Jaimy Gordon - Bogeywoman

“You know, I was a doper before I was even born and I still am and that’s how I wound up in the bughouse and got in the Bug Motels and met you,” Egbert said. “My Unkie Jerry told my old man and old lady to put me in this place and I cussed the hump out of all of em but now I see they were right. My Unkie Jerry’s an obstetrician. He’s the one who was always telling me, Bertie, get off that shit! Be a producer not a consumer! But you know, since he delivered me, he was the first one pumping it in.” “Um, er, uh, pumping what in? Whaddaya mean you were a doper before you were even born?” I inquired, half curious half squeamish to hear this story. “Pinky, that’s my mom, when she’s pregnant with me she has to be the hippest thing in motherdom, the most in the know, so she goes through La Mayonnaise or however you call that training, but when the day came, no matter how natural she breathed I wouldn’t come out until they put some D.O.A.P. in her. So there you are, that’s why I say I was a junkie before the Steins ever got hold of me.” “Aw quit bragging,” I laughed. “No, man, I mean it, this sounds funny but I swear I can sorta remember it. I’m squinting down the rabbit-hole and see Unkie Jerry standing there in the light at the end of the tunnel, in his white coat. Come on, son! he says, Be a producer. Not a consumer! He’s got this little blue starter pistol sticking straight up in the air, and it goes BANG! Sumpm about him got on my nerves, man. I wouldn’t budge.” “You remember all that?” I said doubtfully. “Sure! Then in comes this beautiful toasted-almond-color nurse carrying a little ampule and a big syringe. Hello junior, she says, I got sumpm here I bet you like, and shoots up Pinky, and bingo, I came, soon as the stuff was in her, see? So I figure if it was just me I didn’t even want to be born. Only the idea there was D.O.A.P. out there could move me.”

“I dig,” I said. I liked Egbert. I mean, we were in the bughouse, where they’re always tryna get you to rat on your parents. I had to admire him for stealing the blame for his own bughood, even if he had to sneak back into the womb to do it. “Say, are you rolling in dough, Egbert?” I asked. I remembered that the concert house across from the B &O was the Stein, the third floor where Emily got wedged in the laundry chute was the Stein Otolaryn-gological Institute, the Stein Cartography Collection on the high mezzanine of the downtown library was a hot contender in my search for the primo launching pad in the city for offing myself to a greasespot, all the most tubercular-looking blue period funambules were in the Stein Wing at the art museum-“You met Egbert and Pinky,” Egbert said, “if they ate their dough with a knife and fork it still wouldn’t run out. They’re so godzilla rich they don’t do anything. They run the foundation, that’s about it.” “The foundation?” “For draining off the family money… But I think I’m more like Unkie Jerry, I gotta do sumpm.

“You know, Ursie, some people-not you-” he waved his hand, breezily exempting me, “need sumpm to chase after, and I’m one of em. I need sumpm to do, some kinda thing outside of a person. D.O.A.P. takes care of all that. When you’re a junkie you know what you’re looking for all day long-you’re looking for stuff . That’s why love is the same as D.O.A.P., it gives you some kinda half a reason to get out of bed in the morning,” he added-where had I heard that before?

“Hey, that’s what O says about love,” I snuck in. “Does she?” Egbert yawned. Not that I was trying to sic her on him, I even kinda missed the life-or-death thrills and chills of her amorous persecution, but it came down to this: better him than me. “Speaking of O…” I said. “Back off, it’s hopeless, Ursie,” Bertie said gently, “I’m in love already. Hey, I know the one I love is, er, funny about fuddies , but we’re both in the Bug Motels and that’s love too. Draining music out of death supplies is a high form of love, man. That’s what we do. She sees The Importance…”

He didn’t dare look up from his bed-panioforte. I felt the heat rush up to my ears, for that could only be me he was describing. So he knew I was funny about fuddies . If he had divined, who else was hot on my trail? I didn’t mind his love so much: Like I said he looked kind of sweet hunched over his keyboards, and not much of a fuddy at all, maybe a hundred and five girly pounds with sharp little hipbones barely holding up his pants. He looked like a stiff breeze would flatten him, I mean I couldn’t see him and O at all, but, who knows, these musical wizards have fingering, and they see The Importance. If he had to love a Bug Motel, it came down to this: better her than me.

“O…” I opened my mouth. “O… O…” I shut it again and looked hard at the flagpole, that little tent of stars and stripes behind the barber chair, for I had just spotted a pair of gold lamé ballet slippers at the bottom of it. O was among us. Egbert followed the dotted line of my gaze and I saw he saw. What had we said that might egg on a murderess? It seemed like every word of love could have stuck to O as well as to me. Was O funny about fuddies ?-well who wasn’t? And O of all people had to stop thinking about men that way . Was O in the Bug Motels? Did O make bughouse music? I had the words but she had the tubes, the spooky-flute and the gumbo wobble. And as for who saw The Importance: what girlgoyle thinks herself a lightweight? not even Tinkerbell. We ought to be safe, Egbert and me, but the American flag was muttering under its breath.

There was one way out of this fix: “… a three and a four and a…” I burst into song.

Shananah so what shazaam

Ma nishtanah hullo whozat?

Meeka mooka boppaloo adonoy

So what shazaam bray pree hagofen

The words were pure foam off the top of my head, but I knew I had never sung so well. Egbert outdid himself falling in with this doggerel. His double-jointed thumbs on the bed-panioforte dribbled out their usual tender monkey dissonances, his pinkies whisked the jingles on a distant tambourine.

And then I caught wind of sumpm else: O oowooing from inside the Stars and Stripes, not mad anymore but sobbing like the lost soul of America she really was. How come she hadn’t jumped me on the general suspicion, as was her habit? I gazed at the flag in perplexity, and right away I saw a certain roundness behind the thirteen colonies where her belly was. Yes, O had been unusually zaftig lately, her momps as a matter of fact had left even Mary Hartline’s in the dust, good godzilla could she be

“You are angels from heaven for the world! My god, where you have learned to make music like that, what nobody can teach-”

In rolled Doctor Zuk, and not only Doctor Zuk, for she had in her hands the wheelchair handles of Emily Nix Peabody.

It was the first I had seen of my see-through princess in months. So much had happened since I burned her up in her I CHOCOLATE bathrobe that a different me struggled to my feet to get a look at her. And of course it was a different Emily. Fatter, way fatter, and it wasn’t just the padding she was wrapped in. Her arms stuck out over the sides of her wheelchair like a blow-up doll’s, each one ending in five gauze sausages. Her thighs were mummied up too and propped wide, but on the other side of her knees her regular old shins and feet dangled, in her regular old dirty white socks and scabby Mary Janes. Her face was puffy, still Emily but too tired to be ugly-cute anymore. She looked plain and sad. When she saw me her beaky little top lip poked out in the old way and her bucked teeth showed, but I wasn’t so sure she was glad to see me. “Hey Em, how ya doing,” I whispered. “Not so good,” she whispered back, the colorless fringes of her tapwater-blue eyes gummed up with tears, and she looked away.