Bruce Bauman - Broken Sleep

“How so?” Moses asked, naïvely curious.

“The princes of the paparazzi.”

“I’m beginning to see.”

Alchemy replied, “You. Have. No. Fucking. Idea.”

As soon as they got close to Santa Fe, Alchemy asked to use Moses’s cell. His own was in New York or L.A. or any of a number bedrooms. Moses dialed for Alchemy, who talked as he drove.

“Trudy, I’m coming through in about six, seven hours. Staying one night.” He hung up and talked to Moses. “She’s an old friend. Did some of the first pics of the Insatiables. They paid for the down payment on her place. Now she teaches yoga and does nature photography.”

“You mind if I ask how it went up there? I always wondered about that much isolation, if I could do it. I think so. Maybe ten percent of the time, because I want to keep that hope, I believe in God or an afterlife. I want to believe but …”

In the previous decade Alchemy generously shared his controversial opinions on politics, sex, drugs, and scores of arcane subjects in hundreds of interviews. When the Insatiables released The Multiple Coming , he didn’t dodge provocative discussions about God or religion. He was careful never to reveal his personal beliefs (or lack thereof) and explained that the entire album consisted of different characters’ relationships to faith.

Moses continued, “I’m thinking, if I survive this, I might try something like that.”

“Maybe you should. Meditation is pretty addictive when you get into it. I got going on both dysphoric and euphoric hallucinations. I thought I had weird sleep patterns before, but this place messes you up on purpose, three hours here, three hours there. My brain got so disoriented that my nightmares were happening when I was awake and screwing with my daytime reality …”

Moses wanted to interrupt and ask about his nightmares. He thought about his own daymares. But Alchemy seemed to be on a talking jag.

“Desiree advised me to lower my adrenaline levels. I’m an action junkie. Have this need to get off on crowds and attention. It was hard to withdraw from phones and e-mails. Ended up cathartic. I’d do it all again, except …” He shook his head and exhaled a loud breath. “No sex. You’re not supposed to, um, pleasure yourself. I was walking around with a permanent stiffy. I gave up. Haven’t jacked off that much since I lost my cherry when I was a kid in Berlin.” Alchemy paused and took both hands off the wheel, held them aloft and strummed an air guitar, gave a childlike “Woo — woo.” He sang the Country Joe song, “And it’s five, six, seven, open up the pearly gates … Whoopee! we’re all gonna die …,” as the car lurched perilously close to the edge of the road. Moses glanced down at what would be a thousand-foot drop, clamped his hand on the door handle, and clenched his jaw. Alchemy finished singing, retook the steering wheel, and jammed his foot against the accelerator. “Nathaniel, my mom’s guy, used to sing me that song when I was a pup-star. Had no idea what it was about but it stuck in my head. Mose, it’s going to be okay. I promise.” Moses was only half listening, thinking that if Alchemy kept driving like a drunken Evel Knievel, any marrow transfusion would become moot. “I’m jet-streaming nonstop. I don’t like it. I prefer to think before I talk. Not like Salome, who, you’ll see, you never know if she’s just channeling her DNA or is in one of her ‘Blue Savant’ periods, that’s what she calls it. Ruggles got other names for it. You meet Ruggles?” Moses nodded. “You have to beware, sometimes you think she’s out of it but she’s just playing you. Now, Ambitious, you’ll have to meet Ambitious, there’s one cantankerous motherfucker who talks or punches before he thinks. If you call what he does thinking. He’s PO’d at me now.

“Shit, though, almost six weeks of being a mute. Of nodding or shaking my head. I’ve have my silent periods but — phew. Mind?” Alchemy pointed with his right elbow to some bottles of water in the backseat of the car. Moses handed him one. “Thanks.” Alchemy finished an entire bottle, then another. “So, am I what you were expecting?”

“Don’t know yet. Hadn’t thought about that.”

“Ever?”

“No.” For so many years Moses had imagined meeting his father, but he’d never imagined life with siblings. For someone as introspective as he considered himself to be (and he had considered the possibility his father ran off with another woman), Moses was confounded by this omission. “Four days ago I had no siblings and a different mother.”

“That is one mindfuck. Maybe it was too painful? You didn’t want to miss what you could never have? Hey, Mose … You got a brother now.” As was his habit, Alchemy renamed him. No one had ever called him Mose or Mo or Moe. “Mose” sounded romantic and sin-street tough, misleading perhaps, but so what, he liked it.

Alchemy was deified by the luck of the genetic evolutionary hierarchy. It wasn’t that he talked different, was smarter, more graceful, or even more beautiful than so many others, but he radiated an energy that no hype machine could manufacture. Moses had run across plenty of “stars” in New York and L.A., and instantly you could spot the ones whose eyes yearned, like a starving discarded dog, to be noticed and coddled, and yet would shoo you away if you approached them. Only a rare few possessed presence that commanded you to gawk at them. Alchemy had that specialness, charisma, magnetism, those overworked and abused adjectives that cannot capture or quantify the inimitable and illuminative qualities that transcend logic and language.

As Alchemy continued his monologue, Moses thought about the night he’d seen the Insatiables at the Whisky. As one of their encores, they jammed on a harder-edged version of the Lovin’ Spoonful’s “Do You Believe in Magic.” Alchemy sang, almost beatifically, “The magic’s in the music and the music’s in me …” It was true, Moses thought to himself. He was magic .

As the Focus descended the mountain, Moses now hoped this magic man would not only transfuse him with his bone marrow; he longed to be blessed with a few sprinkles of Alchemy’s miracle dust.

When we left the hospital, it was early morning. I could taste and smell Horrwich’s soulsmell of overcooked hair dye. I told him to go home, that I wanted to be alone. I traipsed toward the Chelsea Hotel, where I knew lots of people. Just as I was crossing 23rd Street, I was in such a tizzy, I stooped over and an oncoming ambulance almost decapitated me. I didn’t even hear the siren! Three, maybe four people grabbed me. One of them was Horrwich’s photographer friend, Xtine. Aha — you could claim coincidence that at precisely this moment she would be crossing the street — she lived at the Chelsea. It wasn’t. The second she told the bystanders we were friends, I knew she was there to help me. She seemed quite unflappable. I looked repulsive with my eye already black and blue and bandages covering the stitches on my face and left hand. “What happened? Are you all right? You were so radiant the last time I saw you. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.” She held my unbandaged hand as we walked. You could have knocked me over with one of Andy’s wigs. “Please come upstairs to my place and rest.”

People have this notion of the Chelsea as a roachy rat hole. (The wanton acts only took place in some of those rooms — such sweet decadence.) Xtine had this grand apartment with high ceilings and spectacular windows. Although they were cracked and it was damn drafty. She had installed a darkroom. I lay down on a futon in the main room while she boiled water for herb tea. I remember watching her as she sashayed across the wooden floor. Not dyke-ish at all. She had an alluring angular face with high cheekbones. Deep brown, small, almond-shaped eyes. Lithe but short. Her soulsmell was a pungent mix of cerulean blue and baking bread. Of course pure colors have smell, and sound, and taste. You’ve heard of the blues, as in the music? Alchemy wrote the song “Salome’s Sensation Bluz” for me. It sounds like how I feel when I’m low.