About a month after Absurda’s funeral, we hold a memorial concert at the Troubadour. I’m reeling like someone stabbed me in my good eye. I get high. It don’t help my ornery mood and I get in an argument with Salome. Hugo Bollatanski shows up, and I’m on my way to throw him out when Alchemy steps in. “Let it go. He’s trying to make amends. We all have to let the bad blood go.” He means me and him, too. But his speechifying during the show — he makes her drug use and dying into a reason to legalize all drugs so the government can tax and control it — fuckin’ pisses me off.
After the show, me and Alchy get in a stare-down duel. I wait, and then I says, “You making Absurda a poster child for drugheads wasn’t right. Not tonight.” He lights up an American Spirit and the match flashes and it’s like it lit his eyes on fire, a voodoo doll gold and brown. Lux pulls me away. Me, Lux, and Bryn walk to my car. I’m wondering if Alchy told him anything. I ain’t said zip. Not even to Bryn. Lux asks Bryn to get in the car while me and him talk. He says, “Ambitious, you and Alchemy, man, I don’t know what went down in Fond du Lac, but whatever it was, you guys need to make peace.”
“Yeah, it’s on him, too.”
“No doubt. But Absurda wouldn’t want the two people she loved most in the world to stop talking because of her.”
I mumble, “Lux, I need some time. Me and Bryn are going to Cancún.”
“Take whatever time you need.” He opens his arms and bear-hugs me.
The trip away was a good escape, but I still ain’t sure what my next move is gonna be. The Topanga place is near deserted when I return. Salome is back in Collier Layne after getting caught leaving the compound with Alchemy’s Beretta to do who the fuck knows what. Nathaniel is confined to the guest house with his nurses. Alchemy’s disappeared into a freaking monastery. His version of a biddy-bip-bip farm.
I feel jumpy staying in Topanga. The Rampart house is too fucking packed with boogeymen. I put it on the market and rent a place in Hollywood Hills for a few months. Bryn kinda moves in with me but also keeps her condo ’cause she don’t want to stay alone in my new place after we hit the road.
When Alchemy reappears in L.A., he tries to keep under the radar ’cause of the shit with his new brother, Mose. But the media catches on and makes Alchemy a bigger hero for saving Mose’s life. Alchemy plays it all modest in public. To me, he brags how “intelligent” his “professor brother” is. For months I keep asking to let me meet the mysterious Mose, and he keeps avoiding it. I figure he’s embarrassed by me.
We’re also dealing with the Sheiks selling Kasbah to the Germans for gazillions. That kinda helps reunite us, ’cause we gotta decide if we are going to continue as a band, and if we are, how we deal with this takeover. Lux invites me and Alchemy to his parents’ place for dinner so no outsider will bother us. I’m kinda nervous about going there. Feeling ashamed, but I got no choice.
We eat dinner with the Bradshaws in their dining room. It’s kinda tense. I ain’t saying much. On the wall across from me is two pictures. One of MLK and one of a sorta black, dark-eyed Jesus. Made me think of the pictures of JFK and a white blue-eyed Jesus that Granny McFinn kept on her dining room wall. Lux was about as religious as me, but he was trying to be the peacemaker.
After dinner, Big Lionel and Mrs. Bradshaw go to their bedroom.
Lux steps up. “Straight out, I want us to continue. Not for the money or the women. For the music. For what we’ve done and can do. It’s not going to be the same without Absurda. I’ll never stop missing her. But you two need to stop acting like bratty teenagers.” Lux was never afraid to call out Alchemy (or me, for that matter), and Alchy always took it from him. “I love being an Insatiable. Or we can all go do our thing elsewhere.”
I realize Alchy has said nothing to Lux. Still, I want him to speak first.
“We have to continue as a band. I have to continue now.” He turns to me. “Ambitious, what I did with Heather was flat-out wrong. I wish I could undo it. And maybe you wish you could undo some things, too. But we both did what we did because we hurt so damn much and acted in ways destructive to each other and to ourselves.”
That don’t get to the heart of it, but if I start in again about Madam Rosa’s and what happened in the hotel in Fond du Lac — I can’t live with Lux hearing any of that — that’s a road with only one way out. I don’t answer them directly. “Okay, guys, what’s our strategy on this merger bullshit?”
For what feels like forever, we have all these dumb-ass meetings about our new deal. The chill between me and Alchy has warmed, especially after we start jamming. We’re looking for a new guitar player after I decide to stay on the bass.
After the German takeover is done, we all have our gourds full of lawyer bullshit. It takes us a while to get going, but I’m excited to hit the road for a U.S. tour, which will bank millions. We settle on Silky Trespass as guitarist. Everything is first class. We’re as popular as ever, only we don’t hang out that much. Me and Alchy get into it big time one night in front of Lux and Silky, ’cause he wants to add a bunch of lefty antiwar songs to the set list. I am one hundred percent against it. We don’t agree about the war in Iraq or even Afghanistan. I says, “What the fuck? They blew up the Trade Center, and you ain’t no pacifist, so what’s your problem?”
He gives me some spiel about war is not the way to make peace and because they kill innocent people doesn’t mean we should. He wants the world to love us. I don’t give a damn what the world thinks as long as they keep their bombs to themselves. Suddenly, he gives me this condescending smile. “Sometimes, we have to think about how things affect more than just ourselves.”
“Just because you think you doing good for others, don’t mean you ain’t doing it for yourself.”
He sighs overloud and says, “Okay, say that I’m doing for myself. I’m also doing it for others.”
He writes “Dyin’ to Be Your Hero,” which is a good song. We play that one the rest of the tour. Only I’m feeling it ain’t really settled between us.
57 THE SONGS OF SALOME
The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner
Alchemy gallivanted across the world’s stages for much of the year as I prepared for the Hammer retrospective. Xtine flew out to help with the assistants I had hired to build the Pillzapoppin’ and Electroshocked Ladyland installations. Nathaniel argued against exhibiting the Baddist Boys. I had to because I knew that, like a curse I must expunge, no longer could they remain repressed in the unconscious attic of my studio.
Before the show opened, the spate of publicity certainly alerted the spawn of Malcolm. As the day approached, I felt myself teetering, unsure of where I might fall considering some of the eruptions at previous openings. Alchemy, with an uncharacteristic lack of intuitiveness, sniped at me for acting histrionically when I threatened to boycott the various openings. I dared not reveal that I’d found a picture and profile of the Pretender on the Web site at the university where he taught. I kept it undercover in my studio and spent far too many hours trying to commune with him through our DNA, hoping one of our mutual ancestors would bring us into contact and prove he was of my blood. He remained apart from me.
During one of the preopenings, from the Hammer’s second floor, I watched as the crowd entered. He slithered into the lobby by himself. I recoiled when he and Alchemy shook hands like … old bros. I made my way unsteadily to the exhibition hall and started my talk right in front of the B Boys—and the two of them.