Jaimy Gordon - Bogeywoman

I never quite got it how being the wizard of world peace during the Vietnam War turned into money for the old man; there couldn’t have been any dough in those two-donkey village squares where Merlin’s Puppets was always mounting the same old show. But sumpm must have turned into sumpm because here I was. Only famous court cases like O and Emily got scholarships to this dump. Anyhow, the way I looked at it, after all those years of feeling left out of the fame part, here I was doing my bit for history by costing Merlin so many dollars a day that he had to stay in Asia and be the bane of Lyndon Bugbane Johnson himself. Now and then I did wonder just what unsavory republic might be putting up the bucks.

Still, that was a terrifying threat from Merlin: I’d have to nurse you … It meant of course being nursed not by Merlin but by the cadaverous vice puppeteer Suzette, who’d be flown home from Hanoi or Samovarobad or somewhere for the purpose. Which, shudder, could mean that the theatrical vampiress might one day try to touch me with her creepy whisker-thin hands. And also the idea of home starched my will to stay where I was. I had said-in fact I had hollered, pretty inconveniently if I should ever change my mind-that if they threw me out of Camp Chunkagunk I would never go home. And I didn’t. Not that I had a home to go home to, in the usual sense of the word. But this way they wouldn’t slap one together for me, either, with some slave-driving twenty-one-star foster mom out in Harford County, in the pay of the state, with the girls’ dormitory set up in an old chicken house on the family farm and enough “chores” to exhaust an infantry battalion.

Anyway the social worker wouldn’t hear of me going back to Merlin’s house on Ploy Street all alone, to bounce around like the last beebee in a broken puzzle, the only one that hadn’t rolled out the hole yet. Merlin and Suzette were on tour and sister Margaret was off somewhere with that racetrack bum and couldn’t be reached-yes I had given up on old Margaret, for the moment.

To save me from being remanded to the juvenile authorities , a phrase terrifying even to him, Merlin used his connections to get me into Rohring Rohring and sent the cadaverous vice puppeteer Suzette home from I think it was Fiji, for a week. She packed whatever looked like my stuff in spare packing crates from Merlin’s World Tour and was supposedly going to haul it up six floors to the Adolescent Wing of the bughouse all by herself. But as soon as Mr. Nurse’s Aide Reggie Blanchard spotted the skeletal but rich and trashy-looking redhead endangering her fake fingernails on those boxes, he saw fit to saunter out of the supply closet, where he was sneaking a smoke, and carried them for her. And come to think of it that was my first sight of the Regicide, once the crates and I were both upstairs-as he leaned against the supply room door, staring down his Egyptian nose at Suzette’s stony buttocks in a miniskirt, and sliding his hand out of the white pants pocket where he had just stuffed her enormous tip.

I had a private room-we all did. Likewise a private bath and, as I said, a private closet. These lodgings weren’t fancy but neither were they like your common everyday hospital room, nor even like the clean ugly compartments in a new motel. Instead they kinda reminded me of servants’ bedrooms in swanky old Central Park West apartments like Grandma Schapiro’s, or in Monument Street brownstones like Grandpa Koderer’s, square airy rooms, neither small nor large, high-ceilinged, white-walled, with oak woodwork. And one large window, barred in a discreetly ornamental fashion, just like at Grandma’s.

To return to my private closet, its oaken doorframe had been blackened by a thousand coats of shellac, and the cracks in the plaster resembled the queen of spades in deep décolletage, looking at her icy self upside down in the playing card mirror. I had better sense of course than to tell them that. Bertie Stein, who lived next door to me, once whispered to a nurse’s aide that the tangled pipes and cracks and water stains on his ceiling were maps, drawn by trolls, of the royal palace. If Bertie said it, this was nothing but doper’s theater you may be sure, and even so there was sumpm in it: one floor up were the offices of all our dreambox mechanics, traceable by their rotten plumbing, if you left out about the trolls. Bertie got a little pill each morning for that indiscretion, Hollywood Bar blue, Stelazine it was called, which to me sounded just like the name of some babydoll-faced bride whining for a dope (meaning a Coca-Cola) in a Tennessee Williams play. Bertie even kinda looked like Stella Zeen, with his silky page boy, and soft co-cola eyes, and droopy little shoulders. So as usual Bertie got his dope, and took it too. Even if it made his head feel like a cabbage, to him any pill at all was better than no pill.

As for me, as long as I was here, I took my job to heart of being a bughead-for I saw right away that the others were better at it than me. I was a Unbeknownst To Everybody, and I meant to keep it that way. It was like I’d pitched my one-woman igloo at the South Pole, where nobody’d ever see it, and now and then I wondered if I might not as well be dead as be bopping around with the penguins down here.

Course I knew I wasn’t the only in the world. At Girls’ Classical I used to hear the rumors-what the hump, I spread some myself-about those two Popeye-jawed gym teachers Miss Swigart and Miss Dusterhof, in their size 14 lime-green gym-suits and pink eyeglasses, who had oversprung kneecaps bulging out a bit at the back and raucous altos like military macaws. At least Swigart and Dusterhof had each other, or at least they had the same address in the Vineyard Villas Apartments on North Charles Street. I never asked em-lemme die first-but I looked em up in the phonebook. I knew I might grow into a bird like that myself someday. I didn’t want to be in the same club with those gnarled dollies even if it was the only one that would have me for a member.

When I got to Rohring Rohring, my cut-up arms said sumpm loud and clear to the management, but then there were three hours a week with Dr. Foofer left to kill. I treated my dreambox mechanic to the changeless silence of the ice shelf. With all that empty space for interpretation, the old gas bag thought the worst of me, I could tell, and I was pleased. Still, at pharmaceuticals that might seed the brainclouds in my dreambox and really change the weather, I had to draw the line. I mean I didn’t even know what my own real weather was yet. So I tongue-rolled every little green pill and stockpiled them in the hem of my overalls, just in case I might as well be dead.

Then I made it into the Bug Motels (the name of our rock group): which was Bertie, Dion, Emily, O and me. None of us heard voices. None of us thought we were the Virgin Mary or Jesus either. I got asked into the Bug Motels one day when I saw that one more green pill and the bottom of my overalls would sag. So I palmed over to Bertie an M &M’s bag full of the things. “Holy godzilla,” he said, “good stuff. How much?” “Nuttin,” I said, and next thing I knew I was sitting at the Bug Motels’ table in the dayroom, bidding zero at O Hell.

Everybody said that Bertie Stein had had a brilliant mind before it got flattened under the influence of various drugs like a chihuahua under a garbage truck. He had pawned his genius sister’s viola, a Guarneri del Gesù, insured for $50,000, to buy a block of hashish the size of a small pound cake, and had smoked the whole thing himself, and so landed in Rohring Rohring.