City on Fire (30 page)

“Hey, Pencil Guy. Didn’t realize you were a fan.”

Could a nod count as a lie? “How would you have?”

“Anyway, I hope you got your fill, ’cause you kids won’t have Billy Three-Sticks to kick around anymore. I only came out of retirement for Nastanovich.” Nastanovich, evidently, had been the bassist, right up until his overdose. This farewell show was for money to pay off the funeral home.

“I’m really sorry to hear that.”

The guy looked away. “What are you going to do?”

“Billy Three-Sticks, though—that’s you?”

“My secret identity. A nom de plume.”

“De guerre, you mean. De plume is for writers.”

The guitarist’s eyebrows twitched. Then he set down his guitar case and, from some recess of his leather jacket, retrieved a flask. “Really it’s William. You thirsty?”

At the risk of being thought prudish, Mercer said he didn’t drink. Or, come to think of it, maybe prudishness would serve to put the brakes on whatever was transpiring here. But William just said, “Don’t tell me you don’t eat food, too, because the best pizza in the city is just around the corner.”

IN HIS OTHER LIFE, William was a visual artist, a painter, and when he learned Mercer was new in town, he offered to take him on a guided tour of the Metropolitan Museum that very weekend—that is, if Mercer was free. “Summers in junior high, I practically lived here,” he would explain, leading Mercer to the ticket window. The two-dollar suggested donation was going to just about clean Mercer out for the day, but William only handed over a dime, and indicated by a look that Mercer was to do likewise, which he did, a little guiltily.

“You grew up in New York?”

“More or less,” William said, “until they packed me off to prep school.”

“I start teaching in a couple of weeks at the Wenceslas-Mockingbird School for Girls. My first real job, unless you count manning a grill.”

But as they wandered through the galleries, it was William who did the teaching, riffing on the artworks on the walls and the contexts that had, he said, produced them. If Mercer hadn’t known better, he would have thought it was William trying to impress him. “Look,” he said, stopping in front of a Renaissance painting.

“Jacob and the angel, right?” Mercer said. “My mother’s church has an entire window.”

“But here.” William pointed to an incongruity. The angel’s muscled leg was lifelike, subtly three-dimensional, where the tunic it disappeared into was crudely geometric, more like an icon of clothing than the thing itself. “This is the entire history of Western painting, right here. The struggle to represent things accurately. And then, when we develop a language for rigorously rendering 3D shapes in two-dimensional space, what do we find? We’re as far from the truth as ever. The robe here may be less real-looking than the hand, but at least it’s more honest about its status as representation. And of course, both are in service of a fairy tale. It’s the old Nicholas of Cusa thing.”

Something roused itself in Mercer. “Remind me …”

“Well, Nicholas was this monk who pointed out that the more sides you add to a regular polygon inscribed in a circle, the more it looks like the circle. By definition, though, it’s becoming less and less like a circle, because a circle only has one side.” William unwrapped a piece of hard candy and popped it into his mouth. “Or maybe no sides, I can’t remember.”

“So it’s like a paradox?”

“Depends on whether you buy Nicholas’s solution.”

“Which is?”

William was inches away now, though they both continued to look at the painting, and Mercer could smell sweat and leather and what was either butterscotch or rum. “Nicholas says you can close the distance between the two only by an act of belief. A leap of faith.” And he reached out and pressed a finger to the paint. “Hey, I touched a masterpiece.”

This would always be where William excelled, the discussion of ideas and movements and things, the matrix of the very abstract and the very concrete that made up the culture. Mercer’s own sense of culture, formed first in the Greater Ogeechee Public Library and then under Dr. Runcible, was essentially nostalgic: greatness had ceased to occur in the arts right around the time when his father was off fistfighting with Hitler. It was William who would introduce him to Schoenberg and La Monte Young, Situationism and West African tribal art and Fluxus. Right now, as they ate hot dogs on a bench behind the museum, he was riffing on Susan Sontag’s “Notes on ‘Camp’ ” and the artistic merits of the graffiti that seemed to be swallowing New York’s lampposts and trashcans. On the great green rug of the Park, brown circles had begun to spread like cigarette burns. The haze of August blurred the apartment buildings opposite. A trumpet somewhere was blowing a tune by Harold Arlen—not Hoagy Carmichael, as William said, but Mercer didn’t correct him. It was too easy to remain in the passenger’s seat and be carried along wherever William wanted to go. To lie back, so to speak, and let him delve into the ideas that had animated his own band, back before the whole thing went to hell. More recently (one thing being as good as another, in Sontag’s reading), William’s tastes had been running toward disco and reggae, he said. Punk rock was frankly too white. The generic terms were meaningless to Mercer, but he knew this last bit was for his benefit. He watched William rip off pieces of hot-dog bun to toss to a pigeon. He watched a nearby college kid, twenty-one or twenty-two, proposition an older woman. He watched the sun come out from behind a cloud, and the branches of the elms thrown up like dancers’ arms, and the green garments they held to the wind. Incidental, all of it, of course, but this was what this city bestowed that novels couldn’t: not what you needed in order to live, but what made the living worth doing in the first place.

THEN FALL ARRIVED, blowing the stink off the sidewalks. The riffle of drying sycamores softened the traffic noise. By late September, there were premature garlands scattered on the ground, so that if you squinted, you could almost imagine the sidewalks as browning pastures, and yourself as a wandering bard. Or perhaps this was Walt Whitman bleeding beyond the ruled margins of the school day; Mercer had been shepherding his students through “Song of the Open Road.” He found he liked the work—liked these girls with their first names that might have been last names, their braces and bony knees, the chewing gum that couldn’t quite cover the smell of illicit tobacco. He didn’t mind that they blushed when he called on them; it wasn’t that he was male, or black, he told himself, but that he had separated one of them from the herd. He tried to do this gently, fairly, to use the power Dr. Runcible had warned him about for good rather than evil. He liked the way they attempted to conceal beneath an air of sophistication the anxieties it nonetheless caused. And he liked the way that, from the safety of groups, they gabbled over him maternally, with their awkwardly personal questions. Was he settling in okay? Was he getting home-cooked meals? In their fumbling propriety, they reminded him of himself. Most of all, he liked the chance he had to offer “his girls” (as he came to think of them) larger, freer selves—selves that had read Cervantes and Aphra Behn, and could quote from memory the sonnets of John Donne. He was like a chef presenting fabulous new dishes, lobsters of intellect, figs of sensibility, the very tastes that had freed him from Altana.

After the three o’clock bell had tolled and his last laggard pupil had slogged off to field-hockey practice, he would pack up the Italian-leather satchel he’d splurged on with his first paycheck and strike out toward the brownstone blocks north of Washington Square. This was another thing he liked: proximity to the glamour of attainment. The days were ending earlier, and in softened light he could see through the buffering trees into homes unlike any he’d known. Sing, Muse, of high, molded ceilings and built-in bookcases chockablock with hardcovers! Sing of armchairs with scarlet upholstery and highboys lacquered like mirrors and the elegant shadows of potted palms! Sing of a chandelier made entirely of antlers! Of what looked to be a genuine Matisse on the wall above the hearth!

Of course, he had still not yet divulged to William his plans to become a great writer. Why would he? They were just friends, after all, who, on the cosmopolitan model, owed each other neither explanation nor apology. After an evening of Chinese food plus drinks, someone’s loft party plus drinks, or just drinks (Mercer’s always virginal) they would find themselves at the top of a set of subway steps and Mercer would mention the pile of papers waiting for him back in Alphabet City, and then he would extend his hand for a collegial shake, trying not to imagine where William, who had no such stack of papers (though half the time neither did Mercer), would spend the rest of the night.

Even when he did in fact have papers to grade, Mercer often forgot them, staying up late daydreaming instead. For daydreams were safe, as secret identities and well-defended boundaries and watertight compartments were safe. He confined his friendship with William to west of Broadway and below Houston Street, confident no one from work would discover it. He must have been doing something right, because for three glorious months—a fall that ripened and reddened like some champion apple—life came easily, more or less. Weekends, when his mother called, he had to work to keep from gloating.

Then one evening at the end of the semester, just before he was to fly home for Christmas break, he found himself coming out of a subtitled movie in some section of the city he hardly knew. Or film, to borrow a word from William, who bounced on the balls of his feet to the beat of some inner metronome, grinning up at the egg-shaped moon. “God. Don’t you feel like you’ve just been taught to see again? When she smashes the jar of strawberries against the door—I feel like I need to hold my head perfectly level, so that nothing I just saw sloshes out.”

Even as he said it, he was spinning to take in Mercer’s reaction. They’d known each other only fifteen and a half weeks, but already Mercer had embraced the role of straight man. He suspected that William enjoyed his diffidence, his potential corruptibility, his unease with his own instincts. Halfway through the film, his hand had come to rest for a full minute on the thigh of Mercer’s corduroys, inches from his crotch, and now Mercer was feeling flushed and giddy and a little dangerous himself. “I would have written it differently,” he said. “Where was the plot? I think I dozed off once or twice.”

“Plot is incidental. Those strawberries!”

“Yep. Must have slept through them.”

“You little philistine!” William gave his arm a hard punch. “I am appalled.”

“Matter of fact, does the theater offer refunds? I might have to go back and ask for one.”

But William caught him as he pretended to turn and pulled him into a doorway, one hand on each arm. There was liquor in his mouth—it must have been in his soda cup—and then it was in Mercer’s. How often, in later years, would he return to this taste, and to the heat of William’s hands, and to the friction of their whiskers in the dark! It was why, he now saw, the city had summoned him. Or it was why William had. And he had apparently as early as December of ’75 already stopped bothering to distinguish one from the other.

21

THE CONCEPT, ORIGINALLY, had been a four-piece. Venus handled keys and wardrobe; Big Mike banged on the drums; Billy Three-Sticks was guitars, vox, art direction, and most of the songwriting, and Nastanovich, who had never touched a bass prior to 1973, provided the loft they practiced in. When Nastanovich lost his day job, though, and had to move back in with his mom in Queens, they no longer had anywhere to play. William sure as hell wasn’t going to invite these guys up to Hell’s Kitchen, to make fun of his unsold paintings and start trouble with the sixth-floor Angels. Then, at the record release party that summer, a kid came up and ID’d himself as a fan. He’d heard they were looking for a space to jam, he said. Well, the house where he was living had an unused utility shed out back. It was right off the Second Avenue F. Were they interested?

It seemed like the perfect solution, and at first, the kid was all solicitude (though his handle—Nicky Chaos—might have served as a warning). He’d borrowed a soundboard for them to run their instruments through, and even a four-track, for if they felt like laying anything down on tape, and had brought in a friend of his named Solomon, a window-washer with some high-school vocational training, to run it. Nicky watched every session, seemingly without blinking, gargoyling forward from his perch atop an amp. After a month or so, though, he began offering constructive criticism, and then just criticism, full stop. The voice William sang in, he said, was too Anglophile to be truly revolutionary. Too Mockney. Here’s how he’d do it. And he hopped down off his amp and took the microphone, and though the screaming that followed evoked stuck pigs, you had to hand it to the guy—he knew all the words by heart.

Soon he had insinuated himself into the band as a second guitarist. And here was the problem with running a band on a non-hierarchical model: even if they’d been in a position to say no to Nicky Chaos, which by this point they weren’t, who would speak for the group?

Now, when Nicky got overbearing or temperamental or William simply got tired of hearing his voice, he walked over to the record store on Bleecker to remind himself why he and Venus had started playing music together in the first place.

The staff there was always happy to see him. This may not have been unrelated to a sideline William had in those days, ’73, ’74, which was scoring cocaine in small amounts for various friends and acquaintances, record store clerks not excluded. Hobby, was probably a better word than sideline. He did it not for the money—his trust fund was still more than enough to live on at that point—but as a species of philanthropy, a way of doing his small part to combat the overall hassle that seemed to be creeping into the process of securing good drugs, because, he figured, what went around came around. And besides: he was in a position to do it. One of his conquests from uptown had become a dealer and, even after they stopped fucking, extended to William a discount that allowed him to cop in family-sized quantities, which he would then take around like Santa Claus visiting the Nice list. He liked the way it opened doors for him, the way it made people happy to see him, not because he was William Hamilton-Sweeney III, the wastrel heir, or Billy Three-Sticks, frontman of the storied Ex Post Facto, but because, he felt, he was himself.