I was well connected in the world of temporary employment. Name on file, assignments began to roll in, at least a couple a week, which were plenty for me. Toil-filled days, when my expertise as a General Office Specialist rescued many a commercial enterprise from the crises provoked by absentees, days subsumed by computer drudgery and telephone answering on behalf of pimperary agency profits, were followed by nights with my sort of people in the de-facto hotel bar, only an elevator ride, and a skip on the sidewalk from my very room.
I had come back spiritually and hormonally refreshed from my vacation in what Lila had designated as that border wonderland between The Valley and Hollywood. My neighbor and bar mate, the cartooning Andrew was in the seat beside me. The Professor, as he similarly was six nights a week was the designated enabler behind the bar. The place was full, and making a racket when a man older than expensive cheese wobbled away from the men’s room and came in our direction. The unshaved and unkempt man squeezed himself between Andrew and me at the bar, smiling, saying not a word. Finally acknowledging him Andrew asked, “How you doing tonight, Stu?”
“Got one for you.”
“All right,” Andrew agreed reluctantly.
“What’s the lightest thing in the world?”
“Ummmm.” Andrew looked at me and I shrugged my shoulders.
“Couldn’t tell you,” Andrew conceded.
“A penis. It’s so light, you can lift it with a thought.”
“Pfft. Pretty funny, Stu,” Andrew commended.
“Not bad at all, Stu,” I concurred.
“Professor,” Andrew barked, summoning the barkeep over.
Instead of complying the Professor yelled from down the bar, “Yeah?”
“Give Stu one on me, okay?”
“Gotcha.”
Stu turned stiffly and began to shuffle past the line of barstools, down to his own.
After acting as paying audience for Stu, Andrew and I turned back around, and watched the final portion of an interview with the former senator, Alan Simpson by Brian Williams on MSNBC. Andrew began a new installment in an ongoing series of interpretations of Brian Williams.
“Brian Williams has got to be a Republican,” Andrew said.
This led to the ritual spat with the Professor. “I’m not any happier about it than you are,” the Professor told him snickering, “but after the first sixty-seven times you pointed it out, I stopped considering the possibility he wasn’t.”
“And either way, I’m telling you now, that you can tell he’s a Republican by his neckties,” Andrew continued.
“How can you tell by his neckties?” I asked.
“If you start checking, you’ll notice he’s always wearing red ties. That’s his way of signaling to the other reactionaries. When Republicans win states, the states are colored red on the electoral maps. Ties are how they wink at each other.”
“Yeah, and when that doesn’t work,” said the Professor, “you can just go by the fact he subtly shades his questions and skews his snide remarks in such a way it’s discernible what his preferences are.”
In the midst of this, from the seat on the other side of me, Sherman, a thin black man with thick glasses, in his late twenties, articulate, a regular for whom it had not been necessary to acquaint himself with the hotel’s accommodations, started to recount his difficulties with, and to ask me questions about ants. No doubt my current residency made me a presumptively knowledgeable source. As we spoke, I heard the Professor say to Andrew on the other side of me, “Try hitting the ashtray every once and a while.”
“Perfectionist,” Andrew could be heard to say.
“I’m running out of bar rags,” the Professor told him, in furtherance of their snappy exchange.
On the other side of me Sherman was saying, “It’s like the Ho Chi Minh Trail…they come marching down from the cabinet. It has to be a whole battalion, carrying supplies. I believe they’re hauling cracker crumbs and pieces of Chip Ahoys, and potato chips from up there. “
“I’m telling you, don’t bother with any of that other crap. Buy those metal stakes that come in a box of ten. Actually, they’re designed to be used in gardens. There’s a hole in them that has some sticky kind of insecticide inside. Put four or five of those stakes around. After only a couple of days, at the very most, you’ll see light at the end of the tunnel.”
“Next time I go to Savon. Nothing’s safe around the place any more.”
“You talking about the guy who got killed?” the Professor asked.
“No,” I answered. “We’re talking about ants.”
The Professor, who already had the remote in his hand, jumped the channel from Fox News, where John Gibson was boring into the camera, to the Mary Tyler Moore Show on Nick-at-Nite. The Professor watched Mary for a moment, and then hopped the channel back to Fox News. He muttered over his shoulder to the rest of us, “I don’t know.” He turned it back to Mary, where Ted Baxter stood delivering news.
“Which one do you want to watch?” the Professor asked.
“Why don’t you flip a coin,” I answered. “It’s exactly the same show.”
A young, well-built black man, wearing extremely baggy pants, a tee shirt and a gold chain had come into the bar, and was sidling up beside Sherman on the left of us to order a drink. The Professor spotted him, and went down to take his order. While the Professor fetched it, I overheard the man in the tee-shirt say to Sherman, “Evenin’.”
“Evenin’,” Sherman answered, no more than politely.
“You like this place, brother?” the man in the tee shirt asked him.
“It’s all right for what it is.”
“What is it?”
“How about the Southern California version of a degenerated Montmarte café,” Sherman informed him, with a sublimely inflated air.
“Whatever that is,” the man in the tee shirt said with a rough laugh.
“I just come in to sit and absorb, and take a few notes,” Sherman elaborated.
The Professor brought the new arrival his drink, and whipped a payment out of the stack of bills the man in the tee shirt had laid out.
“You in the music biz?” the man inquired of Sherman.
“No, I’m not.”
“What kinda hip hop you mostly into, bro?”
“I detest it.”
The man in the tee shirt frowned. “Detest what? Detest hip hop?”
“Yes. Hip hop, rap, rock…I detest it all,” Sherman declared.
“What the fuck you listen to then, brother?” He feigned a chuckle, adding, “You not listening to the voices in your head are you?”
“I have you to listen to.”
The man in the tee shirt cackled and said, “Right. How ‘bout I buy you a drink, Holmes?”
“I’m fine. Thanks though.”
So what you listen to?”
“Ellington.”
“Who?”
“Duke Ellington.”
“That’s it?”
“Nope.”
“Who else?”
“Thelonious Monk…Miles.”
“And that’s it? That shit?”
“That shit, as you say, and a little Sinatra, occasionally Motown, vintage variety.”
“Whew,” the man in the tee shirt exclaimed.
I lost the thread of the free exchange of ideas and opinions to the left of me when distraction intruded in the form of raised voices just to the other side of Andrew. A single voice summoning, “Professor,” loudly, and then a second time even louder, “Professor,” drew my attention. Shouting before looking over to see who was in fact summoning him, the Professor snapped, “What?”
A large blonde man with hair combed down in his face, and bushy, long sideburns bellowed, “Hey, you’re too young to be a professor, Professor.”
The Professor glanced up, and with a look of recognition, approached the blonde-haired man as well as the man standing beside him a
t the bar.
“Try to keep the yelling below the supersonic boom level, boys. Are you lover boys having any luck tonight?”
The blonde man turned to the other man and asked, “Are we having any luck tonight?”
I leaned forward, and craned my neck around Andrew to get a better look. Both men at the bar were wearing uniform shirts with names sewn on. The large blonde man’s shirt displayed the name Bob, while the shirt of his companion, a thin man with a deeply receding hairline bore the name Ray.
Ray answered drunkenly, “No. We never do.”
“Everybody has luck,” Bob corrected him. “No such thing as no luck. Fuck, we don’t need luck; we need cooter. My kingdom, my kingdom for some cooter pie,” he beseeched dramatically, with arms upraised. “Ain’t that so Professor? Hey, you’re too young to be a professor, Professor.”
“I believe you mentioned that,” the Professor reminded him calmly. “You men remember what I said, and keep it down to a dull roar. Enjoy yourselves.”
The Professor turned and sauntered back down the bar. Andrew had control of the remote, and he resumed acting as spellbound witness to an interrogation of Merv Griffith by Charlie Rose. I resorted once more to eavesdropping on Sherman and his recently acquired debating partner. When I picked up on the conversation again, the man in the tee shirt was asking Sherman, “Brother, you interested in politics at all?”
“If it’s a part of politics that pertains to me, yeah, I’m extremely interested.”
“That’s what I’m saying about the hip hop artists, a lot of the lyrics is politics that has to do with us. Take Dre or Jay-Z…didnya you ever listen to Public Enemy back in the day?”
“I’m all in agreement with Chuck D’s politics, I just don’t have any affinity with his kind of music…so called music.”
“So called music? You rough man…you awfully rough on some brothers.”
“You brought it up.”
“I tell you what my brother,” he told Sherman, “you seem smart. I just like feeling you out.”
“I understand.”
“What you do for a living?”
Sherman replied to him softly, “Let’s just say I’m currently between jobs.”
“So what was the last one you had? And what’s the next one you plannin’ to have if you say you in-between ‘em?”
I turned away from the two of them, when Andrew stabbed my ribs with the business end of an elbow. After my involuntary, “Owww,” I swung around on him with the look that demanded to know, “What the fuck was that?”
He nodded toward the door and apprised, “Look at this.”
Just inside the doorway, moving easterly toward the male customer leaned against a post with his drink in hand was a slightly emaciated and sloppily dressed transvestite. The leaner leveled a pre-emptive, threatening glare, and the new arrival serving double duty moved past. A muscular Latino man awaiting an order from the Professor was approached next, as he patiently stood in back of Andrew. All three of us heard the transvestite say to the man, “I’m looking to suck some cock. Like me to suck yours?”
The prospective recipient of fellatio remained calm and sternly advised the failing seducer, “Move on.”
The Latino man’s good fortune, when the transvestite behaved as he had been advised, became Andrew’s misfortune, as the transvestite stumbled forward to him.
“I’m dying to suck on your cock,” the transvestite vamped at Andrew. “Whaddya think?”
“I think you’d have a better chance lady if you didn’t scratch your balls while you were asking.”
Down the bar, Bob, the big, drunken blonde man had observed with interest the transvestite standing in profile. He hollered, “You can come right over here darling.”
The transvestite spun around, straightened up, and moved in Bob’s direction. The alarmed, and possibly chastened sober Bob, screamed, “No. Go back. Go back over there. Go back.”
The resigned, now four-time loser once again turned around, this time marching directly into the men’s room.
Rising voices to the left of me put the swivel in my neck again. The black man wearing the tee shirt was barking at Sherman in a riled voice. “Be careful, walkin’ ‘round with dat dere colored skin. You gone’ get arrested for impersonating somebody of my race.”
Brooking no guff, Sherman retaliated, “Street cred doesn’t impress me friend. Means zero, less than zero to me. The African race has a very long history of sophistication. This thuggish, ignorant, illiterate street niggah stuff totally misrepresents our people and our heritage. It’s an embarrassment as far I’m concerned.”
Nearly crackling with voltage, the tee-shirted man responded, “You say I’m embarrassing?”
“In your way.”
The man in the tee shirt got a hold of Sherman around the neck, put him in a headlock, while repeatedly grunting the word, “Motherfucker.”
Sherman squiggled and squirmed. He finally managed to use his legs to push his barstool away from the bar, and onto the floor. The men followed shortly thereafter. The professor separated them, and straddling Sherman offered him a hand up. He said to the man in the tee shirt, “I don’t know what the problem is bud, but you need to leave.”
“Glad to,” the man said. “Fuck his motherfucking Tom ass.”
As the man in the tee shirt dusted himself off and left, the Professor, pulling Sherman up by the hand, asked, “What in the hell was that about?”
“Duke Ellington.”
“Come again?”
Being in the unenviable and unusual position of having to rise in the morning to report along with other of the suffering gainfully employed, my better judgment surpassed its more reliable inferior. I chose to spread my good-byes around, while the premises were still atwitter with our eye blink of a scuffle’s wake.
I reported the following morning to the receptionist’s desk at Cerebral Features, a production company specializing in the making of documentaries. Instructions descended from the Head of Research, under whose purview was a squadron of researchers; beneath them, yours truly served. The boss was a large female, who with her dirty blonde, and twitching ponytail looked from behind a little like Mr. Ed. Her voice resounded with the same stentorian boom of authority. Often using the “royal we,” she presented my duties with the emphasis on the minutiae, using a simplicity of delivery that permitted even the help…me, in other words, to comprehend in full.
I was to be in command and would in fact comprise the entire workforce of the Cerebral Features Resource Center. My job was to hold the fort for the regular overseer of the domain taking vacation. The repository over which I would reign included non-fiction, and fiction books; reference volumes galore; documents, government records, archived magazines, journals and periodicals, videos, and a battery of internet-juiced computer terminals. Fundamentally I was there only to check materials out, and to monitor their usage. I wasn’t convinced the company couldn’t just give keys to everyone and let them come and go as they pleased, checking out the material of their own accord.
“Cerebral wants,” said The Head, “ for there to be accountability, as well as security, particularly when it comes to our equipment.”
The physical space was loft-size, downtown New York loft size by the way: vaster than the words cavernous or gymnasium convey.
Cerebral Features I came to learn, had three full-length documentaries actively in production. One I was told, took the life, times and family origins of the painter Robert Rauschenberg as its subject. Subjects having to do with the various arts, as well as biographies of artists were frequent and cherished topics of the company’s pictures. Another film in the works was a biographical investigation of the butcher-cum-furrier-cum-banker-cum-icon of capitalism-cum-plutocrat’s plutocrat, John Jacob Astor. The third film underway delved into the individual slice of the hip-hop world carved by Suge Knight, a
rags to better rags in the inner-city story, with all the attendant flying lead, and with the working title: The Life and Times of Suge Knight. The Research Center had in its collection, or had access to material or information about those very subjects of course, and as a research facility appeared loaded for bear.
My first day on the job was uneventful, as uneventful as it was in any way possible for a day to be. Not a living, breathing human form walked through the door for its entirety. I sat there like a flowerpot the first half of the day hoping to present the demeanor of waiting expectantly to be watered. Sometime in the afternoon, I pulled a book from a shelf and read till quitting time. The second day I brought a book of my own, and by afternoon, with the tally of foot traffic still not budged from zero took to one of the computers, and fooled around online the rest of the day.
Moving about at the company beyond the empty enormity of The Resource Center I encountered other employees jitterbugging from place to place, assuring me no general disaster or catastrophe had wiped the personnel slate clean, so to speak. The Head had neither visited, nor communicated with me electronically, telephonically, or otherwise. On the third day I switched from playing online in the afternoon, to playing online in the morning, taking up a book in the afternoon initially, but finally falling asleep. Still no researchers had made the traversal from the theoretical to the corporeal as far as the acting Head of The Resource Center could attest. Research on any current or future documentary production, or anything else had yet to be done in the Resource Center during my becalmed watch.
I’d been circumspect in my pursuit of derangement of the senses each of the evenings previous to a day at work. On the eve of my fourth day I succumbed to multiple temptations, and on the following day slept from morning till lunch, undisturbed by activity of any kind, then after a noon repast, slumbered till the so-called workday reached its end. Thursday night I developed the universally occurring, “flu-like symptoms,” with their possible causes reaching infamously to infinitude, and feeling feverish, wondered if I would be capable tomorrow, not so much of making it through the workday, but through the much more stressful, and burdensome effort of traveling across town. The pimperary didn’t care for absences due to alleged illness, but were more forgiving when there was evidence of a doctor or an emergency room visit. In order to ascertain the severity of my fever, and assess the worth of making a journey to a hospital, or an Emergi-Care I needed to take my temperature. Undaunted that a thermometer was not among my possessions, I asked around, till I received the tip that my neighbor across the hall, a gaunt man heavily predisposed to, and perhaps religiously devoting his life to the use of stimulants was a current thermometer owner.
I knocked on my neighbor’s door, but getting no response, after forty-five or fifty seconds knocked again. After the sound of footsteps, a man asked a grouchy, “Yeah?”
“It’s Donovan, your neighbor across the hall.”
My hall-mate let me in, reedy as ever, silver-headed, with a silver goatee to match. “I wondered if I could use the thermometer you have. I need to see if I have a temperature.”
He led me to a chest of drawers, rummaged in the drawer third from the top and pulled out the standard thermometer.
“You know how to work it?”
“Yes.”
He returned to the bed, where obviously he’d been sitting before I had interrupted, picking up a spoon with a powder in it and holding it over a flame pluming above a burner. A younger man with shoulder length hair was sitting in an armchair a couple of feet away.
I took the thermometer into the bathroom, turned the hot water on, and ran it until the steam emanated from the stream. Then I held the thermometer under the spigot until I’d scalded every living microorganism to death, before changing the flowing water from hot to cold. When the thermometer seemed sufficiently cooled, I took it into the other room, sat down on a grocery crate and inserted the thermometer in my mouth. In the meantime, the two men in the room with me talked while they cooked the mother’s milk.
The man in the armchair said, “Why do they call it freebasing?”
“I don’t know, Jimmy” the man on the bed answered.
“It don’t have nothin’ to do with baseball?”
The man on the bed’s stare lingered on Jimmy’s face for a while before he told him, “I don’t really see the connection, Jimmy.”
“Well shit.”
“You didn’t leave anything cooking on your hot plate again did you?” the man on the bed asked.
Jimmy shook his head no.
“You sure?”
“Yeah.”
“If you want to go down there and check to see, go now. Christ.”
“Ain’t nothin’ on it man. Shit.”
“All right.”
Then they sat silently staring at the bubbling liquid. I sat on my crate with the thermometer in my mouth.
All of the sudden, the man on the bed said to Jimmy, “Jimmy, I guess it slipped my mind, but you know you're right about that baseball thing. “
Jimmy furrowed his brow and said, “What baseball thing?”
The man on the bed closed his eyes for a second and shook his head. “Baseball being the origin of the term freebase.”
Jimmy ticked up his head in recognition. “Yeah?”
“This coca shit, it comes from down there in Colombia and Bolivia and Peru, those kinds of countries. And…I know you know this...all those baseball players come from down there...pro players in the majors, guys like Jesus, Felipe, Roberto, that kind of shit.”
“Yeah.”
“So these guys, playing ball down in South America, instead of chewing tobacco, or something else, they chew on these coca leaves...Indians down there used to do it...ballplayers got it from them.”
“Huh.”
“So, when these players would get on base, they'd have this really excellent boost from chewing the coca leaves, and they'd be able to steal more bases, or run for an extra base on a hit...a free base...freebase...”
“Damn.”
I took the thermometer out of my mouth and checked the mercury. It had come to a standstill at the 99.6 mark…one above par. I couldn’t get a decent note from an emergency room or a doctor with that. It appeared I wasn’t terribly sick. Mine perhaps, were only the delayed symptoms of a time-release hangover coming home to roost. It is the classic situation: miserable in body or mind with a misery that resists quantification whenever the time comes to put the misery to decent use.
I stood, held up the thermometer and informed my neighbor the medical testing was done. I thanked him for use of his equipment, and told him I’d be on my way. As for the thermometer he instructed, “Throw it on the dresser.” My nostrils seemed to rise expectantly, as traces of the acrid bouquet floating from the men’s vicinity wafted past. I was unable to locate sufficient remorselessness to try to horn in on the two desperados’ happy smoke.
I took the aimless route to our de-facto drinking annex next door. I still was feeling no better than crumby. When truly sick, and it was necessary to be absent from work it was beneficial to get the note, regardless of the cost of the medical visit, in order to stay off the pimperary’s infamous blacklist…not actually a blacklist, but only the bottom of a list to be called to work, which instead of a blacklist, perhaps more accurately could have been tabbed a black bottom. Among the complaints and disgruntlements I carried into the bar with me inside my personal blue bubble of miasma were: that the hotel I occupied was listed in lodging guides as a five star hotel for rats; that the jobs I worked were worse than electrodes planted in the brain by the CIA as far as their effectiveness at making you go mental; that the world was upside down, and inside out, perpetuating its built-in advantage to, and remaining under the spell of jackals, preening peacocks and hyenas who understood the rest of us all too well for our own good.
I sincerely launched the first drink still intending not to cannibalize my vigor the night before a day of work as a hired hand. Hours later, having sustained through at least a couple changing shifts of dipsomaniacs and fair-weather boozers, I had become thick with the man who had spent a long span of time on the stool beside me. Certainly as we talked and drank, the length of our respective tethers from any commonly agreed standard of sobriety stretched in unison.
“Where is the sunny side of this street, that’s what I want to know?” he asked, not so much out of the blue as out of sequence. I told him I would let him know where it was as soon as he bought me another drink.
“I’m tired,” he said at some point.
“I know the feeling. I hate to see you go,” I added truthfully, “but maybe you should turn in your glass for the night and rest up.”
“No. Not that kind of tired.”
“No?”
“Everything is tired. All of it is worn out. I’m so tired of everything being tired…I mean the ‘I have a dream’ thing I’ve done to myself so much I’m laughing at the fucking thing myself, really laughing, at the impossibility anything, I mean anything will ever, could ever go your way…you know, something important enough to give you some dignity. And besides that, when even every single trace of mystery about how the screwers continually screw the screwees is gone, and you realize there wont be anymore of the titillation you got from those revelations, you know you’re really in a permanent pit of blah.”
This struck me as extremely funny. Extremely funny in a bitter way or bitterly sad way, I concede.
I replied, “Nobody said it was going to be a tank of laughing gas. I wish they’d said, or hinted that it was going to be like having your ears sheared off with a Black and Decker saw.”
This made him cackle, the both of us now not so much happy drunks, as drunks with spasmodic funny bones. The man had said little about himself, an inclination I understood more than adequately.
He said, “It’s all pro-forma. That’s not the party line. If it was, nobody would even bother; so I guess the deities in charge know what they’re doing.”
“There are deities in charge of this? Listen, nobody ever said…here I go again with the nobody said…maybe somebody said it, we just didn’t hear it, that whoever set all this up so it would cause so much hair-pulling was stupid or incompetent.”
He was average size, had a ruddy face, curly dark hair, probably handsome to women but who the hell knew. He was likely older than me, but not by much, I didn’t think. Though I knew little about him other than his capacity for gin, he had mentioned listening to classical music, and even that he liked to compose it. I wasn’t clear if he meant compose it in a casual way or a serious way. He said he didn’t like to talk about it and I needed no additional emphasis to understand him. As far as composing was concerned, I think the problem was that hardly anybody had ever seen or heard what he’d composed.
“You’re doomed, you sense it from the beginning,” he said. “You want to kill yourself, but you convince yourself it’s premature. But naaaah. You’re fooling yourself. God, I hate that.”
“Me too. More than anything.” The Professor, acting as a sort of composite Olympic committee of judges, gave our state of intoxication, and attendant asininity through his words and body language the equivalent of 9’s and 10’s all the way across.
“Jesus I feel pounded down.”
I didn’t answer, just took a gulp of my drink.
“If I’d been totally without a scrap of luck or ability, or talents, particularly luck in a lot of things, it would have made sense, or been easier for me to accept, or to understand. Why dump all this in my lap if it’s only going to end up entirely squandered? ‘It’s all up to you.’ Up to me, my motherfucking ass.”
He became more self-revelatory, not as a result of urging, prodding or baiting from me, as the gin continued to pour into the reservoir.
“I’ve spent so much time composing, thousands upon thousands of hours over years and years. There’s nothing to show for it. Not a thing. Nothing.”
“I probably know as little about modern classical music as it’s possible to know. ”
“A lot of people composing for fewer and fewer listeners.”
“Did you study it?”
“I was a music major in college, concentrating on piano, but that doesn’t really have to do with anything. I didn’t go on with the academic study of composing. Basically I’m self-taught.”
“So how did you learn to do it?”
“Building on the foundation of musical training I’d had, reading tons of scores, listening to recordings to make the correspondences between the scores and the instrumentation…the actual sounds from the records.”
The man excused himself to the restroom. The Professor leaned in and said, “A guy from the college in Santa Clara was in here one time hanging out with that guy, and he told me the guy writes incredible music.”
“Seems pretty sharp.”
“I’m not much of a classical music type.”
“No kidding? I thought you spent all your time away from here going to symphonies.”
“No, but I keep hoping you’ll spend more time away from here.”
“I know about the usual classical music suspects, but beyond that…I guess I’m reasonably content with my ignorance.”
“You’d think with more alcohol you’d be less sarcastic.”
“I know. It doesn’t seem to work.”
“It doesn’t.”
When my freshly bonded pal returned to the seat beside me he lowered himself to sit, barely touching his pants to the seat before shooting back up as though the seat were a scalding stovetop. Then he stood in front of it craning his neck down and around to examine himself.
”See if I forgot to do anything before I left the bathroom…if I can put it so elegantly,” explaining himself, before taking a drunk’s care to scrutinize his clothing to be absolutely certain the I’s were dotted and the T’s were crossed, if you will.
“I think you check out,” I offered, “even though I’m probably not the world’s most eagle-eyed inspector at the moment.”
“I’ll consider myself to have passed since I don’t see any potential inspectors here who look to me to be in better condition.”
“But then in your condition, who are you to judge?” I asked hooting like a drunk.
He sat back down, and after I had scooped the cocktail napkin I’d sent airborne off the floor where it had landed, retrieving it with the gracefulness of a penguin eating baby peas with chopsticks and balancing on a longneck bottle of Coors, both of us were back in our seats.
“I’m pretty sure you’re the first classical music composer I’ve made acquaintance with in here.” I mentioned, taking up my drink again.
“You’re meeting them in the right order, starting at the bottom and moving up, if level of public accomplishment or extent of recognition are criteria.”
“Fuck ‘em,” I said, “if they can’t take a joke,” coming close, but getting no cigar for the direct relationship of my response to the statement made.
“Yeah,” he said somewhat sullenly, reflecting on the dismalness of his perceived stature, or feeling the silliness of my response as a kind of dismissal.
“What do you do with compositions?” I asked, reiterating my interest. “Unless they have an orchestra handy, what do composers do with music? If it’s music for piano I suppose you perform it yourself.”
“I use the piano to compose, but I don’t perform. I don’t care for performing. When you’re composing but not performing…that’s known as being a pure composer. And no, I don’t like the unfortunate suggestion of purity,” he added with a boozy chuckle.
“Then what’s supposed to happen to the compositions? What do you do with them when you’re finished?”
“For somebody like me, the main thing, about the only thing you can do is try
to hook yourself up with a music publisher. You try to find one who’ll publish your scores.”
“I’ll spit into the wind and guess you’ve already tried that.”
He laughed harshly and said, “You could say I have.”
“So that’s the whole ballgame basically, at least for people who don’t perform themselves? Music publishing companies are it?”
“You can send them out cold to orchestra directors, or conductors, but the actual person you send them to rarely sees them.”
“Who sees them?”
“Assistants, secretaries, screeners, flunkies, sycophants … everybody but.”
“The way of the world,” I proclaimed with a knowledgeable belch.
“So it seems…at least if my miserable existence is any guide.”
If it’s possible to inwardly wince I did so when his sorrow and frustration expressed themselves so acutely. “The guardians at the gate, and not very astute ones at that,” I managed.
“Looks that way to me.”
“So what would this hypothetical music publisher do, what do they do with scores? What do they do for the composer in the eventuality these hypothetical scores actually get accepted?”
“They make money off copyrights and royalties. But classical music is the least commercially viable of it all, surprise, surprise.”
“I don’t know Bach from Botox.”
“No?”
“Not as bad as that really. I have an occasional fling with classical.”
“That’s all we ask,” he said, smiling again. He called for the Professor to provide refurbishment to his empty glass, and as the need was being addressed continued. “Music publishers publish the scores, they produce sheet music, they distribute it for rental, for studying, or in the best case scenario, performance. They lay out money to promote the composers they represent. Nowadays, they finance the production of demos; they hire somebody to play the score, make CD’s they can send around to record companies. The publisher signs a contract with the record company, and then the record company finds artists to record the music, then sells the records, and so on and so on. The publisher usually promotes the music for television or movies or videos…even theater musicals, or advertisements, anything and everything.”
“Does it usually work…I mean, once the publisher accepts somebody and gets the process rolling?”
“Sometimes a composer gains recognition, sometimes not. Sometimes the publisher and the composer turn a profit, other times they don’t. It’s a crapshoot like everything else. I don’t know what the odds are, but I doubt they’re good.”
“So, say there’s a little success, how do you, or, how does this theoretical composer make money? Royalties?” I tried to be careful now to make the questions as painlessly impersonal as humanly possible.
“Voila. For somebody like me, royalties. If people start to commission scores, commission symphonies or chamber music or whatever, you’re home free, financially, or at least able to make a living above subsistence.”
He took a Thirsty Man gulp of gin. “Commissions are a major source of income for composers, especially pure composers who don’t perform.” After a pause he added, “Of course, I don’t do anything at all, other than write music, send it out, then throw the envelopes away when they send it back.” He emitted a piercing sigh. “I’ve never made a penny, never made any money whatsoever, never gotten a dime for composing music. I’ve never heard any of my music performed. Failed, completely.”
“Last call,” the Professor belted out, its arrival as astonishing to the ears of patrons, as Taps would be played above the undead. But to me its timing was a relief, saving me from an immediate need of response to something I had no decent response for.
“This isn’t the oblivion I was hoping for,” my buddy said. “This work is far from done.”
“I admire the ambition,” I told him, “but given the time, I think you’re staggering at windmills.”
“Not necessarily,” he said.
Overhearing, the Professor admonished, “You’re forcing me to say this…the good news is: you don’t have to go home. The bad news is: you can’t stay here.”
My new pal piped up, “I remember things…like my name, my address, and most of my personal history.”
“What is your name?”
“Fred. What’s yours?”
“Donovan.”
“Fred and Donovan. Sounds like tap dancers or a fucking gospel music duet, or worse.”
“It doesn’t sound good.”
“We should keep this going. I’ve got some weed at home.”
“How far is home? I need to have a reasonable shot at getting back here…I live at Hotel Terminus,” gesturing toward my lodgings.
“Like two and a half blocks away.”
“Weed, huh?”
“Good stuff.”
“Well nobody ever says, ‘I got some weed’ or ‘I got some blow, but it’s really lousy.”
“Usually not. But this is good stuff.”
We got the last ones from the Professor, disposed of them, and adjourned to the street. We did the moonwalk down the cratered sidewalk to Fred’s place. The clouds had blown ashore so we noisily ricocheted past a gauntlet of mist-bound, and yellow drooping streetlamps, palm fronds poking out of feathery sheaths above our heads. His part of the neighborhood two blocks west, and half a block north of mine was better than my own by a factor of the slightest amount above negligible. His housing wasn’t too bad, however. It was a lower middle-class complex of weathered, though not battered bungalows.
The inside walls were orange. Fred had a living room with a gaping sofa that was virtually a siren’s call to languidness, a coffee table, a couple of big, worn, low-slung chairs, bookshelves sagging with tomes, some sheet music, a stereo, and a pile of neatly arranged CD’s. It wasn’t all that different from my own little slices of Beatdom over the years.
“I have some gin here. You drink gin?”
“In combat conditions, yeah. By any means necessary.”
The bedroom housed his piano, but other than that room was left for little except a mattress, part of which lay beneath the piano. A bottle and two glasses came back with him from the kitchen. He sat on the sofa. I sat in one of the chairs. We downed some gin and he produced his tiny bat pipe and a plastic bag of green. He’d been right and I’d been cynical. The chronic was good. Tubs of vodka, of gin, of superior ganja, and I barely knew where I was.
It wasn’t long before we got back to topics we had saddled ourselves with at the bar. As it had begun to do there, merriment was leaving the building.
“Hold onto your dream, that’s the lesson, hold onto your dream,” Fred mocked, calling up award acceptance remarks from a thousand points of celebrity.
“You’ve inspired me, Fred.”
“Christ.”
I tried to light a smoke, but the lighter, no matter how many times I ground the metal together refused to spark. But matches were on the coffee table beside our pouch of vegetation. Cigarette in one hand, a drink in the other, I pontificated as though it were cocktail hour at the Kiwanis.
“Don’t give up, Fred. If you work hard, work your fingers to the bone, never give up, never, never stop…well, there’s no stopping you. Hell, if you never stop, there wouldn’t be any stopping you…so, looks like logic is in your favor, Fred.”
He looked gloomy.
“You’ll get there, Fred, old Freddy boy, you’ll get there.” I was spinning like a top now. Perhaps some flotsam of merriment remained, but was blowing south.
”Yeah,” he muttered woozily, “hard work, persistence…fuck me… honing, perfecting your abilities, fuck that…staying different from the rest, different from the rest, yeah, yeah…fuck, fuck fuck. Tell me more motherfucking lies, please.” He held up his drink. “Here here, more lies, more lies…lies, lies,” and he was really reeling.
“I don’t care much for your pessimism, Fred.”
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His face cracked a sliver of a smile.
“I really have worked…hard and ambitiously, persistently, doggedly…I’m almost certain I’m extremely good, and authentically original, Donovan. I wouldn’t say that to anybody else. I never have. Sorry,” he apologized, sounding fleetingly as if he was dead sober. “All of it to no effect.”
“I bet you are, Fred. Goddamn right you are. No need to apologize, for any fucking thing.”
I was suddenly conscious of some dreadful kind of discomfort just below my waist, until I realized I hadn’t urinated in an ice age or two. I took my turn in the facility, and when I sat back down in my chair, a copy of Final Exit, the famous self-help book for suicides, with its recipes and its tables and charts and descriptions for the savvy consumer who wished to ensure the most effective suicide money could buy was lying cover up on the coffee table. I realized then as well, that we had been surrounded by an acoustic bombardment of piano and symphony, something of a particularly lachrymose variety. Fred’s head was down and resting in his palms as though it was throbbing with pain.
“What’s the matter, Fred?”
“I can’t do this any more, I can’t…I can’t, I can’t,” he said in an agonized voice. “I can’t do any of it anymore. I’m not going to…no, I can’t. I’m taking off. Fuck it.” He took another heavy belt of gin and kind of swooned back against the sofa cushion.
“This music may not be helping how you feel. It’s sort of on the sad side. What is it?”
“Scriabin,” he said. “The Russian composer, Scriabin.”
I’d just begun answering, “I’ve heard of him,” when he bounced from the sofa over to the music system, stopped what was coming out of the speakers, made a rapid vertical scan of the stacks of discs, singled one out and stuck it in the machine. As he was sitting back down a fairly perky Scott Joplin ragtime began to fill the room.
“Toe-tapper,” he said, taking another hit from the pipe.
“Uh huh,” I said flatly, dazed by the Dada incongruity of the total situation.
He leaned forward and flipped the book back over, then put his index finger on the page and slid it down, finally moving it left to right across the page. He looked up at me for a second and said, “Don’t worry about any of this.”
“I don’t know,” I said uncertainly.
“Shit,” he said, getting up from the sofa and going into the kitchen. I lit another smoke, and leaned back in the chair with my gin. Scott Joplin’s piano tinkled sunnily along. Eight or nine minute later, sensing through my layers of medication that Fred hadn’t returned from the kitchen, I sprang up, and looked in. He was standing at a kitchen counter, gripping a pestle in his hand and twisting it inside a bowl. There was a glass of milk beside the bowl on one side, and on the other, six or seven overturned pill containers.
“What are you doing?” I asked with unconcealed alarm.
“Making myself something to drink,” he answered.
I walked over and stood to his left. I picked up one of the prescription bottles and was squinting at the label when he said, “Seconal.” Then he pulled a sugar bowl out from against the wall, removed the lid, revealing a brown looking powder and told me, “Cyanide.”
“Jesus Fred.”
He mixed it all in together, and pounded away with the pestle.
“Come on, Fred,” I beseeched. “You know I can’t stand here letting this happen.”
“Don’t stand there, then,” he said with a grim, stoned giggle. He upended the bowl, and dumped the pill powder down into the liquid, then began to stir it with a spoon, until he had a glass of rich chocolaty lethal milk. Suddenly he appeared to sort of buckle at the knees, trying to hold himself up by hanging onto the edge of the counter.
“Come on, man,” I said, pulling at him and loosening his grip, causing him to cling instead to me. Then I shuffled with him back to the living room and dropped him on the sofa.
By the time I got back to the armchair his eyes were closed. By the time I had a cigarette burning in my mouth he was loudly snoring. I sat there, perhaps an hour, possibly an hour and a half. The ragtime never stopped. I turned the living room lights out and went into the kitchen. The killer milkshake was sitting there, along with the rest of it. I figured Fred would likely wake up from his drunken night, take a look at it and be scared straight. I considered the possibility, stretching the definition of what it is to “consider” when one is in the state I was in, that he might be reinvigorated with the “can-do spirit” next morning and try again. “I doubt it,” I said aloud. I thought of dumping it in the sink but said to myself, “Maybe the shit’s expensive.” I hated to waste it, even if it was deadly poison. It was after all, his deadly poison. So I left it. If he was going to do the thing, having to go to the trouble of mixing up another batch wasn’t going to stop him. I guess I could have called the cops, but both snitching, and coercing someone to live went strongly against my peculiar grain, more so because of, or despite, being stupefied with drink and weed.
The next morning I actually resurrected and got myself to Cerebral Features. Once there the day’s toil more or less had been completed. I scrunched myself into the fetal position in my chair behind the desk and snoozed. The severity of physiological deterioration inflicted the night before dragged at me like sopping, muddy clothes. Woozy, weak, anemic, and fully pitted in the gut, I slept without waking till three in the afternoon. Improved, I closed up shop for the duly authorized lunch break, walked down to the nearby deli for a sub and a monster Coke. Feeling much better after that I returned to my post at the Cerebral Features Resource Center, where nary a documentarian roamed. Easing back into my chair, feeling relaxed, satiated and warm, though still beat, I yawned, heaved a drawn out sigh, and within a few minutes returned to a deep slumber. I ended up putting in a little overtime, unauthorized and unpaid of course, leaving for good near the waning of dusk. The Head’s office door was standing open when I passed, so I stopped, and let her know I was going. She thanked me for my service, and asked me how the week had gone, inquiring if there had been, “many difficulties at all?”
“Cakewalk,” I told her.
The workweek, as it were, concluded, I stopped off in my room for cosmetic sprucing up before heading down to the pied-a-dive for cocktails. After the Professor brought the first he made a crack about the “spectacle of consumption” Fred and I had provided the night before. In between naps during the day I had recalled the previous night, though nothing had caused me to reassess the likelihood of Fred’s rebound the following day. Yet sitting there now with a drink I was visited by misgivings.
After another one, both for fortification and to finish off my work-related stress, I paid up and moved on. The cool air was tingling already with a trace of typical Friday night sizzle and the streets had begun to bottleneck with weekend traffic. The travel time to Fred’s seemed quicker than the night before. After the short walk, I confidently located the bungalow again, and knocked at his door. To my relief, the door opened. Fred was standing there wearing a coat as if he was about to leave. He had a box wedged under an arm. Rather than invite me in, he stepped outside.
“How’s it going?” I greeted him.
“That’s a hard one. I was just stepping out for a minute,” he said, closing the door behind him. “Why don’t you come with me?”
“All right. Where are we going?”
“Come on,” was all he said, and started walking.
We walked along the sidewalk, passing bungalows on one side, parked cars on the other. Turning onto another sidewalk we continued until finally passing through the open gate in a wrought iron fence. We were in back of all the bungalows, stopped at the edge of a concrete patio beyond which there was a tiny yard. Far in the back of the yard was the community dumpster. I had stopped when Fred had stopped. He brought his cigarettes out and began to smoke. Standing beside him, I did the same, the two of us smoking and staring int
o the darkened yard.
“I wanted to see how you were doing,” I said.
“I’m doing fine. He’s not.”
“He? Who’s he?”
He pulled the box from under his arm and held it in his outstretched arms. “Van Dyke Parks is dead.”
“Huh?”
“My cat. Van Dyke Parks is the name of my cat. He went into the kitchen last night while I was zonked, got up on the counter and drank some bad milk, really bad milk.”
“Right. The milk. You have a cat?”
“I did.”
“So the other Van Dyke Parks is still alive?”
“As far as I know. I hope so.”
“Where in the hell was your cat last night when I was there?”
“He hides when people come over.”
Fred started forward again, and I followed him through the yard. I walked beside him up to the dumpster. I told him I was sorry his cat was dead. He took a cat toy out of a pocket of the heavy parka he was wearing, opened the makeshift casket with Van Dyke Parks inside, lovingly laid the cat toy in, and replaced the lid. He blew a hard stream of smoke out between his teeth. It was a chilly night, chilly enough that we could see our breath in the air too. We stood a few moments more silently smoking the cigarettes. Fred heaved the box with the cat inside over the side and into the maw of the dumpster.
“I never saw that cat,” I said