And yet it was the beginning of the end for me, some kind of end, although I didn’t see things that way at the time.
* * *
I returned to New York triumphant. I had crashed going 140 miles an hour and more or less walked away unharmed, mostly because of the helmet and the leather racing suit I’d had on. Just a sprain, bruises, and road rash of which I was secretly proud. I’d been allowed to drive the Spirit of Italy. I had been in the cockpit, which held the faint residue of Didi Bombonato’s aftershave. I had breathed his aftershave and pretended it was Flip Farmer’s, or that I was Flip Farmer. The speed had felt right, even if I had been afraid: to go fast was to conform to the logic of the steering, the speedometer, the gas pedal. I knew the world, now, from inside the Spirit of Italy.
I knew that feeling. To be the driver. To watch the mechanics in their white jumpsuits leap over the blinding salt toward the vehicle, faces jubilant. Toward me, behind the wheel.
* * *
Fall had arrived, and a feeling of hope and freshness suffused the city. The sky was a vivid, seersucker blue. I was finished with my first day back working with Marvin and Eric at Bowery Film, strolling under a canopy of green leaves that were big and floppy, a few gold or ruby-red around the edges, one twirling downward as I crossed Washington Square Park. The light cut a sharp shadow instead of summer’s fuzzy outlines. Autumn had brought in definition, a sense of gravity returning to a place where it had been chased out by the sun, by the diffuse rule of humidity. There was a late-September crispness in the air. I thought of smashed horse chestnuts on the sidewalks of Reno. The feel of new corduroy. Of course I had a great story to report, and the hopefulness I sensed from the gold-edged leaves above me could have been my own.
I had run an errand for Marvin, dropping off processed film to an address on lower Fifth, and was on my way to meet Sandro. The NYU students loafing around the empty fountain in the park were trying out the fall fashions, the boys in sweaters of wholesome colors, orange, brown, and green. The girls in pleated, brushed-cotton coats and suede clogs or those oxfords with the wavy soles. Lace knee socks and hand-tooled leather purses with a long strap worn crosswise between the breasts. A few berets. In light, dry gusts, the air riffled the leaves, yellow as wax beans, and a few floated softly downward. In such hopefulness, even a beret seemed like a good idea.
“Did you ever notice that three-quarters of China girls have a widow’s peak?” Marvin had asked me that afternoon, as he was setting up the lights to take my picture holding the color chart. Mostly I helped customers and ran errands, but twice a year or so they needed new pictures for different emulsions and densities of film.
“I mean a pronounced one,” he said. “But you—you have no widow’s peak.”
It was true. For some reason many of them had a widow’s peak.
I have no widow’s peak.
I liked the little brushed-cotton coats, very retro-1940s, but soon I would have the Moto Valera, which was being repaired at the dealer in Reno and would be shipped back to New York, all at Sandro’s expense. (Did I care? No, I didn’t. The money was practically nothing to him.) It might take months for it to be repaired, because they had to order parts and bodywork from Italy since it was a 1977 model, not yet released, but eventually I’d have it, at which point the dainty cotton jacket would be useless. I would need leather. And not just leather but tight leather. Since my crash, I understood its use, which had nothing to do with the kids in leather who packed into Rudy’s Bar after midnight. The leathers I had worn on the salt flats were too big, and where they sagged they rubbed my skin off as I rolled and skidded. The scabs were just now beginning to fall off, revealing pink skin, not ready for the world. As the bruises on my legs and hip healed, dead matter just under the skin drained downward in blackish streaks, sedimenting around my ankles like coffee grounds. I hadn’t known the body’s methods were so crude. The streaks itched terribly. Sandro liked them. He said they looked like paint pours on a Morris Louis canvas. I heard him telling people about my trip to Bonneville, the crash, the ride in Didi’s jet car. Neither of us acknowledged that had it not been for Ronnie’s taunts, Sandro never would have made the trip possible for me.
The night I’d returned, Sandro said, “Did I tell you I’m doing a show with Helen Hellenberger?” He smiled happily.
“You are?”
“I’ve been with Erwin too long. I think it’s time for a change. He doesn’t really get the work anymore. He can’t take me to the next level at this point in my career.”
I sensed he was repeating Helen’s argument to him. I’d seen how persuasive she could be. We were in the kitchen, which always felt like Sandro’s kitchen, because I’d lived there all of five months, in a place that had been his for several years, where he had his own finicky way of arranging things and where all the things were his and I felt more like a guest, one who navigated her domestic surroundings with only partial knowledge. Over the course of the first six months we were dating, the boiler in my building broke and was not fixed. “Why stay there when there is heat and hot water at my place?” Sandro said, and soon I was practically living with him, and then the question was why pay rent on my apartment when legally I probably had a right not to, since the place was overrun by roaches and there wasn’t hot water? Why not just move in with him? It was hard to argue with. Sandro’s place was never homey to me, but it was a lot nicer than mine.
As he and I spoke about his move to Helen’s gallery, my eyes drifted to the sideboard, where two dirty wineglasses and several empty wine bottles stood. I had been gone two weeks, and I assumed he’d had a friend over, Ronnie or Stanley, maybe Morton Feldman. When I’d first walked in, he’d looked directly at the glasses, the empty bottles, and said he’d missed me terribly. Now I understood that Helen had been here.
“I’m really happy about this move,” he said. “I think it’s a bold change. An important one.”
If I had expressed jealousy over him having invited Helen to the loft for drinks, our loft, I sensed he would have become the wise father, attributing jealousy to youth, which was how he spoke of jealousy in others, as a kind of fretting that Sandro, the elder, wouldn’t indulge.
* * *
A couple of days after returning, I’d taken my film to be developed. Sandro had given me part of a huge room to use as my studio, where I spread out photos on a long table. They weren’t at all spectacular. They were the detritus of an experience, ambiguous marks in the white expanse of the salt flats.
Ronnie came over and looked at the photographs. He said I should keep the bike as it was when I crashed it. Wheel it into a gallery and place it in the middle of the room, with the photographs of my tracks on the walls.
I’d rather have the bike, I said, to ride it. And he said that was a choice I’d have to make. I agreed with him that the photographs by themselves were too ephemeral. But I was on, now, to the next thing, what the crash had given way to, which was my new and curious association with the Valera team. They had contacted me through Sandro, and had invited me to come to Italy the next spring for a photo shoot at Monza, Didi and I on the famous racetrack outside of Milan. And after Monza, a publicity tour for the tire company. It was, I felt, way beyond what I’d hoped for with the attempted film on Flip Farmer. I would have total access, and they said I could film and take my own pictures.
Sandro had acted as if it were a ridiculous proposal that I go to Italy under the auspices of his family’s company. And not only that, but to end up reduced to the ignominy, he said, of a calendar girl. He scoffed at the idea that the company actually thought his own girlfriend would agree to such a thing.
“But calendar girls don’t drive race vehicles,” I said. This was something else. I’d actually gone fast enough. And he had to consent that yes, it was true, but promoting his family’s company was too far. I tried to keep my attitude casual. I wasn’t going to pass up the chance to go to Italy and tour with the Valera team, but I didn’t push things with Sandro. I simp
ly knew privately that I was going, and hoped he would eventually see things my way.
I was on the trail of land speed racers, as if everything—my childhood with Scott and Andy, my early attempt to interview Flip Farmer—had all been logical training.
Except I was no kind of racer myself. Flip and Didi were actual racers, with actual talent. And the truth was that in participating in some kind of promotional tour, I would be more like what Sandro said, a calendar girl. But if I were an actual racer it wouldn’t be art. It would be sport. This, the infiltration, as I thought of it, was a way of drawing upon myself, my life, just as Sandro had encouraged. You lived your art if you were serious, according to Giddle.
“Another thing about the majority of China girls,” Marvin had said that afternoon, my first one back at work, as he adjusted a round silver reflector, “is they don’t ride motorcycles. And their portraits don’t suggest trauma. They don’t show up covered with bruises.”
He and Eric were annoyed with me.
“The problem with the bruises is they make you not anonymous,” Eric chimed in.
“You’re not supposed to evoke real life. Just the hermetic world of a smiling woman holding the color chart.”
“Yeah. Anonymous. Friendly. Comely. Various -ly’s.”
Marvin and Eric had me do my hair and makeup and try on outfits as if each of our minor, in-office photo shoots were my one chance to make it in Hollywood, when in reality it didn’t matter what I looked like. Technically they could have used any face. All they needed was a natural skin tone—any living female would do—in contrast to the color chart. But the film industry tradition was that reasonably attractive young women did this work, posing for film leader so the lab technicians could make color corrections. I didn’t just hold up the color chart. I placed it lovingly in my hands like it was the answer to a television game show question. I smiled in a tentative but friendly way, as if some vaguely intimate possibility might exist between me and whoever caught a glimpse of me on film, just the slightest possibility.
* * *
SAVE YOUR FREEDOM FOR A RAINY DAY
It was still there on the wall of the women’s room at Rudy’s.
Also: “Long live the king.”
“Who?”
“Le roi.”
“Roy who?”
“Roy G. Biv.”
“Fucker owes me $$$.”
On another wall: “Looking for an enemy. Tall. Slim. Ruthless. With a sense of humor.”
SO HOW DO WE FIND EACH OTHER? Someone had written underneath in big hasty block letters.
I went to rejoin Giddle and Sandro, who were probably stiffly awaiting my return, having exactly nothing in common but me. I felt a hand on my shoulder and turned around. It was Ronnie. He was wearing mirrored aviator glasses. He smiled and I saw that his front tooth was chipped.
“What happened to your tooth?”
He ignored the question, which was very Ronnie.
“Ronnie, you look like a Nuremberg defendant in those glasses,” Sandro said, motioning to the waitress. “Could we have four slivovitz? And what happened to your tooth?”
“I was riding a mechanical bull. Oh, shit. Saul is here.”
“You went to Texas,” Giddle said. “Is that what they really do there? Ride mechanical bulls?”
Ronnie ignored her. He and Sandro both had little patience for Giddle, less than she seemed to have for them.
“Skip the bull,” Sandro said. “Ha-ha. Tell us about the trip.”
Ronnie had gone to visit the artist Saul Oppler in Port Arthur.
“It was a disaster. I shouldn’t have gone. But he called me up one night sounding desperate. Three a.m. and he’s complaining bitterly about how much he hates Port Arthur. He’s stuck down there for some kind of family stuff, and whines that he misses his pet rabbits, which he’d left under the care of a New York assistant and blah-blah-blah. ‘Saul,’ I said, ‘do you want me to get those rabbits and bring them down to you? Would you like me to do that?’ ‘Gosh, Ronnie,’ he says, ‘I don’t want to put you out. But the truth is, it would mean so much to me if you were able to do that. You could take my Jaguar.’ I thought, why the hell not?”
“Uh-oh,” said Sandro.
“I left that same night. I’d never driven an E-type Jaguar before, and I had to stop and get different shoes because my goddamn sneakers were too bulky or puffy or something to handle the tight little Jaguar pedals. Twice I almost drove off the road because I couldn’t get to the brake adequately. The pedals on that car were so close together they were designed for like Italian driving moccasins. You know, really supple kidskin leather. Buttery little shoes that barely have a sole, just a faint slip of leather, so you can feel every nuance of the accelerator and clutch. Professional dance slippers would have been best. I couldn’t find any of those. Nothing even close. I was at a truck stop in Maryland. They had key chains with crabs in sunglasses. Stun guns. Packages of tube socks, which everyone knows are for the truckers, for no-mess masturbation while driving. They didn’t have any Italian shoes. I bought women’s bedroom slippers, Dearfoams, size thirteen. After I slit the heel they fit me perfect. I was ripping down I-85 in Oppler’s E-type with his rabbits in the back, wearing my Dearfoams, and somehow managed not to get pulled over. I felt like Mario Andretti. I understand that Reno here set a record and dazzled the Italians, but let’s not forget Ronnie’s death race through Texas. Wasting people. Like the two fruitcakes in a souped-up Monte Carlo who tried to overtake me. Later I almost hit an armadillo. I drove all night. Got to Port Arthur in the late afternoon. Horrible place, by the way. Big, squat refineries, air that smells of burning tires. Snakes dangling from the trees, trying to stay cool, I guess. And dead ones, flat paddles of jerky fused to the road. In the middle of the gravel drive into the property was a giant lizard eating a baguette, one of those really cheap and fluffy grocery store baguettes. Sickening, this lizard tearing off hunks of bread and devouring them. I park, and Oppler comes out of his studio and starts limping toward the car, I guess his leg was asleep or something. He’s calling to those rabbits like they know their names and are going to be happy to see him. I’m thinking, isn’t he amazed by how quickly I got here? Isn’t he going to at least mention it? I was redlining his Jaguar. I pissed in a Dr Pepper bottle. When it was full I pissed in a potato chips bag. I broke the law. Gave up a night’s sleep. Forwent the tube socks at the truck stop.”
“Incredible self-control,” Sandro said.
“All in the name of doing Saul a favor. I mean, you try to help a person. He opens the car door and leans in the back and makes this sound. A wailing. High-pitched.”
“Oh, no,” Sandro said, and put his hands over his face, feigning a brace for disaster.
“Yeah, that’s right. Those goddamn rabbits were dead.”
“You forgot to check on them.”
“My job was transport. And I didn’t hear any complaints from back there. But I had the windows down and there was a lot of truck traffic—especially on the 10. I don’t know what happened. They just . . . died.”
“That’s why you’re wearing those sunglasses,” Sandro said. “The guilt is doing you in. Did you give them any water, Ronnie?”
“No, I did not give them any water. Listen, if he’d wanted a night nurse he should have called one. He called me. And there I was, in this hellacious armpit of the gulf and Saul is not speaking to me. He refuses to come out of his living quarters. He’s got these black drag queens working around the property, feeding chickens, running his tea tray. They look like football players. Local Texas high school football players, in nightgowns. Biddy and Pumpkin Ray. They don’t serve me any tea. Just dirty looks for killing Saul’s rabbits. I figured I’d get a quick night’s catch-up and leave at the crack of dawn. Put his car back and pretend the whole thing never happened. I was in the guest cottage and had to listen to birds screeching and chirping all night. Apparently it was mating season for something called the ovenbird. All night long I heard
this teacher teacher teacher. Teacher teacher teacher. I was fantasizing about calling the sheriff and getting these ovenbirds hauled away in a paddy wagon. I got up in the morning, shook the scorpions out of my boots, opened the cottage door, and there was a rooster, staring me down. It was tall. I could tell what it was thinking: You’re my size. An unusually tall rooster and it would not let me pass. It lunged and all I could do to save myself was grab something from a nearby lumber pile and swing. I ended up having to go for broke. Double down. Thing just would not let up. Saul came out in his pajamas. Didn’t say a word. Just picked up the dead rooster and started plucking. Then he lit barbecue coals. All very methodical, as if it had been in the plans from the beginning that I kill this rooster and we eat it, and that’s what we did. I killed it, he cooked it, we ate it. Seemed like he wasn’t mad at me anymore. Thing tasted like rubber bands.”
Sandro beamed. Ronnie made him happy. He loved these stories. They were part of Ronnie’s artistic genius, even if Sandro didn’t always like Ronnie’s actual art, which was sometimes thin, he felt. Too flatly ironic, the magazine images he collected, slogans and slickness and advertising reformulated for camp effect. Sandro’s favorite piece of Ronnie’s was a blithe declaration Ronnie once made that he hoped to photograph every living person. Sandro said it was Ronnie’s best work and something on the level of a poem: a gesture with no possible rebuttal. It didn’t matter that it was never made. That it was unmakeable was its brilliance.
“Let me ask you something,” Sandro said. “How many scorpions were in your boots?”
“Just one. Drunk. Waddled under a bush and went back to sleep.”
It was my turn to report on my trip. I left out the part where the man tells me I won’t look as good in a body bag. He’d meant to shame me and I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of shaming me again, in front of my friends. I also left out the part about the invitation to go to Italy in the spring. I told them about Stretch, and the wind knocking me sideways, and how I ended up driving the Spirit of Italy.
The Flamethrowers: A Novel Page 15
