Her voice lured me without a sound
“I’m your mystery and you’re my enemy”
as I crawled into the well-trod garden
of her pleasure mound
I ask, “So you think Camille’s doing me just to get the part?”
“What makes you think this song is about you?”
I don’t answer.
Before we start shooting, me and Camille talk about the video. She says rejection’s part of the business and she’s fine with it. I ain’t so fine. I say to Camille that we’ll get married the next day — then they have to give her a part. “Ambishoos”—I loved the way she said my name—“that is very kind but a bad reason to marry. We are fun together. And you are a better man than you think. I feel you don’t really love me.” And wow, she is harsh, but she is right. “Please, don’t be angry wheez me, but no one who loves you should marry you. Not now. Even eef you fight, you are too much in love wheez Alshemie. You need to break from him before you are free to love so strong like you did wheez Absurda.”
I don’t say nuthin’ to Alchy or no one else. We shoot the video and head home. I’m sad about leaving Camille. She gives me one last piece of advice: “Don’t be impulsive. Break when you feel strong.”
Before recording more songs for Dieseasee and starting the South America and Asia tours, we take a little time off. I’ve given up the lease on the Hollywood Hills house, and Alchemy says I can stay in Topanga. I accept but don’t plan on staying. Alchemy is preoccupied with Mose, Salome, and Nathaniel, who had more strokes and talks so slow it ain’t even fun jousting with him.
Andrew calls me up saying Alchemy is buying a building in downtown L.A. for Winsum Realty. I answer, “You never ask me before. Just do it.” He says Alchemy thinks I should check it out. Bastard knows me so damn well, ’cause I love it. I end up claiming the top floor for myself. While it’s getting fixed up, I take a trip back to New York. I spend a little, very little time with my mom and sister. See some old guys from Flushing. I jam nights with some guys from ’70s and ’80s NYC bands. It’s fun and we talk about doing some recording together.
And get this, they built a condo on the site of the puke-filled Gas Station club where I slept outside as the good-for-nuthin’ Ricky McFinn. I buy myself an apartment.
The whole time, I’m doing some heavy reconsidering about my future. I am feeling pretty good about myself. So when Alchemy summons us to regroup in L.A. to start planning the tour and recordings, I’ve decided, after almost fourteen years, it’s time to cut the cord. Alchemy don’t try to dissuade me. Just says, “If that’s your decision, I’ll have to accept it. Lux asks, “So, what’s your plan?” I’m ready for that. “I been playing with a bunch of guys from New York and we’re talking about doing something together.”
Later, when we’re alone, Lux says, “Are you sure about this? It’s cool to play with other guys, but it won’t be the same.”
“Lux, it ain’t been the same with us for a while. For now, I’m good.”
I call up a coupla the NYC guys, but they end up punking out on me. So I take a trip to see Ricky Jr. When I get back to L.A., I call Lux about hanging out some night. He can come check out my new place downtown. He says he can’t do it. They’ve finished auditioning bass players, chosen one for the tour and are rehearsing like mad.
I hang up the phone feeling like, Holy fuck! What the fuck have I done?
59 THE SONGS OF SALOME
Into the Mystic
I told Bellows a few more times that I had some information that would interest Palmer and his committee of investigators. He ignored Bellows’s bidding for a visit with Persephone.
I sing to Persephone, as I sing to Nathaniel.
I found him. Napping, I first thought, in his wheelchair on the porch. I tilted his head up and removed his glasses. I kissed his lips one last time. His face laden with Gravity Disease. The last years offered so few rewards. He felt like his life’s work had been debased. He willed himself to stay with us and experience my Hammer retrospective, which delighted him.
That morning on the porch I breathed, for the final time, the purity of his soulsmell. It spread from his essence to his corporeality, and suddenly — the Gravity Disease lifted. His face appeared almost youthful. Tranquil.
I lay down next to him. His left hand was draped over the chair’s side. I held it in mine. With the ministrokes coming more and more frequently, he had left me a note a month before. “No wishing you’d not done this or had done that. Make more art. I treasure the life we lived together.”
I awakened Alchemy with my phone call. “Nathaniel’s gone. I’m okay. I just need you to come here from wherever you are.”
And he did.
As Nathaniel wished, we buried him in Virginia beside his parents. There was a memorial service in New York City. I didn’t go. The tentacles of the dark matter beckoned. I resisted. Alchemy, before going back on the road, stayed with me and then Xtine. Ruggles, now retired, visited briefly. No one could replace Nathaniel. I’ve never stopped missing him.
60 THE MOSES CHRONICLES (2009–2010)
Obey My Voice, and Arise
Moses often speculated that as memory compresses and expands, time slows down and speeds up almost inexplicably. For when he reflected upon the year immediately following his operation, it passed in an elongated and vivid slow motion, and the next years felt compressed, swiftly passing into indistinguishable, barely recalled moments, interspersed with incidents that expanded to significant and memorable in the present or in retrospect. And now, today, almost a decade after finding his brother, Moses girded himself as time nearly stopped. Salome was on her way to the foundation.
The pseudoreasons for this visit were to get her approval on how her work and Xtine’s photos were to be used to decorate the walls and to review the final applications for the first Nathaniel Brockton Fellowship for Political Activism. Since her few oblique comments after the Hammer opening, she had never hinted at even suspecting the truth, so Alchemy and Moses decided that Alchemy should not broach the subject of Moses’s existence with Salome ahead of time.
This latest attempt to meet had been delayed not by his illness, pathos, divorce, or the perpetual recording and touring of the Insatiables, but by the passing of Nathaniel Brockton and Salome’s descent into self-imposed isolation at the family’s Shelter Island home.
Moses scoured Nathaniel’s obituaries for insight into his mother. He found precious little. Moses admired Nathaniel’s devotion to his ideals, but he didn’t think much of Tag. He wondered if Salome had ever mentioned him to Nathaniel.
Moses paced around the office, occasionally glancing at the tantalizing Suzan Woodruff abstract on the wall. He’d hired Jay as a consultant to furnish and decorate the offices, in hopes of keeping her close to him. Foolish move. Of course she was sympathetic when he relayed the events of the Teumer meeting. But she glided over his hints at attempting reconciliation. Whenever she left to meet someone — he couldn’t ask who — the wound breached and bled.
Although they e-mailed a few times a week, and spoke on the phone erratically, they’d last met at the office three months before. He had told her about the upcoming “Salome summit.” How he wished she were beside him now.
His friends pushed him to end all contact with Jay, to lower the unattainable standards set by his rose-colored vision of her. They encouraged him to start dating. He placated them by going on a few setups, which “didn’t work out.” After the Evie misfire, he understood that he couldn’t approach sex as a good meal, gratifying yet disposable. He was terrified that, literally, he wouldn’t survive another failed relationship. So Moses made one simple decision: He would remain alone. It never occurred to him that his emotional retreat imitated his mom’s behavior. Hannah, too, had forsworn the risk of romance after the rejections by her first husband and Teumer. With no child to love, the Nightingale Foundation became the recipient of Moses’s adoration and passion.