“People falling in love with death,” said Bobby. He gave a little sniff of something like laughter, then looked at the purple wall. “I’ve known some people like that.”
“I suppose there were lots of them in high school,” Anger joked.
“I was kicked out of high school.”
“So what does that mean? Reform school? Juvenile hall?”
“Are you filming this?”
“What?”
“I’m just wondering if you’re filming all this. How much of this anyone is going to see.”
It was spring, 1966. Anger would go for walks in his new neighborhood, a slum taken over by young people, and try to make sense of the odd mishmash of deterioration and adornment: broken stairways with freshly painted railings, run-down porches crawling with morning glories or draped with a faded American flag. He saw young people holding hands and whispering to each other, or sitting on the sidewalk playing guitars, barefoot, the muscles moving solemnly in their shoulders and arms. In Golden Gate Park, he saw streams of soap bubbles drifting over the lawn, flashing prisms of light, and in the distance behind them there might be anything: a group of truant schoolkids, a girl with a German shepherd, a cross-eyed boy in black body paint juggling a set of knives. Everyone under thirty had decided to be an exception: a musician, a runaway, an artist, a star. They seemed unaware of any past that was not as safe or malleable as this present.
He had met Bobby last week at a concert in an old church that was now a community center. LSD was still legal, and it sent tight cords of tension up Anger’s legs and his spine, his skull nothing more than a diaphanous veil. In the darkened building, Bobby’s band was playing in front of a movie screen that showed otherworldly scenes from nature: the blue and red membranes of dividing cells, the pink torrent of corpuscles rushing through a vein, the solar glow of an embryo in the black ink of its amniotic sac. Onstage were conga players, trumpeters, guitarists, violinists, five girls dressed only in harem pants, circling their naked breasts with their outstretched fingers. At the side of the stage was Bobby, playing guitar in front of one of these girls, dressed in a purple cape and a black top hat that shone in alternating bands of white and blue. The song he played had no chorus, no verse, no recognizable structure at all. Perhaps it was a new kind of music, or perhaps it was just noise. It didn’t matter. What mattered was the way his hair fell all the way down to his shoulders, beneath his top hat, like a woman’s hair. He went into a gradual crouch before the girl, bending the knees of his fringed buckskin pants, and she trailed her silk scarf over his shoulders. For a brief moment they both appeared to be framed inside the red and gold border of an antique playing card that buckled and threw off motes of light. Then the image melted into a neon impression of Times Square. Anger could see the revolving red lights as Bobby tilted his head and, in another aspect of his showmanship, ran the tip of his tongue over the girl’s sweat-glistening breast.
Afterward, Anger tracked him down in the parking lot, where he and his girlfriend were loading equipment into a van. He was a filmmaker, he said, he was making a film, would the boy have any interest in playing a part in his next film?
His girlfriend put her fingers on Bobby’s cheek and whispered something into his ear. He turned to her and whispered something back. Then the girl looked at Anger with a furtive smile, a smile that echoed and expanded and gleamed.
He was eighteen, Bobby told Anger that afternoon. Most people thought he was older because he’d been living on his own for the past year and a half, first in L.A, then in San Francisco. His parents in Santa Barbara had kicked him out, because he was out of their control. He would disappear for a couple of days, sometimes more, not even realizing it, just forgetting to call home, forgetting why it mattered. It was his dreaminess that his father never understood. It was what they fought about day after day, for as long as he could remember.
When he was sixteen, they’d sent him to a reform school north of Sacramento, where he’d lived in a barracks with thirty other boys, digging ditches, moving rocks, cleaning bathrooms, loading sacks of potatoes onto flatbed trucks and then riding with the trucks to the grader to unload them. For a year, he’d worn the same uniform as everyone else. Like everyone else’s, his hair had been shorn with an electric clipper, so that the curve of his skull shone like a knob beneath the taut gray skin. Eventually he lost his real name and was called by a nickname chosen by the others, a way of being told all over again that he would be perceived in a way that had nothing to do with who he was. There were fights almost every day — fights behind the mess hall, fights in the showers, fights with bare fists or with plungers or with brooms or with knives from the kitchen. He learned to fight with a joyless focus that made his opponents lose interest, until eventually his friendship became coveted and he didn’t have to fight at all anymore.
When he got out of reform school, he was seventeen. He lived with his parents for an abortive month, then he lived for a while in a trailer with a thirty-six-year-old woman. In the meantime, he’d started playing with a rock band in L.A., a band who had a recording contract now — who were on their way to becoming famous — but who had told Bobby he was too young, too pretty-looking, that they were serious musicians and he had to leave.
Anger couldn’t stop looking at him that afternoon. He could feel the faint tension as Bobby paced the room, wondering perhaps if Anger was even listening. At times, it was like looking at a beautiful girl, a diffuse desire that he wasn’t quite sure what to do with. At other times, the desire was so blatant that he could feel his face burn.
“There’s this thing about women,” Bobby told him. “You get to a point with them where they can’t say no without hurting themselves, some idea they have about themselves. I used to go to nightclubs in this very straight outfit, suit and tie, my hair all combed and watered. I would have a Coke or a ginger ale. It was like, ‘Oh, I’m just this lost little boy. So shy I can barely talk to you. Maybe you could take me home.’ ”
“A good act,” said Anger.
“But it wasn’t an act. I never thought it was an act. If I did, I never would have been able to do it.”
He was making a film about Lucifer, yes, but it was not the devil he was talking about, not the pitchfork and the horns, not the spooky thing from the movies. Lucifer was a god of light, a child god, the fallen angel who after two thousand years of repression was finally coming back. He was the god of desire, illicit desire, the liberator, the revelator. How could he explain it to someone like Bobby, whom Anger could not look at without seeing the angel’s wholly unknowing embodiment? He’d said that it was just a way of naming or looking at things that were happening in the world right now, a kind of mythology he liked to play around with sometimes, a way of describing how the world was changing, opening it up to deeper meanings. Yes, he’d told Bobby, Lucifer was the role he would play in the film, but it wasn’t worth thinking about very much. All he would really be doing was just playing himself. At first, it would just be a matter of watching him, watching him and seeing what happened.
They started by making little films around town: at Golden Gate Park, in front of the Diggers’ “free store” on Frederick Street. One day they went for a drive north of the city toward Bolinas, the camera and the equipment in the back of the station wagon, Bobby at the wheel, Anger in the passenger seat. Through the windows, the hills were a pale brown, like wheat, and the ocean, when they glimpsed it, was gray beneath the fog.