The Legend of Poison Jim, the Mustard King

by Rich Bellis

In the Museum of Chinese in America, two blocks north of Canal Street in New York City, a small, illuminated tile informs visitors that “sometime before 1865,” a Chinese American squirrel trapper known as “Poison Jim” found the mustard plant “growing weedlike in the Salinas Valley.” By selling the seeds, he “unintentionally turn[ed] mustard into a commercial crop” in the United States. A textbook published in 2010 repeats the story, with Poison Jim making and selling mustard until it “became a major California product.”

“Poison Jim Chinaman” was first documented by the little-known writer Owen Clarke Treleaven, who published a six-page story about him in a 1919 issue of the Overland Monthly, a magazine serving middle-class readers a diet of human interest pieces and folksy caricatures of the American West long after its wildest years were behind it. Writers glibly peddled stereotypes about the multiethnic fabric of frontier societies; the issue in which Treleaven’s story appeared also included an article on “Queer Korean Superstitions” and a poem called “Loleeta — An Indian Lyric.”

According to an old stagecoach driver, Leagan, whose yarn makes up most of the narrative, Poison Jim earned his nickname for having “more luck than anyone else ’round here mixin’ poisoned grain to kill off ground squirrels.” But when wild mustard overtook the valley one spring, threatening wheat production, Jim knew what to do: He rounded up a hundred Chinese laborers who swiftly set about clearing the fields, drying the plants, and storing away the threshed seed. When the mustard crop in South Africa failed later that year, a French condiment manufacturer, having gotten wind of a large harvest of mustard seed, showed up in San Francisco to buy Jim’s stock for thirty-three thousand dollars. With his earnings, Jim purchased a small ranch but lived modestly. Several years later, a drought blighted two consecutive grain crops, intensifying already strained conditions in the local “Indian village.” When a dispute erupted there over a stolen sheep, the owner who went looking for it opened fire, killing a man and a young mother. “Then,” Leagan recalls, “we saw what ‘Poison Jim’ was made of.” He stoically gathered up the murdered woman’s baby, then returned four days later to distribute fifteen thousand dollars worth of provisions to the sick and hungry throughout the entire valley.

Leagan’s story takes place “’bout forty years back” from the time of its telling — roughly 1880. If it’s difficult to imagine a Chinese squirrel trapper escaping public scrutiny for decades after suddenly striking it rich, that might be because it didn’t quite happen that way. According to James Perry, a curator and archivist at the Monterey County Historical Society, “Poison Jim, as far as our records relate, never existed.”

In the introduction to his 1985 study of Chinese life in the Monterey Bay region, Chinese Gold — a title drawn from the nickname mustard earned after being commercialized — the historian Sandy Lydon points out that one reason Chinese Americans were often excluded from the historical record was “the ferocious struggle between the Chinese immigrants and all levels of government in the United States.” Both “wished to obscure” it for their own reasons — “the Chinese to avoid further harassment by immigration officials, and the whites to cover the often embarrassing facts of the conflict.”

By that measure, the very difficulty of proving Poison Jim’s existence could be considered an argument for it. That paradox hints at a second one: The mustard profit that allegedly made Jim famous posed a threat that would have been best mitigated by giving much of it away — as publicly as possible. Indeed, Treleaven isn’t alone in praising Jim’s largesse. Besides the tenuous mention of a “prosperous San Juan Mongolian, named Jim Jack” in a small local newspaper, The Pajaronian,in 1900, the only other major source about Jim is a a 1929 account by Isaac L. Mylar, a Salinas Valley local who described working as a thresher under “‘Jim Jacks,’ or ‘China Jim,’ the ‘Mustard King.’” Mylar affirms that Jim was “one of the most generous and best liked men, by all children and families in need.” (Mylar’s account is perhaps no more reliable than Leagan’s, though: It was written not by Mylar himself, but “from the author’s narrative” by James G. Piratsky, the enterprising editor of The Pajaronian.)

Regardless, modern scholars bought into the “Poison Jim” story. In Lydon’s retelling, which ignores Mylar’s account, Jim first sold enough seed to a San Francisco broker to pay his workers before striking a second, bigger deal; the mustard crop failed not just in South Africa but in Europe, too; and it’s only then that a French buyer scooped up Jim’s remaining wares. And, while Lydon left out the epilogue involving the gunned-down woman, he inexplicably raised Jim’s fortune by two thousand dollars and claimed it was paid in gold.

Given that no other historical sources about Poison Jim have emerged, what led Lydon to alter the story further is, like much else, a matter of speculation. But a changing political climate is one possible incentive. Spurred on by the Civil Rights movement, a new generation of scholars in the late sixties and seventies began making strides to restore the experiences and contributions of those typically left out of the historical record. While Perry contends that mustard “commercialization has been negligible in the valley when compared to most other crops,” Lydon and others show it did enjoy a heyday in which Chinese Americans played a major part: Tax rolls from the 1890s list the names of Chinese and white farmers alike who paid taxes first on seventeen tons, then thirty-four, and, in 1895, “a whopping” sixty-eight tons of mustard seed. Yet Lydon’s scrupulous presentation of those figures contrasts with his embellishment of Treleaven’s story; that his modern version feels more plausible gives the impression he felt it needed to be.

While a literature scholar writing in 1974 about Chinese representations in the Overland Monthly approached “Poison Jim Chinaman” strictly as a fable, another, later historian — and a textbook and a museum — have not. If Treleaven’s story seems crafted to convey the progressive pieties of an earlier America, even before appealing to those of a later one, it’s because it probably was. During the last half of the nineteenth century, when discrimination and racial violence against Chinese Americans was at its most intense, the Overland Monthly devoted many pages to debating the “Chinese Question.” Around the time that Treleaven’s article appeared, the past decades’ antipathies toward Chinese immigrants had begun to coalesce under a nativist political climate opposed to immigration altogether. In light of all this, Treleaven’s “Poison Jim” seems specially fashioned to upend those hostilities and suspicions; he embodies the “Chinese character” while at the same time proving its harmony with homespun American virtues like ingenuity and industriousness. At first, old Leagan warns that “them Chinese have more up their sleeves ’bout everythin’ than we know anyway,” but that wiliness turns out to be a hidden asset, benefiting — twice over — the very community someone like Jim would have had every reason to mistrust. In Treleaven’s story, the mustard hardly matters.

A modern history of labor in California contains a footnote regretting that “the San Bautista Historical Society was unable to locate the photograph of Poison Jim that appears in” Mylar’s book. Today, the mustard plant is easier to locate in the Salinas Valley than the fragmentary traces of its supposed progenitor, whoever he was, or wasn’t. James Perry, the Monterey County Historical Society curator, points out that “mustard was and continues to be valuable for farmers as an off-season cover crop to prevent land erosion, and also as [a] nutrient additive.” In late winter and early spring, its furious yellow blossoms cloak the valley. Hundreds of farm workers still go there to harvest it. Many of them, still, are immigrants.

Rich Bellis is a freelance writer based in Brooklyn and a blog editor for The Brooklyn Quarterly.

Jeremy Brooks

by Awl Sponsors

VICE Sports and Budweiser meet the Palestinian Women’s National Team as they prepare to challenge a men’s team to see how football can bridge cultural divides and combat conventions that discriminate against women.

Hi Polly,

I’m 29 and have been through an enormous amount of shit that is both situation-specific and universal; I am not unproud that I’ve made it this far, considering. I’m in therapy and have been off and on since I was eight, looking for a way to beat back some severe depression and find good reasons to keep doing normal people things that actually feel excruciating. I’m on some meds now that make me not feel like I’m walking around without any skin, but I know that’s just about getting level and now I’ve got actual work to do. I just have no idea where to go or what to do next.

I’m committed to not being a sadsack asshole anymore, and I’ve learned so much. I’m trying to stay away from both tepid and unhelpfully intense relationships that remind me of my fucked up childhood. I’m looking for ways to dive deep and be okay with metaphorical heat and darkness and actual solitude and uncertainty. I want so much to hold on to what I like about myself — my bravery, my depth of feeling, my brutal, nasty intelligence — while also learning to be an actual regular person who can do things like enjoy basic times of friends without boozing myself into maudlin unbearableness, or getting so discouraged at my job that everyone wonders what I’m even doing there until I get fired. It’s like I keep figuring this shit out, and then forgetting it immediately.

I guess, I just can’t find a good middle ground about anything? When I imagine what my “best life” is, it’s only possible through a time machine. I don’t want to write, or be a writer, I want to have already published a barnstorming first novel at seventeen that made me universally adored and celebrated. I don’t daydream about meeting a good dude and making it work, I lose hours imagining having never met the asshole abusers or lukewarm Mr. All Wrongs. I’m so lonely, because I’m never as kind or gracious to myself as I am to my friends, but every chance I get to make a connection, I cock up with try-hard nonsense or totally losing my shit. I try to make plans, try to remember that good people with good lives have to work for them, but I almost always feel like I have missed the boat for any of the normal stuff people do or enjoy. I want to want things for myself, but can’t follow through on anything, like I already think that I’ve failed and should just bow out, or second guess if I really want those things or can make them work until opportunities have sailed right on past.

This attitude made more sense, I guess, when my dreams were so big they were laughable. I’m barreling down the road towards middle age, the time to become a child prodigy or set myself on the path to run the world or start an epic hundred-year romance are gone. I’ve tried to lower my expectations for myself, to accept that my big dreams, or even normal-sized ones, aren’t in the cards, but I can’t shake the sense that what I want and what I can achieve are so far apart that even tiny things feel beyond reach.

Writing to you feels like a cop out, because it seems like you’ve addressed all of these things before. But seriously, how do you love yourself? How do you accept your flaws and strengths and offer your best to others while trusting they will make allowances for your worst? How do you be a person? I’m struggling here to make any reasonable plan, or even take a simple positive step, to being happy and whole.

I know there’s no secret, and I don’t really want to live in a Jules Verne novel, but seriously, how does someone actually get to a place where they can combine and use all the good advice they’ve been given, and just live a life?

Sincerely,

I Need A Meaning I Can Memorize

Dear INAMICM,

It’s funny that I should stumble on your letter today, because I’m sitting down for the fiftieth time to write an introduction to a potential Ask Polly book, and I’m pretty sure that I’m going to fail, yet again, to come up with a clear, coherent message, a MEANING TO MEMORIZE.

Because you can’t sell a book today without a short, snappy, memorizable meaning. I’m not sure you can sell anything without a zippy message attached to it. Literary agents, publishers, publicists, talent bookers, lifestyle magazine gurus, opinion page honchos, network executives, TV producers, studio heads, investment analysts, local politicians, world leaders, archangels, God, Yoda, Darth Vader? They all want a concise, coherent, provocative, urgent, necessary, salty-sweet message-nugget, and they want it delivered from the head of the Great and Powerful Oz, flanked by flamethrowers aimed at the sky.

At the very least, they’d like you to smile a little more often, and flat-iron your hair.

Helpful, regular people might say to someone like me (or you!), someone with enormous expectations and weak follow-through and brutal, nasty intelligence and a tendency to dive into maudlin unbearableness, “So, smile more and flat-iron your hair, for fuck’s sake. What’s the big deal?”

What do we say to that? Because “Smile and flat-iron your hair” is a meaning we can memorize, right? Just hide your wishy-washy self behind the fucking curtain, aim the flamethrowers at the sky, and speak into the Mr. Microphone with the All-Powerful Deity effect turned on. This is what our skin-deep, tl;dr culture appears to want from us: distilled three-second tidings. Slap your long-winded ass in a saucepan on medium heat until the confusion and the second-guessing burn off, but so do the complexity and the unanswerable philosophical questions and the soaring but somewhat vague epiphanies.

Instead of reading like a cry for help, though, your letter sounds almost like a mission statement. Because, even though you feel isolated and lonely, even though you’ve drawn circles around your so-called “bad” behaviors and said, “I need to do less of this,” even though you’re ready to get on the “right” track and start feeling happy and “whole,” you also paint a pretty compelling portrait of how it feels to be a complex person in a world that embraces forced smiles and simpleton wisdom and bulletproof solutions, a world that kicks the wishy-washy and the maudlin to the curb. In some ways, your letter sounds less like “Here are my many fucking problems” and more like a kind of rallying cry for complicated, sensitive, brutally smart human beings who crave a meaning they can memorize but who are also severely allergic to memorizable meanings.

Likewise, I think I’m struggling to write a general-purpose introduction that encapsulates the kind of snappy, three-second messages that signal a saleable product for the same reason I struggled to tolerate annoying jobs and half-assed relationships and passive-aggressive friendships when I was your age. I got all weird and wishy-washy or I cocked up with try-hard nonsense or I totally lost my shit. I knew that I should smile more and flat-iron my hair, but even thinking about these things made me want to show up unshowered and ramble incoherently about all of the reasons everything in the world was bewildering and wrong. Somehow KNOWING that there was ONE right answer only made me want to offer up five hundred wrong answers instead.

Right now, you are the living, breathing manifestation of five hundred wrong answers. Your letter, if you reread it with the right spirit of appreciation, is a paean to wrong answers.

But listen, I’m not sure you have a big problem with follow-through, or long-term commitment, or wholeness. I think your problem is about introductions, literal and figurative. Regular life was excruciating up until not so long ago, right? You are just starting out on a smooth path. You clearly don’t love your career, and maybe you suspect that your friends, what few friends you might have, are incapable of understanding you. You haven’t really dated a man who’s healthy yet. Give yourself a break, because you’re only twenty-nine years old, and YOU JUST GOT HERE, to a place where you’re not an unhinged, severely depressed, unstable human attracting other unhinged, severely depressed, unstable humans. Also, beginnings are not easy, precisely BECAUSE they demand that we get behind the goddamn curtain and act like we’re simpler and less conflicted than we are.

Just as you believe that you should somehow retool yourself to be more resilient and optimistic and tenacious and THEN life might be ok (but you are still, somehow, resistant to being retooled), I imagine that any Ask Polly introduction I write will get flat-ironed until I don’t recognize it anymore. I might start with something dark and digressive on the outside with a chewy optimistic center, but eventually it will be hammered into a less dark and digressive state.

That’s a problem. Because the real value of this column and the reason it could only thrive on the weirdo terrain of The Awl, is that it’s exactly as unwieldy and rambling and flawed as it needs to be in order to kick up some tiny speck of redemption. Maybe there are coherent messages along the way (DARE TO BE “THAT WOMAN.” KICK TEPID MEN TO THE CURB. Or my personal favorite: COME ON HIS HAMPTON BLOUSE AND MOVE ON), but if you cut straight to that message, why would you even care? I wouldn’t. Who wants to sound just like every other little digestible square of upbeat text in the world, the text of cereal boxes and lifestyle magazines and yoga retreat pamphlets and TEDx talk summaries and organic tea bags?

Although I do think that we’re stumbling half-blind into an era of newfound indifference to memorizable messages and the Great and Powerful in general, it’s hard to know what we should put in place of the simpleton wisdom and the well-styled gurus. For example, I just watched five new TV comedies and dramas that will air soon, and every last pseudo-subversive one of them either features blood and gore and worms crawling out of eyeballs, or nasty people who insult each other and talk about masturbation and what’s going to get them off around the clock like overgrown, angry teenagers (see also: a real-life version of that TV show “Just ‘Batin’” from Idiocracy.) Even when culture rejects the zippy, Live Your Best Life, self-improvement-as-extreme-overachiever-sport messages out there, the results aren’t all that appealing or meaningful. A few minutes in, someone smashes someone’s head in with a tire iron or makes some casual joke about anal sex, and the carnival’s over before it even started.

So this is what I have to say to you: Forget easy slogans. Your tendency to think of yourself as a damaged, sad misfit who might never fit in or be happy, who needs to be fixed? It’s understandable, but it needs to change. Even though you had to identify the extreme duress of your past and locate the ways in which these traumas formed you; even though you STILL need to be wary of tepid men and intense overbearing people who will use your scars to bend you to their will; even though you will probably ALWAYS, in some tiny corner of your brain, suspect that you’re too fucked by your circumstances and chemistry and nature to ever be a regular person in the world with an equal shot at happiness as everyone else, you also have to, simultaneously, try to let that stuff go. You have to learn to take all of these ways you bungle your introductions, with darkness and digressions, and embrace them a little.

Because it’s pretty fucking hard to follow through with things that start with forced smiles and flat-ironed hair. You have no way of knowing how good or bad you are at sallying forth from a point that feels authentic and gratifying and real, whether it’s a job or a friendship or a love affair. Personally, I’ve been amazed at how easy I find it to be married to someone who’s actually interested in me, insane rambling wishy-washiness and all, and I’ve been surprised at how hard I’m willing to work at a career that feels meaningful (occasionally!) and offers chances for me to delve into complex subjects without glossing or reducing or oversimplifying (sometimes!).

You write, “It’s like I keep figuring this shit out, and then forgetting it immediately.” That’s not your strange little personal problem. That’s not what makes you uniquely fucked. That’s a universal truth, a fundamental dimension of the human condition. You know who feels that way? You, me and everyone we know. Fucking OPRAH feels that way, or she’d have fallen asleep while interviewing Deepak Chopra a long, long time ago.

So: We can all continue to be controlled by the ILLUSION that this is not how it is for everybody else. We can decide that we hate our jobs because we are SINGULARLY stubborn and lazy and bored. We can decide that we quit things because we are UNUSUALLY unable to deal. We can get angry at ourselves, over and over again, because we are uncertain and full of longing. Or we can wake up and notice that this is a common thread of human existence, easily traceable through history (although perhaps less true of people who had to, say, wake at dawn and plow the fields, which is why Viktor Frankl always advocated structuring a depressed person’s day with lots of hard labor and very little time to reflect).

Did I mention that we’re in conflict with ourselves? We’re in conflict with ourselves because we want A MEANING WE CAN MEMORIZE, but we also DISTRUST ALL MEANINGS, memorizable or otherwise. In other words, we are like Goths in black leather with pretty highlighted, flat-ironed hair. We are huffing spray paint and watching Oprah. We are Hannah Montana, skipping and chewing bubble gum, and we’re also Miley Cyrus, fondling Alan Thicke with a giant foam hand. We are Julie, cruise director of “The Love Boat,” smiling and gushing about bingo on the Lido Deck, and we’re also Khaleesi, Mother of Dragons, growling, “I will answer injustice with justice!”

We are angry and hopeful and disappointed and we want more. We also blame ourselves for wanting more, as if we should’ve been stronger inside than to be molded by a culture that trains us, from the moment we’re conscious, to want more, more, more. As if we could simply shut out decades of snappy three-second messages that remind us, over and over again, of our hunger and our thirst. As if we could endure a non-stop media barrage of sexy Amazonian humans with flat-ironed hair who never age, repeatedly saving the day on our big screens and saving orphaned children in our magazines and speaking in snappy messages and trading in a five-million-dollar beach house for a twenty-million-dollar mansion on the Italian Riviera every few milliseconds. As if we could encounter these frothy, airbrushed fairy tales for most of our lives and emerge feeling peaceful and satisfied with our frizzy hair and our imperfect love lives and our mountains of debt.

Of course you don’t want to write. Who wants to sit and try at something and rarely get paid for it and possibly fail at it? I don’t want to do it a lot of the time. We all wish we’d published a barnstorming first novel at seventeen that made us universally adored and celebrated. OK, I would’ve been fine with that happening at age thirty-seven, actually. Age forty-seven would be ok with me, too.

But I also know that I wouldn’t be completely satisfied with that. Even if I were to publish a brilliant bestselling novel, I’d be halfway through the book tour (hating it, like the fucking ingrate I am), and I’d already be wondering if I’d ever publish anything half as brilliant as my first novel. I’d already be plagued by worry over whether I could pull it off all over again.

And even though there are some people reading this who are thinking, “OH FUCK YOU PEOPLE, I WOULDN’T BE LIKE THAT AT ALL, I’D FUCKING ENJOY EVERY MINUTE OF UNEXPECTED LITERARY SUCCESS!” most of those people would be running in some other form of tiny circle, worrying about something else, like we all do.

The only thing you gain as you get older is the ability to look around you and say, “This is pretty much what I get, and I’m not going to have this forever. I’d better really enjoy it.” But don’t get me wrong, I’m not all peaceful and satisfied. I’m just thrilled to be more peaceful and satisfied than I was ten years ago. I can go on vacation without getting twitchy. I can hang out with my kids without playing Candy Crush or impatiently scanning the news, sometimes.

What I’m trying to tell you is that life is fucking hard and messy for everyone, and there is no quick way to memorize a little motto or jingle that will see you through the messiness and the melancholy. No one will save you. No one will make you feel whole. I personally knew a guy who published a barnstorming first novel at seventeen that made him universally adored and celebrated, and his life has been a rollercoaster of highs and lows since then, just like the rest of us. I don’t know if he’s happy or sad, but he definitely never wrote another novel. (That might mean he’s very happy, mind you. I don’t know. But that first celebrated novel certainly didn’t solve everything.)

Success at writing rarely adds up to anything you can touch. You either write because you enjoy writing or (more commonly) you like how it feels to have written something. These are merely things you do with yourself. Even if, by some miracle, you become Jennifer Egan overnight, you still have to face the same question: Do I want to practice my craft today or not? Can I find meaning here? Does it feel good to do this, even when I fall short? Can I accept that I will usually fall short, that it takes a ton of work to gently massage a bad thing until it becomes a good one?

Because even though you might think you don’t want to work hard at anything, I think you’re wrong. You worked very, very hard to get here. Clearly, you enjoy hard work a lot.

Go watch that documentary about Jerry Seinfeld returning to stand-up comedy after making something like eight hundred million dollars from his sitcom. Because in the end, even for a megarich megastar, it’s all about craft. And WHAT is harder than trying to make a joke funny enough to make a room full of people — PEOPLE SKEPTICAL ABOUT MILLIONAIRES — laugh? Why would Seinfeld try to do something THAT DIFFICULT, that embarrassing and possibly catastrophic? Because the alternative was to retreat to Neverland and hire a doctor with a fondness for propofol.

If you’re not dodging chemical bombs or walking five miles through the desert heat to find potable water, you have to wake up and shut off your bad brain and work. When your work is done, you have to figure out how to shut off your bad brain and relax. You have to recognize and accept, in your bones, that accomplishing everything you’ve ever dreamed of (like Seinfeld) feels a little bit like never having accomplished anything. You will still have to inject meaning into your life every day, somehow, some way.

Speaking of “celebrity” profiles, the other day I saw a teaser for a TV special about that guy who says “Let’s get ready to rrrrrrumble!” at big events. In the teaser, Rumble Guy describes that fateful day when he tried out a bunch of different stupid catchphrases, and landed on the one that was stupid enough that stupid people might get all frothed up every time they heard it. Then Rumble Guy’s brother, who is or was his manager, talked about how they were extremely strategic about building a gigantic fortune around this one stupid catchphrase. I assume they made sure that NO ONE ELSE COULD EVER SAY this stupid catchphrase, except for Rumble Guy. That way Rumble Guy could spend the rest of his life flying around the country, uttering this one stupid catchphrase, and then taking home a giant bag of cash.

In contrast to the Seinfeld documentary, this story epitomizes the absurd Dr. Seuss-like world we inhabit today. Because not only did Rumble Guy have the gall to trademark his shitty catchphrase, not only did he have the gall to charge millions for it, but he also had the gall to sit around in front of the camera and smugly discuss what a fucking genius he was for coming up with that one enchantingly idiotic idea — not even an idea, really, but a string of five pointless words. I don’t mean Rumble Guy is a bad guy. Of course not. But can you FUCKING IMAGINE being that guy, and happily riding the fumes of something that stupid for the rest of your life?

It takes a special kind of a person to do that. And honestly, when you present me with your string of difficult questions, this is what I think about. I think about hard work and the ability to suspend your disbelief, how those two things are really what constitute follow-through — with love, with your career, with your friends. You ask me, “How do you love yourself? How do you accept your flaws and strengths and offer your best to others while trusting they will make allowances for your worst? How do you be a person? I’m struggling here to make any reasonable plan, or even take a simple positive step, to being happy and whole.” All of these things mostly boil down to hard work and suspending your disbelief. You have to be a little bit like Jerry Seinfeld and you have to be a little bit like the Rumble Guy. Because even though one guy gets up in the morning and does something really challenging and maybe even embarrassing (and then, yes, eats delicious fucking meals and flies places in his private jet) and the other guy just mutters five empty words (and also, yes, eats delicious fucking meals and flies places in his private jet), both of those guys know how to do something very important: They know how to shut off the part of their brains that say things like “Oh my god, I made the world’s best sitcom and maybe I’ll never create anything that good for the rest of my life!” and also “Oh my god, I’m just a cheesy dude with a spraytan and a growly voice!”

It goes without saying that these people have their problems. We all do. Do they love themselves? Do they offer their best to others? Can they make plans? Are they happy and whole? Who the fuck knows? What the fuck is “whole”? What does happiness look like, exactly? They do what they do and they don’t question it. Or, they mute the questions for just long enough to get ‘er done.

THAT SAID, my guess is that you won’t be able to suspend your disbelief and shut off your bad brain until you let your disbelief and your bad brain have their time to shine. Again, you are grappling with introductions, with trying to appear smooth and kind and not-maudlin and never-brutal. What you really need is space to be maudlin but not unbearable, brutal but not nasty, dark and digressive but not self-destructive, rambling and vague but not impossibly self-involved. You are a good writer and you should write more, because it will allow you the time and space you need to let everything out. In my opinion, when you’re complicated and smart and damaged and sensitive and self-conscious, you can’t just “accept” your flaws, you have to embrace them.

Embracing your flaws is, paradoxically, closely related to suspending your disbelief. It’s about rejecting the snappy message that the world wants snappy messages. It’s about daring to be fucking “tl;dr” in order to also access “win” and “yaaasss” and the “omg.”

You will never be the polished, one-dimensional person this world desires. Let the world have their airbrushed, frothy sloganeers. You need to make messes and embarrass yourself. When you stick your neck out and open up and embarrass yourself, lots of people will find you intolerable, because lots of people don’t like half-formed, wishy-washy, scattered introductions. The more you accept that and let your hair down anyway, the less you’ll compulsively try too hard, hide, drink too much, hate yourself, cock it all up, etc.

You must stop trying to fix things, and start trying to love what’s not completely fixed. You must be flawed and scattered, in as active a way as possible. Your work is to find some place for flaws and maudlin scatteredness. Find your own craft, and maybe even find your own messy fucking catchphrase, too.

In fact, maybe snappy messages and catchphrases aren’t so bad after all. Maybe we hate them because most of them feel so willfully blind to how it feels to be a person in the world. But maybe you can cobble together a message that you really believe in. Maybe you can look at what you fear the most in yourself, and love that part of you instead. You may not feel love, but you will be resolved to show yourself love anyway. You will stop using harsh terms to summarize your glory — your unique, off-kilter glory. Or maybe you’ll still use harsh terms but you’ll imbue them with glory, somehow. You’ll appropriate the most soul-sucking messages that were ever used against you: YOU WILL COME ON THEIR HAMPTON BLOUSE AND MOVE ON.

Let yourself ramble. Let out the full scope of who you are. Find your own meaning, and memorize it. Let your meaning be scrappy and misshapen enough that you can feel love for it. Get up in the morning and open the window and say:

I AM MAUDLIN AND BRUTAL AND BRAVE.

Say it like you mean it, until you mean it. Suspend your disbelief. Then get to work. Let your flaws lead you past the awkward beginnings, past the skin-deep introductions, past the clumsy trying-too-hard greetings, to the good part, to the bad part, to the real thing. Just keep moving forward, breathing in and out, trusting that darkness and digressions will lead you to love, bright and pure and real. Follow your best intentions and your worst fears and feel how excruciating it can be, to simply endure the beating of your tender heart. It hurts, and you’re exhausted. Look around you: Everything is beautiful, right now. Smudgy and melancholy and incomplete and unbearably beautiful.

Polly

Are you a three-second memorizable message and want to be tl;dr? Write to Polly and discuss!

Heather Havrilesky (aka Polly Esther) is The Awl’s existential advice columnist. She’s also a regular contributor to The New York Times Magazine, and is the author of the memoir Disaster Preparedness (Riverhead 2011). She blogs here about scratchy pants, personality disorders, and aged cheeses.

Photo by Jay Aremac

“While the talks between the two companies have thus far been considered friendly, people involved in the discussions said that Mr. Murdoch is determined to buy Time Warner and is unlikely to walk away.” — The experience of truly cheating Death comes with an awareness, a soft, white noise that never quite recedes wholly into the background, that one has not acquired a permanent injunction barring further contact, but merely extracted a non-binding promise — an intimation, really — that while the evasion was fair play, the momentary lapse will be remedied in the fullness of time, the enabling loophole closed, completely and utterly. So Death circles, endlessly, the curve unbroken.

“I’m ashamed of you. You’re what’s wrong with this country.” — Senator Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, not incorrectly, to executives from companies that manufacture or market e-cigarettes.

Just another Diamond Day is 44 years old, and Vashti Bunyan has a new album coming out October. Time: Is it just a dumb lie???

“[REDACTED]: the new word that will make your life slightly simpler, forever.” — Is it “death?” Maybe “money?” Or perhaps it’s “Vitamix” or “delivery laundry,” but that’s two words, hmm. I’ve found that the word “no” is effective for making life simpler; but in rare cases, “yes” works too.

★★ An indecisive follow-up to the sweeping storms of the night before. Morning was humid gray. A couple crowded into the niche between the turnstile fence and the MetroCard machines to kiss. The air was close and still. Paulownia leaves sprouting from a traffic-calming planting bed found enough breeze to wiggle on, and then a puff of wind delivered a raindrop just below the corner of the mouth. That was all the rain, for a while. The gray became glaring, up on the roof. White edging showed, and a little blue, until it was too bright to read in. Then it darkened and dimmed again. A shower passed, carrying a harbor smell to the Upper West Side, and another arrived. Both were unspectacular.

Q: “Will Camu Camu Be The Next Amazonian ‘It’ Fruit?.”

A: Eh.

The Pull

by Matt Siegel

I interviewed Saul in 2011 for a project about sex addiction that never came to fruition, at least in the form I had originally envisioned. A sixty-something native of Bensonhurst, he had the most delicious speaking voice, which I dare describe as a potion of equal parts Jewish, gay, and old-school Brooklyn. But it was his untapped authorial voice that moved me to develop our conversation into a monologue, unburdened by an interviewer’s questions, and strung together into a reflection on the intersection of sexuality, religion, and identity in the 1960s and 70s.

I didn’t have sex until I was already out of college, and was a social worker. I decided I wanted to have sex with men. I said, “I’ll try this and see,” and I went with hustlers who were — some of them were attractive, but it didn’t go well because they were on 42nd Street, and it was a very degrading area and it was only about money. And then I realized it’s really not what I wanted. But I started with the hustlers, because that was what was available. It was before Stonewall. So that was what you did: You went in a dark area. You can go to a bathhouse, which I didn’t do; you could go to a movie house, which I didn’t do; but you could go to 42nd and pick up people who were…that way, so that’s what I did.

I only got my information through reading gay novels like City of Night, and things like that, and I might take notes on that and use that as a reference. But that’s a novel; that’s not really historical, so it just didn’t fit when I would go to 42nd. The way I’d approach people was not…they did it in the novel — but they don’t do that in New York City that way, like saying, “Are you a hustler? How much do you want?” That’s what I got out of these books.

The first experience wasn’t very good, but I figured nobody knew about it, so… And I had some people that liked me, some hustlers that I became their regular customer. They liked me very much. They had girlfriends on the side, so, um, like once, one guy said, “You’re the only gay man I allow. I’ve broken off with this because my girlfriend doesn’t want me to do it, but I keep you — you’re the last one.” So I was sort of a privileged character.

Even if they couldn’t perform — some of them were on drugs, you know — I would just leave the money and not have sex with them. I felt good about that, that I just…the guy was so out of it, you could see. So I would leave the ten dollars and go. But we went to the shitty hotels, flea-bitten hotels. That’s where these hustlers would take you. The rent was so cheap, it was five dollars for the night, and I’d say I wanna have sex — and he’s already out, he’s on the bed sleeping, and drooling a little bit, and their noses all red from the drugs, you know. But I paid. Even where it was not dirty and filthy you could still get sick. This hustler had a beautiful apartment with fish tank and beautiful bed, you know, just like — and I caught parasites from him.

I moved to California to help my brother in Los Angeles, and I was living in Beverly Hills, and went on leave of absence from my job as a social worker. I was doing really well by the way — got very good evaluations — and I went on a leave to help my brother who was an alcoholic. He had that Los Angeles lifestyle of drugs and goofballs and liquor, and my family said, “Well, go out there and help him. He’s staying in bed all day and sleeping and drinking and drugging and all these women hustlers…whores. He had all these street girls — what do you call them? — prostitutes, those types, and he’s hanging out with call girls. Some of them were street, others were really high class. And go and see if you can help him out.” I couldn’t help him. I myself picked up on some of the laziness. I went to work at one in the afternoon. I used to go to these discos there that just opened up in 1968–69, and I went to the discos, and the guys in L.A. looked much better than the guys in New York. They took their t-shirts off, they had these beautiful bodies, and they had long hair. And so that’s when I started with the becoming a disco queen in L.A. There was a place called Zeros which, during the week, was a famous nightclub; it would become The Patch on the weekend. The Patch was an all-gay giant disco. And everyone had a car so I would drive there. I had a white Cadillac. And all these palm trees, the weather was nice. But I wasn’t happy because it the L.A. living wasn’t no love affair, it was just all pleasure orientated, you know?

I became addicted to disco, and I stopped with the hustlers because I met somebody who was walking on the street, who was very good looking, and I didn’t know he was a hustler. I thought he was a student or something, and I talked to him and said let’s have lunch together. So he went home with me to my house and we had sex and he was very handsome: blond hair, blue eyes, a hippy with the long hair. Thing was, I didn’t realize he was probably hustling to survive, and he joined the Marines to straighten out, and he became my boyfriend. He’d be in the Marines and visit me, come flying in from Camp Lejeune in North Carolina. He would fly in and I would pay for the airline tickets and we would stay the whole weekend together and then, after the weekend was over, he’d have to go back. And so that was like what I consider to be my boyfriend because he was the only one I had, and I was the only one he had, so he and I hit it off well. But in the end we broke up over money. I couldn’t keep up sending him to his family — airline tickets — he needed to go to visit his mother who was very sick, and his brother who was in a car accident. So I’d send him to Louisiana and then bring him back, then send him to North Carolina and bring him back, and I couldn’t keep it up, you know? And so he went back into the straight world, but I knew for sure he was gay because this lasted for about three years.

I was a little blue but I didn’t go back to the hustlers, I just went to the disco world, which was now flourishing in New York. Sybil’s had just come over from England. It was Sybil Burton’s, the ex-wife of Richard Burton — she took the divorce money and she opened up Sybil’s, and I used to go there with my straight friends. Then, I went to another one Andy Warhol had: Electric Circus. This is before I came out as gay, and I would go in and be dressed to kill: sequin jackets and glitter and white fur coat and large platform shoes made in Brazil, and silk pants, you know the look — the look of the Bee Gees, but all super hyped up, and I would go and I would have a good time dancing and all that. I never found Mr. Wonderful on the dance floor, but I did show up. I went to all those discos including Studio 54. After all, if movie stars go there it must be ok. Everything the movie stars did was good for me.

I went back to being a social worker — this time they needed me as a probation officer. I took the test and I got a very high score and they hired me on the spot and I started to work with teenage kids and I was very good at it — got very good reviews — and it lasted about fifteen years, and the only thing was, that at night, I’d go out cruising these gay bars and go to the gay discos, but during the day I’d be very straight with these kids, telling them that they shouldn’t go out dancing and all that. I was still a religious boy going to synagogue, but I’d also be going to the bathhouses and to the back rooms, which had opened up.

The Anvil. International Stud — I went there, it was my first one. I went with my friend, and he disappeared the whole night. Then we went to the Toilet. We went to Crisco’s. These were the names! Toilet, Crisco’s, and, uh, there was Asstrick — A-S-S-T- R-I-C — the Vault. Each one kinda had their people would ejaculate — no full sex, only ejaculation wearing jock straps. The worst one, one I would not go to, was the Mineshaft because Mineshaft had tubs where people would defecate into the tubs with men in them, and there were levels of, like, Dante’s Inferno, so you went lower and lower, and some men wore masks because they were doing such terrible sex acts they wanted no one to see.

The bathhouses had fantasy rooms, some with trucks inside of them — giant trucks inside a room, because the meat trucks along the West Side Highway were popular sex spots. They’d have other fantasy rooms with pillows and cushions — Arabian Nights. I’d go up and down the staircase — couldn’t wait for the elevator. I would just run up and down and up and down. There were like fourteen flights of stairs, different levels of the bathhouse, and I’d go to each one. Run up and then down and up again to see if I would meet somebody, you know?

When you went to the back rooms you could hardly move, your arms were just jammed against you. There were people fisting each other, there were people in swings, going back and forth naked in swings. It looked like Berlin in the thirties — it was so decrepit. Downstairs there was regular sex. That was gay men who were not necessarily addicts. Underneath there, there was another floor that was the addicts — those were the ones who weren’t doing well with, you know, normal sex, so I went there where people stayed till eight in the morning, and I was very unhappy, and I would always have trouble leaving. I’d say, “Ten more minutes and I’m gonna go,” until it’d be eight o’clock in the morning. That was when I knew I was in trouble, because I couldn’t leave until they closed the place up! We’d come out; the light, the sun would get us in the eyeballs. The sun. Like in a movie. It was grueling and exhausting, just to get somebody you think is going to make you happy, and all you got was a little more sex.

I prayed to god to save me in certain places when I could not leave. I was able to finally get out of these places because I turned to God instead of the guy next to me. I said, “Help me out.” I said, “God, you gotta get me out of this place. I’ve been here ten hours and I still haven’t met Mr. Wonderful.” So, that kind of discontinuity, this brokenness of one’s life ’cause you’ve been in a dark place all night — and the smell is awful. Urine, smells of urine and poppers and marijuana got into your clothing. Some people liked it.

But it was very dangerous. People got stabbed. I got robbed several times. They got my jewelry ’cause I wear jewelry. I wear a lot of jewelry because when I was kid we just lacked it. We didn’t have any jewelry at all, and it was nice to have. Now I can wear jewelry if I want to. It’s inexpensive stuff but it’s flashy, you know? And I find it very comforting for some reason. It’s just like, ’cause I didn’t have it when I was young, you know? And I have some very very beautiful jewelry. I only wear it on the weekends. Like, I have gold and diamonds that people gave me. Gold necklaces. I wear that on Friday and Saturday for the Sabbath. That’s good stuff. This is just inexpensive jewelry I wear during the week. So that, that gives me a sense of, like, abundance? Something like that, you know? But my friend had his wallet stolen. I had someone put the mark of Zorro on my shirt with a razor blade. I went outside and I felt a little draft and sure enough, this big Z — this beautiful shirt, silk shirt, and somebody had taken a razor blade and put a Z like that on the back. I once met these two kids there, they were about 12 years old, having sex there with a man, and it was just, oh my gosh, they’re letting anybody in.

I didn’t realize…I thought that was gay life. We didn’t know. We thought that that was what being gay was: Party at somebody’s friend’s house, disco, bathhouse, afterwards we’d eat ice cream sodas at one of these places on Sheridan Square, and then go to the trucks, and then go to the piers, and after the piers, go into the bushes in Central Park, and that was the gay life. It was nothing; it was just pure sex. Loads of sex, sex, sex on top of sex, but all in the dark, and I remember praying at the baths, “God, get me out!” ’cause they’re all skinny shaved-headed guys on these bunks, and it looked just like Auschwitz, and, “Oh, God, get me out of these bathhouses, I hate it!” I thought gay and slut and addict is all the same thing, and it’s not. I realized that, in South Dakota, a backroom was where you keep the beer. I thought everything was a backroom for gay men, you see?

But there were human moments. Sometimes people used to tap me on the head when I was having sex with them. Tenderness was important — male-to-male tenderness. But what I went through to get that was really not.Was it worth all that effort to get that tenderness? A tap on the head is nice, but let’s face it, after paying ten bucks and going up the twelve flights of stairs to the fantasy room, and ten flights down again…

I had sex with a man once and he was having a wonderful time and he — it was funny because he jumped off this box and landed on a dolly — he had no legs. So he rolled himself outta the back room. I said, my gosh, he has no feet, this man, you know? I said, “Well, he had a good time…that’s, you know. Always looking for some positive. He had a good time. But my point is that’s how little we knew about people.

What really bugged me was the utter discontinuity in my life between my values and principles and my behavior. Once, friends of mine were getting married, I had just been with a hustler on 42nd Street, and all I had time was to run from the hustler, which was very unsatisfying sex, you know, and it was only twenty bucks in those days, and I remember I went to the temple and the rabbis were all blessing the people, and I couldn’t go right in because I had to check my face for pubic hairs. There’s holy people, weddings, and me coming from a hustler — this clashing of different worlds that didn’t seem to fit. There’s this kind of like, something’s happened, I’ve fallen through a crack in the universe and I can’t get out. This sense of sordidness, living in the life of sordid degradation — this awful feeling like you have this filthy rag on your body because you know what you’ve really been doing. Some people love that, but it wasn’t for me — to live a sordid nightlife, which in New York was very easy to do because they had regular bars and mafia bars and regular bathhouses and specialty bathhouses and fantasy bathhouses, and it was very easy to just go from one to another. That’s not what I really wanted, but I thought happiness would be found there, and it was an illusion. Happiness is never found in a back room.

And I’d go home so unsatisfied because the real beauties were not interested in me. The real beauties were interested in the other beauties, you know? They’d have, like, the Greek bodies and blond hair and blue eyes and tall and handsome. So, in other words, you go out for a positive experience, and you would endure rejection after rejection, but even that would feed my addiction because I would say, “I’ll have my revenge tomorrow. I’ll be back again!” So, you see, that was the pull. That was the pull of the gay life.

Matt Siegel is a graduate of the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program. He has previously written for Gawker, The Hairpin, The Huffington Post, and Flaunt Magazine.

Photo captured from here