Plastic Vodka Bottle Sleepover Archives

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BY SAM FARAHMAND

vanity of vanities; all is vanity.

I came to Mexico to try to forget all about someone, which I now know I might’ve done the same on the other side of the border with the other half of a bottle of tequila, seeing the half I have left here and knowing all I might’ve done different there is say some of the same words but worse for lack of a bitterer word in a language I can pronounce all of the words right, but here the language means much more to me signifying nothing other than to show how I still feel about la puta.

It is my first time outside of America and my third day in Mexico after departing two days before the inauguration from Los Angeles International Airport three quarters after one in Pacific Standard Time, arriving, after several hours hungover in Mexico City, a quarter before eleven in Central Standard Time in Mérida, Mérida being the capital city of the Mexican state of Yucatán in the northwest of the Yucatán peninsula several hours west of the beaches in Quintana Roo I am sure someday soon and maybe even before this trip is over where I’ll end up in Cancún, though for the time being I can’t cunt, but space being the best visualization for time we have for now, I needed to have some distance between the past and me.

Maybe I might’ve felt better if I had bought a bigger bottle, but I don’t like to drink tequila because tequila is the sort of drink for people who don’t drink to drink, though I was told the tequila in the country is supposed to be cleaner than the water here, so if I don’t drink I might die. I don’t remember if it was an American or an alcoholic who told me that, one of the ones on their way to a beach where I am sure the sea there is the cliché they say it is with the sand and the sun the sort of sand and sun that would make one want to take a shot then shoot one of the locals, but they’re all tourists there.

Not that I’m not. I am rereading this review I rewrote from a second floor room in a hostel just south of the square in the center of Mérida, looking down at the couple of pages I had folded into quarters for being in my back pocket and blue around the edges from being in my back pocket as I sweated the blue from my jeans into the pages while staying up until the sun with strangers rubbing the backs of their jeans on the front of my jeans. From here I hear the world has ended again and this time in America, looking up from the pages to see there is a bed and there is a bottle and there is a balcony I can stand on and see the center of the city and the cathedral and it is all alive, around it all of the carriages and cars driving in circles around the square full of the birds and the bums and it looks like one of those square parks in an America when an artist could afford to live and when love was just as clichéd as the time. Love is always as clichéd as time, but hindsight is me remembering how good her ass looks in black jeans.

When the conquistadors came they burned all the books but one, someone says to me somewhere where I’m not at the time because I am remembering I have ten nonconsecutive days of sobriety, not counting today, this new year. I know it doesn’t mean as much when I can’t cash in my chips because I am not on a roll, but it’s sort of the same as saying this is the forty-fifth when knowing there have only been forty-four with one who held two nonconsecutive terms, though for all our obsessiveness with counting the days and recounting, consecutive or nonconsecutive, there is no such thing as death in America.

Maybe death is why I am here, not because love is a kind of hatred, but because love is death in some syllogistic sense that every x is y is therefore the same as x is y is y. God is dead is dead and maybe I’m here because it seems like all our associations of south with down and down with death would make them much closer to death here, but then I’m disappointed that so far the only skulls I have seen have been covered in skin while the most they have shown of themselves is in their smiles.

It has been some time since I’ve smiled with my teeth, but then I think if i always came before e then the name of this city would translate to shit, which to me seems to be meaner than it seems meaningful, being here in Mérida rereading this review. I’m supposed to be here recording sound for the film my friend Santa Ana, a friend I’ve had for half of my life, is filming, maybe even acting in the film as a revolutionary but without any lines so I won’t have to remember anything, but we haven’t started shooting. I’m happy to not have to remember anything and I go back inside the room and I don’t know if it is the bottle or what is inside the bottle that is colored gold to make it look like urine, but I’ll still try to get rid of the same dream I’ve had for some time where I see la puta on the beach.

Santa Ana says we might pay a prostitute to play a prostitute in the film because it’ll be easier than finding someone else, so now I’m somewhere between Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo and maybe I am a revolutionary in some revolution I don’t remember in some dream, though I wonder if my likeness will be pressed into cloth. I didn’t bring my blue sweatshirt that reads El Camino Real in blue on a white background and Conquistadors in gold over a print of a conquistador on the front because it might’ve made me look like another tourist as far south in North America as he can afford to be in a Mexico standing in for a South America because Santa Ana couldn’t afford to take us down to the Amazon.

The tequila is down now to half a half of a bottle, which still feels more optimistic to me than the odds on a quarter, but soon I will be taking a bus down to a small town an hour outside of Mérida and only several hours away from where the world ended, on the way there the signs for Chichén Itzá and its pyramids and the signs for the crater at Chicxulub as if there might be one coming up for Xibalba, but after enough time, all any civilization leaves behind is its afterlife.

I don’t need to see the ruins or the crater to know they’re there. I know the crater is our creator as much as I know when the agave stopped being subsidized everyone in the towns started living off of showing the tourists the sinkholes fractured off from the crater buried under Chicxulub, the sinkholes they all call the sweetwater. The tourists swim in them, but I’ve been spending my time in a different sort of hole to water in because it’s a dollar for a score of pesos and a little less than forty for a forty with the cost of living here not much more than the cost of dying. All the houses here made of concrete and a lot of them painted on with signs for their savior and some verses he said, but I’d rather die than have someone else die for my sins. It’s my sins that give me the surest sense of who I am.

If not death, it’s God they’re closer to here. Maybe only because the sun is that much closer to the surface here, seeing the dogs straying on and off the sides of the roads and all of them coated in their diseases and sometimes so asleep in the sun I can’t tell if they’re dead. I don’t know what they did to deserve what they don’t, but at least they still have all their genitalia. Forgetfulness is forgiveness enough for me, but I’m afraid I’m losing some of my life here because they burn and they breathe in all of their trash during the day, though I have nothing of hers to burn but what is left in my head when I see a dog that looks like la puta lying down under a pair of white swinging saloon doors that makes everyone look like they have angel’s wings when they leave into the sunlight after they step over the dog still staring at me while I drink in this cantina several hours to the right of the middle of nowhere.

Every end, even a good end, is still an end. I see a fetus of a dog on the side of the road on the way back from the cantina and I hear a cock crow three times before the sun is up and soon I will be heading back to still another America to cross this country with some poet and I will likely be reading this review at one of these readings, if not another one of the essays I wrote that have this same short story in the middle, but here it is for the fourth time:

President’s Day

Happy hour ends in half an hour.

I’ll see you in half a half an hour then, I say but hold the tall can of Mexican beer to my mouth while I wait for her to come back and set down a red American Indian figurine on the bar for the buyback. It’s a good bar during happy hour because they give you two beers for one beer and it’s a good bar because the beers are cheap even when it isn’t happy hour.

The bartender is pregnant in a white dress and she looks like someone’s daughter who’s going to have to be someone’s mother. It must have been over half a year ago the last time I was in here and I saw her first, though if it weren’t for her being pregnant and all she would just look like any other bartender with rosy tattoos and long dark hair, but it must have been her tattoos or her hair or her being a bartender that got her pregnant. She tells me it’s, Five dollars.

Four Mexicans for five dollars.

What.

‘Cause it’s a tall can, so it has two cans worth in each can, then there’s another two on the way. I don’t know. I’m sorry, I just like this happy hour here.

If you like it so much, we have a midnight happy hour too.

When does that start, I ask but she just stares at me. I wonder if I want to wait here for another happy hour, even if The Library bar is the only good bar on the Lower East Side, though it’s neither Lower nor Easter of me, but no one really lives in Manhattan. I mean, when does it end.

Are you not waiting for someone.

I don’t know.

What’s her name.

What’s your name.

Do you not know her name.

Do you wanna know my name.

You ask a lot of questions for someone who doesn’t know anything.

I laugh and the bar is quiet and I think I’ll get drunk enough to try to get her to drink with me, so I ask her what she thinks of my name.

I don’t know what your name is. It’s not like it’s embroidered on your shirt.

I don’t work in the sort of place where my name is embroidered on my shirt.

No one works anymore. At least, not today.

No one drinks today.

She says it like she’s going to turn to point at some sign, But whether they drink or not no one works for free.

Five dollars for four Mexicans, right. I hand her a ten dollar bill and say, Hamilton.

Hamilton. Your parents named you Hamilton. That’s too bad.

I laugh and tell her, No. I just find that I’m much less likely to spend all my money on alcohol if I call all the presidents by their names.

She tugs at the ends of the bill and asks me, Why don’t you call him Alexander.

I don’t wanna get too attached. I’m still an alcoholic.

She walks away with the Hamilton and goes to and opens the register then counts the change and closes it slowly with her hip and walks back to me and hands me the change and says, Here you go Hamilton.

These aren’t Hamiltons.

I’m calling you Hamilton.

Oh. So you’re not gonna ask me my name. You’re just gonna call me Hamilton then.

Well, your parents never did.

I raise the can to her and say, I still resent them for that.

Plus I don’t want to get too attached. I still have to serve alcoholics.

She smiles at me and I can see why she’s pregnant. I smile back as she turns to go to the other end of the bar and I can see why she’s a bartender. I drink as fast as I Mexican and keep drinking and I finish my drink so she has to come back and get me another drink. I leave a Washington on the counter with the Indian figurine and I look for her to come back, but she’s with someone else, so I just have to pick up and finger the figurine. I don’t know why his headdress is so large on his head or why they made him red.

They laugh at the other end of the bar and I look up for her to see me, which she does, but she sees me like she sees through me and she still takes her time coming back to my end.

I smile when she’s close and set the figurine down on the counter again.

You know, Ham, it hasn’t been half a half an hour yet.

You know Hamilton wasn’t a president either.

Are you telling me you’re not the president of these United States of America.

Well the president doesn’t have his name embroidered on his shirt.

He doesn’t work today either.

When does he.

I don’t know. He never comes in for happy hour. I guess I don’t know him as well as you do.

I guess I don’t know you as well as you do.

Another Mexican. She takes the figurine and comes back with another beer. Hamilton.

I guess I don’t know me as well as you do.

No one ever does.

I like talking to you. I know I don’t have a horse in this race. I can just talk to you.

Are you saying I have a horse of a face.

No, I mean it’s not like I have to ask you when you get off.

Are you not going to get me off.

Are you having fun with me.

You’re just trying to get me to say you’re fun.

Am I.

You really don’t know anything do you.

I don’t know much, but I do know I don’t not know anything.

Sure you don’t.

Can I have a lime for this one.

Sure. She picks a lime out of the limes and drops it on the mouth of the can. Will that be all.

I don’t know, I say forcing the lime into the can. Alexandra’s a good name, you know.

And Alexander’s a great one. But it’s not mine, so what’s that got to do with anything.

Your current predictament.

My current predictament is that it’s not mine.

It isn’t.

Well, it is. But I’m not keeping it.

That’s too bad.

Why’s that.

You’ve got your whole life ahead of you.

Everyone has their whole lives ahead of them. Well, not everyone. Not even you, Alexander.

Why not, Alexandra.

She smiles and she says, Happy hour ends in half a half an hour.

Plastic Vodka Bottle Sleepover

I am reading a copy of Plastic Vodka Bottle Sleepover while on my half a half an hour break in a break room in back of a bookstore in a strip mall that could be anywhere in Los Angeles but anywhere else and where there isn’t enough time for me to go anywhere else to do anything else, but then again, all the sections in this book are short enough for me to read some of them whenever I have a break to read the only copy of this book to ever be in this bookstore.

It is the day after New Year’s Eve and might as well still be the night before when I smoked a Romeo y dos Julietas worth of cigar that don’t seem to be getting along with everything else still in my stomach while I am slurring through returning all the returns the customers have to return. The bookstore is one of those brick-and-mortar ones customers always become all fire-and-brimstone about before they’re angry with me at the price of the bestsellers they decide to order online after leaving all their books at the register for me to reshelve. Dust doesn’t collect in alphabetical order, so I’m still not sure where all of the books should be reshelved, but the bookstore is doing well enough during the holidays for one of the assistant managers to tell me we might be able to be paid this year after all, though I am afraid I’m not selling enough to stay on after my seasonal employment and I am afraid I’m not smiling enough at every customer’s attempt to confront their death anxiety through capitalism.

I’m no stranger to that since I sold my soul to be the writer I am, but I still don’t know how to sell out, which I would if I could, so for a time being I have leased the pain in my spine from my back to my neck for ten dollars an hour in a hell that isn’t waiting in a line but waiting on a line. The hell in a well, you’re doing well, you’re not doing good. I am not doing well, but I am doing good enough good to customers as plastic as the plastic with which they pay, which must be why they become so angry with me when I have to charge them a dime for a paper bag, but they think they can smile through anything if their teeth are whitened enough. I tell them a tote bag we have for two dollars has on it the original cover art of This Side of Paradise. Most of them don’t know how to read, but their fingers are good for turning pages.

One of them asked me if I could bring her dog back from the dead, which made me smile that she could have asked for me to bring back anyone from the dead but only asked me to bring back her dog. She bought a book and I told her about our fourteen day return policy with a receipt for a full refund before I go to piss because I drink a lot of water to have to piss a lot to have to walk across the bookstore to the restroom to piss to have to wash my hands hard and try harder to stare at myself, though there isn’t a sign here that says employees must wash sins of the customer, but I know why I’m here as much as I know ignorance isn’t innocence.

Another one buying a copy of the Bible asked me if I believe in the word as he patted down a Bible he still hadn’t bought. I told him I believe in words, but he had nothing to say other than to pay for his copy of the Bible because all we have in common is consumerism is our communion. We even have our own pyramids to it here, though we seem to forget the point of the pyramid is to be buried under the pyramid, but on my last day before I leave for Mexico I realize I’ll have to make some means of getting money into my hands and holding onto it longer than turning it into change and handing it right back. I look at the change and remember there might even be a black face where there were only white skulls with powdered wigs on them before, but still it all looks green to me. We bend the truth over until it’s lying down like this line.

There is a section too long for me to read in the few minutes I have left, so I set the book back in my locker in the break room and sit down while I hold something else in my hand to stare at it so it doesn’t look strange that I’m sitting here and staring at nothing. I try to remember what I had read because I always thought that if you underline all the lines you like, you should cross out all the ones you don’t, so I only dogeared the pages I will come back to for the review, but all I think of as I try not to think is la puta.

Plastic Vodka Bottle Sleepover Part Two

Plastic Vodka Bottle Sleepover is a book about one of those unnamed narrators trying to get over a lost love à la La Maga from the book Hopscotch by the Latin American author of whom I don’t remember the name. The title Plastic Vodka Bottle Sleepover feels like it should have a hyphen put in there somewhere and a handful of consonants taken out, but then I remember the author of Plastic Vodka Bottle Sleepover is from the other half of the world where most of their words are almost all consonants and where consonants aren’t considered to be an autoerotic asphyxiation of language as much as a means to get the most out of their vowels when they say something.

I have always thought much more of the hyphen that comes before American than where the ______-American comes from because punctuation is like a simile, though the truth is you’re not an American if you weren’t born in America, but you’re even less of one if your father and mother were. Like love, the only thing we ever share is the past, but history is a mass hysteria. Maybe my memory is worse than I remembered because I remember there was more Polish than there is here, but here is all of the Polish in Plastic Vodka Bottle Sleepover with the page numbers for the pages on which the Polish is:

Musimy jakos zyc, czy istniejemy czy nie

dinozaura, prosze

Przygody Dobrego Wojaka Szwejka.

Wszystko Twoje

Trzeba sobie jakos radzic, powiedzial baca, zawiazujac buta dzdzownica

barszcz

uszka

pierogi

Trzymaj sie, siostra

Nareszcie

Writing a review is like the difference between underlining a line and writing, seeing as a review is only written for the writer and the only reason I’m writing this review is because I will know at least one person will, whether or not they underline lines, read this, but then again, there are a lot of lines about an American Dream in Plastic Vodka Bottle Sleepover worth underlining and there are a lot of addresses to you as a reader and in some of the shorter italicized sections to you as an unnamed character, but as you reads through the book the same as I travels through time, Plastic Vodka Bottle Sleepover being as deictic as it is, whatever that is, you realize like in life how your you‘s start to get used and your I‘s get used to it as they do the meaninglessness of me.

But we make sense of things through things though things because we are all merely stand-ins for someone else, if not stand-ins for something that came before all this and if not for something to come after, friend being the worst f word there is as far as any mot just concerns me, but it’s all the same. Something, as in, anything, is a lot closer to everything than it is nothing.

I should rewrite this review after I realize all of the art of today is the art of the art of, though for the time being the most common quality of writing that makes me less likely to read it is if it is published. It makes me think this all might’ve ended up instead of down if I were some sort of successful author, as if selling a bestseller would make a bookstar of me, but like being loved for who we’re with, don’t we all want to be loved for who we’re not. I was always afraid the only National Endowment for the Arts I’d ever have my hands on is my cock.

I reread this review and I realize I’d forgot how much of ourselves we have to forget when we try to forget someone else, but in my head all I hear is the same old same All hail, Might’ve, thou shalt be king hereafter. I ask the author to read this review before I send it out to be rejected, but then the author tells me she thinks it reads like la puta is referring to her, which makes me smile that she might’ve thought this review is about her, though maybe even I don’t know who la puta is, as much as I now know I didn’t, but no one, maybe not even la puta, knows who la puta is but la puta.

Still I might be able to get something good together to review Plastic Vodka Bottle Sleepover, something, as in:

The title Plastic Vodka Bottle Sleepover turns in itself like love into a lover as it turns the nouns into adjectives from Plastic to Vodka to Bottle to Sleepover and we see all life is is this effort to try to turn nouns into adjectives. Plastic Vodka Bottle Sleepover is all about deixis and in more than one sense, but in the story and the sound of its title, it is the same as This Side of Paradise and, like the title This Side of Paradise itself, it is the same in a structural sense of sound reflecting story to show how it signifies This Side of Paradise.

I have never had much of a Mary to hail, but I’ll try because I’m afraid only one person will read this as much as I’m sure la puta will read this because you are la puta and I am la puta and all of this is puta y pues puta y puta y pues puta. Our puta who art in puta, puta be thy name thy kingdom puta thy will be puta in puta as it is in puta. Give us this puta our daily puta and puta us our puta as we puta our putas and puta us not into puta but deliver us from puta; pues puta. Hail puta madre full of puta, puta is with thee.

The words are, whether we write them or not, all there because all we are is our word and our words for our word, though looking back now on all of my looking forward, all I know is I don’t even know myself, but that isn’t all I don’t know.

All I know is I don’t know.

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Sam Farahmand is an Iranian-American writer from Los Angeles. He is an editor at drDOCTOR. He has an MFA from The New School and his writing has appeared in Hobart and drDOCTOR Vol. 1.