by Jarett Kobek
Adeline was in her bedroom on the second floor. She opened the door and yelled, “What?”
“Adeliiiiiiiiiiiiiine!” yelled Suzanne. “Please come down here and talk with me.”
This all happened before Adeline developed her Transatlantic accent. This happened before Adeline saw Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Adeline still sounded like a regular Californian teenager.
“Okay, fine,” said Adeline. “Like, whatever.”
Adeline went down into the living room and sat on the love seat.
“Adeliiiiiiiine,” said Suzanne, “I think we need to talk about you and George.”
“What’s to talk about? George is just, like, you know, this guy I met on the beach,” said Adeline.
“I’ve never wanted to be your enemy,” said Suzanne. “I’ve always thought we could be best friends and talk about things like girlfriends.”
Oh, no, thought Adeline. She wants to talk about sex.
“Look, Mom,” said Adeline. “I’m not, like, totally stupid, okay? Me and George aren’t fucking and I know all about birth control. We’ve have, like, sex-ed, remember? It’s not like when you were young. It’s the 1980s.”
“You’re an old soul,” said Suzanne, “I thought you’d probably be too embarrassed to talk about it, so I taped something for you off the television.”
“Who, like, are you?” asked Adeline.
“Please,” said Suzanne. “I think it’ll help.”
Suzanne walked over and put her gentle hand on Adeline’s shoulder. Adeline smelled whiskey on Suzanne’s breath.
“Fine, okay?” asked Adeline. “I’ll totally watch it. Right now. Let’s get this over.”
Suzanne turned on the television. She inserted the VHS tape. She turned on the VCR. She used the remote control to play the tape. She left the room.
Adeline watched. Her eyes were ringed with kohl. She was thinking about Tiffany Thayer, the astounding keyboardist in The Castration Squad.
It was an episode of ABC’s Afterschool Specials, a series of moralizing dramas that aired in the early evening and dealt with issues which teenagers faced in the uncertain social climate of America’s Cold War.
Suzanne had taped an episode called Schoolboy Father, starring Rob Lowe and Dana Plato.
Rob Lowe was an actor who would later be videotaped, twice, having group sex. Dana Plato was an actress who would later star in softcore pornography and die of a drug overdose. Neither of them had any eumelanin in the basale cell layers of their epidermises.
In Schoolboy Father, Rob Lowe plays a young teenager. He discovers that a girl he met at summer camp has given birth to a child. He suspects that he is the child’s father. The girl is played by Dana Plato. She hasn’t told Rob Lowe that she’s pregnant. He finds her in the maternity ward. She tells Rob Lowe that she’s planning to put the baby up for adoption. They fight. A social worker tells Rob Lowe that before the baby can be adopted, he has to sign a consent form. He decides to bring the baby home to live with him and his mother. He thinks he can handle it. His fantasy of parental competence conflicts with the reality of caring for an infant while trying to maintain an age appropriate social life. Rob Lowe realizes that he can’t take care of a baby. The baby is put up for adoption.
Adeline wasn’t sure what point Suzanne was trying to make with Schoolboy Father, but she knew enough not to ask for clarification. Suzanne was a drunk.
Adeline showed the tape to a gaggle of her deathrocker friends. They found the dialogue hilarious. They took great pleasure in quoting the film.
“Those sneakers are a national disgrace!” they yelled.
“You used precaution, didn’t you?” they asked.
“We didn’t think she’d get pregnant!” they yelled.
BUT NOW IT WAS 1993 and Adeline was pregnant. And all she could think was that she’d failed to learn anything from Schoolboy Father.
She’d been caught with her hand in the cookie jar. Her sexual encounters with Nash Mac had been so pointless. The sex itself hadn’t been particularly good.
Now there was a child. A child was like a life sentence of Nash Mac.
She’d considered an abortion but didn’t do it. This was not due to ideology.
Adeline had been the person in high school who helped other girls get abortions. She’d driven them to clinics and held their hands in reception areas painted the color of Norman Mailer’s living room in Brooklyn.
Adeline believed that abortions were a social good.
Which, of course, they were.
She still brought Emil to term.
ADELINE’S OLDER SISTER DAHLIA flew out from Los Angeles to help with the pregnancy.
Dahlia had a husband named Charles. She’d had two children with Charles. No one in Dahlia’s nuclear family had any eumelanin in the basale strata of their epidermises.
Charles and the children loved Dahlia but they were happy to have a break. Dahlia was a total pain in the ass.
AS SOON AS DAHLIA got off of the plane, she told Adeline that Adeline had better prepare for giving birth because giving birth felt like shitting out a baby seal.
“Dahlia, you blithering idiot, I’m not even close to my due date!”
“A baby seal, Adeline! A big wet baby seal!” said Dahlia. “You’ll be shitting out a big wet baby seal!”
This all happened in a terminal at JFK Airport, long before America was terrofucked, so Adeline met Dahlia at her gate.
DAHLIA HELPED OUT. She talked with Suzanne and asked for money. Dahlia dealt with doctor’s appointments and prenatal care and the hospital.
And she stayed with Adeline for a few months after the birth, which meant that Adeline never missed a deadline on Trill.
THERE ADELINE WAS IN A PRIVATE ROOM at Roosevelt Hospital, experiencing the miracle of childbirth, bringing a beautiful human life into this world and the only thing that she could think was about how she was shitting out a baby seal.
When she held the child in her arms, she knew that she’d call him Emil.
Emil was the name of her older brother.
The first Emil was a suicide.
He’d been caught soliciting tricks on Selma Boulevard in Hollywood. Because of their father’s forays into local politics, Emil’s name and face ended up in the Pasadena Star-News. In the photograph, Emil was wearing a white tuxedo.
He threw himself off the Colorado Street Bridge into the Arroyo Seco.
THE CIRCUMSTANCES AROUND HER CHILD were what convinced Adeline to leave New York and move to San Francisco. Nash Mac was making noise about not having custody and never seeing his son.
Adeline wasn’t going to get herself in a situation where Emil flew out to California to spend court mandated time with his father.
Suzanne’d suggested that they sue Nash Mac into oblivion.
“Adeliiiiiiiine,” she said, “You know that we’ve used Bert Fields in the past! I’m sure he could recommend an attorney who would pound your sperm donor into the dust!”
Adeline had grown up in Los Angeles. She’d been around Suzanne’s friends and gone to private school out on the Westside.
She’d attended the Crossroads School for the Arts & Sciences, which was an alternative education relic of the 1970s. It was at Crossroads that Adeline had helped several pregnant girls procure their abortions.
She’d seen what lawsuits did to people. Divorce proceedings and custody battles seemed, more than anything, to harm children.
So she packed up and moved to San Francisco. Her boyfriend at the time, a former East Village punk rocker turned legal assistant, came with her. He didn’t last.
AS A SINGLE MOTHER drawing over 30 pages of comic art every month, Adeline didn’t have much time for a social life.
This was okay. She was in her thirties. She’d whittled away her teens and her twenties with questionable sex, drug use, and novels in translation. There wasn’t much left undone.
Suzanne visited regularly. And Jeremy and Minerva came into the city from San Venetia. And Baby showed up from t
ime to time. Even Dahlia was around.
The early years were wonderful. Emil had a sweet personality. He was a bright child.
LOOKING BACK, one of the things she remembered most was the sense of dread that arrived whenever Emil handled inflated balloons.
Balloons were a state of existential terror. You waited for the rubber to pop. You waited for the explosion of sound. You waited for your child to start screaming. You waited for your child’s incomprehension about its imploded and disappeared toy.
WHEN EMIL TURNED 12, he began finding Adeline embarrassing.
She could see why.
Don Murphy had optioned Trill. Scholastic was sniffing around. Adeline spoke in a Transatlantic accent. Most people in her chosen field thought that she was a Russian man. Her best friend wrote Science Fiction. Sometimes an actual Russian woman would come over and swear about how capitalism had ruined her vagina.
When Emil turned 13, and it was clear that things weren’t getting any less weird, he asked if he could go live with Nash Mac.
NASH MAC had transitioned out of computer games and was working for IronPort, which had been acquired by Cisco. Adeline didn’t know what he did for a living. She didn’t care. She didn’t ask.
It was hard to maintain a pretense of civility, even for Emil’s sake. Every time she saw Nash Mac’s dumb face, it reminded Adeline of how stupid and pointless it is to be young.
Nash Mac had married another woman and fathered two other children. His new wife had blonde hair and no eumelanin in the basale stratum of her epidermis. Her name was Stephanie. She tried very hard to forge a working relationship with Adeline.
DESPITE HER EFFORTS, Stephanie couldn’t bridge the gap. She and Adeline were very different.
While Stephanie was writing her Master’s thesis on Barbara Kruger at Stanford, Adeline was stepping over dope sick East Village junkies and drawing Felix Trill’s misadventures with amorous cephalopods.
AND THE SHARED SEXUAL PAST weighed on Stephanie’s mind.
Aware of the distance between them, Stephanie spoke to Adeline in an unusually slow and loud manner, which wasn’t that far from how some people talk to the foreign, the blind and the mentally backwards.
This manner of speaking made Adeline assume that Stephanie herself was mentally backwards.
Her responses to Stephanie’s perceived mental backwardness did not foster conversation, as Adeline tended to talk to Stephanie as a person might speak to a favored pony.
“HELLO... ADELINE... YOU... LOOK... NICE... TODAY!”
“Many thanks, darling. You yourself are rather fetching.”
“ADELINE... WOULD... YOU... LIKE... SOMETHING... TO... EAT?”
“Aren’t you just a breath of fresh air? You’re like a mint julep. I could simply drink you down in one gulp, princess.”
“EMIL... SEEMS... LIKE... HE... IS... ENOYING... SEVENTH... GRADE!”
“Yes he does, doesn’t he? We all must enjoy things in this world of ours. I do hope you have some things that you enjoy. You do? Well, aren’t you a good girl!”
STEPHANIE AND NASH MAC lived out in Milpitas, one of the endless California suburbs comprised of strip malls and decaying erotic fervor.
Emil had his own room for the nights that he slept over. Both Stephanie and Nash Mac said that Emil was more than welcome to live with them.
So Adeline agreed.
She had regretted the decision ever since.
EVEN WITH THE NEW LATITUDE OF MOVEMENT, the loss of Emil was a sucking wound which would not heal.
“Baby,” she said while visiting Provincetown, “It’s like a creature has ripped asunder my soul. I knew he was going to grow up and leave me but why did it have to happen so soon?”
“For fuck’s sake, Adeline,” said Baby, “Go and take him back. You have custody. You’re his mother. Can’t Suzanne sue somebody?”
“He doesn’t want me,” she said. “He doesn’t want anything to do with the weird life I’ve made for myself. He wants to be with his father and that dreadful woman. She talks so loud, Baby, and so slow. I suspect that she might be mentally backwards. I suppose she’s his new mother.”
“She’s not his mother,” said Baby. “You’re his mother. He’s supposed to hate you. You aren’t supposed to take it seriously. You aren’t supposed to let him move out of your apartment.”
“No, Baby,” said Adeline, “It’s different. I remember hating Suzanne. This isn’t hate. If he hated me, it wouldn’t present a challenge. This is different. He doesn’t hate me. He’s just disinterested in my silly little life.”
Baby rolled his eyes. Of all Adeline’s strange decisions, he considered this the strangest.
ADELINE’S MOTHER HAD LEFT PASADENA and bought a condo in Downtown Los Angeles. Adeline couldn’t imagine Suzanne anywhere other than Pasadena. It was too strange.
Suzanne kept her house but wanted something in the city. Downtown was revitalizing. “It’s gentrifying, Adeliiiiiiiine!” said Suzanne. “All the swinging people are swinging again and they’ve cleaned out all that nasty burned out trash!”
When Adeline was young, she’d loved all the nasty burned out trash.
NOW EMIL WAS LIVING with his grandmother. This turned out to be worse than when he had lived with Nash Mac.
At least when Emil lived with Nash Mac, Adeline could see him when she wanted. At least he was still forced to stay with her on the weekends.
Now he’d fallen off the radar. Now he was out in Los Angeles. He didn’t return her phone calls. He very rarely sent her email.
WHENEVER ADELINE needed to hear about the actual details of Emil’s life, she had to call her mother and ask about her son. Whenever Adeline wanted to see an idealized self-portrait of Emil’s life, she would check his presence on various websites owned by multinational corporations.
But she attempted to avoid the latter. She found it creepy to stalk her son’s Internet presence. Emil’s WaNks Index Score was 83.21223121.
ADELINE TRIED to take things in stride. Whenever she worried about irreparable harm to her relationship with Emil, she remembered the years when she wasn’t speaking with Suzanne. And now she and her mother were on better terms than ever.
Besides, what was there to be afraid of?
Adeline herself had been a young waif on the streets of multiple urban environments. And that had been when the cities were dangerous, before they cleared away the burned out trash. That had been when cities were scary and before Internet pornography had anesthetized an entire population.
WHEN SHE SAW EMIL’S PHONE NUMBER come across her cellphone, she was thrilled. She answered on the first ring.
“Emil?” she asked.
“Mom,” he said.
“How’s Los Angeles, darling? Are you simply baking in the sunny sunshine with Mommy Dearest?”
“Mom,” said Emil, “You’ve, like, got to stop using Twitter. You’re so fucking embarrassing. It’s totally awful.”
“They’ve been saying some very terrible things about your mother on the Internet.”
“I totally saw what you said about Beyoncé,” said Emil. “All of my friends saw it. Do you know how many people, like, sent me it?”
“I’m sorry,” said Adeline. “It wasn’t my fault.”
“When has it ever been your fault? When has a single thing ever been, like, something that you admitted was your fault? Our whole lives are so fucking crazy and it’s never because of you.”
THIS WAS UNFAIR.
As the daughter of an alcoholic, Adeline knew all about people who refused to see the relationship between the course of their lives and their own poor decisions. Adeline wrestled with as much responsibility as she could bear. She knew that her life was her own creation. It was nobody’s fault but hers.
But Emil was young and his mother was dispensing relationship advice on Twitter.
“YOUR OPINIONS,” said Emil, “are like, really, offensive. I totally don’t know why you’d say any of those things in, like, public.”
On the Internet, Emil offered a very different self-portrait than one might deduce from his California dialect. His intellectual output was full of words that he’d learned during his foundation year at CalArts.
He had been taught theory. His fellow students had recommended essential books, most of which were post-theory novels.
Whenever Emil posted something on the Internet, he included a great deal of jargon like epistemology, ontology, intertextuality, binaries, intersectionality, extrarationality and improvisational impulse.
Yet whenever Emil was involved in a vocal conversation, his California roots betrayed him. He sounded like a media stereotype.
The split between his written and spoken selves was startling, but not unusual for kids involved in the Los Angeles art scene. There were thousands of them. They all used the Internet to articulate what they could not articulate in person.
For all of her flaws, Adeline was flush with a mother’s forgiving love. She had never noticed that her son sounded like an idiot.
A THING THAT ADELINE had never told anyone, not even Baby, was the real reason why she let Emil go live with Nash Mac.
It wasn’t that Adeline didn’t take responsibility. It was that Adeline took too much responsibility. She let Emil go live with Nash Mac because she’d felt guilty.
Guilty about bringing a child into her weird life, guilty about subjecting Emil to her family and her friends, guilty about putting Emil into a situation beyond his control, guilty about robbing him of his own choices, guilty of sticking him on a planet that had less than a century left.
The only thing a parent need do, thought Adeline, was to inflict as little damage as possible and give their children the tools to handle future damage done by others.
