by Bruce Bauman
I trusted his explanation. I also sensated a deeper disloyalty. “If I can’t have you on my terms and that means I can’t have you at all, it is my fault. Not yours. Nathaniel.” My chest tightened, but I had to ask, “You have to tell me if you aren’t coming back to New York when this semester is over.”
“I don’t know where I’m going next.” His expression colorless, tone glum, gaze teetering into vagueness. Gravity Disease was beginning to infect his soulsmell with the deceitful scent of a rusty galvanized water pipe, and I was the cause. I fretted all through the night. All I could think about was removing myself from a life where I could hurt and be hurt by others—and if he were to desert me, I feared I’d end up inside Collier Layne.
36
THE MOSES CHRONICLES (2004–2007)
I Read the News Today, oh Boy
When he got home from the dinner with Alchemy, Moses asked Jay if she’d heard about Salome’s upcoming exhibition. She admitted that she had, however she’d hoped it wouldn’t happen so she’d stayed silent. (She remained mum about her visit to Kasbah’s offices, where she confronted her “new” brother-in-law and testily explained that if he didn’t warn Moses about the exhibition, then she would.)
This Salome news did nothing to dispel the discomfort that had infiltrated the home of Moses and Jay like an odorless California fungus over three limbolike years.
Moses had finally regained much of his strength. He had resumed teaching a three-quarter course load and doing research for his proposed book on Holocaust survivors and their relations to God. Despite adhering to an exercise regimen and healthy diet, the illness had noticeably aged him. His hair had grown back with streaks of gray. At forty, Moses’s demeanor had retained an energetic boyishness, but by his late forties his being was characterized by a wizened frame, eternally puffy eyes, and an emotionally brutal fatalism that a long life would not be his, which earned him a new Alchemy appellation: Early Eminence Grizzled. At thirty-eight, Jay, who could still swim twenty laps with ease, was in the prime of her life. The Bernes & Allen consulting business forged ahead, spurred by a booming economy for the wealthy art-buying strata. With the outer trappings and inner dynamics of their postillness life evolving, Moses adjusted his Livability Quotient and now nurtured a commodious solitude within himself while subsisting on the little pleasures of life.
As the months rolled on, Jay spent more and more time attending to her business and socializing with clients. Unlike pre-illness times, Moses abstained from joining her, preferring to stay home or occasionally meeting with his “history pals” from graduate school. And Jay had stopped accompanying him to SCCAM events.
They resumed their usual summer and spring break vacations. In the past they had alternated on who chose the destination. Now Moses ceded the decisions entirely to Jay. More often than not, citing fatigue, he would remain in the hotel room reading while Jay toured, hiked, or whatever. Moses felt that as long as they spent dinner and evenings together, all was well.
During a spring break trip to the Grand Tetons, Jay announced that she no longer wanted to use birth control. “Moses, how about we let fate decide?” Moses, while making his usual case against fate in general, and specifically his worry about leaving her to raise a child alone if his cancer returned, saw Jay’s body deflate. Joylessly, but wanting to please her, he surrendered. “Okay. Let’s give it a shot.”
Over time, Moses’s resistance took a more passive form: He no longer initiated sex. When Jay did, he often found an excuse and said, “Not tonight.” He tried not to worry over their diminished sex life until one night when Jay called from a MOCA party and asked him to look for the diamond pendant that once belonged to her mother. She could’ve sworn she’d put it on but now she hoped she forgot. He found it in her sock and stocking drawer, alongside a fairly new vibrator. How could he complain? Better she fantasize than slip off with another man—as long as that fantasized lover was not named Alchemy.
Butterworth and Moses explored the gnawing whispers of what other “meaningless” affairs Jay had withheld. Moses found no portents in any other past affairs, hidden or not, that could imperil their future; that responsibility fell upon his insecurities.
During one afternoon session, Butterworth, in an uninterrupted and evidently prepared speech, dismantled Moses’s equivocations with unsentimental precision.
“Your parents’ abandonment, your mother’s death, Jay’s dalliance with Alchemy—all are fixed actions beyond your control. You possess the power to change your perceptions and therefore their effects. Knowledge is power, but there are times when knowledge is painful and counterproductive. Is this the right time for you to answer some hard questions? Would it have served you better to be raised by an unstable Salome and an emotionally ill-equipped father? Would you be better off never to have met Jay? Or screwed her and left her and been alone when you became ill? Would you feel more masculine if you’d balled those coeds? You’ve chosen not to initiate a meeting with either of your biological parents. You’ve chosen to stay with Jay. The manner in which one perceives the past can alter the way one exists and acts in the future. When you got sick, you acted. You saved yourself. You can do the same with your past and your future.
“It will take time. The unconscious, with its diabolical intricacies, is the greatest trickster of all. This will be no Pauline conversion. Shedding habitual, unhealthy behavioral patterns, letting go of both the trivial and large hurts we all suffer, the envy of what others have or have done, and thus reordering perceptions and gaining acceptance—this takes immense time and incalculable effort.”
Moses, shell-shocked by Butterworth’s barrage, could only nod along with a spate of “I knows” and “I sees.” In time, he accepted the challenges. Butterworth was right. It was not an epiphanic journey, more like a never-ending Escher maze with no destination in sight. But Butterworth’s methods appeared to be more than Band-Aids on open wounds. Rarely did a new daymare slip through the sluice that emptied unmasked fears into his conscious mind. Months passed without falling under the spell of previous daymares. He slept less fitfully most nights, when Butterworth didn’t call.
On a Sunday morning in October 2007, as he sat down at the kitchen table to eat his whole wheat bagel with light cream cheese, Moses picked up the Los Angeles Times. As was his habit, he read through the news section, then flipped to the Calendar section. His eyes immediately fell upon on a photograph of Alchemy and Salome, arm in arm in the Hammer Museum, under a headline that announced Salome’s upcoming retrospective.
The moment of reckoning had arrived. Moses began hyperventilating.
Too agitated to wait until Jay awoke, he marched into what they still called their bedroom and hovered beside their bed, like an impatient child waiting for his mother to make him breakfast, staring and shuffling the paper until she reluctantly opened her eyes.
“What?” she mumbled sleepily.
He read aloud the opening paragraph. “You knew, didn’t you?”
“I got a mailer with listings for upcoming shows last month. No idea about the article.”
Moses bit into his bottom lip with his front teeth; he wanted to lash out. He couldn’t. She’d heeded his wishes to keep mum about what she heard about the exhibit unless he inquired.
“Do you want to see her?” Jay asked as she put on her bathrobe and slippers.
“How can I not?”
“I have a plan.”
“A plan would be good.”
“If you want to wait until late January, the private opening is usually a few days before the public opening. Let’s go as Mr. and Mrs. Bernes, art collectors. You can meet her and then see what you want to do next.”
Moses’s anger wilted. “That sounds reasonable. I’m going to call my brother.”
While the Insatiables toured the world, Alchemy and Moses e-mailed often. They limited their correspondence to politics and culture, occasionally mental and physical states, but avoided intimate confessionals. As far as Moses knew, Sa
lome and Nathaniel still resided in New York.
Now that the Insatiables had returned to L.A., Moses and Alchemy were planning to meet for dinner at a restaurant in Pasadena sometime before the Insatiables took off again in a few weeks. Moses didn’t want to wait. He called Alchemy. His ire palpable, Moses didn’t begin the conversation with preliminary niceties.
“Alchemy, I deserved a heads-up. You know I scour the papers.”
“I assumed you’d decided not to deal.”
“That’s bullshit. You should have told me.” In forming his new Livability Quotient, Moses had chosen to believe the show would never happen.
“Yeah, I’m sorry. I fucked up.”
“Yes, you sure did.”
“I can’t undo it. She’s gone but she’ll be back. You want to know when? Ruggles has retired, but he’s willing to come out here if you decide to meet her. But Mose, we, you and I, still need to meet before I take off.”
“Why?”
“ ’Cause I have some stuff to talk to you about that might be better said in person.”
“No, spill it now.”
He paused. “Mose, well, fuck it—the Enquirer is threatening to do a piece about my sex life and … Jay, shit … They claim they got proof. No idea what they call proof. Mose, I wish all of this could’ve gone another way.”
Moses simply said, “Me, too,” and hung up the phone.
37
MEMOIRS OF A USELESS GOOD-FOR-NUTHIN’
A Room of One’s Ownership, 1998 – 1999
It took a while for me and Absurda to stop doing the tiptoe two-step and become two dudes playin’ in the band, able to party like the messy breakup never happened—and for me to feel like I wasn’t gonna get tossed on my ass, outta the band and back in the deep end of the shitpool. Mostly them years was like one never-ending recording-touring session interrupted by some notorious incidents. We made five new records between ’93 and 2000 and played more than a thousand shows. Some critics who loved us at first dissed us later, saying we was lucky to make it before the music biz fragmented and we only popped so big as a reaction to the synth-mope blandness of the ’80s. Big yawn to them. Alchy was a constant geyser of songs, semen, and ideas. I used to think he must’ve been cranking up. Meth, ’roids, something. Nope. He’d often go three, four nights, gettin’ maybe two hours of sleep a night before his eyes were protruding like burnt popcorn kernels and you couldn’t mumble hello without him being disputatious. That’s when he’d pop some tranqs.
Alchy’s relaxation is sex games, and I can only partake after me and Absurda have uncoupled. I ain’t usually a group sex guy, and I’ve stayed away from the porniest details of his sexcapades, but after a show in Dallas, this “mom” who Alchemy sexed before and three very hot and very young cowgirls want to entertain me, Lux, and Alchemy. We check what we call the Miranda Wrights of the young ones. For you who won’t admit they watch cartoons, Miranda Wright was a female cop on Disney’s show Bonkers. We use that as code when we think a potential may be too young or just plain trouble. The mom swears for them. Marty delivers a couple of grams. We get high and then Alchy says to the mom, “Come hither,” so she strips and sits on the edge of the bed. He reaches into his suitcase and pulls out a rare Thomas Green beauty from the 1700s. For a lefty, Alchy sure loved his guns—for lots of uses. He points it at his head. “Savant roulette, anyone?” I freeze. Lux, who seen the sex stuff before, still gets twitchy. Alchy pulls the trigger. Zip. Mom slips the smooth barrel, which is like six inches long, into her mouth and starts gumming it. “ ’Happiness is a warm gun,” he croons. Mom falls back on the bed and grabs the gun. Alchy kneels down and his tongue goes into overdrive and she’s still suckin’ ’til she starts coming. Fuckin’ freaky.
Turns into one dead-dick-in-the-morning night. I ask him, the next day, “What the hell was that?”
“My mom told me to always please a woman before you please yourself. So, I do.”
“Not that, I mean the gun thing.”
He just smiles all mysterious. “Tonguing and gunning …” I always wondered if Salome told him about that, too.
Despite drugs being everywhere, Alchy only indulges if he needs it to close a sex deal. Me? You name it, I tried it. How else you play the road like that? Especially when we were traveling donkey class the first few years. Absurda was the only one in the band who got hooked, although, at first, none of us seen it that way. Not even Mr. Savant.
We all finally got hip to her problem being so destructive in spring of ’98 during a six-month Euro tour. We’d already recorded most of Blues for the Common Man. Alchemy likes to try the songs on the road and come back and redub, remix, clean up, and maybe even redo or dump some entirely. It’s going great ’til Absurda misses a gig in Naples. She hired a driver to take her and some Italian smoothie who latched on to her to Pompeii. She says some fresh iced tea made her sick. None of us buy it. Lux is so furious and worried his biceps is Nadling at warp speed. He insists we do a intervention and get her in rehab ASAP. Alchemy has a sit-down with her. She agrees to Sue, who is tour manager, rooming with her. Absurda don’t miss none of the last six shows and plays great.
Back in L.A. we’re working on the intervention. As an excuse we’re gonna have a dinner to discuss the video for The Ruling Class, which is about half the world’s population being under twenty-five.
I was crashing at Alchy’s newest digs, a four-bedroom place in the Hollywood Hills. Salome and Nathaniel had moved into the guest house. Alchemy never finished furnishing any of his houses. He got closest after he met Laluna and had Persephone. This place was half empty and half filled with Dumpster-worthy shit that Salome used in what she called her art. Sometimes there was lots of crap I was scared to sit on, eat off, or even touch. He and Salome used to go on spending sprees, piling up art, books, and old records, and she drags home some weird shit like old clocks or rat skeletons. Alchemy is also beginning his life as the rock ’n’ roll Bruce Wayne: money maven by day, politico by evening, and rock god by night. He starts Winsum Realty and we’re his partners. He scopes condos and houses and land parcels so they meet his “aesthetic criteria.” He dumped lots of ’em before the crash in ’08 and we made plenty of dough. We donated some of the money and buildings to fix up in New Orleans after Katrina and New York after Sandy and an urgent care center in east L.A. Later, he starts Audition Enterprizes. We ain’t partners in that but can invest on a case-by-case basis. I admire his good-guy shit, but I don’t get involved.
I’m still carousing, and one night I got into a fistfight at Little Joy, the dive, and then did the Howard Stern show—me and him get each other, being two dudes from Queens who got out—live like 6 A.M. I get back “home” and Alchy is awake. He says, “Let’s go see some stuff for Winsum. Or maybe for you.” I don’t like nothing he shows me, and we land at the House of Pies over on Vermont. I’m still sorta drunk—I snuck in my own bottle a scotch and poured it into my coffee cup, and he don’t know I popped a coupla midnight runners as well. While I’m eating a pile of onion rings and fries, I notice Alchemy is consternated so I get all applesauce brained and admit, “I’m embarrassed to be so lame, I feel like all of this is a fake-out and I am a fraud and one day you’re gonna ice me for something I don’t even know I done, toss me out just like you found me, and it will all disappear.”
He gives me a face like I gutted him with a knife and sits his elbow on the table and leans his chin against his fist. He don’t say nuthin’ for a few minutes. “We need to have this conversation, especially in light of Absurda’s problems. There is no crisis that can bring you and me down. That is not going to happen with us.”
“How the fuck you know that?” I say again, because I’m thinking of what I seen outside a Madam Rosa’s and how, even though I’m cool with Absurda, I’m still pissed off. “What if I do something stoopit like Marty?” Truth was, Marty still worked for us.
“What could you say that would be so horrible? I know we could always work it out.” He said that in
his Alchemy-controls-all voice.
I’m still feeling like his looking for a place for me is some kind of warning, or maybe some Alchemy trap. That maybe he knows I seen him and Absurda, and he wants me to say something. But I never forget if it comes down to it, I’m the one who goes, so I say nothing and change the subject.
“Why’d ya pick me up in the first place?” All those years, I never done asked him. I didn’t worry about not having shit ’til I had it.
“Coincidence is also opportunity. It’s up to each of us to read the signs and make good or bad decisions.” That was the hookie-dookie Alchemy in a nutshell. “Remember when I had that nightmare in the motel that first night?”
“Fuck yes.” He had them after that, but I never got so spooked again. He later told me they was love and hate notes from his unconscious and he’d be lost without them.
“The way you reacted, I trusted you. I still trust you. My mom, contrary to the grief she gave you that day—”
“Still does.”
“She blessed you with the Salome seal of approval. Said that you were no phony.”
“No kidding?” I was flabbergasted. “I thought Salome always sized me up as some smelly sock you toss to the dog as a chew toy.”
“Nope. One more thing you have to be sure about. Ambitious, you’ve made it to the big leagues, the toughest league of all. And no one, not I, your mother or father, or anyone can take that away from you except you. Besides, no lie, you are my street brother.”
I swear to fucking God I was almost crying. That was the forthrighteous reason I ain’t bought a place, at that time I love being with the band on the road and living with him, and even Salome and Brockton. They was my family.
38
THE SONGS OF SALOME
Humpty Dumpty
Back in New York, my mystagogues in limbo, bored, and horny as hell, wondering if it was over with Nathaniel, I lust-fucked a few young studlies. The satisfaction was short-lived. To fill the hollowness, I wrote Nathaniel a letter a day. He wrote me twice a week and called every other Sunday. He returned to New York for two weeks over Easter to meet an editor who wanted him to do a book about Bohemian Scofflaw twenty years on. I thought he would move back to New York. Not so. While he was attending a No Nukes rally in Berlin, the directors at the Free University invited him to come for a two-year lecturer stint. He wanted me, us, to join him. Ruggles encouraged me to go and be with Nathaniel. I could always come back. I was excited and wary. In almost eight years, I’d never been away from New York (or Ruggles) for more than two weeks.