The Flamethrowers (43 page)

He and I, listening to Bene’s steps on the landing as she departed.

Gianni’s face, unreadable. His distance, which I had interpreted as chivalry, a form of respect. When in fact it was just what it seemed: distance.

“I need to take a trip,” he’d said. “I want you to come. We’ll go together. You want to see the Alps?”

His question confirmed or explained or simply filled the space of tension I’d felt all along with Gianni, from the first moments at the villa.

He took out a cigarette and lit it, in no hurry for my answer. Probably in no hurry because he knew, somehow, that my answer would be yes.

It was a North Pole, the same brand of cigarettes that Giddle smoked. It struck me as funny that Gianni smoked Giddle’s brand, but there was no witness who would understand why this was funny. Giddle and Gianni, from opposite sides of the globe featured on the cigarette packet.

*  *  *

I had no other world to turn to now but this one, the roof, Dogg’s band, Giddle’s antics.

Hookers and Children filled the night. There was a lot to say on these two subjects.

They were playing their own stuff now. Dogg’s earnest voice, but with more dissonance in the chords.

Henri-Jean wrapped himself tightly against Giddle and they swayed from side to side. Their dancing seemed especially obscene for the fact that he was out of character. He wasn’t supposed to grind against women. He was supposed to be this lone figure in the cityscape, jester and outcast with his idiosyncratic burden, the pole over his shoulder. But in fact he was a man, bending his knees to lower his pelvis to the level of Giddle’s ass.

Nadine was talking to Helen. Smiling in a remote manner that was probably nervousness but would be read by Helen as reserved, attractively reserved. Helen said Nadine looked familiar and asked if she, too, had by chance gone to Dalton.

“No,” Nadine said in a dispassionate tone, almost like a corpse, no expression on her face. I sensed that she had been coached by John Dogg to remain aloof or to pretend to. She held herself perfectly still. By revealing any animation to her face or body she would spoil the effect of the hair and the dress and the patent leather heels, which shone on the roof’s gravel like wet ink. Watching her hold tight to sudden elegance, hold it like it was a religion that could save her, I understood
that Nadine had told the truth and Giddle had lied. Giddle had never been a prostitute. I didn’t know where she went in the velvet jumper she kept in her work locker, but it wasn’t to a midtown hotel.

While Thurman Johnson and an unidentified Ronnie had gone out to buy scotch that night at the Chelsea Hotel, Nadine had told me about the first time she turned a trick. It was with a very old man. He wanted a blow job. “Five dollars a minute, I told him. I knew he had a lot of fives in his wallet.” This was an important part of the deal, she had explained. You made an educated guess of roughly how much money they had on them, and how much more they might be able to acquire if they ran out of what was in their wallet. You priced accordingly, tried to divide time into segments that corresponded with a complete emptying of their wallet. “You have to think in totalities, as my ex-husband used to put it. The larger view. So I said five a minute, figuring he had about a hundred dollars. The first minute goes by. I take his little pud out of my mouth and he says,
Oh please, oh please
. ‘Five more dollars,’ I say. I made about eighty bucks. My mouth was numb. It’s actually not so simple when they stay soft. It’s like slurping on the corner of a plastic bag that has a little bit of air in. He never came. It was just minutes and fives. Another thing I have done to make money is cry. Some men will do anything to get you to stop crying. They don’t like to see women cry, nuh-uh. Nice guys will do whatever they can to get you to stop. The problem is most guys aren’t nice.”

Giddle’s lie didn’t matter. Giddle lied about everything. I didn’t even know if her name was Giddle. Her lie was not a claim to a life like Nadine had lived. It was something else, whatever Giddle naively imagined to be the glamour of the call girl, the secret power, a cliché, champagne and silk teddies. The way Giddle said “businessmen,” daubing cucumber oil on her neck. The way she said “midtown,” and flipped her hair out so it lay evenly and full like she was Rita Hayworth. It was play-acting. It wasn’t that different from my childhood fantasy of the Mustang Ranch as an actual ranch, grand and Western-fancy, and not various ugly trailers. It was like saying “timepiece” when you meant watch; there was no such thing. Only minutes and fives.

“This one’s called Bud’s Doughnuts,” Dogg said into the microphone. “Our Second Avenue home away from home.” It sounded like surf rock. A psychedelic projection behind them. Hookers and Children were like a slightly ironic prom act.

“I
know
Bud,” Ronnie said to someone. “It’s a real dude. I know him from high school. We both moved to Manhattan and he opened Bud’s Doughnuts on Second Avenue. His brother Tom opened a car wash.”

“Tom’s Car Wash, out on Myrtle Avenue?”

“No, man, that’s not the same one.”

There was a guy on the roof with a Polaroid camera, getting girls to show him their breasts. When he approached Nadine, she gave him a terror-stricken look and shook her head. She was again with Helen Hellenberger, who politely said, “No thank you.”

Burdmoore had talked about the lost children. The times to come. The times that had been to come but that had not come.

There was the matter of who was awake and who was asleep. The question of it. The ambiguity inherent in this way of dividing people one to the next, awake or dreaming.
We were their nightmare
. If one group was dreaming the other, there couldn’t be certainty as to which group was which.

After Burdmoore and Fah-Q had withdrawn themselves from battle, retreated to the mountains of northern Mexico, Fah-Q had a vision, Burdmoore had told us that night at Gloria and Stanley’s. After the vision came to him, Fah-Q broke from their grim, secret encampment and traveled all the way back to New York City. He needed to speak with Allen Ginsberg. Fah-Q was certain that Ginsberg had an important message for them, Burdmoore had recounted to us. A message about their clandestinity, about the revolution. “So what was it?” Didier had asked, a lightness in his voice, the joke being that whatever the message was, perhaps it might still be of use. Fah-Q found Ginsberg, Burdmoore told us, and indeed, Ginsberg had a message for the Motherfuckers. The message was that they should all quit smoking. They should give up cigarettes. Didier, seated across from Burdmoore at the Kastles’ dinner table, had narrowed his eyes and sucked wetly on
his Gauloise and nodded, understanding that Allen Ginsberg was truly the idiot Burdmoore had claimed he was.

More and more people crowded onto the roof as Hookers and Children finished their set. All the other roofs around SoHo were dark, occupied by squat water towers, rickety and hand-hammered spacecraft set down for the night, dormant and crouching on spindly legs over dark, flat expanses. This roof was noise and movement and shifting silhouettes. Empty plastic cups sent over the edge. The hopeful, gaspy pumping of an empty keg. Ronnie telling someone a story about a Japanese stripper named Shomi.

The air was cool and breezy now. I checked again on the bike as a gust loosed pear blossoms from the trees, invisible hands stripping branches of their little white petals, scattering them on the sidewalk.

“The thing about songwriting,” John Dogg was saying to someone, “is that you can address things
obliquely,
but no matter. You can’t get away from the content that is the essence of the form. All songs are about unrequited love.”

“Except ‘Green Onions,’ ” Ronnie said. “Which isn’t about love at all.”

It must have been Tim Fontaine, and not Ronnie, who’d had to live with that song in his head. Tim had spent a decade in prison. Got out, violated his parole, and was now back inside, as far as I knew. It was Tim’s experience in prison that Ronnie had spoken of. Tim, who was doing Ronnie’s time. Why couldn’t Ronnie just say so? Why did he have to present these elaborate stories, and some of it was true and some wasn’t and you were never going to know which was which. Either he’d worked in factories, or on boats, or both, or neither, and whatever he had or had not done, there were a lot of stories. Sandro had always protected Ronnie’s evasions. “You don’t know,” he’d tell people. But Sandro didn’t know, either.

“I’m talking about songs with lyrics,” Dogg said. “Not instrumentals. ‘Green Onions’ is an instrumental.”

“ ‘Take This Job and Shove It,’ ” Ronnie said. “Tell me that’s about unrequited love.”

“Oh, but it is. It is,” Dogg said. “It is.
Take this job and shove it, I ain’t working here no more,
” he sang. “He’s quitting because his woman left him. And she was the only reason he withstood the lousy treatment in the first place. He’s done being abused by the factory foreman now that his heart is broken.”

John Dogg was not a complete idiot. He had merely seemed like one. It was wanting something a great deal that made people embarrassing—which was why I’d hidden my wants around Sandro and his friends, and Giddle, too, pretended I didn’t want an art career when I did. Pretended I wasn’t jealous of Gloria, of Helen Hellenberger, of Talia, when I was.

I wove through the crowd, heading for the fire stairs. Giddle was flirting with John Chamberlain, who made precarious sculptures of crushed-up car parts. She was drunk and kept asking him if he had a driver’s license. That was a particular mood of Giddle’s, heckling as flirtation. When that didn’t work, she said she knew his secret, his dirty secret.

“What is it?” he said, suddenly interested, looking her up and down in stark assessment.

“You used to be a shampoo girl,” she said.

He laughed, grinning at her broadly. “So come on back to my place and I’ll shampoo you.”

I passed Ronnie. He was talking to a girl I didn’t know. “Have you had any contact recently with people from other planets?” he asked her. His voice got louder as I passed. He turned in my direction.

The stairs were behind the water tower, where the drinks table was. Nadine was there alone. She poured wine into a keg cup all the way to the top. It was dark and she didn’t see me. I watched as she drank the entire thing in one quick and continuous series of gulps, then wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, looked around nervously like a hungry animal eating some other animal’s food, and refilled the cup.

Don’t you remember me, Nadine?

Don’t you?

But why would she. She was on her way down, or up, or down, and
not looking for friends. She wasn’t shopping for experience. She was trying to survive. I was the one shopping for experience. I who remembered her and everything she had said to me, and that was enough. It was enough that I remembered her.

*  *  *

The bike would not start. I couldn’t get it to turn over. I pushed it off the centerstand and figured I would try to bump start it, coast and get some speed and hopefully it would catch. It had been fouling spark plugs. Maybe that was it.

“Engine trouble?”

I realized, hearing his voice, that I had hoped Ronnie would follow me out. He bent down. “Could be this.”

One spark plug lead was dangling. A simple thing that anyone could see. He plugged it back into the cylinder head.

“Thanks, Ronnie.”

“Well, maybe you could give me a ride. I mean, if you can start it.”

“I can start it.”

I’d given rides back in Reno, when I’d had the other, older Moto Valera. A lot of passengers didn’t understand that you leaned with and not against the driver. That you put your hands on her waist, never on her shoulders. But Ronnie had ridden plenty. He owned that Harley when I met him, and he knew how to be a passenger, to lean with me when I cornered. He held me snugly, his arms tight around my waist, his chest pressed to my back. I couldn’t tell if this was deliberate or not. Scott and Andy had told me that boys became connoisseurs of breast size, shape, feel, having girls pressed against their backs as they cornered and braked. Andy said if you weren’t sure, you stopped short, so that your passenger mashed into you, which gave you a good idea of what was underneath her sweater.

I drove Ronnie to his place on Broome Street. “You can come up,” he said, hopping off. His tone wasn’t exactly enthusiastic. It was as he said, you can if you want to.

It had been two full years since the night I’d spent with him, a night
that had opened out, self-expanding, into a world of infatuation and innuendo and games, and finally, the two of us in my old apartment on Mulberry Street, innuendo had turned to assertion. We had lain down. Faced each other and let our lips touch, and I had felt like we were two shirtless kids, sibling and casual, done with our paper routes and relaxing on the grass. Later, our bodies entwined, we weren’t casual, or like siblings. I had been sure it meant something. Even if he had shown no vulnerability, nothing even close to it. I had mistaken physical passion for passion.

Ronnie’s loft had the same high ceilings and industrial grime as Sandro’s, but it was more cluttered. The cakey smell from the fortune cookie factory on the ground floor filled the room, a rising sweetness in the middle of the night. The floor Ronnie occupied had been an Asian import foods warehouse before Ronnie took it over, and he had kept a lot of what had been left behind. Huge barrels that said
MSG
on them, where he stored the clothes he bought and wore and then threw away instead of laundering. Against one wall were crates of canned lychee packed in heavy syrup, whose labels he said he found beautiful, and meant to do something with at some point. There was a 1954 calendar on the wall, an Asian woman whose prettiness was meant to promote some product, her face faded to grayish-green, smiling under all that lapsed time.

I opened Ronnie’s refrigerator. He had gold boxes of Kodak film and three cans of Schlitz. We each opened a can and joked about how no one had food in the refrigerator. I would have thought married people like Stanley and Gloria might have food in their refrigerator, but no. Film canisters, margarine, and Kraft Fluff. Generic brands had just begun appearing on the grocery store shelves. What would they call Fluff? Ronnie wondered. Schlitz could be “Beer,” and Fritos “Corn Chips.” But Fluff was its name and what it was. “Whipped Marshmallow Puree?” I said. Maybe, he replied, but it lost the effect of simplicity. It sounded like an industrial product.