Evidence of Occupation

I have often been told by people I meet that they have looked me up on the internet and immediately wondered what I do for money. It’s pretty easy for me to understand why. At twenty-four, I have been a relatively successful, if underground screenwriter and director for about two years. Sometimes I also design sets, and I make silly drawings that I advertise on my Instagram stories, and women my age who post pictures of themselves biking in the city in gingham dresses pay $150 a piece for them. I’m famous with certain crowds, in a certain way – I have done popular Reddit AMAs, but I don’t get mobbed at Whole Foods. I gave a guest lecture at a really tiny college, and 24,682 people liked the video of it afterwards. When I say I am relatively successful, I mean that I have been paying for the following since I graduated from college: my rental in Echo Park, my groceries, my beer runs, my movie theater tickets, date nights, my acne medication. The first two months out were an exception, fine, I did often call my parents crying then and they sent me money and ordered me pizza for dinner. But since then, I have somehow cracked the code of doing the things I like to pay for my life. I made my first film, all eighteen minutes of it, in my last year of college. I had spent the previous years of my Film and Media Studies degree creating nothing, convinced I needed to have seen every single good movie that existed before I could make my own. It was a stressful and unsatisfying time. My first film was a mockumentary, and I spent weeks shooting B-roll around campus, then convinced my best friend Elani to play the main character, a young woman describing her experience of sexual assault at a fictionalized version of Dartmouth. Her experience slotted easily into the Dartmouth experience we were having in 2016. The twist was that she was revealed to have graduated in 1968. I wrote and directed it, and made artistic choices like outlining the characters’ silhouettes in colorful squiggly lines while they talked about sexual violence and settler colonialism. I briefly considered titling it Dat Mouth. It won something called the Volkswagen Prize, which paid zero money, but involved a screening ceremony in the library where someone with a press badge took pictures on a big Nikon. Elani’s older sister was, at

the time, working on a TV pilot about a group of institutionalized twenty-somethings, and because I had won the Volkswagen Prize and was crying a lot about how I had no future, she offered me a spot writing with her so I would stop. I wasn’t supposed to get paid unless the pilot was picked up, and the pilot wasn’t supposed to be picked up, but then somehow it was. So then I was a writer on a sparsely watched, one-season show about mentally ill people, and was paid more than my parents’ combined income in the last two years. I started directing some episodes. It didn’t go terribly. Because I was writing and directing consistently, I got an agent, and the agent got me a writing job on a small indie feature. I did some small jobs on other projects too. I started posting about my work – promoting an episode drop, a casting call for extras, pictures from a set I technically designed, because there wasn’t enough money for a qualified person to do it. Then I started posting more and more things, because it’s boring when people only post about work, even if the work is cool. I try to maintain a healthy balance. I post pictures of sunny skies and pastel clouds, and palm trees and Spanish architecture in my neighborhood. I recently posted a picture of my face and naked torso, reclining on a sunchair, my chest covered by an open copy of Slouching Towards Betlehem. A selfie taken in the reflection of a parked car window, where I’m holding an iced coffee and wearing a cowboy hat. A table covered in cocktail glasses and a plate of oysters, with a bouquet of flowers on one of the seats. A picture of me on a sandy beach in a blue hoodie, laughing, hair visibly greasy from the saltwater. In another picture, I have zoomed in on my face and I am wearing a silk scarf tied babushka-style under my chin, and Prada sunglasses. My online presence is evidence of a life lived in aesthetic alignment, enabled by a sort of carefree, unintended professional success that gives me time for leisure and the appreciation of fine things. At the same time, it’s clear that our show has ended, and I only have a few additional things out publicly. I understand why people are confused about how I’m still at the farmer’s market seemingly every week. Because I relate to the interest in how delicate flows of money and labor underpin people’s lives, I will tell you how this is possible. I work on things that don’t make it big, but also don’t die on impact, and the people that like them keep watching them. I am a fast learner and not an asshole, so people are willing to keep me around. I’m pretty, and I can be funny, and I’m an age that is implicitly granted taste-making credit by older generations. And finally, I work in entertainment, so I get paid stupid amounts of money even for things that aren’t that successful, and then I randomly don’t get paid for six months regardless of what I do. This is how I have cobbled together a life that isn’t nearly as easy-breezy as I portray it to be, but it’s still fun and, at least for now, sustainable. There you go.

My boyfriend, Carlos, was the first to notice the bruises in person. We had gone to Echo Park Lake for the afternoon, and I was sitting on our striped picnic blanket, eating the pears he had cut up at home. I was wearing a broderie anglaise minidress and hoping Carlos would at some point flip it up and finger me in it. But for now it was just riding up on my thighs, exposing the bruises. “Wait, wait,” he said, alarmed. “What the fuck happened here?” I looked down at my legs. The bruises appeared about a week ago, and now the pale skin on the top of my thighs was overtaken by blooming puddles of harsh greens and blues, some of them turning into purples and browns. I already had several pictures of them on my phone. “Oh yeah,” I said trying to buy time. “I actually don’t know. They’re not even that bad.” Lies. If you saw no other part of my body, you would have no idea what race I was. “I think I bumped into Elani’s nightstand when I stayed at hers,” I added, “it’s at a really stupid angle next to the bed.” Carlos eyed my thighs skeptically. “They look horrible. Not like your usual bruises. Do they hurt a lot?” I shook my head and handed him a piece of pear. I liked his agitation, how visibly he cared about me. I liked the fact that he differentiated between these bruises and my usual ones – the ones he gave me during sex. I kissed him on the mouth before he could say anything else, or even eat the pear I had given him. His hands went automatically to my hips, then settled on my thighs, right on the edge where my skin started to turn a dark violet, like a storm cloud.

The bruises came up for the second time two days later, when my parents came over for lunch. I panic-scrubbed the bathroom and made a cold pasta salad, and they brought wine and a residual bad mood from an earlier argument about the monthly cost of their car insurance. They also passed along a gift from my aunt, a pair of off-white linen pants. She apparently bought them the last time she was released from the psychiatric ward and allowed to return home, only instead she returned to her favorite place, the mall. I took off my skirt in the middle of the kitchen to try them on, my legs carelessly on display. “You’re not drinking enough water,” my mother announced, looking at my bruises. “And now you look nasty. Is that something you want? To look nasty?” This had been an ongoing concern of hers for most of my life. “Do you remember how you got them?” In fact, I did. I got them at work, having carried out a particularly intense scene about two weeks ago. I had sat on my bed and tied rope around my thighs, pulling it taut so my legs were flush against each other and secured it in a practiced motion, my laptop’s camera following every movement. I didn’t think the pain was too bad, but when I untied myself afterwards I realized my legs had gone numb and my skin was red where the rope had dug into it, and weirdly grey in the places in-between. “I’m giving you Dr. Krauker’s assistant,” my mother was now saying, as if preparing to hand me a real person. Instead, she texted me Dr. Krauker’s assistant’s email address. Dr. Krauker was the ancient man who had been, holistically and unsuccessfully, treating my aunt’s psychosis, my mother’s arthritis, my father’s insomnia and my grandmother’s irregular heartbeat for a decade. He worked out of a nice but crumbling building, smelled of cigarette smoke, was forever returning from trips to Israel, and often swore at his patients. I had no desire to see Dr. Krauker, and my family’s constant patronage of his practice did not fill me with confidence about his medical skills. On the other hand, the bruises were becoming problematic. Viewers had already noticed even though I had tried to hide them, figuring they would only appeal to a small, if vocal minority. I sat at an awkward angle, kneeling, my tits jutting out and my neck craned slightly, laptop propped unsteadily on a pillow. If I tilted the laptop further up then my legs wouldn’t be so clearly in view, but my face would be, which had been off limit. So there they were, in plain sight. Press on ur bruise, somebody had typed in the chat that day, and I did. It didn’t really hurt, but I made a sound like it did. I thought about whether the person understood that me being on their screen in the first place was a much greater act of masochism than pressing on my bruise. I had done similar tricks before. Once, I read from a book – Anaïs Nin, feeling demoralized about my unoriginality – while sitting on a vibrator. The idea was that I would become gradually unable to continue reading as I progressed towards orgasm, highlighting my descent into ecstasy. The thing is, I have always been a great reader, just as I have always been very in control of my orgasms. At most, my eyes are screwed shut and my mouth is slightly open, but it’s nothing like the writhing and moaning you usually see. So in that scene, I pretended to be both a bad reader and a hyperactive orgasmer, gasping and grinding and fluttering my eyelids and pretending to grab onto my tits for balance. I was gifting the audience the sense that I had been reduced to something degrading outside of my control, so that they could get off to it. In one way or another, that’s what all my scenes were about. I could have been sitting there fully clothed and staring at the ceiling for an hour, and it still would have been about that. So, the bruises had their fans, but they catered to a specific taste, plus they could be recognized. As I said, my face never featured. That also meant I had to put real thought into the props. I used tasteful but unobtrusive pastel bedsheets, and wore small tank tops and shorts that were skimpy, but not in an obviously purposeful way. I was curating the appearance of a casually slutty employee at a video rental store in 2007, as opposed to a seasoned hooker. I have a bleached, grown-out pixie cut, but on camera I usually wear a long brunette wig, the hair falling onto my shoulder and chest. Men can learn to like weird hair when it’s attached to a whole woman with real charm and a personality, but when it’s a headless sex object, they want the long hair, the big boobs, the whole nine yards. Staring at my mother’s text, I decided to see Dr. Krauker as soon as possible.

The next Saturday, Jared called me just after nine in the morning. I knew him from college, where he was supposed to direct a movie I wrote with my friend Emma, about the stories of various couples told from the perspective of a waiter serving them at a popular date spot. The project was short-lived primarily because the movie was really pretty bad, and secondarily because Jared and Emma experienced creative differences over Jared’s decision to make out with Emma’s boyfriend. Since graduation, Jared had gone on to direct a movie with the cast made up entirely of puppets that showed at Telluride, and a short documentary about an old Albanian man and his granddaughter tracking down the piano he played on as a boy. I watched that one when it was uploaded to YouTube and it did make me cry. Unlike me, Jared has no social media presence, but a search for his name does reveal multiple public domain shots of him in a wine-red suit at Telluride, two black braids framing his face. We text every few months.

“You want to be in a movie, yeah?” he asked, after having pretended to care about how I’d slept.

“Not particularly,” I replied.

“No, but I mean, you do,” he said. His ability to not be dissuaded was both inspiring and irritating. “You write and you direct and now you want to be in something. It’s the natural progression of things.”

“It really isn’t. If I wanted to be in a movie, wouldn’t I already have been in a movie?”

“Ouch,” he said, and I could hear he was smiling. “Okay, maybe you don’t want to be in a movie, but you want to be in my movie. I will put you in a backless top so we can see your shoulder blades. I will love you forever. Please don’t make me call anyone else and demean myself all over again.”

It wasn’t any of what he had just said that spoke to me, right? I mean, I appreciated the thing about my shoulder blades. And also, my whole life felt like it was built on a piece of plywood suspended in the air. I had no solid foundation. At all times, I had an acute sense that everything was frail – my name in credits, my Echo Park apartment, my bank balance. I had made a life for myself, but I had to keep pursuing it for it to stay afloat. I had to do things, regardless of whether I wanted to or not.

“Okay,” I heard myself say, then, after a pause, “I’m doing it. But you really do have to love me forever.”

Jared laughed, and for a moment I felt lucky to know someone who was so willing to convince me of things. “Hand on my heart. Also, can you send me some headshots? Apparently that’s a thing people want when you are doing it the legit way. And how okay are you with full frontal?”

After we hung up, I made a mental list of things I needed to do. I needed to disabuse myself of the notion that actors were actors and I was a director because I was smarter than them, which is something I had told myself to be able to boss around people so much hotter than me. I needed to walk back a lot of things I have said about actors, period. I needed to get a buccal fat massage. I needed to take headshots. I needed to see Dr. Krauker so I could be very okay with full frontal. I needed to get Carlos to break up with me.

The fact that I wanted Carlos to break up with me would have come as a surprise to most people who knew us. We looked good together. He was kind to me and I bossed him around in a way everyone found endearing, including him. Even after three years, we went on real dates multiple times a week, and I posted pictures of all of them. We had seafood pasta on patios lit with fairy lights, and gin and tonics in dirty bars with live jazz, and cappuccinos in museums with white walls and big windows. There were pictures of us kissing in elevator mirrors and holding hands in the car. I bragged about how it was enough for Carlos to smell my perfume to get hard. He once gave me a large hickey on my chest and I wore a low-cut dress to dinner with our friends afterwards, showing it off. It was important to me that people understood I had someone who both loved me and wanted me – that I was capable of sustaining that relation. We met at a house party in my last year of college when he was just somebody’s skater friend, visiting from the NYU Gallatin School of Individualized Study. He met my family at graduation. I told him I was moving to LA and he could come but I didn’t want to live with him yet, and he came anyway. The issue between us was one I didn’t think anybody would understand so I never talked about it, but it kept growing bigger and bigger inside me. The second time we slept together, I had guided his hand to my neck and he had started squeezing almost immediately. A few weeks in, we already had a safe word because “no” and “stop” weren’t that. I would tell him to get me a drink from the bar, or to change his jacket, and pretend to swat him with my purse and he would make a big show of holding up his hands and going, “Okay, okay, okay!” and everybody would laugh. What I think of as our ongoing, simmering breakup started because I asked him a while ago if he had ever been dominated by a woman. When he said no, I asked if he had ever had sex where nobody was dominated. The next day, I asked him if he thought our friends would laugh if he spoke to me the way I spoke to him when I was ordering him around and he said no, they wouldn’t like it. The fact that he understood that was demoralizing, because it meant he understood that it was a joke that hinged on pretending I had more power in our relationship than I actually did, and we all laughed at the fact that we knew it wasn’t true. And even my pretend power meant Carlos wanted to tie me up and push his fingers down my throat every night, letting me know I didn’t really have it. I knew why I got off when he hurt me, but why did he? Why were all the other people streaming on the same website as me women? Why was I not surprised when that man told me to press on my bruise, and why did I go along with it? Why did I know, with absolute certainty, that the person with no profile picture and a randomly generated username was a man? The longer I was with Carlos, the more acutely I understood that behind every creative woman with a cool Instagram is a man choking her out in bed. You can’t escape the act and you can’t escape the fact that both of them want it. I wanted so badly to be with the guy other women would stare at in a crowded bar, then ask me “Where did you find him?” when they saw me in the bathroom. But once I had thought my thoughts I couldn’t unthink them, and they were bubbling like a hot puddle of grease under the surface of all my other thoughts. He got to do everything right and be a good guy – one of the best – and he still got to convince me that this time it won’t hurt so bad. But he had also sat up all night with me, talking about our childhoods. He cried when we watched Call Me By Your Name. He slept on the floor when I wanted more space. He made me coffee every morning he stayed over.

Part of the reason our breakup was taking so long was because I kept changing my mind about it, and he respected my decision every time.

Dr. Krauker’s office was covered in posters of old-school anatomical illustrations that I immediately wanted to hang in my own apartment. He still smelled like cigarettes and spoke with a satisfying rasp. He instructed me to climb up on the exam table and pull up my dress. “Your mother told me about these,” he said, pointing at my legs. “She said they were nasty. Do you think they are nasty?” I had to consider this for a second. “I guess they are pretty unappealing,” I finally said, “and I’m going to be in a movie soon, so they really need to go.” Dr. Krauker nodded. God bless you Los Angeles, you barren, understanding land of opportunity. “What do you weigh?” he then asked. I looked right back at him. Was I smiling? I pulled my knees to my chest and wrapped my right arm around my shins, feeling out the way I folded into myself. I liked situations where I could physically feel the boundaries of my body. Sitting on a chair and having space left on both sides. Squeezing past someone through a narrow opening. Lying in bed on my side and feeling my knees knock into each other. The moments in which I experienced my own compactness somehow gave me confidence for all the other moments of my life that felt scary. It let me do the work I wanted to do. It let me live the life I wanted to live. I thought about how much I disliked some parts of my work at times, like getting yelled at in the writers’ room or fucking myself with a fake dick while faceless people watched, but it all amounted to a security – however frail – that I couldn’t imagine living without anymore. I still hadn’t answered Dr. Krauker. I knew he was expensive, but I hadn’t even thought to ask my parents how much before I called his assistant. On good days, I could still feel the weight of my money sitting in my bank account, extending a net underneath my entire life. Yes, I had to keep working for it, every day. But it was mine, for now. I could listen to Dr. Krauker and then walk out and tap my card at the reception desk. Full fee. No awkward conversation, no transferring money between accounts, no shuffling around, no missed utility payments. Then I would drive home, safe and insulated in my coupe, propelled forward by three tons of metal and engines. I had been so broke before and life had an edge during that time I could no longer find. I felt warm and full of life, like a baby bird held in a big, soft palm. It was my work that had gotten me there. It was my work that would continue to keep me there.

“I just don’t know why you can’t drive yourself,” Carlos repeated, staring ahead at the traffic in front of us. “You like driving in the city. And it’s what, an iron shot? You’re not coming out of surgery.” I didn’t reply. I had told him I had a low blood platelet count after I came back from seeing Dr. Krauker. I had told him I didn’t want to get an iron shot and I didn’t want to drive myself home afterwards. We were still together, and I became determined to really and truly make him perform the role of a boyfriend. I had become someone slightly different. I was needy and pouty and demanding, but also soft, pliable.

Someone easy to shove back against in irritation. In the end, I had said that he was welcome to take responsibility for me ending up wrapped around a palm tree if I did drive myself, and that’s how I ended up in the passenger seat of my car, feet on the dashboard. I recalled that scene with Humbert driving, and Lolita blowing bubblegum next to him. From the side, Carlos looked regal and invulnerable, beautiful in an intimidating way, the muscles in his forearms flexing when his hands moved. I wanted to say something to him then, something true and real, something that wouldn’t fall flat – but nothing came to mind. He dropped me off a few blocks from Dr. Krauker’s office because traffic was bad. I walked, squinting in the sun with cars swooshing past me, and realized he didn’t let me know where he'd park. I left my phone in my bag at Dr. Krauker’s desk during the appointment. Afterwards, it was hard to make out all the notifications because I only looked at my phone once I was back outside, and the sun was still blinding and my brightness was on low. When I turned it up, I still only saw fragments of text first, a few select words. Carlos, subreddit, fucking fuck, immediately, call, delete. I had my own subreddit, which I guess I also didn’t tell you. It didn’t have that many members, but the ones who were there talked a lot about how my rich parents were probably funding my career. Well, now they knew. I had not imagined Carlos to be one of the faceless people watching me, but I guess he had been. I had not expected him to screen record either, but he had been, for the entire past year. Some videos were too large to post, so he did short outtakes and screenshots. DM me for the full thing. There were pictures I had sent him too, but not as many. Even at their most debasing those had been meant for him and had therefore been tinged with love that

was impossible to wash off, consequently unpalatable to his intended audience. I was there, wide open, in all my lack of glory. By the time of the funeral a week later, some of it had been taken down, but I had already lost the ability to look anyone in the eye and not assume they had seen it. Most people had, conversely, seemingly lost the ability to look me in the eye at all. I had gone to Coronado, where his family still lived. His mom gave a eulogy, and so did some of friends from school I had never met. The circumstances of what had happened – LA, Mercedes GLC, unregistered gun – had been so distasteful as to escape mention. So had I. I hung back, watching from the sidelines. People knew my name. I was famous with certain crowds, in a certain way. Everybody had seen me, and now nobody wanted to talk to me.

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Galina Dukov is a London-based multidisciplinary writer. Her work has previously appeared in SEXTET, Reverb, Wild Greens and Word Taffy.

Instagram: @greenbellpepperfanclub