Friends and Traitors

by Jarett Kobek

  When we got to the Strand, there were a thousand kids dressed in black. They were wearing t-shirts which said MARILYN MANSON in red and antichrist superstar in yellow. Behind the lettering, there was a photograph of an angel in front of some tenement windows, for all of its supranatural life looking like it’d just shared some intimate time with Bela Lugosi.

  The image conveyed a visceral shock rock thrill, but I fixated on the words. Both MARILYN MANSON and antichrist superstar were in serif typefaces. With the professional élan of someone who’d argued with Doubleday over a dustjacket, I wondered whether or not a serif typeface appropriately communicated the idea of a spooky angel shooting over the top with Bela Lugosi. Wasn’t sans more sinister?

  The opening act was on stage, a band fronted by a blonde woman. Three notes in and I knew what they were. An East Village band, a relic of that brief moment in the early ’90s when all of our neighbors sounded like the Velvet Underground had fathered a child inside Joey Ramone, right before everybody who was anybody discovered electronica.

  The song ended.

  —Thank you, said the vocalist. Thank you. This next song is a bit of a New York story. This is about a girl who jumped off the Empire State Building. In New York City.

  No matter how far you go, you can’t escape.

  Keep on running, Baby.

  I tuned out and wandered through the crowd, which was a general admission pit, and oh god everyone looked so innocent. All of those cherubic visages and all of that belief in the power of black t-shirts.

  And then, somehow, I bumped into one of them. He wasn’t like the other kids. There was no makeup, his t-shirt read HOLY COW, and his curly hair was long and unkempt.

  I started a conversation, joking that he seemed like the only person in the place less interested than me.

  —I’m with a girl, he shouted over the New York story. I don’t know if you’ve seen her, she’s the palest person in here. She lost a kidney half a year ago and just got out of the hospital. And she has no eyebrows. Well, she shaves her actual eyebrows, I think, and then glues on these vinyl replacements.

  —I’ll keep an eye out, I said.

  —I’m not even her boyfriend. She has a boyfriend. He’s from Boston. He’s here, too, wearing a dog collar and some spiky bracelets. And a mesh shirt. But she won’t fuck him. And she won’t fuck me. She won’t even touch me. The only person she fucks is Twiggy Ramirez.

  —Who?

  —The bassist. In the band. Not this band. The next band. Marilyn Manson.

  —Why are you here?

  —She asked me along. So I came. All it takes is one look. Maybe it’s the missing kidney. Maybe the eyebrows. But one look, man. When the band’s in the Northeast, all she does is follow them around and fuck Twiggy Ramirez. And I guess all I do is follow her.

  —Sounds rewarding.

  —It’s not, he said. But I’ll figure it out.

  —Can I ask you something?

  —Go ahead, he said.

  —Are you from here? From Rhode Island?

  —Yeah, he said. Chepachet.

  —What do you call the things that water comes out of? The things that you drink from, the things you find in the hallways of high schools and airports?

  —Bubblers? he asked.

  The lights went down and then there was a great noise and then Marilyn Manson was with us. Anyhoo, there it was, Baby, there you saw the way of all flesh.

  The lead vocalist, who shared a name with the band, was dressed in a corset that doubled as a straitjacket, straps akimbo and loose. Half of the band was in drag. Boys in dresses! And the crowd was singing along with them, and then they were chanting along with Manson, shouting “We hate love! We love hate!” and then the band was covering the Eurythmics, singing “Sweet Dreams” which I remembered hearing when I’d gone to a pool party at Cave Canem. MDMA resonances ripping through time. And then Manson was up on a podium, with the rest of the band dressed like Nazis, and he was ripping up a Bible and making some statement against God or Jesus or the Kanaim or whatever, and I think that’s when I left, pushing my way through the crowd of kids, through all the black makeup, through the Bela Lugosi post-coital bliss.

  Out into the streets of Providence.

  I’d written two books about the future but now I could see it. All culture in America flowed up from below, from all the fucked-up queer kids cowering in clubs, from all the Black people whose intellectual and artistic legacies had been robbed for decades, and it was copied and copied and copied until all the alienating detail had been lost. Until it was smooth and marketable product.

  Marilyn Manson was like watching someone’s little brother wearing hand-me-downs. Everything was there. The cross-dressing, the outrageous costumes, the shock antics, the vague horror film overlay, the Hollywood glamor and the serial killer amok culture, the attempts at the sacred and the profane, the transgressive.

  And now it was for straight people! Fucking heterosexuals in black lipstick! In the Tunnel Basement and at Disco 2000, there’d been no delineation between attendees and the stage. You could come up and drink your piss and be a star. Yes, everyone knew Michael ran the show, but he wasn’t the show. Everyone was the show.

  Marilyn Manson was signed to Interscope Records, a division of MCA Records, itself a division of Seagram. With that lineage, you knew the exact circumference of the magic circle and who it kept out. Artist. Customer. Artist. Customer.

  Sometimes in New York, when everyone was telling you New York stories about girls jumping off the Empire State Building, you forgot what the rest of the country was like, forgot how disconnected most people were from the livewire, even if they were only two hundred miles away, forgot how there was a world of people whose lives and tastes were controlled by other people, controlled by people that the kids in Providence would never meet, people who didn’t think of the kids in Providence as anything other than customers, as pieces to move around a chessboard, controlled by people who worked in offices and created aesthetic experiences that could define hundreds of thousands of millions of lives, and that the people being defined had no idea that this was happening, had no idea that culture didn’t arrive via spontaneous generation, had no idea that they were being used by the assholes of New York, by the assholes of Los Angeles, by the assholes of D.C., by the assholes of London, by the assholes of Paris.

  By assholes like me.

  These Providence kids, who all looked like they’d choked into orgasm while being held by the arms of Bela Lugosi, couldn’t imagine the complex processes required to bring their flesh into the Strand, couldn’t comprehend the countrywide manipulation that dominated their dreams.

  Back at the Strand, not even Marilyn Manson was drinking piss, and there was only one star and his name was on the marquee, and he was making serious money for some very serious people while his bass player fucked a girl with one kidney and no eyebrows.

  The king was dead. Long live the king.

  Back in my hotel room, I finished a short story. After learning that I wouldn’t review Infinite Jest, Bob Glück wrote to me, saying that I should still submit. Send anything you like, wrote Glück. Included with his letter was a copy of REAL: The Letters of Mina Harker and Sam D’Allesandro by Dodie Bellamy and Sam D’Allesandro.

  Bellamy’s letters were written while possessed by the spirit of Mina Harker, the unmoved mover of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, detailing a hyper-poetic rendition of psychogeographical sexual wanderings through San Francisco. My yarn was a response to the book. I called it “The God Hole.” It’s a love story.

  The Daily News ran an article by A. J. Benza speculating that a body found in the Harlem River might be Angel. The paper’s fact checkers had not bothered to ascertain that the Harlem River runs along the top of Manhattan, separating the island from the Bronx. The fact checkers at the Daily News had not bothered to ascertain the direction of the Hudson.

  Yet the article was Michael’s undoing. Its appearance jogged the memory of a police detective
who’d taken a call on Staten Island. Some kids discovered a body in a box. The autopsy showed head trauma and asphyxiation. There were no legs.

  Official channels were worked.

  I had a message from Michael Alig. He said that he was throwing a new Friday night party called Honey Trap in Hell’s Kitchen, at the Mirage. He’d invited me to the grand opening, on October 11th.

  I returned too late. Michael didn’t call again, which meant that I didn’t need to invent excuses. That I needed excuses may offer a sense of the bizarro world of New York in 1996. Michael had murdered Angel. I knew it. Everyone knew it. It’d been aired in the press. Why the hell was anyone letting him throw a party? Why would I apologize to a killer for not attending his soirée?

  Attribute my disinterest to exhaustion. I’d undergone the great open expanse of America. I was drained from meeting hundreds of people who read literary novels.

  My events were variations on a theme. I’d talk and talk and talk. Some people in the audience feigned interest. Others couldn’t hide their boredom. No matter what city, one or two wits asked about Michael.

  The tour ended. I headed back home.

  I wanted to be alone, and there is no better, and no worse, place for solitude than Manhattan. I loved every stupid street, every ugly face, every disgusting high-rise apartment building. I loved the old New York erupting from the past. I loved the new New York pointing toward the future. I didn’t care that the island had gentrified. I didn’t care that Rudy was destroying the fabric of society.

  The configuration of the street grid, and the sordid tangle of streets below 14th Street, and the insanity of millions crammed into a small space, and the weekday surge when millions more poured in from the surrounding area. The weird angle of the Empire State Building from Bowery. Everyone desperate to bilk the last dollar. These are the ingredients of a witch’s brew, the undeniable black magic of Manna-hatta.

  I too lived. I walked the streets of Manhattan Island and bathed in the waters around it. I rode the subway. I invented excuses to make photocopies at the Kinko’s on 12th Street and gorged myself on overstuffed burritos at the Big Enchilada. I hung out at the public library. I haunted parks, greatly amused by the appearance of a mobile NYPD station on Washington Square South. I traipsed along St. Mark’s, watching kids shop at Freaks, watching kids shop at Religious Sex. I delighted in the block between 1st and A, where the Jamaican drug dealers were under the command of a lanky white dealer in rave clothes named Nev. I wandered through the four floors of Irreplaceable Artifacts. I spent hours at the Met. I saw films in Kips Bay, in Times Square, on 19th Street, at the Cinema Village, at the Quad, beneath David Wojnarowicz’s old studio, on Third Avenue, at the Music Palace.

  Manhattan! My one true love. Never leave me!

  NOVEMBER 1996

  Baby Goes to Honey Trap

  On November 2nd, Adeline telephoned.

  —Baby, she said, there’s an article in the Daily News. They’ve identified Angel’s body. Page 16.

  I ran out and bought a copy. In black and white, in newsprint, written by John Marzulli. BEACHED BODY IS MISSING CLUB KID.

  I had to go to the Honey Trap.

  November 8th. Friday night. I made my way over to West 56th Street, between Eleventh and Twelfth avenues. There was barely a line. I talked to Kenny Kenny, who worked the door. Michael is upstairs, said Kenny, the party’s on the second floor.

  I dressed to the nines, putting on my Gieves & Hawkes and a deer-stalker hat that I’d bought for five dollars on Canal Street from a guy with unrepentant body odor.

  The Mirage was like a warp through time and space into someone’s New Jersey living room. The DJ was Whillyem Ikillyou, one of Michael’s final acolytes. I’d never heard of him.

  A mixture of gawkers, onlookers, and last-generation club kids. The regulars, part of the retinue for years, were missing. One guy talked to me, identifying himself as a reporter for the Guardian. I thought he’d taken me for another reporter, but he knew who I was.

  —I have your little book about Michael, he said.

  —Have you read it?

  —Not yet, he said.

  —It’s not about Michael.

  —That’s not what Mim Udovitch suggests in Details.

  —That goddamned article will be the death of me, I said. The book is a noir set in the distant future. There’s a character based, vaguely, on Michael. The connection is fleeting.

  —I understand, said the reporter for the Guardian. Everyone is distancing themselves now that judgment is coming down. You know that he’s working with the DEA, don’t you? He’s going to testify against Gatien. That’s why he hasn’t been arrested. He’s worked out a deal. He’s going to get full immunity.

  —Poor Peter, I said.

  —You know the one-eyed man? Are you willing to go on the record?

  —No comment, I said. Where is Michael, anyway?

  —He’s floating around, said the reporter for the Guardian. He had a bottle of Champagne the last that I saw of him.

  The dancefloor was anemic. The tables were empty. Most activity came from security, shining their flashlights, looking for drugs. A microcosm of entropic heat death. Maybe this was how everything went, with a dissolution into irrelevance. It felt thin, as if I could see through it, as if I’d lost whatever quality had allowed me to haunt clubs and not care about terrible people. Not care about shallow experiences. Maybe change is the only way a thing can survive. I always knew it would end like this.

  Michael was in a little enclave near the dancefloor, lying on a disgusting pink bed. It’d been a year since I’d seen him. He looked like a dead man. A picture of Martin Luther King Jr. hung above the bed. I thought about nonviolent civil disobedience as a discipline of social protest, I thought about King’s eventual realization that the problem wasn’t a racial one, but rather one of class, that poor white people and poor Black people had more in common than poor white people and rich white people. I thought about the Poor People’s Campaign shattered by an assassin’s bullet at the Lorraine Motel.

  Michael didn’t even see me. He was too high. What did I expect? That he’d croak at me and we’d have a conversation?

  In an English accent, a guy was saying: —Do you have any comment about the fact that the police have identified Angel’s body?

  Michael didn’t hear him. He snorted a line of drugs up his nose and crashed back onto the bed, supine before us.

  It was the last time that I saw him.

  DECEMBER 1996

  Michael Alig Is Arrested

  A month later, on December 5th, Michael was arrested for the murder of Angel Melendez. The cops picked him up at a motel in Toms River, New Jersey. The next Tuesday, he was the Village Voice cover story. They went for it: THE PARTY’S OVER. THE END OF MICHAEL ALIG.

  I didn’t bother reading.

  DECEMBER 1996

  Adeline Breaks the News

  Adeline called me on the pretext of making plans for Christmas dinner. I agreed to eat with her and Jon and Emil. As I’d done on Thanksgiving.

  I’d started dating again, set up with a few guys that knew friends of Parker, but nothing serious enough to warrant shared holiday misery. Things were bleak enough that I considered getting in touch with Abe and seeing what an old boy from the American Middle West was doing for Christmas. I was curious to see if he’d be going back home.

  Adeline said there were matters of serious import that needed discussion. As in a tête-à-tête. We met for dinner at Around the Clock. I ordered a hamburger. She had a Caesar salad with grilled chicken.

  —Baby, she said, there’s something we need to talk about.

  —I know that tone.

  —We’re moving, she said.

  —Where? I asked.

  —California, she said.

  —Please tell me you’re not moving to Los Angeles.

  —Holy moly, she said, you’re potty. Much as I’ve rekindled the friendship with Mommie Dearest, I’m not yet that far gone.


  —So where?

  —San Francisco.

  Winterbloss was pressuring Adeline to come back in the hopes that they could step up production on Trill, still selling in pamphlets but doing unusually well in trade paperback. He envisioned real capitalization. Adeline had resisted his entreaties, particularly on the basis of not wanting to screw up Jon’s work life. But Jon had spoken with a few people from the old punk days, and they’d assured him that he could get the same gig in San Francisco. Under the reign of Mayor Willie Brown, Baghdad by the Bay’s prosecutorial establishment found no shortage of poor bodies that needed shafting. Besides, Jon’d taken the LSAT and was thinking about applying to UC Hastings.

  And there was the issue of Nash Mac, who’d rattled sabers about never seeing his son.

  —When? I asked.

  —January 15th.

  —What about the apartment?

  —I was thinking that you might reassume control, she said. You could sublet your current abode and then you’ll be back on old 7th Street, where you’ve always wanted to be.

  —The only place that I want to be is 31 Union Square West.

  —You can’t repeat the past, she said.

  —Can’t repeat the past? Of course you can.

  But I agreed. I always agreed. Anyhoo, Adeline was right. I did want to move back into 7th Street. I missed the East Village. I’d have the second half of January to move my stuff.

  DECEMBER 1996

  Baby Attempts a New Book

  I started a thinly veiled fictional memoir about our eleven years in New York. Each chapter constituted one year, told in the first person either by the Baby analogue or the Adeline analogue, and rather than attempt the fullness of that year, most chapters would be biopsies of events and people. We had met bizarre characters and lived in the right place at the right time. I could scribe things as they happened, act the amanuensis. I even devised a title.

  Burning for the Holy Immaculate Fix.