Friends and Traitors

  PRAISE FOR THE FUTURE WON’T BE LONG

  “Set primarily in Manhattan in the tumultuous decade spanning the years 1986 to 1996, this picaresque novel refracts the coming of age of its two main characters through their alternating narrative viewpoints and the events and personalities that defined the city at that time … Kobek has a great eye for detail, and his descriptions of his characters’ peregrinations through New York’s neighborhoods and nightlife read with the authenticity of genuine experience. Punctuated with gentle humor and awash with genuine fondness for its characters, this novel breezes giddily through the disorder and shifting landscape of their lives, bearing out Baby’s contention that ‘Good or ill, there’s always change coming’” Publishers Weekly

  “One of the best New York City novels I have read, a wise and funny book that captures the city from the mid-’80s to mid-’90s” Largehearted Boy

  “Kobek crafts an electric tale, and the wilds of New York City during this intense time period provide a magnetic context” Booklist

  “Hard not to recommend … Full of delightfully cynical aphorisms … At the heart of The Future Won’t Be Long is the friendship between Baby and Adeline—at once loving and destructive and convincingly drawn by Kobek” GQ

  “Kobek follows his brilliant 2016 book I Hate the Internet with a hilarious novel set in the 1980s and ’90s New York City art scene. It follows Adeline (a rich art student) and Baby (a Midwest expat) over their decade of friendship. Kobek’s writing is a dryly ironic cocktail of observations about sex, tech, friendship and other absurdities of modern life … If he is for you, he’ll be one of your favourite authors” Omaha World-Herald

  PRAISE FOR I HATE THE INTERNET

  “Hilariously caustic … his genius in this relentlessly quotable tirade is to hector you about the shady workings of money and power while making you laugh on every page” Metro

  “Extremely funny … he’s fast and furious but his prose also has elegance, rhythm and wit. Bill Hicks would have loved this book” Big Issue

  “Jagged and quotable … one can open it on almost any page for pithy, scathing take-downs of life, the universe and everything” Times Literary Supplement

  “Wildly entertaining … inspired … he leaves you inspecting the carnage with a grin on your face” Spectator

  “Could we have an American Houellebecq? Jarett Kobek might come close, in the fervor of his assault on sacred cows of our own secretly-Victorian era, even if some of his implicit politics may be the exact reverse of the Frenchman’s. He’s as riotous as Houellebecq, and you don’t need a translator, only fireproof gloves for turning the pages” Jonathan Lethem

  “[A] thrillingly funny and vicious anatomy of hi-tech culture and the modern world in general … this book’s cleverly casual style, apparently eschewing literary artifice, reminded me […] of Kurt Vonnegut. But it’s the enraged comedy of its cultural diagnosis that really drives the reader onwards. There are so many brilliant one-liner definitions that it’s hard not to keep quoting them” Guardian

  “The Kurt Vonnegut, hell, the Swift and Voltaire of the Twitter age too, why not? He has come up with a satirical novel that, at least while you’re immersed in it, makes everyone else’s novels look like the blinkered artefacts of the bloated, tech-addled, smilingly exploitative western culture that he so nimbly takes to bits. It’s vicious. It’s a hoot” The Times

  “A grainy political and cultural rant, a sustained shriek about power and morality in a new global era. It’s a glimpse at a lively mind at full boil … This book has soul as well as nerve … My advice? Log off Twitter for a day. Pick this up instead” The New York Times

  “A brilliant, laugh-out-loud screed against the ‘overlapping global evils’ that the internet represents, a furious manifesto dressed in the guise of fiction, about a San Francisco artist whose life is upended when a recording surfaces online of her doing the unthinkable. It’s an eye-opening look at the world we live in, where our lives revolve around devices made by enslaved children in China, and where the only thing we feel empowered to do about it is complain … via said devices” Chicago Review of Books

  “This is a relentless, cruel, hilariously inflamed satire of a loop of economic mystification and the re-emergence of the credibility of the notion of Original Sin in the technological utopia of the present-day Bay Area and the world being remade in its image” Greil Marcus, Pitchfork

  “With the nasty-eyed sharpness of Swift, Burroughs or Houellebecq, Kobek writes a tripwire just above the level for walking. Everyone falls down. It’s a satire about losing track of the world. How? It takes a swipe at those that suppose we’re tracking the world we’re in, rather than just the world. The result of that first-person engorgement is a fetishised digitalised idiocy exposed as a blank hate state, a bleak panorama of digitised repression balanced on the corrosive manipulative belief in a centred world. If Donald Trump is the personification of the centred world, then Kobek’s satire can be directed towards him and all he stands for” 3:AM Magazine

  Jarett Kobek is a Turkish-American writer living in California. He is the author of ATTA, published by Semiotext(e), and I Hate the Internet, published by Serpent's Tail.

  ALSO BY JARETT KOBEK

  I Hate the Internet

  ATTA

  Soft & Cuddly

  First published in Great Britain in 2017 by Serpent’s Tail,

  an imprint of Profile Books Ltd

  3 Holford Yard

  Bevin Way

  London

  WC1X 9HD

  www.serpentstail.com

  First published in the USA in 2017 by Viking,

  an imprint of Penguin Random House

  Copyright © 2017 by Jarett Kobek

  “You Like It Real,” lyrics by Christopher Means. © 1993 Holy

  Cow. Used by permission of Christopher Means.

  “Night Clubbing” by Michael Musto, The Village Voice, April 23, 1996. Copyright © 2017, The Village Voice, LLC. Reprinted with permission of The Village Voice.

  Hand lettering on page 132 by Sarina Rahman

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, dead or alive, is coincidental and not intended by the author

  A CIP record for this book can be obtained from the British Library.

  eISBN 978 1 78283 359 8

  To e.j., wherever she may be on this American continent

  SEPTEMBER 1986

  Baby’s Parents Murder Each Other So Baby Goes to New York

  I moved to New York not long after my mother killed my father, or was it my father who murdered my mother? Anyhoo, in a red haze of blood and broken bone, one did in the other. Several weeks were spent filling out paperwork and cleaning up the gore.

  After I finished with these burdens, I abandoned my siblings and boarded a Greyhound bus in the parking lot of a corner store on the outskirts of my Podunk little Wisconsin town. Thirty-six hours later, I was in the city.

  When I came out of the Port Authority, a building that scared me shitless, I couldn’t see the Empire State Building, so I asked a cop how to get to the river. He looked at me and laughed, hard, because of how countrified I was, a real corn poke, and showed me which direction was west.

  I walked on 42nd in daylight. No one mugged me. At the end of the street, I made my way acros
s the highway and onto a pier. I looked out at the Hudson River. I looked out at New Jersey. I watched boats on the river. I saw the distant Statue of Liberty and believed in her gaudy symbolism.

  People in New York would never understand about my Podunk little Wisconsin town. It was an issue of size. Even in Jerkwater, Ohio, or Back-stabbing, Pennsylvania, you still had neighborhoods and streets and thousands of citizens. My Podunk little town was seven hundred people, mostly farmers.

  In a place like that, what you do for fun, for amusement, is drive, day in, day out, day in, day out. You cruise the three blocks of Main Street in your car, seeing boys you knew from school, pretending that you want to fuck the girls.

  So with the possibility of NYC, I was like, okay, please. I am yours. You may conquer me. I submit to your underground system of the soul. Bring me to 241st Street and White Plains Road. Bring me to Coney Island. Bring me to Midtown. Bring me to Morningside Heights. Bring me to Flushing, Gowanus, Wall Street. I am yours. I am yours. Free me from the tyranny of the automobile!

  I could walk, at last, I could walk. Back in Wisconsin, you’d drive for three solid hours to buy an album, or a book, or pants, or anything. And that would only bring you to what people back home call a city, a place of maybe ten thousand people.

  Oh people, oh the people, oh New York, oh your glorious people. Your Puerto Ricans, your Hebrews, your Muslims, your Chinese, your Eurotrash, that fat little fuck Norman Mailer, your uptown rich socialites, your downtown scum, your Black Americans, your Koreans, your Haitians, your Jamaicans, your Italians, your kitchen Irish, Julian Schnabel, your Far Rockaway and Staten Island white trash. Oh New York, I loved your people. They were all so beautiful! Many of them were hideous, really ugly with terrible teeth, but even the ugly ones were beautiful too! Oh I was in heaven.

  And your fags, New York, oh god, your fags. All I hoped was that they would love me.

  I was as queer as a wooden nickel, but Wisconsin hadn’t offered this yokel much opportunity for erotic love, so what common language could I even speak with the cocksmen and leatherboys?

  One day in ninth grade, I made the mistake of blowing my best friend, Abraham. I was afraid to let Abe come in my mouth, so I got him to the edge and made him spasm into his blanket. As punishment, he refused to reciprocate, which was a real downer, but he did give me a handjob, which was okay.

  I went home and thought about it. I decided that I’d let my best friend come in my mouth.

  The next day, as I received the first blowjob of my life, in walked his mother. She saw everything. Her son, naked, me, naked, my cock in his mouth, my hands on the light down of his stomach. I ran out of their house and drove home. Neither Abe nor his mother ever said a word, but it ruined the friendship and I spent my high school years clutched by fear, worried that I’d need to leave our town in shame.

  I never did anything else, not with anyone other than a few girls who were kissed to keep up appearances. Their tongues in my mouth like soft robots, offering abstract interest but no sexual desire, no longing, no need.

  And then, New York, there you were, like a homo homecoming queen standing before me, hands on your hips, regarding this shy wallflower. With your Meatpacking District, your West Village piers and Fire Island. I was yours, crying out, Oh, take me, take me, take me!

  But before anything could happen, I needed a place to stay.

  A guy from my Podunk little town had moved to the city. This guy from my Podunk little town was about three years older than me. I asked the guy’s brother for the guy’s phone number.

  —Watch out, his brother said, we don’t talk much with him and I heard he’s living in squalor.

  Squalor sounded fabulous. I didn’t care about the phone bill, so I called New York. His name was David.

  A girl answered. I asked for David.

  —Okay, dude, she said, hold on.

  I waited for about ten minutes. When he came to the phone, he spoke with this high, nasal voice.

  —Hey, he whined, is this El Gato?

  —It’s me, I said, you know me, remember?

  But he didn’t.

  —I’m the one, I said, remember, I’m that guy who set the school record for both the fifty- and hundred-yard dashes in the same day?

  —Oh, yeah, he said, you, that guy, why are you calling?

  I begged and groveled until he said that if I made it out east, I could stay with him, giving me his address on 12th Street. David explained the crude navigational tools of New York life, telling me to look for the Empire State Building and then head in that direction. Once I was past that giant, north and south could be discerned by looking for the Twin Towers, the relative position of which also indicated east from west. This method was useless for people who went above 30th Street, but come on, David said, who goes above 30th Street? Maybe some assholes for drugs.

  I walked from the highway to Times Square. That was some hell of a place. You know all about it. Who doesn’t? The sex and sleaze that made its butterfly transformation into a tourist trap, a Walt Disney wonderland. I saw it happen, or, well, I was in the city while it happened, because, really, it was going above 30th Street. Who went to Times Square? Maybe for Club USA. But otherwise?

  Moving along Broadway, I took in the stores and buildings. As I was a country bumpkin, I couldn’t control my personal space. I stumbled into people with an alarming frequency. Most brushed past without a look back. A few cursed me to the high heavens.

  When I got to Union Square, it was a ruin, a park surrounded by hookers and pimps and filled with drug dealers. I didn’t know why men kept saying, Works, works, works, you need some works?

  —Sorry, sir, but I’m not seeking employment.

  —What the fuck is wrong with you?

  I shut up and walked until I got to 12th Street. Then I headed through the East Village and into Alphabet City. David’d said his place was in an old brownstone between B and C. It took a minute to find because the address wasn’t on the building. I knocked and knocked but there was no answer. I tried the door. The knob gave way. I went inside.

  The place was burned out and dirty, the color of charred wood, trash everywhere, graffiti on the walls. Exposed wiring, exposed plumbing, exposed insulation. I didn’t see anyone.

  —Hello, David?

  I walked in a little farther and repeated myself. A punk rock-looking guy came out from behind the staircase. Other than album covers and television and pictures in magazines, this was the first time I had ever seen a punk rock-looking guy.

  —What do you want? asked the punk rock-looking guy.

  —I’m looking for David?

  —Who’s fucking David?

  —David, he’s from my hometown. Back in Wisconsin? We talked last week, he gave me this address.

  —Try upstairs, said the punk rock-looking guy, but don’t steal nothing.

  I climbed a flight of stairs to the second floor. Things crunched and broke beneath my feet. I peered inside one of the bedrooms. I couldn’t see a thing. I flipped a light switch. There wasn’t any power.

  —David, David, where are you, David?

  Then I heard a weak voice.

  —Come here, said the voice from a room across the hall.

  I went in.

  —David? I asked of the darkness.

  —Over here, someone said.

  I went toward the voice. A young man lay atop a pile of old rags.

  Back home, he’d been beautiful. I remembered his skin with its network of blue arteries. Now, several compacted layers of dirt darkened his acne-strewn flesh, dimming its grim tattoos. Grease matted down his brown hair.

  —Who are you? he asked.

  —David, it’s me, remember? I’m that kid who set the records for the fifty- and hundred-yard dashes?

  —Hey, man, you’re in New York?

  I sat beside David on another pile of dirty clothes. I didn’t say much. I hadn’t thought this far ahead. Even if he hadn’t been living in squalor, what could we talk about?
The only thing I knew about David was how hard I’d crushed on him in tenth grade. For two solid weeks, I’d masturbated thinking about his cock in my mouth. It was a cavalcade of semen, real and imagined.

  David slumped over, his chin down on his chest. I’d never seen a junky before, so I thought he was tired. Twenty minutes passed. I couldn’t take it anymore.

  —David, I said, David, wake up.

  —Oh man, you’re still here? How’d you get here?

  —Remember when we talked on the phone?

  —No?

  —You said I could stay with you.

  —I did?

  —Yeah.

  —Rent’s fifty dollars a week.

  —Fifty dollars a week?

  —City’s expensive. Everyone pays. You give it to me, I give it to the boss.

  —You didn’t mention rent on the phone.

  But talking was pointless. He’d fallen back asleep.

  I looked for a safe place to put my bag. The room’s main features were two separate stacks of old mattresses, around which were scattered several broken tables.

  Someone had taped black construction paper over the windows. Dirty garments and plastic food wrappers. I pushed some clothes into the far corner and stashed my bag under the pile. I scattered old cupcake wrappers on top of the clothes.

  Back in the hallway, a voice boomed down through the wooden floor-boards of the third story. I started toward the first floor but stopped because the shadows moved.

  —You do realize that you needn’t pay him, don’t you? David is as full of it as an overflowing latrine. There is no rent. There is no landlord. This is a squat, darling.

  The shadows walked forward. A girl, a year or so older than me, nineteen or twenty, dressed in a checkered gray skirt, wearing ugly yellow sneakers and torn up black tights. Her red hair was crazy, spiky. She’d dyed in a few black streaks.

  —No soul in this house of ill repute pays rent, she said. David wants to score. You look like an easy mark.

  I blushed. An easy mark?

  —My name is Adeline, she said. On occasion, I stay here.