A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (31 page)

I wake him up. He gathers his stuff.

“
He was talking in his sleep,
”
he says.

“
Huh. What did he say?
”

“
Nothing, really. Just mumbling.
”

I write him a check. I open the front door for him. He gets on his bicycle and, still half-asleep, rides away, awkward and jumpy like a butterfly. I lock the door after him.

I go back to the living room, where Toph is splayed, as if boneless, on the couch. He has brought a comforter from his room, which is now on the floor. His mouth is open and there is a dark round pond of drool on his gray T-shirt.

“
Hey.
”

“
Mmph.
”

“
Hey. Help me out here.
”

“
Mmph.
”

“
I
’
m gonna put you in bed. Put your arm around.
”

He puts one arm around my neck and grabs it with the other, pulls his head toward me so I don
’
t hit it on the door frame.

“
Don
’
t hit my head.
”

“
I won
’
t.
”

The molding cracks.

“
Owww.
”

“
Sorry.
”

“
Idiot.
”

I lay him on the bed, in his jeans and sweatshirt, and put his blanket over him. In the kitchen, I check the answering machine. I look in the fridge. I wonder briefly about people I could call. Who would be awake? Someone will want to come over. Who would be willing?

I walk back to my bedroom, drop my change on the dresser.

The wallet. On the dresser.

It was here.

VI.

When we hear the news at first it means almost nothing. It has just been announced that
The Real World,
MTV
’
s seminal program involving the housing of seven young people in one house and the televising of their lives, will film its next season in San Francisco. MTV is seeking applicants. They are looking for a new cast.

At the office we have a few hearty laughs about it.

“
Has anyone seen the show?
”

“
No.
”

“
No.
”

“
Some of it.
”

We
’
re all lying. Everyone
’
s seen the show. We all despise it, are enthralled by it, morbidly curious. Is it interesting because it
’
s so bad, because the stars of it are so profoundly uninteresting? Or is it because in
it
we recognize so much that is maddeningly familiar? Maybe this is indeed us. Watching the show is like listening to one
’
s voice on tape: it
’
s real of course, but however mellifluous and articulate you hear your own words, once they
’
re sent through
this machine and
are given back to you, they
’
re high-pitched, nasal, horrifying. Are our lives that?
Do we talk like that, look like
that?
Yes.
It could not be.
It is.
No.
The banality of our upper-middle-class lives, so gaudily stuck between the mindless drunk-driving of high school—that was meant as a metaphor only—and the death that is homeowning and family-having, especially when packaged within a comfort zone of colorful couches and lava lamps and pool tables—wouldn
’
t this make interesting television only for those whose lives are even more boring than those of
The Real World
’
s
cast?

But it
’
s impossible to ignore.

As half of the people we know, in secret or unabashedly, are scrambling to get their applications in, we wonder what sort of fun we can make, put our much-needed spin on it all.

One of our contributors, David Milton, writes a letter to them, which we have ready for the first issue. The letter reads:

Dear Producers,

Something is radiating deep within me and it must be transmitted or I will implode and the world will suffer a great loss, unawares. Epic are the proportions of my soul, yet without a scope who cares am I? This is why I must but must be one of the inhabitants of MTV
’
s
“
Real World.
”
Only there, burning brightly into a million dazzled eyes, will my as yet uncontoured self assume the beauteous forms that are not just its own, but an entire market niche
’
s, due.

I am a Kirk Cameron-Kurt Cobain figure, roguishly quirky, dandified but down to earth, kooky but comprehensible; denizen of the growing penumbra between alternative and mainstream culture; angsty prophet of the already bygone apocalypse, yet upbeat, stylish and sexy!

Oscar Wilde wrote,
“
Good artists exist in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating...[they] live the poetry [they] cannot write.
”
As with Dorian Gray, life is my art! Oh MTV, take me, make me, wake me from my formless slumbers and place me in the dreamy Real World of target marketing.

Sincerely,

David Milton

And after the chuckles, and after I
get
over my fleeting paranoia that Milton
’
s making fun of me in particular, we get serious for a second. We are trying to get advertising, distribution, all that flotsam lined up for our first issue, and right now we are nowhere, because we have nothing and are no one.

We have, though, assembled a crack team. There is Moodie, of course, and now there is Marny, who has moved out, a few months out of college. Yes, in high school we had dated. Yes, she had been a cheerleader, though an improbable one, a serious one, the one who never smiled. And now she is the one among us who reads
Ms.,
who reads
The Nation,
who knows what or who Che Guevara was. And there is Paul, who has just joined up, having grown up twenty miles south of us, along Lake Michigan, on the cold, cruel streets of Chicago
’
s Gold Coast. We had started with one more, my grade school best friend Flagg, whom I had coerced into leaving his girlfriend and job in Washington to move to Berkeley to be a part of the start-up. He had made the trip, set up with us, at a desk by the window, had spent his days doing our
“
market research
”
— it was just for show, soft, unprovable statistics to parade in front of advertisers—but he soon learned what the rest of us pretty much knew going in: that there would be no money in this, not for a long time at least, if ever, and the hours were going to be ludicrous, spent in a filthy corner of a shaky warehouse, where dust falls from the rafters when the tenants walk above, where the locks are decorative only, where the rent sets us back $250 a month.

But it
’
s not like anyone here, in San Francisco, in this building, is going to tell you you
’
re wasting your time.

The rest of the floor consists, with occasional musical chair-ings, of a desk for our landlord, Randy Stickrod (real name), who is a magazine consultant, having recently aided in the launch of
Wired,
the founders of which only recently vacated the precise area we are currently inhabiting, and moved two floors up. Across from us is the desk, desk-organizer, and tiny computer of Shalini
Malhotra, who helps
with just Go!
’
, a tiny ecotravel magazine, and who is working on her own zine, provisionally titled
Hum
—the Indian word for
“
Us
”
—which will be dedicated to uniting and speaking for/to/from twentysomethings of the South Asian American persuasion. There is also
bOING bOING,
a
“
neurozine
”
published by Carla Sinclair and Mark Fraunfelder, a plastic/gel/leather-new-wave-circa-1984-looking husband-and-wife team just up from L.A. In the back there is a guy putting out a magazine called
Star Wars Generation
—no explanation necessary. All together, our floor, our building, it has something, is bursting, is not just a place where people are working but a place where people are creating and working to change the
very way we live.

The warehouse, as luck would have it, is in San Francisco
’
s South Park neighborhood, an area of maybe six blocks which, if the newspapers are right, is itself about to explode, because this is where
Wired
makes its home, as do a handful of other magazines, mostly computer rags but also
SF Weekly, The Nose
(humor) and
FutureSex
(
“
cybererotica
”
(naked people wearing virtual reality gear))—not to mention countless start-up software companies, Web developers, Internet providers—and this is 1993, when this stuff is new—graphic designers, architects, all surrounding or very close to a small oval of green called South Park (no relation)— bordered by small Victorians and bisected by an active playground—within which sits, on its perfect lush green grass, an incredibly dense concentration of sophisticated and gorgeous youth—a green oval teeming with the vernal and progressive and new and beautiful. They have tattoos before everyone has tattoos. They ride motorcycles, and their leather is amazing. They practice (or claim to practice) Wicca. They are the luminous young daughter of Charles Bronson, who interns at
Wired,
where the ratio of attractive young women to interns and assistants is 1:1, they being one and the same. There are bike messengers who also write socialist tracts, and bike messengers who are 200 lb transvestites, and
writers who prefer to surf, and raves are still attracting crowds, and the young creative elite of San Francisco are here and only here, do not want to be elsewhere, because technology-wise, New York is ten or twelve years behind—you can
’
t even e-mail anyone there yet—and style-wise L.A. is so
‘
80s, because here, in stark contrast, there is no money, no one is allowed to make money, or spend money, or look like you
’
ve spent money, money is suspect, the making of money and caring about money—at least insofar as having more than, say, $17,000 a year—is archaic, is high school, is completely beside the point. Here there are no clothes that are not preworn—when a shirt is not a used shirt, when a shirt has cost more than $8, we say:

“
Hey, nice
shirt
”

“
Yeah, nice.. .you know,
shirt
”

And there are no cars that are not old cars, or preferably very old cars, silly cars, cheap cars, the coveted parking spaces around South Park filled with automotive mutants, anomalies. And in San Francisco, for better or worse, there are no ideas dumb enough to be squashed, or people aren
’
t honest enough to tell people the truth about their dumb ideas, and so half of us are doing dumb, doomed things— And there is no prestige like the prestige in working for
Wired,
wearing one of those new black shoulder bags they just had made, or having been at the party thrown by the people from Survival Research Laboratories, who make giant robots and have them fight each other—and though the material rewards are a joke, and the apartment rents are already starting to
get
silly, we say nothing and complain little because when the cherubic bald anchorman on the news says that this is the
“
best place on Earth
”
we cringe but then kind of even believe it, in a way, believe that we have to work eighteen hours a day, whether for ourselves or one of these tech start-ups or whatever, because we
’
re in a certain place, are lucky, feel lucky even though it
’
s been only a few years since the hills burned, since the highways
collapsed— But so we are gathered here, each and every perfect warm-but-not-too-warm day, each day lathered in sun and possibility,
probability,
and while everyone drinks their lattes and eats their burritos, pretending not to be checking each other out— there is a feeling that we are, at least at this point in time, with our friends, on this lush grass, at the very red molten-hot core of everything, that something is happening here, that, switching metaphors, that we are riding a wave, a big wave—of course, not one that
’
s too big, not like one of those huge Hawaii kinds that kill people on the coral—