Broken Sleep (9 page)

Civil Wars

After the babydeath I struggled to keep my equilibrium, waiting for recovery and regeneration. I finished high school and Dad built me a light-filled studio. Against Mom’s “better judgment,” they even got me a used Thunderbird convertible. I painted the front yellow and red and flaming orange and called her Kyle. Years later, Alchemy took it. He and Mindswallow drove it off a cliff in Malibu, which appeals to my sense of rightness. Sometimes, but not too often, I’d go to the cemetery and wonder how my life would’ve changed had the baby lived. Dad found me there once and I bawled my eyes out and he just held me. I remember his cough echoing throughout the house. We had a huge blowout when I burned his carton of Winstons and he grabbed them out of the BBQ pit on the back lawn. He said calmly, “You are still my child and not the other way ’round.”

I worked the farm stand, but Dad got frustrated with me because I gave away free food to some and charged others too much. Donnie Boyle gave me a job at his diner as a waitress. I kept telling the customers what they should eat instead of what they wanted. I dropped dishes. Mostly by accident. Dear
Art did his best to cover for me or take the blame. Donnie’d had the hots for me forever and he never would have fired me, so I fired myself.

I decided to do volunteer work as a kind of aide, going to the houses of the old and the sickly in the North Fork. I also painted, read, wrote in my notebooks, and discovered physics. That’s when I started to formulate my theories on emotions and gravity.

Entranced by the tide and inhaling the smells of the Sound, hoping to find Kyle, her atom self, but no … I’ll tell you about that soon enough. That night I first understood the secrets of gravity, and the moon, and embraced the power of my acute sense of smell. My first shrink here, Samuel Sontag, who I nicknamed Count Shockula, thought I just made up these smells. I challenged him, “You don’t deny gravity, do you? Or its effects on the tides? Or on objects as small as atoms? What are smells but molecules floating in the air? And moon tides—gravity determines their motion. And people are seventy percent water, and have smells inside them that are affected by gravity. I call them soulsmells.” He just kept looking down and taking his notes.

After incubating in Orient, I realized I had to leave or become an erased soul inside a physical shape pantomiming the motions of life. Or a lonely oddball wasting away like Art. Dad had told me about the trust Greta and Bickley Sr. set up for me. I decided to attend Parsons in New York. I thought life would be different. It wasn’t. I sport-fucked. Made very few friends. Parsons had a soulsmell of dried blood, moldy cork, and self-absorption.

I went to see all of Greta’s films. I found books about her in the NYU library, which I later learned got so many things wrong. Yes, she left Hollywood after the perfectly titled
Two-Faced Woman
flopped both artistically and financially, which allowed her studio bosses to use it as a pretext to dump her lovely derriere, and her (to them) inequitable salary. The greed-gods leaked the vilifying “truth” that she’d suffered a nervous and physical breakdown, felt abused by those so magnanimous Hollywood employers. She planned to take one or two years off in New York City and return triumphantly to Hollywood. It wasn’t the war, her desire to be alone, even the movie mongrels that stopped her. It was an affair. Like all of Greta’s affairs, with both men and women, it was clandestine and doomed. Unlike all the others, this time, in 1943, she gave birth to a child. Me. She chose my name: Salome. And then she chose to give me away.

I would go to her apartment and wait outside, and sometimes I saw her come out and get into a car. Or go for a walk. Few people recognized her. I never talked to her.

For almost two years, I floated though my classes and explored the city. Through the recommendation of one of my professors, I found this small gallery. The gay owner loved my “look,” so he gave me my first show,
ARTillery
. After one of my weekly performances straddling one of the cannons, I met the Great and Powerful Horrwich and he invited me to his opening, and so I flitted into the Murray Gibbon Gallery up on 57th and Fifth. (He soon moved to SoHo and later Chelsea.) We consummated our lust-power attraction that night in the closet of the gallery. Soon after, I moved into his loft on Prince
Street. He owned the whole damn building. The industrial plants still reigned like the dying kings of SoHo, unaware of their impending extinction, mighty buildings with soul and the energetic odor of toil and beer-injected muscles.

Horrwich and I became a pair. I all but quit going to Parsons when we got to setting up the
Art Is Dead
happening. Dad found out what we were planning from Art. When I went to Orient to bring Art into the city, Dad picked me up at the bus. “Salo, I know in your heart you want to help Art. But please, this is wrong. I’m asking you to think about it.” We went to Art’s and I told him what Dad had asked. Art pleaded with him. “Gus, I want this. I need this.” Dad gave up.

A few months after the happening, some of the few friends I made at Parsons threw a nongraduation party for me because I officially quit the school. It happily surprised me when Hilda and Dad arrived. They couldn’t stay angry at me. But damn, did they stand out: Auntie Em and Uncle Henry venturing to the Emerald City. They seemed to be having fun until Horrwich got drunk. He oozed over to me while I was talking to some guy who was hitting on me. Horrwich tugged me away and asked, prosecutor style, “How many other people here have you slept with?”

“None of your business.”

His lips coiled and he smelled jealous. Jealousy has the odor of a steaming iron. He got even drunker and was high on his extract of belladonna, and then, in front of everyone, he picked up a copy of Bertrand Russell’s
Selected Letters
and in his pedant’s voice yelled, “It is such a shame Russell gave up philosophy. Does anyone know why he gave it up?” No one
uttered a word. Dad and Hilda looked bewildered. I cringed. Horrwich’s talons were out. I didn’t know how to stop him. “I’ll tell you. Russell said it was because he discovered fucking. Tonight we are celebrating the lovely Salome, who skipped the philosophy and went straight to fucking, and she is damn good at it!” I wanted to laugh. This so-called progressive artist was just another recondite chauvinist.

Dad marched over to Horrwich and punched him in the gut. Without even talking to me, he and Hilda started to leave. I ran up to them and begged them to stay. His eyes told me he despised my slatternly lifestyle. “We are going and you can come with us,” he said. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t go back to that life. I hugged them and whispered, “I love you both, but …”

I went with Horrwich to his loft. After he fucked me, he nodded off. I couldn’t sleep, so I walked over to the window and stared out. Below was a bum leaning against a lamppost—I inhaled his cheap alcohol breath and stale body odor. The streetlight was barely visible through the mist. I watched as he, so carefree, pissed in the gutter. Then I smashed my hand through the glass. Horrwich jumped up. “Salome? What?” I picked up a shard and cut my right cheek. Instead of rushing me to the hospital, Horrwich, still naked, snapped pictures. He said my face looked prismatic with the blood mixing with my tears and circling my jade eyes. He thought it was some kind of art statement. He ended up showing the photos in a gallery and selling them. He didn’t give me a dime.

I finally kicked the camera out of his hand, he got dressed, and we taxied to St. Vincent’s. The ER doctor didn’t call a plastic surgeon and he butchered me. I have this Frankenstein’s
monsterish scar under my right eye that stretches for a little more than an inch. It’s fading after all these decades, as I have faded. Still, you must see that I possess powers worth more than youth, beauty, or natural memory. And those deep scars on my hands have not fully faded. They too are memory and memento.

Each morning I exhale the decomposing cells of my face and my body. And time, the human definition of time, that hobgoblin of impending bodydeath, is my earthly enemy. Disintegration has spoiled my external eyesight, and the new surgeries have failed. Everything outside of me appears foggy. My eyes were always so light sensitive. I have always seen, and still do see, the past and the future. Not seeing is humbling and mortifying, but seeing was often more humbling and mortifying. Others have defined me as a visual artist, but really I am a sensation artist, a sensate morphologist—all of my senses, especially smell, are hyperacute. Even now, I can inhale the pulse of the moon.

Step to the Music (Which He Hears), 1992

I finally catch some z’s, and when I get up I see it’s all green grassy. You know, in Queens, Jack, ’til I was about twelve I thought all parks had blacktop and cement. A park meant basketball and handball courts. I ain’t hip to the notion that most of the world thinks of trees and grass and hills when they hear the word “park.”

We stop at the Dunkin’ Donuts. This cute virginal-looking Jersey babe behind the counter is salivating over Alchemy. The first of a million times I see this. He’s talking in this voice that one of his babes later says “oozes out like delicious, hot cum.” I’m watching this in disbelief as he spews his BS. “Are those sugar-covered doughnuts … are they as sweet as you look?” She smiles red faced as she hands him the bag. He goes, “I’d just like one little lick.” I wanna fucking puke. I mean, she’s ready to get down on her knees. While they’re mindfucking away, I look at him hard. It’s the first time I examine him in daylight and, whoa, he looks sort of different than the night before. Very weird ’cause now he looks
part
something. He’s brownish skinned. His eyes look a much darker brown. Maybe part black. Maybe Arab, or who knows what?

He hands me the bag of doughnuts, two coffees, and the keys to the car. “Have to use the facilities. Be out in a minute.”

Waiting in the car, I’m steaming. I go back inside. I don’t see him or the cutie.

He comes back fifteen minutes later and he pauses outside the car and gives me that smile of his that says, “If you’re cool, I’ll give you the key to babe heaven.” Well, right then he ain’t givin’ me nothing but agita. He announces like someone important is really listening (as if someday he
knew
I’d be doing this), “This is where the American heartland really begins. Where the towns and communities are bound together by winding blacktop roads like the seams on a baseball. Someday, I want to spend more time here.”

I’m thinking,
Why? So you can fuck more of ’em?
Only I learn soon enough it’s part of his Big Plan, but me, I care not one rat turd about the American heartland, so I yell, “Did you just fuck that cunt? Did that little whoarh give you a blow job in the bathroom?”

“Hey, man, first, it’s not cool to screw and tell. Second, if you call women by those misogynistic names, you will pile up
no
chicks and
no
money.”

I shake my head, not real pleased at being lectured, not knowing what “misogynistic” means, and I’m feeling the itch like he’s a born-too-fucking-late child-of-the-’60s hippie type. We get going and he keeps chewing his doughnuts, drinking his coffee, and flying down this two-lane road through what looks like Robin Hood’s hideaway in Sherwood Forest. We come to this gate all connected to twenty-foot-tall cement walls. Alchemy waves to the guard, who lets us in, and we
drive about two miles ’til we’re outside the main house that looks like some French castle I seen in the movies. The sign reads COLLIER LAYNE HEALTH FACILITY. The place is famous for housing million-dollar nut jobs. Until now, I ain’t seen Alchemy as money. He just don’t have that feel that rich schmucks have, that no matter what happens, Mommy and Daddy will bail their ass outta trouble. I think maybe this guy is flummoxing my instincts and I need to be more careful.

“So, you are a spoilt fucker after all? I shoulda guessed when you high-stepped outta that limo. Shoulda rolled you then.” I’m still pissed at him for getting sex and talking to me like I’m a doofus.

“Man, is
that
wrong. You have no idea why I was in that limo. Let’s just say a two-faced woman paid for the limo and that well is nearly dry.”

I think,
Sure, whatever you say, bub. You call yourself Alchemy and we’re visiting your mom in biddy-bip-bip land
.

We walk into the lobby. He whispers to the guy at the desk and they start laughing. The guy leads us into this large sitting area with all of these fuckin’ trees growing out of the roof. He calls it the “arboretum.” I’m looking up for birds and squirrel monkeys that’ll be dropping their turds on me.

I find a safe spot and plop down in this fluffy sofa by a TV that is on to the Mets game. Alchemy sits down, too. Turns out we’re both Mets fans.

Five minutes later, the hottest middle-aged babe la-di-dahs out, dressed in tight-assed pedal pusher pants and a bikini bra and a fishnet shawl, in sandals with her toes painted purple,
and holding a flashlight in her left hand. I do a Jackie Gleason–like double take. Really, she is about the sexiest any-thing, any age, I ever seen. I would’ve done her in a Flushin’ flash.

She and Alchemy hug and hold hands. He says, “Mom, please meet Ricky Mindswallow, a car thief from Queens.” I look at him thinking, like,
Whoa there, that was your idea
. And that name? I don’t say nuthin’ before he says to me, “This is my mom, Salome. A shape-shifter from another dimension.”

She looks at me, her eyes a popping deep green and unblinking, and her skin is damn pale. She takes the flashlight, turns it on, points it at his feet, and slowly moves the light up his body.

“Mr. Mindswallow, take a close look at my son of the multicolored eyes,” she says, kinda snarky, “I am not the only shape-shifter in this family.” Then she turns and shines the light in my face and I can’t tell if she notices my glass eye. “A car thief, hmmm. What I need to know is this: Are you a homicider or a suicider?”

Alchemy starts chuckling. I try to block the light with my hand until she turns it off.