key word: filthy, title: unauthorized autobiography in "the next big thing" flash fiction

My time spent Los Angeles made me lazy. No, not lazy, not exactly. When I had work and knew what I was supposed to be doing, I worked my ass off, point me in some direction and give me a push, I’ll stagger on forward until my legs give out. Complacent. The word’s complacent. L.A. made me complacent, I see that now. There are no glasses with a clearer prescription than time.

The weather’s almost always beautiful and the few times it isn’t, oppressively hot or the rare times it rains, it’s welcome change of pace to the relentless perfection of the Southland. With enough money to get by and enough time to breathe between pushes to make that money, you could just enjoy the dry sea breeze, drink cheap margaritas, watch the freaks on Hollywood Boulevard or Muscle Beach, just do that until the day you die. Inert vacant changeless stasis.

New York City was filthy. Everything smelled faintly of hot dogs and urine, all the time, fancy restaurant, gutter, everywhere. In the subways, it was stronger because of the humidity. Around the tourist spots, sometime the saccharine-stench of burnt sugary nuts would overwhelm the piss-sausage waft but to be honest, I prefer stadium men’s room to scorched almonds myself. Fifteen-hundred-a-month for a studio pizza-oven in Bushwick, dodging hipsters and Hasids alike all in black on goddamn old-fashioned bikes to get anywhere, it all just lit a fire under my ass instead.

Seven years in California, comfort punctuated by punches to the heart, the bluest sky you’ve ever seen set against being let down by myself or life or both on an alternating tape loop. A year and a half in the Outer Boroughs, I ran with occupiers and I ran with buskers and ran with performance artists who’d smash eggs on their chest while screaming “Mother!”, who’s walk on the stage in a diaper, pull out a Snicker bar and eat it while screaming for money, I ran and I saw and I ran and learned and I ran and I grew and eventually ran out of money myself. Christ on a Christ-flavored cracker, though, it was glorious for just some tiny little while, you know? Just enough to see my best self.

I’m still haunted by the reflections in the mirror I received by living other places, whether for a long time or a little precious while. We’re tofu after all, this whole doomed damned human race, bland little sponges that’ll pick up any kind of taste, provided on our time to marinate and place.

I miss my brother and a few close friends in Los Angeles, that’s why I go back once or twice a year but when I get driving out on the thruway pointed east and I see that sign, New York City two-hundred-and-ten miles away, I mostly just mourn myself. Not the sunshine nor the sea-salt spray, the hot dogs and the piss, the marinade that made me the man I often miss.

Last updated July 30, 2019