Up Jumps the Devil (20 page)

“I can't!” she gurgled, opening her throat like Pig had taught her so the wine would just pour straight down.

The door opened. Cool air rolled in, making whirlpools in the steam. Pig peered at her (the band was cool with nudity. They didn't really have a choice).

“You all right?” he gruffed.

The tenderness in his voice—it was there, if you knew Pig—was the only real thing in her world, for just a second. It almost made her cry.

“Yeah, Pig,” she said. “Piggy Pig.”

The door closed.

The mist swirled and settled.

Fame was a surprising thing. It was and was not what she'd expected.

On one hand, it held her like a pink cloud. If she closed her eyes now, in the warm water and bubbles and steam, with blue pills and wine softening everything, she could feel them out there. A sea of blurred faces, listening, loving her. Floating her up. Filling her blank spaces. Sometimes, just for a moment, like right now, it was enough. It was like the music itself, and she was happy without having to think about it.

But it never lasted.

Because fame was like an animal, too. It was like having a lion on a silver chain. It impressed people that you had it. It brought you good things, but it made demands, too. It had to be fed. It was phones that never stopped ringing. It was deadlines and miles to be traveled and hard work to be done. It didn't float around like a happy cloud. It stared at you with green animal eyes, and roared questions at you, and interrupted your sleep and made you over in its own image until it seemed the You that was famous hardly resembled the You that was You. It was something most people would never understand or believe: being famous was hard work, and it was scary. It could swallow you. Or, worst of all, it could just walk away.

Memory opened her eyes, breathing hard.

Damn. One second she'd been so happy. The next, full of fear. That's what she got for stopping to think.

Little girl lost, she thought, and threw up in the bathwater.

Her discomfort and revulsion were momentary. She hadn't eaten all day. It was just wine.

“Bathing in my own wine …!”
she sang.

The echo seemed to last forever. Like a studio reverb.

She fell asleep listening to it.

SOMETIMES
, when he had inhaled a great deal of coke, the Devil found himself blurting that he loved her.

Not to Memory herself.

“I love her,” he would slur to Two-John, Pig, or some stranger.

But no one heard or else forgot, and the Devil himself forgot the second the slightest distraction came along, like having to pee or realizing he had peed himself.

Falling momentarily in love and peeing yourself were common hazards of this fast, weird life, he realized. So were music and good times and the sense that a whole new world was opening.

“Let there be light,” said the Devil, sprawled between naked women in a candlelit hotel room, stinking of pot and urine.

PURPLE AIRPLANE PLAYED
Madison Square Garden, and stayed at the Chelsea Hotel.

Jason Livingston loved the Chelsea. He was a worshipper on a pilgrimage.

“The fucking Chelsea!” he gushed, slowly turning in the lobby, gazing at the upstairs balcony, watery eyes almost brimming over. This was where Dylan Thomas and Bob Dylan had lived, he told the rest of them, and Arthur Miller until not too long ago, and William Tell brushed past him and said he'd told them already, a hundred fucking times. Two-John paused long enough to agree it was “Nice.” Then he ashed on the carpet and headed for the bar.

An Austrian circus was staying at the Chelsea, too. The musicians and roadies of Purple Airplane and the circus performers kept passing one another in the lobby all afternoon. Memory got in the elevator once, and found it occupied by a clown and a dancing bear on a leash.

“Don't be afraid,” said the clown, in an Austrian accent. “She can smell fear.”

The circus people were unusually beautiful. Every single one, it seemed. All during rehearsal at Madison Square Garden, they talked about how beautiful the circus people were.

After the show, they stayed up all night. The Devil drove them around in the Kennedy limo with a case of champagne, and they didn't get back to the Chelsea until after sunrise.

Everyone slouched off to bed except Pig, who announced that he was going to keep right on drinking, and vanished into the bar. Memory fell asleep on a chair in her bathroom.

She awoke to the phone ringing, and someone telling her that the dancing bear had mauled its owner and was wandering the halls. The manager and his crew were feverishly dialing each room, one by one, telling the guests to stay behind doors.

Outside Memory's door, something shuffled down the hall, and she croaked, “Oh, wow.”

It took forever for the cops and paramedics to arrive. In the meantime, the bear wobbled into the bar and stuck its nose in Pig's drink.

Pig and the bartender gave the bear blank looks.

Then Pig slipped off his stool, took the bear's leash in hand, and led her back upstairs to her cage.

PEOPLE DISCOVER NEW DRUGS
and new lovers in the least likely of places.

Memory didn't know she was discovering heroin. She was going on
The Dick Cavett Show
.

There were to be two guests; the studio made sure Memory was introduced second. She walked onstage in platform shoes, to wild applause, and Dick Cavett introduced her to Eliot Crump, the Rock Star of American Bird-Watching.

Dick Cavett asked her some smart questions about psychedelic music, and she gave some smart answers, but mostly her attention was drawn to Eliot.

He was a handsome fellow in his thirties, but man, was he shaggy! He had an unmanaged mop of heavy black curls, five o'clock shadow all over his face, and a mustache like a great black jungle caterpillar. He looked at her across Dick Cavett, and his eyes drowned her. Never had she seen such lucid eyes. If a rainstorm was a pair of eyes, it would be these eyes. Later, when she understood more about heroin, she would understand why his eyes looked like that. But here, in front of a studio audience, taping for a million viewers, she just thought he looked relaxed.

Dick Cavett asked Memory about her amnesia—part of the reason she had agreed to do the show was a hope that someone might recognize her. After eight million album covers, no one had come forward yet.

“I think I'm kind of relieved,” she said. “On one hand, it would be like a dream if some guy came out of nowhere one day and turned out to be my husband or something, but on the other hand, it would be more like a nightmare, you know?”

Dick Cavett sympathized, in a crisp kind of way.

He had already interviewed the Rock Star of American Bird-Watching, but he turned to Eliot again as they closed, saying, “What kind … Eliot, what kind of, ah, what kind of bird would you say Memory looked like?”

Apparently one of the cool things about Eliot was that he could instantly pair any human on Earth with whatever bird they most resembled, and his answers were always right on the money.

“An ibis, Dick,” said Eliot. No hesitation.

The audience gasped and applauded. An assistant somehow flashed a picture of an ibis on the studio wall, and the taping ended in a swell of smiling and clapping.

Then the Rock Star of American Bird-Watching asked Memory if he could take her someplace for a drink, and she said “Yes.”

And he said, “I'm your long-lost husband, by the way.”

They became friends very quickly.

He drove her to a bar way down in Brooklyn.

He had his own car, a red LeMans, which he had driven in from Vermont. It was the first time in a while that Memory had ridden in something that wasn't a limo or a tour bus. She made the most of it, rolling down the window and turning up the radio.

“This is a treat,” she sighed, propping her bare feet up on the dashboard.

Eliot didn't say anything. He just drove and listened to the music and looked relaxed.

MEMORY FOUND OUT
why Eliot Crump was such a great bird-watcher.

Heroin.

The day after
The Dick Cavett Show
, he drove Memory up to his cabin in the Adirondacks, and the first thing he did was split a chocolate bar with Memory, and start smoothing out the foil with a wad of toilet paper.

“What the hell?” Memory wanted to know.

He asked if she'd ever chased the dragon.

“Is that a kind of bird?” she asked. When he laughed, his heavy black hair shook all over.

“Chasing the dragon is when you smoke smack instead of shooting up. It's healthier.”

He explained that when you shot up, anything the heroin was cut with went straight into your bloodstream. If you smoked, the impurities burned away.

He made the foil perfectly flat, and dissolved a tiny caplet of Turkish smack in lemon juice. It turned almost instantly to liquid, rolling like oil around the foil.

Memory held a match beneath the foil, and Eliot inhaled through the glass tube.

White smoke spiraled up inside the pipe.

With one puff, his eyes got that bottomless depth. Another, and he switched with her, lighting a new match.

It was like nothing else she'd ever done. With one puff, it hit her like a golden train.

“Golden train,” she said, rolling her head around.

“Yeah,” said Eliot Crump, and they went out to his tree house.

At first, Memory couldn't handle how the mountains seemed far away, and then close enough to hold in her hand. The tree-house ladder stretched away through green branches and vines, but the climb was over in a second. Then there was a hollow dark all around, and they were in the tree house Eliot had built. It was a wooden deck cantilevered out over the floor of a mountain valley.

The valley was golden. The sky turned.

Everything she focused on made Memory know things she hadn't known before. She felt her lost memory hovering just beyond reach.

They sat in perfect calm and stillness this way.

Every once in a while, the Rock Star of American Bird-Watching would say, “There's a Halberd's speckled grackle,” (or something) and take notes, and take pictures.

And every once in a while, Memory would say “There's a crow” or “There's a robin,” and he dutifully took pictures and notes.

“Tomorrow,” he told her, “we'll drive over to Fulker's Hollow and have a look for the bird of paradise.”

“There's no birds of paradise in Vermont,” Memory argued. She knew
that
much. “They're tropical.”

Eliot nodded. “Except this one. It was a pet or something, and someone let it go. Did you know the bird of paradise is a perfect mimic?”

“Like a mockingbird?”

“Better. A mockingbird just imitates other birds. The bird of paradise can repeat any sound it hears. Even nonorganic sounds. This one must have lived in the city before it escaped; people will be out in the woods and all of a sudden they'll hear a train up in the branches, or a garbage truck backing up. It would be far out if I could get a picture. It would be the only temperate bird of paradise on record.”

“You're fucking with me,” she accused.

He shook his head. His hair bounced. Sparks of sunset flew.

“No,” he said. “But since you mention it …”

He gave her a golden look. The shadows in the trees grew long.

They undressed each other with long pauses and long, fascinated looks. Sometimes they forgot what they were doing.

It took five and a half hours.

WHEN THE TOUR ENDED
and the band started writing new songs full-time at Bubble Records' San Francisco studio or at Memory's beach house, Memory found herself preoccupied. She started spending a lot of money chasing Eliot Crump's golden dragon. She spent a lot of money, too, flying east to see the Rock Star himself.

The Devil didn't go with her. He had a good thing going with acid and cocaine, and preferred to spend his days wandering the beach. The beach near Memory's house was a rocky, misty strand, with pounding breakers and cold spray. He, and he alone, dared to swim its terrible rips, piercing the surf and floating way out to sea. He kept Memory in his mind's eye, lazily watching over her as if through a kaleidoscope a thousand miles long. She seemed okay. She was doing what she was meant to do. Things were good.

In Vermont, Memory and Eliot hiked Fulker's Hollow, all aglow and relaxed. They were watchers of atoms and molecules. No way a bird of paradise was getting past them.

They were deep in the woods. Eliot carried a tent on his back.

They spent the night, and through the mist the next morning, hiking between cliffs of moss and granite, green and gray, vibrating with the dragon in their veins, they heard a jackhammer.

“Jackhammer,” said Memory. “Far out.”