Great Jones Street (Contemporary American Fiction) Page 10

  “What you have to teach is greater than our capacity to learn. You must stop so we can understand what you’ve been doing. I’ve come a thousand miles to see you. Now begins the long wait until you come to me.”

  Later, Bucky and I watched the sun sink into the lake in a riotous blaze of color. I asked him about his obviously undeserved reputation for controversy and mayhem, and when he made no reply other than a clown’s sad smile, I wondered aloud how difficult it must be for him to occupy the stormy heights of his profession, how hard to endure the constant stress of being number one in a business where the roadside is strewn with casualties.

  “Wear sweaters,” Bucky said softly in the fading glow of twilight, sitting just a yard away from me on the spacious patio behind the house in the gathering chill. “Sweaters absorb the major impact. I wear three and sometimes four sweaters everywhere I go, weather permitting. Not on stage. I’m not talking about on stage. On stage you’ve got to be naked at the moment of impact. That’s the moment of ultimate truth and ultimate falsehood, and the only way to go is go naked. Off stage, I wear sweaters. One on top of the other. All kinds. Three and four and sometimes five sweaters.”

  Mazola June came out then, wrapped in the longest scarf I’ve ever seen in my life, and before too long they’d both nodded off to dreamy sleep, right there in front of me, a pair of babes in the northern wood.

  Title track from

  PEE-PEE-MAW-MAW

  Recorded on Anspar Records & Tapes

  International copyright secured

  Pee-Pee-Maw-Maw

  Blank mumble blat

  Babble song babble song

  Foaming at the mouth

  Won ton soupie

  Spit gargle retch

  Easter bunny juke puke

  Family zoo me and you

  Moo moo moo

  The beast is loose

  Least is best

  Pee-pee-maw-maw

  The beast is loose

  Least is best

  Pee-pee-maw-maw

  Nil nully void

  Biting down on hankychiffs

  Where’s the end round this bend

  Scream dream baby

  Boo holler hoot

  Picking on the ear string

  Cut a slice of steel guitar

  Spang bang clang

  The beast is loose

  Least is best

  Pee-pee-maw-maw

  The beast is loose

  Least is best

  Pee-pee-maw-maw

  Pee-pee-maw-maw

  “Pee-Pee-Maw-Maw”

  Words-and-music Bucky Wunderlick

  Copyright © 1971 Teepee Music

  All rights administered Transparanoia Inc.

  Material not to be offered for resale.

  None of the copyrighted material herein is to be published in any form whatsoever without written permission from Transparanoia Inc., 30 Rockefeller Plaza, New York 10020.

  Copyright secured under the Port Moresby, Pan American, International, World and Universal copyright conventions.

  Public performance rights for U.S. and Canada owned by Teepee Music, an affiliate of Transparanoia Inc. All other world rights owned by Chumley Productions, an affiliate of Transparanoia Inc.

  Made in U.S.A.

  All rights reserved.

  Officially registered and legally restricted.

  12

  WHEN I LIVED in the mountains I had a special room built into the studio portion of my house. It was an anechoic chamber, absolutely soundproof and free of vibrations. The whole room was bedded on springs and lined with fiberglass baffles that absorbed all echo. There I listened to tapes of my own material, both in transition stage and final form. Music was a liquid presence in that chamber, invisible wine for the ear to taste. I used the room often but not always to play the tapes. Sometimes I just sat there, wedged in a block of silence, trying to avoid the feeling that time is stretchable. The small room seemed a glacial waste, bounded only by solid materials, subject to no central thesis, far more frighteningly immaculate than it was when pure music skated from the tapes. If you could stretch a given minute, what would you find between its unstuck components? Probably some kind of astral madness. A bleak comprehension of the final size of things. The room yielded no real secrets, of course, and provided no more than a hint of the nature of silence itself. There was always something to hear, even in that shaved air, the earth roiling into a turn, cells in my body answering to war.

  Azarian came from Los Angeles to offer condolences. He climbed the stairs, shook hands with me, stood at the far end of the room. Somewhere along the way he had been given official word; her death was natural, coming as a result of unrelenting neglect. An acute pancreatic infection, viral pneumonia, an intestinal obstruction, a non-infectious kidney disease centered in the blood vessels of that organ. I wondered how much pain she’d endured in order to comply with her own cruel rudiments of conduct. Attrition. Let the stress of trying to live determine how you die. Ride along and hope it doesn’t hurt too much. The intransigence of an enchanted child. Loving the child, I’d been half in fear of the woman, knowing she was serious, an unbroken line defining whatever it was she’d hoped to gain or lose. Someone to measure myself against. Azarian went on to say that Globke had contacted the family and arranged for the body to be sent back home, air freight express.

  “What are you doing in L.A.?” I said.

  “Tremendous things. I probably shouldn’t tell you about it. In fact I’m determined not to.”

  “What is it?”

  “Blackness.”

  “Black music?”

  “Black everything,” Azarian said. “Blackness as such.”

  “What’s it like being into blackness.”

  “I’m not too far into it yet. But I’m making my way, little by little. I really shouldn’t be talking about it. It’s really deep, Bucky. Deep and dark. It’s pressing against me with tremendous weight, practically crushin chest. A lot of fear is involved. All kinds of fea hard to pick out a single moment when I’m not afraid.”

  “How do you get into something like blackness? Do you have to shed your whiteness first? Or do you just go hurtling forward, bang, and risk all kinds of injury, mind and body?”

  “How do I get into blackness? Is that what you’re asking?”

  “Can you put it in words?” I said.

  “It’s a street thing. Blackness is a street thing. It’s the self-identification of the people on the street. Watts is a whole big bunch of streets. Same with Bed-Stuy. Harlem, it’s not so much the streetness of Harlem, it’s more the history and the badness of the vibes. Black is baddest in the best sense. I mean that’s where you have to go to make sense of the magic of existence. You pass through all that streetness and weight and terror and you come out a more dimensional person.”

  “But how do you get into blackness, being nonblack?”

  “I can’t put it in words,” he said.

  I pointed toward a chair but he said he preferred to stand. He seemed to avoid looking directly at me. The curse in the eyes of the bereaved. I watched puddles form under his boots as a series of tiny ice slides occurred.

  “How’s the band?”

  “We’re laying down vocals,” he said. “Still plenty of contract problems though. I don’t know at this point who we’re recording for. People come in screaming at us. When are you making it back out?”

  “Not yet. I’ve been set back. Have to reassemble myself.”

  “Bucky, these people I represent. They’re real interested in getting their hands on the product we spoke about last time I was here.”

  “Talk to Happy Valley.”

  “I’m afraid to, Bucky. It’s not just fear of being physically hurt or maimed for life. It’s the whole idea of who they are that scares me.”

  “Who are they?”

  “You know that better than I do. You’ve been in touch with them. They hired Opel to deal for them. At this late date you know more ab
out them than I do. In other words you’re the one that should talk to them. I know you’re in mourning or whatever the hip equivalent of mourning is. So obviously you’ve got other things on your mind and I appreciate the fact that if you don’t want to do business right now, there’s a time and place. But if I go in there and talk to Happy Valley on my own, anything and everything might and can happen, especially since there’s been a split in their own ranks.”

  “That makes things more interesting,” I said. “You can play one side against the other.”

  “Are you crazy? I wouldn’t get involved in anything like that. Are you crazy?”

  “Why don’t you stick to music then?”

  “I am sticking to music, Bucky. Being into blackness the way I am, I’m getting interested in root forms of rock ‘n’ roll. I’m beginning to delve real deep in that area. But I also have this other part of my life that I’m trying to find a place for. There’s so much to be afraid of in contemporary society. I’m establishing a permanent relationship with these people I’ve mentioned on the Coast in order, among other things, to examine and find the sources of my own fear. Together we’ve come up with a plan whereby you with your influence and mystique can make an offer to the Happy Valley Farm Commune, this or that faction, flip a coin, whoever’s got control of the product, and you can do it without letting on that I’m involved or my people on the Coast are involved or anybody’s involved except who you say the involved party is. Do you want to hear the details?”

  I shook my head and once again pointed out a chair. Azarian wanted to stand, remaining in a far corner, apparently trying to avoid the center of the room, an area he seemed to regard as dangerous, if not totally unapproachable, Opel’s deathly fumes still clinging to furniture and choice belongings, and he talked of the old days, his uncomplicated fame, the girls who walked in and out of his bed, several every night, coming and going like popcorn vendors at a circus. We shook hands again. Then he went uptown to be interviewed on stereo FM.

  13

  NOTHING CHANGED, altered or varied. There were no plants in the room to climb or die. I saw no insects. Sleet struck the window with sparse fragile impact and all demolition in the area was halted by weather. Time did not seem to pass as much as build, slowly gathering weight. This was the sole growth in the room and against it hung the silence, peeled back to reveal the white nightmares voiced on the floor below. I tried to remember places and things. Rain on the runway of the international airport. Rain on the simulated hamlet. Rain in the terminal province. Rain at vespers in the heliport near the river. Rain in the abstract garden. Rain in the boots of the bitch in Munich. Rain on the nameless moor.

  I returned to the radio, to watching the firehouse, to becoming fixed in place. The artist sits still, finally, because the materials he deals with begin to shape his life, instead of being shaped, and in stillness he seeks a form of self-defense, one that ends with putrefaction, or stillness caught in time lapse. But I wasn’t quite at that point in my career. I dreamed a return to the old palaces, the great jaded hulks of rock ‘n’ roll, boarded up but still standing, as far as I knew, in this city and that, always on the edge of comatose slums.

  A man came to see me. He was wrapped in a double-breasted suit and high tight shirt collar. His custom-styled hair was rigid and thick, sprayed into place and fitted trimly over his forehead—a work of Renaissance masonry, it seemed. He stood in the doorway, coat over his arm, earnest hand waiting to be taken.

  “Who are you?”

  “ABC,” he said.

  “Forget it.”

  “Nothing big or elaborate. An abbreviated interview. Your televised comments on topics of interest. Won’t take ten minutes. We’re all set up downstairs. Ten minutes. You’ve got my word, Bucky. The word of a personal admirer.”

  “Positively never.”

  “I’ve got a slot on the local mid-morning news. In case you didn’t catch the face. I do youth events and youth personalities. Sure, it’s the same old commercial brainwash that we’ve all been fighting against but on the other hand the only way we can get exposure for certain voices is to slip them into little scheduling cracks here and there. It’s a question of easing the pressure the different slots exert on each other and then slipping in there with the visionaries, the prophets if you will, the authentic non-bullshit voices. Ten minutes of televised question and answer. Frankly I’ve been researching hell out of you.”

  “No.”

  “I haven’t done this kind of massive research since I’ve been in the glamour end of the business. I used to be in the ass end. But there’s a softening in the market as old faces crumble and new slots become available. I’m trying to fill some of these slots with youth-oriented conceptuals. Bucky, just your unrehearsed comments on the rumors, the whereabouts, the future plans if any. What I’m making is really a small demand on your time. Frankly it barely qualifies as a demand, considering the demands I’m accustomed to making.”

  “Maybe later in the decade.”

  “Your power is growing, Bucky. The more time you spend in isolation, the more demands are made on the various media to communicate some relevant words and pictures. We make demands on you not because we’re media leeches of whatever media but frankly because proportionate demands are being made on us. People want words and pictures. They want images. Your power grows. The less you say, the more you are. But this is an obvious truism of the industry and I didn’t come down here to present my credentials as some kind of theorist or moneychanger in ideas. I’m an on-camera entity. I do my thing and go to black. It’s a complicated way to live. Let me tell you in ten words or less what I’ve got downstairs.”

  “Can it wait?”

  “I’ve got camera and I’ve got sound,” he said. “They’re down there in the street. Cameraman, soundman, both top people, artists if you will. We’d like to do the interview directly in front of the building. We do a vertical pan down the building right to you and me. We’re standing there in the sleet. I’m holding an umbrella over both of us as we talk.”

  He looked at my hands and then my face, as if checking flesh tones and textures to measure against his camera’s passion, the nibbling skills of its enormous jaws.

  “Come back when I’m not here,” I said. “It’ll be easier. You can do whatever you want.”

  “I’m really anxious to fill those slots, Bucky. Your power grows. I hate to think of all those slots going unfilled. What’ll we put in there? We’ve used clips of rock festivals absolutely everywhere but in the Okefenokee Swamp and I’m sure that’s next with everybody either getting typhoid or ripped apart by alligators.”

  “That’s an interesting shirt you’re wearing.”

  “This shirt I’m wearing? This shirt is a knit concept. Higher neckband than the average knit. Treble-button cuffs. Strong coloration. Snug body-fit. It’s a Scandinavian import and it totals out at twenty-two ninety-five. Take a look at my face.”

  “Why?”

  “Take a look at my face. Go ahead, a close look. Now what do you see?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “You see healthy pores. You see pores that aren’t clogged. How do I do it, right? I’ve got a facial-aid skin machine. This is a device for cleansing pores of all the pollutants in the air. It blasts pollutants right out of the holes in the face. Why do I take the trouble, right? Listen, I’m on camera an average of three minutes total every day of the week six days a week. That tells you everything. The heat. The lights. The tension. The sweat. The tight close-ups. Now it begins to make sense, right? The skin machine. The accessory pore-brush. The clear gel peel-away mask. The deep dissolving nonallergenic soap. I make it my business to communicate a crisp image. Do you want me to tell you how I knew you were here?”

  “No.”

  “Somebody talked,” he said. “Somebody’s pushing. Somebody’s trying to get you out of here. But meanwhile it’s time for me to get back uptown. Shame to waste that slot. God bless, despite everything. So long now.
See you soon. Peace.”

  “War,” I said.

  I listened to the radio. Announcers took turns reciting the same news reports. Each man gave way to the next man in the series until a cycle was completed. Wording was altered only slightly and vocal tones remained consistent all through the hour. Out of a nest of static came a new voice now, fantastic and savage, beautiful to my ear, churning with gastric power.

  “Lissen what I say, bay-bee, this be Doo-Wop here, bop and groove, yow yow yow, lissen what I say but no do what I do, boogie with your footie, ay chihuahua, stone gold monster music, down and round, popping at my console, Doo-Wop bay-bee, lissen and live, stone gold number eight, Bad Jasper Brown with Mama Mama Mama, five and dive, Doo-Wop bopping your dead head, yow yow yow, stone gold eight, mama mama what’s it all mean, Bad Jasper, cut me down.”

  Hanes visited then. His exemplary fatigue made him appear even younger than he was, stylish boy of the boulevards, intelligent and frail, ever ready to renounce even his own spectral pleasures, a voluptuary indulging himself in the idea of restraint. He was carrying a Macy’s shopping bag.

  “Regrets et cetera,” he said. “She was just beginning to accept me as a person. She even said she might eventually learn to like me. I have no reason to believe it wouldn’t have worked out—Opel and I working together.”

  “Did you come for the package?”

  “There’s a corpo on the steps outside.”

  “Must be recent,” I said.

  “His head’s been bashed.”

  “We need Florence Nightingale to come back and tell us how to deal with these matters.”

  “I may get an eight-track stereo cartridge recorder. What kind do you recommend I get? It’s the one thing my music system’s missing. Don’t let money interfere with your line of thought. I may very soon be in a position to afford pretty much the best.”