29 Kathryn Nowinski: Stop Drinking the Te

Stop Drinking the Tequila

Kathryn Nowinski

I. Scene 1, Operation Warped Speed OMG.

Setting: November 3, 2020. She stands suspended upon the stage laid by the bed of a pickup truck, backed across the ditch that leads to the soccer fields that were a pumpkin patch until the farmer who owned the fields donated the land to the local chapter of the AYSO during the late ’90s.

KATHY: What do you know about corporate oligarchy?

WHAT do you know about descent into totalitarianism? | Homo sacer, Agamben’s idea of bare life written backwards in the mirror in Sharpie across her tits. It’s the day of the 2020 election, it is her 29th birthday. |

| Harrison Township did not have a library when I was growing up. My father spent his Saturday mornings drinking coffee at the Starbucks of the Barnes & Noble on Hall Road while he waited for me to finish drama classes.

“if one kills the one who is sacred … it will not be considered homicide?” What is contained within an ellipsis?

SHILOH: This is not a dreamscape, this is not a nightmare. This is the mundane, the ways white girls from the suburbs from good families lose their virginities and go on to lead wholesome lives. Before we could fix a toilet or clear out hair from the drain with a coat hanger. White girls from nice families, who didn’t buy silver rings that turned their fingers green because they didn’t want to spend their allowance, but still attended abstinence events. You could reclaim your virginity they said, but that wasn’t in our minds then. Girls from nice families, on their backs, in a twin-sized bed.

What is there to reclaim? Chantilly street in Laurel ‘For god guns love and country’ & a ‘don’t tread on me’ bumper sticker on your Jeep Patriot. One of those is overkill, we get it.

II. Eyes to See Setting: a porch, a toilet seat, or a dinner table. Candles lit surrounding her. SHILOH: Can you imagine something so recklessly beautiful as peeing into a toilet bowl filled with soft boiled eggs? The pleasure of it? Dreams where you wake yourself up just as you’re sitting down on a toilet, muscles unwinding, body expelling. You wet the bed once while sharing a hotel room with your family travelling for a wedding. You were 13 and drank too many Shirley Temples.

Now imagine something so recklessly beautiful as a woman resting on a sofa, laying with the pages of a thick book draped over her eyes. She likes the weight, but it is also a little suffocating.

III. Kitchen Poetics SHILOH: She asks me to bring the ramps from the fridge. A ramn (corvus, bird) is not a ramp, nor a ram, I wonder to myself does a ramn (corvus, raven) eat a ramp? A ramp is a wild onion, different from a shallot, maybe. Dogs cannot eat onions. Addy’s new girl he is seeing has a nightshade allergy. What does it mean to throw shade? Addy’s new girl he is seeing I call Margaret. Her name is not Margaret. I called her Becky at first like the girl before her, the last girl’s real name was Becky, that’s not even a joke.

SIGMUND: Kathy is not in love with me but wants me to give her the kind of attention that a person in love with her would give and I resent that. I contribute to her sense of security and I’m her best friend and Bishop-the-dog’s father. She doesn’t have a lot of close friends in Detroit right now and she feels abandoned by her friends who have moved away. When I shift and adjust my boundaries it hurts her because often I am very attentive and interested in her, especially when I am not dating anyone else. When I shift those boundaries, especially when I am dating someone else, it hurts her, so there needs to be some consistency in boundaries. Ultimately I feel very compassionate toward Kath and love her.

SHILOH: Abortion rights. Margaret was 22 when she said, Oh my God just come in me. And he did. He has always wanted a baby named Arlo.

I took adult beginner ballet classes the summer before my grandmother died. The last time I saw her in person, I had to leave for adult beginner ballet classes after eating a pizza with her and my great Uncle Rich, her youngest brother. It was Jet’s. Claire is dating a boy who works at Jet’s now during the pandemic. He made her a mixtape, they made a collage. I want to have sex, I masturbate with a rose quartz dildo that Addy bought me when we were breaking up. I want to have a love affair.

ED: Especially under the conditions of the coronavirus pandemic, themes of the body, illness and dis-ease, and how those constructions are articulated formally through what we consume are at the forefront of public thinking. These spaces have long histories of exploration in disability studies and body-centered discourse. I seek to expand and integrate these through editorial work on this proposed column.

KATHY: I know Ed as both a mind and also a dear friend. He shot video images of me diving into the Detroit River, then pacing back and forth draped in a Dora the Explorer towel my roommate had from her niece as I dried off. I hated the image, I thought it was campy, I wanted to do it without the towel. Eddy said it was like Kevin Killian and Kylie Minogue, that that’s why he liked it. So we kept it.

SHILOH: This beautiful, cold, liquid thing. If you stay very quiet and listen, you hear cube touching cube, cube touching glass. Gaseous spheres rise and rise. Or collect upon the surface. When they cannot rise any farther.

The following scene might be a flashback, or it might be a fantasy.

ARNAUD: Hey, I just wanted to let you know I made it home. I had a really lovely time tonight. Thank you for having me over. SHILOH: I was just going to text you but you beat me to it. Thank you for dinner, I had a great time as well, it was really lovely meeting you.

ARNAUD: What are you up to? Want to get ice-cream and watch a movie? SHILOH: I’m just having some tea with my sweet little Chloe, but if you’re up for it breakfast tomorrow? ARNAUD: I can make breakfast tomorrow! SHILOH: What kind of thing do you make? My interest is piqued, or I will say it is because I’m flirting with you. ARNAUD: I can make all kinds of things. How about shakshuka? Cheese should be invited to the party too. SHILOH: I can’t believe you said that last part, but RBG just died and to communicate about fascism and potatoes at once is disconcerting.

SHILOH and ARNAUD making out in bed.

ARNAUD: I’m so sorry I didn’t get back to you. I’m starting to feel overwhelmed with school, teaching, projects. It might not be the best time for me to date right now. I’m really sorry. I’m down to hang out as friends. SHILOH: I can’t even indite him on it, he’s too formal, forthcoming and respectful. So I’ll say, “I think you’re really onto something, I totally get it. Really, I remember that point in grad school too and it’s just like, all the layers of labor, stress, pressures ... selfhood starts to dissolve and get a bit hazy ... let alone engaging other people.” I’ll say, “I think you’re lovely though, if you ever want to share a co-working space with a girl or to watch one of the one-million film-school things you’ve got assigned, I would love to be casually invited.” // Then a few weeks later, maybe a month or two from now, I’ll send him a WAYD text, or a “U up?” and see if he bites.

IV. Scene 5, after Rosie Stockton

KATHY: Tulip, shapeshifter, a crack in the windshield, here is the moment to demand, WAGES FOR MUSES, “how essence gets tied to bodie”, “I want to talk about something else now like how this rock is fucking heavy” (rosiestockton 2017). Translations of woman, our work, the names and places and a yellow building that houses years and memories and commerce. You ride across the sea on crumpled paper boats. Today is a day to drink strawberry wine, the brut is gone already, veuve clicquot 1772, colonialism bottled up. What color is the sacred? Your skin in summer. A haircut, a hat, a dress, living in our bodies and minds these days.

Dripping tequila out of a bottle, you take a shot, squirt lime in your eye, then the salt lick, like a cow, alcohol pours, guzzles into a small pan, bowl, cast iron. Lighting a match. | I leave a half eaten cookie half-frozen still from the freezer on the window sill just near my bed. An offering for a mouse.