Bruce Bauman - Broken Sleep

Horrwich and I became a pair. I all but quit going to Parsons when we got to setting up the Art Is Dead happening. Dad found out what we were planning from Art. When I went to Orient to bring Art into the city, Dad picked me up at the bus. “Salo, I know in your heart you want to help Art. But please, this is wrong. I’m asking you to think about it.” We went to Art’s and I told him what Dad had asked. Art pleaded with him. “Gus, I want this. I need this.” Dad gave up.

A few months after the happening, some of the few friends I made at Parsons threw a nongraduation party for me because I officially quit the school. It happily surprised me when Hilda and Dad arrived. They couldn’t stay angry at me. But damn, did they stand out: Auntie Em and Uncle Henry venturing to the Emerald City. They seemed to be having fun until Horrwich got drunk. He oozed over to me while I was talking to some guy who was hitting on me. Horrwich tugged me away and asked, prosecutor style, “How many other people here have you slept with?”

“None of your business.”

His lips coiled and he smelled jealous. Jealousy has the odor of a steaming iron. He got even drunker and was high on his extract of belladonna, and then, in front of everyone, he picked up a copy of Bertrand Russell’s Selected Letters and in his pedant’s voice yelled, “It is such a shame Russell gave up philosophy. Does anyone know why he gave it up?” No one uttered a word. Dad and Hilda looked bewildered. I cringed. Horrwich’s talons were out. I didn’t know how to stop him. “I’ll tell you. Russell said it was because he discovered fucking. Tonight we are celebrating the lovely Salome, who skipped the philosophy and went straight to fucking, and she is damn good at it!” I wanted to laugh. This so-called progressive artist was just another recondite chauvinist.

Dad marched over to Horrwich and punched him in the gut. Without even talking to me, he and Hilda started to leave. I ran up to them and begged them to stay. His eyes told me he despised my slatternly lifestyle. “We are going and you can come with us,” he said. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t go back to that life. I hugged them and whispered, “I love you both, but …”

I went with Horrwich to his loft. After he fucked me, he nodded off. I couldn’t sleep, so I walked over to the window and stared out. Below was a bum leaning against a lamppost — I inhaled his cheap alcohol breath and stale body odor. The streetlight was barely visible through the mist. I watched as he, so carefree, pissed in the gutter. Then I smashed my hand through the glass. Horrwich jumped up. “Salome? What?” I picked up a shard and cut my right cheek. Instead of rushing me to the hospital, Horrwich, still naked, snapped pictures. He said my face looked prismatic with the blood mixing with my tears and circling my jade eyes. He thought it was some kind of art statement. He ended up showing the photos in a gallery and selling them. He didn’t give me a dime.

I finally kicked the camera out of his hand, he got dressed, and we taxied to St. Vincent’s. The ER doctor didn’t call a plastic surgeon and he butchered me. I have this Frankenstein’s monsterish scar under my right eye that stretches for a little more than an inch. It’s fading after all these decades, as I have faded. Still, you must see that I possess powers worth more than youth, beauty, or natural memory. And those deep scars on my hands have not fully faded. They too are memory and memento.

Each morning I exhale the decomposing cells of my face and my body. And time, the human definition of time, that hobgoblin of impending bodydeath, is my earthly enemy. Disintegration has spoiled my external eyesight, and the new surgeries have failed. Everything outside of me appears foggy. My eyes were always so light sensitive. I have always seen, and still do see, the past and the future. Not seeing is humbling and mortifying, but seeing was often more humbling and mortifying. Others have defined me as a visual artist, but really I am a sensation artist, a sensate morphologist — all of my senses, especially smell, are hyperacute. Even now, I can inhale the pulse of the moon.

I finally catch some z’s, and when I get up I see it’s all green grassy. You know, in Queens, Jack, ’til I was about twelve I thought all parks had blacktop and cement. A park meant basketball and handball courts. I ain’t hip to the notion that most of the world thinks of trees and grass and hills when they hear the word “park.”

We stop at the Dunkin’ Donuts. This cute virginal-looking Jersey babe behind the counter is salivating over Alchemy. The first of a million times I see this. He’s talking in this voice that one of his babes later says “oozes out like delicious, hot cum.” I’m watching this in disbelief as he spews his BS. “Are those sugar-covered doughnuts … are they as sweet as you look?” She smiles red faced as she hands him the bag. He goes, “I’d just like one little lick.” I wanna fucking puke. I mean, she’s ready to get down on her knees. While they’re mindfucking away, I look at him hard. It’s the first time I examine him in daylight and, whoa, he looks sort of different than the night before. Very weird ’cause now he looks part something. He’s brownish skinned. His eyes look a much darker brown. Maybe part black. Maybe Arab, or who knows what?

He hands me the bag of doughnuts, two coffees, and the keys to the car. “Have to use the facilities. Be out in a minute.”

Waiting in the car, I’m steaming. I go back inside. I don’t see him or the cutie.

He comes back fifteen minutes later and he pauses outside the car and gives me that smile of his that says, “If you’re cool, I’ll give you the key to babe heaven.” Well, right then he ain’t givin’ me nothing but agita. He announces like someone important is really listening (as if someday he knew I’d be doing this), “This is where the American heartland really begins. Where the towns and communities are bound together by winding blacktop roads like the seams on a baseball. Someday, I want to spend more time here.”

I’m thinking, Why? So you can fuck more of ’em? Only I learn soon enough it’s part of his Big Plan, but me, I care not one rat turd about the American heartland, so I yell, “Did you just fuck that cunt? Did that little whoarh give you a blow job in the bathroom?”

“Hey, man, first, it’s not cool to screw and tell. Second, if you call women by those misogynistic names, you will pile up no chicks and no money.”

I shake my head, not real pleased at being lectured, not knowing what “misogynistic” means, and I’m feeling the itch like he’s a born-too-fucking-late child-of-the-’60s hippie type. We get going and he keeps chewing his doughnuts, drinking his coffee, and flying down this two-lane road through what looks like Robin Hood’s hideaway in Sherwood Forest. We come to this gate all connected to twenty-foot-tall cement walls. Alchemy waves to the guard, who lets us in, and we drive about two miles ’til we’re outside the main house that looks like some French castle I seen in the movies. The sign reads COLLIER LAYNE HEALTH FACILITY. The place is famous for housing million-dollar nut jobs. Until now, I ain’t seen Alchemy as money. He just don’t have that feel that rich schmucks have, that no matter what happens, Mommy and Daddy will bail their ass outta trouble. I think maybe this guy is flummoxing my instincts and I need to be more careful.

“So, you are a spoilt fucker after all? I shoulda guessed when you high-stepped outta that limo. Shoulda rolled you then.” I’m still pissed at him for getting sex and talking to me like I’m a doofus.