Friends and Traitors

by Jarett Kobek

  I played the records all night, headphones pressed tight against my bony skull. I didn’t apprehend Минерва’s arrival. Nor when she and Jeremy departed, nor when they returned, nor when they retired into their bedroom. The voice of Miss Simone bored a hole. That voice owned every word that it enunciated, bending music in its service.

  Towards midnight, I took in Kid Eternity #1. It was the single strangest thing that I had ever read, and you know me, darlings, I’ve been identified by several law enforcement agencies as one of those wretched people who adorates Simulations and all the other borrrrrrriiiiiiing books on Semiotext(e).

  Kid Eternity, the titular character, can resurrect any historical or mythological figure, making them present in the flesh. An overweight Buddhist monk suggests that Kid Eternity must create a Moonchild. The purpose of this homunculus will be to bring mankind to its next state of developed consciousness. The narrative ends up encompassing the entire Greek pantheon, a group of demonic children who eat their own skin, and a Symbolist Beelzebub in hell. There’s also a B-plot about the discord among the people Kid Eternity attempts to mate in the creation of his Moonchild.

  At least that’s what I think happens. I most certainly could be wrong. Interpretation is a fine art and Ann Nocenti is an unsung genius, a freak of nature walled within the prêt-à-porter ghetto of the comic book.

  I asked Jeremy about Ann Nocenti. “She’s incredible,” he said. “But the comics world is too sexist. No one ever pays attention. We should bow at her feet. Vertigo is a good place for her. They’re doing a lot of interesting work somewhere between the mainstream and the alternative world. She couldn’t fit anywhere else. By the way, have you read Sandman?”

  MARCH 1993

  Nash Mac

  The one constant of daily life is other people’s inability to mind their own business. Минерва and Jeremy had drawn negative conclusions regarding my shambling around San Francisco.

  Too much perambulation enclosed within tendrils of fog and woe. They’d decided it was unhealthy. Thus the picayune image of my hosts dragging me hand-over-foot to Thai House, a restaurant on Noe Street.

  We walked in the shadow of Corona Heights, a rock outcropping looming over this patch of the city. Jeremy noticed my interest and said, “Do you know the writer Fritz Leiber? He wrote a great book about Corona Heights called Our Lady of Darkness.”

  I hung my head low. “Mmmmm, uhhh, mmm, uh,” I replied.

  Fritz Leiber. Yes, sir, I did indeed recollect Fritz Leiber. The name filtered into my consciousness through the same route as all such trivialities, via a certain personage who possessed an unrefined taste for science fiction. I’d been avoiding all thoughts of the other one, but it proved impossible, as in the moments when our behemoth cat would crawl into my lap and insist on being hugged until he purred. The beast’s gray face, his caterwauls. What had been lost.

  Thai House represented a new stratagem. Jeremy took it upon himself to arrange a mutual dinner between we three and one of his co-workers, a man named Nash Mac.

  “Nash Mac?” I asked incredulously. “He sounds like a gay cash machine.”

  “It’s short for دومحم رصان,” said Jeremy. “His family’s from Persia.”

  “But Jeremy,” I whined, “I don’t want to meet any of your dreadful computer people. I hate computers. I hate technology. I wish I could live in the eighteenth century, my tattered dress speckled with the rot of the road.”

  “He’s not like the others,” said Jeremy. “He cares about things beyond computers.”

  There we stood outside of the restaurant, its interior glow lighting the sidewalk. Минерва leaned against her beau, hands beneath his jacket, kissing his neck. How had they managed to keep it alive? In my humble experience, most relationships lasted two years before dissipating into contempt and mutual loathing. Yet their vegetable love grew vaster than empires.

  “Why ever are we suffering this cold?” I asked.

  “I told Nash Mac that we’d meet him outside,” said Jeremy.

  “Fine,” said I. “You wait for this young man who is apparently incapable of peering inside a glass window. I’ll collect a table. Минерва, will you come with me?”

  “Prefer standing,” she said.

  I entered the establishment. It could have been any restaurant in San Francisco. Simple design and modest touches of ethnicity. I spoke with the hostess. She sat me at a table. I waited, in total boredom, for another ten minutes.

  There was action outside, blur of bodies in nighttime. They rushed in with the mystery guest. I had to admit that Nash Mac was crushingly handsome, but oh so poorly dressed in his pale blue button-down and his brown khakis. Alas, his sartorial missteps made no difference. You know your Adeline. She’s always believed in the fundamental attractiveness of the poorly dressed male.

  Nash Mac made eye contact only to break it a moment later. He didn’t ask a thing of me, preferring to speak with Jeremy about work, about the way that Ron Gilbert had left the company, about finishing touches being put upon something called D.O.T.T.

  Минерва and I were boooored. She kicked Jeremy beneath the table. He stopped talking. We all stopped talking.

  “So what do you do?” asked Nash Mac.

  “Me?” I said.

  “Yes,” he said. “You.”

  “I’m one of those poor souls doomed to wander the night without anything like a clear idea of what it is that she does. Don’t you know that I feel obsolescence creeping upon me?”

  “Is bullshit,” said Минерва. “Adeline is artist.”

  “Now, darling,” I said. “You know how I hate that word.”

  “But it’s true,” said Jeremy. “She’s incredibly talented.”

  “And that talent, Nash Mac,” I said, “is why I’ve spent the last few years drawing pictures of women in their bras. There’s a great wide world of difference between being talented and being an artist. Talent is a curiosity that one squanders or develops. It doesn’t mean a single thing.”

  “That is misguided bullshit,” said Nash Mac. “People are distinguished by natural gifts. Some people are born beautiful. Some people are born smart. Some people are born talented. It’s a crime to waste your gift. If you’re okay with being a criminal, you’re a fool. You’ll regret it. If you don’t already.”

  The waiter brought our entrees. Nash Mac consumed his pad thai, inhaling the meal. Awkward, messy, the noodles slipping over his face and fork. I am insane enough that it appealed to something deep in my soul.

  We landed at Mad Dog in the Fog, an Irish sports bar on Haight Street. Минерва and Jeremy ordered a drink and made their strategic retreat, feigning exhaaaustion, leaving me by my lonesome with Nash Mac.

  “So, Nash Mac,” I said. “Why don’t you inform me about the relationship with your last girlfriend? Are you still friends?”

  “This is distasteful,” he said. “Are you making fun of me? What did Jeremy tell you?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “Why so nervous? Did you cheat on the girl and leave her for someone else? I’m simply curious. A person’s last relationship can tell you an awful lot.”

  “She’s dead,” he said.

  “What,” I said.

  “I don’t bring it up when I first meet people,” he said. “It tends to murder conversation.”

  In my indecency, I pressed for details. He demurred. I inquired into his life. His father and mother, doctors with deep connections to the Shah, had fled Iran during the Revolution, bringing a young دومحم رصان into the States United, where he adapted to the new culture by bowdlerizing his own name, assuming an ultra-American identity. He graduated high school in Fairfax, Virginia, then ended up at college in Bloomington-Normal, where he’d studied computer science, graduating with his BS and then heading out for the Bay Area. Everyone was making noise about the prominence of the region, about the development of new technologies, about Steve Jobs and NeXT. He picked up work and learned that he couldn’t
stand employment at a normal corporation, that he’d dedicated his life to an intolerable industry. He quit his job with every intention of becoming a retail wage-slave, but then a friend suggested that he apply at LucasArts. They were looking for quality-assurance cogs. A week into this position and Nash Mac realized his passion for the material. He pushed his way up, functioning as an intermediary between the technology people and the designers. Initially, that line had been blurry, as the original designers were the people who created SCUMM, the primary scripting language of the LucasArts adventures. Yet the technology had accelerated so fast that it became impossible to both design and handle the back end. Nash Mac assumed his halfway position. He’d recently been promoted, working under Tim Schafer on Day of the Tentacle. Nash Mac liked Tim, liked D.O.T.T., but knew that he’d missed the golden age. LucasArts under Ron Gilbert was a palace of wonder. Gilbert was a master. Nash Mac treasured even his tangential involvement with Monkey Island 2.

  “Some games are just games,” said Nash Mac. “Some designers are only designers. Ron Gilbert is an artist. Monkey Island is real art. But the process is collaborative.”

  “That’s all well and good,” said I, delighting in my crassness, “but tell me about this girlfriend.”

  They met when he moved to the Bay Area, introduced by mutual friends. She lived in San Francisco, he resided near Menlo Park. The first year went well enough that when her lease expired, she made the daft suggestion they find a place together. Nash Mac thought it was surely too soon, but worried that saying no would end the relationship. She discovered a two-bedroom apartment in the Marina. She was fine. He was fine. Things were copacetic. Then her father died. Then her mother killed herself. Nash Mac attended the funerals, driving both times to Spokane, Washington. She lost her job. Nash Mac hadn’t a clue what to say. Around then, he said, he came to understand that he’d moved in too soon. She started doing speed, keeping the activity clandestine, in shadows distant. Nash Mac was an innocent. He never made the connection. He simply thought that her mood was improving. Life continued on apace. As it must. As it does. She didn’t work. He paid for everything. The speed started giving her grand swells of delusion and paranoia. She turned cruel. Nash Mac asked her to move out. She refused. He told her to retain her hold on the apartment. He’d leave. She said that he couldn’t. He said it was happening. She said that she’d rather die than live alone. Nash Mac didn’t believe her. She did it in the bathtub. He found the body, the gory lifeless mess, the blood and the water.

  “The worst part,” he said, “is that we hardly knew each other.”

  And that, darlings, is how I ended up with the first boyfriend of my postcollegiate life. I’d dumped a nonpracticing Jew and set up shop with a nonobservant Muslim. A microcosm of American foreign policy passing through my loins, the flesh of my flesh, the bone of my bone.

  APRIL 1993

  Adeline and Jeremy Go to a Signing at Comic Relief

  In my boredumb, I started hanging out at The Owl and Monkey Café on Ninth Avenue, which served a customer base of aging burnouts with insatiable desires for coffee and homemade quiche. On occasion, these drug casualities would gather en masse and listen to the sounds of live acoustic music.

  Meself, I sat near the counter, straining for cheap stereo sounds, avoiding any critique of the artworks that hung on the white walls and dodging stories about famous musicians who’d performed at the august institution. One gent in particular availed himself of the opportunity, every single day, to inform me that the cover of a Mike Bloomfield album had been photographed in the establishment. Each afternoon, he promised to bring the LP and show me. Yet he never did.

  On the topic of records, I should note the day when I walked home from The Owl and Monkey and stumbled over a cache of discarded vinyl at the corner of Cole and Cart. This harvest, which I cherry-picked, provided the soundtrack of my life on those days when I was not in the café or sleeping at Nash Mac’s apartment in the Sunset District.

  Entertainment came through indulgence in Jeremy’s comics collection. Befitting a gent who’d worked in the Marvel offices, the boy was rife with material. Boxes upon boxes upon boxes upon boxes. The reservoir ran deep. I devoured forty or so issues of Ann Nocenti on Daredevil, a run marked by yearly Christmas stories and Matt Murdock’s espousal of pacifism whilst solving his problems through a perpetual recourse to violence.

  Jeremy initiated me into the world of Los Brothers Hernandez, into Eightball, into Alan Moore’s run on Swamp Thing with Steve Bissette and John Totleben, into Hate, into Elfquest. More titles, too, that I shan’t mention. Some horrible, others ridiculous. Almost none of the creators were women.

  “If you’re interested,” said Jeremy, “come next week to Comic Relief. There’s a Vertigo signing. Grant Morrison will be there. He sort of knows who I am. I had a few letters published in Doom Patrol.”

  Минерва wanted nothing to do with the event. She dismissed it as plain madness. “What Grant Morrison does for you?” she asked. “You pay him, not vice versa. Now you stare at his face for hours like risen Messiah. Strange people.”

  Yet there we were, April 18th, a Sunday, trudging towards the Upper Haight at 6 pm. Gray buildings, gray sky, gray faces, gray people. Fog over Buena Vista Park with sinister intent, carpet looming above Golden Gate Park.

  Regarding the trees of the former, I thought, as ever, about the hey-hey heyday of the hippie era, imaginating how much smaller the vegetation would have been during the golden years, wondering if the psychopatho-logic influence of their increased heights wasn’t responsible for the shift away from Luv on Haight.

  The human mass outside of Comic Relief produced instant repulsion, like a finger on the trigger of my latent claustrophobia.

  Jeremy assumed a place in line. I wandered the store, examining the scene. Morrison sat at his signing table, dressed in a twee black leather cap, wearing red-tinted sunglasses, a white shirt, and a black leather jacket. His outfit gave him a very San Francisco look. Everyone in San Francisco wore black leather jackets.

  Beside him was Jill Thompson, remarkable with her witchy mingles and waving red hair. The third guest, Steve Yeowell, was notable for the normalcy of his appearance.

  I milled about, thumbing books while Jeremy ascended through the line. I smiled my way to the front when I saw that mi amigo was chatting up Morrison. Jeremy schmoozed into the man’s social good graces. They talked about Animal Man.

  Jeremy asked Morrison what he and the others were doing after the event. To my surprise, Morrison told him. It should be remembered that Jeremy had worked in editorial at Marvel. His professional livelihood had been dependent on manipulating comics creators into doing his bidding.

  I thought about, of all people, my late lamented father. Daddy offered such a presence within our home that we would forget about his civilian identity. We never remembered that he was an oral surgeon who maintained a thriving practice. His celebrity clientele remained distant concepts until those ridiculous moments when we’d be out in public and Daddy would fall into a conversation with Judd Nelson or Kathleen Turner.

  Daddy dominated those dialogues. World-famous celebrities deferred to him. He had the right manner, the suave calm that perpetuated his business. He was the man who gave them their prize-winning smiles.

  “Ah, fuck,” said Morrison, in a Scots dialect. “We’re down to a fifty years of LSD rave.”

  “I see,” said Jeremy. “Good luck with that. Nice talking with you.”

  Outside, Jeremy said, “We’ve got to discover the location of that rave. We have to be there.”

  “Why ever didn’t you ask? He seemed amenable,” I said.

  “Too awkward,” said Jeremy. “But if we show up, that’s a challenge met.”

  “You tell me, then,” I said. “How do we find a rave in San Francisco?”

  Jeremy rustled up a copy of the SF Weekly, a localized and lame alternative weekly that employed the same cover template as the Village Voice. Spreading the paper acr
oss the trunk of a parked car, Jeremy flipped through until landing upon a list of cultural events. “Look here,” he said, pointing to an advertisement that read:

  FOR ALL RAVE INFO CALL

  RAVE HOTLINE

  1-900-844-RAVE

  “There’s another on the other page,” he said. “Same thing, but different number. 900-844-4RAV. We’ll go home and use the telephone.”

  At Steiner House, Jeremy telephoned and listened. “It’s on Folsom, south of Market. Robert Anton Wilson will be there. It starts at 8, so let’s show up around 11. We can walk. It’ll take about an hour.”

  Минерва stumbled in and decided to accompany us, whilst making it ever so plain that she still disapproved of Jeremy’s fixation on Grant Morrison and other comics professionals, asking why he would ever desire such a thing and why he acted with such subterfuge. “I don’t know,” he said. “It seems interesting. His run on Doom Patrol was exceptional, okay?”

  I strung together an outfit from my own rough materials and Минерва’s discards. Tiger-striped tights, purple sweater, green army jacket, knee-high brown boots.

  The walk down Haight was borrrrrrrrrrrrrring. By the time our legs crossed Market, fatigue settled on my brow. Carried away by Jeremy’s enthusiasm, I hadn’t considered my decision. Going to a rave, embracing a scene that I’d rejected in NYC, a scene that I’d decidedly besmirched before a certain somebody. But that’s very me, isn’t it, darlings? Grade-A hypocrite.

  I imagined him at that moment, ambling towards a club, listening to ghastly music and schmoozing with people for whom he harbored no particular affection.

  Our journey was a drift through the homeless and the destitute and the indigent. People screaming with desperate cries. A miniature drama staged on every corner. The threat of violence lingered, but our individual appearances added up to a sum total that dissuaded outside interference.