The Butterfly Kid

by Chester Anderson

  We wedged our way in, escaping Laszlo in the crowd, and moved by a process much like osmosis through the steamy loft, hunting for Harriet so we could pay our counterfeit respects and split. Perfect and preferably strangers, most likely female, shrieked, “Darling!” brutally through my tender ears. Anybody stepped on my feet all the time. Something tried to remove my clothes, I hope. My well-known joi de vivre signaled TILT.

  (Sativa — that unprintable lady Machiavelli — wasn’t with us, nor was Sean. They stayed home to take advantage of our absence, and I still don’t know how she engineered it. Under my breath, and sometimes above it, I invented gorgeous ancient curses for her head.)

  We reached the back of the loft without encountering Harriet, which was odd, she being a lot too large to miss. We’d not found Gary either, but in that environment this single lonely blessing went unnoticed. We had, however, mysteriously acquired tall glasses full of a swampy bluish liquid that, remarkably, didn’t taste at all bad, considering. We emptied our glasses, tossed them out the nearest window, and started back toward the front of the loft.

  Just as we were sneaking past that felonious rock pile again, it blew an untuned fanfare that plastered us against the wall. When this was over, silence or studio deafness fell upon the gladly smitten horde.

  “Cats and chicks,” a regrettable voice boomed from the rock group’s biggest amplifier. That explained where Gary the Frog was lurking. “Cats,” it regibbered, “and chicks: welcome to our little party.”

  “Yes,” came Harriet’s equally amplified baritone, “we’re so glad you could make it tonight,” which might mean a number of things but probably didn’t.

  We were trapped, Mike and I, trapped and doomed. Even when no one was talking, the air pressure from that six-foot amplifier’s humming kept us pinned against the wall. We couldn’t get away, and the wall had splinters.

  “Farewell, Michael,” I sighed at the top of my lungs. “I will sleep now.”

  “Courage, mon brave,” he bellowed nobly. “We are not yet dead.”

  “That’s half the problem,” I explained.

  Then, “Cats and chicks,” the talking frog attacked again, “on account of this is our anniversity, me and Harriet’ve fixed up something superspecial for all our buddies here tonight. Right, Harry?”

  “Right, Gary!”

  “You bet. An’ here to tell you all about it is a local Village celebrity who needs no introduction, a cat who we all know an’ dig the most, a great artiste that his accomplishments are all the talk of MacDougal Street and environs, none other than your old buddy, Mis-ter Lasz-lo Scott!”

  “Michael,” I said in what currently passed for a whisper.

  “Yes?”

  “I think I’ll start worrying now.”

  “I’ll help you.”

  Amid sporadic cheers and weak applause, Laszlo climbed over the bass drum and grabbed the microphone.

  “Friends!” he lied. “Nah, let me call you colleagues.”

  I was too weak to resist.

  “Doubtless you have all heard about my Reality Pills, no doubt. Some of you have dropped ’em for yourself already, and even if you haven’t, you seen what they can do, right?”

  Once more, “Michael,” I whispered, so to speak.

  “Speak.”

  “I think it’s too late to worry now.”

  “Check.”

  The only bright spot of the evening so far was that Laszlo kept making full stops for applause, but no one was applauding. Guessing this might be the only bright spot, I treasured it carefully.

  “Now, everybody knows,” Laszlo hinted, “that I’m the only connection for my famous Reality Pills. Nobody can’t score ’em offa nobody else, you dig: just me, Laszlo Scott. An’ everybody knows how I been a Good Guy an’ just give ’em all away, mostly: just layin’ my famous Reality Pills on everyone I see, right? ’Cause that’s the kind of cat I am. I just can’t help it. If ol’ Laszlo’s got it, baby, it’s yours. Just ask me.”

  I was growing ill, for any one or more of a number of reasons, take your pick. Two from Column A and one from Column B, but no one was applauding. Pass the mop.

  Laszlo fumbled on. “An’ that’s just what I’m gonna do for each and every one of you people here tonight. In fact, dig it, I already done it. There’s been a great big dose of Laszlo Scott’s famous Reality Pill in Liquid Form in everything you people drank tonight. So all you people just go have yourselves a ball, an’ remember good ol’ Laszlo Scott’s the cat who turned you on.

  “An’ now I want to close up with a brand-new poem I have wrote for this occasion.”

  “Michael!” I was fighting like a netted panther, but Laszlo, the bastard, the inhuman friend et cetera, turned the volume up for his epic and I couldn’t even move my arms.

  Laszlo made a great show of searching his pockets for the manuscript (though a rumor, made up by myself, that he could neither read nor write was generally accepted). Finally he gave up.

  “Shucks,” he promised. “I must’ve left it home.” Tantalizing pause. “But I think I can remember how it goes.”

  I doubted I’d be lucky enough to die.

  Laszlo threw his cape back in a silent movie gesture that knocked Gary the Frog and the bass drum to the floor, struck a plaster of Paris pose, and began: “Love Song in a Summer Loft, by Laszlo Allen Scott the Fourth.

  “Your grandfather hates me because I

  Am twict as good as any other guy.

  He don’t like me. He don’t even try,

  But someday your grandfather’s gonna die, baby,

  An’ this is what I’m gonna do to you —

  I’m gonna f. “…ZAP!!

  All the lights went out. The amplifiers quit. Mike and I fell to the floor in bruised and splinter-ridden heaps. Laszlo became blessedly inaudible.

  “There is a God!” I yelled.

  “Where are the fuses?” some idiot asked.

  “Don’t tell him,” ordered Mike.

  Lots of people screamed, but after what we’d just been through, the peace, though merely relative, was wonderful.

  “Let’s get out of here,” I suggested.

  “Great. How?”

  “Crawl.”

  “Which direction, pray?”

  “Any direction. If we can’t find the door, I’m willing to make do with the windows by now.”

  “Seven stories?”

  “You’d rather stay here?”

  “Lead on.”

  I did, keeping my right shoulder against the wall for a guide and crawling staunchly toward what I was almost certain was the door.

  “Keep in touch,” I whispered back to Mike.

  “Roger.”

  “That word again.”

  “Right.” He grabbed my left heel and held on.

  “Toot! Toot!” I stated in my best steam locomotive accent. This was fun! In fact, the whole party had been fun, come to think of it, but this was clearly the best part. I felt great.

  Part of me worried about that. Why should I feel so good? After (“Pardon me, ma’am”) what I’d just been through, at the very least I ought to ache all over. (“Excuse me, sir or madam.”) Instead I was feeling downright euphoric, which wasn’t natural. Something (“Toot-toot, toot-too… Oops! Sorry ’bout that.”) was wrong. (“Toot-toot.”)

  Then my prancing fingers found the doorjamb. Aha. Anderson was right again, as usual. When would these fools ever learn not to doubt me?

  “This way,” to Mike as I pulled myself erect. He joined me and we slipped quietly out of the loft and into the hall. It was much darker there, but the air was clearer and there was no crowd, so I could find my way around by ear nearly as well as I could’ve with my eyes if the lights had been on, but I stuck close to the wall to keep from worrying Michael.

  We found the stairs with no trouble at all and started carefully down. I was feeling better by the second. To think, a few moments earlier I’d been worrying because I felt good. How absurd! Why should anyon
e worry about feeling good? What sort of old-maid-Protestant thinking was that? Probably thought didn’t deserve feel good, right? Bull. Felt great. Greater. Greatest. Yeah!

  In fact, I felt so unprecedentedly good I could almost hear Handel’s Water Music playing behind me, my favorite happy music.

  Halfway down I said, “Are you okay, Mike?”

  “Of course.” Hmm. He sounded lots more vibrant and virile than usual. Echoes from the stairwell, doubtless. “Why shouldn’t we be okay?”

  “Groovy.” We? Really? Poor old Michael. All that noise upstairs must’ve finally unhinged him. I’d seen it coming years ago, but what can you do?

  I could still hear the Water Music. It was an amazingly lifelike illusion: the sound seemed to reverberate through the all but deserted old building, and the interpretation, which was brilliant, was completely unknown to me. I realized I’d have to have something done about that tomorrow, but for now it was a gas.

  “Chester?” My God! Michael sounded ten feet tall.

  “Yeah?”

  “Must they play so loudly? We can hardly hear ourself think.”

  “They?”

  “That orchestra.”

  I stopped. Mike bumped into me. He wasn’t ten feet tall.

  “You,” I said, “you can hear them, too?”

  “I could hardly fail to. They’re probably audible in Brooklyn. Do they have to play so loudly?”

  “Hmm. I refuse to believe any of this.”

  “Believe what you like, but please ask them to cool it. They’re hurting our head.”

  And then the lights came on.

  Mike says it was five minutes before I could move again, but he’s probably tinting the facts a bit. I distinctly remember that the gaudily liveried baroque orchestra that filled the stairs behind us played a little less than half a minuet before I screamed.

  The music stopped. “Your pleasure, sire?” said the fiddler in the fore, bowing deeply, fiddle straight out at a 45-degree angle behind him and bow held horizontally across his chest in what was clearly a salute, though I’d never seen it done before.

  “What,” maintaining my cool, “is all of this in aid of?”

  “Doctor Handel’s Water Music, sire. I was given to understand that you were fond…”

  “No. I mean you. The orchestra.”

  “Ah. Your privy band, sire. Did you not, upon many a time yet fresh in memory, express a fond desire that such as we might…”

  “Cancel.”

  “Sire?”

  “Tilt.”

  “Your pardon, sire.”

  “Forget it. Please play on, maestro, ma un poco mezzo forte, if you please.”

  “Your most humble servant, sire.” He bowed again, then nodded his white-wigged head, and the minuet I’d screamed to pieces began anew, but softer now. We all continued down the stairs.

  I was quiet for another flight — not thinking, just reacting — and then said, “Yes. It’s obvious enough, once the shock wears off, and even rather flattering, in a mildly introspective way. But, Michael, why have you taken to calling yourself we?”

  “No room,” Michael gestured crossly. “None at all. Your walking jukebox takes up more room than a teenyboppers’ fan club on parade. Hmph. Inconsiderate, we calls it, but we’ll wait.”

  “Oh. You’ve become a convention?”

  “No, more like an invocation.”

  “Invocation?”

  “Possibly.”

  We walked the final flight in silence, not counting my personal band. That, by the way, seemed to leave a little something to be desired. Every now and then a false note rang out through the otherwise exceptional ensemble. Not a wrong note, mind you, just a slightly out of tune one. Bassoon, from the sound of it. This bugged me mainly because, the orchestra being merely an external figment of my own imagination, the false notes were my fault. The implication was humiliating.

  Meanwhile I took time out to admire how well I was taking it all. Very calm. Very cool. Very natural.

  “Wow!” Mike said as we approached the door. “That’s a relief.”

  “Oh? Are you alone now?”

  “More or less. Wow. Now I know how a tenement building feels.”

  A crowd of not-much-stranger-looking-than-usual people across the street beckoned, whistled, and waved to Mike. A rowdy bunch, not really our kind of people, but he sauntered over to see what they wanted.

  I was more interested in the orchestra. Oh, it was a doozy! Authentic livery of purple watered silk and plum plush with lots of lace; authentic instruments like serpents, recorders, krumhorns, sackbutts, oboi d’amore, cornets, brasses without valves and woodwinds without keys, two almost Turkish kettledrums carried by two husky ’prentices each, all absolutely authentic and brand-new and being played by virtuosi — with the exception of that bassoon; authentic interpretations such as no man had heard since the early eighteenth century; authentic musicians, running roughly six inches shorter than modern average and ruddier complexioned than we’re used to: it was perfect — except for that bassoon.

  While the leader arranged the orchestra in street formation — four abreast and God help anyone else using the same sidewalk — I searched for that bassoon. There were fourteen bassoons, but I found the culprit at first glance by instinct. Except for being shorter, he was Andrew Blake’s double, stiff red beard and all. My imagination has a better sense of humor than I do and I’m jealous.

  “My good man,” I addressed him, falling into character, “you seem to be a little out of tune.”

  “Aye, sire,” tugging his rusty forelock, “so I seem,” and he sounded exactly like Andy’s famous Irish impersonation, the one he uses to con free drinks on St. Patrick’s Day.

  “I trust you will correct the defect.”

  “An it please you, sire,” the forelock bit again, “I’m not allowed.”

  “No?”

  “ ‘Throw ’im a clinker now and again for authenticity,’ they tells me, beggin’ your pardon, sire.”

  “Oh.” How was I supposed to handle this? I decided to try ignoring it. But, “Pardon me, do you have any relatives named Blake?”

  “Relatives?” He laughed. “God love ye, sire, you know the likes o’ me ain’t got no relatives. We’re all too poor, beggin’ your pardon. You want relatives, sire, you go talk to the leader there. ’E’s got himself a Nephew, he does, playin’ second fiddle. Or them four drum boys, now. They’re all each other’s Brothers, so they say. But I ain’t got no relatives, sire. Not me.”

  “This is turning into one hell of a night.” Michael was back, with company: those oddly-dressed rowdies from across the street. I wasn’t at all sure about those people. They looked like the kind of Saturday types I generally avoid, but Mike was my best friend so I held my peace.

  “What are we going to do with all this?” I wondered, waving florid circles in the air.

  “Who am I to question the dictates of the gods? Onward to The Garden of Eden. Why not?”

  Why indeed. “That’s boss.”

  It took awhile to start moving. The orchestra was already in order, but Mike’s associates couldn’t agree on who ought to walk where. They exhausted the possibilities of discussion and negotiation in less than five minutes and asked Mike’s permission to retire to the nearest alley for a conference. I found myself wondering about Mike.

  The rowdies’ conference took some fifteen minutes. Then they returned, none the visible worse for wear, and took up stations flanking the orchestra, four on each side. They stood there glowering and making highly improper and hostile gestures at each other while Mike and I, both a bit puzzled, walked to the head of the column.

  “At your pleasure, sire,” the leader bowed.

  “You may begin,” I nodded.

  And we did.

  There are problems associated with marching an orchestra in full throat through lower Manhattan after midnight that the average man can’t possibly imagine, and I envy him. The police were no problem — not after th
e leader produced, on irate demand, an appallingly official city permit to hold a parade through those streets at that hour playing music — but the people who lived in the buildings we passed were difficult to cope with. They threw some of the strangest things, and I couldn’t see just how they were being coped with. I was starting to develop some faith in the Reality Pill, though. It seemed to give good service.

  Mike’s acquaintances continued to worry me. “Michael,” I inquired as we columned right onto Broadway, “your — friends — look very interesting.”

  “Yes.” he beamed. “Aren’t they great? I’m really very proud of them.”

  “I can see where you might be. Ah, what are they?”

  “Gods, of course. A whole pantheon. It’s a little pantheon, I’ll grant you, but it has a certain fey charm of its own”

  “Gods, eh?” They were still tossing graphic threats at each other and their fey charm was moderately difficult to see. Acquired taste, perhaps. “Gods of what?”

  “Oh, this and that. You know. I’ll introduce you.” He turned and yelled, “Hey, Mick, front and center!” then turned back and said, “You’ll like Mick. He’s quite well done.”

  Mick, it seemed, was the god of teenyboppers, and quite well done. A little under seven feet tall and glowing, with shoulder-length gold hair, deep blue vacant eyes, and a pretty face that managed to look healthy, sensitive, pouting, and cheerful all at once, he was slimly dressed in white-net T-shirt and tights over gold and brown paisley briefs, and shod in supple fawn suede boots that tapered three inches higher aft than fore. He exuded, furthermore, an almost irresistible electric adolescent sexuality. Once more I wondered about Michael.

  In the prettiest boy-man voice I’d ever heard, Mick spoke a few choice words so flawlessly fatuous I forgot them before he’d finished speaking, then returned to his place beside the orchestra and set to snarling at his colleagues once again.

  “That’s unfair criticism, Mike,” I pointed out. “Most rock and roll musicians are…”

  “Cool it. I’m not criticizing them.”

  He wasn’t, I realized, not at all, and God help MacDougal Street.

  Then we had the incident of the parade permit, after which I met Toke, the god of pot, just as tall as everyone but skinnier than most, no particular age, quaintly dressed in nickel bags and cigarette papers, with a hempen wreath in his shaggy hair (the very same color as yours) and reeking of patchouli so strong I could almost walk on it: another threat to MacDougal Street’s stability.