by Jarett Kobek
“It’d be kind of embarrassing,” said Christine. “He might gush the whole night.”
“Baby’s simply been gushing for days. It might be nice to have someone else do the dirty deed.”
Christie ditched her friend. Christine told her friend that she was taking a cab home.
Christine walked out of City Lights, headed down Columbus towards Market. She waited five minutes and doubled back on Pacific, Grant and Kerouac Alley. Her friend was gone.
BABY INVITED his own set of people. Adeline didn’t know any of them. One was a gorgeous twink.
Twink was slang for a young gay man without any personality or body hair.
EVERYONE WENT across the street to a bar called Specs, an old wooden place decorated with a wide-range of curios.
Adeline let Baby hold court. She didn’t interrupt. She talked to Christine.
“Tell me, you charming girl,” said Adeline, “Do you think Baby is going to screw the brains out of this twink? If so, do you posit that this screwing out of brains will occur at my apartment?”
BESIDES THE TWINK, Baby brought along five other sycophants. Adeline and Christine listened as they asked Baby pointless questions about Annie Zero.
Like: In chapter fifteen, when Annie Zero demands that the agrarian class enter a state of permanent revolution, does this preclude allies from the proletariat?
Like: Who does Annie Zero marry in the end?
Like: How did you think of the thing with the anteater?
NEITHER ADELINE NOR CHRISTINE were part of the conversation. Adeline suggested that they pass the time by doing what Baby had done, which was to invent a lot of bullshit words.
Adeline came up with pregnot: the time between the last unprotected sex and the onset of ovulation.
Christine came up with jeejoonjaz: the sensation of existing, simultaneously, within three different calendar months.
Adeline came up with celebusikenz: being made sick by the accidental radiation of a D-list celebrity.
Christine came up with shizpaz: the problem of needing to urinate and defecate at the same time and the confusion that arises when a person can’t figure out which to do first.
Adeline came up with haksiksad: the feeling a person gets when they hear their cat wretch but before the feline has vomited.
Christine came up with disaguit: when a handsome young man invites you back to his place only to take off his shirt and play the guitar.
Adeline came up with terrofucked: the moment when an empire is destroyed by 19 guys carrying box cutters and a few cans of mace.
Christine came up with sloslopped: the slowing of time as you spill liquid across a linoleum floor.
Adeline came up with twinkiwink: when you’re not sure whether your best friend, who is leaking mucus from every orifice of his countenance, will bring a twink to your apartment for sex.
Christine came up with oldthunked: when you conceive, in totality, the full life of a person who you have met in their final decade.
ADELINE AND CHRISTINE exchanged numbers.
They started hanging out.
They saw each other about once a week.
BABY SCREWED OUT the twink’s brains. He took the twink to Adeline’s apartment. They made orgasms and earthquakes of pleasure. They shook the guest bedroom.
Baby was coughing and leaking the whole time. The twink didn’t care.
Adeline put on headphones.
EVERYONE WHO’D BEEN AT CITY LIGHTS came down with a cold. This included Adeline. This included Peter Maravelis. This included the twink. This included Christine.
Baby had coughed all over the audience and infected them with his germs. This was only slightly metaphorical.
chapter thirteen
J. Karacehennem had moved to San Francisco at an insane moment in its history. The beauty of the city was not outweighing its annoying residents.
THE WORD USED TO DESCRIBE the insanity of the moment was gentrification, but no one knew what gentrification meant, not really, and most people did not understand what was happening.
Christine was one of these people. She had lived in the city for almost two decades. She was caught up in a whirlwind of change. She had no idea what the fuck was going on.
It was as if she’d been hit by one of the Ford F-150s advertised on Twitter.
GENTRIFICATION WAS WHAT HAPPENED to a city when people with an excess of capital wanted their capital to produce more capital while not attributing any value to labor.
THE POINT WAS THIS: in 2007, the American economy had crashed.
In the decades leading up to the crash, a series of US Presidents had done everything they could to make sure that capital, rather than labor, was the driving force of the American economy. This process was called deregulation.
These Presidents were: Ronald Reagan, George Bush I, Bill Clinton, George Bush II. None of them had any eumelanin in the basale strata of their epidermises.
RONALD REAGAN was a former actor who had starred in a movie in which he taught morals to an ape. He was the Governor of California before he was President of the United States.
George Bush I came from such an old money family that his father sat on the board of a bank under Nazi control. George Bush I had been the director of the Central Intelligence Agency.
Bill Clinton grew up poorer than dirt. He positioned himself in the imaginary political center, which was a polite way of saying that he governed from the Right while mouthing platitudes of the Left. He loved three things: (1) Women. (2) The sound of his own voice. (3) Deregulation.
George Bush II was the son of George Bush I. He was a draft dodger. He was President when America was terrofucked. His brother, Neil, was a sex tourist who caught herpes from a sex-worker in Southeast Asia.
George Bush II was an alcoholic and one of the worst Presidents in history. His inexperience led to him being manipulated by his Vice President, another draft dodger who loved three things: (1) Torture. (2) War. (3) Self-righteousness.
THE PRESIDENCY, which was limited to eight years, had an incentive for deregulation.
The incentive was simple. The short term gains caused by deregulation appeared very fast. The damage took decades to arrive.
IT’S WORTH NOTING that the one constant in all four Presidencies was the presence of Alan Greenspan, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve.
Alan Greenspan loved deregulation.
He was also one of Ayn Rand’s disciples. He’d sat at her knee whilst she talked about poor people being garbage who deserved to die in the gutter.
Ayn Rand was the most formative intellectual influence on the man who oversaw the Federal Reserve during a period of intense deregulation.
The predictable result of this deregulation was a series of speculation bubbles that destroyed the economy.
It’s arguable that Ayn Rand’s finest achievement was not the authoring of two shitty novels. It’s arguable that Ayn Rand’s finest achievement was crashing the economy twenty-five years after her death.
A SPECULATION BUBBLE was a scheme in which people with money convinced people with less money that things have value greater than their actual worth.
People who get in at the beginning of a bubble and then get out before the bubble pops make a ton of money. Everyone else gets screwed.
WHEN THE ECONOMY IMPLODED, the response of the Federal government was to institute a series of half-assed reforms which kept the status at quo.
Part of keeping the status at quo was lowering short term interest rates to near zero and instituting a series of quantitative easing programs which pumped billions of dollars, monthly, into the economy. The latter had the effect of lowering long term interest rates to almost zero.
If interest rates were near zero, traditional outlets—savings accounts, treasury bonds—would no longer offer returns on investment. This would force people with capital to move that capital into other parts of the economy.
By putting money into investment opportunities, cash circulated and the
economy was stimulated.
In theory.
ONE OF THE MODELS by which people invested their money was venture capital. Venture capital was the dominant investment model of the San Francisco Bay Area.
Erik Willems was one of the men who worked in venture capital. He moved money in the desired directions of his masters.
Before Erik Willems worked in venture capital, he had a job with Fear and Respect Holdings Ltd., the firm run by His Royal Highness Mamduh bin Fatih bin Muhammad bin Abdulaziz al Saud.
HRH MAMDUH BIN FATIH BIN MUHAMMAD BIN ABDULAZIZ AL SAUD disliked using his given name with people who weren’t native Arabic speakers. To grease the gears of global capitalism, he’d adopted many names in different languages.
In Chinese, he was called 野生花卉, which meant Wild Flower.
In Spanish, he was called El Diablo árabe, which meant The Arabic Devil.
In Turkish, he was called Küçükkutsaldağ, which meant The Little Holy Mountain.
In German, he was called Der Meister der Weltschmerz, which meant Master of the World’s Sorrow.
In English, he was called Dennis, which meant Dennis.
ERIK WILLIAMS MET DENNIS at Harvard University. They were both graduate students.
Erik was earning an MBA at the Business School. He spent his days arguing case studies and pretending as if future success could be predicted from past failure.
Dennis was earning a Masters of Public Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, an institution where war criminals taught the global elite how to rule with an iron fist.
Erik met Dennis at a party on Commonwealth Ave in Brighton. The apartment was rented by another student at the Kennedy School. The rentee’s father was prominent in Mid-East politics.
The apartment was small. Dennis asked the rentee why he hadn’t chosen accommodations more befitting someone whose father was prominent in the governance of his native country.
“We afford only so much,” said the rentee. “My father isn’t too corrupt.”
“All things in time, my friend,” said Dennis. “In the domains of the Prophet, Peace Be Unto Him, even the agèd learn on which side their bread is buttered.”
Dennis was living in a Victorian mansion on Chauncy Street. His father owned the building.
ANYWAY, ERIK AND DENNIS were at a party in this apartment on Comm Ave in Brighton. They both arrived alone. The guests were boring.
Dennis noticed that Erik was examining the rentee’s bookshelves. He walked over and introduced himself.
He told Erik to call him Dennis.
“Do you recognize any volumes befitting of your tastes?” asked Dennis.
“They’re all textbooks.”
“I myself am a man of some refined literary avarice,” said Dennis.
This was before Erik had moved to the Bay Area. He’d yet to develop a taste for juvenile literature.
No one had heard of Annie Zero because Annie Zero didn’t exist. Baby was licking his wounds from the failure of Hot Mill Steam. He hadn’t begun to think about the Megaverse or Neo-Maoists.
“I don’t know much about books, really,” said Erik to Dennis.
“As of late,” said Dennis to Erik, “I have cultivated a hunger and passion for the words and philosophy of the Russian émigré Ayn Rand. I find that engagement with her work relieves the vital center.”
The friendship was formed.
ERIK AND DENNIS graduated at the same time.
Dennis would have graduated earlier but America got terrofucked.
In the aftermath, when dark accusations were flying about the Saudi royal family, Dennis took a leave of absence from the Kennedy School.
On September 13, 2001, he and several relatives charted a private jet out of Rhode Island’s T.F. Greene airport.
Dennis spent the next year in Paris. His father co-owned a hotel in le 8e arrondissement. Dennis crashed in a palatial suite on the penultimate floor. He ingested a great amount of Bolivian cocaine and fucked a copious number of high priced sex-workers while listening to the albums of Iron Maiden. His favorites were Seventh Son of a Seventh Son and The Number of the Beast.
One time, when he was high on Bolivian cocaine and listening to Iron Maiden and in the company of a sex-worker with a great deal of eumelanin in the basale stratum of her epidermis, Dennis imagined that he himself was the seventh son of a seventh son.
“I am not a simple prince of The Kingdom of Saud,” he told the sex-worker, “But also am I born the seventh one, born of woman, the seventh son! I have the power to heal! I have the gift of the second sight! So it is written! So it shall be done!”
“Mais oui, bien sûr, mon mari,” said the sex-worker in Tamil-inflected French. “Mais ma chatte ne ronronne. Passe-moi la Blanche neige.”
When America was back to business and using cluster bombs to transform illiterate Pashtuns into scattered chunks of bruised meat, Dennis returned to Harvard.
A FEW MONTHS after graduation, Dennis offered Erik a job with Fear and Respect Holdings Ltd.
Dennis formed Fear and Respect with a capital seed of $100,000,000. The money was a graduation present from his father.
For over three decades, the old man, His Royal Highness Fatih bin Muhammad bin Abdulaziz al Saud, had run his own company. He’d built it into a powerhouse and made himself the third richest man in the Middle East.
One of Fatih bin Muhammad’s few failures came during the dotcom era of the 1990s, when he’d lost a lot of money on bad investments. The most notorious was Kozmo.com.
Kozmo.com was a one-hour delivery service that sold goods below cost and hoped to make up the money on delivery fees. The hysteria of the moment was such that even with a business model dedicated to losing money, the company raised about $250,000,000 in capital.
Dennis’s father had invested $20,000,000. The money disappeared in about a year. Fatih bin Muhammad was convinced that while the Internet offered growth opportunities, he himself didn’t understand the burgeoning online world.
As he was learning this lesson about the new digital economy, Fatih bin Muhammad was also wracked with concern about his son.
Heretofore, Dennis had proved to be little more than a useless layabout. His only appreciable skills were: (1) An internal radar which allowed him to land at any major airport in the world and immediately locate the city’s upscale drug dealers. (2) Fucking high priced sex-workers.
Fatih bin Muhammad would be damned to Karacehennem before he allowed Dennis to become another useless Saudi playboy. He combined his two problems and decided that Dennis would run a company which invested in Internet and media.
“My son, my son,” he said, “I’m too old for the Internet. My body grows weak and betrays me. Such illness. No longer shall I be called Abū Mamduh. All now shall know me as Abū al-Amrāḍ.
“But you, my child, you are yet young. The swift blood of your mother runs through those veins. The Internet is for the young. Mass entertainment is for the young. Do not shame your father. Go and prove yourself. Conquer the Internet! Conquer new and old media!”
Fear and Respect Holdings Ltd. was formed.
ERIK WAS DENNIS’S FIRST HIRE. On the whole, the situation worked. They had some successes. They had some failures. They made more money than they lost. Fatih bin Muhammad was happy.
Erik only lasted about two years with Fear and Respect. He hated the constant travel and he couldn’t handle Dennis’s frequent insistence that they smoke DMT in brothels.
“I’m good with whores,” Erik said while giving notice. “And I can deal with elves revealing universal secrets in 360° vision, but I can’t handle elfin revelation in Castilian whorehouses. It’s too much for me.”
Erik left Fear and Holding with a decent severance package and a few words of Dennis’s advice: “Get to San Francisco! I am certain there is money awaiting your conquest. Fear not, dear friend, for I will come and visit. My father owns two buildings in the Haight and another in the Financial District.”
&nb
sp; Erik went to San Francisco and found a job at Sequoia Capital. Sequoia Capital was a venture capital firm.
VENTURE CAPITAL firms offered opportunities in venture capital funds.
Venture capital funds provided money to up-and-coming companies.
In exchange for this funding, the firms purchased a certain amount of equity in these up-and-coming companies.
The funds were managed by general partners like Erik. The investors, either very rich individuals or very rich institutions, were limited partners.
The general partners found opportunities and, using the money of the limited partners, invested in these opportunities.
THE BASIC UNDERLYING APPROACH of venture capital firms was to invest in a wide range of companies. Most of the companies in which venture capital firms invested would fail.
The hope was that one or two of these companies would make a great deal of money. This great deal of money would offset the losses from the bad investments.
It was like shooting at a flock of birds with a sawed-off shotgun.
AFTER A FEW YEARS at Sequoia, Erik Willems and some of his co-workers decided to found their own venture capital firm. They named it MoriaMordor.
The co-founders arrived at this name by combining two imaginary locations in J.R.R. Tolkein’s The Lord of the Rings. Having lived in the Bay Area for some years, Erik and the other co-founders were well versed in juvenile literature. They groked Sci-Fi/Fantasy.
Before anyone could join MoriaMordor as an official co-founder, they had to pass a trial by fire. Each needed to land at least one limited partner.
