The Butterfly Kid

by Chester Anderson

  Mike and I, habitually cool, cautiously pretended nothing much was happening, but we were both a bit stunned. At the corner of Third and MacDougal we bowed gravely to each other (one more private ritual), said “ciao” in unison, and parted, I to the left and workward, he to the right and The Garden of Eden.

  I watched him bumble his way through the confusion, thinking sadly, Yonder goes what may well be my last link with reality, which was a hell of a thing to think about someone like Mike. By then, however, I was used to bidding my last link with reality farewell, so I squared my shoulders and loped off toward The Mess on MacDougal Street, flailing my briefcase before me to clear the path of lepidoptera and things that go boomp in the night.

  Chaz Wainright’s Mess on MacDougal Street, actually on Third Street two blocks away, was already crowded, despite or because of the Army and the butterfly plague, but nothing was happening onstage yet.

  “Good evening, Chester Anderson!” Charley trumpeted with false and boisterous formality. Thanks to the day’s events and incidental publicity, every head in the house turned its empty face toward me. Appalling, but that’s just what Chaz’d bellowed for. He was a native showman, and I was part of the show. Far, far be it from Charles J. Wainright to let free publicity go to waste.

  “Howdy, Chaz,” I trumpeted back, because I was part of the show. “Read any good butterflies lately?”

  One of the customers tittered hysterically, a terrifying sound, but Charley performed a saving belly laugh, and the whole house crashed into hilarity like surf on old rocks. All at once I felt great. Hurrah! The laughter of a hundred happy strangers was too strong a high for me to kick, and — butterflies be damned! — I knew it was going to be a swinging night.

  Stu, Pat, Kevin and Sativa were waiting in the back room. Stewart Fiske (a chortly, mustachioed drummer from the distant wilds of outer Milwaukee), Patrick Gerstein (a perpetual Bucks County teen-ager who looked like a black-haired baseball hero but was really our lead guitarist), Kevin Anderson (a warmly chocolate-toned MIT dropout who preferred rhythm guitar and lead singing to the aesthetic rigors of quantum physics), Rosemary Schwartz (i.e., Sativa, a svelte, suede chick who did nothing but sing and practice sex appeal and Subud), and I, your friendly neighborhood harpsichordist, had banded together a few months before as Sativa and The Tripouts. We played a kind of music of our own invention that we called, when we had to call it something, either Baroque and Roll or Raga Rock, as the fancy took us. McLuhan music, as it were. It never really caught on, but it was more fun than working, and it paid better, too. Michael was our manager, so to speak.

  “Wow,” said Pat as usual. “How ’bout them bugs?”

  “Butterflies,” I answered, and Stu amended, “Moths.” Kevin seldom had anything to say. Now he just grinned. He and Sativa were holding hands, this being his week or something.

  “Sure,” Pat veered. His conversation was generally erratic. “Let’s warm up.”

  We retired to the alley behind The Mess and, dodging inquisitive moths et ah, smoked a few pipefuls of marijuana, which was still illegal in those days. We firmly believed it improved our playing, and perhaps it did.

  When we were properly stoked, we wandered onstage and started tuning. We had among us some 120 strings (most of them mine) to put in order, and tuning could be a fairly poignant experience. To keep our audience happy, we made a more or less comedy routine out of tuning, an ad-lib blend of topical jokes and hip ambiguities, from which we broke without warning into our most popular song, “I’m in Love with a Girl Called Alice Dee,” carrying everyone within earshot along with us. What the hell is earshot?

  That got the evening started, and for a long while I was too busy with keys, dials, and switches to notice anything else. It was during Patrick’s solo, while Stu and Kevin were scanning the house for new soft young round ones and Sativa was staging a private latihan, and I was counting noses (each nose representing one four-dollar cover charge, of which we Tripouts were entitled to one-third — which is sixty-six point six cents per nostril, if you like to think along such lines)… It was during this that I noticed our boy Sean, the Butterfly Kid himself, sitting in the front row at a table all alone.

  Right.

  Sean wasn’t making butterflies, thank God, just sitting with his hands in his pockets, which was something of an accomplishment, looking slightly hypnotized, like all the rest of our audience. I wondered what’d happen if he tried to applaud after the set, then decided not to worry about it.

  I drew a yellow index card from my right cheek pocket, wrote on it in red, “butterfly boy here Grab Him!” and propped it up on my console. The Tripouts’ warm-up routine made it necessary for me to write down anything I wanted to remember.

  Pat’s solo ended in a burst of ethnic gaudies, and before the house could gather itself to applaud, we segued into “Green Sleeves and Yellow Hair,” one of my tunes, ending the set with a proper bang. We liked to run a good tight show.

  The kid clapped a total of two golden moths, and then resorted to tapping the tabletop hipply with his right index finger like the rest of the audience. Before the frantic clicking had a chance to fade, we were off stage and Al Mamlet, a very funny man, was on and running through his first riffs.

  I grabbed the kid by a handy shoulder (inadvertently traumatizing him), whispered, “C’mon, baby,” and half-dragged him into the back room.

  My colleagues had already split. Our schedule allowed for ninety minutes between sets, and they liked to spend the time hanging out on the Street. It’s fun to be even a little bit famous.

  “Okay, Sean.” I was firm and comforting, like a pastor or slightly older uncle — somebody wholly unlikely to administer a spanking. “First question: where did you go?”

  “Go?” Still scared.

  “Yeah, go. I was talking to you in the park and then you disappeared. I saw you. Or rather, I didn’t see you. Where did you go?”

  He looked slowly around at the back room, hunting for eavesdroppers maybe, but finding only cobwebs and poorly stacked old lumber. This gave him confidence. “Oh yeah,” he mumbled, “I went home.”

  “Dallas?”

  “Dallas? Hell no, man: Fort Worth!”

  “That’s boss. How?”

  “How?” Oi. If Sean was going to make a habit of repeating everything I said, I might easily go bald before I got any information out of him. “How?” he redoubled. “Well… To tell you the truth, man, I don’t rightly know.” He threatened to sniffle.

  “Hey, baby, don’t cry! There’s nothing to… I mean, just… Oh shit.” I gave him my only clean handkerchief, red silk, and he noisily blew his nose. Emotional people embarrass me.

  “Anything wrong back here?” That was Charley. Sometimes he worried. He was afraid somebody might break a law or something on his premises.

  “All clear, Chaz,” I guaranteed. “Just talkin’ to an ol’ buddy of mine from Texas.” The whole truth seemed uncalled for.

  Charley looked dubious — one of his better looks — but went peacefully away. Meanwhile the kid stopped sniffling.

  He half smiled. “Hey, y’all play Good.”

  “Thanks. Now what…”

  “What do you call that thing?”

  “What thing?” Interruptions!

  “That piano thing you was playin’. What’d you call that?”

  “That’s an amplified harpsichord.”

  He opened his mouth to launch another question, but I beat him to it. “I’ll explain later,” I promised. “What were you thinkin’ about just before you went home?”

  “Huh? Oh yeah. I dunno. I was just a tad bit homesick, like. You know.”

  “Okay, I’ll buy that. You were homesick. Maybe you had butterflies in your stomach.” We winced. “But why did you come back?”

  “Man, I hate Fort Worth!’

  “Oh.”

  We were silent long enough to hear Mamlet, out front, yell, “And then they told me what it was For!” while the audience broke up glori
ously. Al is a very funny man.

  I, meanwhile, was scheming as hard as I could under the circumstances, hunting for some way to open this kid up. Those butterflies of his were bugging me.

  Then, “Where are you stayin’?” I remembered my own Village puppyhood.

  “Me? Here ’n’ there. I dunno,” meaning the kid was up tight for a pad. Right. Now we were back where we’d started in the park, upward of too many hours ago.

  “Need,” I insinuated, “a place to crash?” Playing it slow.

  “Well…” Yes.

  “You’re welcome to use my Guest Room for a while, if you want to, until you can find a place of your own.” I was hard pressed to keep a note of pride from marring the precisely nonchalant tone in which I performed this ritual incantation. Guest Rooms are scarcer in the Village than gold-plated diaphragms.

  “Gee thanks!” Pause. “I mean, ah, if like you don’t mind… I mean…”

  I explained that of course I didn’t mind and delivered a small but polished lecture on Village mores and the tribal custom of the pallet on the floor. Within, I exulted. There wasn’t much in the world that I wanted more than any old explanation for those damned butterflies.

  Then, “You do look kind of beat,” I recited, strictly from memory.

  “Um.”

  Right. “When did you sleep last?”

  “Oh man, sleep? I dunno. Thursday?”

  “Oh yeah? C’mon.”

  I still had half an hour before the next set, so I led Sean tenderly out through the dark auditorium, pausing to collect his guitar and put him on my tab, and on out to the street. There we encountered Mad John, the spherical pride of New Orleans, lewdly eyeing an anthology of tourists from Ohio.

  “Greetings,” he offered. He was wearing gaudily-trimmed green lederhosen and an Alpine cap with a pigeon’s tail feather hanging from its band, his standard Village tour guide outfit, but he didn’t have his usual cash-and-carry following tagging along.

  “Howdy, Swamprat,” I sang out. This was meant to make him sputteringly furious, a most engaging spectacle, and usually worked, but not tonight.

  “Look around,” he said with word and gesture.

  I looked. “So?”

  “They’re gone.”

  So they were. No moths! The only nearby reminder of the plague was a clutch of wibberly GI’s wearing uneasy expressions.

  “You’re right!” I rejoiced. “Wow! Later.”

  I hauled Sean away before Mad John could start rapping, and we practically ran down West Third Street. “What,” I panted, “happened to the,” gasping, “butterflies?”

  “I came down.”

  Oh.

  At The Garden of Eden (“Hey, baby, like, ah, What Happened?”), we found Mike at the family table surrounded by Harriet, Gary the Frog, several people called David (that having been a big summer for Davids), and the usual three or four total strangers who knew all about us, so to speak: our admirers.

  Whilst everyone talked at once, I explained the situation to Michael in my firmest sotto voce. “So take him home Now,” I finished. “Feed ’im, put ’im to bed, tuck ’im in, and for Christ’s sake, don’t let him get away.”

  Mike, the kid, and I pushed through a swarm of questions to the street.

  “How come you call him Michael the Theodore Bear?” the kid wondered as we wove a path back to The Mess. The Street was Saturday-packed, but we seemed to be the only moving bodies. Everyone else just stood there, still and gape-mouthed, staring at everyone else.

  “Because he’s much too dignified for nicknames,” I explained, “and Pooh has already been used.”

  We parted at The Mess’s door under Charley’s most paternal eye — the left one, possibly glass — they to feed and bed the Butterfly Kid and I somehow to work.

  “Wow,” Sativa whispered in the alley as we warmed up for the second set. “What happened to the butterflies? Pretty?”

  “The kid who invented ’em came down.” By then I didn’t care what I said.

  Sativa took it calmly — being that kind of chick — but Stu choked and coughed, maybe because of the smoke. The explanation seemed to satisfy Patrick, though. But then, most things satisfied Patrick.

  Sativa sighed. “I liked them,” exhaling clouds of solemn blue smoke. “Pretty.”

  Chaz insists I gave the best performance of my life that night, but I didn’t notice. My head was busy.

  The kid came down.

  Sure.

  Oh wow.

  5

  I WOKE up at seven-thirty and instantly repented. The sun was blaring in my face and a so-help-me monarch butterfly was clinging to the outside, praise God, of my window screen. These were clearly Bad Omens, and if I’d had as much faith in omens as I thought I did, I’d’ve stood the day in bed, missing out on everything and looking like a total ass.

  I couldn’t remember why yet, being still two-thirds asleep, but the sight of that innocent, battered monarch languidly pulsing its wings outside my sunrise window bothered me. I threw a critical slipper at the screen and fell, exhausted, back against the pillow. The butterfly was unimpressed.

  By eight o’clock I was reconciled to being up, and I’d recalled what happened to my lifelong fondness for butterflies, too, all of which left me with no decent reason to stay in bed. Ah well. I pulled on a light bathrobe and pattered into the living room.

  No one else was up yet. The pad felt crowded and empty at the same time, like a well-stocked haunted house. Then one of Mike’s more ambitious snores pushed through his door, and in that broken hush of a moment I was thoroughly at home in the present again after all night’s dreaming, irrevocably awake. Michael’s snores are nothing if not real.

  Obviously Mike was still asleep. The guest-room door was open,, and I could see that Sean was sleeping, too. He was bent and twisted into an improbable position he couldn’t’ve held for a minute wide awake.

  Spurred by a pint of orange juice and some of the muddiest thinking on the Upper East Coast, I set out for church fully and properly dressed and in plenty of time for the ten o’clock Mass.

  The ten o’clock turned out to be a supersolemn High Mass of sorts, somebody’s daring new liturgical experiment horribly sung to the accompaniment of nothing but percussion instruments: a real piety tester. Therefore I didn’t get home with my nineteen pounds of Sunday Times until quarter of twelve, almost.

  They were still sleeping, and Sean had developed an even more elaborate and unlikely position. I wondered idly if yoga were popular in Texas and shed a little surplus pity for the poor girl Sean’d someday marry, wondering how she was going to react the first time she saw her brand-new husband turn into a topological whimsy in his sleep. But maybe Sean’s luck’d mate him to a young female contortionist.

  The Times was full of yesterday. So was I. Things had certainly happened. The butterflies’d been so thick they’d stopped traffic. Charming. Not a wheel had turned between Fourteenth Street and Canal after three P.M. They’d even stopped the subways for a while, until the City sent four guys down with Army surplus flamethrowers to clear out the West Fourth Street station.

  It’d been a funny day, in its own quaint way. An old wino was smothered under a pile of burgundy butterflies. Plate-glass windows were shattered by the things. Governor Kennedy had declared the Village an official New York State Disaster Area, Class III, and called out the whole National Guard. Forty-seven tons of government surplus DDT was scattered over the neighborhood. The coffee would doubtless taste foul for a week.

  And it wasn’t just the butterflies. There was a coyly retouched photo of some vaguely familiar little blonde teenybopper from Long Island who’d walked all the way from West Eighth to MacDougal and Bleecker mother-naked and twelve feet up in the air. Yes, quaint.

  A grove of gaudy orange palm trees popped up right in the middle of Sixth Avenue and then, poof, vanished just before the men with the flamethrowers got there.

  It’d been a very busy day. No wonder I was tired. A brig
ht spot was that Andy’s halo wasn’t even mentioned. I’d been worried about that.

  Three cups of maté and The Times kept me happy till one or so, when, “Enough will do,” I quipped and sat down at the harpsichord. Naturally, the phone chose that time to whistle at me.

  “Yes?” I don’t like phones, with or without color screens.

  “Chester?” A strange, thin, possibly strained through cheesecloth and certainly unhappy voice. Vision squelched.

  “Speaking.”

  “Help me! Please!” Absolutely tragic, and not a quiver of it faked. Nevertheless:

  “Who’s this?”

  “It’s me, Andy! Andrew Blake. You’ve got to help me, Chester. I haven’t slept all night!”

  Now that he’d identified himself and set the mood he wanted, he let his voice resume its basic double-reeded plaintiveness, like an orphaned English horn. In the background something possibly giggled.

  “Andy?” I said. “What seems to be the trouble?”

  “I can’t sleep.”

  “It’s Sunday afternoon.”

  “I couldn’t sleep last night, either.”

  “Why on earth not?”

  “The light gets in my eyes.”

  “So turn if off or pull the shades down or something.”

  “I can’t turn it off, it’s my… that is… ah, it’s…”

  “Oh! Your halo?”

  “Please don’t call it that.” Pause. “Yes,” most dejectedly.

  Now here was a thing or two. Somehow I’d tacitly expected the aura to go away when the butterflies did. I said this.

  “Well, it didn’t.” Petulance. “It didn’t go away at all. It’s been getting brighter!” Again that giggle in the background. “And this Girl…”