Gold is fleeting, gold is fickle, gold is fun!

There is gold across the river but I don’t want none

I would rather be dry than held up by a golden gun

saying Work more, earn more, live more, have more fun!

-Laura Marling-

In a few short hops, the squirrel would have made it to the little paper scrap flapping out of the sidewalk crack, but since she was already holding between her teeth a chunk of bread twice the mass of her body, she had a moment of existential crisis. Comfort or Curiosity? Nourishment or Knowledge? Provisions or Poetry? As it happened, the point was made moot in a moment of unruly scramble:

Two pairs of feet went rushing toward the squirrel, as their passengers yelled “Get the bread! Get the bread!” Reacting instinctively like a bat out of hell, the squirrel-plus-loaf almost ran smack into a crude pair of skinny tires belonging to an even cruder cyclist who yelled, “Outta the road, squirrel! Goddam rodent scum! Fucknuts!”

Calming her nerves with bread, the squirrel watched in relief from the shelter of a curbside bush, as the little paper scrap was discovered and read by a rotund man in a very thick tweed-suit-and-overcoat ensemble.

The man stood still a moment, reading the aforementioned scrap of brilliance. He let the paper rest its weightlessness in his hands as his eyes made a full circle around their quarters; then, with an invisible shrug, he put the paper in his pocket and whistled in his stroll past the theatre department down to the math hall where Real Men were made.

He did not, nor did the squirrel for that matter, have any reason to imagine that a young student inside that theatre building would have found (had he found it) that lyric delightful and poignant, simple and direct. Both squirrel and man had plenty business of their own without worrying over whether or not some young lad who would highly value Marling’s poetry was currently plotting an act of insurrectionary art.

Indeed, said art student was deep in the laboratory of cultural examination, learning an exact alchemy of art and science. Harmless compounds that would turn to colorful cloud bursts when mixed with the sulfuric gasses of a human being’s digestive waste. Harmful compounds that would detonate upon impact with air, bone, or a ten-foot wall of thickly-stacked twenty dollar bills. Careful formulas of ultra-diluted, odorless pepper spray that could be piped into a room slowly but surely, causing tears and nausea so mild as to be thought emotive.

The idea was nebulous, but then so was Jove’s sense of self at the time. Since his liberation into the fermentation garden that was NYU, he had laid himself and everything he had known upon the chopping block. Everything he had always known to be real was real—which alone was terrifying—but so, too, was everything he wanted to be certain was not. His work was both a breaking down and a knitting together. This production fed him as it fed upon him. Everything was going in, and whether he ended up with Sangria or Cyanide was none of his concern [1]. When he went into this cave, all the hieroglyphs were moving, enraptured and enraged, into philharmonic action. Everything was on the table. There was nothing to hold back and nothing to hide, though Jove always did his work in the dark recesses of his allotted personal Theatre Department cube. He was extremely well-hidden as modern cave-dwellers go, insulated by blaring jazz, binging on a particularly well-crafted mix of licorice tea and deprivation.

In this way, before the first Harvest Moon, he was able to come up with the bones, or rather the spinal cord and tadpole tail, of his production. By “his production,” it is appropriate to infer that he—yes, even as a mere sophomore—had showed his chops in such a manner as to be selected winner of the Theatre Department’s yearly contest, the College Heavyweight Arts Intensive, in which individual artists were challenged to give eighteen shows in eighteen days, in honor of Chai, the numerological basis of the Hebrew word for “Life” and yeah, Theatre Nerds are that thorough. The CHAI this year had as its grand prize, in addition to a year’s supply of a certain warm beverage, the chance to write and direct a theatrical production that would premiere during the Vice Presidential address, given in the first months after Inauguration. NYU was well-funded and well-connected, and the Theatre Department had a special sort of pull with the Board [2], so every four years the VPOTUS was signed up to give a motivational address to the Hardworking Inspired Student Body of this Outstanding Institution [3]. This year happened to be Inauguration year, so, to many theatre students, performing at the VP address was akin to tea time with the Pope. So Jove had done a right jolly good job in the esteemed CHAI contest. He had worked his garbage-can-playing, body-painting, glitter-spewing, gender-questioning, young gifted ass off. And he had won all the marbles, at the ripe age of 20.

If he’d had a father who would have slapped him heartily on the back for an artistic feat of wonderment, he’d have been slapped on the back for this one. But Jove had, it was crystal clear to him, a father that would be shocked and chagrined by the creative assembly of his son’s artful vendetta. [4]

Although the project was still quite embryonic, we can get a glimpse of its form.

So far, the spinal cord and tadpole tale would appear like this, with enough sonic waves bounced off of them:

Explosion.

Begins the scene and catches the attention. Erupts into wondrous spiral dancers with dinosaur bones who eventually melt into the ground. (Two levels used simultaneously or singly, connected by spiral stairs and a firefighter’s pole. And a stripper’s pole.)

Scene 1 with Board Room and Belly Dancers. Very psychotically-early-60s entertainment vibe, real decisions being made. Strangely off-putting, doomful, but rife with colorful delight.

Belly Dancers remain, become jingling stars. Sky is falling. Kids with telescopes. “Jimmy’s Day at Camp” feeling. Earth opens up, children leap into it with glee and abandon. Fire. Hidden.

Shadow screen, dancers behind. Red. Fast. Feels thick. Wheat grows up from this. Second story ground. Slowly: bugs.

Tiny spiky insects. Eating away chunks in wheat, tearing off each other’s legs, piling them in the middle with the wheat shards, burning the pile with last arms left (use red crinoline for this fire, yellow for slow glow, sink through to lower stage, unleash dancers.)

Dancers below & above; fire & aerial. By this time, the crowd is at a delightful Cirque de Luna, captivated and dazzled, sparkley-eyed. Play with them.

Lights down, fire dancers swirl round, igniting slowly walls of candles. Hundreds of candles. Thousands. Candles handed out in the rows. Candles across the balcony. Candles in the scaffolding. (Get fire marshall signed off on this.) (Give cash if necessary.)

Jove. Spiral-eyed child, crackpot journalist and insurgent dreamer, mouthpiece of the clarinet. He had had enough enough times to cause a runaway train to derail on his neurons. But his body had not won the battle with his mind, partly because they were secretly in love and didn’t want to disappoint the Planning Committee by coming out in unity. They had work to do. Hard work. There was a war on, for Chrissake!

Thus, his brain was hard at work sparking The Change, his body surrounded with the Bunson burners of redemption. Everything in the way of understanding is a product of this culture, he was scribbling in a journal on his right while scooping a pile of metallic powder on his left. (He left out the part about how every product of the culture was a way of understanding, but one can suppose it is implied by the rule of opposites. Or the Theory of Relativity. Or something. [5])

Holy cross. Bugle player. Mountain rancher sunset. Something equally manipulative, flags or bunnies. Heartbreakingly beautiful. Must cause tears. Must. (Gas available.) Film reel of home movies spliced in with babies, birds, and detonations. Flowered vines, soaring kites, smog, detonations. Kissing fools, dancing cranes, running water, detonations. Hand jives, hand tools, hand shakes, hand jobs, detonations. Keep it going way past comfort. Slow, sad curtain with silk-spinning dancers drawing them closed mid-air.

No intermission. Leave people holding their candles for a full minute. Keep the aerial dancers spinning slightly off-stage. Then open curtains: candles gone. Brick building in place. No light. All light in audience. One (implanted) audience member get up and check out building dimensions with candle. One (implanted) usher follow and assess the situation. Two lights on stage. Tension of possible conflict, but candle meets flashlight. Begin to dance.

Meanwhile… Cash stacked inside. Chains discovered upon the building. Chain dance. All dancers back, but hidden and locked up on second floor. In chains. Movements wrong, maddened, menaced, crazed. Anxiety. Nausea. Awful. Loud fearsome music. Over the top.

Walls sink. Dinosaur bones stand in their place, house skeleton.

Christmas tree cash tower. Money stacked. Examined. Stage lights very important now. Music has lots of space, silence, stretches of shadow.

Every few minutes he would stretch out his long legs, crank up his Nat King Cole or Prince or Copeland or what have you, kick across the room, and tail-spin back. This would not only wake him up and remind him of his holysacred heart, but it would give the lonely strips of skin paving the deserted psoas highway a chance to feel again, if only to feel the inside of his pant legs. Then, well-acquainted with gravity, he would land dutifully back into his spinny stool and crank the machine of the brain until the next wave of embodied movement.

The kid was very efficient. In this manner, he could work all night, sleep for one R.E.M. cycle after the sun rose, if necessary, and bust his ass for class all day. Most of the time, instead of sleeping, he would just climb to the roof and watch the sunrise with a teacup in one hand and the latest music-playing marvel in the other. [6]

More to stage that are “in audience” or “on crew” or “hospitality.” Two more scenes, please. Make them count: pull attention to the edges and wings. Keep anxiety in place, right in the middle, but divert and deny enough to cause resignation, to cause a preference for distraction, a surrender to the authority of the Stage.

Lull to sleep, then rip open with Explosion. Big one. Money burn and fly. Security guards in. VPrez will be contained, but one dancer will brave being tazed in order to deliver goods. Make dramatic citizen’s arrest in the name of tax evasion, embezzlement, fraud, and war crimes. (Guns not necessary, but back-up options available.) When people get a grip, it is done. Allow them to consider, compute, and clap wildly. It is theatre. It is real. It is done.

To Do: Contact hackers and puppets to completely deplete the Federal Reserve. For Real. (Call Jarrod.) Finish Revolution. Enter Exquisite Redemption.

This scrawled impressionism was not yet any real living being of Jove’s conception, although it indeed was being given its life. The above was merely, as stated, the ultrasound. While the ultra-sonic depiction of reality that language provides is fascinating enough, it is certainly no Venus de Milo, no L’Eternel Printemps, no homemade YouTube classic [7]. It is a cool photobooth reel, live enough to cause excitement, fuzzy enough to cause confusion. Words, Jove reminded himself, could not grasp what his endless toil was actually producing in that basement.

Many rooftop mornings, after his Liquid Licorice-n-Sunlight breakfast, he would read the following passage by Rainer Maria Rilke, squinting needlessly against his memory’s boast into the crumpled font peppered over the long, thin ribbon of wood pulp. He felt like a treasure hunter. He felt like Banksy in a Guy Fawkes mask. He felt like a Lady of Marie Antoinette’s court. He felt like his heart was beating:

Dear Sir,

Your letter arrived just a few days ago. I want to thank you for the great confidence you have placed in me. That is all I can do. I cannot discuss your verses; for any attempt at criticism would be foreign to me. Nothing touches a work of art so little as words of criticism; they always result in more or less fortunate misunderstandings. Things aren’t all so tangible and sayble as people would usually have us believe; most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a space that no word has ever entered, and more unsayable than all other things are works of art, those mysterious existences, whose life endures beside our own small, transitory life.

–Rainer Maria Rilke, “Letters to a Young Poet”

-**

1. Well, as we will see, the latter was very much indeed of his concern. Was I not supposed to say that?
2. Yes, what you heard is true, they are sleeping together.
3. HIS BOI…? Surely leading to future headlines: Vice Potus Hollers at His Boi!
4. That fact was indeed part of the inspiration for this piece.
5. He was no Physicist, to everyone’s surprise.
6. As was common with many of his peers, Jove’s marvel was smaller than a postage stamp and his teacup was bigger than a breadbox.
7. Respect, Sweet Brown. 

Desperate. The last thing that people wanted to be. The last thing, at least, that people wanted to be seen being. (A subtle but important distinction, yes?)

Desperation had Jove by the jugular. He walked around in its acrid fog, from night to day, from class to class, from push to shove. He looked out of its eyes at the hand-holding couples on their way to the swanky bars where they would pretend to do their homework over beers, kisses, and mid-afternoon sunshine. He wrote about it in his journal and drew its monsters in the sidelines of his notes.

It’s not that he didn’t count his blessings. It’s certainly not that he didn’t thank his lucky stars he had won a lavish position in the “arts” part of the liberal arts community (“liberal,” as it turns out, was somewhat of a euphemism anyway) and he now was required—not tolerated, not discouraged—yes, required, to dance his heart out several times per week. This alone was far and away reason enough to float to dreamland every night in a bed of delicious satiation. But no such bed awaited him at night. Jove had made a practice for so very many years of feeling downtrodden, incomplete, desolate, misunderstood, and—yup—desperate.

No, it’s not like he woke up one day and chose it. No one does that, do they? “I think today I’m going to feel alienated from my kind and impossible to appreciate, and I’m going to deal with that by eating too many Nutter Butters, farting a lot, and hiding in my bag when people come by, digging for something that will make me feel momentarily important. I will also write with a smug look on my face so that people don’t approach me and so I can rest assured that they will think I think I’m better than them. Lastly, I will throw an internal tantrum when I step in a puddle with my new shoes, cursing god and all the angels and most of all my sad, sad shitsack self.” Humans don’t decide these things outright. They tend to make it up as they go along, riding on autopilot, filling in the gaps that make sense with the status quo. “I feel like crap: must be a good reason…” And thus, reasons come flooding in.

Not that young Jove was depleted of Very Good Reasons. He still had a constant sense of ungrievable loss that he had never, ever been without. He still had a family who denied, denigrated, and disowned non-normative gender expression [1]. He still had only a few years of space from his experience with sexual trauma, having found out in the midst of depressive isolated teenaged angst that things were even worse than they seemed. He still had a daily mix of attraction and revulsion with his brethren, a melée of confounding, turbulent, simultaneously-occuring desire and hatred. He still had a guilt-ridden white-kid trust fund and a growing arsenal of supplies for an imminent cathartic guilt-clearing of personal and public interest. He still had his large front teeth and too-serious nose.

But the habit of desperation did not survive on explanation. It was not affected by the presence or lack of any of those Very Good Reasons. In fact, it had become shorthand for the reasons, which meant that even though the reasons would always be there to back it up and give it weight, they were not even readily available for examination. They were all zipped up in a file marked “Desperate.” To manage this, one has to search for and download a free extraction application, after making sure it isn’t full of viruses and spyware, and by the time it downloads, oh yeah, one has to re-start one’s computer and agree to all the preliminary set-up options, and then, even after all that, sometimes the application doesn’t support the file type, and one has to do the whole thing over again, this time being very vigilant to seek an application that includes the right file configuration for the contents of “Desperate,” and then, finally, if it all works out, one can wait a few minutes while the giant file called “Desperate” is unzipped and made ready for perusal. And, if one is lucky or stubborn or touched, one will still remember why the file was so important to read in the first place, and one will spend hours on end getting lost in the maze of well-rutted justifications of the psyche.

This is not a recipe for becoming less desperate. [2]

The mantle of desperation that Jove wore around like he was clothed by Ichabod Crane, it did have one notable payoff. It made for some invigorating stage work. Jove’s dancing was second to none, always at the ready to burst forth, a lava flow from somewhere hot and dark within the deep. When he pulled that realm into being, there was nothing in the world that could hold it back. Fellow dancers would twirl to a stop. Instructors would hold their breath and squint their eyes. Dust bunnies would flee the scene. And Jove—firey, storm-brewing, rock-generating Jove—would be in five places at once, hands to the invisible sky and body rolling yards below the ground, gulping air into his cannon and blasting its molecules into color combustions no eye would allow the mind to discard.

All in the name of Desperation.

A great critic would say it was worth it. A great artist would say it could be no other way. A great lover would say it was exquisite, courageous, and unnecessary.

Jove said it was survival, as he packed up his sodden clothing into a flimsy vinyl bag, leaving his curious dancing partners without another word.

And when he got home to his chilled, unsatisfactory bedding, he cried the tears of a survivor, triumphantly sad and sadly triumphant, leaning into the sharp edge of his only weapon.

-**

1. As well as, if one pans back for a wide-angle view, anything else out of the ordinary, anything that didn’t match their curtain patterns.
2. It is, however, free, voluntary advertising for a program called jZip that requires none of the aforementioned bullshit.

Coffee. Pressure drop. There was a spiral staircase leading nowhere, and people milled around it drinking coffee and waiting for their bowels to move.

Toughen up. Toughen up. Toughen up. Toughen up. Jove’s monkey slapped its mantra against the little pastel furballs of his mind. They didn’t like to be slapped; they liked to choreograph synchronized swimming on the smooth linoleum of Jove’s public persona. Sure, it was only the top floor above an agonizing mob who occupied the lower extremities in the name of a freedom few people would ever call free, but it was shiny and polished and slippery enough for intricate spiral patterns of motion. So long as that monkey left them alone. Today, at the moment, the fuzzies were terrorized and frozen, troubled and fuming. Tiny poofs of subdued rage. A menacingly mechanical primate smacking them like tennis balls. Toughen up. Toughen up. Toughen up. Toughen up.

Meanwhile, Jove’s eyes scanned the faux-fifties coffee counter where he lingered over lunch break. There were three people reading, each a different medium: one, a bulky laptop once the top of its class, two, a tiny wristbound square that required frontal stroking with the index finger every few seconds, and three, a newspaper, the last refuge of scoundrels. Jove, like usual, was able to stare without staring. So accustomed was he to becoming invisible that his body fuzzed into just the right demeanor completely on cue, so it looked like he was engrossed in the spoon that crept in concentric circles through the murk of his mug.

The three were, it seemed, rather straight and satisfied, though he didn’t claim to know the digests of their bedrooms. They just seemed so… unquestioned. [1] Instead of doing his English Lit. homework, Jove wrote them each a little poem, slaloming through snark as he went.

~

Gentle Ben, glasses aflare, you think that none know where you stare

but little birds perched at the glass can see the glow of hand-on-ass.

Back at home, your betrothed

awaits your research of the exposed,

those raunchy bodies you feign despise

to look at ‘fore her dainty eyes,

but know you well this gloomy fact:

you steal from them your every act.

~

Mary, Mary, whores and fairies ain’t got nothing on your aviaries,

sanctuaries for the flocks that dazzle ladies like those rocks

fastened to that golden ring that says now you’ve got everything,

so you & the girls, out you go, way lit by the diamond’s glow

you put it on your registry, a week of birds and one of bees,

so first you must watch feathers fly, then pollinators buzzing by,

then to that hubbs a marriage great you finally can consummate,

unless in times of bees and birds, you find out you’d much rather be hers.

~

Oh, Columbus, Mr. Magoo, find out who is watching you

there’s treasure to dig in every cranny

it’s not “What is it?” it’s always “How many?”

the media darling whose boots are divine

has front page courtship on The New York Times

and somewhere in section thirteen of C

you’ll find a head count of deaths overseas

but here on page four, so sexy and sweet

you can read up on starletts you never will meet,

and on to the hot gas of Those Who Are Right

where pages are dripping byproducts of Might

you’ve only one friend there, and that is the period;

the comma too wordy, exclamation too serious,

and the question mark never makes an appearance:

no conviction nor bluff, it couldn’t get clearance,

so flip back to the comics with Garfield and Friends

there’s a spot of relief from opinions and trends

but then you’re in classifieds of a dead market

seeking a sturdy car or at least a place to park it

so others will know how much you do care

how smart you’ve become, how dignified an air,

here you can show what a Good Guy you are,

what time is it, noon? well, it’s off to the bar!

~

Surprisingly uplifted, Jove looked down at the notebook where he had been musing before this sudden dose of limerick-laced glitter had spilled into his bad mood. The last thing he’d written, up above the sharp-edged sparkle that won his black little heart’s black little medal for the day, was this: “fuckers all bunched up telling me I can’t have sex.”

Who is telling you that? piped up his inner politzi. Uhhhh. They are. They all deny my validity. Even to him, the very one imagining that comeback, it sounded like bullshit. They what? They don’t know you from the cracks in their asses. On what grounds do they “deny you,” as you put it? Jove had grown sick and tired of defending himself to himself, yet had found no suitable distracting replacement (“Go get the ball, boy! Get it! Get it! That’s it, boy! Goooooood dog.” [2]), so he dutifully responded with both defense and defeat. I’ll tell you on what grounds! They don’t have to ask any of these questions, they don’t have to paw through their youths to find one single example of a time their family didn’t hate them for who they were, they don’t have to endure the projections of thousands of blind reproducers in a centuries-old game of divide and conquer.

One good thing about fights with inner voices is that you don’t have to see the expression they would be wearing when they have absolutely no use for what you just said. The voice, if it can be called that, sighed, if it can be called that. Jove rolled his eyes just to fit in. He felt the familiar tug of muscle, tendon, and nerve. The voice barrelled on:

First of all, you probably made that up, and if you’re gonna make shit up and believe it, you might as well make up shit that has you enjoying life a little more. Maybe even shit that has you laughing in their faces. Or giving up caring what they do with their lives so long as you are another happy and self-actualized being on this planet. Or I could be way off, and you need to secretly loathe them more and blame them for your deficient sex life. What’s the bottom line, kid, honestly? That’s right: you’re not getting any.

Ugh. Jove hated this terminology, and hated even more the fact that his internal logging system had not wiped it from the memory years ago. “Getting” applied to things you can buy at Walmart. “Any” implied that there was a lot of something, or at least a certain quantity of it, and people were out in the streets just scooping it up, and here you are, orphan bowlfulla nothing. Put together, “Getting Any” was like a modern frat system’s fantasy football gambling terminology for Whatever Thankful Fulfillment Incarnate Spawned Them Here Into Sacred Life [3]. How completely inane. How totally immature. Made Jovie want to shoot little rubber bands at people walking by. Made him want to play ding-dong-ditch. Made him want to cry. Made him want to stand up and yell in that trendy coffee box, “Suck my hidden cunt, you idiotic prisoners!”

Oops. He must have been mouthing the words, because subject B (Mary, Mary!) was giving him the over-the-glasses glare, the kind for which you don’t move your head and shoulders at all, the kind that jams the penny of your irises into the slot machine of your eyelids, making it so you can’t win and no one else can play. Oh well. His beef was no longer with her anyway. Nor was it really with the imaginary footballers with very slim chances of discovering Tantric Divinity. It was with that wretched VOICE, the know-it-all that seemed to actually know it all.

OKAY! I am pissed off and I feel lame and juvenile because I want to be with someone in a special way and I can’t possibly fathom that the type of person I actually want to be with would show up in this two-bit mochas-for-posers crap factory to just hold my hand until I land on something beautiful to say. I have no hope for the love that I want, so I talk shit (secretly) about other people and believe that they all want to keep me from having what I want.

There was a silence. Really. In Jove’s head, for just a moment, for the first time since the forest Faeries of his youth, there was a silence where silence was designed to be. Then:

The royal blue coffee bowl sloshed in his hand, spilling dark brown sludge all over his beautifully-woven recycled silk scarf. These details cranked their chains through his mind as the main attraction rolled forward: things were flying every which way, glasses breaking, apple cinnamon tarts mashing into neighboring chairs, hot liquids scalding hands and refashioning clothing. People screamed, not because they couldn’t figure out what to do, but because it added to the drama. After several seconds of utter mayhem (as far as management was concerned), the earth-shaking horror subsided and Jove was faced with a pathetic scene of bougie café survival tactics.

It was an earthquake. The little kid inside clapped hands, a real live earthquake!

People were wedged up against the big glass at the storefront, all hugging into the one place that would shatter first. Others were huddled under the dingy shellacked card tables that had passed most undergrads’ expectations for “trashy chic.” [4] Still others were laid out on the floor, rolling in breakfast goods. Some were walking out of the bathroom with dazed frowns and spooky look-around eyes. Jove found himself holding the empty coffee mug in one hand and the curly blond mane of an Economy professor in the other. His scarf was ruined. Her hair was ultimately fine.

People slowly regained mobility and stumbled out of the coffee shop, kids in a post-horror-movie glaze of giddy intoxication.

As narcissistically grandiose as it was, Jove found himself asking the inner know-it-all: Was it something I said?

-**

1. Unquestionable?
2. Good news for your trainable thinking mind: help on the way.
3. WTF IS THIS Life?
4. As opposed to “cheeky trash,” which is an epithet flung at your narrator quite often.