Brandy Fucking Melville
by Amy Zimmerman
It was the summer Lana Del Rey insisted she didn’t glamorize abuse, that she was just a glamorous person who wrote a lot about her abusive relationships. Kerry didn’t like Lana as much as people probably thought she did, but she acknowledged that they were kindred spirits: poets who didn’t write poetry, witches who couldn’t cast spells, white girls who saw heterosexuality for everything it was—passé, violent, exhausting, elective—and did it anyway.
Before the pandemic and the lockdown, before everyone with money left for the Hamptons and empty bars started selling Bloody Marys for bitcoins, Kerry would play Norman Fucking Rockwell on repeat at the Brandy Melville off 13th street. What had started as a job a few years back had turned into a forever-job, which is not the same thing as a career. Brandy Melville was a clothing and accessories brand founded by two Italian men and named after the fictional romance between two concepts—Brandy, an American girl, and Melville, a British boy. Their bestsellers were graphic shirts that said Los Angeles Wyoming Nantucket Santa Monica Alaska Maui Newport Beach West Coast or Paris—shirts that come from nowhere and can be sold and shipped across the world. At Brandy Melville everything is tiny and labeled one size fits all, which means that if you’re not pubescent or permanently hungry, you’re nonexistent.
Instead of traditional ad campaigns, Brandy Melville HQ had Kerry and her co-workers take pictures of teen shoppers on Polaroid cameras to post on Instagram. Kerry made small talk with different high school seniors every year and folded napkin-sized crop tops that purported to fit all, priced with purely cosmetic euro signs. Kerry didn’t feel old, because Brandy Melville had somehow managed to suspend all laws of time, place, currency and matter.
Brandy Melville hired a lot of NYU kids who Kerry couldn’t help but mentor. They were quite simply born yesterday, had somehow been allowed to fly across the country without cultural references or survival skills. They were constantly telling Kerry tragic stories about having their fake IDs taken at midtown beer gardens, or showing up traumatized to work after getting lost in Brooklyn the night before. They’d be desperate to process everything they’d seen: above ground subway lines, gas stations and graveyards, Avenue Z. “I thought it was supposed to be a grid?!” they’d sob, as Kerry tried to figure out where they’d gone wrong, how they’d overshot Bushwick and ended up in Bensonhurst. To 21-year-olds, Kerry had quickly discovered, everything she didn’t like about herself was glamorous, made her a woman of the world. They loved to hear about what pills her psychiatrist was prescribing her, which of her dietitian’s edicts she was ignoring this week. Sometimes, when she told them about thrift stores that were better than Depop or which food scale to buy on Amazon, they even took notes.
This is how to disappear/this is how to disappear…As the chorus looped for months, seeping out the Brandy Melville windows all the way to Union Square, Kerry taught her barely legal co-workers about Lana Del Rey, née Elizabeth Woolridge Grant. Lizzy Grant was the product of an ad agency copywriter and an account executive. 25 years later, with the help of her father, she rebranded as Lana Del Rey, a name that is not timeless and universal so much as it is ripped from time and place. Lana Del Rey took the sound of her name from Miami, from the Spanish she tried on there. Also, the Del Rey sedan, made by Ford in Brazil and sold in Chile, Venezuela Uruguay, and Paraguay. Last but not least, Lana Turner, a pin-up model and MGM movie star. Turner had the kind of past that Del Rey’s oeuvre presupposes. She was discovered at 15 while ordering pop at a Hollywood malt shop. Her first big role was a murder victim, and her fame rose exponentially in 1958, when her teenage daughter stabbed and killed her mother’s lover.
“In the music video for ‘Doin’ Time,’ Lana Del Rey is a gigantic woman crushing Venice Beach under her heel,” Kerry would narrate, a makeshift shoebox projector streaming YouTube on to the white walls behind the register. “We zoom out to see a regular-sized Lana gazing up at herself onscreen.” At some point during this lecture, Kerry’s audience (a too tall NYU sophomore named Stella) would lose interest; she’d stop watching the video and start flipping through customer Polaroids, throwing the brace-faced and the uggos into a discard pile.
Back in college, Kerry had dated a boy for years who couldn’t get over his parents’ divorce. Brad was her first artist, and she trusted implicitly that his art was smart and good. At student receptions she would stand in front of his photographs until her neck hurt, fix her mouth in subtle awe and let her eyes go unfocused until she could be looking at anything. What she was looking at, unfortunately, were a dozen black and white photographs of a suburban house, a suburban tree, and a suburban road. In his artist’s statement, Brad wrote about the time before the divorce, when middle class white suburbia was a refuge, and the time afterwards, when everything from the church across the street to his own yard at nightfall took on a sinister, ominous tone. Even then, Kerry understood him, and his work, in far fewer words. He had believed in one thing, and now his faith had been taken from him. Of course the art wasn’t interesting, Kerry allowed, still nodding her head slowly in case anyone was looking. Brad had believed in boring things. Luckily for him, Kerry was there now. Like Lana, Kerry knew that the woman who is watching the film, eyes wide as her date hands her a can of pop, is also art.
Kerry didn’t know which came first: the rosary she always wrapped around her neck or Brandy Melville’s line of tiny crucifix charms, swinging from delicate hoops, stacked along the earlobe like rose-gold soldiers. She had grown up in and out of Catholic schools and hospitals, but it wasn’t until recently that Christianity had become a major facet of her brand. Two years before lockdown, she went on a pilgrimage to el Santuario de Chimayo, a shrine with an age-old vault of holy dirt. No one else on the trip knew it was a pilgrimage. It was Kerry’s boyfriend at the time plus all of his friends; they wanted to go to a DIY artist’s retreat a girl named Ember was setting up in Taos. Kerry’s boyfriend wasn’t an artist, and neither were his friends. “I’m organizing an artist’s retreat” was just Ember’s way of saying that she had a summer house in Taos. Early one morning Kerry took the car and drove the hour and a half to Chimayo, past cartoon-style towns of single street and dust, huge billboards dwarfed by orange sky. The church was safe between mountains, a thousand mismatched crucifixes hanging from a wire fence. In silence Kerry walked the compound, laid hands on a likeness of the Virgin Mary, a rough wooden cross. And then it was into the dank of the adobe church, the side room where she got down on her knees and scooped dirt from the very foundation into her mouth, swallowed. Later, Kerry’s boyfriend made fun of her, said that the holy pit was filled every morning with trucked-in dirt. The next time Kerry took the car she didn’t bring it back.
Eating dirt had been a turning point. Kerry was less inclined than ever to go to church or keep up with her daily minimum calories—in terms of sustenance and religiosity, she already had everything she’d ever need. Technically she was a lapsed Catholic, which in practice made her more Catholic than ever. The bloody iconography and boozy doctrines that she’d imbibed as a kid were no longer relegated to Sundays. She had spent all her teenage time on pro-ana Tumblr tags and could look at ribs for hours, whether they were on her Instagram explore page or pixelated images of Christ stretched out and suffering on the cross. She saw angels on sidewalks, Jesus of Nazareth in the skateboarders-turned-models who fasted for definition. She loved their sharp cheekbones, bruised knees and palm stigmata. All the best moments in her life consisted of the sun against her skin, that fine line between a blessing and a smite.
All the best moments in her life were ego death, followed by ego resurrection in someone else’s stuff. This is how to disappear. She could remember the minutes before—walking into the lobby of a doorman building on Riverside, watching the golden hour of Chinatown against the floor-to-ceiling windows of the loft Jake sublet that summer. Some others: The Port Authority bus she took with commuters to Rockland county, his car idling next to the road-side stop; a basement room in Crown Heights with exceptional molding, the first notes of a playlist that might have been (but wasn’t) made for her. The next thing she knew she was risen, with new clothes, new friends, and a new life’s purpose. She would overhear herself talking at parties and marvel at her inflections, how many people she knew, the interests and values she seemed to share with others. There was no other explanation—Kerry was a sacred vessel. The dirt she had swallowed in New Mexico had mixed with guts and acid, wetted into living clay. She could naturally be molded into any position, drink cocktails at a corporate office party or crack PBRs in Prospect Park, help set up a backyard show or sit attentively next to her man at an organizing meeting. Kerry could be all of these things and none of them. She was like the Virgin Mary, who was above all a mother and not a mother. Also like the Virgin Mary, she once dated a carpenter and she spent a lot of time in the corner of the frame, looking on in adoration. In the lead-up to the pandemic, Kerry was seeing someone in every borough and feeling as loved as she could remember.
In retrospect, all of this—all the lives she’d half-lived—was preparation for her enclosure. In medieval times, according to a history she’d found on Google books with every other page left out, women with a higher purpose were shut in church-side cells. To usher in their big day, the priest would recite the Mass of the Dead. “Here the various ceremonies of the Burial Office seem to have been enacted. Holy smoke and water, the prostration of the recluse upon the bier, the scattering of earth—nothing was left to the imagination; and at the end of it all, with the safe emergence of the bishop, ‘let them block up the entrance to the house.’”
And so, Kerry donned her loosest linens and bolted the door. Instead of the priest issuing her last rites she had governor Cuomo on NY1, his endless incantations of six feet apart, flatten the curve, stay at home. Another aspiring corpse in the anchoritic tradition, Kerry embroidered Etsy samplers, read whatever scripture she could cobble together, looked out the window and laid very still. Her pothos plants spread over her TV and bar cart, strangled her cat. Delivery men trailed outside her door like suitors, or crumbs. She ordered more than she could ever eat and pretended they were offerings, that she could confer grace or salvation in return. She imagined the suffering of the essential workers—it was part of her daily routine, the holy cultivation of her mind-garden.
But at the end of the day it was His suffering she wanted to bathe in, not theirs. “Our Lady sees the Creator’s greatness, and her own insignificance; the great drops of blood running down from the crown of thorns.” Her other boyfriends had taken her to see the world, but what was the world? There were as many worlds as there were boyfriends, and she would never get to them all, and what if she could? It would never be enough. She was sick of the minor leagues, ready for a big time love that transcends time and place, the kind of longing that obliterates the self and gets you painted on a thousand triptychs.
On Wikipedia, she learned that the majority of surviving anchoritic texts aren’t revelations from enclosure—they’re manuals, long lists of do’s and don’ts that reputable men wrote for virgin shut-ins. Somewhere in medieval Brittany, a man with too much ink on his hands scrawled out schedules for daily anchoritic life, rules for dress and decorum, parameters for right and proper prayer. Sat at a large oak desk, looking out the window, he saw a dirty cottage with the entrance bolted up, a bride of Christ illuminated in a simple white dress. His wet dream became a book and the book became historical record. Boy, look at you, looking at me. She imagined bringing all this new knowledge back to the girls at the store. “In return for loving Christ infinitely and out of sight, the anchoress is endlessly adored,” she would teach, until their hollow heads were full.
New York City was shut down, empty but for the echo of the sirens and the legion of dogs that ran the sidewalks over every morning. Kerry had sixteen holy visions, was too blacked out on delivery margaritas to remember nine or ten of them. She cut the tip of her thumb off slicing a bagel and saw Jesus on the cross, knew his pain and discomfort. Wanting more of him, she cut the tip off her other thumb, but passed out at the sight of all that blood. Hallucinating in and out of dehydration, she knew herself to be in the Norwich cell of Mother Julian, then in the manger where Mary gave birth. The straw was not so uncomfortable, felt like one of those oatmeal-texture blankets, and the severed umbilical cord was wrinkled and discolored like the tips of her thumbs. In a matter of days, she had immaculately conceived, given birth, and watched her son suffer, the blood between his ten perfect fingers and bruises on his ten perfect toes. Her exes called and texted, wanting to know how she was “holding up.” She wanted to soothe them like she always had, to laugh at their jokes and send perfect nudes they’d hide from their girlfriends, but all their numbers and faces blurred together in a great big blob of before.
TMZ headlines float across Kerry’s consciousness like airplane banners: Lana Del Rey has been born again as Mrs. soon-to-be Larkin, an area girlfriend haunting strip malls in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma. I feel free when I see no one and nobody knows my name. Soccer moms gawk across the parking lot, sneak surreptitious photos in the salon.
During her final revelation, Kerry swears she is back at work, only the stack of Polaroids is out of control, pre-teen mugshots bursting out of the dressing room and covering the floor. Each amateur model is identically dressed, interchangeable. Kerry can’t be sure that they aren’t all her. She picks up one of the Polaroids and tries to focus on her face. Keep or toss? She’s so thin that Kerry can already picture her as a relic: humerus, skull, fragment of arm.
Amy Zimmerman is a writer and bookseller living in upstate New York. Her writing has appeared in Gigantic Sequins, Fourth Genre, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and elsewhere.
Image: Jermaine Ee/Unsplash
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