Friends and Traitors

by Jarett Kobek

  I don’t deny that the mechanism was clever, and the graphics impressed in their Tex Avery style, but I only played about as long as I could manage, which was somewhat under thirty minutes.

  Jeremy found his computer sitting idle and myself returned to the living room. “You didn’t like the game?” he asked.

  “Darling, I didn’t dislike it,” I said, “but it’s someone else’s cup of tea. One thing did surprise me.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The attempts at humor. Are all games like that?”

  “All LucasArts games are funny,” he said. “Except for Loom. Loom was moody.”

  “How very remarkable,” I said. “Nash Mac is less interested in humor than any boy that I’ve ever dated. Yet there he sits toiling, day and night, on D.O.T.T.”

  “Computer people are weird,” said Jeremy, “I have no idea what I’m doing with my life.”

  Jeremy wasn’t like Nash Mac. Technology wasn’t in his blood.

  “To be honest,” he said, “I kind of hate it.”

  “Why don’t you do something else?” I asked.

  “I have an idea,” he said.

  He went in his bedroom and returned with a sheaf of papers and several notebooks. He laid them on the floor. “Look through them,” he said, but I demurred, suggesting that he play docent and give me a tour. I didn’t dare make my own journey through that voluminous body.

  Jeremy had dreamt up a comic about a society of anthropomorphic cats. The first ten issues would follow one family through history, from primitive sabretooth origins to a late medieval period. Each of these early issues would focus on one cat interacting with the troubles of their world. Some would be high adventure, others snapshots of historical domesticity. By the tenth issue, in which we meet Felix Trill, the series’ main protagonist, it is apparent that the previous cats have been incarnations of the same soul, the soul which now inhabits Trill’s body.

  From issue ten, the narrative follows Trill as he goes on a winding adventure through the medieval world. Jeremy had yet to plot out that adventure, but if the time ever came, he’d work off of patterns in the previous nine issues. The details, he was sure, would emerge from his cranial lobes.

  “With the way the direct market works,” said Jeremy, “all you have to do is publish with a splash. Everything is print to order, and the orders are nonreturnable. I know Dave Sim. He said that if I ever get anything together, he’ll run a preview in the back of Cerebus, which means orders in the thousands, if not higher. It’s like minting money, except you’re also creating work. I know that I can make this happen.”

  “So why not?” I asked.

  “I need an artist,” he said, with a finality that gave me the fear.

  “You should make it a love match with your lady,” I said. “Her line work has gotten very fine.”

  “Минерва has no interest,” said Jeremy. “Plus, she couldn’t follow through. I was thinking about you, actually.”

  There was the long conversation and the hard sell. I resisted. I did not believe in art. I did not want to be an artist. As much as I had enjoyed my brief dalliance with the wonderful world of comics, I couldn’t be interested in a full-time gig. I’d seen Grant Morrison, seen Jill Thompson, even seen poor old Steve Yeowell. I didn’t want to be a rock star, didn’t want to be surrounded by acolytes, didn’t want to be stalked at raves by would-be writers. I was so old, reader. All I wanted was for the world to leave me alone. I wanted to grow aged, obscurely in obscurity, my final days spent in a nursing home flushed with golden light. I didn’t want anyone to know my name. I didn’t want people expecting things.

  “There’s no point,” I said. “Art is meaningless.”

  “I figured you might say that,” said Jeremy. “There’s one last thing I want to show you.”

  He went back into his bedroom and this time returned with a little booklet printed on 8 x 11-inch sheets of paper, folded in half and stapled together. Right away, my peepers spotted it for what it was. Someone’s zine. Jeremy pushed the booklet upon me.

  I looked at the front page and in my shock I saw it. Very familiar lettering surrounded by the line drawing of a bathtub:

  DRESS SUITS ON FIRE

  “What in the holy high hell goddamn!” I said.

  “I bought it at Bound Together,” he said.

  “This isn’t original,” I said. “It must be a Xerox of a Xerox. Of a Xerox.”

  “I asked at the store,” he said. “New copies get mailed in every six months. You made this thing, what, five years ago? Somebody was moved enough to keep it in print. And Adeline, it’s good. It’s really good. You’re letting everything go to waste.”

  There I was, back again, on the street looking up at rotting plastic and an aging tuxedo.

  I attended a screening of Sliver at the Galaxy Theatre, a monstrosity of a building with enormous screens and a functionless yet delicious glass lobby presumably constructed as salve to the architect’s ego.

  When I moseyed on over to see the film, I hadn’t the slightest that it starred Sharon Stone. Watching her thrash around in a bathtub, I couldn’t help but think of her previous flicker, another scandal du jour titled Basic Instinct, which had provoked insanity in the American nation by featuring a brief intimation of Stone’s outer labia. A great deal of that film takes place in a club based on Limelight.

  Sliver convinced me that there were no standards for cultural products. Jeremy’s hard sell had left me worried about working on a project released for public consumption, worried that if I said yes, we’d make something that wasn’t up to snuff.

  I’d been measuring myself against expectations of the Good. Sliver taught me that I had the idea backwards. It’s never a matter of being good. One needn’t be good. This is America! There are no standards. Nothing is good. One needn’t be good, one only need be no worse than anything else. One only need be as bad as Sliver.

  “You win, amigo,” said I to Mr. Winterbloss. “I’m yours if you’ll have me. Fetch me my ink and my paper.”

  Jeremy’d decided that the comic would be black and white, and he’d concluded that we must have at least three issues completed before he initiated the business end. Independent comic books, he said, worked best when the issues came out on a regular monthly schedule. The road to Rome was lined with promising projects that had fallen apart because of creators unable to stick to a schedule. If I drew sixty-six pages and three covers, it’d keep us from a false start.

  Jeremy’s scripts were an especial torture, as his descriptions were massively elaborate yet exceptionally vague.

  PAGE ONE, PANEL ONE: WE SEE A BIPEDAL SABRETOOTH CAT EXPLORING AN UNCONQUERED WORLD, BLEAK IN ITS EXPANSE, OVERPOWERING IN ITS ENORMITY. THE UNIVERSE SHIMMERS ALONG ITS MICROCOSMIC/MACROCOSMIC SPLIT. WE SEE IT ALL IN THE CAT’S POSTURE.

  “Jeremy, darling, what in the world do you mean?” I asked. “How could a person draw such a thing?”

  “You’re the artist! Figure it out, Adeline!”

  Much of my time was spent in the reading room of the Park Branch Library. I’d walk over to Paige Street with my paper and pencils, station myself, and dig through the tomes for reference imagery.

  I reeked of ambition when I started, developing an intricate and controlled line, but soon discovered that precision made it impossible to produce pages with anything like due speed. I simplified my style, focusing on the fluidity of line, going cartoony on the figure work while maintaining a level of detail with the backgrounds. I inked in heavy blacks, the density undercutting the saccharine cuteness.

  Those weeks disappeared, eaten by my process. Drawing, café, library, Nash Mac. Repeat, repeat, repeat! Repeat! Soldier on, O Dear Adeline!

  One of San Francisco’s street people took up late-night residence on Steiner Street. This ne’er-do-well arrived each and every around 1 am, heralded by the telltale sound of his shopping cart, and spent several hours screaming out non sequiturs. Many times he went on and on and on and on about foo
d products. Other times he remarked upon traffic regulations.

  I dreamt of drawing, dreamt of the cat people. One dream, in particular, stood out, and I included it in issue #2. You’ll find the transmuted sequence, darlings, on page 13, where the cat people are standing before an obelisk.

  In the dream, I watched from a far distance, their backs turned until one noticed my presence. The rest followed its lead. A sea of cats’ eyes, green and blue.

  What you won’t see on the page, however, is that the central cat was looking at me with the eyes of good ol’ Patrick Geoffrois, my dashingly bizarre Frenchman, the blackest magician in the Lower East Side.

  Patrick was the greatest freak with whom I’d ever made an acquaintance, and he had arrived at the very moment when I needed a friend disconnected from my past and with whom there was a total absence of romantic tension.

  Baby had taken an instant dislike to my pal, convinced that I’d turned acolyte of the dark arts, crushed by Aleister Crowley. Poor Baby! It was beyond his mortal ken that one could vibe on magickal aesthetics without believing a single word.

  The people who one meets are so dreadfully boring, aren’t they? Whatever criticisms you might lob at M. Geoffrois, the man never bored. He was a traveling circus, clad in black and dressed in the gaudiest baubles that ever bubbled.

  Missing the man, I sent him a few postcards. He never wrote back.

  JULY 1993

  Daddy Was in KGB Gets a Good Review

  A bright moment occurred when the Bay Guardian featured Daddy Was in KGB as “Demo Tape O’ The Week.” Минерва rushed into the apartment, her pale face flushed with ruddy color. It was the first time in our friendship where she’d displayed unbridled enthusiasm. She seemed positively American.

  With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the evaporation of Communism, it wasn’t a question of “if?” but of “when?” and “where?” I’m happy to report that the when is now and the where is here. Daddy Was in the KGB, a S.F. punk outfit made up of four women who’ve escaped the former Soviet States, offers a headcrunching, genre-bending response to the last few years of realpolitik. Songs like “Sergey Kirov Makes Fuck in Karl Marx” and “Do It in Your NKVDs” warp the mind and offer a PhD-level education in Russian history and American consumerism. A shiver went up my spine when I heard lead vocalist Minerva Krylenko’s bloodcurdling cry of “Messerschmitt fire at Leningrad, made blood in ground plan, don’t have cow, man!” The instrumentation is simple but effective, reminding us that those boys from Seattle and Portland may have “rediscovered” something that never went away.

  ALEX LASH

  Send tapes to Demo Tape, Bay Guardian, 520 Hampshire, S.F., CA 94110.

  “I hadn’t the slightest that you’d recorded a demo,” said I.

  “Secret well kept,” she said. “Band agreed not to tell. Next we press 7-inch.”

  We were all imbibing at Mad Dog in celebration. I watched those wild Russian girls running up and down, acting as if they’d won the Nobel Prize in economics. Even the drummer showed his chubby little face. Despite looking as if he’d crawled straight from the crib, the bartenders didn’t ask for proof of his age.

  Two beers into the evening and the child became sullen. Минерва and I engaged him in conversation, but it was like extracting teeth with pliers. After his fourth drink, it emerged that the article had hurt his feelings, as it had presumed that he was both a girl and a Soviet. He was especially peeved that the reviewer had misrepresented the band’s name, throwing in the decidedly un-Russian definite article.

  The young lad spent the night under the kitchen table, waking me at 4 am with the sounds of his vomit splattering against the ancient toilet. Doesn’t this child, says me to meself, have parents?

  JULY 1993

  D.O.T.T. Goes Gold

  Day of the Tentacle went gold and shipped. Nash Mac blossomed into a sweeter person, a massive tension released from his body, as if he’d shrugged off the terrible weight. To mark the occasion, we went to the Tonga Room, where we became unspeakably tight, and then walked back to his apartment. From Nob Hill to the Sunset, across three blotto hours. Inhaling the city, languishing under its burdens.

  Near Van Ness, we met a homeless woman, reasonably well dressed, only a few years older than I. She was pressed against a building, begging for change. I slipped her a dollar. The poor thing started singing an off-key version of “She Loves You” by The Beatles.

  Any song but that! What if Nash Mac read meaning into the lyrics?

  I’d such a wonderful time, rutting in the Sunset, that I telephoned him at work the next day, suggesting we meet again. He told me to amble on over around 8 pm, which was fine with yours truly, as I was planning to spend the day at The Owl and Monkey.

  Nash Mac’s rented house was not very far from the ocean, a two-bedroom installation with a roommate who was never home. I let myself in. Yes, darlings, we’d progressed to the point where I had my own key.

  The lights were off. Stepping into the living room, I presumed that the boy was not at home. Then I heard the breathing from the couch and saw him curled up like a foetus that’s survived its own abortion. He may well have been crying, but I didn’t dare investigate, fearful of producing emasculation.

  “Nash Mac?” I asked.

  “My whole life,” he said, “my whole life is over.”

  “How’s that, brother?”

  He’d arrived at work, late, and come upon his co-workers playing the leaked 0.5 alpha of a forthcoming game called DOOM, which was published by iD Software. iD’s earlier work on Wolfenstein 3D was revolutionary, but Nash Mac intuited from this early version of DOOM that a massive leap had been made. This was the big one, he said, the one that would cleave the past from the future, and it was clear that his division at LucasArts was on the wrong side of history. “No one will play adventure games in five years. No one. I don’t like any other games. What am I going to do?”

  Yours truly lacked the proper vocabulary to make a convincing argument. What was an alpha release? What was an adventure game? So I thought about it for a moment and then decided to work in generalities, best to discuss life at the end of the American Century.

  “You must realize,” said I, “that you’re talking with a person who believes that we live in a society which is completely off its rocker. We’ve spent fifty years, at least, pretending in the supremacy of technology. All we’ve received in return is screens to stare into and cars that poison the environment. Technology, dear heart, will never save any of us. It may make some number of us richer, but to what end do you put that money? To buy more technology. I wouldn’t worry. If you make one kind of game or another, it won’t change a single thing. You’re still distracting people from their lives. It’s all a con. America is the greatest con, and the most perverse. America is a con that America runs on itself. I’ve spent my whole life being told about the things that I should want and the things that should matter. Yet I’m old enough to know that none of it matters. None of it has ever mattered. I don’t care about Harvard. I don’t care about wealth. I don’t care about prestige. I don’t care about the ambitions of the upper middle classes and those who are desperate to scramble into it. My heroes are drag queens and drug addicts. My heroes die at twenty-seven. I’m older than them now, darling, so not only am I a failure but also a full hypocrite.”

  In bang-on fashion, batting a thousand for sensitivity, this was the worst thing that I could have said. He withdrew even further into his protective cocoon, curling tighter.

  “It’s all over,” he said. “It’s all fucking over.”

  Vulnerability always was one of Adeline’s turn-ons. The weaker the sob sister, the more I wanted to sleep with him, the more I wanted to help him maintain his eroding macho status.

  I rummaged through Nash Mac’s kitchen, making him some oatmeal with fresh strawberries and a dash of honey. I wouldn’t see him this upset again until he frittered away hours attempting an install of Slackware 1.0 on his spare 386SX,
only to discover that the last three of his twenty-four 3½-inch floppies were useless with bad sectors.

  “Eat this,” said I. “The heat will help.”

  OCTOBER 1993

  Adeline Receives a Postcard

  I should have learned from Emil. I should have learned from Daddy. I should have learned from Baby. The universe had sent me the message three times, as plain as possible. Adeline, it said, Adeline, don’t ever take too much pleasure in anything. It’s when things seem their best, Adeline, said the universe, that I’ll fuck you up the most. Adeline, don’t get arrogant. Adeline, stay far from hubris.

  I ignored the obvious and let myself be happy. I’d finished my sixty-six pages and three covers. When I reached page 40, Jeremy started working his connections. He’d asked Dave Sim if we could preview in the back of Cerebus. Sim said yes, whenever we wanted, simply send him the pages. He’d even connected us with a cheap printer, Preney Print and Litho of Windsor, Ontario. Everything was set. We were ready. We even had a name: Trill.

  Jeremy’d taken leave from LucasArts. He was checking the post every day, like clockwork, waiting to receive formal notice from several distributors. We’d developed a tiny routine, him retrieving the mail and myself waiting for the good news.

  Then, on that night, he came into the living room. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “What is it?” I asked. “Is it Diamond? Was there bad news?”

  “No,” he said. “It’s this. It’s for you.”

  It was a postcard with a picture of the Empire State Building on its front, the kind of cheap item that one bought for pennies in Times Square. I flipped it over. Patrick’s wife’s handwriting.

  Oct. 2

  Hello Adeline,

  Your friend Patrick died on September 12th. He had a stroke.

  “New York is calling one back home. It’s time to ramble,” I said, the words cutting across the roof of my mouth as they made their terrible way out. Goodbye, California, goodbye.