Friends and Traitors

by Jarett Kobek

  —Can you wait a minute? I asked. I’d love to catch up.

  The next person presented me with a book. I had no idea how I’d do two weeks of events. Each copy of Saving Anne Frank felt like a rebuke for having written the thing.

  —Baby, whispered Adeline, whoever is this Abe?

  —Do you remember my one and only sexual experience back home?

  —Not him!

  —The very same, I said.

  When I finished with the line, the Barnes & Noble handler asked if I would sign more books for stock. I worked my way through the pile.

  Adeline and I went to Abe.

  —How’d you find me? I asked.

  —They had your picture in the newsletter, he said. I recognized you as soon as I saw it, no matter what name you’re using.

  —I’m amazed. I can’t even recognize myself.

  —You look about the same, he said.

  Abe lived in New York, having himself abandoned the American Middle West. He’d taken a few years off before getting a degree in economics at Chicago. He presently worked in a nebulous analyst position on Wall Street. I received the distinct impression that he’d come to the city so that he could live as a queer.

  We exchanged phone numbers and promised to be in touch. I presumed that we wouldn’t, that at best we might have a handful of chance meetings but make no particular effort to spend time in each other’s company. Until he saw me, he’d forgotten how much he needed to forget.

  —One thing, he said, before I go. I’m really sorry about your parents.

  —Don’t mention it, I said.

  —I can’t imagine it was easy, said Abe. Not with them dying like that. Not with them dying in that way.

  —Time helps, I said. I don’t think much about it.

  —I always liked your mother.

  —She was a good person, I said.

  —I tried to find you when I heard. By then you were gone.

  —I always was a runner.

  Abe disappeared down the escalator. Adeline and I waited, talking with the publicist, talking with people from Barnes & Noble. We waited until I felt sure that Abe was gone.

  —I need a drink, I said to Adeline. Can you drink?

  —Any human soul requires a tall order after that encounter, she said. Wherever shall we go?

  —The Old Town, I said.

  *

  Ensconced in the bar, I ordered a Jean Harlow. Adeline ordered a Cape Cod. I stared up at the tin ceiling. I knew the question that was coming but hoped it could be avoided. I sipped my drink, dreaming that she’d say something, anything. She didn’t.

  —What’s wrong? I asked.

  —It’s only that I’ve realized, she said, I haven’t a clue what happened with your parents. Will you ever tell me?

  So I told her.

  I have two siblings, an older brother and a younger sister. Our childhoods were scored by the sounds of our parents’ constant argumentation. Some fights were ridiculous, about absolute nonsense. The way that my mother looked at my father in the kitchen. The color of new drapery. Some fights were serious. How much my mother hated the way that my father acted around her children. Money, always money.

  Every altercation occurred at the same volume. EXTREMELY GOD-DAMNED LOUD.

  Divorce was out of the question.

  An incomprehensible bond connected them, a thing as real as conjoined flesh, as if they were one entity. To be blunt, our parents loved sex.

  They were obsessed with giving each other the time. Excluding moments of intense pregnancy or illness or menstruation, I doubt that a single day passed without them getting down to business.

  My own unearthing of the situation was Freudian. One night, I awoke with an overwhelming urge to urinate. Rushing to the bathroom, desperate to empty my bladder, I heard the sounds of my parents’ lovemaking.

  Peeking through their slightly ajar door, I saw them naked, lit by moonlight. My ghost father atop my shadow mother. The sounds of their grunting, eavesdropped in darkness, augmented by the slap of skin against skin.

  Had there been better illumination, I would have witnessed more of their bedroom’s décor. Years earlier, my father had affixed an American flag on the ceiling, announcing the primacy of the red, white, and blue over their private lives. No one asked why. My father was a peculiar man. Who knows? Maybe he liked looking at it while he shot over the top.

  Other than the bed, the only piece of furniture was a giant black metal cabinet. This steel onyx rectangle, always locked, was the subject of great speculation among us children. We’d pushed the heavy wardrobe on its wobbling casters, hoping that its mobility would confer a sense of its contents. My brother came up with the most plausible answer, suggesting that it was a gun cabinet. My father threatened to shoot us at least once every couple of hours, but other than a shotgun used in the routine needs of farming, we’d never seen him brandish a single firearm. Ipso facto, his guns must be in the box.

  Fighting. Screwing. Fighting. Screwing. Fighting. The trochaic pentameter of our lives. I was an ingénue lacking any sense about the meaning of sexual activity spread across decades. I found my parents incomprehensible. Their marriage mystified.

  These days, I’ve been down in the groove myself, lived through long relationships and know that the best sex only occurs once people give themselves to another. That weird growth sprouts only from the soil of familiar love.

  We move now to the summer of 1986. I’d graduated high school and had no determinate future. There’d been talk about an athletic scholarship at a state university, but this had not panned out. My parents could not afford tuition.

  The previous May, my kid sister had become an Evangelical Christian, washed in the blood of Christ. This unexpected conversion was the result of her friendship with the Rentmeester family, a wholesome American clan who’d invited her on a church ski trip. She returned from the snowy peaks and was born again, having called Jesus into her heart.

  Many criticisms can be hurled at my parents, but give them their due. At least they hadn’t raised us religious. Our family didn’t believe in anything, a state of affairs that stoked my sister’s evangelical fires.

  She witnessed to us. She spread the Good News. We begged her to stop, but this only renewed her dedication. She gave each of us a Bible, copies of the Authorized Version of 1611 with the words of Jesus in red ink. Her church was one of those perverse institutions that believed in the incorruptibility of King James’s version.

  The most unfortunate aspect of her zeal was the application of Biblical quotations to our daily lives.

  When my father slaughtered cattle, she said: —Hither comes the fatted calf, to be killed. We shall eat and be happy.

  When our parents got into an oversized argument that ended with my mother saying that she could never forgive my father, my sister said: —Likewise shall my heavenly Father do to you also, if ye shall not forgive all of his trespasses.

  When the yield of our crop was less than expected, she said: —And other seed didst falleth upon good ground, and yieldeth fruit that springeth up and increaseth.

  I inquired as to the origins of these quotes. She supplied me with chapter and verse. Armed with the Good Book, I discovered that all her bon-mots of Biblical Wisdom were jumbled and mutilated. She garbled the early seventeenth-century syntax, omitting words and rearranging their order. Let us say nothing of the context.

  There came a fantasy in which I would confront my sister about her abuse of the inky red words of Christ. Hey, sis, I’d say, how’s about you don’t misquote that there Bible no more? If you must rub our faces in shit, please do make certain that it’s textually accurate shit. Verily, I doest beseecheth thee.

  But I never did. There are times when a plague must be suffered.

  Anyhoo, the summer of 1986. A night in August.

  We’d all gone to bed. I was half asleep, thinking of a world beyond my world, wondering if I’d ever leave the farm. My older brother had moved to St. Paul. He’d sen
t several letters reporting on life in his new environs. Life was much harder than he’d expected. He missed home, thought often of our haystacks.

  My sister was asleep. If everyone has at least one innate skill, hers was falling aslumber. The family joke was that you could lay her across any surface and within five minutes she’d be in the arms of Morpheus. It doesn’t seem funny now, but at the time it was hilarious. We always broke up into laughter.

  As I stretched into blackness, there came an enormous crash. Our house quivered with reverberation. I thought, for a moment, that I’d dreamt it. Then I thought it was an earthquake, but we never had earthquakes. My sister opened her bedroom door.

  I went into the hallway. She stood confused in her nightgown.

  —Did you hear that? I asked.

  —I think it came from their room.

  I knocked on my parents’ door. They didn’t answer.

  —Mom? Dad?

  No answer. I took a deep breath and pushed into their room.

  Their sex must have done it. The deep emanations of repeated pelvic thrusting. They were as naked as cherubs. We could only see their limbs, the hands and the feet.

  The cabinet had fallen upon their bed, taking the American flag with it. The twin doors were splayed open, spread across their bodies like the wings of a great flightless bird, as if my parents had been destroyed by an aberration of evolution. Their skulls were crushed and emptied, brains on the floor.

  My parents hadn’t been keeping guns.

  There was nothing in the cabinet.

  Then my sister misquoted the Bible.

  —And by their fruits ye shall know them.

  OCTOBER 1996

  Baby Goes on a Book Tour

  Before I embarked upon my tour of America, I bought a new computer, an IBM ThinkPad 560 with an 800-megabyte hard drive and 100mhz Pentium processor. The total cost, tax included, was a steal at $2,300. I’d gotten a deal through a friend of Parker’s. Compared with models of similar power, the cost was exorbitant, but I’d been assured that the ThinkPad offered a durability missing from other models.

  —You can beat the living shit out of the thing, said Parker. Everything else is a toy.

  Besides, Saving Anne Frank was doing well. I’d avoided the reviews. Parker read them with the devotion of a monk at vespers. The most significant was by Michiko Kakutani, the great enemy of that fat little fuck Norman Mailer. By Parker’s unhappy tones, I could tell that Kakutani had unsheathed her blades.

  What the hell, I thought, I’m just a farm boy whose parents were crushed to death by a cabinet. Even a negative review in the Times accusing the author of Holocaust trivialization was a serious destination. It was way more than I had any right to expect.

  I traveled by train. I went and saw the Eastern Seaboard.

  My best event was the first, in Boston, at the Harvard Book Store.

  The next event was the worst. Providence, the College Hill Bookstore. Only three people showed up.

  In the hours before, I took the opportunity to wander through H. P. Lovecraft’s old neighborhood. I sat for an hour in Prospect Terrace, a small park overlooking the whole of downtown Providence, and then walked over to 10 Barnes Street, where the old racist Gent wrote the lion’s share of his substantial work.

  One of the blessed three attendees was this weird straight kid, dressed in black with makeup smeared all over his face, his lips the color of dead snails, his eyes ringed with kohl.

  You wanted to meet your audience, I thought. Well, here they are, here are the people who read science fiction. Apparently, they look like they just fucked Bela Lugosi.

  I talked, I read, and I took questions. I avoided eye contact with the embarrassed customers who wandered in for reasons of commerce and found themselves confronted by the spectacle of a corn-fed homosexual addressing an audience of empty chairs.

  The kid who looked like he’d fucked Bela Lugosi took advantage of the Q& A to ask about Michael Alig and daytime television. He didn’t speak with a regional dialect, which was odd, because everyone else in Rhode Island had an accent so thick that it sounded as if they’d been dropkicked in the jaw.

  And then it was over. The store manager was all apologies.

  —Usually we get a bigger crowd. Some of the kids at Brown love sci-fi. George Takei was supposed to do an event last year. He canceled at the last minute but he still got about fifty people.

  —So what you’re saying is that an actor who didn’t even show up still somehow drew a crowd over ten times the size of my own.

  —I guess you can see it that way. I wouldn’t take it personal. It’s a television culture. The whole country’s a real toilet.

  The weird straight kid was the last to get my signature, which meant that he stuck around while I signed stock, asking me questions. Mostly it was about Michael. I was curious how a weird straight kid in Rhode Island was so in the loop on the scandals of New York’s demimonde.

  —I saw that article, he said. In Details.

  —I can’t imagine you as a regular reader of Details.

  —Billy Corgan was on the cover. Have you heard the new album? “Zero” is a great song.

  The day before I left New York, a new issue of Details had appeared on newsstands. The cover photo did indeed feature the grim image of Billy Corgan, bald as Jenny Talia, dressed in a leather jumpsuit, his stained hand wrapped around a glass star.

  The cover lines advertised articles about the male g-spot, inline skates, and Mim Udovitch’s piece about Michael and Angel. The article appeared on page 168. They’d gone classy and titled it CLUBBED TO DEATH?

  Page 169 was a full-color photograph of Michael in his underwear, standing inside an oversized Jack-in-the-Box. Udovitch referred to Michael as a genius, remarked upon his childlike innocence, and entertained the notion that Angel wasn’t dead. There were quotes from the usual crowd, Gitsie included. Everyone said how impossible they found it that Michael, of all people, could have killed someone. Michael was too much of a child, they said, he was too simple to remove the corpse. Michael? He couldn’t’ve!

  There were other photos, snapshots of club life. I wasn’t in any of them. A small miracle. The saddest was a black-and-white portrait of Michael taken at Coney Island, standing before Dante’s Inferno. A fiberglass devil hovers above his head. Michael wears a pair of children’s pajamas. His stomach fat oozes between the top and the bottom. The twisted expression exudes psychopathia. He doesn’t look very fabulous.

  There I was, on page 172, beside Dante’s Inferno. Two paragraphs. I’d talked to Udovitch for an hour:

  But Disco 2000 wasn’t only a place for dispossessed young things, attracting any number of New York’s slumming intellectuals. [Baby], a well-regarded novelist, is a prominent graduate of Michael’s circle. His most recent novel, Trapped Between Jupiter and a Bottle, is a science fiction detective tale bearing a surprising resemblance to the Downtown scene. There’s even a club promoter with the head of an elephant named Michelle Gila.

  [Baby] denies that his novel is about Michael, but speaks fondly of his time in the darkened arenas. “It was like this demonic Disney World with Michael as Uncle Walt. He made the whole thing happen and we were all his cast members.” When I ask [Baby] if he thinks Michael is guilty, he evasively replies, “Lots of people are guilty of lots of things, but the only people who really know what happened are Michael, Angel, and Freeze. None of them are talking. Until then, I’m withholding judgment. What does guilt even mean anymore?”

  I’d rather be savaged by Michiko Kakutani than give idiotic quotes to Details, but there it was. The words like unrevised prose. I came off moronic, like a stupid club kid who didn’t know that Angel was dead. It sounded as if I didn’t believe Michael and Freeze had killed Angel, but Michael and Freeze killing Angel was the only thing that I did believe.

  Uncle Walt? What does guilt even mean anymore? Why the fuck had I tried being clever?

  And now some kid who looked like he’d just fucked Bela Lugos
i was asking about Michael.

  —Michael killed Angel, I said. Obviously.

  —That’s some sick shit.

  —It always is with Michael. It always was.

  —So you’re still into that stuff?

  —Not especially, I said. The most exciting thing happening these days is that sometimes I’ll go out and have mixed drinks on the rare evenings when a single mother can find a babysitter.

  —It’s just because there’s a show tonight at the Strand that I thought you might like. I have an extra ticket if you want.

  My hotel room was in the Providence Biltmore, one of the Beaux-Arts monstrosities that you can find in any old city. They’re always beautiful and ornate and ornately beautiful and built just before the Great Depression. My room had a nice view of Lovecraft’s College Hill and as I looked out through the glass, with a view exactly opposite that of Prospect Terrace, I thought about how much of what I did for money had come from Providence, from this shitty little city with its shitty little writer who was afraid of everything.

  When the hour grew long, I went into the streets of Downtown, trying to find something called the Strand. Even though the venue was close, I got lost wandering through the park next to my hotel. This brief detour gave me a chance to inspect the indigenous peoples.

  Their accents were jaw-kicked. There were less homeless than I’d expected, but way more junkies. It was heroin city. I thought about scoring but then remembered the last time I’d chased that particular dragon. Without The King of France and his vomit, what was the point?

  I saw two girls dressed in black, their baby-fat faces smeared with black makeup. I figured that if I followed from a polite distance, I’d end up at the show. Some things never change.

  I’d done the same thing back in Los Angeles, that night when we’d gone to Scream, the night that I’d met Jaime. It wasn’t even ten years but it felt like another person, another life.