The Future Won't Be Long

by Jarett Kobek

  Those weeks disappeared, eaten by my process. Drawing, café, library, Nash Mac. Repeat, repeat, repeat! Repeat! Soldier on, O Dear Adeline!

  One of San Francisco’s street people took up late-night residence on Steiner Street. This ne’er-do-well arrived each and every around 1 am, heralded by the telltale sound of his shopping cart, and spent several hours screaming out non sequiturs. Many times he went on and on and on and on about food products. Other times he remarked upon traffic regulations.

  I dreamt of drawing, dreamt of the cat people. One dream, in particular, stood out, and I included it in issue #2. You’ll find the transmuted sequence, darlings, on page 13, where the cat people are standing before an obelisk.

  In the dream, I watched from a far distance, their backs turned until one noticed my presence. The rest followed its lead. A sea of cats’ eyes, green and blue.

  What you won’t see on the page, however, is that the central cat was looking at me with the eyes of good ol’ Patrick Geoffrois, my dashingly bizarre Frenchman, the blackest magician in the Lower East Side.

  Patrick was the greatest freak with whom I’d ever made an acquaintance, and he had arrived at the very moment when I needed a friend disconnected from my past and with whom there was a total absence of romantic tension.

  Baby had taken an instant dislike to my pal, convinced that I’d turned acolyte of the dark arts, crushed by Aleister Crowley. Poor Baby! It was beyond his mortal ken that one could vibe on magickal aesthetics without believing a single word.

  The people who one meets are so dreadfully boring, aren’t they? Whatever criticisms you might lob at M. Geoffrois, the man never bored. He was a traveling circus, clad in black and dressed in the gaudiest baubles that ever bubbled.

  Missing the man, I sent him a few postcards. He never wrote back.

  JULY 1993

  Daddy Was in KGB Gets a Good Review

  A bright moment occurred when the Bay Guardian featured Daddy Was in KGB as “Demo Tape O’ The Week.” Минерва rushed into the apartment, her pale face flushed with ruddy color. It was the first time in our friendship where she’d displayed unbridled enthusiasm. She seemed positively American.

  With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the evaporation of Communism, it wasn’t a question of “if?” but of “when?” and “where?” I’m happy to report that the when is now and the where is here. Daddy Was in the KGB, a S.F. punk outfit made up of four women who’ve escaped the former Soviet States, offers a headcrunching, genre-bending response to the last few years of realpolitik. Songs like “Sergey Kirov Makes Fuck in Karl Marx” and “Do It in Your NKVDs” warp the mind and offer a PhD-level education in Russian history and American consumerism. A shiver went up my spine when I heard lead vocalist Minerva Krylenko’s bloodcurdling cry of “Messerschmitt fire at Leningrad, made blood in ground plan, don’t have cow, man!” The instrumentation is simple but effective, reminding us that those boys from Seattle and Portland may have “rediscovered” something that never went away.

  ALEX LASH

  Send tapes to Demo Tape, Bay Guardian, 520 Hampshire, S.F., CA 94110.

  “I hadn’t the slightest that you’d recorded a demo,” said I.

  “Secret well kept,” she said. “Band agreed not to tell. Next we press 7-inch.”

  We were all imbibing at Mad Dog in celebration. I watched those wild Russian girls running up and down, acting as if they’d won the Nobel Prize in economics. Even the drummer showed his chubby little face. Despite looking as if he’d crawled straight from the crib, the bartenders didn’t ask for proof of his age.

  Two beers into the evening and the child became sullen. Минерва and I engaged him in conversation, but it was like extracting teeth with pliers. After his fourth drink, it emerged that the article had hurt his feelings, as it had presumed that he was both a girl and a Soviet. He was especially peeved that the reviewer had misrepresented the band’s name, throwing in the decidedly un-Russian definite article.

  The young lad spent the night under the kitchen table, waking me at 4 am with the sounds of his vomit splattering against the ancient toilet. Doesn’t this child, says me to meself, have parents?

  JULY 1993

  D.O.T.T. Goes Gold

  Day of the Tentacle went gold and shipped. Nash Mac blossomed into a sweeter person, a massive tension released from his body, as if he’d shrugged off the terrible weight. To mark the occasion, we went to the Tonga Room, where we became unspeakably tight, and then walked back to his apartment. From Nob Hill to the Sunset, across three blotto hours. Inhaling the city, languishing under its burdens.

  Near Van Ness, we met a homeless woman, reasonably well dressed, only a few years older than I. She was pressed against a building, begging for change. I slipped her a dollar. The poor thing started singing an off-key version of “She Loves You” by The Beatles.

  Any song but that! What if Nash Mac read meaning into the lyrics?

  I’d such a wonderful time, rutting in the Sunset, that I telephoned him at work the next day, suggesting we meet again. He told me to amble on over around 8 pm, which was fine with yours truly, as I was planning to spend the day at The Owl and Monkey.

  Nash Mac’s rented house was not very far from the ocean, a two-bedroom installation with a roommate who was never home. I let myself in. Yes, darlings, we’d progressed to the point where I had my own key.

  The lights were off. Stepping into the living room, I presumed that the boy was not at home. Then I heard the breathing from the couch and saw him curled up like a foetus that’s survived its own abortion. He may well have been crying, but I didn’t dare investigate, fearful of producing emasculation.

  “Nash Mac?” I asked.

  “My whole life,” he said, “my whole life is over.”

  “How’s that, brother?”

  He’d arrived at work, late, and come upon his co-workers playing the leaked 0.5 alpha of a forthcoming game called DOOM, which was published by iD Software. iD’s earlier work on Wolfenstein 3D was revolutionary, but Nash Mac intuited from this early version of DOOM that a massive leap had been made. This was the big one, he said, the one that would cleave the past from the future, and it was clear that his division at LucasArts was on the wrong side of history. “No one will play adventure games in five years. No one. I don’t like any other games. What am I going to do?”

  Yours truly lacked the proper vocabulary to make a convincing argument. What was an alpha release? What was an adventure game? So I thought about it for a moment and then decided to work in generalities, best to discuss life at the end of the American Century.

  “You must realize,” said I, “that you’re talking with a person who believes that we live in a society which is completely off its rocker. We’ve spent fifty years, at least, pretending in the supremacy of technology. All we’ve received in return is screens to stare into and cars that poison the environment. Technology, dear heart, will never save any of us. It may make some number of us richer, but to what end do you put that money? To buy more technology. I wouldn’t worry. If you make one kind of game or another, it won’t change a single thing. You’re still distracting people from their lives. It’s all a con. America is the greatest con, and the most perverse. America is a con that America runs on itself. I’ve spent my whole life being told about the things that I should want and the things that should matter. Yet I’m old enough to know that none of it matters. None of it has ever mattered. I don’t care about Harvard. I don’t care about wealth. I don’t care about prestige. I don’t care about the ambitions of the upper middle classes and those who are desperate to scramble into it. My heroes are drag queens and drug addicts. My heroes die at twenty-seven. I’m older than them now, darling, so not only am I a failure but also a full hypocrite.”

  In bang-on fashion, batting a thousand for sensitivity, this was the worst thing that I could have said. He withdrew even further into his
protective cocoon, curling tighter.

  “It’s all over,” he said. “It’s all fucking over.”

  Vulnerability always was one of Adeline’s turn-ons. The weaker the sob sister, the more I wanted to sleep with him, the more I wanted to help him maintain his eroding macho status.

  I rummaged through Nash Mac’s kitchen, making him some oatmeal with fresh strawberries and a dash of honey. I wouldn’t see him this upset again until he frittered away hours attempting an install of Slackware 1.0 on his spare 386SX, only to discover that the last three of his twenty-four 3½-inch floppies were useless with bad sectors.

  “Eat this,” said I. “The heat will help.”

  OCTOBER 1993

  Adeline Receives a Postcard

  I should have learned from Emil. I should have learned from Daddy. I should have learned from Baby. The universe had sent me the message three times, as plain as possible. Adeline, it said, Adeline, don’t ever take too much pleasure in anything. It’s when things seem their best, Adeline, said the universe, that I’ll fuck you up the most. Adeline, don’t get arrogant. Adeline, stay far from hubris.

  I ignored the obvious and let myself be happy. I’d finished my sixty-six pages and three covers. When I reached page 40, Jeremy started working his connections. He’d asked Dave Sim if we could preview in the back of Cerebus. Sim said yes, whenever we wanted, simply send him the pages. He’d even connected us with a cheap printer, Preney Print and Litho of Windsor, Ontario. Everything was set. We were ready. We even had a name: Trill.

  Jeremy’d taken leave from LucasArts. He was checking the post every day, like clockwork, waiting to receive formal notice from several distributors. We’d developed a tiny routine, him retrieving the mail and myself waiting for the good news.

  Then, on that night, he came into the living room. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “What is it?” I asked. “Is it Diamond? Was there bad news?”

  “No,” he said. “It’s this. It’s for you.”

  It was a postcard with a picture of the Empire State Building on its front, the kind of cheap item that one bought for pennies in Times Square. I flipped it over. Patrick’s wife’s handwriting.

  Oct. 2

  Hello Adeline,

  Your friend Patrick died on September 12th. He had a stroke.

  “New York is calling one back home. It’s time to ramble,” I said, the words cutting across the roof of my mouth as they made their terrible way out. Goodbye, California, goodbye.

  DECEMBER 1993

  Dorian Corey

  New Year’s Eve is only another stitch in the great tapestry of distant drug memories, but I’m positive that I wasted my evening in a dismal club. Eyes blasted, nose aching, chemical drip leaching into the back of my throat. Christmas is the same. Only blurry intimations of jingling bells and Salvation Army Santa Clauses.

  My memory of the period is very spotty. And not because of my chemical intake. The drugs goofed up my memory, sure, but the writing was way worse.

  The more that I vomited out words, the less that my own life maintained its texture, the less that I remembered of my daily existence. My brain couldn’t juggle two realities, couldn’t maintain its focus, so I plunged further into the world that paid the bills, into the world that kept me rent stabilized.

  Of that entire holiday season, only one thing stands out. A headline that ran in either the New York Post or Newsday: DRAG QUEEN LEFT MUMMY BEHIND.

  The queen in question, Dorian Corey, died in August. She was famous. You may remember her from the documentary Paris Is Burning. You may not.

  For something like twenty years, Dorian designed clothes for other ballroom queens from her apartment on West 140th Street. When she croaked, another victim of AIDS, her friend Lois Taylor inherited the wardrobe. The glory and the glitter. Word got around that if people needed outré outfits, they should get in touch with Lois.

  Two straight guys asked Lois if Dorian’s apartment might hold a black cape. They were going to a Halloween party, and one of them wanted to dress like Dracula. Lois said, sure, honey, come and take a look. She let them explore the bedroom-sized closet. Lois saw a bag on the floor, beneath an orange dress. She tried to lift the bag. It was too heavy. One of the men cut the bag with a pair of scissors, releasing a boggy stench.

  —What is this? asked the guy. A dead dog?

  And here the story goes Only in New York. One of the men identified himself as a cop. Consider that. Consider a straight cop digging through a queen’s closet in Harlem, looking for a cape because he wanted to dress up like Dracula.

  Anyhoo, guess what he found?

  A mummified body wrapped in naugahyde. Through a disgusting process, which involved cutting the fingers off at the second knuckles, injecting them with a special solution, slipping the skin off the bone, and finally, a police technician wearing the fingertips like a glove, the corpse was identified.

  Bobby Wells a/k/a Bobby Worley, born 1938. Arrested for rape in 1963. Last seen in 1968. It’s possible that Dorian lived with his body for twenty-five years.

  The club kids were crazy with the mummy. Who could blame them? Michael Alig loved it, couldn’t stop talking about Dorian. It was the weirdest story in a long time, the old striking out against the new, a reminder that even with growing gentrification and the reign of Mayor Rudy Über Alles, the city remained the most bizarre place on earth.

  A mummy in a drag queen’s closet! So perfect. So New York. So beyond my imaginative powers as a writer.

  —Educate me about this fucking mummy, Parker said over the telephone. Give me the scoop on Dorian Corey.

  I made up a story about how Dorian charged admission to see the corpse. Back in the early ’80s, when things were bleak. She only asked for five dollars. The lie satisfied Parker. More gossip to throw in his colleagues’ faces. The inside scoop. The real deal.

  I only hoped that he wouldn’t end up the fool, bloviating about nothing. But who would challenge him? People in publishing were afraid of Parker.

  He was big and he was abusive.

  And he was my main man.

  Parker transformed my pages into cash money, keeping me in my coffers. In this arena, none of his many efforts had matched the feat of optioning Trapped Between Jupiter and a Bottle to the Hollywood director/producer Alan J. Pakula.

  When Pakula first started sniffing around, I rented several of his films. The best was All the President’s Men, starring Robert Redford at the height of his beauty. Robert Redford was gorgeous. I couldn’t get over it. I ended up renting The Candidate, a slightly earlier film where his face radiates off the celluloid, his very image imprinted upon the human brain.

  All the President’s Men featured two-time Academy Award winner Jason Robards in the role of Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee. Robards made me think of Adeline, of the time that he took her to Serendipity III. Not that I needed any excuse to think of Adeline. I thought about Adeline every stupid day.

  I told Brickley that if Pakula wanted the book, and if Pakula would fork over a ridiculous chunk of change, then, please, Parker Brickley, take your twenty percent. Set up the deal. I needed the cash.

  Pakula’s largesse bought an incredible luxury. It gave me free time. I quit my job at Theatre 80. Partly because I’d been blessed with the imprimatur of Hollywood, Parker was able to negotiate a much bigger advance on the next book.

  That’s the one that nearly killed me.

  JANUARY 1994

  Baby Attends the Launch for Philip Levine’s The Bread of Time

  Despite it being an explicit work of science fiction, Parker had convinced Michael Kandel to publish Trapped Between Jupiter and a Bottle with the trade dress of a literary novel. Books are like pastry. Presentation is everything.

  My trite SFisms about the future and gene splicing and robots, written with the sorry earnestness of youth, were misconceived as dense
metaphorical allegories about present-day society. I stopped being a geek interested in spaceships. I became a postmodernist.

  Most reviewers situated Trapped within a trend of new literary works encompassing the outward aesthetics of genre fiction. Comparisons included Robert Coover, Thomas Pynchon, and Don DeLillo. A sizeable minority rejected this review, believing it closer to the nihilit of Bret Easton Ellis. My favorite review appeared in The Houston Chronicle. This minor masterpiece suggested a link between the elephantine appearance of Michelle Gila and the Hindu god Ganesha, reading my novel as a substrata retelling of Vedic literature. Michelle Gila was the new remover of obstacles, swiping away the world’s troubles with his synthcoke-encrusted trunk.

  The Voice Literary Supplement asked for an interview. I said yes, which was a mistake, as the resulting article did not increase sales one iota but made common knowledge of my residency in Manhattan. I would have preferred my location to have been a mystery, going so far as to claim in my biographical blurbs that I was a fishmonger in London’s East End.

  But the secret was out. I started receiving invitations to launches and readings. Even worse, I started saying yes.

  The very first outing that I attended was held at Nell’s.

  When I started clubbing, Nell’s emanated an aura of a mystic world where yuppies and aging veterans shelled out ridiculous amounts of money on food and alcohol and high-grade cocaine. There’d never been any reason to go into Nell’s.

  When I did get inside, my name on the list, I didn’t talk to anyone. I stood in a corner and watched as a group of women in their late thirties decayed into shrieking laughter.

  For someone who haunted clubs, I’d made an inexcusable mistake.

  What’s the first rule? Never arrive alone.