A Certain Hunger

by Chelsea G. Summers

The deer in Fire Island are so cheeky, insouciant in the way of West Side Story Jets, standing their ground, cigarettes rolled in their shirtsleeves, whistling a tune, singing an expletive-free song of defiance.

I gave my permission to have my psyche plumbed and prodded, plumped and pushed.

It’s not that women psychopaths don’t exist; it’s that we fake it better than men.

It was all about whom you knew, whom you blew, and whom you’d yet to screw. You just had to be at the right cocktail party, at the right gallery opening, at the right restaurant, in the right club’s bathroom doing the right drug, on the right coast, in the right tight black skirt, thighs pressed to the right person, in order to find your name on a masthead of some slick publication. And that was how I became the food critic for Noir.

I learned that being female is as prefab, thoughtless, soulless, and abjectly capitalist as a Big Mac. It’s not important that it’s real. It’s only important that it’s tasty.

You can’t be a woman without protection. Condoms fail. Pepper spray can be turned against you. Information almost never does.

Information is like a feral cat: what it wants most is to be free and to bite someone. Who am I to stand in the way of the call of the wild.

New York City may have a commercial skin, but it’s built on a skeleton of sex and magic. The bridges hang like jewels around the throat of the night, and the rivers unspool in endless runners of oily gray silk charmeuse. In the soulless corporate canyons of Midtown, the buildings point accusatory fingers at the uncaring sky. The streets flow with an endless human wash, so many people running like dumbstruck salmon, looking for love, looking for money, looking for a place to eat, wanting for fame, hoping for a place to sleep, hoping for a person to sleep with, praying for meaning in the dark before dawn.

New York City, it’s a place that doesn’t care who fucks whom, as long as you do it. Fucking, metaphorical or literal, is New York City’s soul. Fucking with, fucking up, fucking over, fucking around, fucking right: New York Fucking City has earned its name.

Americans adore systems. We want a system that obscures the system so that we feel comforted by there being both a system and a conspiracy system behind the system. We Americans are absolute fiends for rules.

I loved him, I suppose, but it was the love of an itchy sweater that looks too good on you to throw it away. Every time you slip into that sweater, you know you’re going to get compliments and admiring glances, and every moment you’re alone, you’re going to scratch your flesh raw.

Now that I’d made a decision, everything felt clear as vodka.