“George Bush can kiss Laura Dinnebeil’s Bronx High School of Science ass! So can women who read Lucky to figure out how to dress, and pretentious academics who read Ms. Dinnebeil’s work to figure out how to think”. Ms. Dinnebeil’s work has been featured in NY Press, Erato, Locus Media Monthly and TimeOut NY. She has also appeared on Comedy Central and is an accomplished screenwriter/comic. www.myspace.com/laurelbeauty

Laura Dinnebiel

The New Stupid: The Brooklyn Bourgeois

“Time goes by so slowly, so slowly….” At first Madonna’s song is a public disownment of age, but then I realized the lyrics were about waiting impatiently for a man’s phone call. It is an unpredictable double entendre and, as usual, her great talent merits a nod for brutal feminist vision. She defies the patriarchy on a monumental scale, making people dance to women’s nightmares. The NY Post reduces her to a tacky hag who wears a nun’s habit on Halloween, but Christ, the queen of pop keeps me addicted. The addiction is to a tortured power-womb, to some Hera-like goddess; the most unpopular one. In the pain of waiting is a danceable beat. She makes gauche moments in life sexy. Time goes by so slowly as New York has changed quickly, over the last ten years, into a city of emotionally with-holding conformists, most notably in Brooklyn . No Madonnas live in Carroll Gardens, just babies and their mothers who don’t hold the door for you at the Korean deli. See, if they did, it would mean their Diesel-jeaned, pilates-toned asses weren’t worth their million dollar brownstone. It’s the new aristocracy.

My gauche orange boots, a prize I bought at Daffy’s for seventeen dollars, proved to be objects of the devil one night. I could barely walk a block in the fluorescent high heels without stopping to ease the pain in my feet. I stumbled back from my date in ankle socks, leaning on brick buildings along Thompson Street as my toes stung, holding my leather fuck-me’s in one hand. Young men talked on their cell phones and barely looked up. They probably thought I was a drag queen on a bender. As I descended the stairs to the subway casually, looking straight ahead in my socks, I felt a sisterhood with the pavement, with the blackness of the tunnel. I now had no sole to separate my flesh from a walkway that had been stepped on by millions of financiers, homeless people, teenagers, pedophiles and failed actresses. I was in the stream, on top of the stream, walking shoeless to the Coney Island bound F. I screamed for a man to hold the door as I made the train. Hopping in, I sat to my left, my orange boots the stars of the subway car. It was Friday night and I noticed none of the women wore high heels. They all wore soft brown Aerosoles. One seated girl in her twenties knitted with utmost seriousness.

I got strange looks in Brooklyn . I put my boots back on in the subway station because there was water all over the stairs and floor. As I bent over to slip my feet in the towering high heels, young pedestrians looked at me with ridicule. Women flipped their long hair vainly like show horses who had never left Connecticut, and glared at my ass. This was on Smith Street , where I used to cop dope by sticking my hand through a hole in the wall, to then feel a nickel bag bursting with urban marijuana in my fingers. Now, women stroll past French restaurants with lifeless eyes. They all have natural brown hair and wear olive, their clothes deliberately lack invention. The exceptions are the fat girls who work at American Apparel near Degraw Street . One had the balls to wear those gold lame pants with a green tube top the other day, a head band crowning her wide ass and huge cleavage. Style started disappearing from New York in 1995. It has continued to degenerate as high rises have emerge aggressively, pushing the CBGB’s, the Tonics, and other mom and pop businesses out of hope for merciful rents. Everyone notices that, but fail to admit Manhattan has evolved into a dirty, soulless island of pavement, where people are pining for culture, but destroy it as soon as it blooms. And Brooklyn is decidedly small minded. The white people didn’t move there to escape their bourgeois family, they moved here to recreate it. They’re pleasant faced, moneyed human cockroaches, whom no one can exterminate.

Then, of course, there is the unfathomably successful Brooklyn Industry chain that has made the color shit-brown a hit. They sell the bags the girl who picked her nose in fifth grade carried- functional sacs printed with daisies. The women who buy them are slightly overweight from eating rich food in Carroll Gardens restaurants. They wear jackets that fall right below the hips and square pants, because their idea of sexy is pretending vaginas don’t exist. These are the assholes who glared at me as I walked down Smith Street in ankle socks.

Or sparsely populated the restaurants on Smith Street , gossiping about 401K’s or their neurotic dogs when not lifting a fork to stuff their mouths with a buffalo burger. Either they teach urban planning at a city college, or take the graduate class. The husband works in finance. The parents own a string of hospices in Nevada and pay for her brownstone on Union Street . That’s how aforementioned chubby, pretentious girl has the money to shop at Smith Street novelty shops, purchasing accessories such as a brown-green plastic lamp. Items marketed as contemporary, but are just ugly. The colors lack purity and briskness like the buyer’s mind. It expresses emotional cowardice.

Hence my animosity towards the local population as I carried my orange boots up the block. I was unable to wear them as an indirect result of these dime-a-dozen pod people. They, as a collective unconscious, had crippled me. Their culture prevented me from moving. To them, my deviant mind was better exploited for corporate marketing than for myself. I was an inspiration for Viacom. A plot twist in a Pixar cartoon. I am nothing but a quirky character, a horny, irrelevant narcissist, who happened to self-actualize herself from a sheltered, sexually timid Jew into a sleek, obnoxious artist by luck. They put their foot out just as I stepping into the sunlight of success, blurring the boundaries of intellectual property, as is the phenomenon of modern business and, as a result, my ankles aren’t strong enough to wear racy boots….

Milk the victim and smile like a gracious sore

When you wander the streets

looking for illegal sunshine,

I’m thinking about the mutual sexual harassment.

Are her breasts,

succulent like the juice of marijuana,

you, sipping to innocently get high,

as a flawed disciple of God?

Your eyes closed,

because when horny,

you are always shy.

My breasts are foolish

metaphors for intimacy.

Time alone to meditate

on each other’s inadequacies.

Your pain rings like a bell,

sometimes I hear it.

sometimes I sing it.

I could love you for a thousand stone-aged years,

or never again,

but if I ignored my heart now,

I would condemn her to an eternity of strangers,

mouthing I love you behind glass..

She would milk the victim

and smile like a gracious sore.

She loves a man who slipped off the earth,

but never let go.

He never stops vanishing

because I left him battling with destiny.

R.I.P of a Masochist’s Pain

I fried an egg,

and it reminded me of how little we talk.

The butter dancing,

the yolks on fire, screaming,

“Turn me! Turn me!

You’re the only one I’ve hired!”

The eggs are begging

to get beat by the spatula,

or maybe I should cut down on Chinese porn and ginseng.

Your eyes are red,

my white ass is blue,

you don’t love me

no matter what I do.

I cry with my eyes closed,

as I hang from my nipples,

and you send your girlfriend in

to see if I tickle.

That was when it became clear,

you were not my friend,

because that bitch has no talent

at S and M.

You’ve carried me

and you have no backbone.

I am Oxy Cotton addicted

to a lighter stone.

I pine for you still,

I send you weird mail,

then when I see you out,

your face goes pale.

I fried an egg,

and it reminded me

that the dungeon opens in an hour

Sex Diplomats

I am dying inside

like a poisoned Czech Republic butterfly

that lands on dogshit by mistake;

her wings are drunk.

And you are an ebullient butterfly,

that does not know

it has a disease.

Flying for a minute century

until death smiles in the night.

How lucky you are;

I carry death in a baby’s blanket,

crouching through the streets

like a guilt ridden mother.

When I met you I was en route to a divine mistake,

I was backstroking into disaster.

But-

you are my true love.

Others are angels who explain love.

Sex diplomats from the fucking health department,

explaining the answers to algebra

as they take off their clothes.

You are my soul double,

nourished by oral sex,

purring like a demon,

who shakes out my skeleton

to make the bed.

But who the fuck knows what you do for the rest of the day.

You’re the weariest man

who is too tired to die,

resting longer than eternity

in what is rightfully my sleep.

Stealing the event before I ruin it-

the event of leaving.