Jarett Kobek - I Hate the Internet

Adeline went down into the living room and sat on the love seat.

“Adeliiiiiiiine,” said Suzanne, “I think we need to talk about you and George.”

“What’s to talk about? George is just, like, you know, this guy I met on the beach,” said Adeline.

“I’ve never wanted to be your enemy,” said Suzanne. “I’ve always thought we could be best friends and talk about things like girlfriends.”

Oh, no, thought Adeline. She wants to talk about sex.

“Look, Mom,” said Adeline. “I’m not, like, totally stupid, okay? Me and George aren’t fucking and I know all about birth control. We’ve have, like, sex-ed, remember? It’s not like when you were young. It’s the 1980s.”

“You’re an old soul,” said Suzanne, “I thought you’d probably be too embarrassed to talk about it, so I taped something for you off the television.”

“Who, like, are you?” asked Adeline.

“Please,” said Suzanne. “I think it’ll help.”

Suzanne walked over and put her gentle hand on Adeline’s shoulder. Adeline smelled whiskey on Suzanne’s breath.

“Fine, okay?” asked Adeline. “I’ll totally watch it. Right now. Let’s get this over.”

Suzanne turned on the television. She inserted the VHS tape. She turned on the VCR. She used the remote control to play the tape. She left the room.

Adeline watched. Her eyes were ringed with kohl. She was thinking about Tiffany Thayer, the astounding keyboardist in The Castration Squad.

It was an episode of ABC’s Afterschool Specials , a series of moralizing dramas that aired in the early evening and dealt with issues which teenagers faced in the uncertain social climate of America’s Cold War.

Suzanne had taped an episode called Schoolboy Father , starring Rob Lowe and Dana Plato.

Rob Lowe was an actor who would later be videotaped, twice, having group sex. Dana Plato was an actress who would later star in softcore pornography and die of a drug overdose. Neither of them had any eumelanin in the basale cell layers of their epidermises.

In Schoolboy Father, Rob Lowe plays a young teenager. He discovers that a girl he met at summer camp has given birth to a child. He suspects that he is the child’s father. The girl is played by Dana Plato. She hasn’t told Rob Lowe that she’s pregnant. He finds her in the maternity ward. She tells Rob Lowe that she’s planning to put the baby up for adoption. They fight. A social worker tells Rob Lowe that before the baby can be adopted, he has to sign a consent form. He decides to bring the baby home to live with him and his mother. He thinks he can handle it. His fantasy of parental competence conflicts with the reality of caring for an infant while trying to maintain an age appropriate social life. Rob Lowe realizes that he can’t take care of a baby. The baby is put up for adoption.

Adeline wasn’t sure what point Suzanne was trying to make with Schoolboy Father , but she knew enough not to ask for clarification. Suzanne was a drunk.

Adeline showed the tape to a gaggle of her deathrocker friends. They found the dialogue hilarious. They took great pleasure in quoting the film.

“Those sneakers are a national disgrace!” they yelled.

“You used precaution, didn’t you?” they asked.

“We didn’t think she’d get pregnant!” they yelled.

But now it was 1993 and Adeline was pregnant. And all she could think was that she’d failed to learn anything from Schoolboy Father.

She’d been caught with her hand in the cookie jar. Her sexual encounters with Nash Mac had been so pointless. The sex itself hadn’t been particularly good.

Now there was a child. A child was like a life sentence of Nash Mac.

She’d considered an abortion but didn’t do it. This was not due to ideology.

Adeline had been the person in high school who helped other girls get abortions. She’d driven them to clinics and held their hands in reception areas painted the color of Norman Mailer’s living room in Brooklyn.

Adeline believed that abortions were a social good.

Which, of course, they were.

She still brought Emil to term.

Adeline’s older sister Dahlia flew out from Los Angeles to help with the pregnancy.

Dahlia had a husband named Charles. She’d had two children with Charles. No one in Dahlia’s nuclear family had any eumelanin in the basale strata of their epidermises.

Charles and the children loved Dahlia but they were happy to have a break. Dahlia was a total pain in the ass.

As soon as Dahlia got off of the plane, she told Adeline that Adeline had better prepare for giving birth because giving birth felt like shitting out a baby seal.

“Dahlia, you blithering idiot, I’m not even close to my due date!”

“A baby seal, Adeline! A big wet baby seal!” said Dahlia. “You’ll be shitting out a big wet baby seal!”

This all happened in a terminal at JFK Airport, long before America was terrofucked , so Adeline met Dahlia at her gate.

Dahlia helped out. She talked with Suzanne and asked for money. Dahlia dealt with doctor’s appointments and prenatal care and the hospital.

And she stayed with Adeline for a few months after the birth, which meant that Adeline never missed a deadline on Trill.

There Adeline was in a private room at Roosevelt Hospital, experiencing the miracle of childbirth, bringing a beautiful human life into this world and the only thing that she could think was about how she was shitting out a baby seal.

When she held the child in her arms, she knew that she’d call him Emil.

Emil was the name of her older brother.

The first Emil was a suicide.

He’d been caught soliciting tricks on Selma Boulevard in Hollywood. Because of their father’s forays into local politics, Emil’s name and face ended up in the Pasadena Star-News . In the photograph, Emil was wearing a white tuxedo.

He threw himself off the Colorado Street Bridge into the Arroyo Seco.

The circumstances around her child were what convinced Adeline to leave New York and move to San Francisco. Nash Mac was making noise about not having custody and never seeing his son.

Adeline wasn’t going to get herself in a situation where Emil flew out to California to spend court mandated time with his father.

Suzanne’d suggested that they sue Nash Mac into oblivion.

“Adeliiiiiiiine,” she said, “You know that we’ve used Bert Fields in the past! I’m sure he could recommend an attorney who would pound your sperm donor into the dust!”

Adeline had grown up in Los Angeles. She’d been around Suzanne’s friends and gone to private school out on the Westside.

She’d attended the Crossroads School for the Arts & Sciences, which was an alternative education relic of the 1970s. It was at Crossroads that Adeline had helped several pregnant girls procure their abortions.

She’d seen what lawsuits did to people. Divorce proceedings and custody battles seemed, more than anything, to harm children.

So she packed up and moved to San Francisco. Her boyfriend at the time, a former East Village punk rocker turned legal assistant, came with her. He didn’t last.

As a single mother drawing over 30 pages of comic art every month, Adeline didn’t have much time for a social life.

This was okay. She was in her thirties. She’d whittled away her teens and her twenties with questionable sex, drug use, and novels in translation. There wasn’t much left undone.

Suzanne visited regularly. And Jeremy and Minerva came into the city from San Venetia. And Baby showed up from time to time. Even Dahlia was around.

The early years were wonderful. Emil had a sweet personality. He was a bright child.