by Betsy Aaron
Situations-Wanted Ad: Non-abstemious agnostic wants to live like Agnes Martin—but not during that spell when she had to work as a dishwasher. I’ve already done the shit jobs: picking out pubic hairs from motel bathtubs, selling marked-down bras and girdles to jumbo-size women, working overtime for coke fiends who used the business of documentary film production for cover. Read the rest of this entry »
by Betsy Aaron
My neighbor is an artist and I’ve been walking my dog Vera past her door daily looking for evidence of how she lives. I’m new here now but no longer young. When I was, I lived in the same neighborhood but it was different, so even though my first address in this city was only a few blocks from my current sublet situation, things feel foreign. I find comfort in still being able to hear Ukrainian spoken at newsstands, in the exchanges of landlords who greet the day by stepping out to sweep their portion of sidewalk clean, and on church steps that are crowded each Sunday, despite the growing population of atheists who sleep into the late afternoon and then emerge to observe their ritual of brunch.
The prevailing street style is Ramones meets vintage, just as it was when Joey could be seen skulking around, though there was no street named for him and if there had been, I would not have explored it because even though this neighborhood is now full of bars and boutiques and salons manned by young Japanese hairstylists, I first knew it as a place safe only for drug dealers. Like so many others, I’d come from a different culture, in my case, via Long Island Railroad. I was a recent college graduate, numb over the death of my father. Though he often told me that I had common sense, I had no idea how to care for myself. I loved my father but I often wished that I had been born into a family of artists like that of my neighbor.
In the time that she has resided at her present address, I’ve had seven— excluding an all expenses-paid summer-long residency at a five-star Italian hotel courtesy of a client whom I despised, nine months in a corporate flat in London that caught fire twice, and the six months I spent sleeping on a friend’s living room couch while I gave Los Angeles a go. Read the rest of this entry »
by Betsy Aaron
What makes a man,
who becomes a woman
with no biological clock,
tick?
Read the rest of this entry »
