Count Geiger's Blues (13 page)
24
Lydia Dearest
On Thursday, Lydia and Bari whooshed
into Lanier International Airport on separate flights. Their wide-bodied jumbo jets landed only twenty minutes apart. Xavier had Mikhail stay in the waiting area of the gate where his mother would disembark. He stood at the panoramic plateglass of a waiting area five gates nearer the main terminal. Lydia would want some time to talk to The Mick alone, and this arrangement would give her that even before they got to Xavier’s. Xavier, in turn, was looking forward to his reunion with Bari, who came off the plane utterly dragged out, in a charcoal-colored Dolce & Gabbana dress pleated with weirdly spaced clasps that reminded Xavier of aluminum locusts. The dress was from a decade-old collection. Had Bari worn it to mirror her morose mood and listlessness, or had the gloomy dress triggered those conditions?
Who knew? Bari was “really glad”—she claimed—to see him, but, although usually immune to the depredations of jet lag, today she didn’t want to meet Lydia, or come by his apartment, or make a date of any kind until next week. All she wanted was to return to her atelier, crawl onto the mattress under her cutting table, and sleep, sleep, sleep. In fact, to Xavier’s surprise, Bari insisted on taking a cab home. He could help by collecting her luggage—she gave him the tickets—and bringing it to her later.
Presto! she hurried off.
*
Xavier walked back toward the reception gate where he’d left Mikhail to meet his mother. Most of that flight’s disembarked passengers had already cleared the area, but Lydia and The Mick were standing in the corridor arguing, going at it like sparring partners. Xavier grimaced and hung back. The only good thing about this was that Lydia was too engrossed in her spat to be disappointed or annoyed that Bari—the famous Bari of Salonika—had left the airport without saying hello. It hadn’t been a snub, anyway, and now Lydia would not be able to regard it as such. Xavier would say that Bari had wanted an introduction, but had been too embarrassed by her argument with The Mick to intrude. He steeled himself and strolled toward the pair.
“You’ve got to come to San Diego,” Lydia was saying. “You have no choice.”
Her tone echoed Xavier’s manner of dealing with staffers when he’d had a bad day. This was at once a startling and a depressing insight.
“I don’t have to do nuthin’ you say.” The Mick held his nose a tissue’s width from Lydia’s. “You abandoned me here, shunted me onto a cubic geezer who can’t even play chess without catching a nosebleed.”
“Your uncle? Are you talking about your uncle?”
“Uncle? He’s a fucking know-it-all parole officer.”
“Hello, Lydia.” Because she didn’t even bother to turn his way, Xavier kissed her lightly on the temple.
She brushed at the spot as if a fly were trying to land on it. “Parole officer? He hasn’t done much to clean up your language. And what do you mean,
abandoned
you here? You
wanted
to come to Salonika.”
“Lydia,” Xavier said, gingerly stepping back.
“What I really wanted, Ma, was
not
to go to Pakistan.”
“You wanted to live with Xavier, to explore a new part of the country.”
“Sheeesh,” The Mick said, with a disbelieving sneer.
“What’s going on?” Xavier asked.
Lydia finally faced him. “Philip and I have been transferred from Pakistan to Bangladesh—to help three UN agencies and some people from the Ford Foundation with the medical side of flood relief there.”
“Great,” Xavier said.
“We’d like Mikhail to join us, but Mikhail doesn’t want to.”
Why would they want Mikhail to join them? At this point, Xavier would’ve done almost anything, short of hiring a hit man, to be shut of the willful brat.
“Only a masochist or a monsoon freak would move there,” The Mick said.
“Is that how you see your father and me? As masochists? As monsoon freaks?”
“No, ma’am,” The Mick said. “As bleeding-heart libsters with first-degree delusions of sainthood.”
“Mick!”
“Mama!” The Mick shot back.
“You’re flying to San Diego with me tomorrow, young man. No ifs, ands, or buts. Well, the only if is this: If, after a week with me, you still don’t want to join us in Dacca, you can return to Salonika—assuming, that is, Xavier will take you back.”
“A big ass-oooming,” Mikhail said.
A
huge
ass-oooming, Xavier thought. Mikhail had disrupted his life. His motor mouth, retropunk attitude, and recent moronic defection to Satan’s Cellar had disillusioned Xavier, who actually wondered if The Mick’s presence had aggravated the effects of his Philistine Syndrome.
Lydia turned to Xavier and picked with big-sister-knows-best impunity at his clothes. She straightened his tie knot, renotched his belt-buckle prong, and darted a finger around his collar to check for fraying. “I know you thought I’d have a few days to visit with you, Xavier, but I don’t. This new mission’s an urgent one, and I’ve got some stuff to do in Chula Vista to prepare for it. Would you object if I kidnap Mikhail? If he keeps refusing to join Philip and me in Bangladesh, I’ll send him back to you next week.”
“I ain’t going to Bangladesh
or
to San Diego,” The Mick said. “No way.”
“To San Diego at least,” Lydia said. “For some QT—quality time, I mean—before I have to fly out again.”
“QT, huh? On the qt, Ma, your QT usually ain’t.”
Feeling persnickety, Xavier said, “If you’re flying out tomorrow, Lydia, there’s another reason The Mick’s not anxious to go with you.”
“C’mon,” The Mick warned. “Keep it on the qt, unc.”
“There’s a Smite Them Hip & Thigh concert tomorrow night, I’m covering it, and my boss gave me an extra ticket.”
“Ah, outgunned again.” Lydia looked at Mikhail. “Didn’t you see those yodeling banshees in Birmingham last year?”
“Every show’s dif. And I got to make sure your
’iddle brutha
gets righteously culture-briefed, don’t I?”
Lydia handed Mikhail a baggage-claims ticket. “Go see my suitcase hasn’t been stolen. I need to talk to Xavier.”
Mikhail snatched the ticket and swaggered toward the escalator to do what he’d been told to do, grateful for the excuse to absent himself.
“Please let Mikhail stay on. His mind’s made up against returning with me.”
“Lydia, he ran away for a week. Only an outright bribe brought him back. I was afraid you’d get here before he came home. I could imagine your wrath, and I would have deserved every reproach.”
“But he did come back. You’re doing terrific, better than Phil and I seem able to.”
“Then you lied when you foisted the little bugger off on me last fall.”
“It would’ve been a very difficult foist if I’d told you the truth.”
“We do semiokay sometimes, sis, but we haven’t done even semiokay for a while now. The Mick’s headstrong and tetchy. He’s . . . impossible.”
“You’re a steadying influence, Xavier.”
“His performance at Ephebus got worse each grading period. If that trend goes on this year, they’ll suspend or expel him. And I won’t be around all day to keep him from doing salad gas, tuning in the Pornucopia Channel, or computer-cracking the secret formula of Diet Coke. Who’s to say I could stop him even if I
were
around all day?”
“But you’re a man. You’re providing him an accessible masculine role model.”
“What’s Phil, then? An inaccessible hermaphrodite?”
“The ‘inaccessible’ part’s on target. And, um, I’m” —Lydia sighed— “not much better, I guess.”
Cripes, thought Xavier. The noose was tightening.
“We’ll pay you. We’ll up Mikhail’s allowance, we’ll cover your rent and utilities, we’ll—”
“No. Definitely not.”
A concourse cart toting a handicapped passenger beeped at them, and Xavier pulled Lydia out of its way. “He ran away from us too,” said Lydia, heedless of the cart. “Stayed gone a month and a half. We had him declared a missing person. When he came home, we locked him in his room.” Xavier gave her a quizzical look. “It was a suite, actually. With a bathroom.”
Lydia badgered, harangued, and cajoled as they strolled to the baggage carousels in the main terminal. By the time they got there, Xavier had agreed to let The Mick stay another year. The first one hadn’t been all azaleas, but neither had it been an utter disaster, and maybe attending a Smite Them Hip & Thigh concert with the boy would effect a rapprochement.
Even if it didn’t, Xavier believed that Lydia had forgiven him, in advance, if The Mick cut out again, OD’d on salad gas, or came down with a fatal disease. Not that he wanted any of that stuff to happen, God knows, but if something unforeseen and terrible did occur, he wouldn’t have to walk about the rest of his life under an ugly guilt-lined cloud. The Mick did have a way with words, and he did sometimes cook, and Bari didn’t regard him as an unrehabilitable yahoo. . . .
*
When Xavier got home from work on Friday, his sister was gone. Mikhail said that she’d taken EleRail back to the airport—he hadn’t wanted to go with her—to catch her flight to San Diego. Meanwhile, The Mick had dressed for the concert at the Grotto East, and he sported a reprise-punk outfit with face paint, shaved temples, a spiked collar, and ankle-high boots. As an obvious peace offering, he’d also prepared dinner—hot dogs with chili, oven-ready French fries, and, for dessert, microwaved apples.
“This almost looks edible,” Xavier said. “But I don’t think I can eat.”
“Yeah. I’m pretty excited too.”
The fact that Mikhail might not see his mother again for a year or even two didn’t appear to distress him much. But he was used to not seeing his parents. Even in Chula Vista, Lydia and Philip had been upwardly mobile workaholics. The Mick had had to become, well, exactly what he’d become. Namely, The Mick.
“Look,” Xavier said. “Could we declare a moratorium on feuding?”
“Your ad said ‘Trooce,’ remember? I didn’t come back only for the Smite ’Em tickets—mostly, but not only.”
Xavier didn’t remember that his ad had said “Trooce,” just that it had offered a bribe—but Grantham had written the ad, he hadn’t, and Xavier was inclined to think that the bribe had had more to do with Mikhail’s return than had the doubtful extension of an olive branch.
25
“Count Geiger’s Blues”
At Grotto East, they sat front-row-center.
On The Mick’s recommendation, Xavier had worn blue jeans (designer blue jeans, to the kid’s disgust), a white shirt, a pair of high-tech tennis shoes, and a navy-blue windbreaker. He didn’t look retropunk, but he didn’t look like some old fogey either. Earlier, Bari had told The Mick that such dress would probably get his uncle through the show without bringing down catcalls or a thrashing with bicycle chains—unless somebody there recognized Xavier. As a precaution, then, he had also worn a pair of granny glasses with cola-colored lenses.
To Xavier, the warm-up band for Smite Them Hip & Thigh sounded like twelve people shattering glass in an empty swimming pool. They were called The Indictments or The Incitements, but Xavier couldn’t see that their antiestablishment monicker made an iota’s difference, either way, and in his notes did not jot down the titles of their “songs.” Indeed, it was a mercy and a relief when the I-worders finished their set and departed the stage basketing their crotches, wagging their outthrust tongues, and blessing the delirious crowd with upraised, pogo-sticking middle fingers.
“Homey touch,” Xavier told The Mick. “Staining their bird fingers blue.” The Mick was too stoked to rebut either this sarcasm or Xavier’s observation that any band following these guys would sound like “melodic troubadours.” And, in fact, Smite Them Hip & Thigh did come across, on stage, as melodic troubadours—if only by comparison. Its three women all played percussion instruments (drums, sticks, tambourine, xylophone) while Gregor McGudgeon, on a guitar shaped like a futuristic post-hole digger or an upright synthesizer on chrome-plated casters, and the white-haired bassist Kanji Urabe laid down melodies counterpointed by computer-generated images flashing on two huge screens at the back of the stage. Xavier had never heard music that sounded quite like this. It had Oriental, African, and Polynesian flavors and bristled with an electricity that was more than simply amplified sexual energy. And if he listened hard, he could make out the mocking but literate poetry that Gregor McGudgeon had set to this music.
Except, he thought, maybe “superimposed on” was a more accurate way to put it than “set to.” In any case, the lyrics were as much a part of Smite Them’s appeal as the grab-bag quality of their music or as the contrast between the women’s robotic footwork and the men’s fierce immobility. The Mick sat transfixed watching them, a zircon of spittle at the edge of his mouth, while the rest of the audience either swayed in place to the weirdly infectious rhythms or tried to lip-synch McGudgeon’s rapid-fire lyrics as he blankly talked/sang them over each number’s accompaniment. It was blasphemy to make such a comparison, even in his head, but McGudgeon reminded Xavier of Rex Harrison as ’Enry ’Iggins in
My Fair Lady
. A young, lean,
angry
’Enry ’Iggins, with lots of hair, fiery eyes, and a wardrobe patched together from Salvation Army castoffs and the most expensive items in a swank New York leather shop. McGudgeon was that self-assured, haughty, and charismatic. His Broadway
savoir-faire
kept rubbing the nap off his
au courant
disdain for the zombied-out mindlessness of the pop world’s regard. At one point, Xavier was certain that McGudgeon was staring at
him
, gazing down from behind his keyboard with a look that drilled to the crux of his hypocrisies and presumptions.
You’re irrelevant to the universe that my band is recreating from the present chaos,
McGudgeon’s look said.
You’re a tottering anachronism.
The fact that McGudgeon was machine-gunning the lyrics of “Nowhere Man Redux” only heightened Xavier’s discomfort.
“Whaddaya think, Uncle Xave?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know? What’s not to fucking know?”
“Mikhail, I’m trying to take everything in, okay?”
“Sure. Suck it all up, unc. Suck it all up.”
The kids around them were swaying, but not dancing, to the band’s weird music. As song succeeded song (“Game, Set, & Match to Jill,” “Pope-a-Dope Shuffle,” “The Bush Man’s Got a Nerve to Brag,” “O, You Vulgar Boatmen,” “The Utes in Their Utopia,” etc.), Xavier grew more, not less, confused. He recalled some of the lyrics to a cryptic old Bob Dylan song—
“Something’s going on here, / But you don’t know what it is, / Do you, Mr. Jones?”
—and he thought that Smite Them was making that statement to him while talking around him to their clued-in fans. Was what they were laying down good or bad? Deathless art or smarmy dreck? McGudgeon introduced a new number. “This un’s in honor of your city, Salonika, metrop of the hustle, home of UC’s stalwarts. Git sit, sibs—‘Count Geiger’s Blues’!” He gave his band a downbeat, and Urabe, Matison, Suarez, and Kambo launched into a toe-tapper of a ditty, even though its lyrics included lines like
“Lost her forever / Near the Pripyat River”
and
“Old Man Meter’s a red-cell eater. / Don’t he make you wanna / Call yourself a goner?”
Now, at last, the group’s fans—collectively, The Mick said, known as Smittens—started to boogie, gyrating in front of their thirty-buck seats. Xavier, smitten by—well, something—began to move too, with so much energy and enthusiasm that The Mick gave him a smile and flailed even harder himself. The entire Grotto East was rocking, the computer screens behind the band were flashing up successive images of Count Geiger in his silver suit and ghastly burn mask, and Xavier was knee-twitching and elbow-jerking with the most frenzied of them.
Only Xavier understood that the Philistine Syndrome had struck again. He wasn’t dancing. He was reacting on a perverse physical level to the sheer Quality of Smite Them Hip & Thigh’s unique brand of art. A kind of palsy had seized him. He
looked
to be enjoying himself, but he was suffering. With his hands at shoulder height, he couldn’t keep from thwapping his own face. He was doing a Saint Vitus jig, in thrall to such a madcap chorea that his limbs and torso shook, his facial muscles spasmed, his internal organs jounced. He liked what McGudgeon’s band had showed him, he considered their act worthy of praise, but he was in hell, a sinner in the hands of an angry God.
“Get it!” The Mick cried. “Go, Uncle Xave!”
Before “Count Geiger’s Blues” concluded, Xavier lurched stageward, staggered, and, toppling, struck his head on the edge of the platform. As at Mahler’s
Seventh
some time ago, he was out, really out, and for exactly the same reason.
*
The review that Xavier later wrote, scribbling it out in pencil while propped up in his bed, had this lead:
“Five percent of Gregor McGudgeon’s work is ‘deathless art,’ and Smite Them Hip & Thigh brought only that 5 percent to their brilliant show in the Grotto East on Friday night.”
