by Jarett Kobek
He attracts a great number of followers.
At the dawn of the twenty-fifth century, Darius 2C Danko, a Nuevo Swedenborgian, wanders the galaxy in a clunky spaceship. His mission? To plant space apples and spread the gospel of polymorphous perversity. The narrative follows his peregrinations, working a somewhat heavy-handed allegory about American political figures. I also threw in a nonsense mystical overlay, drawing a parallel between Appleseed and the Greek god Bacchus, finding resonance in the spread of vegetation and wild love.
I submitted the story to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. The editor, Edward L. Ferman, sent a letter of acceptance, informing me that my work would appear in the July 1991 edition. Months later, I received a package containing a check and my contributor’s copies.
As far as these things go, the cover illustration was not a disaster. A half-translucent panther’s head hovered over a mountain landscape. I opened to the table of contents. There I was, between “Autumn Mist” by Nancy Springer and “The Pan Man” by Elizabeth Engstrom.
They’d changed my title.
I was the proud author of “Johnny Cyberseed.”
Regardless of this abuse, people loved the story. The magazine forwarded complimentary letters, kind words from the readers. Their cloying language made me decide that most of my correspondents were very lonely. Nice, but lonely.
In February, a note came from Parker Brickley. A literary agent working at William Morris, he’d been trying to find my phone number. But that was impossible. I was invisible East Village scum living under one pseudonym and writing under another.
Brickley’s office was uptown. I called him. He invited me to lunch.
That simple, that easy. All you need do was write. Even if the editors changed your titles. Even if the world believed you responsible for “Johnny Cyberseed.”
Life was going well. Too well. I’d forgotten that human existence is a waveform moving up and down through time and space, and that fortune’s wheel never stops turning. Good or ill, there’s always change coming.
MARCH 1992
Patrick Geoffrois
Baby, said Adeline, don’t you know that I bumped into Jon on First Avenue? The mere sight of his face drove me to infuriation, so I gathered some of my menstrual blood and threw it at him.
—You threw your period at your ex-boyfriend? I asked.
—Yes, she said. But I simply fell short, my volley landing at his feet. Jon stood there, not comprehending what I’d done. I told him exactly what had happened. I told him that I had aimed for his stupid face.
—How is that even possible? I thought you used organic cloth.
—Darling, don’t you know that I switched to the Keeper months ago? I bought mine at Magickal Childe.
—I had no idea.
—It’s much more efficient. I’ve been using my blood to feed the plants.
Following the dissolution of her affair with Jon de Lee, Adeline had taken up new hobbies. She’d reverted out of her schoolmarm outfits and become, as best I could tell, a regressed punk. She dyed her hair purple, shaved the sides of her head, and was now wearing unfortunate amounts of denim. There was a lot of talk about anarchism as a viable political philosophy. She hid away her Steeleye Span records and the You Made Me Realize EP, and took up early punk like (I’m) Stranded by The Saints and the X-Ray Spex’s Germfree Adolescents.
The album that she played most was Legacy of Brutality by The Misfits. I’d been with her when she purchased it. Had I known what it meant, I could have stopped her.
But I didn’t know that I was about to live through months of brutish New Jersey ambition, courtesy of Glenn Danzig né Azalone. I can’t estimate how many needles Adeline destroyed listening to that record, but I know exactly how much of my patience she ruined. All of it.
In terms of her social life, she fell in with a fucked-up Frenchman named Patrick Geoffrois, a street hustler who kept a table outside of Twardoski Travel on St. Mark’s. He’d been a fixture for years, telling people’s fortunes, reading palms and spreading the Thoth tarot.
Geoffrois was one of those street characters who cannot be ignored, a gaunt ghoul with piercing blue eyes, no teeth, slicked-back blond hair hanging to his shoulders, black clothes accessorized with hokey jewelry like pentagrams and, irony of ironies, inverted crosses.
Adeline made his acquaintance in the same way that she made all of her bad decisions, via a fixation that was part intellectual, part emotional, entirely crazy.
In February, the man’s face had appeared on the cover of Newsday, a cheesy picture in which he held a sword’s pommel over his left eye. Beneath this grim visage was the headline: CULT PROBE WIDENS.
It went back to Daniel Rakowitz. Although two years had passed, the Manhattan District Attorney’s office and the NYPD’s Occult Crimes Unit had concluded that Rakowitz murdered Monika Beerle on the order of Geoffrois, as a ritualistic human sacrifice to Choronzon or Duke Focalor. Satanic panic done New York style, with leaks to the press and grandstanding detectives discoursing on demonism in Far Rockaway accents.
No one disputed that Geoffrois was an occultist. But there’s occultism and there’s occultism.
Anyone who’d been on the Lower East Side for more than two weeks knew Geoffrois for what he was. A huckster, a conman, another pathetic street performer trying to earn his bread. If he controlled a coven, and if he could routinely summon supernatural forces, why would he waste years freezing and begging on St. Mark’s?
When Adeline saw the cover of Newsday, she walked a block over and encountered the Frenchman at his folding table, sitting where he always sat, doing as he’d always done. She never detailed the exact nature of their first conversation.
I’ll hazard a guess.
A recovering junky magician speaking in his slightly accented English about whatever hocus pocus floated in the deep recesses of his brain, dismissing Rakowitz as a hanger-on. Adeline going on about Dress Suits to Hire and the violence inherent in the urban experience, attempting to delve into New York’s random cruelty and murder, asking the self-styled black magician for help discerning the hidden meanings of coincidence.
Adeline started visiting Geoffrois’s apartment on 11th Street, where he lived with his wife and her young daughter. My roommate returned from these salons with a head full of bizarre ideas about the universe’s mystical undercurrents. She began reading books by Aleister Crowley. Diary of a Drug Fiend. Magick in Theory and Practice.
Out of morbid curiosity, I opened her copy of The Book of the Law. It heralded the Dawn of a New Aeon through Egyptian sex Magick.
Remembering Geoffrois’s entrée into tabloid media, I noted one section in which Crowley suggests that Human Sacrifice is a Necessary Act for the Achievement of One’s own Will. It was that kind of book, one in which words underwent an enforced capitalization. There was no will in Crowley. There was only Will. He was that kind of Writer.
If Adeline’s interest appears silly, what else could she do? Throw herself into a series of punishing one-night stands? Win back her cheating boyfriend?
MARCH 1992
Baby and Erik See Kiss Me Deadly
Theatre 80 was showing Kiss Me Deadly, a 1955 film directed by Robert Aldrich. I invited Adeline and Erik. He accepted. She declined.
—Why, Baby, she said, don’t you think that I’ve seen it a million times? It’s the very best film about Los Angeles! Keep an eye out for the heavy. His name was Albert Dekker. He’s one of those très tragique Hollywood stories of a motion picture star dying in distressed circumstances. I won’t tell you how it happened until you see the film, otherwise you’ll spend the whole time thinking about his death, leaving you simply unable to concentrate. And don’t you know that it’s the best American film of the 1950s? I’d feel oh so terrible if I removed you from the narrative.
Adapted from an execrable novel by Mickey Spillane, Kiss Me D
eadly stars Ralph Meeker as Mike Hammer. The film opens with Meeker in his car, nearly running over a deranged female hitchhiker. She’s young, naked, and D-list beautiful. A convoluted plot spills out, oozing with the grimy trappings of the noir.
The real thrust is in the presentation of character, focusing on the twin protagonists of Mike Hammer and the city of Los Angeles. Hammer comes off as the world’s most amoral creep, the noir antihero taken to its termination point. A scuzzball private detective who uses his secretary, with whom he has sexual relations, as bait for wayward husbands in divorce cases.
Los Angeles is Hammer’s mirror. Every dusty nook and cranny is explored, every boardinghouse and car garage. The film was shot on location. The dialogue provided exact addresses.
Albert Dekker plays an older doctor of dubious character. Whenever he was on screen, I wondered about his death.
The lights came up. Erik and I walked to the Yaffa Café, taking a table within its red velour cave. I thought about Ralph Meeker, about the knowingness of his big dumb face.
I lowered my menu and looked at our fellow patrons. They were so goth. Tables filled with kids from the outer boroughs and Long Island, done up in black clothes, faces smeared with kohl and greasy lipstick, black nail-polished fingers that dipped pita bread into piles of hummus.
—This place is lousy with spooky kids, I said.
—Don’t be negative, said Erik.
Our waitress seemed stoned. I was sure that she got our order wrong, but I didn’t bother correcting her.
—You loved the movie, said Erik.
—Who wouldn’t? I asked.
—I’m tired of nihilism, said Erik. It’s so done. Our culture has been stuck in this miserable loop for the last forty years. Maybe I’m too Aquarian, but I think these stories we keep telling ourselves are totally wrong. We’re not in a death spiral. Things keep getting better, but everyone pretends like they’re worse. Kiss Me Deadly is a film about how you have to be afraid of everything. About how the world is going to end at any minute through the stupidity and meanness of people. Why aren’t there any films about how people are good?
—Probably because most people aren’t.
—That’s bullshit, said Erik. How many bad people have you actually met? Two? Three? Out of how many thousands? Most people are good. Most people value other people. We waste our lives only paying attention to the wrong ones, to the handful who don’t honor the social contract. I’m not complaining. I’m just tired of squalid movies and squalid books, and I’m tired of being told that the planet’s on the verge of its own doom. I believe in humanity, I believe in our future, I believe that we’ll figure it out. I believe we’ll be here in ten thousand years, not much worse for wear.
At least he wasn’t talking about Jesus.
I couldn’t help but think that we were a terrible match. He was too good. Maybe I’d been in New York too long. Maybe the farm disabuses a person from any illusion about life’s sacredness. How could a person look at human history and feel anything like optimism? Our planet was a whirling mudball infested with insignificant creatures that evolution had driven to the heights of cruelty.
On the other hand, I sat in a basement café in the world’s most interesting city, surrounded by kids dressed like they’d just fucked Bela Lugosi. My beautiful boyfriend’s countenance shining high with dreams of human goodness.
I knew enough not to let the moment escape. If I could have that spasm of happiness, maybe there was hope. Maybe there was a way that we wouldn’t destroy the planet. Maybe Erik was right. I hope so. I still do. I always hope that Erik is right.
He escorted me home, but couldn’t spend the night. He was starting a new job in Midtown. He’d been bouncing between offices for years, quitting every sixteen months. He’d been hired by a group of lawyers.
Before we kissed, we looked up and down the street. An unfortunate side effect of living so near McSorley’s. For 138 years, the bar had attracted a certain kind of clientele. I wasn’t worried about being bashed, but I’d rather not beat a drunk senseless when all I wanted was a goodnight embrace.
Adeline was in the kitchen, cooking ramen noodles and boiling eggs. Another new habit. I’d known her seven years and never seen her buy groceries.
—Baby, she said. Did you love it?
—It knocked me out.
—Do you want to hear about Albert Dekker?
—Sure, I said.
—They found him on Normandie, between Hollywood and Franklin. His fiancé hadn’t heard from him in a few days. She did as people do in these situations. She contrived a way into his apartment. When she got inside, she discovered Dekker’s naked corpse kneeling in the bathtub. A noose is tied around his neck and is affixed to the shower rod. Leather belts restrain his body. He’s handcuffed. Someone’s taken lipstick and written all over his body. ‘Whip’ and ‘Make me suck’ and ‘cocksucker.’ Someone drew a vagina on his stomach. He’d been there a few days. Putrefaction had set in. There were valuables missing. And do you know the most amazing thing? Even with all of that, the death was ruled accidental. A possible suicide.
APRIL 1992
More Patrick Geoffrois and His Cacophony
I was deep in Grove Press’s unfortunately idiomatic translation of Albertine Sarrazin’s Astragal when someone cried Adeline’s name. We’d lived in the same building since 1987. The landlord had yet to install a buzzer.
She ran downstairs then barreled back up. Her boots stomped the holy hell out of our unpolished kitchen floor. She knocked on my bedroom door.
—Yeah? I asked.
—Baby, Patrick’s outside. Will you walk with us?
—I’ll pass, I said.
—Young man, she said, don’t dismiss this out of hand. You simply have no idea what kind of experience you’ll be missing. You’re acting like a bigot. Don’t close that beautiful American mind.
Experience. The magic word. I operated from a naked and foolish belief that each experience of the writer’s life would recycle into the work. The dreck and stupidity of humanity undergoing an alchemical conversion into the gold of literature. If Adeline wanted me to walk with the sorcerer, then even that could be transmuted.
Geoffrois was on the sidewalk, facing our building, leaning against a parked car. His gaunt face like a death mask lit by streetlight, ringed with the white flow of his hair, his wardrobe its usual sable. His eight points of interest dominated by gaudy jewelry.
—Patrick, said Adeline, this is Baby.
—I too have a baby, he said. But my woman and my child are not home. I thought I would show Adeline the demonic currents running through the East Village.
—I’ve seen you tell fortunes on St. Mark’s, I said, with your finger in the palms of creeps from Jersey.
—Even pigs have a destiny, said Patrick Geoffrois. It may be the slaughterhouse, but it remains a destiny.
Geoffrois launched off the car, heading east. Adeline matched his stride. As the evening’s designated third wheel, I trailed behind, affording myself the opportunity to observe the man’s frailty. His clothes sagged over his body. A true devotee of Ulysses S. Grant.
Their conversation went beyond my comprehension. Something about Crowley and the Star Ruby Ritual. I listened, wanting to understand, but the details proved elusive.
Geoffrois spoke at length about the necessity of preparing the ceremonial chamber, about the importance of set and setting in implementing the science of change.
Adeline took this seriously, responding in kind, her voice imbued with gravity. It came to me that I had no idea whether or not Adeline believed in God.
An American moment. You can know someone’s outward personality better than you know your own but still lack any clear sense of their inner beliefs. There is no way of knowing if they hope for an intangible being that permeates infinity with its eternity.
Geoffrois yell
ed: —Witches will be released upon New York! Men and women will die, animals will come back to life. Penises carved of olive wood will propagate the wisdom of Satan. Samurais of all kinds should stay put in Brooklyn! Giant green flies will come out of the mouths of children.
—What are you talking about? I asked.
—The fate of New York, he said. The vengeance that it will suffer.
—Hasn’t the city suffered enough?
—It hasn’t yet begun to suffer, said Geoffrois. The suffering that the city knows is like a drop in the ocean. A great plague will come upon it, and heretics will beat stockbrokers with sorghum and fennel, and the stalks will burn like hot irons.
He babbled all the way down 7th Street, pausing only before the McKinley Apartments. Staring into the light well that split the building’s two wings, Geoffrois claimed that its negative space was an intentional representation of Le Maison Dieu, or The Tower, the sixteenth trump card in the Major Arcana. New York, he said, is a city with too many towers. Ruin will befall them. Always beware The Tower when it is pulled in a reading. It is the most sinister of omens.
We crossed Avenue A. The park was closed, encased within eight-foot-tall chain-link fences, the result of a riot that had taken place on Memorial Day.
This most recent outburst of popular dissent wasn’t nearly as severe as the one that had destroyed Adeline’s ability to think about city life, but it adhered to genre conventions. Fires in the streets, bottles thrown, wild eyed nudist radicals screaming about the New World Order, dumpsters serving as barricades.
The municipal authorities became convinced that the very topography of Tompkins Square was desperately wrong. They suspected that its individual parts comprised the gears of a great machine which deranged the human mind into a fervor against civilization. The holy reliquaries of Robert Moses transmitting out energies of chaos.
A month after the Memorial Day riot, several hundred cops secured the park’s perimeter while the bells of St. Brigid’s pealed. The homeless went out, fences went up. Renovations announced, with no fixed date of completion.