NEW YORK, NY
1. I’ve started taking my vitamins with diet soda. Like Kendall Jenner, I believe Pepsi is capable of anything.
2. America somehow see-saws between being more polite, less polite, sexier, more prudish, fatter and more anaemic than any theme park experience in the world.
3. Broadway shows can be so awful that you have to leave at interval laughing into warm rain and subway gas to find a bar instead but settle on oversize cookies and milk from a supermarket that sells 600 different drinks but no Band-Aids.
4. Nobody refers to New York as home, it’s always just “here” or “New York”. I assume people don’t live in houses, but ‘here’s’.
DURHAM, NC
My phone pings. It’s so hot, my screen has powered down so I can’t see the sender. Could be a murderer lurking behind who’s prick-teasing me with cryptic messages. If there were, I think I’d just let them do their murdering. Too fucking hot for self-defence.
Maybe that’s why they have guns. Perhaps, in three months, I’ll be standing in the living room explaining it all to my family back in Australia with large hand gestures and a new belt through my pressed blue jeans. Because in this heat, the only things that can bear to move are thumbs against triggers.
AMERICA! A scream from below.
FUCK YEAH! offered in reply.
It’s 97 degrees out and I’m leaning over a railing watching the local baseball team sail little white balls on heat waves. Watching at a rape-safe distance under a giant cut out of a hulkish red bull with a ring through its nose and perfectly set eyebrows. I don’t mean to be alarmist but as a woman, I’ve been taught not to trust sports teams and other potentially fatal gatherings. So, I’m happy here in the shadow of the bull.
Start humming some semblance of a Taylor Swift song where she says something about bleachers and, despite having jeans and a white singlet on, suddenly feel a short skirt and push up bra coming on. Google if Durham has a Sephora so I can buy one of the eyebrow pens my girlfriend uses because, at 31, I’m just starting to get into skincare. Better late than never. But Durham does not.
Durham does not is probably a good tagline for the town itself. Unsweetened fruit? Durham does not. Unflavoured water? Durham does not. A visible population? Durham might but I haven’t seen them. Maybe they’re hiding under other giant two-dimensional mascots in other slow-cooking stadiums. in A pair of tight white pants hits a wide ball on the field below and a cloud of heat and deep male appreciation sounds swallows my head whole.
Phone has recovered enough from its fainting spell to reveal the source of the ping. It’s a message from a friend on Instagram.
SHIT DURHAM IS WHERE THE STAIRCASE HAPPENED. THE MURDER ONE WITH LIKE TONI COLLETTE, I WANT TO SAY. FUCK FUCK FUCK. BE CAREFUL?
So, it’s not just me after all. Durham itself is standing in the shadow of the bull.
CHARLOTTE, NC
Big food, smacking service, rude air conditioners that butt and sputter over tepid conversations and streets named after overripe fruit.
Peachtree Avenue.
Orange Grove.
Note: No fruit available for actual purchase. They used it all to pave the roads, sweet and sticky-fingered with the summer.
NASHVILLE, TN
White paradise.
Proof that there is a sideshow at the end of the world.
The sense that everything here was constructed quickly to show doomed Trump supporters a good time before they fall off the side of everything.
Day drinking, the smell of warm beer baking into bricks.
At night, the city screams a single devilish note in the key of fuck you.
Fuck you black, fuck you Democrat, fuck you queer, fuck you special.
Oil, oil, oil in our hair and our alcohol.
High pitched denim shorts, violins and clap-dancing around the shoulders of long time wives and peachy-assed stares across the room to the good boys and girls of a future that no longer has a porch because they ran out of money during construction.
But as long as there’s beer.
Someone vomits over a balcony while their friend sings the national anthem.
Pale meaty mornings sear and spit with shame.
But as sure as there’s morning, there will come the night.
And as long as there’s night, there’s paradise.
As long as you’re white.
ATLANTA, GA
Our flight was delayed, so we keep to the sanitised guts of our mid-priced downtown hotel.
The lift to Level 8, where there’s a half-assed outdoor pool, is plastered with grinning pictures of 30-somethings in the traditional poses of friends on vacation - drinking, taking photos on clunky cameras and throwing their arms around each other’s shoulders.
Their expressions are starting to crack and peel like this was a party they intended to leave three hours ago but they can’t find the exit. There’s no-one else in the lift but when I leave, I hold the doors for moment, just in case.
Despite the 95-degree heat, the pool is deserted aside from a couple who are dancing in the shade smoking deep clouds of broody weed and taking photos with a champagne bottle like they plan on asking if it would like to make love with them later.
He does furious laps at random intervals, as if he’s trying to stay on top of an unwelcome erection.
She’s filming herself dropping her gorgeous robe and letting it pool at her feet by the water’s edge.
They are the kind of beautiful you can’t help but want to see up close, in the throes of fucking, how their faces bead and blush, just to see the seasons on their skin.
They’re in love.
I wonder how many people in this hotel can say that. Are saying it.
How many people are fucking at any given time of the day.
How many are taking practicing edging seriously because coming makes them want to say I love you and they can’t yet.
How many people have died in Room 1147, physically or otherwise.
There are so many people in America, not all of them breathing.
I get an ice cream and it tastes like coconuts that don’t exist.
I cross the road but the traffic lights don’t make a sound to let you know when to walk.
There’s a candy cart on each corner of the road, selling my second ice-cream for the day.
I walk out onto the road with it and without being told.
A car the size of a small apartment screams its horn at me as it rounds the bend.
Everything in sweeter in Atlanta, and more capable of death.
Until our next flight.
X TN