A first offering of under 30 pages from an under 30 (not listed on Forbes)…
Intro
I didn’t pray as Kremlin tanks groveled past my Polish driver’s abjectly new American F150 hidden pat in a forest thicket. Instead, from the observer’s backseat, I internally rewound a brassy Shostakovich overture to piss off any reapers who dared take me in a soviet killing field at 37. My frontal cortex, still soused with greasy hair and plum slivovitz drug out for the previous night’s Warsaw embassy meet-and-greet, failed to reconcile the compulsory musical pomp of 85-odd years ago with the brute, pulpous appendages floundering for the same nationalistic vision before my incurably dispassionate face. God! Too many kiddie arms were leaking blood way too early, like stillborn egg-yolks flecked with shrapnel shells and soufled into detritus for wiser animals.
And yet, despite all the B-movie biological gore crudding my ride’s windshield, the bucolic vantagepoint I admired from my window framing the pine fringes of the Kursk battle lines made for an offputtingly engaging backdrop to a what nine out of ten of my colleagues calls an objective atrocity. Frankly, I think the trope-ish Disney appeal of a sun grazing verdant treetops over rolling hills, at whose base I conveniently forgot twitched corpses, threatened my raison d’etre for the hour. At any rate, it certainly deflated my chances of sourcing my usual overt, saleable portrait of humanitarian decline.
This scene wasn’t how I pictured the pre-USSR shtetl farmland my great-grandparents derided as their parents’ old country from a saltbox with views of the sublime natural phenom known as suburban Hopewell, New Jersey. I can’t, and therefore won’t, try now to articulate any deeper symbolism that I should’ve plucked from a foreign wood thrice removed from my genetically modified generation of keyboard scrollers. But I, sheltered chief correspondent for Global Frontline’s Eastern European Affairs Bureau, can admit this much. I was not prepared for the uncanny valley pastiche that rattled my bullet-proofed, private-schooled guts that morning.
Even later, as I suffered through flat white spritzer in the good-enough confines of an economy plus lounge, my wired body refused to nip at the alcohol bait. A less jaded Jules Sapir, who usually takes over when I’m buzzed, couldn’t suppress the cinematic dissonance of witnessing dismembered limbs sprinkled atop what otherwise would be a decent North Face promo shot.
At the time, I made a point of never being prepared to write anything worth sharing with the world in the 48 hours after intensive field work. I suppose that’s the shameful luxury being anointed top dick of some organized group afforded you in 2024. Yet, evading the eye whites of young, confused soldiers as they lulled asleep in their socket wombs, no doubt left an impression on me. I was crushing my second melatonin (kid’s size) in a free juice box, planning a mental low-road hike, when an older gentleman in my flight group tossed me a nod. I soon cowered myself into a performance for him, jotting a few sentences in a Moleskin, if only to commemorate my having communed with and outmaneuvered Death.
I figured I could do the bare minimum at my no-collar day job and plod through some lines on the quote, authoritarian destabilization of power hierarchies in the surrounding Baltic states due to Western pressure, unquote. Or I could try a little harder to sublimate my latest personal realization into a coherent essay. Really, all I wanted was to confess to an audience. Catholics have their priests. We atheist Jews have the internet. And I wanted someone, anyone on the world wide web to validate me with a stranger’s uninformed tenderness that I could never lavish on myself.
I would scream at my spiritual ShamWow, “I am a vapid consumer of injustices. I suckle every last drop of aggrandized virtue I can wring out of decrying heinous tragedies that are never my own! My life, on whole, is disgustingly satisfying! My greatest adversity is lacking any justification for being a bitter critic of the human condition!”. That’s what I wanted to release in the four hours I had left while waiting for my Boeing’s technical inspection to barely pass.
Chapter I: Beginning of an End
Following my war watching stint, I found myself loafing out of a makeshift ascetic’s Walden in my soon-to-be-former Georgetown pied-a-terre. My furniture- vintage Ikea dorm in 2008’s hopeful shape- was tangramed my first morning back into one of those U-Haul minis. It’s still, to this day, being ferried by my second-cousin’s kid into a Jersey City storage locker for a personal tour of my alma mater, Princeton.
Despite only having a blowup from my landlord to sleep on and zero AC for a full week, I wasn’t itching to face three-star hotel niceties, especially after dodging an offer to overnight at a Ukrainian campsite near Crimea. And honestly? I was enjoying my almond butter and Red Bull meals alone, set to Fugazi knockoff riffs on the local radio broadcast from the commercial drag behind my block. Besides, I’ve always liked the au naturelle dark that penetrates my world the second time I forget my electric bill is due. I often have a ball playing intrepid pioneer with my cellphone flashlight (though not quite Donner party) as I guide my throbbing urethra to any bowl-shaped shadow hanging off the wall. It’s that chance to be dirty, even a hair transgressive, with the mathematical insurance that no one will ever know that appeals to me.
I’m also proudly allergic to the kind of inappropriate loneliness that straight, single men my age profess to their better-educated female therapists. In my Freudian book, it’s a pervy hit job under the guise of emotional disclosure from a faux feminist ally. I’ll pat my own shoulder. I’m a socially stable, preemie-bachelor of rare but sincere self-monogamous form. The closest interpersonal interaction I can liken to warm-bodied, life-long connection with anyone, breathing or dead, in the last decade always comes courtesy of my D.C. editor, Preston Xiao.
Preston’s your salt-and-peppered, Bergdorfian former prosecutor in an insider’s booth ordering a hundred bucks of smoked gin with one hand and gesticulating on a private call with the other. He coats every morsel of speech in lawyerly gravitas, even the inanest quips about overestimated American engagement during the Sino-Soviet border conflicts. So thankfully, he only texted me a superficially light, let’s chat tête-à-tête invite three hours after my return. I still loaded my papery Levi’s back pocket with a decent wad of cash the dawn of our meeting. As my mother used to advise when we were down to every other night drinks at Veritas circa 2013, it’s better to offer the handout than take it first when negotiating.
Preston and I met in the swampy Potomac mist on a not quite A-list sidewalk, good for judging uninfluential congress members as they lick salt from tax-deductible burgers at the Capital Grille. We strode an unusually paranoid distance apart for an uphill block. A minute in, Preston waffled, shoved his hands in his bespoke trench, and plastered on a sinuous apology smile. I knew him enough to let him have the floor. He still nodded up the cobblestoned street to cajole me into asking what he wanted from me. His logic flowed as follows, so I assume: if I participated in my own misery somehow, then he could deliver a message of any quality sans guilt. I crossed my arms and shrugged. Our familiar routine was now in motion. His lips sagged into a downward parabola.
“Arlo just delivered the execution Slack. Bob said to cut your piece. It’s…too politicized. We’re getting hammered by the assistant junior defense press secretary. Who knew that was a cabinet job! But in any case, the cut was Bob’s note. Not mine. Or Arlo’s.”
Thirdhand insult transmitted, Preston shrunk away from my silence to pop open a black watch umbrella as a distraction. My ears absorbed his words in queasy waves that dribbled like non-Newtonian mucus down my cochlea, the viral bits sliming the wrong cranial crevices. I made no offer of facial acknowledgement or cogent response.
Robert B. Longue II, by the way, is this comically effete octogenarian who inaugurated our foreign policy periodical from his West Point office and sold it to the dying father of mild-mannered New Statesman defector Arlo Hamburg for a few thousand and an editorial say. The check was signed in ’61, a month before Robert abandoned his first diplomatic post in Argentina over what he called minor differences of opinion. Nonetheless, I can’t definitively claim that Robert is a card-carrying adherent to any jus post bellum theory or a denier of 20th century genocides. He’s just an underachieving two-star general who knew how to mobilize a cadre of insecure PHDs to make himself sound better informed than he’d ever need to be. While he’s neither a genteel beggar like Arlo nor a self-made scion like Preston, given his preferred currency is centrist-coded country club intellectualism, he’s doing all right for himself.
The more I mulled Robert’s checkmate over my pawn sacrifice, the more my brain spun conspiratorial explanations for his intent; my theories somehow always hinged on his being an incapacitated Manchurian ward of the current State. Meanwhile, Preston purposely fiddled with his umbrella (of course, before closing it in defeat) to escape my no-doubt overcalculated pupils. He sniffled for my attention. In return, I quelched an ego shriek bubbling up my asthmatic chest, passing off a genuine SOS cry as an innocent hiccup.
Damn it! The gal! Dead of dawn, and I was already foaming at the mouth with Red Bull backwash straining to splotch my only clean on-the-job polo. I had already nixed my abstinence from writing and was fourth-drafting a decent, perhaps slightly partisan take on the evolving nature of Russian ideological aggression as symbolized by the uncoordinated Kursk Forest attack.
But then, I thought, what is politicization nowadays when everything is inherently politicized, even spilt unpasteurized cow colostrum? Should it be oat? Dare I mention my personal, possibly toxic, distaste for soy? Sometimes, the idealist Jules in me wishes ethical realism won’t turn out to be another bullshit, biblical lie. It would be nice if a hostile, unprovoked takeover of a sovereign state at the behest of a diminutive sadist could safely be called a bad thing without getting you cancelled as un-American.
Preston cut into my reverie with his brogue tap and Patek Phillipe glance maneuver. I succumbed and mustered up a gracious, “What the Hell was he expecting! Now, he’s puckering up to the DOJ’s hemorrhoidic, rectal—!”
Preston fished his cellphone from a croc murse and angled it in front of his face. My tongue flicked over my caped incisors (the originals having been sawed to stubs on a saber shot in a Czech crypt bar). The following exchange- filtered through blue light and clenched jaws- ensued.
“You’re lucky this isn’t the office!”
“Do I need legal counsel?” I withdrew my cellphone from my suburban dad phone clip. I always bring a loaded shitpost draft on my notes app to a verbal sparring match.
“We’re only taking pitches on domestic policy right now. You’d be angrier.”
“How about the rise of media bias reviews as an ICC violation! Or…is climate change a military-industrial construct? We can call it psychological subterfuge from those demonic Canadians!”
“Well, Bob’s grandmother was half Québécois.” Preston really emphasized that last word, as if to imply the stated information was a statistically significant variable in the equation of Bob’s boundless self-worth.
“I meant the ones from Alberta. They look freakishly democratic!”
“Jules, I have a 9:30 brunch. I just wanted to personally let you know what’s happening.”
“Perfect, ‘cause I’ve gotta go prep.”
“Right. I forgot your move is this week. Good luck.”
“No, no! For my prostrate exam!”
Preston laughed, waved, and sauntered off. He always left my rantings unchecked because he knew he could without fear of my retribution. I’m the self-styled absurdist comedian who, one Heineken-induced black eye in, drops the grad school act and swings lower than Joe Rogan on the next punch. Preston knew I wasn’t going to forfeit my vaunted position for the sake of some delusion like absolute journalistic integrity.
At the end of the day, I liked having a personal need, namely a plateauing 401K, to flee my residential address for an abandoned bunker near Chernobyl’s Exclusion Zone or a bullet train skirting a hair too North of the DMZ, all expenses paid. I’ve always found comfort in being able to patch up the gaping dissatisfaction in my own boring existence by chronicling other peoples’ borrowed misery and oppression.
After all, there is no six-sense experience comparable to escaping via pregnant donkey on a tear over bloodless ice sheets through a Siberian penal colony demarcated as an air raid zone. The same cryofrozen, omnipotent chill still floods my heart when I remember that, at one point, I was the only live vesicle for delivering the unworldly evidence of grotesquery outside the electric, apocalyptic borders of what should be Hell. I sometimes reconjure the Promethean sensation of knowing that the vital warning cry for a savior’s conscience thrived or faded to propagandized cremains with my survival in a classified wasteland of slaughtered morality. For a blissful second, my precarious existence became something of necessity for all humankind, and therefore, something of value.
Chapter II: New York, Old Patterns
The rest of the week, I chewed down my Blackwing pencil stash, cursed Robert B. Longue II (who could easily have been an unremarkable junior to a buffoon of a sperm leaker like me), and childishly cobbled together evidence of my untouched mental health days into a decent hiatus proposal. But, after summing up how far I could afford to disappear for a long weekend, I gave up on seeking refuge in cross-continental escapism.
Instead, I- or more accurately, some kid named Emerson from Citibank- decided on my purposeful sojourn into the dreaded annals of the West Village. I left a farewell message in my best “I’ll show you, mother!” lisp on the voice mail for our perfectly lovely HR, Caroline, without articulating an actual plan. Oh well. When pressured by Caroline’s VIP of an intern, I said I could check in with my father’s former nurse, Marsha, and harangue Arlo to give me a featured page in the op-eds. I left out my obligatory reunion with my actual maternal figure.
To satisfy my eternal lust for discomfort and strife, I asked to hole up in Preston’s assistant’s asbestos-painted sublet that, I was told, was languishing in a between-renter state of benign disrepair. I thought the tradeoff was a steal; I could handle the free board and Zabar’s bagels for a slap-dash showerhead install. I would expect the bare minimum and leave a little bit more (cacti and merlot?) to make sure the scales of virtue were tipped in my favor when I checked out thinner, unbathed, and possibly cancer stricken.
To my dissatisfaction, what began as a purposely distressing pitstop, just as quickly spiraled into an atemporal nightmare of riches. The studio was too decent. I couldn’t sleep on organic cotton sheets that demanded being folded in the mornings. A downy berber couch and its matching cashmere throw presented the only alternative bedding. I hated staring at the effervescently bohemian tiled walls, unmarred with human pictorial grime, or the silky knife-pleat curtains that dabbled in daylight. I was even afraid of the raw wood counter’s phallic bananas that refused to bruise or shrivel or leak. They made me self-conscious. Worst of all, I sensed a subtle stripping of my identity at play. This padded, gentrified jewel box was like a sanitarium for masochistic curmudgeons. The verbena soap serums, agave retinal lotions, and palo santo diffusers tucked in every corner were secretly exfoliating me of my crass Jersey apathy.
Outside wasn’t any better. I couldn’t stand the public busyness shaming my interior stagnation. I found myself inflating my lame credentials everywhere I slumped in platinum streets overrun with inborn, purposeful pricks who had achieved more than me by Montessori years. I could see my brown roots fading to dirt grey among the fresh-waxed assholes, the kind of poster-men who know it’s constitutionally guaranteed that some AI bot will slurp their Soho House cum and flush their toilets hand-molded by Jeff Koons.
The incessant disjointed jostling to the gutters of competitive crowds left me with medical grade vertigo. By the halfway mark of my trip, I was nodding off at some Cannes-winning slogfest in a velour-coated Lincoln Center theatre with the golden boys and girls of tomorrow like a haggard has-been. And to my horror, that night, I caught myself unironically dreaming my mother had booked me the tourist cruise around New York harbor to leer at David Geffen’s yacht that Marsha raved about.
On my penultimate sunrise, I don’t know why, but my desperation for acknowledgement finally overshot its limit. I decided that I was lonely enough to pet my building’s unclaimed, mangy pug who was always peeing on the front rose bushes. Perhaps the pug had an ulterior agenda in forcing me with her watery eyes to scratch her acneic cheek folds. No sooner had I bent down than I heard my name called from an exclusive children’s only park at the end of the block.
The radio-announcer voice required minimal eye-contact. Here I was, crouched in urine-soaked flipflops on the side of a stranger’s window before the Godlike shadow of my old freshman roommate, Frankie Renault, now probably a doctor of some kind. And suddenly, there he was, Clark Kent, effortlessly pushing twin copies of himself in a new-agey stroller, a bonafide participatory dad. As he flew towards me, he gracefully raised a triathlete’s hand advertising an overpriced fitness tracker and gold wedding band.
“God, what do I do?” The pug howled at my stupidity with maternal disgust and wandered off to sniff a cigarette butt by a trash can. I took her word and rocked on my haunches to standing. I think Orwell would agree, two legs at least confer the impression of competent adulthood.
Sure enough, the act worked. I was suddenly side-squished and serenaded by Frankie while his mini-versions watched from their sheepskin thrones, awestruck at their father’s magnanimity. Frankie really buttered on the pretense of having enjoyed my work at his world-renowned, Park Avenue neurosurgery clinic. Panicking, I complimented his latest project (a clinic in downtown LA) that I had surreptitiously googled on my cellphone while he was in Muybridge motion. To my dismay, I must’ve come across a little too sincere for my own good because Frankie, unwillingly to hear the end of his praises, invited me to a lunch on him and his wife, Cheryl.
In a matter of seconds, he whisked me, like Julia Roberts, off the streets in his surprisingly unblemished Tesla to the all-travertine, modernist building his brother-in-law owned. He insisted that he “looked unhoused” and needed to upgrade his clothes (to ensure that I wasn’t out-dressing him in flannel and shrunken chinos) and see if Cheryl deigned to dine with us. I waited in the marbled lobby giftshop for Frankie’s not-so-quick change and watched as a Dolly Parton-esque nanny cooed at the twins with a smoker’s rasp before strolling them back outside, into oblivion.
At noon, Frankie reappeared in an expensive, fitted suit by the front desk overrun with part-time fashion models. What struck me more than Frankie’s wardrobe, however, was that the woman beside him, the mysterious Cheryl, was anathema to my imagined Mrs. Frankie. In my defense, I think most people would’ve assumed the punchline to the description of Frankie thus far was that his wife was too young, too attractive even for him, or both.
On closer glance, Cheryl was clearly the daughter of the woman I had mistaken for the nanny. However, while her mother was a bedazzled ex-ingenue, Cheryl was a no-frills, cruelty-free, unintentional Hitchcock blonde. From her silvered temples and creped arms concealed in a chunky sweater, I guessed she had a few years on Frankie. Still, despite her perpetual look of boredom, her low, unvarnished Michigander accent lent her an out-of-towner realism that gave me hope for our Nobu lunch.
To keep things short, I’ll admit incompetence. I was suckered in by her school marm first impression. Frankie and Cheryl had a regular spot reserved for impromptu conferences in a luxuriously vaulted, exclusive dining room with acquaintances they wanted to drug on mercury and publicly pat on the head. Without us needing to order, a rich boy maître d delivered bowls of uni and caviar to our central table followed by a round of omakase sashimi flecked with the kind of gold leaf anyone on the Forbes 500 list can defecate. Over mountains of translucent fish, we caught up on the last 17 years at an alarmingly dull pace. It took no less than an hour for me to discover that Frankie and Cheryl were the kind of talkers who didn’t leave you hanging when it came to gratuitous spoilers for their own fascinating lives.
Frankie had taken a gap year after Princeton to climb the Alps and intern for the Red Cross before blazing through a stint at Harvard Medical where he met a brilliant future geneticist named Charlene (now Cheryl, thank you very much) from Grand Rapids. Later, he became a proud father to Leo and Theo and an overnight success as a neurosurgeon who saved the lives of celebrity parents.
I had the unappealing task of following him up with the bullet version of my post-grad misery memoir. One year in a Florida mental hospital (shockingly not all booked) for a breakdown at my father’s funeral that may have involved verbal desecration of a corpse. Two years at a South Jersey paper writing salacious police blotters to titillate the police. Another six months failing to sell a novel based on said blotters while living with my mother off-Broadway. Finally, a PHD back at Princeton in foreign policy affairs (it sounded employable) that all but sucked my brain fluids dry.
I compulsively tacked on that I only got my position at the floundering Global Frontlines because Preston had read one of my articles in a grad student journal and thought I’d be the ideal candidate to infiltrate a Chechnyan corn smuggling ring. Apparently, something about my melon-balled cheeks, lanky torso, and tenth-grade Russian proficiency screamed starving subsistence farmer with criminal intent.
After pooh-poohing my digression into the Ukrainian army’s latest campaigns and encroaching authoritarianism in Slovakia, Frankie steered the conversation back to his priority topics. He, and to a marginally lesser extent Cheryl, needed me to know that Cheryl held a very impressive patent on cutting-edge technology that could, via lasers, isolate a baby’s stem cells in its mother’s uterus[1]. Frankie probably uttered the word uterus more than twenty times before he noticed that I had stopped cringe-sucking on my chopsticks.
Cheryl explained that her lab was awaiting FDA approval to sell home test kits to parents of missing children or mothers who gave up babies for adoption. Because stem cells contained a baby’s genome, a mother could use the cells she zapped from between her legs to search for profile matches in government databases. Cheryl claimed that she was headed for Shark Tank next month with prototypes (I wonder who was testing) and was in talks to pitch a reality show to a wannabe TLC streamer titled Homemade Apple P.I.
The whole time Cheryl spoke, Frankie rubbed his palm further and further up her lap while emitting strange, grumbling noises of affirmation. To this day, I like to think he saw himself as nothing more than a platonic business coach motivating his most fervently brainwashed disciple. But I still politely looked away.
When Cheryl paused for a sip of Frankie’s non-alcoholic Sapporo, I had the nerve to muse that her kits sounded like a mashup of Elizabeth Holmes’s Theranos tech and Anne Wojcicki’s 23 and Me venture. It had escaped my memory, perhaps due to calorically induced lethargy, that the former was a billion-something scam, and the latter was a bankruptcy case. If they were the slightest bit insulted, Frankie and Cheryl refused to show it. Like glad-handling pros, they giggled off my astounding ignorance. Cheryl even had the decency to mention that good friend Anne had dated their neighbor, a famous architect from Porto.
Sadly, this lifeline of relief I was just thrown somehow only compounded my delirium. Now at ease, I one-upped my unfiltered faux pas with an even more deranged truth. I said that I had always wanted to try out one of those genetic test kits for the novelty but never found time in continental America to mail off my spit. I left out that I couldn’t spare cash to waste on what would, I assumed, likely be unrevelatory information that could improve my self-ambivalence. The only name brand relative I had to look forward to is my father’s second cousin, Steven Seagall.
Before I could namedrop, Cheryl picked up the poor conversationalist mantle
’s reflexive mid-western instincts prevented her from letting any vaguely negative statement go unsmoothed by her optimism longer than a nanosecond. She quickly assured me, with a sticky hand on my arm (as she didn’t use chopsticks), that genetic information is always life-altering and that she would get me a freebie test kit from her old advisor’s lab out in Clifton. I’d more than likely have to blood draw, but the upside was that I’d have my genome sequenced with FBI-precision in two weeks.
Before I could make any protest, Frankie insisted that he’d buy lunch (as if his invite hadn’t implied the offer) in exchange for my sharing my results with him so that his clinic could use me as a neurology research test subject. According to Frankie, college-educated men in the 18-45 age group are the least compliant guinea pigs on the clinical trial market. I wanted to gag at the implication that my DNA could so easily be prostituted between two fish-perfumed egomaniacs, but my father’s voice suddenly goaded me from the ether above. I could hear him quip that, unlike Jesus Christ superstar Frankie, I have nothing better to do. I have nothing to lose but dignity, a pint of hemophilic blood, and an afternoon in Clifton. Needless to say, I took the deal and promptly forgot about it.
Chapter III: Darkest Hour at Arlo’s
My final hours in the city that never sleeps were spent on gin-laced redeye tea with Arlo. He’s an Oxford Britt (of part Teutonic extraction), a very tepid, unassuming old gentleman who would never strike you as the descendant of an aristocratic, failed Napoleon assassin. A two-decade widower who married into money, he keeps a small townhouse for himself and his cat in the meat-packing district, decked in what can be best summed as vintage BBC murder mystery kitsch.
Besides dousing Bob’s honest temper with his slimebag diplomacy, Arlo’s greatest contribution has been tightening up our small western bureau and fledgling op-eds section that we now farm out to perpetually soapboxed, untenured academics. When he’s not editing their profane rants, he attends services at St. Paul’s three times a week to brainstorm politically correct ways of donating his wife’s money for a tax write off.
It’s worth mentioning that Arlo is also a raving covert narcissist minus the moldy, do-gooder hairshirt. That’s why it’s been a widely but quietly celebrated tidbit that he posted his partial retiree status (on LinkedIn) last year and claimed that he would divvy up his managing editor responsibilities to psychologically healthier protegees like Preston.
I tread carefully when sharing my pieces with him, but I never manage to escape unjudged for what he dubs my schadenfreude-inducing, exotic trauma porn. I always make a counterpoint of reminding him that my Pulitzer short-listed pornography has singlehandedly tripled our readership, not that the starting mark was high to begin with. He responds that I’m capitalistically commodifying misery for my own spiritual gain. I then remind him that intellectual antisemitic tropes are on the rise. Clearly, we have a decent rapport.
Still, I keep a personal rule to only drink with Arlo when I need the leverage of live bodies in my corner over Bob or when the power of crisis compels me to bestow a topical op-ed on the masses. This time around, both conditions were satisfied. I came prepped with the first complete draft of my visceral, deliberately graphic portrait of the Kursk Forest. If Bob was going to submit his throat for strangulation from D.C and forfeit his own First Amendment rights, so be it. I wasn’t willing to cosign onto his resistance-to-resistance movement, even if his usual threat of death by shoddy, “You’re fired!” health insurance put me on a democlean cucking stool.
I had envisioned my meeting with Arlo as an uncontestable triumph of morality over whatever Bob’s indecision would lead to. So, while it’s laughable to me now, I was genuinely nonplussed at Arlo’s doorstep betrayal. He greeted me with two guardians my age looming over his back like Chris Angel impersonators attempting mind control. The female, on Arlo’s right, shook her moptop of auburn curls until her shrunken pleather jacket squeaked hello. Her partner, the male, soaked through my exterior with a glassy-eyed glare, his waist length golden tresses and longer beard lending him a Cousin It je ne sais quois. I could sense they were both sneering at my try hard clean-cut aura, their pierced tongues side-swiping hash-coated inner cheeks.
My hand extended with my obligatory sleeve of Laudrée macarons that Arlo always pretends are frivolous bastions of imperialist France but undoubtedly swallows whole in bed, Proustian-dandy style. He took my cursed offering and quickly bequeathed it to his female captor.
“Mira? This is the kid!”
The kid? He was talking to Fire-tips, in an acid-wash boilersuit and gold star sneakers, about how I looked immature? I wanted to call in an editorial review, but I could feel my consignment blazer sliding down my wiry frame, coated in sweat and spittle accumulated on my ten-block scooter ride over that saved me cab fare. Fine, I reasoned with myself, I’m still a kid.
Mira gave me an awkward, semi-closed fist, elbow-height wave before retreating inside. I almost wished she had thrown her last shreds of normalcy to the aliens above and fully flipped a bird with her flesh-painted nails. Goldilocks eyed me up and down, then followed Mira in sullen, monastic silence. Arlo waited for the duo to disappear before motioning me over his threshold, into his tweedy living room.
“My niece. She’s starting a master’s at The New School.”
“What field?”
As I settled in my usual stone-cold admiral’s desk chair, I tried hard to keep my eyebrows in place by pretending I was as botoxed as Frankie. Arlo noticed.
“Graphic communications marketing…good enough. I told my brother. If she can collect the vanity paperwork, I’ll have her and the fiancé on op-eds.”
With nothing to add, he eh-hemmed. His dry under-acknowledgement of Mira’s millennial cliché biography was all the permission structuring I required to set my crow’s feet loose and laugh. Arlo’s trussed-up avoidance of reality provoked my lowbrow Americana defensiveness of failure. Mira’s a fellow fuckup, rejoice! And better yet, she’s a step ahead on the path to rock bottom enlightenment! She’s no longer in a denial blazer, decreeing that nepotism won’t prevail and extolling the Instagram mantra that the telos of human life encompasses so much more (fill in the blank from a culturally appropriated text) than overworking at a trade to die healthy and financially solvent.
Arlo didn’t bother hiding his frustration with my existential mirth. He posed by the ash brick fireplace across from me, editor’s ballpoint pinched between two fingers on dry lips itching to complain. His red eyes lingered on my unopened laptop bag. Like the valedictorian of Phillips Exeter Academy (who led a professional cheating ring to outrank me), I slipped from my bag a precocious manilla-foldered printout of my draft and lobbed it over the leather trunk coffee table at the cat-haired, paisley loveseat. Arlo ignored the folder and began his polemic.
“I read the thing. Isn’t quite an op-ed yet.”
“Thing? Kid? Are proper nouns only for true radical, left-wing lunatics?” I couldn’t stem the sarcasm dripping from my pores.
“Read Florian’s intern capstone if you haven’t already. That should be the new sort of, I suppose…we can call it an aesthetic direction.” He instinctively backed away from me, bracing for impact. I held up a look of sublime serenity for maximum subversion of his expectations. There was no point in arguing against our old school readership decline or the frighteningly possible marketing genius of a savvy 20-something with a social media presence.
“Which one is Florian, again?” In my mind, I commiserate with our annual crop of Ivy interns wishing we were The New Yorker, but never having been an intern myself, I rarely try to relate to them in-person. I have no wisdom to pass on that they couldn’t grift from a psychiatrist.
“Mira’s fiancé…really a fascinating guy, once you get past the hair. He’s pivoting. But he was working with this brilliant microfinance startup building enrichment academies in a, gosh, it’s a ghost town in…”
I knew he’d expect me to tune out the rest of his stump speech, so I skimmed the piece in question on my laptop titled, Talking through the Gap: A Commonsense Guide for Civility in the Era of Intellectual Division. Titular redundancies aside, the following four paragraphs of drivel (that amounted to two finger swipes of filler content for a self-help listicle on family estrangement) left me with a bodily sensation that I bet would rival the worst intestinal hernia. I was so mired in repulsion that I failed to realize that Arlo had finished whatever he thought he was impressing upon me about Florian and was already hovering at my shoulder.
“Don’t tell me to shoot you.” He rumpled my hair with full knowledge that it’s my most prized possession.
“You probably would!”
“I’m a Russellian pacifist.”
“I can give you medical power of attorney!” I may have batted my lashes. I’d seen his tabby do the same with positive results.
“It’s not half bad when you count the views.”
“That means the number of people who clicked to feel better about themselves. Viewing isn’t reading.”
“Of course, sure, it’s passive consumption. Which is a perfectly acceptable goal. We aren’t a non-profit…” He glanced out his front window. I followed his gaze to glimpse Mira and fascinating Florian vaping on the stoop like real teenage rebels with two new band members (shaggy, bookstore lurkers), their plastic faux-crystal tumblers of wine lining the stoop railings.
I took a minute’s vow of silence to consider whether the number of views (aka clicks) on an obscure periodical’s Substack post was an acceptable metric by which to evaluate the post writer’s craft. Nope, I decided on a gut churn. It was antithetical! If gatekept philosophizing is your kalamata fougasse loaf and Vermontese single batch butter, why would you bother to seek mass-market appeal? It should be a badge of honor in your bubble to claim that the few consequential people who need to understand you can and will read your damn words. All other Adorno quoting yuppies can go validate their middling IQs by viewing the cartoons section of a different publication!
Equally lost on his own mental track, Arlo yanked his gingham curtains shut over the window, effectively sequestering the vignette of Mira, Florian, and co for a drunker conversation. Then he turned to me and whispered a phrase I never thought I’d be the first to hear. “I’m stepping down this year.”
My brain instantly lurched into a digressive spiral, struggling to parse the whisker slim semantic differences between our concepts of stepping down and retiring. Was Arlo mentally unstable or just British? Did he forget that he was retired on the internet? Isn’t everything that’s unintentionally saved to the Cloud an official decree enforced by the holy trinity of Musk, Bezos, and Zuckerberg?
I scanned Arlo’s wrinkly hide, visually inspecting him for signs of decline. No patch of thin skin that hadn’t already lost collagen to gravity years ago came to my attention. Unsure of what else to say to my open mouth, he slunk over to the loveseat where his ancient tabby proceeded to purr besides him. If only to cutoff the cat’s soporific lullaby, I yawned and asked with boneheaded innocence, “Who’s replacing you?”
Arlo stuck out his neck and tipped his monkish skull at the blockaded window, then turned to me and shrugged. I understood the impetus towards avoidance. He didn’t want any reminders that he should question who Mira was beyond simply qualifying her as acceptable by virtue of her body being his blood relation. I could tell he was, in the moment, realizing that it is, or at least ought to be, permissible to compare the kin we don’t raise with other strangers of unknown quality.
“First-class honors from Cambridge in classics. Did a Fulbright in Athens. Worked as a UN policy researcher. She has…it’s all there. She just needs a breakthrough.” He tapped his head with his ballpoint, almost willing a transwindow mirror-touch synesthesia to funnel awareness into Mira’s smoke-haloed head. I nodded circumspectly, full knowing that he had a second bomb lined up.
“Preston told me he doesn’t want to be pigeonholed as opinion editor. Given our traffic. And I heard he and his team are courting offers from name brands…Politico. Washpo.”
I tried to cover my shellshocked kneejerk. “How about the ones that don’t end in o?”
“That’s why you weren’t up for promotion.”
“Thank God. We’d have no more lawyers and week one, we’d be sued for defamation!”
“Just…help her get her bearings?”
“Where’s Florian going.”
“He’s got some family connections to parliament. I thought he could shadow Ted, maybe sign on with the Western bureau. He-”
Wordlessly, I made my exodus, monkeywrenching his gibberish mid-sentence, my open laptop tottering on an upturned, deity-beseeching palm. My furled toes purposely groveled and scrapped on the knotty divots in Arlo’s floor, only lifting from Earth to kick open his stupidly juvenile curtains. He maintained his façade, hunched behind his needlepointed throwaway shams, even as the tabby swatted his nose with her Medusan tail. Sudden exposure to the truth outside that he and I didn’t want to engage with was unnerving. He froze, ossified to a jaundiced, sulfuric stone beneath the sunset’s spotlight. I bagged my laptop and flew. I was willing to take the risk that the internalized shame awaiting me outside his door was less credible than the eye-popping shame flag he would pin to my back for the world to jeer at.
My feet dragged my otherwise comatose corpse to the end of the block where I spotted Mira, Florian, and their posse drinking at the counter of a grungy outdoor bar that I’d feared for years. Florian smugly waved at me with while I doubled over to exhale. I pretended not to notice and instead made a decent bit out of hailing a cab back to the apartment
Seven bucks was well worth my mental preservation. After being so ruthlessly, nakedly conquered as a utilitarian side charity for the grand production of Frankie and Cheryl’s metanarrative, my soul didn’t have a drop of idealism left to fight a better fight against Arlo. And really, what was Arlo but a forefather of Frankie and Cheryl’s self-appointed, self-serving intelligentsia class?
Chapter IV: Mother Damnedest
My default instinct on my cab ride of shame to a home that wasn’t mine was to bend an imaginary wire hanger and shiv it against my own neck. How had I unintentionally accumulated such a reputation of organic nice guyness? I never considered myself a genuinely nice guy whose docile, wholesome persona transcended the unhinged undercurrent colloquially associated with the term. If anything, I was too sure that I exuded the questionable vibe of a paved-over landmine waiting to erupt in family court before an ex-partner and dog! I was beyond certain- thanks to empirical proof- that the character I had molded to repel delusional attention seekers more than six feet on either side of the GW bridge was developed well enough to suit my needs. How could I be anything, but a malic acid tongued, judgy snark who skirted over the poverty line by digitally spitting on helpless fools from behind a paywall?
On my last night as an elbow-greased New Yorker, I treated myself to an impulsive panic attack. I finally dirtied down the studio’s prim bedsheets and cracked through the 01’ Merlot I had dropped a few hundred on as a manipulative thank you to my unknown host. And then, for the first time in three decades, I sobbed.
I lacked the linguistic vitriol to properly expel my frustration at being mistaken for a freelancing, empathetic deuteragonist by everyone into whose bigger orbit I accidentally stumbled. Instead of ranting to my insurance provider’s on-call therapist, I grunted through a mental autopsy of my recent interactions. I couldn’t resolve the discrepancy between Jules the sweetheart sucker who I’d apparently become in the last four days and Jules the professional jerk who thought it perfectly rational to blubber over his unrecognized jerkiness into a stranger’s expensive duvet.
The self-hating sucker was desperately seeking a confidence fuckover from a Devil in the jerk who, to my disappointment, proved himself nonexistent. Every reflection of my tear-stained stare offered a profile in easygoing, sensitive guilelessness. By midnight, I was ready to forsake my glowing shadow headlining the walls and windows and mirrors like an overwrought persona plucked from an Ingmar Bergman deep cut. At last, I had no choice but to allow hot, fearful sweat to molt away my glib exterior. Maybe the sucker was who I’ve always been at my core.
Post sleepless night, I still felt too gently victimized to leave the city without a formal nail puncturing my aorta. I wanted the full amputation of my ego, and the only panacea that could properly trigger my deathbed will to succeed for all loser-kind was feeling my mother outmatch my biological quirks with her consciously cultivated, pedestrian normalcy. I needed her to reaffirm my character as her antithesis.
My mother, Elise Weill Bernstein, is a retired actuary who painstakingly hides the fact that she grew up on the Jersey shore, though she really shouldn’t bother. When I turned 25, she achieved her life’s ambition and bought outright the theatre district apartment where we once caught my former father screwing her Rockette sorority sister before signing his divorce papers. She can tolerate (like is too certain a word for her) Springsteen, J. Crew outlets, Dianne Keaton movies minus a certain controversial auteur, and me. I respect her as I respect myself, that is to say, deeply but with incessant misgivings about my taste.
I never go back to her apartment and, if pressed, will decline by purposely requesting ridiculous accommodations like a Wiccan high priestess’s blessing or imported goose down mattresses from Devonshire to replace the Ikea boxspring where my paternal line undressed company. Because I also try to avoid the blocks around her building (featuring Trump Tower among other lowlights), I stick to a strict visitation ritual when she’s on my schedule.
As per custom, I checked in early with my mother’s neighbors, Nolan and Jeff, who play sons for her when I’m out of the country. The last text I had received from them right before I left for Warsaw was an amber alert screaming that she was taking a weekend roadtrip out to LBI, packed for a sleepover with a younger contractor whose silver fox status they couldn’t agree on. I didn’t ask any follow-ups. Knowing me, however, they still sent pictures roasting said contractor’s teal thunderbird with the license plate in good view, just in case I asked them to dox him later.
When I called, they were happy to inform me that the contractor was a Republican reject and that my mother was incensed (her finest mood) and ready to gossip whenever I had five hours. I said yes to kvetching at some toxically twee, overpriced café that victimized me. I felt like spilling about my upcoming DNA test as if it was one of those pointlessly meritocratic national “can you fill in a bubble” exams before which I always pre-shat myself. And, more importantly, I wanted my mother’s bluntness to dictate my priorities for the week. I imagined she’d advise me to let the fate of Uyghur dissidents rest for an hour, hawk my Y-chromosome data to the feds, and enjoy having successful, sane acquaintances while they’re willing to associate with me.
I was hopeful enough to walk at least partway to our meeting point. However, after an upstream trudge through the FiDi manosphere to the less kush-centric midtown, I needed a sacred space to lose my burden of fake confidence. I considered popping in the Met while waiting for Elise. Rumor has it that my dementia-addled grandmother prayed for Holden Caufield as a prodigious grandson at the Temple of Dendur (a staple of the Met that J.D. Salinger never immortalized) when my mother turned 21, and in a stunning disconfirmation of any higher power, wound up dead the same week my mother c-sectioned me, lap-banded Ignatius Riley, at youthful 35. For this petty, unconfirmed reason, my mother avoids all art museums that don’t feature G-rated movie or presidential memorabilia and signage with giant font.
I pretend to love the Met to horde it as a continental Jules-only hideaway, and I’ve never revealed to my mother that I detest its arty halls more than her. I unabashedly prefer the MoMa. At the MoMA, I’m not the only fraud. I’m reassured that all I need to be a successful creative is to buy a blank canvas, nail it on a white wall, and label whole shebang something falsely profound, profane, and exceedingly pretentious like, A Study of White Male Autosarcography. I feel ashamed, impotent, and jealous of the oily paintings when I wander through the Met without a tour guide cancelling the artists over their MeToo worthy backstories.
Suffice to say, I never made it beyond the rows of food carts helpfully barricading me from the pinnacles of human achievement inside the Met. Elise texted me to announce that her vile subway was held up thanks a fame whore in a trash bag protesting on the tracks with roadkill and that, in the interest of her time, she would wait in Central Park. I wallowed behind the pigeons scavenging piss-coated boiled nuts around a fountain for a few minutes, then J-walked to greet my mother who was gawking at an anorexic carriage horse stalled in traffic.
My hemoglobic breath coagulated behind my epiglottis and left me choked up with tin mouth as I caught a sudden glimpse of my mother’s full front. She wasn’t armored in her Teflon foundation and indoor sunglasses reserved for days after depression jags. She wasn’t meeting to give me the satisfaction that I craved of pulling her together as a layup test of my emotional competency. She was over the contractor. Oh God! She was here, all faculties alert and braced in a crisp ecru pantsuit, to salvage me. She thought I was the one flailing!
While we strolled past early morning overachievers in spandex, my mother graced me with one of her sporadic performance reviews. My clothes were too baggy, and I couldn’t go on without a professional haircut. Fair, predictable. But more to my genuine shock, I felt for a vellus-raising second that she deeply understood my emotional wants that I’d forgotten to explicitly weave into my maximalist outpouring of expository complaints about my city trip.
According to Elise, giving away my DNA was absolutely a ridiculous proposition that only an idiot would seriously entertain! To Frankie, no less! Because what kind of a monstrous dipshit trades his obviously struggling friend a free lunch for an outright personal data grift? And, on the subject of grand old Arlo, who was he to dangle an overdue promotion in front me only to snatch it away for the nepo-induced hegemony of his own screwed up family? Are we living in a Neanderthalic feudal anarchy?
“Well, see, here’s my conspiracy. Someone on the Committee of Maga Safety’s quashing coverage on Russian disinformation intelligence. It’s apparently unpatriotic. But they’re not pulling the firing squad on me!”
“So, good. They know they need you. You find a way to work in their system. That’s what a smart person does. Use their tactics against ‘em. Right? Put out some fluff for Bobby. There’s your cover. You get the Britt to sign off. And you do your own rant on the side with Preston. Mel Brooks it a little, you know?”
I must’ve had a premature aneurism while listening to her rhapsodize and rationalize my frustration with terrifyingly manipulative cult-leader precision. Of course, the hole I needed to poke in her reassuring mindfuck was the very pertinent question of whether Mel Brooks qualified as a master of subtle satire. But I wasn’t mentally there yet. From some disassociated perch beyond my body, I could sense my material form being goaded into hunched over filial piety and reluctant sideways motion by tactile stimuli alone. My mother looped her insectile arm through mine and buoyed me to an ungated swing set, spiffed up with a mid-century flair for wayward adult children. “Jules?”
We huddled on the swings, and without further ado, descended into a vapid, mutually nostalgic relitigation of her failed romantic endeavors. As I struggled to gain momentum, gawky legs firmly epoxied in the terra tragicus below, I was coaxed back to my teenage comfort zone as an observer, a complaint filer, an inscrutable and immutable time capsule that my parents took turns inflicting with their grievances against the world.
Chapter V: Der Ring Von Clifton
My mother chose to depart at the east 86th street subway where she saddled me with her expired NJ transit cards. We shared our usual unprotracted goodbye. She adjusted my shirt collar, I pointed out the various drug paraphernalia she should avoid stepping on, and, not a minute overtime, we shook hands a good yard from the platform. We’ve both felt the urge to faceplant before and, at least in my case, thought about what would become of the other if we stepped over the edge.
Once I saw my mother off, I felt the immediate sting of having no greater agenda at 3:30 on a Saturday. I scrounged around for another four hours, even getting my kicks at the MoMa before dozing on the path train back to Jersey City’s Exchange Place where I was relieved to find my thirdhand, glacier blue Saab 9-3 Aero rusting gracefully in a back lot for a cool 275 and change. In record time, we paid our dues and chugged downtown through the smoggy, electric dusk to the riotous comedy podcast, The War Room (by Steve Bannon).
[1]Real research suggests Cheryl was right on some things but not the specifics. Here’s my proof: https://www.viacord.com/blog/fetal-maternal-microchimerism-unexpected-bond-between-mom-and-baby?srsltid=AfmBOooxxKVX6r1rOtC3xYwMvaIdhoP4OOxChJjlWRA1XWMaykKPvqOI