RACHEL RABBIT WHITE & NICO WALKER
Read at KGB on 16 Feb 2022

I’m going to introduce our final two readers together. 

Nico Walker was arrested for armed robbery the week an article about his garage rock band was set to publish in the music blog Consequence of Sound. He received an 11-year sentence, entering the prison system when he was 25, for robbing almost a dozen banks in the Cleveland area over four months in 2010 and 2011. 

Six years earlier, when he was in his late teens, he’d served as a medic on 250 combat missions in Iraq. It was a few years after 9/11, in the worst years of the Iraq War, and he was stationed in the areas where the violence was the most severe. He saw bodies blown apart, smelled skin burning. 

When he returned, he took Oxycontin to help him sleep. He had nightmares, reliving what he saw. He later started shooting heroin. When a judge asked him, during his sentencing hearing, what “the catalyst or the motivation” was to rob the banks, he said, “I have been very desensitized to things like this, and I am not trying to be insolent at all, but at the time, it just didn't seem like that extraordinary, you know, such a terrible thing to do.” 

In prison, the first book he read was War & Peace. After he’d written a book based on his experiences, which Christian Lorentzen of New York Magazine called the “first great novel of the opioid epidemic,” he received a letter from a reader who, like him, had PTSD. She told him the thing about PTSD is that you can’t unsee things. And he said, that’s right. You can’t just un-know what you know. What you know about life. What you know about what’s out there. 

When Nico Walker got out of prison, he emailed Rachel Rabbit White on a burner phone he’d bought from Walmart, using a fake name. He was working on a project for a magazine and wanted her to contribute poems, having read her book Porn Carnival and found it elegant, painful, fierce, pure — found that it stayed with him. Rachel wrote Porn Carnival at a time when she was trying to regain a sense of her own interior life, which had fractured and dulled after years of overwork as a high-end escort. 

Many of the book’s scenes of decadence show Rachel inside the work space, as she put it to E Taylor in The Believer, “where I’m made to be a luxury among other luxuries: hotels, dinners, a way of life for wealthy men.” Much of Porn Carnival grapples with Rachel’s relationship with sex work, an editorial decision that didn’t entirely feel like a choice, she said. “I was burnt out, and when I tried to write, all that came out were sex work stories,” she told Fiona Duncan in Garage Magazine. “I was frustrated feeling that work was all I had in my life and then when I finally manage to cut time for myself — my interiority — all I could talk about was work. I felt as if there really were nothing else.” When Rachel began talking to Nico, though — after she responded to that first “shady-ass email” — the poems began to change. Love poems began pouring out. 

Rachel and Nico have lived fast, extreme lives, and their literary work reverberates with the aftershocks. Their work reckons with the ways in which they’ve been pushed to the edges of gender, their bodies made into weapons or pillows, often forced past the limit of what the human form can take. There’s frequent discussion of dissociation, of leaving the body entirely, experiencing your reality as unreal, senseless: “You had to remember that it was all make-believe,” Nico writes in Cherry. “The drill sergeants were just pretending to be drill sergeants. We were pretending to be soldiers. The army was pretending to be the army.” “If I’ve suffered,” Rachel writes in the conclusion to her poem “Cabaret,” “I’ve surely never felt it.” 

Suffering bends time — it takes the body out. Love bends time, too — it puts it back in. Work, violence, being thrust into the machinery of power — all that can numb you out. But love requires presence and attention. It can bring you back. It can be the present you return to. 

Rachel and Nico came together over a passion for literature, and found in each other constancy, sensitivity, play, joy, lightness — all the ingredients for a great love story. Rachel and Nico are a great love story, a great American love story. The Bonnie and Clyde comparisons are legit. 

Their falling-in-love is detailed in an expanded edition of Rachel’s poetry book, called Porn Carnival: Paradise Edition. “That anyone can contain the emotions of a life is wild!” Rachel writes. “Now give us a celebration / for how good the fuck was / Let’s lay on the floor / reintroduce ourselves / and not think one thought / about time / or houses / or distances.” 

New York, I want us to give them that celebration tonight. Thank you for coming out to honor their love and hear their work. But, I will say, this particular reading is not about their work. In fact, it’s not even a reading. 

This event involved a surprise restaging of Rachel & Nico’s wedding, with their “readings” being their vows.