Jarett Kobek - I Hate the Internet

“I’m moving,” he said. “After WTF comes out and I do the events.”

WTF was his new book. It was being published in the small press.

“Why now?” asked Adeline.

“This morning,” he said. “I woke up to a 400 people protesting outside of my door.”

J. Karacehennem really had woken up to 400 people protesting on the other side of his door.

Oh Christ, he thought when he heard the sounds of the crowd, they’ve come at last. Why did I write a book about Islamic terrorists?

The protestors weren’t protesting J. Karacehennem.

They were protesting Local’s Corner.

The housing situation in San Francisco was bad enough that people were regularly staging protests against the effects of the tech industry on the rental market.

People were being evicted at a rapid clip.

The cost of living was skyrocketing.

A protest was planned on 24th Street. It started between York and Hampshire and moved towards Mission. As the procession reached Bryant, a decision was made to divert the hundreds of protestors down to 23rd Street.

23rd & Bryant was the intersection that hosted Local’s Corner.

J. Karacehennem lived a few doors down.

J. Karacehennem and The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter woke to the sounds of people cheering. And the sounds of people banging drums. And the sounds of a flatbed truck with a PA system parked in the intersection. And the sounds of people yelling at Local’s Corner through the PA system.

J. Karacehennem and The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter went outside. They looked at the flatbed truck.

Sandra Cuadra was speaking through the PA system. She was telling the story of how Local’s Corner denied her service.

Here is some of what she said: “So another person that was with us said, ‘Hey, you know what, let’s go to this Local’s Corner on 23rd and Bryant. I want to try it out.’ I said, ‘Yeah, I want to try it out too. It’s a new place.’ So we walked over here. It was six of us. Two of them were my niece and nephew. One was 14 and the other one was 12, and we came here to come eat. And it was two people on the outside table and there was I think two other people inside the restaurant. So I walked into the door and I asked the lady, ‘Six people.’ There was a lady on the ground, kind of cleaning something, and she kind of looked up with the deer in headlights. So she looked at the guy behind the counter, and she kind of looked at him, didn’t say anything, she’s like ‘Uh, uh.’ He’s like, ‘Can I help you?’ I go, ‘Yeah, there’s six of us.’ And then he says, ‘We can’t accommodate you.’ And at first I didn’t trip, I thought maybe he had to move tables. So we’re like, okay, we’ll wait a minute. Right, so we’re kind of waiting. And then he says, ‘No, we can’t accommodate you.’ I go, ‘What do you mean, you have tables inside, right?’ And then he goes, ‘Uh, uh, uh, we kinda can’t.’ Right, kind of stuttering, kind of like shocked, he didn’t know what to do. So you know, we’re like, ‘Well, you know, we can move tables together.’ We didn’t mind eating separately because I have a big family we’re used to doing lots of tables. He just kept saying they couldn’t accommodate us. And then, you know, kind of wait, pause a moment and he goes, ‘You can go to our restaurant over there on 24th Street.’”

Sandra Cuadra stopped speaking. The protest continued for another ten minutes before moving back up Bryant. People stood outside of the restaurant banging on its windows and beating drums.

J. Karacehennem said to The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter, “We have to move. We can’t live like this.”

The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter agreed.

“When we move, we’re leaving San Francisco,” said J. Karacehennem to Adeline. “I want to leave the city. I hate San Francisco. Or at least whatever the hell it’s become. But it’s not like we have any choice. There’s no way we can find an apartment even remotely comparable for the same rent that we’re paying.”

“Where ever will you go?” asked Adeline.

“I’ve got a few events set up for WTF. One of them is in Los Angeles. Another is in Portland. I guess we’ll look at both cities.”

“Portland is so dreary,” said Adeline. “It’s like San Francisco but even worse. Do you think that your constitution could truly handle a return to Los Angeles?”

“I’m more inclined towards Los Angeles,” said J. Karacehennem. “It’s still the only place that ever felt like home.”

Adeline didn’t say anything but she worried that if J. Karacehennem and The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter dropped out, then it was only a matter of time before everyone else dropped out too.

Adeline herself was fine. Her family was rich. She owned her apartment as part of a tenancy-in-common. But she felt loss around the margins. The slow disappearance of her friends.

For a moment, things had hung in perfect balance.

But all things end.

Adeline learned that on the day her brother killed himself. Nothing lasted. The whole world was on a script of loss and people only received their pages moments before they read their lines.

Adeline lifted up a copy of the Spanish translation of ZIAD. She flipped through.

“How is the translation?” she asked.

“ Lo siento ,” said J. Karacehennem. “ ¡No habla Español! ”

“Do you feel anything?” she asked. “I remember when mine eyes espied the first translation of Trill. It was into that barbaric language of German. I hoped that it would mean something. In the end it meant nothing.”

“I guess it makes it real,” said J. Karacehennem. “It’s too bad, there’s another book that I’d love to do. I can’t. I just can’t. If I do one more book about terrorism, then I’m just that guy. I’m just the terrorism guy.”

“What’s the book?” asked Adeline.

“I want to do a book about the really hot terrorists and freedom fighters from the 1960s and 1970s. People don’t remember, but there was this amazing moment when terrorism was high fashion. When you didn’t have to be an ugly little man from the middle of nowhere with an overwhelming fear of sex. Terrorists and freedom fighters used to be really hot. Don’t you remember Leila Khaled? Leila Khaled was one of the most beautiful women who ever lived! Or Djamila Bouhired? Holy shit, Djamila Bouhired! Don’t forget Dolours Price! Fuck, even Gudrun Ensslin or Patty Hearst. It’d be a book about closing doors on a wide variety of semi-valid political expressions. It’d be about the death of romance in modern life. Why are all of today’s terrorists so bland and so drab? I’d call it Death in a Miniskirt. ”

Ellen Flitcraft of Truth and Consequences, New Mexico was visiting San Francisco. She was crashing with her friend, Hilary, who Ellen knew from UCLA. Hilary didn’t have any eumelanin in the basale stratum of her epidermis.

Hilary and Ellen had been freshmen year roommates. They’d lived together at Hendrick Hall, in the close quarters endemic to Third World countries and the student housing of American public universities.

Six months had passed since Ashley Nelson uploaded pictures of Ellen performing oral sex on Maximiliano Rojas.

Ellen’d been fired, she’d been shamed, she’d sunk into a state of anxiety followed by a long depression. She had self-medicated with processed foods. She’d gained weight.

The latter helped, a little. The weight gain made Ellen somewhat unrecognizable to the men of T or C.

Being a woman in a society that hated women, Ellen had spent her post-pubescent life tormented by the unwanted attention of men. After Ashley uploaded the photographs, a personal element had entered the rictus grins of the world’s men.