Bogeywoman (25 page)

Though behind ourselves in every other way, as rockers we Bug Motels were ahead of ourselves, or our time, or at least far out in front of the sagging royals, and we intended to stay there, up around the bend where they had found us, or sent us. We were getting better, every one of us, at least there were signs. Long ago on his druggie’s endless wanderings, when he used to pace the corridors beaming every deadend wall and locked door with his x-ray eyeballs, Bertie had found the Bug Motels a clubhouse,
NO ROYALS ALLOWED
it said on the door—we had taped that over the old sign that said
NEUROPATHOLOGY
. Bertie, now happily reunited to his legal moniker Egbert since (he thought) it had a certain musical
ton
, had turned up this weensy surgical amphitheater on the second floor, locked up tight so no mental patient of our day would even think of the kind of procedure that probably went on there once upon a time. But we liked it exactly because of that, because of the sick dream of skull tops sawed off like the ends of hairy coconuts and ice-cream scoop brains glistening wetly under their lids. Center stage down front was a dusty American flag and, in front of it, no lie-down table but a sit-up chair like a barber chair; here the poor wretch must have sat with the top of her head flipped open; here (we shuddered) must have clicked the doctors’ knives, forks and spoons to put an end to that mental peon’s troubles for good. And so after Bertie organized us a key we sneaked downstairs and took turns sitting in the barber chair, playing medical experiment, tongues hanging out,
x
’s in our eyes. We sat in the student desks around the barber chair and rested our medical instruments on the stomach-shaped desktops and played bughouse music. We were trying to fool around as much as we could before the royals threw us out. But they never did throw us out.

“Keeps yall off the street,” Reggie Blanchard joked and that was more or less the line the royals took on the Bug Motels and their “funny-farmyard noises,” which were, in fact, to the surprise of everyone, us as much as them, eerily beautiful and as light-fingered and sparsely knotted one to the other as audible cobwebs.

Then everybody got into it. By now hardly a day passed without somebody’s nurse escort or dreambox mechanic smuggling us a peculiarly melodious surgical instrument or scrap of hospital plumbing. But we Bug Motels didn’t take just anything.
Love will get us out of here
, we sang, but how to know it was love when we heard it tinkle or hiss? We had to listen hard. O had charge of a fleet of noisemakers not one of which percussed above a violent whisper.

O in song had a slow gluey quaver to her spooky-flute, a faintly wobbling vibrato deep in the gut of it like near-boiling gumbo, and, maybe to go along with the speculum castanets, she dug up a mantilla you could have sung Carmen in, webbed herself in red and black fishnet, stuck sequin beauty spots on her face and, not exactly flounced, more like lurked, lurked darkly around in this getup, staring at all of us unforgivingly out of the bottoms of her eyes. Her song, written by me, Bogeywoman, went:

Who were we Bug Motels now? Come to find out inside our old confusion was fusion, anyway Egbert said so—
fusion
and
conk
. “They drop the
k
cause it reminds every mental patient that he is king, king of his own conk. Conk ya see is an old American negro word for the dreambox or a hairdo on top of it,” Egbert explained. This was the missionary Egbert at the peak of his
conk
-version. “You probably noticed, Bug Motels, how we are getting our heads together playing this music? We are conk-
neck
-ting our conks to our bodies like yesterday we connected our gut strings to our instruments and, whaddaya know, come to find out
Love will get you outa here
. Like it says in the weird kinda tunes the Bogeywoman writes for us.” (Egbert gave my shoulder a fond little punch, and I saw that O saw. I smiled weakly at her.)

Out of the bottoms of her eyes O peered at Egbert when he talked of love, to find out if he meant her. He didn’t, but still he was the one she looked at whenever she sang. She was off into labyrinths of twisted love for this bughouse Orpheus and his sawed-off-sneaker sandals and the sweaty prongs of dark hair sticking out around his ears and his round little-boy tortoiseshell eyeglasses that bounced on his nose whenever he dabbed at the keys with his hammers. She was staring out of the bottoms of her eyes at Egbert’s skinny, shiny, piecrust-crimper spine where it curled out of his tee shirt. He didn’t know she was there. That’s what she liked in a fuddy, he should be so absorbed in The Importance of what he was doing he didn’t know she was there. When a fuddy started tryna please a girl it got repulsive fast, well that’s what O said anyhow.

I was wondering if she still loved me, loved me at the same time she loved Egbert, and was I any better off if she did. He hunched in that miserly way over his homemade keyboards, plinking out tiny unearthly bug trails of notes, microscopic
music-box rolls, jerky tunes, spastic countertunes, faint and far far away. Dion nodded to the beat. He went for all that love stuff and moreover couldn’t wait to love himself in a baby-blue spangled tux and kick in unison, if he could get anybody else to kick with him. His baritone was best bopping up and down the stave in round monosyllables like
bum
and
boo
. His song, composed by himself, went:

Reggie helped him with the second verse:

The Regicide hung with us down in our surgical amphitheater as often as he could get off the mop. He fronted as our chaperone, as usual, but nowadays we prized his counsel, for his street
corner doo-wop experience went deep. The refrain of course was from me, Bogeywoman.

You could see it in the scared respectful eyes of our dreambox mechanics: our music had made it beyond their usual categories, maybe even come bubbling up from someplace prior to them—the tar pits or the mysteries or sumpm. Anyhow they shoved over, the royals. Weren’t we getting better?

I liked Egbert myself, now that he was getting better. His skinny body looked good hunching over his bed-panioforte like a man overboard clambering onto a life buoy. As a Bug Motel, I admired him. After fifteen minutes fooling with the object, he could play anything, beef bones, bottle caps, orthodontic braces, PVC pipe with the plumbing code still on it. He sang the song I rustled up for him, although it was square as a barn door and old as the itch and he suspected it was filched from somewhere, which it was.

“Where you come up with them complexicated vocabules, Bogeywoman?” the Regicide, who was visiting, wished to know. “She has plagiarized Mother Goose and God and a few other bigwigs,” Egbert explained smoothly, “chops em up and
conk-
nects em all together. Don’t let it go to your conk,” he warned me.

I wondered where Egbert had gotten that love idea all of a sudden and it was easy to ask him because we two were the
grinds among the Bug Motels. All the livelong summer’s day the two of us were plinking and strumming down the clubhouse when pretty soon the rest of em got sick of it and went back to playing O Hell for dimes and quarters at their old table in the dayroom. Egbert and me saw The Importance. Of course O didn’t see The Importance, but she saw us seeing it. She gazed and gazed at the pair of us out of the bottoms of her eyes.

Still, even O had to be alone sometimes; first thing every morning she had to make up her eyes to their usual mine disaster hugeness and scariness, and that took maybe an hour. At nine o’clock in the morning, Egbert and me were already plucking and twanging away in our clubhouse that had
NO ROYALS ALLOWED
taped over
NEUROPATHOLOGY
on the door. Our snack bar coffees were steaming, our Kools lay fuming on our armrests, and I asked Egbert: “Where’s this love stuff coming from? Used to be it was all D.O.A.P. with you, Egbert, and now it’s love.” Naturally I suspected that he, like me, had a Doctor Zuk behind it all, a secret passion moving everything it wasn’t crushing. Come to think of it—I narrowed my eyes at him—maybe he’d fallen for Zuk himself. Of course it had to be madame-too-beautiful-on-her-horse! I mean, who else in this fuddy bughouse was worth it?

“Naw, it was always love,” Egbert smiled up at me from tightening the endpin on some soundboard. “I just didn’t know back then what I was hungry for. I used to chase all day after D.O.A.P. and now I run after—better stuff. Higher stuff.” “Like—royal stuff?” I asked. “Royal stuff?” he echoed, looking at me
conk-
fusedly. He lifted the drain pan manjocello or gourdolin or whatever it was he was tuning, laid it on his desktop and stroked it sweetly. “See, when you track that D.O.A.P. all over the city it’s love, Ursie, but when you cop that D.O.A.P. and shoot that
D.O.A.P., it’s nowhere, man, you’re right back where you started. But real love,” he turned his smiling face up at me and the fluorescent lighting starred all his very straight teeth, “love takes you up a level.” “Ya mean like—to the seventh floor?” That’s where the royals had their offices. “Hump no, Ursie. You don’t get it, do you?” I shook my head. Who cared what love was?
Who
do you love, that’s what I wanted to know, but I hadn’t figured out how to put the question.

“You know, I was a doper before I was even born and I still am and that’s how I wound up in the bughouse and got in the Bug Motels and met you,” Egbert said. “My Unkie Jerry told my old man and old lady to put me in this place and I cussed the hump out of all of em but now I see they were right. My Unkie Jerry’s an obstetrician. He’s the one who was always telling me, Bertie, get off that shit! Be a producer not a consumer! But you know, since he delivered me, he was the first one pumping it in.” “Um, er, uh, pumping what in? Whaddaya mean you were a doper before you were even born?” I inquired, half curious half squeamish to hear this story. “Pinky, that’s my mom, when she’s pregnant with me she has to be the hippest thing in motherdom, the most in the know, so she goes through La Mayonnaise or however you call that training, but when the day came, no matter how natural she breathed I wouldn’t come out until they put some D.O.A.P. in her. So there you are, that’s why I say I was a junkie before the Steins ever got hold of me.” “Aw quit bragging,” I laughed. “No, man, I mean it, this sounds funny but I swear I can sorta remember it. I’m squinting down the rabbit-hole and see Unkie Jerry standing there in the light at the end of the tunnel, in his white coat.
Come on, son!
he says,
Be a producer. Not a consumer!
He’s got this little blue starter pistol sticking straight up in the air, and it goes BANG! Sumpm about him got on my nerves, man. I wouldn’t budge.” “You remember all that?” I said doubtfully.
“Sure! Then in comes this beautiful toasted-almond-color nurse carrying a little ampule and a big syringe. Hello junior, she says, I got sumpm here I bet you like, and shoots up Pinky, and bingo, I came, soon as the stuff was in her, see? So I figure if it was just me I didn’t even want to be born. Only the idea there was D.O.A.P. out there could move me.”

“I dig,” I said. I liked Egbert. I mean, we were in the bughouse, where they’re always tryna get you to rat on your parents. I had to admire him for stealing the blame for his own bughood, even if he had to sneak back into the womb to do it. “Say, are you rolling in dough, Egbert?” I asked. I remembered that the concert house across from the B&O was the Stein, the third floor where Emily got wedged in the laundry chute was the Stein Otolaryn-gological Institute, the Stein Cartography Collection on the high mezzanine of the downtown library was a hot contender in my search for the primo launching pad in the city for offing myself to a greasespot, all the most tubercular-looking blue period funambules were in the Stein Wing at the art museum—“You met Egbert and Pinky,” Egbert said, “if they ate their dough with a knife and fork it still wouldn’t run out. They’re so godzilla rich they don’t do anything. They run the foundation, that’s about it.” “The foundation?” “For draining off the family money … But I think I’m more like Unkie Jerry, I gotta do sumpm.

“You know, Ursie, some people—not you—” he waved his hand, breezily exempting me, “need sumpm to chase after, and I’m one of em. I need sumpm to do, some kinda thing outside of a person. D.O.A.P. takes care of all that. When you’re a junkie you know what you’re looking for all day long—you’re looking for
stuff
. That’s why love is the same as D.O.A.P., it gives you some kinda half a reason to get out of bed in the morning,” he added—where had I heard that before?

“Hey, that’s what O says about love,” I snuck in. “Does she?”
Egbert yawned. Not that I was trying to sic her on him, I even kinda missed the life-or-death thrills and chills of her amorous persecution, but it came down to this: better him than me. “Speaking of O …” I said. “Back off, it’s hopeless, Ursie,” Bertie said gently, “I’m in love already. Hey, I know the one I love is, er,
funny about fuddies
, but we’re both in the Bug Motels and that’s love too. Draining music out of death supplies is a high form of love, man. That’s what we do. She sees The Importance …”