Bruce Bauman - Broken Sleep

“You were.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Apology almost accepted. How about we finalize it and go someplace less oinky for a real drink …” She reached for his hand and dragged him out of his chair and toward her car. He resisted. Why? She was damn cute. Seemed kind of goofy. He had nothing to go home to. He needed to change his life and he still regretted his youthful timidity with women. So … he surrendered and suggested Chez Jay, the forty-year-old dive of the older “hip” crowd. There was little chance either his students or Jay would see them there.

A few hours later, dizzy, besotted by liquor and lust, Moses found himself laying out his credit card for a room at the nearby Loewes Hotel. Once inside the room, Evie, in a series of swift motions, slipped her iPod into the room’s player and turned up her band’s CD. She pulled her T-shirt over her head. “Evie, I don’t …” She thrust her breasts in his face, which Moses found himself kissing frenetically before she slunk down between his legs. She unzipped his pants, dismissing Moses’s halfhearted admonishments.

“Tastes good.”

Moses, enthralled at being seduced so boldly, suppressed his rising panic.

“Professor T”—she giggled, pulled off her jeans, and sat on the bed—“now suck me then fuck me.” She put her legs on Moses’s shoulders and gently pressed him into a kneeling position as she lay on her back. Moses surrendered. Consequences be damned.

A few hours later Evie woke Moses. She was already dressed.

“Geez, how long have I been asleep?”

“Not that long. It’s only ten. Sorry, but I have to go.”

Nonplussed by the sight of this young woman he hardly knew standing over him in a hotel room, Moses mumbled, “Oh, okay. I guess.”

“I’m meeting my band at eleven. I don’t want to have to explain why I can’t make it.” Evie bent over and kissed him. “That was very nice. And don’t worry, Prof”—she pulled her hand across her lips as if zipping them shut—“our secret. Maybe next time I’ll stay, if, ya know …”

“Yes, I think, yes, I would really like that.”

I want to be grateful — my son’s stardom and wealth unshackled me from Collier Layne and Billy Bickley Jr. But I’m not. Do not condemn me yet.

For almost three years I wandered in the haze of grainy, bleachy fumes caused not by the fire but the embalming fluids of a “new” psychotropic concoction that clouded my mind. I was Lady Tiresias trapped in asphodel, visited by stygian visions of the first son undead, the descent of Nathaniel, and Alchemy’s death by envy.

When Ruggles finally reconfigured my drug regimen, I emerged from my exile. Alchemy appeared with the guttersnipe Mindswallow in tow, on their way to L.A. We’d missed celebrating Alchemy’s twenty-first birthday. I was so thrilled to see him.

Unfortunately, the immediate joy was tempered by the mention of Billy Jr., who’d “summoned” Alchemy to a meeting. Alchemy told me that after the Lively box cutter performance, as part of the deal not to prosecute me (which everyone had hidden from me) and put me in Collier Layne, Greta had appointed Bickley Sr. as my official guardian and trustee. She wanted no more to do with it.

Nathaniel’s marriage proposals now made sense. If we’d married, instead of the Bickleys he could’ve attempted to become my guardian and keep me out of Collier Layne.

Bickley Sr. died in 1989, after my incarceration and just before Greta’s death. Evil Billy Jr. became my guardian and trustee, so he controlled the dispersal of funds. He and Ruggles successfully completed Alchemy’s army hardship discharge. Ruggles hoped that freeing Alchemy would be healthy for me. But during their meeting, Billy Jr. explained that with the discharge papers completed, when Alchemy turned twenty-one and was no longer in college, there was no legal obligation to give him another cent, and besides, he needed to conserve the money to keep me in Collier Layne. And then he almost giddily added that if the trust ran out of money he’d personally drive me to a “public dump.”

After he dutifully relayed the bad news, we spent the afternoon laughing and reminiscing about good times. Those precious few hours with Alchemy brought me such joy. As we walked to the lobby, he sensed my onrushing despair and promised to return to rescue me.

Good to his word, Alchemy used his signing bonus to sic the Sheik’s lawyers on Billy Jr., and my son became my guardian and gained control of the trust. He moved me to L.A. I lived in his newly bought home for a bit. Nathaniel took a sabbatical and joined us when the Magnolia semester ended, and we (and the first of many “nannies”) moved into a small rented house in Silver Lake.

From the first time I visited L.A., the town’s ballyhooed clichés of eternal sunshine, apocalyptic winds, and lemming-like pursuit of froth and fashion spoke a language of living that eluded my sensibilities. Its soulsmell of a smoldering surfboard, drive-thru ice cream, and tattoo and gun parlor sensated me with intestinal panic.

I tried to live my life as Salome the artist, not as mother of superstar. I thought about finally exhibiting the Baddist Boys collages, but my psychopomps’ undulating warnings whispered, “Too soon, too soon.” I listened.

I prepared a smaller exhibition for the Grand Dame of the L.A. art scene, Lily Fairmont. As the title of the show, I truncated the Diogenes quip, “It’s not that I am mad, it is only that my head is different from yours,” into My Head IS Different . Using the garage in the Silver Lake house as a studio, I painted a series of portraits of other Collier Layne vacationers. I defined them with quasi-abstract squiggly profile lines, color, and brushwork. I can’t say I made one intimate friend during any vacation. I never had a single violent or sexual interaction with any other guest. I only watched and listened. I’ve purposely refrained from detailing the barbaric and profane treatments of group therapy, electroshock, and mind-raping drugs given to others. It is not my right to tell their story. I wouldn’t want any of them to reveal their version of mine.

Some days after the opening, Lily called. Her voice dripped with her sardonic tone, “Honey, two not at all amusing elderly gentlemen want to buy some pieces.” I asked her to describe them. They were standing right there, so she held out the phone. I heard the unmistakable voices: Lively’s slow-winding-lariat-snap drawl and Teumer’s strident Teutonic grumblings. Lily, the anti-Gibbon, agreed that certain people should not have my work. I asked her to put them off and have them return the following afternoon.

The next day, nurse-nanny number one drove me to the gallery. She waited in the car.

I arrived before them and hid in the back room. I watched as she denied them the paintings. Teumer was bloated, rounder, and no longer even vulgarly sexy. Lively, hulking as ever, appeared uneasy. Teumer kept trying to change Lily’s mind and she kept insisting, “Honey, there’s not a chance.”

Unexpected reinforcements arrived in the form of Absurda, Mindswallow, and Pullham-Large, who had missed the opening — not that I cared. They were dropping by before going to a recording session.

I uncloaked myself and emerged from the office. I mouthed to Lively and Teumer, “Stay there,” while I draped the others with histrionic hugs. Absurda and Pullham-Large perused the pieces in the back of the gallery. Mindswallow leaned against the front wall, drinking a beer; art interested him about as much as football did me. I turned to face my nemeses.

“Pig meat sweat! I smell pig meat sweat fresh from the inferno.”