The Road Narrows As You Go

by Lee Henderson

  I’m glad you didn’t bring me along on this little excursion, said Wendy as she watched the story unravel. But thanks for stealing my car, you jerk. You owe me a back massage for that, at least.

  Jonjay kept this documentation in a box labelled A Game of Checkers that he was going to use in his solo show at Justine Witlaw’s. There was no reason for us to be afraid that someday this prank might become evidence in our trial, as if the CIA and the Pentagon are going to investigate a pile of icing sugar. He was never going to cop to the prank, just to recording a news cycle that fascinated him, as an artist—the documentation was his art. Never breathe a word of it to anybody, he told us and sliced a finger across his neck, or we’ll all go to prison.

  Frank happened to call the manor that day. And it wasn’t like him to call—his routine of seduction-slash-business was to deliver good news through Gabrielle Scavalda, working in a whole different time zone on the whole other coastline.

  Something the matter? Wendy asked.

  No, nothing, he said cagily. How’s things there at No Manors? She said they were fun as always. That’s good, he said. I just needed to hear your voice, he said. She asked if he was on his Motorola and he laughed, yes, he was.

  You know they would be glad to get you a freebie.

  Who would get me a freebie of what? Wendy put down her pen and listened to him.

  Guess who wants to ink a lucrative licensing deal with Strays?

  Last time it was gas stations in Wichita, so I’m stumped. Wait. Hold the line. No way. That’s the limit. I draw the line at your silly cordless wonderbrick. My animals selling cellular phone boxes? That’s ridiculous. I can see it now: When you ain’t got a home and you still want a phone.

  Strays will provide the images and Motorola’s slogan’s up to a copywriter, Frank said humourlessly but with a laugh. But I’ll pass that along. Should I have to go through Gabby as per, or do I have your blessings to get back to Motorola with an offer?

  Since when do you ask for blessings? I never blessed Wichita’s gas stations, I just got a work order.

  This is deal is on a magnitude of ten thousand Wichitas, Frank said. Think of it as a pinnacle, Wendy. The first commercially available cellular phone. I’ve been waiting to ink this deal since we first met. You, me, and Motorola are about to make history. You have to be in on this. I wanted to be the one to tell you myself.

  Fine then, fine, you did, thank you, she growled at him and hung up. Argh, why am I so upset at him over this? She spent another ten minutes struggling to unwind the knots in the phone cord before she got too exasperated and slumped down on the kitchen floor covered in sweat and gave up.

  It’s just another deal, another contract to sign, pictures to draw, not a calamity, we said as we crouched over her and undid the hogtie she’d put herself in. We’ll help, don’t worry.

  It is what I want, she said. Just painful. It’s like sex without touching.

  In the time he lived at the manor, we noticed Jonjay’s fingernails and toenails were square-edged.

  He was an incorrigible nonvoter with contradictory principles and no faith aside from a Liquid Papered pentacle on the back of a sleeveless denim jacket.

  He had us go hunt down cans of black and white latex house paint for an idea. He painted the garage door a matte black, and once it was dry, he brought out the can of white and painted a freehand circle and an inverted star inside it, his and Hick’s favourite antisocial hex. Jonjay claimed his freehand circles were Rembrandt good, to the ninth decimal of pi.

  Pure No Manors, he said as he admired his handiwork.

  Wendy came out to take a look at what he’d done and we took some Polaroids to document the pentagram. He seemed rather proud of this one for some reason.

  That’s ridiculous, she told Jonjay. This is your idea? What are you doing? I hope your plan is to paint over it now that there’s pictures.

  Say what? That’s there to protect your car. One sigil like that wards off a lot of evil, trust me. That’s good for at least five years. Now look, watch see … Jonjay opened the garage door and then shut it again, to show off the effect of the pentagram. You park your Gremlin behind a wall of cool confusion. Looks cool and thieves, arsonists, rapists all respect the dark slayer of the black arts. They won’t touch the house. The Lord of Chaos’s amulet says to a rat stranger, Don’t fuck with me, I’m a friend of the outlaw lifestyle.

  Fine. Okay. The satanic star can stay. Only because it reminds me of Hick and Michelle Remembers and heavy funk music, and because you can draw such an amazingly perfect circle. You punk, thanks for your silly anti-gift.

  You are welcome, he said.

  However, the next day Wendy went on a joyride through town taking pictures of the city with two of us in the Gremlin with her, Rachael driving and Twyla in the backseat, and we came home to find the neighbours’ kid out in front of her garage defacing the symbol on the door. In fact that afternoon we had been invited to the home studio of retired cartoonist Vaughn Staedtler, who was still being sued for back payment by his former assistants on The Mischiefs. The comic lived on in thousands of papers and Staedtler retired to the south side of a sprawling adobe-style duplex the colour of pink marzipan way out in Golden Gate Heights. Now his home studio was full of canvases on which he’d painted lurid portraits of clowns in thick buttery oil paint. A small college-age kid in overalls who Staedtler said was his grandson sat in a corner facing a television that played old Max Fleischer Superman cartoons. Other than that, it was the clowns. Some of the clown paintings were life-sized, others were bigger. The treatment in oils was sloppy, with colours straight out of the tube, and garish half-melted expressions on the grinning, smeary faces. Vaughn thought he’d captured some kind of metaphysical pun, painting portraits of clowns in painted face makeup. Scaring his audience to the point of skincrawling repulsion did not seem to be the purpose at all, so we tried our best to be positive for him. But the clowns, terrifying on their own, when added up to this army, were madness. A circus would not accept these, let alone an art gallery. So maybe they were so ghastly that he was on to something. There was nothing to say about them, not aloud anyway, and Vaughn Staedtler was absolutely one hundred percent certain that New York should prepare, he said, for a cannon blast across the bows of contemporary American art. He listed off galleries who would beg for his work. Gagosian, Vaughn growled.

  The main reason for our visit was to sell him eight ounces of pot and we left soon thereafter. We might have had a couple other stops along the way there and back to the homes of other, better cartoonists, such was our life in those days, we the keepers of Hick’s spirit.

  We replenished our supply through Biz Aziz upstairs, who sold it to us in pounds, and she got it from someone in the Twomps, South Oakland. That’s all we knew. That’s all you want to know, Biz Aziz told us. You don’t even want to know that, she said. It wasn’t her habit to deal, it wasn’t ours either, it was Jonjay who set us up with the arrangement and we all convinced ourselves it was to honour the legacy of Hick Elmdales. And fear, fear that we would go broke otherwise, and fear we would remember the substance of that night we met Jonjay if we stopped and thought about it.

  And when we got home from our rounds, the Evangelical neighbours’ boy was on the last strokes covering Jonjay’s sigil with his own can of white housepaint.

  What on earth gave you this idea? Wendy demanded to know.

  The kid looked up at her, a little nervous, but without a shred of guile, knowing his fate was not in his hands. He said, My parents told me to come paint over this.

  Shouldn’t paint over another person’s symbols, that’s bad juju, kiddo. Wendy tsk-tsked him and wagged a finger. When the white paint dried she wanted the neighbour boy to come back and repaint the inverted pentagram.

  That was an evil symbol, the kid said.

  That was there to ward off evil, you li’l Tom Sawyer. She took the kid’s ear and carried him back to his parents.

  Along with an Evangelical wreath
on the front door, the doormat said Luke 10:5, on the lawn was a white cross on a chopping block pedestal, and in the driveway there was a woodgrain station wagon with a giant Vote Reagan sticker that took up half the bumper. Wendy told the boy to wait behind her.

  Did you tell your son to trespass and vandalize my property?

  We saw a devil worshippers’ symbol vandalized on your garage yesterday. The mother was in her apron and the father stood behind her and he scratched her neck as she spoke, which was weird. We asked our son to paint over this offensive graffiti.

  My friend painted that pentagram for me yesterday as a gesture. It’s to ward off evil.

  It represents evil.

  I live in that house and that’s my garage. I think in America I’m allowed my own definition of evil.

  We can see your garage door from our kitchen table, the father said. Son. Get in here. Don’t hold that lady’s hand.

  Wendy told the Evangelical parents their son should come over tomorrow at the crack of noon and repaint the pentacle to teach him it’s not correct to trespass or paint over other people’s property just because something offends you.

  They put up a heartfelt argument, but she had a point, and in the end their sense of responsibility to a loving God forced them to force their son to repaint the satanic symbol. So the Evangelical neighbours’ kid came over the next day with a bucket of black paint and a brush and Wendy broke out a lawn chair and supervised. His parents could be seen at the kitchen window.

  Are you a devil worshipper? the kid asked. He was painting the bottom point of the star.

  Is that what your parents told you?

  I don’t know, he said.

  Only thing I worship is Charlie Brown. What about you?

  The boy’s circle was more of a wobbly lasso and his star was more of a lopsided spider’s web, but we all agreed this was far better than Jonjay’s creepily perfect rendition.

  Dear Dr. Pazder,

  Get a load of what just happened to me. So I’ve got a few roommates and one of them, actually he’s more of an ex-boyfriend, but anyway … he decides to …

  Ruthvah ~ For Men.

  Once many years ago while hunting Kooloomooloomavlock in a zoned-out meditative trance, Jonjay claimed he had met the astral projections of Aleister Crowley and his mistress. They, too, were out tracking the beast across the Himalayan Kingdom of Bhutan, those cliffs populated by mountain goats, wildcats, and monasteries. Over steaming cups of buttered tea, the three disembodied travellers became fast friends, and it was Crowley who told Jonjay the secret ingredients to the mythic love potion, a cologne so powerful no woman could resist its wearer. A brothy smell and, most important, loaded with pheromones.

  What was it about Jonjay that made us join him when he took a bicycle off the ceiling and asked us to ride with him against the sun, up and down the sinewaves of San Francisco’s hills, on the hunt for supplies. Racing our shadows in and out of milky fog. Trolling the flea markets and second-hand stores with him until we found the half-ounce amber cut-glass bottles Jonjay was looking for. A dusty crate filled with what must have been two hundred of these little bottles, used for laudanum in the nineteenth century. He put them in the milkcrate tied to the back of his bike and off we went to the next spot. Ingleside, Sunset, up into Richmond and the Haight, through the Tenderloin and the Seven Hills as he gathered together from Trader Joe’s and whole foods outlets, aromatherapists and Wiccan spice dealers the essential oils and seeds for his recipe. The Haight’s underground anarchist grocery network put him in touch with a spermaceti dealer. We biked home and that evening he went to work. He set a big round brass pot on the stove at a low heat and began to measure ingredients one or two at a time: a drop of pheromone extracted from the pineal gland of a female civet, essence of stag musk, oil of monkeyflower, wild celery called Holy Ghost, okra seeds. Added to this potent, eye-watering blend of olfactive extremes—more glandular and disagreeable than the smell of Hick’s laundry—was extract of tuberose and ylang ylang for their rowdy properties, blended with base notes of powdered oud, ambrette oil, then came the biggest base note of all, a pint of whale ambergris stirred for a few minutes until the pot’s fumes made you dizzy, your heart pounded, eyes dilating asynchronously. Then he let this glutinous protean jelly simmer with the lid on for three days, stirring once an hour for a minute until what remained in the pot was a clear water with rainbows of oil on its surface; it evaporated on contact and gave off a heady aroma full of imperceptibles that made your eyes flutter back as though you’d come face to face with the onion of desire.

  As he waited for all the pungent ingredients of his stovetop concoction to ready, he prepped a logo to make into a tinplate etching for the bottle label. His line art resembled the work of Ivan Bilibin or Jack Kirby, this bold image of a robotized dragon with serpentine body and tail coiling to frame the name Ruthvah ~ scent of Crowley ~ for Men, and in the centre of the label, his portrait of Aleister Crowley as a young magician wearing the Eye of Horus as a headpiece, his face savage with insight, a tuft of hair flying out of the third eye. The stewpot of cologne, reduced to this essence, made enough to fill a hundred bottles. So he ran off a hundred labels on the printing press Hick had bought and kept in the basement next to the carport. Then he carefully glued each label onto every one-half-ounce bottle. He corked them, sealed the corks in decorative blood-red paraffin stamped with the Crowley Eye, and went out to sell his scent wholesale fifty per. He brought the girls along with him, Twyla and Rachael, Wendy, too—we volunteered as living proof. We rode our bikes like groupies for Ruthvah, pumping our legs downwind of Jonjay doused in the cologne as he led the way.

  Even the women’s libbers go nuts for Ruthvah. That was his unwholesome pitch to the needle-artists in the North Beach tattoo parlours. Artists whose canvas was the flesh of Hells Angels and merchant marines never thought to sell a bottle of perfume to that clientele, until now. Damn, this shit smells like a strip club on uncle’s night. I’ll buy a couple bottles, why not.

  This is a highly volatile fragrance, Jonjay told the clerk at the Jupiter headshop in Haight-Ashbury, who wore leather aviator goggles and braids in his hair down to his shoulders and wondered why the scent wasn’t still there on his wrist. It’s strong and doesn’t last long, just long enough to whet the appetite. A drop on your neck and another on your wrists and you’re laid.

  After one whiff, the owner’s head kicked back, he stamped and whinnied and had to pull the goggles off, they’d steamed up. That is powerful stuff, he said. He bought ten bottles, cash.

  Take in those heart notes, Jonjay said. You catch hints of sambac and ylang ylang as they pitterpatter across the waves of the fragrance. I’m showing this product to you first, was all Jonjay had to say to Isola delle Femmine, the swooning Sicilian mother who owned Dahlinks, the chic men’s and women’s boutique south of Market catering to the opera crowd.

  Put a drop from the tester bottle on a wrist, and say no more, sales were final. No consignment. Fifty per.

  What was it about Ruthvah? Definitely not the first eye-watering impression of cat litter and a man’s armpit, cherry cola and dirty snow. It was the headrush from the after-effect of those heavy base notes that knocked you out, this vapour hit like a brick in the back of the head. Followed often by immediate and singular arousal. The smell of having sex mixed with the smell of wanting sex. Inhaling Ruthvah gave men the appetite, like a bull growing his first horns, it made his chest puff up, his legs bow in stride, his chin shoot up, jaw thrust forward, eyes flickering like bonfires. On women the effect was biological: you caught a good lungful of Ruthvah and it made the mouth water, nostrils and pupils dilate, nipples harden, thighs open, toes curl, the brain swooned, the tongue purred. You couldn’t slap yourself out of it, the fragrance lasted on your conscience or libido long after it had evaporated from the air and your skin.

  Justine Witlaw wanted twenty-five bottles but didn’t have the money, and his policy of no consignments vexed her, but she relented, dug
deep and bought three. She swore she would have the rest, and what she owed for those old sales to Frank Fleecen, which she still hadn’t paid him, by end of day. Not doubting her desire one bit, Jonjay ignored her vow anyway, and we never rode back to Chinatown to collect. If she wants art, she needs to pay what she owes, was Jonjay’s idea of gallery representation. He wondered if she owed O’Connell money for blue squares, or Ferzetti for his pedestals and plinths, or was he the only one she stiffed?