Molly Mae

Oh, Molly Mae. I’ll admit, I love to look at her. She’s the most recent thing to capture my interest, and I can’t stop thinking about her. Physically, she’s something else. She’s got one of those physiques that can only be achieved through both a winning genetic lottery ticket and near-constant, unspoken deprivation. Her limbs all long and spindly, her slight frame an anomaly for a woman so tall. She’s a wisp of a woman, a tall weed bending in the wind.

Her facial features sharp, bird-like almost. Attributes that look gorgeous on camera but harsh in real life. She never makes an attempt to soften them through make-up. Hell, I don’t think I’ve even ever seen her wear mascara. She loves her face the way it is. Her long, naturally blonde tresses give me a pang of envy—an emotion I don’t feel often these days. Her beautiful hair was down to her ass. My own can only get a few inches longer than shoulder length before it starts breaking off and looking scraggly. When I’m overdue for a cut, I’m a baldcap away from being a deadringer for Rocky Horror’s Riff Raff.

She could have been a successful model back in her day, but wasn’t interested in that life. Modeling was too pedestrian for her. She was an aspiring actress. Emphasis on the aspiring: she had been doing that for two decades without any success. The only paid gig I can recall was “Seatbelt Woman” in an airline safety instructional video. Her part was simple: pull the belt around her 24” inch waist, buckle, then tighten. They didn’t even show her head. When I congratulated her in earnest on the booking, she winced as if to say “ick, that’s not me.”

Her website is mostly headshots and a few clips from short arthouse films directed by friends, other millennial Brooklynites still clutching to their dreams like sand through their fingers. She has no range, and no apparent desire to have it. She can play a fragile beauty, and a fragile beauty alone—a hard sell at 40 years old to an industry that feasts on youth, sucking it out of young women like strawberry gogurt. The last time I heard a role suggested for her, it was to play the mother of a 16-year old girl. She rejected it outright, declaring herself too young for the character.

My local Pilates studio is one of many she patronizes. She bores of them, disappears, and blows back in weeks later. I was surprised to see her at this particular class one Friday morning; the last time we spoke she expressed her displeasure at the instructor. “She’s just too, I don’t know…enthusiastic,” she scoffed. “Big theater kid energy.” It amused me that an exercise instructor, whose entire purpose was to be energetic and motivating early in the morning, annoyed Molly Mae.

I surprised to see her here for another reason as well: she had been out of the city shooting a short film she had written. It was all a birthday present to herself. She had been a funk with her lover of seven years, and wanted to “pour herself back into her craft.”

When she told me the plot, I had to forcibly close my gaping jaw: an aging actress (played by Molly Mae) grows tired of her neglectful lover and reconnects with an old flame (played by Molly Mae’s old flame).

What shocked me further was that her boyfriend of seven years presumably read the script and still agreed to fund the endeavor. Either that or he didn’t read the 15-page script, but still decided to fund the project. Which is more depressing?

Making a film about cheating on your boyfriend and then making your boyfriend finance the project. Damn. I couldn’t decide whether Molly Mae was downright Machiavellian or the most self-unaware person I’d ever encountered. Was she playing three dimensional chess or chutes and ladders?

“Hey, how are you?” It was a loaded question.

“I’m okay…filming just wrapped,” she said.

“Oh? How was that?” I asked. If she says the word “cathartic,” I’m going to lose my shit, I thought to myself

“It was…a lot. I’ll tell you about it later. I just…really needed to do it, you know? It was just so cathartic.” She was so predictable, I loved it.

“Oh yeah, I’d really like to see it,” I wasn’t lying. I really wanted to see it.

“Yeah, it’s still in post-production. I’ll let you know when it’s done. I’m going to submit it to Cannes and Berlin. I have some contacts there.”

I saw some of the other girls in class listening in, their interest piqued by the slender doll speaking of film festival submissions. Good, Molly Mae likes that.

“You should do Tribeca and SXSW too,” I suggested, glossing over the ridiculousness of her last statement.

“No, the film’s like, too out there for American taste. They won’t like it. It’s too raw and sexual. It’s very European.”

She’s the portrait of Brooklyn chic: utterly effortless yet constantly curated. Her outfits painstakingly plucked from high-end vintage stores and indie designers. Asking who she’s wearing is an exercise in futility. It’s one of a kind, the designer is long dead, the label’s been cut out, a friend made it for her, she found it in a trunk that washed ashore on her latest trip to Sint Martin. Her instagram presence is strictly regulated to cultivate mystery: 1-3 carefully selected photos posted each month designed to “tell a cohesive story.” A black and white shot of her walking through ocean waves in a briny silk slip dress, a roaring bonfire, a rooftop spritz in San Miguel de Allende. She has amazing taste; it’s not incidental to her personality, it is her personality.

After class we walked to get a coffee.

“Did you see the new Peewee Herman documentary?” I asked. She considered herself a connoisseur of the avant-garde so I thought she might have seen it.

“Yeah, it was so good. I never watched PeeWee’s Playhouse, though. It’s really not my thing,” she said. “I'm into art that’s more subtle.”

I had to quash a smirk again. No, of course Molly Mae wasn’t into talking chairs.

While she’s never worked with them, she’s allegedly had brush-ins with some of most famous independent filmmakers of our time: Abel Ferrara, Jim Jarmusch, Vincent Gallo, Alejandro Jodorowsky. She loves rattling off the names, I’ve heard them all eight times over by now. Each one that rolls off the tongue reassures her that she’s somebody. Of course none of these men could pick her out of a line-up, but then again I’m not actually sure Ferrera or Jodorowsky could pick their own wives out of a line up these days.

“But I totally identify with Paul Reubens as an artist, a creator. I really saw myself in him.”

“Mmm.” I said. Does she even hear herself?

At the café, we sat down and ordered our coffees.

“Are you hungry?” She asked. I shook my head, I didn’t want to make this more than coffee.

She hailed the waitress back and ordered a $14 frittata.

She picked at it and told me all about the shoot. The chemistry with her co-star was electric. Everyone on the set had said so, it wasn’t just in her head.

“It was just so heavy. We ended up making out off camera for a bit, but we stopped ourselves from going further,” she admitted. I resisted the urge to say “damn, who could have seen that coming?” like an asshole.

Then, her demeanor changed. “Joe found out. He’s so mad at me right now. We were supposed to go to Miami for my birthday, but he canceled it.” She said solemnly. The conversation turned to how terribly unhappy she had been in her relationship for the past few years. When I suggested the obvious, a good old-fashioned break-up, she brushed it off as an impossibility.

“Even if I wanted to, I don’t have the money to break-up with him,” she said, her voice cracking a bit. “I have 39 dollars in my bank account right now.”

Comments like these are not unusual in a city with a 1:1 rat to trust fund baby ratio. But, she was born low, like me. Her father was a farmer from rural Maine—the northernmost part. Her wild mother long fucked-off to Texas for a man more important than 8 year-old Molly Mae. Her kind, old father still alone on the farm, unless, that is, you count the coonhounds and goats.

Her snobbery was an overcorrection of that frostbitten, provincial upbringing. I see her in me, though we’ve chosen different paths. I watched my mother ripped apart by her financial dependence on my father, a steady-armed executioner ready to lob off her head over every misspent dollar. And if my mother excelled at anything, it was misspending dollars. Their bitter divorce and my mother’s financial ruin put The Fear™ in me and made me turn inward towards radical self-reliance.

While her father was poor, he was kind, unlike mine. She didn’t have The Fear and there was nothing anyone could do to put it in her. The Fear is an ugly thing, for ugly people. And there was simply no space in her for ugly things. It was almost charming, the way she lived so deep in her dream, her delusion. Like it was a little stone cottage in the woods, safe and protected from the most odious thing imaginable: the ordinariness of existence.

What made you this way, Molly Mae? At some point, you stared in the mirror and your beautiful reflection must have promised you the world. Maybe it was a showing of Breakfast at Tiffany’s at a delicate time in your life. Maybe your father drove you to the video store as a silent apology to say “I’m sorry, but it’s just the two of us now, Molly Mae.” And when you popped the tape into the old VCR, your grey, lonely world melted away into an intoxicating blur of city lights, chic dresses, leisurely meals, and handsome, doting men.

I find her a tragic figure, a Blanche Dubois for the Instagram age. To me, she lives in a dream ever on the cusp of a nightmare. She has no savings, no skills, no safety net other than a couple of friends’ couches and a still-pink room in that remote, dilapidated farmhouse. The only thing separating her from catastrophe is the thin membrane of her lover’s own fear of being alone. I’ve only met him a few times. He’s tall and lean like Molly Mae. There is an ever-present aura of sadness about him. A mutual friend told me some details of his childhood, the objectively worst one of any people in my orbit. It made sense of their relationship. But he had overcome the hard hand he was dealt. In adulthood he found moderate success in the city’s highly competitive nightlife scene which provided both him and his dependent a solidly upper-middle class city life. Like many of us here, they live ephemerally. They own no property. Meals are sourced from restaurants, regardless of the simplicity of the dish. Money instantly evaporates on an endless sea of trips, trinkets, tickets, and tipples.

“I didn’t cheat on him,” she protested. Part of me felt like it was almost worse than commonplace cheating. It felt so premeditated, so curated in that singular Molly Mae way. I’m sure her lover felt the same. A mugshot of a beauty, the charge was murder, not manslaughter.

She broke down crying.

“It’s just…he doesn’t even touch me anymore. I was crying out for intimacy for years. I didn’t know what else to do. I just wanted him to see me.” As she continued on about the grim state of affairs, I found myself softening. Her big, watery blue eyes two oceanic whirlpools and I was in their pull. He really gave her no choice, I suppose. For a moment and only a moment, I agreed that Molly Mae was justified. It was just a little heavy petting, after all.

“Maybe it’s time to start looking for a ‘job’ job and put acting aside for a while.” I said this as diplomatically as I could, though my reference to a “job job” was admittedly condescending. But I should be commended for not saying what I wanted to, which was “Wake up, bitch. Dream-time’s over.” No, I could never say something like that to her.

“I’ve been looking, really. I can’t find one. I put in applications at a few boutiques over a month ago, they never called me back.” I wondered which ones, before wondering whether it was true at all. She changed the subject: she didn’t want to talk about jobs.

“Do you want a baby?” She asked me. I wanted to respond that we’re not good enough friends for her to ask me that, particularly this early in the morning. In fact, we’re not really friends at all. But instead I shook my head and flippantly said “Nah,” without providing any further explanation. She didn’t press the matter. Not out of politeness but because she’s simply not interested in me outside of my ability to serve as a sounding board for her own fears and desires. I have no idea what she thinks of me, or whether she thinks of me at all. If I had to guess, I’m likely a blunt instrument to her. A woman completely lacking in the subtlety she loves so much. I’m just an animatronic talking chair.

“I think I want one,” she volunteered back, picking at the spinach in her frittata.

I would support her decision to have a baby. I think it would help her re-center and find purpose. People who spend too much time online often grouse about how it’s selfish for two broken people to bring a child into this world. I think that’s idealistic at best, and at worst just another symptom of that American neuroticism for which I have so much disdain. Besides, most of us on this earth, including myself, are the progeny of deeply damaged individuals. Some more than others, of course. But we are certainly in the majority. Right at this moment, there are thousands of $400/hr therapists nodding their heads and cooing “that must have been so hard for you” to a sea of under forty-somethings talking about their troubles, all of which are now blanket-categorized as “trauma.” They’re the children of bipolars, alcoholics, helicopter parents, almond moms, absentee dads, tiger moms, Q-Anon dads, the list goes on and on. Children of people who did their best with what they had, and others who didn’t. None of us are special.

Only recently has a large swath of the Western world adopted a draconian approach to procreating. Nowadays in America, the whole ordeal is simply ill-advised unless the two subject humans satisfy a laundry list of financial, mental, and compatibility benchmarks. I can’t subscribe to this. Think of all of the wonderful books, films, and art that would have never been created if we so self-regulated ourselves into oblivion. Think about how boring and stupid the world would be if only Goldendoodle people had kids.

I can hear the dissenters already, ready to twist my words towards their logical extreme: “Father_Karine is advocating for crackheads to have babies, Father_Karine wants to run a daycare for the kids of paranoid schizophrenics.” Of course not, I’m talking about the middle ground of people capable of raising kids without killing or irreparably scarring them, even if they’re not totally well-equipped or prepared for the job. And I think that the vast majority of these people, or more specifically women, should have babies if and when they want to. What other point is there in being human?

And I don’t particularly see the state of the world as an issue. I believe there will be a point, long after anyone who’s ever read this post is returned to dust, where very strange and interesting things happen in the universe. The unpredictability of our existence is a beautiful thing and, in my view, a reason to have your babies now, if you want them. I’m not a pro- or anti-natalist, I just don’t see the point in anyone denying themselves a child (if they want one) because the world feels unpredictable and scary—something it always has been, and always will be.

Of course I’d prefer Molly Mae had a baby with a man she respected, a man who respected himself and didn’t indulge her like a child. But nothing else was on the table right now, and it was quite clear to me that these two would do everything in their power to preserve their little status quo as long as they could. If this Freudian piece of cinéma vérité didn’t do them in, I’m not sure what would.

“You should come watch me DJ on Thursday,” she said, cheering up. A few times a week she plays music at one of her lover’s establishments. In exchange, he pays her an allowance so she can pretend she earns her own money. Like a child playing bakery whose stern father, charmed by the innocence of it, exchanges a real dollar for an imaginary cake or pie every now and again.

When the $40 bill came she instinctively picked up her phone. I threw down my credit card; she politely invited me to venmo her.

“It’s fine, just get me next time,” I said. I knew the funds would never karmically boomerang back to me. I didn’t care. I’ve had my fair share of financially opportunistic friends and acquaintances over the years. Their behavior never changes so I’ve simply reframed it as the cost of entertainment. With that simple mental reshuffling, I’ve been able to eliminate any feelings of resentment and now live happy and free.

She suddenly looked sad again.

I searched for some token reassurance to offer her, settling on “I’m sure it will all work itself out.” She latched onto it with a weak smile.

I didn’t entirely believe myself, but what else could you ever say to a woman like Molly Mae?

***