by Jarett Kobek
—So everything’s copacetic? I asked.
—Things are beyond copacetic, you poof, said Parker. I had a girlfriend who couldn’t pronounce epitome. She kept calling it epi-tome. Like some crazy Greek fuckbook. Things aren’t the epitome of copacetic. They’re the fucking epi-tome. We’re set and ready to go.
—All right, I said. I’m deliriously drunk and I need to feed my cat.
—I’ll call you tomorrow, he said. They’re gonna kill us for this, but it’ll be such a glorious fucking death.
I took The King of France into my lap. He flopped on his back, showing me his snowy gut. Having never had a mother, and being exiled from his siblings, the kitten had never learned any normal cat behaviors. He didn’t enjoy being pet, but he loved being slapped on his stomach.
He purred as hard as I’d ever heard. The weakness of alcohol came upon my body. I felt so fucking lonely. I’d made it as an author, I’d gotten where I’d wanted, but in the end, I didn’t have anybody. I’d fucked up my friendships, fucked up my love life. The best that I had was Franklin. Back to that dead awful sensation of my first day in New York, the complete and absolute freedom of having no human attachments. I’d escaped the American Middle West and it still felt awful. I was a member of the 7th Regiment, stationed at Petersburg, hoping not to die.
I called Franklin.
AUGUST 1994
Reunion
I’d been listening to Dion and the Belmonts. My favorite song was “Little Diane,” an up-tempo number with very dark lyrics about Dion wanting revenge upon a two-timing woman, but also admitting that his desire for vengeance is the only mask that can suppress his pain. The song’s unique feature comes in its instrumentation, with a kazoo as the lead instrument. You’d think that this would kill the song, but somehow a child’s toy gives it an ultra-modern sound.
The Greatest Hits of Dion and the Belmonts was one of the first CDs that I’d purchased. I’d given over to the new technology, liking the clarity of sound and the smallness of the individual unit. I didn’t own many LPs, but whenever I moved them, it was like carrying a solid ton of material.
While writing Saving Anne Frank, I’d bought a six-disc changer so that I could listen to solid hours of music. I’d never been particularly interested in music, even as a devotee of the club, an environment in which you were supposed to have favorite DJs and all this other unmemorable crap, but I had discovered one kind of music that I truly loved. Old pop and soul from the 1950s and 1960s. This material was being re-released on CD, so I was spending every Saturday down in the Village, digging through the racks.
Then there was the time when I was thinking about Sam Cooke. Unable to get “That’s Where It’s At” out of my head, I went to Bleecker Bob’s with the hope of finding more material. I came across an import of a Japanese CD, Live at the Harlem Club, 1963. I’m not big on live recordings, and it was pricey because it was from Nippon. But what the hell, I said, it’s Sam Cooke. If you can’t trust Sam Cooke to be good, is there anything you can trust?
Sam Cooke is always good. “Bring It On Home to Me” was my favorite song. It’s the best song ever recorded. And the saddest.
The young man behind the register, who looked as if he’d made a habit out of avoiding sex, gave me the once-over. He couldn’t believe that some swish guy in gross clothes with an obvious yuppie attitude had enough taste to buy this album. I could hear the question that he wanted to ask: Are you sure you don’t want some Pearl Jam?
I’d changed, I’d evolved past the Village, evolved past record store clerks. I was something else.
Still, I always loved the NYU stomping grounds. On MacDougal, I drank an iced espresso in Caffè Reggio, sitting in the alcove by the bathroom. Beneath a cheap bust of Nefertiti. I’d brought a book. A Prayer for Owen Meany, by John Irving. I read about 100 pages, going blind from the titular character’s dialogue, which appears IN ALL CAPITALS. Other than this typographical oddity, I liked the novel just fine. I liked everything by John Irving.
I walked through the park, passing the homeless guys playing ultra-abusive games of chess. There were more drug dealers than I remembered. Each said the same thing. Smoke, smoke, smoke.
One of New York City’s great mysteries is the fountain in Washington Square. You can never predict when it’ll be turned on. As I moved toward the center of the park, I could see the water blasting skyward. It was one of the lucky days.
A crowd had formed around the pool. Half-naked teenage girls sat on the upper ring, their feet dangling into the water. Parents let their infant children splash around. A guy played an out-of-tune guitar and sang off-key.
I watched for a little while. Then I heard a girl calling my name.
—Baby Baby Baby!
I shuddered inside, not wanting to deal with a club person in the blinding clarity of late-summer sunlight. But what could I do? I turned. And there she was. And there she was. And there she was. And. there. she. was.
Adeline.
—Adeline? I said.
—Baby, she said.
We hugged. I held her too long. She tried squirming out of my arms. I wouldn’t let her go. She’d put on weight. She didn’t feel like a skeleton.
—Baby, she said, please. I can’t breathe.
—If I let you go, are you going to run away? I asked.
—You’ll remember that I’m the one who called you.
I let her go. Her face was red. She took in a deep breath.
—I don’t come to the park very often, I said. I live up in the mid-30s.
—I started making my appearance only a few weeks ago, she said. It’s a pleasant enough exercise. One does what one can to stave off boredom.
—Where are you living? I asked.
This question may have given away more than I wanted. It presumed that I knew she wasn’t living on East 7th Street. I’d haunted the old block on several occasions, hoping to catch a glimpse of Adeline. I never did. Finally, I encountered this old Ukrainian lady who lived on the ground floor of our building and asked if she’d seen Adeline. The Ukrainian said that Adeline had moved out.
—The same old place, said Adeline. I’m serving a life sentence on East 7th.
—No kidding, I said.
Adeline couldn’t even look at me. She kept staring at other people’s children.
I saw the conversation ending in five minutes, with us maybe running into one another on the street every couple of years. As if we’d never been real friends. I swallowed my pride, my everything.
—Adeline, I said. I’m sorry.
—Don’t be sorry, she said. I’m the one who should apologize.
—It’s all my fault, I said. I fucked everything up.
—I’ve wasted the last two years blaming myself, she said.
I hugged her again. I didn’t care if she couldn’t breathe. I loved her so goddamned much.
—Put me down! she cried. For God’s sake, man, get some control over your impulses.
—Adeline, I asked, can it go back to how it was?
—You can’t move into my apartment, she said.
—That’s not what I meant, I said. I want to be friends again. I want to go back to how we were.
—Me too, she said.
—But, Adeline, I said, you can’t repeat the past.
—What do you mean you can’t repeat the past? she asked. Of course you can.
Everything would be fine again, everything would resume where it left off. But that was a crazy fantasy. Things left off horribly. It was a nice thought, a reassuring moment. A point of adolescent reversion.
A child in a stroller started crying for its mother. I was about to say something to Adeline about irresponsible parents who inflicted their miserable kids on the world, but she wasn’t there.
She picked up the crying child. She carried the crying child to me.
—Baby, she said, meet my son. Meet Emil Mahmoud.
AUGUST 1994
Reunion, Part Two
I’ll beg your
indulgences as I simply flood you with information, that new currency of our twenty-first century. Very many things transpired betwixt my San Francisco departure and the decade’s halfway mark. I’ve gossip to dish, you lovely creatures, and I suppose that you must be dying to hear about Emil Mahmoud and his big daddy Nash Mac and my procreative urges and how yours truly found herself embalmed by motherhood.
As you might imaginate, it started in simple innocent pleasure, with Nash Mac screwing out my brains. Please believe me when I say that I ain’t one of those foolish simps who adopts an inactive role in her own contraception. I insisted, each time, that Nash Mac wrap his Johnny within a rubber, whilst also personally deploying many a liberal squirt of spermicidal gel.
When my period ran late, I thought nothing of it. You’ll remember the dreary months following my contretemps with Baby. Only natural, wasn’t it, to assume that faulty plumbing had forced another work stoppage. As it turns out, I’m one of those rare women blessed with a lack of morning sickness.
I maintained my starred-eyed ignorance until month three. ’Round then, I came to the misbegotten notion that, Great God All Mighty, I might be carrying a child!
By that point, I’d reestablished residence on East 7th Street, evicting Luanna’s friend and retrieving my useless possessions. I had presumed that a return to NYC would be as pleasant as a four-automobile highway massacre, so imagine the surprise when excitement burst beneath my skin as I stomped down from the L train at Third Avenue. When I saw the dome of St. George’s, why, a jolt of pure joy rose in my breast!
Luanna’d begun grumbling about how I must learn to use a computer, as daft an idea as any I’d heard. “Things are changing,” she said. “It’s a cutthroat business and the newest knives are digital.” I’m positively certain that you’ll understand why I gave up illustration and chose to focus on Trill.
I didn’t give a jot or tittle about the business end of comics, trusting that Jeremy could handle matters. Winterbloss suggested letting a third party take care of distribution. He arranged a last-minute deal with Image Comics, a company founded by some of the biggest brutes in the whole dirty funnybook bizness, men like Todd McFarlane and Robert Liefeld.
Those boys had established Image as a response to the ghetto work-houses of Marvel and DC, focusing their new company on creator-owned projects and constructing a framework by which the individual might release her work upon the world. The company took the upfront, asking for zero stake in the intellectual property, an arrangement unprecedented in human history.
Jeremy’s connection was Jim Valentino. They’d dealt with each other, briefly, whilst working on an issue of The Official Marvel Index to the Avengers.
Winterbloss reasoned that with our promotional debut in Cerebus and Image’s place of pride in Diamond’s Previews catalogue, we would establish a fairly meaningful beachhead. If business with Image proved unpalatable, then we could dump the company and self-publish on the strength of the material and the launch.
Everything was swellegant. Yet you’ll remember, darlings, that when life is at its most swellegant those who are doomed to live it will most often cock the thing up.
My breasts swelled. My stomach protruded. My emotions veered into the erratic.
All of this seemed cotton-pickin’ peculiar and far beyond the elementary discomfort of a long overdue period. Don’t you know that the idea arrived fully formed like Pallas Athena? Adeline, said my brain, what if you’re pregnant?
O, God no! says I to myself. How could it be? The only man who’d given me the time was Nash Mac, and it seemed impossible that anything about the fellow, let alone his DNA-infused spermatozoa, possessed the gumption to survive a heady mix of latex and Nonoxynol-9.
I purchased two pregnancy tests at a grocery store on Avenue A that was built into the crumbling remains of an old RKO movie house. I had no other items of acquisition. The woman behind the cash register proffered an all-too-knowing glance. A lesser person would have wilted under her disapproval, descending into all six forms of Judeo-Christian shame.
Yet you know me, darlings. I’d read somewhere about a custom during the Middle Ages called The Beggar’s Tribute. Kings and other nobles took no vengeance upon any beggar who dared insult them, believing a beggar’s voice to be his only coinage and his insults the only tribute that he might pay. A beggar’s insults marked one as a person of distinction.
This grocer woman was no different. Let her stare down my slutting ways, let her examine the “A” branded into my cheek. That’s what beggars do before their betters.
I made water upon the first test. Not examining its result, I made water upon the second. I waited a good ten minutes before consulting both.
+. The double +. +.+. ++. Ne plus ultra. My fertile womb, my jolly unborn child. +++++++++++++++++++++.
A baby was so much work. A baby was so much money. A baby would change everything. Life would never be sane again. All those dreadful little clichés. I was acting positively plebeian!
The enormous debate. Whether or not to keep the thing. Yet there ain’t much suspense in that regard, is there, oh reader? You know that the babe was born. Little Emil may be many things, but we shan’t count him as the sole known example of spontaneous human generation.
I’d floated through life vowing that if I ever had suffered the misfortune of being knocked up, I’d dilate-and-scrape quicker than two shakes of an epileptic’s fist.
I’d known some very dubious young sophomores and juniors who conflated abortion with birth control. How many friends from Crossroads had I driven to Planned Parenthood? I never judged, never saw it as anything other than an operation. Many of the girls were shell-shocked by their visit to the clinic. Their rationality of choice could not outweigh the emotional imbalance.
They resided in a country that heaped ashes of guilt upon their heads, victims of a misbegotten religious society which framed the argument through a bogus feint towards the inherent sanctity of all life. What egregious nonsense! The sheer hypocrisy is revealed by anyone who spends twenty minutes walking through any major American city, any person who speaks with the country’s destitute and its broken, with its homeless. People smeared in their own filth, reeking of acidic urine, destroyed by mental illness. Life was sacred, old boy, but only so long as it remained within a woman’s womb. Once the damned creatures crawled from the primordial uterine ooze, then it was a battle for every cent and every breadcrumb. There are no handouts in America! Everyone must operate their own bootstraps! Three cheers for a decrease in the surplus population!
This says nothing of the poor abused mothers. Girls doomed by social pressure into the wrong decision. Their fragile lives ruined by the phantasmal promise of sanctified motherhood. Those who are miseducated from their early months, told of the beatific glow of motherhood, only to be thrust deep into the bowels of poverty.
Abortion is a social good, but you’ll never hear tell of that particular notion. Our country is addicted to its own lies. Even the so-called pro-choice wing of the national dialogue will not publicly admit the truth. At last some mouth must give it an utterance, so I suppose it shall be yours truly. Abortion is a grand thing.
For me, myself, I considered the operation in the stewing mess of my own life. I’d spent years running towards the weird, shunning the normal. And it hadn’t gotten me very far, had it? I drew a comic book about anthropomorphic cats, and I spent a good many days listening to Astral Weeks, but there wasn’t much to show, was there? What if the only path forward was through an embrace of family?
The situation itself suggested that I might not want to tempt fate’s vagaries. If this particular sperm, of all the billions, had survived its many travails, then surely it must be a special thing, a creature desperate to be born. It struck me that the universe was giving me a sign.
You’ll be charitable enough to remember that the pregnancy went three months without discovery. My body had flooded itself with hormones designed to cloud judgment and commandeer my thinking
. The fetus protected through biochemical manipulation of its mother.
I telephoned Nash Mac.
I’d dumped him in San Francisco. That news hit with a rough shock. He sunk so low as to suggest following me to New York. I’d given this half-baked notion a complete veto. “Dear boy,” I’d said, “don’t you know that you’re a San Francisco person? A California kid? You can’t come live in New York. It simply won’t do, old sport. It won’t do!”
Nash Mac pointed out that Fairfax, Virginia, was significantly closer to New York than Pasadena, and that thus, perhaps, he had more of a genuine connection with the East Coast. Acrimony ensued. He accused me, as most men eventually do, of never really knowing him. It hit me as it always does, but what can a person say when they’re escaping a scene and going back to their once upon a time? I cut the apron strings and said good-bye.
Now imbued with the news that he was a father-to-be, Nash Mac moved to New York. Nothing could keep him from his child, and, one supposes, myself. He asked no permission, but in fairness, the pregnancy had me befuddled enough that when he arrived at JFK, I waited by his gate and brought him into my arms and my bed.
He’d taken an extended leave from LucasArts, summoning his inner Daniel and reading MENE MENE TEKEL UPHARSIN. He’d arranged employ at Enteractive Inc., a third-rate outfit on West 40th Street. Despite the many times that he attempted description, I could not understand the nature of his job. I presumed that he was hired as a result of his infinitesimally tangential association with George Lucas.
Had it lasted, I’ve no doubt that he would’ve proposed marriage.
I managed a month and a half before his tender ministrations drove me to distraction. I cut the cord, again. In the seemingly endless fight, he held his move to New York over me, suggesting I hadn’t expressed gratitude for his performance of an action that I hadn’t requested.