“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.
17 THE SONGS OF SALOME
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.
Socrates slumped over the podium, almost hidden in his oversize houndstooth jacket. Occasionally, he’d glare and take a puff from one of the three cigarettes he’d strategically placed — one in his right hand, one in an ashtray on the podium in front of him, and one hanging off the edge of a chair. The skin of his oblong face looked like mottled mercury and cooled lava. His thick-lensed glasses made his eyes look bulgy. His voice drizzled out with an Olympian sneer of superiority.
Crazed child Nub pulls his metal casquet over his loopy eyes. He munches on Chilean eyeball apples. Sucks skin-sap through his braced teeth. Comes up from behind and spits in my mouth. Mumbles “Protofacsists’ liquid dick sauce. Your favorite.” He pulls my harness and rams his Tin-Can-Do into the hard crack of my buttocks. Yvulva announces, “It’s the midmorning of mindfuck. The pubescent mind-melders are at the gate.”