Talking Heads

by John Domini

  “You’ll survive,” Rick said. “Hey, you’re back with the good guys now.”

  Kit tried to think of a way to change the subject. Rick hadn’t said much yet about his own story, a Mass Transit piece. The MTA had made an unexpected find during excavations for a waterfront station, turning up a Colonial shipworks down at what used to be the harbor. They’d even found native Shawmut stuff. A local archaeologist had declared the site “invaluable.”

  But the freelancer preferred to talk about Zia’s piece. “Oedipus?” he asked. “No shit? Is this a nom de knob?”

  “The name of his show is even better.” Half a smile peeked from one side of Zia’s cigarette. “Nocturnal Emissions.”

  They made a strange pair, Rick and Zia. Worlds in collision. The freelancer let his hair billow well below the shoulder, whereas Zia cropped hers close, allowing no more than a trace of its natural curl. And Rick wore a sweater of deep hides-the-dirt brown, a fatigue jacket that hung on him like spaghetti gone cold. Mr. Natural and the punkette.

  Miss Marina was altogether quite smitten by this … disc jockey. She waxed positively girlish, insofar as one can in red thermal underwear and a black leather jacket. She kept fingering her rosary beads (at least, I think they were rosary beads). The question raised by her hero’s career, Miss Moroni kept saying, was this: How can a punk be a success?

  “How can a punk be a success,” Rick said. “Sexy.”

  To Kit, Zia’s Oedipus profile sounded like what he wanted in Sea Level. No puff, no fluff. Zia wasn’t interested in anything so superficial as finding out the disc jockey’s real name. She wanted to explore the meanings of his career.

  “See, Oeddie began in the basement,” Zia explained. “Cellars by starlight. Like, the mattress is on the floor, and you have to share it with someone in a methadone program.”

  Grinning, Rick hooked one arm under his sweater, scratching his narrow chest.

  “That was Oeddie,” Zia said, “totally in the basement.”

  You should understand, earnest reader, that Miss Mirrorme’s outfit was entirely appropriate to her calling. The red and the leather, the ex-communicant’s rosary, all perfectly appropriate. The woman writes about the new “punk rock,” you see. Yes, “poke rock,” the latest ‘70s scourge.

  The crowd included a number of Miss Marinara’s, ahem, musician friends. Indeed, her champion deejay was on the scene, great Odious himself. Quite flush with success, oh yes—a puke, but flush. Over New Year’s, it seems, the man was hired by the biggest rock station in town.

  “Suddenly he’s made it,” Zia was saying. “An office, a telephone. He’s really made it.” And this was in Boston, she repeated. “I mean, with the demographic this city has, the number of, like, young people …”

  Rick was nodding.

  “Boston radio, I mean, it’s the cutting edge.”

  “No shit,” Rick said. “Radio, electronics, that’s where the action is these days. Us print types, we’re way behind.”

  Zia snorted. “So Oeddie now, he doesn’t just get, like, a salary and benefits. He gets clout in the industry.”

  “And how can a punk be a success?”

  Pensive, she tugged at her top, a red thermal undershirt. Tough girl: when she tugged, you noticed her breasts.

  “Sexy,” Rick said. “A real hook, there. It’s loss of innocence, it’s testing of values.”

  Meanwhile, among Miss Merengue’s, ahem, friends, there emerged a curious consensus. All the spank-rockers seemed to regard Sea Level as though Mr. Viddich were one of their own. They saw him as a comrade-in-underwear.

  I spotted for instance four or five members of, ahem, the Human Sexual Response, a “gay” outfit. Yes, “gay,” meaning “real slime.” The Humans make no attempt to hide their perversion—part of the Castro District/Harvey Milk/Village People consensus, I suppose, out of the closet and all that. The leader, I daresay, found the new editor in town quite delicious: a tall tumbler of Minnesota lake water.

  “I love him,” the leader of the Hummins was heard to declare. “That Bitch character—I mean, you think I’m a punk? I mean, that man’s a punk.”

  “Well yeah, see it’s important,” Zia said, suddenly loud. “It matters, what happens down in those basements.”

  Rick’s eyes flicked wide. Where was the woman’s button, when had he pushed it? But Kit understood—Zia’s heat was directed at him. At him, sure. Kit had never hidden his misgivings about Zia’s subject matter, this cellars-by-starlight stuff. The first time he’d sat down with her he’d let her know that, originally, he’d never anticipated doing much “entertainment reporting” in Sea Level. Better she heard it from Kit himself, he’d figured, than from her father.

  Hoo boy, had that been a dumb move. A glaring example of his defective social skills. No wonder he felt like he was walking on eggshells around here.

  Rick knew an exposed nerve when he heard it crackle.

  “Zia, tell me,” he said, “how’d you like working with old Kit here?” Rockin’ Rick. “He’s a wild man, you know.”

  Then Kit, on eggshells, saw something new. He saw Zia’s arm, the way she massaged her arm. If he hadn’t been at such a bleary internal distance he’d never have noticed. Zia was a lefty, wouldn’t you know it, and here on her workspace halfwall Kit observed that when she got worked up, she massaged her right forearm. She massaged the right only—unlike her friend Topsy, for instance, who massaged the left only.

  “I mean, I love him,” someone was saying. “I mean, you think you’re a punk? This man’s a punk.”

  Kit didn’t think he’d ever seen Zia in short sleeves.

  Oddyes said much the same: Mr. Benttip was a pogue after his own heart. I caught up with the young deejay—or did he catch up with me?—over by the heroin. Caterers had set out Sterno cans, syringes, and strips of tubing for tying off. Oddipuss, heating his spoon, couldn’t have sounded more enthusiastic.

  “I’m wicked psyched to see the next issue,” he said.

  Kit didn’t follow up on his suspicions. His lack of socializing was bearing down on him with brutal clarity—he’d only just now realized that Rick was flirting. The freelancer wasn’t here to talk about a new T station, no. He was here to say “sexy” every chance he got. Rick had even come to the office with a newly pierced ear, a touch Zia might go for. Among guys, only the hard-core hip would risk an earring; the accessory was still mostly taken as a sign a man was gay.

  So Kit let his suspicions lie, putting out of mind the low thought that he might stay and rifle Zia’s desk. What was he supposed to find? Works? Anyway he already knew old Leo had a private agenda for Sea Level. Three or four private agenda, more than likely. And he’d spent too much time alone with his low thoughts, his strange thoughts. Kit quit the office when the other two did but then, back home in Cambridge, he found himself alone once more. Bette had left a letter on the kitchen table.

  Kit could see it from the apartment doorway, a full sheet of print squared against the edge of the table. From the doorway, he knew she was leaving him. His wife was leaving. The believer had lost what he believed in most. Silly fumblethumbs believer. All that remained to him was nothing but one echoey room after another, worm-eaten rooms with walls of peeling dreams like the decaying fiber of his moan as he crossed the kitchen on long rancher’s legs.

  No. No, this was another sort of letter. An ordinary see-you-soon letter, ticking off the evening schedule.

  Bette wouldn’t even have written the thing, or she wouldn’t have written so much, except that she’d wanted to see what a computer printout looked like. “I tell you frankly,” Kit’s wife had written, “there are moments when I believe that I’ll never pull anything from this Apple except worms.” Aw, Betts. Kit recalled her smile, its intricate works, and then, lifting the fanfold sheet from the table, he discovered she’d clipped a second message to the back. A message that required no reading—a wrinkly blue Trojan. She’d been careful about the paper clip, making sure it wouldn’t poke
through the packaging.

  He hadn’t yet come entirely out of his wooze. As he unclipped the condom, Kit lost his bearings again, tumbling back to yesterday’s before-breakfast uproar. To exhale meeting exhale in the half-light while he and Bette snuggled and he lingered inside her. The wrinkles succulent, UnTrojan’d.

  “That next issue,” said Attaputz, shooting up, “that’s got to be a motherfucker.”

  Really, one wonders what Miss Marryme sees in this person. Why, he’s hardly a person at all—just a voice on the air.

  “It’s got to come from the basement,” the “deejay” was saying. “A lot of pressure on that next issue.”

  Even after Kit cleared his head—a couple fingers of Johnny Walker helped—Bette’s printout still read to him like something in another language. The dot matrix suggested Braille.

  His wife explained that she’d taken her latest editing over to Professor Glenza at the Medical School. She had no appointment, no deadline, but she wanted to know what he thought of what she’d done so far. “I suspect that Glenza is to me rather what you are to your Ms. Mirini,” she’d written. “(Yes Mzzzzzzz: she’s a bee in my bonnet).” Aw, Betts. “I suspect, you’ve now got two women who need mentors, saviors, knights on white chargers.”

  What language was this? Kit knew most of his wife’s stage business, but tonight’s printout careened from pose to pose in free-fall. Bette hadn’t entered another word about Zia. Instead, she’d started a fresh paragraph, saying that after the Med School she was “heading to Rowley to give Hepburn a good lunging.” Hepburn was Bette’s Morgan, a stallion, three years old. One of those odd accoutrements of family wealth that exist outside the month-by-month cash flow. Kit’s wife kept her mount stabled at a farm belonging to one of her aunts. “Tuesday’s a good day for it,” Kit read. “Aunt Georgie goes into Haymarket Tuesdays.” And after that, Bette planned to visit a psychic.

  A psychic. “She speaks with ghosts, this woman.”

  Just a voice on the air, that’s your precious hero of prank-rake radio. The way he comes in one ear and goes out the other. Why, a person can’t tell if he’s ahead of the times or behind. And so far as your humble Society reporter could see, Mr. Bitterid was no better. Saturday night I journeyed out of my body briefly, in order to get a fuller view of the proceedings. I floated up by the rafters, in the dimension of the spirit. And Boston’s newest newspaper editor why, I’ve never seen an aura so dangerously in flux.

  “Well yeah see it’s important,” declared tatty young Miss Mindyourmind—or rather her tatty young essence, afloat beside me.

  “It’s like I said,” her shade went on. “How can punk be a success?”

  Bette had gotten the psychic’s name from a man she’d known years ago. A man Kit wouldn’t have met, a holdover from a time in her life she called “The Rampage.” “Ivan,” Kit read. “One of a very few I’ve kept in touch with from out of that, well. Out of that era.” And if she was reaching back to The Rampage, Bette concluded, well. Then she must need whatever she was reaching for. She must need it badly, this seance. “Of course I’ve already told you so in words,” Bette had written. “Words, words, words. But I believe I also let you know by means of, what shall we call it, symbolic language. See attached.”

  Bette had used underlining too: “God knows I hope to avoid living Aunt Georgie, but I’d love to hear from dead Aunt Winnie.”

  Kit finished his reading, his rereading, in their bedroom. He sat on the crumpled covers, his heart once more a soaked beehive. He had a notion of finding the psychic’s address and running over there. Darling, he’d begin, I’ve been chasing some ghosts myself. He’d ask if there’d been more crank calls. And he’d say something about Zia, something to put both his and Bette’s minds to rest.

  Eventually his eyes shifted to the photo of his father.

  The photo stood on Kit’s bureau in a formal wooden frame, a Midwestern, mid-century frame. It had come with one of the last letters from Korea. Chris Viddich Senior, Nordic and full of bones, stood on the wing of his Marine Corps Sabre jet. The baggy flight suit couldn’t conceal his fitness, his muscularity. The helmet was off. His grin seemed like the fleshy outermost spill of an eruption (was this just because the photo’s black and white recalled ‘40s war flicks?), like some all-natural prehistoric sureness had proved too powerful for the suit and helmet.

  “It’s the question of the ‘70s,” Miss Marines went on—still asking her question. “This is all about the ‘70s.”

  Her own aura had an astonishing sureness, I must say, some all-natural prehistoric sureness too powerful for her longjohns and leather. And though she claimed to be of the moment, riding the ether of this decade only, she spoke in terms that were timeless.

  “It’s culture vs. counterculture,” she said. “It’s that basic. As basic as keeping up a good front when, behind the front, you’re riddled with doubt.”

  *

  Did he sleep? Did he wake and touch his wife, take coffee and the MTA? Midnight and morning seemed to carry Kit down the same shadowy tubes. By ten-thirty Wednesday, Corinna was getting exasperated. She began waving at him with each new call, showing off her nails, trying to light a fire under the boss.

  For one call, her high-gloss lips got into the act as well. Eagerly they shaped a word Kit couldn’t read. A, B, A, B?

  Then he recognized the connection, the static. He thought again of Bette’s psychic, talking to the dead.

  “Mrs. Rebes?” Kit bent close to the machine.

  Getting the Monsod story had required no pull, no Parker House. The first of the Five W’s was Who, sure, and so Kit had chased down the names of the men serving sentences longer than three years. Then he chased down their families. Finally Kit found a convict in the right place—down in solitary—with a contact on the outside he could trust. The prisoner was Junior Rebes, doing thirty-five years to life. Rape, murder, narcotics. Junior seemed to spend a lot of time in solitary, in the penitentiary basement. Down there, according to what Kit could put together, the rot was worst.

  The contact on the outside was Junior’s mother. “You got a minute for me, Missah Viddich?”

  “All the time you want.”

  It still jarred him, a woman ten or twelve years his senior calling him “Mister.” But she didn’t like using first names. She never let him visit her apartment either. She claimed she had to keep Kit away from her other son. According to her this second son, Louie-Louie, was a better boy than Junior. But Louie-Louie would expect too much from Kit. The younger boy would expect Kit to turn the whole system around for them, get them on the TV or something.

  Mrs. Rebes herself seemed to expect nothing. Today she told Kit she’d read the piece, she’d shown it around the coffee shop, and to hear her you’d think that Sea Level’s few smudgy columns were the best her boy could have hoped for.

  Kit had seen her shop. On the Goodwill Industries side of the South End, its floor tiles had long since run to yellow. There he’d made himself sleepless with caffeine, listening. Mrs. Rebes had revealed at last that she could show him something “a lot better than plain old letters.” She’d told him she had “the actual, real cassettes.” The tapes Junior had sent from prison. After that Kit had done most of the talking. The hopped-up flow of his words however had felt unreal, intrusive, hypocritical, and it’d come to Kit that he needed to work the same transformations on himself as on this string-fingered, unhappy woman. He needed to trust his own asking. He had to know that he was beyond sheer nickel-plated ambition.

  Mrs. Rebes could stare for minutes on end between question and answer. Just sit there staring in cap and apron, a still-young woman worn to shreds.

  Today Kit remained close to the phone. “There’s a certain kinda way,” the mother was saying, “it’s even better you didn’t use our real name. It’s better in the paper I mean, for someone else readin’ it.”

  “I’m glad you think so, Mrs. Rebes.”

  “It opens their eyes, in a certain kinda way. When
you say the name isn’t real, they see it could be anybody.”

  “Well … that’s the idea.”

  Fine talk. To hear him you’d think a man put together a story out of nothing but angelhair and the Ten Commandments. Kit’s using an alias for Junior, however, had been as much a matter of protecting his back as anything more noble. Globe editors lurked in the bushes. And Sea Level might have suffered worse, with a single-source story. Public Relations at Monsod had stonewalled him when Kit called for confirmation. Refused to confirm or deny. A couple of the other convicts’ families had provided corroboration here and there, but for more than one crucial passage Kit was going entirely on Junior’s cassettes. Junior was the only one who could describe the closet. So Kit had created a straw man, “Manny.” He’d declared up front that the name was an amalgam, a fiction.

  You had to do something. There were stories like that, top-page possibilities soft in a couple of spots. Kit however had never done it before, cooked up an amalgam.

  “Yeah,” the mother told him now. “But it’s not just any reporter woulda done what you done.”

  “Well … thank you.”

  “Not just any reporter look out for my boy.”

  “Thanks, Mrs. Rebes.”

  Kit began to think he knew why the mother had called. She needed bucking up; she’d developed a dependence. How’s that feel on the conscience, Viddich?

  “I’m working on a follow-up, Mrs. Rebes.” The constructive tone didn’t ring unredeemably false, at least. “Maybe next time we can meet at your place.”

  “Uh-huh well now you mention it Missah Viddich, you know that’s kind of why I called. About the, the follow-up.”

  “Don’t worry. Please. Nothing’s going to happen until you and I get a chance to talk.”