by Bruce Bauman
Alchemy’s eyes opened wide, and for a split second he froze in place. Almost immediately, his expression became unreadable. “Great to see you again. Though not under these circumstances.” He turned to Moses. “Your wife tried her best to get the Sheiks to buy real art. They bought posters.” Thankfully, the nurse came out and escorted them into Dr. Fielding’s office.
In the days before the operation, after the HLA test had confirmed him as a match, Alchemy behaved blithely confident that the transplant would be a formality and its happy result a fait accompli. Moses, Hannah, and Jay blamed the palpable tension on the seemingly interminable wait and the twenty-five percent chance that Moses would not survive the operation.
Hannah often paced, smoking or imitating the motions of smoking without actually lighting up, desperately wanting to ask about Salome but holding her tongue. Like her son, or he like her, she preferred ignominious ignorance to confrontation and finding her fears confirmed. The unspoken social contracts among them, between husband and wife and mom and son, remained in force.
Alchemy’s marrow was harvested as an outpatient. Moses underwent three more days of chemo, and four days of cleansing after the surgery was performed. Afterward, Moses spent just over three weeks in complete isolation to protect him from infection, receiving blood transfusions and waiting for the marrow to be accepted and take hold, or be rejected.
Moses languished in his solitude, contemplating his belief in one universal truth: The past, present, and future are fixed and ever recurring, inextricable and singular, and always, always at once, dead and alive. And from this very alive past came two vital questions: Was Jay screwing Alchemy while she was seeing me? and Why didn’t Hannah push harder and so much sooner to find out about Salome’s existence and whereabouts?
In the abstract, he accepted that the answers didn’t matter. His wife and mom loved him now. Only, this acceptance was compromised by derision—to hell with abstract notions of fairness and morality! His mind revved into overdrive: Am I a fool? Am I, at my core, just a pseudoliberal, antihedonist with a latent strain of puritanism?
Moses tried and tried to extinguish these negative, soul-depleting thoughts. He wanted to confess his shame. He wished for a pill that could vacate his memories, erase the spiteful thoughts and primitive urges, the guilt that engorged his empathy and compassion.
No mythical memory-erasing pill arrived. Instead, here arose a daymare from the depths of his postoperative miasma. A vision ascended not from his unconscious but from elsewhere, from outside:
A plaguelike mix of rain, hail, and vicious winds obscure the last rays of sunset while two hundred cultists glossolate a mocking serenade, countering the braying of drunken Roman guards singing, “99 Jews on the cross / 99 Jews / if one of them we happen to toss / 98 Jews on the cross.”
A horde of sadistic voyeurs cheers the luridness of the drip-by-bloody-drip of his slow death. I think, I am a stranger in the strangest land. A ferocious wind scatters his blood and pieces of his torn flesh into the crowd. A woman draped in soaking white robes, bearing spices and carrying a torch, approaches me. She daubs my cheek with a dampened shroud and then speaks.
—Moses.
—You know me?
—I have watched you.
—And you are?
—Shalom.
—Shalom, the shaman and dybbuk?
—I prefer “healer.”
—As he claimed as well.
—You have forsaken those who love you.
—Forsaken? Who? How?
—Moses, you will have another chance.
—Chance to do what?
—To heal the future …
The aging sibyl sprinkles me with spices and touches my forehead with her torch. I feel no burn. There is no scar.
The daymare ended. Moses felt himself in his hospital bed, bathed in sweat and staring through the window bank toward the San Gabriel Mountains. He closed his eyes and awaited the arrival of his wife, mother, and brother.
22
MEMOIRS OF A USELESS GOOD-FOR-NUTHIN’
Merchants of Venice, 1992 – 1994
Falstaffa begged Alchemy to give Marty another chance. ’Cause Alchemy loves Falstaffa, he does, and they become our roadies. Sue Warfield, who swooshed her Malibu manse booty, starts unofficially managing us. She cracked me up. She says, “If I am there, I make the scene. And you want to be seen at MY scene so you make the scene.” That’s why Alchy gives her the nickname Trendy Sue. We showed up at the Viper Room, Tatou, the Sanitarium, 924 Gilman in Berkeley, SOMA in San Diego. My antennae is on high alert ’cause I’m inkling that Alchemy is doing the mystery dance with Sue and not exclusive, which worries me. I am wrong and right. ’Cause Sue’s preference is other women. She scored us our first gig at the Troubadour. Soon she partnered with Andrew Pullham-Large, this upper-crusty English wanker who was in love with Alchy, and they started Surface-to-Air with us as their first client.
Alchy set up a rehearsal sked for six to sixteen hours every damn day. He comes off so Yo, Bro nonchalant, Let It Be, baby. What horseshit. Lux got so mad at him once he typed a list of everything he did in the day from brushing his teeth to taking a piss and presented it to “the micromanaging Generalissimo Alchemyo Savanto.” Alchy laughed, but I ain’t sure he thinks it as funny as the rest of us. He always had a plan. No, lots of plans. One day he asks for a list from each of us for songs to cover. He’s nodding and smiling at Absurda’s list, which is all chick shit, and Lux’s list, which is a mix of funk and punk. He scans mine, which has lots of heavy metal, and don’t say shit. So I says, “Fuck you. What?”
“What? Nothing what.”
“Nothing what, says nuthin’. Say somethin’!” I muscle up in his face and give him a little whack on his left shoulder with my open right palm. He don’t react. Don’t clench up, just puffs on his cigarette and blows the smoke away from me. So I pull back.
He says, “I feel these are a tiny bit pedestrian.”
I says, “Okay.” Again, I ain’t sure what he means. Like pedestrian traffic? I says, “What’s yours?”
It’s all political, like “There’s a Riot Goin’ On” or shit I don’t know, which I’m guessing is political, so I says, “Are we a rock band or a political group?”
“We’re a rock band with a point of view. You get two vetoes like everyone else.”
Lux and Absurda are with him on this, so I got two choices—agree or step out. I let it go. Later, at the house, I look up “pedestrian” in Absurda’s dictionary and it says “dull or uninspired.” Me and Absurda stay up all day and night doing speedballs and fucking, but I am still pissed when we get to rehearsal. Right off, he apologizes in front of Absurda, Lux, and Falstaffa. “I’m sorry. They’re some good songs.” We choose Deep Purple’s “Never Before” and Grand Funk’s “We’re an American Band,” and they became crowd pleasers. Years later when I do my solo covers, I title it Songs for Pedestrian Tastes.
But his apology don’t cut it and I’m still sizzling from the coke. Before we split for the night, he corners me alone and this time he gets in my face, inches up to my nose, not his usual style, and says matter-of-fact, “We, the band, need your unpredictable edge. I’m glad you and Absurda are together. Only thing … if you two keep hitting the smack and coke so hard, it’s you who’s out. Not her—you.”
Protesting is useless. I could eat shit or I could quit. For once, somewhere, I figured out, truth, he was being selfish, but also truth, he was trying to protect me and Absurda. I still did more than a bit a dabbling after that. I can’t understand why I never got hooked. I could quit easier than quitting eating Twinkies.
It’s clear Alchy was in such a damn hurry ’cause he was obsessed with springing Salome from the funny farm. He was writing songs like one a day. Before we even had a contract, he wants to start a company to handle publishing rights. Sue hired some clammy-mouthed entertainment lawyer who asked for some scambooger deal. Alchemy didn’t buy that shit. He found Kim Dooley, a super-jui
cy, super-sharp paralegal who saw us early on at a USC frat party. She and Alchy had a quick thing and stayed friends. Kim set up Scofflaw Music for a few hundred bucks. A few years later, we paid for her law school and she got richer than she could’ve ever dreamed because she became our lifelong lawyer. Alchemy gave us each credit for writing the music even though he wrote ninety percent of it, and that turns out to be mucho millions.
In the summer of ’93, Sue and Andrew invite a bunch of A&R guys to the St. James’s Club on the Strip. That day we was as nervous as I ever seen us. Even Alchemy, who’s usually the picture a confidence. Before we go on, Alchemy tosses me a T-shirt that says CAN I KILL YOU, PLEASE with a drawing of a 357 on it, a riff on the “Please Kill Me” shirt Richard Hell designed with a bull’s-eye back in the ’70s. Alchy yells, “My mom made it for you.”
“Really?”
“You’re a killah, right?”
’Course I put it on.
We’re standing just offstage and I see two hundred men in suits. Even if they ain’t in suits, they’re in suits with their shiny STDs—Silicone-Titted Dollfaces—on their arms. I see a few grungy crit types, and some who is old enough to be my father. Not our usual audience. I hear Alchemy muttering and repeating, “Failure equals death. Failure equals death.” Which kind of scares me.
When he’s ready, he leads us out. The lights is dim and we’re so fucking amped we hit the stage and never lose it. This big-shot critic, Zed Cone, who was a friend of Sue Warfield, wrote about the show for LA Weekly and really started the buzz.
THIS WEEK’S ZED CONE
What Is the Color of Alchemy in the Silence?
“Tonight’s the dream you’ve been waiting for all our lives …” With a glint of cheek and irony, the Insatiables singer-songwriter and soon-to-be superstar Alchemy Savant led his band into the spellbinding “Futurific.” Never was the future so danceable. Song over, still in his trance, eyes closed, he swilled the last drops from a bottle of whiskey as his band mates, whose musicianship is as precise as a Swiss clock and their stage presence as combustible as a Molotov cocktail, strummed and drummed to a bristling backbeat.
Savant glided into the mesmerized crowd, and in one graceful motion placed the empty bottle of whiskey on the tray of a nearby waitress. A group sitting at a front table leaned forward, nearly propelling their bodies out of their seats toward him. Savant flashed an enigmatic smile, leaned over, made a slow snakelike motion with his right arm, and swiped a beer bottle from a woman at the table. He took two huge gulps.
Savant wet his lips salaciously with his tongue and staccato-stepped backward in time to Compton’s own Lux Deluxe’s smashmouth drumbeat. Then —bim bam BOOM! The lithe, erotic, and dexterous CalArts-trained lead guitarist Absurda Nightingale and the menacing, teenage ex-con bassist Ambitious Mindswallow bashed into the rock noir “Licentious to Kill.” The song over, the stage went dark until two spotlights settled upon Mindswallow and Lux Deluxe, face-to-face and clench-fisted. In a harrowing reimagining of Sly Stone’s “Don’t Call Me Nigger, Whitey,” they raised the tension from taunting to warlike—and ended with Lux kissing a stunned-looking Mindswallow on the lips.
For the encore, Savant returned to center stage and led his cohorts in mayhem into “More (Is Never Enough)” their three-chord, jaw-breaking comic anthem declaring that all he—his band—each of us—that all America ever wanted was more, more, and more.
Zed Cone answer: The color of the music in your dreams.
(I read the thing about five hundred times. Sent it to my parents, who had asked for money. I toss in fifty bucks with a note that says, “Thanks for nuthin’.” Signed it, “Your useless son.” My bastid father writes back, “Figures, he don’t hardly mention you except when you kissed a nigger. You always was a nigger lover.” I wish I could’ve beat the fuckin’ crap outta him. I settle for ripping the note into a thousand fuckin’ pieces.)
Sue and Andrew had strategerized right. Lotta the big company dudes showed up. During “Face Time Is the Right Time,” Absurda skanked into the audience and pretended to give head to half the old fart execs. She spread her legs like she wanted them to suck her pussy, and poor Randy Sheik, no fuckin’ lie, spurted in his pants!
Man, the Sheiks, they were real beauties. Their rep is as bit players and hustlers with second-rate acts who had finally hit it big with the rapper MC Kreep, and Samureye, four nerds from Brooklyn whose gimmick was dressing up as the heavy metal band Samurais. They made a star outta Viviana Kerry, this teenage lollipop music slut queen, who was doing Buddy.
You had to love the Sheik’s chutzpah. They went from the Sheicksteins of Bayonne to the Sheiks of Venice, CA. Their offices was like Leonard’s of Great Neck meets an Arab oasis. Splashed out all blingy lamé and shiny shit and fake palm trees and stuffed camels. The waiting area was designed in the shape and dirty brown color of a chopped-liver camel.
They was three brothers. Randy, who thinks he is a Jew Luca Brassi but he’s only the family water boy. Absurda used to jive him that if he lost fifty pounds and cut his ’stache she’d give him the best blow job in the world. Walter was maybe forty and stooped over like a Jewy bookkeeper with his black-rimmed glasses, short and skinny. I use to peek down and tickle his bald spot and tease him, “Walter, you forgot your pope’s cap.”
Buddy, though, he was one smooth alligator. All greasy groomed and expensive clothes but could snap your neck and never think twice. His extra-boldfaced gold watch sparkled on his dark, hairy-gazairy wrist. His voice raspy like an overheated seltzer bottle.
In the dressing room, we were kiss-the-sky high. We’d slayed ’em. I was spraying everyone but Alchemy with champagne. Andrew’d ordered plastic glasses that didn’t shatter, so I was stomping them with my boot. (Hey, I was young and doing what I thought rock stars should do.)
Alchemy, though, none of us dared enter his space until he gives the signal. He’d find a corner and cover his head under a towel. After a show, it was like he was some giant Thanksgiving Day parade balloon with the air hissed out and shrunk down. The energy he let loose was so atomic, and he needed time to rev up to be Alchemy.
He had finally uncovered his head and was gulping a bottle a bubbly when Buddy Sheik rams backstage, flanked by Randy and Walter. Buddy gloms on to Alchemy and Sue. Randy talks to Absurda. Walter is on me, Lux, and Andrew. Then Buddy says real loud, “Deal?” and reaches to shake Alchemy’s hand. Alchemy nods and says, “Not yet.”
Buddy barked, “What? You don’t trust me?” We all turn to watch them.
“Why should I? Besides, all four of us have to agree.”
“Man, I could grow to love a boychick like you. You shouldn’t trust me. Yet. I’ll change that.”
Buddy paced around the space like a combo strip club pimp and used-car salesman. “Alchemy, you are like no one I’ve ever met—you’ve been kissed by God. And I’ll be blessed to have you as a member of the Kasbah family. The question you should be asking is: Why am I here? The answer: I want Thee Insatiables. I can feel how much I want you because it sickens my kishkes to think we won’t get you. We will give you ‘More’ than any other company …” He stops, waits, begins again, his voice calmer. “I know you’re thinking, Man, this schlemiel got nothing to say to me. Yeah, I’m a low-life schmateh peddler who never had a class act like you guys. You’ll see, you take risks. Me, too. If I didn’t, I’d still be selling rags. You got your dreams. I got mine.”
Buddy walks up to me and pinches my cheek. “Even you, you got class. Most of it low.” I slap his hand away and Randy inches up to me. Buddy keeps spieling. “Ambitious, here, I bet he thinks, and maybe the rest of you do, too, that we’re missing the boat on the ‘grunge scene’ and we need you. No! I want. I never need. Me and my brothers, we secretly been to see you twice. And we agree—you are it!”
Buddy keeps his focus on Alchemy and Andrew while slipping glances at the rest of us. Alchemy, who could keep a tractor beam stare on anyone, never takes his eyes off Buddy. They’re playing mind m
acho poker.
“Talent is not enough. Dedication is not sufficient.” His voice crackled now. “You need vision, need to see the lay of the land. Where the rat traps are and where the gold mines are. You sign with me and we’ll disarm the rat traps and find the gold mines.
“Anyone here know what schvartz gelt is?” He looks around. “No takers? Andrew, what’d they teach you at Cambridge?”
Andrew mumbles, “It means black and gold.”
“That’s kaiser-speak. In Yiddish it means …” He pauses ten seconds before whispering, “This never goes beyond this room. Schvartz gelt is Yiddish for T&E. The taxmen call it ‘Travel and Entertainment.’ Bull. It’s ‘Tits and Ego.’ Tastemakers make stars. Some need a massage. Every company will supply you with ‘party’ favors, but we best everyone in this business at giving the right people T&E. We’ll give you ten dollars less than anyone else … Less, because I want you to be able to tell every mother-effing person who asks that artistic freedom is what we gave you. This comes from my heart and my pocketbook. I will personally write in an extra $50,000 T&E to promote Thee Insatiables.”
Buddy looks around, pleased with himself.
Alchemy says, “Ten dollars won’t do it. We’ll take ten thousand less.” I wanna scream, What the fuck? Sue and Andrew don’t look over the moon either. We all kinda know Alchemy is testing them. “You give five K to the ACLU and five K to Bernie Sanders’s campaign in our name and Kasbah matches it.”
None of us in the room knows this Sanders dude is some commie congressman until Alchemy explains it later. I ain’t thrilled, but after listening to Alchy and Nathaniel, I ain’t surprised either.
“We can do that … And remember, you can call me or one of my brothers any time of the day or night. Can you do that with SONY? No damn way. We answer to no one but ourselves. Call me or any of us anytime.”
He walks up to me, stares at my shirt. “Don’t kill me just yet. Deal?”
