The Flamethrowers: A Novel

by Rachel Kushner

  “Thanks,” I said, fairly sure I looked no different. I was in cutoffs and knee-high socks, the men’s kind with blue and red stripes around the ribbing at the top. Those socks weren’t allowed when I was with Sandro. “Come on, seriously,” he’d say. “You’ll make me look like your father, like I’m taking you to your basketball game.”

  I had on a leather jacket; maybe that was the difference Ronnie noticed. And I had the bike, outside, unseen, but it had become a kind of mental armor.

  “Yeah, you look like you’ve grown up a little.” He was looking at me from various angles. “See, now you’re doing that whole smiling-woman thing. That’s good.”

  I’d had a fantasy, back at Sandro’s mother’s villa, of saying something to Ronnie, letting him know he was a bastard for giving Talia my hat. But now I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Talia wasn’t here. She didn’t matter. I would make her matter by bringing her up.

  * * *

  Even while he seemed not to focus on me, I felt Ronnie’s attention at John Dogg’s opening. Even as he spoke to others, performed his Ronnie shtick, I suspected he was secretly performing it for me. Things were shifting. I was no longer his best friend’s lover, but a girl he’d once slept with.

  Ronnie told John Dogg’s parents his name was Sergio Valente. To the girl with the see-through pants, he introduced himself as Albert Speer.

  “I hearda you,” she said, unimpressed.

  Being Albert Speer got Ronnie started on the notion of the uncommon criminal, and then he turned to me and cued himself. What made a criminal common or uncommon? The girl with the see-through pants took the opportunity to wander off. She moved through the room, trapped inside her exhibitionism, unable to pretend she was just another girl at the opening, to get beyond the awkwardness of her nudity.

  Ronnie seemed not to notice her exposed butt, even as he stared at it and at her.

  “I’m collecting mug shots,” he said to me as his eyes tracked her across the room.

  “Did I tell you that? I go down to police records on Centre Street. I’m looking for convicted criminals with my name.”

  How many could there be? I asked.

  “A few,” he said. Actually, only one so far. But three if you included the Ron Fontana and the Robert Fontaine that Ronnie himself did include. They were doing important work, especially the one with his actual name. The heavy lifting, Ronnie said, the dirty work.

  I thought of Ronnie’s brother Tim, the single time I’d met him. Too muscular to be trusted. His clothes too new and too boxy, the clothing of a prisoner just freed. He was talking about a partner, the plans they had. He could have meant a partner on a construction job, but “partner” could mean partner in crime, cell mate, or all three: a guy you met in jail and then doubled up with for construction jobs and burglaries.

  “I’m starting to believe this guy up at Rikers is doing his time, pacing his cell, for both of us,” Ronnie said. “Doing our time.”

  He’s talking about his brother, I thought.

  Giddle showed up. She and Burdmoore were no longer together. He was too sincere, she said. It had started to drive her nuts. He always wanted to get to the bottom of things. Get to the heart of things. “This supposed heart,” Giddle said. The way he talked, assuming it existed, zapped whatever feelings she’d had for him. “This whole ‘let’s take off the masks and hold each other’ thing,” Giddle said. “No thanks. I’m just passing through. I said, ‘If you want to pass through from some other direction and meet and have a good time, fine, but there is no heart and no fundamental thingie.’ He put too much pressure. I started making things up,” she said, “to satisfy him. Like I’d tell him I was sexually abused by my brother and that was why I had low self-esteem, which was what led me to cheat on him with Henri-Jean.”

  “The guy who carries the pole?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “And the thing is, I don’t even have a brother and suddenly Burdmoore wants me to start hypnotherapy with this friend of his, a woman who counsels incest survivors. I’m just trying to entertain myself. Keep it light. Have a good time. By which I mean make stuff up and watch how he reacts. He didn’t know how to play the game. And then the thing with the pants, oh God.”

  Giddle had brought a pair of white pants into Rudy’s and pinned them up on the wall with an announcement that anyone who fit into them could sleep with her. It turned out the white pants were too small for most of the guys at Rudy’s. The artist John Chamberlain got them up to his knees. Henri-Jean managed to get them on but could not zip them. Didier was next to try them when Burdmoore showed up. Burdmoore snatched the pants out of Didier’s hands. He held them upside down, gripped each pant leg firmly, and ripped the pants by the crotch seam, tore them clean in half.

  “If you could have seen his face,” Giddle said. “The guy has a serious anger problem.” She left with Henri-Jean, who shrugged as they passed Burdmoore. A mime’s shrug. Life is sweet, I’m a helpless neuter. Whimsy is the answer to tears. I’m going to fuck your girlfriend here shortly. Shrug.

  “Did he use it on you?” Ronnie asked.

  “What?”

  “That big pole he carries.”

  “Ha-ha. He didn’t need to, Ronnie.”

  John Dogg led Nadine past us, holding her hand like she was his little girl. She looked down shyly as he spoke to someone about borrowed light. They seemed like one happiness, a partnership. She’d been reinvented in the glow of his sudden success. And her rehabilitation made her into useful and effective arm candy for him. Just as you weren’t supposed to point out that John Dogg had recently been considered a clamoring outsider, one was not meant to approach this gleaming version of Nadine and ask if she remembered pissing in a bathtub, or letting Thurman Johnson rub the barrel of his starter pistol between her legs. It was more unseemly of me to think of these things than it was unseemly for her to have done them.

  She and John Dogg had made it into the castle just before the gates shut. And the point was not how they got in, or that they almost didn’t, or to wonder if they deserved to be there. It was, here they are. Welcome. The point was that they were in. They were in.

  “I bet you wore a long coat tonight, and took it off when you got here. Is that right?” It was Gloria, accosting the woman with the butt window.

  The woman looked quickly at Gloria and then turned away, but before she did, I saw the distress in her face.

  “I just wanted to know,” Gloria said to me because I happened to be passing by, as if she would have spoken to anyone passing by and barely registered who that person was, “how committed she is. I wanted a sense of her commitment.

  “When the revolution comes it won’t make any difference,” Gloria said. “They’ll have a special guillotine for girls like that. With an even rustier blade for the artists who ogle her. These people here don’t matter. It’s MTA workers who need to see her rosy butt cheeks. But no, she wears a trench coat on the subway and reserves her hot little ass for us people who have already seen any number of hot little asses. Barbara Hodes was making see-through dresses in 1971. Eric Emerson wore chaps and a jockstrap upstairs at Max’s, and Cherry Vanilla only goes topless. It is so done. Done done done.”

  But it’s new to her, I should have said but didn’t. She’s on her timeline, Gloria, not yours or anyone else’s.

  * * *

  After the opening there was a party on the roof of a building around the corner from the gallery, and John Dogg’s band played. That was what he’d wanted, a performance of his own band. It was a way to get a gig, using his newfound popularity in the art world to shoehorn in his music project behind him. Once you wedge the door open, push as much of yourself through as possible. They were called Hookers and Children. Bass, drums, saxophone, and John Dogg playing guitar and singing. They wore suits, and the drummer had a silver-sparkle drum kit like an entertainer from the mezzanine of a midtown hotel. They covered a Donovan song, “Young Girl Blues.” Dogg wasn’t bad. In fact, he was good. He sang like he really
meant it, wavering his voice just like Donovan.

  It’s Saturday night. It feels like a Sunday in some ways

  If you had any sense, you’d maybe go away for a few days

  The tender but slightly paternalistic love of whoever was addressing the young girl.

  Stanley and Gloria had gone home. I stayed. Partly because Ronnie stayed. But I didn’t hover around him. We were two coordinates on that crowded roof. I was aware of him and I felt his awareness of me even as he mingled with others. It was a clear night, three stars glinting through a suspension of smog and city glow. I recognized a lot of the people on the roof, but because I’d been away, I felt I was watching them from some remove and didn’t have to engage, didn’t have to say hello the way you needed to when you had seen everyone the week before, that hello of having mutually decided you would permanently remain mere acquaintances. I stood back, hands in the pockets of my leather jacket, leaning against the railing. I felt like a balloon, like I could just float off the rooftop. I weighted myself with beer from the keg. Watched Giddle dance with Henri-Jean. Leaned over the railing periodically to be sure the Moto Valera was still there.

  I didn’t want to think about Sandro. I didn’t want to think about Gianni.

  “The three passions,” Stanley had said to me that morning, “are love, hate, and ignorance. Ignorance is the strongest.”

  I had a hard time getting Bene’s face out of my thoughts, her barely concealed smugness, as if to say, he’s all yours.

  I had not wondered, why is she passing him over? Why is she letting him go so easily? I had not wondered.

  Bene had put her hand out, steering me toward the room where Gianni was. To the right of her, the other women soldering, hoping to repair a transmitter the carabinieri had smashed. When I passed them, Lidia and the others had not looked up from what they were doing and I understood that I had been shut out. I had not done anything wrong, but that was it. Bene had shut me out. What other choice did I have? I had no money. No friends. Gianni had brought me there, and it was to him I turned.

  He and I, listening to Bene’s steps on the landing as she departed.

  Gianni’s face, unreadable. His distance, which I had interpreted as chivalry, a form of respect. When in fact it was just what it seemed: distance.

  “I need to take a trip,” he’d said. “I want you to come. We’ll go together. You want to see the Alps?”

  His question confirmed or explained or simply filled the space of tension I’d felt all along with Gianni, from the first moments at the villa.

  He took out a cigarette and lit it, in no hurry for my answer. Probably in no hurry because he knew, somehow, that my answer would be yes.

  It was a North Pole, the same brand of cigarettes that Giddle smoked. It struck me as funny that Gianni smoked Giddle’s brand, but there was no witness who would understand why this was funny. Giddle and Gianni, from opposite sides of the globe featured on the cigarette packet.

  * * *

  I had no other world to turn to now but this one, the roof, Dogg’s band, Giddle’s antics.

  Hookers and Children filled the night. There was a lot to say on these two subjects.

  They were playing their own stuff now. Dogg’s earnest voice, but with more dissonance in the chords.

  Henri-Jean wrapped himself tightly against Giddle and they swayed from side to side. Their dancing seemed especially obscene for the fact that he was out of character. He wasn’t supposed to grind against women. He was supposed to be this lone figure in the cityscape, jester and outcast with his idiosyncratic burden, the pole over his shoulder. But in fact he was a man, bending his knees to lower his pelvis to the level of Giddle’s ass.

  Nadine was talking to Helen. Smiling in a remote manner that was probably nervousness but would be read by Helen as reserved, attractively reserved. Helen said Nadine looked familiar and asked if she, too, had by chance gone to Dalton.

  “No,” Nadine said in a dispassionate tone, almost like a corpse, no expression on her face. I sensed that she had been coached by John Dogg to remain aloof or to pretend to. She held herself perfectly still. By revealing any animation to her face or body she would spoil the effect of the hair and the dress and the patent leather heels, which shone on the roof’s gravel like wet ink. Watching her hold tight to sudden elegance, hold it like it was a religion that could save her, I understood that Nadine had told the truth and Giddle had lied. Giddle had never been a prostitute. I didn’t know where she went in the velvet jumper she kept in her work locker, but it wasn’t to a midtown hotel.

  While Thurman Johnson and an unidentified Ronnie had gone out to buy scotch that night at the Chelsea Hotel, Nadine had told me about the first time she turned a trick. It was with a very old man. He wanted a blow job. “Five dollars a minute, I told him. I knew he had a lot of fives in his wallet.” This was an important part of the deal, she had explained. You made an educated guess of roughly how much money they had on them, and how much more they might be able to acquire if they ran out of what was in their wallet. You priced accordingly, tried to divide time into segments that corresponded with a complete emptying of their wallet. “You have to think in totalities, as my ex-husband used to put it. The larger view. So I said five a minute, figuring he had about a hundred dollars. The first minute goes by. I take his little pud out of my mouth and he says, Oh please, oh please. ‘Five more dollars,’ I say. I made about eighty bucks. My mouth was numb. It’s actually not so simple when they stay soft. It’s like slurping on the corner of a plastic bag that has a little bit of air in. He never came. It was just minutes and fives. Another thing I have done to make money is cry. Some men will do anything to get you to stop crying. They don’t like to see women cry, nuh-uh. Nice guys will do whatever they can to get you to stop. The problem is most guys aren’t nice.”

  Giddle’s lie didn’t matter. Giddle lied about everything. I didn’t even know if her name was Giddle. Her lie was not a claim to a life like Nadine had lived. It was something else, whatever Giddle naively imagined to be the glamour of the call girl, the secret power, a cliché, champagne and silk teddies. The way Giddle said “businessmen,” daubing cucumber oil on her neck. The way she said “midtown,” and flipped her hair out so it lay evenly and full like she was Rita Hayworth. It was play-acting. It wasn’t that different from my childhood fantasy of the Mustang Ranch as an actual ranch, grand and Western-fancy, and not various ugly trailers. It was like saying “timepiece” when you meant watch; there was no such thing. Only minutes and fives.

  “This one’s called Bud’s Doughnuts,” Dogg said into the microphone. “Our Second Avenue home away from home.” It sounded like surf rock. A psychedelic projection behind them. Hookers and Children were like a slightly ironic prom act.

  “I know Bud,” Ronnie said to someone. “It’s a real dude. I know him from high school. We both moved to Manhattan and he opened Bud’s Doughnuts on Second Avenue. His brother Tom opened a car wash.”

  “Tom’s Car Wash, out on Myrtle Avenue?”

  “No, man, that’s not the same one.”

  There was a guy on the roof with a Polaroid camera, getting girls to show him their breasts. When he approached Nadine, she gave him a terror-stricken look and shook her head. She was again with Helen Hellenberger, who politely said, “No thank you.”

  Burdmoore had talked about the lost children. The times to come. The times that had been to come but that had not come.

  There was the matter of who was awake and who was asleep. The question of it. The ambiguity inherent in this way of dividing people one to the next, awake or dreaming. We were their nightmare. If one group was dreaming the other, there couldn’t be certainty as to which group was which.

  After Burdmoore and Fah-Q had withdrawn themselves from battle, retreated to the mountains of northern Mexico, Fah-Q had a vision, Burdmoore had told us that night at Gloria and Stanley’s. After the vision came to him, Fah-Q broke from their grim, secret encampment and traveled all the way back
to New York City. He needed to speak with Allen Ginsberg. Fah-Q was certain that Ginsberg had an important message for them, Burdmoore had recounted to us. A message about their clandestinity, about the revolution. “So what was it?” Didier had asked, a lightness in his voice, the joke being that whatever the message was, perhaps it might still be of use. Fah-Q found Ginsberg, Burdmoore told us, and indeed, Ginsberg had a message for the Motherfuckers. The message was that they should all quit smoking. They should give up cigarettes. Didier, seated across from Burdmoore at the Kastles’ dinner table, had narrowed his eyes and sucked wetly on his Gauloise and nodded, understanding that Allen Ginsberg was truly the idiot Burdmoore had claimed he was.

  More and more people crowded onto the roof as Hookers and Children finished their set. All the other roofs around SoHo were dark, occupied by squat water towers, rickety and hand-hammered spacecraft set down for the night, dormant and crouching on spindly legs over dark, flat expanses. This roof was noise and movement and shifting silhouettes. Empty plastic cups sent over the edge. The hopeful, gaspy pumping of an empty keg. Ronnie telling someone a story about a Japanese stripper named Shomi.

  The air was cool and breezy now. I checked again on the bike as a gust loosed pear blossoms from the trees, invisible hands stripping branches of their little white petals, scattering them on the sidewalk.

  “The thing about songwriting,” John Dogg was saying to someone, “is that you can address things obliquely, but no matter. You can’t get away from the content that is the essence of the form. All songs are about unrequited love.”

  “Except ‘Green Onions,’ ” Ronnie said. “Which isn’t about love at all.”

  It must have been Tim Fontaine, and not Ronnie, who’d had to live with that song in his head. Tim had spent a decade in prison. Got out, violated his parole, and was now back inside, as far as I knew. It was Tim’s experience in prison that Ronnie had spoken of. Tim, who was doing Ronnie’s time. Why couldn’t Ronnie just say so? Why did he have to present these elaborate stories, and some of it was true and some wasn’t and you were never going to know which was which. Either he’d worked in factories, or on boats, or both, or neither, and whatever he had or had not done, there were a lot of stories. Sandro had always protected Ronnie’s evasions. “You don’t know,” he’d tell people. But Sandro didn’t know, either.