Bruce Bauman - Broken Sleep

“Right, right. Good. Go on.”

“Aside from the fact that we don’t know who to fight yet, before you make any war you need a plan to win the peace. Which doesn’t mean crushing the enemy. These chicken-hawks are clueless about the inferno that is war and have no idea how to calm the fires that we, literally and figuratively, will create.”

“You’re damn right about that.” Alchemy sat back, impressed. “Thanks, man. You saved me from a potential public pillorying.”

“Least I could do.” Moses leaned back against his pillow and his eyes gazed upward. “You saved me from dying.”

In the next two days, they hashed it out. Alchemy offered to publish it under co-bylines. Moses demurred. The credit would’ve been good for his career, but it didn’t outweigh what the loss of anonymity would do to his private life. A week later the Times printed it. The last lines of the article read:

What happens not in the first three weeks, or three months, after the murders but in the years to come will determine if the songs we sing will tell of darkness becoming darker, or darkness becoming light .

Alchemy used to joke that Lux’s family was more like the Beaver Cleavers than the Eldridge Cleavers. That wasn’t exactly right, but his parents stayed married ’til death did them part. His father, Big Lionel Bradshaw, was an East Coast — born NWA. Don’t gimme no grief, he called himself that. He grew up in Red Hook, Brooklyn, when it was the city’s deathliest hood. He enlisted in the army and shipped out to Nam. He survived, and his best army brother was a Compton homeboy who got Big Lionel a job as a roofer in L.A. He meets Lux’s mom, who works at the DMV. They are military-strict parents. Like me, Lux goes to a magnet school for the musically gifted, only he don’t get thrown out. When the Crips or Bloods or whichever gangstas fucks with Lux or his sister, Big Lionel threatens them if they mess with his kids, he’d take out ten of them before they got him. They listened. Lux got a scholarship to some all-black college but ends up back in L.A. and meets Absurda in around ’90, when they was working at McCabe’s guitar store.

It was rare to come across a real playa worth dick who didn’t have a chip on his shoulder. I ain’t going deep on you — that was Alchemy’s MO, not mine. Me and Absurda never wanted to cozy up with our families. Sure, we were generous with them. But it was more like blackmail: We’ll give you cash to stay the fuck away and shaddup. Lux claimed when he was onstage he felt like the invulnerable Lux Deluxe. His face turned rust-red pissed off if someone called him Li’l Lionel. I get that. I hated being Ricky McFinn.

Alchy, his situation was confusing. He never spilt no numbers on his pop. In his stonewalling or stories he’d spin to the media about the guy, you could tell he despised him. When I ask him about why the hell he enlisted in the army, he joked, “To sublimate my hostility toward my father. He was the enemy.” Later he’d say he’d planned it ’cause he wanted the army cred when he went into politics. I thought it was to mess with Nathaniel ’cause of his pacifist bullshit. Alchy, no matter his antiwarmongering, was never no pacifist, and he said he regretted never getting to Iraq because Salome cracked. Salome and him, they was like a two-headed monster who had a love-hate thing going that they both needed and resented.

All of this is my backdoor way of sliding up to the first time I met Absurda’s family. I don’t like rehashing it but I got to.

It was Thanksgiving ’95. We was touring between More and Get Large . Mostly now, those shows merge into one after another after another. It was party time and we loved the audiences. This show in Madison, at the college, was nuthin’ special. After the gig, that’s when things started to get memorable. First, Absurda’s sister Heather, who was a college student, came backstage with like five of her bosomy buddies. Heather is an Absurda knockoff with the same tight body, only shorter and tatt free. She don’t cover her tiny freckles with makeup. Has a bigger, well, chest area. Longish blond hair, unlike Absurda’s, whose is cut asymmetrical sharp at the neckline and in front. Surprise, surprise, one of the girls (not Heather) kept Alchy busy that night. That got Absurda pouty faced as I ever seen her. She never blinked at Alchemy’s carousing before.

The next day me, Alchemy, Absurda, and Heather drive to Fond du Lac to celebrate the holiday with the Akin clan. Lux and his babe head to Chicago to be with her relatives. Falstaffa and Marty “decline” the invite to Fond du Lac, which was most definitely motivated by a few words from Alchemy. They drive the bus and we’re gonna reconvene in Minneapolis for the next gig.

Before we get going, I see Absurda in a head-to-head with Alchemy. Later, I inquire if all is copacetic, and she snipes, “Why shouldn’t it be?”

“No reason.” I’m thinking, but don’t say, If all of youse was coming to meet my clan, I’d be scramming out of town . She persuades me to stay with her in her mom’s house by the lake. Mr. Alchemy gets to lounge in the hotel.

I’m itching to hear what she’s told them about me. She’d always been slightly cagey when it came to the details of her family. What I picked up over the years is that her dad was a local hockey star. He goes off to college and discovers he’s just another middling jock. So he comes back, knocks up Absurda’s mom, and settles on being a math teach and football coach. Her dad is the town ladies’ man. Her mom, Geez, was Miss Wisconsin Dairy Queen or something. Heather is born after they divorce. Her two older brothers are big blond dudes who look like they were sculpted out of ice.

We drive to the white two-story house by Lake Winnebago. It’s like finger-freezing cold. Only had my leather jacket. It’s starting to snow, so we hustle inside. Instead of hugs, her brothers greet Absurda by offering her (and us) shots of schnapps, which we take, and they lay out in front of the fireplace playing Styx’s “Too Much Time on My Hands,” for chrissake. Got that right. We’d be meeting the wives and kids at Thanksgiving dinner.

They act like they last seen Absurda (or Mandy as they insist on calling her) yesterday rather than two years before. Her mom is up in her bedroom. Absurda tucks my hand in hers and pulls me upstairs. Mrs. Akin is sitting up in bed watching CNN, munching American cheese slices and saltines with a glass of red wine by her side. She’s wearing a pink sweater with a silver cat face on the front, pink plastic-framed glasses, and pink sweatpants. She don’t move. Absurda goes and kisses her. Mrs. Akin acts like she’ll get freezer burn if she presses Absurda too close. And Miss Dairy Queen? She must’ve a won a lifetime supply a milk shakes. Still got a cute face, though her skin is a little blotchy.

Absurda introduces me, and Mrs. Akin nods, a half smile, reaches for my hand, and clasps it way too familiar. “So pleased to meet you, Richard.” No one, I mean no one , has ever called me Richard.

“Me, too, Mrs. Akin.” I feel like a smarmy doofus in a John Hughes movie.

“Come downstairs, Mom.”

“Mandy, is your father here?”

“No. Why? Is he coming?”

“He promised to make an appearance. Do you want to call him?”

“No. I can wait to hear his rhapsodizing about how crime free and pristine life is here, and how grotesque and squalid it is in L.A.”

The three of us go downstairs, and her brother Jim says to Absurda, “Jody Messerschmitt wants you to call her. Think she’s looking for a reunion of Mandy’s Men and the Big Gulp Girls?”