by Bruce Bauman
“Is Nathaniel okay?” I feared something had happened to him, and that was the reason Lively came to visit.
“I have not seen him.”
“Is he still getting out in September?”
“I have no news contradicting that.” Lively dabbed at the sweat forming on his temples and forehead with a white handkerchief.
“Are you checking up on me for Hilda?”
“I have neither seen nor spoken to her.” He rat-a-tatted the table with his gnarly knuckles and gaudy ring. “What do you know about your biological father?”
“Nothing. Hilda and Gus claimed they were never told who he is. The one time I met Greta, she was more than elliptical. My personal research says that he must have been an artist.” I quickly covered myself. Lively would never accept my genetic travels as anything but the hallucinations of a madwoman. “It’s fact that Greta was friends with many artists when she arrived in New York.”
Lively scratched at his cheek but said nothing.
“You have more than an idea, don’t you?”
“Unhmm.”
“Lively, I’m listening.”
“First, in regard to Hilda, I have my qualms about your abilities to keep a secret.”
“I don’t ever purposefully hurt her.”
“That is exactly my fear. Your lack of purpose.” He tilted his head toward the sky, then leaned forward over the marble table and gave a smidge of a nod toward Shockula. “Your father was Gus Savant.”
“Oh, please!” I sputtered. “It took you almost two years to come up with that twinkle-twinkle-nursery-rhyme explanation?”
“Accept it or not. It’s a fact.” He paused, letting the needle he’d slipped into my consciousness evacuate its message. “I’m sorry he was not an artist. From what little contact we had—my meetings with Gus were fleeting—he impressed me as a most decent man.”
“He was better than decent. I loved him. I’d be proud to be his offspring.” I sat pensively for a moment. Never had I connected Gus’s chromosomes to me. “He would never have done that to Hilda.”
“Salome, even good men falter. Gus was adamantly, and rightly, opposed to an abortion. No one wanted to risk a public explosion. It would have guaranteed ruining Miss Garbo’s image, and your father’s marriage. Gus and Hilda got their child.”
“Lively, what do you want from me?”
“Nothing. I’m trying to do right.” He took off his sunglasses, placed them on the table, and without wiping the sweaty curlicues forming on his cheeks, aimed his Shiva the Obliterator eyes onto me. “I have no reason to lie. I’d have more reason to lie if it weren’t true. Hilda was never told of Gus’s paternity and he never wanted her to hear about his lapse. That is why you best have the sense not to tell her.”
“Who told you? And why should I trust you? Why didn’t you tell me that day in Billy Jr.’s apartment?”
“As I said then, William Bickley felt honor bound to keep his word to Gus. At the time, I felt honor bound not to act against his wishes. Still, I am not under his jurisdiction or hogtied by any legal agreements.”
“When did they meet? How?”
“That is not relevant.”
“To me it is. Give me proof. Were they in love?”
“I haven’t the faintest idea. As far as proof, my proof is my word.”
The man was so taken with his own benevolent hubris he brought out the violence in me. I wanted to dig my nails into his gorillalike sideburns and scream, “You’re fucking with my life!” but I stayed seated and sipped my water before asking my next unanswerable question. “Was Greta a spy?”
Lively’s incisors ground into each other to maintain his posture of gentlemanly formality. We sat silently. I had sensated correctly. “Of course she was. She worked for you and Bicks Sr.”
“I wouldn’t say that. Not exactly.”
“What would you say?”
“Let me propose that she was sympathetic to us.”
“And Gus, he was a spy, too?”
“No, he was not.” Lively stood up, towering over me. “Despite your previous attempt to injure me, I bear you no ill will.” As always, he made me feel as if his blandest statements were a lethal threat.
“Since you are in a giving mood, think you have the resources to dig up whether my mother and Marcel Duchamp ever had an affair?”
He tugged at the perspiring chicken skin around his massive Adam’s apple, suddenly perplexed. “You mean the French fella who is the mime?”
I started giggling. “Forget it.”
He shrugged. He bent over and put on his sunglasses. I should have thanked him. But I couldn’t be that phony.
I called Hilda a few nights later. “I was looking at an old picture of Dad from when he was in the navy that I have here in my room. What did he do during the war?”
“You heard these stories when you were a child. Have you forgotten?”
“The doctors told you. Some of my memories are scrambled from the treatment.”
She tried to answer jokingly, “Some of them were scrambled before.”
“That’s your opinion.”
“Let’s not fight.”
“I’m not fighting, I’m asking a question.”
“Gus had done two years in the navy when he was nineteen, before we started dating. He reenlisted right after Pearl Harbor. We were married by then. After serving about a year at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, he was reassigned back to Greenport, where he became the liaison between the navy and the Picket Patrol, the group of civilians from the North Fork who sailed out to scout for Nazi submarines. Why do to want to know?”
“Because I miss him.”
“I do, too.” And she did. She never suspected that Gus betrayed her, if indeed he did. Never did I find Dad within me. I could only commune with Greta’s mitochondria and they, like she, never revealed the secret of my father.
25
THE MOSES CHRONICLES (2001)
Toilet Humor
Alchemy came by the hospital three days after he and Jay spoke in the Jag. Jay remained purposely absent. He relaxed in a burnt orange plastic reclining chair beside Moses’s bed, both of them half watching the TV talking heads yammering, when Alchemy asked, his voice oddly muffled by the medical mask, “How come you guys decided not to have kids?”
Moses muted the sound on the TV. “At first, selfishness and vacillation. We traveled a lot in my time off. We enjoyed our freedom. I had no grand desire to subject a kid to this world or relive my childhood by proxy through my progeny.” Moses did not volunteer that Jay’s mother’s dolorous descent into a waking coma, then her father’s cavalier behavior, kept her ambivalent. At least, at first. “Just before my diagnosis, Jay, well, we reconsidered. We were going to try. Then I got sick …” His voice trailed off.
“Maybe there’ll still be time after this. Mose, you’d be a cool dad.”
“Good, maybe. Cool, don’t think so.” They laughed. In that moment, Moses decided to hand Alchemy a piece of near-sacred information. “Can I tell you something? Will you keep it in confidence?”
“My word.”
“Before we met, Jay got pregnant by a boyfriend she wasn’t serious about and she had an abortion. Sometimes I think she regrets that, only when I ask her, she insists it was the right choice and the discussion ends there.”
Moses didn’t mind if Alchemy pondered the possibility that it might’ve been his child. It wasn’t. Moses and Jay occasionally ran into the old boyfriend, a businessman, whom she had met at an art auction that she had organized for Doctors Without Borders, and for whom Moses felt barely a trickle of jealousy or resentment.
Feeling a bit nervy, Moses probed deeper. “How about you, are you so sure you never knocked someone up?”
“As sure as the paternity tests I’ve taken. I fully expect there is a legitimate kid out there as opposed to all the wannabes. Andrew has bullied and paid, and I mean bank account balloons, for abortions for women who were with Ambitious or Lux, and they each got
at least one unplanned kid they pay for.”
It struck Moses as “normal” that rock stars would be propagating machines. He was surprised that Alchemy had produced no progeny. “So what you said when we were driving, you really don’t want to settle down and have kids.”
“Highly unlikely. Although I have to say I don’t want to end up like Mick or, worse, Hef. Poor guy looks like a brine-embalmed blue mummy. Kids? I don’t need that affirmation. I get what you say. Almost everyone has to fight their way out from some family curse or escape a parental tendril. Lots of people have grown up with what they consider lousy parents. Half the marriages end in divorce. Half the ones that stay together suck. Still, none of them had Salome for a mom.” Moses nodded agreeably. Alchemy leaned forward in the chair; beneath the mask his soft, feminine lips pursed, his nostrils tensed, and his usual pliant posture stiffened. “My father, I told you I met him. You know the song ‘Fast Enough’?”
“Sure, was a big hit back in the ’70s. The Baddists. British band, right?” Moses sang a few bars, “Why ain’t I fast enough for you …”
“The lead singer, Phillip Bent—he’s my father. He and Salome had about a twenty-minute wham-bammer during a Central Park Summer Stage concert in the artists’ Porta-Potty. That is either the crudest or the most perfect place ever to conceive a rock star. Maybe both.”
“She admitted that?”
“Admitted? She boasted that it was the second-best time she ever had in a portable bathroom. I never asked what was first. Bent cared as much about me as I do about”—Alchemy scanned the room and pointed—“that water pitcher. So Mose, maybe not finding your old man isn’t the worst outcome.”
“Was it that horrible when you saw Bent?”
“I saw him twice. The Baddists had a minor hit with Chain Saw Disco Massacre and were touring in ’77. I was about six and met him with my grandmother during Salome’s first time in Collier Layne. I remember zip except that he kept repeating in his Cockney accent, ‘So, you’re the fuckin’ lit’l swine.’ Seven or so years later, we were living in Berlin, Salome finally persuaded him to see me.” For the first time, Moses heard Alchemy lose control of his perfect-pitch voice. “Nathaniel flew with me to London so I could meet him. Stone-cold junkie. I’ve known dogs that make more sense.” He took out a cigarette and twirled it in his fingers. “I’ve never told this to anyone but my mom and Nathaniel, not even Ambitious, so if I hear it anywhere …” Moses nodded. “Fucker kept calling me ‘Mimi’ and ‘Chemistry.’ After five minutes I realized he was not worth the piss in the toilet. All Salome ever said was, ‘He was so gorgeous.’ ” Alchemy shook his head and flicked the unlit cigarette against the window. “The prick ‘sold’ me to a squishy lord who had a hard-on for teenage boys. I kicked him in the nuts and got my ass outta there and back to the hotel where Nathaniel was staying. We flew back to Berlin.”
“I’m so sorry.” Moses, feeling guilty for his little ploy earlier, reached to give him a loving pat on the back, but he couldn’t quite make it. Alchemy extended his hand and they slapped five in a jesting, congenial display of brotherhood. “You ever see him after you became famous?”
“Nope. Andrew made arrangements with him so he stayed away and quiet. I look at it this way, the people who raised and loved me, I’d do anything for any of them.”
“You sure you don’t want kids? For a shiftless rock ’n’ roller, you sound pretty damned sensible to me. You wouldn’t be like Bent.”
“I wouldn’t do that. I have no idea what I’d be like. None. Uncle seems like the perfect role for me.”
Alchemy’s cell rang. “It’s Bruce. Have to take it for a sec. It’s about the concert for 9/11.” Moses gave him the thumbs-up and Alchemy stepped out of the room.
By the time Alchemy returned, Moses had flipped on the sound to the blabber-blatherers and was “arguing” with Louise Urban Vulter, radio and TV host, who was bloviating as a self-anointed Middle East expert. “An expert would know it’s Osama bin Laden and the blind sheik, not Hussein.” Moses mumbled and again tapped the Mute button on the remote control.
“Mose, who’d you say did it?”
“I’m betting it’s Al Qaeda, the same people who went after the WTC back in ’93. Hussein and bin Laden are enemies.”
“You sure? I think Hussein wants revenge because Bush Sr. tried to off him.”
“I’m not saying he wouldn’t like to see either Bush dead. Hussein’s a megalomaniac whose prime directive is self-preservation. This kind of attack guarantees that someone will pay. Even if it is the wrong someone, or millions of someones.”
Alchemy pulled a paper from the inside of his sports jacket pocket and handed it to Moses. “Take a look. I scratched this out over the last two days.”
“It’s poetic, but from my perspective, it lacks historical context,” he said when finished.
Alchemy appeared taken aback by Moses’s frankness. “How so?”
“Before I answer, what’s this for?”
“Op-ed piece. I’ve been in contact with the New York Times for a while about penning something. Tragically, this is the right time.” Alchemy announced with unmistakable determination, “Someday I’m going to get more involved in politics. Nathaniel wants me to start a real third party. He claims all we have now are two different sides of the same coin. Not sure what I’ll do. Eventually, when the time is right …”
Moses tilted his head.
“What? Rock stars are excluded from politics when movie stars and athletes are not?”
“No—no.”
“Rock ’n’ roll has always been not just the soundtrack but the agent of change. Look at the best of it: Cooke, Baez, Lennon, Marley, Fela. I got everything materially I could ever want. Building houses and giving to charities, that’s all for the good, only I can do more.”
Moses decided that the outrageous events of this last week had taught him it’s never wise to underestimate the possibility of the remotest, most far-fetched idea becoming truth.
“Mose, tell me where I’ve gone off course.” There was no air of defensiveness in his voice, only genuine inquisitiveness.
“First off, it’s a bit too glib for what you want to achieve. More important, it’s historically inaccurate and a woeful American conceit to think that this ‘is unique in history.’ Great cities—from Rome to Delhi, Moscow to London, Baghdad to Jerusalem—have been plundered, burned, and bombed. Innocent people have been raped, maimed, and killed. It’s not even unique in our history. Washington, D.C., was burned to the ground by the British in the War of 1812.”
“Right, right. Good. Go on.”
“Aside from the fact that we don’t know who to fight yet, before you make any war you need a plan to win the peace. Which doesn’t mean crushing the enemy. These chicken-hawks are clueless about the inferno that is war and have no idea how to calm the fires that we, literally and figuratively, will create.”
“You’re damn right about that.” Alchemy sat back, impressed. “Thanks, man. You saved me from a potential public pillorying.”
“Least I could do.” Moses leaned back against his pillow and his eyes gazed upward. “You saved me from dying.”
In the next two days, they hashed it out. Alchemy offered to publish it under co-bylines. Moses demurred. The credit would’ve been good for his career, but it didn’t outweigh what the loss of anonymity would do to his private life. A week later the Times printed it. The last lines of the article read:
What happens not in the first three weeks, or three months, after the murders but in the years to come will determine if the songs we sing will tell of darkness becoming darker, or darkness becoming light.
26
MEMOIRS OF A USELESS GOOD-FOR-NUTHIN’
The Homecoming, 1995 – 1996
Alchemy used to joke that Lux’s family was more like the Beaver Cleavers than the Eldridge Cleavers. That wasn’t exactly right, but his parents stayed married ’til death did them part. His father, Big Lionel Bradshaw, was an East C
oast–born NWA. Don’t gimme no grief, he called himself that. He grew up in Red Hook, Brooklyn, when it was the city’s deathliest hood. He enlisted in the army and shipped out to Nam. He survived, and his best army brother was a Compton homeboy who got Big Lionel a job as a roofer in L.A. He meets Lux’s mom, who works at the DMV. They are military-strict parents. Like me, Lux goes to a magnet school for the musically gifted, only he don’t get thrown out. When the Crips or Bloods or whichever gangstas fucks with Lux or his sister, Big Lionel threatens them if they mess with his kids, he’d take out ten of them before they got him. They listened. Lux got a scholarship to some all-black college but ends up back in L.A. and meets Absurda in around ’90, when they was working at McCabe’s guitar store.
It was rare to come across a real playa worth dick who didn’t have a chip on his shoulder. I ain’t going deep on you—that was Alchemy’s MO, not mine. Me and Absurda never wanted to cozy up with our families. Sure, we were generous with them. But it was more like blackmail: We’ll give you cash to stay the fuck away and shaddup. Lux claimed when he was onstage he felt like the invulnerable Lux Deluxe. His face turned rust-red pissed off if someone called him Li’l Lionel. I get that. I hated being Ricky McFinn.
Alchy, his situation was confusing. He never spilt no numbers on his pop. In his stonewalling or stories he’d spin to the media about the guy, you could tell he despised him. When I ask him about why the hell he enlisted in the army, he joked, “To sublimate my hostility toward my father. He was the enemy.” Later he’d say he’d planned it ’cause he wanted the army cred when he went into politics. I thought it was to mess with Nathaniel ’cause of his pacifist bullshit. Alchy, no matter his antiwarmongering, was never no pacifist, and he said he regretted never getting to Iraq because Salome cracked. Salome and him, they was like a two-headed monster who had a love-hate thing going that they both needed and resented.