G was back from Berlin and texted, so I went to his place. The 3 to the L, ears popping below the East River. It was August and muggy. More gray had crept into G’s beard over the months and his long hair was unwashed and stringy. He pulled his phone from his pocket and it—the actual device itself—stunk like leg sweat.
“Look, look what they did to me.” He showed me photos of gallery walls where his photos were displayed in what looked to me to be a completely normal way. Some were his PJ Harvey works, where he restaged her album covers with himself as PJ, whipping his wet hair around in black and white; others from a series where he wore only socks and hid the top half of his body behind lengths of mid-century wallpaper, his cock peeking out from below the colored patterns. “Totally fucked up the, like, context of them.”
I’d known all about his show, read art magazine articles he posted to his Twitter which Google translated badly from German to English. Everybody standing around in the pictures looked American in a way I couldn’t place. “Yeah,” I said. “Awful.”
Our fucking was unceremonious. G liked doing it from behind. His bed was small, so I had to hold on to the windowsill for leverage. He kept a planter there, full of soil, but anything he tried growing always died from lack of light and water. As he groaned and came, I stuck a finger into the dirt, feeling around for old strings of root.
He wanted a drink, so we went to a bar in Williamsburg that was once a singles bar back in the 2010s but was now tame and quiet and pastel-painted. We got a booth and he sat, showing me texts from his ex-wife texts from his ex-wife, asking of each, “What does this mean?” She reached out at strange hours of the night, asking banal questions about old kitchen implements she was sure they’d once had, wondering if they were available to borrow, or if he’d left them in a box on the sidewalk. “‘Do you still have the salad spinner?’ What the fuck?” Their dog needed surgery and she wanted to split the bill 50/50. “I only walk him like twice a week. Havesies just feels like…too much?”
I chewed an ice cube at his use of the word havesies and pain shot through my teeth. He asked if I was living in the same apartment with the roommate who played modular synths; I was. If I was still working at the coffee shop in Bed-Stuy, if I was still considering making a Substack; I wasn’t. I told a story about a DSA guy I briefly went out with who kept a ribbed pocket pussy in his bedside table, then told the story of what my therapist had said when I told her about it. As G always did, he praised me for not having an Instagram, paraphrasing something from Marx. He asked about my Twitter account.
“Deleted it,” I said. “Kept my alt.”
“Yes,” he said. “That’s…yes.”
He still seemed jet lagged, or else had gotten drunk very quickly, so we left and made the walk back to his apartment. Just a block away, we spotted a stray cat slinking along a warehouse wall. “Poor guy,” I said. The cat darted out across the sidewalk and under a car.
“Shit!” G yelled. “Gonna get fucking killed.”
“It’s fine. It’s a side street.”
“The way people drive?” He got down on his stomach and tried reaching beneath the car for the cat, then drew his arm back with a loud yell. Blood trickled down the back of his hand, staining the cuff of his shirt.
“Is it a bite or a scratch?” I asked.
“Fuck. I dunno. Is there a difference?”
“Aren’t their mouths, like, antibiotic?”
“That’s dogs. That’s definitely dogs.”
Of course, G didn’t have a first aid kit, just a couple of old Band-Aids wrapped in crusty paper. I washed the wound out with soap. “We need to disinfect this.”
“With?”
“Peroxide. Alcohol.”
“I’m out of alcohol.” With his good hand, he rifled through the kitchen cabinets and pulled out a half-empty bottle of grappa. “Will this work?”
“Why do you have grappa?”
“It’s my ex-wife’s.”
“Don’t you think she’ll want it back?”
We managed as best we could, wrapping his hand with paper towels and electrical tape. G leaned back far on his couch and kept arm raised above his head. I slunk into the space between him and the armrest. Crumbs stuck to the backs of my calves.
I wanted him to tell me that I should leave New York and go to Berlin, either with him or alone, so I could tell him that I’d been in the City my whole life and wanted nothing more than to live out the rest of it here, so he could say something backhanded about my parents’ money, so I could respond with a shrug and he could be impressed by my aloofness about money and my leg up and go off on some tangent about what Brooklyn was like when he moved here in the 00s, so I could tell him I was here then, too, so he could say that elementary school didn’t count and we could laugh and I could pull him close, help him up, pull him towards the bedroom. Instead he fell asleep almost instantly, stinking of shitty liqueur.
I wanted to leave a note, but couldn’t find a pen or paper. I ordered a car and stood inside G’s front door, waiting, listening to him snore down the hallway. The Lyft driver was an older man who said nothing, played his music at a low volume, and got me home quickly, never even glancing at me through the rearview mirror. I thanked and loved him for that silently, then, and I thank and love him still.