Epilogue
It’s been almost four years Since U Been Gone, and I still hear you.
I can’t be here, Joe.
If you were here, you wouldn’t believe the state of the world. I think that’s why I take so many long walks. It’s the only way to escape the noise, not the pretzel carts and the sirens—I love that shit, I do—but the noise that’s more invisible, everyone so distracted, so “connected.”
Your friend Cynthia has something called a MySpace page where she uses her pain about your untimely demise to attract suitors.
Vagina is even worse. She has a Facebook page where she shares photos of her new life in San Diego, as if we don’t know what it looks like when the sun fucking sets.
In some ways, you are the John Cusack now, my dear.
You are Better Off Dead. Did you ever see that movie?
Will I ever stop asking questions that you can’t answer?
But I mean it. I stand in line at the Angelika, and girls are not looking at me.
Girls are looking at their phones. Everyone Poops and now…
everyone texts. You would not be able to handle the botanical garden of friends festering in the hands of every woman in this city.
What is so urgent? Why do people talk so much? Why not talk to me?
No, you didn’t live long enough to own an iPhone and go on Facebook, but then again, you didn’t live long enough to see them make Closer into a movie, to meet me at the Angelika.
I buy two tickets and a box of peanut M I still see you everywhere, in the bus that passes by because that is what buses do in this city.
You really did that, Vail. You got so Carried away that you ran into a bus like your favorite Miss Lonely in your favorite fucking play.
You did have a dark sense of humor. And maybe someday I’ll be able to appreciate the irony.
Sex and the City assistant gets run over by a Sex and the City tour bus.
Some bystanders say it was suicide. That tracks.
I can’t be here, Joe. Others say it was an accident, and I can see that too.
I can’t be here, Joe. You just weren’t that good at the world, were you?
Maybe you sensed it coming, your fixation on your quarter-life crisis…
Twenty-five, don’t wanna stay alive. No way to know.
People choose their own adventure, and it’s a fact of life, death.
Some books leave you hanging. As the sole survivor of you, me, and Dick, it still hurts to remember.
Do you know what it was like for me, Vail?
Alone in our loft, listening to people on the street try to save you as they speculated and screamed. Did she do that on purpose?
I toss the last bit of my cone in the trash, and that feeling again that you are in the can, looking up at me. The sucker punch of a steaming hot dog stand, my old friend Jeremy.
Everything is you. Everything.
I want you, and here it comes. My new cage, meaning the aftermath of my, ahem, procedure. The pain of contemplating the pleasure.
My doctor was right. Adult fucking circumcision…It’s no joke, Vail. I ache.
I know. You loved me just the way I was, in my natural state.
You only disparaged me in those phony chitchats with Dick because his phantom member was crowding your extra hole, because you thought it was your role as a woman to make him feel better about his dick.
But last month, your friend Cynthia got a tattoo to pay tribute to you.
See what I mean? That’s the problem with MySpace. Why do I need to know about her body art?
I needed to do better. I can’t be here, Joe.
I know the feeling, Vail. I needed to kill myself, same way you did.
I read a few books about circumcision. Miss Frascatore would be proud of me.
I trusted Dr. Alvin McMurphy with my life.
I let him drug me into a deep sleep. I allowed him to trim my foreskin, the most sensitive part of my body, my soul, my Sex.
I woke up in the hospital across from a woman recovering from a C-section.
“Well, I just had twins,” she said, when I told her my story, and I don’t really get it, but that’s what women do.
You say things you don’t mean. You say things just to say them. I love you. I never loved you. I can’t be here, Joe.
The doctor warned me to give it time. When you take the one place on your body meant for pleasure and transform it into a temporary factory of pain, it’s gonna take a minute to adjust. There’s a reason mothers circumcise their sons before they have language, hard-ons, loneliness. It’s like Dr. McMurphy said.
All pleasure will lead to pain, but then one day, it won’t.
I’m still waiting, Vail. But I’m patient.
A fresh start should fucking hurt, and the pain is a nice distraction from the same old pain of you.
I can’t help it. I bang a left and walk by the Beanery, and it’s the same as ever.
A new dick behind the counter. No doubt he’s holding a dozen or so women hostage on his fucking laptop, luring them into his coffeehouse where most tap at their phones while a few still push their pens into spiral-bound notebooks.
What the hell are they even writing in there? !
Onward, northward, and that’s another thing I can’t tell you.
I heard that song the other day, the Bob Dylan song about loneliness, and it was like a page out of your favorite book.
He wasn’t bragging about going to old Honolulu, San Francisco, or Ashtabula.
He was planning to go on those adventures, hoping to be fucking wrecked. It made me smile.
There is a thing with feathers inside of me. There is hope for me yet. A Zimmerman can become a fucking Dylan. It just takes a little time. Seduce and Destroy.
“Greetings, Joseph.”
“Hi, Mr. Mooney.”
Yeah, of course I went back to the shop. Same way I ditched SoHo and moved back to Bed-Stuy. You never liked the guy, but I’ll say this. A few days after you died, he asked if I wanted to talk about it. I said no.
“Well done, Joseph.”
I looked at him. I didn’t get it.
“Bury the dead. They stink up the joint.”
And then he winked, which is so not his kinda thing, and that’s not even his line; it’s from the movie Cocktail of all fucking things, and that’s where the “old man” is not all bad. You never did give him a chance. He surprises me like that.
The idea of Mooney on the couch with Martha and meat loaf and Tom Fucking Cruise.
But it’s a slow day. Deader than I want it to be.
I fire up my laptop and I curse the fucking laptop.
Before AOL Instant Messenger, a guy like Dick couldn’t do it, Vail.
He couldn’t talk to seventeen women at once.
He couldn’t Destroy you without making the effort to Seduce you, and you couldn’t sit in your messy bed putting things in writing that you don’t mean, playing the beggar to let him feel like the chooser.
Oh, Vail. I wanted to save you. I tried to save you.
I know. Shit happens. Get over it. But I can’t help it. I have to wonder. If you’re out there, do you get it now? Do you get that being alone is not a worse fate than death? I am in hell, still dwelling on you, still writing to you on Hotmail knowing that it will remain here in the cold.
And I know this is weird. I know I have to stop writing to you every day, but it’s kind of like the thing with my Portnoy.
I will know when it is time to pick up the knife and cut the cord.
I am unbearably sweet. My sweetness terrified you.
So much that you ran out of my apartment and smack into a bus.
You didn’t think you deserved it, so it doesn’t matter that you did deserve it.
I still love you, Vail. I still sit in this bookstore and tell you that I wish you had come back to The Shop Around the Corner instead of enlisting our old friend Craig.
I still wish that we went to Serendipity on Day Fucking One, and there’s all the small stuff too.
Angus Kaplan is dead, Vail. And no, it wasn’t an overdose.
His heart went on strike, and did I ever tell you about Cynthia?
She came by our loft a few days after you went under the bus.
She was the last girl to be in our place.
It didn’t feel right, having her in there, eyeing the space, eyeing me.
“First Dick and now Vail…. I have to leave because if bad things come in threes…Anyway, do you want to get a drink?”
I said no. Same way I said no to Vagina when she called to check on me. Remember her? And what is it with you women? Why do you want us when you know we don’t want you?
Anyway, Mooney caught Vagina with her hand in the cookie jar. She stole a shit ton of money and offered to pay him with her extra hole. He fired her, and she left, kinda like Schlitz, who couldn’t handle New York City without Dick. He moved back home to Wisconsin.
It really is like none of it ever happened, like everyone in our world went poof. That’s the thing about writing to you like this.
I am keeping you alive. And I know, Vail. My Portnoy is healing. I need to live my life. I need to let you go.