by Hob Broun
“Tally ho,” said Tildy.
They had just enough to cover the toll.
Midtown, midafternoon. All manner of faultlessly turned out honeys bombing up and down the pavement; a career-girl carousel. Fueled by Lo-Cal lunches consumed at their desks, they emerged from their warrens carrying briefcases crammed with reports and market research printouts, considered their profiles in shop windows, hailed cabs imperiously, letting the wind whip their layered coifs since, after all, today’s woman doesn’t live by her looks.
Tildy wondered how she could possibly compete.
“There it is,” Christo said. “Hot enough for you?”
Five blocks south of Times Square he curbed the Fiat next to a pay phone, dug around for a dime. But the phone was inoperative: receiver clipped off, coin box disemboweled, and all over everything the felt marker glyphs of pubescent soul writers—
and
“Wait here for me. If you get bored, just circle the block. I’ll catch up with you.”
He dialed Looie from a Blarney Stone bar. A woman in rainbow knee socks was wishing herself happy birthday. Three old-timers were arguing with the bartender over program selection on the tube.
“What’s shakin’, Looie? You ready for a delivery? We’re just fifteen minutes north.”
“We? No, never mind. Surprise me.”
“She’s not your type, Looie. Trust me.”
“‘Trust me,’ he says. I didn’t even know they’d let you out until a couple days ago. You’re in defiance of science, my friend. You’ll teach them all humility before it’s over.”
7
LOUIS “CHEMIKAZI” LEVITSKI CAME from rugged Ashkenazic stock. His father was a muscular, taciturn individual who had learned, during a lengthy tour of Eastern Europe’s DP camps, that a keen sense of dread was a man’s best friend. He was not a family man, preferring to spend all his time behind the counter of his stationery store, sipping schav from a Mason jar, never removing his overcoat. He wanted his son to go into banking or real estate and become “a bigger thief than any of them.” Louis’s mother, a sickly woman with an erratic temper and a compulsive devotion to the films of John Garfield, wanted him to become a composer of Broadway melodies. “With the royalties, you can buy me a whole hospital,” she used to say. But Louis disappointed both of them. He was a genius.
In 1965 he became the youngest student ever to be graduated from the doctoral program of Rensselaer Polytechnic. A multinational corporation offered him a substantial bonus package to sign on and he went immediately to work on a shellfish toxin project funded, through a Liechtenstein holding company, by the CIA. While the project itself was a failure, Louis was not. He was, in fact, the talk of the boardroom. Skipping a few levels of the hierarchy did not endear him to his colleagues (that was fine; he didn’t want friends), but a year later he had his own lab, an unlimited budget, and was busily rearranging peptide chains in an effort to develop a neuromuscular blocking agent which, when released into an urban water system, could “neutralize” as many as half a million people in less than twelve hours. He was extremely happy in his work.
Then came the Summer of Love and Louis was ravaged, subverted.
Late one evening he was snuggled in his tiny apartment listening to Ezio Pinza and reading a chemical engineering journal—or trying to. The noise from above was making it very difficult: clangs, thumps, shrill laughter, and what sounded like someone roller-skating from one end of the hall to the other. He went upstairs to complain.
There, in a hot crush of thoroughly unhinged folk who seemed to be emitting smoke from every orifice, a large man inexplicably dressed in Bermuda shorts, a straw boater and the dress tunic of Her Majesty’s Coldstream Guards prevailed on him to have a cup of punch and then another and then … Yes, he’d been right about the roller-skating. Lovely girl, but her taffy face was, my God, drooping down around her waist. Hmmm, better lay off that punch. Tastes like glue anyway…. Getting chilly. Maybe ought to close those portholes, keep the storm at bay. At bay in the Bay, indeed. Louis with the large L, have we met before? Athens, perhaps. Look out for the cactus, look out…. Fingers numb. Tingling in scalp area. Blankets, more blankets. I must see the Captain…. I’m repelling electrons, buddy, don’t get smart with me…. You’re okay. Just some queasy thing’ll pass. I know what I’m doing. Ionization. I’m in solution … Wait a minute. Oowooo, there’s something in my belly made of jelly and it needs to get out! …
This first LSD experience was by no means his last but, in its aftermath at least, was certainly the most transforming. After riding up and down in an elevator with two gay poets and a beagle for an hour and a half; after scampering through soot-black tunnels of the IRT line with a teenage waitress from Babylon, L.I.; after a dawn confrontation with the Angel of Chemistry, a cheap dame wearing all kinds of bead necklaces who spilled maggots from her mouth whenever she opened it; after waking up fully clothed in three inches of bathtub water in the home of a kindly black postal worker who had scooped him off the shoulder of the Cross Bronx Expressway, Looie Levitski had no choice but to start all over again.
He entered his laboratory that afternoon, destroyed all his notes, poured acid over the desks of several vice-presidents, and with his bare hands smashed spectrometers, gas chromatographs and a scintillation counter worth upwards of four hundred thousand dollars.
A fugitive from justice, he fled to Oregon and built himself a cabin overlooking the Rogue River. There he passed the next four years, sturdy and contemplative, with his logger’s boots and brier pipe, hewing wood and drawing water, observing birds and wildflowers, casting for steelhead trout and making serene, Tantric love to a series of fragmentary women who came to sample the purest hallucinogenic drugs in the state, the product of Looie’s undiminished skills. To his amazement and delight, he discovered that women found him charming. By almost any standard, certainly, he cut a less than dashing figure, so what was it? Perhaps his newly discovered abilities as a chef? His cool acceptance of failure? His distaste for violence of any kind? Or perhaps it was nothing more than his avowed discovery of a vaginal enzyme that prevented tooth decay and his manifest intention never to darken again a dentist’s door.
But one day, Looie wandered into the forest to collect pine cones, having left a gas flame on near a beaker of formic ether. The cabin burned to the ground. Everything was lost, including eighty-nine chapters of automatic writing: “Cacaphonous Desperation Versus the Inherent Glide of Starched Mush.”
He returned to New York via bicycle. It took him five months.
Looie’s loft was on Pearl Street in a part of the city originally laid out with the horse-drawn vehicle in mind and Christo had to jog back and forth on one-way streets. The block was grimy and dismal, a line of vacancy; obsolete workshops of stale-cake brick held together with barbed wire and rusted sheet tin; street pocked with glass, sparkling seeds from which the weeds grew.
Tildy, with narrowed eyes: “Who’d want to live here?”
“You know what they say. Never judge a book by its jacket copy.” He made a modified K turn, nosed up to an enameled green steel door. “Actually, I think you’ll like this part. It has a certain cinematic tang.”
He got out, climbed on a standpipe to press a button high on the wall. The door lifted, revealing a caged freight elevator. Christo pulled the gate and drove them, Fiat and all, aboard, called “All in” up the shaft; they began very slowly to rise. The shakes and shudders gave Tildy the same and she reached for Christo’s hand.
“It’s all right. This thing can hold a cement mixer.”
At last they edged into light. Looie was waiting for them by an already open gate on the third level of this one-time hides and leathers warehouse, a short, thinset being in a velour tracksuit. He had beady black eyes and, except for a small, triangular beard dyed blue, not a hair on his head—this made his prominent nose even more so, like, you could open beer bottles on it. The original-cast album of Bye, Bye Birdie was playing and he lip-synced alon
g.
“We’re going to park in this guy’s living room?”
Christo smiled. “I thought you’d like this part.”
But there was no living room as such. The dividers, panels of pebbled plexiglass on overhead tracks, had been drawn to one side; it was one clear-through space so large that details at its farthest depth—some kind of platform, old machinery—were hard to make out. The floor was sanded white, walls stripped back to the brick, tin floral-imprint ceiling, furniture of chrome and suede, warm earth tones, recessed lighting.
Glossy head tilted appraisingly, Looie helped her out of the car.
“Meet my partner, Tildy Soileau.”
“Enchanté.” His lips skimmed across her knuckles and he embraced Christo, kissing him on both cheeks. “Welcome back. Welcome back to the madhouse without walls.”
“You’re looking good, Chemikazi, got that glow of health and wealth. And I like the blue beard. It looks a lot better than the green.”
“It’s been a tough year, a lot of cruelty and fraud out there—you know—people whizzing around like insects, trying to stay clear of the big boot heel coming down. But I just float through it all and never get hit with the debris. I can’t explain it. It’s a matter of faith…. Now, can I get you anything? Ham salad? Fondue? White wine?”
“Later for that. I say we sample up.” Christo applied the trunk key, opened one of the garbage bags, tore off great fistfuls of the herb, gummy with resin, dropping them onto an unpleated road map. “Pierce tells me they had a very dry growing season down in Colombia and we have here some tops of the bush pickings. El Primo. He says even an old jade like you will be impressed.”
While Christo sat at a butcher-block table rubbing buds through a flour sifter, Looie took Tildy lightly by the arm and showed her around his “barracks.” He pointed out rosewood cabinets he’d installed himself, the hand-cranked dumbwaiter where he stored onions and potatoes, a row of pancakes—blueberry, buttermilk, whole wheat—tacked up intact as instant sculpture. He opened a locker of salvaged skins of bear and fox and stoat and made her feel the brittle age in them with her hand.
“Once when I still had hair I shared a lunch of berries with a young grizzly. Tremendous berries in Oregon. Justly famous.”
He’d saved the best for last, guiding her now to a window centered in one wall, tiers of green, flashing movement behind the glass. How lovely his touch is, she thought, I know his arm is there but it feels weightless.
“My vivarium,” Looie announced. “Not a terrarium or aquarium. It’s sort of a country club for reptiles, you know, like the place where the mobsters go. La Costa.”
The terraced enclosure was high and deep. Mossy outcroppings and sandy pools were surrounded by wooden sticks (for climbing) and broadleaf vegetation. There were perches and hollows, tunnels through the wet black earth, areas of shade and areas of warm yellow spotlight (the same lamps, Looie said, fast-food places use to keep the french fries warm). Heaped mealworms writhed in the feeding dishes and a ventilation unit hummed quietly.
“Some of these types in here are temperamental or frail. I try to keep it at an even eighty-two degrees. I’m afraid they do get institutionalized after a while, you know, roll onto their backs at the first break in routine.”
Tildy indicated two green lumps wedged behind a chunk of lava.
“Korean fire belly toads,” he whispered. “I’m going to isolate them soon for breeding. Extremely difficult to obtain in this country. I’ve been doing some consulting work for a flavors and essences company. They felt they needed help with their mocha and their number-two beef, so I went up to New Rochelle for a week, gave one a few more bass notes and softened the salts in the other. Simple. But it paid for my toads.”
With some prompting he got her to distinguish a speckled salamander with gold chip eyes from the dwarf begonias under which it was curled, and explained how an old girlfriend had smuggled it from Africa inside a steam iron.
“How did you get him out?”
“That’s nothing. Two friends of mine, brothers, attempted to smuggle marijuana from Yucatán in their scuba tanks. It took them all day to pack it in through half-inch air valve holes. But it only took Customs two hours to unpack.”
“Caramba!” Christo displayed a wicked cheroot of Rubio de la Costa, Colombia’s highest octane strain, tightly and quite symmetrically rolled in a sheet of onionskin paper. “Let’s go, boys and girls.”
He lit up with an entire book of matches, paper flaring as he inhaled, face barely visible behind clouds of smoke.
“Nice flavor, very nice. Like incense in a Catholic church.”
The paper was burning too quickly, ash and seed embers dropping to the floor.
“That’s like a taco. You have to do it over something.” Looie brought a cookie sheet.
Collecting smoke in cupped hands, he washed his face with it. “Excellent bouquet. Pungent but not too sharp. Almost camphorous.” He made the delicate pass with Christo, took small puffs, exhaling rapidly through his nose, then one large one which he swirled, shifted back and forth between pouched cheeks like a wine taster. “Good resin content, no doubt about that. A little harsh on the throat.” Lifting a teapot from the table, he sucked cold oolong from the spout. “Any metabolic signs so far?”
“Slight chill in the palms, increased pulse rate … and this—this sort of walls-of-stone effect in my sinuses.”
“Uh-huh, uh-huh.” Looie refilled his lungs.
Then Christo held his face over a smoking hunk that landed on the cookie sheet and sucked through his nose till his eyes watered. They both watched the column of lacy blue smoke undulate toward the ceiling, examining it for omens, nodding learnedly like a couple of Delphic kibitzers.
“Looks like Pierce has done it again,” Christo said. Tildy stared into the grain of the table and wobbled her feet; he prodded her. “What about you? Why don’t you join me in our test kitchen to sample a new product absolutely free.”
“Okay. But I should tell you, strong grass gives me a headache.”
She handled the thing, smoking like a flare now, as if it were a cigarette; though her eyes bugged out, she managed not to cough. Christo made encouraging whatta-ya-waitin’-for gestures, and pinched her on the cheek.
“Just fuck off, Jimmy,” she choked. Looie shook his head, recalling something once said about not messing with a psychotic. She took a few modest hits, passed. “Don’t get pushy, that’s all. It provokes me.”
“You don’t want to come along, don’t.” Christo shifted, his speech twangy, stressed. “There are some changes really need to be made in Colombia. They’re still locked into that coffee economy, and monoculture just destroys the soil. Clear the forest for coffee trees that suck the nutrients out of the ground, before long you have to clear more forest and start again. Now nationalized marijuana plantations would offer a much more favorable foreign exchange situation without the inefficient use of land. It’s labor-intensive, you can have staggered planting and harvest times….”
Through gritty casement windows flanking the elevator cage, the sky bled by slow degrees to a duller shade of gray. The only sound in the room now a repetitive hissing: phono needle circling the end-groove of a Bing Crosby album. The humongous joint had been followed by a second, lying crumpled now and half finished on the cookie sheet, generating an atmosphere wrapped heavily with aimlessness. Like waiting for fruit to drop off the tree. In want of hostly energies, Looie snoozed open-eyed amid the fumes of an Indonesian clove cigarette. Christo, trying to do figures in his head, kept losing the handle in the process of rounding them off, but returned doggedly to the starting point. One kilo equals 35.2 ounces. The silence was so commanding, so tightly sealed, that when finally Tildy spoke, the words were like machine-gun fire.
“I think,” she said thickly from the depths of a canvas sling chair, “I think those aspirin you gave me are outnumbered.”
“I can give you something stronger,” Looie said, nearly toppling out of h
is chair as he reached to test her cheek for fever.
Beginning at the tips of his fingers, a protective urge shot through him. This brittle and uncertain girl thrust suddenly into a wild frontier—for her alone he would draw the wagons into a circle, heat bath water over a buffalo chip fire, pamper her with silk bloomers all the way from Junction City. One so dainty as you, ma’am, out here on the plains …
“The three-thousand-dollar kilo,” Christo said, discarding his calculations and taking a stab at it. “I think we’ve reached that plateau. Ought to check in with the boss. Where’s your phone?”
Looie pointed into the shadows. “All the way back on your right, next to the sewing machines.”
Tildy, for her part, had been sizing Looie up for some time, admiring his sleek contours and the elegance in the movements of his mouth. She imagined now a certain telegraphy between them—perhaps it was nothing more than weed hyperbole—a swift, uncoded message of flesh need. One for the homefolks, Karl in particular. “What’d y’all do up in New York?” Fucked a guy with a blue beard.
Conscious of her watchful eyes, Looie fanned out crackers on a cheeseboard, sliced up a wedge of Emmentaler shot through with cumin seeds, popped open a bottle of sparkling rosé.
“Pierce wasn’t home, but I left a message on his machine.” Christo appeared as Looie dealt out the glasses, filled one and swirled wine in his cottony mouth. “Ain’t nothin’ to it but to do it. With a little teamwork we can have this shit bricked up in no time flat.”
“What’s the hurry?” Looie, to be sure, had other things on his mind.
“Fine. You two go ahead and sit there, chew the fat and get drunk. I’ll do the work. Don’t worry about it.” He walked sideways toward the Fiat, hands on hips, as though expecting one of them to jump him from behind. “Don’t worry about it at all.”
