"Cinderella she seems so easy .
'It takes one to know one,' she smiles,
Then puts her hands in her back pocket,
Bette Davis style,
Then in comes Romeo he's moaning
'You belong to me I believe,'
Then someone says 'you're in the wrong place, my friend,
You'd better leave.'
And the only sound that's left
After the ambulances go
Is Cinderella sweeping up
On Desolation Row."
-Bob Dylan
1.
Katherine was sitting on the sofa when I woke up the next morning, talking to some fellow who looked and sounded just like Leo Gorcey. He was about five feet tall, with luscious greased-back hair, and a teethy way of talking, as if he was literally nibbling at his ideas. He had a hockey-cum-motorcycle helmet tucked under his arm and wore a navy blue polo shirt that read POLICE. I guessed he wasn't really a cop when I noticed he had brought weed and was in the process of getting Katherine high. I kept expecting him to say, with tough-guy joviality, " why I oughta pop you" and "I'm the boss here, see, I'll say the way things go." Lester came out shortly in his terrycloth bathrobe to relieve her of her conversational duties. He was a security guard at a hospital, it turned out, named Buster. Within minutes he and Lester were arguing about George Herman Ruth, Baltimore's Bambino, the Sultan of Swat, the Great One, the Baby, tiffing over whether it was good Father Matthias or bad Father Callahan who turned him from an urchin to an athlete, then whether it was Jack Dunn or Bob Carrigan who taught him his magic stroke. Before I knew it, a season-by-season stat book was produced and they were comparing his dead ball numbers with those of Home Run Baker. They went on in this esoteric vein for some time, but they didn't sound at all like sports nerds. They were like two deaf old men waxing wistful over the long ago days when the game had meaning, more meaning than all the rest of life combined. Their voices seemed to rise from the dust of long demolished bandstands, as they noted with feeling the fear for their lives that Vinegar Bend Mizzell evoked in batters, the shaking in the stands when Tilly Walker got to the plate, the spontaneous joy among his teammates that Stuffy McInnis inspired, the silence when Heinie Groh speared a line drive. I was only half listening, more concerned with getting an early morning buzz-on than this strange conversation, but I noticed a more sinister tone develop that intrigued me.
"Yeah, the '27 Yankees rotation was Godlike perfection, no doubt about that," said Buster. "Hoyt, Moore, Pennock and Shocker, with Dutch Reuther and George Pipgras as good as any on the side. But it was too perfect, ya know? Shocker was the odd man out. I think that's why they had to let him have it."
"No way," replied Lester, "he was a mulatto, man, think about it, I mean we're talking here about the only guy who could always strike out the Babe. What were they going to do? Trade him? Send him to the Negro Leagues? What can you do with a guy that smart and that wild? Hell, it took all the arsenic they could feed him to keep him winning less'n 20 games. They had to keep it going 'til he died, he just had too much on them."
"No, no, that ain't right at all. The Baby trusted him, that was the only guy he did trust, and the gamblers got him to teach the Baby a lesson."
Despite the irresolvability of their differences, there seemed no doubt in either of their minds that this pitching legend was sacrificed on the altar of some dark conspiracy. It was equally certain that I had never heard of him. "Hey, guys," I asked, " Who'ur ya talking about?"
"Urban Shocker," Lester interrupted a long bong hit to reply.
Just then, Coffee Bob knocked on the door, forever pausing this conversation. Katherine and Lester did their best to get rid of him, but I felt he had come out of some sense of remorse for what had happened last night, and not because, as they claimed, his wolf nose had detected weed from a mile away. As it turned out, though, he had forgotten about last night and only wanted a couple of hits. He really wanted to get the scoop on a certain Eliza Rantoul, a barfly heiress who had just broken up (for what I'd learned was the 14th time) with Lester's brother Hector. He was looking for the proverbial keys to her metaphorical garden. Lester warned him, quite sincerely it seemed, not to get involved with such poison, but Coffee Bob just took that as protectiveness, and it made him even more eager to pester him for more information. Finally, Lester concluded his argument by giving the answer Coffee Bob had been looking for: "why, I betcha she's at the Mount Royal Tavern right now, already twisted no doubt from the valium in the Yagermeister."
Coffee Bob looked excitedly around the room. His eyes fixed on mine, I guess because I was the only one trying to look away from him. He needed a crash test buddy, a stunt double for the friend, so he asked if I wanted to come along. No way, I thought, for I was the bubble boy and was going to stay right here forever, but the look of pity on both Katherine and Lester's face urged me on, so I cleaned myself off and escorted him.
We walked along the railroad tracks, following some vague scent of creosote. About a mile in, we suddenly went down an embankment into a dark tunnel. The voices of a sunny Saturday in the city sounded warped in the subterranean darkness — they echoed like coyotes. Coffee Bob found a ledge, and we climbed it, finding at the top a dim green glow, a musty smell, and a long concrete hallway clogged with…art! It was amazing: here in the grimy bowels of Charm City was a veritable gallery of disfigurement and anguish. Everywhere I looked I saw strange contorted figures: ravaged Venus De Milos, AIDs-pocked Adonises, African transvestite Mona Lisas, scrap metal Davids, winged torsos on wheels, Plaster of Paris cocks hung like corkscrews from the ceiling, coat hangers sticking out of blots of sodden paper mache, cracked faceless heads lolling about the floor, portraits that were all eyes, all hair, all veins. Broken picture frames were strewn into the mix, and a few stained dropcloths covered what must have been horrifically obscene. It seemed to go on for miles, with no sound but our own feet shuffling in the dust.
"What is this place?" My voice had a slight echo.
"Oh, this is just the storage area for the School of Art. Some of this junk has been laying around here for decades."
"Reminds me of the Land of the Misfit Toys from 'Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer.'"
Coffee Bob started to smile, thought for a moment, and frowned. "Yeah, whatever."
"Why did you lead me here?" Coffee Bob was always opening magic doors of amazing places for me, yet he always seemed disinterested.
"It's the quickest way to the tavern."
I picked up a chiseled stone sculpture of a baby's arm holding an egg. It must have weighed fifty pounds. "Can I take this?" I asked.
"You shouldn't steal from here. It's a sacred place."
We kept walking. Coffee Bob stopped and looked up. I saw the source of our light: it poured down from thirty feet up through a sewer grate. I heard the sound of dripping water. Coffee Bob gripped the first of a series of wrought-iron handles that looked like giant staples and climbed the blackened stone wall in his Mao boots all the way to the top. I followed. The grate lifted right off and we popped right up into the street, behind the tavern. We walked in through the back door.
It was nearly full. The druggies congregated in the back, in circles of alienation, waiting for dealers to bless them. The cokeheads slapped the pinballs with fire in their eyes, their bodies leaning eerily into the machines. The speed freaks stood by the phone, taking seething drags on their cigarettes and staring at the peeling black brick wall. The potheads tried to stay in close proximity to the jukebox, insisting on endless versions of "Shaft," "Midnight Confessions" and "Crimson and Clover," if only to ward off those who would play "Relax" by Frankie Goes to Hollywood (although why is a good question, because you couldn't hear anything amid the noise). The junkies, of course, moved in and out of the bathroom doors, staring at everything with their vacant eyes. Although each crowd seemed intent and occupied, they were merely empty cartridges, just waiting for their connections to show. This wasn't much different, actually, from the front of the bar, where the real drinkers were hunkered down, for it seemed cattle season was in full prod. You could tell by all the leather. Men goosed to the gills with bullshit braggadocio faced off against ladies armed with mace and flattery. No one on the barstools looked the slightest bit comfortable, but still the addicts from their autistic holes in the back looked on them with longing. I cased the cigarette machine for Viceroys but it didn't have any, so I bought a pack of Raleighs.
Coffee Bob fit right in with his neck-craning, eye-popping, sour-smiling visage as he scanned the bar for Eliza. While he was looking, a gaunt man with grey, stringy hair past his shoulders patted him on the back and smiled with black, crooked teeth: "Robert the Penis, my man, what's shaking, dude. Still hanging a little to the left?"
"You know where I can find anything?" he asked meekly. "I just want to share a dime or something."
"Maybe later, man, pop on by, I'll set y'up real homespun. You can listen to my latest poems, got some incredibly significant stuff just dripping off me right now, lot of heavy heavy laundry got hung out to dry, real naked, hope you come. Hey, shit, can I have one of those?" He wanted one of my cigarettes.
"You like Raleighs?" I asked as I thumbed him one.
"My grandfather smoked these. He died of lung cancer. Now, if you'll excuse me gentlemen, I've got to catch a composer friend of mine. He's a Doctor at the Peabody Conservatory, a real genius. He's framing some of my po-ems with musical settings." He took a drag off my match. "I especially like his disturbing take on ' Wingéd Genet- alia.' Hey, man, if you want to be truly shaken to the core, you oughta check it out. We got a cassette coming out real soon, um, wuz your name?"
"Felix."
He laughed, " yeah, like the cat." His voice had a slight impediment, as if he was too lazy to properly form words. As "cat" ended with an echo of " th," he disappeared into the smoke.
"Who was that guy?" I asked Coffee Bob. He looked vaguely familiar.
"You don't know Red? He's deals smoke for a lot of artists in the neighborhood. But he gets it all from Didier, this Haitian guy in his building who doesn't want to soil his hands by dealing with white people. He's kinda like an annoying front man. Got a cool hubcap collection, though."
The first of my many questions was why he was called Red instead of, say, Gray, for there was nothing remotely red about him. I didn't get the chance to ask, however, for Coffee Bob had spotted Eliza and entourage in a booth, slouched like Absinthe drinkers. We went over but they wouldn't let us sit down with them.
"This is a girls only table," said Eliza. The rest of the group giggled and pretended to ignore us.
Coffee Bob sat down anyway, right on top of Eliza's feet, which were stretched out on the bench facing her. I got the edge of my coccyx down on the corner of the bench. This neither pleased nor displeased the ladies, they seemed to ignore it and continued talking, something about how this place was so damp they were surprised algae wasn't growing on the walls.
"Where's Hector?" interrupted Coffee Bob. "I thought you needed a diet of 300 spastic grimaces a day to survive."
"Very funny, cocksucker. Why don't you just do us all a favor and get the fuck out of the closet. This guy here looks cheaper than any of us will ever be."
"I'm strictly hetero," he said, which was news to me.
I tried to move the butt in question onto the bench, but Coffee Bob on Eliza's feet was in the way, so I gave Coffee Bob a gentle bump and tried to smile. The girls laughed hysterically. I was in.
"So what do you do?" the one across from me asked as Coffee Bob and Eliza continued their love making. She had a tiny head, broad bony shoulders, no neck, huge brown eyes and pearly buck teeth. The whole effect in the dim midday light of the bar was that of a big brown bat.
"I'm a musician," I proclaimed proudly, not realizing this was the same line virtually every other guy in this bar used.
"Oh yeah?" she winked. "Then why are you up this early?"
"I was going to ask you the same question," I replied.
"Is loverboy in your band?"
"No, not yet anyway, actually, me and my buddy are a kind of a...songwriting team, ya know, like Jagger and Richards."
She laughed deliciously, although I didn't know why. "That reminds me of this scene from ' Ishtar
' where Warren Beaty tells Dustin Hoffman 'this song's better than "Bridge Over Troubled Water."' Have you seen it? Great flick." She paused and smiled at me. "What's the name of your band?"I was stumped. I looked at her shining eyes, her cute dimple as she moved her sexy overbite outward. "Uh...Urban Shocker."
"The baseball player?" was her immediate response.
"Well, it's about a lot of things," I improvised, "the past, forgotten people, racism, the incongruity of it all...hey, how do you know about the baseball player?"
"I'm a graduate student in Baseball Studies at UPenn, that's how," she laughed, clutching the table like a bat clinging to rafters. "To me, the name enigmatizes the tension in the game, don't you think, between country and city, its rural appearance and, yes, urban reality. Beyond the aura of a timeless, unspoiled agrarian past — even the minors are called the farm leagues — is the rough and tumble overcrowding of people literally killing to become a part of its innocence. I think of all those hicks who followed their dream to the lonesome cities only to pine for their innocence. Y'know , heroic shadows under the brutal sun. Is that what your music is about?"
" Kinda." I looked into her eyes. In the center was still a woman, willing to believe anything.
"I think that's cool." She gave me a once over. "Now, what do you really do?" My business haircut, my goofy grin, and my obvious unfamiliarity with the etiquette of this bar had given me away.
"I work for..." I gave the name of my employer.
"Oh," she perked up, "an investment banker! Hey, girls, this here's an investment banker. Howsabout a round of drinks?"
"Sure, but you have to give me your name first."
"Philadelphia."
"Do they call you Phillie for short?" I asked, still confused about how or why someone could major in baseball, especially someone slumped down in a dive like this.
"Nah, too equestrienne. Just call me Phil."
"You're named after the city?"
"No, a character in some old some movie (Fort Apache, I later learned). Now go get us some beers."
I waded through the increasing inebriation to sidle into a spot at the bar. I pointed my finger out as if I was flagging a cab. After an interminable delay, the bartender looked at me.
"I'll have a pitcher."
"Of what?"
I panicked and asked for Coors. He just stood there with a deeply wounded look, as if I had just pulled a gun on his whole reason for working there. I looked at the tap. "I mean that," pointing to the National Bohemian handle. He smiled and poured me a round of black beer. It was only a dollar.
"Ah, Natty Boh Dark, you made the right choice," cheered Eliza when I returned. "You have good taste for a money man."
"I'm not a money man. I just play one during the day. I distribute Communist agitprop in my free time."
"A regular bat man, with his ward here Dick Grayson," said Eliza, nudging Coffee Bob.
Philadelphia looked deeply into me. Her contorted smile said it all: "you better take me to your place today, young man, but, sadly, that's all of me you're going to have."
I offered her a cigarette. She declined, saying she only smoked Pall Malls. I fetched her a pack and we shared some. They were brutal on my throat, and when I started coughing she clutched my hand, suddenly all feminine like, and said "don't inhale them, silly."
The green beer light daubed the bar in romantic tones. A world of feeling seemed to emanate from it, as if all the false hopes and half truths of the patrons were brought to life under its rainbow. To me, however, it was only the sign itself that mattered: people's faces were no less ugly and misguided, the place was no less fetid and decrepit, but the light, man, it was a beacon, to higher, holier leanings, a pure beam that gave only one message: "Genessee."
I could not bring myself to ask Philadelphia to leave with me. Her curious, beckoning eyes did all they were expected to, but I failed in my masculine responsibility of actually posing the question, for I was helpless before the heavy lifting I knew would be coming. It all seemed too much a part of a preordained plot for us to get together: even Coffee Bob, Eliza and the other self-absorbed women yawned at that inevitable. My mind swum with rationalizations: maybe I was rusty after being out of commission for so long, maybe I was guilty because I still felt connected to my wife, maybe after what had happened I didn't believe anyone would really want me, maybe I just freaked at the idea of taking her where I actually lived. Besides, I reasoned, there were only so many directions a woman who was blotto at noon was going to take.
Meanwhile, Coffee Bob, terrified and insecure and trying desperately to look macho, seemed for all the world to be drinking Eliza's onslaught in greedily, as if he had been waiting all his life for this moment of masochistic bliss. She in turn wanted nothing to do with sycophants and just stopped talking to him entirely. So after a while Coffee Bob and I were both emasculated and hence tiresome to the table, and they continued their merry conversation, about the debauchery of a Harriman party and The Wall Street Journal as the last bastion of anti-Semitism in America.
Coffee Bob finally eyed me to leave. We stood up abruptly, as men are wont to do, and just walked, through the front door, not even looking back at the no-doubt surprised female faces. The mid-afternoon light was harsh. I asked Coffee Bob if we could go back and see the statue I liked in the art cave. The piece was gone. "What the hell," I muttered. Coffee Bob was visibly upset, "I can't believe someone would steal something from here." On the way out I noticed a particularly old, varnished portrait. I stopped to peer at it. Yes, the shit-eating expression, the death-like pallor, there could be no doubt who this was — it was Red.
2.
Back at Lester and Katherine's, things had taken a turn for the weird. The door was deadbolted. A seven-foot 300-pound man with thick black plastic glasses answered the bell. "I don't think you should come in," he said in a low voice after coldly eyeing us over. "You could be destabilizing."
"But I live here," I replied, "and who the hell are you?"
"That's not important," he said with a tone that suggested he was a counselor-in-training at a mental hospital and I was a distraught "resident." "The point is Katherine and Lester cannot be disturbed. They must attend to very serious business."
"Like what? Discussing whether the second Partridge Family drummer was really Billy Idol?"
"I am not at liberty to disclose that information," he said in a nervous voice.
"What the fuh? Is Buster here?" I asked incredulously.
"No, I had to send him away. His was not a good influence. Now, if you will pardon me, I must return to the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling." He shut the door.
Coffee Bob and I decided to climb in through the alley window. He put his fingers together and made a step to hoist me up. I used all the leverage I could muster to jimmy the casement, even as I wobbled like a skyscraper in a ' Noreaster. No sooner had I lifted the handle, though, than I saw a huge belly inside, glowering at me. It was that guy again. He rudely slammed the window down and locked the sill. The last thing I saw before the blind closed was his foul scowl.
We knew, Bob and I, that something was going on in that house we just had to be a part of, so we formulated a strategy, drawing it up in the dirt like huddling 6th grade quarterbacks. I would climb the telephone pole and enter the building through the hole in the roof. He would go through the crawl space and try to insert himself into the opening where the boiler pipe left the building.
I climbed up the pole like an opossum and skittered over the tarpaper roof. Instead of the hole I remembered jamming under there was now a stained glass panel raised on wooden slats and hinged by an unlocked latch. It depicted lambs following a radiant, cross-shaped staff, as if it had been pilfered from a church and hidden away where no one would ever see it. Feeling like the only human being with the privilege of viewing it, I gazed reverently through this window, but saw only suspended particles of rose-colored dust in the empty room below. I fought the urge to break the stained glass and go straight to the truth, and gingerly lifted the latch. I knew there were a series of attic doors connecting through the apartments down to Lester and Katherine's bathroom. When I found the first one, I gritted my teeth and proceeded, shutting out visions of dropping in on terrified old ladies on the crapper. Fortunately, the only resistance I ran into was a white Labrador drinking from the second floor toilet bowl. With a mouthful of water, he tried to spume out a bark, but his tail was wagging and his teeth were showing as if in a smile, so I gave him a pat, said "good boy," and descended through another door into our empty bathroom.
I walked in on Lester and Katherine laying horizontally in their chairs and laughing hysterically. "I can't taste any-thing," Katherine cackled as she took a drag on her cigarette. Lester was waving his cigarette in furious circles through the air. He exclaimed "look. Lassos of light. Ah, the ravaging vicissitudes of fire," and continued to churn his cigarette around and around. The big man was sitting expressionless in a nearby chair like a warden. When he saw me, he sprang up and lurched menacingly in my direction. Lester lifted his hand like a delicate king and said "No need, Melvin. He works for us now." To me, he said "Fee-Fee! You're just in time. You caught us in mid-epiphany. Here, drink sum o diss, it's a bomb," and pointed to a silver tea service on the coffee table. On it was a glass pitcher filled with ice and blue liquid and an ornate silver stirring rod. I immediately poured some into one of the delft china teacups that were stacked on the tray. After I took a sip, Lester said "whoa. Not that much. We'll have to scrape you off of the ceiling."
"What did I just drink?"
"Cyanide," Katherine laughed. "In small doses, it's Soma, the Jesus of cool, the apogee of highness, the wormhole to munificent exaltitudosity. Unfortunately, you took a smitch too much. That's just too bad."
"Actually, it's far worse," corrected Lester, "you just dropped the Big L, or Captain America as they call it in Vermont."
"I don't feel anything," I reported with a touch of surliness.
"Oh, you will," Katherine informed me, and then went back to humming " om" into her cigarette. Her irises were the size of a cat's, but she didn't seem to be looking out of them.
Just then there was a knock on the floor.
" Hephaestus has finally had enough and wants to melt me back down," Lester immediately responded.
Katherine was of the mind it was Hermes Trismegestus but it was actually Coffee Bob, covered in soot. "What's up, guys?" he asked with a grin.
"Drink some of that and you'll start to notice the wires behind Eliza's face," said Lester.
"Mr. Sid?"
"He goes by many names..."
"Where did you get this elixir?" Coffee Bob asked as he gulped directly from the pitcher.
"Stop asking so many meaningless questions," warned Lester, "meditate on why Michael Jordan and James Dean look exactly alike. I bet you've never seen them both in the same room."
"Do you know Philadelphia?" I asked Lester
"Yeah, it's halfway between Baltimore and New York, in every way."
"Not the city, Eliza's friend."
"That's no name," he replied, as if his judgement settled it.
"She majors in baseball at UPenn, isn't that whack? I kinda told her Urban Shocker was the name of our band."
Lester didn't respond to this confession. He seemed to think pursuing a fly with his hand was more important. Coffee Bob took one of Katherine's cigarettes. Melvin eyed him suspiciously, like an attack dog.
Lester grabbed a copy of The Nation and bolted up to chase the fly around the room. When Melvin saw this, he too stood up, grabbed The Baltimore Sun, tightened it into a weapon, superficially concerned with the fly but surreptitiously out to vent his severely repressed rage on Lester. Within minutes, paper shreds were floating around the room to the accompaniment of blam! blam! blam! They bashed lampshades, curtains, chandeliers, but mostly each other with their coiled newsprint savagery, but it was inevitable that the flabby-with-ads Sun would eventually overcome the ascetic Nation, and that the fly would escape unharmed. Fortunately, Kitty was on the scene; she stuck her paw in the air and speared the fly, then quickly ate it as if it was a hot but tasty sausage.
"I wonder what her last name is. Should I call her?" I asked.
Katherine was staring at the ceiling, admiring the aftertrails of the newspaper war. Melvin seemed immensely pleased that he could freely trash someone's place without the female of the house intimidating him. Lester meanwhile just stared at Kitty, and Kitty nervously skittered away from him. Coffee Bob only smiled, gawking at the pelt-clad women on TV, one in a squat pinning the other in a half-nelson, the other grimacing, flailing, and rubbing the attacker's groin with the pads of her feet.
"I should have asked her out, I know it. Is it too late to call her for a date?" I repeated my plea.
Lester said "I threw the phone in the broom closet. Melvin, be a good troglodyte and plug it in."
"Are you fucked up yet?" Melvin leaned into me to ask.
"No, are you?"
"Don't be ridiculous," he sneered. "If you keep it under control, I'll hook up the phone," and he walked into the kitchen without waiting for my response.
After he left, I asked Lester what his official function was. Lester said I'd find out in about 10 minutes — when the cube settled in. Katherine urged me to have pity on him because he was engaged to marry this cadaverous medical school shrew and was shortly going to move in with her family in Detroit. Lester added that he had a penis the size of an pencil eraser, as if I needed that bit of information to complete the puzzle.
"Phone's on," came a shout from the other room.
"Her last name's Greene, I believe," said Coffee Bob.
"Go for it," said Katherine.
Information did have a Philadelphia Greene, but an older woman answered the phone. "Is this Philadelphia?" I asked.
" Youse mean Phil, Hon... Phiiiiiiiiiiillllllllll! Gentleman calling..."
"Hello?"
"I can't believe I found you! This is Felix. We met at the Mt. Royal today."
"Oh, yeah. Do I have your keys or something?"
"No, I wanted to see if you were free tonight."
"No, I'm feeling sick."
"I bet," I chuckled, "but I mean tonight, not right now."
"No, I've got some kind of nasty flu. Maybe some other night."
It was about at this time that the acid started to kick in. "But I just saw you 20 minutes ago. You can't be too sick."
"Leave me alone, what do you know about it, don't you believe me?" she tsked.
"I thought there was something happening between us. I didn't mean to hurt you. I'm just so afraid of love I don't know how to act sometimes..." I continued to blither on in this vein.
" Puh-leez. You're giving me a migraine with this dorkitude. What is it? Are you married, gay or living with your parents?"
"I'm none of those things, I'm nothing at all, only the thought of you. I think you know what I'm getting at."
"Yeah, it's not safe to leave my house anymore." Her spirits seemed to be picking up.
"I can show you places you didn't think existed, beyond all your fears, and I'll follow you to the lonely spaces where your dreams lead you. I'm that face you see in the mirror." Lester, Katherine, Coffee Bob and Melvin were now in the room, staring at me.
"Are you for real? Just get it over with right now and tell me you want to chop my head off."
"Oh, I am very real, and I'm not going to act like I hate you just so you'll want me, what kind of basis to a relationship is that?" My voice was calm, gentle.
"Relationship? You didn't even last through three rounds of drinks. I only talked to you out of pity. I'm sorry I felt sorry for you."
"So you really don't know what you're missing, do you? You really don't care to be adored?"
"I don't need you for that. I can snap my fingers and men come jumping out of trees."
The drug was expanding exponentially in my brain. I felt all knowledge and power spiral out of the universe into me, but still I had no clue what to say to her. "No," I sighed. "You can't mean that. You can't mean that."
"Oh, but I do," she laughed, "only losers talk like you do."
"No, you don't mean that," I said. She suddenly sounded like a duck, I could even see her annoying duck face as she talked, precisely programmed to resist everything I said.
"What does it matter what I say? It sounds to me like you'd be better off flogging your own dolphin, so that, as Gide says, 'the pleasure given would be equal to the pleasure received.'" She kept driving me crazy by turning into a duck.
"What does 'flog my dolphin' mean?" I asked. The others in the room broke out into laughter.
"Who's with you?" Philadelphia barked.
"Oh, just some friends. Coffee Bob, Lester, Mel..."
"Lester Riley, Hector's brother?"
"So they say." M
voice was suddenly echoing.
"Listen, I gotta go," she said after a pause. "You will come back to the Tavern sometime, OK?" Her duck voice was fading into nothingness.
"No, don't go," I sputtered, but I saw Lester's thumb coming in to disconnect the phone, so I said "Yeah, OK, later" to the dead line.
"Why'd you do that?" I asked Lester.
"Trying to save ya dude. The only conclusion we could draw on this side of the line was that you were being tortured by a tribe of Amazons. What were you thinking?"
I was in no shape to respond. The LSD was attacking my body: my stomach was an inferno, my head was boiling, massive electrical charges coursed through me. I had to run.
"Hang with it, man. That part will be over in about 15 minutes." I hoped I would survive that long.
I ran out the back screen door. The light in the yard was like snow. Although it was about 80 degrees, I shuddered continually. I could see my breath. Flames of violet trailed the tree leaves as they shivered in the breeze. The tree bark looked like human skin. The low sky exploded in my eyes like a literal heaven, beckoning me to lose myself utterly in its all-destroying light. My aperture blinked and it was just a vacant field, remote from my thought, indifferent to my feeling, just a lifeless sweep of hopeless blue.
I began to titter maniacally, and the sound of it in my ear terrified me. I felt surging inside me some immense mute power that demanded expression. For some reason this led me to start screaming "WASTE, WASTE" at the top of my lungs, and I saw this word as the horrible answer to everything, why mothers with strollers moved so slowly, why the best minds built bombs, for all were striving amid the molasses of gravity, snagged in the sagging, flagging morass. Our vast hungers aroused a filth that kept us glued down, our energies depleted, consumed in anger, idleness, fantasy or fear. We were capable only of insufficient thoughts and ineffectual motions, held down in a birth of waste and returned to the dust of waste — forms emerged from chaos only to become chaos again, in all their transformations never becoming more than what they once were. The journey was all: the urge to love and learn and grow all led to a finite point, a contour on the wall. As spring was emerging in all its fecundity, with the distant sound of pop music in the wind, I imagined the world as a giant fetus roasting on a spit. This thought helped, but not enough. I climbed over the ten-foot fence and ran out into the street. I had to tell everyone about it all. They had to learn.
I made it to the corner of St. Paul Street before Melvin collared me. He somberly dragged me back as I kicked and shrieked for freedom. I saw a passing hugging couple; she whispered "I love you" into his ear and turned her ear to his mouth. I tried to tell them all about it, but they too were slow-moving and unaware, infected with the hegemony of flesh. They smiled gently at my protestations, as if that could dulcify my madness. There was no way to reach inside them and make them understand; they were too busy trying to show me how happy they were, and they would only hear my words as happy things they already understood and would only see my gestures as responses to all the wondrous things they were doing. They needed my approval just as much as I needed theirs, and each of us was prepared to completely ignore the other to get it — we were both, after all, nothing more than an attempt at communication, and that would be the one impossible thing. I looked at all the row houses, bound together in brick, each one with a different way of trying to distinguish itself from the rest, some with the peasant hauteur of whitewashed marble stoops, others gritty and unpainted in a pathetic salesman routine, all looking out on a world they desired to impress — what a shame, I thought, they couldn't face each other.
I came back into the house wanting to put my arm around Lester and reach inside his mind. Here was someone, I thought, who could rescue me from miscomprehension, who could ease my synaptic tempest. The room throbbed with candlelight and everyone was gathered around Lester.
" Morrissey is the only gay..."
"Testify...many are called."
"Vegetarian..."
"Oh Yeah — many are chosen."
"Literary recluse..."
"Uh-huh — been there."
"Zen Buddhist..."
"Amen — done that."
"Celibate..."
"Ouch — I can name that tune in three notes."
"Rock Star!" At that Lester leaned back as the room exploded into laughter and hallelujahs.
I tried to explain my wonderful insight that man was totally alone and mired in a futile, meaningless existence, but no one cared. Katherine just muttered that I should have been a minister.
"Felix, you're just in time, we were just having fun reducing people we know to common stereotypes," said Lester, oblivious to it all.
"I think he oughta cool down a bit. He's not acting like a team player," said Melvin before pushing me behind locked doors into Katherine and Lester's bedroom.
I trembled on their bed. My heart, my brain, my spine, all were open and racing. The only solution was human contact. I ran toward the door, banging desperately, clawing, howling. I could hear them ignoring me on the other side. Their voices seemed to come over water, over a vast unbridgeable gulf. I fell to my knees. I literally could not stand up. Stoned and alone, my head exploded with how I never saw anyone except as a mirror to my vanities. I deserved to be ostracized, to be imprisoned forever in this dark chamber, to gaze like Bodhidarma at the wall for nine years until the self that held the truth back became annihilated. Just then Lester came in. The door apparently had been unlocked the whole time. "What're doing in the dark?" he asked.
"Trying to find the light?"
"That's not the way to do it. Hey, listen," he whispered, "we've got to do something about Melvin. He's way out of control. Coffee Bob wants to go to the Seven-Eleven to get some Cool Ranch Doritos because he claims they make blue sparks when you bite them, but Melvin won't hear of it. Here's the plan: Katherine kinda sweet talks him, while the three of us ambush him from behind, then we tie him up with this chicken wire, think you can handle it, are you cool?"
"I love you, man."
"Great, that's the spirit. We have to distract him first, talk about diet colas for awhile. Are you straight enough for that? Good, let's go."
We emerged into the searing candlelight. Melvin was listening intently to Katherine describe how the Coca-Cola company, also known as the Democratic party, wanted to shake down the Madagascar vanilla cartel (yes, vanilla comes from Africa), who were starting to hook up with the Soviet Union that had so long been closely tied to the Republican Pepsi party, so they cooked up this marketing blitzkrieg called the New Coke to pass off a vanilla-less confection, thinking the addicts couldn't tell the difference (one can only imagine how stupid they must have thought their customers were for giving them such insane amounts of money). Anyway, she continued, it was all planned out, did he think their scheme would work?
Before he could respond, Coffee Bob threw what looked like a fish net over him, and Lester jumped on his shoulder, taking him down. As he heaved violently, Coffee Bob kept kicking him gingerly in the shins. Lester eyed me to grab the chicken wire, which I did, handing it to him and stepping on one of Melvin's beefy arms. Within moments our acid energies had completely overcome the lumbering mass of Melvin. Katherine added the coupé de grace by stuffing a sock in his mouth and tying it over with a red bandanna. At this, Lester said, "sorry, dude, but we must get to the Doritos."
Melvin on the ground made moaning noises behind the sock, as if to say "you Fascist Fools, Doritos are made by Pepsi!"
Instinctively afraid of what we were doing, we started running down the darkening street like some demented 80's version of the Mod Squad. We passed by the Catholic school for pregnant teenage girls, the now-empty Reagan/Bush campaign headquarters with their pictures still smiling behind the broken teeth, mustaches and black eyes that artists had seen in them over the years, the glue factory which forced everyone in this neighborhood to need inhalers, the burned out Greenspring dairy now as dead as a milkman, the edges of the white ghetto, blighted except for the Lottery, Liquor and Marlboro signs. We passed without comment on all this that would seem to lead us to a hopeless end, but we kept chattering on about the Cool Ranch Doritos promised land, becoming more convinced with each step of the righteousness of our path.
We shocked the cashier in the Seven-Eleven for some reason we couldn't figure out and bounded straight for the snack food aisle, hoping we weren't too late. We finally located a cache of about twenty bags at the far end of the store, but not before Lester screamed about the vast Doritos conspiracy right in front of two children wide-eyed, holding Popsicles. Between the three of us, we grabbed all the bags of Cool Ranch Doritos in the store, paid for them with a couple of $20's, and walked out each with huge armfuls.
We came back to find Melvin asleep on the floor. "He does that," said Katherine, "that's how he deals with stress, except he usually does it by locking himself in the bathroom for hours, so we're lucky, really."
Lester and Coffee Bob pulled the bags open while Katherine got some blue Wyler's out of the fridge. I pulled out a cigarette. I felt much calmer now, although still tripping like mad. The cigarette tasted wretched in my mouth, like an exhaust pipe. I cracked a few Dorito's. I could not taste the salt, cheese, corn, dextrose or mesquite, it was like I was one of those human-sized brass heads Frito-Lay uses to test the crunch of new products in their labs. At the same time, vast phosphorescent rainbows of color trailed off the chips as I lifted them to my mouth. This strange sensory combination told my expanded consciousness that these snacks were not the toxins I had believed them to be, they were nothing in fact compared to the power my mind had to control the experience. The mind created sense and feeling, it lit up the dim stuff all around, it conjured reality; "solid" matter was after all almost entirely empty space, a void except for the merest vibration of imperceptible waves — photons, gluons, solitons, strings, loops, membranes, nothingness moving at different resonance modes. In theory, if man's telescopes looked out far enough they could see, at the end of the universe, the beginning of time — could they not see the nothingness beyond that? I looked around the room — it seemed we were all of the same mind, caught in the same Doritos epiphany, minds crunching at the nothingness of all we perceive. I had to get up.
"Don't look in the mirror," warned Lester, knowing exactly what I was about to do.
"Just for a minute," I replied.
"You'll never leave," my trip guide advised.
"Come get me then if I get stuck."
"By then it might be too late," he said.
"I'll take my chances."
As soon as I walked into the bathroom I knew exactly what Lester meant. My skin was like a shiny moon, my smile was wider than a clown's, my entire face was a mask in fact, and the eyes behind it had someone else looking out of them. I peered closer: there was nothing left of my baby blue eyes — they had been eclipsed by two shimmering black stars, and like black holes they sucked me in. The more I looked into these swollen pupils, the more I understood that the force pulling me in and allowing no light to escape was not absence, it was not the cold weight of death, it was not the irresistible lure of opaque evil, it was, in fact, the opposite, pure light — a love energy — so strong it had no need to escape from itself, for it collected all imperfect, giving loves into it. This forced me to change my whole cosmology: was "empty" space the place of spirit and form its empty shell? Was darkness actually light? Was loving actually in the receiving rather than the giving? Were black holes, the giant abscesses in the universe, actually the central sun, the primal source of love that anchored the universe in place? My impossibly wide eyes said "yes," as I continued to gaze into the mirror (a glass painted black on the back), looking with the blackness of my eyes into the blackness within my eyes, the dark windows to my soul. At the center of that soul was an observer. The act of seeing was the same as what was seen, there was no difference; the answer I wanted to learn was the question I thought to ask, the end was the source — the only difference was that it understood itself perhaps a little better, the itch was realized in the scratch.
I focused on a particular spot of beautiful blackness, and within a few moments, my face started changing. I was a sad old woman with a deformed face, a ferocious warrior with a tusk helmet, a wry wrinkled scholar, and finally, just as Katherine predicted, a brimstone-eyed minister. Were these my past lives? Paler images flickered in and out, a wild boar, a wolf, a spider, their lines etched lithographically on my face. Suddenly, the images stopped, and my entire form was filled with light, even as the room around stayed exactly the same. It started as deep red, then moved up the spectrum, to orange, then yellow, then green, then deep blue, then indigo, then violet, then it changed at random, mixing, merging, darkening. As this happened, I felt energy bursts move up and down my spine, it hit my heart at green, my forehead at violet, the solar plexus at yellow. I felt myself as pure energy, ascending through the layers of ether above, the seven heavens, which were not actually places to travel to, but dimensions of myself I could access in my consciousness. I wished I didn't have the weight of this drug keeping me corporeal (forgetting that it took only a sip of it dissolved in liquid to give me this effect). I wanted to fly.
Just then Lester walked in. "It's far worse than I imagined." He saw me shivering, my knees on the sink basin, with a crazy leering grin, drooling, inches away from the mirror. "Get outta here, you..."
"But I'm seeing my body dissolve into all these different forms," I rattled off without moving.
"That's your third eye remembering your past incarnations, cool isn't it, but it won't do you any good here."
"Is this stuff going to rearrange my brain chemistry?"
"Yes, but no more than the theme song from MASH. Come on, we're going driving."
I dutifully dropped to the floor, the trance over, and went back to the living room. Melvin had been de-netted and uncuffed and was now sound asleep under a white blanket. Coffee Bob and Katherine were engaged in an excited gibberish over whether the correct expression was "hock a loogee" or "hug a looger." Neither one made any sense to me. The weed I saw on the table did, though, so I asked for some. "Help yourself," said Lester, "but you won't feel anything."
He was right. It had absolutely no effect, if anything it brought me closer to animal state I was trying to evade. "What's the point?" asked Lester as I hunkered down to take another hit, "c'mon, let's go."
"In what?"
"Melvin's truck."
"Who's driving?"
"Coffee Bob, of course, he's got some sort of brain defect where he can actually drive on acid."
Coffee Bob sat calmly smoking a cigarette. Should I put my life in his hands? He flicked the ashes into the heating duct. Hell, why not, I thought, so off into the night we trundled.
The truck required Lester and I to lay down like astronauts in the covered bed in the back. Coffee Bob shot out of the space, and all Lester and I could see were streetlights and the occasional green road sign. We could tell from the banks of light and concrete that Coffee Bob had headed out on the expressway. I didn't like this direction — it was like some kind of antiseptic future world. I felt I was being delivered as a sacrifice to the God of science, so in my prone state I became factious. I started yelling "take us to Compton."
No one knew if Compton was a real place or an imagined ideal (least of all me), but for some reason it fit everyone's circuitry, so we all started demanding to go there immediately. Almost instantaneously, the road roughened, it felt like a cobble stone street and Lester and I were stuck in the bed's tight quarters as if riding the underground railroad. "Is this Compton?" I asked. Coffee Bob, the only one who knew, said nothing. "I wanna go to Compton!" I said, "I want to earn while I burn."
"Earn while you burn, yeah, that's it," said Lester, " take us to Compton, damnit."
An interminable time later, the truck finally stopped. "Is this Compton?" I asked, full of hope and expectation.
We emerged to a strand of overgrown shrubs, and an overpowering smell of petroleum distillate. A few other recreational vehicles were parked with us in the dirt. A sign read "Ferry Bar Park." On the other end of the dirt road was a concertina wired maze of rusted Quonset huts used as temporary worker's quarters.
"Where the hell is this?" Lester asked Coffee Bob.
"It's a cool place. Give it a try," replied Coffee Bob dreamily.
"This isn't Compton," I muttered sadly.
We went through the bushes. On the other side was a sandy beach, gently lapped by thick black harbor water. No more than 100 feet away was a city of light that filled the horizon, full of huge concrete columns, steeples, spheres and cones, each one decorated with hundreds of tiny white lights, the whole confection powdered with white ash. It was like Oz itself, intricate webs of moving conveyor belts, and smokestacks with huge bulbs of flame roaring out of them. On the beach was a black soot-covered picnic table. A father and son were by the bubbly shoreline with a galvanized tin bucket, fishing in the gas-leak rainbows. Further into the mire, a shopping cart was submerged, along with a bicycle and some snow tires. The whole scene glowed in a ghastly green, like a huge radioactive TV.
What kind of park was this, I thought. Was that network of pipes on that building a series of monkey bars? Were those wrecking cranes swingsets? The wastewater funnels slides? A splinter-infested plank ran from the sand to a partially submerged crab boat closer to shore. Some young kids were running along the decks playing pirate with swatches of sumac. We were awestruck at the beauty of the scene. Coffee Bob and I walked the plank to the boat and circled its dead hull. Lester, who had gone to relieve himself in the bushes, came out while we were gently bobbing the craft, working out a call and response between our energies, the boat's and the universe's, finding all was in balance, a perfect slow-motion ballet. Lester was fuming, as angry as I'd ever seen him.
"Coffee Bob, you fucking condom, why'd you motherfucking drag us to this fucking roach forsaken pisshole of the earth, for Jesusfuckingsakes?"
We all tried to ignore him, in fact we could barely hear him beyond the grinding hum of the complex. The other zombies on the beach certainly didn't pay him no mind, was he speaking...to us?
"Huh? Why'd you do it, you fucking arrogant cocksucking piece of worthless jet shit? " I could see in his eyes that he did not want to look at this in aesthetic terms. "This place is a goddamned cesspool, do you know how many motherfucking rats are running loose? Ooh, but they're friendly here, you want to fuckin' squeeze them? You want to pet them, pissweasel? Do ya?" He started snorting horribly at the thought.
The others wanted to stay, and we passively held our ground, but we recognized it was just a stump of land, nothing more to it, meanwhile Lester had walked off back towards the lunchbucket shacks, repeating to their interconnected strands of lights in his hurt, indignant moan "Homey don't play that, oh no."
We finally rounded him up and climbed back into the truck. Lester was still frothing at the tastelessness of it all as we lay back in our coffins. Coffee Bob, still at the wheel, still smiled slightly. We rolled back onto the highway. I again demanded to go to Compton and Lester again cursed the fact that we considered this all one big joke. We all kept smirking, even though the force of anger he displayed — even on his back — would wilt a Marine. He was so utterly serious, which was why it was so funny. The more we ignored him, the more he persisted, and the more comical it became. He had, after all, taught us all how to appreciate things such as Ferry Bar Park, and we weren't about to go back now to some meaningless sense of security.
Abruptly, Coffee Bob braked the truck. "Stop number two," he announced. I instinctively trembled. I rose from the bed, however, to find a sylvan faery land, a photo-negative world enveloped in a mosquito net of mist, full of frosted evergreens and dark maples. Ivy dripped from thatched roofs over the soft crystal windows of gingerbread mansions and fluttered over their shimmering slate walls. Lights of more distant estates twinkled like eyes in the forest. We walked through a glade of thick, dewy grass blanketed with asters. It seemed like some emerald, enchanted forest. Nightbirds cooed. Dogs sang in the distance. Bullfrogs bellowed like swamp cows in the far-off marshes. A calico cat slithered playfully cross our path and then darted like a mole into the forest under a mesh of grass blades. Spiderwebs hung in the mist like nebulae, stitching the thick profusion together with patterns of infinity. The air was thick with that spermy smell of pollen. Wood pigeons sounded like monkeys in the darkness.
We came to a gate, overgrown with ivy and monstrous yews. It squeaked open easily. Inside was a huge swimming pool, but not a standard-issue Olympic blue pool, it was more like a fountain one might find nestled in the royal forests of England. Beyond it was a Victorian garden complete with gazebo and overhanging trellis. Carved stone tables and chairs were arranged casually around the water's edge. Spanish moss hung dreamily from the trees. One would imagine ghost personages in tennis whites sipping champagne from long fluted goblets — except the tiles were covered with lichens, the stone whitened from rot, and the props framing the garden had collapsed to become part of the overgrowth. Clumps of algae and lily pad floated on the water's surface.
The mist was so thick, it was like light. Katherine dove off the stone diving platform. Soon we were all in, fully clothed, swimming in the September heat, the pool glowing as if from an underground beam. After a brisk splash, Katherine sunned herself. Lester dove for barnacles. Coffee Bob swam in circles watching the water lilies ripple. I sat bobbing by the edge, trying to become a frog. I saw a black shape pass underneath. I cleared some moss away. It was a turtle, about four feet long and three feet wide. Because I now considered myself an amphibian, I decided to join him. On his next pass, I grabbed with both hands onto the back part of his shell and rode him as he descended deep into the pool. Fortunately I did not know at the time that this was a snapping turtle who could rip my hand off with one swipe; he must have recognized the purity of my intentions, my utterly fearless amphibian spirit. How else to explain how I held on during the speeds he attained, but hold on I did as he circumnavigated the pool, even breathing with him when he came up to the surface. As if by some electric current, all of us took turns, gently riding and softly releasing from brother turtle in thankfulness. When the last of us had let go, he dove even deeper, his speckled flippers plashing madly, as if into a subterranean stream. He never reemerged.
My fellow trippers were lolling like reptiles on the white ceramic tiles, covered with a muddy fleece.
"The meek shall interpret the world," I finally said, trying to come up with some explanation as to why we had stepped into this Pre-Raphaelite painting.
"Yes, the beak of the winterferb bird," Coffee Bob repeated, in all seriousness.
"The Edna Ferber bird," Katherine clarified.
"The Edna Ferber burger," offered Lester. That seemed to sum things up.
Coffee Bob had managed to smuggle in a pocket cassette player, so he took this opportunity to lay down Prince's latest, "Sign 'O' The Times." I remember hearing about a hundred layers of sound, the strangest chords and tempo variations, even weirder with that melting sound music makes when it warps over water. We sat there stunned listening to it, paralyzed by its greatness. It was like a vast robot machinery controlling us. When it finally ended and we made our way out, the mist had gotten even heavier, like a floodlight. We paused in the rarified air, and became statues in the mist. All of us looked at each other, still and stone and standing for something only now that we were mute. But we were thinking, feeling stone. We were like the doomed spirits at the end of the Aeneid, graying old souls sharing an evanescent fragment of time in the achingly beautiful foglight of the Elysian Fields before we descended to the underworld.
We jumped back into the truck. The pool was, according to Coffee Bob, in Ruxton, one of the wealthiest areas of Baltimore, a place that would undoubtedly look upon our invasion as a figurative rape, talked about over cocktails for weeks, symptomatic of the general condition of society, which could be summed up as too few wars and electrocutions. I imagined the person who actually owned the pool as controlling probably half the world's supply of tomato paste, but he sat in his study all day long, insane to everything but how to control the world's supply of tomato paste.
We never did find Compton. We rode on until we found ourselves, as if sucked into the maelstrom, at the harbor center. It must have been two o'clock in the morning when we arrived, but the mall was still full of people, mostly children — hundreds of them — walking with sour, greedy expressions and holding giant inflatable crayon balloons. Lester and I noticed a young boy clutching five Gumby dolls, each of a different size.
"What happened to Pokey?" I asked.
" Zere iz no Pokey," Lester replied in a firm German accent, " eet never eggziested. Oh, I vish dere ver a Pokey," he continued with a lilt of jollity, "but no, you are mistaken."
It was clear we were back in the land of the living dead. Flesh was all this crowd wanted: they ravaged bratwurst dogs or slush puppies, eyed members of the opposite sex with blistering lust, grabbed parent arms as if to rip them off. We had reached that point in our trip where the ether world had faded, but our skin was still torn away, and here we were deposited back at the carnival of carnality, the free-for-all flesh derby. The anguish we had suffered to get to our elevation — albeit significantly less than a monk cloistered for twenty years of solitary endured — made us feel in our oversensitized state like Charly realizing in his genius state that he would soon be coming home to retardation.
As if to prove that point, we tarried next in Patterson Park, where we spent the darkest part of the night on a swingset, straining for the moon on squealing strings that conversed like ghost voices, while the life of rapes, murders, OD's and muggings went on all around as before. We then wandered past the closed-down bars along Fells Point, on Broadway, Fleet and Thames Streets, finally smelling sausage by the waterfront and being more thankful for a sunrise than I could ever remember.
The cigarettes began to have taste again as we trudged home, feeling normal human desires like hunger and shame again. Melvin was waiting for us, fretful and kind and solicitous, not at all what I expected. He cooked up some eggs and bacon and we gorged in silence, he watching us eat with a protective air. We were empty of meaning and ready for sleep. But before I could crash, it was Monday morning, and there was just no way I was going to make it in to work that day. The manager who answered when I called didn't believe I was really sick on such a beautiful morning. I told her honestly I was going immediately to bed, and made strange hacking noises to cut the call short. She let me talk and logged me off, but she still didn't believe me. It must be nice, she seemed to say, to lie without any guilt. If she only knew, in her world of obligation and fear, what I'd been through, she'd beg to do something to help me, I thought — but then again, maybe not. At least that's what I pondered for the hour or so it took to fall asleep.
3.
I was awakened, in what must have been late afternoon, by a phone call.
" Yuh."
"Yes. I just want you to know that I'm heading back to school this morning, but I will be back this weekend if you want to call me."
Normally, this call from Philadelphia would have been great news, but she had interrupted a dream where I was trying to keep my soul mate, a wild Irish lass with translucent red hair, from riding her horse off forever into the moors. "No, nooo!" I said to the tiny girl with the big duck voice.
"So it is all a big joke to you. I should have known as much. I'm usually much smarter than that."
"No, no, I'm sorry, I was sleeping. I do appreciate your call. You saved me the trouble of phoning you every night this week," I lied, still buzzing. "In fact, if you're free say, Friday night, well, you know what Mencken said about Baltimore, 'America's stomach.'"
"If you take me someplace that would make Mencken sweat, I'd consider it."
After I hung up, I was struck again with envy for all those people who would come into work on Monday and say "man, I got so toasted last Saturday, I don't remember how I ended up in the feeding trough, it's all one big blank," when I, on the other hand, forgot nothing of my own depravity and embarrassment. And so the nuances of last evening circulated back with more clarity than at the moments when they happened. Did I really say all that? What could she have thought? Then I realized "shit, men are dogs, don't knock divine intervention; it worked." I could not, however, fall back asleep. Soon, Lester came out of the bedroom, he too spooked by total recall.
"Did you really tell some girl that the name of our band was Urban Shocker?" he asked.
"Uh-huh, it just happened," I apologized, as if I was talking about getting a girl pregnant or contracting AIDS.
"Shit. That must mean there is a band after all, and Coffee Bob's in it. Damn."
"What do you have against Coffee Bob?"
"Music is all about keeping him sane. I just like to rock'n'roll."
The phone rang. Lester answered it. "Yes, this is he...Oh, thank you so much for asking...Yes, I would be interested in hearing about a special offer ...Ah- humn...Ah- humn... That sounds like a wonderful idea, Erica, but I'm afraid I don't need a complementary lawn inspection, for you see, it's difficult to admit this, but I don't have a lawn...No, it's no bother, really, it's a quite fascinating idea...What's your rush, Erica, are you busy? ... That's a shame because I really wanted to find out more about you. You sound like you're very happy at your job, Erica, is it interesting? ... Why, yes, as a matter of fact, there is someone else I know who could benefit from a complementary lawn inspection. Would you mind holding? ... Great."
He put the phone on the side table and turned to me, "do you really want Coffee Bob riding up our asses all the time? Next thing you know he'll think we're some kind of professional band, and he'll want to be the bitch."
"What's with the phone? You're just going to leave it hanging?"
"Don't fret about that. I'm just c
eansing the line. After a couple of treatments, none of the scumsuckers ever call again — it's like they're all connected to some central switchboard. She'll hang up any time now. That call made it impossible for them to make money today," he added proudly.
As if by design, the phone started beeping rapidly. "Now, what do you think about Coffee Bob?" Lester asked as he hung up the phone. "Don't you think he carries a little too much baggage?"
"You could always put him on bass. What damage could he do there?"
"That's what they said about letting William Shatner sing. Can you imagine how frustrated he would get? Bass is the most important instrument, it's the singer's best friend. You should play bass, man."
"You really think so?"
"Hell, yeah. I'm so sick of bass players all concerned with playing the root of the chords and staying in tempo and shit. What's up with all those low notes, man? You could be a wild man, getting inside the instrument. Coffee Bob could stay on guitar, he's good for vapor chords, some high register bent notes and a few chugga-chuggas if he's feeling spry."
"But he was with us last night dancing with Mr. Sid. Doesn't that make him part of us."
"Yeah, he's always around, that's the problem. But, yeah, he's so lame he could actually add something. The larger problem is, where we gonna to find a drummer?"
"There doesn't seem to be a shortage of drummers," I said.
"That's what I'm afraid of. You have no idea what kind of Lysol-drinking bag heads most Baltimore drummers are. Most of them just walk down the streets in a glue frenzy trying to locate a bunch of loud instruments to crash in on. They're not musicians at all, whereas real drummers are the most musical of the whole band, they're the orchestrators."
"Hey," I interrupted, "why didn't we jam during our...interlude last night?"
"I once tried to play guitar on acid, but it screamed whenever I tried. It told me that whenever man attempted the express himself artistically through the savagery of life he made it worse and only revealed himself as an egotistical, ignoble beast. Silent suffering was the key to divinity. On paper, blotter paper that is, I agreed with the guitar, but when I came back down I just wanted to beat the shit out of it for not fighting the power. Speaking of which..." He gestured towards the basement.
"Isn't Katherine here?"
"Nah, she left hours ago for Sweeney's." She had recently gotten a second job at a bookstore to help make ends meet.
"What's stopping us, then?"
After a few hits on the leaves of the digitate, we went downstairs. Before we actually started playing, I tried to interest Lester in tuning our instruments. This resulted in a half-hour long discussion about how boring true sounds were, the conflict between the tones was what made the music exciting, to which I replied that untuned instruments made listeners want to kill the band, to which he replied that I was proving his point. I gamely tried to explain that we needed a modicum of professionalism if we wanted to do anything with the music, but he sneered that the biggest threat to rock'n'roll was this idea of professionalism: "were the Stones professionals, was Dylan a professional, were the Sex Pistols professionals?" Before I could reply "yes, they were all just old-style vaudeville entertainers," he defined professionals as musicians such as Al DiMeola, Vangelis and Kenny G, virtuosos who in their vast and awe-inspiring mastery of music had forgotten to include soul.
The thought of that got Lester and I playing immediately. As usual, he kept changing chords and tempos without any regard for whether I could follow it or not. I was becoming increasingly frustrated by his chaotic approach, so I stopped playing entirely. After a few more minutes, he stopped too, and asked "what's the matter?"
"Don't you think we should agree on a basic chord progression and tempo and just riff off of that?"
"Huh?" he asked querulously.
It was clear I would have to start at the beginning. I took a deep breath, and slowly, very patiently got him to understand that other people needed a musical anchor around which their ideas could interact. The standard way of doing this was to have a common key signature, and so on. We had worked up to an eight-bar I-V chord blues in G, me playing bass, he playing guitar, finding together some near-funk flexibility on the edges of this form, when we saw Coffee Bob squirm in through the furnace opening. He dragged behind him his guitar case.
"Sounds good. Why don't you sing, Lester?"
He didn't mind if he did. Before too long, we were doing reasonably passable versions of various chestnuts: " Midnight Special," " Killing Floor," " Cold Cold Heart." Coffee Bob and I watched Lester's hands move on the frets, so we could follow where he was
going. Lester was amazed we kept playing the same notes he was. None of us noticed how little we were adding to these songs; we heard the great originals in our mind's ear, and our earnest, scholarly mimickings were more like ghost projections than updates.
When we did a second round of these covers, though, we started to discover hints in them: they seemed at times to move in synch with our frantic, thoughtless modern rhythms, they palpated with the latent violence of our recent quarrels, they brought us a little closer to some recent heartbreak. As this happened, the songs started to loosen in our hands, like women responding to our touch. They were just starting to breathe again — like old, weary souls after a long sleep — when there was a loud jangling knock at the basement door.
"Hello! Your drummer's here!"
It was Barbie, Coffee Bob's old roommate, her hair in a wide 60's headband of somber autumn orange and her 350-pound frame wrapped in something out of Laugh-In. In one hand she held a tambourine and in the other a huge bag of marshmallow circus peanuts. We asked immediately if she had any blow. She pulled out a huge bag of green home grown, and began her elaborate pre-rolling ritual, all the while gabbing about how our "band" should play at the Woodstock II festival that was taking place in a week in upstate New York. She knew a guy who could guarantee prime time on stage and it would cost only $200 apiece to get equipment and transportation taken care of, and we would be fools not to take advantage of this opportunity, for we were talking about WOODSTOCK, man, gimme an F and all.
Coffee Bob tried to nip any idea of her playing in our band in the bud. "You guys just don't know how much you need me," she interrupted. "You're nothing but stud weasel meat without me. I could take us to the Strawberry Blonde Statement Alarm Clockwork Cherry top, dig? I know me some slickee boys."
The sight of this mat-haired bag lady laying this power rap on us reminded me for some reason of Martin Luther King Jr's admonition that a society was only as strong as the least among it. I asked for a circus peanut.
"No, I need these for medical reasons. Here's the gig, you" - pointing to Lester - "you will be big lips, try to sound like Mick Jagger, be a good pouter. You" - pointing to me - "are the splendid wheel, propelling the whole thing with your hips, just pace around in circles to keep the electromagnetic energy circulating. Just look like you don't know you're a movie star. As for you' - her witch finger wagging at Coffee Bob - "you will always only be golden boy fag. Cut your hair and bleach it, Tyler. That's de cool chicken flickass-ee." She pulled a piece of string out of her hair. "Image," she continued, "you know what I'm stating, hipdudes, is the nazz. You gotta look like you be hidin' something. Can I get a witness?"
In all her dancing across the fine yellow line between genius and insanity, coolness and embarrassment, she had still not pinched bud one onto her rolling paper. The excitement of our jam was deflating like a torn Lipstick Lucy doll. Lester finally said, " are you going to play with us now, or what?"
"Oh, oh yeah," she said in her husky little girl voice, "but I need to still chill for a spill and check the spectral wavelengths. Just spoon it, spode-e-odi."
We assumed this meant she was going to shut up, so we staggered out a version of " Honky Tonk Woman." She stopped us before we even got to the chorus. "None of that bitter penis aftertaste. Something original I beg of you."
And so all my plans for playing an actual song evaporated. We quickly descended into an inferno of cacophony. Barbie soon joined in, flailing her tambourine to take away any beat we had developed, and shrieking her soprano fireballs whenever there was any inadvertent connection of musical ideas.
When it was finally over, and we were finally puckering away on a waterlogged joint, I seemed to be the only one unsatisfied with the results. Lester had been freed from the tyranny of having me berate him like a nun, Coffee Bob had been allowed to express his demons (which were no more articulate in musical form), and Barbie, well she got to feel like she fit in. They all kinda glowed. I was imagining the horror an audience would have.
Barbie, sensing this, said "don't you torture yourself about it, wheel. That's what people want to hear. It's auth-en-tic."
I couldn't argue with that. I noticed it was dark outside. My fingers were covered with blisters. Barbie seemed battened down for the night, inching ever closer to getting the guitar in her hand. Katherine had come back it seemed for the sole purpose of kicking Barbie out, and so those two unassailable females tangled to the wee hours while the members of the weaker sex slipped away to get some needed sleep. I heard shrilling, wailing and splashing in my dreams, but when I woke up she was gone.
4.
When I went to work on Tuesday, we were all brought into a special meeting (so special they even brought in some Dunkin Donuts) to introduce us to our new computer system, a "state-of-the-art" system with "all the bells and whistles" that would revolutionize the way we did our jobs, and demonstrate the company's commitment to become "a world-class presence in the 21st century." Our salaries of course would have to be trimmed, and customer fees increased to help pay for this massive expenditure, but we would agree if we had a choice since our lives would become so much easier. As it turned out, the corporate fathers had been laughed at by the other members at the club because they did not spend as much money on new technology as the other feudal lords, and so they decided this new system would help them "win the race."
The programmers of this system had no idea of what the actual users of the computer did, and no one thought to ask us. Instead, they must have figured after running a few test cases that the computer was so packed with gizmos it could do anything. As a result, it took us — when the system worked properly — three times as long to enter information, due to extra data entry requirements. Fortunately, it always crashed when more than ten people used it, which would have been great except the company would not allow us to tabulate everything by hand after they had made such a big commitment to technology, so everyone had to "team with the computers" and stay until midnight every night to get their work done for the day. This gross misuse of overtime was unacceptable to the managers; they had built into the budget the vast efficiency gains the salespeople had promised, and with the extra costs, they'd have to reduce the services to their customers if they wanted to maintain their bonus increases, which, of course, wouldn't have been a problem, except that the customers were already livid because the new program took off the balances from their statements. To complicate matters, the computer was what was known as a "smart work station," which meant everything was connected together, and when the computer went down, so did the phones. Loooong story short, both the managers and customers were extremely pissed off at us representatives all the time, which was the only thing that kept us going in the face of our suicidal frustration at the endless hourglasses and the strange "fatal exception errors" that preceded the erasure of hours worth of work. I'd like to say this difficult period brought the workers closer together, but it actually divided us into tribes — I was a member of the cigarette-smoking tribe. Eventually, the whole computer system was gutted and written off by the corporate parent, and we went back to the old way as if this whole experiment had never happened. The board of directors concluded in the end that such sophisticated technology could not be mastered by today's under-educated work force. I wonder how many of them had read Hegel.
After a few days of my working late, Lester became perturbed. He relied on our evenings together to unwind — I just had no idea of the hard mental labor involved in watching daytime television — developing his thesis, for example, that the " Underdog" cartoon was a metaphor for the Cold War. There was no point explaining to him the tenuous position of the worker in a capitalist society; besides, he was right, whatever he was doing had to be more psychically important than the absurdities of the workplace. Katherine, too, realized the value of Lester's unique role in a society that unquestioningly viewed material gain as the only value, when it was painfully obvious that it was pretty far down any real list of values. Both Katherine and I, however, being human and being products of the fear at the center of that society, did not always treat Lester with the respect he deserved — we became resentful of his laziness, always looking for an excuse to badger him about tiny little things like not flushing the toilet or not turning the TV off when he went to bed. To his credit, he always took our irritations in stride, just looking at us in his bemused way, as if to say, " that's what you find important?"
Lester managed to keep me up til three o'clock in the morning a couple of nights that week so we could jam — softly. I began to notice these sessions, where nothing was expected and there were no agendas — such as rock superstardom or who was buying the doubage or keeping the voice of Phil Collins out of our minds — were the ones where magical things happened, where thoughts were given wings. It was clear in these moments that there was nothing missing, nothing we needed to prove, no distance between where we were and the ends of the universe, we were in it.
I managed to sneak out of work Friday night so I could go on my date with Philadelphia. I borrowed Katherine's car and took her to Archuletta's restaurant, an Olde English stucco affair that specialized in dim lighting. She dropped peevishly when I held out her seat for her. She ordered a Caesar salad and I ordered a steak — so much for adventurousness on a first date. While she was talking about her fall courses and such, I giggled at the strange Muzak version of "Under My Thumb" wafting in along with the baked bread. She seemed offended that I would grace such a song with a response.
"'Under My Thumb?' What have you got against that?"
"That kind of primitive chest-beating was almost innocent way back in the Sixties, but how could anyone today, in light of feminist theory, defend that song?" She seemed roused for some kind of battle.
"Jeez, I don't know, it's got a bitchin' beat," I responded, a bit perplexed.
"My, what a sexist word you chose to use." She leaned up to me pugnaciously.
"Well, there's no male equivalent to bitch."
" My point precisely, from a linguistic perspective, nor is there one for whore, slut, spinster, hag, broad, chick, cunt, nymphomaniac, or castrating wench."
While she was talking, the waiter, a strapping Italian guy who had worked with me in another restaurant, delivered the Pillsbury crescent rolls. He seemed quite turned on by all this dirty talk, and tried to make bedroom eye contact with Philadelphia, but he was invisible, a servant boy, to her, just as I apparently was to him.
"C'mon, really, Phil, ' Under My Thumb' is a rather comic display of how pathetic men really are, don't you think?"
"I don't see it that way at all."
"Mick's so ridiculously proud because he finally has the upper hand, at least for two and a half minutes. It's a song of joy, not of domination. With all the male sleaze in the world, is that the best you can do?"
"Don't get me started."
I didn't want a fight. I actually wanted to learn more about uber-wench post-feminism, but she couldn't clarify my questions because she kept assuming that nothing I said could be taken at face value. After the dinner, a steak the size of a silver dollar and a custardy plateful of wilted romaine the waiter tossed at the table using a special hip swivel, I paid the check and suggested an art flick. She suggested going to Lester's.
At Philadelphia's insistence, I picked up a bottle of White Star champagne along the way. Katherine and Lester were both home, in pajamas. They weren't exactly overjoyed to see us, but they soon warmed up to our good cheer. It seemed Philadelphia and Lester knew each other. She proposed we slum it by drinking the champagne from Dixie cups. We crumpled up the empties and threw them against the plywood cover of the fireplace, where a big pile of them collected, like in some old movie time-lapse sequence.
Lester carried the conversation, and we all sat around giggling. "So Frank Zappa asks Alice Cooper if he really did bite off the chicken's head on stage, and Alice says no, of course not, and Frank says 'great, now don't tell anybody that.'"
They all laughed at that but I couldn't get very far explaining the origin of the term geek, a carnival freak who was so low-down he would bite the heads off of chickens, and the spectators so low-down they'd pay to watch someone do it. This thought only depressed them, so Lester changed the subject to what he called High Dundalk cuisine, by which he meant Cheez-Whizzed Oscar Mayer hot dogs chased with Miller Lite, a troughful of Kraft macaroni and cheese, and for dessert Jell-O topped with Kool-Whip, washed down with Maxwell House coffee. Phil laughed uproariously at each elaboration of this repast, but when I tried to explain that all these products were made by the world's premier dealer in death, Philip Morris, she stopped laughing.
For hours it continued. Between Lester's talking and Philadelphia's laughing, I couldn't get an edgewise word in. I finally caught them in a pause, shrugging their shoulders about the absurdity of teaching Creationism in schools. I took this opportunity to chime in how Darwin's theory might as well be a religion, too, except its faith was in the idea of man as the only intelligent designer in the universe. The idea of apes slowly progressing into people, I continued, besides being deeply offensive to apes, could never, despite the best scientists money could buy, be proven — not by the fossil record, not by DNA evidence, even though Evolutionists had the whole descent of man to protozoa mapped out, and in their elegant elitist fantasies insisted that everything was already conclusively proven by genetics, as if randomly mutating genes like an infinite number of monkeys at typewriters could produce the Hamlet of a thinking human brain. Anyone who's lived past high school knows the survival of the fittest idea is nonsense — who survives and reproduces seems as random as the zygote you rode in on; if chance only came to the rescue of the strong, man would have wings and wouldn't have perfect pitch. The DNA is just the parts shop anyway, I said. Receptor and effector proteins in the cell membrane, reacting directly to stresses from the environment, tell a particular gene whether to reproduce, change or die. Such triggers are only different in degree than kind between phlyplankton and human brain cells. We are all fractals of something larger. The drama of human life is precisely that people are not born with this knowledge. In order to be connected to the source they must adapt, learn to respond to the world without their biased unwieldy minds interfering — and after all isn't that what all the world's religions — and sciences — teach?
I wondered even as I was talking why I was giving this sermon. I had had a bad experience with a biology teacher who offered me $20 to stick his hands in my pants, but I also hoped to spring the conversation to some of the insidious ways smug accepted opinion blinds us to the need for love and kindness, as I thought I'd learned from Lester. They looked at me as if I was the Pope.
I didn't know what to do. I wanted to take Philadelphia down to the waterfront, for I knew it was a magical place where females turned from frightened girls to lust-filled women. No go. She kept hounding Lester with her laughter for more of his material until Katherine dragged him to bed. She did, however, let me touch her in the wake of his departure.
The next morning, while Lester was still asleep, Katherine asked me over croissants and cigarettes if I was serious about her. I said "yes, I think so," and she took a long drag on her cigarette.
"I'm afraid I must ask you to leave, then."
She was careful to clarify and sympathize, and I to indulge in explanation and self-pity, but there was really nothing we could do after that. Like the sphinx, she had seen something, and so everything changed for all of us. It was just one of those things that God continually throws at you that tickle at your sense of sanity. I started looking for a place.
5.
Most of my fellow subsistence clerks roomed in strange-sounding outposts of exurbia like Lutherville, Timonium and Reisterstown, usually in apartment complexes piled along the side of the highway. The theory was if you could locate beyond the bus routes, you'd have less chance of seeing people sleeping in the bushes. The reality was that they would spend 2-3 hours driving each day on the clogged arteries that fed the central city, and would pay more per day on parking than on food.
As part of my increasing alienation from normal society (meaning I no longer had a car), I rented a large apartment all to myself within a 10 minute walk of work — and in the process saved enough money to support my growing drug habit. I had found the place by stopping at the first "For Rent" sign on my way downtown from Lester and Katherine's. It was only about three blocks away, in Mount Vernon. The only unpleasantness involved was in securing the lease, as all my financial records contained the fact that I was married. The landlords — a Transylvanian family who doubled as lawyers, actuaries, notaries public, bouncers, all around maintenance help — gave me the undertaker treatment, no eye contact or hand shaking, just a cold and curt "we hope you will be happy here, Mr. Brady" as they took my security deposit with what seemed like rubber gloves.
The house lacked the Victorian froth and languor of Lester and Katherine's place, instead it had equally oppressive German accents, with dark, ornate touches such as tiny stained glass windows in hidden corners, a steep spindly staircase curved underneath like a giant tongue, ceilings embossed with what looked like giant thumbprint whorls, and an inexplicable series of bulbs, diamonds and other chiseled wood ornaments throughout. The entire interior was white, but still it radiated darkness — all the surfaces were thick with a cracked, tangled web-work of many layers of paint. Like some kind of fallen church, the whole house had lost its vertical and horizontal integrity, and the dizzying array of angles and jagged lines gave it a tilt like Kurt Schwitters' Merzbau House, as if it was all made of plaster and paper and would crumble like the House of Usher into the silent tarn.
The exterior of the house was brick, but the trim was an eerie green, like faded bronze, almost glowing. Across the street was the Park Plaza Inn, a renovated luxury hotel whose mostly mythical clientele made Rolls Royce owners look like the salt of the earth. Next to my building was an imposing brownstone with an ominous sign that read "Baltimore Investment Club." The gay nightclub was around the corner.
My apartment was on the second floor. It consisted of two large, high rooms, one with a black marble fireplace, the other with a white marble fireplace, both sealed. In between was a compact modern kitchen circa 1951, and a bathroom that contained an footed tub with one of the feet broken, tiles infested by the black rust of mildew, a wash counter mottled by yellow pocks of cigarette burn, and a curious item on top of the toilet: a plastic figurine of a kneeling, naked American Indian woman.
I had virtually no possessions, so I stuffed everything into a duffel bag and dragged it down the sidewalk like Eppotamus dragging a loaf of bread through the dust on a leash. I found a perfectly good bed in Lester and Katherine's attic, which I wheeled down the street with a feeling I had stepped into an old Monkees episode.
Upon my arrival, I heard a cello playing in the neighboring apartment. It was a simple line, late Mahler, and it seemed to be beckoning me to something unspeakable. I quickly unpacked my effects and examined my domain, suddenly feeling berserk with joy, drunk with glee.
"So," I thought, "here I am. Romantic squalor at last." What better way to celebrate than to pop in a tape on my portable player of Mr. Tom Waits himself, professor emeritus of the art of losing.
"Well it's Ninth and Hennepin..."
I patted my pockets in vain pursuit of a cigarette.
"All the doughnuts have names that sound like prostitutes / And the moon's teeth marks are on the sky / Like a tarp thrown all over this..."
I finally pulled out a grey butt-end from the crease inside my hip pocket. I poked for a match, but came up with only a bent toothpick.
"And the broken umbrellas like dead birds ..."
Holding the toothpick as if I was a lepidopterist with a pin which held a moth that had somehow evaded the evolutionary process, I wandered into the "kitchen." The smell of gas was overpowering.
"And the steam comes out of the grill / Like the whole goddamn town's ready to blow..."
The blue flame leapt off the grid, but my mighty toothpick just wilted and a black ember fell into the burner basin.
"And the bricks are all scarred with jailhouse tattoos..."
I hooked my finger through the grate and poked the black stick to ash.
"And everyone is behaving like dogs..."
It was still burning hot, so I pulled my finger out and sucked on it. Ivy shadows pressed against the window like a lace curtain.
"And the horses are coming down Violin Road..."
A rusted fire escape hung down like a broken limb, its first step just a few feet off the pavement.
"And Dutch is dead on his feet..."
A large mattress rested on plump garbage bags in the green dumpster with brown stains down its side. Stuffing wisped out of a crevasse.
"And all the rooms they smell like diesel..."
I heard the strange moan of the cello again in the distance. It seemed to be calling someone or something that was hiding in the closet somewhere.
"And you take on the dreams of the ones who have slept here..."
The radiator kicked in, like a wrench banging along the pipes.
"And I'm lost in the window, and I hide in the stairway..."
I opened the grey blind on the other window. It faced a brick wall.
"And I hang in the curtain, and I sleep in your hat..."
There was a thin black man hunched asleep on the street underneath, shivering slightly.
"And no one brings anything small into a bar around here..."
Beside him was a glittering mosaic of broken nips.
"They all started out with bad directions..."
My tarnished chandelier was as gray as a hobo. The floor fell toward the windows.
"And the girl behind the counter has a tattooed tear / 'One for every year he's away,' she said"
I began to think of other things — procuring weed, calling Philadelphia. The apartment looked so vast and cold without furnishings I felt like Howard Hughes.
"Such a crumbling beauty, ah"
I thought of my wife, imagining how she had abandoned me here without anything — possessions, illusions, pride — and was off now in suburban denial with guys who would make it their life's work to please her.
"There's nothing wrong with her that a hundred dollars won't fix / She has that razor sadness that only gets worse / With the clang and the thunder of the Southern Pacific going by"
It all seemed so final now — the one-year lease, the key, Katherine's soft negations — I saw the tall and legendary Stafford Hotel in the corner of the window's eye, its name still lettered in the brick, now nothing but another flop house for addicts, transients, schemers — lonely guys, in other words.
"And the clock ticks out like a dripping faucet / 'til you're full of rag water and bitters and blue ruin / And you spill out over the side to anyone who will listen..."
As if by some miracle, I found a book of matches in my shirt pocket. It was from Danny's, an old restaurant in Towson I used to go to with my wife. I lit a match with a purpose, a vengeance.
"And I've seen it all, I've seen it all / Through the yellow windows of the evening train..."
I sucked deeply on the butt, and smudged my new home with its smoke. The floors squealed like a dentist drill as I scampered across them. I noticed a strange crack on the wall. It went all the way from about an inch from the ceiling to about three feet off the floor. It seemed to be growing as I watched it.
The buzzer rang. I ran down the rattling stairs and into the stale entranceway, which had that threadbare, fading sweetness that immediately makes one think of elderly people. It was Lester, looking sheepish behind the glass as if he had snuck away from Katherine to give me a housewarming. After we walked the waxy corridor to my apartment, he spent his first few minutes pacing intently between the rooms, not so much examining them as trying to ward something off. He went out of his way to compliment the apartment, opening the combination sink/stove/refrigerator as if that was the way to open the horse's mouth and look at the teeth. He had brought along a pipe and a copious supply of smoke, of course, and as he primed the pump we rapped in our usual way. We were pulling down hits and discussing whether the compulsory introduction into the water supply of the most effective transporter of heavy metals across the blood/brain barrier — fluorine, ionized as fluoride — was simply a ploy by the aluminum companies to profitably get rid of a waste byproduct or a more sinister effort to enfeeble the population when Lester suddenly asked if there wasn't anything I could do to get some furniture in my place. I could walk down to Epstein's, the ghetto department store, I supposed, and pick up a rug, a poster, maybe some chairs. Lester said no, that wasn't what he meant, couldn't I get a few things back at my old place, couldn't I ask my wife or something, weren't some of those things mine? I realized he was referring to something more than his momentary comfort, that he had stepped out of his own vow of poverty to signal that maybe I had given up a little too much too quickly. I got defensive, saying I didn't need to be dependent on any woman for my material comforts and besides, wasn't minimalism the right look? As he pressed and pestered me, however, I agreed to give my wife a call the next day.
"You want to pick up a few things, huh?" was her nasty reply.
"Yeah, I thought I'd come over this weekend. I can get a ride. It won't take more than a few minutes."
"This weekend is out of the question."
"Next weekend, then."
"No, I'll be out of town for two weeks at a convention."
"What about this Friday night?"
"Don't even think of coming Friday night."
And so it went. She kept putting logistical blocks in the way of having to actually deal with my situation in any way. I finally got off the phone before she could come around to how much money I still owed her.
When I confronted Lester with all of this, he said "that's a no brainer , let's just pay her a visit anyway." So on Friday night, on our way out to some sawdust roadhouses on the Pennsylvania border to hear authentic country music, we stopped by, Lester, Katherine, Coffee Bob and I. I asked who was going in with me. Katherine and Lester just laughed, but Coffee Bob said "sure, why not," so we climbed the stairs and rang the bell. My wife opened the door in a lazy, wistful southern belle sort of way, as if she was expecting someone else. When she saw me she quickly slammed it with a vengeful grimace, but I forced my way in anyway. She had some kind of party going on, but from the expressions of the people it looked more like a seance, what with the candles and the sea of ghost-white faces looking at me. I tried to tell her/them I just needed a few things, I'd be out of the way in a jiff, but she kept pushing me back toward the door, muttering things like "you mustn't disturb Mr. Wright, he's very sensitive, he's the one who puts the rose and the cognac on Poe's grave every year, you know. Lord knows what my friends think of you already, I've told them about you, you know, everything," she warned with a wave of her hand. Among the people in the room were movie guy, some of those Star Trek teenagers and what must have been the aforementioned Mr. Wright, who wore along with his mustache the furrowed, worried expression of a helpless spectator to life. He looked at me as if I was Poe's specter coming back to punish him. I tried not to look at him or anyone — I just wanted to unhook the stereo and be on my way. Coffee Bob, meanwhile, passed the time by helping himself to the popcorn which was laid out in a steel paper-towel-lined serving bowl. My wife stood in the way of any move I tried to make and gently tried to smooth me away. Realizing the stalemate, I headed peaceably to the door. Just as I was about to be whisked away, though, I noticed a painting of my father's hanging on the wall, a desolate watercolor of a tobacco leaf barn in Connecticut amid black winter limbs and ashen snow — the barn frame was folding into the snow, disintegrating, held up only on the crucifix of its cross-beam. I instinctually lunged for it, taking along handfuls of people as I drove for the wall. Just as I lifted the wire off the nail (and Coffee Bob saw the opportunity to grab more popcorn), the whole party swarmed to push me back into the hallway. A short muscular guy popped his way out of the crowd at the door. My wife suddenly shifted her attention to keeping him off me. He broke through her security wall and came barreling towards me, but instead of delivering a punch, he shook my hand warmly and said "I'm glad to finally meet you," as if I was some kind of celebrity or something, or as if to say "thanks for keeping her warm and being so agreeable." He flashed me a stupid grin as I walked outside just to completely fuck me up, and to this day I wonder what I was supposed to make of that.
Lester couldn't believe after all that time I had come back empty handed, but he calmed down when Coffee Bob gave him some popcorn. I thought this whole incident was forgotten, but about a week later, Lester and I were again standing in my living room smoking weed, discussing the striking parallels between the way Lincoln helped orchestrate the bombardment of Fort Sumter and how Roosevelt helped plan the Pearl Harbor invasion when he said "things just won't be right until you get your stuff back, man." I remembered my wife had said she would be out of town that week, and that was all Lester needed. He concocted a scheme where we borrowed Katherine's car, convinced the maintenance people I had lost my key, and ransacked the place most righteously. He sealed the deal, as he so often did, by quoting Dylan: "If you live outside the law," he twanged, "you gotta be honest."
On the appointed day, Katherine took her car to work. That's OK, said Lester, we just make the trip in the bus, organize things, and pick everything up tonight. The maintenance people were West Virginia émigres who would have soon as hung us on clotheslines as help us, but I had an ID, a copy of the lease, $20 for key replacement, and most importantly, was white. But even as they were grinding the key, they looked at me very suspiciously — they knew something was very wrong but felt powerless to stop it.
The key fit like a...key, and once inside I scurried to hoard all my stuff like a homeless person at a freshly loaded dumpster. Lester took a more leisurely tact; with softly flickering bowl he fingered through the records. He considered it his solemn obligation to pick my music collection, but not before sampling everything at transistor-shattering volume, and dumping what he deemed worthy of me in a pile at his feet. After a few hits, I too settled into a slower, more discerning pace, reading it seemed whole chapters of books to see if I should hold on to them.
Lester went next to the clothes closet, and I had to forcibly restrain him from setting fire to some of the pantsuits. I pulled out a black polyester shirt that wasn't mine and suggested I keep it for a Night on Disco Mountain Halloween costume; he warned me not to, but I had to draw the line somewhere and insisted. We had mostly torn the place up when he opened the refrigerator and saw orange juice and lunchmeat and helped himself to a sandwich. "I can't believe she'd leave such good food around to spoil," he said with a mouth full of food, "she must be stupider than I thought."
While he ate, my nosiness got the better of me, and I inspected the nightstand to see whose picture was there now. It wasn't until I opened the medicine cabinet that I realized something was terribly amiss. It was the thin oval box! I opened it up — a long line of pink pills! Shit, she wasn't out of town after all. She'd lied to me, the scumdog.
We panicked like two naked teenagers under the glare of a cop flashlight through the back seat window, but recovered quickly and soon were as logical as two scientists explaining why the earth-obliterating meteor stopped in midair. It was only three o'clock, after all, all we had to do was smoke a few more bowls, make some crucial aesthetic decisions, hook up a ride, load the stuff...as long as we shoved off by four thirty, all was cool.
While I gathered up everything I needed, Lester called everyone he knew who had a car to get us a lift. No one was good for it. The sun was starting to go down, and we began to feel trapped like parents at a Metallica concert. We had done our part — my essence had been extricated and lay angled around the door in concentric heaps. All I could do, while Lester made more phone calls, was sit there on the sofa, thumbing distractedly through the latest issues of Self magazine and The Ladies Home Journal, my Stepin Fetchit eyeballs always keening towards the door, steeling myself for the inevitable bust. After about 20 calls, an old high school buddy of Lester's agreed to drive up from Dickeyville halfway across town to help us. After a feverish waiting period, we finally saw his brown Honda Civic pull up, and his quizzical, bemused expression greet us. He took the lead in fitting the bookcases, stereo components, chairs, tables, clothes, books and records and us into his tiny vehicle. He was just one of those guys you forget about until you need him, but then comes through with more than you could ever possibly imagine, as if to make you feel totally pathetic for even asking him for anything. We offered him money, weed, a girl, but he just shrugged it all off, as if nothing could suffice, leaving us at my stoop only with a pained "no problem" and driving off into the dust under the car cigarette coil of the evening sun.
6.
Once I got my furniture settled in, two things began to happen. For one, the house itself changed its relationship towards me. It went from cautiously observing me to welcoming me, as if it now owned me. The fellow residents began to say hello as we passed the curves of the hallways, instead of pretending — or was it pretending? — that they couldn't see me. The lady who lived directly above me even knocked on the door one night, hair in curlers, laundry basket in hand, and asked if she could do any of my shirts. I hid my shock and politely said no (the landlord had informed me she had been living in that apartment more than 60 years, and that a few others had lived there 20 years or more). Because the lights would sometimes flicker and turn on and off by themselves, I began to keep candles lit throughout the apartment. The ever-present cello began to mirror my moods, and when it wasn't playing, I began to hear far-off noises, not so much a moaning as a cooing.
The other change was that Philadelphia, after at first evading my post-Lester life, began to take more interest, at least in my spendthrift ease and my proximity to the center city. She would actually visit me, in fact, unannounced, sometimes with a bottle of red wine. She went along for my ride, sitting in the windowsill in her Pall Mall thought balloons, echoing laughter to the cracked rafters. During the week, she'd send me postcards from school, quoting from Rorty or Bloom or some other fashionable thinker, effusing how she learned from me how to laugh at the rich kids who from the comfort of their fraternity dens scoffed at all the truisms. I bought her an expensive gold necklace at an inner-city jeweler. Even the store clerk was amazed I didn't prefer the slashed prices outside. Philadelphia just giggled and wrapped it around her ankles. On the weekends, lots of wordplay, red wine and sex; we'd talk, screw, eat at a new restaurant down the street, laugh at the suburbanites at the independent movie house or the symphony, get some nightcaps at alpine bars with marble countertops, talk again, maybe screw again or eat some smoked herring, and then she'd go driving off home to her parents. It was the revenge that Lester promised, but revenge didn't seem so important anymore. Still, we never did talk much about what we were doing together. The only time I asked, she just laughed "you know, you seen one love affair, you seen them all."
As for my wife, she called me at work the day after the heist, but she was more concerned about the shirt I had taken than the robbery. She almost respected me for that, because I finally realized how stupid the maintenance people were. (She actually came to my place, much later, along with her new boyfriend and a series of official separation papers for me to sign, to get the shirt and a globe she had given me for my birthday. Snow covered the cars like a mold and dissolved into the steamy sewer grates, and she frosted up the entrance glass complaining how rude it was that all the ice had not been shoveled off the stoop. Her boyfriend was a typical pretty boy jock misogynist salesman with a fat smile. I just opened the door, globe in hand, and said "welcome to my world" before surrendering it and the black flag of the shirt. That was the last I ever saw of her).
In the midst of this, I walked in to work one Monday morning to find everyone looking like faces in a clock. It was so quiet you could hear a stock certificate drop, or coffee being swallowed. There were hundreds of calls holding when we opened for business. The first caller asked me if people were jumping out of the windows yet. I laughed at the insight, and pondered aloud why no one had thought of such an apt metaphor before. He didn't think my response was funny in the least. Apparently, the stock market was falling like Lucifer, and advance word of it had splashed out all over the weekend papers, but, as I could no longer read them — without wanting to kill someone, that is — I didn't know. But once it became apparent, my first thought was "outstanding, helluva deal, I'm on the front lines of history."
Gainsborough had left by this time. He had taken up with a lad named Russell, whose family was richer, as they say, than God, with "interests" in chemicals, pharmaceuticals, plastics, food and textiles (which were all the same thing: oil), but a fortune derived, it was whispered, from opium trading in China in the late 19th century. Within a few days, both Gainsborough and Russell were gone — they had just walked off the job like some dishwashers from the projects. I found solace for his loss by quoting some of the things he used to say to the angry mob of customers wondering what to do, things like "the market always goes up, it just takes little vacations here and there" or "selling short is downright un-American." But no matter what I said or how much effort I put in, suddenly no one was fooled. It had been as easy as apple pie, and now it was as hard as fruitcake.
The callers' lines of inquiry got to be pretty predictable: "How could I have been so stupid?...I knew I should have listened to my grandmother...let's sell it all...{while I'm processing the trade} you big money monopolies are probably laughing at us poor little suckers right now and calling in all your chips...I consider myself a strong guy, been in the war when I was younger than you, made a hard living out of cattle {or fiberglass, concrete, tuna fish, plastic bottle caps, etc.} but I'm powerless against a force like you...where have you ever gotten me?...Ah, it's not you I should be yelling at, you seem like a nice boy, I'll let you get to the next customer, have a nice day." Somehow, being stripped of their retirement dreams and exposed to the naked brutality of their fears brought out the best in people, and I was thoroughly enjoying the emotion that was flowing like the toilets at a Saturday night fish fry. The people around me, however, looked like ghosts. The corporation had brought in bookkeepers, marketing specialists, lawyers, even portfolio managers to man the phone banks, and none of them could muster more than a despondent "there, there, now, now" as they scribbled out trade instructions and stuck them in their out-bins, hoping I guess that the after-hours maid would execute them.
My managers felt sorry for us being on the phones all day, so they actually let us leave early, and I was very surprised to find both Lester and Philadelphia — on Fall break — waiting for me on my stoop, holding a bottle of red, red wine. We went inside and they congratulated me on overseeing the overthrow of capitalism, convinced it was me, burrowing my subversive way through the corporate wormhole, that dun it. "No, this was not Star Wars," I replied, "a lot of good people lost a lot of money." At this they laughed uncontrollably. "What makes you think it was ever their money?" they smugly giggled.
"Let me tell you a little something about capitalism," Lester said, as he pulled out a pipe. "My mother's family literally owned thousands of farmers in the Dakotas. It was railroad money, nothing personal, just something they had to do because of the situation they'd been put in." He took an even more vigorous hit than usual. After exhaling, he continued. "But some guy came and took it all. He didn't stop with a fortune, he had to leave them penniless. Again, that was just part of the code, and my mother and her four sisters, went from pampered brats to bitter brats, just like that." He snapped his fingers as the fire turned to ash.
Philadelphia, uncorking the wine, had a similar tale. " All my father ever wanted was his own boat. Since he was a carpenter, he thought a good start would be to build a dock. If he had a dock, you see, the boat would follow. And his crazy dream — which we loved him dearly for and got such a kick out of tormenting him about — led him to buy some postage stamp of land by the bay. The area was considered worthless enough that Governor Handlebar decided to buy some of it up and put a turnpike on it. My father, by chance, got a piece of that, and bought a few apartments in the neighborhood he grew up in. Well, horror of horrors, now they're gentrified, and he's loaded. He's got a fleet of boats, but I've never seen him more miserable. He's a shell. When he's not up late worrying about whether his tenants are respecting him he's doling out pineapple slices at the homeless shelter. You think I want to go to this fancy college?"
These experiences seemed fantastic to me. My parents viewed the relative poverty of their youths as a curse. They escaped their parents' depression-induced sense of limitation by trying to inch in as close to the rich as possible, to feed off the droppings that were left behind. "You have to learn to make a friend," my father often said, "of money." In this they became like courtiers, rich enough themselves eventually, because, I always supposed, they literally saw a gold aura around those with wealth. I never could, and often wondered — and do even today — if it was my vision that was defective, if I was color-blind.
Perhaps because of this, I didn't see what the big deal was. We watched the news on my little TV and no matter what station we watched, there was no chance of recovery, it was one of those once-in-a-lifetime moments of tragedy, like the Kennedy assassination, our innocence was forever lost. The news was full of ticker tape in 1929 and apple/pencil venders in 1933, and everyone felt so savvy to have learned the lessons of the original stock market crash — instead of proudly proclaiming that nothing was fundamentally wrong with the economy, the media pundits said that something was fundamentally wrong, they just didn't know what it was yet. Oh, there was much debate: it seemed to all revolve around the national debt, so vast that no one understood what it was or what it would do, only that the huge albatross around the nation's neck of our immoral spendthrift greed was now finally shot down and — ha-ha — taking us with it. There were a few other factors, of course: the rise of common man investing through mutual funds, the decline in the dollar, corporate takeovers, the rise of computerized program trading. When I heard these explanations fearfully leave the lips of the most sagacious minds of Wall Street, I felt as if a great cloud was lifted. So it wasn't just me who was scamming the investing public. These guys were in on it too! The sky opened up and I understood — as I hadn't with my law school brethren — that these were my brothers. A wave of sympathy and love washed over me. I even blushed as I watched them try to come up with some plausible explanation that would get people to buy more stocks, only to become more deeply engulfed themselves in panic and grow smaller and smaller while their suits grew bigger and bigger. Suddenly, it seemed vitally important to rescue the world financial system from the chaos of a lack of confidence — for what kind of cruel, limited world would it be where we couldn't just trust in the judgment of these fools? If anything was wrong with the world of money, it was simply lack of faith. Everyone seems to know deep down that money is a lie, it probably doesn't even exist, but God forbid if we were ever to act on that knowledge, and try to redeem the money-back guarantee from the institutions of trust and confidence that safeguard all our cool stuff. Expecting our financial and political establishments to tell us the truth is like expecting Niagara Falls to rise. We pay them to lie because we desperately need lies, for lies are always better than the truth, they give us hopes, ambitions, the will to do the impossible. How could I allow all that to be taken away? Suddenly, the oppression of the bulk of humanity, the poisoning of the rest, and the slow, irrevocable annihilation of life on this planet caused by the Midas touch of capitalism suddenly seemed far less important than the need to band together to make these male models in pinstripes feel good about themselves again. If we all just went along for the ride, without doubt or reservation, the combined power of our belief in the illusion would carry us through.
This thinking didn't sit well with Lester, who was contemplating the Rasta revolution again, or Philadelphia, who hated Reagan so much she would allow the impoverishment of everyone if it would only get rid of him. But they looked at me as if I knew something about it, like I was an authority, and so they sadly, grudgingly accepted that the sky would not be falling today, Chicken Little.
I learned a lot about Lester at that moment. For clearly, I was deeply troubled, in need of someone to tell me that it was sympathy and not curiosity that killed the cat (or at least that I was stoned beyond hope of rationality), but because I had possession of a smidgen of credibility, however accidental or ill-deserved, I was allowed to continue drawing up the blueprints for my fantasy world with nary a reprimand. I realized why Lester seemed to froth at the mouth to avoid possessing anything — a fixed address, an unchanging opinion, a job — for these would have protected him from reality, from the necessity of examining everything as if for the first time.
"Aw, it's just as well, I've got guitars to feed," he said, pausing on the darker undertones, and we changed the subject to the more heartening news that Jesse Jackson was running for president again.
We stayed and talked until Philadelphia had to go home, then we jammed until the weed ran out.
"Do you know where we can get some more?" I asked.
"Are there Basques in Boise? Do they grow eggplant in New Jersey? C'mon," he said.
7.
A few blocks down, on a tree-lined row of brownstones, we rang on a dead bell above a mailbox with no name. Lester threw some pebbles at the third floor window. "You never know if the man's home," he muttered. After a few minutes of shivering stealthy waiting, a short black man walked past us into the house, and, Lester's foot as the doorstop, we followed him in. The entranceway opened up all the way to a painted-over roof window. We passed on our way up the stairs the sound of someone playing trumpet along with Charlie Parker on one floor and the echoing sound of Space Invaders on another and everywhere the overpowering smell of marijuana. We were headed up to the loft apartment. A larger-than-life poster of Nosferatu hung over the door.
"Who're we visiting?"
"Someone truly evil. I suggest you keep your hands in your pocket and let me do all the talking."
We knocked on the door. After what seemed like five minutes, a bony arm opened it.
" Whas up, Lester Rile Me?"
"You got anything for me today?" asked Lester politely.
"Hey, I know you," I blurted out when I realized that this was that Red guy from the tavern.
"I don't think so, unless you got a new face," said Red matter-of-factly, "but, yeah, come on in, gentlemen, I can run some down for you. You're just in time for a poetry reading."
We walked through a dark passageway filled with grimy hubcaps and an incredibly beautiful series of oil paintings on the walls — rich Jenkinsesque veils of color hiding archetypal images of horses, stars, mandalas, dragons, serpent priestesses, eyes everywhere. At the end of the passageway was a small cove stuffed with junk — yellowed newspapers, warped books, broken sea shells, unmatched golf clubs, empty Marlboro packs. Loudly through the speakers came Red's slurry voice echoing over an overdone accompaniment of pulsating string flourishes à la Days of Future Past. I couldn't make out a word of it. On junkyard couches were sprawled five men, all of whom looked at us meanly when we walked in. Around them was a cluttered table with a large gold water pipe in its center.
There were no introductions, we just sat down and stared with the others at the gold pipe. The discussion didn't seem to be about poetry but whether Red could or couldn't kick everyone's ass in the room at basketball. Red sat in a quasi-rocking chair gently twirling his Marlboro, graciously allowing some dissent to his proclamations of superiority but cutting it off when the tedium of the arguments began.
The others in the room all had that uncomfortable furtiveness of drug addicts. There was a burly guy who spritzed his mouth with an inhaler every few minutes, a frail black man who tried to lean as close as he could to Red to try to work some kind of weed mojo on him, a much older bald gentleman who gazed into my eyes with liquid surrender, a leather guy sporting a cockscomb of dyed black hair who muttered "pungent, pungent" at every joke, and a fat blonde fellow with glasses who laughed just like John Candy. I didn't realize it at the time but there was a woman in the apartment, too, pale and wide-eyed in the shadows, careful not to make a sound or be seen. The conversation, which had moved to Red's superiority at pool and golf and picking NFL games, was going nowhere for me, so I picked up the notebook on the table. Its spirals were clogged with paper strips. No sooner had I opened it than Red said "if your checking out my poetitude, look at this instead."
He handed me an unreadable sheet of paper as greasy as a phyllo dough layer of baklava. As I struggled to decipher it, he continued: "You're not getting the right ambiance for this. It should only be played with Bob Marley in the background, because he was the inspiration for it, but, you know, copyright laws."
Despite this, and without giving me any real time to read it, he asked what I thought. I tried to be as positive as I could. "It's beautiful, so much so, it seems a shame to stake something of spirit like this to the mortal machine, if ya know what I mean."
"That's eggzackly what the poem's about, you're very perceptive, but I say 'hey, if you've got it, flaunt it.'" The others looked at me uneasily when he called me perceptive, but went back to their glazed rigidity once Red started bragging again. I wondered how long they'd been here subjected to this.
Red pulled out a leaf of corrasible typing paper from the middle of a pile and handed it to me. It was a typed poem entitled "Howl Again." "You might," he said, "be enlightened enough to appreciate this. Try it on."
I pulled out a cigarette as I started the scan the page. "Whoa, a Viceroy man!" said Red. "Hand one over here. It's the least you can do for taking my poem out for a spin." I arched my brow as I passed him two, as if to say "Oh yeah, where's my bong hit, blowhard?"
He held out an uncapped Zippo lighter swimming with flame. I lit up and started reading the poem:
I have seen the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness again!
"This is a reference, you see, to an old poem from the Fifties, and what kinda inspired me is how things haven't changed at all. I wanted to make an anthem for our generation, to speak for all those who can't speak, to let everyone know that we're here and we're waiting. I saw you wince a little bit. It makes most people uncomfortable, but that's the way truth is sometimes, you know?"
I nodded, annoyed that he and his interpretations kept me from reading his poem. A slight hubbub was starting to develop in the room from the vacuum formed by Red devoting his energy to me. Red raised his hand: "quiet please. The man wants to read a poem, is that okay? You redneck punks couldn't tell the difference between Jack and Robert Frost."
"Your poems don't mean anything to me," the muscular guy bravely volunteered. "Nothing connects together."
"Yeah, and it doesn't even rhyme. Isn't it supposed to rhyme?" the fat guy felt strong enough to volunteer.
"Yeah, nobody reads poetry, man, that's for lunatics and fags," the black guy said in a half-crazed effeminate way.
Red looked at them with studied smugness, as if to ask "are you done yet?" and added, "My, the ignorance is just staggering, my friends. I guess we'll have to start at the beginning, with ' The Love Song of J. Arthur Prufrock.'"
I was amazed that Lester had not said a word. I nudged him, but he just kept his eye fixed on the pipe dream prize. Red got up and put on a record and, sure enough, it was a scratchy T.S. Eliot affecting an absurd British accent reading Prufrock. There was no way I could concentrate under these conditions, so I said "I really like your stuff, Red, but I'd like to borrow it, so I can appreciate it more fully."
"No go, bro. I can't be too careful. I'm a published poet. Got a reputation to protect." He pulled out a copy of a thick mimeographed publication. It was called The Schizophrenic Monk and on its cover was a picture of a lecher in a raincoat working his finger into the snatch of lady justice, who was naked, blind, her hands occupied with the scales and unable to defend her virtue. "This is an ee-leet publication. There are 1,000 rejections for every poem published." I riffled through the pages. There must have been 200 poems in it.
"I understand," I said, instinctively sensing the set-up coming.
"But I can sell you the magazine. I have a few extras. Only five bucks."
"Thanks. I'll think on that, but I'm more interested in..."
Lester stamped on my shin quietly but hard. Red lit up my other Viceroy and smiled at me with fiery eyes. When he'd finished it, he finally said to the assemblage "so, who's buying?"
As if on cue, everyone stayed silent and kept their expressions to themselves. Red put a big bag of light green buds on the table and took out, from under his chair, a postal scale.
"Here's an ounce," he pronounced without weighing it. He pulled a bud out of the bag and dropped it on the table. "We'll split this four ways, assuming at least two of you loafers aren't good for it." His tone was firm, knowing, but somehow sympathetic.
His spindly hand moved with sureness towards the pipe. He grabbed it like a trophy, caressing it as he twisted the bowl off. With professional nonchalance he crushed about half the bud into the bowl. He grabbed hold of the neck of the pipe, rocking it slowly back and forth and looked around the room with a leer. Was he looking for the one who could best pretend not to care, I wondered, or the one who didn't care to pretend? He offered it to me. "Here ya go, Fee- lis"
I accepted, blushing slightly, taken aback that he remembered me, or at least my name. I took his lighter and engaged. Before the smoke had even touched my lips I could tell that taking a hit with this contraption was to be a macho exercise in endurance, like riding a mechanical bull or listening to Duran Duran. Even so, the severity of the blast forced me to quiver and it took all my willpower to suppress the tickle that would turn if undefended into a raging tubercular slobber. Lester was perched next to me waiting to grab the reins out of my dying hand. He sucked down the last of the bowl in a quick, maniacal motion. Red refilled it and sent it around, but I wasn't paying much attention, for it was clear that this was not the usual salad that went around the neighborhood. My heart was thumping at twice its normal speed. I could not recall what I had been thinking of even one second earlier. The people in the room suddenly seemed like Mylar balloons. "Put on some tunes, man," I found myself gasping as Eliot droned on without any sense of humor or drug-induced paranoia. Red and the other balloons giggled at that. "Pretty wide open, that stankleaf, hanh?" Red said with a smile like he knew the secret of life. He put on a savage Janis Joplin cover of " Ball and Chain." It soon became apparent that this song was the aural equivalent of my life flashing before my eyes, and that I would not make it through to the end, what with Janis' hovering and plummeting cat-wail careen giving a voice to all the loneliness in the world in an electric tornado of Texas blues, bringing down the power lines and trailer homes and traveling bard salesmen in its way.
Red and the boys were not moved. Unleashed by the weed, they argued over who was the best of the 20 or so pitiful third basemen for the Orioles in the Eighties, only occasionally making an air guitar gesture to acknowledge the song that was carrying me off to the endless violent mother sea. Before too long, I could no longer make out what they were saying, it was like steel pylons sizzling underneath the torrent.
But the song ended, the storm passed, and I foolishly joined into a conversation already in progress.
"Life," Red speculated between puffs, "is like a poker game."
"You mean it seems to be so important when it's going on, but when it's over you either just play another game or go on to something else?" I asked.
"No, nimrod. I mean it's all luck and bluff."
"You mean there's no luck," interjected Lester.
"What are you talking about?"
"You heard me, dude, cards are about chance, not luck. Don't forget the original playing cards were Tarot cards. You always pull what you do for a reason."
"So you deserve what you get?"
" Karmically, yes."
"Well, what do you say we play a round of pass the shit? I'll kick your ass."
"Oh, yeah, bring it on."
While Red sifted through a maze of papers and bric-a-brac trying to locate the cards, I asked who did the paintings on the wall.
"What paintings?" he replied, disinterested.
"Those," I pointed, incredulous.
"Those aren't paintings, those are hubcaps. Got a '66 Mustang up there...somewhere," he said before as he came up with a few stray bicycle cards in his hand.
I, still confused, opened my mouth and Lester once again kicked my shin. " Gotta get back to the little woman," Lester said.
"Good, she can kick your ass instead," smiled Red.
"Felix, the scratch," Lester motioned. I handed him a twenty, the standard price for dope no matter what its size. He secreted the cash to Red and eyed the placing of the weed on the scale like a gambling commissioner watching two boxers weigh-in. After the transaction, Red got suddenly friendly, offering his unqualified hospitality, winking to me "come on over when Pester's not around some time, I'll show you my good stuff." I didn't know if he was talking about his weed or his poetry, but in my state of mind they seemed like the same thing.
When we got back outside into the jagged night shadows and sobering air, I expected Lester to berate me for some lack of dope decorum, but he just walked along like Snoopy, happy to be buzzing. So I started the conversation. "Why'd you kick me?" I asked.
He looked at me with sleepy eyes. "Put it this way. You're a businessman. What's the first rule of business?"
"The customer is always right?"
" Eggzackly."
After a minute of expectant silence, I tried again. "But aren't we the customers?"
"Nah, we're trick dogs. But let me tell you something about Red...he's a pure egomaniac, and that absolves him of all responsibility for his actions. Besides...there's actually dope at the end of his rap."
Lester went on to describe the continual frustrations of trying to score smoke in the
city. I couldn't believe he was actually as stupid as he made himself sound, falling for the most obvious of cons, but soon enough I would have my own stories to tell. One time, for example, waiting for Lester outside his apartment, this Jamaican guy came up with a small wad of aluminum foil full of what he described as "killer pink hash." Something about the way he cradled it nervously or looked into my eyes without a trace of humor convinced me to break in to Lester's apartment and trade a bag of his weed for the hash, which turned out to be ground-up pencil erasers, which we both nevertheless smoked all of, even as Lester tried to understand what non-Euclidean logic I had followed to lead him to this sorry conclusion. Another time I was walking home from Lester's and was escorted by a couple of real friendly, obsequious black teens who talked about the opium-laced Thai stick their man had waiting in the apartment. They seemed so sincere, I realize now, because they probably honestly believed they earned their money for kissing my cracker ass for four blocks. All I had to do was give them the twenty and they'd come out with it in a minute. I wasn't about to fall for that, so I insisted on coming in with them into their apartment building, thinking "I know where these guys live, how could they rip me off?" I walked in to a sea of very angry black faces incredulous that a white boy was let into the place — and me stupid enough to calmly wait outside the kid's door for my bag of illegal dope, until another tenant asked me what I was doing there and I told him and he knocked on the door, was let in, and came out a minute later with a grocery bag, opening it quickly so I could see it was a quarter full of green leaves and he said "you better get out of here" and I did, clutching the bag until I got home in the hope against hope that it wasn't oregano, which of course it was. There were many other examples: the dope that looks and smells like dope but doesn't get you high mystery, the "he lives in that project, drop me off right here and I'll be right back" routine, the "he'll let me in, but you better wait outside" theme, the "don't look in the bag, the cops are watching me" variation, they were all brilliant, righteous, perfectly-conceived set pieces and one had to ultimately agree with Lester that "greedy honkies deserve to be taken, objectively speaking" even though at the time one joined the rest of one's race in the wish to incarcerate all black males — at least until the better mousetrap came padding its feet to one's door.
But these annoyances, and my earlier resolve to save capitalism, didn't seem nearly as important now. Things seemed to be in good hands with Red. Lester suggested we light up a few in the cool night air, so he led me to the city graveyard, with its blackened stone turrets and maze of asphalt pathways. They were labeled Avenues A ,B,C, etc., and we ended up at Avenue D, around gravestones of members of the generation that was once called the Lost Generation. This prompted us, like two buddies having a friendly knife fight, to vie to out- diss each other with downer "d" words:
"You discredited..." " disavowed..." " debunked..." " defanged..." " disgraced..." " discarded..." " derivative..." " dated..." " dilapidated..." " decrepit..." " diminished..." " dwindled..." " deformed..." " defective..." " debauched..." " deranged..." " demented..." " deviant..." " diabolic..." " devoid..." " dissociated..." " disaffected..." " disingenuous..." " double-dealing..." " double-talking..." " down-and-out..." " downfallen..." " doomed..." " dissolute..." " distressingly dissipated..." " drearily decadent..." " despicably draconian..." " desperately dubious...," "do-nothing dangerously disenfranchised dupe...," I'd say, "deluded doddering duplicitous dwarf," he'd reply, and we'd fall off the tombstones laughing.
After a few hits courtesy of Norbert Gallison, 1897-1953, we were opened up to all the late voices of heartbreak and regret as the wind washed through the wilderness of bone chimes. We felt we needed something a little more...solid to help us with the overwhelming failure that made their lives so perfect — like one of those cool gravestones, for example. Lester and I knew without speaking it was the "Avenue D" street sign that had absorbed all our perceptions and could carry this weight for us. Using a tomb as our stool, we wrestled the sign off the pole relatively easily. I lugged it off, Lester tossed a little bud onto the black grass — "to the Gods" — and we parted company a few blocks on without even realizing it.
8.
I displayed the Avenue D sign proudly on my "living room" mantle. It seemed to soften the place. Philadelphia was curious about it, so I tried to convince her to make the pilgrimage to the graveyard with me, to maybe drink some Mad Dog, tap dance on the graves and debate whether democracy was an outdated notion, but she was aghast: "are you sick?" she asked.
In the days that followed, I delayed leaving the apartment each morning for as long as I could, and came back as soon as I could, usually smoking a bowl within seconds of my arrival. At first, I thought this was a work-related disability. After all, I had been the unemployed son-in-law to the customers when they were raking in money, and now that they were losing it I was like the ex-son-in-law who turned out to be gay. It was a little too close to my actual experience. Meanwhile, my fellow employees had begun to fine-tune their
resumes, the managers couldn't look me in the eyes, even the higher-ups didn't visit any more. But this urge to stay home persisted even after the market began its miraculous climb back up and everyone began to take back all the words and actions that they could never take back by collectively forgetting them.
It soon became noticeable even to me that I never wanted to leave my nest. I would let all my clothes pile up in the bedroom and my refrigerator empty to a box of baking soda before venturing out. I'd pace all evening between the rooms, pushing the garlic skins on the floor into the corners, hot with the suffering of all I had witnessed in split second flashes of that city day: the questions asked that had been ignored, the hopeful looks that had been turned away from, the easy joy that was almost hit by speeding cars at crosswalks. I obsessed about my wife, and the vengeance that I felt I deserved. I thought about Lester and Philadelphia, how they were using me in some way I couldn't comprehend. I calculated all the money the financial paper mine I worked for was making, and how little of it I or the other honest workers ever got to see.
One evening, the walls themselves were not enough to hold me in. I floated out my door, down the steps, and kept on walking, down to the basement. The door was tightly shut but the padlock was undone. I grabbed the door handle and pushed. It wouldn't move. After five minutes of increasingly violent shaking, I went back up the narrow stairs to try a ramrod leap, only to hear a slight creak. I turned around. The door was opening up. I could see a grainy sepia glow in the rooms inside. I pursued. The floor was shiny, dried mud. A large front room was empty except for five rectangular limestone boxes about six foot long apiece. There were hieroglyphic inscriptions on each, but I couldn't make them out in the encroaching darkness. I tried to lift the lid off one box, but it wouldn't move.
My mind strangely empty, I tripped along to the back. There was a sagging dusty shelf along the wall filled with large empty glass jars, the kind they fill with formaldehyde. A smaller interior room to the right was also empty, except for a series of wood storage stalls. I was pulled in, and cased it like a wolf covering its territory. I stalked into one of the stalls, closed the door and, turning around, immediately bashed my head against a steel pipe. I fell to the floor unconscious, a dim smell of musty pavement guiding me down.
I woke up disoriented, my pants covered with moisture, head throbbing, chills running up and down my temples. I was stuck in what seemed to be a large drain on the floor. I pulled myself out of its suction only to hit the bar again, not hard enough to knock me out, but enough to make me understand how serial killers grow to feel the way they do. I wiped off my pants and pulled away a black goo that covered my hand. I rattled at the door with my black hand, wanting an image or at least a voice, if only in my head. For a moment — or was it an hour — it wouldn't open, but it finally did, and I ran out. The floor, which had been dry, was now so muddy my shoes were getting stuck. How long had I been asleep? Did it rain, or did this water just come from those thick black veins in the walls? I wanted desperately to be someplace far, far away, but still it took all my effort to flee up the stairs.
I discovered I had only been missing a half-hour, about the length of a sitcom. I lit a cigarette with trembling hands, wondering what possessed me to do this, what message was I supposed to receive, for clearly it was not me doing that, or was it? It was so hard to tell where I ended and something else began.
I didn't watch much TV anymore — or read, or listen to music, I just liked to stew a lot — but I needed some diversion and turned the set on. A wide-eyed hairsprayed man had his hands around the borders of the screen as if he was trying to pull my head into the tube. "Are you in the hands of Satan? Do DEMONS torment your very soul? Are you inching ever closer to the point where you can't walk back?" I blinked, but he continued. "I know who you are, YES, you, I know you are CRYING in the wilderness for hey- ulp. It is no accident you are watching me nah." With his Texas twang, platinum cufflinks and stiffened ducktail, he would not let me out of his sight. "PERHAPS you have a problem...with drugs. OH YES friend they are warping your mind oh...you won't admit it you're...so cooool under...control...on top of everythang but why then...are you...alone right now with all those...thoughts...of hate?" This was not the kind of salvation I was expecting, but I couldn't turn away. "I want you to do something nah. GOD HELP YOU I ASK that you do THIS ONE SMALL FAVOR FOR ME NAH. I want you to put your hand, you-heard-me LAY YOUR HAND...on this television set and I know what you're saying 'Carl...what good could this TV do...for me?' and I say nothing ABSOLUTELY NOTHING it won't do ya eh- nuh good no good'a'tall it'll turn your brain in fact to oatmeal and your will to sand because you know...it isn't the television set...oh no it is the...hand...OF GOD that is reaching for you today doan cha UNDUHSTAYUND? So I want you to put...your head DOWN GET THAT HEAD down oh I know...you can feel it can you even say my lost misguided one that you feel the...DIVINE praise Gee- zus HE IS HERE." Well, you know I had my hand on the TV and my head bowed way down. "DEMON...AWAY...BE HEALED."
At that moment, it didn't matter that he had a line of actors like canned laughter waiting to feign a cure, or that he was actually a subsidiary of a telemarketing firm whose phone bank was poised to pounce on the weaknesses of the spirit — something real in him fired up the real thing in me. I was in the cross hairs of the cross, glimpsing in the desert the vapor of the One. Jesus had indeed survived all attempts to kill him — those hordes of so-called followers who quoted him out of context, read his poetry literally, emasculated his message by making him the message, and reduced him, finally, to God, the unnamable and inscrutable, as if his death was the expiration date. And here he was in my living room, laughing at it all, gazing at me with those eyes he had, so intently I had no choice but to look inside instead of out. Since I had literally never done that before, the choice became miraculously clear: I could either suffer all alone, or give service to others' suffering. By dissolving into the unknowable sky—what they called on Get Smart the cone of silence—a true self began emerging, so much greater than I could have imagined, knowing and encompassing everything, perfect without even realizing it. The love for Man that Jesus had was simply his consciousness that we are all Gods who have chosen to be slaves, for the glory of seeking love in our chains and truth in the blank walls.
When I felt this revelation, the chandelier quivered ever so slightly. I got down on my knees and prayed for the one thing I most wanted: Philadelphia. I thought of her visceral laughter, which I found myself needing more and more, for fear I would disappear. I remembered the way she tamed the place, running barefoot to the kitchen with glass of wine in hand to get the anchovies. Or the way she tamed the oncoming winter by wearing my flannel shirts and pouring the wine into coffee cups. Or the way we teased a physical relationship out of wisps of smoke: we together created for example a mutually agreeable reality where the unlikely Minnesota Twins would somehow go all the way to win the World Serious, and as we watched the whole thing unfold just as we drew it up, we laughed absurdly as only two people who share something just between themselves can laugh.
For that Friday's visit, post-revelation, I resolved to clean the place up a bit. I bleached the floors, swept all the cobwebs away, prepared veal hearts with fettuccine, salad and tiramisu, even picked some flowers from Katherine's garden.
I met her at the door with the flowers. Her first words were "Uh-oh."
"What's wrong, you who look lovely tonight?"
"We have to talk."
She did not want to go inside the apartment. She wanted someplace more neutral. I finally cajoled her up the stairs, to the table setting, candles, wine and food. She glanced at it and looked away. "You can't be happy going out with me."
"What do you mean?"
"I'm away all the time, serious student, using you to get dinners and drinks, going home to my parents, you know."
"But that's what's so charming about you."
She looked up at the ceiling and tried another tact. "What do we have in common except scoffing at people?"
"And sex," I added, "and I'm not sure about the scoffing at people."
"Don't you want something a little more...serious?"
"You're trying to dump me, aren't you?"
She gave me a blank stare with her courtesan eyes. "I never meant things to get this involved," she offered gently, with an actress voice.
"Neither did Jesus," I chuckled.
This lame joke went over like a rock down a well. If I were to fold up my arms and cluck like a mandrake, she would have no doubt wasted no time calling me disturbed, chuckling proudly, not thinking at all why I would actually do such a thing, what it meant.
I felt deflated, defeated. The flowers seemed to wilt on the spot. All of a sudden there was no common poker game, no easy give and take between us, nothing to lean on: no sympathy, no protectiveness, no reservoir of goodwill, only ideas, that shimmered like fireworks and vanished, leaving empty souls underneath the shards of shared experience vying to discover themselves.
"Do you think I can just stop loving you? Like that?" I asked.
"Aren't you weary of avoiding anything that might expose our vulnerabilities?" she asked. I hadn't thought of that. "Isn't your private world slowly dying?"
"Hello? Isn't that the point?"
She winced. She mentioned certain things I had done recently that bothered her, like rubbing my teeth until they bled or cackling uncontrollably throughout The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, or continually rearranging the furniture while she sat there smoking nervously, trying to watch Jeopardy. "I knew you the moment I first looked in your eyes," she finally concluded. "Now I'm totally confused."
There was nothing I could do except look at her bright eyes and lovely upperbite with longing. Just as mysteriously as she had opened herself up in joy to the life I led, she now shut herself off, with no real explanation.
I later learned that it was some guy at school, a volunteer in the Dukakis campaign, that turned her away. That fact would have only have made me madder at God. For the hard, cruel, gentle, soft fact for me was that heaven on earth had to stand in line behind other lessons. I had too much outrage that had to be turned into revenge. I had suffered too much to just let go of it — the thought of final victory was too thrilling, the fear of defeat too overwhelming. What the house kept echoing but the angels couldn't speak to was how much more comforting the unyielding and unrelentingly cruel world is than laughing blissfully at everything and knowing at every moment that one is moving in lock step with the perfection of the universe — how dizzying, when one could be, for example, choking on a TV dinner watching one all-too-human team forced to play by the rules of basketball while the opponents, Michael Jordan and the Bulls in the china shop, commit felonies in front of millions of people to be proclaimed immortal heroes by the announcers, with the seriousness of professional wrestling flacks, and everyone watching an accomplice in the pretense that it is some kind of cliff hanging entertainment whose outcome hadn't been worked out well in advance.
To confront that and still wake up every morning believing in something, that was living. The apartment seemed to feed on this dissonance brought on in me, it demanded a sacrifice of nothing less. So, as I worked up a suitable froth over Philadelphia's betrayal, I made a deal with the world. And part of the deal with the world is that it takes everything away in due time — it forces you, in other words, to find yourself anyway. How's that for kindness?
The next evening, after another day of vague uneasiness toward me on the part of my co-workers and my slinking away whenever a chat had broken out, I was impatiently waiting for the elevator when a fellow worker took pity on my holey shoes and bum's wool Doublemint cap and asked me "where's your twin?"
I immediately put aside all thoughts of Philadelphia and read all kinds of significance into this comment. I figured this poor woman — named Jane — was my soulmate. Frantically, I began to open up about Lester's ghost house experience and followed her to the bank machine telling her all about it. I was getting to the part about vampires when she cold as charity cut me off: "I suppose the next thing you're going to say is you're living over an old Indian burial ground, hm?" Then she calmly pushed her car alarm to open the sedan door and got in.
I thought at once of the plastic squaw in my bathroom. Then I remembered those limestone sarcophaguses...were they coffins? As I walked back home I realized that no black people lived in Mount Vernon, despite exclusively black neighborhoods on all four sides. If I had thought about this at all, I just figured they didn't want to contract AIDS from a mosquito bite. Was it really something else? And the look of everyone in Mount Vernon — were they all really tortured artists, those friendless, speechless passers-by who barely held onto jobs and walked with perverse dignity? Were they really working on deliciously subversive masterpieces or was there only a notebook of venom that awaited them in their apartments? By the time I got home, I had convinced myself that I was, as Ricki Lee Jones put it, " dialing from the Western slope."
Yet, within minutes of being once again safely inside, I knew my suspicions were preposterous, even as I gazed at the Indian on my toilet for a clue. Ghosts, if they existed at all, were outside of my mind, trapped spirits between dimensions, besides, no serious person believed in such things, only superstitious peasant women did, just as only hillbillies believed in UFOs. If I was acting peculiar, it was only because I was a genius, and I was free now — for the first time — to indulge in my brilliance. I resolved to batten down, and I flicked on the TV to Reverend Carl.
9.
One of my first orders of business in the new regime was getting rid of Lester. He had begun to take, as I later learned at the instigation of Katherine, a more active interest in my welfare. He insisted I get a phone, for one, and began to visit more often. He'd often forcibly drag me out to Foodtown or a hip hop club. I began to hide beside the windows when he came by, thinking up crazy stories to tell him later about what I had been doing. I resented the way he was always the procurer of weed. I tired of his loud voice always overtaking every conversation, the way he decided what to pay attention to and what to laugh at. But most of all, my mind kept wandering to the thought of him and Katherine together. There was no distance between them, a simple look in her eye told him everything he needed to know, his words making an intoxicating leap across the narrow palisades to her side instead of falling forever down the hole as mine seemed to. I felt envy for the way they cared enough about each other to ask the hardest questions, like estheticians popping pores to make each other cleaner and stronger. I recalled the long languorous Sunday mornings they spent in their lavender-shadowed room, like John and Yoko in Amsterdam, gently murmuring then going silent then giggling, recharging their batteries before they came out to assault one another for other people's edification. Their love, I concluded, was somehow holding me down.
I devised a number of schemes to break Lester's spell, but I never could leave the house to carry them out. But one day, after scraping the last of the resin off my pipe, I finally worked up the nerve to go down to Red's.
To my surprise, the front door opened right up. Even better, Red opened his own door with a smile seeing it was me. I debated whether to say outright I needed weed or to pretend I was there to read his poems. I felt for a moment like a woman at that inevitable crossroads, trying to convince herself, as Zsa Zsa Gabor said, that "all rich man are handsome." Red spared me the trouble of explaining myself, welcoming me in to his inner alcove as if he had been waiting for me. The only person there was a woman who, from the looks of things, wasn't visiting. " Juli, this is Felis."
She didn't say anything, she just looked at me with an uncanny combination of expression-less mouth and doe-like, fiery eyes. She was smoking a Marlboro and sketching what looked to be Red, sans the crooked teeth and wrinkles. As she devoted her whole attention again to her drawing, Red offered me a bong hit, a cigarette, my choice from his record collection and of course unlimited access to his oeuvre. I took the bong hit first.
"We were just talking about art," said Red as he passed me the pipe. " Juli says the artist has to suffer to produce great work. I say great artists produce great work regardless of their circumstances. What do you think?"
I thought about the question while holding the hit, not the question itself but what the socially correct answer would be. I looked at both of them. Juli, fashion-model beautiful behind her animal hair and floury pallor, didn't seem to take the slightest interest in what I had to say, while Red, who
ooked like a normal guy on a long hunger strike, looked at me eagerly. "It depends on the artist," I started, "but generally speaking, great artists not great conditions produce great work." Inexplicably, my comment aroused a smile on Juli's face and what looked like a worried frown on Red's. "But," I quickly added, "I don't even know what great art is any more. The older I get, the more it seems social acceptability is the standard of great art, not intrinsic merit."
"Yeah, you got that right," said Red, bristling, "but there's a quantitative difference between, say, Steel Pulse and Eddy Grant."
"I suppose, but I'm sure Jamaica is full of rockers much better than either one, so I would argue that it doesn't matter. Who knows they won't be listening to Michael Jackson in a hundred years? After all, history is written by the winners. Why, I'll bet Ronald Reagan goes down as a great president."
Even Juli laughed at that one. "You had me and you lost me there, friend," chuckled Red, his teeth like an Afghan poppy farmer.
As the weed started to kick in, I asked Juli if she did the paintings on the wall.
"What paintings?" she asked nervously.
"Those oils there. They're works of genius really."
"I don't know." She looked at them momentarily. "Yeah, I think I did those."
How can someone not know if they painted something, I thought. I looked at the sketch. It was clearly the same hand, the same dark line that was so simple it was painful to look at. "That's beautiful what you're working on there," I said.
She just kept working, not acknowledging my comment. Red, though, said "she based it on this poem" and opened up his notebook to a particular page.
Noble chin and killer grin slithering cat tail black glow eyes like dragon moons or gnarled smack spoons hair soft with the shades of the wise.
"I wrote that while looking in a mirror. I was listening to Miles Davis. You know how you become what you hear, how it finds you?"
Maybe Lester was wrong about this guy, I thought. He seemed so genuine. "Be careful what you listen to," I replied.
"I like to listen to two things at the same time. It forces you to get to the essence, like a third voice, you know," he winked, "synergy."
"That's the way I feel sometimes playing with Lester," I said.
"You oughta steer away from him. He's trouble," Red said with what seemed authentic concern for me.
Juli showed her sketch to Red and looked at him with eyes like amazonite. He sleepily said "yeah, yeah, fine," and went back to explaining to me how Lester was a user of people who would suck the life out of me and anyone close to me. I had heard all that before.
We traded cigarettes. I smoked a Marl', Red smoked a 'Roy. Soon, Juli asked me in the softest of voices "Can I have one too?"
As I passed her one, I felt the slightest of electrical charges pass through my fingertips. She seemed to blush in taking it. I asked her what she wanted to listen to.
Red interrupted. "Got some crunchy new grooves from a group called Dread Zeppelin. They do reggae covers of Led Zeppelin songs with a fat Elvis singer. It's just about as close to perfect as you going to get, and they're taking it all the way."
"Deal me in," I said, and he put it on. I asked to use the bathroom. Red gave me directions. On the way I passed one monumentally cluttered room with a futon on the floor and another room in the back that was completely bare. The bathroom walls were covered in crud. The toilet bowl looked like a copper mine. The window was painted over in green, so I popped on the light switch. It didn't turn on.
When I came back, Juli was gone. "Where did she go?" I asked.
"Who Juli oh she went to work." After a moment, he continued. "We agreed, you see, that both of us being artists, the weaker of the two has to make the money, so at least one would survive. She busses tables at a Korean restaurant."
This was way more than I wanted to know. "You better fix your bathroom light."
"There's no power in the back of the apartment. My friend Tommy hooked up a line to his apartment, but it only covers this lamp, the stereo and the refrigerator."
This was also a little too depressing for me. I wanted to leave. "What's with the room in the back?" I asked.
" That's for the ghost in the apartment. He leaves us alone if we give him the room. He's a pretty cool ghost when you get to know him. He protects us, in a way."
"I think my house is haunted," I said. "Should I leave?"
"It's not for me to say. We actually need the ghost around, because of, you know, the circumstances around Juli's family." He said this in a totally pragmatic, matter-of-fact way.
"Circumstances?"
"Didn't I tell you? Her family is real stuck in some deep Freudian shit. From Philadelphia, you know? When they discovered she wanted love and not money, they hired all kinds of heat on us, lawyers, psychiatrists, detectives too. They keep trying to kidnap her. We don't have the resources to fight that, but we do have..."
"The ghost."
" Eggzackly."
I really had to leave now, and I mumbled something about having to go to work myself (it was Saturday). Red said yeah, whatever, stop by again sometime, he had a "suite" of poems he wanted to show me. I tripped over myself getting out of there, back to the safety of my own confines, but before I got out a painting caught my eye, a wild-eyed woman on a stallion, galloping off as from some lovesick longing. It was like my recurring dream.
Back in my apartment, it didn't take long to convince myself that Juli was crying out for me to rescue her. She was a naïf, a frail waif with bazooka eyes, tremulously whimpering for praise, support, protection. If I was brave, I could save silent Juli, who I imagined to be like Katherine, from Red, a poor man's Lester, and so strike some small mark against injustice, against my own complicity.
For days I struggled over strategy. The specter of Red, solid, sensible, respectable in certain circles, seemed insurmountable. The voice of Reverend Carl was now broadcasting nearly all the time in my apartment. He said "don't you want it? Don't you FEEL...you deserve it? Well get off your good-for-nothing too-unworthy-for-God's-mercy high horse and just...ask for it. It's easy...as pah." I got down on my knees and prayed to him and the God he represented for a solution to my dilemma. This woman needed a better life than that, and so did I. The answer hit suddenly, inevitably. I believed in her, I wanted her to be free to paint, I had some money — why not commission a painting? How much did paintings go for? $100? $500? I checked my bank balance: $350. That sounded right. It was so perfect it sent me hurling hosannas towards the rafters.
I immediately ran to their apartment in my old blue football jacket, full of pure promises and impure intentions. There was no one there. I tried again over the course of many darkening November evenings, always rehearsing my proposition carefully beforehand. I finally got to them by about my tenth attempt, but the enthusiasm I had once felt had degenerated into desperation. Red saw immediately what was at stake, but he played it cool and friendly, thanking me again and again for the financial help. Juli just stood there dumbfounded, scared of me. One of them handed me a cigarette, as if they had given birth, a Chesterfield, in fact.
A few days later Juli phoned. "What is it that you want...for your painting?"
"You're the artist," I smiled. "I like that piece with the horse."
"I don't know what painting you're talking about."
"You know, the woman on the horse getting chased by spirits."
"I don't remember that. I was thinking of a scene I saw in the sky the other day, the conjunction of Venus and Jupiter, how that must look close up — that wise green iris in a red swirling eye..." She spoke with a frenzy, utterly unlike before. "All that energy coming together, the sensitivities of Venus and the power of Jupiter. Do you know what I mean?"
I knew all too well what she meant, or thought I did. "That would be perfect. Green and red are complementary colors, so there would be a lot of drama."
"I'm glad you like that. Still, I need to get to know you better. I've never sold a painting before. Could you meet me at Society Hill, say, tomorrow evening at 8:30?"
"Sure. I'll bring half of the money so you can get some supplies."
"Swell. And I'll show you some lines I'm thinking of. You're a musician, right? I think the line is like the melody and the colors are the harmony that flows naturally from it, don't you?"
"Yes, yes, a thousand times yes," I said, as if I was younger than her. "I look forward to seeing you tomorrow."
Society Hill was yet another old Baltimore bar whose dreams of its own past glory meshed perfectly with the nostalgic ambitions of its threadbare patrons, as if both had formed an uneasy truce against the uncivil glare of modernity. I got there before Juli. As I nosed in to the seat at the edge of the bar, it seemed the right place for my fantasy, too, that of being a collector. I ordered a single malt scotch in a cognac glass and surveyed the old photographs on the brick walls. Working there was a cook I had worked with at the harbor center restaurant, a gregarious black Muslim named Ackmed who was always giving me advice, such as "always pour a bit of salt on your tongue before you eat, scientists have proven that it aids digestion," "women are meant to care for children, they will make your life miserable if you can't give them that," "you must understand that it is all about surrender, to Hullah, not to you, not to him or her, but to Hullah — which, by the way means 'nothing,' think about it — if you listen closely enough you can hear Hullah in every whispering sound, the bus, the trees, the passing cars," and my personal favorite "don't you know that white people are the result of a botched DNA experiment to create a race of slave laborers?" He said all of these things with kind eyes and an earnest smile, so you didn't doubt them in the least. He seemed very glad to see me and soon had brought out a steaming plate of egg rolls for me. As I ate, I heard this strange hissing from behind. I turned around and saw about twelve feet away a middle-aged woman — mascara'd lashes, pink cigarette tips, the whole bit — leering at me. Her teeth seemed to bray at me and she screwed her eyes around, and opened up her legs ever so slightly. Her husky voice said softly but unmistakably "come on, boy, what are you waiting for?" I turned back around, terrified, gulping my drink and hanging on Ackmed's every word about how alcohol was the worst of all the drugs. Before I knew it, a tap came to my shoulder. I quivered my head to the side. It was Juli, smiling broadly and waving a girl scout "hi." She was cleaned up and made up, looking Egyptian underneath her mascara. Over the bohemian elegance of her outfit she wore a large silver medallion that I got the distinct impression was the only piece of jewelry she owned. It seemed vaguely satanic but it was so inapt on her it made her look even more wholesome. She settled in next to me, her body barely obeying her desire for modesty. She leaned into my face with a rapid-fire monologue on anti-space and post-heroic chromatics and other art dealer babblety-brook she had probably just read in Art News. I didn't care, for I saw the real beauty that transcended all that huckster hyperbole when I looked directly into her eyes. But no sooner had I thought these thoughts than Red stumbled in the door, in the middle of giving the finger to somebody outside. He ambled up to the bar in his uncombed hair and a black t shirt. When he sat down next to us, Juli turned her eyes away from me and let him do the talking. He listed supplies "they" needed and asked for $180 up front. I reluctantly handed him the money, and he led her out a short time later, walking loosely and much too close to the other patrons, and leaving me with Gloria Swanson and her leopard-skin purse. So I too exited, not even saying good-bye to Ackmed.
I followed up by visiting them a few days later. Again it was like they were waiting for me. They let me inspect all of Juli's work, which was lying haphazardly around the apartment. It ranged from a beach glass mosaic of a butterfly to a black and white photograph of a 50's toaster-style trailer in what looked like an endless desert of caked, ruptured, black mud. I liked each new piece more than the last, calling her a genius more and more emphatically. Red stood to the other side of the room, scratching his stubble. Juli came near me and withdrew, and then she passed near Red. She went into the kitchen and came out with a blue glass full of some kind of red liquid she called bug juice. She handed it to me and then ran into the arms of Red. They desperately hugged and passionately kissed while I drank the Hawaiian Punch. When I had finished, I tiptoed out the door.
The whole thing had happened so quickly. When I got back to the apartment, I was mad at it and at God and mostly at myself, but the house was unmoved. It knew all along the futility of the plan and had been waiting for my arrival. As a result, I spent far more time second-guessing the plan than I had spent cooking it up. I let myself rage on at Red, at Juli, at Lester, at Katherine, at Philadelphia, at Gillian, at my wife, they were all ignorant conspirators in this plan to keep me on the dark side, forever embittered to everyone else's joyful illusion that one would be rewarded for graciousness with love, and hard labor with success. What happened to the assurance I had in high school, when all the girls wanted to go to the prom with me and all the colleges wanted me to pick them? Here I was, six years later, alone in some strange uncharted ghetto. Worst of all, what I felt seemed so clichéd. Was I unable to maintain a better intellectual grasp of life than that it was random, meaningless, finite?
I was to receive no sympathy on this, not from the passersby in the street, who were accustomed to receiving no help from no one at no time; not from my co-workers who knew the only value, the only truth, was to look out for oneself at all times; not from Lester, who when I told him of all this said "why'd you have to go and do such a dangfool thing as that? I could have used that money," even as his eyes betrayed a deep sympathy for the idealism and innocence at the center of my quest. To Reverend Carl, nothing had changed, it was all about tithing, giving even what you don't have as a demonstration of faith. If I had frittered it away, hallelujah, now, maybe, a true blessing can come.
A few weeks later, just as I was beginning to understand how we must learn to be gentle when God asks that we stay within the life we are given — the terms of our contract — another call came. The picture was finished, Juli exclaimed, would I like to come over and view it? Yes, I exclaimed, I could think of nothing better to do, but this set in motion a whole new series of speculations. So I was a patron of the arts, after all, I thought, and had a role to play: defender of genius. I looked in my closet for a cape and a walking stick, but there was nothing in there but a heap of cigarette-fetid work clothes, and a few tie-dyed shirts. I speculated where to place the picture; should it hang over the lengthening crack in the wall, or above the old bar chairs, TV trays and plastic rug in the center of my living room? Maybe over my mattress. Perhaps the bathroom. How should I accept it, on whose behalf? It was only raw curiosity that tore me away from these questions and sent me to Red and Juli.
They greeted me warmly, explained what an inspiration I had been to them, how I came through like an angel when they needed help. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I thought. The painting was in the main room, hanging over the stereo. One glance was all it took to sicken me. On top of the two rich, otherworldly orbs — flaring red-orange, opalescent green — someone had cartooned in a face — tree-brush eyebrows, mountain nose, lake mouth, fish for eyes. It looked ridiculous, so much so I felt totally humiliated and embarrassed. They just smiled. "What do you think?" they asked in unison. I looked away from them and muttered "that isn't it, at all," and walked out with funereal tread. Amazingly, they didn't say anything or try to stop me, as if they were happy to keep it. I later learned — and I knew this unconsciously at the time — that Red had completed the picture. It was their collective effort, their way of discovering themselves. It closed their deal.
I went back, like some prodigal son, to Lester.
10.
We began jamming again every day. Lester had taken to heart all the ambitions I had laid on him — all the ambitions I no longer believed in — and had realized during the time I had distanced myself from him that he needed to care about such things in order to have me as a friend, as a partner. He began rounding up people to play with, and came up with schemes for getting into places with actual sound systems, and he started to hit me up for money to buy more equipment. He brought my old amplifier over one day, and we began to jam with it, turning it louder each time we played, until we were wailing. Amazingly, the neighbors didn't say a word or even cut me sideways glances in the hall.
Coffee Bob had found a regular Thursday night jam session in a midtown warehouse that we started to frequent. It was the shop of a gay coke fiend named Harold, who was described by Coffee Bob as a "wood turner." The place was full of sawdust, and scattered amid the lathes, giant bandsaws, planers, routers and miter boxes was a drum set and some amps. Harold, on drums, was about 45, thin, radiating with passive irritation over not being consulted on this or that detail. With him was a 17-something guitarist who called himself Ani-mal and shook his Jim Morrison locks whenever the beat inspired him. We went in expecting to finally be able to play our stuff as loud as we wanted, but we found we had to accompany Harold's Leonard Cohen- esque ballads first and then try to follow Ani-mal's mindless stabs at White Zombie riffs. After an hour, we finally got to play something Lester and I had been working up in my apartment. After a few thumps, everyone else piled on, and it devolved into a blues free-for-all. The next week, Harold wasn't even there, instead it was this scary-looking drummer with a toothpick in his mouth who talked the entire time. He wouldn't even shut up when we played; within a measure or two of any song we started, he stopped drumming and came on like Vince Lombardi: "you guys suck dick...play something uptempo, I'm falling asleep over here...try to hit the notes together, losers...I can't beat that meat...P.U. in New York you dirtbags would end up crying for fishheads in an alley...what's so difficult about a motherfuckin' pop song, boys?...I played with Frankie Valli, I know showbiz, you have to want it more than that." When this torture was mercifully over and we'd put down our instruments, he became best pals with us, sharing his cigarettes, saying he was only so hard on us because he knew we had talent, offering to get us into this speedmetal club where he was a bouncer.
The third week, it was just the three of us. It was such a novel experience we spent 20 minutes trying to figure out what to play first. "What key are we in?" I asked. "No key, all notes are perfect," Lester replied, "in fact, there are no notes either, that's just another lie the West tells to limit the human spirit." We finally fumbled our way into a loose-enough groove to accommodate our separate yearnings — and from there, like magic, we began to comment and expand on each other's ravings of isolation, in a way we couldn't using words. I was discovering that the bass was like columns, huge Hellenic columns that connected the world of spirit with the world of insurance salesmen and lawyers and other financial racketeers who hid behind the scrolls and folds. The bass was the tenuous center between untenable opposites, the dark, convulsive echo, the imperceptible orgasm far below the shriek. Coffee Bob, meanwhile, was toying with the thought that wisdom came from atonement and atonement came from sinning. He rushed up bravely to face this stupefying contradiction with dissonant, arrhythmic dominance and then cowered back with repentant smolderings of blue into his own idea that he was no good, and if he was no good, then nothing could be any good. Lester had a nice pattern of chords, always suspending and moving downward, capturing moments of grace on their flight into pain and vice-versa. We meshed nicely, me reaffirming Lester's etherics while Coffee Bob moralized around it by asking the musical question "so what?"
Then Barbie came in, carrying a guitar case and two tambourines as bracelets. We tried to ignore her. We sped up the tempo, turning up the knobs on our instruments whenever she screamed. We tried to avoid even looking at her, which in hindsight was a mistake, as we didn't see her pick up the snare drum and throw it into a sawdust molehill. Nor did we see her reach into the wood pile and pull out 2x4's of rough-hewn pine. She swung them madly around the room. By the time we noticed what she was doing, the drum set was crushed and there was a large gash in Harold's Ampeg. "What the HELL do you think you're doing?" yelled Coffee Bob.
" Bravassimo!" replied Barbie, clapping. "You squatters are blowing it out, living it large, def- idelity, baby. The Mobtown Reds play the blues, no?"
"You didn't have to destroy the equipment," Coffee Bob replied in a softened but still incredulous tone.
"If you were so concerned about that," she laughed, "you woulda let me play."
11.
If only we were a suburban teenage band who could rely on the clubhouse, the VFW center and well-insulated basements for rehearsal time. Trying to find a place to play in the city brought us up against people who considered it their solemn duty to extinguish our dreams like cigarette butts. We decided to try the suburbs. Lester and Coffee Bob came by to pick me up one Sunday morning with Katherine and Marcy Walloon, her best friend, to drive out to a place they identified only as "the ranch." It was located somewhere between Butler and Sparks, well past the beltway, in a thickly wooded mid-70's development with faux mansions and large yards. The house was superficially a suburban-style pseudo-Colonial, but the grounds were almost wild — full of monkey grass and trees blanketed with ivy. The interior, meanwhile, demonstrated that its inhabitants — and no one would explain to me who they were other than don't worry about it, but they seemed to be connected in some way with Coffee Bob — were clearly at the edge of what any suburban notion of leisure allotted. There was a paneled family room complete with pool table, a dry bar full of Stoly, books as far as the eye could see and a Scan shag rug in Rothko colors; a kitchen with hand-crafted ceramics, fresh rosemary, sage and basil hanging upside-down, exotic condiments (chutney, tahini, marzipan sauce) and munchies (baby corn, smoked oysters, grape leaves); an art studio complete with pottery wheel, a Fauve-like still life on the easel with its subject (dried milkweed pods and eucalyptus, money tree branches and some kind of furry red grass arranged in a vase) by the window; a solarium with trees and gurgling water in it — and furry white sofas, more paintings and a selection of all the finest magazines and coffee table books (Foreign Policy, New York Review of Books, " Ansel Adams and the Mythology of the American West") — all that was missing was a parrot. But the penultimate apogee was the living room, which was a veritable anthropology museum: the walls were full of South American modern art, African masks and ceremonial weapons, batik from Indonesia, early-American wrought iron implements, and some eye-popping voodoo dolls from Haiti on the mantle.
Needless to say, we went rough-shod over the place, enjoying it in ways its owners could scarcely conceive. While the two women smoked cigarettes in the sun room and talked, we pretended we were vying for their attention by playing football, Frisbee and baseball in the side yard, shooting pool and bourbons, flinging clay onto canvases and paint onto spinning clay, and gorging on a rolling collection of hors d'oeuvres impeccably prepared by Coffee Bob. Then there were chickens and baked potatoes wrapped in aluminum foil and cooked over a roaring fire in the fireplace. All through our cavorting, Lester saw to it that we were continuously supplied with furtive hits of herb as well as a rigorous mix of classical oddities (Gregorian chants, PDQ Bach, Harry Partch) from the hundreds of mostly classical records, reel-to-reel tapes and compact discs (a new thing which combined inferior packaging with inferior sound and cost twice as much as records).
After all that, we jammed. A piano and cello were in the house, and we had arranged our amps and instruments around the room for maximum sensory stimulation. We finally got the women to turn their heads for a few moments, but the music was too precious, too flaccid — a day of opulent play had sapped our creative energies.
So we began serious drinking. We sat around the fine cherry table in our ripped flannel shirts and painters pants, talking heatedly about nothing. The rarified environment, or the excess of dope, had turned the women into British gentleladies:
"She's a few shits short of a pot."
"You think so?"
"And furthermore she's got a horse's patoiee"
"Bigger dumplings than mine?"
"Way bigger, and it won't be long before the whole world knows it. You have noticed she never tucks in her blouse?"
"Oh, Katherine, you're fiendish."
"And the hair, like dead grass after it rains."
It took me about an hour to realize that the subject of their merciless attentions was the subject of mine: Juli. Marcy, it was explained to me, was Red's old girlfriend. She had managed to escape from him by renting a U-Haul and clearing out all his stuff one afternoon when he was at a baseball game. Now she was content to cruise bars with Katherine and pretend they were lesbians. Lester once showed me a portrait she did of Katherine — it was so masculine and sensual we both were puzzled, and ultimate reality slipped a little further from our grasp.
Coffee Bob was cleaning up downstairs, and Lester was getting romantic, much to Katherine's consternation. Marcy flashed me flirtatious looks and snuggled close to my ear with throaty giggles. She made masterful use of cigarette movement and eye contact, driving me crazy with desire. Something about her seemed European, either a certain stiffness of bearing or her Picasso eyes. We talked a little about how beautiful the mountains of Western Maryland were and she confided to me that her favorite 70's band was Average White Band. She even said she thought the way my neck veins bulged when I sang was really sexy.
Despite all that, before I knew it, I was settling to sleep on the couch in living room, looking at African masks. Coffee Bob came downstairs with a Navajo blanket and asked me if I was okay. I said sure, great day, good night. It wasn't until the following morning that I realized Lester had a roll with Katherine while Coffee Bob had shacked up with Marcy. He just climbed into her bed. I suddenly felt very alone, and very embarrassed for myself, but, strangely, they all loved and respected me more in the morning than they had the night before, although I couldn't tell whether that was from some imagined perception of my self-control, or pity.
12.
The next place we tried to play was the Owlglass, a loft on the top floor of a TV repair shop on Plywood Street (officially known as North Avenue). It was a home for artists, Coffee Bob explained, but it was full of what he described as "the Mt. Washington intelligentsia" and what Lester described as "fashion fascists." A hundred or so people were crowded around three black-lit rooms, waiting, Coronas in hand, for an event of Warholian disproportions. The occasion was the appearance of the Ubiquitous Minutia, a local band who were about to be signed to a record contract and were being compared by some of the participants to everyone from Big Black to Alien Sex Fiend to Henry Cow while others described them as "shockingly original," "vital" and "the advance wave of rock's final act." The buzz around the band was so intense, I thought for sure the slow space funk that started when we arrived was them. Coffee Bob, Lester and I filed in to the "music room." The air was filled with what looked like floating goose down, like a slow motion pillow fight, and a strobe light like a lawn sprinkler flaring us vampires. I was pleasantly surprised to see guitars and various percussion instruments lying around the room. Lester picked up the old Les Paul while I ended up boinging the interesting strings of a set of mattress springs. A number of other people joined in, and soon it was as if the collective cultural conscience of Baltimore — or rather, the white cultural conscience — was making its stand with the Ubiquitous Minutia. Coffee Bob explained to me afterwards that that was only a "fun" jam session, the Minitiamen would come later.
While we were waiting I examined the "art room." There were paintings literally covering all the walls, electrical threadlike things hanging from the ceilings, TVs with faces screaming obscenities, but the most interesting thing to me was the patterns formed by people's feet after they stepped on the multicolored blobs of paint that lay like turds on the floor. I tried to listen to the conversations, but they seemed to be some sort of secret society, a royal court that deemed what was worthy of irony and what was beneath contempt. That is the way with the hyper-hip, continually mixing, teasing and dealing with parts of the spectrum that are unrecognizable to mere mortals. There was a tremendous energy and purpose in the room: the outfits were like Halloween costumes, one could feel the effects of many strange drugs surging through the crowd, even the way the talking circles formed and demingled spoke of a sublime rhythm and style. It was all enough to make me feel I was in the presence of something real — real artists and real patrons — not those loud, disheveled sociopaths with whom I spent my time.
Then the band came on. Amid raucous applause, they settled into a set of Talking Heads riffs, Tangerine Dream atmospherics and I-learned-everything-I-know-about-singing-from- Bryan-Ferry vocal effects. To call it predictable would be recklessly understated. It was like they telegraphed everything they would do measures in advance, leaving nothing to chance. There was no cliché they didn't seize upon, no opportunity for an angst-ridden sneer avoided, no danger of lapsing into a beat even the slightest bit grooving. The crowd looked at them as if they were Gods, and the band blew kisses to the crowd between songs, saying things like "thanks for believing in us during the tough years" and "we will never forget each and every one of you." On the way out, I overheard someone say "this could be Baltimore's best chance for a major label break out." I had no idea what that meant.
Coffee Bob stayed on after Lester and I left. On the way back, we had to cross the bridge over the railroad terminal. It was a steel arch continuous truss bridge approximately 600 feet across and about 30 feet high. Lester said, " let's climb it." I looked down. It was a good 100 feet from the street to the tracks. I looked at him. I knew it was all about authenticity. "Roger," I replied.
The only real way to get over the bridge frame was to sort of shinny up. The problem was that foot long spiked metal fans appeared every eight feet or so. Crossing them required us to free up our hands to lift our legs over the spikes. Between the altitude, the strong December wind and the cold slick steel, this act was terrifying. But even a third of the way up, it seemed impossible to turn back. I lived for that moment when I could crouch again after climbing a spike and dreaded the thought of getting the flare of my jeans caught on one and hanging skewered hundreds of feet up in the sky. When we reached the top of the arc, it was all I could do to fight temptation and not look down. With the wind kicking up even more and the girders wobbling, I started whimpering to Lester, who was ahead of me, and he said, like we were on some kind of tourist excursion, that we were over the same tracks that Randy Newman rode when he wrote the song "Baltimore." His whole sad dismissal of the city had come from peering out of an Amtrak window on a rainy summer's day. I wondered whether he would have had the nerve to write lines like "it's hard just to live" if he had seen us inching our way over the top of that orange bridge.
Getting down was more difficult. I could sort of skirt around the spikes, but I had to hold on much tighter to keep from sliding uncontrollably. Once bushes began appearing to the side, however, I gained confidence — to land in those would take only a 20 foot drop. We finally made it down, and we looked back at the bridge, and at the Owlglass a slight distance away. We knew we had just risked our lives meaninglessly, but the experience seemed a lot more consequential than anything else going on. We went back to my place for a rooftop jam.
13.
That night, I dreamed Lester and I flew through time and space and landed inside a bubble somewhere, some unknown yet familiar city, jaywalking and cutting through lawns, restless like clocks, searching for weed. We checked in with Red, who was living in a two-story place, each floor the same: a bedroom window looking out on an city jungle backyard, a clean blue efficiency kitchen, an old upright piano. On each story he had a woman — they both looked like Juli, like twin Juli's. They were friends with each other, like good polygamic wives, but I could tell they were secretly competing to be the one Red chose, and I could tell also that the last thing Red wanted to do was choose, and they would defer to this, as women defer to men's self-absorption everywhere, every time — and that was good for them to be so cleverly underhandedly upbeat, because they knew through Red that the one who was chosen was the one who would die. Then I was one of the women, and I felt the desperation of wanting Red, of secretly wanting to be chosen. I would do anything to be the one to die in his arms. I was like a penitent who, in the face of overwhelming desire, conflates pain with pleasure. To fulfill this need — for which Red was only an accessory — I would idolize his every direction, saying like a slave girl "yeah, I'll be quiet, silence is what I need, I'll dig grok groove deal with the silence, the all-meaningful silence, the gift I can give you to show I know how alone you are." I would do anything because there are never enough good ladies for bad men.
Then Red said there wasn't any weed, and I started to wake up, still full of longing, but for what? The faceless girls? Faceless Red? I think it was myself ultimately that I desired, the me I couldn't see, the higher self that was Juli, that was Red, that was Lester, the self who saw with an open heart, and so felt all that was unexpressed and unresponded to. I was still semi-conscious, dreams drizzling on my brain, when the phone rang.
"Good morning, Vietnam," my automatic voice answered as my mind watched surf lathering a shore.
"Felix Brady please."
"Speaking."
"I thought you were off for good to Tehran. I was told you could tell me about some flawless tourmalinated emerald I heard came in."
"What?"
"Yeah, yeah," he continued, unfazed, "I know. You're no longer in the gem business, right?"
"I don't know what you're talking about."
" It's okay, this is Mike Stasiak, remember? From Cleveland? Not a good idea to jack me around. Ecuadorian topaz?"
"I don't deal in gemstones, you must have the wrong number."
"You are Felix Brady, right?"
"Yes, but I've never been to Cleveland." This was a lie, and he picked up on it right away.
"So you aren't Felix Brady the diamond man? That's too bad, because he's the best, one of a kind. I'm sorry to disturb you, sir, so early in the morning."
"That's...okay," I said, and fumbling for something to conclude the call with, continued earnestly with "it sounds very interesting. Do you trade in large quantities?"
"Aha!" he replied. "I knew it was you. I recognize your voice."
"No, really, I don't know anything about any of this, you have the wrong man."
He paused at my sincere, exasperated voice, and finally said "OK, I don't believe you, right, but if you feel you have to lie about it right now, hey I respect that. I won't call you again if you say so."
"Thanks for calling -------------," I said, instantly, the closing line imbedded in my brain from the months of working the customer service mines. Flummoxed, I hung up wondering why even the most basic level of communication was impossible.
I brewed some Chase and Sanborn coffee in a percolator I had found in the garbage, and pulled out the last Viceroy from the pack. I ripped away the cellophane and threw the rest into the pile of empties by the bed. I had been collecting every pack I ever smoked, systematically. I had wanted to tack them all up on a canvas, side by side, just like on a store shelf, but as art, because each pack held unique, lived experience: the abandoned factories that still burned on; the nature preserves for the homeless; the insane geniuses hidden away in every alley fleeing every age but our own; ghetto soda fountains; underground art museums; old robber baron mansions inhabited by Indian ghosts; and over it all that magical music that dies in the air because it has nothing but the truth to offer. What was to become of the feelings generated by these scenes, where was the explanation? It was in the cigarette packs — how much clearer could it be? The cigarettes were the reflection, the consolation, the only voice that said "yes, I care." I surveyed the now-unruly pile of red and gold pockets. This experiment had gone past the point; I was now hooked; I was not living the movie, it was living me.
I poured the coffee from the tin into a sticky cup. I was deep in reflection when Lester rang the bell. I tried to interest him in my plight.
"You want some coffee?"
" Naw, that stuff'll kill you."
"Who am I?" I asked suddenly.
"Someone who asks a lot of questions about himself to people who don't care."
"No, but look at me here, I'm falling apart. My wife left me for an movie usher, Juli prefers a bad poet who makes her bus tables at a Korean restaurant to me, and Philadelphia wouldn't even tell me why she went away."
"As Bob Dylan said to Peter Grant when he introduced himself as Led Zeppelin's manager, 'I don't come to you with my problems.' You should just, as the song advises 'thank God and Greyhound she's gone.'"
"But for what? I could be the head of an advertising agency or something, pitching passels of fine spin and plummy apercus. Instead, this crazy life just sucks me up and then flies away."
"Why didn't you say you were out of Buddha? I can help with that," he said in his comforting bedside manner.
Actually, I had a little weed left, this time, and I had assumed he had only come by to share mine. But I appreciated that he was acknowledging my right to salve my self-pity, if only because it gave me the illusion that there was a me in there who actually felt pain instead of nothing. Lester's tone of voice held a promise — not a money-back guarantee, mind you, but something to which paper could never attest — that by going with him I might actually discover the real stuff, the only pain humans are capable of suffering — the pain of others.
We stopped for more Viceroy's in the tiny Vietnamese grocery that had everything and walked, away from the skanky streets where the usual dealers hung out their snake skins. Lester wouldn't say who we were visiting, except to mention that this guy didn't deal, but would definitely share a buzz.
He brought me to a tiny but unmistakable dirt path behind an old book warehouse and through a steep hill of briars. Gravity sped our pistons down to an old railroad switching yard, a sea of rails at a lower level than the plain of the city. Each rail was stamped with the insignia "Bethlehem Steel, Baltimore." There were no trains or people here, although I could see the brick archway of the main terminal far off in the haze. The only things visible at ground level were a tiny tar-encrusted shed that lay poetically in the distance, a pair of large round railroad wheels, a pile of broken crates, and some rusted oil barrels. I asked if we were going somewhere but he just pointed in the opposite direction at a bridge — the bridge. Underneath it I saw a strand of bushy growth and, miraculously appearing as we moved in closer, the outlines of a tent.
In front of the yellowed tarpaulin, which turned out to be an old camping tent, bug screens and all, was parked a shopping cart full of blankets, clothes, jars of peanut butter and books, all jumbled together. The tent flap projected past the bridge, and held in its folds a pool of runoff water. I did a double-take when I noticed what was propping up the flap: the sculpture of the baby's arm holding an egg that I had tried to retrieve from the underground art gallery.
Lester announced our arrival. "Jan, man, it's me, Lester, you OK?"
A thin voice answered from within. "Yes, please come in. Through the Lord's poverty may you be rich," he proclaimed. "Corinthians 2:9," he clarified as we lowered our heads to enter the place. It was about as grim as I'd ever seen: overpowering mildew, black stained walls, some kind of ancient stove apparatus, an army cot and moldy wool blanket, a few cardboard boxes and stacks and stacks of warped, discolored papers taking up about half the space.
Jan smiled at me with eager eyes. He had a natural dreadlock of very long blonde/white hair and almost no skin pigmentation, which gave his light blue eyes an overpowering sheen. He wore layers of flannel, ratty finger-less gloves, grey oily jeans and old dingo boots and was holding a Bic pen. We weren't introduced, and I didn't know what to do, so I offered him a cigarette. He declined it so gently that I immediately felt enough at ease to sit on the cot. On it was a notebook filled with verses lettered in small, precise handwriting. "May I read this?" I asked, as he and Lester started discussing whether Luke was the most subtle of the New Testament books.
"Read it ennui," he punned Joycely, and went back to the religious discussion that made no sense to me.
As if to reward Lester for his spiritual work, Jan pulled out an old Budweiser can that had been turned into a makeshift bowl: flattened in the middle and punctured with tiny holes. He reached under his cot and pulled out with his hand a fistful of herb that looked like hay. As the vessel was prepared and sent around the tent, I read. My eyes first glazed over this verse:
Songs of Illness
The smell of the diesel is keener on this grey afternoon in the city,
but that doesn't make it any better of an explanation
for the mean indifference of a society that measures what can be withheld,
and the ridiculous lack of absurdity in the way God turns hands to cruelty
to withhold all but what we need too vitally:
for me, some space to think, and constant reminders,
in the wheelchairs that trundle by,
of paralyzing pain and horrifying waste, the world not functioning properly,
for lack of skills that are all too abundant, but not allowed to be used —
while imitation wine floods the shelves,
those born to be grapes die, on the vine, unredeemed,
and winos dry-heave cheerless lives away,
and the lost perception of this becomes my only possession,
my reason to be, and I discard it carelessly
to be ignored systematically, on the chance that my failure to communicate
may someday inspire out of grace and nobility another failure,
may bring alive a miserable self-regard
and, by bringing alive, to instill hope that, in the last-minute squeeze, turns leaden
and springs out the epiphany of energies destroying themselves,
darkening to listlessness and dread,
leaving a shell filled with memory's winds
driven to what they can never connect with:
what has gone, what they could have been, what will could not call into being.The knowledge of youth gazes through bifocaled wrinkles
at an actual youth oblivious to its presence.
This scene becomes another song, fulfills another task,
takes a new one down more dark alleys
that become, in her mind, heaven's gate.
"Jeez, this is great. You oughta get it published," I said.
Jan continued his discussion with Lester, seeming to ignore me. "Jesus, you see, couldn't hold his own with any argument — he barely got a few nonsense syllables in — but, you see, we're still dealing with those words, the mustard seeds," Jan tapped his temples, "he planted. It doesn't matter whether any one sees any value in it," he continued, addressing me, "it doesn't make it any less valuable."
"That sounds like a rather selfish attitude to me," I told the hermit.
Lester interjected. "Nothing could be more selfless. He doesn't bother anyone with his research. He suffers for all of us." Lester's way of defending him sounded awfully offensive to me, but Jan seemed indifferent.
"But don't you think we could all benefit from your insight?" I asked.
This time Jan answered, again with that smiling tolerance and annoying assurance, "People choose the miracles they wish to believe in. Only God creates wealth. Mankind merely distributes it. But let me answer your question in the way you think you want it answered. I sent out, mm I don't know, thousands of these little stories, to magazines, journals, newspapers, anywhere I saw poetry published, and I always got back these polite little form letters, except when I received personal letters that expressed a great deal of anger that I had wasted the editor's time with such amateurish efforts. I didn't know how to respond. It's all I want to do...all I can do...write poems...all night and all day. I did once imagine that I was a prophet of sorts, and that something bad would happen to the world if they ignored me. But I later — much later — realized that even the whole world against me is only a way of trying to scare me into thinking my instinct is wrong. It all comes back to conquering fear. I don't want to bore you with all this, but I had to make my sense of right and wrong overcome the world, and that," he waved his arm around his hovel, "is easy...once you realize the only other alternative is to conclude that the universe wants me dead." He chuckled.
Shit . Once again, Lester had led me into the maw. Sensing my unease, Jan said "I suggest you read Tolstoi's " The Gospel in Brief." That will explain it all." He lit the beer can.
"Where did you get the dank?" I asked.
"An interesting word, let me note that down," he said as Lester and I looked on embarrassed. After writing it down, he continued. "A friend, a very intense seeker, drops it off here. I've been designated as a watcher of sorts. There are many bales of the herb around these weeds. And I'm not the only one down here. You just can't see them now. You're fortunate to see me." He paused to take a small hit, then continued in his even but joy-filled tone. "I can have as much as I please, but the secret is to share with pilgrims like yourselves. Here, receive it in love." He handed the herb-topped tin to me, reading my mind that I was about to ask him if we could buy some to take home with us.
"That is for you to ponder until your head explodes with enlightenment," Lester said on the way back, after reading poems and scripture and the inscrutable Budweiser label for another hour or so. "Now you know a little bit why I'm the way I am."
"I'd like to know more," I immediately requested my only friend, a man still very mysterious to me.
"Ah there's still more time, grasshopper," he laughed, "be careful. I'm a wolf looking for a few sheep who think for themselves."
Considering myself duly warned, I thought again how we needed to get that band together, for people to hear, so that people like Jan could, in some way, be heard.
To that end, the next attempt, in our endless search for a place to play, was a legitimate venue, open mike night in the town's "alternative" club, The Blue Rooster. Coffee Bob, Lester and I loaded all our equipment into Katherine's tiny car and drove down there expecting to be treated like Long Island celebrities on the slum. Instead, we were faced with a sign-up sheet and the prospect of sitting through five bands before we could play. Despite all the hype about looking for new talent, it was clear this gig was designed as a way to draw in like a bug light the multitudes of local musicians and their girlfriends into the bar without having to pay for entertainment. But no one that night complained about the price of beer, for there was a PA system, an engineer and a large audience of mostly women. As is usually the case, whether the powers-that-be liked you or not depended on how well you mingled, and so Lester and I went to separate corners of the room to try to feign interest in the musicians' inevitable sarcasm and condescension. I scored a few points with some band members for pointing out how the future was no longer cool, because the Japanese had replaced the sleek, modernist style of Star Trek, with its beige T-shirts and oscillating gizmos, with their own bonsaied geometries. I gave it all back, however, when a drummer asked me how "my band" learned a tune. This guy could not conceive of anything but memorizing one's part by listening to a tape of the original and then tightening it by
endless rehearsal. My answer that we were not a cover band was completely foreign to him. He apparently told his friends, for by the time the music started, only the bartender was talking to me, pointedly bragging about all the celebrities he'd kicked out of clubs. I ended up looking at a brochure some guy had handed to me. The cover was a glamour shot of four mechanics with perms. "Styx, Journey, Foreigner —" the headline screamed, "now there's Wolfbane — the sweet power sound of REAL Rock'n'Roll." On the back is read "Originals $450, Covers $1,000"and listed a booking agent and a manager, as well as testimonials from owners of record stores, clubs, recording studios and TV stations. They even offered a free demo if you called an 800 number. I immediately vowed never to allow a flyer for our band.
The twenty minutes allotted to each band seemed way too long. I wish I could say our similar circumstances gave me a renewed appreciation for all the hard work and talent of the other musicians, but it was just the opposite. Maybe I was becoming the dread jaded professional whose joy in music had been flushed out of him, but I couldn't help but file away each performer under a stereotype: anguished but earnest lesbian folk singer 1A, free-form jazz odyssey five, tape loop computer dorks 15(b )3, multi-colored sweating to the oldies R'n'B warbler 29, quirky, edgy rapper with stolen equipment 17, the wanting to get paid by the note heavy metal blues band version 475.
After two hours, it was our turn. Before we went on Lester tried to vex out the jitters with a motivational speech. "Remember, lads, we are the band...with the musical discipline of...the Grateful Dead,"
"Thank you. Thank you."
"The keen commercial instincts of King Crimson,"
"You gotta believe."
"The unrestrained funk of Boston"
"I still can't believe those guys are white."
"The understated passion of Emerson, Lake and Palmer,"
"Oh the nuance."
"The lyrical brilliance of Spandau Ballet"
"I still haven't recovered."
"The spiritual depth of George Michael."
"Like lambs, man."
"The raw kinetic energy of Depeche Mode,"
"She's breaking up, she's breaking up."
"The integrity of Kenny Rogers,"
"The man loves his wife."
"The reggae instincts of Paul Simon,"
"Hit me with your rhythm stick, rastaman."
"And the empathy for the audience of...Michael Bolton."
"Let's roll."
From the first note it was clear that it was time to run for cover. On stage, lit with heat and moment, we felt all our coiled animal instincts release from us. The PA allowed us to play as hard as we wanted, and we responded with crushing chords, bottle-humming feedback harmonies, skull surgery with bass, terrorized/terrorizing vocals. We put into it all we had gone through in the last month, year, our whole lives. We were on: the sound was totally original, the lyrics brilliant, the stage show a ballet of unremitting anguish. In short, we bombed. The other acts had their girlfriends cheering. We, with no one there for us, ended to an empty house, the only sound a ringing in our ears like crickets.
Or so we thought. As we were packing our stuff into the car, a guy who had been sort of nervously looking on the whole night came up to us. "I want you guys to play some of my songs" he stammered.
"What on Earth for?" a disconsolate Lester asked.
"You guys can actually get up on stage and sing. I can't do that."
"Sure you can," said Coffee Bob.
"Anyone can," added Lester.
"You don't understand. I can't, and I have great songs, better than Dylan."
Lester flashed him a heavy eye. "I'm sorry, but we have our own problems here."
"You've got to play my songs. We need to set up a time to get together. How 'bout right now?" For someone afraid of going on stage, he sure was assertive with us. I was already in the back seat of the car holding the amp, so I watched helplessly as Coffee Bob and Lester dealt with this guy as he blocked their path and started to take his guitar out of his case, all the while looking inside the windshield straight at me.
When we finally drove away, I was afraid to look back for fear of seeing him still running after us, guitar case swinging wildly.
14.
We played right through that setback. We foolishly thought that more practice would ensure us another chance to play at a business establishment. My apartment was the chosen venue, sometimes with Coffee Bob, sometimes not. We rehearsed all through the winter, learning new chords to subvert, new more virulent beats to inflict, new ways to make covers unrecognizable. Our coupe de grace was "I'm Free," which we made into a chain-clanging cry from the deepest rung of hell (a task made easy in my gothic apartment).
What little humanity my place possessed had long since vanished; it was now empty of furnishings, full of trash and food debris, the phone disconnected, the TV shot, newspapers and books impatiently strewn about (I could not read them for more than a few seconds), pornographic posters on the walls. The top of my amp had become my all-purpose ashtray, bongstand and dinner table. I still made it in every morning to work (my only real failing at the time), but otherwise I lived to play music.
One night, working out melody lines on one of the many junkyard guitars that came in through and fell through Lester's hands, the buzzer rang. I instinctively went downstairs and opened it, expecting Lester, Coffee Bob or both. Instead, it was Red, standing under the street lamp with a bunch of teenage boys, some with motorcycle helmets. I invited them in and offered them all bong hits. This almost unnerved them, put a peculiar softness into their eyes, but they insisted they were on a very serious errand, for it seemed that a shirt, a bag of weed, an unspecified sum of money and a mandolin had been stolen from one of these gentlemen's apartment and I was the prime, in fact the only possible, suspect. I laughed. I confidently pointed out that Red knew I would never steal anything, I had a real job and, as they could plainly see, few needs. Instead of stepping out of this nightmare to reassure me, Red stiffened solemnly, as if he stole those things himself just to pitch the blame on me, to teach me a lesson. The items were pilfered, I was told, the day I last visited Red, when the tenant had left his door ajar for a few minutes to go to the basement. I searched wildly for an explanation, for they were rapidly making me guilty. "What about Juli?" I pondered. "She left before me."
Wrong answer. Not only had I revealed I was not to be trusted, but Red let slip an expression that indicated that that was what this whole Raskolnikovian charade was all about. Juli was gone, I hypothesized, and he wanted to search my apartment to find clues. I welcomed them to search the place, even the closets. They seemed amazed I had so many ties, but seemed totally nonplused I had a month-old pizza on a fireplace mantle. They searched seriously, making lots of interesting noises and turning lots of things over, but in the end, they found nothing but a strange scarf that Philadelphia had left there, and their fear of me seemed to dissipate a little. Following Red, they loped out, and I followed them to the door, waving goodbye.
This weirdness had to be explained, so I turned, as I always did in such situations, to Reverend Carl, who, even though my TV set was dead, was still available on a distant radio station, but only, it seemed, when I needed him.
"Can you truly say that you have not sinned? Can you truly say that you have not stolen some of the goodness of the Lord and hoarded it for yourself...well you...have been discovered, friend, you have been found out because you need to know you cannot hide from the La- hord NO. He watches what you do with His gifts, these MIRACLES he gives so freely BECAUSE HE...he loves you...and wants only that you reach out to He- im OH THE LOVE HALLELUJAH in Heaven when you take that one small step to He- im, not even to say thanks, although that is a blessing yes... but to ask...and this is all it is...TO ASK THE QUESTION...what can I do...for Yew PRAISE JESUS."
I threw another empty Viceroy pack on the floor. How ignorant I had been to think that the logic my scheme presented would work out that way in reality, for man's simple logic had nothing to do with it — my result had everything to do with how conditional I had made my offering. I could have been an agent of grace, bestowing an inexplicable blessing — instead I howled at the sky for not letting my mind be correct. Once again, in my egotism, I had given some small glimmer of hope — to Juli just as to Gillian, to that songwriter at the club, even to Red — and I couldn't expect to escape from the pain it ultimately brought. I was throwing my love out all over the town like a rat brandishing its tail, expecting love to come back from these dark halls full of closed doors, these 10,000 hearts that I could not feel beating, not even thinking to send it to the one place where I knew I would be protected, where I was needed as much as I needed. I begged for faith, and offered myself, again, to the universe.
It was now, I don't know, mid-March, and like a sudden shift of wind, Lester — it turned out under the direction of a concerned Katherine — began to urge me to leave my apartment. He talked of the change in me, my dissociation, apathy, the constant obsessing. He didn't claim to know what exactly had taken hold of me, but he was confident enough to brush off all my hysterical clinging to his loopholes and questioning of his motives, persisting even as he and Coffee Bob came over to clang ever more ghoulish tunes and push the cabinet tubes again. He even spoke of the evil in the place while in the place, his loud voice echoing in the walls.
After he had left that night, my elderly upstairs neighbor knocked on my door. I answered, frightful for all the transgressions she could rightly accuse me of. Instead, she stared at me hard, grabbed my face with both her hands and kissed me full on the mouth. The next day, when I came home from work, the following note was taped to the door of every apartment, including my own. As I peeled it off, a convoy of ambulances screamed by. The typed note read:
It has come to our attention that a particular tenant has violated the terms of the rental agreement. We have received numerous reports of illegal walking on the roof, acrid smells, unbearably loud noise at all hours and other actions in blatant disregard for the rights of the other tenants. Such behavior will not be tolerated, and we guarantee it will stop. All measures will be taken to ensure the tenant in question vacates the premises. Thank you for your patience in this matter. Management.
I followed my first instinct, which was to straighten up the apartment. I threw virtually everything lying around into a large green plastic garbage bag and started sweeping feverishly. I had piled up several big dust lumps on the floor before I stopped, confused about whether I was preparing to flee or trying to make myself presentable. I called the landlord. In contrast to the stern tone of the missive, he seemed sheepish, genuinely confused about why all of a sudden everyone in the building was calling him to complain about me. When I explained that I was guilty as charged, but had never heard any complaints until this, he seemed agreeable to giving me — a punctual payer of rent — another chance. But no sooner had I got off the phone than Coffee Bob called. He was now living in a Fells Point row house with a bunch of pre-med students — female students — and — guess what — they needed to rent a room — $100 a month. I was skeptical, even as I heard the ship of Lester and Coffee Bob's compassion finally coming in, even as I could hear Coffee Bob smiling through the phone line. It took an impassioned follow-up plea from Lester — about the lost souls paralyzed in the prisons of their own creation who choose not to see the rays of light shining through the open doors. Even that wasn't enough. I felt I owed the place another chance, had I been fair after all? Trying to block out Lester's voice, I closed my eyes, lipped a small prayer for strength, and upon opening them saw the crack on the wall. It was a good three feet off the ground when I had moved in. Now there was only a hair between the crack and the floor. It was leave or die.
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