Chapter 4
The Naughty and the Nice
The party, a “Being-In” held by the children of the middle class, who imagined that injustices that had characterized society since the ancient Greeks somehow could be eradicated by college students smoking and ingesting illegal substances in the name of “peace,” took place in a filthy loft in the derelict, grimy section of Manhattan which was normally the preserve of drug addicts, homosexuals, and petty criminals. Daubs of brightly-colored, glowing paint applied to dirty factory walls and crude signs affixed to lamp posts pointed the way to a decrepit building on an ill-lit side street from which the sound of loud, primitive music, of the kind that sinks the spirit of men in the debased urges of adolescent emotionality rather than glorifying it in a purest expression of abstract exaltation, could be heard. It would take more than ten years from the Great Takeover for the neighborhoods, and the offspring, of men to be rescued from the corruptions and decay of the previous order.
It was Nathan A. Banden’s first experience of such a neighborhood and, as was typical of the pampered children of the professional class, he credited himself with personal courage and ethical praiseworthiness merely for walking down the street. That there were visible no menaces to his safety was of no consequence, nor was it of any importance to his preening self-regard that the periodic appearance of a police car, sent to monitor the possibilities of civic rowdiness, served as a deterrent to any possible crimes in public.
Banden had, in the heat of their last exchange, told Dragnie he would be moving back in with his parents, but in fact he had not done so yet. He decided to take advantage of her pilgrimage to Glatt’s Gorge and remain in the Glatt penthouse, where he had spent the past two days nursing his self-pity and stoking the flame of his indignation. It was while there that he had received a phone call from her office, informing him that her return would be delayed by at least four days, as would Glatt’s. To Banden this felt like a betrayal. It was bad enough that she had rejected the prospect of carrying his seed and giving birth to his child; now she was extending the trip into a five-day vacation with his chief rival, and in the one place to which his entrance was barred and where she and Glatt had experienced perhaps their finest hour.
Banden trudged up the wide, worn steps of the building toward the increasingly deafening noise. He was unsure of why he was there, of what he was looking for, or if he would know it if he saw it. He knew only that, like romantic swains of ages past trapped in the suffocating misery of rejection, he sought something cathartic, possibly dangerous, and perhaps even deadly. When he had seen a sign near the Glatt apartment advertising this event, he decided to attempt to assuage his feelings of jealousy and diminishment by looking into it.
The loft was immense, poorly-lighted by unshaded, naked bulbs scattered throughout and several neon beer advertisements on the walls. It was teeming with writhing bodies, for whom the word “dance” denoted a state of gyrating, spastic gesticulation indistinguishable from a gran mal seizure. The music, for so the assembled deemed it, featured amplified bass and thunderous drums under shrieking, caterwauling electric guitar strumming, all accompanying indecipherable lyrics shouted by “singers” of no notable training or ability. The crowd consisted primarily of young men and women of college age. Each considered himself to be exploring new avenues of self-expression, and so each wore clothing with an identical intention: to offend their parents. In evidence were flared pantaloons, tunics, Indian sport coats, blousy shirts, black t-shirts and tight jeans, dandified frills, Bluebeard costumes, feather boas, plumed hats, and other calculated tokens of strained whimsicality or affronts to normal standards of attire. Banden, in the pressed slacks and crisp dress shirt of the Glatt School student, instantly felt self-conscious.
Having led a privileged and sheltered life, Banden had no experience with the kinds of people now gyrating before him. One young man doing The Bugaboo in a red and purple striped shirt, was the son of a doctor. He believed that Western medicine was a fraud, and that men could be cured of all diseases through chanting foreign syllables and drinking herbal infusions. The previous week he had contracted an infection and demanded that his father provide him with antibiotics without cost.
A girl in a billowing dress imitative of that of a peasant wife danced the Meat and Potatoes with abandon. She believed that the corruptions of civilization began with the stricture that women must shave their legs and underarms, and for that reason had made it a philosophical priority to display the hairy legs of a savage and to smell like a gymnasium.
Nearby danced a woman for whom the highest expression of personal freedom and individual liberty consisted in the unconfined swinging of her breasts. The week before she had taken part in a demonstration at which women too old, unattractive, or disagreeable to obtain a lover had gathered to remove their brassieres and burn them in a public display of what they considered to be advanced thinking and political protest.
Banden’s eye fell on an older man, just past thirty. He was an assistant professor of sociology at a local university. As befitted his relative maturity, he gazed at the gathering from the periphery and contented himself with smoking a tiny ceramic pipe stuffed with the compressed extract of the poppy. In his classes he instructed his students that the mind was an illusion, the brain was essentially a large kidney, and the collective wisdom of three thousand years was contemptibly out of fashion. He urged those attending to his words to follow precepts uttered by illiterate popular singers, Hindu mystics, or Buddhist worshippers of self-annihilation.
A man in his late twenties dancing The Twang wore a pseudo-military jacket of braids and epaulets. He was a dealer in mind-damaging plants and hallucinogenic chemicals. That one of his customers had, the previous week, been under the delusion that he could fly, and had leaped to his death off the roof of a building, was of no consequence.
Two women in blue jeans and shapeless gray sweat shirts were Lesbians. Their movement scarcely qualified as dancing at all, even by the debased standards of the present event. Instead, they deemed it a measure of their freedom to be able to openly engage in kissing and stroking on the dance floor.
A boy wearing a shabby tuxedo and top hat, with his face painted yellow and red, spun like a Dervish, displaying no sense of rhythm or form. He had no aptitude for study and lacked the discipline to derive any benefit from a university experience, and yet felt entitled to a full scholarship to one of the most prestigious colleges in the nation.
One couple, each in black from head to toe, clutched each other and rocked as though in the grip of an attack of deliriums tremens. She was an associate professor of English. He was “a poet.” Both believed that the problems of society were due to the necessity of each individual to earn a living, and both called upon the workers of the world to overthrow the creators of wealth and to distribute their riches among “the people.” That they lived in a townhouse purchased by her father was a fact neither found difficult to ignore.
“Hey, man, your attire is far away.”
The girl who spoke to Banden was pretty, slim, and with the exaggerated eye-makeup of a child exploring the treasures of her mother’s dressing table. She was slightly shorter than he and wore her dark hair long, unstyled, and untied. “I’m Angel Human,” she said.
He started. “Is that really your name?”