friendship in the time of consumerism

What you are about to read began as a love letter. Perhaps it is still a love letter of sorts—it’s definitely an ode, to someone who is all at once fleeting and everlasting. Her name is Whitney. I’ve known her for a couple years now, but I don’t even know her last name. She is a salesperson in the handbag department of the Barneys in San Francisco. I’ve always thought of her as “my” salesgirl but perhaps it is more accurate to say that I am “her” buyinggirl.

I first thought about writing something about Whitney while I was preparing to come back to the East Coast from my usual summer in San Francisco. As I was packing my summer loot, I was suddenly struck with the thought that over the last few years, the friends I’ve had in the Bay Area have kind of faded into a distance that feels sadly like the past (This is mostly my fault—self-enclosed solitude is an easy instinct for me). Aside from my dearest sister, I was really not going to miss anyone in San Francisco. Except Whitney. But if this strikes any of you as a pathetic admission (“You think your salesgirl is your friend?”), I don’t care. It is true that Whitney is not my friend. But Whitney and I do have an intimacy.

Whitney is a young woman, probably in her mid twenties. She is tall, and in the teetering stiletto pumps she favors, she’s even taller. Chicly, her limbs are about the width of a toothpick. All of this, combined with the fact that she has a cute, doll-like face, makes her a shoo-in for America’s Next Top Model. Her long black hair is usually middle-parted and styled in soft waves that make you think ever so slightly of Farrah Fawcett, but pulls you back right at the moment of full-on 70s retro nostalgia. Of course she is always dressed perfectly, a femininity that seems simultaneously strict and floral. Maybe it’s the fact that she wears glasses (black Ray-bans) and resin earrings in the shape of roses in bloom. Her voice makes me think of raspberry peppermints.

Last summer, Whitney sold me my first Proenza Schouler PS1 bag. In the couple weeks leading up to my finally settling on (of course) plain black leather, Whitney welcomed my obsessive stalking of the bag with salesperson perfection: she encouraged me to test the tactility of various models (urban environment is rough in suede), try swinging various sizes off my shoulders, offered handbag camaraderie as a customer (she herself ownd the Givenchy Nightingale and we bonded about the inability of boyfriends to understand the primacy of expensive handbags). Whitney guided me through my investment with the strategic focus of a general and the soft leniency of a psychotherapist. And unlike a lot of snooty bitch salesgirls old and young who regularly ignore me in high-end shops, Whitney indulged me sweetly week and after non-purchasing week, even though I was wearing a cracked-out Danzig t-shirt and raggedy rolled up jeans.

And out of that came a familiarity that became, this summer, a kind of intimacy. A week before leaving San Francisco, I dropped by to check out the pre-Fall wares, and while we were doing our usual loose small talk, she impulsively (it felt like impulsiveness to me) revealed: “I got engaged this summer!” We hugged and hopped up and down. I felt so happy for her I felt emotions gushing out of every pore. We grabbed each other’s forearms while she told me all the details of how her man proposed to her, when and where the wedding will be, showing me her ring. We were acting like old girlfriends, and so lost in our moment that Whitney almost lost sight of the unhappy-looking old woman waiting to be shown a bag. “See you at Christmastime!” she chimed in that inimitable raspberry peppermint voice as we parted for the summer.

But what is this intimacy between a buyinggirl and a salesgirl? Our relationship is predicated upon the capitalistic system of purchase and exchange. She is the employee of a corporation of consumption and I am a consumer who keeps that corporation going. It could be argued that her friendliness to me is fake, a performance necessary for her job and function. But if she began her friendly overtures to me as the performance of “salesgirl,” is it necessarily so that that friendliness remain “fake”?

Obviously, I don’t believe so. A couple weeks ago, I actually had a discussion about this subject of performing friendliness with my boyfriend (My boyfriend refers to it as an “argument”). We were talking about urban affects, specifically the difference between New York and San Francisco affects. Being a boy who escaped from the South, my boyfriend prefers the bluntly abrasive affect of New Yorkers to the gliding-the-surface niceness of Californians: he found the post-hippie affect of San Francisco to be “fake,” on par with fakey Southern so-called charm, whereas New York aggression may not be nice, but it is always the truth. But my argument (OK Roddy it was an argument) was: performance is always performative. That is, you begin acting a certain way, knowing that the act is a fiction necessary for a certain kind of survival, but do it long enough and you find that you have become the fiction. You have turned yourself into the embodiment of the fiction, you have turned the script into an emotion. You have crafted fact out of fiction.

I believe that the affect of aggressive bluntness is a performance, too. If you are mean or abrasive to strangers, you are communicating a desire for, and in fact, effecting, a basic foreclosure of any desire for future friendship. (No matter how probable or fantastical that future may be.) On the other hand, You may begin “acting” friendly as an act, perhaps because your job requires you to, but if you are any kind of human at all, you do it long enough and you find that the friendliness becomes you because the feeling has actually produced real happiness, detached from the original context of the performance.

This is the way I think about the intimacy between Whitney and me. Behaviors that produce contact points between humans have a tactility. I just prefer that it be soft. Whitney and I bonded over an outrageously expensive handbag. Our intimacy was negotiated and produced over the barrier of a brass-edged glass counter with a discreetly hidden cash register of which we were always acutely and silently aware. So the original form of our “friendship” was, quite simply, hierarchical: salesperson and customer. But with her consistent California salesgirl affect, Whitney pulled me down from the perches of customer and made me instead a baggirl—like her. Her wedding is set for next summer, and of course I do not expect an invitation. But I don’t need one; I’m giddy enough envisioning her as the radiant young bride I know she will be. Even if we never see each other again, Whitney will always be my friend, my California.

de profundis

I’m suffering the loss of my long long hair. Sixty days after the impulsively calculated moment with scissors, I am in full regretful mode, in the pain of waiting. I know it is frivolous and self-indulgent to plunge into mourning for long hair that you yourself willingly and willfully cut, but there it is. Suffering is one very long moment. I can’t divide it by seasons. I can only record its moods, and chronicle their return. It feels like time itself does not progress. It revolves. It seems to circle round one center of pain. The paralysing immobility of a life every circumstance of which is regulated after an unchangeable pattern, so that we eat and drink and lie down and pray, or kneel at least for prayer, according to the inflexible laws of an iron formula: this immobile quality, that makes each dreadful day in the very minutest detail like its brother, seems to communicate itself to those external forces the very essence of whose existence is ceaseless change. Friends tell me it looks fine, but there it is and remains: the knifelike remorse I feel every time I pass the mirror. And I find myself counting the days to go by, obsessing over the fractions of inches pushing out of my scalp and measuring it against the days gone by.

Because my hair has been my diary. Like a certain species of girl writers (Sylvia Plath, Anaïs Nin, Uma Thurman in the film Sweet and Lowdown), I’m never entirely sure whether I’m writing down the experiences through which I’m living or I’m actually living through specific experiences so I can have something to write down. That is why, right now, in the prison cell of my bobbed hair, I look back to that night I cut off the long braid of hair and wonder if I needed a reason to look forward to a day 365 or 730 days from October 10, 2010. Some people’s lives are a nicely projected vector: they know the exact temporal and spatial point of their destination, and the arc of that movement is like an aced geometry test. My life has always been a heat-seeking missile: I know where it needs to go, but unfortunately, the target keeps moving so my days keep hurling itself this way and that, getting lost, jagging up its path, knowing nothing but the sole certainty that it’s being pulled by the small but definite heat of a dream in the future.

Using the tiny movement of hair growth as the pages of my diary makes my days feel long and slow. But at least I know my hair is a ceaseless change; its growth is a fact of my body. Two years from now, I’m not sure whether I will have a published book, tenure at my job, or a husband. Waiting and working for those things make me tired, precisely because they are moving targets with vague body heat. But hair growth is inevitable: I just have to sit on my butt and wait. The rate at which the pages of my diary gains heft word by hard-earned word is the same one by which my hair will become heavy enough to pull my head back into its destined posture.

But waiting for the day when my hair can again cover my back is still painful; the viscerality of regret is real. The diary is a way to create my body without the benefit of the mirror: my flesh constructed solely through the puked word-particles of my immediate past. In this same way I will try to dissipate my body: to have a less visual sense of my body while I wait for my hair to catch up with my desires. Less mirror-reliant, and more tactility. A molecular sense of self. A more abstract, yet more material sense of my body: air hitting my stretched out neck; the bounce of a good handbag against the tops of my hips; the red warmth of my eyes when it traps the dust of raccooned black eyeliner; how my titties get excited under a soft old t-shirt; the masochistic crunch of toes squeezed into narrow hard leather loafers.

(This piece contains an interpolation of “De Profundis,” by Oscar Wilde, 1897)

children get older

I have a white hair. I had a white hair. In the early morning light of November 9, 2010, that fucking one white lock was glaring at me, daring me not to pull it out. I yanked it out. I want to believe that it is a fluke of vegetarian vitamin deficiency, but I’m afraid that it is really the start of an ambush of aging cells.

In fact, I had a foreboding of this getting old thing just the week before that fateful morning. My buddy Trace and I were putzing around downtown Boston. It was a Saturday, the day before Halloween, and at the Marc by Marc Jacobs store on Newbury Street, cute tweenies were planning a costume party:

“Yeah, totally dress up and come over tonight. We’re having a party and the theme is 90s grunge. It should be so fun!!”

As we walked out of the store, I nudged Trace: “Did you hear what those shopkids were saying?” She hadn’t, so I repeated it, and then got a bit hysterical: “Can you believe this. ‘90s grunge' is a costume for them! But it’s not a costume for me; ‘90s grunge’ is MY LIFE!!”

Which is true. It’s not just about operating my brain to the rhythm of Hole’s “Miss World” and Liz Phair’s “Glory.” It’s putting myself together in a way that grunge music pours of me like a too heavy perfume. This personal aesthetic is dictated by the epic slogan of a Nirvana t-shirt:

FUDGE PACKIN

CRACK SMOKIN

SATAN WORSHIPPIN

MOTHER FUCKER

OK of course not literally. But I take the nihilist spirit of the text and turn it into a styling structure of feminine dissonance: stiff jeans, simpering t-shirts, limpid flannel; careful jewelry and sloppy make-up; big fat hair, small posture; clean skin, filthy mind. I used to think all of these things represented me. But the layers of the years, nay, layers of decades, have fused these things to my skin and I, me myself and I, have become a representation of those things. In other words, I used to think I wore these things on my body to carry with me the ideas they symbolized. But when twenty-year olds see me as an extra in a costume drama about the 1990s, I myself have become the symbol, I myself have become the costume. Bag me up, price me up ($6.66) and staple a cardboard fold-over tag on top: 90S GRUNGE COSTUME.

But unlike how the white hair makes me feel, I like this feeling of being a prepackaged costume for children ages 15 to 25. Like my insides (Born in Korea, moved to Iowa, had bad acne, was gothically gay, went to University of Virginia, blah blah blah ofpersonal history) have been scooped out clean and replaced with a jittery expectation of being filled by a younger body who wants to embody an idea that my body has become.

So growing old means: I’m becoming hollow. Hollow like a costume waiting for October 31^st, hollow like...a handbag. As you may or may not be able to tell on my most current masthead, I have been feeling fused to my newest and most favorite handbag: a Proenza Schouler PS1 in black leather. The intense level of attachment I have to this thing has been something over which I’ve been wrangling with my words, but is captured nicely in the publicity video for the PS1 in patent:

Skin-sheathed body becomes reduced to handbag. When the cute tweenies unknowingly labeled me so old as to become costume, they also turned me into a handbag. And this is not a bad way to learn to grow old: you become not a role model for youth, but a role, as in, a shell to put on over complex flesh.

Being a role, being a shell: If I am an empty handbag, who is going to carry me around? I ask that, rather than: who is going to fill me and with what is that person going to fill me? This is a totally different self-pedagogy of growing old than the tired one of waiting for that one (that man) who will make my soul feel like a blood-enriched vaginal cavity. But what does it mean to think about the sugar walls of my brain as the jacquard lining of a luxury leather good? Rather than mark the passing years by the dread of not finding the man who will fill me thus complete me, I will instead imagine how the children who grow older with me will, in their brain, skin me and pull me around them to have youth adventures in the world. I might not know who or how many have done this to me. But I’ll know that it has been done: my skin has become leather and is having fun, out there, everywhere.

a brick...i mean, a book, in my handbag

Quite recently, I came to the really obvious realization that I’ve been handbagging it. I was standing in a Muni train, just moderately crowded enough to cozily find a leanspace that allowed me to pull out my book (Mary Gaitskill’s beautiful new anthology, Don’t Cry) and read during my ride. But getting out of the train, I was so rushed at by pre-commuters that I didn’t have a chance to put the book back. Instead, I had to awkwardly maneuver the just-closed book from my hands to one hand, then clasp one edge while pulling the pink block of papered stories to my left breast. As I stepped off the train, a sense memory: a flush of babyfaggot femininity.

There were a couple of reasons why I had this flush of faggoty feminine youth, the central one being that in those few clumsy seconds, I was carrying a handbag. Ah, the catcall of the teenage homophobe: “Nice handbag, faggot!” And please, let’s be clear about this: I was not carrying a man-purse or whatever. This was a straight-up lady handbag, and a roomy one that made me feel like a luxe grunger: a red plaid flannel tote from 3.1 Phillip Lim’s second fall collection. Here’s what defines a true handbag, which also produces its awkward bodily syntax: the handles look broad enough to sling over the shoulder, but is actually just narrow enough to prevent it, therefore forcing the gal to wear it on hanging from her fist or the crook of her arm. The over-the-shoulder model of the handbag is actually an innovation in androgyny, borrowing from the technology of army knapsacks. A true handbag, like most traditional accoutrements of world femininity, hobbles the woman wearer. Holding a bag’s straps in her hand, or immobilizing her arm in a right angle to provide branch for the bag, robs the handbagger of the use of one arm.

Of course, we have been taught that such a robbing is a handicap, when I prefer to think of it as a disability. That is: not being able to use one arm is a profound loss if you understand “ability” as defined by a sparkly healthy body. But the tenets of physical health are often tied to masculine notions of physical boorishness. The logic of which is something like, suppose a bully came after you: how are you supposed to properly defend yourself if one arm is locked in the deadly (but delicious) embrace of a designer handbag?

My answer: well, the handbag doesn’t rob you of the use of your legs, does it? Of course, running away is so un-manly, I guess. Which goes along pretty well with how the mechanics of transporting goods has been gendered: if it allows you free use of your arms, you are pretty able-bodied and more aligned with men. But running away is not the only recourse available to a poor defenseless handbagger. There is a great moment in Jennie Livingston’s film Paris is Burning in which an attitudinous emcee at a drag ball comments on the evening ensemble of a ball walker: “Everybody knows that an evening bag is a must. No lady is safe at night.” In this pretty natural conclusion, the handbag becomes a weapon—that old adage about carrying a brick in your handbag is no joke. The item that hobbles you into femininity is that which can re-arm you. In this way, I think of the handbag as a pretty rad piece of low-fi technology: it physically handicaps you, but simultaneously gives you the prosthetic by which you can transform that handicap into an empowering identity of “the disabled.” The handbag is the ultimate feminine prosthetic.

But so much for its physical prosthetic uses. The handbag is an emotional prosthetic as well, which brings me to the second reason for my babyfaggot femininity sense-memory. When my handbag forced me to clutch the book in one arm, I was sent back to junior high and high school, when there was a gender politic to carrying your books. I’d be walking down the hall minding my own business and carrying my books, and some snotty-nosed boy (always a boy) would inevitably sneer about how I carried my books “like a girl.” Boys carried their books flat against their hip, their arm straight and parallel with the verticality of their posture. Girls hugged their books. I hugged my books. This is the memory that rushed through my capillaries that day, stepping off the Muni, book to boob.

But as I continued walking away from the train, flash-remembering all those moments of teenage torture, I didn’t put the book back away in the handbag. Instead, I spent the rest of the day in that same pose, hugging book with one hand, Phillip Lim bag hanging off an arm. It was quite an epiphanic exercise, with emphasis on “exercise.” It was tricky to figure out how to rifle through racks of vintage clothes when both arms were occupied with carrying things. (Solution: tuck book in armpit, hang handbag from same arm, and make sure that arm is not your writing arm.) But it strangely felt lovely. Part of it was reclaiming that homophobically tortured babyfaggot, plucking him from out of Iowa City into lovely San Francisco with me. But the other part was that I remembered the fetishistic function books have always had for me. All through junior high and high school, I carried, along with my ghetto generic Trapper Keeper and grocery-bagged textbooks, a novel. It was never a novel for English class, but “my own” novel, a novel I had picked out of the library for my own pleasure. They were usually huge, and often trashy, with some exceptions I suppose. In those six years, I was quite a book whore. But some still stand out: Kathreine Dunn’s Geek Love, John Updike’s Witches of Eastwick, Danielle Steel’s Kaleidoscope, Ruth Rendell’s Talking To Strange Men and Collected Stories, and Toni Morrison’s Beloved. I remember these because I had the novels for not only story (these were great stories) but also for their beauty: books with fabulously designed book jackets. These books, unassigned by my teachers, were fetishes of my adultfaggot futurity, when someday I would leave the Midwest and have some lovely life, free. These great thick adult books were my babydrag handbags. Amid the warzone of adolescence, they made me feel simultaneously true to myself, and safe.

I do this still. I don’t leave the house without a book to read. But for so long, I’d thought of the book as a content of my handbag rather than as a handbag. In tribute to that small self from long ago, I’m going to begin this practice again. As you see above, I’ve currently been reading Boy George’s autobiography, Take It Like a Man (which I think is very apt, by the way). Boy George-as-handbag is a bit difficult, since it weighs a ton. So I thought I’d try out some other textual handbags for fun. The latest issue of my favorite magazine, French Vogue:

And my favorite art book, Karen Kilimnik’s Drawings:

Although as you can tell by the awesome outsizedness of Kilimnik’s book, it is quite dangerous to carry it as a handbag. Don’t try that at home.