Back then, my form was inflated with big muscles and fat. I felt like a proud blown-up woman who never covered up, finding various forms of humiliation cathartic, including bad art, which could serve as my good example. I stomped on the street to scare rats on Stanton Street with too much zeal, starting the Godzilla routine half a block away from the offending garbage cans. I felt productive if the rats appeared. I noticed that they, too, were made of muscle and fat.
*
If bad mimicry becomes great poetry, so could I unfold from a point of faulty interpretation, socially and sexually, the ribbon rolling slightly askew. I want the ‘anxiety of influence’ to work in my favor. Less and less do I find myself with strangers who might offer these kinds of generous distortions. Back then, I sat at the coffee shop on Smith Street, completely content to while away eight hours playing chess, reading comic books and listening to T-Rex albums—-mostly because I had been misunderstood as another kind of girl who wasn’t me, but I was happy to chip in and play her part.
*
I wanted to be him: liberated from ambition but always the smartest guy in the room; an outsider who always got in, having merged with the Chinese soccer league, a punk band, and now, he would be appearing in his friend’s film, nude, “because they need someone whose cock starts small and gets huge,” which described him perfectly. So much so that I once had my ovaries checked.
He was a rascal but also plain Zen, a nilla wafer with an extra hard drive, a storage space. I wanted that space. He wore white karate pants and carried a tote. And like a newborn baby, he never knew shame.
