“I’m a fan of that mustache you’re growing,” Mel tells her. “It’s a real vag-grabber.”
“That guy from Time Out New York is here. Maybe you guys should go talk to him before you’re too sloppy to put a sentence together.”
When Cathie sees me sniffling, she makes her face go blank and drops her eyes. Mel stands and stretches, tossing her iPhone onto the table. “Thanks, hon.” Turns to me. “I got this. Have a smoke, calm down. Come back out and we’ll make Fart buy us tacos from the truck.”
Mel closes the door behind her. The room is quiet, the only sound the thumping of the stereo system rattling the metal door in its frame.
When I’m sure I’m alone, I heft my shoulder bag from the floor and sift through until I reach the bottom, where I know it will be—a beat-to-hell, unruled eight-and-a-half-by-eleven Moleskine sketcher’s diary, the first I ever bought, now held together by a fraying Goody hair band. I put my head down and listen for a moment to make sure Mel’s not coming back before I open it.
I need to see the List.
I call it the List, though it is, in form and function, no list. It is not itemized; it’s barely chronological. It is a junk drawer, my offal pile, my brain-gnawing archipelago of fuckery. My greatest ongoing work, to be completed never.
The List is a secret compendium of every man with whom I have ever fallen in love.
It began as a comfort project in the wake of the great Zack-from-Kansas rejection of December 2001 (a dismissal that bit because it unfolded in exactly the manner I had expected it to—he was spotted, unawares, making out with the Hallmark blonde at a party; I ran off, thus beginning a long and distinguished history of scuttling away crying). The idea was born of a combination of grief and the brand-new sense of enterprise that being in college, Mel’s collaborator, and newly committed to being an artist had given me. I decided I would draw him out of my head and make it so good I would be done with him.
Rubens’s primary medium was not oils but women—the pale, peaked bodies of well-fed girls. My medium is dick. The men are the impetus: from the fifth grade, when I was in love with Teddy Caudill, the List’s patron saint, to the present. Every floundered crush and ill-advised infatuation is documented. And the hot, rock-hard rejection, ever present from age thirteen on: my love life, as it is, largely a spectator sport. Once I drew one, I had to draw them all: I did the same for the next guy, and the next, and all the ones who came before. The List deepened, became richer and more fetid. Like the best projects, it grew its own horrible legs.
The man is always in the middle, captured in realistic strokes. Mel once told me my style reminded her of R. Crumb, his ability to sketch accurate form in feature and proportion yet maintain a few merry cartoon elements—thick, goony smiles, a bulbous nose. I’ve paid good-natured attention to sneaker toes, gummy iPhone cases, the horned edges of boutique specs. Some smile. Others slump. A few glance off the page accusingly, as if aware they’ve been pinned for observation. Stats dance along the edge: ACT scores, favorite books, shoe size, names of exes. Breakup method. Jack is at a Coney Island shooting gallery, gaping, surrounded by snarling stuffed chimps and bears. Pavel splays in the booth of a Midtown coffee shop, leg bent, knee cocked up; his hamburger opens up on his plate, teeth visible, readying to bite him. Steven stands in front of a crumbling factory in Bushwick, the windows of which are screaming.
But about ten pages in, the List becomes something else, veers into even darker, more alien territory. Unseemly things appear. A knife in a bed of flowers. The tip of a rifle emerging from a page’s edge. One begins to see things they immediately wish they hadn’t, the snuff film you should not have watched by yourself: next to number 58, a long, dark oak chest, the shadow of which stretches over half the page, a snake dripping out over one side.
Above number 69, a lock set into wood stares out, an eye with no pupil.
Around number 5, a series of tiny hands; on each, a solitary finger broken.
The head of number 32 floats in a sea of blackbirds, neck and shoulders disappearing behind flutters of dark wings.
Number 87 lost in a forest in which each tree is the torso of a woman, growing from a stump.
Number 43 drives a dark minivan down a mountain road, hundreds of arms drooping from the windows, the front bumper a set of teeth.