Broken Sleep (20 page)

Moses stepped onto the small porch, the front door still open, where he stood stupefied. Once again everything had changed, yet truly nothing had changed, and he attempted to escape this irrationality by imposing an almost perverse dialectic: Did Jay love him less? No. Had their years together somehow been nullified and degraded? No. Had she betrayed him? No. But still … History had taught Moses that all nations—and individuals, too—must, in order to survive, obfuscate, deny, and rearrange the exact composition of the smelted logic of lies and silences into “truth.” He had formulated a General Principle of Livability: Hope + Need – Denial = your Livability Quotient. Now, his “truth” undone, he wondered if could rebalance the equation. If it even mattered anymore.

The Waves

I had another “episode” last week after suffering three nights of exile from my sleepself. Thankfully, these new burns are not severe. Dr. Bellows did not exactly react with compassionate rectitude as I tried to explain the terror of clarity.

The terror begins when I see my life as one long nocturnal arc of sleeplessness. I become enraptured by visions of such persuasive and vital detail—when the veils that divide the mist of real and dream, past and future, fall—and all the timeless dimensions stretching between Dream and Reality become one. These dimensions, except during the “clarity,” are as unseeable as the eighty percent of the universe that is hidden, dark matter. The invisible tentacles of light eviscerate my soulsmell. I feel the light tentacles transforming into laser blades that slice into my synapses, which sets off an uncontrollable panic that I will be separated from my body. The psychic protons that hold me as a consciousness are jettisoned, and I am disseminated into the universe, into nontime, lost in the dark matter. I fear I will never again find myself whole.

This is not at all similar to the transcendent out-of-your-body creative experience that is familiar to every true artist.
Or when I am communing with my DNA. The clarity is no spiritual reverie. No, I am ripped from my essence, my body and soul. I never know if I will come back to myself or if I will forever be torn, trapped in this unforgiving, odorless realm.

It happened again last week, the same way it first happened when I was teenager. After the baby died—and he
did
die to me!—I awoke during the night and ran shrieking into my parents’ room. They stayed awake with me all night as my body trembled. Hilda put warm compresses on my head. Dad rubbed my feet. It happened once with Horrwich, too, on the night of my ungraduation party. It happened when Alchemy was murdered.

When I hurt myself or hurt others, it is because this terror is seething and I can feel the waves beginning. My cuttings, my burnings are my declaration: I am real. You are real. I can hurt myself and hurt you and I can bleed. I will remain tethered to this reality, no matter how painful. The doctors think my behavior reflects self-loathing or a desire to escape. It conforms to none of those categories. It is unclassifiable.

Only in those etheresque episodes, sucked into the invisible dark matter, have I felt unvarnished fear. I have no fear of what has been done to me or what will be done, because nothing has power over me except for that one incurable terror. I never want to feel it again. Yet I always know that I will.

Now that Alchemy is gone, I have no one who understands. If only I could see my granddaughter, Persephone.

O Persephone, if you could only sing for me and I for you …

De-lirious, Di-laudid, De-lusionary

The swirls of the ashen apocalypse at dusk, the eyes of unseen assassins, the ferric pyres, and the incandescent collapse of a great American edifice: eternal images from that inconsolable September day. In that stark moment of communal suffering and rage, Moses hoped that he would be forgiven for his small exaltations. The doctors proclaimed Phase One of the operation a success.

Waking up in his bed in Cedars’ Bone Marrow Transplant Unit, his mind bathed in morphine, Moses wondered if the events of the previous weeks—discovering the truth about Hannah and Salome, Alchemy and Jay, and the Trade Center tragedy—were some kind of drug-addled mirage. But when his mom and Jay rushed into the room for the first time after he was released from isolation, his aching heart told him it was no illusion.

He remembered that first morning at Dr. Fielding’s office, after he and Alchemy returned from their road trip. Fearing that any memory of Jay had been lost in Alchemy’s cascade of conquests, Moses quickly introduced them. “You remember Jay from when she worked for the Sheiks at Kasbah.”

Alchemy’s eyes opened wide, and for a split second he froze in place. Almost immediately, his expression became unreadable. “Great to see you again. Though not under these circumstances.” He turned to Moses. “Your wife tried her best to get the Sheiks to buy real art. They bought posters.” Thankfully, the nurse came out and escorted them into Dr. Fielding’s office.

In the days before the operation, after the HLA test had confirmed him as a match, Alchemy behaved blithely confident that the transplant would be a formality and its happy result a fait accompli. Moses, Hannah, and Jay blamed the palpable tension on the seemingly interminable wait and the twenty-five percent chance that Moses would not survive the operation.

Hannah often paced, smoking or imitating the motions of smoking without actually lighting up, desperately wanting to ask about Salome but holding her tongue. Like her son, or he like her, she preferred ignominious ignorance to confrontation and finding her fears confirmed. The unspoken social contracts among them, between husband and wife and mom and son, remained in force.

Alchemy’s marrow was harvested as an outpatient. Moses underwent three more days of chemo, and four days of cleansing after the surgery was performed. Afterward, Moses spent just over three weeks in complete isolation to protect him from infection, receiving blood transfusions and waiting for the marrow to be accepted and take hold, or be rejected.

Moses languished in his solitude, contemplating his belief in one universal truth: The past, present, and future are fixed
and ever recurring, inextricable and singular, and always, always at once, dead and alive. And from this very alive past came two vital questions: Was Jay screwing Alchemy
while
she was seeing me? and Why didn’t Hannah push harder and so much sooner to find out about Salome’s existence and whereabouts?

In the abstract, he accepted that the answers didn’t matter. His wife and mom loved him now. Only, this acceptance was compromised by derision—to hell with abstract notions of fairness and morality! His mind revved into overdrive: Am I a fool? Am I, at my core, just a pseudoliberal, antihedonist with a latent strain of puritanism?

Moses tried and tried to extinguish these negative, soul-depleting thoughts. He wanted to confess his shame. He wished for a pill that could vacate his memories, erase the spiteful thoughts and primitive urges, the guilt that engorged his empathy and compassion.

No mythical memory-erasing pill arrived. Instead, here arose a daymare from the depths of his postoperative miasma. A vision ascended not from his unconscious but from elsewhere, from
outside
:

A plaguelike mix of rain, hail, and vicious winds obscure the last rays of sunset while two hundred cultists glossolate a mocking serenade, countering the braying of drunken Roman guards singing, “99 Jews on the cross / 99 Jews / if one of them we happen to toss / 98 Jews on the cross.”

A horde of sadistic voyeurs cheers the luridness of the drip-by-bloody-drip of his slow death. I think
, I am a stranger in the strangest land.
A ferocious wind scatters his blood and pieces of his
torn flesh into the crowd. A woman draped in soaking white robes, bearing spices and carrying a torch, approaches me. She daubs my cheek with a dampened shroud and then speaks
.

—
Moses
.

—
You know me?

—
I have watched you
.

—
And you are?

—
Shalom
.

—
Shalom, the shaman and dybbuk?

—
I prefer “healer.”

—
As he claimed as well
.

—
You have forsaken those who love you
.

—
Forsaken? Who? How?

—
Moses, you will have another chance
.

—
Chance to do what?

—
To heal the future …

The aging sibyl sprinkles me with spices and touches my forehead with her torch. I feel no burn. There is no scar
.

The daymare ended. Moses felt himself in his hospital bed, bathed in sweat and staring through the window bank toward the San Gabriel Mountains. He closed his eyes and awaited the arrival of his wife, mother, and brother.

Merchants of Venice, 1992 – 1994

Falstaffa begged Alchemy to give Marty another chance. ’Cause Alchemy loves Falstaffa, he does, and they become our roadies. Sue Warfield, who swooshed her Malibu manse booty, starts unofficially managing us. She cracked me up. She says, “If I am there, I make the scene. And you want to be seen at MY scene so you make the scene.” That’s why Alchy gives her the nickname Trendy Sue. We showed up at the Viper Room, Tatou, the Sanitarium, 924 Gilman in Berkeley, SOMA in San Diego. My antennae is on high alert ’cause I’m inkling that Alchemy is doing the mystery dance with Sue and not exclusive, which worries me. I am wrong and right. ’Cause Sue’s preference is other women. She scored us our first gig at the Troubadour. Soon she partnered with Andrew Pullham-Large, this upper-crusty English wanker who was in love with Alchy, and they started Surface-to-Air with us as their first client.

Alchy set up a rehearsal sked for six to sixteen hours every damn day. He comes off so Yo, Bro nonchalant, Let It Be, baby. What horseshit. Lux got so mad at him once he typed a list of everything he did in the day from brushing his teeth to taking a piss and presented it to “the micromanaging Generalissimo
Alchemyo Savanto.” Alchy laughed, but I ain’t sure he thinks it as funny as the rest of us. He always had a plan. No, lots of plans. One day he asks for a list from each of us for songs to cover. He’s nodding and smiling at Absurda’s list, which is all chick shit, and Lux’s list, which is a mix of funk and punk. He scans mine, which has lots of heavy metal, and don’t say shit. So I says, “Fuck you. What?”

“What? Nothing what.”

“Nothing what, says nuthin’. Say somethin’!” I muscle up in his face and give him a little whack on his left shoulder with my open right palm. He don’t react. Don’t clench up, just puffs on his cigarette and blows the smoke away from me. So I pull back.

He says, “I feel these are a tiny bit
pedestrian
.”

I says, “Okay.” Again, I ain’t sure what he means. Like pedestrian traffic? I says, “What’s yours?”

It’s all political, like “There’s a Riot Goin’ On” or shit I don’t know, which I’m guessing is political, so I says, “Are we a rock band or a political group?”

“We’re a rock band with a point of view. You get two vetoes like everyone else.”

Lux and Absurda are with him on this, so I got two choices—agree or step out. I let it go. Later, at the house, I look up “pedestrian” in Absurda’s dictionary and it says “dull or uninspired.” Me and Absurda stay up all day and night doing speedballs and fucking, but I am still pissed when we get to rehearsal. Right off, he apologizes in front of Absurda, Lux, and Falstaffa. “I’m sorry. They’re some good songs.” We choose Deep Purple’s “Never Before” and Grand Funk’s “We’re an
American Band,” and they became crowd pleasers. Years later when I do my solo covers, I title it
Songs for Pedestrian Tastes
.

But his apology don’t cut it and I’m still sizzling from the coke. Before we split for the night, he corners me alone and this time he gets in my face, inches up to my nose, not his usual style, and says matter-of-fact, “We, the band, need your unpredictable edge. I’m glad you and Absurda are together. Only thing … if you two keep hitting the smack and coke so hard, it’s you who’s out. Not her—
you
.”

Protesting is useless. I could eat shit or I could quit. For once, somewhere, I figured out, truth, he was being selfish, but also truth, he was trying to protect me and Absurda. I still did more than a bit a dabbling after that. I can’t understand why I never got hooked. I could quit easier than quitting eating Twinkies.

It’s clear Alchy was in such a damn hurry ’cause he was obsessed with springing Salome from the funny farm. He was writing songs like one a day. Before we even had a contract, he wants to start a company to handle publishing rights. Sue hired some clammy-mouthed entertainment lawyer who asked for some scambooger deal. Alchemy didn’t buy that shit. He found Kim Dooley, a super-juicy, super-sharp paralegal who saw us early on at a USC frat party. She and Alchy had a quick thing and stayed friends. Kim set up Scofflaw Music for a few hundred bucks. A few years later, we paid for her law school and she got richer than she could’ve ever dreamed because she became our lifelong lawyer. Alchemy gave us each credit for writing the music even though he wrote ninety percent of it, and that turns out to be mucho millions.

In the summer of ’93, Sue and Andrew invite a bunch of A&R guys to the St. James’s Club on the Strip. That day we was as nervous as I ever seen us. Even Alchemy, who’s usually the picture a confidence. Before we go on, Alchemy tosses me a T-shirt that says CAN I KILL YOU, PLEASE with a drawing of a 357 on it, a riff on the “Please Kill Me” shirt Richard Hell designed with a bull’s-eye back in the ’70s. Alchy yells, “My mom made it for you.”

“Really?”