February 23, 2004
The Manifesto
It started – as so many regrettable things do – with a manifesto. We were drinking one night and complaining about some rival’s recent success, and Marcus said, “Listen, we spend so much time tearing one another down and criticizing everything. It’s fucking bullshit. Why should we care? I’m tired of critiques. I want manifestos.”
It’s hard to explain it to people who weren’t there, but at that time, with the drink, and Pamela’s easy laugh, and Marcus’s deep voice, well it made sense. So, with the sun coming down through the trees and the buzz and the optimism of early spring, I wrote it down on the back of a napkin advertising a new kind of cardboard steamer-trunk.
That should have been the end of it, but it wasn’t. I left the manifesto with Pamela and she typed it up and sent it around to a few friends and acquaintances, and then it was reproduced and sent around again. It hadn’t been published – it wasn’t as if it was part of the popular consciousness or anything – but it was known, first amongst our scene, and then rippling out to others.
People we didn’t know started coming up and asking us about it. I remember one afternoon I was at the bar and a woman introduced herself to me and said, “Weren’t you one of the signers of the manifesto?” This put me in an uncomfortable position. We had made it clear in the manifesto that our arguments had nothing to do with individuals, but having signed the manifesto – having been a part of that original group – well it meant something. If what we had come upon was as true as we had assumed it was at the time, then didn’t we deserve credit for being the ones who uncovered it? All I’m saying is that I wasn’t the only one who got laid for being an original signatory of the manifesto.
Eventually the manifesto became a journal. At first we printed it up in Marcus’s basement, but soon demand outpaced our letter presses and we had to find a real printer. We took submissions and chose the best of them and printed them and every week the journal would sell out immediately. No matter how many we printed it seemed like the demand would never end. It was a little unnerving, honestly, to realize that there were so many people interested. We had always assumed that we were right, but there was something vertiginous about it when everybody started to agree with us.
Soon, the quantity of mail that came in for the journal became too much. We spoke to the mailman, and he adopted a cascading system of delivery. If the mail slot was filled at the office he would deliver it to Pamela’s apartment, and if Pamela’s apartment was full he would deliver to Marcus’s, and so on, down to me.
For months I would sit in my apartment and dig though the piles of mail and try and find something worthwhile. At dusk we would meet in a café and talk about the day’s catch and have a drink. It was obvious we were in trouble. There was always more to read – it was getting to be too much. Most of the people who were sending submissions to the journal hadn’t even read the manifesto. Marcus couldn’t find the original napkin; his apartment was so crowded with submissions it had been buried. Worse still was that a recent survey of our readers revealed that the people who were buying the journal were only reading what we were printing because they wanted to be printed in it themselves. Most discouragingly, groups of writers whose work we had not published were becoming dissatisfied, and they were writing their own manifestos – manifestos that critiqued our original. When I heard this I became outraged. I went to one of their meetings to try and explain that we were all working towards the same thing, but they threw beer at me and chased me into the street with threats and balled up fists.
I gave up on it eventually. I taped the mail slot shut. I stopped going to the café and refused to answer the phone. One day Marcus came and pounded on the door and screamed at me, called me a traitor and a coward. I sat in the bathroom with the door locked and waited for him to leave.
It took longer than I expected it would, but eventually they left me alone and I learned to willfully ignore the effects of the manifesto. I made a new life for myself and avoided the scene.
One day, on my way home from work, I got caught in a rainstorm and ended up in the old café. Marcus and Pamela were sitting in the corner surrounded by their admirers. They had found someone to take my place, and he sat there next to them taking notes and sipping wine. Marcus was going on about something, so I lingered at the edge of the crowd and listened for a while. It was still inspiring to hear him talk, but after all we had been through I knew that that's all it was. It was clear that the crowd of people were more interested in him than in what he was saying, and that the young kids who used to hang around and bum cigarettes and listen to us, well they had long since moved on. The original ideas had been lost forever.
