Dog Days
because tomorrow, we'll all need money and healthcare, and tomorrow, I'll hold my phone.
-one (a lil preamble)
I called it Leatherface Robocop because two years ago I wrote the phrase on a page in a journal that I lost on a train to Philadelphia and I wrote like it was the title of a poem and then I drew a little picture that I wish I still had but I never wrote the poem. But who does not feel like a deformed man who wears the skin of others and can’t remember who he was or why he’s hurting people or what’s guiding him sometimes…anyway.
It is genuinely so hard for me to write myself out of this pop cultural wormhole I spent so many years using to unstick myself from time. And now those movies and books and albums and games are, more than ever, useless; We must refuse to become unstuck, for our survival, even as the present grows more and more surreal. And here I am, cradling all this ephemera to which I’ve accidentally bonded my sense of self. These are gonna be rough, for now, and will probably wind up like the worst kind of personal essay. From the depths of my heart, thank you for reading.
- two (being a/lone hero)
Not to make the Freudian freaks too self-satisfied, but my mom used to say my father looked like Al Pacino and that probably fucked me up some kinda way (not her fault).
I’ve been finding comfort in how Al Pacino expresses *care* in his performances. I love how he leans on Kitty Winn in Panic in Needle Park, I love his puppy dog affection for ghosts in Heat and The Godfather Part III. Much has been said of psychological bravura, his late-career pivot away from any inkling of a naturalistic acting philosophy. But I want to focus on his sweetness, that sweetness I loved so much in men I mistook it for another kind of love.
Because in Dog Day Afternoon Pacino is a narcissist, and boy howdy do I see the man I tried to be, the man I would hate to be, in a movie star who looks like my father as he tries to get money for a transsexual’s surgery, a transsexual just like me! It’s a loop of frankly objectionable nonsense.
When Sonny infamously invokes the Attica prison riots to rile up the crowds, it’s an ugly moment of appropriation. He’s not anti-establishment, he’s just angry. Because his lover can’t get the medical help she needs, because not being able to do something makes you angry and hot and sweaty. Time passes slowly in Dog Day Afternoon, because nobody knows what to do next, but they have to do *something* next. Time passes slowly, now, too.
The fantasy of Dog Day Afternoon today is one of visceral proximity. The robbery is ill-thought out and stupid, a grand romantic gesture, a plan borne to be sensationalized. But how alluring is the notion of being able to pull something off, alone, to be able to “fix” the hurt for people we love, even for people tangled up in the reverberations of a telephone speaker.
I have spent the past few days exchanging increasingly chaotic voice memos with my friends, and we tell each other we love one another, check up to make sure they have food and rent money (because for some reason, we still need rent money in a pandemic). I keep wanting to do something more by myself - quit my job, give all my money away, steal a car pick up my loved ones and start a farm. But those are selfish impulses. In those hyperbolic hypotheticals, I want to show care when there is nothing much, really, I can do, from my bedroom in rural Connecticut. I’m poor and I don’t have a car and I don’t have a bed to offer. I am also, really, just writing a mythology for myself. I sure do love a martyr, I sure would love to be Sonny.
What I would give to rub my face like Pacino now. My body used to sweat so much before estrogen. now all my muscles tense up and I get dizzy from spiro, or from dehydration, or from stress. My body got fucked up from the drugs, and I don’t know exactly what’s wrong with it, but I know other have it worse, and we all need healthcare, then and now and now.
Don’t we all just want to know we can be cared for, however selfishly, to be told that we can do something that matters and will help others and that they will do the same for us? There are ways we can help, without that physical immediacy, those struggling find food and shelter and funds (here's one and here's another and another, for starters). Organizing mutual aid locally can be extremely beneficial, from talking on the phone to those struggling to getting people supplies and resources if within your capabilities. Mostly, though, because we have no other option, we must stay inside. Our bodies aren’t built to handle this - not the virus, not the stress, not the isolation - and if you’re reading this, you already know the government is not going to help us. I did not get sober alone, I did not transition alone, I am not surviving on my own. So many of you have helped me. I hope I have helped at least a few of you. There is no space for Sonnys today. This is a collective movement for survival and justice. We will do what we can. I can’t say what that will look like; it’s not tomorrow yet.
Leave a message from your bank’s telephone, it’s getting hot out.
love you all. <3
song for today’s post: Os Mutantes - "Panis Et Circenses"