#4: Boys R Us

Starring Mr. Americana and the Ketamine Queen

Welcome to edition #4 of Hot Girl Gothic. If you missed edition #3, the one about festive family trauma, check back in your email (spam and promotions too!) and mark it as important, or click here. Tell a friend! xoxoxo.

Sometimes I forget that I am not addicted to drugs. Like, I have spent so much time in the past couple of weeks just staring at a wall and craving ketamine. I ache for it! Yet, I have never done ketamine. Life is funny in this way.

I can’t feel these emotions… but how exciting is it to smell it <3

The logic behind drug addiction is obvious to me. I hunger for a dream-like trance and I have to imagine that, while I greatly enjoy watching Seinfeld, it is not the same as doing hard drugs. Neither is spinning around in circles until I am extremely dizzy and then sitting down on my floor to cry. That does feel a little closer to the high I am trying to achieve, but it lasts for barely 30 seconds, and that’s only if you spin for like a solid five minutes. I can understand trying to keep that party going, at all costs, forever.

I did drink a can of Red Bull (not the sugar-free kind, to assert my skinniness) on an empty stomach and that was the closest I’ve gotten in this pandemic pursuit of euphoria, but again, it just didn’t last.

The dead eyes of someone who has known caffeine biblically

I feel like I am in a constant state of withdrawal, and nothing I am doing is working to quench it. You may wonder, “why doesn’t she just do drugs?” and my answer is:

1. If I did these drugs, especially right now, that would be it for me. They would solve all of my problems and I would never emerge into the sober world again.

2. No one I have a crush on is currently offering them to me.

So it’s for the best, really, that I am trapped in a periwinkle blue prison cell of an apartment in Brooklyn, unable to destroy myself. If I had access to a party or any source of adrenaline right now, it would be my last. Even my watching of Seinfeld is done to excess. I cannot just enjoy it. I need it to heal me, consume me, until I feel nothing except the warmth of 1989 Jerry Seinfeld’s smile.

He makes me feel held

Yesterday, as I was brushing my teeth, I closed my eyes and slow-danced with an imaginary lover. This morning, like most mornings, I forced myself to drastically oversleep in order to remain in a dream state for as long as possible. I own more nightgowns than I do pairs of underwear. By all cinematic indication, I am an ingenue who is losing her mind.

Stop drooling, boys! I know, I know, you’re falling madly in love with my dazzling instability, but hold fast, because I have not yet made the final descent into madness. Yes, even as we’ve passed the one year anniversary of not being able to kiss strangers on the mouth, I still have a guiding light that spares me from the depths.

Because, despite all that I have lost, I, Maison Kelly, can still talk to boys on the phone.

Little Blue Towels

I was speaking with a boy—some would say a man—recently and he began telling me about his day. Normally I would not tolerate this kind of behavior, but I was feeling particularly existentially amorphous and in need of an anchor. This boy, let’s call him Cliff, is a perfect, mellifluous anchor.

Google image result for “Cliff”

Cliff is the American dream. He’s a window washer. He eats drive-thru hamburgers. He can jump, run, skip, throw, catch, you name it. He wants to get married someday and he says things like “when I have kids…” confidently, assuredly. He’s a glass of cold milk on a picnic table underneath a palm tree.

In the story he was telling me, it had been a difficult day in the window washing business (O, what a romantic profession!) and he found himself in quite a crisis. The details of the crisis escape my memory, but I find a specific phrase of the tale etched onto my soul forever.

“Maison,” he cried, “there I was, exhausted, heat-stricken, little blue towels strewn around me…”

I inhaled so sharply that I thought my eyeball might have popped.

“Cliff,” I nearly wept, “I need you to stop talking this instant. I need us to go back to what you just said. Please, can we go back?”

I don’t remember how the phone call ended. All I remember is the sudden throbbing of my head and heart rendering Cliff’s baritone into oblivion.

“little blue towels strewn around me…”

The phrase had already begun to eat at my heart like worms; the phrase that would sing to me during sleepless nights, the phrase that smelled not of window washing fluid but of cashmere, St. Louis, and melancholy.

“little blue towels strewn around me…”

I could black out looking at this right now.

Could I ever be married? One day, Cliff will lay back in a recliner and watch The Andy Griffith Show with his children. He will spend Thanksgiving with his wife’s family and Christmas with his own. He’ll tie a red bow around a puppy and present it, with pride in his eyes, as a gift to his first child. Where will I be? Burning alive in some town square?

“little blue towels strewn around me…”

Cliff wasn’t incapacitated, as I was, by this beautiful, melancholic phrase he effortlessly uttered. He didn’t even notice he had said it! What must it be like, to be so sure of everything? To be capable of such effortless beauty? Little blue towels will always find a way to strew around him. He will never be alone.

Ketamine, marriage, little blue towels, the Midwest.

I wish I could put all of these things into a snow globe to keep forever on my vanity! It might feature Cliff on some cool Los Angeles drug, looking out over the Missourian ocean. Maybe an altar, too, a beach wedding, every guest in a shade of powder blue. A beautiful bride. When shaken, little ketamine snowflakes dust the beach and encase the whole scene in a dreamy haze. I could hold this world in my hand whenever I wanted.

And then I could put it back down.

In dire moments, hot girls may long to live forever in this snow globian Americana dream. We are all committed to be ever-traveling tourists, until we happen upon a compelling place to stay. We taste the Coca-Cola. We hear the warm voice of a lover. This is what happens when you follow the Lana Del Rey pipeline to its natural end! But what did that gain Lana? She dated a cop and now her albums are boring.

Post-cop Lana, trapped in her snow globe.

These perfect worlds are so fun to look at, to hold, to visit, but they are not for us to stay, no matter how picturesque. Once you’re shrouded in the plastic, there can be no escaping. We know that being hot means that we honor and cultivate our worst, most human impulses, but being goth means we always escape in the nick of time! A hot girl gothic life can never be contained in a snow globe. Even if there’s ketamine there. Or mellifluous boys.

You have to break open the snow globe. You have to jump off of the Cliff. Drug-like trances cannot save us. The only thing we can do to avoid the trenches of tradition is to stay moving, stay untethered, stay hot, and stay goth. We can find love in the liminal and triumph in the transient.

We don’t need the American dream. We’re wide awake, baby queens.

xo Maison