Side By Side
04/23/20
by Stevie Cisneros Hanley and Noa/h Fields
Side A: ( ) by Noa/h Fields
Roommates: a self-contained unit of quarantine. Our apartment is an intimate loop, a symbiosis-machine. Getting “through” this means being “with” each other. Recalibrating rhythms; puttering around, across, and alongside each other: a dance in space. Being patient with mood fluctuations and an even more intemperate wifi hotspot, speaking directly when necessary, and knowing when to retreat to fortify in solitude.
I remember the tingly feeling that filled me when I first moved into the apartment to live with you. Like we were embarking on something special. A grand experiment in living together. In my head, we were Jess and Robert Duncan. I checked out their collaborative artist book from the library and set it out on the coffee table next to the three-foot dracaena. I dreamt of the collaborations we would make.
I could never have dreamt of the ways we’d become life rafts for each other.
*
You got sick on the eve of your birthday. I baked you a chocolate cake, but you lost your sense of taste. You were puzzled why it tasted like yogurt, but you held your tongue. You start listing your symptoms, uncertain but dreading diagnosis. Paranoia kicked in, as did my caregiving instincts. Pots of soup. Runs to the pharmacy to pick up meds, or to the grocery for more turmeric tea. Must. Keep. Distance. Coordinating friends delivering inhalers and takeout meals, keeping them in the loop with health updates. The days of the week lost their names, and we slipped into a fever dream of mounting needs to keep symptoms in check. Relentless chest pain.
One night you had a panic
attack & asked
me to guide you through
a breathing
meditation. My own
heart racing
as I tried to slow
down yours.
There was so much misinformation and panicked confusion. “Sorry, just so I am understanding, why did the doctor decide that Stevie shouldn’t get tested?” a friend texted. But tests were not readily available, and they were actively discouraged for “mild” cases like yours. An over-the-phone diagnosis had to suffice. Could be COVID-19, could be pneumonia. Fortunately, your doctor checked in every day and wrote a prescription for Hydroxychloroquine.
You were reluctant to be cared for. To be in the exposed position of dependency. But of course, I was just as dependent on you. Everything was so precarious. Tentative. I couldn’t begin to process what was going on around the world. I was grateful to have something to focus on. Someone to care for. You fully recovered in two weeks and I avoided symptoms entirely, despite exposure. I will never forget your face when you could finally taste your birthday cake, still moist but beginning to stale.
*
Our morning routine starts with Democracy Now, breakfast burritos, and coffee with a hint of cloves, all winding up into animated conversation. Did you see Paul Preciado’s essay in Artforum? His half-joking conspiracy theory that COVID-19 is the curse of exes everywhere. You can always count on him to be overdramatic in the best way possible. “In this new reality, those among us who had lost love or who had not found it in time—that is, before the great mutation of COVID-19—were doomed to spend the rest of our lives totally alone. We would survive but without touch, without skin.” Preciado confessed to writing a love letter to an ex, then throwing it out, only to find an email from her burning in his inbox.
Your “quarantine boyfriend” broke up with you, so you’re writing yet another missive for your box of unsent “angry letters to exes.” Meanwhile, I’m trying my damnest not to think of all the quarantine sex I couldn’t be having with my ex in Las Vegas. Exes were the bane of our existence. So I started writing you love letters.
Oh dear, I’ve been an ass. Here’s a sorry note—no, a love note. I’m shutting down & I’m sorry that’s looked like me being cold & self-isolating. I wish I could be more present with you. I’m exhausted. This change in rhythm & flow, especially social patterns, has really disrupted my mojo. I’ve felt so unproductive, uninspired, uncreative. I’ll try to keep my door open more & be more communicative about when I’m up for more together activities. Thanks for respecting my distance in the meantime.
I’m thinking of starting a poetic project, a homo-phone-book. Homophonic translation is vaguely a variation of the game Telephone, where you take a line (usually from another language) & translate the sounds & music of the words rather than the semantic meaning. So it sounds reminiscent of the original, but drifts apart. I think that’s pretty gay. Anyway…
*
The “homo-phone-book” project I mentioned preoccupied me for at least another week. In its earliest incarnation, I jotted down short entries based on homophones in my journal.
Enter it. Entrance it.
Enduring is endearing.
Dear door, I could walk
Into the rest of my life any minute now.
Since then it’s morphed into a social experiment in participatory poetry. I’d call up a friend and ask for a poem, then send them back a homophonic translation. I did a test run on a friend’s poem about losing an ex, starring a delightfully unexpected metaphor from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. My butchering was a smattering of silliness, with the irresistible first line: “Use no housing, desist seizing of butts, knees, divans, pirate lairs.” It could only go downhill from there.
*
The gigs came to a trickle. First I got an email cancellation for a cabaret I was slated to perform in, while I was on my way to rehearsal. Then the summer workshop production of my musical at Victory Gardens was cancelled. My music studio switched to online teaching, but a number of my students dropped. And quarantine wiped out teaching at the studio’s spring break day camp, which I had been relying on for extra cash.
You were patient with my delayed utilities payments. You stretched your budget to cover my groceries too. You connected me with grant resources and paying opportunities, including this one. You helped me draft a letter to organize a rent strike with our neighbors.
*
Downstairs, our living space has transformed into an all-purpose studio. In the corner, my keyboard and violin avail themselves for teaching and practice. Next to my instruments, you laid out a drop cloth. You don’t like to use prepared canvases, so you’re making your own grounds for new work. You apply primer to five brown boards, then coat them with leftovers like cracked egg shells and garlic skins. “This one’s for our collaboration. I give you permission to do anything to it.”
I struggle to accept this permission you offer me. How should I work in this medium so removed from my own? Visual language feels foreign, to me—a grammar of intuition I do not grasp. Helplessness overtakes me as I stare down an abstract grid. I’m not even sure of the proper way to hold a brush or make a mark. All of my choices feel random. I’m hesitant to disturb anything in your compositional field. (Yes, I know you said “our,” but I know it’s you who’ll end up having to cover up my chicken scratch etchings.)
Evening approaches, and we talk out the piece a bit more. What’s working here? What’s not? I feel the hot pressure of crit. We are both anxious about the pressure of creating a presentable finished product. You are more attuned to the material flesh of the work, its seams and splotches. I engage the best I can with your kitchen-inspired improvisations—now you’ve thrown in Jell-o, ginger, and onion skins—though I’m desperate for a conceptual frame. A word or thesis I can cling to. Gesturing to the negative space around a mound of egg shells, I tentatively suggest outlining a long curve like a parenthesis. Miraculously, my idea takes. We land on the idea of sibling pieces: opening and closing parentheses. Side by side. Our bond intimated in between parentheses, a world whispered from one ear to another.
It’s a work in progress.
Side B: Mr. Clean Orgy by Stevie Cisneros Hanley
In state-mandated isolation, how do we sublimate our sexual and romantic drives into socially responsible forms? Do we take on the internet? A new interest in experimental baking? My own psychic plumbing can’t seem to get past a fever-dream of a Mr. Clean Orgy I had at the height of my own scary battle with a diagnosis of COVID-19. Must’ve been my subconscious paranoia on infection, germs, dirt, disease, and ultimately, death.
If I were to further dissect the psychic innards of this nightmarish wet dream, it would have something to do with our contemporary society’s blind faith in science and industry to overcome nature and somehow save us all, maybe even from death. Fear, misguided faith, loneliness, and a desire for physical intimacy propagated an army of Mr. Cleans in my fevered egghead. The Mr. Clean Orgy played out much in the same way as that Charles Ray sculpture, Oh! Charley, Charley, Charley…, where the artist made a dozen life-size replicas of himself, all in the throes of sexual intercourse with each other/themselves/himself.
1992, Charles Ray, Oh! Charley, Charley, Charley… (1992).
Mr. Clean, Procter & Gamble trademark.
In my dream, as I got closer to the blurry ravages of orgiastic ecstasy, I realized that, rather than fucking themselves/each other, they are furiously scrubbing and cleaning each other’s dirty genitals, administering all-purpose cleaner enemas, and pouring toxic chemicals down each other’s throats. There are always sheaths of plastic between all physical contact, bright yellow fisting gloves, minty toothpaste colored dental-dams, and condom mouth face coverings.
In this new present, I’m trying to make sense of this fever-dream and my own sexuality, while cooped up with house paint, taped-together scrap sheets of paper, markers, pencils, crayons, and whatever other mark-making devices I can scrounge. I have been drawing from imagination, images of Mr. Clean, and the porn I masturbate to, trying to merge them together into that fleeting dream. Why do I feel like drawing this dick in great detail will somehow bring me answers? Maybe it won’t, but it seems to be helping me process something very personal and still sticky with shame: masturbation.
Masturbation seems almost more shameful than sex with others. I’m trying to be honest about my desires, the things I actually jack off to. I’m ashamed of how basic my PornHub playlist is, featuring mostly white, mostly “masc” athletic jocks. I want to exorcise these internalized racist, transphobic demons that seem to have a restrictive copyright on what is “attractive.” Attraction and beauty are so much more expansive than what is sold to us. Drawing by hand slows down what I too quickly visually consume.
I don’t want to nurse any more shame around my practice of masturbation. I’m not saying I don’t want to have sex with cis white men or be attracted to them. What I want is to go spelunking in the substructures of my own desires. Desire is messy, both socially constructed and transcendental. It may seem uncontrollable, but we have more agency over it than we realize. I want to open the doors and windows to recognize the immense glory and beauty of the many people who do not fall within those categories, including my own precarious identities in terms of race and gender.
I do know if I dress a certain way, as an ambiguously brown person—if I’m “clean-cut,” “proper,” preppy in a button-up, and ultimately coded as “clean looking,” instead of disheveled, dirty, and read as “poor,” the consequences for me are very different than for someone solidly white and cis. Cleanliness is next to godliness, and the gods of the colonizers are white. Sometimes, I feel like a coward going the easy way out, but we are all just trying to survive in the ways we know best.
Mr. Clean has a very interesting ethnic heritage himself, involving the death and maiming of numerous Sinhalese boat cleaners. In the early 1950s, Linwood Burton, who owned a marine ship cleaning business, chemically concocted the first all-purpose (and somewhat less toxic) Mr. Clean, in an effort to no longer pay significant premiums in disability claims for his workers in Sri Lanka, who were being maimed and killed in great numbers. In 1958, Burton sold the product to Procter & Gamble, and then “went on to commit several war crimes, including pillaging, taking hostages, and intentionally committing homicide of innocent civilians in the Vietnam War (1955-1975).”
Then, Procter & Gamble hired the Chicago design firm Tatham-Laird & Kudner to develop a mascot for the Mr. Clean product. Tatham-Laird envisioned a magic Arab genie. He was a muscular, bronze-skinned man with a pierced ear (originally, a pierced nose), who you could own and who just loved to clean. Most of this history has now been scrubbed from the internet by the Procter & Gamble corporation. Mr. Clean still has his copper-colored skin, but for the most part he has been fairly whitewashed, and now sports a pair of the most sparkling beautiful blue eyes.
Supernatural Toxins are the real specter of this Mr. Clean Orgy. I’ve started to cut up my porn drawings and reassemble them. I then paint over the dirty pictures with another thin layer of house paint, transforming the fornicating figures into a phantasmatic ghost orgy. This orgy seems to be caught in a constant loop of purification, sanitation, sterilization, and simultaneous longing for true, dirty, human intimacy.
Noa/h Fields is a nonbinary poet and teaching artist. They have written for Filthy Dreams, Telekom Electronic Beats, Anomalous Press, and Sixty Inches, among other publications. Their poetry chapbook WITH is out from Ghost City Press. They are fond of techno and avocados.
Stevie Cisneros Hanley is a Chicago-based artist and California native of mixed indigenous Hawaiian, Mexican, Irish and Punjabi heritage. Hanley, or “The Dainty Satanist,” as described by Vaginal Davis, has exhibited extensively in Berlin, where they lived for six years, most notably at September Gallery, Kunstraum Bethanien, and the Schwules Museum. Stevie Cisneros Hanley brings their perspectives of education, queer aesthetics, and religious experiences (specifically, of a failed Mormon-led “sexual-reorientation” therapy), together within their navigation as an artist, educator, and sex worker. Hanley has also exhibited in Istanbul (Artist Fair Tüyup), Jerusalem (Artist House Jerusalem), New York City (La Mama Galeria), Los Angeles (Canary), and Mexico City (Lodos Contemporary). They are represented by M. LeBlanc Gallery in Chicago.
Noa/h Fields and Stevie Cisneros Hanley worked on this piece with Mairead Case, the Quarantine Times Thursday editor. Each week, Mairead selects a Chicagoan to share a commissioned creative response to the pandemic.
