Will Lyman — Portfolio

“Part of it is the distance you put there yourself,” S. said to me between sips of his Aperol spritz, which Parkside serves in pint glasses. Together we sat in the outdoor dining hut, watching Citibikes whizz between us and the bar in the thin safety of the bike lane. The bar’s windows were filled with neon signs: advertising Brooklyn Brewery and Miller Lite. Their psychedelic glow made its way across the bike lane and onto our table, smearing color on the several dozen gays who surrounded us. S. and I were having a conversation about estrangement, and, more specifically, what to do with it. 

It was on our minds for a simple reason: we were the youngest, and the most unestablished, in a group of late-twenty-somethings. We’d been invited to follow them to drinks after a gallery opening for a writer we both loved. All our new friends were impeccably dressed and high achieving. Through conversation, we learn that they have made documentaries, written novels, edited those novels, and so on. We simply weren’t on their level, however fiercely we hoped to be. 

“We’re all from the West coast,” one of the gays says as he sits down with us. He’s wearing a brown leather jacket that’s tightly tailored and undeniably stylish. Then, I have to chime in and break the news that I’m from the midwest, puncturing the moment of relatability and feeling guilty for doing so.

Perhaps I’m glimpsing the terror that lies within social interactions: to search for commonality, to search for a conversational groove, and find none. To leave feeling alien, underdeveloped, or inept. 

As we chatted with them we learned things we couldn’t yet know (which city in Italy was the most beautiful, how mean people were in Berlin nightclubs, and which weekend was best to go to Fire Island during Pride month). They were the tender possibility of community—people who created things and saw them through. To us, the high society.

 S. and I sat on the outer edge of the group, so I was presented with the united visual of all them. A sparkling, delicious image of what our lives could eventually resemble. 

Beforehand, we attended the opening of Brontez Purnell’s art showcase. Brontez, a writer and performer we both admire, is debuting a new show about truth and the performance of the self, whereby dancers––some naked––move across xerox copies, obscuring and manipulating the text on them, asking the audience to participate, and in the process dramatizing the mutation of truth inherent in our memories and self-conceptions. In other words, the performance was trying to communicate that in trying to figure out who we are, we lie to ourselves and we lie to others. All writing, in some sense, is parafictional––it expouses meaning out of experience. 

A large part of the exhibition was interactive. During the performance, audience members were asked to involve themselves in the show: to hold props or emulate the actions of the performers. It was this interactivity that supported another tenet of the exhibit: that spectators participate in this fictionalization, in this formation of a literary or artistic “alter ego.”

Of course, I was yet to understand the context behind the movement, so all I see initially is nakedness and paper. It felt wrong to admit this to myself, but I was slightly scandalized. This, of course, was the intent. The show was stylish and punk and everything it needed to be.

A child of the classics, often I find myself skeptical of experimental art––falling into the easy view that punk art exists just to be different, that it’s more style than substance. But my venture into this ideology is reigned in by S., who works with experimental artists, and more importantly, is one himself. “Experimental art has to exist for more traditional forms to exist. There has to be a space to push boundaries and play with mediums,” he tells me, “That’s how traditional art is secured. It’s also how it’s expanded.” I sip my Aperol pint while he continues. “Someone has to be on the outside.”

S. greatly admires Brontez, and it is evident when he sits with us at Parkside and we chat for a moment: about drugs and sex and such. I can see in S.’s face how much the proximity, the recognition, means to him. He turns to me after Brontez is gone. “Moment for life,” he whispers. He’s brushed shoulders with an idol.

But on his face I catch a look of fear, as if his wonder had turned into intimidation. Minutes later, when the conversation that we aren’t a part of resume, S. whispers “I wish they were more interested in me.”

Thus, when I turned to S. after my second drink—which I’ve learned is the threshold that begins my ramblings—and told him that I felt very far away from it all, he decided to humor me. That’s when he reported, with a stony prediction as if he’d said it before in his head, that I share in the responsibility for my alienation. That part of estrangement is the distance I put there. 

“I mean this physical estrangement,” S. gestured to our separate seating, a few feet away from the nearest bundle of conversation. “Is it serendipity that we sat here or instinct?” 

I didn’t have an answer for him, because it was likely instinct that we sat slightly separate from the rest of them. It was our shared hesitation to take up space, or maybe it was the feeling of safety we could only get by being close to one another in a group of strangers. 

S. rose to get us glasses of wine, and while he was gone I thought that everyone splayed in front of me looked like a renaissance painting: all commotion and faces and busy composition. It was a thought I shared with S. when he returned, setting a thin-stemmed glass in front of me. 

As if plucking the thread of our last words out of the air, he asked me how it would feel to be inside the painting, to be one of the faces dwarfed by its companions. “Because it’s nice to look at a painting, to be outside of it observing. But if we were in the center, we’d lose that security. People would be all around us. We would have blind spots.”

I began to explain how I often wondered if, at some point along the way, the estrangement that was forced onto me by where I grew up, by my statistical isolation, became who I was. “I wonder if this is just who I am,” I tell him, gesturing at everything before me, just out of reach. 

I wondered if I had learned to separate myself—either by physical distance or by putting on some sort of act (for I was often the funny one, telling jokes to keep people at bay). I wondered if estrangement was all I knew. I wondered if it was possible to have enough of a good time, if I could ever feel connected to those around me.

“Well it’s not just you,” S. said to me, giving me a needed dose of reality. He explained that the feeling will pass, that it does whenever he feels it. For example, he says he felt it most recently at the launch party for my college magazine. “In the room of people I don’t know, I go to that crazy place of ‘who are we and why are we here.’”

And maybe this is queerness: to instinctually position yourself as extraneous, as alien, to things as they are presented to you. Be it sexuality or style or social structures, perhaps a comfort of queerness is to be the lurker in the party, to be questioning it all.

Observing the renaissance painting, as I now thought of it, was a symptom of the hour. We felt this way now because in this space we were young, we had less in common. In another hour, perhaps we’d stumble into a bar that’s less intimidating, that’s safer, and, once there, we’ll no longer question our place in the room. To try and decide that we are inherently different from everyone around us is to embellish a momentary feeling, it is to perform the same fictionalization Brontez played with in his performance. 

We say our goodbyes and give kisses on the cheek. There’s talk of another bar, another party, but we’re weary of overstaying our welcome. Everyone is lovely and sends us off kindly, but still inside me was the fear that I’d feel this way––this estranged––more often than I wouldn’t.