"Fame, riches, greatness, immortality."
We sat through a long period of silence. Fenig tugged on the laces used to tighten the hood of his sweatshirt. He took his own pulse, right thumb on left wrist. He ran his tongue over the hair on the back of his hand. Then he made an odd sound. Warp. I leaned toward him.
"What's wrong?"
"Sick to my stomach," he said. "It's a characteristic of every dark period I go through. This is the absolute middle of it. The cold ocean trench. Not being able to start something new. Warp. It's happened before but never this bad. Genetically blind fish."
"Some water maybe."
"I'll be all right in a minute."
"You don't look good."
"Warp."
"Something to drink, Eddie."
"I'd better get upstairs. I thought it was sinking back into my stomach but maybe it's not. Upstairs would be best. Warp. I don't like to inflict my creative tensions on other people. Best if I went upstairs."
"Yes," I said.
The bed was a vast welcoming organism, a sea culture or synthetic plant, enraptured by the object it absorbed. As I headed deeper into mists and old stories, into windy images poised on the rim of sleep, I began to feel that the bed was having a dream and that the dream was me. One candle burned, this light not quite eluding my awareness. I was barely conscious, being dreamed by a preternatural entity, taken for a mind's ride into the mystery of things. It was all a question of control. I was being dreamed-smoked-created. The dream took form as a man asleep in a bed situated in the middle of a room in which a lone candle burned. This was not real but a dream and I was no more than the stale chemical breath of the dreamer.
The essential question was one of control. I went deeper now, struggling to produce a dream of my own, to return from those dim midlands with the fire of legend and sex contained in a thimble, safe for men to use. I was suspended in a double moment, trying to free myself, when suddenly a fierce noise broke over the bed, a wild ringing that lifted me through levels of consciousness out into the cold open room. Telephone. It seemed incredible and I merely stared at the sucking black shape. Each note seemed louder and more shrill, the protest cry of a thing that preferred its latent state. Telephone. I walked across the floor and picked up the receiver.
"What do you want? Who is this?"
"Bucky, how are you, Bucky?"
"Son of a bitch. Globke. Rat bastard."
"Bucky, Bucky, Bucky."
"Who else but you. Money machine. Sitting behind your fat-ass desk."
"Bucky, Bucky."
"Why'd you turn this thing on? I don't want a telephone in here."
"Bucky, Bucky, Bucky."
"Shit machine. Rotten globke bastard. You globke son of a bitch. You're a fucking unspeakable adjective, you know that?"
"They can fix phones from the office. They did it from their office. The phone company. It wasn't broke, understand? It was just turned off. So we had them turn it on."
"Manager."
"You've suffered untold agony. You're distraught, you're bereaved, your stomach is extra-acidic. It's only natural you fling out in all directions. I understand this. I wouldn't have it any other way. Yell at me. Exhaust your vocabulary of foul words. I said to Lepp before I got into the car and picked up the phone to call you, I said to Lepp I'd rather have Bucky unload all the verbal garbage on me, his personal manager, instead of on top of the media, where it could hurt us a little bit. But the point is I'm sitting right now in this automobile of mine and I'm looking at the lights of the George Washington Bridge as I make my approach from the West Side Highway and I'm thinking it all means nothing to him. I'm thinking he's sitting there in this dead person's apartment suffering untold agony and for what? On the other side of this bridge is America. Do you hear what I'm saying, Bucky, above the whiz-whiz of the cars going the other way? America is out there, just beyond this bridge, and it's full of people who are waiting to be told what to do. Here I am on my way to a high-powered business dinner at Irv Koslow's Steak Fantasia in Metuchen and there you are suffering untold agony and for what? They want your sound out there. They want your words. They want your arms and legs and unmentionables. That's what I'm thinking as I sit here in this twenty-two-thousand-dollar banana boat of mine. I'm thinking other things too. I frankly admit that. I'm thinking dollar volume. I'm thinking grosses. I'm thinking unit sales. You can sit there for just so long. The best thing for you is work. The tour. The road. The travel. The tour represents a survival all its own, Bucky, and I know you perceive that truth. They're waiting out there, just the other side of this bridge. It's America. The whole big thing. Popcorn and killer drugs. You can't just sit there."
"You haven't sent Hanes down with any money lately."
"At least I got you thinking about money with that little speech of mine. The trouble is it's hard to get at it. We've got so many interlocking operations it's hard to know where to take from and who to give to. It's not easy to get at the money, Bucky. I'm trying to get at it. But so far nothing but legal hurdles. It's tied up, the money. It's being used to make more money. But I'm up on seven now and I've got the legal minds working on it. Our senior people. So maybe things might begin to loosen up and we can put you back on a cash-flow basis. Maybe not too. It's hard to get at. Everywhere I turn I run into a legal hurdle of one kind or another. Lepp meanwhile is running all over town planting trees to keep people happy because of all the demolitions he's got planned. There's real estate an J unreal estate. Whoever's unhappy, Lepp plants trees. He tells them look how nice, a tree, a shrub, see how it makes up for the noise and monstrousness of tearing down an old building and putting up a new building. That's the whole secret of corporate structures, my friend. Tell the enemy you'll plant some trees."
"What do you want?" I said.
"It's not what I want, Bucky. It's what they want. The ones who buy what we sell. That's no life you're leading sitting in a dead person's room and I say these words as I cross the bridge right at this pivotal moment and prepare to go through the tollbooth to the first acre of real American soil where they're watching and waiting for either a return to your old self or the emergence of something new and chart-busting."
"I'm all through listening."
"Because this is a pivotal time in the music business and in the future of the country as a whole."
"Don't call back."
"Abuse me, I love it Spit on my clothes, I'll never get them martinized. Nobody's happier than I am to dine in four-star restaurants with the spittle of a genius on my hand-tailored polyester checks. But one thing you should know about, Bucky."
"What's that?" I said.
"You were seen stealing a can of pineapple chunks in a supermarket in Fresno."
15
The package contained the mountain tapes. This was how Opel had chosen to mark the day of my birth.
On the tapes were twenty-three songs, all written and sung by me, all played by me (without accompaniment) on an old acoustic guitar, the first I'd ever owned. The songs were the most recent things I'd done. I'd taped them about fourteen months earlier, alone in the mountains, sitting down with the guitar and tape recorder and making up lyrics as I went along. I had just come off a world tour and my voice was weary and scorched, no sound nearer to my mind than the twang of baby murders in patriarchal hamlets. In time a visitor came upon the tapes and played them. Word got out, distorted of course, shaped by rumor and speculation. I refused to discuss the tapes with anyone. I declined to release them, to re-record the songs, to accept any offer concerning this material. I didn't understand the nature of my own labor. The guitar work was recognizable but the voice didn't seem to be mine. It possessed an extraordinary childlike blandness, a bit raw at times in its acknowledgments to pain, but mostly lonesome, homeless and dull, lacking true crudeness as well as any other distinctive quality. Beyond this were the lyrics themselves, strange little autistic ramblings. Perhaps because the words had never been put on paper, or even thought about for the briefest moment, these songs conveyed a special desolation, a kind of abnormal naturalness. In the past there had been a mind behind every babble and moan I'd ever produced. But the mountain tapes were genuinely infantile. I had no idea whether this was good or bad. I didn't know whether the songs were supposed to be redemptive, sardonic or something completely different. Tributes to my own mute following. Cheap plastic tricks. Ironic sonnets to the nation's crazed statesmen. Main Street parade noises. Commercials for baby food. Beseech-ings and calumets. Sequels to the ballads of the dead revolution. Whatever they were, the songs had come oozing out, one after another, over a period of two or three sleepless days. I had no clear memory of that period. The tapes themselves served as confirmation of what had taken place. Every reel was full of repetitions, mistakes and slurred words. There were long incoherent vocal passages interspersed with the sounds of eating, drinking and talking back to the TV. I played the tapes a number of times but their essence continued to elude me and so I simply put them away, preferring to forget what had been, after all, just a few days of unremembered effort – a collection of songs whose release would be sure to cause vast confusion. After that, mention of the tapes was made only by close friends or fetishistic rock scholars dressed like Superman. I was younger then and felt an obligation to my audience. I wasn't fully aware of the uses to which confusion might be put. Fame is treble and bass, and only a rare man can command the dial to that fractional point where both tones are simultaneously his. Opel had put a murmur in my head. I didn't know when she had lifted the tapes from my house in the mountains and at first I thought she was being merely playful in returning them. Conjuring up my own past confusions. But of course there was more to it than that. I remembered several things she'd either said herself or instructed Hanes to say.