by Jarett Kobek
Michael’s cavorting and capering struck Franklin like an epiphany. Connecticut clubs were one thing, but the city held real action. There was a great wide world over the state border. He resolved to find Michael. Which he did, the very next week. Michael loved fresh meat.
I couldn’t ferret out whether or not they’d screwed out each other’s brains. I hoped that they hadn’t. As far as I could tell, I’d managed to avoid sharing any of Michael’s sex partners. Only Venus and Ulysses S. Grant knew what bacteria and viruses haunted that accursed bloodstream.
A few nights after my escapade with Franklin, I read an article in New York magazine about gonorrhea. The disease congregates in a germ pool at the back of the throat. There is no such thing as safer sex. Oral won’t give you AIDS, but dip your dick into a tainted throat pool and it’ll give you the clap.
I obsessed over the idea that Franklin’d given me gonorrhea. Whenever I pissed, I was terrified that it wasn’t urine, that it marked the early formation of pus. But the disease never arrived.
If I were a good person, I’d say that I never saw Franklin again. But I can’t. We were together at least twice a week. It went on for so long. I was screwing his brains out the whole time that Cecil was screwing out mine.
FEBRUARY 1994
Baby Sees Schindler’s List
On the basis of Trapped’s relative success, the film option, a five-thousand-word excerpt, and an outline, Parker had sold my second novel to Bill Thomas at Doubleday. They were happy to have me. I was a young writer building my name. They had faith in my future.
I decided to abandon science fiction and focus on noir. My second novel’s tentative title was In She Walked, Her Legs as Long as Midnight, Her Back as Bold as Brass.
Set in 1950s Los Angeles, the narrative followed the misadventures of Frank Fist, an ex-Marine turned private eye. He’d been hardened at Guadalcanal, soaked in the blood of a thousand Japanese. He brought his brutality home, using it to service his clients’ needs.
The science fiction overlay of Trapped had allowed me to skirt around heterosexuality’s central place within the crime novel. Now, with no practical knowledge of female anatomy or its tactile sensations, I made the leap. The neon jazz bebop of crime writers was an ultraqueer manifestation. They all tried so hard to be butch.
I wrote the most stupidly straight scenes that I could. Here’s a brief excerpt:
She swung her caboose low and easy. With a behind like that, she didn’t need a smart mouth. Every conversation ended when she walked away. Her derrière taunted a man from across the room, making him want to teach peace to the conquered and tame the proud. “Miss Orrin,” I said, “young ladies like you come to the big city and talk a tough game, but you dames are a dime a dozen. One spanking and you cry for papa. Get your sweet kiester over here, Miss Orrin, and let me wipe that lipstick right off your face.”
I eked out twenty thousand words. Things were going fine. I could have finished the book, but I derailed myself. I attended a screening of Schindler’s List at a second-run theater, months after its release.
Within the film’s three hours, there’s an absolutely brilliant work done a disservice by its director’s pedagogical impulse. Over forty-five minutes are wasted making sure that the audience understands that the Holocaust was bad and that Oskar Schindler’s salvation of twelve hundred Jews was good. Why the morality tale? The story is strong. Why the window dressing?
As I’d learned in my brief conversations with Alan Pakula, screenplays are based on an inherent three-act structure. Issues raised in the first twenty minutes of any film must neatly resolve within its final ten. But what about the Holocaust is resolved? There were no ten final minutes, only decades of psychological suffering and historical consequence.
I kept thinking about the German and Polish gentiles, the fathomless millions of goyim who never appear in Schindler’s List, the millions of good citizens who kept on keeping on while their government orchestrated genocide. The average people who didn’t say a word against the crimes. Who couldn’t give two shakes of a stick about the Jews, the gays, the Romany, or the mentally ill.
Twelve hundred lives is a miracle, but six million deaths is cold fact. The consequence of a world placing a premium on capital and technological efficiency. Europe saw it through to its final solution.
But who was I to judge? I didn’t know a thing about the Holocaust, about the suffering of its victims, or about the Nazi regime. My understanding of WWII was cobbled together from a piss-poor public education and the ongoing fiftieth-anniversary commemorations.
I ended up at the Strand, buying as many books as I could carry. Until I stood within the bookstore’s sickly light, peering up at the twelve-foot-tall gray metal bookcases, I didn’t have any idea how many books had been written about the war.
Books on every goddamned subject, from the obvious to the ridiculous. Books about GI rations. Books about German tanks. Stalin. Churchill. Hitler. Roosevelt. Truman. Books about obscure Japanese rituals. Books about Czechoslovakian housewives. Books about the impact of tanks on migratory patterns of North African birds. Books, books, books. Tales of the Luftwaffe. Endless books.
I stuck to titles that I recognized. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Night by Eli Wiesel. Both volumes of Maus. The Boys from Brazil. War as I Knew It. And finally, Eichmann in Jerusalem by Hannah Arendt.
The balding middle-aged cashier blanched when he noticed that every book was about Nazis or the Holocaust. I didn’t mind, but I did feel some sympathy for him, imagining the deranged ones who must come into the store and buy an ungodly number of titles on gruesome subjects. Feeding an obsession through bibliographic mania.
But not me! I was doing research, though by this time it was difficult to discern writing from mental illness. I’d developed the muscle to the point where it no longer required conscious thought. I sat at my computer and the ideas poured out. I could watch it happen.
To sit there and have the words flow out of you, to make characters speak, to move them like chess pieces. It was madness.
Eichmann in Jerusalem. I read it last. A mistake, as it was the best. Hannah Arendt wrote with a naked glass malice that was the only rational response to systemic Teutonic cruelty. Unflinching, without sentiment, cognizant of the paradox of trying Eichmann under the laws of a country that did not exist when he committed his crimes.
When Arendt reached the sui generis case of Denmark, she nailed me. Here is what she writes: “This was one of the few cases in which statelessness turned out to be an asset, although it was of course not statelessness per se that saved the Jews, but, on the contrary, the fact that the Danish government had decided to protect them.”
That one sentence flipped my thinking. The story of the Holocaust was one of bad governance. I’d lived my life hearing about the evils of the government, about the horrors of bureaucracy. A hate and mistrust of the federal government was probably the sole opinion shared by East Village hipsters and farmhand yokels, proving that stupidity and ignorance are constants, regardless of your neighbors.
The only thing that keeps America from fascism is our laws, our courts, our checks and balances. Everything good about American life, and everything bad, is the product of the federal government. In 1787, the world’s staunchest adherents of liberty wrote a Constitution that did not afford the citizenry any protection against being owned by other citizens. In 1860, four million people lived in the shackles of slavery. In 1865, the addition of thirty-two words to the Constitution released those slaves from bondage. The myth of the lone individualist is full-spectrum bullshit permeating all strata of society. It’s a way of disguising personal complicity in the descent of our public life into trifles and nonsense, an excuse for what we’ve let ourselves become. Historically, the enemy has been evil rich people and stupid people. The latter are used by the former, trapping society within a death cycle of pretense, the great myth of an America that flourishes in spite of, rather than because of, her laws. A world in
which the zombified corpse of Ronald Reagan embraces profound and systemic industry deregulation and is followed into the presidency by Bill Clinton, a back-slapping Southern politician who never saw a civil protection that he didn’t detest. Both men abandoned probity, abandoned good thought, abandoned rational thinking, inhaled the jargon-saturated monocultures of Hollywood and Wall Street. Both men well aware that the ability to sparkle on camera could blind an entire nation. Who cared if these rabid animals destroyed the fabric of society? Who cared if the weak and the idiotic were left vulnerable to predators and parasites? A cowboy actor with a chimpanzee sidekick and a philanderer playing his saxophone on late-night talk shows. I’d grown into an adult at the exact moment when society had abandoned adulthood. I’d become a man after everyone had agreed that manhood was a thing without use. Far better to destroy the government. Far better to eradicate the girders of American life while chasing ephemeral dreams of maximum profits and self-regulating free markets. Far better to pretend that Ayn Rand was a prescient genius, that her psychopathic doctrines possessed an actual connection with reality. Far better to shoot enormous wads of jism into dog-eared copies of Atlas Shrugged, an orgasmal cri de coeur for John Galt and Howard Roark. Far better to disguise every ignoble goal in catchphrases, buzzwords, and pop culturalisms that appeal to a mix of the greediest and the least educated. Far better to bamboozle the very people who need protection from the world’s bad actors, those simpletons who always vote and buy against their own self-interest in exchange for whispers about which showbiz phantasm vaginally penetrated other showbiz phantasms. Far better to pander to the Business Community, a self-appointed circlejerk of low IQs in thrall to every bogus investment, who conceive of their fellow citizens as open mouths hungry for nothing but rank diarrhea and runoff, who see every vacant lot and every charming warehouse as an opportunity for miserable low-quality condominiums disguised as luxury living, who are themselves so dazzled by their own bullshit that they gladly eat the same poisons, convinced that their horrors are medicines. The spectacle reflects itself, our lives grow ever more hollow, there is no longer quality or value in modern life. The populace is so badly educated that it doesn’t complain when sold toxic plastics, when goods break four days after purchase, when nothing works. The goat of the woods produces a thousand new monsters who suckle upon her and stalk into the world, their bellies filled with treacherous milk, repeating the process, producing their own young, each generation nourished on less and less substance until the edifice collapses beneath nature’s gentle breeze. Everything ends when the government abandons all responsibility, when lust for power and money replaces the desire to serve one’s fellow citizens. There are no natural rights, no universal and inalienable human liberties. Rights are protections granted to a citizenry by its government. A right comes into existence at the exact moment that its violation is illegal. Not a moment sooner. Laws are reality. When a nation has bad laws, its citizens live in a bad reality. We allow the worst of all creatures to position themselves as our leaders. The kind of men who swindle us, convince us that the word bureaucracy is a pejorative. Bureaucracy is the only thing that saves us from ourselves! Americans can’t see a difference between the government and the state. The government is comprised of the corrupt scum who rule you. The state is the bureaucratic functionary that protects you until it is corrupted by the government. Without a well-functioning state, our rights are bought and sold with as much ease as a new computer. And those rights can be taken away with as little effort, particularly if the people are bewildered away from self-protection. Welcome to an economic cycle of perpetual bust and boom. Welcome to a world where education is devalued and underfunded, leaving the country with a population too stupid to remember the last catastrophe. Welcome to a world where no one can recall the taste of shit. Welcome to an America where McDonald’s is an investment opportunity and a quick buck is of greater value than the people’s health. Civil rights are only another product that is debased and copied and deleted and relayed until nothing remains but a blank piece of paper. Philip K. Dick was wrong. The Empire always ends. Nero’s fiddling is the soundtrack of our collapse. America dies when the integration between her government and her entertainment becomes absolute, when politicians pander without shame to the famous and the few, basing public policy on the opinions of degenerate CEOs and shit-eating rock stars. When powerful men believe that conferred power is less important than naked fame, when they see their elected positions as venues for mindless self-glorification. It all comes back to clubland. America really is a club, and everyone wants to be in the VIP room. Everyone wants to be fabulous. Andy, take my picture.
European Jewry didn’t need Steven Spielberg’s vision of an American individualist dressed in Weimar drag. They needed the same thing that everyone has always needed.
A good government.
I went back to the Strand and bought a copy of Anne Frank’s diary. It wasn’t my first go-round with Annelies. My English teacher had assigned the book during my sophomore year of high school, but I’d been a dopey adolescent preoccupied with his athletics. I didn’t pay attention.
With total clarity that came from having read the other books, I entered the Diary. The tortured cultural history was stripped away. The book made dull by bad teachers, by social piety, by shitty Hollywood adaptations. That was gone. Now the words burned with gunpowder. Her soul reached through the page. That funny voice, that wiseacre girl trapped behind a bookcase in Amsterdam, the fear of it. And all I wanted was to save her.
I called Parker and told him that I’d abandoned my crime novel. I couldn’t do a book about an American who’d gone to the Pacific and came home. That wasn’t the story. The only story was the Holocaust.
He tried talking me out of writing a different book.
—I admire the ambition, he said, but it’s a freaking headache that neither of us needs. You know I’ve got hemorrhoids. They give me pain and complicated shits. I don’t need you mucking about with social issues. You saw what happened to Bret Easton Ellis with American Psycho. People are calling in death threats to Dennis Cooper. Death threats, kid. The country’s changing. No book is worth dying over. I want ambition dripping out of your scrotal sac, sure, but not like this. Have a little scale.
—If I do the book, I asked, will you stand behind me?
—I’ll stand behind you whatever you choose, he said. But it’s a terrible idea. It’ll fuck your whole life.
—It’ll be tasteful, I said. Don’t worry. No one will take offense.
—This is America, you dopey fuck, said Parker. People take offense at a paper bag.
FEBRUARY 1994
Karen Spencer
Cecil introduced me to his best friend, an artist named Karen Spencer. They’d been at NYU together, both enrolled in drama at the School of the Arts. Upon graduation, Cecil descended into the mire of the publishing industry and Karen Spencer fell in with the dissolute louts of the East Village and SoHo art scenes. Her own paintings never had much success, but she’d made fabulous friends and dabbled in selling their work.
Cecil convinced me to visit Karen’s loft on Spring Street. I heard Adeline in my head.
—Baby, why ever would you visit an artist’s loft? Haven’t you spent enough time with those dreadful people? All they do is cover the walls with their own work. Whatever will you say? You’ll have to fake enthusiasm. Can you do that, Baby? Can you fake enthusiasm?
But Karen’s walls were blank. She’d left her space unreconstructed in its industrial chic, not touching the exposed beams and ancient windows. As it was the dead of winter, her loft ran about the same temperature as a Frost Giant’s cavern.
—Come and sit by the heat, she said.
She’d installed several wooden chairs around an oversized space heater. I pulled as close as I could. How the hell had I gotten so sensitive to cold? What happened to that farm boy hardened by Lake Superior?
Karen and Cecil talked. I couldn’t follow what they said. Partly work, par
tly gossip about old friends, partly nonsense refined through a decade of friendship.
—Cecil says you’re working on a new book, said Karen.
—Yes, I said.
—And you write science fiction?
—Not this time, said Cecil. He’s writing a noir.
I hadn’t informed Cecil of the new direction. I let him tell people about a book that I’d abandoned. Correcting him seemed too much effort. What did it matter, anyway? Easier to agree with whatever he said.
—I love crime novels, said Karen Spencer. Do you like David Goodis?
—Goodis is great, I said. What’s your favorite?
—The Blonde on the Street Corner.
—I haven’t read that, I said.
—It’s barely a novel, she said. Mostly it’s broke people who fuck and then fight and then fuck again. You’ll love it.
Karen went to her kitchen and put on a kettle. She poured us cups of tea. The heat thawed my hands, the liquid warmed my innards.
—Baby, asked Karen, have you ever watched The Bold and the Beautiful?
—No, I said.
One thing about a life without Adeline. I’d purchased a television. A big color one. A real television. I’d watched more boob tube in my first six months of ownership than in the previous seven years. Several interesting programs had premiered on the networks. NYPD Blue, The X-Files, Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman.
Generally, though, I kept the thing on Channel 13, on PBS. I stayed as far from The Bold and the Beautiful as I could. A soap opera! My god, no!
—And you, Cecil? asked Karen.
—I work an office job, he said. I’d have to tape it, which I don’t.
—You can see that I don’t own a television, said Karen, which makes it a rare experience. A couple of weeks ago, I was in the waiting room at my doctor’s, and because you can’t go anywhere without there being a blaring television, I was sitting directly beneath the noise. I ignored it, trying to read Entertainment Weekly, but I kept hearing my name. Karen, Karen, Karen, Karen. If you have a name like Karen, you get used to hearing it, so I ignored it. But then the television was saying my full name. Karen Spencer, Karen Spencer, Karen Spencer, and for a second, I thought that I’d lost my marbles, that I’d gone schizo and was hearing voices. I stand up and look at the television and there’s a plotline about this character, Karen Spencer. I ask the receptionist what show we’re watching. She says it’s The Bold and the Beautiful. I ask her if she knows this Karen Spencer character. She has no idea who I’m talking about, so I point to the actress on the screen, and the receptionist says, oh, her, she’s been on for a while. This called for investigation. I went to a newsstand and bought Soap Opera Digest, and it’s full of plotlines about Karen Spencer! I went to the library and looked at old issues. Months and months of Karen Spencer.