Jaimy Gordon - Bogeywoman

“Keeps yall off the street,” Reggie Blanchard joked and that was more or less the line the royals took on the Bug Motels and their “funny-farmyard noises,” which were, in fact, to the surprise of everyone, us as much as them, eerily beautiful and as light-fingered and sparsely knotted one to the other as audible cobwebs.

Then everybody got into it. By now hardly a day passed without somebody’s nurse escort or dreambox mechanic smuggling us a peculiarly melodious surgical instrument or scrap of hospital plumbing. But we Bug Motels didn’t take just anything. Love will get us out of here , we sang, but how to know it was love when we heard it tinkle or hiss? We had to listen hard. O had charge of a fleet of noisemakers not one of which percussed above a violent whisper.

O in song had a slow gluey quaver to her spooky-flute, a faintly wobbling vibrato deep in the gut of it like near-boiling gumbo, and, maybe to go along with the speculum castanets, she dug up a mantilla you could have sung Carmen in, webbed herself in red and black fishnet, stuck sequin beauty spots on her face and, not exactly flounced, more like lurked, lurked darkly around in this getup, staring at all of us unforgivingly out of the bottoms of her eyes. Her song, written by me, Bogeywoman, went:

O’S SONG

Doobee doobee dubio

Doowop welladay

Hugga bugga yumma yum

How do you like your buggers done

Boiled in bug juice, boiled in rum

Says the Queen of the Cannibal Islands

Love love

Love will get you out of here .

Who were we Bug Motels now? Come to find out inside our old confusion was fusion, anyway Egbert said so- fusion and conk . “They drop the k cause it reminds every mental patient that he is king, king of his own conk. Conk ya see is an old American negro word for the dreambox or a hairdo on top of it,” Egbert explained. This was the missionary Egbert at the peak of his conk -version. “You probably noticed, Bug Motels, how we are getting our heads together playing this music? We are conk- neck -ting our conks to our bodies like yesterday we connected our gut strings to our instruments and, whaddaya know, come to find out Love will get you outa here . Like it says in the weird kinda tunes the Bogeywoman writes for us.” (Egbert gave my shoulder a fond little punch, and I saw that O saw. I smiled weakly at her.)

Out of the bottoms of her eyes O peered at Egbert when he talked of love, to find out if he meant her. He didn’t, but still he was the one she looked at whenever she sang. She was off into labyrinths of twisted love for this bughouse Orpheus and his sawed-off-sneaker sandals and the sweaty prongs of dark hair sticking out around his ears and his round little-boy tortoiseshell eyeglasses that bounced on his nose whenever he dabbed at the keys with his hammers. She was staring out of the bottoms of her eyes at Egbert’s skinny, shiny, piecrust-crimper spine where it curled out of his tee shirt. He didn’t know she was there. That’s what she liked in a fuddy, he should be so absorbed in The Importance of what he was doing he didn’t know she was there. When a fuddy started tryna please a girl it got repulsive fast, well that’s what O said anyhow.

I was wondering if she still loved me, loved me at the same time she loved Egbert, and was I any better off if she did. He hunched in that miserly way over his homemade keyboards, plinking out tiny unearthly bug trails of notes, microscopic music-box rolls, jerky tunes, spastic countertunes, faint and far far away. Dion nodded to the beat. He went for all that love stuff and moreover couldn’t wait to love himself in a baby-blue spangled tux and kick in unison, if he could get anybody else to kick with him. His baritone was best bopping up and down the stave in round monosyllables like bum and boo . His song, composed by himself, went:

DION’S SONG

There was a bug lived in a zoo

It bugged him havin nuttin to do

bum bum bum di boo boo boo

Love will get you out of there

Reggie helped him with the second verse:

Fee fi fo fee fi fo fo

Hello? Say who? Don’t live here no mo .

Love has got him outahere

Outahere .

Rich bug poor bug buggerman thief

Bug mechanic Winnebuggo chief

Love will get you out of there

Only love will get you out

of

there .

The Regicide hung with us down in our surgical amphitheater as often as he could get off the mop. He fronted as our chaperone, as usual, but nowadays we prized his counsel, for his street corner doo-wop experience went deep. The refrain of course was from me, Bogeywoman.

You could see it in the scared respectful eyes of our dreambox mechanics: our music had made it beyond their usual categories, maybe even come bubbling up from someplace prior to them-the tar pits or the mysteries or sumpm. Anyhow they shoved over, the royals. Weren’t we getting better?

I liked Egbert myself, now that he was getting better. His skinny body looked good hunching over his bed-panioforte like a man overboard clambering onto a life buoy. As a Bug Motel, I admired him. After fifteen minutes fooling with the object, he could play anything, beef bones, bottle caps, orthodontic braces, PVC pipe with the plumbing code still on it. He sang the song I rustled up for him, although it was square as a barn door and old as the itch and he suspected it was filched from somewhere, which it was.

EGBERT’S SONG

And this will pass for music when nobuggy else is near ,

The bug song for singing, the bug song to hear!

That only I remember, that only you admire ,

Of the bughouse that screeches and the bughouse choir .

“Where you come up with them complexicated vocabules, Bogeywoman?” the Regicide, who was visiting, wished to know. “She has plagiarized Mother Goose and God and a few other bigwigs,” Egbert explained smoothly, “chops em up and conk- nects em all together. Don’t let it go to your conk,” he warned me.

I wondered where Egbert had gotten that love idea all of a sudden and it was easy to ask him because we two were the grinds among the Bug Motels. All the livelong summer’s day the two of us were plinking and strumming down the clubhouse when pretty soon the rest of em got sick of it and went back to playing O Hell for dimes and quarters at their old table in the dayroom. Egbert and me saw The Importance. Of course O didn’t see The Importance, but she saw us seeing it. She gazed and gazed at the pair of us out of the bottoms of her eyes.

Still, even O had to be alone sometimes; first thing every morning she had to make up her eyes to their usual mine disaster hugeness and scariness, and that took maybe an hour. At nine o’clock in the morning, Egbert and me were already plucking and twanging away in our clubhouse that had NO ROYALS ALLOWEDtaped over NEUROPATHOLOGY on the door. Our snack bar coffees were steaming, our Kools lay fuming on our armrests, and I asked Egbert: “Where’s this love stuff coming from? Used to be it was all D.O.A.P. with you, Egbert, and now it’s love.” Naturally I suspected that he, like me, had a Doctor Zuk behind it all, a secret passion moving everything it wasn’t crushing. Come to think of it-I narrowed my eyes at him-maybe he’d fallen for Zuk himself. Of course it had to be madame-too-beautiful-on-her-horse! I mean, who else in this fuddy bughouse was worth it?

“Naw, it was always love,” Egbert smiled up at me from tightening the endpin on some soundboard. “I just didn’t know back then what I was hungry for. I used to chase all day after D.O.A.P. and now I run after-better stuff. Higher stuff.” “Like-royal stuff?” I asked. “Royal stuff?” he echoed, looking at me conk- fusedly. He lifted the drain pan manjocello or gourdolin or whatever it was he was tuning, laid it on his desktop and stroked it sweetly. “See, when you track that D.O.A.P. all over the city it’s love, Ursie, but when you cop that D.O.A.P. and shoot that D.O.A.P., it’s nowhere, man, you’re right back where you started. But real love,” he turned his smiling face up at me and the fluorescent lighting starred all his very straight teeth, “love takes you up a level.” “Ya mean like-to the seventh floor?” That’s where the royals had their offices. “Hump no, Ursie. You don’t get it, do you?” I shook my head. Who cared what love was? Who do you love, that’s what I wanted to know, but I hadn’t figured out how to put the question.