The Rabbits

A Beckett's retrospective

“Those who are surrounded by lust crawl around like a hare in a trap. Held in fetters and in bonds they suffer and suffer again.” –Dhammapada

LOS ANGELES

Several years ago, after Tai had been fired from the In-n-Out on Sunset Boulevard, she met this ex-Blood named Dex who had a strange obsession with having his body cryogenically frozen after he died. She started trimming weed for him in Tarzana, in the Valley. They became close friends over the bonfire in his backyard, and then he asked her to start selling for him, and so she did. Tai then met Lindsey Shaw, who was on Pretty Little Liars at the time, at the Whole Foods on Fairfax and Santa Monica. Tai started selling Lindsey weed and cocaine, and they became friends. Lindsey invited Tai to her Beyoncé-themed 25th birthday party. Tai told Dex about it, and Dex said that Tai should bring acid and molly, supplying the party favors for business purposes. The party is in this West Hollywood bungalow behind a 7-Eleven on Santa Monica Boulevard, close to the Whole Foods where Tai met Lindsey. It’s full of famous people, including most of the cast of Pretty Little Liars. Tai had heard about Lindsey’s roommate, Chet, but had never met him before tonight. Chet’s wearing a backwards baseball cap and speaking in a Jamaican patois (which he picked up from this Jamaican woman from South Central he was dating at the time), and Tai offers him some acid. He says that he’s never done it before and is kinda scared, and Tai says that it’s ok, he shouldn’t worry, she’ll be his guide on this psychedelic journey, and she gives him the acid. She also gives acid to like half of the other people at the party, including Lindsey and the other Pretty Little Liars cast members. She mingles for a bit and about an hour later checks in on Chet again. By now Chet has come up hard and entered a deep psychedelic trance. Holding on dearly to whatever is left of his ego, he asks Tai to step outside and talk with him, and Tai says ok I got you it’s all good. They step outside and it’s raining, high winds, a powerful storm.

“I’m sick of living in my father’s shadow,” Chet says.

“Sure, but isn’t that a common thing young men feel?”

“Yeah, but not when your dad is Tom Hanks.”

Chet goes on a long tangent about how his own artistry has always been overshadowed by his father and brothers, but because of this acid trip, he’s now concluded that his voice is essential for the moment and that his time has come to step into the limelight.

Hours pass, and Tai rests on a couch in a psychedelic haze. Lindsey is in her bedroom fucking this actor guy who is Australian (or possibly British, but definitely not American). Lindsey’s ex-boyfriend, a white guy in a prominent indie band, shows up in a coked out rage because somebody told him that Lindsey was fucking this dude. The ex-boyfriend breaks the glass of front door window and reaches in with his bloody hand to turn the knob, then bursts into the apartment, storming through the living room and going straight toward Lindsey’s bedroom. Everyone is screaming at this point. The ex-boyfriend starts beating the fuck out of the actor guy, who is wearing nothing but boxers, full blown jumping his ass. Tai starts hiding her drugs because she realizes the cops are probably going to be showing up soon. As the ex-boyfriend beats the actor guy, Lindsey is screaming at the ex-boyfriend about calling the cops, but he keeps going. She grabs a lamp and holds it over the ex-boyfriend’s head, “get the fuck out of here or I’m going to fucking kill you with this right now!” She keeps screaming about how the cops are coming and they’re going to throw him in jail and the ex-boyfriend relents and slinks off into the night. Tai and Lindsey stay up the rest of the night cleaning up the glass, Tai talking Lindsey down from her manic psychedelic rage state as they rip the bong. The cops eventually do show up, but it’s 10AM by then. Tai leaves and walks down Santa Monica Blvd toward her homie Spencer’s house. The actor needs to be hospitalized, missing a flight to Australia he had planned for two days later.

***

NEW YORK

I’m lying on the floor of Tai’s apartment on Fulton Street, and Tai tells me the Chet Hanks story right as I’m making the finishing touches to “Spring of Narcissus” on her computer. She’s on some of the molly gummies but I haven’t taken anything because I’m still manic from writing. We hang around and smoke weed for a bit before I calm down and then we head out to this house party a few blocks away celebrating the birthday of Ana from the Neoliberalhell podcast. This is the second of Ana’s birthday parties, the first one a week prior, at Mehanata in the Lower East Side, where Andy Flint told me about the dharma. A bunch of microcelebrities are supposed to be at this party tonight, and maybe even some real celebrities, too. It has been raining a lot lately, but it’s just drizzling now. We get to Kingston and Atlantic under the Long Island Railroad overpass and as we’re standing by the curb right about to the cross the street a car speeds by, right through an enormous puddle, which explodes like a landmine, completely drenching both of us. Before we can react, another car speeds by and we’re drenched again. We’ve just had two buckets of the nastiest Brooklyn pothole puddle water poured right over our heads. We step away and realize that we’re so drenched that we can’t even show up to this party. Tai’s makeup is running down her face. “Let’s just head back to your place and chill some more,” I tell her, and she says that sounds good. That disgusting water was a sign, we speculate. We weren’t meant to go to that party. Shivering our way back to Fulton Street, we realize we just experienced some sort of baptism.

***

I get a text from Charlie Monday evening with the address of a “Thiel adjacent publishing party” and instructions to act like I don’t know her if I show up. I ask if this was that new Dimes Square space that Nick told me about at that Ion Pack/Praxis Society party, the one that’s supposed to replace Beckett’s and host Gasda plays and Urbit–Mars Review parties, and she said that she thinks so, Anna and Dasha are here, they’re so funny, this is insane idk how you wade through this all the time, the mud is so thick. “Damn, that’s nuts,” I say, “but I def am too tired to deal with this today.” She texts back saying that she would’ve loved to read my thoughts on it but that she understands, and then a half hour later she texts again saying that it turns out I was “like so not allowed” and that they would’ve kicked me out if I showed up. “Lol that rules,” I answer.

The next day I’m at Beckett’s where they’re having this party for the Chicago-based magazine The Point, which people are saying is the definitive final Beckett’s party before the city hands the keys to 432 Hudson over to the Hasids who recently bought it. There’ve been countless other “final parties,” but something feels different this time. I run into Michael Saltypickles and he’s going off about how his roommate Max came back the night before from that Thiel adjacent publishing party. Michael had asked Max why he hadn’t heard about it and Max said that they were specifically told not to invite Saltypickles because he’s too close with Crumps, and Michael is angry about this. “Like, what the fuck, I’m cool with everyone, I’ve got beef with no one,” Michael goes on, practically shoveling cocaine up his nose as we stand right next to the bar, “I’m just trying to hang out and have a good time, I give those motherfuckers so much coke and ketamine, they’re always around for that, they beg to get into my elite Twitter group chat—only to ban me from their parties!” Not that he had any intention of going, he fell asleep early watching kung-fu movies that night, but the deliberate exclusion was still a betrayal of sorts. “You’re a dangerous guy to these people,” I tell him, “the paranoid ones at least, you’re insufficiently loyal to their cause.” The event was for Passage Publishing, a fledgling reactionary press that has two titles so far: Passage Prize Volume 1: Exit from the Longhouse, a collection of Frogtwitter essays and poetry, and Unqualified Reservations: Volume 1, a collection of Curtis Yarvin’s blog posts. Apparently in Exit from the Longhouse there is at least one short story that uses the hard-r n-word a ton and this is the first thing that pops out to a reader casually flipping through its pages. “That sounds cringe as hell,” I tell Michael, “no wonder they didn’t want me there, it would be like shooting fish in a barrel.” These people are so socially inept that they really do need a safe space just to gawk at Martin Shkreli, who finally pulled up to one of these things. But them being so aware of their own vulnerability and scared of this Substack that they ban even the plug from the inaugural event of “the new Beckett’s,” that’s a bit more unexpected.

***

A few days earlier, the “final Saturday” at Beckett’s, they’re having a big event with a bunch of performances. At least that’s what people are saying. In the afternoon I go out to Jackson Heights and eat vegetable momos at Nepali Bhanchha Ghar, which Jeremy said was the best Nepali place in the city. I walk from Roosevelt Avenue down Broadway from Jackson Heights through Woodside toward Astoria and then turn on 31st Street and down until I get to Queensbridge and then I take the F over to Manhattan and I walk from 57th Street toward downtown, and most of the time in Manhattan I need to pee really bad, it seems like every place I go into has closed their toilets, I get to a Starbucks that has an open restroom and I order a drink and get the code for the restroom but by the time I even get the drink the workers have already closed the restroom, sorry it’s closed now, I bought the drink for nothing, guess I’m gonna have to just pee at Beckett’s, so I pick up the pace and eventually get to the West Village, which is a total bougie wasteland aside from Beckett’s beatnik squatter den, I’d never be here if it weren’t for that, I get to Beckett’s like a half hour before the event’s supposed to start and there’s just Beckett and some of the beautiful young people helping him set up, who’s that, Beckett asks from afar, and I say Crumps, it’s just Crumps some of the others repeat, and he says you’re early get outta here, yeah yeah I just need to pee I’ll get out of your hair in a second, and he says ok, so I go and pee and try to pee quietly because the toilet isn’t really in a separate room or anything, which isn’t a problem when it’s crowded and noisy, but now pretty much everyone can hear everything. I get out of the makeshift restroom and meet Meg Spectre and she’s lovely as ever and she tells me she’s the MC for the evening and that I should leave before I get press-ganged into helping them set up and she asks if I’m going to be coming back later and I say of course. I go out to the park a block away and meditate and smoke weed and then pace around in circles as the sun sets and a chilly ocean breeze comes in until Tai gets there and then we drop acid and go into Beckett’s, which is now a packed sauna.

The lineup for the evening is long. First there’s Christian Lorentzen reading an essay “against adverbs” with his old crank voice and then there’s Megan Nolan reading a story about jealous lovers in her lilting Irish voice and then there’s novelist bank robber Nico Walker reading a story about someone being recruited by the cops to do undercover vice squad work in his smokey Mississippi Lou Reed voice and then there’s Noah Kumin reading a story about a writer who works for a Russian email scam troll farm in an accentless voice I can’t really describe and then there’s George Olesky doing this monologue about an actor who goes on a date and talks about his acting and this monologue makes reference to the characters and plays in Spring of Narcissus, and then there’s an intermission. During the intermission Saltypickles asks if I have any more acid and I give him some. After the intermission there are pole dancers and folk musicians and Beckett himself acting in a short play by his namesake, Samuel Beckett—I haven’t mentioned this in the Substack yet but Beckett’s father is Barney Rosset, Samuel Beckett’s American publisher, and there’s a lot of other Beckett lore I won’t get into in detail here but involves heroin and Rikers and an eccentric duchess-patron he lived with who died during the pandemic and left him this whole space all to himself and then Gasda coming along with his theater troupe and eventually Beckett realizing that hosting Gasda’s theater means not only some extra cash but also a bunch of wide-eyed young actresses and models hanging around. Meg has been introducing all the performers and there’s one point in the second act when the audience is getting restless and she puts on this pouty waifish voice and tells the crowd that they should be quiet, and if they aren’t then she’ll have no choice but to take it personally and be sad. It’s almost midnight by the time all the performances finish, and then it’s just a party for the rest of the night. I’m still sitting with Tai when a girl comes up to me and says that Saltypickles pointed her in my direction because I have acid and she’d like some, and I say sure, if people want to open their minds who am I to refuse, and I start searching my backpack to find the stuff. She says she’s a writer and that we write about overlapping subjects. The search takes a little while and as I’m digging around a photographer takes pictures of us, and the girl says that the photographer is with the New York Times. Damn, I say. The girl leaves shortly after I give her the acid, and then Kitty sits with Tai and I. Kitty tells me that she’s exhausted because Beckett has had her working the bar this entire time, so she’s been standing up in these uncomfortable shoes, and once she was done with that she did a fat line of what she thought was cocaine—it was actually ketamine—and she says with a defeated sigh that she’s now on the precipice of k-holing. Then Maisy comes and sits with us. “Crumps you smell like loud.” Maisy tells me about the party Tai and I missed, how seemed to be full of people with “allegations” against them, par for the course, and then she mentions Beckett and how she thinks that he doesn’t like me, which also isn’t surprising, but I ask her to tell me more.

“He doesn’t get your Substack thing,” she says, “he’s an old-school guy, he’s a publishing guy, ancestrally at least, the man’s father published Tropic of Cancer and Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Real ass books. So, the Crumpstack is, like, beneath him.”

“Yeah, well, there’s that, and I also called him old and crusty and wrote about stealing that L.F. Celine book from his bookshelf. And I mentioned the time the cops came in and took pictures of his bar during one of Gasda’s plays. Maybe there’s some other slights I don’t even remember. I came to his book sale the other day and he was like, ‘what was with that last piece, you writing autofiction now or something?’ He said it in a sort of charming way, but I could tell he was annoyed, the palpable contempt with which he said that word, autofiction. I actually paid for the books this time, too. I knew he wasn’t going to let me just walk out with a backpack full of his Buddhism books and German language volumes of Lessing, Heine, Brecht.”

“Yeah, he thinks you’re a parasite. And that you need to be careful not to make too many enemies in New York.”

“There’s always LA.”

“Yeah, to go and die. Either way, Beckett rants about a lot of people. He’s got beef with Gasda and Weinberger too, believe it or not. He says Gasda would be nothing without this space.”

“Gasda already had a profile in the New York Times by the time they first showed Dimes Square at Beckett’s. And that was also like a month after my initial Substack piece skewering the play went semi-viral.”

“Sure, I guess so.”

“What about Weinberger?”

“Weinberger published a picture of Beckett in his column for Paper magazine, and Beckett said it made him look like a crackhead.”

***

This dude strikes up conversation with me, says he’s been following my stuff for a long time and he mentions some deep cuts—short stories I wrote in college, tweets I made when I had 300 followers, old beefs with Frogtwitter people, the incel psychoanalysis, stuff like that. He says something about smoking weed and I’m like, “yep, I love smoking weed.” Straight from there he asks about my masturbation habits, and I’m taken aback for a moment but still curious where this guy’s going. Turns out he’s a “gooner,” someone who is completely and miserably addicted to porn but embraces it and loves it (Urban Dictionary definition). This gooner loves getting stoned and jacking off for sessions of 4–12 hours at a time, a habit he picked up during the pandemic when his job went from an office 9–5 to permanent work-from-home. This is a work arrangement that we have in common, and he’s very interested in comparing our everyday schedules. Sure, I say, I jack off sometimes. I try to appease the gooner but he wants more details. How often? For how long? What do you fantasize about? He asks me if I know of that self-portrait by the Russian-French painter Zinaida Serebryakova, and I say yes, and he says she’s mad hot and that her painting At the Dressing Table: Self Portrait is his favorite “goon-object.” Not a bad choice, I say. She’s definitely a hottie. The gooner smiles, he’s satisfied with his own taste. He asks me my favorite goon-object and I tell him that I don’t really have one off the top of my head. “You’re lying, Crumps. I’m sure of it. I’m sure that when I ask you that, an image comes to your mind. Maybe it’s not always the same image, but I know that something popped into your mind just now, when I asked you about the object of your desire. Something came to mind, and you aren’t telling me, probably because you are ashamed or embarrassed.” I hesitate a bit longer and then he asks if I ever gooned to the Red Scare girls, and when I say that I can’t recall ever doing that, he bursts into laughter. “Do you think I was born yesterday? Do you really expect me to believe that you’ve never even gooned to Red Scare? I must say, I’m disappointed. I just want to know one thing, Crumps: are you a Dasha guy or an Anna guy?”

***

Beckett inspired a character in Gasda’s play Afters, the sort-of sequel to Dimes Square, and he was playing the part when I saw them perform it when it was still a working draft. “I can’t believe Gasda made me from fucking LA in his play,” Beckett says afterward, “Jesus Christ, I’m as New York as it gets.”

***

We’re in Olympia’s opium den in Greenpoint doing lines off the same mirror they used as a prop in Dimes Square, the one you see in the picture from the New York Times article with Christian Lorentzen’s face in it, where he looks a bit like Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now. There’s an ayahuasca cult next door. Christian Lorentzen lives here now, with Olympia, he got kicked out of his old place, and Olympia warns me I need to head out before Christian gets back, he’s not going to want see Crumps in his new apartment, but we have some time, it’s only 3AM and he probably won’t get back until much later. Olympia and Saltypickles have thrown their respective stashes down on the table and we are just plowing through it with this other tall beautiful model named Kathy and her boyfriend Jake. We’re talking about modeling for a moment and then that Dimes Square “No Agency” modeling agency comes up, which doesn’t seem to be a real modeling agency, but all I really know about it is that they have me blocked on Twitter. Kathy is connected to it somehow. The No Agency people hate me, too, Olympia says, and then we talk about how the No Agency people have some beef with this guy Barrett Avner, an artist-musician-podcaster guy from LA who now lives in Texas and appears in this Substack, near the beginning of my time in New York. He was in the orbit of the whole angelicist movement, but I think he’s since distanced himself from it. I can’t really tell how the beef started, but Barrett was going off on Twitter about how all the New York art/fashion world cool kids are just like idiot mediocrities and saying that Crumps was right all along and the No Agency account was making fun of how Barrett apparently shot and killed some guy in a home invasion back in LA. If I understand their back-and-forth correctly it was like an “Alaskan cowboy” who broke into Barrett’s house or something. I don’t know much more than that and I don’t really feel like finding out. Then the girls start talking about Beckett, who is apparently mad at Kathy for not showing up and helping out at that last big event at his place, and she says that’s unfair and shitty of him because it’s not like she’s getting paid or that she owes him her labor. It’s not really his fault, Olympia says, he’s had a hard life, he’s used to jail, yeah he’s a bit sleazy but he’s just worried about his future, he doesn’t have a family, he’s worried about everyone leaving him once his place closes down, what’s going to happen with the magazine he’s starting—by the way, Crumps, we were talking about who to profile in the first issue of TENSE and I said we should profile you, but Beckett shot that down. He’s actually right to do that, I interrupt. It’s sad really, she goes on, all these young people just use him for the parties he hosts, he’s like a tourist attraction for them to gawk at, a relic of a long-gone New York, they use him because he has a place to throw parties and do drugs but most of them don’t really care about him. I’m sort of taken aback. Who gives a fuck? You really think that all these young people, many of them like, suspiciously gorgeous girls, just owe this guy their servitude indefinitely? Yeah, because I actually care about him, Olympia says. These young girls, you think they’re so innocent, Crumps, and that’s actually lowkey misogynistic of you, they know what they’re doing, they know exactly what they’re doing. I ask what that is. But the conversation never gets there.

***

I pull up to this cramped cave of a bar on MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village to hear Ellie read her poetry. I met Ellie at Beckett’s, where she seemed to have become something of a regular, at least enough to start helping out with things, like moving set pieces around during the final Saturday performance. I asked what brought her to Beckett’s in the first place and she said, with God-drunk enthusiasm, something about how it was “like the real bohemia.” The bar tonight is rabbit themed, I pay a ten dollar cover and get a little rabbit drawn on my hand when I enter, there’s a big rabbit mural on the wall right behind where the poets will perform. The crowd there isn’t very sceney, there’s just me and Beckett himself and two other 432 Hudson regulars and then Charlotte who organized the event (not sure if she’s super sceney but I’m including her because she had met Ellie at Beckett’s). Other than that it’s the creative writing MFA types who do readings at KGB Bar and submit normal non-reactionary poems to normal non-reactionary literary journals. Ellie is there with this photographer Liam who says it’s his first time at a poetry reading. Beckett is posted up at the bar, arms crossed on the table and head low like he’s fading into a deep sleep. He doesn’t seem too happy to see me, but he perks up a little when Ellie talks to him. Her voice is sweet and compassionate, but I can’t make out much of what she’s saying, probably just mundane small talk, I only see the back of her head, her light blonde hair pulled back in a tight ponytail and tied with a ribbon, and the way she puts her hand affectionately on his slouched shoulder. His voice sounds almost like a dying Hugh Hefner. The first two poets read and then it’s Ellie’s turn. Charlotte introduces her: Ellie is a writer and editor from Augusta, Georgia and an ex-Presbyterian who is now working at a literary agency and getting a Master’s degree from the New School. Then Ellie reads from her phone a short story about getting violently fucked while kneeling as if in prayer by some guy who gets off to his own aggression. During the climax of the piece, the front door of the bar opens and someone enters, and Ellie slips for a moment, blushing with embarrassment before getting right back into it. She finishes her reading and comes back to the bar and Liam and I tell her she was great, marvelous, and so on, and then we listen to the final reading. The final reader says that she’s going to be reading poems about sex, but they turn out to be much less intense. Afterwards Ellie is like, “I hope it’s okay I unloaded all of my years of religious trauma on you guys,” and we are like no it’s fine that’s what this is all for, and she wonders aloud if she should’ve included a trigger warning, and we are like no it’s fine this audience can totally handle it. She mentions that the praying position thing was inspired by some routine torture she endured as a child. Her reading seemed to be the authentic, repressed form of what Forever Magazine tries to do with its tradcath kitsch. Ellie asks if I’m planning to go to some party in Greenpoint for the premiere of this short film, an event where I’m sure to see all the usual suspects, and I say sure. Beckett already left because he wanted to get there early, Liam isn’t coming and he dips out, so it’s just going to be Ellie and Charlotte, and I hang around with them at the bar before we call a car. We’re talking with the bar manager and it comes up that I write stuff about “the scene,” the people in it, and the art those people make. The bar manager asks if I’m the sort of writer that writes good things about these people or bad things about them, and I laugh and say that I’m sort of notorious for being the latter, and she says that’s good and that she’s like that herself. She says she has a lot of contrarian hot takes and I ask what they are. First, she says that The Strokes suck, and I’m like, okay what’s next, and then she says that Patti Smith sucks, and I’m like go on, and then she says Patti Smith sucks because of her criticism of Israel and support for the BDS movement. Realizing that this is not the place to share my feelings about Zionism, I say something about how my friend Jeremy, the Buddhist guru guy, used to date Patti Smith’s daughter. “What was that like?” He said it was kinda weird. Ellie shows us a text she just got from her mother containing a message of vague life advice from some evangelical pastor that her mother follows on social media, and then we leave the bar. As we’re riding in the Lyft to Greenpoint, Ellie tells us that she used to date Liam. She tells us that she’s supposed to be meeting up with this other ex of hers at the party we’re going to and that he’s going to return the copy of Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus that she lent him. But now she’s regretting it, she reached out to this guy in a moment of weakness and now she’s dreading seeing him outside this party. She tells us about how she also used to date some Tompkins Square Park skater who lived with his parents and slept until 3PM every day. As we’re speeding across the Williamsburg Bridge she tells us about this oldhead guy she randomly met when he overheard her conversation with a friend about a long-gone East Village afterhours club called “Save the Robots,” a hangout of the Club Kids during the real original downtown era, and the oldhead was a regular there. This oldhead also claimed to have known Lana Del Rey before she got big, he called her Lizzy, Lizzy Grant, he was saying Lizzy this Lizzy that, he loved her, but Lizzy forgot all about him when she got big, when she went to LA, and he can’t ever forget her, his Lizzy, his darling Lizzy. For a moment I imagine another world where darling Lizzy is one of the ladies of the canyon at 432 Hudson, and a subsequent song about the old bastard who lives there, and then I remember what I’m ostensibly trying to pry out of Ellie. “Do you have any idea what’s next for Beckett, like, for that space, and for the magazine he’s trying to publish now? What’s going to come of this little world that’s sprung up around the guy?” She says she has no idea, she hasn’t been back at Beckett’s since that last party for The Point, but she left a jacket there and needs to go back and pick it up eventually. I tell her that I’d ask Beckett all this but I get the feeling that he doesn’t like me, or that at least he doesn’t trust me (with some others this had elicited a response something like “yeah, true, Beckett was mad at you about this or that thing you wrote, he was cursing your name as we were all doing coke in his apartment until 7AM” and opened up dialogue trees about his beefs with other characters). With exquisite indifference Ellie tells me that I should simply talk to Beckett himself, he’s a nice guy after all, surely he’ll be understanding once he just gets to know me.

We get to the club in Greenpoint. Tai pulls up, Tai meets Ellie and Charlotte, we go inside, Ellie and Charlotte disappear into the crowd, Tai and I scope out the place and eventually encounter Gasda and Cassidy at the bar. Tai and Cassidy had just wrapped up performing in Tai’s avant-garde dance show Weaver the previous weekend. That was also in Greenpoint. There’ve been a lot of things in Greenpoint lately. Gasda and company have opened up shop there with the new space they’re calling the “Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research,” which is where I saw Cassidy perform a different dance act, a solo show. I strike up conversation with Gasda as Tai chats with Cassidy.

“What do you think will come next for Beckett, like, for that space, and for the magazine he’s trying to publish now? What’s going to come of this little world that’s sprung up around the guy? Do you think he’s still going to be this player on the scene without 432 Hudson?”

Gasda smiles and laughs. “You know, I have an answer, but I’d have to write it up and put it in a sealed envelope and dig it up in six months and tell you.”

“I’m also just curious, I mean, what’s the deal with all the beautiful girls that just hang around there? What’s going to happen with that whole gang? They’re not getting paid, they don’t seem to be actually fucking Beckett or anything. Or if they are, I’ve missed something. But Beckett does have some real swagger. He’s kinda hot, in an abject way. And it’s not a cult, it seems too loose for that, the subjects don’t seem to be quite socially-isolated enough, they’ve got lives of their own. But it kinda seems like it could metastasize into one, if given enough time and resources. These girls just seem to spontaneously show up, asking how they can “help out” and whatnot? It’s weirdly organic? Why do they do this? Some of that crowd is brought in from your plays, I mean that’s what got his spot popping in the first place, but your plays are so nerdy, no offense, so that alone can’t possibly explain this. It’s not about the plays or the art or anything, it’s just the scene itself, it takes on a life of its own. But what even is the scene? Certainly not just all that Thiel and Urbit and adjacent reactionary stuff, even though that’s what’s most readily newsworthy for the mainstream press, because that’s all so socially-inept and “autistic” that it always scares the girls, who then tell me all the insane shit those people say, and then I write about it. But even with that insane reactionary energy, this space doesn’t have anything like the predatory creep rape culture I remember from the college fraternity world. Basically, what you have here are all these greasy hipster worm-men who crank out a ton of goofy middlebrow right-wing art and then there’s all these, like, stunning LA lotus princesses, who aren’t really about all that, they’re just here for the vibes. Who are these people? And the crazy thing is that this all seemed to have worked somehow! It was fun! But it was weird, too. I don’t know. I guess I just watched some staggeringly beautiful girl recite her intensely erotic poetry to what felt like a room of just me and Beckett, and there’s something about that whole experience that I still can’t really describe. Somehow I feel like I walked in on something I wasn’t supposed to see. I don’t know what I was expecting, but it left an impression.”

Gasda now has this Cheshire cat grin.

“What’s the matter Crumps, had enough of the sweet life? Is there a certain wistful bourgeois melancholy I’m sensing? Have you realized yet how your lovely informant-muses stand in for the impossible object of your longing? Beckett is… a man who appreciates beauty. And that’s fine. But what he’s created is a heterotopia, both in the the ‘heterosexual’ sense, the Playboy mansion sense, and in the Foucauldian one. It’s a world of illusions, one that I think I need to step back from. And it’s really a sexless world. A world of surveillance, which I suppose can be helpful for your own paparazzo project. But now 432 Hudson is gone, supposedly, and we’ve got the place in Greenpoint, where I hope to focus more on the drama that takes place inside my plays, rather than just around them. Beckett himself is friendly when you have something he wants. I had that, for a time. I don’t think you ever had that. You have something that some of the girls want, and he begrudgingly realizes that. The thing with what Beckett has, is that it’s fragile. Not just the space itself, which came about in a totally random way, completely out of character with what surrounds it in the West Village, but also in the way he has managed to curate beauty. Once you call it what it is, it’s gone, the spell is lifted. It’s daytime and you’re standing soaking wet in the Trevi Fountain. Maybe that’s what you’re about to do, I don’t know.”

Gasda then goes on a funny tangent about his personal hobbyhorse obsession, which is his prophecy that Zoomer Maoists are eventually going to take over the scene and have all us white cis millennial artist writer guys castrated, and I’m included in that, I just turned 30, I’m a class enemy whether I like it or not, the Zoomer Maoists are going to parade me down Canal Street and castrate me, too. And I’m just like “don’t threaten me with a good time!”

Tai and I go outside to smoke. Through the window from outside, we see Beckett standing up and shaking hands with Gasda. The next moment, Beckett is outside and he’s lighting our cigarettes with a Zippo lighter, and through the window I see Ellie’s blonde ponytail with the little ribbon where Beckett was sitting before. “Huh,” Beckett says, “you guys smoke Parliaments?”

***

I’m telling Tai the parable of one of my doubles, this guy I know from college. I knew him through “Greek life” somehow, but I forget how we met exactly. We weren’t in the same fraternity, he was in one of the cooler ones. We both came from a similar class background, preppy bourgeois Virginia Republicans, he was richer and closer to the center of DC power, his father was some GOP operator, and he had a more carefree adolescence with much more freedom, and he thought more fondly of it than I do mine. He was certainly a “character” by the standards of stifling Virginia. He was handsome and had long hair and this dream of going out to California and living this Laurel Canyon rocker-actor life, and his parents gave him the resources to do just that, which I envied as I settled into my dreary postgrad DC copyeditor professional office world. His politics were, in a word, “based,” which I tolerated and even sometimes agreed with in those days, far more often than I’m now proud of, before I had managed to come to terms with how much I had internalized the latent fascism of the world I grew up in. He imagined himself as some bigshot Hollywood star California Republican, and we flattered each other’s delusions in the way that bros do. He loved Ariel Pink. He had fine taste for fashion Neither of us thought anything of going to New York—it was too liberal for him, and too stressful and expensive for me (though that’s just what I told myself, because I would’ve moved anywhere from DC in a heartbeat). His parents gave him the money to buy a foreclosed house in Boyle Heights and he packed up and drove across country with his guitar and all his guns, many of them certainly illegal in the state. Eventually, we said, I’d follow him out and then write the blockbuster movie he’d star in. But making it in LA is tough, it’s a much more exclusive scene, all about the house parties you need invites to. And it’s hard to get those invites when you have such trouble figuring out who you are, split between this ideal of free-spirited bohemia and his personal satisfaction with the preppy conservatism we both came from. None of his projects took off, and he was paranoid about being cancelled by all the normie California libtards who just don’t get it. He came back to Virginia more often than I went out to LA. He had this Mexican girlfriend he met through this crypto-libertarian yoga cult, but he complained about all the illegals and how fucked up it is that the state of California lets them have drivers licenses. We had a falling out during the George Floyd uprisings, when I told him how pathetic our delusions really looked when juxtaposed with the actual courage of the people in the streets, right now, people our age and younger, so-called “cringe libs,” getting beaten and maimed by the cops. Who the fuck do we think we are? He just repeated some bullshit Tucker Carlson talking points back at me, and we never talked again. I hear later from someone else that this guy ended up in a huge standoff with the cops at his place in Boyle Heights, SWAT team and helicopters and all, he was holding his girlfriend hostage in their bedroom for eight hours before relenting and letting her go, and then shooting himself. This was all still long before I came to New York, I’m telling Tai. But now I think about him from time to time, like, goddamn, this guy would’ve loved Dimes Square. He should’ve just come to New York. He would’ve loved the Urbit parties and all the Thiel shit. Maybe Gasda could’ve made him a star. Maybe Beckett could’ve saved him.