Over the course of 2020, Brad Phillips and Gideon Jacobs are writing a 12-chapter "serial novella" for Autre. It will be written Exquisite Corpse style — they will alternate who writes each month's chapter, and won’t have access to the previous chapter until it has been published. Brad and Gideon have not discussed plot, structure, format, themes, characters, etc, and promise not to do so even once the project is underway. The idea is to react to each other's work, and hope the final Frankensteinian product is something that deserves to exist. If the authors like what they've made when it's done, the editors might publish it as a "zine." Installments will go up on the 15th of every month. Click here to read Chapter 2: Guillermo’s Funeral.
text by Gideon Jacobs (and Brad Phillips)
There are basically three ways to acquire a nickname.
The first way requires patience. You have to just go about your business and wait for the pack member most likely to be a nicknamer—usually a jokester, a talker, someone inclined to build intimacy via power plays disguised as teasing—to come up with your nickname. For example, say you work in an office building and the lobby floors of your office building have just been mopped, and while running to catch an elevator, you slip but regain your balance, narrowly avoiding a banana-peel pratfall. When you enter the elevator, the nicknamer says something like, “Close call there, Slippy,” in front of a handful of your colleagues. They laugh. Now you’re Slippy. After this, you will gradually lose your office identity as John. Your colleagues will think it’s funny that most new hires don’t even know your real name. Every so often, you will be asked to explain the origin story of Slippy, and you’ll have to tell the origin story, or lie and say you don’t remember it.
The second way to acquire a nickname requires planning. It’s similar to the first way, except in this case, you have at least some chance of choosing your nickname. For example, if you would like to be called “Ham,” you can increase the chances of that happening by packing a ham sandwich for lunch every day, and when people ask what you’re eating, don’t reply, “A ham sandwich,” but instead just say, “Ham,” with a mouthful of half-chewed ham. This would still leave a lot up to chance, though. If you’re really set on a nickname, it’s best to manufacture some overlapping meanings. To increase the likelihood of acquiring a nickname like Ham, you could make a habit of telling funny, theatrical, and embellished stories, as this might prompt one of your colleagues to say, “John, you’re such a ham,” in front of the nicknamer, who then will probably put the pieces together—John is a ham who loves ham. After that, the nicknamer will do what he does best.
The third way to acquire a nickname requires persistence. Most people think you can’t give yourself a nickname. The conventional wisdom is that nicknames only stick if they are arrived at organically and assigned by others, but the conventional wisdom doesn’t account for a pathological kind of obstinance and a socially inappropriate level of compulsiveness. That is, you can be sure to always introduce yourself as your nickname, and if anyone asks you what your real name is, you just matter-of-factly say your nickname again. And if anyone calls you by your real name, you kindly but firmly correct them. And if anyone calls you by your real name even after you’ve kindly but firmly corrected them, you make it clear there are repercussions for doing so, that physical violence is a strong possibility. Essentially, you just function like good totalitarian governments do, bludgeoning the old narrative out of existence with consistent and relentless messaging of a new narrative, and of course, literally bludgeoning anyone who won’t allow the old narrative to expire.
This third way of acquiring a nickname is how I acquired the nickname Liminal Phil. I chose Liminal Phil because a few years ago I found out what the word liminal meant while using the internet in the computer room. According to Wikipedia, there are many complicated meanings of liminal, especially in anthropology, psychology, and religion. I really like all of these meanings, but I mostly like the more general concept of liminality when it refers to an in-between space. As far as I understand it, these sorts of spaces aren't really spaces at all because they have no definition, no spatial identity. They exist somewhere that doesn’t officially exist, in the theoretical split second when you have left one zone but have yet to enter the next one. This ontological—another word I recently learned in the computer room—paradox raises a lot of questions: Where are you when you’re neither here nor there? Do you disappear when in a liminal space? If so, where have you disappeared to? What realm are you in?
It was when I first finished reading the Wikipedia page about liminality on some quiet weeknight a few years ago that I started believing in God a little bit. I hate believing in God. Believing in God is very dumb and very embarrassing. But that Wikipedia page got me thinking about how all the really wise people in history lived in liminal states. I hate to use Jesus as an example because using Jesus as an example is also very dumb and very embarassing, but the miracle of that guy was that he lived in between the earthly world and the divine one. He was simultaneously walking amongst us mortals and walking amongst the divine. He was, as they say, both man and God.
So, in one of my more dramatic moments, I decided, right then and there, that I too was going to be both man and God, flesh and spirit, a two-passport-carrying dual-citizen of this world and the next. I didn’t want to join the clergy though. I like to fuck too much for that. So, I started meditating every morning, reading the bible every night, and began the process of acquiring the nickname, or maybe more appropriately, rebaptizing myself, Liminal Phil. My name is John though, but I knew that if I kept any remnants of my old identity the new one had no chance of sticking.
Here’s another “intellectual” porn—this one rejected by Luridmax—for you to masturbate to or, depending on your sexual proclivities, just read and wonder, “What kind of person masturbates to this?”
Gary was interviewing a young man named Barack for a job as an accountant at his crumbling creative agency. This was an interview he would normally have conducted with his best friend/founding partner, but a few months ago, his best friend/founding partner was coked up enough during a morning meeting to believe that she could surreptitiously blow a bump of coke in a morning meeting. When Gary confronted her about the incident, she said, “I’ve just been under a lot of pressure lately,” an explanation so cliché and pathetic that Gary saw it as a greater transgression than the incident itself, so he offered to buy her out of the agency right then and there. They made a handshake deal, and now Gary was stuck interviewing Barack alone, while his best friend/founding partner spent her days meditating and surfing.
Barack was just out of college, and had a lanky build, slumped shoulders, and a manipulatively soft, eager-to-please smile that made Gary certain that he was both hyper intelligent and sexually deviant. For the first few minutes of the interview, Gary did his best to euphemistically explain that the agency was in trouble, that their books were a mess, that he needed an accounting whiz for the price of a summer intern. Then, when he started to properly interview Barack, as in, ask questions for Barack to answer, he began to see flashes of the young man climbing underneath the desk and slowly licking his dick from base to tip, base to tip, base to tip. These flashes didn’t feel like fantasy, though. They sat in Gary’s mind’s eye in a different way. They were more vivid, less malleable, as if he had stumbled across them rather than authored them. Gary wondered if the visions of mid-interview felatio weren’t fantasy, but prophecy.
Gary tried focusing, tried to come up with good questions—“What’s it like to share a name with the most popular president in recent memory?”—but the image of Barack’s tongue sliding down the length of his dick was simply too loud to be competed with. So, he just sat in front of Barack, folding and unfolding his resume, biting his lip and shifting in his chair. There was an inappropriately long silence. Barack was concerned and confused.
Then Barack saw it: wedged between the fabric of Gary’s pants and his left thigh was an above-average sized, objectively handsome-looking hard dick. Barack stared at Gary’s erection, and Gary stared at Barack staring at his erection. Gary held his breath, squirming, waiting for Barack to raise his gaze so he could exhale, but Barack kept his eyes trained on the dick, not just because he was enjoying looking at it, but because he enjoyed making the man squirm.
In these few seconds, the power dynamic of the room shifted so drastically, it was as if there had been a change in some basic law of physics. Barack, who was previously on the edge of his seat, trying to look attentive, now leaned back in his chair. Gary, a heavy man who took up a lot of space, now seemed blimpish, still taking up a lot of space, but possibly vulnerable to a stiff wind. Any nerves Barack had felt going into the interview were gone. He felt utterly in control. He could take a shit on the floor and the job might still be his.
But Barack didn’t really want the job. It would clearly be six horrible months of overwork and underpay. So, still staring at the dick, thinking he might be able to see it visibly pulse if he looked closely enough, he began to do a few simple calculations in his head: What was the probability that someone would walk into this room in the next ten minutes? Maybe 20%. What was the probability that this balding, middle-aged man would accept a blow job from him right now? Maybe 50%. What was the probability that he would regret giving this man a blowjob right now? Maybe 80%. What was the probability that, regardless of the results of all these calculations, he was going to climb under this desk and begin licking this man’s dick, base to tip, base to tip, base to tip? Maybe 100%.
For more from Gideon Jacobs, follow @GideonsByeBull on Instagram. Click here to read Chapter 4: A Eulogy For Brad & Gideon.