“Fuck your wall. I’m talking nightmares. Why would I be having nightmares?”
“You must talk with Victoria.”
“Who the hell is Victoria?”
“My wife,” Zerminsky said, squeezing at the fetal clay. “My Victoria reads dreams the way I read faces. She frightens me. A woman who has wandered through ancient caves where bats hang upside down coping with their own inverted dreams. I love her completely. She understands the grueling demands of living with genius. But I admit, the woman is a witch.”
“Your wife is a psychoanalyst? I have news for you. My company is turning psychoanalysts into pharmacists. Regis Pharmaceuticals has cured more schizophrenics than the Republican Party.”
“Victoria is no psychoanalyst. She never finished grade school. Her skills are intuitive. They are brewed from air, fire, water and estrogen.”
“I don’t think she can help me, Voltan. I learned long ago that demons are best faced alone.”
“Our session is finished for today,” Zerminsky said. “I am going to take a long shit and smoke a cigar. Let me send Victoria in here. What have you to lose except a few minutes?”
Regis looked at his watch. Belladonna was expecting him. He was looking forward to an excruciating hour. But he’d allowed himself enough time for a quick lunch before his appointment. He could give that up. “All right,” Regis said. “Why not?”
Zerminsky bent his large body until his hands touched the floor, righted himself, rubbed his back, turned and left the studio. Regis spun around on the stool that Zerminsky used to park his subjects. He browsed the casts in Zerminsky’s gallery. With their white plaster skin the bunch of them looked like zombies. Then it came to Regis that trumping the death card was what all this art business was about; he decided to place his bet on cryogenics. Regis shivered.
He decided to trade Victoria Zerminsky’s counsel for a Cobb salad and a glass of Pinot Grigio. Regis was buttoning himself into his camel hair coat when the sculptor’s wife appeared.
Victoria Zerminsky was a formidable woman. No ravishing beauty but presentable enough, good peasant stock with a body strong enough to tolerate the nightly pounding of a 6-foot, 250-pound, self-confessed genius. Regis liked her smile.
“So tell me,” Victoria said.
“Tell you what?”
“Your haunting. Your phantoms.”
“Did your husband tell you I was haunted?”
“He did. Voltan said you were a man possessed.”
“That’s a bit of an exaggeration. I mentioned an irritating dream.”
“About the boy with the spoon and your intestines.”
“Not a spoon. A fork.”
“Describe the child.”
“A boy. I’m not sure of his age. Maybe six, maybe ten, I don’t know. Ordinary features. Reddish brown hair. Blue eyes.”
“More. I need more.”
“What can I say? He seems to be athletic. Very active. Never in one place for long. Dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, sneakers, no socks. He confronts me, says a polite hello then reaches into a pocket and comes out with that fork. I try to fight him off but he keeps jabbing at my belly yelling pie, pie, pie. ”
“Pie? Any special kind of pie? Apple? Blueberry? Peach?”
“Just pie, pie, pie. I say to him, stop it, you stupid nit, but he keeps attacking.”
“A stupid boy who says pie, pie, pie. Are you certain no particular pie?”
“Wait a minute. One time he did mention a particular pie. Apple pie”
“A nasty boy who wants a slice of apple pie,” Victoria said. “You said he is a stupid boy. Is his name Simon? Like Simple Simon in the poem?”
“Simple Simon met a pie man,” Regis said. “Simon could be his name. By God, it is his name. I know exactly who’s haunting me. Simple Simon, Apple pie. Simon Apple. That little motherfucker. Of course it’s him. How could I have missed those signals? Who else would he be?”
Victoria clasped her hands together as if she were applauding herself but there was no applause. “Simon Apple of Glenda, Minnesota? The boy whose father owns the Quikpix?” Victoria said. “Don’t call Simon Apple a stupid boy. He’s a smart boy. A beautiful boy. A gifted boy. A star-crossed boy.”
Regis Van Clay finished buttoning his coat and left the Zerminsky witch blowing her nose and weeping.
23
Simon Apple was miserable at the Glenda Middle School. By age thirteen he had accepted that the sky came down to earth, a crushing sky that flattened any inclination toward optimism. He rolled through the halls like a hoop; he had no center.
Simon felt separated from the other students by a wall impenetrable as the barrier that kept King Kong from eating his neighbors. That wall was made of hardened sludge and slime, tangled foliage impossible to breach, too slippery to climb.
He hated the music, movies, sports and TV shows he was required to enjoy. He spent his free time reading a random selection of books from the school library and liked some of those but even while he read he was plagued by the guilt of separation. It took an enormous amount of energy to keep those feelings private. He wanted to be popular. Simon honed a talent for lying; he feigned enthusiasm for everything Top Ten.
At night, instead of doing homework, he memorized the moment’s constellation of overnight sensations—actors, athletes, mostly the reigning gods of rock ’n’ roll. He specialized in the most obscure musical groups on the charts: Black Oak Arkansas, The Hues Corporation, Stealer’s Wheel, The Love Unlimited Orchestra, 10cc, The Blue Ridge Rangers, Commander Cody & His Lost Planet Airmen—the “artists” who signaled a refined sensitivity far beyond the obvious passion for Dylan, Lennon, Jagger, Franklin, Gaye, Flack, Knight and her Pips. Everybody knew the biggies, no trick to that.
The litmus test of a dedicated hipster wasn’t just knowing that Jim Croce died in a plane crash. It was in knowing that Pig Pen McKernan of The Grateful Dead died on March 3, 1973, when his liver quit, that Bongo Rock was on the MGM label. Simon realized that, in a disposable world, ultimate triumph belonged to trivia. He absorbed and discarded the essentials of American Pop, swallowing and defecating the information that would make him one of the boys.
Simon sweated to keep up with what he considered the blizzard of crap that saturated Glenda’s air and stuck to the flypaper brains of his contemporaries. His strategy didn’t work. When he dropped a name it didn’t bounce. It was nobody’s fault that Simon Apple couldn’t find the password to belonging. He had nobody to blame but himself. He set off alarms of an alien presence easily detected by the clever antennae of the in-group. He wasn’t convincing because he wasn’t convinced.
When Simon dared the leap from the flying trapeze, his designated catcher yawned and let his hands go limp. The would-be flyer ended up squirming in an unwanted safety net that kept him from smashing to pulp and ending his misery. Rejection turned to self-pity seasoned with self-hatred; the brew slowly crystallized into snobbery and obnoxious arrogance. He became a pain in the ass.
He ripped down the posters of Marilyn Monroe and Elvis that covered his bedroom walls and replaced them with photos of wart hogs, reptiles and carnivorous plants. He dressed in hideous combinations of blacks and browns. He let his fingernails grow until they curled. He spiked his hair and dyed it green and purple. He wouldn’t shower or brush a tooth. He chewed garlic buds and onions before he left for school. He filled a scrapbook with newspaper clippings of serial killers, rapists, cannibals, gazed into their volcanic eyes, then stared into a mirror at his own baby blues in search of some kinship.
He read the laments of Beat poets, envied the druggies and drunks wandering through Glenda’s garbage dumps and automobile graveyards. He wrote his own songs of suburban rot and curdled love, odes to bum piss on brick tenements. He listened to The Fugs crow songs like Coca Cola Douche and Slum Goddess on a scratchy LP.
He longed to escape from Glenda’s predictable parade and join the march to oblivion that seemed headed in the right direction. Simon thought a
bout skipping town but before he went he wanted his father to show some trace of concern or, preferably, agitation. It amazed him that Robert J. didn’t seem to notice that his son had morphed into a kind of swamp-spawned lizard.
At least his teachers acknowledged that Simon Apple wasn’t his old self. Esther Palm, the English instructor who once told Simon he had a literary bent, now crossed herself when they passed in the hallway. But, all things considered, Glenda absorbed him as if he were a ghost made of fog. His hometown was either amazingly tolerant of extreme mutation or simply indifferent. “This too shall pass away” was Glenda’s motto, a soothing if horrifying mantra. On the street, a few children pointed at Simon’s multicolored head, some even dared make remarks, but their adult escorts scooted them along. Everybody had somewhere to get to in a hurry, no time to dwell on a passing troll.
Finally Simon was jolted by hope of recognition. Sitting by himself, as usual, in the school lunchroom, he was approached by Albert Essman, aka Assman, who’d formed a small pseudo-renegade gang named The Assassins.
Essman certainly didn’t have the appearance of a born leader. He was a short, boneless boy with the expression of a salmon spent after spawning. Yet this flaccid Essman, who reminded Simon of day-old rice pudding, was a real personality and everybody’s friend. His Assassins, with their feeble attempt at respectable rebellion, were the school’s heroes.
Simon had watched Albert Essman from a far distance, wondering about the source of his charisma. The nerds and studs stood in line to slap his hand; the girls, including Polly Moon, went to butter when he appeared. It was widely rumored that Essman got laid on a trip to Disneyland; it was said he scored with a dancer in a Dumbo costume. The story was probably a myth but it added hugely to Essman’s glitter; nobody else in Glenda had come close to fucking an elephant.
“You want to talk, Crap Apple?”
“About what? Cheeseburgers or knockers?” Simon said, as if he always talked to socialites.
“You know about The Assassins?”
“I heard you got some kind of club.”
“Very choice fraternity,” Essman said. “It’s usually a closed society. But when Paulie Baner moved to Milwaukee it left an opening. Are you interested or should I just go fuck myself?”
“I guess I’m mildly interested,” Simon said, sucking ketchup off a french fry. He fought off an urge to bolt; a small voice asked him if he was selling out to the establishment, if Kerouac, Ginsberg or James Dean’s ghost would tag him a whore. From Simon’s vantage, The Assassins were less On the Road and more in-the-tank, a conglomerate of complacent turds who walked the walk and talked the talk without a clue to the whys and wherefores of life lived under random bombardment by quarks and angel droppings.
Simon suspected The Assassins liked the world as it was, once over easy, that they would shit bricks if they ever met a stoned Buddhist from a parallel universe staggering down Glenda’s Main Street snapping at pussy, making his dick gyrate like a cobra to music played on an electric panpipe. Simon had no idea of how he himself would behave free of Glenda’s umbilical in the presence of a beatific, androgynous Beatnik god, but he was reasonably sure The Assassins would cringe and grovel.
“OK, then,” Essman said. “Meet me after school at The Ptomaine Wagon.”
“Deal,” Simon heard himself say, “But it has to be a short visit. I’ve got to get to work.”
“At Quikpix, right? My cousin, Rowena works there. Major piece of tail. So tell me, is your daddy doing her?” After Francine left, Robert J.’s first official act was to rehire Rowena Trask. Simon often wondered if his father was “doing” her. “Never mind, Apple Sauce,” Essman said, holding out his hand, palm up. Simon gave it a slap. At long last, Simon Apple made contact.
The Ptomaine Wagon, a van usually parked outside Glenda Middle School’s main gate, was owned & operated by Isaac Glenda IV, the great, great grandson of the farmer who’d decided that his fields were fertile enough to grow a town. Most of Isaac’s progeny had been ruined and scattered by the Great Depression but a few of the founder’s descendants hung around, ruled more by inertia than civic pride. Most of those leftovers served Glenda’s new barons as plumbers, carpenters and gas station attendants. Isaac IV, more entrepreneurial, sold chilidogs, hamburgers, wedges of chocolate pie, ice-cream sandwiches, candy bars and soda to Glenda’s emerging generations. He was also a source of cigarettes and six-packs of Budweiser to the privileged underaged.
Simon chewed on an O Henry bar while Albert Assman Essman negotiated for a pack of Camel’s. “I’m handing you a piece of paper with the address of our clubhouse,” Essman said. “Swear by Jesus that you’ll never give away the information even under torture.”
“Amen,” Simon said.
“We meet on Saturday afternoons. Can you get off of work?”
Simon knew if he pressed hard enough he’d be granted dispensation. All such requests were honored since he’d begun behaving like a land mine; Robert J. danced around him avoiding contact with any lethal nipples. His father wanted peace or the illusion of peace at any price. For Simon, it was an ideal arrangement.
“No problem. What time?” Simon said.
24
The Assassins’s meeting place turned out to be the old Lombard Cinema, one of Glenda’s eyesores. Abandoned in the sixties when the Magic Mall Multiplex was built just off the turnpike, all that remained of the Lombard’s former Art Deco majesty was a cement rectangle with corners curved in the style of streamlined locomotives. That design was carried through to a collapsing ticket booth where Crazy Henry, Glenda’s only certified psycho, was allowed to nest. Protruding from the theater’s broken body was the remnant of a once-ornate marquee pocked with empty bulb sockets. On the humiliated marquee a tipsy assortment of black letters in different sizes read wE SUP pORt OUR B OyS In NAM, a sentiment of the Veterans of Foreign Wars.
Near the arched entrance was a faded poster for M*A*S*H under glass cracked into a spiderweb, held together by a rusty chrome frame. The Lombard’s walls, chipped and stained brown, were covered with small-town graffiti: initials, hearts, bowling ball breasts, bent penises dangling in limbo, male and female names appended with brief résumés of various talents (hottwat, gives goodhed, shitmeister, cockteaser). A few washed-out fliers advertised obsolete record albums, local politicians hungry for votes, and a circus that once came through Glenda on a date erased by wind and weather. Taken together, the Lombard was like a tombstone in a horror movie. Simon was impressed that The Assassins had enough imagination to pick the place. He wondered if he’d misjudged them.
Walking past the ticket booth, Simon smelled frying meat. A curl of smoke came out of the little hole where the ticket lady once took orders. He peeked inside. There was Crazy Henry stirring up fire inside a pail, humming “Stardust” to a pork chop skewered on a stick. Crazy Henry never bothered anybody; he was more a thing than a person, part of the scene like a traffic light. The idea that he had an appetite left Simon edgy.
The Lombard’s doors were boarded shut but Essman’s note covered that; as instructed, Simon found a panel marked with an A in red paint, and pushed. He slithered under plywood and found himself in what used to be the lobby. There was enough light leaking inside for him to make out what was once the candy counter and the box where a uniformed usher once tossed ripped ticket stubs. The chilly wind of nostalgia made Simon shiver.
Simon remembered the excitement he’d felt on his Saturday matinee trips to the Lombard, holding tight to sweet Victoria’s hand, her perfume smell mingling with the smell of caramel popcorn, anticipating the taste of Goobers or chocolate disks covered by dot-sized white sugar beads with a weird name that sounded like nunpearls, especially licorice domes called Black Crows that Victoria loved to suck until they dissolved. He could still hear the voices and music of Coming Attractions from inside the theater’s great shell.
On this Saturday, stepping over the spongy rot of royal blue carpet, entering the Lombard’s ruined entrails, he
felt as if maggots crawled inside his pants. Even past the entrance, he caught another whiff of Crazy Henry’s sizzling meat.
Simon saw where the light came from; a large chunk of ceiling was missing, gouged out where a gigantic chandelier once hung over the auditorium. That gash in the ceiling made him feel better; it was some kind of emergency exit even if it was forty feet off the ground.
He was also glad to see that a few of the Lombard’s seats were still rooted to the floor by thick iron pedestals. Their velvet cushions gave off a sour stink but the empty rows still conveyed a welcome sense of order. And the stage was still there too, rising behind a pit that once held a gigantic organ. The base of the stage was carved into Chinese dragons. Their yellowish hides—the tarnished transformation of gold-leaf skin—still clung to those fierce bodies. Above the dragons, a torn, splotched, screen dangled like the window shade in a cheap motel. The stains on the Lombard’s violated screen seemed to have shape and substance—they could have been scenes from thousands of films crusted into a grotesque mural.
“Apple Crumb, The Assassins command you!” Simon heard Albert Essman’s thin voice rise from the protruding belly of the Lombard’s balcony. Simon looked up through speckles of dust floating like tiny fish in the thin tube of sunlight. “Ascend the stage,” Essman ordered.
“If it don’t fall apart first,” Simon said, realizing that ascending the stage meant climbing over the convex dragons. He found footholds in the ridged dragon humps and made the climb. Up there, he saw that there was hardly enough stage left to hold his weight. He could see down into the basement.
“Now strip,” Essman yelled.
“Fuck that,” Simon said, balancing on a steel beam. “It’s freezing in here.”
“Our rituals are sacred,” Essman said. “Do not defy.”
“What are you, some kind of queers?” Simon said. He pulled off his shirt, dropped his pants, kicked off his sneakers and waited in his jockey shorts.
“The whole nine yards,” Essman said. “You get my meaning?”
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