by Jaimy Gordon
“I think I heard that song before,” said O, wrinkling up her nose. She was always poking that nose into some ragged anthology in the dayroom, maybe she really smelled a rat. “Heh-heh, I don’t think so,” I muttered, but then my eye fell on Zuk. Her ugly hands were on her hips and her dark eyes flashed. “You have steal Miss Peabody’s song,” she said, “I am shocked.” “No I didn’t,” I said uncomfortably, “I just borrowed it.” True, I had sung Emily’s words to O Susanna in my sloppy haste. Probably that gave away my larceny even to a dreambox mechanic from Outer Hotzeplotz. Yes, all at once I was sure that even in Outer Hotzeplotz, third graders sang “O Susanna!” the same way we sang “La Cucaracha” and “Song of the Volga Boatmen” at P.S. 149. I turned red. “Greedy, greedy girl,” Doctor Zuk rolled her guttural r’s at me, “what I will do with you? Look what you have done,” and she pointed down at gauze-upholstered little Miss Peabody, refusal was her middle name. Emily had managed to twist her face into her wheelchair so all I could see was the tangled back of her head.
I saw I’d better do sumpm for Emily or Zuk would be disgusted with me for weeks. “Hey Em.” She turned back around and she was a puzzle piece of sad lumps around her face, like all Bug Motels when they wonder how they fit in. But the thing about puzzle pieces is, you can turn them. “Say Em,” I said, “I made up that song just for you and if you don’t like it, I don’t know what I’m gonna do.” And my neck, it’s a pretty long neck, wilted like a strip of bacon. I got so low and depressed that I even banged my chin on my pukelele, which played a weird, going-nowhere, broken-down fence gate of a chord. Then she had to do sumpm for me, see. Then she fit in again. “That ain’t it, Ursie, I love that song,” she said nobly. “It was my best,” I sniffled.
I slid a glance over at Doctor Zuk to see if she bought it. I don’t think so. Her eyes glowed down at me like nuggets of greenblack kryptonite or sumpm. “You are good little horse thief,” she said to me without smiling. “So-what shall be punishment of Bogeywoman, Miss Peabody? She must be punished. You may choose.”
“Whatcha gonna punish her for?” Emily asked in genuine consternation. “For too big will,” Doctor Zuk replied, “she eats too much, she talks too much, she sings too much, she takes whole room and lives only little bit for somebody else.” “She wrote me that purty song,” Emily pointed out. Doctor Zuk smirked knowingly behind Emily, but only for my benefit. “At everything, everything she touches, Miss Bogeywoman is good,” Doctor Zuk agreed, “but she can be better. So what is right punishment for her?” Emily looked around for some kind of help, her grave little Joan of Arc eyes gone watery, almost scared now. “Make her sing her own ugly song,” I whispered in Emily’s ear. “Make her sing her own ugly song,” Emily repeated in relief. “Your song, please,” Doctor Zuk ordered. She was furious. Her eyebrows arched, her eyelids descended; she was imperially bored. “It’s ugly,” I warned em. “I hope is ugly, since you have steal show from Miss Peabody,” Doctor Zuk said, “now please to get it over.”
MY SONG
Bugs Baloney, who’s a phony?
The fat begins to fry
Nobody home but the telephony
Who’d call a goyle like I?
Doowop dwop dead
The blind eat many a fly
Every slave will have a slave
Why not you and I
It was ugly all right, hungry and repulsive. It was Emily puffed up in her yellow salve and white gauze like a cheese stick, and me trying to save her, and Zuk trying to save her from me, and me showing off and feeling rotten. It was me feeling like kissing somebody, but even more like throwing up.
Egbert caught the smack of gay disgust as only a musical genius could, and gave it a Leprosy Tango beat on the bed-panioforte, and where the eyeball goes into the highball, O oowooed inside the flag with the righteous spookitude of one in whom spookitude is innate. Emily blatted in the classic manner of a fabulous girlgoyle, somewhere in the general vicinity of the beat and just slightly off key. O, she was a Bug Motel all right from the first blat. Now I see it was always Emily who gave us our air of ninny self-confidence, of dumb innocence ploughing on, of infant hope already caught in the jaws of failure but bumping cheerfully over the molars, like a babe bouncing down thickly carpeted stairs.
Just then Dion showed up in the clubhouse and took over the sterilizer-top steel drum, energetically playing pianissimo (it had only one dynamic, pianissimo) so you could thank godzilla hardly hear him. It didn’t matter how he played, for with his black forelock leaping around like Mighty Mouse, he was as handsome as he thought he was, and while we stared at him, he stared entranced at his own spoonified face in the drumhead mirror.
Nobody home but the telephony
Who’d call a goyle like I?
Dwip dwop dwop dead
Boruch a tweet tweet tweet
ENTER THAT DIRTY STOOLIE, MARGARET KODERER
And this is where you came in. “Ursula?” “Margaret! Godzillas sake what took you so long and where the hump have you been. How’d you find me?” You smiled slyly. “This adroit professional showed me around the hospital and escorted me down here poisonally and even fixed the parking ticket on my pickup truck.” Behind you stood the Regicide in his custom-tapered white orderly’s trousers and three-button white jacket, which, pinkies genteelly extended, he was just now buttoning once, at the breastbone, as was the fashion.
Everybody was waiting to be introduced. O even came out of the flag and got in line. Reginald had a new Polaroid camera, ker-POP, ker-POP, ker-POP-a Great Day in the Bug Hospital. That’s why this famous picture exists. “Doctor Zuk and The Bug Motels: Egbert, Dion, Emily, O and me. May I present my older sister, Margaret Koderer?” “Hi.” “Pleased.” “How ya doin.” “Enchanté.” “Gr-r-r-r-r.” [“Cheese, O, you look all ballooned up, are you pregnant or sumpm?” “None of your beez-wax, what do you care.” “So whose is it?” “Keep your big nose out of it but suppose I tell you my hubby-to-be is here in this room and is a lowdown royal.” “Reggie! You don’t think the Regicide is gonna marry you?” “He better cause I gotta get better fast or they won’t let me keep my baby, I mean I been in the bughouse two years already.” “You wanna keep it? You call that better?” “Oink yourself, Ursie.”]
“So you are Margaret. I have heard very much about you and now is fascinating to see you with own eyes.” “Well don’t look too hard or my legend will crumble.”
How do you do it, Margaret? Even with O in the room, and Emily, and Doctor Zuk herself, the forbidden love of my life-even in that starry group, you were the center of attention, ker-POP, ker-POP, ker-POP. Well, for a minute, anyhow. That certain air of erotic abandon you have-godzilla knows it isn’t your good looks. “Pfui,” Doctor Zuk muttered, sniffing the air, peering around for the reason the whole clubhouse suddenly smelled like a horse barn. They eyed your bristly pigtails tied off with red vegetable-stand rubberbands, and your muck-stiff dungarees, and your yellow-green eyes afloat in big black eyeglasses like two frogs in two ponds. For maybe a minute they eyeballed you, and Reggie snapped shots of you, ker-POP, ker-POP, ker-POP. O thought about cutting your throat, no doubt, but she had to get better now.
Then you broke the spell: “Say, that tune was cooking, Ursula, you got genius like I never knew you had. And you look good, surprisingly good. I don’t know, I was gettin a message on the pineal channel like you’d landed at the end of the world and I’d better swoop in and get you outa there, but I’m beginning to see this joint must have its compensations. For example who woulda thought you had blond hair under all that grease? But long as I’m here and that barber chair is so handy, lemme give you a haircut.” You unrolled the Morning Telegraph you had in your pocket, fanned out sheets of it, produced scissors, waved your hand at the chair. And like a zombie I climbed in, ancient habit.
[“Who are these people?” you whispered in my ear, “I mean, can we talk here?” “Nothing too poisonal,” I hissed back, I mean how was I gonna tell you that I’d changed my mind ab
out leaving?]
“Ahem,” you began, “well who would have picked this dump for the place where the birth of the blues O-riginated? But I’m only a sane person, you bughouse guys are so talented… [Ursula, who is that cute, well sorta cute, little girl wrapped in gauze and what in godzillas name happened to her?” you fizzed in my ear, snip snip snip.]
“Excuse me, we Bug Motels don’t presume to play the real negro blues on our bughouse instruments,” Egbert expounded, trying to collect any little stray crumbs of your attention, and I could see you registering his dimensions, thinking, The glasses are cute but what a squirt, I could wrap my legs around that sardine twice, “we play conk-fusion,” he continued, “which is to say, using whatever hospital stuff we can pinch to play the tinny tiny noises of our own unknown inner machinery, on the notion that love will get us out of here, er, are you doing anything tonight?” (I eyed O, who eyed me. I shrugged. Poisonally I was beginning to wonder what was with all these bugheads? Had every one of them scarfed some love gunk today like in A Midsummer Night’s Dream?)
“Blues was just a manner of speaking,” you smiled serenely, as if this happened to you every day, which it did, snip snip, tinka tinka tinka, “and actually I’m only here to parlay privately with my sister, that is, if I can ever pry her out of this schubertiad, but thanks.”
“Ursie writes all the words for the Bug Motels,” Emily tattled gravely.
[“Who is that child?” you whispered, “does she need a home? Could she be fostered?” “Not by you,” I hissed back, “you live in sin with a racetrack bum for godzillas sake, you think the folks that run this bughouse are crazy?” “So maybe I’ll get married,” you said. “Yeah sure, Margaret, when pigs fly and rivers run uphill. And anyhow I gotta admit he’s not just a racetrack bum. Mr. Tod Novio, alias Boyfriend Death, would be a bum anywhere. The exact face of Lovelace in the Classic Comic! And by the way, on which ten-cent racetrack are we refusing to sully our hairy hands with labor now?” “Indian Mound Downs,” you smirked, “Great Cacapon, West Virginia. I gotta be back to feed by five. Listen Ursula I could fix that little girl, I could fatten her up, I could get her all the way better.” “Better kidnap her then, they’re never letting you have her.”]
“Bertie plays the bestest, but Ursie sings the loudest,” Emily further reported. (Loudness was not a point in your favor with the Bug Motels.) “Regardless,” you said, raising a finger: “I can only say, Ursula, your song is shayn vi die zeeben welten. Honest I didn’t know you had it in you.”
“First learn to talk, then learn to sing, say wise old men of treatment staff, okay I go along with this,” Doctor Zuk recalled, “but when Miss Bogeywoman finally opens her mouth, after twenty-one months silent like grave, song comes out, only song, and what song! like an angel. I wonder what Sigmund Food would say? Surely is something for mental science in all of this?” Doctor Zuk ran her strong ugly hands through her spiky hair and smiled secretively.
And this was the first you must have awakened to the mysterious powers of this beautiful dreambox mechanic or bughouse commissar or whatever exactly she was, from some pre-Foodian oblast east of the Urals: you stepped back from the barber chair and took a long look at her. “You know I knew old Ursula here wouldn’t talk to the dreambox mechanics no matter how much Merlin had to pay for a room in this dump-in fact the more the better. Twenty-one months, eh?” You laughed hysterically.
Doctor Zuk arched an eyebrow at you, possibly she had been indiscreet? But then she continued decisively: “I see you are getting incredibly better, Miss Bogey. You can make songs like that! Why don’t you tell me what you want. You want music lessons? You want go back to school? I talk tonight to Dr. Feuffer.” I stared at her. Sumpm about that I talk tonight to Dr. Feuffer got seriously on my nerves, what was it? “Don’t talk to Foofer tonight. I’ll talk to Foofer myself. Cheese I turned into the creakiest gate in the bughouse while you weren’t looking,” I whined, “and now you’re gonna talk to Foofer!” “What makes you think I was not looking?” Zuk said loftily: “How dare you say this? You think you know me? My dear, you don’t know where I come from, where I go. You must see big, not small, to find me. You must get much more better to know me. You don’t know me at all.”
Sumpm about this speech so crushed my heart I threw myself into my little NEUROPATHOLOGY desk and banged my pukelele on the desktop and sulked right in front of everybody. And it’s a good thing there were no razor blades handy-I looked for the scissors, but they were in your hand. “Hey, Ursula, your haircut’s not done,” you said. “Got a dime?” “Sure.” “Call somebody that gives an oink,” I snarled. “Why you are so evil-tempered when somebody praised your song?” Doctor Zuk inquired, in her most enlightened and dreambox-mechanical voice. I glared at her. You are a leviathan, even your kiss is like a house fell on me.
Finally I tried to save face: “Look, it isn’t just me. Where our music is concerned, all us Bug Motels hate to get our hopes up.” “Bingo,” Egbert said, “don’t make us hope for fame or you’ll spoil everything. We know we could be as good as Chuck Berry and still get nowhere but Neuropathology. Or maybe we get a fifty-dollar gig playing Cousin Freddie’s bar mitzvah now and then, but we don’t care. Only love will get us outa here. Everybody’s a rock star now.”
“Wait-how many rock stars live in the bughouse? I mean dat’s a new angle, ain’t it?” Dion declared. Bla-a-a-at, spla-a-a-t, we all blew raspberries at this childish idea.
[“That is one Adonis of a retard, definitely better than anything else I see around this bughouse, he’s got a genuine Greek cevapcici fattening the pinstripes in those pegged pants and anyhow he’s not so dumb. When you think about it, the publicity angles for a rock band from the bughouse are fantastic,” you hissed in my ear, “what’s he in for anyway?” “Terminal narcissism… go ahead, laugh, he’s so in love with himself he had to go to Emergency one time for trying to oink himself in his own bunghole, in front of the mirror.” “Well, judging by the structure in those trousers it wouldn’t be out of the question…” “Ugh, Margaret, how can you even think of oinking that mooncalf.” “At least I’m just thinking about it,” you smiled.]
“O why can’t you dreambox mechanics leave us the oink alone,” O said gloomily, “we’re the Bug Motels, we don’t play to get famous, we don’t even play for ourselves. We play to forget ourselves, for O… O… O… O… blivion.” “What she means is, we’re kids, we don’t zackly like grownups,” Emily explained. “There you are. That’s why we don’t get our hopes up,” I concluded.
Doctor Zuk blew a great cloud of Turkish smoke in our faces. “Hopes? who talks anything about hopes?” she said. “Who lives on hope dances without music, but who has music lives without hope. You five Bug Hotels have music, this I know. I, I have no music, but I know how to set saddle on right donkey. This is my God-given gift.” And her face filled up with light and looked love, not on us, on me, me alone, for seven straight seconds. Well it was more than five, less than ten, but I could tell it was love-I snuck a glance over at you-you saw it too.
Trouble dented your forehead. Your idled scissors snipped air, tinka tinka tink. Doctor Zuk, having blessed me with that look, was already squinching out the door in her silver sandals. I watched her, the familiar systole diastole of her muscular buttocks, the flickering curves of her soccer player’s calves. All at once my heart opened up like a peacock’s fan, I knew all the colors of love. First red hunger drenched me, hot and disgusting, and I almost choked on my own tongue, so strongly did I want to put all that in my mouth. Then, black shame-you were watching, worried sick, with that dent printed on your forehead. Then I went white, for suddenly I knew why it made me furious, that Tonight I tell Dr. Feuffer. This wasn’t epidemic insomnia among harassed professionals, with late-night telephone calls. It was a dinner date! The scoop on Foofer (via the Regicide, hence you could run trains by it) had him outa here and into Haussner’s for a kirschwasser every afternoon by five on the button. Ergo, cocktails at the very least. They
were in cahoots, no, in love, it explained everything. My heart drowned. What else did I expect? She was beautiful, she was famous, I could never get her or be her. Then that hot surf of hunger slapped me around again and ground me into the sand and when I stood up again I was dizzy and seasick, and knew what I had to do: spy on Madame Zuk.
“Hey, how about getting back in this barber chair and letting me finish. You look crazy as a bedbug with your hair half on, half off.” Snip snip. [“It’s not just your hair, Ursula, you got a mad light in your eye, the way you were eyeballing that old dame’s hindparts when she left like you were gonna track her and do bad stuff to her, say, what the hump’s going on here anyway? You’re not really buggy, are you, Ursula?” I suddenly realized I better explain. “Er, uh, you got any dough, Margaret?” “Sure.” “How about you take me down to the Chesapeake Room and feed me?” “The which?” “Glorified cafeteria, ground floor.” “My pleasure.”]
Crabcakes, coleslaw, devil’s food cake, your treat, just like old times. “So whaddaya think?” I finally asked you, wanting your take on Doctor Zuk-I was gonna tell you, I really was.
“Cheese, are you sure you don’t want out of the bughouse, Ursula?” you jumped right in instead, “I mean it may be a private joint and sorta ritzy, and setting Merlin back a yard a day which he deserves for deserting you, but it still smells like industrial solvents and dead people’s farts and it’s kinda like jail.” “That’s just all the overcooked vegetables,” I said, “breathing those farts is better’n eating, I mean there’s a lotta vitamins in em, and besides you deserted me too, Margaret.” I pointed my fork at you.
“I’m not your mother or father,” you said. “Sure you are if the real ones are missing, and anyway you took the job till you got, er, uh, boy-crazy is too weak a word, how about bug-eyed for outlaw fudd of every stripe and color?” You laughed. “I don’t know why,” you sighed, “the respectable type just doesn’t appeal to me…” “So is that con-man-in-a-ragged-silk-shirt doing any work around the farm these days?” “Not a lick.” “What good is he anyway?” I grumbled. “Ahem, you really want the venereal details?” “Some other time maybe…”