Rachel Kushner - The Flamethrowers

Henri-Jean wrapped himself tightly against Giddle and they swayed from side to side. Their dancing seemed especially obscene for the fact that he was out of character. He wasn’t supposed to grind against women. He was supposed to be this lone figure in the cityscape, jester and outcast with his idiosyncratic burden, the pole over his shoulder. But in fact he was a man, bending his knees to lower his pelvis to the level of Giddle’s ass.

Nadine was talking to Helen. Smiling in a remote manner that was probably nervousness but would be read by Helen as reserved, attractively reserved. Helen said Nadine looked familiar and asked if she, too, had by chance gone to Dalton.

“No,” Nadine said in a dispassionate tone, almost like a corpse, no expression on her face. I sensed that she had been coached by John Dogg to remain aloof or to pretend to. She held herself perfectly still. By revealing any animation to her face or body she would spoil the effect of the hair and the dress and the patent leather heels, which shone on the roof’s gravel like wet ink. Watching her hold tight to sudden elegance, hold it like it was a religion that could save her, I understood that Nadine had told the truth and Giddle had lied. Giddle had never been a prostitute. I didn’t know where she went in the velvet jumper she kept in her work locker, but it wasn’t to a midtown hotel.

While Thurman Johnson and an unidentified Ronnie had gone out to buy scotch that night at the Chelsea Hotel, Nadine had told me about the first time she turned a trick. It was with a very old man. He wanted a blow job. “Five dollars a minute, I told him. I knew he had a lot of fives in his wallet.” This was an important part of the deal, she had explained. You made an educated guess of roughly how much money they had on them, and how much more they might be able to acquire if they ran out of what was in their wallet. You priced accordingly, tried to divide time into segments that corresponded with a complete emptying of their wallet. “You have to think in totalities, as my ex-husband used to put it. The larger view. So I said five a minute, figuring he had about a hundred dollars. The first minute goes by. I take his little pud out of my mouth and he says, Oh please, oh please . ‘Five more dollars,’ I say. I made about eighty bucks. My mouth was numb. It’s actually not so simple when they stay soft. It’s like slurping on the corner of a plastic bag that has a little bit of air in. He never came. It was just minutes and fives. Another thing I have done to make money is cry. Some men will do anything to get you to stop crying. They don’t like to see women cry, nuh-uh. Nice guys will do whatever they can to get you to stop. The problem is most guys aren’t nice.”

Giddle’s lie didn’t matter. Giddle lied about everything. I didn’t even know if her name was Giddle. Her lie was not a claim to a life like Nadine had lived. It was something else, whatever Giddle naively imagined to be the glamour of the call girl, the secret power, a cliché, champagne and silk teddies. The way Giddle said “businessmen,” daubing cucumber oil on her neck. The way she said “midtown,” and flipped her hair out so it lay evenly and full like she was Rita Hayworth. It was play-acting. It wasn’t that different from my childhood fantasy of the Mustang Ranch as an actual ranch, grand and Western-fancy, and not various ugly trailers. It was like saying “timepiece” when you meant watch; there was no such thing. Only minutes and fives.

“This one’s called Bud’s Doughnuts,” Dogg said into the microphone. “Our Second Avenue home away from home.” It sounded like surf rock. A psychedelic projection behind them. Hookers and Children were like a slightly ironic prom act.

“I know Bud,” Ronnie said to someone. “It’s a real dude. I know him from high school. We both moved to Manhattan and he opened Bud’s Doughnuts on Second Avenue. His brother Tom opened a car wash.”

“Tom’s Car Wash, out on Myrtle Avenue?”

“No, man, that’s not the same one.”

There was a guy on the roof with a Polaroid camera, getting girls to show him their breasts. When he approached Nadine, she gave him a terror-stricken look and shook her head. She was again with Helen Hellenberger, who politely said, “No thank you.”

Burdmoore had talked about the lost children. The times to come. The times that had been to come but that had not come.

There was the matter of who was awake and who was asleep. The question of it. The ambiguity inherent in this way of dividing people one to the next, awake or dreaming. We were their nightmare . If one group was dreaming the other, there couldn’t be certainty as to which group was which.

After Burdmoore and Fah-Q had withdrawn themselves from battle, retreated to the mountains of northern Mexico, Fah-Q had a vision, Burdmoore had told us that night at Gloria and Stanley’s. After the vision came to him, Fah-Q broke from their grim, secret encampment and traveled all the way back to New York City. He needed to speak with Allen Ginsberg. Fah-Q was certain that Ginsberg had an important message for them, Burdmoore had recounted to us. A message about their clandestinity, about the revolution. “So what was it?” Didier had asked, a lightness in his voice, the joke being that whatever the message was, perhaps it might still be of use. Fah-Q found Ginsberg, Burdmoore told us, and indeed, Ginsberg had a message for the Motherfuckers. The message was that they should all quit smoking. They should give up cigarettes. Didier, seated across from Burdmoore at the Kastles’ dinner table, had narrowed his eyes and sucked wetly on his Gauloise and nodded, understanding that Allen Ginsberg was truly the idiot Burdmoore had claimed he was.

More and more people crowded onto the roof as Hookers and Children finished their set. All the other roofs around SoHo were dark, occupied by squat water towers, rickety and hand-hammered spacecraft set down for the night, dormant and crouching on spindly legs over dark, flat expanses. This roof was noise and movement and shifting silhouettes. Empty plastic cups sent over the edge. The hopeful, gaspy pumping of an empty keg. Ronnie telling someone a story about a Japanese stripper named Shomi.

The air was cool and breezy now. I checked again on the bike as a gust loosed pear blossoms from the trees, invisible hands stripping branches of their little white petals, scattering them on the sidewalk.

“The thing about songwriting,” John Dogg was saying to someone, “is that you can address things obliquely, but no matter. You can’t get away from the content that is the essence of the form. All songs are about unrequited love.”

“Except ‘Green Onions,’ ” Ronnie said. “Which isn’t about love at all.”

It must have been Tim Fontaine, and not Ronnie, who’d had to live with that song in his head. Tim had spent a decade in prison. Got out, violated his parole, and was now back inside, as far as I knew. It was Tim’s experience in prison that Ronnie had spoken of. Tim, who was doing Ronnie’s time. Why couldn’t Ronnie just say so? Why did he have to present these elaborate stories, and some of it was true and some wasn’t and you were never going to know which was which. Either he’d worked in factories, or on boats, or both, or neither, and whatever he had or had not done, there were a lot of stories. Sandro had always protected Ronnie’s evasions. “You don’t know,” he’d tell people. But Sandro didn’t know, either.

“I’m talking about songs with lyrics,” Dogg said. “Not instrumentals. ‘Green Onions’ is an instrumental.”

“ ‘Take This Job and Shove It,’ ” Ronnie said. “Tell me that’s about unrequited love.”

“Oh, but it is. It is,” Dogg said. “It is. Take this job and shove it, I ain’t working here no more, ” he sang. “He’s quitting because his woman left him. And she was the only reason he withstood the lousy treatment in the first place. He’s done being abused by the factory foreman now that his heart is broken.”