complain about the changing city because only bougie cunts do that. They attend pug meets. They unironically admire the withered pug in the homemade wheelchair, dragging the weight of himself around the room. Irony in general means nothing to old punks; they consider it too distant from blood, bile, phlegm and black bile. HOWEVER. They are not above attending an exhibit about Richard Hell at the Brooklyn Museum should such an exhibition come to pass. Unexpectedly, Joan Crawford’s autobiography serves as a personal bible. Nightly services are held throughout the East Village while lounging in bed watching TCM. Surviving punks WhatsApp each other throughout whichever movie, smoking their own marijuana. “What is wrong with Esther Williams?” “Collapsed vulva.” Old punks, having survived all the parties, now prefer parties for one. Do not imagine that because you got commissioned for a second series or are presently showing in some blue-chip gallery in Chelsea that any of this means anything whatsoever to Roberta—she remains a door bitch. The order of business is:
Charm of dog
Psychology of dog
Behavior of dog
Humor/moods of dog
This list goes on for a good long while before personhood becomes an issue. Crawford herself couldn’t get through that gate without a dog. When old punks don’t win the fancy-dress contest—despite presenting four different pugs dressed as sushi rolls sitting on a bed of nori—old punks can become enraged, filled with black bile, and will make their contempt for the Friends of Washington Square Association perfectly clear. The glorious essence of punk remains a refusal to be cowed, most especially by time. But even Roberta was a little unnerved to see her long-term parrot, Preston, pass from this world into the world beyond, the one to which we are all finally heading, hidden behind the beaded curtain, out of view, where all the comic books, hookahs, lip rings and bad tattoos are stored. Is it still punk to be predeceased by a parrot?
The Black Market
I said to Raphael, I said: “I’m going to quote Du Bois at you. I’m going to say: How does it feel to be a problem?”
And Raphael said: “Right, except if it was also and at the same time: How does it feel to be a sensation?”
The answer is: still not really like a person.
Raphael is very beautiful and stylish, but he doesn’t over-dress like a fashion student; he dresses with the good taste of someone who until recently was not fired by Frieze for calling a senior editor a “zombie collector whore.” (Mitigating circumstances: Raphael’s yearly wage was thirteen thousand dollars.) He’s moved from Bushwick to Forest Hills. Back up in the mix with his tote bag. But he is feeling the general malaise. Feels like he’s being “torn apart inside.” Raphael takes wonderful photographs of black skin but now everybody’s doing that, you literally can’t move for photos of the “black body” and he was more interested in one particular black body (his own) but it’s this generalized “black body” they’re all looking for now, and you get paid on a rising scale for how much white guilt you can squeeze out of a pound of flesh, and this is very tempting, extremely tempting, but Raphael is of the older generation (twenty-five) and is awful close to going offline altogether, or at least removing himself from every platform, because holy God it is exhausting. (Out of nostalgia for his youth, however, Raphael will be staying on Tumblr.) The struggle, the hustle, the struggle, the hustle, the struggle, the hustle! The intended audience can’t usually tell the difference between these two, but those in the know know what they know. All of which means nobody’s in the market for these exquisite pictures of Raphael’s face at the moment of orgasm, and that’s a damn shame. “There’s these doors opening up all over the place but the catch is they only open if you lie on the floor and start performatively bleeding.” His boo meanwhile is nineteen, white, walking for Versace in Milan at this moment, this very moment, which also involves more than a pound of flesh—Struggle! Hustle!—but “he’s a big boy and he knows what he’s getting into.”
The older people in this city appear to be eating the younger ones alive.
“Yes, yes,” said Raphael, putting his feet up on my desk, “but that’s my point: maybe it’s time for me to become the diner instead of the meal! I’m beautiful! I’m talented! I’ve got something to say!”
It was actually my office