Love Is the Law (15 page)

Roderick was pissing against the side of a tree in a yard by the house. It was to be another basement show. I walked up to him and said, “Hey, nice cock.”

“Thanks,” he said. “I inherited it from my father. But if you want more than what you see, you’ll need to pay me a quarter.” He tucked it back into his pants and zipped. “I won’t offer to shake hands with you.”

“I appreciate that, thank you,” I said. “So, getting a good crowd for the show?”

He nodded. “Yup. Should be a good one. Promises have been made.”

“Do you know the Abyssal Eyeballs well?”

“Eh, not really,” he said with a shrug. “But they weren’t the ones to make the promise, you know?”

“I don’t.”

“You don’t?”

I rolled my eyes. You’d think I’d be used to the utter absence of straight answers in my life by this point, but no, not really. “Is Greg here?”

“Yeah, he said he’d be here. Didn’t he talk to you?”

I shrugged. “He left me a note. I’ve been busy.”

“What have you been up to?” Roderick asked.

“I beat the shit out of some crackhead bitch,” I said. “A girlfriend of my father’s.”

“A girlfriend? Does he have more than one?”

I nodded. “Yeah. He’s a very attractive crack-addicted crazy person and incompetent fuckface who let my mother die because he couldn’t even keep a job building nuclear bombs for Ronald fucking Reagan.” Roderick sucked on his teeth, unsure. “You know, Reagan had a large appetite for nuclear holocaust. It should have been like selling shoes to socialites.”

“Well, okay,” he said. “Your father . . . Well, he sounds like a real piece of work. Anyway, let’s go in. It’s cold out here.”

There was a cellar door, the good kind, the kind worth sliding down, and it was open. Some didgeridoo music floated out from its maw. We stepped into the basement and both of us giggled. The place had a nautical theme—very Long Island. Stuffed swordfish on the wall right over the slapped-together plywood and 2 x 4 stage, a pair of white lifesavers on the far wall, netting strewn with fake plastic starfish. The staircase leading upstairs into the home proper was decorated too, with fishing oars and boxes of tackle put on display under glass, like mutant butterflies. There was a boom box in the corner, and not too far from it stood Karen, leaning against a pillar. Even the pillar was decorated with some nautical knot work. She was the only one here, and so small none of us saw her until she waved.

“Hey,” she said when she saw me. Her smile seemed authentic. “Did you bring the painting?”

“Why would I bring the painting to a house show?” I asked. It was in the car, but she didn’t need to know that.

“Painting?” Roderick asked.

“Well . . .” Karen started. “I thought maybe you would. I mean, what else would you do with it? Where would you keep it now?”

“Now,” I repeated. She had nothing to say to that.

So, “Hello, my name is Karen!” she said instead, turning toward Roderick, her tiny hand out. He shook it, confused. “Didn’t you host the last show?”

Roderick nodded. “Yeah, I did. Kinda. I don’t know the band at all, really, but I got an offer you couldn’t refuse, let’s say.”

“Ah,” Karen said. “Friends in high places?” She was suddenly suspicious. Then we all had an awkward moment.

Roderick said, “More like low places.” He tapped the floor with his foot and winked at me.

I had no idea what he was talking about, and decided to go for it. “What do you mean by that? What are you talking about, Roderick? What’s your connection to the Abyssal Eyeballs, to this house, to the people who are coming tonight? Do you know that girl with the Chelsea haircut?” He stared at me, and so did Karen. “She’s fucking my father.”

“She looks like you,” Karen said.

“I know. That’s purposeful,” I said. “But Roderick, I was talking to you, about you.”

“Well,” he said, “I’ve got some cousins who work in construction and home improvement, so we know all the good basements—”

“And these events?”

Roderick snorted. “If I could explain these events . . .” He trailed off, waved his arms, then started again. “Well, you were at the last one.” We were all agreed, at least if awkward silence equals vague consent.

“Look, there’s a fake plastic seagull hanging from two wires in that other corner,” I said, finally.

“I feel like I should have a kid’s menu and a paper placemat with word puzzles and a labyrinth,” Roderick said. “I want fish and chips.”

“Where’s Aram?” I asked Karen. Then I wanted to chew my tongue to pieces and spit it out. Asking about a man, again. The old patriarchal script.

“He’ll be here soon,” Karen said. And with that, our conversation was truly over. Neither of us had anything to say. We both turned to Roderick, but he was out of ideas as well. The door at the top of the steps squeaked open, then someone flicked the lights on and off. “Hello?” Karen called out, but nobody answered. The lights went out completely. The door shut. In a corner, the building’s furnace roared to life, a little peephole of fire sending our shadows strobing against the walls.

The cellar door opened again, and down walked Greg on mantis legs. It took me a moment to see that there were other people with him; he was so tall compared to everyone else. With one step he broke from the pack and stood before me, expectant. Was he expecting a hug and a kiss? He said, “Hey, you’re out. Was it that guy you made me call?” He put out his arms and really did hug me. I kept my hands at my sides. “I’m surprised. He didn’t sound rich,” he continued in a whisper, arms tight around me.

“Hi,” Karen said. “You were at the
last
Abyssal Eyeballs show?” Roderick looked at Greg but didn’t say anything.

“Anyway, he’s outside,” Greg said to me, in my ear. “He has a flier about you, but he wouldn’t give me one. I think he recognized my voice.” The basement was filling up now. It was larger than the last basement venue, and the Abyssal Eyeballs fan base had seemingly expanded over the last week to match it. Perversely, I wondered if Riley would host a house show of his own in that gorgeous basement of his, then I remembered that I might have to kill him somehow tonight.

The band had come in with the bulk of the crowd, sight unseen by most, but I spotted them. I pushed through the crowd toward the heavy woman, the beatboxer, but was intercepted by Chelsea. Another person I felt like killing.

“Guess what?” she said. “Daddy’s mad at you.” She laughed, a quick piping
haha!
and smirked at me.

“Why? Because I won’t fuck him, so he has to depend on a skank like you? Should I let you know when I change haircuts so you can rush out and get one just like it?” I said.

“You know why,” she said.

“Let him call the pigs,” I said. “Hello, police? I’m a crack addict and I’d like to report a crime against my favorite crack whore. She’s a little wary of coming down to the station to file a report for some reason, so could you send a couple of officers down to my crack-house squat?”

Chelsea cracked a smile at that, and snorted. “Cute. You don’t even know what the hell’s going on, do you?”

Something came up from under my feet. It was that black thing from the core of the Earth, more huge than ever before. An ocean-sized wave, filling me up, every cell. The band started with a deep bass roar that made my sternum vibrate. Everyone felt it, and shut the hell up. The Abyssal Eyeballs were all pro. No tuning, no fucking around with the monitors, no clumsy banter with the crowd or grumbling amongst themselves; they were on stage and making a joyful noise with a single depressed key on an electronic keyboard. Chelsea and I both turned to the band, though the only light was from the furnace, which was still grinding away in counterpoint to the deep note from the Abyss.

Chelsea leaned in and whispered in my ear. “You’re gonna fucking die,” then put herself back upright.

So I leaned in and said, in her ear, “No, you are.”

It was a weird crowd, I realized as my eyes adjusted. Chelsea and I must have looked like foreign exchange students from another planet. And there was Greg, and Roderick, who was at least a kid, but everyone else was dressed like the bush-league bourgeoisie. Button-down shirts with pinstripes, Dockers, pencil skirts and blouses with the giant shoulder pads for the women, of which there were a few. Karen, who hadn’t drifted from her corner—I realized now that she was in charge of the boom box and had turned it off at some point to wait for her next cue—looked practically homeless next to the women here.

So she was with the band. And had a contact with the would-be buyer of my Tower painting. Who was certainly Riley. Who knew Bernstein, and who bought the house out from under us. Who knew my father. My father, who was in the room. I didn’t recognize him at first because he was in drag as a member of the middle class. I remembered that suit jacket, that tie. I’d bought it for him for Father’s Day, with the few dollars I’d made from babysitting, back when people would actually let me near their kids. What little Daddy’s crack habit didn’t kill, my punk rock habit had. The band shifted toward a song of some sort—there was beatboxing, drumming, odd groans and noises, all on the lower registers. I was in the belly of a whale, a great leviathan. My father seemed caught up in the noise just as much as everyone else. Aram, a hulk next to Karen, was entranced. Greg peered up at some special part of the ceiling. And the people I didn’t know, or barely did, from the bus or the mall or who were neighbors of my junior high school friends, were all one with the sound.

I felt it too, but I also experienced something deeper, more familiar. That great and dark sea under the sands of Long Island. It was both ocean and creature, a thing so huge it swam in itself. As the Abyssal Eyeballs played, a pair of eyes appeared before me. The Leviathan.
None is so fierce that dare stir him up: who then is able to stand before me?
Leviathan is older than all the old things. He is the one who cut this long island free from the earth; he is the glacier and we are just the moraine. The debris left in his wake.

And Leviathan looked at me, and Leviathan loved me. I spent an eternity staring into his eyes, and he stared back into mine. This was the great Bernsteinian secret. The Leviathan, the great watery creature, he was the mystic incarnation of the mass struggle. The class, or nation, or race. Like the sea itself, Leviathan carved out the borders of the lands of earth, and we little monkeys could not help but fill the niches Leviathan left in his wake. Leviathan, all consuming, that was the god I would be.

“Bernstein . . .” I said, and though I whispered I was sure everyone heard me, and everyone knew of him, and everyone now understood him. This is what he had been looking for in the pages of
Workers Vanguard
, and in his brief trip aboard the Red Submarine, and in his endless rituals, the psychedelic experiences, the Hermetic experiments.

Water is cold and gets colder the deeper one goes. But beyond where men can swim, where the sheer fact of water is so dense we can not penetrate without crushing our bones and meatbags to jelly, water boils and seethes. In the coils of the Leviathan. The monster burned with rage. I knew the feeling, and I smiled. And I knew what was going to happen to me now. There’d be no j______, but there would be vengeance. I would swallow Mammon whole.

The song stopped, and the lights flared to life. I already had my eyes closed. My father wrapped his necktie—the one I bought him, with horseshoes on it for good luck—around my neck, and Chelsea punched me in the stomach. There was a generalized cheer as I buckled over. The bitch had palmed a roll of quarters or something. Big Aram grabbed me by the shoulders and pushed me onto the little stage, and expertly tied the tongue of Dad’s necktie around a trio of thin copper pipes running along the low ceiling of the basement. It was tight around my neck, but not too bad. I could even address the crowd, if I so wanted.

“Yeah!” Dad said. “Fuck fucking yeah!” He spun on his heel to get a good look at everyone, and to make sure that everyone got a good look at him. “See, this is going to happen, just like I said!” Chelsea twitched her jaw, contemplative. I glanced around the room myself, not looking for allies, but rather for reactions. Greg was pale, sweaty. He took a step forward, but some guy whose muscles showed like bowling balls under his preppy sweater put a thick palm on his chest and stopped him. Roderick was cool. He winked at me. Most everyone else was hungry for me.

Bernstein had never fucked me. My mouth, sure. Honestly, part of my attraction to him, part of why I kept coming around his little shack of a house in those early days was in the hope that he would. What would he be like in bed, for real? Would he close his eyes? Was he a chatterer? The type to say “Good girl” or just grunt? Were his chest and arms covered in scars from his attempts at
Liber III vel Jugorum
? Was he a condom fumbler or the type of guy to just pull out and come on my tits, then expect me to coo like some porn star?

Which I totally would have done for him, had he wanted to fuck me. But he didn’t. Instead, we breathed together, adopted yoga postures together, and spent hours in these awkward positions, reading the sectarian left press together for kernels of Divine Wisdom together. And I sucked him off like I was a diabetic and his
ov
was insulin. I had a very strong jaw, and neck, thanks to Bernstein.

Dad started ranting, and gesticulating. Something about the “excess road to wisdom leads to a palace!” He hardly knew anything about magick; drugs had scrambled his brains as much as the ice pick had scrambled Trotsky’s. But he had his Chelsea, who was smiling at me, like she was the flower girl and I was the bride, and this small crowd of people—maybe twenty-five all told—were the guests, and they were rapt. I don’t know if they believed Dad’s shit, or just wanted to see a girl get killed, live and in 3-D. Fat Joshua from the comic shop had eased down the cellar door steps and filled up that little doorway. Mike was sharking his way to the front, cutting between shoulders with the palm of his hand. He made it up to Dad and squeezed his shoulder.

“This is fantastic. You’re a fucking hero, man,” he said.