by Jarett Kobek
Ninety-five percent of the time, it’s as simple as looking weiiiiiird. Why bother with a freak when there’s always another easy victim around the corner?
1015 Folsom Street was only another nondescript relic from the industrial era, a place converted into four stories of dancefloors. I’d been to Tunnel. I’d been to Limelight. I’d been to Mars. I possessed an immediate understanding of the layout.
I contemplating drinking myself absolutely stinko blotto, but decided instead on eating hallucinogens in celebration of fifty years with Dr. Hoffman’s problem child. Although, I must say, that for yours truly there has always been a kind of hyperintoxication that emerges from alcohol, when the head spins, when the streets rise with power, that has struck me as very close to the experience of consuming lysergic acid diethylamide.
Don’t you know, my sweet things, that for an event explicitly tied to drug use, I had a rather difficult time observing any obvious ingestion. I surveyed the scene, hunting for degenerates and dopers. No matter how hard that I searched, I seemed doomed, like the protagonist of a mildly popular country ballad, to never discover the object of my longing.
I changed my approach. Amongst the dancing bodies, the laser shows, the pounding electronica vibe, the circus, I sent out a psychic signal. Putting on my very best little-girl-lost face, I leaned against an exposed metal girder and waited for men to come and speak.
Talk they did. All manner of balderdash. I asked each one if there was any MDMA upon his person, yet each was appalled and refused my request. Finally, the last of them, a bit overweight and sweaty for my tastes, offered me two tablets imprinted with McDonald’s golden arches.
Obligation hung heavy upon me. He’d given me intoxicants, so I let the man go on and on and on and on and on and on and on, tuning in and out of his monologue, waiting for the drugs to take hold. “In a truly dance-oriented shamanistic society,” he said, “we would all be known by our own personalized dance as much as by name. In fact, our very names would become synonymous with our external manifestation of our inner being. And to others, these names would also take on their own personal meaning. Individual symbols of individual existence.”
Unsure how to respond, I started dancing, a crazy little St. Vitus dance. I melted away towards the floor. Darlings, how I danced. Yet I wasn’t listening to the music.
My thoughts were of an album that I’d rescued from trash. Lark by Linda Lewis. I’d picked it up assuming that it was an example of 1970s schmaltz but instead found a quiet album marked by clear production, constructed to highlight Lewis’s five-octave range. She could go from a deep growl to a breathless high-pitched sound. The best song was “It’s the Frame.” Her voice sang within my head: Now, Lord, well you don’t wanna be alone in Heaven, do ya? Wouldn’t you like me and my friends and my family for company?
Минерва emerged from within the crowd, giving me a bottle of water. “Drink,” said she. I danced and danced and danced and danced and danced but now was victim to looping drug logic. The experience of an idea imprinting itself upon your waking mind, like a dealer’s brand pressed upon a pill. I could see individual dances like signatures, identifying signifiers as distinct and powerful as names. What would it be like to live within a truly dance-oriented shamanic society? How ever would dances function as repeatable signatures? The human body mutates, as does one’s sense of self. The name remains unattached. I saw dances shift through constant change. Even my own. I undulated, an oddity with my arms, as if I were performing a butterfly stroke. I’d never danced like that before. I never have since. How could one maintain a style of dance long enough to establish a workable social identity? Michael Jackson had The Moonwalk, but what else was there? What would happen in a truly dance-oriented shamanic society to poor souls incapable of rhythm? I danced with the awkwardness of a white girl. Would my failure to stay on beat mark me out with the equivalent of a regional dialect? Would one’s lack of ability separate one from society?
Inhaling a deeeeep breath of toxic club air, holding it within until I slowed my beating heart. I exhaled and repeated the dreary process. I’d wanted a pure drug experience, but now I was infected with this masculine taxonomy where even dance was destroyed by a man’s language, by another man’s insufferable need to rewrite society. I suspect that my benefactor believed himself a fellow on the cusp of a new society, of a viable alternative, but he attempted to tear down the master’s house with the master’s tools. Real change would come only when hordes of thick Amazon women conquered the American male, when warrioresses stormed the White House with bows and arrows, when they invaded the boardrooms of the corporate empire, when Fortune 500 CEOs were subject to processes that instilled humility.
People kept talking about CRASH WORSHIP. Every mouth in the room said CRASH WORSHIP. I asked, “What’s CRASH WORSHIP?” and they said, “CRASH WORSHIP is the main event. It’s why everyone’s here.” “I presumed that everyone was attending to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of LSD.” “Yeah, that too, but, like, we’re mostly all here to, like, see CRASH WORSHIP.”
You’ll forgive me, darlings, but the states that every human being is entitled to at least five experiences in her life beyond the descriptions of words, and CRASH WORSHIP was one of my personal quintet.
People together in a pit, surrounded by drumming. Fires built. Liquids thrown. Dancing, dancing, dancing. CRASH WORSHIP finished its set. The atmosphere had evaporated. We’d been moved to a different realm. Space and time no longer existed.
Jeremy talked with Grant Morrison. “I’m working on something new,” said Morrison in his Scots dialect, rougher than before. “I think it’s the big one. I think it might change everything.”
“I’ve got an idea, too,” said Jeremy. “We should compare notes.”
“I’ll give you my address,” said Morrison. “You can write me a letter.”
“What time is it?” I asked.
“It’s almost 2 am,” said Grant Morrison. “I feel like a dandy in the fucking underworld.”
“How long was I dancing?” I asked Jeremy.
“Hours,” he said. “Минерва took a cab home.”
“Did you enjoy CRASH WORSHIP?” I asked Grant Morrison.
“Aye,” he said. “That I did.”
“I think I may have seen God,” I said.
“Really?” asked Grant Morrison. “How do you know?”
MAY 1993
ADELINE ♥ Baby
Somehow I embroiled Nash Mac and myself within a ridiculous fight about crime rates, with yours truly staking the claim that San Francisco was a backwater compared against New York City. People can be astonishingly provincial about the homes they’ve chosen, taking pride in all manner of absurdity, and so the boy argued for hours, insisting that his adopted hometown was worse than anywhere in America.
When one factored in the gangs and the homeless, he said, Baghdad by the Bay was far less safe than any other locale. He spoke of how often he’d been mugged, of the time when someone had punched him in the head.
Yet I was a New Yorker of a certain vintage. Absolute knowledge of the 1990 murder rate, constituting two thousand two hundred and forty-five deaths, had been tattooed upon the neural pathways of my brain. I’d suffered the crackhead influx, swum the primordial ooze of the Lower East Side and its junkies, bore witness to untold numbers of crime. There were always more dress suits for hire. There was always another bathtub.
My anecdotal and statistical evidence meant nothing to Nash Mac. He knew everything. He always knew everything. After all, darlings, the man worked with computers.
Storming out of Nash Mac’s flat, elemental heat pouring from my eyes, I leapt upon the N Judah. By the time I disembarked, I was laughing at myself, at how lunatic I’d gone with fervor.
If you can believe it, I’d never before had such a heated fight, not with any of my other boyfriends. Not even Ian fucking Covington. I hoped, with every wispy strand of my soul, that I wasn’t in love.
I arrived a
t Steiner House in time to witness Минерва’s bandmates shuffling out of the front door. I’d never spoken with any of them, not the femme chellovecks nor the San Rafael adolescent. They raised their hands to greet me. I motioned back with a royal wave. They turned the corner, heading towards the Upper Haight.
Минерва smoked from her bong in the living room, sitting beside a stack of flyers advertising the next performance of Daddy Was in KGB. Imagining the babushkas plotting official business in my de facto bedroom, I recollected again the indignities of the freeloading houseguest.
“You see girls?” she asked.
“Yes, and your pubescent with them,” I said.
“Nice boy,” she said. “I think loves Нина. Girl does not notice.”
“That’s cute,” I said.
Daddy Was in KGB were scheduled to perform in two weeks’ time at the Night Break, a club on Haight separated by a small space from the bowling alley. The other bands on the bill were The Mecies, Kill Sybil, and The Bottom Feeders. According to a parenthetical note on the flyer, Kill Sybil were from Seattle.
Минерва had invited me to go with her to an event at Night Break called Sushi Sundays, during which the management erected tables and set up an impromptu restaurant. The denizens of San Francisco sat devouring tekka-maki and kappa-maki and were entertained by local punk and metal bands. I’d declined.
Following a few merry-go-rounds with Минерва’s bong and its sweet maryjane, I couldn’t help myself. I spilled the beans about my fight with Nash Mac. “That boy is such a clod,” I said. “You know New York, darling, you’ve been there. You remember what it was like. San Francisco is nothing.”
“Wrong,” said Минерва.
“What?” I asked.
“Wrong idea,” she said. “San Francisco is deadly.”
“We walked over the corpses of junkies! You were a Tompkins Square anarchist!”
“San Francisco is too fresh,” she said. “You are tourist. Sorry, but is true.”
“Two thousand two hundred and forty-five murders in 1990!” I said. “The city elected a fascist because it couldn’t deal with the crime! San Francisco is a liberal paradise with a handful of muggers!”
“No argument,” said Минерва. “We seek truth like explorers. Come, get your coat.”
She brought me down Steiner, over to 14th, across Market on Church past Aardvark Books, over to 18th and Dolores Park, and then on to Mission Street. Our footsteps punctuated only by Минерва’s color commentary. “Never eat at Sparky’s,” she said. “Instant diarrhea. Instant misery. But open late.” Then: “You see church in distance? Where they shoot Vertigo. Alfred Hitchcock. We see screening at Castro. Typical misogynist domination fantasy. Kim Novak shaped by two different men. Winterbloss loves. Says is about depth of obsession and despair. Sure thing.”
The Mission was one locale that I had not fully explored. The dreary place always seemed too much a wasteland, beyond reach and without purpose. Now, in the streetlamps and headlights, it appeared not so very different from the 1980s desolation of the East Village. The human faces and bodies were different but I viiiibed on the crumbling sidewalks and broken pavement.
“We go here,” said Минерва, pointing to a building at the corner of 20th. The neon read HUNT’S QUALITY DONUTS, donut-shaped letters falling into a giant coffee cup. Along the building read the ominous tag: OPEN 25 HOURS A DAY. My heart fluttered, all pitter patter, as I recalled Disco Donuts.
“An extra hour of life,” said Минерва.
You needn’t ask for a description, reader, to conceive of the unsavory characters hanging about on the pavement. It took all types, my sweet nothings. I steeled myself for the catcalling, but through intercession of the Virgin Mother, Минерва and I ran the gauntlet without a word. They didn’t see us. We were the invisibles.
Within the warmth of the restaurant, the human comedy advanced to Act IV. To our left was the serving counter. Tables filled the rest of the restaurant, tables occupied by drunkards, by hollow men, by Latino gangsters, by drug dealers, by the criminal class, by the broken, by the miserable, by the bored, by the extraterrestrial. A layer of smoke hung over the panoply, thick like a fog shroud above the Haight, penetrated by flickering fluorescent light. Oh Lord, thought I, please let my Ruskie friend get to her point.
Минерва surveyed the customers. I ambled to the counter and ordered doughnuts. The poor boy took my order, smiling, made my change, and pushed across mi donas. They appeared day-old and stale, but one never refuses wafers in church. I bit into one of my prizes, rushing with the vile sugar and dough, the taste reaffirming what it meant to be a citizen of these States United.
Минерва extracted a doughnut from my bag. “Him,” she said, biting into the cheap delight. She nodded towards an individual sitting at the back.
He had the appearance of someone’s junky uncle, the kind who’d come for Thanksgiving dinner, shoot up in the bathroom, and then nod off while passing the cranberry sauce. “Man we come for,” said Минерва.
She sat opposite him. I sat beside her. He looked up. The fluorescence made him ashen, a visage like the secret decade that existed between the 1940s and 1950s, where every clock’s hands always pointed to the twenty-fifth hour. “Yes?” he asked.
“We need object,” said Минерва. “You sold me object before, remember?”
“I think I remember you,” he said. “I think I remember you.”
“Yes,” said Минерва. “Great friends. Amigos.”
“What is that you need?”
“A knife,” she said. “Special knife.”
“What’s so special about this knife?”
“I want knife that stabbed a man,” she said. “With blood on blade. Not fresh. Dried blood.”
“That could be hard to come by,” he said.
“Thirty bucks,” she said. “No more, no less.”
He stood and left.
“Eat doughnut,” said Минерва. “We wait.”
“Are you quite certain this man will return?” I asked. “He almost certainly made you for a copper.”
“He comes,” she said, biting into the brown frosting.
Hunt’s Quality Donuts. A hot-stepping hoedown where everything had gone wrong. The bloodshot alcoholic eyes of the other customers. The cheap wine. The disgraced tables. Act V. I’d spent my adult life fetishizing the outré of the urban landscape, indulging in the decay which only an abandoned city can produce, but beneath the smoke and green light of Hunt’s, I experienced a moment of doubt and pain. Whoever these people were, they were not on our side. These people didn’t have a side. They were as distant as the Sahara.
The man returned with a rolled-up towel. He sat across from Минерва and unrolled his package. Surely enough, there was a knife, a serrated blade, with uneven and spotty brown stains along its length.
“You didn’t get this from me,” he said. “I’ll deny it.”
“Sure thing,” said Минерва. Turning to me, she said, “Pay man.”
Not about to refuse a knife-wielding gentleman, I sputtered out a response that died into nothing. I wished she’d told me. I could have had my money ready. Instead, I dug through my purse beneath watchful stares of the criminal class. I counted out the bills.
“Put in purse,” said Минерва, handing me the knife.
The man stood up and rushed out.
“Fucking junkies,” said Минерва. “No manners.”
I finished my second doughnut. We exited Hunt’s. Yes, I suppose, it was impressive that one could buy a blood stained knife in a doughnut shop. The speed certainly was remarkable, taking less time than a delivered pizza. Still, aren’t junkies always stabbing each other? The North American continent was crammed full with knives caked in their victims’ effluvia. Yet I wasn’t about to argue the point with Минерва, knowing that it’s always best to let your landlords win their pyrrhic victories. We must al
low others their idiosyncrasies.
At 17th and Church, whilst Минерва occupied herself with a store window, I dropped the knife into the trash can. As I stepped away, I looked down at the gutter and saw graffiti carved into the pavement by some cad who’d come upon it while the cement was still wet:
BUCK ♥ bAbyDoll
Don’t you know that it gave me the Mississippi boll-weevil blues? It took all my blossoms and left me with an empty square.
Who was Buck? Who was Babydoll? Were they still together? Perhaps they’d always be together, perhaps the permanence of cement meant that their relationship could never end, that theirs would be one of the great love stories.
Yet all great love stories end in tragedy. Héloïse and Abelard, Bonnie and Clyde, Romeo and Juliet, Sid and Nancy, Scott Summers and Jean Grey.
It wasn’t Nash Mac flashing in my head. Nor Jon de Lee. It wasn’t even Ian fucking Covington. Don’t you know, darlings, that I thought of Baby Baby Baby?
BABY ♥ aDelINE
ADELINE ♥ bAby
I heard his voice. “Adeline, stop thinking of me,” he said. “You can’t repeat the past.”
“Can’t repeat the past? Why, of course you can.”
JUNE 1993
Jeremy Makes a Proposition
Jeremy labored from home, stationed at his computer, playing a pre-release of Day of the Tentacle. Weeks passed bathed in the blue glow of his monitor. He reported by telephone and through email. Nash Mac still went into the office, rarely discussing the project. I asked Jeremy to show me the game, to show me the fruits of their struggles.
Using the computer’s mouse, one navigated characters around a très outré mansion. I gathered from Jeremy’s comments that this was rather similar to Maniac Mansion, the game to which Day of the Tentacle served as a sequel.
What separated the latter from the former was the novelty of being able to navigate the mansion through three separate historical eras, these being the American Revolution, the present day, and the far future. The player controlled one character in each time period, passing items between them via an arcane mechanism that involved the flushing of toilets.