by Jarett Kobek
The real thrust is in the presentation of character, focusing on the twin protagonists of Mike Hammer and the city of Los Angeles. Hammer comes off as the world’s most amoral creep, the noir antihero taken to its termination point. A scuzzball private detective who uses his secretary, with whom he has sexual relations, as bait for wayward husbands in divorce cases.
Los Angeles is Hammer’s mirror. Every dusty nook and cranny is explored, every boardinghouse and car garage. The film was shot on location. The dialogue provided exact addresses.
Albert Dekker plays an older doctor of dubious character. Whenever he was on screen, I wondered about his death.
The lights came up. Erik and I walked to the Yaffa Café, taking a table within its red velour cave. I thought about Ralph Meeker, about the knowingness of his big dumb face.
I lowered my menu and looked at our fellow patrons. They were so goth. Tables filled with kids from the outer boroughs and Long Island, done up in black clothes, faces smeared with kohl and greasy lipstick, black nail-polished fingers that dipped pita bread into piles of hummus.
—This place is lousy with spooky kids, I said.
—Don’t be negative, said Erik.
Our waitress seemed stoned. I was sure that she got our order wrong, but I didn’t bother correcting her.
—You loved the movie, said Erik.
—Who wouldn’t? I asked.
—I’m tired of nihilism, said Erik. It’s so done. Our culture has been stuck in this miserable loop for the last forty years. Maybe I’m too Aquarian, but I think these stories we keep telling ourselves are totally wrong. We’re not in a death spiral. Things keep getting better, but everyone pretends like they’re worse. Kiss Me Deadly is a film about how you have to be afraid of everything. About how the world is going to end at any minute through the stupidity and meanness of people. Why aren’t there any films about how people are good?
—Probably because most people aren’t.
—That’s bullshit, said Erik. How many bad people have you actually met? Two? Three? Out of how many thousands? Most people are good. Most people value other people. We waste our lives only paying attention to the wrong ones, to the handful who don’t honor the social contract. I’m not complaining. I’m just tired of squalid movies and squalid books, and I’m tired of being told that the planet’s on the verge of its own doom. I believe in humanity, I believe in our future, I believe that we’ll figure it out. I believe we’ll be here in ten thousand years, not much worse for wear.
At least he wasn’t talking about Jesus.
I couldn’t help but think that we were a terrible match. He was too good. Maybe I’d been in New York too long. Maybe the farm disabuses a person from any illusion about life’s sacredness. How could a person look at human history and feel anything like optimism? Our planet was a whirling mudball infested with insignificant creatures that evolution had driven to the heights of cruelty.
On the other hand, I sat in a basement café in the world’s most interesting city, surrounded by kids dressed like they’d just fucked Bela Lugosi. My beautiful boyfriend’s countenance shining high with dreams of human goodness.
I knew enough not to let the moment escape. If I could have that spasm of happiness, maybe there was hope. Maybe there was a way that we wouldn’t destroy the planet. Maybe Erik was right. I hope so. I still do. I always hope that Erik is right.
He escorted me home, but couldn’t spend the night. He was starting a new job in Midtown. He’d been bouncing between offices for years, quitting every sixteen months. He’d been hired by a group of lawyers.
Before we kissed, we looked up and down the street. An unfortunate side effect of living so near McSorley’s. For 138 years, the bar had attracted a certain kind of clientele. I wasn’t worried about being bashed, but I’d rather not beat a drunk senseless when all I wanted was a goodnight embrace.
Adeline was in the kitchen, cooking ramen noodles and boiling eggs. Another new habit. I’d known her seven years and never seen her buy groceries.
—Baby, she said. Did you love it?
—It knocked me out.
—Do you want to hear about Albert Dekker?
—Sure, I said.
—They found him on Normandie, between Hollywood and Franklin. His fiancé hadn’t heard from him in a few days. She did as people do in these situations. She contrived a way into his apartment. When she got inside, she discovered Dekker’s naked corpse kneeling in the bathtub. A noose is tied around his neck and is affixed to the shower rod. Leather belts restrain his body. He’s handcuffed. Someone’s taken lipstick and written all over his body. ‘Whip’ and ‘Make me suck’ and ‘cocksucker.’ Someone drew a vagina on his stomach. He’d been there a few days. Putrefaction had set in. There were valuables missing. And do you know the most amazing thing? Even with all of that, the death was ruled accidental. A possible suicide.
APRIL 1992
More Patrick Geoffrois and His Cacophony
I was deep in Grove Press’s unfortunately idiomatic translation of Albertine Sarrazin’s Astragal when someone cried Adeline’s name. We’d lived in the same building since 1987. The landlord had yet to install a buzzer.
She ran downstairs then barreled back up. Her boots stomped the holy hell out of our unpolished kitchen floor. She knocked on my bedroom door.
—Yeah? I asked.
—Baby, Patrick’s outside. Will you walk with us?
—I’ll pass, I said.
—Young man, she said, don’t dismiss this out of hand. You simply have no idea what kind of experience you’ll be missing. You’re acting like a bigot. Don’t close that beautiful American mind.
Experience. The magic word. I operated from a naked and foolish belief that each experience of the writer’s life would recycle into the work. The dreck and stupidity of humanity undergoing an alchemical conversion into the gold of literature. If Adeline wanted me to walk with the sorcerer, then even that could be transmuted.
Geoffrois was on the sidewalk, facing our building, leaning against a parked car. His gaunt face like a death mask lit by streetlight, ringed with the white flow of his hair, his wardrobe its usual sable. His eight points of interest dominated by gaudy jewelry.
—Patrick, said Adeline, this is Baby.
—I too have a baby, he said. But my woman and my child are not home. I thought I would show Adeline the demonic currents running through the East Village.
—I’ve seen you tell fortunes on St. Mark’s, I said, with your finger in the palms of creeps from Jersey.
—Even pigs have a destiny, said Patrick Geoffrois. It may be the slaughterhouse, but it remains a destiny.
Geoffrois launched off the car, heading east. Adeline matched his stride. As the evening’s designated third wheel, I trailed behind, affording myself the opportunity to observe the man’s frailty. His clothes sagged over his body. A true devotee of Ulysses S. Grant.
Their conversation went beyond my comprehension. Something about Crowley and the Star Ruby Ritual. I listened, wanting to understand, but the details proved elusive.
Geoffrois spoke at length about the necessity of preparing the ceremonial chamber, about the importance of set and setting in implementing the science of change.
Adeline took this seriously, responding in kind, her voice imbued with gravity. It came to me that I had no idea whether or not Adeline believed in God.
An American moment. You can know someone’s outward personality better than you know your own but still lack any clear sense of their inner beliefs. There is no way of knowing if they hope for an intangible being that permeates infinity with its eternity.
Geoffrois yelled: —Witches will be released upon New York! Men and women will die, animals will come back to life. Penises carved of olive wood will propagate the wisdom of Satan. Samurais of all kinds should stay put in Brooklyn! Giant green flies will come out of the mouths of children.
—What are you talking about? I asked.
—The fate of New Yo
rk, he said. The vengeance that it will suffer.
—Hasn’t the city suffered enough?
—It hasn’t yet begun to suffer, said Geoffrois. The suffering that the city knows is like a drop in the ocean. A great plague will come upon it, and heretics will beat stockbrokers with sorghum and fennel, and the stalks will burn like hot irons.
He babbled all the way down 7th Street, pausing only before the McKinley Apartments. Staring into the light well that split the building’s two wings, Geoffrois claimed that its negative space was an intentional representation of Le Maison Dieu, or The Tower, the sixteenth trump card in the Major Arcana. New York, he said, is a city with too many towers. Ruin will befall them. Always beware The Tower when it is pulled in a reading. It is the most sinister of omens.
We crossed Avenue A. The park was closed, encased within eight-foot-tall chain-link fences, the result of a riot that had taken place on Memorial Day.
This most recent outburst of popular dissent wasn’t nearly as severe as the one that had destroyed Adeline’s ability to think about city life, but it adhered to genre conventions. Fires in the streets, bottles thrown, wild eyed nudist radicals screaming about the New World Order, dumpsters serving as barricades.
The municipal authorities became convinced that the very topography of Tompkins Square was desperately wrong. They suspected that its individual parts comprised the gears of a great machine which deranged the human mind into a fervor against civilization. The holy reliquaries of Robert Moses transmitting out energies of chaos.
A month after the Memorial Day riot, several hundred cops secured the park’s perimeter while the bells of St. Brigid’s pealed. The homeless went out, fences went up. Renovations announced, with no fixed date of completion.
The first act of destruction was visited upon the band shell, crushed into nothingness. They’d painted over Billie Holiday two years after I moved to the city, but I imagined that she went to dust with strains of “Strange Fruit” on her crudely rendered lips.
A key component of the park’s transformation was the establishment of a constant police presence. Tompkins Square was under guard twenty-four hours of each day. But this was the East Village. The first few months were pure show. Cops making a general demonstration of force for media and the mayor, followed by the inevitable diminishing of resources and interest.
Breaches appeared along the chain-linked perimeter. These entrances did not appeal to the anarchists. Sneaking into the park offered no political theater. Why bother if you lacked an audience?
Adeline and Geoffrois scrambled through a hole along 7th Street. I crouched down and went inside, hoping that I wouldn’t snag my clothes.
Geoffrois stumbled off. I was looking for the empty space where the band shell had been. Passing through the rubble, I considered it a lesson in controlling dissent. Create symbolic distractions for the vocal contingents fixated on imagery. Then destroy the symbol. Ignore the content.
Geoffrois and Adeline ran beneath the brick portico near 10th Street, stopping beside a monument that looked like an oversized headstone. Its purpose had been vandalized away. Graffiti rendered the inscriptions illegible. Its water spout, a lion’s head, had been broken off and stolen. The basin blown apart by fireworks.
—This is the most mystical object in New York, said Geoffrois. It was erected in memory of a disaster, of the General Slocum. A passenger ship that caught fire. One thousand dead. That’s the cover story, a lie designed to hide occulted knowledge. This stele sits at the intersection of at least five different ley lines that power the city’s economic energies. This is the heart of all New York’s money!
—Why does it look like shit? I asked.
—The secrets of ages were with the keepers of flame. When Churchill extinguished the flames, the knowledge was forgotten. Only the adept can know the truth. If this memorial disappears, then so too disappears the whole of New York’s economic prowess. Good-bye, Wall Street. Good-bye, Dow Jones Industrial Average. This is why squirrels and birds congregate at its base. They sense its power. Animals are mental states. I’ve personally inhabited the body of a bird and my eyes were seeing through its eyes. I saw my double and I was not dead.
He ran from us, toward Avenue A.
—Isn’t he simply fascinating? asked Adeline.
—I can say with honesty that I am amazed.
I could’ve been writing. I could’ve been giving my boyfriend the time. Instead I was chasing a necromancer through an abandoned park.
I’d spent too much of my life in New York, too much time interacting with its street people, with its lunatics, its mad ones, its charlatans, its would-be revolutionaries. I remember when I could be held rapt by any street preacher with a grievance against Ronald Reagan. But I knew now that none of it amounted to anything. It was all substance abuse, underlying emotional problems, and enforced commitment at Bellevue.
I found them beneath the graffiti-covered canopy of the Temperance Fountain, the word CHARITY above them, the zinc statue with her missing arms like the crippled goddess of a forgotten pantheon. Geoffrois stood over the fountain, hands extended, fingers spread. Beneath thick hooded eyelids, his eyes rolled white.
—He’s about to cast a spell, whispered Adeline. He needs absolute concentration.
—A spell? Really?
—Don’t concern yourself, she whispered. Nothing happens. Nothing ever happens. It’s about the psychological transformation of the self.
Geoffrois grunted and threw his arms up over his head. He spread his legs and thrust back his head, assuming the shape of an X. He shouted. I worried about the volume. After all, we were surrounded by the cops.
He lowered his arms over the bowl.
—Body of fire, body of light, he said. This is how we can describe the astral body. Egyptian gods live in the astral plane. We can also find symbols and alchemists there. With the body of light, we can travel anywhere. Everything is possible. Spirit of fire, remember! Gibil, spirit of fire, remember! Gibra, spirit of flames, remember! Oh god of fire, mighty son of Anu, the most terrifying among your brothers, show yourself! Appear, oh god of fire, Gibil in all your majesty and devour all of my enemies! Appear, oh god of fire, Girra in all your might and burn the sorcerers that persecute me! GIBIL GASHRU UMUNA YANDURU TUSHTE YESH SHIR ILLANINU MA YALKI! GISHBAR IA ZI IA IA ZI DINGIR GIR A KANPA! Appear, son of the enflamed disk of Anu!
I took my leave. Neither Adeline nor Geoffrois paid me a lick of attention. I traversed the empty lunar landscape and escaped back to Earth through a hole in the fence.
No police saw me. No one saw me.
MAY 1992
Baby Goes to Erik’s Hometown
Erik asked me to visit his hometown. I wanted to shout, No, absolutely not, not now, not ever!
—Honey, said Erik, you can meet my mother.
My beau begged. I resisted. He demanded. I refused. The barometric pressure dropped. A storm grew on the horizon. So I agreed. I said we’d do it. I’d acquiesce. I’d visit Narberth, Pennsylvania.
We picked a weekend in mid-May, after semester’s end. Which was also the end of my time at New York University. Graduation loomed.
I kept this momentous event on the sly, avoiding conversations about its possible meaning, adamant in my refusal to attend the ceremony. I had no taste for the flavor of tiny American piety of the commencement address.
And mine was to be no typical ceremony.
Three weeks prior to graduation, a septuagenarian resident of Yonkers named Stella G. Maychick lost control of her Oldsmobile Delta 88 and crashed through the western entrance of Washington Square Park. Mrs. Maychick injured twenty-seven and killed five. One of the deceased was a sophomore at NYU, his bleeding body crushed atop the graves of twenty thousand.
The university always scheduled its commencements in Washington Square. There was no time to find a new location. Hallowed ground newly made, the site of a student’s tragic demise.
I imagined Dr. L. Jay Oliva, our university presiden
t, offering a speech rife with the stupidities and reassurances that make unwelcome appearances at every funeral, any tragedy, all unexpected deaths. Always remember. Better place. Never forget. Honored friends. Trusted memories. Carry on.
Complete and total horseshit. Only time salves the wounds of loss. Year after year until failing synapses dull away the pain.
My last few nights as a student were spent writing a paper on Don Quixote and another examining Etruscan images of Lucretia. With these minor works completed, a sense of finality washed over my frame. I’d spent four years in the womb of NYU. There was no going back. Time to be reborn.
That Friday, Erik and I navigated the labyrinth of the Port Authority, climbing aboard a dingy Greyhound bus on the lower level. I hadn’t been on a bus since my arrival in New York. I hadn’t been outside of the boroughs in almost four years.
I’d decided to embrace the trip and the suburban weekend. Our relationship needed the time. Neutral space away from New York was an absolute requirement. It had become clear that I’d have to level with Erik about my literary output.
He knew nothing of the stories, of the publication credits, nothing about the endless span of effort.
It wasn’t that I didn’t want to tell him, but I was embarrassed that there was a thing in my life that mattered. I was ashamed that I’d done anything. Faced with the flaws in my writing, and the atrocious aesthetics of science fiction digests, I’d never mentioned my relative achievements.
By the fifth published story, it was easier to pretend as if it was happening to another person.
The pretense was now impossible. I’d met with Parker Brickley, the squeaks of his childlike telephone voice leaving me unprepared to encounter a middle-aged bearded behemoth trapped in the clutches of male-pattern baldness.
He insisted that we lunch upstairs at Sardi’s. The portraiture was grotesque, but I loved Parker. Instantly. He was the most obscene man that I have ever met.
—I don’t fucking know why it fucking happened, said Parker, but something about the way you scribble gets my dick throbbing. You’re a fucking faggot, so you probably think you’ve mapped out the whole territory of cock. You’d be surprised about the secret knowledge of the straight pervert. Reading your stuff is like rubbing an eight ball under my foreskin and paying six prostitutes to seek the powder. Johnny fucking Cyberseed, like shitting myself in pleasure. I loved it. I’ve got literary clients, but only science fiction floods my erectile vessels. I’d trade five Jane Smileys for one of you. So please don’t tease me. Please don’t say that you’re the kind of girl who lets a man buy dinner and then won’t hike up her skirt. I want to see that big ass and those tender thighs. Tell me about the sweet treasures of your pussy. Tell me that you have a fucking manuscript. Give me something, buddy, give me a juicy piece to take back to William Morris and ram up their shit-stained asses.