FSF, March-April 2010 Page 14

  Still thinking about that long-ago night at the Fillmore, I found myself on the Bowery in front of Taxi Stand. Maybe you remember the restaurant. It was briefly trendy a few years back just after it opened, up the street from CBGB's which was still in business then. Completely remodeled in aluminum and glass, Taxi Stand occupied a spot that had for decades been a blowsy all-night cafeteria favored by cab drivers, cops, and prostitutes both TV and female.

  Wall murals of black and white photographs from the 1940s and ‘50s caught the Bowery by night: neon signs, parties from uptown slumming, drunks with ruined faces singing, fat women flashing their garters as they danced on bars, drunken college louts trying to be hip.

  When I arrived right at noon the place was still almost empty. I saw Marty before he saw me and was amazed that a white-haired old guy like that was still off on artistic adventures. He's sixty-three. Six months younger than I am.

  When Marty spotted my approach he said something to the woman with him. Judy Finch turned my way, smiled, and spoke my name. She looked good: mid-forties instead of very late fifties, ash blonde, no obvious work on her face. For an instant, I saw a flash of the honey-haired kid caught between boarding school and Max's Kansas City. She stared at me and I wondered if she was remembering that first encounter or was just trying to remember me.

  "I can't believe it,” she said softly, saving her voice. “We precious few don't die easily.” She took a sip of the mimosa with which she was bringing the morning to a close. “Marty tells me that you've got some amazing material."

  He had ordered iced tea, which meant he was keeping his head clear. I did the same and Marty told me about the show they were developing. “It will be a little bit like cabaret, a bit like those evenings Elaine Stritch did, and Bea Arthur. Great monster ladies of the American stage talk about breaking onto Broadway, sing a couple Sondheim songs, reminisce about Golden Girls on TV, then give you a few funny/painful glimpses of their lives."

  "Their stage careers are kind of impressive,” said Judy. “But I pretty much got those old ladies beat when it comes to the life story aspect. Living with the Lord of Light who turned out to be the God of Death and with the guy who killed him; they can't top that.” She laughed at my startled expression and said, “Oh, yes, I'm going to talk about Ray and BD and the deaths."

  "We're going to use a bunch of Ray Light songs that Judy did originally,” Marty told me. “There's a band in the show."

  "Yeah, Ray's music has slipped out of peoples’ memories,” Judy said. “This maybe will bring it back."

  "What she can't get is permission to use any kind of reference to Phillip Marcy—nothing he wrote, not a photo, nothing,” Marty said. “His family threatens to sue if his name is even used."

  "They were afraid we were going to defile his memory. As if that would be possible,” said Judy. “We were kind of stuck. Then Marty asked if I remembered you. Like I ever forget anybody from back then in the East Village!"

  Just the way she looked into my eyes and said that made me pretty certain that she had. The waiter came with my drink and took our orders.

  "Can you show us what you have?” Marty asked. I brought out a copy of “The Kid with the Sun in His Eyes” and read aloud the opening section I'd looked over at home.

  I finished and Judy said very quietly, “When I was fifteen, I used to walk Ray down to Fourth Street every night. He called the guy he lived with the Man. I never saw the Man. All I knew was that I hated him.” Then she asked me, “You have more?"

  The waiter came with our food. I put the oyster po'boy I'd ordered aside and read:

  * * * *

  At night East 4th Street becomes the off-Broadway Rialto and the Kid mixes with boys and girls on the corner of Second Avenue, the glassy-eyed drag queens smoking in the alley next to the Club 82 where guys in dresses talk dirty and sing lewd songs in falsetto for the benefit of middle-aged drunks in New York on business.

  He slips in and out of the intermission crowds at Truck and Warehouse and La Mama, pokes his head into Phoebe's on the corner of the Bowery looking for a daddy for the night. And there in the smoke and amid the crowd of dealers and at-liberty actors and lead-poisoned painters and playwrights dying for a break, a guy comes up to him and says, “The Kid with the Sun in His Eyes."

  For a moment the Kid is in the man's memory a thing that every once in a while happens with him, sees himself on the street that afternoon with Mad Rimbaud who has since disappeared and knows this is the guy Rimbaud was talking about. The guy starts buying him drinks, tells him his name, says that he has a gallery uptown and even seems like he thinks the Kid might be impressed. But the only things about this john that the Kid pays attention to are the money laid out on the bar and something he says. “You can read me, I felt you do it. I see you flying toward the rising sun with your eyes wide open and blind. And I'm tagging along.” The Kid understands what Rimbaud was saying about this being one crazy queen but he believes he can handle it.

  Later with the crowd beginning to thin out the man says he knows the Kid is the one who is going to break through and he wants to find out tonight. By then the Kid's snorted enough junk in the men's room using the man's money that he's plucked off the bar and he isn't afraid of anything.

  The Kid with the Sun in His Eyes can't remember the drinks and the junk, can't remember the ride in the creaking freight elevator or what had happened to all his clothes or when his hands got cuffed behind his back. “Close your eyes and see into me,” says a voice behind him. The Kid's bare feet are on a window sill. A huge window is open in front of him and eight floors down is the concrete sidewalk. The glimpse he briefly had into the mind of the one who'd brought him here is wavy and blurred. Reaching it now is like trying to see through a sun glare even though it's night outside and cold air is hitting him.

  "Look at me,” he hears the man who stands right behind him say, but the man has a grip of iron and holds the Kid's head so the Kid can't turn to see him. “Look into me,” the man says. “You did this once this afternoon when I first saw you and you did it for a moment in the bar. And you will do it again. You will look into me,” he says. “I can teach you how but I want you to be able to do it better than I can. Once I had this boy. I found him on the street and brought him here and he could see with his eyes shut and could look into me but not at will, only off and on. I taught him in the same way I'm teaching you. And when he had almost reached the point where he could lead me, they took him away.” He talks some more and the Kid realizes he's going to be trapped here and tortured until he sees or dies.

  * * * *

  Judy paused with a bit of salad on a fork but didn't put it in her mouth. “Let me read the whole manuscript,” she said. “This is fascinating. I feel like the boy he's talking about having taught is Ray. Something like this happened to you?"

  I shrugged. “A little bit. When Ray sang that last weekend at the Fillmore I saw what had happened to him and knew he was the one Marcy had talked about. So I put that in the story."

  "We both got a touch of Ray,” she said and looked at me like suddenly she did know who I was. “Was it after this you started writing science fiction?"

  "I write fantasy,” I said, “and that began a lot later."

  "I want to use this material,” she told Marty.

  "We need to ask the lawyer but I think it will be fine.” Marty looked my way and smiled. “We'll work out a deal, and you'll get a writing credit and some kind of small percentage."

  On my walk back home after lunch, I remembered that after the Lord of Light concert at the Fillmore, I hadn't wanted to hang around for the other acts. Instead I gave my friends the slip and went back to the Avenue A apartment where I was staying.

  The neighborhood was going bad. Some blocks you took a deep breath before you walked them. A big part of the story of those years was kids coming to the city, curious or desperate, and getting swallowed up. Cults were working the streets. That night I remember women members of the Children of God
were doing what they called, “fishy flirting,” soliciting guys for sex and maybe conversion.

  That night I got home after midnight and none of the people I shared the place with was there. On the kitchen table was a paper opened and folded to a story that had taken place in that very neighborhood. “Art Expert Dead in Eight-Story Plunge,” was the headline. I recognized the face in the accompanying photo. I read some sketchy details of Phillip Marcy's death and a few facts about his career.

  And I remembered the morning a couple of years before when I awoke and saw the big windows that still had “Haverford Business Forms,” a long-dead company, written on them in gold lettering.

  The windows overlooked a neighborhood where almost nothing was more than eight stories tall. The morning sun flowed in and semi-blinded me. It created a halo around the figure that appeared. The night before, Phillip Marcy had picked me up at Phoebe's Bar across the street. Upstairs I'd found he was bigger and stronger and far scarier than I'd guessed. Even fear of falling eight stories onto the cement wasn't enough to make me able to link my mind with his.

  The next morning when he approached, I tried to stand up and realized I was still handcuffed. He gestured and I rolled off the couch, walked in front of him to the door of his loft. On a stool were my clothes, nicely folded, and my boots lying on top of them. He pulled open the bar lock and the front door swung open. I cringed at the cold.

  He picked up my clothes and tossed them into the hall, then he took a key out of his pocket and unlocked the cuffs. He put one hand on my shoulder and propelled me out the door. He tossed some wadded-up bills after me. Before I could even scramble into the clothes, the door slammed. And because I was very young and very stupid, I felt like a terrible failure.

  I'd been a flop in Phillip Marcy's horrible world. Not the kind of boy he was looking for—one who fulfilled what I thought was about the deepest kink I'd ever been near. But the night of his death I had just heard Ray Light sing: “You found me in the Meld and hid me in your cage."

  Remembering that and looking at the newspaper photo, I sat down at an ancient Underwood typewriter and wrote “The Kid with the Sun in His Eyes.” And forty years later, I was still kind of pleased with it.

  * * * *

  3.

  One reason that I may be the last person in Manhattan without a cell phone is that I cherish the excitement of coming home and finding a call light flashing. It happened on my return that afternoon. The Lizard had left a message. Without ever identifying himself he said, “I have news that will bring a faint ray of light into your dreary existence,” and gave me a telephone number.

  It took a few calls. The first couple of times I got busy signals. Then the receiver at the other end was picked up but all I heard was a woman yelling. She was too far from the phone for me to tell what she was saying. I knew this was the right number, though. Women were always yelling at the Lizard. And, in this case, I recognized the voice.

  A few minutes later he called back. “I'm coming into the city immediately,” he said. “We need to get together.” He also told me the good news.

  "There's an online site that wants to revive Biting the Apple, and is willing to pay for the privilege.” This was a board game he and I had produced almost thirty years ago for the brand-new humor magazine, Cheap Irony. That mag was supposed to meld the best parts of Saturday Night Live and The New Yorker. It had gone belly-up after a few issues.

  "But we got paid,” the Lizard remarked. “We got a certain amount of attention that got us a few more game commissions. And they let the rights revert to us. No wonder the yutzes went broke. The people who are interested now think it's quaint, an historic artifact. By the way, do you happen to have a copy of the damn thing?"

  It so happened I did and even knew where it was. Biting the Apple was one of the things I'd clawed my way past that morning while searching for my story.

  "Splendid,” he said when I told him. “Rumors of your senile dementia are clearly exaggerated."

  Then he gave me the address of a place where we'd meet in a few hours and hung up.

  For the second time that day, I scrabbled in my storage bins, still marveling at the serendipity this day was showing.

  When I found Biting the Apple I realized it had the same basic rules and design as Mack Daddy Mack but was about making it big in Manhattan circa 1980—finding a rent-controlled penthouse, producing a disco musical, making a fortune with a video game arcade, meeting Jackie Onassis, wearing a mullet, visiting Studio 54, The Saint, and Limelight. My head reeled.

  Over the years the Lizard and I drifted in and out of each other's lives, close at times, not even speaking at others. Somehow we'd fallen into the racket of designing games for toy companies, for ad agencies that thought games were nice promotional tools, for people who hired us because they believed that we were so weird we must be creative and maybe even wise.

  I remember an account executive looking at my partner askance and asking him, “What kind of name is Lizard Pavane, anyway?"

  "An invented one,” he had replied, seemingly amazed that anyone could ask a question so idiotic. We designed a game in which one player got to commit a series of famous murders and the other tried to stop him, a game for a giant insurance company in which the players were all brokers trying to sell as many insurance plans to corporations as possible, a game for a lobbyist to play with members of the U.S. Congress to convince them to deregulate the railroads.

  Demand had been hot for a little while and had then disappeared in a puff of smoke. I'd had a few other projects with Lizard Pavane after that, but we hadn't seen much of each other since he moved to New Jersey some years back.

  My meeting with the Lizard took me across town to the East Village for the second time that day. It was the first neighborhood where I'd lived in the city and I'd seen it go from gritty, working-class Slavic, to mad hippy, to drug-raddled hellhole. Now the blocks I went down were tree-shaded and lined with gift shops, boutiques, small restaurants. The place I wanted was a little bar called Giga's Guillotine on 10th Street and Avenue C.

  On my way, I thought about Lizard Pavane calling me on the same day Judy had reappeared in my life. The Lizard's connection with her had been a much more intimate and dramatic one than mine. We'd never talked about it but I'd heard plenty of stories, even seen it mentioned in a book or two. I debated telling him about what had happened that afternoon.

  Only when I reached my destination did I understand there was little need to mention Judy and absolutely no chance that his reappearance in my life on the same day as hers was a coincidence.

  Giga's Guillotine was someone's dream of a 1950s Paris bistro, all quirky and intimate with a parquet floor and Yves Montand playing on the sound system and not at all the Lizard's kind of place.

  Ambience, though, was not why we were there. Seeing it, I realized that the site had once been occupied by Sid's, a place everyone called Ugly Sid's, a low-life bar that always managed to stay open until dawn. And it was in Ugly Sid's, the Sunday night after their Fillmore concert, that Ray Light had died with a knife in his gut.

  The Lizard sat at a table sporting a crumpled yachting blazer, drinking an amber liquid that I assumed was Jack Daniels. A small suitcase and a grayish raincoat rested on the chair beside him. Long sleeves and a buttoned-up collar hid the iguana tattoos.

  I hadn't seen him in five or six years. But really, at five foot four with his black eyes gleaming and his head freshly shaved, he looked not very different than he had thirty-five years before when I met him for the first time.

  Now he saw me and rasped, “You look kind of the same too, except old and confused."

  Since I don't drink, I ordered a seltzer. “Was that Nina I heard in the background on the phone?” I asked.

  "She does have a distinctive shrill scream,” he said. “Doubtless your life is as cold and lifeless as ever so you're interested in mine. I'm in the midst of civil insurrection, domestic upheaval."

  "Nina tossed you out?�
� Nina is the long-suffering but not infinitely suffering type. She has a management job with William Morris that bought the house they live in.

  "If only she had! What a thrill to be picked up by a strong woman and physically tossed out a door! I would die happy. But she knows that's what I want so she never laid a hand on me: just screamed until I went away and no doubt is changing the locks even as I speak."

  He looked at a table full of kids in their twenties and his lip curled. “Girls these days just have gym muscles. In my time there were women who did actual physical labor. Did you bring the game? Nina was whining because she couldn't win. She destroyed my copy after I won all three times we played."

  "Is that what the argument was about, you insisted on winning a game you'd designed?” I didn't add, “Even at the risk of pissing off the woman who's supporting you?"

  He looked surprised that I asked. “Of course,” he said and without pause added, “I think we can get another couple of thousand for updating the game, making it relevant for right now. Any ideas about how you win the rat race these days?"

  "Having a blog that gets fifty thousand hits a day,” I said. “The ability to speak Mandarin plus two Chinese dialects,” I added. He looked bored. The game was the excuse, not the reason for my being here. Wondering what angle the Lizard was playing, I glanced around the room, trying to catch some trace of Ugly Sid's.

  "Yes,” said the Lizard. “This tacky piece of faux whimsy sits on the very spot where very late one night Bruno Delmar, AKA BD, put a knife into Ray Light before going home and hanging himself."

  "I once heard that while those things were happening Judy was with you at your loft,” I said. I hadn't known Lizard back then, but the story was part of his legend and gave him a bit of the aura of a great lover. The very fact that his looks made that so improbable was a sly twist to the tale.

  Some of that must have been obvious on my face because the Lizard cackled and said, “You're thinking to yourself that a gay guy who looked like me would live and die alone. You don't understand. Girls may want to talk to pretty guys who make nice conversation. But they end up having to rely on guys who look like me.