With that, Comediva presents Crank Fiction, or the unofficial extension of a fictional universe by someone who wishes it never existed in the first place.
This edition: Sex and the City.
Acting on a tip she overheard at Le Bernardin, Carrie Bradshaw eyes a pair of Forzieri slingback pumps that a boutique priced $200 cheaper by mistake. Besides nailing that column on foot scrubs and riding the business end of a 24-year-old day trader named Renaldo, it’s to be the highlight of her week.
Hooking the straps with her fore and middle fingers, she purses her lips at the unfavorable shade of coral the shoes have in the overhead fluorescents. God knows how they’d clash with a velvet rope in the subdued blacklight of a VIP section. “So much for the discount,” she quips to no one in particular.
Carrie exits the shop and sashays toward a corner bistro, occasionally clipping passersby with the corners of her bundles of shopping bags from Barney’s. Curiously, the strangers don’t share the mirth that her whimsical half-apologies offer. While in sight of the bistro, she motions for the young man holding the door for his girlfriend to also hold the door for her. But before making her way in, Carrie’s cellphone rings. She puts her Barney’s loot on the ground outside, obstructing her eyeline with the homeless man lying limp a few feet away, and checks the display of her iPhone before answering.
There ain’t no bitch with a bigger flower than me.“What’s the good news, Charlotte?” Carrie says, using that jaded, acerbic New York sense of humor she believes she has.
Silence on the other end.
“C’mon, girl. Haven’t got all day.” She really doesn’t. That 300-word piece on lipliner isn’t going to write itself.
After a few moments, Carrie hears guttural, gasping sobs. She rolls her eyes.
“Hold on a sec, Charlotte.” Carrie scratches an itch on her right calf that had been driving her nuts for the past five seconds.
“Carrie. Samantha.” Charlotte can barely form the words. “Samantha. She-…”
“Oh, great. Here we go,” she groans. Although Carrie never misses an opportunity to feign interest in her friends’ personal affairs and offer unsolicited advice, she just isn’t in the mood to hear Charlotte’s barely shrouded jealousy of Samantha’s nocturnal galavanting and male escapades. It reminds Carrie too much of herself.
“No,” Charlotte utters between sniffs. “Samantha. She’s dead.”
The blood rushes from Carrie’s face. Her limbs feel like they belong to someone else. It is at this point that Carrie Bradshaw realizes that for years filled with shopping sprees, upscale dinner parties, and impromptu brunches, she’s never experienced anything truly bad in her entire life.
Unsure if she’s still coming in, the young man lets the door to the bistro slowly close.
—
Ding, dong, the witch is dead!Charlotte and Miranda are waiting for Carrie when she arrives at the hospital. They see her, and the three embrace in heaving whimpers. Simultaneously, each woman silently worries that the other two are smearing mascara on her blouse.
A doctor sidles up next to them and asks, “Were you friends of Samantha Jones?” He stands six-foot-three, well-tanned, broad shoulders, graying at the temples. The women adjust their appearance as subtly as possible so as not to overtly telegraph any deep-seated shallowness or sudden indifference to their best friend’s death.
“Yes, doctor,” Miranda says. “What happened?”
“Details are a little slim, but what we do know is that Ms. Jones collapsed last night around 3 A.M. outside a nightclub called,” he checks his clipboard, “‘Touch.’ We found the cause to be acute alcohol poisoning. Appletinis, from the looks of things. We also saw an abnormally high amount of Xanax in her system. The police brought her here, but at that point, there was nothing we could do.”
Carrie asks what they are all thinking.
“What was she wearing?”
The doctor furrows his brow for a moment but regains his composure. Glancing back down at his clipboard, he says, “Um, yes. Ms. Jones was brought in wearing a majenta mohair sweater. Crew neck, I believe. And, oh, those sweatpants that look like jeans. What are those called?” He taps his forehead with his pen. “Pajama Jeans. That’s it. Pajama Jeans.”
Carrie hurls the contents of her stomach in a gushing torrent onto the doctor’s chest. She dry heaves a few times, as if to punctuate the horror, then stares blankly at the semi-digested shrimp salad now congealing on the doctor’s chest.
Stiffly wiping at the green and pink-streaked goo, the doctor grimaces, “So sorry for you loss.” He walks away, shaking his head.
The women stand there in silence as the harried hospital staff is forced to sidestep around them. Opening and closing their mouths, unable to formulate words, they look like three trout slowly drowning on a lakefront.
I’ve got dibs on her shoes!“I guess she finally snapped,” Charlotte says at long last. “The pressure to be in style. The obsessive fixation on looks. The endless fight to look and stay young. It must’ve been too much for her.”
“I feel that way myself sometimes,” Miranda says, looking at the floor.
Carrie whips her head toward Miranda like a steel trap. “What in the hell would you know about style? What in the hell would you know about glamor? You never started any trends. You never inspired a look. You never coined a catchphrase that gay men adopted in droves. Nobody aspired to be you.”
Carrie leans in and narrows her eyes. “Nobody … ever … wanted to be a ‘Miranda.’ “
Miranda’s jaw hangs open in a rictus of shock and painful self-awareness. Even Charlotte’s expression indicates the message hits home for her, too.
Carrie waves a hand at the two distraught ladies. “I’m done. I’m done with the both of you. I’m done with this whole thing. What’s the point? As a foursome, it kinda made sense. But if I’m looking at spending the rest of my life cackling over Cosmos with you two empty vessels, I may as well step in front of a moving train.”
She strides toward the exit, leaving Charlotte and Miranda on the verge of collapse, and heads out into the night.
—
The 77th St. station is quiet this evening. Underground, the air is comfortably cooler than the mild night twenty feet above.
Carrie stares at the turnstile, unsure of how the whole process actually works. She exchanges a glance with a woman in a hideously layered sweater-and-button-down-shirt combination accented with a pair of faded jeans. The whole look conveys a casual disregard for high fashion. If Carrie’s insides hadn’t already been emptied of fetid bile, it would be dripping from the chrome bar in front of her.
“Swipe,” Carrie whispers. “Swipe.” The word has no meaning to her. Nothing does.
I can’t believe I went out with a watermelon on my dress!
The samaritan smiles with commiseration and drags her MetroCard through the scanner. “Here. You look like you had a rough night.”
Carrie watches the woman sling her bulky handbag over her shoulder and walk toward the track. Instinctively, she follows suit. She stumbles through the turnstile, almost falling over in the process, and trails the stranger down the platform atop two numbed, wobbly legs.
The last six years echo in her mind. The walk-in closets and racks of shoes. The opulent, but wholly vapid soirées in highrises. The unceasing blather with three shrieking harpies consumed by nothing but designer labels, vacuous hunks, and egregious self-indulgence.
She thinks of her fleeting relationships and her inability to form a lasting, meaningful connection with a fellow human being. She thinks of her whirlwind romance with Mr. Big and how she allowed it to deteriorate once she learned that his real name is Chuck Zalewski.
She thinks of her whole stinking existence and realizes something profound. Something cathartic. Something final.
The dim light from the 6 train heading downtown appears at the end of the tunnel. Unbeknownst to her fellow straphangers, Carrie inches closer to the edge of the platform.
The rumble grows louder as the metal behemoth hurdles closer and closer. A look of serenity, one untinged by envy or duplicity, washes over Carrie’s face.
The conductor applies the brakes, but the train maintains a steady clip as the front end breaches the station.
Carrie Bradshaw loses her footing and frees her mind from materialism, solipsism, and the need to social climb. The outside world goes quiet as she plummets in slow motion. Through the silence, one last futile prayer pierces through the sanguine fog before her limp body hits the track and goes unnoticed.
“God, I hope nobody looked up to us.”
