coffee shop would be plenty easy to establish.
Even then, he didn’t realize the purpose of the coffee filter. Dad would mash the most expensive beans he could find—yes, rich, ebony Honduran beans shaped like fossilized snail shells, or aromatic cacao passed through the scat of civets and elephants, sifted by the hands of unpaid, Maharashtran operators—only to waste it by tinting the filter, and the dunking it into the water until the mixture took on brownish-green bilgy tinge typically seen in our Cumberland River. Test groups did not initially take kindly to this. They complained of thickly silted cappuccinos, watery lattes, pisscented cortados, and overall barm-bubbles that seemed to breathe homuncularly, feigning life.
[The Dean jumps up and shouts out “hey!” At the use of the p-word, mistaking it in his Freudian damage for “pussy”]
But my father, stalwart, would tilt his Boater Hat like some psychotic huckster of yore, yank his facial hair, and let slaver wet his facial hair as his mind went to work, a muzak cover of Macklemore’s “Thrift Shop” probably soaring through his skull’s vacant corridors.
My father, had he been a cowboy, would have heard the term “Snake Oil” and thought it an admirable business proposition. And then he would end up being bitten by a snake, envenomed, barrel-rolling, screaming, frothing, perishing: with creased, coarse, blue knuckles still environing the rattle, having tried to “milk” it.
My father, would have heard “Mountebank” and thought it meant that he’d be paid for leaping from a hoodoo’s peak into river, and scarce pay consequence its due for counsel (only a penny of thought), and end up convincing himself that the fall would be broken by a sifting pile of cash along the riverbank, awaiting transportation to a cousin of its kind, only to break his brains, and not the bank, though along its granular shores.
My father’s greatest stroke of genius came from the realization that he could ride the archetypal Nashville Nu-Male look to its aesthetic terminus. He had taken to wearing loosely-woven straw boater hats. He pomaded his mustache, fluffed his beard, and kept his hair combed over. It looked like reeds after a blizzard, frozen in the lees of their winnowed resistance. And if only he could find an occupation to match his aspect…
Come 2020, craft beer places were out! Didn’t you know? They weren’t nearly quaint enough. That was the First 21st Century Plague, of course. Not quite as bad as Porcopox, perhaps, but worse than the Bird Flu of 2031. In 2020, he opened up a coffee shop called “Harl3y”—which soon came to be pronounced as “Harlotry.” He thought that calling someplace Harley’s 2 would reference how
[Veronica’s finger-quotes look like bugs’ antennae here]
“Big Nutrition coat-hangered my brain-baby”
But 3 makes it seem more purposeful. Iteration, rather than desperation.
“Like Sherlock Who,” per his verbiage.
Harl3y would open in a reclaimed furniture factory off Nestor Street. His initial concept was to bust out the back of the thing and cordon off a plot of alluvium for chairs and parasols, the interior a Goldbergian system of pestles and stillatories rattling overhead, and funneling into the center bar like the nerves in the Brachial Plexus. Unfortunately, he spent too long planning, not enough time contracting, and come opening day, there was little more than a central bar, and a lobotomic hole in the back wall.
When enterprising influencers arrived at the factory, they found no seating, no ornamentation, no rich, clinging scent common to any other coffee shop. The Giant Cursive “Harl3y” sign’s lightbulbs without power, the colorful frame anaclitic to the cold, corrugated wall.
The only thing of note was my Father in the center: standing behind a wooden bar caparisoned with a crinkled tarpaulin and a couple of cheap coffee appliances. The customers were shocked. But while he expected terror, they applauded him. When customers asked questions, he stonewalled and poured a random drink. If they gaped in befuddlement, he’d recede and gesture to the coffee machines—the Keurig, the pestle, the milk-hisser.
“Do it yourself,” this seemed to mean. And some people did.
Harley soon stopped even coming in, save to pick up revenue. At first, the visitors only supplied the necessary appurtenances. They brought in thick-weft wicker chairs, and false marble tables. They themselves bought luxury beans from far off continents—the more abstruse, the better. But then they became less coffee focused and more “space-focused.” They started digging up the linoleum with ice cream scoops. They began to frame brutalist furniture out of scrap, and began growing crops imported from Mesopotamia like Bitter Vetch along the rich yet plastic-ridden soil of the Cumberland River, so the stalks came up all wonky. Their own beans they brought, no longer did they comminate, but simply chewed them like so many almonds, foraging for that which they forgot that they had sown.
Fashions ricocheted, the customers eventually constructing furniture themselves with materials they filched from nearby stores. When detectives came to investigate for the trial, they found that the customers had already upset the billboard: a hastily-made maypole had usurped their God. They wore Harl3y brand paper coffee cups on their heads like an order of Shriners.
Faded, their senses gone.
As a baby, I walked really early. And when my parents discovered my precocity for coördination, they were determined to put me in dance as soon as possible. I dreamed of Angelina Ballerina. Spinning, Arabesquing, My parents had other plans: Tin Roof, Mojotown, Honky-Tonk. When I turned 2, Lynnaea hired one of her friends, Lauren Hooseldoog, a pensioned Rockette (retired at 27 due to a shuffle-off-to-buffalo that folded her toes into the heel like a freshly-laundered towel) and a former sorority sister caboosing the Nashville TikTok boom. How could I know the origin of a “Twerk,” a “Dead Drop,” a “Shimmy?” I did as I was told, and did it very well. I wore the children’s short-shorts that would be called a thong on any grown person. I wore a midriffless tube top that was more or less an open-toe sock.
Her whole take was this desire to supersede the loop, to make a loop of a dance so long people wouldn’t even notice it wasn’t looping, if they took their eyes off of me. There’s something less mesmeric about the songs—even if the music shifted, even if the environment did, the dance would remain the atom-identical same.
As it was rote, as was their rite, and I’m told my dancing was “the height of hypnosis.”
At every venue, funnel-minded hands shot out like shafts to grab at the instrument of capering. I’d collapse to the floor and security, having been happily Cash-Apped, gave a count of four-Miss-issi-ip-pi to interrupt their gropes.
Spinning, dancing thoughtlessly on the lurid carousel, riding the ass that they say is a stallion—wondering why they get to stand while you’re stuck circling. The lights blind, and laughing freaks watch from the ride’s curtilage. What’s out there, beyond the Ferris Wheel, the spoke-lashed iron lid that blots an eye by artifice? Is there ever a scent distinct from fatty pastries? And then the dripping neon blinds again, like the sight of a deity’s blood, the tortured organ wails with wild, paralyzed, lesser pain it’s settled on as glee—not knowing there are any sounds else.
Scent is vestment of thought and vessel through memory. My girlhood’s smells are artificial, perverse. The nostril-wrinkling spritzes and antiperspirants. The fusty piles of sawdust strewn over vomit. Alcohol. Where most children had baby powder, I had hair pomade and mustache wax. For No-Tear’s shampoo, I had Polo Lauren cologne and eau de toilette. The only time I felt I could breathe was the brief moments off of Broadway, in between the clubs & crowds, before we entered the Audi—packed like a bodybag—when the night air deigned to share the fruits of the season—even the natural reek of the Cumberland River seemed a sort of boon. In winter, the snow stood up to greet me with its pleasant purity. I bowed to receive it:
“Thank you, Mr. Winter.”
My parents never heard.
And like how the hateful baba, fame-avid, bisects the tongue of a guileless sparrow, my mother always sought to stop my thoughts with contrivance. She would drop a a Rosetta Electronics HieroTab 2 in my lap, flattening my Twitch Streamer Barbie & Youtuber Ken, and go off to scrape the candies seamed by heat into her lingerie; my father would then eat it.
Overcolored fruits with unfasciaed faces danced, leapt, caromed about the stables of my screen, and the first discovery was that I could stop it at my pleasure, the stunted punnet-tykes of the stars of Veggie Tales. Either with the double click to summon two bars, or with the clicking tablet on the side of the pink device.
[Charlie Baltimore (Hip-Hop Studies), one of the half-dozen students in the auditorium with a Sonoya Occipital Chip, v.4 (i.e. not the one that causes cortical blindness and aleatorially dispersed surface lesions) is listening to Veronica, but also mentally TMS-sexting an internal MRI of his hypertrophic left testicle to The Dean, who nearly expelled him last semester for accidentally brain-casting a live feed of the right one up onto the smartboard in a Physics lecture hall.]
Mom worked out by algorithm that she only needed to post with me about once a month—exploiting the chronic disability of being-permanence inflicted on her generation by High Fructose Corn Syrup and synthetic visions of stanza’d light. And when she made me my own account, she ceased posting about me directly at all. I became an excellent reservoir of revenue, but never one that would overshadow her.
And it was around the age of eight that my mother figured out that I would no longer be a perfect adorable little sweet honey bless-my-mommy-heart baby cha-yai-yai-yai-ald. In her mind, puberty was just around the corner (except it wasn’t, not for another half a decade.), but pimples marred her mind, menarchy incited anguish, and hormones total anarchy. My sortie into singing had been met with glowing praise, yet was comparatively dimmed by my dances.
Sometimes, like with the seltzer water, I thank whatever God was watching us, then, for my mother’s lack of foresight. If she had prized the money pimping me out as a teenager higher than the potential mortification youth could have sprung, maybe I wouldn’t be so free as I am today.
Nevertheless, she consorted with my father (i.e. talked at him while he recited quotes he thought were from German Philosopher ‘Franklin Itchy’, but were actually omniphonic announcements from some ancient retail outlet known as “K-Mart”), and they decided that something must be done.
Now, this was before the app Zy-Go, when you could find folks with whom you could exchange babies on the fly. It’s hard to imagine a time before we were able to design the genes of babies to keep them perennially stunted, right? But such was the era!
They contacted one @LynLynFan3992, who had always commented (apparently supportive, per the emojis that followed) illegibly and religiously on every post.
Here’s one that followed a picture of my Mother sipping coffee from a rusty tin can outside of Harl3y (she had not tagged the shop, of course):
Coop Coop bintesty!
#🕋
Evidently this inspired some sympathy within my mother’s own logophobic soul. Their conversation was as follows:
>Do you want me?
>Yuh 👩🏻🚀
>How do you want me?
>i watn totch bbubis. ☸
>I have cologned [sic] myself, and I will give it to you for $60 if you are welling to keep this a secrete [sick!].
>@LynLynFan3992 has Venmoed you $660.
#🅱️🅾️🅾️🅱️🆘🔛🔝
>We’ll meet at Printer’s Alley. 10PM, Saturday. Ok?
>>@DouceyFan3992 has Venmoed you $6,000
#🆗🅱️🅾️🅱️🅾️
[Veronica is reading the literal names of the emojis out loud, plus saying sic out loud, which has half the auditorium at laughter’s pants-wetting threshold]
The venue of my final performance was to be the now-defunct Ms. Kelli’s, which sat where the 5-floor Mega-Chik-Fil-A/COOK OUT now clucks eternal. It was the definition of a dive—flimsy wood paneled floor, with fonts of congealed alcohol pulsing up through the cracks. Long reticulated rods of electric neon piped garish, spectral light upon the cowboy-capped, yoga-legginged, denim-jeaned tribes of near-adults. A tetrad of young men, about the age we are now, entered with a basketball and an actual amphora of what I think was Carolinian Firebrass.
Several had come to see my feats, and my unshod feet, and I was plopped up there in a gingham dress with crinolines, an imitation-carbuncle headband, diaphanous red-satin evening gloves that purpled sucking strands of cyan light, and tapered at my tiny triceps brachii, and glitter pasted under my eyes that made me feel like when I hadn’t rubbed the eyesnot out in the morning. By then, I had held a microphone more times than I ever had my parents’ hands. I was doing body rolls to Sheryl Crow, and I’d never even had a friend before. What is a Santa Monica Boulevard?
As with any other venue, my parents had bribed the bouncer into practicing his whistling instead of fixating on whichever minor might be zipping in or out, however, with whoever, to wherever, to do whatever. It was as I was stepping off the stage, amid the clamor of plaudits, I felt something tough cinch my underarm. I smelled it before I saw anything and looked up to see the lurid, crescent smile of Mr. Jorge Gambol, owner and proprietor of Nashville’s own Goo Goo Shop (open since 1912). There was a strange instant between perception and apperception, of “I know this guy!” before the “Why is he here? Why is he holding me tighter than I’ve ever been held, except by that raspy corset Mom makes me wear everywhere?”
[Someone in the audience starts screaming, but not because of the content—because Quinn Crim (Psychotic) is clambering over several rows on all fours like a lemur with a butter knife. Veronica proceeds.]
I didn’t even know what was happening as he led me out until I turned, and saw a tall, middle-aged, natural woman approach me. Mom and Dad had turned, were pushing bar-ward, and became tufts of hair lost in drug-fumed light. I was out of mind.
“Excuse me! Sesseleigh-Lucreesja! Miss Dunbar-Cassidy! A word?”
The giant stopped his waddling.
She pushed back several strands of split-end silver into the quiver of her ear. She wore an orange sports coat, and removed a rectangle from said coat.
On it were written letters and numbers, but they didn’t mean a thing.
I can’t recall if she had scampered off, or I, but before I could even think, the vape-heavy night air was rushing past me, and sight was fractioned—a pavement path, an oxter’s pang, the ring of metal closing over me. Then total dark. But within the trunk, I saw the familiar stele logo of the mirrored R, and the idea came to me.
As the driver stoked the engine travel-ready, I became aware of four facts:
1. I was being kidnapped.
2. I was surrounded by cartons of Goo Goo Clusters.
3. I had my Rosetta rPhone II and the little white rectangle in my pockets.
4. This car was a (since discontinued) 2018 Rosetta Agglutinac.
Now, Rosetta’s slogan has always been “Neutralize.” They first went viral in the mid 2010’s for the fact that their products could be accessed and edited by any other person possessing a Rosetta product. Is someone playing Beyoncé a little too loud in Centennial Park? Jack into their Rosetta Pastille® and lower that sucker to the volume of a dragonfly’s wings, I figured this out after Mom started shutting down my tablet when I wasn’t watching something dance related. The instinct behind this was ostensibly that the user’s were a “family.” In actuality, there was little thought besides stirring up marketing drama.
While this free-for-all libertarian-paradise feature was outmoded in 2017, after an unfortunate spree of turning Rosetta DeFreeze Heaters® up to full power to make make-shift bombs, it didn’t necessarily matter then. For cars, at least—anyone within the car would be able to access its features.
After about 10 minutes of driving, I was finally able to get the car’s app downloaded and hook it up to his console.
“What the FUCK?!”
I heard it muffled; I was doing everything I could. I was flipping seat warmers off and on. Rearview windows were retracting and oscillating. I slowed the car to a cool 40 MPH with a safety idea. I was finally able to set off the airbag in the shotgun seat by claiming that I was sitting in it (No such luck with Gambol’s: his seat’s occupation automatically updated by the pressure of his hind end.) Never once did it occur to me to call 911. My father often told me that someone calling 911 in New York City had resulted in the dummy cops getting confused, taking the cars up to the top of a building, and then crashing said cars into the tallest building in New York—twice.
“All Cops Are Mustards.”
I rent open the threaded seam on a glossy crate of Peanut Butter Goo Goos. And started shoving them down my dress at as rapid pace as I was able. It was fortunate that they were peanut butter, considering they have a bit more give compared to the Originals, and especially those angular, nutty Supremes. I went back to my tumbling lessons with Ms. Lauren, the speed of the earth beneath effacing any cracks in the road or poorly painted lines. I held as many Goo Goos as I could muster up to my head, exhaled, and rolled out of the vehicle with inexorable zen. By adrenaline’s grace, I did not yet notice that I had dislocated one of my shoulders.
The vehicle turned.
[No one yawned, no one burped. The audience is entirely rapt.]
In my exit, I immediately lost control over the car. I saw him—mad, lozenges of sweat cascading down his sunset vibrant face, the white COUSSIN GONFLABLE resting next to him like a giant, microwaved marshmallow the windows still down, he began to play Britney Spears as loud as he could, and charged.
In a toreadoric manner, to dodge: it is a dance like any other, a curve of the flank evading seeking wrists, and slakeless hands a springing cartwheel, the two of us dodging, him sometimes in starts, mad with death and desire. Who even knew then? He would probably delight more in a corpse than anything alive. It was then that I realized the lot was situated near a ravine, and I would have to play chicken with him. He came straight for me. I didn’t move. He began to swerve, thinking he had outsmarted my ploy. But drifting as he did, the overzealous machine swung too wide. His front wheels seized deliriously—the back ones sending up uselessly grit and dirt, he screamed, kitschy music over him enslaving the sound. He flew from the car like a baseball nailed with a bat: he’d disabled his airbag, he’d disabled his seatbelt—he feared that I might suffocate, or strangle him.
I sat watching the flames for several hours. Many times, I considered filming the flames, the quiet crudescence of metal blacking from sleek shine into textured char, foreign handiwork rendered up to the God of Carbon, and new senescent body going the way of maharajas and vikings, eyes and brains the sickening ornament of the damaged tree: a Black Alder with a hexagon of soughing green leaves. I considered filming it for a moment, to post, the aftermath of a performance. That was the best I’d ever danced after all. I steadied the camera and held it there, watching what I could watch with my own eyes transpire through a pixelated phalanx. When the tree caught fire, it was brilliant against the night, and I could film no longer. When the tree caught fire, my phone was at 3%. I called the number on the phone the lady gave me.
The courts said my parents spent all $6,660 of the money they earned that night—on clubs, on drinks, on anything. There’s a picture of them, spotted ironically at at Jane’s Hideaway, leant with balconic aplomb—we are all held or failed by something after all. Mother’s blush shamed the summer stars: and she possessed an unblemishable face that tutored the moon to steal from the sun. My father, his only violent virtuosity effaced by time’s clawing winds, blithely ignorant to everything except the immediate: all his being concentrated in the hairy arm palanquin to her simmering hand, and the cool cylinder of beer that wept in his hand sinister. Those eyes are the eyes of one given to an eventual animal death.
I could talk about the settlement, or the adoption, or any of that other nonsense—but it truth it’s all quite banal and boring. Results normalize otherwise bizarre processes.
On my 10th birthday, I could finally transcribe the song they sang. And it was the first time I’d spelled “Happy” correctly. My new guardian worked me hard as a performer, but I’ll take fussy primping over hussied pimping any day. I was put in a real school—St. Cecilia Academy—
[Selena Sprezzatura (International Politics), who has been resting her eyes, jolts at the mention of her Alma Mater, recalling Skripka—who then sported oil-black asymmetrical bangs—from Ceramics chokes a little on the Cheerwine & Vodka she’s been swishing from an opaque Yeti Cooler, and begins smacking the lacquered, wooden armrest of her designated seat—confounding Kobe Mbuge (International Politics), who is Somali, and worried that this will result in an “incident” akin to the one anent the balloon, and, all but ready for Skripka’s peroration to signal manual percussion, pretends not to notice what he genuinely believes may be the expiry of another human, rationalizing that an ad-hoc tracheotomy with the sizable pink straw in her imbibing receptacle is only a worst-case scenario.]
–and I was allowed a room with a real door, and a real lock.
On our last day in court, outside, a single Goo-Goo fell from my Mother’s pantsuit, the melty chocolate still shelled with painted paper. A rat scuttled out from a culvert on the riverside, and stole with it away, slaloming her crocodile tears.
I took this as a sign from Christ: I’ve always preferred Moon Pies, anyway.
Nowadays, my father’s dead: experiments with quicksilver in his coffee gone wrong.
[Phillip Montalbon (General Studies) blanches, having used a dropper filled with mercury these past three years in his morning coffee in hopes of attaining the priapic augmentation Youtube had promised.]
My mother’s face is as unrecognizable as her words, botulistic. I’ve seen her shuffling around Broadway, screaming buzzwords from my infancy (“SLAY! YASS! WERK!”) like witchy incantations into a kyphotic, dirt-matted canister of R.C. Cola, only interrupting to bang her head against ATM’s. This woman, once who greased her doily with cosmetic suet, now soils herself on Broadway curbs. The skin stays pink and taut while the mind molders brown in its shrieking, shrinking, plastic-crowded cell.
This city is an ossuary of art, the bones exhumed and dusted off, and repainted. Oh, leave those marble statues unpainted! Keep the bronze boxers’ eyes put out! No one makes Country Music anymore. No one makes any Rap. Bastard chimeras, all—contorted and genremandered as my mother’s body. Hades feasts on Kronos’ flesh: the child cleans the parents’ carcass.
We cast ourselves in Moloch’s Maw:
O, Gnash vile! Gnash vile!
No more.
May these degrees heat your brains with energy as often as you heat your livers and cheeks.
Osda enoyi, εχε γεια, good bye City, fare well Gaia.”
