by Bruce Bauman
“We gonna go have a cocktail with the prez? Got some advice for him from my brother and my dad. My brother got back from Iraq last year, and my dad, who was in Nam in ’69, they love Bush and they think nukin’ Hussein and taking the damn oil fields is the right fucking move.” I think he’s surprised I know who’s the president and even more surprised that I’m clued in to Hussein and oil.
“We’re skirting D.C. and heading to the Shenandoah Mountains. We need to swap cars. I need some clothes and cash or we’ll be hitching to L.A.”
He ignored my family’s input on solving the Iraq situation.
“I still say we hit up the prez for some dough. His family’s loaded.”
“I don’t take gifts from an Ivy League warmonger who once was Chief Spook.”
“That’s exactly the cheese balls whose palms I wanna tickle. Makes ’em feel superior and gets me on their good side. Besides, he’s still the prez. Even you,” I razz him, “must respect that.” He just nods like he’s keeping score of my answers. He had this way with everyone, almost never saying out loud that he is judging you so you couldn’t call him on it, but I damn well sensed it.
He announces we’re seeing Nathaniel Brockton, like he’s the pope or maybe Ozzie Osbourne. I inquire, “Who the fuck is that?”
“Nathaniel’s been my mom’s main man off and on for years.” I’m guessing they’d met at a biddy-bip-bippers convention. “He’s been a leader in antiwar movements from Vietnam to Iraq. He just came back from Yugoslavia. It’s unconscionable that we’re letting that happen.” I got no inkling of what we’re letting happen. “He’s a great patriot and the most just man I know.”
“My dad and brother hate antiwar wimps. Me, too.”
“Re-ally?” he says, all sarcastic. “Do us both a favor, don’t argue politics with Nathaniel.” Alchemy takes a sec, then mutters, “Or maybe I should tell you to start an argument, since I’m beginning to see a pattern of contrary behavior that is all too familiar.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment. So, why the fuck not?”
“If you want to spend the night listening to me and Nathaniel debate the intricacies of the failure of American democracy, be my guest.”
“Nooo thank you. Where’s the next stop?”
“Magnolia College. We lived here for a few years when I was a teenager. We, no, my mom was good here. For a while. Nathaniel took a position here because he thought it’d be a tranquil place for my mom.”
We turn down this tree-lined road, and he tells me about the school and the campus and how it was founded by some lady named Sylvia Lancaster in honor of her daughter who died when she fell off her horse and whose nickname was Magnolia. The girl, not the horse. We turn down a road, and I see these gigundo three-story houses. Brockton’s was painted with orange, red, and yellow boxes. Even then I could surmise that was a Salome job.
Brockton ain’t there. The door is unlocked, so we slip in and take a few beers and some slices of roast beef from the fridge. The place is like some minimuseum with paintings and photos covering the walls. I was staring at a black-’n’-white with Brockton and a real young Dylan.
“He hung out with him?”
“Way back. A little.”
“Ya meet him?”
“No.”
“Who’re all these others?”
He names the faces as we move down the living room wall. “Allen Ginsberg. Angela Davis. Abbie Hoffman in Chicago during ’68. Joan Baez. That’s a cover of Osawatomie, an underground magazine from the ’60s.”
I heard of Baez, she being Dylan’s babe in her prime. I had a vague idea about Abbie Hoffman ’cause Pete Townshend clocked him with a guitar at Woodstock, but that’s it. “Who’s the dogfaced old fart with the funny eyes and big glasses who looks so cum-fucking happy nestling with all them young titties?”
“Jean-Paul Sartre. In Paris. Not sure when. The girls? His groupies, I guess.”
I remember thinking, If a guy that butt-crack ugly could get chicks, so could I. Or maybe I should move to Paree. Alchemy was always giving me books, and he gave me some by that guy. Most of them are boring as a bologna sandwich except the one where the people get locked together for all time—sometimes I think that was us in the band.
Right next to the picture of the Frog was a black-an’-white of Salome in come-on-over pose. Her backside facing out. Man, she had a killer ass. Her face was turned profile with a beret tilted over her forehead. Alchemy nudged me. “Xtine took that. She took hundreds of photos of my mom. Some were for Life. She helped raise me, too. She did some great shots of the Dictators and Television at CB’s way back. You want the rest of the magical history photo tour?”
We start inching down the hall, and I catch sight of some major spiders crawling on the ceiling corners, creeps me out. Alchemy stops and raises both his hands and touches the wall with his palms and fingertips, slowly like he’s searching for an invisible portal. The wood is burnt and charred. “This is why my mom is now back in Collier Layne. She locked Nathaniel in his office”—he pointed down the hall with his chin—“and started a fire.” He shook his head, half laughing in disbelief.
“Alchemy!” Brockton blustered in an accent that was a mix of Foghorn Leghorn Southern and Manhattan clothespin-on-the-nose hoity-toity. He seemed like a pretty old dude by then even if he was only fifty or so. In them early photos he was real skinny, but now he was lumpy with a potbelly. His face was full of lines like a scruffy old basketball, and his hair going thin and gray. He reminded me a bit of this nerd in grade school, Ronnie Nadler, who never sat still. Drove the teachers nuts. We call anyone whose body parts were out of control “Nadling.” Brockton was a Nadling champ.
They shook hands, stopped, and then bear-hugged. In all the time I know Alchemy, there are only two guys I ever seen Alchemy bow down to—Brockton and Buddy Sheik. And, well, Laluna. I got plenty to opinionate about her later.
Brockton drummed his fingers against the wall. “I didn’t repair it because every time I start missing Salome and want to go get her, I look at this and accept I can’t take care of her anymore.” Alchemy looped his arm over Brockton’s shoulder.
“Nathaniel, my mom can make anyone feel horrible when she doesn’t get what she wants, but you’re the best thing that ever happened to her.” They both shrug in a kind of holy communion of helplessness.
“So, who is your uncivilized-looking friend with the jaundiced mien?” He smiles like he done paid me a compliment. He reaches to shake my hand. I wanna show him uncivilized by rearranging his damn crooked teeth. I’m ignorant of what he means by “jaundiced mien” ’cause I ain’t yellow eyed, so I don’t shake his hand. I only says, “Hey.” Alchy introduces me as “Ambitious Mindswallow, member of the Insatiables.” First time I hear my full moniker de rock ’n’ roll. I gotta admit, I took to it right away.
We move single file back into the kitchen, and Alchemy turns and tosses me a take-a-hike glance. I get the message. Magnolia is like some massive male fantasy camp. Seven hundred chicks.
This was my first up-close and personal view of the split between the truly rich and the rest of us. In the city you felt it ’cause of Park Avenue bullshit, but they don’t flaunt it in the same way. Even after we made it and I become one of them, I feel like the snotass from Queens. Only in America could a farting, cursing juvee degenerate like me crawl from the sewer and into a penthouse.
I pass by the tennis courts filled with blondes and bouncing boobs. I keep going, sticking to the path. I hear the girls squealing and splashing down by the lake. I sense this is snakeville. Snakes is my kryptonite, so I make a U-turn to see this goddess babe on her horse galloping down a dirt road. A sign points BARN. I head to the stalls, which is fuckin’ bigger than my folks’ apartment. The babe who was riding and two others are brushing their horses. I’m trying to think of something clever, but all I can think of is the time when I was about eight years old. I had a crush on Suzy Balboa, who was having a birthday party at the North Shore Country Clu
b. What a joke! Place stank like a bowling alley bathroom. My dad, Mr. “Ricky, you ain’t nuthin’ but a useless good-for-nuthin’ and will always be a useless fuckin’ good-for-nuthin’ loser,” gives me his fatherly drunken advice. “Ya watch it when ya go inta the pool, ’cause they got a special dye that mixes with pee and chlorine, makes your bathing suit burn off and the lifeguard blows his whistle and everyone nyahs-nyahs at the dumb fuck with the tiny dick who peed in the pool.” I never go swimming the whole afternoon.
Alchemy comes swooshing down the road in this ’60s T-bird. It’s gonna be our new ride. Was once Salome’s. “How’d you find me?”
“A lone guy with shades, biker boots, and tattoos all up his arms is not blending into the local mountain foliage.”
“I was just gonna make my move.” I see he’s already scoped the babes.
He ambles out of the car. “Go for it.”
“Hey, these yours?” I ask suavishly.
They keep brushing, hardly looking at me, so I step closer. “I had a dog once, a German shepherd named Uzi.” The girls don’t react. Not sure they get Israeli firearms. “He do not live too long.” (I’m trying to talk with no accent.) “My brother took him up to the roof of our apartment building and he threw his bone as far as he could off the roof, and Uzi chased after it, and phfft.” I wave my hands like I was reaching for him.
The girls look like they’re gonna barf. Alchemy laughs and says, “He’s kidding.” He slouches up to the superbabe’s horse and starts to pet it. “Big guy. How many hands?” I’m thinking, hands? Since when do horses have fuckin’ hands? They start talking horse poop. He asks, “Will you be at the Magnolia Patch later?” The girls giggle and glance at each other. He says, “We will. Around ten. See you.”
When we get in the car, he is amused. “That was one classy bit of seductive reasoning. Uzi for a German shepherd? Why not Lugar?”
“Like it. Maybe next time. Truth, man, that’s what happened to Uzi, though I left out that my brother spiked Uzi’s food with PCP.”
“And you listen to his advice on foreign affairs?”
“Hey, he been to war. Have you?”
“Yes and no.”
“What the fuck’s that mean?”
He don’t answer right away. Then deep from one of those moments I come to call “Alchemy in Collidascope Land,” he says, “Depends on how you define ‘war.’ Some people need to leave home to escape war. Some need to leave to see war. In the end, no one ever really leaves home and you’re always at war. You’re only rearranging the furniture.”
At the house, Brockton cooks about the best BBQ I ever ate. We’re getting drunk and riffing on cars, movies, sports, only it keeps swerving to the serious-politico, and Brockton and Alchemy rant about the L.A. riots and President Bush being a WASPy sub rosa racist. Brockton’s face is sliding from easy rolling to mean-motor-scooter drunk, and his eyes and lips go school-nun stern and his body stops bouncing except for him clicking his teeth and he finally asks me, “What do you think? You a Republican?”
“I’m a nuthin’.”
“You’re apathetic?”
“Let’s say I’m noncommittin’.” Alchemy, he forgets zilch and hears everything, ’cause years later he comes up with The Noncommittal Nihilists for Nuthin’ record. It’s sharp mouthed, none of Alchy’s hookie-dookie or political stuff, just us as a band.
Brockton looks like he’s ready to explode on me. Alchemy sees it, too. “Nathaniel, cut it. He’s only—”
“Nah, man, I can handle myself.” Brockton’s too old to smack, so I take an empty beer can and crush it in my hand. Brocton snorts at me. “Look, pals, I don’t know all this crap like youse two, what I learnt in that shit hole where I come from is if you ain’t committed to saving your own piddly ass, zero else means squat. Most of the people ain’t got the dough to be committed to nuthin’ but making their rent, and no one is sending them to ‘horse-grooming college.’ The way I see it, it’s on such highly educated ass wipes like youse to make the world a better place for us dumb-as-nails lowlifes.”
“Good rap, kid. You’re no fool. In fact, you’re pretty savvy. How much TV do you watch? How much tobacco and dope do you smoke? And your folks? Do they vote?”
“My dad says he’s gonna vote for that Pro guy if he stays in the race.”
“You mean Perot?” Nathaniel asks kinda snotty. “Why him?”
“ ’Cause he’s different. He ain’t one a them.”
Nathaniel don’t talk to me but to Alchemy. “See? Third parties, it almost doesn’t matter what you stand for. Perot is a weasel with the money to promote himself. He’s funny looking with a squeaky voice and announced his candidacy on CNN. He has no serious policy but, like the kid says, he ‘ain’t one a them,’ and he’s neck and neck with Bush and Clinton.” Alchemy nods and Nathaniel turns to me again. “So, Ambitious, will you vote for him?”
“I tolt ya, I’m noncommittin’.”
“Nathaniel, he’s not even old enough to vote.”
“Am so. Am eighteen now.”
“Hang on, guys.” Alchemy decides to change the course of the conversation and disappears from the kitchen. He reappears with a book and starts reading:
“Let’s get the stones a throwing and the bombs a bursting and punch some holes in the souls of the monsters running the Military Industrial Oedipus Complex. It’s no time to lay back, because if you do, you’re going to GET FUCKED instead of getting laid. It’s time to turn off the tube, turn on your heart, and change the world. Let them eat fire and burn!”
“Alchemy, stop.”
He closed the book and laid it on the kitchen counter. “I’m still waiting for the return of Bohemian Scofflaw. Or, at least, your memoir.”
“You’ll have to keep waiting. The powers that bemoan the death of literacy do not care one whit what a dinosaur like me has to say.” Brockton hangs his head and reminds me of Larry Bird when he was washed up and couldn’t play no more. “I sent out the memoir to some agents at Distinguished Writers International who once represented me. The top agent of DWI called me all excited. They wanted salacious gossip. Not my thing. The self-indulgence trip leads to degradation and gracelessness.” (In that regard nothing’s changed in the thirty years since ’92, ’cause they ask for plenty of gossip in this particular masterpiece. Only I got less scruples than Brockton.)
“Nathaniel, you think that’s true of Rousseau, Nabokov, or even Fitzgerald in The Crack-Up? They wrote great memoirs.”
“It was a different time and I am not them. I can’t read The Crack-Up—it’s both pathetic and bathetic.” He runs his hands through his hair and ties it up into a ratty ponytail with a rubber band. “I’m a guy who, almost by mistake, wrote a book that caught the zeitgeist. Guys like James Simon Kunen or George Jackson, we’re not true writers. I’ll keep working the front lines. I’m going back to Sarajevo during the Christmas break, but as a writer, I’m done.”
Alchemy gulps his drink and sits down next to him. “I can’t believe I’m hearing this defeatist line from you. You always insisted that the personal is political.”
“I said that all politics is personal. But all that is personal is not political. Your personal life can make you political, but that doesn’t mean it has any meaning to anyone. It has meaning in our life choices: How we spend our money, who we vote for, or who we work for. It does not mean squawking about your mother’s drinking problems, the finicky sexual diversions of your father, or your mate’s emotional crises. My personal life is not for public consumption.”
“I agree on that principle. What about a follow-up to Tag? Everyone loves Scofflaw.”
“I can’t get the voice right. Besides, I was full of hope back then. Now I’m a fifty-three-year-old earnest secular preacher who believes the bad guys are winning.”
That self-analysis sounded perfecto to me. Alchemy cups his right hand into a loose fist and then rubs his nose with his knuckles, a sign I come to recognize meaning he is displeased. He takes another hit
of scotch. Brockton ain’t finished yet.
“Alchemy, you have it all: musical genius, business sense, beauty, and integrity, a true American mutt heritage. Use it wisely.”
“I hope you’re right. And I will. My word.”
They stare at each other. I see that Brockton idolizes Alchemy, and Alchemy, well, he worships Brockton and becomes all smush-brained when he’s within five miles of this good-for-good’s-sake bullshit, like Brockton’s his damn dad or the dad he wished he had.
“For now, keep in mind what Shelley wrote about poets being the unacknowledged legislators of the world. Your way will be the hardest challenge, but you can do it, the third-party way. Too many American artists have surrendered their ideals in favor of fame or esteem. All art is political, whether they want it to be or not, and by accepting these rules of the game, their art will suffer.” He stood up, pretty whomped. “Anyone who says there is no relationship between art and politics is selfish. Or cowardly.”
All of that bull, that’s what led to Alchy getting involved with the Nightingale Foundation, which led to the Nightingale Party and him dressing up in his save-the-freakin’-world costume. It all goes back to Sir Brockton. Nah, that’s not fair. It was Mose. And Salome. And Laluna. And me, too. And the masses. Truth is, he loved talking politics to anyone. Used to drive me up the fuckin’ wall when we was on the road. Still, that don’t matter either, ’cause in the end, it came down to all of us, what we wanted and what we put on him.
Alchemy glides into the living room, which is cluttered with magazines and books and record covers, and sits at this Steinway. He swings into Porter and Gershwin, which my grandparents loved, before he slides into this strange riff I don’t know.
He catches my eye. “What’s that?” I ask.
“It’s ‘Blue Monk.’ Man, we’re gonna have to teach you about music.”
Brockton growls, meaning “good fucking luck.” I was blown away by Alchy’s playing and how he was like some music encyclopedia. I learnt a whole fuck of a lot from him and later Absurda and Lux—no bull, they was the bestest teachers anyone could’ve had.