Lost Causes

St Jude is dead.

Mondo 2000 insider, the Internet 's answer to Courtney Love.

We're not immortal. Who knew?

When I knew St Jude, she was Jude Milhon living with Efrem Lipkin and Mark Szpakowki in a ramshackle house on Berkeley's northside. They ran the Community Memory project out of the Berkeley public library which later I found out was the first electronic bulletin board. I was 19 at the time so that was a million years ago. The house always smelled vaguely unpleasant like gym socks or unwashed male scrotums. I had occasion to smell it a lot because I was living with Mark's brother Luke at the time. I was always being dragged over there to hang out with these people who were many years older and whom I found quite dull. They talked about politics endlessly. They took a lot of drugs.

Jude had a beautiful teenage daughter named Tresca. Named for a famous anarchist, I was told. Tresca was a problem. A problem that nobody quite knew what to do about.

One time I got into a screaming match with Jude over Tresca. When Tresca was seven or eight, Jude had started dosing her with massive quantities of LSD in an effort to rid her of bourgeois conditioning that would inevitably sublimate and oppress her ebullient human spirit. Now understand I was something of an acidhead myself at the time – in fact I had spent my entire short career as a high school senior (before I dropped out) tripping in geometry and advanced English. Curiously, none of my teachers ever caught on. I always sat in the back of the room. But even I, the budding young sociopath, understood it was… well… wrong to give LSD to children under twelve.

And I told Jude so.

"Who the fuck are you to judge me?" she screamed.

I think this was at a Thanksgiving dinner. I think I stormed out of the house. Luke followed reluctantly. Back at our apartment – the fifth floor of an old twenties apartment building straddling a pair of storefronts out of which the landlord ran an adult bookstore and a driving school – he wondered petulantly, "Why won't you ever let me have any friends?"

Always wondered what happened to Tresca after Jude got a little famous.

Time passed. I reinvented myself. I was a volunteer medic at the Berkeley Free Clinic cheerfully performing gonococcal smears and dispensing shots of penicillin for the betterment of the unwashed denizens of Telegraph Avenue. And Jude surfaced again – she was out of computers, into medicine. She wanted to organize: the people united will smash supply-side demand! I had the sense to avoid her, other friends were not so fortunate. Jude was into vamping young men in a big way. Young men are frequently horny and will generally fuck anything as long as it doesn't have metal spikes. Jude scored quite often. The problem was that after fucking them, she always wanted to annex these young men into the inner Jude anarchist collective. The SLA model of romance!

I had a friend named Ted Atcheson who fell into the trap, and I watched him for one long summer while he struggled to free himself from the spider web.

Some years later after I'd joined the Well, Jude reappeared yet again. This time she was a minor celebrity, a hacker. Well. Maybe she was always a hacker but she'd had to wait for world to catch up and make being a hacker the big fabulous. Pop culture. Always the moving target. She'd changed her name to something catchier and more iconic: St Jude. Patron of lost causes. Mondo, the zine she edited, was getting a lot of attention and she preened in the limelight, making various incomprehensible pronouncements that went right over my head: "There are only one or two ways to be correct and millions of ways to be a Dada revolutionary." What the fuck does that mean? Never understood the whole Smart Drug scene myself.

I was inclined to view her more charitably however because somewhere along the way someone had told me the central defining tragedy of her life: she'd given birth to two children. Tresca had had a younger brother. The younger brother had died of Tay Sachs disease when he was less than a year old.

I suppose after you have a kid who dies – if you have to go being alive – it all lurches into the area of performance art. Because really – nothing else can hurt. Hence, there are no consequences.

Rest in peace, Jude.