Hipster Castle: A Novel

Part I

from the Oxford English Dictionary:

hipster - noun, informal
​a person who follows the latest trends and fashions

castle - noun
​a large building, typically of the medieval period, fortified against attack with thick walls, battlements, towers, and often a moat

hipster castle - noun
​a large building, typically of the medieval period, fortified against attack with thick walls, battlements, towers and often a moat, which houses a person or persons who follow(s) the latest trends and fashions
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1858 was quite the year. King Frederick William IV of Prussia suffered a stroke leaving him mostly paralyzed and mentally incapacitated to the point of farce. His older brother William I became regent.
​Felice Orsini, an Italian revolutionary, tried and failed miserably to assassinate Napoleon III in Paris. Two months later in France, Orsini is executed by guillotine. As there tends to be in these sorts of things, collateral damage occurred. The bombing resulted in eight dead and 142 wounded. However, an optimist might say this is better than nine dead and 143 wounded.
​The first pencil with an eraser is patented by Hyman Lipman. This became extremely useful when writing histories of society.
​A young Jewish boy, surprisingly named Edgardo Mortara, is seized by the police in the Papal States of Italy and whisked away into the night to be raised as a Catholic. While ultimately a successful conversion, Edgardo later lamented that "Jews are way more fun."
​Other fairly notable events include Minnesota's admittance into the United States,  the founding of the city of Denver, Colorado, the sort-of peaceful end to the Indian Rebellion, Macy's opening for business, Abraham Lincoln's acceptance of the Republican nomination for a U.S. Senate seat, and finally, oddly enough, the exceedingly progressive Ottoman Empire legalizes homosexuality.
​But most importantly, in Brooklyn, New York, the Grand Opera Hall opened its doors.
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2012 was also a year. As The Bard would say, "The times they are a-changing'," or "Things have changed." However he also said "Tomorrow is a long time," and "Time passes slowly," so who is really to say? And what is it that's actually being said? While the alacrity and concrete definition of this shift is up for schizophrenic debate, one thing is for certain: a temporal change of some sort took place.
​Technically, the Grand Opera Hall was still standing, but there were rumblings. Rumblings of uncertain origin, but rumblings nonetheless. Dirty white people poked their heads out of their apartment doors to see what they could see. Some accounts claim that there was one black person too. Their universally long locks, with the exception of the supposed black person, dangled in front of their eyes impeding their vision, and this is already after they've smoked their marijuana and their eyes are mere slits. When the doors of the majority of the tenants on the 3rd floor flew open, smoke crept into the hallway, and a medley of Pitchfork Media-endorsed music filtered through as well. Somewhat ironically, Girl Talk was just one musical sample of the hallway's mash-up track.
​Maybe it was cannabis-induced paranoia but for some reason, this felt like the end. The end of this beautiful fucking building, with its rich 250-year history that none of the tenants actually knew, was approaching its final sentence. And it would be too late to write an epilogue.
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​ROOM 303

December 1st, 2011 was a new day. While technically it was a new day for everyone, it was a particularly new day for Vincent Eastman, aka The White Face. No one really knew who Vincent was, but everyone knew who The White Face was, even though they didn't know who The White Face actually was.
​The White Face was an anonymous up-and-coming underground artist beginning to gain traction on a national scale. His speciality? Portraits. But portraits of a special kind. Portraits with a special ingredient. The general consensus among those who were privy to TWF's art was that it was a work of sheer genius. The apogee of the mother of the mountain that is satire.
​While The White Face does virtually no press of any kind, and even if he did he would never let loose this pearl, that his true inspiration was not particularly, for lack of a better word, intellectual. Vincent had in the not-too-distant past developed somewhat of a masturbation habit. One painfully typical afternoon when Vincent was pleasuring himself to fake-rape porn, he realized at the worst possible time that he had forgotten the most important part of his ritual: tissues on the desk. Grabbing frantically for anything disposable and not too abrasive, a copy of the newest Newsweek was the closet viable option.
​When Vincent came, he came hard. He chalked it up to forgetting the tissues; the catalyst of the thrill of potentially spilling his seed in inconvenient places, and knowing he'd have the laborious task of chiseling the dregs out later.
​After cocking his head back up and contorting his face to its normal damp disposition, he looked down at the mess he'd made in the latest issue of Newsweek. His  semen was splashed and dripping down a close-up of Colin Powell's face, and it was beautiful. While Colin was doused, one single solitary white tear managed to find its way perfectly placed below Colin's left eye. Vincent was in awe. He was overtaken by the staggering accidental beauty of Colin Powell's face being covered in cum, and the baffling confusion as to why Colin Powell would even be considered relevant enough to publish in the most recent issue of Newsweek. No wonder print was dying.
​While Vincent stared into the sties which Colin's eye sockets had become, he thought to himself, "If this were real life, Colin may want to get his eyes checked out for sties. My aunt was an eye doctor, you know."
​But right after that thought, he had another one. After staring until whatever was left of the semen hardened or streaked off the page, still fascinated and transfixed by the interesting ink-blot patterns he'd made, Vincent thought, "This could be the most narcissistic thing I've ever done. That is, if I don't share this brilliance with other people."
​What was already an increasingly disturbing masturbation habit considering its frequency, now the potentially debilitating ritual was imbued with glorious purpose.  Vincent, this was no longer a simple act of self-gratification. It was art. The high kind.
​There was no particular rhyme or reason to whom Vincent decided to paint. It was totally at random. Whatever the latest periodical, be it People Magazine or Time or even the AARP magazine, Vincent just grabbed and ripped the nearest page.
​Vincent began to spend larger and larger amounts of his paycheck from his job as a barista at Goat Beans Cafe on magazines. Didn't matter which. He would go to Goodwill stores and other thrift shops to buy boxes and boxes of old magazines too. While sometimes wrapping his penis with decades-old magazines of Time Life and the like, Vincent coughed and gagged, and his penis burned. He learned the hard way that he would have to account for dusty pages. He could appreciate the odd nostalgic quality some of these old magazine photos had. There was something soul-warming about seeing Jackie O before that day, looking genuinely happy and full of life. And covered with semen.
​Vincent masturbated in front of his computer in a leather reclining chair. He used a MacBook. He laid out a stack of open magazines out in front of him like a sunflower garden, or a magician's card deck, "Pick a card, any card." After climaxing into any page he ripped out with his eyes closed, Vincent would immediately try to regain his composure and flatten out any wrinkles that may have developed in the soiled page. He would hold it up and let his paint drip. These cummy pages had an undeniably hypnotic quality. He would collect the finished pages for later and matte these one-of-a-kind pieces.
​Today was a new day for Vincent because he could finally afford to live alone. He was moving into a three-bedroom apartment for $2,200 a month. His burgeoning art career had made it difficult to live with three other roommates in his prior situation, especially since his art was of such a "private" nature.
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