Still Life with Woodpecker (14 page)

“Or enough toot,” said the captain, who had just walked up with a plate of cocaine. Bernard did a line. Leigh-Cheri was hesitant. “Come on,” said Bernard. “This stuff’s so fine Julius Caesar called for it with his dying breath. ‘A toot, Brutus,’ is what he said. Come on, try it.”

Leigh-Cheri did a line. Then Gulietta did one. Perhaps Gulietta was remembering the snuff her royal employers used to snort in the good old days. The days when she would watch the swans sailing in the castle moat, never dreaming that one day, frogless, she would sail a moonlit ocean with a cargo of goofiness and love.

The sloop reached Honolulu on Saturday afternoon. The following morning, the Princess and Gulietta—and Bernard Mickey Wrangle (listed once again as T. Victrola Firecracker)—flew home to whatever stings or honeys awaited them in the vibrating American hive.

WHO KNOWS HOW
to make love stay?

1. Tell love you are going to Junior’s Deli on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn to pick up a cheese-cake, and if love stays, it can have half. It will stay.

2. Tell love you want a momento of it and obtain a lock of its hair. Burn the hair in a dime-store incense burner with yin/yang symbols on three sides. Face southwest. Talk fast over the burning hair in a convincingly exotic language. Remove the ashes of the burnt hair and use them to paint a mustache on your face. Find love. Tell it you are someone new. It will stay.

3. Wake love up in the middle of the night. Tell it the world is on fire. Dash to the bedroom window and pee out of it. Casually return to bed and assure love that everything is going to be all right. Fall asleep. Love will be there in the morning.

Bernard the Woodpecker, who had mocked if not broken the behavioral codes of an entire civilization, rebelled, naturally enough, against the notion that he must obey the rules and regulations of a house of second-rate royalty. Eventually, however, he put pride aside and obeyed—for he wanted very much to make love stay.

The billionaire Arab sportsman, A’ben Fizel, was, with Max and Tilli’s encouragement, paying court to Leigh-Cheri. If Bernard wanted so much as to see her, he had to formally court her, too. She loved him wildly, but rules are rules. She was not prepared to abandon royal privilege. “Changes are occurring in my family’s country. It’s boiling there. Perhaps someday the throne will be restored. I could eventually be queen. Think of the good I
could do.” When he failed to respond, she added, “Think of the fun we could have. I’d put you in charge of the arsenal.”

So he paid court. He would treat her as if her crotch were a piece of Viennese wedding cake, sugar-frosted and rococo. He would behave as if toy soldiers guarded the vaginal gates.

Max and Tilli knew him only as a commoner the Princess had met in pagan Hawaii. They wouldn’t have granted him suitor status had not Gulietta put in a good word for him. As a result, Gulietta was given a plastic frog full of coke (a substance for which she’d acquired a sudden fondness).

Bernard resided downtown in Pioneer Square. He leased the Charles Bukowski Suite in the Been-Down-So-Long-It-Looks-Like-Up-to-Me Hotel. A bachelor apartment in a building favored by pensioners and mice. The living room sofa turned into a bed. Sometimes, during the night, with him in it, it would try to turn back into a sofa again. In the bathroom, where he redyed his hair prior to calling on Leigh-Cheri, there were cigar burns on the toilet seat. There was rust in the tub and soot on the curtains. There were spiders, greasy drafts, and a calendar so out of date it still believed that holidays could fall in the middle of the week.

Dressed in a black suit, black shirt, black boots, socks, and tie, the outlaw drove his battered Merc convertible to the suburbs. The rain had stopped, but the sky hung low. It was the color of moles. Seattle’s sky reminded Bernard of prison bedsheets. Using hindsight, we can see that that was ominous.

The King and Queen were to receive Bernard in the library. It was a musty room, but on its floor lay a very rare and very expensive white carpet. Whiter than doves, whiter than a toothache, whiter than God’s own breath. Bernard hadn’t seen Leigh-Cheri in nearly two weeks. He decided to attempt to smuggle a note to her via Gulietta. In the note he would recommend ingenuity. “May we be
eaten by starving baby ostriches if we can’t concoct a secret way to meet.” Waiting for his prospective in-laws, he went to the desk and commenced to scribble the note. In his nervousness, he knocked an open bottle of ink onto that Easter-white carpet.

The puddle was large. The stain permanent.

Surely Queen Tilli was gracious about the mishap. Wrong. In fact, she made no effort to conceal her extreme vexation. She caressed her Chihuahua in ivory silence. Awkward and tense, the evening drooped like the sky.

Tea was poured from a silver pot whose spout had once bowed to Winston Churchill. It was excellent tea, but the suitor was craving tequila. The King made small talk about basketball. About blackberries. The Princess was afraid to look Bernard in the eye. Birds could not have flown through the longing between them. Blackberry briars could not have penetrated the longing. At nine o’clock sharp, the suitor was dismissed. Chuck tried to follow him home but lost him when in a snit he ran six red lights, the last two backwards.

The next day, Bernard managed to get Leigh-Cheri on the telephone. She told him that Queen Tilli was inconsolable. He would not be invited back. “You’ve got to think of something.”

“I already have. Let’s go live in a gypsy cave on an island off the coast of Panama. I’ll play my harmonica for you and tie your hair in knots with coca leaves.”

“Nothing doing,” she said. “You must make amends.”

A few days later, Bernard bought two dozen roses and set out for Fort Blackberry. He knew King Max was in the hospital having his valve checked. Just as well. He would call on the Queen. He rehearsed the most moving apologies. He was a trifle desperate. He would not settle for less than amends.

An uneasiness was in Gulietta’s ancient eyes as she let him in. She gestured that he should wait in the music room. “Okay, but I forgot my harmonica,” said Bernard. Gulietta reached for the flowers. Bernard said no, he’d
just hold onto them. He went into the music room and took a seat on the couch.

As he sat, he felt something warm and heard a soft, dry snap/crackle/pop, like a singular oversized Rice Krispy being bitten into by a crocodile. He stood up slowly. The dyed hair on his neck stood up with him. Beneath him was the beloved Chihuahua. He had sat on it. And broken its neck.

There was nothing to do but lift the lid of the piano and lay the dead Chihuahua inside on the wires. He stuffed the roses in on top of it and closed the lid. He left without saying goodbye.

O sleep thy doggy nap of ages, wee beastie, yap after pharaohs’ cats in the alleys of the afterworld. For Bernard Mickey Wrangle would neither sleep nor play that night. Fate had punched his ticket, love had bought him a seat on that train that only stops on the dark side of the moon.

This time, Chuck was successful in tailing him. In his haste for tequila, Bernard nipped into a Pioneer Square watering hole he normally wouldn’t have frequented, the Ra Bar & Grill, owned and operated by a solar energy collective. Even the jukebox was powered by picking the sun’s pockets. While Bernard was feeding that jukebox, hoping that Waylon Jennings would restore his sense of reality, Chuck was across the street in a phone booth ringing his contact in the CIA. The agent was elated. The teacup that Chuck had delivered to him two days before had yielded fingerprints. Once that same cup had worn the fingerprints of Winston Churchill, but now only the prints of the Woodpecker adorned it. “The FBI will take care of him,” said the agent, “he’s made monkeys of them for years. Then my office will determine what part he’s been playing in the plot to restore King Max. Don’t let him out of your sight.”

Within an hour, Bernard was arrested—ten months to the day before the statute of limitations would have cut him loose. And although he yelled to the barroom crowd as the agents dragged him away, “They haven’t got me!
It’s impossible to get me!” officials at McNeil Island Federal Penitentiary were already dusting out a cell from which they claimed Houdini could not have escaped.

And soon Princess Leigh-Cheri would be dusting out her attic, a cell devised to thwart love’s escape, a bare museum dedicated to what each of us wants and cannot have and to the sadness and joy of that wanting.

And here might be the moment to squirt one perfect tear, all bittersweet and shimmering with dreamy resignation. Except that as the serpent once sunned its coils in Eden, patiently awaiting the opportunity to let the biggest cat in eternity out of the sturdiest bag, so a pack of Camel cigarettes stands in these wings, waiting to come on and do its most unexpected stuff.

THE REMINGTON SL3
has a new paint job. I’ve brushed the sucker red. Don’t ask why. It’s the only way I can continue with the damned machine. Externally, at least, the effect is interesting. Almost shocking. Almost intimate. Jiggling upon my table now, it’s as ruddy and indiscreet as a plastic sack full of hickeys.

Internally, too, it may be destined for alterations. For better or worse, it’s going to have to cope with letters, words, sentence structures with which no existing typewriter has had experience. Let me explain.

On a recent journey to Cuba, I found myself in the downtrodden plaza of an inland village, surrounded by adolescents politely requesting Chiclets. Had I imagined that Chiclets were a rare delicacy to Cubans, I might have smuggled in a few cartons from the Thrift-E Mart back home. As it was, however, I lacked both Chiclets and, as it turned out, the linguistics to say as much.

Always, I’d believed that the Spanish verb
hablar
meant “to have,” so that when one said “Sí, hablo español,” one was saying, “I have Spanish—I have command of the Spanish language.” Operating out of that
misconception, I said to the handsome young Cubans, “No hablo Chiclets.” They smiled courteously.

Later, I learned that what I’d said was, of course, “I don’t speak Chiclets.”

At first I felt pretty dumb. But then I thought, “Well, it was an honest statement. I
don’t
speak Chiclets.”

Then I thought: “Why not?”

In the months since, I’ve been teaching myself to speak Chiclets. Let me tell you, it’s easier to speak Chiclets than to read or write it.

Nevertheless, there is a definite possibility that in the remaining pages of this book I might lapse momentarily into Chiclet prose. The subject matter almost requires it.

I hope that the Remington SL3 is up to the task.

Does the moon have a purpose? Are redheads supernatural? Who knows how to make love stay? I’m going to submit those questions, and several significant others, to the Remington SL3. Like a war between magicians, it can last a long time, and even then the outcome may not be what it appears to be.

But if the Remington SL3, freshly painted, can type in Chiclets, then this enterprise may hold together. Something has got to hold it together. I’m saying my prayers to Elmer, the Greek god of glue.

PHASE
III

AFTER A DECENT INTERVAL,
Queen Tilli acquired another Chihuahua. Max insisted on it. He couldn’t stand it when she blubbered during dog food commercials, and the little urn of ashes was giving him the creeps. One day he simply blew out the black candles and drove her to a pet store.

An outlaw lover is not so easily replaced.

Leigh-Cheri refused to see A’ben Fizel. She refused to see the reporters who telephoned daily. The reporters didn’t want to ask her about the Woodpecker—her relationship with him was still secret from the public—the reporters wanted to talk about the monarchy of Mu. Two days following Bernard’s arrest,
People
magazine hit the stands with its article on her. It seemed the press thought Mu a good idea. Several deposed royals who’d been interviewed thought it a good idea. Even King Max, who’d never had the slightest interest in natural environment, beyond the blackberries that drummed their million menacing fingernails outside his walls, thought it a good idea. Max encouraged her to follow through. He encouraged her to see the reporters. He encouraged her to see A’ben Fizel. But Leigh-Cheri would see no one. She wished
only to see Bernard, and so far the King County Jail, where he was being held while awaiting trial, had refused to allow him visitors.

He was not allowed bail, either. If he had been, Leigh-Cheri would have hocked what was left of Tilli’s crown jewels to go it, and the Furstenberg-Barcalona code could take a flying fuck at a rolling tiara.

“The most important thing is love,” said Leigh-Cheri. “I know that now. There’s no point in saving the world if it means losing the moon.”

Leigh-Cheri sent that message to Bernard through his attorney. The message continued, “I’m not quite twenty, but, thanks to you, I’ve learned something that many women these days never learn: Prince Charming really
is
a toad. And the Beautiful Princess has halitosis. The bottom line is that (a) people are never perfect, but love can be, (b) that is the one and only way that the mediocre and the vile can be transformed, and é doing that makes it that. Loving makes love. Loving makes itself. We waste time looking for the perfect lover instead of creating the perfect love. Wouldn’t that be the way to make love stay?”