Under Embargo until 21.03.21 00:01: Blackout Youngmen
Dancing on bars, sitting on skateboards and reading the modern day City of Night
Phillip sticks two fingers down my throat to help me throw up vodka sodas. “More,” I whisper, before the smell of the drinks in reverse makes him sick too. We crawl back to bed and fall asleep, waking up by nightfall to do it all over again. The last incarnation of our friendship finds us fuck buddies, as if we hadn’t sufficiently tortured each other yet, only to dissolve for good once jealousy really took hold of both of us. On most days, we’d dance in our boxers on Lillian’s bed, taking turns making out and seeing who can perfect their handstand first, as she played backgammon with Billy smoking Lucky Strikes.
A fashion designer friend tells me her new PR cc’d her in an email to a musician that wants to wear her stuff: “We can offer you access to other brands too.” My friend is pissed, seeing as she connected them herself so the agency can arrange sample distribution. If the clubs were open, she’d be spinning that high pony like a wind turbine only to do the walk of shame the next morning. I miss walking down the street at 8 am dishevelled and disoriented myself.
A creative producer friend tells me she’s struggling with job applications. “Ready to shave my hair off any day now and going full Britney.” I’d say it is in bad taste, but my buzz cut from 2016 begs to differ. A lad I used to go blackout drinking with tells me he’s broken up with his girlfriend (lockdown #3 casualty) and asks if I’m free to go to our fav dive bar on April 12th. Days and nights will collapse in one themselves this summer, we’re about to go off the rails like never before.
The summer before my senior year in high school, parents were attacking Britney Spears, seeing her as an emblem of all that is wrong with young people and for setting a bad example for their kids in the process. If they had been paying closer attention to home, they’d have realised the kids had grown up and were blowing each other at parties, with Britney providing the soundtrack in the background. “Feels like the crowd is saying,” wasn’t a call to action, it just happened to mirror our collective sex drive.
I promised to interview seven writers and artists, but haven’t even made a start at looking at their work to put questions together. A writer tells me they want me to review their book, another offers to send me their poetry zine, which I find romantic. Obsessed with print now. Another writer asks if I’ve ever seen a work of fiction serialised as a newsletter. A journalist asks when I can deliver copy by, another whether I can connect them with daffodil farmers. Meanwhile I’m thinking how I will go about convincing the lads at Blondie’s to play Lana when the bar reopens and casually message Rob Doyle to request not-yet-released info. DM for the job that you want, or whatever.
As far as intros go, “It’s Britney, bitch” is the stuff writers work themselves into breakdowns to come up with for their novels, but inevitably fail at. If you accept that no book you write will ever hook your audience in from the very beginning like this, keeping them in somewhat of a trance throughout, you’ll be a better writer. Or you’ll give up, who knows?
A year after the release of Britney’s record of reinvention, fresh out of school, we lazed about the seafront. Sitting on skateboards and watching a crew of BMXers, we responded to virtually every question with “more”, mimicking Britney mouthing the word, the movement of her lips in the video after the bridge, as she swings to look directly at the camera. Radios had moved on to other songs, including one about a girl kissing another, but at that stage making a fuss about kissing seemed not so much middle school, but middle class. “Call me when you’ve eaten her out,” was Phillip’s review. We’d dance at a local bar that always played what had become our song and didn’t mind if we were half naked, our three-stripe shorts and muddy white sneakers our only armour. L and the girls would come in black dresses and hair pulled back so tight it seemed they were out for pain. “Once you get branded a whore for sleeping around you might as well act the part, give them what they really want which is to jerk off to you from afar as you unravel,” L said one night as we did shots off a bartender’s abs.
Our first nihilistic era, preceding the financial meltdown still to come, coincided with Britney’s infamous breakdown. We were struggling to maintain agency over our own lives, acting out and getting battered for it in the process. What everyone got wrong about Gimme More was that it was inspiring bad behaviour, when it was rather an anthem of solidarity. If people want to drag you, if they want to blast all of your secrets out in the open, if they want to punish you for not conforming and to publicly shame you for your mistakes, then give them what they’re after till you’ve exhausted them into their own breakdown.
When the dust settled, I spent more time reading books. I was obsessed with Grove Press, anything deemed good enough to publish by Barney Rosset bound to be a masterpiece. I didn’t like John Rechy’s City of Night when I first read it. I think I was expecting the homosexual Henry Miller, but his book had a seriousness and a depth I was too dumb for.
After two months of continuous setbacks, I finally move into my new apartment on November 3rd, two days before the second lockdown comes into force. It takes me weeks to settle in, as I transition back to working full time. The first thing I read at the new digs is a story on the Evergreen Review by Quinn Roberts about young hustlers who eat McNuggets.
Straight out of Music To Watch Boys To era Lana, Roberts’ The Whore Stuff is a spiritual sequel to Rechy’s debut. It is the story of massage parlour owner Edson in the aftermath of masseur Ollie’s departure, whom he’s crushing on hard - a story of paid-for handjobs, the erotics of distance, and worshipping people you cannot be with.
Set in downtown Salt Lake City, Roberts’ story shows the solidarity between young men in the sex trade, similar to Rechy in City of Night: “The hustlers maintained an informal coalition of sorts. They shared cruising tips and clients, apartments and clothing, skateboards and cigarettes. Sometimes, out of teenage lust, they even slept with one another.”
It also represents significant departures from the world Rechy describes. In The Whore Stuff, the hustlers feel no impulse to prove their masculinity. They don’t need to prove anything at all, in fact. They’re unafraid to be exactly who they are, the need for personas the hustlers in Rechy’s narrative employ to lure the trade utterly absent, replaced with aggression, porn-like performances.
The openness of the streets available to Rechy’s youngmen has disappeared too in Roberts’ story, hustlers confined to massage parlours, representing the collective move towards individualism.
City of Night is about a hustler’s journey to self-discovery. In Roberts’ claustrophobic narrative, the hustlers already know who they are. The former wants acceptance, the latter are focused on getting enough cash to get through the day, the week, the month. While Rechy’s narrator lusts for connection, the skaters in Roberts’ story could not care less.
Ralph, the youngster that replaces Ollie, with his skateboard, attire of cut-off denim shorts and white tank top, stands in for all the young people who engage in this work, recruited from “parking lots, at basketball courts, outside of drive thrus.”
Rolled inside the story are moments of great social satire: “They wanted a brief moment of fame, just like every moron in America, even if afterward they plunged further into obscurity.” Ralph was a Disney kid once, long facing diminishing opportunities. The American Dream is dead, but Roberts highlights the lack of compassion in modern day America and the lack of possibilities. If the openness of the streets is gone, so too is the possibility of escape. Where Roberts’ writing shines is in capturing the narrator’s interiority (“The difference was so apparent to Edson, so deeply and painfully obvious, that he’d assumed Ollie understood.”), his memories and observations (“he thought instead of Ollie’s laughter, the gap in his teeth, the shape of his lips.”).
The story is accompanied by images from Brendan Lott, picturing men in the semi-nude, one with his hand hanging out of an open window smoking, another working out on the floor. Living in lockdown, the images work on two levels: as signifiers of the eroticism of distance in Roberts’ story as well as a reflection of our lives in isolation, bursting at the seams with built-up sexual energy.
Ten years later, I leave Isabelle and Chloe at a bar out East and text Kelsey who I hadn’t seen since I was a student. I crash over at hers in South London, waking up in a sea of glitter the next morning to remember we did hand stuff. I was wearing her fur coat and she my supreme black cap. We took turns brushing our teeth, me using my index finger for lack of a toothbrush, as Break the Ice played on her laptop. She asks if I’m OK, what’s wrong, if I am spiralling. I’m so exhausted of people asking me questions, asking me to do work, asking me if I want to do freelance work for free, asking me to be present, asking me to leave because I took my top off to dance on the bar, asking me to dance on the bar for cash, asking me whether I slept with their boyfriends, just exhausted at having to constantly respond. I go home and replay the song, falling asleep to flashbacks of us making out. Extract the memories you like from your experiences, blackout the rest of the noise.
What is Gimme More if not the singer’s rebirth choosing to shoot fire back at her aggressors? I tell a friend who’s watched the recent #FreeBritney doc I find celebrity toxic. Later that day I ask an author about his personal life on IG, so I guess I’m just as much of the problem.
My dream blunt rotation is Elizabeth V Aldrich, Sky Ferreira and Kirsten Dunst. That’s just something I thought the world should know on March 6th.
At least I didn’t click tweet on the other draft that day, ‘Have you even fucked on a daffodil field bro?’ Growth.
You’re stupidly brilliant. Also, I used to strip to Toy Soldier by her. Love that album.