"Now the moon is almost hidden,
The stars are beginning to hide,
The fortune telling lady
Has even taken all her things inside.
All except for Cain and Abel
And the hunchback of Notre Dame,
Everyone is making love
Or else expecting rain.
And the good Samaritan he's dressing,
He's getting ready for the show,
He's going to the carnival tonight
On Desolation Row."
-Bob Dylan
You must believe in spring, as the song goes, and in this case, spring believed in me and took an early flight out of Miami, making moving day a glorious one. Coffee Bob came to pick my few things and me up in Katherine's car. He, with a quiet cleverness, managed to hold my mattress and box spring on the roof with twine and used the resulting pressure to hold the bulging hatch down.
My new home was in one of the oldest parts of town. Fells Point had long been the place for longshoremen, merchant marines, and pirates of all stripes to get drunk, break things and procure the one thing they needed. With the port containerized, the railroads dead and Southward-moving demand changing the shipping channels to Norfolk and Newport News, Fells Point had only her bars left, like misbegotten sons, to support her, and she had more of them, so they said, than any other two mile stretch in the country — even New Orleans. There were still sailor types there, but they mostly slept all day under the eaves of the community shelter. Young suburbanites now overran the area on Friday and Saturday nights. One could see the bars fall one by one into yuppie pretension (tearing down old pissed-stained brick walls to replace them with brand-new "weathered-looking" brick walls, replacing the pool tables with sushi bars, discontinuing 99 cent insecticide-smelling rotgut draughts in favor of coconut and fruit concoctions with umbrellas in them, replacing mean smoking granny and her hatchet spatula with wood-fired pizza ovens). But such refurbishings barely made a dent in the neighborhood. It was a truly amazing sight to wander down Friday night and see five, maybe six bars with lines coming out the door, and the rest of them nearly deserted, and the shadows of Shocket's Discount Store (40 years without a coat of paint) and the hardware store/XXX newsstand run by Peanut, the meanest man in the world, looming malevolently over the fun.
My new place didn't suffer from any of this ambiguity; it was about five blocks from the center of the point. There, all the bars (Butts and Betty's, the Rip Tide, the Dead End) were pure and the people hated not only yuppies but ... everyone.
I had not been to the house before I moved in, so I was excited to see that it was a three-story row house jobber, peach trim and dark red brick, built about 1760 (almost European, I reasoned). Coffee Bob and the girls occupied the second floor. We entered through a locked gate to the side of the front stoop and walked down a long cobblestone tunnel to the open back, where from the makeshift second-story porch one could look out over weeds growing through the tarpaper garage roofs to a scrapyard and, further on, the harbor. I savored the salt air as Coffee Bob and I climbed the rickety stairs, a gang of stray cats — including a tiny albino one — scurrying out of our way. The door and windows were open, shabby curtains flying away.
The large front room (or was it the back room) was an all-purpose kitchen, dining, TV and party room. As we walked in we saw a woman and a man enjoying a comfortable conversation and sharing coffee in fine gilded bone china cups on a table that was literally covered with garbage: smeared cups, full ashtrays, grapefruit rinds, piles of sticky plates, smeared newspapers, empty wine bottles, shaggy fountains of spent candle wax. They daintily poured their coffee from a Wedgwood serving pot, sipped, and, noticing us, clinked the cups to their saucers. I figured that these two were a couple. "You must be Felix. Welcome to Fleet Street," said the women, who said her name was Vesper. The man stood up and introduced himself as Larry. He seemed like a gracious fellow until Coffee Bob introduced him as Larry of Larry and the Sophisticates, a leading singer and harmonica player in the Point, and then he got this distant, haughty look about him. I asked him if he lived here, and he in a funny way said no. Vesper, with smiling teeth like a toothpaste commercial, showed me to my room. She moved like she had a chalkboard eraser on her head.
If there is anything unique about Baltimore, it's the row house interiors. It was so commonplace to see such things as purple kitchen cabinets, pink shag carpets around black living room walls, burgundy bedrooms with Crane's blue trim that I wasn't even surprised by my room, which was entirely lime green, from the carpet to the molding to the wallpaper. Coffee Bob lived in a tiny attic room, Vesper lived across the hall from me, and the two other girls had the large front bedroom. We all shared a toilet and a tub behind the kitchen..
While I settled in, Coffee Bob went to work his evening shift at Obrycki's Crab House. I was just pinning up my last poster, a Redon print someone had thrown into a dumpster, when I saw this large blonde woman, hands gripped to both sides of the door frame, staring at me, a strange grin on her face. She welcomed me to "her" house and introduced herself with a firm handshake as Hedda. She was obviously German but her voice sounded British, a particularly self-conscious British at that. Her mannishness took me aback, but I tried to be nice, so I joined her for a bottle of wine in the other room. Before too long we started talking about Kafka's love letters to Felice Bauer and the way he signified he was dissolving into her by dropping successive letters off his name when closing each new correspondence until finally he just ended it "Yours." Then she played an album by Yello, who she claimed was universally recognized by people who really know music as the greatest band in the world. The way she described it, I couldn't tell whether their superiority resulted from the fact they couldn't tour or play instruments or because they had to go deep into the mountains of Switzerland for three to five years to put an album together. I wanted to give them an audition, but after a few measures, Hedda brought the conversation back into her lap, running through topics like she was checking them off some master list: men are cowards who are unable to tell you anything out straight, but try to manipulate women by subtly screwing everything up (I defined this as "passive aggressive," but she said "no, it's not like that at all"); America is the most racist country in the world; Nietzsche was the most profoundly misunderstood thinker of all time (for power is all, end of discussion); and how everyone should just leave the Germans alone, get over it. All I could do was listen to her, and watch the door periodically, hoping that someone, anyone, would come in. After we drained a couple of bottles of grape, I escaped to the Royal Farms Store for a few draughts of air to get us cigarettes (she called them gaspers).
When I got back, she was making dinner for me, slicing scallions with alarming speed. When she had prepared a pile of greens, she transferred Yello — perfect as only something synthetic could be — to a portable tape player, and we ate out on the porch, the moon presiding over a thousand candles on the sea. Before I was even finished, she hooked her legs around my hips and held me down to kiss me. I had been thoroughly drunk under the table, so I submissively moaned and let her practically carry me like a carcass along with the tape player to her room, which looked like an aquarium under a strange aqua lamp.
She deposited me on my knees on her fur-covered futon, and pulling my hair, made me bite off her blouse, bra and panties with my teeth. Then she guided my hands up to a foil pipe and I held on, my legs on her shoulders, as she ravenously bit, sucked and tongued me. She grabbed my master like a sausage, rolled on top of me, and with incredible force, plunged her damp cleft over it. Shaking violently and howling like an animal, she mashed her lubricious body down and up, breasts flailing madly, grinding me like a pencil sharpener, gripping my flanks and crushing me with warmth. Yello just kept up the pace, no pausing on the backbeat for breath with that group. For the next hour she whipped me on like a horse: we did it doggie-style, missionary-style, sideways, rolling in the fur blanket, me standing up, her standing up, even upside down, anything but kissing. It was all too garish and real — even for the prospect of later fantasy usage. I was so angry at her I wanted to give her more pleasure than she'd ever known before, just to spite her. Between the smells, her clammy flesh, the harsh teal light and the melting make-up on her face I found it impossible to think of coming, but I knew it was that or die of exhaustion from the effort. Finally, she started twisting to a finally semi-funky beat and I felt my energies pulled oh so sweetly away and had a long convulsive orgasm. She clicked off the tape player, and even though I wanted to hold her, rolled away from me, to sleep.
Somewhere in the middle of the night, I woke up somewhere in the middle of her bed, a distinct impression I was one of three bodies there. I quietly grabbed my clothes and went into my own room.
2.
I awoke to the sound and smell of dripping coffee, which felt like Chinese water torture on my temples. All the tenants in the apartment were eating breakfast around the table, looking, as I did, like death warmed over. The only one I hadn't met was Iza, another big-busted blonde German, who affected a softer look with her cheap green plastic glasses. I was very embarrassed about what had gone on the night before, thinking that everyone must have known about it, but no one seemed to care or refer to it in the least, the quiet intake of coffee and cigarettes was all that mattered. Had it been some kind of rite of initiation into the house?
I felt obligated to sit close by Hedda, but she kept moving away. Later that day, when I pressed her about it, she said "look, you needed it, I needed it, it was fun, but don't think there was anything...addicting about it." I wasn't sure what she meant. I'd spent the better part of twelve months measuring my life by my proximity to women, wondering what secret thing I was required to do to get one to want me, only to find it given to me without any effort on my part, in such gross abundance it seemed like some kind of cosmic joke. My small mind had yet to get past the idea that the world was governed by rules.
I sat listlessly eyeing the paneled room and the beige carpet. As I watched in the silence I realized both were grey, and I began to notice that pillows of dust clung to every crevice, the orange modular Chesterfield furniture was all crooked, the floors all tilted, there were stains all over the ceilings, and through the open window came the stench of cat piss and the sound of parents beating screaming children. I saw a syringe lying on the fence outside. The seedy reality of my new home was beginning to settle in when the joint started going around. Before too long, a jug of wine, and words started forming from the fuzz-filled mouths. Then, on the turntable, impossible to tell whether the record or the band was skipping, thumped The Last Record Album by Little Feat. As "All That You Dream" (and the weed) kicked in, the house began to glow, a golden dust. The air carried in the freshness of ancient islands, of Thera, Corfu, Madeira — or, better yet, fried seafood. The decayed timbers vibrated with a timeless beat that would endure no matter what fashions of funk might inhabit it at any given time, for the party was continuous, and when we plugged in we felt an awareness — dim and partial — of the bliss that pervaded everything.
As women everywhere always do, these women wanted to know all about me. I told them what little I knew, the facts that seemed so small as to be unimportant. I asked them why they wanted to be doctors. They gave vastly divergent but somehow exactly the same reasons: Western medicine was sick. Hedda was on a mission to thrust the medical paradigms of Africa (where she had lived for several years) into the face of the medical establishment. Iza had studied Chinese medicine and wanted to combine its mind/spirit/body symbiosis with the more pathogenic Western approach. Vesper, an American I guessed, was following a whole different line of thinking — as best I could make it out, she studied the geometric patterns, or "harmonics" formed by sonic analysis of the mid-brain glands to determine how the "illusory" concepts of space and time are imprinted on the mind. "I took biology," she stated tersely, "to learn the secret of life," and added, after a Jack Benny pause, "I didn't."
The girls, excited to have a listener, went on to tell me that a cure for cancer had been found. Essiac, primarily a common weed called sheep's sorrel mixed with natural blood purifiers like rhubarb and slippery elm, had been clinically proven to reverse cancer cell growth 100% of the time in terminal patients and has been brutally suppressed by the medical/petrochemical establishment ever since because cancer (and now AIDS) are too profitable to let go of. I knew next to nothing about any of these subjects, but I did know that these women would either be disabused of all these notions or forced to find another career path. They had such blatant disrespect for the medical profession, they would never be allowed to be doctors, but in the blaze of weed and youth they seemed sure they could face down the juggernaut.
Their economic situations varied. Hedda had lots of money and would take a plane to India or Kenya whenever she got disgusted with America (which was quite frequently) but otherwise liked to live in an essential way: thrift shop clothes, steamed vegetables, generic cigarettes. Iza, almost as well off, worked part-time for kicks at The Loved Ones, a hard-core pornography gift shop and book store, so her view of the male gender was a bit skewed (or dead-on, depending on your perspective). It had always seemed to me to be a cat and mouse game of who's going to be embarrassed, the customer or the person ringing up the sale, but Iza said it was nothing like that at all, she was so cheerful about stuff like that, in fact, I'm sure she always made the customer the embarrassed one. Vesper, who wore better clothing but acted like she was almost actually poor, worked as a bartender in a crab house.
As for Coffee Bob, he seemed vaguely perturbed that I had taken such an interest in my new roommates, for he imagined he and I with our male will to power could start to take back the house and turn it into some kind of jamming emporium.
Such a notion was not to be, at least not today. After some miso soup, we en masse decided to go shopping. We walked down the street to a boarded-up warehouse that had been re-opened as The Bargain Hut, three stories of junk not even presentable enough for Goodwill: the shoes that were for sale looked like they had been purloined from the morgue, the customers stepped all over the records that littered the floor, even the incomplete set of 1950's encyclopedias had a sticky coating of black gunk. The only thing of any real value in this final dystopian resting place of American consumerism was the people shopping, in whom I recognized all the faces of poverty: the middle-aged women who slap-banged merrily on a rickety bicycle, evading the security guards, smiling the toothless magnanimous smile that showed she had escaped the imperative of survival for a few moments; a couple of boys sucking insolently on cherry lollipops until a younger boy came up to them and begged maniacally for one, and they suddenly got so interested they threw their pops down the freight elevator opening, careful to see the suffering on the child's face and laugh at it, living for such moments when they had that power to cause pain; an extremely obese woman in a rainbow scarf, faux-fox coat, purple curlers, and the arrogant look that this was all normal, but it was actually a manufactured pose that took tremendous courage, done to convince herself that she was real, that she counted; a man a little older than we were, hardened and suspicious, who sniffed at us examining bent and tarnished spoons, his envy eating him alive, making him easy pickings for any hustler who promised him a payoff which made someone else a sucker; another man who leaned into us and spilled a coke and French fries on Iza's blouse, and then demanded that she pay for another one because she bumped into him, with his rat-mind gamesmanship he was ready for everything but what she did, which was completely ignore him; a woman so bedraggled and disheveled one needed to look away, to allow her at least the right to the ugliness of her squalor; a couple fighting viciously with the cashier for the missing rubber tip on a pathetic $2 chair, excited they had found an opportunity to engage their continuous smoldering rage; a bunch of teenagers still holding on to some kind of dignity, carrying the coolness of total ruthless self-interest in the way they calmly put their feet through baby carriages and stuck switchblades through doll heads; at least they had some life left, for mostly there were those who had surrendered even the pretense of dignity, so hollow and sorry there was nothing you could feel for them, you wished they were invisible.
It was enough to make me wonder what my new roommates were doing here: they carried along with them small bags of gimcracks, and examined items as they passed them not only as if they had a real right to, but as if this was a real department store. What twisted betrayal could have led them astray from the heroin-clean malls to this methadone hell? Were they going to whip out their cameras and take pictures? As if they were answering me, the girls gave warm and very-much-appreciated smiles, hellos and directions to a confused old man in thick black glasses who was looking for a straw hat. They seemed so genuine and natural about these downtrodden people, I thought they just might end up doctors after all.
On the way back we passed St. Stanislaus, a 200-year-old blue-painted wooden "cat-licker" church whose bells had made countless widows forget momentarily the sea. Its thick oak doors opened as we hurried by, trying to avoid the crack dealers, so we entered, and as we did my head stabbed with pain. A small, mostly elderly congregation sat mid-mass in a yellow light as the priest homilized, his heartfelt pleading and Brooklyn accent blurring on the way to our pews in the back, where the whole thing was like a far-off ceremony in Latin. As we walked out right before communion, the priest seemed to look right at us, with a sadness more compelling than the hollow edifices of hymnbook, incense and sermon combined. It was as if, by us leaving, he had lost.
Coffee Bob stopped at George's and brought me out a housewarming Souvlaki. As we shared it on the back porch, Hedda came out to warn us. "You know that animals are very angry when they are slaughtered. They will take something from you when you eat them. You assume all the fear they feel at the moment of their death."
"Everyone wants something, I swear," I said. I took a huge bite.
"Do you know it takes 10 kilograms of grain to yield one kilogram of meat? The nine left over is animal waste. That's what's polluting and starving the planet." Her voice was gentle but almost desperate. "Not to mention all the parasites in even the best-cooked meat. Everybody has them. They are designed to live in your intestines without you ever knowing, and cause all kinds of ailments."
"I can't even eat a sandwich in peace. Do ya mind?"
"Don't mind me," she said. A minute later, she started up again. "You better make sure you eat lots of garlic with that. It will thin the blood and help absorb the negative energy."
"So meat bad, garlic good," I tried to clarify, my mouth stuffed with food.
"Oh, no, you should never eat garlic without meat. It will increase your own negative energy."
"What about cheese?" I asked, taking another huge bite.
"You do know that cheese is made with the stomach linings of very young calves, don't you?" she asked, as if it pained her to say so, as if she really did care for me.
"Uh. No," I said, as I bit off more cheesy lamb. "What do you eat?"
"It's hard to get anything edible in the States, actually. You people want it quick, cheap and convenient, you don't really care if it's full of antibiotics that break down the body's natural immune system. Look at all these diseases: AIDS, asthma, Epstein-Barr, Alzheimer's, they're all immune dysfunctions brought on by diet. There is deadly bacteria in McDonald's hamburgers that one of these days your bodies will no longer be able to fight off."
"Isn't McDonald's popular in Europe?" I asked, purposefully toying with her sincerity as she had toyed with mine the night before.
"Oh, it's totally different," she laughed. "They serve food at European McDonald's. Can you imagine somebody from Germany," she pointed at my grease-soaked bag, "wanting that? To answer your question, I'm getting ready to fast. Water every two hours and vegetable broth once a day for three weeks. I recommend it. It totally cleans out the system."
"Kinda like Keith Richards going to Switzerland to have his junkie blood replaced before going on tour?" I joked.
"No, not at all," she replied sadly, the joke going way over her pointy head. "You're clever, but you're not enlightened." She went into the house, content that she had figured the whole thing out and could go on to other pursuits. I looked at Coffee Bob. I realized he hadn't said a word all day.
"This is a real cool place," I said. "Thanks for thinking of me."
He smiled. "Come over here," he said, moving to the hole in the plywood wall that formed the far side of the porch.
I peered through and saw a block of Baltimore row house back yards: the concrete cracked with crabgrass, the sagging second floors, the chained attack dogs, overturned plastic swimming tubs, empty clay pots, barbecue grilles, TV antennas, gently sloping telephone lines. I marveled at this vista, but Coffee Bob said, "look directly underneath." There, in a tiny space a story down, on an old mover's blanket, was a litter of hairless kittens suckling their mother. She looked up at me without fear, with a kind of pride in fact, the pride one only finds in the city.
Before I knew it, Coffee Bob had brought out two guitars, his usual acoustic Epiphone and some ancient brown thing with wire strings too tight even for Luther Allison. We pulled back on the chairs and played a reasonably accurate "Angel of Harlem," him on rhythm, me on lead, but everything was missing. Without Lester, it was all a waste of time and fingers, both better spent turning Japanese or flipping the knob of the stereo. We put our guitars down, at a loss for words, and smoked a few cigarettes before retiring to our separate rooms.
It wasn't long before I recognized Lester's voice calling from below. I went down to let him in with my new key. He and Katherine came in with lilies and guitar case in hand. He barely expended any niceties, madly searching through the closets for a suitable place to jam.
Katherine and the women, meanwhile, settled in for a visit. Tea was brewed, cigarettes were drawn, topics broached in a genteel way. The excitement was palpable, for with women, the idea of company means someone to enter one's emotional extremities and, in sharing them, granting them succor. With men, on the other hand, company was always a chance to push oneself away — which was what we did, upstairs to Coffee Bob's loft.
Lester opened the window wide. The panoply of street noise became like a fourth member of the band. We played our repertoire, now about 20 songs, with titles that ranged from "Lucy Had A Flange" to "Train of Horrors." Coffee Bob had set up a mini PA system, complete with Shure microphone, which Lester grabbed like he was at a Barmitzvah. Soon he was using it more to bark orders at us than to sing, telling me to play louder and Coffee Bob to play a C major chord instead of C minor in a certain spot, to which Coffee Bob insolently replied that he'd always played it as C minor and thought it added texture, to which Lester said it was the wrong chord. Coffee Bob had a hard time accepting that there were right and wrong chords all of a sudden, and that Lester had the authority to decide which was which. Lester's argument that he actually wrote the song carried no rhetorical force with Coffee Bob.
When we came back downstairs, it was Katherine who spoke for all of them. "Positively Fleet Street," she said of our playing, as if we had lived there for years, for, in a way, we had. Lester started fiddling with the stereo dial, muttering "why oh why did my formative years have to be the early 80's novelty era of pop?" He twirled relentlessly, looking for songs or snippets of songs or riffs or choruses or bridges that offered some hope of instant transcendence. He seemed immensely pleased that he had identified and isolated the gold dust on the dial, but we all felt we were being subjected to a Ferris wheel ride jarred by incessant hard stops; we would have gladly tolerated all the talk and car commercials to avoid the constant mid-song shifting.
The women were in the middle of an elaborate tarot reading, black candles ablaze. Lester started stuffing his pipe with herb. Vesper asked him to roll one instead. He looked sheepishly at her, and explained that he didn't know how to roll joints. We all laughed at him, and Vesper said, "give me the bag, then, ya big oaf." He clutched it and she had to continue to needle him for it, as if trying to coax him off a ledge, and Lester finally, ever so cautiously obeyed. She rolled a perfect one in no time, her fingers like a surgeon's.
Iza had prepared some Chinese noodles, vegetables and broth, which was sent around the room with chopsticks. In the crazy musical mix, Nina Simone followed by the Doors' Morrison Hotel followed by Raymond Scott followed by King Sunny Ade followed by Beck-Ola, I lost myself in a version of Billy Strayhorn's "Lush Life" sung by Donna Summer. In the hands of men, this was an impossibly sad song, a requiem almost to the life I had until recently been leading, but here, done by a woman, in a house of women, it took on a far different context. It was a vision of heaven, the ideal:
Romance
is mush,
stifling those
who strive
I'll live a lush life
in some
small
dive
and there
I'll be
while I rot
with the rest
of those whose
lives are
lonely
too
Vesper was rolling another one when a knock came at the door. It was a Baltimore City Police Officer. Bespeckled and thin-chinned, he looked like Wally Cox and seemed almost afraid of us. The bag of pot was in plain view and the smell was still swirling around amid the noodles. Vesper, whether because she wasn't looking or didn't care, made no attempt to conceal what she was doing, and kept on rolling. The cop didn't care. He was there because the people who had just moved in to the first floor had reported their VCR stolen. Hedda asked each of us if we saw anything, and we each shrugged, in the end concluding that we should always lock the gate.
Lester and Katherine left before too long, and they seemed to be almost instantly replaced by Larry who came by with a couple of black guys. They picked up our guitars and played an impromptu jam, hard muscular blues, a few notes really, before settling in to the "baby, you're beautiful and I'm bad" routine. One of them cracked open an eight-ball of cocaine and we all sampled a bit, leaving the bulk for the guys with the gold rings and the dark green shirts.
They all left for the respective bedrooms with the women, followed shortly by Coffee Bob and his guitar. I turned on the small TV, the first time in a while I'd caught the late night shows where TV turned so surreal it was almost like reality, and there was Reverend Carl, smiling from sideburn to sideburn: "NOW, didn't ah promise yew?...wuzzint it...everything I foretold and more? Isn't the beauty and WONDROUSNESS OF GOD a beacon...to behold? Hallelujah great GOD almighty..." I clicked it off. I no longer needed him. I went to my green room to bed.
3.
All of us, come Monday morning, went off to work like the whole weekend never had happened — like it never could happen. The students crunched, Coffee Bob left early to deliver supplies for a catering company, and I walked the two and a half-mile stretch through the old industrial strip beside the harbor to my downtown cubicle. The low sun turned block after rotting block into shimmering prisms. More than the sights and the salt you can feel on your skin were the smells: the coffee, sausage and eggs from Jimmy's, the rising bread at H&S Bakery, the dumpster gas from The Horse You Came In On, the shrill industrial seepage from the epoxy plant, the thick smell of germination at Meyer's Seed, the fresh perfume of detergent at DynaSurf, the sinus-inflaming diesel from the endless procession of rough trucks shaking down the streets, the sour scent of pig iron wafting in from any of five possible directions. Such aromas triggered my imagination. Passing piles of anonymous plastic lawn furniture in the broken windows of Bagley Furniture, I conjured up their life-cycle, starting off as dinosaur blood sucked up by a vacuum pump somewhere in the endless dust of West Texas (where you can actually see the curvature of the earth), then refined in Galveston, then burned into plastic on the shores of the Delaware River, then the sweating machinist here gently molding huge hot slabs of plastic into templates from where they are cut and fit into place, then the ships and rails that take the finished fabrications to Portsmouth or Terre Haute, then the lives that use them there, as mute backdrops to bridal showers, toddler teething, post-funeral gatherings, Sunday afternoon barbecues, all the milestones of life as it is lived so similarly whether in the heartland, the mountain valleys, the river banks, or the shore.
As I walked that spring day, and every day for the next several months, I strode in the smiling Raisin Bran sun through a world clarified to stillness yet leaving an incendiary trail of gold, and turned my thoughts not to what was right in front of me, but of how it would soon be gone, to fluorescent and grey, the blurry indoors, the silent and unknowable corporate machine.
What did I have to do with the smooth functioning of the world? I was only privy to the frenetic cries of "buy, buy, sell, sell" while the slow globe rolled on undisturbed. I was told my words kept money circulating among professional capitalists, helping direct resources to the point of most efficiency — but that's only how it seemed from the air. On the ground, it was a bloody process, money turned effortlessly into more money for some, while for others everything they had of value to offer was stolen. Either way the fruits were then squandered in the corporate competition that, like any warfare, was nothing if not inefficient, a matter simply of who has the power to change the rules the game is played by, to use the tricks of capitalism to fool mother nature. The corporate engine didn't reward intelligence, discipline, fortitude, honesty, loyalty or acumen with anything but the contempt they deserve, for they are all hindrances to the real goal, the smooth flowing transfer of power to the most rapacious, emptiest center. Such concerns as making the company more profitable, building a good reputation with customers, and bringing innovative products to market are all valid as marketing rhetoric, but they are wholly incidental to the massing of armies and calling of names that is at the heart of a successful corporation. What people like Lester who never worked in a corporation and always complained how everything was pitched towards the "lowest common dumbinator" didn't understand was that all good things must be ripped apart and rebuilt as mediocre things — only when "ownership" is stripped away can everyone be "on board," decisions made invisibly somewhere along the endless chain of command.
And so my mind drifted on in this way, but when I got to work, I realized how very naive my musings were. It usually took no more than a few minutes to remember that Corporate America was about far different things: the waste that would be hideous to an economist was an elegant way of dispersing fruits so that no one could profitably complain. While the products of the corporation may have been so much smaller than the things Lester and I were working on, business was not ultimately what Lester perceived it to be when he went screaming madly away from the prospect of gainful employment — a place where every clock-watching moment brazenly denied the awesome awareness of life and death. It was, in fact, a platform for life's lessons. It managed to dole them out as widely as possible, so that everyone could gain some kind of spiritual sustenance from pain, whether it's the pain of learning that any anger you display will alienate someone with a power over your future, the regret of putting aside one's dreams of being a baseball player to feed a family, the guilt over robbing the company blind of its time, or the joy of seeing your idea implemented commingling with the awareness that you are to receive none of the credit. How one dealt, as individuals, with these lessons was the real message — not how fairly or wisely the corporation made use of the gifts that kept raining down. All theoretical constructs were obliterated by the fat hot hand of people — their needing — to give. Under the crushing towers and constant flux of perpetual motion machinery, the human is somehow on a larger scale, the faces puffy and jagged, seeming to scream at you as they walked by amid the whiteness and concrete.
Reversing my direction back home in the evening, I couldn't trot fast enough. My only thought was of that first blast of marijuana. I had expended an intense effort to make sense of the world all day, and would soon make an intense effort to make it senseless by night, walking right by the factory workers who resented my tie, the aproned matrons who resented that I hadn't been born in the neighborhood, the blacks who resented that I was white.
One day, on my way back home, a van slowed down to offer me a ride. Thinking how this might actually delay my rendezvous with weed, I hesitated, but something in the driver's voice, a jovial incredulousness that I could actually refuse, made me accept. The back of the van was littered with religious pamphlets and there was little room to sit amid the boxes of clothes and appliances. The driver asked where I lived. I saw his eyes in the mirror and recognized him immediately at that black would-be businessman who seemed so interested in me months ago on the bus. Now he was dressed in a loose-fitting beige tunic and talking about how my place was smack dab in the middle of his route delivering supplies to homeless shelters. He seemed like a different person, except for the gentle voice and generous smile; his hair was long and unkempt, his gestures slow and careless. He talked about how excited he was to be working for a church and making a difference in people's lives, but how he wished he could do more — there were so many more elderly folk who needed hugging and listening to, and kids who needed to learn the lessons of baseball, homework and family, than he could attend to. He didn't say anything about accepting Jesus into his life or asking me to volunteer at a soup kitchen in any way. He seemed very curious, in fact, why I chose to live where I did, and expressed gratitude that I was trying to form a band — "oh, what a wonderful thing that is, I wish I was creative like that," he said, looking at me with the translucent eyes of a moth fixed on a light.
I felt befuddled as he dropped me off at the sidewalk in front of my house. I did not know why, or even if, I was choosing what was happening to me. I had no reason other than the weight of entropy carrying my life down to the point of least resistance. The fact that he had shed what looked like a thick skin of ambition so easily left me uneasy, for he clearly had some idea of how life should be, and how he should be living it, and was taking action, forging an identity, to right some unbalanced buzzing that only he heard in his ears.
I believe it was that evening, after dinner, Coffee Bob, Vesper and I were smoking Viceroy's on the back porch, silently watching the scrapyard darken and the distant factories disappear, when a domestic shorthair kitten skittered across the tar paper roof in front of us.
"Look at that," said Coffee Bob.
"Looks like an Elvis," I said. The moment I said this, I felt the eyes of Coffee Bob, Vesper and the cat upon me. Without a word being said, I understood that by naming it, the cat was now mine.
Elvis padded his way toward me.
4.
Katherine had changed jobs by now, taking on a Legal Assistant position at Sarah's Hearth, a shelter for battered women. Since this job paid even less than the Good Neighborhoods position, Lester was forced to take gainful employment. He panicked at this prospect, asking me to recommend him where I worked, going so far as to compose an elaborate, wholly fictitious resume for me to bring "to the hiring dude." His connivance gave me a queasy feeling, which I realize in hindsight was the protective instinct to keep him from being eaten alive, although at the time I thought I resented that he could just waltz so easily into a position of servitude and anguish I had worked so hard to "earn." Fortunately for all of us, the personnel department didn't even stoop to review his phony resume, and he ended up with blissfully self-directed hours working as a bicycle messenger downtown, using Katherine's brother's bike. He even stopped by to visit me once or twice, the guards on orders to let in anyone who was white. He strolled the floor like a king inspecting his court, pleased that his people were working so hard in such small spaces. My co-workers gasped with shock, wondering why the guards hadn't yet been sent to escort him out.
When he couldn't come in, he called me at work, effortlessly exploiting the only known loophole to my employer's perfect scheme of bondage — after all, we were paid to take phone calls. I had to tell him to chill, though, after I was caught by a manager who monitored his conclusion that Marilyn Monroe was murdered by her psychiatrist after finally deciding to slip off his Freudian amphetamine-and-lithium pander once and for all. The manager — a 40-something spinster with a bun so tight it pulled up the skin of her face — found this scintillating conversation irrelevant to the number of calls holding — which I guessed meant she thought men were sex object-obsessed slime who didn't understand why oppressed women might think the only way out was to give up their lives.
Katherine was even less happy with Lester employed than I was. It wasn't so much that he put on the "hard day at the office" routine (although he did do that), it was all the little fibs he told, about hours worked and days missed and paychecks squandered. Although I believed her when she later said that "all she ever wanted from him was to work," it all must have seemed too much trouble chasing after him like Willie Nelson's accountant — it surely would have been better to take a third or fourth job than to pursue it.
We got a respite from this in May with the arrival from Spain of Lester's father, who everyone called Armando even though his real name was Calvin. I went with Lester and Katherine to pick him up from the airport. Along the way, Lester had to say that he reminded him of me, which pretty much ruined the possibility of any accurate understanding of him.
Airport crowds are like no other crowds — in no other place are the demographics so sharply shifted to the well-dressed, the anxious but fundamentally sated souls. And airports themselves are almost sterile, like hospitals without stairs, complete with wheelchairs and rolling gurneys and people in uniforms rushing, except airports have actual windows out on the great voyages they exist to feed — the arrivals, departures, delays and all the other precise shuntings to keep the movement flowing. Armando was conspicuous in these environs, looking like a character out of Picasso's blue period, wearing soft loafers, an oversized red beret, a London Fog raincoat, and a look of almost Portuguese melancholy. While the air was thick with the anger of scurrying people, Armando couldn't go slow enough. He patiently waited until everyone else had their bags before he took his denim duffel bag from the spinning steel turbine. Although he was from Minnesota, he had been so completely transformed into a European, I was surprised he spoke English. His voice was so low and soft, it sounded like he had left it overseas.
He gave the slightest of smiles to Lester when he saw him, but other than that, the only emotion of any kind he expressed was a twitching perplexity at virtually everything he saw, like he had just been let out of a cave after twenty years. He was utterly confused by: the rent-a-car buses with company names in big lights, which seemed to him to represent some sort of autonomous corporate countries; the Roy Rogers restaurants in the terminal, which inspired a ghostly look on his face, like maybe the Nazis had indeed won World War II; the huge television sets everywhere that had Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North proudly bragging how the law couldn't lay a velvet glove on him because he had destroyed all the evidence — looked at from Armando's eyes it was like Orwell's 1984 had come and gone with nary a notice, because such books were part of a forgotten history and language, some discredited ideology of the "liberal" Sixties when everyone smoked pot and thought wars could be avoided.
His sad visage continued with each new stimulus: cigarette billboards, porn bookstores, the endless blocks of burned-out, papered-over tenements — it was like some Communist propaganda film from the Fifties. But his worst twitching was reserved for downtown Baltimore, which we walked through after dropping off his stuff at Lester and Katherine's apartment. He dimly remembered what it used to look like and was horrified to see hordes of tourists from Japan, Germany and Pittsburgh traipsing on the ghosts of the News-American, the Southern Hotel, Chessy Railroad, Stevedore Local 125, St. Casimirs S&L — even the Bromo Seltzer tower was only a perfect recreation of the Ponte Vecchio, it no longer had the giant rotating bottle flashing blue neon to the harbor. We were trying to find something to do with him, some place to go that might ease his demons. We ended up at the Holocaust Memorial, where one bum was puking onto the basin of the giant sculptural flame and another one was accosting us for "ya know, a lil' sump'n ta hep tide me ovah see." Armando reached into his coat pocket and with very serious concern asked him how much he needed, but we managed to whisk him away just in time. We zigzagged desperately through the gorges of city streets, trying in vain to protect his sensitivities, trying to discuss something besides what was going on all around us, for, like parents everywhere he had attached all his lost hopes and nostalgias into a fixed, ridiculous picture of his son, who was meanwhile wishing to rush to the nearest mountain top, not to go somewhere important, but to get away.
He was flustered by our scurrying and all the noise. "Can't we just pause for a few minutes at a coffee shop?" he asked, as if we were the ones keeping this from happening. When he said this, Lester looked stressed, Katherine looked angry, and I laughed out loud at the thought that the only thing around here that would qualify as a coffee shop would be a Burger King. Armando, however, flashed that nebulous smile, which betrayed volumes, about his idealism, his didacticism, his humility, his almost holy sense of humor, but more important than all that, his knowledge that in five short years, there would be European-style coffee shops on every corner of America, as insane as that seemed in 1988.
We finally got him on a bus back to Lester and Katherine's. While most white people might have felt a bit uncomfortable to be the only Caucasians on the bus, Armando Riley looked finally at home. He looked at the bus people with wistfulness, as if they were so much more than they were. He had actually started to talk, about the interesting hairstyles in America (meaning the bus), when a young man in a leather jacket started pummeling an elderly man with a cane. Everyone on the bus looked on afraid, powerless. Lester got up and walked over. He put his body between the blows. The kid yelled at him to "get out 'da way, ya crazy white Muthahfucka," but Lester held on, insistent. Finally, Lester, who was a couple inches taller than the boy, said in a firm but soft voice, "he's an old man." Something about the way he said it took the fire out of the boy.
Armando acted as if this was the most normal thing in the world for a son to do, but then, after the bus had returned to normal, mentioned casually how Bob Dylan once told him that public transportation was the only thing connecting us to Walt Whitman.
"Wait a minute," I interrupted. "Doesn't he ride in limousines?"
"Oh, this was a long time ago," he said in his deep and serious voice, "when I was his teacher at the University of Minnesota. There were a lot of good folk singers in Dickeytown. He wasn't even one of the best ones."
I was suddenly intrigued, but that was it. He had cut off the flow. I was left with only a wisp, like a De Chirico sketch, of a place redolent with a sense that something had happened there, but the people had gone.
I would get this feeling a lot in the coming weeks, as Lester and Katherine's life revolved around trying to keep him occupied, to give him something to do and not to do. We sat there smoking hash and watching "The Wizard of Oz," he making only the comment that the Frank Morgan character was based on Grover Cleveland. We walked down the azalea'ed streets of Charles Village, past the architectural history of America, row houses that looked like Amsterdam counting houses, Zurich jewelers, London merchants, and his only comment was that the topography of Baltimore was exactly like Denmark. Lester and I were arguing about some new band we were championing at the time and he said he thought the Fugs were due to make a comeback. And with each of these bizarre comments, he unloaded a little of his own perplexity onto us, as we thought and thought through these little riddles, and were never able to reach beyond our own egoistic striving for a complete picture of the world to see just how he was teaching us: the true meaning and source (of The Wizard of Oz) is unfathomable and unimportant, the connections between things (Baltimore and Europe) go deeper than we imagine in even our wildest drug-induced ravings, and that all the victorious defining of our moments (current bands) climb on the back of other moments (the Fugs).
But these conclusions were far in the future. At the time, the one thing he said that really impressed me was that he voted for Dick Gregory in 1968. I didn't realize that this is what every self-respecting radical (the hundred or so who voted) did during those times; I was just amazed that someone my father's age was so hip to the double-tongue of death from the two-headed Repiglican/Semirat hydra. I also noticed, before Armando was shuffled off to Lester's brother, that the cloud hovering ever over him traced back in some way to Lester's mother. The only time her name was mentioned, it was like he had taken a deep and empty breath of sadness, and was trying not to exhale.
As if on cue, just as we were celebrating his departure with copious quaffs of hash under glass (Lebanese brown, courtesy of Armando), Lester's mother, Patricia, stopped by unannounced. Katherine quickly straightened up and wheeled the sofa into their bedroom, while Lester lysoled the premises, he and Patricia still persisting in the illusion that he didn't smoke dope, had a job, and was a fully functional citizen.
I had never actually met her before. She was upright, fashionable, but she had a child-like face that made her look much younger than she was (and about 30 years younger-looking than poor Armando). She was with a weedy guy in a cardigan sweater who looked nervously around the room whenever he talked to you, but kept quiet most of the time. He had to have been at least ten years younger than her. She sounded a little like Judy Garland as she gushed about her "magnificent" walk in the park and the "stellar" service at the Thai restaurant down the street and how "posh" their apartment was — "oh, and how's my little kitty-witty."
Lester for his part gave a much softened account of what he had been listening to, reading, bothered by (but only the Apollonian sweetness and light things — Merchant and Ivory, "Graceland," "Hannah and Her Sisters," seeing John Waters on the street — none of the Dionysian darkness he was actually immersed in). She laughed at everything he said, which of course made it appear like he had no sense of humor at all. Then she proceeded to pull from her bag for him a seemingly endless stream of elegantly wrapped presents. No occasion was announced for these gifts. Mother and son just shared the ritual as if childhood had never ended and there was no one else in the room. There was a pewter and turquoise bracelet, a fine linen notebook and fountain pen for his "pillow thoughts," Dire Straits and Indigo Girls albums, an Andean reed flute, a crystal ball key chain, a Tibetan coin bottle, and for frivolity, a toy crown for the cat.
Katherine brought out shortbread cookies and a tea service. Patricia kept the conversation away from anything that might be controversial, like the reality in front of her face, and talked about the new "10,000 Maniacs" record as "brilliant" (frowning) and the new Jim Jarmusch movie as "repellent" (smiling). Then she bragged about Jack, her husband, who finished first in his Foreign Service class and was about to be joining the State Department and moving to Russia!
She seemed informed on an impressive array of subjects, and had an instinct for asking just the right question that stymied proponents of any particular theory, all the while stroking the cat and drinking tea with what seemed like a forced, or at least learned, elegance. The conversation eventually meandered towards the 1988 elections and how "exhilarated" they were to be volunteering on the Dukakis campaign. Now, Lester, Katherine and I had had many passionate discussions about Mr. Duetaxes and how we just didn't get why the Democratic party would move mountains so it could lay on its sword with that robot than face up to the challenge the big black man on the hill with the marbles in his mouth was handing down, and I was amazed to see them sit there silently while Patricia raved on about how he spoke Spanish and remembered his immigrant roots and was a true intellectual. I had to speak up.
"Too bad he doesn't have a beer named after him. Then he might have a prayer of winning."
After acting as if I wasn't there for the last twenty minutes, she turned around and addressed me with an eerie air of familiarity, as if she had helped raise me and was responsible for my opinions.
"My dear, I don't think it will be too much trouble dispatching Mr. Bush. His mother started Planned Parenthood in Connecticut for gawdsakes."
"So? His father hired Hitler. You think losing is an option for people like him?"
"Oh rihhly," she pooh-poohed, "you oughtn't make such irresponsible statements."
"I'm irresponsible?" I shouted. "Look it up. You could argue that Prescott Bush didn't mastermind the German war effort, but not that he was heavily involved in funding it. His brokerage firm was even closed down in 1939 and its assets confiscated, but of course the Bonesmen intervened."
"Ah, such eviscerating conspiracy theories," she said with an air of incredulous hilarity. "That was a far different age. War games were a pastime for the very rich. If this theory of yours was truly rel-evant, dear boy, I would think it would have been vetted by now in the Post..."
I was dumbstruck with rage. "You get your news from Pravda on the Potomac? The very newspaper that let Bush and his boys bring down Nixon because he wasn't supportive enough of the heroin operation in Vietnam?"
At last she glared at me with the look of pure malevolence I'd been waiting for. "Revisionist history," she spit. "The p-people decided," she stammered.
"The same people who will elect Duetaxes to succeed Reagan, I suppose?"
"The country's not ready for a black president," Lester said softly to calm me down.
"Faction Jackson is a fool," she continued. "His only message is himself."
"Don't you realize that all these things the country lacks — universal health insurance, equal opportunity, real help for the poor — are denied because everyone is still deathly afraid that the benefits would go to blacks?"
"It's naive to think it's about black and white, it's not..."
"It's about the examined life," I screamed, wholly ignorant of just how devastating this comment was.
Silence fell over the room. After a bit, she went back to ignoring me, and tried more small talk directed to Lester, bravely pretending that this row had never happened. After she was gone, I tried to apologize, but Katherine shushed me.
"It's clear we should have told you the whole story before now."
"What do you mean?"
"Do you know who the man she was with was?" Lester asked.
"Jack?"
"Yes, he was my best friend in high school."
"He's our age? Wha' happened?"
"They started going out together when I went off to college," he responded matter-of-factly.
"How did it get started?" I asked, amazed.
"Well, that's a little like trying to summarize how World War I started. Jack and I were so close, it was hard to know exactly where I ended and he began...you'd never understand that since you've never had a twin brother, but anyway, he has these unimaginative born-again parents who were trying to keep him from, you know, experiencing life, and I, well, I wanted to help him out, so I arranged for him to move in with us while he went to college, into a spare study in our basement. My mother was going through heavy menopause at the time and was very...vulnerable. She had this fiendish friend of hers, Kyra, also going through menopause, and something about the chemistry made them very...fearless. They would set me against my father, and Hector against Jack, just for fun. Hector was going out with Kyra's daughter at the time, and they made such a fuss about them, you know, how they were not yet fully baked loaves of bread and other things spoken out of bitterness that would just poison the mind of someone just beginning to understand what their dreams really were. Her reasoning was sound: my father was suddenly old, and growing older by the second, and wouldn't lift a finger to fight it, while it was ingrained in her to rage against the dying of the light, so to speak. It all happened very quickly, a kind of collective madness — a quick half-thought-out decision that she could never recover from."
I couldn't believe what I was hearing, mostly because I had never heard any of it before. "So, what happened with your father?" I asked. "Was he living there?"
"Oh yeah. Soon my father was living in the basement and Jack was in my room, although he was really... with my mother. I didn't really know what was going on, but I did really know what was going on, if you know what I mean. One day she called out of the blue and said it was urgent I come over. It turned out she needed me to kick Hector out of her house because she thought he was getting quote psychotic, but it was really just a way to get on with her relationship. My brother was just very concerned for her welfare and after a life of being in competition with him for her affection I had to tell him ever so gently she wanted him gone. He didn't take it well, needless to say, he immediately tried to get into his van, in the dead of night in the middle of a blizzard. I finally calmed him down and negotiated a settlement where he would stay another two weeks, to give him time to find a place and all, but she said she wanted him out of the house that instant. She went on about how I had chosen him over her, how I wasn't a man and other things that in hindsight show just how very scared she was of having slipped into the trap of all flesh. I let myself be hurt by it all and, uh, kinda slipped my leash and went on a tear through the house, even yanking down the Christmas tree and saying this wasn't my father's house anymore. I left, and Hector left, but even on the way out she couldn't help being maternal, desperately urging us both into therapy.
"I went into a tailspin after that. I blamed myself for letting Jack in, for betraying my father, for not helping my mother out when she needed me. I had even played along at first when she started paying attention to Jack. I was 16, y'know, like any teenager I needed the scent of adult misery to survive. I'd been raised to believe my selfishness was the glue that held the family together. I had learned to dominate the family, always fighting the world, always demanding the seat next to Kenneth Burke or Lainie Kazan. My parents never fought, the talk was always of art and philosophy, I thought they had it right and everyone else was hopelessly misguided. I still think that at some level. But I was forced to confront the fact that my magical childhood was suddenly an elaborate puppet show, complete with a trap door finale. When my assurance that the world, the entire world, was within my grasp, fell apart, what else could I have been but the evil twin? Wasn't that better than knowing that I could never fix things? After all, mother was perfect, aren't all mothers perfect? What did this make me?
"But it was not about me at all, I just couldn't see it at the time, and I foolishly held on to a lot of resentment. And this wasn't even the first time she had tested me like this. I remembered a European vacation when I was nine, when she went off with this Spanish guy into a tent nearby and I could practically hear them, as if she wanted me to know all about it. He had befriended me on the ocean liner and I led him, just as with Jack, to my mother. He was one of those larger than life European con men, hunting women like deer, totally obsessed with detecting and exploiting weakness, but empty otherwise. My mother of course loved every minute of it. He claimed he played the Minotaur in 'Fellini's Satyricon,' carried a gun at all times, talked of taking us to live with him in Tenerife. I hid all my money — the ten or so dollars I had — under a rock so I could someday escape to go back to my dad. Things did eventually get back to normal — for a while."
"Why would she want to expose her children to that?" I asked.
"I've spent many a sleepless night pondering that. It was just an instinct on her part, I suppose. I thought for years she wanted to make me jealous but the opposite makes as much sense, that she was just sick of being a mother, and who wouldn't be? Both realities may be true, but she would never acknowledge either."
Katherine interjected. "I asked her about it once, and all she said was that it was ridiculous to think such a thing would have an effect on Lester, like I was playing amateur psychiatrist, or questioning her right to do as she pleased."
I'd like to say this confession brought tears to his eyes, or gave him new insight, or made him want to hug Katherine or me, but, in truth, he said it so matter-of-factly, so distantly, that all I could think of was what a rat of a friend he was for holding it in. "Did you go into therapy?" I finally asked.
"Oh, they had a field day with me, as you might imagine. I once went to this hard-assed old Freudian guy who wasn't phased by anything, incest, bestiality, all part of the job, but he wiped off his glasses at my story and said 'whoa, that's a heavy.' It made me feel better, in a way."
"What about Jack? Doesn't he feel tremendously guilty?"
"He's too dependent," said Katherine. "You have to understand the parasitic nature of these relationships. With Calvin, Patricia was making the phone calls, typing up the proposals, explaining the importance of the work to anyone who will listen, all he had to do was have the ideas and stand enigmatically behind them. Now she's doing the same thing for Jack, cultivating the people, doing the research, keeping his life uncluttered so he can work, which means think, which means explain everything to her, but even that's not good enough because deep down she hates herself so much she needs the brightest dream of them all to stand behind, to interpret...into greatness. Maybe Jack will, as Calvin did, beg her to find out something on his own, and maybe she will be moved. She's such a whirlwind of energy, though, she's blinded by some sort of never-vanquished bitterness from seeing his humanity. Because she acted like she never deserved any of the credit, she could never feel any responsibility or remorse. It's like a shell — impervious."
As I pondered this story for the next few weeks and months, I thought it explained everything about Lester: the American dream relentlessly chased, then exposed as a fraud, with Lester screaming into the sudden void, desperately trying to reverse everything, to fill the role of failure, sociopath, the hobo who lives in the forest behind the school. He purposely fucked up school, was caught stealing, ran away from every responsibility he'd been taught to value in this world, and love was the very thing that he would never let save him. But Katherine was there to coax him back, ever so slowly, to reality, the reality where love doesn't have to be the martyrdom it was for his father, where kindnesses actually come from the heart, where ambitions are not lies but one of the only honest ways to serve. And I, who secretly reveled in his failure and used it as a stick to ward off society's rattlesnakes, was some sort of father figure coming back to rescue his mind from the oblivion of his fears.
But then I realized that the story explained nothing. It sounded good, like manifest destiny and the big bang theory, but it was ultimately just an incident in a person's life. It revealed a lot about his mother, his father, him, but aren't people made of stronger stuff? Why did he decide to let himself be ruined by that? I was left with an overpowering feeling of shame, not just for the voyeuristic way I used these facts to explain Lester, and ultimately myself, but the way this story, this finale or denouement could substitute for the real sadness of their lives. Like some celebrity scandal, I knew that people would revel in the tawdry details and seek some motivation for these raw facts, yet they would not think to be puzzled by the actual souls who lived through these facts and withdrew from them into a kind of living death.
"There's one thing I don't understand," I said to him.
"What's that?"
"Why'd you move the sofa to the other room?"
"I stole it from her, and she keeps asking for it back. She just doesn't get it."
"Aw, well," I said, by way of explanation, "you can turn a horse into an ass, but you can't turn an ass into a horse."
Lester laughed, as if for the first time. I had finally reached the point of meaninglessness where I was beginning to make sense.
When Katherine went into the kitchen to clean up, I asked Lester how he had met Katherine in the first place. He smiled, filled me a bowl and told me the whole story.
"It was in the school cafeteria. She was showing pictures of her fiancé to everyone, so happy. I wasn't the type to 'know' things, but I knew with 100% certainty that she wasn't going to marry that guy. I was quite angry in fact that she thought that she would, although I didn't even know her. I felt she belonged to me, and that she was cheating. She had such a heartless face, but behind it those sad eyes that seemed to look at the world to see if it caught her act. I caught it immediately. I soon discovered she had a bigger heart than anyone at that small-minded college did. She was careless, vulnerable, delicate, brutal. That's probably why after I met her, every beautiful girl on campus was after me. Now, nothing like that had happened to me before or since, it was my fifteen minutes of girl fame, but that was just the size of her heart and her spirit that attracted them to me. We were reckless and crazy. She was only really watching over me to make sure I didn't get into trouble, but she spent a lot of time, something I could not understand. I mean, she was taking 21 credits, engaged, held down two jobs and was everyone's little angel, driving them here and there and helping them through breakups and failed exams. Plus she was living at home, taking care of her family as well, which was the worst torture of all. Meanwhile I was barely pretending to attend class, smoking bowls all the time, sleeping under an orchestra pit, stealing lunch from the cafeteria. She kind of mothered me, she brought me Kentucky Fried Chicken, she was most attracted to me because I needed the most help. I smoldered at the thought of her being stuck with that fiancé, a sardonic, joyless social worker who no one liked but Katherine. I was so obsessed it took me a while to realize she was all I was thinking about. Three things got her intrigued in me: first off, I refused to thank her for the help she gave me, as if I was truly pathetic. Second, I just refused to talk about the basic things, like my family, girlfriend, past. Third, the clincher, I finally told her everything. And then I told her I loved her. You know what her immediate response was? 'Fuck you, Lester.' Yeah, but I soon enough took her to smoke some moss in a shiny white pipe by the old viaduct by the Patuxent River — moon rippling, we were the moon rippling. When we scampered down the mountainside I bashed my knee. I remember her looking up at me, with that look, that unmistakable look, that showed the way I felt, that showed how everything was reciprocal, the look that said you can do whatever you want with me. I of course did nothing. A long period of chase and retreat games after that, and finally my life just collapsed and I caved in to her world, just as she was graduating and I was moving to Spain to be with my father — my mother who had no money at the time had managed to buy me a ticket. Before I left we slept together, at her parent's house. It was surreal, like landing on the moon, like a god and goddess in a slow motion water ballet. I went to Spain and the letters started, long, flowing, luscious letters. That's where you came in, I believe."
Katherine, as if by design, walked in at that moment with a giant Toblerone bar, which we shared. They giggled about some of their memories, Katherine tapping him on the hip whenever she thought he was exaggerating something, which was most of the time. The way her smile crinkled into a dimple revealed how genuinely shy she was. Anything positive he said about her made her blush and slap him. The negative stuff, if that's really what it was, made her chuckle delicately. But what really made her laugh was when Lester talked about himself, his legendary lack of prowess with tools, appliances, delivery people, phones, Katherine's parents. He worked up a sweat trying to give her what she wanted, which in the end amounted to the upper hand, so she could slap deliciously the fleshy parts of his soul. She sat on his lap, and looked down on his face with a wry grin. Their eyes effervesced for a moment before they tilted over to me. I took the long walk home.
5.
Life at the party house continued. People came in and out all night long, like some kind of extended dysfunctional family. The long red bong was always out, we never bothered recorking the two liter jugs of red wine, and on special occasions (thrice or so a week) someone saw to it that pots of cocaine were produced. The conversation turned around such things as what they would do if they won a million dollars in the lottery, the consensus being to get the first one-way ticket to the islands and wallow in the perpetual holiness of rastafari freebase. I just dug the stereo and the way its beat tracked everything worth happening in the city. Outside, two nearby clubs vied for the air waves, a hard core metal/punk hole and a hard blues biker bar, the bass-heavy sounds mingling into an industrial-grade grinding that Coffee Bob and I used to jam to on the back porch.
Despite all this stimulation, Vesper usually went barhopping around 9:00. Coffee Bob, too, often left to go off to the uptown art bars, and warned me off the ones nearby, saying I'd get knifed for sure. I followed this advice, especially given the number of times the siren's call enlivened the music and the blue light made the shadowy porches and windows glisten. And many a morning I'd walk past police cordons and coagulated pools of blood around "1819" or the "Jolly-O Tavern." But Vesper, a tiny thing with a teacher's pet smile, went to these places, alone, and came back so full of mirth and insanity that it wasn't too long before I wanted to tag along.
"Sure," she smiled one night in her pink denim mini-skirt and leather boots.
She led me through the pitch-black tunnel and out into a street harshly lit on damaged people. She strutted ahead of me into the chalk and sawdust and bent-note blues frenzy of the biker bar. It was like a ZZ Top convention, a long row of long beards lined up like shots along the narrow bar. We walked through, me seeing only the sweet eyes in the wake of Vesper's passage through. At the end, green lights illuminated velvet pool tables. She asked me to get her a Vodka and tonic and went right to the table.
Squeezing in to order a drink between two ham arms tattooed to the shoulder blades was actually easy, for I was so high, I felt invisible, and fit in neatly. My hand made a fearless motion, again the drugs had prepared me, and I pulled out the drinks from the narrow space using all my bus boy training. The guys of course were scowling and muttering curses at me, but I returned only a sleepy-eyed drug smile, and they knew right away I was initiated into their brotherhood of intoxication, so I became their fast friend, an immediate recipient of their deep-down gentleness.
By the time I got back to Vesper, she was running the table, using her tiny hands and knowledge of physics to make one incredible shot after another. She quickly downed the drink I gave her and soon had collected many more from the awestruck pool sharks. While I was waiting for Vesper to finish, I lit up a 'Roy, looked around the room, and soaked up the dueling blues realities of the Telecaster and keening Strat — one John Lee, one Muddy, one Wolf.
Scattered among the men were emaciated biker chicks with sunken cheeks and sallow faces, their skin as tight as leather, bleach and pocks of grease, but still beautiful, from suffering, while their men wore long grey braids and beards like Ezekiel, denim vests and spit-shined key chains pocket-to-pocket, many with canes. They were more serious than businessmen, for they handled a harder woman, they had become what the Harley V-Twin forced upon them, bearing the road that moved too fast and sitting silent in their pain as each road, once taken, bent more harshly away. They had no choice left but to rage on, in remembrance of all who had come before, and of those machines they, scholar mechanics, had lovingly preserved — the Knuckle-, Shovel- and Pan-heads, the Electra and Dyna Wide Glides, the Road King, the Ironhead, the Hugger, the Fatboy, the Softail, the Low Rider, the Night Train as they rolled on, infecting with ugliness all they loved and all that would bind them. That was what was behind the enigmatic, scare-the-shit-out-of-you look they'd perfected: they understood death. I saw this more clearlya few months later when I went with Vesper to the funeral of a biker named Elijah Charity. The brother bikers followed in Harley convoy the cops in black leather to the cemetery, took scoopfuls of dirt with their hands as the crane lowered the remains and completely covered the black box with dirt.
Everybody's talking/ they say I've completely lost my mind
Everybody's talking/ they say I've completely lost my mind
Your loving is so much stronger than I am / and my soul is doing time.
It wasn't long before a corn cob pipe came my way, full of green flakes I knew to be PCP. I gladly inhaled the horse tranquilizer and passed it along. The only real right I had to share their drugs and Saturday night was this communion I felt with them. It was yet another glimpse into how society molds its outcasts, and how these outcasts share their pain.
Vesper and I hopped many bars that night. In one of them, quiet and almost empty, with an assortment of bras draped over the cash register, an old black man cadged a drink and a smoke from me with some incoherent rap about people not knowing where the music came from, as he spouted off the names of Otis Redding, Arthur Conley, William Bell. "D'y'nah ooh ahs paypull ah?" he shouted indignantly. "D'y'nah ooh ah m, hah?"
"You a soul singer?"
"Duh thang."
"Lemme hear you then." I went over to the jukebox, finding only the "classic rock" playlist of songs that had worked grooves into my brain stem, but I did locate "People Get Ready" with Rod Stewart and Jeff Beck, and selected it.
"Curtis Mayfield," he smiled as it began, and started singing away, a raspy gospel of soft anguished highs and overpoweringly resonant lows. His version so much blew away Rod Stewart I felt sorry for the white chap, but I soon forgot all about Rod as my companion wove in all his still-red-hot dreams to the words of the song:
People get ready/ for the train a coming/
don't need no baggage/ you just get on board/
all you need is faith/ to get the diesel humming
don't need no ticket/ you just thank the Lah-ord.
When he was done, it was only he and me and God on the barstools, the pool shooters leaning far on down the line. He looked at me with desperate eyes. I noticed he was very sick: a lame arm, a constant shake, he probably had AIDS which was why he was here instead of in his own community. I grabbed his shoulders and hugged him. He held on as if in a death grip, and in squeezing sucked all the strength and emotion out of me. When he finally let go, he looked at me with pure love, just saying "thankee, thankee." He pulled a stick out of his pocket and gave it to me. "Take 'iss. T's verr impoh'ta." I looked quizzically at the stick — it was from a tree branch, an inch long, half an inch thick, with a slight knobby protrusion on the side. "Ya kin putta quarta innit. Lookee." He then picked up a quarter from the countertop and stuck it between the protrusion and the shaft of the stick. It held there for a few seconds before clanging to the floor. He gave me back the stick. "Hole on ta dat. T's gud lock."
Vesper walked by with a guy who looked exactly like Reverend Jim from "Taxi." "Where are you going?" I asked.
"Rocket Bob here's got some coke and ice. Wanna come along?"
I looked in Bob's face to see if he was hysterically jealous at this thought. His expression seemed blank, the kind of blank that betrays a cauldron of turmoil. I hesitatingly agreed.
Rocket Bob jauntily walked us to his pad. He said he was a house painter, but it was clear he had the DT's and a pretty loose grip on reality. He made comments along the way about how that guy we just passed owed him money and that bag lady over there was an undercover cop. When he asked me what I did, and I said I was a musician, he just as matter-of-factly claimed that he was once a songwriter but stopped because Jimmy Buffett stole all his songs and refused to pay him royalties.
He lived on the second floor of a shuttered Fells Point storefront. He walked us up, still talking all the way. His room overlooked the street. His bed was on a plywood platform facing out through a wide bay window. It looked like some kind of stage. He offered us some orange juice from his refrigerator. He didn't end up having any cocaine or crystal methamphetamine, only some green weed that was so moist he had to toast it in the oven. While he shared a pipe of it, he told us all manner of tall tales, about being a chess master and playing guitar with the "new" Iron Butterfly. When the weed was gone, we wormed out to his entranceway. I was expecting him to make some kind of move for Vesper, after all the bragging talk, but instead he grabbed me and stuck his tongue in my mouth.
I was shocked, and Vesper, on the way back, sensing my unease, said "You don't have to walk me home. If you want to stay with him, that's O.K.," she winked.
I just started laughing. "Do you really think I'm gay?" I asked.
Her almost-leering face hardened. "Aren't you and Coffee Bob...?"
"Queer as a $10 bill?" I asked.
"I just saw you two walk in together and figured, you know, thin, model-types, artistic...I'm sorry."
"Hey, it's not like someone died. Does Larry think I'm gay?"
"How would I know?"
"You didn't discuss it?"
"Why would I discuss the sexual orientation of my roommates with him?"
"I don't know, to get excited or something."
She laughed. "Larry and I don't have anything going on. You're funny."
The walk home suddenly took on a more leisurely pace for both of us. Gone were the frantic need to take in everything, the anxious speed and hard-edged voyeurism. We eased into a liquor store to get a quart of Smirnoff's, club soda, Viceroy's and sister Belair Menthols and aahed at the model train set chugging merrily through a mountain of cotton, its pinpricks of light ablaze. We gazed into the closed-up storefront windows on Eastern Avenue, at fishing tackle, Salvation Army clothes, loud and negligible lingerie on aged indifferent mannequins, huge vats of olives and hanging kielbasa and hard salami, the bowling alley in the old fire station, the floodlit Laundromat, the funeral home. We looked with eyes glinting at these touchstones of East Baltimore coupledom, the only consolation prizes for life here, as if realizing for the first time how very precious these things actually were. We quietly walked past, moved by it all but without any need, as yet, to attach. The breeze grew warmer, like a gentle breath on our backs, seeming to lift us up off the grime-caked street and away — to the island only seagulls knew, where they fly off to be alone together.
She pulled me as if by an invisible string to the waterfront. She warmed her hands in the breeze. I felt a strong urge to grab them, but could not. We stopped at a tall wrought iron fence against the harbor. She told me how her father was raised on these streets, following a trail of fights from bar to bar, and his father before that, who worked his whole life at the Domino Sugar plant in front of us. And going back, from Poland and Italy, a line of seafarers who ended up drifting in to this deep, humid harbor. The wind pushed sharply against the water, seeming to prod us toward the undifferentiating sea, the fence the only thing holding us back. Vesper's long black hair tangled about her face. She tried to control it with her delicate hand. I grabbed it. She looked at me with eyes like obsidian. We kissed.
We ended up somehow back at the house, in my room. I played the most sublime thing I knew: Otis Redding, b/w Steve Cropper, Duck Dunn, Booker T, Al Jackson and the Memphis Horns. She had never heard anything like that before, and, like countless women before, she melted into its liquid fire, its driving but supple rhythms, its flinging off of brutal wisdom in the name of love:
It's early in the morning woh
It's near-about-a quarter to three oh-no
I'm sitting here talkin with my babee
Over cigarettes and coffee...
She took out a bone. The fitzgig popped as she lit it. We shared it like a communion cup, fingers touching and eyes flaring under the flame tip. When I opened my mouth to speak, she put her pinkie on my lips, and whispered there's no need. We nestled on the bed against the green wall and watched a candle burn down — and then we disappeared.
6.
As Vesper cracked open the door to her reality, I began to see that her world did not necessarily jibe with what I had learned to believe about my world. First off, there was the strange matter of the electrical equipment. It was always surging and shorting out, always sending Baltimore Gas & Electric technicians to our place to investigate, they knowing Vesper by now and believing her to be a witch, and our electrical bill always way too low. She had this strange rotating machine in her bedroom. It was some kind of fan with a tone arm that moved like a hand of Shiva, but it didn't really do anything I could figure out. It wasn't plugged in to anything, so I asked her how it worked. She explained, tersely, that it produced positive energy, because it was necessary to balance energy in this spot "on the grid." As to the mechanics of how it actually moved without power, all she said was someone told her how to build it. Who? I asked. She didn't respond. Remarking that this seemed like some kind of perpetual motion machine, I asked her if she had ever tried to sell the idea. She said an old boyfriend talked that kind of crazy talk, too, and made her apply for a patent. She took out a slip of paper with the letterhead of the Security Group of the U.S. Patent Office. It read:
To the applicant above named, her heirs, and any and all of her assignees, attorneys and agents, hereinafter designated principals:You are hereby notified that your application as above identified has been found to contain subject matter, the unauthorized disclosure of which might be detrimental to the national security, and you are ordered in nowise to publish or disclose the invention or any material information with respect thereto, including hitherto unpublished details of the subject matter of said application, in any way to any person not cognizant of the invention prior to the date of the order, including any employee of the principals, but to keep the same secret except by written consent first obtained of the Commissioner of Patents, under the penalties of 35 U.S.C. (1952) 182, 186.
This order should not be construed in any way to mean that the Government has adopted or contemplates adoption of the alleged invention disclosed in this application; nor is it any indication of the value of such invention.
"What the fie-uck? This fountain thing is a breach of national security?" I asked.
She just giggled. "Don't worry about that. You watch. They are already preparing us for more information. In ten years, we'll know all about the visitors."
"Visitors?" I rasped. This was getting way too weird.
"Oh, you don't have to think about this, love. If your reality were not real, you would not perceive it as real. I only believe in miracles because I have witnessed them. Your skepticism is why everyone out there loves you so much."
I felt like the only non-believer at the Flat Earth Society convention. Her cheerful smile, her utter lack of concern at whether I believed her or not, above all, her chuckling at my questions gave me no doorway in. She was like some schizophrenics I had encountered, but there was none of the desperate desire to communicate, the broad leaps of logic, the sadness. It was like she actually was communicating to something far bigger than me inside of her.
She concentrated for a minute. "They remember you from Athekaines, in the Pleiades, before time. They kneel before you in love, for you wear many colors."
"Who? The planet Krypton? Is that where you're from?" I asked.
She laughed again. "Oh no, I'm just like you. Don't let the antenna fool you. I'm really a scientist. Let me explain it this way. Each carbon atom has 6 protons, neutrons and electrons. 666. That's the mark of the devil. Every living thing on Earth is essentially made of carbon in some combination. Earth, in other words, is Hell. Matter is the weight vying against spirit. Empty space — the 99.9999% of the universe between vibrating sub-atomic particles — that's spirit. And everything we know, the body, the Earth, the carbon atom, is inside of it."
"So if I understand you correctly, love is stronger than carbon."
"Yes. Love is what we are made of — literally. All of creation is electromagnetic waveform. Light, for example, is not a something that travels at a certain speed, but a relation. The circular motion of an electron around the nucleus of an atom is essentially an illusion — the relative motion of both energy fields through space gives us that illusion. We perceive matter because we are resonating with the frequencies of that which we perceive. Or, to put it another way, we share in our mind's creation so fully we don't realize it is our creation."
"So...we can never fully explain the universe, because it always moves, or seems to move, as we do?" I asked, quickened by amorous feeling to pay as close attention to this as I could.
"No, we are the universe! Do you think you create the thoughts in your brain? How can you create a thought when you can't create anything else? When energy can be neither created nor destroyed? All we know as reality is electromagnetic radiation, right? What none of the physicists can explain is why this radiation — color, sound, heat, intuition — turns into matter, becomes a 'solid' particle, when we perceive it, but remains a wave, pure undifferentiated energy, when we don't perceive it. But the answer is obvious if you really think about it: there is a mind out there creating pictures for you to see, thinking, in fact, through you. Just as one cell can be cloned into a whole human because it contains all the necessary DNA, so you can tap into all knowledge at any time, if you are conscious enough, open enough to the streams moving through you. To understand, you must have the nonjudgmental openness of the Buddha, the unconditional love of Jesus. Didn't they try to tell us that reality is a metaphor, in which each piece contains the whole? And isn't our task to learn to see the reflection of the whole in detached, broken shards?"
"Isn't that what Spinoza said?"
"I can see you're not ready. We don't have to discuss this any further."
"But the whole thing sounds so illogical to me," I ventured.
"Logic is love — listen to Bach."
And that was that. No more explanation, even as the Shiva fan kept rotating without any further explanation. She was a woman, after all.
And she said all this with such charm, like a Polynesian beauty following some ancient ritual as I watched on mesmerized. It wasn't something she talked about quite often, however. Save for some strange night terrors, she led with me as happy and normal life as a barfly med student who hustled pool could. Sparks flew, however, when her and Katherine got together. They swapped stories about prepubescent experiments in telekinesis like they were recipes. They demonstrated little tricks to us — cards flipping over, the blinds skittering down — like they were ex-athletes picking up a ball again. Katherine learned early on that turning lights on and off was a great way to take some of the starch out of her parents. Vesper, on the other hand, was motivated more by rage; she would make the pots and pans clang together angrily and sometimes would let them drop near someone. But while Katherine graduated to the more immediate world of boys and money, Vesper stayed on. She soon, however, found competition for her soul from a darker force. One night while dreaming of being guilotined, a painting come off the wall within an inch of her head. Another time, when she was depressed and thinking of suicide, the radio automatically turned on to "The Fire Down Below," distortedly loud. In a dream Mary came to her and told it was vanity to use these powers, and by forsaking them the other forces could not harm her. So she worked on inner planes, travelling on an astral rope, finding long-dead relatives, golden personages joyous they had "gotten through" to her, who gave her messages like "Paul is adopted" and "I never knew how I hurt Leonard" that she dutifully passed along to her pooh-poohing but secretly freaking-out family. She eventually went even higher, to nonphysical spheres where she learned that she — like all of us — simultaneously existed on 340 different places in the universe (even in the person sitting next to you), and her existence was a long thread that was part of what connected the vast but unified cosmos. It was then that "the visitors" began to interrupt her dreams. They transmitted thought-bursts in English and often came in the guise of people she knew, but she came to recognize three basic types — the classic light bulb heads with big eyes, the small shriveled reptilian ones, the large horned monsters who usually sat in the back watching. They would stick long probes into her, pass large crystals over her body to remove things — blood, tissue — and they implanted in her pituitary gland some kind of chip that she swore she could feel. When she prayed to Jesus to help her, they said "We know your God, he cannot help you now." They only came in her dreams, but she showed Katherine and I strange discolorations on her skin, the only surface marks she bore — besides the electrical surges that baffled BG&E. She knew they were coming whenever she saw "trucks in the sky" amid the great rolling ball of the cosmos. She finally learned from, she claimed, sources in Sirius, that they were a weak, dying race who were trying desperately to harvest some of the power of humans to generate the love energy that powered the universe. They fed off her fear of them and all she had to do was ask them to stop, and the law of the universe dictated they would, and they did. But, ever brave, she kept going further, and was now in "contact" with all manner of "collective rays" who traveled inside light and were at that moment in time heading towards Earth to assist humanity in the transformation of the planet. The veil was to be lifted slightly, new gamma energy infused from the photon belt, we were to be allowed more information about the essentials of our existence, for we were all star children who had voluntarily chosen to incarnate here lifetime after lifetime in order to teach the rest of the universe how to acquire grace without any knowledge of the truth that underlay things. Building light from blindness was all part of the source rediscovering itself and generating with the joy of discovery love to fuel the continuation of the cosmos. It was like some kind of running bet, in which one side predicted that an entity cut off from any knowledge of their source would descend into darkness and fear, while the other wished that humanity would find the tools even in darkness to build up enough love energy to keep the planet alive. Apparently, the forces of light had won the bet, and Vesper was one of the entities who had prepared other planets for ascension and now would help with this one. And she was apparently a very valuable component of this dynamic, even though she couldn't discuss these matters with more than two or three people and appeared to all the world as a normal, unassuming person — albeit with a few unusual interests.
Vesper explained all this dryly, as if she had become bored and rather embarrassed by the whole thing. Katherine, however, was amazed, pressing her for every detail as if she held some kind of key to where we were going. As for me, I'll tell you honestly — I was totally wigged. I liked the part about humans being honored throughout the universe for our bravery and service — I liked to think there was something out there clapping hands whenever I did something noble, especially when no one else saw it. But the whole thing about this network of invisible communication that was in effect a giant ant colony in which we were all one big interacting mind engaged in the production of love energy — to believe such a thing would send me over the tiny barrier fence put up by society to keep me from hurtling into the crevasse — even if it was, as Vesper insisted, objectively provable. How could one live in such a state so totally at odds with how one is supposed to conduct oneself? It was exactly as they'd warned us about so long ago: "it's all in your mind, it's only your imagination." Little did we know that God Itself rested on this thin imagined thread society tried to wrestle from you. Vesper I suppose handled it by drinking herself to sleep every night to keep her higher self under more control, and perhaps to help her forget that she was literally alone with this incomparable, terrible gift.
She and Katherine would spend days consulting all manner of divination cards — Tarot, Mah Jongg, I Ching, Angel, Crystal, Animal Medicine, Runes — not for "advice" in the customary sense, but for a connection to the many layers of spirit guides within and outside their minds, like some kind of extended tea party.
This was a blessing for Lester and I, for we finally got what seemed unlimited jam time, and we took the opportunity to write songs. Usually, he would come in with a chordal framework, and I would come in with, say, a song title, like, for example, "Red Lights." While he planged away on his Spanish guitar, I'd sing wordless improvisations in, around, on top, under, against them, like some kind of stream getting directed by his stony chords. He'd pick out and isolate melodies he liked, and start singing them himself, shaping them into more substantial things. His wordless moaning in turn would suggest words to me, almost like the words were there to be plucked. "Creativity," it seems, is only listening, being open to the sound, to what was there all along. For "Red Lights," a story/feeling emerged out of this honing, of rebels who fall in love, and find unity in opposition to society, which dooms their love. Lester had an Argentinean lilt to his guitar playing, and a gravelly delivery that made me think, for this ballad, of "Blue Valentine" by Tom Waits. "I'm thinking torch song, with lots of drinking, Manhattans and pink squirrels" he said as he played a quick descending progression punctuated by a quivering flamenco hesitation.
"They drank blue Valentinos," I sang the first line, a word to a chord, D - Amaj7 - G - D.
"That's a new thing. I'm there," he replied, shifting, for the second line.
"While the world was on the table," I continued. G-A-D.
"They said they felt somehow related," he added, getting into the story. G - D.
"To the kingdom" A
"At the top" Bm
"Of the stairs." A-G.
Verse one. Then I asked "What is their name?"
"I've always been partial to the name Kevin."
"Kevin touched her..."
"On the elbow."
"She went swinging in the sunlight."
"Make her tremble. She was trembling like...a rosebud"
"Or an outlaw on the run."
He modulated to a dark minor scale, full of weighty, thick notes. All his unexpressed remorse came spilling out through his vibrating strings, and my empathy, my openness to his confession, allowed the tune to just spill out.
"I can't admit it but I'm broke/ broke but you are wonderful
Wrap the distant time/ around a finger/ entwined around me"
"Run like a mad ghost when the town is all in flames," he added, sensing my peculiar pain.
"What'll they be saying on your cornerstone?" I raised the ante.
"Who will speak your name?" he called it.
He modulated again, to a major key, and notched his voice up to a falsetto, and in doing so expressed as best he could the fears, dreams and motivations behind his actions:
"Run bully, run bully, run bully run from the scene
Run bully, run with it, there will be no mess to clean."
I pondered this as he tightened up this segment, then added my own analysis:
"You're free now to walk past the counter with your pockets full of meat
Little by little, you let them come back and get you."
Then it was back to the verse. It was clear we were longer in Nicholas Ray tragic young love territory, but someplace far more personal, inexpressible, and we spent hours getting the timbre of our own doom just right:
They made love all through the morning
There was no one that could touch them
But he went to buy a paper
And the darkness swallowed them
The roses were still in the window
Men dive from buildings still in Tokyo
Two may pass at intersections
Or stare at red lights all day.
It wasn't the words, it wasn't the melody, it wasn't even the way the melody fit the words. Our thoughts had met and found enough common ground to open up a universe of understanding.
But when we played this and our countless other songs to people, to their yawns and complaints that they couldn't make out the melody or words, we thought our songs were too personal for other people to relate to. It was in actuality the other way around: the songs were too personal to us to be able to play them in front of other people. We almost intentionally garbled the lyrics, tried to cancel out each other's singing, subverted the melody with noodlings on the guitars and bass. We couldn't hide behind the songs at all, and we marveled how John Lennon could make others feel his uniqueness extended out to them, or how Van Morrison could objectify his inner torment. How did they bleed out their lives to scores of voyeuristic fans when we couldn't even sing with a straight face to our girlfriends?
But we had to try. We had to get it out to that mass of nothingness called "the people." There was too much insight that burned into us when we worked together to let all this just vanish into the atmosphere. It wasn't that we had put so much work into it (though we had) or that we thought it was better than anything else out there (though we did) or even that the world needed in some way the glimpse of freedom we at our best offered (though we clearly thought so). It was that we were haunted, by the real source of this music, an entity unnamable, unknowable, but who would occasionally sing along when we were alone. We didn't claim to know what it really wanted, but we felt it could not rest until it was heard. In hindsight, we should have realized that other people hearing our songs was just the tip of a vast iceberg.
We brought Coffee Bob back in and returned to The Blue Rooster. Since Katherine and Vesper had heard us play, they wanted no part of going where we would be embarrassed by "real musicians." We got there early, and this time there was only a pickup band of local blues musicians ahead of us. Although they played a number of standards, what really struck me was the improvisation that started their set. They found it so easy to exist in the strict blues form, and found the interplay of voices so comfortable, their sound disappeared into the great blues symphony in the sky. It reminded me of the first time Lester and I jammed together, when there was no expectation, no self-knowledge, only the familiarity of the new. Now we had become so clever, so attuned to each other's moods and the subtleties of the musical tradition, that it sounded boring, like a well-tempered clavier. I marveled how these musicians, far older and more experienced than we were, could make it all seem so natural. But they, too, by the end, had tightened it up into an homage, and we just couldn't care anymore as it rippled over us.
We went on stage, trying just to get it out, to get it right, and although we had softened out the dissonance and got the beat into something approximately regular, there was a blandness, an overseriousness. It sounded diminished for being perfect, it lacked the chomping at the bit for what we wanted to express but couldn't. It was only music, not something more life affirming and important. Without the tension of us trying to make an effort against considerable mechanical odds, we were left with only product, and with that the realization that what mattered deeply to us may not even make sense to others. The thing it was to me it was not to others — so what was it, really? The few people listening to us had quizzical expressions, as if to ask "why are you making so much out of three chords and a four/four beat?" In their eyes I saw all my ideals vanish, like I had still imagined rock musicians to be like Saturday morning cartoon heroes, who after fighting crime ghouls played guitar in lame suits. Why were we playing? What were we trying to prove?
When we finished, the owner of the club came up and grabbed the microphone like Dick Clark. "That was, uh, inneresting. What did you say the name of your band was?"
"Urban Shocker," we mumbled.
"Pardon?"
"Urban Shocker," I repeated.
He looked kinda strange at me and said "ladies and gentlemen...these guys."
We got a few scattered, condescending claps, like we were no different than elementary school lads reciting the pledge of allegiance at parent's day.
A massive drunk Indian who had sat at the bar the whole time talking loudly to no one in particular came over afterwards and said, in a whispersoft voice, "Hi, I'm Scott. Thank you for your gift" as his eyes tried to suck our souls out. Larry the harmonica player was there to hear some buds play, and gave us a nice critique: "tune better, play in key, and sing into the microphone. And another thing," he paused, "it's for the girls. You've got to come on without offending the boyfriend. That's the key. You have to want them to have sex."
As we were leaving, the bartender came up and said "you guys sounded a lot better than the last time. Keep practicing. By the way, Jimmy Page was in here tonight."
"What?" asked Coffee Bob. "Are you sure?"
"He had hookers on each arm, drank shot after shot of Dewar's and didn't know if it was morning or night. Don't you think I'd recognize him?"
"Did he like us?" asked Lester.
"How the hell would I know? But when the blues band got off stage he stuck his fat face right up at 'em, saying 'nice set, blokes,' like he was spitting in their face. It was hilarious."
Coffee Bob and Lester's heads were floating against the top of Coffee Bob's car all the way home. "Jimmy Page heard us play" was the continuous buzzing mantra that made everything OK, even though I didn't remember them ever talking about Led Zeppelin before. I was just trying to figure out who in the sparse audience he was. He must have been the short, fat, grey-haired, wool-capped old geezer in the trench coat with the inflamed jowls and the red slits for eyes, escorted like he was a blind man by two street skanks. Is that what happens to those rock'n'roll heroes who have the temerity not to die? And if I ever did become famous, would I too have to do the time until eternity in seedy bars drinking enough scotch to handle the thousands of local bands I would have to endure like some kind of charity obligation?
Lester saw it in far less ambiguous terms. "It's a message from the skies, man. What are the odds of someone like that being in Baltimore, much less coming in to that bar on the night we happened to be playing? How much clearer a signal can we get not to give up? It's really starting to happen for us."
And so it came to pass that we listened to Led Zeppelin for the next several weeks. My roommates didn't mind that we "dropped some Led, man," for Zeppelin to them was like the scent of linden-blossom tea and petite madeleines to Proust: the ticket to the amusement park of one's past. As for us, we so sifted through the entrails for clues to our personal fate that any meaning was lost on us. All we got out of the bargain was the more frequent visits of Barbie, self-proclaimed "world's foremost Zeppelin authority." But when we told her of our brush with Zep greatness, she didn't go into her usual rant about how records played forward spoke to and from the conscious half of the mind, but when played backwards revealed authentic messages given and received by the equivalent unconscious mind (and that one can really hear the backwards messages in any conversation if one focused hard enough on it). Nor did she go into her predictable spiel about how we had to give it up for Satan, acknowledge Him as fount of all spiritual advancement in this tainted world, nor did she analyze the power of Zeppelin's music as the stealing of the spirits of Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin by Messrs. Page and Plant, nor did she urge us to drink lamb's blood while "Dazed and Confused" played or else die from the unnatural rhythms and unholy dissonance.
Instead of these her usual riffs, she favored us with an anecdote of how she had "met" Bob Dylan. She was at a Grateful Dead sound check, on the front row of the balcony so she could get the choicest Jerry feedback. While digging that, she noticed Dylan was sitting directly underneath her, smoking a joint, sucking like his life depended on it. He finally leaned into a long, slow toke, which he held in with a Cheshire semi-smile for a few moments. At the split second he started to blow it out, Barbie let out a huge scream "DID YOU GET ALL OF THAT ONE BOBBY BAYBEE?" He started coughing spasmodically, looking around madly, small and vulnerable once more to all the shit the crazy world could dish. He finally looked up into the moon face of our crazy 300-pound hippie in the tie-dye toga, who was smiling, adoring and sharing his delicious secret, and he started laughing uncontrollably, just as he did at the beginning of "Bob Dylan's 115th Dream," way out of proportion to anything that had happened. At least that's the way she told it.
Having trumped us, she started playing Lester's guitar and asked us to join her. Somehow, with her simple chords and tuneless, rhymeless melodies, I found myself again, as if I was Eric Clapton slumming it by backing up Delany and Bonnie. It all made sense again: my playing music must have been some kind of divine sanction if I spent so many waking hours consumed by its reveries instead of worrying about what I should have said to this person or what that person expected me to do or of all the things I was always missing out on; as Marlene Dietrich said at the end of "Touch of Evil," what does it matter what you say about people? Music was about chasing after the shiniest butterflies, seeing how far out on the cliff one could cast one's net. Drowned out into irrelevance was the judgment of all those people who could not go out onto our limb with us.
After we played, Barbie insisted on preparing a luau, and while we salvaged the last embers of the weed, she went downstairs to the kitchen, found bananas, strawberries, limes and oranges, and crushed them in Coffee Bob's old bartender blender. With a sudden jolt of electrical power, she succeeded in pureeing them, letting it grind while she found in the cupboard a mother lode of red pistachios. The blender was still going when we heard her mashing the shells with her clogs on the deck. She had gotten through about 200 when the blender top flew off and a lumpy spray of pink exploded over three rooms, even getting into the toilet bowl, like some kind of super roach bomb.
Vesper, Hedda and I came out just in time to see the fireworks. We looked in horror at our cotton candy home, only to find the porch looking like a firing range of spent pistachio shells and Barbie red-handed, trying to talk her way out of it, but all she could say was "it's a party house, dudettes, blah lah lah lah loop, shit happens, aw well, whatever, where were we, and then they, you know what I mean?" and finally, when pressed with physical violence, "I'll clean it up, Ranger Rick, I can wipe my own asshole while I'm walking down the street to get a cup of water ya know, I just need to digest my Lotus berries."
And so Barbie was banished from the house, not to her face, but to us, after she finally left, hours later, with no cleanup effort in sight. Vesper scrubbed the whole place down with ammonia, while Coffee Bob and I shoveled the pistachio husks into lawn and leaf bags. Her air hung over us like a spell, however, and she worked on Coffee Bob until we finally agreed to go out to her place to jam. So off we went, equipment in tow, in Katherine's Civic.
We drove straight into Towson, a town of about 40,000 people just north of Baltimore that to us at the time seemed like the inner circle of Hell. Towson, it should be noted, is a perfectly nice and respectable bedroom community, as well as an attractive center for businesses that wanted to relocate from the city. It is the seat of Baltimore County, and full of interesting malls and jewelry stores and some of the best hospitals and colleges in Maryland. We didn't see it in those lights at the time, however. We saw it as the bloody red emblem of all that was wrong in society, an antiseptic place of all-too-easy diagnosis and all-too-quick surgery, of passionless people who refused to even acknowledge the suffering of those who were open to the world's anguish. We drove with sick stomachs through block after block of ugly, overpriced, upwardly mobile homes, each of them eager for social sanction and market value. Some were greyblue, some greyyellow, some even greypink, most were vinyl sided, all were endowed with shubberies and embroidered with small, wilted flowers — lawns manicured within an inch of their lives. Any poignancy in them had been forcibly removed, so that the owners presumably could be free of any thought of age and obsolescence — which itself, of course, was poignant. In the epicenter of this suburban nightmare were the new mini-towers that denied the old big city from which they sprang, the malls that reduced people's hopes and dreams to sequins and chatchka, and the people who walked the streets with an attitude of smug superiority for the sole simple reason that they were blind, much like the imperialists who seeded Western civilization on unsuspecting primitives, and who refused to see what the other side had to offer and, by so doing, took over everything.
Barbie lived in the very middle of Towson, in the only dwelling for miles of commercial propositions. It lay in the shadow of the recently-closed Hutzler's Department Store, next to an upscale Burger King and a Le Corbusier-like dentist's tower. It was an old colonial house, windows out, paint gone, wood sagged beyond repair, a corrugated chicken shack in its overgrown back yard. It was the only thing with soul in the whole town, a remnant of the days when it actually was a town. The few panes intact in Barbie's upstairs window were decorated with large Runic characters. From the litter-free streets they looked positively Satanic, the only hint of evil allowed here, which of course made it the only thing that was not evil. The letters looked out over a lifeless Brasilia-like modernity like a quiet cop, the only bulwark against the brutal assault on our senses.
We parked in the tall grass surrounding Barbie's house and hacked our way through stalks of ragweed and crabgrass that resembled spider plants. We entered through the locked and unhinged back door.
The kitchen was piled to the roof with dirty dishes and pans (some with brown scum so caked on they should have been thrown away long ago). The Formica floor was sticky and deeply stained. Lawn mower bodies hung on the walls and engine guts spilled along the floor (Barbie's "boyfriend" Blue — she called him "mein Fuhrer" — was a hippie lawn mower repairman). As disheveled as the kitchen was, it was next to Godliness compared to the rest of the house. The living room was nothing but a massive, chaotic heap of clothes, junk, paper and wrappers. We waded along a thin cleared path like we were walking a plank, to a fuzz-pocked divan sort of floating in the sea of fabric. On it Barbie lounged with her guitar, her guinea pig hopping in and out of her hair like a furry rubber ball.
"Dude-orado-me's! You smelled this fine fat aged schwag, don't lie, Smokey Joe is all y'alls I-tin-o-rary," she cheered, as if it was the most normal thing in the world to drive through Towson. Indeed she did have some dope, but, as usual, spent an hour rolling, holding, and lighting it for herself before we got any of it. She occupied the wait bitching about her boyfriend, which I won't annoy you with now, except that it descended into a shouting match between Coffee Bob and Barbie, Coffee Bob complaining how hard it was to get out here, and the only reason we did was because she had no respect for anyone and as a result got herself kicked out of our house, to which Barbie replied "If I had fifty bucks an hour for every time I nursed you back to sanity, I'd have my own daytime talk show," and then, in a rolling blur of syllables and a little-boy laugh: "you are just too, too...two people in one."
Meanwhile, I found a piece of paper filled with strange alien hieroglyphics. It was a letter from Blue to Barbie. I picked up her guitar and composed a tune around his words:
I disappeared...last fall
I thought I could handle it but I can't
I just can't be...a buddy
With a business to run I can't have the extra angles
of thinking about you
happens every time I see you
I can not lighten up
You'll never understand me
Don't show up again until you're safely chaperoned by a new boyfriend.
As I performed this, full of major seventh chords, frequent modulations and an overembellished melody, Barbie cackled joyously, rocking back and forth with campy handclaps. "He's such an prick," she finally said, "he could be a top 40 song."
We never did jam that night. We drew pictures with Barbie's crayons, in the Towson darkness producing terrifying Jungian archetypes that violently melted into each other. Then we listened to her songs, read other letters of Blue, and spent the better part of the night traipsing the deserted streets — at Barbie's request — for an open sub shop. We finally found one five blocks away, where I ordered a vegetarian pita. We drifted along what was once the old, poor, black part of Towson, saw a brand new concrete library and a white senior citizens home complete with black security guards and television cameras. Everything was new, clean, as if there was no past, not even a plaque. We ended up staring at the Pegasus on the buzzing Mobil Oil sign, contemplating the quiet, endless miles of bedrooms, kitchens, TV's and industrially fragrant suburban bathrooms, hoping there was something at the end of this road besides another cluster of people. But they were in all conceivable directions. And, despite what Jimmy Page might have to say, they, not us, would be the ones who decided what reality was.
7.
"Turn the music down and dance with me. We're going on a road trip."
I looked up from the fretboard, and tamped out the cigarette in the bowl that held the remains of my beans and rice dinner. Lester had on his light green madras shirt, a sure sign that he wanted to go to a club. "Now?" I asked.
"Yeah, road trips are the secret of life. You improvise, you screw up and say hello to the terror. How else can life make sense? There's a new band playing at The Rapunzel Club."
"Death metal?"
"Not tonight, Mr. Livingstone."
"What's their name?"
"Even if I could remember, it wouldn't mean anything to you. Like I said, they're new."
I had no choice but to go, even though I was uneasy at the thought of walking halfway across town to the notorious heavy metal bar that was undoubtedly full of women in pink saran wrap bodices go-go dancing in lion's cages, ogled on by their working-redneck male counterparts (who in the Sixties would have worn crewcuts but in the Eighties wore chest length hair). But the air was warm, the feel of the evening sensual. We walked past open row house doors, revealing the center of life — the TVs — within, covered with doilies, in front of always-comfortable sofas, the walls arranged with velour prints of the Virgin Mary and K-Mart family photos. On the scrubbed-down stoops were the men with Elvis hair and the women in bathrobes, so serious they seemed to draw the night air out of their cigarette filters.
Lester hooked us up a ride on the city tugboat from some wharf rat who had hands like rope and a voice like hot tar. He sold us a bag of extremely strong krypie that we shared on the way. The tugboat, despite its peeled paint and grime, was actually just for show, for authenticity, he explained in the thickest of East Baltimore accents, a curious mixture of Cockney, Brooklynese and Southern, and, while we toked under the fluorescent factory lamps that seemed to sizzle on the choppy waters, he went on about the days when he was really riding the cold salt winds of truth as a fisherman on the high seas, but all I really caught was something about "icicles hanging out of your fucking nose."
He dropped us off at a pier on the spit of land across the water from Fells Point, which was a strip of factories I saw everyday with no inkling people actually lived there. But live here they did, as in some kind of alternate reality, strange mutated people — hunchbacked men, bald children, twitching mothers — all looking away from us as if we were a beam of light and they were vampires, scurrying towards miniature rowhouses that looked like formstone dollhouses going on for miles, broken only by the vast manufacturing plants where I was told most of the nation's olive oil and dishwashing liquid was produced (well, they looked the same, I reasoned).
We rose very quickly from this valley of living death onto Federal Hill, at the time a small cobblestoned enclave of elegantly refurbished colonial-era row homes - complete with bullet hole leaded glass, silk draperies, ornate newels that must have caused many a craftsman to lose his mind, even an occasional horse-drawn cart. It was hard to buy into this expensive fantasy, however, given that the lights of downtown flared in on history like a Hollywood premiere. The Hill was inhabited by young and hungry public relations flacks, advertising executives, lawyers, and M&A specialists who could dock their weekend boat homes at the harbor and whistle while they walked to work. We passed two women approximately our ages, and exchanged hard, flirtatious eyes. They were dressed in power shoulder pads and we in flowing ratty robes, but we knew our scary bohemianism would have filled just as much of a void in their lives as their money would have filled in ours, and it could've worked, if only we were sensible and practical instead of the hopeless romantics they would have fallen in love with.
We dropped down from the Federal Hill pinnacle, and quickly fell into some kind of ravine. At the bottom was a community entirely under the expressway, a strip of condemned rowhouses approximately the same age as those on Federal Hill. People were ambling about shamelessly, cars were loitering with windows open, heads leaning out exchanging some indecipherable code. Lester had to point out to me that everyone on the street was on heroin, which explained the smiles, the laughing, the ease. It seemed like a dusty old west town, as Interstate 95 rumbled above, except they slung horse here, not guns. A town of tough, quiet and quick people with blue glassine skin, pinprick pupils, sunken limbs and faraway gazes, and that cadaverous junkie walk - stiff, upright, slow, yet spasmodic, shivering, arms too long at the sides, head jerking too unpredictably, almost sleepwalking, with a palpable sense of menace, brought on from the mingling of ecstasy with the abyss. They seemed selfless, in love with death, their obsession no different than any lover's, for they had a privileged sense of death's splendor and beauty, as if the lock that kept us hinged to our miserable lives had been loosened for them. Something else I noticed that no one who hadn't actually been in such a place would ever have known: there were cop cars everywhere, just to make sure the bazaar functioned smoothly.
Things got really scary beyond Junkie Town, as we had to walk under the jet-black eaves of ruined factories. Lester worried that a pack of rats could take us out and no one would ever find our bodies. But soon we were face to face with the gaudy sign that announced "The Rapunzel Club," our destination — a quick exit off the highway for people with cars.
It was a weeknight, but even so, it was amazing how few people were there: us, a far-away couple, a guy with an Oxford shirt ripped at the cuffs who insisted on spitting at everybody that moved by him, and a few straggler metal heads perched at the bar.
The band started playing, and it soon became clear why Lester didn't remember the name: it was John Lennon! Those same simple but complex melodies, that unearthly voice, the irresistible edge of danger. Like Lennon, he metamorphized during the course of the songs, from a frail aesthete to a bully to something harder and more closed off, except this time he was playing with a trio, a mountain man bass player and a drummer obviously in the advanced stages of a junk string — in fact, the whole band seemed to be stoned on something far beyond our ken. They pretended to be punk rockers — distorted guitar, raw fast comping, sudden barrages of drum fire, then the bass a step behind, making the thing sound like a boiler room with a few screws loose. The more I listened, though, the more it seemed like we were hearing ourselves play: it was the same tortured singing and idealistically leaping melody lines, the same rejection of everything clever and hip and popular and virtuositic, the same contradictory lyrics (although the only one I actually caught was "my whole existence is for your amusement" — and that could have been "my hole stinks from your glue jets.") The singer/guitarist/leader of the group was at a far remove from the cavernous hall and the few indifferent people who clearly thought nothing of him and his bag of earthly tricks. We, on the other hand, couldn't even ignore the couple on the other side of the room, bopping out of rhythm to the music, hugging and kissing and turning the hymns of waste and sorrow into something sexual and safely under their control. We wanted to go over and shake them and say "that's not what the music is about at all," but we didn't want to interfere with the smile on their faces, preferring like Rock'n'Roll martyrs to suffer their insult ironically. But soon, even they were gone, and we were left with a band playing endless streams of high-energy music, to no one. Even we were unworthy of its sincerity, it seemed destined for some other planet, some other consciousness that wouldn't wipe it off its smirky chin.
We left deeply disturbed, not only by what we'd witnessed, the fully formed brilliance of that seemed to be in the process of destroying itself, but by the fact that this was our own pain and insight coming through to us, and I could almost physically feel God stepping in to tell us, "it's about the listening, boys, to suffer with them, to feel the spot they've been given to touch — that is the true work, this playing is just ejaculation." Or, as the eastern sages put it: "to gain everything, you must lose yourself." Lester noted on the way back how insufficient his art was, to which I responded that art was always flawed. He said no, that's not what he meant, he meant his art was insufficient, it added up to nothing despite the vast amount of work he'd put into it. I responded by saying that that may be true, but something about the two of us together made it almost work, to which he said "no, the two of us together are even worse...can you tell me why?" he asked finally, sincerely, at about the same time that whoever was calling the shots arranged to have us pass by The Blue Rooster. It was just like one of those "Jesus Saves" graffiti's you always encounter just when you are confused and in need of an epiphany. I bit my tongue, not daring to share this insight. It was like a lock kept me from talking.
We knew this band, no matter what it would later do, could never duplicate what it had done that night, yet it fell on completely deaf ears, including ours. We could only hear ourselves. Even the band's name taunted us. Nirvana, how could that extinguished heaven transmit to a world hungry to hear it? I could not forget the sight of the singer as he walked off the stage, in a complete rigor mortis of anger at everything — was that what was finally required?
8.
Lester and I would occasionally see movies at an old Hollywood theatre in what was now a ghetto — massive condemned balconies, an old locked-up piano, yellowed posters of Joan Fontaine movies, peeling wallpaper with once-gold Fleur de Lis's that looked grey when the lights were on and pink when the lights went down, big bloody side lights that looked like roman candles, bubbles all over the ceiling, the smell of mildew so strong it was like urine. Typical of the fare of this theatre was Sorority House Massacre 7, something we could, with the rest of the house, laugh, shriek and ogle at. This time, however, we became hooked into multiple viewings of the movie that was more than a movie, that seemed to bring on so much of what was to follow.
Set in early 50's Harlem and New Orleans, it concerned the efforts of one Harry Angel (played by Mickey Rourke), a phony hard-boiled detective, to pursue Johnny Favorite, a pre-war crooner with a trail of slime behind him who had seemingly disappeared off the face of the Earth. His client, a Louis Cypher (played by Robert De Niro), will not let poor Mr. Angel off the hook, even as every person he inquires after in his impossible search — the morphine-addict doctor, the voodoo bluesman, the Satan-worshipping politician — is savagely murdered. Angel, in locating these people trying to keep their horrible pasts secret, seems to bring death upon them — while, at the same time, he seems to know these people already, and they him. They all seem to be playing out a game for the benefit of someone else, assuming roles for some other audience. We find out soon enough that they may actually be playing to Cypher, who may actually be Lucifer, coming down to claim Johnny Favorite, who may actually have sold his soul for fame but tried to whelch out of the deal by taking another soul — by eating the heart of a young serviceman named Johnny Angel.
The true terror of the movie was just how innocent Johnny remained, how he couldn't be touched despite all the Devil's attempts to bring him back to the scene of his crimes. Only Johnny had no past, and only he, who did not really know how these murders happened, would suffer eternally for them (in fact, the final vision where we see him committing the murders comes off as a fevered hallucination "guided" by the "hand of course" of Satan).
One didn't know even this, for Johnny could equally be pure evil, so well disguised in his obliteration of everything left of his past that only the most underhanded duplicity of the Devil could corral him, to save humanity.
It ultimately came down to how one never knows what one does to others. The characters in the movie, upon seeing Johnny (again?), seemed shells of what they were, waiting for him to return yet blocking out all memory, equally destroyed and given life by him, just as he simultaneously tried to remember and tried to forget. As most genuine movies are, this one was about fame, the lives that were destroyed in the pursuit of it, and how, when fame was gone, the crooner was a forgotten soul even to himself.
Which one of us was Johnny Favorite and which one Johnny Angel? How many lives had we already unwittingly ruined chasing something that was ultimately empty? In reaching outside of our identities and the lots that had been given to us, would we even recognize ourselves in the mirror? Would there be anything there? These were the questions that plagued Lester and me in the aftermath of the only true fame we were to know, brought on, as usual, by Barbie.
She would come back to visit us when the women of the house weren't around. She'd bring along "friends" who would sit in some kind of silent judgment on our work. The only comment came from this gentle, half-Japanese guy with a huge blonde fro who said "nice...sounds like Fleetwood Mac...early Mac." As innocuous as this seemed, it soon led to our being invited to the "collective jam" that occurred twice a week at the Jelly Belly, an old WPA building in the heart of the Greenmount Avenue demilitarized zone that was now, according to Coffee Bob and Barbie, Baltimore Communist Party headquarters. The space was vast, empty except for a decimated Christian Science reading room-like bookshelf and the crated remains of the weekly "farmer's market" that took place there each week. Painted on the concrete block walls were Orozco-like portraits of Che Guevara, Daniel Ortega and Fidel Castro, and they stood in sharp contrast to the vaguely Nazi stone eagle, common to many buildings from that era, watching us from its perch above the window. The musicians and musical equipment were all in one corner, looking smaller-than-life.
There were four other shaggy minstrels besides Lester, Coffee Bob and myself: a beach blonde bum on alto sax, a gay black intellectual on a broken-down bass, a grizzled hippie on keyboards, and a tenor sax player who looked Mongolian but was actually half-Haitian, half-Italian and looked exactly like somebody, only I couldn't remember who. We settled into a sort of psychedelic drone jam, sacrificing musical ideas like eggs into the blender's continuous channel of sound. The others didn't seem to care one way or another that we had joined them. The keyboard guy kept stopping to write down the notes, even though there weren't any.
Barbie suddenly romped in with two guys in black leather jackets. One had purple hair and pulled a leash connected to the other, who wore a spiked dog collar. The leader demanded Coffee Bob's guitar and started filling the room with temple-shaking feedback. The other guy hopped on the empty drum set and started rattling off military runs. Everyone but Coffee Bob, Lester, the tenor man and I started packing up. I felt a surge of electricity as these two increased the tempo and volume. This was the fearlessness we'd been waiting for.
"These are the dudes I've been evangelicizing about," Barbie said to them. "They're da bong."
"Know any Throbbing Gristle?" the purple haired one asked us as the other one laughed.
"We're not into death disco," intoned Lester seriously.
"Rock on," said the purple one, who gave his name as Napalm.
We started to play one of our songs. Napalm stopped us with his low, raspy voice. "Nah, man, this ain't no snivel-city coffeehouse. Deep shit like 'at gotta go down hard, turn your brain into fucking snot."
He proceeded to demonstrate, running Lester's chords through a buzz saw, while the drummer, Andy, double-timed the tom-tom and hit the high hat with an almost syncopated ska style. Lester and I dove right in, churning into and against their choppy waves of sound. Amazingly, they adjusted to our chord and tempo changes, too, like they were eerie doppelgangers just waiting for our songs to vent their frustration on, just as we'd been waiting for frustration to vent our songs on.
Keeping up with the drummer took all my chops. My two front fingers soon blistered from plucking, so I went to the next two, then the thumb, until all my fingers were bloody, so then I played with a pick, and still he kept pushing me down, forcing me into the background, where the bass should be. The tenor man, meanwhile, kept wailing through it all. Lester's and my voice became hoarse and brittle, until they sounded like charming devils instead of strident angels.
Within moments of playing with them, it was like I finally tasted the reward that had long been withheld for living life — the skies detonated and voluptuous paradise embraced us in all its perfection and ecstasy. Coffee Bob, meanwhile, was seething about having his guitar taken away. Barbie tried to smooth him down like a cowlick, their continuous wall of fuss inciting us further to blast them, the town, the world, through the vortex that sound waves echoed into on their way out of earshot and towards their true home.
We finally took a break when Andy starting waving his arm frantically, saying "it's numb, it's numb." I thought he was having a heart attack but it turned out it was only air bubbles in his blood from shooting heroin. They asked us if we shot, and we just showed them our virgin arms. "Make that too fucking bad," replied Napalm in his raspy junkie voice. "Can't kick the world's ay-ass," he muttered, "without discovering Chinee. Can't play what you hear.
"It's also cheaper than pot," he added matter-of-factly. "Shit, pot costs as much per ounce as gold, or prescription drugs."
Then he took out a knife and began cutting into what looked like the beginnings of a tattoo into his wrist. The blood came up easily and he shook it at us, laughing as he sprayed the walls and the equipment. "Shit, I'm sailing. What's say we give 'em the Hong Kong freeze?" Napalm asked. "Yeah, yeah, yeah," snickered Andy.
They left the building and I became very afraid of what they would come back with. Coffee Bob, meanwhile, wanted to leave and was trying to reclaim a cord he had long ago lent Lester. Lester claimed it was actually his, using as his argument a variation of possession is nine/tenths of the law and brute force is the other tenth. Coffee Bob continued to whine, reciting a long list of borrowed equipment Lester had chiseled from him, and demanded either replacement or payment. Lester became so furious he finally yelled "you are a faggot among homosexuals," just as the boys walked back in. Coffee Bob left in an impotent huff, dragging Barbie behind him.
Napalm and Andy carried in a grocery bag full of alcohol: beer, triple sec, rum, peppermint schnapps, vodka. They took out two Big Gulp cups and did some furious mixing. Then they pulled out fizzing concoctions that they put in our face and told us to guzzle down. It tasted exactly like Dr. Pepper. I drank about ten of them before I realized my mind was swirling with incoherent energy, everything dissolving through nets of meaning, which gave everything a higher, more uproarious meaning.
"T'aint no poison worse than hootch," smiled Napalm with his beatific junkie smile.
We tried to pick up our instruments and play covers, but Napalm and Andy did not recognize any of the names we threw out: Howling Wolf, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, Tyrannosaurus Rex, Terence Trent d'Arby, Garland Jeffries, nor did we recognize their names: Christian Death, Clock DVA, Corrosion of Conformity, Tesla, Green River. So Napalm told us how his latest stint in jail came around — they were playing Band of Susans real loud and the pigs knocked on the door, asked if they could come in, and some gavant on 'shrooms opened the door wide, the whole coffee table glistening like a salad bar with powders, pills, herbs, cylinders, vials and scales. Hearing this, I gave them my "no big deal" expression, mortified that any expression would reveal how uncool I actually was (even though I'm sure they knew that right away, and that was what they liked about me). He went on how it was much easier to get good shit in the lockdown than outside, but he had no idea why we mentioned Ronald Reagan in this context, calmly informing us he had no interest in politics before continuing on about the Mosher Street drug wars. Our nervous systems soon degenerated into random grunts and grins, and we became equals in inebriation, at last, at least.
We jammed again with them two days later, and soon we were playing on a regular basis. The amazing simpatico between us loosened the songs from our grasp, and we could almost watch them fly off like birds. Within a couple of weeks, people started showing up to hear us play, real bizarre people: shaved head pogo-stickers, old soul college girls, dangerously shy groovesters. They stared at us with vampire eyes, and undulated to our beats. Some came up to us afterwards to ask what our lyrics meant and to talk about the songs they wrote.
Napalm talked continuously about how we were going to be famous and how we should cut off one of our ears and send it with a tape to a celebrity musician, but seeing as there were no actual musical celebrities we could tolerate in 1988, we never got around to making the tape. One night some guy came in to hear us and afterwards announced he was an "A'n'R guy" from Dischord Records, rapping about how we made the Sex Pistols sound like Yes, throwing up enticements of recording sessions and bookings at the 9:30 Club in DC. We were supposed to meet him the next day at some crab house in Rosedale, but none of us showed. I had to work, and none of the others had the transportation or the inclination.
If Coffee Bob had been around, he'd have worked it out, but couldn't face him anymore. Constructing a vast conspiracy out of our own guilt where everything that went wrong in the house was his fault, we egged Hedda on to kick him out of the house. After a brief discussion of our legal rights to do so (he was not officially a tenant), Hedda wrote a note to Coffee Bob listing his sins and demanding he vacate, for, as she put it, "selfish lack of consideration for the others in the house." Immensely pleased with ourselves, we tacked the note on the door and went into the living room to drink burgundy and pack a few bowls.
Coffee Bob soon came home, took the note off the wall, and walked into the room with a deathly pallor. Too shocked and wounded to fight, he asked each of us with a gentle, otherworldly voice if we really wanted to ditch him. After we, like jury members individually polled, gave our solemn verdict, he agreed to leave, and went upstairs to his room. We were overjoyed to have handled things so smoothly and businesslike.
Then Vesper came home. She stumbled onto the note and dropped her bookbag to the floor. She pounced into the room, asking if this note was for real. Hedda grinned and said "isn't it great we're finally getting rid of that bitch?" before realizing that Vesper was furious. She assaulted Hedda with a series of condemnations along the lines of "why would you think you could do this?" and "how could you be so cruel to another human being?" Tiny Vesper and her ballerina walk would stomp an elephant if her sense of justice was violated, as it so violently was at that moment. Lester and I cowered in the corner.
"Besides, you have no right to boot him out. My name's on the lease! Have you all lost your minds?"
She went upstairs to console Coffee Bob. I opened wide the window, letting into the stagnant room a blast of torrid air as well as the sense of shame which had been whispering to get in all this time. In a few thoughtless ticks of the clock, we had set in motion an irrevocable change. Coffee Bob would reject Vesper's entreaties to stay, Hedda would feel so guilty that she too would look for a new place, Iza would follow her, and in less than a month there would be just Vesper and I left in the house.
Summer and its transmogrifying heat had come too quickly. The great opaque sun lay in a white haze of narcotic clarity, a dumb orb. Day after somnolent day we sat dangling our legs over the deck, drinking Natty Boh's and holding on to the softest gusts, our snuffed minds hissing like drills, like the locust hum of telephone wires stretching, all our attempts to regain what we thought were natural rhythms foiled. And in limp, seared, sweating Baltimore city, the boiler room kept pumping all night long. In our sweatlodge jams, musical instruments became slicker, easier to play. The strings turned flat and bluesy. Our minds flowed together without any resistance, effortlessly connecting like a paw dipped on the surface of the bay connected with all the waters of the world.
We were becoming frighteningly good, scaring off all but the most committed nihilists. The music was wound so tight, a twist in either direction and it could have been Guy Lombardo or white noise. We shared our dope with Napalm and Andy, they'd sprinkle a little white powder on it and teach us how to break into houses with a credit card and otherwise try to convince us they were intelligent, moral people even though they'd spent time in jail, snatched purses from old ladies and sold speedballs to junior high school students ("I'm just a bad seed, fuckin' Damian man," Napalm'd laugh). Mostly we talked about how we would be famous, and rich, and could eat any pussy in Hollywood. Such talk denied the reality of the blues, it forgot Robert Johnson who went from flophouse to gin joint scrounging for nickels unconscious that such fame could exist. It also denied us, and perhaps because of that, we were only able to say so much before we had to go back to playing, and then Lester and I would become gangsters again while Napalm and Andy would again become intellectuals. The cigarettes tasted like ice on those nights.
"I need drugs to play."
"You need drugs to live."
"What's the difference?"
One day I got a call at work from Lester. He had waited on queue like my customers for twenty minutes to talk to me, but unlike them he would not settle for whatever half-baked explanation I came up with, but pinned me down to what I really meant to say, which, of course, I had less idea about than the topics my real customers asked about.
"Hey, man, whassup?" He asked in his familiar voice.
"Why is he calling me here?" I thought. "Hey, Fester, whassup," I said.
"I'm watching 'Quincy,' trying to find out his first name," he said.
"This fucking bum has nothing better to do than lay this schtick on me again," I thought. "He doesn't have a first name," I said.
"C'mon, he has to have a first name. He'll let it slip," Lester assured me, true idealist that he was.
"I got a little solid I need to lay on you," he continued.
"Aha," I thought, as I saw the red light of calls holding on my phone starting to flash furiously — the danger mode. "You name it," I said.
"Yeah. Katherine and I wrote a little explanation of things, see. I want you to get it published."
"Now I'm a fucking literary agent?" I thought. "Why don't you," I said, "send it the Sun. They'll run it. Have you seen their letters section?"
"You should know better than to say that. I was hoping that maybe you can help edit it. We thought about you when we wrote it."
"Thought about me, right," I thought, "probably got 'em all hot and bothered when they were considering my plight." "What kind of help can I give you?" I asked, "I don't know nothing about birthing screeds."
"You think so much more clearly than me," he said, "besides, you know about these things. You have a job."
"I might not have one much longer if this keeps up," I thought, "come on, bosswoman, tell me to take a real call, take me back to the real warm world." "Listen, man, I've got to get going. They're telling me to take a real call."
"Let me just read a little bit to you," he softly pleaded. "It's on my mind, you know?"
He riffled some papers for an interminable period, then started reading. "We are an invisible generation. We see the city in its fullest, bleakest light, but we have no entrance to the buildings, no access to the museums. We see our parents, fixed and embittered, thrown to the wolves, our war heroes scraped off the streets, the parks filled with ruined, wasted children."
"Blah blah blah," I thought, the blinking red light angering my eyes. "You've captured the '80's in a few words, my friend, but who would really understand and care?" I said, softening my voice, "here at the sad, rococo end of one long coke binge Reagan's America? It's so very late — Hollywood."
"There you go. I thought you'd like it." Without waiting for a reply, he continued. "While the red sun as it always has drops heaven into our eyes, and the birds as they always have speak holy syllables, The World Voice tells us the planet is dying and destined to end, and then It denies what we see with our eyes, the babies picking through dumpsters, the golden houses beyond the gates full of empty rooms."
"So life is unfair," I quickly concluded to myself, "so he's gone snooping around to uncover, horror of horrors, the laziness and duplicity of those in power. So what? What's his next trick?" I was perturbed by his nerve, making pronouncements from his position of privilege, detached from the bad coffee and the evaluatory standards of the executive class. I waited until a suspendered shaved neck shiny-topped fellow employee had passed by my cube and said, "Is there an alternative? Like so many children born in the Sixties, you believe you are entitled to your own opinions. As Margaret Thatcher said, you cannot just get away from society. You can't be of service to humanity and not be of service to the power structure. Look at Jesus, crucified and, just as he predicted, the same power structure he opposed rules with velvet rod under his name."
"That's just pure ignorance," he said. "I'm surprised at you. Don't you see how this society you so treasure is but the tip of an enormous iceberg. Our real duty is to help people discover the uniqueness in themselves. That's the way Jesus wore down the society that tried to sweep him under the rug, wasn't it? Do you really think people won't listen?"
"When is this guy going to get off the phone? Doesn't he have some hamburgers in Jamaicatown to chase down?" I thought. "I don't see a whole lot of people listening to us," I said. "Our truth doesn't seem to have an impact on their truth."
"Precisely, which brings me to my next point." He continued reading. "We conclude there is no one truth, or at least any that matter. Meaning blows like leaves through so many fragile realities, and we float in between, in dusty cracks, among smudged indecipherable clouds, in the sheen of stoic office towers; we can feel each others presence, in the beer lights, the bass notes, the smell of earth before it rains, catching glints of overexposed eyes, scintillations of capes scurrying past doors, voices pleading to no one behind the heavy groan of traffic."
"So he's trying to move people now with poetry, the most ignored art form on Earth?" I thought. "What has he left for me to do?" "Hey, Lester," I said, "let's talk about more important stuff, like the way, say, early Beatles songs had Hawaiian cocktail guitar cheesing up the background, or how Stevie Ray Vaughan always sang the word 'bad.'"
"What could be more important than the machinery itself? You oughta be writing this stuff. It shouldn't be up to me." His voice betrayed anger, in contrast to his coolness of tone to this point.
"For me to write about it would be to write about him," I thought, "what would that make me? An errand boy? A parasite?" "I can't write down all we've gone through," I said. "Words are such miserable apologies. Why can't I just be a bass player for some fuckit bar band and follow along forever without any need to think about anything but how to funk it up while keeping the beat? What about Katherine?"
"No, sadly, she doesn't have it in her. Here, let me finish this." He kept reading. "But there is nothing in us, nothing but listening, and no possibility of speech. With our eyes we see nothing but paintings, with our ears we hear nothing but music, we speak only poetry, we smell only perfume — and yet, all we perceive seems to us to be real, that is, outside."
"His words are like ghosts, only images to trick my mind," I tried to convince myself, as I thought of what all those others had said of him, and of how alluring he made things seem. It made me anxious without really knowing why. "That's beautiful," I said, "but I really have to get back to work." The red light had disappeared. There were no calls holding anymore.
"Sure, sure, we can talk later. How about coming over tonight for a little jam, just you and me, like old times, maybe write a few songs."
"Sorry, guy, but I have to work late," I lied.
"I understand," he said, disappointment in his voice.
9.
In the Summer, Lester lived like a lizard in the languor of his backyard, his forked tongue sucking bowls, a bronzed hairy chest, dark Ray Bans, the blissful smile he always wore. Baltimore zoning ordinances mandated short fences throughout the city (so the city would become one neighborhood watch to keep tabs on everyone's backyards, apparently), but somehow he and Katherine had an eight-foot privacy fence around their yard. And inside was their own secret garden: lime green beach chairs, a Red Devil cooker and Presto Grill, a garden of violets, irises, Turk's cap lilies, trumpet vine, delphinium and roses, a plum tree, Chinese lanterns, a statue of a baby's arm holding an egg. Vesper and I would come over nearly every Sunday to make him guide us on another magical mystery tour until the late afternoon slipped into grace. On this particular Saturday, however, I came over alone.
Katherine's job as a legal advocate involved trying to convince battered women to leave their men. As she once explained it to me: "it's not about giving them things or protecting them, but convincing them they deserve better — what I do is tell them real-life stories of people who've overcome worse situations than their own, in order to carry them away, to block out minds that would spend every moment in fear, especially of themselves. These were women afraid of wearing eyeshadow their mates didn't approve," she said in a kind tone. "But for every one we free, we lose ten, and the truth is, we don't know whether those who stay behind are dumber or wiser than us. They always seem to think they give as good as they get. Liberals have it hard. Compassion seems to count for so little."
With talk like that, it was only a matter of time before the job infected Lester with a sense of duty to help Katherine better do her job. The closest he ever got was that Saturday when I came over and found Katherine's face swollen like a plum with tears, Lester holding his bandaged arm, and blood all over their yellow kitchen. He had stuck his fist through the back door glass. He couldn't hurt her but he sure as hell could hurt himself, take that. I helped her get him to the emergency room, and waited with them the eight hours it took to get uninsured treatment, and while waiting we had a very ugly conversation. We went over everything: his father, his mother, the way Katherine had to sleep on the couch because of the violence of his nightmares. Like an intermittent wave of pain he and Katherine fluctuated between verbal brutality and mute remorse. In her more lucid periods, Katherine like a scientist insisted on finding logical reasons for this miscarriage of rage, not realizing that illogic was what he used to keep her bound to him. She insisted that he carried some hatred from another life, some remnant of tragedy that must be brought, like used blue blood, to light and air as something red and tangible.
"Don't you see the fear in him?" I asked, exasperated, after Lester had been wheeled into the emergency room. "He feels he has to claw for position to win your love, as if by getting the upper hand he'd deserve your trust."
Katherine humored my observation but persisted in believing something darker. "It's not so black or white. We trusted each other implicitly — before the demons came. They feed on what we are afraid of looking at in ourselves. He remembers all too well how to be a tyrant, just as he knows deep down, as you suggest, what a tyrant feels like. When he imagines, even for a moment, he's no better than the other men I serve, my clients, he agrees to become capable of any kind of violence, and isn't imagination the key to what one can or cannot do?"
"So it's not a matter of you trusting him?" I asked, trying to steer the conversation back to my point.
"Trusting him is like trusting myself. The branch bends when I walk on it. These battles need to be fought, Felix, there are too many forces that have amassed themselves around us. But how you prosecute the war matters, for all of this, every nuance, will be remembered in the Akashic Records. The negative can be turned positive, as it already is on the other side. That's what I promised him I would do. Do you understand?" Her voice was pleading, shrill, a direct line on the enormity of her suffering.
I felt the hot breath of Lester's dogs, heard the insane laughter of Andy, saw Napalm's cold face. I thought of the unearthly amount of alcohol Vesper drank and how fearless she became, but her teeth were always gnashing on self-doubt, which multiplied in the fermenting rooms of the city into self-hatred. There was nothing I could do for Katherine. I had done enough by opening up my own vents to this haunted air.
My home was empty when I came back. Someone has stolen the rest of my weed, and no one had even stems left to steal. So I turned to my old standby. Lester and I, mechanical fools in general, were regular watch repairers when it came to resin harvesting. We'd unwind coat hangers and stick them into clogged pipe barrels, plunging out tiny black beads of resin, lifting them back into the bowl with my fingers, using paperclips for more delicate finishing jobs, as the sticky tar stuck to my fingers and nails like hot wax. Resin was a longer lasting but less intense high than regular dope, like a foul tasting hash, a good substitute when one was between scores. A vast amount of federal money had gone into keeping the streets clean that Summer, however, and the bowls had already been so thoroughly scraped that the only way to get any more resin was to burn the vapors out (which, believe me, I would have tried if I was any more stoned). So I got down on my knees, with the toothpicks and cobwebs, and checked the carpet cracks for more pitiless poison, a stray leaf trapped in lint or resin thoughtlessly smudged against the walls from better days.
Something told me Vesper was in someone's bed, and I imagined all the possibilities, nursed the bellows of stiff, jealous rage. The house was dark and I did not turn on the light; I only streaked by the windows amid the savage glow of my Viceroy. The phone rang. When I picked it up, I could hear in the background a collective moan, distant muffled screams, as well as some kind of dripping sound. As if from a hole deep underground, Vesper beckoned me, in a laughing but dead voice "why don't you join us?" The background noise seemed to quicken when she said this, as if she was surrounded by a pack of passionate dogs. I asked her who was with her. She said "Marcy and I are playing. You're welcome to watch." I had no way to get there, and even if I did, I wouldn't know whether to bring tabs of ecstasy, a lamb's skull or a gun. My sweat dropped onto the phone handle. I tried to talk, to keep a conversation going, but she slunk away with a drunken "suit yourself." I curled in the heat into a ball of emasculated torpor, utterly confused, about everything. I convinced the operator to call the number back, but the receiver bleated like the number didn't exist. I lit a candle. It was black like every blessed one in the house. I pulled Vesper's tarot cards out of the veil she kept them in. I drew one. The Tower. Disintegration, destruction, betrayal. I chose to interpret this in a positive light, and asked for guidance with a second card. The Devil. Waste, largesse, indulgence. This too I ignored at my peril, thinking of goat-boys frolicking over green hills.
I went out to find Napalm and Andy. With no money, I walked halfway across town to try to track them down. I knew they had something for my pain, even as I realized it would be over for me if I partook. I cut through downtown, across Carey Street in Pigtown (which everyone called Scary Street), past the Babe Ruth House, up ML King Boulevard, past the black brick housing project towers with the tiny lights that looked like stars. The tenants had emptied out and clung like heat vapor to the sidewalks. Some yelled that they didn't want me walking down their street, or otherwise tried to give me the evil eye, but I completely ignored them. They guessed I was either completely insane or some kind of Tae Kwon Do master. I walked under the yellow arc lamps down the median strip on North Avenue, under a mushroom moon, past the Korean hair dealers and the janitor supply stores, into darkest Fulton and McCulloh Streets, where time had not been kind; the black servants who lived here 25 years ago had seemingly been burned out of their dwellings, as if by the ghosts of the Ku Klux Klan.
On the fringes of this urban chaos was a private drug club Napalm and Andy were known to frequent. I asked the bouncers, but they just flexed their cool and laughed while a greebo version of "We're An American Band" gave me a better answer than I deserved. I checked out the nearby hip hop hole, only to be met on arrival by none other than that guy I kept seeing, the black corporate wannabe turned Christian Samaritan. He recognized me right away, and reached his arm around my shoulder. This time he wore short, semi-braided dreads, a rainbow mufti, and that same smarter-than-me smile as before. He raved about how penny I was to camp down and snap up the baggy tones and "take it to the head...all the way down." He pulled at me, practically begged me to stay: "why don't you join us?" he implored. I loosened from his grip and ran.
I didn't actually make it home until the next morning. I wandered through all the now-familiar streets of East and Central Baltimore, expecting to feel what I felt the first time I walked them, that quiver of excitement. I thought the streets themselves had somehow given me that, and were withholding it now, as if to punish me. Around 2 AM, I heard the unmistakable sound of a gunshot about two blocks on. Around 3 AM, a Doberman Pinscher started following me. I could not shake him no matter what path I took through the blocks of unlit houses that looked no darker under the lamp lit night sky than they did during the day. Was I free or was I under surveillance? There was no escape for me, I concluded as I walked past block after block of identical rowhouses, for I had discovered nothingness, the end point where no one cared about you, where nothing I had learned was of any value, where no object would reveal itself under my gaze. After this, any idea of a home was an illusion.
Soon the dog disappeared and I felt even lonelier. My only company was empty, air-conditioned buses I didn't have the money to board. They wheezed by until the first layers of indigo broke through the orange rim of the horizon. The sky exploded with strep throat red, then the sun rose like a peach, exposing drunks lying like dead soldiers after the mist of the battle rises. The mercury vapor streetlights turned to bluish white before fizzing out. I felt tired in my skin. I hated the purple peach fuzz sky because of its overwhelming beauty that would inevitably turn, again today, to cruelty.
A bizarre string of phone messages awaited me when I got home. The first was from Lester, back from the hospital, saying all our (my) equipment was gone. The second was from Andy, telling me that Napalm was going back to jail. This time he had ransacked some Guilford mansion and was caught sitting in the kitchen by an owner back early from vacation. Andy laughed as he told the story, of the man asking "what in hell are you doing here?" and Napalm sniggering indignantly "I'm just having a glass of milk, man." Andy himself was going to Atlanta to try his hand at session work, because he'd finally decided he wanted to make some money from music ("but I really enjoyed playing with you guys)." The third call came from Coffee Bob, to tell me that some psycho-prince had torched Barbie's house the night before. Barbie was O.K., but she had been sleeping when he set it and was a little shaken up. "Pray for her, I'll hope she'll be all right," Coffee Bob said. He also reported that the same guy also stole our equipment. He had been following her and us around, convinced we were evil. Coffee Bob almost laughed at the absurdity of that, even as his voice betrayed a diabolic rage that someone could do such a thing.
I was strangely numb, though, as I watched everything I had staked my future on pursue its ineluctable, hyper-revved course to the horizon and past the vanishing point. Like the proverbial sharp blow to the head with which the Buddhist masters always seem to receive enlightenment, I suddenly realized I had been poisoned by attachment. And what was I attaching to? I had boarded with a pure heart and without expectation a ride which surprised my senses, and this led to an expectation that what it was offering was more than a conditional kind of answer, and this led to longing, which brought the need to hold on to it, and to hold back all that opposed it, and this turned into rage, of the sort that would turn into hatred for everyone and everything, most especially myself. It was all mind. All the stuff was tiny bubbles that would pop once my mind let the wind blow them onwards. Elvis the cat came snuggling up to me, for food, yes, but also to play his part in the illusion, as something whose expressions of love were his own and not from somewhere else.
The answer was to change my perspective. I stared at the brick wall through my bedroom window. I started laughing. Here was the solution, so obvious I must have had something deranged in my brain to have missed it: I needed to get an air conditioner!
There was a ghetto appliance store within walking distance. I skipped over and decided on a Gibson model, because it had the same name as the guitar. There was no fixed price, so I haggled as if I was in an Oriental market, and of course ended up paying more than I would have in a suburban Sears. I lugged it as far as Eastern Market, then decided to hail a cab. As I rested the 50-pound box on the marble pedestal of a long-gone monument, I looked up to see a TV camera poking its way into my face. Next to it, holding a microphone, was a guy I recognized as the weekend anchor on channel 9. He first flashed the pained, phony smile he had learned from years of being recognized everywhere he went — the bitter "you got me, I'm only a TV character" expression — and then, as the camera was setting up and zooming in on my face, he slipped me a more malevolent look — kinda like "don't make any trouble for me, now, I know you're freaking out" — and then the camera light went on. He asked me, with that rich voice dripping with personality — as only something totally impersonal could — what prompted me, on what was expected to be the hottest day of the year, to buy an air conditioner. "I don't know, Frank," I replied, feeling cool under the cool TV eye, "I guess I just reached my limit." Within a few seconds, he and cameraman had vanished like a date palm in the Sahara. A black woman came up to me right away and screamed "Why d'ey talk to you?"
"I think it was because I was carrying around an air conditioner on the hottest day of the year," I suggested, still basking in the rational glow of the tube.
"Nah, 'cos you white," she sneered, practically in my face. Indeed, I was the only white person in the whole market. There was no refuting her reality. Things get real confusing in the heat. I couldn't wait to get home and pray that my wife didn't see what TV had reduced me to.
When the cab dropped me off, I immediately set up the air conditioner in my window and turned it on. Aaaah. Soon Vesper came home — with a smile. "I missed you, babe," she said. We hugged and all and I showed her the Gibson. She immediately brought the rest of her belongings into my room. It turned out her night was innocent. She was just too drunk to drive home. "All my old boyfriends were so jealous," she gushed. "You're so not like that. I love that about you. All things we know are just coming through a prism from love."
We went down to Jimmy's for a leisurely breakfast and walked home the waterfront way, murmuring like the waves alongside the skreaking seagulls. Along the way we passed two derelicts staring at a broken pint of liquor on the sidewalk. One was disconsolate at the amber puddle in front of him while the other, with a sad, disappointed voice, barked "Why you do dat?" over and over again, his continuous plaint serenading us for blocks.
10.
We hadn't been home too long before Coffee Bob called to invite us out to the ranch. It had "opened up" and he wanted to have a combination commiseration/celebration/all is forgiven soiree. For supplies, he'd visited garden co-ops, patisseries, Asian grocers, fruiterers, natural gourmet shops — in late 20th century America, one can find everything the world has ever come up with in the way of food. And Coffee Bob spared no expense, the man who rebrewed coffee grounds and found a thousand uses for cabbage. It was an enigma.
Vesper and I were among the first to arrive. As more and more junked-up cars fit into the driveway, the party began to assume a momentous air. Everyone came — Victor and his girlfriend Justine, Red, Juli, Marcy, Lester, Barbie, Blue, Katherine, even Buster — they were all dressed to the nines: for the women, hemp skirts, pork pie hats, royal blue tie dye blouses, Chinese shoes or high braided sandals, and for the men, baggy parachute pants or short-short jeans, and T-shirts emblazoned with finely etched visions of cannabis, Bob Marley and/or the Dead skull. As Coffee Bob dug a pit out in the backyard, the invitees gathered into recreation circles along the grounds. Pitchers of spermyellow lemonade gleamed in the sun on stone seats alongside galvanized steel buckets full of ice, Red Hook Ale and Orangina. A volleyball match went on next to the garage, a football game in the front yard, some hoopsters worked around the basketball net, there was even hackysack at the edges of the woods. Vesper and I started a croquet contest in the tall grass of the side yard amid arbors of grapevines. We ended up circulating among all these pastimes, grabbing along the way hits of dope that ranged in quality from funk to skunk. Rules were changed, each sport reinvented. Croquet became a game with a pitcher and a batsperson; volleyball became twice as interesting when hitting the ball under the net was part of the strategy; basketball seemed like chess when the person with the ball was not allowed to move; as for football, instead of avoiding the shrubberies and trees, we incorporated them into our game plans, and in addition, the offensive team chose in the huddle what projectile it would use on a given play, the choices being an "official NFL" football, a deflated football, a tiny red dog chew football, a nerf football, a whizzing arrow football, a whiffle ball, a tennis ball, or a Frisbee.
Inside the house, a vast heap of foodstuff was organized around the kitchen, and each to his ability and need contributed to its transformation into steaming goodness. Vesper made pesto, I sharpened knives, and while we were doing this, some local chef named Molice cut orange and lemon skins into roosters and porpoises and flowers.
A cardboard box of musical selections lay by the stereo. Everyone was free to put something on that interested them, and so we sampled the gamut over the course of the night, from Tibetan singing bowls to "The Theremin: Sound from the Future," a mid-60's "hi-fi" instrumental sampler. This didn't prevent people from banging on the piano, cello and Coffee Bob's acoustic guitars. I myself enjoyed sawing the cello along with the theremin.
The party didn't really become something besides the sum of its parts until Lester arrived. There was no talk of his bandaged wrist. His magical hand rearranged the small groupings and narrow subjects of conversation so that everyone was vying for his attention, hanging on his every hilarious word. I realized that he was the reason we were all here. We were all friends of Lester, come to think of it, in the end.
With food cooking, sunset approaching, the cordials and some very strong dope moving freely through the crowd, the party became a living thing, feeding for its energy off the sacrifice of our own. Any idea at all, whether a memory from distant childhood or an instantaneous vision inspired by a Miller Beer commercial, became grist for the party mill, and was expressed, dispersed like a milkweed pod, and transformed. The widest imaginable range of impoverished ethnicities mingled freely under the Benetton rainbow; all bent on our turn to act like rich pigs.
I left the party reality for a while to help Coffee Bob prepare the pit fire and stuff the crabs and oysters in cheese cloth. When I was inside the house, it all seemed like a diaphanous cacophony of positions and interests, selfishness and compassion. On the outside, however, it sounded like a kind of symphony of small talk: Lester's basso starting the theme, various solo variations in other voices, a building crescendo of unisons and harmonies, building dissonances washed over with the reeds of laughter. As crowds mingled and dispersed, the movements seemed to move in a well-organized rhythm, as if under an orchestrator's baton.
By the time I returned, the party had moved from its grasping and mewling infant stage to a kind of adolescent thoughtlessness, full of energy and mordant self-consciousness. Playing on the stereo was the kind of rock'n'roll that made some women want to turn it off violently and others want to strip. Vesper had discovered the pool table and the wet bar, and was in the process of running the table against seasoned pool buzzards like Red, who were each totally baffled that this tiny Helen with her rosin-covered hands would foil their dreams of world domination. Lester had given his mouth a rest and was simultaneously stuffing into it dim sum, an orange apéritif, and a tiny hidden bowl, all the while thumbing through the records and listening to each of the seven conversations going on simultaneously in the room.
I had a chance to talk briefly to Juli, wan as ever, who had been commissioned to paint a mural in the Hollins Market area, an old slum going through a gentrification scare. She had sent in some slides of her work to the Maryland Arts Council and they offered her $350 to cover a brick wall with flowers and butterflies and surreal Hudson River School nature imagery amid the Ash Can School reality of charred, sagging row house frames, nailed planks over window frames, pay phones ripped out to their wires and plastic bags rolling about like tumbleweeds. Red had enlisted himself as her "co-creator," in the process helping her run through the supply money about a quarter of the way through the job. Juli of course blamed the city for its "bureaucracy," as if the utter freedom the city gave them was itself one giant snafu of red tape, which I suppose it was.
Barbie seemed remarkably subdued, calmly sitting on a rattan sofa in the conservatory, sharing a watermelon schnapps with her boyfriend Blue, who seemed a quite solicitous and easygoing fellow, not at all the monster she had portrayed.
I also had a chance to talk with Victor, although talk is probably too strong a word — we eyed each other approvingly, trying to get our eyes to express the strong emotions we felt while our voices waited in vain for collaboration. He no longer smoked pot, and had undergone an equally dramatic change of appearance, having gained a lot of weight and walking with the slow gait of a retired person — he even had on a polo shirt and khaki shorts with belt hitched up past his waist. There seemed nothing left of his former self — the gentle giant dope dealer who commanded respect because he respected us, despite his size and pedigree and more important, his ever-ready supply of killer weed, even defended us against forces far larger than he, like the time we played basketball in Hamden and a group of neighborhood kids came on with tire irons and baseball bats to knock the shit out of him and his nigger-loving friends. He just stared them down in the white way he had learned, the look of honest pity, not the angry, shifty, disgusted or resigned look most black people use, and it backed them away.
He had always found a way to turn everything into a competition — whether it was shooting bottle rockets at cops from apartment roofs or pondering day-long games of Risk in his underwear while his giant husky dog climbed all over him and sirens rolled by like hungry babies — games he always found a way to win even as he sportingly let defeat sit on his lap and stare him straight into his eyes.
All that was gone. The pigskin had been packed away, the hoops turned down, the Saab melted, the brave refusal to believe any lies left behind, as if his too-large heart had let go its final dream and flew away. His girlfriend Justine came over to snipe and comment and fret while Victor looked on distantly, a strange combination of irritated and bemused. But Justine was not to blame; yes, she was a stereotypical mentally ill rich girl whose parents disowned her when they found out she wanted to marry a black man, but no, life was just no longer a challenge for Victor, the games were not worth playing, for he did not stand a chance at a certain level of civilization where every advantage one possessed had to be hidden to save oneself from others' condemnation. So his 300 pound, six foot six frame looked at me and, after five minutes of silence, said "jeez, it's so good to see you, Felix," before moving off to visit someone else.
By some miracle of spontaneous organization, dinner was served. We pulled food off the many platters in the conservatory, the rich hiss of the flowing water and the tree adding a note of nature and civility to the proceedings. Among the dishes: quail and rock Cornish game hens in a bitter elderberry dressing, wild rice with wild mushrooms and chestnuts, spicy seafood bouillabaisse, the backyard smoked oysters and clams, fresh white Maryland silver queen corn, sliced tomatoes and raw mozzarella in basil and olive oil, extraordinary complex Mediterranean salad and for dessert, ricotta pie — all made or supervised by Coffee Bob. And in the center of the table, a bouquet of Novalis' blue flowers. Lester, who had done literally nothing to prepare the food, served himself first and sat at the head of the formal dining room table. Since everyone wanted to sit with him, Vesper and I took our meals around the fireplace. Some ate standing up. I could hear Lester talking the whole time, carrying the party's munificent light. He talked about his terrifying day spent working in the infamous "boat restaurant." It was an actual ship that was imbedded at the corner of Boston and Fleet Streets. It was in fact the actual boat its owner, a Greek immigrant turned magnate, took to the promised land of America, by which he wanted to show his love of this wonderful country. No one ever came to this particular piece of ridiculous real estate, all but a few stray tourists were petrified of the place, the partygoers in fact were amazed that Lester had actually been inside. Lester detailed the endless rounds of filling and refilling water jugs, toasting and throwing away bread, making and drinking coffee, but worst of all, the owner spent all his time there, and was so proud of the boys who worked with him he harangued them constantly in a thick accent no one could understand. To top it off, the guy always wanted to touch you, shake your hand, grab your shoulder, which wouldn't have been a big problem except that he, according to Lester, had lichens growing out of his palms, a fact, Lester told the incredulous crowd, scientifically explainable by the fact that we lived in a crazy town. "Unbefuckinglievable, Jackson," someone amened, and he continued on with his sad work history of many other one day stands with deranged, needy proprietors who were all too dismal to contemplate, much less buy their "work hard like you are my son because it's good for you, damnit" rap. In some ways it was as close as he'd ever come to explaining himself.
After dinner, the party settled into a maturity of quiet wisdom and the accompanying difficulties with bodily functions. Some greenhorn kids talked to me about dope, asking me the difference between Top and ZigZag paper as if they already knew the answer. They looked up to me as some kind of fucking father figure! I met a guy named Ray Roberts, who apparently had worked with me, knew me, was let go post-crash and had never recovered from this brutal snuffing out of his dreams. His look was eerie — half awe, half anger — as if to say "you don't know how lucky you are, boy." Another guy showed me an astrological watch that looked like the instrument panel of an airplane. It could tell the position of any celestial body at any given moment, even Vulcan or Io. He didn't trust it, however, because he wasn't sure it was gauged to the millisecond with the official national clock at the Bureau of Standards in Washington DC, where the calibration weights measuring time were cleaned with fine laser mist every week to keep the extra weight of dust from altering the correct time. As a result, he never knew exactly what to do, he felt dislodged from the earth and stars, and that was why he stayed stoned all the time and couldn't hold down a job.
I couldn't tell if he desperately needed someone to say everything was all right, or if he was mocking me. Everyone at the party seemed, in fact, to be imitating me, just as surely as the ladies' homemade bob haircuts and smiling mask of faces were in emulation of Vesper, who had long since passed from that proper state into advanced aggressive drunkenness, her hair swirled all over her face, her face red, her hand bopping out in front of her as if to say "don't you fuck with me, all you pathetic wannabeats." They all looked at us as if we were celebrities, movie stars. I felt the pressure to keep them entertained, so I trotted out my trademarked circle of comedians theory, the one that postulates that comedians want to be actors, actors want to be writers, writers want to be musicians, musicians want to be athletes, and athletes want to be...comedians. Its flawless logic kept everyone entranced, as people came up to ask how they fit into the equation.
Lester came in with an electric guitar that he managed to plug into the stereo, and the crowd started tapping out a rhythm as he played, and someone handed me a harmonica like I was the guest of honor, and I blew. For the next hour, we pushed each other's spots we knew so well, he finding dense strong chords, me finding strange vibrations as I hammered out the metallic tone of the mouth harp. It was the blues, allowing everything, even what we didn't have. And, despite all our efforts, the veils on the canvases and the masks affixed to the walls didn't contradict us. I felt that life should go on like this forever.
It wasn't until the embers of the fire were whispering out, the guitars long since passed around, while Vesper snored on the couch and a few people sat around lighting cigarettes with wide, sleepy eyes and catatonic smirks, that Lester gave me the news. He was moving, he said, to Italy, with Katherine, to live with his father. He was so excited to get out of the country, have a chance at a real job, find a decent paella, prepare a better life for them he seemed not to notice the look of utter shock on my face. I couldn't get any words out except to ask how long he planned to be gone.
"Ah, not forever, a coupla years, I suppose, you never know. Time is totally different over there. The apartment I'm going to live in is thousands of years old."
"What about our band?" I finally blurted out.
"What do you mean? You've got girl," he smiled, nodding over to sleeping beauty, as if to say "my work here is done." "You didn't really expect to get anything going with the music as long as women were around, did you? Why would you want to anyway?"
"Don't chicks dig musicians?"
"Yeah, because they're sensitive, would make kind fathers," he continued. "But in the end it's that old choice between her and the mistress. Besides," he explained in his perfect, incomprehensible way, "you'd have to be desperately unhappy with life in general to go on the road, chasing das capital with all those lonely migrating herds of rockers. Those people they call successful are simply not satisfied where they are — you can feel at home in the ghetto or out-of-place in the penthouse. Are you a better person when you flee or just a freak? The sun slides into seaside vistas equally as it grazes rat-infested porches. Why beat your head to a pulp trying to change things? How hard some fools fight against the obvious."
There was no opening, despite the irony of him saying all this, now. As if he was taking his cues from a backstage manager, he'd said the one thing that could hold me back. Although I wanted to exact the most detailed forms of revenge to make him feel the suffering he was causing me, his shit-eating grin made me realize it would only be me suffering. Furthermore, what right had I to say he owed me anything? If our friendship was as strong as I thought it was, surely I owed him that. And how could I compete with Italy?
I felt that momentary consciousness when, although everything is exactly as it had been, everything seems to have suddenly turned into a cardboard set folding away to something else, except there is no something else, only a shimmering, a lightness of perception that soon enough dulls back to the same heavy numbness with which one had been stumbling through life.
My urge to play — and my buzz — gone, I lifted the sleeping Vesper off the couch and headed home. Driving her car, I looked at her and wondered who she was and what she saw in me. I felt I was stealing something, and that every car was a police cruiser ready to pull me over. The lights of the returning city throbbed, suggesting both my imprisonment and my total freedom.
1 comment:
I found Coffee Bob on facebook. Imagine that! Funny how I still can relate to Vesper. Some things never change. Great re-reading this.
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