To Xavier, the warm-up band for Smite Them Hip & Thigh sounded like twelve people shattering glass in an empty swimming pool. They were called The Indictments or The Incitements, but Xavier couldn’t see that their antiestablishment monicker made an iota’s difference, either way, and in his notes did not jot down the titles of their “songs.” Indeed, it was a mercy and a relief when the I-worders finished their set and departed the stage basketing their crotches, wagging their outthrust tongues, and blessing the delirious crowd with upraised, pogo-sticking middle fingers.
“Homey touch,” Xavier told The Mick. “Staining their bird fingers blue.” The Mick was too stoked to rebut either this sarcasm or Xavier’s observation that any band following these guys would sound like “melodic troubadours.” And, in fact, Smite Them Hip & Thigh did come across, on stage, as melodic troubadours—if only by comparison. Its three women all played percussion instruments (drums, sticks, tambourine, xylophone) while Gregor McGudgeon, on a guitar shaped like a futuristic post-hole digger or an upright synthesizer on chrome-plated casters, and the white-haired bassist Kanji Urabe laid down melodies counterpointed by computer-generated images flashing on two huge screens at the back of the stage. Xavier had never heard music that sounded quite like this. It had Oriental, African, and Polynesian flavors and bristled with an electricity that was more than simply amplified sexual energy. And if he listened hard, he could make out the mocking but literate poetry that Gregor McGudgeon had set to this music.
Except, he thought, maybe “superimposed on” was a more accurate way to put it than “set to.” In any case, the lyrics were as much a part of Smite Them’s appeal as the grab-bag quality of their music or as the contrast between the women’s robotic footwork and the men’s fierce immobility. The Mick sat transfixed watching them, a zircon of spittle at the edge of his mouth, while the rest of the audience either swayed in place to the weirdly infectious rhythms or tried to lip-synch McGudgeon’s rapid-fire lyrics as he blankly talked/sang them over each number’s accompaniment. It was blasphemy to make such a comparison, even in his head, but McGudgeon reminded Xavier of Rex Harrison as ’Enry ’Iggins in My Fair Lady. A young, lean, angry ’Enry ’Iggins, with lots of hair, fiery eyes, and a wardrobe patched together from Salvation Army castoffs and the most expensive items in a swank New York leather shop. McGudgeon was that self-assured, haughty, and charismatic. His Broadway savoir-faire kept rubbing the nap off his au courant disdain for the zombied-out mindlessness of the pop world’s regard. At one point, Xavier was certain that McGudgeon was staring at him, gazing down from behind his keyboard with a look that drilled to the crux of his hypocrisies and presumptions. You’re irrelevant to the universe that my band is recreating from the present chaos, McGudgeon’s look said. You’re a tottering anachronism. The fact that McGudgeon was machine-gunning the lyrics of “Nowhere Man Redux” only heightened Xavier’s discomfort.
“Whaddaya think, Uncle Xave?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know? What’s not to fucking know?”
“Mikhail, I’m trying to take everything in, okay?”
“Sure. Suck it all up, unc. Suck it all up.”
The kids around them were swaying, but not dancing, to the band’s weird music. As song succeeded song (“Game, Set, & Match to Jill,” “Pope-a-Dope Shuffle,” “The Bush Man’s Got a Nerve to Brag,” “O, You Vulgar Boatmen,” “The Utes in Their Utopia,” etc.), Xavier grew more, not less, confused. He recalled some of the lyrics to a cryptic old Bob Dylan song—“Something’s going on here, / But you don’t know what it is, / Do you, Mr. Jones?”—and he thought that Smite Them was making that statement to him while talking around him to their clued-in fans. Was what they were laying down good or bad? Deathless art or smarmy dreck? McGudgeon introduced a new number. “This un’s in honor of your city, Salonika, metrop of the hustle, home of UC’s stalwarts. Git sit, sibs—‘Count Geiger’s Blues’!” He gave his band a downbeat, and Urabe, Matison, Suarez, and Kambo launched into a toe-tapper of a ditty, even though its lyrics included lines like “Lost her forever / Near the Pripyat River” and “Old Man Meter’s a red-cell eater. / Don’t he make you wanna / Call yourself a goner?”
Now, at last, the group’s fans—collectively, The Mick said, known as Smittens—started to boogie, gyrating in front of their thirty-buck seats. Xavier, smitten by—well, something—began to move too, with so much energy and enthusiasm that The Mick gave him a smile and flailed even harder himself. The entire Grotto East was rocking, the computer screens behind the band were flashing up successive images of Count Geiger in his silver suit and ghastly burn mask, and Xavier was knee-twitching and elbow-jerking with the most frenzied of them.
Only Xavier understood that the Philistine Syndrome had struck again. He wasn’t dancing. He was reacting on a perverse physical level to the sheer Quality of Smite Them Hip & Thigh’s unique brand of art. A kind of palsy had seized him. He looked to be enjoying himself, but he was suffering. With his hands at shoulder height, he couldn’t keep from thwapping his own face. He was doing a Saint Vitus jig, in thrall to such a madcap chorea that his limbs and torso shook, his facial muscles spasmed, his internal organs jounced. He liked what McGudgeon’s band had showed him, he considered their act worthy of praise, but he was in hell, a sinner in the hands of an angry God.
“Get it!” The Mick cried. “Go, Uncle Xave!”
Before “Count Geiger’s Blues” concluded, Xavier lurched stageward, staggered, and, toppling, struck his head on the edge of the platform. As at Mahler’s Seventh some time ago, he was out, really out, and for exactly the same reason.
*
The review that Xavier later wrote, scribbling it out in pencil while propped up in his bed, had this lead: “Five percent of Gregor McGudgeon’s work is ‘deathless art,’ and Smite Them Hip & Thigh brought only that 5 percent to their brilliant show in the Grotto East on Friday night.”
26
A Run to SatyrFernalia
Over the telephone, Grantham said, “It says you’ve lost your edge, that’s what your Smite Them Hip & Thigh rave-up says to me, Thaxton.”
Thaxton. Not Xave or Xavier. A bad sign. “But McGudgeon’s band is good,” Xavier said. “Mikhail was right about them. Dead on the money.”
“Thanks,” said The Mick, sotto voce. He was sitting on a red stool across the living room while Bari, alarmed to learn that her lover had suffered another fainting spell at a concert, had come to Franklin Court to see about him. She lounged beside Xavier on the sofa, a hand on his arm.
“Uh-huh,” Grantham said through Xavier’s handset. “Now what’re you gonna give the kid for Christmas?”
“Unfair, Walt. I called that concert as I saw it. As I heard it. Smite Them are very good at what they do.”
“Yeah. You could say that of Hitler and Company too. Would you give them a four-star write-up?”
“Walt, that’s a bigoted cheap shot.”
“Maybe, maybe not.”
“You weren’t there—”
“Thank God for major mercies.”
“—but I was, and I reviewed them with the respect their performance earned.”
“You tripped and hit your head on the stage. To rehone your edge, you should go back to the ‘really good stuff.’ You and Stamz should return to your previous beats.”
“That’ll make Lee happy.”
“You’re not cut out to do pop entertainment, Xave.” (Calling him Xave was supposed to soften the rebuke.) “And the last thing I want from you in the coming weeks is a hallelujah chorus for a foul-mouthed comedian at Hooter’s or a round of sloppy kudos for a slasher flick.”
“I wouldn’t give those things—”
“Xave, who knows what you’ll do? Your nephew has screwed your artsy-fartsy head on backwards for you.”
“The spectrum of what I’m able to appreciate has been expanded, Walt. That’s all. I’m delighted it has.”
“‘Thus Saith Xavier Thaxton’ should be
withering stuff, not nosegays and pulled punches—at least when you’re covering the crap that Lee and his gang usually do. Get well, okay?” Grantham abruptly hung up.
“I’m reassigned to my Fine Arts post,” Xavier said.
“Your first love,” Bari said.
“Yeah,” The Mick said, picking his nose, “but, hey, he’s got an expanded septum of appreciation. “
“Spectrum. Meaning I’m further away from licking my Philistine Syndrome. In fact, Mahler and McGudgeon are now equally capable of making me sick.”
“Awl riiight!” The Mick said, raising a fist.
Xavier ignored him. “But reassigned to my Fine Arts desk, I’ll be fair game for temporary blindness, falling hair, or involuntary echolalia every time I encounter something good.”
“After reviling junk for so many weeks,” Bari said, “maybe just getting back to the good stuff will stabilize you.”
“I don’t know,” Mikhail said. “Uncle Xave liked Smite ’Em’s show, but lookit—liking it put a fucking walnut over his eye.”
Xavier touched the bandage on his forehead. “Much more of this and I may just lie back and sip my hemlock.”
“What you need,” Bari said, “is a talisman, something you can keep with you even at a gallery opening or a ballet.”
“A talisman?”
“Something to override your syndrome so that you could cover an entire event without any ill effects.”
“A kind of phylactery? An asafoetida bag?”
“Sort of. Something that’s the product of superstition or the popular imagination, something to keep it close to your body—so close it’s almost a part of you.”
The Mick hopped off the bar stool. “I’ve got it. Not a bag of garlic or anything like that—but something a whole heckuva lot fucking better.”
“What?” Xavier and Bari said together.
“Got to call this dude,” Mikhail said. “And then maybe go on a little run.”
“Who?” Xavier said. “Who’d go on this . . . run?”
“You and me,” The Mick said. “Bari, if she wants to, but you’d definitely have to come with, unc.”
Great, thought Xavier. A “little run” at nine o’clock on a hot September Saturday night in Salonika. With his forehead gauze-wrapped and his body still twitching from Smite Them’s “septum”-expanding show, Xavier could think of many things that he’d rather do than go out on a “little run”—but, scooting aside, he let Mikhail punch out a code on the telephone.
*
In Satan’s Cellar, not far from P. S. Annie’s, The Mick led them through scrap-strewn streets, under switchbacking fire-escape cages, and past wino-blockaded foyers of fleabag hotels to a cobblestone alley lit by sick fluorescents and teeming with people so far out of the plebeian mainstream that you couldn’t even label them hoi polloi. A few tuxedoed or evening-gowned slummers had wandered into the Cellar, but even they were poked up, strung out on alcohol or technodrugs. Xavier saw that Bari and he, imperturbably guided by The Mick, must look like Tory tourists on a walkabout among the urban damned. He wished that Donel and Bryan—or, better, Lee Stamz—were along to afford their expedition some muscle, for these alleys were Salonika’s stews. At least the bandage on his head made him look a little tougher than he was, a lot tougher than he felt. Some of the hard-trade types they ran into face-on glanced aside, sidled away. This section of the Cellar was like something out of Hugo or Dickens. Or an old comic book.
“Mick, where the hell’re you taking us?”
The Mick plunged on through the crowd, checking occasionally to make sure he hadn’t outrun them. At length, he turned into a side street with less light, fewer people, and a heavy, disabling reek. The stench seemed to be a mix of grease paint, stale roses, and homemade drugs, but Xavier couldn’t quite focus his suspicions about the place or determine a point of origin for all the overlapping odors.
“Here!” The Mick ducked into a three- or four-story building—collapsing, like all the others in the area. It had an almost elegant neon logo over its entrance: SatyrFernalia, which winked on and off, its tubes flickering crimson and violet. Briefly, The Mick reappeared in the doorway. “Come on. It’s okay.” Xavier and Bari followed him up the steps into the disintegrating shell. The Mick waited on the landing of a cockeyed stairway. Each step in its creaking scaffold seemed ready to give way to midnight and empty air. From the landing, The Mick beckoned them impatiently. Despite the stairs’ sorry condition, they rail-walked to a loft room constituting at least half the third story. They crossed this echoey space into a vast bay where a balding man in pleated pants and a houndstooth jacket hunched behind a counter reading the Urbanite in the spots cast by the flashlights mounted on three greasy iron poles. On one page of his newspaper sat a rodentlike beast—a gerbil, Xavier guessed—busily shelling sunflower seeds.
“Do for you?” the gerbil keeper said.
“Yo, slick, I called.”
The man looked Mikhail up and down. Xavier noted with some pleasure that he’d been reading his review of the Smite Them Hip & Thigh concert. Or, maybe, the story just under it about the variable fortunes of a dog track in Alabama. Xavier, as the gerbil cracked another sunflower seed, suspended judgment about these matters.
“Shake out the cobs,” The Mick said. “I did call.”
“Okay,” the man said. “I’m Griff. What you want’s back there. Somewheres. Go ahead and look.” He waved brusquely at the shadowy racks behind him, acres and acres of clothes, like a quartermaster’s barracks or an all-night laundry.
“How are we supposed to see?” Bari asked.
“Take you a coupla beamers,” rasped Griff, nodding at the poles supporting his flashlight lamps. At each pole’s foot was an iron plate on casters—Xavier, looking over the counter, realized they were to maneuver these unwieldy devices into the bay, like patients on IV drips walking bottled glucose down a hospital corridor. Sort of. Griff lifted a counter section to let them through. Guiding their flashlight poles into the bay’s warehouse, Xavier, Bari, and The Mick soon learned that SatyrFernalia specialized in mechanical sexual aids and sartorial aphrodisiacs. The costumes racked here were meant to stimulate the imaginations of their renters. (Were kinky trysts occurring in warrens around the building?) They had glimpses of waxed leather, polished brass, delicate lace, and intricate ivory or plastic devices . . . also of capes, hoods, tights, belts, scarves, and less identifiable garments.
“Mikhail,” Xavier said, halting the boy, “how do you even happen to know about this place?”
“You guys buying or renting?” Griff called after them.
“They’re buying,” The Mick said over his shoulder.
“Mikhail!”
“Easy, Uncle Xave,” The Mick said. “It’s superhero garb I skate on. They’ve got Scarab, Snow Leopard, Ladysilk, Decimator, Mantisman, Saint Torque, DeeJay, Gator Maid, Yellowhammer, Warwoman, MC2—”
“Damn it, Mikhail, that’s plenty!”
“Shhhh,” said Bari. “Can’t you see why he’s brought us here?” She turned her flashlight pole so that its beam whitewashed a rack of costumes. Motes swam blurrily. Braidwork, piping, and strange medallions glittered.
“Frankly, no. None of this epic tackiness makes a soupçon of sense to me.”
“Your talisman’s not exactly a talisman, Xavier. It’s a costume, a stalwart’s outfit. Pick one out.”
“That’s crazy.”
“We didn’t pick our way into the seediest part of Salonika to have you nix The Mick’s idea without a trial, Xavier. I mean it, choose one.”
Xavier realized that he could not win here. Bari and The Mick had allied against him. The Mick was his ward for who knew how long, and Bari was . . . the woman he loved, a fact that gave her leverage. He felt like a child resisting his mother’s insistence that he try on new clothes for Easter: doomed. His talisman wasn’t a talisman—no amulet, coin, or magic feather—but an entire costume. Would that work? Would that afford relief from the absurd horr
or of the Philistine Syndrome? On a nearby rack, Xavier rummaged through costumes, squinting at an emerald-green leotard, a cape made to resemble a fanlike spiderweb, an ermine sheath with a cat’s face and gloves clawed with bamboo plectra. His fingers found and pulled out a suit shining like hammered tinfoil. He handed this costume out to Bari. The Mick took one of its sleeves.
“Count Geiger! That’s it, Uncle Xave. That’s it!”
Bari also fingered the fabric. “I’m not sure what it’s made of, but it’s porous enough to wear under a suit without bulking you up too much or giving you heatstroke.”
“Under a suit?”
“You could wear it instead of a suit, but you’d get ribbed at work. Better to wear a suit over it, like Clark Kent wearing his Brooks Brothers over his flashy BVDs.”
“Heatstroke be damned,” Xavier said. “I’m more likely to come down with the everlasting Count Geiger’s Blues.”
“Or everlasting relief from your problem,” Bari said.
“Stop bitching,” The Mick snarled. “You’re buying this fucking costume.” He swallowed the snarl. “Aren’t you?”
Back at the counter, Griff spread the silver bodysuit out and folded it as if it were a handkerchief. Griff’s gerbil sat in the pocket of his houndstooth jacket, its paws hooked over the lip, its tiny eyes glittering. It looked at Xavier with the same contained derision that McGudgeon had fixed on him at the Grotto East. Griff lifted the folded bodysuit and placed it in a box not much larger than a man’s billfold.
“Great choice: lightweight, stylish. One grand in greens, please.”
Xavier imitated apoplexy. “One grand!”
“A bargain, sir. We clear that much a week renting out this Count Gargle outfit.” He picked a sunflower seed off the newspaper pile and handed it to his gerbil, which accepted the seed and ducked out of view to crack it.
“If it’s so profitable, why sell it?” Xavier asked.
“We got three others just like it out now. Makes good sense to underwrite another coupla costumes with a straight-up sale or two. Occasionally, anyway.”
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