The yellow pages ad for the Midwest firm was a drawing of a figure in what might almost have been a cop’s uniform shining a flashlight into an alley where a teary-eyed, scared little girl huddled. In fact, the last runaway child he’d helped return (to a family of wealthy aluminum manufacturers terrified of scandal) was a seventeen-year-old, three-hundred-pound blob of fat with an insatiable appetite for methedrine and for whores who’d sit on his face.
When Krazy Kid said good-bye to the German shepherd and then to him, he went to the dog run and let Marlene off the leash. She bounded forward, stopped, seemed to watch a slightly stubby dog with some Doberman in him.
A little farther down the fence, staring through the dogs and trees and iron lampposts of this ragged-assed old-fashioned park, looking like he was gazing into the navel of the universe and was not pleased by what he saw, was a skinny black man with gray hair. He was dressed in ratty pin-striped dress pants and a turtleneck jersey. On his head was a broken-down velvet Borsalino that must once have belonged to a pimp.
BD guessed that at one time Chambliss had been that man. Right now, though, what he did mainly was deal, shoot junk, and climb fire escapes to break into the apartments of people who went to work during the day.
BD moved down the fence, keeping his eye on Marlene like that was his concern. When he was close, Chambliss—without shifting his gaze, without moving his mouth—said, “That one you was interested in? Calls herself Aurora?”
Marlene was racing in an improvised pack up a dirt mound and down the other side. A woman called, “Regal!” to the Doberman mix.
Chambliss said, “She’s in a political commune on Avenue B and Sixth Street, southeast corner. There’s some commie dyke runs it. They got pictures on the windows of Chairman Mao. I seen Aurora out shopping at the bodega around the corner. She does that every morning.”
A group of kids barefoot and in tatters came by ringing cowbells and chanting “Hare Krishna.” A police cruiser sped across 9th Street with its cherry-top flashing. The kids all screamed, “Pig” and gave the cops the finger.
Chambliss said, “I gave you the lead. You owe me twenty.”
“Friday.” BD just breathed the word but compared with the other man’s voice it felt like he was shouting. That was company policy; Chambliss got paid for the week on Friday.
Chambliss was silent for a long moment but BD knew he was going to speak again. He listened to the chants fading, to distant sirens, to the occasional yip and snarl from the dog run.
Then he heard, “I hear some queer dude last night was asking about undercovers. Says he knew one was working the neighborhood a few years back disguised as a halfway house boy, calling himself BD. Wants to know what became of him.”
BD always kept a twenty folded thin in his pocket. He had it in his hand as Chambliss pushed away from the fence. The black man seemed as if he might have something more to add.
Before BD could ask what that was, Marlene, bothered by Regal the Doberman mutt, took a bite out of his shoulder as the two of them began snapping and snarling. The mutt’s owner yelled her protest. As BD looked that way, Chambliss ambled past, his hands hung at his sides. When he snapped up the twenty it was too fast for a human eye to follow.
BD’s living room had a sofa and chair from the Goodwill, a telephone, and not much more. Late that afternoon BD sat on the couch with his feet resting on the chair and talked to his boss. He rolled a joint as he spoke.
“Aurora Sun?” he said. “Formerly Marilyn Friedberg of Greenwich, Connecticut? She’s living at Ninety-three Avenue B. I started charting her daily routine this morning.
“Yeah, I’m sure. She’s stopped washing her hair and wearing dresses but it’s her. The photos are on their way up to you.”
BD paused, twirled the joint in his fingers, and said, “I got a question. About an old case from early sixty-five. You remember a queer rich kid named Jonathan Duncan who called himself Ray Light? We put a snatch on him, returned him to the bosom of his family. I’ve got reason to think the little freak is back.”
Marlene was stretched out on the floor. She raised her head and BD scratched her ears as his boss searched the files. It turned out that as far as Guardian Lamp Investigations knew nobody was looking for Jonathan Duncan. The boss wondered if BD had fond memories or something.
That made BD angrier than he expected to be. He said, “I don’t feel a lot of sympathy for a spoiled fag who had some queen supporting him and had a girlfriend on the side and a rich family spends thousands of dollars to make him come home and be rich along with them again. It was my job to return him. And I did it. I just wonder if he’s back here and trying to fuck up our operation.”
Again he listened to his supervisor. “I am sticking to business and not letting things get personal,” he said. “Aurora will be packed for shipping by Wednesday. Thursday at the latest.”
After he hung up and fired the joint BD thought of Ray Light and Judy Finch on the stoop. He remembered how he’d risked blowing his cover for no reason at all when he went up and asked them for a match.
Later, on the day they’d planned to do the snatch, he’d tailed the two of them, called in his location from pay phones as they sat on benches with her holding him, traveled arm in arm in a wide arc through the city. He forgot to breathe sometimes watching them.
Then they turned back toward 4th Street and he knew they were headed to the spot where the snatch was set to go down. For a moment he wanted to catch up and warn them, to be part of what they were and run off with them.
Instead he made the call and Ray Light got taken off the street, right on schedule. The next morning Judy’s father walked her to school. The day after that she was gone.
That had been his first assignment. He was a lot more professional now and nothing like that had happened since. Tuesday he was up early staking out the address on Avenue B, confirming what Chambliss had said about Aurora Sun’s morning schedule.
By that evening the Friedbergs had seen the photos of a barefoot waif in an oversize muumuu and confirmed that this was their daughter. The snatch was set up for the next morning. It was all going very smoothly.
He started drinking that night at the Annex opposite the north corner of Tompkins Square Park. There he met some people he kind of knew and ended up at a crash pad where the air was so full of pot and incense smoke that it felt like you needed to part it like beaded curtains. Something had been added to the grass. The walls were moving.
Then he saw what appeared to be Ray Light looking just as he had the day he got snatched. With Light was a crowd of very thin, pale, and amused people. They wavered in the candlelight, stared at him, and made kissing mouths.
BD watched as Ray stepped forward. Only when the figure was right in front of him did he realize it was actually Judy Finch.
“How’s it going, BD,” she asked. She was taller than he remembered and much thinner.
“The name’s Bobby Danton,” he said.
“Cut the shit, BD,” she replied and smiled. “You’ve been asking about me. You want to know where I went? After you kidnapped Ray and then starting hanging around in front of our house, my parents thought I was going to be snatched. They were getting divorced and to keep me safe I got sent to an all-girl school in fucking Vermont. Two and a half years of subzero hard time. Thanks to you.”
She spoke in a loud clear voice that everyone around could hear over the music. Later he found out she was studying acting. The pupils of her eyes were like pinpricks.
“Doing a lot of meth?” he asked.
“Uh-huh. Another thing you need to answer for. Brought up in the East Village and the most I’d done was a couple of tokes of grass and a sip or two of Daddy’s booze. One semester at school and I had an extreme speed need.”
She took out a matchbook, stuck it in his shirt pocket, and said, “This is Ray Light’s number. He always talks about that vision you had of our future. You need to call him.” By the time he could react, she and everyone with
her were gone.
A few years before when they had snatched Ray Light, BD was around the corner in a phone booth. He’d just made the call that set the operation in motion. The car with the kid facedown in the backseat sped right past him.
For an instant it was as if he were in Ray’s head. In that moment he saw three figures: one in denim and short hair, one in leathers, one in flowing robes. They stood on a stage amid bright light and flowing color. He knew the three were Ray and Judy and him.
The next morning BD and Marlene watched from a block away as Aurora walked to the local bodega. He gave the signal and a woman from Guardian Lamp came up behind Aurora while a man suddenly stepped in her way. She didn’t even yell when they hustled her into the car that rolled up the street.
Then someone appeared and snapped a picture of them. A woman shouted, “Kidnapping pigs!”
“Nazis!” yelled a man and threw a beer bottle against the front window as the car jumped a light and sped away.
“Hey, dog man,” said a familiar voice. BD turned and someone took his picture. Krazy Kid and her sleaze of a boyfriend were there. She spat at him. The boyfriend had a camera. He took another shot. BD went at them. Marlene snarled. They ran but not before getting one last shot of him and his dog.
When he got home, someone waited across the street and watched him go in the front door. BD packed everything he owned into two suitcases. He looked out the front windows and saw a couple of guys standing in doorways on the block. He called Guardian Lamp.
“Someone talked,” said the boss.
“Chambliss,” said BD. The whole thing was a setup. He should have known that when Chambliss said someone was looking for him.
“You trusted him too fucking much,” said the boss. “I’ll send a car around to pick you up. We got stuff to discuss.”
The issue of The East Village Other with pictures of BD on the front pages and “Undercover Cop” in headlines hadn’t yet hit the street and been reprinted in hippie enclaves everywhere. But BD knew that his career was over.
He waited downstairs in the front hall. When the car pulled up, he came out the door of his building. Someone stepped up to him saying, “Press. I’d like to talk to you.” But Marlene with one growl and an aborted lunge took care of that.
No one else came near them. He put his luggage in the trunk and got in the backseat with the dog. He wondered how he’d take care of her.
Somebody shouted, “That’s him!” as the car pulled away. Someone took a picture of him. He took the matchbook with Ray Light’s phone number out of his pocket.
BD remembered something about what Judy had called his vision. He knew that the three figures were Ray Light, Judy Finch, and him. But he hadn’t been able to tell which one of them he was.
Part Three
Early in 1971, a couple of days after his band, Lord of Light, played the Fillmore East, Ray Light was interviewed in a booth at the Odessa, the blowsy old Ukrainian Restaurant on Tompkins Square Park. Judy had taken him there when they were kids. He sat facing the front window so he could keep an eye on Marlene, who sat next to the parking meter where she’d been tied.
“It’s been awhile since you’ve been in New York,” said the rock critic for The Village Voice. This was a second-stringer—not Bangs or Goldstein. But then Ray was still young and his group was an opening act at the Fillmore—not the headliner or even the number two band.
The critic made statements instead of asking questions. He had hair that came down like a curtain to his shoulders without a curl or twist but with some gray strands.
Ray saw him as a failed PhD candidate who’d blown out his frontal lobes in the battle for cosmic consciousness. Not someone with whom he could make contact.
He said, “It’s been almost six years. I lived here until my family had me kidnapped. This is where I met my soul mate. And the private eye who snatched me.”
He planted this information in each interview. His bright smile gave it an eerie quality. Judy had taught him that trick.
“You were sixteen when you were returned to your family,” said the interviewer.
The guy had done his homework and Ray believed this was going well. “They opened up my mind back there,” he said. “Shock treatment is better than acid.”
“You were close to Phillip Marcy, the playwright.”
Ray frowned for a moment like he was trying to think how best to put this. “I mostly called him the Man. Close? Well, he kept me handcuffed to his bed a few times. Recently we were in touch. In lots of ways he was a monster. But he taught me stuff.”
The reporter raised an eyebrow, seemed interested but a bit uneasy about asking what kind of stuff got taught.
Ray Light told him, “The Man said that if you don’t make your own story out of your life, someone will make his story out of your life. I guess he couldn’t take his own advice.”
Ray had known the Man was going to jump before he did. He had gleaned that from a kid in Seattle months earlier. They’d linked minds when the other recognized him on the street. Later in a hotel room, Ray caught in the other’s memory a picture of himself in Rolling Stone alongside a brief article on the suicide of Phillip Marcy.
He hadn’t thought much about the Man but after that vision, he talked about their time together in an interview in the San Francisco Oracle. When it came out, he sent it to the Man, then called him up and said he had a song, “Spangles, Bondage, and Speed,” that he wanted them to sing onstage. Not at the Fillmore but maybe at Max’s or On-dine in a midnight show.
The Man refused. Ray insisted. Ray spoke about him on the radio. When the Man jumped, the article in Rolling Stone was accompanied by a picture of Ray.
Now the Man was part of Ray’s story. A legend was being built. As the tour progressed there were whispers, and someone had nicknamed the group “Ray of Dark Light.”
The interview was winding down and Ray indicated he had an appointment. The reporter said, “This was fascinating,” but seemed anxious to get away, which was perfect.
Marlene danced on her leash when he returned to her. She had been the first thing that had gotten taken away from BD when he arrived begging to become part of the vision of the three of them that he’d once seen.
A couple of nights before, Ray had stood in the wings of the Fillmore East and looked through a peephole at the crowd filtering into the seats that soared up the roof of the old movie house.
Here Joplin had shouted and moaned as the red and yellow plasma of Joshua Light Show exploded on the screen behind her and the packed balconies screamed back. Now Joplin was gone. Tonight’s main act was not going to fill the theater and there was a rumor the Fillmore was closing. The crown was in the street. Nobody knew who’d be the next king or queen.
The sound check had been done. The emcee was warming up the crowd. His drummer and bass player, steady guys who kept to themselves, waited behind him in the wings.
Judy came up beside him and put her hand on his arm, smiling. She could play keyboards and sing backup like Emmylou Harris. BD appeared carrying a tambourine and looking as if he still couldn’t figure out what had happened to him.
“And now the Fillmore East is proud to present, Elektra recording artists Lord of Light.”
There was good applause and some cheers as they made their entrance. The audience saw what Ray had picked out of BD’s mind years before. Ray wore black leather from head to toe. The first song would be “Dollar a Day Boy,” about the girl who loved him and the cop who busted him. The girl now had a blond crew cut and a Marlboro in her mouth. In silk robes and hair to his waist the ex-cop moved like he was in a trance.
The trio paused and looked out at the audience. In that moment Ray linked with another consciousness. And in it he caught a glimpse of his future.
That glimpse was what had him standing at the eastern end of St. Mark’s Place on a February evening in a light, cold rain. He faced Tompkins Square and watched the lights come on.
In the neighborhood a
round the park there were patches of black where streetlamps were broken, storefronts boarded up, buildings abandoned. It had always been a gritty neighborhood. Now speed and junk ruled and graffiti sprouted everywhere: death heads and Black Panther symbols, swastikas and cult signs.
People mourned the death of the East Village. Ray knew the good part was just starting. This time and place needed its own myths and he was prepared to provide them.
Hendrix’s gift while he lived was to stand on a stage amid the smoke and reverb and for a solid hour enfold ten thousand minds inside his own.
Ray could touch the consciousness of a few people. Among those were certain ones like Judy and BD who could see not just his past but his future.
He had once asked a guru, a Jungian analyst in Taos who had done much mescaline, about this gift. The old woman had looked right through him and said, “You are a diver in the gestalt sea where there is no then or now or will be. The ones you find there know you entirely.”
Shock treatment and drugs had sharpened his ability to find these people. But lately what they showed him was small. He had few hints of what lay beyond the Fillmore performance and was afraid that his gift was gone.
Then on Friday night someone in the audience showed Ray himself all alone and in a spotlight in front of a huge iron gate. The gate was black and decorated with gargoyle heads with red and green moving eyes. His expression was desperate, possessed, and he sang into a hand mike. Singing at the Gates of Hell was how he thought of it.
The vision chilled and mesmerized him. He had to find out how he’d come to be at the gates and what would happen next. It bothered Ray that Judy and BD were not with him there.
All he knew was that the one he’d touched was a woman, that her name was Rainier though it had once been different, and that she thought of herself as a witch and prophet. After the show and for the night and day afterward he searched for her and hoped she hadn’t gone back to Westchester or Queens.
The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy Page 19