Over the course of the next month, Devin, doing his boy a solid by seeking out avenues of recompense and reconciliation. Seeing in Billy a contrition that burned with an insistence perceived as genuine, culminating in a lengthy letter found under his windshield wiper on a late winter’s morning, a missive that included a sub-letter to Libby he asked Devin to deliver.
Billy, pleading in the cover letter he’d submitted how Devin should feel free to peruse the letter-letter, the one to her, for his sanction and approval and rubber-stamp, after which passing the document to the other victim, as he termed them both—victims of his headstrong, ruinous stupidity. All of which he explained would sort of at last kinda codify the matter as legitimately resolved and the akashic records expunged, whatever that meant, as well as to consign memories of the events into what might be termed a friendship foolishness archive, dusty and forgotten and sealed forever.
Too many words saying not enough. Devin’s takeaway.
Sitting in the Mustang reading the cover letter, three pages handwritten in Billy’s distinctive, blocky print, Devin smoked and sipped on a lite beer from a six-pack he’d grabbed after class. The Libby letter? A dozen typewritten pages, single-spaced. Jesus. So much print Devin didn’t give a shit what it said, so long as he didn’t have to read it all.
One passage in the cover letter, however, stuck out:
Ruck, as I leave for the Dead show in Greensboro next week, I have to say that you, Libby, Roy Earl, everyone, ‘y’all’—see, I am one of you!—feel like the only real friends I’ve ever had in my life. You are like real people compared to the robots whose tutelage I grew up under, ostensibly smart and urbane types, whatever, but in reality nothing more than soulless moneysuckers, the lot of them! My father, my mother, the stepmothers—like a sitcom!—everyone in my life have been leeches and whores. My life, before last semester, that is. And meeting all you cool cats.
Seriously. You don’t know how often I prayed for a brother, someone like you, someone with that same jaundiced eye like mine, asking the big questions and taking no guff from that bunch of bipedal nincompoops running around this old redneck college campus here in the heart of the Confederacy. You feel like that brother to me, you did before I fucked up, and you still do now.
I know that’s hard to believe but I swear it’s true, and I’m not sure if what happened wasn’t me only trying to be closer to all of you, not just Libby. God help me but I swear I believe that, so much so that I don’t know anymore whether it sounds crazy.
Okay okay, it probably does. It probably sounds fucked and sick, but what can I tell you, I thought I owned the universe that night. I thought I was a hundred feet tall. But instead, I was only an amoral, delusional intellectual dwarf. Ruck: you have to know that it was all an accident. And again, a delusion. Like you said.
Devin, noting a strategic round splatter, a faded blue asterisk courtesy of the author’s own tear duct. Folding up the sheaf of pages, putting them into the envelope to deliver to Libby, his spider-sense told him some aspect of all these words represented bullshit.
Libby’s response? She mashed Billy letter, unread, into a festering wastebasket muck of old takeout Chinese food, sweet and sour sauce soaking into his unheeded literary plea for understanding.
Forty-Two
Billy
How it had all worked out, man. Like, big-time.
Not.
Bursting apelike from the apartment, Billy, his legs rubbery, face and stomach hurting from Devin and Libby’s punches, heaved his body up the hill from University Terrace. The streets wet and shiny, his breath pluming in the cooling misty air, he ducked into alcoves and alleys and shadows to avoid being caught, to avoid capture. He ran for miles. At last he collapsed against a slick green trash dumpster a resident had forgotten to take back in from the sidewalk. Puking into it. Hard.
Recovering from the spew, he pondered what had happened: They’d called out the big guns on him. In his mind a squad of ten trained, fearless cadres had descended and beaten the living bejesus out of him. A pride of lions, ripping him to shreds. A looneytune of Tasmanian Devils. And now, flaps of skin hanging down, contusions, blood, viscera, even his dick shredded like hamburger meat flopping wet and useless with gore.
Except, no; jeans and a black T-shirt. No blood. A little puke.
Finding himself standing on the corner of Blossom and Barnwell, reality locked back in. Surrounded by students coming and going from the concert down to party in the neighborhood, he’d barely run three blocks. No gang of militarized toughs.
Only the girl you love and her boyfriend, whipping your ass.
Wanting to go back, to explain, to apologize.
Or to kill them both.
Surprised it hadn’t happened.
Yeah. Earlier, he’d had to run—his control, slipping.
She’d laughed at it. Women didn’t love his dick—they thought it ridiculous.
How hard. It had been.
Not the steeplemeat. Not hard—difficult. To prevent an accident.
With Libby.
That would have ranked right up there with his greatest fuck-ups.
Relief.
But pent-up with bothersome energy. What to do?
To have an accident on purpose? Finally? Just to blow off the steam?
No. Hadn’t he made enough mistakes tonight? Accidents were what they were and needed to stay that way. If that made any damn sense.
Billy, back home to his condo by himself to watch movies until the acid wore off, trudging through the dense pilgrimage of thirsty college students heading to the bars; being recognized from Meat Mallet by one dude, which was cool.
One after another for hours, jamming VHS tapes into the deck, pulling them out, winding, rewinding—scenes, bits and pieces. Finally realizing the sun had come up. A class day. Light bending around the edges of everything. Tinnitus from the ungodly loud, albeit crystal clear, Grateful Dead PA. Most impressive concert sound he’d ever heard. They had a following of worshipful millions. Maybe the punks had been wrong about the hippies. Every punk Billy knew, except for him and Mucky, whose dad had plenty of bread, were poor as shit. Like an ethos. Fuck punk.
Seeing Libby in de Lisle’s scriptwriting class that next Monday, the one for which he still owed scenes from last week, much less the current assignment, made for a tense morning. Her face, a mask of icy revulsion. After Max’s lecture, about a concept the teacher called ‘separate sentience’, that is, imbuing the characters with the sense they lead a life outside the story and the page, she had all but run from the classroom.
He trembled all over as the tall, wiry old writer, who had actual credits on Hollywood features and TV shows back in the 1950s and 60s—WRITTEN BY MAX DE LISLE in forty-foot typesetting on a movie screen—peered almost eye to eye.
“Where’s the promise we saw in the early scenes, sir?” Max called everyone sir. Well, the dudes. The girls he called ‘ma’am’ like any good Southern boy does, or so Billy had discovered after spending time in South Carolina thanks to his grandfather’s enormous plastic bag plant in the upstate. Consumers all over the world purchased their goods in Stemplewicz blister-packs they then toted home in a variety of Stemplewicz plastic containers. Dustin Hoffman should have listened to his Dad’s friend.
“Prof, I don’t know what to tell you. The muse has left me.”
“I know you’re in a rock band that ‘gigs’ late in the evening, as Paul Simon sang. Is that the problem?”
“Why don’t I bring in the late work tomorrow. I’ll bring the rest in on Wednesday.”
“It’s a deal. ‘No excuses’ goes a long way with me, and in the industry. Just do the work and step back. The path to serenity.”
That next week, however, Billy decided to drop de Lisle’s scriptwriting class and take an F for the semester—oooh, how scary. Like that hadn’t happened plenty of times. He’d drop off a note saying that he had lied; that he had a drug problem and would be back in the spring after rehab.
&nb
sp; He was a rock star. Max de Lisle was in show business. He wouldn’t only get it, Billy’s proactive behavior would only bolster the man’s respect for him. Blowing off the last month of classes to avoid the reproving stares? Win-win.
Billy spent the holidays first with his father in his DC townhouse, and later taking the train to Manhattan two days before Christmas to visit his harridan mother and fiancé, a smooth-talking, African-american razor-jawed looker a dozen years her junior named Trenholm Whitaker, a hot-shit I-banker worth seven figures. It was nothing like Billy’s family fortune, of course, but her beau nonetheless acted the part with aplomb—in other words, a tiresome Princeton nimrod whose impossibly white teeth looked too big for his erudite mouth.
Money. The Steeples already had plenty, pal. Get over yourself.
Besides—money alone didn’t get you into the club.
Hell, Billy’s grandfather was a member of both Skull & Bones and Bohemian Grove, as well another fraternal organization or two. You didn’t talk about any of those, though. Nobody’s heard of them anyway. Another world from the simple folks down in Edgewater County and at Southeastern University, far off the Ivy League track that delivers masters of commerce and the world like his granddad.
It was a world in which you didn’t know who to trust. And people who talked out of turn got disappeared. The folks down in South Carolina seemed to be merely going on about their ordinary lives. Billy felt relief from bothersomeness among them. Unlike his own family.
New York, alive with holiday cheer—snow flurries, traffic, human beings bundled in animal skins and burdened by clusters of shopping bags.
But Billy, deader than dog shit inside. Wandering in the slush, glimpsing Libby out of the corner of his eye in every smiling, happy female face; seeing his failures in every worthless rag-wearing malcontent, in every stumblebum drunk. For all the money and family pedigree, no more powerful than they at exhibiting control over his circumstances.
Billy, walking for blocks in cold sleet, considered heading to the tip of the island and to the top of one of the massive twin obelisks there; hurling himself off, plummeting to the sidewalk below. Or else out wind-borne over the frigid waters of the harbor, his London Fog coat flapping like a cape and providing lift. No guts, no glory; but if followed through upon, no chance for Libby.
Yes—as long as Libby Meade lived, he clutched at the possibility of redemption. Had again come to believe such was possible; like a manic depressive, the peaks and troughs of his Libby obsession a wild and undulating high-frequency waveform, forced by occasional lucidity into acknowledging the unlikelihood of ever winning her heart.
Conjuring scenarios in which Rucker stepped aside—either willingly, or through misadventure.
Flashes of Libby, falling grief-stricken into Billy’s arms at the news of Ruck’s death. Remembering in her time of crisis the nascent connection they’d enjoyed—savored, even—prior to the almost-accident on the night of the concert. Both devastated at the sudden, tragic loss, the gravitational attraction provided pulling them inexorably toward one another, two cosmic bodies destined for collision and personal apotheosis. Ruck’s sacrifice, an alchemical dissolution necessary to get to the gold.
Anything possible. Anything he wished—arranging for Ruck’s death. Delegating so as to avoid the obvious emotional entanglement of killing his best friend. Paying one of those crackheads over in Simpkins Park.
Now he knew—Ruck.
Ruck would be the first non-accidental killing.
He felt a pulsating warmth inside like intuition; it seemed to say Not-Ruck.
Soul-sick and confused, he ducked into the first dive he came across, a Blarney Stone. The smell of cheap draught reminded him of Lupo’s, in the Old Market where Meat Mallet gigged. Or the Rainbow, where he and Devin had shared their pitcher of forgiveness.
After two hours of drinking and watching television with the daytime drunks in the pub, Billy, half-lit and near tears, alone as he’d ever felt yet eager to get away from the filthy snow and the smog and being in the same city as his preening, self-centered mother, went about a charade of buying halfhearted gifts.
In the epic biographical film of his life they’d someday make, the mother character would not merit so much as a walk-on, much less a supporting or featured role: the all-but unseen villain, Elisabeth Gallard Steeple Barrett or whatever her next surname to be, estranged from her old Brahmin bloodline of the Boston Gallards and now holding sway and power over nothing, not even her own progeny, would be portrayed with brutal honesty.
No disloyal fille de joie like her held any power. Or could. Only the sexual ministrations making men vulnerable gave them any hope of dominance.
Now his mother, there was a potential accident which would do the world some good. But Billy, gagging in revulsion at the Oedipal implications of such a bothersome notion.
Billy sobered up enough to put on a sport coat and slacks to meet his mother for dinner. He told them both at Twenty-One how he’d completed no fewer than three feature length screenplays, two of which had already started making the rounds at agencies out on the coast.
“My god, son.” Elisabeth, slurring already from holiday cheer, shone with approval. Her face, which he tended to remember from the brief time they had lived together in his early childhood, as narrow and youthful where now it had grown puffy. “You never fail to astound me.”
“I understand the coverage on them has been uniformly positive.” Billy, sipping a velvety, oaky Malbec, swished like an oenophile and swallowed in slow motion. “So a quick sale is likely, if not a bidding war. Or so I understand.”
“A sale?” Whitaker, who had been eyeing Billy with cool detachment through his wire-framed gold glasses, leaned forward and squinted. “I thought you were shopping agents.”
“That’s what I meant—an agent, to manage such matters. As a quick sale.” Billy shrugged. “I’m just telling you what my professor says. He knows the business.”
“Fantastic,” they’d cooed, oohing and aahing.
“You’re going to make so much damn money,” Whitaker said.
“And he’s the man to tell you where to invest it, son.”
“Sure, guys. Sure thing.”
All smiles. But wanting to puke. He was making all this money to show Granddad. Well—one day, he would manifest these current lies.
Enough of this shrewd maneuvering. Contemptuous but quiet, when his mother went to the powder room Billy smirked and said to Whitaker, “As though my grandfather’s people aren’t available to help me manage my money.”
“Listen—I’m not trying to stick my beak in the middle of family business.”
“So we have that going for us. Know your place, son.”
By the time they finished the rest of a dinner whose temperature had turned cool and he made excuses to leave, Billy’d gotten the distinct impression that his mother’s boyfriend would refrain from making any more ridiculous entreaties. Next time it happened, Billy would make his point with prejudice.
Billy, getting to the meat of his real reason for visiting, took the train out to the Connecticut countryside where his grandfather still respected the old ways, celebrating the high holidays with an eye toward tradition; not so the younger Steeples, who eschewed their Jewish heritage, held no religious beliefs that Billy’d ever witnessed. But of course, like all good Americans, they had celebrated Christmas like the unrepentant Philistines they were.
Or so Grandad often declared. “I warned Bill Senior not to marry outside the tribe,” he’d confided to Billy. “Now look at the family.”
Llech Stemplewicz toasted his grandson’s arrival. “Billy—my boy. You look so much better now that you’ve got some hair on your head.”
“I feel like I’m starting to get my ‘head’ together, Poppy. Feeling grown up, finding myself.”
Telling his forebear about plans to make films and become a living Hollywood god—the author of his films, and his own destiny—Billy knew it wouldn’t be enough.
“Movies? You wouldn’t rather make something of yourself in the real world?”
“It’s an industry.”
“It’s make-believe.”
“A billion-dollar pretense.”
“Men like us are destined for greater things than mere play-acting. The stories we tell become other people’s hard reality.”
The old man, rapping his knuckles on the arm of the sofa; a fire, crackling in a fireplace almost as tall as Billy in the mansion’s enormous family room the size of a meeting hall. Troubled and uncertain about his grandson trying a life spent in the arts, a look crossing his face like one day my grandson will be grounded, will see his way through to the life he should be living.
But for now satisfied, satisfied his progeny had at least come to visit. “So long as there’s money in it—real money. Remember—that’s the only path to true satisfaction in this life. The money is what matters. Without the money, you don’t have the power.”
Billy, concluding the holiday visit by discussing his new girlfriend Libby, how by the next time he came, he hoped to bring her along. “From a good family back home. They own half the county.”
“Old money?”
Billy winked and nodded.
That’s the stuff, his grandfather’s twinkling eyes said.
This final lie, needling Billy by slipping out unbidden as it had. He’d tried to stop thinking about her.
Tried. But with each day, it only got worse. The sense of loss. Of separation. At times it could feel downright bothersome.
Without announcing his departure to anyone, the next morning Billy called a car service and headed for La Guardia, his destination not South Carolina but west, to the golden coast for the Grateful Dead’s annual four-show New Year’s run out in Oakland. Just the ticket. Also a hotbed of punk as well out in the East Bay area to be explored.
Mansion of High Ghosts Page 31
