by Jarett Kobek
“It’s for work, mostly,” he said. “But I’m using it more and more. Have you heard about email?”
“Please, spare me the details,” I said. “I have trouble enough with the regular mail.”
We sat in their living room, overlooking the street, our faces illuminated by red Christmas lights. Минерва emerged from their bedroom carrying a brightly colored plastic bong, and seeing that instrument of intoxication, at last I knew that I’d landed within the borders of Californy.
We helped the Captain get his bearings and then listened to L7’s Bricks Are Heavy. We bullshitted about the whereabouts of former Parsons students.
“Do you remember Janine?” asked Jeremy.
“Nooooooo,” I said. “Whatever did this Janine look like?”
“She had black long hair, which I think she dyed, and glasses, and she always carried an unwashed grotty pink messenger bag.”
“Oh, her,” I sniffed. “We called her the Pink Princess of Nassau County.”
“That’d be the one,” said Jeremy. “Do you want to guess what she’s doing?”
“I detest guessing. I’m always wrong.”
“Pink Princess is dog catcher?” asked Минерва.
“She stayed in New York for a year or two,” said Jeremy. “I guess she was working in fashion, but then she moved to Hollywood and now she works for Jack Nicholson. She works for the Joker.”
“Whatever does the Princess do for Mr. Nicholson?” I asked.
“No one really knows,” said Jeremy. “I think she’s his personal assistant.”
“I loved Five Easy Pieces,” said yours truly, “but one imagines there’s a singular task in which he requires the assistance of a pretty young thing. And that, my darlings, is an idea that’s real horrorshow. Think of their faces twisting and contorting in the throes of orgasm. Oh, the terror, the terror.”
They turned in before the clock struck midnight, retiring into the apartment’s sole bedroom. It’d been decided that I would slumber on the living room couch, but sleep was beyond my powers. I sat stoned and stared into the street.
Over the rooftops, I espied the dark and ragged outline of Buena Vista Park, towering above San Francisco like Fangorn over Middle Earth. The blinking lights of Sutro Tower hovered like UFOs. It’d been so long since Jon. I hadn’t seen the other one in almost six months. I’d alienated my family. The only friends who gave two shakes of a fist were in the bedroom, but they were coupled, and the mystery of every coupling is impenetrable.
I slept fully clothed, not removing a stitch, opting to ignore the blankets piled beside the couch.
MARCH 1993
Adeline Wanders Around San Francisco
I became as a pilgrim on the road to Canterbury, frittering away the weeks by wandering around San Francisco, un flaneur sans privilège du pénis.
I flitted in and out of the city’s little fiefdoms, developing the mad idea that one could create a sonic map for the blind on the basis of each neighborhood’s catcalls. The hola mi lindas and ay gueras of the Mission, the pssst psst psssst sexys of Hayes Valley, the polite honky condescension of the Marina, and then the vortex, the absolute sucking silence of the Castro.
My many years constrained within the rigid grids of New York and Los Angeles had left me unprepared for San Francisco. Why would anyone build a city punctuated by things like Nob Hill? What gin-soaked sot had believed that Market Street was best designed as a diagonal slash cutting through all rational thought? How could one explain California or Geary streets? How was I to comprehend the inexact and odd location of the Financial District? What in God’s good graces were the Richmond and the Sunset?
Four years had passed since Loma Prieta shook ’em on down, but traces of the destruction were everywhere. Empty lots where apartment buildings collapsed upon themselves, the blankness of the former Embarcadero Freeway, the dead zone by Fell Street.
I haunted cafés and walked the streets and wondered how the city’s residents could content themselves with living in such a jerk backwater. Everybody was stoned, everyone worked pointless jobs. Everyone was laid-back, but it wasn’t the sunstroked ease of blithe Los Angeles. People in San Francisco affected strange airs, undercurrents of tension and anxiety, of an undirected madness. Perhaps it was the weather, perhaps a result of the pure heresy of living in a place with more fog than sun.
*
Wandering out of the Marina, I spied a grand Art Deco marquee reading METRO in red neon lights. I moseyed over and discovered that the theater was screening a new film entitled Point of No Return, starring Bridget Fonda.
I’d last watched the actress in a risible thriller called Single White Female, where she battled her ravenous Sapphic desires. That film was terrible, but I grooooooved on the dynastic implications of her flat performance. Famous family, Hollywood nepotism, the decaying of American values. I wasn’t sure, but I thought that Daddy might’ve worked on her father’s dental bridge.
The next showing of Point of No Return was but half an hour away.
Inside the theater, I encountered one of those majestic institutions from the halcyon days when cinema remained an event and theaters were designed to highlight the moment’s monumental nature. Yes, darlings, those nouveau-riche aspirations were unmatched by the modest little films that they played, asking an audience of millions to satisfy itself with the heavy lids of Gloria Swanson, but the cinemas were like palaces.
The ceiling was Spanish Revival, the walls painted with red fairies, and the seating, mes amis, the seating was tiered. The rickety wooden chairs were an unrelenting agony, but one imagined a time when they’d been something better. I could have died there, and, like Claudius at prayer, witnessed my gentle soul transported straight to heaven.
Point of No Return was no better than Single White Female. I thought about drafting a letter to Ms. Fonda’s agents, suggesting that they select her roles with greater care. What’s the point of a famous name if it doesn’t deliver a modicum of dignity?
It’s the little details that stick. Not the plot, not the characters, but certain aesthetic moments rising from the mise-en-scène.
Минерва’s enthusiasm for L7 was beyond my understanding, but she’d played their LP enough times that I could recognize “Everglade” when it appeared on the soundtrack. It acted as prelude to the sonic entrance of Dr. Nina Simone, a record artist with whom Fonda’s character is obsessed. This musical choice is the only quirk of the entire film.
I knew of Miss Simone, coming across Little Girl Blue in bins of used vinyl, but I’d never listened. Upon hearing “Feeling Good,” I understood that I simply must purchase her records. The song was wonderful enough to overpower any concerns about a recommendation offered by an ultraviolent multimillion-dollar spectacle.
I ambled my merry way back, taking Fillmore and cutting through Alamo Square, encountering the inevitable tourists photographing the Painted Ladies. I watched them watching the buildings, wondering where in America they were from and what they thought about the decay of the neighborhood, if they could reconcile the houses that appeared every Friday night on Full House with the untreated mental illness and feces smears of the homeless.
At Recycled Records on Haight, I ran my long fingers through the vinyl. I unearthed ten different albums by Miss Simone. Working from the mystery of tactile osmosis, I picked Nina Simone Sings the Blues and I Put a Spell on You.
An unpleasant-looking creature behind the register lifted the albums, bringing the cardboard close to his pockmarked face. I worried he might extend his tongue and taste the vinyl.
“You’re buying these because of that movie, ain’t you?”
“Whatever do you mean?” I asked.
“That movie. Point Break. You’re the third one this week. All of you women.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Sure you don’
t,” he said. “Fifteen bucks.”
I headed home, passing beneath Buena Vista Park, trying yet again to apprehend its trees and its eldritch nature. Both Jeremy and Минерва had warned me against the park. They spoke of unknown crimes, of bodies discovered.
Yet I’m an infant in my mentality and being told not to do a thing always piques my curiosity. On my third day, I’d climbed to the park’s crown. I’d repeated this journey on several occasions, never once encountering another human being, only finding indirect evidence through discarded drug paraphernalia and canvas tents pitched amongst the trees.
Jeremy was at home. Минерва was working. Jeremy was reading a comic book.
“You need to check this out,” he said.
“Whatever is it?” I asked.
“Kid Eternity #1,” he said. “It came out last week, on Vertigo. It’s by Ann Nocenti. It’s the craziest thing I’ve ever read.”
“Leave it for me when you’ve finished,” I said. “I require a record player.”
Jeremy ventured into the breach of their overstuffed closet, pulling out a cheap plastic turntable. Минерва had purchased it for $5 at a garage sale, entertaining the delusion that she was one of those punk people who cherished seven-inch records, who collected and listened to the latest releases of her acquaintances. Her dreams proved fruitless. She could not resist the sway of the compact disc.
The player had a headphone jack. I plugged in Jeremy’s giant oversized plastic contraptions and sat on the living room floor, playing records. I preferred Nina Simone Sings the Blues. There was a consistency, not a bad song on it, though it lacked a standout. I Put a Spell on You was punctuated by numbers of incredible power. The title track, the aforementioned “Feeling Good,” “Gimme Some,” and “Taking Care of Business.”
I played the records all night, headphones pressed tight against my bony skull. I didn’t apprehend Минерва’s arrival. Nor when she and Jeremy departed, nor when they returned, nor when they retired into their bedroom. The voice of Miss Simone bored a hole. That voice owned every word that it enunciated, bending music in its service.
Towards midnight, I took in Kid Eternity #1. It was the single strangest thing that I had ever read, and you know me, darlings, I’ve been identified by several law enforcement agencies as one of those wretched people who adorates Simulations and all the other borrrrrrriiiiiiing books on Semiotext(e).
Kid Eternity, the titular character, can resurrect any historical or mythological figure, making them present in the flesh. An overweight Buddhist monk suggests that Kid Eternity must create a Moonchild. The purpose of this homunculus will be to bring mankind to its next state of developed consciousness. The narrative ends up encompassing the entire Greek pantheon, a group of demonic children who eat their own skin, and a Symbolist Beelzebub in hell. There’s also a B-plot about the discord among the people Kid Eternity attempts to mate in the creation of his Moonchild.
At least that’s what I think happens. I most certainly could be wrong. Interpretation is a fine art and Ann Nocenti is an unsung genius, a freak of nature walled within the prêt-à-porter ghetto of the comic book.
I asked Jeremy about Ann Nocenti. “She’s incredible,” he said. “But the comics world is too sexist. No one ever pays attention. We should bow at her feet. Vertigo is a good place for her. They’re doing a lot of interesting work somewhere between the mainstream and the alternative world. She couldn’t fit anywhere else. By the way, have you read Sandman?”
MARCH 1993
Nash Mac
The one constant of daily life is other people’s inability to mind their own business. Минерва and Jeremy had drawn negative conclusions regarding my shambling around San Francisco.
Too much perambulation enclosed within tendrils of fog and woe. They’d decided it was unhealthy. Thus the picayune image of my hosts dragging me hand-over-foot to Thai House, a restaurant on Noe Street.
We walked in the shadow of Corona Heights, a rock outcropping looming over this patch of the city. Jeremy noticed my interest and said, “Do you know the writer Fritz Leiber? He wrote a great book about Corona Heights called Our Lady of Darkness.”
I hung my head low. “Mmmmm, uhhh, mmm, uh,” I replied.
Fritz Leiber. Yes, sir, I did indeed recollect Fritz Leiber. The name filtered into my consciousness through the same route as all such trivialities, via a certain personage who possessed an unrefined taste for science fiction. I’d been avoiding all thoughts of the other one, but it proved impossible, as in the moments when our behemoth cat would crawl into my lap and insist on being hugged until he purred. The beast’s gray face, his caterwauls. What had been lost.
Thai House represented a new stratagem. Jeremy took it upon himself to arrange a mutual dinner between we three and one of his co-workers, a man named Nash Mac.
“Nash Mac?” I asked incredulously. “He sounds like a gay cash machine.”
“It’s short for ,” said Jeremy. “His family’s from Persia.”
“But Jeremy,” I whined, “I don’t want to meet any of your dreadful computer people. I hate computers. I hate technology. I wish I could live in the eighteenth century, my tattered dress speckled with the rot of the road.”
“He’s not like the others,” said Jeremy. “He cares about things beyond computers.”
There we stood outside of the restaurant, its interior glow lighting the sidewalk. Минерва leaned against her beau, hands beneath his jacket, kissing his neck. How had they managed to keep it alive? In my humble experience, most relationships lasted two years before dissipating into contempt and mutual loathing. Yet their vegetable love grew vaster than empires.
“Why ever are we suffering this cold?” I asked.
“I told Nash Mac that we’d meet him outside,” said Jeremy.
“Fine,” said I. “You wait for this young man who is apparently incapable of peering inside a glass window. I’ll collect a table. Минерва, will you come with me?”
“Prefer standing,” she said.
I entered the establishment. It could have been any restaurant in San Francisco. Simple design and modest touches of ethnicity. I spoke with the hostess. She sat me at a table. I waited, in total boredom, for another ten minutes.
There was action outside, blur of bodies in nighttime. They rushed in with the mystery guest. I had to admit that Nash Mac was crushingly handsome, but oh so poorly dressed in his pale blue button-down and his brown khakis. Alas, his sartorial missteps made no difference. You know your Adeline. She’s always believed in the fundamental attractiveness of the poorly dressed male.
Nash Mac made eye contact only to break it a moment later. He didn’t ask a thing of me, preferring to speak with Jeremy about work, about the way that Ron Gilbert had left the company, about finishing touches being put upon something called D.O.T.T.
Минерва and I were boooored. She kicked Jeremy beneath the table. He stopped talking. We all stopped talking.
“So what do you do?” asked Nash Mac.
“Me?” I said.
“Yes,” he said. “You.”
“I’m one of those poor souls doomed to wander the night without anything like a clear idea of what it is that she does. Don’t you know that I feel obsolescence creeping upon me?”
“Is bullshit,” said Минерва. “Adeline is artist.”
“Now, darling,” I said. “You know how I hate that word.”
“But it’s true,” said Jeremy. “She’s incredibly talented.”
“And that talent, Nash Mac,” I said, “is why I’ve spent the last few years drawing pictures of women in their bras. There’s a great wide world of difference between being talented and being an artist. Talent is a curiosity that one squanders or develops. It doesn’t mean a single thing.”
“That is misguided bullshit,” said Nash Mac. “People are distingui
shed by natural gifts. Some people are born beautiful. Some people are born smart. Some people are born talented. It’s a crime to waste your gift. If you’re okay with being a criminal, you’re a fool. You’ll regret it. If you don’t already.”
The waiter brought our entrees. Nash Mac consumed his pad thai, inhaling the meal. Awkward, messy, the noodles slipping over his face and fork. I am insane enough that it appealed to something deep in my soul.
We landed at Mad Dog in the Fog, an Irish sports bar on Haight Street. Минерва and Jeremy ordered a drink and made their strategic retreat, feigning exhaaaustion, leaving me by my lonesome with Nash Mac.
“So, Nash Mac,” I said. “Why don’t you inform me about the relationship with your last girlfriend? Are you still friends?”
“This is distasteful,” he said. “Are you making fun of me? What did Jeremy tell you?”
“Nothing,” I said. “Why so nervous? Did you cheat on the girl and leave her for someone else? I’m simply curious. A person’s last relationship can tell you an awful lot.”
“She’s dead,” he said.
“What,” I said.
“I don’t bring it up when I first meet people,” he said. “It tends to murder conversation.”
In my indecency, I pressed for details. He demurred. I inquired into his life. His father and mother, doctors with deep connections to the Shah, had fled Iran during the Revolution, bringing a young into the States United, where he adapted to the new culture by bowdlerizing his own name, assuming an ultra-American identity. He graduated high school in Fairfax, Virginia, then ended up at college in Bloomington-Normal, where he’d studied computer science, graduating with his BS and then heading out for the Bay Area. Everyone was making noise about the prominence of the region, about the development of new technologies, about Steve Jobs and NeXT. He picked up work and learned that he couldn’t stand employment at a normal corporation, that he’d dedicated his life to an intolerable industry. He quit his job with every intention of becoming a retail wage-slave, but then a friend suggested that he apply at LucasArts. They were looking for quality-assurance cogs. A week into this position and Nash Mac realized his passion for the material. He pushed his way up, functioning as an intermediary between the technology people and the designers. Initially, that line had been blurry, as the original designers were the people who created SCUMM, the primary scripting language of the LucasArts adventures. Yet the technology had accelerated so fast that it became impossible to both design and handle the back end. Nash Mac assumed his halfway position. He’d recently been promoted, working under Tim Schafer on Day of the Tentacle. Nash Mac liked Tim, liked D.O.T.T., but knew that he’d missed the golden age. LucasArts under Ron Gilbert was a palace of wonder. Gilbert was a master. Nash Mac treasured even his tangential involvement with Monkey Island 2.