City on Fire (31 page)

As for the coke itself, it made him funny and good-looking, but he was already those things, so he could take it or leave it. He generally abstained Sundays through Wednesdays, and never got high before painting. He might knock off early as the weekend approached to do a bump before happy hour, or break out his stash on a date that had started to drag, or if he was headed to the Village bars, or to Grand Central to cruise the men’s rooms, for old times’ sake, but that was more or less the extent of it. Coke was like the Democratic Party: he went along with it on principle, but it did not speak to him personally.

After the first time he did heroin, though, in the slant-ceilinged manager’s office of that record store, he would spend the rest of his week calculating how he could slip away as soon as possible to swim down into himself, into the delicious blankness of that canvas, again.

This was in the fall of 1974, a sweltering day in September. He was carrying some 45s for the store to sell on consignment. “Kunneqtiqut” b/w “City on Fire!” They’d recorded the tracks in preparation for the second LP, back when Nicky was still confined to his amplifier top. Now it seemed that record would be going in a different direction, or at least that it would take time for William to reclaim the helm of the band, so he’d paid to get them pressed up as a seven-inch. Before handing them to the clerk, he dropped into the hole at the center of the stack of records a bag of coke. The guy waited until the little heat-sealed sleeve was already in his pocket to tell William he didn’t have any cash.

It was cool, William said. Consider it a gratuity.

“I mean I know I got a drawer of cash here, but I can’t touch it, man. I’ve been fired like five times already. But if you can come upstairs for a second, we can maybe work something out?”

The ceiling fan spun woozily, and the door to the street was open, a frame of green light and the ambient noise of the traffic.

“Watch the till, honey?” the clerk said.

The only other person in the place was the chubby girl in overalls and a halter top scouring the rack of fanzines by the door. Did William know her from somewhere? Then his friend was leading him upstairs, to a tiny office whose ceiling sloped to one side, beneath another set of stairs. There were old concert posters peeling from the wall, a safe with a stereo sitting on top of it, a loveseat, and some big, uncovered speakers. You could hear the upstairs neighbor kids running around, like shoes tumbling in a dryer. The friend switched out the reggae record on the stereo (“I hate this shit. This is the owner’s shit.”) for a white-label bootleg. Then he produced from a drawer a tiny sachet of what looked like sand. “Brown sugar, my friend. A favor returned.”

William was by this point projectile sweating. There was no fan up here, and the only window, cracked onto an airshaft, was too yellow from smoke to see through. He’d observed the junkies under the El tracks up at 125th, and nodding out on the front steps of his building, and at that moment, he had not a self-destructive bone in his body. He should have said, No thanks, and turned and not looked back. Should have gone back to Hell’s Kitchen and put in another couple hours on his painting. On the other hand, was this not life, too, trying to tell him something? And was his job, as an artist, not to hear what it was saying? He said, All right, cool, and the friend—or was it acquaintance, really?—said, “Hey, wait wait wait wait wait. You don’t want a taste?”

William got out his blade and looked around for a surface to cut some lines on, but again the guy, whom frankly William was starting to wonder if he even liked, stopped him.

“No no no no, man,” he said, as if William were a child playing with a can of roach spray. “This is caviar. You’ve got to boot it.”

As the guy tied him off, William looked away. His fear of needles, when he was a kid, had been legendary. Every time Regan retold the story of his tetanus booster, the number of nurses who’d had to help Mom hold him down grew. Apparently, though, fear was merely the mask fascination wore to hide itself from itself. Or at least he was fascinated now, a little aroused, as if perhaps this was the thing he’d been looking for these last few months, as the band’s future grew dimmer. The distinguished thing. Now where had he come by that phrase? The smell of cooking drugs was like burnt hair or corn, or like dental work, acrid but sweet. There was a hand on his upper arm and a vituperative little pinch. “Keep still, brother. You’re squirming.”

“I don’t feel anything,” he said. And then he was descending arm-first into a body-temperature bath, wondering disinterestedly as it reached his waist if he was going to come in his pants. His face was traveling away from his what, his soul, which was swimming down into the warmth, which was where God was. And this was only the first ten seconds. He felt his jaw hit his chest, where it was clearly meant to be.

Righteous. Am I right? The voice came from far, far away.

He heard another voice an octave lower than his own, a beautiful lush voice, purr, “Righteous.” He was only dimly aware of the first voice, owner of neither purr nor jaw, tying itself off now, and then later telling William he could stay up here as long as he wanted, when really what William wanted to know was was it possible to get higher.

The speaker cabinets went up and up. The record was about Cortés the conquistador, the killer, and it was angelic, big coppery clouds of guitars sailing like galleons toward the rise where William stood watching, stark naked, in a breeze sweet and chaste off the pavements and dumpsters outside. There was something infinitely sad, and thus infinitely beautiful, about these ships and the green sea and the Yucatecan sunset and the little particles of ash in the follicles of the carpet. He wanted to paint the gray specks, the distinguished green. The distinguished thing was death, of course, Death was coming already from the far shore to which it had removed his mother, but if this was what it felt like, then as Nicky said, Who gave a fuck? The ships were too far off to hurt him anymore and he watched for a while, naked in his skeleton mask, as someone came and someone left and the cannons sparkled on the hillsides like beads of drool on an armrest. He could barely get the needle moved back to the beginning of the side, and then after a while he didn’t need to. The music was inside. He had crawled inside the speaker.

22

THOSE FIRST FEW WEEKS OF GRIEF COUNSELING, Charlie took the LIRR in. He was always late, though; invariably his train would get hung up in the East River tunnel. He couldn’t tell how much time had passed unless he asked other people—his dad’s watch still lay in a coffin-shaped box in his underwear drawer—and they were already looking at him funny because he was doing his nervous humming thing. The stares only made him more nervous, which led to more humming, and when he came out of the subway he’d bolt the last five blocks to the doctor’s and arrive sweaty and short of breath, sucking on his inhaler. Dr. Altschul must have said something to Mom, because after he got his driver’s license, in May, she insisted on his taking the station wagon, as she’d insisted on the counseling in the first place.

The office was on Charles Street, in the half-basement of a brownstone you wouldn’t necessarily have known was anything other than a residence. Even the discreet plaque below the buzzer—All appointments please ring—made no mention of specialties. This was probably for the peace of mind of clients (patients?), so no one in the waiting room would know what you were there for, who needed board-certified grief counseling and who needed whatever it was Dr. Altschul’s wife (also, confusingly, named Dr. Altschul) did. Honestly, that Dr. Altschul should be married at all was a mind-bender. He was the kind of bosomy overweight man who could make even a beard look sexless. Charlie kept trying to memorize the doctor’s zippered cardigan, so that he could determine at the next session if it was the same one. But as soon as he’d settled in, Dr. Altschul would sort of tip back in his large leather chair and place his hands contentedly on his belly and ask, “So how are we doing this week?” Charlie’s own hands stayed tucked under his thighs. We were doing fine.

Which could mean only one thing: Charlie was still in denial. For eight or ten weeks now, he’d been resisting the pressure of Dr. Altschul’s questions, the Buddha-like invitation of those flattened but not knotted fingers. Charlie focused instead on the oddments of the therapist’s desk and walls—diplomas, little carved-wood statuettes, intricate patterns woven into the tasseled rug. He’d had the suspicion, from the very first, that Dr. Altschul (Bruce, he kept telling Charlie to call him) meant to vacuum out his skull, replace whatever was there with something else. It was connected with the doctor’s studious skirting of the word “father” and its equivalents, which of course kept the person they referred to at the very front of Charlie’s mind. But suppose they were right: the school guidance counselor, his mom. Suppose the dead father lodged in his skull was making him sick, and suppose Dr. Altschul could pry Dad out, like a bad tooth. What, then, would be left of Charlie? So he talked instead about school and pee-wee league, about the Sullivans and Ziggy Stardust. When given a “homework” assignment—think about a moment he’d been scared—he talked about the terrifying dentist his mom used to make him go see on the thirty-eighth floor of the Hamilton-Sweeney Building; how old Dr. DeMoto once scraped his plaque onto a saltine and made him eat it; and how the window, inches away from his chair, gave onto a sheer drop of six hundred feet. Mom had this idea that for the finest care, you had to go to Manhattan. In fact, maybe ponying up for a fancy headshrinker now was contrition for Dad; maybe she thought if he’d been rushed after the second heart attack to a hospital in the City, he’d still be alive. “Heights—that’s what scares me,” Charlie said. “And fires. And snakes.” One of these wasn’t even true. He’d put it in to test Dr. Altschul, or throw him off the trail.

Then one Friday, a month before school ended, he found himself holding forth with unexpected vehemence about Rabbi Lidner. This had been another of his “homework” assignments, to “recover” his feelings about his adoption. “Abe and Izz will do fine with the Torah study, it’s in their blood, but honestly, sometimes I feel sorry for them. They don’t know what they’re in for.”

There was a twitch, a resettling of fingers on the cardigan, like a cellist’s on his instrument, a movement at the corner of the therapeutic mouth too quick for the beard to camouflage. “What is it you feel they’re in for, Charlie?”

“All this stuff about being shepherded, watched over … You and I both know it’s bullshit, Doc. If I was any kind of brother, I’d take them aside and tell them.”

“Tell them what? Shall we role-play?”

Charlie let his gaze rest on Dr. Altschul’s pantheistic tchotchkes. “You know. You are alone, you were alone, you will be alone.”

“This is a worldview you have.”

“I’ve only been saying this for like two months now. What I feel is, basically, you’re an alien dropped on a hostile planet, whose inhabitants are constantly trying to tempt you into depending on them. Have you seen The Man Who Fell to Earth?” Charlie’s face was hot, his asthma tightening his throat. “I realize that maybe sounds like a metaphor, but you listen to David Bowie, he’s thinking about what people will face in the future. I guess I’m trying to, too. Because there’s two ways of taking off a band-aid.”

Was it the cardigan he was allergic to? Its lurid flamestitch pattern seemed to fill the room. And right then, in that moment of weakness, was when the doctor pounced. “Charlie, what do you remember about your father?”

All of Charlie’s beautiful rope-a-dope had deserted him. “You make it sound like he died thirty years ago.”

“This is what we call an evasion, Charlie.”

“What if I just said fuck you? Would that be an evasion?”

“It makes you angry when I ask about your father?”

“Is our fifty minutes up?”

“We’ve got another half-hour.”

Charlie resolved to sit there silently with his arms crossed for the remainder of the session, but after a couple of minutes, Dr. Altschul offered to pro-rate. He seemed to feel a little bad, but probably this, too, was a ploy. They obviously trained them not to have feelings. As Charlie rose to open the door, the doctor told him that his “homework” this week was to think about it. A red-haired lady out on the waiting-room couch looked up, curious; Think about what? He had an urge to grab the magazine from her hands and rip it in two. Instead, he said something a girl at school had said to him once: “Take a picture, it’ll last longer.” And fled through the narrow basement door, grazing his head on the overhang.

It was midday now, the air hotter and stiller than it had been when he went in. The lime-green pelt of pollen on the cars boxing in Mom’s wagon let you know they hadn’t been driven in a while. Nor had the street been swept; rotten mulberries from the trees littered the asphalt like dog shit. Charlie kept walking. As the blocks piled up between him and the grief counselor’s office, his indignation ripened into something almost like pleasure. Messiness, death, righteous anger: this was Charlie’s world. It pleased him that the berries were spoiling and the brownstones were falling apart and the plastic window of a convertible he passed was slashed, wires spilling from its dashboard where the radio had been. It was Dr. Altschul who was the freak, hunkered in his anal little cave, trying to sell Charlie on a world that made sense. It was Dr. Bruce Altschul who was in denial.

On Bleecker Street, a speaker out front of a record store blasted Jamaican music. He saw two leather-jacketed boys, one black, one white, loitering inside between deep bins of LPs. Charlie’s normal move would have been to hurry past, but the bright, clear flame of defiance was still lit; woe betide anyone who tried to fuck with him now. Not that the boys even saw him come in. They were not so much loitering, actually, as pretending to loiter, while a person he hadn’t noticed snapped pictures from across the store. “Good,” she said. “That’s great. Except can you try not to look at the camera, dumbass?”

All it took was the voice. It was her: the girl from the ballfield. The hair was different, or maybe it was that the headphones were gone, but her features were still larger than life: the pierced nose, the wide, expressive mouth. He flipped through some nearby records. Quick glances took in more of the boys across the shop. Or men, possibly, in a kind of uniform. Slogans in various hues covered their black jackets, superseded by an identical logo freshly painted on the back of each. The white guy’s hair was short and uneven, as if cut by lawnmower. The black one wore a stocking cap. The camera would make them look lost in contemplation of the record stacks; click, click, it went, a devouring sound, or so Charlie imagined. In reality it was impossible to hear over the deep-dish bass thumping off every surface. Then the white one, the giant one, announced he was bored. “Are we done yet?”