Mike: “So what else is new?”
“Ninety-five outside and sixty-five in here. If I don’t wear a suit, bubie, I’m dead.” He sounded like a melancholy woodwind.
Meanwhile, a small Black-Haired Chick I’d been noticing around lately was sitting by herself across the aisle and staring at us. With her unfashionably healthy face and lorn waif eyes, she looked like a kid outside a toyshop. A collector of sorts, I decided, checking to make sure I had all my sorts about me.
Just now she was watching us with what looked to be pure reverence, perhaps. Most likely she’d just found out who we were — you know, real live authors she’d almost read books by, and I a long-haired minor rock-n-roll celebrity as well.
I wasn’t alone in noticing the chick, but then, I never am.
Mike said, “That makes sense.” Though he was ostensibly talking to Andy, he was using his invitation-to-overhear tone for the chick’s benefit. “You hang out here to beat the heat, so you have to wear a suit to keep from freezing. Sure. Tell me more.”
“What can I tell you?” Blake performed his famous Yiddish shrug. “So I’m without form, and void.” His open-letter voice was now in operation. The Black-Haired Chick was getting the full treatment.
I refused to participate in this foolish charade. I was a working entertainer, among other things, onstage every night. I’d be damned, so to speak, if I was going to stage a private showing for his hero-worshiping adolescent matriarch, this antique teenybopper who was clearly all of seventeen. Nay, sir, not I.
“Not quite,” I stated firmly and sonorously. “What it is, Andy, is that Contact High routine again.” Blake groaned and the chick leaned eagerly toward us. “And darkness,” I explained, “was upon the face of the waters.” I sat back, smiling proudly.
While Andy’s face was arranging its well-known That’s-It! grin, Mike chuckled in quick appreciation of the joke, and the chick looked vaguely puzzled. Frankly, I agreed with the chick. I didn’t know what was funny about it either, only that Mike would surely laugh and Andy would certainly explain, giving the chick a clear choice among Mike the Clever, Andrew the Understanding, and Chester the Profound Humorist. It’s nice to have friends.
“That’s it!” Grinning, Blake clenched his right fist in front of its shoulder and stuck the index finger out at shirt-pocket level to emphasize the point — a gesture I felt to be unfairly phallic and subliminal. “Of course. This is all somebody else’s hallucination and,” he paused to let the understanding index finger take effect, “I keep stumbling in the darkness.”
I was disappointed — he generally does much better by me — but the chick seemed satisfied, and yes, that outthrust finger business was decidedly unfair.
Ranting on, Andy said, “I just wish to God whoever’s running this show would move on to the next verse.”
Whereupon all three of us declaimed in loud, clear unison, “And God said, ‘Let there be light!’ ”
By now, of course, everyone was staring at us. That’s what they were supposed to do, and they always did it. Once you’ve been famous in the Village, no other fame can wholly satisfy you. The chick looked sinfully idolatrous. A few trained cynics near the door applauded. Then everyone said OH!, for Behold, there was light!
The Garden of Eden was a sudden deep pit of silence, and Andrew Blake, renowned author of Love Pusher, Virgin for Eight Hours (“…enthralling reexamination of progressive education…” Appaloosa Post-Chronicle), and Sex, Incorporated, good old Andy, sat across the table from me swathed head to sole in what could only be called a halo.
It was baby blue and it pulsed.
It was appalled. I remember thinking that somebody had pulled a monumentally unfair trick, and even wondering to whom it was unfair, during that long, frozen stillness; but then there was an unusually sincere scream and Little Micky, who’d come back, left the coffeehouse again, this time through the front window, and ran noisily off toward the East Side. It was a lovely exit, and I was irrationally glad he’d had the opportunity to make it.
Blake looked undecided, as though he and I were maybe thinking the same thing. Saint Andrew the Pornographer? Mike looked heavily put upon. I’ve no idea how I looked, and wouldn’t care to know, but the Black-Haired Chick was smiling like Christmas all year long.
“Pardon me,” Saint Andrew bleated with grave courtesy as he rose slowly to his feet. “I feel, ah, unwell. I think I will go Home now. Thank you. Yes?”
What was there to say? Mike nodded, I gawked, and Good Saint Andy walked slowly toward the door, his path made perfectly visible by halo shine. He looked like a dignified, contemplative, thickly bearded will-o’-the-wisp (but he cast fuzzy violet shadows, alas), and everyone he passed shrank from contact with the pale blue-white light he shed. Joe even let him leave without paying his check, an event almost as unprecedented as the halo itself.
Other than Andy, nobody moved but the Black-Haired Chick. She followed him at three yards’ careful distance through The Garden of Eden and out to the street.
For a long time after they were gone, the unnatural silence did not break.
As soon as I could, I asked Mike, “Contact High?”
“I… ah, I… I think the butterflies were prettier.”
3
HOME WAS several billion butterflies distant, on St. Mark’s Place in the mysterious east. We walked there through a contemplative silence broken only by distant screams we carefully ignored. It was an amazing walk. Michael hummed classical rock songs out of tune, I wondered if the butterflies’d hurt that night’s business, and neither of us thought at all.
Nobody spoke to us. Not even the panhandlers and tourists were talking to us that afternoon, which felt very curious. We were both a little up tight by the time we got through Washington Square.
The world seemed to be blaming us for the Andrew Blake affair. Mike insisted that even the pigeons were avoiding us, but he’s always had this artistic leaning toward paranoia. It comes of having been a spy. The pigeons were merely afraid of the butterflies, that’s all, but I didn’t try to explain this to Mike. Go reason with a paranoid counterspy.
When we got home, we found Sandi Heller pressing desperately against our front door, pounding on it with both fists. Great natural sense of rhythm. We could also hear the phone whistling inside.
“Hi there,” Michael chirruped.
She spun around as only a dancer should, yelping, “Oh good Lord! You’re all right!” She pressed her shoulders against the door and cried or something — it was hard to tell — saying, “Oh,” gasp, “Good Heavens.” The phone was still whistling.
I was confused, but M. T. Bear penetrated to the heart of the matter at once. “I deny everything,” he explained. “Categorically.”
“It was on the radio!” Twenty watts of frantic contralto. “Wings! I thought you were dead or something.”
Oh. That explained something. It also brought me down like a pail of cold water. Wings indeed. And Butterflies. Right.
“Sandi?” I said. She was still doing whatever it was that she was doing against our door. “Sandi, why didn’t you go in and wait for us? It’s never locked.”
She fell silent, looked stunned (Stanislavsky # 31-a), groped for the doorsnap behind her, pushed it, tottered into the living room, regained her balance brilliantly, tripped over a footstool, and fell plomp on her dignity beside my harpsichord.
It turned out to be one of those Busy afternoons when nothing gets done. To begin with, Mike and I spent at least an hour coaxing Sandi out of her hysteria. This was pretty fair time, really, considering the rumors she’d managed to invent concerning Andy’s halo, plus her innate fondness for psychodrama. I’d rather have spent the time practicing, or writing, or loafing, or doing other such creative things.
When Sandi wept, Mike comforted her, proving by glorious syllogisms that everything was perfectly all right, honestly it was. I’ve always been helpless with crying women.
When she laughed, it was my turn. I solemnly re
minded her that we had no idea yet just how serious the situation was and that there was no telling what was going to come of it all. Mike, who is an ursine mountain of stability when that’s what’s needed, couldn’t cope with Sandi’s laughter, mainly because he was having much the same problem himself. I, on the other hand, worry gracefully.
Finally Sandi recovered and brewed a pot of maté. Then we talked about what had actually happened — Andy’s awkward aura and all that — and she said, “Is that all it was? My God, you people do that every day,” which I thought was a bit unkind.
Then it was five o’clock and I remembered that I ought to get some practicing done. I played amplified harpsichord in a rock-n-roll ménage called Sativa and the Tripouts, a complex vice of which I’ve since been cured. Anyhow, while I ran through changes, fiddle tunes, and baroque riffs, Sandi and Mike cleaned up the maté things and rehashed Andrew Blake’s adventures as a lover, literary agent, raconteur, stand-up comic, and, most recently, saint.
“Oh!” Sandi yelped. “Oh my! Oh good Lord! Oh my!” I leaped up, ready to stem off another laughing jag, but she just sputtered, “Phone! I mean, the vidiphone. Listen!”
It was still whistling at us, its pathetic little view screen flashing off and on red. Mike and I looked appropriately sheepish, and I picked up the mouthpiece. “Howdy,” I said, and, “Hello? Hello there? Speak up, baby, it’s your quarter.” Then I hung up. “No one there.”
“Oh my! I have to go home. Right now.” Sandi whirled through the place like a ponytailed butterfly (alas), with Mike and me trailing along behind her, being ponderously reasonable.
“You don’t understand,” she insisted, quite accurately. “I’m all right, really I am. Only, when I heard about it, you know, I tried to call you, but you didn’t answer, so I had to come over here, and I forgot to… Ob. my God, whatever will Leo say?”
Ah, it was all so beautifully normal. And when Sandi was gone (saying, as always, or quoting, “I trust everything will work out all right,” at the door), I wandered through the pad, lazily dressing for work — tight black pants, suede boots, and a gold silk paisley shirt — singing classical Beatles tunes with the day’s events for texts, chuckling inanely, and grinning till my face hurt all over me.
All this euphoria stopped when Mike said, “You know something? I’m worried.”
He was standing at the living-room windows, staring down into the courtyard. In fact, I recalled with a start, he’d been staring out the windows for the past half hour or so. This was significant. I’d learned years before that whenever Mike spends as much as ten minutes in silent thought, for my own protection I’d best take his conclusions seriously.
“Explain?” I mourned.
“Look.” He pointed down toward the courtyard, a grubby red-brick and tin-can oasis temporarily bathed in glory.
“Oh,” I said after an incredulous while. “That’s a Butterfly, isn’t it?”
“Right.”
There was no question whose butterfly it was, for it was mainly yellow, but fluorescent, with a wingspan upward of a yard. Sean’d evidently realized that the absurd size of the thing might cause confusion: when it spread its wings it displayed a pattern in glowing sable running from tip to tip that looked like this:
“He’s getting good,” I breathed.
“Yeah. Good.”
Later, “So?”
“So wait.”
We didn’t have to wait long.
“Hey,” I wondered, “I hear trumpets.” And I did, too, a blatant horn call that knew the price of everything, coming, approaching, from somewhere above the building.
“Yeah.” I could tell Mike was impressed by the unemotional flatness of his voice. “Look.”
I suppose it was another butterfly. I’ll never know how, but it was obviously making its own music — gaudy fanfares from the fool’s-gold days of Hollywood — and the day-glo polyethylene-extruded fanfares were perfectly apt.
“God.” I wasn’t swearing.
“Wait.”
It landed in the courtyard with an audible thud (an awkward butterfly?) and waddled about to the accompaniment of a hidden symphony orchestra, mainly horns and strings, not quite in tune but much concerned with the importance of the occasion. I was far too awed to comment, which was just as well, for, with a loud orchestral sweep, it spread its polychrome wings to their full ten-foot span. So, a wide-screen butterfly. Groovy.
The colors skittered and glowed, changing in a rigid order just beyond comprehension. Almost subliminal patterns of psychedelic urgency swept erotic eddies across the wings in deep tides of hypnotic rhythm, making me uncomfortably conscious of the heavy July heat; and over all this, in a living red that seemed to strike directly into my brain without passing through my eyes, bruising words succeeded each other, became one another, intersected each other like virtuoso drill teams in competition:
I’MportANT
signifiCANT - - - - eSTABliSHEd
rESPecTABle
f
a
m
O.
U.
SEAN!
over again and over, always the same idea but nothing else the same, while the music screamed BELIEVE THIS like a hundred 3V pitchmen pushing soap.
Mike and I backed slowly away from the window, thoroughly unnerved. “Hey,” one of us breathed, “he’s getting good!” and then that footstool caught us from behind and we fell loudly to the floor. I still have that footstool.
We felt better the moment we landed.
“Yeah. Worried.” I wasn’t about to admit I was scared.
“What,” asked Michael in a skinny voice, “what do you make of it?”
Night had already taken place. While I tried to think of some kind of answer for Mike, glibly colored light from Sean’s superlepidopteran rippled across the ceiling.
“Joke?” I suggested.
“Yeah, joke.” Doubtful.
“Sense of humor,” I urged.
“Yeah,” he jibed. “Humor.”
“I mean, it’s a very good sign, you know?”
“Good. Sure.” Mike isn’t always the most comfortable kind of roommate to have around.
The lights on the ceiling grew brighter, crisper, more primary, and the music tasted like pure tent show. That seemed encouraging, somehow. “How old is he?” I asked.
Mike thought about it while the music sprouted piccolos. “Oh,” he drawled, “would you believe seventeen?”
“Thereabouts,” I agreed. “And therefore more brilliant than subtle, right?” I liked kids.
“Oh yeah?”
“Okay then, clever. Spoilsport. What do you want from the kid? Anyhow, the odds are in our favor.”
So we said it together: “A Buterflybynight!” and I went on: “But I sure wish we had better odds.” For no sensible reason, this seemed to mollify Michael.
The thing flew off then in an exuberance of calliopes, and we, dazed, finished getting ready for the evening’s entertainment.
A famous proto-hipster[1] once said, “It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.” Michael the Theodore Bear, my beloved roommate and manager, has precisely this odd twist of mind, and he’s always producing shattering surprises with it. Being Mike, he has a special voice he uses only for pointing out momentous obvieties everybody else has failed to notice: a dry, insouciant, malty tone I can’t at all describe. When, just before we were ready to split, he said, “You know what?” in just that voice, I stopped whatever I was doing, shook myself gingerly, stood at parade rest, and held my breath.
“Swell,” I drawled nasally. “No, Michael, what?”
“You know,” he repeated, dragging it out, “I’ve been thinking. That kid’s been making butterflies since sometime before eleven o’clock this morning. Lots of butterflies.”
Silence.
I grabbed my briefcase and scuttled toward the door. Mike followed, whistling a happy little monotone.
I was in a hurry, latish, so
we took the stairs instead of waiting for the elevator. I tried to estimate how many butterflies a young rock-n-rolly from Fort Worth could generate in nine or ten hours, and just before we reached the street door I stopped short, turned to confront Mike (beaming blandly), and said, “Thanks a lot, baby.”
I didn’t sound sincere.
4
WASHINGTON SQUARE was an armed lamp. Two huge searchlights, one by the fountain and the other in the chess circle near MacDougal, reared fluttering cones of illuminated moths boiling toward the sky. Nervous, heat-gun-toting GI’s stood guard almost everywhere, swatting moths and cursing brilliantly. Moths. I was charmed by the kid’s adaptability.
Tourists and chastened teenyboppers, shielding their faces with outstretched hands and/or autographed straw hats, moved sluggishly through the park, herded by the sweaty soldiers. Photographers played fast and loose with flashbulbs, giving the whole area a strobe-lighted, discothèqueish feeling. Hardened Villagers openly gawked.
The shiny NYU library showed battle scars. One friendly old oak near the park pissoir had been truncated by somebody’s skitterish heat gun. Everyone who didn’t look confused looked terrified. I hadn’t seen anything like it since the famous beatnik riots in the sixties.
“Michael,” I shouted, the militia being rackety, “this could become rather serious.”
“Serious? I think it’s hilarious.”
“That’s what makes it so damn serious.” We had a private convention that summer: when in doubt, philosophize.
If the park was frantic, MacDougal Street was worse. Ancient Italians chanted clackety Rosaries. U.S. Army vehicles of strange shapes and even odder functions (known, only to Michael) swarmed up and down the street, making jaywalking hazardous. Fuzz stood puzzled on the corners and pointed uneasily at things. Panicky teenyboppers stampeded in tight circles, shrieking, “Dig it! Dig it! Dig it!” and knocking unwary tourists off their feet. Jittery reporters loudly interviewed jittery businessmen. Moths and untimely butterflies abounded.
The Butterfly Kid Page 2