The Future Won't Be Long

by Jarett Kobek

  I arrived at Steiner House in time to witness Минерва’s bandmates shuffling out of the front door. I’d never spoken with any of them, not the femme chellovecks nor the San Rafael adolescent. They raised their hands to greet me. I motioned back with a royal wave. They turned the corner, heading towards the Upper Haight.

  Минерва smoked from her bong in the living room, sitting beside a stack of flyers advertising the next performance of Daddy Was in KGB. Imagining the babushkas plotting official business in my de facto bedroom, I recollected again the indignities of the freeloading houseguest.

  “You see girls?” she asked.

  “Yes, and your pubescent with them,” I said.

  “Nice boy,” she said. “I think loves Нина. Girl does not notice.”

  “That’s cute,” I said.

  Daddy Was in KGB were scheduled to perform in two weeks’ time at the Night Break, a club on Haight separated by a small space from the bowling alley. The other bands on the bill were The Mecies, Kill Sybil, and The Bottom Feeders. According to a parenthetical note on the flyer, Kill Sybil were from Seattle.

  Минерва had invited me to go with her to an event at Night Break called Sushi Sundays, during which the management erected tables and set up an impromptu restaurant. The denizens of San Francisco sat devouring tekka-maki and kappa-maki and were entertained by local punk and metal bands. I’d declined.

  Following a few merry-go-rounds with Минерва’s bong and its sweet maryjane, I couldn’t help myself. I spilled the beans about my fight with Nash Mac. “That boy is such a clod,” I said. “You know New York, darling, you’ve been there. You remember what it was like. San Francisco is nothing.”

  “Wrong,” said Минерва.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Wrong idea,” she said. “San Francisco is deadly.”

  “We walked over the corpses of junkies! You were a Tompkins Square anarchist!”

  “San Francisco is too fresh,” she said. “You are tourist. Sorry, but is true.”

  “Two thousand two hundred and forty-five murders in 1990!” I said. “The city elected a fascist because it couldn’t deal with the crime! San Francisco is a liberal paradise with a handful of muggers!”

  “No argument,” said Минерва. “We seek truth like explorers. Come, get your coat.”

  She brought me down Steiner, over to 14th, across Market on Church past Aardvark Books, over to 18th and Dolores Park, and then on to Mission Street. Our footsteps punctuated only by Минерва’s color commentary. “Never eat at Sparky’s,” she said. “Instant diarrhea. Instant misery. But open late.” Then: “You see church in distance? Where they shoot Vertigo. Alfred Hitchcock. We see screening at Castro. Typical misogynist domination fantasy. Kim Novak shaped by two different men. Winterbloss loves. Says is about depth of obsession and despair. Sure thing.”

  The Mission was one locale that I had not fully explored. The dreary place always seemed too much a wasteland, beyond reach and without purpose. Now, in the streetlamps and headlights, it appeared not so very different from the 1980s desolation of the East Village. The human faces and bodies were different but I viiiibed on the crumbling sidewalks and broken pavement.

  “We go here,” said Минерва, pointing to a building at the corner of 20th. The neon read HUNT’S QUALITY DONUTS, donut-shaped letters falling into a giant coffee cup. Along the building read the ominous tag: OPEN 25 HOURS A DAY. My heart fluttered, all pitter patter, as I recalled Disco Donuts.

  “An extra hour of life,” said Минерва.

  You needn’t ask for a description, reader, to conceive of the unsavory characters hanging about on the pavement. It took all types, my sweet nothings. I steeled myself for the catcalling, but through intercession of the Virgin Mother, Минерва and I ran the gauntlet without a word. They didn’t see us. We were the invisibles.

  Within the warmth of the restaurant, the human comedy advanced to Act IV. To our left was the serving counter. Tables filled the rest of the restaurant, tables occupied by drunkards, by hollow men, by Latino gangsters, by drug dealers, by the criminal class, by the broken, by the miserable, by the bored, by the extraterrestrial. A layer of smoke hung over the panoply, thick like a fog shroud above the Haight, penetrated by flickering fluorescent light. Oh Lord, thought I, please let my Ruskie friend get to her point.

  Минерва surveyed the customers. I ambled to the counter and ordered doughnuts. The poor boy took my order, smiling, made my change, and pushed across mi donas. They appeared day-old and stale, but one never refuses wafers in church. I bit into one of my prizes, rushing with the vile sugar and dough, the taste reaffirming what it meant to be a citizen of these States United.

  Минерва extracted a doughnut from my bag. “Him,” she said, biting into the cheap delight. She nodded towards an individual sitting at the back.

  He had the appearance of someone’s junky uncle, the kind who’d come for Thanksgiving dinner, shoot up in the bathroom, and then nod off while passing the cranberry sauce. “Man we come for,” said Минерва.

  She sat opposite him. I sat beside her. He looked up. The fluorescence made him ashen, a visage like the secret decade that existed between the 1940s and 1950s, where every clock’s hands always pointed to the twenty-fifth hour. “Yes?” he asked.

  “We need object,” said Минерва. “You sold me object before, remember?”

  “I think I remember you,” he said. “I think I remember you.”

  “Yes,” said Минерва. “Great friends. Amigos.”

  “What is that you need?”

  “A knife,” she said. “Special knife.”

  “What’s so special about this knife?”

  “I want knife that stabbed a man,” she said. “With blood on blade. Not fresh. Dried blood.”

  “That could be hard to come by,” he said.

  “Thirty bucks,” she said. “No more, no less.”

  He stood and left.

  “Eat doughnut,” said Минерва. “We wait.”

  “Are you quite certain this man will return?” I asked. “He almost certainly made you for a copper.”

  “He comes,” she said, biting into the brown frosting.

  Hunt’s Quality Donuts. A hot-stepping hoedown where everything had gone wrong. The bloodshot alcoholic eyes of the other customers. The cheap wine. The disgraced tables. Act V. I’d spent my adult life fetishizing the outré of the urban landscape, indulging in the decay which only an abandoned city can produce, but beneath the smoke and green light of Hunt’s, I experienced a moment of doubt and pain. Whoever these people were, they were not on our side. These people didn’t have a side. They were as distant as the Sahara.

  The man returned with a rolled-up towel. He sat across from Минерва and unrolled his package. Surely enough, there was a knife, a serrated blade, with uneven and spotty brown stains along its length.

  “You didn’t get this from me,” he said. “I’ll deny it.”

  “Sure thing,” said Минерва. Turning to me, she said, “Pay man.”

  Not about to refuse a knife-wielding gentleman, I sputtered out a response that died into nothing. I wished she’d told me. I could have had my money ready. Instead, I dug through my purse beneath watchful stares of the criminal class. I counted out the bills.

  “Put in purse,” said Минерва, handing me the knife.

  The man stood up and rushed out.

  “Fucking junkies,” said Минерва. “No manners.”

  I finished my second doughnut. We exited Hunt’s. Yes, I suppose, it was impressive that one could buy a bloodstained knife in a doughnut shop. The speed certainly was remarkable, taking less time than a delivered pizza. Still, aren’t junkies always stabbing each other? The North American continent was crammed full with knives caked in their v
ictims’ effluvia. Yet I wasn’t about to argue the point with Минерва, knowing that it’s always best to let your landlords win their pyrrhic victories. We must allow others their idiosyncrasies.

  At 17th and Church, whilst Минерва occupied herself with a store window, I dropped the knife into the trash can. As I stepped away, I looked down at the gutter and saw graffiti carved into the pavement by some cad who’d come upon it while the cement was still wet:

  BUCK ♥ bAbyDoll

  Don’t you know that it gave me the Mississippi boll-weevil blues? It took all my blossoms and left me with an empty square.

  Who was Buck? Who was Babydoll? Were they still together? Perhaps they’d always be together, perhaps the permanence of cement meant that their relationship could never end, that theirs would be one of the great love stories.

  Yet all great love stories end in tragedy. Héloïse and Abelard, Bonnie and Clyde, Romeo and Juliet, Sid and Nancy, Scott Summers and Jean Grey.

  It wasn’t Nash Mac flashing in my head. Nor Jon de Lee. It wasn’t even Ian fucking Covington. Don’t you know, darlings, that I thought of Baby Baby Baby?

  BABY ♥ aDelINE

  ADELINE ♥ bAby

  I heard his voice. “Adeline, stop thinking of me,” he said. “You can’t repeat the past.”

  “Can’t repeat the past? Why, of course you can.”

  JUNE 1993

  Jeremy Makes a Proposition

  Jeremy labored from home, stationed at his computer, playing a pre-release of Day of the Tentacle. Weeks passed bathed in the blue glow of his monitor. He reported by telephone and through email. Nash Mac still went into the office, rarely discussing the project. I asked Jeremy to show me the game, to show me the fruits of their struggles.

  Using the computer’s mouse, one navigated characters around a très outré mansion. I gathered from Jeremy’s comments that this was rather similar to Maniac Mansion, the game to which Day of the Tentacle served as a sequel.

  What separated the latter from the former was the novelty of being able to navigate the mansion through three separate historical eras, these being the American Revolution, the present day, and the far future. The player controlled one character in each time period, passing items between them via an arcane mechanism that involved the flushing of toilets.

  I don’t deny that the mechanism was clever, and the graphics impressed in their Tex Avery style, but I only played about as long as I could manage, which was somewhat under thirty minutes.

  Jeremy found his computer sitting idle and myself returned to the living room. “You didn’t like the game?” he asked.

  “Darling, I didn’t dislike it,” I said, “but it’s someone else’s cup of tea. One thing did surprise me.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The attempts at humor. Are all games like that?”

  “All LucasArts games are funny,” he said. “Except for Loom. Loom was moody.”

  “How very remarkable,” I said. “Nash Mac is less interested in humor than any boy that I’ve ever dated. Yet there he sits toiling, day and night, on D.O.T.T.”

  “Computer people are weird,” said Jeremy, “I have no idea what I’m doing with my life.”

  Jeremy wasn’t like Nash Mac. Technology wasn’t in his blood.

  “To be honest,” he said, “I kind of hate it.”

  “Why don’t you do something else?” I asked.

  “I have an idea,” he said.

  He went in his bedroom and returned with a sheaf of papers and several notebooks. He laid them on the floor. “Look through them,” he said, but I demurred, suggesting that he play docent and give me a tour. I didn’t dare make my own journey through that voluminous body.

  Jeremy had dreamt up a comic about a society of anthropomorphic cats. The first ten issues would follow one family through history, from primitive sabretooth origins to a late medieval period. Each of these early issues would focus on one cat interacting with the troubles of their world. Some would be high adventure, others snapshots of historical domesticity. By the tenth issue, in which we meet Felix Trill, the series’ main protagonist, it is apparent that the previous cats have been incarnations of the same soul, the soul which now inhabits Trill’s body.

  From issue ten, the narrative follows Trill as he goes on a winding adventure through the medieval world. Jeremy had yet to plot out that adventure, but if the time ever came, he’d work off of patterns in the previous nine issues. The details, he was sure, would emerge from his cranial lobes.

  “With the way the direct market works,” said Jeremy, “all you have to do is publish with a splash. Everything is print to order, and the orders are nonreturnable. I know Dave Sim. He said that if I ever get anything together, he’ll run a preview in the back of Cerebus, which means orders in the thousands, if not higher. It’s like minting money, except you’re also creating work. I know that I can make this happen.”

  “So why not?” I asked.

  “I need an artist,” he said, with a finality that gave me the fear.

  “You should make it a love match with your lady,” I said. “Her line work has gotten very fine.”

  “Минерва has no interest,” said Jeremy. “Plus, she couldn’t follow through. I was thinking about you, actually.”

  There was the long conversation and the hard sell. I resisted. I did not believe in art. I did not want to be an artist. As much as I had enjoyed my brief dalliance with the wonderful world of comics, I couldn’t be interested in a full-time gig. I’d seen Grant Morrison, seen Jill Thompson, even seen poor old Steve Yeowell. I didn’t want to be a rock star, didn’t want to be surrounded by acolytes, didn’t want to be stalked at raves by would-be writers. I was so old, reader. All I wanted was for the world to leave me alone. I wanted to grow aged, obscurely in obscurity, my final days spent in a nursing home flushed with golden light. I didn’t want anyone to know my name. I didn’t want people expecting things.

  “There’s no point,” I said. “Art is meaningless.”

  “I figured you might say that,” said Jeremy. “There’s one last thing I want to show you.”

  He went back into his bedroom and this time returned with a little booklet printed on 8 x 11-inch sheets of paper, folded in half and stapled together. Right away, my peepers spotted it for what it was. Someone’s zine. Jeremy pushed the booklet upon me.

  I looked at the front page and in my shock I saw it. Very familiar lettering surrounded by the line drawing of a bathtub:

  DRESS SUITS ON FIRE

  “What in the holy high hell goddamn!” I said.

  “I bought it at Bound Together,” he said.

  “This isn’t original,” I said. “It must be a Xerox of a Xerox. Of a Xerox.”

  “I asked at the store,” he said. “New copies get mailed in every six months. You made this thing, what, five years ago? Somebody was moved enough to keep it in print. And Adeline, it’s good. It’s really good. You’re letting everything go to waste.”

  There I was, back again, on the street looking up at rotting plastic and an aging tuxedo.

  *

  I attended a screening of Sliver at the Galaxy Theatre, a monstrosity of a building with enormous screens and a functionless yet delicious glass lobby presumably constructed as salve to the architect’s ego.

  When I moseyed on over to see the film, I hadn’t the slightest that it starred Sharon Stone. Watching her thrash around in a bathtub, I couldn’t help but think of her previous flicker, another scandal du jour titled Basic Instinct, which had provoked insanity in the American nation by featuring a brief intimation of Stone’s outer labia. A great deal of that film takes place in a club based on Limelight.

  Sliver convinced me that there were no standards for cultural products. Jeremy’s hard sell had left me worried about working on a project released for public consumption, worried that
if I said yes, we’d make something that wasn’t up to snuff.

  I’d been measuring myself against expectations of the Good. Sliver taught me that I had the idea backwards. It’s never a matter of being good. One needn’t be good. This is America! There are no standards. Nothing is good. One needn’t be good, one only need be no worse than anything else. One only need be as bad as Sliver.

  “You win, amigo,” said I to Mr. Winterbloss. “I’m yours if you’ll have me. Fetch me my ink and my paper.”

  Jeremy’d decided that the comic would be black and white, and he’d concluded that we must have at least three issues completed before he initiated the business end. Independent comic books, he said, worked best when the issues came out on a regular monthly schedule. The road to Rome was lined with promising projects that had fallen apart because of creators unable to stick to a schedule. If I drew sixty-six pages and three covers, it’d keep us from a false start.

  Jeremy’s scripts were an especial torture, as his descriptions were massively elaborate yet exceptionally vague.

  PAGE ONE, PANEL ONE: WE SEE A BIPEDAL SABRETOOTH CAT EXPLORING AN UNCONQUERED WORLD, BLEAK IN ITS EXPANSE, OVERPOWERING IN ITS ENORMITY. THE UNIVERSE SHIMMERS ALONG ITS MICROCOSMIC/MACROCOSMIC SPLIT. WE SEE IT ALL IN THE CAT’S POSTURE.

  “Jeremy, darling, what in the world do you mean?” I asked. “How could a person draw such a thing?”

  “You’re the artist! Figure it out, Adeline!”

  Much of my time was spent in the reading room of the Park Branch Library. I’d walk over to Paige Street with my paper and pencils, station myself, and dig through the tomes for reference imagery.

  I reeked of ambition when I started, developing an intricate and controlled line, but soon discovered that precision made it impossible to produce pages with anything like due speed. I simplified my style, focusing on the fluidity of line, going cartoony on the figure work while maintaining a level of detail with the backgrounds. I inked in heavy blacks, the density undercutting the saccharine cuteness.