Mallory's Camera

Dreamed I had been in some kind of weird student living situation with Mercedes from The Shahs of Sunset! It had been every bit as awful as you’d expect it to be, but I had escaped! Found Barbara Angell. And Barbara and I were going to Georgia! (The country, not the last train to.)

Then I had the misfortune to run into Mercedes again in some kind of strange futuristic café.

She was wearing my old purple cable-knit sweater, which I’ve had for decades, and which I simply cannot bear to throw away despite its multiple stains and generally unkempt appearance.

“You told me you’d give me $4 because you got spots on my sweater,” Mercedes said, scowling. And there were dark grease marks on the sweater.

“Oh, sure, sure, sure. Right,” I said.

I had three dollars because I’d had to get cash to pay for the BBQ we ate last night. (Clever dream to incorporate a real life detail!)

I asked Barbara if I could get the other dollar from her.

“Oh, of course, Patreetz,” she said.

So, I rummaged around in Barbara’s purse but I couldn’t find any one-dollar bills. I found bills in other denominations, including a $543-bill (!)

Finally, I found a fiver. Handed it to Mercedes: “I’ll need change.”

Mercedes scowled.

She was there at the futuristic café with members of her young male posse, all of whom were telling her how hot she looked—even though she did not look hot—and how great her shoes looked—even though her shoes were very ordinary-looking.

One callow young male shouted at me, “But you owe other people in the house money, too! Like $300!”

And I panicked for a moment, thinking, Three hundred dollars! How am I ever gonna find that? Fuck them! I won’t pay, and they can’t make me.

Then he began laughing, and I realized it was either an extortion attempt or they were messing with me.

But anyway, what did it matter? I had a Georgia trip with Barbara Angell to look forward to!

###

In waking life, I have no trips to look forward to.

And that’s what I spent most of yesterday mulling over: How can I work the limits of this strange quarantine existence so that it has some kind of future tense? I feel like Rapunzel with a crew cut: Okay, the golden hair escape route is out. How else can I get down from the tower?

I didn’t come up with an answer.

But I did take a lot of videos—a very nice one of a grasshopper complete with that weird little chirrup, chirrup sound that grasshoppers make and several of C getting drunk at dinner and talking about his grandfather’s misadventures when that grandfather first appeared in Dutchess County circa 1920-whatever.

I am thinking it would be fun to take a bunch of videos and use iMovie to splice them all together.

I am also thinking that such iMovies, served up as Instagram stories, would be the perfect way to publicize the Work in Progress, since I am more convinced than ever the Work in Progress will never find a terrestrial publisher. Economics, doncha know. (I can see Mister Penguin Random now: Publish a first-time novel from an old hag pushing 70? Whaddiya think I am? Crazy?

Plus I have all those unpopular, classic liberal political views.)

So, I could do a bunch of videos that present actual slices of June’s historical life.

Annotate the novel through Instagram stories, as it were.

###

Self-publishing would also give me more freedom to write what I wanna write. Or should I say—insert Woo-woo-ooooo music—what the book wants me to write.

There is a scene at the dance hall near the beginning of the book, for example. Business is dead; the dance hall is near closing. So, the owner imports a bunch of Chinese girls who become a big hit.

In the first draft, the scene contained many insulting Orientalizing descriptors, entirely appropriate for the close, first-person POV since June was a racist. (C’mon! Everybody was a racist in the 1920-somethings.)

Then I got chicken. Nobody will ever publish this if I include descriptive paragraphs about pig noses and greasy black hair, I thought.

So I bowdlerized that section of the book in an early edit.

But now, I can put all that stuff back in.

###

Speaking of close, first-person POVs, I am rereading Broken Monsters, in preparation for the publication of Afterland in just—count ‘em!—two short days.

Lauren Beukes is such an extraordinarily good writer! I liked The Shining Girls—just optioned as an HBO series!—a bit better than Broken Monsters because it was such a neatly wrapped time travel paradox with no dangling strings, plus I am constantly running into the house Harper Curtis lived in:


Broken Monsters is a much longer, more ambitious novel. Its Big Bad is a psychic monster that wants to make art! Which is blackly humorous as well as chilling. The story is told through a series of first-person, free-associative narratives that are extremely well-observed and tight and just beautiful in terms of what Beukes does with language.

Plus the novel takes place in Detroit, which I am told these days is prime Mad Max country.

I have only once taken a car ride through Detroit.

I long to go back and tromp around in it, experience its urban blight up close and personal, see its abandoned houses and crumbling skyscrapers, but I doubt I’ll ever get the opportunity to that in this lifetime at least.

Maybe if I ever do another lifetime in the early 21st century.

But why would I ever wanna do that?