Bruce Bauman - Broken Sleep

Laluna is acting more rock ’n’ roll than any of us. Alchemy, grinning, says, “See, that’s why I love her.”

Funny, though, later that year when we’re back in L.A. for a hiatus between tour legs, he invites me and Lux up to the Topanga house to watch the Super Bowl to see what “we’re missing out on.” That what you call irony? That year, the party is only like ten of us. It starts what becomes his and Laluna’s Super Bowl party tradition.

We changed the sked so the Grand Canyon gig is our final show, which Alchemy says is a true celebration of America, and we make the show free for the two hundred thousand people who show up. HBO broadcasts it live. We take a helicopter up to the top of the mountain and I remember Andrew teases him, “I can see the multitudes … Alchemy, are you going to consume them all tonight?”

“Maybe yes.”

We open with a new song, “Beat Attitudines”:

Declared peace/got war

Kissed the moneychanger ,

Befriended the mocking deranger

Lay between the virgin and the law

Turned wine into water

Who ended up teaching me more?

It’s always love

We’re searching for

Got cheeks to turn/money to burn

The meek got no net worth

Rich claim it’s theirs by birth

Made swords into stock shares

Gave away my golden chairs

Wandered forty days in the sand dunes

Sold my sermon on the mount

They asked for a discount

I sung my American tunes

Dropped my pants/did my peace dance

Prayed for mercy

They treated me worsely

Beautify and rejoice

We are the saviors of tomorrow

’Cause we got no choice

Live in happiness with your sorrow

And don’t hang me up

’Cause I will let you down …

Some rabid believers call that song blasphemous. Me, I think it was blasphemy that we burned through so much money on that concert ’cause with all the permits, lawyers, and cleanup, it cost us like three million bucks.

When we return to L.A., I am still hoping Alchemy’ll change his mind and we’ll do another record, and then, who knows? I don’t see him much because I’m hangin’ with Ricky Jr. in New York ’til I get another death call. Falstaffa passed from the hep C. We knew it was coming, but it still sucked. I wasn’t even forty yet and I buried too many good people. The funeral is one major-league bummer. Me, Lux, Alchy, and Marty are the pallbearers. (A week later, Alchemy pays off Marty with $250K and asks him to “retire.” He never forgot Marty’s trashing Absurda to me all them years before.)

I think it’s kind of strange, ’cause even though she don’t know Falstaffa like us, Laluna don’t show and I’m questioning if they broke up or she caught him, well, being Alchemy. Before we head out, he asks me and Lux if we can come up to Topanga the next Monday.

We meet in the studio. Laluna ain’t there. He has three bottles of Cristal on ice. He’s almost beaming, which is not what I expect. “Laluna is pregnant. She’s had a tough few weeks. Doc came yesterday, and it’s three months and all looks good. We’re announcing it soon.”

Congrats all around and we pop the bubbly and we each take swigs from our bottle. He puts his down and picks up his guitar. “I got a new one. Come to me last week. It’s called ‘Know More.’ ” He starts playing before singing. It has a real slow, bluesy feel. Me and Lux get what it means, but he says it anyway. “When Laluna is up to it we’ll record a coupla more songs. And that’s it, I’m done. No reunions. No nuthin’.” He takes a few giant gulps from his bottle. “I’ve accomplished everything I ever wanted to do in music as the Insatiables, and I couldn’t have done it without you two.”

When Lux goes to take a pee, I ask about that stuff he played for me a couple of years ago.

“It never came again. I’m waiting. Anyway, I’m not sure I’d ever release it.”

Even after twenty years, he don’t always make sense to me.

L.A. felt purgatorial. New York resonated with the vacant chair that was Nathaniel. I wanted love. If not love, I’d settle for great sex. In the last years with Nathaniel I was left to devices of self-fulfillment. I needed my orgasms. I did not want sex to become a memory or fantasy. I considered hiring a younger male nurse. Ha. Too Sweet Bird of Youth .

Alexander Holencraft phoned that he was in L.A. for a week. He asked to meet for dinner in West Hollywood. He greeted me at the restaurant entrance with overblown flattery about how young I look. Even in the dim light, in his disintegration I saw my own. He took my hand. I followed him to the table. We were not alone. Persistence brought me Willibrordus Ildefonsus Ignatius Verdonk, a chief curator at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. His name was virtually unpronounceable, so I called him Tryx. We’d met briefly during the Hammer show when the Sted bought Pillzapoppin’ for their permanent collection. During Nathaniel’s illness, I’d ignored Tryx’s missives, so he hounded Holencraft to reintroduce us. As a twenty-six-year-old grad student traveling in Berlin, he’d seen my performance by the Wall, which ignited a twenty-five-year fantasy.

He wanted to make a documentary about me. With his soulsmell mix of sawdust and soldered silver, I had found a man who wanted to fuck me and who I wanted to fuck.

We set about to make the film Remembrances of Things Past and Future .

Tryx became my accompanist in Amsterdam and New York, choosing art, getting new photographs, and doing interviews for the doc. I could never reveal my mystagogues, so when questioned about my creative method I showed them a never-exhibited painting of red, white, and blue stripes with one word written in each stripe with ministar shapes: Dream. Listen. Sing .

I chose the music we used over Xtine’s montage of videos she’d taken of me working over forty years and mixed in some old photos of Dad’s. Alchemy did an interview that was funny and sweet about how I inspired him to be an artist. That’s when he wrote “Savant Sensation Bluz,” and he also picked other music.

Laluna did not contribute. Our relationship remained unflourished. Alchemy announced his retirement from touring and from the Insatiables. A few months before the opening and preview of the film, he flew to Amsterdam to tell me of my impending grandmotherhood.

Stunned. Overjoyed. Speechless is how I reacted to the news. Without sentiment, Tryx and I parted. I returned to L.A. after the huzzahs over the exhibition quieted. I needed to infuse my granddaughter with my songs.

A few months after the birth of Persephone, Alchemy and Laluna’s daughter, Moses took a day off from the foundation and motored up the 405 to the Skirball Center to attend a daylong symposium expounding upon the works of concentration camp survivor Levi Furstenblum on the twentieth anniversary of his suicide. In spite of, or perhaps because of the past years’ revelations, Moses’s fascination with the Third Reich’s craven depredations continued. How different his questions for Furstenblum would be now than if they’d met fifteen years before.

He sat in a middle-row aisle seat as the panel began debating the meaning of Furstenblum’s views on forgiveness and redemption. The moderator began with a quote from Jacques Derrida’s essay on “unforgiveness” followed by a passage from Furstenblum: