by Joshua Cohen
Moe yanked us in and across the backseats and directed the driver in a mellifluous Hindi, “He will take us to women,” he translated for us. But we stopped at this sportslounge with a grungy chalet debased out back as like it had slid down from the hills and the driver said something and Moe shook his head and responded something else and said to us, “He misunderstood that we wanted prostitutes,” but we said nothing again and he said, “If we maintain this luck we will have no need for prostitutes,” and then he spoke to the driver who banged a sharp U, let us off in the lot of a stripclub.
Moe said something to the driver and translated for us, “I told him to come in with us, we will treat him.” But as like the driver declined, Moe pressed, saying something about it not being a hassle or condescension. Or about how we would pay not just for the cover charge but also for the dances and lost time. Moe got out of the cab and removed from his jeans his naugahyde wallet spilling a wad of bills across the asphalt and as like we stooped to reclaim them from the wind more $100s fell loose from the pouch of his lumberjack plaid, and Moe gathered them up himself and offered them to the driver.
The driver then declined again by delivering a canonical poem in Hindi until Moe got soberer and solemn and held his hands to his heart and then hugged the guy and kissed his lips. Moe must have told the driver he had to take the money because the driver finally agreed and accepted the bills smoothing them as like to soothe them into a roll to fold into his pocket and the total was definitely more than $2K.
With the cab turning around we stood separate from Moe in another slotted emptiness of lot and asked him what the driver had said. “He said his wife is to have her surgery tomorrow.”
The cab slipped back onto the boulevard and sped through a yellow. We asked, “What type of surgery?”
But Moe was already grinning past the bouncer. We caught up with him and inside the club he flipped his trench over his head and spread it into the frill of a spooked dinosaur and hopped around yelling, “Cardiac cardiac cardiac cardiac.”
The club was loud and crowded gagging from the smell of bowlingalley antifungal footspray and was called 98.6°, if we did not already mention it. It was 360° all around us that hot, in Fahrenheit.
The coatcheck girl offered to check the trench by asking, “Am I taking it? Or not?” Moe said, “I was hoping you would just give me the hanger,” and she said, “Lick my cock,” and Moe said, “Why?” and she asked, “What about you?” But we kept our jacket and msgrbag too and the girl shrugged, “Whatever, I dance next.”
A bar and stools up front, banquettes toward the back, all the walls except the curtained one behind the middle stage mounted with TVs as like old and bulky bodied as like the audience, riveted to a replay of the NBA quarter or semifinals, the Dow, the NASDAQ ticker, NASCAR, Seattle or Portland up, the Dow down, the NASDAQ down, NASCAR at the finish. At the completion of each circuit a fresh young flatscreen showed the Hollywood clipnews.
Six girls took their turns twirling germs around two stainless steel poles. We cannot recall anything about them except how blatantly diverse they all were as like in an ad for democracy. One white, one black, two in the middle, two Asians. The martinis were watery and on the cutting, the bleeding edge of expensive, but we drank them and were crashing, we were core failure crashing.
Moe stubbed a menthol out on the table and covered the burn with the acrylic placard, No Smoking. Then he shrugged out of his trench and went for a lapdance. Then he came back for a second pack he had stashed behind the placard, left again for a double Asian lapdance. The trench hung on the chair in a manner suggesting it was skin that had been flayed from its owner. We were teetotaler nonsmoking veganfuckatarians, feminists, proponents of female bodyhair, enemies of glass ceilings, of the mirrored ceiling above us, supporters of equal pay for equal work that extended to a fair wage for domestic chores for the stay at home parent. That was the milk we were raised on. We hated strobes and fucking hated being recalled to the genre distinctions between hiphop and rap. But this must not be construed as like racism. We had never been to a stripclub before. The flesh was live, not just live on the monitors.
Our share, all our poker money from the Moe split, was in our msgrbag, which would not leave our neck. We had not been able to count it all exactly.
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Moe returned to the table with the coatcheck girl and picked up his trench and huddled into it and sat again to take out some bills. He paid her this fistful of cash she was fanning us with as like it was our turn and though we only shook our head it was as like she was angry with us not for denying her but for being ourselves, and so she left, and we were left to correlate an increase in stiletto height with an increase in length of stride.
Moe was kicking at the denominations that had spilled to the tile, he was kicking the $50s and $20s into a mound and then leaning as like to fall and stuffing them back into his pockets.
Then he took out something black, contoured round and smooth as like a lingam, and he pointed it at us and we put up our hands. “Either I rob you or we rob this joint together,” he said.
Then he laughed and set the remote down on the table and tugged the trenchflaps around to his lap and dug through unloading the other pockets.
The exterior pockets held cash but the interiors held remotes, a different failed successful remototype in each pocket, rather no type because all universal. Also packs of batteries. AAs. AAAs.
Moe lined some remotes on the table and some on his lap but a bigger one was in his hand and he pressed at a button and nothing. Or anything that happened was just not discernible to us, because we had been transported to another time so faraway that the future must miss us and the present was only the waveparticle excitement of the past.
Moe repocketed the biggie then and picked up a smaller one instead and pressed a button but nothing or just the undetectable happened again, and so he repocketed it and went for a third, which had come from a breast slit, a fourth, which had come from a hip slit, a model even smaller than the models preceding it, and with a strand of DYMO plastic label tape peeling: the Amote 2niversal.
Moe pressed, and up on the TVs stockcar crashes changed to the sitcom Friends, pressed again and changed foulshot recaps to the sitcom Seinfeld. Pressed yet again and the stereo system hiphop got louder to rap. Pressed the TVs that were muted unmuted. A movie about a woman who fell in love with her vacuum or how much plasma a papertowel absorbed or how baby gentle this roll of toiletpaper was or else it was a commercial.
We took another remote, took another that worked and we worked it more too, in a History Channel war documentary, and the girls onstage below the switching were caught in the crossfire, the changing flame colors and shrieks of the laughtracks, and they slowed their dancing toward the screens, they stopped their dancing and then the hugenormous penitentiary brawny bouncer who was the only untelevised personality not fixed on the girls or the screens was waving a truncheon as like to smack the plastic from our hands.
We turned to leave just as like he was clearing the other remotes from our table and cracking a few between boot and floor.
Outside he was saying, “Gimme those fucking things!” because this was something a bouncer would say and because we were drunk and menthol was burning our lips it was Moe who said, “These are the property of the federal government,” and the bouncer said something as like, “Fuck you, gimme,” and Moe said, “We are fieldtesters and this is the field.” But it was a full parkinglot of the cheaper SUVs and the type of sportscars that are just sedans with spoilers attached and the bouncer yelled in essence, “Do not make me call the police,” and Moe yelled, “Do not make me call Al Gore.”
A fight but with blood would have erupted had we not dragged Moe away, and walked off down the strip.
We were the only pedestrians in the universe, pointing randomly, pressing buttons randomly. Most of the bars and restaurants we passed had projectors flinging shows onto walls, and they were not affected, and most of the karaoke moni
tors were not affected either, and because the streetlight never changed and click as like we might we were unable to change it we waited long to cross at the crosswalk, so long that a homeless pixel had the time to get near with its shoppingcart of recyclables and Moe pointed his remote and pressed and said, “You are dead,” and the homeless said, “Tell me about it,” and Moe pressed again and said, “You are alive,” and the homeless said, “Give me a cig,” fundamentally.
Then the light changed and we crossed and once we got residential it was just splenda. Moe fell and in helping him up we fell too and Moe helped us up and led us down Cienaga. We are not going to pretend we know LA. We had four years at Montessori but we are not going to pretend we know Spanish. But La Cienaga was as like a swamp or drowning. We have not had a drink since. We are yoga practitioners and reformed adherents of the revered Master Classman. We are Stage IV terminal bardo. We are clean. We maintain a monastery in Noto.
We took Holloway or Hollow Way the street might have been down to Hacienda, we recall Hacienda. Bungalows and cottages in the mission style or as like the Moors had wandered off from the studios and conquered the rest of Hollywood. The residents of all the terracotta around us were not the poors who are never asleep, yet neither were they the rich who are never awake, instead they were the middles who were always getting stuck in the middle and paused between. We put ears to their sills, eyes to their drafts, cupped at their panes, peeked through their bubbles, passed unscathed through their walls and with our remotes went flicking their switches ghostly.
Moe messed with one guy in a groundfloor unit by flipping his Indiana Jones to either softcore porn or a nature show about the beach and how undressed a girl had to be to enjoy it. We were arguing which but the guy blocked our vista and gave us another show by getting up from his beanbag and searching the shag on all fours for his own remote, and not being able to find it, crawled over and rechanged the channel and sat back down but Moe pressed again, and it was either softcore again or just a show about the harmful effects of pederasty on coral, we did not stick around to find out. Instead Moe flipped a neighboring woman onto some frequency, no way of telling whether it was some special mod or just a glitch, but we got her from an MTV or VH1 grind into fuzz, pure flakey rain she could not get out of, we could not get her out. On the next house his channel up/down did not work, or did not work with the consistency of our volume and picture, so this matching monogrammed robe couple had their domestic soundtrack shrieks blared as like we hued and tinted the picture, turning all the whites and blacks to yellow.
We cut across a yard and Moe got snagged in a mesh for volleyball and dropped his remote and then we got snagged too by our msgrbag and dropped our remote and we both scrambled around just searching. But we decided to screw it and keep moving only as like a siren drove past, though the loss enraged Moe who said, “It is just a false alarm, people panicking that they have lost their entertainment.”
But maybe he or we had dropped our remotes earlier or maybe later in a pool, point is we had the big remotes in our hands, basically the biggest ones and the only buttons they had that worked anything approaching universally were the Powers and because one click that would turn off an on TV would also turn on an off TV, we canceled each other, we canceled the couples, in darkness or colorbar light. We plugged and unplugged from a distance removed. Then either a scream from a resident or a scream from a speaker but whichever it was it would fade, their echo would fade, or just blend into the next as like we bolted. Garagedoors opened but nothing would be inside except kittylitter and a hose. Nothing would be inside except bulk granola bars and a Chevrolet Blazer. We buttoned them closed and bolted. Our msgrbag was gashed and leaking cash and Moe was dropping cash too and the gusts blew the bills across the patios and lawns and we chased them. We ran past a mailbox shouting about how much we hated mailboxes, with their weeny flags, obnoxious. We ran past a villa whose mat was mounded with advertising circulars shouting about how much we hated advertising circulars and the sprinklers turned on and soaked us or maybe we fell into a Jacuzzi or maybe only Moe did. Then an autolight switched on and we crouched in a hedge until it switched off and we emerged but it detected our motion again and pitbulls barked for our throats.
Toward the back of the property was a sleepy casita and Moe went to wake its screens but his remote did not work so we tried ours and ours did not work and Moe fumbled for batteries and replaced his and nothing and replaced ours too and again nothing either, and so we leaned against the trunk of a palm and kept smacking the remotes against the palm, and sliding open their back casings and taking out their batteries and shaking the water out of the casings and replacing the batteries again. New ones or two old in the other direction, plus to minus and minus to plus, sliding the covers back until clicking.
But the moon could not be raised and the sun could not be lowered and the night could not be rewound and the day could not be fastforwarded. The sky was still dark to the west but getting light to the east and the casita was just the alleyed trash vestibule for a dump of apartments decorated with archways and turrets and CO2 emissions, the Alhambra, it was called, or the Alcazar. We crept into the courtyard and people were stirring and so their TVs were stirring too. We clicked and off they went.
But then this was cur, unexpected. The TVs that were on would turn off but the TVs that were off would not turn on, at least not the ones we discerned through the screened windows that were both off and on at once because toward the west they reflected and shone and toward the east they absorbed and were shadows.
We had become crashers, blackeners, goodnight monitors. We pounded for that last surviving function of our last surviving button, pounding harder and faster to keep up with the wakers, putting them back to their sleeps as like dreaming.
We were in a fit, rolling along a lattice fence and slamming that only button in its only function, shutting the apartments down, shutting the city down, snapping and zipping everything up, putting everything off off off off, forever.
We came to a caretaker cabaña whose window had no shade and through the window was all junk hefty wood rung around with cola sweat and not retro or vintage but just sad floral print upholstery stained with seepage from the foam noodle containers, but over and above it all as like lording was this new expensive polymeliac idol screen showing news, which nobody was paying any attention to but a wheelchair.
Or whatever was in the wheelchair was still asleep or just dead as like the body on the news we could see, we could hear it—a body as like of a child, crisp and bleeding and wailing in stereo, and yet before we could be told who this was, or how this was, before we could be told when and where this was—we clicked it, we cut it.
“Shiva,” Moe said, he said we were Shiva, but only the two of us together were, the ear that hears the ear, the allseeing infrared third eye of the consort of death.
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DUBAI
[recfile 58 hello hello.]
Testes testes 1 2 3. Do re mi. Pop goes the sibilance. Red leather yellow leather. Aluminum linoleum. L M N O P.
Do not leave your Tetbook unattended. We repeat, do not leave your Tetbook unattended.
[So we were dealing with how you got involved with Carbon Capital.]
It was fairly straightahead, at least it was at the sniffing of asses. Basically no one wanted to fund us. No one even wanted to discuss our funding, which we to be honest took personally as like a presentation issue. We were unwashed, which was borderline normal. Malnourished, insomniac, rude, all borderline normal too. But also we could not explain what we did, or could not explain how there was money in it.
Keep in mind this was a time of major seeding, major sowage. Sums were being strewn to the breezes, and reaped. But every firm had responded firmly the same. Profitability implausible. Not just for us but for any of our partners. Everything was still vertical then. Not horizontal but vertical. We would drive traffic away just when the wisdom was insisting on users being kept inportal or at least onsite.
Domains had to be protected, hosts prioritized, content would never be mutual. The VCs still considered sites as like stores or casinos. Do not let them out, the users. Do not let them leave to consume or even peruse the products and/or services of competitors. But in our model coming would be going as like going would be coming. No difference ever countenanced, because we were just the conduit. Expose the users to all competitors because the exposure itself will be the shop of life, where users become their own products and/or services. That would be our gamble.
Basically it was Moe who made us profitable, but accidentally. This we have to stress, it was never his intention.
He was an artist, an engineer, no rapacious dick tasseler graduated from B School to a Series A. He could count cards, up to four decks, but he could never even balance his checkbook. It was just something he said. Something for us both to regret.
[I don’t understand—regret what? And how do you make money accidentally?]
Backtracking. We were just heading back to the Bay from LA whingeing to Moe about our lack of offers. No bids on purchase. No bids on license. All rejections were accompanied by referrals to consultants. But then we had no money for consultants. Every VC hinted that things would be different if we had advertising. Paid banners up top, paid sidebars. But we were against any advertising. Unclean, violative.
Moe, who had no appetite for businesstalk, stayed hungover autopilot silent. He got off at the right exit but in the wrong direction, permuting the 680 into the 280 as like we were going to his place. We were going to our place, though, to drop us off. Backtracking was, though all of San Jose was, ponderous. But then we passed a billboard.
[What billboard?]
That is the point, it changed. We cannot recall what exactly it was at the time. Some local place. Some fuel place with a family zoo and swings and slides and a ballpit. Moe said, “Did you ever notice that on billboards on the highway they never advertise for crazy shit as like a pit a hundred miles away?” and we said yes, “but that every ad is made for parents passing fast and having to make quick decisions pertaining to where to stop for bathrooms or gas or balls for kids to swim in?” and we said yes, again. “The point is just what is expeditious and convenient, what you need, and where you need it,” and we were with him all the way.