Stairs Toward the Sky Lead to Sin

i dont actually remember the pretense for this assignment, what exact story i was told to mimic. but i’ve posted two snippets from this on here so far, so i figured id just put the whole thing up— for my legacy of course. i was quite funny when i was binge drinking everyday. ITS FICTION, BTW, FICTION!

The 500lb Bench Press

I had a dream I could buy a place for myself, a spot for myself in Heaven. I placed the Van Cleef down across His ginormous feet—the toenails of which hung straggling over His ever-so Mighty flesh—alongside the dragon, 50 goats, and 10 tons of grain my father received in return for Me in my marriage contract. I threw my degree across all of it, as if I could prove to God my mind was worthy enough to be here. And on the devilish left side of the pile, I put down the Mini Cooper and the Tribeca apartment and the Dalton donation check and the honeymoon in St. Barts and the — now that I am thinking about it, only ghosts can lift such things, and yet here I am, alive and awake, wishing to lift them.

Debauch

This month, I spent a grand total of $2500 of my immigrant parents’ money to club, eat, drink —Oh, how I love to drank— and Über myself to the Trust Fund Baby’s parent’s apartment on the Upper West Side. He is a bit ugly, but he has a home in the Hamptons, which is where his parentals stay while we debauch. He always has something to say about the other guys I hang out with who actually WORK (in Finance).

3

I grew up alone. I transformed my mother into an abomination of pillows for a body and a basketball for a head. I wanted something to hold, and she probably weighed around this amount. My mother was always small, worn down, beautiful, and weighted like a brick. So much in such a small thing. Very dense.

Thanks to my father we weighed a lot, only it was a lot more obvious on me. When he was here, he’d gorge me with Wendy’s after every single Mom Mandated swimming lesson. It laid so stubbornly on my thighs that I will still be fighting, cycling, and cutting it off 50 years from now.

Oscar de la Renta

Celine, my good friend in college, had a one-out-of-three, limited edition, never-seen-before, never-made-again, groundbreaking, amazing, challenging, hideous Oscar de la Renta dress. As she showed it to me, I worried about my ride home.

She held it up proudly, offering to let me wear it, but not really, and said, “Carrie wore something like this in Season 3 of SATC!”

“I think you mean Season 2, when she was chasing after Mr. Big… again. I just watched that episode last night.”

I was always late to something, everything.

5

I told my close friend who believed himself to be my boyfriend, “No one cares here!”

He did not wish for me to tell my friends about our intimacy problems as he considered himself to be a Public Figure. Celine had sent me a picture of her father standing beside the President of Argentina minutes before this conversation even began. I asked her if we could go Nazi hunting or if we missed the RSVP deadline for that.

I’m pretty sure my great grandmother was raped by a Nazi. His genes, to my dismay, survived long enough to make me a mutt.

My Time in Westchester, New York

A few years ago, maybe 10 or 35 or so, I was born. This was a few years after I was fake born. Or perhaps, you escape a dark cave of nothingness and ignorance twice in life—birth, rebirth, birth, death of all prior, Phoenix, reincarnation. All I know is as soon as my mother started paying for my education, I became alive.

Have you guys ever heard of Shamus Rahman?

B+

I started my paper for Doctor/Professor/Mister around 30 minutes before the deadline. I was crippled by the thoughts all the prior week. The thoughts of everything that was to come. It crippled me. I think I have arthritis in my finger joints, I can’t fucking type. So I took a few shots of Strawberry Lemonade Svedka and vomited on a page.

“Yes, Bush did, in fact, do 9/11.” He gave me a fucking B+ for my genius.

8

I want a child one day. I sent this child to Dalton. And it was raised Ⓥ.

Birth of Venus

I married a man who believed himself to be my husband. I cared much for the wedding and cared much for what amount his family was willing to donate to such a wholesome, artistic, and metaphorical event.

He let me take all the creative direction available to me outside of the person we hired. I hated everything she did because she was a Buffoon. She never went to college, she wasn’t well read, and she was First Gen. My imbecile Kidnapper thought we could relate to each other.

Despite her complaints, I wrote on my invitation, “A wedding is an artistic debacle, full of who one once was and who they shall remain for the rest of a breath-filled eternity— a tainted name, a shadow of the light, a stealthy movement into obscurity, a display of accumulation accomplishment.”

The strikethrough was included. Such genius, right? Right.

Yacht Girls, like Meghan and Bella and Miranda

My mother complained to me about my un-seriousness. And I took a few bites out of the campus Indian food that gave me food poisoning a few weeks prior, praying that I would bombard her ears with sounds of gagging and excretion sometime during this call.

“Maybe, if you start having to pay for things yourself you’d understand why you have to go to law school. I have invested too much into you… I came here with nothing… *Womp, womp, womp*”

“Did you know Meghan Markle was a Yacht Girl?” I responded, hoping to remind my mother of who she once was and who I always wished I could be instead.

11

They say John Summit, the DJ, started off as an accountant and made his beats in front of stock market monitors. But, I do not wish to start living so late.

Aspen

I posed to her, “What if I started expressing myself, creating… I don’t know just being me?”

Her eyebrows furrowed in confusion. An eyebrow furrow which posed to me questions about marriage, job opportunities,

How would you make our high school look in the news media?

and

Is it even classy to exist so openly?

“Hm, do you wanna just come to Aspen with me and my mom from January 10th to the 18th? We can talk about all that… and get fucked up.”

I Do Not Own Arc'Teryx, But I Have Known Africa

I have since come to learn that when Snow People are in the snow, and on the snow, they pierce their skis through the stagnant air to the beat of the latest Top AfroHouse Hits. Techno bongos and tribal war cries escape precisely eight Bose F1 Subwoofer speakers, filling these coked-out zombies with just enough uncivilized vigor to partake in civilized words I had once upon a time never heard before: Sabrage, Black Diamonds, and Following Rivers the Lykke Li Way.

We were in Aspen when I first realized that The Rest of The World was a vibe to be felt, to be heard, a general idea to be known, to be fantasized about. All of it lacked the specificity of Apres Ski in Val Thorens. So in my final retaliation, I specifically took out the Naira Bill stained with the oils of the Global South that had once birthed it and me, placed it to my nose and then promptly upon the line of pure Colombian powder that laid before me.

“Tomorrow, I will hit the Bunny Slopes!”

I guess before my high, I wanted to attempt to pierce, with my voice not my skis, the EDM-ized Ivorian chant of On dit premier gaou n’est pas gaou / C’est deuxième gaou qui est niata Oh (They say the first fool is not a fool / It is the second fool who is a fool).

14

One of my boyfriends at the time took me to see a strange movie downtown. Well, I picked the movie, he picked the seating designated for disabled people so he could shamelessly grab my boobs while laying horizontally in public.

This boyfriend did not have much or any money to his name, he was a Fun Boyfriend– an idea of a man my friends and I created to distract ourselves from our mothers’ tight grips on our predetermined destinies.

I’m not staying on this farm! were the only words that could possibly escape my mouth on the way back home. That was all I understood from the film.

“Wanna get Halal when we get back to yours,” my Fun Boyfriend began to ask. I knew more was coming, and I did not want to hear anymore out of fear of making the wrong choice.

“I’m not staying on this farm!” I shrieked. Everyone in the subway car looked at me, but immediately turned their gaze as the familiar Ding of 86th Street took up the remaining silence. I took this as an opportunity to get off the train, to finally make that dramatic and unforgettable exit he’d feel intensely enough to tell his roommates about. And suddenly I had one less boyfriend.

I never had another Fun Boyfriend after this. Nor did I ever take the subway again.

15

Today, my kid is asking for a dog. He had woken me up at 7 o’clock in the morning with a persistent tapping that irritated me enough to consider placing the very pinch upon his ears my mother had placed upon my own, many not-so-many years ago.

The now-raisined Gen-Z ladies on television always preach about Gentle Parenting and instilling Self-Advocacy within our children, but never about what exactly to do when you’re being pestered to spend your money on an abomination for a sentient being. At this point, I do not know if I speak of the dog or the son. But I do know, I saw the face of a Fun Boyfriend hovering behind the counter at the Dog Purchasing Store… No idiot dogs will be purchased today.

16

I truly have everything I want. I have never used my degree for anything productive, other than manipulating the Thief of My Life Source into putting my name on the deed for this loft. But some time ago, I did dream of owning a nightclub in this city. My team would develop an unintelligible algorithm that determined who the velvet ropes opened up for. It would be so curated-ly random that I, alone, would leave this city’s greatest minds in array.

We wouldn’t even let in the Kar-Jenners or their spawns into my very own heaven. Truly, that nightclub is one of many things I never got because I, too, forget.

Son of Dennis

Shiloh, my son, was quite ugly. His eyes were of my own doing, and bulged a little too far out of his skull in a way that made him resemble a frog. On my own face, the bulgy eyes were reminiscent of a 2007 Slavic model during Haute Couture’s Doll Face Era. I blame his father. And I blame myself for making a decision that resulted in me adding yet another hideous thing to this world.

“Mommy, you love me, right?” He, much like his father, would always be stealing life from a beautiful woman. That was the destiny I was sure to write for him.

“Yes, my dear,” I say, “Now ask me again in Mandarin like your tutor taught you.”

18

In the Starbucks across the street, I saw a little boy who looked like the splitting image of my friend, Timothy, when he was that age. I wish I could say I thought the poor boy was cute and that seeing him instilled a bittersweet nostalgia within me, but he appeared to me as a ghost. Shiloh was ugly, but this one was someone who once was and never came to be– a ghastly little thing. I hope they never meet, such generational curses can become contagious.

Pity the Fool

“I do not want to work by the time I’m 24,” Timothy often whined, back when we were 21.

“Well, you have three years to make something of yourself.”

Well, he actually had four years to make his bones shatter upon impact with the pavement. Witnesses were interviewed on FOX News, a broadcasting company my dear friend hated with every fiber of his cold materialistic heart, and not for their affinity for conservative politics, but for their lack of discernment in picking respectable-on-paper guests. They said his arm had caught the metal railing of the Equinox Hotel’s 34th Floor Grand Suite and the scrawny severed limb landed on the outdoor dining table seating a Miami-based influencer on a date with a married 67-year-old ethical oil tycoon (He was to run as a Senator for the Democratic Party that following year, if not for my meddling partner in crime).

Perhaps if that old oil tycoon was a Republican, Timmy’s story would have been told on CNN from the mouth of an elegant New York woman in an Emilio Pucci gown rather than a southern tourist dressed in her fanciest plus-size Torrid wrap dress.

20

I ordered my 3rd Cold Foam Americano with a Double Shot of Espresso for the day. I no longer order ahead on the mobile app for the sake of adding more authentic human interaction to my life. And it became evident to me, in that moment, that I had learned over the course of the years that some people just had to lose for those of us who are on the waitlist to weasel our way through these heavily bolted doors.

Even some versions of myself had to lose for the sake of the falling velvet rope, with iterations of the limbs of my old dreams landing upon infinite tables of distant opulence.

“My fucking God, how long is this going to take?”

“Please, Ma’am, there are people ahead of you,” the barista remarks while cowardly avoiding eye contact with me. Does she not know that there always were?

Das Rheingold

These days, I spend a lot of time looking out from our dock and gazing upon the moonlit glimmer which dances upon the lazy waves. Within each sparkling undulation, I can almost see myself, but more often than not, I find someone I do not recognize– a wrinkly face, sagging from her years of personal betrayal in the name of the stability. A woman who 70-some years ago was promised she would be written in the stars by her chosen child.

By the firepit, a much older Celine recounts to our fortunately good-looking grandchildren a story from my growing pains. “I once took your grandmother to a German Opera– Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen at the MET,” she says so slowly. Now, words escape her just as quickly as carbon dioxide does due to all those years of poorly rolled blunts mixed with bodega grabba grazing upon her thin lips. “I will never forget how amazed she was at the theater’s ability to make the mermaids look like they were actually swimming on the stage!”

“Celine,” I invade the conversation from my self-induced exile. I wondered if my dear friend was in that lake, and my tired legs begged me to jump in, to maybe find him somewhere underneath the dark satin sheets hiding the very treasure of life that I just could never seem to acquire. So much had been promised to me, and so much had been given. I had renounced love, renounced half of the world, and yet here I remained:

“It was never the mermaids. It was always the fact that my nightmares had flung me into the river, like that hideous monster, and as the light shone between my ever reaching fingers and my limbs swirled in my progression to nowhere– directionlessly forward, I still marched. Then at the bottom, white gloves would replace the skin on my arms, a gown would become me, and a princess would be born. That's the gold they showed us at the bottom of the Hudson Rhine– an insatiable dream, a reminder of failure in even taken opportunities, that had once been so strong I almost forgot I was someone before I dove.”

But I did not intone this poem. I just said, “It is time for bed.”