A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

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A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius Page 19

by Dave Eggers


  “I won’t.”

  The molding cracks.

  “Owww.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Idiot.”

  I lay him on the bed, in his jeans and sweatshirt, and put his blanket over him. In the kitchen, I check the answering machine. I look in the fridge. I wonder briefly about people I could call. Who would be awake? Someone will want to come over. Who would be willing?

  I walk back to my bedroom, drop my change on the dresser.

  The wallet. On the dresser.

  It was here.

  VI.

  When we hear the news at first it means almost nothing. It has just been announced that The Real World, MTV’s seminal program involving the housing of seven young people in one house and the televising of their lives, will film its next season in San Francisco. MTV is seeking applicants. They are looking for a new cast.

  At the office we have a few hearty laughs about it.

  “Has anyone seen the show?”

  “No.”

  “No.”

  “Some of it.”

  We’re all lying. Everyone’s seen the show. We all despise it, are enthralled by it, morbidly curious. Is it interesting because it’s so bad, because the stars of it are so profoundly uninteresting? Or is it because in it we recognize so much that is maddeningly familiar? Maybe this is indeed us. Watching the show is like listening to one’s voice on tape: it’s real of course, but however mellifluous and articulate you hear your own words, once they’re sent through this machine and are given back to you, they’re high-pitched, nasal, horrifying. Are our lives that? Do we talk like that, look like that? Yes. It could not be. It is. No. The banality of our upper-middle-class lives, so gaudily stuck between the mindless drunk-driving of high school—that was meant as a metaphor only—and the death that is homeowning and family-having, especially when packaged within a comfort zone of colorful couches and lava lamps and pool tables—wouldn’t this make interesting television only for those whose lives are even more boring than those of The Real World’s cast?

  But it’s impossible to ignore.

  As half of the people we know, in secret or unabashedly, are scrambling to get their applications in, we wonder what sort of fun we can make, put our much-needed spin on it all.

  One of our contributors, David Milton, writes a letter to them, which we have ready for the first issue. The letter reads:

  Dear Producers,

  Something is radiating deep within me and it must be transmitted or I will implode and the world will suffer a great loss, unawares. Epic are the proportions of my soul, yet without a scope who cares am I? This is why I must but must be one of the inhabitants of MTV’s “Real World.” Only there, burning brightly into a million dazzled eyes, will my as yet uncontoured self assume the beauteous forms that are not just its own, but an entire market niche’s, due.

  I am a Kirk Cameron-Kurt Cobain figure, roguishly quirky, dandified but down to earth, kooky but comprehensible; denizen of the growing penumbra between alternative and mainstream culture; angsty prophet of the already bygone apocalypse, yet upbeat, stylish and sexy!

  Oscar Wilde wrote, “Good artists exist in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating...[they] live the poetry [they] cannot write.” As with Dorian Gray, life is my art! Oh MTV, take me, make me, wake me from my formless slumbers and place me in the dreamy Real World of target marketing.

  Sincerely,

  David Milton

  And after the chuckles, and after I get over my fleeting paranoia that Milton’s making fun of me in particular, we get serious for a second. We are trying to get advertising, distribution, all that flotsam lined up for our first issue, and right now we are nowhere, because we have nothing and are no one.

  We have, though, assembled a crack team. There is Moodie, of course, and now there is Marny, who has moved out, a few months out of college. Yes, in high school we had dated. Yes, she had been a cheerleader, though an improbable one, a serious one, the one who never smiled. And now she is the one among us who reads Ms., who reads The Nation, who knows what or who Che Guevara was. And there is Paul, who has just joined up, having grown up twenty miles south of us, along Lake Michigan, on the cold, cruel streets of Chicago’s Gold Coast. We had started with one more, my grade school best friend Flagg, whom I had coerced into leaving his girlfriend and job in Washington to move to Berkeley to be a part of the start-up. He had made the trip, set up with us, at a desk by the window, had spent his days doing our “market research”— it was just for show, soft, unprovable statistics to parade in front of advertisers—but he soon learned what the rest of us pretty much knew going in: that there would be no money in this, not for a long time at least, if ever, and the hours were going to be ludicrous, spent in a filthy corner of a shaky warehouse, where dust falls from the rafters when the tenants walk above, where the locks are decorative only, where the rent sets us back $250 a month.

  But it’s not like anyone here, in San Francisco, in this building, is going to tell you you’re wasting your time.

  The rest of the floor consists, with occasional musical chair-ings, of a desk for our landlord, Randy Stickrod (real name), who is a magazine consultant, having recently aided in the launch of Wired, the founders of which only recently vacated the precise area we are currently inhabiting, and moved two floors up. Across from us is the desk, desk-organizer, and tiny computer of Shalini Malhotra, who helps with just Go!’, a tiny ecotravel magazine, and who is working on her own zine, provisionally titled Hum—the Indian word for “Us”—which will be dedicated to uniting and speaking for/to/from twentysomethings of the South Asian American persuasion. There is also bOING bOING, a “neurozine” published by Carla Sinclair and Mark Fraunfelder, a plastic/gel/leather-new-wave-circa-1984-looking husband-and-wife team just up from L.A. In the back there is a guy putting out a magazine called Star Wars Generation—no explanation necessary. All together, our floor, our building, it has something, is bursting, is not just a place where people are working but a place where people are creating and working to change the very way we live.

  The warehouse, as luck would have it, is in San Francisco’s South Park neighborhood, an area of maybe six blocks which, if the newspapers are right, is itself about to explode, because this is where Wired makes its home, as do a handful of other magazines, mostly computer rags but also SF Weekly, The Nose (humor) and FutureSex (“cybererotica” (naked people wearing virtual reality gear))—not to mention countless start-up software companies, Web developers, Internet providers—and this is 1993, when this stuff is new—graphic designers, architects, all surrounding or very close to a small oval of green called South Park (no relation)— bordered by small Victorians and bisected by an active playground—within which sits, on its perfect lush green grass, an incredibly dense concentration of sophisticated and gorgeous youth—a green oval teeming with the vernal and progressive and new and beautiful. They have tattoos before everyone has tattoos. They ride motorcycles, and their leather is amazing. They practice (or claim to practice) Wicca. They are the luminous young daughter of Charles Bronson, who interns at Wired, where the ratio of attractive young women to interns and assistants is 1:1, they being one and the same. There are bike messengers who also write socialist tracts, and bike messengers who are 200 lb transvestites, and writers who prefer to surf, and raves are still attracting crowds, and the young creative elite of San Francisco are here and only here, do not want to be elsewhere, because technology-wise, New York is ten or twelve years behind—you can’t even e-mail anyone there yet—and style-wise L.A. is so ‘80s, because here, in stark contrast, there is no money, no one is allowed to make money, or spend money, or look like you’ve spent money, money is suspect, the making of money and caring about money—at least insofar as having more than, say, $17,000 a year—is archaic, is high school, is completely beside the po
int. Here there are no clothes that are not preworn—when a shirt is not a used shirt, when a shirt has cost more than $8, we say:

  “Hey, nice shirt”

  “Yeah, nice.. .you know, shirt”

  And there are no cars that are not old cars, or preferably very old cars, silly cars, cheap cars, the coveted parking spaces around South Park filled with automotive mutants, anomalies. And in San Francisco, for better or worse, there are no ideas dumb enough to be squashed, or people aren’t honest enough to tell people the truth about their dumb ideas, and so half of us are doing dumb, doomed things— And there is no prestige like the prestige in working for Wired, wearing one of those new black shoulder bags they just had made, or having been at the party thrown by the people from Survival Research Laboratories, who make giant robots and have them fight each other—and though the material rewards are a joke, and the apartment rents are already starting to get silly, we say nothing and complain little because when the cherubic bald anchorman on the news says that this is the “best place on Earth” we cringe but then kind of even believe it, in a way, believe that we have to work eighteen hours a day, whether for ourselves or one of these tech start-ups or whatever, because we’re in a certain place, are lucky, feel lucky even though it’s been only a few years since the hills burned, since the highways collapsed— But so we are gathered here, each and every perfect warm-but-not-too-warm day, each day lathered in sun and possibility, probability, and while everyone drinks their lattes and eats their burritos, pretending not to be checking each other out— there is a feeling that we are, at least at this point in time, with our friends, on this lush grass, at the very red molten-hot core of everything, that something is happening here, that, switching metaphors, that we are riding a wave, a big wave—of course, not one that’s too big, not like one of those huge Hawaii kinds that kill people on the coral—

  Of course, we, and our magazine, can’t let on that we’re part of this scene, or any scene. We begin to perfect a balance between being close to where things are happening, knowing the people involved and their patterns, while keeping our distance, an outsider’s mentality, even among other outsiders. Ridiculing other magazines, especially Wired upstairs, we do a What’s Hot/What’s Not list:

  WHAT’S HOT WHAT’S NOT

  the sun snow

  flambe vichyssoise

  branding irons a cold beverage

  lava (molten) lava (hardened)

  We place an ad with the local media organizations, saying that we are not this and we are not that, that this will be, unless something bizarre and terrible happens, the very first meaningful magazine in the history of civilization, that it will be created by and for us twenty somethings (we try alternatives, to no avail: people in their twenties? people of twenty?), that we are looking for writers, photographers, illustrators, cartoonists, interns— Anyone who wants to help will be put to work—we need hundreds, can use thousands. We send in the listing-manifesto, and in days (hours?), a cascade of resumes. Most just out of college, some with pictures drawn above their names, designs in the margins, transcripts from their years at Bates, Reed, Wittenberg attached. We call everyone, can’t call them quick enough, we want to marry every one of them, are thrilled to have found them, to have made this connection. We offer work to everyone.

  “What kind of help do you need?” they ask.

  “What do you want to do?” we say.

  “What kind of hours will it require?”

  “What kind of time do you have?”

  We’ll take anything, anyone we can get, no matter what kind of loser they are, we don’t care, even if they went to Stanford, Yale. For us it’s all about numbers, amassing sheer numbers of people— Most who come have other jobs, and many, thank God, have no jobs at all, and have been given by their parents a year or so to get on their feet. Every time someone walks through the door and steps over our garbage and around our boxes looking to offer themselves we have met a brother, a sister, already believing so fervently in the utter urgency of what we’re doing—

  “I saw your notice and I just fucking had to come down. It’s about fucking time someone did this.”

  “Great. Thanks.”

  “Now, I’ve got some poetry...”

  and though we can’t accommodate everyone’s talents, proclivities, and agendas—about five different people want to write about the many, many uses of hemp—we know that we have something, have touched a nerve. We want everyone to follow their dreams, their hearts (aren’t they bursting, like ours?); we want them doing things that we will find interesting. Hey Sally, why work at that silly claims adjusting job—didn’t you used to sing? Sing, Sally, singl We feel sure that we speak for others, that we speak for millions. If only we can get the word out, spread the word, with this, this magazine... We will make the magazine a platform from which to spring, a springboard from which to speak—

  We write the premiere issue’s opening essay:

  Could there really be more to a generation than illiterate, uninspired, flannel-wearing “slackers”? Could a bunch of people under twenty-five put out a national magazine with no corporate backing and no clue about marketing? With actual views about actual issues? With a sense of purpose and a sense of humor? With guts and goals and hope? Who would read a magazine like that? You might.

  That’s where the pun comes in. That last part.

  To fund a second phone line, for the fax machine, we hold bake sales in the park. All the contributors bring goods, and we raise about $100. We beg everyone we know to switch to Working Assets for their long distance—

  “But you have to. They donate money to good causes, and they say if we get a hundred people to change over, they might advertise and—“

  We seek out alliances with others, like us, who are taking a formless and mute mass of human potential and are attempting to make it speak, sing, scream, to mold it into a political force. Or at least use it to get themselves in Time and Newsweek.

  There is Lead or Leave, a Washington, D.C., political group which already, in 1993, claims some 500,000 members. There is Third Millennium, a similarly minded advocacy group, one born of a weekend brainstorming session held at the family getaway of one of the young Kennedys. Both organizations want to amass their own thousands, register voters and become the youth version of the AARP, then, once the numbers are marshaled and the weapons distributed, they’ll fight the war that we all must fight, the war that will become our Great War, or at least our Vietnam:

  Social Security.

  It appears, from the calculations of many economists, that, when we are all sixty-five or seventy or whatever, when we retire, there will not be enough money left in the pot for us.. .that Social Security will be bankrupt. Lead or Leave and Third Millennium make news everywhere by registering voters and holding press conferences to call attention to this looming Armageddon, and we make contact with these organizations, pledge solidarity, though to be honest we have absolutely no idea what they’re talking about. Though we share with them the desire to motivate and bring to action (some kind of action, though what exactly we are not sure) our 47 million souls, what we are most interested in is their mailing list.

  It’s not like we don’t support them—because we do, conceptually if not materially, or ideologically—it’s just that, given little to no contact with economic insecurity of any kind, we have a hard time finding the fire in the belly for such things. We want to join them in complaining about the burdens of student loans, but then remember that of all of us, only Moodie had to take one on. We want to complain about jobs, but we don’t really want jobs ourselves—not the kind you’d complain about—so quickly fall mute. And Social Security? Well, personally at least, I cannot in my wildest fantasies see myself making it past fifty or fifty-five, so find the issue moot. All we really want is for no one to have a boring life, to be impressive, so we can be impressed.

  We try to convince people that we’re a lifestyle magazine.

  “See, we’re talking here ab
out a style of life”

  “Huh.”

  “Get it? Not lifestyle like lifestyle. Life. Style. A style of life.”

  “Right.”

  “A style. Of life.”

  We find strength in people doing things we find worthwhile, heroic, and who are getting great press for doing such things. We lionize Fidel Vargas, the youngest mayor in the country, whose politics we know nothing about but whose age (twenty-three) we do. We glorify Wendy Kopp, at twenty-five the founder of Teach for America, which places recent college graduates in understaffed or -financed schools, mostly urban. We love people like this, those who are starting massive organizations, trying new approaches to age-old problems, and getting the word out about it, with great PR, terrific publicity photos, available in black and white or color transparency.

  We are willing and ready. Whomever we need to ally ourselves with, whatever we need to do, we will be there—if we have to organize events and sponsor speakers, if we have to go to large, loud rock concerts and sit at tables and hand out literature and look down the loose-necked tanktops of late-teenage girls... even if we have to appear on television and in magazines and be quoted extensively and live like rock stars and wield power like messiahs— whatever it takes, we are ready. Just tell us where to be, who we’re talking to, the circulation of your newspaper or approximate view-ership, and a vague idea of what you want us to say.

  It’s like the ‘60s! Look! Look, we say to one another, at the imbalances, the glaring flaws of the world, aghast, amazed. Look how things are! Look at how, for instance, there are all these homeless people! Look at how they have to defecate all over the streets, where we have to walk! Look at how high rents are! Look at how the banks charge these hidden fees when you use their ATMs! And Ticketmaster! Have you heard about these service charges? How if you charge your tickets over the phone, they charge you, like, $2 for every goddamn ticket? Have you heard about this? It’s completely fucking ridiculous.

  But soon it will be okay. When we begin publishing, and put in the six months or so until world domination, these things will be addressed, redressed. We look at portfolios. As I sit down with a comely photographer named Debra, I see not only a possible dating possibility, but also an image that immediately screams the theme song of our message. In her book is a picture of a stark naked man streaking across a beach, blurry with speed.

 

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