by Don DeLillo
Don DeLillo
Great Jones Street
Contents
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
Superslick
Mind Contracting
Media Kit
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
The Mountain Tapes
21
22
23
24
25
26
1
FAME REQUIRES every kind of excess. I mean true fame, a devouring neon, not the somber renown of waning statesmen or chinless kings. I mean long journeys across gray space. I mean danger, the edge of every void, the circumstance of one man imparting an erotic terror to the dreams of the republic. Understand the man who must inhabit these extreme regions, monstrous and vulval, damp with memories of violation. Even if half-mad he is absorbed into the public’s total madness; even if fully rational, a bureaucrat in hell, a secret genius of survival, he is sure to be destroyed by the public’s contempt for survivors. Fame, this special kind, feeds itself on outrage, on what the counselors of lesser men would consider bad publicity — hysteria in limousines, knife fights in the audience, bizarre litigation, treachery, pandemonium and drugs. Perhaps the only natural law attaching to true fame is that the famous man is compelled, eventually, to commit suicide.
(Is it clear I was a hero of rock ‘n’ roll?)
Toward the end of the final tour it became apparent that our audience wanted more than music, more even than its own reduplicated noise. It’s possible the culture had reached its limit, a point of severe tension. There was less sense of simple visceral abandon at our concerts during these last weeks. Few cases of arson and vandalism. Fewer still of rape. No smoke bombs or threats of worse explosives. Our followers, in their isolation, were not concerned with precedent now. They were free of old saints and martyrs, but fearfully so, left with their own unlabeled flesh. Those without tickets didn’t storm the barricades, and during a performance the boys and girls directly below us, scratching at the stage, were less murderous in their love of me, as if realizing finally that my death, to be authentic, must be self-willed — a successful piece of instruction only if it occurred by my own hand, preferably in a foreign city. I began to think their education would not be complete until they outdid me as teacher, until one day they merely pantomimed the kind of massive response the group was used to getting. As we performed they would jump, dance, collapse, clutch each other, wave their arms, all the while making absolutely no sound. We would stand in the incandescent pit of a huge stadium filled with wildly rippling bodies, all totally silent. Our recent music, deprived of people’s screams, was next to meaningless, and there would have been no choice but to stop playing. A profound joke it would have been. A lesson in something or other.
In Houston I left the group, saying nothing, and boarded a plane for New York City, that contaminated shrine, place of my birth. I knew Azarian would assume leadership of the band, his body being prettiest. As to the rest, I left them to their respective uproars —news media, promotion people, agents, accountants, various members of the managerial peerage. The public would come closer to understanding my disappearance than anyone else. It was not quite as total as the act they needed and nobody could be sure whether I was gone for good. For my closest followers, all it foreshadowed was a period of waiting. Either I’d return with a new language for them to speak or they’d seek a divine silence attendant to my own.
I took a taxi past the cemeteries toward Manhattan, tides of ash-h’ght breaking across the spires. New York seemed older than the cities of Europe, a sadistic gift of the sixteenth century, ever on the verge of plague. The cab driver was young, however, a freckled kid with a moderate orange Afro. I told him to take the tunnel.
“Is there a tunnel?” he said.
The night before, at the Astrodome, the group had appeared without me. Azarian’s stature was vast but nothing on that first night could have broken the crowd’s bleak mood. They turned against the structure itself, smashing whatever was smashable, trying to rip up the artificial turf, attacking the very plumbing. The gates were opened and the police entered, blank-looking, hiding the feast in their minds behind metered eyes. They made their patented charges, cracking arms and legs in an effort to protect the concept of regulated temperature. In one of the worst public statements of the year, by anyone, my manager Globke referred to the police operation as an example of mini-genocide.
“The tunnel goes under the river. It’s a nice tunnel with white tile walls and men in glass cages counting the cars going by. One two three four. One two three.”
I was interested in endings, in how to survive a dead idea. What came next for the wounded of Houston might very well depend on what I was able to learn beyond certain personal limits, in endland, far from the tropics of fame.
2
I WENT to the room in Great Jones Street, a small crooked room, cold as a penny, looking out on warehouses, trucks and rubble. There was snow on the window ledge. Some rags and an unloved ruffled shirt of mine had been stuffed into places where the window frame was warped and cold air entered. The refrigerator was unplugged, full of record albums, tapes and old magazines. I went to the sink and turned both taps all the way, drawing an intermittent trickle. Least is best. I tried the radio, picking up AM only at the top of the dial, FM not at all. Later I shaved, cutting myself badly. It was strange watching the long fold of blood appear at my throat, collecting along the length of the gash, then starting to flow in an uneven pattern. Not a bad color. Room could do with a coat. I stuck toilet paper against the cut and tried with no luck to sleep a while. Then I put Opel’s coat over my shoulders and went out for food.
It was dark in the street, snowing again, and a man in a long coat stood in the alley between Lafayette and Broadway. I walked around a stack of shipping containers. The industrial loft buildings along Great Jones seemed misproportioned, broad structures half as tall as they should have been, as if deprived of light by the great skyscraper ranges to the north and south. I found a grocery store about three blocks away. One of the customers nudged the woman next to him and nodded in my direction. A familiar dumb hush fell over the store. I picked up the owner’s small brown cat and let it curl against my chest. The man who’d spotted me drew gradually closer, pretending to read labels along the way, finally sidling in next to me at the counter, the living effigy of a cost accountant or tax lawyer, radiating his special grotesquerie, that of sane men leading normal lives.
I got back to find Globke with his arm down the toilet bowl.
“I dropped a dime,” he said.
“The floor’s not very clean. You’ll ruin your new pants. What is that - vinyl?”
“Polyvinyl.”
“And the shirt,” I said. “What about the shirt?”
He struggled up from the floor, then held his stomach in and adjusted his clothes. He followed me into the main room, not exactly a living room since it included a bathtub and refrigerator. Globke himself occupied a duplex apartment in a condominium building situated on the heights just across the Hudson River. His apartment was a model abode of contour furniture and supergraphics, an apparent challenge to the cultured indolence of Riverside Drive. His second wife was young and vaporous, a student of Eastern religions, and his daughter by his first marriage played the cello.
“There’s a story behind this shirt,” he said. “This shirt is part of an embroidered altar cloth. Fully consecrated. Made by b
lind nuns in the foothills of the Himalayas.”
“What’s that color? I’ve never seen a shirt exactly that color.”
“Llama vomit,” he said. “That’s what they told me when I bought it. There’s a rumor you’re dead, Bucky.”
“Do you believe it?”
“I came here for the express purpose of letting you know, all kidding aside, that no matter what your intentions are, we’re determined to see you through this thing, irregardless of revenues, monies, so forth — grosses and the like. Your own intentions are uppermost.”
“I have no intentions.”
“Contractual matters. Studio dates. Record commitments. Road arrangements. We go when you say go. Until then we sit with our legs crossed. What the hell, an artist’s an artist. Bookings. Interviews. Press parties. Release dates.”
“How did you get in here?”
“It wasn’t hard to figure out you’d be here. I knew you’d be here. Once we traced you to New York, I knew this was where you’d be. But look how hollow-cheeked. Look how ghostly. I had no idea. Who knew? Nobody told me.”
“But how did you get in here?” I said.
“I picked up the key on my way in from the airport I’ve been in Chicago the past two days. First they tell me you’ve disappeared, so I make all the usual inquiries. Then they tell me there’s a riot in the Astrodome, so I make all the usual public statements. Then I catch a plane to New York and pick up the key on my way down here.”
“Pick up the key where?”
“At our lavish offices in world-famous Rockefeller Center.”
“What was it doing there?”
Transparanoia owns this building,” he said.
“I didn’t know we were in real estate. Since when?”
“Two or three months ago. Modestly. We’re in very modestly. Lepp’s a cautious man. He picks up a piece of property here and there. Mostly related to the business. An old ballroom or theater. Shuttered property. Nothing big.”
“What are we doing with a building like this?”
“Lepp stays out of my sphere of influence and I don’t go messing in his. I’m not in love with what you look like, Bucky. You’re a morbid sight. A one-man horror movie. Where’s Opel?”
“Don’t know.”
“I thought she’d be here. I don’t see her all this time I figure she’s in her funny apartment shooting God-forbid some kind of terrible drug between her toes, the only skin left.”
“I haven’t seen her in a while. She may be in Morocco, she may not. Then again she may.”
“You plan to go looking?”
“I’m staying right here,” I said.
“That’s your right and your privilege, Bucky, with or without a studio-equipped house in the mountains. The first death rumor was in the evening paper. I could easily stop it here and now.”
“I don’t think you could. But either way, don’t get into it. I want to see how long it lasts.”
“Whatever you say.”
“I haven’t asked about your wife. How’s your wife, what’s-her-name, your lovely and charming wife?”
“Wife, companion, lover,” Globke said. “She’s all that and more. Mother, daughter, teacher, adviser, friend. But I’m keeping you two apart. Otherwise it’s instant sex karma. She’s got a beautiful soul but I don’t trust her body. See, oldness and fatness. They make me a bad person.”
“What’s she do all day, stranded on top of that cliff?”
“She curls up with the Upanishads. She’s been reading the Upanishads in paperback for the last three years. She feels the East is where the truth is, what she calls the petal of all energy. Non-attachment turns her on.”
“And the little girl,” I said.
“Still at it with the cello. Appreciate your asking. To think my genes could produce this kind of classical talent. She’ll be concertized next year. Age of fourteen.”
“Will it hurt?”
“You attack even the things I hold dearest, Bucky, but I forgive you because I know you’re on the threshold of something extra-extra-ordinary or you wouldn’t be here in this cold dark room far from the hue and cry. Or am I wrong?”
“Dead wrong.”
“At least you could give me the mountain tapes. If you handed over the mountain tapes, I’d at least have something to play with.”
“How’s my band?” I said.
“The boys are confused. What can I say? The boys are confused, hurt and bereaved.”
“Azarian’s not bereaved. He’s doing his little hip-flips right out front.”
“With him everything’s on the surface. He doesn’t give it that extra level. I think they’ll break up.”
“Not for a while.”
“Who needs them?” he said.
“They’re valuable as artifacts.”
“Bucky Wunderlick. That’s what people want. In the flesh.”
“I have to get some rest now.”
“You’re kicking me out. Listen, why not? It’s been an emotion-packed twenty-four hours and you desperately need sleep. It stands to reason.”
“Tell Lepp to get rid of this building.”
“It’s a business thing,” he said. “Diversification, expansion, maximizing the growth potential. Someday you’ll understand these things. You’ll open your mind to these things. Someday you’ll be thirty years of age and you’ll have to go out and make an honest living, ho, hike the rest of us.”
“Never,” I said.
“Ho, the ageless wonder. But what I wish you’d do is, talking of time and tide, is I wish you’d go back to writing lyrics, real lyrics the way you used to write them and sing them. That would amaze and delight the whole world, Bucky. A surprise return to your old self. There was nobody better at it.”
“When are you leaving, Glob?”
“He throws me out right to my face. A spontaneous put-down. He is famous for this kind of thing but I stand here and take it because it has been an emotion-packed twenty-four hours and he is a star of the firmament while I am only his personal manager who took him out of the rain when he was a scrawny kid and made him what he is today, an even scrawnier kid. But just so you don’t think I’m not appreciative of what you’ve been doing in the later stages, normal lyrics or no normal lyrics, I want you to know a few weeks ago wherever I was in the vast Southland I picked up HBQ Memphis on the car radio and they were doing ‘Pee-Pee-Maw-Maw,’ both sides, no commercial interruptions. Not that it’s so unusual. I just want you to know I’m not all cash-and-carry. I relate to your sound. It’s not my sound. It’s not the sound I want my kid to make. But it’s a valid sound and I relate to it.”
“Love to all,” I said.
I watched him make his way down the narrow staircase, prodigious in his width, haunches rocking in that firm eternal way of beasts of burden. I imagined him a few minutes hence, standing on the Bowery trying to hail a cab to take him to his car, a custom-made machine gleaming at the top of a circular ramp in some midtown garage. Globke was accustomed to being propelled, ballistically, to and from distant points of commerce, and so there was something agreeably serene, even biblical, in his rudimentary journey down those stairs.
I set the radio dial between local stations and picked up some dust from a delta-blues guitar far off in the night. After a while I had some soup and went to bed, wearing Opel’s coat. I knew it was warm wherever she was, most likely a crowded city in one of the timeless lands she loved so much. She favored warm climates and teeming streets. In my mind she was always emerging from hotels in timeless lands and looking around for signs of a teeming street. She liked to watch Arabs spit, and was entertained by similar shows of local prowess in non-Islamic countries. Opel’s father was a titled American — president of a small Texas bank, board member of a utilities company, partner in an auto dealership. She fled all this for a Me in rock ‘n’ roll. She wanted to be lead singer in a coke-snorting hard-rock band but was prepared to be content beating a tambourine at studio parties. Her mind was exceptional
, a fact she preferred to ignore. All she desired was the brute electricity of that sound. To make the men who made it. To keep moving. To forget everything. To be the sound. That was the only tide she heeded. She wanted to exist as music does, nowhere, beyond the maps of language. Opel knew almost every important figure in the business, in the culture, in the various subcultures. But she had no talent as a performer, not the slightest, and so drifted along the jet trajectories from band to band, keeping near the fevers of her love, that obliterating sound, until we met eventually in Mexico, in somebody’s sister’s bed, where the tiny surprise of her name, dropping like a pebble on chrome, brought our incoherent night to proper conclusion, the first of all the rest, transactions in reciprocal tourism.
She was beautiful in a neutral way, emitting no light, defining herself in terms of attrition, a skinny thing, near blond, far beyond recall from the hard-edged rhythms of her Me, Southwestern woman, hard to remember and forget. She went on tour with the band and we lived together in houses, motels and apartments, Bucky and Opel, rarely minus an entourage, the beds piled high with androgynous debris. There was never a moment between us that did not measure the extent of our true connection. To go harder, take more, die first. But before it could happen, Opel began her travels to timeless lands.
3
I DON’T KNOW exactly when it was that I became aware of footsteps in the room above mine. They were measured steps, failing lightly but in obvious patterns, suggesting a predatory meditation, as of pygmies rehearsing a ritual kill.
The mornings were cold and dark. Down the street the rounded doors of the firehouse remained closed except for one day at dawn when a truck nosed slowly out, its lights dissolved in low fog, silent men clutched to its sides, apparitional in black slickers. Derelicts were everywhere, often too wasted to beg. Many of them had an arm or leg in a cast, and the ones with bottles mustered sullenly in doorways, never breaking their empties, leaving them behind as they themselves moved north to forage, or simply disappeared. Two feeble men wrestled quietly, humming wordless curses at each other, and an old woman limped into view, bundled in pounds of rags, an image in the penciled light of long retreat from Moscow. I opened the window and touched the brittle crust of snow settled on the ledge. The fire engine went speeding down Broadway, pure sound now, shrill wind, a voice from the evilest dreams.
