He went into the kitchen and made some tea, bringing it back in two stained cups that he carried on a plate. As a way of changing the subject, he took out some photographs of Paris. He talked about his time there, about the artists he’d known. He talked about his former mentor, Jean Cocteau (dropping another name that Bobby had never heard), letting it all come gushing out, all that feminine talk.
Sometimes Byron would call, usually in the middle of the night, usually without saying a word. Anger would pick up the receiver to stop it ringing — Byron could wait for several minutes — and hear nothing but the faint static that conjured the distance between them, the miles of wire tense and responsive in the darkness.
He would see Byron’s face, unshaven, somehow off-kilter behind the large green sunglasses he had made him wear for all those bedroom scenes. I want it to be real. I’m the only one putting anything real into this. Every time it gets serious, you start smirking, playing your games.
In the bathroom, he would find Bobby’s jeans lying in a pile by the toilet. Through the cracked door of the extra bedroom, he would see the bare shoulders of the girl who moved slowly above him in the dark.
“I don’t really see where this is going,” Bobby said.
He was sitting naked on a wooden crate, cross-legged, raising his arms up in the darkness. With Anger’s watching presence invisible behind the camera — with the music on, the jagged meanderings of Sun Ra — Bobby had been stoned enough to enter into the role, aroused by his own nakedness, holding the pose, but now the moment was over and he was ashamed.
“The band is playing tomorrow,” he said, getting down off the crate. “Light show, everything. You could film that, help us out for once.”
Anger looked down at the camera. “I can’t always film the band, Bobby. You know that. It’s expensive.”
“Right.”
“I’m not going to talk about this anymore.”
“But that’s what it always comes down to, isn’t it? Money.”
“I don’t know what you think that means. Like I’m trying to rip you off or something.”
“There’s no script, no anything.”
“This is the script.”
“I’m making a bunch of gestures in front of a camera.”
“Why are you getting angry?”
“I’m just saying who has the money? That’s all I’m saying.”
He bent over to pull his pants on, clumsy on one foot, then the other. The strobe light was still on. It made everything hysterical, exaggerated, prolonged.
“I don’t have any money,” said Anger. “That’s the truth. It won’t change anything, getting angry.”
“I’m not getting angry. You’re always making more out of this than there is. The truth is I really don’t give a shit anymore.”
That December, Anger went on a business trip to New York. Scorpio Rising was having an almost permanent run there. He was going to meet an art dealer uptown, Robert Fraser, from London, who had sold some prints of Scorpio and Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome to a few of his private clients. Among them was a famous rock band. Anger had seen them before, but he had never paid much attention. While he was in New York that week, he saw a clip of them on TV. They were playing a song about a young man’s fantasies of blackness, a throbbing, hypnotic song with an Arabic melody played at first on an Indian sitar. It was more aggressive than any pop song Anger had ever heard. Like his own work, it was dark, but also shot through with exotic colors that had as little to do with darkness as a stained-glass window.
It came first from the blond one, Brian, who sat cross-legged on a white disk suspended onstage in purple-tinged darkness. He was the one playing the sitar, dressed in white Indian pajamas, his facial expression switching from a studied aloofness to an embarrassingly complicit, head-nodding smile. He looked very stoned. He looked alternately glad to be a part of the band on its latest televised appearance and less convincingly intent on the music, always on the verge of breaking into laughter.
The singer, Mick, wore a green military jacket with epaulets and a brass star. It was a hint of fascism that, along with his purple mascara and silk tie, made him look uncannily like a character in one of Anger’s own films. He moved and leered like an epileptic, contorting his arms and fixing the audience with a judgmental stare. His hair was cropped short on top and longer in the back — an awkward haircut, reminiscent of prison — and when he pointed at the crowd, the glare in his eyes was like the glare of two chips of mirror.
At his side, the guitar player, Keith, was like his henchman, dressed all in black, with a black guitar, looking at his leader with open, self-conscious joy.
There was nothing about the band that wasn’t outwardly camp, but somehow they’d reversed the meaning of it all so that they looked more aggressively, even violently, straight than they would have if they were dressed in business suits. They made Anger feel oddly embarrassed for Bobby, who would never have dreamed of such a simple, compressed, and utterly sexual song.
When he got back to San Francisco, Bobby wasn’t home and the apartment was a shambles. There were bedrolls and piles of clothes in both bedrooms, even in Anger’s, where someone had left a pair of hiking boots and a suitcase and a shopping bag full of groceries. There were dirty plates left not just in the kitchen but on the floor of Bobby’s bedroom and on the sheets of his unmade bed. The Sephiroth was lying there on the floor, its pages held open by metal clips. Someone had been tracing some of its diagrams. There were sheets of these copies on the floor, some of them colored in with pencil, some of them lettered with the name of Bobby’s band. From where he stood, Anger could not read the legend beneath the diagram, but he knew what it said: “Look into the sightless Eye of the Moon and see what Light glows there. There is no Life without Death. You have been sleepwalking. Now go back to bed and dream of the Sun.”
In the kitchen, on the stove, there was a pot of ruined noodles, charred black at the center where they were stuck in a resinous clump to the aluminum surface. Everything smelled like American cheese and smoke.
He took The Sephiroth back to his bedroom and returned it to its shelf. That was when he noticed that although the other books there were neatly arrayed, they were not in their proper order. There was something particularly irritating about this, just as there was something irritating about the way someone had pushed his boots and suitcase into one corner of the room, as if this tiny effort at neatness could make the general intrusion any less offensive.
He took a more careful look at the bookshelves. It was only now that it occurred to him that something had been stolen. Why had all the books been taken down, and why had they been rearranged? Perhaps because whoever did it knew that Anger would never remember everything that was supposed to be there.
Bobby came back at around seven o’clock, carrying his guitar case. The two girls he brought with him were unusually ragged. One of them wore a lumberjack shirt over a stiff, synthetic dress. The other was freckled and auburn-haired, her eyelashes very fair, almost invisible, so that her face looked stripped or as if it had recovered from a mild burn. All three of them were so stoned that their cheeks were stiff and their eyes swollen, their gestures a parody of three people acting surprised, anticipating a greeting.