Hurricane Season On storms, repairs, and family.

Hurricane Season On storms, repairs, and family. 

By David Sedaris  The New Yorker

Illustration by Tamara Shopsin 

Grow up in North Carolina and it’s hard to get too attached to a beach house, knowing, as you do, that it’s on borrowed time. If the hurricane doesn’t come this autumn, it’ll likely come the next. The one that claimed our place—the Sea Section—in September of 2018, was Florence. Hugh was devastated, while my only thought was: What’s with the old-fashioned names? Irma, Agnes, Bertha, Floyd—they sound like finalists in a pinochle tournament. Isn’t it time for Hurricanes Madison and Skylar? Where’s Latrice, or Category 4 Fredonté? 

Florence, it was said, gave new meaning to the word “namaste” along the North Carolina coast. 

“Are you going to evacuate?” 

“Namaste.” 

Hugh and I were in London when the hurricane hit, and was followed almost immediately by a tornado. Our friend Bermey owns a house—the Dark Side of the Dune—not far from ours, and went over to check on the Sea Section as soon as people were allowed back onto Emerald Isle. He found our doors wide open—blown open by the wind. A large section of the roof had been ripped off, and the rain that had fallen in the subsequent days had caused the ceilings on both floors to cave in, the water draining, as if the house were a sieve, down into the carport. Bermey took pictures, which looked so tawdry I was embarrassed to share them. It seems that rats had been living in the second-floor ceilings. So there were our beds, speckled with currant-size turds and tufts of bloated, discolored insulation. 

All the interior drywall would need to be replaced, as would the roof, of course, along with the doors and windows. We were left with a shell, essentially. Had ours been the only place affected, it might have been easy to have the repairs done, but, between the hurricane and the flooding, thousands of homes had been either destroyed or severely damaged—and that was just in North Carolina. 

Our other house, luckily, was relatively unscathed. It’s next door to the Sea Section, and when it came up for sale, in 2016, Hugh disregarded my objections and bought it. His argument was that if he didn’t get it someone would most likely tear it down and construct the sort of McMansion that has become the rule on Emerald Isle rather than the exception. The size of these new houses was one thing—eight bedrooms were common, spread over three or four stories—but what came with them, and what you really didn’t want next door to you, was a swimming pool. “It happened to us ten years ago,” moaned my friend Lynette, who owns an older, traditionally sized cottage up the street from us. “Now all we hear is ‘Marco!’ ‘Polo!’ over and over. It’s like torture.” 

The place that Hugh bought is ancient by Emerald Isle standards—built in 1972. It’s a single-story four-bedroom, perched on stilts and painted a shade of pink that’s almost carnal. Like the Sea Section, it’s right on the ocean, but unlike the Sea Section it’s rented out to vacationers. At first, Hugh went through an agency, but now he does it himself, through a number of Web sites. Our friend Lee across the street rents out his place, Almost Paradise, as do most of our Emerald Isle neighbors, and all of them have stories to tell. People leave with the pillows and coat hangers. People grill on the wooden decks. They bring dogs regardless of whether or not you allow them, and small children, meaning all sorts of things get flushed down the toilets: seashells, doll clothes, dice. And, of course, people complain about absolutely everything: The TV only gets ninety channels! There’s some missing paint on the picnic table! 

Lee once got a comment from a renter that read “I was shocked by your outdoor shower.” 

“I was thinking, How surprising can it be?” he told me. “I mean, you’re at the beach, for God’s sake. Then I went out to wash up, and when I touched the handle for the hot water I got thrown clear across the room.” 

Hugh bought the second house with everything in it, and, although it’s a bit heavy on the white wicker, the furniture is far from awful. He drew the line at the art work, though. It was standard fare for a beach house: garish pictures of sailboats and sunsets. Signs reading “If You’re Not Barefoot, You’re Overdressed” and “Old Fishermen Never Die, They Just Smell That Way.” 

If he wanted to, Hugh could work as a professional forger. That’s how good he is at copying paintings. So for the rental house he reproduced a number of Picassos, including “La Baignade,” from 1937, which depicts two naked women knee-deep in the water with a third person looking on. The figures are abstracted, almost machinelike, and cement-colored, positioned against a sapphire sea and an equally intense sky. Hugh did three others—all beach-related—and got a comment from a renter saying that, although the house was comfortable enough, the “art work” (she put it in quotes) was definitely not family-friendly. As the mother of young children, she had taken the paintings down during her stay, and said that if he wanted her to return he’d definitely have to rethink his décor. As if they were Hustler centerfolds! 

“Can you believe that woman?” Hugh said, almost a year after the hurricane hit, when we arrived to spend a week on Emerald Isle. It was August. The Sea Section was still under construction, so we stayed at the rental house, which he was calling the Pink House, for reasons I could not for the life of me understand. “It’s just such a boring name,” I argued. 

“It really is,” my sister Gretchen agreed. She’d pulled up an hour before we had, and was dressed in a fudge-colored tankini. Her long hair is going silver, and was gathered in a burger-size bun, not quite on the back of her head but not on top, either. She had turned sixty earlier that week and looked as if she were made of well-burnished leather—the effect of age and aggressive, year-round tanning. The skin between her throat and her chest had gone crêpey, and it bothered me to notice it. I cannot bear watching my sisters get old. It just seems cruel. They were all such beauties. 

“Calling this the Pink House is just nothing,” she said. 

The best name, in my opinion, considering that the rental was next to the Sea Section, was a choice between the Amniotic Shack and Canker Shores. Both had been suggested by a third party and were far better than what I’d come up with. 

“And what was that?” Gretchen asked, opening a cabinet in search of a coffee cup. 

“Country Pride Strong Family Peppermill,” I told her. 

“Not that again,” Hugh said. 

“It’s not a pun, but I think it has a nice ring to it.” 

Hugh opened the refrigerator, then reached for the trash can. Renters aren’t supposed to leave things behind, but they do, and none of their condiments were meeting his approval. “It sounds like you just went to the grocery store and wrote down words.” 

“That’s exactly what I did,” I told him. 

“Well, too bad. It’s my house and I’ll call it what I want to.” 

“But—” 

He tossed a bottle of orange salad dressing into the garbage. “But nothing. Butt out.” 

“C-R-A-B,” Gretchen mouthed. I nodded in agreement, and made pinching motions with my hands. It can sometimes be tricky having Hugh around my family. “What is his problem?” each of my siblings has asked me at one time or another, usually flopping down on my bed during a visit. 

“What is whose problem,” I always say, but it’s just a formality. I know who they’re talking about. I’ve heard Hugh yell at everyone, even my father. “Get out of my kitchen” is pretty common, as is “Use a plate,” and “Did I say you could start eating?” 

I’d like to be loyal when they complain about him. I’d like to say, “I’m sorry, but that’s my boyfriend of almost thirty years you’re talking about.” But I’ve always felt that my first loyalty is to my family, and so I whisper, “Isn’t it horrible?” 

“How can you stand it?” they ask. 

“I don’t know!” I say. Though, of course, I do. I love Hugh. Not the moody Hugh who slams doors and shouts at people—that one I merely tolerate—but he’s not like that all the time. Just enough to have earned him a reputation. 

“Why did you yell at Lisa?” I asked, the year that three of my sisters joined us for Christmas at our home in Sussex. 

“Because she came to the dinner table with a coat on.” 

“So?” 

“It made her look like she wasn’t staying,” he said. “Like she was going to leave as soon as her ride pulled up.” 

“And?” I said, though I knew exactly what he was saying. It was Christmas dinner, and it’s a slippery slope. One year you wear a down coat at the table, and the next you’re dressed in a sweatsuit eating cold spaghetti out of a pan in front of the TV. My sisters can say what they will about Hugh’s moodiness, but no one can accuse him of letting himself go, or even of taking shortcuts, especially during the holidays, when it’s homemade everything, from the eggnog to the piglet with an apple in its mouth. There’s a tree, there are his German great-grandmother’s cookies, he will spend four days in an apron listening to the “Messiah,” and that’s the way it is, goddammit. 

Similarly, he makes the beach feel the way it’s supposed to. A few years back, he designed a spiral-shaped outdoor shower at the Sea Section that we found ourselves using even in the winter. He grills seafood every night, and serves lunch on the deck overlooking the ocean. He makes us ice cream with fruit sold at an outdoor stand by the people who grew it, and mixes drinks at cocktail hour. It’s just that he’s, well, Hugh. 

When I get mad at someone, it’s usually a reaction to something he or she said or did. Hugh’s anger is more like the weather: something you open your door and step into. There’s no dressing for it, and neither is there any method for predicting it. A few months after we met, for example, he and I ran into an old friend of mine at a play. This was in New York, in 1991. We thought we’d all go out to eat, then Hugh offered to cook at his apartment. Somewhere between the theatre and Canal Street, his mood darkened. There was no reason. It was like the wind shifting direction. The making of dinner involved a lot of muttering, and, when my friend sat down to eat, his chair gave way, causing him to tumble onto the floor. 

I apologized, saying that the chair was already broken, and Hugh contradicted me: “No, it wasn’t.” 

“Why would you say that?” I asked, after my friend had hobbled home. 

“Because it wasn’t broken,” he said. 

“It doesn’t matter,” I explained. “The point was to make him feel less embarrassed.” 

“Too bad,” Hugh said. “I can’t hide who I am.” 

“Well, it’s really important to try,” I told him. “I mean, like, really, really important.” 

“Let me ask you two a question,” Hugh said to Gretchen and me, on our first afternoon at the Pink House in August. He opened the sliding glass door to the deck and invited us to sit on the rocking chairs out there. The nails that held them together had been weeping rust onto the unpainted wood for so long that I put a towel down so as not to stain my white shorts, and got snapped at for it. 

“Now, please.” 

I took a seat. “Ready.” 

“O.K., do you think those are rickety? That’s what the renter who hated the paintings called them.” 

I settled in and swayed as much going side to side as I did going back and forth. “Yes,” I said. “ ‘Rickety’ is probably the best word for this, possibly followed by ‘kindling.’ ” 

“This one, too,” Gretchen said. 

“Well, you’re just spoiled,” Hugh told us. “There’s nothing at all wrong with those rocking chairs.” He stormed back into the house, and I heard the click that meant he had locked us out. 

“Goddammit,” Gretchen said. “My cigarettes are in the

Lisa and Paul and Amy couldn’t make it to the beach this time. It was sad being on the island without them, but at least it left fewer people for Hugh to crab at. “If you want to raise your voice to someone, you might consider the contractors,” I said in the living room the following morning, looking next door at our empty driveway, and not hearing what I heard coming from other houses: the racket of hammers and Skilsaws. 

“Why don’t you call them?” Hugh asked. “I filled out all the insurance forms. I see to all the bills and taxes, so how about you take care of something for a change?” 

I didn’t respond, but just sighed, knowing he wasn’t serious. The last thing Hugh wants is me taking care of something. I wouldn’t have paid him any mind, but Gretchen was in the room. I don’t like seeing my relationship through her eyes. That said, I do like seeing my family from Hugh’s vantage point. To him, we’re like dolls cut from flypaper, each one of us connected to the other and dotted with foul little corpses. 

“What is with men adjusting their balls all the time?” Gretchen asked, staring down at her phone. 

“Are you talking about someone specifically?” Hugh asked. 

“The guys that I work with,” she said. “The landscaping crews. They can’t keep their hands away from their crotches.” 

“It could be due to heat rash,” I suggested, adding that touching your balls in public is now illegal in Italy. “Men did it to ward off bad luck, apparently.” 

“Hmmm,” Gretchen said, turning back to her phone. “I was in a meeting a few weeks back, and when I took one of my shoes off a roach ran out. It must have been hiding in there when I got dressed that morning.” 

“What does that have to do with anything?” Hugh asked. 

I rolled my eyes. “Does it matter? It’s always time for a good story.” 

“Your family,” he said, like we were a bad thing. 

That afternoon, I watched him swim out into the ocean. Gretchen and I were on the beach together, and I remembered a young woman earlier in the summer who’d had a leg bitten off, as well as a few fingers. Squinting at the horizon as Hugh grew smaller and smaller, I said that if the sharks did get him I just hoped they’d spare his right arm. “That way he can still kind of cook, and access our accounts online.” 

It’s hard to imagine Gretchen’s boyfriend crabbing at anyone. She and Marshall have been together almost as long as Hugh and I have, and I can’t think of a gentler guy. The same can be said of Paul’s wife, Kathy. My brother-in-law, Bob, might get crotchety every so often, but when he snaps at Lisa for, say, balancing a glass of grape juice on the arm of a white sofa, we usually think, Well, she kind of deserved it. Amy’s been single since the mid-nineties, but I never heard her last boyfriend, a funny and handsome asthmatic, yell at anyone, even when he had good reason to. 

Gretchen and I had been on the beach for all of twenty minutes before she did what she always does, eventually. “I went online recently and read all sorts of horrible comments about you,” she said lazily, as if the shape of a passing cloud had reminded her of it. 

I don’t know where she gets the idea that I—that anyone—would want to hear things like this. “Gretchen, there’s a reason I don’t Google myself, I really don’t want to—” 

“A lot of people just can’t stand you.” 

“I know,” I said. “It’s a consequence of putting stuff out there—you’re going to get reactions. That doesn’t mean I have to regard them all.” 

Jeez, I thought, sprinting back to the house over the scorching sand and wondering which was worse—getting snapped at by Hugh or having to endure what Gretchen was doling out. Although it’s true that I don’t read reviews or look myself up, I do answer my mail. A few months earlier, I’d been given two hundred and thirty letters sent to me in care of my publishing house. I had responded to a hundred and eighty already, and brought the remaining fifty to the beach, where I figured I’d see to ten a day. Most were just what I’d always wanted: kind words from strangers. Every now and then, though, a complaint would come along. I’d like to say I brush them off, and I guess I do, in time. For days, though, and sometimes months, I’ll be bothered. For example, a woman sent me her ticket stubs, plus her parking receipt, demanding that I reimburse her. She and her husband had attended a reading and apparently objected to my material. “I thought you were better than that,” she scolded, which always confuses me. First off, better than what? I mean, a clean show is fine, but no finer than a filthy one. Me, I like a nice balance. 

That aside, who doesn’t want to hear about a man who shoved a coat hanger up his ass? How can you not find that fascinating? “What kind of a person are you?” I wanted to write back. 

Sometimes after a hard day of angry letters or e-mails, after having an essay rejected or listening to Gretchen tell me how much a woman she works with thinks I suck, I’ll go to Hugh and beg him to say something nice about me. 

“Like what?” he’ll ask. 

“I shouldn’t have to tell you. Think of something.” 

“I can’t right now,” he’ll say. “I’m in the middle of making dinner”—as if I’d asked him to name all the world capitals in alphabetical order. I feel as though I’m always complimenting him. “You look so handsome tonight.” “What a great meal you made.” “You’re so smart, so well read, etc.” It’s effortless, really. 

“I don’t want to give you a fat head,” he’ll tell me, when I ask for something in return. 

“My head is, like, the size of an onion. I’m begging you, please, enlarge it.” 

He says I get enough praise already. But it’s not the same thing. 

“O.K.,” he’ll say, finally. “You’re persistent. How’s that?” 

Ilike coming to Emerald Isle in May. It’s not too hot then, and most everyone in my family can take a week off. Ditto at Thanksgiving. August, though, is definitely something I do for Hugh, a sacrifice. The heat that month is brutal, and the humidity is so high my glasses fog up. At home, in Sussex, I’d happily be walking twenty-two miles a day, but at Emerald Isle, at the height of summer, I’m lucky to get fifteen in, and even then I really have to force myself. 

I don’t like to aimlessly wander, especially in a place where thunderstorms can appear without warning. I need a destination, so I generally go to a coffee shop near the grocery store, usually with a couple of letters to answer. Back and forth I’ll walk, making three or more trips a day. When Hugh and I lived in Normandy, he heard a local woman telling a friend about a mentally challenged man she often saw marching past her house. He wore headphones, she said, and looked at pictures while talking to himself. 

That, of course, was me, but they weren’t pictures I was holding. They were index cards with that day’s ten new French vocabulary words on them. 

In Sussex not long ago, an acquaintance approached me to share a similar story. Again I was identified as mentally challenged, this time because I was picking up trash and muttering to myself. Only I wasn’t muttering—I was repeating phrases from my Learn to Speak Japanese or Swedish or Polish audio program. “The woman who saw you said, ‘I just hope no one tries to take advantage of him,’ ” the acquaintance told me. 

On Emerald Isle this August, it was German I was muttering. I might have picked up an occasional bit of trash, but I wasn’t carrying any equipment, just ziplock bags of hot dogs or thick-cut bologna to feed the snapping turtles in the canal. 

We’d been at the beach for four days when I noticed a great many ant colonies in the dirt bordering the sidewalk between the strip mall the CVS is in and the one the grocery store is in. The ants were cinnamon-colored, hundreds of thousands of them, all racing about, searching for something to eat. 

“Excuse me,” I said that afternoon to the guy behind the counter at the hardware store. “I was wanting to feed some ants and wonder what you think they might like. How would they feel about bananas?” 

The man’s face and neck were deeply creased from age, and the sun. “Bananas?” He took off his glasses and then put them back on. “Naw, I’d go with candy. Ants like that pretty good.” 

I bought a bag of gummy worms from beside the register, bit them into thirds, and, on my way back to the house, distributed them among the various colonies as evenly as I could. It made me happy to think of the workers, presenting their famished queens with sugar, and possibly being rewarded for it. 

“You’re out there feeding ants candy?” Hugh said that night at the table, when we were all discussing our day. “They don’t need your help, and neither do the stupid turtles. You mess these things up by feeding them—you hurt them is what you do.” It wasn’t what he said that concerned me but, rather, his tone, which, again, I wouldn’t have noticed if my sister weren’t there. 

“Well, they seemed pretty happy to me,” I said. 

Gretchen patted my hand: “Don’t listen to Hugh. He doesn’t know shit about being an ant.” 

This was a relatively short beach trip. Renters were arriving on Saturday, so the three of us had to have the house clean and be out by 10 A.M. Gretchen left a bit earlier than we did, and, though I was sorry to see her go, it was a relief to escape her judgment regarding the life I have built with Hugh. As it was, whenever anything good happened during that week, whenever he was cheerful or thoughtlessly kind, I wanted to say, “See, this is what my relationship is like—this!” 

It was a three-hour drive to Raleigh. I had work to do, so while Hugh drove I sat in the back seat. “Just for a little while,” I said. I must have fallen asleep, though. After waking, I read for a bit, and the next thing I knew the car wasn’t moving. “What’s going on?” I asked, too lazy to sit up and look out the window. 

“I don’t know,” Hugh said. “An accident, maybe.” 

I righted myself and was just attempting to hop into the front seat when Hugh advanced and tapped the car in front of us. “Now, see what you made me do!” 

“Me?” 

I don’t know anything about cars, but the one he’d hit was bigger than ours, and white. The driver was husky and pissed-off-looking, with the sort of large, watery eyes I’d expect to find behind glasses. “Did you just hit me?” he asked, walking toward us. He bent to examine his bumper, which seemed to be made of plastic and had a pale mark on it, possibly put there by us. 

Hugh rolled down his window: “I maybe did, but just a little.” The man glared at what he probably assumed was an Uber driver making extra money by taking people to the airport, or wherever that gap-toothed dope in the back seat was headed. He gave his bumper another once-over, then the traffic started moving. Someone honked, and the man got back into his car. “Hit him again,” I said to Hugh. “But harder this time. We need to show him who’s boss.” 

“Will you please shut up,” he said. “As a favor to me. Please.” 

When we first got news that Hurricane Florence had all but destroyed the Sea Section, I felt nothing. Part of my indifference was that I’d expected this to happen. It was inevitable. Then, too, I wasn’t as attached to the place as he was. I wasn’t the one who’d be contacting the insurance company. I wouldn’t be dropping everything to fly to North Carolina. It wouldn’t be me picking turds off our beds, or finding a contractor. In that sense, I could afford to feel nothing. After looking at the pictures that Bermey had sent, I shrugged and went for a walk. At dusk, I returned and found Hugh in our bedroom, curled up with his face in his hands. “My house,” he sobbed, his shoulders quaking. 

“Well, one of your houses,” I said, thinking of Florence’s other victims. 

Some, like Hugh, were crying on their beds, far from the affected area, while others were on foldout sofas, in sleeping bags, in the back seats of cars, or on cots laid out like circuitry in public-school gymnasiums. People who’d thought they were far enough inland to be safe, who’d had real belongings in their now ruined houses: things that were dear to them, and irreplaceable. The hardest-hit victims lost actual people—mates or friends or family members swept away and swallowed by floodwaters. 

Then again, this was something of a pattern for Hugh. So many of the houses he’d lived in growing up had been destroyed: in Beirut, in Mogadishu, in Kinshasa. He’s actually sort of bad luck that way. 

I put my arms around him, and said the things that were expected of me: “We’ll rebuild, and it will all be fine. Better, actually. You’ll see.” This was how I always imagined myself in a relationship: the provider, the rock, the reassuring voice of wisdom. I had to catch myself from saying, “I’ve got you,” which is what people say on TV now when they’re holding a distraught person. It’s a nice sentiment, but culturally speaking there was only a five-minute period when you could say this without sounding lame, and it has long passed. 

I do have him, though. Through other people’s eyes, the two of us might not make sense, but that works in reverse as well. I have a number of friends who are in long-term relationships I can’t begin to figure out. But what do I know? What does Gretchen or Lisa or Amy? They see me getting scolded from time to time, getting locked out of my own house, but where are they in the darkening rooms when a close friend dies or rebels storm the embassy. When the wind picks up and the floodwaters rise. When you realize you’d give anything to make that other person stop hurting, if only so he can tear your head off again. And you can forgive and forget again. On and on, hopefully. Then on and on and on. ?

For Trump, Impeachment Is a Show

For Trump, Impeachment Is a Show

Washington is Hollywood and Trump is the leading man.

By Charles M. Blow NY Times

Opinion Columnist

The point is proven. The corruption has been established. 

It’s rather simple: Donald Trump abused his power as president to extort a foreign country into investigating a political rival. 

There is no remaining doubt that this happened. 

Furthermore, the conspiracy of people involved in the execution of this plan, as well as pursuing the debunked conspiracy theory that it was Ukraine that interfered in the 2016 election to help Hillary Clinton, rather than Russia interfering to help Trump, is also coming more into focus. 

It is clear that Trump has committed impeachable offenses. (Some people around him may also have committed prosecutable crimes.) The only remaining question is whether some honorable Republicans might join Democrats in voting for whichever articles of impeachment might be drawn up in the House of Representatives. 

At present, it appears that few or none would do so. That is a sad indictment of our country and of the Republican Party. 

I have contended from the beginning that impeachment was important regardless of Republican support, regardless of the chances of conviction and removal in the Senate. Impeachment is important because our system of democracy is being tested. The Constitution is being tested. And, not moving to impeach would in a way enshrine abuse of power as a precedent. 

And yet, it is still remarkable to see the way partisans are choosing to behave in this moment. It is still remarkable to see the disinformation coming from conservative media. It is still remarkable to see just how many fellow citizens have bought into deception. 

This is one of the great successes (if that word can be used in this way) of the Trump presidency: He has succeeded in eroding truth and bending reality among those who support him. He has succeeded in commandeering conservatism and twisting it into something nearly unrecognizable. 

And now, all of Trump’s supporters and defenders are erecting a protective hedge around him. The cult of Trumpism can’t be allowed to fall. 

They are devoted to Trump’s version of the truth and his version of reality. In it, he is a tough-talking tough guy who uses colorful language and sharp elbows to change things in their interest and in their favor. In this reality, he is unfairly and incessantly maligned by those obsessed with hating him as a person and for his supposed successes. In this reality, Trump is being bullied. 

Also, nothing said about him is to be believed, no matter who says it and how much proof is presented. Conversely, believing him, a compulsive liar, happens by default. 

For instance, poll results published last month by Monmouth University found that 67 percent of self-identified Republicans and Republican-leaning voters believe Trump’s baseless claim that Joe Biden probably did pressure Ukrainian officials to keep them from investigating his son’s business interests there, while just 16 percent said Trump made promises or put pressure on Ukraine’s president to investigate Biden, even though Trump had already admitted it and the partial transcript confirms it. 

This is a both confounding and frightening. How is a democracy supposed to survive when this many people deny a basic common set of facts? How does one engage in political debate with someone lost in a world of lies? 

And of course, this is just as Trump wants it. He has spent his entire life bending the truth and flat-out lying. It was one thing when he did it as a private citizen, to puff up his chest and inflate his wealth. There were no real consequences for the country in the telling of those lies. 

But now he has brought his “lie loudly” tactic to the White House, and he has realized that there is a section of America hungry for a show, willing to believe anything the carnival barker says and be thoroughly entertained by it. 

Trump realized something that few people are willing to acknowledge: That politics is theater first. It is about appearance and performance to a disturbing degree. People want a story, a vision, a fascinating protagonist. Politics loves a star. 

The derisive cliché, “Washington is Hollywood for ugly people,” coined by Democratic strategist Paul Begala, has lasted so long because there is a grain of truth in it. It’s simply another version of Hollywood, where great tales are packaged and sold, where great actors teach people to believe in ephemera. 

It’s just that the show in Washington controls the national budget and the national arsenal and affects real people’s real lives. 

But, Trump knows that the impeachment inquiry can simply be seen as part of the show, and if he can put on a bigger, better show, he can survive it. Trump is not concerned about truth, protocol, tradition or the sanctity of the Constitution. 

Trump cares about Trump. Trump cares about the Trump brand and the Trump show. Trump will reduce this country to rubble before he will submit to correction. And, he’ll portray our destruction as his greatest show.

nature when capitalism has put its future at risk.

Acquiring an acquaintance with nature when capitalism has put its future at risk.

By Lewis H. Lapham Lapham's Quarterly

The Course of Empire: Destruction, by Thomas Cole, 1836. New-York Historical Society, Gift of The New York Gallery of the Fine Arts.

It is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism.

—Fredric Jameson



The “control of nature” is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, when it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man.

—Rachel Carson



How is it that I have been able to exist for so long apart from nature, and without identifying myself with her?

—Gérard de Nerval

The warming of the planet currently spread across seven continents, four oceans, and twenty-four time zones is the product of a fossil-fueled capitalist economy that over the past two hundred years has stuffed the world with riches beyond the wit of man to marvel at or measure. The wealth of nations comes at a steep price—typhoons in the Philippine Sea, Category 5 hurricanes in the Caribbean, massive flooding in Kansas and Uttar Pradesh, forests disappearing in Sumatra and Brazil, unbearable heat in Paris, uncontrollable wildfires in California, unbreathable air in Mexico City and Beijing. 

The capitalist dynamic is both cause of our prosperous good fortune and means of our probable destruction, the damage in large part the work of Adam Smith’s invisible hand, guided by the belief that money buys the future. Nature doesn’t take checks. Who then pays the piper—does capitalism survive climate change, or does a changed climate put an end to capitalism? 

Eighty-five percent of the carbon now present in the atmosphere is the value added during the course of my lifetime, 2.5 trillion tons, roughly equivalent to one thousand times the total weight of all the fish in the sea. I was fifty years old before I knew it was there, much less understood it to be a problem. 

It’s only the futility of the first flood that prevents God from sending a second. 

—Sébastien-Roch Nicolas Chamfort, 17

Born and baptized in Rachel Carson’s Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, I grew up in the city of San Francisco in the 1940s, so far apart from nature I assumed most of it located in Africa, picturesque specimens to be seen in Golden Gate Park and the San Francisco Zoo. The streets in my neighborhood bore the names of trees—Walnut and Cherry, Laurel, Chestnut, and Spruce. I didn’t wonder what the trees themselves might look like; nor was I familiar with the birds, plants, insects, and animals living on the far side of the Presidio wall, half a block from my boyhood home. Like most city-bred children of my generation (especially those among us brought up under the protection of money and machines), I thought bread came from the baker, light from a bulb, milk from a bottle. At grammar school during the Second World War, I devoted the free study periods to sketching the silhouette of every fighter plane and bomber in the American, German, and Japanese air forces. 

When America emerged from the war in 1945 as the world’s supreme military and economic power, I was ten years old and sufficiently well versed in my grandmother’s readings from the Bible to associate the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima with God in the book of Genesis granting to mankind dominion over the beasts in the field, the birds in the air, and every creeping thing that creeps on the earth. Not only did nature exist for the convenience of man, man’s control of nature was absolute. Whatever was yet to be done in the name of peace, prosperity, and progress, nature henceforth had little say in the matter. 

The degree of my ignorance conformed with the climate of victorious American opinion dominating not only Carson’s Neanderthal age but also what Aldous Huxley in 1956 named as the “most gilded golden age of human history—not only of past history but of future history.” The two authors refer to the same middle years of Life magazine’s American Century, but Huxley is trafficking in irony. His gilded golden age is the work of spendthrift heirs to the fortune that is nature’s gift to mankind in the form of “metallic ores and fossil fuels accumulated in the earth’s crust during hundreds of millions of years.” Let the profligate gold spoons persist in their extravagance, and Huxley figured that “within a few centuries or at most a few millennia” the human race must reduce itself to beggary or be remanded to oblivion. 

The word to the wise appeared in the same year I was graduated from Yale College, urged by the commencement and prize-day orators to ignore it. The cap-and-gowned wisdom gathered under the elm trees on Old Campus assured the class of 1956 there would be no end to the wealth of its inheritance. The world was our oyster; go forth and partake in the feast of its consumption. 

Huxley’s guess at how long the party would last was soon seen to be optimistic. In 1972 the voice of doom advertising itself as the Club of Rome (an ad hoc committee of internationally prominent scientists, economists, industrialists, and historians) issued a report, The Limits to Growth, that reduced good-time Charlie’s life expectancy to less than a hundred years. The committee had been set up in 1968 to address the specific problem of world food production and overpopulation (not enough of the former to feed the latter), but its findings broadened the reach of its concern: 

If the present growth trends in world population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue unchanged…the most probable result will be a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity. 

In the context of the early 1970s, the report was both new and old news. For three thousand years, it had been well-known by observers with a mind to know it that wherever man plants his foot on the earth, he destroys the harmonies of nature. He had been doing so since he first began planting crops and husbanding animals, building cities and staking out empires. 

Yuval Noah Harari, author of the best-selling 2014 history of mankind, Sapiens, rates Homo sapiens as “the deadliest species in the annals of planet Earth,” the historical record making him “look like an ecological serial killer.” Harari offers as case in point the settlement in Australia of the first hunter-gatherers crossing from Asia and climbing on arrival to the top of the food chain. Within the relatively brief span of a few thousand years, they permanently transformed the ecosystem. Of twenty-four animal species weighing a hundred pounds or more, twenty-three disappear, among them a marsupial lion, flightless birds twice the size of ostriches, and the giant diprotodon, a two-and-a-half-ton wombat. 

The Roman historian Tacitus places the same modus operandi in the hands of Domitian’s legions marching to conquer the far north of Britain in the year 83. The words for their enterprise Tacitus gives to the tribal chieftain Calgacus, rallying the indigenous barbarians against the threat of extinction. He says it’s no good trying to escape Rome’s arrogance by submission or good behavior. “They have pillaged the world…If an enemy is rich, they are greedy; if he is poor, they crave glory. Neither East nor West can sate their appetite…They plunder, they butcher, they ravish, and call it by the lying name of empire. They make a desert and call it peace.” 

Times change, and so does the weather, but Homo sapiens in any and all climates remains steadfast in method and purpose. In 1864 the American naturalist 

George Perkins Marsh draws the moral of the story then being told in the early years of the industrial revolution: 

The destructive agency of man becomes more and more energetic and unsparing as he advances in civilization, until the impoverishment with which his exhaustion of the natural resources of the soil is threatening him…commences an almost indiscriminate warfare upon all the forms of animal and vegetable existence around him. 

What was new in the Club of Rome’s report was the projected short period of time in which mankind was bound to accomplish its self-destruction. The resulting uproar in the popular press coincided with the growing public awareness of what was then coming to be known as “the environment.” The 1968 photograph Earthrise seen from Apollo 8 gave high-definition meaning to Alexander von Humboldt’s concept of the earth and all its creatures enveloped in a fragile membrane of unified being. 

The fervent upwelling of the environmental movement in the mid-1970s also coincided with my becoming editor of Harper’s Magazine and therefore obliged to learn something about which I’d learned next to nothing during the long years of my thinking nature confined to quarters in a diorama. The publication’s back issues shed a first light in the darkness. Since its founding in 1850, Harper’s Magazine had devoted the greater part of its substance to reports and reflections on man’s relation with nature, and in lovingly preserved leather-bound volumes, I could read dispatches filed by Herman Melville, Mark Twain, John Muir, Teddy Roosevelt, and Bernard De Voto. 

Staying on message during my thirty-year term as the magazine’s editor, I published the notes and observations of Loren Eiseley, Edward Abbey, Annie Dillard, Edward Hoagland, Louise Erdrich, and Barry Lopez, sent scouts to explore kingdoms of creation in the Canadian Arctic, the Galápagos Islands, the African jungle, and the Arabian desert. My acquiring an acquaintance with nature kept pace with the increasingly frequent sightings of environmental distress—more endangered species of fish, mammal, and bird; the Colorado River running out of water; toxic chemicals seeping into the soils of the Sacramento Valley; glaciers crumbling into the Weddell Sea; coral on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef fading to the palsied white of Melville’s Moby Dick. 

Meanwhile and slowly, consulting sources scientific, philosophical, and poetic, I got to know myself as an organism, like every other organism in the cosmos, made from the wreckage of spent stars. Learning that I drew the breath of life not only from trees to which I hadn’t been introduced but also as a gift from unseen phytoplankton in the sea, I moved on to discover that with no more than a slight shifting of the astral dust of which I was composed, I might have ventured into the world as an eggplant or a killer whale. More likely the latter. Homo sapiens is born with the instincts of a Neolithic hunter-gatherer, no sating of his appetite east and west, no end north and south to his craving for riches and glory. 

The capitalist dynamic is the craving for riches and glory in the hands of machines seen by 

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in 1848 as the revolutionizing instruments of industrial production geared to “naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation,” and understood by Marsh to be waging “indiscriminate warfare upon all forms of animal and vegetable existence.” The carbon in the biosphere is the weapon of mass destruction. 

It was recognized as such in 1988 by Dr. James Hansen, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who testified before Congress about the accelerating rate of global warming, noting that “the greenhouse effect…may also have important implications other than for creature comfort.” How important the good doctor didn’t say. Not wishing to be seen as a spoilsport alerting the indigenous barbarians to their forthcoming extinction, he left it to other voices in other rooms to fill in the blanks and work out the details. 

Their doing so provides many of the texts in this issue of Lapham’s Quarterly and shows them finding it easier to imagine the end of the world than to conceive of an end to capitalism. The journalist David Wallace-Wells, author of this year’s best-selling cry of alarm The Uninhabitable Earth, calls upon more than sixty expert witnesses (physicists and astrophysicists, biologists and microbiologists, climatologists, archaeologists, poets, and chemists) to identify Homo sapiens as a seriously endangered species. Let the carbon levels in the biosphere continue to rise at the current rate—and with them global temperatures warming by a few degrees Celsius—and the once-upon-a-time lord of the manor goes the way of the two-and-a-half-ton wombat. 

Exactly how few degrees Celsius is a matter of conjecture, and Wallace-Wells is careful to say that the reading of numbers into the future, like the nightly news weather forecast, is not an exact science. The trend, however, is unmistakable; of the past five years, four have been the hottest on record in Europe, Asia, and the Americas. 

Entrance to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, Norway, 2016. Photograph by Jonas Bendiksen. © Jonas Bendiksen?/?Magnum Photos. 

Nor is climate change something new under the sun. The earth’s climate has been constantly changing for five billion years, passing through long ice ages and long ages of tropical wet, enduring short periods of environmental convulsion due to the tilt and spin of the earth’s orbit. Sixty-five million years ago, the beginnings of the Rocky Mountains were underwater; thirty thousand years ago, the Amazon jungle was dry savanna. The scene shifting was known to 

Aristotle in 340 bc: 

And if in places the sea recedes while in others it encroaches, then evidently the same parts of the earth as a whole are not always sea, nor always mainland, but in process of time all change. 

Ancient Roman and Chinese sources attest to a darkening of the sun accompanied by crop failure that spread across half the globe in the 40s bc. The historian 

Philipp Blom tells the story of the Little Ice Age dropping the temperature of Europe by up to two degrees Celsius in the seventeenth century and by so doing reconfiguring not only the climate but also the course of modern history. 

Prior to the nineteenth century, the changes were the work of nature; they still are, but nature in its incarnation as man. Somewhere in the middle of the twentieth century, the planet with all its creatures moved out of the geological Holocene (the epoch into which I was born, together with the cherry tomato, the fox terrier, and the smallpox virus) and into the Anthropocene, so named in recognition of its having been formed in the carbon footprint of nature’s foremost ecological serial killer. 

It isn’t the planet that’s at risk; the planet will continue to exist for another 7.5 billion years until the sun absorbs it. What’s at risk and in the throes of chaotic change is the biosphere, the stratum of cosmic organism encircling the globe (from a depth of six miles below sea level to a height of five miles above it), encompassing and networking all the forms and strands of life—forests and cities, begonias, centipedes, and trade unions—that we know collectively as “the world.” 

The biosphere contains multitudes, but its resources are finite and cannot accommodate the pursuit of infinite growth that is the capitalist dynamic blowing up the hot-air balloon of the global consumer economy. Too many new people coming into the world (three billion in the years since Dr. Hansen testified before Congress) and not enough fresh water, fertile land, and clean air to provide them with the means of survival. The simple arithmetic accounts for the rapidly multiplying signs of environmental convulsion that float to the surface of the morning and evening news. The biosphere isn’t restricted to flora and fauna; it incorporates the fields and streams of human feeling, behavior, and thought. The ice melting in the Arctic and the sea levels rising on Miami and Malibu Beach (like the seventy million refugees these days everywhere in flight from disease, drought, and despotism, or the shrinking of vertebrate populations by an average of 60 percent since 1970) are aspects of climate change. So is the brutal and clownish incoherence of American politics in the age of Trump, British politics in the grip of Brexit, the flood tide of hatred and stupidity inundating America’s social media, the increasing number of shootings in America’s schools, twenty in the first six months of 2019. 

Numerous authors in this issue of the Quarterly take note of the further correspondence between the human and geophysical kingdoms of creation. None do so more tellingly than 

William Shakespeare. Everywhere in the plays, he builds bridges of metaphor across the biosphere’s myriad streams of consciousness—Hamlet’s melancholy situated in an unweeded garden, Lear’s madness in a raging storm, Ulysses in Troilus and Cressida speaking to the Greek army stranded on the beach at Troy, plagued by “shaking of earth,?/?commotion in the winds, frights, changes, horrors.” 

The weather is an “evil mixture to disorder”; so is the temperament of the Greek captains and commanders who have been ten years below the walls of Troy, unable to behold the face that launched their thousand ships. Their “enterprise is sick.” Having lost sight of “the ladder of all high designs,” they fight among themselves on points of vanity of greed, turn to looting one another to sate their appetite for riches and glory. 

Take but degree away, un tune that string, 

And hark what discord follows… 

Then everything include itself in power, 

Power into will, will into appetite; 

And appetite, an universal wolf… 

Must make perforce an universal prey 

And last eat up himself. 

The global consumer market is an universal wolf. Left to its Neolithic instincts, it must perforce eat up itself, devour and destroy the human race. Not with malice aforethought or for reasons ideological, but because it is a machine, and like all machines, among them the atomic bomb and Facebook, knows not what else to do. 

Unfortunately for us all, neither do the profligate gold spoons who manage the world’s political and financial affairs. The instruments of “naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation” stuff with riches their corporations, banks, and party bags, and over the past fifty years, we have learned to accommodate ourselves to the climate of a world made by and for machines. Losing sight of ourselves as human beings, we look to machines to tell us who and why and what we are, what to do and where to go, what to eat and buy and think, when to cry, how and at whom to laugh. 

We live in an age convinced that money buys the future, technology the salvation of the human race. The current episode of climate change is proving both assumptions wrong. The only power on earth capable of saving the human race is human, the means of doing so the learning that we are one with nature, not superior to or separate from.

Chloe’s Scene

Chloe’s Scene 

If you don’t find your fashion on Seventh Avenue, Chloe is the It Girl with a street-smart style and a down-low attitude. 

By Jay McInerney The New Yorker October 31, 1994 

It’s weird, this happens all the time. Chloe Sevigny is sitting at one of the outdoor tables at Stingy Lulu’s, on St. Mark’s Place just off Avenue A, absorbing a mixed green salad and devouring the just-out September Vogue. A black girl and an Asian girl huddle anxiously on the corner a few yards away, checking her out. The two are about Chloe’s age, which is nineteen, and they seem to be debating whether or not to approach. Do they recognize her from the Sonic Youth video—the one filmed in Marc Jacobs’ showroom, which was kind of a spoof of the whole grunge thing—or did they catch her modelling the X-Girl line last spring? Maybe they saw her photos in Details, the ones taken by Larry Clark, who has just cast Chloe in his new movie, “Kids.” The girls pass by once and walk halfway up the block before they turn back, clinging to each other, and stop just behind Chloe’s right shoulder. 

“Excuse me.” 

Chloe looks up, wrapping her arms tight around herself in an instinctive gesture of protection, as if to reduce the exposed surface area of her body even as she manages a smile that is shy and skeptical and indulgent all at the same time. It’s not like this hasn’t happened before, but it’s still a little, you know, weird. 

“Can you, um, tell us where you got your, uh, shoes?” the black girl asks. 

Chloe giggles with relief. She looks down at her jellies—transparent plastic sandals. Now that practically everybody’s wearing big, chunky, cleated boots and platform sneakers—even people who shlump every day to offices uptown—Chloe has moved on. She’s already gone. And the two girls standing on the sidewalk in their big black Doc Martens want to follow her. Chloe tries to remember where she got the sandals. 

“I think it’s right around the comer, on Avenue A. I can’t think of the name. Something Something.” 

“Like, that way? Over there?” 

“Yeah.” 

The girls thank her and practically run up the street. Chloe fires up a Camel Light and resumes her study of Vogue. Watching Chloe read a fashion magazine makes you think of Alexander Woollcott devouring a ten-pound lobster à l’américaine or Casanova undressing a servant girl. “This Marc Jacobs dress is beautiful. . . . Helmut Lang is my absolute favorite. . . . God, Armani is so old-ladyish. . . . Lagerfeld ruined the house of Chanel; Coco would never have done miniskirts. I watched this documentary about her. She was so great. . . . I’m like a fashion-magazine junkie. I love them, but they’re usually pretty lame. By the time they print it, it’s already happened. The British magazines are much further ahead in terms of what’s happening in the street.” 

Chloe can speak with some confidence about what’s happening in the street. Some say Chloe is what’s happening in the street. In addition to her jellies Chloe is wearing a very short white dress made of a shiny, flame-friendly space-age synthetic. It looks sort of familiar (Gaultier? X-Girl?), although you won’t see anyone else on the street wearing one, at least not yet, with eight weeks to go till Halloween. Maybe you saw it a few years back on the little girl from the next building who came around with her father and held her pillowcase open for the mini Snickers bars. It says “Cinderella” in floral-pink letters across the chest, above an image of a magic slipper and a cheerful pink-and-blue rendering of the fairy-tale princess inside her pumpkin carriage. All that’s missing is the plastic mask. The funny thing is, it looks really good on Chloe. Several people have already asked about it today, and she’s told them she scavenged this number in a Brooklyn thrift shop. Two dollars. She accessorizes it with a fake Chanel bracelet from Canal Street, which she wears around her biceps. At this moment, she is five feet eight, weighs a hundred and ten pounds, and looks, in her current short coif, quite a bit like a skinny Jean Seberg. Her nose is perhaps a bit blunt, and she points out the crookedness in her posture, which is the result of childhood scoliosis, but this doesn’t prevent downtown style-chieftains and scenesters from comparing her to Twiggy and Audrey Hepburn and Edie Sedgwick. 

After lunch, Chloe cruises over to Daryl K, a boutique on East Sixth Street. She checks the racks methodically and holds up a pair of white vinyl pants. “I used to want these really bad, but I don’t now.” She still feels guilty about the fact that she once spent a hundred and twenty dollars on another pair of pants here. It’s the most she’s ever spent on anything, clotheswise. Generally she shops at thrift stores; not at vintage shops, which are thrift stores with an attitude, and not even at Manhattan thrift stores—forget about Cheap Jack’s and Andy’s Chee-Pees, which she considers self-conscious and hopelessly picked over. Chloe favors places in Brooklyn and her native Connecticut. It’s a rare day that she’s wearing more than ten dollars’ worth of clothes. Perhaps because she’s nervous that her current shoes are about to be fruitful and multiply, she decides to walk down to Chinatown and get a pair of Chinese fishnet sandals for two dollars. 

The first time it happened, Chloe was seventeen. She was standing at a newsstand on Sixth Avenue, in the Village, when she was approached by Andrea Lee Linett, the fashion editor at Sassy. Linett was styling a commercial for the short-lived “Jane” show. “I saw Chloe,” she says, “and I thought, Oh, we have to put her in the shot, but the producers said, ‘No, she’s really weird-looking.’ ” Linett stuck her in the commercial anyway and then asked her to do a shoot for the magazine. Chloe was photographed eating a carrot, wearing the big tan corduroy overalls that had caught Linett’s eye. At the time, Chloe had hair down to her butt, and she used to tuck it up inside a big Nefertitian hat of her own creation. After the shoot, Linett went out and bought baggy tan corduroy overalls for herself. 

Chloe was still a student at Darien High School then, sneaking off to the city whenever she could. She’d tell her parents that she hated them for raising her in Darien, that ur-suburb, though actually her parents were pretty cool: when Chloe shaved her head, her mother told her that she looked really cute, kind of French. And her father understood her attraction to the city; he’d lived on St. Mark’s Place and hung out at Max’s Kansas City before he moved to Darien for the sake of the very kids—Chloe and her older brother, Paul—who would later yell at him for it. Chloe’s was not quite the conventional Darien upbringing, any more than she is the conventional rebellious suburban kid. She grew up in a gray shingled ranch house near Long Island Sound that looks pretty raffish amid the austere white Colonials and the tall, picket-fenced Victorians. “My father was in insurance until his company was sold, and then he started painting trompe-l’oeil. He started with our kitchen, and then he did it for other people. He’s really good. We never had as much money as everyone else. I didn’t really like the kids in Darien.” So Chloe started coming to the city, where she found kindred spirits in the tribe of skateboarders based in Washington Square Park. “I used to tell my parents I was going to Greenwich or New Rochelle. Then I’d drive into the city. The summer of ’92 was when I first met everyone. I came to the city with two girls from Connecticut who were my homegirls. We’d go to Washington Square Park and I’d meet people. Every skater in the city was there. I’d go every weekend and hang, and then stay at different skaters’ homes.” 

It happened again a few months after the Sassy shoot, when Chloe was hanging out in the city, kicking it with her friend Harold and the other skateboarders. While she was sitting in a friend’s car just off Washington Square, she noticed a woman walking past for maybe the third time, and then the woman stuck her head in the window and told Chloe she was a photographer and asked if she would like to be in i-D, a British fashion-and-music magazine that just happened to be one of Chloe’s all-time favorite publications. 

Meanwhile, the folks at Sassy asked Chloe to be an intern that summer. And then Sonic Youth—the godparents of alternative rock, and possibly the coolest band in the world—cast her in their new video. The idea for the video was to do a little parable about the way Seventh Avenue plagiarizes the guerrilla fashion of the street: the Trickle-Up Theory of Fashion, where the Up Haute cops the Down Low. The whole grunge thing was just peaking: runway models were slouching around in expensive hommages to the scruffy rockers of Seattle and their thrift-shop flannel shirts. And who better than Chloe to represent the supercool street girl whose style gets ripped off in the designer showroom? 

“I heard about Chloe through Sassy,” says Daisy von Furth, twenty-five, who styled the video and, together with grungy heartthrob Kim Gordon, the bass player of Sonic Youth, designs X-Girl, a line of casual rock-and-roll-girl clothing. “When I met Chloe, I instantly knew that she was so super-cool, and it’s been so cool to see where she’s gone from there fashionwise. She was dressing in arch preppy stuff and wide-wale corduroys, and she always had the best look. It was never off-the-rack skate stuff. We were all into old Fila stuff from the mid-eighties, but it was like her Fila sweater would blow yours away. She looked like a village guy who steals from Polo.” The Polo element of Chloe’s wardrobe was in part a function of a job she’d taken at the mall in Stamford senior year. Chloe tried all the stores in the mall: “I had just shaved my head and I thought it was really funny that Polo was the only one that called me back.” The safe, sporty uniform of prepsters and Westchester Saab drivers was at that moment being hijacked by rappers and skaters in a sort of inversion of the Trickle-Up Theory. “All the hip-hop kids were sporting Polo then,” Chloe explains. “They called it ’Lo. But now it’s not hip. Everyone wears it now.” Everyone but Chloe. 

“She’s ahead of the other girls,” von Furth says, “because she’s read all the history of fashion and she can go into a thrift shop and find the old Yves Saint Laurent dress, when all the other girls are going, ‘Hey, wow, look at this wacky T-shirt.’ If you can get it on Prince Street or Broadway, it’s already over for Chloe.” 

Chloe was one of the models for the New York launch of the X-Girl line, which took place on Wooster Street last April—a major gathering of the interconnected tribes of hip-hop, rave, indie rock, and skateboarding. Chloe was also one of the muses. “We took one shirt she had,” von Furth says, “and we knocked it off. It was this blue broadcloth shirt and it just fit her so well. When we were doing our fall stuff I had her try on stuff. Sometimes I think, This is really Chloe-ish.” 

Around that time, Chloe posed for a fashion spread in Paper, the Vogue of the down-low universe, and she did the Lemonheads video for “Big Gay Heart.” The Lemonheads are considered either very cool or really bogus—lead singer Evan Dando has managed to inspire an anti-fanzine called Die Evan Dando, Die, presumably because he is too cute and his songs are too catchy. But Chloe simply likes the Lemonheads. “One of the great things about Chloe is that she’s incredibly enthusiastic,” von Furth says. “A lot of other girls in her position as super-cool girl would be really mean and jaded, but she’s not jaded at all.” Andrea Lee Linett agrees. “She’s not too cool for school, and she doesn’t have an attitude. She’s like a pure Edie Sedgwick, minus the drugs and craziness. She still likes her parents.” 

Chloe’s girlish enthusiasm can break out at almost any time, as when she hears from a friend that a film based on her favorite book, Jim Carroll’s “Basketball Diaries,” is being shot in the East Village. She just has to wander by the set, and, my God, there he is, the slouchy poet laureate of the downtown lowlife himself, Jim Carroll, and she can’t help approaching him and telling him, “You can’t let them do this.” Chloe is concerned that the film will violate the spirit of the book, not just because she has heard a rumor that they might be changing the heroin to crack and because Marky Mark (Chloe rolls her eyes) is in it, but finally because it’s, well, Hollywood. Yet, for all her purist concern, what comes through when she recounts this story is her delight at meeting an idol: “I was so excited. It was one of the highlights of my life.” 

Certainly anyone who has heard Chloe’s laugh—which alternately suggests a mallard surprised into flight and a drowning victim gasping for air—would be hard-pressed to call her jaded. But it’s probably her spacey air of mystery and reserve as well as the street chic that keep causing people to ask, “Who is that girl?” 

“She’s definitely the girl of the moment,” says Walter Cessna, a writer for Paper. “All the kids think she’s the shit, all the store owners think she’s the shit. What’s interesting about Chloe is she spans both scenes, the whole grunge thing and the whole rave thing. Chloe really is the symbol for all those kids. But she does keep to herself.” Cessna wrote a screenplay, “Children of the Rave,” loosely based on Chloe and other kids from the scene. He also tried to represent her for modelling assignments, but found her curiously indifferent to being marketed. “I came up with serious stuff, like Steven Meisel for Italian Vogue, and she never showed up. It was kind of a fuck-you thing. At the time I was pissed, but now I kind of admire it. But finally I couldn’t deal with the fifteen phone numbers and everything.” 

Chloe cheerfully admits to blowing off Meisel, one of the most important fashion photographers alive. (This seeming indifference to marketing herself may be her most attractive quality. It may also be canny.) To call Chloe elusive is an understatement: contacting her is a matter of triangulation—calling friends, calling her parents, calling Liquid Sky, the boutique on Lafayette Street where she has been working for the past year. When an appointment is made, it’s not always kept, particularly if it’s before afternoon. And when you find Chloe—when she’s right there, sitting across the table from you at Jerry’s or Odessa, in a tight black sweater she bought in Darien for three dollars embroidered with French expressions like “Affaire de Coeur” and “Cherchez la Femme”—you may find yourself still looking for her, looking for something more. It’s a neat trick to be able to suggest hidden reserves—to be a tabula rasa and seem to be the Dead Sea Scrolls—and Chloe’s friends all eventually allude to this sense that she is holding back. “She just sits there,” says her friend Rita Ackermann, a Budapest-born artist, “but she controls the whole scene. That’s her charisma.” 

Here in the blue-tiled bathroom of Tunnel, a night club that has survived the eighties to enjoy a second round of popularity, it looks like a rave is going on: dozens of street kids in their mid- to late teens dancing to house music, smoking whatever, and kicking it. They’re waiting for Chloe. The girls are slim and boyish; the boys are all trying for goatees, but most of them aren’t quite up to it yet. In their baggy pants and T-shirts, they hardly appear costume-designed. The dirty fingernails are real, and more than a few of the kids are brilliantly reproducing that fucked-up party look (dilated pupils and silly grins), although it’s only two in the afternoon and this is actually the set of “Kids,” a modest-budget feature directed by the photographer Larry Clark, who is best known for his book “Tulsa.” Clark spent time in Washington Square Park photographing the skateboarders and later persuaded one of them, Harmony Korine, to write a screenplay about the scene. Clark then secured the invaluable backing of Gus Van Sant. 

Harmony is one of the kids standing around the giant bathroom of Tunnel, and he’s wearing two-inch-thick prismatic glasses that make it impossible, presumably, to see much. He looks like a fifteen-year-old mad scientist; his expression is the perennial smirk of the kid who’s just waiting for the stink bomb to go off. He admits that he may have had Chloe in mind when he wrote the lead female role. “She’s kind of passive, like Chloe,” he concedes. Harmony couldn’t stand the first actress cast, an actual professional, who apparently looked like an actress amid all the street kids. “I hated her!” Harmony shouts. “I wanted to punch her. So Larry said, ‘Do you have anybody else in mind?’ and I said, ‘Why not Chloe?’ ” The actress was fired, Chloe was hired, and now everybody’s waiting to shoot one of the final scenes, where Chloe’s character comes to the rave to look for the guy who stole her virginity. 

Jim Nugent, the Teamster captain on the production, who has just finished working on the new Walter Matthau movie, thinks things on this set are getting a little too real. “These kids, the extras—they’re, like, right off the streets. One of them tried to pick a fight with me the other day. I said to him, ‘Are you fucking crazy? I’m a Teamster.’ He didn’t care.” Nugent likes Chloe; he worries about her and about the company she’s keeping. “So the first day of shooting I’m supposed to pick up Chloe, she’s like the star of the movie and she gets a driver. So I say, ‘Chloe, where do you want to be picked up tomorrow?’ and she says, ‘I don’t know,’ and I say, ‘What do you mean, you don’t know?’ and she says, ‘I don’t really live anywhere,’ and I say, ‘What? You’re homeless? What am I, s’posed to pick you up at cardboard box No. 7?’ ” Finally, they decided to give Chloe a beeper, so they could find her each morning wherever she had crashed. 

The next night—well, technically, Saturday morning—Chloe is back in the coed bathroom of Tunnel, this time as a civilian. She’s wearing a very short surgical-cloth shift with a laser-printed design by her friend Rita Ackermann on the front: two sloe-eyed “opium-den girls” with violently smeared lipstick. 

Forget about the so-called V.I.P. lounge; the bathroom is the best scene in the club. It looks almost like the eighties in here, only more extreme—drag queens, drug deals, pierced lips, world-class posing. The crowd is homogeneous in its inchoate youthfulness (no aging pop artists, socialites, or countesses in sight) and heterogeneous in its drug use: a few grinning love bugs on ecstasy; glassy-eyed junksters; furtive, Speedy Gonzales cokeheads zipping in and out of the stalls. Yes, it’s back; it never went away. Here’s a pre-voting-age enthusiast wearing a T-shirt that says “Snort Coke, Snort More Coke.” Quaaludes are back, too. And Ritalin, the drug often prescribed for hyperactive children, is a relatively new buzz on the scene. Then there are the truly fucked-up—the candy flippers, the most catholic of druggies, who mix their pharmaceuticals like the ingredients of a tropical cocktail. They come out of the stalls pie-eyed after a couple of lines of Special K, a snortable combination of horse tranquillizers, heroin, and coke. 

Chloe is greeted and hugged by William, one of the club kids, a hulking, tatterdemalion figure wearing layers of shirts and ragged sweaters, with pink hair shaved close to his skull, and rings and plugs in his lips. And there’s Sophia, looking very 1967 in a white leather mini, with her long, straight dyed hair. Someone—not Chloe—comments that Sophia looks good considering that she is, like, really old, like forty or thirty-four or something. Here also is the famous and much loved Junkie Jonathan, his eyes ringed with kohl, tottering on high platforms. He’s wearing some kind of crocheted shirt, which is accessorized with a slave collar and a black lunchbox. Chloe says, “Actually, he’s not looking so hot tonight. Usually he has a kind of deconstructionist punk look.” 

The club kids are professional party creatures, who dress and coif themselves to fabulous extremes and are paid by the management of the clubs to hang out—thereby, presumably, attracting the less fashion-forward wannabes and weekend scenesters. The kids form one of the downtown tribes among which Chloe moves, like a roving ambassador without portfolio. 

“Some of the club kids have great fashion sense and they influence high fashion,” Chloe says. “Last spring, Anna Sui and Donna Karan were definitely influenced by the rave scene. All that athletic wear and techno wear, all the stripes. Anna Sui rips everything off.” 

Chloe scans the room. “It’s kind of tacky tonight,” she says, observing dozens of young men who are wrapped in sheets. The word has apparently gone out on some deep-buried wire that tonight is toga night. Here, at what should be the cutting edge of street fashion, the late arrivals look like a bunch of beer-bashing Phi Delts. And over there is Methuselan mogul Steven Greenberg, the Benjamin Franklin look-alike who has haunted the hot spots since at least the Pleistocene, wearing four young women with his well-cut navy business suit. “Oh God, him,” Chloe says. “That’s the guy who gives my friend Carissa money all the time. He’s like her sugar daddy, but she says she doesn’t have to do anything.” Chloe’s idea of an attractive older man is Evan Dando, who is twenty-seven. Her current boyfriend is an eighteen-year-old named Robby Cronholm, who plays in a band called Crumb. She takes out his picture and displays it. “Isn’t he cute?” He looks like a very attractive twelve-year-old with long hair and a big goofy grin. Unfortunately, Robby lives in San Francisco. The thought turns Chloe melancholy. 

At 3 A.M., Chloe is checking out the merchandise spread along the sidewalk on Second Avenue between St. Mark’s Place and Seventh Street. Last week, she bought a great silver-plated picture frame for fifty cents, but she doesn’t find any treasures tonight. She steps over a pile of women’s shoes into the narrow doorway of the apartment building where she’s been staying for the past month—in a second-floor walkup she and her friend Lila Lee are subletting from the “Kids” costume designer. It’s a small studio with uneven brick walls. The tub is in the middle of the floor; toilet’s down the hall. Chloe surprised a junkie there last week. The refrigerator harbors a pitcher of cold tap water and not much else. 

Lila returns at about three-fifteen. She’s just had her butt-length dreads waxed, and she keeps feeling them. Lila is one of several people who are said to be Chloe’s best friend. She is from a first-generation Korean family who live near Nyack. Like Chloe, she hates the suburbs. “I started coming down to the city when I was thirteen,” she says. “I got into some really weird situations, staying with squatters. I can’t believe I didn’t get in more trouble than I did. My first kiss was in this squat; I kissed two different guys on the same night.” 

Chloe puts on Pavement’s “Slanted and Enchanted” album. Pavement is currently one of her favorite bands, along with Sebadoh and Courtney Love’s Hole. “My first place in the city, I lived on Fourth and Avenue C with this friend and her boyfriend,” Chloe says. “She was a junkie. It was a spot, and the dealers would watch out for us and take care of us, but eventually one of the dealers ripped my friend off. When we went out, we’d go to Limelight and USA and raves. After Avenue C, I lived in Brooklyn Heights with another junkie friend, who was also a dominatrix. She was eighteen. It was a real hell house. Everybody was doing a lot of drugs. When River Phoenix died, we had this tribute party. We rented four movies and did dope. It was pretty sick.” Dope is heroin. Chloe says she doesn’t do dope—she’s too paranoid—and it finally became awkward for her to hang around with junkies. “It got too weird. The police would come to the door about credit-card frauds. I had to get out of there. Then I went from house to house, living with different friends. Then I moved into another house in Brooklyn Heights, with four friends, until June.” 

When Chloe left the Brooklyn Heights flop, she and Lila drifted from place to place together. “We stayed with friends,” Lila says, “and if we couldn’t find a place to stay we’d just go to a rave. Every Friday night, there was a NASA rave at the Shelter.” (NASA refers not to the space agency but to Nocturnal Audio Sensory Awakening, an unofficial organization devoted to another kind of space travel.) “It was open till 8 A.M. It was the after party. People would be at Limelight, and then they’d go to the Shelter.” 

During the day, Chloe and Lila would hang out outside, with the skateboarders. Skateboarding is not quite equal-opportunity employment. The girls mostly watch. “You’d just sit there for hours waiting for people and watching people skate,” Lila says. “Skating is a little life style. They stick together. Skaters aren’t really into drugs. Just weed and booze. They shun hard drugs.” 

“In the summer of ’93, the ravers came in and took over Washington Square Park,” Chloe recalls. “If you were a geek in high school, you could be a raver. Anyone could go to a rave. At a hip-hop club, everyone’s putting on a front. Everyone’s tough. At a rave, everyone is high and mellow. But then heroin came along and made it much darker and more depressing. There was this big ecstasy dealer everybody knew on the scene. He died of a heroin overdose, and it really fucked everyone up. But they still do it.” 

From the stereo, Pavement sings, “Can you treat it like an oil well, when it’s underground, out of sight?” Lila says, “The scene in the park got too commercial. Kids from New Jersey would come in, and the skaters had to find more down-low spots.” 

“Down low” is a cherished concept: secret, alternative, not commercial—everything one wants to be. Except one also sort of wants to be famous, and here is the contradiction at the heart of Chloe’s world, the dilemma of subcultures that ostensibly define themselves in opposition to the prevailing commercial order, the dilemma of all the boys and girls who want to be in Paper and Details: What do you do if Harper’s Bazaar, or Calvin Klein, comes calling? In Chloe’s case, so far, you sort of blow them off. 

Chloe lights a cigarette and pours a glass of water. Lila gets up to change the CD to A Tribe Called Quest. She tells Chloe she’s rented “River’s Edge.” 

“I hate Keanu,” Chloe says. But, since it’s there, they play it, watching until dawn. 

When “Kids” wraps a few days later, Chloe isn’t sure what she’ll do next. First she’s got to move her stuff back up to her parents’ house, in Darien, simply because there isn’t anyplace else to put it. She might go to London for a few weeks—she’s never been. And then she’s going to get her portfolio of drawings together and apply to college. She’s thinking about some kind of fashion or design degree. Someday, somebody should erect a statue to Chloe in Tompkins Square Park, with the amazing legend, “She didn’t want to be an actress or a model”—although she is going to do the Martin Margiella show at Charivari, since she likes Margiella clothes. What she thinks she’d really like to be is a costume designer for period films. For the time being, she has decided to go back and work at Liquid Sky, which is more of a home to Chloe than any of the apartments she’ll be crashing in. 

Liquid Sky is the creation of Mary Frey, a waifish bleached blonde from New Orleans, who actually looks more like Edie Sedgwick than Chloe or anyone else does; Carlos Slinger, a.k.a. DJ Soul-Slinger, a Brazilian disk jockey and rave evangelist, whose air of mystery is enhanced by his wraparound dark goggles; and Claudia Rey, a London based artist and designer. The store presents a narrow, liquid face to Lafayette Street: a sheet of real water shimmers down the front of the window. Inside, a clubby, trippy ambience prevails. Over the cash register is a giant papier-mâché head of Astrogirl, who is the house mascot. A cooler in the corner is stocked with smart drinks, including Gusto Love Bomb: “It’s the surreal thing.” A staircase at the back leads down to Temple Records, billed as “100% underground. Import dance techno. We have the top acid, trance, breakbeat, ambient, house and jungle. The American music industry (radio) does not want you to hear this music.” 

Mary Frey ricochets from one end of the store to the other, wearing a blue Astrogirl T-shirt, bluejeans, and a nose ring. “Liquid Sky is a posse, a concept,” Frey says. “It’s a whole vibration. It’s music, it’s d.j.s, it’s fashion. It supports the whole future of adolescence. This is New York Rave Central. We’re the connection to all the raves on the East Coast.” Frey sees the rave scene as a reaction to the élitist night-club scene of the eighties. “Everybody was sick of the corporate clubs. They were doing that picking-and-choosing thing, that exclusionary thing. The raves are more democratic.” 

Frey first noticed Chloe at one of the boutique’s parties and was taken with her unearthly poise. She said to Gabriel Hunter, an Aspen transplant who was hanging out with Chloe, “Who’s that girl? She seems so together.” 

When Frey, Slinger, and Rey opened the store on Lafayette Street, they asked Gabriel and Chloe to join them. Gabe and Chloe became in-house muses, models, and gofers. Chloe also became a seamstress. “I needed somebody to sew,” Frey says, “and Chloe said, No problem. She would gladly do anything that needed doing around the shop.” At twenty-six, Frey considers herself somewhat ancient, and feels lucky to have the inspiration of youth. Speaking of Chloe and Gabe’s generation, she says, “They don’t want to hang out with older people and go to the Hamptons. It’s a completely underground scene. A lot of fashion people come down and they rip it off. But that’s O.K.” 

Today, Frey has to run down to Chinatown to grab an outfit for a wedding in London. This guy who’s in Depeche Mode is getting married, and she’s flying tonight, and all her clothes are dirty. She keeps talking on the way out the door: “Chloe’s her own category. She’s not a raver. She’s not a rocker. She’s like the old muses of Chanel or Christian Dior. Now you have this commercialized beauty, you have these cheesy-assed models like the ones who live in that building.” Frey pauses and points into the ornate lobby of the Police Building, the super-expensive downtown coöp. “It’s not about what designer you’re wearing anymore,” she says to the building. 

Chloe’s old room in Darien is waiting for her. Its bookshelves are filled with back issues of Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and The Face. There’s a lava lamp on the bookshelf and a framed poster for a Sonic Youth and Breeders concert hanging over the desk. Chloe shows Lila a spread in the November, 1992, Sassy, with the head: “Our intern Chloe has more style in her little finger . . .” 

Chloe is going to drive Lila back to her parents’ house tonight. First, though, they head for a thrift shop in downtown Darien. Chloe works the racks the same way she works the pages of a fashion magazine—thoroughly, meticulously. She goes up and down the rows, missing nothing. Eventually, she comes up with a cream-colored Christian Dior shirt with a long collar, probably from the seventies, and a thin aqua belt. She almost buys a man’s brown felt fedora but decides it’s a bit too big. The total for the shirt and the belt is five dollars. 

Then Chloe is spotted by two girls she knew in high school. It is hard to imagine these chubby-cheeked girls, with their white baseball caps and Top-Siders, in the same school lunchroom as Chloe. Her claim that she was an outsider at her high school begins to seem like an understatement. Whatever these girls may have thought about Chloe Sevigny in junior year, they are clearly thrilled to see her now. 

“Oh, hi, Chloe, how are you? I heard you were in a movie.” 

“Yeah. Wow. That is just so great.” 

Chloe tries to shrink away behind the clothes rack. “Well, it’s only an independent movie,” she demurs. “It probably won’t even get shown here.” 

“Wow, that is so cool.” 

“That’s awesome,” the other girl agrees. Later, back in the car, Chloe says to Lila, “God! That one girl was the sister of this friend of mine. Once she threw this book from the top of the stairs, and it gashed my forehead.” 

Lila shudders in empathy. In just a few days, she starts her junior year. 

In front of Charivari on West Fifty-seventh Street a few days later, a dense crowd blocks the sidewalk, forcing rush-hour pedestrians out into the street. It’s a downtown congregation gathered uptown, including Lila, who’s visiting from Rockland County, and Harmony, who is shivering in a white T-shirt, along with a slightly skeptical posse of black-clad assistants and editors from Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. The veteran celebrity photographer Bill Cunningham scans the crowd and doesn’t recognize many of the faces. Everyone is waiting for the preview of Martin Margiella’s new fall line to begin. Margiella, of course, is the Belgian designer who practically invented deconstruction—or, at least, the fashion world’s version of it—a couple of years ago: all those unfinished seams and inside-out designs that reveal the construction of the garment. 

The door to Charivari is blocked by a guard; the windows are covered over with brown paper. “I like to watch Chloe model,” Harmony says. “Usually, she stumbles.” But there’s nothing so conventional as a runway here. Chloe doesn’t have to walk. The sound of bongos signals the start of the presentation. The paper over the windows is ripped away to reveal ten models slouching on the other side of the glass. All are wearing Mylar strips, which obscure their eyes. Chloe’s the third from the left. Only the spectators in front see much more than the heads. Eventually, everyone funnels into the store. 

Inside, Chloe talks to Gabriel Feliciano, who is a fledgling stylist and part-time hostess at Lucky Cheng’s, the Chinese drag restaurant in the East Village. Gabriel’s wearing a shiny lime-green shirt that looks very seventies. Chloe is in Margiella’s tailored two-piece brown suit, which is based on a design from the forties. Suddenly, silver-haired Polly Mellen, the legendary longtime fashion editor of Vogue, who is now at Allure, comes over to examine the outfit through her owlish glasses, casually adjusting the jacket and skirt on Chloe as Chloe stands, slightly awkward, unused to the intimate anonymity of being a professional mannequin. Chloe’s normally enigmatic expression clearly says, Let me outta here. 

The meeting of one of the priestesses of high fashion and the downtown girl of the moment passes uneventfully. In a couple of hours, Chloe will be back downtown, in her world. 

Clutching a wineglass and watching his friend, Feliciano says, “People want to project their desire on one girl. She’s smart enough to hold back, and that allows us all to project whatever we want to. I could go on and on about Chloe, but actually I know very little about her.” ? 

Published in the print edition of the November 7, 1994, issue.