Live. Tonight. Sold Out. Coming at you from the stage. The beautiful Ashlee. The beautiful Breanna. They all had names like this. Ashlee. Breanna. Caylee. The beautiful Savannah. The kind of names you heard a million times on television every day, soap opera names, names that shouldn’t possibly exist outside fiction, but the sad truth was that they invariably did. This was just how that wheel got spun. And the strange part about it was that most of these names were actually real, as in they weren’t just for the stage or the moment. These were their actual names. There was a period of like ten years or so when certain parents had just started making shit up. Jaymee. Kaysey. Kammey. Kimmey. Jayden. Lots of J and K sounds. Lots of names with strong double E’s at the ends of them. Brit-ney. Lay-cee. Hay-lee. A sort of doomed pubescence to the names, a sort of pre assigned infantilism that the girls sort of willingly resigned themselves to in turn. As if that was all that they were ever going to be good for. As if this was as good as it was going to get. As if by being given this name, you forever had your future foretold for you, your life and your path and the areas of life to which you would forever be banished to. What could you do? It was your name. So why not take part in it, at least? Why not just go along? It sure made your life easier in the meantime.
The truth was that these names had less to do with the girls themselves and everything to do with their parents. Not only did you understand when it meant when you met a beautiful, blue eyed Caylee or a blond locked Jaycee for the first time, you also sort of understood something about their parents too. You also kind of got the idea of what was in a name exactly, your first inkling of it, especially when that name suggested influence, power, prosperity, ownership. These girls did not belong to you and were marked as such. These girls were destined for far greater things, far greater than you could ever possibly hope to provide anyway. These girls had fathers who made more money than yours did. These girls were already going somewhere and weren’t going to have to do much to get there, just stand and look pretty mostly, and it was a journey that need not involve you and in fact was somewhat of a socioeconomic miracle that they were even sharing the halls of this public school with you in the first place. One tax bracket higher and they wouldn’t have been here at all, but instead studying the finer points of dance and cheer in some elite private school somewhere, perhaps at the base of the Alps. This was a thing that you instinctively knew, but not a thing that could be easily named. These girls were not as nice as the girls who would talk to you, the girls who were actually your friends, but you lusted after and ogled these untouchable ones just the same. It was something that turned your stomach even then, but still you could not help yourself, hormones being hormones and all. And the funny part about it was that you pretty much wouldn’t be able to stand these girls, if you would ever be able to actually engage them in meaningful conversation of some kind, and you knew it, but that certainly did not make the lusting any less acute. You had been trained to respond to their carefully kept beauty and poised grace just the same as the rest. It was a funny thing and it was not until much later in adolescence, when you began to actually be exposed to girls of actual substance, the smart girls who you would truly fall in love with and who would make up the actual requited loves of your life, it wasn’t until then that you would begin to see these earlier crushes for whom they actually were. Less an attraction here than a duty. Less a crush than an involuntary maintaining of a carefully crafted image whose effect depended entirely on the input and responses of the surrounding culture at large. It was everybody, but you began to see your part in it too. Of course it did no good to get mad about it later, or to get disgusted, or to blame the girls themselves, these future beauty queens and television personalities who would marry and play housewife to rich and successful men that would not be you, who would have jobs that you would not want, men that you sort of already knew and despised and were despised by now. What good would it do, even talking about it really? Or getting upset? This was the way the world worked. You had found your tribe and they had found theirs and never the twain shall meet. This was just life after all. The only important part to keep in mind ever was what belonged to you and what did not. And these girls did not.
Looking back on it now, as an adult, being older and harder in many ways and less hard in others, and then also ostensibly wiser about a great many things, things that seemed so unimportant and fleeting to you then, but yet you feel less wise about the things that you were once the most convinced of. Therefore you are somehow simultaneously both more and less sure of how the world actually works. Still it is easier for you now to see the other side of things, of how the darker mechanics of those years really operated on your life, the sort of secret and unspoken ebb and flow of things. You could not stand to look at these girls, once you knew, and yet you couldn’t take your eyes off of them and this was not their fault. You could not help but love these girls and desire them and place them in your impossible fantasies and this was not their fault either nor was it even really yours. That you objectified them and adored them and then hated them and then later forgot about them, whether they grew into the life that you had imagined for them or not, and that this was nobody’s fault either. That this was about their parents and that this was about class and that this was about money and that the life of an American adolescent had been this way since, well, since forever probably. At least since we started to make a thing about it, since we had started talking about it as an actual physical place. Not the high school itself, but the years that went into them, as an actual universe unto themselves, occuping both time and space. Which they were, of course, and a terribly important time and space at that, a microcosm of the world at large, the world as it stood now and not necessarily as it could be, and so naturally it should be expected that this space would reflect the mores of the day, the prevailing views and opinions of society as a whole. But what a hell of place to live though, right? What a hell of a place to grow up. Kids beating up on other kids. Any kid who tells on another kid is a dead kid etc. This clique and that clique and this tribe and that tribe forever diplomatically warring like they were small sovereign nations or something. What are you looking at? What’s up with your friend, your pants? Sometimes I doubt your commitment to. Sometimes I doubt your commitment to. Yeah well, you had said to yourself privately, sometimes I doubt your commitment to as well. But still what the fuck are you looking at man? I mean, what the fuck is up with you anyway? You wanna go? You little faggot. Retard. Spaz. Fuckface. And yeah this means you too. And you sort of know it, though you are powerless to change it. Don’t you think he would if he could? And so. And so. And so why should the fact that you were only fifteen have made it any different here? There were levels to understanding any of it and again it was something that you couldn’t always wrap your head around at any given time or even remotely have had a conversation about with anybody older than you were, even if they had understood what you were saying, simply because you yourself did not. Not always. You did not fully understand the extent of what it all meant, the only thing that you knew for certain was that nobody else in charge of your god forsaken life really did either. Or that they might pretend to, but that their knowledge of it was fraudulent or completely out of date or at the very least suspect, because if they knew so much, then why hadn’t they done anything about it, why had they not changed it or fixed whatever it was that was wrong here, and why had they then placed you here, in the exact same broken place? Was surviving this meant to “build character” in you or something? Pretty shitty place for an object lesson, one might conclude, since the real learning didn’t have that much to do with the actual classroom to begin with. You had survived the day not getting your ass kicked or having your books sent flying or teased or embarrassed by bully or teacher alike. Congratulations. You made it home. Want a cookie? Why not just club the adolescent male on the head and hand him a shovel and tell him to get to work already, if he was not here in this place to actually learn something useful? Or was this actually the instruction? These little survival lessons. These girls who were not for you. These boys who were not you and not your friends, not really, not at the end of it, each so carefully already groomed for success. What was their secret? These kids with parents who made more money than your own parents did and hated your parents without meeting them, you thought, and you would have been mortified should any such actual meeting occur anyway and your parents of course obviously hating them anonymously in turn, you felt, for no other reason but this, for the reason that they were all probably in direct competition with each other too, each and every day for their own measly slice of that American pie. And so too then were their kids, by extension, but for far lesser stakes. And so who were you to complain about it then? What to make of it? What to say? Was it not an interesting fact the kids who would eventually make up your inner circle would have parents that your parents seemed to get along with just fine? What was that? What did proximity even mean? What were neighborhoods about? What was public school even for then? You could just stay home all day and learn on the block. It was sort of safer in a way. School was like some weird audition for life, some bizarre debutante ball and everyone was invited and you went and you collected dance cards and you gave out your own to whomever would take one and you threw your keys in the bowl same as everyone else, but the results always came back looking just the same, like they were already pre-arranged to begin with, like none of it was an accident, so why even bother in the first place? No happenstance, no chance, no hope of esacping circumstance. Just the motions. So what was all of this about then? Kicks? Fun? You sure weren’t having any.
The worst part was that you had to keep your mouth shut. Even when it was obvious. Why were you not allowed to speak of it, even when what was happening here was so clearly evident to anyone even mildly awake? The untouchable girls. Ashlee. Breanna. Caylee. Who were these people? Where had they come from? Why had their parents done this to their children and why hadn’t anyone done it for you? Even when you had wised up and joined theatre or the a/v club or something, and stood slouching in the parking lot, leaning against your friends Volkswagen and smoking cigarettes, trying to look cool, the sight of one of these long-legged beauties still filled you with longing and shame and terror and disgust, and this disgust felt wholly towards yourself. Why should you care so much? Why were you still so simultaneously attracted to and repelled by that which was not meant for you? And why couldn’t you say anything about it? Why did these girls, these objects of furtive and furious self-abuse sessions on your part, why did they seem so not longed for you and in a way, not even longed to be anything but what they already were, here, at this moment? Why did they seem at times, these girls that everybody wanted to touch, no matter what they proclaimed in public, to be even less than girls and more like representatives of some shadowy, unspoken ideal? You didn’t know what it was, because you couldn’t bring it up, but it haunted and perplexed you just the same. These girls were stars already, celebrities almost, and you, you could barely get your hair right. And it was weirdly mimetic, pandemic almost, the way the other girls (the lesser girls?) fell in line with this, aping the popular, beautiful ones with deadly accuracy, a sort of pantomime that didn’t have anything real to do with them either, but perhaps one they felt they had to get behind just the same. To not do so would be to risk what? Being cast out? Not measuring up to the bar and where it had so clearly already been set? You got the idea that girls started in on this shit with each other way earlier than you boys did, that they understood the rules of the game much, much earlier than you, and so had already accepted it, internalized it, the natural order of things, and had moved on. Because to have NOT done so would have been tantamount to engaging in a sort of slow suicide, socially speaking, and this you understood all too well. Wasn’t it funny that the girls that you actually did relate to, the girls who actually would think about you in that way, were also the ones that you had no romantic or physical interest in at all? And why these smart girls always so condemned? Why always left so lonely? Wasn’t it funny that these girls, the ones who were your actual fucking friends mind you, had it much harder than you to begin with and always had? Think about it. What did it mean when a girl who wasn’t one of the super girls and didn’t or couldn’t or even bravely refused to play the game and was labeled a freak by the popular kids at large, actually liked YOU? And then was sort of kept waiting around for you or else coming back after you had rebuked her and you were too dumb to see it or else you did see it and were either too cruel even to acknowledge it or else you ignored it because you did not feel it back or perhaps if you were a real bastard, more so than most teenage boys anyways, you did engage them and allowed them their interest and then you refused them and let them come back to you time and time again, like the most spineless coward inside imaginable, simply because now you had your own admirer too? Jesus. What a fucked up game it all was. Where even to begin? The only thing that was true was that you were guilty too. You played along.
But these girls. These beautiful girls who you once knew every square inch of in your mind and pretended to know their innermost private thoughts and secrets as well. What ever became of them? You had imagined then, of course, that they were all destined for lives of glamour as sorority sisters and then later, as rich wives of successful bank presidents or something so you couldn’t really feel too sorry for them. Even though you did later, just a little. What a life of tedium and boredom that must have been. What a colossal waste of time. Was this what they had wanted? Better you than them then. But if not, then why not? Why had they not made any move to stop it, why had they not asserted themselves and their own personalities and agenda if it had in fact been there? Maybe it wasn’t. Maybe that life was all they had ever hoped for, or planned for, or dreamt about. Maybe they had enjoyed it, at first, the attention. I mean, who wouldn’t? Or maybe it was a role that they had been ascribed to and couldn’t break out of, no matter how hard they tried, and this was sad too, but still, it wasn’t a life completely devoid of merit. Or maybe the truth was that you just hadn’t looked close enough. Repeat the names again now in your mind and let the faces come back. Whichever ones you remember. Ashlee. Breanna. Caylee. Kaysey. Jaymee. Jayden. Jordyn. Kassidy. Lacey. Haylee. Natalee. Savannah. These are not the names of bankers’ wives, are they? These are not the names of anyone that you actually know now in real life at all, not really. No offense to anyone reading this whose name might be a permutation of one of these, as it’s only an example, but let’s just get it out of the way and say that there are names and there are people behind those names. There are banker’s wives and then there are bankers. The names here are not the names one would expect from a wife of a banker or from a banker herself. Or a doctor. Or a lawyer. And that is perhaps the greatest shame. No, these are names that were more or less made up in America in the last quarter of the century, names with no real history or weight behind them, influenced by infotainment and the porn aestheic, names that are of no other time or place but right now, today, this very minute. These were names that belonged to beauty pageants and then to strip clubs, we might as well admit it, and so what does all that mean? It means that these girls were not your children. That these were someone else’s. But so now ask the questions that you had wanted to then, the ones that you did not think you were allowed to, and scream them into being outside the silence of your own head. Why? Why had your parents done that to you? How did it feel, the number? What were they trying to predict for you? Why had they cast you into that role? Why had they chosen it for you? Had you let them do it easily or did you fight against it or did a part of you want it too? What ever became of it? Did you ever snap to and fight back? Did you ever scream inside at the void, at the hollowness of it all, and if so, did you do it out loud? Did you do it then or was it later, and if it was later, how much later? Was it too late for you by then? Why had they dressed you like that? Why had they helped sexualize your appearance, at such a tender age? Why had they starved you? Was it intentional? Did you go along? How much of it was you and how much your folks? Why had they set you up as an object of fetish, of adoration? Had they asked your permission for it? Had you given it? Ask these girls now the questions that they might not even have the answers to, but ask them anyway. Should you have been a son? Should you? And speaking of, why does art that dares to attempt to broach any of this, to speak the truth with any sort of prescience or real relevancy, why does it always seem so harrowing to us, like a vision or some sort of maniacal glimpse of the future? Why does watching others actively engaging in the cure seem so much harder than just admitting the disease? Why is it so hard for us to talk about what is right out there in front of our faces? Is it something that we truly do not want to address in ourselves? Why no middle ground here? Why always so destined, our too pretty girls, for either stage or for screen or else for missing persons reports or else sudden abject violence, the butt of the pistol, the abrupt hard bottom of the cold, darkened lake? What is that? Why? Why is that? Why do we kill what it is that we set ourselves up to desire the most? Why do we kill at all, of course, but especially why there? Is it we, is it they, is it them, is it us? is it all of us together? Is it a house with only one real victim, womankind itself, but with many, many hands at the blade? Is it that on some level we understand the fallacy, the flaw; the strange mocking savageness of what we’ve done wrong here in adopting this culture, the sheepish, complicit guilt in that which has failed us? Ashlee. Bryanna. Caylee. Kaysey. Jaymee. Jayden. Jordyn. Kassidy. Lacey. Haylee. Natalee. Savannah. Why did the daddy seem to love and hate you in such equal amounts? Why is the mommy forced to participate in it? Or is it the other way around? Why is it that the master and his brethren seem to take such joy in destroying what it is that they so wondrously create? Are the gods that we have used to replace the older, less useful gods, are they gods at all? Or are they just merely altars of sacrifice? A ravished rotating maw to be eternally fed and nourished with the blood of the new and the young? Or is it just us? Is it just me and is it just you, helplessly watching the whole thing go down in flames, stoking the flames, feeding it with our curiousity, our insatiable thirst and gnawing lust for that which is both real AND beautiful, even though we’ve got the two horribly and perhaps irrevocably confused? What is it that we have wrought here? What is it that has gone wrong inside? What?
But. But if these days feel like the end of an empire. And if so, then perhaps an acceleration of things that will feel like nothing to you because you already know what to expect. Because you already know what it feels like. Living this way, the way that we do now, is like carrying a small corner of the apocalypse around with you in a corner of your heart all the time. Anything could happen, anyplace, anytime. It’s literally exhausting. Perhaps it will be then an acceleration of things and then a contraction and after that round round we go where we stop nobody knows. But. But so then. But so all things being equal and so then even the animals beginning to notice the waters start to rise. So what? So then what then? What ever will you do about it? But here. Look. If you are here and it is now, then it is here and you are now. And if so, then there is one hope and one hope only. You are here and you are alive, in this time and in this place, and you are reading these words in real time. It is Live. It is All Access. It is better than more entertainment tonight. And so there is a thing that you can do. And so today you should begin it. So that we might begin to unlearn a thing that we have no use for anymore. And so you may as well ask yourself for it, because that is where these changes always begin, in your own mind and in your own heart, and in your own true eyes that have never really forgotten just what it means to actually see. What that word means. Because, you see, it is you now and only you now in the end and you always knew that this day would come and so now it is in your hands. And so you may as well start asking questions of that other too, of the hand that you have fed and that you have fed from so easily in return. No one’s saying bite here, not by any means, but maybe just go take a long hard look at it. Because really. What could it possibly hurt at this point? What could it matter? What is it that is left here that you might still be afraid of losing? What? Belief?
For Jake.
