I Hate the Internet

by Jarett Kobek

She honored the feeling. She let Emil live where he wanted and hoped that things would repair themselves.

  She was waiting for the verdict. The jury was still out.

  “ENOUGH ABOUT THIS TWITTER NONSENSE, darling. Tell me, how are you? How ever is your band?”

  “It’s not a band, Mom,” said Emil. “I’ve told you, like, a million times. We’re not a fucking band. No one plays instruments. It’s really not a fucking band.”

  “Sorry, darling,” said Adeline.

  chapter twenty-one

  J. Karacehennem left his apartment near the corner of 23rd and Bryant. He was alone. He was going to a literary event where he would read aloud some of his own writing.

  The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter was not coming along. The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter did not like his writing.

  When he published his novel ZIAD, The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter read it. She said there were some nice parts but she didn’t think the book was that interesting.

  “What do you mean it’s not interesting?” asked J. Karacehennem. “It’s about Ziad Jarrah! One of the 9/11 pilots! It’s a book about a psychopath who wants to crash a hijacked plane into the Capitol building! He fucked up your whole world forever! What could be more interesting?”

  “It’s just more masculine bullshit,” said The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter. “Men are always writing books about killing each other. When they aren’t writing books about killing each other, then they’re just killing each other.”

  Anyway, The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter had been to a great number of J. Karacehennem’s literary readings. She had seen enough. She didn’t need to keep going.

  She was skipping this one.

  THAT VERY MORNING, J. Karacehennem had woken up and walked past Local’s Corner. Local’s Corner was the public relations disaster of a restaurant opened at 23rd and Bryant.

  The previous evening, someone had vandalized the restaurant. They had used purple spray paint to tag its windows with graffiti. The graffiti read:

  KEEP MISSION BROWN

  Mission was the neighborhood in which Local’s Corner was located. Brown was a colloquialism indicating the writer of the graffiti’s desire to maintain the historically Latino character of the Mission.

  A FEW WEEKS EARLIER, on Cesar Chavez Day, a woman named Sandra Cuadra and her family went to Local’s Corner. They were a party of five. They all had eumelanin in the basale strata of their epidermises.

  They were turned away.

  The server would not seat Sandra Cuadra.

  An explanation floated later was that Local’s Corner didn’t accommodate parties bigger than four people.

  Sandra Cuadra was a long time resident of the Mission. She was Latino. She was Brown. She was an activist and a former city employee.

  She sent email to a wide group of people. She detailed her experiences with Local’s Corner.

  Latino people were feeling squeezed by the forces of gentrification. Their neighborhood was being pulled apart by the whims of mega-capitalists, low interest rates, investors from out of town, and corporations located in Silicon Valley.

  And there was Local’s Corner, the most obvious and tone deaf symbol of the changes wrought on the neighborhood.

  It had denied a Latino family service. On Cesar Chavez Day. Its owner had a bad reputation around the neighborhood. The matriarch of that Latino family was a beloved neighborhood fixture.

  So the vandalization and graffiti began.

  LATINO PEOPLE were the genetic descendents of both the Western hemisphere’s indigenous peoples and the Spanish colonialists who had invaded the Americas. The Spanish colonialists started showing up at the end of the Fifteenth Century.

  The Spanish colonialists had murdered and poisoned and infected the indigenous peoples of the Americas. Because the human race is driven by reproductive urges, the Spanish colonialists also vented their lust into the indigenous peoples of the Americas.

  There were Portuguese colonists, too. From the perspective of the indigenous peoples who were being murdered and poisoned and raped and infected, the Portuguese were just Spaniards with a shittier accent.

  LATINO PEOPLE were a diverse group of nationalities. Some Latino people had some eumelanin in the basale strata of the epidermises. Others did not.

  The presence of some eumelanin in some Latino people is why someone had suggested keeping the neighborhood Brown.

  WHEN SPANISH CONQUERORS invaded the San Francisco Bay Area, the indigenous people were the tribes of the Ohlone people.

  The narrative history of the Ohlone people was the same terrible narrative visited upon all the indigenous people of the Americas. Death and depopulation through infection, murder and rape.

  Before the Spanish arrived, there were tens of thousands of Ohlones in California. There were about 2,000 in 2013.

  THE THING WITH THE OHLONES wasn’t simply a Spanish problem or a California problem. All of the United States of America was stolen land.

  The treatment of the indigenous people of the United States of America was the world’s biggest genocide.

  Americans loved doing things in a really big way. They couldn’t help it. They were maniacs for obscene consumption. Americans were nuts for the enlarged and its attendant dramas.

  HERE IS AN APPARENTLY TRUE STORY.

  Prescott Bush was the father of George Bush I and the grandfather of George Bush II. He was the guy who worked for a Nazi bank.

  The story goes that Prescott Bush and five other guys dug up the grave of Geronimo.

  Geronimo was an Apache warrior. The Apaches were a grouping of indigenous people of some eumelanin in the basale strata of their epidermises whose way of life was destroyed during the genocide.

  Prescott Bush and the five other guys were all students at Yale. They were all part of a secret society called Skull and Bones.

  YALE WAS A UNIVERSITY. Universities were confidence games which pretended to ennoble their students through pedagogy. What universities really did was simple: they were research institutions that created better weapons for future wars.

  Many universities, like Yale, used the humanities as a cloak for their development of better weapons for future wars.

  The humanities were inquiries into the nature of human beings and their ability to create culture and have emotions and thoughts.

  The humanities were also unprofitable.

  Some institutions of higher learning, like Worcester Polytechnic Institute and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the California Institute of Technology, didn’t bother with the cloak of the humanities.

  The teachers at these institutions pretty much ignored things like reading and critical thinking and focused their efforts on devising new ways to kill more humans.

  Humans killing other humans was part of the human experience, but what Worcester Polytechnic Institute and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the California Institute of Technology wanted was peak efficiency. This term meant the most dead humans in the least amount of seconds.

  Peak efficiency was very profitable.

  SKULL AND BONES was a secret society of elite students who attended Yale. Skull and Bones had a disproportionate influence on America society.

  Prescott Bush’s son, George Bush I, was a Bonesman. His grandson, George Bush II, was a Bonesman. Both George Bushes ended up as Presidents of the United States.

  In 2004, Bush II ran for reelection. His opponent was John Kerry. John Kerry was a Senator from Massachusetts. He was another eumelaninless Bonesman.

  PRESCOTT BUSH dug up Geronimo’s skull and sent it back to Yale.

  The skull remains in the clubhouse of Skull and Bones. Both his son and his grandson had regular interactions with a skull taken from a grave robbed by their paterfamilias.

  IF YOU WERE FROM CALIFORNIA, and it was the year 2013, and you were talking about Prescott Bush robbing a grave, you’d say, “It’s, like, so ironic, because America is, like, totally a country ruled by both, like, laws and,
you know, human decency and, like, the people who rob graves totally bring a stain upon, you know, themselves and, like, their families forever.”

  You’d be right. It would be ironic.

  You’d mean the opposite of what you were saying.

  Because Prescott Bush ended up as a Senator in the United States Congress and a banker who worked with Nazis.

  His son ended up as President of the United States.

  His son’s son ended up as President of the United States.

  His son’s other son ended up as Governor of Florida and a Presidential candidate in the 2016 Election.

  Granted, his son’s other other son did catch herpes from East Asian sex-workers. But his son’s other other son was a black sheep.

  And if you were the relative of the person whose body was robbed, you’d have a good chance of being mired in poverty. You’d have a good chance of starving and struggling with alcoholism on a reservation administered by the country that stole your land.

  But don’t worry.

  We live in the best of all possible worlds!

  J. KARACEHENNEM was turning from 22nd Street onto Valencia. He was thinking about his father Mehmet Karacehennem.

  Mehmet Karacehennem was an alcoholic.

  Unlike Adeline’s mother Suzanne, Mehmet had been sober for seven years.

  This sobriety coincided with his departure from America. He moved back to İzmir, Turkey, the city in which he was born and raised. He gave up drinking.

  BEFORE HE WENT BACK HOME, Mehmet had lived in America for over twenty-five years. He’d worked in the jewelry factories of Southeastern New England. His co-workers had taught him the intricacies and pleasures of swearing in both English and Spanish.

  No one needed to teach him about cursing in Turkish.

  Other than monitoring the exchange rate between the US Dollar and the Turkish Lira, Mehmet’s only real hobby was calling his son on the telephone and unleashing torrents of obscenities.

  If J. Karacehennem did not answer when his father called, his father would unleash torrents of obscenity on J. Karacehennem’s voicemail.

  “Kid,” he would say to the voicemail, “What the fuck is the problem? Are you a fucking hain gavur who doesn’t call his fucking father? Why doesn’t hain gavur call his fucking father? Are you trying to fucking antagonize me? You piece of fucking shit, I will murder you some day. Küçük bok. Don’t be fucking pislik. Call your fucking father. Pick up the fucking phone, you garbage. Don’t be maricón, kid. Allah’ın belâsı! Call your daddy.”

  WHEN ZIAD was published, J. Karacehennem sent his father a copy of the book.

  As ZIAD was about Islamic themed religious fanaticism, J. Karacehennem was curious about the old man’s thoughts.

  Mehmet was quite simply the shittiest Muslim who’d ever lived.

  This is not to say that Mehmet did not believe.

  Belief in itself was not his problem. He believed in everything.

  Mehmet believed in: (1) Ghostly Hauntings. (2) Time Travel. (3) Fairies. (4) Alien intervention in human destiny, by virtue of every major religious personage being an extraterrestrial in human form. (5) That the earth was a prison in which the worst souls of the universe were trapped until they had rehabilitated. (6) Witchcraft. (7) Satanism. (8) Demonology. (9) Telepathy. (10) Telekinesis. (11) ESP. (12) Alien abduction. (13) Bigfoot. (14) The Loch Ness Monster. (15) Indigo children. (16) Crystal healing. (17) Faked Moon Landing. (18) Biorhythms. (19) Reincarnation. (20) Metempsychosis. (21) Reiki. (22) The water words of Masaru Emoto.

  And that list just scratches the surface.

  That list doesn’t say a word about the leprechauns.

  BEFORE MEHMET READ ZIAD, his phone calls had centered on the problem of his son not being married.

  After ZIAD, the phone calls became long digressive monologues during which Mehmet offered profane and obscene advice about the books that his son should write.

  “Kid,” said Mehmet, “Don’t be a fucking dummy with fucking bullshit terrorism. Write some fucking sex in this shit, man. When I was young, we read books called yakılacak kitaplar. Books to be burned. That’s what you call the book, kid, A Book to Burn, and make it all about sex. Don’t be fucking stupid, kid. Make sure you don’t say anything too explicit. You just say things like, ‘I shook my branch at her ripe melons,’ and ‘Her peaches tasted sweet.’”

  “Maybe I will,” said J. Karacehennem.

  “Everyone in America is fucking obsessed with sex, kid. They will love yakılacak kitaplar. Turkish people are obsessed with sex, too. Americans get married for love, but Turkish people get married so that they can get up to hanky-panky.”

  ONE TIME, Mehmet saw a televised news report about the runaway sales of Fifty Shades of Grey, a book by E.L. James that was a total piece of shit.

  Like Les 120 journées de Sodome, it was a graphic novel. Like Les 120 journées de Sodome, it failed at being a novel. Unlike Les 120 journées de Sodome, it also failed at being graphic.

  “Kid,” he said, “Why the fuck don’t you do something like this Fifty Shades of Grey?”

  “Did they say what the book was about?” asked J. Karacehennem. “It’s sadomasochism and bondage and domination. In the novel, there’s a red room of pain where the guy practices all three on the woman.”

  “Kid,” asked Mehmet, “Does it involve The Agony and The Ecstasy?”

  THE AGONY AND THE ECSTASY was Mehmet Karacehennem’s self-invented euphemism for anal sex.

  Anal sex was a type of sex during which a male’s penis penetrated the rectum and the anus of another human being. This could be painful. It could also be pleasurable.

  Typically, both the rectum and the anus were used for the expulsion of solid human waste, so a certain frisson emerged from both the waste-factor and pain-factor of the rectum and the anus being penetrated by the male sexual organ.

  Anal sex and its attendant frisson were given a great deal of value on the Internet.

  MEHMET HAD INVENTED this euphemism for anal sex during one of J. Karacehennem’s visits to İzmir.

  One night in April of 2011, J. Karacehennem was woken at 4AM by the sounds of Mehmet’s next door neighbor having sex with her boyfriend.

  At first he mistook her wailing for a ghost because the wailing sounded like the real world representation of the ghostly wailing present in Floyd Gottfredson’s classic Mickey Mouse newspaper serial House of the Seven Haunts, in which the ghosts made sounds like:

  HOOHOOHOOHOOOHOOOOHOOO.

  Then he remembered that he didn’t believe in ghosts and that if ghosts did exist they probably wouldn’t make sounds like the ghosts in Floyd Gottfredson’s classic Mickey Mouse newspaper serial House of the Seven Haunts.

  Then he remembered that in Floyd Gottfredson’s classic Mickey Mouse newspaper serial House of the Seven Haunts, the ghosts had turned out to be fake.

  Then he decided that the howling must be that of an owl.

  Then he remembered that Turkey doesn’t have owls.

  Then he remembered that he had no idea whether or not Turkey had owls, but that if Turkey did have owls, they probably weren’t in the urban environment of İzmir and they probably didn’t sound like the ghosts in Floyd Gottfredson’s classic Mickey Mouse newspaper serial House of the Seven Haunts.

  Then he woke up a little more and realized that people were having sex on the other side of the wall next to his head.

  J. KARACEHENNEM spoke to his father the next morning.

  “Mehmet,” he said, “she’s so loud!”

  “I know what is going on in there with sürtük, but I can’t say it to you. She is doing a keetchy-keetchy special thing. She is having The Agony and the Ecstasy.”

  “I thought this was a repressive country with restrictive sexual mores! I thought that you worshipped Allah and followed the religious strictures of the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH)! I’ve been sold a lot of lies!”

  “Eh, kid,” said Mehmet, “it’s İzmir. Sikişmiş İzmir. We are a city of infid
els. Gavur İzmir. What can you do?”

  “ANYWAY,” SAID J. KARACEHENNEM to his father, “I’m not really sure I could do another Fifty Shades of Grey. I don’t really know much about bondage or domination.”

  “Kid,” a father asked his son, “Can’t you learn?”

  ANOTHER TIME, Mehmet suggested that his son write a book called Stopped at the Top.

  “Kid,” said Mehmet, “What you will do is this. You will go to Los Angeles and you will investigate what happened to all jurors in the O.J. Simpson trial. You will see where they are now and what kinds of houses they have bought. You will find out that they all got $5,000,000 each from the government to return a not guilty verdict. Kid, I know this because I saw it on the news that night. Bill Clinton went into the office next to the Oval Office and did a big sigh. Kid, they bought those jurors. Bill Clinton did it with secret money. If you write about it, oh, the books you will sell. Oh they will go fucking crazy for you, my boy.”

  J. KARACEHENNEM crossed Market Street at Church. He had just passed by Aardvark Books, the best used bookstore in the city. Long may you live, he thought. Long may you thrive!

  He was going to 851 Haight Street, the venue at which he had agreed to do a literary reading.

  851 Haight Street was on the third floor of an apartment building near Divisadero Street. The apartment was vacant. The apartment was in disrepair. It had been vacant for years. All the other apartments in the building were occupied.

  A person called Janey Smith had come into possession of keys to the apartment.

  Janey Smith had taken his name after the protagonist of Kathy Acker’s great novel Blood and Guts in High School. Janey Smith said that he’d had sex with Kathy Acker back when he was 18. This was before Kathy Acker died of cancer, when Kathy Acker knew Kevin Killian.