Broken Sleep (16 page)

Alchemy slowed the Focus as they neared the two-street town. He stopped in front of Trudy’s adobe-style house, which stood atop the mountain overlooking Sedona’s red rocks to the north and Prescott’s Verde Valley to the south.

Trudy greeted them in her kitchen, where she was cooking dinner. She was in her midforties, much older than Moses had imagined, with a pretty, kittenish face and brown-and-gray-streaked hair. She gave Alchemy a loud smooch. She served them two of Alchemy’s favorite entrees: buffalo burgers and veggie lasagna. After dinner, Trudy showed Moses to his room on the first floor, and then she and Alchemy mounted the stairs to Trudy’s bedroom.

Moses called Jay and got the machine. He left a message. Then he called his mom.

“So how are you feeling?” She asked in a taut voice.

“I’m good. Very, very tired but good. We should be in late tomorrow afternoon.”

“Jay told me. We’re all frayed and stressed. She’s so distraught that she didn’t even come over to swim and have dinner. She made your appointment with Fielding for the day after tomorrow.”

“Fine,” Moses said perfunctorily, now worried about Jay.

“Moses, are you still angry with me?” He heard her inhale deeply on her cigarette. He wanted to nag her about quitting but held back.

“I told you I wasn’t angry at you and I’m not now. But Ma, you need to control your nag genes.” Again came that poisonous word,
genes
, which had once bonded them but now divided them. Neither one responded to its new meaning. “I’m not going to let forty-plus years of love and devotion change anything because of this. Got that?”

“Yes,” Hannah said, not quite convincingly.

Too enervated, Moses refused to play the cajoling game. If he answered with a hint of uncertainty or impertinence in his voice, the conversation would continue in a circular fashion for hours. “Mom,” he said in an even but firm tone, “I need you to be strong for me now, the way you have been all of my life. Okay?”

Hannah, satisfied with Moses’s answer, allowed the conversation to end on a note that signaled a truce in this new phase in the war of parental territoriality.

At around eleven, Moses heard a commotion in the front room. He stumbled out to see Alchemy fully dressed and with guitar case in hand, while Trudy talked on the phone. “We’re
headed over to the CopperPot bar on Main Street,” Alchemy said cheerily. “Come by, if you’re up to it.” Moses took the accompanying pause to the invitation to mean that Alchemy expected him to come.

“You go ahead. I’ll meet you down there.” Feeling both obliged and curious, Moses got dressed. By the time he strolled outside, half of Jerome’s four hundred inhabitants, like characters in a ’50s zombie movie, were marching in lockstep toward the CopperPot.

Moses sat next to Trudy, who had saved him a seat. Alchemy, perched on a stool on the tiny stage, Gibson guitar slung over his shoulders, gulped a beer and puffed on a cigarette. No doubt this appearance would hit the still-embryonic Net. Apparently, Alchemy couldn’t handle five weeks with no sex and no adulation. As the crowd in the bar swelled, Moses felt, as he had that night at the Whisky, the oceanic presence that was the public Alchemy, and what it promised:
I am your dream, and in me our dreams merge as one
.

He began abruptly, “My homage to Mr. Hemingway.” Alchemy started strumming and nodded slyly in Moses’s direction.

He spoke as if talking to an invisible presence. “Because I never thought we could do justice to Roky and Lou Ann, so now …” He effortlessly slid into a song called “Starry Eyes.”

When he stopped singing, Alchemy smiled glowingly at the audience. “As some of you know, I’d been in solitude for five weeks and five days until I was rescued. In fact, if anyone asks, I’m still not here. Tell ’em it was an impersonator, goes by the name of Dusky Goldplate.”

His fingers meandered on the guitar strings for a while before landing on a Leonard Cohen paean to youthful need and hope. Unlike Cohen’s husky Old Testament chastising drone, Alchemy’s voice flowed out like a hymnal with sweet and tortured resignation. He let the last notes linger before he addressed the audience again.

“I wrote this during my recent monastic vacation. I’ve never sung it aloud before so it’s a virgin ride for all of us. It’s called ‘Mystic Fool.’ ” He stooped, picked up his bottle and finished his beer. “For Absurda.”

The room pulsated with a man-on-a-high-wire tension. Alchemy closed his eyes and bowed his head, and almost everyone found themselves in their land of private laments and regrets, with the echoes of Alchemy’s voice to carry them along. A drunken guy yelled “Chicks and Money!” and another chimed in “I Wanna Be Seen!” breaking the spell. Alchemy unclipped his guitar strap. In seconds, a gaggle of women, young and old, surrounded him. Trudy tapped Moses on the shoulder. “Let’s go.” He arched his eyebrows quizzically. “I’m tired and he’s gone for the night.”

“You’re cool with that?”

“Have to be. He’s Alchemy.”

In the morning, more than a little concerned about Jay and why he hadn’t heard from her, Moses called and woke her up at 7 A.M.

“Hey, where were you?” Moses heard his voice dart out with a mix of accusation and fear.

“At the gym. A late Pilates class. I didn’t want to call you last night in case you were asleep.”

“My mom said you are distraught.”

“Distraught? What should I be, a happy idiot?” Now Jay’s tone was accusatory, petulant.

“No, I’m not saying that. But there’s some hope now.”

“I’m sorry. I’m just anxious. I’m so glad you’re coming home.”

“Me, too.” To lower the tension, and keep up some pretense of normalcy, Moses asked about Jay’s meeting with her latest demanding client. They made more small talk and Moses promised to call her later.

Alchemy strolled by alone while Trudy and Moses were having breakfast at the Flatiron Café. Trudy teased him with lighthearted jests unique to those who have had a long friendship punctuated by casual sex. “Did you play Romper Room teacher with the
leetle
girls?”

“You could say that. Gave them some, um, breathing lessons. I advised them to take your Tantric yoga class so they can learn new positions from the expert.”

“Thank you,” she said sarcastically, “but
that
class is full. No beginners.”

“I wouldn’t call them beginners. Not anymore.”

Trudy placed her palms together in front of heart and closed her eyes deferentially, “Namaste, my master.”

Alchemy placed his palms together in front of his heart and bowed his head slightly. “No mistakes, dear guru.”

Their game over, Alchemy asked Trudy to take some photos of him and Moses side by side, which she did. “Unless I call, please don’t release them. And then only one mag,
People
would be my first choice. I want Mose here to have his privacy until he decides otherwise.”

Moses took the wheel for the first few hours, while Alchemy napped. When they stopped, Alchemy called Sue Warfield; his hunched shoulders and low-toned voice made it clear he didn’t want Moses to hear this conversation. Moses bought the supplies this time.

Alchemy drove the last four hours while they listened to the radio and spoke about Moses’s illness. The conversation lacked any mention of moms, dads, band members, women friends, or potential nervous breakdowns. At first Alchemy’s distant, almost detached manner discomfited Moses. In time, he realized there were many Alchemys, and that trying to comprehend or predict his behavior was probably best left to astrologists or cultural prognosticators.

As the Focus cruised along the I10, the brothers contemplated their own theories regarding the psychic rumblings of what was then the middle ground of American society: a seemingly pleasant world held aloft by the repressive rules of black and white, right and wrong, and where all questions have answers, no matter whether the physical plane was a canvas of sorrowful grays and unending rows of stolid, protective redbrick apartment buildings, developments of dingy doublewides, or shiny new tract homes in brown deserts.

At a fairly young age, Alchemy had determined that those rules and those tired or monumental edifices contained the
foul dust of the American dream. Under the surface seethed resentment and paranoia—sentiments that alternately exploded and imploded in a needful catharsis every few generations, often in wars in far-off countries—and at that moment, unbeknownst to either Alchemy or Moses, was about to explode again. But even before
a new screaming comes across the sky, both had their own explanations for the complexities of their America. Moses sensed the unseen viruses that contaminated the collective soul. Yes, he had specific ideas on how to remedy the virus, from passing a one hundred percent inheritance tax to doing away with private education and eliminating the electoral college. What he believed America needed most was a constitutional convention.

Moses didn’t have faith in himself to change much of anything. And now, with his illness, he yearned only for the cocoon of his home with Jay.

Alchemy, too, felt his country had gone astray, and would, if he had known them, agreed with Moses’s propositions. Alchemy didn’t think in terms of political policy bullet points. He believed America was destined to plod recklessly into the future before it eventually imploded upon itself, unless someone with grander foresight and vision came along to change the course of history. And he had a pretty keen sense of who that person could be.

Spy vs. Spy

The bicentennial sissy boom-bah God Bless America blitzkrieg and the anti-rah-rah blather of the downtown scene made me almost want to be … French. I ingested some mesc on the 4th and traipsed to the river. With the fireworks exploding inside and outside my body, I envisioned what I’d create for my mid-September show.

All summer I hid in my studio in Orient as if a two-millennia-old and long-searching dybbuk had ascended. I painted bright and dark landscapy abstract visions of the dying bucolic, pristine landscape of farms and marshland of Orient—brilliant greens, autumnal golds, scorching summer whites, and winter Savant Blue. Yes, there is a color bearing my name. Two colors, in fact. The work was more emotionally tactile, sensual, and visually subtle than anything I’d done before. I titled the show
Flowers, Feminism, and Fornication
. Only Xtine had been privy to my studio until Gibbon came by from his Hamptons home. He erupted into a hissy stomp, “This isn’t Salome Savant art!” Like I would ever listen to him.

“Taunt piss, Murray,” I answered.

Of course, money trumped misgivings, so Gibbon promoted it in the Hamptons over Labor Day weekend. I went to the city to generate noise for the show. New York in the mid-’70s was still fun, in a deranged sort of way.

The city was undergoing one of its periodic skin sheddings. The Fillmore closed and the hippies fled, taking their colors with them. Downtown dissolved from an LSD light show to a heroin-cocaine black-and-white muck, a studied, cool sepia wash. Lost was the mix of hedonism and purpose, and the hipguard became a superficial veneer of seriousness covering too many grabby, frivolous poseurs. My city shrank down to the area below 14th Street, while the rest went from excessive to anorexic before the next “rebirth” in the early ’80s, when it became obese and bloated once again. Except for the AIDS ghettos. Those sections of the city smelled emaciated, like dried bones, and looked like the washed-out browns of old leather pants. It happened again after 9/11, when the city’s hungry ghost arose from the crater in search of its soul.

Xtine babysat Alchemy. I donned a leopard-skin
Sheena, Queen of the Jungle
top, a sheer rust red skirt with a belly-dancer’s belt and bright red hot pants underneath, stilettos, and an orange scarf wrapped around each arm, and went to Blind Lemon Socrates’s reading at St. Mark’s on 10th and Second Avenue. I doubt old Pegleg Peter Stuyvesant, who is buried under the church, appreciated the moral turpitude of the Poetry Project’s congregation.

Socrates was already in midread when I fluttered into the courtyard. I nearly choked on the cigarette and pot fumes.

I’d arranged to meet Alexander Holencraft, a young sharpie who dubbed himself a “writer.” I’d been floozying around a bit again. Less spontaneously because of Alchemy, but asceticism was never me. Holencraft scribbled copy for the ad agency of Yorkin & Stunkle. We met briefly during a photo shoot with Xtine, and he’d asked to do my head shots. He had bigger plans for me and for himself; he was in the formative stage that would lead to his becoming a major tastemaker. He later invested in Manhattan real estate and started the celeb magazine
I, Me, Mine
, which he named after the Beatles song, but devoid of any irony. He claimed he’d written the famous poster phrase “The night the underground comes uptown” about Lou’s Alice Tully Hall show and coined the term “cool hunter.” I’m guessing he was in the room with the guy who really created them.

An SRO crowd jammed into the room, which was hotter than a Chinese laundry and about as well ventilated. I stood at the back. Sitting behind Socrates as he read was Anne Waldman, the poet who ran St. Mark’s, and the novelist Ally Sendar, who’d written the foreword to Socrates’s new novel,
The Floating Prickhouse
.