by Jarett Kobek
When the music finished, Baby begged off. I protested, but when I took in the scene on Avenue A, I was happy for my roommate’s evanescence. It was pathetic, and I was a contributor, one of several slags crowding the bands, desperate to chat up musicians. But these are punk people! I thought. Punk people should be above mere cock-rock bullshit.
“The cheeseburgers here are the best in the city,” said Jon de Lee. “Greasy and good and cheap.”
“I suppose,” I said. I did admire the diner’s interior. The walls and the vinyl were abortion-clinic green, one long room contained within brick, a counter with stools up against it and five booths. Through our half-circle window, the emptiness of Great Jones and Lafayette, perfect view of a parking lot.
When Jon de Lee floated the idea of a second rendezvous, I refused to attend another live event, insisting rather that we do something, together, alone, as two acolytes sharing a moment in time. The concept perplexed him: “Isn’t the date a bourgeois fallacy designed to reinforce the myth of natural marriage?”
“It could be,” I said. “But we’re going all the same.”
He invited me on a constitutional around the city. So we perambulated, talking. He pontificated his usual bullshit, obviously, more rants about war against the poor, about police power, about the unrighteous applications of the state. But he talked, too, about his family and his early life.
His name wasn’t Jon de Lee. An adopted nom de guerre. He’d been born Jonah Lieber, a Jewish boy out in Monmouth County. “My parents,” he said, “divorced before I was born. Growing up, it was me, my mom, and my sister. My brother didn’t live with us. My father was gone but sent child support. Then there was school, which went fine until junior high and my bar mitzvah, when I started noticing a difference between me and the other kids. They were too Jersey, I guess. Or I wasn’t Jersey enough. I never gave two fucks about their gold chain bullshit. I dropped out and came to New York. I’ve been on the Lower East Side ever since.”
“You’re well spoken,” said I. “For a dropout.”
“Why should an intellectual be academy educated? America has a long tradition of self-made men,” he said.
“You don’t believe in America,” I said. “You’re an anarchist.”
“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. I believe in the dream of America.”
“What’s a hobgoblin?” I asked.
“Like Puck, you know, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”
“Never seen it,” I lied. “Or read it.”
“It’s all right,” said Jon de Lee. “I prefer The Tempest. We have a song about Caliban called ‘Dildo Lies Bleeding.’ Caliban washes up on the East River and becomes a heroin addict in Alphabet City. I got the idea after reading Hart Crane’s The Bridge. There’s a section about Edgar Allan Poe on the subway, and I thought, that’s so true. Because Edgar Allan Poe did look like a waxy-faced subway pervert.”
We landed at Wall Street. “In all my days living in New York City,” I said, “I’ve never been to Wall Street.”
“There’s nothing interesting down here,” he said. “Just assholes on portable phones.”
A statue of George Washington stood before Federal Hall. Our nation’s Founding Father on a pedestal, the likeness a little too dandified. Smears of dried blood ringed the pedestal. The rotting corpses of small animals littered the pavement.
“In all of tarnation,” I said. “What are these things?”
“Haven’t you seen this before?” asked Jon de Lee. “There’s a cult out in Flatbush. They think the founding fathers are voodoo loas. Or something like that. It’s never been clear. Now that you know about it, you’re going to see this shit constantly.”
I agreed to a third date but insisted that Jon feed me. Thus the Jones Diner. Thus the drastic sight of Jon de Lee sucking down a cheeseburger deluxe.
“So why the fuck are you in college?” he asked, pounding on the flat end of a ketchup bottle.
“It’s simply what’s done,” I said, playing my role to the hilt. “People of my social status are destined for college.”
“But you’re an artist?” he asked.
“Something like that,” I said.
“Aren’t you going to eat?”
“I ate your fries,” I said. “That’s enough for me.”
“I hope you aren’t suffering from anorexia nervosa,” he said. “There are people in this neighborhood who actually can’t afford food, who don’t have the luxury of starving themselves.”
“Oh, Jon,” I said, “can’t we just let them eat cake?”
When he finished his meal, we walked east. I showed him 84 Second Avenue. I informed him about the existence of Dress Suits on Fire. He knew the story. “Her family still lives here,” he said. “I’ve talked to one, her sister, I think. It’s tough, you don’t want to ask too much. I know someone who saw a ghost up there.”
“Brown Tony?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “It was Spacer.”
Around then I decided that I’d take him into the boudoir, but his status as an anarchist played on my worries. I didn’t feel any particular investment in monogamy, but I had pride.
“So your ethos, darling, your creed of a propertyless utopia, prevents you from commitment?”
I asked before the wrought-iron gates of the Marble Hill Cemetery. A gaggle of the homeless had taken shelter among the dim remains of the dead. They incinerated wood in barrels. A few tents erected, no doubt filled with needles and glass pipes.
“I didn’t say that.”
“You did indeed,” I said. “On the first night we met.”
“I talk a lot of shit,” he said.
MARCH 1989
Adeline and Jon Have Sex
When one suffers a long and protracted illness, it’s possible to lose all memory of good health.
Like myself. I am a prime example. I hadn’t the slightest of how sick I’d become, not until I took the cure.
Consider the many instances of my short life involving intercourse with doltish young men, idiot boys and their scrawny bodies. Sex without any erotic charge, akin to favors offered to a friend.
Reader, mistake me not. Your old pal Adeline was not one of these hopeless young nymphets doomed to fornicate like a bunny rabbit with pleasure always just beyond her reach. There were moments of enjoyment, instances of genuine good. Fumbling fingers and tortured tongues. Nervous orgasms. It happened. This I shan’t deny.
Sex with boys was disconnected from possibility. A kind of friendly masturbation, a semi-mutual achieving of physical release.
Memories of these previous encounters became distant, remote, erased once I got down to brass tacks with Jon de Lee.
With Jon it was communication, a dialogue between two bodies, electric impulses transmitted over wires of flesh and bone. Words one cannot speak, words that can only be heard. Skin that became skin that became skin anew.
We made love and we had sex and we had sex and we made love. But reader, again, I implore. Mistake me not. I am not your Pollyanna, I am not your sweet princess. We fucked, we fucked, we fucked, we fucked, we fucked, we fucked. We fucked in the effluvia of our bodies, we fucked in the scent of it, in the sheer stench of it, in the garden of our human flowering. Stained sheets, stained clothes, stained souls, stained towels. Fucked until my pussy ran dry and was rubbed raw, fucked until the Captain yowled outside my door, his gray paws smacking against the wood, fucked until Jon’s daily erections withered into nothingness, unable to support a third or fourth condom, fucked until the arrival of my period, pausing only until the heavy flow ceased, then fucking as Jon’s penis turned cartoon red with my discharge, fucked until celestial bodies rotated on their axes and reversed course in the Heavens, until the bed broke, until the building itself became hypercharged by orgones. Our fucking was a pulsing wave, a holy burst of scared geometry, a congress of wonder.
Between sessions, Jon would proffer half-baked Marxist analysis, saying, “What I admire about you
women, and where I’ve got a powerful sympathy for your kind, is in the amount of effort you put into sex.”
“Whatever do you mean, old sport?” asked I.
“Take yesterday, after I couldn’t deal with the condom, and you used your hand and your mouth. I couldn’t help it, but I felt like a factory boss and like you were the worker, and I kept you from the means of production, because there was no fruits you could reap from your labor.”
“It’s not a job,” I said.
“Was it a gift?” he asked.
“I’ve had gift sex,” I sighed. “That was nothing like gift sex. You’re too much of a dude, dude. You’ll never understand.”
Bret Easton Ellis telephoned while we fucked, leaving a message on our slightly dysfunctional answering machine. “Adeline,” said the machine. “It’s Bret Easton Ellis. Sorry to call on such short notice, but I’ve got a thing uptown. Jayne can’t go. I was wondering, would you come with me? There’ll be free drinks, of course. Jay McInerney’ll be there and he’s an absolute fiend for frozen watermelon. Call back if you get this before seven. Thanks. It’s Bret Easton Ellis.”
I was in love. I’d even used the word, said it to Jon de Lee and heard him say it back. And love conquers all. Or saves the day. Or conquers all. Or saves the day. I didn’t return Bret Easton Ellis’s phone call. A shame, but I couldn’t leave Jon. Not with work to be done.
I imagined Bret Easton Ellis worrying about his social function, the enfant terrible in his social milieu, telephoning a young woman who lay beside a punk rocker from Jersey, a man who resided between C and D in an illegal apartment, who existed beyond the confines of the cash economy.
Both men were on the same island, separated by nine tenths of a mile. For practical purposes, they may as well have been on different planets.
APRIL 1989
Minerva ♥ Jeremy
Jeremy telephoned one afternoon, inquiring if I was free. He wanted to pop over for a visit. I said that I’d be delighted. I rang Минерва. I suggested that she drop by.
When he entered our domicile, Jeremy handed me a small pamphlet. The Hepcats Jive Talk Dictionary, priced 25¢, published in 1945. On the cover, a woman and her fella are dancing an anemic jitterbug, her skirt swirling waaaaaaaaay up past the knee, revealing an ultrascandalous bit of slip.
“Why, whatever is this?” I asked.
“I bought it at a comic convention on Long Island,” he said. “Turns out that a fifth of the definitions are slurs for Black folks. And that, Adeline, is some shit I’ve been hearing my whole life. That’s one set of terminologies for which I don’t need a dictionary. I thought you might like it.”
“Are you implying that I have a need for racial invective?” I asked. “What shall I do with your hepcats and their jive dictionary? Stage a Klan rally?”
“I’m implying that you enjoy awkward vocabulary,” he said.
Минерва shouted my name from the street, her thick accent bounding off the buildings of East 7th Street. I walked downstairs, opened our front door, and let her in.
I made her introduction to Jeremy. The silence was absolute, like sudden and mysterious teleportation into the total vacuum of space.
“Jeremy works at Marvel Comics,” I offered.
“Marvel?” asked Минерва. “How is Red Ghost? Still he has his apes?”
“How do you know about the Red Ghost?” asked Jeremy Winterbloss.
Sometimes it’s that easy.
They departed, together, concocting plans for the next day.
Reader, allow me to remove any hint of foreshadowing. Of the many comings and goings within this book, be assured that Jeremy Winterbloss and Минерва comprise the one pairing who will not suffer any undue tribulation. They will remain connected until their bodies crumble into dust.
MAY 1989
Adeline Gets Sick
The night after his spring semester ended, Baby returned from an orgy of unrighteous clubbing, shivering and covered with dank sweat. I demanded to know what drug had induced such a nightmarish state, but he assured me of his sobriety.
This wasn’t drugs, it was physical illness. Obviously, said I to myself, he’ll catch death in the clubs, rubbing up against all those people. It’s like an incubator for germination. But consider, darlings, that your world-weary pal Adeline was oblivious enough that she did not think of AIDS. She imagined a pedestrian illness, like virulent influenza.
Baby burned with fiery fever. Then came the congestion, the running snot and thick phlegm. He lost his voice.
I assumed the role of Florence Nightingale, nursing him, wiping down the molten forehead with ice-cold rags. Never once did I believe myself vulnerable to his disease. I considered my physicality impenetrable, a sentinel incapable of being laid low by Apollo’s arrows. This was, by the by, the absolute heights of delusion.
His body healed itself on the tenth night, something of a spontaneous miracle, as his summer courses began the very next morning.
The next day, while he attended classes, I manifested all of his symptoms. Simultaneously. Lost voice, copious production of phlegm, fever deliriums.
Patient Zero was too busy with his book learning to offer much nursing, so he telephoned Jon and said, “Jon, if you love your lady, you’d better come over to our swinging pad.”
One of the Lower East Side’s premier thrashcore vocalists, in whom I’d invested my affections and affectations, sat at my bedside for many long days, suffering my every outrageous complaint.
Alas, none of his tender ministrations helped, no matter the attempt. On my seventh day, he said, “You won’t find someone who hates the medical establishment more than me, but you’ve got to go to a doctor.”
“I don’t know how,” I said. “I’ve never made a doctor’s appointment.”
“Should I call your mother and ask about your insurance?”
“No, not Mother!” I said. “Just find a doctor, please.”
He scheduled an appointment. He slept beside me throughout the fever-soaked night.
The doctor was a woman in her earlier fifties, dyed auburn hair hanging flat on the sides of her head. She inquired how long I’d been sick, to which I offered a truthful answer.
“What is it with you people?” she asked. “Do you need to lose an arm before you get help?”
She prescribed a weeklong course of antibiotics. Jon helped with the pharmacy.
“Don’t you have somewhere to be?” I asked.
“I’m pretty fucking sure this is where I should be,” he said.
By their sixth day, the antibiotics cleared my infection. On the seventh, I hoped to rest like the Good Lord Almighty, but this proved impossible.
An itching in my vagina prevented peace. Urination became an episodic visit to pain. On the eighth, the discharge started. What pleasure it is to have corporeal form!
We hadn’t fucked since I’d taken sick, entering into our third week of enforced abstinence. Jon was like a starving animal hungry for raw meat, pressing for it, voicing inchoate complaints about losing the summer.
I was too ashamed to explain why we simply couldn’t. What do you offer to the man that you love? “Sorry, sonny Jim, but at this very moment my vagina is expelling chunks of clotted cream. This state of affairs probably renders the area rather inhospitable for your own genitalia!”
I called Минерва and asked if she wouldn’t accompany me to the doctor. “Trouble?” she asked. “Yeast infection? Is nothing. Doctor will fix.” But would she come with me? “Okay, Joe, why not? I experience American medical practice. Plus is good excuse. Winterbloss wants see Batman movie.”
The very same doctor came into the examination room. I worried that she lacked recollection of yours truly, so I spake, “Doctor, I hope you’ll note that I scheduled my appointment very promptly!”
“What’s the problem?” asked the doctor.
“Her pussy is yeasting,” said Минерва.
“It’s true,” I said. “My cup
runneth over.”
“Young lady,” said the doctor. “It’s my firm belief that women generally know more about what’s going on with their bodies than anyone else. If you say it’s a yeast infection, I believe that it’s a yeast infection. I could do the swab and slides and prepare a culture, but I have a feeling that it’ll only confirm what you’re telling me. Let me ask you, do you want to go through the process, or do you just want a cure?”
“The cure, please,” I said. “I won’t stand for another minute of this terrible itching.”
She prescribed the weeklong application of a topical solution. Under no circumstances should I attempt intercourse.
“Doctor,” I asked, “what do I tell my boyfriend?”
“Tell him the truth,” she said.
I was sure Jon’d seen more infections than I could imagine, his natural scene involving junkies and crackheads, two groups not renowned for robust health.
Yet I’d begun thinking of myself as an island of sanity in the madness of his life. I’m not a blushing robin, I’m not afraid of the horrible things that my body can produce, but in the end, one simply need face reality. Body-positive feminism fails at the yeast infection.
I dissembled, I dissimulated, I performed an outrageous amount of oral sex. By the end of the week, all evidence of infection disappeared. Terrified that those unfortunate white stains would return to my underwear, I kept Jon leashed for another seven days.
AUGUST 1989
Daniel Rakowitz
On August 19th, at 6:30 pm, in Gramercy Park, a subsurface Con-Edison steam pipe went kablooey. An eighteen-storey geyser, steam and mud thrown high above the city, windows blown out, cars destroyed, the park splattered with filth. Edwin Booth covered with Manhattan’s subterranean muck.
If I’d ventured out of doors, ambulated up to Cooper Square and looked north, I would’ve seen a steam cloud rise above the city like an ill-tempered djinn menacing Baghdad. Yet it was an awful drizzling New York night, the air thick as molasses. I refused to leave our apartment.