The Future Won't Be Long

by Jarett Kobek

  “Some games are just games,” said Nash Mac. “Some designers are only designers. Ron Gilbert is an artist. Monkey Island is real art. But the process is collaborative.”

  “That’s all well and good,” said I, delighting in my crassness, “but tell me about this girlfriend.”

  They met when he moved to the Bay Area, introduced by mutual friends. She lived in San Francisco, he resided near Menlo Park. The first year went well enough that when her lease expired, she made the daft suggestion they find a place together. Nash Mac thought it was surely too soon, but worried that saying no would end the relationship. She discovered a two-bedroom apartment in the Marina. She was fine. He was fine. Things were copacetic. Then her father died. Then her mother killed herself. Nash Mac attended the funerals, driving both times to Spokane, Washington. She lost her job. Nash Mac hadn’t a clue what to say. Around then, he said, he came to understand that he’d moved in too soon. She started doing speed, keeping the activity clandestine, in shadows distant. Nash Mac was an innocent. He never made the connection. He simply thought that her mood was improving. Life continued on apace. As it must. As it does. She didn’t work. He paid for everything. The speed started giving her grand swells of delusion and paranoia. She turned cruel. Nash Mac asked her to move out. She refused. He told her to retain her hold on the apartment. He’d leave. She said that he couldn’t. He said it was happening. She said that she’d rather die than live alone. Nash Mac didn’t believe her. She did it in the bathtub. He found the body, the gory lifeless mess, the blood and the water.

  “The worst part,” he said, “is that we hardly knew each other.”

  And that, darlings, is how I ended up with the first boyfriend of my postcollegiate life. I’d dumped a nonpracticing Jew and set up shop with a nonobservant Muslim. A microcosm of American foreign policy passing through my loins, the flesh of my flesh, the bone of my bone.

  APRIL 1993

  Adeline and Jeremy Go to a Signing at Comic Relief

  In my boredumb, I started hanging out at The Owl and Monkey Café on Ninth Avenue, which served a customer base of aging burnouts with insatiable desires for coffee and homemade quiche. On occasion, these drug casualities would gather en masse and listen to the sounds of live acoustic music.

  Meself, I sat near the counter, straining for cheap stereo sounds, avoiding any critique of the artworks that hung on the white walls and dodging stories about famous musicians who’d performed at the august institution. One gent in particular availed himself of the opportunity, every single day, to inform me that the cover of a Mike Bloomfield album had been photographed in the establishment. Each afternoon, he promised to bring the LP and show me. Yet he never did.

  On the topic of records, I should note the day when I walked home from The Owl and Monkey and stumbled over a cache of discarded vinyl at the corner of Cole and Cart. This harvest, which I cherry-picked, provided the soundtrack of my life on those days when I was not in the café or sleeping at Nash Mac’s apartment in the Sunset District.

  Entertainment came through indulgence in Jeremy’s comics collection. Befitting a gent who’d worked in the Marvel offices, the boy was rife with material. Boxes upon boxes upon boxes upon boxes. The reservoir ran deep. I devoured forty or so issues of Ann Nocenti on Daredevil, a run marked by yearly Christmas stories and Matt Murdock’s espousal of pacifism whilst solving his problems through a perpetual recourse to violence.

  Jeremy initiated me into the world of Los Brothers Hernandez, into Eightball, into Alan Moore’s run on Swamp Thing with Steve Bissette and John Totleben, into Hate, into Elfquest. More titles, too, that I shan’t mention. Some horrible, others ridiculous. Almost none of the creators were women.

  “If you’re interested,” said Jeremy, “come next week to Comic Relief. There’s a Vertigo signing. Grant Morrison will be there. He sort of knows who I am. I had a few letters published in Doom Patrol.”

  Минерва wanted nothing to do with the event. She dismissed it as plain madness. “What Grant Morrison does for you?” she asked. “You pay him, not vice versa. Now you stare at his face for hours like risen Messiah. Strange people.”

  Yet there we were, April 18th, a Sunday, trudging towards the Upper Haight at 6 pm. Gray buildings, gray sky, gray faces, gray people. Fog over Buena Vista Park with sinister intent, carpet looming above Golden Gate Park.

  Regarding the trees of the former, I thought, as ever, about the hey-hey heyday of the hippie era, imaginating how much smaller the vegetation would have been during the golden years, wondering if the psychopathologic influence of their increased heights wasn’t responsible for the shift away from Luv on Haight.

  The human mass outside of Comic Relief produced instant repulsion, like a finger on the trigger of my latent claustrophobia.

  Jeremy assumed a place in line. I wandered the store, examining the scene. Morrison sat at his signing table, dressed in a twee black leather cap, wearing red-tinted sunglasses, a white shirt, and a black leather jacket. His outfit gave him a very San Francisco look. Everyone in San Francisco wore black leather jackets.

  Beside him was Jill Thompson, remarkable with her witchy mingles and waving red hair. The third guest, Steve Yeowell, was notable for the normalcy of his appearance.

  I milled about, thumbing books while Jeremy ascended through the line. I smiled my way to the front when I saw that mi amigo was chatting up Morrison. Jeremy schmoozed into the man’s social good graces. They talked about Animal Man.

  Jeremy asked Morrison what he and the others were doing after the event. To my surprise, Morrison told him. It should be remembered that Jeremy had worked in editorial at Marvel. His professional livelihood had been dependent on manipulating comics creators into doing his bidding.

  I thought about, of all people, my late lamented father. Daddy offered such a presence within our home that we would forget about his civilian identity. We never remembered that he was an oral surgeon who maintained a thriving practice. His celebrity clientele remained distant concepts until those ridiculous moments when we’d be out in public and Daddy would fall into a conversation with Judd Nelson or Kathleen Turner.

  Daddy dominated those dialogues. World-famous celebrities deferred to him. He had the right manner, the suave calm that perpetuated his business. He was the man who gave them their prize-winning smiles.

  “Ah, fuck,” said Morrison, in a Scots dialect. “We’re down to a fifty years of LSD rave.”

  “I see,” said Jeremy. “Good luck with that. Nice talking with you.”

  Outside, Jeremy said, “We’ve got to discover the location of that rave. We have to be there.”

  “Why ever didn’t you ask? He seemed amenable,” I said.

  “Too awkward,” said Jeremy. “But if we show up, that’s a challenge met.”

  “You tell me, then,” I said. “How do we find a rave in San Francisco?”

  Jeremy rustled up a copy of the SF Weekly, a localized and lame alternative weekly that employed the same cover template as the Village Voice. Spreading the paper across the trunk of a parked car, Jeremy flipped through until landing upon a list of cultural events. “Look here,” he said, pointing to an advertisement that read:

  FOR ALL RAVE INFO CALL

  RAVE HOTLINE

  1-900-844-RAVE

  “There’s another on the other page,” he said. “Same thing, but different number. 900-844-4RAV. We’ll go home and use the telephone.”

  At Steiner House, Jeremy telephoned and listened. “It’s on Folsom, south of Market. Robert Anton Wilson will be there. It starts at 8, so let’s show up around 11. We can walk. It’ll take about an hour.”

  Минерва stumbled in and decided to accompany us, whilst making it ever so plain that she still disapproved of Jeremy’s fixation on Grant Morrison and other comics professionals, asking why he would ever desire such a thing and why he acted with such subterfuge. “I don�
�t know,” he said. “It seems interesting. His run on Doom Patrol was exceptional, okay?”

  I strung together an outfit from my own rough materials and Минерва’s discards. Tiger-striped tights, purple sweater, green army jacket, knee-high brown boots.

  The walk down Haight was borrrrrrrrrrrrrring. By the time our legs crossed Market, fatigue settled on my brow. Carried away by Jeremy’s enthusiasm, I hadn’t considered my decision. Going to a rave, embracing a scene that I’d rejected in NYC, a scene that I’d decidedly besmirched before a certain somebody. But that’s very me, isn’t it, darlings? Grade-A hypocrite.

  I imagined him at that moment, ambling towards a club, listening to ghastly music and schmoozing with people for whom he harbored no particular affection.

  Our journey was a drift through the homeless and the destitute and the indigent. People screaming with desperate cries. A miniature drama staged on every corner. The threat of violence lingered, but our individual appearances added up to a sum total that dissuaded outside interference.

  Ninety-five percent of the time, it’s as simple as looking weiiiiiird. Why bother with a freak when there’s always another easy victim around the corner?

  1015 Folsom Street was only another nondescript relic from the industrial era, a place converted into four stories of dancefloors. I’d been to Tunnel. I’d been to Limelight. I’d been to Mars. I possessed an immediate understanding of the layout.

  I contemplating drinking myself absolutely stinko blotto, but decided instead on eating hallucinogens in celebration of fifty years with Dr. Hoffman’s problem child. Although, I must say, that for yours truly there has always been a kind of hyperintoxication that emerges from alcohol, when the head spins, when the streets rise with power, that has struck me as very close to the experience of consuming lysergic acid diethylamide.

  Don’t you know, my sweet things, that for an event explicitly tied to drug use, I had a rather difficult time observing any obvious ingestion. I surveyed the scene, hunting for degenerates and dopers. No matter how hard that I searched, I seemed doomed, like the protagonist of a mildly popular country ballad, to never discover the object of my longing.

  I changed my approach. Amongst the dancing bodies, the laser shows, the pounding electronica vibe, the circus, I sent out a psychic signal. Putting on my very best little-girl-lost face, I leaned against an exposed metal girder and waited for men to come and speak.

  Talk they did. All manner of balderdash. I asked each one if there was any MDMA upon his person, yet each was appalled and refused my request. Finally, the last of them, a bit overweight and sweaty for my tastes, offered me two tablets imprinted with McDonald’s golden arches.

  Obligation hung heavy upon me. He’d given me intoxicants, so I let the man go on and on and on and on and on and on and on, tuning in and out of his monologue, waiting for the drugs to take hold. “In a truly dance-oriented shamanistic society,” he said, “we would all be known by our own personalized dance as much as by name. In fact, our very names would become synonymous with our external manifestation of our inner being. And to others, these names would also take on their own personal meaning. Individual symbols of individual existence.”

  Unsure how to respond, I started dancing, a crazy little St. Vitus dance. I melted away towards the floor. Darlings, how I danced. Yet I wasn’t listening to the music.

  My thoughts were of an album that I’d rescued from trash. Lark by Linda Lewis. I’d picked it up assuming that it was an example of 1970s schmaltz but instead found a quiet album marked by clear production, constructed to highlight Lewis’s five-octave range. She could go from a deep growl to a breathless high-pitched sound. The best song was “It’s the Frame.” Her voice sang within my head: Now, Lord, well you don’t wanna be alone in Heaven, do ya? Wouldn’t you like me and my friends and my family for company?

  Минерва emerged from within the crowd, giving me a bottle of water. “Drink,” said she. I danced and danced and danced and danced and danced but now was victim to looping drug logic. The experience of an idea imprinting itself upon your waking mind, like a dealer’s brand pressed upon a pill. I could see individual dances like signatures, identifying signifiers as distinct and powerful as names. What would it be like to live within a truly dance-oriented shamanic society? How ever would dances function as repeatable signatures? The human body mutates, as does one’s sense of self. The name remains unattached. I saw dances shift through constant change. Even my own. I undulated, an oddity with my arms, as if I were performing a butterfly stroke. I’d never danced like that before. I never have since. How could one maintain a style of dance long enough to establish a workable social identity? Michael Jackson had The Moonwalk, but what else was there? What would happen in a truly dance-oriented shamanic society to poor souls incapable of rhythm? I danced with the awkwardness of a white girl. Would my failure to stay on beat mark me out with the equivalent of a regional dialect? Would one’s lack of ability separate one from society?

  Inhaling a deeeeep breath of toxic club air, holding it within until I slowed my beating heart. I exhaled and repeated the dreary process. I’d wanted a pure drug experience, but now I was infected with this masculine taxonomy where even dance was destroyed by a man’s language, by another man’s insufferable need to rewrite society. I suspect that my benefactor believed himself a fellow on the cusp of a new society, of a viable alternative, but he attempted to tear down the master’s house with the master’s tools. Real change would come only when hordes of thick Amazon women conquered the American male, when warrioresses stormed the White House with bows and arrows, when they invaded the boardrooms of the corporate empire, when Fortune 500 CEOs were subject to processes that instilled humility.

  People kept talking about CRASH WORSHIP. Every mouth in the room said CRASH WORSHIP. I asked, “What’s CRASH WORSHIP?” and they said, “CRASH WORSHIP is the main event. It’s why everyone’s here.” “I presumed that everyone was attending to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of LSD.” “Yeah, that too, but, like, we’re mostly all here to, like, see CRASH WORSHIP.”

  You’ll forgive me, darlings, but the states that every human being is entitled to at least five experiences in her life beyond the descriptions of words, and CRASH WORSHIP was one of my personal quintet.

  People together in a pit, surrounded by drumming. Fires built. Liquids thrown. Dancing, dancing, dancing. CRASH WORSHIP finished its set. The atmosphere had evaporated. We’d been moved to a different realm. Space and time no longer existed.

  Jeremy talked with Grant Morrison. “I’m working on something new,” said Morrison in his Scots dialect, rougher than before. “I think it’s the big one. I think it might change everything.”

  “I’ve got an idea, too,” said Jeremy. “We should compare notes.”

  “I’ll give you my address,” said Morrison. “You can write me a letter.”

  “What time is it?” I asked.

  “It’s almost 2 am,” said Grant Morrison. “I feel like a dandy in the fucking underworld.”

  “How long was I dancing?” I asked Jeremy.

  “Hours,” he said. “Минерва took a cab home.”

  “Did you enjoy CRASH WORSHIP?” I asked Grant Morrison.

  “Aye,” he said. “That I did.”

  “I think I may have seen God,” I said.

  “Really?” asked Grant Morrison. “How do you know?”

  MAY 1993

  ADELINE ♥ Baby

  Somehow I embroiled Nash Mac and myself within a ridiculous fight about crime rates, with yours truly staking the claim that San Francisco was a backwater compared against New York City. People can be astonishingly provincial about the homes they’ve chosen, taking pride in all manner of absurdity, and so the boy argued for hours, insisting that his adopted hometown was worse than anywhere in America.

  When one factored in the gangs and the homeless, he said
, Baghdad by the Bay was far less safe than any other locale. He spoke of how often he’d been mugged, of the time when someone had punched him in the head.

  Yet I was a New Yorker of a certain vintage. Absolute knowledge of the 1990 murder rate, constituting two thousand two hundred and forty-five deaths, had been tattooed upon the neural pathways of my brain. I’d suffered the crackhead influx, swum the primordial ooze of the Lower East Side and its junkies, bore witness to untold numbers of crime. There were always more dress suits for hire. There was always another bathtub.

  My anecdotal and statistical evidence meant nothing to Nash Mac. He knew everything. He always knew everything. After all, darlings, the man worked with computers.

  Storming out of Nash Mac’s flat, elemental heat pouring from my eyes, I leapt upon the N Judah. By the time I disembarked, I was laughing at myself, at how lunatic I’d gone with fervor.

  If you can believe it, I’d never before had such a heated fight, not with any of my other boyfriends. Not even Ian fucking Covington. I hoped, with every wispy strand of my soul, that I wasn’t in love.