by Jarett Kobek
Literary Death Match wasn’t anywhere as cruel as a Celebrity Roast.
But it was the same atmosphere.
Somewhere in the middle of this, when Amber Tamblyn was talking, she mentioned that she was drunk.
The next round happened.
Annabelle Gurwitch and I had decided in the green room that she’d read first.
She did.
And then I read.
My appearance at Literary Death Match occurred after years of countless San Francisco literary readings. If I’d learned anything, it was how to work an audience.
I fucking killed.
And then it was time to hear from the judges.
Annabelle Gurwitch and I sat in chairs. Stage right.
The judges were seated stage left.
We watched as our performances were dissected with the jokey malice of a Celebrity Roast. In front of an audience of 280 people.
You’ll forgive me, but I can’t remember a word of what anyone said about Annabelle Gurwitch.
And you’ll forgive me when I say that I can barely remember what Jody Hill and Dana Gould said about me, although I do remember that one of them talked about how innovative it was that I read my piece off an iPad.
It wasn’t an iPad.
It was an Android tablet.
The last judge to comment on my piece was Amber Tamblyn.
She’d been taking notes throughout the event, and she began by reading one of her notes. This is what her note said, give or take: “This guy is wearing white pants. That’s hot.”
She was a person who was infinitely more successful than me, with infinitely more money. She was on America’s highest rated television show. She was published by serious New York presses. And she was in a position of actual, literal judgment on my merit as a writer, and that judgment, if positive, could affect the success of my work and my future.
And she was drunk and making sexualized comments.
In front of an audience of 280 laughing people.
And all I could do was sit there, take it, and pretend to laugh.
While my friends watched.
By any conceivable metric used during #MeToo, this was sexual harassment.
But, seriously, who fucking cares?
Amber Tamblyn wasn’t even the worst.
One time, I was assaulted by a rabid fan outside of the Echo Park Film Center, and another time, I received unsolicited emails from a beloved elder statesman of the literary scene fantasizing about sucking my cock.
He remains a friend.
And I know that as a society we’ve descended into revenge narratives in which a lesser figure remembers some stray incident from the past and uses it to attack someone who’s significantly more famous.
Speak bitterness!
This is our entertainment.
And I realize how uncomfortably close this chapter reads to those narratives.
But that’s not what this is.
Because here is an everlasting truth: if you get Diane di Prima money, you should be allowed to sexually harass the living shit out of everyone in the world.
If I were to give advice to anyone who wants to enter the public sphere, this is what I would say: don’t.
If this theoretical person insisted on entering the public sphere, I would say: recognize the binary presentation inherent in mass media. A public figure can either be good or evil. There are no shades of gray.
So recognize this binary and do yourself a favor: do not cloak yourself in virtue.
Cloak yourself in vice.
Being cloaked in virtue creates an impossible situation: the presentation of self as infallible.
And you will fail.
And when you do, the mass media will be waiting, and the public will feast on your corpse. Nothing tastes better than false virtue.
But cloaking yourself in vice?
There’s nowhere to go but up.
The early days will be difficult, but if you can last four years, you will be an unshakable fixture.
Who knows?
Do this long enough and you might become President of the United States of America!
If the Queen of England trips over a dog, it’s a national scandal.
When Liam Gallagher kicks an old man down the stairs, no one even blinks.
That’s Liam being Liam.
But when our kid hugs a jaundiced paraplegic?
All of that said, it remains a very peculiar experience to be sexually harassed by someone who pens opinion pieces for the New York Times on the social scourge of sexual harassment.
If there’s one aspect of every opinion piece on the social scourge of sexual harassment, it’s that they all contain an implicit core: that there are ways to make the world a better place.
Which, of course, there are.
But when the tools used to make a better world are owned by the Patriarchy, the best outcome you’re going to end up with is a discussion about the social mores in the workplaces of the haute bourgeoisie.
And, remember, that’s the best case.
Here’s one much worse: that, in the end, everyone’s life is still dominated by the whims of the very rich and the social mores of the slightly rich. And that this new reality is exploited by the people who understand that appearances are more important than reality.
All of which is to say that by fixating on sex, the discussion around sexual harassment misses the key element.
Which is the harassment.
The people who end up in positions of power end up in those positions because they are very, very good at humiliation.
That’s their skill.
That’s how they end up as CEOs.
Everyone who has ever had a job has been humiliated by their boss.
This is the nature of the thing.
And, yes, it sucks that the men who end up in power are so fucking crude that the only way they can imagine humiliating women is with sex.
But every single boss who’s humiliating his women underlings is also humiliating his male underlings.
This is who we, as a society, put into power.
Remind me: how many obsequious movies and books and articles have been written about Steve Jobs?
In the end, having a job, even a job like writing, is about interfacing with money, and the biggest lie of our society is that the individual currencies of money are units that measure value.
Money doesn’t measure value.
Money is the measure of humiliation.
What would you do for a dollar?
What would you do for ten dollars?
What would you do for a million dollars?
What would you do for a billion dollars?
So of course Amber Tamblyn would sexually harass me at Literary Death Match.
Why wouldn’t she?
She’d been put into a position of power at an event predicated on the perpetual humiliation of writers.
Chapter Fourteen
When Y Meets X
After the Fontenoy was a bust, Celia and Rose Byrne spent weeks and weeks exploring magical strands of smartphone navigation, which gave the women a decent internal map of Los Angeles and its surrounding environs.
One ropey strand of salvia took them to the Self-Realization Fellowship Lake Shrine, where they wandered around a lake decorated with religious kitsch.
Another strand took them to the site of Jack Parson’s hermitage in Pasadena, where L. Ron Hubbard learned about ceremonial magick and imbued himself with the ideological basis of what would become Scientology.
Another strand, and by far the longest, took them out of Los Angeles and all the way to 274 Coast Boulevard in La Jolla, where, during World War Two, Anna Kavan had spent several months hard drinking and going ga-ga for an architect while looking at ridiculous California coastal splendor.
Another took them to 6026 Barton Ave, the address at which Samson de Brier held his cultural salons, where the former Francis Fuller had made the deal for Handspun Roses several decades
before Celia wiped out any memory of the film or its director.
Another took them to a lecture at the Philosophical Research Society on Los Feliz Boulevard, which had the virtue of being very close to the house on the hill.
Another took them to the Bellagio gate of Bel Air, where buses from the San Fernando Valley dropped off the permanent servant class of Latino Americans to perform domestic duties in the homes of the Celebrity branch of American governance.
Another took them to a one-room structure behind 7508 Sunset Boulevard, where the members of Guns N’ Roses had lived in depravity.
And there were other places, arbitrarily chosen by authorial whims: the former St. Francis Hotel, and the shack on North Genovese where Marjorie Cameron spent the final years of her life, and the site of the former Motel Hell on Hollywood Boulevard, and the former Security Pacific National Bank Building on Hollywood Boulevard, where in the early 1980s AD a tribe of street freaks called the Night People took up residence while the bank still operated out of the bottom floor.
And there were others too.
Countless others.
But nowhere did they find Fern.
Meanwhile, the women of Fairy Land spent their evenings in bars.
They sampled places like Frank N Hanks and the HMS Bounty before settling on Tenants of Trees as their regular haunt.
Tenants of Trees was a Silverlake bar that was home to a fairly pleasant outdoor patio.
It was a human meat market filled with the sexual desperation of people who’d made the mistake of following their dreams and moving to Los Angeles.
Celia used the meat market to engage in reckless sex with some of the city’s more pathetic men.
One night, Celia and Rose Byrne were sitting in an open-air room off the patio.
“I have seen too much of this mortal world,” said Rose Byrne.
Rose Byrne was wearing a T-shirt that said: CRIMSON GLORY.
Celia was wearing a T-shirt that said: KING DIAMOND.
“Another drink, I think,” said Celia.
Celia had cast a spell on Tenants of Trees which gave them an open and bottomless tab.
Celia made her way to the bar, passing a man and woman involved in a meat-market transaction. The transaction was comprised of monosyllables.
“That’s, you know, so dumb,” said the woman.
“Shit, isn’t it,” said the man.
“Right, don’t you think?” asked the woman.
“Fuck,” said the man.
“What you, like, do, I’ve done,” said the woman.
Celia sat on a stool at the center of the bar.
The bartender, a young woman with full-sleeve tattoos, was serving other customers. She didn’t see Celia.
A man on the stool to Celia’s left turned his body in her direction.
“Whenever I espy a woman in licensed tour apparel, I am stricken with a fevered and paralyzing round of myxomatosis,” said the man.
“I beg your pardon?” asked Celia.
“King Diamond, madame,” said the man. “Your shirt. Is this not a reproduction of the Abigail artwork?”
“I suppose,” said Celia.
Celia had no idea about King Diamond, the eponymous vocalist of the heavy metal band King Diamond, or the band itself, or the band’s 1987 AD concept album Abigail.
As with every other day, magic had chosen her outfit.
Through the coincidental power endemic to fiction, the man was also not wearing an outfit of his choice.
He was wearing a pair of banana-yellow shorts with a fringe trim.
And, like Celia, he was also wearing a T-shirt.
Unlike Celia, his T-shirt did not advertise a heavy metal band from the 1980s AD.
His T-shirt said this:
The man’s T-shirt was very long.
That morning, with his body smarting from the previous night’s Abu Ghraib-themed BDSM/taqiyya session, HRH had done a Skype interview.
The journalist was from Portland, Oregon. The interview subject was the Klaus Mann Center, a homeless shelter in Portland that HRH had opened in 2007 AD. The shelter had a specific focus on LGBTQIA+ youth.
“I believe,” said HRH into a laptop that displayed the computerized face of the interviewer, “that it is our duty to protect the least fortunate of society.”
“It’s very unusual, though, isn’t it?” asked the interview.
“I should hope that this belief is universally held,” said HRH.
“You’re a Saudi prince,” said the interviewer.
“The royal flesh is my own,” said HRH. “Yet do not forget, I am a citizen of St. Kitts and Nevis.”
“I was only curious if things like the Klaus Mann Center made family reunions awkward,” said the journalist.
“Whenever is a reunion of family not a-drip with awkwardness?” asked HRH.
“One last question. Why name a shelter in America after a German writer?”
“I had wished to christen the enterprise after Annemarie Schwarzen bach,” said HRH. “An advisor warned me against both the length of her name and its linguistic closeness to that of film star and former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. In her stead, I opted for that friend of her bosom, Klaus Mann, a man whom I rate as a personal hero. He was tortured by his father. When the Nazis willed themselves to power, Klaus fled into exile, and beyond the snug confines of the Weimar Republic, he found that his fey lust for the bodies of other men caused great pain. He committed suicide. Yet I consider his life a triumph. Through the torrents of suffering, he authored several brilliant books and one unvarnished masterpiece. He inspires us all.”
After the interview, HRH went to a board meeting at the Venice Beach offices of Snapchat.
Snapchat was a smartphone app that had achieved a long-standing dream of corporate America: cornering the ever elusive market of child pornography.
Following a tip received at an orgy full of unattractive men and female sex workers, all of whom were in the thrall of MDMA, HRH had gotten in on the Series A funding of Snapchat.
Snapchat was a late-period capitalist innovation: a corporation either worth nothing or everything, and one with such a complex relationship to money that it was impossible to judge the company’s failure or success.
The Series A funding had earned HRH a seat on the board.
HRH arrived wearing a suit that’d been tailored in London by Gieves & Hawkes.
By the end of the board meeting, the suit was so stained that HRH had to borrow clothes from an employee of Snapchat.
“There is a curious lacuna in Abigail, and one that is never revealed through the stylized vocals of King Diamond,” said HRH to Celia. “Speak not of the ludicrous sequel. We are not barbarians, madame. We consider texts unburdened by a priori knowledge. As King Diamond sings, we meet the ghost of Count de LaFey, and also his unfaithful wife, and their descendant Jonathan and his wife Miriam. One almost need not even mention Abigail herself. The stillborn child of de LaFey’s wife, conceived in the sullen pits of adultery. Although the main thrust of the album concerns itself with Abigail’s attempts to possess Miriam, represented as the symbolic transition from eighteen to nine, I remain struck by our ignorance of Abigail’s father. Her sire is the one player never identified. I wonder, madame, have you any theories as to the identity of this unfortunate progenitor?”
“I beg your pardon?” asked Celia.
“Is this swine bothering you?” asked Rose Byrne.
From her bench in the open-air room, Rose Byrne had been keeping an eye on Celia.
At first, she wasn’t concerned when she saw Celia talking with HRH.
She’d seen Celia speaking with a legion of meat-market men.
But then she noticed HRH’s face pushing too close to Celia.
Celia was inching backwards on her stool.
Rose Byrne decided to intervene.
Her broadsword was in a scabbard.
The scabbard was hanging from her battle belt.
Throughou
t their journeys across Los Angeles, the broadsword had occasioned enough comment that Celia had cast a spell making the weapon invisible to mortals.
But it was always there.
HRH turned to Rose Byrne.
HRH looked Rose Byrne up and down.
“If there is any one thing that I am able to recognize within an instant, it is a servant,” HRH said to Celia.
“Her name is Rose Byrne,” said Celia.
“Wonderful!” cried HRH. “A dwarf with a broadsword! Straight from the pages of John Ronald Reuel! Madame, you offer no end of surprises! Where did you find such a creature? I must have her! Another blinkered specimen for my menagerie of the damned! How much must I offer to purchase this beauty?”
“We have no use for money,” said Celia.
“I am not for sale,” said Rose Byrne.
“Sir, I know not how it is that you see the broadsword,” said Celia. “I suggest that you leave us in peace. Rose Byrne is disagreeable and her weapon was sharpened this very morn.”
“You issue threats, madame?” asked HRH.
“A statement of reality,” said Celia.
“Are you as unpleasant as she claims?” HRH asked Rose Byrne. “Your apple face betrays no wrath. I see only dwarven mirth. Sing me a song of the misty mountains cold!”
“I am a whirlwind,” said Rose Byrne.
“If I fluster your companion any further, you will use this sword on my person?” asked HRH. “You will murder my body in Tenants of Trees?”
“Without a doubt,” said Rose Byrne. “Your head will roll on the tiles.”
“Wonderful!” cried HRH. “Wonderful!”
HRH jumped off his bar stool.
HRH kneeled on the ground before Rose Byrne.
HRH bent his head.
“Come now, you broken creature of Khazad-dûm! Here is my neck! Make swift with your cut. Pretend that I am the bastard offspring of Charles the First and the Great God Pan! I will be the martyr of the people! Chop, chop, cut, cut, make your haste!”
Rose Byrne’s previous murders in Tenant of Trees had required a great deal of magic.
Many lives had been erased.
Celia saw no need for the bother.
She cast a spell to transport HRH out of Tenant of Trees.