The chauffeur smiles back. Doublemint or Juicy Fruit, Richy Rich?
*
And so it began that summer. After picking up his "rich and powerful" clients and shuffling them back and forth between the airport and their brokering places and hotels, the chauffeur picked up his two 'unwashed' boys, two or three times a week all that summer. We waited for him on a park bench near the Boston Common, the tourists snapping digital pics of the famous duck boats, all daffy with forced delight. I would be reading some tome Felix had loaned me (forced on me, really), and Richy would keep an eye out for vice cops, and wave to the ones he knew. Then Felix would pull up curb-side on Arlington St. and beckon us to the limo, and in we'd hop, and off we'd go to Avalon. And a few hours later, after all was done and said, we'd come south again, over the bridge, through the tolls, and Felix would drop us off at the edge of the Town and we'd walk home, stopping off at the convenience store with our new funds to buy Twinkies or Fritos and a couple of cans of Coke, the booty of our lust and learning.
The rides up over the bridge were always the most exciting. Always Felix was provocative, titillating, original. One time he'd dress up like a handsome Cossack, but made up like Edgar Allan Poe in black, then say, My name is Ivan Nevermoresky, and we'd spend the next couple of hours comparing Dostoyevsky's tortured Underground Man to the tortures of the Pit and the Pendulum, and, of course, Das Kapital would raise its ugly head, so off it had to go. Or another time he'd leer at us, decked out as Batman, and have us play out how the role might develop in a Michael Haneke version of the caped crusader. With tight shorts. Another time he came costumed like Darth Vader, breathing heavy behind the mask, lay on the back seat between us, the back of his head in my lap, and assign us the roles of Freud and Jung--Analyze me, he'd say, and Richy would put a cigar out in my face, figuratively speaking, and I would crown him back with a barbed archetype that wiped away his superior smile. Or the chauffeur'd come all Vincent Price-like, Dr. Phibes, and tell us he was the Mainstream Media and ask us to consider how truth could be dangerous and propaganda useful, then had us write a faux piece for the New York Times and defend its value to the public. Pretend I'm a potential subscriber, he'd say. One time we spent an hour considering Heraclitus' famous fragment about not entering the same river twice, and then, when we seemed sufficiently perplexed, he'd read a passage from Twain's Life on the Mississippi, wherein the young river boat pilot, having spent an exhausting nerve-wracked day learning the language of the river, discovers he must begin his learning of the ever-changing river anew the next day and every day, forever, like some Sisyphus of the tides. O, Route 1 was our river! (With tight shorts.)
Then we'd arrive in Avalon at the cabin, and I'd sit in the back of the limo, while Richy and the chauffeur went inside and enacted their love-albeit for cash. The ride home was always quiet, serene, each of us pensive, self-absorbed, original. Though none of us smoked, the limo always seemed to be filled with unctuous French clouds gesturing upward in complex undulations, cigareuse. Richy clearly got more of what he needed out of Felix through their mutual physicality, while I preferred the stimulus of his stellar intellect; he was brilliant, and I Ioved him. I don't know what Felix got from us, save, perhaps, the freedom of molding new ideas each day-we, his turning clay--, or like some visionary artist throwing himself at the blank canvas, knowing the energy is fleeting, the result always ultimately false, that it's not really about representation but about being. But don't quote me.
Then JB decided to bang my sister.
I did not bang your sister. Or rather, I did, but it wasn't as crude as that.
Man, you were up to your sinuses in quim jam. You positively reeked of her. Not crude? OPEC wants to talk terms with you.
When you went off to the store to buy some Twinkies, she came out of her room in that black silk dress looking like a Chivas Regal ad. She had nothing on underneath but fish net stockings and she wore that violent red lipstick. I'm thinking: Liza Minnelli, Cabaret. And then she jumped me. It was all I could do, and so on. We stayed friends and smile.
And then one day Charles Stuart was being chased by the police and jumped from the Tobin Bridge to escape them, and then Felix came one last time as The Knight of Infinite Resignation, dressed in tight shorts, as I recall, and then disappeared until Christmas Eve, when we heard on the news that a man fitting his description had jumped from the Tobin Bridge spouting the final lines from Pagliacci. And then we grieved and went our separate ways, toward F*ck You magazines, Genet-ic theatre and post-modern Academe. But the river, the Oily, remains the same.
*
A voice calls him back from the edge of the universe, where he'd gone to look for a window into other realms or possibilities; slowly he zooms out, returns to a consciousness of the present, as in that first episode of Carl Sagan's TV series Cosmos, which rapidly compresses time, from the Big Bang to the Now of 1974, in a matter of minutes. He's got the news on in his dim-lit room and the female impersonator of public virtues is telling her viewers:
Felix sits up in his bed. No, no, no, it wasn't Pagliacci, you clown. I said: 'Siamo contenti? Son dio, ho fatto questa caricature.' Nietzsche, not Pagliacci.But he waved it off. It was inconsequential. His muse was summoning him and he must not keep her waiting. And besides, there were new boys waiting, waiting to come back to the woods--not to Avalon now, but Camelot.
Outside the Camelot Office he drops his postcard in the box. It is addressed to the Triad. It has a picture of a tightrope walker and a stamp with "Love" and pink hearts. On the card he has penned: Versteh'? Or have I come too soon again? And, below, his signature: a graffiti-like falling star.
*
Next Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
