Great Jones Street Read online

  “I got depressed so I took an antidepressant.”

  “As -who wouldn’t?”

  Lycra Spandex lived with her mother and sister in Lefrak City. I didn’t know where Vegemato lived. Lynn Forney lived with Notorious Nora and the Seventh Fleet on Avenue B. Jerry Dane lived in an East German Vopo greatcoat. Tia Maria used to live in a city bus abandoned under the West Side Highway but truck drivers on their way to the meat terminals used to ram the bus for fun, sometimes stopping just long enough to rape Tia Maria, more or less, and finally she moved into a storefront church presided over by a man who wore spats and claimed to be a direct descendent of Mohammed. I closed my eyes a moment, aware of a woman’s voice depositing names at my feet.

  “Bucky, this is Zenko Alataki, who happens to be Axel Gregg the documentary film-maker’s brother-in-law, and I’m Axel’s sister Lillian, Zenko’s wife, Lillian Alataki. My husband’s just up from northwest Mexico to raise some money for the earthquake he’s been working on down there. Just make sure you don’t call it art. It’s not art. It’s back to before art. Fire-building and the fingering of testicles. The wonder of pre-information is that men perceived the earth and themselves actually in the process of changing. Zenko’s been trying to create pressure along a fault with a series of very delicate TNT explosions. Just a few more in the right places and hell have his small quake. The greatest work of art ever achieved. Except don’t call it art.”

  “Is this true?”

  “Why not?” Zenko said. “The continents ride on plates. The crust shifts, which causes breaks or faults. The beauty of a man-made fracture is that you can photograph the adjacent surface. Place objects on the surface and take aerial photographs of the objects toppling. I call this a kinetic shiver. Objects toppling. Objects being swallowed up. If society wasn’t so obsessed with false values, I would be permitted to use live animals in my shivers. Sheep, goats, some rabbits. Earthquake technology enables man to give back to the earth. Goats being swallowed up would make a perfect shiver. It’s an act of sacrificial love. We give back. The earth takes and is greener. How much do you weigh?”

  “Is this the first shiver you’ve worked on?”

  “This is the world’s first shiver,” he said. “I’m being prudent but bold. Life-serving destruction is always bold. How much do you weigh? Have you noticed what a very emaciated group this is? It’s as though you’re all disappearing before my eyes.”

  Opel went to bed fairly early in the evening. People crawled over and around her, and a few of the more forlorn simply remained at her sides in little ribbons of woe. Diane Bowie took a teddy bear with her into the bathroom. Voices seemed to burn slightly. People bit the tips off chocolate kisses, bad teeth, smudged fingers, horrible posture. Winona Barry said she’d advertised her sewing skills in a West Village newspaper. A man called, wanting a nun’s habit and crotchless riding pants. They bargained in spare phrases. “Extra for perversion.” “Money no object.” “Extra for satiny under-things.” “Do a sensitive job.” “Extra for the hole in the riding pants.” “Ill send plenty more business your way.” Miss Mott tried to dial the time on Opel’s phone.

  “My sister has a new fella,” Lycra Spandex said. “He’s a detective with the safe, loft and truck squad. He took one look at me and nearly gagged. How do I tell a fella like that about the childhood I spent dreaming of lash curlers, mascara, highlighters and toners? Can I explain to a plainclothes man about gauzy blouses, long flared skirts, superbitchy underwear, chokers, earrings, pins and clips? He’s a plainclothes man. He wouldn’t understand, would he? Do I dare tell him what it means to wear eye shadow and have skin that’s rose-petal soft? All my life all I’ve ever wanted was to be two people. Marge and Gower Champion. Alternating day to day. Can I confide in this detective? Can I explain about the whole Fox Movietone era and those girls in tutus jumping over the sawhorses? This detective spent his entire adolescence hitting other kids with bicycle chains. I’m supposed to tell him about my sheer pantyhose that do away with crotch sag? Sorry but I won’t play that game. I know what’s best for Lycra Spandex. Lycra Spandex does not have to kowtow to authority figures, even when they’re with the police department of the city of New York, even when they’re with the safe, loft and truck squad. If the son of a bitch is so great, why doesn’t he get me a decent loft to live in, or a safe where I can keep my crappy jewelry, or a fucking truck that I can drive over a cliff?”

  A tall pale girl stood near my chair. Her red hair was in pigtails and she wore paint-streaked jeans and a T-shirt with a hole in the middle. I leaned over and touched her arm. Therefore I am. She turned and I put my mouth to her navel. This made her laugh and twist a bit. Softly her thumbs browsed about my ears. Her navel was lint-free, abnormally large, an inner moon of convolutions and repose. There was no reason to wonder who she was or how that level moment was rounded by her hands.

  “Name’s James,” someone said. “Heard and enjoyed your stuff. Third album’s a landmark work. Stunning album. Noise and screaming and babble-babble. Heard all your albums and all your singles and liked them all and that comes from someone who’s kind of famous in his own right except nobody knows it. Mylon and I. I’m a friend of Mylon’s. We live in the same piss-hole building. I gather you’re laying back. Understandable. There’s nothing to paint and nothing to write and nothing to film and nothing to sing about and nothing to make love to. But your sound comes out of the radio all the time. Stunning sound. Amazing when you think about it how your sound is big even out there in the sticks and boondocks where I come from originally, the absolute sticks, the deep boonies, where it’s unlike a big city where people can absorb that kind of sound. Your second LP is killer too but I think number three’s the landmark work.”

  Mylon Ware stood in a corner talking to no one. He was a folk singer from western Canada, a lean bleak man with strange eyes. His second winter in New York he killed and ate his dog to keep from starving. People had offered him food and urged him to go on welfare but he took nothing, listened to no one, said not a word. The dog was a German shepherd, bought for protection, and very hard to kill. Mylon began by using the long bar that was part of his police lock. The first blow wasn’t severe or direct enough and the bar proved too long a weapon for the kind of struggle that followed. However it was useful for holding off the dog while Mylon maneuvered with his hunting knife, also bought for protection. It took him fifteen minutes to kill the animal. When it was over, almost nothing in the small apartment stood in the same place or was free of blood. Mylon cut the dog up and over a period of four days cooked and ate whatever seemed edible.

  “This is the last party.”

  “The first act is better in the New York production. The second act is better in the London production.”

  “Kiss.”

  “This is my vision. Everybody in the whole world wearing each other’s underwear. Whole nations exchanging underwear. China doing Egypt’s laundry. Big strong Turks wearing panties from Scarsdale. A people thing. I’m pro-people all the way. It would help us so much. I see it in my mind’s eye. Special fourth-class rates for underwear. Cargo ships full of underwear plying the trade routes. This is my vision. Underwear chain letters. World peace through underwear.”

  “I admit I whimper. I admit I’m fantastically infantile most of the time. I admit I want to sit on the floor and say ma-ma, da-da, na-na.”

  “For a Filipino she’s practically statuesque.”

  “Winona’s little baby is the shittingest little baby you’ll ever want to see. That little baby should have its own agent. That baby has a talent no other baby will ever come close to. I told Winona get on the phone to William Morris. That little baby should have an agent.”

  “This is the last party. Pass it on.”

  “I’ll tell you how I’m shooting this picture. I’m shooting it beautifully. That’s how I’m shooting it.”

  “This is the last party.”

  “I’m selling comic books on Fourth Avenue. It’s a living, right?
Kids come in. College boys with the hair, the clothes, the skin. I sell them old comics. I sell them glossies of Bonita Granville and King Kong. They don’t call it a living for nothing. It’s a living. I live. There’s worse could happen. I at least live. It’s a living. I make a living.”

  “This is the last party. Pass it on.”

  “The Self is inside the Other. Motion is the guiding mind of the solar community.”

  “Happy Valley’s into violence now.”

  “Kiss.”

  I thought of all the inner organs in the room, considered apart from the people they belonged to. For that moment of thought we seemed a convocation of martyrs, visible behind our skin. The room was a cell in a mystical painting, full of divine kidneys, lungs aloft in smoke, entrails gleaming, bladders simmering in painless fire. This was a madman’s truth, to paint us as sacs and flaming lariats, nearly godly in our light, perishable but never ending. I watched the pale girl touch her voluptuous navel. One by one, repacked in sallow cases, we all resumed our breathing.

  11

  IN SLEEP I opened an unnumbered door and found the sea. It was wide and still, veneered in delirious silver. Someone I knew was walking along a road that went down a hill toward some houses. The heat was brilliant. Vindictive light burned into the stone of all the small houses chalked near the sea. I heard voices and thought I saw people at the door.

  Opel toasted frankfurter buns for breakfast or whatever meal it was. She held the buns on a fork over the burner, toasting the insides of the buns intended for me, the outsides of those intended for her. Each of us thought the other strange for his/her preference. She spread strawberry jam on the buns and brought everything to bed with her.

  “I wish we had real strawberries,” she said. “Big whole strawberries to look at and eventually eat.”

  “Live strawberries instead of strawberries on tape.”

  “I remember traveling literally about six thousand miles in four consecutive flights and then getting to somebody’s house I knew and they were eating strawberries and I just sat there and looked at these strawberries sitting in sugar in the middle of the table and it was inconceivable, it was like returning from the land of the dead. They lived, the strawberries lived. I could look right into them. I understood what strawberries really are, not that I could put it in words. They were inconceivably beautiful, so rich and plump and alive, actually glowing from within. Of course I was probably stoned on something.”

  “Who were you talking to at the door?”

  “I thought you were asleep.”

  “I was asleep but I wasn’t fast asleep. Somebody was at the door and the two of you talked about something. It wasn’t Fenig because I know Fenig’s voice. It wasn’t the woman downstairs because it was a man. So I surmise one thing. It was the man you’ve been waiting for. The courier. Is that who it was?”

  “It was the man,” she said.

  “Good news or bad?”

  “Dr. Pepper is not where he’s supposed to be. But they expect to reach him in forty-eight hours. I don’t know why it’s forty-eight hours. Why not forty-seven or fifty-three? Anyway I’m to be ready to leave at a moment’s notice as of tomorrow night. I told him I’ve been ready for days. He expressed the hope we’d function well together.”

  “Glad it’s finally under way?”

  “Except one thing bothers me. He wasn’t what I’d hoped to get. I thought he’d resemble some lower-echelon A-and-R type like from Motown. Bronzed glasses, wispy beard, that hunched-over funky walk. I expected pure funk, you know? Someone who’s spent his whole life dealing merchandise of one kind or another.”

  “What did you get?”

  “I got Hanes,” she said.

  “Goddamn, that voice I heard. Hanes. On one level I knew it was him. You didn’t tell me Globke was involved in this.”

  “He’s not, Bucky. Hanes is free-lancing. It’s not surprising it’s him really. There are so many people we know in common. If you put all the names on paper and draw lines back and forth, it would probably be very logical that Hanes would be the one to show up at my door. Anyway seeing him gave me an idea. It involves a surprise for you. Your birthday present in fact. Belated maybe but a stroke of true bitch genius.”

  “Can’t wait.”

  “A gift that’s rich with I don’t know what.”

  “Hanes is a human blotter,” I said. “I don’t like it when people like that get involved in this kind of enterprise. He’s very limp. You could pick him up, use him as a blotter and throw him away. Submissiveness and paradox. He’d just as soon do business with the police.”

  “I’m nice and settled,” she said. “Go toast more bread.”

  It was getting dark. I left all four burners on. We finished the buns and Opel lay in bed eating jam off the blunt edge of the knife. The power of her immobility was beginning to fade. Departure was implicit in everything she did now. Until Hanes appeared at the door, Opel’s presence had been immense; she’d reigned in that bed like a bloated Creole queen of the swampland, giddy with magic, wallowing in the sensual pre-eminence of her own stink. Opel had stolen my immobility. I had been motionless as salt. People had swirled around me and I had plotted changes in the weather, gradations of light and silence. I had centered myself, learning of the existence of an interior motion, a shift in levels from isolation to solitude to wordlessness to immobility. When Opel occupied that center I became the thing that swirled.

  “Maybe I’ll be going back out,” I said.

  “Out on tour? What with?”

  “I’m not sure yet. In fact I’ve no idea at all. But I’m thinking of getting back out. That’s the important thing. Time to stop looking at the wall. You were right. Time to get out.”

  “Why not work on new material and let it go at that? Why go on tour?”

  “That’s got to be part of it. I’m not sure why. Maybe I just want the contact. You can’t reach extremes by working in. a studio. I want to reach extremes. It’s like a passage from suicide to murder. I’d been all worked out and fucked over and grabbed at. Suicide was nearer to me than my own big toe. It was the natural ending. I mean it was right there. No one would have been surprised or shocked. I really think it was expected of me. If I hadn’t left the tour, one way or another it would have happened. A soft papery collapse. Even after I left, the thing was right there looking me in the face. But now I think I’m out of that. I want to return but in a different way. New extremities. It’s like a passage from suicide to murder.”

  “I’m not sure I get it, Bucky.”

  “It’s too evil for a mere dealer like yourself.”

  “You want to return with a whole new thing. But what thing? You can scream ugly lyrics and throw rattlesnakes at the audience. Is that the general idea? You can sing love songs to the Pentagon.”

  “Nothing political,” I said.

  “There’s nothing out there but a dull sort of horror. You can’t just churn it up into your own fresh mixture. Hero, rogue and symbol that you are.”

  “Maybe I don’t want to churn it up at all. Maybe I want to make it even duller and more horrible. I don’t know. One thing’s sure. I can’t go out there and sing pretty lyrics or striking lyrics and I can’t go out there and make new and louder and more controversial sounds. I’ve done all that. More of that would be just what it says — more of the same. Maybe what I want is less. To become the least of what I was.”

  “Sure, the beast is loose, least is best. But who’s the beast in this case? Be careful you don’t twist your own neat lyric. Of course that may be exactly your intention. In which case I look on with interest. Ready as a matter of fact to offer whatever aid and comfort you feel you need. Hell, man, we’re old friends.”

  “Old and true,” I said.

  “Old, true and lasting.”

  “No doubt about it.”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Sure as shit.”

  I turned off the burners and stood near the window. Steam whistled distantly in th
e pipes. I wasn’t unhappy being where I was. Tilings here were not deprived of their emanations. The distances were correct; noise was undisguised; air was allowed to flow without recirculation. But this completeness seemed less than enough to keep me now. I struck a wooden match and put the flame to one of the candles over the sink. Opel pretended to evade this shallow light, sinking deeper into the bed.

  “People are getting to be all one thing,” she said. “Look at me, for instance. I used to have shadings. Now I’m all one thing. Civilization by reflex. If we’d been alive in Pavlov’s day he could have saved a whole lot of money on dog food. Now take you now. If you want to go back out as a Las Vegas version of what you were, fine with me except I hope you know what it is you’re doing. You’ll lose the perspective and the edge will crumble and you’ll really become the other thing. Maybe it’s a natural evolution. You were getting incoherent anyway, album to album, more so all the time. By the end you were making incredible amounts of noise and communicating absolutely nothing. The whole band was all curled up like a burning piece of paper. You know what you did? You embraced the insanity you were telling us about. So maybe it’s a natural evolution. You were too much in love with the horror going on because it formed your sound for you and you were fascinated by it as subject matter. It could very well be the natural next step that you crawl out on the stage at the Sands and just sit there in a jockstrap grunting. Ever since I’ve known you, you’ve been surrounded by money-grubbing and talk of money and people dealing and operating but that’s the last thing you’ll ever be corrupted by, money, even if you were literally starving. It’s yourself you have to watch out for, that little touch of the antichrist. It happens to be what I like most about you and of course it accounts for your fame and your glory so maybe I’m wrong to even bring it up. But evil is movement toward void and that’s where we both agree you’re heading. It’s your trip. I’d help you get there if I was sure you wanted to go. In my own bitch-genius way I think I’ve already put a certain teasing idea into circulation, soon to end up on this very doorstep. You have been listening to a panel discussion on a subject yet to be agreed on. Our panelists will now disrobe and paint each other’s bodies in colorful native pigments.”