In the middle of our meal Perkus halted some rant about Werner Herzog or Marlon Brando or Morrison Groom to announce what he’d made of me so far. “So, you’ve gotten by to this point by being cute, haven’t you, Chase?” His spidery fingers, elbow-propped on the linoleum, kept the oozing, gory Jackson Hole burger aloft to mask his expression, and cantilevered far enough from his lap to protect those dapper threads. One eye fixed me while the other crawled, now seeming a scalpel in operation on my own face. “You haven’t changed, you’re like a dreamy child, that’s the secret of your appeal. But they love you. They watch you like you’re still on television.”
“Who?”
“The rich people. The Manhattanites-you know who I mean.”
“Yes,” I said.
“You’re supposed to be the saddest man in Manhattan,” he said. “Because of the astronaut who can’t come home.”
So, no surprise, Perkus was another one who knew me as Janice Trumbull’s fiancé. My heart’s distress was daily newspaper fodder. Yes, I loved Janice Trumbull, the American trapped in orbit with the Russians, the astronaut who couldn’t come home. This, beyond my childhood TV stardom, was what anyone knew about me, though some, like Susan Eldred, were too polite to mention it.
“That’s what everyone adores about you.”
“I guess so.”
“But I know your secret.”
I was startled. Did I have a secret? If I did, it was one of the things I’d misplaced in the last few years. I couldn’t remember how I’d gotten from there to here, made the decisions that led from my child stardom to harmlessly dissipated Manhattan celebrity, nor how it was that I deserved the brave astronaut’s love. I had trouble clearly recalling Janice, that was part of my sorrow. The day she launched for the space station I must have undertaken to quit thinking of Janice, even while promising to keep a vigil for her here on earth. I never dared tell anyone this fact. So if I had a secret, it was that I had conspired to forget my secret.
Perkus eyed me slyly. Perhaps it was his policy to make this announcement to any new acquaintance, to see what they’d blurt out. “Keep your eyes and ears open,” he told me now. “You’re in a position to learn things.”
What things? Before I could ask, we were off again. Perkus’s spiel encompassed Monte Hellman, Semina Culture, Greil Marcus’s Lipstick Traces, the Mafia’s blackmailing of J. Edgar Hoover over erotic secrets (resulting in the bogus amplification of Cold War fear and therefore the whole of our contemporary landscape), Vladimir Mayakovsky and the futurists, Chet Baker, Nothingism, the ruination Giuliani’s administration had brought to the sacred squalor of Times Square, the genius of The Gnuppet Show, Frederick Exley, Jacques Rivette’s impossible-to-see twelve-hour movie Out 1, corruption of the arts by commerce generally, Slavoj Zizek on Hitchcock, Franz Marplot on G. K. Chesterton, Norman Mailer on Muhammad Ali, Norman Mailer on graffiti and the space program, Brando as dissident icon, Brando as sexual saint, Brando as Napoleon in exile. Names I knew and didn’t. Others I’d heard once and never troubled to wonder about. Mailer, again and again, and Brando even more often-Perkus Tooth’s primary idols seemed to be this robust and treacherous pair, which only made Perkus seem frailer and more harmless by contrast, without ballast in his pencil-legged suit. Maybe he ate Jackson Hole burgers in an attempt to burgeon himself, seeking girth in hopes of attracting the attention of Norman and Marlon, his chosen peers.
He had the waitress refill his gallon-sized Coke, too, then, as our afternoon turned to evening, washed it all down with black coffee. In our talk marijuana confusion now gave way to caffeinated jags, like a cloud bank penetrated by buzzing Fokker airplanes. Did I read The New Yorker? This question had a dangerous urgency. It wasn’t any one writer or article he was worried about, but the font. The meaning embedded, at a preconscious level, by the look of the magazine; the seal, as he described it, that the typography and layout put on dialectical thought. According to Perkus, to read The New Yorker was to find that you always already agreed, not with The New Yorker but, much more dismayingly, with yourself. I tried hard to understand. Apparently here was the paranoia Susan Eldred had warned me of: The New Yorker’s font was controlling, perhaps assailing, Perkus Tooth’s mind. To defend himself he frequently retyped their articles and printed them out in simple Courier, an attempt to dissolve the magazine’s oppressive context. Once I’d enter his apartment to find him on his carpet with a pair of scissors, furiously slicing up and rearranging an issue of the magazine, trying to shatter its spell on his brain. “So, how,” he once asked me, apropos of nothing, “does a New Yorker writer become a New Yorker writer?” The falsely casual “so” masking a pure anxiety. It wasn’t a question with an answer.
But I’m confused in this account, surely. Can we have discussed so much the very first time? The New Yorker, at least. Giuliani’s auctioning of Forty-second Street to Disney. Mailer on NASA as a bureaucracy stifling dreams. J. Edgar Hoover in the Mafia’s thrall, hyping Reds, instilling self-patrolling fear in the American Mind. In the midst of these variations the theme was always ingeniously and excitingly retrieved. In short, some human freedom had been leveraged from view at the level of consciousness itself. Liberty had been narrowed, winnowed, amnesiacked. Perkus Tooth used this word without explaining-by it he meant something like the Mafia itself would do, a whack, a rubout. Everything that mattered most was a victim in this perceptual murder plot. Further: always to blame was everyone; when rounding up the suspects, begin with yourself. Complicity, including his own, was Perkus Tooth’s only doubtless conviction. The worst thing was to be sure you knew what you knew, the mistake The New Yorker’s font induced. The horizon of everyday life was a mass daydream-below it lay everything that mattered. By now we’d paid for our burgers and returned to his apartment. At his dinette table we sat and he strained some pot for seeds, then rolled another joint. The dope came out of a little plastic box marked with a laser-printed label reading CHRONIC in rainbow colors, a kind of brand name. We smoked the new joint relentlessly to a nub and went on talking, Perkus now free to gesticulate as he hadn’t at Jackson Hole. Yet he never grew florid, never, in all his ferment, hyperventilated or like some epileptic bit his tongue. The feverish words were delivered with a merciless cool. Like the cut of his suit, wrinkled though it might be. And the obsessively neat lettering on the VHS tape and on his CDs. Perkus Tooth might have one crazy eye, but it served almost as a warning not to underestimate his scruples, how attentively he stayed on the good side of his listener’s skepticism, making those minute adjustments that were sanity’s signature: the interpersonal realpolitik of persuasion. The eye was mad and the rest of him was almost steely.
Perkus rifled through his CDs to find a record he wished to play me, a record I didn’t know-Peter Blegvad’s “Something Else (Is Working Harder).” The song was an angry and incoherent blues, it sounded to me, gnarled with disgruntlement at those who “get away with murder.” Then, as if riled by the music, he turned and said, almost savagely, “So, I’m not a rock critic, you know.”