Vincent Gallo Canceled Me (Fiction)
"I’m not strong enough to handle anything but compliments from strangers."
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In the photo I’m wearing a green velvet figure skating dress with a brocade design spiraling along the bodice, my greasy hair tied back with a scrunchie. My right leg is bent and pointed as I sit on the desk, and in my left hand is an iPhone raised to the wall-to-wall mirror.
The dress, a relic from childhood, is a girl’s size twelve. It’s the same dress I’m wearing in a photo I’d sent to Muzzy a few months prior, when the Hinge conversations about movies and music naturally escalated to sexts and video calls.
I’m drinking a bottle of cheap wine while sitting on the floor of my room, watching the dappled sunset through a tree in front of my cul-de-sac window. I take some lorazepam and become desperate enough to send Muzzy the photos I’d just taken in the figure skating dress, hoping it’ll get his attention. When he doesn’t immediately respond I message him, “Are you just going to ignore any horny thing I send you now?”
“Well I don’t think we should do horny stuff anymore tbh,” he texts back, almost immediately.
“Horny stuff”? The absurdity of those words coming from a now thirty-one year old man sets me off, but at least he’s responded. I’d last heard from him about three weeks ago, when I made a fool of myself on his thirty-first birthday while dog-sitting with him at his sister’s apartment in Oakland. Before arriving, I’d ingested three milligrams of lorazepam on BART, using the benzodiazepine as a source of synthetic courage, to stay the weekend with a stranger I had only met a handful of times.
I’d arrived in Oakland defenseless and beatific as a good girl should be and took two more milligrams of lorazepam in his bathroom, swallowing them with tap water. My plan was to get drunk, hoping the mix of benzos and alcohol would induce a slight mania teetering on amnesia—a state I’d achieved many times in the past—but at some point, I blacked out.
The next morning, after regaining consciousness with a gasp, I asked Muzzy what’d happened, and he recounted the previous night’s events: Ana crying while making out, sobbing the words, “I don’t know you, I don’t know you.” Ana hugging one of the dogs and asking what its name was, saying its name is Printer, then getting scared when it barked at her. Ana falling down, knocking things over, speaking nonsense, like dreaming while awake. But the worst part was when Ana passed out, he couldn’t wake her up.
He did not say “Ana,” of course, he said “you.” I did those things he described, but did I really, if I was not conscious for it?
I begin to sob, remembering all this, so I FaceTime him and he answers. I ask him about “horny stuff” and he says that he’s too old to be dealing with my bullshit, that I reminded him too much of other self-destructive people in his life, like his heroin-addicted brother. “You just become a liability at a certain point,” he says.
“But if you’re ever up in San Francisco—” I cut him off before he can finish and start bawling, because it hurts too much to hear him say this. Knowing that if I lived in the same city as him, if only I were more convenient, he would’ve allowed this nonexistent relationship to drag on even longer.
In other words, I’ve scared him off, and he just wants to be friends. I’m not one to chase after someone when I know I’m not wanted. I hang up on him and start looking through my phone for someone to talk to. Friends from college, strangers from the internet—anyone that’ll give me a response. I’m at a point in my life where the only friends I have are boys that want to fuck me.
I open Instagram. I’m in the habit of messaging meme pages when I’m drunk or on benzos or both, usually both, when I’m more willing to debase myself for attention. Through the algorithm I’ve been taken down a rabbit hole of “intellectuals” accounts, or meme pages with that suffix run by irony-poisoned internet users. I’ve been following this one called vincentgallectuals for a while and decide to send them the thirst trap photo of the figure skating dress I’d sent Muzzy earlier and the message, “Just might end my shit tonight.”
An admin responds and asks me if I want to hang out. “Do you wanna talk to a vincentgallectuals admin on the phone,” they ask, and I say yes, to which they respond, “Ok cool just give me a moment.”
vincentgallectuals started a videochat
The anonymous admin has a male voice and his video screen blacked out. Like my own personal suicide hotline, I cry and tell him about Muzzy. He tells me not to cry over a failed musician. “You have beautiful teeth,” he says.
This intellectuals account is a meme page centered on the canceled and problematic multidisciplinary artist Vincent Gallo. He’s most famous for directing and starring in a film that features actress Chloe Sevigny giving him an unsimulated blowjob. I haven’t seen that one, but I did watch Buffalo ‘66, his most popular film, while still in high school. I loved it, it really spoke to a specific female fantasy.
On Tumblr, I heard rumors about him selling his semen online, so I went to his personal website to see for myself. And there it was. To this day, his website poses an invitation for any female-born woman to email him a naked photo of herself. As “merchandise” he offers his own semen for $1,000,000 USD, with an additional $500,000 USD “natural insemination fee.” I was always curious about the type of woman that would be desperate enough to want that.
I knew Vincent was often messaging pretty girls online through Instagram, some as young as eighteen. While there are no pedophile allegations, it’s a bit odd he seeks female attention solely from barely legal girls, when he himself is now is in 60s.
I’d recently talked about Vincent Gallo with Muzzy because we watched one of his films during a virtual date night. The film was Trouble Every Day (2001) directed by Claire Denis. Vincent plays a newlywed cannibal attempting to hide his affliction from his young bride as they honeymoon in Paris. In my favorite scene, he quite literally eats the pussy of a female victim, coming up with his mouth covered in blood.
I decide it’s time to message Vincent Gallo himself on Instagram. He doesn’t post much aside from the occasional political rant. It’s unlikely he’ll respond to my DM, but I’m drunk and go for it anyway. I send Vincent the same thirst trap photo of myself with the opening line: “I love king crimson that’s why my username is moonchild. I’m 23.”
The next day, at 10:18 PM, he responds: “You are very pretty.”
I gasp, flattered by this celebrity calling me pretty, even if he is just a dirty old man. I’m shocked and excited and can’t help but smile. I immediately screenshot the message and send it to Muzzy and the vincentgallectuals admin and a few of my friends from college. Muzzy ignores it, but everyone else responds with intrigue. It makes me happy that people are actually interested in me again. All I’m thinking about is how much influence Vincent has over these internet boys posting memes about him, how they worship him, even if they’re making fun of him, and how he’s now giving me attention. Vincent would never give them the time of day.
The rest of the conversation with Vincent that Friday night goes like this:
me: I’m so fucking lonely 10:27 PM
me: I’m the lonely boy in your song 10:27 PM
V: Send more photos 10:33 PM
I send him a photo of me standing on a chair in front of a mirror wearing the skating dress so my legs are visible.
me: This is my skating dress 10:34 PM
V: How old are you 10:35 PM
me: I said I’m 23 10:35 PM
V: Where 10:35 PM
me: San Francisco lol 10:35 PM
V: I’m there often 10:36 PM
me: What do you do there 10:37 PM
He doesn’t reply. The next night I send him a picture of the late Zoë Lund, an actress and screenwriter who was a heroin advocate and addict. I ask him if he knew her.
“What was she like,” I ask.
“Funny girl,” he types back.
“Did you ever do heroin with her?”
“I don’t take drugs,” he responds. “Never did.” I’m genuinely surprised.
While I’m grateful for the occasional Vincent reply, I want to draw him in all the way. I send him a disappearing image of me in the skating dress with my legs apart, censoring my crotch, with the caption, “Do you want to see this in SF?”
He replies to the image and says, “Yes. Everything,” and I know I’ve got him. But I’m sober, so I feel kind of sick about the whole thing. He’s so old now. I picture him as he existed onscreen in the early 2000s, lanky and brooding and handsome. Unsure how to respond to the message, I decide to get drunk.
Three hours later he hits me up: “Show me.”
“Show what?” I respond, “I’m shy :( I’ll show in person.”
“Just a little,” he says.
I don’t feel like taking any nudes, so I scroll up a few months through my photos and find a picture of me shirtless with my arm covering my breasts. I send it to him.
“Just a little more,” he says.
He really isn’t satisfied with a partial nude? I laugh. He’s the only man that has ever outright asked me to send nudes. Not even Muzzy would pressure me in that way; he once said there’s something gross about the kind of people that do.
Muzzy still hasn’t responded to my text, which bothers me. There’s no way he hasn’t seen it yet. I bet he has, and now he’s freaking out and regretting breaking up with me. I take a screenshot of Vincent's message and write to Muzzy, “Vincent Gallo is asking me for nudes.”
While I wait for a response, I look in my recently deleted photos for a nude I’d taken while blacked out. All of my thirst traps are taken while blacked out, because I’m usually too embarrassed to take any while sober. I’m not very good at being a whore without my drugs. I find a photo in which you can see at least one nipple and my arm positioned to cover my crotch, and I send it to Vincent.
“You’re are super sexy,” he says.
“Thank you :),” is all I reply.
I’m burning with the satisfaction of being desirable in some way by a man even better than Muzzy. More successful, anyway. I can’t help but compare them: They have the same chin and green-blue eyes and dark curly hair. They both paint and make music. They represent my ideal male form—who I imagine I’d be if I were born male.
But I’m not. I was born with this female body and so I’ll use it to get to where I need to be with the least amount of effort, because that’s what whores do, and until you find a man to become his wife that’s what you are.
Later that night Vincent messages me again: “You wanna talk by phone?”
I’m so excited by this possibility I text everyone I know again and ask them if I should do it. There’s no way I’m able to talk to him sober, so I consider my options. I’m out of lorazepam but remember this dime bag of coke someone had given me two years ago. I find it carefully tucked away beneath my bed then pour some out onto my desk. It’s all chunky and grainy from sitting unused for so long, but I do my best to rail a line by rolling up a dollar bill.
Fifteen minutes later I finally tell Vincent, “Yeah just give me a few minutes.” I wait for his call, but at 10:04 PM he says, “I have to call tomorrow.”
I wake up early Sunday morning anticipating a phone call I am slowly losing faith in. Supine in bed, I imagine a world where I meet Vincent and we don’t do anything sexual. I think of the scene in Buffalo ‘66 where he kidnaps Christina Ricci and forces her to be his fake girlfriend for his parents, and when he takes her to a motel, he doesn’t touch her at all; he won’t even let her touch him. Deep down, he is just a vulnerable man in need of attention from the right girl.
“We are the couple that doesn’t touch.”
—Buffalo ‘66 (1998)
I receive a message from Vincent at 10:18 AM: “You up?”
“You up?” like he’s some fuckboy messaging me at midnight for a booty call. Vincent is like the final boss of all the narcissistic art boys I’ve tried to date. His mode is not unfamiliar to me. But it’s not midnight; it’s ten in the morning. I know what he wants, and maybe this is just a ploy to gain my trust. I want to see how far he’ll take it.
“Yes what’s up,” I respond.
“What’s your number,” he says.
I give it to him, and then he says, “Calling from a blocked #.”
Is this real? I disassociate, my body vibrating with excitement. How long do I have? Minutes? Seconds? It’s 10:36 AM and I’m pouring out the rest of the coke onto my desk and cutting it into lines. I use a piece of a plastic straw to snort the grainy white powder and wait to feel something. It hits quickly, something like gasoline dripping in the back of my throat, just as the phone rings.
“Hello? This is Vincent Gallo” he says his full name in his unmistakably caustic voice.
“Hi,” I say softly back. “Nice to meet you.” I try to sound calm and speak to him as I would to Muzzy. I tell myself he’s just a person, this isn’t real, I’m not a person. I’m setting up lines as we speak. I’m not a person.
“What are you doing right now?” I ask.
“I’m driving from New York to Los Angeles.”
“That’s a very long drive,” I say.
“I like driving. I enjoy the solitude.”
“I’m surprised that you’re driving,” I say, “I feel like most bicoastal elites take private jets.”
He laughs. “Well I don’t use a jet, but I am elite. I’m an elitist.”
“I’m an elitist too. And I know you’re elite,” I say in a lowered voice, almost flirting. It’s as though I’ve unlocked a hidden personality of mine, like a confident, charismatic person has suddenly taken control of my body. I let it ride.
“Right, well,” he says, “I just want to make things clear right at the beginning, so you don’t have any misconceptions about this. You sent me some pictures, and I decided to talk to you, as long as this conversation stays between us. I’m not saying I would, but you know, I wouldn’t want to share those pictures with anyone else, as long as this stays between us. Not that I would do that, of course.”
Is he trying to blackmail me already? Maybe, or maybe that’s just what I want him to do. I think he can’t hurt me, because I look good in those pictures. Maybe I want him to hurt me.
“Okay, I promise,” I lie.
“And possibly, if I’m up in San Francisco, we can meet in a way that you feel completely comfortable with. And all I’m asking in return is that once in a while you send me some pictures. Make an old pervert happy, if you will.” He laughs. I don’t say anything, not wanting to make him feel bad.
“I’m sorry if what I said crossed the line and made you uncomfortable just now—”
“No, it’s okay,” I finally say. “I’m just really shy.”
“Yes, you’re surprisingly soft spoken. Based on your pictures I thought you’d be a bit more…I don’t know.”
“Yeah, I get that a lot.” He was expecting me to be bolder, more of a slut, I’m guessing.
“Was it hard for you to send those photos?” he asks.
“No,” I say, after a slight deliberation. I was drunk, but I won’t tell him that.
He asks me where I am at the moment and I tell him.
“San Jose is like that person in high school you kind of remember but you can’t remember their name,” he says in response.
“That’s me too,” I say, “no one from high school remembers me either,” but I feel him ignore this.
“Sorry for asking about your age earlier. I just had to be sure. I don’t want people to think I’m grooming you or something.”
“It’s too late for that,” I say. “I was in love with this guy, but I wouldn’t have sex with him because he wouldn’t be my boyfriend, and I was a virgin. So I’d just keep going over to his house and give him blowjobs.”
I hear him almost jump out of his seat, laughing. “Did you say give him blowjobs? I really don’t understand girls who think blowjobs aren’t sex. Like would you rather suck the ugliest, fattest man’s dick without a condom or just let him fuck you with a condom?”
“Ew,” I say, “I’d use the condom.”
I ask him what he was like when he was younger, and he says as a teen he used to masturbate up to eight times a day. Then, seemingly earnest, he says, “Most people aren’t who they’ll be for the rest of their lives until their late twenties.”
“I wonder who I’ll be then,” I say.
“You’ll be…pretty. You’ll be Miss Pretty Face.” Of course.
We talk for over an hour about his films, the film industry, actors he considers sell-outs, human rights (“What the fuck is the U.N.?”), his investments, and other boomer-adjacent topics. He says he’s never read a screenplay or a fiction book in his life.
Towards the end of the conversation he asks me to email him a photo of my face, “Just of your face,” he says. I find a selfie I’d taken with my cat and email it to him. The thought of an email exchange is very funny to me, but I do it anyway. After an hour and forty-five minutes of us talking he checks to see if I’ve sent it. “What a beautiful cat,” he says, almost in reverie. And then: “Well, I have to get going now.”
I feel slightly disappointed and confused, like the entire purpose of the conversation was for him to get a picture of my face, and now he got what he wanted so he’s moving on. We say our goodbyes. “I look forward to meeting you,” he says, and I blush. It all seems so unreal, as though I’m lucid dreaming. Not a real person.
As soon as he hangs up, I have the urge to call everyone I’ve ever known and tell them about what happened. I send the vincentgallectuals page screenshots of all my messages with Vincent, and the admin asks if they can make a post about it. I say yes, doubting Vincent would ever see it, believing it would get me the most attention with the least amount of effort.
I call Muzzy but he doesn’t pick up. I call a few other friends who do pick up and I tell them things Vincent said that I probably wasn’t supposed to tell, because I’d promised to him. I yearn for the attention I’ve been starved of for so long. When I stop getting replies and there’s no one left to text, I run out of steam and take a long nap.
I awake around 7 PM to another message from Vincent: “How about another picture.”
I shudder instinctively, because I’m sober now, and he’s not playing pretend. But I can’t just quit now. I send him a selfie in a nearly see-through button-down.
He views it but doesn’t respond, which disappoints me. I thought we had an agreement: I send him photos, and he compliments my body— “you’re so sexy,” “you’re so pretty,” etc. This time I only receive a timestamp.
I open Instagram later and see the vincentgallectuals account dedicate an entire post to my screenshots with Vincent: “We’re giving possibly our biggest shoutout ever to this gallectuals girl soon to be Mrs. Gallo.” I’m flattered that they assume he’ll fall in love with me, something I would never admit to wanting myself. The admin messages me again and says The Drunken Canal wants to do an interview with me.
The whole circus amuses me, and I’m happy to be at the center of it. I read the comments on the post, which are mostly positive: “Can she ask him if I could have his sperm for $50,000”; “I’m so jealous”; “Omg what.”
One comment completely derails me, though:
“She looks like an unholocausted Hila Klein”
…what the fuck? I have to look up Hila Klein because I don’t know who she is, but apparently she’s a gaming podcaster or something. Not that I’m Jewish at all but it perturbs me to know internet trolls are coming up with new words to be anti-Semitic. I’ve never felt so exposed. Am I being bullied? I’m not strong enough to handle anything but compliments from strangers.
I open up iMessage and look at all the unread texts I’d sent Muzzy. I decide to send him another one.
“Ur not gonna talk to me anymore?”
“Don’t be dramatic,” he texts back almost right away.
“How am I being dramatic”
“Ur not gonna talk to me anymore,” he says, “is a dramatic thing to say. I don’t really know what to say about the Gallo thing. It’s just so…desultory.”
So that’s why he wasn’t responding. I feel myself sinking into oblivion. Then I remind myself I talked to Vincent Gallo on the phone, and he’s better or the same as Muzzy anyway.
I turn off my phone. Lying in bed I think of how Vincent Gallo wants to meet with me. Muzzy never wanted to meet with me. I was always the one that had to suggest it first, and I was always the one to go to him. Soon he won’t even matter though because a microcosm of the internet will know who I am. Soon I’ll be Mrs. Gallo. I laugh to myself.
My phone buzzes. It’s from Vincent, and I’m expecting a response to the photo I’d sent, but the preview alone sends me into a dumb shock:
“Wow. You shared my message to you. Wow.”
My heart drops then jumps to my throat. Shaking, I open his message to see what he’s talking about. An opp praying on my downfall must have sent him screenshots of the vincentgallectuals page’s post. I can’t believe it. How could he have found it? I ask him, “How did you even find that?” and when he doesn’t respond I say, “I’m sorry.” When he doesn’t respond to that I send him a paragraph of apology. I tell him I’ll do anything, please forgive me. He reads them all but doesn’t respond.
So I scared off another one. Am I the problem? I message the meme page admin and ask him to remove the post because Vincent saw it. He does, and any trace of my minor celebrity is gone. Like nothing ever happened. Later, I message The Drunken Canal to see if they still want to interview me, but they don’t respond. Is this what it’s like to be canceled? I know I’m not canceled in the classic definition, but Vincent Gallo ghosting me feels like a cancelation.
The next morning, I video call Muzzy one more time. To my surprise he answers quickly and his face, half covered by a green tie-dye mask, fills my screen. He’s sitting on a stoop outside his apartment in the Mission district, waiting for a friend.
“I’m sorry for calling,” I say, a bit nervous, not wanting to show my excitement. Undoubtedly he only answered out of curiosity, and nothing has changed between us. “I know you said you didn’t wanna hear about the Gallo thing, but I just have no one else and wanted to talk to you.”
“It’s okay,” he says, sighing. “What was he like, anyway?”
“Well,” I say, glancing away for a second then looking at him, hoping he can feel my gaze through the screen: “He was kind of like you.”