Great Jones Street (Contemporary American Fiction) Read online

“He throws me out right to my face. A spontaneous put-down. He is famous for this kind of thing but I stand here and take it because it has been an emotion-packed twenty-four hours and he is a star of the firmament while I am only his personal manager who took him out of the rain when he was a scrawny kid and made him what he is today, an even scrawnier kid. But just so you don’t think I’m not appreciative of what you’ve been doing in the later stages, normal lyrics or no normal lyrics, I want you to know a few weeks ago wherever I was in the vast Southland I picked up HBQ Memphis on the car radio and they were doing ‘Pee-Pee-Maw-Maw,’ both sides, no commercial interruptions. Not that it’s so unusual. I just want you to know I’m not all cash-and-carry. I relate to your sound. It’s not my sound. It’s not the sound I want my kid to make. But it’s a valid sound and I relate to it.”

  “Love to all,” I said.

  I watched him make his way down the narrow staircase, prodigious in his width, haunches rocking in that firm eternal way of beasts of burden. I imagined him a few minutes hence, standing on the Bowery trying to hail a cab to take him to his car, a custom-made machine gleaming at the top of a circular ramp in some midtown garage. Globke was accustomed to being propelled, ballistically, to and from distant points of commerce, and so there was something agreeably serene, even biblical, in his rudimentary journey down those stairs.

  I set the radio dial between local stations and picked up some dust from a delta-blues guitar far off in the night. After a while I had some soup and went to bed, wearing Opel’s coat. I knew it was warm wherever she was, most likely a crowded city in one of the timeless lands she loved so much. She favored warm climates and teeming streets. In my mind she was always emerging from hotels in timeless lands and looking around for signs of a teeming street. She liked to watch Arabs spit, and was entertained by similar shows of local prowess in non-Islamic countries. Opel’s father was a titled American—president of a small Texas bank, board member of a utilities company, partner in an auto dealership. She fled all this for a life in rock ‘n’ roll. She wanted to be lead singer in a coke-snorting hard-rock band but was prepared to be content beating a tambourine at studio parties. Her mind was exceptional, a fact she preferred to ignore. All she desired was the brute electricity of that sound. To make the men who made it. To keep moving. To forget everything. To be the sound. That was the only tide she heeded. She wanted to exist as music does, nowhere, beyond the maps of language. Opel knew almost every important figure in the business, in the culture, in the various subcultures. But she had no talent as a performer, not the slightest, and so drifted along the jet trajectories from band to band, keeping near the fevers of her love, that obliterating sound, until we met eventually in Mexico, in somebody’s sister’s bed, where the tiny surprise of her name, dropping like a pebble on chrome, brought our incoherent night to proper conclusion, the first of all the rest, transactions in reciprocal tourism.

  She was beautiful in a neutral way, emitting no light, defining herself in terms of attrition, a skinny thing, near blond, far beyond recall from the hard-edged rhythms of her life, Southwestern woman, hard to remember and forget. She went on tour with the band and we lived together in houses, motels and apartments, Bucky and Opel, rarely minus an entourage, the beds piled high with androgynous debris. There was never a moment between us that did not measure the extent of our true connection. To go harder, take more, die first. But before it could happen, Opel began her travels to timeless lands.

  3

  I DON’T KNOW exactly when it was that I became aware of footsteps in the room above mine. They were measured steps, falling lightly but in obvious patterns, suggesting a predatory meditation, as of pygmies rehearsing a ritual kill.

  The mornings were cold and dark. Down the street the rounded doors of the firehouse remained closed except for one day at dawn when a truck nosed slowly out, its lights dissolved in low fog, silent men clutched to its sides, apparitional in black slickers. Derelicts were everywhere, often too wasted to beg. Many of them had an arm or leg in a cast, and the ones with bottles mustered sullenly in doorways, never breaking their empties, leaving them behind as they themselves moved north to forage, or simply disappeared. Two feeble men wrestled quietly, humming wordless curses at each other, and an old woman limped into view, bundled in pounds of rags, an image in the penciled light of long retreat from Moscow. I opened the window and touched the brittle crust of snow settled on the ledge. The fire engine went speeding down Broadway, pure sound now, shrill wind, a voice from the evilest dreams.

  A boy named Hanes, the fairest of Globke’s assistants, came to see me one afternoon. He brought mail, newspapers, contracts and some cash.

  “You were seen in a drive-in restaurant in Ocala, Florida,” he said.

  Hanes was barely twenty, poetically delicate in appearance, and it was hard to imagine him at work in the Transparanoia offices, a place where squat men, out-sweating the effects of air conditioning, were willing to hack off slabs of their own body fat to sell by the pound over transatlantic phone hookups.

  “You were also seen at the airport in Benton Harbor, Michigan. According to the thing in the paper, the person who saw you walked up to you and said: ‘Hey, Bucky, where you going?’ And you said back: ‘To get some Chinese food.’ Then a two-engine plane rolled up and you got aboard.”

  Hanes sat on the edge of the unmade bed. His eyes never left me. I remembered a night on the West Coast some months before. The country’s blood was up, this or that atrocity, home or abroad, and even before we hit the stage the whole place was shaking. We were the one group that people depended on to validate their emotions and this was to be a night of above-average fury. In our own special context we challenged the authenticity of the crowd’s passion and wrath, dipping our bodies in coquettish blue light, merely teasing our instruments for the first hour or so. Then we caved their heads with about twenty thousand watts of frozen sound. The pressure of their response was immense, blasting in with the force of a natural disaster, and it became even greater, more physically menacing, as they pressed in around the stage, massing for the holocaust, until finally it broke, all hell, and the only lucid memory I later had was of someone slightly familiar pushing across the stage, his face brilliant with pain, eyes clearly seeking me through every layer of chaos, Hanes, stopping now to punch the drums, whirling in his torn shirt, a sleeve hanging empty, Hanes himself, tumbling backward over a bank of amps.

  “I’ve got a new Garrard changer,” he said.

  “Glad to hear it.”

  “My tone arm setup has zero tracking error.”

  “Do one thing for me,” I said. “Take these contracts back.”

  That night there was a fire in an oil drum on the street below the window. Four people stood around the drum, occasionally tossing wood and garbage into the flames. I tried to read one of the newspapers Hanes had left. The words made no sense to me. I looked at the cover of a magazine and could not quite put together the letters in big block print. In time I fell asleep in a chair, remaining there after waking. There was a knock at the door. I went to the window and looked down to the street, where three of the people were still gathered, bouncing on their toes in the cold. The fourth was at the door, an ageless girl in defeated wet fur, trying to blink her way back to the realm of events. Her long druid’s face rested on a package she carried high on her chest

  “I’m Skippy, Bucky. I just want to give you something from somebody and I won’t hang around and bother you, I really promise and all. Can I come inside for a minute and no more?”

  “But not your friends,” I said.

  “There’s a body in the hall downstairs.”

  “Probably mine.”

  “First off this boy I know from New Mexico, Bobby from New Mexico, made me promise to tell you he knows where to get some unbelievable hash that you can have for nothing and you don’t even have to talk to him. I’m pretty sure that’s it—hash, for nothing, unbelievable.”

  “I turn on and off with the
radio now.”

  “It’s okay really because that’s not the something I’m supposed to give you anyway.”

  She handed me the package.

  “What is it?” I said.

  “They want you to hold it here because they trust you and there’s no other safe place. Someone will come and pick it up at the right time.”

  “Who wants me to hold it?”

  “Happy Valley Farm Commune.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s a new earth-family on the Lower East Side that has the whole top floor of one tenement. Some of them are ex-Desert Surfers.”

  “They don’t trust each other. But they trust me.”

  “I guess so,” she said. “Three of them are outside now. But they didn’t want to come up. They want to show you they respect privacy. They want to return the idea of privacy to American life. They have shotguns, they have handguns, they have knives, they have blowtorches, they have army explosives, they have deer rifles. They stole whatever’s in that package. I’m supposed to tell you that Dr. Pepper is going to analyze the contents as soon as they can find out where he is. So once they find him and either get him to Essex Street or go to wherever he is, someone will come over here and get the package. I’m supposed to say Dr. Pepper, analyze, Essex Street, get the package. I’m pretty sure that’s it.”

  “Your friends aren’t too well organized, are they?”

  “They’re getting it together. It takes time, I guess. They’re new to the city and all. But they think what you’re doing right now is really something.”

  “What am I doing?”

  “Returning the idea of privacy to American life.”

  “Nice seeing you,” I said. “Always nice to see nice people. If you ever want the package and I’m either unconscious, dead or not here, have your friends kick in the door. I’ll leave the package in an obvious place.”

  “My name’s Skippy.”

  “I know.”

  “I can come back later if you want. Whatever you want, Bucky. I can bring my friend Maeve. Or I can come all by myself. Or I can just send Maeve.”

  “None of those,” I said.

  “Okay, real glad I came up and all. I was in Atlantic City when you did the four straight hours. Bobby from New Mexico was in Houston the night you weren’t there. Said it was killer. Broke his left wrist jumping off a wall. Real ga-ga night. Okay, have to go now. Too bad we didn’t get too much chance to really talk. But it’s okay, Bucky. I’m nonverbal just like you.”

  From the window I watched her talk with the three men before all walked off in a light snow. I heard the footsteps again, someone pacing in a complicated pattern. The package was about twelve inches square, not heavy, wrapped in brown paper sealed with plain brown tape. I dropped it in a small trunk in a corner of the room. It took a long time for the fire in the oil drum to go out. I put on Opel’s coat and waited for first light.

  Slowly along Great Jones, signs of commerce became apparent, of shipping and receiving, export packaging, custom tanning. This was an old street. Its materials were in fact its essence and this explains the ugliness of every inch. But it wasn’t a final squalor. Some streets in their decline possess a kind of redemptive tenor, the suggestion of new forms about to evolve, and Great Jones was one of these, hovering on the edge of self-revelation. Paper, yarn, leathers, tools, buckles, wire-frame-and-novelty. Somebody unlocked the door of the sandblasting company. Old trucks came rumbling off the cobblestones on Lafayette Street. Each truck in turn mounted the curb, where several would remain throughout the day, listing slightly, circled by heavy-bellied men carrying clipboards, invoices, bills of lading, forever hoisting their trousers over their hips. A black woman emerged from the smear of an abandoned car, talking a scattered song. Wind was biting up from the harbor.

  I had the door half-open, on my way out for food, when someone spoke my name from the top of the next landing. It was a man about fifty years old, wearing a hooded sweat shirt. He was sitting on the top step, looking down at me.

  “I’ve been waiting for you,” he said. “I’m your upstairs neighbor. Eddie Fenig. Ed Fenig. Maybe you’ve heard of me. I’m a writer, which gives us something a little bit in common, at least retroactively. I write under my full name. Edward B. Fenig. You’re tops in your trade, Bucky, looking at your old lyrics, never having attended a live performance. So when I saw you from my window yesterday when you were crossing the street this way, I was naturally delighted. Sheer delight, no exaggeration. Maybe you’ve heard of me. I’m a poet. I’m a novelist. I’m a mystery writer. I write science fiction. I write pornography. I write daytime dramatic serials. I write one-act plays. I’ve been published and/or produced in all these forms. But nobody knows me from shit.”

  Americans pursue loneliness in various ways. For me, Great Jones Street was a time of prayerful fatigue. I became a half-saint, practiced in visions, informed by a sense of bodily economy, but deficient in true pain. I was preoccupied with conserving myself for some unknown ordeal to come and did not make work by engaging in dialogues, or taking more than the minimum number of steps to get from place to place, or urinating unnecessarily.

  4

  AGAIN I had a visitor, four days into unbroken solitude, a reporter this time, flamboyantly bald and somewhat dwarfish, dressed in sagging khaki, drifts of hair from outlying parts of his head adorning the frames of his silver-tinted glasses, an emblem on the sleeve of his battle jacket—RUNNING DOG NEWS SERVICE.

  “Where do you want to sit?”

  “Your manager told us you were approachable,” he said. “We’ve known for seventy-two hours where you were located but we didn’t want to make a move until we got ahold of Globke. We don’t operate mass-media-crash-style. We wanted Globke’s version of your frame of mind in terms of were you or were you not approachable. I’ll take this chair and we can put the tape recorder right here.”

  “No tape,” I said.

  “That’s what we anticipated.”

  “No notes either.”

  “No notes?”

  “Note-taking’s out.”

  “You want some kind of accuracy, don’t you?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Then what do you want?”

  “Make it all up. Go home and write whatever you want and then send it out on the wires. Make it up. Whatever you write will be true.”

  “We know it’s asking a lot to expect an interview, even a brief one, which is what we assure you is what we want, but maybe a statement will have to do. Will you give us a statement?”

  “A statement about what?”

  “Anything at all,” he said. “Just absolutely anything. For instance the rumors. What about the rumors?”

  “They’re all true.”

  “Okay, but what about authorities in Belgium?”

  “Does Globke have Belgium under contract? If Globke doesn’t have it under contract, whatever it is, I’d be guilty of malfeasance in discussing it publicly.”

  “Authorities in Belgium want to question you about your alleged financial involvement in a planeload of arms confiscated in Brussels that was supposedly on its way to either this or that trouble-spot, depending on which rumor you believe.”

  “Do you know what the word malfeasance means? This is a word that carries tremendous weight in a court of law. Much more weight than misfeasance or non-feasance.”

  “Okay, but what about the damage to your vocal chords from the continuous strain and the story that you’ll never perform in public again?”

  “You decide,” I said. “Whatever you write will be true. I’ll confirm every word.”

  “Okay, but what about Azarian? Azarian says he’s reorganizing the group along less radical musical lines. Will you make a statement about that?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “What’s your statement?”

  “Azarian has been horribly disfigured in a gruesome accident. His face is being reconstructed with skin and bone taken from the faces of volunteers
. His voice is not his voice. It belongs to a donor. What Azarian seems to be saying is really being said by another person’s vocal chords.”

  “That’s the other thing. An accident. You were in an accident and you’re hidden away in some rich private clinic in south central Maryland. The accident thing was interesting to us, ideologically. An accident for somebody like you is the equivalent of prison for a revolutionary. We were kind of rooting for an accident. Which is, wow, really weird. But that’s what happens. You get into guerrilla ideology, you find yourself trying to handle some pretty unwholesome thoughts.”

  “There’s no such region as south central Maryland.”

  “Okay, but listen to this on the subject of accidents. We got a tip from I won’t say what source that your manager was about to leak word of an accident. We figure he wanted to co-opt all the other accidents. He wanted exclusive rights to your accident. Anyway his story had you half-dead when a schooner piled into some rocks during a storm off the coast of Peru. First you’re missing and presumed drowned. Then you’re half-dead aboard a rescue vessel. And Peru does have a coast because I was there two years ago Christmas. But he dropped the idea for whatever reason. This is pretty sophisticated stuff, Bucky. I mean there’s rumor, there’s counter-rumor, there’s manipulation, and there’s, you know, this ultra-morbid promotional activity. What’s it all mean?”

  “The plain man of business is gone from the earth.”

  “Before I forget,” he said, “we’d like to add your name to a list of sponsors that we use on all correspondence pertaining to the black captive insurrection fund. The other names are on this sheet. Should I leave it and you can get back to us or do you want to look at it now? It’s up to you whatever you want me to do with it.”

  “Tear it in four equal pieces,” I said.

  “Okay, can we get on to some more statements now?”

  “I don’t think so, no.”

  “We’d like a short statement about your present whereabouts.”