Bugsy & Other Stories
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Synopsis
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.
Release date: February 13, 2024
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Print pages: 256
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Bugsy & Other Stories
Rafael Frumkin
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 you know someone who’s already in. And you can only bring one guest.” She looked at her phone and began texting, briefly absorbed in some drama. Then she looked back up. “Wanna be my guest?”
The speakeasy was underneath a boring-looking liquor store on the block across from a bunch of slate-colored townhomes. Jules knocked and waited to be assessed through the peephole. A guy who was maybe in his forties opened the door, the kind of guy who would roll into my place of work around 3 a.m. after a Weezer show, and Jules said, “Kenny,” and then she said, “Don’t water the flowers,” and the guy nodded and stood aside.
Inside was what looked like a garden apartment made into a performance space: there was a three-person band playing in one corner, high-quality photos of oiled bodies having sex in another. People were walking around drinking and talking. There was a couch and two easy chairs in the center where people sat and smoked, and on the coffee table were massive, purplish nuggets of weed. The walls had been painted with Day-Glo paints: flowers and dinosaurs and elves and hairy monsters.
“Oh my god, machine elves,” Jules said, pausing at a scene of squinty-eyed elves piecing together a human body out of gears and electric wire.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Do you know what those are?”
I shrugged and gave a half nod, trying not to lie without revealing my ignorance. She smiled.
“You see those when you do DMT,” she said. “God, I wanna do DMT.”
A guy in black glasses and a T-shirt with what looked like a demon making out with a ’50s housewife came over to us. Jules hugged him and said, “Kenny!”
“Who’s this?” Kenny pointed at me.
“Oh, this is my roommate. She moved here a few months ago.”
The two of them waited for me to introduce myself, but I just nodded and half-smiled.
“OK. That’s cool,” Kenny said. “You know, everything here’s free. Like, literally. Whatever you can get your hands on, you can take.”
“Even the photos?” Jules asked.
Kenny smiled and puffed out his chest. “Even the photos,” he said. “I took them, actually.” Then he grabbed Jules’s hand and pulled her close and whispered something in her ear.
“Hey,” she said to me. “Kenny needs to show me something. Are you gonna be OK on your own for a minute?”
I worried I wasn’t going to be, but I nodded anyway.
“Cool,” she said. “I’ll be right back.”
I watched Jules and Kenny disappear into the crowd. I decided to do what I had done at parties before, which was get a drink. It was harder to get into awkward situations when you were drinking something.
The kitchen was just behind the weed couch. It was packed. The island was completely covered with liquor bottles, and people were taking and leaving them at a steady clip. A girl in a dress made of newspaper gave me a cup of what she told me was hot buttered rum. An inch of newspaper on her left boob had gotten wet and the ink was starting to run. I sipped the rum, unafraid of roofies because a girl had given it to me. It tasted thick and sweet. I stood against the wall and nodded back when people smiled at me in passing. I began to think then. I thought of drinking moonshine and going blind. I thought of drinking so much my organs would begin to shut down. I thought of getting my stomach pumped and choking on my own vomit. I drank faster.
Then there was a woman leaning against the wall next to me. She looked older than everyone else there, and her face was thin but in a glamorous way, with smile lines like Charlotte Gainsbourg. She wore a maroon velvet jacket and metal bracelets on her wrists that disappeared beneath her sleeves and reappeared as she ran her hand through the uncombed length of her hair or raised her mug to drink. Her legs were wiry and crossed at the ankles, and she wore leather shoes with massive buckles and low heels, the kind that belonged in the nineteenth century. I wanted to look at her for hours.
“Do you like it here?” she asked.
“Like, at this place?”
She tilted her head to one side. “No, like Chicago.”
I became anxious that I’d already messed up the conversation. “Yeah,” I said.
She smiled and I looked straight ahead. I could feel her gaze traveling from my feet to my face.
“I’m Vanessa,” she said.
I told her my name.
“You ever see someone and like them instantly?” she asked.
I wanted to say that I just had but instead I stayed silent and downed the last of my drink.
“Of all the people here”—she wagged her index finger across the length of the room—“I think you’re the most interesting.”
I swallowed and then barked out a laugh and then got embarrassed. I rubbed the rum from my lips with the back of my hand. “OK, well, that seems wrong.”
Vanessa smiled. “Why’s that wrong?”
“Because I’m a fuckup.”
She laughed.
“I’m going to get another drink,” I said.
“You’re very beautiful,” she said.
I felt my heart begin to race. “Are you hitting on me?” I asked. “Is this a trick?”
She shrugged.
“I’m not beautiful,” I said. My hair was boy-short, shaggy, my legs thin and my stomach thick enough that I had a small belly. I wore sneakers and skinny jeans that were too tight at my waist and, over my long-sleeved shirt, a hoodie for a mediocre metal band that Abby’s boyfriend had discarded in our dorm room.
“You are, but I’m not going to sit here arguing with you. I can’t convince you of anything. I’m just some idiot in a drug basement.”
I didn’t know how to preserve my dignity. “I am, too,” I said.
She brought the mug back to her lips. “Sure, and you’re also beautiful.”
I drained my drink. “I’m gonna go find my friend.”
She grabbed the sleeve of my hoodie and pulled a flash drive out of her back pocket. It had what looked like her name and number taped to the side. “Take this home and tell me what you think. It’s my work. Or, at least, some of it. If you like it, give me a call.”
I put it in my pocket. She looked down at my shoes, Timberlands my mom had gotten me for my nineteenth birthday.
“Do you lace those up every time? Or slip them on?”
I looked down with her. “I slip them on.”
“Yeah,” she said, and grabbed my hand and squeezed it. “I could tell.”
Kenny and Jules had taken molly and were making out in the Lyft. They made me sit in front with the driver, who tried to talk to me about how he never went south of Roosevelt because “thugs live on the South Side.” When we got home, Kenny and Jules tore off their clothes in the hallway and he started fucking her against the wall, his pants at his ankles. I watched for a minute, my hand around the flash drive in my pocket. It was like a video of praying mantises I’d seen in the fifth grade, the male’s body bobbing a little up and down while the female stayed relatively still before biting his head off. Jules’s face screwed up when her eyes met mine.
“What the fuck?” she said. “Stop looking, seriously.”
I stopped looking and went into my room, where I could hear Jules moaning. Eventually they went into Jules’s room and the moaning got a little more muffled. It felt like the barometric pressure had suddenly dropped in my head. Involuntarily, I imagined Kenny stabbing Jules, Jules stabbing Kenny. I imagined stabbing myself, stabbing them both. Was it possible to accidentally stab someone? Was I someone with such awfulness inside of me that I was capable of accidentally stabbing someone? I used the pocketknife to make a little slice in my forearm. I took off my pants and made another one on my thigh. I felt sick and restless, like a swarm of bees was pressing to be released from under my skin. I got a knife from the block in the kitchen and brought it back to my room and set it next to me. The blood from my forearm and thigh was starting to drip. I didn’t do anything about it. My mom had texted me I love you sweets. I hope you’re having a good night. I turned my phone off.
I opened my laptop. I had watched everything on Netflix. I had streamed every movie and show that wasn’t on Netflix. There was nothing left. There was no use for my laptop. Might as well infect it with the malware that was probably on Vanessa’s flash drive. The laptop would make screeching dying-robot sounds that would hopefully drown out the noise of the fucking.
The flash drive was called OPUSES and there was one folder inside: TO WATCH. I clicked on it and the thumbnails of a bunch of mp4s showed up with names like TheInquisition.mp4 and AnInquiry.mp4. I thought about Vanessa again, thin in her velvet jacket, and imagined her filming a beheading like ISIS. I pressed my thumb into the knife and drew a little blood. I felt disgusting, like the kind of person who would lie about being pregnant or steal change from a homeless person. I decided I would watch one video and then try to find a vein.
I chose NotesFromUnderground.mp4. The screen read VANESSA REDWIRE PRODUCTIONS. There was the thick staticky sound of video without music. Then the title screen vanished and Vanessa was sitting on a folding chair in shorts and a tank top in a room with soft white light. Behind her was some kind of metal frame, like a medieval torture rack but friendly looking. Vanessa was beaming. She crossed and uncrossed her legs.
“How are you feeling about this?” said a man’s voice behind the camera. It, like the rack, was friendly.
“Amazing,” said Vanessa without hesitation.
The man laughed good-naturedly. “I’m glad to hear that.”
Vanessa adjusted the straps of her tank top. She was acting at least ten years younger than the woman I’d met at the speakeasy.
“Can you tell me when this started?”
“Well, as a kid I always wondered what it would be like to be tied up. And then as a teenager I wanted the room quiet and dark while I made myself come. And then in my twenties I bought a sex swing to use with my boyfriend but…”
They both laughed.
“I’m guessing that didn’t work out so well?” the man said.
Vanessa grabbed the edges of her seat and rocked back and forth. “Obviously not.”
Then there was a cut and Vanessa was in a full-body black suit made of what looked like latex. Something about her bare head made me feel like I was watching an explorer-queen, someone beautiful and regal who didn’t care about her beauty when she was cutting through thickets in an uncharted wood. The creases at either side of her mouth were softer in the white light. A black-haired woman in a shiny latex dress and very high heels was standing next to her holding a leather hood with buckles on all sides and a hole for the mouth. Vanessa stood still as the woman put the hood over her head. The woman had a hard time getting it on, and Vanessa, the woman, and the man behind the camera all laughed. Once the hood was on, the woman began to buckle the buckles and asked repeatedly if the buckles were too tight or too loose. Vanessa directed her and the woman responded promptly to her direction, a look of worried compassion on her face. Then the hood was secure and Vanessa was giving a thumbs-up to the camera.
Another cut, and Vanessa had been tied to the frame and was completely suspended. She pretended to be struggling. She made moaning noises as she struggled. The woman had gone off-screen but now appeared on-screen again. She was holding a vibrator bigger than the one I’d seen on Abby’s nightstand. She asked Vanessa if Vanessa liked being tied up and Vanessa nodded. She asked Vanessa if Vanessa wanted to come and Vanessa nodded again. The woman held the vibrator to Vanessa’s crotch and Vanessa’s muffled moans intensified. Then the woman took the vibrator away and said, “Not yet,” and Vanessa whimpered. The woman laughed. She turned the vibrator on again and traced Vanessa’s breasts over the latex. She traced the inside of Vanessa’s thigh. She teased her like this for a few minutes. Then she pressed the vibrator to Vanessa’s crotch and Vanessa’s muffled voice said, “Oh, oh, oh!” and I didn’t really notice what happened next because I was feeling better than I’d felt in a long time, something bright and colorful was flooding my brain, and there were stars on the ceiling, and my whole body was shaking.
I watched all twenty-four videos in the TO WATCH folder that night and then started watching them again and fell asleep to the fifth. I had seen porn before: on my parents’ computer as a kid, when TorontoDude87 sent me a picture of a woman licking an erect dick on AOL Instant Messenger. When my friend Trish had dared me to google “hardcore porn” sophomore year of high school and we’d watched a video of a man thrusting into and choking a woman who wheezed, “Thank you, daddy” after she’d swallowed his cum. When Abby showed me her “dream,” which was a video of a woman on all fours with one guy’s dick in her mouth and another guy’s dick in her ass. I didn’t understand porn, and on the rare occasion that the subject of porn came up in my parents’ house, it was referred to as “degrading” and “obscene.” I decided not to watch it because, I told myself, I didn’t want to be involved in something that was degrading and obscene, but really it was because I didn’t like it. The women always acted scared and worshipped the men. There was always a close-up shot of the man coming on the woman’s stomach or boobs or face. Sometimes the women would come and scream and the men would put their hands over the women’s mouths and tell them to be quiet, especially if it was one of those storylines where the woman was cheating on her husband while he was in the next room.
Trish had told me she could make herself come without touching herself. All she had to do was think of her boyfriend naked and cross her legs together really tight. A lot of people’s boyfriends made them come multiple times in one session: the highest count I’d ever heard was thirty-one, which I didn’t believe. At night while my parents watched PBS, I lay in my bed wearing the oversized T-shirt I’d gotten from sleepaway camp and no underwear and I’d rub myself, thinking of Jake Gyllenhaal and Channing Tatum. When they first appeared in my mind, they were fully clothed. I tried to undress them but for some reason I couldn’t imagine them without clothes. Sometimes they had my dad’s upper body when he walked around shirtless in his towel after a shower (in which case I stopped touching myself immediately and pulled the shirt over my knees), and sometimes they had the oversized biceps and thighs of bodybuilders. They were usually in midconversation with me when I imagined them saying their lines from Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time or Magic Mike XXL, and I felt rude for interrupting them. So I tried to imagine Trish’s boyfriend instead, his peach fuzz and high-tops, but that was somehow worse than imagining my dad’s shirtless body. Then I tried imagining erect dicks, but whenever I tried that I’d start laughing because I’d be thinking of bratwurst or elephant’s trunks. By the time I left for college, I’d stopped trying altogether.
Vanessa’s videos were different from anything I’d ever seen. The women had ideas and Vanessa let them act the ideas out. Rope, leather, buckles, straitjackets, Lycra, latex, gas masks, ball gags, rubber gloves, hoods, vibrators, swings, Saran Wrap. And when the women came, no one told them not to make noise. And other women made them come. And they talked to each other, told each other their ideas, said they were feeling great about each other’s ideas.
For a few days, I woke up, watched the videos, went to work for nine hours, came home, watched the videos. I felt sick and dizzy when I was away from the videos. I felt like I was falling in love. I barely saw Jules and her friends—I barely took the time to take my shoes off in the hallway before running to my room, closing the bedsheets around me, and watching the videos. Sometimes I would come up for air—get a glass of water, pee, change from my work clothes into my pajamas—and wonder what it meant that I liked the videos. Before I could draw any conclusions, I’d whisper You like the videos because you like the videos, and then I’d plunge back in again. I came constantly, involuntarily.
I read an article online about a serial rapist and pedophile who remembered being five years old and fantasizing about the way Jabba the Hutt put Princess Leia in shackles. “When you’re five and already thinking about shackles, where do you go from there?” the article asked. I thought about destroying the flash drive. I thought about telling Jules and asking if she could help me. But ultimately I made an incision in my left forearm and told myself to stop thinking about it. When I couldn’t stop thinking about it, I decided I owed it to myself to call Vanessa.
I called on a Friday, my only day off, in the morning. When she answered, her voice was foggy and tired. She had either just woken up or been up all night. I told her I was the girl from the speakeasy.
“Beautiful girl,” she said. “How are you?”
I told her I was fine.
“Did you watch the videos?”
I told her I had.
“Very nice. What did you think of them?”
I was silent. I had no idea how I could begin to say the things I wanted to say.
“Well,” she said dreamily. “I know you did, because you’re calling. I don’t give flash drives to a lot of people. If I did, people would think I was a pervert.”
She laughed but the word destabilized something in me and I felt myself beginning to sweat.
“I’m guessing you want more of them,” she said.
I could barely say yes, but I did. She gave me an address. I promised I’d be there next Friday.
The house was in Humboldt Park, a Chicago Greystone with a neon-pink-and-green palm tree filling a corner of the lower left-hand window. Someone was smoking on the porch, a blond girl in a striped hoodie. She was frowning at her phone. When she turned so I could see her face, I recognized her from Don’tKnockItTilYouveTriedIt.mp4, in which the blond girl wore a latex catsuit and put her feet up on the back of a woman in a full-body cast who was serving as her ottoman. In the video, the blond girl wore full makeup and what you could see of her hair was shiny and thick. Now she wore smudged mascara, and strands of her hair stuck out from under her hood like straw.
I was worried the blond girl would see me and think I looked suspicious, so I checked my phone, too. I had no new messages and no new notifications on any social media app. I scrolled through my own camera roll: covert pictures of other people’s dogs, a poorly lit picture of some plastic-wrapped food lump whose label read HAM AND RESINS, a picture I’d taken of my arm right after a fresh cut. The blood had swelled to the surface and begun to trickle out the edges, which was always something I liked to watch. I looked at it for too long and then, feeling as though I was about to be found out, put it away.
“Hey!” the blond girl was shouting. Her voice was hoarse and deep, not at all how I’d expected it to sound. “Are you watching me?”
I shook my head and halfway raised my arms as though I was about to be arrested. “I’m here to see Vanessa,” I said, quieter than I probably needed to. I crossed the street and stood in the front yard and pulled the flash drive out of my pocket, my hand shaking as I did. “She gave me this.”
The blond girl looked at me skeptically. She extended her arm and I gave her the flash drive. She looked it over, rubbing her finger over Vanessa’s name and number.
“Who are you?” she asked.
I said my name.
“That’s a horrible name,” she said. “I’ve never heard of you.”
“I’m sorry.”
She smiled and then wheezed out a laugh. “Thanks for apologizing. Vanessa’s not here right now.”
This sent an explosion of adrenaline through my stomach and chest. The buzzing beneath my skin picked back up in full force.
“I’m Andie,” she said. “Spelled with an i-e.”
“Nice to meet you.&
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