Vine: An Urban Legend

by Michael Williams

  She had dated them both, back in the day. He wondered why neither of them had worked out for her. Maybe it was the drinking, or maybe something else. Whatever the case, he was kinda glad they hadn’t.

  “So, Jack? You and Koenig? He’s pretty cool, you say? Does he like you? I mean, do you guys get along and stuff? I know, it’s none of my—”

  Jack waved his hand sinuously. “I know…my hair, right? Naw, even if, Koenig’s straight, man. And hey, just because you hear about them ministers with meth-head hustlers and wide stances in airport men’s rooms…well, that don’t mean there’s a course on that in seminary, you know. Most of them are pretty mainstream dudes, even the prick assistant ministers. And you know, after all…”

  “What?”

  “Never mind, Aron.”

  “No…what?”

  “I’m just gonna be around for the play, dude. I don’t wanna put anybody out. We can find me a couch somewhere to crash, I guess. So if it’s not Mr. Thorne’s place or Mr. Castille’s—and we both know it so shouldn’t be either of them—maybe I can put up at the De Chevre’s a while. After all, Vinnie and Maia both wanted me in the neighborhood.”

  Jack grinned and put on the earphones, and suddenly Aron’s imagination reeled with the possibility that he had got this wrong, had miscalculated the whole venture. The hope, manufactured on the park stage earlier in the week, that the conversation between Jack and Maia was simply something between friends, that her hand on the other boy’s shoulder was a sign of solidarity, of alliance, suddenly began to dismantle. After all, he hadn’t heard the words, had just stood there probably looking dumb and lumpish while a beautiful pair talked and laughed and perhaps confided…

  The idea of Jack Rausch under Maia’s roof. Aron tried to picture him there in safe scenarios, but his imagination failed: he could not piece together what the place looked like. He had never been invited. And without the set and backdrop, sultry scenes became more possible.

  He spoke Jack’s name aloud twice. Then the third time, hearing him at last, the boy removed the earphones entirely. “Yes, Aron?”

  “I guess my mother wouldn’t mind if you stayed at our place a little while.”

  “How hospitable, Lord Dionysus. I guess you’re not the bad host everybody claims.”

  Only Jack’s riddling smile suggested that Aron’s new lodger was teasing.

  39 Episode: Where are You Going?

  Maia looked out the window of the Eurovan onto the corner of Fourth and Fellini.

  As Vincent steered down the St. Catherine exit, she tried to lock the doors inconspicuously, without ruffling the attentions or the feelings of the passengers. Mel B and Daddy Chrome were whispering in some wine-ignited contradiction across Falcon, who sat between them, sullenly silent since Vinnie had asked her not to smoke in the van. Nevertheless, the vehicle smelled of stale tobacco, stale wine, and stale bodies, and Maia wanted her brother’s new friends let off by the laundromat rather than taken all the way to the dodgy intersection.

  T. Tommy had kept silent until now. Seated farthest back, alone in the third row of seats, he began to speak as they crossed Second Street and approached Third, the Walnut Street Baptist Church on their left.

  “This is your granddaddy of the mega-church, Gemini,” he said at last. “Third and St. Catherine, called Walnut Street Church in commemoration of where it begun, north of Broadway in another locale entirely. Telecasts since television, services packed until the ’60s when half the white people moved east. Now they come here defensively, their doors locked on the way to Jesus.”

  Maia’s hand moved from the door to her lap. She bit her lip and blushed in the dark as the streetlight spilled across the passengers.

  “People don’t know, children,” T. Tommy intoned, “about the bell in yonder church. How it was donated as the twentieth century turned by a man who gave the money on the assurance that no black folks would ever worship there. Walnut Street—the street, not the church—goes by Muhammad Ali Boulevard now, in honor of the fighter. Would it be ironic, you think, if a mosque was to someday take over this site, make this Constantinople into Istanbul?”

  The van turned left, headed past the abandoned Winn-Dixie and the row of dollar stores, wig shops, and the one decent Chinese takeout in the city.

  “Someone bought up half this block years back,” T. Tommy pronounced. “For development, mind you. But the LMPD will tell you ’tis a place where crack deals conspire. There is dark history interconnected here. I dare say no more. Now, if you’d let us off at the corner, young Vincent. I am pleased we could help you be insubordinate, but now it is back to work as the abandoned we go.”

  “We won’t abandon you,” Vincent insisted. “You’ve made some friends here, T. Tommy.”

  “Oh, isn’t that good to know, young Vincent. And you’ve visited Walnut Street’s grandchild as a kind of bonus. The Antioch church is large, I know. And not quite earnest, I’m guessing.”

  Now, with the van slowing at the notorious corner, T. Tommy motioned them into the Red Giraffe parking lot. “Here were karate movies rented, and those that featured the serial murders of high school students and those that, given this neighborhood, featured same-sex love and loving, which I have grown too large to judge.

  “There is the drug store at the threshold of which I saw two Jehovah’s Witnesses saving a drag queen who had stopped in full regalia for a bottle of Gordon’s and a carton of Vogue Menthols. She or he was weeping when the spirit settled, and I have heard that she or he indeed adopted the name Grace Descending in later appearances with the girls at Flaming Mo’s.

  “And there is the crossing light, where the Sign-Talking Brother comes when hallucinogens are on him. Disco survivor, copper thief, gas money negotiator by day, by night he comes to the corner, as he will shortly, children. And here he holds forth against the white and glowing walking man before the red hand of God rises to compel his silence.”

  “It ain’t everyone that bad off on the corner, am I right, Tommy?” Vincent asked.

  “Don’t say ‘ain’t,’ son. You are bound for more education than that. But you are otherwise right in part, because there is Bus Stop Jesus, who begs for cigarettes a block north by the Methodist Church, then blows kisses at passing cars. He’s showing four paintings in a gallery on Main Street and sleeping behind the hundred-dollar steakhouse a block from his exhibit. So is he not so bad off, or is he worse because the door he can’t open is ajar for him, and they is light on the other side?

  “We’ll embark here, children. Lock your doors and don’t say ‘ain’t.’ And may the peace of the Lord that passeth all understanding keep your hearts and minds…”

  And T. Tommy made the sign of the Cross over the children, and he and the Brischords labored off into the baffled night. Vincent dutifully locked the doors behind them, and an approaching beggar turned disconsolately away.

  Ahead the lights went out in the Chinese restaurant, and at the corner opposite, the Sign-Talking Brother approached the intersection through the back lot of the boarded bank, already speaking in angry tongues.

  “We’d better be going, Maia,” Vincent urged, turning west onto Oak toward the Ninth Street intersection and the road to home and safety.

  And Maia looked through the glass at a gaunt black woman, curled fetally under the Rite Aid sign, eyes unfocused and yellowed by the pipe. For a moment they locked gazes, and with something resembling recognition Maia saw the youth in the woman, saw her laughing with church friends and aspiring to nursing school. Maia realized the woman was not much older, not really, and for a moment her heart turned that way, met mid-glance by the woman’s vacant eyes. And the woman saw the blonde girl’s face in the window of the van, marking her and marking the vehicle, and knowing that the time was coming when its doors would open.

  40 Episode: Annoying the Tao

  You took him from sure success, from a supportive crowd, she said. You caused all kinds of trouble with a powerful, successful man, so that this boy can
play music for your doomed production. She wasn’t crazy for Peter Koenig either, she assured him, but he was a respectable man, and decent, and frankly, Stephen, this behavior was simply juvenile.

  The coins had given him the fortieth hexagram. Kieh. Relief.

  Had warned him that the third SIX, divided, shows a porter with his burden, riding in a carriage. He will tempt robbers to attack him. However firm and correct he may try to be, there will be cause for regret.

  But then, in the sixth SIX, divided, we see a feudal prince with his bow shooting at a falcon on the top of a high wall, and hitting it. The effect of his action will be in every way advantageous.

  He knew that Muriel would win the small arguments, as usual. That she would entangle him in her thickets. He also knew that winning the argument did not make her right. Her disapproval of Jack Rausch’s abduction was justified; her reasons were not.

  It was hardly kidnapping, he assured her. Jack was free to come and go as he pleased, not kneeling and hooded in some admonitory video, with some hulking, sword-brandishing Taliban above him. And after all, the boy had come willingly, had expressed no enthusiasm for yet another Our Town—a play so exhausted and over-produced that his entire cast had appeared in one version or another.

  She allowed this was so, but reminded him that he had directed The Crucible, and everyone preferred a wholesome small town to a tired old Arthur Miller Salem witch hunt, complete with hysterical young people and ill-guided parsons. She was surprised, she suggested, that Stephen had not dressed the cast in contemporary clothing to imply the play was a commentary on the Bush Administration, and when Stephen asked her what on earth that was supposed to mean, she had shifted ground again, this time sliding through bracken and undergrowth, asking him what plays he had directed at Yale, at Kent. Whether they might have included Our Town.

  In (the state indicated by) Kieh advantage will be found in the south-west. If no (further) operations be called for, there will be good fortune in coming back (to the old conditions). If some operations be called for, there will be good fortune in the early conducting of them.

  Get it over early, he told himself. Muriel Thorne was enough to annoy the Tao out of you.

  She wasn’t sure that she would attend the opening of Stephen’s Bacchae. June was always so hot in Louisville, and after all, she had seen the play before. Even auditioned for the part of Agave, she reminded him.

  He asked why she so liked seeing Our Town again and again.

  She responded, enigmatically, that it was different.

  Then Stephen asked if it was different because this Bacchae was his Bacchae, and she wondered how he could say such a thing, knowing that she lived and died with his hopes and the disappointments that always followed. Like Yale. Like Kent. But recently, too. It was why, she said, she had to leave his Crucible at the end of the first act, when Betty and Abigail made their list of those they had seen with the Devil. It was bad enough what Joe McCarthy had done to all those people, but Arthur Miller would not let it drop and had to rehearse it through these ridiculous Puritan girls. And to make matters worse, her own son had directed a version that Wade Abner had called “excruciblating.” In the ensuing weeks, when everyone had recovered, she had mustered the courage and maternal love to go through the photo stills from the performance. To even order a few prints of her own.

  Stephen reminded her that she had ordered photos of one Muriel Thorne, seated in the front row of the theatre, hair hennaed and in slight overdress. Six of them, as he recalled. And none of anything else.

  There was no need to scold, she replied, her voice wounded, briefly inaudible amid acoustic shadow, her voice rattling and dodging, then surging back in a chittering of static as though she had emerged from a cavern of bats. She had so few good photographs of herself, after all, and all of her friends were clamoring for one. In fact, she wished now she had ordered more of them. They would have been, she claimed, a kind of salvage from the night.

  He would hope dearly, Stephen said, that his own mother would reconsider. And then the answer rose from the hexagram, offered the escape.

  If some operations be called for, there will be good fortune in the early conducting of them.

  Perhaps we could make allowances for weather, Stephen offered: if the night of dress rehearsal promised to break cooler, Muriel would be able to attend, thereby avoiding the empty seats and humiliations and Wade Abners of the opening night. It was something that George Castille’s mother would have done, had not her death ten years ago prevented her.

  Muriel doubted that Amanda Wingfield Castille would have been supportive of a son like that.

  41 Episode: Twin Speak for the Head

  The famed intuition of twins begins in amniotic bonding. Sometimes, on rare and heartbreaking occasions, the bodies join, wedding flesh and bone and vital organs. But more often—quite often—the soul’s interweaving shows in a shared private language, the parts of which fit together like the halves of a ring in an old comedy, when twins separated at birth link a coin or a signet in the last scene of the play and discover they were bound together all along, that they are lucky they didn’t violate taboos when they wanted each other in the second act.

  As they grow older and necessities draw them apart, they sometimes develop an intuition, an extra sense between them. This is the case with human twins, as parapsychology maintains. But also with divinity, with Apollo and Artemis. So, too, perhaps, Castor and Pollux. Helen and Clytemnestra, though in their cases one twin was divine, the other mortal, and it was more difficult, of course, for two such different natures to commune with intimacy. In all cases, something like a soul traces in the chromosomal pattern, in blood or ichor or a blending of the two, for the gods know what the gods know, but the insight is larger than mortal.

  Cassandra is more than a complex. True prophecy on disbelieving ears, a girl resisting the god’s advances and punished for her resistance, for chastity. The god Apollo approached her, the story goes, all golden and beautiful, all oracle and sunlight and promise, expecting the trade-off as entitlement, his gift of foreknowledge at the price of her love.

  There is another part of the story. Like Maia De Chevre, Cassandra was a twin. And when the festival was held to honor her birth and that of her brother Helenus, the two of them were put to bed in Apollo’s temple, while parents and friends celebrated the occasion. Then, flushed with wine, the adults went home, forgetting the twins in the sanctuary. Next morning, sober again, they returned to the temple, where they found the sacred serpents coiled about the children, cleansing the infant eyes and ears with their flickering tongues. Frightened by the outcry of the woman, by the wail raised at this prodigious sight, the serpents disappeared among the laurel boughs which lay beside the infants on the floor. From that moment, it is said, Cassandra and Helenus possessed the gift of prophecy.

  Cassandra and Helenus. She was cursed with others’ disbelief, and prophesied the burning of a city to the laughter and doubt of its people, of her friends, her family. Meanwhile her brother supposedly prospered, touched by the god as well.

  What did second sight tell him of her visions? He takes a place of prophetic honor among his people, though in some versions of the story he helps in their betrayal, even introduces the idea of the Trojan Horse to the Greeks. In all versions of the story, he survives.

  But traitor or not, why does Helenus never defend his sister? Prophet himself, why does he never see she is right?

  Another set of twins. Another time and city. Another venue sacred to another god, a serpent coiled in its wings and recesses. So Maia, driving the hippie van to pick up her brother in the park, felt a stir in the energies and an unusual foreboding. But indeed, Vinnie De Chevre was quite content and peaceful, tuning his guitar for a first duet with Jack Rausch.

  Aron had brought Jack to Stephen Thorne’s doorstep the night before. There they found Thorne, George Castille, a fifth of scotch and an acrid, nutty smell in the room, though Stephen had hastened to open the window at
their arrival. Stephen played the cool old hippie, announcing that he disapproved of the recent abduction but loved how they all had gone about it. Behind Stephen, Castille winked conspiratorially at the boys, then told them that Mr. Thorne had announcements regarding the casting of the play.

  Aron stiffened at the prospect of changes, but relaxed visibly when Stephen made known his intentions to play old Cadmus himself, the grandfather of Dionysus and Pentheus, while Mr. Castille would play the ancient prophet Tireisias. Our Town, it seemed, had reminded the men of how tedious it was to watch young and amateur actors play characters five times their age.

  Relieved and emboldened that he was still Dionysus, still the star, Aron asked Stephen Thorne whether Jack could crash there until things blew over at Antioch.

  The glance exchanged by Cadmus and Tireisias was one of horror. They were not about to follow the god’s command, and both insisted they had no room for guests. Neither mentioned how awkward it might be for a grown man to house a seventeen-year-old boy who was neither his son nor relative, but it confirmed what Aron had grown to suspect, what he had talked about to Jack in the ride home from Antioch. So he conceded his mother might make the better host, that Jack might stay with them, if only briefly, and both men calmed and returned to planning the play, and Aron silently planned what to say to Dolores.

  She let him stay, of course. Something about being accustomed to cleaning up after men, after all their messes. So Aron stopped worrying about that part of it, set Jack up on the sofa. And the next day he played music and Aron sulked until Dolores said enough, they should get out for a while, and then Jack and Vinnie played music here at the park, and Aron again sulked as the sun set and the daylight tumbled into the first warm night of the season.