Bruce Bauman - Broken Sleep

Back in L.A. we’re working on the intervention. As an excuse we’re gonna have a dinner to discuss the video for The Ruling Class , which is about half the world’s population being under twenty-five.

I was crashing at Alchy’s newest digs, a four-bedroom place in the Hollywood Hills. Salome and Nathaniel had moved into the guest house. Alchemy never finished furnishing any of his houses. He got closest after he met Laluna and had Persephone. This place was half empty and half filled with Dumpster-worthy shit that Salome used in what she called her art. Sometimes there was lots of crap I was scared to sit on, eat off, or even touch. He and Salome used to go on spending sprees, piling up art, books, and old records, and she drags home some weird shit like old clocks or rat skeletons. Alchemy is also beginning his life as the rock ’n’ roll Bruce Wayne: money maven by day, politico by evening, and rock god by night. He starts Winsum Realty and we’re his partners. He scopes condos and houses and land parcels so they meet his “aesthetic criteria.” He dumped lots of ’em before the crash in ’08 and we made plenty of dough. We donated some of the money and buildings to fix up in New Orleans after Katrina and New York after Sandy and an urgent care center in east L.A. Later, he starts Audition Enterprizes. We ain’t partners in that but can invest on a case-by-case basis. I admire his good-guy shit, but I don’t get involved.

I’m still carousing, and one night I got into a fistfight at Little Joy, the dive, and then did the Howard Stern show — me and him get each other, being two dudes from Queens who got out — live like 6 A.M. I get back “home” and Alchy is awake. He says, “Let’s go see some stuff for Winsum. Or maybe for you.” I don’t like nothing he shows me, and we land at the House of Pies over on Vermont. I’m still sorta drunk — I snuck in my own bottle a scotch and poured it into my coffee cup, and he don’t know I popped a coupla midnight runners as well. While I’m eating a pile of onion rings and fries, I notice Alchemy is consternated so I get all applesauce brained and admit, “I’m embarrassed to be so lame, I feel like all of this is a fake-out and I am a fraud and one day you’re gonna ice me for something I don’t even know I done, toss me out just like you found me, and it will all disappear.”

He gives me a face like I gutted him with a knife and sits his elbow on the table and leans his chin against his fist. He don’t say nuthin’ for a few minutes. “We need to have this conversation, especially in light of Absurda’s problems. There is no crisis that can bring you and me down. That is not going to happen with us.”

“How the fuck you know that?” I say again, because I’m thinking of what I seen outside a Madam Rosa’s and how, even though I’m cool with Absurda, I’m still pissed off. “What if I do something stoopit like Marty?” Truth was, Marty still worked for us.

“What could you say that would be so horrible? I know we could always work it out.” He said that in his Alchemy-controls-all voice.

I’m still feeling like his looking for a place for me is some kind of warning, or maybe some Alchemy trap. That maybe he knows I seen him and Absurda, and he wants me to say something. But I never forget if it comes down to it, I’m the one who goes, so I say nothing and change the subject.

“Why’d ya pick me up in the first place?” All those years, I never done asked him. I didn’t worry about not having shit ’til I had it.

“Coincidence is also opportunity. It’s up to each of us to read the signs and make good or bad decisions.” That was the hookie-dookie Alchemy in a nutshell. “Remember when I had that nightmare in the motel that first night?”

“Fuck yes.” He had them after that, but I never got so spooked again. He later told me they was love and hate notes from his unconscious and he’d be lost without them.

“The way you reacted, I trusted you. I still trust you. My mom, contrary to the grief she gave you that day—”

“Still does.”

“She blessed you with the Salome seal of approval. Said that you were no phony.”

“No kidding?” I was flabbergasted. “I thought Salome always sized me up as some smelly sock you toss to the dog as a chew toy.”

“Nope. One more thing you have to be sure about. Ambitious, you’ve made it to the big leagues, the toughest league of all. And no one, not I, your mother or father, or anyone can take that away from you except you. Besides, no lie, you are my street brother.”

I swear to fucking God I was almost crying. That was the forthrighteous reason I ain’t bought a place, at that time I love being with the band on the road and living with him, and even Salome and Brockton. They was my family.

Back in New York, my mystagogues in limbo, bored, and horny as hell, wondering if it was over with Nathaniel, I lust-fucked a few young studlies. The satisfaction was short-lived. To fill the hollowness, I wrote Nathaniel a letter a day. He wrote me twice a week and called every other Sunday. He returned to New York for two weeks over Easter to meet an editor who wanted him to do a book about Bohemian Scofflaw twenty years on. I thought he would move back to New York. Not so. While he was attending a No Nukes rally in Berlin, the directors at the Free University invited him to come for a two-year lecturer stint. He wanted me, us, to join him. Ruggles encouraged me to go and be with Nathaniel. I could always come back. I was excited and wary. In almost eight years, I’d never been away from New York (or Ruggles) for more than two weeks.

We moved in early July to a spacious and inexpensive fifth-floor apartment in the Kreuzberg district, with cathedrallike ceilings and windows. Unpatched WWII bullet holes pockmarked the outside walls, and coffee and spicy odors from the Turkish café down the street mingled with polluted air that wafted from the East. I had my own room/studio with a bank of windows and a tiny Juliet balcony, where I’d sit and peer to the East at a group of forcibly vacated buildings, a reverse Potemkin village. (Nathaniel said the East German government kept those buildings empty because when people lived in them, too many tried to make it over the wall.) I imagined myself levitating, waltzing in the air above the watchtowers and the East Wall piled high with barbed wire like a black, thorn-filled rosebush sprouting above a barren field of land mines. The East, a lifeless, indecipherable blankness of the enforced silence smashing against the particles of neon light, bursting with possibility, in the encircled yet unbound West sector.

Though it was about a half hour from Kreuzberg, we enrolled Alchemy in the John Kennedy International School, which taught its classes in English and German. He showed a natural ear for languages and adjusted within weeks.

Nathaniel immediately immersed himself in the university life and in political groups in both East and West Berlin. He asked me to think about teaching some art classes. Think about it is about all I did. He and male his “colleagues” gathered on Friday nights for eating, drinking, and opinionating while the women sat like docile appendages. In what I thought was a sign of maturity, I suggested to Nathaniel that it was better for me to stay home with Alchemy because I might cause a scene. He wanted me to go. When one of them blabbered his claptrap, “The Wall is the great monstrosity of postmodern, postwar Europe,” I answered, “You’re wrong. The Wall is action. It’s beautiful. It’s the only true masterpiece of the twentieth century. True People’s Art. Someday it will be the reason communism dies. Maybe then you’ll recognize your myopia.” They all pooh-poohed me. Ha. I was right. I cried in happiness when the Wall was breached, and in sadness when it was torn down in a tyrannical act of aesthetic demolition. They should’ve rechristened it the Wall of Freedom — refashioned it as a monument to man’s stupidity and a gateway to the future. Now it’s only a memory, destined to be a mythical Atlantis of art.