“I won’t read it.”
The dark blue couch carries me forward, rowboat style. Yesterday, puke orange, today intern khakis brown: the administration must’ve figured a way to change the color for every patient. My therapist is a cup of tea on a screen being circled with a spoon soldier. The pitch of the steel against the corrugated ceramic cup.
“Why?” Her voice is a low, conspiratorial purr.
I’m not going to judge you, her tone implies. The soldier completes another rhythmic lap.
“It ain’t about me. I can’t relate.”
“You say that, but I keep telling you: helping others is the way to get them to help you.”
My forehead between my thumb and my index finger. The empty sack of my fat belly aches in time with my gathering headache. I swallow dry, weed-infused phlegm.
I start to tell her about an ex who once told me she didn’t believe in a bad book. Just a book not ready for you yet. Beach read. Cancer diagnosis read. Twenty-five year old I’m the smartest motherfucker in the room read.
I don’t say anything. I distract myself with the art on the walls.
Two cowboy lovers in fireplace colors embrace against a tree, branches chalked in the outline of a southwest desert. The square angles of the men’s shirts.
The same artist has another painting hanging on a perpendicular wall. Two men as fat as me. Could be cowboys, could be police officers. Slick haircuts, one has a part that reminds me of my wedding day. Same terrain, brushed in this time. Cactus skyscrapers, cactus single family homes.
“I never should’ve written any comment on that chick’s story.”
“We’re back here.” She sounds haunt-you-for-years hot.
The white walls have planets of mold dotting the ceiling. Their outer circles are yellow rings.
“She was too young for my lit attack. I’m yapping in her comments about OnlyFans and whatever other bullshit I was on. I want groupies, and I’m the biggest groupie.”
“No one likes a neurotic bully.”
The nail didn’t even hurt that much.
“Your new carpet already lookin dingy.” I comb my fingers through my thickening hair. Moist oil into my palms my reward.
“You haven’t said anything about the dance reading performance.” The spoon stops. The hand relaxes, grasps the cup, takes a delicate sip, returns the tea. A first. Did she just drink me?
“I’m happy I did it. Happy it’s over. First time always the hardest.”
A bug appears in a ceiling corner. Scurries down the wall into disappearance. I can’t be seeing right.
“That Beef story is worthless anyway. A bunch of rap references no one got. I don’t know. Is it even a story? I miss the original draft. Now, the OG draft, that was heartbreaking.”
Tea whistles. Eeekkkkkyyyyaaaaaaa. She won’t even make a sound.
“Sixty rejections for Fat Like Raymond. He’s too fat for nasty thoughts. Our painter wouldn’t approve.”
My therapist presses a laughing sound effect. Not my cackle. A giddy chorus of VIP girls alone with their bottles. She has a bunch of these. Men hawking women on the street is her fav.
“This fucking spreadsheet with all these personal responses from editors passing on me. Smiley faces on I don’t want you letters. Fuck. I never should’ve commented on that story. What did I even say? Bigtoughguy or whateverthefuck.”
She plays the sound of a baby crying. I cover the couch pillow over my face.
Smushed voice, “Failed writer, that should be the name of my new genre.”
The sound of acoustic guitar soothes the room. The hands pluck the instrument into familiar sounds we can’t escape. She finds them everywhere and recreates them.
The therapist stops turning her spoon and listens with me.
“Mmmm.” The most approving noise she has ever made.
“The whole list thing itself was super cringe. The guy has whatever page he had and he was basically celebrating the authors on here that get all the love. I was sick of not getting the love. Decided to say something, discredit the list, and you know I never liked lists. I’m like the cool kid who always felt bad for the depressed kid in the back of the room. Then he’s calling me crazy and I’m posting Tupac and Kanye West videos, taunting him, only for him to write an article about me next. So basically I whined until he gave me the special treatment I wanted. Thanks! Tho that did help with my agent. She emailed me, you’re making momentum. Moan-mentum.”
The screen cuts to an instagram collage of photos. A hot Black woman’s legs in SKIMS on a private plane. A glass of champagne next to an airplane window. Luxury luggage in the back of a Black car. A night landscape dotted with lights from the bird’s eye of a hotel suite. She’s on vacation during the session?
“Then there’s the famous Substack PR guru, magician with a cell phone. [I lower my voice.] Substack High tried to get her attention, just another clout chasing addiction.”
My therapist is now at the nail salon. The technician applies a dark purple shine with platinum exclamation points in the center of each tip.
She unmutes her screen. “That was a low point. But back to this book, Piano Man. Why won’t you read it?”
It’s sitting on the coffee table across from me. The front cover’s design reminds me of The Simpsons. Children and drugs. Sex and innocence. A loser with a new start. A rebrand for failure.
“I can’t respect these fucking self-destructive failures. I respect failure cause of idealism, cause of romance, but someone who fails because they can’t get out of their own way, naw, nope, fuckoutta here. No interest.”
“I’m not sure I am seeing a big difference.”
“Just imagine being that old and still chasing whatever you been running from, working in opposite directions against yourself the whole time. But fucking, just holding on, to art, itself is bad enough, but to the excess of art, the self destruction, I can’t co-sign that shit.”
“Again, these are a lot of assumptions for a book you haven’t read.”
I grab the book, toss it end over end. I want to put it through the screen. I put it down, instead.
“I only agreed to be part of this roaming anthology for a book that wasn’t supposed to exist but now it’s everywhere cause of Sandy. Did you see that Times Square ad for it?”
“My limousine wouldn’t be caught dead in Times Square.”
“Sandy’s piece. Man that shit was alive. You meant to play the piano or the piano meant to play you? Now, that’s the question.”
“You have motivated forgetting.”
She’s in the back of a limousine. Beyoncé plays from the speakers. I’m not sure she’s alone. “I’ve heard you mention Sandy before.”
“Oh.” My hand feels tight. Cuffs around my wrist. “You know. There was that thing between us. I got all race emo with her. Sent her a voice note. Said she had to pick sides and she picked the wrong one.”
“Damn, you a sensitive ass nigga.”
I bristle. She cut past bone. My mind sprints past the thoughts I don’t want to share. Being called the N word, the soft R, over and over again by a profile photo on the 2024 election night. A weird one. Over and over. This Notzi stacker I knew from high school. Weird [N—], stuck like flipping the light switch seven times before leaving the room. He wanted to walk down the street pretending to be an underground builder and get me worked up by his slurs. I couldn’t see any world where the clown didn’t work for me. Just another night with the coyote. Let him attack my straitjacket before I got air-lifted back to safety. Let me never touch the ground.
“What do you think happened to him?” She’s shopping. I think Phipps Plaza. Or Highland Park Village. She ain’t in Jackson. I can promise you that.
“There's only one thing that can happen.”
She’s cashing out. A man’s forearm enters the screen. A black card exchanged for shopping bags.
She lets the receipt print. Crumbles it, throws it away.
“Hope still ignoring you?”
“Why you bring Hope up?”
She chuckles. We both know why.
“Okay, okay, no. I’m waiting for her to make a poster for Cheater. For her to respond to my messages. For her to do the actual flash-style battle she been saying she gonna do. It’s like my relationship to artshit has become transmuted onto one person with a balloon that needs to be popped; facial features less realistic than if a fingerless child had painted them.”
“Can you turn your volume down, just a smidge?”
I hate when people tell me I’m talking too loud. I once walked out of a doctor’s appointment for this. That happened yesterday.
I know better than to walk outta here. She ain’t issuing refunds.
“I want to tell everybody on Substack the truth I’ve hidden for so long, so bad. It’s me.”
“They’ll never forgive you.”
“I know, but I gotta be freeeeeee: I'm the slumlord Emil keeps complaining about. Each house he bitches about, I own. He can’t escape me. I’m like a smoke alarm missing its battery.”
“When you gonna tell him?”
“I’m telling him now. Emil, it’s me, you don’t get rich fixing roof leaks.”
“Anything for Emma? Since we letting it all go…”
“Egh. Look. I coulda been nicer for sure but fuck outta here what do people want from me. I told her to read an author I love. Thought it might help. Maybe I was wrong. Who the fuck am I to tell people what to read? But I did. And my grave sin is saying a writer should…read more? That's the thing. I always got some recommendation. Some opinion. Some correction. Then everybody acts surprised when I become the evil Unc. Huh? For that? They love Hope, but I’m the evil Unc because I said this ain’t OnlyFans, which was epic btw. Cause fuck….Substack is kinda OnlyFans. I onlywantfans.”
“Too much.” She’s humming. The guitar returns.
“You feel better? More relaxed?” The tea cup has returned. The spoon figure not an officer now. A tourist guard. Quite the cap.
“I’m not gonna relax until the Black writers on this fucking app fuck with me heavy. Too many of my fans are white. I doubt many of the Black people on here are even reading this shit. My shit is called Rap Fiction for fuck’s sake. I love all the same shit they love. They stay talking about everybody Black, everybody Black, but what the fuck about me. Nobody Black showing me love. Well. There’s Alex B. and Miguel, but shit I can already tell I’m losing even him. Is he going to be at a lit reading one day out dancing me to one of his poems? Is John gonna come out of anonymity and write a flash fiction piece about a desperate nigga with only white readers!? I mean, it’s Juneteenth!”
“You’re getting worked up again. Try three breaths in, hold three seconds, three breaths out. We talked about this.”
“On top of that the whole publishing world is all up in arms about this Piano Man book becoming #1 on every bestseller list and you want me to relax? Fuck outta here. I wanted to write the book that brought back the readers, but I’ve been outgunned by an unknown social media invisible asshole who wrote a book about self-defeating failure. A main character cosplaying as some piano Hunter S. Thompson. And a bonafide ass nigga like me can’t even get an agent email back these days. Ain’t that crass on they part?”
“Okay, Outkast. How do you even know all this if you haven’t read it?”
I squeeze a silent fart into the lightest note. My gout medicine does this. She waves her hand across her nose on the screen. The fuck?
“I did a little research.”
“More like a lot.”
A standoff. She drops a new tea bag into her cup. The fat belly floats.
“Let me ask you a serious question for once?”
Wait…the other questions weren’t? What kinda therapist…
“What’s your issue with fame really about? Your envy? Your compulsion to chase attention? You seem to be aware it’s beneath you but you can’t seem to stop?”
The bug from earlier emerges from the same corner of the wall. It scurries diagonally down. A gang of bugs follow behind, soon the wall is covered in them. I blink. They are gone.
“I think y’all have an infestation problem.”
The screen dissipates into a blank screen with the text: Substack Customer Service. The AI voice asks if there is anything they can do to help me. I respond with a list of specific grievances and concerns, starting with the fact that their website stole my original story arc domain and won’t give it back. The AI voice calmly repeats abstract nothings into my ear. I try to get to a supervisor. There is none. I lie and say they solved all my problems.
She returns. Well, the tea cup does. “You refused to answer my question. Why the fame worship?”
“Don’t blame me, you got the wrong Andi. It’s Andy Warhol you should blame.”
“I’m sure you have a whole theory that I don’t want to hear. You’ve been on Substack now for almost three years, while you were writing your book that you still haven’t sold, you must have learned something deeper than whatever bullshit you were about to go off on.”
“The two biggest lessons I’ve learned on Substack are that there are universes of writers with gripes about their literary disappointments and egos…and talent is way flatter than I imagined.”
“Tell me more.”
“Being on Substack showed me how flat talent is. Sure, the landscape has all kinds of topographies, there are mountains out there; yeah, people wanna go see them, be awestruck, climb them, hang out on their peaks, but that’s few and far between freaks of nature that belong to their landscape more than they belong to themselves. They lose some of their humanity to the mountain. And those mountains surrounded by hills of specialness, and those hills maybe preen more than the mountains. Then there’s deserts of sadness, isolation, addiction to writing. Hiding in writing. Giving your life to writing cause it’s easier than figuring out how to give writing into life. I get it. I ain’t betta, I’m worst. I love the dry air. The buried crystals that don’t wanna be on no mountain, that despise the vacuousness of the hills, and don’t want no pressure on top of their lives. They just want the sweat and the heat. And I ain’t mad at them. The mountain is just a mirage in the desert. But there are a lot of plains. Greens longer than the eye can see. Power in the words of so many. Writers who have the same fucked up calling as me? Total strangers who have it as bad as me. But I only hear my voice.”
She enters the screen. High ponytail. Medellin restaurant light catching her collarbone. A cross necklace and whatever the other one says. She has food in front of her she hasn’t touched. She looks like she just remembered I exist.
“Same time next week?” Her eyebrows gesture toward PIANO MAN sitting across from me.
“Yeah.” I take the book. Slip it into my back pocket.
I feel something moving on my cheek. Fast. I slap it. I look at my palm.
Dead bug.
I walk out.
Piano Man, written by the fictional author Thomas Eberle, is a creative spark that connects a wide variety of stories, like a quiet ripple. I am writing three‑part arcs that introduce new people, new places, and new turning points, but the shared thread is how this one book nudges something in each of them.
Some characters read it.
Some argue with it.
Some only know it because someone they love won’t stop talking about it.
But for all of them, Piano Man becomes a spark — a moment of reflection, change, or connection.
Guest authors, such as those contributing their own takes on the story, are creating a wide world of literary interconnection. This project is meant to feel like wandering through a neighborhood at dusk, catching glimpses of lives in motion. You’re not following one plot; you’re following the echo of a story inside a story, watching how art lands differently in every life it touches.
Shout out to Anthony Hurd and Quinn Belice for their art on Substack.
And of course, Vince Wetzel.
lol. Sometimes I worry your voice is so good, people will get distracted by it and actually think it's real. Maybe that's the point. Delightfully abrasive, provocative, self-lacerating, disagreeable, forward thinking and yet loopy. But also as always insightful, and brave through the obsessive humiliation. The obsessive evaluations. The compulsive compulsion of editing *in* what everyone else would almost certainly edit *out*.. Is saying the worst thing, the best thing? Is it the antidote to the filters and the fake jets and therapy talk? Or is it just the inverse? Is it its own indulgence? Is this the ultimate diagnosis of substack 2026, or just another substack 2026? Both? I don't really know. But you certainly got me feeling many feelings.
My favorite line is “I couldn’t see any world where the clown didn’t work for me.” I like the elitism, at war with a mix of other energies. Very midlife.