FSF, March-April 2010 Page 15

  "Judy came by my place. She seemed desperate and afraid, obviously wanting to stay with me. Who was I to refuse? The next day we found out what had happened. ‘She was with me all last night,’ was all I had to tell the cops when they came around. The guy and his girlfriend I shared the space with corroborated.

  "At that point, the lawyers descended. Her parents both had money. All they were interested in was showing she had nothing to do with the murder, had no idea BD was going to do what he did. After a few weeks or so her family took her away somewhere to recover. That was practically the last I saw of Judy."

  "Had you and she been together for long before that night?"

  "We'd just met a couple of weeks before the Fillmore gig—Lord of Light was laying down tracks at Electric Ladyland. Bruno Delmar got Judy and me together at a party. I was already doing okay at that point; I had that reviewing gig at Rolling Stone. She and I dug each other as the saying went. Until the fateful night, though, we'd done nothing more than talk and exchange glances.

  "BD, though, told her that if anything happened I was the one she could turn to. Bruno and I went way back. He trusted me. Maybe I was the only one he trusted."

  "You knew BD?” This was a surprise.

  "Bruno Delmar and I went all the way back to grade school together. We were the two smartest boys at Saint Martin de Tours in Carnasie. He liked to be called BD and when I first knew him was a really decent kid. Gallant, you know, stepping into fights and standing up for you if you were his friend.

  "After that I went to Brooklyn Polytech, got a scholarship to Cornell. BD got caught in family problems. His mother was badly crazy and when his father died he had absolutely nowhere to live. He ended up in a halfway house and the army and we lost touch.

  "A few years later I was back in the city after college, hanging around the East Village. And there was BD. He didn't say what he was doing and I didn't ask, that's the way we'd been brought up. But he was still the Bruno Delmar I'd gone to school with. Then one day his picture was in the underground papers. It turned out BD was a private eye working undercover to send runaways back to their families. He disappeared before I could speak to him."

  "I first saw him back when he was working undercover,” I told Lizard. “A whole bunch of us including Judy Finch were at a loft party. She was dressed as a boy like she sometimes did back then. It was all very spacey: everyone ripped, incense burning, and the light was hundreds of candles. She pointed out this guy and told us he was the private cop that had once busted Ray. I remember that he was hot-looking and could easily have been one of us. I guess that was why his cover worked.

  "Judy walked over and asked, ‘How's it going, BD?’ He gave a tight little smile but otherwise stayed straight-faced and said that wasn't his name. She just shook her head, took a matchbook out of her pocket, and said, ‘This is Ray Light's number. He talks about how much he wants to see you again. Don't be afraid. You need to call him.'

  "As she turned in the flickering light and walked away, he stared after her like he was lost and in love. Not long after that he disappeared and almost immediately Judy was gone too. Later I found out they were part of a band."

  "You're right about him being in love,” said Lizard. “Come on, I got to meet someone.” He threw money on the table, picked up his bag and coat, and headed out the door.

  "The next time I saw Bruno Delmar he was with Lord of Light,” Lizard said. “He was in some kind of relationship with Ray Light and Judy. Right at that moment you couldn't be wingy enough to satisfy the fans.

  "But he and I could still talk. The gallantry was still there. He obviously loved Judy even though she didn't much like him. It was what made him find a way of giving her protection, providing cover."

  "Why did she need cover? He killed Ray Light in front of a dozen witnesses."

  We went up gentrified Avenue C. Lizard Pavane now walked a bit slow and stiff-legged but something I remembered about him was still true. He hated to have anybody get in his way or walk faster than he did. Each time someone passed us, he'd kind of growl and make a move like he wanted to hit them with his bag.

  "Idiot!” he said to me, “She knew Ray Light had killed people. And it's my guess that she wanted BD to off him before Ray did the same to her. BD made sure she had the alibi. And the way he did the deed took all the attention off her.” He looked at me hard and gave his cackling laugh. “You don't believe little Judy Finch could have arranged such a thing, do you? Boy, has she got you conned!"

  We were on the corner of 14th Street when he stopped and said, “Thanks to Nina, I found out Judy's doing a memoir show and your old boyfriend is directing it."

  "I only found out about that today,” I said.

  The Lizard looked like he didn't believe me. I had brought a copy of my story. On an impulse I handed it to him and said, “She's interested in this thing I wrote years ago. On the same day that Marcy died and two days before BD and Ray did."

  "I'll be in touch,” he said and stuffed it in his bag. Before he crossed the street and headed into the green lawns and neat brick apartment houses of Stuyvesant Town, the Lizard told me, “If Nina calls, you don't know where I am or where I went."

  As I walked back to my place in the West Village, it seemed to me that I was always on the periphery of great events, never quite on the scene. I saw Ray Light and BD the evening of their last night alive, probably around the time Judy went to visit the Lizard.

  They were getting into a van outside the house on the north side of Tompkins Park where the band was staying. BD had washed the makeup off his face and wore black coveralls. He looked like the guy I had seen at that party a couple years before. Ray had a red kepi cap pulled down over his face, his collar turned up and his hair in a ponytail. He didn't want to be recognized. But the pale skin and the dark eyes were unmistakable.

  He glanced my way and for a moment I saw what he saw: dim lights and shadows in the park, a darkening street, a guy in derelict leather jacket and Frye boots who was a bit past being a kid and a little too battered by the street to be hip.

  It took me a moment to recognize myself in another's eyes. I saw the wonder, lust, and envy that were on my face as I watched Ray Light. Then I felt his contempt. It lasted just a few seconds but in that moment I wanted to die.

  BD put his hand on Light's shoulder and broke the connection before I saw any more. BD shook his head and gestured for me to move on.

  Remembering the encounter all these years later, I wondered if he'd saved my life.

  Nina called me later that night. We exchanged tentative greetings and remarked at how long it had been since we'd seen each other. Then she said. “Where's Lizard?"

  "I don't know."

  "He talked to you before he left. You agreed to meet at that idiotic Guillotine bar. There's someone he sees who lives in Stuyvesant Town. I need to know if he's staying with her."

  "I couldn't tell you."

  "You just did,” she said and hung up.

  * * * *

  4.

  A few days later I sat in a small rehearsal space in the bowels of the Public Theater along with Marty listening to Judy talk about being a kid living on St. Mark's Place with her father the artist and her mother the critic; about becoming a teenager the year Kennedy was shot. The guy who would be music director of the show played guitar and Judy sang a snatch of Sam Cooke's “A Change Is Gonna Come."

  She stood leaning on the back of a chair and said, “I was fifteen in nineteen-sixty-five and going to the Quaker School. A few blocks away from me another tale played itself out. An old friend of mine, who knows a bit about these things, wrote this version.” She told the story of “The Kid with the Sun in His Eyes” and ended with this section:

  * * * *

  "The Man held the Kid's fingers to a lighted candle and told him, ‘I'm teaching you as the one who taught me did. He brought me to the point where I could meld with certain other minds and I can do that with you. He would have taught me more but he was ta
ken from me. I will not leave you until you can go into every mind and meld with anyone.’”

  * * * *

  Unless you've been writing for the theater for a long while and had it happen to you hundreds of times, I believe it's hard to resist when someone reads your words aloud. Also Judy understood this material, had the attitude and stance down. I liked the dumb vulnerability she projected. This section was my guess as to what had happened to Ray Light. We had talked it over and agreed that it felt right.

  * * * *

  "At first the Man never let the Kid with the Sun in His Eyes out of his sight, kept him tethered and tied when he went out, got him off drugs cold turkey. The Kid could not just go away in his mind with the Man. The Man could go there and bring him back and Kid stopped fighting it because he was learning to get inside other peoples’ minds, not most of the time or with most people. But he could look down at the street below, look inside certain people and he wanted to learn how to do that with everyone.

  "After the first night, the Man no longer suspended him in front of an open window to force him to communicate. After a couple of weeks, the Man trusted him enough that when he went off to work one morning, he gave the Kid a dollar, let him out on the street, and told him to be back at six o'clock. It was a test. And it worked. The Kid was fascinated enough that he did come back even though he hated the Man. Given how things were there was no hiding that."

  * * * *

  Judy relaxed, lost the Kid's stance and speech and said in her own voice, “I met him on one of the first days he was out. I saw him on St. Mark's Place looking a little scared. He said his name was Ray, Ray Light. I found out later that it was actually Jonathan Duncan—too mundane for the life he wanted to lead in this city.

  "Right then, out of nowhere and all in a rush, I knew just what he was feeling, I knew without our even talking that he was a runaway, that he was afraid of being spotted by someone who'd report him to the cops, that he lived with someone he thought of as the Man.

  "At that same moment he knew everything about me. I thought that was what it was like to have a boyfriend. Raised by parents in the arts in this city in the 1960s and I was that naïve.

  "We spent that afternoon together until he had to go back to the loft. After that he'd meet me when I got out of school; we'd get together on weekends when the Man let him out.

  "We were like that for maybe two months. Then one day private detectives hired by his family snatched him off the street right in front of me. No other boyfriend was like him. I didn't see him again for another few years. But I thought of him every day."

  Later she took a break and we all sat together drinking coffee. Marty had some notes that Judy glanced at and nodded. It was all kind of comfortable, reminding me of sitting on the front steps on St. Mark's Place so long ago.

  Then she looked at me and said thoughtfully, “After a while, even with someone as big and great and wonderful and scary as Ray, one's memories become very set—like a series of old photos. Your piece gave him back to me in a strange way; let me see him from a new angle."

  "And gets us around the Marcy problem,” said Marty.

  "You know,” she said, “a few years after Ray and BD had gone, a very creepy old Englishman, into Satanism, a friend of Aleister Crowley, talked to me about Phillip Marcy.

  As she spoke, she fell into an imitation of the man's speech. He sounded amused, sinister, a bit absurd, a bit chilling. “When young Phillip was in college, one of the professors was a man I knew with remarkable mind control and an ability to teach the skill to others, not always with the best intent, not always by the gentlest methods.

  "Phillip Marcy fell completely under his spell. Then one day the teacher disappeared. He was never found. The police, of course, were useless. Dear Phillip had learned enough of the gift for it to obsess him but not enough to control it. He spent his days trying to learn, trying to teach. Again, it wasn't always by the gentlest methods. No great surprise when he met his end."

  Then Marty asked, “So Ray Light really did have some kind of gift?"

  "Yeah,” I told him. “I encountered Ray the last night he was alive. He looked at me and I saw myself through his eyes. It was like a knife going into me. I wanted to die but...."

  I caught anger in Judy's eyes and shut up. I'd told her about being in Ray's head the night of the concert but hadn't even remembered that last meeting until my talk with Lizard Pavane.

  Maybe she was angry that I'd seen her lover alive after she had or because she was afraid I'd seen a little too much. Most likely I was a minor irritant and she'd decided she'd gotten everything useful out of me.

  What I'd been going to say was that if Ray Light showed that kind of contempt to a harmless fan boy who'd blundered into his path, what must Phillip Marcy have been shown? One look at himself as Ray Light saw him and Marcy would willingly have gone out the window where he'd tortured God knew how many.

  * * * *

  5.

  "Thanks, buddy,” said the Lizard on the phone. “You gave the bloodhound just enough information so that she could track me down.” He said it sarcastically, but he was calling from home and really did sound like he was thanking me.

  We talked a bit about updating the game. “Well, what do kids do when they come to the city, these days?” he wanted to know.

  "Rent a thirty-five-hundred-dollar-a-month apartment with four other people and get a job in the Financial District,” I suggested. We were old and this particular spring of inspiration had run dry some while ago. “Obviously, if I ever had any idea of how to make it big in Manhattan I would have done so."

  Then the Lizard got down to the real point of his call. “How's Judy's show going?"

  "Really well. They let me see it again a couple of days ago. There's music. Judy can still sing. It's taking shape as a kind of cabaret. Next week is a run-through for friends in the business to start a little buzz.” I didn't mention that she no longer spoke to me.

  He paused, then said. “I thought that story you wrote was a real acute guess about what Phillip Marcy did to Ray Light. Maybe a bit more than a guess?"

  "Just a bit,” I said.

  "You poor kid.” Lizard actually sounded sympathetic. “From what I remember BD telling me, Light had an obsession with the one he still called the Man. Whenever they were in New York, he'd try to approach Marcy because there was a lot he hadn't been taught. But the guy didn't want to see him."

  I said, “Maybe Phillip Marcy heard rumors about various of Ray's enemies killing themselves and didn't want to join them."

  "Ray wanted BD to get himself picked up by Marcy and then let Ray into the loft to join them. Bruno and Light were in some kind of deep, complicated relationship but Bruno didn't want to do that."

  This reminded me of something I'd seen on East Fourth Street one night. I was cruising the block and noticed an androgynous kid. He was in the pose, one boot on the cement the other resting against the wall behind him, looking very familiar. I was half a block away before I realized it was Judy. Had Ray first made her try to hook the Man?

  "Eventually BD did what Ray wanted,” I said to Lizard Pavane. “If he was as gallant as you say, seeing The Man go out the window must have bothered him a lot. Something I wonder is how could Light not read BD's mind that last night and know what he had planned?"

  "From what Bruno told me, Ray Light would pick up a vision of the future or something from his head. It was part of what Light found so fascinating about him. Mostly, though, he had no idea what BD was thinking."

  Lizard paused, then said, “Okay, I gave you all that, now tell me when the performance is."

  So I told him and was quite curious as to why he wanted to know.

  * * * *

  6.

  Judy sat on a low stage and spoke. “When Ray and I got together again it was five years after he was taken away from me. Nineteen-seventy was a much different world from 1965, dark and full of fear. If you don't understand that change you didn't live through t
hat time in this place."

  "An informal workshop,” was what they called this. It was held on a Monday night in a rehearsal space at the Public Theater. “Nothing was absolutely clear in that world,” she said. “When Ray Light came back to me, he brought with him BD, Bruno Delmar, the one who had helped snatch Ray off the street. Everyone thought of him as a monster, a pig. We'd chased him out of the neighborhood. He and Ray now were lovers.

  "I became part of that and we started playing together.” She sang the old Lord of Light song, “Just a Boy without Wings.” It was a quiet song now, not scary as much as a little lost and sad.

  The quartet on the stage had worked with her before and was tight and a bit jazz inflected.

  Marty was happy. The show had word-of-mouth to spare. Old theater friends of Judy's, people from various production companies, someone from a foundation that did arts funding and a couple of documentary film producers, seventy or eighty in all, sat on folding chairs.

  One chair with a Reserved William Morris sign was empty. I remembered that Nina worked there and kept my eye on it.

  "Oh, there were rumors,” said Judy, “stories that various people who had given Ray trouble—a psychiatrist, his father—had died by their own hand. But that kind of legend surrounded a lot of bands and a lot of personalities in those days. And there were lots of moments when the three of us, Ray, and BD, and me, were one."

  She tuned the guitar and said, “This is something I started many years ago and finished just recently.” The song's lyrics were all about the night of the murder/suicide. It had the lines:

  * * * *

  The one who loved me and the one I loved

  Went out one night and never returned.

  * * * *

  When she finished, I looked over and Lizard was sitting in the empty chair I'd noticed earlier. He stared at Judy and, as the crowd applauded, he stood up and took a couple of steps toward the stage. She noticed him immediately and paused where she was.

  "BD did more than love you. He saved your life and left you free to live it,” Lizard Pavane said.