we can dance
Paris, Lisbon, Leiden // July 21, 2024
Hey everyone. I hope you are doing well.
I’m on a plane thirty thousand feet in the air. If I look to my right there’s a porthole window, light blue sky and flat terrain in the near distance. To my left, a guy. He’s asleep.
I went to Paris to meet Dennis Cooper and suffered the consequences of my own ego. We’d emailed back and forth a few times, confirmed dates etc and I built up this idea in my head that I would go shake his hand, we’d share a cigarette, he’d tell me about his new book, I’d tell him how much his work means to me, maybe we’d kiss, maybe we’d make love, who knows? My friends told me that would have been inappropriate, but I’m totally in over my head anyways, I thought, so why not go all the way?
The thing is, Dennis didn’t show up. He stopped replying to my emails. Maybe for a very understandable reason, but I hazard to guess I’ll never know.
So I spent Paris alone. I tripped and fell into the Orsay and saw some big splotchy paintings and walked very slow between meals. I ran shirtless by the water and drank quietly next to beautiful couples. In my dreams, I’d dive in the Thames, make it just deep enough to see all the sunken bodies and bicycles, and be pulled back up by the ankle to a somewhat familiar face. Maybe he’s an old lover, someone who told me I’m special, someone I’ve never met. He’s got my ankle tight and he won’t let go.
I told my dad not to read my stuff. It’s not that I don’t think he’ll respect it, it’s more that I’m scared of what he’ll want to talk about with me.
I didn’t meet my hero, which is maybe for the best, but I did certainly try. My friend insisted I make my way across the river to a famous jazz bar in a basement. This was my last night, so the desperation was in full effect. I emailed Dennis three times.
Email 1: “I’m at the jazz bar. I’d love it if you could join.”
Email 2: “I’ll be here late, it’s my last night.”
Email 3: “We can dance.”
The last one was the most desperate. He said nothing, so I drank 24 euros of cocktails and met up with a different old guy named Michel. He said nothing when I opened the door to his apartment, just smiled, probably surprised that I’m real. He invited me in with a turn of his torso and pointed to the bathroom. I pissed, washed my hands, dried them on his towel, and we had silent sex for maybe twenty minutes. It was kind of painful but he seemed to be having a blast. I saw just a bit of Cooper in his eyes, of course, but there was something else too. It’s funny seeing an old man on the floor for you.
We cleaned up and I laid in his lap for, oh, maybe ten minutes before he told me he’s one of the most important men in France. We looked through his Wikipedia together and I laughed, wondered what it was like to be so famous and so alone, and shook his hand at the door.
Like most young writers, especially those with whom I’ve placed myself in a kind of lineage (Edmund White, Dennis Cooper, etc), I surely expected something great to come from Paris. Something monumental, a shift in tide, a whole leap forwards towards a novel, a play, a series of poems, whatever. Instead I got stood up and fucked. Ha.
Lisbon next. The city is far more interesting than Paris in that the graffiti is begging for your help rather than just telling you to kill yourself. There’s a real desperation to the place’s beauty, some sort of quiet screaming. It’s obviously beautiful, of course, but there is undoubtedly something ugly there too. Let me explain.
On my second day (maybe), I sat motionless in front of the blank television in the living room. I was following the path of a fly across the room, trying to find some pattern in its movement to finally kill the fucker, when I heard banging, metal on metal, right outside my window. It’s quarter notes, maybe 120 beats per minute and it’s accompanied by the screams of an old lady saying something about being stupid in Portuguese (I can understand the language like how a baby understands peekaboo). The screaming gets louder, louder, louder still before I hear a return, some feedback, shattering, loudest screams yet, water poured over her head, neighbors screaming, glass shatters, lead pipe, cops called, hour goes by, more screaming, crying, blood everywhere, more cops, everyone’s watching. It brought me back to my tenth birthday in St. Augustine, Florida, 2012. It was early August, hot as shit, and the hotel lounge was filled to the brim with my massive extended family (at least 20 or so people). This blond lady steps up onto the table in front of her and shouts “SOMEONE CALL 911 NOW! DOES ANYONE HERE SPEAK SIGN LANGUAGE?” The next thirty minutes are a blur, but at some point she pulls out a knife, a man swings a broom at her head, she takes her top off, a bunch of cops come, and my uncle is gashed by her fingernails. So the Portuguese lady is a lot like this Florida lady in that they’re both losing their minds in a very public, very violent way. I can’t help but respect the hustle and think maybe there’s something with the heat, something with the sun, something with the coastline that makes people break shit and cry.
I wonder if the old guy in Paris, the famous one, knew Dennis. I asked him actually, but he misheard me and pointed confused at his TV screen. “David Guetta. He’s a famous DJ.” There was some YouTube livestream of the DJ performing. I laughed and thought about marrying the man only for the visa, the money, the connections, and the awesome divorce, but he seemed nice and truly lonely, so I thought better, cleaner, and smiled back. “I love David Guetta!”
His apartment was covered floor to ceiling, wall to wall, in books. I spent a good ten minutes while he showered mourning my ass and exploring the titles of his vast collection. Almost all of them were French nonfiction, but a few were about girl pop stars like Britney Spears. He had her memoir in the bathroom, actually, next to a stack maybe fifty copies high of architecture and design magazines. I asked him what it’s like to be so powerful. He said it’s nice, but stressful. I could tell he needed to be held. I wondered when was the last time he was held like a little boy. I thought I’d maybe say, “Michel, if you want, I’ll sleep over,” just to see what he’d say, but he sobered up, looked at our bodies in the mirror, recognized their incongruousness, and ushered me out the door with little more than a phone number.
Dennis on my mind, I walked back to my housing slowly, semi-drunk from a few hours ago and definitely drunk from the sex.
I was once again mourning something totally ineffable.
I was thinking about El Paso actually, a place I’ve only ever been on accident. I crashed my friend’s dad’s car on a roadtrip and we spent four-ish days in limbo in the city. We stayed in a Holiday Inn on the outskirts of town (all of El Paso is outskirts) and sat in silence, staring at the pool, waiting for the sun to burn our skin. Dennis, El Paso, Michel, broken down car, all these things whorling about in a heterogeneous slurry of grief. There will soon come a day when I will have to pay for all of this.
I’ll likely die in an accident.
I can’t blame Dennis for bailing. I can’t really imagine what he was expecting from all this. He’s got a movie and a book and a whole life to attend to. I’ve got to talk on the phone and go on runs. It’s no comparison. Still, the grief lingers and I have to call it what it is. That jazz club where I went on the last night was populated by maybe nine couples, all of whom were aged forty to eighty. I watched them sway in the cellar, holding onto back fat and sweating just a bit on their brows. It’s, of course, enchanting watching people fall in love again. That’s surely why they came to Paris, to renew some spark or something. Their kids are at home with the nanny, in college, married, have kids of their own, making love, falling in love, whatever, but they aren’t here in this cellar swaying, spinning, dipping just a bit to the sound of this quartet. The music is just okay, but that is truly secondary to the view of these figures silhouetted against themselves, working in perfect harmonic motion with the inharmonic jazz. The pianist plays a solo and it’s just one note which makes the bassist chuckle a bit. The saxophone player points up in the air and the bassist turns up her amplifier. This room is a tomb and that’s the best part. It’s cold and somehow both quiet and loud and dark and bright. The whole place exists to harken back to a bygone time before the bombs fell, the bombs fell, and the bombs fell again.
After I, the last of my parents’ children, moved out for college, they took up weekly dance lessons. They’d send us kids short four or five second clips of my dad dipping my mom, her smile, his smile, the instructor’s claps. Seeing them dance made me cry every Sunday at 7:30 EST for about six months. They have no rhythm, no swing, no fluidity, no moves, no focus, no confidence, but so much obvious love for one another and I think maybe, just maybe, that’ll keep me going forever. That image of my dad dipping my mom, her head only a foot from the hardwood floor, her very hazel eyes looking through the camera, through the phone, through me, at my soul, and my dad’s looking right into her’s. That there is heaven and I won’t take no for an answer.
All the mothers, all the fathers, sisters, brothers, grandmas, grandpas, dogs, cats, fish are all asleep. Everyone’s tucked in and the rooms are all the perfect mix of cold and warm. Dad snores. Mom snores. Dog snores.
I wanna love you like how they did in the old days. I wanna love you like Donnie and Gretchen or maybe like the people from John Green books or those songs I used to play on guitar. I’m a romantic, but I’m also a boat taking on water.
I promise I can make you laugh. If there’s nothing to say, we can dance.
And on an entirely separate note if I see one “Dennis Cooper” in the streets his ass is done
Amazing piece, there a real energy wrapped up in these words. Love it