“I wish you wouldn’t go away again,” I said.
“You can come with me,” she said. “Do you know there’s a fine for chewing gum in Singapore?”
“I’ll just bet there is.”
“Stop it, Andy, I’m serious! You can get a fine for chewing gum! And in Yo Jakarta, a bell... which do you like best, Andy, I’ve heard it pronounced three ways. Joe Jakarta, Yo Jakarta, and even Georgia Carter, which sounds like a stripper, doesn’t it? I prefer Yo Jakarta, it sounds softer, doesn’t it, Yo Jakarta? Do you remember the trouble Daddy had with the names in The Once and Future King? When he read it to us at bedtime? All those strange medieval names! But in Yo Jakarta, a bell peals at bedtime, to remind the women to take their birth control pills. They sound a second bell an hour later.”
“The second one is called coitus interruptus,” I said.
Annie laughed.
I knew she was making all this up.
“In Bali,” she said, “if a person is buried in the ground, he won’t go to heaven. That’s why it’s important to be cremated. But if you live on the side of a mountain, it’s all right for your body to be laid out on the ground to decompose in the sun. That’s because mountains are holy.”
The sun in the Western sky was rapidly dipping below the horizon. We sat side by side with our backs against the pigeon coops. It was such a good time of day. It was so good to have Annie home again.
“There’s a temple in Bali where menstruating women aren’t allowed to enter,” Annie whispered, as if telling an enormous secret now. “There’s a big sign out front, I mean it, this isn’t a joke. Because it’s a holy place. I’ll take you there sometime, it’s called Uluwatu, and it’s supposed to be full of these little gray monkeys that are holy. I went in, anyway. They told me later I shouldn’t have. Because that day, there was only one monkey in the temple, instead of the hundreds that were supposed to be there. In fact, they call it The Monkey Temple. But there was only one monkey that day. Because I had my period, and went in, and angered the gods. Was what they told me later.”
“Who told you? The guides?”
“No, not the guides.”
“Then who? The gods?”
“Don’t be silly.”
“Well, who, Annie?”
“I don’t remember. Somebody told me. Who remembers? Anyway, what difference does it make? I never listen to what they say.”
“What who says?”
“Whoever,” she said, and waved one hand on the air, as if brushing away a fly. “I’d go crazy if I listened to them.”
I turned to look at her. Her face was stained by the setting sun. In the gathering dusk, she shook her head, and then closed her eyes. Behind us, the pigeons were muttering softly.
“Do you remember when Daddy used to read to us at night?” she asked.
“Oh yes.”
“Do you remember when Archimedes the owl taught the Wart to fly?”
“I remember,” I said.
The sun was almost gone.
“Do you remember Cully the hawk? And the two falcons, Balan and Balin?”
“Yes, Annie, I remember.”
“Do you remember the wild goose Lyo-lyok?”
“Yes, oh yes.”
“It used to be such fun,” she said. “Flying.”
In September of 1985, my sister started a new rock group named The Gutter Rats, and was preparing for a tour through Dixie. A tour!
You have to understand that this so-called rock group was in effect a garage band with pretensions. I don’t know how they managed to find a booking agent, and I don’t know how he succeeded in getting jobs for them throughout the South, but they did, and he did. His name was Wallace Hennessy, Wally to my sister and the four other members of her group. I met him only once and remember him as a huge and flatulent man in his early forties, wearing a rug that looked like a fright wig.
There was a black girl named Pearl in the group (she played keyboard) and a lead guitarist and bass guitarist who were also black and whose names were either Teddy and Freddie or Perry and Lennie, I forget. There was also a white drummer named Stephen. As she had with The Boppers, the group we formed when we were fifteen, my sister played tambourines and sang. You will remember that in that earlier effort, I played bass guitar, which is the equivalent of choosing geology as the course to fill your science requirement. I mentioned this to either Freddie or Lennie, one old bass-guitar player to another, heh-heh, get it, Fred, Len, little poke in the ribs there, get it? Not a smile.
In January of 1986, Wally booked The Gutter Rats on a tour that ran them through Virginia and the Carolinas, and then swung through Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia, before heading into Florida where they would play Tampa, St. Pete, and a few towns in the Everglades. As rock bands go, they weren’t too bad. They were merely amateurish. In that respect, and again because our lives — my sister’s and mine — seem to run all too often along parallel lines, my writing wasn’t too bad, either, it was merely amateurish. Or maybe it was bad and amateurish. But at least it never got me in trouble. The band did get Annie in trouble.
I was still living at home, and attending school at NYU, when the call from Georgia came that May. My mother answered the phone. It was the middle of the night. Everything with Annie seems to occur in the middle of the night. “Andrew, wake up,” my mother yelled, “quick, pick up the phone!”
“What is it?” I said.
“Your sister’s in trouble. Annie? Hello, just a minute, your brother’s getting the extension. Andrew!” she yelled.
“I’ve got it,” I said.
I was on the living room phone already, standing there in my pajamas. My mother was on the phone in her bedroom.
“Annie? We’re both on now. What is it?”
“Hello, Sis.”
“Hi.”
“What is it, Annie?”
“Nothing,” she said. “I got arrested.”
“What for?” my mother asked.
“I peed on a policeman.”
“You what?”
“He wasn’t in uniform.”
“Annie, what on earth...?”
“Where are you?” I asked.
“Georgia,” she said.
“Where in Georgia?”
“Just outside Atlanta.”
“You got arrested?” my mother said.
“It’s okay, I’m out on bail.”
“But why’d they... what did you say you did?”
“He forced us to cake off our panties.”
“Annie!”
“Well, he did, Mom.”
“Then he’s the one they should have arrested.”
“Oh sure,” Annie said. “I need money to pay the fine, Mom. The gig broke up in a riot, and we never got paid. Can you send me some money?”
“How much money?”
“A thousand dollars.”
“What!”
“The fine is a thousand dollars.”
“What!”
“This was a cop I pissed on, Mom.”
The way she tells it, the party at the fire house was in full swing when this young man came up to the bandstand and made advances. Fire house, you heard me correctly; the jobs Wally Hennessy booked for The Gutter Rats were seldom of high caliber. The job that night (or gig, as my sister preferred calling it) was paying a hundred dollars a man (women, too, for that matter) and started at eight and was to have ended at midnight had it not been for the fracas precipitated by one Harley Welles.
At the time, Pearl Williams was a strikingly attractive black girl who was only a fair musician, as for that matter was every other musician in the group, with the possible exception of my sister whose tambourine-shaking was admittedly no great shakes, but whose voice was pretty good for this level of performance. They made a nice couple, my sister and Pearl. Shaking her tambourines and her considerable booty, Annie would stand emerald-eyed and blond and somewhat body-pierced, belting out songs made famous by other singers, while behind her at the keyboard Pearl tossed her head and hurled lightning bolts from her flying fingers, dark eyes flashing, wide grin promising gospel-sister pleasures. It was no wonder that Harley Welles thought both these ripe young ladies from the big bad city might care to accompany him home for the night.