Don DeLillo - Great Jones Street

"You haven't sent Hanes down with any money lately."

"At least I got you thinking about money with that little speech of mine. The trouble is it's hard to get at it. We've got so many interlocking operations it's hard to know where to take from and who to give to. It's not easy to get at the money, Bucky. I'm trying to get at it. But so far nothing but legal hurdles. It's tied up, the money. It's being used to make more money. But I'm up on seven now and I've got the legal minds working on it. Our senior people. So maybe things might begin to loosen up and we can put you back on a cash-flow basis. Maybe not too. It's hard to get at. Everywhere I turn I run into a legal hurdle of one kind or another. Lepp meanwhile is running all over town planting trees to keep people happy because of all the demolitions he's got planned. There's real estate an J unreal estate. Whoever's unhappy, Lepp plants trees. He tells them look how nice, a tree, a shrub, see how it makes up for the noise and monstrousness of tearing down an old building and putting up a new building. That's the whole secret of corporate structures, my friend. Tell the enemy you'll plant some trees."

"What do you want?" I said.

"It's not what I want, Bucky. It's what they want. The ones who buy what we sell. That's no life you're leading sitting in a dead person's room and I say these words as I cross the bridge right at this pivotal moment and prepare to go through the tollbooth to the first acre of real American soil where they're watching and waiting for either a return to your old self or the emergence of something new and chart-busting."

"I'm all through listening."

"Because this is a pivotal time in the music business and in the future of the country as a whole."

"Don't call back."

"Abuse me, I love it Spit on my clothes, I'll never get them martinized. Nobody's happier than I am to dine in four-star restaurants with the spittle of a genius on my hand-tailored polyester checks. But one thing you should know about, Bucky."

"What's that?" I said.

"You were seen stealing a can of pineapple chunks in a supermarket in Fresno."

The package contained the mountain tapes. This was how Opel had chosen to mark the day of my birth.

On the tapes were twenty-three songs, all written and sung by me, all played by me (without accompaniment) on an old acoustic guitar, the first I'd ever owned. The songs were the most recent things I'd done. I'd taped them about fourteen months earlier, alone in the mountains, sitting down with the guitar and tape recorder and making up lyrics as I went along. I had just come off a world tour and my voice was weary and scorched, no sound nearer to my mind than the twang of baby murders in patriarchal hamlets. In time a visitor came upon the tapes and played them. Word got out, distorted of course, shaped by rumor and speculation. I refused to discuss the tapes with anyone. I declined to release them, to re-record the songs, to accept any offer concerning this material. I didn't understand the nature of my own labor. The guitar work was recognizable but the voice didn't seem to be mine. It possessed an extraordinary childlike blandness, a bit raw at times in its acknowledgments to pain, but mostly lonesome, homeless and dull, lacking true crudeness as well as any other distinctive quality. Beyond this were the lyrics themselves, strange little autistic ramblings. Perhaps because the words had never been put on paper, or even thought about for the briefest moment, these songs conveyed a special desolation, a kind of abnormal naturalness. In the past there had been a mind behind every babble and moan I'd ever produced. But the mountain tapes were genuinely infantile. I had no idea whether this was good or bad. I didn't know whether the songs were supposed to be redemptive, sardonic or something completely different. Tributes to my own mute following. Cheap plastic tricks. Ironic sonnets to the nation's crazed statesmen. Main Street parade noises. Commercials for baby food. Beseech-ings and calumets. Sequels to the ballads of the dead revolution. Whatever they were, the songs had come oozing out, one after another, over a period of two or three sleepless days. I had no clear memory of that period. The tapes themselves served as confirmation of what had taken place. Every reel was full of repetitions, mistakes and slurred words. There were long incoherent vocal passages interspersed with the sounds of eating, drinking and talking back to the TV. I played the tapes a number of times but their essence continued to elude me and so I simply put them away, preferring to forget what had been, after all, just a few days of unremembered effort – a collection of songs whose release would be sure to cause vast confusion. After that, mention of the tapes was made only by close friends or fetishistic rock scholars dressed like Superman. I was younger then and felt an obligation to my audience. I wasn't fully aware of the uses to which confusion might be put. Fame is treble and bass, and only a rare man can command the dial to that fractional point where both tones are simultaneously his. Opel had put a murmur in my head. I didn't know when she had lifted the tapes from my house in the mountains and at first I thought she was being merely playful in returning them. Conjuring up my own past confusions. But of course there was more to it than that. I remembered several things she'd either said herself or instructed Hanes to say.

(1) The gift is a stroke of true bitch genius.

(2)It is to be referred to as the product.

(3) It is not to be opened until Globke starts maneuvering for his star's return.

Opel saw the tapes as my way back out. She'd known exactly what I needed. I'd told her my own designs were too evil for a mere dealer to understand. Now she was daring me to prove it, even giving me the means. Wunder's last lick. It was the chance to remake himself, lean man of mystery, returning with the fabled tapes for all to hear, luring his crowds to new silence, their fear in baby bottles under their seats. I didn't even have to create new material. That was part of the point of it all.

Watney called from the airport. He was on his way in to see me. England's anti-king and duplicate bishop of hallucination. Watney was in the fifth or sixth year of his semi-retirement. He'd done very few concerts and recordings in that time, preferring to study, meditate and gross millions. His sources of income were obscure and apparently varied. Money came to him in undetected torrents from the north of England, from the south of France, from secret places in the low wallowy bogs of Europe. When I asked him what he wanted to see me about, he said we'd have to discuss it in person. Man to man. Face to face. Hands across the table, as it were.

I repacked the tapes and put them back in the trunk. Opel's mind seemed present in the room. ("Evil is movement toward void.") I took off my shoes and socks, then sat on the bed and counted my toes. In not too long I'd be ready to learn firsthand what rages were ahead, boys and girls nibbling at my loins, season of gray space and unknowable words. Things to be figured out first, bits and pieces, some time to spend putting all together. I went into the bathroom and looked in the mirror, counting eyes, ears, nostrils and teeth.

Watney's manservant Blessington was a portly boy with pink hands and the shuffling manner of someone who works in the subways. I watched him come up the stairs, four suitcases in his grasp and an airline bag around his neck. Watney followed, wearing blue suede shoes. He shook my hand, looked around the room and took the chair near the window, sniffing once through each nostril. Blessington sat on the floor amid luggage.

"We've got a limousine all right," Watney said. "It's parked right downstairs. Three rooms and a dining alcove. But at the same time fairly inconspicious. Black. Solid black. Black inside and out. See, I wanted something inconspicuous. That's the way I like to travel. No point in being ostentatious. Given the two choices, inconspicuous or ostentatious, I would never hesitate past the natural reaction time for making a pointblank decision. But you're wondering why I've had the luggage brought upstairs. We've got a limousine all right. But I didn't want the luggage getting nicked. That's it then. I didn't want some rampant New York junkie ripping off my accumulated luggage. You see, the car's all right. The car's got a driver inside. We didn't trust the driver with the luggage. But we trust him with the car. That's his job, innit? The luggage is mine. The car is his. We trust him to look after the car."