SAY HELLO TO TOO MANIC HEARTS
[Loft on Astor with a real tree in its living room that we are sitting against, looking at a big pink Georgia O’Keeffe flower on the wall, after an after-party]
Nasa: My father told me when I was a kid he was afraid of me. I would break down in tears, get hysterical. I “hated my family”, something he found to be adorable, yes, but also the sign of a wild heart. The same unsettled energy still exists in me, though I’ve found more productive ways to let the rage and rumbling work for me and not against me. I throw myself into work. “But a workaholic is still an addict”, my therapist once cautioned. I dismissed her advice and stopped going to therapy. I know it’s not normal to obsess over the nexus of small details, big dreams, endless devotion to the bit, but it makes me happy. Well, it keeps me from being miserable. When I got into production, I found a whole new world of solace in working with my hands, climbing up ladders, jimmyrigging things, and learning how to do it the right way. Writing is another thing I can do with my hands and which staves off the pain of life by being difficult and beautiful, in the end. I need to get back in a flow of writing. I’ve fallen off yet again. I write in my head – I’m doing it now – but that’s just selfish. Paper to pen.
Jack: I feel like you work a bit like my father, a master woodworker who works till he is too tired to think, so he can just escape the pain for a while and enjoy the genuine pleasure of focus. But he loves the end-product too. He used to at least … he’s getting sadder, and if he loses love for the work, that’s a deathblow. Yeah. Fuck. I do it too, but I get my kicks in other ways.
Such as when I have the images at my fingertips and get giddy to the point of tears. Such as when I was led by the hand to some Chinatown apartment at 3 in the morning, and the woman, in her black and pink dress, brought me to a table upon which she had laid out gemstones and diamonds, for the stars, swatches of wool, for the nebulae, all upon a big blue cloth, that was her sky.
Hold on, hold on. Put this song on while I tell this shit.
[Jack hands Nasa his phone, which is broken and flashing green every other second, and she puts on:
Slick haha. Yeah … She stood before this tabletop diamante sky, and illuminated it with the torch of her phone so that it came to life, became really celestial, the light pouring from the geometric innards of one crystal onto the edges of another, each pitching their own beams outward, into the air, into the dulling wool, but all the light interrelated too. She brought me close to her, blank-faced, put her skinny arm around me and it was as if we were really watching distant stars, they weren’t just a chain of garnets twinkling. They were a chain of garnets twinkling.
The chain of garnetts twinkled. They really did.
I get my life-nourishment from those strange moments. I get through my sadness by being happily bewildered by the fact that I made it through all this madness.
Nasa: We sleep very little despite all our dreams.
Jack: Too true. Beautiful thing.
What do you think of me, Nasa?
How do you describe me out there [gestures to the city beyond the window].
Nasa: [Cigarette in mouth, eyes closed, speaking fast as if to avoid thought] My dearest friend Jack is a young man I met outside of a club I was programming live music in last year. Tall and handsome but more importantly, clever, interesting, and poetic. And he smoked cigarettes. Naturally we got along great and everyone I introduce him to enjoys his company – and he handles it well. They like his hot takes on NYC, they lean into his Irish mind. Even the most pretentious motherfuckers around me. We shared a special time together over the summer with another impassioned soul and when us three were together nothing external really mattered. It wasn’t meant to feel that way but we would erupt into poetry at bars, break into fits of laughter and luxuriate in our drunk, witty, playful minds. We were quick to praise and love each other, and it was really all genuine. Ha ha.
The chain of garnetts really twinkled.
Jack: The figures in your life, Nasa, those who surrounded you when we shared the city, they inhabit my mind like primary colors. I remember when I went to that club to meet you for the last time before I left for Ireland, I approached the front desk … ah, fuck it, haha.
Do you have another cig?
Sound.
I have always been wary of the number four.
But there is something dependable about squares too.
The emaciated bodies of a shipwreck on some tropical beach. They debate whether to stand, half-starved and dripping with sweat. The sea has no swell. And the aqua-blue sky is so wide it’s round. One of them blesses himself four times, because for him it is a comforting number.
Ah, I was going to tell a story about when Dea lit up my life on a street, but there’s too many details just to say she’s interesting.
She’s interesting, and I owe the little bit I know her to you.
That’s my point.
Nasa: Dea’s a true beauty, her light shines within.
Jack: People would like to read what we’re doing right now. We should let people love us. Everyone! Look at us. How can we get that done? We should publish ourselves … we should publish ourselves!
Nasa: Yes. Yes. Yes. [Her eyes close, her face tilts to the air above, future’s behind her eyelids] Your writing is beautiful and eloquent. The stories you spin bloom and blossom. They feel like renaissance paintings. My writing is more personal essay, conversational, matter of fact. It’s like a deer and a jaguar drinking from the same fuckin river ha ha. Side by side. Yes! … People would appreciate that … I like to shrink life’s situations into simple truths. Like graffiti. You went to a fancy literary school. I grew up in Queens. But here we are, worlds apart and side by side, coming upon dreams together … A publishing house. A way of life. To publish ourselves.
[They look at each other, competent in the other’s dreaming, able to bear the unglamorous halflight and the other’s eyes upon their blemished skin. Wordlessness ensues, the dreaming persists, words only an interference].
The Georgia O’Keeffe painting: This should be forever, the sound of a cash register closing, two lit cigarettes, confession, lighter flicks and unpoliced passion. To say something just say it.
Fist pumping visions.
