Friends and Traitors

by Jarett Kobek

  Each eruption demonstrated the hopeless delusions of the American political left.

  In general, The Power Mongers paid zero mind to the shrill ululations of San Francisco faggots on the topics about which, it may be assumed, the San Francisco faggots possessed some degree of expertise. Like a decade of dead gay men. Why then would our Dark Masters suddenly muster two fucks of a feather regarding a subject about which, it may be assumed, the San Francisco faggots knew nothing?

  Outside of America’s liberal hotbeds, the country was transfixed by a creeping jingoism. The great unwashed masses proudly wore t-shirts that read DESERT STORM and BONK BONKS SADDAM HUSSEIN and IT’S NOT OVER TILL STORMING NORMAN SCHWARZKOPF SAYS IT’S OVER! and BE A PATRIOT, SUPPORT YOUR SCUDBUSTERS!

  The bloody affair lasted four months before the military ran out of Arabs to turn into charred meat. By Stacie’s arrival, the Gulf War was as faint as memories of last Sunday’s dinner. The sole visible remnants were the tattered remnants of yellow ribbons, syphilitic chancres that had erupted when the fever ran its hottest, symbols of support for the troops that now frayed under the effects of weather and air pollution.

  Stacie had never been to New York, a happenstance that she neglected to mention before her flight. Had I known, I would have met the lass at her terminal gate. As it was, I simply gave her directions regarding the subway, telling her which trains to take and to where.

  The girl managed, arriving on 7th Street with jumbo-size luggage in tow, hollering my name from the pavement. I thrust my head out of our window.

  “I’ll be right down,” I said.

  “Hurry!” she cried. “I’ve got to pee!”

  Some brute had left an empty cardboard box on the second flight of stairs. I tripped over it, but caught my balance before I brained myself against the wall. I threw open the front door. Stacie and I hugged.

  “The toilet is the far closet,” I said. “You have to wash your hands in the kitchen sink.”

  “Ew,” she said.

  She asked if she might lie down. I stationed her in my boudoir. She promptly fell asleep.

  I’d put Baby on notice that his presence was expected, demanding that he come home as soon as possible. I had no idea what to do with this creature who’d washed ashore. The reappearance of another old face from the Californy past was the absolute least of my desires.

  I sat at our kitchen table, cobbling together work. The locks turned.

  “Where’s Stacie?” Baby asked.

  “Sleeping,” I said. “How’s life?”

  “Classes, boyfriend, films, literature, writing. The five pillars.”

  “As salaam alaikum.” I asked, “What do we do with her?”

  “I have no idea. I’m practically a hermit. Ask what she wants when she wakes up.”

  “Oh, Baby,” I said. “You’re no help at all.”

  Not long after he closed his bedroom door, the melodic pounding of Baby’s typewriter filled the apartment. When first we met, Baby typed with two fingers, but over the years he’d developed fluidity on the keys. The sound was like horses running across sand, like an earthquake, like waves crashing, like a visitation of Neptune.

  Stacie emerged, bleary eyed, yawning. “What’s that noise?”

  “Baby,” I said.

  “He’s home?”

  “Through there,” I said, nodding at his door.

  “Baby!” she cried, rushing into his room. Their shadows, on the wall, merged into an exaggerated hug. I wondered if Baby was happy to see Stacie, or if it were pantomime. That boy never could say no.

  I reclaimed my bedroom and managed about twenty minutes of work before Baby and Stacie interrupted me.

  “Change your clothes,” said Stacie. “We’re going out!”

  “What’s wrong with what I’m wearing?” I asked.

  “We’re going to Limelight,” said Baby.

  “Must we?”

  “Baby says it’s, like, the best,” said Stacie.

  If there was any obvious reason to applaud the influence of Erik, Baby’s new beau, it was how quickly he’d diminished Baby’s interest in Michael Alig. It’d been over eight months since the last foray into clubland.

  Baby donned an uncouth approximation of what he thought the kids might be wearing, squeezing into a pair of silver pants and a shimmering shirt made from bargain-basement sequins.

  I refused to change. My options were looking like a legal assistant or looking like a legal assistant desperate to assimilate within club culture.

  We walked. I told Stacie about Jon. Baby told her about Erik. We asked Stacie if she had anyone in her life. “There was this one guy, but you know, he turned out to be a fucking jerk,” she said. Following the inevitable breakup, she’d applied to graduate school and entered the philosophy PhD program at UC Irvine. She’d spent the last two years reading.

  The doorman at Limelight recognized Baby but turned up his nose at mi amigo’s reappearance. Baby’s outfit was hopelessly out of date, having left the fast lane. All the bright young ones now wore outfits of significant complexity and expense. Baby looked as relevant as a middle-aged man in a leisure suit.

  Stacie had no problem. No capitalist ever turns down a half-naked woman. Only age devalues the currency of human flesh.

  “Now I could let you in,” said the doorman to Baby, “on the basis of who you were. But the question is, who are you now? The distance between here and there can be very small or it can be the longest trip of your life. How should I know? And anyway, you’re shedding sequins.”

  “My God,” I said, growing sick of the argument. “Let him in. You will in the end. What’s the point of this? Open the goddamned door.”

  “Okay,” said the doorman. “He can go in, but you can’t. Not dressed like that.”

  “Why the hell can’t she?” asked Baby.

  “She looks like a cop,” said the doorman.

  Baby turned to me. His eyes scanned over my outfit, focusing on the hem of my skirt.

  “You two go,” I said. “I must work.”

  “But I came here to see you,” said Stacie.

  “We’ll reminisce on the morrow,” I said. “Baby is a much better choice for nightlife. I’m simply boring after dark.”

  One hopes that others will protest when one asks to be left behind. Yet it was but a single strophe and antistrophe before Baby and Stacie disappeared within the church walls.

  The doorman said, “You’re really very pretty, you know, but you’ve got to do something about those clothes. You look like you’re from Staten Island.”

  “Dear boy, what a coincidence,” I said. “I am from Staten Island.”

  “Too bad,” he said. “The worst scumbags come from Staten Island.”

  “You know what they say, don’t you?”

  “No,” said the doorman.

  “And you never will,” I said, twisting on my heels and sauntering off into the night.

  I hailed a cab. The driver was Armenian. It was like being back in Los Angeles.

  In the humble experience of yours truly, cabdrivers the world over make a habit of flirting with the hapless young women who pour themselves into taxis. I was waiting for it.

  Yet Papik Topalian expressed no interest. I gave him my address. We traveled in silence, catching a Zen moment of Manhattan traffic, one of the beautiful bursts that occur only under the cloud of darkness, when the streets are empty of cars and a vehicle can pass through multiple intersections with nary a hesitation. The green lights are like beacons that call one forward. Faster! Faster!

  New York appears its best when one is in transit. Leaving the city, entering it, or simply riding within its confines. These are its best moments.

  Our apartment came as purest relief. What had happened over these years? Why was I dressing like a legal assistant? Why was I so pleased to avoid a party?

  Perhaps, said I to meself, you should cultivate stupidity as your new hobby. Perhaps you should become one of those horrible people trapped in pe
rpetual adolescence, delighted to bounce up and down in dingy spaces, clapping your hands, listening to atrocious music and smiling like an infant feasting on applesauce. Wouldn’t that be the bee’s knees? Wouldn’t that be divine?

  I checked Baby’s room to see if he had any cannabis. He hadn’t. How boring he’d become! Almost as bad as yours truly. Perhaps the common denominator was being in a relationship.

  I collapsed into my bed. The Captain sat on my chest, purring with the full force of his oversized body. I fixated upon the ceiling, stared beyond it, thinking about Stacie. Her urchin face ripped me right back to Los Angeles. Of all my friends from home, only she had met Emil. I couldn’t think of a single soul besides Stacie and blood relations who could testify that my brother too lived. I imagined his life if he hadn’t destroyed himself by leaping into the Arroyo Seco. He could have been happy, I was sure, if only he’d let himself. It wasn’t that my own life was a crucible of joy. The only important thing I’d learned from New York City was to shape one’s perceptions of life’s inevitable cruelty. People with blazing disabilities lived reasonably pleasant lives. Cripples who loved every day of their existence. Why not me? Why not Emil?

  Stacie roused me from sleep at 5 am, crawling into my bed. She stank of bitter stale sweat and cigarettes and alcohol. A human perfume permeating every square inch of Limelight. The scent of depravity. “Ugh,” I moaned, “comport yourself with some decency.”

  “Push over,” she said, shoving me.

  “Where’s Baby?” I asked.

  “Passed out in, like, his room, I guess,” said Stacie. “He did a lot of drugs. Me too.”

  “No after-hours party?”

  “Too tired,” she said. “So much jetlag. So much cocaine. Have you ever done Special K?”

  “No,” I said.

  “We did it tonight,” she said.

  “How was it?” I asked.

  “Interesting,” she said. “God, you know, we don’t have anything, like, you know, Disco 2000 or Limelight in California. I thought we were sophisticated because we grew up on the streets of Hollywood, but shit, we aren’t, like, anything, you know? Nothing we have back home is like Disco 2000. You know they have a human freak show at the end of the night, where people get naked for fifty dollars and then this one dude pisses into a bottle and drinks his own pee? And there’s this amputee woman who takes off her leg and starts dancing around with it? I was like, ‘Baby, how is this fun?’ and he was like, ‘Stacie, just do another bump and you’ll figure it out,’ and you know, he was right. It got really fun.”

  “May we sleep?” I asked. “I’m exhausted.”

  “Sure,” she said. “I hope so, anyway. I might be too high to sleep.”

  Her tossing kept me awake, long sun-kissed legs kicking against me as she sighed, exasperated, pulling my bedclothes. She ran to the bathroom every forty minutes, her body frantic to flush out unholy toxins.

  We didn’t sleep until about 8 am. Sheer ruination. I was up by noon.

  When the evening hours rolled around, we sat in Baby’s bedroom, talking about Pump Up the Volume, a movie that, incredibly, all five of us had seen.

  Meself, Baby, Erik, Stacie, and Jon. The quintet was thus.

  The unusual factor was Jon. He never saw films, especially those made in Hollywood. Especially those starring actors like Christian Slater.

  Pump Up the Volume offers the story of an Arizona high school student. Under the nom de guerre of Happy Harry Hard-On, he operates his own pirate radio station. He broadcasts tepid social subversion to his classmates. These children of suburbia are bored with their lives, bored with school, bored with America, bored with each other, bored with life. They take to this anonymous unknown broadcaster and his message. Society comes down hard. Teachers, principals, cops, the FCC. Tears and lamentations.

  “It’s such bullshit,” said Jon, sucking down a shot of tequila. “Another bourgeoisie vision of rebellion and youth gone wild.”

  “Be that as it may,” I said, “I liked it.”

  “You like everything,” said Baby.

  “She always has,” said Stacie.

  “Even if one strips away all the terrific clichés and demands of the three-act screenplay, there is something enormously appealing about Christian Slater establishing that radio station in his parents’ basement. One doesn’t often see that in film, one doesn’t often see private worlds, disconnected realities built by outsiders through force of will, constructed with taste and abstention.”

  “I enjoyed it,” said Erik, long brown hair running along his shoulders.

  “He also likes everything,” said Baby.

  “Why’d you like it?” asked Stacie.

  Erik was one of those mad people who are fully functional. They maintain jobs and operate in the wider world without difficulty, but their inner lives are overrun with divergent thinking. These people take their sweet time before revealing the full scale of their lunacy, by which point one is sucked into their sphere of influence.

  “It’s all just Christian allegory, isn’t it?” asked Erik. “It’s the Crucifixion without the Resurrection. Or maybe it’s about Jesus after his return, when he rises from death and is so different. Maybe Happy Harry Hard-On is the resurrected Christ of the 1990s.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” asked Baby.

  “Think about it,” said Erik. “He preaches a message that outrages the power structure. He slums about with the lowest and the worst of society. He performs miracles, heals the suburban soul. His demise is a ritualized slaughter. No one ever listens to me, but it’s true, Happy Harry Hard-On is the new Jesus.”

  “Oh, Erik,” I said.

  We’d run out of tequila. I ventured into the kitchen, hoping to discover more. Baby followed. I rummaged through our cupboards, looking for remnants of previous debauches.

  “We’re out,” he said. “Drier than a dry county.”

  “I’ll purchase more.”

  “Wait for me,” he said. “I’ll go with you.”

  We left behind Erik and Stacie and Jon.

  “What a crew,” I said to Baby on the stairs. “What a bunch of misfits.”

  In the deli, we debated different brands of tequila and vodka before settling on a bottle of each. We went as cheap as possible. The bill came to about $20.

  I said good-bye to the man behind the register. I wasn’t sure if he’d grown fond of us, but at the very least he must appreciate our faces. He saw us almost every day.

  “What in the world do you think Erik was saying? Nuevo Cristo?” I asked.

  “I’ve learned to not anticipate what comes out of Erik’s mouth,” said Baby. “Should I worry about this Christian Slater thing? What if it’s an early warning sign of Evangelicalism?”

  Erik was in the kitchen, reading a paperback of The Yellow Wallpaper. I worried that he might unfold the story’s secret meaning. Another Christian allegory, with Gilman’s protagonist as the repressed female psychotic Christ of the nineteenth century.

  “Hello,” he said.

  “Where are Stacie and Jon?” I asked.

  “They’re still in Baby’s room,” he said, shrugging towards the open door.

  I removed the bottle of tequila. At Baby’s door, I heard Stacie talking, saying, “It’s, like, okay, what you’re talking about, with your music, right, like how it can’t fulfill you anymore and how you’re wondering, like, if something hasn’t changed, like, if you’re all fucked in the head because you don’t think hardcore can work in the ’90s, like, the thrill is gone, right? What you’re describing, really, is an experience that Kierkegaard would call the transition from the aesthetic to the ethical, which is, like, this moment when one is forced to choose between good and evil, not in, like, an absolute sense, but is forced to, like, understand that there is a choice and that choice must be made. The aesthetic personality is, like, a passive participant, while the ethical person is an individual who is actively reclaiming their actual, innate sense. Achieving the ethic
al isn’t really about choosing good over evil, but rather like hardening yourself toward the necessity of that choice, okay? And it isn’t that the ethical means you can no longer be aesthetic, it just means you’re, like, moving up to the next level of experience.”

  Baby came over and stood behind me.

  “God in Heaven,” I whispered. “It’s like tenth grade all over again. It’s like Jon is Ian fucking Covington. Absolute déjà vu.”

  “You could be right,” said Jon. “That’s great insight. You seem very wise.”

  “Who is Ian fucking Covington?” Baby asked.

  “He was my boyfriend,” I said. “Stacie screwed his brains out.”

  “I totally understand what’s going on,” said Stacie. “I’ve been told I’m very perceptive, especially by, like, really sensitive people. And I can tell you’re really really sensitive. You’re, like, an artist. I admire artists.”

  “This isn’t the past,” said Baby. “You can’t repeat the past.”

  “What do you mean you can’t repeat the past?” I asked. “Of course you can.”

  “It’s hard being creative,” said Jon.

  “Why don’t you go in there and say something?” asked Baby.

  “I should,” I said. “Really, I should. Yet it’s a funny old thing, Pooh Bear. I’m not jealous. I’ve never been jealous about anyone but you.”

  “And by their fruits ye shall know them,” said Baby.

  JANUARY 1992

  Baby Beats Jon in the Street

  Jon screwed out Stacie’s brains, really giving her the time, but for many months this tryst was an unrevealed secret that haunted us like Communism or the plot device of a minor Gothic novel.

  Their frenzied coupling occurred on the last day of Stacie’s visit, a few hours before she hailed a cab and disappeared from our lives.

  That very afternoon, I’d arrived home, dropping off books between class and work, and found the dynamic duo. They were, supposedly, waiting for Adeline. They said hello, smiling, innocent, angelic. Flushed faces. The rife humidity of sex hung over the apartment. But what could I say? I hadn’t one inch of proof. I couldn’t go and smell the sheets, could I?