by Jarett Kobek
There’s a moment when the male protagonist’s life has gone tits up. His lady’s been killed, and he’s transubstantiated her into a zombie, a plan that works out rather poorly.
At his lowest moment, given over to despair, our hero is hiding in a sewer. He engages a homeless vagabond in conversation. The young man tells his newfound friend all about his hopes and his dreams. He wants to go to Seattle, to join a band, to be a drummer. Everything’ll be cool once we’re in Seattle, he says.
You’ll recall that the film was shot during one of those appalling moments when the spectacle has found itself a new youth movement. The world was lousy with bands from Seattle. Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, Mother Love Bone, Temple of the Dog, Tad, Screaming Trees. Sub Pop Records.
O Jesu Cristo, protect me from such demons!
What’s saddest about III is imagining its creative fulmination, the moment when its director, Brian Yunza, and its scriptwriter, John Penney, read an article in the New York Times about the latest craze with the kiddies and envisioned making their film fresh, with real cultural currency. And where did these men land? On a boy who longs for Seattle whilst his zombie girlfriend takes up the hobby of body piercing.
No one is worse than the oldest person at a punk rock show.
That was Baby. Clubbing had not been kind. It never was. The spectacle of a successful young author trapped in his own desire for relevance, believing that he must, at all costs, keep up with people ten years younger.
Since our reunification, I’d concluded that life was, indeed, a repeating cycle. I’d convinced him to stop sleeping with that mysterious little toad named Franklin, but it’d left Baby lonely, and brought us back to where we’d started. I spent my spare time wondering how I might fix Baby with a nice boy.
APRIL 1995
Baby and Adeline Go to Norman Mailer’s House
During one of my more addlepated phases, I sallied forth under the delusion that perhaps one could make friends with those undergoing the same maternal experiences as one’s lonesome. I even joined a support group of new mothers, following a recommendation from Emil’s pediatrician.
Alack, most of the group tended to be rather boooooooring and soooo stiflingly conventional. You should have heard their complaints, reader! They fixated upon the awful jobs of their miscreant husbands. Otherwise it was sore nipples and the inability to find the right toys. Their braying wore on the nerves. I absconded after a few months, more than happy to be left alone with my comic book cats.
The only other freak of our little group was a raven-haired woman named Frances Washington, who hailed from the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations. Never quite confined by the smallest state’s definitions of life for a poor girl living in Smith Hill, she’d graduated from Classical and matriculated to RISD on scholarship. She did her graduate degree at Parsons. Her current employ came as an in-house graphic designer for NBC, at the General Electric building in Rockefeller Center.
She too was one of those unwed mothers about whom so much hay was made in the mass media. As was I. If you can believe it, your old pal Adeline had joined the sole demographic which all of America had decided it could hate. Single mothers! Yet Frances had it worse. At least my crimes occurred within the rubric of Whiteness.
Our status as wanton strumpets provided common ground, giving Frances and I many a thing to talk about. Or tawk about, as she’d never lost all traces of her native accent.
I’d asked her if, as Baby contended, Rhode Islanders were the only people besides Wisconsinites who used the word “bubbler” as a noun for drinking fountains. To my shock, she said yes, yes, Rhode Islanders drink water from bubblers.
We shared a general paranoia about leaving our children with strangers. During the day, Frances deposited her child with an understanding aunt from Queens, giving Miz Washington two hours of daily commute.
At night, she lacked a good option. “I just can’t do it,” she said. “I’d rather be single the rest of my life than leave Danielle with a sitter.”
One night, stuffing our faces with undercooked pizza, we examined our parallel situations and made a pact. As she was ensconced up in the badlands of Gramercy, not so very far from 7th Street, we would pool our resources and mind the other’s child whenever Mommy needed a night.
Thus it was on a fated Friday, somewhere in April, when I escorted Emil to East 19th Street. Frances answered the door, clad in paint-stained clothes. “I’ve been back at the canvas again,” said she. “I need to work on something that isn’t paying my rent.”
“You simply must take up comics,” I said. “No one ever earns real money in my dirty little industry.”
Frances showed me her canvas. A tableau evidencing deep traces of the medieval. A woman in the garret of a tiled, multitiered Moorish tower. A half-human, half-frog strapped to a table. The woman uses an impossibly arcane instrument to measure the monster’s limbs. On the shelves are beakers full of variegate liquids. Twisting blue smoke rises from a candelabra made from a waxy human hand.
“Whatever is it titled?” I asked.
“Nagasaki/Hiroshima: After Remedios Varo for the Tutsi Peoples.”
I hugged and kissed Emil. He’d be spending the night. Much as I loathed leaving him, I couldn’t tolerate dragging the boy home at 2 am. Besides, the darling did enjoy his visits with Frances and Danielle.
“What’s the plan?” asked Frances.
“Do you know, I’m not quite certain,” I said. “Baby invited me to one of his literary parties. Some dreadful place in darkest Brooklyn.”
I rode the 6 to Grand Central, reading the briefest snippet of Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber. In the main concourse, I did as always and attempted to discern the astrological symbols on its ceiling. I caught vague intimations of the zodiac beneath the black tar, but I couldn’t discern any specific shapes.
Putting on my headphones, I turned on my Walkman and listened to Bob Dylan’s most recent album, World Gone Wrong, a clear aftershock of Dylan’s laboring through a wrenching experience. Namely the 1980s.
I still picture with abject horror the middle-aged troubadour in his stonewashed blue jeans, his leather vests and white t-shirts, his crucifix earrings. I chill to the bone when I think of his unspeakable contribution to “We Are the World.” Let no charitable mouth speak of the baroque horror that is Empire Burlesque.
Yet you’ve gotta serve somebody, and no soul ever recognized the pearly gates without first glimpsing fiery brimstone. The old boy had abandoned the cocaine and pastel glitz and neon of the previous decade and reconnected his self with what’d first brought him into the music biz. Those old vinyl and shellac 78s.
Race and hillbilly records flew at the man, and he decided to record a few of the ancient numbers by his lonesome. One man, one acoustic guitar, no mastering, no studio albatross. The first effort, Good as I Been to You, was throat-clearing, or voice destroying, because truthfully, Robert Allen Zimmerman sounded as though he’d inhaled a balloon full of helium before every take.
By World Gone Wrong, the follow-up, his voice had cracked. He sang with a gravel-hardened instrument. The years became evident, weighted with the backroads of American history. I couldn’t cease listening. Between World Gone Wrong and The Sporting Life, a collaboration between Diamanda Galás and John Paul Jones, I had soundtracked out months of my life.
Dylan synced with 42nd Street. This excess of human glitz and greed, of flesh and lust and sinister grace. I wondered about Erik, Baby’s old beau. He’d turned me on to Dylan, saying that my caricatured image of the singer did not tally with the recorded work. He lent me copies of Desire and The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. Now Erik was gone, disappeared into the stupidity of broken human relations.
I crossed Fifth Avenue, staring at the public library and its increasingly anachronistic lions. A half-crippled fat man limped in my general direction. His was a face designed to bear disappointment. He wore a green t-shirt with white lettering that read I’M
A KEEPER.
Baby had some dreadful business with his agent that occupied the early evening. He’d suggested we meet at 41st and 7th Avenue. As I came upon him, the boy stood rigid, looking into the glimmering distance of Times Square.
“It’s different on television,” he said. “I haven’t been here in a long time. I didn’t bother when they closed Club USA.”
“Do you know that I haven’t been since we went to McDonald’s?” I asked.
“I think Outlaw Parties are well behind us,” said Baby. “It feels like twenty years ago. My father used to say that time sped up as you got older, but for me, it’s only getting longer. Everything seems so remote.”
I considered recommending World Gone Wrong. Bob Dylan was a man keyed into the weight of time’s passage. Yet I thought better of it. Who could fathom what associations Baby had with Bob Dylan?
“Anyhoo,” said Baby. “We’ve got to get on the 2 or the 3. I have no idea which one is faster.”
The Times Square subway station is a hideously complex subterranean world. Tunnels upon tunnels upon layers upon exposed rusting girders. The experience oppresses one’s spirit. We rushed to the first available train. Baby and I didn’t much ride the subway together, but whenever we did, I was grateful that his disinterest in conversation equaled my own.
We exited at Clark Street, the first stop in Brooklyn, the strangest of all the straaaaange subway stations in New York. First of all, darlings, after we ascended the platform stairs, we walked a long hallway towards a series of three elevators. Two of which were broken. Crushing ourselves into the sole functioning apparatus, we then disembarked into the converted lobby of an old hotel. Tiny stores built into its walls. Finally, in the street, there we were, standing on a corner in Brooklyn Heights beside the remains of the old Hotel St. George, a blocksized castle.
“Baby,” said I, “this experience is très outré.”
“Wait until we get where we’re going,” he said. “It’ll be dynamite. I guarantee it’ll fry your synapses.”
“As long as I needn’t employ the word manqué,” said I. “Then I shall be fine.”
Baby guided us towards the water. “Have you ever heard ‘I Saw Linda Yesterday’ by Dickie Lee?” he asked.
“No,” I said.
“I was reading about it in George Plimpton’s oral biography of Edie Sedgwick. I guess Andy Warhol listened to it for eight solid hours. I haven’t heard it. I guess Warhol thought it contained the key to American pop culture. I guess he was right.”
I rolled my eyes. Baby on Warhol.
We arrived at a four-story brownstone. Baby simply waltzed in, pushing open the unlocked front door and climbing three flights of stairs. The noise of a party drifted down somewhere around the second.
“It’s not even a launch,” said Baby. “This is an afterparty. I’m not sure we’re welcome. Technically, we aren’t invited.”
“Whose abode is this?” I asked.
“It’s the home of that fat little fuck, Norman Mailer,” said Baby. We swept into an apartment painted a color best described as Alcatraz Green.
Amongst the bric-a-brac of a multidecade literary career, one noticed that the apartment’s ceiling, being the roof of the building, had been gouged. A glass pyramid extended above, resembling the hold of a seafaring ship, nautically themed and painted white. A series of ladders led to different platforms within the triangle. People hung over its balconies. Others had stuffed themselves within its faux cabins. They were all very sophisticated literary types, most decades older than me or Baby, and, reader, we were not young. I was a mother!
“That fat little fuck just launched a book about Lee Harvey Oswald,” said Baby. “I read Michiko Kakutani’s review. She hated it. Boy, she really hated it.”
A group of middle-agies waylaid Baby, asking him about his forthcoming novel. Publication scheduled rather soon. I knew nothing of it. “I want you to be surprised,” he’d said. “I want you to read it with open eyes.”
I drifted around the apartment, examining books on the shelves, fiddling with mementos. A man with an English accent approached me, asking if I’d read Oswald’s Ghost, which I intuited was the title of Mailer’s new work. I said that I hadn’t. The man said, “I rather liked it until the final chapter.”
“Whatever happens?” I asked.
“Mailer goes on a long transhumanist digression, positing a future in which our race will emerge from an accelerated evolutionary process. The males become translucent squids and the women become fully opaque octopuses. It’s a very strange coda to a book about Oswald, don’t you think?”
“Indeed,” said I, considering what possible response one could make. Particularly as I had yet to read the book. The man regarded yours truly. Yours truly regarded the man.
He bumbled off in another direction. I stood, mouth open, gaping at a bookcase full of books written by Mailer. Another man approached, and this one, I do admit, was to die for. Whilst he wasn’t what one might call handsome, he was extraordinarily well groomed. His appearance was spotless. His clothes well chosen.
“Did Danny speak with you about the squids?” he asked.
“How ever did you know?”
“He’s an editor at Random House,” said this man. “He goes to book parties and talks to people about books that they haven’t read. He tells everyone, no matter what the book, that there’s a final chapter about a future in which mankind has transformed into cephalopods. I’ve heard him say it about everything from Fathers and Sons to Prozac Nation.”
“How very peculiar,” I said.
“It’s supposed to be a joke,” said the man. “Only no one laughs.”
We talked and chatted and gabbed. We commiserated. The man introduced himself as Thomas Cromwell, bearing the same name as an unfortunate historical figure during the reign of Henry the VIII. When I inquired as to the origins of his moniker, the nouveau Thomas Cromwell suggested that his mother was too poorly educated to know of American historical figures, let alone the brutal enforcer of a Tudor king. I went on and on and on and on about, of all things, the Tuesday siren in San Francisco, this monstrously annoying occurrence every week at noon when the city officials see fit to blast all quadrants with an alarm followed by a message reminding the citizenry, yet again, that the noise is only a test.
Thomas Cromwell was, apparently, another book editor. In his late 30s, gainfully employed, and not gay. I was such an innocent that I didn’t look for a ring. Had I, I should have found nothing. The man was not married.
He went on about how much he loved the unicorn tapestries at the Cloisters. “It depends on how you look at them,” he said. “If you walk while fixing your eyes, the tapestries can be three dimensional. They shimmer and move.”
Well, well, thinks I, here is a grown man talking to a youngish woman in Norman Mailer’s living room, and his chosen topics of discussion are unicorns and medieval tapestries. Well, well, says I, here’s a man to whom, perhaps, one might expose a poor child.
Mark me, reader. I had not engaged in the fleshy temptations since Nash Mac’s departure. Even if one excluded my prolonged period of existential crisis about the meaning of sex and relationships, it was getting on to a ridiculous number of months.
“Now, your lordship Master Cromwell,” says I, “seeing as you are here, is there not somewhere a Lady Jane Grey in hiding, drifting in and out of these nautical cabins?”
Often it ain’t worth asking a question if you can’t bear its answer. Thomas Cromwell says back, very kindly, I thankee, “My girlfriend’s somewhere around here.” Then, horror of horrors, he suggests that I follow him as we go and look for his lady.
We climbed all over Norman Mailer’s apartment. Up ladders, down ladders, into cabins, out of cabins. In the galley, out of the galley. On the balcony, on the roof. At one point, Thomas Cromwell pointed over the open space, and said, “Norman’s very excited about something.” I peered across and there was this tiny old man with a great blast of white hair rising
like steam, hearing aid in each ear, encased inside a very animated conversation. His interlocutor?
My old amigo Baby Baby Baby.
“We’d better find your lady,” I said, “before I’m shown the door.”
She sat alone on the outdoor balcony, looking across the East River towards Lower Manhattan. One often had moments with the Twin Towers, of recognizing their incredible height and their hideousness. Yet their size transcended facade. Perhaps one could find a lesson in there. Perhaps sheer scale outweighs questionable aesthetics.
“How do you do?” she said. “My name is Aubrey.”
I wanted to loathe her but simply couldn’t. She charmed one, all the more so because whilst she was not by any means ugly, she was no great beauty. One thought, if nothing else, this Thomas Cromwell must appreciate women for more than their pulchritude.
She explained how she’d insisted that they attend the party. She was an inveterate reader of Mailer and not necessarily as an aficionado. Rather, she appreciated the ongoing limitations of his work. She thought it pitiable that such a radical figure believed in masculine solutions to the problems created by men.
“It’s like when a farmer shoots at a rabbit and misses,” she said, “but the rabbit’s nervous system gives out. The animal keeps running in circles of decreasing size, getting nowhere, doing nothing. That’s a bit like Mr. Mailer, I’m afraid.”
By the end of it, when I saw Baby wandering beneath the pyramid, a daze on his face, done in by the old man, I’d become bosom with Thomas Cromwell and Aubrey. They gave me their phone number. Aubrey said that we should get together. She suggested that I stop by her office, in Chelsea, where she worked as a lawyer. We could lunch. Thomas said the same.
“It’s so difficult,” I said. “I have a son, don’t you see, and I hate exposing him to a sitter.”