Jason Haaf and Scooter LaForge have collaborated on a somewhat unclassifiable art book together. It’s as gripping as it is gorgeous. Part sex memoir, part meditation, entirely collage, the prose dissects relationships, exes, hookups, obsessions, addictions at a brisk pace. Smartly, the artworks are hybrid themselves: a sad boy watercolor of a face half underwater at the very beginning has scribbled over it (in handwriting): “A beautiful young man, an Adonis, balanced the bottom of his feet on pool railings, dove in, and walked under water looking like a zombie from John Carpenter’s The Fog.”
You assume the words are Haaf’s, the drawing and coloring to be LaForge’s. But that can’t really explain the full experience of Wasteland. We quickly realize the book won’t be a predictable illustration or graphic rendering of anything. One page declares “Angst” like it’s a poster for a gay version of 1984, with cryptic lines typewritten below: “I love you.” and “With fervor, / Turning the corner, I saw a stairwell.” The narrator on the facing page meanwhile is having a minor freak out about a new interest, one that makes him feel “like I was 19.” He gets sent sexy gym videos (fun) yet is already worrying “Why does he live in my head?” Relatable.
About midway through I decided Wasteland is a book as purposefully open-ended as queer erotic life itself. Unnamed past and present fixations come and go. Summarily we’re informed “A romantic friendship was about to die” (oof!) and the brilliant choice of the authors throughout is to neither confirm nor deny the necessary contexts. Like Gertrude Stein, this is everybody’s autobiography. Or at least that of quite a few fags, myself included. To the question are you more emotional or feral? The book seems to answer only: Yes.
Often when I read books ‘with’ art components, you feel one contributor has the upper hand. That doesn’t have to be a bad thing, of course. But Wasteland shows Haaf and LaForge working in tandem, riffing at, overwriting one another, letting the words and images duel, blend, make out and—importantly—occasionally flat out ignore each other. A lot of people, queer and trans folks especially, have haunted pasts. But Wasteland argues we almost prefer unfinished business, even as we know these connections aren’t built to satisfy, let alone last.
I love how discontinuous the overall narrative is. Just when you think you’re on sure footing, “queer angst” injected repeatedly like a chorus, we slam up against: “I wanted to be fucked as I made my way to a sex shop where a stranger fed me poppers and cleaned my ass with wipes, like a baby.” For good reason, a lot of us have felt forced to become cheerleaders for our sex habits (or lack of them). But Wasteland is plaintive, funny, softly nihilist, and very horny. I enjoy retrospection presented as an impossible contradiction. Simple printed text is surrounded with nothing but white space around it: “It wasn’t enough.” How I love to sink into such ambivalence. I want a partner; I want to be freed from my past; I feast on insufferable longing; my needs must be met instantly; I feel empty. All these states coexist successively without rhyme or reason. Yet I can’t help reading into the anonymous revelations anyway. I hear the continual use of a nameless he/him, sometimes referred to as monster or Goblin (lol) as a recurring character. One we’ve all met, or are in the process of meeting, or will sometime soon again.
The book admits in its last pages that when it comes to the love-lust gray zone “there isn’t an ending.” Yet Wasteland does end, though not how you’d expect. Our collaborative authors recruit (like any hungry couple) a third to the project: so ensues a response by Nate Lippens, one of my favorite living writers. It’s strangely refreshing. Lippens’ piece is as much about paying rent and a lonely landlady as anything else. Why? Lippens’ text also provides no answers. Only another banal yet not slice-of-life reminiscence brilliantly fragmented. One that’s tart, not exactly bitchy, yet refuses to embrace the very genre that maybe we’re all condemned to: “Memories piled like junked cars and about as useful.” I mean I love collecting junk. Wasteland happily collects a lot of it. Of all kinds. With real heartache and giddy mayhem and lots of other stuff too. Lavish dick pics included.
By The Friend
The Friend is a poet and teacher who lives in New York City and author of two books of poems: The Late Parade (2013) and George Washington (2016) from Norton/Liveright. They are a professor of creative writing at Rutgers University. Follow on Instagram @nonbinaryangel.
Wasteland, an art novel by Jason Haaf and Scooter LaForge, is available now from Doable Guys.
Leave a Reply