fuck you, sucker

a fan's notes on Charli XCX

Part I: Origin Story

It was 2015. I had just moved back to Pittsburgh from Iowa City, where I had lived for the previous three years as a a student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. I had been rejected from every post-grad fellowship I applied for. The path forward with my writing career was clearly something I would have to make myself, instead of leapfrogging from one island of prestige to another. Staying in Iowa City felt wrong. It’s hard to make the transition from workshop student to former workshop student. You still get invited to parties, but you move further and further away from the heart of the action. You can, of course, continue to talk endlessly about Stoner and Why Did I Ever? when you run into other writers at the Hyvee (seriously, you cannot escape them), but you’re not in the loop w/r/t whose workshop story totally kicked ass this week, and whose workshop story was a thinly veiled retelling of a hookup from the previous semester, and which poorly adjusted former Ivy Leaguer had been so nervous during her workshop that she ate, mechanically and seemingly without awareness, an entire wheel of brie during her critique.

I had not “had a real job” really, ever. Not an office job, a full-time job, a show-up-every-day job. The last time I had worked in any recognizable sense, I was an Artist-in-Residence at a tiny arts magnet school in a Beaver County river town otherwise home to two nuclear cooling towers and a grocery store where the lights in the back half of the store never worked, and the produce was uncannily warm to the touch. I developed and provided arts enrichment activities for middle school students. I drove from one school to another, teaching the seventh graders how to write poems (what a joke—seventh graders are poems). I drove from Ambridge to Industry to Aliquippa to East Rochester. Like a strange Mary Poppins, or a stand-up commedian who read you poems by Terrance Hayes and e.e. cummings, I breezed into the classroom, did my bit, then chainsmoked Salems in my car on lunch break. (Hilarious that I thought nobody could smell cigarettes as long as they were smoked in a Hyundai Elantra just beyond the perimeter of the school.) I did, however, have to wear business attire, slacks and sad rayon shirts, but only in that respect did it have any quality of “a real job.”

I moved back to Pittsburgh to enact an experiment: To see if I could survive in “the real world” as a writer with a day job. My then-boyfriend believed it was impossible. Look at how much time you spend doing yoga and taking walks, he said. But he was constantly postponing his own writing by accumulating an endless list of topics he felt he had to research before he could begin his novel, so I didn’t take it too seriously, and also, I love being underestimated.

But moving back to Pittsburgh, where I had gone to college fourteen years prior, was not exactly simple. I was still in Alcoholics Anonymous at the time, and I felt a tremendous pressure to fit in. AA loves to tell you that you have to “stay in the middle of the pack” to be safe. If you drift to the margins, you might fall into the outer darkness, and thus “jails, institutions, and death.” I did not think it was an overstatement to say that making friends with the AA girls felt like a matter of life or death to me. Sometimes I shared about this anxiety in meetings, even, and when I said that being accepted as part of the group was a matter of life and death, many people solemnly nodded.

But it wasn’t working. I felt strange and wrong almost constantly. I went to the women’s meeting everyone told me I would love (“You’ll meet your best friends there!”) and felt like an imposter because I didn’t read the twelve steps or traditions with gender-swapped god language, as was fashionable in the urban liberal girly arm of AA. The queen of the AA girly clique didn’t like me, but this dislike only surfaced in forms so subtle and situational that even describing them to someone else made me seem insane, or insanely sensitive and self-involved.

still essentially a headbanger

Finally I found a job—through a man I met at AA meetings, who would, of course, later ask me out on a date and take it very badly when I said no. But before all that, he pulled some strings and got me a job at a large construction company in Robinson, out by the airport. The job paid very well—better than being the Mary Poppins of 7th grade Beaver County poetry, anyway—but it was a culture shock. My co-workers went out to eat at Panera every day for lunch. They thought I was insane for bringing my own sprouted-grain bread to work, making salad and an avocado toast that I ate at my desk. I had one co-worker I liked, a middle-aged woman with heavily tanned skin and thick eyeliner. Her boyfriend was a personal trainer, and she took pictures of his oily abs on her flip phone and showed them to me, unbidden. I loved her, but everybody else made no sense. Or I made to sense to them, in a way that felt exactly like high school. Whenever I opened a new box of coffee pouches for the instututional Bunn in the break room, one of the engineers would see me using scissors and say, I swear to god, “Be careful with those.” Not just once, but every time. I felt insane. It never took me less than an hour to get home during rush hour. My new sponsor told me that “being tired” was not a valid reason to miss an AA meeting.

It was, in other words, a season of doubt and loneliness.

Enter Charli XCX.

I was at the Squirrel Hill branch library one day, perusing the CDs (how quaint that we once did such things), and I noticed the cover of Sucker. I don’t know why it stood out to me. I don’t remember what correspondence lit up in my brain, if I could even have told you there on the spot. (Probably not.) I don’t think I had ever heard of Charli XCX at all. But I checked out the CD and played it in my car as I drove away.

I remember the first moment that something about that record clicked. I was sitting at my desk in the arctic air conditioning of the office, eating my lunch, staring at the bland expanse of Microsoft Teams software on my computer desktop, and some lyric from the song “Sucker” appeared in my brain spontaneously: Oh dear god I’m a killer now, I’m a killer now, so are you—wow, you’re awesome.

Who can say what synapses fire when a pop song has embossed itself on your brain? It’s nothing linear, nothing logical, and I’m in some sense defying its magic by even trying to describe the moment. The sound of the song is girly, scuzzy, happy, braggy. Sarcastic. Its lyrics reveal a sneering kiss-off to the pop predator Dr. Luke. Fuck you, sucker. “Luke loves yr stuff.” This sentiment went right to my heart, like an arrow. I am a creature whose first impulse is to doubt myself. Especially being the new person in town, the new person at the job. I had a strong tendency to assume that in any difference of opinion between myself and someone else, I must have been wrong. But maybe I wasn’t.

Maybe, somewhere in me, there was a killer.

And by a killer, I just mean someone willing to say fuck you, sucker.

I felt like I was miles away from that version of myself. But I began to think that she might exist. And until she existed in plain sight, she could exist in my headphones, in an office where no one really knew me.

A few months later, I got a different job. Someone else I met at AA helped me get a job working in the Google offices as a subcontractor. (It bears mentioning that not all of the AA girls were as cliquey as I first found them to be—many of them I went on to have long friendships with, even after I left AA, which indicates that perhaps some of my earliest isolation had at least a little bit to do with some projected sense of alienation and weirdness coming from me.)

But anyway, I blasted Sucker driving home from the interview, and I knew that I got the job.

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Thank you for reading! Come back next week for part two. Our regularly scheduled weekly bibliomancy forecast will resume soonish, when the time is right. Saving up lots of chunes for you till then. XS