by Bruce Bauman
57
THE SONGS OF SALOME
The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner
Alchemy gallivanted across the world’s stages for much of the year as I prepared for the Hammer retrospective. Xtine flew out to help with the assistants I had hired to build the Pillzapoppin’ and Electroshocked Ladyland installations. Nathaniel argued against exhibiting the Baddist Boys. I had to because I knew that, like a curse I must expunge, no longer could they remain repressed in the unconscious attic of my studio.
Before the show opened, the spate of publicity certainly alerted the spawn of Malcolm. As the day approached, I felt myself teetering, unsure of where I might fall considering some of the eruptions at previous openings. Alchemy, with an uncharacteristic lack of intuitiveness, sniped at me for acting histrionically when I threatened to boycott the various openings. I dared not reveal that I’d found a picture and profile of the Pretender on the Web site at the university where he taught. I kept it undercover in my studio and spent far too many hours trying to commune with him through our DNA, hoping one of our mutual ancestors would bring us into contact and prove he was of my blood. He remained apart from me.
During one of the preopenings, from the Hammer’s second floor, I watched as the crowd entered. He slithered into the lobby by himself. I recoiled when he and Alchemy shook hands like … old bros. I made my way unsteadily to the exhibition hall and started my talk right in front of the B Boys—and the two of them.
I saw nothing of me in his face. I inched closer, and closer still when he asked a question. I hesitated before answering, for in his eyes—not the luminous optimistic multicolors of Alchemy’s eyes, but ominous hazy gun-smoke gray—I sensated his innards crumbling as the vision of my assignation with Teumer and my relief at his unbirth unfurled within him. His palpable pain flustered me. Again, I tried to commune with him. He fled the museum.
The morning of the official opening I awoke at sunrise. Haunted by my failure to carry out my Margarita mission, I’d slept little. As Alchemy began his cooldown walk after his morning jog around the compound, I joined him. I asked him about the man quizzing me about the Baddist Boys.
“An acquaintance. Collector. Why?”
“I got a whiff of a familiar, unholy fragrance. Pig meat sweat.” I lied to gauge his reaction. He frowned but didn’t take the bait.
“He’s a very smart guy. History professor. I think he and Nathaniel would get along.”
“How did you meet him?”
“His wife used to work with Kasbah. I met her first.” His answer turned out to be perfectly true and perfectly untrue.
“I didn’t see him with anyone.”
“I guess she had other plans.”
He wiped his forehead with his T-shirt and his eyes narrowed ever so slightly. “I have to shower before you impugn me with having an unholy fragrance.”
I sniffed the air. “No, just man sweat. Go. I have to help Nathaniel get ready.”
The opening completed the reversal of my art world reputation from the misogynistic imprecation as hysterical woman artist who fucked her way through the world to what became, in Scoggins’s validation, “an underappreciated, often misunderstood visionary worthy of our veneration and awe.” I attempted graciousness and welcomed his plaudits, as my atoms attempted to flee my corporeal body. I hid behind Nathaniel and his wheelchair, which he needed for longer outings, most of the night. I only insulted a few people. During the four-month run of the exhibition, other opportunities to move the show presented themselves. I committed to nothing.
When it was over, with the Insatiables preparing to tour again, despite my embracing by the L.A. art community, Nathaniel and I preferred to return to New York. I never sensated how foolish that move would turn out to be.
58
MEMOIRS OF A USELESS GOOD-FOR-NUTHIN’
Going, Going, Gone, 2003 – 2006
Back in L.A. after the tour, I’m hanging at Kasbah. I see Alchemy in a face-off with a slinky familiar-looking lady in the corner by one of the fake oases. I intrude. He introduces her as “Jay, my brother Mose’s wife. We’re discussing his long-term follow-up treatment.” His way of telling me to get lost. I was about to bounce when Randy shouts, “My brother needs more art!” Whoa! I remember her. Me and her never talked much ’cause we had nuthin’ to offer each other.
Later, when me and him is relaxing in Buddy’s office, I says, “Man, that is wazoo wild shit. Your bro know youse two did the shimmy an’ shake?” I ain’t sure they did, but it’s a good bet.
He rubs his fist under his nose and he says, dead cold, “There is nothing to know. L.A., within its various circles, is a small town. They’re both in the art circle.”
“What the fuck’s that got to do with anything? I bet she got into artfully circling her limbs around all things Alchemous.”
“Don’t be a jerk. I’m telling you we were friends. She was more interested in my mom’s art than me.”
I’m thinking he is protesting too much, and being his “friend” didn’t mean shit. Soon, I find out why I’m right about them and why he don’t want me to meet Mose. I was at the Key Club jammin’ with some local L.A. guys. After the show, some scumsucker paparazzo tracks me down in the bathroom. He says he’s pitchin’ a piece to the Enquirer on “The Insatiable Sexual Appetite of Alchemy Savant.” I says, “So?”
He says, “I need you to ID some of the women in these pics and tell me if he had sex with them.” He shows them to me and one of them is Mrs. Mose and Alchemy all lovebirdy-like back in the ’90s. I tell the fucker to get very lost. Fast. Not that I care much about Mose or his wife. I just hate them paparatzi.
Then the pap threatens me: “If you don’t help me, I’m going for a story that you’re a no-show cheapo father.”
I should’ve told you this already. I got a son from a trampoline break in St. Louis about six years before. I don’t even remember the girl’s name when she contacts me, which she does after the kid, Ricky Jr., is already born. The test proves he’s mine and I pay child support but, I dunno, I never seen him.
I clench my fists so the pap sees, and I say to the ratfuck, “Run the damn article. ’Cause I will never, ever help you.”
Sue and Andrew have already heard about this guy trying to dirty me if he can’t get to Alchy. They advise me to see Ricky Jr., who lives with his mom, a nurse. It turns out to be a great thing. Thankfully, he’s a cute kid. Nuthin’ like me. His mom married a decent guy. I spend lots of time with Ricky Jr. over the years and we are now pretty close. He’s getting ready to go to law school next year. Ain’t that a sweet switch.
I tell Bryn about Ricky Jr. and she is cool, until I say maybe we should have a kid. She is so not into that. I propose that she quit her job, come on the Euro tour, and we get married. She don’t say nuthin’, just scrunches her nose. I fucking offer to quit the band. She not only smacks me down, she breaks up with me. I was her trampoline.
I dive into a drug and drink binge the second we land in London and don’t quit all through Scotland and Scandinavia. I don’t give a rat’s ass that everyone is “worried.” We go to Paris for a show at Parc du Catherine Deneuve or something like that. At the after-party, this actress, Camille Javal, who been in the film Paris by Night, says she is going to audition for the Friendsy for You video, which we are going to come back and do at end of the tour, ’cause Alchy wants this young French kid to direct it.
Camille has these juicy lips and a deep-throat voice that’s so sexy I got a hard-on listening to her coo my name. While we’re touring the rest of Europe, me and her talk all the time. I dunno why, but she’s the first person I feel okay to tell about the Madam Rosa’s shit. And how bad I feel about everything. It was a good choice ’cause she don’t condemn me or nuthin’. “It’s good to love so hard that it nearly breaks you,” she says.
I start staying at her flat when we get back to Paris. The Frenchy director rejects Camille for the main female part. I put it to Alchemy, “Since when do we, m
eanin’ you, let anyone else call these shots?” Alchemy says it was a mutual decision with him and the director. I say, “C’mon, give me this one.” He’s kinda embarrassed, but he tells me Lux, Silky, and Andrew don’t want her neither.
I figure I’ll talk to Lux on my own. Maybe I can change his mind. He says if Alchemy agrees, it’s okay by him.
A couple of nights later, Alchy plays me this new song “Mysteries and Enemies.”
Lying at the corner of suicide and loathing
when she slipped her hands down my clothing
smile as sweet as Judas’s gun moll
eyes glistenin’ like a midnight Manhattan snowfall
Her voice lured me without a sound
“I’m your mystery and you’re my enemy”
as I crawled into the well-trod garden
of her pleasure mound
I ask, “So you think Camille’s doing me just to get the part?”
“What makes you think this song is about you?”
I don’t answer.
Before we start shooting, me and Camille talk about the video. She says rejection’s part of the business and she’s fine with it. I ain’t so fine. I say to Camille that we’ll get married the next day—then they have to give her a part. “Ambishoos”—I loved the way she said my name—“that is very kind but a bad reason to marry. We are fun together. And you are a better man than you think. I feel you don’t really love me.” And wow, she is harsh, but she is right. “Please, don’t be angry wheez me, but no one who loves you should marry you. Not now. Even eef you fight, you are too much in love wheez Alshemie. You need to break from him before you are free to love so strong like you did wheez Absurda.”
I don’t say nuthin’ to Alchy or no one else. We shoot the video and head home. I’m sad about leaving Camille. She gives me one last piece of advice: “Don’t be impulsive. Break when you feel strong.”
Before recording more songs for Dieseasee and starting the South America and Asia tours, we take a little time off. I’ve given up the lease on the Hollywood Hills house, and Alchemy says I can stay in Topanga. I accept but don’t plan on staying. Alchemy is preoccupied with Mose, Salome, and Nathaniel, who had more strokes and talks so slow it ain’t even fun jousting with him.
Andrew calls me up saying Alchemy is buying a building in downtown L.A. for Winsum Realty. I answer, “You never ask me before. Just do it.” He says Alchemy thinks I should check it out. Bastard knows me so damn well, ’cause I love it. I end up claiming the top floor for myself. While it’s getting fixed up, I take a trip back to New York. I spend a little, very little time with my mom and sister. See some old guys from Flushing. I jam nights with some guys from ’70s and ’80s NYC bands. It’s fun and we talk about doing some recording together.
And get this, they built a condo on the site of the puke-filled Gas Station club where I slept outside as the good-for-nuthin’ Ricky McFinn. I buy myself an apartment.
The whole time, I’m doing some heavy reconsidering about my future. I am feeling pretty good about myself. So when Alchemy summons us to regroup in L.A. to start planning the tour and recordings, I’ve decided, after almost fourteen years, it’s time to cut the cord. Alchemy don’t try to dissuade me. Just says, “If that’s your decision, I’ll have to accept it. Lux asks, “So, what’s your plan?” I’m ready for that. “I been playing with a bunch of guys from New York and we’re talking about doing something together.”
Later, when we’re alone, Lux says, “Are you sure about this? It’s cool to play with other guys, but it won’t be the same.”
“Lux, it ain’t been the same with us for a while. For now, I’m good.”
I call up a coupla the NYC guys, but they end up punking out on me. So I take a trip to see Ricky Jr. When I get back to L.A., I call Lux about hanging out some night. He can come check out my new place downtown. He says he can’t do it. They’ve finished auditioning bass players, chosen one for the tour and are rehearsing like mad.
I hang up the phone feeling like, Holy fuck! What the fuck have I done?
59
THE SONGS OF SALOME
Into the Mystic
I told Bellows a few more times that I had some information that would interest Palmer and his committee of investigators. He ignored Bellows’s bidding for a visit with Persephone.
I sing to Persephone, as I sing to Nathaniel.
I found him. Napping, I first thought, in his wheelchair on the porch. I tilted his head up and removed his glasses. I kissed his lips one last time. His face laden with Gravity Disease. The last years offered so few rewards. He felt like his life’s work had been debased. He willed himself to stay with us and experience my Hammer retrospective, which delighted him.
That morning on the porch I breathed, for the final time, the purity of his soulsmell. It spread from his essence to his corporeality, and suddenly—the Gravity Disease lifted. His face appeared almost youthful. Tranquil.
I lay down next to him. His left hand was draped over the chair’s side. I held it in mine. With the ministrokes coming more and more frequently, he had left me a note a month before. “No wishing you’d not done this or had done that. Make more art. I treasure the life we lived together.”
I awakened Alchemy with my phone call. “Nathaniel’s gone. I’m okay. I just need you to come here from wherever you are.”
And he did.
As Nathaniel wished, we buried him in Virginia beside his parents. There was a memorial service in New York City. I didn’t go. The tentacles of the dark matter beckoned. I resisted. Alchemy, before going back on the road, stayed with me and then Xtine. Ruggles, now retired, visited briefly. No one could replace Nathaniel. I’ve never stopped missing him.
60
THE MOSES CHRONICLES (2009–2010)
Obey My Voice, and Arise
Moses often speculated that as memory compresses and expands, time slows down and speeds up almost inexplicably. For when he reflected upon the year immediately following his operation, it passed in an elongated and vivid slow motion, and the next years felt compressed, swiftly passing into indistinguishable, barely recalled moments, interspersed with incidents that expanded to significant and memorable in the present or in retrospect. And now, today, almost a decade after finding his brother, Moses girded himself as time nearly stopped. Salome was on her way to the foundation.
The pseudoreasons for this visit were to get her approval on how her work and Xtine’s photos were to be used to decorate the walls and to review the final applications for the first Nathaniel Brockton Fellowship for Political Activism. Since her few oblique comments after the Hammer opening, she had never hinted at even suspecting the truth, so Alchemy and Moses decided that Alchemy should not broach the subject of Moses’s existence with Salome ahead of time.
This latest attempt to meet had been delayed not by his illness, pathos, divorce, or the perpetual recording and touring of the Insatiables, but by the passing of Nathaniel Brockton and Salome’s descent into self-imposed isolation at the family’s Shelter Island home.
Moses scoured Nathaniel’s obituaries for insight into his mother. He found precious little. Moses admired Nathaniel’s devotion to his ideals, but he didn’t think much of Tag. He wondered if Salome had ever mentioned him to Nathaniel.
Moses paced around the office, occasionally glancing at the tantalizing Suzan Woodruff abstract on the wall. He’d hired Jay as a consultant to furnish and decorate the offices, in hopes of keeping her close to him. Foolish move. Of course she was sympathetic when he relayed the events of the Teumer meeting. But she glided over his hints at attempting reconciliation. Whenever she left to meet someone—he couldn’t ask who—the wound breached and bled.
Although they e-mailed a few times a week, and spoke on the phone erratically, they’d last met at the office three months before. He had told her about the upcoming “Salome summit.” How he wished she were beside him now.
His friends pushed him to end all contact with Jay, to lower
the unattainable standards set by his rose-colored vision of her. They encouraged him to start dating. He placated them by going on a few setups, which “didn’t work out.” After the Evie misfire, he understood that he couldn’t approach sex as a good meal, gratifying yet disposable. He was terrified that, literally, he wouldn’t survive another failed relationship. So Moses made one simple decision: He would remain alone. It never occurred to him that his emotional retreat imitated his mom’s behavior. Hannah, too, had forsworn the risk of romance after the rejections by her first husband and Teumer. With no child to love, the Nightingale Foundation became the recipient of Moses’s adoration and passion.
Ten minutes before Salome’s scheduled arrival, Moses began to feel faint. He texted Alchemy: “Call it off.” No response. Moses paced—I should leave. I should call Jay. No. I can’t. He scurried into the bathroom, doused his face with cold water, and took a Xanax.
He decided to wait in the conference room. It was bigger and safer than his office. Moses stood in front of a wall where a series of Jasper Johns prints hung. They’d been donated to the foundation by Salome’s onetime dealer Murray Gibbon, after he met with Alchemy’s lawyers, who’d uncovered some dubious accounting practices. In time, they would be auctioned off.
Moses heard the front office door open. He peeked out from behind the door. “In here!” he screamed too loudly. His eyes focused on his mother, dressed for the winter cold of New York in a camel hair coat. She rewound a flaming red scarf around her neck before slowly removing her tan leather gloves and stuffing them in her coat pockets. Alchemy said something to her that Moses couldn’t hear. With the elegant Savant sashay, which had bypassed Moses, they entered the conference room. Moses retreated to the far side of the marble table.
“Mom, I want you to meet Moses. He is the driving force as well as day-to-day operations runner of the foundation.”