DISPATCH: The Giancarlo DiTrapano Foundation at Nightclub 101 (Manhattan, NY)
I LEFT MY PANTS IN NEW YORK
In many ways, this one is a do-over: I had tickets to the Giancarlo DiTrapano Foundation’s last NY event back in January, but that big blizzard we had in the Northeast got a lot of trains cancelled. No worries this time. I arrive at the Pittsburgh station around 6:45am. I’m surprised by how packed it is. Packed enough that I’m worried I’m gonna end up with a real shitty seat. Thankfully my girlfriend left me her credit card so I’m checking if I can upgrade for a business class seat. I stand off to the side and navigate the Amtrak app.
“Excuse me,” an older woman says behind me. “Are you in business class?”
I realize I’m standing in what’s going to be the business class line. I guess I don’t want to get out of line since I’m trying to upgrade, right? Amtrak lets you bid on a seat. I bid the minimum, which the app warns me may not be too low. “Maybe,” I say to the woman. “I’m trying to figure that out right now.”
“Mhm,” she flattens her mouth. “So you’re just coach.”
“If you’d feel better, you can get in front of me.”
She happily does and gives me a side eye as she passes. I about break my fucking thumb reopening the Amtrak app and adjusting my bid until it says “Likely to Succeed.” This is only about five dollars more. I spend the next ten minutes refreshing the app, waiting for the results of my bid. A line has formed for coach which stretches around the station. I keep refreshing. My battery, which was at 97% when I arrived, is down to 89%. This is the most people I’ve ever seen waiting for a train without there being a ton of Amish people. I tried not to sleep too much so that I could just rest on the train; if I end up in coach I’m fucked. Believe it or not, a bad train is probably the very worst way to travel for one reason: people get up and walk around. On a greyhound you’re all sad and disgusted and stationary. But on a busy Amtrak some family will let their crying toddler run up and down the aisle. Someone will come back from the dining car with entirely too much crap which they proceed to spill everywhere. Someone will go to the restroom and come back and you’ll realize they weren’t wearing shoes. A quiet Amtrak is a peace unlike any other, but a packed Amtrak is what I’ll surely ride after I step out of my deathbed.
Fuck. Why didn’t I just buy a better seat to begin with? It wasn’t that much more! But, less than one minute before the train calls for business class passengers to begin boarding, my bid goes through! Okay forget everything I just said, I’m riding in style today. We go up to the train platform; the moment I’m off the escalator I walk past the lady who went ahead of me in line. Had I been wearing suspenders I’d have looped my thumbs through them. Yes, she’s old and slow and miserable while, for this one moment at least, I am young and quick and enchanted with the thought of my head hitting the reclined headrest of a business class seat. I briefly wonder if Gian, a man I never met, who couldn’t have possibly known who I was, might be proud of me. Probably not. I pop a Zzzquil and am knocked out for six of the eight hours we travel. I dream of absolutely nothing. It’s great.
We arrive in the city, I go straight from Moynihan to B&H to buy a roll of Ektapan 3200. Could I just shoot pictures with my phone? No, actually.
In addition to a great seat on the train, I’ve gotten a room for the night. I’m actually here a day early. It would probably be smarter to come in on Friday, the day of the reading, and stay overnight, but a Friday night room was substantially more expensive than a Thursday night. It doesn’t matter who’s paying, I’m not willing to do that.
The cheapest hotel was the Paramount in Times Square. I am forever stuck in Times Square because I am forever stuck as a perpetual tourist. Whatever taste or culture I may accrue in my travels is entirely accidental and in spite of myself. That culture, for this trip, is due to the World Cup. Germany and Ecuador are playing over in Jersey and the hotel lobby—neon and chic with a projector showing all of the Fifa matches—is filled with jubilant fútbol fans. What a fantastic irony that the single best part of America’s semiquincentennial has been seeing the country filled with joyous crowds of foreigners bonding over cheap barbeque and beer. I watch the game for a bit but it remains tied as I head up to my room.
What a joke of a room, too. I have a view of a brick wall and the toilet is wedged between a tall steam heater and the sink in such a way that I have to sit diagonally to actually use it. I undress and step into a lukewarm shower with weak water pressure, only to be greeted by the dreaded 3-in-1 shower gel crap every hotel seems to use now. What happened to those delightful little bars of almond-scented soap? Wrapped in paper, a little present to open; if there was an extra, you took it and a small part of your journey got to literally come home with you. The enshittification of even the most modest modern joys is beyond depressing. We are sold discomfort so that we may pay extra for the luxury of relief. And have you ever tried to jerk off with that shower gel stuff? It’s impossible. Not even worth trying.
I dry myself off and get ready to put my clothes back on. Except I did it again. I split my pants. I don’t know what it is but every pair of pants I own eventually gets ripped at the crotch. I’m not running around doing the splits like Kenzie on Love Island; I don’t get it. But it’s the perfect rebuttal to my preternatural hobo mindset. Pack more than one pair of pants, man. Jesus. How long was I walking around Manhattan with my balls hanging out? It’s like some cosmic joke to keep me from ever feeling remotely comfortable in this city. Oh, he’s been visiting a lot lately? Gettin’ a little too cocky. Heheheh let’s make that literal: TEAR HIS FUCKIN PANTS OPEN.
Well, off to the Levi’s store, where a smaller pair of pants fits perfectly but costs entirely way too much and a larger pair of pants barely buttons but is on sale. I size up and buy cheap. Then off to IFC, where apparently John Waters was just having a Q&A with Criterion for Desperate Living. When I see one of the Criterion people is distracted, I snatch a tote bag and scurry to my screening of Jinsei, which is remarkably good. Before that film, a trailer for a Mary Oliver documentary gets interrupted by a kid sitting next to me, who nudges his friends upon seeing Nick Flynn talking about Oliver’s poetry. “What the fuck?” He says. “That’s my neighbor, Nick!” New York is an unusually small city in many ways. I first met Flynn after a reading at the Strand for the PEN Prison Writing Awards several years ago; I may in fact be the first winner of those awards to read their own work. After the reading, Flynn offered me a stick of gum and asked how long I’d been in jail for. “About nine months,” I said.
“But you’d been writing before that?”
I nod my head.
“Okay, that’s what I thought,” Nick said. “Because you don’t learn how to do that in nine months.”
This remains the greatest compliment a professional writer has ever given me.
I think about that most of the night, heading back to the Paramount lobby to watch the US get beaten by Türkiye. How many writers have I known? And when did my mindset mellow out to where I’m happy to write about them here and now? These little dispatches are meant to use narcissism as a trojan horse for genuine admiration. At least, I hope that’s how the subjects feel. It wasn’t always that way. I remember shortly after we got our apartment, I bought a punching bag off of Craigslist and installed it in our living room, velcroing photos of authors I loved. Because I loved them, I wanted to beat their secrets out of them. But as Joyce Carol Oates once said, boxing is not a metaphor for anything. Boxing is just boxing. So I’ll leave that there. I got rid of the bag years ago. But I will say, Giancarlo DiTrapano is someone I would have velcroed to the bag while he was alive. I punched plenty of dead guys’ photographs, but I don’t think I would have done that with Gian. Whatever secret he held, he took with him. I guess it always feels that way when someone dies too young.
I check out of the hotel at 11 and put my pants into a trash bin in Times Square. The kind that you lower open like a thrift store donation box that prevents you from reaching into the bin. I shove the pants in but the bin won’t close, I try to open the lid and push the pants down but they won’t go. My arm is halfway in the trash bin and a cop at the corner is staring at me. I pull my hand out and leave the pants there, one leg dangling from the lid. I spend most of the day sitting in Central Park, people watching. I don’t see much worth mentioning. I listen to an interview of Ta-Nehisi Coates with Sam Seder and Emma Vigeland. Around 5pm I start heading towards 101 Avenue A, aka Nightclub 101.
The bar is empty besides staff. I buy a cider and sit at the end of the bar, next to a plug, as my phone is nearly dead. The first person I see is Sean Thor Conroe, whose Walk Book was officially released a few days earlier from Adam Voith’s Little Engine press. Shortly after them I see Zona’s own Conor Hultman, wearing a Tyrant Books t-shirt just to really rub in the fact that he’s cooler than all of us. Staff directs them to the basement, where the event is taking place. I wait for my phone to fully charge and eventually follow.
Voith and I talk about Sean’s new book, as well as Pittsburgh, which Voith has family in. Seems like everyone has family in Pittsburgh; I’m unsure if that speaks to how many people end up there or how many leave. Nico Carrasquillo of the Mutt reading series shows up and asks when my writeup of Mutt’s last event will go live. I tell her Hultman promised it’d be up today but maybe he scrapped it or something. Take it up with him. Hultman chalks this up to a clerical error and leaves in a hurry, supposedly to cover another event happening tonight as well, but it appeared he was holding his jaw as he left. I think Carrasquillo hit him.
Tom Ianelli, who actually read at that Mutt event, arrives and talks with Voith about the success of their placing copies of The Walk Book out for sale at Peter Books, over on Bedford and 5th. “For sale” is a misnomer: the books are free. Online or on the street, even a few on a table here tonight. A gift from Sean Thor Conroe is the sales pitch tagline and it works. I notice people are beginning to fill the basement by this point. The program starts pretty much on time.
Charlotte Sununu, representing the Foundation, kicks things off with a reading from the new Vices book, a collection of DiTrapano’s essays for Vice magazine “before it sucked,” Sununu clarifies. The piece is about Gian discovering Scott McClanahan, not through reading, but watching a video of him performing one of his pieces. Having seen Scott read last March in Baltimore, I can attest to Gian’s observation that Scott’s voice lends so much to the work. As someone who writes more for the ear than the page, I can appreciate how his delivery of the material gives it that much more power. This winds up echoing through most of the night, with each reader bringing a casual vibe to their readings. For someone who worshipped the work from Tyrant back in the day, this is both alarming and refreshing. Although nobody here is putting their coolness ahead of their work, this is ultimately just a hangout in an East Village basement.
Maeve Barry is the first official reader. She describes a girl, Brianna, her character knew growing up. Brianna bites her and, instead of getting in trouble, is consoled due to the fact Barry screams at her. For the first of what would be many times throughout the evening, I find myself eerily relating to the work. I used to have these cousins growing up. Blonde hair and blue eyes, little cherub faces, that would fucking torture me. One would throw himself on the ground as the other ran to tell on me to our grandma. The “injured” cousin on the ground would wink at me and pretend to cry. As pathetic as it may sound, the sense of injustice this instilled within me has never quite been resolved. For Barry’s story, she and Brianna end up in a shabby barn, where Brianna has promised her beautiful horse, Cupcake, lives. Brianna shows off her grandfather’s dirty magazines, then a loaded rifle. As the tension rackets up, the question of whether or not Cupcake is even real lingers, but ultimately it’s a double bluff as the horse does indeed exist, but is so tired and sickly that Barry runs away and immediately calls her mother to pick her up. Years later she sees Brianna at a grocery store. Skinny, eyes glazed. Catatonic.
Jimmy Cajoleas, one of the editors of the illustrious Southwest Review, opens by asking if we’re hearing any feedback from the mic. “Eh,” he shrugs. “Who cares?” He reads a piece combining two true stories from his life into one very good fiction piece. Part of a touring band, Jimmy’s character is stuck driving the van at 4 am (the reason being that his driving is so bad everyone needs to be asleep to withstand it, preferring to die in the middle of the night than be awake to suffer) and pulls into a gas station near Nashville. There he sees a man chasing a random cat, which he eventually catches and tosses into his car. Jimmy’s character goes into the gas station to buy snacks as the cat-snatcher yells at the clerk that he needs a receipt, as he’s on a business trip. The clerk says they’re out of receipt paper, which is infuriating enough to the man to pull a gun. Jimmy’s character, of course, knocked something over. Instead of blasting him away, the man with the gun tells the clerk to ring him out. In a panic, the clerk overcharges the items, which Jimmy’s character tries to forgive, but the man with the gun won’t hear of it, demanding he give the correct change. It becomes somewhat reminiscent of Robert Loggia’s driving manual scene from Lost Highway. The man with the gun informs Jimmy’s character that he knows what this looks like, but this is a business trip, so he needs receipts or his boss will go apeshit. The man launches into a tirade about all of his life’s troubles, how hard it was to get his wife pregnant and now not being home to help raise their child. He hugs Jimmy’s character, who can’t resist asking what’s up with the cat. “It’s a pet,” the man with a gun says, police sirens in the distance. “Who doesn’t love pets?”
Stacy Skolnik reads from her recent poetry collection, Robert Frost, named after a former high school friend of Skolnik’s who became homeless but remained an avid poster on Facebook. These posts, often appearing benign on the surface, reveal the mindset of nomadic living in America. Lines like, “This sub is supposed to be six inches but I think I got ripped off an inch” elicit scattered chuckles, but it becomes apparent this is a man rightly obsessed with examining the mechanics of his increasingly difficult survival. The room begins to become so quiet I feel bad taking a photograph. Again I’m reminded of my intimate familiarity with the subject matter. For a short time I was homeless. I attended a semester of college in Iowa, wasn’t quite digging it, and tried to come back home. Believing I’d be forced to go back to school, my parents wouldn’t let me stay there anymore. It’s one of those things you don’t empathize with until you’re older. A decision that led to a lot of crazy life in my life which sucked then but is lore now. So whatever. I was working at an AMC movie theatre, eating unsold hotdogs and bathing myself in the sink for the 3D glasses washing station. Just before I was kicked out, I’d booked a solo painting show in a small gallery outside of Pittsburgh. To have as much time as I needed to set up the show, I was given a key to the gallery. I slept in the crawl space beneath the front display window. Somehow I was found out and woke up one morning to two Subway sandwiches on the floor waiting for me. It’s impossible to overstate how overwhelming such a gesture feels. It swells your heart, but fills it with lead. You feel it sink down into your ass and never leave. But as Frost/Skolnik says in one of the poems, “Anything can be beautiful when you look at it with love.”
Before Aziza Kasumov takes the stage, I notice that someone is wearing clove perfume. It smells like L’Etang Noir, which is an interesting choice for how goddamn hot it is as I’d pretty strongly consider that a Winter fragrance. Then again I have no issue wearing something like Voice of the Snake in ninety-degree weather, so whatever. Still, the basement is getting very warm and now smells like a stale pack of Djarums.
Kasumov reads from her novel in progress about a boy in the Soviet Union in 1989. It begins with him commandeering a boat which he aimlessly takes into the Baltic Sea, unsure if he should try to escape or simply go back home. He chooses the latter, and we know that won’t turn out well. The boy’s father reads a story in the paper about two hippy girls who try to escape but drowned. The father says if the boy ever did the same he would drown him himself, then slams his son’s head off the newspaper on the table. The boy later finds the print still stained to his nose. Later on, after some time, the boy has sex with a woman and thinks of being stuck on that boat, as he believes the thought would keep him from coming. Instead it has the opposite effect. He tries to pay the girl but she’s more interested in going to America with him. He says yes and we’re left to wonder what might happen from here. It will be exciting to see where Kasumov takes this.
Sununu introduces Dean Jamieson by saying that, during his time at the Foundation’s residency in Italy, his parents asked that he receive adult supervision while in their swimming pool. Fair enough, as Jamieson enthusiastically propels himself into the story of a former T-Mobile employee, Virgil, who gets fired after getting caught cranking it at work (I begin to wonder why Jamieson’s parents believed he required supervision). Virgil gets a new job thanks to his mother, whom his new boss Herbert annoyingly asks about often. Jamieson sells his neurotic fiction with a reading that’s more engaged than every other reader combined up till this point. It risks dropping into “author voice” but never inappropriately, especially with lines like, “The beginning of the end but the end hasn’t ended yet, instead dragging onnnnn and on.” It’s fun work that reminds me of my first few jobs as a teenager. That awful realization that this is what will be expected of you for the rest of your sad, short, American life. It’s enough to make anyone lose it.
Izzy Casey was at the same Baltimore reading as McClanahan a few months ago, so I’m eager to hear more of her work. This time, however, she reads fiction instead of poetry. This doesn’t change her reading voice—loud, monotone, and singsong—which lends itself so well to her work. Casey takes a moment to find the story and apologizes for having a shitty phone. Up until now I want to say everyone else read from paper, but the 101 basement is pretty dark. A few of the previous readers remarked as such. Casey’s piece finally opens with how it isn’t worth cleaning up cat shit because that isn’t a task you’d ever boast about doing. A long series of cats have left a longer series of shits in this family’s life. However, today the main character must clean up, as CPS or someone similar is coming to check in on her to see if she should be taken away from her mother who is as large and pale and cold as their refrigerator filled with spoiled milk. The whole thing feels like it would belong in a pre-AI bullshit Harmony Korine film, the eclectic style of which can’t even be interrupted by Casey’s aunt calling her in the middle of the reading. Back to the cleaning, which for them involves simply moving garbage from one room to another. As one last measure before their visitors arrive, both of them pray to Jesus.
Conroe ends up as the final, semi-surprise guest of the evening. He wasn’t officially on the bill for tonight, but it seems one reader had to drop out and things got reshuffled. It’s fitting Conroe ends up being here; visiting the New York Tyrant/Gian Instagram page, an early cover of Conroe’s first novel, Fuccboi, is one of the last posts. Him getting to read from the new book is only right. “This book is about when I tried to walk across the country,” Conroe says. “...America.” He says he’s gonna read one page that he thinks is a good page, but ends up introducing the book and its inception for just as long as he ends up reading. I guess it’s not surprising he has a podcast. In The Walk Book, Conroe wakes up in a ditch near a Walmart parking lot. This is day 78 of his 100 day journey. As promised during his intro, the work is procedural. Clipped but conversational. Conroe meets a man named Eno who hopped a train. Eno has a scar from a dude beating him up for trying to stop the dude from beating up another homeless guy. Again, the ghost of the material haunts me. I’ve been working on a train-hopping novel for years now. Hopped a couple myself literally just for a few minutes at a time to get a feel for the physical mechanics of doing such a thing. But I’ve traveled all over and met people like Eno. Folks who wound up on the rails because there was no place else to wind up. They aren’t running away from anything because it’s all gone. They’re running towards something that probably doesn’t even exist. I received my free copy of The Walk Book a couple days ago and can’t wait to see what Conroe was running, or, uh, walking towards.
Sununu thanks everyone and tells us to stick around for some jazz. As she walks off the stage a playlist begins and I wonder if that’s all she meant, because that’d be funny. But no, there is a band, they just need a few minutes to set up. Unfortunately for them the room halves within moments. It’s just too fucking hot down here. Maeve Barry drops a wine glass on the floor; supposedly this is an accident but the rumor is she purposefully hurled it onto the floor due to the frustrating heat. Either way I grab a trash can from the corner of the room and hand it to Barry’s friend to throw the shards away. The room continues to thin out. I talk to Jimmy Cajoleas for a while. He has a tote bag of a record store featuring the lady in the radiator from Eraserhead. I point that out and Cajoleas says he uses the tote bag as a sort of litmus test. Will people recognize the record store, or the Eraserhead imagery? Something about this makes me feel slightly ashamed, like I picked the far easier option to notice. Cajoleas looks at me with a sort of resigned pity, his hand gently rubbing the tote bag, a sinister gleam in his eyes. I’m pretty sure he chuckles at me beneath his breath. This idiot doesn’t know the record store this is from. As I’m prone to, I double down. I begin telling the story of how I met David Lynch, which is a pretty good party story. Laura Albert keeps trying to convince me to turn it into something for The Moth and maybe I will someday. Nick Dove is here too. We talk for a while. About his recent piece on the Whitehouse UFC fight for Playboy, about how St. Petersburg could have potentially become what Berlin was in the 1970’s or Korea was in the 2010’s if not for the Ukraine invasion. Most importantly we talk about writing, of course. Voith and Conroe are heading out, I invite myself along. Voith is getting hungry but Conroe can’t help living up to his first novel’s namesake. Voith, sick of Conroe’s horniness, goes outside.
I try to wait on Conroe because I have a picture in my head of him ascending the basement steps of Nightclub 101, its funhouse mirror walls on either side. However, I see Charlotte Sununu coming down the steps so I snap that instead. She thanks me for coming out and we talk about Gian for a while. I say that, selfishly, this entire event has kinda pissed me off. How I’ve been the homeless guy eating a sub, been the guy talking to tramps on the road. Been in those houses filled with cat shit and spoiled milk and Jesus. I say how I’ve always resented anyone who tried to recommend a book to me because someone else’s work reminded them of me. I’ve come to find that Faulkner, Denis Johnson, and Larry Brown all do what I do much better than I’ll ever do it. I don’t need any more recommendations. But the one time I was truly grateful for one was when N. J. Campbell gave me his copy of The Sarah Book by McClanahan. That shit blew me away. So yeah, the night kinda pisses me off because Gian wasn’t supposed to die. New York Tyrant Magazine was one of the very first places I sent work to after I got out of jail. I believe it was a piece about working at a Rite-Aid, not dissimilar from Dean Jamieson’s work. The piece sucked and I never heard back; part of me wanted to continue honing my craft until I felt like I could submit again. But by then it was too late. No, Gian wasn’t supposed to die because we were supposed to link up and work together. As I spill my guts about all of this, Sununu’s eyes widen. Oh shit I’ve said too much and made a fool of myself. What a ridiculous, insensitive thing to say, right? We’re all here to celebrate the Vices book, after all. The fuck’s that got to do with me? But then Sununu says, “Oh my god, that’s exactly how I felt!”
The night feels like that Hemingway quote, about how the world breaks people and they become stronger in the broken places. But everyone forgets the second part of the quote, that the people the world cannot break, it kills. Gian is dead and we’re all broken. Hell, I even broke my pants. How much stronger anyone feels is up for debate, but it’s undeniable that everyone is happy to be here tonight. Outside, words find their way between the spaces of air not filled with cigarette smoke. I hang around for a while before it’s time to walk back to the subway and head to Penn Station. An overnight Greyhound later, I’m back home and find my copy of Giancarlo DiTrapano’s Vices just arrived.
It’s like he won’t leave me alone.
 | A guest post by
|
And still know yer story about Lynch would be perfect for The Moth ! Xo
ridiculous and insensitive, yeah