Great Jones Street

2

I went to the room in Great Jones Street, a small crooked room, cold as a penny, looking out on warehouses, trucks and rubble. There was snow on the window ledge. Some rags and an unloved ruffled shirt of mine had been stuffed into places where the window frame was warped and cold air entered. The refrigerator was unplugged, full of record albums, tapes and old magazines. I went to the sink and turned both taps all the way, drawing an intermittent trickle. Least is best. I tried the radio, picking up AM only at the top of the dial, FM not at all. Later I shaved, cutting myself badly. It was strange watching the long fold of blood appear at my throat, collecting along the length of the gash, then starting to flow in an uneven pattern. Not a bad color. Room could do with a coat. I stuck toilet paper against the cut and tried with no luck to sleep a while. Then I put Opel's coat over my shoulders and went out for food.

It was dark in the street, snowing again, and a man in a long coat stood in the alley between Lafayette and Broadway. I walked around a stack of shipping containers. The industrial loft buildings along Great Jones seemed misproportioned, broad structures half as tall as they should have been, as if deprived of light by the great skyscraper ranges to the north and south. I found a grocery store about three blocks away. One of the customers nudged the woman next to him and nodded in my direction. A familiar dumb hush fell over the store. I picked up the owner's small brown cat and let it curl against my chest. The man who'd spotted me drew gradually closer, pretending to read labels along the way, finally sidling in next to me at the counter, the living effigy of a cost accountant or tax lawyer, radiating his special grotesquerie, that of sane men leading normal lives.

I got back to find Globke with his arm down the toilet bowl.

"I dropped a dime," he said.

"The floor's not very clean. You'll ruin your new pants. What is that – vinyl?"

"Polyvinyl."

"And the shirt," I said. "What about the shirt?"

He struggled up from the floor, then held his stomach in and adjusted his clothes. He followed me into the main room, not exactly a living room since it included a bathtub and refrigerator. Globke himself occupied a duplex apartment in a condominium building situated on the heights just across the Hudson River. His apartment was a model abode of contour furniture and supergraphics, an apparent challenge to the cultured indolence of Riverside Drive. His second wife was young and vaporous, a student of Eastern religions, and his daughter by his first marriage played the cello.

"There's a story behind this shirt," he said. "This shirt is part of an embroidered altar cloth. Fully consecrated. Made by blind nuns in the foothills of the Himalayas."

"What's that color? I've never seen a shirt exactly that color."

"Llama vomit," he said. "That's what they told me when I bought it. There's a rumor you're dead, Bucky."

"Do you believe it?"

"I came here for the express purpose of letting you know, all kidding aside, that no matter what your intentions are, we're determined to see you through this thing, irregardless of revenues, monies, so forth – grosses and the like. Your own intentions are uppermost."

"I have no intentions."

"Contractual matters. Studio dates. Record commitments. Road arrangements. We go when you say go. Until then we sit with our legs crossed. What the hell, an artist's an artist. Bookings. Interviews. Press parties. Release dates."

"How did you get in here?"

"It wasn't hard to figure out you'd be here. I knew you'd be here. Once we traced you to New York, I knew this was where you'd be. But look how hollow-cheeked. Look how ghostly. I had no idea. Who knew? Nobody told me."

"But how did you get in here?" I said.

"I picked up the key on my way in from the airport I've been in Chicago the past two days. First they tell me you've disappeared, so I make all the usual inquiries. Then they tell me there's a riot in the Astrodome, so I make all the usual public statements. Then I catch a plane to New York and pick up the key on my way down here."

"Pick up the key where?"

"At our lavish offices in world-famous Rockefeller Center."

"What was it doing there?"

Transparanoia owns this building," he said.

"I didn't know we were in real estate. Since when?"

"Two or three months ago. Modestly. We're in very modestly. Lepp's a cautious man. He picks up a piece of property here and there. Mostly related to the business. An old ballroom or theater. Shuttered property. Nothing big."

"What are we doing with a building like this?"

"Lepp stays out of my sphere of influence and I don't go messing in his. I'm not in love with what you look like, Bucky. You're a morbid sight. A one-man horror movie. Where's Opel?"

"Don't know."

"I thought she'd be here. I don't see her all this time I figure she's in her funny apartment shooting God-forbid some kind of terrible drug between her toes, the only skin left."

"I haven't seen her in a while. She may be in Morocco, she may not. Then again she may."

"You plan to go looking?"

"I'm staying right here," I said.

"That's your right and your privilege, Bucky, with or without a studio-equipped house in the mountains. The first death rumor was in the evening paper. I could easily stop it here and now."

"I don't think you could. But either way, don't get into it. I want to see how long it lasts."

"Whatever you say."

"I haven't asked about your wife. How's your wife, what's-her-name, your lovely and charming wife?"

"Wife, companion, lover," Globke said. "She's all that and more. Mother, daughter, teacher, adviser, friend. But I'm keeping you two apart. Otherwise it's instant sex karma. She's got a beautiful soul but I don't trust her body. See, oldness and fatness. They make me a bad person."

"What's she do all day, stranded on top of that cliff?"

"She curls up with the Upanishads. She's been reading the Upanishads in paperback for the last three years. She feels the East is where the truth is, what she calls the petal of all energy. Non-attachment turns her on."

"And the little girl," I said.

"Still at it with the cello. Appreciate your asking. To think my genes could produce this kind of classical talent. She'll be concertized next year. Age of fourteen."

"Will it hurt?"

"You attack even the things I hold dearest, Bucky, but I forgive you because I know you're on the threshold of something extra-extra-ordinary or you wouldn't be here in this cold dark room far from the hue and cry. Or am I wrong?"

"Dead wrong."

"At least you could give me the mountain tapes. If you handed over the mountain tapes, I'd at least have something to play with."

"How's my band?" I said.

"The boys are confused. What can I say? The boys are confused, hurt and bereaved."

"Azarian's not bereaved. He's doing his little hip-flips right out front."

"With him everything's on the surface. He doesn't give it that extra level. I think they'll break up."

"Not for a while."

"Who needs them?" he said.

"They're valuable as artifacts."

"Bucky Wunderlick. That's what people want. In the flesh."

"I have to get some rest now."

"You're kicking me out. Listen, why not? It's been an emotion-packed twenty-four hours and you desperately need sleep. It stands to reason."

"Tell Lepp to get rid of this building."

"It's a business thing," he said. "Diversification, expansion, maximizing the growth potential. Someday you'll understand these things. You'll open your mind to these things. Someday you'll be thirty years of age and you'll have to go out and make an honest living, ho, hike the rest of us."

"Never," I said.

"Ho, the ageless wonder. But what I wish you'd do is, talking of time and tide, is I wish you'd go back to writing lyrics, real lyrics the way you used to write them and sing them. That would amaze and delight the whole world, Bucky. A surprise return to your old self. There was nobody better at it."

"When are you leaving, Glob?"

"He throws me out right to my face. A spontaneous put-down. He is famous for this kind of thing but I stand here and take it because it has been an emotion-packed twenty-four hours and he is a star of the firmament while I am only his personal manager who took him out of the rain when he was a scrawny kid and made him what he is today, an even scrawnier kid. But just so you don't think I'm not appreciative of what you've been doing in the later stages, normal lyrics or no normal lyrics, I want you to know a few weeks ago wherever I was in the vast Southland I picked up HBQ Memphis on the car radio and they were doing 'Pee-Pee-Maw-Maw,' both sides, no commercial interruptions. Not that it's so unusual. I just want you to know I'm not all cash-and-carry. I relate to your sound. It's not my sound. It's not the sound I want my kid to make. But it's a valid sound and I relate to it."

"Love to all," I said.

I watched him make his way down the narrow staircase, prodigious in his width, haunches rocking in that firm eternal way of beasts of burden. I imagined him a few minutes hence, standing on the Bowery trying to hail a cab to take him to his car, a custom-made machine gleaming at the top of a circular ramp in some midtown garage. Globke was accustomed to being propelled, ballistically, to and from distant points of commerce, and so there was something agreeably serene, even biblical, in his rudimentary journey down those stairs.

I set the radio dial between local stations and picked up some dust from a delta-blues guitar far off in the night. After a while I had some soup and went to bed, wearing Opel's coat. I knew it was warm wherever she was, most likely a crowded city in one of the timeless lands she loved so much. She favored warm climates and teeming streets. In my mind she was always emerging from hotels in timeless lands and looking around for signs of a teeming street. She liked to watch Arabs spit, and was entertained by similar shows of local prowess in non-Islamic countries. Opel's father was a titled American – president of a small Texas bank, board member of a utilities company, partner in an auto dealership. She fled all this for a Me in rock 'n' roll. She wanted to be lead singer in a coke-snorting hard-rock band but was prepared to be content beating a tambourine at studio parties. Her mind was exceptional, a fact she preferred to ignore. All she desired was the brute electricity of that sound. To make the men who made it. To keep moving. To forget everything. To be the sound. That was the only tide she heeded. She wanted to exist as music does, nowhere, beyond the maps of language. Opel knew almost every important figure in the business, in the culture, in the various subcultures. But she had no talent as a performer, not the slightest, and so drifted along the jet trajectories from band to band, keeping near the fevers of her love, that obliterating sound, until we met eventually in Mexico, in somebody's sister's bed, where the tiny surprise of her name, dropping like a pebble on chrome, brought our incoherent night to proper conclusion, the first of all the rest, transactions in reciprocal tourism.

She was beautiful in a neutral way, emitting no light, defining herself in terms of attrition, a skinny thing, near blond, far beyond recall from the hard-edged rhythms of her Me, Southwestern woman, hard to remember and forget. She went on tour with the band and we lived together in houses, motels and apartments, Bucky and Opel, rarely minus an entourage, the beds piled high with androgynous debris. There was never a moment between us that did not measure the extent of our true connection. To go harder, take more, die first. But before it could happen, Opel began her travels to timeless lands.