Great Jones Street

15

The package contained the mountain tapes. This was how Opel had chosen to mark the day of my birth.

On the tapes were twenty-three songs, all written and sung by me, all played by me (without accompaniment) on an old acoustic guitar, the first I'd ever owned. The songs were the most recent things I'd done. I'd taped them about fourteen months earlier, alone in the mountains, sitting down with the guitar and tape recorder and making up lyrics as I went along. I had just come off a world tour and my voice was weary and scorched, no sound nearer to my mind than the twang of baby murders in patriarchal hamlets. In time a visitor came upon the tapes and played them. Word got out, distorted of course, shaped by rumor and speculation. I refused to discuss the tapes with anyone. I declined to release them, to re-record the songs, to accept any offer concerning this material. I didn't understand the nature of my own labor. The guitar work was recognizable but the voice didn't seem to be mine. It possessed an extraordinary childlike blandness, a bit raw at times in its acknowledgments to pain, but mostly lonesome, homeless and dull, lacking true crudeness as well as any other distinctive quality. Beyond this were the lyrics themselves, strange little autistic ramblings. Perhaps because the words had never been put on paper, or even thought about for the briefest moment, these songs conveyed a special desolation, a kind of abnormal naturalness. In the past there had been a mind behind every babble and moan I'd ever produced. But the mountain tapes were genuinely infantile. I had no idea whether this was good or bad. I didn't know whether the songs were supposed to be redemptive, sardonic or something completely different. Tributes to my own mute following. Cheap plastic tricks. Ironic sonnets to the nation's crazed statesmen. Main Street parade noises. Commercials for baby food. Beseech-ings and calumets. Sequels to the ballads of the dead revolution. Whatever they were, the songs had come oozing out, one after another, over a period of two or three sleepless days. I had no clear memory of that period. The tapes themselves served as confirmation of what had taken place. Every reel was full of repetitions, mistakes and slurred words. There were long incoherent vocal passages interspersed with the sounds of eating, drinking and talking back to the TV. I played the tapes a number of times but their essence continued to elude me and so I simply put them away, preferring to forget what had been, after all, just a few days of unremembered effort – a collection of songs whose release would be sure to cause vast confusion. After that, mention of the tapes was made only by close friends or fetishistic rock scholars dressed like Superman. I was younger then and felt an obligation to my audience. I wasn't fully aware of the uses to which confusion might be put. Fame is treble and bass, and only a rare man can command the dial to that fractional point where both tones are simultaneously his. Opel had put a murmur in my head. I didn't know when she had lifted the tapes from my house in the mountains and at first I thought she was being merely playful in returning them. Conjuring up my own past confusions. But of course there was more to it than that. I remembered several things she'd either said herself or instructed Hanes to say.

(1) The gift is a stroke of true bitch genius.

(2)It is to be referred to as the product.

(3) It is not to be opened until Globke starts maneuvering for his star's return.

Opel saw the tapes as my way back out. She'd known exactly what I needed. I'd told her my own designs were too evil for a mere dealer to understand. Now she was daring me to prove it, even giving me the means. Wunder's last lick. It was the chance to remake himself, lean man of mystery, returning with the fabled tapes for all to hear, luring his crowds to new silence, their fear in baby bottles under their seats. I didn't even have to create new material. That was part of the point of it all.

Watney called from the airport. He was on his way in to see me. England's anti-king and duplicate bishop of hallucination. Watney was in the fifth or sixth year of his semi-retirement. He'd done very few concerts and recordings in that time, preferring to study, meditate and gross millions. His sources of income were obscure and apparently varied. Money came to him in undetected torrents from the north of England, from the south of France, from secret places in the low wallowy bogs of Europe. When I asked him what he wanted to see me about, he said we'd have to discuss it in person. Man to man. Face to face. Hands across the table, as it were.

I repacked the tapes and put them back in the trunk. Opel's mind seemed present in the room. ("Evil is movement toward void.") I took off my shoes and socks, then sat on the bed and counted my toes. In not too long I'd be ready to learn firsthand what rages were ahead, boys and girls nibbling at my loins, season of gray space and unknowable words. Things to be figured out first, bits and pieces, some time to spend putting all together. I went into the bathroom and looked in the mirror, counting eyes, ears, nostrils and teeth.