In the first episode of Julio Torres’ HBO series, Fantasmas, one of the many digressions in the “A” (letter pun intended) plotline arrives in the form of Julio’s alphabet story. Specifically, a story about Q. He explains to Chester (Tomas Matos), his “Chester” driver (instead of Uber), Amina (Eudora Peterson), a teacher riding in the Chester cab, and Vanesja (Martine), a performance artist performing as Julio’s manager, beforehand that, “I can feel the inner lives of, uh, shapes and colors and sounds and numbers and letters. I started doing letters recently.”
With that train of thought in mind, he asks them, “Like, okay, let me give you an example. You know how the letter Q comes up way too early in the alphabet… It should be all the way in the back with the fellow avant-garde letters: the X, the Y and the Z.” Painting the picture of Q as a surly punk rocker played by Steve Buscemi (indeed, Fantasmas is filled with “New York staples” of his nature, including Julia Fox, Natasha Lyonne and Rosie Perez), we see Q go onstage to perform his song right after P. The audience’s roaring applause for P only sets Q up for failure as Julio narrates, “All the letters in the alphabet have been so accessible…until Q takes the stage.” Ergo, his problem is that the booker keeps putting him on too early, before the audience is ready to accept something “different” or “offbeat” that’s in line with the W, X, Y, Z scene.
As Q tells him, he needs to go on later, when the audience is more liquored up. More open. The booker is unmoved by his suggestion, prompting Q to go off on a tangent as he declares, “You know what? I’m proud to be niche. I don’t care.” But, of course, he does care. Even the most “fuck this system” people can’t avoid being glamored by mainstream acceptance. Or hell, any kind of acceptance at all really. Which continues to elude Q as Julio spins the yarn about his increasingly bleak fate. After singing his first song, featuring lyrics such as, “You’re all gonna die! I don’t know why. Shit fuckers,” he then announces, “This next one is called ‘Your Zipper Is Open and Your Cock Is Hanging Out.’” Obviously, his performance is met with crickets as Julio remarks, “No one gets him. Q just went up too early.” This assessment being a nod to the many artists who have suffered from total insignificance in their lifetime only to be “understood” after their death (e.g., Vincent Van Gogh and Franz Kafka).
Through Q, Julio delineates the struggle of staying true to yourself as an artist when all anyone wants to do is stamp that inclination out of you if it doesn’t “make sense” or, worse still, if it doesn’t make money. Q persists in playing his music in public places that are even less receptive to his presence. As Julio describes, “No one is buying what Q is selling. There’s no market for weird.” Even more vexing to Q is being approached by O, who tells him he’s just an O without the “stick” before goading, “Give me a call when you’re done being an out-of-work letter.” After which O hands Q his business card. Q reacts by pretending to vomit on the card in front of O. He’d rather die in poverty-ridden obscurity than surrender his integrity. The curse of the true and pure artist.
As though to mock his suffering, “all the mainstream letters were swimming in opportunity.” We then see Q in his apartment watching some entertainment news program rattling off headlines like, “F is set to sign a multimillion-dollar contract to start a new word alongside America’s sweetheart, B.” The torture of seeing nothing but schlock appeal to the masses is almost more than Q can bear. Until “the worst happened: weird suddenly became cool.”
Thus, on that same entertainment news show another night, an interview with the “weird” letters has Z (Evan Mock) telling the viewers, “Yeah man, we’re W, X, Y and Z and we don’t play by the dumb rules of this town and we won’t play nice.” Q can’t believe what he’s seeing. That after all this time, there’s a market for the very thing he was doing all along, and he’s not even part of it. As Julio puts it, “Q just missed the boat.” Incensed that his act is still irrelevant despite being theoretically more relevant than ever, Q starts to trash his own apartment in response to the interview. Julio narrates, “As the injustice of it all suddenly crept in, it finally became too much for Q. All of those years of insisting on his art, staying true to himself. Feeling stuck, he decides to…break free.” A euphemism indeed. Alas, the window he tries to jump out of is positioned too close up against a brick wall for him to even succeed at his own suicide.
In another act of desperation (perhaps even more desperate than killing himself), he calls O, presumably to surrender, to let go of his “stick” to become an O himself and secure more steady work. But as he’s about to admit this, Z adds in the interview, “I just want to address something here. I don’t think we’d be here without the influence of Q… Their work has had an impact on mine and I can safely say for us all here. And we would have never been here had it not been for the boundaries Q broke down. To no fame, no glory—just to the relentless, unwavering commitment to authenticity. Q made audiences uncomfortable long before weird was cool.”
Touched by the tribute, Q forgets he’s on the phone with O. He brings Q back to Earth by shouting, “Hello, are you there?” Q, remembering who he is, tells O, “Fuck off.” All of which is to say that, sometimes, the only thing a struggling, unacknowledged artist (no matter their medium) needs in order to keep going is for just one person to tell them that their work means something to them. Sure, it might not be as significant to one’s livelihood as money, but there is an underrated importance placed on the occasional kind word from even a “mere layperson.” Because, yes, many artists who have never received positive reinforcement of any kind for enduring in their pursuit (despite no acceptance whatsoever) are prone to attempt jumping out the window like Q. Ostracism, after all, is a killer. Because, regardless of how “avant-garde” or “anti-Establishment” an artist believes themselves to be, the cold, hard reality is that “life lacks meaning without acceptance.” And part of Q’s initial lack of acceptance was the fact that he had never managed to find his tribe, a quest that can be even more herculean for the often antisocial, introverted personality of an artist (excluding actors, of course).