by Jarett Kobek
“Fucking Jon de Lee,” whispered Минерва. “Of Inverted Bloody Crosses.”
“Do you know him?” I whispered back.
“I fucking do,” she said.
“Would you be good enough to introduce us?”
The speeches petered out. Constant recycling of anger. Минерва and I ascended to 9th Street, in the freezing late-March weather, and there I was, talking with Jon de Lee, him looking at me, and I thought, oh great God be damned, what a God damned attractive ruffian. I asked if he had a girlfriend and he laughed. I asked him what was funny and he said, I’m in a band. I’m an anarchist. Anarchist band members don’t have girlfriends. They don’t believe in relationships. I said that sounded like masculine bullshit. He asked what I was doing tomorrow.
And that is how I ended up with my third and final college boyfriend.
MARCH 1989
Adeline Goes on Three Dates
Sitting in a booth at the Jones Diner with Jon de Lee. Watching as he ate a $1.50 cheeseburger deluxe. My fingers picking, gingerly, at his soggy French fries.
The single previous time that I’d dared cross the establishment’s threshold was on the evening that Jean-Michel Basquiat died, five days following the bloody brouhaha at Tompkins Square. Word of the artist’s passing spread via telephone, particularly amongst the more motivated students at Parsons. Someone mentioned that our hometown hero had overdosed in his loft on Great Jones Street.
A handful of us drifted to his building. The corpse was long gone, putrefying somewhere in a morgue, undergoing a coroner’s autopsy. There wasn’t anything to see but a handful of crack addicts. As we stood in the street, one daft soul couldn’t cease her prattling about how this old rock star, Bucky Wunderlick, had lived on the block waaaaaaay back in Ye Olde 1960s.
“Bucky’s stuff is really a wonder. Even now,” she said. “Have you heard the Mountain Tapes? People think he’s crazy because he converted to Islam for a while and made annoying albums like Abu Dharr’s Tears, but that was only a phase. The most recent aren’t as preachy. The last one’s kind of weird. Bucky seems like he’s gotten super upset about NASA.”
Then another of our holy fools suggested eating at the Jones Diner. So that’s what Parsons’ Finest did on the night that old Jean-Michel gave up his ghost. We stuffed our faces with the most grotesque food you can imaginate, only a couple of hundred feet from where they’d wheeled out the body.
Do you wonder, reader, why had Jon de Lee escorted me into the diner’s confines? The answer is very simple. We were on our third date. The diner was his idea of fine food.
“So you’re rich, right?” he asked.
“The family has money,” I said.
“And Mommy gives you the cash?”
“You might say that.”
“For what, college and your clothes and food?” he asked.
“You might say that.”
“So really,” he said. “You’re another gentrifier who believes for no apparent reason that the East Village is a place she can make her own.”
“What a charming line of inquiry,” I said. “Darling, a man who’s adopted the name Jon de Lee shouldn’t criticize the pretensions of others. It ain’t as if you were born within the ringing peals of the Most Holy Redeemer. Red Bank is a long way from the Lower East Side.”
“I was born working class,” he said. “It makes sense that I would gravitate to another working-class neighborhood. I know these people. I don’t see them as local color.”
*
Our first date, if it may be so called, had occurred on a Tuesday night when Jon de Lee invited me to witness the hallowed event of his band playing the Pyramid Club.
The Inverted Bloody Crosses shared the bill with Collapsed, Bold, and Nausea. I hadn’t the slightest. I somehow convinced Baby to come along. “You’re a groupie now?” he asked.
The Inverted Bloody Crosses sounded horrible but were the proper sort of awful, constructing signs and signifiers of post-riot LES discontent. Pronouncements, sans musique, about the cops, about the rich, about wars against the working poor. All delivered by Jon de Lee. Vocalist and lead guitarist. In the short moments between his prolonged bouts of ranting, the band cranked out dense eruptions of noise. Jon later explained that the Crosses were thrashcore, elaborating on the various punk subgenres and their distinguishing features. I tuned him out, bless his pretty little head.
“So what,” said Baby, “you’re going to fuck this guy because you saw his band?”
“Cease your judgments,” said I. “Only the good Lord Jesus Christo knows what shenanigans you’ve experienced at the Pyramid.”
“Adeline,” said Baby. “You can’t repeat the past.”
“Can’t repeat the past?” I asked. “Of course you can.”
When the music finished, Baby begged off. I protested, but when I took in the scene on Avenue A, I was happy for my roommate’s evanescence. It was pathetic, and I was a contributor, one of several slags crowding the bands, desperate to chat up musicians. But these are punk people! I thought. Punk people should be above mere cock-rock bullshit.
*
“The cheeseburgers here are the best in the city,” said Jon de Lee. “Greasy and good and cheap.”
“I suppose,” I said. I did admire the diner’s interior. The walls and the vinyl were abortion-clinic green, one long room contained within brick, a counter with stools up against it and five booths. Through our half-circle window, the emptiness of Great Jones and Lafayette, perfect view of a parking lot.
*
When Jon de Lee floated the idea of a second rendezvous, I refused to attend another live event, insisting rather that we do something, together, alone, as two acolytes sharing a moment in time. The concept perplexed him: “Isn’t the date a bourgeois fallacy designed to reinforce the myth of natural marriage?”
“It could be,” I said. “But we’re going all the same.”
He invited me on a constitutional around the city. So we perambulated, talking. He pontificated his usual bullshit, obviously, more rants about war against the poor, about police power, about the unrighteous applications of the state. But he talked, too, about his family and his early life.
His name wasn’t Jon de Lee. An adopted nom de guerre. He’d been born Jonah Lieber, a Jewish boy out in Monmouth County. “My parents,” he said, “divorced before I was born. Growing up, it was me, my mom, and my sister. My brother didn’t live with us. My father was gone but sent child support. Then there was school, which went fine until junior high and my bar mitzvah, when I started noticing a difference between me and the other kids. They were too Jersey, I guess. Or I wasn’t Jersey enough. I never gave two fucks about their gold chain bullshit. I dropped out and came to New York. I’ve been on the Lower East Side ever since.”
“You’re well spoken,” said I. “For a dropout.”
“Why should an intellectual be academy educated? America has a long tradition of self-made men,” he said.
“You don’t believe in America,” I said. “You’re an anarchist.”
“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. I believe in the dream of America.”
“What’s a hobgoblin?” I asked.
“Like Puck, you know, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”
“Never seen it,” I lied. “Or read it.”
“It’s all right,” said Jon de Lee. “I prefer The Tempest. We have a song about Caliban called ‘Dildo Lies Bleeding.’ Caliban washes up on the East River and becomes a heroin addict in Alphabet City. I got the idea after reading Hart Crane’s The Bridge. There’s a section about Edgar Allan Poe on the subway, and I thought, that’s so true. Because Edgar Allan Poe did look like a waxy-faced subway pervert.”
We landed at Wall Street. “In all my days living in New York City,” I said, “I’ve never been to Wall Street.”
“There’s nothing interesting down here,” he said. “Just assholes on portable phones.”
A statue of George Washington stood before Federal Hall. Our nation’s Founding Father on a pedestal, the likeness a little too dandified. Smears of dried blood ringed the pedestal. The rotting corpses of small animals littered the pavement.
“In all of tarnation,” I said. “What are these things?”
“Haven’t you seen this before?” asked Jon de Lee. “There’s a cult out in Flatbush. They think the founding fathers are voodoo loas. Or something like that. It’s never been clear. Now that you know about it, you’re going to see this shit constantly.”
*
I agreed to a third date but insisted that Jon feed me. Thus the Jones Diner. Thus the drastic sight of Jon de Lee sucking down a cheeseburger deluxe.
“So why the fuck are you in college?” he asked, pounding on the flat end of a ketchup bottle.
“It’s simply what’s done,” I said, playing my role to the hilt. “People of my social status are destined for college.”
“But you’re an artist?” he asked.
“Something like that,” I said.
“Aren’t you going to eat?”
“I ate your fries,” I said. “That’s enough for me.”
“I hope you aren’t suffering from anorexia nervosa,” he said. “There are people in this neighborhood who actually can’t afford food, who don’t have the luxury of starving themselves.”
“Oh, Jon,” I said, “can’t we just let them eat cake?”
When he finished his meal, we walked east. I showed him 84 Second Avenue. I informed him about the existence of Dress Suits on Fire. He knew the story. “Her family still lives here,” he said. “I’ve talked to one, her sister, I think. It’s tough, you don’t want to ask too much. I know someone who saw a ghost up there.”
“Brown Tony?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “It was Spacer.”
Around then I decided that I’d take him into the boudoir, but his status as an anarchist played on my worries. I didn’t feel any particular investment in monogamy, but I had pride.
“So your ethos, darling, your creed of a propertyless utopia, prevents you from commitment?”
I asked before the wrought-iron gates of the Marble Hill Cemetery. A gaggle of the homeless had taken shelter among the dim remains of the dead. They incinerated wood in barrels. A few tents erected, no doubt filled with needles and glass pipes.
“I didn’t say that.”
“You did indeed,” I said. “On the first night we met.”
“I talk a lot of shit,” he said.
MARCH 1989
Adeline and Jon Have Sex
When one suffers a long and protracted illness, it’s possible to lose all memory of good health.
Like myself. I am a prime example. I hadn’t the slightest of how sick I’d become, not until I took the cure.
Consider the many instances of my short life involving intercourse with doltish young men, idiot boys and their scrawny bodies. Sex without any erotic charge, akin to favors offered to a friend.
Reader, mistake me not. Your old pal Adeline was not one of these hopeless young nymphets doomed to fornicate like a bunny rabbit with pleasure always just beyond her reach. There were moments of enjoyment, instances of genuine good. Fumbling fingers and tortured tongues. Nervous orgasms. It happened. This I shan’t deny.
Sex with boys was disconnected from possibility. A kind of friendly masturbation, a semi-mutual achieving of physical release.
Memories of these previous encounters became distant, remote, erased once I got down to brass tacks with Jon de Lee.
With Jon it was communication, a dialogue between two bodies, electric impulses transmitted over wires of flesh and bone. Words one cannot speak, words that can only be heard. Skin that became skin that became skin anew.
We made love and we had sex and we had sex and we made love. But reader, again, I implore. Mistake me not. I am not your Pollyanna, I am not your sweet princess. We fucked, we fucked, we fucked, we fucked, we fucked, we fucked. We fucked in the effluvia of our bodies, we fucked in the scent of it, in the sheer stench of it, in the garden of our human flowering. Stained sheets, stained clothes, stained souls, stained towels. Fucked until my pussy ran dry and was rubbed raw, fucked until the Captain yowled outside my door, his gray paws smacking against the wood, fucked until Jon’s daily erections withered into nothingness, unable to support a third or fourth condom, fucked until the arrival of my period, pausing only until the heavy flow ceased, then fucking as Jon’s penis turned cartoon red with my discharge, fucked until celestial bodies rotated on their axes and reversed course in the Heavens, until the bed broke, until the building itself became hypercharged by orgones. Our fucking was a pulsing wave, a holy burst of scared geometry, a congress of wonder.
Between sessions, Jon would proffer half-baked Marxist analysis, saying, “What I admire about you women, and where I’ve got a powerful sympathy for your kind, is in the amount of effort you put into sex.”
“Whatever do you mean, old sport?” asked I.
“Take yesterday, after I couldn’t deal with the condom, and you used your hand and your mouth. I couldn’t help it, but I felt like a factory boss and like you were the worker, and I kept you from the means of production, because there was no fruits you could reap from your labor.”
“It’s not a job,” I said.
“Was it a gift?” he asked.
“I’ve had gift sex,” I sighed. “That was nothing like gift sex. You’re too much of a dude, dude. You’ll never understand.”
Bret Easton Ellis telephoned while we fucked, leaving a message on our slightly dysfunctional answering machine. “Adeline,” said the machine. “It’s Bret Easton Ellis. Sorry to call on such short notice, but I’ve got a thing uptown. Jayne can’t go. I was wondering, would you come with me? There’ll be free drinks, of course. Jay McInerney’ll be there and he’s an absolute fiend for frozen watermelon. Call back if you get this before seven. Thanks. It’s Bret Easton Ellis.”
I was in love. I’d even used the word, said it to Jon de Lee and heard him say it back. And love conquers all. Or saves the day. Or conquers all. Or saves the day. I didn’t return Bret Easton Ellis’s phone call. A shame, but I couldn’t leave Jon. Not with work to be done.
I imagined Bret Easton Ellis worrying about his social function, the enfant terrible in his social milieu, telephoning a young woman who lay beside a punk rocker from Jersey, a man who resided between C and D in an illegal apartment, who existed beyond the confines of the cash economy.
Both men were on the same island, separated by nine tenths of a mile. For practical purposes, they may as well have been on different planets.
APRIL 1989
Minerva ♥ Jeremy
Jeremy telephoned one afternoon, inquiring if I was free. He wanted to pop over for a visit. I said that I’d be delighted. I rang Минерва. I suggested that she drop by.
When he entered our domicile, Jeremy handed me a small pamphlet. The Hepcats Jive Talk Dictionary, priced 25¢, published in 1945. On the cover, a woman and her fella are dancing an anemic jitterbug, her skirt swirling waaaaaaaaay up past the knee, revealing an ultrascandalous bit of slip.
“Why, whatever is this?” I asked.
“I bought it at a comic convention on Long Island,” he said. “Turns out that a fifth of the definitions are slurs for Black folks. And that, Adeline, is some shit I’ve been hearing my whole life. That’s one set of terminologies for which I don’t need a dictionary. I thought you might like it.”
“Are you implying that I have a need for racial invective?” I asked. “What shall I do with your hepcats and their jive dictionary? Stage a Klan rally?”
“I’m implying that you enjoy awkward vocabulary,” he said.
Минерва
shouted my name from the street, her thick accent bounding off the buildings of East 7th Street. I walked downstairs, opened our front door, and let her in.
I made her introduction to Jeremy. The silence was absolute, like sudden and mysterious teleportation into the total vacuum of space.
“Jeremy works at Marvel Comics,” I offered.
“Marvel?” asked Минерва. “How is Red Ghost? Still he has his apes?”
“How do you know about the Red Ghost?” asked Jeremy Winterbloss.
Sometimes it’s that easy.
They departed, together, concocting plans for the next day.
Reader, allow me to remove any hint of foreshadowing. Of the many comings and goings within this book, be assured that Jeremy Winterbloss and Минерва comprise the one pairing who will not suffer any undue tribulation. They will remain connected until their bodies crumble into dust.
MAY 1989
Adeline Gets Sick
The night after his spring semester ended, Baby returned from an orgy of unrighteous clubbing, shivering and covered with dank sweat. I demanded to know what drug had induced such a nightmarish state, but he assured me of his sobriety.
This wasn’t drugs, it was physical illness. Obviously, said I to myself, he’ll catch death in the clubs, rubbing up against all those people. It’s like an incubator for germination. But consider, darlings, that your world-weary pal Adeline was oblivious enough that she did not think of AIDS. She imagined a pedestrian illness, like virulent influenza.
Baby burned with fiery fever. Then came the congestion, the running snot and thick phlegm. He lost his voice.
I assumed the role of Florence Nightingale, nursing him, wiping down the molten forehead with ice-cold rags. Never once did I believe myself vulnerable to his disease. I considered my physicality impenetrable, a sentinel incapable of being laid low by Apollo’s arrows. This was, by the by, the absolute heights of delusion.
