Chapter 12: When You Exit A Room You Just Enter Another One

Over the course of 2020, Brad Phillips and Gideon Jacobs wrote a 12-chapter "serial novella" for Autre. Click here to read Chapter 1: G and B.

text by Brad Phillips (and Gideon Jacobs)

Gideon did a great job above finishing his last chapter of this project. You can see that right? Don’t take it for granted that Gideon has talent.

He wrote about the beginning and the ending of things. When you exit a room, you end the experience of being within it, but of course when you exit a room you just enter another one. You are never not in a room.

This is the end for me. Everything has an ending, even an ending. This is the end of my ending. On Monday though, I’m starting Wellbutrin after almost a decade of not taking antidepressants, only mood stabilizers and Clonazepam. I am weaning myself off Clonazepam. Clonazepam, ironically, increases anxiety over time. I have been taking it for twenty-six years, never once having missed a day. Anything soothing will, after a span of time, become terrifying. 

(For a while I had a literary agent who was an idiot and when I sent him the first draft of my first book he seriously thought I should replace the word CLONAZEPAM with the word KLONOPIN for American readers. And he also seriously thought that I should drop the U from words like colour and labour so as not to alienate American readers, and this is the utter stupidity you sometimes have to deal with in life, and I stopped working with him when I saw his high school yearbook photograph and he was wearing a bowtie, and then I saw his Instagram and he was STILL wearing the bowtie.)

I’m wondering about NXIVM. About Keith Raniere and what about the women in his house who died of cancer from rat poison, why is nobody talking about that? I want to know what’s happening to him in prison and I hope it’s rape and beatings. In Canada there’s an allergy pill called NEXIUM. I want to send it to Catherine & India Oxenberg for their allergy to poor people. I’m writing my first novel. I thought it would be out by now. My first book was published on my birthday in 2019. I turned 45. In February I turn 47. I basically just started a writing career. I’m worried a gap of more than two years between books will damage my possibly ascendant career. And I worry about the book itself. All the time. I’m writing about science-fiction and basically everything my first book wasn’t about, cause I don’t want to repeat myself. But I want to make money, and I don’t want all the ‘fans’ of my first book (who are numerous and loyal and generous and thank you) to be disappointed or feel alienated that this new one isn’t about BRAD AND DRUGS AND BLAH BLAHAHLAHA. I couldn’t be more boring as a subject—this should be apparent by the end of this paragraph. I wrote a detective novel that’s an irritatingly postmodern book within a book. I hate postmodernism. I’m trying to figure out how to incorporate it into the structure of the larger novel. It’s fifty-five thousand words, the detective book, which is already the word count of a short novel. If I insert it periodically in the structure of the main novel, I worry people will lose track of the larger novel, become frustrated by the interruptions, or only read the detective novel which is admittedly more gripping. The best solution I’ve come up with is to insert each chapter as an endnote at appropriate points throughout the novel proper, but as soon as you think about endnotes you think about David Foster Wallace and I really hate the idea of what would likely be ALL writing about the book to be about Infinite Jest and the endnotes. Cause Wallace himself got super bored of that and irritated (even though everything about Wallace is obnoxious and fake and performative and of course he loved the endnotes and the talking about them), but I’m not like him. I wouldn’t get bored, I’d get upset cause I don’t want to be compared to him or have people think I ripped him off. I’ve been painting a long time and nobody can say I ripped anyone off. But with your first novel if its got a lot of endnotes people can say you ripped of Wallace, especially someone like me: a soon to be 47 oooh 12 step meetings type wears a thing on his head all the time white asshole with a chip on his shoulder or a seeming or perceived chip on his shoulder and even now this sentence sounds like Wallace. I hate David Foster Wallace. He threw Elizabeth Wurtzel out of a moving car.

People say they like the ending, they savour the ending, they wait and they wait, and they postpone the ending cause it’s so bittersweet this ending, but ultimately they want it cause they have to move on. But death, everyone is scared of that ending. That’s why religion and Jesus and the virgins and reincarnation and all the lies people tell themselves about a new beginning which is really not a thing so much as a choice one makes every day.

I am supposed to be working on a novel and making paintings, but I ordered books, some suggested, some chosen by me, and they sit in front of me telling me, “Brad, fuck work come read” and these are the books 
- The God Molecule by Brian Clegg (or Particle, some aren’t right in front of me)
- The Superrationals by Stephanie Lacava 
- The Incest Diary by Anonymous
- Child of God by Cormac McCarthy who I never read and who everyone says you have to read
- Serotonin by Michel Houllebecq which I ordered an advance copy of the translation and thought it’d take a lot longer to come out then when it came the other day I was like, shit now the Houlellebecq book is here and I really want to read it but also it’s a bad idea to read it cause his writing style might somehow influence me and then I’d be ripping off yet another shitty white guy with bad hair.

(I feel worried and upset that by listing the books above people will think I’m attempting to appear smart, or well read, or intellectual, or that I’m posturing or showing off.) 

My hair is also thinning and I bought Rogaine and am so ashamed and can’t believe I’m writing it down.

“2020 WAS A HARD YEAR EVERYONE LET’S PUT IT BEHIND US” 

You don’t want an ending. I don’t want an ending. I want to be forever beginning, but I’m not an idiot child who shits his pants and leaves food on his face so I’m forced to face the facts.

You do not have to be forced to face anything. You can shit your pants and leave food on your face and be accountable to nobody so this is what I’m offering you at the end with very little energy left wearing a pair of red Nike sweatpants that people think are ‘cool’ but really were just cheap and I bought them at an outlet mall by my parent’s house and they’re actually the sort of sweatpants that high school jocks wear in the suburbs. I’m wearing a hat because I’m scared to see my hair and my wife Cristine’s shirt which has a big circle with a stripe through it spray painted on the front like a NO or CANCELLED sign cause I’m cancelling myself before anyone else can or demonstrating that I know I should’ve been or should be cancelled. 

So it’s this:

Turn to Chapter 4 if you want Brad to quit painting and devote his time solely to writing.
Turn to Chapter 7 if you want Gideon to quit editorial writing and devote his time solely to writing fiction.
Turn to Chapter 1 if you want this to be published in some manner.
Turn to Chapter 6 if you secretly shoplift things like beef jerky from gas stations and nobody knows it.
Turn to Chapter 9 if you’re obsessed with Tao Lin but pretend like you’re not cause you’re frightened of judgment.
Turn to Chapter 2 if you don’t want this to be published.
Turn to Chapter 5 if you’re considering Christianity in spite of having seen dinosaur fossils in museums and can’t reconcile the creation story of Adam & Eve with what you know of science but still want to really give Christianity a shot.
Turn to Chapter 8 if you want Gideon and Brad to live long healthy lives.
Turn to Chapter 4 if you’ve ever been happy and the end of that happiness did NOT bring you suffering but somehow, illogically, did not hurt you.

For more from Brad Phillips, follow @brad___phillips on Instagram. For more from Gideon Jacobs, follow @GideonsByeBull on Instagram.

Chapter 11: Penultimate Chapter Meditation

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A Meta Method for When the End Draws Near (7 minutes)

Over the course of 2020, Brad Phillips and Gideon Jacobs are writing a 12-chapter "serial novella" for Autre. It will be written Exquisite Corpse style — they will alternate who writes each month's chapter, and won’t have access to the previous chapter until it has been published. Brad and Gideon have not discussed plot, structure, format, themes, characters, etc, and promise not to do so even once the project is underway. The idea is to react to each other's work, and hope the final Frankensteinian product is something that deserves to exist. If the authors like what they've made when it's done, the editors might publish it as a "zine." Installments will go up on the 15th of every month. Click here to read Chapter 1: G and B.

text by Gideon Jacobs (and Brad Phillips)

People emphasize the importance of beginnings and endings. One always wants to “get off on a good foot,” “go out with a bang,” “start strong,” “leave them wanting more,” etc, etc. These truisms are, at their core, about manipulation, and manipulation is, at its core, about control. If our “exquisite corpse serial novella” has taught you anything, which it really shouldn’t have, it’s probably that control is for suckers. 

With beginnings, we go from nothing to something, crossing the threshold into the experience in question. Examples: meeting someone, walking into a room, opening a book, etc, etc. We all know that the nature of this threshold crossing is the foundational stone on which the experience will be constructed. Change is what we notice. This is why we feel acceleration and deceleration, not velocity. This is why we place such a premium on first impressions. 

With endings, we go from something back to nothing, crossing the threshold out of the experience in question. Examples: breaking up with someone, exiting a room, finishing a book, etc, etc. We all know that the nature of this threshold crossing is the taste left in our mouths as we move on to other experiences, including that of telling the story of the experience in question to ourselves and others. In a sense, endings are valued because they so heavily inform the beginning of what’s next: our processing of what just happened.  

All that said, it’s the moment just before the ending begins, the gray transitional zone that marks the conclusion of the chunky middle, that tends to go underrated and overlooked. It’s here that people are most comfortable and, therefore, vulnerable, with the finish line finally in sight but enough race left to run that there’s no anxiety about what lies on the other side. It’s here, when we are simultaneously hyper aware of the finitude of the experience in question and still very much inside it, that we can really relax. 

So, relax. Soon, when things are officially almost over, you can start thinking about what you’re going to do when it is, in fact, over, but for now, just relish the purgatorial peace, the limbotic lull. Did you know the word “lull” has roots in middle english and latin that mean, “To quiet a child?” Whether you knew that or not, let your collicky inner child be soothed by the calming energy available in this unique moment of our greater narrative arc. Bask in it. Suck it like a fucking pacifier. 

Good. Now that you’re sufficiently relaxed, your defenses down, we can focus on the real goal of this meditation: to prime you in a way that allows for optimal enjoyment of the final chapter of our “exquisite corpse serial novella.” This process isn’t simply about getting you into a good mood so that you’re more likely to enjoy whatever comes next. No—what we’re going to do is have you prepare a positive expectation of how incredible the final chapter will be, and pair that expectation with a positive sense memory of how good it was. In a sense, we are going to create a mold in which your near-future experience of reading the final chapter can be shoved into. 

This might make it sound as if by predetermining the quality of your reading experience we’re robbing your future-self of agency, but that’s paranoid thinking. What could be more empowering than choosing your fate? What could be more enjoyable than guaranteeing your future enjoyment? Don’t be spooked—this is just what guru’s are really talking about when they talk about “manifesting.” 

So, let’s assign the final chapter a color. It can be any color, but be sure to choose one that you associate with good feelings, maybe love, excitement, comfort, peace, strength, etc, etc. Once you’ve chosen your color, imagine the final chapter not as a bunch of cold words on a page or screen but as a kind of warm, amorphous ball of energy that is, inside and out, your color. Anticipate how good it’s going to feel to enter the ball of energy, to cross the threshold between the penultimate chapter—your current experience—and the final chapter—the ball. 

Now, once you feel like you’ve spent enough time immersed in your color, once you feel your body and mind have been totally saturated by it, imagine exiting the ball of energy and finding yourself plopped into a beautiful home in the middle of a dinner party. There are a handful of your favorite friends there, and a few very attractive strangers too. The table is lively with conversation but you’re having trouble finding an opening to throw in your two cents. This makes you feel self-conscious, weak, timid, impotent, childish, etc, etc. 

Just as you’re about to give up, about to resign yourself to spending the evening sulking rather than participating, the most charming of all the dinner guests, maybe sensing you’ve been a little quiet, redirects the flow of the conversation toward you. Now, you have the floor as all eyes and ears at the table are wondering, “Have you read anything good lately?” “When was the last time a piece of writing really moved you?” and most specifically, “What’s a novel or novella that really nails its ending?” 

Normally, this much attention would cause your voice to tremble a little with doubt, anxiety, uncertainty, panic, etc, etc. But when you open your mouth, you suddenly feel like you’re back inside the ball of energy, or more accurately, it now feels like it is inside of you. When you speak, your voice doesn’t tremble. Much to your surprise, you sound confident and self assured as you tell your little audience that it is so funny they should ask because you have, in fact, just read something good, something that moved you, something that managed to both end with a bang and leave you wanting more. 

For more from Gideon Jacobs, follow @GideonsByeBull on Instagram.

Chapter 10: First Class to Basel

Over the course of 2020, Brad Phillips and Gideon Jacobs are writing a 12-chapter "serial novella" for Autre. It will be written Exquisite Corpse style — they will alternate who writes each month's chapter, and won’t have access to the previous chapter until it has been published. Brad and Gideon have not discussed plot, structure, format, themes, characters, etc, and promise not to do so even once the project is underway. The idea is to react to each other's work, and hope the final Frankensteinian product is something that deserves to exist. If the authors like what they've made when it's done, the editors might publish it as a "zine." Installments will go up on the 15th of every month. Click here to read Chapter 1: G and B.

text by Brad Phillips (and Gideon Jacobs)

Hi Summer and Oliver,

Thanks for this. I don’t like when people ‘break the fourth wall,’ but maybe Gideon and I have done that already?

It’s ironic, because when you sent me this document, before I even opened it I said I didn’t know if I'd be able to get my part done in time because I’ve been so mentally fragile lately. And then you wrote that you were worried about our mental health. So this is, really... I can’t imagine a sign of better editors, in that you seem to have predicted my current state of mind. I don’t know how Gideon is doing, he hasn’t responded to my texts for a few weeks, but I do see that he looks at my stories on Instagram. 

The book that I published last year dealt a lot with suicide and mental illness etcetera, and it was ‘autofiction,’ but really, that was just a sort of way to cover my ass if people didn’t like certain content—ultimately none of it was fictional. I ended up in the psych ward of the hospital twice after it came out, and if my new book wasn’t science fiction/incest based, then it would probably be about the story of an aging man who published a successful book, hoping it would ameliorate his mental suffering, only to find out that in fact not only was it unhelpful, it actually made his (my) mental health worse.

When I was thirty-three I had a solo show at Liste, a satellite fair for younger artists attached to Art Basel in Switzerland. I’d had a really bad year, my marriage was in the toilet, a lot of other things were going on. So I did this thing I often did (and, knowing what I know from the past should not still do, still do), where I put all my hopes for mental recovery into the success of my show. My ex-wife and I went to Basel, my dealers were billionaires and flew us both there first class, put us in a hotel room larger than my current apartment, gave me a daily stipend of five hundred Swiss francs, etcetera. That first day, I had to go to the building where the fair was taking place and help hang my paintings. Before we patched all the holes in the wall, Ivan Wirth and Manuela Hauser, who own Hauser & Wirth Gallery (which all my life I dreamed of showing with, and still do to this day) came and bought the entire show, seventeen paintings, hours before the fair even opened. This should have been good news...I mean objectively it was. I made close to sixty-thousand Swiss francs. My dealers put their Christian Louboutin shoes up on the table, smoked Marlboro Reds and drank Veuve Clicquot. They looked triumphant, and also a bit like they’d won the fair—like they were better than everyone else. And I performed ‘thrilled’ as long as I could then went down to the bar with my ex and ordered a beer. Once it arrived, I just started bawling my fucking eyes out, in full view of dealers I wanted to work with and artists that, back then, I felt intimidated by. Because what I’d wanted had happened, but I didn’t feel any better. I’d stupidly put all my hopes into the idea that selling out my show (or even having it go well) would fix my depression. When it didn’t fix my depression, I felt even worse. Because then it became, what’s it going to fucking take? That day I understood success was nothing more than a big shiny balloon. It looks pretty and floats around, but when you pop it, it’s just hot air and cheap plastic that settles on the ground like dead skin from a colourful animal. 

Worse still, was that I now had a lot of money, and back then having lots of money was very bad for me. I didn’t save money like I now do with my wife Cristine, using it intelligently to invest in the stock market or get closer to buying a home—I just spent it on dope, and Prada shoes, and similar bullshit. So while I want this to be good, what Gideon and I are doing, I know that whether it turns out well or not, it’s not going to make me ‘feel better.’ Mental illness isn’t contingent on outside factors like success or failure (although failure can certainly exacerbate it). I’m working on my first novel right now, and if I’m lucky, I write a paragraph a day. I don’t know if it’s procrastination or self-destruction. I know that, but maybe I’m wrong and think ‘I’m worse off than him,’ that Gideon is more mentally sound than me. Maybe he isn’t, though. I mean, I worry about him not having texted me in weeks. I’d reach out to him but don’t have much to say, like words of comfort or platitudes that mean nothing, and that to intelligent people usually read as insults rather than expressions of concern. 

When I buy a house I’ll be happy. But then there’s the renovations. When I have 50k in the bank I’ll be happy. But, then there's the taxes. When I show with David Zwirner, I’ll be happy. But then I’ll have to churn out paintings. 

I’m not even sure I know what happiness is. I know what relief is, and sometimes confuse it with happiness. What I know, I guess, is the absence of fear, and the absence of anxiety, and the absence of depression, and those things register to me as happiness. I suspect though that happiness is something different, like bubbling joy and delight at the world. I don’t know those feelings. Joy is just a name from the ‘70s, and delight is the second work in a candy I enjoy that it seems no one else does—Turkish Delight.

You can print this, add it to our project. It’s honest and real, and maybe this is the only honest and real thing I’ve contributed to this project so far. 

If you reach Gideon, tell him I love him, and I hope he’s okay, and that he can call me any time if he wants, but that if I don’t pick up, please don’t try calling again five minutes later.

I hope you’re both okay. Today they said Trump caught the coronavirus, so my face muscles moved into that expression people called ‘smile.’ This must be an improvement of some kind, no? 

XOB

For more from Brad Phillips, follow  @brad___phillips on Instagram.

Chapter 9: Time For A Check-in?

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Over the course of 2020, Brad Phillips and Gideon Jacobs are writing a 12-chapter "serial novella" for Autre. It will be written Exquisite Corpse style — they will alternate who writes each month's chapter, and won’t have access to the previous chapter until it has been published. Brad and Gideon have not discussed plot, structure, format, themes, characters, etc, and promise not to do so even once the project is underway. The idea is to react to each other's work, and hope the final Frankensteinian product is something that deserves to exist. If the authors like what they've made when it's done, the editors might publish it as a "zine." Installments will go up on the 15th of every month. Click here to read Chapter 1: G and B.

text by Gideon Jacobs (and Brad Phillips)

To: Brad and Gideon

From: The Editors

Dear Brad and Gideon, 

To start, we want to thank you for writing your “exquisite corpse serial novella” with us. When you mentioned the concept back in winter, we were immediately intrigued. It sounded like the perfect sandbox for writers like you two to play in, a recipe for something unusual and surprising. Over these months, it’s been fun to watch you ping-pong the novella back and forth, unaware of the other’s intentions and ideas, fingers crossed that it will result in something cohesive and whole. We’ve laughed out loud at some point while reading every single chapter. 

All that said, we’re emailing today just to express a few concerns. The first is that we’re a little worried that in December, the final chapter will be published, and the cohesiveness and wholeness we were all hoping for might be, well, lacking. We’ve spent the last few days reviewing the story as it’s been written so far, and to be honest, there’s just not much of a story to speak of. The chapters are individually compelling, but there’s no real traceable connective tissue or logic between the chapters. Sure, sometimes a character will appear more than once, but often these appearances are more confusing than they are orienting, and the reader is left a little out to sea. 

I know the point of this experiment was for you two to not have a plan, to not communicate, but after much discussion, we’ve come to the conclusion that it would do the project a tragic disservice if, when it comes to an end, it has the feeling of an experiment that failed. We’re not recommending that you guys tie a neat little bow around the narrative—that would also do the project a disservice. There doesn’t need to be a linear plot. There doesn’t need to be a plot at all. What there needs to be, in our opinion, is some small payoff for those who have been following along, some kind of ending that makes the project feel justified and complete. 

Maybe the issue here is more philosophical than it is editorial. Do we owe the reader anything? Is it our obligation to reward them for their time or our prerogative to do so? Is the goal of this project to make something “good?” It seems that you two have been more focused on process than product, which is, in a way, exactly what you should have been doing—we never like writing that feels like a means to an end. But, that said, it’s our job to focus on product, our job to make sure the result of your guys’ process is something we’re all proud to have worked on. 

OK, so now, with the business out of the way, our second concern is of a more personal nature. Basically, we just wanted to check in about your respective mental states. While both of you are known for focusing on dark themes, sadness, and suffering, often writing about life and death with a kind of nihilistic flippancy, there has been kind of a lot of mention of suicide in several of the chapters. Suicide is a fascinating subject, totally fair game, and we wouldn’t be bringing it up at all if you hadn’t started referring to this project as a “groundbreaking innovation for the murder-suey industry.” That line caught our attention, had us worried that you two might, in fact, have had a plan for how this thing ends after all, just not the sort of plan we had in mind. 

If this novella has, in any way, become a negative force on your mental health, we would like to pull the plug immediately, and make sure you both have the psychological support you need. Frankly, the idea that this project may be even vaguely serving as a container for suicidal ideation or stoking depressive flames makes us sick to our stomach. Your wellness comes first; the work comes second. We mean it, and to be very clear, we’re not just covering our moral and legal asses in case you guys aren’t kidding about the “murder suey.” We care about you both and are legitimately concerned. 

So, in short, please tell us how you are. We would greatly appreciate it if both of you could write us back letting us know if you’re OK, and if you are, then we’d also appreciate it if you sent over a few ideas as to how we might end this project in a way that renders it a creatively fulfilling success. 

Looking forward to hearing from you. The Editors

For more from Gideon Jacobs, follow @GideonsByeBull on Instagram.

Chapter 7: An Outline of Chapters 1-6

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Over the course of 2020, Brad Phillips and Gideon Jacobs are writing a 12-chapter "serial novella" for Autre. It will be written Exquisite Corpse style — they will alternate who writes each month's chapter, and won’t have access to the previous chapter until it has been published. Brad and Gideon have not discussed plot, structure, format, themes, characters, etc, and promise not to do so even once the project is underway. The idea is to react to each other's work, and hope the final Frankensteinian product is something that deserves to exist. If the authors like what they've made when it's done, the editors might publish it as a "zine." Installments will go up on the 15th of every month. Click here to read Chapter 6: Imposter Syndrome.

text by Gideon Jacobs (and Brad Phillips)

Chapter 1 

I’ll write the first chapter, but please know that I am very wary of being someone who takes charge of group projects, someone who breaks the silence after the teacher asks for a volunteer to captain the science olympiad team with an earnest “I’ll do it,” or even worse, an “I’ll do it” of feigned reluctance. I was never that guy in school. No way I wanted to do that much work. But I also didn’t want to be associated with any projects that I considered poorly executed, so unless my “I’ll do it” volunteer was smart, I tended to give so little effort that I could not, in any scholastic court of law, be considered a bonafide collaborator.

I assume you weren’t and aren’t a group leader either. Maybe that has something to do with why we get along OK. But our similarity in this regard, our relative non-assertiveness in group dynamics, leaves us in danger of playing a game of beta-male chicken in which we both insist on deferring the alpha position to the other. So, to save us from such a fate, I’ll bite the bullet, feign reluctance, and get us started.

I think it would be good to begin with a handful of vignettes of pretty straight narrative prose that seems freighted with meaning and significance. It doesn’t matter much if it’s actually freighted with anything at all. I guess that makes “seems” the key word here. I suggest this mode of writing because, in my opinion, this is what everyone wants pretty much all the time, to like art and not be totally sure why they like it. To be clear, I don’t mean this as a negative quality in a reader. I see it more as having something to do with our desire to feel stuff rather than know stuff, to sense that there’s more rather than having the “more.” It makes sense. We are a species that, at its core, doesn’t trust itself, and so, a desire to keep reading that can’t be explained is much more likely to succeed than one that can.

With this in mind, why don’t I make all these vignettes in the first chapter about pairs of characters whose names start with the same letters as ours: “B” and “G.” This will likely have readers assuming that I’m trying to say something about us, or authorship in general, or trying to send you a coded message, or all the above. The whole exercise will be nauseatingly self-referential, but nausea is only painful when moderate. Once nausea gets to a certain level of acuteness, one usually purges and feels better—it hurts more to bend than to break. Let’s get our audience puking right away. 

Chapter 2

So, as you’ll be writing this chapter, feel free to do whatever you want and ignore this “outline” entirely if you so please. That said, I think this is where we really need to sell the exquisite corpse element of the project, to satisfy our readers' curiosity as to how this little experimental writing conceit of ours is going to work. It doesn’t have to be too complicated. Maybe it’s as simple as picking up a couple threads that I began in the first chapter and running in surprising directions with them. That’s the pleasure of the proper exquisite corpse game after all, to extrapolate incorrectly in ways that leave you with a Frankensteinian drawing in the end. Let’s give people the Frankenstein they want, the Frankenstein they deserve.

Also, maybe you should switch genres here. Like, if my first chapter is pretty straight literary fiction, you could take a hard left turn into Raymond Chandler territory, or even better, John Grisham land. Isn’t the book that you’re currently working on kind of a pseudo hardboiled novel? Or just vaguely pulpy? Am I misremembering? Either way, it seems that genre fiction is very hip right now, one of those things that is so inherently uncool that it’s cool now, so lowbrow, shameless, and unabashedly manipulative that the literati are beginning to fetishize it. I would be very pleased if you make chapter two something worthy of a lonely top shelf of the proverbial airport Hudson News.

Chapter 3

I’ve been wanting to write some sexy stuff, so maybe I’ll do that here. I’ll choose a character from chapter two and devise some scenario that gets them fucking and sucking. I really like writing about sex, not because I like sex more than the the average fucker and sucker but because, as discussed, I am easily distracted, easily bored, and sex seems to hold my attention. 

For example, writing this little outline was starting to turn into a bit of a chore (and I’m not even halfway done!). After I quickly wrote the first paragraph, I purchased some socks on the internet, drifted away from my desk and took a nap. When I woke from the nap, I didn’t feel like finishing this outline, so I ate a snack. When I finished the snack, I still didn’t feel like going back to the page. Then I had the idea that we could write some sexy scenes into our project, and I drifted back to my desk. It was that cause-and-effective.

 I’m not trying to say something hideously cliché about the allure and power of sex, not trying to make the kind of wink-and-elbow observation that bozo uncles of the world tend to back up by citing that ubiquitous yet totally nonexistent study that claimed men think about sex every seven seconds. But I am pointing out that sex, maybe better than anything in this world, can grab a wandering mind. That is, sex sells not because we’re all so goddamn horny, but because flesh is, in a way, always the shiniest surface in a room.

 Chapter 4

This is where I imagine you pull back the curtain and start writing about us writing this serial novella. Sure, even our most forgiving critics might cry that, right here, in chapter four, is where things got a little too “postmodern” or too “meta,” but frankly, there was no way we were going to avoid talking about ourselves in this project.

Why is that? Well, I think we’re both a little self-oriented. Apologies if you don’t like that label. I know it doesn’t sound very nice. I’m not calling us narcissists, though. I just think, knowing you a little and knowing myself a lot, that we both suffer from distinct psychological issues that share the similar symptom of having our respective outward gazes constantly turning inward.

I’ll stop speaking for you now, and just say that my periodic bouts of crippling depression are what have made my brain my most urgent interest, my most compelling project, my most relevant subject. I am very preoccupied with how I think and feel. I am obsessed with my own experience of the world, not because I think my experience is significant or important, but because my capacity for mental anguish is a product of my thoughts and feelings, and my mental anguish is, by far, the most weighty force in my life.

Actually, now I’m rethinking my previous claim about flesh being so “shiny.” Pain is shiny. Pain is loud. Sure, it’s hard to do long division while your penis is in someone’s mouth. It’s impossible when there’s a knife in your thigh.

I’ve never had a knife in my thigh. I’ve actually never had a broken bone, never even needed stitches. (When people are aghast at these facts, I usually respond that I’m simply very graceful.) The point is, we both suffer from diagnosed mental maladies, and these maladies make us a little self-obsessed. So, in short, let’s do what we do best, and write about ourselves.

Chapter 5

We’re both pretty into suicide, huh? Maybe in this chapter I’ll introduce the idea that this whole project is actually wrapped up in some plan for some kind of murder-suicide performance piece. Maybe I’ll also reveal that we’ve been cheating this whole time, that I attempted to a rough outline of the project. Maybe I’ll even hint that the outline will be included in chapter seven.

Chapter 6:

As you can probably tell, this outline has started to feel like a chore again. I’m tired. I’m bored. I want to go eat three bosc pears in under two minutes. 

Write about whatever you want in this chapter. We’ll figure it out.

For more from Gideon Jacobs, follow @GideonsByeBull on Instagram. Click here to read Chapter 6.

Chapter 5: Cheaters

chapter 5.jpg

Over the course of 2020, Brad Phillips and Gideon Jacobs are writing a 12-chapter "serial novella" for Autre. It will be written Exquisite Corpse style — they will alternate who writes each month's chapter, and won’t have access to the previous chapter until it has been published. Brad and Gideon have not discussed plot, structure, format, themes, characters, etc, and promise not to do so even once the project is underway. The idea is to react to each other's work, and hope the final Frankensteinian product is something that deserves to exist. If the authors like what they've made when it's done, the editors might publish it as a "zine." Installments will go up on the 15th of every month. Click here to read Chapter 4: A Eulogy For Brad & Gideon.

text by Gideon Jacobs (and Brad Phillips)

Dear Ms. Jacobs,

Below, see a transcription of one of many handwritten letters Gideon sent Brad in the days leading up to what the two writers were flippantly referring to as their “groundbreaking innovation for the murder-suey industry.” It seems they weren’t exactly following the rules of their exquisite-corpse serial novella, and were secretly corresponding behind their editors’ backs the whole time. I hope these words give you some insight into their mental states during this period, and that some insight affords you some solace. 

-Detective Leslie Morris

P.S. For the record, we’re still figuring out who did the murdering and who did the suey-ing. It’s…complicated. 

[Letter postmarked 01/01/20]

Bradley, 

I hate that I sometimes call you Bradley. It’s what Ellen Page’s character in that movie Juno would call her best friend if her best friend was named Brad. She’d pick up her hamburger phone, dial your number, and do a quirky dance while waiting for you to pick up. You’d pick up, and say, “Hello,” like a normal person, and she’d say, “Hello, this is Juno MacGuff’s assistant. May I please speak with Bradley Phillipino?” in a kind of faux formal voice. Then you’d have to decide whether to be a good sport and go along with the bit—“Hello, this is Bradley Phillipino’s assistant. Can you please put Ms. MacGuff on the line? Mr. Phillipino is a very busy man.”—or be a buzzkill. 

I could go on with this scenario, and maybe go on so long that I accidentally write a very bad sequel to the movie, which, in spite of its Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, is already very bad, but I’ll shut up about Juno now, mostly because I know that you know exactly what I am getting at and, therefore, know exactly how much I hate myself for sometimes calling you Bradley, Bradley. 

But Bradley, (how annoying is this?) the real reason I’m writing to you today is to talk about writing. (“Keep moving, nothing to see here, just a couple writers talking about their fucking CRAFT.”) In short, I don’t think I like it. That’s such a cliché, to hate writing, and if we’re gonna talk about that we might as well murder-suey now, before we even embark on our “exquisite corpse serial novella.” (Did you know George Eastman’s suicide note ended with the beautifully sincere question, “Why wait?) But I’m serious, Bradley. Cliché or not, I don’t like writing. Maybe it’s not that I don’t like writing—I definitely don’t though—but that I don’t like boring writing, and approximately 95% of all writing I encounter, both others and my own, bores me terribly. I start many books and finish few of them. I write every day but usually quit after an hour or so. 

I am especially bored by all descriptive language. My favorite conversation we’ve ever had about writing was about how neither of us really cares about description. We agreed that we don’t really give a shit what stuff looks like unless it’s directly relevant to the story. Do you remember that conversation? Did I dream it? Just in case I did dream it, I’ll reiterate that while it seems like all good writers spend a lot of time painting a picture, setting the visual scene, my eyes tend to speed read straight through those chunks. 

But I don’t know. Maybe we’re wrong. Maybe we’re weird. Maybe if we spent more time writing descriptively people would like our stuff more. Maybe I should start the “exquisite corpse serial novella” like this:

“I met Bradley on a very classically gross summer evening in New York City, the sort of night when the city stinks and everything is slightly muffled by the heat and humidity, as if the air’s moisture is rounding the edges of every sound, or maybe it’s not ‘as if’ that’s what’s happening but that’s what’s actually happening and I just don’t understand the physics of it. Bradley was tall and thin, so I guess that would mean lanky. But the word that comes to mind is sinewy, a build Jesus might have if Jesus had a pretty moderately used Crunch Gym membership. Bradley was also heavily tattooed and bearded, a look that, in artsy corners, allows him the flexibility to look like shit if he feels like looking like shit, or look good if he feels like looking good. I’m not sure how to explain that specific aesthetic phenomenon. I guess it is, in a way, also kind of Jesus-y, in that Jesus could easily blend in with the sick and poor, but, in a different context, could pass as the Son of God, the King of the Jews, The Light of the World.” 

Etc, etc, etc. OK, I’m not saying that the paragraph above is good. Please don’t judge it. I wrote it very quickly to prove a point, the point being that, if I ever throw that kind of paragraph into a story I’m working on, it is probably out of some perceived literary obligation to do so. Maybe what I’m really getting at is that, when it comes to art, I just don’t really care about details. This is partially why Knausgard’s books sound like my worst nightmare. From what I understand, that guy spends like 50 pages describing what’s in his fridge. I like that as a concept, but I don’t need to actually read those 50 pages, as the concept, his insane and meticulous commitment to mundanity, is the art. I’d get more out of listening to a smart person tell me about his book for ten minutes than spending a summer struggling through Knauzy’s big ol’ struggle. 

This actually reminds me of another conversation we once had about wall text at museums. Do you remember that conversation? I was interviewing you for that magazine. Or did I dream it again? Basically, we realized that although we are similar in some ways, we are very different in others, one of them being our policies around museum wall text. I read all wall text because I need an intellectual entrypoint in order to enjoy art, as thinking about it is half the fun. You don’t read wall text because you think it’s VISUAL art, and if you can’t LOOK at it and get something out of it, it’s probably very bad. Different strokes for different jokes.

Bradley, I think it’s time to cut to the chase of this letter. I can feel that we’re reaching that point, kind of like when you’re hanging out with someone and you realize you’re both ready to stop hanging out, or when you’re on a date and you realize it’s time to kiss. But we shouldn’t kiss, for the sake of our friendship, so I’ll cut to the chase instead: I am about to start writing the first chapter of our “exquisite corpse serial novella,” a phrase I continue to put quotes around because, although I came up with it, I hate it, and it’s good to mock what you hate, otherwise IT MOCKS YOU. 

What I’m wondering is if it behooves us to, well, cheat, to make some kind of masterful grand plan for this project, to outline a story that is very epic and very good, and then execute it in a way that appears to be totally spontaneous. This would, of course, require us to keep the writing raw and unpolished, to throw in lots of deadend plot lines, having characters weave in and out of seemingly unrelated realities. We’d have to make efforts to keep up the exquisite corpse ruse. 

Personally, I think this is the way to go. If you agree, my next letter will be a possible outline of the entire fucking thing. What do you think? If it it doesn’t work, if people start to realize that this improv show is, in fact, a well-reherased routine, who fucking cares. If the whole project is a dud, also who cares. We’re going to be sipping daiquiris with Yahweh and Lord Vishnu by the time the sticks and stones hit their targets. 

Happy New Year, -Gideon

For more from Gideon Jacobs, follow @GideonsByeBull on Instagram. Click here to read Chapter 6: Imposter Syndrome.

Chapter 3: Luridly Liminal / Liminally Lurid by Gideon Jacobs (and Brad Phillips)

Over the course of 2020, Brad Phillips and Gideon Jacobs are writing a 12-chapter "serial novella" for Autre. It will be written Exquisite Corpse style — they will alternate who writes each month's chapter, and won’t have access to the previous chapter until it has been published. Brad and Gideon have not discussed plot, structure, format, themes, characters, etc, and promise not to do so even once the project is underway. The idea is to react to each other's work, and hope the final Frankensteinian product is something that deserves to exist. If the authors like what they've made when it's done, the editors might publish it as a "zine." Installments will go up on the 15th of every month. Click here to read Chapter 2: Guillermo’s Funeral.

text by Gideon Jacobs (and Brad Phillips)

There are basically three ways to acquire a nickname. 

The first way requires patience. You have to just go about your business and wait for the pack member most likely to be a nicknamer—usually a jokester, a talker, someone inclined to build intimacy via power plays disguised as teasing—to come up with your nickname. For example, say you work in an office building and the lobby floors of your office building have just been mopped, and while running to catch an elevator, you slip but regain your balance, narrowly avoiding a banana-peel pratfall. When you enter the elevator, the nicknamer says something like, “Close call there, Slippy,” in front of a handful of your colleagues. They laugh. Now you’re Slippy. After this, you will gradually lose your office identity as John. Your colleagues will think it’s funny that most new hires don’t even know your real name. Every so often, you will be asked to explain the origin story of Slippy, and you’ll have to tell the origin story, or lie and say you don’t remember it.

The second way to acquire a nickname requires planning. It’s similar to the first way, except in this case, you have at least some chance of choosing your nickname. For example, if you would like to be called “Ham,” you can increase the chances of that happening by packing a ham sandwich for lunch every day, and when people ask what you’re eating, don’t reply, “A ham sandwich,” but instead just say, “Ham,” with a mouthful of half-chewed ham. This would still leave a lot up to chance, though. If you’re really set on a nickname, it’s best to manufacture some overlapping meanings. To increase the likelihood of acquiring a nickname like Ham, you could make a habit of telling funny, theatrical, and embellished stories, as this might prompt one of your colleagues to say, “John, you’re such a ham,” in front of the nicknamer, who then will probably put the pieces together—John is a ham who loves ham. After that, the nicknamer will do what he does best. 

The third way to acquire a nickname requires persistence. Most people think you can’t give yourself a nickname. The conventional wisdom is that nicknames only stick if they are arrived at organically and assigned by others, but the conventional wisdom doesn’t account for a pathological kind of obstinance and a socially inappropriate level of compulsiveness. That is, you can be sure to always introduce yourself as your nickname, and if anyone asks you what your real name is, you just matter-of-factly say your nickname again. And if anyone calls you by your real name, you kindly but firmly correct them. And if anyone calls you by your real name even after you’ve kindly but firmly corrected them, you make it clear there are repercussions for doing so, that physical violence is a strong possibility. Essentially, you just function like good totalitarian governments do, bludgeoning the old narrative out of existence with consistent and relentless messaging of a new narrative, and of course, literally bludgeoning anyone who won’t allow the old narrative to expire. 

This third way of acquiring a nickname is how I acquired the nickname Liminal Phil. I chose Liminal Phil because a few years ago I found out what the word liminal meant while using the internet in the computer room. According to Wikipedia, there are many complicated meanings of liminal, especially in anthropology, psychology, and religion. I really like all of these meanings, but I mostly like the more general concept of liminality when it refers to an in-between space. As far as I understand it, these sorts of spaces aren't really spaces at all because they have no definition, no spatial identity. They exist somewhere that doesn’t officially exist, in the theoretical split second when you have left one zone but have yet to enter the next one. This ontological—another word I recently learned in the computer room—paradox raises a lot of questions: Where are you when you’re neither here nor there? Do you disappear when in a liminal space? If so, where have you disappeared to? What realm are you in? 

It was when I first finished reading the Wikipedia page about liminality on some quiet weeknight a few years ago that I started believing in God a little bit. I hate believing in God. Believing in God is very dumb and very embarrassing. But that Wikipedia page got me thinking about how all the really wise people in history lived in liminal states. I hate to use Jesus as an example because using Jesus as an example is also very dumb and very embarassing, but the miracle of that guy was that he lived in between the earthly world and the divine one. He was simultaneously walking amongst us mortals and walking amongst the divine. He was, as they say, both man and God. 

So, in one of my more dramatic moments, I decided, right then and there, that I too was going to be both man and God, flesh and spirit, a two-passport-carrying dual-citizen of this world and the next. I didn’t want to join the clergy though. I like to fuck too much for that. So, I started meditating every morning, reading the bible every night, and began the process of acquiring the nickname, or maybe more appropriately, rebaptizing myself, Liminal Phil. My name is John though, but I knew that if I kept any remnants of my old identity the new one had no chance of sticking.  

Here’s another “intellectual” porn—this one rejected by Luridmax—for you to masturbate to or, depending on your sexual proclivities, just read and wonder, “What kind of person masturbates to this?”

Gary was interviewing a young man named Barack for a job as an accountant at his crumbling creative agency. This was an interview he would normally have conducted with his best friend/founding partner, but a few months ago, his best friend/founding partner was coked up enough during a morning meeting to believe that she could surreptitiously blow a bump of coke in a morning meeting. When Gary confronted her about the incident, she said, “I’ve just been under a lot of pressure lately,” an explanation so cliché and pathetic that Gary saw it as a greater transgression than the incident itself, so he offered to buy her out of the agency right then and there. They made a handshake deal, and now Gary was stuck interviewing Barack alone, while his best friend/founding partner spent her days meditating and surfing. 

Barack was just out of college, and had a lanky build, slumped shoulders, and a manipulatively soft, eager-to-please smile that made Gary certain that he was both hyper intelligent and sexually deviant. For the first few minutes of the interview, Gary did his best to euphemistically explain that the agency was in trouble, that their books were a mess, that he needed an accounting whiz for the price of a summer intern. Then, when he started to properly interview Barack, as in, ask questions for Barack to answer, he began to see flashes of the young man climbing underneath the desk and slowly licking his dick from base to tip, base to tip, base to tip. These flashes didn’t feel like fantasy, though. They sat in Gary’s mind’s eye in a different way. They were more vivid, less malleable, as if he had stumbled across them rather than authored them. Gary wondered if the visions of mid-interview felatio weren’t fantasy, but prophecy. 

Gary tried focusing, tried to come up with good questions—“What’s it like to share a name with the most popular president in recent memory?”—but the image of Barack’s tongue sliding down the length of his dick was simply too loud to be competed with. So, he just sat in front of Barack, folding and unfolding his resume, biting his lip and shifting in his chair. There was an inappropriately long silence. Barack was concerned and confused.

Then Barack saw it: wedged between the fabric of Gary’s pants and his left thigh was an above-average sized, objectively handsome-looking hard dick. Barack stared at Gary’s erection, and Gary stared at Barack staring at his erection. Gary held his breath, squirming, waiting for Barack to raise his gaze so he could exhale, but Barack kept his eyes trained on the dick, not just because he was enjoying looking at it, but because he enjoyed making the man squirm.

In these few seconds, the power dynamic of the room shifted so drastically, it was as if there had been a change in some basic law of physics. Barack, who was previously on the edge of his seat, trying to look attentive, now leaned back in his chair. Gary, a heavy man who took up a lot of space, now seemed blimpish, still taking up a lot of space, but possibly vulnerable to a stiff wind. Any nerves Barack had felt going into the interview were gone. He felt utterly in control. He could take a shit on the floor and the job might still be his. 

But Barack didn’t really want the job. It would clearly be six horrible months of overwork and underpay. So, still staring at the dick, thinking he might be able to see it visibly pulse if he looked closely enough, he began to do a few simple calculations in his head: What was the probability that someone would walk into this room in the next ten minutes? Maybe 20%. What was the probability that this balding, middle-aged man would accept a blow job from him right now? Maybe 50%. What was the probability that he would regret giving this man a blowjob right now? Maybe 80%. What was the probability that, regardless of the results of all these calculations, he was going to climb under this desk and begin licking this man’s dick, base to tip, base to tip, base to tip? Maybe 100%.

For more from Gideon Jacobs, follow @GideonsByeBull on Instagram. Click here to read Chapter 4: A Eulogy For Brad & Gideon.

Chapter 2: Guillermo's Funeral By Brad Phillips (and Gideon Jacobs)

Over the course of 2020, Brad Phillips and Gideon Jacobs are writing a 12-chapter "serial novella" for Autre. It will be written Exquisite Corpse style — they will alternate who writes each month's chapter, and won’t have access to the previous chapter until it has been published. Brad and Gideon have not discussed plot, structure, format, themes, characters, etc, and promise not to do so even once the project is underway. The idea is to react to each other's work, and hope the final Frankensteinian product is something that deserves to exist. If the authors like what they've made when it's done, the editors might publish it as a "zine." Installments will go up on the 15th of every month. Click here to read Chapter 1: G and B.

text by Brad Phillips (and Gideon Jacobs)

It could reasonably be posited that Bernardo’s statement at Guillermo’s funeral; “It’s true, there was no suicide....has anyone seen a body?” was in fact a true statement.

This is why Guillermo, as is the case with many people who like keeping their families on their toes, had made it clear in his Last will & testament that he would not abide an open-casket funeral. Just those seven words alone — ‘would not abide an open-casket funeral’ — implies that the putative dead person could object in the middle of the ceremony, raising themselves by sheer force of ab muscles, to demand that their casket be shut. Obviously, to be able to shout out from your casket that you’d prefer the lid closed would indicate that death had not entirely ‘taken.’ Open-casket funerals, whether by choice of the dead or their families, are ideal for those who’ve bought into the notion of that one, most problematic idea of the late, Oprah-influenced 20th century: the idea of closure. 

Closure in relation to a casket is linguistically accurate. Closure in relation to the dead is psychologically silly. 

Consider the expression often heard at funerals: “The dead live on in our memories; in our minds.” How truly frightening is this idea, and how much terror must it strike into the minds of grandchildren, now wary to experiment with masturbation should dead Uncle Dwayne or Aunt Cathy be watching from that place where they now reside; the mind of a horny child? 

Guillermo had only ever given two pieces of advice to his two sons in their times spent in the dynamic. Bernardo had always thought his dad was ‘joking around.’

1. If you must drive drunk, eat a large spoonful of peanut butter before getting in the car, as this complicates the standard breathalyzer test.

2. If you cannot beat the breathalyzer test (or for any other reason are in the company of police officers) and are subject to a lie detector test, do not despair, you can beat that as well. It’s as simple as this: no matter what the question (the one you’re meant to be honest about—your name. The one you’re meant to lie about—did you mutilate the corpse), once that query is nearing its end and your answer is meant to begin, clench your asshole like you’re trying not to shit your pants on prom night. When we focus all of our attention on that one, tight sphincter muscle (the one most associated with shame and to some extent, relaxation and satisfaction), all systems regulate to assist in maintaining its closed status. You may appear to be sweating, you may have an elevated heart rate—you may show any of the signs that interest an expert polygraphist. Unless they’ve been trained by the Central Intelligence Agency, they will not be able to differentiate between the markers exhibited by liars, and the markers of someone who just happens to have high blood pressure and hyperhidrosis. “What is key,” he told his sons, “and this part is fucking important, is that no matter what, don’t think about the lie you’re keeping, don’t think about the fact that if you blow it you might end up doing a nickel in Ossining. You need to believe, as you’re strapped to that machine, that you are in fact on the verge of shitting yourself. And you need to remember that, like any reasonable individual, be they a murderer or a cashier at Homesense, nobody, nobody, wants to shit their pants in mixed company. You are only one thing while seated in that chair, wires hooked up to god knows where. You are a man with an intense, overwhelming need to eliminate his bowels in an environment where it would be extremely embarrassing to do so.”

I’d been writing this sort of ‘intellectual’ porn (which really, I can’t imagine working for anyone); stories about people like Gordon and Ben, massive insertions, strange insertions, illegal insertions, pay-to-play, hotel takeovers, huge wads on hairy backs (for which I received a small bit of payola from Semenax) for years. I can’t say I particularly enjoyed it. It started when I was in prison, because I was really unhappy with the way I was being sexually assaulted, and found that, similar to prison lawyers or elegantly literate men who could write love letters to women consigned to wait at home for their lovers to be released, I had a talent; a talent that would and did forestall a prolapsed rectum courtesy of Hank, Timmy, Big Timmy, Chinese Dwight, The Accountant, Liminal Phil, and Butch 3. 

The series on Gordon and Ben, I actually had smuggled out by a friend and it ended up being published by Luridmax, an obscure French erotica publisher who focused mostly on golden shower and macrophilia narratives.

They are now out of business.

My brother Bernardo was right when he spoke of our father’s mercurial nature, the fact that he may have faked his own death—this was not out of the realm of possibility for Guillermo, but nonetheless, I am now the only living person who can both attest to the fixity of his death, as well as the manner of its deliverance. 

Dad had easily convinced Bernardo that he was an ‘academic’ working on a thesis. There are two reasons this was done so easily. One is that my brother is a dipshit, an asshat and a moron. The other is that Bernardo could not and never was able to accept the the truth of what our father was: a criminal. He didn’t play violent video games as research for a thesis, he played them because he was a violent man who liked to play violent games.

I inherited this from my father, which is why I was the sole beneficiary of his will, the same will Bernardo and my sister are still battling over in a probate court somewhere, while I live off the full inheritance in Tenerife. My father taught me much more than my brother or sister about how to live in this world (I’m sure Bernardo has used the peanut butter and lie detector test advice dad gave us to amuse people at obnoxious academic parties for years). My dad taught me how to break the law and not get caught. Here are some things I was told, having become the favorite child early on when dad caught me stuffing a Snickers in my diaper at sixteen months:

1. Your best friends are leather gloves.

2. Three things to eliminate in a jam: teeth, hands and feet. DNA is popular, but it takes a while. Head in one bag, torso in another, arms and legs in a third, hands and teeth down a sewer grate. Dump the bag head in a residential garbage can thirty miles from where you dump the torso bag, and thirty miles from where you dump the arms and legs. Ideally, dump each bag in a different state. This causes the police to engage in typical jurisdictional squabbling and creates legitimate technical problems, which can give you an astonishing head start.

3. When choosing a new identity from the grave of a dead toddler in a cemetery, pick a common name. John Smith, Alan Phillips etc. Whatever you do, do NOT pick an antiquated sounding name — no Forbes Pennyworth DeQuincy, those sort of names draw attention no matter what.

4. Whenever possible, marry the new wife in international waters. She’ll think it’s romantic, what she won’t know is that it’s not legally binding. That way, should your bigamy ever come to light, you won’t be charged. You’ll just look like an asshole.

5. Always look like an asshole.

I loved my father Guillermo DeTorquido San Felipe (né George Lazard). One thing I loved more than George though, was and is money. I was taught about this love by my father, so I know that in the end, while he might not have been ready to die, he would have respected my move. This is what’s most important to me. That while I’m certain he would have preferred to keep living, I put an end to it in a way I know he’d genuinely respect.

Bernardo with his PhD in Ancient Music. Sophia with her moronic dentist husband Lyell who’d say sorry if you hit his car. Spineless, weak people. Not me. Never me. 

“You may be a piece of shit, Carlo. You may be a shiftless predatory fuck, but you’re my son, and for fuck sake, you make me a helluva lot more proud than your brother and sister, living their lives inside the lines. Honestly if I didn’t have warrants out at the time, I would’ve stuck em’ both in a sleeping bag full of rocks and thrown them in the river.”

Words like these from a parent, they feel real good.

It happened like this.

My dad had just finished a three-year bit. Bernardo and Sophia thought he’d been living in Tucson, running a ‘workshop’ on some type of bullshit.

I was looking at eleven more months of a six-year sentence for felony battery. Dad had been the only one who visited me (or the only one I allowed to visit) during that time. It was on one of his last visits that he told me he’d cut my siblings out of the will, because, as he put it rather succinctly, “Fuck em.”

By the time I made it back to my cell, I had the entire thing planned perfectly. I almost wanted to call my dad and tell him, but….

My cellmate, John Allan Richards, had terminal lung cancer, was facing compassionate early release after serving almost twenty years for bank robbery. We’d developed a good, quasi-paternal relationship over our time together. Once I learned about the will, I told John that, since he’d be getting out, and since he wouldn’t have much time left out there, I had a story to tell him. I wasn’t asking per se, but I knew that since his doctors had told him he should already be dead, that old-fashioned prison ethics would steer him in the direction I needed.

Look John, I never wanted to bring it up — it’s too hard, this sort of language. I told him how my father Guillermo had molested my sister Sophia from when she was five to thirteen. John had three daughters. It would strike him where I needed him struck. “Jesus fucking Christ, Carl. This is no good. No, this is just no good. And he’s out there still?”

I told him he was.

“I sort of suspected John,” I told him. “Sophia was always sick, always sad, had no friends, acted too clingy when I brought male friends home. I knew my dad, I knew he was a sick fuck, there wasn’t anything I’d put past him. But it wasn’t until I was sixteen, going through his VHS collection looking for porn that I found the tape. It was the only one with a handwritten label.”

“What’d it say?” he asked, looking already like he wanted to reach through the prison, send his arm through the streets of Philadelphia and rip my dad’s throat out.

“It said ‘Little Blondes’...”

“For fuck sake!” he cut me off.

“I know, I know. I put the tape in. Well, there she was John, Sophia. I turned it off right away. I knew there’d be other blondes. I mean, fuck sake, she was mostly a redhead.”

“Alright, Carl. I want to help you with this. Cause this…I can’t abide this.”

It’s not just a myth of film and television that pedophiles are considered to be subhuman scum in prison. Just as in the real world, they’re seen as such. Everything came into motion so easily. He actually coaxed the information out of me, which was beautiful. I told him where my father lived and where my father drank, because I knew those things. He was still sending me letters, often just written on coasters from the bar. John’s date was coming up soon. The cancer had spread to his brain, he was starting to forget things and would wake up with subdural hematomas that looked like mandarin oranges. I think I’m making my point.

Carl was released on June 15th, 2009. We had a party for him, Vino brought an empty Tide container of his best pruno. At the end, when he was leaving the cell, Carl took my head in his hands and looked me in the eyes.

“I got this, John. Fuck this bullshit. I can’t abide it. I just cannot abide it. Plus, it’s likely bullshit, but maybe if I can do one good thing in this life, make some stab at redemption or whatever, God might not shit on me so heavily.”

I told Carl I loved him. I did love him. Then I slipped him the piece of paper with my father’s address on it.

July 3rd, it was in the news, which is how I heard about it first. It took Bernardo a few days to call and tell me, probably ‘cause he was playing the ocarina or some bullshit at a recital in Sonoma or Marfa.

Guillermo DeTorquido San Felipe, aged 69, was leaving the bar he drank at regularly to walk to his home three blocks away. In the neighborhood, most people avoided San Felipe. They heard he’d done some shit, and he never smiled. But, if you had a flat, he was gonna fix it for you. As he approached his home, John Allan Richards, notorious for a bank robbing spree that stretched from Abilene to Austin and released from prison weeks before on compassionate grounds, approached San Felipe in the middle of the street, brandishing a handgun and visibly limping. He was heard to shout, “Hey, short eyes!” immediately before pressing his revolver against San Felipe’s head and pulling the trigger. San Felipe died instantly. Richards did not run or hide his gun. Instead he sat on the curb next to the body. When the police came he was taken to central booking. There was no clear motive for the slaying, and police were perplexed as to why a man who’d just been released after serving two decades in the penitentiary would execute what appeared to be a stranger, resulting in his return to the penitentiary.

For three days, police questioned Richards. They pressed for his motives, enquired as to his relationship to the victim—these sort of police questions. Richards would only say one thing: “He had it coming.” Police were at a loss to understand. San Felipe had served his time in prison, mostly for wire fraud or the occasional aggravated assault. There was nothing that would explain a revenge-motivated execution in the middle of the street.

On his fourth day of interrogation, Richards asked Detective Leslie Morris to get him a Sprite. He said his mouth was dry from “talking to you fucking goofs for so long.” 

When Detective Morris returned to interview room eight, Richards lay slumped on the floor, dead. An autopsy later revealed him to be stuffed with tumors, and his personal physician later stated his surprise that Richards was still living.

The will went through probate quickly. I received very little in terms of liquid assets or investment products. I did, however, inherit an antique briefcase. Inside this briefcase was a small card — “It’s a boy!” The envelope held the key to a storage space. The day before the funeral, I rented a car and drove for an hour. Behind a bunch of lamps and stolen dishwashers I found a suitcase containing one and a half million dollars in small bills.

Once my lawyer informed Bernardo and Sophia’s lawyers that the will was incontestable, Sophia apparently expressed surprise that I was alive. I hadn’t seen them for over fifteen years.

At the internment, I stood mixed in with a group of mourners at a nearby funeral while Guillermo’s was happening. I watched Bernardo deliver his ‘clever’ speech, and Sophia her saccharine one. Once everyone was gone, I left a bouquet of tulips and a bottle of Wild Turkey on dad’s grave. I didn’t want anyone to see me. I’m sure nobody wanted to see me either.

Before I left for Tenerife, I paid for John Allan Richards’ tombstone. He had no family, and no money, and would’ve been buried in a potter’s field. He’d done me a great service, and really, John had never done anything worse than rob a bank. A thing that, really, all of us are entitled to try.

For more from Brad Phillips, follow  @brad___phillips on Instagram. Click here to read Chapter 3: Luridly Liminal / Liminally Lurid.