Extraordinary machine

non-sequiturs on starting fires, maturity, and loving brooklyn

Matthew Lopas, ‘Black Swan’

May 22 — There is a fire truck parked precisely outside of my new gallery. I’m alone there today, babysitting the labyrinth of rooms; I’m sitting at a glass table between a vase of wilting flowers and a ceramic vase with a painted image of Sailor Moon getting fucked by a veiny penis. I can’t stop sneezing from all of the dust. The fire truck has a Chucky doll sticking out from one window. The lights are blinking, but I hear no sirens, and I smell no smoke, as if I’m in a dream where some senses have been omitted.

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I set part of my hair on fire last week. I’d just gotten my first-ever blowout at the notorious Drybar in Tribeca, and leaning forward to flick a light onto the end of my skinny menthol while waiting to cross West Broadway, a few ends went up in flames. I quickly thought of the hairspray I’d asked for an extra hit of two minutes prior: dumbass. Surely I had a few witnesses to my somewhat-contained flailing and grasping at the burning lock with my fingers, but once I’d doused the flame, all I could do was laugh and wait for the light to turn. I think I realized almost instantly that, considering the fact that I had not melted off my face, I would share this scene with strangers at parties or bars the following week. I would at least tweet about it.

The singed fumes followed me around the rest of the evening, even as I clicked around in an otherwise perfect assemblage of a dress and heels I’d thrifted the day prior. A friend who told me that she used to get blowouts before every opening added that it’s the cigarettes that are the problem, not the blowout. I read later that some women have actually died in this exact way. Why does the glam Girlboss aesthetic and tortured artist habit feel so impossible to mix, like a doomed chemical equation? Surely the 1950s Hollywood women whose coiffures adorned the salon’s walls were also chain smokers?

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Months ago, there was a fire across the street from my old gallery—trucks clotted the avenue, with ladders angled up to the fourth and fifth floors of the old SoHo building, men in heavy gear swarming below. Windows had been smashed through or lifted to air the smoke, and one of them had been propped open with a bamboo chair. Through another, I could see delicate lingerie on a rack, their jewel tones catching light as they spun almost imperceptibly.

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I commit a terrible faux-pas one evening when, behaving horribly out-of-character, I send a thorny text to the woman who lives above me: Hey Susan! I hate to be a busybody but is there a chance you could gently remind the folks housesitting upstairs that there are downstairs neighbors who can hear them? I think this is the third time now that there’s been loud partying, screaming, etc. from early evening late into the night…

I do not exaggerate about the noise nor the previous times this has occurred, but is barely 8:30pm, and I have no good reason to explain why I, as a 23-year-old, am trying to read articles on my laptop in the dead silence of the basement on a Saturday night. After waiting thirty or so minutes for Susan to respond, I decide to take things into my own hands and march up the stoop to ring the doorbell. My hands are shaking, and I can envision the perpetrators vividly: a gang of rich Yale sophomores who have time and time again trashed our sweet neighbor’s lovely home with White Claw cans and crushed Adderall. I am stunned to see a group of much younger-looking kids in bar clothes and beers in their hands descend the stairs one by one, crowding up to give me suspicious looks before eventually parting to reveal Susan’s teenage daughter. She opens the door and apologizes to me before I can say a word. We’re about to leave, sorrry! I apologize in return and lie to her face: I promise I won’t say anything.

I rush back down the stoop in a haze of shame. Dumbass. It’s graduation season, and how do I know it’s not her birthday or something? Who am I to narc on a teen having fun? Wasn’t it only a handful of years ago I was trashing the houses of rich strangers and screaming until dawn? When did I suddenly become the worst sort of person imaginable?

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Susan, forgiving my brief moment of demonic middle-aged hag possession, asks me a week later if I can feed their cats. I have never been into the upper 75% of the brownstone we share and I’m thrilled by the opportunity, as my worst lifelong pleasure is walking through other peoples’ spaces while they’re not at home. At the top of a steep staircase that spirals over my head toward a skylight, I encounter a different type of luxury than the one I expected. The apartment’s furnishings are not excessively expensive-looking and sparkling clean, but what I can only think to describe as idiosyncratic: most appear to be selected tastefully, brought home from wherever they escape to abroad, pottery and drawings and room dividers and ornamented mirrors. The effect is so far from any nameable style, anything one could see in a Pottery Barn catalog or Architectural Digest video. That is to say that it enamors me to the point where I get a headache and have difficulty breathing. I have no idea how long I am up there, craning my neck and letting their Devon Rex bump against my shins with violent affection. I feel as if I’ve stepped into Narnia. I stop my freak-self from going upstairs or touching anything, but can’t help but snap a few pictures of particular corners “for inspiration” should I ever have money. When I finally return, I declare to C that our basement looks like a dump, a comparative dump.

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Later that evening, I’m walking home from Evana’s when I spot a little wooden table in front of someone else’s stoop and decide that it simply must be a part of our home. I hoist it only a few blocks, but end up with bruises on my thighs and almost unbearable pain in every part of my body for the next several days. I walk like an old lady, slightly angled, with one bent elbow and a waving forearm. The table—although imperfect, with a gnawed-through hole in one drawer I later discovered—does look lovely in the corner next to the stove. It is also a sore reminder of my faulty impulse control and cheap stoop materialism.

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I haven’t washed my hair in nearly a week, but I swear to God people are looking at me differently now that I have a blowout.

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Who am I now, and who am I trying to be?

Someone asked me at a party whether or not I was going out, or tied in some way to the “downtown scene,” and I simply answered: No, I live in Central Brooklyn and I have a dog.

I remember telling someone long ago that I was moving to my current neighborhood, and they told me I’d wind up with a stroller within the year. This strikes me as the type of thing I would typically feel miserable about: early on-set domesticity, and with that, waste, anonymity, stasis. But I’m not sure if I do. I’m not sure if I feel anything.

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Nowadays people in their twenties act like they’re in their thirties, and people in their thirties act like they’re in their twenties, some people say, but I can’t wrap my head around what that means. The median age of most people in my life sits right at thirty. I am now in a habit of constantly asking these people what their life was like at 23. Usually I am told it was shambolic, and that I shouldn’t worry, and that I am such a little baby.

I find myself paying close attention when watching the people I admire, even in their small scenes of success, commit their own faux pas.

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I imagine feeling flattered when people tell me I seem mature for my age, but I’m not sure if I am either—mature for my age, or flattered by that impression. I am sometimes grasped with a sudden fear that I am aging ahead of myself too quickly, and perhaps that this aging is only performative: there is a faltering teenage girl stuck inside of me, and my deep immaturity becomes more and more shrouded by social posturing over the years. I wonder if I enjoy some spheres of Twitter because they feel privately infantile, a space where women in their late twenties and early thirties express, and even revere, what I can only describe now as girlishness. I have somehow learned to equate immaturity with humiliation/pleasure and maturity with dread/self-satisfaction.

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I guess I still miss the short summer I lived above a sex shop in downtown Manhattan and worked nights at a bar and felt like I was living fast and hard, because it felt then like I was in my quintessential early twenties, with my girly shithole of a bedroom where I’d sit on my knees in front of my Amazon-delivered mattress and snort Vyvanse and do my makeup in a floor-length mirror while drunk NYU students swarmed the street outside of my window. I Romanticize this all like I’m 100 years old, although it wasn’t that long ago and I don’t think anything in me has fundamentally changed.

Right now I am burning taper candles I precariously shoved into empty liquor bottles on my mantle because I’ve seen it done on Pinterest. I am still wary of the mid-thirties fantasy of stability and comfort, or whatever false idols New Yorkers seek by buying the things in subway ads and gentrifying brownstones and going to yoga class and standing in line at the bakery with strollers and dogs and yes, even just going into the city to get a blowout at the goddamn Drybar.

Yet I am surprised to realize, wandering for miles toward Flatbush in the heat while wearing the wrong shoes, how fiercely I love Brooklyn these days. It is a place where time remains in the historic rooftops of buildings, and in the outdated awnings of storefronts below, and my age somehow becomes liquid and irrelevant. Comfort or not, it is a place where I walk and walk and the road just rolls out behind me.

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