Выбрать главу

It grieved him to his heart, Super said, that the powers had ever made human beings, and worse, that he’d been born unto them. He praised the storm if only that it might blot from the earth not just him and Basil but all humankind, people together with animals and creeping things and creatures of the air. The earth was corrupt, he said, the earth was filled with violence.

But each time Basil tried to leaven Super’s weight, he gave him a taste of the cutter, and a squirt of fetid breath would escape his teeth, and his eyes would roll up, and he’d set again to ranting.

He swore about certain pods of anguish, of how soon, on a bed of niggardly hearts and jealous bones, beaks sewn shut with thread and the toes of babes hacked off with shears, those pods would blossom into flowers of spleen, and the colossus of venality humanity had become would shudder and by crappers crumble in that swarm. Super was mad. The moon had come too near, he said. The eagle should never have landed. And the man on the moon was a whoreson goon and all the world his toilet. Basil looked skyward, and by godfrey there it hung, the moon, peering through the clouds like the eye of a giant owl. Even as they spoke, Super told him, they were bound by a Gordian knot and that, ecce signum, here be the storm that corresponded to the storm in the eye of another storm yet, turning on itself and turning on its turn.

“We’re just varlets in a void,” Super said, Basil said. “The stratosphere was a lovely basket before the likes of you and me and the man we used to be come along with our fubbings and shoggings and horses from the same bleeding opera evening after absurd evening. Don’t you know, boy? Don’t you know?”

Basil stayed pressed to the tree, silent and amazed, feeling he should know, feeling he did know, but for all his trying couldn’t say. And even if he could’ve said it, he wouldn’t have. Because he wanted the old man to say it for him. At that moment, Basil felt as if Super’s words somehow possessed the amplitude of prophecy. He could’ve said Orangejuice or Snot or Duran Duran and Basil would’ve found some meaning. The geeze had been trying to teach him something, but Basil, insolent and ingrate, had been unwilling to learn. Again he tried opening himself to the old man’s hoodoo but felt he was nothing to him but a trinket with which he could entertain himself until ennui sent him forth once more to search. When finally Super had resumed his speech, it seemed to Basil the sun should’ve risen and the storm passed. But not a minute had passed, much less an hour. The old man’s fingers loosened, the cutter fell away. Basil could scarcely blink or breathe, the old man had been squeezing him so. A protracted shiver ran through him as he gazed into Super’s face, and then an icy numbness. The old man grinned. The grin became a chortle and the chortle a laugh, an obscenely sinister sound that seemed from the throat of a ghoul. And yet again Super dangled his fancy pipe. “You can’t always get what you want, boy,” he said. “Just what you need.” Then he turned up the road, Fortinbras at his heel.

Basil felt ultimate disappointment. Super had lied. More heinous still, he’d stolen his lie from a song by one of Basil’s most idolized bands, those five timeless beings who with sheer cheek and scorn for so-called bourgeoisie protocol had achieved a stature very near to that of God and second only to Iggy Pop, who was himself God (after all, Basil had said on numerous occasions, no one but God could survive on peanuts and bloody marys and bihourly main bangers of the jeweler’s little kid, and then hit the road to put on the show Iggy put on night after night, and any dork foolish enough to say otherwise must be summarily flogged). And not only had Super lied — he’d had audacity enough to fob the notion off as his. Now the words would be forever leashed to his condescending growl. Not to mention, again, they were a lie. Basil had always got what he wanted, for as long as he could remember. And yet, he thought, if that were so, why was he standing alone in the dark in a storm?

You can’t always get what you want.

He’d wanted to shout after Super, to tell him how full of shit he was, that he didn’t, as Dinky’d always said, know his ass from fat meat. But Basil only stood there, absurd, swathed with the mud the old man had given him a rolling in. He peered through the gloom, hoping some face from his past might appear, cheesy and smiling, to reassure him — Potsie Weber or Mr Rogers or the Charmin Man — but nothing of the sort. Super had gone for good.

You can’t always get what you want.

But goddamn it, maybe Super hadn’t lied. When Basil looked at his life, he had to confess that nothing he really wanted had fallen his way. He’d wanted, for instance, to be a rock star since that day in ’75, when he’d gone to see KISS at the Cow Palace (in the middle of “Rock and Roll All Nite” Paul Stanley had skittered across the stage with his famous mouth and eye, straight toward the hirsute but awestruck teenager, and flung his monogrammed pick right at him; after all these years Basil still carried the thing; he loved it so much, he always bragged, he intended someday to bestow it on his eldest child as a principal family heirloom), and yet They hadn’t deemed him worthy. His grandparents by then had of course already given him more money than he could spend, but not a dollar in the pile had lured Fame his way, the old pimp, nor the love and attention he’d thought Fame would bear.

But more than the rest, Basil longed for a father, or for the return of the father he’d had. Come Basil’s seventh b-day the swindler told the boy’s mother he needed to run an errand. On his way back, he promised, he’d nab some Otter Pops and Fritos for the imminent bash. Instead the villain bailed — caught a number 15 AC Transit to the Fruitvale BART, a train to Civic Center Frisco, a jitney to SFO, and thence a plane to Puerto Vallarta, where he rendezvoused with a recently immigrated Hungarian secretary from the accounts department of Kilpatrick Baking Company, Oakland, California, a woman whom only three months earlier he’d bought a new nose, two grand. The mula for this he’d conned from another mark yet, a senior citizen named Mrs Annabelle Lovejoy, exstripper, porn-star, and erstwhile mentor to Bettie Page — yes, the Bettie Page — who, Mrs Lovejoy, had been making regular monthly deposits of 500 smackaroonies into Basil’s father’s account, under the presumption, as the tale gets told, that he in turn would soon begin work on a private ranch in southern Nevada, a discreet, albeit fully indulgent, men’s club. And once bolted, Basil’s father never returned. Nor did he so much as call, nor even send a card. His mother learned of his father’s whereabouts four years later, by happenstance, from a grocery clerk at Lucky’s whose husband knew a bookie Basil’s father was up to his neck in debt to. He’d left his Hungarian nosejob for the daughter of a snake-charming preacher from the Church of the Redemption of the Lost Apostles, Woodland, CA. Yes, he’d got religion now, and in the biggest way. Holy-rolling via cable from his own late-night soap box (much like the infamous Dr Scott), he and his sermons (authorized of course not only by the good Lord Himself but as well by a PhD from Dr Ronald Hassler’s Night School for the Ecclesiastical Faithful, Soledad, CA, just a block down the street from the prison) could now be seen and heard in more than fifty-five municipalities throughout the Great Central Valley. Not until Super had appeared, Basil said, had he admitted how very much he’d missed his father, and yearned for his father, and for his father’s love. He’d wanted his father’s love for as long as he could remember, really, badly enough that ultimately that wanting had parleyed to a hurt only a bottle or bud or rock could ease. They, however, hadn’t seen fit to grant him this, either, this revenant daddy.