by Gini Koch
“The polls are opening any time in California for the Democratic Primary. Bobby Kennedy is the only candidate campaigning in Southern California. It’s all there, John.”
“I know, Sherlock. Just relax. It makes sense. It’s plausible, but there’s no way we can let anyone know now. I could possibly get one of Andy’s groupies to trust me, but who would we call? The FBI? The LAPD? The NYPD? They’re all pigs. One of the newspapers? They’d have us out as crank callers in a second. We can barely string sentences together.”
He put his head in my lap. “I know. I know. I just... I’m sure of it.”
“Could be the amphetamines or the ’ludes. We’ve had quite a lot.”
We sat there for a few minutes, the morning sun bouncing off the windows of the building opposite, the smells from the bakery coming up and turning our stomachs. We drank the water, and the wine, and then Sherlock turned to me and kissed me again, and in his kiss was hunger and desperation. We made love on and on and it was like nothing I’ve experienced before or since. It—he—was filled with an intensity and urgency that was simply indescribable.
He was right, of course. Probably, anyway. Bobby Kennedy was shot just after midnight as the polls closed, and Nixon went on to win the election. It was the beginning of the end as well. The Factory stopped being so open. The hippies grew up. Irene Adler disappeared, and was forgotten by pretty much everyone. She would become a footnote in the Factory, a face flashing by in some of Warhol’s films.
Sherlock was devastated.
He spent three days and the six blues that he had left wandering around the apartment, listless. He smoked cigarette after cigarette, shouting out the window into the night at the girls downstairs. He went down onto the street and bought bags of grass, then bags of brown powder later, cooking them up and, for want of a syringe, snorting the brown liquid.
I went out and bought a deadbolt and locked him into the bedroom on the top floor to let him dry out, leaving him newspapers, a carton of orange juice, some bananas, and water. After twenty-four hours, I went in to him, and he was sitting on the floor in the beam of the setting sun, holding his knees and rocking, my newspapers strewn all around him in a disordered mess, all the articles on the Kennedy and Warhol shootings arrayed around him, and a book open in his lap—Voltaire’s writings after the revolution.
“It’s my fault, John. I did it. I had it all figured out. I could have saved him, if I was able to speak. Knew who to speak to. Solanas was the practice run. Revenge on Warhol. She wasn’t even really an heiress. She came in, flashing around money, acting the type, wanting something from Warhol, but her star fell too fast. Solanas was an opportunity, but Sirhan Sirhan was the long game. Irene Adler probably wasn’t even her name.
He held up the Voltaire. “With power comes responsibility, John. I’ve got to make my work mean something. Save lives. Stop the corrupt.
“And for my diversions, and distractions, you and your magical tablets, those are for afterwards. When the lives are saved and the city is safe. To keep us from being bored.”
Soon enough, we had a string of people coming in to 221 Avenue B, eating one of Mrs. Hendrix’s cakes or bean pies, explaining to Sherlock and me their unsolvable riddles, which he’d go and unwind, rooting out evil and corruption across America.
Bored? We were never bored.
Sherlock got harder, colder. I think I was the only one who ever saw his sense of humour, and hardly ever again. He never spoke about our lovemaking, not after that one time. We were friends and associates. People suspected, sure, but they never found anything concrete. The times changed, the world got darker.
He never forgot Adler, though. She was always The Woman. I think he was a little in love with her. The only one to ever outsmart him, and to get away. He’d only find shreds, suggestions of her existence. A few lines in the Solanas transcripts. Scenes in Warhol’s unwatchable films. Occasional cuttings from the newspaper.
She created him, in her own way. Would 221 Avenue B have given such hope to the hopeless? Would those we’ve caught have killed and stolen more? Would we have been something more than friends? Happier? Would New York be as safe, or any more—or less—interesting? Where would we have been without her?
the power
of media
one
PIECE IT TOGETHER
WE USED TO believe in the future. Not just Sherlock and me, but everybody. Andy and his hangers-on were changing the means and process of production. Women were going to be equal; Blacks, Irish, whatever. Wars were going to end.
Until it all wasn’t.
Sherlock was just getting started and was right in the middle of it, of course. It was the littlest things that indicated a bigger story; maybe the biggest story ever. I’ll never really understand how it wasn’t, except... well, you’ll see. The people involved are good at making things go away.
I’m writing out how it really happened. I’ll take out the choice parts before anyone sees it. Most of the drugs and the sex, and some identifying information. People need to be protected, probably even their children. I have to write it all down, though, even if it never sees the light of day.
It’s hard to know where to begin. The stuff Sherlock would want me to write—how he’d built a case up on top of a tiny scrap of hair or a smudge of grease. He’d want me only to write a dozen pages on grease viscosity or paper stock and leave all the interesting parts out, the parts about people and how they work.
IT REALLY STARTED right after the Adler thing, when Andy Warhol and Bobby Kennedy got shot in the same week and Valerie went to jail when Andy was stuck in the hospital, for weeks on end. He died, you know, for a few minutes there on the table, but he came back, bigger than ever before. I still had my business—using the doctor’s license that the Army had left me, along with the shrapnel in my shoulder—to procure and provide mental, physical, and chemical support to those bright young things inside and out of the Factory. It’s not as bad as it sounds, now—no one thought of me as a drug dealer. There was no war on drugs, not yet, and a lot of people, respectable, everyday people, then and now, thought that a little chemical help was just what they needed to get through their day. I just served societal outcasts instead of well-to-do housewives. As a doctor, I could prescribe what people needed and it was better than buying things on the street. Sure, some things were off-label, but my feelings on the Hippocratic Oath have always suggested that you should do what works.
It was a different time. We still thought we had a future, something to look forward to. We actually believed that if we could just fix the rules, then the country would change, and our problems around race and class, war and peace, they’d just... evaporate, I guess. Fat lot of good that did. People wanted to turn me and Sherlock into gay icons, but in that time and place, we didn’t really consider ourselves gay or bisexual or anything. Little Joe used to joke that we were all trisexual: we’d try anything sexual. If you gave yourself a chance, you might find you liked something different. For me, it was more about who people were. I didn’t like people very much, but Sherlock was different. For others, for Joe, or Irene, or some of the other Factory hangers-on, it was more about who they could introduce you to, what you could get out of it. People were honest about that, too. Who or what you could get out of a good screw.
two
AN INTRODUCTION
ANDY FINALLY CAME home, weeks later, after the New York summer was in full swing, dripping air conditioners everywhere, the heat beating up through the soles of your shoes, the concrete soaking up the energy of the sun all day and throbbing with heat after the sun went down. Everything made it hotter—the subway poured steam out of the sidewalk grates and pumped flat, dry air past commuters. That time of year, it seemed like everything was hot, even the ice in your Coke would melt in seconds. If you weren’t lucky enough to have air conditioning, you could only sleep with all the windows open, spread eagled and not touching. No sheets, needless to say.
My wallet was thin since
I’d just spent the better part of two weeks nursing Sherlock back to health and what I thought was a fragile sanity. He hadn’t left the house in all that time. Hadn’t left the room, after I installed the deadbolt. I had to be doctor and nurse and swap out buckets for a toilet while he was sleeping. Mrs. Hendrix kept what would become her legendary calm, but her eyebrows would go up all the time, waiting for the police to come in and arrest her for whatever we were doing.
“It’s time, Sherlock. Time to face the world.”
“I know, John.” He looked up at the bedroom door with its shiny new deadbolt over the old knob. With a sharp intake of breath he stood and looked down to touch my face. “You’re right.”
“Andy’s home. We could go and see him, see if we can be of any kind of help. Be nice to see everyone, if you’re up for it?”
Sherlock looked at the floor. It was Adler’s manipulation of Solanas that had led to his week-long binge of amphetamine and Amphedoxamine. He closed his eyes and shook his head. “Yes. We absolutely should. Maybe there’s something out there for me.”
I didn’t know what he meant, but I went to the floor and tossed our clothes onto the bed and started picking mine out, dressing myself and watching him armor himself against the outside world.
On our way out we were stopped by Mrs. Hendrix. “Dr. Watson, Mr. Holmes? I want you to meet my nephew Joseph. He’ll be working for us from time to time. He’ll be up on the second floor, moving stuff around sometimes, but he’ll stay out of your floors, though, won’t you Joseph?”
“Yes ma’am.”
Joseph was young and wiry, his hair cut short and dressed, just like Mrs. Hendrix, in clean clothes despite working around loose flour all day. He looked down at his hands, which were fidgeting with each other.
“Mrs. Hendrix, we’re not worried about that at all. Joseph, it’s very nice to meet you.” Sherlock stepped forward and stuck his hand out to shake. Joseph looked at it, then shook it. “If you’re around sometimes and not too busy, would you be averse to running errands or messages? Nothing dangerous, and we’d pay you, of course.”
Joseph risked a glance up. “As long as my auntie says it’s okay, sir.”
“Great. We’ve got to go. Thanks, Mrs. Hendrix. Great to meet you, Joseph.”
“WHAT WAS THAT about, Sherlock?”
“What do you mean, dear John?”
“About running errands and all that? Do we suddenly have errands to run we can’t do ourselves? We’re not exactly flush with cash.”
“Oh, I don’t know, John, but I think there are places where a young man like that could go that he would be less visible than you or me, so I just thought having the option couldn’t hurt. He seemed really uncomfortable, didn’t he?”
“He did. Colored people often are. They have the Civil Rights Act now but it’ll take time, a couple of generations, before they work their way up and are completely equal. They’ve got to get doctors and lawyers and, you know, artists and everything. But we’ve crossed the main bridge now, right?”
“You think so, John? Really?”
“Well, no, but getting the laws in place is the most important thing, isn’t it? Society can and will change, but it takes time. Look at women’s rights. They got the vote in 1920, and now they’ve got woman’s lib. You can’t expect people to change overnight.”
Sherlock stopped talking and looked forward, walking in silence for a couple of blocks. “That young man was so nervous he wouldn’t even meet my eye. He’s a good-looking, strong-backed young man of, what, sixteen? Eighteen? Standing there in his trousers that had been hemmed short and then let out three times as he grew. Mrs. Hendrix is intelligent and works hard. It would be reasonable to believe that he would be the same, but can’t he look at his aunt’s lodgers in the face? He did risk a glance, though, when I shook his hand. He looked at me, up and down, glancing ever so briefly at my face. You don’t look at someone like that unless you’re trying to figure them out. He’s intelligent and observant, but he’s short of opportunity.”
“THIS IS THE elevator that she ran up and down that day. She rode it up and down for a couple of hours before she went in.”
Sherlock stood in the corner, where Solanas had stood, looking around, riding up to the floor below the Factory and then back down, then back up again.
“What do you think had been going through her mind as it cracked, John? Girodias had disappeared, and maybe something about Adler’s conditioning redirected her anger on Andy?”
“I can’t even imagine. She was on the news the other day, shouting about scum. It’s awful, but it sounds worse on television, like there’s no filter to it, no context.
“I still don’t completely understand it, Holmes. I can believe that it’s possible, maybe, if a little crazy, but how can you be certain about such an off-the-wall idea? Some master criminal somewhere that can find unstable people, groom them, and point them at their intended victim like a gun? It would make a good movie, maybe, if you could get all the twists and turns right.”
“Look at the evidence, John. Why did Adler disappear? She hadn’t been cut out of the inner circle at the Factory. Nothing was wrong. She went to Los Angeles on the same day. Two unhinged murders in the same week, unexplained, with the same person in place at both of them? Conspiracy theories are already boiling up around the Kennedy shooting, but they’re missing the insight that we had over here. If you examine the facts, and you eliminate the impossible, then what remains, however crazy it sounds, has to be true.”
The elevator door opened on Billy Name and Ondine in the reception, studiously not looking at each other. Billy’s face lit up with a smile when he saw us.
“Oh, hello there, Doc. You got something for us?”
“As always. Something to help Andy feel better, if he’s up to it? How’s he doing?”
“He’s all right. Quiet. More quiet than usual. Working on the edit of a movie for Madame Ondine there.”
“New movie, Ondine? What’s it about?”
“Wrestling. Women. College.”
“Oh, really? You’re the star?
“Of course. It’s all about me, honey.” He lit a cigarette and looked out the window, blowing smoke out of the side of his mouth.
Billy looked at Ondine and decided to change the subject. “Did you hear that that Maurice-fucking-Girodias is publishing that bitch’s book? SCUM Manifesto. She writes about scum because she is scum, and he’s nothing but scum. He’s the worst.”
“Yeah, I met him. He was horrible. When he spoke, it was like macassar dripping into my ears. Awful.”
Ondine didn’t respond, just stared out the window flicking his cigarette. Odd. He never missed the opportunity to be catty about someone, especially an enemy.
“Where’s Little Joe? I heard he was looking.”
“Oh, Doc, you know Joe. He’s not actually going to pay you. Maybe a little hustle if you want it. You’re better off finding somebody who wants to sleep with him if you need cash. Plenty of those down at the Chelsea. Speaking of—how’s the Alphabet, huh? They miss you back there. Especially the landlady. She keeps asking us where her forty-two dollars’ back rent is.”
“She can hold her breath, the way she treated me when I was there. Okay if we head in and pay our respects to Andy?”
Ondine perked up. “Pay your respects? He’s not dead. He’s just in there moping, last I saw of him. Not doing anything. Unnerving everyone, like when I first met him. Went to a big old orgy and sat there chain smoking and just watching with that annoying smile on his face. ‘Throw that thing out of here, would you?’ I said. I wish I could throw him out of here, but he’d probably bleed everywhere.”
I was surprised—Ondine wasn’t the nicest of the Factory hangers-on, but the tone in his voice could strip rust off of a bumper faster than Coke. I nodded at Sherlock and went around the corner towards the door.
“What are you doing? I just told you to leave him alone. Not now. He’s got to finish my movie. Besides, he’s a bum
mer. Away with you. Get out!” Ondine flipped his hand—he thought he was the Queen of England—and shooed us out. “Go find Silver George. He’s looking for you.” He stood there and watched the elevator doors close behind us.
“Goodness,” Sherlock said after we started back down.
I had to laugh. “You’re funny, you know that?”
“I wonder what’s the matter with her?”
“Got up on the wrong side of the bed this morning? Got dumped? Bad comedown? Hasn’t slept for a few days? Ran out of pills before I came back?”
“He’s preoccupied in the worst way. It’s uncharacteristic. This was... actually mean.”
Sherlock—
Congratulations on the living arrangements. Alphabet City. You always did like your letters. And a Doctor. Mother would be proud. Well, on the surface anyway.
If you’re looking for a vacation this year, I’d skip Chicago. The heat is worse than the cold.
—Mycroft
BY THE END of August the eyes of the nation were on Chicago. No one had any idea who the Democratic party was going to nominate, with Bobby Kennedy dead and buried and his votes up for grabs, and there were the Yippies threatening to put LSD in the water supply and riots breaking out in the Windy City. The FBI had put out a warning about Black Panthers threatening violent uprising, and no one knew if the war or peace movements were going to prevail.