Friends and Traitors

by Jarett Kobek

  I missed my period when Bush fumbled away his presidency, and I did not cease bleeding until after Bubba Bill Clinton assumed office of the usurped king.

  Around then, you see, I learned the unfortunate truth of the human body. One can spend years experiencing all manner of illness and horrible vagary and remain unprepared for how far the flesh will go. There’s no end to scars and scabs in this old world, dearies, and our organs do betray.

  I’m surely conflating the months, but I could swear that my crimson odyssey ended on the very same day that I left the apartment and walked to Cooper Square, snowflakes falling around my bonny red hair.

  Reaching the western corner of 7th Street, I encountered an exodus from the southerly lands, a great swell of people, many with noses ringed by dark ash.

  “What in the blazes is this?” I asked a woman.

  “Explosion,” she said. “Down at the World Trade Center. Everyone’s evacuated.”

  February 26, 1993. For a few hours of naiveté, the world held out hope that perhaps the explosion wasn’t caused by a bomb, that perhaps it was a baroque mechanical failure.

  Of such things are dreams made. Boom! Pause for a moment and consider, my sweethearts, that the 1990s was a decade in which Islamic-flavored terrorists attacked the World Trade Center and the United States of America waged war against Iraq. History always repeats.

  I’d long mastered the indifferent sneer at life’s circumstance, curling my upper lip like a J.D. in a paddywagon on his way to the hoosegow, but over the next week, the bombing tugged on my soul, wormed its way deeeeeeeep into my consciousness.

  Navigating city streets became a great difficulty. I jumped like a jack-rabbit at the backfiring of cars, winced at shouts, a general nausea settled in my stomach, constantly expecting to fall victim to an unknown and unseen horror.

  Then the dreams started.

  Dreams of being trapped, of wandering through a blown-out basement, of being in office buildings filled with smoke, dreams of exploding cars, dreams of my skin shredded by metal fragments, dreams of fire, dreams of my body maimed and mutilated, huge holes blown into the flesh, limbless and flopping like a fish hooked out of water.

  I had stayed in touch with Минерва. We spoke every few weeks through the fine art of telephony. She had suggested, ad infinitum, that I move to the Bay Area. “San Francisco is shitfest,” she said, “but different flavor turd. Come learn bitter disappointment of new city.”

  Noodling it out, I struck upon the thought that there was no time like the present. The dreams, said I to meself, are a signal. New York is hitting you like a zonk on the head. All your old used-to-bes got their get up and went. It’s time, Adeline, for a change.

  I subletted away my home of six years. The sublessee was an acquaintance of Luanna’s from somewhere in the great wilds beyond Manhattan. We never met. Luanna handled the details, taking her cut off the top.

  Who cared? Let unknown parties trash the whole place. Let them burn the building. Any keepsake of value or meaning had been put into a dismal storage unit on Houston Street.

  The Captain accompanied me, his carrying case tucked beneath my arm. For the third time in his short life, the feline hurtled at thirty thousand feet across American skies.

  Jeremy Winterbloss had found his employ in Marin County, as a low-level functionary at LucasArts, an organization named with great modesty by its founder, George Lucas. The company’s purpose was the production of computer games.

  Each morning, Jeremy traversed a semi-mythical journey across the Golden Gate Bridge and arrived at the Skywalker Ranch, a vast expanse of land purchased with Lucas’s endless Star Wars lucre. It was an education not only in his profession but also in the American potential for grotesque opulence.

  For her part, Минерва floated through a litany of retail jobs. Her real focus was elsewhere.

  She’d somehow encountered two dissolute young девушек, both escapees from the former CCCP. As all three members of this femme troika shared a mutual interest in punk aesthetics. They cohered into the nucleus of an almost all-girl band called Daddy Was in KGB.

  The single masculine note in this estrogenized symphony came from the drummer, a 17-year-old high school student from San Rafael who’d contacted Минерва after she’d stapled advertisements to the city’s telephone poles. WANTED: DRUMMER FOR BAND.

  Минерва mailed me the flyer for every gig played by her band. The names of the other groups always amused. Lilyvolt, Cheap Vegan Cafe, Storm and Her Dirty Mouth, Honeypot, Drunk People R Loud, Homo Holocaust, Coffee Scented Come Stain.

  She herself had illustrated many of these flyers, working an intentional homage to the Family Dog and Neon Rose posters of Victor Moscoso. At Parsons, she’d never evidenced much interest in control of her line, so this move towards psychedelic baroque represented a visual direction that was brand sparkling new.

  “What you expect?” she said into the telephone. “Every creature changes or dies.”

  *

  I landed at San Francisco International. Jeremy and Минерва stood by my gate, their wide bright smiles dispelling the ugly magick generated by the drab interiors of the American airport. All of that functional decoration, all of the white and gray paneling, the navy blue carpeting working like a slow poison on the human constitution.

  “Jeremy! Минерва!” I cried.

  “Adeline!” shouted they.

  Our group embrace was horribly awkward. I banged my forehead against Winterbloss’s spectacles, and stabbed my skin on the metal studs of Минерва’s leather jacket.

  I looked into their shining faces, into the radiant visages of people who were so clearly my friends. Much to my horror, my eyes began crying.

  “What shit,” said Минерва. “Unnecessary displays exist beneath you.”

  “I’m ever so sorry,” I said. “It’s been a hard year.”

  We descended like Dante to the lower level and waited beside the baggage carousel, standing amongst the rubes and zanies who’d flown with yours truly across the Great Abyss. The majority of my fellow passengers looked to be from Northern California. I imaginated their luggage, stuffed with fleece jackets and plastic Statues of Liberty and white t-shirts boldly proclaiming love for New York City.

  In the backseat of Jeremy’s 1986 white Toyota Camry, I simply delighted in their voices, attempting to decipher the hermetic shorthand of a long-term relationship.

  “Donny’s a real carpetbagger,” said Jeremy.

  “You meet Donny,” she said to me, “you meet the world.”

  Whittle away enough of one’s life in California and one grows accustomed to empty highways where the only visible nighttime landmarks are bodies of water and distant mountains. U.S. Route 101 was a road that I knew all too well. It had bored me for most of my childhood.

  The generic landscape dissolved into growing industrial distress and we trespassed into the city. An instant disorientation settled upon my starry brow, as if the Victorian houses conspired with the hills and the uncanny quiet of the streets. Every thing, and I do mean all things, looked sinister. Great swaths of fog rolling in from the west, caught by headlights, a spectral layer haunting the world. The dark and decayed city. I wondered, and not for the last time, what I had done to my poor self, and where I was. If nothing else, the human body was not meant to jolt twenty-five hundred miles en moins de six heures.

  Their third-floor apartment was located within an ancient building on Steiner in the Lower Haight and had an irrefutably San Francisco floorplan. A street-level entrance with a ridiculous staircase that led to an irregular space, the primary feature of which was the cancerous sprouting of rooms along a long hallway.

  Though Минерва and Jeremy had navigated the horrors of cohabitation and the maintenance of erotic desire in the suffocating context of love, they hadn’t displayed much competence in adapting to the needs of decoration and décor.

  They lived beneath a worn tapestry of American
pop detritus. I had no doubt about what belonged to whom. The punk metal inverted crucifixes and revolting caricatures of political figures went into one column. The full-size posters of Wolverine and Maniac Mansion in another.

  One fixture to which I paid an especial attention was Jeremy’s state-of the-art IBM PC Compatible 486DX-33mhz computer, replete with 1024 x 768 SVGA video and a SoundBlaster 16 Pro 2. I’d never encountered a home computer that was actually in a person’s home.

  “It’s for work, mostly,” he said. “But I’m using it more and more. Have you heard about email?”

  “Please, spare me the details,” I said. “I have trouble enough with the regular mail.”

  We sat in their living room, overlooking the street, our faces illuminated by red Christmas lights. Минерва emerged from their bedroom carrying a brightly colored plastic bong, and seeing that instrument of intoxication, at last I knew that I’d landed within the borders of Californy.

  We helped the Captain get his bearings and then listened to L7’s Bricks Are Heavy. We bullshitted about the whereabouts of former Parsons students.

  “Do you remember Janine?” asked Jeremy.

  “Nooooooo,” I said. “Whatever did this Janine look like?”

  “She had black long hair, which I think she dyed, and glasses, and she always carried an unwashed grotty pink messenger bag.”

  “Oh, her,” I sniffed. “We called her the Pink Princess of Nassau County.”

  “That’d be the one,” said Jeremy. “Do you want to guess what she’s doing?”

  “I detest guessing. I’m always wrong.”

  “Pink Princess is dog catcher?” asked Минерва.

  “She stayed in New York for a year or two,” said Jeremy. “I guess she was working in fashion, but then she moved to Hollywood and now she works for Jack Nicholson. She works for the Joker.”

  “Whatever does the Princess do for Mr. Nicholson?” I asked.

  “No one really knows,” said Jeremy. “I think she’s his personal assistant.”

  “I loved Five Easy Pieces,” said yours truly, “but one imagines there’s a singular task in which he requires the assistance of a pretty young thing. And that, my darlings, is an idea that’s real horrorshow. Think of their faces twisting and contorting in the throes of orgasm. Oh, the terror, the terror.”

  They turned in before the clock struck midnight, retiring into the apartment’s sole bedroom. It’d been decided that I would slumber on the living room couch, but sleep was beyond my powers. I sat stoned and stared into the street.

  Over the rooftops, I espied the dark and ragged outline of Buena Vista Park, towering above San Francisco like Fangorn over Middle Earth. The blinking lights of Sutro Tower hovered like UFOs. It’d been so long since Jon. I hadn’t seen the other one in almost six months. I’d alienated my family. The only friends who gave two shakes of a fist were in the bedroom, but they were coupled, and the mystery of every coupling is impenetrable.

  I slept fully clothed, not removing a stitch, opting to ignore the blankets piled beside the couch.

  MARCH 1993

  Adeline Wanders Around San Francisco

  I became as a pilgrim on the road to Canterbury, frittering away the weeks by wandering around San Francisco, un flaneur sans privilège du pénis.

  I flitted in and out of the city’s little fiefdoms, developing the mad idea that one could create a sonic map for the blind on the basis of each neighborhood’s catcalls. The hola mi lindas and ay gueras of the Mission, the pssst psst psssst sexys of Hayes Valley, the polite honky condescension of the Marina, and then the vortex, the absolute sucking silence of the Castro.

  My many years constrained within the rigid grids of New York and Los Angeles had left me unprepared for San Francisco. Why would anyone build a city punctuated by things like Nob Hill? What gin-soaked sot had believed that Market Street was best designed as a diagonal slash cutting through all rational thought? How could one explain California or Geary streets? How was I to comprehend the inexact and odd location of the Financial District? What in God’s good graces were the Richmond and the Sunset?

  Four years had passed since Loma Prieta shook ’em on down, but traces of the destruction were everywhere. Empty lots where apartment buildings collapsed upon themselves, the blankness of the former Embarcadero Freeway, the dead zone by Fell Street.

  I haunted cafés and walked the streets and wondered how the city’s residents could content themselves with living in such a jerk backwater. Everybody was stoned, everyone worked pointless jobs. Everyone was laid-back, but it wasn’t the sunstroked ease of blithe Los Angeles. People in San Francisco affected strange airs, undercurrents of tension and anxiety, of an undirected madness. Perhaps it was the weather, perhaps a result of the pure heresy of living in a place with more fog than sun.

  Wandering out of the Marina, I spied a grand Art Deco marquee reading METRO in red neon lights. I moseyed over and discovered that the theater was screening a new film entitled Point of No Return, starring Bridget Fonda.

  I’d last watched the actress in a risible thriller called Single White Female, where she battled her ravenous Sapphic desires. That film was terrible, but I grooooooved on the dynastic implications of her flat performance. Famous family, Hollywood nepotism, the decaying of American values. I wasn’t sure, but I thought that Daddy might’ve worked on her father’s dental bridge.

  The next showing of Point of No Return was but half an hour away.

  Inside the theater, I encountered one of those majestic institutions from the halcyon days when cinema remained an event and theaters were designed to highlight the moment’s monumental nature. Yes, darlings, those nouveau-riche aspirations were unmatched by the modest little films that they played, asking an audience of millions to satisfy itself with the heavy lids of Gloria Swanson, but the cinemas were like palaces.

  The ceiling was Spanish Revival, the walls painted with red fairies, and the seating, mes amis, the seating was tiered. The rickety wooden chairs were an unrelenting agony, but one imagined a time when they’d been something better. I could have died there, and, like Claudius at prayer, witnessed my gentle soul transported straight to heaven.

  Point of No Return was no better than Single White Female. I thought about drafting a letter to Ms. Fonda’s agents, suggesting that they select her roles with greater care. What’s the point of a famous name if it doesn’t deliver a modicum of dignity?

  It’s the little details that stick. Not the plot, not the characters, but certain aesthetic moments rising from the mise-en-scène.

  Минерва’s enthusiasm for L7 was beyond my understanding, but she’d played their LP enough times that I could recognize “Everglade” when it appeared on the soundtrack. It acted as prelude to the sonic entrance of Dr. Nina Simone, a record artist with whom Fonda’s character is obsessed. This musical choice is the only quirk of the entire film.

  I knew of Miss Simone, coming across Little Girl Blue in bins of used vinyl, but I’d never listened. Upon hearing “Feeling Good,” I understood that I simply must purchase her records. The song was wonderful enough to overpower any concerns about a recommendation offered by an ultra-violent multimillion-dollar spectacle.

  I ambled my merry way back, taking Fillmore and cutting through Alamo Square, encountering the inevitable tourists photographing the Painted Ladies. I watched them watching the buildings, wondering where in America they were from and what they thought about the decay of the neighborhood, if they could reconcile the houses that appeared every Friday night on Full House with the untreated mental illness and feces smears of the homeless.

  At Recycled Records on Haight, I ran my long fingers through the vinyl. I unearthed ten different albums by Miss Simone. Working from the mystery of tactile osmosis, I picked Nina Simone Sings the Blues and I Put a Spell on You.

  An unpleasant-looking creature behind the register lifted the albums, bringing the cardboard close to his pockmarked face. I worried he might extend his ton
gue and taste the vinyl.

  “You’re buying these because of that movie, ain’t you?”

  “Whatever do you mean?” I asked.

  “That movie. Point Break. You’re the third one this week. All of you women.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Sure you don’t,” he said. “Fifteen bucks.”

  I headed home, passing beneath Buena Vista Park, trying yet again to apprehend its trees and its eldritch nature. Both Jeremy and Минерва had warned me against the park. They spoke of unknown crimes, of bodies discovered.

  Yet I’m an infant in my mentality and being told not to do a thing always piques my curiosity. On my third day, I’d climbed to the park’s crown. I’d repeated this journey on several occasions, never once encountering another human being, only finding indirect evidence through discarded drug paraphernalia and canvas tents pitched amongst the trees.

  Jeremy was at home. Минерва was working. Jeremy was reading a comic book.

  “You need to check this out,” he said.

  “Whatever is it?” I asked.

  “Kid Eternity #1,” he said. “It came out last week, on Vertigo. It’s by Ann Nocenti. It’s the craziest thing I’ve ever read.”

  “Leave it for me when you’ve finished,” I said. “I require a record player.”

  Jeremy ventured into the breach of their overstuffed closet, pulling out a cheap plastic turntable. Минерва had purchased it for $5 at a garage sale, entertaining the delusion that she was one of those punk people who cherished seven-inch records, who collected and listened to the latest releases of her acquaintances. Her dreams proved fruitless. She could not resist the sway of the compact disc.

  The player had a headphone jack. I plugged in Jeremy’s giant oversized plastic contraptions and sat on the living room floor, playing records. I preferred Nina Simone Sings the Blues. There was a consistency, not a bad song on it, though it lacked a standout. I Put a Spell on You was punctuated by numbers of incredible power. The title track, the aforementioned “Feeling Good,” “Gimme Some,” and “Taking Care of Business.”