I Wanted to Become a Famous Killer. Then I Met a Real One.
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How does Asher imagine the documentary crew will portray his apartment and persona?
I'm sure the first thing they'll get wrong is my apartment. They'll shoot it in the morning, and they'll get the light wrong because the light only does the thing I like at this hour in November. The crew will probably be there in July, with sweat on their cameras and C-stands. They'll do a slow pan across the bookshelf, and they'll linger on the Bolaño and the Zeybolt, and the Patti Smith memoirs, and the move past the Pynchon too fast, because nobody has ever read Pynchon, even me. They'll show the typewriter. They'll show the bar cart. They'll show the framed Saul Leiter print I bought at the Freeze Fair in 2023 with money that wasn't mine. They will not show the kit yet, though they may allude to it.
The title sequence would have just finished, fading to black. We'd begin to fade back in. There's a baritone voiceover, possibly Morgan Freeman, but dialed back half a notch so it's not so overtly him. The camera tracking through the front room. Asher Van Sickle grew up between Greenwich and Manhattan, Morgan would start. the only child of a hedge fund manager and a woman who served on three boards. By 28, he was living alone in a cobble-hill brownstone left to him by his maternal grandmother, a fact he rarely volunteered. The light is doing the thing it does in November, even though it's October now, because the weather has been generous to me lately, which I take to mean something. I make a pour-over with beans I picked up recently from Debasian.
I drink it standing at the kitchen island, then open the journal to the entry I was working on, which is two sentences long. I read them to myself. The city is alive with violence, and no one is paying attention. They will be. I close the journal. I've arranged my bookshelf by spine color in the section that faces the front room and by author in the section that doesn't. The saw lighter print is hung so that anyone in the reading chair has to half turn to see it, which is a choice I made because I read somewhere that you should make people work for the things you love. I don't remember where I read it. I may have made it up. Either way, it's true. I sit in the reading chair. I open the journal, then close it again.
Back to the documentary. Friends and acquaintances described Asher as private, even withholding. He kept his real life, said a friend only known as Jay, like in a separate room. There is, in fact, a separate room. It's my bedroom. The kit lives under the bed in an Aesop shopping bag because the bag is an olive green that photographs well, and because the ritual of unpacking matters, and the ritual is better if it starts with the rustle of paper. I bring it out and spread everything on the duvet. The Polaroid first. From the late 80s, with a brown leather strap I sourced separately and loaded with film I purchased secondhand from a flea market. I haven't taken a photograph with it, so I don't know if the film is any good.
There's also a knife. A buoy I had made by a man on Etsy. The handle is wrapped leather with an angel wing tooled into the grip. My idea is execution. I asked him what kind of person commissions a bowie knife with an angel wing on it, and he said, a guy with a story. And I have thought about that sentence almost daily since. There's the moleskin, of course. Also olive green, large, soft cover. On the front, in fat black sharpie, I wrote, If you must know. Inside, 11 pages. Some of it is rather derivative of Camus, some of Ligotti. A bit is dialogue I flat out stole from a conversation I heard at the table beside me at a hinge date. The rest of the genius, the madness, is mine. Or close to mine. Then there are the gloves.
Lambskin, black, never worn. And finally, there's a battered mass market paperback copy of In Cold Blood. I have underlined the passages that move me, and starred the passages the documentary will linger on. Or the podcast will read aloud if licensing allows. I look at everything spread out on the duvet, my inner world. I smile. Moments like these are fleeting and I know I won't get them back.
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