by Bruce Bauman
“Lorraine,” he called out to his wife, “come fetch the boy and have Marcella prepare some milk and cookies for him.” Lorraine was a thin woman ten, fifteen years younger than Jr. She reached for Alchemy’s hand. “He’s adorable.” Alchemy eyed her with some suspicion. I bent over and whispered in his ear, “It’s fine. Don’t let them take you out of the apartment without me.”
Billy Jr. opened the doors. We entered a study with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves on three walls and, on the fourth, a bank of windows and a brick fireplace. He pointed to two peppermint-green-and-white striped divans. I kneeled on the left divan, leaned my arms on the seatback, and took in the expansive view of Central Park. This Philistine, I’m sure, never appreciated its beauty.
He lit a cigarette and asked if I wanted one. I declined. He remained standing.
“Junior, where is your father?” He was about fifty then and moved with the audacity of a once healthy frat boy gone soft and paunchy. He was a homicider. His putridity contaminated anyone close to him.
“My father is turning seventy-five soon. He’s semiretired to the family compound in Palm Beach. It is out of deference to his wishes that I am speaking to you.”
Despite or maybe because of the visceral indecency of his work, I never felt like Bickley Sr. judged me beyond the difficulties my existence caused him and his “client.” But Billy Jr. considered himself superior to me.
“Junior, you smell like you have a question.” His question had the offensive odor of rotten eggs. “So what is it?”
“Why did you bring the boy?”
“I thought you were the boy.”
“Don’t be snide, Salome. I know all about you.”
“You think you know me. All you know is what’s in some crackpot file that I’m not even allowed to read.” We glared at each other. “And if you mean my son, Alchemy, Greta’s grandson, I thought perhaps she wanted to see him.”
“She has no desire to see him or you. None.”
“That was not your intended question, was it?”
He asked, almost giddily, “Why are you seeing Nathaniel Brockton? Don’t try to deny it.”
“You little prick. What you really mean is: Will I help you send him to jail? Junior, see this?” I stuck out my fuck finger. “You suck it until it squeezes out of the pinhole in your skinny dick.”
“Your insults will not help him. He is being arrested at this very moment.” My fury at his arrogance overwhelmed the sword thrust to my heart. I leapt up and moved closer to him. “You know what Diogenes said about a rich man’s house?”
“No, no. I don’t.”
“He said that the only place to spit—is in his face!” I launched a gob that nailed him in his right eye.
“You crazy cunt—”
He lunged at me as the door swung open and this not-so-jolly giant, who must’ve been listening, lumbered in. Jr. had got me around the neck and I was clawing his face. The giant tossed Billy Jr. away and grabbed me with his glommy, Cyclops-like hands. His ring dug into my arm. He lifted me as if I were a feather duster and dropped me onto one of the divans. He was too massive for me to kick or bite and do any real damage.
“Miss Savant, please do not move.” His voice, stern with me, switched to agitated contempt as he turned to Jr. “Bill, you should go wash up. Come back when you’ve regained your self-control.”
The galoot stood well over six feet, dressed in a green polyester suit with a ridiculous handlebar mustache and a ’70s crew cut. His soulsmell reeked of larceny and fired gunpowder. He turned back to me.
“Please excuse Bill, he is not always the most mature of men. Miss Savant, you must understand that your response, despite his tactlessness, was most unwomanly.”
“Your definition of unwomanly, not mine.”
“Let us agree to disagree about that for now. We asked you here today to consult with you on a vital matter. To help you avoid trouble for yourself.”
“Are you threatening me? I haven’t done a fucking thing wrong.”
“I agree you’ve probably done nothing illegal. Which is different from wrong. Now, our purpose is to inform you that Nathaniel Brockton will be arrested today. I am asking you, for your own good, and for that of your son and your mother”—I sensated when he said “your mother,” he hadn’t meant Hilda—“to spare them pain and embarrassment, to refrain from seeing Brockton when he is imprisoned. Also during his trial, if there is one.” I realized he knew much more than I first suspected.
“Is there a deal? Is he surrendering?”
“I am not at liberty to answer that. There are forces at work, and some of them would deem you unfit to retain custody of your son if you were to cosset a criminal and an enemy of America such as Brockton.”
“He’s a patriot. If you believe he is an enemy, then you are the enemy.”
“Miss Savant, as you said of yourself, do not presume to know me.”
“So fill me in, then. You a Fed? CIA?” That face, which looked like a drunken sculptor had pasted it together from used coffee grounds, didn’t reveal a damn thing.
“Let’s assume I work for the government. Our country is one in which people are free to disagree as long as they do not break the law by distributing illegal substances or acting in a violent manner to destabilize the constitutionally established order.”
“Nathaniel never dealt a drug in his life. And he does not advocate violent revolution.”
“That will be decided by the justice system.”
“Fucking bullshit. You and Billy Jr. with your illegal spy games, threats, and self-righteous attitude. Since you are so concerned with protecting Greta—”
“Miss Savant, we are here to speak about Nathaniel Brockton. I may be able to ask William to work with you regarding other matters, but first you have to work with me.” Obviously, Papa Bicks was playing some version of puppet master.
“Depends on what you mean by other matters. You tell me who my father is and then maybe we can ‘work’ with each other about Nathaniel.”
The phone rang. Junior must’ve picked it up in another room. A minute later the doors burst open and he came charging at us. “The bastard disappeared.” Billy Jr. turned to me. “Did you talk to Brockton last night after you got my note?”
“Bill, shut up. Just shut up.” The galoot curled his upper lip and sniffed through his large nostrils in absolute disdain. “Goddamn incompetent. Sh-eet. Miss Savant, I must go. For your own sake and for the sake of your child, please stay away from Brockton if he contacts you. We will talk again.” The two of them left the apartment.
Lorraine and Marcella the maid brought Alchemy to me. Oblivious (willful or not) of the atrocious machinations of her husband, Lorraine complimented Alchemy. “Your son was playing our piano. He plays splendidly. He’s quite precocious.”
“Thank you, Lorraine.” I wasn’t sure if there was another implication beyond his musical ability. “What’s the name of Bill’s friend?”
“Oh, that’s Laban Lively. He’s more of a business associate than a friend.”
“Of course,” is what I said, thinking, How lucky you are to live in Blissland! We got the hell out of out there right then and took the bus crosstown. At 68th Street, we took the 6 train down to Spring Street. I checked Fanneli’s. Maybe he’d left a note. No. So we walked over to the gallery. I asked one of the gallery assistants to take Alchemy back to the Chelsea before I strutted outside. If they were watching me, I didn’t want to appear afraid. I hailed a cab, and some Russian coot picked me up. I told him to keep driving around SoHo.
Nathaniel never showed up.
I’d never felt so lonely or helpless. I’d had plenty of men come and go—a few meant more than others—but they never reached inside my soulsmell. Nathaniel certainly wasn’t the best looking or even the best lover, though he became more skillful under my tutelage. But he could be silly and smart, and unlike so many others who went on a charm offensive until they got sex and just became offensive, Nathaniel accepted me for
me and remained true to himself. Sitting in a room while he read and I sketched, or in an abandoned room in the Christodora—those times with him and only him, I felt safe from myself and the forces of the dark matter. Even as he grew despondent by political defeats and frustrated by his inability to end my “episodes,” he was always the kindest man, in all respects to all people. He didn’t parade around like some famous do-gooder in public life and become a double-dealing whoremonger in private. In the end it was a stroke that killed him. But Gravity Disease corroded his cells.
Xtine was too smart to offer superficial salves for my oozing sore-of-a-self. She took special care of Alchemy. I spent a lot of time at the gallery hanging and rehanging the show, hoping Nathaniel would reappear. I heard nothing from him or the Bickleys.
The night of my opening, I forced myself to don my party mask, wearing a black cocktail dress and a jacket I pastiched out of an American flag, cut from the bastard cloth of Abbie Hoffman and Jasper Johns. Xtine was Alchemy’s “date” for the night, and he’d be sticking by her side at the gallery, so I felt safe in disobeying my usual preopening injunction—no drugs, no drink until the after-party—and snorted a couple of speedballs Holencraft had brought to the gallery. I had no idea what to expect.
“Decorative.” “Soft.” “A total regression.” Those were the rehearsed phrases lip-synched by the pandering class. Myron Horrwich sniggered with his new student appendage by his side. Les Tallent’s remarks emasculated me like no one else’s: “Retinal painting is dead and you will not be the one to resurrect it.”
Andy, who would’ve been perfectly cast as Tinker Bell, looked mortified and slinked away. It wasn’t the real Andy. My theory is that after he was shot in ’68, there was no “real” Andy Warhol, just five skinny guys with bad skin wearing silver wigs who showed up everywhere. The real Andy had moved back to Pittsburgh and skulked around, hardly leaving his room with five TVs playing twenty-four hours a day.
After Andy II or III sylphed away, Leslie tapped his foot, until I finally answered. “I thought you were more sophisticated than your average critic!” The art world is as provincial and cliquish and mean-spirited as the corporate world so many artists despise. Which is pretty damn funny.
Ezekiel Panti, a critic and cohort of Leslie’s, joined the flogging fray. “Salome, I admit that these are beautiful, but my question is, So what? Beauty without meaning is meaningless, and for art to matter in this age, it must have meaning.” He stroked his goatee with his pig-in-a-blanket fingers and positioned his weight forward as if he was about to make some grand pronouncement. “I’m a Duchampian, you know …”
“I was one, once. Now I’m just a simple beautician.”
Panti didn’t crack a smile. Maybe he’d heard I’d nicknamed him Smarty Panti. He was oh-so-proud of his PhD in philosophy from Brown, and he panted after girls like a neutered dog.
We were in a stare-down when Xtine, without Alchemy, her mouth and eyes wide open, came rushing through the crowd and whispered in my ear, “There’s some Southern-baked golem in a brown suit in the office who says he has to talk to you. Now.”
I understood immediately. Lively.
I shoved Leslie and Panti out of the way and hurried to the office, Xtine trailing closely behind. Alchemy was playing his harmonica for him. Lively did a rather disgusted double take when he saw my flag jacket but held his tongue on that subject.
“Miss Savant, I won’t dilly-dally. We’ve arrested Brockton in Michigan. He was fleeing toward Canada. I want you to hear this from me because I’d much appreciate your cooperation. It would benefit us both. You know there are some people who believe you aided Brockton’s escape.”
Alchemy sensed my depleted hope and sudden heartbreak. He got up and bit Lively on the leg. In the midst of my pain, I laughed. Lively, incomprehensibly, seemed paralyzed, almost intimidated by Alchemy. I pulled him away and he clutched the bottom of my dress. “Please don’t cry, Mommy. I’ll play you a song. Please.”
I gripped his hand. “You go now with Xtine back to the Chelsea. I have to do something that may take a while.” I hugged him hard. I kissed Xtine on the cheek and whispered that she should take him to Orient Point if I didn’t call her in an hour.
“Lively, I’m sorry.” He looked pissed. “This is a big night for me, so can you wait here about ten minutes? I need to take care of some business. Then I will cooperate. I won’t run. Deal?”
“Deal.” He put his massive hands in his jacket pockets and bared his primitive incisors. Almost as an aside, most assuredly as a threat, he said, “We have two men outside.”
What happened next? The drugs, the hotwires have all conspired to muddle my memory. From what I remember and heard from others, I ducked into the closet where they kept the supplies and borrowed a pair of box cutters. I snuck up behind Lively and slashed his back through his suit. Almost in slow motion, he buckled and fell to the floor. I ran out of the office and barreled through the crowd, then stopped in front of a canvas. I ripped two long gashes from top to bottom. I did it to another piece, and another.
Because of my previous work, some people (including Tallent, Gibbon, and even Horrwich, for fuck’s sake, who should’ve known me better) thought it was a performance. They thought I was making a “statement.” They started applauding. But they stopped when I took the cutters and slashed one thumb, and it began to bleed. I felt no pain yet and took the cutter in that hand and sliced it from cuticle to wrist. I still have five-inch scars on each thumb. People started gasping and yelping at the spurting blood. Finally, Gibbon yelled, “Stop her! STOP her!”
Lively, who was bleeding through his thrashed suit jacket, and his two henchmen came ramrodding through the crowd like football goons, knocking everyone aside. Holencraft claimed he put himself between Lively and me because Lively had a murderous gleam in his eyes.
My last sensates from that horrendous day are of Alchemy screaming “Mommy!”—Lively had not let him and Xtine leave—while one of his agents bear-clawed my five-year-old son as he struggled to save me. Lively’s men pinned me to the floor.
Lively (whose wounds were superficial) and Billy Jr. worked out an agreement so I wasn’t prosecuted for any crimes. I received a ticket for my first vacation here at the Collier Layne amusement park, with a bonus package of drugs and rides on the electroshock roller coaster. I was never the same after that stay. Never.
18
MEMOIRS OF A USELESS GOOD-FOR-NUTHIN’
On Your Mark, Get Set, Go, 1992 – 1994
I was one of those New York snots who bought the whole la-la land as a town full of Jell-O heads and faggots, as in wimps, not homosexuals, though there are plenty of those, or Mexies who can’t speak English no better than me, which like everything about L.A. is true and not. There was some hard-core shit going down. Parts of the town still smelt like a giant ashtray after the ’92 riots, which blew up six months before we got there.
As we drive into L.A. that first night, Alchemy goes all hookie-dookie again. “This city—underneath the spit shine of Hollywood—is a phenomenal metropolis with a cursed soul. At first glance, too much of the architecture is graceless, without symmetry, and they keep tearing down the inspired structures. The homes on the coast should be planned so the mountains and the sea meld with the man-made landscape. No one is a better architect than Mother Nature. Ambitious, whether you look at the surface or below, you’ll see that L.A. is America’s future.”
My mom had two books in the house when I was kid, The Joy of Sex and Jonathan Livingston Seagull, and I says, “Alchemy, you sound like that gooey-brained Segal guy floating above us all.”
He laughed. “Yeah, I guess, sometimes I am gooey.”
We’d been driving fifteen hours straight, when we pull up to the Pantera Rosa. Yeah, the song of the same name is about that dump. Was a former “Beaner bar,” off the 10 and Olympic Boulevard. A pink wooden shack outside and black and murky inside like a murdered body is hidden in the ceiling. Was a few artists living in th
e hood, though mostly working class and bangers. They tore down the Pantera around 2000 when the hood got ritzy, but we was long gone.
Falstaffa and Marty live in the apartment above the Rosa, which they used as their office for an, ahem, “car service” delivering “packages” to movie and biz types and the platinum card kids from the private school down the block. Some of them and their parents was our first fans.
Falstaffa, a 350-pound tough Tijuana Santería princess, lumbered out to meet us. With her buzz-cut orange hair and tattooed forearms and thighs, and a switchblade-sharp fuck-you sneer, she gave me the willies. Wrongo. She turned out to be the biggest-hearted no-crock-a-shit person I ever met. We did a shitload a laughing and partying together before the hep C got her.
She picks up Alchemy and twirls him around like he’s no heavier than a picked-clean chicken wing. Out preens Marty, a four-foot-eleven Mick midget. He smacks a kiss right on Alchemy’s butt. When Alchy introduces us, Marty squeezes my hand so hard it’s like he’s trying to break the bones. I’m squeezing just as hard back when this loopy boxer comes streaking at me and jumps at my back. Marty lets go and orders the dog, “Get the Fuck Over Here,” yep, that’s the name to which he answers. I’m thinking, My life is forever gonna be a three-ring freak show. Alchy informs everyone that I’m his bass player. I don’t protest about nuthin’ right then ’cause I am so damn tired.
The next day Lux Deluxe and Absurda drop by. Lux I’d heard of as the drummer in the Hip Replacements, a punkfunk band of black and white guys that had an indie hit with “I’m Your Black Doorman.” Turns out Alchy penned them lyrics. Lux’s spangled up in a fringe jacket, bling hanging from everywhere, and Frye boots. I want to tell him that Hendrix been dead for twenty years. I find out later he wants to tell me that Sid Vicious been dead for almost twenty years! We got a good laugh out of that one. Lux has a style and swagger like a western hero, only black, old-fashion strong-silent type. He introduces Absurda, with her vacuum-sucking eyes, natural blond hair, and swooshy bangs, Goth makeup and an itchy-bitchy walk that says she needs to fuck. She’s just my type—lanky and tight and all attitude. I figure if she ain’t with Lux, all chicks are Alchemy’s or wanna be Alchemy’s, so I lay back. While Lux and Alchy are huddling up, I ask Absurda how she met Alchemy.