Torn Self-Portrait with Striped Shirt

LARB presents an excerpt by Wayne Koestenbaum from the anthology “Snapshots: An Album of Essay and Image,” edited by Dinah Lenney.

By Wayne KoestenbaumFebruary 3, 2025

• Memoir & Essay

I TOOK A WALK and found my reflection in a torn spot. Where precisely? On a damaged rectangle of paper draped over a store window. The store was closed, under repair, seeking remedy. Part of the paper, covering the window, was ripped. The paper’s job was to conceal and protect the window. The paper made a mess of its task. The paper failed to meet its obligations. Inside that failed area I found the mirrored image of myself, a photographer, wearing a marinière, a boat-neck striped shirt. I wasn’t in Saint-Malo or Quimper. I was in Midtown Manhattan, in 2021, during the pandemic. The most characteristic trait in the photo is my right shoulder, its tension, its avoidance of repose. (Do I detect a ghost of a bicep in my right arm?) My raised shoulder offers ballast for the hand that grasps an iPhone, a recording device that conceals my jaw, mouth, cheeks, and most of my nose. My right hand clutches the phone with a tight grip that recalls my mother’s hand, long ago, clenching a red Paper Mate ballpoint pen. It might have been blue. I’ve already written about that Paper Mate, and my mother’s hand, holding it. She kept her pens in a cup beside the downstairs phone. Long ago, her phone number, mine also, was 408-252-3801. That numerical sequence was my identity for nearly 18 years. The 252 bespeaks symmetry and godliness. We were a godly household and a symmetrical household. The 3801 suggests a welcome variousness. We were a various household, given to sweetmeats. What were our sweetmeats? Tension was one of our sweetmeats. Hiding our faces was one of our sweetmeats. Avoiding the topic was one of our sweetmeats. Repetition was one of our sweetmeats. I keep accidentally typing “sweatmeat” instead of “sweetmeat.” Notice, I’m inserting sweat in the place of sweetness. We were not a sweaty household though our phone number was 408-252-3801. We didn’t like sports. We took showers infrequently. Once a week was the protocol for showers. My penis would begin to stink, in the days when my phone number was 408-252-3801. I could peel a curl of smegma from around the rim of my glans. I’d take a washcloth, wet and soapy, to my organ, in the bathroom that was known as the “kid’s bathroom,” to distinguish it from my parent’s bathroom, which was the master’s. My mother was the master. She was a woman of no sweat and much tension. Her repose did not take place in my father’s arms. Perhaps he offered repose more frequently than I realized. The 8 in our phone number was an infinity sweetmeat. We would go on forever, I was confident of that fact. Our immortality was sewn into the heart of our tension. My right shoulder in the self-portrait is the sweetmeat memento, the proof of tension and of failed repose, failed because I didn’t seek it. Photography is repose, and so now I seek photography, black-and-white especially, because it steals colors away from me. I don’t deserve colors. And I don’t deserve a full self-portrait, just torn pieces, discarded sigils, garbage-like crullers, crabbed and nonce. I’ve discovered a new website. It’s called Sniffies. You can instantly find men. I cruise Sniffies but don’t hook up. I am a Sniffies bystander. From Sniffies I’ve learned a helpful phrase: pump-and-dump. In the days when my phone number was 408-252-3801, I didn’t know about pump-and-dump, though the “1” in my phone number sings the song of pump-and-dump, a sweetmeat aria for one voice without accompaniment. Logic decrees that when you post a selfie on a website like Sniffies, you will choose the most flattering photo, but an attractive image is not necessarily accurate. So it’s better to post an unflattering selfie. But if you put forward a less attractive snapshot, no one will seek you out. Torn between the Scylla and Charybdis of flattering and unflattering depictions, I remain a detached chronicler of the online bacchanal. My favorite activity these days is using a hole-puncher to punch out small holes from 16 mm films I’ve purchased on eBay. I bought an educational film from the 1960s, What Do Flowers Do. Using my hole-puncher, I punched out tiny circles from What Do Flowers Do, and then, with clear Scotch tape, affixed these circles of informative emulsion onto clear leader. Leader is the blank footage at the beginnings and ends of films. You can’t thread precious footage into the projector. You need to creep into its gate with crummy, dispensable leader. Leader is a delicate way of beginning your conversation with the optical machine, which wants to eat up your film. I bought 200 feet of clear leader from a film supply shop in Illinois, along with a 16 mm clip from an unspecified 1970s movie. A woman—I don’t know the actor’s name—enters a bedroom where Richard Harris is waiting. Or maybe Harris walks into the room where this unidentified woman is waiting. I put the two-minute clip in a bucket with a few capfuls of Clorox and swirled the solution around for a few minutes, to bleach out most of the information from the film. On the newly blank portions of this Richard Harris bedroom clip, I taped tiny circles of What Do Flowers Do. My finished hybrid-film, a collage, alternates between botany and bedrooms. What you need to remember from this essay is the word sweetmeat as a substitute for unattainable satisfaction. You say sweetmeat when you are ravenous but are not at liberty to discuss your appetite.

Excerpted from Snapshots: An Album of Essay and Image, edited by Dinah Lenney, courtesy of Bloomsbury Academic. Copyright © Dinah Lenney and Wayne Koestenbaum, 2025.