"Across the street they've nailed the curtains,
They're getting ready for the feast,
The phantom of the opera,
A perfect image of a priest.
They're spoonfeeding Casanova
To get him to feel more assured,
Then they'll kill him with self-confidence
After poisoning him with words;
And the phantom shouting to skinny girls:
'Get outta here if you don't know
Casanova is just being punished
For going to Desolation Row.'"
-Bob Dylan
"Is this Felix?" It was a voice that sounded like every girlfriend I had ever had.
"Yes, is this...?"
A giggle. "Oh, you don't know me..."
"Are you sure? You sound so familiar."
"I'm quite sure you've never met me in your life. My name is Katherine and Lester told me I needed to get your approval before we could see each other again." Another giggle. "He's told me a lot about you."
"Is Lester with you?"
"No, he's still in Spain with his father. He needs to get out of this country every now and again."
"Are you in contact with him?"
"Oh yes. Not too much by phone, of course, but he's written me letters."
"He writes letters?"
"Yes, wonderful ones, and they sound just the same as the way he talks. He said you could help me to understand some of the more puzzling aspects of his personality."
"I'll do what I can, lady, but I haven't seen him in a year."
"I know that." She paused. "I wonder if you could comment on his extreme vulnerability."
"He strikes me as one of those picaros one finds throughout Europe who live off their wit and their taste but who can't survive in this country. He really needs a patron, I think." I was more surprised by my response than by the question.
"I see," she said, as if I had any idea of what I was talking about. "His father thinks it's a shame he has to work. Isn't that peculiar?"
"Actually, that makes perfect sense. He's an oppositional kind of guy. It's like Dylan said 'there's no success like failure.'"
"Who said that?"
"Bob Dylan."
"I'm not familiar with him. Sounds a bit like Rimbaud, if you ask me, but getting back to the subject, where does one go after a childhood like that?"
"I'm not sure I know what you mean."
"The utter indulgence, being allowed to rip paintings off of museum walls if he didn't fancy them, having every line he uttered picked over at cocktail parties."
"That's all news to me. What does his father do?"
"His father is still recovering."
"From what?" I asked.
"The shock. I guess the question I'm formulating is this: Is escape possible? Can a man find a new life or must the devil inevitably destroy it?"
"It depends on how innocent his soul has remained," I said, groping.
"But what if, through no fault of his own, his soul was taken. Can he get another one?"
"No. He has to get the old one back ," I replied, still not willing to admit that I had no idea what this woman was talking about.
"I see. That's exactly what I needed to know. Thank you very much"
"Wait a minute. Can you fill me in on a few details?"
"Why?" she cheerfully answered. "You've just explained everything. I was afraid Lester only wanted to use my powers for enlightenment, and that he wasn't prepared to perform the necessary destructions. You've convinced me otherwise."
"I have? Powers? Aren't I supposed to bless you or something?" I was trying to get as much information before this strange current of energy was gone.
"You already have, silly."
2.
You can bet I mulled over that conversation a hard long time. So I was an important part of Lester's life? Enough, it appeared, to send the chief investigative reporter for Satan's Sentinel to my doorstep. And what were those allusions to his childhood? I resolved to be more insistent with him the next time around.
I wouldn't have to wait long. The next day he called. "So what do you think of her?" he asked.
"What constellation did she say she was from?"
"Oh, the hocus-pocus, don't mind that. Wasn't her voice really sweet? So you think she really likes me?"
"Yeah, she's a nice girl," I said, "But what was that thing about your father recovering in Spain?"
"Did she say that?" He laughed. "I knew you two should talk. It saves me a whole lot of trouble. Sounds like you hit it off."
"Do you not want to talk about your family?" I asked, taking the last refuge of the scoundrel.
"My father reminds me a lot of you, actually. He's a brilliant man, a teacher. He's now doing archaeological research on all the taverns mentioned in the Lazarillo de Tormes."
"For a university?" I asked.
"He's an adjunct professor right now for a community college in Omaha. He teaches at a U.S. Army Base in Madrid."
"What did he used to do?"
"Oh, he's taught everywhere, a Fulbright scholar, Cornell, Princeton, Yale. He was always asked to leave because he had the good sense to never write anything down. My mother wrote his Ph.D dissertation."
"That's so interesting," I said. "What was it like growing up in a house like that?"
"Well, I grew up among a bunch of annoying celebrities. James Wright changed my diapers. Robert Bly used our place to hide whenever he was being chased by the FBI or collection agencies. Sam Fuller used to kick me out of my bed and the thing would reek of cigars the next day. I saved Bob Dylan's life."
"What?"
"Yeah, there was a big party and everyone was up on the roof looking at the stars. Bobby had to go up, but he couldn't come back down the ladder. He kind of freaked out. I was the only one there who could climb up and carry him down. What thanks did I get? Nada."
"At least you got to touch his garment. That's more than the guy who wrote 'Blowing In The Wind' can say."
"You mean the orderly in the hospital where Woody Guthrie stayed? I was so relieved when I found out about that. 'Blowing in the Wind' is such a dreadful song. Take it away from his oeuvre and you'll find no protest songs and no folk music, just beatnik rock'n'roll. No, I think the guy who wrote it got a lot more than me. His song wasn't folded up after the high school talent show, and he ended up a normal person instead of a drug-crazed paranoid who can't walk down the street without being spit at. That's actually one of the kinder anecdotes from the annals of show business, don't ya think?"
"Yeah, look at James Jamerson, the Motown bassist. What did Paul McCartney do for him?" I said this even though I recalled some trust fund for his widow. "How did your folks meet up with all that glitterati?"
"Drugs. That always brings 'em together — that and the fact they are celebrity lepers — huh, sounds like a game show, doesn't it? Have you ever noticed how those Hollywood celebrities and sports figures all hang together? Paula and Arsenio and Quincy and Magic, they're all good friends."
"But they are all such anti-drug crusaders."
"Wouldn't you be?" Lester had a ticklish little giggle as he talked, and it made you want to laugh.
"I don't know about all that," I said, wondering how this topic had come up.
"C'mon, the Beats all prayed at the church of Benzedrine, today's fashion models are all cokeheads just like yesterday's Hollywood chorus line girls were heroin addicts. Only wretches need apply. I thought we were evolved enough to realize all this."
"Aren't you generalizing just a little bit?"
"Hey, the history of rock'n'roll is the history of drugs. Name me one rock star who was better after he kicked the habit. The joint was passed from some itinerant street musician to Neal Cassidy to Allen Ginsburg to Dylan to the Beatles who passed it to the world. And then Brian Wilson tried to outdo them by cubing himself, and then came the junkie heroes, Messrs. Clapton, Richards, Page, the whole gaunt, mangy, glistening crew from James Taylor to John Lennon. The best bands are still those with the best drugs, if for no other reason than the drummer makes the band, and drugs are all drummers care about. These new avenues are just new chemicals: Punk is greens, Hip Hop is crack, British fag rock is poppers and DMT, and we all know what Reggae is about. What musician with anything to say wouldn't mainline himself off a cliff chasing after God? Frank Zappa? Is that what we'd be stuck with?"
"You know all about it."
"You can listen to me, or not listen to me. The choice is yours. I'm just reporting what I've seen." He started coughing violently. "Ah, that was a good one," he gasped after it was over.
"A good cough? I asked.
"A good hit," he corrected.
I felt a powerful urge, at that moment, to get high. That may, in fact, have been what inspired me to try to set up another rendezvous. "You never did claim that amplifier I promised you as a wedding gift," I offered.
"Oh, yeah, or the bong," he said, as if he had forgotten about the whole thing.
"Aren't you supposed to give me something. My brother-in-law gave me a set of Hummel figurines." He was playing into this a little too easily.
"I gave you a buzz, didn't I?" Again, that delicious smirk crinkled through the phone lines.
"OK, well, anyway, I was wondering if I could deliver the amp. Where do you live?"
"I have an apartment at the corner of Park and Monument. The basement apartment. I have my own door. Check me tomorrow afternoon after four...and don't forget the bong."
3.
I had an amplifier in storage that was left over from an ill-advised experiment in Lionel Richie impersonation in high school, but a bong...Where on earth would I procure one of those? A quick review of the yellow pages was of no help. An inventory of friends who might have something in the attic did me no good. After a hopeless search of the alley in back of my apartment complex, I finally decided to give Yankee ingenuity a try. I found a glass beaker in an old chemistry set, and fashioned holes using an Exacto knife, a penny and, for the carburetor, a button. I stuffed a three-inch strip of copper tubing I found in the utility room into the larger hole, affixing to it a knurled nut from the EZ Plumbing kit given to me for my eighteenth birthday. I screwed into the nut the wooden bowl of an old fisherman's pipe I found on an diorama I had done in eighth grade. For a filter, I cut out a coin-shaped segment of the window screen and, Voila, une Bong.
I put the bong in a paper sack and hid it in the opening at the back of the amplifier. Fortunately, this amp had wheels, so I could roll it down the street to the bus stop. Getting it on the bus was more difficult — I had to use the wheelchair lift. As is usually the case in Baltimore, my fellow passengers were more annoyed that I was interfering in some small way with their own problems than curious about what I was doing on a bus with a television-sized amplifier.
It was two cobblestone blocks from the bus stop to Lester's place, but I felt surprisingly comfortable trundling my speaker down the sidewalk. This neighborhood had beautiful Victorian mansions of brownstone and red brick, with long elegant windows, ornate stonework, flourishes of brass and wrought-iron, and huge bay windows cantilevering out over streets lined with flowering trees and kerosene street lamps. On every corner, huge churches that can only be described as gothic cathedrals loomed, stirring some fear from deep in my ancestral blood. The streets were full of interesting-looking people, stylishly-dressed, sensitive, intelligent, but somehow distant, with a tortured look that I took at the time to be the mein of the artist in the grip of obsessions. I heard a cello feel its way through Shubert, while a piano in a house nearby accompanied it with Liszt. I thought immediately of how nice this area would be for my wife and I to live in.
Lester's door was just where he described it. The only problem was he wasn't around.
I decided to wait, sitting on my amplifier like a chair. I started gazing at the black, humorless statue in the park across the street. Its eyes looked for inspiration in the skies, as it sat, sword resting, on a terrified steed. Within a few minutes, I noticed a thin black man sitting on the concrete next to me. He wore ratty clothes and reeked of BO and alcohol.
"You waiting for the conservatory to open?" he asked, but his voice was so thick as to be almost indecipherable.
"No, just waiting for a friend," I politely responded, hoping this man would just ask for my money and go on.
As if I had said some kind of magic word, he started talking about how the world didn't understand, how everyone had abandoned him, how the universities were corrupt, how he envied people who could just walk down the street and think nothing of it. His voice was shaking and he had a heartbreaking look in his eyes.
"My friend should be here any minute now," I said, looking intently at the marble stoops across the street.
"Yeah, I know. Have you ever read Saussure?" Was I wearing some kind of sign?
"Sure," I lied.
"Doesn't that make you suspicious of ideas?"
"How so?"
"Truth is divine and infinite, but ideas apply a fatal closure — to mark its conditions, medium and limits in an external and supernal dialectic that leaves one systematically and genealogically exposed to misunderstanding and nonrecognition." He leaned his face close to mine as he spoke, overpowering me with his nasty scent.
"I thought Saussure was a linguistic philosopher," I ventured, hoping that wasn't the wrong answer.
"That's exactly what I'm saying," he slurred, somewhat irritated. "Consciousness is only a physiophonetic fact, automatic and prephenomenological. Since there is no absolute perceptival origin of any sense, the invariance and variability juxtaposing themselves between signifier and signified cannot be mediated, thus one never knows whether one's interpretation of reality shifts toward the infinite or the impossible, but you won't expect any professor to acknowledge this."
"Not even a structuralist?" I asked. Anytime I didn't understand a philosophical concept, it was usually explained as Structuralism.
"No, man, this is basic physics," he rasped. "Haven't you ever read de Broglie? We can never determine the frequency of a wave because it must be infinitely long. As we do with language, with God, we could measure its frequency against a standard oscillation, but we would have to wait forever to be absolutely sure. Hence, since we can never actually determine the frequency or wavelength of a wave, nor the position and momentum of a particle, we never know if it is a wave or particle, or neither. So matter is irrefragably impermeable. That's Bohr's theory of complementarity, but no one cares to follow its implications."
He hiccoughed, then continued. "But that's all rational analysis. The key is that there are quite simply other modalities in place that disrupt all the paradigms of logos. You know what I mean?"
"Yes," I lied, realizing I had nothing but time.
"It's still physiology, really, the connections in the vestibular labyrinth of the ear. The ganglion cells innervate the ampullae of the ducts and the maculae of the utricle and saccule. So we are distanced, just like Adam and Eve. It's so clear."
Strained past my tolerance, I finally replied, "so what?" and he got that hurt look back again.
"Man, how can you even ask that? I was thinking you were cool up to that moment, but you blew it, man, you blew it."
"I'm sorry," I said, not knowing what else to say. His ether was getting to me.
Before I knew it, Lester arrived with the key. As he was opening the door, I wanted to continue the conversation, but the man was gone.
"What's the matter?" Lester asked.
"There was a wino just here talking about post-deconstructionalist quantum theory."
"It's just as well, I don't understand any of that stuff anyway."
Lester's pad was the apartment equivalent of that little utility drawer in everyone's kitchen where stuff that doesn't belong anywhere else collects into a fascinating chaos. A rubberized toilet seat rug was being used as the entrance mat. Two piles lie in unholy coexistence on either side of the room: a pile of vinyl and recording tape (it would be too charitable to call them records and cassettes) and a pile of putrid clothes. The beat-up stereo I recognized from Butcher's Hill rested uneasily on some cracked cinder blocks. On one wall hung a bike chassis, on the other a used dropcloth. In the center was a sofa-sized pad of foam, a beanbag chair with pellets all over the floor, and a wood table darkened by many layers of lacquer and polyurethane and now covered with ashes and melted candle wax. In the far corner was an empty bookcase whose books were strewn everywhere — in the bathtub, on top of the refrigerator, lodged into the broken glass in the window, as a doorjamb. Scattered around were such oddities as a Chinese food menu, croquet mallets, a plastic guitar, a super ball with a streamer tail of glitter, two wind-up toy robots that spit out sparks when they moved, an orange road cone, and a dead cactus. The eye was drawn to the aluminum pan in the sink. The inside of it looked like a Petri dish, with a strange blue fungus growing from the center. The refrigerator giggled and wheezed like an emphysematous old man in second childhood. The window blinds were completely drawn, making the place look as dark as a bank in the mysterious late afternoon light. Lester lit a candle. He had run out of light bulbs and had not bothered to go to the store to pick up more.
"Quite an improvement," I noted. "But what about the science project in the sink, why don't you clean it up or throw it away?"
"I'm too scared of it," he said. "Now let me see that bong."
I pulled it out. He examined it, gave an approving "hm," then went to the fridge. He opened the door and I suddenly heard a loud squealing. There was nothing inside of it but a jug of ice water. He poured some down the center of the bong. He pulled out a stuffed baggie full of herb. It had a sweetly pungent scent, like oranges mixed with cigarette butts. He pulled out a big bud, three inches long and one inch wide. With fingers like a surgeon, he crumbled off the tip of it, and sprinkled powder neatly into the bowl. He handed me the pipe with an indulgent smile. There looked to be more dope than I could possibly smoke, but it went down very easily in one hit, the ice water smoothing out the rough edges. I held it in for what seemed like a minute before exhaling. A huge plume of smoke came out of my mouth and wouldn't stop. I instinctively began coughing, a deep, dry catarrh. He smiled in appreciation. "Kind buds, eh?"
I felt my lungs tightening and my pulse racing, but within a few seconds everything seemed imbued with a divine presence. The long bus ride, the unfathomable neighborhood, even the strange man seemed connected to the vision I was accessing, indeed they were all a part of me. The angel at my center suddenly started breathing, and new things began appearing I hadn't noticed before — the tree branch outside the window swayed in a strange, yet familiar way; the face on a book entitled "Arab Politics" had an unearthly shine, and it seemed to be chastising me as well as pleading with me to do something; Andy Summer's rhythm guitar could be distinguished from the rest of The Police, and every chord offered up visions of mountain temples, hazy harbor pagodas and long, lonely corridors of glass and marble overlooking endless green meadows. When I closed my eyes, a jade field of light appeared, and flickering through it went all manner of spirits and monsters, a sea of life constantly mutating and changing, some images clinging to my awareness, others floating just beyond, all of them unimaginable. I sat in the beanbag chair and felt myself sinking to eternity, pulled in by a chain that reached to the center of the earth and spun dizzily in a sidereal path across the ever-expanding cosmos. Even as I felt everything being pulled into my orbit, I was completely alone, Lester and the other sluggish, puzzling creatures a part of a reptile world with reptilian brains. My skin felt numb, my nerves raw, and the transparent wall between myself and the rest of the world began to take on deeper, darker hues.
Lester, however, wanted to talk about sex. "I just got back from my old girlfriend, Kristine. Things got a little out of hand, if you know what I mean," he said.
I looked at him with the universal raised eyebrow symbol and he nodded. "And you're worried that Katherine might find out," I said.
"Shh," he said, "she lives upstairs." I found it odd he would ask for quiet when I could not hear myself think over "The King of Pain." "The problem is... I have no will, no control at all. Even Sophocles would have been depressed seeing Kristine and I together, but look at me, trying to revive it, after two years of learning how to take care of myself." I was thinking how he must have meant this in a figurative sense. "And even stranger, I actually love Katherine. I want everything to be...magical, but...well, let's just say there are other problems."
"Sounds like that old scared of commitment cliché that women talk-show hosts always trot out to explain a man's motivation," I replied glibly. "So what are these problems you're referring to?"
"Well, this is very difficult to talk about. I think it stems from the fact that she was born on John Lennon's birthday. She has a distastefully masculine approach to...love, as if I'm some zoo animal. I've tried to be coy and let her hold all the cards, but, jeez, she's thought through every angle before I get there. I thought the stupid one was supposed to be the aggressor."
"Hence the infidelity thing," I suggested.
"That's just it. There is no...sex. She tries so hard I, or rather I, have to deny her...I guess I have this old-fashioned view of romance. Souls should remember each other from another life before they even hold hands. Let's face it, Felix, sex is an extremely bizarre and unnatural act. Many candles must be sacrificed before one can truly acquire its taste."
"That's old-fashioned all right, the old whore and Madonna complex," I retorted, sawing an imaginary violin, not believing what I was hearing.
"You think so?" He seemed completely oblivious to the fact that I was mocking him. "You're married, you know about all that stuff. What should I do? Everything just seems so unconscious with Kristine. She's not physically beautiful, but she always has that look that makes me feel like a man. With her, it slips in every time. Katherine, on the other hand, is supremely beautiful, like white flowers against a grey sky, with eyes that see far away, cheeks that seem chiseled by time, lips that have kissed a thousand kings and found them all wanting. I want so much to have a...normal relationship, but something in me won't let it happen." He paused. " I guess she just refuses to ever say the thing I expect." He paused again. "It would devastate her if she found out what was going on. What kind of twisted fate has led Kristine back into my life now?"
My instinct was to give him the advice that would best serve my self-interest. This Katherine woman seemed way too bizarre and manipulative, while a banker's daughter might bring Lester closer to my world. Still, I knew the best I could do in the circumstances was to string along and let things take a natural course. "I need another bowl before I can think straight," I said.
After receiving my dosage with the utmost efficiency, I began my pontification. "It seems to me that this is a test — for you and Katherine. You need to make a decision. She needs to let you find her. Ironically, this kind of betrayal, if that's what it is, will only increase your need for her. By the same token, your anxiety about your own sexual competence only makes you more attractive to her. I'd like to tell you to go jump desperately off a bridge, all is lost, but the situation is so perfect as to be almost banal."
"Yeah, I guess you're right. Kristine and I had this hopeless symbiotic teenage tragedy thing going...which often happens at the Bruce Springsteen age."
"Remember all the movies Terry we'd go see, trying to learn to walk like the heroes we thought we had to be," I sang.
"It's time I grew up and faced up to a bitter, distrustful adult relationship...maybe I've reached the Elvis Costello stage of development," he laughed, without missing a beat.
"You gave me the kiss of my life. I might even live to tell the tale," I added.
"Every wall is a door, and vice-versa," he continued merrily, as if he had finally found the contradiction that would solve all his problems. "Hey, you want to meet Katherine? She should be home by now."
We went upstairs. I suddenly felt rather uneasy. I was expecting Mata Hari, complete with black candles and shrunken heads. Instead, I found an ordinary apartment, in the front hall of which was the ugliest caricature I'd ever seen, a grey pastel sketch of what I assumed was a circus freak in a business suit. Lester commented in passing it that a sidewalk artist did it, and that it captured that special quality of Katherine and how amazed he was that a stranger could pick up on that. The real Katherine followed his comment into the main room. I tried to find, fantasy-starved roué that I am, a hint of beauty in her face. She had mousy, expressionless eyes hidden behind thick glasses, puffy jowls, and bloated, pouty lips that seemed to hold her mouth open. But then when I looked again, she looked like Marilyn Monroe, with a wanton smirk, a sensuous pout, attaching eyes, her round and firm body harnessed behind a librarian sweater, her lustiness accentuated rather than hidden by her glasses.
Far from the dominatrix she seemed on the phone, she appeared quietly terrified of both of us. She seemed to look at me, especially, with a guilty, squirrelly look. I offered up a few friendly gobs of small talk, which she handled as if she was at a job interview. I then asked her what she did for a living. She said she was about ready to quit her current occupation as an office manager for an accounting firm. That sounded like an interesting job, I replied, and I asked her about it. Becoming more comfortable, she threw around some terms that sounded to me like magical talismans, keys to hidden worlds, words like accounts receivable, traffic coordination, and collections control. Student that I was, I couldn't believe that such fascinating duties could be as boring as she considered them to be. I asked her what kind of work she was looking to do. She replied that she wanted to help people, and that there was an opening in Good Neighborhoods, a nonprofit organization that helped poor people prevent eviction.
"Like the Communist party in Italy," added Lester, bemused.
"I think that's great," I said, "Howd'ya find out about it?"
"Actually Lester kinda pointed me in that direction."
4.
After it was determined that she could not hang and smoke weed with us, Lester and I went back down to his fallout shelter. The subject of Katherine seemed to evaporate from his mind. He was now intent on what would come to be known as "jamming." It involved him comping irregular chord changes on an out-of-tune guitar and expecting me to complement it with some perversely off-key melody from whatever instrument I could lay my hands on: kazoo, pennywhistle, gyroscope, it sounded the same no matter what I was playing. The louder I got, the more he tried to drown me out by banging the chords even more out-of-tune, which made me more resolved to play even louder and more off-key. In those early days, it was all relatively harmless, a druggie drone causing no more cause for alarm than say, a Hare Krishna chant. As our homicidal impulses were quickened, however, the number of sane people who would want anything to do with us narrowed, perfect strangers turned into savages, the authorities were inevitably summoned to snap some heads, and a whole new circle of lost souls was inexplicably pulled in, like bats to a saw-tooth wave, thinking our shaggy cacophonies the very expression of their demented spirits. Ah, but I'm getting way ahead of myself.
The whole thing started with Lester suggesting an actual song to cover, and me saying I didn't know that tune, then me suggesting an alternative that Lester would claim not to know. This ritual was repeated for years, a necessary prelude to the chaos that would follow. This first time, we started with a passable version of "Tracks of my Tears," except that the chords were wrong, the tempo was too fast, the melody was improvisationally altered, and most of the lyrics were either forgotten or mumbled. By the end of that first "session," I was reciting rapid-fire gibberish rhymes that were drowned in dissonant power chords and heart-attack rhythms, a little something we labeled Jap Rap. Then and later, Lester had a way of pushing everything way past its limits. It was only when my fingers were bleeding and my mind had already checked into the Betty Ford clinic that he felt our best work was possible. It is hard to say whether this "third wind" of utter exhaustion and carelessness brought Bach's angels hovering near our mortal instruments, for this was always the point where the tape machine ran out of room, the spools finally fleeing in horror along with any other well-intentioned visitors.
It was one AM before we finally put down our butterfly net guitars. I had semi-knowingly forgotten my required nine PM phone call, and spent much of the intervening time flatting my notes from the anxiety of what was to become of me. My angst reached a fever pitch when it became clear that my unannounced absence from my home was now unavoidable. I'm not sure the invisible music critics accepted my musical explanations any more than my wife accepted the couldn't find a phone or a bus excuse, but I wallowed in the glory of my tragedy — here I was being consumed on the altar of high art and she thought it was all a pointless indulgence; I was brimming with the ideas the world was crying for while she cynically used her complete lack of comprehension as a weapon; I was wrestling with the Faustian decision to be free but she was stuck in the fly paper of her own insecurity. At my somber spectacle, the spirits must have been rolling in laughter, for they knew the whole world saw through my act, but amazingly, I did not.
5.
Within a week Lester had moved into Katherine's apartment. As spring came and brought back smells to the city, I visited him more and more often on my way to and from school. That homemade bong acquired the resinous patina of our discourses on such insoluble topics as: who was the greatest left-handed pitcher in baseball history (we got into such a pitched battle between Lefty Grove and Sandy Koufax that we finally gave the honor to Steve Carlton because he went bankrupt giving money to bums); who was calling the shots, Picasso or Braque, Murnau or Lang, Dean or Brando, Pollock or De Kooning, Bogie or Bacall, Lennon or Ono?; who had worse lyrics, Dan Fogelberg or Yes? (this one I won on points with Yes' "Total Mass Retain"); which was better, The Odyssey or The Iliad, and which translation?
At school, I majored in cowering in the back row hoping I wouldn't be called on, and started supplementing my law books with "The Collected Works of Sylvia Plath." While my fellow students were starting to intern for judges or footnote law review articles, I was bussing tables at various restaurants, following a trail of ambience that seemed baffling to everyone else but always made perfect sense to me, and always led me back somehow to this dated neighborhood that time forgot and its tenants, whom everyone forgot.
Me, like a student on a semester abroad, and Lester, flush with his student loan or grant or stipend or fellowship (it was never fully explained what it was or how he got it or what requirements besides not going to college were attached to it) would take me around. We had hot Ralston cereal with molasses and root beer floats at an old-fashioned drugstore soda fountain, we surveyed foreign newspapers at Sherman's stationary store, where old man Sherman (who was, I later learned, the de facto mayor of Baltimore between 1930 and 1949) would interpret the news by glaring at us with the meanest look in the world, we found 50 cent suits and $1 records like "The Elvis Presley Christmas Album" at the Goodwill store, we tried in vain to convince ourselves that the mannequins in Hutzler's window weren't human, we scoffed at the upscale art gallery's collections, which usually looked as if painted by gorillas, and we bought Ernie Ball guitar strings and stole picks at Ted's Music, where hundreds of old instruments — zithers, clavichords, bass saxophones — hung from the ceiling like sides of ghost beef.
A kind of merry serendipity seemed to always surround us. For example, just as Lester was railing at the way men always have, by the power of their ignorance, forced women to conform to lives of hopeful despondency, we'd see in a sidewalk book stand a hippie paperback version of "The Subjection of Women," by J.S. Mill. Just as we were trying to figure out why our generation was labeled by the media one day as heartless greedheads and the next as lost, ambition-less waifs, we'd spy in the trash an old copy of "Growing Up Absurd" by Paul Goodman. Lester would be trying to explain to me why Rome is the greatest city on Earth when we'd pass a wood-oven pizza place, and order blanc pizzas topped with proscuitto, porcini mushrooms, water buffalo mozzarella and white asparagus. I'd be wondering what to get for my wife's anniversary present and we'd stumble into an outdoor flower bazaar pullulating with black-eyed susans and petunias. We'd be fantasizing about Edgar Poe and Francis Scott Fitzgerald, each the dissolute nephew of Baltimore's premiere literary icons, rolling from bar to bar somewhere near here in 1933 when we'd trip over the basement steps of the legendary Peabody Book Store and Beer Stube and fall inside to read the poems gouged into the tables, drink mint juleps, and listen to a pianist who had to play in white gloves because otherwise electrical sparks would attack his fingers.
Through all this, we had the distinct impression we were being watched. It seemed that no matter where we went, the proprietors were waiting for us. And invariably, once we got there, they seemed to feel their mission accomplished, and shut quickly down like a carnival or a Western movie ghost town set. Sherman's, open 60 years, burned down a week after we visited. The Peabody Book Store, open 100 years, was closed the next day.
6.
Lester and Katherine were inseparable, living together in a tiny room, in a tiny bed, reading aloud to each other, massaging each other while comparing notes on the injustices of the world. Katherine liked to brew big pots of Cambridge tea and we would sit sipping it on the fire escape, watching the birds migrate between the baroque eaves and the bleak city trees. As if by a divine blessing on their relationship, they found a mangy, almost dead kitten in the dumbwaiter. To nurse it to health, Katherine fed her the finest cat food on the market, a black paste she could find only at the Arabian grocery. Kitty, as she was called, soon had a collection of toys that would be the envy of any two-year old, as well as her own velour chair. Katherine would scatter seeds in the park in the early morning hours, before the police got there, spreading them around the sleeping bums in her black dress like a nun with a censer. This, of course, made the birds inviting targets for Kitty, but Katherine didn't care, she knew instinctively that life was nothing but ironies like that.
After a few months, with the pennyroyal she planted growing like ivy out of her window box, Katherine decided to give a party. I convinced my wife to come, as a chance to show off a new gown and maybe talk to some people her own age. In attendance were the usual suspects: blue-haired intellectuals; psychosluts in leather; young girls so full of raw life they had to chain-smoke, make themselves up like corpses, and wear weary existentialist attitudes; angry young horny alcoholic art school dropouts in flannel shirts who liked to talk about the latest torture devices; gregarious gay drug dealers and their depressed accountant lovers; smiling, sweet-smelling black men who winked at blondes and tried to be as quiet as possible, and so on. It was a labyrinthine mosaic of red and amber liquids and posturing hairstyles, all the mousse and tiptoeing serving the singular purpose of trying to get laid. It could be confusing: when a guy is coming on to you, you think he is actually talking about the chromium-filled crabs in Baltimore harbor, or when a girl is talking about lesbians in show business, you think she is actually coming on to you. My wife, long story short, felt a tad threatened by the solicitude of some of the men toward me and the amount of skin showing on the ladies and well, some egos ended up a mite bruised, a few walls a touch knocked over, but those who weren't hospitalized enjoyed themselves immensely, and those who were didn't remember a thing.
I was not so lucky. Not only was I asked to pay for the repair of the wall, I was forbidden by my wife to associate with such slatterns and ne'er-do-wells again. That, of course, did not stop me from continuing to visit Lester on the sly, but it gave me a kind of fatalism, a feeling that it was only a matter of time before this affair was discovered. One day, after a particularly brutal spoons and ukulele session of Sex Pistols covers, we found in Katherine's closet an old chimney sweep broom and a blindfold that looked like it would be used for Mardi Gras. I remarked how much easier it must be for a blind man to walk down the street than a guide, who had to face all the eyes who looked with fear and pity. He suggested we try an experiment where I wore the blindfold and carried the broom down to the 7 Eleven with him guiding me. I readily agreed, figuring his ulterior motive was to try to convince me once again, this time via a blind taste test, that 7 Eleven pizza was the best in town. I imagine we looked, as we walked past the law firms and ad agencies of this ivy-covered Victorian neighborhood, like a couple of idiots run amok from a Dickensian insane asylum, he with a Mike Nesmith wool cap, a Hawaiian shirt, and a red shark bathing suit, me with a restaurant uniform, a silly smirk, a blue blindfold webbed with lace, and the aforementioned broom, which I held like a kid holds a tennis racket pretending it's a guitar. As he gave me verbal direction, I was feeling fine, walking with a confidence I had never known before. Unbeknownst to me, though, Lester was freaking out, and by the time we got to the store, he bolted across the street, leaving me to wander the aisles alone. His consternation turned to mirth as watched me from the distance, artlessly dodging the Vienna sausages and pretending it was the most normal thing in the world to be shopping in a blindfold. He counted nine minutes before I finally took off the mask and to my horror saw that he was not there and that many others were there who were looking at me with an expression that wasn't sympathy and wasn't concern. I calmly bought a pack of wintergreen Velamints and strode out, just a fool and his broom.
Lester was beside himself with laughter, in a hurry to lay the incident at Katherine's feet like a cat drops a carcass. I tried to change the subject to how Gram Parsons had orchestrated the Seventies from the grave, but some things are more scandalous than art. When I went home that evening, I resolved to clean myself up, study harder, and trip more carefully around the trap doors of sensation.
7.
I managed to survive my first year of law school. Without any ambition to speak of, and locked in a terrified survival mode, I was given what amounted to a free pass, while those who actually dared dream, who could outthink the teachers and wanted to pursue the cases not found in the textbooks, were kicked and hindered at every opportunity.
My wife and I had moved into a generic apartment complex near her parents. It seems one of those immutable laws of nature that rental complexes always deteriorate during the time one lives there — from fresh, well-kept hotel rooms to roach-ridden, crime-infested hovels. In our case, what started as a lovely practice home for our practice marriage — sunny windows, louvered doors, track lighting, hallways smelling of chicken stock and the occasional chocolate chip cookie and echoing with the chirrup of young families and the measured adjustments of an elderly couple who looked like Kris and Emma Kringle — ended up with our neighbors replaced by a gang of crackheads in one apartment who played deafening rap music while across the hall skinheads on PCP tried to drown out the rap with satanic metal, along with other homey touches like trash bags in the trees, a bullet through our window (could've been fired from miles away, the police ballistics expert said), visitors held up at gun point, the storage room sacked of lawn furniture and Christmas ornaments, and drug deals transpiring as I walked out into the hallway at night. Ironically, this was a suburban lawn community whose residents were the sons and daughters of working-class city dwellers moving up or escaping, depending on one's perspective, from the poverty and chaos of the city, only to find it tailing them like a dripping private dick. I found it hard to muster up sympathy for all the hand-wringing among my in-laws over this issue. After all, I'd been spending a lot of time secretly in the maw of their nightmare, the center city, and finding literally none of the problems I'd encountered in my overpriced apartment; even in the projects there was a sense of decorum utterly lacking from my home.
As the hot Baltimore summer fell over everything, I again spent more time with Lester. I even brought him out to my apartment one day for some secret air-conditioned jamming. My wife and I had recently acquired a black kitten a kid in the library parking lot begged us to take. We named him Edgar because he looked like a bat. From a tiny ball of fur who had to be fed through an eyedropper he soon turned into a psychotic menace, pissing all over the apartment, climbing up the curtains only to jump into my hair, attacking anyone who entered the room and holding on with his claws to their legs even as they tried to kick him off. For some reason, he left Lester alone. Edgar actually stayed still, tilting his ears while we played. We were five minutes into it when a loud knock came at the door. One of the last remaining elderly people left in the complex stood outside the door, looking forlorn. He had recently come home after cancer surgery. One of his legs had been amputated and he leaned on a brace. He glared at me and said "how about it?" I wondered if he was this rude to the flakeheads next door to him when they savagely beat their girlfriends in the middle of the night. After telling him we'd quiet down, sorry sir, I looked to Lester for some help, but he was unrepentant, telling me, simply, that the man did not have a leg to stand on.
I did succeed in getting the music quieter, but soon there was another knock on the door. This time it was the sorriest bunch of maintenance people I'd ever seen, coming in to regrout the leaking tub. They all followed the leader, who was a wisecracking old alcoholic named (wouldn't you know it) Earl, who knew that Billy Ripken shouldn't be playing second base for the Orioles but clearly did not know anything about his actual job. Lester said "isn't it great that they're working for you?" while they did some pointless hammering and head-scratching before concluding that specialists should be called in. When they left, we went back to jamming, but the exterminator soon came in and forced us both out.
We went back downtown on the bus. Lester suggested we visit Coffee Bob, a friend of his who might jam with us and maybe get us high. He called Coffee Bob a great guitarist who happened to be a Communist. This sounded very interesting to me, since the opportunity to meet an actual Communist seemed akin to meeting a Shaker or an Amish person, and if his herb controlled the means of production, so much the better.
Coffee Bob lived in an overpriced 2nd floor apartment in an elegant row home in the Yuppie district of Charles Village. He answered the door with a dour but familiar expression, as if we were two of Dr. Frankenstein's creations disturbing the good doctor's experiments. He looked like a Greek waiter, with a ruffled white shirt and pressed black polyester pants. Vinyl covered the sofa. A vintage Fender Stratocaster and a Roland electric piano were just sitting there in the room.
"Any smoke?" Lester mumbled.
"Nah, this dude Tucker couldn't get off his effing ay-ass to get his mother to give him a ride. He picked a b-ad time to mess up my head," Coffee Bob complained.
"That's too bad," Lester consoled. "Mind if we jam with you?"
"Aw, I don't know, I'm going through a lot of heavy shit right now and..."
"We won't interrupt you. We'll just tap on the instruments, y'know, regular maintenance, be out of your way before you know it."
While this delicate negotiation was going on, I found my way to the Roland and started banging major 7ths like a cocktail pimp. I felt I owed it to the instrument to introduce myself. Coffee Bob was not amused. As he started bitching like a wino, Lester took the opportunity to grab the Strat and add some tremolo to my vibrato.
"C'mon guys," pleaded Coffee Bob, "I've got some uptight neighbors. It's bad enough you might have been seen like that in the hallway..."
"Fock the doomed," quoted Lester, in his best Richard Nixon-on-acid accent, "lighten it up." Lester nodded with a patrician graciousness towards a red Epiphone guitar. Coffee Bob seemed to forget for a moment that it was his own guitar. He grabbed it by the neck, and down we went.
Unlike Lester or myself, Coffee Bob seemed to actually listen to what was going on. He flavored the mess with a wry, timid commentary, his full-throated chords chuckling at our drowning cries for help. We actually recorded it, and on playback it sounded like Lester and I were the only ones listening, and that Coffee Bob was arrogantly popping in whatever guido riff he could remember at the moment.
We went back to jamming, grabbing ginger beer from the fridge and changing instruments as we played, not letting tangled wires or death-by-hanging straps let us miss a twisted beat. Until, that is, Barbie walked in, singing along as if we were actually playing a song.
Barbie was a 350-pound space daisy who always had her pet guinea pig climbing around her hair. She kept all her worldly possessions in a Volkswagen microdot microbus that she pretended still worked, wore tied died sheets around her like a toga, smiled like she was beautiful, and had that marvelous quality of making the world conform to her dementia at all times. Before her voice had even pierced the swastika-like molding on the ceiling, Coffee Bob was complaining.
"You left your spell pot in the sink again. How many times have I told you that nightshade and verbena do not mix well with humus. What are you doing with it anyway, some kind of green ooze is coming off of it that doesn't come out. What the hell's the matter with you?"
Barbie addressed us rather than Coffee Bob. "This guy loves me so much it hurts," she smiled.
"Bar-bee, I don't appreciate this continual lack of respect for me or my things. My friends and I are having a special jam here and you have to come in fucking everything up, as you fuck up everything, all the time, are you listening to a word I'm saying?"
In a voice like Tweety Bird she giggled "Ooh, da wag is bwudy today." .
She then pulled out the biggest joint any of us had ever seen. Within seconds, we were like trained dogs as she commanded us with her tambourine to play Monkees songs. She then serenaded us with some of her own songs, 20 minute diatribes that made me wonder why Yoko Ono had never crossed over to the pop charts but Melanie did, about how her boyfriend always wants to stick his dick up her ass, about how Coffee Bob is a selfish, childish, sexually confused bimbo, and a more experimental tune in which she asked us guests the musical question of what was our sign. After an hour, the joint was still untouched. She finally lit it, as she talked about how processed foods were poisoning mankind and how Led Zeppelin constructed their chords from satanic pentagrams and how beautiful she was and what a tragedy no one could see it. She spent fifteen minutes toking and talking like this before handing us the waterlogged remains of the joint. Maybe it was the pot, maybe it was the sensory over-stimulation, but I hung on every word, believing it the voice of a angel sent down to fill us with the bitter truth, and, even more uncanny, believing that she could read my mind as I thought these thoughts. Just at that moment, she beamed at me with total love, as guinea pig droppings splashed her face.
By this time Coffee Bob was too hysterical. Things were falling off of Barbie left and right — empty candy wrappers, dead dandelions, peanut shells. As Coffee Bob dug into her, all she said was "Thanks for being my friend." We decided to leave.
"Is that his roommate?" I asked.
"I have no idea who that woman was," replied Lester.
As we were riding back, I said "Oh, I forgot to mention it. My life is falling apart."
"And the problem?"
"It's so ridiculous. My wife woke up while I was talking to you last week, and kept track of how long we talked. She of course thought I was talking to another woman, and has made me sleep on the sofa all week. I don't have any kind of decent explanation, and deep in my heart I know I'm guilty of something. She's real scared and angry, and she doesn't listen to a word I say." I paused. "She told me yesterday she doesn't love me anymore."
"And you believed her?" He seemed to grimace.
"Well, it seems like a pretty serious charge, don't you think?" I was staring at him wide-eyed in the face.
"Let me put it this way. Do you think you can ever really stop loving someone?"
"Sure. People drift apart all the time."
"Oh, no, people are separated all the time, there's a difference. Jesus said divorce was a worse sin than adultery." He paused as a couple of yo boys passed our seats. "Do you know why he said that?"
"Something about lusting in your heart being the same level of abomination before God?"
"Jeez, Americans with their Calvinistic masochism. No, mister boy scout, it's because when you abandon someone, you take with you everything they have given you, which is everything. All they can do is let you go and hope you will return." He stared somberly out of the bus window at the people smoking on the street corners.
"But her fears are so...misplaced," I furiously replied. "It's as if some force beyond my or her control is making this happen, as if God Himself wants our blood sacrifice."
"Hey, whatever brings you to the altar," he laughed. "You gotta lie to tell the truth. What painter doesn't cheat the face to bring out the true expression? Don't you feel worthy? It must be a tremendous feeling of loss and injustice you're going through. Why not celebrate it?"
"So I should just fool around so I can feel less ironic?" I wasn't about to let some kid play with my feelings of loss and injustice.
"Look, Felix, there are many wolves out there, all of them divine messengers sent to test your love. If you pass all their tests, then they send another one to kill you."
I thanked him for his advice, although I had a nagging suspicion that I would continue to get by by being as oblivious to disaster as I had been up to this point. Like a Siberian husky in a high-class neighborhood, I had to kill. I had to love.
8.
I kept hearing, like a broken record, the broadcast of my wife's opinion of me, so much so I began to hear her voice in my dreams reminding me what a deceitful, ambitionless, arrogant and weak person I really was. It got to be so much background noise, nothing to worry about really, nothing that affected the way I lived my life day-to-day. After a particularly brutal night of drinks and tears, I'd slip into bed, and she'd reach over with hesitant tenderness. I'd hold on to her hand as if my life depended on it, and we'd slowly and silently fall asleep in each other's arms. I'd think at those moments that we were too familiar to ever grow apart, that she was really only afraid, that she wouldn't say those things unless she really cared. The situation made me realize, just as Lester had predicted, how capable of love I really was, how endless my feelings for her were, how perfect our love was, even if our humanity stared back at us like a wet, hungry child selling candy at the door. The next morning, as we sat drinking coffee, and I glowed with warm feelings, she'd tell me again how she felt nothing, and that she wished I would just leave her alone, and how sick she was of seeing me. I wished I could fast-forward life, and look at all this with a numb eye, to be like the total past that, as Wallace Stevens wrote, "felt nothing when destroyed." Women, it is said, have a right to change their minds, for they follow a higher instinct, a wave that is savage, unpredictable and unassailable. The human male, like an insect male, is basically an accessory, poked and prodded into providing a necessary service, but, ultimately, expendable. And so my thoughts at the time went, as I stayed unaware of how little I had listened to Lester and how little faith I really possessed.
I spent the Fourth of July with friends of my wife's family. He had been a psychologist before being brutally attacked by a prisoner he was counseling and was essentially a vegetable. His wife was so overcome with grief she spent every moment of every day making happy talk about quilts, casseroles, and shrubbery. Their hermaphrodite offspring was called a daughter and wasted her brilliance working in a rat lab affectionately known as "the morgue." We grabbed all the folding chairs and stood in a long line to see a free fireworks display sponsored by a local appliance dealer. The parking lot was mobbed with large, blonde people holding beers and their large, blonde kids sucking sugar from straws. We waited an hour while my mother-in-law and the psychologist's wife competed with each other to see who could manufacture the most psychotic enthusiasm for Tupperware. Long after dark, a few far-off blips of green light flickered, followed by a few fizzy crackles, and topped by some low booms that made my lungs feel dislocated. I felt like invading Canada. After a final flurry that looked like exploding stars from our distance, we went back, to have nonalcoholic egg nog and listen to the two women compare their doll house collections. The whole time I kept thinking how sad it was that my wife's mother had given her each Christmas a beautiful new ceramic doll and then, when puberty struck, during the course of one summer, smashed them all, each one hurled with a rational explanation of "this is for..." It struck me as amazing how we're not allowed to outgrow certain things.
On the way home, my wife complained that I wasn't respectful of her family or her dear friends, I just sat around moping whenever we'd visit. Instead of saying that I didn't find the 30 ways of avoiding beltway traffic the most interesting conversation starter or even that the whole scene was unbearably tragic, I denied I wasn't interested in anything her family had to say and acted shocked that she could think so.
Before we got to our apartment, we stopped at a video store. My wife ran into an old friend from high school in one of the aisles. He had been the equipment manager for the girl's field hockey team and now, six years after graduation, was working as an usher in a movie theatre. He was a 98-pound myopic with Mr. Goodbar skin, popcorn butter hair and Dr. Pepper teeth. He told us jokes he memorized from "The World's Most Truly Tasteless Jokes" and my wife laughed hysterically. He tried to interest us in one of the "Porky's" movies, talking about it like it was some kind of wine or something. When I hesitated, he shoved a documentary called "Kerouac" in my face and suggested that he and my wife see something funny on his quadraphonic Sensurround laser TV. I went home to watch the Kerouac movie alone expecting some kind of explanation but I only saw a bloated and bitter man tell William F. Buckley that he was not responsible for the hippies, he hated hippies.
The next chance I got, I went to visit Lester. He and Katherine had spent Independence Day drinking Chablis on their rooftop looking at the gigantic firework dandelion seeds explode from the harbor. We spent an afternoon at an Irish Pub, downing Cooper's stouts and arguing about Mike Tyson's place in boxing history. As usual, I went a little over my allotted time, and ended up having to call my wife from a pay phone.
Dah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah went the sirens
"Yes, dear, I know, I know, but I...but I...oh, honey, oh baby."
She bush wack home dis tallywacker packed fo crack corn give dat ho a bone nome saying went the passerbys.
"But baby...that's ok, that's O-K...it'll be all right...calm down, honey, calm...down."
Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr went the automobiles.
"Baby...baby...baby...it's ALL right...there, there, baby...now, now...but, baby...baby, please."
Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh went the neighborhood madman making his rounds.
"It's really ok, I'll just be...a...little...late...oh, baby, no, sweetie NO, no...no, baby."
As Lester stood nearby impatiently rolling his eyes at me, I worried more what he might think about what was left of my manhood than about anything I might possibly say. Midway through the conversation, a line started forming at the pay phone, and there I was, trapped between the conversation that would never unwind, the pitying look that would never understand, and the row of angry faces that would never back away. I hung up and decided to go home.
When I got back to my apartment, I found a note that said "It doesn't look like you'll ever change. I've gone someplace. I don't know when I'll be back." I spent the evening waiting by the curtain, thinking about the roses I might have brought home, wondering why what I did was so wrong, never figuring out where my wife actually was that night. I called her parents. They expressed shock that I would be calling them about her whereabouts. I finally surmised she was out driving somewhere. I took the green magic marker next to her note and drew in her sketch pad a picture of her surrounded with flowers. I considered this my love offering. Then I took the marker and went to the painting hung in the bathroom of pastoral grazing cows that I had to stare at every time I took a crap. I filled in one of the cows with the green marker. I considered this my desperate plea for help.
She didn't come home that night, but she came in the next morning smelling like cigarettes. I was so glad to see her I didn't ask much. She noticed the sketch pad immediately and began castigating me for defacing it, claiming that each sketch represented a special part of her life and that I had ruined it by putting that horrible drawing right in the middle of it. She never noticed the green cow.
Despite all that, life did achieve a semblance of normality for a while. I don't think I saw Lester at all the rest of the summer. I remember Sunday afternoons and holidays spent stuffing my face at my in-laws' house, the conversations also about food, mostly, with occasional forays into crime and the increasing tax burden. Sometimes, however, there was talk of the ghost who lived in the house. She must have been a jilted lover who died in the bed upstairs, they speculated. They were all quite fascinated and amused by this, despite the fact they lived in the house, voted Republican, and drove Plymouth automobiles. They talked of heirlooms missing from the attic, hairbrushes vanishing for days, blankets inexplicably taken, they were certain that everything lost and misplaced in the house was taken by this presence. Soon I too became its voyeur. When I would go into their house to wash my clothes with no one home, I'd hear a furious popping across the ceiling. I'd go upstairs only to hear unnatural creaking from the floors upstairs. No matter where I went the sound seemed to stay just beyond me. Once I became used to it, even I began to feel some kind of presence. I felt it when I played their old baby grand. As my hands moved without thought, as if by instinct through progressions of diminished chords, I sensed something feeling the emotion of the notes as I played them, a response on the other side of my fingers, matching it. As I sat there in a deserted house on a deserted suburban street on a weekday afternoon, I felt that every note was significant, part of a performance for some invisible audience that was generating itself through the medium of my hands. Yet, I knew too that I could be imagining the whole thing; after all, it always felt that way when I played.
A few months after our blow up, as we were walking through swirls of fall foliage, my wife seemed suddenly eager to tell me something. She finally blurted out that she was in her parents' house with movie guy one day when a plaster wise man I had painted for the nativity scene we had given her parents the previous Christmas suddenly flew off the mantle and hit him in the face. She said they both turned white as sheets. She seemed relieved to be finally sharing this experience with someone else. When it failed to hit me what the significance of this anecdote was, she clarified: "You know I slept with him."
9.
Lester and Katherine, meanwhile, had moved to an apartment a few blocks away from where they were, on Lovegrove Street. It was a large airy loft with a wrought-iron spiral staircase entrance, lots of ivy-covered windows, a working fireplace in the bedroom, and an enclosed brick terrace. I went to visit just after they moved in. I brought along an old saxophone I had picked up from a pawnshop as a housewarming present — it had a mature, rusty tone I thought would fit in well. When I arrived, boxes were everywhere, nothing was unpacked except recording equipment, a bookshelf, a chair and a few guitars. All the windows were open because of a funny kerosene-like scent that permeated the place. Lester seemed dead set on arguing that this was not only the best place in Baltimore, but that it possibly was the rival of any of the 250 apartments Baudelaire resided at in Paris. Any implication I suggested to the contrary was met with steely resistance and a torrent of loud words, most accusing me of bad faith because I was envious of the insanely low price they were paying. It was a hard place not to like — an old maple tree wrapped around one wall of dormered windows, through another I could see the backyard miniature gardens of rehabbed stone mansions, and along the skyline I counted twenty steeples. Between the ivy on the third wall, green brass gargoyles along the roof of the nearby Belvedere Hotel gleamed with an unearthly light. Somehow, though, the place gave me a touch of the willies; for one thing, it faced out on an alley where all sorts of strange castaways kept ambling by; for another, it seemed too historically accurate, as if it had been preserved in salt as some wing of a 19th century mansion — even the kitchen had a huge cast-iron stove. More than that, Lester made me uneasy, the way he roamed aimlessly from room to room strumming his guitar, a strange fatalistic glaze in his eye, mumbling about inner secrets and it being a good time to plant roses. These feelings were temporary, however, for Lester had procured from Victor some dope that had been soaked, or so he said, in embalming fluid. It burned my lungs and had a camphor-like aftertaste. Our jam session was particularly intense: we started in late afternoon and by the end it was pitch dark, neither of us wanting to turn on the light, in fact, afraid to. I attacked the saxophone, forcing its ravaged insides to scream so desperately they began to float out over its body, producing the sighing chimes called harmonic overtones, which merged with Lester's guitar to produce that eerie echoing voice that sounds like a third musician to some and to others sounds like God. For a beat, Lester started stamping the microphone stand on the floor with his feet, and it slowly began to overpower us, getting louder and more dominant as we played. Lester stopped playing the guitar to bang it, and then he began to hit me with it, and the sound of that was interesting too, so I began to hit him, and we took turns hitting the person who was playing, and soon we started fighting over the microphone, not playing at all, just rolling on the floor bashing each other with it, hearing the pain we felt and seeing the blinding flash of light on impact as part of the music, so hitting more savagely, chasing each other up the walls to get more leverage for our attacks, laughing at how the pain only made us more numb, wanting to increase the intensity to something we could actually feel — but ending up paralyzed in a tangle of cords in the darkened room, our ears ringing with our own blood rhythms. We untangled to listen to the tape, but there was nothing on it but hissing.
It was too late for a bus, so I had to convince Lester to take me home in Katherine's car. He was standing at the window, gazing into space. There was a feeling of teeth-chattering loneliness. The walls, the curtains, the floors all seemed overwhelmed by sadness. I tried to convince Lester to move. He was catatonic and rigid. He seemed a part of the house, as if both he and it had silently pitted themselves against everything. I looked through the windows into the alley and saw only darkness. There was another wave of sadness. It was as if someone kept sending love desperately and hopelessly up from the street, but it did not have enough faith to get past the leaded crystal windows. I could not get Lester to respond to me. I started to panic. What if I was trapped here and couldn't leave? I began pulling books down from the bookshelf, wanting to get back to a warm body and some illusion of love. I flung myself at Lester, though whether from anger or desire or the all-pervading apathy in the room I didn't know. He roughly pushed me away and started mumbling about the monstrous old men at the nearby Maryland Club, who did nothing but drink scotch and boast — not about all the billions they've made but about all the souls they've destroyed. He talked of the homosexual vampires roaming nearby streets, driven by the urge to infect with AIDS men whose only crime was loneliness. There was no emotion in his voice, in fact it seemed disembodied. The urge to leave started slowly to dissipate. I began to feel a warm anger replace my feelings of emptiness and longing. But just then Lester snapped out of it, mumbled "what have I done?" and suddenly hurried me out of the house.
On my way home, he hit a concrete embankment that blocked off the lane he tried, at 80 miles an hour, to enter. We got out, but the old Buick didn't have a scratch on it.
My apartment had its chain lock drawn, so I could not enter, but I could see the rooms were darkened and I could hear a low, soft sobbing. My knock was ignored at first, but as I grew louder and more insistent, a quivering voice asked who it was.
"It's Felix."
"I don't know anyone by that name. My husband left me many years ago, and I'm not to let in strangers."
"This is ridiculous, honey. Please let me in."
"I've waited for years for my bonnie lad to return. I fear he has perished at sea. If you bring news of him, I'm not sure I can bear to hear it anymore."
"Baby, it's me. Everything is going to be all right. Please calm down and let me in. Everything is going to be as it was. It's late and the neighbors might be annoyed. Please let me in."
The chain clinked and there was a whooshing inside. My wife had flown to bed. Her face in the sheets, she muttered on in her Bette Davis voice about how alone she was and how life was a cruel joke, but cruelest joke of all, she had not the courage to end it. As I tried to calm her with the softest sounds I knew, I mentioned that Lester had given me a ride home and that I was inviting him in.
"WHAT?! I will not have that...CREATURE in my house. Get out. Both of you...away."
I rushed to get Lester out as soon as possible. He was standing in the stairwell with a forlorn look. I came out with a wink and an OK sign, the kind that Ronald Reagan used to flash to reporters. He stared at me incredulously. I had to calm him down too, as he wanted to go in and attack my wife. The thought struck me that they were too much alike, so sensitive. Oh, the things they would do to each other. I'll never forget the wild-eyed way he left me that night.
A few days later I received a call from Lester. He sounded distraught. He asked me to meet him at a park on the outskirts of his neighborhood — right away. I hurried down, fearing that something terrible had happened to him , or that he might have taken my wife's outburst in the wrong way. He was waiting for me on an unpainted park bench.
"Thanks for meeting me here. I'm afraid to go back into my house."
"Why? What's wrong?"
"Did you notice anything funny the other day when we were jamming?"
"You mean us trying to kill each other? Pshaw. That's what happens when you smoke formaldehyde," I joked.
"Then you didn't see that black man staring at us through the window?"
"No. What, were you robbed?"
"I didn't think anything of it at the time," he continued. "But I saw him and closed the shutters before we left. When I came back, I started pacing all around the room, and then, all of a sudden, a shutter flew open and there he was, glaring right at me. I felt a burning feeling in the back of my neck, and I went in to the kitchen to get a knife. I wanted to kill him. But he was gone. The next day, Katherine was digging in the terrace, trying to make a space for a garden. She found some marbles buried in the ground, along with a broken jar. She put the marbles in the jar and placed them on the mantelpiece. It was like something ignited. That night before I went to bed, strange black liquid began to ooze out of the bathtub. Kitty spent the evening cowering in the corner. The kitchen was too hot to enter, it had an overpowering burning smell. Katherine found the marbles the next morning on the other side of the apartment. Thinking Kitty had knocked them over, she put them back and locked Kitty in the living room. When she came back that evening, the marbles had again rolled to the other side of the apartment. She naturally accused me of doing it, and, well, I...I hit her. She kept lunging at me, sticking her face in my face and accusing me of trying intentionally to drive her mad. Her eyes were so violent. My throat started itching and I made strange gurgling sounds. I went to the kitchen to grab the knife. It was so hot I could barely lift it. Just then the phone rang."
"Who was it?" I asked.
"I don't know. It was just a voice, saying 'You must leave the apartment immediately. You will kill her if you don't.' I asked who this was, and she said she was not permitted to tell me, but that she heard a cry for help. She said I had been chosen for a very evil deed. She knew I had a twin, and this seemed to be important to the whole scenario. I pressed her for more information, but all she said was 'check the records...check the records' and hung up."
"When did all this happen?"
"Last night."
"What did you do?"
"We stayed at Katherine's sister's house last night. This morning we went to the library."
"And what did you find?"
"Oh, Felix, it was too horrible."
"Did you find out something about the house?"
"We found many newspaper clippings. The most gruesome kinds of murders in that house. Strangulations, hangings, stabbings, mutilations, asphyxiations, immolations, drownings. The most recent was this gay man who they said killed himself because his lover had left him. I'm convinced his lover was the man I saw. He seemed to look at me more with sympathy than anger. But that's not the strangest part."
"There's more?" I asked.
"Yes. This house was once part of a much larger mansion. It belonged to a merchant who funded pirate expeditions and apparently was involved in the slave trade. The family mysteriously sold the house in 1890, after their daughter died."
"The marbles..." I said.
"Exactly. After we brought in the marbles, we heard this voice, this laughing, horrible voice, a little girl's voice. We thought it was a girl from next door, asking us to play with her. This morning we realized that voice was in our own minds."
"Did you tell the landlord about any of this?" I was shaking.
"He denied it, and accused us of trying to whelch out of our contract. Like I want the security deposit back. The floor in this guy's office was completely cracked. He said he has to replace it at least once a month because the concrete keeps breaking apart. He didn't think anything of that. Weirdest of all, against the wall, which is the basement wall of our apartment, was a huge crucifix. When he asked him how that got there, he just shrugged his shoulders."
"What are you going to do?"
"That's where I need you help. We're moving all our stuff out today."
The thought of messing with a haunted house seemed exciting to me, but Lester nipped that kind of thinking right in the bud. "Don't get any ideas," he said, "about testing it. It only lives through you. Just go quietly in and out."
I went with him to the house. Katherine's brother had brought over a U-Haul. It was what we called a Wyoming day, terribly sunny and blue, with ponderous buttes of cloudbank and a dry, slashing wind that made everything echo. Instead of the living organism I had seen the house to be initially, now it seemed dark and dead, finally closing up its secrets after having cried for so long that they be revealed. We carried out boxes filled with belongings that in a living space had character, but now seemed blank. The furnishings too seemed lifeless as they were carried down the sun-dappled staircase, except for an occasional indignant chair that screamed to be handled with more care. "Here...No, there...Careful...Lift...Down...Now," ordered Lester, as the sum of his life was paraded like a pharaoh through the dusty alley. I was one of several anonymous pallbearers, each of us trying our hardest to avoid recognizing the pathos of the situation. No matter how scenic and new the roads that take our lives onward are, each new place always offers us a little less. Our eyes are a little less able to see past the sting of remembrance, the unsettled debts of our former, tossed-away lives. In this house, as in every scene and situation, there was that all-embracing decision: death or honor. No one ever knows which path is chosen, only that, in moments of irreparability such as these, the decision had been made. In Lester's haunted face I could see the sum total of all the house wanted from him; it had shared itself with him and he would forever be a caretaker of that memory. As for myself, I thought this all some kind of momentary glimpse into the abyss. I had not yet learned the lessons of Lovegrove Street, or of this city.
10.
Meanwhile, the only time I was able to kiss my wife was in public. She came and went as she pleased, talking to me only to bark orders or, when I did not obey them, to express her resentment at my lack of a livelihood. Most of the time I spent in my apartment I was alone, the cat digging his claws into my shins as I paced the floors and what was left of our wedding crystal vibrating from the constant synthetic hip-hop beat from next door. She had found a whole new circle of friends, movie guy's friends, and she had hung a poster of Tom Cruise in "Top Gun" on our bedroom wall. I considered that poster my mortal enemy. When she did come home, we both had smiles on our faces, but as soon as she saw me in my pile of law books, she put on her Minnesota mom scowl and began to remind me of the housepainting I had not done, the appointments I had not made, the money I was not earning. One day I decided to press the issue. I asked her if I could take down the Top Gun poster. She indignantly replied that it had great sentimental value, and warned of violence if I tried to take it down. I didn't know what to say, my request had seemed quite logical both in aesthetic and moral terms, and here she was acting like she was on Iwo Jima. Words kinda shattered in my mind when she said things like that with so much conviction. For strength, I put on Blood and Chocolate," an album I had begged her to buy for me the week before, her in her business suit and me unshaven and polite, the teenage cashier looking at me in utter horror.
"I want you-oo. You've had your fun you don't get well no more..."
"Are you going to stop seeing him?" I asked.
"Your fingernails go dragging down the wall..."
"Are you going to leave this house?" she said.
"Be careful darling you might fall."
"Why should I leave the house? I love you."
"The truth can't hurt you it's just like the dark..."
"If you loved me, you'd set me free."
"Go on and hurt me then we'll let it drop..."
"Do you want to go to a marriage counselor or something?..." I asked.
"I want to know the things you did that we do too. I want you..."
"Haven't I given you everything you've asked for?..." I asked.
"I want to know he pleases you more than I do. I want you..."
"Do I not appreciate you enough?..." I asked.
"Did you call his name out as he held you down?"
"What can I give you to make you change your mind?..." I asked.
"Oh no, my darling, not with that clown. I want you."
"What did I do to make you want to throw me away like this?"
"Ha. Let me count the ways," she finally replied. "You don't share my values. You don't respect my family. You don't believe in this country." She nodded toward the poster. "You don't believe in God. I can't go on..." She paused, and then said with a look that I thought was a little too guilty to be one of pity, "...because you are crazy."
As if to signal that that was all I was going to get out of her, she pulled off the record and replaced it with one of those records you can make at the beach, where they play the background of a popular hit that you can sing over. It was movie guy, singing "R-O-C-K in the U-S-A" in a nasal, dangerously off-pitch whine. She seemed to think it was great. Nothing I said had seemed to have any effect on her. It was like she was on crack or something.
After a night spent worrying whether what she had said about me was true, I detected a new warmth in her at breakfast the next morning. She suggested we go out skating that night, that there were some friends she wanted me to meet.
The friends consisted of movie guy and a small, pale girl with terrified eyes and blue teeth (from some pregnancy drug her mother took). Everyone seemed quite intent on introducing me to this child, who had the unusual name of Gillian Straw. My wife drove our white Oldsmobile, movie guy in the front seat and me and Gillian in the back. The girl stared at me with the widest, bluest eyes, as if I was some kind of celebrity, and she leaned in to hang on every word, like I was some kind of prophet. With blonde hair shining in the streetlights, she was beautiful, in a wild, fragile way, but I was unprepared for how she acted at the skating rink. While "Sledgehammer" played, she gyrated with the most provocative series of thrusts and squats I'd ever seen. It would have been revolting if it wasn't so...innocent, as if she was simply overwhelmed by the combined yang of my hovering frustration and Peter Gabriel's computer-enhanced vocal orgasms. I couldn't help but follow, and as I did, she skated delicately, effortlessly away, the slightest of smiles on her face. While we were unlacing our skates, I asked her if she liked Peter Gabriel, she said yes, that was her favorite, how did I know? I said she seemed pretty into that one song of his, to which she replied she didn't remember them playing a Peter Gabriel song.
For a few days, I felt very friendly toward my wife. She had taken my mind right off of movie guy. I wanted to meet more of her friends, and to see this strange creature again. As if she sensed my interest, she decided to have a party at our apartment on Saturday night. I was to pick up Gillian, she was to drop off the cat to be castrated and then pick up movie guy. The rest of the invitees would be at an apartment in Cockeysville, so we agreed to meet up there.
I was told Gillian lived at the end of Belair Road, which was part of Route 1, the old Boston Post Road. The only time I had been on that road was when we bought the Oldsmobile. It was a strip that, like so many of the great American roads, consisted entirely of used car dealers, mechanics and gas stations, and, beyond that, strip-mined hills slagged with rolling waves of junked cars. I turned down the designated street, a dirt road marked by a rusted bulldozer, and rounded a dusty mecca of tires, tin cans and bedsprings. There, on the hill in a haze, a huge trailer park appeared like some kind of aluminum promised land. It went on it seemed for miles, but I maneuvered the makeshift streets and found the right disabled vehicle, the one with "Keep Out / Bad Dog" spraypainted on its oil tank. I rang the buzzer. No answer. I knew she was supposed to be here, so I peered through the orange doily in the windows — nothing but a lot of Masonite paneling. As if one couldn't hear the buzzer in one of these oversized toolsheds, I called out "Gillian."
"I'm right here, Mister Felix."
I looked around. I couldn't see anything. "Where are you?"
She giggled deliciously. "Guess."
I went around back, calling her name as if she was some kind of dog. I tried to open up the storage shed. I must have circled around the patch of gravel for five minutes in crazy accompaniment to her deranged laughter. Just as I was ready to get back in the car, she said "Look up, not down."
Within a second I located her. She was crouching on the roof of the storage shed, wearing jeans, a boy's flannel shirt, and a dingy Isadora Duncan veil. Just as I was about to ask her how she got up there, she hopped down the ladder. She led me by the hand into the small trailer. She said she lived with her father here, one room was his and the other was hers. The stereo was in his room, so we sat down there. She offered me a Dr. Pepper. I thumbed through the records, finding as she'd foretold a motherload of Peter Gabriel — bootlegs, imports, radio demos — everything, it seemed, except his most recent, multi-platinum album. My eye was soon taken by the huge number of Fifth Dimension albums, full of phosphorescent clothes and smiling Afros. "Are these your father's?" I asked.
"All the records are mine."
"You like the Fifth Dimension?"
"Oh yeah, that five-part harmony slays me."
This to me was a most interesting development, because one of my favorite singers was Laura Nyro, who sang like a delta preacher and played the piano like a nun on speed and whose songs of addiction, poverty, spiritual transgression and rape were models of harmonic and rhythmic intricacy that would make Brahms throw up his hands but were somehow through the magic of late 20th Century capitalism transformed into cheesy hits performed by Three Dog Night, Barbra Streisand and, yes, the Fifth Dimension. "Can I hear some?" I asked.
She put on something else instead, a heartbreaking version of "Don't Go To Strangers" that sounded to me like, well, Laura Nyro. When I asked who it was, she made me guess.
"Judy Garland?"
"Nope."
"Try Again."
"This isn't horseshoes."
"Etta James."
"Not even close."
"June Christy."
"Who?"
"Jo Stafford."
"It's a female singer."
"OK, OK, I'm completely full of shit. Now will you please, please tell me who it is." This was driving my crazy because the singer became who I guessed it to be as soon as I said it.
Instead of answering me, she showed me the record jacket. It was a very young Eydie Gorme. "Is there a particular reason you're playing this song?" I asked.
Instead of answering that question, she pulled out a giant white rat from a nearby cage and brought it over for me to pet. "Be careful of Prissy's claws. I got kicked out of my last apartment because he ruined all the furniture."
Because I was a heterosexual male, I pet the rat.
"Ooh, I think he likes you," she said, "that's a good sign."
"Where on Earth did you happen to come upon this...lovely creature?" I asked.
"I found him in a psych. lab, in a tray, waiting to be destroyed. I fell in love with him right away."
I saw a certain charm: the human hands, the beady eyes, the desperate teeth, but that long pink tail got to me. "Did you work at a psych. lab?"
"No, but I have friends there. I probably do need help."
"That's what all sane people say."
"What do insane people say?" she asked.
"Get me out of here," I wailed, and then waited for her to laugh. When she didn't, I asked her: "do you go to school?"
"No, what's the point?" she said in a clipped voice. "I work at an animal hospital."
"How old are you?"
"Seventeen." She seemed delighted that the conversation was staying fixed on her.
"Are you old enough to drink?" I asked, not knowing what possessed me to.
She laughed a full, Lauren Bacall-like laugh and rolled her long blonde hair around her head like a horse. I was seized with a desire to kiss her. She got up and flitted to the other room, her room. I followed. The room was unnavigable, piled from floor to ceiling with clothes and toys. It smelled like human urine. She somehow fit through the crack in the doorway and, after a few minutes, came out wearing what looked like giraffe gloves. We were on our way.
Halfway to Cockeysville, she told me to stop at a High's for a pack of Marlboros. I went in to buy for her the first pack of cigarettes I had ever bought in my life, and came back to find her laughing, tapping her bare feet on the dashboard. When I asked her what was going on, she said "Oh, it's nothing. While you were in there, another car pulled in and a guy got out. There was a woman waiting on the passenger side. We looked at each other and started to laugh how we were each in the death seat. Now where are those smokes?"
I flipped her the pack like I had seen Robert Mitchum do in "The Big Steal." She unwrapped the foil, lifted the red top and pulled out two cigarettes, one she offered to me. I stuck it in my mouth, leaving it unlit, as I had seen on Baretta. She vanished like Marlene Dietrich behind a cloud of silver smoke. It soon became apparent to me that if I was going to survive the plume of toxins emanating from her lips, I had better light mine too. I stiffened the tip against the orange coil of the car lighter. I inhaled it to life, and I felt a stream of pain fill my lungs that was at the same time a kind of joy. I looked at Gillian and that joy extended to her — I wanted her pouting mouth as I wanted that next torturous drag. In a few seconds, it all became tangled in a crazy fury of obsession, as, from the outside, our separate images disappeared behind the glass, swallowed in the smoke.
The place we were to meet the rest of the gang was a generic apartment complex in a nondescript bedroom community, not exactly the dank tavern filled with toothless people I wanted to wrap her in my cape and enter. A room of fat teenage girls awaited us. They were sitting in green-plaid pseudo-Colonial furniture around an old woman in a green bathrobe lounging on the sofa, giggling nervously at her every word, all of them facing a giant television set. I asked immediately where my wife and movie guy were. The old woman smiled like a lizard and said "I taught dey wuz wit youse."
"Are we ready to go? How many cars do we have? How about if you just follow me?" I said, feeling like a spider caught between two window panes, with a bunch of expressionless faces staring as I climbed helplessly, never thinking of opening the window. The old woman, who was too fat to be as old as she looked, told us to sit awhile. They were watching a great movie that would soon be over. I looked and saw David Bowie singing to a Muppet. He was heavily made up in blue tones and wore an orange evening jump-suit. The Muppet was naked and about four feet shorter, and gazed up at him with puppydog longing. Everyone except Gillian was transfixed by this. Gillian looked at me with a look that made me want to throw a piece of raw meat at her, as if to say, "if you don't find some way to get me out of here right now, I will force you to listen to the Carpenters until you puke." I tried to start a conversation.
I asked them if they knew movie guy. They looked at me with disgust, as if they had all slept with him.
I tried again. "So, you guys like David Bowie?"
"I think he's really weird. I mean, how can two guys like, you know, do it?"
I was going to say that I didn't think he'd be taking any Muppet to bed with him tonight when the old woman spoke up. "Are youse a Trekkie?" she asked.
I looked at Gillian and then back at the old woman. I didn't know if she was mocking me or scoping me out to see if I was some kind of pervert. I stuttered for an answer. "No, William Shatner reminds me of too many waiters I've known. I'm an 'Outer Limits' man myself."
"Dat's too bad. Youse have not experienced love until ya been to a 'Star Trek' convention. Everyone cares so much for each udder — it's just unbe-liev-able." I detected a soft hum begin, as if all the girls were starting to recite a mantra. "Servants of Trek share everyting," she continued. "Dere are no egos, no bound-ar-ies, everyone's connected toogeder in Trek consciousness. It's de state of hahmony ee-magined by all de great religions. And it's really he-ah — on Eart — now."
She reached her hand out to me, this grizzled woman in a room of teenage girls. It was then that I noticed the bong next to the coasters in the center of the coffee table. "Is there life on that planet?" I asked, pointing to the amber chamber.
"May youse live long and prosper," she said as she handed me the pipe. I offered it to Gillian.
"No, thank you," she said. "I don't care for it."
I beamed myself up and then watched grandma take a hit. After a minute, it still didn't make any sense, so I said I was supposed to meet my wife an hour ago and asked who was coming with us. Six of the girls stepped forward, as if they had been chosen, and we all piled into my car.
When we got to my apartment, my wife and the movie guy still weren't there. She had stopped at the liquor store to get wine and the fixings for Kamikaze's, though. As the girls were mixing drinks, I headed over to the record player and played every Laura Nyro song that the Fifth Dimension covered: "Stoned Soul Picnic," "Sweet Blindness," "Time and Love," "Save The Children," "Flim-Flam Man", and of course, "Wedding Bell Blues." I was so excited because I had never been able to bribe anyone to listen to this with me.
Don't go to Gibsom cross the river.
The Devil is hungry. The Devil is sweet.
If you are soft then you'll wish your mirror hidden
To hide the eyes that look on Gibsom Street
Gillian listened intently and then declared she liked the Fifth Dimension's versions better. I was heartbroken, but a palace coup was brewing over my choice of music, which reminded these girls of Herb Alpert records their parents used to listen to. When I suggested Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, they opted for the Bee Gees instead, chased with Lionel Ritchie. As the girls sat on the sofa watching music videos without sound and drinking Kamikaze's, Gillian and I started dancing. We did a kind of East Village free tango limbo thing, and I held one hand while pouring wine into the glass in her other. She mashed the floor with her stiletto castanets and emptied the glass like Gloria Grahame, sending me diving to the floor as she hurled it to the rug. She immediately smelled like a wino. Lionel had just eased into his calypso number, "Dancing on the Ceiling," when there was an unceremonious knock at the door. Expecting my wife, I looked in the peephole and saw two uniformed police officers. "It's the police," I gasped, and within a matter of seconds everyone disappeared. My first thought was that there was some kind of terrible accident.
"What's the matter, Officer?" I said."May we come in?"
"Sure," I said, unlocking the gate.
"Are you the tenant of this apartment?" There were two cops, a talking white one and a scowling black one with a mustache.
"Uh...Yes." As I said this, I noticed that the cop who didn't talk was strutting around my living room, sniffing feverishly. If this guy was Baltimore County's idea of a dope-sniffing cop, he was a total dud. For starters, who has to try to smell marijuana, and second, even I could detect without sniffing the odor of crack and greens from the neighboring apartments. At least it was clear they weren't here to investigate the bullet that came through our window. "What's the matter?"
"May we see your driver's license?"
"Sure." I checked my pockets and of course it wasn't there. "It must be in my coat," I assured them, and opened the closet doors.
Yes, you guessed it, they were all in there, trying to hide behind the coats, with faces like Lon Chaney, shaking from cop adrenaline. As I fumbled futilely for my expired license, trying to act drunk so the cops wouldn't think I was a complete idiot, the talking cop noticed that Gillian was clutching a paper bag. He smiled. "What's in the bag?" he asked.
"Uh...Cookies," she whispered, bit her lip and clutched tighter at the bag.
"What do you really have in there?" asked the cop, a line of reasoning that surprised me since there was enough evidence of underage drinking in the kitchen to have us all busted.
"Cookies," she whispered again, looking more terrified and again clutching tighter.
"Can I have one?" the cop asked with a salacious smirk.
"Uh...no sir...they're my cookies," she stated firmly but quietly, still cowering behind my huge lamb's wool coat.
"C'mon, can't I have just one?" taunted the cop, practically ejaculating with glee.
"No sir, they're my cookies, and I don't wush to share 'em," she quietly slurred. The cop grabbed at the bag. She resisted. The cop grabbed again, she moaned "no" and held on like mad, but his cop arms finally wrestled the bag away.
"Cookies, ay?" he said with a wink to the other cop. "Hey, Burton, let's have a looksie and find out what's really in this bag. Why'nt you tell me what's in there?" he asked, looking at us, not the bag.
The other cop opened it up and peered in. He didn't say anything.
"Why don't you tell everyone what's in the bag, Officer Burton?" He leered at all of our frightened faces.
"It's...cookies, Hal. There are cookies in the bag."
As if his partner too was not to be trusted, Hal pulled open the bag to look for himself. "What do you know, it is cookies. Are you kids having a seance or something?"
"No, sir, but if the music's too loud..." I started, sounding like Alan in Scooby Doo.
"How old are you?"
"Twenty-four." I made myself a year older.
"Keep it quiet, huh?" he muttered ambiguously. As if totally satisfied he had given the bad people what they deserved, he and his partner left, demonstrating once again how the urge to preserve the ego always triumphs over the will to render arbitrary and capricious psychic torture.
As soon as he had gone, Gillian said "Fucking pigs" with braying blue, transparent teeth and convulsed with laughter. Immediately we all joined in, the tension exploding into a laughter far more violent than any noise her Cuban heels could possibly have made on the floor. She explained how she had found the cookies in the closet and held on to them by instinct and, well, couldn't resist the opportunity with Officer Smirk-Off. We all started eating, Keebler Grasshoppers they were, even as a part of me became frightened about what would happen if my wife walked in on us devouring her secret stash.
It didn't take long to find out. She and movie guy stormed in. She threw my driver's license on the table with disgust.
"I found this in the parking lot, Space Shot."
So that's what happened. It must have fallen out of my pocket. The cops would have probably arrested me for having an expired license. What serendipity. "Oh, thank you," I said. "It's funny, because the cops were here."
"What did you do? I better not owe them any money."
"Oh, no. It was quite hilarious, actually..."
"I doubt it," she muttered, and started complaining that there weren't any potato chips. She looked around and the dual jealousy factor stared back at her: the teenagers circling movie guy as if he was a deejay with Bon Jovi tickets, and Gillian baring her fangs at the end of my invisible leash. Looking away from both, her eyes caught the ripped and limp cellophane of her burglarized cookies. She had a look of total violation. But instead of consoling her, everyone recoiled in horror.
"Show's over," she finally said, her coat still on.
I was just drunk enough to make a stand. "You can't break up a party just because you want to," I said.
"Fine," she smiled, "it's not like I ever get to decide anything anyway." Then she announced to the room: "Whoever wants to stay here with loverboy, enjoy. Anyone who wants a ride, it's leaving now."
As if by some preordained plan, the room divided into two camps. The expressionless young girls were transformed by sudden, inexplicable allegiance to one of my two realities. In one I was the stoic hero, and they observed me with wide, respectful eyes and slightly open mouths. They seemed to wear my martyrdom as some kind of seal or badge and felt that my protection was the only thing that mattered. In the other reality, I was the scoundrel, flaunting my brand new girlfriend to the wife I poisoned and discarded — someone who should be reprimanded with any means possible, for no lie or act of violence was wrong when done to protect society from such an insidious subversion. This second group glared and spit, a constant hateful watching, and exhibited a slight quivering that I took at the time to be the result of their guilt at pretending I was the evil hand behind this terrible scene, but that I later realized was genuine terror.
I wanted to reach out and embrace my wife, or at least try to talk over how things got to this point, but the faces on either side wanted blood, no other taste would satisfy. I looked at movie guy. His expression exactly mirrored the confusion, powerlessness and sympathy I felt. While he tried gently to extricate my wife from this scene, she flung him aside and stuck her jaw in Gillian's face.
"I trusted you. I thought you were my friend. You're nothing but a slut."
With that, Gillian launched a glass of wine to her face.
The girls made a circle around them like it was an after-school fist fight. The argument seemed to be about me, but they kept me away from the action. Movie guy sat on the sofa pretending he was reading "TV Guide." Within moments, it broke up, and my wife grabbed him and led her public out the apartment door.
I was left after the diaspora with maybe five girls, including Gillian. As king of this realm, I was forced to realize that these were real people, not pieces on a chess board. Not having a car to transport them, I tried a variety of things to keep them interested, including charades, Trivial Pursuit and distributing my wife's supply of women's magazines. It seemed they had other plans in mind, though, and started amusing themselves with gossip about movie guy. Gillian, meanwhile, continued to drain wine from the jug. She danced around the apartment away from my pursuit, offering suggestions about how I was so full of shit I had to use toilet paper after I talked, and so cold I'd steal my mother's Alka Seltzer and feed it to seagulls, and, worst of all, that my shirt made me look like a computer geek. Whenever I got close, she asked for food or to use the bathroom. I finally cornered her in front of my wife's bureau. She looked up at me with lambent, watery eyes and asked "What is it that you want?"
I reached my head down and touched my lips to her mouth. She opened, and I dove my tongue in.
11.
Amid the low rumble of exhausted drunkenness, my wife finally came back, alone, at 3:47 according to the red time on the night stand. Gillian was clutching me like a tree-dwelling creature, just a scared child with no reliable illusions of hope to which to cling, only me, covered in her sap and exhausted from being unable to get my hand into her tight jeans. Was this revenge? Was it love? Instead of a dramatic climax, the final assault when I was finally vulnerable, all I heard was a muffled sniffle. Gillian and I stayed there paralyzed on my wedding bed for the remainder of the night. Bare branches scratched the window. In the darkness, however, I saw no stranger tapping to get in. There was only, in the silver of morning, winter's chilly laugh, another gift for us.
I tried a few times to get Gillian to venture out into the living room with me, but she kept holding me to the bed, vice-like, her eyes exploding with terror. The intense quiet was broken by the sound of eggs cracking, followed by the sizzle of margarine on a skillet. I slid out of Gillian's grip to investigate, finding a roomful of sleeping girls, sitting on chairs or the floor like stuffed sacks with heads nodding, my wife on the sofa, head in hands, whether from sleep or grief I couldn't tell. A girl was in the kitchen quietly and perkily buttering toast, as if this was some kind of slumber party and she was playing mom. In the center of the living room floor my notebook, where I kept the few song lyrics I could actually remember, was opened to "Song for Gillian," one of many jocular titles I used, for among the lines was "Throwing virgins to the sea/ That's me/ The Volcano guy." But there it was, lying prone on the carpet, the pristine vessel of my private thoughts 24 hours ago was now a loose tramp open to any interpretation. I walked back into the bedroom, with my finger to my lips took Gillian by the hand, and the two of us dodged the scarlet letters, past the slumbering women, and crept off to my white Oldsmobile.
I nervously turned the key in the ignition, but nothing happened. I flicked it repeatedly, as if a different rhythm or greater force or a more willful attitude would allow me to escape the fates, or at least get this child home. Gillian, wearing her faded purple scarf like a shawl, looking deathly blonde, watched me with the weight of too many lifetimes, each one sickened by the sheer blind hopefulness of my struggle.
"You really don't know what you're doing, do you?" she said, as kindly as she could.
"I wonder if she pulled the ignition wire," I said. "I might have to sneak back inside and check her coat." "Yabetter hurry, I have to be at work by seven."
"You have to work? It's Sunday morning," I moaned with disappointment, although I had no idea what I would have done with her, save a long morning of coffee and catharsis at The Donut Hole.
"Animals don't observe the Sabbath," she reminded me with a nervous titter that in the enclosing panic only made me think how we had both sold our souls to the devil and were going to be consumed in the red crushed velour interior of this vehicle. I looked down to see if there was another key on the floor and noticed — how could I have overlooked the obvious — that the gear was in drive instead of park. I shifted and the engine started right up.
"You truly are an idiot," she laughed, lighting a cigarette.
"Amen," I smiled.
She worked at the far end of Falls Road, just beyond the stone estates of Baltimore's gentry. We could see some of the mansions through the bare trees. Each one overpowered us with a tremendous silence. We sensed the burden, the weight, of the secrets hanging in the rafters. Neither of us could say a word to each other. I wanted to cry, suffused with love but powerless in the face of all love is forced to carry. As I dropped her off by the back entrance, the sound of the dogs inside like hatchets on trees, we looked sadly at each other, a gaze of recognition we'd been waiting our lives for, the "I understand and everything's OK, there is no limit to my love for you" look that cannot move even an inch closer, for it would be ruined if it was not allowed to be swallowed up in the vast distances between us.
That moment gave me just enough strength for all that was to come. As I drove home under a creamy gray sky, the trees appeared as huge capillaries pulsing with hidden juices, and things took on a painful purity — whatever else these women would take from me, they could not take away my capacity to love, for I knew that true love was a feeling inside me, no matter who or what was on the outside. I floated into the apartment, expecting nothing and pretty much getting just that, the group of them around a table pensively self-absorbed, paying virtually no attention to me. The whole spectacle had moved them to examine what they would and wouldn't do for love, and what they would expect a man to do for them, but the actual flesh and blood agent of it all (me) ceased to be (if it ever was) important, so much so I joined sleeplessly lightheaded in their hypothetical discussions, talking about how one must always follow the heart and suffer the consequences gladly, to which they nodded blankly.
In the crueler light of the following evening, however, my wife focused her selfishness on me. Ugly words like betrayal, cheating, adultery, it was like I had stabbed her in the heart, how dare I do such a thing, don't even try to answer, dickweed, there is no possible justification. For once, her words meant nothing to me, instead I had an eerie feeling of peace, because the locus of my love had shifted somewhere else. I couldn't wait to call Gillian again, despite everything, for something had been awakened in me that was saving me, and I wanted to keep pursuing what I thought was its source.
After a week of impatient daydreaming, including a few calls to the animal hospital from a pay phone in an arcade across the street from the law school library (which was like listening to a disembodied voice at the end of a wind tunnel, behind the sounds of bubbling, zinging, whooshing and pinging of the huge electronic farthouse on one end of the line and the howlings and mewlings of imprisoned pets on the other, all braying together towards some note beyond my ken, meanwhile no one who nswered the phone had any idea of what I was talking about or who I was asking for), my wife calmly asked my permission for her to spend the weekend with someone else. When I asked only for the car in return, she kissed me and told me what a good husband I was. After pampering and prettifying herself for a North Dakota hour, she finally left, telling me to be sure to pick up the cat from the vet. As soon as she was gone, I made the first of what seemed like hundreds of phone calls to Gillian. She was washing her dad's car, then she was playing with some little kids, then she was helping mend a neighbors fence, then she was making an avocado salad, what kind of desperate loser was I to keep interrupting her? I was literally climbing the walls, looking frantically for some kind of diversion from the reality that I had allowed my wife to fall in love again. I picked up Edgar, trying to find in him a greater pain than mine, what with his life energy snipped away and all his desires redirected towards utter fealty to the queen. Instead he bit me, like an unrepentant prisoner fresh out of jail holding me responsible for everything, not changed, it seemed, at all, a point reinforced when he pissed on the living room rug as soon as we got back. I only envied him, his claws holding on to my ankles as my pacing built a corral of dust. I tried other distractions, for example playing all of my wife's records to see what the worst band in the world was — I had it narrowed down to Kansas and Styx, but I didn't have the stomach to make that final cut, which just shows how distracted my mental state was, given how obviously worse the aptly-named Styx is. Throughout the day, the phone kept ringing, the wives of my wife's parent's friends, obviously tipped off to something, calling to tell her what schmucks their husbands were in order to convince her of the sanctity of marriage, and, upon finding her strangely not there while I was, told me. It took all my effort to expend polished responses: "I'm sure everything will work out for you two," "No, I'm not quite sure where she is, but I'll be sure to convey your message, for no one does more with aspic then the junior league," and "I'm not sure what our plans are then, but let me mark that down in the old calendar, I don't think I've ever seen so much fine china in one place."
I had removed all the mints, chocolates, gels and caramels that had been carefully hidden in jars throughout the apartment and was nibbling them in bed with my shirt off, reduced to watching "Star Search" and pressing the redial button on the phone like a post-op patient pushing the morphine injector. I finally decided to give Lester a try. He had been kinda cool since the creature episode, refusing to come 'frinstance to last week's party. He now had a phone, but contacting him during these weeks of confusion had been impossible. His phone was either busy for hours at a time or kept on ringing, as if he was on the phone so long he had to suddenly run out of the house to do all the errands he'd neglected when he was on the phone. This time, however, he picked it up, it seemed, before it even rang.
"Hello...oh hey, Felix, can I call ya...right back?"
"No, man, I need your help. I'm watching Ed McMahon on TV and eating gummy worms and obsessing about what my wife might have been doing all day long."
"Ed McMahon, huh? That's cold. Do you have a car?"
"Sure I..."
"Why don't you come on down, then. I need a ride to The Bulb anyway, there's this semi-retarded cop I know giving a poetry reading. I've got some golden nuggets here," he added. "I'll daff-initely puff you down."
On the way there, my car was sideswiped by a pickup running a red light. My front end gave way like it was made of plaster, and as I felt the automobile dissolve, it felt all-too-easy, yet another loss that would never be healed. The other driver, having just worked a 20 hour shift at a job that obviously required massive amounts of alcohol ingestion, turned out not to have a license, insurance or a scratch on his truck, but he did have sympathy for me, running up saying "sorry, dude, my fault, my fault." Unfortunately, my license had expired, and we were in a part of town where the only cops were undercover, and anyway the crack dealers by the coke machine were eyeing my hubcaps. So all I drove off with was a scrawled piece of paper with his number on it, which turned out of course to be fake, which of course became yet another suspicious lie I used to cover up my blatant and reckless contempt for Her, for all she had slaved to give me, and for America itself — a charge none of my family or friends ever doubted, incidentally, so busy were they empathizing with my woeful state of mind. In reality, I wondered whether driving to Lester's had become such an end in itself, the Perceval's grail that would finally unseal my hermetic isolation, that I would have stopped at that green light if I'd had a saner possession of my faculties (but then, I reasoned, what sane person drives?). The wreck did have one salutary effect: instead of worrying about my troubles, I worried about how embarrassing I looked in a smashed vehicle. I was looking so closely at the expressions of pedestrians, in fact, I almost hit Lester trying to flag me down in the street.
"You gotta help me, I'm in a bad way," he frantically gestured, completely unaware that my grille looked like a David Smith sculpture. "You gotta drive to that parking lot over there and check out the white pickup truck with the lights on. I can't see them from here and I don't want to be spotted. Be careful not to attract any attention."
"But..." I pleaded.
"Don't ask me any questions, just this once," he appealed, a hysteric edge to his voice.
I had no choice. I drove over slowly having no idea what I was supposed to be on the lookout for. I hid the car behind a city salt truck and gazed into the eerie parking lot light. Ah, lovers, I thought, seeing two dark figures in the cab, once I was one of them too. They're probably trying to find a secluded place for a blow job, or worried whether their parents will smell them when they got home. How very careless they are. They moved closer briefly and then the woman stepped down. I saw that it was Katherine. The guy drove off, and I saw the streetlight hit his face. He seemed attractive enough, the kind who would cause women passing-by to speak louder. He had that slowwitted grandeur that most women find intriguing and most men find threatening. But — he had a mustache, thus negating any danger to Lester.
"Were they kissing?" hissed Lester, after tapping on the window.
"They were intent on each other in a parked vehicle. You do the math," I said distractedly, my mind fixed on Romantic notions of transgression and eternal torment. Then I remembered my friend's precarious state and recovered. "I mean, I think so," I meekly replied.
"I knew it," he seethed. He paced furiously for a few seconds, and said, "I gotta handle this, man, sorry I can't blow buds with you," and then stalked off.
I stared at the waves on the wheel and drove home.
Since they wouldn't sell me liquor in the suburbs on account of my expired license, I stopped at a ghetto store. The man behind the bars laughed when he saw me, as if I was a little kid at a brothel or something. But his joviality, and the loaded six-pack of Olde English "700" malt liquor I carried under my arm, were the best things that happened to me that weekend. My wife didn't come home until Sunday night, but I stopped rehearsing all the words I could never say to her and just listened to Sinatra's "Only the Lonely" album about 20 times straight. I sang along with all my heartbreak, as if I was serenading someone, maybe the elderly neighbors who probably considered Frankie a pipsqueak punk and his music the cacophonies of the jungle, maybe the hip-hop connoisseur next door who would have labeled it, probably accurately, along with Bach and Elvis Presley, as lifeless white people music, without a trace of melodic interest or harmonic complexity, something to dance a stupid white dance like the polka to. I didn't know who I was singing to. Perhaps the spirits heard, the only ones who'd understand how they'll never write lyrics this good ever again:
The torch I carry is handsome,
It's worth its heartache in ransom,
And as the twilight steals
I know how the lady in the harbor feels...
As for Gillian, I finally reached her on Sunday afternoon and answered the question she asked me that fateful night. "I want...us...to share the chalice," I said. Instead of responding, she reprimanded me for luring her into the sick world of adults, who play messy, deadly games, like her mother who ran off with a hairdresser and wrecked her father's life forever, do I know how much he's suffered, and how she used to think having friends was the easiest thing in the world but it seems pleasure is a business with me, I've made her lonely, maybe if I had called her earlier in the week when she needed someone to help her sort through her emotions, things might have been different.
My resistance caved in before this onslaught. "Perhaps you're right," I replied. "This couldn't possibly work. Uh...Thanks. Take it easy."
For the first time since I'd met her, she sounded surprised. She seemed shocked, in fact, that I would give up so easily. She started gasping as if there was so much more to say when in fact she had just a moment ago confidently rested her case. I had to hang up. I saw in a flash the brilliance of the whole ruse, the bait and now inevitable switch. It was staggeringly comical. There I was, I thought, embarrassing everyone with my earnest, immovable presence, and now here I am passing get out of jail free cards to everyone who's conspired to shut down my marriage, and, most hilarious of all, I've completely ruined an unwitting child. It was too good; my wife could never concoct such a clever plot, much less movie guy. No, I knew this came from a higher, funnier power, and I began to laugh uncontrollably, a disabling, stomach in my lungs kind of laugh, like the first time I realized Andy Kaufman was funny.
12.
The rest was pure formality. My wife gathered up what she considered to be my possessions — some of my shirts, a comb, my records — and handed them to me in a box. She told me to go look for a place to live, which was not the easiest thing to do since I didn't have any money. I made a list of people I could call to stay with temporarily. To make this painful chore easier, I took the absurd initial step of putting Lester's name down and, since his name came first, I called him first. Figuring that he and Katherine and Kitty were trying to build some kind of respectable life for themselves, I tried to fill the airwaves with a strained analogy between the game of baseball and day-long Allman Brothers jams before casually mentioning, my eyes rolling, that I needed a place to stay. He, as if proving my assumptions wrong was more important than his personal comfort, immediately offered to let me stay with him. There was a small loft off to the side of their apartment that was empty, he said, and we could jam and throw baseballs all day. I asked if that was OK with Katherine, and he put her on the phone. She told me, with chilling warmth, that she had to let me stay there, and asked if I could chip in for food and rent, since she was having trouble making ends meet on her Good Neighborhoods paycheck. She also made the odd request that I was not to steal any of her possessions, as if she had a rap sheet on me, who had been afraid to take straws out of my high school cafeteria. I readily agreed to all the conditions, and humbly offered any thanks and blessings a nowhere man such as myself could give, to which she lightened up, giggling at my vanity.
With the housing arrangements made, I still had some tense final negotiations. I was forced to trade my entire Neil Young collection (even "Zuma") for a decent quilt, but I managed to score a portable tape player for an Emerson, Lake and Palmer LP, so maybe my wife did have some pity on me after all. She forestalled any request for more long-term provisions, however, by insisting that we were only getting separated, she just needed time to sort things out, and she had given me that leather jacket so it rightfully was hers. Suddenly, not being needed by someone so needy began to feel like a tremendous relief, and the fact that I was also being released from the matching World's Fair collector plates, the pastel jumpsuits two sizes too small and the large chartreuse rug filled me with more joy than I could handle. I felt positively syphilitic with glee as she drove me away in the Oldsmobile, my world on my lap.
As the terminus neared, the velour began to swallow me in its plushness; it grew so red my eyes hurt, and finally I became convinced it was the most precious thing on Earth. My hand reached to stroke it, and just then the car came to a stop. It was March 19th, 1987, a warm, gentle, full-mooned night where even the prostitutes along the sidewalk weren't forbidding. We turned simultaneously to face each other, but our good-byes were drowned by a battery of sirens from nearby streets. As I left the car, my wife hesitated slightly, showed a strange worried look, but I marched bravely through the open door, up the giant steps.
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