Bruce Bauman - Broken Sleep

I’m just wishing, wishing this cat had been my lawyer in juvee court. “Okay, boys, past your bed-wettin’ time.” The CT guys start slinking away and Alchemy surprises me when he yells after them, “Give me your number.” They stop and do that, and the screw job, he thanks them.

I think it’s finally done ’til Duckman grabs my arm. “How much you get?”

“Hundred.”

“That and the shit be mine for services rendered.” No way I’m hosing Duckman. “And, one mo’ thing, as I am sure you remember, anything you sell to the white boys in here, I gets seventy-five percent. And them other three corners, I owns ’em.” He and Alchemy shake hands. I hand over the cash and the dope to the Duckman, and he quacks on back to his corner. Alchemy yells out to me, “You up for a ride?”

“Where to?”

“L.A. Going to start a band there.”

Never been to L.A. and I ain’t got sweet nuthin’ to lose and no future in New York. “Let’s jam.”

Alchemy drove like red lights, slow-moving cars, potholes is just hazards to be avoided. Or not. In minutes, we’re over the GW Bridge and jetting away from dumps like Bayonne, the “American Dream Developments,” and them putrid gas tanks of the “Garden State.” Yeah, a garden doused in weed kill. I’m thinking to myself, So Looong Flushin’ , when he swivels his head so he’s looking backward and stares at the city, and I’m getting a tick nervous here about his driving skills, and he says, “Look at that skyline, and the acolyte cities, the lights, they’re like God’s dissonant drips merging across the sky on a Jackson Pollock canvas.” Uh, yeah, sure. I don’t know Jackson Pollock from Jack-in-the-fuckin’-Box, and if God created Hoboken in his image, then book me a ticket to Satanville.

A coupla minutes later he turns and asks, “So, besides taking advantage of foolish college kids, what do you want to do?”

“Pile up chicks and money,” I croon. We laugh and start riffing about L.A. and the music we want to play and all the movies we dig and all the shit we have in common. ’Cause I don’t know yet, but sense there’s plenty we don’t.

We drive for a coupla hours and it’s like 4 A.M. when he pulls off the 80. Even at that hour it’s not like any Jersey that I seen. No gas and garbage smells.

He announces, “I need to see my mom. There’s a motel where we can get some rest first.” In the room, in like one minute, the guy’s asleep. About two hours later, I hear him howling. I am freak- ing out, and I don’t freak easy, but I ain’t never heard such scarifying noises exiting out from no one except when Tommy Huston shot Davy Rathbone in the nuts. I’m thinking the guy is a psycho or he’s gonna die on me and that’s all the bullshit I need, stuck with a “borrowed” car and a dead body in Nofuckingwhere, New Jersey. I leap out of bed, turn on the lights, and shake his ass awake. He sits up, he’s all sweaty, and his eyes — whew! They are a kaleidoscope of light and dark browns with dots of tans and whites, gonzo wild and like he has just seen God and Satan — only his voice and body are totally cool.

“It’s part of my birthright,” he finally says. “You’ll see in the morning. Now go back to bed.”

I’m more than a bit jittery, so I put on the cable TV, watch some porn, and jack off in the shower while Alchemy is once again fast asleep.

After the babydeath I struggled to keep my equilibrium, waiting for recovery and regeneration. I finished high school and Dad built me a light-filled studio. Against Mom’s “better judgment,” they even got me a used Thunderbird convertible. I painted the front yellow and red and flaming orange and called her Kyle. Years later, Alchemy took it. He and Mindswallow drove it off a cliff in Malibu, which appeals to my sense of rightness. Sometimes, but not too often, I’d go to the cemetery and wonder how my life would’ve changed had the baby lived. Dad found me there once and I bawled my eyes out and he just held me. I remember his cough echoing throughout the house. We had a huge blowout when I burned his carton of Winstons and he grabbed them out of the BBQ pit on the back lawn. He said calmly, “You are still my child and not the other way ’round.”

I worked the farm stand, but Dad got frustrated with me because I gave away free food to some and charged others too much. Donnie Boyle gave me a job at his diner as a waitress. I kept telling the customers what they should eat instead of what they wanted. I dropped dishes. Mostly by accident. Dear Art did his best to cover for me or take the blame. Donnie’d had the hots for me forever and he never would have fired me, so I fired myself.

I decided to do volunteer work as a kind of aide, going to the houses of the old and the sickly in the North Fork. I also painted, read, wrote in my notebooks, and discovered physics. That’s when I started to formulate my theories on emotions and gravity.

Entranced by the tide and inhaling the smells of the Sound, hoping to find Kyle, her atom self, but no … I’ll tell you about that soon enough. That night I first understood the secrets of gravity, and the moon, and embraced the power of my acute sense of smell. My first shrink here, Samuel Sontag, who I nicknamed Count Shockula, thought I just made up these smells. I challenged him, “You don’t deny gravity, do you? Or its effects on the tides? Or on objects as small as atoms? What are smells but molecules floating in the air? And moon tides — gravity determines their motion. And people are seventy percent water, and have smells inside them that are affected by gravity. I call them soulsmells.” He just kept looking down and taking his notes.

After incubating in Orient, I realized I had to leave or become an erased soul inside a physical shape pantomiming the motions of life. Or a lonely oddball wasting away like Art. Dad had told me about the trust Greta and Bickley Sr. set up for me. I decided to attend Parsons in New York. I thought life would be different. It wasn’t. I sport-fucked. Made very few friends. Parsons had a soulsmell of dried blood, moldy cork, and self-absorption.

I went to see all of Greta’s films. I found books about her in the NYU library, which I later learned got so many things wrong. Yes, she left Hollywood after the perfectly titled Two-Faced Woman flopped both artistically and financially, which allowed her studio bosses to use it as a pretext to dump her lovely derriere, and her (to them) inequitable salary. The greed-gods leaked the vilifying “truth” that she’d suffered a nervous and physical breakdown, felt abused by those so magnanimous Hollywood employers. She planned to take one or two years off in New York City and return triumphantly to Hollywood. It wasn’t the war, her desire to be alone, even the movie mongrels that stopped her. It was an affair. Like all of Greta’s affairs, with both men and women, it was clandestine and doomed. Unlike all the others, this time, in 1943, she gave birth to a child. Me. She chose my name: Salome. And then she chose to give me away.

I would go to her apartment and wait outside, and sometimes I saw her come out and get into a car. Or go for a walk. Few people recognized her. I never talked to her.

For almost two years, I floated though my classes and explored the city. Through the recommendation of one of my professors, I found this small gallery. The gay owner loved my “look,” so he gave me my first show, ARTillery . After one of my weekly performances straddling one of the cannons, I met the Great and Powerful Horrwich and he invited me to his opening, and so I flitted into the Murray Gibbon Gallery up on 57th and Fifth. (He soon moved to SoHo and later Chelsea.) We consummated our lust-power attraction that night in the closet of the gallery. Soon after, I moved into his loft on Prince Street. He owned the whole damn building. The industrial plants still reigned like the dying kings of SoHo, unaware of their impending extinction, mighty buildings with soul and the energetic odor of toil and beer-injected muscles.