by Jarett Kobek
I was far more comfortable with grandiose nihilism. After all, I knew Michael Alig.
I opened the bathroom door, walking in on a man and woman, both shirtless, lying on a futon mattress wedged between the bathtub and the toilet. The woman’s hands covered her sagging breasts.
—Shut the fucking door, said the man.
—I have to make water, I said.
—What?
—I have to make water.
—He has to piss, said the woman.
—Don’t worry, I won’t splash you.
There were flecks of vomit around the toilet’s rim.
Michael Alig. He was somewhere in New York, flying kite high, screaming and primping and dancing. He was with women unafraid to show their breasts. These women, the ones with Michael, exposed themselves at the slightest provocation. They shoved people’s face into their bosoms. That was their idea of a joke.
In the living room, three dirty men sat on the floor in front of a television. They were playing a video game on a Nintendo system that looked different than the one I remembered. The game was definitely Super Mario Brothers, but the graphics were too good for Super Mario Brothers, and besides, since when did Mario ride on the back of a green lizard?
—What game is this? I asked.
—Super Mario World.
—And that’s Nintendo?
—It’s Super Nintendo.
—There’s a Super Nintendo?
—Where’ve you been?
—New York.
—It’s 16-bit.
—Huh.
A new Nintendo with a new Mario. They’d changed the power-ups. A feather came out of the question-mark bricks. If Mario got the feather, he’d put on a cape that let him fly. Mario could fly. I hadn’t played much Nintendo, but I’d wasted hours at other people’s houses, staring into the abyss of the original Super Mario Brothers. Long philosophical discussions about the meaning and function of the Minus World, and whether or not it portended other hidden secrets within the game. It seemed infinite, like if we hit the right combination of buttons in the right location, we might discover a new, entirely unknown vista. I remember staying up late, watching my friends kill themselves over Ghosts’N Goblins, beating the Devil only to discover that the true conclusion required another quest. I remember people playing Metroid at parties in Brooklyn, desperate to get the best ending, the one where Simon takes off the suit and wears a bikini.
A Super Nintendo. If they’d released a new Super Mario Brothers, then there was almost certainly a new Legend of Zelda.
Everything was changing. I felt so fucking old.
Erik was in the basement, drunk, laughing, playing Ping-Pong. A crowd watched. They’d all placed bets. Most of the room had money on his opponent, a burly looking fat kid. I had no idea that Erik played Ping-Pong. I was learning new things every goddamn minute.
*
Liz gave us a very drunken guided tour of the streets between the party and Erik’s house. She talked a mile a minute, asking Erik about people from high school. She talked about the basic unfairness of life, about how people had succeeded and left the area because of their parents, because they were born into money.
—I’m not impressed, she said. Nope, I’m not impressed.
We got home around 3 am. We crawled into bed. I was very buzzed. Erik was wasted. I took off his shirt and his pants.
Moonlight through the window. Pupils fully dilated, I surveyed the whole of Erik’s room. His mother had never removed any of his things. The only additions from this decade were objects that Erik had sent back home, using the house as a storage space. Old objects upon old objects upon old objects. Like compressed layers of dead skin.
I fell asleep realizing that I hadn’t told Erik about my novel. It’d have to be tomorrow before we got back to the city. I’d do it on the train. Or on the Greyhound. But it’d get done.
I dreamt of my parents’ house. It started in their bedroom. I was talking to my mom about their black cabinet. Then I went down in the basement, where there was a hole in the foundation. My father and I examined it, discovering the Captain curled up with another cat.
Try as we might, we couldn’t coax them out.
*
Erik’s mother stood over the bed. Us with our arms around each other. Me in my underwear, Erik naked. My face pressed hard against the back of his neck. The gayest possible tableau. She was screaming, she was screaming, she was screaming.
He tried calming her. It didn’t work. She told me to get out. The woman who’d fixed breakfast had twisted into a ruddy monster. It didn’t take long to gather my things. I always pack light.
If life is a cycle, then it’s the worst things that repeat. At least his dick hadn’t been in my mouth.
I sat on the front steps, waiting over an hour for Erik. I’d brought along a copy of Connie Willis’s Lincoln’s Dreams. I tried to read it, but with the muffled screams, I couldn’t concentrate.
The door opened. Erik was wearing yesterday’s clothes. He wasn’t carrying his bag.
—You should go, he said. I’ll come to the city later tonight.
—Don’t stay, I said. Come with me.
—She’s my mother, he said.
—Please, I said. Nothing good can come of you staying.
—I’ll call you when I get into the city.
—I don’t even know how to get to the train.
—Walk in that direction. Just ask anyone, they’ll help you.
He went inside. No goodbyes. I walked to the train station. Narbeth was tiny. The sun, the birdsong, the quiet of Sunday morning. The train ride was easy, as was the Greyhound terminal. A bus waited. It was so easy. Everything was easy.
Erik and I never spoke again. I called and called and called and called. He never answered. He didn’t return my calls.
JULY 1992
David Wojnarowicz Dies
David Wojnarowicz died. Mad, delirious, brilliant, done in by the disease and its cure. I read his obituary in the Times. Another beautiful fucked-up faggot stolen away. I told Adeline.
She didn’t say a word.
That night, she knocked on my door.
—Patrick also carries the infection, she said. Too much heroin.
—I hope to Christ you aren’t sleeping with him, I said.
—Don’t be disgusting, she said.
JULY 1992
Baby Goes to Disco 2000
I went back to Limelight. I called Regina, Miss Queen Rex, whom I hadn’t seen in months and said, Sister, I’m fucked up and lonely and I’m sorry I put a relationship before you, but here I am, about to be a published author and I’m alone and I can’t manage a love life. Let’s go to Disco 2000. Let’s see Michael Alig and James St. James and Kenny Kenny and Kabuki Sunshine and Jodi Jingles and Sebastian Jr. and Armen Ra and Sister Dimension and Astro Erle.
She said yes, sure, I was going anyway.
I refused to dress like a club kid. I’d gotten everything that I’d wanted and discovered that none of it meant anything. I was a young urban professional.
After the advance came in, I had attended an event hosted by Bloomingdale’s Men’s Store, with the very special guest of Mr. Robert Gieve, personal holder of the Royal Warrant of Appointment to HRH The Prince of Wales. I blew thousands of dollars on a black pinstripe Gieves & Hawkes. I didn’t give a shit about the money.
I put the suit on before going to Limelight. For the finishing touch, I went to Duane Reade and bought their cheapest aftershave. I doused myself in the blue liquid. I smelled like Barbicide and balsamic vinaigrette. I was ready for Disco 2000.
On my first night back, I watched a man piss into a bottle and drink his own urine. The audience cheered. I watched an amputee remove her prosthetic leg and insert it into her vagina. The audience cheered. Weird bridge-and-tunnel people got up on stage. T
hey stripped for fifty dollars. The audience cheered. I was watching Rome fall and it was fucking fantastic.
Queen Rex introduced me to ketamine, a veterinary anesthetic. Its packing reads: FOR USE IN CATS AND SUBHUMAN PRIMATES ONLY. Like a message written in hot neon, a clarion call to the world’s drug fiends. This drug destroys minds and reaps souls.
In the chapel of a deconsecrated church, while Donald Trump and his bodyguard played a hand of pinochle, I snorted bumps off the key to Regina’s apartment. Ketamine was like water, clear, like being disconnected and shut down from the senses, being forced into using the hidden senses to comprehend input of the primary five. The body imprisoned in one place, the soul in another. Glimpses flickered in and out. I’d be on the side of the club one moment. The next, I’d be on the other, with no memory of the distance between. Intermittent psychic visions flashing in my head, mindless insight into the world. I lived other people’s lives, from birth to death. I saw myself in the distant future and the backwards past. I touched the whole of eternity and mingled with the infinite. Very stupid jokes became funny. Knock knock, who’s there? Boo. Boo who? You don’t have to cry. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha.
When I started to come down, I snorted cocaine. When I came down from the cocaine, I snorted more cocaine. When I came down from that cocaine, I snorted more cocaine. When I came down from that cocaine, I smoked pot.
Michael treated me like a king. Regina’d told him about the book. I also suspect that he noticed the quality of my suit. Michael was a truffle hog about money. I became popular with the new club kids.
Most of the old faces were gone. Replaced by the young, the fresh, the dumb. They’d’ve followed Michael into burning ovens if he’d said there was a party inside.
He pulled me aside, eyes bleary with drugs, and he said: —Tell me, honey, what’s the book about?
What was the book about?
I’d titled it Trapped Between Jupiter and a Bottle, after this time when Erik and I were lying around naked listening to a Bob Dylan album called Street Legal.
—I’ve never understood what he meant, said Erik, when he sings that she was trapped between Jupiter and a bottle.
—You’ve got it wrong, I said. She’s torn between Jupiter and Apollo.
—I’ve listened to the song for nearly ten years. I know the lyrics.
—Start it again.
On the third rotation, Erik admitted that I was right. So, yes, I’d titled my novel after my boyfriend’s charming error. Because I loved him.
The action is set in the year 2043, in New York City. The novel’s protagonist is an ex-cop turned private gumshoe named Lucy Lucatto. For an unexplained reason, the 2010s began a vogue in which parents bestowed their male children with typically feminine names. And their female children with typically masculine names. Anyhoo, Lucy is hired by a femme fatale named Bruce to follow her husband through the New York underworld.
I borrowed heavily from my own life, making almost verbatim transcripts of my experience in clubland. I’d even based a character on Michael. Michelle Gila. The only significant difference between Michael and Michelle was that Michelle had injected his genetic code with an elephant’s DNA. As a result of this back-alley procedure, the king of clubland grew a great fleshy gray head and an enormous trunk for a nose. Imagine the boatloads and mountains of drugs which might be snorted by an elephant’s trunk.
The book was based on a flash of inspiration. I’d started to tire of science fiction, having exhausted the genre’s possibilities not only as a writer but also as a fan. There weren’t many good books left unread. I turned on to the crime novel, to the noir, to that detective subgenre, and spent months hunting down old paperbacks. My favorite writer was Horace McCoy, author of They Shoot Horses Don’t They? and Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye. The prose of the latter went through my brain like a hook through the scales of a fish. I couldn’t escape. I moved to Hammett and Chandler. Then I discovered Ross MacDonald and the late-period Archer books.
After Sleeping Beauty, I decided I’d never write straight science fiction again. In my epiphany, I saw that the bitter flavor of noir, its midnight lightning, could be married with an outrageous science fiction context, and that the push and pull of two ridiculous genres would mask the flaws of both.
And I assumed that the juxtaposition would allow its writer to be funny. I was too insecure to not build in humor. I needed to be funny.
What was the book about?
—It’s about you, Michael, I said. I’ve written an entire book about you.
—How fabulous! I’ve been waiting all my life for someone to write about me! It’s about fucking time! But I always thought it’d be someone good like Dominick Dunne or Kitty Kelley! But a girl can’t be choosy!
AUGUST 1992
Baby’s Birthday
On my birthday, I invited Adeline to Limelight, knowing that she would refuse but asking anyway. She said no. I said fine. I made other arrangements, inviting Regina and Parker Brickley.
The sacred anniversary of my advent fell on a night when Limelight was hosting Lord Michael’s Future Shock. A techno extravaganza with a bridge-and-tunnel crowd. Lots of people stayed far away, but I dug it. I thought it was beautiful how a bunch of fucked-up Staten Island Italians could come together, eat Ecstasy, and lose their machismo. Countless young men without their shirts, sweating and dancing and hugging, approximating love through the chemically mandated release of serotonin into their synapses.
Parker stared at the drugged-up women, laser focused on their thick asses and even thicker accents, watching the girls strut in obscene clothing.
—If I couldn’t agent, said Parker, I’d like to be a modern-day Victor fucking Frankenstein. I’d take the legs from that one and the tits from that one and the face from a third and sew them all together. I’d make the perfect mate.
—Isn’t that a little Rocky Horror Picture Show? asked Queen Rex.
—I’ve never bothered watching that fruit shit, said Parker. Hey now, but what do I see over there? The most beautiful creature. Look at that ass. I’m going to see if she wants to sin on my face.
Leviathan sank into the human ocean. There came no screams, no signs of obvious violence. Maybe Parker got what, or whom, he wanted. Maybe a girl really did sin on his face.
When Parker didn’t return, I converted to the nouveau theology of birthday intoxication. Regina rummaged in her purse, taking out a clear glass vial of ketamine, her compact mirror, a dollar bill, and an expired credit card.
I’d gotten worried that ketamine’s dissociative states had spilled into my waking life. Away from the club, in my daily existence, I was attuned to the unreality of human experience.
I’d lost the ability to comprehend and could no longer believe my eyes. The street corridors of Manhattan were haunted. The Empire State Building was a monolith of confusion. A veil of gossamer web draped each hour. Nothing was real. Life felt thin. I felt thin.
It might have been depression. I missed Erik.
The ketamine went up my nose. I snorted it right on the dance floor, in a jangle of limbs and bodies. There wasn’t much effect, so I headed toward the chapel.
I never arrived. I submerged into a world of spectral light.
An enhanced universe of rainbow gradation. There was no boundary between my body and the light, the pleasure of colors. I could go like that forever, and it went for hours and days and months and years before the shadow people arrived. Their bodies were ill defined, like compounded smoke, and they were talking to me, but they couldn’t speak. They were aliens with no capacity for sound, who had developed modes of communication through the mechanism of high-frequency light manipulation. It took a few weeks, but I learned their language.
I could see what they said: —I find you obscene, unclean, and, most of all, ordinary. Your money can buy you just about anything. From what we know, Judas was the vict
im. He had earned more money than Christ. Twenty gets you laid, ten gets you high, three gives you death for a whole weekend.
When I reemerged into the mundane universe, I was in Limelight’s bathroom, staring at a toilet. People were screwing each other’s brains out in the next stall. The grunts, the moaning, the thrusting. Sounds from the predawn of history. Words on the toilet blazed: AMERICAN STANDARD.
James St. James told me that he’d seen Andy Warhol’s ghost on 47th Street.
—You believe me, don’t you honey? I knew Andy. I’d recognize that walk anywhere!
Regina and I left early, around 2:15 am. We both had headaches. She asked if she could stay in my apartment. Ordinarily, I’d’ve refused, but brain chemistry prevented any resistance. She could’ve asked me to hit my face against the colonnade of the Manhattan Bridge, and I’d’ve been there, mashing my skull against Neoclassical granite.
We walked on Broadway.
—On my very first day in the city, I said, I did this route. Times Square to the East Village via Broadway.
—You’ve told me before, said Regina. Let me ask you something. Do you really think that Dinkins can’t beat Giuliani?
—I can’t stand politics, I said. Why would you ask me about politics?
—Thirty minutes ago you were in the VIP room, screaming about how New York would be the staging ground of a Fourth Reich. You told a guy from Tompkinsville and his bleach-blonde girlfriend that Giuliani would be their new Führer.
Other people got high and screwed like a rampaging Minotaur and woke up in a gutter.
—Get out, I said. I did not.
—Even if you’re super fucked up on ketamine, said Regina, you probably shouldn’t talk about politics. Especially not with club people.
—Let’s not talk about it now, I said.
I told her about the world of spectral light. I told her about the shadow people. I told her about their method of communication. I told her their language.
