The iGeneration
By
E. Sandoval
SMASHWORDS EDITION
* * * * *
PUBLISHED BY:
E. Sandoval on Smashwords
The iGeneration
Registered Copyright 2011 by E. Sandoval
TXu 1-787-988
All Rights Reserved
ISBN: 978-0-615-59759-1
This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locales is purely coincidental. The characters are productions of the author’s imagination and used fictitiously.
Adult Reading Material
*****
Special thanks to Catie Heym who originally inspired the book, and to Ulrike Dillo who patiently listened to me read it many times, and commented and made suggestions; also to Shelly Denny, who gave critical advice, as well as to Lauren Rae Champa who sparked me to finish it.
I hope you enjoy reading the story as much as I enjoyed writing it.
*****
The iGeneration
*****
CHAPTER 1
She couldn’t believe he was actually doing it. Or, she didn’t want to. She found out that he’d spent every day since he was promoted destroying everything she’d created over the seven previous months — all on principle.
Chloe wasn’t naïve, but she’d never met anyone that vindictive.
I told her, Get out of there. Right now.
People who live on principle first destroy themselves, becoming inflexible, then try to destroy everybody around them because deep down they’re miserable and they want to make everyone else feel miserable too, to prove that they’re right, to justify their own choice for misery, to validate their principle.
But she didn’t want to leave.
Nate quickly worked his way up as the darling of the growing team that analyzed aerial photographs, and immediately started to undermine Chloe. And every day, Jasper, the main boss, stared at her — first because she was so beautiful, but also in stunned amazement, shocked at how accurately she did her job. He couldn’t dream of doing it so well himself, and yet he couldn’t even bring himself to even compliment her. He was what I call socially retarded.
Nevertheless, she enjoyed her work. If there was one niche in the world she felt like she could carve out as her own at the time, without going back to school for her PhD, that was it.
Analyzing aerial photographs.
Nobody else could even compare.
And then Nate ruined everything.
Nate recognized her skill too, as soon as he arrived, and immediately set out to destroy her. Where in the world do people learn things like that? From their psychotic parents? It’s not human nature. At least it wasn’t for Chloe. We don’t all try to destroy whoever we find the most beautiful, or the most excellent. Usually we treasure people like that.
But the first thing he did, only two weeks after being hired, was ask to be promoted. Sounds harmless enough. Nate’s dad, a Vietnam vet, told him to do it. And despite the fact that the quality of his work was worse than everyone else’s on the team, Jasper and Justin, like knee-jerk dead robots, were “impressed” by Nate’s “ambition”, and since Jasper was soon to take a two-week vacation to Zimbabwe, and Justin didn’t want to take over Jasper’s work load, he convinced Jasper to give it to Nate. Done.
Chloe was aware of Nate’s maneuvering, and had a nagging feeling in the back of her mind like an index finger scratching that she should do something about it, but she hesitated to react. Although she was the best in the office, the thought never even crossed her mind to position herself above everyone else. She just wanted to do her job well because for the first time in her life she could walk to work. It was only ten blocks from her apartment, and it was a job she liked, right downtown. The pay wasn’t that good but she thought that most people who worked at Nimbus were pretty cool. And the project they were working on was for a good cause. They were analyzing data from the Mobil oil spill near Juneau, Alaska, in order to provide evidence for a lawsuit by the NOAA against Mobil Oil to repair the damages and repay local merchants for their loss of revenue. Good karma.
Nate lived closer to the office than Chloe, but he drove to work every day on principle. To him, driving was about social status, and even if it was the dorky one-cylinder motorcycle that his dad bought him, he thought it was satisfying. Every day, after cruising by the Proactiv anti-acne vending machine, he would slouch at a black metal patio table for lunch, about ten feet from the black metal racks where he parked his bike, gazing proudly at his little yellow one-popper, with one exhaust pipe coming from the one cylinder, poking awkwardly back out over a knobby tire. And he actually mocked Chloe for walking to the office, saying nonchalantly, I hear you walk to work...
He was a Sketcher: all of life was just a sloppy sketch to him. He absolutely refused to do anything thoroughly or completely or accurately because that meant you’re “anal” or “uptight”. He didn’t particularly care about anyone he worked with. They were all only stepping stones. And the project didn’t particularly matter to him either. An environmental disaster only meant that he would get paid, so actually, “the more the merrier”. Let’s see more oil spills, forest fires, and toxic leaks. A perfect line of business for someone who studied Environmental Conservation.
You could always count on somebody polluting, so why not get into the business of cleaning up the environment?
Reverse Intelligence.
Pretty much the same as an arms dealer.
Meanwhile millions get killed.
Chloe teased him when he first arrived, calling it "Environmental Conversation" because of his total lack of conviction, which sent him into a silent rage with glaring, glassy eyes and a plastered smile on his face with gritted teeth, chest puffed out. Maybe that was what turned him against her.
But he was “living the dream” as far as he was concerned.
The bike was like kinky sex to all the geek boys at Nimbus who hadn’t touched a girl in years. Like first timers at a strip club, or amateurs in a drama workshop, one by one, they each came over to Nate’s desk and gushed over his new Kawasaki, and told him about the one guy they knew who also owned a motorcycle, and how they each wanted one too, and how cool they thought it was to ride, etc… And Nate basked in the blaze of their brownnosing, leaning back in his chair with a casual smile on his stubbly zit-pocked pasty face, with a proud glint under droopy half-stoned eyelids, and greasy limp hair almost to his shoulders like Shaggy in Scooby Doo. Chloe sat right next to him in the office so she had to endure him and the parade of nerds everyday.
Maybe she would have retaliated against his underhanded attacks if it weren’t so hard for her to simply fathom the fact that an unshaven, mouth-breathing, stoner snowboarder, who wore plaid shirts, dirty jeans hanging halfway down his butt, torn up Air Jordan’s, and a polyester “Volcom” trucker’s cap — cocked sideways! — was getting the best of her. Maybe she was a bit proud. After all, it never escaped her that she was intellectually superior to most people. Speaking five languages, and having a master’s degree in physics — that she paid for herself — made her more educated than almost everyone on the team.
Nate was actually scared of her. He shifted nervously having to sit next to her every morning, and clutched his stomach as if it felt cold in the pit. Hundreds of times a day he would jerk his head around and abruptly glance at Chloe, expecting to catch her staring at him. Chloe only noticed because she had a sort of panoramic awareness — she saw pretty much everything that was going on around her. And she was well accustomed to guys being afraid of her. She’s mixed race — African-American and Spanish adopted by an Italian stepfather — and looks like a tan Bo Derek in the movie “10”, with the corn-rows and everything, and having an IQ over 140, most guys leave skid marks as soon as she says a single word.
Since his first promotion Nate only spoke to Chloe when he was told to ask her to do something, and he stammered through every line. Recently, she’d been ignoring his assignments though, because he’d ask her to do something but then he’d quickly tell her he‘d do it himself, or assign it to his friend Dave, either of whom would screw it up royally.
That was the main reason Nate had a problem with Chloe: her work was better than his and he knew it — and so did everyone else. The middle managers at Nimbus already coined a phrase. When somebody got proven wrong after asserting that they were right, they said you got “Chloe-ed”. Because she was calm, because she wasn’t trying to go fast all the time, she could see mistakes that nobody else could see. They were mostly jacked on caffeine and nervous and trying to prove something, but she simply looked at what was in front of her and did her job. She wasn’t the fastest, but she was the best. And everybody in the office came to Chloe when they had a question to ask.
But Justin and Jasper didn’t seem to care that she was the best, until one day. She first understood she was in trouble when she got promoted to “Data Quality Control” and Nate insisted that if Chloe got promoted he had to be promoted too — only three months after his first promotion — to be “Lead Quality Control”: her superior. Justin, Nate’s immediate boss, the “Data Manager”, was completely spineless so he agreed, but then he asked Chloe to do an assignment that he didn’t think anyone else could do. He kissed up to her, saying that Nate was “ninja” but he needed “Jedi”, and that “the name that kept coming up in the office as the right person for the job was ‘Chloe’”. Justin looked like a pink-eyed white lab rat with pop-bottle John Lennon glasses that he constantly pushed up on the bridge of his greasy pointed nose. He was skinny, and hunched over, and wore “cool”, drab, thrift store clothes that were meant to scream “retro”, and listened to death metal all day long in his glassed-in office. He had a master’s in something Environmental, and despite his lack of any natural skill with people, he was hired as the manager of the team simply because of his degree.
Chloe’s team looked at over twenty thousand aerial photographs a month taken from a company airplane that flew the coast daily with a high-definition digital camera. Then, with graphics software, they delineated the area affected by the oil spill. Chloe’s visual acumen was off the scale. It was ideal for physics where she could visualize problems like Einstein did, and it came in handy for analyzing aerial photographs too. But what really set her apart was her sense of humor. She knew that because of her darker skin everybody half-expected her to be funny already, and she had them doubled over in pain laughing their heads off when she made up a satirical news story and sent it around.
“Massive Oil Spill Results In Heretofore Unseen Wildlife ‘Viscosity’”. A Mobil supertanker ran aground Monday near Juneau, Alaska, spilling more than 60 million gallons of crude oil, greatly improving the viscosity of local marine life. The spill, the world's largest since the Exxon Valdez, coated over 600,000 birds, fish, and seals in quality, medium-weight lubricant that will provide them with valuable protection and will keep important animal parts running efficiently for months.
Local wildlife officials were excited about the spill. "A thick coat of oil should help these animals tremendously, especially with the cold coming," said Ginny Fordman, Secretary of Alaska's Department of Fish and Wildlife. "Last winter, over 3,000 sea otters suffered severe thermal breakdown from the weather. When temperatures get to 58 below, sea otters actually need a quality oil like Mobil to keep their fangs and claws and other parts moving smooth."
Particularly enjoying the Mobil spill was the local flounder population. Several thousand were spotted on the beach enthusiastically flopping about in the crude oil, gasping for air from all their playful exertion. Many of the fish were so tired from frolicking that they stopped moving altogether.
Mobil public-relations director Rob Stanfield weighed in on the serendipitous petroleum release. "For years our products have provided A-1 protection for millions of car owners. Now we've shown the world that we can offer that same protection to Alaska's birds, fish, and other wildlife."
The shoreline was divided into segments, and for every segment, Jasper — who was Justin’s boss — had delineated the area that was supposed to represent the part affected by the oil spill, defined by several rules, which he made up, that everyone else was supposed to follow, delineating the area in every subsequent photograph of the same area. However, Jasper was a total scatterbrain, and was completely overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the workload, and was absolutely numbed by the endless repetition of images he was supposed to look over, day after day after day, and he rarely followed any of the rules he himself created. He was on Concerta, a time-release anti-ADD medication, which he’d been on all his adult life, but it didn’t seem to do him much good. He kept his MySpace page up all day, right next to his work, and his Yahoo Mail too, and emailed, and instant messaged, and chatted with his friends all day long while he attempted to do his job. One positive thing about the iGeneration is their ability to multi-task. Even so…
The plane flew over the same stretch of coastline day after day in order to show the affect of the oil spill over time, and seeing photos of the same stretch of beach over and over again and again made Jasper’s blood fizzle like seltzer water, making his big head feel like it was going to explode. He didn’t have the patience, or the resolve, or the discipline, or the strength to simply sit with it, and he never really wanted this job in the first place. He had no idea what he really wanted. And it all became like noise, like nails scraping a chalkboard, like a disgruntled DJ trying to find "robot girl" (more in a minute), like a hundred dirty homeless people screaming simultaneously, rushing at him, the dissonance of their yells creating a warbling smelly wall of sound. Crazy making!
There were a bunch of segments that hadn’t been considered at first that needed to be delineated, and Jasper couldn’t bring himself to do it, so he pushed it off on Justin who quickly assigned it to Chloe. Jasper’s dad was a senior partner in the firm, and he gave Jasper the position straight out of college with his bachelor’s degree. Nothing like nepotism. There were PhDs working under Jasper. His dad was a helicopter parent, always hovering over him (who in the world would name their son Jasper?), never letting him face a risk on his own, guiding him through the right school curriculum, coddling him, hiring tutors, yelling at his counselors and academic advisors, getting him internships, calling him three times a day to make sure everything was okay. He’d tried the drugs — Ritalin and Adderall and Vyvanse, molecularly the same as cocaine and amphetamine and dexamphetamine. 350 million kids worldwide are being medicated with these “legal” drugs for ADD and ADHD, all becoming future “illegal” drug addicts. He’d tried hypnosis, which didn’t work at all. And now, as a last resort, he actually hired a private meditation instructor and a private yoga teacher for Jasper, because he could never consistently show up to classes. The next thing the parents of the iGeneration are going to try to buy wholesale for their ugly duckling children is the focus and clarity of eastern spirituality, praying they’ll finally turn into swans. But that still didn’t seem to be doing much good for Jasper.
Nevertheless, he became increasingly forthcoming with Chloe, and soon he would go on and on whenever he ran into her at the water cooler. He would tell her how he didn’t want to grow up because there's no future. Corrupt corporations are running everything and destroying the environment. Wall Street is raping us. There’s a world banking conspiracy to keep us all enslaved to debt. The Government creates recessions to make young people sign up for the military to fight and die for the interests of the rich. And most people are so stupid they think “It's All Good”; that this is the greatest nation in the world. Meanwhile, there are at least twenty countries with better standards of living, better healthcare, better education, better environmental policies, etc… Everybody's parents are divorced, religion is bankrupt, almost every college student owes tens of thousands of dollars when they graduate, if not hundreds of thousands, everyone’s got STDs, etc., etc., etc. And all I want is to do something good for the world…
The iGeneration… It’s no mystery that “random” is the most commonly used word in the English language today. We’re bombarded with so much information that without some kind of grounding practice, like sitting on a cushion and meditating, we lose all sense of continuity. People go to one website with a link to another website and click on a link to a third website, and another, and before long they don’t remember where they started. Relationships aren't seen as real. You can leave anytime you want. Jasper fell in love with some girl online who he'd never even met, and when she didn't want to talk to him anymore "her sister" texted that she'd died. Who knows if it's true? People feel like it's okay to just click off. And it all creates a compulsion to constantly move on. So many hipster intellectuals like to argue that life really is random, but almost anyone can hear the pleading whine in their voices if you really listen. It’s a cry for help, and even they don’t really believe what they’re saying is true. They all still wake up as the same person from one day to the next — because it’s not random — with the same depression that they still have to deal with, day after day, and swallow their pills. There is continuity... Thirty billion dollars were spent on anti-depressants in the US alone last year. Why is everyone so depressed in the nation that is envied by every other country on earth? Everyone else still thinks this is the land of opportunity, even the Chinese. And now scientists are discovering that anti-depressants cause birth defects.
Congratulations.
Jasper even told Chloe that the first time in his life he ever felt completely happy was the first time he took Ecstasy, and for a while it became a religion for him, doing it every time he went out, making out with “random” girls at parties, until he finally realized he was depending on it, and quit.
But then he was just unhappy again.
The thing is, he could screw up endlessly and never get fired, and by now he simply expected everybody in the office to take care of him, like all the bloated corporations and arrogant Wall Street firms that expect to get bailed out by the government — and ultimately us unfortunate taxpayers — if they fail. Chloe understood that he was overwhelmed and felt sorry for him, and one morning as he filled his mug at the coffee maker and she made a cup of tea, she noticed that he wasn’t wearing one shoe. His foot was wrapped in white gauze that was slightly bloodstained, and dirty because he’d been walking around in it. It looked like there was a sixth toe growing on his foot. She asked him, Jasper, are you okay?
She really wanted to know.
He responded nasally, It’s really great to have a bump and a piece of chocolate for breakfast... And he stared at her indignantly, as if he expected her to whip him up an omelet on the spot. And then he walked out.
She thought, Wow, there are ten restaurants within walking distance where he could buy breakfast.
Chloe delineated the new segments, but then Nate proceeded to sabotage her. He literally worked overtime, coming in two hours early and staying two hours late everyday in order to wreck all the work Chloe did, not just on the new assignment but still on everything she had done so far for over seven months, changing it all from the precise delineations she made into his sloppy renderings without all the “unnecessary details”.
As Nate messed up her work in the database, she looked over at him, and she could almost hear his tiny brain teeming, What century does she think she’s in? What is she, Japanese?! What a bitch! The atmosphere in the office changed from a calm quiet focus to a boisterous frat house exuberance because he was approving sloppier and sloppier segments. Nate was the hero, and everybody paid court to him, greeting him in the morning, slapping him on the back, buying him lattes, laughing and cracking jokes, kicking up their dirty feet on their desks like he did on breaks — even girls. They even started dressing like him, in plaid shirts and filthy jeans and trucker caps. Justin called it “Team Nate”.
Chloe asked herself the age-old question: “Do you want to be right or do you want to be happy?” She thought, The tables have turned. I’m sure that question was originally asked by people like Nate to challenge people like me. And it made her question if she wasn’t the one being inflexible.
Now the focus wasn’t on accuracy, but on speed, speed, speed, and more and more speed, and Justin and Nate sat hunched over his computer screen every night after everyone left, “getting high” (in Justin’s own words) on whoever “cranked out” the most segments that day, however sloppily. Chloe finally accepted the reality, and quit, but immediately got a job that paid almost twice as much.
When Nimbus delivered their research results to the NOAA, and when they brought it to court, the Attorney General ruled that the evidence was incomprehensible, and they had to start all over again, spending another five million dollars to get it done properly. Nate got fired, of course, and shortly afterward he face-planted on his motorcycle and died. Not paying attention. Justin got fired too, and ended up becoming a social worker counseling recovering drug addicts while becoming addicted to crystal meth himself. And last Chloe heard, Jasper was living in his dad’s basement on Brattle Street, playing around on Ameritrade and with his X-Box. But at least he finally came out of the closet and admitted he was gay. Chloe was shortly afterward discovered as the Second Coming of Christ.
CHAPTER 2
I was ghosting again. I had a plane ticket to New York City and was packing my bags. Max invited me to a New Years Eve party that would make every other seem like the Catholic Youth Groups we used to go to when we were in junior high school, although he was always off in some dark unused room in the church basement making out with a girl.
I was on Christmas break from teaching. I would get to see Chloe. Why not go to New York? The big black check-in bag, right to left: shirts stacked first, next pants; then socks and underwear; toiletries in the hanging zipper compartment. In the carry-on shoulder bag, my laptop and my glasses prescription, a couple of books, my music. Traveling makes you realize what you really need.
If you’re lucky — not much.
Everything was changing. It was the fin du siècle, 1999. Something was dying and something else was being born. The French found it romantic at last century’s end. Now everyone was just afraid. I know so many people who stockpiled food and water, and even weapons, as if the world were coming to an end. Just what the nihilistic powers wanted them to believe. I met a hardcore raver afterward who said that most of his friends committed suicide. …And the whole Y2K Scare turned out to be a scam.
The Branding Iron was a greasy spoon relic from the 50’s. It had a lighted plastic sign on two tall metal poles with the name in red on a yellow background so it was easily visible from the highway from either direction, even at night – the only logical place for an airport shuttle stop, right on the main east-west, at the only exit ramp in town. The brick structure was low and boxy with a flat roof, and plate glass windows wrapped around three sides, and the parking lot was filled with gigantic, jacked-up, gas guzzling, American 4-door 4-wheel drives. The waitresses wore tight pink uniforms and nametags, and served coffee in inch-thick white porcelain cups that hadn’t broken probably since the place opened, and the clientele sported more than a few Stetson’s, and huge shiny oval-shaped rodeo belt buckles, pairs of skin-tight Wrangler jeans and cowboy boots. It was good old comfort food, if the prospect of cardiac arrest wasn’t too discomforting: $5 steak and eggs every day – the cow was probably shot and butchered less than a mile away, served up in Grade A inch-thick cuts — although the biggest rancher around had his cattle flown in on a jet from Argentina. The ambiance was truck stop meets grandma’s homemade ranch décor. I waited outside by the front door and the aroma of fresh brewed coffee wafted by me every time somebody left or entered.
The shuttle pulled right up to me and the driver loaded my check-in through the back, took my money, and gave me a receipt. I settled into a seat behind the five other passengers, and put on my headphones and some Trance, and we took off. I was relieved to say goodbye to Fort Lupton. I felt lighter already, like the shuttle van was pumped full of pure oxygen. We headed south on 85 to the 470 Turnpike, then southeast to Peña Boulevard, and straight east to the airport – no more than half an hour.
Fort Lupton is flat in all senses of the word, population 6,787, spreading out on a grid from the stoplight at the main intersection of County Road 12 ½ and Denver Avenue. Aims’ campus is about a mile east of town. I was lucky because the text for ESL was the Oxford Picture Dictionary, which required no lesson plan at all. I had zero preparation for class; I had no tests to give, and no homework to grade, so when I left the classroom I dropped the job completely and had all my free time for writing or watching films, although I wasn’t doing much writing. There was the option for all ESL teachers to have our students test for the Colorado Department of Education Certificate of Accomplishment, and I was the only teacher at the time to even attempt to test my students, and all my students passed, but the accolade wasn’t what motivated me.
It was the best job I ever had in my life. The majority of my students were from Mexico, but I had students from El Salvador, Nicaragua, Colombia, even Peru; and I got to speak Spanish everyday. Granted, they thought we were insane with our disregard for family, the terrible food we eat that makes us obese, our constant scrambling only for money, our delusional desire for romantic love, our lack of real spirituality. And they told me about the countries they loved, and about their food, and their families, and their histories. But they liked the US too, and they felt like we didn’t even like it as much as they do. I actually looked forward to going to work for the first time in years.
The shuttle dropped me off at the United terminal under the shade of the weird white Arabian circus tent roof of Denver International and immediately I was hit by that eerie “up in the air” feeling of airports because so many people are in-between and I remembered Brian Eno’s “Music for Airports”. The driver got my bag out and I tipped him and went inside, rolling my check-in over the glossy gray-brown marble floors imported from Italy. I checked my bag, got a boarding pass and headed to the gate. After security and the train I still had about a half-an-hour wait, so I settled into a seat on one of the thin black leather airport couches by the floor-to-ceiling windows where I could watch the planes take off and land.
CHAPTER 3
At Newark I got my check-in, took the AirTrain to the local station, rode NJ Transit into Grand Central; then took a cab through the city to Max’s place in Williamsburg. It was unusually warm there too, in the mid 50’s. I love that transition from the crowded concrete canyons of Manhattan to the space and wide open vistas of the Williamsburg Bridge, suspended in air over water between two banks. Weightless. It was dark when the cab dropped me off at his apartment. It was on the wide end of a triangular three-story building, only four blocks from the bridge. As soon as I opened the taxi door all I heard was the pounding beat of electronic music and a roar of voices echoing down the street. The party had started.
I got buzzed in by somebody and awkwardly pulled my check-in into the darkly crowded apartment jammed with hundreds of his New York artsy friends, and all of their friends, all whooping and cracking it up with gigantic rolling eyes, swilling from brown beer bottles snatched from the big tin ice tub in the kitchen.
There was no more than one lamp on in each room, and I couldn’t find anyplace to put my bags, so I finally stashed them behind the couch in the living room, pushed back into the party, and grabbed a beer.
The apartment twisted at odd angles from a living room, dining room and kitchen on the ground floor, up to a bedroom, a bathroom, and another living room on the second floor; to a painting studio, a photography studio, and Max's bedroom on the third floor, and ended in a stairway that gave access to the entire roof.
His roommate Toby was a photographer at the Village Voice, and his pictures of Manhattan street scenes were phenomenal, hanging on the walls all the way up. He was out of town but didn’t want anybody staying in his room so I’d be sleeping somewhere else.
I couldn't find anybody I knew, stumbling up the narrow wooden stairwell packed with people in jean jackets and t-shirts with cool sayings, shouting over the blasting House music, pounding from the ground floor up to the top floor, until I pushed my way up toward the roof for some fresh air, bumping past Trevor, one of our college buddies, in the tight stairs, and then both of us turning with recognition.
He still had his characteristic thick blond curls.
Dude?! What's goin' on!? He said.
We grabbed hands, and he chuckled.
How’re you doing?
It's live up there, dude... Check out the video. He said.
Then he spaced like he always did, eyes going vacant.
I'll check it out.
Cool...
And he bolted down the stairs. No doubt he was doing his Casper routine – disappearing on his girlfriend Lilly.
She nicknamed him Casper because you could be in the middle of a conversation with Trevor and pause to look at something, and when you looked back he was gone. It was like a talent or a skill. At first it pissed her off to no end, but I’m sure she was used to it by now.
I walked up that last creaking flight of stairs, through the battered black steel door flung wide onto the roof.
A cool wet breeze rustled around me for a second and I walked to the edge of the dancing crowd. Everybody on the roof was jumping up and down to the music, and I felt the ancient beams of the wooden roof flexing under my feet. Whoa.
Max didn't need to worry about the cops or the neighbors. None of them cared about the noise. Landlords griped about the property taxes rising, and yuppies and artists moving in, but lots of them were looking to sell. Gentrification. Good for the city. Good for them. Good for everybody. The cops let the artists party, and couldn’t care less if the poor got evicted. The crime rate was already dropping. The only sting was that homeowners everywhere could see their stories ending, their histories fading. Families that had been there two hundred years… The Williamsburg they knew and loved was ghosting, and so were they.
Right then I felt a hand slap my shoulder.
I turned and Max said, Xavier! Good to see you, man! He briefly hugged me and slapped my back, God! It’s been like two years?
It has.
Max looked like Michelangelo's David, the same Jewish-Italian mix as the sculptor’s model. Every woman I knew who met him said he was beautiful.
He said, How are you, man?!
I’m good. Glad to get out of Colorado.
How’s the party? He asked.
It’s great.
This is only the pre-party, dude. He said. Wait till you see where we’re going after this.
Is Chloe here? I asked.
She’s here. He chided.
Max was dismissive about Chloe because, although they were good friends now, they tried to get together once in college, but they were so similar it felt incestuous and they repelled each other like the north poles of two magnets. I think that in reality they each found their equal in the other, but were both afraid to have a real relationship where they weren’t simply toying with inferiors. But then again, both of them would say that they never wanted what I would call a real relationship.
Max knew I hadn’t had a girlfriend in two years so he wanted to hook me up.
He put his arm around my shoulder and said, Welcome back, man!
Thanks.
Then we plunged into the darkness and the roar and the sea of flashing faces. I got caught up by the dance floor and he disappeared.
There’d been a brief rain shower since I was inside, and the black tarpaper roof and all the writhing bodies were glistening wet. Tall black stacks of speakers now blasted spacey Middle Eastern sounding Drum 'n' Bass. Hundreds of warm bodies twisted to the sad tweaky groove, and I watched the video of abstract images projected from one of the third floor studios onto the white-walled building across the street. A pretty girl with pale skin and dark brown hair wearing an elegant short dark blue and red silk print dress and black flats, came over, smiled and started dancing near me, facing me. I knew how this worked. I started dancing too. After a minute she smiled and turned her back to me, still dancing. That was the signal to move in and I held her waist, and she rubbed her behind into me. I’ve never really liked that style of dancing – it’s kind of boring. I mean, it feels nice at first, but then there’s no more mystery or intrigue. So after a few minutes, I walked away. In no less than 10 seconds an unshaven guy, wearing a half-cocked orange Yankees baseball cap, oversized white t-shirt, baggy jeans hanging halfway down his butt, exposing his red plaid boxers, pants bunching at his ankles over orange Fila high-tops, swooped in and was behind her, knees flexed, with his fists extended in front of him, corralling her.
This is what we’ve come to: Oedipal dressing. The girls look like sophisticated young ladies, and the boys look like grubby little children playing dress up with their big brother’s dirty laundry. It must appeal to a woman’s maternal instinct to nurture a toddler because if it didn’t attract them, guys wouldn’t dress like that. And conversely, the “dudes” seem to go for the “hotties” who look more refined and adult – like their mothers.
I saw Max sitting next to a girl at the edge of the roof and I pushed through the crowd, slipping between wriggling slick figures toward a tiny open space on the ledge lit by a streetlight, and sat down next to them with the hissing street traffic to our back. The girl Max was talking to had a pretty face, with green eyes, blond hair, long thin torso, and wore a blue and green vintage 1960's taffeta dress, smoking an organic American Spirit cigarette. I could smell her sweet Egyptian musk from there, a fragrance popular with the neo-hippies in Boulder, that they usually over-apply, as is also the case with patchouli, but which in my opinion is a much less offensive scent, so I was used to it. Definitely a hippie though – through and through – but also tough, wearing a game face throughout the conversation – a thorough New Yorker, I thought.
Max looked around at people dancing, and said, You don't seem like you're too into this...
I like the music. She said. Just not the dancing.
What do you mean?
I’m not going to go out there and grind my butt up against somebody I don’t know. I actually can’t believe that’s become socially acceptable. She said.
I felt a little embarrassed but thought, Wow, someone who I could potentially connect with.
You mean you don’t like men and women touching each other while they dance? He teased.
I mean when a man and a woman who don’t know each other start dancing next to each other and at some point it becomes okay for him to grab her from behind and push his crotch into her without exchanging a word!
What’s so horrible about that? Max asked.
She held out her fingers to count the ways.
She’s shamed by social convention into not protesting, because if she does she’s a “bitch”. And he’s egged on by social pressure to be sexually aggressive, otherwise he’s a “wimp”. It’s all about instant gratification. What ever happened to a man asking a woman to dance, or her asking him… taking your time?
That still happens. He replied. But if they hook up on the dance floor and they’re both having fun what’s the problem?
Um, well, let’s see. They’re both objectifying and dehumanizing each other; it’s not about getting to know someone, it’s about bragging rights, collecting trophies, life for story value; it’s shallow and won’t lead to friendship or intimacy, it's only empty sex. How’s that? She said.
…Those are some big assumptions. He responded. What if once they leave the dance floor they do talk to each other, and get to know each other? And what if they see each other again and their relationship does turn into a friendship? And what if then they do become intimate and eventually make love. That’s possible. Anything’s possible.
Shockingly, she had nothing to say to that, and turned away, and took a drag of her organic cigarette.
She exhaled, and said, Whatever…
Then he offered her his hand, and said, Max.
She shook it, and responded, Gaia.
Earth Mother?
My parents were hippies. She added.
I thought, How typical: the daughter of liberals turned conservative.
I’ve got to make the rounds. Max said.
This is your party? She asked.
Yeah.
She smiled at him, So, you’re that Max…
That was a good conversation. He responded. Give me your phone number and maybe we can talk again.
Her eyes sparkled and she said, Okay.
He put her number in his cell, and touched her hand.
Let me know if there’s anything you need: a different drink, some ear plugs, a shotgun…
She laughed briefly, I’ll let you know.
It was good to meet you. He leaned in toward her and she turned to face him and very briefly, they kissed.
Max was incredible. Stunning. How in the hell did he do that?!
I followed Max through the crowd over to the DJ wearing a fuzzy white hood with rabbit ears, set up on a folding table under a canopy tent.
Max leaned close to him and said, Robot Girl.
And he walked away.
I was into the track the DJ was playing so I stayed and listened and looked out over the dancing crowd. He mixed the next track and it was kind of a train wreck. The beat didn't match, and he switched to Techno. I turned and looked at him and he grinned at me deviously. People on the dance floor noticed too. A few people left. The next mix was a train wreck too and the track actually sounded kind of dorky. More people left the dance floor. The following several tracks got dorkier and dorkier until the only person left on the dance floor was a tall drunk girl with short red curly hair in a white tank top, skintight gray jeans, and green Converse canvas sneakers, dancing "the robot" — clowning, laughing, and glancing over at her friends waiting impatiently for her by the door.
Robot Girl.
After everyone was gone I flopped in a bristly old burgundy armchair in the second floor living room that would have been velvety decades ago, and sipped a beer. Max and Trevor came in, now with Lilly, and our friend Molly. We all said hi, I stood briefly and gave Molly and Lilly kisses and hugs, and they sat on the couches next to me.
What's up, bad boy? Max said.
He slid a magazine across the coffee table between us, Check out this cover I did...
I picked up the magazine and squinted at it. The cover was a pixilated fuzzy image of a woman putting two hard penises into her mouth, superimposed by the magazine title.
He said, It's a lesbian magazine, so of course the first thing I thought of was a girl sucking cock. I did it with one at first, but the editor said she couldn't print that. Then I did it again with two and they published it. Two heads are better than one, right?
I chuckled and slowly shook my head. Only in New York…
They all chuckled too. We were all kind of giddy at seeing each other again.
I said, How many writers does it take to screw in a light bulb? Three: one to hold the light bulb and the other two to drink till the room spins.
They laughed.
I held my palm drunkenly to my forehead and said, I don’t know if I can make it to another party.
You’re jetlagged, but I’ve got a little somethin' somethin'.
Max fished in his pocket and handed me two clear capsules with tiny
American flags on them and white powder inside, Here.
Man, I quit doing that years ago.
Come on. He said. How often do we all get together? Let’s party!
I don’t think so… I said.
This can be a one off. Then you can go clean again. Come on.
Peer Pressure.
I popped them in my mouth, and washed them down with a swig of beer.
America is an experiment. ...I was willing to experiment.
He grinned. You want to know what that was?
Not really. I replied.
They all chuckled again.
Let's head over to Organism. He said.
And we all stirred...
Now, I don't condone habitual compulsive drug use of any kind — case in point, I quit — but I'd be a liar if I said they didn't make a difference in my experience. The first time I took acid I could follow every single thought from its origin to its logical conclusion. And the first time I took mushrooms I laughed for hours.
I'll never forget walking with Chloe under a shining crescent moon and towering black cottonwood trees through greenish Norlin quad at CU; turning to her filled with the freshness of revelation, and saying, You know what? We are God!
Obviously I'm not the first one to say that, but I really felt it at the time. And I never had before. They can provide a glimpse into expanded consciousness, although not necessarily for everybody. You see a flower blooming and it's all flowers blooming. Yet even if they do give you a glimpse it's always only temporary. But psychedelics can jolt you out of your supposed reality to see the truth every once in a while.
CHAPTER 4
Next we were staggering down an empty Williamsburg cobblestone street – parts of the street paved over with asphalt lit by pink streetlights. The buckled sidewalk was pushed up by centuries-old elm tree roots, and glimmered with shattered glass. A tall chain link fence and bright green weeds glistened at the edge of the sidewalk. The old cobblestone showed through thinning asphalt in places; then the asphalt finally gave up and let the old cobblestone rule. Like a baby teething... or the original intention refusing to be denied.
Max stopped, and said, See this?
He held the big fan-shaped leaf of a small tree right next to the street.
It looked like Gingko. We all stopped.
It was around before the dinosaurs. He said. It survives in the city because it could deal with all the carbon monoxide after the meteor hit. This is prehistoric, man!
We all went, Whoa... And walked on.
I sighed and looked up at the streetlights streaming down in glistening rainbow tendrils, feeling my body tingle from the drugs.
It was a big night in Williamsburg. A New Year’s Eve Witches Sabbath for artists called “Organism” at an old abandoned mustard factory near the waterfront, just across the water from Manhattan. I recognized groups of people from the party at Max's house: some getting out of cars, some arriving by foot, but lots of new people. We all formed a loose dark procession toward the entrance over shiny brown brick-laid streets and greasy granite slab sidewalks, flowing silently past the rusty corrugated tin fence, orange in the streetlights, around the ancient abandoned factory. Nobody spoke, because we were all overcome with the sense that something big was about to happen, or at least I was.
We walked into the main building of the gigantic abandoned mustard factory, and Beg for Eden played screaming lyrical guitar riffs like My Bloody Valentine in front of a 50-foot-long, fuzzy-looking mural that Max had painted on one of the old brick walls with a broom and a ladder and 10-gallon tubs of house paint. It depicted a naked young couple walking through a meadow under trees.
Like an early Matisse.
Paradise.
There was a row of folding tables where they sold cans of imported beer on ice and bottles of water for two bucks apiece, and people walked around selling
ecstasy, mushrooms, acid, pot, GHB, etc…
Then I was alone in the crowd.
In another huge room hundreds of watermelons hung by wires from the twenty-foot ceiling over sweat-drenched hordes writhing to sexy Techno blasting from a massive black wall of speakers while a DJ spun at a booth on three decks, bubble headphones over his red tuque, bobbing his round shaved head to the beat, surrounded by hundreds of paintings, sculptures, and drawings lining the walls. At random the watermelons exploded overhead and showered pink flesh and green rinds onto the crowd.
They all had M-80's planted in them.
Outside, swings were set up over puddles of white paint next to the side of the main structure. As people got swinging they dragged their bare feet through the paint and smeared them on the dark walls making abstract foot paintings. There were metal 50-gallon barrels with fires in them at various places in the compound where people could get warm.
Thousands watched as several men dressed in skin-tight all-white plunged down the 200-foot-tall phallic mustard seed silo on thick white ropes, one after the other, rappelling, while videos of chimpanzees mating, and other animals too, were projected onto them over the curved metal sides.
I laughed, and thought, Is that all we want?
There were candy ravers sucking on lollipops and pacifiers, wearing cut-up t-shirts and immensely baggy pants with chains and zipper handles dangling – there for the drugs and the fashion. Dreadlocked neo-hippies in loose hemp fiber earth colors with primitive tats — into the tribal vibe. Yuppies and business people in dark suits, tuxes, and cocktail dresses – there to get their minds blown and to blow off steam. Yoga instructors — with their perfect bodies — in tight pastel colored stretchy garb, there to feel like they were still a part of life outside the studio. Pale Goths in leather and black vinyl with spiked hair and black and white makeup, there to make people see that there is a different darker reality. Ex-hippies in their 50's wearing rainbow-colored tie dye, and face paint, looking for a flashback to their better days. People of all races and all ages. There was even some dude dressed as a cowboy, with a Stetson, a Carhartt jacket, Wrangler jeans, a 4-H rodeo belt buckle, and classic low-heeled boots — in New York City! Raves always have the widest cross-section of the public — one of the few places we can all come together. Makes you wonder why so many people are against it. The beat pounded.
A lot of conventional-minded people can’t handle the raw sexuality of the beat. I’d been to a couple of raves in Boulder where a few frat boys showed up and on both occasions they started freaking out, mocking the sexuality of the music and dancing. Once, three of them surrounded a guy dancing by himself on the dance floor and they all started mimicking him, as if they were trying to come on to him. He left. The other time, two frat boys actually touched the backsides of two guys dancing next to each other, not because they wanted to overtly come on to them (maybe covertly), but to piss them off — the guys dancing were not gay. They all ended up pushing each other until the guys dancing left. I have a DJ friend who says that that’s why there was such a conscious effort to destroy disco in this country, because social conservatives couldn’t handle the rolling beat — that and the fact that it was made by and danced to by mostly black people. Radio stations would rake the needle across disco records; at professional baseball games they would actually smash thousands of disco records with a tractor in the middle of the field for the crowd after the game; all across America people sold “Disco Sucks” bumper stickers. Meanwhile in Europe disco never lost its popularity, it just evolved.
But most of the people at Organism seemed open-minded enough to handle it. I saw Chloe in the crowd and she ran over to me and threw her arms around my neck.
Xavier! I was looking all over for you at Max's!
How did you know where to find this? I asked.
Max gave me a flyer.
…Chloe Pentangeli.
Obviously she got the cool last name from her stepdad.
Her slender body felt like it belonged in my arms, and she had a sweet lilac scent; I only wanted to hold her and forget about everything else. But she had always said she didn’t want a boyfriend, and she was clear about that up front.
Chloe said relationships are basically people trying to freeze a moment to make it last forever, because by nature they're stuck – dead fish bobbing in an eddy, caught in a spiraling sidetrack going nowhere, outside the flood of change – because humans, like all mammals, are not naturally monogamous or sexually exclusive.
It's so good to see you! She said, sounding a little surprised, and kissed me.
Good to see you too.
How’s teaching ESL out in the boondocks?
I still like the job…
Are you writing yet?
Nothing major.
How long are you here?
My return flight’s in a week.
She beamed into my eyes, You should come up to Cambridge. I've got a room for rent in my house.
…That sounds interesting. I replied.
Her eyes sparkled, Do you want a beer?
Sure.
I'll go get us some.
Here. I handed her some money.
I'm buying. She said. Wait here.
And she disappeared into the crowd.
I didn’t know what to do with Chloe except go along with being “just friends”. We all have only a few people in life who are unforgettable, people who changed our lives irrevocably — the ones we learned from, the ones who splashed down like meteors sending ripples through time all the way to the beginning and all the way to the end, exterminating the dinosaurs, giving rise to humanity — and she was one of them for me, and I loved her. I wouldn’t call it unrequited love, because she loved me in her own way, but I knew we would never be a couple.
Crash Worship started playing on the outdoor stage, and as their three drummers built up a thundering primal rhythm, they stripped down to only loincloths, bare-chested and naked-legged — men and women — and smeared mud on themselves and straw, put on Native American spirit masks, and pounded crooked wooden staffs with hubcaps nailed to the tops like cymbals on the stage to the rhythm of the drums. The guitarist loosened the strings as he played to get the eerie low groaning sound he wanted, and I realized they were playing a dark dirge version of Ring Around the Rosies.
Ring-a-ring-a-rosie
A pocket full of posies
Achoo, achoo
We all fall down
Children sang that during the Black Plague because the first sign of infection was rosy little rings. Dark images of medieval woodcut prints of massive 4-weeled horse-drawn carts lit by torches, bearing statues of Jagganath — a title for Krishna in his role as World Ruler — with people throwing themselves under the wheels, being crushed to death, were projected onto a giant screen behind the band. People infected with plague all over Europe and Asia joined those travelling rituals, ingested hallucinogenic mushrooms, went wild with dancing promiscuity, and ended their lives in a blaze of glory rather than suffer a creeping agonizing death by plague.
Lightning flashed and thunder boomed and it started to rain again, like the band did a rain dance that worked, and the crowd roared. They sped up the music. Pyrotechnics exploded; towers of flames shot into the drizzling sky and lit up the stage, and thousands roared again. Women in the crowd tore off their shirts and jumped half-naked onto the slippery platform, bouncing with the band.
It was like a pagan orgy.
A writhing juggernaut... Fire and flesh under a deluge.
A Dionysiac. A Panic. A feral lament.
The psychedelic frenzy of the World Ruler.
Plague victims ecstatic for release from miserable lives throwing themselves under the rolling flaming wheels.
A shooting star into the black.
The death of a century.
I recognized Molly on stage, naked from the waist up, with her gray t-shirt dangling from the back pocket of her low-riding blue jeans, rocking the muffin top, shaking her wet red hair and her firm plump breasts everywhere spreading water in luminous rainbow arcs under the lights. Max stood at the foot of the stage, staring up at her. He said something and she got down on her knees excitedly, grabbed his wrist, pulled him up on stage with her, and she put his hands onto her breasts as she danced. He threw his head back and laughed with abandon. She grinned mischievously. They were kaleidoscopic in the rain, shimmering under stage lights as they swayed to the pounding beat. And her eyes... She had heterochromia, one amber-brown eye, and one pale blue-green eye, but from where I stood they were two watery black holes surrounded by white space pulling me in. Two other women naked from the waist up joined Molly and Max on stage, and formed a small dancing circle. Max took off his shirt, stuffed it in the waist of his jeans, and wrapped his arms around all three of them.
Chloe came back with two brown bottles glistening with moisture catching the reflections of the stage lights and handed me one.
Here’s to you coming to Cambridge. She said.
Cheers.
We clinked bottles and sipped the cool golden fizziness and wandered through the carnival throng.
Where are you working now? I asked.
She sighed, and got a sad far away look in her eyes, and said, This place called Stellar. It’s a technology distributor.
What do you do?
I’m in Inside Sales. I just talk with resellers who have existing accounts and book their orders.
What’s a reseller?
Okay, this is what they call “The Channel”. The distribution channel. You have the manufacturer, like IBM, then you have the distributor, like Stellar, then you have the reseller, and then you have the end user. The manufacturer says to the distributor, This “whatever” costs $100 dollars — which probably only cost them only $50 — then the distributor says to the reseller, This “whatever” costs us $110 dollars, and the reseller understands they’re inflating the cost, and so the reseller then goes to the end user and says, This “whatever” actually costs $200 dollars, but I’m willing to work with you., and then the end user usually says — if they’re smart — I want it for $140, and everybody makes out with a profit. It’s like a gentlemen’s agreement, The OBC.
What?
“The Old Boys Club”.
Why doesn’t the manufacturer just sell it directly to the end user for $140?
Because they think the cost of an Inside Sales team, and an Outside Sales team would cut into their profits, and they don’t want to diversify, they want to focus only on manufacturing. The guys at the top don’t want to think about all that extra information. Like, “I can’t handle it".
She waved her hands briefly in the air by her ears.
I’m going to go back for my PhD soon. She said. I feel sorry for most people I work with.