Broken Sleep (11 page)

In the previous decade Alchemy generously shared his controversial opinions on politics, sex, drugs, and scores of arcane subjects in hundreds of interviews. When the Insatiables released
The Multiple Coming
, he didn’t dodge provocative discussions about God or religion. He was careful never to reveal his personal beliefs (or lack thereof) and explained that the entire album consisted of different characters’ relationships to faith.

Moses continued, “I’m thinking, if I survive this, I might try something like that.”

“Maybe you should. Meditation is pretty addictive when you get into it. I got going on both dysphoric and euphoric hallucinations. I thought I had weird sleep patterns before, but this place messes you up on purpose, three hours here, three
hours there. My brain got so disoriented that my nightmares were happening when I was awake and screwing with my daytime reality …”

Moses wanted to interrupt and ask about his nightmares. He thought about his own daymares. But Alchemy seemed to be on a talking jag.

“Desiree advised me to lower my adrenaline levels. I’m an action junkie. Have this need to get off on crowds and attention. It was hard to withdraw from phones and e-mails. Ended up cathartic. I’d do it all again, except …” He shook his head and exhaled a loud breath. “No sex. You’re not supposed to, um, pleasure yourself. I was walking around with a permanent stiffy. I gave up. Haven’t jacked off that much since I lost my cherry when I was a kid in Berlin.” Alchemy paused and took both hands off the wheel, held them aloft and strummed an air guitar, gave a childlike “Woo—woo.” He sang the Country Joe song, “And it’s five, six, seven, open up the pearly gates … Whoopee! we’re all gonna die …,” as the car lurched perilously close to the edge of the road. Moses glanced down at what would be a thousand-foot drop, clamped his hand on the door handle, and clenched his jaw. Alchemy finished singing, retook the steering wheel, and jammed his foot against the accelerator. “Nathaniel, my mom’s guy, used to sing me that song when I was a pup-star. Had no idea what it was about but it stuck in my head. Mose, it’s going to be okay. I promise.” Moses was only half listening, thinking that if Alchemy kept driving like a drunken Evel Knievel, any marrow transfusion would become moot. “I’m jet-streaming nonstop. I don’t like it. I prefer to think before I talk. Not like Salome, who, you’ll see, you never know if she’s just
channeling her DNA or is in one of her ‘Blue Savant’ periods, that’s what she calls it. Ruggles got other names for it. You meet Ruggles?” Moses nodded. “You have to beware, sometimes you think she’s out of it but she’s just playing you. Now, Ambitious, you’ll have to meet Ambitious, there’s one cantankerous motherfucker who talks or punches before he thinks. If you call what he does thinking. He’s PO’d at me now.

“Shit, though, almost six weeks of being a mute. Of nodding or shaking my head. I’ve have my silent periods but—phew. Mind?” Alchemy pointed with his right elbow to some bottles of water in the backseat of the car. Moses handed him one. “Thanks.” Alchemy finished an entire bottle, then another. “So, am I what you were expecting?”

“Don’t know yet. Hadn’t thought about that.”

“Ever?”

“No.” For so many years Moses had imagined meeting his father, but he’d never imagined life with siblings. For someone as introspective as he considered himself to be (and he had considered the possibility his father ran off with another woman), Moses was confounded by this omission. “Four days ago I had no siblings and a different mother.”

“That is one mindfuck. Maybe it was too painful? You didn’t want to miss what you could never have? Hey, Mose … You got a brother now.” As was his habit, Alchemy renamed him. No one had ever called him Mose or Mo or Moe. “Mose” sounded romantic and sin-street tough, misleading perhaps, but so what, he liked it.

Alchemy was deified by the luck of the genetic evolutionary hierarchy. It wasn’t that he talked different, was smarter,
more graceful, or even more beautiful than so many others, but he radiated an energy that no hype machine could manufacture. Moses had run across plenty of “stars” in New York and L.A., and instantly you could spot the ones whose eyes yearned, like a starving discarded dog, to be noticed and coddled, and yet would shoo you away if you approached them. Only a rare few possessed presence that commanded you to gawk at them. Alchemy had that specialness, charisma, magnetism, those overworked and abused adjectives that cannot capture or quantify the inimitable and illuminative qualities that transcend logic and language.

As Alchemy continued his monologue, Moses thought about the night he’d seen the Insatiables at the Whisky. As one of their encores, they jammed on a harder-edged version of the Lovin’ Spoonful’s “Do You Believe in Magic.” Alchemy sang, almost beatifically, “The magic’s in the music and the music’s in me …” It was true, Moses thought to himself. He was
magic
.

As the Focus descended the mountain, Moses now hoped this magic man would not only transfuse him with his bone marrow; he longed to be blessed with a few sprinkles of Alchemy’s miracle dust.

It’s a Small World After All

When we left the hospital, it was early morning. I could taste and smell Horrwich’s soulsmell of overcooked hair dye. I told him to go home, that I wanted to be alone. I traipsed toward the Chelsea Hotel, where I knew lots of people. Just as I was crossing 23rd Street, I was in such a tizzy, I stooped over and an oncoming ambulance almost decapitated me. I didn’t even hear the siren! Three, maybe four people grabbed me. One of them was Horrwich’s photographer friend, Xtine. Aha—you could claim coincidence that at precisely this moment she would be crossing the street—she lived at the Chelsea. It wasn’t. The second she told the bystanders we were friends, I knew she was
there
to help me. She seemed quite unflappable. I looked repulsive with my eye already black and blue and bandages covering the stitches on my face and left hand. “What happened? Are you all right? You were so radiant the last time I saw you. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.” She held my unbandaged hand as we walked. You could have knocked me over with one of Andy’s wigs. “Please come upstairs to my place and rest.”

People have this notion of the Chelsea as a roachy rat hole. (The wanton acts only took place in some of those
rooms—such sweet decadence.) Xtine had this grand apartment with high ceilings and spectacular windows. Although they were cracked and it was damn drafty. She had installed a darkroom. I lay down on a futon in the main room while she boiled water for herb tea. I remember watching her as she sashayed across the wooden floor. Not dyke-ish at all. She had an alluring angular face with high cheekbones. Deep brown, small, almond-shaped eyes. Lithe but short. Her soulsmell was a pungent mix of cerulean blue and baking bread. Of course pure colors have smell, and sound, and taste. You’ve heard of the blues, as in the music? Alchemy wrote the song “Salome’s Sensation Bluz” for me. It sounds like how I feel when I’m low.

I used to urge everyone, especially my shrinks, to get in touch with their inner sexual music. To get laid by loins that sing. All of my shrinks—men and women—needed to unbutton their crotches and screw more. Even my latest “caretaker” here, Dr. Zooey Bellows, with her soulsmell of fresh pineapple and steamy ice right out of the freezer that lingers for hours after she has gone, reeks of repression.

Xtine was the first woman to make my sex sing. Yes, we were lovers. Her photos of me were the ones that ended up in
Life
. Unlike any male photographer I’ve ever known, she could bring out my sexuality and vulnerability without it seeming porny or kittenish. Maybe it was the delicate manner of her touch.

I broke up with Horrwich and I began enjoying life. Sport-fucking was fun. The only sport at which I excelled. Art was fun. Serious was fun. I put up one of my favorite shows at Gibbon’s new gallery on West Broadway in ’69. There were only
a few galleries then. Paula Cooper, OK Harris, Cunningham Ward, Hundred Acres. I collected Do Not Disturb signs from dozens of hotels in dozens of languages, and I made paintings, collages, photos, all centered around Vietnam, Biafra, and the riots in Selma, Nixon and an American public complacently snoozing away.

I followed that up the next year with
This Is Not a Pipedream
. You know, playing off Magritte. I slept in the gallery and people watched me. Behind a curtain I did some pipedream-like acts. Xtine filmed it. Andy had made a film called
Sleep
. His twin obsessions were ennui and celebrity. Me, I wanted to explore what happens in the worlds outside you and inside you when you’re asleep, that in-between dimension of insomnia and slumberland when you think you are awake but you’re asleep, and when you wish you were asleep but are awake. I wanted to record the act of sleeping in the gallery and how people reacted.

We filmed for the entire month. I wouldn’t sell it. Same with the sketches I’d made from my dreams and of the people in the gallery. I told Gibbon that I’d hold on to the original video and all but a few of my sketches. I gave him some so he could pay his alimony and maintain his potbellied plumpery. I gave a few to Xtine and some other friends. I burned or hid the rest with the original films.

Then the good times came to a stop. Dad’s emphysema got serious. He’d never quit smoking. I spent a lot of time at home. I needed to be there for him. Hilda wanted my help, although she didn’t understand me. She believed that I’d grown into some kind of whore, though she kind of absolved me because
I was the spawn of a fallen woman. She wanted to love me unconditionally. She couldn’t. Her eyes always scolded me.

Dad died fast and slow. Each day he withered just a little more until he looked like a shrunken bag of water and bones with two bulging eyes as his internal organs began to fail. He died of a squashed spirit as much as from the disease. We talked a little then. It was cleansing. In his luggy way, he told me how much he loved me.

“Salo, it made me so happy to watch you drawing up on the roof or just staring at birds and the sky. Or watching you ride off on your bicycle as free and determined as an osprey.” At night, alone, I cried and cried, seeing this once powerful man reduced to where the simple act of breathing became unendurable. We buried him next to the baby.

I had to fend off Dad’s Gravity Disease from seeping into me. Gravity, as everyone knows, affects water and the tides and our balance. Besides aging cells, there is emotional aging. An unseen force, an invisible weight that arises in the direst of moments and is the destroyer of so many strong spirits—my dad, and then Nathaniel, and even my Alchemy.

Alchemy. I
was
successful, in one wonderful way. Despite having me for a mother, or maybe because he had me for his mother, he was blessedly impervious in his young life to any major symptoms of Gravity Disease. He bled with the fluid of despair when Absurda, who suffered with a lifelong vicious case, died. But the intrusions of the Pretender and Laluna, Alchemy’s traitoress entrancer, and all those stupid political demands, that’s what did it. He couldn’t run away like me. I
survived because I flew off, went astray. He couldn’t allow himself to do that.

Emotions have weight and force and mass. They are made of quantum-size, blood-dappled molecules existing in multidimensions. There are those who feel this weight more than others, and it shows on their faces. Some balance it out. Others get dragged down and become bitter and small people. Some become more generous in spirit. Some even go slowly mad. Gravity Disease is the death of cells exhausted by sadness and disappointment over a lifetime. The doctors have discovered genetic causes for so many diseases. No matter what they find they’ll be stymied—they’ll never cure them all, and new ones will arise. The raw pain of life is the true cause of Gravity Disease, and there is no cure for that except bodydeath. Those who suffer from chronic disease of the mind or the body or the heart carry tremendous emotional gravity. My disease began to weigh when my first son was stillborn and I blamed myself for his death. The heavier your gravity, the greater your wound. If the gravity becomes too great, your life force is crushed too soon.

It happened to Nathaniel. I miss him so.

When we met for the second time, in 1970, I was pregnant with Alchemy. I’d been hibernating in Orient. After what happened with the first baby, I’d suspended all drugs, drinking, screwing. I didn’t want anyone’s dick inside me, getting in the way of me bonding with my child.

Hilda was lighthearted for the first time since Dad got sick. For her, life was returning to the house. Xtine came out off
and on, and Hilda was mostly cool with that, except when we played “Guess who’s the father?” although I had a good idea who it was. We read aloud from our favorite books. I played music for Alchemy, everything from Lizst to Stockhausen, Holiday to Hendrix.

I visited Xtine in the city for a few days to nourish the unborn Alchemy with art. I was drifting through the old, old Modern when I got a little tired. I headed to a room where I could relax on a bench and began dreaming in the
Water Lilies
.

“Sniffing Monet?” I looked to my left, and there stood Nathaniel. He hadn’t changed at all. I mean literally. It looked like he hadn’t changed his clothes in four years. Still slightly motley, with short hair, a reddish-brown goatee, and gold-rimmed glasses. Scraggly jeans, beat-up khaki jacket, and a satchel slung over his shoulder. Just no camouflage cap.

“Inhaling the colors and letting him or her feel art.” My eyes veered toward my mildly expanded belly and his gaze followed.

“Just as Urso predicted.”

It took me a minute to remember Urso’s insult about the “soupçon du jour,” suburbia, and babies. Instead of teasing him about his need for a wardrobe consultant, I stuck out my tongue and tasted the air around Nathaniel. “Alchemy—that will be my child’s name, boy or girl. Next to me is a man who has one of the purest soulsmells, but he just spit out a comment that is unworthy of him because it is not genuine. In typical male fashion, he does not understand that raising a child is an art at which most people fail.”