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Selected Writing
Postcard from Istanbul: No Time for Tourists
"As banquets bid gluttons to loosen their belts, war compromises borders; Ottoman Cosmopolitanism seemed to be making a comeback."
We All Have Our Double-Cross to Bear
"When Muhammad went out Friday night, you could say life was on his ass."
Taken
Sometimes I think I am a capitalist, but I don’t know how to explain the costs of my work to a capitalist, which leads me to believe there are only artists and accountants. Hudson Hudson is an artist. I know because love made him one.
In the video, his house is crowded. By crowded I mean poor, not stylish. The video is his big move. These videos. As of this typing, Hudson Hudson has 69 videos and 3.1k followers. In small towns, we call that prolific. Most people just Netflix and chill, but Hudson Hudson is building a world.
Hudson Hudson is the kind of 5’10” that doesn’t pretend to be 6 foot. He has a handsome face, a bad goatee, and a tattoo on his side that says TAKEN. He is 150 lbs. Every video features him and his wife doing feeble role plays. It took until “deliveryman” and “housewife” before I recognized them.
In high school, Hudson sat in corners. He didn’t ask why I don’t straighten my hair or tell me if I look up “freak” in the dictionary, I’d find my own image. He just disappeared himself. In a group project, his role plays’ departure from custom would have enraged me. Role plays are supposed to be an escape from the day-to-day. Hudson Hudson works at USPS.
In the videos, Kimberly is emergent–all veins through translucent skin. She is also scrawny. At 100lbs, Hudson’s wife is barely there, but a baby passed through her. Seeing the loose skin of her belly, I think about Hudson Hudson’s name. His mom remarried when he was eight, and she was trying to make him feel part of the new family. The shit he caught for it reminded him he was an afterthought.
On PornHub he calls himself Mister Lovinggood. This is their big secret. They go to Walmart. They pay the power bill. They go to church. And nobody knows that they film themselves doing what every animal on this planet does and upload it to the internet.
Hudson Hudson is not the kind of individual people go out of their way to seduce, but his profile reads “bisexual, happily married.” Maybe he wanted to tell everybody how pleased he was that Kimberly made him a home, but his coworkers couldn’t see him. In general, nobody did. It was partly his fault, for disappearing himself, but then again it also wasn’t.
With each video, he broadcast his relief. If someone asked Hudson, “Are you happy?” he would answer, “I’m grateful.” Only a fool would point out that they aren’t the same thing.
I saw him at the post office this morning. He held the door for me.
A Conditional Heart
In college, Joey called me often to wring his hands. When I answered, I always said the same thing: I’d like to follow those thoughts of yours down their dark alleys so you can sit in the kitchen drinking lemonade and watching the dogs, but you won’t tell me their coordinates. I need to look for those places you can’t find if you’re not alone, you know?
As friends, we stewed in that paradox over tater tots while he recovered from his humanities seminar. Biochem was his thing – biochem and fly-fishing. He didn’t trade in binaries, and he burned for it. He didn’t say he loved me, but he burst in my room at five one morning to put my hand on his chest.
“You feel that?” It was thumping like a broken centrifuge. “My heart doesn’t beat like that for just anyone. Only you.”
I thought I might kill him, but Joey marveled at his body’s truth. Pleased at the psychosomatic alliance of emotion and flesh, he smiled at me, breathless.
After graduation, he called to wring his hands once more. His right ventricle had gone rogue, he said. He had passed out in graduate school. He had to get a defibrillator. He couldn’t safely raise his heart rate. “You remember those athletes who died after fainting? That’s what I’ve got: ARVD.”
A thought–a casualty of misfired memory cells–crossed my mind: perchance, it wasn’t me making his heart beat so fast years ago. By chance, the excitement could have killed him.
“Remember freshman year?” I began to say, but he already knew: his heart wouldn’t beat like that for anyone else—he couldn’t risk it any more.
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