Demonology

by Rick Moody

  Wearers of sheets prepared for a migration across the river. Down into the river they went, allotheistic teens, shawls wrapped snugly around them, to ford the river called Tokeneke, rock by rock. Toward what goal did they proceed? Toward Nicky Foster, on the far bank, where, lubricated by the consumption of beers, Nicky was preparing to set fire to his familial acreage. In its entirety. He had a gallon of high-octane fuel, he had a tiger in his tank. His pyrotechnics would begin with a bonfire, and then it would engulf the entire far side of the river. The fire would have to travel almost a half-mile before it would hit the Goodells’ house, over on Hamilton, and the local volunteer fire department would arrive way before that. There were spots where there were no trees anyhow, just underbrush. Nicky would call the fire department himself, since he had learned the number for all local emergency personnel in the pursuit of a certain merit badge in his troop of boy scouts. There would be no accident or injury. And his audience, the faithful, would be transfixed by his spectacle. The first drenched handful of them, one or two sliding down the muddy bank and back into the river, now labored to reach Nicky’s side. They clutched at roots and branches, pulled themselves from the creek. Where was Julian Peltz now? In that forest somewhere, so that he, the other Jewish kid, could serve as the appropriate sacrifice for Nicky Fosters destruction of property? Tied to a sugar maple and left to broil?

  It was like Gerry had offered him up.

  Polly Firestone, her name afterward an emblem for the excesses of the Fosters’ party, stretched out a hand to Nick Foster. Nick helped her up onto the bank. She fished in the pocket of her nondescript corduroy trousers, which she wore underneath a twin-sized sheet, for a disposable lighter, one made by a large multinational plastics corporation. Nick took the proffered lighter, struck it in the conventional way, and before the rest of the kids were even up on the bank, the bonfire lit up that Halloween. A pair of cedars was engulfed. Some eyebrows were singed. It was all more than they had ever expected in their short, careless lives.

  His mother’s paper on the circumstances of the party and the reaction to it in the local press, which later appeared in the Deviant Behavior biannual (volume nineteen, number two), turned on a line from Nietzsche, as Gerry interpreted it in his middle life, Rejoicing monsters, they are capable of high spirits as they walk away without qualms from a horrific succession of murder, arson, violence, and torture, as if it were nothing more than a student prank. His mother’s prose was subdued, with a faint trace of wistfulness: The songs of contemporary youth worship imaginary possibilities immanent in abstraction: liberty, heroism, revolution. But more practically the freedom connoted in these lyrics, to take the first example, is the abandonment of pregnant women, the abuse of controlled substances, the victimless defrauding of banks and financial institutions, narcissism, selfishness, untimely death. A lineage might be supposed in which libertarian and anti-governmental rhetoric leads directly to destruction of property and violence against parents and leadership entities. See below, e.g., deposition statements of defendants in what I’m calling the Foster Case. I have appended the testimony of one boy, sixteen, who I’ll call Jim, accidentally injured when abandoned in the woods by other party-attendants. The reliable conclusion is that restriction is the proper environment for youth, that time of life that I can only refer to as ethical apprenticeship, during which privileges such as decision making and liberty ought to be controlled, abridged, even eliminated for a period of about seven years from onset of puberty, while ethical and normative values are instilled. Arrest, according to this formulation, is benevolent, arrest is compassionate, arrest is creative, arrest is planning for a serene future.

  Gerry Abramowitz, the legal aid lawyer of Providence, RI, insisted on the language of identity politics, Percocet or no Percocet. He was a disabled person, not a handicapped person. And yet, in his privacies he thought of the injured arm not as some poignant but surmountable problem, but as the Claw. Finally, all places and times of youth had been reconsidered until they did nothing but refer to or predict or reflect back upon the Claw. The useless and homely Claw. Everything was Before Claw and After Claw, and these places he was remembering that were Before Claw, they receded at an alarming rate, like distant galaxies, hurtling toward a margin of space where, in a dazzling and romantic nothingness, they were refracted distortedly: Connecticut, the years when he was in college, the year when he lived in Hoboken, in brief faux-connubial bliss, the following year in Jersey City, all Before Claw, before the weekend when he decided to go look at autumn foliage, alone, because he couldn’t find anyone to go along. What a stupid way to spend a weekend. If he had just stayed home, if he had gone to see movies in the city, then he wouldn’t be doubling up on Percocet, remembering. Everything Before Claw was better than the monochromes After Claw, everything was sweet and acute in the time before. Now daily life was pale and thin, a low-sodium canned broth; After Claw was all survival, how admirable it seemed to survive another year, to have a few friends whom you had known for a while. After Claw, shampooing was a victory; After Claw, knowing the birthday of two or three people was the height of solicitousness; After Claw, being polite to the guy in the dry cleaner up the block was very good; After Claw, thanking a bus driver was remarkable; After Claw, trying a new cuisine was adventurous; AfterClaw, remembering to vote was heroic; After Claw, feeling like taking your clothes off in the presence of a lover was an astonishment (easier to watch television); After Claw, the Weather Channel was the most serene and beneficent institution on earth; After Claw, it was the little things: not having a malignant tumor, not having your hair fall out from chemotherapy not having a colostomy shunt; After Claw, a child that didn’t scream was beautiful, as was a geranium that blossomed once, a cardinal that landed on the feeder, a mailbox without a letter from the tax authorities, a cereal that tasted okay, a government that did something about poverty, a neighbor who told you to close your windows before a storm, a friend who wanted to talk, a sky that cleared. After Claw, everything that was before was better than it had actually been; After Claw, all was poignant and diminished and sad, and all that was Before Claw, was shiny, new, and lost.

  When the sirens began, there was a rush toward the cars parked in the driveway Sheets were abandoned on the lawn. The girl parked in the car next to him was from Wilton, it turned out. They barked out a short conversation. She was the one he’d seen before wearing a costume, a tutu of crinoline, in gold, with white tights. And he met her again six years later, in the city. Same girl. Three times he had idealized her, therefore, once when he was a kid and she was pleasant to him, once when he was in his twenties and she was leaving him, and once in this remembering. But when the carnival of youth left town, leaving behind its crushed Styrofoam cups, dismembered Kewpie dolls, and beer vomit, idealism hitched a ride, in its wake only symptoms of withdrawal. Remembering was a flu then, remembering was a sickness, and his skin crawled, and his nose ran, and his eyes were red, and he couldn’t get comfortable with the temperature in this cramped apartment, and blowing his nose was impossible, because of his bad arm. The girl in the tutu drove a Volvo now, and picked up her own girl in a tutu from the ballet school in Larchmont; and if she called, he deferred to the answering machine, and failed to call back. It was a delirium of stories in which the principals never quite met, never quite spoke, never quite loved, never quite left. The pieces didn’t match and never would, but the pieces were almost identical. The girl in the tutu pirouetted by him on his bad side, and he knew now, indisputably, he was older.

  Wilkie Fahnstock, The Boxed Set

  The ground-breaking, innovative collection you have before you represents a new milestone in the history of Bankruptcy Records, a profound effort to bring to the public one of the representative lives of the last century. Bankruptcy here endeavors to depict Wilkie Ridgeway Fahnstock in a format he personally favored during his lifetime, that of the old-time magnetic tape cassette —in this instance a ten-volume anthology of such cassettes, one for each of the imp
ortant periods of Fahnstock’s life, including the Greenwich Years, the years in Kingston, Rhode Island, etc. (See our Website for more information about other exciting Bankruptcy releases, including collections like the home videos of the McGill family of Poughkeepsie, NY (“Shannons fifth birthday party”“Summer Theater Production of OUR TOWN, 6/21/76!“), and the laser-disk-only release of STAR TREK EPISODES I REALLY LIKE by Rochester, NY, software designer Greg Tanizaki.)

  The earthquake-like cannon blasts of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture serve here as an eclat for Wilkie Fahnstock’s 1964 birth, without complications, at the Mercy Hospital of Greenwich, CT. His mother, Elise Fahnstock (nee Roosevelt) was and is a classical music fanatic, and Tchaikovsky and other classical greats such as Beethoven and Mozart were often spinning on the playroom hi-fi near Wilkie’s crib, especially in renditions by Arthur Fiedlers Boston Pops. Later, when Wilkie briefly tried to learn the violin, he surreptitiously played records of the Bach Cello suites (the Pablo Casals recording) in an effort to fool his mom into believing he was practicing.

  Tragedy struck in 1970, when Elise Fahnstock’s marriage to Stannard Buchanan Fahnstock ended in acrimonious divorce —to the sounds of Simon and Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Water. Wilkie’s dad took to an apartment in New York City in order to date a succession of chainsmoking, high-fashion models. Poor Wilkie! Poor little sister Samantha! Suddenly the tender pop classics of the middle and late sixties —the sunny harmonies of the Beach Boys, the raucous fun of Tommy James and the Shondells, the prepubescent funk of the Jackson Five —gave way to the darker moods of early seventies “progressive rock”stylings. Wilkie, alone in his room (in a succession of split-level Tudor homes throughout the County of Westchester), was contemplating the multiples of Rusty Staub baseball cards while the ominous chords of Mike Oldfield and Pink Floyd floated through his depressive consciousness on a mono-phonic Zenith brand “record player.”Of course, the surge of national drug experimentation was also a part of Wilkie Fahn-stock’s adolescence, as with so many of his peers, and on cassette two (actually dubbed from a moldering Memorex ninety-minute tape found in an old summer camp foot locker), we see for the first time the “heavy”music of such acknowledged “drug”bands as Led Zeppelin, Alice Cooper, and the Moody Blues, especially as these portentous sounds vied for Wilkie’s attentions with the simple easy confections of Elton John.

  Now, as Fahnstock’s parents shipped him off to the Phillips Academy at Andover, as Elise Fahnstock —newly betrothed to Fred Bolger, the reinforced-carton magnate —undertook a demanding career as Metro politan Museum docent, as Stannard Fahnstock relocated his consulting business to Mar-blehead, Mass., the collection succumbs to a brief infatuation with the dazzling surfaces of “glam”rock, characterized by the abundant makeup of bands like Kiss and David Bowie. (Fahnstock tried, at this point, to get a few other prep school chums interested in forming a band featuring fire-breathing and spitting up blood, but given his own character —bad hair combined with high grades, unflattering eyeglasses and a poor sense of rhythm —this plan was doomed from the start.) On the B side of cassette three, however, there’s a precipitous turning toward the introspective, Californian singer-songwriter stylings of the seventies. Probably it was peer pressure. Probably it was the influence of his boarding school contemporaries. In any case, it’s as if Fahnstock comes home across the big Atlantic puddle. Take it easy, dude! Skip trigonometry! Smoke a reefer!

  Just as this easy-listening nationalism took root, however, there was the shot heard round the world. The punk rock explosion! The revolution! Wow! Safety pins! In the space of a few short months, Wilkie Fahnstock turned away from the soft-rock conventions of the mid-seventies entirely and embraced instead the anarchic celebrations flowing out of London’s King’s Row.

  Meanwhile, after years of loneliness and romantic starvation in high school, and with only the simple addition of a diet of beer, speed, and filched prescription medication, Wilkie Fahnstock suddenly achieved campus celebrity as an oddball, the guy with the Devo albums—just as he was being expelled from Andover for curfew violations. So it was back to Mamaroneck High to complete the twelfth grade without a letter in any sport.(I can report here that Fahnstock did, however, finally manage to “cop a feel,”as he put it, from Pauline Vanderbilt of Park Ave., NYC, a fellow An-dover casualty, while in the next room her close-and-play mangled a copy of Blondie’s “Heart of Glass.”Oaths of eternal fealty followed.)

  At home in Westchester, Fahnstock managed to parlay acceptable board scores and indifferent recommendations into an acceptance at the University of Rhode Island, a school which (according to atlases available to the compiler of these notes) was a mere road trip from the recherche and enigmatic Moonstone Beach of the Rhode Island coast. A known nudist bathing location! Fahnstock, with his beer-related paunch and excessive chest hair, was often a sight at Moonstone playing, with various nursing students, volleyball en deshabille! The best music for nudism, at least in those days, was funk, and thus it blasted from the sound system of Fahnstock’s car. We located, in the glove box of his 1982 Volkswagen Rabbit, a battered compendium of funk and “new wave” classics to support the selections from this period.

  In 1984, Fahnstock, turning aside the advice of his more liberal friends, and notwithstanding his countercultural personal habits, nonetheless voted in his first presidential election for former California governor Ronald Reagan. Proving that the G.O.P. can indeed be a big tent, he did not however endorse the conservative “hair”bands of the period —Poison, Ratt, Whitesnake, Loverboy. He concentrated instead on the nascent pop form known as “hardcore“: the sound of the empty landscapes of the American plains, without Dolby noise reduction or compression. Dairy farms in foreclosure. Permafrost. Songs a minute long, played at four hundred beats per.

  A period of retrenchment followed, featuring a flirtation with the local, NYC-related phenomenon called Rap or Hip Hop. Fahnstock learned of it at after-hours clubs, where he spent far too many nights during these summers in col lege. Rap gave way almost immediately to various artists from the past, the Velvet Underground, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan. And this organic past sustained him overland to rehab in Minnesota, where, admitting complete defeat(in Hazelden parlance) less than a month after graduation, he dogged female cocaine addicts and disdained a belief in God until transferred summarily to a halfway house in Queens. He then turned up briefly at confirmation classes at Greenwich Villages Grace Church.

  A succession of bad day jobs gave way to a bad streak of sobriety jobs, as they are called in the demimonde of recovering types, at a succession of New York fashion magazines —in copyediting, and then fact-checking departments. At Self, for example, Fahnstock worked closely with beauty columnist Denise D’Onofrio, whose office beat box listed toward Janet Jackson and Paula Abdul, and whose gin and tonic he accidentally sipped at an Xmas party, scaring himself witless, such that he fled home on the PATH train to his sixth-floor walkup in downtown Jersey City, and didn’t come out again for a week. When he did, it was to relapse.

  Have we spoken already of the Garden State and its influence on Wilkie Fahnstock? Of its flat, Netherlandish aspect? Of the local bands of Hobo-ken? How in the cauldron of that old waterfront town he went through a sort of flowering of compassion for fellow man, however short-lived, as evidenced by his sudden, precipitous decision to take in rehab acquaintance Kristina Ruiz, fleeing at the time a pugilistic husband, so that the two of them might share that tiny space, Wilkie’s apartment, chastely, platonically, until a furious row, after which Wilkie slunk home again to Westchester.

  It was back under the roof of his stepfamily, two years sober, ashamed, unemployable, that Wilkie Fahnstock first saw the MTV video (measuring worth-lessness by the amount of daily consumption of that channel) for a song entitled “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”Another relapse ensued. However, his sheer delight in the movement of rock and roll fashion —in the direction of the so-called grunge music —revivified Wil-kie Fahnstock enough to apply
to law school, financed mainly by his reinforced-carton magnate stepfather. This plan lasted about one year (1994), as did Wilkie’s marriage, contemporaneously, to law classmate Arlene Levy, of Scarsdale. On the occasion of their first anniversary, Arlene informed her own parents that Wilkie’s refusal to study, his concentration on such disagreeable racket as The Shaggs, and his crack binges were unacceptable. Thus, Wilkie took an apartment by himself in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and began to write his roman à clef (untitled), of which, after six months, he completed thirteen pages. Applications to the writing and film programs of city institutions were to no avail.

  Bringing us to the present. The tale, then, of a confused, contemporary young person, a young man overlooked by the public, a person of meager accomplishment, a person of bad temperament, but a guy who nonetheless has a very large collection of compact discs! For this reason, Bankruptcy Records presents to you the music of Wilkie Ridge-way Fahnstock in his thirty-third year. The last WASP (one of them anyway), the last of this nations culturally homogeneous offspring deluded enough to believe in the uniqueness of this cultural designation, a young man whose beloved rock and roll has finally apparently become a thing of the past, a quaint, charming racket from another eon. We present to you, ladies and gentlemen, the life and music of an undistinguished American!