Chester Anderson - The Butterfly Kid

The chat had lasted more than half an hour, and I still didn’t like the phone. It made me feel vaguely like property. Pfui.

I poured myself another slug of maté and returned to the harpsichord. After making the electronic and mechanical adjustments needed for a really impressive racket, I plunged massively into The Carman’s Whistle, an Elizabethan treasure I hope to live to master.

It worked. By the last chord they were both sitting in the living room, looking all bushy and bemused and mightily put upon.

“Good morning,” I announced. “We have a lot to do this lovely morning, don’t we?” Michael groaned.

During brunch we milked young Sean.

“My name, it ain’t really Sean, you dig? But don’t tell nobody! My real name, it’s Johnny — John. But I really dig Sean. I Mean it. Sounds kind of special, know what I mean? I figure, man, if I’m fixin’ to play rock’n’roll, I ought to have me a good Stage Name. You know? I dig Sean.”

I allowed as how I thought Sean was a much better stage name than Johnny, and this made him happy. Michael growled gently.

Little Sean/Johnny was born and reared in Fort Worth, a town I remembered well enough from visiting it in the sixties that I could understand his wanting to escape.

He wasn’t seventeen, as we’d imagined, at all, but eighteen, which made a difference, and, like almost everyone else in the Village that summer, he’d been to college for not quite a year. His family didn’t understand him, which was neither unusual nor important, though he believed otherwise.

“They wanted I should sell insurance like my dad, man. What a drag!”

He was evolving a more detailed autobiography than I really wanted to hear, but I didn’t interfere. After all, I’d seen this puppy making butterflies.

Between crises of poached egg, he explained how he’d become a rock-n-rolly, and I threatened to introduce him to some of his heroes. Two eggs later he gave me the indelible details of his stark-by-our-standards love life: an Oklahoma girl called Mary-Bob with whom he’d once gone All the Way in the back of an abandoned pickup truck while his folks were out of town. I silently envied him the surprises Greenwich Village had for him.

Michael, all the while, seemed to be dozing lightly through this wash of random data, a trick he’d copped from Nero Wolfe. At least, that’s what I hoped he was doing.

Another cup of maté, more toast, and my assurances that he’d done nothing unforgivable with Mary-Bob (though who can say?) brought Sean at last to his arrival in New York.

“I was kind of scared right off, on account of everything’s so Big an’ all, an’ I don’t — didn’t hardly know anybody, know what I mean?

“First two, three days I was kinda lost, you know? When I got off the bus, I asked this taxicab driver take me out to Greenwich Village, an’ it costed me two-fifty an’ I didn’t find out for two, three days I was really in some place called Bronnix.”

“The Bronx.”

“Right. What’s a Bronk?”

“Forget it. What happened then?”

“Oh yeah. Well, I just set in some big ol’ park out there an’ played my geetar till some of these kids with the long hair got to talkin’ to me, an’ one of ’em was a pretty good geetar player hisself. So they said they’d take me on down to Greenwich Village, an’ they did, too.” He was going to have to learn to control that accent of his, but I didn’t intend to muddle things by mentioning it just then.

He’d also hung around the Village two, three days, sitting in Washington Square or in some nameless basement coffeehouse, looking very brave. That’s all interpretation, not what he actually said. It was a familiar scene. After a while he was befriended by a roaming tribe of teenyboppers, “an’ they give me these ol’ pills to stay awake, an’ they taken me off to this party somewheres near some river.

“This was at some real fancy -lookin’ pad, you dig? But they was all rollin’ their own cigarettes, an’ I thought that was kind of funny.”

It must have lasted several days. Village parties often do. They take on a life of their own, if you’re not careful. People kept rolling cigarettes for Sean and showing him how to smoke them.

“They tasted kinda weird at first, you know? But I sort of got used to ’em after a while. Besides, I was plumb outta smokes myself.”

Then, two days ago, “This cat — I think his name was Lizard, somethin’ like that — he shows up an’ he’s got this bottle of like little blue pills.”

Michael’s eyes snapped open.

“Lizard?” I doubted.

“Like that. With an L an’ a L. I dunno.”

“Laszlo,” Michael droned, closing his eyes again.

“Laszlo?” I verified.

“Somethin’ like that.”

Anyhow, this L-and-Z person called his little goodies Reality Pills. Wasn’t that sweet?”

“Yeah, man, Reality Pills. Well, everybody else taken one, so I figure what The Hell? an’ I taken one, too. He was givin’ ’em away for Free.

“Then I got to feelin’ kind of dizzy like, so I went away, an’ all of a sudden I had me them goddamn Butterflies.”

That’s where I stopped him. Reality Pills indeed. I felt a mystical need to sit down and think about it all.

We removed to the living room. Michael sipped glum maté and stared through the wall. I fumbled through some easy sonatinas on the harpsichord. Sean watched the harpsichord’s mechanism as though paralyzed. None of us said a word for a long time.

Reality Pills?

ANDREW BLAKE was less than happy with his halo. He realized the moment it hit him (his word) that it wasn’t going to give him anything but trouble, or so he claimed. Personally, I think his attitude was decidedly un-Catholic, even though events did shortly bear it, and him, out.

When, freshly enhaloed, Andy fled The Garden of Eden, the little Black-Haired Chick we’d all three been so busily impressing followed him. But for once he didn’t particularly want to have a little Black-Haired Chick, no matter how thoroughly impressed, following him.

“What I wanted was to be alone. I kept hoping I could maybe wash the damned thing off.”

Her name was Karen. Almost every chick’s name was Karen that summer, just as almost every boy was a David. Names run in tides below Fourteenth Street.

This particular Karen was a Greenbaum by trade, and during the winter she studied Creative Writing at Bard College, an unofficial Village training ground. She was nineteen, and she thought Andy’s halo quite becoming.

Andrew broke free of The Garden of Eden and turned left toward Sixth Avenue. Karen was nine feet behind him. When he reached the avenue, three-quarters of a block later, she was still nine feet behind him.

“Go away.” He felt neither gallant nor gracious.

“My name’s Karen.” She meant well. “I read your Book.”

“No. God, no. Go away.”

Andy was making a distinct impression on everyone who saw him, and, the weather being good and the afternoon being Saturday, just about everyone saw him. Even in the violent sunlight his halo was clearly visible, flickering about him like an obstinate Saint Elmo’s fire.

“I said,” teeth clenched, “go away! — Taxi!”

Every cab he hailed came just close enough for the driver to make out Andy’s halo, then squealed away, leaving only burnt rubber to show it’d been there.

“What could I do?” he told me. “I had this Halo. No cabby’s gonna stop for me an’ I’m not about to try the subway. So what can a man with a halo do in New York City?” Beat. “I walked.”