by Bruce Bauman
Trudy placed her palms together in front of heart and closed her eyes deferentially, “Namaste, my master.”
Alchemy placed his palms together in front of his heart and bowed his head slightly. “No mistakes, dear guru.”
Their game over, Alchemy asked Trudy to take some photos of him and Moses side by side, which she did. “Unless I call, please don’t release them. And then only one mag, People would be my first choice. I want Mose here to have his privacy until he decides otherwise.”
Moses took the wheel for the first few hours, while Alchemy napped. When they stopped, Alchemy called Sue Warfield; his hunched shoulders and low-toned voice made it clear he didn’t want Moses to hear this conversation. Moses bought the supplies this time.
Alchemy drove the last four hours while they listened to the radio and spoke about Moses’s illness. The conversation lacked any mention of moms, dads, band members, women friends, or potential nervous breakdowns. At first Alchemy’s distant, almost detached manner discomfited Moses. In time, he realized there were many Alchemys, and that trying to comprehend or predict his behavior was probably best left to astrologists or cultural prognosticators.
As the Focus cruised along the I10, the brothers contemplated their own theories regarding the psychic rumblings of what was then the middle ground of American society: a seemingly pleasant world held aloft by the repressive rules of black and white, right and wrong, and where all questions have answers, no matter whether the physical plane was a canvas of sorrowful grays and unending rows of stolid, protective redbrick apartment buildings, developments of dingy doublewides, or shiny new tract homes in brown deserts.
At a fairly young age, Alchemy had determined that those rules and those tired or monumental edifices contained the foul dust of the American dream. Under the surface seethed resentment and paranoia—sentiments that alternately exploded and imploded in a needful catharsis every few generations, often in wars in far-off countries—and at that moment, unbeknownst to either Alchemy or Moses, was about to explode again. But even before a new screaming comes across the sky, both had their own explanations for the complexities of their America. Moses sensed the unseen viruses that contaminated the collective soul. Yes, he had specific ideas on how to remedy the virus, from passing a one hundred percent inheritance tax to doing away with private education and eliminating the electoral college. What he believed America needed most was a constitutional convention.
Moses didn’t have faith in himself to change much of anything. And now, with his illness, he yearned only for the cocoon of his home with Jay.
Alchemy, too, felt his country had gone astray, and would, if he had known them, agreed with Moses’s propositions. Alchemy didn’t think in terms of political policy bullet points. He believed America was destined to plod recklessly into the future before it eventually imploded upon itself, unless someone with grander foresight and vision came along to change the course of history. And he had a pretty keen sense of who that person could be.
17
THE SONGS OF SALOME
Spy vs. Spy
The bicentennial sissy boom-bah God Bless America blitzkrieg and the anti-rah-rah blather of the downtown scene made me almost want to be … French. I ingested some mesc on the 4th and traipsed to the river. With the fireworks exploding inside and outside my body, I envisioned what I’d create for my mid-September show.
All summer I hid in my studio in Orient as if a two-millennia-old and long-searching dybbuk had ascended. I painted bright and dark landscapy abstract visions of the dying bucolic, pristine landscape of farms and marshland of Orient—brilliant greens, autumnal golds, scorching summer whites, and winter Savant Blue. Yes, there is a color bearing my name. Two colors, in fact. The work was more emotionally tactile, sensual, and visually subtle than anything I’d done before. I titled the show Flowers, Feminism, and Fornication. Only Xtine had been privy to my studio until Gibbon came by from his Hamptons home. He erupted into a hissy stomp, “This isn’t Salome Savant art!” Like I would ever listen to him.
“Taunt piss, Murray,” I answered.
Of course, money trumped misgivings, so Gibbon promoted it in the Hamptons over Labor Day weekend. I went to the city to generate noise for the show. New York in the mid-’70s was still fun, in a deranged sort of way.
The city was undergoing one of its periodic skin sheddings. The Fillmore closed and the hippies fled, taking their colors with them. Downtown dissolved from an LSD light show to a heroin-cocaine black-and-white muck, a studied, cool sepia wash. Lost was the mix of hedonism and purpose, and the hipguard became a superficial veneer of seriousness covering too many grabby, frivolous poseurs. My city shrank down to the area below 14th Street, while the rest went from excessive to anorexic before the next “rebirth” in the early ’80s, when it became obese and bloated once again. Except for the AIDS ghettos. Those sections of the city smelled emaciated, like dried bones, and looked like the washed-out browns of old leather pants. It happened again after 9/11, when the city’s hungry ghost arose from the crater in search of its soul.
Xtine babysat Alchemy. I donned a leopard-skin Sheena, Queen of the Jungle top, a sheer rust red skirt with a belly-dancer’s belt and bright red hot pants underneath, stilettos, and an orange scarf wrapped around each arm, and went to Blind Lemon Socrates’s reading at St. Mark’s on 10th and Second Avenue. I doubt old Pegleg Peter Stuyvesant, who is buried under the church, appreciated the moral turpitude of the Poetry Project’s congregation.
Socrates was already in midread when I fluttered into the courtyard. I nearly choked on the cigarette and pot fumes.
I’d arranged to meet Alexander Holencraft, a young sharpie who dubbed himself a “writer.” I’d been floozying around a bit again. Less spontaneously because of Alchemy, but asceticism was never me. Holencraft scribbled copy for the ad agency of Yorkin & Stunkle. We met briefly during a photo shoot with Xtine, and he’d asked to do my head shots. He had bigger plans for me and for himself; he was in the formative stage that would lead to his becoming a major tastemaker. He later invested in Manhattan real estate and started the celeb magazine I, Me, Mine, which he named after the Beatles song, but devoid of any irony. He claimed he’d written the famous poster phrase “The night the underground comes uptown” about Lou’s Alice Tully Hall show and coined the term “cool hunter.” I’m guessing he was in the room with the guy who really created them.
An SRO crowd jammed into the room, which was hotter than a Chinese laundry and about as well ventilated. I stood at the back. Sitting behind Socrates as he read was Anne Waldman, the poet who ran St. Mark’s, and the novelist Ally Sendar, who’d written the foreword to Socrates’s new novel, The Floating Prickhouse.
Socrates slumped over the podium, almost hidden in his oversize houndstooth jacket. Occasionally, he’d glare and take a puff from one of the three cigarettes he’d strategically placed—one in his right hand, one in an ashtray on the podium in front of him, and one hanging off the edge of a chair. The skin of his oblong face looked like mottled mercury and cooled lava. His thick-lensed glasses made his eyes look bulgy. His voice drizzled out with an Olympian sneer of superiority.
Crazed child Nub pulls his metal casquet over his loopy eyes. He munches on Chilean eyeball apples. Sucks skin-sap through his braced teeth. Comes up from behind and spits in my mouth. Mumbles “Protofacsists’ liquid dick sauce. Your favorite.” He pulls my harness and rams his Tin-Can-Do into the hard crack of my buttocks. Yvulva announces, “It’s the midmorning of mindfuck. The pubescent mind-melders are at the gate.”
Socrates didn’t acknowledge the applause and whistles. Leaning heavily on his ivory-handled black cane, his body teetered like a rickety wooden-and-barbed-wire fence. He disappeared through a side door and out of sight.
Holencraft shot me a flinty glance from the opposite end of the hall and waved me toward him. I smiled and waited for him to come to me. From behind, a hand tapped me on the shoulder. I swiveled around and was about to give this Mr
. Blanding’s guy my icy-eye brush-off when—Nathaniel! I wanted to jump up and wrap my arms and legs around him. I knew better. He’d changed his wardrobe. No more outfits designed by Che & Fidel, Inc. Here stood Mr. Suntanned Middle America in navy blue chinos, a lime-green Lacoste polo shirt, and brown loafers. He looked so out of place among all the pallid faces and their ordained black garb. (Is “garb” short for Garbo or garbage?) His hair was shading gray, cut short and neat, his face clean shaven below new, black-framed glasses. He caught me staring at his nose, which stuck out like a half-blind plastic surgeon had pinned a pink rubber eraser on the end of it. “Yeah, I look like Cyrano but without his poetic gifts.”
His soulsmell, even after all the hiding and unjust charges, was imbued with the pristine and hopeful odors of a newly gessoed canvas. As I was about to give him a polite hug and verbal pinch, Holencraft clawed the knotted end of my bandana and leaned over to kiss me. I backed away.
“Alexander, this is uh, um …” Nathaniel interrupted me—
“Philip Noland, an old friend of Salome’s.”
“I need to talk to Philip. Alone.”
Holencraft gritted his perfect teeth in displeasure. “I thought we had a rendezvous.”
“We agreed on a potential meeting to talk of my modeling for you. Nothing more. Nat … um … Philip is an old friend.”
Holencraft eyed Nathaniel as if he were mentally photographing him. He looked perplexed—how could I choose to go with this doughnut-bodied big-nosed guy over a stud as handsome as him? “Okay, but I will hold on to my ticket to Salome’s back room.”
I lightly grazed his arm with my fingernails. “Alexander, I know exactly what you want. Don’t piss me off by acting like a proprietary male beast, or you have no chance of cashing that ticket. Behave like a good boy and you never know …” I grinned voluptuously and turned away.
I tucked my arm around Nathaniel’s waist. “I’m so happy, really, truly happy to see you.”
He removed my arm and backed away from me. “You must be very careful. Meet me at the Odessa in half an hour. Please, do not tell anyone where you are going or who you are meeting.”
I waded through the crowd doing my kissy-kissy come-hither-to-my-show. Then I headed to the Odessa, a favorite of Nathaniel’s but not of mine. The place oozed with the odor of foam rubber, or maybe fossilized blini, bulged from the torn, red plastic seats. In lieu of tablecloths, a thin film of syrup, sour cream, applesauce, french fry grease, and coffee covered each table. The waitresses, graduates of the Joseph Stalin Charm School, took pride in wiping the tables down so that any free crumbs landed on your lap. Flies performed kamikaze missions first on your meal, then on your face.
Nathaniel was seated at a back booth. “So, Mr. Philip Noland, what the hell have you been up to the last five years? Besides running from the outlaws who call themselves the ‘protectors of the people’ and having some defrocked doctor enhance your nose.”
“Mainly that. Being a nine-to-five blender. It’s been heavy times for me. I live in the Southwest. So-called enemy territory. It’s not. I’ve realized that Nixon’s ‘silent majority’ is ready for us, if we learn how to talk to them without sounding so snotty.”
“Being restrained must give you some major case of heartburn. Like this food.”
“Delectable.” He rolled a blini around his tongue. “Salome, for your own good, I can’t divulge too much. They are still running black bag ops on me. Even though we got rid of the Trickster, and the Congress is investigating the secret government, I don’t trust them to end it.”
We left the Odessa and strolled around Tompkins Square Park. Nathaniel’s once nervous energy now seemed just nervous. His eyes were fidgety and his gait furtive and unassured. The park was still seedy with the homeless living in cardboard boxes. The street kids blasted dump-truck-size boom boxes. Everyone seemed high on something, be it junk, glue, or spray paint fumes.
“Don’t worry, Nathaniel, this is a cop-free zone.”
“Yes, these are our Untouchables. No one gives a shit about them. Maybe I should move here and they’d get off my case.”
“Why’d you risk coming back? Because you needed to see me?”
“If you knew how often …” His eyes watered ever so slightly. “My mother has incurable liver cancer. My sister is taking care of her alone. I need to be with them.” He sighed. “My lawyers are close to swinging a deal with the Feds.”
“Oh, Nathaniel. I am so sorry.”
“Me, too. Only, after decades of imbibing any fluid containing alcohol, it’s not a surprise.”
At the corner of 9th and B we stopped in front of the Christodora. A miniskyscraper built in the ’20s, it had fallen into a shambled shell of itself—like me, now. After a fire, the city had it condemned. It got a makeover later, in the ’90s, with the “whitey-fication”—that’s what Nathaniel called gentrification. I often snuck around the boards and yellow tape and foraged inside, peeling off the blue-and-white wallpaper with its images of St. Christine and collecting ornaments for ready-mades and collages.
“Let’s go in.” I stuck a finger through the belt loop of Nathaniel’s pants and tugged at him. We stepped over two grizzled fellows with their bottles of Thunderbird couched between their legs, sleeping shoulder-to-shoulder in the doorway. The ground-floor rooms were shooting galleries lit by candles. The higher you climbed, the emptier it got. A few rooms were lit by the sudden flash of hash pipes. Light from streetlamps flickered through the cracked windows. We climbed the staircase to the ninth floor and found an empty room with a view of the East River and Brooklyn to one side and the World Trade Center to the other. We made love, which, this time, was dreamy. He understood the pleasure of my pleasure in being multiorgasmic. After, I climbed onto the sill facing south toward the river and the Statue of Liberty. The sky, a mix of Wolf Man–movie blue-blackness and low, foamy white clouds with a peekaboo moon imbued the city with an eerie tranquility. Nathaniel squeezed me against his chest.
“I want to go with you. I don’t want you to disappear on me for another five years. I’ll even skip my show.” He smiled almost sardonically. “What? Are you living with someone? I don’t care.”
“No, no one else. It’s been impossible for me to keep up a relationship. I’ve had to move and I can’t tell the truth to anyone”
“I already know the truth, and I’m my own movable fiesta.”
“Salome.” He bowed his head. “If the Feds make a deal, I hope to get some time with my mom and then it’s off to prison. If not, it’s back into hiding. It’s the opposite of your razzmatazz New York life. No readings or openings. If you dress like this,” he teased, “you might get arrested.”
“I can do it. I can. It’d be good for Alchemy, too. You have to meet him. You’ll love him.” I could tell he was thinking, You can’t and why would you … for me?
“You’ll see. I can do it!” Suddenly, I began to tear up. He thought I believed he didn’t want me to come with him, but no, I was overtaken by a moment of clairvoyance. Over the next few days I needed to spend whatever time I could with him.
He wouldn’t divulge where he was staying, but we rendezvoused the next day and went to the Met with Alchemy. As we strolled into the Impressionist room, these two teenage girls ran up to Alchemy. One of them ran her fingers over the smooth skin of his perfect face and practically undressed him with her gaze. Nathaniel whispered, “Is it always like this?”
“Yes.” I didn’t think much of it. Little girls, women, old queens—they all wanted to fuck him. No one ever said it aloud, but I could always smell lust in all its pleasant and nefarious variations. Incidentally, or maybe not so incidentally, the Collier Layne psychvoyeurs have often gone shrink-style ballistic (no yelling allowed) at my blasé attitude toward sex. Though they’ve tried to conceal it, a few of them almost popped their penis out of their pants when I elaborated on some of my salacious anecdotes.
The next day Nathaniel took us to the baseball game at Shea Stadium. Alchem
y’s first. He was so excited. I drew pictures of the field and drank beer that tasted like vinegar. On the subway ride home, Nathaniel gave us—mainly me—his fulmination on why standing up for the national anthem was some form of collective brainwashing. It irked him that he had stood up, against his principles, because he couldn’t afford to be singled out. The born explainer needed to explain to someone. He smelled like my dad’s old leather-bound encyclopedia when he got on one of his unending explain-the-world ragas.
We got off the subway at 23rd Street. Alchemy and I were going back to the Chelsea and Nathaniel to wherever he was holing up for the night. Alchemy reached up and hugged Nathaniel, and I thought, Hilda is always telling me Alchemy needs a man around. Maybe she’s right.
We arranged to meet the next day at Fanelli’s in SoHo before going to see my new work. The opening was the following Saturday.
Alchemy and I walked blissfully cross-town to the Chelsea. The desk clerk handed me a note in an envelope from the firm of Bickley & Schuster. “Be at my home at 11 A.M. Urgent.”
This was a first for Billy Jr. All of my previous interactions, and those of Dad and Hilda, had been with Bicks Sr. I wasn’t one bit anxious. It’d been a few years since I’d seen Greta at the bistro, and I thought maybe she’d discovered a dose of grandmotherly devotion and desired to see Alchemy. So I took him with me.
Billy Jr., his wife, Lorraine, and their ten-year-old son, William Bickley III (sweet kid, Billy the Third) all lived in the same building as Bicks Sr., on 64th Street off Central Park West. Right around the corner from the West Side Y, a notorious gay pickup spot, and probably where Bickley Sr. did his queenly business. Billy Jr.’s apartment was, like so many Upper East and West Side digs, Town & Country austere, immaculate. Beneath the tasteful furniture and accoutrements, I sensated the encrusted scum of immorality.
“Thank you for coming on such short notice.” The lilt in Billy Jr.’s voice betrayed his real sentiment, which was, “Take a cyanide pill, why don’t you?” He led me down the hall and we stopped outside two closed doors.