by Bruce Bauman
Alchemy then slides into a smoother but complex set of chords. I see Brockton don’t know it either and asks, “What’s that?”
“Just something I’m working on.” Years later, we record it as “No Master, No Messiah” for the Multiple Coming sessions.
Brockton tilts his head back, and I swear he looks like he’s ready to bawl his fuckin’ eyes out. When he recovers, he says to me, “Hey, kid, I’m sorry I went at you. Bad form. No class.”
“No sweat. That was nuthin’. My dad would’ve popped me one for mouthing off to him.” He shook his head at me like some holy-guru-y guy, but I still wasn’t buying his Papa Bear act.
“Ambitious, you ready?” I nod. “Nathaniel, we’re going to the Magnolia Patch.”
Brockton, shaking his head, just blows air from his cheeks, “Alchemy, please make sure they’re legal …”
All three babes showed at the Patch, and them girls, they wouldn’t go all out, but they sure liked to gobble the rod. Alchy wakes me at like 6 A.M. and we light out for L.A. without bidding Brockton goodbye.
15
THE SONGS OF SALOME
Let’s Do Naked Lunch
Last night I drifted back in time through my DNA; the power comes with being a sensate morphologist. I am descended from Greta, but we possess the mitochondrial genomes of our personal mystagogue, Salome. Not the Salome who served Herod and danced with the head of John the Baptist. The Salome who witnessed the Crucifixion, the beloved disciple who, according to Mark, sought out Jesus at the tomb to anoint him with spices. I engaged first with Big Mama Salome just after I gave birth to Alchemy, during an evening walk on the beach at Gardiners Bay under the half-moon. I stepped on a cracked shell. My heel began to bleed. From my blood flowed the stigma of my ancestor Salome. Not in bodily form but in the infinitesimal sparks of energy that forever live inside and outside of us. She communicated with me in words that were not spoken but heard. She introduced herself, before asking if I knew the Bible.
“Dad and Hilda read it to me as a child.”
“Good. Young disciple Mark purposely misinformed the masses. Those male disciples are the most unreliable narrators in all history.” She laughed. “Jesus was alive then, as he had been when they helped him off the cross. The Romans did crucify him. We announced his death at the time not because we wanted to start a religion but to fool the Romans so we could slip him out of Jerusalem to a safe haven. I helped him escape to Galilee. He hadn’t arisen anywhere.”
She didn’t tell me that night, but later, that she slept with Jesus. There are intimations to all that in the Apocrypha and the Gnostic texts. Jesus was one carnal man. And he was a man—just closer to perfection than most.
Memory is planted in our genes for those who have the ability to commune with themselves. It will be proved that we can transcend our corporeal bodies and through our DNA traverse what you call time. I might or might not be “alive” when genetic historians prove that I am right, but I can and I have transcended “time.”
When Alchemy was about seven months old, I decided he needed to be exposed to the only other living link to our lineage. He, his grandmother, and I needed to have a nice little group hug.
Greta had become more of a legend in some circles, and those who realized she wasn’t yet dead proclaimed her the world’s most famous recluse. I’d been splitting my time between Orient and Xtine’s. When in the city I rewatched as many movies of hers as I could find, and I saw that the camera understood that she could never love or be loved, that her heart was broken—truly broken. All of those doomed soap-opera screen romances fit her so perfectly. Her eyes, her voice, her leaden walk belied by the erect posture that refused to fall under the burden of so much emptiness. I went on reconnaissance missions, tracking Greta’s walking regimen. She often walked alone. Sometimes with a friend. If she saw me, she never let on. She would drift into the upscale antiques and thrift shops and then lunch at Aquavit, a Scandinavian restaurant, or Raul’s, an unimposing bistro on Madison and 66th.
On an overcast late October morning, I said to myself, “Okay, today.” I dressed casually in a longish black skirt, boots, a turtleneck sweater, and green poncho, and tucked Alchemy into his papoose. I followed her from her apartment to Raul’s. I tried three phone booths—someone had stuck chewing gum in the first two coin slots—before I found one that worked. I wanted Bicks Sr. to accompany me, so I called his office on Park and 56th. I begged him to scurry touty sweety to 59th and Lex. I’d never done that before, so he felt compelled to come. I loved/hated New York in the late autumn. Still do. That’s why I wanted to meet her then. More than winter, the dim fall light shrivels my insides.
I stood in front of Bloomingdale’s window with the mannequins in perfect winter wear. The acrid perfumes from the lobby mixed with the Sabrett hot dog stand. The steamy smut wafting up from the subway station, the sobbing rubber from the gnashing wheels of the buses and taxis, the masses of jockeying bodies whizzing by all sounded like a thirty-three record playing at forty-five speed, which is how everyone walks in New York when it feels like rain but it hasn’t yet come. The swirling cacophony made me want to strip and do an antimodern noise dance while balancing Alchemy on my shoulders.
I spotted Bicks Sr.—the man in the Brooks Brothers suit up the street.
“What is so urgent? Is something wrong with the child?”
“He is perfect.” I took his hand and pulled him down the block. “C’mon, Bicks, earn your money.”
The second we turned onto Madison, he slowed down and clasped my shoulder. “Salome, stop. I think I see. Why now? Why this way? This is a serious breach of protocol.”
“Since when do I fucking care about protocol? If I asked, I doubt she’d deign to meet me. And if she did, she’d pick the time and place on her terms. If you catch someone off guard you get to their essence. If you accompany me, it’ll be less awkward for all of us.”
He sighed and his face turned pinkish. “Please, Salome, no scenes. No funny business.”
“I just want her to see Alchemy. I assume she knows about him.”
“If she’d wanted to meet him she would have told me.”
“Since before I was born she’s tried to manipulate me like I’m a cloying extra in one of her movies. I’m her daughter. I’m an adult. We’re equals.”
He looked into my eyes and understood that no lawyer’s chicanery could dissuade me.
We arrived at the front of the restaurant. He halted under a rust-red awning. His cheeks puckered. “Bicks, if she turns you into such a coward, you can leave.”
“Let’s go,” he said firmly. He took my left hand, led me down three brick steps and, ever the gentleman, opened the door to the restaurant. Immediately, we were hit by chalky air. Cigarette smoke hung below the dimmed lights of the low wooden ceiling with exposed pipes. Odors of garlic and pâté breathed from the walls. I thought about my dad and how he would’ve joked, “The food here sure must be lousy, otherwise they’d turn up the darn lights.”
I spotted Greta sitting by herself. Her posture erect, cigarette in hand. She wore a tan double-breasted jacket, dark glasses, and a red scarf draped around her neck. Only years later have I come to appreciate the uses of neck scarves. The glasses were a bit of overkill for someone who wanted to be inconspicuous.
Raul, the restaurant owner, a squat middle-aged Frenchman, cut me off before I got within five feet of her table.
“Pardon me, do you have a reservation?” He pressed his hand against my shoulder. I figure the only way to deal with obnoxious people was to be obnoxious back. I blew at his hand as if were a fleck of dust and flicked it with my finger.
“Ne touche pas, mon petit steak frites, can’t you see the baby is asleep?” I pressed Alchemy against my chest as his head rested on my shoulder. “We are here to see Lady Garbo.”
Bicks tried to interrupt. I’d never seen the old bat so ruffled, sweating and phumpfering. “This, this is, Salome and her son who and she—”
“Willi
am, stop. We do not need you.” Greta stood beside us sans sunglasses. “I think we can do whatever it is she has in mind by ourselves.” She glanced at me, but her gaze ran no lower than my head and did not move toward Alchemy. I looked intently at her. Even she couldn’t defy time or gravity. But despite the mudslide of flesh covered by too much powder and rouge, the face that millions had worshipped remained. Her voice, almost unchanged in pitch and timbre, carrying the freight of an aged soul with only the slightest vibration of the wounded, the perfect emanation of her silent screen presence. Only now, that distinct vibrato’s ache had been replaced by a dull throatiness.
“Raul, we will be moving to a back table.” The owner nodded and set out to move her handbag and prepare the table. She turned to Bicks. “William, you can go.”
“Are you sure?”
“I will call you. Do not worry. Now, please.” He bowed to her like an English butler. She turned to me. “I assume you prefer if it is just the two of us.”
“Three.” I dipped my head and my eyes focused on Alchemy. “He’s not a year yet, but he is here and I will make sure he remembers this.”
“Three, then. Please.” She pointed to the table for four. She followed behind me. I offered, “Do you want to hold your grandson while I take off my poncho?” She shook her head. Raul held him. I sat with my back to a brick wall underneath posters of the French countryside. She sat to my left, facing the front of the restaurant. She asked if I wanted a glass of wine. “Yes,” I said, “red.” I caressed the still sleeping Alchemy’s back while we talked.
“Do you want to eat?”
“Not yet.”
She ordered the wine. The candle at our table lessened the graininess of the restaurant’s light. I could see the broadness of her shoulders under her jacket hiding delicate bones. I shifted my spine and I felt my bones as hers.
The waiter brought my wine. Greta raised her glass but did not touch it to mine. “Chin.” She sipped her wine but did not speak. I could not read her thoughts. Not for one second. I closed my eyes and inhaled her soulsmell. She had none! Nothing repugnant like a man’s sweaty socks. Or remorseful like a European railway station. Nothing entrancing like an old jazz club. Nothing. Either my smell sense was experiencing some Electra complex block or she had no smell. I couldn’t believe it.
I’d tragically miscalculated. She was right to have given me away, to stay away from me, and now, from Alchemy. Hilda and Dad had wanted me, raised me, and yes, we infuriated each other, but we always loved each other. And Hilda adored Alchemy. I don’t think Greta loved anyone, not even herself.
Sitting there, I understood that Greta was not a narcissist. It wasn’t that she was too big for real life, but much too small. And it scared me that my mother’s machinelike detachment could become me, was the her in me. I hate that about myself, but it’s never changed. I still can’t control the on/off switch to my emotions. Even now, I prefer pain to numbness, to be too emotional than to be inert.
As Greta took an interminably long sip, swoosh, and gulp of her wine, my On switch snapped.
“Fuck this. If you won’t, talk I will. This sleeping little child is your grandson. Do you care to meet him? To know him?”
At last her lips parted into that exquisitely doomed smile that hid, well, nothing. “Yes, but I cannot.”
“Okay, I’m going. You’re not human. You’re not …” Instead of answering, she bent down, and out of her bag she pulled a hat. A red beret. She reached over and tugged it onto my head. “Perfect.” Her face brightened; the gesture pleased her.
Suddenly, I pitied her. “You don’t have to worry. You’ll never see the headline, ‘Garbo’s Daughter Speaks’ in the tabloids.”
“I never thought that I would.”
“I need to ask you one question and then I’m leaving. Who was my father?”
She lowered her eyes, sipped her wine again, and then stared directly at me. I’d hoped to see tears of reflection, the regret of a lost love, or even the flippancy of a one-night stand that ended with me. She sat there, unmoved.
“A man, a woman, a child … He once said I was like a glass rose and he was like a fossilized rose. You think you know the lovers in your life, but truly not.” A slight sense of whimsy had slipped into her voice, but it quickly disappeared. “He’s dead now. So it is impossible for a meeting, you see? There is no reason you need to be preoccupied with him or who he was.”
I could think of a few reasons, more than reasons—my right. But I knew—never was she going to violate her personal philosophy of ultimate restraint.
I stood up and took off the beret and tried to hand it to her. She rebuffed me. “No, no, it is a gift.”
I didn’t want it. Yet I felt impelled by some outside force to take it. I struggled to put on my poncho as Raul rushed over to help. Alchemy, at last, opened his eyes and I kissed him on his head. I bent down so she could see him. Her eyes veered away. I moved closer. I tried to feel an odor beyond the faux essences of her makeup and perfume, to find her soulsmell. Again, nothing.
I placed my lips on hers. She neither kissed me nor pulled back. I whispered in her ear, “We could’ve loved you and made you less alone.” I stood up, strode toward the door, and didn’t look back. I regret now that I didn’t turn around to see her face.
She was about seventy. She lived another twenty years. I could’ve gone to see her, but I never did. To me, she was already dead.
I was incarcerated here and heavily sedated at the time that she physically died. One day, perhaps a year or more after she passed, Ruggles squirreled his way toward my little chambre d’enfer, gnawing at his knuckles outside my door.
“Good Morning, Doctor,” I greeted him. He had weaned me off the worst of the drugs by then. “Hmmm. You smell like you have a question. My olfactory senses are especially keen this morning. Your unpleasant question has the textured odor of the burned plastic of cheap shoes.”
“Salome, you are right. I wondered, after our session yesterday, if you remember the time we discussed your mother’s passing.”
I didn’t recall that session. But I had read about Greta’s death later, in the papers.
Ruggles’s face said he was appalled by my lack of reaction.
“Am I supposed to care? I don’t.” Unlike when Dad or Hilda or Nathaniel passed away and the weight felt like it was severing my heart from my body, I felt nothing.
16
THE MOSES CHRONICLES (2001)
Maybe We Ain’t Us
It is no profound revelation to posit that we experience days or weeks or months in our lives that we remember as if they took place five minutes before. There are years that meld and dissolve as the memories race over us in seconds. Perhaps they stay fresh because we continually relive and reinterpret them. What is bewildering, often frightening, are the moments that we relive like cancerous lesions on the unconscious that turn a dream to a nightmare, or strike capriciously while lolling down the street. One would think that it was Alchemy’s selfless act that Moses would remember most fondly or most distressingly from those first few months of their initial meeting. But no, it was not that at all.
Moses immediately got swept up as another passenger on the juggernaut that was Alchemy’s life from the moment the Insatiables became an essential phrase in the cultural grammar in 1994. A ride that Moses would jump off and on for many years hence.
The fiery speed at which Alchemy lived his life was antithetical to Moses’s contemplative nature and slow dialectic of reason, where he could spend hours deliberating whether to give a student an A or A–. Even though he had long accepted chaos and uncontrollability as the determining forces thwarting one’s will and intentions, he always did his best to foresee the vicissitudes of life. The cloistered safety of a tenured job perfectly fit his self-image. Unlike too many denizens of the academy, he accepted that he was, at best, a concubine to the central culture. Even with the looming imminence of death, Moses speculated his worldview might change under the optimistic
sway of Alchemy, of Alchemy’s lightning-fast processes of both calculation and instinct. Could he rediscover the momentary, youthful adventurousness that had once led him to Israel?
As the Focus passed through Albuquerque and sped west along I40, Alchemy began assessing and planning the days ahead. “I have to call my managers.” Moses dialed the number and handed Alchemy the phone. “Hey, Sue, I’m out … No, it wasn’t exactly jail … Listen, I’m coming to L.A. tomorrow … No, to my brother’s … Yes, brother … No, he doesn’t want money.”
They glanced at each other, smiling, while Alchemy held the phone in one hand and the wheel in the other.
“Not a cent,” Moses said.
“Just my blood … Yes, I am sure. He’s a professor. Sue, any change on Nathaniel?… Tell him to stop worrying and I’ll either take him or go to the WTO protests for him … Sue, fuck my image … Yes, time meditating made me want to be more active … I’ll see Nathaniel as soon as I can, but he can’t tell my mom I’m out … I don’t care about anyone else’s e-mails or calls. Tell no one else for now.” Moses flinched as the car swerved to the right. Alchemy didn’t stop talking. “Right, not Ambitious or Lux. I can’t deal until we fix up my bro here. Later.” He hung up. “I assume it’s okay to stay at your place in L.A. One night. If I go anywhere near my home, a snapping finger of stalkertude will be nearby.”
“Of course. Um, I’m a little tired.”
“No problem. Take a nap.”
Moses tilted the seat back and gazed out the window. He regretted having spent so little time excavating the history of this part of the country. He envisioned a scene directed by John Ford, written by John Steinbeck, scored to Woody Guthrie, and photographed by Walker Evans—his mix of western myths conjoined into a false majesty. The true director of the early twentieth-century West was not John but Henry Ford, and the real producers were Harry Chandler and William Randolph Hearst. Maybe one day he’d even write an essay about this mix of myth and history, Moses thought.