(cont.) "About twenty-five years ago, not long after I finished college, I got a job doing low-level administrative work like filing and making copies, sometimes answering the phone, the sorts of things that make you wonder why you ever bothered to go to school. I remember one day standing at the copy machine, where I had been watching the light go back and forth for like five hours and thinking about a year earlier, when I had been spending all of my time writing my senior thesis, which was about homoerotic imagery in late 19th century depictions of the French Revolution, and how angry I was that I got a B+ and not an A."
"Which interestingly enough there was quite a lot of homoerotic imagery; like way more than you would find one hundred years earlier or -- more surprising, perhaps -- one hundred years later. But that's another discussion. In some ways it was very depressing to think how pointless so much of my life had been if you looked at it through the vantage of standing in front of a copy machine for six hours a day, but it was also exhilarating to think about the possibility of complete reinvention, even if it wasn't a reinvention that I wanted or anticipated."
"But in a general or maybe unconscious way it was something I wanted. I knew I wanted to move to New York City and get a job, which is what I did. And I'm sure I could have gotten a 'better' job. I knew some kids who did that. Like this one guy who became a paralegal at a fancy law firm and this girl who worked in the marketing department for Colgate Palmolive. My friends and I were at a party and after she told us what she did, we couldn't understand why anyone would want to spend their life working on a toothpaste campaign. We were really arrogant and judgmental. Or maybe I still am, because if you think about it, toothpaste campaigns are what most people involved in the internet are doing: trying to figure out ways to sell you dumb shit, except now everyone thinks they're geniuses or something, which I guess maybe they are, because they make a lot of money. To me and all of my asshole friends at the time, though, we thought they were stupid. We wanted to be 'artists.' (Laughs.)"
"What was really interesting about that job, though, was that the office was in a building somewhere in the 20s on the East Side -- I forget the exact address -- that was maybe thirty stories tall. From the outside, completely boring, nothing you would ever notice, but the inside, except for the three floors my company worked on, was completely empty."
"You couldn't even take the elevator to any of the other floors. Like you could press the buttons and they wouldn't light up. We called them 'dead' floors."
"I became friendly with this other temp -- her name was Darlene -- and whenever we finished a big copy project, we would wander around and pretend like we were busy, because we couldn't handle any more copying. Our office had a lot of corridors that were filled with boxes. There were empty rooms. The whole thing was like a rabbit warren. Anyway, one day we found this room that had a door we had never noticed before because it was behind some boxes. We decided to go through because we didn't have anything else to do, and we thought it would be fun to get baked in the stairwell. Nobody really cared about stairs in those days because it was before 9/11, so people couldn't imagine why you would ever have to walk down fifty flights or whatever."
"So we moved the boxes and went through. We cracked open the door with some cardboard so we wouldn't get locked in the stairwell. It was almost completely dark in there -- maybe there was a light a few floors down in addition to what was coming through the door -- but we weren't afraid. We were just relieved to be away from the copy machine. It was the middle of the afternoon and it seemed like a good time to get baked. That was our plan: smoke a little -- just to take away the copy machine jitters -- and then maybe go have some coffee."
"Maybe ten minutes later we were feeling pretty relaxed, when all of a sudden we heard these noises coming from a few floors below us. Sort of muffled, raspy, shuffling sounds of big pieces of furniture being moved around. The only reason it was remarkable was because it was coming from one of the dead floors, which made us speculate that a new company might be moving in. Something about it made me nervous, but Darlene wanted to go take a look, and so we crept down, maybe three flights. The whole time the sound kept getting louder, so we knew we were at the right place when we reached the door."
"By this point I wanted to turn around, but Darlene insisted on pushing through. We ended up in this little foyer or vestibule that had glass walls, which meant that -- in theory -- we should have been able to see the office behind us, but it was dark, so we couldn't see anything. But you could tell there was stuff being moved around -- it was sort of like gray-on-black -- which was very unnerving to say the least. I was ready to go but Darlene wanted to go through and see what was going on. Except when she put her hand on the door to push through, this man stepped out of the gloom and put his foot against the door so that she couldn't push it open. He didn't seem angry or anything, it was his way of telling us that we didn't belong there. And as soon as it happened, Darlene and I turned around and went -- or ran -- back up to our office, where we shut the door and put the boxes back. I remember feeling hypnotized, because it was like Darlene and I knew exactly what to do and didn't have to say anything to each other. Of course we were also a little baked. (Laughs.) And we didn't say anything until we were back at the copy machine and saw that light from under the cover and it was like we both knew we had seen something very strange. I remember the way she looked at me and she didn't even have to ask because I knew what she was thinking, and it was about the man. She said something like 'was he....' and I just said 'yes,' because it was true, but we couldn't talk about it because it didn't make any sense. We went back into the stairwell a few times after that but we never heard -- or saw -- anything again. Darlene thought we imagined the whole thing, but I don't see how two people can have the same hallucination, can you?"
Pictures taken in Fort Tryon Park on August 6, 2016. Text excerpted from The #Gods Project: A Training Manual (Section 2, "Interviews with the Institutionalized.")
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08/06/2016
ORDER HERE
A RADICAL NEW MYTH ABOUT SEX, FAITH, AND THOSE OF US WHO WILL NEVER DIE
A young boy wanders into the woods of Harlem and witnesses the abduction of his sister by a glowing creature. Forty years later, now working as a New York City homicide detective, Gus is assigned to a case in which he unexpectedly succumbs to a vision that Helen is still alive. To find her, he embarks on an uorthodox investigation that leads to an ancient civilization of gods and the people determined to bring them back.
In this colossal new novel from the author of The Metropolis Case, the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice collides with a new religion founded by three corporate office workers, creating something beautiful, illogical, and overwhelming. Part sex manifesto, part religious text, part Manhattan noir—with a dose of deadly serious, internet inspired satire—#gods is a sprawling inquest into the nature of faith and resistance in the modern world. With each turn of the page, #gods will leave you increasingly reborn.
Praise for #gods
“#gods is a mystery, an excavation of myths, an index of modern life, a gay coming-of-age story, an office satire, a lyrical fever dream, a conspiracy. One of the most ambitious novels in recent memory—and a wild, possibly transformative addition to the canon of gay literature—it contains multitudes, and seethes with brilliance.” —Mark Doten, author of The Infernal
“Matthew Gallaway’s #gods is a novel so brilliant, so funny, so full of strange and marvelous things, I couldn’t stop writing OMG WTF I <3 THIS SO MUCH in its margins. It’s rare to find a novel that so dazzlingly reinvigorates age-old meditations on faith and f&!*ing, art and eros. Luminous, enterprising, and sublimely cheeky, #gods tells the story, the myth, the dream of the human soul in all its glorious complexity.” —Suzanne Morrison, author of Yoga Bitch
“Matthew Gallaway’s storytelling manages to be both dreamy and serious; lean and luxurious. His words carry an incantatory power of mythic storytelling where beauty and savagery wrap around each other like bright threads in a gorgeous tapestry.” —Natasha Vargas-Cooper, author of Mad Men Unbuttoned: A Romp Through 1960s America
“If the ancient gods were just like us, only more so, then the same could be said for this strange, wonderful book, in which the mundane sorrows and small triumphs of very ordinary lives glow ever so slightly around the edges, sometimes quite literally. At once an oddly romantic send-up of dead-end office culture and an offbeat supernatural procedural, #gods is terrifically weird, melancholy, sexy, and charming.” —Jacob Bacharach, author of The Bend of the World
'It’s to the credit of Matthew Gallaway’s enchanting, often funny first novel that it doesn’t require a corresponding degree of obsession from readers, but may leave them similarly transported: the book is so well written — there’s hardly a lazy sentence here — and filled with such memorable lead and supporting players that it quickly absorbs you into its worlds.'
-- The New York Times
Music: Death Culture at Sea and Saturnine
Listen or download songs and records from my indie-rock past with Saturnine here and Death Culture at Sea here.
Music Video: Remembrance of Things Past
Watch the rock opera Remembrance of Things Past written and performed by Saturnine and Frances Gibson, starring Bennett Madison and Sheila McClear.
Video: The Chaos Detective
The Chaos Detective is a series about a man searching for 'identity' as he completes assignments from a mysterious organization. Watch the first episode (five parts) on YouTube.