Friends and Traitors
Page 45
The holy immaculate fix came from a short story by Uncle Bill Burroughs. “The Junky’s Christmas.” I’d read it in Interzone, but the text didn’t hit until I heard the spoken-word version on Spare Ass Annie and Other Tales.
I eked out a few thousand words about my first day in New York. The squat, Adeline, Bobby, Second Avenue Theatre, 31 Union Square West.
I abandoned the project. If I had judged Infinite Jest for its crimes, then it was sheer hypocrisy to think a book about my life, or a book about Adeline, could be different. We were only another group of rich white people on drugs.
I thought about the production of novels, wondering how a book akin to Literature could be produced without segregating into identity. My other novels had avoided the great white hole by virtue of science fiction. But I didn’t want to spend my professional life writing about depressed robots who mainlined drugs with names like Substance D and CHEW-Z.
I considered the things that fiction never addresses. Like the way that culture bubbles up from below. Like the way that form is more important than content. Like the way that free speech is the booby prize of democracy. Like the way that assumptions about universal human rights reveal more about the person who assumes than anything universal to the human experience. Like the way that the hardest part of any political position is not navigating the people opposed to your ideas but rather suffering the ones who are on your side. Like the way in which foreign intervention never works, regardless of its purpose. Like the way in which books are the dead-liest weapons devised by the human race. Like the way in which air travel is an abhorrence that destroys the soul. Like the way in which plastic saps a percentage of joy. Like the way in which fluorescent lights have poisoned the modern experience. Like the way in which no specific action by any individual person or group of persons achieves anything and yet somehow life continues on apace. Like the way in which society breaks apart when confronted by mental illness. Like the idea that the best way to deal with great evil is not to recoil in horror but rather to laugh in its face, regardless of its human damage. Like the way in which we fetishize emotional suffering as an attempt to avoid our erotic impulses. Like the way that Jesus Christ was a White Magus in the fashion of Apollonius of Tyana, both of whom conquered death through a shared system of ritual magic involving seminal fluid. Like the way we’d constructed World War II as a Great Honest Battle in which the forces of Good took on two despotic regimes and won, but in fact we’d only beaten one anti-Semitic genocidal abomination by allying with another anti-Semitic genocidal abomination, the consequences of which would haunt us for fifty years. Like the way in which the things that any society believes are its most important are invariably its least. Like the way in which stupidity and ignorance can be wiped out through constant education. Like the way in which the only hope for the future is that this education will render each member of the species subject to stunting neuroses that cripple our ability to hurt each other. Like the way in which the very idea of being a gifted person, or a genius, is a social construct benefiting children of privilege. Like the way in which being labeled a child genius leaves the labeled person in a state of profound incapacity, unable to understand the simplest things that everyone else figures out by the time they are sixteen. Like the way that women are smarter than men. Like the way that the concept of intelligence was devised by men to exclude women. Like the way that every competing theory about human advancement is proffered by someone with a dollar to make and never encompasses even the smallest fragment of being alive. Like the way in which these theories cause people to misunderstand their role in this world. Like the way in which the human animal is wired to pay equal measures of attention to the loudest jerks and the most hysterical women. Like the way in which every powerful man that I’ve ever met was a reeking transparent bag of insecurities. Like the way other people fell over with dumbstruck awe and admiration when given a whiff of that reek, despite the odor being indistinguishable from the smell of shit. Like the human need for leaders who cannot lead. Like the way in which the measure of offense should never be the feelings of the offended but rather a lack of thought in the offender. Like the way in which America is a country broken from its inception, a country founded by the richest men in the service of an immoral regime of multiple genocides and how the ideals enshrined in our fundamentally flawed constitution are undercooked banalities that we bully on to the rest of the world. Like the way in which an entire society, regardless of individual affiliations, can internalize and metastasize bad ideas as solid actualities despite all the evidence to the contrary. Like how if there is a hell, every American citizen is going there and when we arrive we will see these images projected on rocky walls in a random and repeating order: a manacled slave, a Cherokee walking on bloody stumps, the charred flesh of a woman throwing herself out of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, a Vietnamese girl inhaling Agent Orange, a queen being bashed at the corner of Sullivan and Houston, and a ten-year-old Chinese boy building a television. Like the way my mother used to tuck me into bed when I was eight years old. Like the way that my father hugged and kissed me. Like the way that my family wouldn’t tell me that my grandmother was dead until she was buried. Like the way that one unexpected death causes decades of suffering. Like the way that you looked when first I saw you. Like the way that I loved you for eight years and came in you ten thousand times and now can’t remember a single thing about you. Like the way that drunk drivers ruin the world. Like the way that Adeline gave me my life and saved me.
And yet people keep writing. And yet the words keep coming.
CHRISTMAS DAY 1996
When Christmas rolled around, I walked to my once and future apartment. They were celebrating the holiday for Emil. An East Village punk turned legal assistant and his comic artist girlfriend had settled into an offbeat vision of middle-class life.
I called from the street. Jon let me in. We said our hellos. I asked how the packing was going. He said it wasn’t much of a problem, at least when it came to his own stuff, as he’d only moved in a few months earlier.
—I haven’t even unpacked, he said. Not really. So it’s easy.
—And Adeline?
—Adeline’s another story.
The apartment was festooned in Xmas kitsch. Adeline’s apron gave her a beleaguered look. Emil ran around, clutching shitty plastic toys sent by Suzanne. Shreds of torn-up wrapping paper were scattered like bodies at Chickamauga.
—Many apologies for the catastrophe, she said, but that’s Christmas. I remember when Mother and Daddy would give us presents and we’d carpet the house with trash. Yet here we stand, repeating their sins with a new generation.
—Baby, said Emil, come look.
I followed the child into his room and sat on the floor. He picked up this stuffed doll. It looked like a character from Sesame Street.
—What’s his name? I asked.
—Elmo, said Emil. Look.
He tickled the toy’s stomach, causing the thing to laugh and shake.
—That tickles! said the toy. Oh boy!
Emil tickled the toy again, causing another round of violent paroxysms. I watched for as long as I could, but the squealing thing gave me a headache. I went into the kitchen.
—You’re going to go insane with Elmo, I said to Adeline.
—Mother sent it, she said. I’m hoping that Elmo breaks soon. He’s been screaming all morning.
—Clearly, I said, we live in the best of all possible worlds.
We went into her bedroom. Soon it would be mine. If I wanted. Or maybe I’d stick with my old room and turn Adeline’s into a study. Both rooms were the same size. It didn’t matter.
—As I’m packing up the entirety of my life, all manner of odd things have made reappearances.
—I can’t believe you’re leaving.
—Baby, she said, don’t exasperate. Don’t act like a parvenu. If you miss us, buy a fucking plane ticket. You’re moneyed. You can stay whenever you want. I’m always Adeline. You’re always Baby. T
hat much never changes. Location is irrelevant.
—I’ll miss you, I said. God, why did you choose California? There’s so many places to live. Anywhere but California!
—That’s very well, she said, but we must all cultivate our own gardens.
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