Gabby Gabby
Dining Alone At Plaza Azteca
You are always sending me quotes from books that I haven’t read and probably will never read.
We talk about these quotes like conversation because we don’t have anything else to say to each other.
Instead of talking about current events, pop culture, or emailing YouTube video links back and forth, we talk about the past. The unchanging events of fictional characters with lives that are more interesting than ours. Filtering our current stimuli through the lens of some dead white guy.
You like to point out quotes that seem to abstractly apply to our current situation.
I’m currently shitting. If you were still around you would probably have a quote for that.
Through you I’ve read Phillip Roth:
[“This made me laugh,” you said.]
“Just as I am about to unlock the door, imagining I have covered my tracks. My heart lurches at the sight of what is hanging like snot to the toe of my shoe. I am the Roskolnikov of jerking off- the sticky evidence is everywhere!”
[“It has a section titled ‘Cunt Crazy’. The son has a literal Oedipal fixation on his mother. It is written in stream-of-consciousness self-loathing Jewish-American continuous prose. What is with male writers and their cocks? I’ve never felt the urge to write about jacking off. But it is a perennial fixation for Updike and apparently Phillip Roth.”
I said something like, “I think writing is not dissimilar to masturbation.”]
Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty by Bradley K. Martin:
“North Korea called Carter a ‘vicious political mountebank;” his journey, ‘a powder-reeking trip of a hypocrite agitating for aggression and war.’ But a North Korean spokesman in Tokyo said that, in the North Korean lexicon, this was a relatively moderate slur. At least the North had not called Carter an imperialist, its worst insult. “Not an imperialist! Anything but that!”
[For three days we joked in mock horror about the thought of being called an imperialist. You brought up the joke recently and I groaned in return.]
The Marriage Plot by Jeffery Eugenides:
“He held up the baggie. Leonard stuck his nose into the bag and his depression lifted another notch. It smelled like the Amazonian rain forest, like putting your head between the legs of a native girl that had never heard of Christianity.”
[You called it a ‘paltry piece of fiction’ but you said you wanted to put your head between my legs and I said ‘okay’ even though I had no intention of letting you do that. I remembered the first time you went down on me in the hotel room that you lived in at the time. It was the first time anyone had ever gone down on me. It was the first time someone had done something specifically for me for more than an hour. You kept looking up at me periodically with this apologetic look on your face. I kept looking at your bed sheets, trying to figure out the thread count with a concerned enough look on my face that could have hopefully been misconstrued as a look of pleasure. You had an asthma attack during and after.]
Once, you texted me and said, “I must fuck you.”
I didn’t reply but I took a screen shot of the text. I texted you the screenshot a few days later without context.
It is the only quote I have sent you. I think I sent it in a way that meant, ‘look at all the ridiculous things you say to me.’ But you took it as meaning I wanted to sext.
That was the conversation that you told me I would be good at writing erotica and then made sure to add that you’re too much of a book snob to read erotica. Though, while I was sending you detailed descriptions of how I masturbated (face down, sometimes with lesbian porn) you didn’t seem to mind erotic realism.
Tonight you will text me with something like,
“Intense solitude becomes unbearable only when there’s nothing one wishes to say to another.”
You’ll text me again before I answer and tell me that the quote is from ‘Americana’ by Don DeLillo.
I will look at my Iphone light up then check my Gmail.
While I’m going through my spam inbox, trying to figure out how to get off all of these subscription lists (Macy’s, PETA, Sierra Club, ModCloth, Urban Outfitters) that I thought were a good idea to sign up for at some point, you’ll text me a third time and say something like,
“I just finished a margarita. I am dining at alone at Plaza Azteca”
You have perfectly crafted a scenario within the span of three text messages of a lonely drunk writer, drinking comically tropical drinks in a Mexican restaurant, while contemplating the prose of the ‘American heartland’. In the back of your mind, behind your wire framed glasses, matted, self-conscious beard, and nervously thin lips, you think that this is a romantic vision of a struggling writer that drinks margaritas until drunk or out of cash and eats vegetarian tacos because they are cheaper.
Bukowski in paradise.
You quoted Bukowski too many times to count. It was mostly in reference to how you were so much like him. Or how you thought that drinking at 3 am on a Tuesday while writing self-loathing poetry made you so much like him. I usually waited until about the fifth text in a row to text you back when you got started on your Bukowski rants. I knew that the important part wasn’t that I had anything to say back. The important part was to make you feel like someone else thought you were like Bukowski. I didn’t think that but I also didn’t feel strongly enough against it to start any sort of debate.
I always wanted to tell you that I hate Bukowski.
I hate Bukowski. Maybe you are kind of like him.
In response to the first text in the trilogy I text back,
“I like that quote”
Even though I don’t really like that quote.
I like to sit alone and not talk about how I’m sitting alone. I like to drink to get drunk then go to sleep in my own bed. I don’t mind not having anything to say.
Immediately you respond,
“I knew you would.”
“I want you. Come to me.”
I do not want to drink margaritas with you. I do not want to talk in quotes. I do want to be the kind of person that brings novels to Mexican restaurants.
I do not want to be with the kind of person that thinks bringing a novel to a Mexican restaurant makes them an interesting person.
Some nights I just want to watch Mean Girls and talk about the weather. Some nights I really don’t care what is and isn’t post-modern. Some nights I wish that we were post-conversation.
I wish that we didn’t have to turn everything into a metaphor for itself.
You once told me I was your ‘manic pixie dream girl’ like you had never even spoken to me before. Like I was a caricature of myself or a trope to be employed in one of your short stories. You can never talk to me like I am in the present tense.
If I met you at Plaza Azteca I would order a beer, or I would get you to order a beer for me, and you would start talking about how beer makes your stomach queasy the way I make your stomach queasy. The way you are writing a novella about a girl that makes your stomach queasy. You will use that word ‘queasy’ and I will hate it but I will nod like I am interested in becoming a character. I would spend the evening trying to figure out ways to hide my water cup from the waiter who was determined not to see it empty. I would want to see the cup completely empty. No water, no ice. I would sip my beer and hide my water and you would talk to me about something you read or wanted to read. Something about Gore Vidal or Salman Rushdie. You wouldn’t notice what I was doing with my water. I would think silently about how many water related quotes you had; quotes about being empty.
“K.”
Gabby Gabby is the ‘leader’ of ‘Illuminati Girl Gang’. She is the author of three e-books, ‘Pretty Flowers’, ‘The Black Dot Series’ and ‘Holly Go Lightly’. Her full length poetry collection is forthcoming from Civil Coping Mechanisms (2014).
