Broken Sleep (31 page)

“Do you want to see her?” Jay asked as she put on her bathrobe and slippers.

“How can I not?”

“I have a plan.”

“A plan would be good.”

“If you want to wait until late January, the private opening is usually a few days before the public opening. Let’s go as Mr. and Mrs. Bernes, art collectors. You can meet her and then see what you want to do next.”

Moses’s anger wilted. “That sounds reasonable. I’m going to call my brother.”

While the Insatiables toured the world, Alchemy and Moses e-mailed often. They limited their correspondence to
politics and culture, occasionally mental and physical states, but avoided intimate confessionals. As far as Moses knew, Salome and Nathaniel still resided in New York.

Now that the Insatiables had returned to L.A., Moses and Alchemy were planning to meet for dinner at a restaurant in Pasadena sometime before the Insatiables took off again in a few weeks. Moses didn’t want to wait. He called Alchemy. His ire palpable, Moses didn’t begin the conversation with preliminary niceties.

“Alchemy, I deserved a heads-up. You know I scour the papers.”

“I assumed you’d decided not to deal.”

“That’s bullshit. You should have told me.” In forming his new Livability Quotient, Moses had chosen to believe the show would never happen.

“Yeah, I’m sorry. I fucked up.”

“Yes, you sure did.”

“I can’t undo it. She’s gone but she’ll be back. You want to know when? Ruggles has retired, but he’s willing to come out here if you decide to meet her. But Mose, we, you and I, still need to meet before I take off.”

“Why?”

“ ’Cause I have some stuff to talk to you about that might be better said in person.”

“No, spill it now.”

He paused. “Mose, well, fuck it—the
Enquirer
is threatening to do a piece about my sex life and … Jay, shit … They claim they got proof. No idea what they call proof. Mose, I wish all of this could’ve gone another way.”

Moses simply said, “Me, too,” and hung up the phone.

A Room of One’s Ownership, 1998 – 1999

It took a while for me and Absurda to stop doing the tiptoe two-step and become two dudes playin’ in the band, able to party like the messy breakup never happened—and for me to feel like I wasn’t gonna get tossed on my ass, outta the band and back in the deep end of the shitpool. Mostly them years was like one never-ending recording-touring session interrupted by some notorious incidents. We made five new records between ’93 and 2000 and played more than a thousand shows. Some critics who loved us at first dissed us later, saying we was lucky to make it before the music biz fragmented and we only popped so big as a reaction to the synth-mope blandness of the ’80s. Big yawn to them. Alchy was a constant geyser of songs, semen, and ideas. I used to think he must’ve been cranking up. Meth, ’roids, something. Nope. He’d often go three, four nights, gettin’ maybe two hours of sleep a night before his eyes were protruding like burnt popcorn kernels and you couldn’t mumble hello without him being disputatious. That’s when he’d pop some tranqs.

Alchy’s relaxation is sex games, and I can only partake after me and Absurda have uncoupled. I ain’t usually a group sex
guy, and I’ve stayed away from the porniest details of his sexcapades, but after a show in Dallas, this “mom” who Alchemy sexed before and three very hot and very young cowgirls want to entertain me, Lux, and Alchemy. We check what we call the Miranda Wrights of the young ones. For you who won’t admit they watch cartoons, Miranda Wright was a female cop on Disney’s show
Bonkers
. We use that as code when we think a potential may be too young or just plain trouble. The mom swears for them. Marty delivers a couple of grams. We get high and then Alchy says to the mom, “Come hither,” so she strips and sits on the edge of the bed. He reaches into his suitcase and pulls out a rare Thomas Green beauty from the 1700s. For a lefty, Alchy sure loved his guns—for lots of uses. He points it at his head. “Savant roulette, anyone?” I freeze. Lux, who seen the sex stuff before, still gets twitchy. Alchy pulls the trigger. Zip. Mom slips the smooth barrel, which is like six inches long, into her mouth and starts gumming it. “ ’Happiness is a warm gun,” he croons. Mom falls back on the bed and grabs the gun. Alchy kneels down and his tongue goes into overdrive and she’s still suckin’ ’til she starts coming. Fuckin’ freaky.

Turns into one dead-dick-in-the-morning night. I ask him, the next day, “What the hell was that?”

“My mom told me to always please a woman before you please yourself. So, I do.”

“Not that, I mean the gun thing.”

He just smiles all mysterious. “Tonguing and gunning …” I always wondered if Salome told him about that, too.

Despite drugs being everywhere, Alchy only indulges if he needs it to close a sex deal. Me? You name it, I tried it. How
else you play the road like that? Especially when we were traveling donkey class the first few years. Absurda was the only one in the band who got hooked, although, at first, none of us seen it that way. Not even Mr. Savant.

We all finally got hip to her problem being so destructive in spring of ’98 during a six-month Euro tour. We’d already recorded most of
Blues for the Common Man
. Alchemy likes to try the songs on the road and come back and redub, remix, clean up, and maybe even redo or dump some entirely. It’s going great ’til Absurda misses a gig in Naples. She hired a driver to take her and some Italian smoothie who latched on to her to Pompeii. She says some fresh iced tea made her sick. None of us buy it. Lux is so furious and worried his biceps is Nadling at warp speed. He insists we do a intervention and get her in rehab ASAP. Alchemy has a sit-down with her. She agrees to Sue, who is tour manager, rooming with her. Absurda don’t miss none of the last six shows and plays great.

Back in L.A. we’re working on the intervention. As an excuse we’re gonna have a dinner to discuss the video for
The Ruling Class
, which is about half the world’s population being under twenty-five.

I was crashing at Alchy’s newest digs, a four-bedroom place in the Hollywood Hills. Salome and Nathaniel had moved into the guest house. Alchemy never finished furnishing any of his houses. He got closest after he met Laluna and had Persephone. This place was half empty and half filled with Dumpster-worthy shit that Salome used in what she called her art. Sometimes there was lots of crap I was scared to sit on, eat off, or even touch. He and Salome used to go on spending sprees, piling up art,
books, and old records, and she drags home some weird shit like old clocks or rat skeletons. Alchemy is also beginning his life as the rock ’n’ roll Bruce Wayne: money maven by day, politico by evening, and rock god by night. He starts Winsum Realty and we’re his partners. He scopes condos and houses and land parcels so they meet his “aesthetic criteria.” He dumped lots of ’em before the crash in ’08 and we made plenty of dough. We donated some of the money and buildings to fix up in New Orleans after Katrina and New York after Sandy and an urgent care center in east L.A. Later, he starts Audition Enterprizes. We ain’t partners in that but can invest on a case-by-case basis. I admire his good-guy shit, but I don’t get involved.

I’m still carousing, and one night I got into a fistfight at Little Joy, the dive, and then did the Howard Stern show—me and him get each other, being two dudes from Queens who got out—live like 6 A.M. I get back “home” and Alchy is awake. He says, “Let’s go see some stuff for Winsum. Or maybe for you.” I don’t like nothing he shows me, and we land at the House of Pies over on Vermont. I’m still sorta drunk—I snuck in my own bottle a scotch and poured it into my coffee cup, and he don’t know I popped a coupla midnight runners as well. While I’m eating a pile of onion rings and fries, I notice Alchemy is consternated so I get all applesauce brained and admit, “I’m embarrassed to be so lame, I feel like all of this is a fake-out and I am a fraud and one day you’re gonna ice me for something I don’t even know I done, toss me out just like you found me, and it will all disappear.”

He gives me a face like I gutted him with a knife and sits his elbow on the table and leans his chin against his fist. He
don’t say nuthin’ for a few minutes. “We need to have this conversation, especially in light of Absurda’s problems. There is no crisis that can bring you and me down. That is not going to happen with us.”

“How the fuck you know that?” I say again, because I’m thinking of what I seen outside a Madam Rosa’s and how, even though I’m cool with Absurda, I’m still pissed off. “What if I do something stoopit like Marty?” Truth was, Marty still worked for us.

“What could you say that would be so horrible? I know we could always work it out.” He said that in his Alchemy-controls-all voice.

I’m still feeling like his looking for a place for me is some kind of warning, or maybe some Alchemy trap. That maybe he knows I seen him and Absurda, and he wants me to say something. But I never forget if it comes down to it, I’m the one who goes, so I say nothing and change the subject.

“Why’d ya pick me up in the first place?” All those years, I never done asked him. I didn’t worry about not having shit ’til I had it.

“Coincidence is also opportunity. It’s up to each of us to read the signs and make good or bad decisions.” That was the hookie-dookie Alchemy in a nutshell. “Remember when I had that nightmare in the motel that first night?”

“Fuck yes.” He had them after that, but I never got so spooked again. He later told me they was love and hate notes from his unconscious and he’d be lost without them.

“The way you reacted, I trusted you. I still trust you. My mom, contrary to the grief she gave you that day—”

“Still does.”

“She blessed you with the Salome seal of approval. Said that you were no phony.”

“No kidding?” I was flabbergasted. “I thought Salome always sized me up as some smelly sock you toss to the dog as a chew toy.”

“Nope. One more thing you have to be sure about. Ambitious, you’ve made it to the big leagues, the toughest league of all. And no one, not I, your mother or father, or anyone can take that away from you except you. Besides, no lie, you are my street brother.”

I swear to fucking God I was almost crying. That was the forthrighteous reason I ain’t bought a place, at that time I love being with the band on the road and living with him, and even Salome and Brockton. They was my family.

Humpty Dumpty

Back in New York, my mystagogues in limbo, bored, and horny as hell, wondering if it was over with Nathaniel, I lust-fucked a few young studlies. The satisfaction was short-lived. To fill the hollowness, I wrote Nathaniel a letter a day. He wrote me twice a week and called every other Sunday. He returned to New York for two weeks over Easter to meet an editor who wanted him to do a book about Bohemian Scofflaw twenty years on. I thought he would move back to New York. Not so. While he was attending a No Nukes rally in Berlin, the directors at the Free University invited him to come for a two-year lecturer stint. He wanted me, us, to join him. Ruggles encouraged me to go and be with Nathaniel. I could always come back. I was excited and wary. In almost eight years, I’d never been away from New York (or Ruggles) for more than two weeks.

We moved in early July to a spacious and inexpensive fifth-floor apartment in the Kreuzberg district, with cathedrallike ceilings and windows. Unpatched WWII bullet holes pockmarked the outside walls, and coffee and spicy odors from the Turkish café down the street mingled with polluted air that wafted from the East. I had my own room/studio with a bank
of windows and a tiny Juliet balcony, where I’d sit and peer to the East at a group of forcibly vacated buildings, a reverse Potemkin village. (Nathaniel said the East German government kept those buildings empty because when people lived in them, too many tried to make it over the wall.) I imagined myself levitating, waltzing in the air above the watchtowers and the East Wall piled high with barbed wire like a black, thorn-filled rosebush sprouting above a barren field of land mines. The East, a lifeless, indecipherable blankness of the enforced silence smashing against the particles of neon light, bursting with possibility, in the encircled yet unbound West sector.

Though it was about a half hour from Kreuzberg, we enrolled Alchemy in the John Kennedy International School, which taught its classes in English and German. He showed a natural ear for languages and adjusted within weeks.

Nathaniel immediately immersed himself in the university life and in political groups in both East and West Berlin. He asked me to think about teaching some art classes. Think about it is about all I did. He and male his “colleagues” gathered on Friday nights for eating, drinking, and opinionating while the women sat like docile appendages. In what I thought was a sign of maturity, I suggested to Nathaniel that it was better for me to stay home with Alchemy because I might cause a scene. He wanted me to go. When one of them blabbered his claptrap, “The Wall is the great monstrosity of postmodern, postwar Europe,” I answered, “You’re wrong. The Wall is action. It’s beautiful. It’s the only true masterpiece of the twentieth century. True People’s Art. Someday it will be the reason
communism dies. Maybe then you’ll recognize your myopia.” They all pooh-poohed me. Ha. I was right. I cried in happiness when the Wall was breached, and in sadness when it was torn down in a tyrannical act of aesthetic demolition. They should’ve rechristened it the Wall of Freedom—refashioned it as a monument to man’s stupidity and a gateway to the future. Now it’s only a memory, destined to be a mythical Atlantis of art.

I started skipping the Friday night gatherings. I did accompany Nathaniel to the East, where he made connections with dissidents. Unlike the West Germans, most of them spoke almost no English so he always had to go with a translator. It thrilled me, until I breathed in the city’s Gravity Disease. The Stasi, the ubiquitous East German secret police, served as the toxic communicators of the city’s societal tetanus. Only the East’s club scene had any attraction for me, and that held no interest for Nathaniel.