Don DeLillo: Great Jones Street

"Llama vomit," he said. "That's what they told me when I bought it. There's a rumor you're dead, Bucky."

"Do you believe it?"

"I came here for the express purpose of letting you know, all kidding aside, that no matter what your intentions are, we're determined to see you through this thing, irregardless of revenues, monies, so forth – grosses and the like. Your own intentions are uppermost."

"I have no intentions."

"Contractual matters. Studio dates. Record commitments. Road arrangements. We go when you say go. Until then we sit with our legs crossed. What the hell, an artist's an artist. Bookings. Interviews. Press parties. Release dates."

"How did you get in here?"

"It wasn't hard to figure out you'd be here. I knew you'd be here. Once we traced you to New York, I knew this was where you'd be. But look how hollow-cheeked. Look how ghostly. I had no idea. Who knew? Nobody told me."

"But how did you get in here?" I said.

"I picked up the key on my way in from the airport I've been in Chicago the past two days. First they tell me you've disappeared, so I make all the usual inquiries. Then they tell me there's a riot in the Astrodome, so I make all the usual public statements. Then I catch a plane to New York and pick up the key on my way down here."

"Pick up the key where?"

"At our lavish offices in world-famous Rockefeller Center."

"What was it doing there?"

Transparanoia owns this building," he said.

"I didn't know we were in real estate. Since when?"

"Two or three months ago. Modestly. We're in very modestly. Lepp's a cautious man. He picks up a piece of property here and there. Mostly related to the business. An old ballroom or theater. Shuttered property. Nothing big."

"What are we doing with a building like this?"

"Lepp stays out of my sphere of influence and I don't go messing in his. I'm not in love with what you look like, Bucky. You're a morbid sight. A one-man horror movie. Where's Opel?"

"Don't know."

"I thought she'd be here. I don't see her all this time I figure she's in her funny apartment shooting God-forbid some kind of terrible drug between her toes, the only skin left."

"I haven't seen her in a while. She may be in Morocco, she may not. Then again she may."

"You plan to go looking?"

"I'm staying right here," I said.

"That's your right and your privilege, Bucky, with or without a studio-equipped house in the mountains. The first death rumor was in the evening paper. I could easily stop it here and now."

"I don't think you could. But either way, don't get into it. I want to see how long it lasts."

"Whatever you say."

"I haven't asked about your wife. How's your wife, what's-her-name, your lovely and charming wife?"

"Wife, companion, lover," Globke said. "She's all that and more. Mother, daughter, teacher, adviser, friend. But I'm keeping you two apart. Otherwise it's instant sex karma. She's got a beautiful soul but I don't trust her body. See, oldness and fatness. They make me a bad person."

"What's she do all day, stranded on top of that cliff?"

"She curls up with the Upanishads. She's been reading the Upanishads in paperback for the last three years. She feels the East is where the truth is, what she calls the petal of all energy. Non-attachment turns her on."

"And the little girl," I said.

"Still at it with the cello. Appreciate your asking. To think my genes could produce this kind of classical talent. She'll be concertized next year. Age of fourteen."

"Will it hurt?"

"You attack even the things I hold dearest, Bucky, but I forgive you because I know you're on the threshold of something extra-extra-ordinary or you wouldn't be here in this cold dark room far from the hue and cry. Or am I wrong?"

"Dead wrong."

"At least you could give me the mountain tapes. If you handed over the mountain tapes, I'd at least have something to play with."

"How's my band?" I said.

"The boys are confused. What can I say? The boys are confused, hurt and bereaved."

"Azarian's not bereaved. He's doing his little hip-flips right out front."

"With him everything's on the surface. He doesn't give it that extra level. I think they'll break up."

"Not for a while."

"Who needs them?" he said.

"They're valuable as artifacts."

"Bucky Wunderlick. That's what people want. In the flesh."

"I have to get some rest now."

"You're kicking me out. Listen, why not? It's been an emotion-packed twenty-four hours and you desperately need sleep. It stands to reason."

"Tell Lepp to get rid of this building."

"It's a business thing," he said. "Diversification, expansion, maximizing the growth potential. Someday you'll understand these things. You'll open your mind to these things. Someday you'll be thirty years of age and you'll have to go out and make an honest living, ho, hike the rest of us."

"Never," I said.

"Ho, the ageless wonder. But what I wish you'd do is, talking of time and tide, is I wish you'd go back to writing lyrics, real lyrics the way you used to write them and sing them. That would amaze and delight the whole world, Bucky. A surprise return to your old self. There was nobody better at it."

"When are you leaving, Glob?"

"He throws me out right to my face. A spontaneous put-down. He is famous for this kind of thing but I stand here and take it because it has been an emotion-packed twenty-four hours and he is a star of the firmament while I am only his personal manager who took him out of the rain when he was a scrawny kid and made him what he is today, an even scrawnier kid. But just so you don't think I'm not appreciative of what you've been doing in the later stages, normal lyrics or no normal lyrics, I want you to know a few weeks ago wherever I was in the vast Southland I picked up HBQ Memphis on the car radio and they were doing 'Pee-Pee-Maw-Maw,' both sides, no commercial interruptions. Not that it's so unusual. I just want you to know I'm not all cash-and-carry. I relate to your sound. It's not my sound. It's not the sound I want my kid to make. But it's a valid sound and I relate to it."

"Love to all," I said.

I watched him make his way down the narrow staircase, prodigious in his width, haunches rocking in that firm eternal way of beasts of burden. I imagined him a few minutes hence, standing on the Bowery trying to hail a cab to take him to his car, a custom-made machine gleaming at the top of a circular ramp in some midtown garage. Globke was accustomed to being propelled, ballistically, to and from distant points of commerce, and so there was something agreeably serene, even biblical, in his rudimentary journey down those stairs.

I set the radio dial between local stations and picked up some dust from a delta-blues guitar far off in the night. After a while I had some soup and went to bed, wearing Opel's coat. I knew it was warm wherever she was, most likely a crowded city in one of the timeless lands she loved so much. She favored warm climates and teeming streets. In my mind she was always emerging from hotels in timeless lands and looking around for signs of a teeming street. She liked to watch Arabs spit, and was entertained by similar shows of local prowess in non-Islamic countries. Opel's father was a titled American – president of a small Texas bank, board member of a utilities company, partner in an auto dealership. She fled all this for a Me in rock 'n' roll. She wanted to be lead singer in a coke-snorting hard-rock band but was prepared to be content beating a tambourine at studio parties. Her mind was exceptional, a fact she preferred to ignore. All she desired was the brute electricity of that sound. To make the men who made it. To keep moving. To forget everything. To be the sound. That was the only tide she heeded. She wanted to exist as music does, nowhere, beyond the maps of language. Opel knew almost every important figure in the business, in the culture, in the various subcultures. But she had no talent as a performer, not the slightest, and so drifted along the jet trajectories from band to band, keeping near the fevers of her love, that obliterating sound, until we met eventually in Mexico, in somebody's sister's bed, where the tiny surprise of her name, dropping like a pebble on chrome, brought our incoherent night to proper conclusion, the first of all the rest, transactions in reciprocal tourism.