I really do feel I have been on the side of the angels.
—Hugh Hefner, 1994

1. At the Club

Frank and I go dancing at a hideous straight club. We stand in the smoking area and talk about the spaghetti feeling, which Frank calls the string cheese feeling. Our voices keep rising.

I’ve only met one other person who knows what this is, Frank shouts. We’re breathless. I call it the sandbag feeling.

I first encountered the spaghetti feeling as a child, laid up in bed with a fever. It was a full-body sensation concerning, somehow, width. It started with a sound, of distant, thinned-out voices, like I was at the bottom of a canyon and people were shouting from either side of the void. Then the air became dense, like I could sink my teeth into it. Empty space felt like noodles coiled on a fork. There was a springiness to things, and under that, a wet density. Now that I think of it, cocks feel this way—spongy, yet solid.

Mommy, I tried to shout, but my voice came out weak. I felt my body yawn open, like a hole in a stocking, and then something was filling it—an ethereal wad, the wet, warm spaghetti. I hallucinated biting into a bundle of rubber-coated electrical wires, red and green and black and blue. As an adult I would picture chomping down on the bundles of kindling known historically as faggots.

I would encounter this feeling every now and again for the next twenty-odd years. I would feel it when ill, or on the verge of a faint, or on a crowded dancefloor, or, later, when high or after being fucked silly. It usually hits when I’m dehydrated. But sometimes the feeling will visit for no reason, when I’m sitting in the park, pretending to read. When this happens, I put down my book and close my eyes. I give in to the feeling like you’d give in to a hug. It’s familiar, like a song your mom used to play in the car or the memory of touch before you learned how.

• • •

2. At Church

When I was 24, I started a project: visit a new church every Sunday. Walking through San Francisco I’d found myself attracted to church signs, how artfully their proclamations—HE IS AMONG US! PERPETUAL ADORATION! 125 YEARS OF BEAUTY—blended into the cityscape. I didn’t know much about Christians, but I was drawn to this flair, these unironic poetics, like when we sang “O Holy Night” in grade-school choir. Fall on your knees! O hear the angel’s voices! 

My wife Maria Silk, raised Catholic, supported my project, but my mom had reservations. Watch out for Evangelicals, she said, yanking eight dogs behind her on a trail in Marin. And also Scientologists. Maybe you should stick to synagogues. She knew I was an easy sell. Picture me on the church-steps, drinking a Styrofoam cup of free coffee: barely employed, desperate for structure, on the prowl for new painkillers, be they herbal or ecclesiastical. I was submissive, lost, a bit impulsive—the perfect target for Christ and his magic tricks. When Maria and I lived in Big Sur, one of the only CDs in our car was Jesus Christ Superstar. We must have played it, start to finish, a thousand times in one summer. It was easy to picture God’s son as a charismatic cross-dresser, someone I might crush on or at least want to impress. “I Don’t Know How to Love Him,” sung by Mary Magdalen, always made us weep.

I promised my mom I’d stay vigilant. I was a neutral visitor in the house of God. I said I didn’t have something I was trying to gain, which was true, though I didn’t stop to wonder about what I might lose. I’ll do anything for a good story! a younger, dumber me once boasted, as if my lifework was the accrual of punchlines. There’s a bar by my house called Would You Believe?? Cocktails, a dank one-room dive with a throbbing sign outside. I picture this sign over my head, the two question marks flashing as I gather data, tragedies, and jokes.

For as much as I like to feel full, feeling emptied is better. In the following months I would drop all the stories, the theory and style, at the first chance I got. I like bars and churches, I’d discover, for similar reasons: rarely do you exit one without having left something behind.

• • •

3. At the Ballet

While I drifted around SF in my Sunday finery, Maria got a job in the bowels of the opera house answering phones for the San Francisco Ballet.

Am I speaking with Miss Maria? the elderly patrons wheezed. Sometimes they burst into song. I’ve just met a girl named Mariiiiia!

We started going regularly, whenever she could score us free tickets. One breezy evening we met on the Civic Center steps, an hour early for the show. I remember my skirt blowing up, 100% vertical, as we walked inside. We sat on loveseats in the lady’s powder room and snorted little pyramids of K off the backs of our hands, then made a beeline for our premium seats. Traversing the sleek marble floors of the lobby was suddenly like walking in the shallow end of a pool.  Oh shit, Maria whispered. We smiled guiltily at the usher. We just barely made it to our seats before the K took us offline and our bodies fell apart like sandwiches in the bath.

We could hear the orchestra tuning up, that spooky, toothy, sound. The auditorium vibrated with pollen-like waves of gold. I found myself staring at the carpet, thick crimson velvet with yellow fleur-di-lis. The velvet seemed to spread up from the floor to cover the seats like moss and I worried it might get me too. I closed my eyes and the spaghetti feeling came to me. The air in the big empty room thickened; it was filled with invisible objects like memories, spirits, germs, desires, daydreams, particles of perfume, musical notes, all of these entities like raisins in cake. I brushed my hands against the carpet like I was petting a cat, then whispered bossily to Maria: I am velvet.

She rolled her eyes.

The theater began to fill up and I watched women—in pearls, pantsuits, ascots, capes—teeter down the aisles. They all looked unsteady. Ten minutes away from the opera house was the gay bar Aunt Charlie’s Lounge, which was also a place where people dressed up and wore heels and teetered around. The carpet at Aunt Charlie’s was thick midnight blue with dirty white roses; its texture and smell were as familiar to me as a lover’s leg, I’d rubbed against it countless nights. In fact, after the ballet, Maria and I would walk to Aunt Charlie’s for the Tuesday night drag show, then known as High Fantasy, now known as Angels. Along the way, we would bump into a regular, a beefcake named David who had lived in the neighborhood for twenty-plus years. He always wore muscle tees and used words like divine. He was holding a boom box like a purse, playing Wagner at max volume.

Hey angels, he said. Any requests?

We said Maria Callas. He walked with us and blasted the street with Madame Butterfly, which made our chit-chat feel profound. Judging from the lack of reaction from Tenderloin residents, it seemed like David did this a lot.

Back at the ballet, still pawing my armrest, I thought about the phrase carpet muncher and laughed. Maria gave me a look but I couldn’t stop. It suddenly delighted me, this equation of pussies with carpet, specifically the stubbly booze-stained carpet of bars. Carpets and pussies were beautiful. They were downy surfaces designed to withstand abuse. Don’t touch that, we were told, and still drunks rubbed their cheeks on both. Both planes invited petting despite years of wear and tear. Both could be studied like art or ignored like old furniture. In my measly life, I’d loved a few.

At last the theater filled up and the ballet began. It took me a while to understand what was happening. The K was affecting my vision in such a way that I saw every dancer doubled. Not blurrily but perfectly, as if there were two identical bodies on stage, one behind the other, perfectly in sync. Never had a hallucination been so convincing. Solos became duets, duets became foursomes, chorus lines become orgies. I took it as a sign, both obvious and divine, to remember my shadow-selves. They were alive and kicking.

After the ballet and after High Fantasy, long after we had staggered home and thrown our clothes in a pile and fallen asleep, I continued to think about carpets. Where and when did one encounter this noteworthy texture, that of the ex-soft, of the ritzy yet ruined, of coarsened, tortured, long-suffering velvet? It was common in sites of pleasure and surrender: movie theaters, churches, casinos, bars with cocktail or lounge or room in the name. All places of intrigue and dimmable lights. This texture received one, like pillows; it excited one, like hair; it readied one to feel deeply, the way candlelight readied one to be kissed or a certain expression (close your eyes, baby) readied one to be hit.

In his essay “Outing Texture,” Renu Bora writes that “texture and sexuality are both problems wrought with liminals.” So maybe that’s what I was chasing—liminal spaces, shifty little worlds where folks go to let go, where it smells like bodies in repose and sweaters being sweat in, secret cigarettes.

• • •

4. On The Floor

In a coffee shop the other day I overheard two women saying, You know she makes her money lying down, right? They laughed into their lattes.

They weren’t talking about me, but they could have been. I write lying down, and read lying down, and in fact I do make money lying down, in the euphemistic sense of sometimes having sex or doing sex-adjacent things for pay. In his essay on the Playboy Mansion, Paul Preciado credits Hugh Hefner with popularizing the figure of “the horizontal media worker who could just as easily be a writer or a sex worker or ideally both.” Preciado analyzes Hefner’s disdain for morally and ergonomically upright working conditions. He was known for doing business, literally, in his big rotating bed; when in the Playboy offices, he rarely sat at his desk. He would force his employees to spread their work out on the floor and crawl around on all fours. He did it too, nimble in his silk pajamas.

How often, in your everyday life, do you touch the floor? Is it possible that you could go for years without crawling around on your hands and knees? DIRTY! mothers scream when kids drop food on the ground. One Wednesday Maria and her boyfriend got too high at The Stud and sat down on the dance floor, which felt like a novel transgression. I watched open-mouthed as the fog machine erased them both. When they kissed, they were a tripping hazard; their hands stuck a bit to the hard, beery floor. My shadow-self wanted to point and scream, DIRTY!

In kindergarten, we played a game called Hit The Floor. The conceit was deceptively simple: we ran around the room until the PE teacher blew her whistle and we dropped dead to the soft gym mats. It thrilled me to flatten myself, cheek to the floor; it was almost as thrilling as earthquake drills, when we also dropped everything and crawled under our desks. I loved the theater of these gestures, the weirdness of the world from this new upskirt angle. You might even say these games were proto K-holes, sexy/scary moments when time came unbraided and gravity loosened its belt. 

I totally see why Hugh Hefner, trading in fantasy, would choose to work from the floor. Like the pussies in his magazine, it was supposedly off-limits, yet ever-present, all-around. This is how he marketed Playmates: a not-secret secret. He spoke about “the-girl-next-door effect,” writing: “…it’s natural to think of the pulchritudinous Playmates as existing in a world apart [but] actually, potential Playmates are all around you: the new secretary at your office, the doe-eyed beauty who sat opposite you at lunch yesterday, the girl who sells you shirts and ties at your favorite store…” Pussy is a not-secret secret, like the rose-printed carpet at your local Chinese restaurant. The world is bright with erotic potential; all you have to do is get low.

Say what you will about Hefner as an infamous creep, but the man understood the latent wonder of objects, arranging his women on shag rugs or beanbags or loveseats that became just as sexy, as texturally inviting, as she. Hefner objectified women but he also womanized objects, running his hands over the surfaces of the American home. Renu Bora quotes Sartre: “In my desiring perception I discover something like a flesh of objects.” Of course Hefner went to work in his silky pajamas; it was a texturally superior way to engage with the world. He cloaked himself in teen-smooth garments. It was like being felt up 24/7.

We who lie down a lot are ultra-sensitive to texture. There are good days when I lie down in the grass with the sun on my belly and I feel almost good. I dress like a Playmate and pose for no one in the knolls of Golden Gate Park. I shred daisies and listen to that schmaltzy Sting song: Will you stay with me, will you be my love, among the fields of barley? We’ll forget the sun, in his jealous sky, as we lie in fields of gold.

Then there are bad days when I have no choice but to lie down. It’s the only way to withstand the constant nausea and dizziness. Pain, like texture, is a problem wrought with liminals. It’s an uneasy modality in which you flash between states—good/bad, worse/better, high/low, dull/acute, genius/creep, help me/hurt me, baby/baby. Like Hef, I sometimes wear my pajamas all day, but only because I can’t bear to stand up and get dressed.

• • •

5. In His Room

The summer after I graduated college, I became obsessed with the fantasy of fucking on the floor. I’d recently read Because They Wanted To by Mary Gaitskill and was moved by a story in which the female protagonist (a writer, a professor, living in San Francisco) has a younger man over. They make out on her living room floor in an apartment filled with books and shoes. This seemed like the most adult thing one could possibly do.

I thought obsessively about this story when I had something-like-sex with a man I met while he was busking at fisherman’s wharf (oh, youth). Jordan: the first word that comes to mind is knobby, then spry, though Frank met him and summed him up as affected and skeezy. He was a self-diagnosed loner with a musician’s hard hands and a zeroed-in focus that was sometimes off-putting, like when he lit a cigarette and took a bite of an apple and then kissed my mouth and then bit my nipple and frowned and said, Whoa, that’s a lot of tastes right now, and patted my leg and went back to smoking. Who among us, 23 and antsy for touch, hasn’t fallen for such cheap tricks, for the radiant stupidity of a tallish man calling you baby?

He lived alone with his cat in a garden apartment near Union Square, ten minutes from Aunt Charlie’s Lounge. His place was clean, a classic San Francisco one-bedroom—high ceilings, hardwood. I looked in his closet and saw three identical black shirts, two identical pairs of black jeans. They looked good on him and he knew it and I liked it too, though I later begged him to swap outfits with me.

Pleeeeeease! I said. You’d look so good in spaghetti straps. I was wearing a white camisole stitched with the Playboy bunny. I’d gotten dressed for our date feeling sure we would smash, though he made it quite clear that he didn’t consider our roughhousing “real” sex.

I only fuck people I really like, he said plainly. Wanna stretch?

On the floor of his living room was a braided rag rug in a variety of blues. This is where I lied down, under the pretense of stretching. He washed his hands in the kitchen and came to kneel beside me.

Alexa! he shouted, startling me. The cat didn’t blink. Turn down the lights!

Alexa complied and he put his hands on my torso. These are your ribs, he said. Your beautiful ribs. He said it like a fact, not a compliment, in a rapturous deadpan. He moved his hands. These are your shoulders. They are beautiful shoulders. 

He stretched out my hip flexors until I cried uncle. He put his hands on my throat. I keep forgetting that I could do anything to you, he said. He pulled at the skin of my face like he was peeling an orange. I asked him to knee me in the pussy, which he did with panache. You have a very special pussy, he said. You know that, don’t you? He spoke with a hint of threat, like I had better not doubt the specialness of my pussy OR ELSE.

Then he lied on the rug and I sat on his back, massaging his shoulders. I paused to put my hair in a ponytail and he and the cat watched me in the mirror, of which there were many all around the apartment. Of all the selves you’ve shown me tonight, he said, this one is my favorite.

Jesus, said Frank the next day. It’s like he’s auditioning for a role in an essay.

Maria mirrored the sentiment. Weird, she said. Reminds me of Mary Gaitskill.

He had his to-do list taped to the bedroom wall. I’d forgotten to mention this detail to Maria. In sloppy black cursive, he’d written:

1. Empty yourself of anything vapid
2. Prepair yourself for her. 

• • •

6. In the Field

The last time I heard “Fields of Gold” was in the basement of a Japanese karaoke bar, not far from Jordan’s apartment, at 1:30 a.m. on a Sunday, surrounded by K-heads.

Ketamine, like texture, concerns the liminal and erotic. Every object lights up with erotic potential because to touch something on K (a breast, a bed) is to join it, to fuse. A kiss on K is a surgery, stitching and unstitching your epidermal frontiers. The question of texture (silky pajamas, bared shoulder, rag rug) becomes an ontological one—you are one with the objects of your world. You melt onto and into them, creating new forms, like candy left on the dashboard of a car in July.

I was busy melding with the wall when Sting came on. IT’S YOUR TURN! my friend Marissa screamed. The backing track of digital synths sounded preposterously beautiful, church-like. I held the microphone with both hands and opened my mouth, not sure if I was making sounds. The mike became an ice cream drumstick. I watched the lyrics go by on the TV like banners pulled by blimps in the sky: Feel her body rise when you kiss her mouth among the fields of gold.

That same morning I’d gone to the Golden Gate Spiritualist Church with Frank as part of my church project. I wore stained kitten heels that my mom described as “trashy, like, literal fucking trash.” Frank wore a T-shirt reading FUCK HIPPIES over which they respectfully buttoned their coat. Several friends had told me about the Spiritualist Church when I first started my project. It was known to all the witchy gays, a white-and-gold Victorian with a view of the Bay that believed in communication with the so-called dead. They’d been having biweekly services on Sunday and Wednesday since 1924.

The first thing I noticed about the church, dim at 11:00 a.m., was its carpet: wine-colored velvet three inches thick, over which squat leather chairs were arranged in a half-moon. My kitten heels sunk into the floor as into a wet lawn. The frizzy-haired medium began the service with announcements, encouraging guests to bring flowers. They have higher vibrations than, say, cards, she said in a quavering voice. She reminded me of a high school secretary. She said there would be a lecture on the history of Spiritualism in the lyceum at 1:00 p.m., as well as a tea party. Then she nodded to the pianist. Let us now raise our vibrations in song.

We opened our leather-bound hymnals and sang: Angel I will follow thee, til I see death’s lifted curtain. On the opposite page was a different song: “Let Me Hide Myself in Thee.” What a beautiful way to describe the ketamine death-wish, the urge to crush yourself into the floor. I was so excited by this lyric that I tore my program to pieces, half-listening to the medium raise the dead. How it worked was everyone wrote their name on a scrap of paper and put it in a hat. The medium pulled out the scraps one at a time, closed her eyes, and channeled the spirits affixed to that name. The process felt a lot like karaoke: everyone antsy, awaiting their turn.

I’m seeing red tennis shoes, she said. Does that mean anything to you? A man in a rainbow scarf gasped. I’m seeing an overturned doggie bowl. No, kitty bowl. I’m seeing a gentleman, wearing the tennis shoes. He’s saying something. What? He’s saying, it’s off to the next rodeo.

Frank and I stayed for the tea party after the service, where we ate pasta salad and pineapple chunks and drank Lipton tea and made friends with a series of beautiful widows who complimented our shoes. The Spiritualist Church held space for sadness but also for style, that of ex-dancers and/or wounded romantics. It’s so lovely to see you here, they said, unwinding their scarves, dipping pound cake in coffee. I love your energies. In contrast to the lyceum downstairs, the reception room was full of light. This could have been a tea party for patrons of the ballet. The floors were bare, hardwood: no rug.

• • •

7. In His Hands / In the Bath

What I’m trying to get at, with these dotty notes on church and K and carpet, is the haptic dimension of awe. I’m reminded of that childhood song (which I never understood as religious): He’s got the whole world in His hands. When God touches us, what does He feel? And what do we feel, besides wonder and fear? What does the supernatural literally feel like? Is His hand clammy or smooth? Is He fuzzy or slick? Does He wear silk pajamas as he slinks through dimensions? How do you texturally describe angels, if that’s who they are, their diaphanous junk, their misty little hips pushing into your backside?

I can feel your cock through your jeans, I told Jordan as we kissed in his living room.

No, he said coldly, you can’t. Well, God dammit, I felt SOMETHING. This is what believers claim, when they feel God moving around inside. I know my metaphors are mixed. With every church I visit and mean man I humor, the blurrier the boundaries between fact and fiction, fantasy and faith, like and really like, become. 

So maybe this is what the spaghetti feeling is: moments when I am touched by God or in a godly manner, when an angel grinds against me (murmuring, these are your ribs), when the supernatural moves, for a second, in me. It seems plausible. I don’t think the feeling itself is a miracle but it readies my body, perhaps, to receive higher vibrations. The spaghetti feeling is when my skin goes thin, when my heart is saturated like cake dunked in coffee. At the hideous straight club, Frank and I tried to ask a physicist (who was standing next to us, eavesdropping) about the mechanics of the spaghetti feeling. Is it like string theory? we asked, crowding him. What about gravity? Wormholes?

He smiled. I don’t follow, he said. Wanna dance? 

The evangelical church by my house is called Nation Takers (if you search for it on Google Maps, it won’t show up). In their brochures they describe their mission as “the demonstration of the supernatural through signs, wonders and miracles for total restoration and manifestation of joy.” My first thought upon reading this was, how queer! That’s what we do at Aunt Charlie’s on Tuesdays from 10:00 p.m. until 2:00 a.m.: demonstrate the supernatural, restore joy to our sordid lives. We have our own sets of miracles—a death-drop in seven-inch heels, GHB, an expertly-used fan, a maroon body stocking that makes one’s body look mythical. David playing opera on the streets is divine.

I first visited Nation Takers on Easter Sunday. I was ten minutes late, hair wet from the shower. When I walked inside, everyone was already dancing. A live band played something jazzy and upbeat; next to them a screen was projected with karaoke-style lyrics and a cartoon butterfly. Oh happy day, Jesus washed my sins away! 

A surprisingly mixed crowd was rocking out in the aisles, old and young and black and brown and white, techies rubbing shoulders with junkies. When I made eye contact with someone, they embraced me.

I’m so happy you’re here! they cried. Praise be!

Isn’t He perfect? a lady in a flowy white gown asked. She was the perfect one, petite with platinum blonde hair, plucked eyebrows, and long, curved, cherry-red nails. She could have posed for Playboy, pulling her dress up with one hooked acrylic. He is so, so, so, SO beautiful.

She boogied her way down the aisle, where she stood in front of the band and swiveled her hips like a groupie. When she raised her arms, she cast a shadow on the screen, obscuring the lyrics with her writhing form. He’s my best friend! someone shouted, and she started to laugh. I was mesmerized by her shadow-self, her red-hot nails, the outline of her drag queen hands as she waved them in the air. She was sweating through her bridesmaid’s dress. It was all so fucking punk.

I didn’t notice myself raising my arms until it was too late. I felt the beauty of Christ enter me like a swig of club soda; I felt girly and limp, like I was in love with Him and He noticed me and gave me a wink. By then everyone was breathless, shedding their sweaters. I felt myself drop it all: my personality, my history, any sense of self-preservation or regret. I was not visiting; I was enmeshed. When the Pastor said, Can I get an amen? I was among the many voices bellowing, Hallelujah!

The rest of the service was just as euphoric; only later, upon reflection, would I feel more than a little creeped out. We turned to our neighbors and said, Love is the foundation. Then: You deserve better. We were encouraged to give tithes via the MobileGiving app. The pastor, looking dapper in his silver suit, said: If you devote yourself fully to Christ, you will be a walking miracle. He repeated this several times. Prepare yourself for the Lord and He will make a home in you. Your body will be a house for Christ. Can I get an amen?

Amen! I so wanted to be a walking miracle. Christ’s perfect love was a not-secret secret, like Hefner’s Playmates, or my allegedly special pussy—it had always been there, ever-present amongst the stuff of my life, the garbage and the flowers. I so wanted to be a house for God; the spaghetti feeling, maybe, was when He came home, when I felt full to the rafters with Him and His friends. They had a party in me and the neighbors banged on the walls. It reminds me of Jordan’s handwritten to-do list: prepair yourself for her, or Him, or it, or whoever is so beautiful.

On my second date with Jordan, he drew me a bath without asking. I was coming straight from a drag show, still wearing my makeup. The bath was ready when I walked in.

I thought you might be dirty he said. There’s special salts in it.

I expected him to join me, but instead he lit a candle, turned off the lights, and left me to soak. The bathroom had a chapel-like quality as I touched the stubble on my pussy and tried not to cry. In April a john had paid for me to get a full-body wax (though we never did end up sleeping together). It was growing back now, the hair softer and lighter. The texture surprised me; it made me feel tenderly towards myself, like I was still figuring things out. Since I’d started my church project, I was crying all the time. I’d cried at the ballet last weekend, I’d cried to Sting in the park, I’d cried at the drag show thirty minutes prior when a queen did the splits to Celine.

After my bath I stood in the bedroom and we marveled at how silky the salts made my skin. My bare feet sunk into the rug. We didn’t yet know that things would end badly.

Alexa, Jordan said, throwing his cigarette out the window. He stepped forward, fully clothed: black jeans, black shirt, what a sexy jerk. Play Leonard Cohen.

And of course “Hallelujah” came on as he took off my towel. This time we lay on the bed, not the floor, and both did our best to not mouth the words: remember when I moved in you and the holy dove was moving too. The cat watched from the windowsill, a neutral visitor.