Broad Sound

There is no word more suspicious than hello. Like what do you mean? Saying something like that to me? The phonetics are alarming and breathy. The sentiment is perverse. All greetings, obviously, are upsetting, but hello is unbearable. It causes me to actually wince, bro. It causes my mouth to dry out. It causes the past and future to become opaque. Of course, I try to avoid putting myself in a position where I may hear this word. I do not leave the condo unless there is a reason. When I do, I project menace as best I can. I rig my body language in such a way that to approach me would be unimaginable to most people. That it can still happen when I have done so much to circumvent it is amazing to me. I am on the small island of grass in the parking lot with my dog Ascot, who is fixing to shit. Something’s wrong with him psychologically and he takes a real long time. Conditions have to be perfect. All my pits have had some kind of issue like this and it’s tedious. I have my phone out and I am looking down at a game where you try to tell the difference between real images and AI-generated images. I am wrong more than half of the time but it goes forever and so I will presumably have the opportunity to work on my average until it’s more respectable. I don’t even see the bro approach. I only hear him. Just the word. I wince as if stung. I look up. He just keeps moving, towards his car. I see the back of his hair. Had I imagined it or had this bro really said hello to me? He gets in his BMW i5 and pulls out past me. We make eye contact through the glass of his window. Unbelievable. No tint. Now his face is going to be forever imprinted on my mind’s eye. He could have said nothing. He could have said hey or sup or how’s it going. But he said hello instead like a complete freak. Ascot finishes trembling. I pull him away from the island. From the grass. From the sign that said to pick up after your dog. We all know what that sign means. Watch out for the dog shit.

Ascot and I live a simple life. Men generally don’t seem to care what I’m doing, but to women I am mysterious. I can tell that they are mystified by the way they glare into me as if I am some kind of aperture into a dimension of inequity and humiliation. But that’s the only dimension there is, and we are already there. I am flush with the tableau. Everything about me, my facial hair in its custom shape, my cologne, my neck tattoo which is in some font that looks like a signature on the declaration of independence. When I got it, I was on cocaine and very invested in the artistic vision of the guy who was doing it. It may be in Spanish. My point is that my tattoo is not something that I fully understand. My general sense of fashion is basically $200 Hawaiian shirts from Instagram and shorts that are so short that if I don’t wear boxer briefs the tip of my dick will peep out while I’m walking around Whole Foods. Women see this package and the Maserati and they think I must have rapped once or something. They see me at the strip club and they think where did this man get the money that he is throwing into the air even as they thoughtfully collect it for themselves. They think: this man should not have what he does. It is unclear even to me whether I should have what I have. But there is nothing anyone can do. A homeless woman outside CVS told me “Don’t fuck up your blessings.” I have tried and I cannot.

How I got my money is not a secret. I brag about it on the internet and when I am drunk, which is often. When I was sixteen, I broke into a car with a coat hanger, hotwired it, and did donuts until police arrived. I filmed this event using a GoPro, which I had hidden in a sycamore tree that was close to the action. When I got let out of jail the next day, I edited the video together with a grindcore song called “Cock Injury 4” and posted it to YouTube. Behold. Silence. A white Toyota Camry is centered in frame. At the edge of a parking lot in broad daylight. Cars move in the background, navigating the ramps that lead to the interstate. A shape appears, between the cars, closing the distance. It is a dude wearing a plastic mask. I just thought the mask was some old woman but turns out it was a lady called Angela Merkel who is in charge of part of Europe. This dude is holding the twisted wire of a coat hanger and he begins to fuck with the Camry. The door opens. He has practiced. The dude is in there for a few seconds. He is doing something quickly with the wires under the ignition. The car jerks into the curve of the first donut and the door slams shut. “Cock Injury 4” begins. The donuts continue for seven minutes until the police arrive. The donuts continue for several more as the police employ tactics to stop them. When it is clear the driver is not going to stop doing donuts on his own, they roll out a spike strip and the Toyota goes fully on two wheels. It seems like it is going to flip but it does not. The driver loses control of the car and crashes into a pole. The driver steps out and surrenders. He is cuffed face down against the pavement. Just as they pull the latex mask off, the video ends.

I keep dreaming of that freak who said hello to me in the parking lot. I’ll be making out with some chick from the past or TV or porn and I will hear the word hello and look around and the chick will melt out to the side and become like that ball of dogs from The Thing and if I keep trying to fuck it, it will make a loud whistling sound like a train that is really distracting. I’ll be driving my Maz and I’ll hear that hello and everything will slow way down and the gas won’t work and I will be back in Valdosta straight up puttering onto the shoulder as a light rain begins to fall. I don’t know how to purge this transgression. My inner life was already not ideal and now it’s a nightmare. It’s already hard to sleep with a girl in the bed without these dreams and Chloe lives with her parents so she stays out all night or not at all. I mainly date strippers and waitresses. The relationships are short and transactional. I look at these women as a series of ongoing accomplishments and to linger with any one of them for too long would upset the fidelity of a larger project. I do not offer much emotionally because I do not have access to any emotions that are desirable to women. I am also ugly but this has never hindered me in a way that I am aware of. Often, I am alone, and when I am around people, I am forceful with them and my ugliness becomes the least of their problems. I wake Chloe up and tell her to leave. We have an argument that I’m sure will end the relationship. Though it’s funny who comes crawling back to the money. You can’t tell who it will be. It is only after I break up with these women that I begin to slowly respect them. If I never hear from them again, this respect can accumulate unimpeded. Mandy never came back around. She knew what she was about. I can’t sleep anyway so I play the game on my phone. I work on my average but it is clear that I cannot perceive what is real. Who cares? You won’t see me making a big fucking issue about it.

Sometimes when Ascot is done shitting he gets furious for an interval. During this period and others, he can be difficult to control. Ascot is a 160-pound pitbull and I almost lose the leash when he bolts for another dog that some bank-looking dude is walking to the grass. I double the leash around my forearm. The man takes a wide berth like a bitch. Ascot won’t hurt you. Unless you are afraid. Or helpless. Or small. Something like this smaller dog or a child for example. Or a baby. Babies infuriate Ascot no matter if he just shit or not. He goes right for them and you basically have to physically stop him or there is going to be a big problem. I’ve seen him rip up a cat and it happens quick. There is not going to be a lot of time to troubleshoot basically. I’ve never seen him get a hold of a baby but it seems like a matter of time. In any case, if he hasn’t just shit and you aren’t a child and there is no baby around and you don’t get anxious, then Ascot is totally chill.

Jason sends me a Zillow link. I flip through pictures of the property though I have no intention of moving into a “YouTube house” for Jackass-adjacent content creators. Jason has been dreaming of such an arrangement for several years. It’s how we met. And though we now have other topics such as Counter-Strike and pornography to discuss, he will still send Zillow links. The flaw in his plan is that he is in Atlanta and he will not move. He brags about it. He has like 1.8 million subscribers and he is bragging about living in Atlanta. It seems like being rich in a big Chevron. He will talk about neighborhoods in there like me or anyone else gives a shit or even knows what he is talking about. This is one of Jason’s many inadequacies. It’s okay to live in Atlanta but you should not brag about it to anyone. Jason’s plans may have come to fruition in Los Angeles. But they will never take shape in their current form. He is not on that level and his channel is a mess. He will eat Carolina Reapers until he throws up on himself. Then in the next video he will be tasing himself and farting. He has no theme apart from his own debasement. There is no fraternal aspect as there is with Jackass. It is just suffering in a vacuum. “Less than 2 mil and there is an Infinity Pool,” he types. I cannot be expected to respond to any of this. I am watching the new Top Gun and eating random shit from the Whole Foods buffet out of a recycled container.

Yes, my video was the beginning of my money, but it isn’t the whole story. I put it up before YouTube would take down videos of crimes, even if the crimes were sick. The money it made was not very much, but it was enough to validate my actions. I did not go to jail because I was a minor. The judge was basically like don’t do this again. He didn’t know about the glory and purpose I had found. When I did it again, I was sent to jail for 18 months. During this time, because I thought the government or my mom might try to get my YouTube money out of my bank, I put my YouTube money in bitcoin. When I came out of jail, my channel had been demonetized, but the bitcoin had made me a millionaire several times over. I was not just free but extra free. More free than ever before. I could do whatever I wanted. I bought my own car and a new Angela mask (the original was taken as state evidence). I wore the mask, broke into my own car, and called the police on myself. This was kind of a whole thing even though it seemed legal at the time. First, it felt wrong. My donuts, as I did them, were not the same. The purity of the donuts was tainted by the fact that I was doing them in my own car. I became depressed and self-reflective. I don’t like to feel this way and I seriously considered just calling the whole thing off, driving away. But the police were already on the scene, everything blinking red and blue, and so I had to keep doing the donuts until they spike- stripped me and etc. Even though I was handled more roughly than before, kicked, there was an illegitimacy and wrongness to it. My lawyer got me off with a large fine, and I posted the video to YouTube and people watched it. People even believed it was real despite the local news articles other commenters posted, which correctly asserted that it had been my own car. This was sort of rad, the confusion, but it wasn’t the same. It left me adrift. I had lost something essential. My compulsion dissipated. I became something new and empty and purposeless. I had too much to risk to carjack someone else for the donuts, and carjacking myself, I discovered, was stupid.

I cannot sleep. I have hung blackout curtains across all my windows, just in case I get tired, so I can have the darkness that I need. As it stands I am playing the game on my phone and distinguishing reality with a 45% success rate. I am on a lot of pills. I wonder what the man in the electric BMW really wanted. What was he after? What was his angle? If I see him again maybe I’ll just ask him. I could push him down; that might teach him to fuck with me. He’s in these condos somewhere. Or else he was just visiting. Maybe he is gone for good. I visualize his head rotating in front of me like a computer simulation. I time travel a little bit and realize that the door of my condo is open. Ascot is not sleeping in the corner where the carpet has become greasy and matted from his basic secretions. I check all my rooms twice. There are only a few of them and Ascot is a massive dog. I cautiously walk the hallway. It is completely silent. There is no way out of this hallway besides the elevators and the stairwell, which has a door. Ascot is nowhere. I check to see if there is blood in either elevator. There is nothing that I can see. When I walk out into the parking lot, I realize that it’s the middle of the day and that I have exposed myself to potential follow-up from the man who greeted me. I pause at the threshold. I never put a collar on Ascot. No one will know his name or his connection to me. I will not be accountable for what he does. I ride the elevator back up. This is good actually. Now there is no reason to leave. Chloe has not called me. Ascot is gone.

Jason sends me pictures of the inside and outside of a giant empty house. It is the house from Zillow. He claims three other dudes have signed on and that there is a bedroom for me if I want it. I am extremely skeptical, but all I say is what I’ve said a hundred times to Jason, that I’m not moving to Atlanta. The truth is that I already live in Atlanta, but Jason doesn’t know this. He does not have the knowledge or follow-through to dox anyone. I want to move somewhere else, and I have the means to do so. I just haven’t and I won’t because of the hassle. I don’t want to be hassled, I don’t even want to be acknowledged, and I don’t want four twenty-something YouTubers kicking me in the nuts over and over again even if I profit from it. The truth is that though we seem alike, Jason and I, our projects are very different. The things I have done are things Jason will never understand.  

Over the years, I have become dependent on multiple substances. I do not recognize my face in the mirror. I am covered in small scabs. How many birthdays have come and gone at Divinity? I am in my 30s. Beyond that, I can’t say. I’ve made wise investments and I have succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of my mother or anyone else who knew me as a child. Where will my money go when I die? They must let some of it through with you even if it’s just the coins on your eyes. They will find me covered in shit and vomit in this condo, surrounded by bottles of tequila and recycled containers. Empty cans and vape cartridges. I wish they would just seal the door. Retire the unit. I own it. These decisions should be mine to make. My money will probably go to my mother if she is still alive. I fantasize about leaving everything to Mandy. There is no telling what she’s doing now. I barely even remember the details of her. Her version now is at best inspired by the real thing. Reduced to a couple hundred nude frames and a diminishing memory. The first of so many women to recede from me when prompted. Even Chloe seems remote now. I could probably romanticize that bitch at this point too. I can’t bring myself to go outside. I could get a prostitute, I assume, from the internet, but the idea of sex seems grotesque to me. As I sit on the toilet, feeling brittle and miserable, there is one second where it seems like all these people I’ve met are the same. One body. Every day they are so close to me. Up close, really close, it is really all the same. The same pores and hairs and colic smell. Sweating and creased. Tiny polyhedrons. I am carried to the edge of consciousness by a choir of nausea.

A BMW i5 is rare here. Everyone is driving fucking Teslas. All electric vehicles are easier to hotwire than older cars in a lot of ways, but the steps are completely different. I had to premeditate the act much more than any of the others, potentially more than anything I have ever done. I had to do research and watch footage. I had to download car malware off the dark web, jailbreak my phone, and install the shit. Now, in my Angela mask behind Carrabba’s Italian Grill, I simply run the app and it sends a signal to the i5 which unlocks it. Another touch starts the car. People on the internet warned that the beamer could be tracked, that they were poor cars to steal. But, of course, that is not my design. I glance into the rearview as the world begins to rotate. Angela’s slit-open eyes and my own eyes underneath. I get a little squeal and skip from the tires as the Tesla hits the tight orbit I ask from it. It feels exactly right to fold this car into my own ways. I wonder if I had known it from the start. If that man had known that he would catalyze such a triumphant return to my traditions. I decide he couldn’t know. We can never know how we push and pull on each other. The centrifugal force separates him from me. Him and everyone else. The i5 has surprising weight. I push the donuts up to 65. 70. The car is glued to the cement. The years and the mistakes and the small human crimes pass from me until I’m not thinking about anything at all. There is no guilt and there is no shame. By the time I hear the sirens I have been doing these donuts for more than a half hour. It is a staggering amount of time. The tires might have given out if it weren’t for the intervention of the police. But I am glad they are here. They are, in their way, as necessary as the car. If I survive, I will greet this arrest in brotherhood. But there are still revolutions to make as they sort out the situation. I take them one at a time. I let the panorama change as it is redrawn by my actions on this Earth.