She got up and flushed, banging her elbow on the tampon box. At the mirror she struck at wet spots in her sweater with a paper towel, then rejoined the convention hall. Everything seemed derealized, like televised fireworks, all color and brightness robbed of dimension. Heading to her fallen bicycle, she felt her shoulder gripped. It was Evan Perch; he held her canvas bag, which she’d forgotten at her chair.
“Cory, I wanted to say, you blew everyone away. I think you’re ready to kick the world’s butt. Even your hair’s like Wonder Woman. What’s your background? Italian? Black Irish?”
“White Jewish.”
“Go figure. Smart, hardworking.”
Cory sighed and looked out at the milling throng. The thrilling mong. “You didn’t seem to feel that way onstage.”
“But you see what we achieved up there? We plowed through the bullshit. Listen, I know it’s uncomfortable. Honesty is hard work. So I’ll fess up too. I knew your real name all along.”
Cory leaned back. “Excuse me?”
“Your father told me you were coming. Friend of mine, and a terrific entrepreneur. That’s why I picked you. Imagine my surprise when you tried giving me the end run! I didn’t mean to embarrass you, but I fooled you a little to get you to stop fooling yourself.” Perch laughed and put his hand on her back, easing her away from the crowd. “Cory, you’re smart; that’s a fact. But your brain is getting between you and success. Now you need to be willing to succeed. No more guilt, blame, or self-sabotage. It takes some willingness up front. One weekend. Gotta be worth a try. Risk is its own reward.”
They were at one of the registration tables at the back of the room, where a clipboard materialized in Cory’s hands. She couldn’t concentrate with Perch watching, so she skimmed the dense text, filled in her info, and scratched her zigzag on the signature line. Cory pumped Perch’s extended hand, which was dry, large, and warm, like an oven mitt in recent use. Then he was striding away, and Cory walked to her bike, winding and pulling at, sucking and spitting out her ambivalencelocks.
Now she knew why Barr wanted her to attend. Perch’s insistence and utilitarianism and meaty hand recalled nobody so much as Barr himself; she’d been delivered into the suffocating confidences of a proxy father. But Taren had been a father too. Cory reminded herself that the world was full of fathers.
II. The New Management
They rode a bus up to Marin, which dropped them a three-mile hike away from the Handshake “D-Bunker,” an angular art deco facility. She’d barely let her backpack touch the floor of the entryway when she and the other 149 attendees were assigned colored bandannas and divided up into Focus Associations. After some light stretching, they attended a series of “lectercizes” by moderators in gold-trimmed suits, their personalities embossed with Evan Perch’s chipperness. They were corralled from one wood-paneled auditorium to another to receive suppositories of insight. #3: Flood Yourself in Failure. #5: Shitkick the Nitpick. #12: Approach, Reproach, Rapproche. They were told to call up their parents and confront them. During her turn at the phone bank, Cory faked a twenty-minute argument with the SFMTA transit info menu.
On Soapbox Alpha, the square parquet stage at the center of the main demonstration hall, everyone took turns recounting their failures. Cory missed much of what the others said as she planned out her own story, but when she took the stage it all splurted forth: failed relationships, body hate, the daily inability to reconcile moral urgency with lifestyle. The moderator offered follow-up prompts (“Now ADMIT that the BIG LIE OF COMPROMISE is stifling NECESSARY confrontations!”), and her associates followed suit (“WHY are you SUCH a GODDAMN SLAVE TO ACCEPTANCE?!”).
That evening they performed The Handshake: half the attendees plunged their hands into buckets of ice water for two minutes, then pulled them out and grasped hands with their partners, who’d been holding their hands over a fire, sustaining the grasp and silent eye contact for ten minutes, the goals of which were to:
Prosper diagonalized contegrative social strategies
Reinforce physiocognitive correlates of trust (mirroring / muscle empathy)
Affirm objectivity of feeling
Desublimate, desublimate, desublimate!
As Cory’s face touched the pillow after the first night, calories splendidly cashed, she swan-dove into sleep.
The three remaining days were a jumble of unscheduled hazing and noisy introspection. She got along fine on the two daily meals, in spite of erratic serving schedules, but had more trouble with the surprise three A.M. confrontation sessions, when people were better disposed to honesty. She and her associates drank coffee to fight hoarseness as they tenderized each other with their thoughts exactly.
Grain of salt, sure, but if Cory was here, she may as well get motivated. And it was nice to have a sympathetic audience for once, cheering her rants about corporatization, mandated by the left’s apathy and single-issue fractiousness and the right’s hypocritical moralizing, between which all real dialogue had been replaced by a seesaw of factional demagogy and counter-demagogy, against a backdrop of financial fraud and global racist classist imperialist cishet patriarchal domination so outrageous yet so mundanely normalized that all informed dissent sounded paranoid, and though the only chance of resistance required revolutionary socioeconomic and cultural integration, even as an organizer it felt like she was on a one-woman crusade, which wouldn’t matter so much if just one person supported her, but dating took so much time and it was so fucking stupid . . . Anywhere else this would’ve felt self-indulgent, but her associates applauded her “passion.” The more Cory let it out, the righter she felt.
One associate asked whether Cory was eating her feelings. No, she was getting drunk on her feelings, and by the end of the fourth day, the trembling cups of pride-frustration-shame-pity she’d guzzled had made her black out with confessional intimacy. When the shuttle dropped the graduates at the Embarcadero on Monday evening, they hugged and wept until chinstamps of tears darkened each shoulder, relishing the stares of pedestrians navigating around them. Let them see some human feeling for once, Christ, are we robots? If she was going to cry in public, she would at least refuse to apologize.
SINCE TAREN’S DEATH, a postcoup atmosphere lingered in the Socialize offices: no one knew what to do besides present a face of game compliance to the new regime. It felt weird acting without Taren’s say-so, but since Cory’s permission binge at Handshake, everything seemed viable. Quitting weed triggered her migraines at first, but with enough coffee, she could bounce around until five P.M. on chickpea salad and seltzer. She canceled Taren’s final event, a pro–bike lane BMX demonstration at UN Plaza called Sick Transit, and met with a CPA, who helped defer Socialize’s debt a few months longer. She talked the office’s aging Moscovian landlord into extending their lease, citing the half-truth that Cory represented competent new management. And she forced Will to force her to learn how to google, so she could search for moneymaking schemes, yielding an antiwealth of irrelevance—she read news articles about corporate sponsorships for college students, people who sold shares in themselves, even people who’d tattooed logos on their foreheads, restoring branding to its conceptual roots: showing who you belonged to.
Work was a good excuse to keep away from home. As housemates drifted away from the warehouse, Cory had regrettably delegated housemate recruiting to Roopa, who’d brought in dozens of her former housemates from a converted bordello in East Oakland called Mr. Floppy’s Flophouse, lowering the drawbridge to a siege of Burners, burlesque dancers, anarchist Christian envirocore troubadours, hacktivists, skill-toy enthusiasts, and crustpunks with bandannaed pit bulls, all subcultures attracted to large, provisional, nonflammable living spaces. They moved in three to a room with names like 8-Ball and Clèf, and Cory would dodge around clusters of them huffing THC from turkey bags or practicing LED buugeng. Trapezes and silks were hooked to the ceiling gantries, and Cory was more than once startled awake by the plasticky pop of aerialists’ feet striking gym mats. On wee
kends they held backyard community salons: Gourmet Geophagy, Barefoot Jogging, Jelqing, Biothermal Sous Vide, Asexual Theory. With Cory in absentia, they voted to name the warehouse “Iniquity” and dubbed Roopa the Dean of Iniquity.
So it was good that Cory was too busy to feel ostracized. She bought new modular shelves and cord caddies for the office; she swept and vacuumed, rearranged desks, attempted to deodorize the air pockets that smelled like hot dogs, then lashed back her hair and gave the toilet its first-ever cleaning, sloshes echoing in the unventilated bathroom. There wasn’t much to do with the waterstained concrete walls and bare dangling lightbulbs and the carpet sample they used for a welcome mat, but the office was more or less tidy when Cory woke on the couch at six A.M. on her first Monday as a superior, ready to formalize the transition.
Ramping up to a key reprioritization, the Instrumentality mandated an inventorying of synergistic relational assets, i.e., employees. She made a list on the whiteboard. There was the street team of interns who flyered for free admission. Then Martina Inez, the half-time office manager Cory liked a lot. She was a Kansas City transplant, loud and funny with a James Dean pompadour, librarian glasses, and tattered sleeveless smock dresses resewn from XXL motorcycle shirts hugging a vavooming body line that Cory would only consider fat if it were her own. Cory loved having Martina around, but a few weeks ago she’d found Martina’s résumé in the office printer’s tray.
John Grabanger was senior by far, a stubbly, ptotic man who tended to comport himself like some vital ambassador of the sixties sent to steer society off its present crash course—and in that sense he was conservative, the way some radicals believed their battles would never obsolesce, and rather than embrace change ended up regressing to the root of radical: radix, root, subterranean and immovable and bitter, as they mistook unanticipated forms of progress for decline. But Cory still appreciated his free labor.
Pascal Jeffries was the new hire, a sweet childless forty-something on whose flimsy shoulders you could easily picture a shawl. Cory had met her in 2006 when they canvassed for gun control. They’d attracted a Second Amendment fanboy who gave the usual race-coded bunk about how “decent Americans” had to defend themselves against “gangs,” and Pascal had told him things like, We cannot show a cold heart to slavery’s inheritors, and said, Sir, would you agree to participate in an encounter session with a Lake Merritt youth named Victor?, until the guy left with his bleeding-heart mealymouthed liberal prejudices reinforced. But she was reliable, diligent, and unpaid.
To preserve momentum, Cory had put off identifying the Trouble Vector: Luis Garcia. Ever since Cory had been promoted ahead of Luis, he’d treated her with the same contempt he’d shown to Taren. He wore noise-canceling earmuff headphones at his desk, forcing Cory to walk across the entire office to tap his shoulder whenever she needed to ask him something, causing him to yank off his headphones and glare at her. At one meeting he’d bragged about doing tina and getting jerked off in a bar booth the previous night, and another time he’d unbuttoned his jeans to show off a flare-up of crabs. Everyone else thought he was funny, defending him when Cory tried to build consensus about his inappropriate behavior—That’s how Luis do, he’s just a drama queen with no filter, Martina said. But why give him a pass for performing a stereotype, hold him to a lower standard? Come on, Cory wanted to say, you’re the only queer person of color here, I really want you to be cool.
But even though he logged barely half of Cory’s hours, he was indispensable. He was their drag liaison, moonlighting as Mozzy Creampie, and Socialize relied on his contacts for a big slice of attendance, since the queens were strong draws. Cory had considered leapfrogging Luis and forming her own drag community connections, but he’d hear about it eventually. Beside his name, Cory wrote manage, then wiped the board clear.
As employees began arriving at 9:15 A.M., Cory greeted them, standing at the head of the small white conference table. She shuffled the two sheets of paper in front of her until Luis arrived twenty minutes late.
“Mornin’!” Cory said. “Fun weekends?” They sat in silence until Martina said, Pretty good. “Cool. Today I want to talk about the future direction of the company, which is forward, I mean, toward”—Cory made a dumbshow with her arms—“forward toward a goal we’ll set together. I want us all to really own our work. Move in, guys, sit closer! Let’s circle the wagons!”
She searched the whiteboard tray for the green dry-erase marker until she realized she was holding it. She wrote own your work, which felt injunctive, but there it was. “Some business first. We need cash. Cuts are gonna happen. Starting with the free sodas”—the room crackled with sucked cheeks—“I know, it sucks, but we’re doing it to avoid compromising on the important stuff. No more furloughs.”
“Wow, hooray,” said Luis, giving a sedate fist pump.
“I’ve got other ideas too,” Cory said. “Like, what’s one thing we have plenty of?”
“Debt,” said Luis.
“Leftover flyers. Instead of recycling them, we can use them as stationery.”
“We’re going to invoice on scrap paper?” said Luis. “Well, that’s professional.”
“We’ll make it look cool. Okay, next item. The way the Mission’s changing, the venue scene is totally different. The Knockout, El Rio, and Elbo Room are out. Twelve Galaxies is closing. The Make Out Room, Pop’s, Jack’s, the Phone Booth, and the Attic will give us weekdays. We’ll have to tap art spaces, cafés, even backyards. Alcohol licensing will be a problem. We’re not going to drop booze, but officially we’ll have to promote dry. We need to show that dry can be fun and sexy.”
“Fun and sexy,” Luis said. “Let’s inflate condoms into party balloons! Ooh, I’m getting all dry just thinking about it.”
Cory clapped. “Now, I’ve blocked out some time for brainstorming events based on our passions. What are our passions?”
Nobody spoke. How had Taren managed them? With the built-in boundaries of age and maleness, probably. “Ideas, guys? Blue-sky me!”
One hand propping up his miserable face, Luis raised his other hand. “Internet.”
Cory wrote internet on the board. “Cool. What else?”
Luis kept his hand up. “No, let’s talk about this. We have no online presence. We’re called Socialize and we’re not even on a social network,” he said. “Social means Internet now.”
“I’ve been meeting with a web developer.”
“We can’t afford soda or paper but we’re hiring a web developer?”
“He’s pro bono. It’s been covered.”
“Oh really?” Luis tittered. “Are you covering his pro bono?”
“Okay, Luis? Inappropriate.”
John raised his hand. “Long as we’re on the subject, my passion is sex.”
Cory added sex to the board in smaller letters, pulling a face while she was turned away. “Is this gonna be relevant, John?”
“SF sex culture is strong and ripe for politics. The Lusty Lady, the Citadel, OneTaste, the Power Exchange, Open Enterprises, Mission Control, the Folsom Street Fair, the Tenderloin strip clubs, the Castro bathhouses. Once prostitution gets decriminalized next year, sex work will be a huge industry. Need I go on? Kink.com just bought the Armory for $15 million. I’ve visited. Kegs of lube.”
“Websites are how people make money these days,” Luis said, glazed over with tired contempt.
Cory wanted to ask how and why a website would buy a building. “What’s your idea, John?”
“We could team up with the CSC for the Masturbate-a-Thon. No overhead, lots of exposure.”
“Ha, exposure for real,” Martina said. “They start at eight A.M. Can you imagine getting up that early to jerk off all day?”
Cory gulped down a wave of reverse peristalsis. “How does that raise money?”
“We’ll charge,” John said.
“Um, that might be illegal.”
“Who cares? Do I have the green light?”
“Let’s table it for n
ow. Pascal, you got anything?”
Pascal lifted her head by two degrees. Her stutters made her sound anticlimactic. “. . . I think. W-we could do. Pop-up shops?”
“What’re those?”
“It’s like. You put up a temporary store at a bar or street corner. Anywhere. And sell things there. Or offer services. It’s both a store. And an event.”
“Oh, neat!” Cory said. “I like it. But what would we sell?”
“Local crafts,” said Pascal. “Silk-screen stand. Vintage clothes.”
“Girl, you are shredding! Those are great ideas!”
“Photo booths,” said Martina.
“Kissing booths,” said John.
“Even a basic blog with a ‘Donate’ button on it would be better than nothing,” said Luis.
Cory’s arm sprinted to record the cross talk: book swaps, speed dating, karaoke, mojitos, rescue-shelter petting zoo. “Cool,” Cory said. “But we need a bigger surge of cash.” She stepped back to observe the board broadly, capping her dry-erase marker with her thumb. These were good, thrifty ideas. She closed her eyes, trying to picture an event hall. It’d be chaos. Only an outdoor venue could hold enough people to—
“Oh my god!” Cory slammed her marker down onto the table and the cap popped off. “Dolores Park!”
She wished she’d been calmer because now they were expecting something brilliant. She picked up the marker again and circled the entire list. “We’ll do all of it. An outdoor event with DIY attractions. Sell slots to vendors, and run some booths of our own. I mean, everyone hangs out there on weekends anyway. It’s right off the J. Young and participatory. Forty years ago that park was only good for getting murdered in; now it’s a symbol of civic rehab.”
“It also used to be a Jewish cemetery,” Luis said.
Private Citizens: A Novel Page 14
