Somehow, this article I wrote about Seattle’s haunted Coke machine became my most popular post on there yet. Who knew?
You know, hard-hitting journalism.
Heading to Palm Springs this weekend, thank the lord. It’s time to get out of the oppressive snowglobe that this winter has transformed New York into. I’ll be relaxing inside the half-shell of a coconut, spooning a pineapple under the shade of a palm frond.
Give me the desert or give me death.
Due to vague and occasional demand, I’ve made a Tumblr just for my drawings, collages, and paintings.
Follow if you’re on the Tumz.
The Test of Timeless Aphrodisiacs
Another new piece up on VICE, just in time for Valentine’s Day.
Following up on the Cheesy Gordita Crunch tip, here’s some imagery for you.
In 2013, Grocery Store Items Talk Shit and Worship Lil B
Newish piece by yours truly on VICE, plus two more in the works
Holla at a Cheesy Gordita Crunch.
Everyone told me that I would hate winter on the East Coast. My poor father was certain that by mid-November I’d be calling nightly, begging for a ticket back to our perma-65-degree corner of California. To be fair, I thought I would too—two years in Washington state had me practically on the verge of suicide. A choking, damp grayness never seemed to lift; my shoes always felt like they’d been sitting in a leaking refrigerator. But the East Coast has a different kind of cold that doesn’t seem to wrap itself around you … it seems properly old, intentional, romantic. I’ve actually been sort of swept away and charmed by the leafless trees and the whiteness and the scarves and all.
For Thanksgiving, I visited my aunt Sarah and her family in a small town in Massachusetts, one that the Native Americans once entirely burned to the ground and left only a single barn standing. I threw rocks on a frozen pond with my 60-year-old uncle, who insisted that we eat the chocolates that we’d brought for Sarah before even making it to her house because he felt “hypoglycemic.” Seemed legit.
We went for long walks around her neighborhood and saw a beaver swimming under ice. I had never seen a beaver in person before; they’re big and slick and alien-looking. The woods around her house are Blair Witch-y and were covered in crispy leaves, which produced a thick crunch with every step of my boots, and are littered with stumps from where beavers feasted on tree bark to the point of destruction.
I wished for snow. I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve looked out of windows every place I’ve ever lived and just wished for a quiet, pure white blanket of snow. There’s some music in this world that you know just won’t sound good unless it’s snowing, and some thoughts that you can’t extinguish in their longing. And so, finally, it snowed.
I didn’t know that it makes everything glow like dawn, even at 3am, transforming even our dirty Brooklyn streets into something entirely innocent and peaceful and blank.
I woke up on Saturday morning at my friend Mark’s house and it took me five or ten minutes to glance out the window, and there it was again, piling up, and Mark put on Kate Bush and she sounded really great right then, at 10am with a dog sniffing my ear and his roommates drinking coffee and all of this snow.
I never wore headphones until I moved to New York. In my previous life, my designated music-listening time was in my car, which I will admit that I miss terribly even though I often just went on drives for the sake of leisure (“greenness” be damned). In San Francisco, I’d ride my bike to work in less than ten minutes, usually so deep in my own head that I could barely hear anything—maybe the birds if I was paying attention. It has only been when trying to cope with the cramped cacophony of the NYC subway system that it has appealed to me to tune things out. But I’ve come to like it, pumping in your own soundtrack while speed-walking across platforms or chasing up and down staircases. It makes it awfully easy to pretend you’re at the end of a film, and any second, a lost lover will come running after you in a last-ditch effort to make things right. Any minute now.
But these two things, snow and headphones, go very well together. Maybe the novelty will wear off, but right now this is when I feel the most human; walking at night under the glow of street lamps that bounce gentle, glittering white onto every surface, feeling like a song is following me in fog.
I made us all hot buttered rum and I’m going to cut a giant hole in the wall with a chainsaw and fill it with logs and make it into a fireplace. We’ll all lay on the ground in front of the fire very close together, our faces only inches apart, and tell each other all of our secrets.
We’ll wake up late in the morning and laugh that none of us noticed each other, all falling asleep at the exact same time.
This looks exactly like my dad.
Note: I realize that there are worse things than what I’m about to describe. Cancer, the Steubenville rape case, paraplegia, the 2008 financial crisis, etc. But honestly, I think more people have nightmares about this than any of the aforementioned.
Friday began as a day like any other. I woke up exhausted and shuffled blindly to the subway, where I saw a stray rat dragging an unidentified foodstuff through the tracks and felt very glad that it was 20 or 30 yards away, pacing in a valley where I was untouchable. I took the elevator to my office, ate Raisin Bran with almond milk at my desk while hunting through infinity-googol-plex photos of pumpkin pie slices on Getty, and listened to the same Mission of Burma song four times in a row on the subway. I invented the thoughts and desires of fellow commuters while picking lint off of my boiled wool sweater, got off two stops from my house and pretended that it was exercise. I went inside, listened to A$AP Ferg and drank a glass of Vouvray with my roommate, and suddenly remembered that it was my turn to take out the trash.
Taking out the trash is a somewhat involved process at [my address]. One must:
1. Drag the usually-exploding garbage bag down the stairs (leaking quinoa and crumpled paper towels along the way)
2. Throw open the quick-slamming front door
3. Walk about 10 feet to the right
4. Properly insert and turn a small gold key into the large, locked padlock on the plastic dumpster. Remove the padlock and open ‘er up. The dumpster also opens from the front, but typically one only needs to raise the rather heavy dumpster-lid and…
5. Aggressively throw the trash bag into one of the large silver cans within. Shut the lid, relock the padlock, get outta there.
Everything was going according to plan until I reached step 5.
The bag was heavy. Our recycling regimen had really fallen off the rails in past weeks, and glass bottles and jars added serious pounds to the vegetable matter and god-knows-whatever-else that creaked within the thin white plastic. I aimed and hurled the bag at the closer trashcan, but it fell to the side against the edge of the dumpster.
Fine, I thought. No problem; I’ll just open the plastic doors at the front of the dumpster, shimmy inside a bit, and push the bag into the can. Be a good citizen and all. Obey the wishes of our landlord, Auggie, who once told my roommate that his goal in life was to make her happy. Also might have tried to kiss her on the mouth one time, which was pretty inappropriate. Whatever.
But then … the worst thing ever happened.
As I swung open the front doors of the dumpster as though entering a ghost-town saloon, the absolute most atrocious smell that my nostrils have ever beheld wafted right up into my face. Hear you me when I tell you that I have smelled some really bad smells. I’ve worked at dive bars, grown up with boys who don’t believe in hygiene and don’t understand expiration dates, and lived in Tacoma, Washington. But you know in Auschwitz documentaries when the survivors are like, “You never forget the smell of burning/rotting human bodies mixed with excrement?” That was my immediate thought when I encountered this smell. It was almost visual in its potency and had the presence of the poisonous green cloud that cursed Sleeping Beauty. Confused and repulsed, I froze.
And then, very suddenly, I felt a strange, warm, scratching and rustling sensation about my feet and legs. I looked down and covering the bodily area between my toes and my knees were NEW YORK CITY RATS. MANY MANY RATS. Probably more than half a dozen huge, brown, hairy, yellow-toothed rats. And while I’m certain that they actually intended to get away from me, they were doing just the opposite. Their little nails clung to my jeans. Their shit-matted fur brushed against my favorite boots. It all happened in a split second that somehow lasted forever.
I’m sorry, but I’m going to provide a visual so that you can understand why this was the worst thing ever.
Their tails are horrible, scaly, leathery, bitten-off. Their eyes, beady. Their skin mottled with … conditions. This is how the spend most of their lives:
I was not reminded of Splinter from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I was reminded only of the bajillions of rats that I have seen running around the crudded veins of the subway tracks, noshing on KFC bones and human entrails, threatening to climb up the platform and ever-so-gently brush their bubonic-plagued bodies against us. But we thank our lucky stars that they never really do (or we at least should). There are between 8 million and 32 million rats in New York City, and they mostly keep to themselves … until now.
I leapt back and, in a way that I didn’t think I was female enough to be capable of, emitted a high-pitched scream that caused all of the mutant rodents to leap from my gams and scatter. I stood there paralyzed, backing away from the dumpster and hyperventilating while a group of Puerto Rican men laughed their asses off.
“I … DID YOU … DID YOU SEE THAT?” I asked them.
“What happened, mami, some rats? Rats in the garbage?”
“YES … RATS … THEY TOUCHED ME … THEY CLIMBED ON ME.”
One of the men came over and calmly shut the dumpster for me. I wondered if trash rats had ever climbed all over him and traumatized him beyond repair. Clearly not, I thought, as he fearlessly threw the plastic doors shut. Or maybe he just figured that all of the rats had already attacked me and were ready for a siesta. I owed this man thanks but was unable to form words.
“I WAS … THE RATS …”
“I seen some rats in there, little mice too, you know. Better be careful.”
I stumbled back up the stairs and into my house, trying to think of ways that I could sterilize my entire body. I had bought these particular jeans literally the day before and would risk ruining them if I washed them in hot water, and my boots were beyond beloved to me. I had resoled them three times; throwing them away was out of the question. But how could I possibly be cleansed of this incident? So far all I can think of is washing my hands for 2-3 minutes after touching either garment.
A year or two ago, I came across a photo of a truly behemoth rat allegedly found in a Foot Locker in the Bronx. I have left it behind a link so that you are not involuntarily plagued with the same nightmares that I was after seeing it, or if you are, you were at least warned fairly beforehand. I saw this photo long before I had decided to migrate to the East Coast, and I thought that it was merely photo witchery or alarmist propaganda.
But I take it all back. If the End of Days is near, New York rats are leading the way. They’re powerful, and plentiful, and I think that they’re hoarding dead human bodies in our dumpster.
On the bright side, at least they weren’t tarantulas or cobras. That’s the only way that I can think sunnily about this thing that happened, this terrible, horrible thing. This worst thing ever.
HILARY POLLACK 