Bruce Bauman - Broken Sleep

Andy, who would’ve been perfectly cast as Tinker Bell, looked mortified and slinked away. It wasn’t the real Andy. My theory is that after he was shot in ’68, there was no “real” Andy Warhol, just five skinny guys with bad skin wearing silver wigs who showed up everywhere. The real Andy had moved back to Pittsburgh and skulked around, hardly leaving his room with five TVs playing twenty-four hours a day.

After Andy II or III sylphed away, Leslie tapped his foot, until I finally answered. “I thought you were more sophisticated than your average critic!” The art world is as provincial and cliquish and mean-spirited as the corporate world so many artists despise. Which is pretty damn funny.

Ezekiel Panti, a critic and cohort of Leslie’s, joined the flogging fray. “Salome, I admit that these are beautiful, but my question is, So what? Beauty without meaning is meaningless, and for art to matter in this age, it must have meaning.” He stroked his goatee with his pig-in-a-blanket fingers and positioned his weight forward as if he was about to make some grand pronouncement. “I’m a Duchampian, you know …”

“I was one, once. Now I’m just a simple beautician.”

Panti didn’t crack a smile. Maybe he’d heard I’d nicknamed him Smarty Panti. He was oh-so-proud of his PhD in philosophy from Brown, and he panted after girls like a neutered dog.

We were in a stare-down when Xtine, without Alchemy, her mouth and eyes wide open, came rushing through the crowd and whispered in my ear, “There’s some Southern-baked golem in a brown suit in the office who says he has to talk to you. Now.”

I understood immediately. Lively.

I shoved Leslie and Panti out of the way and hurried to the office, Xtine trailing closely behind. Alchemy was playing his harmonica for him. Lively did a rather disgusted double take when he saw my flag jacket but held his tongue on that subject.

“Miss Savant, I won’t dilly-dally. We’ve arrested Brockton in Michigan. He was fleeing toward Canada. I want you to hear this from me because I’d much appreciate your cooperation. It would benefit us both. You know there are some people who believe you aided Brockton’s escape.”

Alchemy sensed my depleted hope and sudden heartbreak. He got up and bit Lively on the leg. In the midst of my pain, I laughed. Lively, incomprehensibly, seemed paralyzed, almost intimidated by Alchemy. I pulled him away and he clutched the bottom of my dress. “Please don’t cry, Mommy. I’ll play you a song. Please.”

I gripped his hand. “You go now with Xtine back to the Chelsea. I have to do something that may take a while.” I hugged him hard. I kissed Xtine on the cheek and whispered that she should take him to Orient Point if I didn’t call her in an hour.

“Lively, I’m sorry.” He looked pissed. “This is a big night for me, so can you wait here about ten minutes? I need to take care of some business. Then I will cooperate. I won’t run. Deal?”

“Deal.” He put his massive hands in his jacket pockets and bared his primitive incisors. Almost as an aside, most assuredly as a threat, he said, “We have two men outside.”

What happened next? The drugs, the hotwires have all conspired to muddle my memory. From what I remember and heard from others, I ducked into the closet where they kept the supplies and borrowed a pair of box cutters. I snuck up behind Lively and slashed his back through his suit. Almost in slow motion, he buckled and fell to the floor. I ran out of the office and barreled through the crowd, then stopped in front of a canvas. I ripped two long gashes from top to bottom. I did it to another piece, and another.

Because of my previous work, some people (including Tallent, Gibbon, and even Horrwich, for fuck’s sake, who should’ve known me better) thought it was a performance. They thought I was making a “statement.” They started applauding. But they stopped when I took the cutters and slashed one thumb, and it began to bleed. I felt no pain yet and took the cutter in that hand and sliced it from cuticle to wrist. I still have five-inch scars on each thumb. People started gasping and yelping at the spurting blood. Finally, Gibbon yelled, “Stop her! STOP her!”

Lively, who was bleeding through his thrashed suit jacket, and his two henchmen came ramrodding through the crowd like football goons, knocking everyone aside. Holencraft claimed he put himself between Lively and me because Lively had a murderous gleam in his eyes.

My last sensates from that horrendous day are of Alchemy screaming “Mommy!”—Lively had not let him and Xtine leave — while one of his agents bear-clawed my five-year-old son as he struggled to save me. Lively’s men pinned me to the floor.

Lively (whose wounds were superficial) and Billy Jr. worked out an agreement so I wasn’t prosecuted for any crimes. I received a ticket for my first vacation here at the Collier Layne amusement park, with a bonus package of drugs and rides on the electroshock roller coaster. I was never the same after that stay. Never.

I was one of those New York snots who bought the whole la-la land as a town full of Jell-O heads and faggots, as in wimps, not homosexuals, though there are plenty of those, or Mexies who can’t speak English no better than me, which like everything about L.A. is true and not. There was some hard-core shit going down. Parts of the town still smelt like a giant ashtray after the ’92 riots, which blew up six months before we got there.

As we drive into L.A. that first night, Alchemy goes all hookie-dookie again. “This city — underneath the spit shine of Hollywood — is a phenomenal metropolis with a cursed soul. At first glance, too much of the architecture is graceless, without symmetry, and they keep tearing down the inspired structures. The homes on the coast should be planned so the mountains and the sea meld with the man-made landscape. No one is a better architect than Mother Nature. Ambitious, whether you look at the surface or below, you’ll see that L.A. is America’s future.”

My mom had two books in the house when I was kid, The Joy of Sex and Jonathan Livingston Seagull , and I says, “Alchemy, you sound like that gooey-brained Segal guy floating above us all.”

He laughed. “Yeah, I guess, sometimes I am gooey.”

We’d been driving fifteen hours straight, when we pull up to the Pantera Rosa. Yeah, the song of the same name is about that dump. Was a former “Beaner bar,” off the 10 and Olympic Boulevard. A pink wooden shack outside and black and murky inside like a murdered body is hidden in the ceiling. Was a few artists living in the hood, though mostly working class and bangers. They tore down the Pantera around 2000 when the hood got ritzy, but we was long gone.

Falstaffa and Marty live in the apartment above the Rosa, which they used as their office for an, ahem, “car service” delivering “packages” to movie and biz types and the platinum card kids from the private school down the block. Some of them and their parents was our first fans.

Falstaffa, a 350-pound tough Tijuana Santería princess, lumbered out to meet us. With her buzz-cut orange hair and tattooed forearms and thighs, and a switchblade-sharp fuck-you sneer, she gave me the willies. Wrongo. She turned out to be the biggest-hearted no-crock-a-shit person I ever met. We did a shitload a laughing and partying together before the hep C got her.

She picks up Alchemy and twirls him around like he’s no heavier than a picked-clean chicken wing. Out preens Marty, a four-foot-eleven Mick midget. He smacks a kiss right on Alchemy’s butt. When Alchy introduces us, Marty squeezes my hand so hard it’s like he’s trying to break the bones. I’m squeezing just as hard back when this loopy boxer comes streaking at me and jumps at my back. Marty lets go and orders the dog, “Get the Fuck Over Here,” yep, that’s the name to which he answers. I’m thinking, My life is forever gonna be a three-ring freak show . Alchy informs everyone that I’m his bass player. I don’t protest about nuthin’ right then ’cause I am so damn tired.