"Now at midnight all the agents
And the super human crew
Come out and round up everyone
That knows more than they do,
Then they bring them to the factory
Where the heart attack machine
Is strapped across their shoulders
And, then, the kerosene
Is brought down from the castles
By insurance men who go
Check to see that nobody is escaping
To Desolation Row."
-Bob Dylan
1.
There was a cot waiting for me in the living room. A construction crew had just that day invaded the loft I was supposed to inhabit, so they lodged me in the main room, which looked, as did so many Baltimore apartments, like the foyer of an elegant old hotel. Rich Tudor beams transected the walls and ceilings, long gilded mirrors sent the chandeliers' reflection throughout the room, while mahogany and marble trimmed it to a warmer, more intimate size. In the center of the space was a vast stone fireplace whose opening was completely closed off by a piece of plywood. There were candles burning everywhere.
Lester and Katherine welcomed me with a smile and a handshake, Lester saying "Welcome, Mr. Brady." Katherine directed me to the cot and handed me a key, offering the full range of amenities (if only I could find them). As I settled in, they resumed their peripatetic busyness, Katherine wandering from room to room in an abstracted manner while smoking unfiltered Camels, Lester in hunched accompaniment taking small draughts from a tiny pipe and wearing what appeared to be a dinner jacket.
Wary of obtruding, I was content to pull out a few books and start reading. One of the things that most annoyed me about my earlier life was that whenever I tried to read a book I'd either be interrupted or told to study. Now at last I had all the time in the world to read the classics. I picked up Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, but after reading a few paragraphs, decided to start somewhere else. I went to Hamlet, something I had wanted to reread for quite some time. After a few lines, though, I realized that that wasn't the best place to start either. I picked up a small pocket Bible, opened a page at random and found more of the same, the rabbi Jesus saying "A man who divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery; and anyone who marries a woman divorced from her husband commits adultery." So much for the classics of literature, I thought. I guessed I hadn't missed much.
As I put the books down, Kitty skulked over and plopped down on my lap. I grabbed her tiny skull and stroked it. As she started purring, the cot began to vibrate and the room sounded full of crickets. She gazed at me with a series of seductive poses and nuzzled me in a gentle, knowing ecstasy. My fingers, in turn, found the touch of her utter pleasure and kept delivering it with the utmost delicacy and adoration. How strange to pass such love between us and yet be so unsatisfied, I thought. Just then, she took off, leaving me coughing in the wake of a layer of fur.
By this time, Katherine was suited up to go out. She was fitting her gloves on and talking heatedly to Lester, with an occasional glance toward me. As soon as she left, Lester, who had ignored me since I came in, rushed over and grabbed me. He led me to the bathroom window, opened it, and started climbing the rusty fire escape ladder that hung outside. I followed him up to an empty room at the top of the building. Broken glass was all over the floor, and there was a big hole in the ceiling, through which the wide moon worked its magic.
"Where did Katherine go?" I asked.
"Just out drinking," said Lester, grabbing his guitar, which was sitting in the half light. "This place has great acoustics."
He started to strum, and indeed, the sound reverberated like we were in some kind of European cathedral. As if he forgot something, he stopped abruptly. He fumbled through his coat pocket and pulled out a copper valve. He handed it to me and lit a match.
"I don't have any expensive German microphones, so this will have to do," he said, referring, I soon realized, not to the musty room but to the pot he was giving me.
I took a hit that felt like a blast furnace. Soon the air was clear again and the sky outside had yielded, once again, its secrets. We just played the blues, him clanging hymns with flatted chords, me singing with altar boy purity about the things I didn't do no more and the hellhound on my trail. After hours of joyous woe, we went back downstairs for the history lesson, and many more hits of the pipe. He started with some LA studio orchestra in 1932 armed with a "tin skillet," Rickenbacker's first electric guitar, the novice virtuoso who played it trying to make it sound like a horn, then like a voice, then like nothing ever before, in the process discovering all the possibilities of the instrument, and then casting it aside as a novelty. Lester then played some Charley Patton, Blind Blake, Leroy Carr and Scrapper Blackwell, Kid Bailey, a Son House demo that had been found in a garbage can in Wisconsin, Leadbelly, Macon Ed and Tampa Joe, then an ill-conceived duet between "West Side" Howling Wolf and "South Side" Muddy Waters which consisted of Muddy singing and the Wolf complaining loudly and continuously over it that "Muddy Waters can't sing," then he played a bootleg tape where Brian Jones introduced Hendrix to Britain and ended up playing, for comic relief, the insane beatnik standup comedy of Lord Buckley. Through it all he gave a running commentary: how the same source taught Dylan how to play guitar and Howling Wolf to sing and Robert Johnson how to tune and it wasn't the devil, it was Charley Patton; how if Alan Lomax the Harvard archivist hadn't gone into the jail where Leadbelly resided — and recorded the proof that a voice could present itself that way — the Beatles would never have happened; how Muddy Waters best stuff was before he was ever recorded; how Hendrix was the last great blues guitarist much like Homer was the last great bard.
All I could contribute to this was awe: Charley Patton in 1929 revealing that all the guitar riffs and howls from the rock'n'roll edge I'd built my life around were grossly imperfect copies of far more beautiful ones, and that the notes and rhythms the white boys missed were not even the most brilliant and essential ones, those ones were avoided as if by design, their pain-infested complexity and relentless gallopings toward truth were erased by time — except for this eerie scratching document. And Muddy's band in 1948, mimicking and stripping it down for a larger audience, outpunching and outpunking anything the sickly Stones or flaccid Zeppelin ever came up with. And Hendrix with his full contingent of genius, newly emerged from the isolation tank, before the sharks changed it all. I asked Lester where all this came from, and he said he borrowed it from some crazed hippie dude who had collected it and much more in an effort to ward off the dangerous brain waves of Bob Hope. Lester complained about all the effort he had to put into getting it, even plotting Bob Hope's travel itinerary to Zoroastrian Persia, beyond the telepathic reach of his insanity, and still he couldn't get his hands on "Brian Jones and the Pipes of Pan at Jajouka, Morocco," which to Lester was some kind of key that unlocked the doors of the invisible. Yet despite the evident care in acquiring the records and tapes, he discarded them in a pile after each use like disposable razor blades.
By the time I blanked out about four o'clock, his synapses were still sizzling with manic energy, spinning more webs of musical connection, calling Tom Waits a well-disguised delta bluesman and Mick Jagger a thinly-veiled impersonation of Frank Sinatra, who ripped off Billie who pirated Louie who got it all from some blind cat named Duvallier, who was excluded from the history books as mysteriously as he was banished from Storyville by the mob-cum-Catholic Church, just like the Protestant profiteers later railroaded the blues ministers because of some ancient blood feud with the Jews who then owned rock'n'roll and so they named it devil's music and the viper asked for a dance, until it became no more the hidden comfort of the desperately tired and hopelessly poor, the whittling away at tiny traditions in the boiling potato sun that wouldn't amount to nuttin,' but, well, devil's music, the greased corporate ladder, the soul-sucking whirlpool that sends the mess down, starting with pale Elvis who learned how to fuck from his mother so well he learned us all.
As I buzzed off into cozy sleep, I felt thankful for all this hard-earned insight freely given, for this glimpse into his secret freemason temple, not thinking for a moment that Lester may have been the lucky one.
Needless to say, Lester didn't remember a word of this the next day. In fact, as we staggered into Howard's Deli for an eleven o'clock turkey club and faced the cold stares of Koreans who were not only pitiless, but accurately pitiless, he denied ever accusing Elvis of incest. He loved Elvis, now Jerry Lee Lewis the Killer, there was a bad dude. He furthermore went into lucid length about how the clergy, far from muscling in on the rock'n'roll action, tried so hard to suppress it they found themselves and their obsolete God replaced by rock concerts, those psalm-chanting, candle-waving, communities of the seeking faithful, to be sacrificed, as anyone who's ever seen a heavy metal show will attest, on pagan altars. It was hard for me to argue with this, although he seemed to want me to. Instead I asked where Katherine was, to which he shrugged "I dunno."
After breakfast, we walked listlessly around downtown like two toothless junkies, sneering at both the businessmen who too easily explained the human wreckage on the street and at the homeless families in front of boarded-up buildings who too readily said "big fucking deal" to everything. We knew where to find empathy, and we buzzed a number of darkened doors to get it. Most weren't answered, so elaborate alternate routes were followed: through transoms in alleys, up trees to peer into windows, down drainpipes to slide into laundry rooms, all ending up knocking at doors that weren't opened, even as the perfume of weed and the loud slow sound of, say, Mahogany Rush or Robin Trower, seeped through. Our jaunt took us, in time, cross town, all the way to Butcher's Hill, where a second-story window finally opened for us, and out leaned a leering Lumbee Indian, with an expression that I later noticed many drug dealers had, that perpetual Joe Namath "I am getting my dick sucked right now" look. He said sure, he could score us some home grown, and within moments a stream of people emptied out of nearby row houses as if they had been waiting for us. Lester, who was handling the transaction, surprised me by saying I was the one buying and signaled that it was uncool not to fork over immediately what little money I had left. When my two Jacksons were exchanged for a plump bag of what looked like lawn clippings, my first instinct was to stick it quickly in my pocket. This was not proper etiquette, however, for I was expected to share my purchase with the neighborhood boys. So we wound up leaning all afternoon against the wall of an abandoned tannery down the hill, puffing spliffs as the haunted harbor sky turned from pearl to gold. There was no talk of rock'n'roll, just nostalgic bragging about childhood acts of violence, such as sticking firecrackers down frogs throats (a procedure called Charms Eddie-ing them), throwing exploding bags of flour into old ladies' living rooms, and greasing the wheelchair ramps at school with horse manure, acts that seem on paper to be quite diabolical but in conversation seemed perfectly natural, to be judged only by the standards of slapstick comedy. Before my bag was gone, and before the conversation could shift to girlfriend beating, Lester mumbled some pretext to head us home.
We followed the harbor back downtown. By the black sand at the water's edge was a looming complex of industrial ruins — spent factories that once fabricated fasteners, adhesives, sealants, springs, ball bearings, coatings, switches, widgets, joists, joints, bolts — all the once-essential cogs of the mighty American war machine century — facilities where the young gentlemen with whom we had just lounged might have ended up shackled during bygone days, before the winds of fate made their only career options security guard or professional con (depending, I guess, on how well they could fake the drug test). These mills seemed no less "dark" or "satanic" for being empty and useless, but that just might have been the way they appeared, all crippled and ashen, with weeds growing like nose hairs out of their cracked smokestacks, surrounded by heaps of chilled magma and endless barren fields of gravel, brooding amid the dead fish scent of decline and the fringe of rust brought on by the twilight. They seemed to me so cool and elegant, but I had no idea at the time that I was far from the only one who thought so.
"Baltimore is a widow that won't stop knitting," Lester said, in a disembodied voice like a character from Baltimoreans Dashiell Hammett or James Cain come back to life. >
"You mean these factories are still going?" I asked, startled.
"You have much to learn," he tersely replied, and pulled me through a strange park full of cardboard boxes and shopping carts, populated by derelicts, some sleeping, some smoking from stem pipes, some playing chess, some reading, one gently playing a blue violin. Weeds covered the entrance, which was surrounded by windowless warehouses.
"Some guy in New Hampshire owns this land," said Lester. "I worry what's going to happen to this place."
"Yeah, I'd hate to see any Sumerians move into the neighborhood," I joked.
Lester took me over to a bum who appeared to be meditating. "Look at this," he said, lifting his dreadlocked face up, "do you know what this is? Pure bliss. Total happiness. The divine hopelessness of being gloriously awake to no dreams. But..." He put the man's head back and gave him a doctor-like touch to the shoulder. "Nobody's watching out for this guy. They act like he's some kind of breach of security. He probably went berserk in 'Nam and then they tried to cure him of what he saw with exorcisms and leeches and blood lettings in one of those state hospitals, only to be dumped out on the street so they could get rid of him once and for all, and now he's actually going crazy because they won't even give him the evil eye anymore and they're going crazy trying to pretend he doesn't exist, so totally bummed he won't go away."
We maneuvered through the lean-to's nestled in the weeds and I pondered this new lesson, wondering why I had always been taught to be afraid. I asked for some dope.
"We better save some for Katherine," he said.
When we got back, she was cooking pork chops for us. She started talking with a voyeuristic smile about the stunning scenes of heartbreak she had witnessed that day at work: the poor woman whose landlord added five dollars to her rent for every rat he found in her apartment, the man who wasn't allowed to break his lease even though his house was being demolished.
"There must be some kind of legal recourse for these people," I ventured.
"Oh, there is," Katherine assured me, "in theory. The difficulty is that E.G. Stone owns half the buildings in Baltimore, and he's the circuit judge. He's heavily into numbers, drug running, prostitution. He gets quite indignant when you use logic on him, he calls it sermonizing. He's convinced he's some kind of guardian angel because he keeps all these lost souls gainfully employed and out of jail through his maze of contacts and kickbacks from club owners and slum lords, and then he launders the money to keep the Peabody Conservatory afloat. Most of the people I deal with have run afoul of him at some point, so my job is often...often delicate."
"This has become tiresome," interrupted Lester as he grabbed a pork chop from the skillet. "Can't we compare Boucher with Fragonard or something instead of talking about rats?"
A heated debate then ensued between Katherine and Lester, one of many I witnessed in my short time there, she complaining that he like Boucher cheapened and subverted life by exaggerating its joy, by which she meant he didn't have a job and was dragging this like-minded urchin in to make her life even harder, he reacting that she like Fragonard talked a good painting but couldn't muster the subtlety or irony to pull one off, by which he meant she had been ignoring him at the expense of her other social work. Embarrassed, I took my dinner out to the fire escape.
When I brought my plate back in, Lester and Katherine were still jabbering, one angrily arguing against the useless utilitarianism of the Bauhaus and the other using the same arguments against the English craft movement. I tried to mediate by putting on a Miles Davis record, but this reduced Lester to tears and made Katherine defiantly annoyed, as she said "See? I hate jazz."
I then realized that Lester had given me the weed, so I pulled it out. Within minutes we were lounging on the sofa, absorbed in the social ritual of de-seeding the dope with an album cover, clearing the pipe, tapping the shake and sparking it. We spent the rest of the evening transfixed on an Andy Griffith Show festival on TV, Lester occasionally remarking how these morality plays were worthy of Aeschylus. Katherine and I just stared, wondering what it all meant.
2.
I woke up to the God awful smell of what I assumed to be burning human flesh. There was a sizzling sound coming from the kitchen. I went in and Lester was frying a huge tongue on the skillet. "What the fuck is that?" I demanded.
"You've never eaten beef tongue?" he said, flipping it over. "It's outrageous. Tastes like Braunschweiger."
I was speechless. I must have turned white, because Lester pulled out a small corn cob pipe from the top drawer. He filled it with pot he got from God knows where and handed it to me. I had a class at 9:30 and I had missed so many already I was this close to watching the whole law school experience slide away like a whimpering dog down an icy mountain ravine. There were no clocks in the apartment and the curtains were drawn as usual so I had no idea what time it was. I wanted to run, but the sight of that bubbling slab held me in place. I reasoned that I, like one of those tongue-less Tibetan monks, could only go "ghah" if asked to defend the Supreme Court's decision that the ban on the Native American Church's use of peyote did not violate either the free speech or religion clauses of the Bill of Rights. I quickly took a hit.
"What do we do today?" I asked after a long, luxuriant pause.
"Now you're talking. I thought we'd go to Wyman Park and throw some baseballs, that is, if you're up to it." He served me a toasted tongue sandwich, topped with watercress, grape leaves, fresh cilantro and a thimbleful of hot sauce.
"Oh, I'm down," I replied, remembering little league and the dust of Ohio summers.
After breakfast and a few more bowls, Lester went into the closet and pulled out two gloves, a brown baseball, a Cincinnati Redstockings cap and a fungo bat. He gave me the cap and one of the gloves, which looked like it was last used by Pie Traynor. We were on our way out the door when the phone rang.
"Yello...oh, Mother, hell-o." He turned as rigid as a corpse. "Yes, I did get your mess-age...No, ma'am, I am not...I'm sure something will turn up...What's that?...No, I've gone here and there but they, uh, resent me, you know?...Yes, I know, I must work extra hard to fight that impression...No, ma'am...Yes, ma'am...She does the best she can...Yes, she does...No, I don't know...I know, but...I know, but...Yes, I know...No, I just don't know...I understand." He hung up.
"Dude," he said, as I was stroking the bat dangerously close to the lamp, "I'm vapor...later." Then he walked out the door.
I called time. It was only 9:10, so I still could get to class. I started pacing. I thought up ten reasons I should go to class for every reason I shouldn't, but, in true lawyerly fashion, I obliterated the yesses with no's, concluding that not only I but the law itself would be better off if it were not to judge me that day.
In reality, a group of my classmates had caught me in the restaurant a few nights earlier, running to bring them water. They openly laughed at me seeing I was still a busboy, not even a waiter, and I went scurrying to the kitchen to hide. My grand designs crumbled at that moment before these solid, unsympathetic attorneys-to-be, for they had, like true lawyers everywhere have, the horrible limitation of seeing only the truth, of not even perceiving the yearnings and dreams and glosses and varnishes that are behind the whole pathetic reality, only the total failure of the end result. But that's not what mattered to them, that by itself would have comforted them, would have made them say "tut-tut, tsk-tsk" and go satisfied to their job photocopying footnotes for the firm of Slaver, Twaddle and Drivel. No, for as a fellow student I had so tested their temptation to accept me, if not as their own, as one of their kind, one of the select, they could not be indifferent to my disgrace. I watched from the corner how easily they could laugh — freely, artificially — at all my efforts, and so overcome them, with a gentle, disgraceful retort.
In truth, I hated their horn-rimmed affectations, the cordovan shoes, the smirk as they detected judges who changed the rules to fit the facts. Outside the brick walls of the school, disease-ravaged hookers hid from violent pimps, winos hid from impoverished social workers, petty crooks hid from bigger crooks, the dealers all took paper losses, but inside was always the air-conditioned standard of justice, a bizarre social engineering scheme where all of messy reality was made to fit some box of literalism, where formulas were gleefully employed and the precedents of the past were forced to predict the future; it made Communism look idealistic, Fundamentalism look compassionate, and Science look desultory, yet it was the basis for all that was right and valuable in society: this group of humorless grifters with a total faith in the power of their strange, lonely language were the gatekeepers of who was let in and out, even as they ran in fear to their library past the lechers and beggars, even as the laughter of welfare moms echoed up through their dusty blinds from outside. While they garrisoned themselves off, they denied no actual right and actual wrong, for in the adversarial system, the only real adversary is the people, that ever-present threat to their rock of logic. They told me all about the stupidity of juries and the necessity of swift and certain punishment, as if they had never been young enough to realize that human motivations and behavior could never be changed, whether by being caught, caged, or ripped open.
As convincing as this argument sounded to me, though, I had to finally admit that the sad truth was I just wanted to belong to their club. But instead of joining the law school community of pain, I assumed the proper capitalist pose that we were all to fight each other to the death afterwards in a big arena. My desperate efforts to be both befriended and superior ended with me dressing in tweed and adopting a professor's air of melancholia, wearing a furrowed lost-in-thought expression and carrying around volumes on Jurisprudence in lieu of the assigned books I was supposed to be reading. I wanted my appearance to convince myself and everyone else that I knew the law, even if no one else did.
In truth, however, I didn't have a clue about the law. I only went to law school because of some half-formed dream of my father's father. I had only wanted to fit in, somewhere, to get a pat on the back from some knowing elder. But, like a wet chrysalis who saw its imprisoning web as the whole world, I turned everything into a mad desire for freedom. Consequently, perversely, I was now pacing like a squirrel, using the full weight of the legal rhetoric I'd learned to torture myself as I squirmed about the room, praying for time to pass so I would no longer have to take responsibility for my decisions.
The phone rang. "Aha, escape," I thought, and picked up. It was my wife. I frantically began to think up excuses for why I wasn't in school, little realizing that she couldn't care less. She wanted me to pay for the damage to the car, or at least "work it out" with the insurance company. Sadly, I took this as a sign that she was trying, in her own prideful, timid way, to start a rapprochement. I needed to prove myself a man to earn her back, I reasoned. So I made a few calls. I phoned information to track down the guy that hit me, and talked to his sister, who was suspicious of me at first but when she heard her dis-insured brother had had yet another wreck kinda freaked and slammed the phone down screaming. That was better luck than I had with the insurance company, where I ended up hearing a perpetually repeating message, like one of those film loops we used to watch in science class, telling me my call was important to them and would be answered in the order it was received, then a long pause, then "Here I am...Rock me like a hurricane," then the same message, then another long pause, then "heard it from a friend who-ooh heard it from a friend who-ooh-ohh heard it from another you been messin' arou-hound," and on and on it rolled like some mobius strip, never resolving, never giving a hint of its true meaning. I could only handle about a half hour before I resolved that it would be far easier to face my wife than to again envision the Scorpions bopping their poodle heads in unison behind the Barco playback monitor. Just as I was working up the nerve to call her, however, the phone rang. It was the mechanic. I had barely said hello before he started explaining in awe-inspiring detail everything that was wrong with the car, which only led me to wonder why doctors and undertakers never explain anything. I tried to cut through his discourse on manifolds, distributors and differentials, but he refused to stop talking. I felt like telling him I'd have my mechanic call him. I started mimicking his Bald-e-mer-ese accent: "sOHW the fayan brOHW-k the RAD-e-ater hOHWse, huh?" Even this didn't faze him, he was like some short-circuited robot. Finally he asked if I wanted a patch-up job or the full treatment, to which I replied he should ask my wife. That made him blow his proverbial gasket. His whole manner changed. I could almost feel him reaching through the phone line to strangle me and say "what kind of sick, twisted fuck are youse, Boy, letting your woman make car decisions." He came on annoyed that I had taken too much of his time. I suddenly wanted him to go back to explaining the chances I was taking with a cracked timing belt, but I just gave him the name of the insurance company, figuring those two could gossip like lawyers about me, and hung up.
I called my wife to tell her that everything was taken care of, now we could go on a date, but it turned out the car repair was just item one, she also wanted my mailing address so I could start a regular plan to pay her back. While she was talking, my pacing was making the telephone cord dance irresistibly, and just when I was changing the subject to my feelings for her, Kitty pulled the cord out of the socket. I plugged it back in but the line was already dead, and Kitty had already shoved her head into my palm.
Before I had time to prepare this random series of events into a platter of my inadequacies, Lester ran in. He immediately went to the stereo, deposited a 45 in it like it was a coin, dropped the arm, dropped his bag, and started dancing. "I'm frrr-ee to do what I want any old tay-um," went the Voice of Mick. It was called "I'm Free," appropriately enough, and had been released, so Lester claimed, as the A-side of "Get Off Of My Cloud," which indeed was on the other side. Although I grew to understand that no other song could make me feel, as Emily Dickinson put it, "as if the top of my head were taken off," for the first 50 or so times I listened to it I thought it was the single worst song I had ever heard, the sickest kind of formulaic fakery, so half-baked as to be impossible to find any consciousness in it, much less irony. While Mick repeated how he was free any old time over and over again (as if we didn't know that already), Brian played the same master-the-sitar-in-ten-minutes riff as on "Cloud," and Keith led a mono chorus of what sounded like drunken friars singing along with the frogs from deep within a well: "Hold me, love me/ hold me, love me," just like "Eight Days A Week," except without any resolving hook, just "I'm free," as if that was all old Mick could say to the hordes of youth who had given up on all their dreams just to worship him. But what I first took to be laziness, the deep-in-the-bones laziness of advertising men who throw everything — sense, history, decorum — out the window for the sake of the product, except here the product was them, and they were laughing not at the bitter absurdity of it all, but with the spoiled satisfaction of children (in short, just another betrayal by the Stones of all rock'n'roll stood for), I eventually came to see as part of the point — what kind of freedom can be allowed in 2 minutes and 30 seconds? What kind of heroes can we have if they are only tolerated when contributing to the profit margin? What kind of statement of rebellion can be made in a medium whose very essence is racist exploitation? And there were the Stones to rattle off the answers: freedom was not the joyous unshackling that Aretha celebrated (prematurely, it turned out), or the unqualified search for answers that the Who proposed, or the right to practice voodoo in public as if the world could be charmed like some giant snake as Jim Morrison pretended, or the ability to liberate the world by masturbating in public as John Lennon thought, or even the loss of all value that Dylan tried to warn us about, all these were dangerous platitudes ripped out of the experiences of hopeless hipster misfits and passed off as wisdom to kids who only wanted the car keys more often. Freedom was just fucking power — in this case, the power to be Mick. The Stones, like all true heroes, were honest enough to have little to say and nothing to offer (and if you think that's easy you obviously haven't heard of BJ Thomas, Leo Sayer or Bryan Adams). All they did was wallow in negritude, and wave the toilet paper banner of the hoax like one of Mick's androgynous scarves. And it was this song that crystallized it all, this song that almost no one knows forever defined and changed a generation and set in motion a desperate series of events that history will never get right. Before "I'm Free," there was nothing but fear: fear of Communists/ Jews/ rock'n'roll/ Negroes, the fear that these things could actually destroy the world rather than our own fear itself, a fear that was made palpable in silence — about the horrors of war, the oppressions of race, sex and wealth, the death of the past. It was a fear of shadows, that showed itself in absurdities like the Vietnam War, which Lyndon Johnson knew was a doomed effort but escalated anyway because was afraid of the Republicans he had just overwhelmed in one of the most lopsided elections in American history. Post- "I'm Free," the social fabric just ripped: kids started acting like musicians — long hair, comfortable clothes, drug mysticism — and adults, not yet hip to the Stones' message, were left acting like scared cops. "I'm Free" was the song played at Altamont before the Sixties — and the concert — ended, it was on Richard Nixon's lips as he talked to the National Guard commander at Kent State, it kept killing through the '70's — the decade when centuries-old conventions about clothing went out in one mass freak-out and everyone finally wore just what they wanted, to disastrous results. And even now, in the pure age of Reagan, those who had the power were ever more free, it was just a privilege of age, no longer of youth. The latest half-formed sentiments of the few had become the range of fantasies for the many, just as Mick foretold. Hold me, love me, I'm free. It was the essence of rock'n'roll: a 20-minute trip to the studio that unloosed the moorings of civilization.
Lester of course knew all this, but he kept himself fresh by letting me guess. Right now, though, he was dancing, a strange cross between a backwards rhino walk and the Charlie Chaplin penguin step, hopelessly out of time but perfectly in tune with the pointless abandon of the song. Compared to psychopathic law professors, pious mechanics and account executive ex-wives, it made perfect sense. I asked him for some more smoke.
"Makes you want to yell 'justice' in a crowded courtroom, don' it?" He chuckled.
"Who's Nanker-Phelge?" I asked, looking at the songwriting credits on the record.
"Some guy Mick and Keith killed, long before they offed Brian Jones of course. He was the baddest of the bad, and the only person besides Brian Jones who could actually live with Mick and Keith. Before Phelge, they were nothing. Afterwards, they were international superstars. Coincidence? I think not. Nanker got credit for quite a few songs, but no one's sure what they really got in return."
"How did they kill him?" I asked.
"Oh, it's shrouded in mystery. There are many theories. It's not like John Lennon kicking Stu Sutcliffe repeatedly in the head while Paul watched. The scholars are divided on whether Phelge was the only person who could stop their evil designs, or was the Evil One himself and had to be taken out. I'm not sure it matters either way. Certain concessions always have to be made. Can you imagine Paul McCartney not playing bass?" He took out a tiny walnut pipe and stuffed it with red leaves. "Want some burn?"
"Why's it red?"
"It's Panama red, Jack. They irrigate it with water dyed red. It's their seal. Kinda like a dog marking territory with his scent. It's killer."
>I reached for it like an Italian reaches for fabric. "Where'd you get it?"
"Victor," he declared, as if all matters of faith were settled by that single word.
I filled my lungs. The dull thickness left over from the morning buzz lifted immediately, and I became hopelessly, irresponsibly stoned. We listened again to "Free," and the underground tunnels began connecting to it. They seemed to go on, like the patterns on a honeycomb or a snowflake, to infinity.
"You can actually hear Mick breathing," Lester said. "Listen. Hear how he makes it part of the rhythm, how it adds to the flavor of his voice? It's a reminder that he's human. It's poignant, really. Now, they try to get rid of all that. Today's engineers slash microseconds off the track to stop the gasp of breath. Some religions think the breath is the only trace there is of God. But it's the digital revolution, mon. I think it sucks."
"Hey, get over it. A four-track thing like that wouldn't even make it as a demo nowadays. If Sgt. Pepper was sent to record company today, even the secretary would think that it was a joke."
"You can't tell me that that stuff doesn't blow away anything made today," he said.
"Forget it, man, it's Chinatown," I replied.
Lester looked terrified. "You don't think I know that?"
What else could we really have done at that point, except pick up our instruments and make a horrible noise unto the Lord? For the truth of the matter was, we were already old. Once you hold to the beauty in anything, Time says, "aha, now I can make you foolish" for clinging to things that refuse to die. And if you hold on to your past, your life, it's only a small step to saying, with every critic over the age of 30, that rock'n'roll is dead, put a fork in Hollywood, poetry, painting, the novel — the fat lady's sung. And that's when the forces of darkness appear and make you forget it's all the same, a continuous life force that overcomes the strictest form.
Lester and I may have taken this impulse too far by ignoring form altogether, but ours was a gutsy salvo against the hesitancy that all art succumbs to, that obsessive compulsion to circle the wagons back on tradition, even as the angels had disappeared to flutter in distant rooms. We made real musicians sound, in fact, like the bluesnoodling showtunesmithing arpeggiophiling handcuffed-to-the-drum-kit-til-they-get-it-right hacks they are. That is their lot, the tone of voice society lets them use, and because they are essentially lonely at heart, they aspire to it. You can see them at every show, regular acrobats on stage, then they sit quietly at the table, smiling at compliments, saying "yes, ma'am" and "no, sir," trying like the summer camp intern to get in on the joke.
We did not have this problem. For no one ruined what we tried to do by listening to it. We had holed ourselves up this time in the basement, surrounded by sawdust, lathes, shelves of vibrating pickle jars full of drill bits, both of us plugged into that old amp of mine Lester had miraculously saved, our lousy cords making the guitars buzz like band saws. Before we knew it, Katherine came down. Her expression was colder than a food server at a bank cafeteria. We thought this was due to the iconoclasm of the music. We hadn't noticed that all the jars were broken on the floor, the sawhorse had a busted leg, the door was off its hinges, and there was a huge crack in the wall. We must have inadvertently thrown some stationary objects around when doing our Sid Vicious/Johnny Rotten thang. She marched us up the stairs, but she only shrugged at our extreme disrespect, irresponsibility, self-destructiveness and just plain poor musicianship; she was really concerned about the decorum and how to fix the mess as discreetly as possible. She displayed no emotion whatsoever, and perhaps that's why Lester panicked and blamed the whole thing on me. He said I had lost control, that it was his fault really because he had got me high, but it was only fair that I repair the damage. This irritated Katherine, and the more he pressed this point, the more it irritated her. Finally, she took Lester into the kitchen, and I could hear her scold him. In my stupidity, I imagined this was about me, and that they would come out at any moment with serious eyes and ask in a unified front if it wouldn't be better for me to leave.
To escape these thoughts, I wandered as far away from the voices as I could. I went to the far corner of their bedroom, which Katherine had lit with black candles. It was obviously the room of a Count. A brass chandelier hung from the ceiling, a huge bookshelf held hundreds of books, the paneled walls were spiced with pre-Raphaelite prints, Beardsley caricatures and a few Mary Cassatt cats, an embroidered canopy hung over the four-poster bed. On the comforter was an egg-shaped toy with the glazed visage of Gorbachev. I opened it up to find a smaller egg inside of Chernenko, then Andropov, then Brezhnev, Khrushchev, Stalin, and finally a tiny malignant kernel of Lenin, looking unrepentant as always. On the dresser was a row of corked bottles, each one filled with a scent — lotus blossom, rose oil, patchouli, clove, New Caledonian cinnamon, hickory. Like a seal in front of a row of bicycle horns, Lester liked to stand there unstoppering and sniffing the phials, commingling the scents into some kind of symphony of fragrance as if he was some character out of Poe — which was ironic considering he himself usually emanated a lethal melange of rat-spray Aqua de Selva and a particularly yeasty strain of BO. But the most striking feature about the room was so obvious it was barely noticeable: everything was black. There were countless shades: pearl black, quiet black, rustic black, nutty black, wispy black, fluffed black, weary black, hot black, silly black, deep black, regal black, mystic black, indifferent black, bold black, naughty black, delicious black, happy black, bleak black and black black.
I heard the creak of footsteps on the hardwood floor. I suddenly felt like an intruder. I realized that despite anything these two might say or do to each other, they were, as the Egyptians say, fated. Everything I could touch was locked up by their unity, and none of it could be changed. Katherine passed me. She looked pale, distraught and envenomed by the acid that makes people slaves to anger, but she was strangely empty of it. She flittered by almost ghost-like, quite beautiful in the candlelight, full of the fragility and wonder which softens eyes that have seen too much. She didn't acknowledge me, merely passed through the sheet into her room. I went into the kitchen and found Lester softly strumming his guitar, trying to wrest some beauty out of an ugly scene.
"What happened?" I asked.
He didn't answer. He just kept playing. For once, I didn't wish to join. I needed some air. Out on the street was life again, full of chaos and stupidity and, above all, choices. I saw a pay phone and decided to ring my wife.
"How dare you call me?" she said. "I will not be stalked like a common animal!"
"I just wanted to...you know, check in. See how you were doing."
"It's too late for you to care for me. You had your chance. You made your choice."
"But, honey, I can't help but feel responsible. I do love you, and I'm sorry that I drove you to do all these horrible things."
"What horrible things? You should take a good look at yourself, Mr. Martyr Complex. You're the meanest, coldest son of a bitch on the face of this Earth."
I thought for a moment and realized she was right. What could be crueler to someone devastated by guilt than forgiveness? What could be meaner to someone trying feverishly to forget everything than someone who has already forgotten? "It must be like the Sting song says," I finally said, "if you love someone set them free."
"See, that just proves you don't care for me. If you really cared, you'd be devastated if I hurt you. You wouldn't let me out of your sight for a minute."
"How do you know how much I've hurt?"
"There you go again, Mr. Martyr. Life with me was such a living hell, you didn't ever want to leave. And nothing I did ever made you stop loving me. Hah! Why are you really calling?"
I felt her pain and tried to absorb it. Although she seemed to be saying the exact opposite of what I was, I knew she meant the same thing. I understood how she had so totally given herself over to the love she had created for me and how I had betrayed it, either by being so selfish as to be real or so frightened as to withhold my reality. It didn't matter which. I was ultimately nothing, just a shadow of grace, and the world I walked through was illusion. My heart welled up with love. That was the light. That was the only solution. "I love you more than anything," I said. "I want to lose myself in you. I have nothing to give to the world. I'd rather let you have it all."
"You are such a fucking liar," she snapped. "I can't believe anything you say."
"Why do you say that?" I asked, trying to remain calm.
"Oh, you've never lied to me. You lied about seeing Lester. You lied about choosing me instead of him. It's pathological. Even now you're probably cooking up some plot to move back in and have Lester come along."
"No," I replied sadly, "I just wanted to share my thoughts and feelings. I thought if I didn't give them away, I'd lose them. I didn't want to lose you. Please understand."
"What bull! You didn't have to lose me, you chose to."
Just then a group of teenage girls giggled by. My wife commented that black people knew how to laugh and have fun. I ignored the wisdom of this comment and tried to plead with her again. She finally said, with an air of expectancy, as if I could, even now, do something about it, "it was always up to you."
I was left holding a purring phone. I felt ready to burst with ardor. I hated the distance between us, just as I would have hated the distance had I been laying in her arms right then. She was right: unconditional love was the most selfish thing in the world. She wanted to love, Godamn it, not be loved, and that, unfortunately, was my dilemma too. As this hallucination continued, I felt at last a sense of closure, although I was destined in the days and months that would follow to wander clueless, asking questions of the walls, trying fruitlessly to unravel this mystery, because looking for a solution where there was something to blame.
I walked down the dark streets trying to remake my reality. I had been coasting along for so long without my own identity I didn't even know how much one cost. I stopped in Jorie's for a toasted cheese sandwich. It was warm, well-lit, full of smiles that you paid for. The waitress thought she'd get a bigger tip by telling me about her incorrigible son. I pretended to be intent on every word because I wanted to impress her. Her other customer, meanwhile, a screaming skull of a man with grey, stringy hair past his shoulders, sat calmly reading the paper and smoking Marlboros. She left him alone because he had told her to take a flying fuck. How I envied him.
On my way out I noticed an empty pack of Viceroy cigarettes on the ground. It had a minimalist modern rendering of a heraldic crest, with swatches of rich red and dark gold, and in bold lettering that great name, which was at once redolent of gambling dens down back alleys and elderly Southern Judges sitting on porches with spittoons saying "Was it big? Shit yeah, it was so big the godamned coon hound tried to fuck it." I picked up the pack at once. It might be of some use, I reasoned, as I headed back toward the darkened windows of the place I now called home.
3.
The only answer Lester knew of was to hold another woman in my arms. That meant I needed to get a daytime job. Besides, things hadn't been the same at the restaurant since Rock Hudson died of AIDS — everyone had reversed roles, the gays becoming happy and the straights becoming rigid with fear. Fortunately, by this time I had been asked to withdraw from law school by an express mail guy in a brown uniform and a marine hair cut, so I was free to enter what is euphemistically known as "the labor market." In hindsight, I only wished that my teachers in second grade had told me that my future earning power would be determined by how funny my classmates thought I was instead of that nonsense about studying hard and getting good grades. I had some large liabilities in the minds of prospective employers because I simply did not have a string of football or javelin-throwing buddies to help me in the job search. When I asked my family for help, all inquiries were referred to my rich, eternally damned uncle, who hoarsely advised me that "whatever you do, boy, don't tell 'em about quitting law school, say you went to Europe to discover yourself."
Fortunately, I had the good grace to be white, and in Baltimore, that meant I'd have to work really hard not to get a job (as I later learned from Lester). I stumbled upon a job as a customer service representative, with the title of "Relationship Management Specialist." My employer was a multinational conglomerate that dominated the fields of insurance, investment banking, and private money management, respectable businesses as everyone but a bookie will tell you, but they all boiled down to sitting on the money of unredeemably rich people and trying to keep them from taking it.
Since my employer had the tallest, glassiest, most obnoxious tower in the city, I assumed I'd be working there, but it turned out the entire skyscraper was leased out, in fact, the entire corporation was leased out, or "outsourced." It was a name only, a brand, like Coca-Cola or McDonald's, one of those elite, imposing names you continually see during Sunday morning talking hair shows or on "The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau," a familiar name that reeked of exclusivity and privilege but if you had to ask what it does...well, please don't. The only physical evidence of the company at all was a huge brass sign in back of a cherry desk where sat a woman who would have been institutionalized if she wasn't so beautiful.
In reality, a vast and intricate web of electronic sweatshops did all the work. My paycheck actually came from a company called Ace Investments. I worked in a downtown "corporate campus" as they called it, but a better metaphor would be "corporate house of correction."
I went into my first day of work, having studied for the drug test by drinking 10 gallons of cranberry juice before the orientation, only to find out that they didn't actually go to the expense of testing for illegal substances, they'd found the threat of doing so scared all the undesirables away (to which I went "excuse me, where's the men's room?"). At our brief training, the other freshly-minted college grads and I pictured ourselves as pinions in a noble, elegant enterprise, getting a contact high from the men in seven-piece suits who knew how to create and distribute wealth, and we would be freshened by the sweet smell of it, how clean money always made one, even if only in proximity to it. I thought my job was to talk on the phone all day about investments and stuff, maybe about the weather in Boca and the slope at Turnberry. After my first few calls, however, I realized just how much society had crumbled. An early caller asked me to fax him his completed 1116 foreign tax credit form. No problem on this one, I thought, and cheerfully told him that I was not an accountant and he should go to his tax advisor since tax preparation was not among the services he had contracted for. No sooner had these eloquent words left my mouth than a small army of managers came running out from behind the potted plants like guerrillas out of a jungle bunker in Vietnam, telling me they had eavesdropped on my call — they called it "monitoring" — and found it inadequate. If I did not have knowledge of a particular subject area, they told me, I was to read from one of the hundreds of brochures that were on hand, and if that did not exceed the customers expectations, I was to send the customer said brochure. I did not see the point in this, since these brochures made about as much sense as Japanese car instructions, and were written by people much like me, totally unversed in the subjects under discussion. Moreover, since they didn't actually pay to keep these brochures on stock, I had to put the client on hold for as long as a half-hour to track one down, if I was lucky, from the mail room, and then stand for another half hour until the line at the lone fax machine thinned (fax machines had, after all, only been invented in 1924, so word of their widespread use hadn't yet filtered down to corporate purchasing departments). Besides, it was not as if I told the customer that his accountant could buy a flight to the Bahamas with his hourly wage while I couldn't even buy lunch with mine. "So I'm supposed to give tax advice?" I asked innocently. "Oh, no, of course not," said the line managers, all of them women, "how could you be so confused, just make sure the clients' satisfaction is your only goal."
I was perplexed by this at first, but I soon learned the only way to survive was to make everything up as I went along. Soon I was slinging tax, legal and investment advice with the confidence and panache of a professional actor: "the Singapore market looks poised for a correction, better reduce your exposure," "if you were my Grandmother I'd recommend 30% U.S. Treasury securities, 20% blue chip stocks, and 50% in our emerging market Latin America real estate limited partnership," "estate tax only covers tangible assets, intangibles such as these Eurodollar hedge contracts can be passed on generation after generation." Soon I became so adept at fabricating these happy lies I actually thought I had some talent as a novelist or something, until I realized that everyone else was spinning the same tangled webs. It was amazing that our clients, people who spent the better part of each day collecting Nazi memorabilia and reading research studies on black people's inferior brains to feel like they've earned their wealth, would put their fortunes in the hands of people like me for the sake of a "value." I made decisions each day about an amount of money equal to the GNP of many countries using nothing more than "Barron's Encyclopedia of Investment Terms" and the I Ching.
Despite all the fun I was having, the drop in income from my restaurant job was noticeable. I began to regret choosing such a dead-end career path. I was just like those kids of my generation that the evening news readers always accused of having nowhere, do-nothing jobs (although I did work 12 hours a day and took over 100 calls each day from bitter old people who not only forgave nothing but had forgotten everything, so enfeebled they actually thought I was getting some of their money). At least in the restaurant I could have aspired to be a maitre'd. Here, I had been hired on a temporary basis, and this made me acutely aware that my managers with the goo-goo eyes were the Gods of my fate. I did not realize until much later that everyone was temporary, as a matter of company policy (to help it avoid such inefficient drags on profitability as health coverage, a retirement plan, sick leave and paid vacations), in fact there was one lady who had been temporary for nearly fifteen years. She didn't work there, she said, for the money, she did it to make a difference, and she did, keeping meticulous records of every whimsical lie the corporation had ever memoranded and bringing every new contradiction to a manager's sleepy attention, expecting to discuss it like a talmudic scholar dissecting scripture with a rabbi. She was like a child in a dysfunctional family, feeling such overwhelming empathy for the repressed emotions of the corporate parent, she was compelled to assume them herself and act them out. The other veterans, by contrast, had all given up, they'd finally realized that ideas are like a toxin to a corporation and must be rejected by its innate defense mechanisms, its antibodies of an endlessly accountable chain-of-command. They were now content to be fat cells within the organism's lining, aspiring to mediocrity and thus promotable. I, on the other hand, was a young man, and in an estrogen-rich province where the only good man was a dead one, my only hope of upward mobility was by becoming the sex pet of a manager — and that was no night at the opera, having to pretend that nobody knew what was really going on when everyone from the janitor to the president was in on the joke.
There was a higher, hazier layer of managers responsible according to the big org chart in the sky, a slew of officious and ineffectual kept men of the corporation who occasionally would deign to give us motivational speeches on "unlimited excellence," "esprit de corps," and "budgetary realities," but refused to answer even our most basic questions, such as why our phones weren't equipped to make outgoing calls (which forced us to put our long-distance clients on hold for as up to three hours while we "researched" on ancient microfilm spools why their account no longer had any money in it), or why they always chuckled when we inquired about career advancement, or why our raises never kept up with the cost of living while the company was making record profits. Often, while I was reconciling my daily trades on my 15-minute dinner break I'd see them leaving in their BMW's, quite satisfied at their productive day belittling the ideas of their peers with lots of meaningless, polysyllabic words at endless rounds of unresolved meetings, or sometimes on mornings when I'd overslept they'd follow me in with their presumably empty briefcases at a leisurely pace while I panicked about whether I'd get fired this time. They all had these tiny tape recorders in their coats, and I imagined them saying things like: "note to self: everyday is a new opportunity to excel," by which they meant "remember to ruthlessly and savagely dominate every individual I meet today." Fortunately for all concerned, these men tried to avoid the embarrassment of being around real workers whenever possible. The only one of them I saw on a semi-regular basis was the nominal head of the subcontractor I worked for, an albino named O'Mulligan. He strolled in very occasionally to his opulent office full of trophies and outward-facing pictures of him shaking hands with various Republican Presidents of the United States but bereft of book one. He'd yell brutishly at one of his three underlings, the repercussions of which we would feel for months to come, then walk down the aisle to make sure we weren't openly plotting against him, and then he'd go back out on the links, immersed deeply as he was in the true corporate trial by fire, the race to spend all day and every day perfecting his golf game, and so be considered the model manager, the ultimate delegator, and be handed the company.
I hated to see O'Mulligan in the office, mostly because I admired his single-minded pursuit of this goal and wanted him to go for the brass balls, but also because whenever he or the other mucky-mucks came around he always wanted to show everyone — namely himself — that he was "engaged,", and this gave me a sinking feeling that would last for weeks. I could see the emptiness of their lives by one look into their eyes: the constant terror that soon they would be found out and made a branch manager in Perth Amboy, the continual humiliation that their growth projections were always wrong, the endless fretting when the latest memo they didn't actually write wasn't actually read by their boss, the incessant worry over whether next years' required suburban assault vehicle would be a Range Rover or a Land Cruiser, the interminable strain of trying to figure out whether their new neighbors got rich via marriage or organized crime, and then the anxiety of seeing everything they'd worked so hard for lost in a divorce settlement. I wondered what these men read, watched on TV and ate. Could they really be as joyless and bland as they appeared, or was it all an elaborate act? Did they secretly like to loosen their Joseph Banks ties and watch Three Stooges movies?
Who in his right mind would want to trade his life for that? That was the question I asked my cellmate (for we were housed in grey modular cells that went as far as the eye could see), a young gent named Gainsborough Proctor. He was flabbergasted that such a thought could ever be allowed to cross my mind, as if the corporate dictatorship applied to my thoughts as well as my actions. Gainsborough, or "Chip" as he was called, had one of those Brahmin names that announced the merger of two rich families much like two corporations would merge. There was something about him, though, that gave him away as not being a patrician scion dabbling in the world of work before moving himself and his trust fund to start an underground newspaper in Prague. For one thing, the regular time-sharers, those who wore yellow worker bee ties, didn't think he thought he was better than them because he had two last names. They were usually bothered to no end by such types, which seemed puzzling to me because these same people weren't exactly socialists when it came to me being able to play darts with them, and anyway the children of the A list on the blue book didn't so much look down their noses, they literally didn't see anyone — the 99.9% of the world they had more money than was, to them, invisible, which is, after all, what the "privilege" of wealth is all about. But with Chip, although he actually did look down his nose at everyone, he had a fat traveling salesman tie circa 1966, so everyone assumed he was retarded. In reality, he was the son of a poor Richmond family who gave him a society name so he could perhaps find the hidden entranceway to the magical world of privilege. And he was angling for that door with a vengeance.
"These men," he said, "are the nobles of America. They get to taste the wine and sample the beluga caviar for the rest of us. It is quite an awesome responsibility, but years of breeding have prepared them for it."
"I'm not sure about the wine and caviar," I replied, "since I think any wine over $3 a bottle tastes like lacquer, and caviar shouldn't be fed to dogs, but how refined could the tastes of someone who carries a whoopee cushion to board meetings be?"
"That's part of the test," he answered, as if he had spent much time studying the matter. "There's a certain smile that says 'I'm above these cheap shenanigans, but if you try that again, I'll stick your golf clubs up your secretary's ass.'" Chip chortled delicately at this, and continued in wonderment: "the secret is to hide your true intention, which is difficult since everybody knows you want to short-sheet their yacht in return." He pondered. "It's really quite sophisticated, if you think about it."
"Sounds like a bunch of spoiled frat boys to me," I opined.
"See, that's just what they want you to think," he exclaimed. "Do you think the rabble would sit still and listen to philosopher-kings pontificate from mountain tops? No, they only understand the clever joust, the sly sword."
I liked this Gainsborough chap, unlike the other cubicle worms he was actually interested in something besides office politics, sex and money, the holy trinity of corporate America — which like the Christian trinity amounted to the same thing. At the same time, he was so deeply and totally full of shit, I didn't know where to begin. It was like encountering someone who had just discovered Nietzsche. I gave it the old college try: "so you don't think there is some kind of instinct or sixth sense that kicks into the common man and allows him to distinguish between bullshit and the divine?"
"Are you kidding? The common man couldn't tell the difference between the Constitution and the rules of football. That's why the Democrats have controlled Congress for 33 years. As Phineus T. Barnum said 'no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the average American.' Just look at Ted Kennedy and Tip O'Neill. If you can stand to."
I wasn't sure what PT Barnum had to do with Tip O'Neill, but I let it go. "I would bet that Jesse Jackson has read the Constitution a little more closely than Ronald Reagan has," I argued.
"Oh, that Iran-Contra business. It's a disgrace the way the shamelessly liberal media has convinced some well-meaning people that there was something wrong there. It was just a disagreement among gentlemen. If anything Congress is to blame for trying to hang those poor freedom fighters out to dry. Doesn't everyone know that the war would only get worse if we cut off the weapons? Ronnie and Ollie saved thousands of lives by being men when everyone else was too chickenshit. As for the Rev-er-end Jackson," he dripped with sarcasm, "where was he when Martin Luther King was assassinated? He talks as if he cradled him in his bloody shirt when everyone knows he wasn't even in Memphis. He was with some hooker in Chicago but do you ever see the media ask him about that? I see right through that clown. If he really cared about civil rights, he'd be arguing against gun control."
"Aren't there pictures of him with Dr. King before he was shot?" I weakly offered.
"No, I dare you to produce one. It doesn't exist. I mean look at the guy, what do you expect? His Chicago mob connections pay for his $1,000 suits and send his kids to the most exclusive private schools meanwhile he's so concerned about the poor. My heart just bleeds. And," he added before I could respond, "what do black people do? They listen to him, they follow him like lemmings, that's how stupid they are. Meanwhile, the Republicans have the only ideas that can lift those people from gangs and drugs and poverty, but they're too blinded to even see it."
"Maybe they know something about the boats those drugs come in on. Maybe they view Ollie North as a drug..."
>"That's preposterous. Next thing you'll tell me all about UFO's. You must be smoking some mary jane from the Sixties, man. Hey, where's the fire? In the old days people actually respected the office of the President and wouldn't dare hurl such puke. Drugs come from loose morals and the degeneration of society, case closed, something Democratic Commissars have been encouraging for decades trying to keep the poor dumb, lazy and voting Democratic. They've convinced people there isn't any right or wrong anymore. Well, I've got news, there is right and there is wrong, and you can't deny that. I suppose you'd also say it was okee-dokie smoky to believe in any old new age religion. If it feels good, do it, never mind what the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ has to say on the subject."
"Forgive them, for they know not what they do?" I offered, trying desperately to remember some line from the Bible.
"That's my point exactly. Just because I forgive someone doesn't mean they shouldn't be punished for their sins. Christ loves us so much He can
forgive even the agents of Satan who deny that He is the only true Lord, but he still damns them to Hell. That's God's business, and it is only vanity for man to ask why. That's why God created laws for man, in case you weren't told about the origin of our legal system. The Lord is very clear on right and wrong: we have an obligation, despite this modern disease of 'moral relativism,' to make sure a woman who wants to murder her baby or a man who chooses to be a homosexual pervert are not allowed a place in decent society. It may not be 'cool' to do this, but it will be a lot hotter for our children if we don't. It's a matter of honor, you know?"
I felt twisted like a pretzel. I so desperately wanted the discussion to move along to Aristotle and this guy was spouting out the same Republican line I heard night and day from all the newspapers and talk shows. I appreciated that he saw things from a different perspective than me, but there was just no way I could prove that Jesus didn't have a crewcut.
As it turned out, though, he enjoyed talking with me so much he invited me to his place after work. He had just moved into an efficiency apartment in Mount Vernon. He had no furniture except a chair, a halogen lamp, a clock, and a stereo. A sleeping bag was on the floor. Boxes of books lay scattered all around. The walls were completely red. While he put on a tape, I rummaged through his books. To my chagrin, I found Celine, "Naked Lunch," "Howl," and most of Kerouac's books. I asked him how he happened upon these, and he went off on how beautiful and true they were, as if they had changed his life or something. He played a thrash band named "Captain Wargasm" and began to bop his head quite righteously. It wasn't before too long that he pulled out a small metal canister of coke and a skull and crossbones mirror. Naturally, I partook — I guess pot is a gateway drug after all — and was soon pirouetting against the wallpaper or laying on the floor with my arms around my head trying to contain my ecstasy. Every passing thought was like an orgasm, and they were all of cocaine. Soon, however, I came down and was forced to contemplate a world without flake, a heartless, Godless world that kept people perpetually screaming to be allowed to die. Chip pulled out about a hundred sugar packets from his kitchen drawer and began pouring them one by one into his mouth. I opted for the more conventional strategy of chain smoking the pack of Viceroys I had just recently purchased. When we had stabilized enough to get our brains working again, I said: "What was all that stuff about drugs being bad?"
"Did I say that?" he sheepishly shrugged. "What I meant was that drugs were very ex-pensive."
I offered him a butt but he stood up, impelled to continue his night quest, and so we parted at the incandescent French provincial foyer of his building, he disappearing into the vacuum of the streets.
4.
Lester was waiting for me back at the house. He sat like a cat in the sill of a large stained glass window. His shadow jumped down on my approach to intercept me with a glad hand before I touched the doorknob. "Let's walk, let's talk," he said.
"You're not helping out enough with the weed supply," he finally said after a couple of blocks. "I need you to give us a couple hundred. It's not for me, really, it's for Katherine."
I was stunned. My first instinct was to clear it with Katherine. In addition to the room and board I was now paying her, I gave liberally to the marijuana honey jar, forking over whatever stray scrapings I could to support Lester's vast, secretive S&L-like pyramid financing schemes. But this wasn't the usual pay-as-you-blow nickel bag debt installment plan with the choicest bud plucked off the top as interest, this was enough to buy a bottle of pure Nepalese hash oil. Furthermore, he wouldn't hear of me taking my concerns to the little lady, this was man's bidness, to be handled by men. So we clashed for a couple rounds of macho logic: each of us exploited lapses in the internal consistency of the others' arguments no matter how true what was being said may have been, and then we crafted cagey assertions totally irrelevant to what each of us really wanted to say, with the whole squinty-eyed match punctuated by a flurry of absurd, off-putting statements such as "you couldn't possibly mean something as ridiculous as that, because..." and "you know you are wrong, because otherwise you wouldn't have...." The only issues involved were ones that served the strategic maneuvers to gain position, all undertaken with the same set of assumptions — akin to framing the debate as whether to bomb for a week or for two weeks, not whether to bomb at all. Our particular Socratic dialogue focused on the hidden but intrinsic value that was not reflected in the mere price of my accommodations. We also discussed the risk premium he had to charge for knocking on doors that promised smoke but could just as easily open to shotguns, scenes of jealous lovemaking, or huge bug-headed semi-people.
Just as I was about to go down for the count imagining huge cockroaches chasing tiny men into floorboard cracks, Lester let it slip that he'd told Katherine he got a job as a Legal Assistant and was supposed to get paid that day. He had actually come to me in desperation. I smiled as I brushed myself off. As it is for men always, everywhere, it was an easy transition from bloodthirsty opponent to trusted confidant. Both stances were only excuses to show off one's brain power and innate superiority, after all, no change in attitude was required. So I tried out my repertoire of advice. Honesty was out of the question, of course, because he had been caught in such lies before. Similarly, he had already used the I-got-robbed-at-gunpoint routine and the I-left-it-in-my-backpack-in-the-library variation. The only thing left to do, he forced me to conclude, was to steal something, some token of affection the approximate size of an impulsively blown paycheck. Lester thought immediately of a store worthy of his efforts, a insanely overpriced purveyor of baubles in the "arts district," a downtown row of stores where middle-income businesspeople and tourists could pretend to be collectors and where artists would never of course be allowed, even if the thought of the place didn't make them froth at the mouth.
To my consternation, he decided we had to strike right away. So we walked there, smoking bowls along the way, me still wearing my business semi-suit, a graying white shirt and an old tie of my fathers, he wearing a tweed jacket, a Marty Feldman T-shirt and a green felt hat with a feather in it a la Robin Hood. Inside, it was all I could do to keep from laughing at the handmade crates, the blank ("100% natural") greeting cards, the B.Kliban cat beach towels, and the wood-framed photographs of trees. Lester muttered something about how everyone here was getting hosed down, but otherwise seemed to be examining politely the candle snuffers and fountain pens. I could barely detect him snagging a few things, it seemed as natural as the movement of the second hand of the hourglass clock, my face gave more away, and soon he prodded me out, past the disinterested teenage cashier and into the morally ambiguous night.
"They deserve this so bad you can't take any pleasure in it," he said on the way back. "And if that wasn't enough, they're just begging you to take something, but everything is so bad, you feel like you're on the dark end of a Christmas gift certificate."
I nodded, although the closest thing to this in my experience was watching Robert Wagner in "It Takes A Thief" swizzlesticking scotches and complaining about the cut of the diamonds in that pathetic John Wayne imitation of his while the other cocktailers were too preoccupied pretending to be wealthy lushes to notice the insane avant-garde revolutionary mambo jazz playing in the background.
Lester pulled out a tin box in the shape of a car, which had painted on it a perfect non-dysfunctional American family circa 1958 smiling from behind the blue automobile wheel.
"Isn't that a tad retro?" I wondered.
"In 1987, after the apocalypse, there's nothing left but these comforting images. These are our ruins." Lester pulled the box open, revealing a black onyx pendant. "Have you ever known a woman to resist a box?" he asked.
He then pulled out an amazing fiber optic candle — splayed sheafs that looked like sea anemones and shot out beams like movie usher penlights. Then some beehive candles (black, of course), a headband with Chinese characters on it, and a scarf illustrated with Edvard Munch's "the Shriek." "Wicked cool, man," I said, "how'd you find all that in there?" (I didn't know at the time that he had been scoping the place out for weeks).
"I have a way with inanimate objects. But there isn't anything here that's better than the stuff you get for a dollar at the DAV store."
We bustled past the burned-out tenements on our way. I was still thrilling in the glow of his finery when he dragged me into a bombed-out hole of a sub shop called "Marco Polo's" that I would have sworn had closed years ago. Behind the broken windows and dim lightning were some of the biggest, toughest, blackest dudes I had ever seen, waiting, it seemed, for us to come in and order.
"I'll have the usual, my man, and one with no onions for my white friend here," said Lester. I looked at him to make sure he was still white.
"Hey Trouble, dyu think Middleton's OK?" asked the big guy in the apron behind the counter.
"No prah-blem," said Lester, referring to what he later told me was the second string tight end of the Washington Redskins, "the anterior crucate ligament will keep Bloody Knuckles out five, max six weeks," like he was some kind of fucking doctor. "He's got a heart like a pig. I'd worry more about a strike. Could shut the whole praetorian sport down forever."
"Strike? Whatchu talkin' bout?" said the guy holding the spatula, "Ain't been no strike thah, niggahs ain't allowed to strike." As they all laughed, I didn't know if I was supposed to join in. "Besides," he continued, "ain't my man, you know, what's his name, Oaklin Rayduhs, muhfuck with a mustache, Upshaw in place?"
"Yeah, Gene Upshaw is the head of the player's union, but the owners are behind the strike. They want to break the union and start scab teams, so they can lower wages. It's a technique perfected by Henry Ford," Lester confidently asserted.
"Henry who? Football can't have no strike, it's un-American," the guy with the spatula said as he violently diced the meat on the skillet.
"No un goan pay see scabs play," the other guy said as he pulled the buns out of the oven. "What fat bidniman with a harem, aw-ight, kin afford to lose hisself cash money like 'at, nome saying? How much de take hahta drop, near fitty percent at lease? "
Lester smiled. "Fifty percent of what?" he queried.
Everyone laughed, but I was the only one laughing at the brazen preposterousness of the prediction. The rest of them were laughing at Lester and all the crazy white notions he always brought around, so innocent were they of the world of sleaze that kept them working in this place.
We were served two cheese steak subs and sat down at a chipped dragonfly blue melamine table. "The best sub in town," Lester sighed, "Check out how evenly the buns are toasted. And the way the mayonnaise mixes just right with the lettuce, it's like a bistro in Abruzzi."
I had to admit he was right, it was just about a perfect sub, with just the right distribution of grease. As we sat there in food nirvana, I mentioned my experience earlier in the evening with Gainsborough Proctor. All Lester said was "you know, you try everything, but you always come back home to the weed. It's always so friendly and welcoming. Know what I mean?"
I had nothing to say to that, and in agreeing I, according to Daryl F. Zanuck, was useless. So I suggested lighting up. His face showed sudden concern. "Jesus, man, not here," said the guy known to puff out of a hollowed-out ball point pen while walking through the downtown lunch hour crowd, "this is the ghe-tto. Don't even whisper it here. These guys have seen way too much. Lookee over there instead."
He pointed to a refrigerated soda display case. It was like the underground railroad of subversive sodas: RC and Diet Rite of course, Orange, Grape and Strawberry Crush, Nehi Grape Soda, Shafta Ginger Ale, Silver Spring Cream Soda, Cheer Wine, Moxie and many Coke- and Pepsi-free others. I hesitated in picking one since I assumed these brands were no longer manufactured, but under Lester's confident direction, I pulled out a Y&A Sarsaparilla, my hands almost trembling. For in fact, one of the small tragedies of my young life was my elusive quest for Sarsaparilla. My father had brought some back from a sales trip once and life was never the same for me. But I could never repeat that first ecstatic moment of union, my innocence was lost in the endless pursuit of it amid an indifferent sea of fountain jerks and vending monoliths. Usually when I tried to order it, I was given a root beer and cruelly told it tasted exactly the same only it wasn't red. Even at my dad's country club they looked at me like I was some kind of pretentious dilettante for even asking for it, as if the word itself was an affront, and I decided I must have been what they defined me as since no one else could taste the subtle but life-affirming difference in flavors. I mentioned to Lester that most people thought it tasted like root beer, and he reacted with deadly serious sympathy, putting his arm around me and saying, "yeah, people so used to drinking that battery acid cola crap that their taste buds have turned into cold sores. Hey Eugene, Muhammed, is there a difference between Sarsprilla and Rut Beer?"
The two black guys in white aprons started laughing hysterically once again, shaking their heads and shimmying in mock paralysis. I clutched my soda tightly, feeling vaguely scorned. I paid the bill and we walked back out into the paper sack prophet streets, pouring down our nectar and understanding at last how even the sweetest ambrosia must taste bitter to the Gods. The chill wind had thinned out the people and blew candy wrappers around our heels. I picked up a pack of Viceroys from the all-night gas station, which we shared on the long stretch to the apartment. Cars burst past, puffing exhaust into our lungs as we crossed the off-ramp where the downtown bridge connected to the expressway. I saw the red lights in the distance flooding away like electric salmon upstream to spawn. Drivers are always terrified of this area, afraid they might break down or be forced at crowbar to stop. I couldn't imagine what they thought of us: our careless stride, our silly smirks, the bad hat, it must have been bloodcurdling to see white boys in their rearview mirrors. I heard a car honk as it passed, and I thought the driver maybe recognized me and was saying hello before resuming his blindered trek to the suburban haven that I knew was now forever gone to me. I imagined the pity he must have had, the pity that I once had had, and now I felt sorry for him, frantically speeding away from the life that just exploded all around and could not contain its joy, to a thin-lipped and dour place that didn't even allow for dreams, leaving room only for the false certainties of dead things.
Lester held some of such dead things in his jacket, but he was oblivious to any danger, he was happy, in fact, like a hunter bringing a pelt back to the cave. Katherine didn't see it that way — she knew before the first gift was even out of his vest-pocket how ill-gotten these gains really were. To make it worse, she had prepared, like a true Pavlovian, a congratulatory meal of kielbasa and sauerkraut as a sign of how much she appreciated him making the effort to work. She had sat there getting hotter while the food cooled, waiting to say what I'm sure she couldn't say when she finally saw how happy he was to see her and how desperate his haunted eyes were for her approval.
As they fought, their angers long since faded, their compulsions forced, I felt reduced to a spectator who had placed a bet on the wrong horse and was forced to watch helplessly the deathly slow parade of his life savings through the gauze of the furlongs. By the time he was fuming because she never left the toilet seat up, I felt like speaking up to take the blame, but something...contrived about his manner stopped me.
His voice overtook hers as he resourcefully kept finding new shortcomings in her. He whined bitterly about the way she didn't marinate the flank steak to his specifications, the way she only cleaned the litter box once a day, the way she just dropped his dishes in the sink after dinner and didn't clean it up until later. For some reason I couldn't then understand, she took it all, her force was stopped, she could only go to the bedroom crying because she hadn't met his needs. After he archly watched her leave, he lightened up but displayed no sign he was aware of how ugly all this was.
He offered me a pipe.
As I drew another cloud into my system, he played a bootleg Dylan tape, a live rendition of "Like A Rolling Stone." Although the band (or was it The Band?) was tight, and the melody perfect, what Dylan sang, it soon became obvious, were not words at all, not even la-la's or yeahs — they were howls. It was as if he was forbidden to use a single word, for they all spoke the name of Yahweh. One would have thought it a masterwork of his paranoid art, he having performed this song for so long to booing, uncomprehending fans that each word dissolved into a note of pure infantile anguish — had it not been for one painfully obvious detail: Dylan was as pickled as Santa Claus. Thus, his tortured, Atlas-like genius was transmuted effortlessly into a failure to do even the least that was expected of him. This required massive effort, but he made it look easy, as if he wasn't even trying to be a grotesque self-parody of himself hurling a giant "Fuck You" on all the suckers who had waited in line for days for the right to hear him. I looked at Lester. His admiration was palpable. He appeared to regret that he himself could not make things seem so easy any more, that certain comforts had trapped him and brought him dangerously close to a sense of identity. I could see even then that he was looking for a way out, and that he knew no matter what cruelty he conjured up, Katherine would always be there, just as Dylan's fans always waited for another round of mockery and contempt, just to prove themselves worthy of his poisoned love.
Before I knew it it was four o'clock in the morning. I smoked my last Viceroy and ate the last of the cold kielbasa, being careful to sprinkle hot sauce all over it. I yearned to hear Sonny Rollins blow his silver sax all alone over the Brooklyn Bridge, but Lester had already started to play Henry Rollins, as if to distance himself even further from humanity. I reflected that maybe Katherine and Lester both had gotten what they'd wanted: she no longer imagined herself the manipulator and could wallow freely in self-pity, he had canceled out his guilt at how unfairly he treated her with rage at how unfairly his robbery was treated. Meanwhile, I had to work the next day. But that didn't matter. Nothing that happened in that night of illegality and confusion mattered, only that look I saw in Katherine's eyes, the look of God's eyes watching, benign and full of pain. I needed a woman.
5.
I took the bus to work the next day because it was raining. On my way, a spectacularly scented black man sat down next to me and started a conversation. He had on a slate Brooks Brothers suit with just a hint of silver, an executive blue shirt with starched white collar, a collar rod holding down a thin tie in just the right shade of grey, and matching alligator belt and shoes. He smiled in the prep-school way and asked where I worked, how I liked it, etc., but only as a prelude to telling me what great things he was doing and how tremendously he enjoyed it. Holding Warfield's, the elite Baltimore business journal, elegantly in his lap, he talked about the excitement of trading options in the pit, where fortunes were made or lost while you went to the bathroom, and where steely pros projected the trajectories of short-term interest rates like combat pilots in a life-or-death game of chicken. He then talked about the venture capital part of the firm, where the geniuses with the ideas of tomorrow came in daily in search of financing. He talked of all the wonderful things the digital age was bringing, foreseeing, he did, an age where every repetitive thought would be handled by machines and humans could one day download even their higher cerebral functions onto a circuit and so truly free their minds. He was an intern, he finally revealed, from some Ivy League business school — I don't remember which one — in love with business and the heroes it produces, people of equal parts vision, drive and charity, but he was equally in love, it seemed to me, with the look, of rich white guys trying to be cool, an image he pulled off flawlessly. I tried to pay attention to him, but my mind was elsewhere, on women, specifically.
After we parted with him giving me his card and vowing to spend some quality downtime doing lunch somewhere nice but not too fussy, I walked into work vowing to ask out some office girl. On the way in I passed a young black girl sitting in the lobby. At first glance, she seemed to be staring at everyone with unmitigated hatred, but when I looked again it looked more like utter apathy — a conscious ignoring of everything surrounding her — and then, as she caught my eye, it seemed almost a smile, a Buddha-like affection, and then, finally, I saw what it really was: pure terror, the girl carrying around for display all her gifts and finding them worthless in the world of offices, and with each jaunty worker passing her by, her fear grew more ferocious.
Safely inside the office, I was again free to imagine my future conquests. I tried first to make eye contact. I employed a variety of poses: holding a Styrofoam cup full of coffee á la Hal Linden, thumbing thoughtfully through my mail, staring pensively at the pastel and grey ink washes on the walls, hectoring an associate like a mad professor while gripping a worn CCH securities index. I felt like a model in the Sears catalog. Most of the women wearing electric blue eyeliner ignored me; at best they ran away, at worst they flirted back, and this made me feel even more awkward.
As absorbed as I was in my own efforts, I didn't realize that these proceedings were like a crisp military operation in which I was surplus ordinance. Those who ignored me were either married or could tell from my scuffed shoes and stained tie I was below their station, the ones who ran away were newly engaged, and the ones who flirted with me were in that post-College window of time of approximately two months when they had to find a marriageable man.
I spent so much energy trying to figure out how to crack this code that I failed to glimpse the obvious: the vast majority of the department had slept together. They all went to the same parties, and after a few too many games of foosball and too much mixing of Coors and Michelob Lights, they got a little too into each other. They then spent the better part of hung-over days avoiding eye contact and pretending they didn't remember anything. The result was a sticky lingering air of halfhearted desire, for a tie, a rouge, a color, and the inevitably soiled aftermath. The chill in the room was broken only by the money wonks with tortoiseshell glasses and monogrammed shirts, those fortunate, clueless few who spoke freely, with a smile, and wondered why everyone reacted with such difficulty to their words.
Gainsborough, meanwhile, clearly looked at me as an undesirable. When I mentioned Nietzsche, he replied that he was unqualified to philosophize since he hadn't worked a day in his life. Marx, similarly, was a bum who sponged off all his friends. As for Freud, nobody paid attention to him anymore. He said the true radical philosophers of today were George Gilder and Charles Murray. In the days that followed, he began wearing red ties and hanging out with a particularly arrogant crowd of refined skinheads. They seemed to deem me a hopeless rebel from society, but when I tried to initiate a conversation with them, they only smirked like high school football stars, which they probably were, and went back to talking about paint wars or graphite putters or the ripping good crew team at their college.
It was about this time that I really began to think of myself as a musician.
I lifted myself above all this squalor by playing air guitar to "No More Mister Nice Guy" as I walked down the modular corridors, or humming "War Pigs" on the way to the restroom with what I'm sure was a deranged look on my face. I spent my lunches at the magazine stand, reading Guitar Player magazine and learning about humbucker pickups and tube heads and phlange knobs and fuzz boxes and phasers. I formed opinions about nylon versus steel-wound strings. I looked to the long-haired men in the ads (who obviously spent much more time grooming their guitars than themselves) as Gods, giants at one with their art who treated their axe as their harsh mistress, even playing it in the bathroom while they brushed their teeth (making the leap that they even brushed their teeth). I imagined myself holding one of their gaudy guitars, a row of custom-made companions on stands behind them like sculpted furniture, each one tuned to get one of those few particular right sounds out of the universe of sounds that were wrong. I imagined myself maneuvering through a jungle of patch cords and coaxial cables. Certain names began to take on almost biblical implications: Fender, Gibson, Gretsch, Ampeg, Marshall. Here was the ultimate argument for capitalism: the Stratavari who crafted these had wrought well-tempered beauty out of the machine tool brutality of our age. I wanted to touch and master all of it. But, like a skier so blinded by virgin powder he would pay any price for lift tickets and equipment, I did not see how such things were only possible because I would buy them.
Lester, after a few weeks of this, warned me about the soullessness of everything I saw in those magazines. "They're like the airbrushed bottle blondes who can't even give you a decent come-hither look and use their silicon breasts to sell everything from car wax to insecticide."
"One of those doesn't sound too bad to me right now," I replied.
"Hey, fight the power, this is where it's at," he said, gripping a weathered Strat he had borrowed, "it's aged by the blues. These kind of guitars will get you through periods of no women better than women will get you through periods of no guitars."
"But I'm jonesing for this righteous EQ board," I argued. "It's got 64 channels, an echo looped midrange, full MIDI compatibility, and no degradation or tape hiss." I was not trying to sell him this equipment, I was peddling the idea of being a professional musician, and like most salesmen, I more than made up for my total lack of knowledge with an embarrassment of confidence and enthusiasm.
He, like most marks, relied on his suspicions to counter even the most established facts. He just kept wailing on the Strat, and soon I was lost again. The tone of his guitar was subversive, deeply troubled, every note was a flaw. The endless virtuosity promised in the glossy musician magazines, on the other hand, had all the numb perfection of jet engine turbines, it was precisely tailored for the sex act or the Christmas buying season, and was designed to bring about animal contentment in its listeners. An honest note sounded wrong, it just burst out of the background like a high, hanging curveball.
Lester's playing was the feedback of the buzz that rattled through the trees, but his sinuous lines were hopelessly mired in the divine, not able to separate into a false form that demanded a place for itself at the dinner table. They were like dirty nomads wandering it seemed without a place of origin or a destination, but strangely missed when they'd moved on.
His explorations ended, as they always did, when Katherine came home. He didn't stop to listen, but to bitch over something about her — her faded blouse, her slutty walk, the 'tude she brought into the house. I wondered if it wouldn't have been better for him to just ignore her and keep on playing. I certainly wanted to. To watch every night Katherine growing slowly paler, grayer, less sure of herself or of anything, was to watch that last boat of certainty and authority drift out to sea. And to make it worse, Lester gave me the Brie, the cigarettes, the smiles he took from her. I sat gripped to the chair smoking her last bong hit, trying to laugh at Lester's elegant comments and ignore the light that was leaving her eye. I found this as hard as ignoring the asthmatic men in camouflage who shivered their way daily past the window, but I somehow managed to pull it off.
In hindsight, I don't regret my silence, as horrible as it turned out to be, as much as I regret those few times I said anything, times when I got all stupid like Gary Cooper and let it not sit right with me, and raised my puny, indignant arms.
"What are you trying to prove," I'd say, "are you afraid she'll have you clawing for your life if you don't kick her twice before breakfast? She just wants a quiet time to take her bath..."
"What the fuck do you know about it, flex boy?" he'd smile, "are you some kind of fucking referee? You gonna protect her from me? You gonna cry foul on every third punch below the belt? I'll just go lower. I have to." He gestured with the hand that held his pipe, and leaned the other against the mantelpiece, looking suavely logical in his smoking jacket, as if he was Sherlock Holmes hosting some kind of psychoanalytic quiz show. "You could never fucking care enough, man. She'd spit in your face, because she knows she has to deal with me, and she knows any bullshit dream you have about charity and justice is only going to give her hope and make her more vulnerable." He picked a burning candlestick off the mantle and dropped its wick to his bowl. "Leave it alone if you have a shred of decency in you," he said as he began to puff.
"So it doesn't matter in the end," I responded, "it's the cynical answer to everything: there is no truth so I don't have to tell it?" I eyed him suspiciously as he smoked, so that he would save me a little of what was left in the bowl. "So you don't care that those pap-dripping illusions like 'justice wins out in the end,' or 'you can survive by pluck and determination,' or 'love has a meaning beyond holding humans to a brutal reproductive servitude' are important to her?" I paused for a moment trying to focus my thoughts. "Are you supposed to get away with ruining her so easily?"
He tapped his spent bowl on the mantle. "Lose the outrage, chum," he laughed, "life's unfair. She knows that. The sooner you learn it, the better. Get off your fucking high horse before I strap you to the chair and make you listen to 'One Tin Soldier' until you see God." I saw the indentation he had made in the well-preserved marble mantle, and all the mounds of ash that now covered it. I thought of the countless previous inhabitants here who had robbed the dignity of generations of their children by yelling at them when they put so much as a water glass on it. I wanted to cringe, but not as much as I wanted to sift through the ash to mine some usable shake.
"Who are you to say what's right and wrong?" he continued with gleaming teasing eyes. "You don't know how happy her sadness makes her, how defeat to her is really a kind of glory. She chooses to stay here, and unlike you, she can always fall back where she came. By stepping in to try to 'help,' you just screw everything up." He filled up another bowl. "The exact opposite of what you are trying to accomplish will happen."
"So compassion and pity and the rules of society are just lies, is that it?" I bravely countered, taking the pipe and the candle.
"No, you got me exactly wrong. Those things are all that matter," he shot back with irritation. "You seem to think that evil has a chance against good, but it's a constant, hopeless struggle. Why do you think they call it ee-ville? You gotta cheat, otherwise it wouldn't be...fair." He took the pipe but just held it dangling in the air while he spoke. "And victory, when it comes, starts to taste like defeat, not because of the means used to achieve it, but because the proverbial other shoe is always waiting to drop."
"So why fight?" I rasped, blowing out a luxuriant plume.
He looked at me, squinting. "Ah, you'd never understand. You'll just have to trust me on it." He took a quick hit and held it in while he spoke in a clipped, breathless voice. "You don't want to end up in my pit. That's beat." He tapped the bowl out again, exhaled smoke and raised his voice back to his normal chandelier-rattling level. "I don’t want another twin."
"So that's all there is to it? You just can't control yourself?"
"Nah, man, it ain't me. You've never met her old man, obviously."
"Is he a bad dude?"
"In a way, yes," he said thoughtfully. "He's perfect, as good as they come."
"Then why is she hanging out with you?"
"Hey, I'm her freedom."
And so we went on, sparring without coming close to what was really going on, in the inexplicable center of everything, the place that haunted both of us, that spot we glimpsed when we saw ourselves in Katherine's pupils.
6.
Katherine had long since left to pick up cigarettes for Lester, and we were free to play music again, so I urged Lester to pick up his stick. As if to have a little fun with my ambition, he refused to play until we had figured out a name for our band. We thought of names we liked: Atomic Rooster, Ultimate Spinach, Blue Cheer, The Electric Prunes, Bloodrock, Moby Grape, Curved Air. Like two effete esthetes at the end of the 19th century who wore black to mourn the fact that all Art had already been done, we thumbed through the canon of rock band names and figured there couldn't possibly be any left (this was during the dark days of The The and Megadeth, before the age of Toad the Wet Sprocket and Screaming Trees of course). We wondered how a great band like the Beatles could have such a ridiculous name while a ridiculous band like Grand Funk Railroad could have such a great name. And what about those bizarre names like Bread, Mott the Hoople, Three Dog Night and The Babys? And, why, dear Lord, didn't Lothar and the Hand People break?
We decided it might be more productive to try getting some other members for the band. We were also out of weed. Lester suggested we visit Coffee Bob, who was living down the street at the time with someone Lester described as a gay philosopher. Along the way we thought up a bunch of names.
"I think the ultimate band name would be the Violets," proposed Lester, "it's got it all: rarefied yet tough, with a sinister hint of violence, avant-garde yet pop, original yet timeless."
"The Violets? Are you out of your fucking mind?" I asked. "Maybe you could have gotten away with a name like that in 1965. In 1987, you'd pretty much be relegated to doing Prince covers in gay discotheques."
"You talk like that's a bad thing."
"Aw, come on, it's so preening it screams. How about Lather? That's friendly for boys and girls. It's animalistic, yet clean. It's punk pop, razors and butter. We could pass out shaving cream at our concerts and title our albums 'Whips and Creams,' 'Hook and Shaving Brush' and 'Frothing at the Mouth.' It'd be chillin'!"
"You have to be black to be able to wear clothes like that," Lester said with finality. "Besides, punk is dead. It'll be another 10 years before that comes back. What is hip today is what people have finally thrown out of their attic. The stuff in the cutout bins. It's about a 20 year delay. What could fuck parents up more than seeing their kids dressed just like they were? Right now it's the anti-1968, with all that psychedelic relic stuff — Castro jackets, granny glasses, bell-bottoms, suede fringe, lots of fluffy sentiments of peace and love and many fuzz-toned guitars. We could pull that off. How about Head Cheese for a name."
"Nah, the critics would eat us alive. Besides, you mean to tell me we have to wait ten years to be what we are? Aren't we trying to be punks? I don't mind selling out, but I have to know what outfit I'm supposed to wear. Let's go the dangerous alienation route — hit 'em in the solar plexus: Cage Droppings." I framed it like a film director explaining a shot.
"Who'd want to listen to band called Cage Droppings? Alienation is so passé. Maybe if we called ourselves The Gorillas. Who's gonna mess with a gorilla?"
"Animal names? Are you shitting me?"
"I shit you not. The Gorillas, man."
"Are we supposed to dress up in monkey suits on the music videos?"
"Hey, if you haven't worn the fur, you don't know what you're missing."
"If we're gonna do that, let's go with The Silkworms. At least we could pretend to be Chinese instead of African. That'd be different."
"Too fey. How about The Urge?"
"Nobody hits the drums as hard as Alex Van Halen," my sarcasm dripped a stain on the sidewalk. "Would our first album be called 'Metal Hair' or 'Scream 'Til You Puke?' How about The Noise Conspiracy?"
"Ve can dezine ze notes so ze eardrum pops from ze inzide, and zen ve vill teach doze schmencks to danz."
"Bliss?"
"A born-again power trio? There's nothing more foul than Stryper impersonators."
"How about Exit?"
"How about No Exit?"
And so it went on. Other names were bandied and discarded: "Heavy Rubber," "The Panty Lions," "Condom Nation," "Beat Attitude," "The Boners," "Pleistocene," "Waiting for Weed," "Pipe," "Gravelmouth," "The Exterminators," and, of course, "Fuck You." We even went for some postmodern levity: "Gilligan and the Islands," "The Unbearable Lightness of Air Supply," "Seals and Crofts are Satan Worshippers," "Michael McDonald's Vocal Cords Must Be Ripped Out Immediately," and "Robert Goulet: The Man and His Muse." It got to the point where it would have been surrender for either one of us to agree. What we needed was some Svengali to give us a name: otherwise we'd die fighting being named by the other. No wonder so many bands broke up.
Coffee Bob now lived in a grey cinderblock tenement with steel frame windows. The rooms were almost empty. The place was icily, lethally clean. There were a few IKEA chairs, a chess board, amplifiers, guitars, stereos, books and bongs, with some frilly wool pillows on the floor. Coffee Bob's roommate had the dead fish look of a hit man and chainsmoked Marlboro Lights as if they smelled like posies. I wanted to ask him what he thought of Ayer but something in his strict, embittered manner told me he'd say "Ayer? The biggest fraud ever perpetrated on the academic establishment? What of him?" Yes, here was a ten-year grad student, it was written all over him: the bloodhound eyes, the total inability to speak, the perpetual scowl as if forced to sniff something unpleasant. To him, I was sure, even Plato took philosophy down a dark, dead-end road and kept its potential tragically unfulfilled. Rat Scabies, on the other hand, explained everything with well-stated elegance, although one wouldn't know he thought so by the way he sat totally impassive and distracted while the band thrashed and burned.
Coffee Bob, as usual, was disgusted to see us. "You can't just barge in on me like this. It's 11 o'clock, I'm taking 21 credits, and Harry and I were trying to enjoy a little quiet time." I wondered if the buzzing lampshades would agree that this was quiet time.
Harry just looked at us with a hard face and an arched eyebrow. He pointed to the mud we had traipsed in on the rug. The place was immaculate except for a fruit-bowl sized canister of butts.
Something in Harry's manner made Coffee Bob vacillate. "But these are my friends," he argued with a nervous giggle. "Don't get your panties in a wad, Harry. I didn't say anything about those Sandinistas who sponged off us all last week and threw wine bottles at the walls."
"Yes, you did, you faggot, you thought they were the greatest thing to hit tiny town until they hit you up for money and then you did nothing but complain all week how they stank up the house."
"That's your fault for inviting Northern Sandinistas instead of Southern ones. We discussed this."
"You mean you discussed this. I was just helping out the cause by taking them in while they were in DC. Don't talk to me about disrespect. You feel free to use all my stuff while I can't even touch your side of the fridge."
They both seemed to sigh angrily. Harry thumbed his butane delicately and lit his cigarette with the smallest of blue flames. I wasn't about to guess what kind of strange chemistry was involved here, but I felt I was in Eastern Europe caught in the middle of an argument about the price of an illegal phone hookup. Lester took the opportunity to make a carnival barker pitch for some ganj.
By some miracle I was soon sitting cross-legged in front of a gold-encrusted bong, Flipper on the turntable, everything among us forgiven. While the rest of us silently eyed the instruments, Harry hypothesized about the best Guadacanal Diary album, almost smiling as he dissected the variables and condensed the data. His conclusion may have been the breakthrough other scholars were waiting for, but we tried not to listen, for we knew he was an evil genie and mistrusted the unlimited bong hits he allowed, for, after all, the proper bong etiquette was to grift hits, not be given unconditional inhalation.
We needed to jam, but we knew Harry would cluck like a Nazi even at Crass covers. His collection was a seamless web of malfeasance, from The Godz to Rocket from the Tombs to Screeching Weasel to Bark Psychosis to Bongwater. However, Coffee Bob was one of these unfortunate souls who thought civilization ended after "Exile on Main Street," so he thought we could rely on him to run interference for us.
"Why do you think so many of the great rock'n'roll cats are British?" Lester asked the room.
"Fucking racism," I said, taking the Liberal perspective. "White Americans were forbidden to even look at black people. And they're not so fricking Puritan about drinking over the Atlantic, so kids can actually learn how to play in pubs before they're 16 and over the hill."
"Nah, the English are just better than us," he replied, taking the Conservative position. "They know how to master a good thing when they see it and they can actually put together a rhyme in meter because they actually learn how to read in school."
Harry wasn't about to mess around with amateurs like us. His weird force field kept us from touching the instruments laying around, even though the amps were humming. He just lit up another cigarette. A dead wisteria vine in a dry vase draped itself across what looked like a chess game in progress, undoubtedly one of many between them, these sad dueling Richard III's. There was to be no jamming today. Harry stared gravely at Coffee Bob, who reeked an air of betrayal: a betrayal of us, of Harry, of himself -- betrayal as far as the eye could see. Lester and I walked on eggshells out of there. We breathed the fresh October air.
"Is Mick Jagger gay?" I asked Lester as we walked.
"Mick Jagger is about as straight as Bud Abbott."
"Are Coffee Bob and Harry, uh..." I started to ask.
"God knows," replied Lester, "But you can never figure stuff like that out. Who woulda thought that Judas Priest was gay and the Village People weren't?"
"You mean 'Some heads are gonna roll' is...'"
"Indeed."
Lester and I probably looked to the temporarily European people here in the student ghetto like we were the ones climbing the other side of the mountain, as we walked close together like Frenchmen, smoked Viceroys, chattered ceaselessly, and jaunted in to the WaWa's together to buy some provisions.
We were almost home when a small mulatto man crossed our path.
"Hey, Lester, man, still trying to get through 'Gravity's Rainbow?'"
"Do I know you?" Lester asked.
"Yeah, your brother, remember?"
It took me a minute to realize that Lester was supposed to know this guy through his brother, not that this was his brother. "Oh, yeah, whatever," replied Lester.
"Thomas Pynchon is still trying to kill me. He hates that I'm in on his scam. He's in the flower shop everyday. He thought everyone was just too stupid to figure it out, but it was an elementary anagram, really. You just have to be familiar with Toynbee's later work to make the connection. You know, the Jupiter colonization? There are still some questions, no doubt, but there's a lot of blood ahead, torrents of it, the whole white race, fr'instance, blam, back to the gene splicing pool from whence you came." He was talking so quickly I thought his head would spin off of its axis.
"Excuse us, we have to go," said Lester, trying to brush this fly out of the way.
"Yeah, sure," he said with a pained look like he was practicing how to smile. "Hey, what ya got in the bag?" He reached his spindly hand into the grocery bag Lester was holding. He tried to peer inside. Lester pulled it away.
"No, really," he smirked, "What you got?"
"Get a-way," Lester said calmly.
The man reached in again, pulling out a jar of Hellmann's mayonnaise. He held tightly to the lid as Lester tried to wrest it away from him. As they grappled, the man said, "Why do you get this? You're worthless. I'm the one who deserves it."
"Calm down," Lester said again as he pulled the jar out of his hand.
"C'mon, give me something else then." He reached in tenaciously and yanked out a tub of sour cream. He evaded Lester's swat and ran from us down the street like a dog with a sirloin in his mouth.
After a couple of blocks of silence, I asked "was that real, or did we just walk into a George Romero movie?"
"My brother has some strange fucking friends," was all he said.
After a final stop to the package store to get some Mickey's Wide Mouths, we went home. Katherine was there with a woman who thought she was hip because she smoked Parliament Lights. They had the sour and bored look of people who'd been snickering and scoffing for hours, and when Lester came in, their eyes lit up. He obliged by telling them about the time he had to give a rah-rah speech at his old high school about the college he wasn't attending. He thought he could just wing it, but he couldn't meet the eyes of the students with their earnest expressions and thoughtful questions, so he stared at the powdered donuts in the front of the podium, and, inspired, lifted one up and ate it, talking about how good they were. He thought he could magically catapult from that to something else, but he didn't, he just kept talking about powdered donuts as confectionery sugar spilled all over his face and hands, a perfect example to the dutiful students of how college destroys young minds. The ladies clung for dear life to his banter, but both he and I kept remembering that we were nearing the black and red hour, and still had no place to jam. We thought of taking his guitar and going to the park, but the last time we did that, someone ostentatiously threw pennies at our feet, not kind and generous like in the ghetto but with a yuppie obnoxiousness, to show that he didn't have to care or listen. Finally, Lester, as if he had been holding out on me, mentioned that yes, he knew of a place. He gave me a recorder and took a plastic saxophone for himself and we headed off.
We walked straight into the ghetto, past sunken porches and junked Cadillacs, as if following the flame that had blackened all the windows, doors and roofs. The only life left on the trees was the batting from gypsy moth webs. We could feel the African spirits accompany us, their shivering bells following us a beat behind and their infinitesimal wails impossible to confuse with the wheezing bus on Greenmount Avenue. We finally stepped down into the cellar of a burned out church. On the side was a faded hand-lettered sign that read "Church of Albert Ayler Mass 4:00 Sunday, Open Jam 7:00 Weekdays." It was frigid outside, but inside was that perfect 50 degree constant temperature of a cavern. A small collection box stood next to the plywood door, above which was a gilded picture of a black man in an orange leather vest and what can only be described as leprechaun shoes. He looked young, but had a beard with a strange white wisp in it and the saddest, most haunted expression I'd ever seen. Below the picture was a quote: "Words are only music." Lester pulled me away, saying "It's not polite to look at Saint Albert too long." I noticed the collection plate had nothing in it.
Something like a stage (or was it an altar) stood at the center of the room. There was sawdust all over the floor and a pervasive smell of sandalwood, ash and piss. It was almost like a bar except the patrons, the five or so of them, were drinking rose hip tea or papaya juice. I noticed they too had instruments with them, a trumpet, a kalimba, a bongo drum. A very tall and serious black gentleman in a dashiki asked us if we wanted anything from the refreshments center. On Lester's lead, I ordered banja tea, which turned out to be a steaming cup of steeped twigs. As we sat on one of the tightly bunched, flimsy tables covered with manila packing paper, someone started to talk to us about the white man stealing "the music" and killing all the warriors. The spiritual core of the black man was so threatening he had to be starved to death and his works destroyed, "while the Rolling Stones make $5 million a day for playing the blues." My immediate reaction was envy, that something as simple as her skin color could give her enough identity to explain away the horrible indifference that was the artists lot. But her comments did made me look around and see the fellow cave denizens not as angry African-Americans, but as just another sad and hopeless bunch like me. I saw again that look which seemed unique to the city of Poe: the wild dress, the crazy hair, the deranged eyes that begged you to stay away from their lethal secret, but only as a way to get you to reach through the haze of indifference to ask it, so that you'd listen to their stories, of the unfathomable unfairness of their lives, the incomparable insights their brains could scarcely hold, the visions and warnings they needed to share with the planet but couldn't speak about -- in short, their pain. It had become so long ignored, it had taken on an exaggerated quality of watching and being watched, like a Poe tale where his oversensitive horror at life itself can only be conveyed by an extremity of observation: the view from the inside of a locked vault or coffin, or the terror of being watched, killed, in fact, by the eyes of the innocent raven. These people, like Poe, had to lie horribly to make their reality make sense to others, but their eyes gave them away, and were much more terrifying.
I was trying to explain all this to Lester, but he was trying to warn me: "be careful of the music, man. You've got to have a strong foundation with this stuff, it will kill you if you don't handle it the right way." I was pondering this when a sudden noise overtook the room. I looked up. The stage was suddenly shaking. A man with an Afro and too-large glasses was standing on a chair to play an six-feet tall Buescher Bass Saxophone, while a lighter gentleman with a handlebar moustache and a leather fedora blew a contrabass clarinet held together with duct tape. Both stood stone still except for their lips churning and their thin white fingers dancing furiously along the pads. Their dissonant counterpoint was not the bleats and splats one would expect from such instruments, it was like the rupturing of the cosmos, the heart-altering sound of the doomed, of those who had opened Pandora's box and had seen God and could not escape from the chaos. There were no notes, harmonies, time. They were playing only sounds, the sound of a subway squealing to a stop before a third-railed suicide, a horse seeing a ghost in the vivid lightning bolt, a baby's cry falling down an infinite well. I felt stricken, healed, redeemed. It was heart-attack-inducing, life-affirming, primitive, ethereal, it made me want to laugh, cry, scream, commit murder, fuck, fight a cop, pray, escape the mortal coil, be born again, curl up into a tiny ball and become completely indifferent to everything but this savage blast of sound. It was so strong it actually enticed ghosts into the room, even though neither we nor the ghosts particularly wanted them to be there. The musicians were so close I could see inside the horns, and when the other people started playing their instruments, it was as if we were all in the middle of some holy orchestra, playing in the pit for the dance of senseless death on-stage. We all were drawn into this holy caterwaul, my recorder spontaneously finding the overtones where the spirit voices resided, my fingers magically avoiding all the notes that had been combined before, the octaves shifting uncontrollably. My sound formed a part of the collective melody only when I tried to stray as far from it as I could; when I listened away from it, there it was, and I found a way in, a connection. People began to moan and testify, single voices began to acquire a second harmonic tone, and even the sung language was wholly imaginary, yet it was more real, more human than any actual language; it was pure expression, stripped of the inevitable politics of communication.
We played 'til the callous that formed on my lip started to bleed. In the silence in the wake of it all, the people in the room looked away from each other suspiciously, despite the intimacy of our communion.
The bass clarinet player came to our table. Lester asked him for guava juice. I wanted to say how stunned I was by this performance. "I'm surprised," I finally said, "by how few people are here tonight. Is it the weather?"
"Are you kidding? This is more people than we've had in years."
I gulped. "You mean there's nobody to appreciate all this...beauty."
"What do you mean nobody," he laughed, "you're here, aren't ya?"
"Yeah, but," I looked at the brown stains on the walls, "it seems to me something this... powerful should be shared with as many folks as possible. It could save lives."
"Where have you been, child?" he chuckled. "There ain't no one out there for the music. Never was, never will. All the great ones died in the gutter. There weren't mor'en five beboppers for example when the whole thing went down, and they sure as hell didn't get nothing for their trouble. Who else is there but us?" He looked at me real intense, making me feel privileged and frightened at the same time.
"Yeah, but surely in New York, there's more..."
"There ain't nothing creative happening in New York, my boy," he growled. "The only way to survive there is to follow around the cat who sucked the most dick and try to sound just like him."
Something outside of myself compelled me to keep trying. "But what about that great syncopated sound of the Apple, the pulse and clang you feel when you're walking down the streets?"
"Just the streets trying to breathe through all the clogged canyons of people is all 'at is. Here, it gotta breathe through the ghosts, and that's a deeper sound."
"How long has this place been around," I asked.
"I been here since the late Fifties. This place usta be sumptin. All the heavy burnin cats came through: Rafael Donald Garrett, Frank Wright, Henry Grimes, they all used to come in to deal with the freshest sounds, even Coltrane would come by, but the sound was too heavy for him. In those days, see, there was the struggle, to speak and be heard in our own tongue. We were about taking back the music, from the swill and whoredom and reefer and scag and Kool cigarettes and Playboy magazine and all those gone attitudes that made white people feel hip but kept the discussion away from what was really going down on our people. We were about holy thoughts, clean living, taking it to the next level, looking at history with some discipline for a change, not just the musical tradition but the whole...diaspora, the whole situation. You need history, you see, a perspective, to get that sound that can cut away what seems most set. Most of all we wanted to turn our whole lives into a shell to cradle the music, to become the horn that delivered the truth pure, without no shuckin'." He seemed to grin, even as his eyebrows stayed furrowed. "But they were as savage as they said our music was, to keep I guess us from giving our children sumptin to believe in. They wouldn't book us or write about us or pay us anything, aah, but we knew we were the truth. We thought because we were blessed and honest and because we lived for the music, the future would be ours. But, nowadays, Hell, they think it's tragic the music ever existed. If they think about us at all, that is."
"But the musicians knew," I gently offered.
"Ah! The performers hated us more than the audience, thought we made it seem like anyone could pick up any instrument and play free, which was kinda the whole point, dig, everyone has the spirit running through them. All they proved is that they couldn't do it."
"It seems to me you made your point, look at...Ornette Coleman," I said, trying to sound knowledgeable.
"Sheet! Not his Texas rock star jive, I'm not talking ento-tainment, reheated Charlie Parker riffs without chords, I'm talking art, man."
"But didn't your attitude rub off...somehow...like on the punks and rappers?"
"Goddamn puerile wet dreams that don't come, good Lord! What the hell you playing, boy, a thumb flute?"
I sat stone silent for a moment, feeling guilty for being so wrong before the master, not realizing that my innocence was like aged scotch to him. He smiled after a minute and said "Mehbee you can help me out. You're a writer, am I correct?"
"Aw, no, I'm a..." I couldn't say the word musician.
"I'm scoring a ballet, a modern version of Petrushka. I need someone to do the libretto. You are familiar with the story?"
"No, sir, I am not."
"Back in the day! You should acclimate yourself with it, son. History can tell us some wonderful things."
"I'm not sure I have time."
"Young man, where there's a will, there's a way. Now, excuse me, I must get some beverages delivered before the next set."
"How long does this go on?" I asked Lester after he had left.
"'Til about 4 or 5 in the morning."
"Pretty wild, huh?"
"Oh, it's the rill dill, McGill," he said as he downed in a gulp the orange liquid he was served.
Both of us wanted to get away, to our rock star fantasies and our myriad addictions. Lester suggested a place down the street called Kitty's Lounge where they served shots of Grand Marnier for 99 cents. This place was even more tucked away seedy than the church. The drinks were just as advertised, but more surprising was the number of people I recognized. There was a local sportscaster, a fundraiser whose glasses and smile always graced the society page, a car dealer who was on TV more than the shows. They all seemed to be waiting nervously and desperately for something to happen. Giant birdcages were tied by rope to the ceiling. In the background, industrial music clanged on, like machines finally brought to the point of screaming, but whether from pain, orgasm, or humiliation it was impossible to tell. I went to the men's room. Instead of the universal signs I saw three doors, marked Heaven, Hell and Purgatory. I of course wanted to see Hell first, but a lady with clothespins stuck all over her face told me she couldn't let me enter unless I signed a waiver form, so I asked her where the bathrooms were, and she asked if I was gay or straight. I knew why when I got there, as a man wearing nothing but a diaper begged me to pee in his cup. I realized that this was the only place these people could go to exercise the sexual perversions that had made them forsake the blessings of a normal life and yearn for the darkness of the spotlight. Ironic, that; they had to come down all the way into this dingy anonymous tank to enjoy their snuff films and have their skin eaten (who can forget the taste of human flesh?). I sensed an impending storm cloud of unspeakable perversion ready to explode, and these men slouched at the bar were waiting to view it with the gentlest of faces. Lester and I took our toy instruments off the bar as if they were six-shooters and went back home.
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