Saffron and Brimstone: Strange Stories (22 page)

I gave up all pretense of studying or attending classes. I worked a few shifts behind the counter at the Queenstown Restaurant, making pizzas and ringing up beer. I got most of my meals there, and when my friends came in to buy cases of Heineken I never charged them. I made about sixty dollars a week, barely enough to pay the rent and keep me in cigarettes, but I got by. Bus fare was eighty cents to cross the District line; the newly opened subway was another fifty cents. I didn’t eat much. I lived on popcorn and Reuben sandwiches
from the restaurant, and there was a sympathetic waiter at the American
Cafe in Georgetown who fed me ice cream sundaes when I was bumming around in the city. I saved enough for my cover at the discos and for the Atlantis, a club in the basement of a fleabag hotel at 930 F Street that had just started booking punk bands. The rest I spent on booze and Marlboros. Even if I was broke, someone would always spring me a drink and a smoke; if I had a full pack of cigarettes, I was ahead of the game. I stayed out all night, finally staggering out into some of the District’s worst neighborhoods with a couple of bucks in my sneaker, if I was lucky. Usually I was broke.

Yet I really was lucky. Somehow I always managed to find my way home. At two or three or four
A.M.
I’d crash into my apartment, alone except for the cockroaches—David would have gone home with a pickup from the bars, and Marcy and Bunny had decamped to the suburbs. I’d be so drunk I stuck to the mattress like a fly mashed against a window. Sometimes I’d sit cross-legged with the typewriter in front of me and write, naked because of the appalling heat, my damp skin grey with cigarette ash. I read
Tropic of Cancer
, reread
Dhalgren
and
A Fan’s Notes
and a copy of
Illuminations
held together by a rubber band. I played Pere Ubu and Wire at the wrong speed, because I was too wasted to notice, and would finally pass
out only to be ripped awake by the apocalyptic scream of the firehouse
siren next door—I’d be standing in the middle of the room, screaming at the top of my lungs, before I realized I was no longer asleep. I saw people in my room, a lanky boy with dark-blond hair and clogs who pointed his finger at me and shouted
Poseur
! I heard voices. My dreams were of flames, of the walls around me exploding outward so that I could see the ruined city like a freshly tilled garden extending for miles and miles, burning cranes and skeletal buildings rising from the smoke to bloom, black and gold and red, against a topaz sky. I wanted to burn too, tear through the wall that separated me from that other world, the real world, the one I glimpsed in books and music, the world I wanted to claim for myself.

But I didn’t burn. I was just a fucked-up college student, and pretty soon I wasn’t even that. That spring I flunked out of the Divine. All of my other friends were still in school, getting boyfriends and girlfriends, getting cast in university productions of
An Inspector Calls
and
Ubu Roi
. Even David Baldanders managed to get good grades for his paper on Verlaine. Meanwhile, I leaned out my third-floor window and smoked and watched the speedfreaks stagger across the parking lot below. If I jumped I could be with them: that was all it would take.

It was too beautiful for words, too terrifying to think this was what my life had shrunk to. In the mornings I made instant coffee and tried to read what I’d written the night before. Nice words but they made absolutely no sense. I cranked up Marcy’s expensive stereo and played my records, compulsively transcribing song lyrics as though they might somehow bleed into something else, breed with my words and create a coherent storyline. I scrawled more words on the bedroom wall:

—

I HAVE BEEN DAMNED BY THE RAINBOW

I AM AN AMERICAN ARTIST, AND I HAVE NO CHAIRS

—

It had all started as an experiment. I held the blunt, unarticulated belief that meaning and transcendence could be shaken from the world, like unripe fruit from a tree; then consumed.

So I’d thrown my brain into the Waring blender along with vials of cheap acid and hashish, tobacco and speed and whatever alcohol was at hand. Now I wondered: did I have the stomach to toss down the end result?

Whenever David showed up it was a huge relief.

“Come on,” he said one afternoon. “Let’s go to the movies.”

We saw a double bill at the Biograph,
The Story of Adele H
and
Jules Et Jim
. Torturously uncomfortable chairs, but only four bucks for four hours of air-conditioned bliss. David had seen
Adele H
six times already; he sat beside me, rapt, whispering the words to himself. I struggled with the French and mostly read the subtitles. Afterwards we stumbled blinking into the long ultraviolet D.C. twilight, the smell of honeysuckle and diesel, coke and lactic acid, our clothes crackling with heat like lightning and our skin electrified as the sugared air seeped into it like poison. We ran arm-in-arm up to the Cafe de Paris, sharing one of David’s Gitanes. We had enough money for a bottle of red wine and a baguette. After a few hours the waiter kicked us out, but we gave him a dollar anyway. That left us just enough for the Metro and the bus home.

It took us hours to get back. By the time we ran up the steps to our apartment we’d sobered up again. It was not quite nine o’clock on a Friday night.

“Fuck!” said David. “What are we going to do now?”

No one was around. We got on the phone but there were no parties, no one with a car to take us somewhere else. We rifled the apartment for a forgotten stash of beer or dope or money, turned our pockets inside-out looking for stray seeds, Black Beauties, fragments of green dust.

Nada.

In Marcy’s room we found about three dollars in change in one of her jean pockets. Not enough to get drunk, not enough to get us back into the city.

“Damn,” I said. “Not enough for shit.”

From the parking lot came the low thunder of motorcycles, a baby crying, someone shouting.

“You fucking motherfucking fucker.”

“That’s a lot of fuckers,” said David.

Then we heard a gunshot.

“Jesus!” yelled David, and yanked me to the floor. From the neighboring apartment echoed the crack of glass shattering.“They shot out a window!”

“I said, not enough money for anything.” I pushed him away and sat up. “I’m not staying here all night.”

“Okay, okay, wait . . . ”

He crawled to the kitchen window, pulled himself onto the sill to peer out. “They did shoot out a window,” he said admiringly. “Wow.”

“Did they leave us any beer?”

David looked over his shoulder at me. “No. But I have an idea.”

He crept back into the living room and emptied out his pockets beside me. “I think we have enough,” he said after he counted his change for the third time. “Yeah. But we have to get there now—they close at nine.”

“Who does?”

I followed him back downstairs and outside.

“Peoples Drug,” said David. “Come on.”

We crossed Queens Chapel Road, dodging Mustangs and blasted pickups. I watched wistfully as the 80 bus passed, heading back into the city. It was almost nine o’clock. Overhead, the sky had that dusty gold-violet bloom it got in late spring. Cars raced by, music blaring; I could smell charcoal burning somewhere, hamburgers on a grill and the sweet far-off scent of apple blossom.

“Wait,” I said.

I stopped in the middle of the road, arms spread, staring straight up into the sky and feeling what I imagined David must have felt when he leaned against the walls of Mr. P’s and Grand Central Station: I was waiting, waiting, waiting for the world to fall on me like a hunting hawk.

“What the fuck are you doing?” shouted David as a car bore down and he dragged me to the far curb. “Come on.”

“What are we getting?” I yelled as he dragged me into the drugstore.

“Triaminic.”

I had thought there might be a law against selling four bottles of cough syrup to two messed-up looking kids. Apparently there wasn’t, though I was embarrassed enough to stand back as David shamelessly counted pennies and nickels and quarters out onto the counter.

We went back to Queenstown. I had never done cough syrup before; not unless I had a cough. I thought we would dole it out a spoonful at a time, over the course of the evening. Instead David unscrewed the first bottle and knocked it back in one long swallow. I watched in amazed disgust, then shrugged and did the same.

“Aw, fuck.”

I gagged and almost threw up, somehow kept it down. When I looked up David was finishing off a second bottle, and I could see him eyeing the remaining one in front of me. I grabbed it and drank it as well, then sprawled against the boxspring. Someone lit a candle. David? Me? Someone put on a record, one of those Eno albums,
Another Green World
. Someone stared at me, a boy with long black hair unbound and eyes that blinked from blue to black then shut down for the night.

“Wait,” I said, trying to remember the words. “I. Want. You. To—”

Too late: David was out. My hand scrabbled across the floor, searching for the book I’d left there, a used New Directions paperback of Rimbaud’s work. Even pages were in French; odd pages held their English translations.

I wanted David to read me
Le lettre du voyant
, Rimbaud’s letter to his friend Paul Demeny; the letter of the seer. I knew it by heart in English and on the page but spoken French eluded me and always would. I opened the book, struggling to see through the scrim of cheap narcotic and nausea until at last I found it.

—

Je dis qu’il faut être voyant, se faire voyant.

—

Le Poète se fait voyant par un long, immense et raisonné

dérèglement de tous les sens.

Toutes les formes d’amour, de souffrance,

de folie; il cherche lui-même . . .

—

I say one must be a visionary,

one must become a seer.

—

The poet becomes a seer through a long, boundless and systematic derangement of all the senses.

All forms of love, of suffering, of madness;

he seeks them within himself . . .

—

As I read I began to laugh, then suddenly doubled over. My mouth tasted sick, a second sweet skin sheathing my tongue. I retched, and a bright-red clot exploded onto the floor in front of me; I dipped my finger into it then wrote across the warped parquet.

—

DEAR DAV

—

I looked up. There was no light save the wavering flame of a candle in a jar. Many candles, I saw now; many flames. I blinked and ran my hand across my forehead. It felt damp. When I brought my finger to my lips I tasted sugar and blood. On the floor David sprawled, snoring softly, his bandanna clenched in one hand. Behind him the walls reflected candles, endless candles; though as I stared I saw they were not reflected light after all but a line of flames, upright, swaying like figures dancing. I rubbed my eyes, a wave cresting inside my head then breaking even as I felt something splinter in my eye. I started to cry out but could not: I was frozen, freezing. Someone had left the door open.

“Who’s there?” I said thickly, and crawled across the room. My foot nudged the candle; the jar toppled and the flame went out.

But it wasn’t dark. In the corridor outside our apartment door a hundred-watt bulb dangled from a wire. Beneath it, on the top step, sat the boy I’d seen in the urinal beside David. His hair was the color of dirty straw, his face sullen. He had muddy green-blue eyes, bad teeth, fingernails bitten down to the skin; skeins of dried blood covered his fingertips like webbing. A filthy bandanna was knotted tightly around his throat

“Hey,” I said. I couldn’t stand very well so slumped against the wall, slid until I was sitting almost beside him. I fumbled in my pocket and found one of David’s crumpled Gitanes, fumbled some more until I found a book of matches. I tried to light one but it was damp; tried a second time and failed again.

Beside me the blond boy swore. He grabbed the matches from me and lit one, turned to hold it cupped before my face. I brought the cigarette close and breathed in, watched the fingertip flare of crimson then blue as the match went out.

But the cigarette was lit. I took a drag, passed it to the boy. He smoked in silence, after a minute handed it back to me. The acrid smoke couldn’t mask his oily smell, sweat and shit and urine; but also a faint odor of green hay and sunlight. When he turned his face to me I saw that he was older than I had first thought, his skin dark-seamed by sun and exposure.

“Here,” he said. His voice was harsh and difficult to understand. He held his hand out. I opened mine expectantly, but as he spread his fingers only a stream of sand fell onto my palm, gritty and stinking of piss. I drew back, cursing. As I did he leaned forward and spat in my face.

“Poseur.”

“You fuck,” I yelled. I tried to get up but he was already on his feet. His hand was tearing at his neck; an instant later something lashed across my face, slicing upwards from cheek to brow. I shouted
in pain and fell back, clutching my cheek. There was a red veil between
me and the world; I blinked and for an instant saw through it. I glimpsed the young man running down the steps, his hoarse laughter echoing through the stairwell; heard the clang of the fire door swinging open then crashing shut; then silence.

“Shit,” I groaned, and sank back to the floor. I tried to staunch the blood with my hand. My other hand rested on the floor. Something warm brushed against my fingers: I grabbed it and held it before me: a filthy bandana, twisted tight as a noose, one whip-end black and wet with blood.

—

I saw him one more time. It was high summer by then, the school year over. Marcy and Bunny were gone till the fall, Marcy to Europe with her parents, Bunny to a private hospital in Kentucky. David would be leaving soon, to return to his family in Philadelphia. I had found another job in the city, a real job, a GS-1 position with the Smithsonian; the lowest-level job one could have in the government but it was a paycheck. I worked three twelve-hour shifts in a row, three days a week, and wore a mustard-yellow polyester uniform with a photo ID that opened doors to all the museums on the Mall. Nights I sweated away with David at the bars or the Atlantis; days I spent at the newly opened East Wing of the National Gallery of Art, its vast open white-marble space an air-conditioned vivarium where I wandered stoned, struck senseless by huge moving shapes like sharks spun of metal and canvas: Calder’s great mobile, Miro’s tapestry, a line of somber Rothkos darkly shimmering waterfalls in an upstairs gallery. Breakfast was a Black Beauty and a Snickers bar, dinner whatever I could find to drink.