Chapter 5: Cheaters

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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 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 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.

Read Artist Brad Phillips' Suicide Note

Tomorrow, Freddy Gallery in Baltimore will open "Problem Is You," a group exhibition featuring three artists: Aaron Carpenter, Philip Hinge, and the very much alive (but maybe not well) Brad Phillips. Instead of a traditional statement about the exhibition and the artists, the gallery offers a morbid, but brilliant, suicide note penned by Phillips, which probably sums up the exhibition more than any standard press release could. If you don't follow Phillips on Instagram, you should - it is an extenuation of the artist's unique practice that ranges from delicate near-photorealistic paintings to text based play-on-words to prose - his book Suicidal Realism is out now on the Swimmer's Group imprint. In the following suicide note, Brad Phillips offers his disdain for the mechanics of the art world and he narrates a spiritual journey of selfhood and artisthood in the midst of self doubt, depression and addition. 

Suicide Note 2015

by BRAD PHILLIPS

It’s that time again. Because it could be that time again. And this always needs revising. Things change; new people have betrayed me, I love new people, I’ve betrayed new people. But a suicide note should  traditionally always be about self hatred or aloof disenchantment with the experience of living.. Those people that write bitter blameful suicide notes don’t deserve the back-flip out of existence that suicide so beautifully offers us all.

In this iteration, I could for example, send out a fuck you to my ex wife in Vancouver Pat Cowan who never visited me in rehab and then kept the few objects that were precious to me ransom for three years hoping that one day I would twist myself into a gargoyle of apology that suited her own permanently scorned, emotionally static childlike blamelessness. But that’s not my style.

Love and money. In the last year I came to know a love I did not know existed. Unconditional. What you hear about in Helen Hunt movies. I met a woman, Lazara, who accepted me for who I was, who did not wish to change anything about me, and who let me be myself, which is not always a pleasant thing to endure. I have spent my life pretending I could change for people. I cannot change. Now the experience of being accepted as I truly am has opened up the world to me in a way I didn’t imagine possible. It’s truly beautiful. But that doesn’t mean I can continue to endure the world that she helped me expand. My being allowed to be myself is in some ways truly frightening. I always resented being asked to change this or that, but I also assumed those requests were fair, because I saw myself as a monstrous burden to those who loved me. That this woman, like some precious angel, is able to carry that weight – this in itself could be contorted, in the right mental state, as a new and different reason to end my life, because how could I let someone so brave and so kind endure so very much? Because I am far too much. I can barely lift my head, how she can carry all of me is unthinkable. I love this woman so much that it would just be another example of my own selfishness to let her take the blows my personality and instincts unknowingly reign down on her psyche, even if she is, of now, unaware of the assault.

2007 I had a solo show at Liste in Basel with a gallery in Switzerland I was working with. At the time I was with my aforementioned ex wife. I had had a very depressing year. Like the one before, like the one after, like this one, like the year of my birth. Being not that bright, I worked very hard on making the best paintings I could, and assumed that if this show went well, then the sun would shine down on me and my problems would be vanquished. Because I was naive then, at 33 I was painfully naive still. Hours before the fair even opened, my dealers told me that the esteemed Hauser and Wirth Gallery had bought my entire show. While other dealers were putting nails in the wall, my dealers put their feet on the desk. They called me ex wife and I into the booth and told me the news. I made something like seventy thousand Euros in fifteen minutes for a year’s worth of work. My ex wife beamed, my dealers beamed. I stood there like a man who had just been hung but the rope broke. I had no words. I went  to the lounge and ordered a drink, my wife followed me, we went downstairs, and I buried my face in her breast and wept like an insane person. Because nothing had changed. I felt no better. I felt no accomplishment. I felt no pride or relief. What I felt was a terrifying sameness. And in that moment, I realized that art was not the thing that would fill the hole in me. And money was not it either. All the money did was give me more money to fill my body with drugs and alcohol. Which I did promptly, for three years and change, having shows here and there where my work suffered, until I ended up living with a psychopath and a single father, drinking every waking hour and wandering skid row puking on my shoes and scoring dope.

In 2012 I went to rehab. I was 38. I was naive at 38 in that I thought if I stopped being a drug addict and an alcoholic, I would feel better. I spent three months there and nine in a halfway house and moved back to Toronto to be near my family. It was a slow motion re-enactment of my sold out show five years before. I took the drugs and the alcohol away, and I felt no better. I just experienced the reality of my mind soberly. I had a minor nervous breakdown. What lives in me is a hole. I have spent my life trying to fill it. I don’t know if I was born with this hole inside of me, or if it was carved or shot or eaten out by experience. But what I do know is that I’ve tried to fill it with everything imaginable. Sex shoplifting art women booze heroin marijuana television reading writing meditating basketball Percocet Jim Beam Ativan Budweiser Philip Roth BDSM. But the hole is insatiable. What it wants to be filled with is the end of me. I am emotionally self anthropophagous. I eat away at myself until there is nothing left. And I’ve done such a good job of it, that now, at 41, crawling into bed feels like crawling into a foxhole, getting into the shower feels like moving a piano, and I’ve eaten away at the energy I need to continue.

Young people have faith in art. Some of them think it can make them money. It has become professionalized. Some of them will make money. I was one. But faith in something that the world doesn’t need is a dangerous thing to stake your life on. I have been known primarily for making paintings. For this last show in Baltimore there are no paintings. Because my paintings aren’t mine anymore, I make ‘Brad Phillipsy’ paintings. I make paintings that look like what I make, like what people have come to expect from me. I’ve started to making paintings the way people in pornography have sex. It looks real to the viewer, but there’s no sincerity in the movement. Scenes stop and start again. Dicks go limp, people cry, lights burn out. And that is where I’ve ended up. A burned out starlet from a small town with dreams of moving from the adult film world to television then to movies, living in a trailer behind a car dealership in San Luis Obispo.

If I die before he does, Aaron Carpenter is to execute my wishes. Which are few. Give it all away to the dwindling number of people I haven’t isolated. Apologize to everyone. Cut my arms and legs off and leave me in the forest.

Life is beautiful and this is true. But the greatest beauty in being alive is that we can stop the whole show in an instant if we choose to, and I’d rather exit now with some sense of empowerment than dwindle and shrink further into myself until my spine and my belly button kiss each other and I writhe on the ground like a sun bleached salamander.

I love everyone that ever touched me.

Brad Phillips, May 15, 2015

"Problem Is You," featuring Aaron Carpenter, Philip Hinge, and Brad Phillips will be on view from June 13 to July 11th, 2015 at Freddy Gallery, 510 W. Franklin Street. Click here to read our interview with Brad Phillips. Text by Brad Phillips. 

[NON FICTION] A Stab at Suicide—I’ve Always Got a Joker in my Deck

A Stab At Suicide—I've Always Got a Joker In My Deck

by Max Barrie

 

I’m not a danger to myself… but what if living is unnecessary? 

         Frankly, unless death resembles LAX, I’m a supporter.  I DO worry about unnecessary suffering.  But we live in such a toxic environment, how can poison possibly be avoided?  On a planet where no one is safe, where no day is free, and enemies are at arms length.  The food is processed, the air is polluted, the water contaminated.

         I was born in August of ’82.  It was at Cedars-Sinai and I came out SCREAMING!  My theory is— as soon as the cold air hit me, I realized I had been evicted and hadn’t had time to get dressed.  My unsolicited birth would soon become a metaphor for my FANCY FUCKED life— with which I was rarely impressed.  And while breathing came highly recommended and everybody was doing it, I eventually concluded that a lot like college— life wasn’t for everybody.

         A bipolar comedian that I worked for in 2006 said to me— “Max, I’ve always got a joker in my deck.”  He attributed the quote to Hunter S. Thompson.  What the expression meant was— I can exit the game at any time by offing myself.  The saying made sense to me, so I had it tattooed on my left arm… which is now covered up by a scorpion.  In 2009 I awoke to an early morning phone call from the comedian’s Uncle.  He was sobbing and told me that my funny former employer, who’s career had stalled, was found hanging from a tree in a wooded area.  I didn’t really know what to say or how to feel… I hung up uncomfortably numb and thought of a joker— a devilish little clown with a shit-eating grin.  This was not my first experience with premature death, but it was the first time I knew someone who had intentionally cut things short.  It would not be the last.

         I never had access to a rocket, but my plan to leave earth had always been brewing.  I obsessed over death as a child and ultimately in my late 20’s I would make half a dozen BOOZE-FUELED trips to The Cold Spring Bridge out in Santa Ynez.  This was before the suicide barriers were installed.  I had read that out of all the jumps off Cold Spring no one had survived.  I would drive nearly two hours… from LA, down the 101 into Santa Barbara… then up into the mountains along Route 154.  Honestly it’s a miracle that I didn’t crash, kill anyone, or get arrested during any of these grisly expeditions.  I drove into the elevated darkness with one purpose each time… but once I arrived at the bridge I could never get out of my car.  Truth is I was petrified.

         By 2014 I BELIEVED my torture had at last outweighed my terror.  I was again fresh out of sober living, now WORKING in drug treatment, and soon back on anything 80 proof with coke… and I don’t mean Classic.  It didn’t take long for me to crumble… it never does once you add venom.  After a couple weeks the word was out.  My roommate wanted me gone, my family wouldn’t have me around, and I was back to lying and stealing.  How many times could I keep dancing this jig?  My feet were tired.  What now, another treatment facility?  Additional counseling?  More mindless prayer with nudniks… fuck that shit.  I thought— why not just quit while I’m behind?

         So I “tried” to kill myself.  And maybe I actually succeeded… maybe I’m dead right now and not really writing this?  Wouldn’t surprise me if Beetlejuice walked in and asked to borrow some Scotch Tape.  Anyway, when I awoke on April 9th of last year I snatched a bottle of vodka, stole a bottle of muscle relaxers, and gassed up my hybrid with a roll and a half of quarters.  Then I drove to a place where lots of people go when they’ve given up all hope— The Valley.

         I maneuvered my way down into Chatsworth, shut off my iPhone and parked my car in a low-key area.  My windows were tinted.  I climbed into the back seat and began drinking and popping pills…

Lights dim… 100…99…98…and frog thoughts… 

         Next thing I know I hear my roommate’s voice far off in the darkness: “Hey, where are ya buddy?”  Then we’re abruptly both in his car driving fast on the freeway— a lit cigarette falls out of my mouth and burns a hole in my jeans… suddenly I’m in some emergency waiting room… my Dad enters and I have trouble walking… a nurse helps me, then comes the charcoal.

         I don’t know how much vodka I drank and I’m not sure how many pills I took… but clearly it wasn’t enough to carry out my exit strategy.  I’m convinced today that had I really wanted to die I would have swallowed every pill in that bottle and never turned my iPhone back on.  Yup.  At some point I don’t remember, I turned on my iPhone, answered it and explained to my roommate where I was.

         My roommate was an 80’s James Spader asshole type, but I loved him in some bizarre non-homosexual us against the world way.  After all this happened he stopped talking to me… and now it’s like he was never really there to begin with.

***

         Many say life is bittersweet, and I can’t really argue with them.  But from my perspective if someone barfs on my Bay Cities sandwich, I don’t ponder the unsullied tomato on the end.  My lunch has been FUCKED and now I have to get back in line or walk over to Swingers— the most annoying restaurant in the history of food.  That’s my take on life.  If you talk to me about balance, I’ll tell you to shampoo my lunchbox.  The bad stuff contaminates everything else and I’d like to speak to God’s supervisor, Mr. Davidson.  On many occasions I see people trudging through everlasting slime… and I get why they want out and I believe it’s their right.  Whether the problem’s terminal cancer or stale popcorn, who says you have to stick around?  Life’s a gift, this bodysuit is mine, and that is fucking that.

"Mummies and dummies continue to fuck like there’s a pussy shortage and then reproduce like rats.  There’s too many of us, there’s not enough resources, and global warming’s gonna melt all the ice by 2040.  Death may actually be a much needed vacation."

         Mummies and dummies continue to fuck like there’s a pussy shortage and then reproduce like rats.  There’s too many of us, there’s not enough resources, and global warming’s gonna melt all the ice by 2040.  Death may actually be a much needed vacation.  I think most of us just have contempt prior to investigation.  I’ll tell you what’s worse than death… yesterday I was in an Uber carpool with two Asian girls who couldn’t stop saying “LIKE…” gangsta rap was on the radio, and the driver only took streets where the magnified sun seared my skin off.

         That said, and even though I happen to be pro-choice long after birth, I do have soul.  It may be a warped black pretzel, but it’s still edible.

         Here’s the BIG PROBLEM with killing yourself, unless you’re Kris Jenner.  Kidding.  But honestly, a stewardess who gobbled cocks in Calabasas and then sold her children for shekels?!  We’re so gullible.  The PROBLEM is when you take your own life, you’re also destroying other lives.  And that will never be ok in my estimation.  When I was drunk and high I used to wanna believe it was nobody’s problem but mine.  But I often got behind the wheel… and I said regrettable things… and I didn’t show up for work… and I once pissed in someone’s dryer until it wasn’t a dryer anymore.  When I was under the influence it quickly became everybody’s problem.

         We often feel that we’re separate or different just in general, but it’s amplified when we’re depressed or ready to check out.  Fortunately or unfortunately we’re not independent.  Everyone’s a part of something more than their own ass.  People are connected, lives are tied in with other lives.  You’re a link… and it’s not polite to break the chain for selfish reasons. 

         That comedian who hung himself had a wife and three small boys at home.  He had a sobbing Uncle who called me… he had other family and friends and people he worked with… he permanently and negatively affected other lives.  We could even go a step further and discuss the ripple effect of that.  It’s kind of like barfing on that Bay Cities sandwich.

I’ll end with this…  

         I never thought I gave a shit until I met Adam in treatment last year.  We shared a room for thirty days and I fuckin’ hated him immediately.  He walked loud, he talked loud, he left his shit everywhere.  He was a spoiled cunt muscle who regularly begged me to write a screenplay with him, only he had no story.  Adam had migrated from bumblefuck to Beverly Hills after college and basically struck gold… but then he lost everything… even his trophy wife.  All day long this putz would talk about every cent he made and squandered, and in group he would explore his new life with, and I quote— “mediocre women.”  He actually said this.

         I complained to him and about him, I shit—talked him, I ignored him.  In my eyes he was a spoiled child who’d run out of DoubleStuf Oreos— Mr. Veruca Salt.  But sometimes he sat with me in front of the TV and talked about killing himself… and I still didn’t buy it.  He just wanted sympathy, so once I said— “Ya know Adam, some people have to leave the party early.”

         He checked out on a Friday after his thirty days were up, while I stayed on for an additional month.  I remember he hugged me by the front door in the morning and grabbed his bags.  He got in the backseat of a small Honda, but he had that Lincoln Town Car look in his eyes.  I never saw him again.

         Adam texted me the next day saying he was out with friends, but still complained about his horrible life.  I think I told him to “hang in there” or some bullshit… then deleted the text.  Then on Sunday Adam went to a shooting range, coincidently in The Valley… and he blew his head off.

         When word got back, everyone in the treatment facility was visibly shaken.  The patients, the doctors, the staff.  I even saw some tears.  I didn’t feel anything at first, but I did think about Adam’s parents back in the small town where he came from… as he was an only child.  And while I wish I had been more compassionate and less judgmental during his life, I don’t take any responsibility for his death.  Shit… maybe a little.

            That first night after he died— when I got into bed and the lights went out, I was instantly flooded and overwhelmed with memories of Adam… one of him eating chocolate cake in the living room with his hands… he said to me: “This is the stuff that makes life worth living.”  Then I thought of that joker— a devilish little clown with a shit-eating grin… and then a voice in my head told me I needed to live.  These days I’m not so sure anymore.

Max Barrie is a writer and artist currently based in Los Angeles. The son of screenwriters, Michael Barrie and Sally Robinson, Max was born and raised in Beverly Hills, California. With acerbic wit and self deprecating humor, Max documents his life growing up in the shallow, superficial depths of Beverly Hills and the Hollywood machine. In his multiple part autobiographical series, entitled A Trendy Tragedy, Max will explore his bouts with addiction, prostitution and his search for identity in a landscape that is rife with temptation and false ideals. 

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