I gripped his hand. “You go now with Xtine back to the Chelsea. I have to do something that may take a while.” I hugged him hard. I kissed Xtine on the cheek and whispered that she should take him to Orient Point if I didn’t call her in an hour.
“Lively, I’m sorry.” He looked pissed. “This is a big night for me, so can you wait here about ten minutes? I need to take care of some business. Then I will cooperate. I won’t run. Deal?”
“Deal.” He put his massive hands in his jacket pockets and bared his primitive incisors. Almost as an aside, most assuredly as a threat, he said, “We have two men outside.”
What happened next? The drugs, the hotwires have all conspired to muddle my memory. From what I remember and heard from others, I ducked into the closet where they kept the supplies and borrowed a pair of box cutters. I snuck up behind Lively and slashed his back through his suit. Almost in slow motion, he buckled and fell to the floor. I ran out of the office and barreled through the crowd, then stopped in front of a canvas. I ripped two long gashes from top to bottom. I did it to another piece, and another.
Because of my previous work, some people (including Tallent, Gibbon, and even Horrwich, for fuck’s sake, who should’ve known me better) thought it was a performance. They thought I was making a “statement.” They started applauding. But they stopped when I took the cutters and slashed one thumb, and it began to bleed. I felt no pain yet and took the cutter in that hand and sliced it from cuticle to wrist. I still have five-inch scars on each thumb. People started gasping and yelping at the spurting blood. Finally, Gibbon yelled, “Stop her! STOP her!”
Lively, who was bleeding through his thrashed suit jacket, and his two henchmen came ramrodding through the crowd like football goons, knocking everyone aside. Holencraft claimed he put himself between Lively and me because Lively had a murderous gleam in his eyes.
My last sensates from that horrendous day are of Alchemy screaming “Mommy!”—Lively had not let him and Xtine leave — while one of his agents bear-clawed my five-year-old son as he struggled to save me. Lively’s men pinned me to the floor.
Lively (whose wounds were superficial) and Billy Jr. worked out an agreement so I wasn’t prosecuted for any crimes. I received a ticket for my first vacation here at the Collier Layne amusement park, with a bonus package of drugs and rides on the electroshock roller coaster. I was never the same after that stay. Never.
18 MEMOIRS OF A USELESS GOOD-FOR-NUTHIN’
On Your Mark, Get Set, Go, 1992 — 1994
I was one of those New York snots who bought the whole la-la land as a town full of Jell-O heads and faggots, as in wimps, not homosexuals, though there are plenty of those, or Mexies who can’t speak English no better than me, which like everything about L.A. is true and not. There was some hard-core shit going down. Parts of the town still smelt like a giant ashtray after the ’92 riots, which blew up six months before we got there.
As we drive into L.A. that first night, Alchemy goes all hookie-dookie again. “This city — underneath the spit shine of Hollywood — is a phenomenal metropolis with a cursed soul. At first glance, too much of the architecture is graceless, without symmetry, and they keep tearing down the inspired structures. The homes on the coast should be planned so the mountains and the sea meld with the man-made landscape. No one is a better architect than Mother Nature. Ambitious, whether you look at the surface or below, you’ll see that L.A. is America’s future.”
My mom had two books in the house when I was kid, The Joy of Sex and Jonathan Livingston Seagull, and I says, “Alchemy, you sound like that gooey-brained Segal guy floating above us all.”
He laughed. “Yeah, I guess, sometimes I am gooey.”
We’d been driving fifteen hours straight, when we pull up to the Pantera Rosa. Yeah, the song of the same name is about that dump. Was a former “Beaner bar,” off the 10 and Olympic Boulevard. A pink wooden shack outside and black and murky inside like a murdered body is hidden in the ceiling. Was a few artists living in the hood, though mostly working class and bangers. They tore down the Pantera around 2000 when the hood got ritzy, but we was long gone.
Falstaffa and Marty live in the apartment above the Rosa, which they used as their office for an, ahem, “car service” delivering “packages” to movie and biz types and the platinum card kids from the private school down the block. Some of them and their parents was our first fans.
Falstaffa, a 350-pound tough Tijuana Santería princess, lumbered out to meet us. With her buzz-cut orange hair and tattooed forearms and thighs, and a switchblade-sharp fuck-you sneer, she gave me the willies. Wrongo. She turned out to be the biggest-hearted no-crock-a-shit person I ever met. We did a shitload a laughing and partying together before the hep C got her.
She picks up Alchemy and twirls him around like he’s no heavier than a picked-clean chicken wing. Out preens Marty, a four-foot-eleven Mick midget. He smacks a kiss right on Alchemy’s butt. When Alchy introduces us, Marty squeezes my hand so hard it’s like he’s trying to break the bones. I’m squeezing just as hard back when this loopy boxer comes streaking at me and jumps at my back. Marty lets go and orders the dog, “Get the Fuck Over Here,” yep, that’s the name to which he answers. I’m thinking, My life is forever gonna be a three-ring freak show. Alchy informs everyone that I’m his bass player. I don’t protest about nuthin’ right then ’cause I am so damn tired.
The next day Lux Deluxe and Absurda drop by. Lux I’d heard of as the drummer in the Hip Replacements, a punkfunk band of black and white guys that had an indie hit with “I’m Your Black Doorman.” Turns out Alchy penned them lyrics. Lux’s spangled up in a fringe jacket, bling hanging from everywhere, and Frye boots. I want to tell him that Hendrix been dead for twenty years. I find out later he wants to tell me that Sid Vicious been dead for almost twenty years! We got a good laugh out of that one. Lux has a style and swagger like a western hero, only black, old-fashion strong-silent type. He introduces Absurda, with her vacuum-sucking eyes, natural blond hair, and swooshy bangs, Goth makeup and an itchy-bitchy walk that says she needs to fuck. She’s just my type — lanky and tight and all attitude. I figure if she ain’t with Lux, all chicks are Alchemy’s or wanna be Alchemy’s, so I lay back. While Lux and Alchy are huddling up, I ask Absurda how she met Alchemy.
Her speaking voice sounds like a clarinet with a cigarette in its mouthpiece. She was born and raised Amanda Akin in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. She left at eighteen and met Alchemy at Juilliard. I don’t volunteer that we had a coupla interns from Juilliard when I was at Performing Arts and I hated the bastids.
“Alchemy was only seventeen when he started. Finished at twenty. I left because I couldn’t take the hypocrisy, and despite the lip service, it wasn’t as progressive as I’d imagined. Guys were still getting the preferential treatment and I was just getting buzzed by Sally Timms and Kim Gordon, and the forevers like Marianne Faithfull and Chrissie Hynde. I transferred to CalArts. Much hipper and less testosterone heavy.”
Alchemy never breathed a syllable about the diploma stuffed in his back pocket ’cause he thought it would ruin his rock cred.
“Bet he also never told you he joined the army?”
“Fuck no. He seems like a, pu — ah—”
“Pussy? I got your number Mr. Ricky-Tough-Guy.” So she did. “Yes, he enlisted. When Salome freaked again, they had to let him out before his time was up.”