The Future Won't Be Long

by Jarett Kobek

  So I drafted Regina. She feigned disinterest, but as soon as I brought her to a party where we watched Jay McInerney crying into a frozen watermelon, she engaged with the concept.

  When we attended the launch of Philip Levine’s The Bread of Time, I had my first encounter with that fat little fuck Norman Mailer. The old fruitcake stood at the bar, eyes agog at every broad in the joint, drooling in his senescent lust. Every inch the pompous ass. I watched from across the room until I was distracted by the cackling of Nan Talese.

  The year previous, I’d inhaled Mailer’s work, first picking up a cheap paperback of The Armies of the Night. It was the best book that I’d read in a long time. It hooked me on the rest of his stuff. Miami and the Siege of Chicago. The Fight. The Executioner’s Song. Of a Fire on the Moon. Even Marilyn! All remarkable, all incredible!

  But nothing about Mailer’s writing made me want to meet the man. If nothing else, future societies will prize my ability to separate artist from art.

  Regina went to the bar, with no recognition of the little troll beside her. She ordered a drink. Mailer scummed up against her. I saw his withered claw on her bare shoulder. I let out an audible gasp and stomped over.

  —Come on, I said, taking Regina by the arm.

  —Listen, sweetheart, said Norman Mailer, you aren’t the person who’ll decide whether or not she’s leaving.

  —I hold a great deal of respect for your work, Mr. Mailer, I said, but you had best say a prayer to your gods if you still think this is 1967 and your headbutting can help you. You aren’t dealing with a Harvard faggot who’ll wilt beneath the stench of your testosterone. I’m molten lava and you’re smoldering embers left over from a long-extinguished fire. I’m a butterfly and a bee.

  —Baby, said Regina, what the hell are you talking about?

  —I’m talking about beating this old man like a dusty broom, I said.

  I yanked her away. Norman Mailer never said a word. I suspect that the scene existed beyond his critical capacity. A faggoty farm boy fussing over Nuyorican tail. The triumph of multiculturalism.

  Word traveled around the party that I was the guy who threatened to kill Norman Mailer. High school is inescapable. No matter how many miles from home.

  This gossip attracted a contingent of younger people. Some pretended to have read Trapped, but I knew that they hadn’t. People at literary parties never read each other’s books.

  But one person had. He was about thirty years old, wearing this ratty blue cardigan and black-rimmed glasses.

  —Hi, he said. I loved Trapped. You based it on Michael Alig, didn’t you?

  —Are you a friend of Michael’s?

  —Oh no, I’m too boring, he said. I caught him on the Joan Rivers Show. When I saw the name Michelle Gila, and the context, I presumed it had to be about the club kids.

  —You’re the first person to catch the reference, I said.

  —My name’s Cecil.

  —Have you ever read Cecil Dreeme?

  —You must be the only other person alive who knows the book, he said.

  —I went to NYU, I said.

  —A fellow alumnus, he said. I graduated in 1986.

  *

  I can’t remember if I screwed out Cecil’s brains that night. I might as well have. You meet some people and you’re doomed to come inside them and have them come inside you. Some dicks are as unavoidable as death. Some dicks are magnets to your metal.

  If we didn’t avail ourselves of each other’s bodies on that first night, then it definitely happened on the next. And for days thereafter. Pretty soon we were going steady.

  We were perfect together. Same interests, same tastes, same relative intelligence level, roughly the same level of attractiveness. Same industry. Cecil worked as an assistant editor at Vintage. He was the sweetest man that I’d dated, the most thoughtful, the only person who’d doted on me. He was always there in the morning with breakfast. The sex was great. We screwed each other’s brains out seven different ways from Sunday.

  I sleptwalked through the days. Cecil by my side, talking, discussing concepts, being considerate, loving, asking with actions but not words if I loved him back, talking about moving in together, talking about our future, and me, eyes blank, head nodding, noncommittal answers, barely words, hugging him when necessary, kissing him when appropriate, screwing his brains out. I didn’t care. None of it mattered.

  I remember obsessing over Jaime, when his presence changed the atmosphere, when the walls sparkled in his light. The same feeling with Erik. As if our entire relationship happened in Washington Square, him looking from the window of a crummy hotel, our breath making white clouds in the air. I could have died.

  With Cecil it was only this thing. It happened.

  Jaime and Erik were shitty people. In comparison, Cecil appeared like a divinity, like the god of boyfriends. Jaime hadn’t even been my boyfriend. He screwed my brains out and refused to tell his friends. Erik wouldn’t fess up to Mommie Dearest about our love. Cecil was on the phone every weekend, talking to his Ma and his sister in Chicago, telling them about me, putting me on the phone. His mother asked every weekend when I might visit. We developed a good phone relationship. She was very funny.

  But I didn’t have the juice. I’d closed the book on that kind of love, on that kind of obsession, on that kind of infatuation. Maybe it was maturity. Maybe not.

  —Baby, said Cecil, you’re the first guy who’s made me happy.

  —I’m happy too, I said.

  —Baby, said Cecil, you’re such an interesting person.

  —You aren’t so bad yourself, I said.

  —Baby, asked Cecil, what’s your favorite thing in New York?

  —The Minettas, I said. What’s yours?

  —Cleopatra’s Needle, said Cecil. Have you been?

  I hadn’t. Cecil let out a girlish scream, the faggiest sound that he ever made, and insisted that we take the subway. Right that minute.

  We got off the 6 train at 86th and walked to the Met. I presumed that we were going inside the museum, but Cecil dashed past the building and into the park, through the greenery and across a road into a circular enclosure, stopping before a giant granite obelisk.

  Its four sides were weather blasted, stained black from pollution, as if the stone was corroded and rotting with atmospheric exposure. Destroyed by the filthy air that we daily breathed into our lungs.

  —What is it? I asked.

  —The oldest thing in New York. It’s from Heliopolis. It’s three thousand five hundred years old. It’s Egyptian, erected during the reign of Thutmose III.

  The city’s toxicity had effaced two sides of hieroglyphics. The remaining two were barely visible. The obelisk was mounted on a base, bronzed crab claws emerging from beneath its bulk.

  I was transfixed, thinking of the rock. Older than all of New York. Older than all of America. Fifteen hundred years old when Jesus was born. That isn’t old. That’s ancient. The clouds moving behind the obelisk.

  I wobbled, stumbled, caught myself on the railing.

  —Baby, are you okay?

  —I’m fine, I said. I don’t know what happened. I was looking at the thing and it was like this sound went off in my head.

  —Let’s get you home and into bed, said Cecil. I’ll make you something to eat.

  *

  Let me backtrack.

  The Tunnel had reopened around Thanksgiving, a month after the police discovered the mummy but before the media linked the body with Dorian. Peter Gatien had purchased the club and shuttered it for renovations. The new décor looked a lot like Arena.

  I skipped the reopening. I was busy. I did attend an event a few weeks later. For one night only, the club exhibited paintings by the serial killer John Wayne Gacy. I assumed that Michael Alig was responsible.

  Michael had become a full-fledged drug a
ddict, developing the mordant streak that is a common reference point among junkies. A real death trip, a modern-day Thanatos. He and the other club kids had started wearing bandages and makeup that simulated injuries. I was convinced the inspiration for this choice was a series of photos of Edie Sedgwick taken after she’d set fire to her room at the Chelsea Hotel. But no one would admit it.

  Anyhoo, there I was in Tunnel, peering at the shitty paintings of a man who’d killed and raped something like thirty-five boys. I wondered what it meant.

  America was always bloodstained, but serial killer chic was a new depth. A dying empire always meditates on death. Maybe Michael Alig’s junky intuition was like an extended antenna, an early warning system, a radar for the great coming doom.

  On my way out, I was stopped by this slutty, druggy-looking guy. I’d seen him before, at Disco 2000, talking with Michael.

  —You’re the writer, right?

  —That’s what they tell me, I said.

  He’d bleached his hair out and dyed it an unpleasant shade of copper. He’d smeared kohl around his eyes. He wore a Stüssy shirt and a pair of ugly jeans. He looked too old for his clothes. By the time a person reaches that age, they should either give up or be fabulous. No one can hover in the middle.

  —I read your book, he said.

  —Oh really? I asked.

  —It blew my fucking mind. Michael said it was good. But Michael says lots of things are good. I bought a fucking copy and I think it’s just fucking amazing.

  —Thanks, I said. It’s nice to hear.

  —Is there somewhere we can talk?

  —What’s your name? I asked.

  —Franklin, he said.

  —Franklin what? I asked.

  —Franklin Perkins.

  —Sure, Franklin Perkins, I said. We can go and talk. Let’s get the hell out of here. I can’t stand these crummy paintings.

  James St. James worked the door. Honey, he said, why are you leaving so soon, aren’t those paintings fabulous? I said, No, they’re awful, I can’t stand them, and they’re beneath you, Jimmy. But James St. James just said, Honey, what isn’t?

  *

  We went to Franklin’s hovel in the East Village. We screwed each other’s brains out. It wasn’t great. It was better than okay. I spent the night. The only problem arose when Franklin broke out a wide array of dildos and harnesses.

  —Sorry, I said, but I have a thing about sex toys.

  —That’s okay, he said. Vanilla is still fucking hot.

  When we woke up, he asked me if I wanted to get some breakfast. I said, Sure, yeah, let’s get some breakfast.

  —I know this really great fucking place, he said. It’s called the Kiev.

  —Oh, really? I asked. Let’s check it out.

  Franklin had moved to Manhattan a few months earlier, emigrating from the middle of Connecticut. Don’t think that he was an innocent. He’d grown up in suburbia and screwed out the brains of every swish young man from Hartford and New Haven, giving of his body as indiscriminately as Jesus.

  He’d seen Michael Alig on the Jane Whitney Show. The episode with G. G. Allin, right before Allin died of an overdose at 3rd & Avenue B.

  Michael’s cavorting and capering struck Franklin like an epiphany. Connecticut clubs were one thing, but the city held real action. There was a great wide world over the state border. He resolved to find Michael. Which he did, the very next week. Michael loved fresh meat.

  I couldn’t ferret out whether or not they’d screwed out each other’s brains. I hoped that they hadn’t. As far as I could tell, I’d managed to avoid sharing any of Michael’s sex partners. Only Venus and Ulysses S. Grant knew what bacteria and viruses haunted that accursed bloodstream.

  A few nights after my escapade with Franklin, I read an article in New York magazine about gonorrhea. The disease congregates in a germ pool at the back of the throat. There is no such thing as safer sex. Oral won’t give you AIDS, but dip your dick into a tainted throat pool and it’ll give you the clap.

  I obsessed over the idea that Franklin’d given me gonorrhea. Whenever I pissed, I was terrified that it wasn’t urine, that it marked the early formation of pus. But the disease never arrived.

  If I were a good person, I’d say that I never saw Franklin again. But I can’t. We were together at least twice a week. It went on for so long. I was screwing his brains out the whole time that Cecil was screwing out mine.

  FEBRUARY 1994

  Baby Sees Schindler’s List

  On the basis of Trapped’s relative success, the film option, a five-thousand-word excerpt, and an outline, Parker had sold my second novel to Bill Thomas at Doubleday. They were happy to have me. I was a young writer building my name. They had faith in my future.

  I decided to abandon science fiction and focus on noir. My second novel’s tentative title was In She Walked, Her Legs as Long as Midnight, Her Back as Bold as Brass.

  Set in 1950s Los Angeles, the narrative followed the misadventures of Frank Fist, an ex-Marine turned private eye. He’d been hardened at Guadalcanal, soaked in the blood of a thousand Japanese. He brought his brutality home, using it to service his clients’ needs.

  The science fiction overlay of Trapped had allowed me to skirt around heterosexuality’s central place within the crime novel. Now, with no practical knowledge of female anatomy or its tactile sensations, I made the leap. The neon jazz bebop of crime writers was an ultraqueer manifestation. They all tried so hard to be butch.

  I wrote the most stupidly straight scenes that I could. Here’s a brief excerpt:

  She swung her caboose low and easy. With a behind like that, she didn’t need a smart mouth. Every conversation ended when she walked away. Her derrière taunted a man from across the room, making him want to teach peace to the conquered and tame the proud. “Miss Orrin,” I said, “young ladies like you come to the big city and talk a tough game, but you dames are a dime a dozen. One spanking and you cry for papa. Get your sweet kiester over here, Miss Orrin, and let me wipe that lipstick right off your face.”

  I eked out twenty thousand words. Things were going fine. I could have finished the book, but I derailed myself. I attended a screening of Schindler’s List at a second-run theater, months after its release.

  Within the film’s three hours, there’s an absolutely brilliant work done a disservice by its director’s pedagogical impulse. Over forty-five minutes are wasted making sure that the audience understands that the Holocaust was bad and that Oskar Schindler’s salvation of twelve hundred Jews was good. Why the morality tale? The story is strong. Why the window dressing?

  As I’d learned in my brief conversations with Alan Pakula, screenplays are based on an inherent three-act structure. Issues raised in the first twenty minutes of any film must neatly resolve within its final ten. But what about the Holocaust is resolved? There were no ten final minutes, only decades of psychological suffering and historical consequence.

  I kept thinking about the German and Polish gentiles, the fathomless millions of goyim who never appear in Schindler’s List, the millions of good citizens who kept on keeping on while their government orchestrated genocide. The average people who didn’t say a word against the crimes. Who couldn’t give two shakes of a stick about the Jews, the gays, the Romany, or the mentally ill.

  Twelve hundred lives is a miracle, but six million deaths is cold fact. The consequence of a world placing a premium on capital and technological efficiency. Europe saw it through to its final solution.

  But who was I to judge? I didn’t know a thing about the Holocaust, about the suffering of its victims, or about the Nazi regime. My understanding of WWII was cobbled together from a piss-poor public education and the ongoing fiftieth-anniversary commemorations.

  I ended up at the Strand, buying as many books as I could carry. Until I stood within the bookstore’s sickly light, peering up
at the twelve-foot-tall gray metal bookcases, I didn’t have any idea how many books had been written about the war.

  Books on every goddamned subject, from the obvious to the ridiculous. Books about GI rations. Books about German tanks. Stalin. Churchill. Hitler. Roosevelt. Truman. Books about obscure Japanese rituals. Books about Czechoslovakian housewives. Books about the impact of tanks on migratory patterns of North African birds. Books, books, books. Tales of the Luftwaffe. Endless books.

  I stuck to titles that I recognized. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Night by Eli Wiesel. Both volumes of Maus. The Boys from Brazil. War as I Knew It. And finally, Eichmann in Jerusalem by Hannah Arendt.

  The balding middle-aged cashier blanched when he noticed that every book was about Nazis or the Holocaust. I didn’t mind, but I did feel some sympathy for him, imagining the deranged ones who must come into the store and buy an ungodly number of titles on gruesome subjects. Feeding an obsession through bibliographic mania.

  But not me! I was doing research, though by this time it was difficult to discern writing from mental illness. I’d developed the muscle to the point where it no longer required conscious thought. I sat at my computer and the ideas poured out. I could watch it happen.

  To sit there and have the words flow out of you, to make characters speak, to move them like chess pieces. It was madness.

  *

  Eichmann in Jerusalem. I read it last. A mistake, as it was the best. Hannah Arendt wrote with a naked glass malice that was the only rational response to systemic Teutonic cruelty. Unflinching, without sentiment, cognizant of the paradox of trying Eichmann under the laws of a country that did not exist when he committed his crimes.

  When Arendt reached the sui generis case of Denmark, she nailed me. Here is what she writes: “This was one of the few cases in which statelessness turned out to be an asset, although it was of course not statelessness per se that saved the Jews, but, on the contrary, the fact that the Danish government had decided to protect them.”

  That one sentence flipped my thinking. The story of the Holocaust was one of bad governance. I’d lived my life hearing about the evils of the government, about the horrors of bureaucracy. A hate and mistrust of the federal government was probably the sole opinion shared by East Village hipsters and farmhand yokels, proving that stupidity and ignorance are constants, regardless of your neighbors.