Page 19 of Bad Words

Parker

Yep, feel free to lol

Justin

lol @ you getting drunk off 2 weak ass cocktails

I loved my siblings, but they were an exercise in being overwhelmed.

In fact, even the things I felt most grateful for that week—the landslide of exposure for High and Dry, the hundreds of supportive messages—overwhelmed me. Sometimes, after two straight hours of refreshing, scrolling, replying, liking, and emailing—Thank you so much! That’s really kind. Appreciate you! Thanks. Totally agree!—I’d lie face down on my bed, close my eyes, and envision the thin dirt trails in San Bruno Mountain Park, where I’d started taking walks near the end of middle school, after my parents had split up for good. I’d imagine the antique armchair in the back corner of Poppy Street Books, six blocks from my mother’s house in Daly City. These places were silent in my mind, oases. I could barely remember what that quiet felt like.

As the days passed, op-eds cropped up in publications and newsletters, each with a rude title like “Parker Navarro’s Big Miscalculation” or “The Obsolescence of the Wounded Critic,” and I discovered that the only thing more annoying than Selina Chan was other journalists trying to outcriticize Selina Chan. A week turned into two, and the interviews began to blur together. I was running out of ways to rephrase my loathing.

Chan—unsurprisingly, for someone who’d built a career on rephrasing her loathing—had no such problem. She seemed to think I was some harbinger of the publishing apocalypse, that if she said even one syllable of a mea culpa, the very offices of City Magazine, and also possibly the rest of civilization, would crash down around her silver-studded ears. I’d developed this compulsion to check her social media the moment I woke up, groping my phone into my bed in the half-light, thumbing in her handle semi-conscious, until finally I was barraged by whatever self-important bullshit she had to say that day. Two weeks after the video, I woke up to this gem in LitHub:

SC: Some of these op-eds have come dangerously close to suggesting that criticism has been replaced by social media, and that the only articles to punch through therefore have to be disproportionately negative. The implication is that my review of High and Dry was negative for negativity’s sake, even for publicity’s sake. Frankly, this is unfair. City remains devoted to writing what we’ve always written: thoughtful long-form journalism executed to a rigorous standard. Even Parker Navarro has never tried to rebut any point I made in my review, though that might just be because he lacks the conviction.

The line wormed its way under my skin. After reading the interview, I lay in bed with the curtains drawn for three hours, like a frail Victorian dying of consumption, and reread her review dozens of times, trying to come up with rebuttals.

But the worst thing about Chan’s review was that while she’d detested the book, she’d understood exactly what I’d wanted to achieve with it. I had wanted to skewer the absurd circularity of modern life. I had wanted to nod to Kafka and Lucy Ellmann and Virginia Woolf.

This had happened with These Extraordinary Times, too: She’d written about my strategies and influences with a crystalline accuracy that had made me feel like she’d X-rayed me, then used that X-ray to puncture my lungs.

That evening, I felt proud of keeping to the plans I’d made. Instead of inventing an excuse to cancel, I dragged myself out of bed and showered and took my medication. I dressed in real clothes instead of depression sweatpants. I took the subway into Manhattan and joined my friends at a tiki bar on the Lower East Side, where you could pay twelve dollars for the privilege of drinking a Corona.

Five of us had made it out tonight, but the overall friend group was twice this size, consisting of everybody from our corner of the Bay Area who’d wound up in New York. Slouched in a booth surrounded by tropical foliage, we kicked off the night chatting about Tyler’s residency—he’d gone into neurosurgery and now discussed catastrophic brain injuries with a weird, blithe indifference. We joked around about Julian’s millionth new startup idea, which aimed, somehow, to disrupt the airport luggage cart industry (“Would you describe it as Uber for airport luggage carts?” asked Maricel). As for Maricel and Xiangyu, they were both consultants and therefore never talked about their jobs, except to say that they were trying to get new jobs.

I was happy to be three drinks deep by the time the subject turned to me. “Hell of a couple of weeks for our famous author,” hollered Julian, ruffling my hair.

“Are we allowed to ask about it?” asked Tyler, sounding more concerned than he had about last Tuesday’s subarachnoid hemorrhage.

“Sure,” I said.

Xiangyu and Maricel exchanged a look. “Okay,” said Xiangyu as they both leaned over the table. “Be honest. Was it staged?”

I choked on my drink. “Was it—what? No!”

“Told you,” said Julian, looking satisfied.

“Why did you think it was staged?” I said, staring between Xiangyu and Maricel.

“Uh,” said Maricel, “because we’ve known you for eighteen years and never seen you lose your shit like that?”

“Must have felt good,” said Xiangyu, grinning.

“It … Yeah.” I hesitated. Part of me wanted to admit how I’d spent this afternoon, to paint the range of the experience, but I didn’t want to complain. Xiangyu and Maricel regularly described their jobs as exercises in soul death. Julian, alone of the people at this table, was still struggling to pay rent. Tyler worked twenty-eight-hour shifts and saved people’s lives. My problems were all fictional.

I told myself, Relax. The last thing I needed was to be seen differently by a group of friends I’d had since childhood, and we were having a nice time here, their smiling faces smudged violet by the tinted lightbulbs. Easy.

“It’ll blow over soon,” I said. “Anyway, I made some author friends from this, which is cool. I’m going to meet them later. One of them is throwing a, like, a house party in Boerum Hill.”

A storm of teasing about my attendance at this prestigious literary salon followed, and Julian gave me a fond elbow to the bicep. “I’ll tell you what, I would not be this silver lining about all this shit happening.”

“Well, it’s Parker,” Maricel said with a laugh, and they agreed that it was Parker, glass-half-full Parker, and I smiled and kept drinking my gin and tonic, and soon they’d moved on to the topics of the subway and that new show they were all watching.

As we parted ways outside the bar, Maricel and Julian and I broke out a little Tagalog to make our goodbyes. I would’ve liked us to practice together more often, but Julian was self-conscious about his pronunciation, especially around Maricel, who’d lived in Quezon City until age ten and was still near-fluent.

“No, you sound great, Julian,” Maricel was saying, and I was agreeing, “Tama siya,” when from a heaving group of passing bodies, a voice slopped out, singsong: