Bruce Bauman - Broken Sleep

Moses, shell-shocked by Butterworth’s barrage, could only nod along with a spate of “I knows” and “I sees.” In time, he accepted the challenges. Butterworth was right. It was not an epiphanic journey, more like a never-ending Escher maze with no destination in sight. But Butterworth’s methods appeared to be more than Band-Aids on open wounds. Rarely did a new daymare slip through the sluice that emptied unmasked fears into his conscious mind. Months passed without falling under the spell of previous daymares. He slept less fitfully most nights, when Butterworth didn’t call.

On a Sunday morning in October 2007, as he sat down at the kitchen table to eat his whole wheat bagel with light cream cheese, Moses picked up the Los Angeles Times . As was his habit, he read through the news section, then flipped to the Calendar section. His eyes immediately fell upon on a photograph of Alchemy and Salome, arm in arm in the Hammer Museum, under a headline that announced Salome’s upcoming retrospective.

The moment of reckoning had arrived. Moses began hyperventilating.

Too agitated to wait until Jay awoke, he marched into what they still called their bedroom and hovered beside their bed, like an impatient child waiting for his mother to make him breakfast, staring and shuffling the paper until she reluctantly opened her eyes.

“What?” she mumbled sleepily.

He read aloud the opening paragraph. “You knew, didn’t you?”

“I got a mailer with listings for upcoming shows last month. No idea about the article.”

Moses bit into his bottom lip with his front teeth; he wanted to lash out. He couldn’t. She’d heeded his wishes to keep mum about what she heard about the exhibit unless he inquired.

“Do you want to see her?” Jay asked as she put on her bathrobe and slippers.

“How can I not?”

“I have a plan.”

“A plan would be good.”

“If you want to wait until late January, the private opening is usually a few days before the public opening. Let’s go as Mr. and Mrs. Bernes, art collectors. You can meet her and then see what you want to do next.”

Moses’s anger wilted. “That sounds reasonable. I’m going to call my brother.”

While the Insatiables toured the world, Alchemy and Moses e-mailed often. They limited their correspondence to politics and culture, occasionally mental and physical states, but avoided intimate confessionals. As far as Moses knew, Salome and Nathaniel still resided in New York.

Now that the Insatiables had returned to L.A., Moses and Alchemy were planning to meet for dinner at a restaurant in Pasadena sometime before the Insatiables took off again in a few weeks. Moses didn’t want to wait. He called Alchemy. His ire palpable, Moses didn’t begin the conversation with preliminary niceties.

“Alchemy, I deserved a heads-up. You know I scour the papers.”

“I assumed you’d decided not to deal.”

“That’s bullshit. You should have told me.” In forming his new Livability Quotient, Moses had chosen to believe the show would never happen.

“Yeah, I’m sorry. I fucked up.”

“Yes, you sure did.”

“I can’t undo it. She’s gone but she’ll be back. You want to know when? Ruggles has retired, but he’s willing to come out here if you decide to meet her. But Mose, we, you and I, still need to meet before I take off.”

“Why?”

“ ’Cause I have some stuff to talk to you about that might be better said in person.”

“No, spill it now.”

He paused. “Mose, well, fuck it — the Enquirer is threatening to do a piece about my sex life and … Jay, shit … They claim they got proof. No idea what they call proof. Mose, I wish all of this could’ve gone another way.”

Moses simply said, “Me, too,” and hung up the phone.

It took a while for me and Absurda to stop doing the tiptoe two-step and become two dudes playin’ in the band, able to party like the messy breakup never happened — and for me to feel like I wasn’t gonna get tossed on my ass, outta the band and back in the deep end of the shitpool. Mostly them years was like one never-ending recording-touring session interrupted by some notorious incidents. We made five new records between ’93 and 2000 and played more than a thousand shows. Some critics who loved us at first dissed us later, saying we was lucky to make it before the music biz fragmented and we only popped so big as a reaction to the synth-mope blandness of the ’80s. Big yawn to them. Alchy was a constant geyser of songs, semen, and ideas. I used to think he must’ve been cranking up. Meth, ’roids, something. Nope. He’d often go three, four nights, gettin’ maybe two hours of sleep a night before his eyes were protruding like burnt popcorn kernels and you couldn’t mumble hello without him being disputatious. That’s when he’d pop some tranqs.

Alchy’s relaxation is sex games, and I can only partake after me and Absurda have uncoupled. I ain’t usually a group sex guy, and I’ve stayed away from the porniest details of his sexcapades, but after a show in Dallas, this “mom” who Alchemy sexed before and three very hot and very young cowgirls want to entertain me, Lux, and Alchemy. We check what we call the Miranda Wrights of the young ones. For you who won’t admit they watch cartoons, Miranda Wright was a female cop on Disney’s show Bonkers . We use that as code when we think a potential may be too young or just plain trouble. The mom swears for them. Marty delivers a couple of grams. We get high and then Alchy says to the mom, “Come hither,” so she strips and sits on the edge of the bed. He reaches into his suitcase and pulls out a rare Thomas Green beauty from the 1700s. For a lefty, Alchy sure loved his guns — for lots of uses. He points it at his head. “Savant roulette, anyone?” I freeze. Lux, who seen the sex stuff before, still gets twitchy. Alchy pulls the trigger. Zip. Mom slips the smooth barrel, which is like six inches long, into her mouth and starts gumming it. “ ’Happiness is a warm gun,” he croons. Mom falls back on the bed and grabs the gun. Alchy kneels down and his tongue goes into overdrive and she’s still suckin’ ’til she starts coming. Fuckin’ freaky.

Turns into one dead-dick-in-the-morning night. I ask him, the next day, “What the hell was that?”

“My mom told me to always please a woman before you please yourself. So, I do.”

“Not that, I mean the gun thing.”

He just smiles all mysterious. “Tonguing and gunning …” I always wondered if Salome told him about that, too.

Despite drugs being everywhere, Alchy only indulges if he needs it to close a sex deal. Me? You name it, I tried it. How else you play the road like that? Especially when we were traveling donkey class the first few years. Absurda was the only one in the band who got hooked, although, at first, none of us seen it that way. Not even Mr. Savant.

We all finally got hip to her problem being so destructive in spring of ’98 during a six-month Euro tour. We’d already recorded most of Blues for the Common Man . Alchemy likes to try the songs on the road and come back and redub, remix, clean up, and maybe even redo or dump some entirely. It’s going great ’til Absurda misses a gig in Naples. She hired a driver to take her and some Italian smoothie who latched on to her to Pompeii. She says some fresh iced tea made her sick. None of us buy it. Lux is so furious and worried his biceps is Nadling at warp speed. He insists we do a intervention and get her in rehab ASAP. Alchemy has a sit-down with her. She agrees to Sue, who is tour manager, rooming with her. Absurda don’t miss none of the last six shows and plays great.