by Jaimy Gordon
I was wondering if she still loved me, loved me at the same time she loved Egbert, and was I any better off if she did. He hunched in that miserly way over his homemade keyboards, plinking out tiny unearthly bug trails of notes, microscopic music-box rolls, jerky tunes, spastic countertunes, faint and far far away. Dion nodded to the beat. He went for all that love stuff and moreover couldn’t wait to love himself in a baby-blue spangled tux and kick in unison, if he could get anybody else to kick with him. His baritone was best bopping up and down the stave in round monosyllables like bum and boo. His song, composed by himself, went:
DION’S SONG
There was a bug lived in a zoo
It bugged him havin nuttin to do
bum bum bum di boo boo boo
Love will get you out of there
Reggie helped him with the second verse:
Fee fi fo fee fi fo fo
Hello? Say who? Don’t live here no mo.
Love has got him outahere
Outahere.
Rich bug poor bug buggerman thief
Bug mechanic Winnebuggo chief
Love will get you out of there
Only love will get you out
of
there.
The Regicide hung with us down in our surgical amphitheater as often as he could get off the mop. He fronted as our chaperone, as usual, but nowadays we prized his counsel, for his street corner doo-wop experience went deep. The refrain of course was from me, Bogeywoman.
You could see it in the scared respectful eyes of our dreambox mechanics: our music had made it beyond their usual categories, maybe even come bubbling up from someplace prior to them-the tar pits or the mysteries or sumpm. Anyhow they shoved over, the royals. Weren’t we getting better?
I liked Egbert myself, now that he was getting better. His skinny body looked good hunching over his bed-panioforte like a man overboard clambering onto a life buoy. As a Bug Motel, I admired him. After fifteen minutes fooling with the object, he could play anything, beef bones, bottle caps, orthodontic braces, PVC pipe with the plumbing code still on it. He sang the song I rustled up for him, although it was square as a barn door and old as the itch and he suspected it was filched from somewhere, which it was.
EGBERT’S SONG
And this will pass for music when nobuggy else is near,
The bug song for singing, the bug song to hear!
That only I remember, that only you admire,
Of the bughouse that screeches and the bughouse choir.
“Where you come up with them complexicated vocabules, Bogeywoman?” the Regicide, who was visiting, wished to know. “She has plagiarized Mother Goose and God and a few other bigwigs,” Egbert explained smoothly, “chops em up and conk-nects em all together. Don’t let it go to your conk,” he warned me.
I wondered where Egbert had gotten that love idea all of a sudden and it was easy to ask him because we two were the grinds among the Bug Motels. All the livelong summer’s day the two of us were plinking and strumming down the clubhouse when pretty soon the rest of em got sick of it and went back to playing O Hell for dimes and quarters at their old table in the dayroom. Egbert and me saw The Importance. Of course O didn’t see The Importance, but she saw us seeing it. She gazed and gazed at the pair of us out of the bottoms of her eyes.
Still, even O had to be alone sometimes; first thing every morning she had to make up her eyes to their usual mine disaster hugeness and scariness, and that took maybe an hour. At nine o’clock in the morning, Egbert and me were already plucking and twanging away in our clubhouse that had NO ROYALS ALLOWED taped over NEUROPATHOLOGY on the door. Our snack bar coffees were steaming, our Kools lay fuming on our armrests, and I asked Egbert: “Where’s this love stuff coming from? Used to be it was all D.O.A.P. with you, Egbert, and now it’s love.” Naturally I suspected that he, like me, had a Doctor Zuk behind it all, a secret passion moving everything it wasn’t crushing. Come to think of it-I narrowed my eyes at him-maybe he’d fallen for Zuk himself. Of course it had to be madame-too-beautiful-on-her-horse! I mean, who else in this fuddy bughouse was worth it?
“Naw, it was always love,” Egbert smiled up at me from tightening the endpin on some soundboard. “I just didn’t know back then what I was hungry for. I used to chase all day after D.O.A.P. and now I run after-better stuff. Higher stuff.” “Like-royal stuff?” I asked. “Royal stuff?” he echoed, looking at me conk-fusedly. He lifted the drain pan manjocello or gourdolin or whatever it was he was tuning, laid it on his desktop and stroked it sweetly. “See, when you track that D.O.A.P. all over the city it’s love, Ursie, but when you cop that D.O.A.P. and shoot that D.O.A.P., it’s nowhere, man, you’re right back where you started. But real love,” he turned his smiling face up at me and the fluorescent lighting starred all his very straight teeth, “love takes you up a level.” “Ya mean like-to the seventh floor?” That’s where the royals had their offices. “Hump no, Ursie. You don’t get it, do you?” I shook my head. Who cared what love was? Who do you love, that’s what I wanted to know, but I hadn’t figured out how to put the question.
“You know, I was a doper before I was even born and I still am and that’s how I wound up in the bughouse and got in the Bug Motels and met you,” Egbert said. “My Unkie Jerry told my old man and old lady to put me in this place and I cussed the hump out of all of em but now I see they were right. My Unkie Jerry’s an obstetrician. He’s the one who was always telling me, Bertie, get off that shit! Be a producer not a consumer! But you know, since he delivered me, he was the first one pumping it in.” “Um, er, uh, pumping what in? Whaddaya mean you were a doper before you were even born?” I inquired, half curious half squeamish to hear this story. “Pinky, that’s my mom, when she’s pregnant with me she has to be the hippest thing in motherdom, the most in the know, so she goes through La Mayonnaise or however you call that training, but when the day came, no matter how natural she breathed I wouldn’t come out until they put some D.O.A.P. in her. So there you are, that’s why I say I was a junkie before the Steins ever got hold of me.” “Aw quit bragging,” I laughed. “No, man, I mean it, this sounds funny but I swear I can sorta remember it. I’m squinting down the rabbit-hole and see Unkie Jerry standing there in the light at the end of the tunnel, in his white coat. Come on, son! he says, Be a producer. Not a consumer! He’s got this little blue starter pistol sticking straight up in the air, and it goes BANG! Sumpm about him got on my nerves, man. I wouldn’t budge.” “You remember all that?” I said doubtfully. “Sure! Then in comes this beautiful toasted-almond-color nurse carrying a little ampule and a big syringe. Hello junior, she says, I got sumpm here I bet you like, and shoots up Pinky, and bingo, I came, soon as the stuff was in her, see? So I figure if it was just me I didn’t even want to be born. Only the idea there was D.O.A.P. out there could move me.”
“I dig,” I said. I liked Egbert. I mean, we were in the bughouse, where they’re always tryna get you to rat on your parents. I had to admire him for stealing the blame for his own bughood, even if he had to sneak back into the womb to do it. “Say, are you rolling in dough, Egbert?” I asked. I remembered that the concert house across from the B &O was the Stein, the third floor where Emily got wedged in the laundry chute was the Stein Otolaryn-gological Institute, the Stein Cartography Collection on the high mezzanine of the downtown library was a hot contender in my search for the primo launching pad in the city for offing myself to a greasespot, all the most tubercular-looking blue period funambules were in the Stein Wing at the art museum-“You met Egbert and Pinky,” Egbert said, “if they ate their dough with a knife and fork it still wouldn’t run out. They’re so godzilla rich they don’t do anything. They run the foundation, that’s about it.” “The foundation?” “For draining off the family money… But I think I’m more like Unkie Jerry, I gotta do sumpm.
“You know, Ursie, some people-not you-” he waved his hand, breezily exempting me, “need sumpm to chase after, and I’m one of em. I need sumpm to do, some
kinda thing outside of a person. D.O.A.P. takes care of all that. When you’re a junkie you know what you’re looking for all day long-you’re looking for stuff. That’s why love is the same as D.O.A.P., it gives you some kinda half a reason to get out of bed in the morning,” he added-where had I heard that before?
“Hey, that’s what O says about love,” I snuck in. “Does she?” Egbert yawned. Not that I was trying to sic her on him, I even kinda missed the life-or-death thrills and chills of her amorous persecution, but it came down to this: better him than me. “Speaking of O…” I said. “Back off, it’s hopeless, Ursie,” Bertie said gently, “I’m in love already. Hey, I know the one I love is, er, funny about fuddies, but we’re both in the Bug Motels and that’s love too. Draining music out of death supplies is a high form of love, man. That’s what we do. She sees The Importance…”
He didn’t dare look up from his bed-panioforte. I felt the heat rush up to my ears, for that could only be me he was describing. So he knew I was funny about fuddies. If he had divined, who else was hot on my trail? I didn’t mind his love so much: Like I said he looked kind of sweet hunched over his keyboards, and not much of a fuddy at all, maybe a hundred and five girly pounds with sharp little hipbones barely holding up his pants. He looked like a stiff breeze would flatten him, I mean I couldn’t see him and O at all, but, who knows, these musical wizards have fingering, and they see The Importance. If he had to love a Bug Motel, it came down to this: better her than me.
“O…” I opened my mouth. “O… O…” I shut it again and looked hard at the flagpole, that little tent of stars and stripes behind the barber chair, for I had just spotted a pair of gold lamé ballet slippers at the bottom of it. O was among us. Egbert followed the dotted line of my gaze and I saw he saw. What had we said that might egg on a murderess? It seemed like every word of love could have stuck to O as well as to me. Was O funny about fuddies?-well who wasn’t? And O of all people had to stop thinking about men that way. Was O in the Bug Motels? Did O make bughouse music? I had the words but she had the tubes, the spooky-flute and the gumbo wobble. And as for who saw The Importance: what girlgoyle thinks herself a lightweight? not even Tinkerbell. We ought to be safe, Egbert and me, but the American flag was muttering under its breath.
There was one way out of this fix: “… a three and a four and a…” I burst into song.
Shananah so what shazaam
Ma nishtanah hullo whozat?
Meeka mooka boppaloo adonoy
So what shazaam bray pree hagofen
The words were pure foam off the top of my head, but I knew I had never sung so well. Egbert outdid himself falling in with this doggerel. His double-jointed thumbs on the bed-panioforte dribbled out their usual tender monkey dissonances, his pinkies whisked the jingles on a distant tambourine.
And then I caught wind of sumpm else: O oowooing from inside the Stars and Stripes, not mad anymore but sobbing like the lost soul of America she really was. How come she hadn’t jumped me on the general suspicion, as was her habit? I gazed at the flag in perplexity, and right away I saw a certain roundness behind the thirteen colonies where her belly was. Yes, O had been unusually zaftig lately, her momps as a matter of fact had left even Mary Hartline’s in the dust, good godzilla could she be
“You are angels from heaven for the world! My god, where you have learned to make music like that, what nobody can teach-”
In rolled Doctor Zuk, and not only Doctor Zuk, for she had in her hands the wheelchair handles of Emily Nix Peabody.
It was the first I had seen of my see-through princess in months. So much had happened since I burned her up in her I CHOCOLATE bathrobe that a different me struggled to my feet to get a look at her. And of course it was a different Emily. Fatter, way fatter, and it wasn’t just the padding she was wrapped in. Her arms stuck out over the sides of her wheelchair like a blow-up doll’s, each one ending in five gauze sausages. Her thighs were mummied up too and propped wide, but on the other side of her knees her regular old shins and feet dangled, in her regular old dirty white socks and scabby Mary Janes. Her face was puffy, still Emily but too tired to be ugly-cute anymore. She looked plain and sad. When she saw me her beaky little top lip poked out in the old way and her bucked teeth showed, but I wasn’t so sure she was glad to see me. “Hey Em, how ya doing,” I whispered. “Not so good,” she whispered back, the colorless fringes of her tapwater-blue eyes gummed up with tears, and she looked away.
Lemme tell you, such a negative report of herself from Miss Dying Popularity, the nurses’ pet, the Bug Motel most prized for her guts, was a shock and my jaw dropped and I didn’t know what to say. “You look fatter,” I finally observed, “that ain’t bad.” “Miss Peabody is doing better in highest degree,” Doctor Zuk announced. “She will soon be well.” Emily sniffed mightily. “What is wrong, my dear?” Zuk asked, peering into Emily’s face; now even she seemed puzzled. “They played so purty,” Emily said. “Yes indeed, and so shall you,” Zuk said heartily, “what I have promised? why are we here?” But Emily didn’t answer and in a moment madame-too-beautiful-on-her-horse leaned over with a handkerchief and wiped her nose, from which a curtain of green snot had descended. “What I have promised, eh?” she soothed, polishing Emily’s little freckled cocktail onion of a nose, flashing her eyes angrily at me over Emily’s head. What did I do, I almost asked, but what kinda question was that, when Emily sat there like Europe in ruins? “You shall sing, you shall play,” Zuk boomed like a prophetess.
All the same I didn’t like that, Zuk telling Emily and all the world that any girl could be a rock star if she only tried. “You could hum along,” I told Emily, and Zuk gave me a look that said Monster, despair, you shall never have me or be me.
But come to think of it Emily could sing, I suddenly recalled, sing, yes, like a little girl, but not just any little girl, the little girl, the fabulous girlgoyle of myth and legend, that is, a high voice straight as a pencil that doesn’t quite land on the blue rule it’s aiming for but pierces to the numbest cochlea… We could use that in the Bug Motels and in fact Emily was a Bug Motel, she had always been a Bug Motel, what was I thinking of?
“Um, er, uh, maybe you can sing after all,” I said. “Soon’s you pick up the tune.” “I couldn’t never make up no wacky words like that,” Emily was sniffling. “Whaddaya mean,” I argued, trying not to look as frog-proud of my word salad as I naturally was, “you just hold your mouth open and the bugs swim out. You’re in the bughouse, right? There’s always some in there.” “Unh-unh, I couldn’t, I couldn’t,” Emily whined. It was like her fabulous girlgoyle nerve had burned up with her fingers.
“Hey, you don’t need a song. I got a song for you, Emily. I got songs for everybody,” I bragged. “Quiet, is enough from you, Miss Bogeywoman,” madame-too-beautiful-on-her-horse had the cheek to cut me off in my own clubhouse, NO ROYALS ALLOWED, and then she turned to Egbert: “Mr. Stein, you have instrument for Miss Peabody?” “It’s around here somewhere,” Bertie mumbled. I could hardly believe my ears-the two of em had schemed behind my back! Bertie bent down and thrashed around in the big black doctor’s bag he used for his music stuff. “Egbert plays even gooder than Ursie,” Emily commented helpfully. She was mad at me, not for setting her on fire of course but for forgetting to save her place in the Bug Motels.
Meanwhile Bertie pulled out this wire thing made of godzilla knows what orthopedic appliances and set it on Emily’s head. It looked like the halo from a Sunday school play, only with one rakish antenna spronging out of it and curling around into Emily’s face-some kinda clear plastic laboratory-pipe kazoo or whistle or sumpm was bobbing there at the end of it. Bla-a-a-at! Wouldn’t you know she got a pure A out of it the first time she tried.
Well I had never felt so rudely put in my place in my life but as it was madame-too-beautiful-on-her-horse who had put me there, I wouldn’t give up so easily. “Hey, Em, wanna hear my song?” I fired off, “even though yours is better?” Emily stopped blowing, the wastewate
r whistle dangled there patiently in its off-the-eyebrows orbit, and she said with a sick little smile, “Yeah, sure, Ursie.” “We have heard your song,” Zuk intervened coldly, “it is very fine song, like we told you once already, but now is time for somebody else.” Exactly when she put on these democratic airs, Doctor Zuk was the royalest royal of them all. “Ahem, NO ROYALS ALLOWED,” I quoted, pointing to the hand-lettered sign thumbtacked over NEUROPATHOLOGY. “Will you please shut up and let Emily play, Ursie,” Bertie said to me. I stared at him in disbelief. He was a whole new person, he was getting better, he was getting even better than me. I didn’t like that. Now that he was in love with me I could see he meant to jack me up to the highest standards. I stuck out my chin and announced: “That last tune was just an improv. I got my own song, everybody gets a song.” “Give Em a turn now. We all know you’re the best,” Egbert said. Dead silence after that, since everybody knew who was really the best. They all stared at me, waiting for me to be a better person. “I ain’t the best, you are and you know it,” I caved in, and was ready to lay my pukelele down or even play humble backup when Emily said, “I got nuttin to sing yet, honest, all-a-youse. Whyncha let Ursie go first.” They looked at each other, shrugging. What could they do? Hah!
Instead of my own ditty, I tuned up my puke and sang
EMILY’S SONG
Because I couldn’t stop for lunch,
It kindly stopped for me.
The van read PIZZAS BY HASSAN
FAST FREE DELIVERY
It’s two weeks later now and I’m
No fatter than the day
I started eating pizza
To postpone mortality.
It’s two years later now and I’m
Still tryna put away
That eighteen-inch cold pizza
Known as immortality.