Bought my ticket online. Entered the digital portal that promises entry to the otherworld portal for 25 euros (23 if you set up an account). This is a business. In some ways it’s the business that keeps Berlin pumping. The parties are the head of the business and the tentacles are multiple; fetish clothes; party drugs; fizzy bottles of yerba mate; fanny packs filled with extra socks, ketamine nose spray and protein bars; black shit kicker boots to withstand floors wet with party gravy; Ubers and Bolts to get to the venue, food trucks selling tacos and vegan borscht, security guards, coat check crew, bartenders, and DJs that play 4 hour sets on multiple floors.

Went to bed Friday night around 11, set the alarm for 7:13. Ordered a Bolt because otherwise I would have chickened out. It’s my first party. I’m 42. I am wearing black oxfords, tights, a mall-bought bikini with slits on the side and a cropped red-mesh tank that I found on my street in a give away box thinking only of future halloweens. Over the whole getup, I’ve got on my trusty ochre puffer coat. Knee length and warm, providing cover.

I get in the Bolt and we drive for 30 minutes and 33 euros to Schoeneweide. It feels like I’m headed to the airport instead of a party. Reminds me of the business trips of my past, where I’m in a cab, full makeup, hair blown out, surrounded by the scent of my own perfume and the musk of the cab. The only difference is I didn’t drink any coffee this morning. I thought it might not work well with ecstasy. My stomach is empty.  My ears are filled with Karina Longworth talking about Richard Gere in American Gigolo. I’m on my way to a party because I need release and adventure and to be less like me for a while.

The driver pulls over near a German middle class shopping plaza. This is where they buy their appliances, their foldout couches, their garden furniture. Outside it’s gray and steadily drizzling. I follow some young people to the warehouse around the corner. They let me know I’m in the right place. I’m still fearful that I won’t be let in because of my clothes or the wrong ticket or some as yet undetermined mishap.

There are guards outside chatting, sitting on bar stools. They say “ticket?” and I show them my phone. They  nod and let me through. Inside the first chamber, another guard is leaning her head back against the wall with her eyes closed. I don’t want to wake her. I walk to a check-in desk and show my ticket to another guard. He laughs at his sleeping partner, says “Saskia…Saskia…Saskia” and she finally wakes up. I walk back over to her. She gives me a wrist band, tapes stickers over the camera on my phone, and checks my bag and body for contraband. Her check is thorough. She searches every compartment of my fanny pack. Where do people hide drugs? In their shoes? In their underwear? What happens if they find drugs? It’s a place for drugs but only the drugs you can sneak in.

In the next room there’s a coat check big enough for a symphony hall. Rows and rows carefully marked with numbers. It’s a long dark room that echoes thumping music from beyond. People are disrobing on long benches in front of the coat check. They peel off sweatpants to reveal intricate leather harnesses. Chains circling naked breasts and woven through nipple rings. Net bodysuits with nothing underneath. The way skin oozes through the netted holes reminds me of ham. Ultra fat bodies and ultra thin bodies. Everybody reduced to their most risky, frisky, essential self. It’s touching. I get choked up.

I strip down to my bikini and red mesh top. I leave my tights on and as I’m entering the dance floor, a woman kindly suggests I don’t wear tights. “You don’t have to but it’s so hot in there.” I take off my tights but worry about my bare feet swelling and straining in my shoes.

Julie told me to text her when I was inside. I don’t have to because I find her right away on the dance floor. An auspicious beginning. She introduces me to Nick and Cody. I ask her if she’s been up all night and she says no way. “I got a good night’s sleep and Scott and I did a stretching routine to prepare for today.” Julie is dressed in her Jane Fonda workout best. A silver bodysuit with that 80s silhouette–cut higher than high on the sides. She’s got a printed scarf tied around her head. Its long tail swings when she thrusts.

It’s Saturday at 8:30 in the morning and I just want to forget about time. Completely forget about the world and melt into someplace else. Some place that is built from my body ecstatically responding to sound and motion. But instead I have to poop. I have to poop because this is my poop time. My body, which I have a perfunctory relationship with, at best, is making its needs clear to me. Now I will have to shit in the bathroom at a club that has been going since Friday at midnight.

Julie asks me if I want to take my pill. I say yes! with a smile.

We walk through the space together toward the bathrooms. Berlin’s gritty warehouse aesthetic is on display. Less is more. All architectural decay is visible and takes on spiritual significance. Exposed pipes are stained glass windows. Low and lumpy black couches are the pews. The DJ cage is the pulpit. Drugs are the sacrament and the bathrooms are the hell you have to pass through to get them.

I took ecstasy and then I pooped over an unlidded toilet bowl filled with piss and toilet paper. The floors were wet with charcoal soot. Evil is a fetish too.

Dance session 1:

Techno is a physical presence. As stupid as it is smart. Demanding restriction and release, restriction and release, in dizzying sequence. The DJ is a general. The DJ is a structural engineer.  I’m a novice attempting to dance.

What do I want? Beat rises.Where is my body? Beat does a loop-d-loop. I look at other bodies and try to feel my own. I am convinced this is the key to unlocking something in me. I am convinced I need this, and I almost know what this is. The bass falls out. My hands weave like I’m at the Dead. How do you know when you feel ecstasy? Bass comes back and everyone claps, hoots. I used to know. I used to be able to get there. I’m not there now. I should be there now.

The drugs aren’t strong enough. There’s still too much me here.

Break 1:

This break room is dim with a dim bar. Groups of people are gathered on leather benches. The room has the proportions of an airport lounge. When I sit down, I become very aware of the bareness of my ass on something so unhygienic. I remember my big red granny panties are in my fanny pack. I thought maybe I’d be too shy to wear the bikini bottom, so I discreetly packed a full coverage option. And now I put them over my bikini and feel like a pro fanny-packer with my big girl red diaper. Julie, Nick and Cody pull out cigarettes. Sven wants to roll a joint but he only has weed. Nick only has tobacco so it’s a perfect match. “Peanut butter and Jelly,” I say for some reason when I see this exchange. Sven and Nick are German so they don’t get this reference. It’s an American stereotype, but an outdated one. It ages me to mention it, I suppose. I get into it anyway. “It’s got to be berry jam. You can’t mix peanut butter with apricot or orange marmalade.” Sven nods seriously. We pass the joint and I yearn for it. My favorite drug. My old friend. Cody says, “grape is the classic choice though.”

Behind us there are three guys that came together. They look approachable so I approach them. I tell Julie, “I’m gonna tell that guy how beautiful his face is.” There’s a uniform for nudity all around me. This room is a fashion salon. In this room I learn chains can be delicate. Craftsmanship is apparent. Beautiful men and women are easy to spot. This environment doesn’t erase that but it feels less important and can be matched by style, confidence and really owning your body.

They are from Turkey. Two are studying here. One, a master’s in Supply Chain Logistics. The other, a PHD in computer science. The most beautiful, Tolga, lives in Istanbul and is just visiting. Tolga’s an elegant alien in black mesh with a harness underneath. His beauty is one I’ve always been drawn to. Haunted eyes that are heavy and dark. Pale and fine boned, with a strong masculine jaw. I tell him he looks like the football player, Mesut Ozil and that I’ve always had a crush on him. I say this because I know people make fun of Ozil for being strange looking.

It occurs to me as I write this that I was probably peaking at this moment. I used up my serotonin rush on peanut butter talk, people watching, and a pretty face.

Dance session 2:

I take another half a pill. So now I’ve taken a full dose of MDMA. My earplugs are in. I close my eyes. This is not an exercise class. This is a party. How will I ever get back into this thump thump thump? I have to tune into the thump thump thump. I shouldn’t use words like have to. There’s no instruction manual but there is a wardrobe. Breasts jiggle but everything else is taut, restrained. Cody and Nick lock into each other when they dance. They feed off each other. It’s not fake and it’s wild to watch. A long rhythmic game of mirroring. I wake up in my body for a second: my head is hanging over my chest. My arms are slack and I am shaking like an old Boogeyman. I’m not dancing. This doesn’t feel like dancing. My energy is a bummer to me and I’m worried it’s affecting the people around me. Remember Jesus Jones? Remember that song Right Here, Right Now? Well it’s in my head. There is no other place I wanna be. Right Here, Right now. Watching the woorrld wake up from history. I guess things could be  a lot worse but this is not great.

Coat Check break

Julie says Scott is here. Scott is Julie’s boyfriend. They live together. They stretch together. They dance together. They do drugs together. They met in a master’s program for sustainable finance. Scott is very tall and has no ass at all. I’ve met him before but we’ve never talked. He sort of reminds me of Chevy Chase at first sight. Chevy Chase looking like a big lanky baby in his tiny leather shorts and string of pearls.

We’re in front of the coat check again. People around us are shedding layers. A hairy italian with a pan-like body does warm up walks in 5 inch heel boots. Others are redressing, adding street clothes over their play clothes. Spent faces, sweaty hair tucked under black hoodies. Some of our gang are sharing protein bars from their fanny packs. We pass water around. Scott is stretching ostentatiously. He looks like a dork, limbering up before the big dance. Sven shares a date hazelnut cocoa protein bar with me. I don’t feel like eating but I assume I should probably eat. Sven says, “I would like to dance in the cage if it wasn’t so tight. I’m always bumping into it and I get blue spots the next days.”

I nod supportively. Support and sharing is a big part of the vibe.

“The cage is too tight but if it wasn’t tight, it wouldn’t be a cage. The edges are sharp. Me, I would like it when the cage is more safe.”

Cody, another squabbling parishioner, says the holes are too small to stick your fingers through. Mimes hanging from a chain.

Dance session 3 on the small floor:

Pleasure seeking missiles. All around me European pleasure seeking missiles, thriving in their environment. Seekers finding what they seek. Finding bulging groins, free flapping tits, tightly harnessed tits. Pupils are dilated. Everything closed is now open. Gaping open, indiscriminately catching whatever rains down, in, and through. The bad and the good. The evil and the ecstatic. The sound and the vibration. I’m so pissed I’m outside looking in. My mind is writing. Drugs and health food. Better living through chemistry. Athletic endurance required. History of drug use required. Understanding of one’s metabolism, mood, required to motivate the body in motion.

Final break:

Julie took something that is like acid but not acid. It lasts a few hours. Julie regrets taking it. She says it’s good for colorful places. Outside summer raves. She says this environment is too dark and minimal and it’s messing with her. Scott is rubbing her thighs. Julie says, He yearns for thighs.

Scott says, I can’t do it as much as my heart desires because of the tendonitis in my thumbs from swiping.

I say, Swiper’s thumb. Makes sense. Repetitive movement causes injury.

We are sharing passion fruit juice and sparkling water.

Scott says, it’s an issue in our relationship.

Julie says, And he likes Bill Maher.

Scott says, Bill Maher is aggressively reasonable on economics.

I say, isn’t aggressively reasonable an oxymoron?

Bill Maher is the one thing I have to put up with, Julie says.

I say, that can’t be true.

The conversation circles around drugs and health food. Physiotherapy talk.

Scott says, I run an AB test and that always works for me. If I do the exercises it feels better. If I don’t do the exercises, it gets worse.

Julie’s head lolls forward and her 80s scarf falls into her crotch.

I talk about my pelvic floor. A disaster area receiving FEMA level aid.

Scott’s Ecco shoes are made by a privately held company in Denmark.

Is that important?

Well I don’t know, everywhere I go–Pakistan, Singapore, the Balkans–someone always asks about my shoes.

Scott says, Guess how much I spent on groceries this month?

400?

403!

I’m waging a private war with inflation. Tomato cans 60 cents up to 1.20 and so many other products are threatening to double.

Scott pulls his hands from Julie’s thighs and pulls his thumbs back in a tight-eyed wincing way.

He says, I’m done Jules…Julie doesn’t respond

Scott says, I’m starting the job hunt.

That’s exciting.

Yeah…I guess…I guess I have to do something.

Scott asks how I’m feeling. I say I wish I was feeling more connected.

Scott wakes Julie to ask her about her stash. He’s trying to help me but she is hazy but miffed. I’ve crossed a line. I apologize.

Scott says, Julie has clear boundaries with her drugs. Rubs her thighs again.

Oh, I apologize. I thought frank talk about drugs was par for the course.

Julie says, I can give you another MDMA?

Scott says, as your physician, I’d advise against it. He explains about serotonin and how much a body can spend. If I take more the comedown will be nasty. I realize this is something I rely on men for. Even though they are so dull, I think I need their help.

The coat check returns my coat with brisk efficiency. I pull my tights back on. Cover up and replace ear plugs with ear buds. Karina Longworth is deep in her 10 episode dissertation on the Erotic 80s. I’m back in the mode of listening. In this story, Paul Schrader is so coked up in a hot-tub he pulls out a pistol. He’s a bad boy. We’re not bad like that anymore. We’re safe.

I reached out to Carver because her upcoming book No Land’s Man gave me courage. Reading is the wrong word to describe what you do with a Lisa Carver book. The book is not the point of Lisa Crystal Carver, the way the album is not the point of Iggy Pop. The point is to check back in with the source, to get juiced up on the art of Carver’s life. 

In reading about her time in Botswana and later, Paris, I was back in her head, communing with an old friend. Her language about herself has evolved and deepened. When she’s sharp, it’s unnerving. When she’s wise, it’s equally unnerving. Carver’s not trying to be anything. She’s documenting her life for herself as much, if not more, than for us. 

Carver approaches her time in Africa as an adventure, but not a swashbuckling one: She makes friends. She walks. She swims. She drinks beer at the expat bar and she dances at church. She goes on safari and gets over a breakup. None of this is rushed. Without being self-helpy, there’s a return to spirit for Carver in Botswana. As she strengthens, the saga of her last marriage (the one she fled America to recover from) finally heals. 

She writes, “This is how I was released from a wounding love: without hurry, without blame, without worry. And smiling at everybody and everybody smiles at me.”

Imagine a white woman going all the way to Botswana to write a book. No doubt there are racist tropes running through your head. There’s always an internal audit that happens when presented with this scenario and a feeling that the white writer will give us a reason to negate their view. It’s thorny shit and white writers usually stay the hell away from writing directly about race in autofiction. But so far as I can tell, a lot of writing happens in the tepid places where identity is neither a threat nor a question. 

I met Lisa Carver over zoom in early January. I’m nowhere near a professional interviewer and it shows. Listeners should be warned that I talk too much and don’t ask enough questions. Listeners should be warned that I used the word “dialectic” when I meant to use “didactic”. Like me, Carver smiles widely, often, and without fear. Like me, she mispronounces words, expresses herself without reserve, and seeks connection above all else. Like me, her heart was open to friendship, and we became friends during our conversation. If you are the sort of person that finds amateur enthusiasm endearing, stay tuned.

April Windsor drank milk with dinner. When I went over to her house, the beverage options were off. Milk with dinner, and for breakfast, orange juice that came out of the freezer. Friday sleepovers were preferable at April’s house. Saturday sleepovers meant I went along to church on Sunday. Church made me anxious. I had such limited exposure to Christianity in general, Lutheranism in particular. There were more worshippers at April’s church on a random Sunday than I’d ever seen at Rosh Hashanah. But still, my myopic LA Jewish bubble convinced me that Christians were the minority.

April went down to the stage (pulpit?) to get her wafer with the other believers. The preacher set it up perfectly. This guy was a real sultan of segueway. He said, “Anyone who wants to come forward for consecration is welcome.” Consecration made me think of the orange juice from concentrate in April’s freezer. Some words are all process and therefore unknowable. I can’t relate to consecration, collision, consternation. Those are what my dad would have called $10 dollar words.

All religious services make me extremely hungry. The marked absence of food is what does it. I get nervous in any space where food isn’t present. In my office-worker days, I was that bitch with a full fucking snack drawer. Anyway, I was dying to know what that wafer tasted like because April said it tasted like nothing and that is just impossible. I asked her, is it good though? She couldn’t answer me. I was 3 or 4 trips to her church deep, when I just rolled up with April, knelt and got one myself. No one stopped me but I felt like they should or they would at any moment. I wondered if the wafer would burn my tongue. A wafer tastes like a cheap ice cream cone, by the way.

It’s the end of the year. From the middle of December until the new year, it’s impossible to do anything but bide my time. I’m not a hero. I’m not about to start some ambitious project on December 18th. My days are purposely empty. I can afford this lifestyle because I was a good saver during my office-worker days. I can live off the fat rendered from years in that ergonomic chair. What did I do all day for 10 years? I typed synergistic. I typed coopetition. I typed innovation ten times into every presentation. Now I write what I want. My time is mine to squander until I have to pick up the kids. It’s 1pm. I pop a blue gummi and put on Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio.

Getting high and watching animation is one of life’s reliable joys. Outside it is -7 C, the kind of cold that erases your chin from your face. I am on the couch with a thick duvet covered in brown and pink roses. I embrace the present fully. I open myself up for immersion and escape.

By the time

Master Geppetto made Pinocchio,

he had already lost a son.

Now this was quite a few years

before my time,

but I learnt the story.

And then it became my story.

Geppetto lost Carlo during the Great War.

They’d been together only ten years.

But it was as if Carlo had taken

the old man’s life with him.

The first lines of the script–spoken by Ewan Mcgregor as Sebastian J. Cricket–are a poem about grief. They are also a writer’s introduction, a masterful grounding in time and place, and a promise that nothing about this film will be light and easy.

The appeal of source material, of ancient stories, is that they include everything. All the major human themes with none of the irony or metaphor that stymies so many modern productions. Pinocchio is an ancient story. When a story gets old enough, it’s basically a religious text. What’s the difference between Adam and Eve and Beowulf? Between Abraham and Faust? Between a story where a guy makes loaves of bread into fish and a story where a boy is made out of wood and grows his nose whenever he lies? Can I believe in Pinocchio? Do I? Is this the only chance for someone like me? Someone without a religious community, to have an ecstatic experience?

I’m drawn to mainstream films that present a version of religion that’s carefully God avoidant. In these productions, death is a place where arbitration occurs, where a hierarchical network is hinted at, and lessons must be learned to move on. Heaven and Hell are only hinted at, sometimes not mentioned at all. There might even be a celestial figure or two, but these films are purposely distancing themselves from recognizable religion.

The first example that really spoke to me was Albert Brooks’ Defending Your Life. After getting hit by a bus, Brooks finds himself in a well oiled purgatory where he’s assigned a caseworker and must have his life’s choices examined by cosmic judges. This stopover of the afterlife is depicted as an Orlando resort, with trams escorting the newly dead to the hall of past lives (where you can see who you’ve been), restaurants (where guests can gorge themselves with no consequence), and a schlocky comedy club (where a lounge singer does a mediocre rendition of “That’s Life”).

I was 11 when I first saw Albert Brooks in an ill-fitting toga, fall in love with Meryl Streep during their stopover to eternity. It’s clear that Brooks has a few more rounds to go on earth. He lived a weak-willed, unconfident life and learned very little about the meaning of existence. But during his weekend, he grows a big pair chasing after Streep, his soulmate. In the end, the star crossed lovers are on different trams, headed to different destinations but Brooks does not go gently into that good night. He leaps from his tram to Streep’s and because of this insane act of last minute bravery, the cosmic judge rewards him and lets him join Streep in the VIP area of the afterlife.

Albert Brooks shopped at the same Gelson’s as my family. I saw him in the produce section shortly after I saw Defending Your Life. I asked my mom for a pen and paper and she fished it out of her purse. Then I asked Albert Brooks for his autograph and he said, “Why?”

Lying comes naturally to me just as not believing in God comes naturally to me. It’s possible the two concepts are related. When I was just a little whippersnapper, the guitar playing rabbi took a beat between Hebrew hits to tell his young flock about HASHEM. HASHEM is all around you. HASHEM is the trees. HASHEM is the wind. HASHEM is your own breath.

Who is this for, I wondered? Who’s actually buying this junk? What kind of nursery rhyme bullshit is this? Here we are, tough Jews, bearers of our ancestors’ stories. As Woody Allen put it, “My grammy never gave gifts. She was too busy getting raped by Cossacks.” So who does this long haired hippie rabbi with his fucking denim vest think he is? God is bullshit. God does not exist. God is a fantasy for people who are too weak to cope with the brevity of life, which doles out one joyful moment for every 400 hundred shitty ones, if you’re lucky.

Lying is just picking up on your own wish fulfillment or tuning into the wishes of others. I can make someone feel great with a soft lie. Most of us can.

Significant lies I’ve told:

• • That my mom died in a car accident. I was in kindergarten. My dad came to pick me up and my teacher hugged him and said, “I’m so sorry for your loss.” I know this story because it’s been repeated to me. I don’t remember doing it myself.

• • That I didn’t steal 80 dollars. I was 12. My parents left for a vacation. They left us with my cousin and they left an envelope full of cash. I took 80 out of the envelope and bought candy for my sisters all week. Do you know what it’s like to flash that cash at the gas station and walk out with a bunch of Laffy Taffy? It’s fucking baller. My cousin caught on and he told my parents. They confronted me and I denied it. I denied it forever. The last time my dad asked me about stealing the 80 dollars, I was in my late 20s. I denied it and he punched me in the shoulder, jovially. Begrudging respect for my method acting.

• • That I used to date Zach Galifinakis. I briefly joined the English language comedy scene in Berlin. It’s a small scene. I did a set that was electrifying about the romance of anal sex. I plummeted after that. I didn’t  even bomb. It was more like I just couldn’t get back on stage. But the comics let me in and I wanted their admiration. I chose Zach Galifinakis because I think I could get him. I’m hotter than he is. I’ve fucked lots of Gakifinakis types. I told this lie in an off the cuff way. I kept it subtle and mysterious because that makes it more believable. Everyone believed me and my Galifinakis-adjacent status kept me in the group despite the fact that I was not producing anything or performing. Eventually I found a serious boyfriend and dropped out of the comedy scene.

   

  Pinocchio is an unruly child. He makes life difficult for his father. He breaks things. He doesn’t listen. He lies. In del Toro’s version of the film, Pinocchio’s curious fumblings are amplified. No one is sure they want him around. Gepetto calls his ersatz son a burden. Pinocchio is ashamed. He wants to make his father proud. He goes about it all wrong. First, he joins a corrupt circus, led by the heartless Volpe (voiced expertly by Christoph Waltz). At the end of his first show, Pinocchio is overjoyed by the love and acceptance of the audience but Gepetto is not proud of him. He is mad Pinocchio did not obey him and go to school. The human cost of blind obedience is an ongoing theme: obedience to fathers, a soldier’s obedience to his commander, even obedience to cosmic rules. Pinocchio questions all of these rules, breaks most of them.

   

  Pinocchio is a boy who can’t die. He goes to an afterlife of sorts, and succumbs to a ritual as quick as a carwash before he’s reanimated. There are rabbits who play cards. There is a keeper of the realm, blue sand and an hourglass that must empty before Pinocchio can return to his body.

   

  Pinocchio’s fourth death occurs when he blows up the sea monster which swallowed his family. He enters the realm of the dead knowing Gepetto is drowning and impatient to get back to save him. The celestial keeper of this realm cannot send Pinocchio back to earth until the sand runs out of the hourglass. Only by breaking the hourglass himself and accepting the consequence of mortality, can Pinocchio return to save his father. Of course, Pinocchio does it. He smashes time. He puts his father’s life before his own. The miracle of the wooden boy that no one wanted is that, despite a life of immense suffering, he wants to go back. Despite only being given the smallest crumbs of kindness, he wants to give back.

   

  For a Catholic, like del Toro, Pinocchio is a Christ figure. Crucifixion is overtly symbolized throughout the film. In the beginning, Gepetto and his original son Carlo, are placing a delicately carved depiction of Jesus’ crucifixion in the town’s church when a bomb hits and Carlo is killed. Later, Pinocchio (who is not delicately carved like Jesus, but made crudely by a drunken Gepetto) enters the church during service horrifying the village with his demonic presence. He is not Jesus and yet he sees a wooden figure, like himself, who is revered. He asks his father, “Why do they like him and not me?” It’s a question that is innocent and brazen at once. Innocent because it is asked by a child, who does not know the history or religious significance. Brazen because Guillermo del Toro knows what he’s doing. He pulls strings to elicit my reactions. He does it with finesse. He goes nuclear with the crucifixion metaphor near the end. The evil circus master, Volpe, places Pinocchio on a cross at the edge of a cliff and lights it on fire, growling “Burn Bright! Like a Star!”

   

  It’s strange that an act as grotesquely violent as crucifixion could become impotent home decor or Jewelry. It’s absurd that del Toro needs to remind us, through a wooden puppet, how horrible this act is.

   

  I am not a Catholic. I live in Europe but I’m not a cathedral buff. I don’t feel “wowed” by the architecture or impressed by how long it took to build. I’m not anti-cathedral, I just don’t care. I haven’t known many Catholics and those I have known are not observant. I remain very ignorant about all religions, including the one I was born into. I have no religious spirituality to speak of. It’s embarrassing to question God’s existence. It seems lonely to go looking for the answers at my age, and for now I’m too timid and frightened to probe more directly.

   

  I am comfortable circling religion, riding an innertube on one of those lazy river waterpark rides, a safe distance from the molten center. In this religious adjacent place, I find meaning in art, in literature, in films. I find most of my joy here too. Much of my existence is anxious and sorrowful, but not most of it. Why mess with success? Don’t go chasing waterfalls.

   

  When I watched Pinocchio on a cold afternoon, high on an adult gummi, there were tears streaming down my face. Pinocchio unlocked my deepest emotions. It’s hard to get to this spot when you’re riding the lazy God-adjacent river ride. I got hit with a jolt of religious ecstasy and the delivery system was Pinocchio.

There are few of us that would volunteer for a grueling 14-day bus tour of Holocaust landmarks in Poland and Germany, but few of us are Jerry Stahl. Known to many as the author of the junkie masterpiece, Permanent Midnight, known to others as an Emmy nominated TV writer, Stahl is known to me as a fellow jew with a high tolerance for pain. In his recent book, Nein, Nein, Nein! One Man’s Tale of Depression, Psychic Torment, and a Bus Tour of the Holocaust, Stahl balances his caustic humor with deep human insights. I caught up with Stahl over Zoom to ask about his experience writing about crime sites, his impression of Germans, and how his musings on a fascist history are morphing into a fascist future. 

I was thinking about the terrible things we do to other people. Even people we supposedly love. In the book, you’re dealing with the fall out of your third marriage, and the separation from your 4-year-old daughter. You’re so honest about the ways you fucked up and the havoc you wrecked, I was wondering, were you drawn to viewing your behavior on a spectrum that ends with nazis like Ilsa, the She-wolf of the SS? Like, maybe you did a bad thing but you didn’t turn someone into a wallet?

Boy! That’s a sentence for the ages. I did a bad thing but I didn’t turn someone into a wallet. It’s a pretty low bar for good behavior but I guess I threaded that needle. I went in knowing I was better than a nazi, thankfully. Once you see what people had to endure, the world of pain and horror they were thrust into, you realize none of your problems mean anything. Which is not the worst perspective to have on this planet.

When did you start writing about the holocaust/nazism and how has that writing progressed? 

I don’t know how you can be a jew and not marinate in holocaust literature, fiction and non fiction. It’s an itch people scratch. The first book where I overtly made it part of the narrative was Pain Killers, where I developed a character that’s hiding out and refers to himself as Joseph Mengele. He’s discovered eternal youth so even though he’s in his 90s, he’s fit as a young man. 

Do you think you’ll always write about it?

I hope I write about other things but it’s definitely in the background. It’s a low hum. I may come back to it. Especially now that we’re living in a time where fascism is making a major comeback. At the time of the bus tour, in 2016, I thought I was visiting the past, but now it feels like I was preparing for the future.

The stern unflappable tour guide, Susanna, is not only there to keep tourists informed and on schedule, she’s also there to model behavior. She seems to be pretty good at shutting down offensive jokes or your tangents on nazi drug use. But at the same time, she’s using this trait that Germans are known for, of being humorless and all business. Did you find that Germans fit the stereotypes that Americans have for them? Or did they surprise you?

First of all, I think it’s a thankless gig. I have the utmost respect for people who put themselves in a place of such crime and horror on a daily basis and don’t lose their shit when some tourist complains about bad cell reception at Auschwitz. As for Germans, I’ve known some funny ones over the years. Gunter Grass had a sense of humor. Tin Drum is hilarious, fucked up and weird.

Your book doesn’t shy away from rampant Polish anti-semitism.You have this run-in with local fascist youths who peg you for Jewish and get aggressive. I guess I’m curious about your comfort level being a Jew in Europe as opposed to MAGA parts of the US? 

Well, I would have said that my comfort level is higher in the US but it’s getting dicey. Trump said something recently about “the Jews better be grateful before it’s too late.” It’s outrageous. But then again, in Poland they passed a law that bans any citizen from associating the country with the camps or the war. You’ll go to jail if you disobey. That’s not the sort of place I feel comfortable being a Jew in. Every time I saw an old man, I imagined him bayoneting babies. That’s my projection. He could have been a sweet old grandpa, I suppose. 

Is tourism based around crime and human atrocity the most honest tourism? Are all other tours fictional aggrandizement and white washing history? Is every historical site in Europe, essentially a crime site?

Doubtless, if you dig deep enough, every square foot of dirt on the planet contains the bones of somebody’s loved ones. 

Throughout the book, you seem perplexed by the appropriate way to take in a crime site. Do you bow mournfully? Do you eat pizza? Do you crack jokes to keep the mood light? Every reaction seems preloaded with a sense of overblown solemnity or lack of humility. Do you think the proliferation of crime as entertainment has forever altered our ability to be reverent? Or have we always been assholes?

As to appropriate behavior at sites of overt tragedy – be it Dachau, the Twin Towers, or the Trail of Tears– that is ultimately an individual decision. If you read the book you know that I, personally, eschewed the opportunities for concentration camp snacking. But that’s me. Plenty of people seem to feel the need for death camp pizza. Along, for that matter, with Death Camp selfies.  But who am I to judge? One might theorize that, after generations of viewing the most grizzly crime footage as entertainment, it makes sense that visitors to concentration camps may feel no compunction to behave with anything resembling respect, let alone gravitas. Growing up in front of fun-time Hollywood mass murderers like Hannibal Lechter, neither respect, nor gravitas, was ever required. Everything is entertainment. Does that account for the odd propensity, among some, for concentration camp sniggering? Are we a society of sociopaths – or are some people just uncouth assholes? The eternal question….

Do you know Bob’s Big Boy? It’s a chain of burger restaurants that started in LA. The Big Boy’s most notable form is as a fiberglass statue, a tangible mascot placed in front of each restaurant. A statue big enough to lure people from their cars into those Naugahyde tuck-and-roll booths. 

Bob is a portly fellow, as the name implies. In one hand, he holds a cheeseburger, big as a plate. His face is really something. Milky white skin, blue eyes cast to the side, cartoonish for mischievous. He’s got a brown cowlick. Cowlick, think about that literally for a second. It’s half Elvis, half Dennis the Menace. He’s got a cherry red smirk, a little more than a Mona Lisa smile. It’s definitely turned up, but there’s something he’s not telling you. He’s got on these loose red checkered overalls. They’re not tight. That’s important. You could definitely get a hand down there, easy. Two simple snaps if you want to take it all the way down. He’s got on a t-shirt that says BIG BOY and big blue clown shoes that match his eyes. I’m not doing it justice. Just go look. Please, it will make the rest of this way easier.¹

This kid is not from my time. I was born and raised in the 80s, the era of made for tv movies. The era of stranger danger. The era of DARE.² Bob’s Big Boy is the 50s made fast food iconography. He is Bob Wills singing Roly Poly…Daddy’s Little Fatty. He’s very goyish. His chubby cheeks need squeezing. He’s Bob’s Big BOY. You’re a good boy. You’re a good boy. Yes you are. He’s nameless because he belongs to BOB. But I kept searching and I found him. I found out his real identity. 

I know his first name is Richard.

We ate there when I was a kid. I mean, we were Jews, so we didn’t eat there a lot. But me and my sisters gravitated to anything with a cartoon mascot. We were curious. Now it feels sinister, like those Jeffrey Epstein teens that lured in other teens to work as massage therapists. The BIG BOY is a pied piper of sorts for his masters. 

They had pudding pies and milkshakes. They had the expected burgers and fries but also breaded shrimp and a soup of the day. Bob’s had a full breakfast menu, a lunch-buffet with jello. But this was much later. Initially it was a burger stand near Warner Bros. studios, run on a shoestring budget by a man named Bob Wian. 

Photo from bobs.net

The origin story of the Big Boy is actually quite pervy. It’s based on a real kid, six year old Richard Woodruff, described as “a ruddy young boy who helped around the stand in exchange for burgers.” This was 1936 or 37, a time that seems unknowable to me, a decade that fell through the cracks. When I recount what I know, it’s bleak: The Depression, Dust Bowl, Grapes of Wrath, birth of the talkies. It was also the dawn of Disney and animated entertainment.

There was a Warner Brothers cartoonist, Ben Washam, who frequented what was then known only as Bob’s Pantry on his lunch break. He was so taken with little Dickey Woodruff that he drew a caricature of him, a chubby boy (despite The Great Depression) in loose red checkered overalls munching on a burger. His mouth is mid bite. He has no shirt beneath his overalls, which appear to be falling down, one snap undone due to his weight or boyish carelessness. 

This quick drawing³ sparked a frenzy. The image adorned napkins, menus, and condiment bottles. It was drafted into a comic of its own, written by the legendary Stan Lee. The comic, which was handed out as promotional material, stretched all the way into the 70s. 

So there you have it. The Big Boy is Richard Woodruff. Rich, Richie, Dickey, Dick. The kid that was always around after school, just helping out. Wiping down tables in the hopes of being rewarded with a juicy burger, a Double Decker.⁴

Bob’s Big Boy Comics

The comics are rare as fuck and hard to track down. They’ve never been reproduced so they’re hoarded by Marvel-heads, Americana-heads, comic nerds. The bit of them I’ve seen, though, is thematically rich. The conceit is that Big Boy is so trusting, so good natured and willing to see the good nature in others, that he doesn’t know when evil is upon him. In one, Big Boy is standing in front of a wanted poster with the criminal behind him. He doesn’t recognize that they are one and the same, and remarks to his burly companion,  “Gosh! Wouldn’t you hate to meet this guy in a dark alley, Mister?” The criminal replies “YEAH!” through snarled teeth, his left hand replaced by a sharp metal hook.  

In another comic⁵ Big Boy dives into the mouth of a shark trying to save a damsel in distress.

I became obsessed with tracking these comics down. I wanted to see if all of them were a variation on the boy in danger plot. From what I was able to find, this theory holds up. I read through two full issues from the 50s and in one, the plot was especially juicy. A sailing trip gone awry lands Big Boy and his sidekick (girlfriend?) Dolly on a strange island inhabited by headhunters. They drag Big Boy back to their lair where, low and behold, the hunted heads are revealed to be sculptures and the hunters are revealed to be artists working a scam where they charge mainlanders for their “savage” heads.  

Stranger Danger

Los Angeles in the 1980s is a hazy splatter-paint collage for me. A mix of memories of the most primal order: the stewed-beef smell of my great grandmother’s apartment, family photo shoots at Sears, roller-skating on Venice Beach. It’s only when we hit the 90s that I can be counted on for anything remotely like accuracy. But I do remember milk carton kids. I remember them because they’re how I learned to read. M-I-S-S-I-N-G, MISSING. I sounded that word out and my parents went…ooh!⁶

In a town a stone’s throw from Yosemite National Park, seven year old Steven Stayner was approached by a man looking for church donations. He asked Steven if he thought his mother would be willing to donate for a good cause. Steven said yes. The man, Kenneth Parnell, asked Steven if he wanted a ride to his house. Steven said yes. The man rode to a cabin nearby and held Steven as a child sex slave until 1980. He changed his name to Dennis Parnell and they lived under the guise of father and son, across many of California’s forgotten towns. Steven eventually escaped at 14, with his intended replacement, a 5 year-old boy named Timmy White, abducted a few weeks earlier in Ukiah. 

When Steven was reunited with his family, there was a media frenzy,⁷ culminating in the made for TV mini series, I Know My First Name is Steven, which detailed the horror of years living under an assumed identity and the fretful reunion of Steven and his family. The mini series left out the sex abuse,⁸ but that part became public during the televised trial. 

1980, the year Steven escaped, is the year I was born. It’s also the year Bob’s Big Boy ran tv commercials with the slogan “Bob loves kids and kids love Bob”

In LA children are exploited.

There’s a lauded industry built on this principle and it fucks kids up. I dabbled in these dark arts as a child. I came very close to being on Kids Incorporated (the irony of this name is NOT lost on me, don’t worry). I was slated to get this role on the premier kid’s variety hour of the 1980s. Kids Incorporated was canned and insincere with a loose plot, covers of pop songs, and rigidly choreographed dance numbers. It was the dance numbers that did me in. I was 11 but didn’t know my right from left. I just could not get the hang of it. It required so much fucking spatial awareness. I am like the arrow on google maps, quivering and spinning in a panicked way as you search for your destination. So when they asked me to dance, I refused. 

My mom was somehow familiar with one of the casting agents. Maybe they went to UCLA together? Anyway, he told her that I had it. It was in the bag and all I had to do was show a willingness to dance, show that I might be teachable. I refused right to her pleading eyes as she explained this all to me. I have no idea if this was:

• Self sabotage
• Divine intervention from a spirit beyond our world, Shirley Temple, perhaps
• A real phobia in the face of choreography⁹
• A real phobia in the face of being taught anything 

Anyway, Jennifer Love Hewitt got the role instead. Back then she went by the first name LOVE, which seemed sick to me. Fuckin groovy.¹⁰

The Kid’s Incorporated, that is Hollywood, was a well greased machine by the time I stepped onto it. They held casting calls at my elementary school in Sherman Oaks, a stone’s throw from the porn studios. I remember my sister and I both auditioned and followed the Ellis Island entry line of hundreds of kids, where we were separated into two slightly smaller camps: Models and Actresses. My sister got model and I got actress. I watched her move on with the other lithe, doe-eyed girls and walked on with my sisters. We of the ethnic nose; we of the ratty teeth; we of the portly proportions. 

Even though I went on to touch the embers of near fame a few times and my sister never once appeared on a runway, I felt she was the chosen one. Pretty beats everything else, always has.

If your sense of being pretty is connected to your sense of being sexy, it can go one of two ways, but it usually goes both: What is sexy if it’s received positively? How much of that vibe is self possession and how much of it is the transactional nature of sexiness, the fact that sexy usually implies an audience, an arbiter, a judge. When I say I find myself sexy, I mean I feel empowered, confident, alluring, in possession of some essence that has sexual value. Beyond that, sexy becomes a  less self-possessed concept, which might also be a positive experience. If it’s about achieving power (and sexy is a currency you control) that experience can be positive. I don’t think seeking validation always equates with low self worth. I think it can play out like a Wall Street bro with his money. There must be Wall Street bros that are fairly well rounded people. Is Warren Buffet in a very public S&M relationship with the stock market? I think so. Is he a psychopath because of it? Maybe not. Just because you need to be reminded that you picked well, that you made it rain, doesn’t mean you’re not happy. 

This version of sexiness, one that feeds off of validation, undermines a lot of women. A sexy actress is not just an actress. A sexy model is not just a model. Is a model ever allowed to be just a model? Do we even value this as a career choice, something that requires talent? Or is it always assumed that a model is cashing in? A sexy scientist, a sexy librarian. Sexy changes everything here. A woman scientist… very different woman comes to mind for me….Someone who wears fleece. Sexy is a negative judgment most of the time. Think sugar babies, cam girls, real housewives, gold diggers, strippers, porn stars. Now go darker. Go to the number one assumption behind every sexy stripper or porn star:

Child sex abuse. 

Anyone who uses sexuality for money is accused of being a victim of child sex abuse, if they get famous enough. What do we do with the fact that it’s often true? 

Sexy is a loaded compliment. It’s uncomfortable to use the word sexy to describe a child. There are many people, though, who find children sexy. Tracy Lorde’s step dad found her sexy enough, at 12, to molest her. She made pornography as a minor.¹¹ Her step dad got her into the business. He took her down to Van Nuys in 1984, just blocks away from my home, and introduced her to the kindly cowboy that ran the show, Jim South, the only man that refused to sleep with Tracy. She was so popular. She blew up the industry. Her sex scenes were ferocious. 

The stories of child stars in the throws of the worst human suffering are boundless. Addiction, sexual abuse, accidental overdose, purposeful suicide, psychosis in later life, PTSD, domestic abuse, spousal abuse. I could go on but I don’t have to because this isn’t news. It’s the price of admission.

Van Nuys

Shortly before puberty, I find myself in a situation I’ve been unconsciously training for my entire life. I live in Van Nuys, the seedier suburb next to Sherman Oaks. Sherman Oaks has the Galleria (where Fast Times was filmed). It has the good fro-yo, and charming cottages. Van Nuys has motels, where bottom of the barrel prostitutes work and bottom of the barrel hotels, where low-end escorts work. It has the rubber-burned smell of being so close to the freeway. 

We live off of Burbank Blvd, where the 101 meets the 405. We live on Noble Ave. My porn name is Deanne Noble, which is less porny than my actual name. 

Van Nuys is the birthplace of industrial pornography. In the shadows left by the Hollywood hills, Porn Valley came to prominence. It was the era of Deep Throat, when the audience for porn expanded beyond greasy men with skinny mustaches. My parents saw Behind the Green Door, on one of their early dates. Porn was for the general god-fearing public and lots of films needed to get made quick. The smell of money to be made was everywhere. For so many–actors, producers, and cameramen–filming porn was akin to driving an Uber in your off hours. Quick and dirty. Fast money. 

In the 80s and 90s, Van Nuys set up porn production studios. I ride my bike to the end of the block and see a woman with a headband and lace panties running after a fluffy white dog. Bright sunlight. Her hands and bare feet are tan. Nails, neon pink. She grabs the dog and stuffing him under her nose, walks slowly back inside, whispering and rubbing her face against him as they both disappear into warehouse darkness.

My parents are often approached by film crews asking to “use our house for a movie.” They never do it. When I start watching the Playboy channel, I recognize a backyard, a mantle piece and flood with the secret information that I am watching someone get fucked at Jamie Baron’s house. 

Two blocks from my home there are seedy motels where prostitutes can be spotted outside. They scare me. They look like sad people, not like barbies. Across the street from the motel there is a strip mall trying to bring Van Nuys some god damned respectability. It has a Kinkos, a Pier One, and Party World, which is where I am headed most of the time. Party World has everything you need for your upcoming event–over the hill birthday, baptism, Quinceniara, or rinky dink wedding. There are many pinatas to choose from and because it is a one-stop shop, there is also candy to fill the pinatas with. This candy lines the wall in lucite bins. They charge by the piece or bulk. I can usually scrounge up a buck’s worth of change and get a sampling of Laffy Taffy, Mike & Ike’s, and individually wrapped Jaw Breakers. 

The walk from my house to Party World is 10 minutes. On the way, I notice the scuffed red car following me because it was so obviously following me. I try not to look at the driver. I walk purposefully without running. Running in this situation seems dangerous, like running when you see a bear. Before you run, there’s a chance you can convince the bear you’re an adversary but once you bolt, he knows he’s got you. You be prey. 

I look over enough to see that the guy looks kind of like my Uncle Allan. No–don’t worry. It isn’t my actual uncle. Can you imagine? Fuck! It’s just a small white guy with aviators, a pastier version of Mathew Mconaughy in Dazed and Confused. The car is a piece of shit. When I look at him, he looks back at me unabashedly. He is hungry and he isn’t trying to hide it. 

I make it to the strip mall and run into Kinkos. Inside copy machines buzzing, the chemical warmth and scent of hot paper, the uniformed employees in khaki pants and cornflower blue polo shirts; worlds away from what is outside. And he is still outside. He is parked right in front. I find a spot in Kinkos where I can see him but he can’t see me. Eventually he leaves. 

Then I did what? I don’t remember. Did I walk home alone? Did I call my parents from the Kinko’s and have them pick me up? It’s wild that I can’t remember anything past his car leaving and my heart slowing down.

In 1939 Nathaniel West wrote Day of the Locust and Bob’s Big Boy became a beloved mascot. 

I bring this up because it’s easy to mistake the past for something innocent. 

Why are you picking on little old Bob’s Big Boy? He’s just a sweet little boy who loves burgers. Why do you have to bring this depraved element into it? Those were different times, traditional times. The dawn of WWII, FOR GOD’S SAKE! You think our fighting heroes would do something so vile…with a child?   

But then there’s West and he gives it to you so dirty it’ll still make your head spin. Altruism nee humanity is almost non-existent in Day of the Locust. It’s a book that splays the ugly out like a banana peel and lets it rot in the sun. West offers up a disturbing and unflinching portrait of exploitation in many guises. He presents a Hollywood that can only be entertained when someone is getting hurt, where violence is a plot point. 

That something so thin could have such a torpid heaviness to it.

David Lynch’s Big Boy period

David Lynch was drawn to Bob’s Big Boy. He held a standing daily appointment for 7 years (halfway through Eraser Head up to the end of Dune) at the original Burbank location. During this stretch of the 1980s, Lynch would take meetings, work on ideas and consume an Andy Warhol sort of lunch of coffee and chocolate milkshakes. He claims to have timed his Big Boy visits (2:30 pm exactly) to the consistency of the shakes. If he got there too early, the shakes were soupy. If he came too late, they were basically soft-serve. 

For seven years his muse was a diner with a creepy child mascot. We know this makes sense for Lynch. His universe is full of looking glass refractions of Americana. Every diner is a universe unto itself and Lynch mined the Burbank Bob’s Big Boy for his art. He got high on sugar and caffeine and jotted down ideas on napkins covered with Bob’s Big Boy chubby face and rictus smirk. He found enough inspiration in these coffee-soaked, sugar-saturated afternoons to dedicate almost a decade of his life there. One day, for example, Lynch “saw a man come in. He came to the counter, and that’s all I remember of this man, but from seeing him came a feeling, and that’s where Frank Booth came from.” Blue Velvet‘s psychotic, gas-huffing, Dennis Hopper-portrayed villain grew out of a moment and a feeling, a disjointed hunch. 

Sugar and coffee are drugs we can imbibe legally all day. But they are drugs and Lynch knew this. He referred to sugar as a great help and a friend. He dubbed it “granulated happiness.” The idea that something as innocent as happiness, can be manufactured by a specific combination of substances and atmosphere is potent. David Lynch is telling us sugar is not innocent. There is no Big Rock Candy Mountain, no Candy Land where children frolic in fields of gum drops. The boy is not real. He is a statue. He is a menu. He is a napkin you can write your ideas on. He will not protest. You can do whatever you want to him. You can make sugar dark. You can make innocence menacing. Bob’s Big Boy is a manufactured child. A child preserved in the amber of 50s Americana; an era that elicited, in Lynch, a perverse delight. His films create a sense of uncanny dread and psychic discomfort in me. Lynch can find evil in a dumpster behind a diner in broad daylight. 

Baby Fingers

Montclair Preparatory School is on Sepulveda Blvd, deep in the Valley. The school used to be a motel. So did the nicer school I went to after that. Some of our classes were in FEMA-like trailers set up in the parking lot. It cost a lot of money and we wore uniforms. In the courtyard near the cafeteria, they cemented the pool that used to be there and covered it with shitty metal tables and benches. This was our informal lunch area. There were never enough seats, so kids sat against the wall of the motel, finding shade where they could. LA is so hot. Hot all year.

Around lunch time the payphone in the courtyard rang and it was always this pervert who spoke obsessively of baby fingers in mouths. Not to bite them off. It wasn’t violent. It was just a fetish. He could not stop going on about it. The conversation would go like:

“Hi”

“Hi”

“Who is this?”

“Have you ever stuck a baby’s hand in your mouth?”

“Huh?”

“Have you ever stuck those little fingers in your mouth and then the whole hand up to the wrist?”

“No.”

“Can you put someone else on?”

He was looking for someone who got it. I get it. It wasn’t me. I felt the wrongness of his questions and couldn’t find the upper hand the way other kids could. His breathing was so intense, a character separate from his voice. His voice sounded fat and stuffed up, maybe with baby fingers, who knows. I was just trying to eat my chicken fingers and get through the day. 

You know there are graveyards where multiple Big Boys are buried? 

The statues are damaged, deformed, decapitated. One visitor’s account opens, “To be honest, it was quite obscure. It’s not often you come across a molded fiberglass version of one of your favorite childhood cartoon characters tipped over in the woods — with a big hole in the side of his head. Not to mention there were three Big Boys. It was evident upon arrival that this was indeed a graveyard.”

Graveyards are like icebergs. All we see, as we walk across the manicured lawn, are carved stones with names and dates. What lies beneath our feet is more complicated, more nuanced and unknowable. What does it look like down there? Six feet under? This exercise requires imagination. It relies on your individual experience with death and burial, your knowledge of how materials decompose–wood and hair and clothing fibers. 

A graveyard is a place you go to pretend that death has borders and boundaries. We tell ourselves It belongs here, in this palatable setting, with flowers and trees. But this is fiction. Death goes where it wants to and usually leaves no trace. In between the graveyard and the imperceptible place, there are small memorials, fading slowly over time. Once they were heartfelt and clean but over time ribbons tear, teddy bears turn mangy. 

A graveyard can be a feeling. A graveyard can be a vibe. People are constantly trying to abduct Bob’s Big Boy. The news is littered with these stories.

Bob’s Big Boy is watching you; always has been. You’ve briefly glimpsed him this once, but he’s been there all along. He was watching you on the day you were born, and he’ll be watching you the day you die. He will always be there. Watching. Judging. Barely containing his rage, and quietly biding his time. He’ll be waiting for you, in the end. God help you when that day finally comes. (Sixteen Severed Hands, Reddit user)