We felt better the moment we landed.
“Yeah. Worried.” I wasn’t about to admit I was scared.
“What,” asked Michael in a skinny voice, “what do you make of it?”
Night had already taken place. While I tried to think of some kind of answer for Mike, glibly colored light from Sean’s superlepidopteran rippled across the ceiling.
“Joke?” I suggested.
“Yeah, joke.” Doubtful.
“Sense of humor,” I urged.
“Yeah,” he jibed. “Humor.”
“I mean, it’s a very good sign, you know?”
“Good. Sure.” Mike isn’t always the most comfortable kind of roommate to have around.
The lights on the ceiling grew brighter, crisper, more primary, and the music tasted like pure tent show. That seemed encouraging, somehow. “How old is he?” I asked.
Mike thought about it while the music sprouted piccolos. “Oh,” he drawled, “would you believe seventeen?”
“Thereabouts,” I agreed. “And therefore more brilliant than subtle, right?” I liked kids.
“Oh yeah?”
“Okay then, clever. Spoilsport. What do you want from the kid? Anyhow, the odds are in our favor.”
So we said it together: “A Buterflybynight!” and I went on: “But I sure wish we had better odds.” For no sensible reason, this seemed to mollify Michael.
The thing flew off then in an exuberance of calliopes, and we, dazed, finished getting ready for the evening’s entertainment.
A famous proto-hipster[1] once said, “It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.” Michael the Theodore Bear, my beloved roommate and manager, has precisely this odd twist of mind, and he’s always producing shattering surprises with it. Being Mike, he has a special voice he uses only for pointing out momentous obvieties everybody else has failed to notice: a dry, insouciant, malty tone I can’t at all describe. When, just before we were ready to split, he said, “You know what?” in just that voice, I stopped whatever I was doing, shook myself gingerly, stood at parade rest, and held my breath.
“Swell,” I drawled nasally. “No, Michael, what?”
“You know,” he repeated, dragging it out, “I’ve been thinking. That kid’s been making butterflies since sometime before eleven o’clock this morning. Lots of butterflies.”
Silence.
I grabbed my briefcase and scuttled toward the door. Mike followed, whistling a happy little monotone.
I was in a hurry, latish, so we took the stairs instead of waiting for the elevator. I tried to estimate how many butterflies a young rock-n-rolly from Fort Worth could generate in nine or ten hours, and just before we reached the street door I stopped short, turned to confront Mike (beaming blandly), and said, “Thanks a lot, baby.”
I didn’t sound sincere.
4
WASHINGTON SQUARE was an armed lamp. Two huge searchlights, one by the fountain and the other in the chess circle near MacDougal, reared fluttering cones of illuminated moths boiling toward the sky. Nervous, heat-gun-toting GI’s stood guard almost everywhere, swatting moths and cursing brilliantly. Moths. I was charmed by the kid’s adaptability.
Tourists and chastened teenyboppers, shielding their faces with outstretched hands and/or autographed straw hats, moved sluggishly through the park, herded by the sweaty soldiers. Photographers played fast and loose with flashbulbs, giving the whole area a strobe-lighted, discothèqueish feeling. Hardened Villagers openly gawked.
The shiny NYU library showed battle scars. One friendly old oak near the park pissoir had been truncated by somebody’s skitterish heat gun. Everyone who didn’t look confused looked terrified. I hadn’t seen anything like it since the famous beatnik riots in the sixties.
“Michael,” I shouted, the militia being rackety, “this could become rather serious.”
“Serious? I think it’s hilarious.”
“That’s what makes it so damn serious.” We had a private convention that summer: when in doubt, philosophize.
If the park was frantic, MacDougal Street was worse. Ancient Italians chanted clackety Rosaries. U.S. Army vehicles of strange shapes and even odder functions (known, only to Michael) swarmed up and down the street, making jaywalking hazardous. Fuzz stood puzzled on the corners and pointed uneasily at things. Panicky teenyboppers stampeded in tight circles, shrieking, “Dig it! Dig it! Dig it!” and knocking unwary tourists off their feet. Jittery reporters loudly interviewed jittery businessmen. Moths and untimely butterflies abounded.
Mike and I, habitually cool, cautiously pretended nothing much was happening, but we were both a bit stunned. At the corner of Third and MacDougal we bowed gravely to each other (one more private ritual), said “ciao” in unison, and parted, I to the left and workward, he to the right and The Garden of Eden.
I watched him bumble his way through the confusion, thinking sadly, Yonder goes what may well be my last link with reality, which was a hell of a thing to think about someone like Mike. By then, however, I was used to bidding my last link with reality farewell, so I squared my shoulders and loped off toward The Mess on MacDougal Street, flailing my briefcase before me to clear the path of lepidoptera and things that go boomp in the night.
Chaz Wainright’s Mess on MacDougal Street, actually on Third Street two blocks away, was already crowded, despite or because of the Army and the butterfly plague, but nothing was happening onstage yet.
“Good evening, Chester Anderson!” Charley trumpeted with false and boisterous formality. Thanks to the day’s events and incidental publicity, every head in the house turned its empty face toward me. Appalling, but that’s just what Chaz’d bellowed for. He was a native showman, and I was part of the show. Far, far be it from Charles J. Wainright to let free publicity go to waste.
“Howdy, Chaz,” I trumpeted back, because I was part of the show. “Read any good butterflies lately?”
One of the customers tittered hysterically, a terrifying sound, but Charley performed a saving belly laugh, and the whole house crashed into hilarity like surf on old rocks. All at once I felt great. Hurrah! The laughter of a hundred happy strangers was too strong a high for me to kick, and — butterflies be damned! — I knew it was going to be a swinging night.
Stu, Pat, Kevin and Sativa were waiting in the back room. Stewart Fiske (a chortly, mustachioed drummer from the distant wilds of outer Milwaukee), Patrick Gerstein (a perpetual Bucks County teen-ager who looked like a black-haired baseball hero but was really our lead guitarist), Kevin Anderson (a warmly chocolate-toned MIT dropout who preferred rhythm guitar and lead singing to the aesthetic rigors of quantum physics), Rosemary Schwartz (i.e., Sativa, a svelte, suede chick who did nothing but sing and practice sex appeal and Subud), and I, your friendly neighborhood harpsichordist, had banded together a few months before as Sativa and The Tripouts. We played a kind of music of our own invention that we called, when we had to call it something, either Baroque and Roll or Raga Rock, as the fancy took us. McLuhan music, as it were. It never really caught on, but it was more fun than working, and it paid better, too. Michael was our manager, so to speak.
“Wow,” said Pat as usual. “How ’bout them bugs?”
“Butterflies,” I answered, and Stu amended, “Moths.” Kevin seldom had anything to say. Now he just grinned. He and Sativa were holding hands, this being his week or something.
“Sure,” Pat veered. His conversation was generally erratic. “Let’s warm up.”
We retired to the alley behind The Mess and, dodging inquisitive moths et ah, smoked a few pipefuls of marijuana, which was still illegal in those days. We firmly believed it improved our playing, and perhaps it did.