Lemonade From Lemons

A buddy of mine working in PR insisted I come to a loud, expensive captial-P launch party for Chris Anderson's book The Long Tail. This is shortly after my series Shooting War was featured in their print magazine, of which Chris was Editor-in-Chief. The shaggy indie garage rock was loud, the schmoozing New Yorkers pontificating about the "social media landscape" even louder. I came prepared myself with a pocket of my magenta "Who The Fuck is Dan Goldman?" business cards (no one ever forgot meeting me), but then felt sweaty fingertips on my elbow slowly guide me through the crowd until a cluster of people parted to reveal Chris Anderson.

At this giant party for him and his book, Chris looks up from the folks surrounding him and zeroes in on me. My pal introduces us and his eyes light up:

CHRIS ANDERSON: Your work is very very unique. You have a bright future ahead of you... What else are you working on?

I start talking about – actually yes I'm pitching – my webcomic "KELLY", a surreal Craiglist roommate romance/thriller. Chris begins vibing less me off now, either it's the diminishing novelty of me as I reveal myself to be not a rising star but just another hungry artist trying to make a living , or it's the quality of my nervous pitch which begins going off the rails when a lanky man with white hair appears behind Chris, waiting for me to take a breath so he can say hello. It's David Byrne and I pee myself a little. David and I lock eyes, politely nod and my whole body is shaking to know David and become friends and ride bikes to lunch cafes together and Chris puts his hand on my shoulder to excuse himself and talk to someone more interesting.

++++

Later that night, I’m with a group of new-ish friends, drunk and high and eating roast duck inside the sweating windows of Great NY Noodle Town. Whole roasted ducks hang on hooks above our heads. I knew maybe half of these people at all, young digital-leaning artists, but to them I’m The Shooting War Guy and all their questions, jokes and anecdotes feel directed at me alone. Which is gross to write but honest.

This is the first time I've ever had this kind of attention from people I didn't even know. It's what I always imagined low-key "fame" or “success” feels like: people who love your work, want more, and find you interesting enough to know the mind and fingers behind it. I gave David Byrne the same vibe, surely.

When the bill comes, they fight over who’s going to pay for my Chinese food.

One person in this group, an electronic musician named Marc, just released an album of 8-bit music made with vintage GameBoys. Marc doesn't touch any of the turnip cakes, roast pork bao, or pea shoots on the table. He sits quietly with a tiny cup of Chinese tea and takes a single steamed broccoli floret into his mouth. Everyone else is talking abut I watch him closes his eyes, chewing it slowly. He looks like he’s about to come. Suddenly we're all quiet, watching him. When his eyes flutter back open, I joke:

ME: Whatever pill you're on, I want one.

MARC: Hah. No... I'm not on a pill. Just returning from The Master Cleanse.

ME: The wat? Is that like... a colonic?

He laughs, he knew I was kidding. Then he explains:

MARC: I haven't eated any solid food for the past twenty-two days, until just now. I've just lived off lemonade.

The whole table, with our sauce-specked chopsticks and grease-dotted chins, is aghast. The blonde pixie sitting next to him cannot believe this and smacks his shoulder with a force that lets the whole table know she plans on fucking him tonight.

MARC: No really, it was so interesting. It showed me that I’ve mostly eaten out of boredom, not hunger. My relationship with eating is so different now.

This was a string of words very alien to me. As grandson of Holocaust survivors, twenty-two days without food was unthinkable. In my family, food is both a love language and a skinless exposed-nerve minefield of inherited starvation trauma.

But as we shambled in a pack down Canal Street to the subway through late night manhole cover steam and neon, Marc stopped in the middle of the street, remembering something. He dug a plain yellow booklet out of his messenger bag with The Master Cleanse written across the front in green. He put it in my hands with a finality and kept walking.

ME: Wait. Really?

MARC: I already did it. It’s yours now.

I stuff it in my bag, duck-burp my thanks and say goodbye as our group disperses to our corners of the five boroughs. I take the Q train home to Park Slope, to the 300 square foot studio that L and I both lived and worked in. Tiptoeing inside, I do a clumsy ballet as I shed my clothes, climb the ladder of our IKEA bunk bed, squeeze into the top bunk with L and our tabby Wedge and begin instantly snoring.

++++

Having recently completed a frantic year-long sprint of publishing Shooting War online, the project that air-quotes put me on the map, I needed some rest badly, in my bones, in my soul. Even though I couldn't really afford to, I refused to work (which I never did) and just let myself recharge for a two weeks.

Which is how I learned – at the age of thirty-two – one of the Laws of Freelancing: when there’s a break in income, you won’t feel it immediately, and might not even for months. But the gap is always coming for you. Working in illustration, clients paid between 30 and 90 days (yes really) after being invoiced. Some clients needed to be chased. But there was always money waiting in the future, and sometimes none in the present. You think, I made XXX from YYY, I'm good for a while. So you take a few weeks off. Be a human being again.

Then the bills on autopay ping-pong off each other and start racking up insufficient funds. Calls for the student loan start coming in. Past due balances you normally shoved forward into the future suddenly have no leg to stand on when once the tap has stopped dripping. It’s a windless sea, a dead zone.

++++

It’s 8:00am and someone is gently knocking on the front door of my apartment. I open my crusty eyes, wipe drool from my jaw and sit up. The pre-hangover is a still junior high school marching band, warming up out of sync. I sit up, climb over sleeping lady and cat and throw on some clothes. Through the front door peephole is my landlord Dennis. Today is the fifth of the month.

I roll back the deadbolt and step out in the carpeted hallway in my robe, whispering hello. Dennis is mad. I can’t read this expression from his face; he’s had too much plastic surgery, injected too much Botox for that flash-mask to respond to his emotions anymore. But the anger flares in porcelain veneer flashes from between thin, wormy lips. His watery blue eyes stare out from the taut skin of his nipped-and-tucked eyelids. Considerate of his other sleeping tenants, we both hold court in whispers:

DENNIS: Good morning. Daniel I wanted you to know that, ah, your check was returned. Again.

ME: Returned by the post office or by the bank?

DENNIS: What? By the bank. Of course by the bank. I'm not a mailman.

ME: Ah. Right, sorry I just woke—

DENNIS: Daniel, I have to ask you a question, as an entree to a potentially, ah, larger conversation.

ME [saying the actual word]: Gulp.

DENNIS: Level with me, Daniel. Can you actually afford to live here?

This is the moment the marching band in my throbbing skull starts to attempt playing music. It's the Darth Vader theme song, but groaning and out of tune and I am standing in the carpeted hallway, seasick.

DENNIS: Understand, this isn't personal... but you're, ah, putting me in a situation here. When you bounce a check to me, I’ve already written my mortgage check on this whole place, then my check doesn’t go through. This is the [actually takes a small spiral notepad from the back pocket of his tennis shorts and checks] fourth time this has happened.

His blue eyes hold mine from inside their leather hammocks, waiting for me to say something. My stomach churns with stress and acid and he shakes his head:

DENNIS: Not good, Daniel.

I open my mouth but the only thing that comes out is a roasted duck-burp.

++++

For over three years, I’ve been living in this overpriced tiny “studio apartment” that was once half of a full-sized bedroom in an elegant Park Slope brownstone owned by Dennis. My next-door neighbor to the left lives in a tiny closet that was once my studio’s bathroom, everything carved up into the tiniest-possible monetizable spaces rented at top-of-market prices.

But even without A/C in the summer and clanging old radiator pipes in the winter, this place was a refuge after a crucible of strange years on a difficult emotional sea, and this place was just perfect for a single guy and his cat, and became very crowded once L moved in with us.

To be honest, no… some months I definitely couldn’t afford to live there. Not as a cartoonist/illustrator who’d recently gone fully-freelance. My income was check-to-check, feast or famine, hand-to-mouth. But Dennis’ question and its implicit threat made me angry. I didn't own this place but I called it "home".

I didn’t want to leave.

++++

Dennis was still staring back at me, tan eyelids stretched across cold blue eyes, waiting for my response.


ME: I can. Of course I can. I will. Let me write you a fresh check.

I scribbled one, post-dated in for two days from now, and the timer was on to come up with the missing amount to make sure it clears... because this was definitely a civil but firm warning before the eviction letter.

++++

Last minute money was generated NY Artist Style: shopping bags were stuffed full of possessions — books, treasured gifts, my coolest clothes, memorabilia — and painfully sold for nickels and dimes at The Strand, Beacon’s Closet, etc until the full balance due was covered. Another month, another panic, CHECK.

Admittedly a temporary and poor solution to an even poorer problem.

After making a cash deposit instantly nibbled down by a negative balance thanks to HSBC's multiple NSF fees, I returned home exhausted and hungry, only to realize: we nothing to eat in the house.

The money in the bank could not be touched for fear of bouncing another check and getting evicted, and there was little cash on-hand. My stomach glorgled, my stomach squergled in broke-ass frustration.

L and I picked clean all 300 square feet of the apartment looking for loose singles, spare change. We were able to scrape together eleven dollars and seventy-two cents.

That pile was counted and re-counted on the mattress, then secured in a Ziplock baggie. Her eyes then met mine in a two-way laser of hot shame and mild panic until guilt forced me to look away. And that was when I noticed the little yellow chapbook sticking out of my ransacked bookshelf. The Master Cleanse.

Flipping through it, my stomach loudly trying to digest whatever remained inside me, the cleanse Marc had praised of was right there:

 how to to purify your body and mind by subsisting for weeks on only lemonade.

In this moment, this did not feel like an accident.

++++

The Master Cleanse booklet went on to explain the reasons, the process and most importantly, the recipe: fresh lemon juice, dark "grade B" maple syrup, a dash of cayenne pepper. It promised this lemonade would not only keep us alive but kick our digestive tracts into self-cleaning mode. It also instructed us to flush our systems every morning by drinking a gallon of salt water upon waking, and drinking a cup of laxative senna tea to evacuate our bowels of whatever remained.

The duration of our cleanse was up to us (it recommended a minimum of three days) but this was the How. Our Why was that it seemed to come into our lives at exact moment when we literally could not afford any food until a check arrived in the mail from either of our clients.

++++

We brought our Ziplock bag of couch change down to a Park Slope organic market and spent all but thirteen cents on the necessary supplies. Upon returning home to our single-person standing-room only kitchen, I sliced and squeezed lemons, added a teaspoon of dark maple syrup, a pinch of pepper, and made lemonade.

And thus we began our Master Cleanse.

++++

Day One.

Everything is hunger. We wake, fill our bodies with salt water and void them. Drink tea and void them again. We both feel weak — forgoing not just all food but coffee/caffeine as well — and decide to stay home and adapt to this new reality.

The first lemonade of the day has too much cayenne and burns going down, burns worse coming out, but by one in the afternoon, caffeine-withdrawal headaches begin to pound on the door.

With several more rounds lemonade prepped in advance — and adjusted to taste — we lay in bed, dazed, watching HD rips of BBC’s Planet Earth off my hacked XBox. Our eyes fixed wide at the Nature’s beauty, even as our bodies occasionally spasm, stomachs gurgling. For hours we take turns going to our closet-sized makeshift bathroom, though we usually both had to go at the same time. Rock paper scissors was the system.

As a recently-married couple, L and I got to know each other on a whole new level. Probably not unlike sharing a prison cell, but with softer bedsheets.

Day Two.

Wake. Flush. Tea. Evacuate. Lemonade.

The caffeine and sugar withdrawal headaches were worse upon waking, but no paychecks waited for either of us, so we soldiered on.

I went outside for a walk only to be slapped and poked and come-hithered by floating cartoon hands of scents rising from every restaurant and coffee shop and bakery in a ten block radius. It was madness how badly I craved a blueberry muffin for a minute. Then a fried fish sandwich. A slice of pepperoni pizza. One of those five-dollar Naked carrot juices from the deli.

Head pounding, I force myself down to Seventh Avenue to see how I’d fare. I was weak, light-headed, and by mid-afternoon, I’d guzzled all the lemonade I had with me and had to head back towards home.

But I’d noticed something else: the rattling bad-acid jitters were fading. My body had passed through its food-less panic — I’d never not eaten for over twenty-four hours before — and a calm had settled in there instead.

Back at home, I opened a fresh can of Fancy Feast for Wedge and my mouth filled up with a quart of saliva as its Beef Flavor aroma hit me. My body wanted desperately wanted for me to sneak a spoonful, but my mind stopped me. Wedge was the only one in the house with enough food stocked up to ride this thing out.

Day Three.

Wake. Flush. Tea. Evacuate. Lemonade.

The pounding headaches begin slowly receding, as if upon waking we began walking away from the beach. By the time we’ve taken all our second turns in the bathroom, the morning feels light and bright and… clear.

After drinking my first lemonade, my body thanks me, releasing chemicals into my brain that make me vibrate with pure pleasure and calm. The third day on this cleanse thing suddenly starts feeling much less intense.

L and I go outside together. The city streets are full of smells, options, temptations, but it’s becoming clear these temptations are just ideas of eating food, not hunger of the actual food. Like:



BRAIN: How good would a tuna melt on pumpernickel be? With a slice of good tomato and oooooh a slice of melted muenster cheese? Mmmmm.

But I don’t actually want to eat it. It’s enough to think about it, take the sense-memory trip of it, let my stomach acknowledge the Nice Idea of Food with a gurgle without physically consuming it.

According to writing about The Master Cleanse, these cravings are a result of the body’s cleansing process: as toxins from these foods are released or burned away, memories of them surface as a sort of farewell cravings. Whether this is total bullshit or not I cannot say, but on this third day I was visited by hosts of ghosts of foods that no longer like anymore, including:

- Cheesesteak sandwiches
- Sweet and sour pork over rice
- Fried mozzarella sticks
- Any combination of peanut butter and jelly
- Hot caramel sundae topping
- Pepperoni on fucking anything
- Hot dogs (I actually used to eat them)
- Microwaveable burritos
- American chocolate bars
- Doritos/et al.
- Red vines
- All soda pops
- Cold cuts, especially bologna
- Cow’s milk

All these processed, unhealthy, overly-sweet or artificially-savory foods took a slow dive through my mind in a multi-sensory experiential trip as they exited my body and my life. I even didn’t know at the time they wouldn’t be coming back.

Day Four.

Wake. Flush. Tea. Evacuate. Lemonade.

I'm started to feel this rhythm. The day’s first lemonade is, again, joyous: combining the ritual of coffee with a nourishing light breakfast.

L and I are both still without paychecks to cash and so we push onward. We have standing plans made pre-fast to visit my friend Simon in his new loft in Fort Greene, but first we prep enough lemonade to get us there and back on foot.

Walking down Flatbush Avenue, I am aware how being simultaneously fasting and dirt-broke has changed my relationship with my city: there is nothing I can eat nor anything I can buy, so none of the storefronts hold any interest for me. I’m just another body out on the sidewalk, watching people existing alongside other people. I’m not shopping for books or having a nibble or another coffee, I’m simply a tiny but self-aware part of the city's human river.

We reach Simon’s place and are greeted by him and his wife Anne. Stepping inside their glorious former garage-turned-living space, we walk into a sweet cloud of brewing coffee. As we took off our shoes and looked around, I took a deep inhale of rich-smelling coffee aroma:



SIMON: We’re just brewing a fresh pot for you. Please sit, make yourselves at home.

ME: Thanks, but we actually.. this is gonna sound crazy but… we’re doing this fast thing?

ANNE: Oh, The Master Cleanse?

L: Yes!

ANNE: Ah, my co-worker and his husband did it. They didn’t eat a thing for over three weeks and somehow they were still shitting every day.

L and I blushed. We were in new and uncharted poop-talk territory together, a place that was intimate and yet Not Romantic, but only between the two of us.

L: You… don’t want the details. Trust me.

SIMON [sipping and enjoying his coffee]: So, how many days in are you?

In sync, we both hold up four fingers, like children.

SIMON: You haven’t eaten in four days? You’re both absolutely mental. I’d be fucking mad from hunger. I’d have eaten one of my shoes by now.

ME: It started off wild but [pops the cap on my lemonade bottle, takes a swig] it’s kind of calming actually.

L: You can’t really understand how much mental real estate eating and drinking takes up until you remove it. It’s actually fucking bananas.

We were, admittedly, complete weirdos: beaming and gurning our way through a conversation we could hardly keep linear. We were weird, like friends who showed up while tripping. It was the last time Simon and Anne ever invited us over.

On the walk home, we waited on the corner of Flatbush and Atlantic for the light to change. There was a Hot Nuts cart parked there and it was busy with customers. The scent of caramelizing sugar with slightly-roasting nuts was one of those smells that instantly brought to my mind the streets of New York City, but now it smelled… burnt. Sickly sweet.

What was happening to us?

Day Five.

Wake. Flush. Tea. Evacuate. Lemonade.

I drink my lemonade like a buddha: eyes closed, serene, no longer even thinking about food. I’m resolutely Not Hungry, not in the least bit. I do not want food.

Our plan for the day — a Tuesday — is to hang at the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens. Tuesdays are free to the public. Time and distance is measured in servings of lemonade necessary for the round trip. We prepare, bottle up and head out.

We trudge down Flatbush in the sun. The air is crisp, the sunlight clear, the plants are happy. Everything is vibrating, vibrating.

We traverse the Cherry Esplanade, the Rose Garden, the Japanese Hill-and-Pond Garden.

ME: This place is so wonderful. Why aren’t we members here?


L: Because we’re always fucking broke, dummy.

ME [sunshine vibes]: Oh, yes. That’s right.

We wander through the series of glass greenhouses into the Orchid Collection. Love and lemonade flowing between us, the plants, the sun through the greenhouse ceiling, full-on tripping without drugs. Our self-cleaning bodies and mental discipline turned us into each into Jesus, wandering the desert, having visions.

Leaves are swaying, flowers are pulsing, indoor trees are breathing in time with my own ribcage, my skin too thin to contain the energy of me that is the same as the energy of them, the plants breathing and swaying around us.

I look at my hands, palms up against my thighs. My skin disappears, revealing not sinew and tendon but forests of flowers, infinitely sighing perfumed breath, coiling root-tendrils down into the earth, lifting spinal column up towards the warm of the sun. This image, this moment, was so vivid I would go home and draw an unexpected scene with unexpected visuals into my webcomic “KELLY”: an orgasm-activated outline of a female form containing a "magical forest" where there is no shame or regret. One of my favorite pieces I've ever done [I wanted to link it here but apparently it's been scrubbed from the internets].

We got home as the sun was setting. Checking the mailbox, there were still no client paychecks.

Day Six.
Wake. Flush. Tea. Evacuate. Lemonade.

My first verbal thought arrives mid-lemonade: I have not eaten a bite in almost a week. How am I even still pooping? How much of our body mass was actually just food and shit?

Inspired by my vision in the greenhouse — and with nothing pressing needing to be done — I spend the day in front of my laptop working on “KELLY”, blissfully happy to experiment with this new visual storytelling idea I’d unlocked.

And when I saw the mailman come from my second floor window, I went downstairs to find two checks from clients in our mailbox, one for me and one for L.

I brought them back upstairs and was greeted with a fresh lemonade. She clapped, so relieved. I was too, but suddenly I could hear the locked-away part of my brain begin whispering again, that whole other world of spending and consuming and wanting wanting wanting more more more:

BRAIN: Fill me back up with food, fill me back up with shit.

Day Seven

Wake. Flush. Tea. Evacuate. Lemonade.

Over that first sunny lemonade, L asked me:

L: So, are we done yet?


ME: Today is a week. Do you want to be?

L: A week is… enough right? We both got paid.

I am a terrible liar, and no one knows that better than L. Disappointment flopped over my face like a wet towel, suffocating me.

L: Were you just planning to… never eat food again? I don’t think—

ME: NO! No, that’s crazy. I was just enjoying this… break from all the things.

She nodded. That means she felt disagreed and didn’t want to be pushy or rude. But the team has to make a unified decision, and L was ready to re-integrate into our society of food, meals, restaurants, spending money, etc. And in New York City, there were zero viable alternatives to this.

Consulting the Cleanse booklet, it talked about how to come off the cleanse: slowly. In steps. Start with a light, clear juice. Then maybe juice with a little pulp, slowly working your way up to solid food.

We broke the Master Cleanse with one cold Martinelli’s Apple Juice each. It was too sweet at first, and I swear by the middle I hallucinated a bit behind my eyelids.

The high fructose content in the juice (maybe?) switched something in our bodies and within an hour we started to get hungry again, after a week. Maybe really it was all in the mind.

In tiny steps — with money from newly-cashed checks - we went into our corner bodega and scanned the shelves. Ninety percent was unappetizing garbage, creating mental flavors that made me physically wince with disgust. But natural juice was okay enough, and we sipped our way through some bottles before we were ready for solid food again.

We called our friend Rami, who joined us at an all-veg Chinese restaurant to break our fast with us. Rami had been living for years on a Buddhist monastery upstate and had recently moved to the urban Zen Center in downtown Brooklyn. He was interested in hearing all about our poverty-born experiment. Also, as fellow Jews, breaking fasts lives deep inside us as a cultural cause for celebration.

The all-veg Chinese place specialized in fake meats made from soy or wheat gluten, which I loved for years before the Master Cleanse. Stepping inside this restaurant now, the place stank of frying oil and thick sauces and cleaning products. It was almost too much.

The three of us parked in the corner. We ordered tiny cups of vegetable soup: light broth with a few slices of carrot, pumpkin, mushroom in it. I hovered over the bowl, steam rising off it into my nose, my lungs, my heart. Something so delicate suddenly so intense and complex.

After sipping broth from wide plastic Chinese restaurant spoons, I reached into the cup with my chopsticks and pulled out half of a steamed shiitake mushroom. The table grew quiet, the restaurant somehow too. Rami tuned into the experience we were having. He smiled and watched as I tucked it into my mouth slowly, my first solid food in a week.

RAMI (laughing): Oh, oh! Look at his face! I think he just went to another planet!

And I did. I had never — nor have since — tasted such a complex mushroom, and I’ve eaten funkier ones in Poland, Montreal and Kyoto. That shiitake was a welcome, back to into the world of food, and the pleasure and experience and sharing of meals.

And Then.

The wildest part was what remained with me, having burned off those “farewell cravings” for so much “American fare”, i.e. processed shit food, whether sickly-sweet or seasonings designed to be purposely-addictive. When I did go back to eating (and over-eating) three meals a day, I only wanted to eat real food: vegetables, fruit, fish, bread, rice.

Over the years, I've been vegetarian, pescatarian, macrobiotic, vegan... all in search of what makes me feel alive and clean and real. The "junk" food label – and fetish – is still a complete fucking gross-out to me.

+++++

A year later, I was sitting around my crib with a young cartoonist friend of mine at our loft. He was finishing a Grab 'n Go bag of Cool Ranch Doritos, his fingers caked with that disgusting non-dairy sticky dust on his fingers. As we sat and talked about making work, he burped, wrapped his arms around his belly, complained about how he ate constantly, either from boredom or stress or to come down from too many energy drinks. Either way, he always, always felt like shit.

I got up, went to my bookcase, slid out The Master Cleanse. As I put it in his hands, I said:

ME: I think this is yours now.

Later, he told me he did the cleanse too.

++++

Beijão for now my darlings,