A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (42 page)

sneer. We quote a professor summing up:
“
A study of Teach for America tells us more about the ideological, even psychological needs of today
’
s middle-class white and minority youth than it does about the underclass to whom the project is targeted.
”

Kaboom!

And because the general public will not believe that we have been chosen to articulate the hopes and fears of a people, to speak for them and everyone and make history, we set out to see what they
will
believe. The cover of the second issue celebrates the magazine
’
s
“
First Fifty Years,
”
with a grid of twenty or so past covers—October 1964:
“
The Beatles Are Reds!
”
; November 1948:
“
Death: The Hidden Killer
”
—to prove it. The opening essay, written a month or so after Kurt Cobain
’
s death, touches on a death that touched us all:

It
’
s so hard to believe you
’
re gone. Even now, I wake with a sense of disbelief. You
’
re gone. Each morning, I rise reluctantly, wondering whether to live the day or just let it wash over me. I walk numbly, listlessly, drifting like a phantom. I feel apart from my body. I am half a person. You
’
re gone.

From the start, everyone knew you were different. There was something more there. A mysterious glow, a strange, unfamiliar beauty. But, somehow, I felt like I
’
d known you all my life. Maybe I did. Could it be?

I always believed in you. And I believe you always believed in me. You spoke to me, about me, for me. During some of my
most trying times, you shone like a beacon of guidance and strength. A rock. Someone real! I idolized you. I wanted to be you.

Some said you were messed up, disturbed—a bad role model. Some said power changed you, that you couldn
’
t handle it. They said your style was scandalous, your conduct immoral. And that
’
s true. You were abrasive, gritty, and tough. You were reckless. A loner. And sometimes you just made me mad. But that
’
s because I loved you and because, despite everything, I always trusted you. And then it happened. But it wasn
’
t your fault. It was our fault. My fault.

For everything we put you through, that life put you through, that you put yourself through, I
’
m sorry. Your struggles with fame, with success, with the press—I know you really never meant to hurt anyone. How can a butterfly cause harm? It is with high hopes and a full heart that I say: Richard Milhous Nixon, beautiful butterfly, fly free, fly strong, live forever. I love you.

We seek out those who, like us, had ideas but have run aground. We publish an interview with Philip Paley, a former child actor who played Chakka the Pakuni on
Land of the Lost,
in which he excoriates his parents, blaming their divorce for his semi-indigent state, living in a humble apartment in Hollywood.

Trouble in paradise?

Yeah...My parents divorced when I was sixteen and subsequently all my money got tied up in that divorce. I lost it all. To this day I
’
m STILL FUCKING PISSED OFF ABOUT IT. Put that in your magazine. My father is a Beverly Hills surgeon with MONEY And my mother got a really large divorce settlement. I don
’
t talk to them.

And what are you doing now?

I have done every fucking job you can imagine. My first job was at Swenson
’
s scooping ice cream. I was a baker, a gas station attendant, a pastry chef; I worked at EF Hutton as an assistant broker, I worked at a stationary [sic] store, I was a painter. I tore down buildings with my BARE HANDS. A lot of unemployment time.

So there goes the myth that child stars are set for life.
Yeah, it broke the myth for me.

The last page of the issue is a fake ad, featuring five of our friends, for something called Street Harmony Jeans. The five friends-as-models are posed in a corner of South Park, one sitting on a Dumpster, two others draped against warehouse walls, and, at the center, is Meredith pouting at the camera while dropping a quarter into a cup held by a hairy panhandler. The homeless man, played by our motorcycle-repairman friend Jamie, is grinning, giving a thumbs up, and holding a cardboard sign that says: WILL WORK FOR FASHION

And somehow we think this sort of thing will endear us to advertisers. Not that we need clothing ads. Or tobacco ads. Or ads from big companies. Or anyone, forget it.

But as shortsighted and pessimistic as we
’
ve become, we still cling to the idea that the right moves might quickly reverse our fortunes. Thus, Moodie and I sit around, looking at Judd
’
s cartoons, wondering if we should have him come on down, show us more work, talk about contributing. We agree that he is not at all a good fit for
Might,
thematically or aesthetically. He has nothing at all to do with what we
’
re about, really, except that he—

We clamber for the phone. I make the call.

“
Yeah, why don
’
t you come down and bring the cameras—er, your portfolio.
”

Two days later he does come by. He walks in, a regular-looking person with thick black hair, and we get up to greet him, and are then confronted, close at his heels, by a scampering eight-legged insect of black video equipment, lights, microphones, clipboards. Shalini, an MTV devotee, at her Mac across the room, is awestruck—we had forgotten to tell her they were coming. It
’
s chaos. People walking by on the sidewalk outside stop and press their faces against the window. We bring Judd to our conference table, under the punching bag, and begin the show.

Judd, with his portfolio, pretends that he really cares about having his work published in our tiny magazine, with its ten thousand readers, even though in two months millions will be watching his every quiver. Moodie and I sit with him, pretending that we are editors of a real magazine, one where people sit down to talk about things like this, and that we care about his work, and believe that it belongs in our (real) magazine. We are wearing what we always wear, shorts and T-shirts, having decided, after thinking about what to wear and then remembering not to think about what to wear, to wear what we would have worn had we not been thinking about what to wear. We are happy with our shorts and T-shirts, one side tucked in, just an inch of it on the right side, showing some belt, the rest hanging out—this is our look—it having been arrived at in high school through careful consideration, through the eschewing of so many possible mistakes. We wear no tattoos, because we feel tattoos indicate too much attention paid to one
’
s look and anyway, though the trend is still on the upswing in 1994, we are sure that inside a year, maybe just only a few months, that whole boom will go bust. (How long, after all, could something like that last?) Same with dyed hair, piercings, brandings, creative headwear, neckwear, T-shirtwear, all other indications and accoutrements. We have opted out, taken the ultimate apathetic approach to looks and attire, have moved past the check-me-out look, past the look of rejecting-the-check-me-out-look-in-favor-of-darkly-rebellious-look—have rejected both and have chosen a kind of elegance through refusal—the check-me-out-if-you-must look-but-you
’
11-get-no-encouragement-from-me look—the look of
absolutely no look at all.
Which is not to say we wouldn
’
t mind looking
good,
Moodie and I, because it would be nice, since we
’
re bothering to slum on MTV and all, to at least be looking appealing, thus increasing our chances of sleeping with Charles Bronson
’
s daughter, or at least the girl from Caffe Centro, the one with the hair down to here, the legs up to there.

We talk to Judd, with both grave seriousness and measured nonchalance, about how and how often we will be working together, all the while choosing our words carefully, needing to sound both articulate and casual, of our demographic, loose but smart, energetic but not eager, because, of course, we are also young people pretending to be young people, putting across an image of ourselves as representatives, for now and posterity, of how youth were at this juncture, how we acted, and in particular, how we acted when we were pretending not to act while pretending to be ourselves. At the same time, it would also be nice to make clear the mistake Laura in casting has made, to have our cameo make clear who the real stars are, stars who far outshine this dowdy Judd person—we the brilliant ringed planets, he just a tiny, cold moon.

And while we must relate to Judd, mano a mano, Judd being on first impression and thereafter a very very nice person, Moodie and I must also try to act cooler than Judd, because we have to make clear that we are not the sorts of people who would be on
The Real World
—or even try out for it!—in the first place. We need to make clear to a casual viewer that, while we are willing to let ourselves be thrust into rec rooms and basements around the world, gazed at by surely adoring teenage girls and their less believing older brothers, by college students eating falafel between classes on couches that came with their apartment, we must make clear to these people that we are on this show only for the purposes of our own perverse amusement—that if you look closely, we are winking, smirking ever so slightly, that all this, our meeting with him, the cameras and everything, will probably be used in
Might
as fodder for some kind of wry and trenchant article or ha-ha chart soon enough. We can play it both ways, all ways. We can look into the eyes of this Judd person, whose eyes look like ours, and we can pour forth to him kindness and understanding, and crack jokes with him and make plans with him, all the while calculating what we might be able to get out of this association, how much of his
sort of access we can get without having to too seriously compromise the purity of our own endeavor by fouling it with his presence, he who, for his part, is probably only talking to us because Casting Laura felt bad about cutting me from the team and so sent him our way, as consolation.

And even while we think we
’
re pulling it off, that we are acting nonchalantly like ourselves, are looking good, are discussing matters vital to Judd
’
s career, the importance of these cartoons to us and him, something weird is happening: the camera guy and the sound guy, slightly older, backward-hat-wearers, are clearly unimpressed, are almost rolling their eyes at us, because they clearly see through the whole thing, that we are using this to get exposure, to prove to all and ourselves that we are real, that we like everyone else simply want our lives on tape, proven, feel that what we are doing only becomes real once it has been entered into the record.

After the first visit, Judd comes by three or four more times, and, a few months later, when the San Francisco
Real Worlds
burst onto the air, Moodie and I are there, in Episode 2. For about eight seconds, of course, but with that eight seconds, we expect to raise the eyebrows of thick-skulled and starstruck advertising-buying proles, not to mention impress people from college and high school. We get one wish but not the other. The appearance does next to nothing in terms of solving our financial woes, but on the other hand, everyone we know and have ever known calls or writes to say they saw it. How they
’
re able in the blink that constitutes our appearance to make out who we are is beyond comprehension. We hear from grade school friends we haven
’
t heard from in eight years, we hear from old teachers, all no doubt because the words spoken to Judd, by me in an appealing sort of drone, were emblematic, unforgettable. Those words:

“
If you, you know, don
’
t draw the way you want to draw it
’
s gonna suck.
”

The appearance makes us mini-celebrities in the neighborhood, particularly in the eyes of Shalini, who
’
s busy with
Hum,
the
“
new voice of the progressive South Asian American twentysome-thing community.
”
In it are articles about the persistence of arranged marriages, gang activity in the South Asian American community, and a health advice column written by her father, a doctor. Moodie and I design it in exchange for use of her laser printer and for her thrillingly frequent, unbelievable, semi-erotic during-work backrubs. Friends, people from upstairs begin to avoid our office, because each time they step in, Shalini
is
kneading our shoulders as we moan, grunt, pant, often while being entertained by her brutal imitation of Indians she calls F.O.B.s— fresh off the boat.

“
Oooh, I tink dat you are dooo dense! Feel da dension in your shoulders! You need do get out, relax more, go do da dancing, da partying with da udder youngsters.
”