Bruce Bauman - Broken Sleep

“Alchemy!” Brockton blustered in an accent that was a mix of Foghorn Leghorn Southern and Manhattan clothespin-on-the-nose hoity-toity. He seemed like a pretty old dude by then even if he was only fifty or so. In them early photos he was real skinny, but now he was lumpy with a potbelly. His face was full of lines like a scruffy old basketball, and his hair going thin and gray. He reminded me a bit of this nerd in grade school, Ronnie Nadler, who never sat still. Drove the teachers nuts. We call anyone whose body parts were out of control “Nadling.” Brockton was a Nadling champ.

They shook hands, stopped, and then bear-hugged. In all the time I know Alchemy, there are only two guys I ever seen Alchemy bow down to — Brockton and Buddy Sheik. And, well, Laluna. I got plenty to opinionate about her later.

Brockton drummed his fingers against the wall. “I didn’t repair it because every time I start missing Salome and want to go get her, I look at this and accept I can’t take care of her anymore.” Alchemy looped his arm over Brockton’s shoulder.

“Nathaniel, my mom can make anyone feel horrible when she doesn’t get what she wants, but you’re the best thing that ever happened to her.” They both shrug in a kind of holy communion of helplessness.

“So, who is your uncivilized-looking friend with the jaundiced mien?” He smiles like he done paid me a compliment. He reaches to shake my hand. I wanna show him uncivilized by rearranging his damn crooked teeth. I’m ignorant of what he means by “jaundiced mien” ’cause I ain’t yellow eyed, so I don’t shake his hand. I only says, “Hey.” Alchy introduces me as “Ambitious Mindswallow, member of the Insatiables.” First time I hear my full moniker de rock ’n’ roll. I gotta admit, I took to it right away.

We move single file back into the kitchen, and Alchemy turns and tosses me a take-a-hike glance. I get the message. Magnolia is like some massive male fantasy camp. Seven hundred chicks.

This was my first up-close and personal view of the split between the truly rich and the rest of us. In the city you felt it ’cause of Park Avenue bullshit, but they don’t flaunt it in the same way. Even after we made it and I become one of them , I feel like the snotass from Queens. Only in America could a farting, cursing juvee degenerate like me crawl from the sewer and into a penthouse.

I pass by the tennis courts filled with blondes and bouncing boobs. I keep going, sticking to the path. I hear the girls squealing and splashing down by the lake. I sense this is snakeville. Snakes is my kryptonite, so I make a U-turn to see this goddess babe on her horse galloping down a dirt road. A sign points BARN. I head to the stalls, which is fuckin’ bigger than my folks’ apartment. The babe who was riding and two others are brushing their horses. I’m trying to think of something clever, but all I can think of is the time when I was about eight years old. I had a crush on Suzy Balboa, who was having a birthday party at the North Shore Country Club. What a joke! Place stank like a bowling alley bathroom. My dad, Mr. “Ricky, you ain’t nuthin’ but a useless good-for-nuthin’ and will always be a useless fuckin’ good-for-nuthin’ loser,” gives me his fatherly drunken advice. “Ya watch it when ya go inta the pool, ’cause they got a special dye that mixes with pee and chlorine, makes your bathing suit burn off and the lifeguard blows his whistle and everyone nyahs-nyahs at the dumb fuck with the tiny dick who peed in the pool.” I never go swimming the whole afternoon.

Alchemy comes swooshing down the road in this ’60s T-bird. It’s gonna be our new ride. Was once Salome’s. “How’d you find me?”

“A lone guy with shades, biker boots, and tattoos all up his arms is not blending into the local mountain foliage.”

“I was just gonna make my move.” I see he’s already scoped the babes.

He ambles out of the car. “Go for it.”

“Hey, these yours?” I ask suavishly.

They keep brushing, hardly looking at me, so I step closer. “I had a dog once, a German shepherd named Uzi.” The girls don’t react. Not sure they get Israeli firearms. “He do not live too long.” (I’m trying to talk with no accent.) “My brother took him up to the roof of our apartment building and he threw his bone as far as he could off the roof, and Uzi chased after it, and phfft .” I wave my hands like I was reaching for him.

The girls look like they’re gonna barf. Alchemy laughs and says, “He’s kidding.” He slouches up to the superbabe’s horse and starts to pet it. “Big guy. How many hands?” I’m thinking, hands? Since when do horses have fuckin’ hands? They start talking horse poop. He asks, “Will you be at the Magnolia Patch later?” The girls giggle and glance at each other. He says, “We will. Around ten. See you.”

When we get in the car, he is amused. “That was one classy bit of seductive reasoning. Uzi for a German shepherd? Why not Lugar?”

“Like it. Maybe next time. Truth, man, that’s what happened to Uzi, though I left out that my brother spiked Uzi’s food with PCP.”

“And you listen to his advice on foreign affairs?”

“Hey, he been to war. Have you?”

“Yes and no.”

“What the fuck’s that mean?”

He don’t answer right away. Then deep from one of those moments I come to call “Alchemy in Collidascope Land,” he says, “Depends on how you define ‘war.’ Some people need to leave home to escape war. Some need to leave to see war. In the end, no one ever really leaves home and you’re always at war. You’re only rearranging the furniture.”

At the house, Brockton cooks about the best BBQ I ever ate. We’re getting drunk and riffing on cars, movies, sports, only it keeps swerving to the serious-politico, and Brockton and Alchemy rant about the L.A. riots and President Bush being a WASPy sub rosa racist. Brockton’s face is sliding from easy rolling to mean-motor-scooter drunk, and his eyes and lips go school-nun stern and his body stops bouncing except for him clicking his teeth and he finally asks me, “What do you think? You a Republican?”

“I’m a nuthin’.”

“You’re apathetic?”

“Let’s say I’m noncommittin’.” Alchemy, he forgets zilch and hears everything, ’cause years later he comes up with The Noncommittal Nihilists for Nuthin’ record. It’s sharp mouthed, none of Alchy’s hookie-dookie or political stuff, just us as a band.

Brockton looks like he’s ready to explode on me. Alchemy sees it, too. “Nathaniel, cut it. He’s only—”

“Nah, man, I can handle myself.” Brockton’s too old to smack, so I take an empty beer can and crush it in my hand. Brocton snorts at me. “Look, pals, I don’t know all this crap like youse two, what I learnt in that shit hole where I come from is if you ain’t committed to saving your own piddly ass, zero else means squat. Most of the people ain’t got the dough to be committed to nuthin’ but making their rent, and no one is sending them to ‘horse-grooming college.’ The way I see it, it’s on such highly educated ass wipes like youse to make the world a better place for us dumb-as-nails lowlifes.”

“Good rap, kid. You’re no fool. In fact, you’re pretty savvy. How much TV do you watch? How much tobacco and dope do you smoke? And your folks? Do they vote?”

“My dad says he’s gonna vote for that Pro guy if he stays in the race.”

“You mean Perot?” Nathaniel asks kinda snotty. “Why him?”

“ ’Cause he’s different. He ain’t one a them.”

Nathaniel don’t talk to me but to Alchemy. “See? Third parties, it almost doesn’t matter what you stand for. Perot is a weasel with the money to promote himself. He’s funny looking with a squeaky voice and announced his candidacy on CNN. He has no serious policy but, like the kid says, he ‘ain’t one a them,’ and he’s neck and neck with Bush and Clinton.” Alchemy nods and Nathaniel turns to me again. “So, Ambitious, will you vote for him?”