by Bruce Bauman
People have this notion of the Chelsea as a roachy rat hole. (The wanton acts only took place in some of those rooms—such sweet decadence.) Xtine had this grand apartment with high ceilings and spectacular windows. Although they were cracked and it was damn drafty. She had installed a darkroom. I lay down on a futon in the main room while she boiled water for herb tea. I remember watching her as she sashayed across the wooden floor. Not dyke-ish at all. She had an alluring angular face with high cheekbones. Deep brown, small, almond-shaped eyes. Lithe but short. Her soulsmell was a pungent mix of cerulean blue and baking bread. Of course pure colors have smell, and sound, and taste. You’ve heard of the blues, as in the music? Alchemy wrote the song “Salome’s Sensation Bluz” for me. It sounds like how I feel when I’m low.
I used to urge everyone, especially my shrinks, to get in touch with their inner sexual music. To get laid by loins that sing. All of my shrinks—men and women—needed to unbutton their crotches and screw more. Even my latest “caretaker” here, Dr. Zooey Bellows, with her soulsmell of fresh pineapple and steamy ice right out of the freezer that lingers for hours after she has gone, reeks of repression.
Xtine was the first woman to make my sex sing. Yes, we were lovers. Her photos of me were the ones that ended up in Life. Unlike any male photographer I’ve ever known, she could bring out my sexuality and vulnerability without it seeming porny or kittenish. Maybe it was the delicate manner of her touch.
I broke up with Horrwich and I began enjoying life. Sport-fucking was fun. The only sport at which I excelled. Art was fun. Serious was fun. I put up one of my favorite shows at Gibbon’s new gallery on West Broadway in ’69. There were only a few galleries then. Paula Cooper, OK Harris, Cunningham Ward, Hundred Acres. I collected Do Not Disturb signs from dozens of hotels in dozens of languages, and I made paintings, collages, photos, all centered around Vietnam, Biafra, and the riots in Selma, Nixon and an American public complacently snoozing away.
I followed that up the next year with This Is Not a Pipedream. You know, playing off Magritte. I slept in the gallery and people watched me. Behind a curtain I did some pipedream-like acts. Xtine filmed it. Andy had made a film called Sleep. His twin obsessions were ennui and celebrity. Me, I wanted to explore what happens in the worlds outside you and inside you when you’re asleep, that in-between dimension of insomnia and slumberland when you think you are awake but you’re asleep, and when you wish you were asleep but are awake. I wanted to record the act of sleeping in the gallery and how people reacted.
We filmed for the entire month. I wouldn’t sell it. Same with the sketches I’d made from my dreams and of the people in the gallery. I told Gibbon that I’d hold on to the original video and all but a few of my sketches. I gave him some so he could pay his alimony and maintain his potbellied plumpery. I gave a few to Xtine and some other friends. I burned or hid the rest with the original films.
Then the good times came to a stop. Dad’s emphysema got serious. He’d never quit smoking. I spent a lot of time at home. I needed to be there for him. Hilda wanted my help, although she didn’t understand me. She believed that I’d grown into some kind of whore, though she kind of absolved me because I was the spawn of a fallen woman. She wanted to love me unconditionally. She couldn’t. Her eyes always scolded me.
Dad died fast and slow. Each day he withered just a little more until he looked like a shrunken bag of water and bones with two bulging eyes as his internal organs began to fail. He died of a squashed spirit as much as from the disease. We talked a little then. It was cleansing. In his luggy way, he told me how much he loved me.
“Salo, it made me so happy to watch you drawing up on the roof or just staring at birds and the sky. Or watching you ride off on your bicycle as free and determined as an osprey.” At night, alone, I cried and cried, seeing this once powerful man reduced to where the simple act of breathing became unendurable. We buried him next to the baby.
I had to fend off Dad’s Gravity Disease from seeping into me. Gravity, as everyone knows, affects water and the tides and our balance. Besides aging cells, there is emotional aging. An unseen force, an invisible weight that arises in the direst of moments and is the destroyer of so many strong spirits—my dad, and then Nathaniel, and even my Alchemy.
Alchemy. I was successful, in one wonderful way. Despite having me for a mother, or maybe because he had me for his mother, he was blessedly impervious in his young life to any major symptoms of Gravity Disease. He bled with the fluid of despair when Absurda, who suffered with a lifelong vicious case, died. But the intrusions of the Pretender and Laluna, Alchemy’s traitoress entrancer, and all those stupid political demands, that’s what did it. He couldn’t run away like me. I survived because I flew off, went astray. He couldn’t allow himself to do that.
Emotions have weight and force and mass. They are made of quantum-size, blood-dappled molecules existing in multidimensions. There are those who feel this weight more than others, and it shows on their faces. Some balance it out. Others get dragged down and become bitter and small people. Some become more generous in spirit. Some even go slowly mad. Gravity Disease is the death of cells exhausted by sadness and disappointment over a lifetime. The doctors have discovered genetic causes for so many diseases. No matter what they find they’ll be stymied—they’ll never cure them all, and new ones will arise. The raw pain of life is the true cause of Gravity Disease, and there is no cure for that except bodydeath. Those who suffer from chronic disease of the mind or the body or the heart carry tremendous emotional gravity. My disease began to weigh when my first son was stillborn and I blamed myself for his death. The heavier your gravity, the greater your wound. If the gravity becomes too great, your life force is crushed too soon.
It happened to Nathaniel. I miss him so.
When we met for the second time, in 1970, I was pregnant with Alchemy. I’d been hibernating in Orient. After what happened with the first baby, I’d suspended all drugs, drinking, screwing. I didn’t want anyone’s dick inside me, getting in the way of me bonding with my child.
Hilda was lighthearted for the first time since Dad got sick. For her, life was returning to the house. Xtine came out off and on, and Hilda was mostly cool with that, except when we played “Guess who’s the father?” although I had a good idea who it was. We read aloud from our favorite books. I played music for Alchemy, everything from Lizst to Stockhausen, Holiday to Hendrix.
I visited Xtine in the city for a few days to nourish the unborn Alchemy with art. I was drifting through the old, old Modern when I got a little tired. I headed to a room where I could relax on a bench and began dreaming in the Water Lilies.
“Sniffing Monet?” I looked to my left, and there stood Nathaniel. He hadn’t changed at all. I mean literally. It looked like he hadn’t changed his clothes in four years. Still slightly motley, with short hair, a reddish-brown goatee, and gold-rimmed glasses. Scraggly jeans, beat-up khaki jacket, and a satchel slung over his shoulder. Just no camouflage cap.
“Inhaling the colors and letting him or her feel art.” My eyes veered toward my mildly expanded belly and his gaze followed.
“Just as Urso predicted.”
It took me a minute to remember Urso’s insult about the “soupçon du jour,” suburbia, and babies. Instead of teasing him about his need for a wardrobe consultant, I stuck out my tongue and tasted the air around Nathaniel. “Alchemy—that will be my child’s name, boy or girl. Next to me is a man who has one of the purest soulsmells, but he just spit out a comment that is unworthy of him because it is not genuine. In typical male fashion, he does not understand that raising a child is an art at which most people fail.”
He laughed and put up his hands. “Okay, I stand reprimanded. I saw you in the Matisse Swimming Pool and you were humming ‘row, row your boat, gently down the stream …’ not noticing a soul.”
“Communing with my child. Levitating out of my body, exactly the way Matisse wanted us to do. It felt glorious. So, how are you?” I’d ke
pt tabs on his career the best I could. I’d seen him on TV when that porcine-faced Mayor Daley had his cops arrest him at the ’68 Democratic convention in Chicago. I’d also read a few newspaper and magazine articles by or about him.
“It’s going better than Time magazine would have you believe, but not so well if you’re an American grunt or Vietnamese peasant getting a napalm skin tan.” Nathaniel had been on the front lines of the Movement for seven or eight years by then, but he still managed a well-balanced mix of rage and optimism.
“I meant you personally.”
“The life of a full-time revolutionary is a big gig.”
“Unless you want me to go back to my dreamworld, you have to talk to me.”
“What do you want to know? I spoke at over a hundred colleges the last two years. Not as much fun as a rock star. Sure as shit doesn’t pay like an arms contractor for the Pentagon. Still, I dig it. I guess I’m part of the new class of rev celebs. Warhol’s a bloodsucker, but I’m afraid he’s right about fame and its currency. I’d give up whatever minor recognition I have in a second if the war ended. That’s my life.”
He shrugged and moved his satchel from his left shoulder to the right. “I saw your Do Not Disturb exhibition. Damn good. I wanted to send you a note or something. You working on a new show?”
“Not seriously. Mucking about.” I followed what came naturally in these situations, to say exactly what I was thinking. “Can you take some time off from bringing down the American Empire and spend a few days with me in Orient?”
Without answering, he stood up and then bent down to tie the shoelace on his combat boot. With his head tucked into his chest, he said in a muffled voice, “I’m sorry. Please don’t say another word.” He stood back up, about-faced, and scurried away.
Fuck, that startled me. And hurt. My reflexive action would be to follow him and give him hell. Just because he had all these political ideals didn’t mean he could act like a dickhead. I tried to lose myself again in the painting. I couldn’t concentrate. I canceled my plans and took the bus back to Orient.
Two days later, as I was painting the porch a vibrant gold, a taxi pulled up. Out bounded Nathaniel with a bouquet of sunflowers and a copy of Catch-22.
“Hey, so sorry, but a Clouseau showed up.” That’s what he called the Feds. “I didn’t want him to catch me talking to you. It took me two days to lose them.”
Nathaniel later discovered he’d made Nixon’s Enemies List. He got hold of his FBI and COINTELPRO files during the brief time when the Freedom of Information Act was being enforced. I found out later they still didn’t divulge everything.
We spent the first three enchanted days together—without having sex. He was totally understanding after I explained why I was so scared of losing the baby.
Also, I didn’t want to rile Hilda. We’d been getting along. Nathaniel behaved with the cordiality of a 1940s gentleman caller despite his appearance, which resembled a Mad magazine version of an anarchist. He gave her the flowers and asked her to show him to the extra bedroom. Later, he treated us to dinner at the Yacht Club. His natural sweetness won her over. Me, too.
The day before he left, we went for a bike ride out to the fields by the Sound and I took him to my and Kyle’s beach. Because the brush was so high, over six or seven feet, and thick, almost no one bothered to trudge through to the clearing. (The developers tract-housed my mini-Eden years ago.) Nathaniel chilled as if I’d slipped him a quaalude. He lay on his back. I took off his eyeglasses and put them by his side. He closed his eyes and, for the first time, remained still with none of his bouncing or body shrieks. Although we’d had some good talks, he hadn’t revealed the deeper Nathaniel, the pure soulsmell that made him, and I yearned to hear it.
“Nathaniel, why do you do what you do? No Vietnam horror stories or superanalytical lecture on protest movements in America allowed!”
He pushed himself up with his palms and patted about for his glasses. I put them on for him and he straightened them out. He began to speak, almost apologetically.
“I told you my parents were blue-blood Americans, right?”
“That’s all you said.”
“I’m a descendant of Mawbridge Brockton on my father’s side. He was a Virginia signer of the Constitution. My mother was old line Dutch, of the Van Buskdraats of New Amsterdam, who were entrenched long before the English docked their boats on Wall Street. They made a fortune in the “shipping trade,” which meant slave trade. Down the line they became abolitionists. By the time we got to my parents, the money was gone and their main occupation was drinking and behaving like unappealing Southern gentry.
“My father could either be imperious or charming. Mr. Political Science Professor preened around the U.Va. campus like he was carved from one of its stone pillars, looking for boys to verbally emasculate and coeds to copulate with. My mom, when sober, was a petite, timid woman of leisure, who knew how to hold a teacup, precisely like so.” He held up his right hand as if he were holding a cup with his knobby pinky sticking out.
“When drunk, which took up too many of her waking hours, she turned into a violent shrew. She once slung a shot glass and knocked out my sister’s tooth for purposely using her maiden name when singing ‘Who’s Afraid of Audra Van Buskdraat?’ ”
I rubbed his back, and his posture, which had sunk, straightened up. “I know talking about yourself is not your style, but Nathaniel, that was about them—not about you.”
“What is this, the Salome Rorschach?”
“If you like to think that, then yes. Tell me something that made you you.”
He leaned back and gazed at the clouds breathing by, and sat back up. “When I was six years old, Adele, who worked as a cook for my parents and was very cute and very black, and my uncle George Turnbull Brockton—that’s how he referred to himself and made us do the same—they had a terrible row. It was a summer morning and I was zipping around in my red fire truck in the backyard. I heard this scream and looked up and saw Adele and Uncle George entangled on the second-floor veranda. The next moment she came flailing to the ground. She broke her arm and a leg but survived. I never saw her again. I guess ‘row’ is Orwellian family-speak. Families perfected it before governments—”
“No politics. What happened next?”
“We were told that Adele was ‘slow’ and Uncle George had been attempting to persuade her not to jump. That was life among ‘colored’ and white in Virginia in the ’40s.
“When I was fourteen, I had an argument with my father about the South’s peculiar racism. I brought up Uncle George Turnbull Brockton and Adele, and said I thought they were having an affair. He shook his head condescendingly and told me I had a creative imagination and my notions of race and American history were silly and clichéd. I answered that he lived a life of privilege based on maintaining the racist status quo. Boom. He went to slap me across the face. My reflexes were quicker than his and I caught his hand in midair, and I just held it there. I’d never defied him before. I let go and he stormed out of the room. That fall it was, ‘Pack your bags, Nathaniel. You’re on the next train to Exeter.’
“The day I left, I went to say goodbye. Robert, one of the ‘workers’ in our family for years, was driving me to the station. I looked in on my mother in her ‘studio,’ already soused, some Charlie Parker coming off the record player while she gadded about in her free-form modern dance. I didn’t even bother to interrupt her.
“I knocked on the door of my father’s study and peeked in. He tilted his head up—I’ll never forget the book he was reading, The Lonely Crowd—and said, ‘Remember, you are a Brockton. Do not disgrace us. We’ll see you at Thanksgiving.’ ”
Nathaniel’s eyes were so bleak, I cupped his cheeks between my hands and placed my forehead against his and held it there for a moment. “It’s because you are you and the way you were born—honest and good—that you do what you do.” I kissed him. He tensed. An egret flew over and cawed—it was Kyle. I clutched Nathaniel’s arm
. “You won’t hurt me. You’re no homicider. I told Alchemy about you last night.” The way I talked to and about Alchemy made Nathaniel a tad nervous. “Jesus, Nathaniel, people talk to God all the time, do you think they’re all crazy?”
He laughed. “Yeah, I do.”
“My baby is real and he can hear my voice.” I kissed him again. I envisioned we’d end up together, at least for a while, when the time was right. I never would’ve guessed it’d take another five years! I wanted him then. The sex didn’t make the highlight reel. I didn’t care. Although he wasn’t the father, I treasured the idea that Nathaniel’s seed swam within me and the unborn Alchemy.
He left the next day for a college speaking gig. He promised to be in touch very soon. When I didn’t hear from him, I told myself the untruth that I didn’t care. Then I heard the news on the radio: The Feds busted him for dealing drugs and he jumped bail. I knew they’d set him up. I followed his exploits the best I could from the mainstream and underground papers. I read a piece he wrote in the Voice and heard a couple of taped interviews on WBAI. After almost a year I got a call from a guy who didn’t give his name. “Nathaniel says he is sorry, but he can’t contact you and he hopes you understand.” He hung up before I could get more information or say, “Send him my love.”
14
MEMOIRS OF A USELESS GOOD-FOR-NUTHIN’
Don’t Know Much About History, 1992
After we left Collier Layne, I postulated we’d beeline it to the California surf ’n’ sunbathing society. I mispostulated. I could get around the subway blindfolded, and my compass said Northern Boulevard runs east-west across Long Island, and if I head north I end up drowning in the Sound and that the East River is west of Flushin’, but Iowa, Idaho, all them is the same. So I got no clue we’d sort of detoured in the wrong direction as Part II of the Alchemy Experimental Family Tour. When we stop for taking leaks and gassing up, I see a sign that says D.C. 30 MILES, and I think we’re halfway to L.A.