“Summer”
The little red book is the single best performing mailer we’ve ever sent, Marcus informs me. Consumed by the leads, Miriam has been slinking around the office for weeks with her headset on, looking blankly at our faces as she inquires about our local weather and what we’re currently doing for our marketing.
I mentioned my troubles with insomnia to Dr. Ball, but rather than lower my dose he only increased it. Maybe it’s because I reported such wonderful changes in my productivity levels as well.
So far this summer I’ve completed the Abs Challenge, the Legs Challenge, the Arms Challenge, and the Squat Challenge, and I’ve incorporated 23 anti-aging foods into my diet. I rub a homemade concoction of coconut, lemon, yogurt, honey, and coffee grounds all over my body every week. I avoid gluten, processed foods, and farm-raised fish and eat a diet low in triglycerides. Every now and then I forget what triglycerides are and I have to google it to remind myself. I drink half my weight in ounces of water a day, and not just any kind of water: RO, which stands for reverse-osmosis. I’m reading one book a week and finishing one audiobook every two weeks. The house has never been cleaner, and I almost never miss a workout. This is what I’ve always needed: drugs. #winning
Super stoked to spend the summer rereading Holocaust books. I used to think the Holocaust is to history what The Doors is to music, something you grow out of in your post-adolescent years, but it actually still holds up. I keep detailed accounts of the atrocities in Forevernote as research for my podcast.
I was trying to remember life before my amazing Information Age lifestyle makeover, but I can hardly recall anything before 2012 and there’s very little evidence of my previous existence. One might consider my disregard for my former selves to be a telling revelation, a sign of someone who is too quick to forget and thus learn from their own history. But what I lack as far as an interest in my personal history I make up for with what has become an insatiable preoccupation with twentieth-century European and Asian studies.
After pay day I begin the formidable task of replacing the makeup that was in my stolen purse. I decide to use this opportunity to acquire some long-coveted makeup staples, starting with the perfect shade of nude lipstick.
The makeup counters are garrisoned by women of a certain age who wear perfume and brooches and speak with unplaceable Eastern European accents. Standing in front of their makeup counters like sex workers in the windows of a red-light district, they promise salvation through flesh.
"I don’t want it to look like I’m wearing lipstick,” I tell my lady. “Do you understand what I mean? This looks like I’m wearing lipstick.” I shake the tube at her in a chiding motion then hand back the lip color. “Someone would look at my lips and say, ‘Her lips are pink.’ This is unnatural.”
The next lip color is not much better. “There’s a metallic shine. Real lips don’t look like metal. Do you see how that’s not natural?”
“Ah,” she says. “I see."
She tries another collection of lipsticks, SilKreme Suprême, which look and feel so creamy it’s everything I can do not to eat them.
“This shade is better, but do you see that it’s highly pigmented? It looks like I have something on my lips. I want people to wonder, ‘Is she wearing lipstick?’”
I show her a pin from my Pinterest account, which I pinned long ago to my L * i * p * s board. She gets it now, and brings me a navy blue and gold tube, unassuming yet classy. It’s perfect, like somebody bottled my own lip color and sold it back to me for $22. By its very artificiality, it is an enhancement of the reality it purports to simulate. I find the link to the product page on my phone and save it to my board F * a * v * e * s, pinning it, it feels, forever inside my soul.
Somehow over the course of the last few months, I feel like I’ve fallen out of favor with my Facebook friends. The likes and comments are declining, yet other people in my newsfeed are climbing to never-before-seen heights of engagement. I’m talking, like, over two hundred likes for a haircut from girls that are, first of all, not even that pretty, and secondly, not popular in real life but through a constant stream of basic content and obsequious flattery have managed to build a strong presence online. Sorry if I don’t have the time to execute an all-out marketing campaign for myself these days. But even if I did, I fear that I wouldn’t have what it takes to rise to the top again.
Robots have started calling me. Some call from 866 numbers but some display local area codes. They call five or six times a day if I don’t block them. Feeling bold, I picked up once and a garbled yet recognizably female voice asked, “Hello, can you hear me?” I hung up without saying a word and searched for the number on Google. Someone in an online forum said they’re trying to record you saying “yes." “It’s a SCAM!” they wrote.
“I had a dream last night that on our beds were fossils of giant cockroaches from the age of giant insects,” London says. “Then all of a sudden they turned into small cockroaches and they were in my mouth. It was gross.”
“God, London! That’s horrible. Why would you tell me something like that?”
London’s dream is like a presaging to me. I’m going to have another run-in with a palmetto bug soon, I just know it. I don’t know exactly how or when, but one is going to fly at me one day and nestle its plump, papery exoskeleton into my neck, and forever after, I will never stop feeling the ghost of its legs, or would it be the “ghosts” of its legs? I can feel cockroaches crawling all over me sometimes, and you can see me every now and then totally freaking out and brushing them off, even though there’s nothing there.
Going for a run around Hibiscus Lake Park, I like to imagine that I’m a prisoner at Sachsenhausen concentration camp testing shoe materials for the German army for shoe brands such as Salamander, Bata, and Leiser, funded by Germany's economic ministry, which paid the camp in reichmarks per day for every prisoner who participated. The camp featured a 2,300-foot-long track made up of 58 percent concrete road, 12 percent loose sand, 10 percent cinder path, 8 percent mud kept constantly under water, 4 percent chippings, 4 percent coarsely graveled paths, and 4 percent cobbled road, in order to ensure all types of European roads German soldiers could encounter were represented. The shoe-walking unit, it was called, was overseen by the notoriously cruel East Prussian master cobbler, Dr. Ernst Brennscheidt. Under his authority, 170 prisoners were forced to walk over 25 miles a day with 25-pound knapsacks. In the spirit of a true scientist, he made sure some prisoners wore shoes that were too small or two different sizes for their left and right feet. The only breaks came after every six miles, when the shoes were examined. Whenever I start to fall behind my target pace, I yell “Schneller!” and pretend that if I don't run faster, Dr. Brennscheidt will unleash his Alsatians on me. Up to twenty people died on the track every day, and I won’t be one of them.
This excerpt was a lot of fun Jesse. And very exciting to finally get a glimpse of your novel. I avoid farm raised fish when i can too just like with my eggs.. The name (Gabby Gaborino) and others remind me of Gogol with his funny sounding and sticky Russian names like Akaky Akakievich. I also like it takes place in Tampa. There's something funny about Totalitarianism and lip stick juxtaposed. Lip stick stuff was great btw. "the Holocaust is to history what The Doors is to music," there's your Amy Hempel line. The jogging and yelling to self lol reminded me of ee Cummings "Enormous Room" but maybe Gulag book rubbed off on you there haha. Can't wait to read more.