by Jarett Kobek
As we walked towards Cooper Square, Emil squirming in his stroller, I said, “When I was in San Francisco, I heard a song on the radio called ‘Detachable Penis.’ What a preposterous name! Do you know it?”
“I heard it once or twice. I didn’t really pay attention,” said Baby. “The chorus is stupid.”
“Baby,” I gasped. “One must always listen to the verses. That’s where songwriters hide the most diabolical messages. ‘Detachable Penis’ is about this doltish East Village denizen who makes an appearance at a party and wakes up hungover only to discover that he’s lost his penis, which, as the title infers, has a detachable mechanism. He goes on a wild and woolly bildungsroman throughout this very neighborhood, attempting to find the missing member.”
“Where does he go?” asked Baby.
“The Kiev,” I said. “He walks down Second Avenue, right next to Love Saves the Day, and finds his penis being sold by one of the junk merchants. Imagine it, Baby! There I am, in a café in the Richmond District, hearing a song about my old neighborhood! A song about the Kiev! It’s a bad omen. A cruel wind blows towards New York. People are taking notice.”
Baby emerged into his old demesne and his eyes went agog-gog-gogmagog-gog with the changes that I’d wrought upon the place.
Via and viva Dahlia, I’d asked Mother for a tad more money in order to ensure that her grandchild wouldn’t choke on lead paint or receive a rusty nail through the foot. Poor Emil, bless his heart, couldn’t grow up in the bozo bohemia of our former lives.
Mother distributed a heavy influx. I’d refloored the place and repainted, replacing the fixtures. New kitchen and bedrooms. Nothing could be done about the bathroom. The toilet, the bathtub, and the sink remained split asunder. There still was no buzzer.
I’d transformed Baby’s room into a nursery, painted light blue and filled with all manner of tasteful toys. I wouldn’t let Emil touch anything plastic, so I’d scoured for vintage playthings built of solid wood.
Yet the room proved an afterthought used mostly for storage. I couldn’t bear to sleep apart. Emil remained cribbed by my bed. I hadn’t yet attempted sleeping together. I wasn’t one to wake in a damp spot of overflowing urine, or worse, retching in the pudding of his shit.
“It’s like you’ve gone yuppie,” said Baby. “You may have become part of the problem.”
“This child,” I said, “will not grow up like the half-loved orphan of a drug casualty. He’ll suffer all the affection that he can handle. All the stability, too. New York will not ruin him.”
“Where’s the cat?” asked Baby. “I’ve been missing the Captain for so long.”
“I didn’t want to say,” I said, “but the animal has passed from our mortal world.”
“How?” asked Baby.
“A tumor on the spine,” I said. “We could have operated but it seemed cruel. That’s the thing about pets, isn’t it? They always break your hearts.”
“I need to sit down,” said Baby.
New York would not ruin my dear child, but his overactive bowels certainly might. A stench wafted through the apartment. Sitting on the floor, he looked up with a tell-tale expression beneath his shock of thin hair.
“The child’s linen must be changed,” I said. “I’ll spare you the quelle horreur and bring him in the other room.”
“Don’t bother,” said Baby. “I have to do something. I’ll be right back. Do I still have to yell to get inside?”
“A handful of things, my dear,” said I, “never change.”
Whilst Baby stomped down the stairwell, I put Emil up on the counter and investigated the matter. His stool was solid, a happy digression from the previous several days. I’d grown worried enough that if he’d gone another day with looseness, I’d resolved to bring him to the doctor.
Catching my reflection in the toaster’s metal as I cleaned my child, I laughed, wondering what Patrick Geoffrois might think of my fixation on Emil’s stool. The science of diapers was almost petty divination, attempting to read the symbols and smears of the child’s thrice-daily deposits.
The sourness passed from Emil’s face. I put him back on the floor. We sat and waited. Baby cried from the street. I descended the stairs and let him inside. He carried a brown paper bag.
Baby bent over and spoke with Emil. “Hello, little guy,” said Baby. “Do you mind if I pick him up?” Baby placed his bag on the kitchen table and lifted Emil in the most unusual fashion, keeping the child at a grave distance and holding the young one by his underarms.
“I can’t believe this living being came out of you,” said Baby.
“Welcome to a very unexclusive club,” I said. “I’m fairly certain that it happened.”
Baby lifted his bag off the table and brought out a book. “I bought this at the St. Mark’s Bookshop,” he said, handing me an odd-looking volume entitled Trapped Between Jupiter and a Bottle. The cover depicted a man with an elephant’s head. “This is my book,” he said.
“Very nice,” I said, handing it to Baby. “But why show me if you haven’t read it?”
“Adeline, this is my book,” he said, pushing it back. “I wrote it.”
The second page bore a dedication. TO ADELINE, WHEREVER SHE MAY BE ON THIS AMERICAN CONTINENT.
“I had no idea if you’d ever see it,” he said. “I never told you my pseudonym.”
“Baby,” I said, “I’ve something to show you.”
I went into my bedroom and pulled out all ten published issues of Trill. We were selling an unfathomable amount each month. I never asked for the numbers, worried that they’d give me performance anxiety, but Winterbloss said that we moved enough units that if I met all of the people buying the book, I’d occupy the rest of my life simply saying hello.
“Here,” I said. “Take them.”
Baby flipped through the pages.
“Written by J. W. Bloss,” said Baby. “That’s Jeremy?”
“Yes,” I said.
“But who’s the artist? M. Abrahamovic Petrovitch. Минерва?”
“Why would it be Минерва?” I asked. “It’s me, Baby. It’s yours truly.”
“Why aren’t you using your real name?”
“Jeremy believed it was best if no one knew that I’m a woman. Comics are America’s most sexist industry.”
“Why the fuck are you the one who has to pretend?” asked Baby.
“We’re both pretending. Why do you think he’s calling himself J. W. Bloss? His real name is known within the industry. I pretend that I’ve got a penis and Jeremy pretends that he’s not Black. It’s an ugly business, but it pays the bills.”
NEW YEAR’S EVE 1994
Baby and Adeline Watch Television
I won’t bore you with the rest of the motherhood rag, as I’m sure you all have your own terribly disinteresting friends phasing through the throes of parenthood. You know the type, don’t you, darlings?
Those folks who’ll telephone at any hour, simply dying when little Tommy takes his first step or utters his first nonsensical monosyllable or reaches some arbitrary milestone only appreciable by those with a direct genetic link. I’m not sitting in judgment on those souls, those friends of yours. I’m with them in Rockland. I’ve made a fool of myself over Emil more times than I care to admit. Yet I won’t bore you, reader. I know you have better things.
I’ll spare you, too, all the disinteresting little details about me and Baby and our reunification. You know as well as I that it was inevitable. If it hadn’t happened, your nose wouldn’t be buried within this book, would it? You’d be reading one of those sad little stories about people who spend their sour lives crying into store-bought beers.
When New Year’s Eve rolled around, it was Baby and I sitting in my apartment, Emil fast asleep. I was outraged, as one will be when one’s child might be woken by the sounds of nighttime revels. “Thes
e mongoloids are making a hullabaloo in the street,” I said. “They have no respect for the delicate nature of a sleeping baby.”
“There was a time when you stalked the East Village.”
“I never ran wild with abandon, shouting out whatever market-tested non sequitur passed through my idiotic head. Advertising slogans and human degradation! Is this how they ring in the last five years of the millennium?”
If you can believe it, we had my old black-and-white television tuned to Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve. I lived on the island of Manhattan, and had lived here, more or less, for ten years. Never once had I been tempted by the Sodom and Gomorrah of Times Square on December 31. Yet there we were, watching it flicker on the screen.
“You need a new television,” said Baby. “I can’t believe this thing still works.”
“When it breaks, I’m not replacing it. The radio is good enough. Emil won’t grow up as one of these fat children whose best friend is the blue glow of the death box. If this contraption still functions when he’s old enough to understand its purpose, I’ll throw it out.”
Although Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve focused on New York, the musical numbers were performed remotely and introduced by the comedians Margaret Cho and Steve Harvey. One watched crowds crammed into Times Square and then the camera cut away to performances at Walt Disney World.
Melissa Etheridge, The O’Jays, Jon Secada, Hootie & the Blowfish, and Salt-N-Pepa. I’d half hoped that they’d feature this reggae singer named Ini Kamoze. At that very moment, he had a huge crossover hit called “Here Comes the Hotstepper.” I found it inescapable. It drifted to my ears from stray radios, from cars, badly warbled from people’s mouths. One couldn’t leave the house without hearing of the hotstepper and his arrival.
As enlightened as yours truly counted herself, a Buddha done up in Aveda, I remained a creature of my own era. Having come of age during the lilywhite daze of synthpop, there was a distinct decay in my understanding of popular culture. Gone down to dust was the Great White Rocker, at last replaced by the sounds of hip-hop.
Emil rendered me too distracted to give two farthings of a faker’s pretense. Busy with my child, busy with my drawing. Even if I hadn’t gone over to motherhood, the thing that I’d’ve wanted least was to be a woman on the verge of her thirties maintaining the pretense that she retained an acute comprehension of teenage tastes, hoping beyond hope for a genuine connection to evolving trends of lowbrow culture. Imagine me talking about Snoop Doggy Dogg!
A few days earlier, I’d rented an awful film from Kim’s Underground on Bleecker, a location with a far better selection than the Kim’s on Avenue A. The title of this awful film was Return of the Living Dead III. As the Roman numerals imply, III is the third installation in a series of zombie films possessing a tangential association to the grandsire of the genre, Night of the Living Dead. The original Return is well liked for its ultracheeze ’80s punk overlay, a bit like Jubilee by Derek Jarman if Derek Jarman’s Jubilee were absolutely moronic and had its theme sung by Dinah Cancer.
Don’t you dare ask why I’d rent such a thing. I offer neither a sane nor reasonable answer. I am an inveterate loather of zombie films, if you exclude my thumping heart for Bela’s bravura performance as Murder Legendre in White Zombie and my great admiration for I Walked with a Zombie by Jacques Tourneur and Val Lewton. I will profess even a certain affinity for Night. Those exceptions aside, the zombie remains horror’s stupidest trope.
With a wee bit of squinting, one can see its appeal to the American mind. We’re a militaristic society, born in battle, defining our historical periods through war. Bloody G. W. enthroned as our first president, the War of 1812, Baby’s idée fixe of Mr. Lincoln’s agony, WWI, WWII, Vietnam. Our silly little history ain’t much but war history. Our entire dialogue is a reference to war. The War on Drugs. The War on Poverty.
Link that with our present-day empire in decline, our high point hit around 1963, and armies of animated corpses begin to make a semiotic sense. I’m not a girl who holds much truck with allegory, intentional or otherwise, but one can’t miss the equation. War culture + societal death trip = a nation enthralled with images of the walking dead.
Filmed in 1992, Revenge of the Living Dead III makes overtures toward the perceived youth culture of its moment. Posters festoon the male lead’s high school bedroom, advertising every alternative band that one can imaginate, including my old favorites L7. The female lead’s fashion is a hodge-podge of early-’90s clichés. Leather jackets, fishnets, dyed hair.
There’s a moment when the male protagonist’s life has gone tits up. His lady’s been killed, and he’s transubstantiated her into a zombie, a plan that works out rather poorly.
At his lowest moment, given over to despair, our hero is hiding in a sewer. He engages a homeless vagabond in conversation. The young man tells his newfound friend all about his hopes and his dreams. He wants to go to Seattle, to join a band, to be a drummer. Everything’ll be cool once we’re in Seattle, he says.
You’ll recall that the film was shot during one of those appalling moments when the spectacle has found itself a new youth movement. The world was lousy with bands from Seattle. Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, Mother Love Bone, Temple of the Dog, Tad, Screaming Trees. Sub Pop Records.
O Jesu Cristo, protect me from such demons!
What’s saddest about III is imagining its creative fulmination, the moment when its director, Brian Yunza, and its scriptwriter, John Penney, read an article in the New York Times about the latest craze with the kiddies and envisioned making their film fresh, with real cultural currency. And where did these men land? On a boy who longs for Seattle whilst his zombie girlfriend takes up the hobby of body piercing.
No one is worse than the oldest person at a punk rock show.
That was Baby. Clubbing had not been kind. It never was. The spectacle of a successful young author trapped in his own desire for relevance, believing that he must, at all costs, keep up with people ten years younger.
Since our reunification, I’d concluded that life was, indeed, a repeating cycle. I’d convinced him to stop sleeping with that mysterious little toad named Franklin, but it’d left Baby lonely, and brought us back to where we’d started. I spent my spare time wondering how I might fix Baby with a nice boy.
APRIL 1995
Baby and Adeline Go to Norman Mailer’s House
During one of my more addlepated phases, I sallied forth under the delusion that perhaps one could make friends with those undergoing the same maternal experiences as one’s lonesome. I even joined a support group of new mothers, following a recommendation from Emil’s pediatrician.
Alack, most of the group tended to be rather boooooooring and soooo stiflingly conventional. You should have heard their complaints, reader! They fixated upon the awful jobs of their miscreant husbands. Otherwise it was sore nipples and the inability to find the right toys. Their braying wore on the nerves. I absconded after a few months, more than happy to be left alone with my comic book cats.
The only other freak of our little group was a raven-haired woman named Frances Washington, who hailed from the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations. Never quite confined by the smallest state’s definitions of life for a poor girl living in Smith Hill, she’d graduated from Classical and matriculated to RISD on scholarship. She did her graduate degree at Parsons. Her current employ came as an in-house graphic designer for NBC, at the General Electric building in Rockefeller Center.
She too was one of those unwed mothers about whom so much hay was made in the mass media. As was I. If you can believe it, your old pal Adeline had joined the sole demographic which all of America had decided it could hate. Single mothers! Yet Frances had it worse. At least my crimes occurred within the rubric of Whiteness.
Our status as wanton strumpets provided common ground, giving Frances and I many a
thing to talk about. Or tawk about, as she’d never lost all traces of her native accent.
I’d asked her if, as Baby contended, Rhode Islanders were the only people besides Wisconsinites who used the word “bubbler” as a noun for drinking fountains. To my shock, she said yes, yes, Rhode Islanders drink water from bubblers.
We shared a general paranoia about leaving our children with strangers. During the day, Frances deposited her child with an understanding aunt from Queens, giving Miz Washington two hours of daily commute.
At night, she lacked a good option. “I just can’t do it,” she said. “I’d rather be single the rest of my life than leave Danielle with a sitter.”
One night, stuffing our faces with undercooked pizza, we examined our parallel situations and made a pact. As she was ensconced up in the badlands of Gramercy, not so very far from 7th Street, we would pool our resources and mind the other’s child whenever Mommy needed a night.
Thus it was on a fated Friday, somewhere in April, when I escorted Emil to East 19th Street. Frances answered the door, clad in paint-stained clothes. “I’ve been back at the canvas again,” said she. “I need to work on something that isn’t paying my rent.”
“You simply must take up comics,” I said. “No one ever earns real money in my dirty little industry.”
Frances showed me her canvas. A tableau evidencing deep traces of the medieval. A woman in the garret of a tiled, multitiered Moorish tower. A half-human, half-frog strapped to a table. The woman uses an impossibly arcane instrument to measure the monster’s limbs. On the shelves are beakers full of variegate liquids. Twisting blue smoke rises from a candelabra made from a waxy human hand.
“Whatever is it titled?” I asked.
“Nagasaki/Hiroshima: After Remedios Varo for the Tutsi Peoples.”
