Bugsy & Other Stories - Softcover

Frumkin, Rafael

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1982189762 ISBN 13: 9781982189761

Verlag: Simon & Schuster, 2024

Inhaltsangabe

Longlisted for the 2024 Story Prize

From the author of Confidence and The Comedown comes a wildly imaginative story collection about queerness, neurodivergence, sexuality, and self-discovery.

Frumkin’s latest book is a deliciously entertaining collection of five genre-defying stories that range from downright hilarious to brilliantly unhinged. Taken together, they celebrate a wide variety of human experiences.

In the title story, a queer young adult with bipolar disorder drops out of college in a fog of depression, aimlessly drifting between maintaining their job at a fast food restaurant and dodging their mom’s texts. But when they fall in with a group of sex workers starring in BDSM films, they find radical freedom, love, and community. In other stories, we meet a psychiatrist whose meticulously-maintained life is upended by an Alex Trebek-like voice in his head, an e-girl celebrity who is being courted by a delusional fan, a young boy on the spectrum at odds with a neurotypical world determined to “cure” him, and an elderly woman whose consciousness is being transformed by her oncoming death.

With incredible insight, compassion, and honesty, Frumkin unravels each story with tantalizing precision. Sexy and raw—and compulsively readable—this collection offers a look at our innermost selves as we all try to make sense of the world and our place in it.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Rafael Frumkin is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the Medill School of Journalism. Her first novel, The Comedown, was published by Henry Holt in 2018, and her second novel, Confidence, was published by Simon & Schuster in 2023. She lives with her partner, two cats, and one dog in Carbondale, Illinois, where she is an assistant professor of creative writing at Southern Illinois University.

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1. Bugsy Bugsy
I DROPPED OUT OF COLLEGE at twenty. I got so depressed the words blurred on the pages of the PDFs I was supposed to be reading, even when I printed them out. Books were out of the question: I read the same sentence over and over again and got through a thirty-page chapter in a week and a half. All food tasted grainy, mealy, gray. I stopped going to the dining hall and ordered pizza instead, which tasted the same as the food in the dining hall. I emailed professors saying I was sick and they responded kindly, offering to set up meetings during their office hours. My philosophy professor said she’d meet me at the local coffee shop over the weekend if that was more convenient. She added that “we all run into hard times, especially in college, when we’re away from our support systems,” and that I should please let her know if I needed to be connected with a counselor at the student health center.

Soon I was too broke to keep ordering pizza so I stopped eating. I let the professor help me set up an appointment at the student health center, where I saw a therapist named Dr. John Neely, PsyD. Dr. John Neely asked about my childhood trauma and I told him I had none. He said to be honest with him, everything I said was confidential. So I told him that both my parents had cheated on the other. He asked if they were divorced and I didn’t want to disappoint him but I told him the truth, which was that they were still together.

“All mental illness stems from childhood trauma,” he said. “You have to understand that.”

He told me to come see him the next week but I didn’t. I didn’t get out of bed for a week. All the professors emailed me. I had more than one email from the same professor, the French one I had five times a week, with the words How are you doing? and then Where are you? and then This many unexcused absences is going to result in a failing grade. I looked up at the ceiling of my dorm room, which I shared with a girl named Abby who stuck little plastic diamonds around the contours of her eyeliner. She didn’t talk to me much but she didn’t seem to mind me. On the ceiling was a crack that made me think of a single vein traveling the length of a body. I followed the crack from where it began above my bed to where it ended above Abby’s bed. I thought of blood moving through a body. I thought of the fragility of bodies. A body crumpling to the ground from a blood clot in the brain. A body crushed under a fallen tree. All the ways a body could kill itself or be killed.

I didn’t shower for two weeks. Abby started staying over at her boyfriend’s on the weekends, and then during the week. I got out of bed twice a day to pee. The rest of the day I watched Netflix on my parents’ account, shows I couldn’t remember watching minutes after finishing them. My mom called me and I didn’t pick up. My dad called me and I didn’t pick up. Eventually Abby told someone—I have no idea who—and a “wellness check” was performed. Campus security with chunky belts and walkie talkies. But by then the semester was over and I’d already failed all my classes.

I was placed on academic probation. I lost my partial scholarship. I told my parents I didn’t want to go back and my mom told me that was OK and my dad said, “Why are you saying that’s OK? What are you teaching her?” And my mom said, “She’s clearly suffering.” And my dad said, “She’s already cost us a small fortune.” And then he looked at me and said, “If you drop out of college, you can’t come back home, do you understand? We’re not going to support you anymore.” My mom cried and begged him not to be so harsh with me. My dad shrugged and said, “Play it as it lays.”

I wound up in Chicago, two hours north of my college. Someone I kind of knew from college named Jules had an apartment in Uptown that she was sharing with four people. I had a “room” in the living room created by hanging bedsheets for walls, with a mattress on the floor. Jules had been two years ahead of me in college, graduating around the time I flunked out. I knew her from a production of Edward Albee’s Seascape the drama department had put on where she played one of the lizards. I had done some tech for the play but didn’t really like it and never did it again. Jules wanted to get famous doing improv in Chicago and so did all her friends. Instead, they were all nannies or dog walkers, making googly-eyed gourds and SMASH THE PATRIARCHY needlepoints for Fiverr and Etsy while working as “teaching artists” in after-school theater programs. I got a job at Oly’s, an all-night burger-and-quesadillas-and-gyros place on Granville. I made $11 an hour. My mom texted me every day and my dad every week and I sent the shortest responses possible. At night when Jules and her friends were out or asleep, I made little welts in my arm with a pocketknife. I grew my nails out and scratched into my wrists, seeing how close I could get to a vein. I figured that one day I would be all alone, my phone turned off and the door locked, and I would finally get close enough.

I was a virgin. I had never even kissed anyone of any gender. One time in high school a guy tried to finger me in his car and I punched him in the head and ran home. He never said anything about it because he was the kind of guy who’d be embarrassed about being beaten up by a girl.

When she did talk to me—or rather, at me—Abby had described how big her boyfriend’s dick was and how great it felt inside her. She had a nickname for his dick: Dwayne Johnson. She’d asked me how many dicks I’d sucked and I lied and said twenty-four. She’d looked worried and told me she could tell I was lying. She’d said that if I stopped dressing like the guys in Pineapple Express maybe I’d get some. She’d said, “I honestly think you might be too messed up to fuck. You need to get that fixed.”

Jules had a boyfriend who lived in Pilsen, which took hours to get to by train, but she had threesomes all the time, sometimes with her friends, sometimes with other people she knew from her improv classes. The living room was next to Jules’s bedroom, and I could hear her through her wall and my bedsheet. If the noise of the fucking made me feel bad, I took the pocketknife to my arm. Sometimes I took it to the tops of my thighs.

One night I got off work early and Jules was in the apartment alone. All her friends were at the screening of an independent film. They all knew the director but Jules was in a fight with him so she’d stayed home. Jules was sitting on the couch looking at her phone. She was wearing a tartan crop top and black jeans with a hole in the right knee. Her hair was up but a strand had fallen loose and hung next to the curve of her jawline. I hadn’t noticed her jawline before, but now I couldn’t stop looking at it.

“Hey,” she said. “You busy tonight?”

It was nice of her to pretend I was ever busy. “No, actually.”

“Do you know what a speakeasy is?”

“Like, in the twenties?”

She laughed, so I laughed too.

“Yeah, I mean, that’s sort of the concept behind them. Except we don’t need them for alcohol anymore.”

I nodded.

“There’s this one in Albany Park. You can only get into it if...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Simon & Schuster
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2024
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1982189762
• ISBN 13: 9781982189761
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 224
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar