FSF, March-April 2010 Page 13
It was a magnificent jump; it carried him to within five feet of them. He plowed into the loose stone and gravel, and his right leg buckled beneath him; he lost his balance and fell.
He struggled to stand, but before he could, the one with the cardboard gun looked up at him. He was grinning, and it might have just been a trick of the fading light, but for one awful instant it looked like the grin of a naked skull. He raised the gun and pointed it at Tom's chest.
And, softly, but somehow very clearly, I heard him say, “Bang."
That was all; just “Bang,” in a quiet voice. There was no puff of smoke, no recoil from the paper muzzle.
But Tom's back erupted in a spray of blood.
He fell backward.
I screamed.
All four heads swiveled up toward me. Their eyes were like spiders’ eyes: black and gleaming.
I knew that following Tom and Malcolm would only get me killed—or worse. There was only one other direction that I could go—back into the cave.
I'd seen before-and-after photos of Arrowhead Cave. The City Fathers had ordered it sealed off, and sealed off it had been, with a vengeance. What had been a dark, mysterious opening into the underworld had been reduced to a pile of rubble, leaving an overhang barely a yard deep.
But there was no place else to hide. I pressed against the unyielding stone, feeling a distant wetness as my bladder let go. I could hear them scrabbling up the slope after me. I turned frantically from side to side, seeking an impossible escape—
And saw, six inches above my head, a lateral crack in the rock.
It was barely wider than my body, and beyond it was unrelieved blackness, yet to me it looked like the gates of Heaven. I jumped, grabbed the flat sandstone lip, pulled myself up and into it, kicking and squirming. There was barely enough room for me to wriggle between the two slabs of rock; I had to breathe shallowly to do so. But I kept crawling.
To this day I've no idea how that providential escape route came to be there. Perhaps it had been overlooked after the blast; perhaps it had been deemed too small to worry about. Or perhaps that temblor we'd had a week earlier had had something to do with opening it. All I know is that, after a lifetime of frantic crawling, I saw light up ahead.
I redoubled my efforts, scooted forward—and felt a cold hand close around my ankle.
I didn't have the breath to scream—it came out as a thin, mewling cry. Whichever one of those things had me began dragging me relentlessly back, down into the darkness. I felt my fingernails splinter on the rock. I kicked back frantically with my free leg, felt my shoe strike what had to be the head of the one that had grabbed me. I gritted my teeth, drew my leg up, and kicked backward with every bit of strength I had left.
His head splintered. I felt his skull cave in. But his grip did not slacken.
Sobbing obscenities, I swung my free leg against my other one, as hard as I could. Among the injuries that would be counted up later was a hairline fracture of my ankle—but at the time I felt nothing but a fierce joy when that cold grip loosened for a moment.
I lunged forward, panting, and came to the end of the passage, so abruptly that I tumbled out before I could stop myself. I caught a brief, dizzying glimpse of a hillside below me, scrub bushes barely illuminated by the crepuscular twilight—then I fell. Pain exploded in my head like a roman candle, and I must have passed out.
My last thought before I lost consciousness was: They're still coming for me.
* * * *
And now most of you are wondering a few different things, I imagine—such as, Why did he waste our time with this silliness? or, He's got quite an imagination, or even, Where are the men with white coats and butterfly nets?
For those of you who wish to know the end of the story—I wish I could tell you. There was front-page material in the local paper the day after that day in 1955, documenting the discovery of Tom Harper's body near Arrowhead Cave. No bullet or gun was ever found, but something very powerful had punched a hole clean through him.
They never found Malcolm.
Me they found at the bottom of the next ravine over from Arrowhead Cave. I had a concussion, and was in a coma for nearly two weeks. When I finally came out of it, I told everyone who asked—and many did, believe me—that I remembered nothing. Which was the truth. My recollection of the events of that long-ago day has come back to me piecemeal, during the course of many a long and sleepless night. I stopped seeing therapists after one diagnosed me with PTSD, and wondered why a writer with no military history was so afflicted.
I suppose it's possible that I imagined the whole thing, in an attempt to supply a story that fit the necessary particulars. If it hadn't been for the finding of Tom's body, I would have no reason not to assume that wasn't true. Which, of course, asks the question: What could possibly have happened that was so horrible that I might have made up such a story to normalize the reality?
In any event, I must admit lying to you at the start of my speech. I said I had always known that I wanted to be a writer. That's not strictly true; until I was seven years old, I had no idea what I wanted to be. But after that night, there was no doubt in my mind.
It's how I deal with it.
So, in conclusion, to those of you out there who know without question what you want to be when you grow up, I say congratulations—and be careful what you wish for.
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Novelet: WAITING FOR THE PHONE TO RING by Richard Bowes
Mr. Bowes has been working on an autobiographical novel currently titled Dust Devil: My Life in Speculative Fiction. His recent stories “If Angels Fight” and “I Needs Must Part, the Policeman Said,” are both slated for inclusion in this novel, as is this new tale of life and death in the East Village.
* * * *
1.
On a morning last October, I was reminded of the Velvet Underground song “New Age,” in the live version, the one where Lou Reed sings about getting a funny call today.
In fact I got two funny calls. The first came before ten a.m., early by my standards. Since I've retired I sleep late. Marty Simonson said hello and asked how I was. My friendship with Marty goes back to college. He's a director now, for the stage mostly. He got a Tony nomination a few years back for that play about Dorothy Parker.
Marty has, of course, an instinct for the dramatic tease. “An old friend of yours was talking about you last night,” he told me. “She's known you almost as long as I have.” Then a slight pause while I tried to imagine what he was talking about and he said, “Judy Finch says hello."
That was a surprise. It was long ago and very briefly that I'd thought of Judy Finch as a friend. We hadn't spoken since about the time she became the girl in the ménage at the center of that legendary early ‘70s catastrophe, the band Lord of Light.
I'd seen her since, of course, like anybody might: in the famous scene in the Scorsese film where she shoots DeNiro, as Pirate Jenny when they did Three Penny Opera at Lincoln Center. And there was the period when she took the name Judy Icon: hipper than Madonna, more famous than Patty Smith. She did stage shows, collages of memory and songs, all improvisational, never done the same way twice.
But it was in the East Village in the great late 1960s that I'd actually known Judy Finch. Her father was a well-known sculptor, her mother was a critic. She was nineteen, studying theater and hanging around Max's Kansas City.
My earliest memory of her is one afternoon when I was on a front stoop in the East Village with my close friend Joan Mata. This girl with long blonde hair walked by and said hello to Joan. Looking at Judy as we got introduced I first saw a nice schoolgirl, then a tough city kid, and then a young woman with a tinge of tragedy.
She sat and talked with us for a while. When she left, Joan told me the legend of Judy Finch and Ray Light. A few years before when Judy was fifteen, her boyfriend had been snatched off the street by private detectives who made a living returning runaways to the families that wanted to destroy them. They'd
been apart ever since but she loved him still.
Forty-five years later, I asked Marty, “What's she doing these days? And how the hell are you and she so intimate?
"She's writing, composing, doing what we all do later in life—trying to make it all make sense. She's got a stage work in mind and I'm helping her shape it. We wondered if you were free for lunch today."
This promised to be kind of interesting. Then Marty made it more so by adding, “I told Judy about a piece you wrote a while back. You showed it to me just after Phillip Marcy died and that whole scene exploded. You know the one? Do you still have it?"
I told him I thought so.
"Could you bring it along? She was intrigued when I described it and I think this may be material she can use."
This was one of those mornings—maybe you've had them—when pressing dental bills meant that a couple of thousand dollars would not have gone amiss. I agreed to meet them at noon at Taxi Stand over on the Bowery.
It took a little searching but the piece Marty had mentioned was in a storage box in my closet. Down among the scribbled rejection notes from long forgotten editors, the abandoned projects, old notebooks full of catty commentary, aborted play and novel ideas, sketches for board games I'd once designed, letters from old lovers, I found it.
Typewritten on cheap yellow paper, it was an artifact from the early 1970s with attitude and run-on sentences to spare. In part it was personal memory and in part an insight I'd gotten directly from the mind of Judy Finch's old flame, Ray Light.
I sat on the stool in my kitchen, read the first couple of pages, and remembered how I'd taken my own experiences and woven into them Ray's insight about what had happened to him a year or two before it happened to me.
* * * *
The Kid with the Sun in His Eyes
The Kid hasn't even been given that name yet as he stands on the corner of East 4th Street and the Bowery and tries to blink away the late-afternoon light because he's not used to it and because his eyes are a bit pinned.
Just a couple of weeks before, the Kid rode from Ohio to the city in several cars and a couple of trucks always with lone drivers, guys who sometimes just wanted to talk about themselves and their families and all he had to do was be there. Other times along the way things got done with his body and for that he managed not to be present, to take a mental walk and come back to himself when everything was over and he and the driver were once more rolling toward New York. That ability to go away was the thing about the Kid more even than his hair and his clothes, that his parents wanted to cut off of him.
In the city the Kid hit Times Square first and it was bright and confusing and scary and then some guy took him downtown to the East Village which was poor and rundown but easier to figure out and the cops were mean but not so thick on the ground as uptown and other runaways warned him about where not to go and who in the neighborhood got rewards or kicks turning in underage kids like him.
So the Kid sixteen years old stands on the corner leaning on a brick wall with one leg up behind him in classic pose and this mad boy who's taken the name Rimbaud is there with him, talking, making flowery gestures, saying, “Another place, another dimension or something is where that stud thinks he's going, man. That he thought I was the one who was going to take him there is what's so fucking funny and freaky. Like he's a cult leader but somehow he's trying to learn from me."
The Kid is coming to understand that it's drugs and hustling that keep boys like him and Rimbaud alive and in contact with this world and he feels still in control of all that. Because he has a kind of skill sometimes with a mark or a john to know what they know as they know it and without them being able to tell he's hip to them. But with all that he finds himself this afternoon out on the block early because he's slipped over some line and woke up just after noon with a nasty need.
Rimbaud says, “The stud is important in art stuff. He owns a gallery or something. He told me he could get me a job and he wants to see me tonight. But, like, he's the most weirded-out trick I've ever turned. One minute he's telling me to read his mind, the next he's ready to push me out a window and fly."
When Rimbaud's finished talking, the two of them pool their money to split a five-dollar bag of junk to hold themselves over until the night. Just as they're about to set out for East Seventh Street where they'll score, Rimbaud nudges the Kid and says, “There he is,” and the Kid sees the outline of a figure, a guy crossing the street silhouetted against the October sun streaming down the long blocks.
* * * *
Then it was getting late and I skimmed the rest of the story. Thinking about it as I brushed my teeth and showered I understood both how it had never sold and how it would be of great interest to Judy if the project was what I suspected it was going to be. As I finished shaving, the phone rang again.
"Hey, Daddy Mack,” said a slightly raspy, somewhat nasal voice, “You know where your string is this morning?"
I'm old and not so fast on the uptake these days. I'd almost hung up before I realized I knew the voice and even recognized the reference. I said, “Lizard?"
He hung up and the number was blocked on my caller I.D. But that voice could only have belonged to Lizard Pavane. Thirty years ago, he and I designed board games together. Some sold and a couple of those did okay.
The game the Lizard referred to was called Mack Daddy Mack, and, yes, each player was a pimp, sending a string of sex workers out onto the urban streets. The game pieces were garishly colored wide-brimmed hats. The board was a city street map. It owed more than a bit to Monopoly. Players rolled dice, drew cards that brought rewards or the unwelcome attention of the cops.
When we'd worked on it, we were still dumb enough to think of ourselves as mad and bad and dangerous. No one could be persuaded to buy and produce it, which now seemed to me just as well.
But the uncanny nature of the Lizard struck me. After my not having thought of it for years, that game was one of the aborted projects I'd just pawed through in my search for the story.
I left my apartment wondering why he called and thinking of the more amazing coincidence that he and Judy Finch would reappear on the same day. I've become so addled that I didn't immediately realize this was no accident.
* * * *
2.
Walking east on Bleecker Street, stopping at a copy shop to get some clear reproductions of my fading pages, I thought about Judy on stage at the Fillmore, singing with the group Lord of Light.
The Fillmore East in 1971 was in the last months of its brief and glittery career. Rock groups were playing in sports arenas by then; the neighborhood was going very bad. Heading the bill that night was a frazzled hippy band whose last hit had been a year or two before. A canny old bluesman had second billing with Lord of Light as the opening act.
Little Judy Finch was Judy Light now. Her abducted boyfriend had returned and Ray Light was his name. The Dark Lord crown was in the street waiting to be picked up and he was one of the contenders. Rumors of suicides and intricate kink washed around the band.
But the Fillmore audience was tough. It took more than that to impress us. Joplin and Hendrix and Morrison had come and gone and left us with exaggerated memories of their performances here. Everyone in the group I was with was ripped out of his or her head. The Fillmore was maybe two-thirds full.
Then the psychedelic amoebas of Joshua Light Show filled the back screen, the drummer and bassist laid down the beat, the group was on stage. Ray Light wore black from the neck on down. Judy had a blonde crewcut. The guy called BD wore long white robes.
Our world was all afire with Lord of Light stories. Ray, Judy, and BD were almost openly an off-stage three way. It didn't come across on stage. Ray and Judy came together to harmonize then stepped apart. BD moved around the stage like a zombie while banging a tambourine.
Everyone in the East Village knew that BD had been one of the private cops who'd helped abduct Ray six or seven years before. Ray Light's father paid money to have his s
on forcibly brought home, then had the boy hospitalized and given shock treatment.
It was said the doctor who treated Ray had killed himself while Ray was in that hospital. His father had committed suicide not long after Ray's release.
"Revelation in a thousand volts,” Ray Light sang. “Blowing you to heaven,” sang Judy. The essential thing with a cult legend as opposed to a popular star is that in an audience of two thousand people, the star touches most of them but the cult legend can touch maybe a hundred. In Ray's case it may not even have been that many. But the touch, I can testify, was searing.
Those in the audience who were like me got caught in Ray Light's memory, passed with him through iron doors that were locked behind them, went down institutional hallways to a place where they were strapped to a table and had their brains blasted with electricity. When the song was over and I glanced around, I saw an audience just mildly grooving. But I noticed a couple of others besides me who looked more than a little disturbed.
After that, most of Lord of Light's set passed without anything similar happening and I was about to write off what I'd felt as what happens when you spend many long nights doing too many strange drugs.
Then they sang “Just a Boy without Wings,” a song where Ray Light yelled, “REACH ME, REACH ME, REACH ME OR DIE” and I was naked and handcuffed on a window ledge trying not to look at the pavement eight floors below while trying desperately to meld my mind with that of the man who stood behind me. The nightmare lasted until the music stopped and I was shaking and wet with sweat.
I realized that Ray and I shared at least one very bad experience. And that he could do what that nightmare man had tried to force me to do.
As the reverb from the stage died down, Marty, who was sitting next to me, shrugged and said, “I give it a nine because you can die to it.” The rest of our party laughed but I was still trying to get myself to breathe normally. That window ledge was a memory I'd taken some care to avoid.
* * * *