18

  Louise D.’s Birthday/Deathday

  Telepathic nudges and winks drew me to her.

  I can alter my own blood chemistry to release Truth Serum into my veins, in order not to lie, because I despise liars and would not stand among them. I don’t lie. It was telepathic beams that drew me over there, and no old grudges against her. I didn’t know her. I had only met her through a pal, who’d been her patient at some hospital or other, and he introduced us one morning at somebody’s house-party, and kept saying, “Louise, you’d love Bobbie! You could never psych out our Bobbie!” She was taller than me, which I didn’t like, and too loud and robust and joking, in her thirties, high on something or other and sounding off about some bastards in the legislature who were trying to cut back on mental health funds, which might mean she’d be out of her job, whatever it was, and she kept swaying and putting her hands on me, but I had my eye that morning on a skinny-legged small-faced blonde with mournful smudged eyes who was barefoot and lonely and needed taking in hand for a weekend, maybe, and so I didn’t pay Louise D. much mind, because I had enough of big energetic cheerful-weepy women with Melva and her friends though somehow I liked Louise D. and had the idea, well maybe, maybe if she was my sister or something, she’d help me out, talking confidentially and quietly the way that lady therapist had talked to me out in Nevada: I had appreciated her interest in making me well. But it was crowded in the house and the skinny blonde was also eying me, sending little terrified dart-messages of Help me, love me, take me in hand, so Bobbie excused himself and headed for the little girl. And he didn’t regret it either because she turned out to be Baby Sharleen and an important contact.

  But Louise’s liquid-bright eager eyes sank into my soul, so that I dreamt them out clear one night when I didn’t even think I had been sleeping, when I’d already lost the guitar and was lying under some bushes in a park with my book-bag under my head stuffed with my personal possessions and the Machete, of course, inside its yards of special Indian cloth. This was three or four or maybe five days after the Pasadena bungalow and the girls who turned out not to be stewardesses for the right airline, but all that was foggy and insignificant.

  I saw Louise D.’s eyes turning onto me. Focussing. I sat up and rubbed my face.

  At first I did not recognize the eyes. I let them focus inside me. I didn’t prod myself, didn’t ask questions. A spark of excitement began, but I paid it no mind. I was done with loving. (“…farewell to love/loving…”) The love-power would not last me, not since I toppled off that tower or turret or whatever people called it at El Portal, clamber-climbing up the vines that turned out to be bug-eaten, while the audience cheered clapped urged me on, consumer-bastards—and so I set my mind fiercely away from that part of my body. Though nobody believes me I must repeat for the record: I never valued such behavior.

  * * *

  Muffled outraged incredulous laughter in the courtroom.

  * * *

  I didn’t! I didn’t value it!…Everyone else did, the girls and the women and the spectators here in Court and the slobbering old-young men, even Danny, even my master Danny, but I never did because it was monkey-antics, monkey-tricks, black-spidery-monkey grappling and wrestling to earn a few bucks, however you lyricize it. Except for the immediate loss of my contacts—how they all deserted me, the pricks!—I didn’t mind the fall and the shock to my vertebrae and my glands and the part of my brain that secretes the power-juices, I didn’t even mind all of them laughing…though sometimes that raucous laughter returns to me here in my cell or in Court.…I didn’t mind that crucifixion because Mr. V. alone did not laugh, though it could be argued that he engineered everything. No, for the record it must be said that I did not mind anything that happened to The Spider Monkey. But my music, my powers of music!—my soul!

  Did you have the idea, Bobbie, that Louise D. would help you?

  Yes. No. I don’t know. I thought…I thought maybe…maybe a big girl like that, a big-sister, maybe she’d…she would sit and make me tea or something and I could explain to her about the guitar that was smashed, and how my contacts were all out of town when I called them, and how Melva had flown to Majorca with her boys and someone else whose identity I couldn’t learn, because people were lying to me right and left!…and I could explain about the stewardesses and how the amplified sound had given me powers I didn’t exactly want, beamed in to me from some rock-group’s soul, and how the Machete had acted of its own volition, hacking away and saying, “Who’s your cute little monkey boy-friend now, honey, who’s your portable plug-in dark smouldering rent-a-monkey now?” while she kicked and tried to crawl out the front door.…And it was a fiasco! A mess! And I thought that Louise whoever-she-was would understand all this, because she’d made such an impression on my pal that he talked her up often, and showed up at her apartment one night with a cop’s helmet he’d gotten off a cop, him and some other boys, and kidded around with her saying, Hey Louise!—we killed a cop tonight!—we killed a pig tonight, want to celebrate?— And evidently she hadn’t acted too alarmed, but asked the boys to please go away, she was so sleepy and the neighbors would be listening, they were nosey, please go away boys and no rough-house, you don’t want to get into trouble. So I thought I would run to her.

  And did she let you in?

  Oh yes! She opened the door and recognized me, she was like a nurse, a mother, a teacher, a big-breasted lady older than me and wiser, standing there in a green flannel bathrobe with something white and flaky on her face.… She recognized me right away. She said Oh! come in, you’re Jerry’s friend the singer, what’s wrong with you?—why are you looking so blue? Are you still playing at Lucky Pierre’s? Are you alone?

  She poured us both a drink though I don’t drink and breathed rapidly and noisily at me, her pudgy shoulders hunched forward, not to miss a word, and I told her weeping about the days I had to hide because I was so sick-looking and the scavenging I did in garbage bins out back of the drive-in restaurants and the supermarkets, pawing through the spoiled meat to get to the fruit and vegetables because I didn’t want to hit off raw flesh without others around to move in rhythm with me, and she seemed to understand, and her eyes filled with tears when I described crawling into a Salvation Army pick-up bin (though this had taken place a decade ago, in Newark) to get a few clothes, and almost falling helplessly inside, and the terror I felt then, and my mind leaped around the kitchen where we were sitting and I had the sudden idea that this kitchen was familiar to me and that the words I uttered here would be taped, recorded, somehow preserved in someone’s memory who was not exactly here in the room with us, but maybe connected with this Louise D. who worked for some mental research clinic and could not be trusted.…My mind skittered onto one of my mothers, and onto another of them, and focussed again on Louise D. who was staring at me with a small strange smile that showed just part of one of her big milky oversized front teeth, and I heard her saying, “Bobbie, don’t be afraid now, Bobbie, Bobbie why don’t you just…just sit still.…I have this friend, this doctor-friend, I would like to call, who can administer something to you to, you know, help you sleep if you’d like to sleep, on my sofa maybe, you’re certainly welcome to sleep on my sofa…I’d love to have you rest up here.…So if you’d just relax and sip some of that drink, or maybe you’d like some milk…I could warm up some milk…some chocolate milk.…And then we could talk about this more quietly…and then… and.…”

  But I interrupted all this. I tried to explain to her about the pilot-film, and how I had been doing so well standing on my hands and leaping about and when I began my climb, my monkey-climb, up the side of the house I had the audience with me all the way, breath-by-breath, and if she moved off that kitchen chair I’d slit her throat, and I didn’t need any doctor-friend to put me to sleep, no thank you, though maybe I’d take her up on that offer of a nap on her sofa because I was very tired. She was about to jump up from the chair to help me, and I grinned at her one of my old slash-grins that must have been a genetic compulsion, a programmed characteristic, since I had never known anyone Inside or Out who could smile the way I did; so she sat back down again. She wasn’t very pretty. I don’t know why I had thought she was pretty. Her skin was yellowish the way Melva’s was at times, early in the morning when her make-up was soured and filmed-over with perspiration, the way my tongue tasted at this moment, scummy and not well. All I wanted, Louise, was to be a face on a billboard!—was that too much to ask?

  POEM FOR LOUISE

  The Olympic swimmer swimming to triumph

  The sparrow-hawk diving to triumph

  Gotteson weeping in dustballs beneath a bed

  or kissing hairs loose on a rug

  or warm and curly with life

  or sticky-drying on the Machete blade—

  you did not look like the bastard

  who gave me a hypodermic in Reno

  or like “Louise D.” on the front page

  beneath the headline FIFTH MURDER

  but like Gotteson craving crawling on the Strip

  and like the Olympic high-jumper jumping

  like Christ on the pole of All Knowing

  we live right up to the last second

  in one big triumph

  I spoke to her evenly and quickly. I knew there was not much time. I told her that Gotteson without his guitar was deadly, that to brush against me would be like brushing against a scorpion, so charged-up, so coiled-back, and that my trouble had always been people crowding too close, causing static to interfere with my natural powers, falling under my spell and begging me for love, even for intimate little husbandly chores like plucking some woman’s eyebrows for her in a steamy bathroom with music piped in.…I told her about the clinic someone had dragged me to, back in Newark, where I had to sit on a bench for an hour and a half, and where I wet my pants, and the other kids began to giggle, one of them a six-foot moron wagging his finger at me. The air in that stuffy steam-heated place had burst into pieces of knife-blades, flying everywhere, and not even little Bobbie himself could escape their wrath! Louise, sit still, Louise, don’t move. She began to cry. She said that yesterday had been her birthday. I asked her, how old? and she shook her head slowly as if pretending she had not heard, and I said, honey, you don’t look more than thirty to me, and she didn’t take me up on the compliment but just kept staring at my hands, which I had to hold still to keep from moving hypnotically, a corny habit of mine I must have got from one of my show-business friends. I said, I bet she was very kind to her patients, she had that kind of cheerful big-sister look that meant so much to sick people, especially men. But the sparks-out-of-my-brain were a little too much for both of us, I think she could feel them, she began to tremble and just sat there staring at my hands, and I tried to keep my voice down because of the neighbors (somehow I knew about the neighbors being nosey) to explain that I was still that child on the bench in Newark, still innocent though fouling my pants and still being laughed at, though now that I was an adult I could strike back at those who laughed. She whispered that yesterday had been her birthday…and I said to her, now yesterday is over…it’s three-thirty in the morning and a new day for you…and you didn’t want another birthday rolling around anyway, did you?

  In that kitchen both of us learned that God is a Maniac like me: out-guessing and out-hyping me. My wildest soaring song came to me in a rush-of-words like a spasm Hate hate hate hate hate hate hate pity. You start with Hate and end with Pity. So I hacked her free of being Female, caught there inside a big bulk of raw flesh, scented with Lilac Talcum Powder from the corner drugstore, the two of us grappling and sliding around on the slippery linoleum, Gotteson knowing deep in his brain the truth of the words of a small cartoon-vision of Gotteson, instructing him that he talked too goddam much and now look! Yet I was out-guessed by the God of the Night, Gotteson himself outdone by the energies that came to him, and crept away exhausted and self-disgusted before four AM, with no one the wiser. If the neighbors heard anything they didn’t let on.

  * * *

  Defense Counsel requests that it be stricken from the record that the Accused made any reference to “God.” The Accused, that is, the Maniac, protests that at that time in his life he did believe, he seemed to have sudden knowledge of, the truth of God’s Mania for Man, His Mania for All of Man (and not just Part), and God’s being able to easily outstrip Man in Fantastic Imagination and Deeds. He meant to honor God! He certainly meant to honor God, as one Maniac honors another!—But the courtroom is noisy, the Judge is actually banging his gavel, the television cameramen don’t know which face to zoom up to, the Maniac sits stricken and impotent in his sweat-drenched thirty-dollar suit, so baggy on his emaciated body and so different from the cruisewear he used to own only a few months ago. He cannot even remember a woman named “Louise D.” and though he is not on trial for her murder (one woman at a time!) he is very sorry to have forgotten her. He remembers a green bathrobe. He remembers a slightly protruding front tooth.

  * * *

  And so, Bobbie, in your activities as a killer you followed the same basic pattern of promiscuity begun so many years ago, as a boy in Juvenile Detention…? Through you, or boys just like you, diseases are spread across the continent. There is an epidemic of diseases, isn’t there? What we are asking you, Bobbie, is just this: to the best of your knowledge is it possible that you are only a pawn?—a tool?— that you and diseased boys like you are actually being used by intelligent forces to infect the American continent with debilitating and brain-rotting diseases…?

  No.

  But it is a possibility, isn’t it? We find it remarkable that someone as degenerate as yourself, as mentally deficient as our records show you to be and your dull-eyed appearance argues you actually are, can answer that question so confidently!

  Throughout my life I did worry about that—about influences. About the way the moon acted upon the ocean, and how it might act upon me. After the stormy session in Louise’s kitchen, when I must have blacked out for ten, oh maybe fifteen minutes, and just seemed to fall through the floor and keep on falling, and threshing around, arms and legs, hacking and plunging and gasping for breath, oh sweet Jesus I had to take stock of myself. I was frightened. I begged for some change by the Brown Derby, where the doorman seemed to recognize me and asked how Melva was, and I lied to him and said she was spending a few weeks at a beauty farm north of San Diego, and hoped he wouldn’t notice my unconvincing tone of voice or the nail-scratches on my face, and excused myself as soon as I had collected a few dollars’ worth of change, and went to a flophouse downtown to take a shower and shave and I turned the water on Cold to give myself a shock; to make myself think. I had to think: Which direction was I headed in? It had always upset me to witness the strange powers of the moon, the rising and sinking-back of the tide, and to apply that to my own life, to think that maybe someone or something was influencing me without my knowledge. I had always received my music, gratefully. I had “received” it without question. But these recent events, the Machete leaping into such life, sweeping and plunging and pulsating and throbbing in a way the guitar had not, this frightened me because my soul blacked out at such times and abandoned me to whatever was going on. So I stood there under the cold freezing shower and thought of penance. Doing penance. Getting my mind straight and reason-driven, Bobbie Gotteson in his own head again, not running wild. I had a terrible vision of one of the chickens out at El Portal, running with its neck cut and blood flying everywhere, and how the girls screamed, and jerked their legs back so the blood wouldn’t get on them, and I seemed to feel myself inside that chicken, running and squawking helplessly, and I thought of how one of my buddies at Terminal Island had explained to me how a kindly teacher of his once taught him to conquer his stammering: by making himself stammer on purpose.

  19

  Doreen B.

  A penitential act. A Negative Act. An Undoing-of-Magic Act.

  Why, I didn’t even know her! Therefore, no personal motives. No personal revenge. She reminded me somewhat of Irma, though shorter and plainer than Irma, just a secretary or typist-appearing girl, that I followed home from the beach and saw how lonely she was, her heels worn down, and her bleached hair wilted from the humidity that day. I followed her right up to her apartment on the third floor of a walk-up, but she closed the door on me and for some reason I didn’t want to knock, I thought she might stare at me through the peep-hole, and, somehow, recognize me, so I waited until dark and climbed up the side of her building, hand-over-hand, concentrating on not falling, on one brick after another, very slowly, cautiously, though there was no moonlight to guide me or to illuminate the blade of the Machete, as I pretended there was in my poem. In fact, the Machete was wrapped in its carrying-cloth and stuck in my book-bag, which had a strap so that I could carry it over my shoulder—