Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me Read online

  “Where you been, baby?” asked one of the vampires, pupils adrift in a sea of mulberry blood vessels, “it’s all been happening since you split.”

  “Talking to the mirror, man, you ever try it?”

  “Don’t put me on.”

  “Dig it sometime. Dig your mouth.”

  “You’re putting me on.”

  “Lip-synch goes off just a hair, slips ahead. Now be a good chic an’ get me a Red Cap, would you? Who’s the hairy cat with the ax?”

  “Locomotive. And get your own goddamned beer.”

  Gnossos picked a piece of her leotard between thumb and forefinger, hissed, and whispered, “Your life is in danger.” Youngblood at the same time gave him the high sign, and Locomotive sang:

  M is for the Methedrine you gave me,

  O is for the Opium we knew . . .

  “What’s up?” from Gnossos.

  “Nothing much, really. Maybe something in that other room, from the sound of it.”

  “I’m hip, but they’re choosy about guests.”

  “So it seems. I’m glad you came back, anyway, we wanted to talk to you.”

  “Hey listen, that girl I split with, that Kristin chic, you know anything about her?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Like I said.”

  “She’s a friend of Jack’s, I think. Why?”

  “Nothing, man.” The vampire arriving with a tray of opened Red Caps, potato chips, and a bowl of creamy dip. She set it down next to the stoned Locomotive, who continued to sing with his shirt open, chest like a bear rug, thick lumpy glasses staring at the floor. “That’s all’s left,” said she timidly.

  “Have a nightcap, Youngblood,” from magnanimous Sophocles.

  “What else you want, baby?” the vampire taking a new tack, folding up next to them, blinking back runny mascara.

  “And old Rosenbloom over there,” said Gnossos, ignoring her. “What’s his story? All those names.”

  “I’m available,” said the vampire to her amulet.

  “He’s German.”

  “No.”

  “You didn’t know that? Parents shipped him to Venezuela, got scared the war would spread and had him converted.”

  “Catholic?”

  “He picked up on it, that’s the weird part. He’s very devout.”

  Poor old Jew. Saint Christopher keeps him safe in his wanderings. Me without a rebus, too vulnerable. “Oh, and another thing, Youngblood. This Pankhurst deal you keep in front. I’m a-political, right? No girl scout cookie campaigns, P.T.A. meetings, anything like that. I assume it’s what you wanted to talk about. They start moving in on my pad, I’ll deal with it all privately. But this committee-style setup; wow, really.”

  “You don’t have to be so stand-offish, Paps. All the other independents—”

  “Truly, man, you’d be wasting rhetoric, it’s not my pattern. Dig the Crusades. Lots of guys got hamstrung and staked out. The rest got the Turkish clap. Nobody got the old grail.”

  T is for the Trip to Coney Island

  H is for a Heroin Ragout . . .

  “I got a little mixture left,” said the vampire, “you wanna make some movies?”

  “Just the Red Cap, ducks.”

  “Lush does your head, baby.”

  “Ain’t lush, it’s Red Cap.”

  “You?” she tried Youngblood, pointing an ebony fingernail.

  Youngblood shook his head, then pressed for a last-minute advantage. “It’s not all as Mickey Mouse as you might think.”

  “Please, man, I’m just not having any,” Gnossos glancing at the gurgling Locomotive, then at the forlorn vampire, who was giving up and crawling away on all fours. A sudden, colossal weariness blew through his bones as he watched her go. He yawned and slouched down, afraid that Youngblood was searching desperately for something significant to say. He waved him into casual silence and offered a benevolent smile for recompense, then stretched out on one of the Indian prints. “Later,” he said, closing his eyes.

  The lids stung with soothing, soporific warmth.

  E is for the Ether in your nosegay,

  R is the Reward of sniffing glue.

  Put them all together . . .

  Unh. What sound?

  He was awakened by the squeak of unoiled hinges, the shuffle of tired bodies. He rolled over sluggishly, his night torn open, and with one eye watched a lumpy apparition in a silk dressing gown, emerging from the door in the brick wall. The figure was murmuring to itself, and an odor of evil swam biliously through the loft.

  Mojo. Lie still. His hair mussed, mustache-ends drooping. From the shadows of the chamber within came sounds of wet flesh. A phthisic hand reaching, a girl’s, that same one. Whose? But before he could remember, Heap joined his master on the threshold and closed the ominous door. They moved along on tiptoes. As they passed the coiled, sleeping pile of unused vampires, the monkey jumped from the press of bodies and chattered a protest. Ugh, wake up.

  All at once a semidark transparence glowed through the skylight. Dawn. Gnossos watched it for a moment, and when he looked again, Heap and Mojo were gone. He stood, stretched painfully, lost his balance, regained it, and found the monkey squatting on the floor, glaring. He tried glaring back, but the sight revolted him and he had to look away, taking deep breaths. The odor was overwhelming, like spilled ammonia. Finally he checked the rest of the loft, looking for an ally, but his friends were gone. Only the sleeping Locomotive remained, collapsed on the narghile. He struggled with his parka, threw it over his shoulders cape-style, and shuffled to the exit on wobbly legs. The monkey shrieked and struggled furiously against the chain as Gnossos, in a jolting rush of fear-inspired energy, jumped the last six steps to freedom.

  Outside, the twittering whistle of morning birds, a wild, cleansing cacophony of tiny cries.

  But after a moment he became aware of still another sound, a malevolent, slapping rhythm driving away the wings. What?

  He made his uneasy way through the chilly morning mist, rubbing his eyes as he went, scraping the ale taste off his tongue with his teeth. The slapping was colored by a metallic ring, the kiss of leather on steel. Then a quick inspiration of breath, a sensual sigh, nearly a moan. It made the skin crawl along his thighs. It was coming from the Dairy Queen, not twenty yards away.

  He stepped more cautiously now, not wanting to be seen, padding through the snow, pausing to pick up a handful for his headache. Eeeeeee, coldcoldcold. He wiped it off with his sleeves, ceasing all motion as the weight of the nearby slap became more forceful. He crept to the edge of the clearing, then stopped as if struck, his heartbeat crunching in his ears.

  Heap was poised in front of the microbus, the bullwhip gripped in his bony fist. He raised it high above his head, swung it in a sinister circle, and flashed out, grunting, at the fenders and grill of the car.

  Ten feet away, leaning with his back against the aluminum of the Dairy Queen, his silk robe fallen open, his legs apart, was Mojo. Beneath the robe he was naked and his pulpy knees were slightly bent. His penis was in his hand, his transfigured gaze was on Heap, and his rhythm was steady and forceful. “More,” he whispered, groaning, as the yellow bullwhip cracked again and again against the enamel of the microbus. “Please, harder.”

  Gnossos stumbled away, perspiring the moisture of mortal dread. He paused for a moment, breathing deeply, then ran back to the highway, mind’s eye awash with the electrifying scene. At first he cantered, hands in his pocket, later he walked, and finally he ambled.

  After an hour the birds had stopped their song of celebration and the dawn had lifted. He reached into his rucksack for the Hohner F, put it to his lips, and thought the day’s first tangible thought as he played along.

  Good morning, blues,

  Blues,

  how do you do?

  9

  But the day became a new one.

  He awoke at noon, the sun exploding under the lids of his eyes like silent-film incendiary bombs; ears ringing with th
e drip and seethe of the thaw. Through the slats on his bedside window (boarded up with plywood and gypsum since the night Pamela Watson-May had tried to kill him), he could see the swollen Swiss drolleries on the porch. The snow had melted and slipped away, saturating the wood. The fat icicles were gone as well, patches of lawn miraculously green after months of entombment, walks and porches clear but for the wet; beams and timbers creaking with the sigh of shrugged-away weight, stretching back into place. All the parts and parcels of the winter that had been were sliding down the gullies of the hill, plunging into gorges, swelling streams brown and gurgling, creeping through fissures and corridors of shale in the glacial countryside, skimming over tops of fallow fields, across slopes like ducks’ backs, seeking a level: the broad, steel-blue plain of bottomless Maeander, where if you listened carefully you heard the French and Indian cannons booming as some monumental piece of earth or stone was shouldered loose from a cliff face by the swelling lunge of ice beneath and dumped into the flawless, pregnant surface of the lake.

  He bellowed like a Cretan bull. “Fitzgore! Where the hell are you? I’m in love!”

  But Fitzgore was nowhere to be seen. The apartment was silent and his tidy bed was still unused from the night before. The only sign of him was implicit in a partially unpacked shipment of Victorian hot-water bottles, copper and brass. “In love, Fitzgore,” Gnossos tried again, then leapt from the sack with an arabesque bound. He was wearing only a black motorcycle teeshirt and khaki socks. He hopped across the room on an imaginary pogo stick, and pounded heavily on the French doors, shaking the walls, jarring loose the hunting horns. “Rajamuttus!” he roared in celebration of the impossible event, “lotus, rosewater, Ravi Shankar!” Then zoom, away to the kitchen for a quick wash in the sink. (The basin in the bathroom was beyond use, swimming with waterlogged underpants, ammonia, and Listerine.) He tossed his teeshirt and socks on the mound of egg shells and cheese rind festering in the corner, and a small cloud of lazy bugs rose with the smelly disturbance. They settled again, sniffed at the new additions, and gasped off into cracks. Gnossos sitting in the sink, back to the faucet, washing his pits with a diluted mixture of liquid Lux, his feet in blue, lukewarm water, old vine leaves awash, blobs of poached egg white, puffy all-bran crumbs, and rice. This, the first ablution in weeks, humming Yerrakina under his breath, massaging his chest with a pink cellulose sponge, dehydrated and scratchy, good for circulation. He considered disinfecting his pubes, then decided to abandon body and soul to a later, evening bath. Take it just before she comes, salt and oils, little bit of scent. Max Factor bubbles?

  drun droon droon droon-droon-droon-droon

  He dried with a gray and tepid towel, flung it into the corner when he was finished, glanced hurriedly about the cupboards, and made mental notes on supplies that needed laying in. Then he ran around abandoning hermetic discretion, opening all the windows, some of them going up easily, others—like the one with the plywood and gypsum—needing a screwdriver. When the wood was too wet, he used Calvin’s hammer: must remember to return it someday, Exhibit A for Dean Magnolia’s case. Maybe melt it, have it cast as an evil eye, hurl it through the Mississippi cabbage-head with a sling.

  On Academae Avenue, across the street from his house, an anonymous couple strolled hand in hand, colliding clumsily as they tried keeping step. He pointed a deliriously happy finger, forgetting his nakedness, and screamed, “YAAAAAAAAANH!” They leapt apart and ran away, but nothing could stop him. He’d felt the potent surge of warmth in the new air, smelled the shifted wind. Mean Mother Winter, man, poof, all gone. He jammed the heavy parka into a drawer with mothballs and lifted a damp, crumpled pair of lightweight corduroys from the rucksack. They had come from the same cornucopia of a forgotten laundry bag in San Francisco’s Coexistence Bagel Shop that had yielded the 1920’s baseball cap he pulled down now over his hair and ears. The cap was a white dome with faded gray pinstripes, a little black button on the zenith, a pale orange peak. Om, zup goes the soul straight through the button, grand slam for the old gods, over the center-field bleachers.

  He wriggled into his undersized boy scout shirt, relic of Taos, and admired himself in Fitzgore’s gilt-framed baroque mirror. Five-year pin, assistant-patrol-leader bars, wolf patch on the shoulder, ready to go. He laced up his boots (no socks), tilted the baseball cap over his eyebrows, and crash, he was out the door. He ran head on into George and Irma Rajamuttu, who had materialized spooklike in the hall, no doubt responding to his cry. They were cloaked in gauze wrapups, eyes jaundiced, and they held tinkling glasses of gin and grenadine. “Goodness gracious me,” said George, jarred sideways.

  “The Vale of Kashmir,” yelled Gnossos, flying past. “Curried duck!”

  “Orange dal,” called Irma after him, the first words he had ever heard her speak. But there was no time. He was climbing the hill in seven-league bounds, flapping his arms, trying to fly. Past the law school, with its Tudor courtyard for duels; the student union, where students hovered with May flies already buzzing in their blood; the high Clock Tower sounding the half-hour in its pointed head; the arts quad with sweatsocks and sneakers everywhere, faces turning to catch the apparition that galloped by; over the Harpy Creek Bridge, where he made whooping sounds; down the footpath by the still-incomplete Larghetto Lodge.

  The shores of Maeander Lake were trapped high on the hill, held in manmade place by the partially concealed hydroelectric dam, where the thaw had sure as hell begun. Massive blocks of ice had heaved up from the surface, tumbled over the shore, and knocked trees flat against the ground with the unbridled force of their motion. The first muddy waters were beginning to pulse through the dam flues, heave against the concrete abutments, spout at the waiting gorge a hundred feet below. He ran around the muddy path, ankles sloshing, stopping to tug on a half-defeated tree and help it to the earth. Better all at once, might be suffering, get a stethoscope, listen to its agonies. He halted once, his breath taken away as one of the enormous iceblocks slid effortlessly past his nose. There were no trees to obstruct, and it moved a full ten feet before it stopped. “Whoo-hoo,” he yelled, and swung up on its tilted, slippery surface, using a dangling branch as if he were Tarzan. He scrambled to the ragged peak and jumped up and down, driving his weight solidly into his bootheels as he landed. He did it with three successive blocks, finally cracking the third one, leaping free before it lumbered apart. Then at the bridge, where the young creek was struggling through the narrows, he paused and listened. Yes. Can you hear the blood soughing? Wind in the lung’s leaves? So many million fibers and cells, surely their collision and tug must have a murmur. The seepage of bile, fluid trickling in the spine, the frequency of growing hair, high and piercing like a nail scratching on a pane of glass.

  For a moment there seemed to be silence. But under the still-unbroken surface of the narrows he heard the gurgling roll of new waters. Here and there he could see beneath a transparent, brittle sheet of ready-to-collapse ice, frothy bubbles skimming along on the underside, seeking a path, collecting strength. He climbed to the outside of the bridge, balancing on the thin field-stone lip that ran along its perimeter, then leaned over cautiously and found a grip, first with one hand, then with the other. Kicking off his weight, he swung free; and thirty feet above the lake he hovered like a pendulum. Now giggling quietly, he inched along until he sensed an area where the snow and ice might be strong enough. Oh, sweet Mortality, I love to tease your scythe, and he let go, just like that, feet apart, arms high in the air, a forefinger holding down his baseball cap, rucksack aflutter.

  He was flying.

  His feet struck and he sank, spreading elbows to brake, stopping only when he was in to the nose. His toes had failed to touch water. Up, up, old Pooh Bear, the body bears heat. He twisted his way loose, stretched flat out, then crawled to firmer snow. He kneeled, stood, walked, hopped, and finally ran across the chunky, broken surface, bounding from block to block, keeping his stride, forcing a rhythm, figuring if he kept the proper pace and failed to
find a foothold, he’d make the next one. Drun droon droon.

  On the far shore of civilization a bus was approaching the Harpy Creek stop. Gnossos waved his cap and sprinted the final fifty yards, just squeezing through the doors, chilly beads of perspiration running into his eyes. He gave the driver a silver dollar and got a dirty look for change. Poor man, no nose for the spring wind. “Thaw,” he whispered as explanation, grinning madly.

  “Saw?” asked the driver, nervous, mistaking a lisp.

  “Caw,” said Gnossos, still whispering, opening and closing the fingers of his left hand like a flying crow.

  “Sure,” said the driver uneasily, letting out the clutch with a chop, glancing in all the mirrors, handing him quarters for the fare machine. Gnossos answering, “Seesaw.”

  “Marjorie Daw,” from the driver, shifting gears, gripping the wheel.

  Gnossos goading him to distraction, pocketing the bread, sliding into a seat, not paying, the driver failing to notice, nearly colliding with a covey of coeds. They scattered like quail, and Gnossos chuckled, wiping his palms on his baseball cap, turning it backward, Yogi Berra sliding down the window by his side. “Fresh air,” he explained to the woman with a prune-whip face. Her hat had nearly blown off in the sudden blast. “It’s spring,” he tried. “Look.”