Everyone was listening now.
Burdmoore smiled. “That’s true. It was us. But we turned him down.”
“Zabriskie Point?” John Dogg said from the end of the table. “You can give him my name if he’s casting for something.”
“And didn’t you guys have a kind of sit-in in front of the UN, with your faces wrapped in bandages, pretending you were survivors from a platoon that had been accidentally napalmed in a Vietnamese jungle by an American bomber?”
“We were bringing the war home. Would it have been better not to stage our dissent?”
“But that’s exactly it! You ‘staged’ your dissent—just as you say. I’m remembering more now. I heard about it from someone who was there. You all removed the bandages from your faces as this coordinated act of protest, strip by strip, ever so slowly.” Didier gestured with his hands, as if lifting bandages from his own face.
“Reporters all around you. There to see the terrible damage as you unveiled yourselves, the few survivors who managed to plunge themselves in a river, jellied gasoline clinging to their cheeks and arms and ribs, the smell of charred flesh—”
“Sounds practically like you were there, Didier,” Ronnie said.
“No, Ronnie. I just think it’s important to draw distinctions between real violence and theater. So there you all were, screaming, ‘Look at us! Look at our faces!’ The bandages fell away. And surprise: no one was burned. You didn’t go to Vietnam. None of you did. It was a hoax.”
“It wasn’t a hoax,” Burdmoore said quickly. “It was theater. Real theater. Like Brecht.”
“What does Brecht have to do with it? I think you should leave Brecht out of this—”
“The people who watched? They wanted to see our burned faces. And if we’d shown them burned faces they would have turned their heads away and flinched, but left satisfied that we were burned, end of story. We thwarted their expectations, left them disappointed. The observers are promised disfigurement, are led to the crime of having wanted to see it. And then a question lingers: where is the violence going to show itself? By removing the thing the mask is meant to cover, we were making a point. The thing the mask is meant to cover can’t be covered or seen: it’s everywhere.”
“Blah-blah-blah,” Didier said. “My advice would have been to give up the street theater and drop below the radar. Go underground. Isn’t that what they’re doing in Italy, Sandro?”
“I don’t keep up on it, Didier,” Sandro said. “And I’m not sure what you mean. There’s a youth movement. It’s out in the open.”
“Don’t play dumb, Sandro,” Didier said. “I’m not talking about students. I mean the factory militants.”
“The Red Brigades,” Burdmoore said. “We never could have been like that. Our trip was not about rigor and self-sacrifice. Anyhow, those people are Leninists. We were more like libertines.”
“Followers of the great windbag Moishe Bubalev,” Didier said.
“Say what you want, Didier,” Burdmoore said. “He was the main thinker advocating a shift from theory to action in the late 1960s. A lot of people were reading his stuff.”
“I’ve got a good story about that guy Bubalev,” Ronnie said. “There was a certain group looking for guidance. A famous group. They had a hostage and needed insight on how to proceed. This is in Bubalev’s diaries. This group showed up at his place, pestering him. They brought liquor and a good-looking female, stayed for the afternoon. Drank as the girl waggled her ass around. When it was time for them to go, Bubalev was sad they were taking the pretty girl away, but at least they left their liquor behind. That’s all he says about them: they took the girl but left the booze. It was the Symbionese Liberation Army, with Patty Hearst.”
“Since when do you read Moishe Bubalev?” Didier asked Ronnie.
“Since never, Didier. Someone told me that story, actually. I have no idea if it’s true.”
“Could be true,” Burdmoore said. “But look, Bubalev wasn’t a priest. He was a professor and probably didn’t get a lot of brainwashed chicks visiting him in faculty housing. It’s best not to look at personal conduct. Take Allen Ginsberg, decent poet, had an important moment. But when you actually know him, a complete charlatan. He hung around our scene. One night, this rich kid shows up at Gem Spa with ten thousand bucks in cash. He wants to burn it in Tompkins Square Park, to take that share of capital out of the system. He was trying to convince me and Fah-Q to come watch him burn this money. We all troop over to the park, thinking there’s no way he’ll really do it, but it was our job to encourage extreme acts. So we’re saying, burn it, go ahead. Allen Ginsberg was in the park that night. Someone told him the kid planned to set this large sum of money on fire and Ginsberg, in his loose, cotton guru clothes, goes rushing over, trying to convince the kid in a rabbinical and pushy tone to give him the money. In the end, the kid decided not to burn it. He gave it to me and Fah-Q.”
“So what happened?” Didier asked him. “You guys had ten thousand bucks. Followers. Energy.”
“Ten thousand bucks was nothing to us. We had steady sources of funding.”
“From where?”
“Can’t say. But it was very steady and very generous. We had accounts all over town that we withdrew from, ten, twenty, thirty thousand bucks a pop. We gave a lot of it away. The reason we pulled the plug had nothing to do with money. Things got hot and some of us split. Went to the Sonoran Desert and lived on horseback.”
“Like real Marlborough men,” Didier said.
Burdmoore laughed. “Hardly. We weren’t peddling addiction as rugged independence. It wasn’t nearly so romantic. A couple of us almost died from hypothermia. Another barely survived a bobcat mauling. We were attacked by wolves. Fire ants. Chiggers. We suffered scabies. Impetigo. Rope burn. Hong Kong flu. Paranoia. Near-starvation. It ruined my marriage, the end of me and Nadine.”
“Nadine?” I asked.
I had never seen her again, after the night with her and Thurman and Ronnie.
“My former wife,” Burdmoore said. “Ronnie knows her. Didier knows her.”
Didier cleared his throat. “I knew her once. Just in passing.”
“Dogg knows her.”
We looked over at John Dogg, who was saying his good-byes. He approached Didier and handed him a business card, determined to make his connection before the night was over and it was too late. “I am not at all opposed to working with art writers,” he said to Didier, “if you’d like to do a project with me. I mean write about my work.”
“I think they’re involved,” Burdmoore said after John Dogg had left. “Which is fine. It’s been a long time. Too much happened.”
Nadine had told me practically her entire life story over the course of that evening, and now her voice came back. High and soft. Her voice and her legs and her long hair, strawberry blond, like ale. The ex she had complained about. It was Burdmoore. Burdmoore who had told her that after the revolution everyone would work two or three hours a week. That’s all that would be needed, with all the robots and automation. “I don’t know if it’s revolutionary not to work,” she had told me, “but it’s better. When you sell your body you are what you do. You’re yourself and you get paid for it,” or so she had thought at the time, still semi-brainwashed by the ideas of her husband’s group. He and his friends said hookers and children were the only people in the world who logically should be idle. Children because they were busy being children, and hookers because the labor happened on the surface of their body. The labor was their body. A man who does what he is is useless, her husband said. Despicable. Though he’d hoped to become despicable, and to survive doing nothing. Nadine had told me it wasn’t a bad time in her life. She loved walking on Hollywood Boulevard, where a banner said, “Wake up in the Hollywood Hills.” An ad for condominiums. And she’d looked up at it and thought, yeah, that’s right—that’s what I do! But waking up in the Hollywood Hills sounded better than it was, she said. She had almost died. “I was slapped,” she said. “Punched. Shaken. Hung
from a balcony over the 101 freeway, and yet look.” She’d leaned toward me, revealing nothing more, just plain beauty, magnified. “I am still . . . so . . . pretty. Let’s not pretend. I don’t have to fake modesty. I have other problems. I am still pretty, never mind that I was burned with cigars. Raped. I snorted Drano by accident. But the really messed-up thing is that I am still. So. Pretty. After all that? How is it possible?”
She was beautiful, it was true. With large hazel eyes, speckled like brook trout, and the hair, reddish-gold around her white face. But I had seen, the night I met her, that her beauty was going to leave her like it does all women. For the face, time relays some essential message, and time is the message. It takes things away. But its passage, its damages, are all we have. Without it, there’s nothing.
III.
We shared a common drunkenness departing the Kastles’ loft together, as if the group of us—Ronnie, Didier, Burdmoore, Sandro, his cousin, and I—carried a heavy blanket or rug over our heads, each supporting a little of the weight, which rested on all of us, and resulted in our slack words, our swaying and knocking against one another in the freight elevator. Time had stretched like taffy, the night a place we would tumble into and through together, a kind of gymnasium, a space of generous borders. Or else why would we have gone, at one in the morning, to Times Square? I didn’t know why, or whose idea it was, only that the night felt roomy and needed to be filled.
We broke into two groups, climbing into taxis, and reconvened on Forty-Second Street, where red light leaked like a juice from the theater entrances. A giant thermometer rising along one side of the Allied Chemical building shifted eerily from red to violet, red to violet. Below it was a frozen planet Earth cradled by a polar bear.
My group—Ronnie, Burdmoore, and I—stood under a marquee on a broad wedge of pink carpet that flopped out to the sidewalk like a tongue, creating a semi-indoors, almost domestic ambience. There were posters lining the entrance, a woman’s face and bare shoulders against a black background, Behind the Green Door. It was all over town, the advertisement for that film. She looked like a nude astronaut floating in space, too sensual for anything like a breathing tube. A stark, look-at-me expression, solemn possibility. I used to be a nice girl. That was required, the just recently having been one. The actress had been a laundry flakes model for a brand of soap that was extra-gentle for baby’s tender bottom.
You had to look the part for such a spectacular fall. I had never looked the part. The gap between my two front teeth, as Ronnie said, spoiled my cake-box appeal. Or as Sandro put it, gave a certain impression of mischief. I never thought I looked mischievous, but I’d always been told this. I could see this kind of thing in women with slightly crossed eyes, some breach in symmetry suggesting another kind of breach, in judgment or morals. Like the actress Karen Black, one eye slightly amiss in its focus. The women in Hustler cartoons were drawn with crossed eyes like Karen Black’s. The mind is off duty but the body is open. There was that movie where poor Karen Black utters the fatal question at dinner with her lover’s higher-class family: Is there any ketchup? At the end, she waits as the man goes into a service station bathroom while their gas is being pumped. A logging truck pulls up between the gas pumps and the restroom. When the man emerges from the restroom, the logging truck is there, blocking her view of him. He approaches the truck’s driver. We hear only the freeway and the idle of the truck as he and the driver speak. He gets into the cab of the truck. It pulls out, climbs the highway on-ramp in low gear. The woman waits in the man’s car. Gets out, looks around, waits some more. The credits roll.
“Triple X,” a man said to us, pointing toward another entrance, large photographs of women stretching upward and backward like pythons. Why did snakes rear up like that? Every moment, poised for killing.
“We got only the hardest-core rating,” the man called out. “Trippel X.”
“Triple X isn’t a rating,” Ronnie said. “They rate themselves that. To make the movies sound better.”
Burdmoore had wandered off, and came around the corner toward us, light flashing over his noble profile and matted beard. He looked like Zeus lost in a casino.
A taxi pulled up, and Sandro, his cousin, and Didier got out. I glanced at Burdmoore, whose face registered the cousin’s beauty. He watched her with interest, but also caution. It was the expression of a man who had handled beautiful women and could still admire them but never wanted to handle them again.
She bounded toward us, not at all aloof, as I expected her to be. I hadn’t said two words to her at the Kastles’.
“Come on! Who’s coming in?” she asked. “I want to see a show.” She turned to Ronnie.
“Not my kind of thing,” Ronnie said.
“What is your kind of thing?” she asked.
“That’s a tough one,” Ronnie said.
“Why?” She sparkled her dark eyes at him. He seemed not to notice.
“Because there’s no market for what I want to see.”
“Then it can’t be that bad,” she said. “For the worst things, there’s a market.”
“You’re probably right about that.” He looked at her as if he were making a new assessment, now that she’d said something possibly smart.
I thought of the girl in the photo in Ronnie’s studio, the one on layaway. She was probably waiting for him this very moment, somewhere downtown. Checking the clock, applying lipstick, concentrating herself into an arrow pointed at Ronnie. Doing the various things women did when they had to wait for something they wanted.
Sandro was counting bulbs on the marquees. He was never waiting for someone else, he was simply in the world, doing, acting on his interests. He said that Times Square was all soft rhomboids, that this was part of the experience, the shapes of modern stamping technology reproduced here, in the shapes of signs and marquees, all rectangles with softened corners, streamlining as an attitude.
“It’s funny they call it Times Square,” Sandro said. “There’s a nude magazine in Italy called Le Ore. The hours.”
“Makes sense, actually,” Ronnie said. “Pornography as a way to mark time. You dictate when and how. There’s no chance in it. It’s clockwork. Daily habits. Control. It’s the opposite of sex. Which is pure freedom, in all its horror. You never know when you’re actually going to sleep with someone, and when it does happen, the character is of surprise: this is actually happening. There is no surprise in simply getting off. It’s scheduled activity. Three p.m. Midnight. The morning shower. You know those marital aids, so-called? The thing about those products is they promise enhanced sensitivity, increased pleasure, and it’s just numbing cream, to make you go longer. They add time. That’s all they do.”
Sandro and Ronnie speculated on whether you could love pornography simply as a cinephile, and on the unit of the quarter, because everything here was twenty-five cents. A quarter to peek through a quarter-size hole. Ronnie said the peep show was based on the Advent calendar. That it was a Christian tradition, this kind of looking, opening a window onto Jerusalem, a peek at the manger for each day of December. Sandro laughed, as if Ronnie were full of it, but also as if nothing pleased him more.
“You see it all through a hole,” Ronnie said.
“Then I’m an Adventist,” Didier replied. “I believe in that kind of isolated viewing, the focus on parts. Metonymy. Does anybody have quarters?”
A change man heard him and moved toward Didier in his coin-dispensing belt.
“Adventist,” Ronnie said with faked wonder. “Does that mean you believe the end of the world is . . . imminent?”
Sandro had told me that Ronnie had a long-standing grudge against Didier, something to do with a negative review Didier had once written of Ronnie’s work.
“Everything and nothing are imminent,” Didier said. He handed the change man a five-dollar bill, cupping his hands for that amount in quarters. “This moment now? Imminent. Wait. Oh, gosh. Now, past. It all depends on how you experience time. Time is a function of ple
asure, as you just crudely pointed out. The experience of it, I mean.”
His blazer pockets weighted with quarters, Didier turned to Talia Valera. “Are you coming?” He said it somewhat insistently, as if she were obligated to go with him because he alone, among the men, was willing.
“No,” she said, glancing at Ronnie.
Didier shrugged and went up the pink tongue of carpet and into the theater.
Somehow the decision was made to leave Didier there and go down to Rudy’s. We got in another cab. Talia was about to sit on Ronnie’s lap when he leaned forward and flipped up the jump seat for her. It wasn’t that I would have minded if she’d sat on Ronnie’s lap. But I would have noticed it, while Ronnie himself would have been oblivious to the echo, me on his lap. So many women on so many nights, flirting with him and ending up in his lap. Ronnie, who always had lovers and never girlfriends and did not kiss and tell. It could have been for this reason alone that I still felt something for him. And who could say that one reason was more valid than another? Unavailability was a quality, too.
As we rode downtown he was murmuring to Talia quietly in fake Italian, taking an Italian suffix, adding it to every word, and then repeating them. “Andiamo in un taxi-dino a Rudy-miendo’s, con innuendo in un taxi-dino—”
Sandro was telling Burdmoore, who was up front, about my motorcycle crash on the salt flats, and how I’d ended up driving the land speed vehicle that his family sponsored, and I sensed he was framing the story as far-fetched, outlandish, but I could have been projecting, since there was a divide between us on the subject. Burdmoore turned around and looked at me with a certain amusement, not unsexual, but not lustful, either. The facts of the story made him a little curious, that was all. A funny thing about women and machines: the combination made men curious. They seemed to think it had something to do with them. This should have been amusing to me, the expression on Burdmoore’s face as Sandro recounted the story. But I was focused on Ronnie and Talia, on the way he was making her laugh. Taxi-dino, innuendo. Pointing out a green-and-yellow Blimpie’s sign, “There! One of ours!” Her laughter penetrating his fake sincerity like carbonation.
The Flamethrowers: A Novel Page 19