by Jarett Kobek
Baby and Crisp spoke for the better part of an hour.
—Do you know, you charming boy, said Crisp, that in the days of Studio 54, the great-grandson of Abraham Lincoln would come up on the train from Virginia to partake in the sheer excess? It’s absolutely true. I’ve had it from multiple sources. His name was Robert Todd Lincoln Beckwith, but they called him Bud. Bud! Bud Lincoln! Isn’t it charming? He was a terrible old man with a degenerative disease of the muscles that left him quite incapable of walking. He would be wheeled in by some lovely young stud, and then he’d spend the night talking with Liz Taylor and Mick Jagger. They were fascinated. Wouldn’t you be? When the time came to return to his hotel, he’d pick up a coterie of lovely young things. Boys, girls, transvestites, queer, straight. Those distinctions didn’t matter in the slightest to the progeny of Honest Abe. Bud brought them back to his hotel and made them fuck each other silly. He’d only watch, as by this time the poor thing’s flower could no longer bloom. People’ve told me the most outrageous stories about his face, about the drooping geriatric visage that leered and drooled while the nubile bodies cavorted and capered in the arms of Aphrodite. The tired old thing died several years back. It goes to show, doesn’t it, my little one? Even in the best families.
The film ended. The trio stumbled outside. Minerva, who did not like Baby, pushed off, leaving the roommates with many daylight hours. Adeline was at a complete loss, the MDMA reducing her to a half giggle, enchanted by the empty lot across the street.
—Did you like the movie? asked Baby.
—Oh Baby, said Adeline, I’ll assume it’s your state of mind that’s made you ask such a dreadful question. I thought we had a pact. No obvious questions after a film!
—Let’s go to Grant’s Tomb, said Baby.
—Shall we? Where is it?
—Way uptown, said Baby. We’ll have to go to Penn Station and take the IRT local.
They rode the 1 up to 125th Street, getting off at the elevated station. As they walked down the long stairwell, Baby experienced dislocation, unable to find the right direction. Drug absurdity. The green trees of Riverside Park were visible, but it took some moments before his brain could issue the cognitive instructions. Adeline was of no help, humming to herself, head tilted upward toward the rusting metal.
—Oh, wow, she said. It’s so beautiful. It’s man-made, but what if it’s always been here? What if it’s ancient?
Baby took her hand.
Like every other open space in the city, Riverside Park was a cluster of homelessness and drug addiction. Some on the nod, others doing the tell-tale shuffle, one step forward, two steps back.
The dome of Grant’s Tomb burst through a canopy of trees. Baby and Adeline passed over crumbling granite embedded with the shattered remains of crack vials and broken bottles. Two large eagle statues stood guard on either side of the entrance, their beaks demolished.
Admission was free. There wasn’t much inside other than a rotunda from which visitors could look down at the sarcophagi of Grant and his wife. A handful of people were visiting, quiet tourists, shell-shocked look in their eyes. They’d come to visit the moldering bones of an American President, the country’s finest nineteenth-century general, and found themselves walking through a park strewn with graffiti and human shit.
Adeline peered from the gallery at the red porphyry of the sarcophagi, polished, reflecting dull light.
—Dude, she said, this is, like, the craziest thing, but I can’t read the names. I can only see my own face.
Ulysses S. Grant, who was incapable of imagining the debasement of his Commander-in-Chief’s great-grandson, an aged man visiting New York to abuse himself among the nubile cocaine-fueled bodies of the twentieth century. We of New York are like space whales of pleasure and debauchery, the cocks and cunts and powders and liquids of unknown vistas. Ulysses S. Grant, eighteenth President of these States United, there is no way that you could imagine to what uses Bud Lincoln would put his famous name. You cannot conceive of Bud Lincoln’s fleshly needs, of Bud Lincoln’s disco nights.
—Here we are, Adeline said, and I haven’t the slightest about Grant.
—He was a terrible drunk, said Baby. Why not buy a book from the gift shop?
—There’s a gift shop? she asked.
—That rack by the front door, said Baby.
No books were offered for sale. Adeline purchased several packets of reproduction Confederate currency. A dollar per cluster of counterfeit cash.
They left the mausoleum, heading north through the park. Adeline opened a package of her faux money, pawing through the bills.
She handed Baby a hundred-dollar note. His eyes saw the bill in negative, its form without context. A series of engraved lines. Baby couldn’t recognize the patterns of the intended images.
—What is it? he asked.
—Pure Southern charm, she said. They put slaves on their currency. It’s three down-home nigras hoein’ cotton.
—Why isn’t Jon here? asked Baby.
—Ask the man yourself, said Adeline. I’m sure he’ll offer you an answer that simply fascinates.
She wandered ahead. How many years since California? Two? When had Baby last been in anything like nature? The bluest sky. The whitest clouds. Grant’s Tomb. Grant, the Great Drunk, the failed President. Grant, who understood human weakness and indulgence and intoxicants. Could it be that he would, in the end, evidence some sympathy for Bud Lincoln? Was it any surprise that his tomb should attract lotus eaters? His body called them, a magnet for the broken and the mad. The secular patron saint of addiction. The secular god of drugs.
Waves off the building, the dome attuned to the upper stratosphere, shooting energy signals into the outer reaches of space. Hyperkinetic emergences of Ulysses S. Grant and his beloved wife, Julia, the bones of their corpses arranged to amplify transmission of messages to the whales. Visit us, conquer us, enslave us. Take this vile world away. No man or woman is fit. Spare us the knowledge of our own evil. We surrender, we surrender. We are Bobby E. Lee. We surrender.
—Baby! Come over here at once!
Adeline stood across the road by a tiny white urn on a pedestal.
—Read the inscription, she said.
ERECTED TO THE MEMORY
OF AN AMIABLE CHILD
ST. CLAIRE POLLOCK
DIED 15 JULY 1797
IN THE FIFTH YEAR OF HIS AGE
*
Then there was the time when Christina had her birthday party in the basement at Tunnel. Michael Alig called Baby with an invitation.
—But why would I go? asked Baby. I don’t even know Christina!
—Oh, please, said Michael Alig. Who cares? No one can ever know anyone else.
The scant number of attendees convinced Baby that he’d been wrangled in the hopes of filling out the crowd. The Tunnel basement hadn’t changed. It wasn’t much more than dirty tables and ugly furniture in a space unfit for human habitation.
Christina, wearing a red dress and stockings, sat under a spotlight. A painting behind her read BEEFEATER. Baby got roaring drunk in the taxi up to 27th Street, sucking down four short dogs in the backseat. As far as he could tell, Christina had agreed to give a performance, singing some songs, and for whatever reason, once the event began, had expressed her total disinterest in doing anything other than sitting and sulking. Nelson Sullivan floated around her, his camera alternating between Christina and the audience.
People demanded that Christina sing “Jumpin’ Jack Flash.” A queen named Hapi Phace was on the microphone, performing a sloppy comedy routine with another queen named Taboo. A birthday cake was brought out. It read: HAPPY BIRTHDAY CHRISTIAN.
An unknown queen whom Baby didn’t recognize took the microphone. Black leather jacket over black dress, black sunglasses, hair dyed cut and shaved post-punk. She claimed that each of Christina’s ass cheeks were tattooed with an M, and that when Christina bent over, her ass spelled MOM. Christina asked the queen how much she wanted to be the ne
xt Madonna. Throwing the microphone to the floor, the queen said: —Girl, it’s not that I want to be the next Madonna. I simply am.
More screams for “Jumpin’ Jack Flash.” Lady Bunny on the microphone, asking for the song. Christina would not move.
Baby looked away. When he looked back, Christina had a hammer. Then Keoki took the hammer away. Then Christina asked for the hammer back. The unknown queen brought it over. Everyone started singing happy birthday, while a handful of people yelled at Christina to eat the cake.
The unknown queen picked up the cake, strutting before Christina. She pushed the cake into Christina’s face. Frosting mashed into her wig, Christina had the hammer, but she wasn’t swinging. Sulking, sitting, the cake dripping off her face. Hammer in her hand. Nelson Sullivan videotaping.
—How do you like the party? asked Michael Alig. Isn’t it just great? Such drama!
—I’m not cut out for this, said Baby.
—Everyone’s only having fun! Don’t be such a nervous Nellie!
Then there was the time when Michael Alig introduced Baby to his mother, whose European accent made her sound like Christina.
—Baby, she said, everyone is someone’s baby! Even you, Baby! Michael is my Baby!
This introduction occurred on the dance floor at Mars. Michael Alig’s mother had flown in from Indiana.
—Baby, she asked, do you have any nose candy for Mama?
Then there was the time when Baby and Queen Rex went to a porn shoot in a warehouse near the corner of Ninth Avenue and Little West 12th Street, very close to Nelson Sullivan’s house.
The interior of the warehouse was in a converted meat processing plant. The pornography was specialty. All bondage, all domination. No sex.
A red-headed woman, track marks visible. An overweight man disrobing her. One of the production assistants whispered to Baby and Regina that this was the thirteenth installment in a series entitled Hammer of the Witches, after the Malleus Maleficarum, a witch-hunter’s manual published in 1486. The authors, Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger, describe the utility of employing certain tortures and techniques in determining a suspect’s familiarity with the dark arts. The producers of Hammer of the Witches had modified these methods to less lethal extremes, subjecting their female stars to adapted versions of the same historical indignities.
Beneath the aging effects of narcotics abuse, the red-headed woman looked about the same age as Adeline. Every four years the city cycled in a new crop of would-be film directors, would-be writers, would-be artists, would-be models, would-be actresses. Baby’d been in New York long enough that he’d begun encountering a second generation of aspirants. There was never any shortage of human flesh, never any shortage of young women and men degrading themselves in the name of commerce or art, never any shortage of dissolution and drug addiction, never any shortage of idiocy or naiveté, never any shortage of raw material for the great grinding gristmill.
The overweight man applied a modified version of the thumbscrew, then attempted to measure the woman’s buoyancy by dunking her in a tank of water. After several more of these endurance tests, the shoot ended with the determination that the woman was indeed a witch. The production assistant told Baby that they’d burn the actress in post.
In the street, outside, Queen Rex and Baby smoked KOOL cigarettes.
—It’s been ages, cried Baby, since I’ve had sex! Absolute ages! I’m an attractive, swish young man who haunts clubs full of drunkards and dope fiends! Why am I not having more sex?
—Welcome to the new normal, said Queen Rex.
—I am absolutely going to get fucked tonight, he said. I don’t care how or where! Let’s go to a club and find some stupid beautiful boy! Or else I’m going to burst!
—We’ll go to Palladium. There’s always some young thing waiting to make a mistake.
Walking along 14th Street, Baby looked up toward 31 Union Square West and wished, in a way that he could not articulate, a deep wordless wish down in the dank of his bowels, that he could move back into the building.
There wasn’t a line at Palladium. Baby didn’t recognize anyone. The club was so passé, but that was its charm. All the outward trappings without any inherent pressures. Regina suggested that they skip the club and go upstairs to Julian’s Billiards. Baby said okay. Regina said that she was only kidding.
Regina went to get drinks, leaving Baby against a wall. He thought about sex. He thought about fucking. He thought about screwing out some-one’s brains. He thought about someone screwing out his brains. He wanted to give someone the time.
Two kids came up to him.
—Don’t you know Michael Alig? asked the one wearing a frilly white lace shirt, his bleached blond hair hanging from a red plastic bowler.
—Michael who? asked Baby.
—Obviously he knows Michael, said the other. He’s Baby Baby Baby! He’s an authentic club kid!
—How fabulous, said the first. My name’s Polly.
—And I’m Esther. How are you, Baby?
—Uh, said Baby, I’m waiting for someone.
—Honey, are you waiting for Michael? Is Michael here?
—No, said Baby. I’m waiting for Queen Rex.
—Oh my God, Queen Rex? How fabulous! I can’t wait to meet her.
Club life. The world’s most self-obsessed people playing out their existences as if on an infinite stage, with every moment a performance. These people were delusional enough to believe that they had a secret audience, that they were always watched.
In New York City, in the so-called Downtown Scene, everything was fabulous. Everything was always fabulous.
Regina came back, visibly disgusted by Polly and Esther, examining the black letters on their identical white backpacks: ALCOHOL KILLS and STOP CORRUPTION.
—Who are these people? she asked Baby.
—I’m not sure, said Baby. They recognized me. They want to know if Michael’s here.
—They recognized you? Why would anyone recognize you?
—The article in Project X, I guess, said Baby.
—They did an article about you in Project X?
—Jesus, Regina, I wrote the article, said Baby. It was my first publication! Everyone’s read it. Even Adeline. Why haven’t you?
—School, said Regina.
—These little boys don’t have a clue about your identity, said Baby. You’re a complete mystery.
—Something needs to be mysterious in this shithole, said Regina.
Polly and Esther talked Baby onto the dance floor. He resisted, not wanting to be seen, but then decided, who cares? It’s Palladium. No one will know. He tried to follow the groove, but Polly and Esther stuck close and wouldn’t stop their terrible dance. Without grace, limbs wild, ignoring the song, inappropriate voguing, outrageousness being the full and only point.
Baby shrugged off and went to find Regina. She sat at a table, drinking a Cape Cod. Polly and Esther came from the dance floor. Regina exhaled pure indignation, stood and left.
Baby took stock. They weren’t cute but they weren’t hideous. He asked where they lived. They had an apartment on 11th Street. He said, let’s go. They said, okay. They said, do you think you could call Michael? Baby said, well, maybe, but let’s go to your place, you’ve got a phone, right?
Inside the apartment, Baby told Polly and Esther to remove their clothes. They obeyed without haste. This is what it must be like to be Michael. To say jump and watch people leap.
—Are we doing this in your bed? asked Baby.
—We can do it here, on the floor, said Polly.
—Wherever you like, said Esther.
—Who needs a bed? asked Baby. Do you have any nose candy for Mama?
Polly and Esther kneeled, their mouths on Baby’s penis. Then Esther’s mouth was on Baby’s testicles. Then Esther’s mouth was on Baby’s penis. Then Polly’s mouth was on Esther’s testicles. Then Baby’s mouth was on Polly’s penis. Then Baby pushed Esther onto all fours. Then Polly retrieved KY J
elly from the bathroom medicine cabinet. Then Baby covered his penis in KY Jelly. Then Baby’s penis pressed against Esther’s anus. Then Baby’s penis was inside Esther’s rectum. Then Baby told Polly to put his mouth on Esther’s penis. Then Baby told Polly to get behind Esther. Then Polly put KY Jelly on his penis. Then Polly’s penis was against Esther’s anus. Then Polly’s penis was in Esther’s rectum. Then Baby’s penis was in Esther’s mouth. Then Baby bent Polly over. Then Baby’s penis was against Polly’s anus. Then Baby’s penis was inside Polly’s rectum. Then Esther’s mouth was on Polly’s penis. Then Polly shouted out. Then Esther moaned. Then Baby’s hand was on Esther’s penis. Then Baby’s penis was in Esther’s rectum. Then Polly’s tongue was on Baby’s anus. Then Polly’s tongue was in Baby’s rectum. Then Baby groaned. Then Baby thought of James Boswell, of the man’s hidden journals detailing endless encounters with prostitutes in public places, of Boswell’s need to ejaculate after watching a public hanging. Not even the finest English writer of the 1700s knew such decadence as this, thought Baby. The twentieth century has democratized lust. Then Baby’s penis evacuated semen into Esther’s rectum. Then Baby told Polly and Esther to put their penises in each other’s mouths. Then Polly’s penis evacuated semen into Esther’s mouth. Then Esther’s penis evacuated semen into Polly’s mouth. Then Esther spit Polly’s semen onto Polly’s stomach. Then Esther sucked Polly’s semen back into his mouth.
Baby lay on the dirty wooden floor. I hope I don’t catch AIDS.
Esther rolled over, penis dripping seminal fluid down his inner thigh.
—Are you going to call Michael? asked Esther.
—No, said Baby. Absolutely not. Not now. Not ever. Not for you.
Then there was the time when Christina overdosed at the Chelsea Hotel. A rumor went around that she’d called Nelson Sullivan and asked him to film her death. Nelson refused. Five days later, the stench of her rotting corpse forced management to break down her door. The human form in such a state of advanced decomposition that identification required dental records.