Everytime I have a bikini wax, I find the kind, efficient, non-English speaking Chinese lady poking around my vagina with a wooden spatula, vaguely depressing. I bet, I can't help thinking, she once dreamed of making a new life in the US, far away from the poverty of the Huang province.
And then she ended up dripping hot wax on my anus for a living.
...my lovely friend Jon gave me a great write up of the book on his blog. Go poke around his stuff too, he's a fabulous writer and has been entertaining me for months with his stories of geekdom....
Nowhere is so miserable as New York on a rainy day when the bottoms of your jeans, sodden with city, weigh you down even more than life. It keeps raining in New York and every time it becomes too much and you're doggy-paddling through the soupy streets, your mouth clamped shut for fear of drowning so the wail just echoes around inside, you wake up and it's back to sunny again, back to how it really should be.
I woke up stiff like a dead spider, threw on some jeans and a tank top and picked my way through the detritus of the roomies, empty bottles of Pale Ale and squashed cigarette butts, pizza cartons and unidentifiable sludge. I don't see the roomies so often. They're pining for summer and holding out merely for Memorial Day and Montauk.
I wandered down 2nd and bought some virulent green vegetable juice, slewed down a coffee, jogged back to 1st. I had a driving lesson. Bill was sitting outside the apartment in a Toyota Corolla. I got in and we set off. I think I drove through about four red lights but it's New York so no one cared. Bill didn't seem to anyway. We talked about immigrants and New York and his kids and Italian Americans (he is one) and he told me to take a Tenement Tour which I'll probably do one day. He dropped me off at 11.30am and I walked down to the cafe on B, which was full of anxious, emaciated white people hunched over Macs. Outside an old lady sat on a stool next to a stall selling second-hand books, slouched forward so her enormous flaps of breasts dangled over pudgy knees, hands rubbing varicose veins slowly and painfully.
I'm just kind of mooching along at the moment. I got the finished copy of the book yesterday and it was underwhelming, a little like getting the book deal. People always screech at you when you say that kind of stuff, especially American females. OHMYGAWD! Aren't you excited? I wish I did get excited about things. I just kind of go, fuck, I have to coalesce all the ideas and notes and half finished books I've done over the last eighteen months and come up with the next one, and it has to be better than this. I mean, did no one ever think to tell me to shorten my sentences and utilize the full stop? Christ. I'm embarrassed by the sodding thing.
I'm bored of being single. I'm bored of my own company and bored of New York. New York was far more interesting viewed from the inside of a sleazy dive bar on 28th or a strip-joint in Midtown. No wonder people take so many drugs here. They're so inured to sensation from being slapped around by the city they need to feel something constantly or they panic that life isn't worth living. Now it's getting hot I want mountains and country and people who live life without this starving need for an adrenalin fix.
I'm getting so over people talking to me about 'my career'. You need to do this, you need to speak to this person, you need to make sure your agent makes sure... you need to get a meeting with.... I find these people kind of desperate. So I pester my agent and publishers, ascertain I don't actually need to be doing anything, and clear a month's space to fuck off away from all these desperadoes. Hey, I'm ambitious, don't get me wrong. I feel like a useless fuck right now as I want to be inundated with work and instead am crawling along with Laid (the second screenplay, halfway through) and a few articles for this and that. But I'm not gonna have meetings with a bunch of self-important losers merely for the sake of arranging meetings. I have no idea if my agent is good or not. He seems to spend most of his time ignoring me or sending placatory emails reassuring me I will make some more money one day, but the thought of getting another? Oh Christ, I hate these fucking cockroaches as it is. Exposure to more will surely kill me.
I've been in New York for exactly two weeks, and during that time no one has hit on me, no one has hissed at me, no one has asked me for a date, and I haven't even been the victim of an attempted rape.
I think it is the orange hair, and in an effort to hasten sexual molestation, I am going back to the Israeli twat today to demand a return to brunette.
I love this delightful lady for her wonderful travel advice. I am now Amtraking across the US for the entire month of June for no other reason than I have seriously itchy feet and need to see the Dakotas, Montana, Idaho, Seattle, Oregon, San Francisco, LA, Texas, New Orleans, Memphis, Atlanta et al really badly after being stuck in a council flat in Kentish Town for the last five months.
Montana, Montana, I'm so obsessed with seeing Montana.
(I stole a beer from the fridge to replace the purloined Gatorade)
My first ten days in New York did not really improve from the initial weekend of hell when I was locked in the swish South End Av apartment with a bunch of cokehead fashionistas. I discovered, in an ironic twist of fate, that my new stoner roommates are kleptomaniacs in the gatorade department, and smoke as much weed as Dingo et al did. Weed acts on me like airborne suicide. I just want to kill myself when I smell it and hear the inane slobbers of its zonked-out victims. Consequently I'm in a foul mood. The East Village sublet does not appear to have heating either, which would not ordinarily be important in mid-May but it's fucking freezing. Nor does the apartment have any curtains, so I must perform a striptease for the whole of 1st Avenue every morning and evening. Matters are not helped when FIL calls up and demands I pleasure myself while on the phone to him.
"I can't, there's this little hispanic guy watching me." "Just go under the covers" "He'll know what I'm doing then, it's gross!" "Aw, don't be so fucking miserable babe!" "Shut up, I can't. How's your mum?"
Long distance sucks ass.
On Monday I went out with an old friend of mine from boats, Shrek, and got bladdered at Bowery Bar. On Tuesday I resolved never to drink again in one of those self-hating porcelain epiphanies / lost blackberry loathings, and on Wednesday, after struggling with the screenplay for a few hours, I called up Ray the writer who lives two blocks away and we went to some dyke/dive bar on 13th street to talk about writing, sex and booze, just in time for the writers 4.30 pm watershed. After a bottle of wine we staggered to 2nd Avenue to watch Lost, and then the evening became subsumed beneath a sea of illegal substances ("I learned it by watching YOU!") and all I can remember are jello shots, drunken yoga and Ray's penis (innocent, for purposes of science and yoga. OK, me watching a boy piss in one of those delayed time reaction things where you realise, 'Oh shit, I was meant to have turned away at this point'). My British accent is completely back and I no longer sound like a New Yorker, so I have to go through the painful process of droning on for the amusement of my delightful American companions (Drug dealer, Attorney, journalism student and writer, respectively. Goddamit I hang out with WINNERS).
"Dat's so cute! Gawd, say it again! Fuck me, dat's so fucking hot! Say "WARRRRR-TTTTTEEEERRRR"
It wasn't funny three years ago and it's not funny now.
It's weird being back in entirely different circumstances, so less fraught and passionate, like returning to a relationship that was never great, but for some reason you can't break free of it, knowing, sadly, that it will eclipse anything else that comes after, that came before. I came with the avid intent to make a life here, and by the time I had the career and the apartment sorted, I was so broken and lonely and exhausted I just wanted to crawl home. Now I'm back - a mortgage in the UK, a lover I can't quite believe is mine, some screenplays on the boil and with no fixed purpose other than to write and travel and keep coming back to America in between trips to England and India...
I got very stressed today actually, had a shitty night's sleep because it's so cold, and then had to go visit the DMV to get my ID card sorted out and pick up a Driver's Manual (I'm re-learning to drive having failed to bother using my UK license for the last ten years). This seemed to take forever and I was shitty and cold and sad and pissed when I got home, and of course it wasn't home - home was on Mott Street but the asshole Polar-Explorer-who-never-went-to-the-Pole fucked that one up. Instead it's an apartment that smells of weed, fat surfer dudes from Montauk / California, and this peculiar whiff of boy. It all became too much and I started to weep like a girl, and then FIL called and kept saying unhelpful things like, "There's no point saying you worked hard for where you are and life should be better, d'you think beggars on the street in Delhi say the same thing?" which is all very well, but sometimes as a woman you just want to cry and hate the world because the shower is dirty, the apartment stinks, you're not getting laid and you want to look pretty but some asshole Israeli twat fucked up your hair and turned it from black to orange. Oh and your first book is coming out in five weeks and it seems like you have no publicity for it AT ALL.
I really think I should just become a fucking dumb-ass bitch stripper or something. See, now I can't even write because I'm so tired and cold and miserable. The book was a sodding fluke.
Tonight I am staying in with Fat Stoner No. 1 to drink tea, eat Wholefoods takeout and look dolefully at the rain. Roll on the end of driving lessons so I can rent that car, hit Montana and get the fuck away from this city before I snort it all up my sodding nostrils.
43 countries, 12 boats, hundreds of flights, a century of assholes and three years later... Living between London and NY (and preferring NY), writing for The Guardian, waiting for my goddamn book to hit the shelves, getting dooced constantly,
not so much musing on anal sex these days as wishing I was a dyke, but still pissing off the
religious right and taking my clothes off occasionally for the correct amount of Benjamins. It's all about the writing, world domination, fame and money. I'm not shallow. Big love people!
"She should be a huge public success, as sociopathic narcissists so often are."
The Guardian
