by Jarett Kobek
Fern spent that year out of Fairy Land.
Her existence was a minor cultural stereotype.
She was living as a pretend artist in a St. Mark’s Place apartment between Avenue A & First Avenue on the island of Manhattan, which was a borough of New York City.
Fern had been in and out of New York City for almost a decade, starting in the Year of the Unquenched Longing, which roughly corresponded to 1989 AD, 1407 AH, and 5747 AM.
It that year, Fern met a young woman named Denise. They dated for a short time, but it was fleeting. Denise had to move to Boston.
Before she left New York, Denise introduced Fern to the demimondes of Manhattan’s East Village and the Lower East Side, two overlapping ethnic ghettos that had transformed into cesspools of petty crime and cheap drugs and were gentrifying into cesspools of international money laundering and the expensive drugs required to fuel international money laundering.
It was in the East Village, where people were wearing terrible leather jackets and even worse denim jeans, that Fern met a boy named Anthony.
Anthony was from Long Island, which was an island next to Manhattan.
The western part of Long Island encompassed Queens and Brooklyn, two of New York City’s boroughs.
At its eastern end, farthest from New York City, Long Island was full of property soon to be the exclusive domain of the ultra-wealthy, where the ruling class would throw parties that commingled the Celebrity branch of American politics with the people who really ruled the world, namely its international merchant bankers.
In the space between the boroughs and the money, there was a heaping mass of vast suburbs.
Anthony was from the middle. He’d grown up in the heaping mass.
Fern met Anthony in a bar on Second Avenue.
The bar was full of ersatz punk rockers and old drunks from the Ukraine.
Their attraction was so obvious, and so apparent, that it made an audible noise.
All of the bar’s drunks heard the noise.
The ersatz punk rockers heard the noise.
Because the bar was full of brains pickled in alcohol, and because its patrons were sitting in a relative darkness designed to hide the shame of their existences, neither the drunks nor the punk rockers could identify the sound’s origin.
The noise sounded like this:
“What the fuck?” asked one of the ersatz punk rockers.
“Hи хуя́ себе́” said one of the drunks.
Then she went back to her drink.
Fern met Anthony in the Year of the Baroque Promise, which roughly corresponded to 1990 AD, 1411 AH, and 5751 AM.
After the love connection made its audible sound, Anthony talked to Fern about the Krautrock band Amon Düül II.
He said stupid shit like: “I found Yeti at Bleecker Bob’s and I had no idea what it was. ‘Archangels Thunderbird’ was one of those moments, you know? It fucking changed my whole fucking life. My God, those drums, that guitar.”
This was the surface babbling of a human being who knew, on the cellular level, that he stood before the firestorm which would consume years of his life.
As his mouth spoke, so too did his subatomic particulars cry out: Fuck me fuck fuck me fuck me love me love me I am yours fuck me fuck me flesh of my flesh burn me burn me my soul is boring a hole this second hole is penetrating the hole of your face the skull of your bone look at me here I am yours and yours alone and you are mine touch me I am the one for whom you have been waiting please please please please please. Kiss me, my darling, for I too am like you, I am a kinder from Bahnhof Zoo.
Unlike the love connection, the crying out of Anthony’s subatomic particulars happened on a level of quantum physics that was inaudible to human ears.
Not even people who had passed the Cash Horizon would have heard.
But in their case, the inaudibility was irrelevant: the rich are incapable of love or its recognition.
Fern was neither human nor past the Cash Horizon.
She was from Fairy Land.
She heard every word.
They talked, they hung around the East Village, they fell into bed, they wandered through the city, and because they’d both consumed endless amounts of media, they were imbued with the photogenic qualities of New York City, and these qualities freighted their wanderings with cultural weight.
Everything was ridiculously romantic.
On their third date, Anthony and Fern were walking in Washington Square Park. They were in the park because they were headed to Jones Street. Anthony had talked Fern into seeing some folk singers at Caffe Vivaldi.
The folk singers in question were absurd historical anachronisms. They were as bad as the people who wrote novels and poetry in the Twenty-First Century AD.
One of the folk singers was a woman named Bianca.
She was in Anthony’s Philosophy program at the New School for Social Research, and she was doing a doctoral dissertation on Spinoza.
“Why don’t you ever talk about your family?” Anthony asked Fern as they passed the statue of Giuseppe Garibaldi.
“What do you mean?” asked Fern. “You don’t talk about your family,” said Anthony. “Do you have any brothers or sisters?”
At Caffe Vivaldi, they sat through an assortment of folk singers who sang 1930s AD ballads about the coming wave of international socialism. Then Bianca got on at the microphone against the back wall.
“Hi,” she said into the microphone. “My name’s Bianca. I’m going to sing a few songs, but while I’m setting up I thought my friend James could do a song. James is a folk singer. He moved to New York last week. I don’t think he wants to do this, but if you give him a round of applause, I’m sure he’ll come up. Let’s have a warm welcome for James.”
Bianca handed James her guitar. He put his mouth too close to the microphone.
“Uhm, hello people,” James said, popping his p, “I’m, uh, I’m pretty nervous. This is the, uh, the first time I’ve ever performed in New York. I’ve never been in the city before, not before Thursday. I’m from Columbus, Ohio. Don’t judge. We all, uh, have to be from somewhere and Columbus is pretty much just as good as pretty much anywhere. Well, kinda. Uhm, you know, sometimes back in Columbus my stuff doesn’t really go over. I thought I’d play a classic from 1935, maybe one you haven’t heard before. Someone played it for me last night on reel-to-reel. So, uhm, can you please be gentle? Kindness never killed anyone.”
Fern thought about the simplicity of music on Fairy Land. Music without filter, music as in ancient times, the voice and the instrument, a holy sound in supplication to the divine.
The purity of what humanity had lost in its era of machines and computers and cars and airplanes. The lost society, the fallen dream, the missing kindness.
James looked so innocent, begging for mercy.
I know how he feels, thought Fern. Oh, please, please, please, let him be good.
James cleared his throat. He checked the guitar’s tuning.
He played his song. This is what he sang:
Every time I fuck them men
I give ’em the doggone clap
Oh, baby, I give ’em the doggone clap
But that’s the kind of pussy that they really like
You can fuck my cock
Suck my cock
Or leave my cock alone
Oh, baby, honey, I piss all night long
If you suck my pussy, baby
I’ll suck your dick
I’ll do it to ya, honey, till I make you shit
Oh, baby, honey, all night long
Long before the Year of the Unspoken Promise, Fern’d concluded that there was nothing new to experience, that all her future years would feature repeats of previous days.
She was like a sexy vampire in a novel by Anne Rice. She was bored by eternal life.
And then, in a bar in the East Village, surrounded by Ukrainian drunks and terrible black leather jackets, she discovered something new.
Meet
ing Anthony was like being in San Francisco in 1965 AD prior to America’s construction of received drug experiences and dosing with high-grade Owsley lysergic acid diethylamide.
Unexplored territory.
It was insane love, l’amour fou, sex magick, the post-coital sparkle of two souls in unison wandering through a fluorescent-lit grocery store at 11:30PM, stoned, drunk, lunacy born of a shared experience, tongue in the mouth as guns fire overhead.
More Bad Sex in Fiction!
Nomination forthcoming!
The vast suburbs of Long Island were built with a specific and exact purpose: to isolate their residents from the perceived chaos of New York City, which was conceptualized as the presence of racial minorities.
In Anthony’s youth, he’d sensed vibrations beyond the vast suburbs, and grasped on an intuitive level that the very experience of the suburbs, and their pretense of isolation, were the byproducts of an economic scheme over which he, and everyone he knew, had no control.
America was a prison for the young: a person either went runaway and threw themselves on the lusts of strangers, or they integrated into the sorting mechanisms of the haute bourgeoisie and hoped that a natural gift would carry them into one of the economic scheme’s higher echelons.
Anthony chose the latter.
He smoked too much pot, he read too many books, he drank too much beer.
He dated a vegetarian girl who wore Malcolm X glasses, had a Siouxsie and the Banshees poster above her bed, and owned an ill-tempered ferret named Pumpkin.
He did well in high school.
After earning an undergraduate degree at the University of Chicago, Anthony ended up in New York City, on the island of Manhattan, doing a Philosophy PhD at the New School for Social Research.
Which is where he met Fern.
During those ridiculously romantic wanderings around New York City, Fern’s thoughts were haunted.
She’d met Anthony at an inopportune time.
She had to return to Fairy Land.
For two years.
And she couldn’t tell the truth.
Imagine the scene: Fern explains to Anthony, who is focusing on a proposed marriage between rational materialism and strict empiricism, that she is a supranatural creature from Fairy Land and that her father was the bastard son of King Arthur and that her mother is the Regnant Queen, and that, oh yeah, all of this has been the subject of Elizabethan pulp fiction and a Jacobean play, and double oh yeah, Fern could not die and was capable of supernatural feats of magic.
She cast two spells on Anthony.
The first drenched him in the radiation of primal magic, altering his brain so that Fern’s periodic disappearances wouldn’t register as significant events.
Whenever the biochemistry of Anthony’s brain produced a thought like: It’s fucking weird as shit that I haven’t seen Fern in seventeen months, it was replaced by another thought: Fern’s gone to Bloomingdale’s.
The other spell drenched him with a second dose of primal magical radiation and created an energy field that rerouted social inquiries.
If someone asked Anthony why they hadn’t seen his girlfriend, the energy field would mess up their minds. The inquisitor would forget that they hadn’t seen Fern. They’d forget her entire existence until the next time they encountered her in the flesh, at which point their brains would be stuffed with false memories of seeing Fern’s nonexistent paintings at hopeless group shows around SoHo.
The spells sat on, and in, Anthony’s body.
They imbued him with the bitter puissance of Fairy Land.
Fern left New York City.
The affair came in dense clusters of contact and absence: one year on, two years off. It was the ultimate long-distance relationship, minus the benefits of then-contemporary modern communication.
There were no letters, no phone calls, no nothing.
Fern disappeared and reappeared.
And the magic deluded Anthony into thinking that she’d never left.
In the Year of the Mechanized Baptism, which roughly corresponded to 1993 AD, 1413 AH, 5753 AM, Fern was back in New York City.
One night, while Fern’s presence was changing the color of the bedroom, Anthony got on the telephone with his mother.
His mother had been born on Long Island.
She still lived on Long Island.
She told Anthony about his uncle’s various bodily ailments, which included dementia, fecal and urinary incontinence, spontaneous bleeding, a lack of mobility, a loss of skin elasticity, and kidney disease.
Then she suggested that it was only a matter of time before her brother would return home from the state-funded institution in which he convalesced.
“He’s not coming back,” Anthony said to his mother. “No one gets better when they’re suffering full-body failure.”
“You’re talking crazy,” said Anthony’s mother. “He’s still young!”
A few weeks earlier, Anthony had left Fern on Manhattan and returned to Long Island, where he’d visited his uncle in the state-funded institution.
Anthony walked past the recreation room and found his uncle’s room, where his uncle’s useless machine of a body had been positioned in a chair.
The useless machine could not get up from the chair. It needed a functioning machine, in the form of a social worker, to help it stand.
This caused its own problem, because every millimeter of the useless machine was wracked with pain. When it was touched, waves of agony ran through the useless machine.
The useless machine could not talk.
The useless machine had wires coming out of its arms and a wire running through its penis into its bladder.
The useless machine was wearing socks that were stained with an instance of the useless machine’s uncontrollable diarrhea.
So when Anthony’s mother said that her brother was still young, Anthony started screaming.
Fern came out of the bedroom and watched as her lover’s face turned red and watched her lover’s mouth emit violent sounds and inadvertent spittle.
“You don’t understand anything!” cried Anthony into the telephone.
“The body isn’t something you can just fuck around with!” cried Anthony into the telephone.
“You’ve never been sick, you have no idea what it’s like!” cried Anthony into the telephone.
That night, when Fern and Anthony engaged in some bad fictional sex, Anthony sobbed like an infant.
In the Year of the Mechanized Baptism, New York City played host to one of its storied events: the Whitney Biennial.
The Biennial was a display of artworks. It occurred every two years at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Generally speaking, artworks were human-made abstract representations of three-dimensional reality.
Anthony wanted to go see a film by the Los Angeles-based artist William E. Jones.
The film was called Massillon and it was included in the 1993 AD Whitney Biennial. Amongst other things, the film was about Jones growing up mega-homosexual in post-industrial Ohio.
“Before we see the film,” Anthony said to Fern, “we should check out the show. The whole thing costs six bucks.”
Everyone who’d come into contact with the energy field residing in Anthony’s body believed that Fern spent most of her time painting. Anthony himself believed this.
When Anthony extended the invitation, Fern couldn’t say no.
The Whitney Biennial was a professional obligation.
They walked uptown to the Biennial, which was housed in the Whitney Museum at the corner of 75th & Madison.
On the way, Anthony and Fern found themselves trapped in an unpleasant discussion.
The topic of this unpleasant discussion was familiar.
It was a reliable source of discord.
This was the topic: Fern’s unwillingness to discuss her past.
Anthony was deeply suspicious that Fern was hiding vital information.
Which, of course, she was.
But Anthony’s body was awash in huge amounts of testosterone and primal magic.
He could not imagine the information that Fern was hiding.
No one could!
Anthony’s body had funneled his suspicion into some serious masculine bullshit. He was fixated on Fern’s sexual history prior to the advent of their rutting congress.
He was convinced that she had a long history of shameful encounters.
From a certain perspective, this was true: Fern had more than her fair share of Fairy Land relationships, and she’d been visiting the mortal world since the Fourteenth Century AD.
But Anthony’s thoughts were more pedestrian.
He was consumed with fleeting images of suburban fingerbanging, semen-smeared threesomes, and an excess of New York City blowjobs.
Don’t forget: he was from Long Island.
“I just want to know the truth!” he shouted. “I can handle it!”
Even in the best of times, the Biennial was notorious for producing a high level of annoyance.
Everyone who visited an iteration of the Biennial left the Whitney Museum and complained about how the abstract representations of three-dimensional reality in the Biennial were the wrong abstract representations of three-dimensional reality to be displayed in a space dedicated to abstract representations of three-dimensional reality.
Unlike previous Biennials, the 1993 AD iteration had overthrown the tyranny of certain kinds of abstract representations of three-dimensional reality and replaced them with different abstract representations of three-dimensional reality.
The 1993 AD show was conceived and executed to engage with voices marginalized from the mainstream of the art world and American culture. It included people descended from the indigenous tribes of the Americas, and people descended from people brought in chains to support America’s original economic scheme, and people exploring the subjugation of women.
And because it was the Year of the Mechanized Baptism, the Biennial occurred before the American capitalist class realized the inherent profitability in men who had sex with other men.
So the Biennial also included mega-homosexuals like William E. Jones.