The Road Narrows As You Go

by Lee Henderson

  Instead we ended the day riding to Little Russia where we visited Anton LaVey at his Black House commune. The Black House was on California Street down from the Rumble Fish diner, on a hill that could see, on a clear day, the Transamerica Pyramid downtown, like looking at a dollar bill on the horizon. The Church of Satan’s home base was a hundred-year-old Victorian house painted matte black including the windows, with high-gloss purple accents. It stood in an otherwise altogether bright, friendly family neighbourhood near Golden Gate Bridge. LaVey was another Californian like Hick Elmdales who collected an enormous and vast library of old 78 rpm shellac records. This wall of fast-spinning, crackly good ditties, and prehistoric organs and synthesizers, was the focus of an entire room dedicated to listening parties. LaVey was also nuts for Hammer horror films and liked to dress himself after Bela Lugosi or maybe a character played by Christopher Plummer. He plucked his eyebrows into angry circumflexes and wore a Vandyke beard. He wanted us to come in, hang out in his home theatre and watch the lost reels from Hammer’s incomplete 1976 adaptation of Vampirella, featuring Valerie Leon.

  I need to meet this chick, LaVey said with his inverted grin, a trademark expression he honed back in his days pumping out musical oddities at the Wurlitzer in a Los Angeles tiki bar.

  Jonjay told him about Ruthvah—Crowley’s own recipe, Jonjay said, and LaVey was clearly intrigued when Jonjay told him the story of meeting the man. LaVey wanted to know where in the Bhutan, and Jonjay described a trek he took across seventeen days (all in astral projection, a nine-hour meditation), climbing the giant steps of broken rock in the cliffs of the Paro region. While he listened to the story, LaVey uncorked the tester and tipped a drop onto the underside of his wrist. He bought three bottles.

  Hey, man, I haven’t seen you for at least thirteen months, LaVey said. Hey I heard a while back. I’m sorry about your friend Hick. He dropped a lot of Thelemic subliminals in his comic. I liked him. A great talent. A force for libertinism. I’ve had a few friends die recently. Terrible deaths. It’s these cancer sores. They get them on their face, everywhere. One friend of mine, we called him the Turk, he turned blue before he died. Have you seen how overcrowded the hospital is? And you see how many gays it’s hitting? Strange shit, wouldn’t you say? Is that how Hick died?

  Yeah, it is.

  It’s a modern-day plague I heard the CIA invented.

  No one is trying to stop it, that’s for sure, said Jonjay.

  Give Crowley my regards, LaVey said at the door to the Black House, giving us the devil’s horns and bidding us a day of total fulfillment.

  And on we rode to yet another prospective buyer, and another, until he was sold out of his tiny bottles and we were all swooning, aroused to the ears from inhaling those intense fumes all day, halfway to an orgasm. It was at least as lucrative as the weed in the laundry basket. Jonjay earned five thousand plus tips from a pot on the stove. From this, he broke off twenty-five hundred and gave it to Wendy.

  That’s to cover the rent I owe you, he said as he hung his bicycle back up on the ceiling, then stripped naked in the hallway on the walk to the shower. I’m not rich like you think. But I am entrepreneurial.

  Thanks, but that’s okay, she said, and chasing after his bare ass tried to return the cash but he wouldn’t let her into the bathroom. He turned on the shower. She shouted, I needed to borrow this back in May when I was broke and none of my cheques were here yet but I scraped it together, so don’t worry. Keep it. Money is a-rolling now.

  Well, gee, Jonjay shouted over the water running, I wish you’d keep some money from my profits anyway. After all, I made this scent to pay you back, Wendy.

  I don’t need money. I need—

  Hey, is that you pounding on the door?

  Yes! Let me in!

  I’m in the shower, leave me alone!

  Sliding to the floor in a crumpled ball. No, no, no, not again.

  STRAYS

  17

  One warm blue-sky day in the mid-eighties—we want to say it was in eighty-four but it might have been as early as eighty-three—Wendy took a bicycle off the ceiling and rode down Stoneman Street to take in some fresh air, clear her head, get some exercise, and be away from the constant crushing pain of seeing Jonjay in the room. Some afternoons he was out selling batches of Ruthvah. Other times he would draw or read. In no hurry to manifest himself. He was going to spend days on end indoors in front of a television or three televisions recording shows onto VHS tapes and drawing the odd picture or two, a monk or an artist, stage actress or bodhisattva in his signature style. Then Wendy would reach a hormonal breaking point and need for him to be out of her sightline for a while. She would say, I’m losing my mind, I need to get out of here. If it was a weekend she might ride down the hill to The Farm under the freeway and dance to live folk music or hear a poetry reading by young men who wanted to exude whatever it was they thought made Leonard Cohen so charismatic. If nothing was happening at The Farm then she’d go see the opening night of an art show at Justine Witlaw’s—Jonjay would never go there, in case she pinned him to a date for a solo show. In fact it took three years for Justine to pay back what she owed him from the sales in eighty-one to Frank Fleecen. Or she would go to the museum and sit on a chair and sketch the reactions visitors had to the perplexing features of modern art. She agreed to autograph signings at bookstores and comic shops for something to get her out of the manor. She took a bike and rode it as far as Broadway and then pushed on west to the public library where she sometimes liked to draw for a change, especially if she was in the mood to look at boys. When she got back from the library that evening, boy she had a story to tell us.

  She came busting into the manor in a cold sweat, shivering and huffing for air, pale as cucumber flesh and belching. She flopped down at the table and with her face in her arms said, I just got approached by a spy.

  Her routine when she visited the library was to browse the Fine Arts section for comics treasuries and random art history volumes, then go sit in a carrel with a good view of the other visitors, read her books, and sketch gag ideas to develop later back at the longtable. On this day, however, the Fine Arts section reeked to high hell of soiled pants and something more pungent than any body odour, coming from two bearded men hunched over across from each other at a table, flipping through the latest issues of Art Monthly and Creative Review. Others did the same about-face at the top of the stairs that she did and hooted at the stink. One level down on Business and Science the air was fresh, the floor unstained, and the tables were neat and tidy. The carrels were occupied by gentlemen with textbooks and notepapers, and handsome men were scanning the card catalogues on the search for esoteric subjects. She caught the eye of one man in a brown corduroy suit who looked familiar, but he didn’t smile back as he went and found a carrel. He opened a slim Stefan Zweig novel, oddly not a library copy. Maybe it wasn’t so odd. She decided to sit near him in case she could get him to flirt. Now she planned to always sit on this floor instead of Fine Arts where the homeless were indistinguishable from the art students and art teachers. On Business and Science there were real prospects for her to goggle. There were professionals here, or at least men inclined towards a career. A slim six-foot man with bright red hair cut in the military style walked by her carrying a leatherbound copy of The Complete History of Plastic Surgery. He went up to the librarian at the front desk.

  Can you pull for me all the material you have on Mentor Worldwide LLC, the breast implant manufacturer?

  Certainly, said the librarian, making a note on a piece of paper. I’ll have that brought to your carrel.

  Wendy had no idea it was possible to ask a librarian to complete such a task. As she sat in her carrel admiring the men and women for how they comported themselves and studying their clothes, she toyed with ideas of Buck as mad-dog scientist in a junkyard lab, made a sketch of Francis as a trigonometry professor at a blackboard in front of hundreds of rabbit ears; another doodle showed a patient on the operating table with
her cat Murphy as head surgeon. She had never read Stefan Zweig but even the name was familiar for some reason.

  She went to the librarian and asked for any information they had on the company Lupercal.

  Lupercal Plastics? Give me ten minutes. Why don’t I find you in your carrel, the librarian said and stood from her chair without a hint of being hard done by.

  Remarkable service. She sat in a carrel with a view of city hall’s domed roof and read through what the librarian brought her. Lupercal Plastics LLC was a private holding company with plastic products across several industries. Originally a manufacturer based in Long Island specializing in plastic and rubber synthetics, eventually their factories ran up and down the Eastern Seaboard. Then, at the behest of toy manufacturers in California, the company moved their head office to El Segundo. With Frank Fleecen’s help, they were stripping down their East Coast operations. The most recent newspaper clipping in the pile the librarian provided noted their expansion into El Salvador and Nicaragua to meet the demands of contracts for the military-industrial complex, from bootsoles to flak jackets to weather balloons. And for the civilian population, Lupercal provided the fabric for hot-air balloons and, what interested Wendy the most, Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloons. The Pennsylvania Senator wrote about how Lupercal designed and fabricated the big Superman, Peter Pan, and Mickey Mouse balloons, and all the other floating ambassadors of commerce ringing in the Christmas season every November. It mentioned Lupercal’s announcement of a sale of bonds to finance the expansion of their fabric factories, to make bigger, more elaborate balloons.

  She read the name Frank Fleecen as the chief negotiator in deal after deal, including the debt financing for Lupercal’s expansion into Central America—worth twenty-five million dollars in 1980.

  She went back to the librarian and asked what they had on Frank Fleecen.

  The financier? Now let me see, the librarian said and stretched in her chair.

  It took the librarian about half an hour, during which Wendy sketched the man in the corduroy suit and a woman with a phrasebook whispering English to herself. Then the librarian brought Wendy a file folder full of newspaper and magazine clippings and two textbooks that had Fleecen’s name in the acknowledgments.

  Want me to get started on another subject or are you okay? the librarian asked.

  Thank you, said Wendy. What an amazing service librarians provide.

  Yeah well, beats the coal mines.

  On top of the pile was a New York Times article from September seventy-seven, about the emerging financial market in debt. A picture of Frank answering the phone was surrounded by a gloss of high-yield bonds. An innovative financial instrument underwritten by a bank in Manhattan called Hexen Diamond Mistral, a retail brokerage institution old as the hills that, until these new special kinds of bonds, was considered by its banking peers to be a backwater of corporate finance. When Hexen opened its doors on 42 Wall Street back in the eighties—the 1880s—it was known as the bank that treated Jews and blacks like respectable businesspeople. Backing that same old principle of equality a hundred years later, the cuddly Times reporter went on to write, Hexen was able to use Frank’s high-yield bonds to leverage small businesses in major takeovers of goliath companies—the first banking instrument in history that was actually able to give the lower middle class a leg up to compete against the goliaths of American capitalism. She flipped open a copy of Time from February of the year before to an article devoted to comparing the success of things like The Cosby Show and Reagan’s philosophies of America to the boom in high-yield bonds. Frank Fleecen’s work in American finance helped regular people’s businesses grow franchisally, buy up competitors, expand their real estate, rise beyond the regional, and so on. There was a slim clipping of a book review from the San Jose Spectator for a nonfiction title, Jack in the Black, by a local business student and former Vegas casino card counter named Jerome F. Fleecen.

  Three years after the Times article about Fleecen’s rise in the ranks of Hexen, the San Francisco Chronicle covered his move to San Jose in an article headlined The Prodigal Junk Bond King Returns and a lead that heralded his arrival: Welcome to Wall Street West. Apparently the banker in charge of the high-yield bond division at Hexen Diamond Mistral had swapped the bank’s Seven World Trade Center offices for new digs in sunny California. The new center of gravity in the financial universe is an unlikely building in a lowrise neighborhood of San Jose. There’s no flashy name on the side to tell you Frank Fleecen, the master of the universe, has come home. The reason for the move? Frank wanted to be close to where his parents lived and where he and his wife, Sue, grew up. Joel Diamond, Michael Hexen, and James Mistral all agreed Frank could move his office to Canada if that’s what he demanded, according to a clipping she came across from the Wall Street Journal, dated August of eighty-two. More than nine-tenths of the entire bank’s profits came from the high-yield division out in California, one clipping claimed. From San Jose, where Frank reportedly sat at the very centre of an all-glass office at a giant table in the shape of an X, with traders and salesmen around the wings in a big-budget version of Hick’s longtable. So, it was true, all Frank’s boasts—he ruled the Wall Street Journal reporter’s idea of the world. He was lauded by his colleagues and clients as a young prodigy of investment-grade corporate financing, capable of turning a Brooklyn kid’s favourite summer treat, for example, a sugar water called Snapple, into a national competitor with Coke. Without the sale of high-yield bonds, the inventors of Rubik’s Cube would never have been able to raise the money to build their prototypes to take to market.

  Then she came to the articles related to her part in this story. Most of these clippings were from newspapers she’d never read, not the kind of press her syndicate picked up and forwarded to her. These were business stories that mentioned her as part of a piece on new finance. She read about the unparalleled licensing bonanza of her comic strip. One Duke University professor of business called Strays a junk bond—branded confection, and said her series of toys and wide line of merchandise were intended to convince bond investors and corporate shareholders that debt-financed restructuring can work. In the view of the experts and professionals interviewed by business journalists across the country, Wendy’s cast of comic characters was endemic to the funny pages, they acted funny on the page but their ulterior motive was as door-to-door solicitors. Strays came in a broad range of new products for old revamped companies, and they introduced a fledgling business to customers using a familiar face. As mascots they improved traffic to a few privatized social services. One American automobile and a European airline used them in advertising. Here was an article from Life magazine that estimated Frank Fleecen made Hexen close to half a billion dollars through contracts for Strays negotiated using high-yield bonds. Wendy Ashbubble saw a few dimes, too, according to the reports she read of herself, her heart pounding behind her ears as each word burst in her ears. Of the hundreds of small businesses that hitched themselves to the popularity of Strays manufactured by the Svengali Frank Fleecen simply by slapping one of her drawings on the side of a package, the one to benefit the most was Lupercal. In a Washington Post piece, a former Hexen bonds salesman who asked not to be named said Frank called the Strays deal with Lupercal the single biggest boondoggle he’d ever conceived. The same source also said Frank wore a miner’s lamp on the morning commute to work in the back of his limo so he could read K-1 financial statements before he got to the office.

  Another of Frank’s colleagues told the Houston Daily Derrick he once saw him, years after he’d made his millions for Hexen, busking at a subway stop in Keyport, New Jersey, playing classical guitar for spare change. The Derrick quoted Fleecen’s own wife saying, Success is not about the money for Frank. Most of his personal earnings go to charities. A 1980 article in the San Jose Sentinel welcoming home their new venture capitalist asked why fewer American banks weren’t brave enough to take the risks that made Frank a success—You know what most banks are
like, an old boys’ club, so finally here’s a man on Wall Street fighting for the little guy, a Las Vegas casino entrepreneur told the reporter. Never drinks. Doesn’t smoke. Married the girl he asked to high school graduation prom. Sue told the reporter, We don’t live extravagantly, we were not brought up to value materialism over friends and family. Wendy tried to picture Sue: she might have a ponytail and wear pink golf shirts and worn-in jeans; she wrote short stories. Fleecen was scooped straight out of college after his graduate thesis in martingale theory for the Wharton School of Finance and Commerce in Pennsylvania made it onto the desk of Joel Diamond, the grandson of the founding partner of Hexen Diamond Mistral.

  The articles Wendy read that day in the library made it sound like Frank’s whole ethos was unlike other financiers’. Most Wharton alumni fought hard to keep their desks at blue-chip respectable firms like Goldman Sachs or Merrill Lynch. Firms like J.P. Morgan were the offices they competed to work for. They wanted to fight point for point on the stock market against a briar patch of Ivy League freshmen and world-class traders buying and selling bits of this pork commodity and that barrel business. But bonds? Bonds were different. Bonds weren’t the jerks in penny stocks, but the market didn’t have any cachet. Bonds were Frank Fleecen’s secret weapon, off the Dow Jones, off the NYSE, bonds were a back door to gain access to any business, Frank saw it that way. The mirror image of a stock was a bond. In the right economy, debt was more powerful than capital. Bonds were an unregulated ocean of potential capital, in Frank’s own words to the Derrick reporter.

  Wendy went to thank the librarian again for helping her, but it was a new librarian, so she left the public library, it was around nine in the evening, and, overcome with emotion, she sat down on the bench outside. She was approached by the man in the corduroy suit who’d taken a seat at a carrel near hers and begun reading a novel by Stefan Zweig. And she remembered finding it strange that it was not a library copy but his own. As she unlocked her bicycle from a fence and wiped the tears from her eyes, he put a hand on her shoulder and startled her. Excuse me, miss, may I speak to you for a moment, please?