Tell me how it begins.
In a car. I am driving. Me but not me. You know what I mean? Night. Dark. Black, really. An empty black highway lined with black trees. Constellations of moths and hard-shelled insects in my headlights smack the windshield, leave their insides. I fiddle with the radio dial. I’m nervous, jittery. Too much coffee? First Starbucks, then Dunkin’ Donuts. Of course Dunkin’ Donuts makes the better coffee. Starbucks is the smart coffee for dumb people. It’s the Christopher Nolan of coffee. Dunkin’ Donuts is lowbrow, authentic. It is the simple, real pleasure of a Judd Apatow movie. Not showing off. Actual. Human. Don’t compete with me, Christopher Nolan. You will always lose. I know who you are, and I know I am the smarter of us. Nothing on the dial for a long span. Then staticky Cuban pop. My fingers tap the wheel. Out of my control. Everything is moving, alive. Heart pounding, blood coursing. Sweat beading on brow, sliding. Then a preacher: “You will keep on hearing but not understand, and you will keep on seeing but not perceive.” Then nothing. Then the preacher. Then nothing. Bugs continue to splat in the staticky nothing. Then the preach—I turn off the preacher. The tires hum. It is so dark. Starting to drizzle. How is that done? How does he make the rain fall? A miracle of craft. Another illusion. The beauty of the world created through practice, over decades, through trial and error. Up ahead, a fluorescent blast of light. Fast-food joint. Slammy’s. Slammy’s in the middle of nothing. In the middle of nowhere. In the middle of drizzle and windshield wipers and bugs and black. Slammy’s. The parking lot is empty; the restaurant is empty. Open but empty. I’ve never heard of Slammy’s in the real world. There’s something disquieting about unfamiliar fast-food places. They’re like off-brand canned goods on a supermarket shelf. Neelon’s Genuine Tuna Fish scares me whenever I see it. I never get used to it. I can never bring myself to buy Neelon’s Genuine Tuna Fish, even though it promises it’s line caught, dolphin safe, canned in spring water, new and improved texture. There have been several of these mystery fast-food places along this road: The Jack Knife. Morkus Flats. Ipp’s. All empty. All glowing. Who eats there? Maybe these restaurants are less foreboding during daylight.
In any event, I slow and pull into the lot. The bugs on my windshield have almost completely obscured my vision. I see but do not perceive anything—but bugs. I hear but do not understand—bugs. I need napkins and water. An African American teenager in a carnival-colored uniform pokes her head suspiciously out from the kitchen at the sound of my tires on their gravel. I park and make my way toward her. She watches me, heavy-lidded.
“Welcome to Slammy’s,” she says, clearly meaning nothing of the kind. “How may I help you?”
“Hello. I just need to use the facilities,” I say as I head for the head.
I chuckle at my mental play on words. I make a note to use this somewhere, perhaps at my upcoming lecture for the International Society of Antique Movie Projector Enthusiasts (ISAMPE). They’re a fun crowd.
The men’s room is a nightmare. One wonders what people do in public restrooms that results in feces spread on the walls. And it is not an uncommon occurrence. Yet how? The stench is unbearable, and there are no paper towels, only one of those hand-blower machines, which I despise because it means there is no way for me to turn the doorknob without touching the doorknob, which I never want to touch.
I turn it using my left hand’s thumb and pinkie.
“Left thumb and pinkie,” I say, to cement in my brain which fingers I should not rub my eyes with or stick in my mouth or nose until I can find proper soap and water.
“I was just hoping for some water and paper towels. For my windshield,” I say to the African American teenager.
“You gotta purchase something.”
“OK. What do you recommend then?”
“I recommend you gotta purchase something, sir.”
“All right. I’ll have a Coke.”
“Size?”
“Large.”
“Small, Medium, Biggy.”
“Biggy Coke? That’s a thing?”
“Yes. Biggy Coke.”
“Biggy Coke, then.”
“We don’t have Coke.”
“OK. What do you have?”
“Slammy’s Original Boardwalk Cola. Slammy’s Original Boardwalk Root—”
“OK. Cola.”
“What size?”
“Large.”
“Biggy?”
“Yes, Biggy. Sorry.”
“What else?”
I want her to like me. I want her to know I’m not some privileged asshole racist Jew northerner. First of all, I have an African American girlfriend. I want her to know that. I don’t know how to bring it up in the context of this conversation, this early in our relationship. But I feel her loathing and want her to know I’m not the enemy. I also want her to know I am not Jewish. There is an historical tension between the African American and Jewish communities. It has been my curse to look Jewish. It’s why I use my credit card whenever I can. I will use it to buy the Slammy’s cola. Maybe then my wallet can accidentally open to the photo of my African American girlfriend. And she’ll see my last name is Rosenberg. Not a Jewish name. Well, not only a Jewish name. Will she even know that it’s not only? It’s wrong for me to assume she’s uneducated. That’s racist. I need to check my privilege at the door, as my African American girlfriend is fond of saying. Still, I have come across many people of various racial and ethnical makeups who have not known that Rosenberg is not a Jewish name, well, not only. I’ve assumed they knew. But later in conversation, they would bring up the Holocaust or dreidels or gefilte fish, trying to be nice, to connect. And I use that opportunity to tell them that Rosenberg is in fact a German—
“What else?” she repeats.
“Do I need to purchase something else to get paper towels?”
“Five-dollar minum,” she says and points to some imaginary sign.
I want to tell her the word is minimum, but I hold my tongue. There will be time enough for that once we become friends. I look above her at the menu: “How’s the Slammy’s burger?”
She looks at her nails, waiting.
“I’ll have that.”
“Anything else?”
“No. That’ll do it.”
“$5.37.”
I take out my wallet, photo of my girlfriend on display. You’d recognize her. She starred as a wholesome yet sexy young mother on a 1990s sitcom. I won’t say her name, but she’s beautiful and smart and funny and wise and African American. She prefers to be referred to as black, but I can’t bring myself to go against my training like that. I’m working on it. The girl behind the counter doesn’t look at my wallet. I hand her the credit card. She takes it, studies it, then hands it back to me.
“No credit cards,” she says.
Why did she take it? I hand her six dollars. She counts out the change, counts it out again, then puts it on the counter. Why won’t she touch my hand?
“Can I also get some paper towels and a cup of water?”
She sighs as if I have asked her to help me move this weekend and disappears into the back, which I guess is where they keep the water and paper towels. A young African American man in the same carnival suit sticks his head out and looks at me. I smile and nod. He disappears. The girl returns with a bag, two small paper cups of water, and three sheets of paper towel.
“Could I have some more paper towels? There’s a lot of bugs on the windshield.”
She looks at me incredulously for a very long time—I want to say five minutes?—then turns and disappears into the back. I really need her to like me. What can I do to change her mind? Does she know I wrote an entire book about the work of groundbreaking African American filmmaker William Greaves, whose documentary/narrative Symbiopsychotaxiplasm was so ahead of its time, I dubbed Greaves the Vincent van Gogh of American cinema? Although I realize now there is something inherently racist in validating an African American artist by comparing him to a white European male artist. Dead, too. I forgot to think dead and also heterosexual. And there’s one more … cis. Does she even know that I wrote that book, though? Is there any way to bring it up here? I am not a racist. Far from it. She returns with three more paper towels. They must come out of the dispenser in threes.
“Do you know who William Greaves is?” I say, testing the waters.
The young man sticks his head out again, threateningly, as if I’d just propositioned the girl.
“Never mind,” I say. “Thanks for the towels and water.”
I turn to leave. Someone releases a long whistling sigh. Either she or the guy. Maybe there is a third African American in the back who’s in charge of sighing. I don’t look back to see. I am hurt. I am lonely. I want to be loved. The instant I exit Slammy’s, the door locks behind me. The interior lights turn off, leaving the parking lot a dim red. I look back. A neon CLOSED sign in the window. Where did they go? Don’t they need light to pack up? Do they have cars?
CHAPTER 2
IT’S EERIE OUT here. Buzzing bugs. Frogs. I put my food and drink in the car and scrub at the windshield with wet paper towels. The bugs spread like Vaseline. Soon the paper towels are useless. The windshield is worse now than it was before. I make the somewhat frantic decision to use my shirt. The large northwest quadrant insect is hard-shelled and stuck fast. I scrape it with my left doorknob pinkie fingernail, the one I paint red in solidarity with Australia’s Polished Man movement and also to cover a minor but horribly unsightly fingernail abnormality called sailor nail. I suggest you do not look it up. The insect comes off in pieces, its insides black and shiny. The inner portion is still alive somehow, like a just-flayed man, but only barely, and I experience one of those profound moments of communion with the natural world. It’s like we acknowledge each other, this insect and I, across species, across time. I feel like he wants to say something to me. Do I see tears in his eyes? What is this creature? As an amateur entomologist, I am fairly conversant in insect varieties, but of course Florida is, in so many ways, its own thing, unlike anywhere else. Even its insects are eccentric and, I suspect, racist. I squash it in my shirt. He was suffering, as are we all. It was the right thing to do.
Then it occurs to me: Perhaps this was a drone. Not an insect at all. A miniature, crying drone. There are such things, I hear. All around us, CCTV monitoring everything. Monitoring everyone. Am I being targeted or was it just an accidental collision? Why would the government want to watch me? Or is it perhaps some nongovernmental organization? Or an individual? Would a fellow critic be able to secure or even afford such technology? Could it be Armond White? Manohla Dargis? One of my enemies? Someone who wishes me ill, who wants to “scoop” me, as it were. I have often sensed that there are forces acting against me, keeping me down. It could be that I am a thorn in the side of the machine. The entertainment industry is a trillion-dollar-a-year enterprise. This is big business, folks. And in addition to the money made, this business has a vast influence on public opinion, cultural shifts, miseducation, not to mention the entire bread and circuses aspect of it. It does not want to be exposed. I’ve often speculated as to why my career gets stalled again and again. Perhaps it is not chance. I pull the drone from my shirt, examine it, peel away the black “flesh.” Inside, I find a tiny, bony skeleton. What fresh hell is this? I ask myself, paraphrasing the great (yet embarrassingly overrated by certain teenage girls) Dorothy Parker, as I speculate as to what our society’s unholy synthesis of electronics and animal technology has wrought. Armond White is a monster. This has Armond written all over it.
I crush this nightmare drone under my foot to make certain it cannot, even in this compromised state, still record my doings, then place it in my glove box for later inspection. I am not an electronics expert, although I did take a six-week course on Atomic Layer Deposition, a thin-film application technique, because I misread the Learning Annex catalog description and thought it was a pro-ana filmmaking seminar.
I see I have been, in the end, left with a driver’s side circle about the size of a medium pizza to see through. It’ll do. I don’t want to be here anymore. I climb shirtless back into the rental car and pull onto the highway. Surprisingly, the cola isn’t bad. Not as sweet as Coke and with more of a citrus kick. I want to say grapefruit but I’m not sure. Pomelo? I perform a good deal of that lip-smacking, tongue-tapping-the-roof-of-my-mouth action to try to determine the flavor. It seems an essential component of identifying flavors, but my wife didn’t do it, and after twenty years of me doing it, she lost all sense of humor about it. What can I say, it’s how I do it. Everyone in my family tastes things this way. Three different Thanksgivings ended in the car ride home with my wife telling me she wanted a divorce. She eventually changed her mind each time, and the subsequent divorce came at my request. This mostly had to do with meeting the African American woman at a book signing for my biography William Greaves and the African American Cinema of African American Identity. She had been greatly affected by the book and had been surprised to discover I am not African American, so insightful (she said!) were my musings on her race and culture. I make a point of including neither my photograph nor my first name on my film writings. The neutral B. Rosenberg (sometimes B. Ruby Rosenberg, in tribute to the essential B. Ruby Rich) allows readers to experience the work free of preconceptions about the source. Granted, she was familiar with the groundbreaking work of celebrated African American Ultimate Frisbee champion Jalen Rosenberger, so she had read the book with a racial assumption about me. But to her credit (not as a credit to her race!), she was able to continue to appreciate the book even after she discovered my race. Even after her second assumption, that I was Jewish. She is an educated woman. I was surprised she did not know that Rosenberg (considering she knew Rosenberger is not necessarily a Jewish name!) is not necessarily a Jewish name. I mentioned that to her. And she said, “Of course I know that, but Jews are matrilineally Jewish, so it seemed conceivable to me you had a Rosenberg father and a Weinberg mother, for example.” First of all, I was in love. Secondly, I told her, no, my mother’s maiden name is not Weinberg, but rather it is Rosenberger, like Jalen, although sadly no relation according to Genealogy.com. Or the fifteen other sources I checked. I needed her to know. Yes, it can also be a Jewish name but is not in this case. I point out that famed Nazi Alfred Rosenberg was in fact a virulent anti-Semite and I believe I am related to him distantly. So there’s that on my side, in terms of not being Jewish.
“You look Jewish,” she said.
“I’ve been told. But I need you to know I’m not.”
“OK. Your Greaves book is amazing.”
She was amazing. She was all the positive African American characters on TV rolled into one, characters created to combat the negative black stereotypes we see on the news every day. She was articulate, educated, athletic, beautiful, charming, enormously sophisticated. And I suspected I had a chance with her. This would do amazing things for my self-worth, as well as my stature in the academic community. I asked her out to coffee. It’s not that I thought of her as a prop or a thing to obtain or something for my résumé. Well, I did think those things, but I wanted not to think those things. I planned to work on those unappealing thoughts, to make them go away. I knew they were wrong. And I knew they weren’t the entirety of my thoughts. So I would keep them secret and instead focus on the feelings of genuine attraction I felt for this woman. Eventually, the novelty of her African Americanness would recede, and I knew I would be left with a pure love for her, as a woman of any color, of no color: a clear woman. Although I understood that even my feelings for women in general were not pure. Attractiveness was a determining factor, which is wrong. And of course any exotic racial, cultural, or national characteristics were appealing to me. I would be as excited to show off my Cambodian or Maori or French or Icelandic or Mexican or Inuit girlfriend as I would my African American one. Almost. It was something I needed to better understand about myself. I needed to fight my instincts at every turn.
Left thumb and pinkie.
Left thumb and pinkie.
I have often felt that I am being watched. That my life is being witnessed by unseen forces, that adjustments are made as these forces see fit, to thwart me, to humiliate me. I worry that the disabled drone might still have a functioning tracking device smeared on the bottom of my shoe.
I drive to the beach and blow the drone through my Slammy’s soda straw, like a pea, into the ocean. Then I scrub my shoe with seawater. I feel suddenly so very lonely. Maybe it is the sea. The vast ocean. Maybe it is the sea that brings on these feelings. I have often felt a certain melancholic homesickness looking out at it. Am I remembering when I once lived there, forty trillion years ago, next to a hydrothermal vent, when I was just a sea slug or whatever?
I arrive in downtown St. Augustine. It’s early and still closed up. The city is, as is everything now, just more Disneyland. Magic castles. Quaint architecture. That the buildings are authentic somehow does not change the sense of falseness, of fetishization. I grieve for us, a world of tourists, for cities in drag, for our inability to be real in a real place. It is 5:00 A.M. The Slammy’s burger sits uneaten on the passenger seat. The car smells of onions and sweat. I dial my girlfriend’s cell. It’ll be 10:00 A.M. in Tunisia. Seems a safe time to call. She’s filming a movie there with a director you’ve heard of. I won’t say his name. Suffice to say, he’s a serious filmmaker and this is an important career milestone for her. So although I miss her with a heretofore unexperienced fierceness, I respect and even applaud her decision to take this role. Although I will admit I was hurt. There were some words exchanged. I am not proud of that. But our relationship is new and consequently fragile. To force an extended separation at this point is worrisome to me. That it was not worrisome to her did not go unnoticed by me. Undoubtedly, there are some very handsome African American actors from all over the world cast in this movie. She is young and beautiful and sexually liberated, so even though I am supportive of her career, even proud of it, I have insecurities. I hate myself for them, I do. But I have them. I call her often. Often she cannot pick up. They shoot at all hours. I won’t tell you the subject of the film, but it is a well-known historical event that took place at all hours. For the sake of cinematic verisimilitude, of which I am certainly one of the foremost champions, by the way—just look at my monograph Day for Day: The Lost Art of Verisimilitude in Cinema for evidence of my strong feelings on this issue—they must shoot at all hours. So it is a delightful surprise when she picks up.
“Hi, B.” (I don’t use my Christian name so as to maintain a gender-neutral identity for my work.)
“Hi, L.” (Not her real initial, to protect her privacy.) “I’m glad I caught you.”
“Yeah.”
“How’s it going? I just arrived in St. Augustine. Long drive.”
“I’m well,” she says.
She never says “I’m well.” It sounds formal somehow. Distant.
“Good,” I say. “How’s the shoot?”
“It’s going well.”
Two wells.
“Good, good.”
I say good twice. I don’t know why. I do realize the second good modifies the first good to make the whole thing less good. I know that much. It was not intentional. Is anything ever?
“So,” she says, “what’s on the agenda for today?”
“I’ll check in to the apartment. Maybe grab a few hours’ sleep. Then head down to the historical society. I have an appointment at three with the curator.”
“Cool,” she says.
She does not use the word “cool.” Cool equals this doesn’t interest me and I can’t think of anything else to say.
“I miss you,” I try.
“Miss you, too.”
Too quick. No pronoun.
“OK,” I say.
“OK?” she says.
She knows I’m upset and she’s calling me on it.
“Yeah,” I say. “Just wanted to say hi. Should probably get some shut-eye.”
No pronouns back at her and the term shut-eye. I don’t say “shut-eye.” What am I going for with that? I don’t even know. It sounds casual, tough, maybe, like I’m a gumshoe? I don’t know. I’ll have to look up the etymology later. All I know now is I hate those handsome, young African American actors over there, with their cocky bravado, their cool confidence, their meaty appendages, their well-muscled bodies. How incredibly narcissistic to spend that kind of time and energy on one’s body. Doesn’t she see that about them? Maybe not. After all, she does that herself, with her yoga and triathlons and Pilates, her boxing lessons and modern dance classes. But it’s different for women, isn’t it? We don’t like to acknowledge that in our steady societal slog toward genderlessness. But it’s the truth. Women are celebrated and rewarded for that type of preening. And now even men, more and more. Certainly the traditional American masculine ideal is strength and muscles, but not for show, not for the sake of muscles. We admired men whose muscles came from work or sport, not muscles that came as a result of the self-conscious pursuit of muscles. Is it any accident that bodybuilding has been, historically, by and large, the domain of the homosexual male? Muscles as adornment. Muscles as drag. Now, however, you’re as likely to see a well-muscled heterosexual leading man, shirtless, manicured, depilated. I’d like to pause here to say that I fully recognize that my attitudes toward the gay community are not without stereotyping and that I’m working on that. It’s complicated to be a male, especially a white male, with all this lack of sympathy, with all this incessant talk of privilege, with this constant admonition to “Sit down. You’ve had your turn. Now it is time for you to step aside and adopt the attitude of self-loathing,” an attitude I have all along been prone to anyway, by the way. Only now that it is insisted upon, I bristle. If I am to self-loathe, I want it to be my choice, or at least the result of my own psychopathology.
“OK,” she says. “Sleep well, B. Talk soon.”
Vague. Indeterminate. Formal. Passive-aggressive.
“I’ll call tomorrow,” I say. Aggressive. “Tell you how it’s going.”
“OK,” she says.
But the timing of the OK is wrong. There’s a sweet spot. Too quick, it’s forced, jumping the gun, covering for something. Too slow, annoyed, exasperated, communicating a silent sigh.
“Cool,” I say.
I never say “cool.”
“Cool,” she says.
She never says “cool.”
“Get some sleep,” she adds.
“I will. Love you.”
“Love you.”
I click off my phone, furious. A stew of heartache, jealousy, resentment, loneliness, and impotent zugzwang. I know if I were a handsome, successful, young African American gentleman, everything would be so simple. If only I were her, even. I would be beautiful and everyone would love me and be sympathetic to my plight, impressed with all I’d overcome as an African American woman in this racist society. If only, I think. Think about being able to admire myself in the mirror whenever I want, how confident I would be in social interactions. How the Slammy’s woman would smile at me, give me hundreds of free paper towels because I am a sister. Maybe we’d even sleep together. I feel a tightness in my pants. A horniness has come over me at the thought of this transformation and an affair with the sullen Slammy’s woman. I catch sight of my actual self in the rearview mirror: old, bald, scrawny, long unwieldy gray beard, glasses, hook nose, Jewish-looking. The horniness evaporates, leaving me despondent and alone.