BASTILLE DAY, 2023 — By Jacob Seferian

artwork by Sonia Redfern

Once, at a dirty old dive with wooden floors painted black where we were the only people old enough to remember the Soulja Boy dance, a friend told me, in so many words, that I was talented and should cool it with the drugs so I’d live to actualize a literary output.

“I see you as a sort of Anaïs Nin.” Which fell on deaf ears since I was already high and I didn’t know who that was. I figured there's always tomorrow for dead Europeans, and tonight felt like art enough. 

Only a few months later I would be in Paris. It was Bastille Day and the city’s streets were crowded with revelers, more than usual, and to my surprise some men were flirting with me, despite my being too fat, too loud, too American. The only French poet I’ve read is Baudelaire, therefore I understood that I should have been lifting up their skirts and sucking their uncut cocks, but I couldn’t get into it. Stateside I am not a choosy fucker so my newfound discernment unsettled me.

When I returned from Paris, I started a job in Williamsburg, once a predominantly working-class Puerto Rican neighborhood in Brooklyn, now a beacon of yuppie distaste, and, coincidentally, the preferred home of French expats. I spend my days serving skinny women who shun deodorant and arrogant men who demand their champagne ice cold and always tip poorly. I don’t want to have sex with these people either! Life can be cruel.

Last week I saw a placard about some guy named Leonard James Hiller, who was forced to flee Germany, according to the signage, at fifteen. (I presume it had something to do with Nazis.) He moved to England and fought in WWII and then eventually came to Brooklyn and now there’s this placard in his honor outside a building of luxury condos in Greenpoint with shitty Jackson Pollock dupes hanging in the lobby.

Perhaps this is the best we can hope for, and I shouldn’t be so hard on the French. After all, they have fewer modern luxury condos. And good wine. And good cheese. And nice clothes. And they respect art. I should have savored those uncut cocks. They don’t make placards for people who don’t.

Jacob Seferian lives and works in New York City.