Yesterday I watched a man die. I’d been around people dying, seen dead people, but I’d never seen the lights go out. It wasn’t how I’d imagined the thing. The guy didn’t seem to know he was dying, his eyes sort of fluttered, a few weird noises rolled out of his throat almost like water going down the drain, weird but not at all how I would have imagined the sounds of death, real fucked but kind of mesmerizing if you know what I mean, I’m no psycho, I can hardly watch scary movies, I don’t have the stomach for blood and guts, but one second the guy is alive, paying for his taquitos and talking to Scabby behind the register, the next the taquitos fella is done as shit, lying there in that dead 7-Eleven light like a mannequin, and before my brain-frozen ass has registered that the man on the carpet in front of me isn’t breathing and that, as the homie next to him, it’s my presumed civic responsibility to drop to the ground and begin administering the life-administering procedures I’ve learned at various points in my life, other people who I suspect are more qualified to help the man, I’m self-rationalizing, have initiated the immediate and appropriate responses you write home about, the skinny cashier in one fell swoop tucks in his shirt and jumps over the counter like fuckin’ Spiderman and starts thumping the man’s chest to the beat of “Stayin’ Alive,” someone screams and calls 9-1-1, a homeless man who smells like piss (I shouldn’t talk shit because I suffer from premature post-micturition dribble) starts gathering the coins that have rolled out of the dead man’s pockets, and I remember, right by the homeless man oblivious to the miracle before his eyes, Virginia Woolf’s essay about a dying moth, how the dead moth had “filled” Woolf with “wonder”—if I could ever write an essay like that, I’d die happy, the teacher who taught the night class said, and I agreed so wholeheartedly I went home and, like a Beaner Crocodile Hunter, killed the arachnid occupying the cabinet-space under the sink and tried to write about the dying spider, to a slightly different effect than my hero—and remembering the essay in the 7-Eleven, I am shook by the opposite of wonder, a sensation closer to fear and rotten food than wonderful. I slurped up what was left of the cherry slushy and threw the cup in the trash and left a few dollars on the counter and dipped. Cars were stringing out of the intersection toward me. I waited for a break in the traffic and crossed the road. Except for white flowers, which seemed to have woken up in the trees and stretched their petals while I was in the store, everything was the same, the horns, the bright midday air. I stopped at a smoke shop and bought an eighth and came back to my apartment and faced the bag. I am trying to write a story where I, the narrator, am exactly who I, narrator, say I am. This has made me feel like a butterfly hunter. When I do manage to catch myself, in a sketch or a doodle in a notebook or a rant about ChatGPT in Notes, I feel I have only captured one version of myself, and though, on close microscopic and microeconomic and macroeconomic and sociological and scatological and psychological inspection all these versions of myself look the exact fucking same, to me and to everyone else, I still find each imperfect and incomplete and beautiful in its own way, like a single frame in a long movie with no plot and no character development and none of the shit that sells movies or makes people feel good, I’m always bald, I’m always stoned, I always feel more or less like I do now, like shit. At work, I’m often frustrated by Freddy’s expectations, sack up, you will serve customers their food with a smile, you will not come to work faded, expectations that carry the burden of pretending I’m a man who does not smoke the devil’s lettuce and fake-smiles, but I need the money and it’s the same everywhere, so I wear these masks. Judith Butler would say this is performance, but I wish they’d use another word like armadillo or execution: performance makes a lot of folk think imposterhood or fraudulence, posturing, actors in masks, and like Butler says, they’re right, the mask is part of the performance, of navigating the world in this body and a survival strategy, forged in the dark bathrooms behind the cafeteria at Darien Elementary School, whereby I, no doubt, adapt myself, somewhat like a chameleon or a cuttlefish or a flounder, to my surroundings: dumb myself down for idiots, play buttoned-up white man at work, neglect to inform people-I’m-afraid-will-judge-me-for-having-fucked-dudes I’m queer, people like Freddy who look at me as if my proclivity for liking men and women is their business, relevant to the services I provide as a waiter, or a matter of debate. You’re a man? Prove it. You’ve read way more than me? Prove it. One time Freddy said alright, drop the act, I know you’re a gay idiot. So I quoted Judith Butler, that really pissed him off, from memory like the Genius and Academic Weapon my tiger parents raised me to be, may they forgive me for the tattoos and not becoming a lawyer or a surgeon or the President of the United States, my sins. I tried. No, I didn’t. But I do roll the nicest blunts east of the Mississippi. I’m sure I could hang with Obama’s Choom Gang. And the septum ring comes out with a twist. Last night I waited on a couple and a boy and a girl, an uber-rich family who I could tell were uber-rich because the little boy handed me a hundred-dollar bill and whispered to keep the double grenadine Shirley Temples coming. I noticed a playbill in the woman’s jacket pocket. I’m no actor, but I love plays. The first play I ever saw was Cymbeline at the B.A.M. I wanted to give a shit. What play? Spending so much time in these masks at the restaurant, I’m becoming the sort of spic my manager would like me to be. This morning the guy directed me to pick up a piece of moldy bread. I laughed and did as I was told. Jerry goes in blitzed, Freddy daps him up and they talk about their weekends and basketball or some shit. God-forbid I show up a little stoned, a little late, with a little spider blood on my shirt. If you fuck a guy does that make you a little gay? Two? Three..? My name is Pedro. I go by Dro. I should be, like Mom said, writing Pedro Potter.
On the toilet, I considered (or am considering) all the ways I can write about the man in the 7-Eleven. I could write the story realistically, in the language of realism, as if the 7-Eleven were in Iowa City. Or magically, like Carlos Fuentes. People would dig that. Right when the guy is about to hit the carpet, serpents slither out of the slushy machines. Man turns into serpent and rides into horizon on donkey. I smoke, no exaggeration, fifteen chops in ten minutes. Shit goes topsy-turvy, I vomit, out goes the high, so I take another smoke, but the downstem is clogged, I get nothing. Bed, I doomscroll and ask ChatGPT for help.
Me: Hey thingamabob. I hate you and what you stand for. Will you please write a story about a bisexual Mexican American man who witnesses a death in a 7-Eleven and proceeds to ramble about shit as he sees it?
Chat GPT (chat.openai.com/chat, 3 April 2023): “I’m sorry to hear that you hate me. However, I’m programmed to provide assistance regardless of how I’m treated. Here’s the story you requested: The sound of the gunshot echoed through the cramped aisles of the 7-Eleven, and Javier froze. He had just come in to buy a pack of gum, but now he was frozen in place, staring at the body lying in a pool of blood on the floor. As he stood there, shocked and scared, his mind began to wander. He couldn’t help but think about how this could have happened. Why did someone have to die? What was the point of it all? Javier was a bisexual Mexican American man, and he knew what it was like to be different. He had been teased and bullied as a kid, but he had learned to stand up for himself. He was proud of who he was, even if other people didn’t always understand him. But now, as he looked at the lifeless body on the floor, he couldn’t help but feel a sense of sadness and anger. Why did it have to be this way? Why couldn’t people just accept each other for who they were? Javier began to ramble to himself, trying to make sense of what he had just witnessed. He talked about the injustices in the world, the bigotry and hatred that still existed, even in a supposedly progressive city like New York. He talked about the struggles of being a Mexican American, of feeling like he didn’t fully belong in either culture. He talked about his own journey of self-discovery, of coming to terms with his sexuality and finding the courage to be himself. As he spoke, he noticed a small crowd gathering around him, listening intently.”
I was surprised, I sort of liked the machine, it helped me even though I didn’t help it and seemed to know some about your boy. And I was relieved I could, as a philistine on a campaign against that bullshit, write better than it can, though I liked the part about the bigotry and the hatred. As a lover, I hate (almost) everything and everyone including, on occasion, myself, and I distrust people, the real haters, who don’t or don’t realize they hate and neglect to counteract (with love and not the pity they should feel for themselves) the poison in their snowflake hearts. I’m somewhat resistant to the “trauma plot,” I carry that shit around, like Claudia Rankine says I was there, but I realized I wasn’t doing enough, on the page, to connect the man’s death and my race and sexuality, me, CatDog, and readers wouldn’t, left to their own highlighters, understand the implications of the shooting. If I tell you I, a grown man with no money, smoke weed 24/7, do you judge me? What if I tell you this: if I didn’t make enough money at the lemonade stand, when I was a kid, my pops chased me around with a belt. Do you judge me the same? Anywho, luck and nothing else: ChatGPT knew Javier’s story. The dead guy’s name wasn’t Javier, but maybe his son is lil Javi. The man was a brown guy about my height, an inch or two shorter, with black hair to his shoulders. I think he was a window cleaner or a construction worker, or a waiter like me, the hands, they contained landscapes and in his last moments held a pack of gum and the fake flautas. Who knows what they called this individual. He smiled. No teeth. When the lead struck his chest the taquitos flew.
“I don’t know how to clean this up,” the second cashier said. “I’m out.”
Often and unpredictably, I go batshit crazy, predictably. For example, in the last minute of Javier’s life he must’ve seen the homeless man, and I think he saw me. He entered the store while I was by the slushy machine, then fingered a banana in a way that struck me as suggestive, though I might’ve been or might be projecting, as I have a tendency to do onto guys I dig and suspect are into me, I often assume everyone’s like me, but the majority are hella closeted and oblivious to their—I’m very handsome, Mom used to say my kids will be like Mexican Gerber babies—attraction to me, an unawareness which often masks itself as jealousy and rises from the depths of the gringo consciousness like milk skin. Scabby gave the man a sandwich, in Spanish. A white dude noticed me checking out Javier. Sensing him watch me watch Javier, I went cuckoo, turned and asked the dude what the fuck he was looking at. Predictably he looked at me like I was a lunatic. “The cash register,” he said. “I’m looking at the cash register.” Scum! Now you think I’m easily offended. You think this story is all a form of projection, which is, well, true insofar as I am (maybe) projecting onto Javier, quick to blame others like the guy in the Minnie Mouse Disneyland sweatshirt for my problems, sensitive to real and perceived slights, and exactly who the fuck I am telling you I am, but, via the shooting I almost witnessed, I only saw the before and the after, no bullet, I will make the case, as one should never do in fiction according to the rule books, that my sensitivity to microaggressions, my tendency to camouflage myself to my surroundings, and the man’s death are your fault, the reader’s, and additionally that, unlike you might suspect of a guy like me, these aforementioned isolating and self-flagellating qualities are my superpowers.
You can tell a lot about a person off how they choose to dress themselves in the morning or at different times of day (at home, for work, to go out) and extrapolate certain shit if, say, a guy dresses the same in each of these spaces or if he doesn’t, I’m no mind reader but if a cat dresses the same at home and at work and at the bar he is one way, if he dresses different in different spaces he’s another way with a different conception of the world and his place in it, and so on and so forth, you get the picture, point is clothes matter, this guy’s fit was very cool, a denim and presumably-scrap fabric assemblage that brought to mind Yayoi Kusama’s polka-dotted galaxies, Los Angeles’ zoot-suiters, and the scent of blue, and, excuse me if I’m once again projecting, the bulge in the guy’s pants matched my bulge, the guy was my carbon copy, one hyper-sexy and hyper-sexualized freakydeaky Mexicano who inspects strangers’ bulges, who, with his last bit of Galactic Juice, in the last seconds of his freakydeaky life, which for a worm or a fruit fly somewhere may have been ages, relativity yadayadayadawhatever, smiled at me. Point is time slurred and stretched. All my senses fell together into a single sensation, what Sheila Heti, whose writing is unusual and good, might describe as a colour, but this feeling was, the way I remember it, closer to the absence of color, not black, I’ve always insisted despite my third grade art teacher’s mad protestations that black is obviously a color, one of my favorites, I’m a first-gen brown kid trying to make it in a country that sees in black and white and insists on its color blindness and “blackholes,” wormholes, where that singular 7-Eleven feeling can probably be located in an infinite concentration of everything. The guy watched me watch him watch me watch him watch me watch him die.