“However, that evening he could not think long or continuously of anything, could not concentrate his mind on anything; besides, he would have been unable to resolve anything consciously just then; he could only feel. Instead of dialectics, there was life, and something completely different had to work itself out in his consciousness.” -Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime And Punishment, Epilogue

(October 2009 – In front of USC's School of Journalism, it’s overcast, an anemic day. I’m stationed at a two-person paint-chipped table with my big red spiral notebook out. I bought it at the campus bookstore, filing through the aisles, I’d wanted something thick, a whole year could be kept in there.)

I’m writing a letter. The gel ink rolls and seeps through the thin pages and bleeds but doesn’t change the word. It doesn’t slant it thickens. I like that. John Berryman’s Dream Songs in my bag on top of a row of bigger books, a paperback with a Pulitzer Prize, the books stacked big to small, the poems pressing up against the back of the smaller compartments from inside. It took me awhile to learn to do that in school. The row would be all out of size like broken piano keys and I just lived with the awkward pressure on my back. Popping along to my mother’s car in car line, a growth extending into my spine, a teachers assistant’s bony hand on my shoulder like grace. For the classes that upset me I carry their texts as rarely as possible.

I’m a slow learner when it comes to physicality, I don’t like shapes (I nearly failed geometry at every stage, the chapter would open and I’d groan). Conceptual spaces seem like broad maps. Like they’re connected by lots of lines labeled by metaphorical letters. I can’t think of the whole city at once when I’m just in my house, or worse, when I’m in public and alone. I just like being inside things.

My ephemeral desk, the chair attached, scouting the lawn. People playing instruments and running thumbs through boyfriends’ hair. Afternoon practice. The person I’m writing to. I don’t ask for help, someone has to come, full of exasperation, on their last straw diving into my canal to scare me. I carried my books this way till high school when it finally seemed to be a translation of something larger and Mom got all pissed: “Your books should go like this, Michael.” And I’ve been careful and flawless about it ever since. The physical state is a cry for help to vigilant people. Look at how fucked up my books are.

I get about half my thoughts down and scold myself when I can’t, wanting the letter to be a journal. Anxiety about spilled water or lunch makes no sense because there’s nothing in the backpack pouches but a dozen ink-dry pens, a basin of quarters and gum wrappers. My dirty Jansport bag, collegiate luggage. I think the statue in front of the music school looks like a penis and I tell that to the page. “It looks like a penis, or a shovel, or a spoon.” The coils of my notebook like big grated wire. My hand glides over the arched metallic rings when I take a break and my wrist goes stiff. My hand goes to the back of my neck to rest. Professors walking up, briefcase, smoking obscure cigarettes thick-smelling like wool. They nod. Pretentious but smarter than you, the agony. Students flying off bikes, throwing the leg over, cradling cell phones with their jaw bones, Yeah Mom I gotta go to class, I’ll call you tomorrow, Okay love you bye. Yoga pants and tank tops, sports bras peeking through beneath armpits.

My lecture is happening in the floors beneath in the building I’m just using for air, the little alcove meant for breakfasts and short meetings. It’s a stop and go place, the entrance patio. It’s for people with real free time. You kill free time there. Today I’m not going to cut it, it’s one of my days off, a tally of leeway I don’t keep track of. Everyone I don’t know has formed a family with the people I’m not with. Because of this I can’t pay attention. But I’ve given myself the job of finishing a letter.

(February 2011 -- Friday afternoon, my legs are disappeared beneath the blue comforter, my whole bed for two years has been the color blue, a deep rich blue of layers like I’m floating in a sad ocean. Pinkish vomit-colored bleach stains are streaks like flashes of rare light on the rims.)

The laptop hums and heats on my stomach. A movie from New York City I’ve needed to see. I’m trying to teach myself how to be a screenwriter. I figure watching movies will ingrain in me something about the ripples and currents of plot, character I think I have covered. It’s an indie film, which means they scrapped the money together from friends, a whole network forming for this one man: Jim, the Cinderella rebel from NYU. He works in black and white, which is more difficult and expensive these days because not many people use it.

All his college career he broke rules and experts told him not to, now he’s more important than they are even though his films are small. People like Jim are good balance. “Sure I’ll do anything for Jim’s movies,” people say in the bonus clips being interviewed. “Jim’s one of those artists you do anything for. Jim calls, you answer.” Jim has had gray hair since his twenties and has been with the same girlfriend since the eighties. “Her only flaw is her taste in men,” he says.

The young man in the scene skips along pavement like he’s a stone. He looks so happy it’s almost like he’s a girl. Almost no one is like that. You have to have no family, only friends, all afternoon and the night completely open. Nothing tying you down but plenty of places to be. Movies do a good job of making the viewer feel like the city is very small. Walking up and down the street doesn’t seem like a big deal in movies, even if it’s a lonely scene. At least we’re there watching it. And this guy was happy, stealing a car, bad all with pleasure, no problems, and I’m watching him. He has more than one life to control.

In the interview he’s smoking, earrings swinging tightly from his lobes like small bones. I think he’s got a lot of talent. “I act and I paint, man.” He doesn’t mention that he can dance too. In the back of my head, an excuse I don’t want to use, is that movies aren’t real (because, in a different way, they are real). This guy’s actual life is probably so bleak. He probably does drugs, drinks alcohol, smokes too much, doesn’t make enough money, and fails with women. The version of him in the interview isn’t female at all. He’s probably just like the rest of us, glass phallus. This collective royal we of self-sabotagers, losers, angry and tricky to press. Promise that has fallen from grace, smart and scared young people, still living.

My roommate comes in (we don’t know each other very well) and looks at me surprised a bit, grabs a basketball and leaves, carrying the door with him. I never relax like this. He’s used to seeing me at my desk rifling around open Internet windows and boxes, stopping to peer down at someone hoisting a sack or hamper on his knee on the way to a chore. This reminds me to get up and look.

Two chicks are running across McClintock outside the wall of the apartment complex during a break in traffic. I don’t like breaking those laws because there’s no thrill in it or not enough for me. It’s too public and lame at the same time. You’re jaywalking, Oh cool, and everyone can see you. And the tickets are huge. Sometimes it even seems low class. I know everyone does it. Once last year my druggie friend Cooper and I were coming back from class and emerged onto the edge of the street, the busiest, between us and the hotel. We’d cut through campus strangely because I let him lead. He went ahead and did it because he didn’t want to wait and I went up to the cross. He couldn’t believe me but he didn’t make a big deal of it and I was thankful for that.

By the time I got back to the floor he was already stoned and shirtless in basketball shorts, scratching his belly against the door frame. The hall smelled like crazy. “How was the crosswalk, dude.” --It was fine, Cooper. One of the girls screeches and her sandals clap and they’re laughing. I’m standing at my window with my hands on my hips.

Being bored at school is different than being bored at home. Being bored at school means there are people around you could be with that can’t or won’t be with you right now. So with boredom comes a sense of rejection. Maybe they could be with me right now. How unfair because we have all the time in the world.

(November/December 2009 – A really thickly dark night. A winter night. And it’s cold so it’s heavy. Looking out the fifth floor window into a black aquarium. Inside it’s okay to wear normal clothes. Inside it’s like California. Outside it’s a different California.)

I’m reading Crime And Punishment beneath the cheap hotel light, a branched-out one with two shades and bulbs that looks like a pair of wide-set eyes attached to antlers. My roommate’s side is burned out so I only have my own. It feels like Russia. Like I’m traveling in Russia. I wish I were. “I’m living in a fucking hotel, how did this happen.”

We recently moved the beds differently so they’re both vertical along the back wall. We’re conjoined at the feet and the light is above the crack. That way we can both watch his TV comfortably from bed before we go to sleep. “Ready when you are.” We watch Jimmy Fallon’s first week with his show and how bad it is makes me nervous for him. He wasn’t ready to deliver jokes like that, not on TV, doing stand up. My arms made a pretzel under my head and breaking our silence I said, “This isn’t very funny,” and Beau agreed, his voice from the other end of the wall. –“You ready?” --“Yeah.” And we went to sleep.

Now I’m flipped around so I can use the shine up close. It’s about nine o’clock. I put my chin to my collar and raise the book for a second. I rest my eyes on the little wave/lip of comforter foamed and puffy at my chest. Pen marks on the edge of it, dashes, extended commas, accidental swipes. I don’t work in bed that much or don’t like to. It was an excuse from middle school to seem like you were working but you were just acting like kids on shows who were supposedly doing homework in bed. Propped up with pillows, the mom comes in: “Hi sweetie, doing your work?” --“Boy, Mom, am I ever. I’m swamped.”

Reading Russian novels you set benchmarks for yourself because the concentration’s so dense. If I get to that paragraph break I’ll get up and use the bathroom. Thinking in terms of the whole chapter is too overwhelming. You’re liable to quit, who needs it, it’s Russian. Our wall hums and moans with the bass from the neighbor girl’s stereo while my eyes follow the lines on the translation of Dostoevsky’s page. Recognizable pop hits, but through the sieve it sounds like war gongs and sustained underwater mumbles. Beau’s sitting at his desk. We both sigh, is she ever going to quit. She’s a party girl so being alone in her room needs to be a party too. But it’s a Friday night so we can’t be that mad. What are we doing?

My shoes are on but I keep my heels straight so the soles don’t touch the sheets or the covers, just the tips and bottoms do. The cones my feet make poke up through the end of the bed where I usually put my head. “I think maybe it’s good for me,” I’ll say in the car in the morning, “to be reading about crime and punishment now.” Sometimes things come from your mouth that are so wise they couldn’t have been thought up. “It’s appropriate.” No one’s on the same page as me because they’re ahead. I have a pile of laundry sitting in the back seat with me as we pull away from the hotel. The book’s on top of my dirty clothes. Half of it is dog-eared.

Raskolnikov, the protagonist, he used to be normal smart too. He went to school, young man, probably dark hair, he lived in small spaces and he quit. He thought he was a Napoleon, what literature has deemed the “Byronic hero,” the coinage for intellectual smoking boys/men at universities (or just outside of them) who lie to themselves and fail. They could have been something great but they demanded genius so they get nothing and destroy everything else. He went insane but not really, he just couldn’t handle what was on his plate, released his love and hate through bad choices.

My experience with books has a lot to do with the binding and the copy, the print, the text. If the physical experience is unpleasant it’s hard for me to get through. There’s no formula for it, it’s completely subjective. Reading for me is sort of like a movie. I think that’s why I thought I’d be cut out for film. There are a lot of payoffs for actually showing people. It envelops the body as well as the mind.

The way Dostoevsky writes sort of reminds me of trying to fit those maps in my head but it’s not that problematic. He knows Russia so well it kind of makes you jealous even if you don’t give a shit about Moscow or the stifled streets or Sonya, the spiritual whore, Raskolnikov’s muse. You have to know who they are and that he needs them, and that he needs place just as much as people. That’s why he’s finally sort of okay at prison because he’s far away and Sonya follows him and makes it easier.

It’s shame and alienation he’s trying to conquer and in the city there’s too much of it. He’s guilty but still gets what he wants. I purse my lips and shake my head. I feel like I’m getting inside the text. I get up to go to the bathroom, trip over our doorstop (a brick) and stop along my closet which is one of those sliding mirror doors that goes a long way. Cursing gratuitously because I didn’t really stub my toe. You’re just supposed to swear when you fuck up. You’ve lost your faith a little bit. And then I go outside not saying anything.

 

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