A voice came through the phone: “I’m sorry. The number you have dialed is no longer in service.”
It was true: I didn’t move here not to fall in love. That night, I watched from my roof as the neighborhood blew itself to smithereens, scattering bits of red paper everywhere, the humid air tinged with magnesium. It seemed a miracle that nothing caught fire that wasn’t meant to. Men and boys overturned crates of explosives of various sorts in the middle of Mulberry Street. They hid behind a metal dumpster as one lit a cigarette, gave it a short puffing inhale, and then tossed it onto the pile, which began to send showers and sprays and flashes in all directions. A show for the residents of Little Italy, who watched from high above. No one went down to the street, only the stewards of this event. My neighbors and I lined our rooftop, black tar gummy from the day’s heat. Pink and red fireworks burst upward, exploded overhead and then fell and melted into the dark, and how could it be that the telephone number for the only person I knew in New York City did not work?
I had asked Giddle if she knew an artist by that name and she’d said, “I think so. Chris. Yeah.”
We were on Lafayette, outside the Trust E Coffee Shop.
“I can’t believe it,” I said excitedly. “Where is he? Do you know what he’s up to?”
She tugged the foil apron from a new pack of North Pole cigarettes and tossed it on the sidewalk. I watched it skitter.
“I don’t know,” she said. “He’s around. He’s on the scene.”
The wind blew the discarded foil sideways.
“What scene?” I asked, and then Giddle became cryptic, like, if you don’t already know, I can’t spell it out. That was when I first sensed, but then almost as quickly suppressed, something about Giddle, which was that there might be reason to doubt everything she said.
* * *
I told this friend of Nadine and Thurman’s that I was from Nevada and he started calling me Reno. It was a nice word, he said, like the name of a Roman god or goddess. Juno. Or Nero. Reno. I told him it was on the neon archway into town, four big red letters, R-E-N-O. I made a film about it, I said. I set up a tripod and filmed cars as they came to a stop at the traffic light under the archway.
“Spiritual America,” he said. “That’s Thurman’s thing, too. Diner coffee. Unflushed toilets. Salesmen. Shopping carts. He’s about to become famous. He’s having a show at the Museum of Modern Art.”
Thurman was not listening to us. He was nibbling on Nadine’s ear.
The friend said, “He’s a great artist.”
“And what are you?” I asked.
“I turn the hands on the big clock in the lobby of the Time-Life Building. Twice a year it has to be reset, to daylight savings and then back to standard time. They call me. It’s a very specialized job. If you push too hard, you can bend the hands of the clock.”
There were tacit rules with these people, and all the people like them I later met: You weren’t supposed to ask basic questions. “What do you do?” “Where are you from?” “What kind of art do you make?” Because I understood he was an artist, but you weren’t allowed to ask that. Not even “What is your name?” You pretended you knew, or didn’t need to know. Asking an obvious question, even if there were no obvious answer, was a way of indicating to them that they should jettison you as soon as they could.
“I was in Nevada once,” he said. “To see something a guy I knew made, the Spiral Jetty. The artist, Smithson, had just died. He was a friend, or something like one. Actually, he was an asshole. A sci-fi turkey, but brilliant—”
I said excitedly that I’d been there, too, that I had read his obituary, I knew who he was, but he didn’t seem to think it was a remarkable coincidence.
“He had a hilarious riff about the ‘real authentic West,’ pretending he’s Billy Al Bengston, you know, gearhead who makes paintings, and he’d say, ‘You New York artists need to stop thinking and feel. You’re always trying to make concepts, systems. It’s bullshit. I was out there chrome-plating my motorcycle and you’re, like, in skyscrapers, reading books.’ Smithson was a genius. There are two great artists of my generation,” he said. “Smithson is one and my friend Sammy is the other.”
“What does he make?”
“Nothing. He makes nothing. He’s living outside this year. He doesn’t enter any structures. Right now he’s camped in a park in Little Italy. He had been out in the Bronx sleeping on a construction scaffold and they were shooting at him.”
There was another man, besides Henri-Jean with his pole, who was often in my little park at Mulberry and Spring. He slept there sometimes and I figured he was homeless but he didn’t quite look it, this young Asian man with shoulder-length hair. There was something too careful and precise about him. I asked if his friend Sammy was Asian and he nodded and said Taiwanese, and I told him I thought I’d seen his friend. He said Sammy had come to New York as a stowaway on a merchant vessel, and that whenever this came up people assumed it was an art project, a performance he had done, and Sammy would have to explain the obvious, that he did it like millions of others, to come to New York. To be an American. And people would laugh as if there were a deep irony under the words.
“We have a bond, Sammy and I,” the friend said. “In having spent a lot of time on boats. In having been delivered from that into a realm where everyone thinks we’re kidding. But it’s the other way around. Life is kidding us.”
I pictured a shore at night. Dark water like the edge of a curtain. A nighttime sea where he and his friend Sammy had both spent time.
* * *
At some point Thurman and Nadine decided we were going to another bar. “You’re coming?” I asked the friend. I sensed his hesitation before he nodded sure. Under it, Why not? There’s nothing better to do. He left his motorcycle in front of the bar because it turned out Thurman had a car. Not just a car but a car and driver—a mid-1950s black and brushed-metal Cadillac Eldorado with a chauffeur who looked about fourteen years old, in a formal driver’s jacket that was several sizes too large, and white gloves, also too large. I thought of the drivers on Mulberry. I said it was like Little Italy on a Sunday but no one heard me or they didn’t care.
We piled into the car with drinks in our hands. Nadine had picked hers up and carried it toward the bar’s exit, and following behind, I thought, Yes, of course. This is how it’s done. Thurman paid our tab, and I was with them, in a Cadillac Eldorado, heavy rocks glasses in our hands, damp cocktail napkins underneath, the ice in our glasses ta-tinking as the car turned slow corners, honking so people would get out of our way, because we were important in that car, me on their handsome friend’s lap, our drinks going ta-tink, ta-tink.
“This is my favorite,” the friend said, pulling a leather datebook from a pocket in the door. “It actually comes with the car: the 1957 Brougham’s own datebook. And this,” he said, pulling out a perfume bottle from a little cubby in the armrest. “The Lanvin cologne atomizer with Arpège perfume. You could order this stuff at the GM dealership when these models were new. Thurman, what else is this thing loaded with?”
“Beats me,” Thurman said. “Blossom was willed the car. It belonged to Lady von Doyle.”
This Blossom had been mentioned several times now. I didn’t ask who she was, who any of the people they mentioned were. I wanted to study the way they spoke. Not interrupt the flow, be the person they had to stop and explain things to.
Their friend reached back into the armrest and retrieved a leather-bound flask with a big GM symbol on it, opened it, and sniffed.
“Scotch,” he said. “This is true post-Calvinist delirium. Like the Jews at Sammy’s Roumanian, eating steaks that hang off the plates, a big pitcher of chicken schmaltz on the table. It’s all about never going hungry again.”
He poured from the flask into our glasses. I felt the presence of his body as he leaned.
“I think Lady von Doyle was Jewish,” Nadine said. “Thurman, wasn’t she Jewish?”
The friend said that seeme
d about right, for a Jew to drive a Cadillac. “In a sense,” he said, “there is simply this axis of General Motors and Volkswagen. I myself have a VW Bug, a car we associate with Eugene McCarthy and flower power and not with Hitler, who created it. The VW doesn’t make you think of Hitler and genocide. It’s a breast on wheels, a puffy little dream. The Cadillac, now, that’s a different dream. Of the two, you’d expect the Cadillac would represent some unspeakable horror, crimes against humanity. Look, here’s the Brougham powder puff. The lipstick case. The pill dispenser. The Evans pocket mirror. All that’s missing is the Tiffany cocaine vial and a chrome-plated .44 Magnum.”
“Keep looking,” Thurman said.
“Ha-ha. Right. But you would never be tempted to chrome a .44 Magnum, Thurm. That’s strictly for rednecks and off-duty cops. My point is that compared to the humble little folks-wagon, the GM seems guiltier, more dissolute, and yet there’s no genocide or forced labor camps under this leather upholstery. Just cotton-wool batting. Itself, unlike the beautiful car, not built to last. But these days, only people in the ghetto think it’s uptown to drive a Cadillac. In fact, only people in the ghetto think in terms of uptown and downtown. Are you aware there’s an oil crisis? I don’t even drive my Bug anymore, with the price of gas,” the friend said. “I got my little Harley.”
“I ride motorcycles,” I said. “I mean I used to, but I sold mine.”
He looked at me. I was seated sideways on his lap.
“You do have a kind of tomboy allure, I might call it. Yeah.”
Okay, I told myself. Something is starting to happen.
“What kind?”
“What?” I asked.
“What kind of bike did you ride?”
“Oh, a Moto Valera.”
“See? This fits in with my general thesis. It just so happens I know one of them, though he’s not involved with the company. I like to rib him about those calendars they print. They pretend this name, Valera, is about firm Italian tits and desmodromic valves, but actually, they used Polish slave labor to make killing machines for the Nazis. Perhaps not specifically. Not exactly. But they used some kind of X to make a Y; fill in your human cost and slick modern contraption of choice.”
“Mine was a ’65,” I said. “Way after the war.”
“Which makes it innocent,” he said. “Just like you.” He touched his hand to my cheek, quick and glancing. “You don’t have it anymore? The Moto Valera?”
“I sold it to move here.”
“X for Y.”
He had placed his hand on my waist, and I felt heat issue from it, and with that heat, something else, something sincere flowing from him to me, a message or meaning that was different in tone from the way he spoke.
I turned toward him.
“Do you want to know something funny?” I said quietly, not wanting Nadine and Thurman to hear.
“Yes,” he whispered back, and moved his hand from my waist to my leg. There wasn’t really any other place for him to put it in that crowded backseat. And yet I read the gesture of his hand on my leg as exactly that. A man’s hand on a woman’s leg, and not a hand that had no other place to rest itself.
“I don’t remember your name,” I whispered.
“That is funny,” he whispered back.
* * *
It seemed we’d been driving for quite a while, the teenage chauffeur working the wheel smoothly, readjusting the comb that was wedged in his Afro like a knife in a cake, as if he’d trained his whole life to drive an enormous Cadillac and retouch his hair simultaneously, and in white gloves whose fingers sagged at the tips, too large for his young hands. We must have been traveling in circles. Only later did I realize we were on Twenty-Third Street in Chelsea, just a few blocks north of where we’d started.
We carried our drinks into a crowded bar, a Spanish place on the ground floor of a hotel, full of color and noise and people they knew. A man called Duke, with root beer–colored chandelier lusters hooked onto his shirt, came rushing toward us. He said the lusters were from the Hotel Earle.
“You’re the Duke of Earle,” Nadine said.
“I’m the Duke of Earle,” he said, and shimmied his crystals.
People crowded around them to say hello. I had the sudden feeling they would shed me. I was a stranger they had picked up in an empty bar, and I was irrelevant now that they’d found their place in a familiar scene. I scanned the faces, wondering if this were the sort of place I might find Chris Kelly. I wasn’t completely sure I’d recognize him. Pale skin, dark hair over one eye. This might be a place he’d go to. I asked Thurman and Nadine’s friend if he knew an artist named Chris Kelly. “Who?” he said, cupping his ear. I repeated the name. “Oh, right,” he said. “Sure, Chris.”
“You know him? He’s from Reno. I’ve been trying to find him.”
“Chris the artist, right?”
It took me a moment to realize he was joking. As I did, I felt that he and his friends were unraveling any sense of order I was trying to build in my new life, and yet, strangely, I also felt that he and his friends were possibly my only chance to ravel my new life into something.
He steered us to an empty booth. I slid in next to him. The Duke of Earle joined us. We ordered drinks and the friend punched in selections on the remote jukebox console. Roy Orbison’s voice entered the room like a floating silk ribbon.
“My mother had his records,” I said to the friend.
“Your mother had good taste, Reno. That voice. And the hair. Black as melted-down record vinyl.”
Someone passed the duke a big bottle of soap solution, and he and Nadine took turns dragging on their cigarettes and then blowing huge, organ-shaped bubbles. The bubbles were filled with milk-white smoke from their cigarettes, quivering and luminous, floating downward as Thurman photographed them. The next table over wanted the soap. The duke blew one final bubble of plain lung air. It was clear and shiny, and everyone watched it as it drifted and sank, popping to nothing on the edge of our table.
“You chose this, didn’t you,” Thurman said to their friend as a new song came on.
It was “Green Onions” by Booker T. and the M.G.’s.
“It’s still a good song,” the friend said. “Even if it was stuck in my head for almost a decade.” He turned to me and said he’d been in jail. Not a decade, just thirty days.
I asked what for. He said for transporting a woman across state lines, and Nadine erupted in laughter. I smiled but had no sense of the coordinates, of what was funny and why.
“The Mann Act,” he said. “Impure intent: what is impure intent? I did some time. And then I was free but my head was jailed in this song, so it was like I did a lot more time.”
He hummed along with “Green Onions,” nodding his head.
“At first, it wasn’t so bad. ‘Green Onions’ was this special secret. Something I was hiding, like a pizza cutter up my sleeve. I was pulling one over on them, jamming out to ‘Green Onions’ while my fellow inmates were getting their cold shower, eating their pimento loaf, reading letters from women who wanted husbands on a short leash. A really short leash. The men wrote back to these lonely women and did push-ups and waited for the women to come a-courting on visitors day, with their fried chickens and their plucked eyebrows.”
He had helped the other inmates write their letters to the women. “Reach out to your loved ones, 39 cents, a sign in the common room said. You got an envelope, paper, and a stamp. These guys would be working away with a little pencil like they give you for writing down call numbers at the public library. ‘How do you spell pussy?’ they’d ask. ‘How do you spell breasts?’ ‘Does penis have an i in it?’ ”
“What was the pizza cutter for?” Nadine asked.
“For cutting pizza, sweet Nadine.” He gave her a puppy-dog smile.
“When I got out, I thought, okay, unlike a lot of my friends, I know what the inside of a prison is like. Most people don’t even know what the outside of a prison is like. They’re kept so out of sight. Yo
u only know signs on the highway warning you in certain areas not to pick up hitchers. While I know about confinement and boredom and midnight fire drills. Amplified orders banging around the prison yard like the evening prayer call from the mosques along Atlantic Avenue. I know pimento loaf. Powdered eggs. Riots. The experience of being hosed down with bleach and disinfectant like a garbage can. I know about an erotics of necessity.”
“Oh, baby,” the Duke of Earle said.
“There’s something in that. You think you’re one way—you know, strictly into women. But it turns out you’re into making do.”
“I am going to melt,” the duke said, “just puddle right in this booth. I had no idea—”
“I don’t want to disappoint you, Duke,” the friend said, “but I’d have to be in prison, and I don’t plan on going back.”
His arm was around me. I was in the stream that had moved around me since I’d arrived. It had moved around me and not let me in and suddenly here I was, at this table, plunged into a world, everything moving swiftly but not passing me by. I was with the current, part of it, regardless of whether I understood the codes, the shorthand, of the people around me. Not asking or needing to know kept me with them, moving at their pace.
“When you get released, they dump you in Queens Plaza at four a.m. Guys are darting in and out of the doughnut shop, wedded in some deep way to prison cafeteria code, drinking coffee, holding a doughnut in a greasy bag like they’ve got a bomb, strutting, but unsure who they’re strutting for, now that there’s no guard, no warden, no cellmate. They are just random dudes in Queens Plaza, wonderfully, horribly free. That same hour of the night women and children line up in midtown to get bused out to Rikers for visitors day. Buses letting out felons here, collecting visiting-day passengers there, while most people are sleeping. The prisons must stay hidden geographically, and hidden in time, too.
The Flamethrowers: A Novel Page 7