Jarett Kobek - Only Americans Burn in Hell

I wrote that he shouldn’t worry, that he should just get a scalped ticket on his smartphone, and I’d pay him back.

At the very least, I thought, he could get a ticket in the cheapseats. It’d be a shared memory even if we were apart.

But he didn’t respond.

Showtime was at 7:30PM.

Around 7:20PM, I decided that I should go back to the pit.

I again went through the phalanx of security.

When I got into the arena, I saw only one thing.

Arafat Kazi, standing in the pit, his circus performer costume as bright as the sun.

He’d talked his way in!

I was so happy that I insisted we pose for a picture where I was kissing his greasy fucking head.

The show was amazing. Guns N’ Roses was the best band I’d ever seen.

They were so good that they were even better than when I saw them at Dodger Stadium, where they’d been brilliant. They were good in the way that people are good only when they hate the alternative so much they’ll do anything to avoid it.

And in the case of Guns N’ Roses, this was the alternative: go home and lead a normal life.

The next day, Arafat Kazi woke up and took a train to San Diego.

He sent me a series of text messages:

My head is still spinning

Nothing makes sense

I think it was a capstone moment in our friendship

That’s what the final scene in the movie about us would be

This is as formative as anything we’ve shared

There are two options here.

You can believe that Arafat Kazi getting into the pit to see Guns N’ Roses at the Staples Center was the byproduct of a random universe acting out in its mechanistic complexity.

But to believe this, you have to accept a chain of events so unlikely as to be incalculable in their probability.

You have to accept a universe so random in its possibilities that it was able to produce the unlikelihood that Arafat Kazi, the only person alive who could talk his way into a $550 ticket, would have a best friend who would be mailed, by accident, two tickets to the same concert after stumbling into the impossibility of making a bunch of money from writing a novel, and that this best friend would see the second ticket and know exactly how it should be used.

And you would have to accept that all of this would happen while someone was dressed like a circus performer.

The other option is to do what I’ve done.

You can accept that the universe, for whatever reason, wanted Arafat Kazi and myself to be in the pit to see Guns N’ Roses at the Staples Center. It wanted us to have that formative experience. It wanted to write that last scene in the movie about our lives.

You can accept that a divine hand was involved in the whole process, easing our path, guiding the journey.

You can accept that I saw the face of God.

And you’re going to have to forgive me, because the worst possible time to see the face of God is in the middle of writing a novel.

It’s going to make a mess of everything.

The last few chapters of this book are going to dissolve into a hectoring lecture about Jesus Christ.

Sorry about that.

Don’t say you weren’t warned.

Anyway, here I am, the author, Jarett Kobek, and I say to you, reader, that I was in the Staples Center, I was in the pit, I was at Guns N’ Roses, I was with Arafat Kazi, I was shortlisted for the Bad Sex in Fiction Award, and I saw the face of God.

And it looked like this:

And this:

And while Celia and Rose Byrne were seeing Wonder Woman at the Vista, another attendee at the same screening was a man named Francis Fuller. He’d been a director of films and television for about thirty years between 1950 AD and 1980 AD.

Fuller began his filmmaking career as a young native Angelino who was queerer than a three-dollar bill and made short experimental films on 8MM and 16MM.

These films were more expressionistic than narrative, featured aggressive editing, and were shown at makeshift cinemas for audiences of people who smoked too much marijuana and had too much sex with strangers.

Embarrassed as he later would be by his works of youth, Fuller admitted that they’d helped earn him admission to the film school at USC, where he’d gained a fundamental understanding of the craft.

After graduation, he’d bummed around Hollywood until 1963 AD, when his life had changed through a meeting at a cultural salon hosted by the former actor Samson de Brier.

It was a night when everyone’d been smoking too much tea, and too many people’d been talking about Thelonious Monk. Everyone was crammed into a little house in the backyard of de Brier’s property on Barton Avenue.

Fuller was bored. He didn’t know fuck all about jazz.

He looked around de Brier’s tiny cottage and saw an exceedingly corpulent man pressed up against a Venetian mural.

Fuller went over and said hello to the corpulent man.

The man turned out to be a lush named Aram Menechian, who’d come to Hollywood with the intention of laundering some of his brother’s ill-gotten money.

Fuller said that he had a screenplay. Fuller said that he’d gone to USC. Fuller mentioned that Time magazine had sneered at his short films.

Fuller walked out of de Brier’s salon with an offer from Menechian to produce the screenplay.

The screenplay was entitled Handspun Roses and for two years, it’d been sitting in Fuller’s bedroom at his parents’ house in Riverside County.

Handspun Roses was a loose adaptation of Elizabeth Gaskell’s “The Poor Clare.” The action was transposed to the San Fernando Valley.

Despite its reliance on narrative, the finished film exhibited the same qualities as Fuller’s experimental work, this time exercised in service of the horror genre.

Handspun Roses caught the attention of Roger Corman, who gave Fuller work directing several more feature-length films, including a black-and-white psycho-biddy starring Myrna Loy.

As the 1960s AD wore on and became the 1970s AD, Fuller found himself working in television. He directed bonecheap made-for-TV films and countless episodes of sitcoms and evening soap operas.

He missed the old days of handheld 16MM cameras, when you could tell ultra-butch straight boys that you were making a movie and watch as they put themselves into homoerotic situations for the sake of maybe kinda getting famous.

But the TV money was good.

And Fuller retained a certain silverback-daddy sex appeal.

And he’d bought his own home on Glendower Avenue in Los Feliz, which was an upper-middle-class neighborhood north of the Vista Theater.

Fuller grew old.

Work dried up, but he’d managed his investments, and he drew a pension, and thanks to Proposition 13, the taxes on his property were almost non-existent. He’d never reached the Cash Horizon, but he’d gotten pretty close.

Fuller lived on, a lonely geriatric in the pink house where once he’d thrown lavish parties full of rent boys and rough trade.

Some fans wrote to him, and there’d been one last non-union effort with a crowdfunded adaptation of “Young Goodman Brown” by Nathaniel Hawthorne, and there were always emails to be answered.

By 2017 AD, Francis Fuller knew that he was nearing the end and that very little excitement would come again.

He’d returned to the primary activity of his youth, when the world seemed full of promise: he went to the movies.