by Jake Packard
The picture runs out. In the studio, Maria and Jamal are on camera with the two rattled anchor billionaires. “Can we administer another biopod exam please? Lorenzo?” The stage manager, also overwhelmed by the sight of Salem, somehow steadies himself, picks up the biopod and aims it at Jamal, pushing the button. The red light hits Jamal’s wrist, the biopod beeps once, hushes, and instantly re-beeps twice, the results flashing immediately on the screens all over New York, “PERSON ID, dnareg34096778, 12/24/47 6:39 PM, VIRAL REP – NEGATIVE. 0Mil per liter.”
NEGATIVE. NO DISEASE. With one bombshell after another leading into this one, the most unbelievable of all, the final mega-stunner completes the city’s collective shock.
Pellet, tortured by the limitations of the physical plane, watches in his car in near paroxysm, veins about to burst out of the skin around his brain.
Sam shakes his head in astonishment, and stares into the monitor. Through the lone camera left active by the technical director, he watches the ABCNN New York bureau in falling apart from witnessing the impossible. Producers and technicians wander about the room, lost about what to do next. Lorenzo attends to an overwhelmed Marty. Ira wipes his own sweaty brow with a handkerchief. Maria has her arms around Jamal’s shoulders and the little boy is staring up at her like a baby chicken imprinting on his mother.
Herbie however, not missing a beat, bolts out of the control room door, zigzags around people in the hallways who have lost reality and are bumbling about in disorientation, and ducks out of view into an unlocked staircase exit.
Jack, savoring the miracle before them, emphatically embraces the celestial chorus now singing in glorious harmony all about his beloved city, and gallantly cheers it all on.
* * * * *
Lorraine
Sweet Lorraine. A woman who did not mind being built as the ultimate toy for a boy. In fact, she loved it. She lived for being sexy, even during the high tide of 1970’s feminism, when the couture of a woman’s liberation was measured by the amount of hair under her arms.
It was that grand and irreplaceable era when Herbie’s dad was born in the backwaters of Harvard and MIT, upstairs in a Cambridge, Massachusetts, attic, amidst a dancing coven of new-wave, nouveau rich, recently emancipated, preppy witches from the suburbs. By then Lorraine had already decided she was to pick her own way the through the rapids in the river of time, damned if she doesn’t make it, she drowns by herself. That’s the kind of girl she was. Once asked at a party by some ultra-rich Harvard sophomore what she thought about original sin, she replied without a moment’s hesitation that she certainly would like to have one.
If she had found one, she would have then started a search for yet more undiscovered peccadilloes, because she was that type of girl. It wasn’t hard for her to find willing partners to assist her in this quest. She was young, she was beautiful, and if she liked you, she showed you. Her preference ran to long-haired and sensitive musicians. It wasn’t like she was a groupie or a plaster caster, she was an artist whose active sexual connections were more than just inspiration; they were fuel.
At first she dabbled in photography, but the price of the cameras, film, chemicals, and the darkroom immediately made it too constrictive for her scamper and rampant type artist’s personality. She needed something more cosmopolitan, more sophisticated, more urbane, more mixed media, something more appropriate, like garbage sculpture. She roamed the streets of Cambridge, looking for anything of artistic, political, or sociological value in trash bins, construction sites, and deserted lots. All the rubbish she claimed would find it’s way back to the back porch of Grandma’s little rental house, which Lorraine had turned into her studio. There she worked, sometimes all night, hammering and sawing and chiseling and painting. What would eventually emerge was a garbage sculpture of how it was she really felt.
She was also really good at rolling joints. That made her a real love and kept her nicely stoned through most of the 1970s. Sweet Lorraine had a constant stable of guitar players and drummers who kept her well supplied and well fueled. She liked when they tripped on psychedelics. It made the experience deeper, got her motor going to get out in the street and collect more garbage to paint.
Grandma just laughed off her best friend’s sexual bravado and kept her only liaisons for Bullmoose. Once at a beer and smoke fest at Perry Street, some hippie in the crowd hit on Grandma. After striking him out with her disarming charm, he asked her in a caustic, sarcastic, punk-ass kind of way what she had against sex. She laughed and told the silly boy that she had nothing against sex at all; as a matter of fact she loved sex, she once had forty-one orgasms in the same night. All purple. So, no thank you, you can’t beat that.
Returning to Boston from India, Bullmoose and Pranan stumbled out of the plane, jumped on the T to Central Square, walked the six or so blocks to Perry Street and knocked on Grandma’s door with just the clothes they wore on their backs and Bullmoose’s Martin guitar, albeit a bit dinged. Grandma, delighted, invited them in and fed them some homemade chicken and barley soup, along with a six-pack of Coors Light. They recounted to her their adventures, including the part with the little Gypsy and all its concurrent sordid details. It was somewhat surprising to Pranan that this didn’t bother Grandma. But he was just beginning to learn that Grandma invented the open relationship and probably was the only person in history to ever actually have one.
Finally, she and Bullmoose drifted upstairs into her bedroom looking for purple and Pranan curled up to sleep on the couch in the living room. Above him he could hear Bullmoose and Grandma giggling, and the floorboards creaking from the bed rocking and rolling. Even though it was two a.m. when they arrived, without sleeping a minute from halfway around the world, the sounds of the amorous action upstairs kept him wide awake and, what was worse, made him horny.
He wandered with great continental disorientation up the stairs to the bathroom, tiptoeing past Grandma’s door out of respect. He opened the bathroom door and there she was. This incredible white goddess, sitting on the john, fully naked, just completely and entirely bare butt naked, reading by candlelight what he later found out was the Kama Sutra. Lorraine, totally unfazed, looked up at him with a brief smile, made a dainty wipe, flushed, and left, muttering a pleasant how-do-you-do on the way out. She went back into her bedroom across the hall, leaving an astonished and smitten Pranan frozen in the hallway. Agape and aghast, he heard a muffled young man’s romantic voice behind her bedroom door ask, “Hey baby, where’s the rolling papers?”
That image of her tender white nakedness never left his mind. Each day as Bullmoose and he continued to crash at Perry Street, it became harder for him to resist her allure and enchantment. He started to feel personally insulted by the never-ending stream of longhaired and sensitive rock musicians who came and went day and night. It was like she was a librarian in a lending library where the only book available was the Kama Sutra, and one couldn’t read it without her reading it to you.
It wasn’t like it a personal snub. Mornings in the Perry Street kitchen, which retained an aroma of cheap red wine and whose greenish wallpaper was burnished by all the marijuana smoke, were always a great way to start the day. Grandma served him a breakfast bowl of granola and yogurt while a sleepy looking Lorraine cooed into the eyes of some anesthetized local guitar jock over a cup of cinnamon coffee. And those late night spaghetti dinners, with garlic bread, Chianti, and boxes of frozen shrimp borrowed from the Greek restaurant where Lorraine waitressed every now and then, were also warm and fuzzy, as she nibbled on the ears of the bartender drummer who helped her accomplish the heist. With Bullmoose pontificating and Grandma cooing over Herbie’s dad, it was actually cozy, like a hippie family. That’s the way Lorraine felt about him, sisterly. You don’t fuck your sister.
She had no time for him sexually; her energy did not flow in that direction. Even if Pranan was a great and merciful East Indian god-like apparition, who looked so good he could have been the cover boy on her favorite book, she was just too bu
sy researching her bathroom literature of choice with other guys who were musicians, longhaired and sensitive.
But, for Pranan, Lorraine was all he could think about. However, he stayed very polite and appropriate, because it was dynamite that Grandma let them crash there as long they needed to. Unlike his American teenage counterparts, politeness was how people from his part of the world always behaved in all situations. Most importantly, even though he was a really nice guy, it was because he was hopelessly lost in love or lust or both. He often lingered as long as he could by the upstairs bathroom door, in case he got another chance to watch her pee naked.
However, Pranan knew the count-on-able rules were working for him: nothing stays the same, everything is interconnected, and you never know what is going to happen next.
The genuine real article, the dropouts of the early 1970s, never had much money. That didn’t really bother this hippie family because the life of a countercultural freak isn’t supposed to involve much currency. In their household, those things important, mostly drugs, came as a part of the lifestyle. They were there, traded, bartered, re-traded and consumed without the exchange of much money of their own. Of course there had to be some money, for the man, you know, for things like rent and food. Money was a necessary evil, so you had to do necessarily evil things.
Often they dreamt about money, lots of it, and came up with crazy schemes about how to get it. Bullmoose was the best at it. He had crazy ideas like making a cup of coffee real fancy, like with shots of espresso, blended with soymilk and topped with caramel and lots of whipped cream. He’d give it a catchy name and sell it to everyone in America everyday for more than three dollars a shot. That would certainly make them a ton of the evil stuff.
But his friends just laughed at him, passed the joint and said how crazy he was. That could never happen; who would be so stupid to buy a cup of coffee for that much money?
One afternoon he thought they could make a TV show about the silly things they did in their house everyday and how they felt about it. They wouldn’t need writers or actors or a plot, they could just let the reality happen. The audience would be entertained just by watching them do the simple things they routinely did everyday and then listen to them talk about what it was that they just saw them do. Maybe they could make up a game or two to keep them occupied, or do stupid and gross things nobody would ever do like eat the cockroaches that shared the love with them in their cozy little kitchen. Yeah, sure, they coughed. Which of the thirteen channels would go for that dumb idea? And what stupid American consumer would waste their valuable time watching something as boring as all that? People don’t want reality they said.
Lorraine just rolled another joint, took a big toke and smiled. Bullmoose sighed, took a puff and resigned himself to having to do truly evil things.
To pay the rent they painted homes in Porter Square and waited on tables on Mass Ave., or they cleaned rooms for the Harvard Library Services, which employed people to maintain the libraries that were built primarily to extinguish insomnia from Harvard Yard. That was Bullmoose’s favorite, wiping the dust off bookshelves, as rich preppies and foreign students, heirs to kingdoms in Africa and Asia, sat around thick hardwood tables and studied the Communist revolution in China as if it might have been at all relevant to the cultural movement going on in America at that time. To Bullmoose, those pinko Harvard guys, who thought quoting Robert’s rules at the open meetings to strike against the university was going to get them girls, were equally as absurd as those MIT nerds, who believed the Big Bang was a way to get laid. His only response to them was, Robert who? And, what in heck came before that, and what before that?
Within a few weeks back in the States, Bullmoose settled for the lesser of all evils and was back up to his old tricks, which was waiting in a brown Boston cab at Logan airport for the Beantown bourgeoisie to come waddling up to the taxi stand to pay longhaired and sensitive young men to drive them to the outlying provinces. Thereby these young men in question could make a little cash before the end of the day so they could turn it over to evil supermarkets, evil landlords, and evil utility companies.
Wistful, Pranan knew some of them were lucky enough to have a lending library of their own to go home to that had an oral tradition of reciting and teaching the ancient ayurvedic sexual practices. But not Pranan, he didn’t even have a job.
Oftentimes in the evenings when Bullmoose was gone, driving cabs for the evil stuff, the little house on Perry Street was quieter and somewhat more peaceful, but certainly not as entertaining. There were no sounds of electric guitars in the basement exploding caveman-like riffs that only white men imitating Jimmy Hendrix could come up with. There were no late-night philosophical dissertations with hygienically challenged college dropouts who came to pool their pocket change to buy beer and other soft drugs.
It wasn’t a bad different, just a mellow different, which was hard to be when Bullmoose was home. But mellow could be an ambivalent thing. For Grandma, it was neither here nor there. She liked mellow; she liked chaos. It was all part of the great scheme of things. Lorraine didn’t like mellow. She liked garbage sculpture; she liked mixed media; she liked nuttiness; she liked anarchy; she loved fuel. But for Pranan, an agnostic Muslim from a Hindu culture of everyone and everything having a distinct place in time, mellow actually gave him some much-needed space to be alone to think. He eventually came up with a plan.
Every morning, without fail, his best friend in the world, Bullmoose, gave him, quite unselfishly, a few evil dollars from the hard-earned tips he made driving the gentry all over Boston all night long. He’d just be getting home and Pranan would just be getting up. Over black coffee, Bullmoose would reveal his latest brainstorm concocted during the night. Everyone in the kitchen would smile, mumble and glance at each other with well concealed smiles when hearing these ideas. They wanted to tell him to shut up, but Grandma clucked something about being careful with the ones you love; so everyone just let him be.
Pranan, born appreciative about life, always accepted the few dollars Bullmoose supplied, albeit evil. Being a born ascetic, he used only what he absolutely needed, saving the rest for something special.
So, on one otherwise undifferentiated morning, after Bullmoose re-defined the future of commercial TV, Pranan made his move.
Feeling charmed, Pranan wandered across Mass. Ave into a pawnshop in Central Square. He negotiated in the stubborn way only a native-born sub-continental Asian can, for an old Boehm silver flute displayed in the crowded window. The antique flute had once belonged to a classical flutist who used to be second chair in the Boston Pops before her heroin addiction became just too much.
Yuri Zeebeesteen, an Armenian who owned the pawnshop, also tried to sell him some high-risk car insurance. The deal was interesting to Pranan only in its intellectual possibilities. He turned it down eventually by telling Yuri that he didn’t own a car. Of course, after that, Yuri tried to sell Pranan a car, which Pranan would have liked, since he missed his Ambassador. He envisaged it sitting at the curb by the passenger drop off in the Madras airport; it might still be there. Before they ran off to catch their plane, Pranan crawled back underneath the heroic little vehicle and retrieved from the driveshaft Bullmoose’s magic ring that saved their lives. Bullmoose was wearing it now on his right hand, an historic gift from Pranan to his American best friend upon their arrival in the U.S. He was glad he did that now, considering how much Bullmoose had given him lately, which was just enough money to buy what he needed to become a longhaired and sensitive musician.
The only wrinkle in Pranan’s wild and crazy cosmic plan was that he didn’t know how to play the flute.
However, being truly resourceful and totally committed, it didn’t take him too long to make a sound. It wasn’t music; it wasn’t pretty, but it was a sound that came from a flute. That was enough for rip-roaring congratulations from the assortment of hippies and street people who congregated at all times around Grandma’s Perry Street nirvana, looking for leftove
rs, sometimes a place to crash, and maybe even a little piece of Lorraine.
That gave him all the encouragement he needed to continue destroying everyone’s sound space. Granted it wasn’t anywhere near as loud and annoying as a crappy electric guitar in the basement, but it certainly wasn’t music yet. That didn’t matter to Pranan because, as he practiced, day by day, he received a little bit more attention from Lorraine, whose ear for music wasn’t quite as keen as were other parts of her body. The sounds may not have turned her on quite yet, but it seemed the effort to make them was just as important, so he felt he was on the right road.
Pranan had hope. He felt a quantum jitter in the universe that opened up this little seam and said, yes, you can sleep with Lorraine; all you need to do is seduce her with your tunes. He really didn’t know how to make a tune, yet, but since the universe gave him reason to try, by Allah, he’d try. God is great.
He tried so hard that many times during the day he grew faint and lightheaded from lack of oxygen. He blew all he could into that thin little silver pipe until it grew hot in his hands. He knew nothing about music except what he liked: Van Morrison, Crosby, Stills and Nash, Jefferson Airplane. But theory, scales, arpeggios--nothing about that, nada. It seemed so simple, make a sound some stoned-out freak could like, and the world was at your command, well, certainly a young, sexually emancipated, upper middle-class, preppy witch or two. Golly, America was a great place, regardless of what they napalmed in Viet Nam.