20:
“Uh huh, yeah. No, I’m listening; stuck at the office; broccoli in the steamer in half an hour; asshole boss – you said it first -; deadline at nine so no later than ten; chicken breast thaw in the sink.” Mumbling on the cordless, wipe afternoon Koz-Zone cartoons out of my eyes. Mom’s staccato instruction, as though it was not mantra every other night this month.
“No. I did my work already, Jesus.” Homework’s unblemished fill-in-the-blank Spanish 1 workbook nestles safe in the nylon nest of my Jansport. Big toe nail scrapes on the white/blue plaid gray linoleum of the one man kitchen; shuffle, shuffle through white tube sock into kitchen, shielding eyes against the halogen track lighting. First light since the last light of dusk set over the Torco building, diving behind the Chicago Public Library; jumping turn-styles at Jackson Blue Line, the dusk heads to the West-side.
“Dad says that he’s got another or two test-drives – whatever, one or two more. Happy? – Anyway he says that he’s going over to the hospital to check on Bri and then he’s gonna try to meet with the doctor, so he doesn’t know when he’ll be home and to eat without him.” Dad sleeps since school let out with “headache” as hello. Brian mechanically breathes infant intensive care today with no visiting hours. Breaking Jewel broccoli on the ash Formica counter. Tracing the foreground pink translucent boomer-rang with index finger tough, trying to get them to take off. Dad sleeps through broccoli banging and sailing counter-pattern boomerangs. He sleeps, still losing the pigment from his hands.
“I need you to sign this thing for me for school tomorrow. No, I didn’t get into no trouble – fine any trouble – I’m failing gym. Jesus, you don’t need to scream, it’s gym for Christ’s sake. I dunno, I just don’t feel like it. It’s stupid running and climbing ropes and basketball without shirts on; it’s all stupid. Is that a good answer?” Yanking the freezer door open, swinging back on two hinges hard and bouncing closed again. Opening a second time soft, taking two vacuum-sealed pink-ice breasts out, “Yeah, I’m doing it right now. I’m making enough for everyone. I thought you said I could go talk to Dr. Tamomi during gym.” Pealing the wrap off the breasts, “thunk, thunk”, they click together like stone in the streaked steal sink, knocking flecks of pink frost blood off. Blood snowflakes melt in to puddles, looking like Hi-C fruit punch teardrops.
“Yeah, I can hold Mom.” Above the molted blue-gray cabinets, smiling black faced Uncle Ben and his five-minute rice come down “shthump” on top of the boomerangs. Shuffle, shuffle; Dad’s thin black socks come into the kitchen, groggy, shifting toward the drawer where his afternoon aspirin are. His swollen, baby possum eyes trying to focus on the elements of dinner, “Mom working late again?”
“Mom” mouthed to his shaking head. “Not now dude. Just tell her that I’ve got to deliver a new M3 and a used Audi four-door. Then I gotta go see Chuck at the Cruther’s funeral home.” “Already did.” Handing him keys, checkbook, and wallet from the ledge of the pigeon-shit white washed window. His chalky hands dart shameful, quick into his slack’s pocket. Color started leaving Dad’s hands almost a year ago, when illness removed Brian from Mom. “Thanks dude, but I think I’ll train it again tonight. I might grab a quick drink with the guys later. See you tomorrow and try not to be up to late, huh?” Front door opens and closes leaving the Old Spice from Dad and the stale hallway musk of chlorine and Berber carpeting in his wake.
“No, that’s fine I can keep holding. Nothing, just sitting on the floor waiting for the water to boil.” Digging under the sink, grabbing the can of Scotch-Guard and the stained yellow rag, applying liberally. Breathing deep, breathing deep until the evening shudders, the atmospheric sucking sound of the South loop, the nothing of the apartment, the boiling water, the Mom on hold; all of it is replaced by “wawawawawawawawaw…”. Sideways in giggle fits and another hit, prism rainbows from the “Pacific Mission” neon cross up the street stream fantastic onto the floor, dancing for me. Light to white; gasping upright thinking “I’m blind, how long was I laying there, I can’t feel my lips, am I dead or have I been, did I burn dinner?”
“Mom?” Two minutes passed sitting there. Water beading, threatening a boil. Holding, still. “Wawa” fades to the return of the silence, popping and hissing, rolling warped like the Frank Zappa LP Mom and Dad used to listen to when they’d read the Sunday Tribune together fifty four Sundays ago. Smallish last hit to stop spinning the wrong way, throw can and rag alike back under sink.
“Yeah, I’m still here. No that’s ok. So the doctor said you gotta go to the hospital now? Did you tell him you have to eat, too? Ok, it’s ok. I’m sorry; stop crying everything is fine. Maybe they’re letting him come home. Yeah, I’ll still eat, good night.” Grasping Fruit Roll-Ups with warm Diet Coke in one pink hand and Scotch-Guard with rag in the other pink hand; curling up on the couch, sleeping there.
27:
I know that you won’t get this until Monday morning, at work. Not until you get through your Monday morning client status meeting. Not until you get your coffee — heavy cream, heavy sugar — and a bran muffin. I think that’s why I’m sitting here right now. I know that Monday morning everything will be different between us. After we meet for brunch tomorrow at Leo’s there will be compromises. There will boundaries. There will not be ambiguous phone calls of formality; “How are you holding up?” Followed by tumbleweeds of silence. There will not be anymore backdoor landings, 3a.m. with a sixer hanging on your hip and six more in your gut. In it of itself, not wrong. I just can’t take much more of this out(law) communication.
Not real sure, not sure why I came all the way home at four in the morning. Why I spent money I don’t have to catch a cab across town to sit at my desk. I have to be on the set in two hours.
No, your little man hasn’t ‘made it’. A woman I met on the set of High Fidelity a few years back gave me a call. She still works for that production firm. She asked if I wanted to make an extra bill or two being her production assistant. The show is called “Show Stoppers.” A bunch of Midwestern teenage corn queens will come to the city ready for they’re big break. They come for their ticket out of St. Louis, Urbana, out of Tulsa. They come to be told that they’re talents are needed elsewhere, in TV. They try out. The whole time we tape their auditions and let the public vote via the show’s web site. They want to be the five mid-season replacement characters on UHF shows. They come to be Bo’s new long lost daughter, to be Moesha’s nemesis, to be syndicated. They do Full House, Ally, ER monologues. It’s exhausting.
But not here in my room, at my desk, at four on Sat. morning. I am tired, drained, but not exhausted. Praise be to the Swiss chemist that found the recipe for dextrin. Been up for almost twenty-four hours and will work for much longer. I shouldn’t have been at that museum fund-raiser tonight; having sparse funds myself. I have strained my eyes looking for you tonight. I thought I saw you a hundred times tonight. Then I saw you, couldn’t talk to you, and got scared. I got scared before I saw you out on the patio. I got scared when I started seeing all of your friends; they saw me back and didn’t blink. They didn’t even look surprised. I got scared.
You should see these girls at the try-outs; they all look scared. They’re scared of me. I watch them as they suddenly disappear into themselves when they hit the lacquered pressboard square in the Hilton conference hall. They leap, bounce with fury on the same ground an apathetic DJ spun “We are Family” hours prior for another group of drunken Gold Coast plastic surgeons and the trixie one of them married. But these kids, you’d love it, I mean they tear into that spot and make it hallow. These girls consecrate the ground when they read. Didn’t you once say you thought about jazz dance at Julliard? You did some modeling ten years ago, I know I still have some of the slides that you gave me and I never developed. Some of these girls even look like you, in a way. Not a strange way, but an earnest driven way. All have that ignition.
God, I wonder if I’ll be able to find a cab around here at this time of morning. Did you know that someone set a cabbie on fire around the corner, on Division last night? Apparently a Patrick Bateman protege slid his money through the window slot along with a lit matchbook, followed it up with a wind of hairspray. Aquanet, I think. The kind the little Cambodian kids that live on the bottom floor huff out of Fanta cans. Anyway, the cabbie catches this little gust of Hell’s breeze straight a way in the face. Lights him up like a kerosene tomato. He leaps screaming from the yellow top, puts his mug out in stagnant gutter soup. The flame-on businessman doesn’t even have the decency to rob the matchstick driver, leaves him crying there. No rationale, no reason. Sorry, I know that you hate gore, but neighborhood gossip is still news. However, reaching into my second sleepless day, I don’t have the patience to be polite.
I am tired of being the bigger man too. For right now at least, tomorrow I’ll be back to my button-down self. Right now I do not feel like being mature. I wanted to find you before you found me. I wanted to sit back and watch you and see if you were having a good time. I wanted to watch you having fun for a change. I think I saw you talking to a few guys. I didn’t recognize any of them. Then I saw Josh standing a few yards away. I didn’t want to talk to him. I wanted to talk to you but didn’t want to make him or you uncomfortable. So I split the difference and made myself uncomfortable. I wish I didn’t do that so much but I do it all the time. I wanted to watch the two of you together, to see how you interacted with each other, and if you looked happy. I don’t know if you saw me, I thought that you might have, then you didn’t come over. I just saw you talking and laughing with other people. It made me think about how many people I kept you away from. I couldn’t stick around for that.
I flew to the film shorts that were being shown in the auditorium. A Barbie doll melted away, rotating, for five minutes in a microwave, that was the first film. The second film; twenty minutes of a pick-up truck dragging a plugged-in guitar down the road while it screamed the whole way. The third film had something to do with two British girls raising an embryo they found in the back yard, growing it into a sex-goddess represented by a blow-up doll, and then leaving it tied to a bar stool, stranded, in a disco. Not the kind of solace I was looking for.
I was jealous still, though you told me I shouldn’t be. I still smoked half a pack of Camels looking for you again. I think you must have left. I wandered around thinking about art and the like. I thought of you and Josh leaving together. I wanted to cry. I did, out in the sculpture garden, right next to that giant round boulder; my head full of images. Then I thought that maybe you might have seen me, got scared yourself. I thought that maybe when you got home — hoping that you went home — that you left me a voice mail telling me that you were scared too. A voice mail yelling at me for not coming over and talking to you. So at four in the morning I got into a cab, rushed home. There was no voice mail. I want to call you. I want to see if you’ll pick up. I want to see if you’re there alone, with Charlie Cat only. And that you want to come over and kiss the bend in my neck. And me likewise.
I know that I am over reacting. I don’t care. I so rarely get to act my age; I am pulling that card right now. I know everything that you told me about you, about Josh. You told me that it helped you get over me. That he just showed up. That you don’t like him all that much. That he has problems. That he doesn’t like Charlie Cat. That it is very casual.
I trust you. But there was a point in our relationship that I stopped believing you. That sounds ugly, sorry. We got into one of our fights. You know the ones typically reserved for late Sunday afternoons? I said something clumsy. I am a clod. It was at the A/X spring runway unveiling; the after-party I think. Where the models served us mini bottles of Dom with a bendy straw. Where the doorman mistook us for important, ushered us out of the line, and winked when he gave us those ‘party favors’ that had me rolling ’til noon the next day. The warehouse was normally packed with fabric rolls and before that it had been stocked with meat that left all those dark brown stains on the floorboards, the spots you refused to stand on. That night though, it was packed with us, trying to look like we belonged in the uber-elite. Trying to believe that Chicago had an uber-elite. I was smashed brilliant halfway through the party; I leaned grinning to your ear and whispered “Your plume is prettier than ninety percent of the birds in this nest.” You hit me with your handbag and yelled at me when we hit the curb. You yelled that you didn’t want to be prettier than ninety percent, for once you wanted to be prettier than everyone, you said it was my job to tell you what you wanted to hear. You stared vacant, said void the cab ride home and forgot the next day. I said nothing.
I used to tell people what they wanted to hear so that I could leave. I didn’t want to do have to do that with you. I go to work in an hour. I’ll spend the day telling girls from all over what they want to hear, “The part we are casting for is actually black/white/asian/latino, I’m sorry. But that was fantastic, though. You should consider contacting an agent.” I will speak this mantra five hundred times today, meaning it none. I never wanted to, but I questioned everything you said to me after that fight. I thought you were telling me what I wanted to hear. I fear that that is your job.
My job will be to tell all but five girls that they are not needed, the cameras will tape their reaction. I will tell the girls that they are not needed in the public eye. That they are still needed in St. Louis, in Urbana, that they’re still needed in Tulsa. I’ll tell them that the JJHS production of the Music Man still needs them. That strip malls with yellow tiled fluorescent food-courts still need them. That back, bucket seats and Camero boyfriends, with hard lumps in their Carharts, still need them. Not something I like as of late — rejection — but learning to work with. Not that I wanted to pass it on to others, unfortunately for the corn queens of the midway, it is really beginning to help.
11:
Levi Leviticus, L.L. for short, sprinted away from the lot with the pace of quicksilver. He was late, he knew it, his mother would wag her thick arm at him and say things like “A boy your age needs study as recreation, this ’stick ball’, playing in an abandoned lot, this is fun? After I slave all day mending the hemlines of half Madhatan, you spend your afternoons playing in the dirt with gentiles? Oy Gavot!”
She would prattle on until her wind was gone, at which point she would use the remainder of her energy to shake her permed head and sigh.
“Look at this!” She would exclaim to the ceiling of their Brooklyn cold water flat. It was up until his ninth year that L.L. was under the impression that God lived in their cracked stucco ceiling. “Look at what this boy of mine runs through the streets in! I spend hours scrubbing your slacks and you gallivant through the neighborhood and God knows were else in this running suit like those Negroes on the basketball court!” and then she’d stare down at him with those cold, mahogany eyes and say “Are doing that dope? Tell me! Lord give me strength of Job for this one!”
The recall of his Mother’s reaction aided in the choice to head straight to the synagogue rather than walking into that overbearing blitzkrieg. Besides, he still had make it all the way over to Sy’s record emporium, the Butcher Shop, to pick up the records and extra record player for Herc’s Bar Mitzvah party.
“Lord only knows what possessed that woman to name her only given son Hector!” L.L.’s mother nettle when she had gotten all the relevant bewailing out of the way. Hector’s mother, after finally receiving her son after three girls, felt compelled to let Yaweh name the boy. Herc’s mother described the image as a vision in line with the Burning Bush. In actuality, the epiphany was no more than the combined rush of the mornings diet pills, first cup of Chock Full O’ Nuts, and two Pall Mall’s. Then and there at her Formica table, she decreed that the first man she saw that day would be the barer of he child’s proper name. “Hector Levcivits, the first Mexican Jew in New York.” L.L.’s mother would blather on after two mid-day Manichevitz’s, “What’s gonna happen to that boy when he realizes that other boys have been named after the sons of Abraham and he’s been named after the spick milk man? Well I wash my hands of it!”
By L.L.’s count, his mother had washed her hands of virtually every social trend since 1963. It was her disapproval of Herc that made them such close friends. That and Herc’s mother let them play their Screaming Jay Hawkin’s and James Brown records as loud they could stand. It was she that consented to L.L. playing the Disc Jockey at the Bar Mitzvah, allowing them to pick whatever records they wanted so long as Hava Nagiela was played at some point. “Anything to get that boy to learn his verses. The way he acts you’d think he never wanted to become a man.” Herc’s mother would tell the other bridge women. “Letting a Mexican named Jew playing Black records about sex in the Temple. Oy Vey!, she’s mushugana.” The other bridge women would whisper to each other when Herc’s mother got up to percolate more chicory.
He would just have to deal with the grief of showing up to temple in a running suit and All-Star converse. He hopped the turnstile to the southbound and double-timed up the stairs. At thirteen, L.L. was a caricature of the awkward teenager. Tall, his slender features were merely a post for his oversized striped running suit to blow around on. The pant portion of the red and white-stripped jogging suit sagged below his hips. His neck was like an acute angle, leaning forward and then jutting back as to counter balance his prominent Semitic nose that his peach-fuzz covered face had not yet grown into.
Boarding the train, L.L. leaned, arms crossed and grimace in place, against the rear wall of the car. The display was akimbo to a baby peacock practicing with its tail feathers, or in his case, a scrawny Jewish kid trying to imitate a Black Panther.
L.L. slid his hand into the coat pocket of his jumper and produced a fat, licorice-scented magic marker. He scanned the car for friends and neighbors of his mother. Seeing none he quickly scribbled he, Herc’s and their other friend’s names with the fictitious gang monogram above it. The movement of the jerking train car only accented the obscured letters that he scribbled. L.L. and friends had started writing each other messages and inside jokes on train cars that they knew the other kids rode. To avoid other people reading it they turned every other letter backwards in Hebrew and came up with new ways to write it so that only they could make out the message. “‘Funky Jew Crew’? What does that even mean?” L.L.’s mother had berated him one night after a friend of hers had caught him putting his tag on the Ave. A stop. “‘Vibe Tribe’, what, you only act Jewish when you vandalize other peoples property? Is that what your ‘vibe’ does? Bring shame to your mother, that is what’s ‘funky’ these days?”
L.L. stepped back to admire his “tag”, as his mother put it, one of few words from her vocabulary that he stole. To him it looked like a puzzle with varying levels to it, and at the center of it was a only a simple message that only the right eyes could enjoy. He smiled as thought about how many things, including his mother and her Torah, was much like his tag; a complex measure of steps to hold a simple idea.
The train then gave sudden skipping lurch causing him to drop these thoughts and his magic maker. The jet-black marker fell directly towards his feet; ominous intention, like a more stunted version of that bomb that everyone was afraid of. And it scored a direct hit to his sparkling white converse, drawing the straight, thick black line of gravity’s’ promise down the side of the rubber toed shoe. Bouncing in rhythm with the train’s rail hopscotch, the maker leapt up in defiance of gravity’s other order and scored two more black lines equally spaced a part from the first. When the train and its minion marker ceased their game of jacks, L.L. snatched up the marker staring in horror at the three strips. “That’s what happens when you treat God’s holy language like a Buck Rogers decoder ring! Of course He punishes me for letting you write on walls by ruining a perfectly good pair of shoes, those were suppose to last you the school year, no respect for how hard your mother had to work to get those.” He could hear his mother already, furrowing her borrow and pacing while over cooking the matzo balls.
He liked the way the stripes looked though, so making a few more even handed swipes with the marker, L.L. manufactured the first pair of shell toes the world had ever seen. As he hoped off at the 53rd stop, Jimmy Adias, the local red pusher was servicing an over due client at the end of the tunnel. L.L. recognized Jimmy; he was a junkie but strait because he’d pick up bottles of Hooch for them at a drop. As soon as Jimmy saw L.L. he ran over from the phantom customer, yelling, “Yo, L hold the horses up for a minute! Man have I got something for you, Whoowe Louie!” L.L. hated it when Jimmy called him that, but he wasn’t about to ignore or rebuke the Golem of rotgut. “Hey Jimmy, pick up the pace huh? I got run man.” L.L. said with a hint of impatience that Jimmy picked up. “Man I tryn’ to hold no one up,” Jimmy said through a cracked yellow tooth grin, making the universal stick-em-up gun with his long gray mugwump fingers. “Na’ man I was just gonna let you know about a few of ma’ specials I be runnin today only… Goddamn where’d you get them there stripped shoes brother!!” Jimmy howled. “I made ‘em outta converse and a magic marka’, solid huh” L.L. breezed trying to sound as ‘down with the brown’ as possible, “but dig” he continued with a little more confidence, “I gotta blow down to the Butcher Shop fo’ sum platta’s. Peace” “Now hold on young Levi” Jimmy shot back trying to sound as Oxford ivory as possible, “I would like to own such fine pair of walk-abouts as those, so hence forth I offer you a trade. Though my purse has been empty for sometime now, I implore thee to take this fine Vietnamese dope for those shoes.” “Nope, ’cause these shoes are the dope” L.L. fired back, waved, and ran up the steps and out into the street, invigorated that an actual black man liked his shoes. In the slime slick tunnel, Jimmy took out his little Steno notebook he kept his debtors in, flipped to a blank page furiously scribbling. He replicated a side and profile sketch of the rubber-toed, three-striped shoe he lusted after, and on the top of the page he wrote, “James Adidas’s Dope Shoes” under which he scribbled, “My Adidas.”
Sy, owner of The Butcher Shop, was out on the storefront’s stoop firing up a nickel-store cigar when L.L. came bounding down the street. “L.L. what’s the rush my man, I ain’t gonna lock the doors up on ya’ boy,” Sy yelled to him. It was already a quarter past six, the service began in fifteen minutes on the other side of town. “Hi ya’ Sy, did you get those other record decks for me?” L.L. called out to the black Santa-like man.
Sy packed all two hundred pounds of himself into his five-seven frame with a grace paralleled only by elves. A benevolent man of plaids and suspenders that hiked up his pants in back so that his white sock/black shoe combo could be seen by all. Sy was of deep, rippling laughter following everything he said. The Butcher Shop had actually been a shop that carried meat products since the twenties, but since the Eco-enlightenment struck the Village five years ago, Sy had to reexamine his trade. “Them chilin’ don’t want to eat none o’ that meat, nope, they wants’ nothin’ but greens.” Sy had admitted to himself a few years previous. “But I guess that’d be betta’ fo’ them in the long run. Maybe I shu’ jus’ lett’em at my record collection.” Sy had been a long running Bayou blues act out of New Orleans back when it was still a brawling port town. At the time that he signed the record deal with Grama, he couldn’t read or write, so he didn’t get paid either. After his first son, the lawyer, settled the estate claim with Gramma, out of court and the press, one of the perks was that Sy would get free distribution rights to the Gramma catalog.
Sy still sold meats though, even L.L.’s mother bought her Sunday roast there, but he made his money on the rarities of soul, LP’s that he was always having shipped in with alligator’s tails from the Big Easy. “Sho’ ain’t nothin’ betta’ than some jerk’d gator and a wailin’ in da’ hi-fi.” Sy would call out to all in earshot.
“You be careful young Levi,” Sy warned L.L. as the boy lept up into the store, two steps at a time, “I got’s sum pork loins thawin’ on the floor there, so watch ya steps, son.” But L.L. was past him and through the door as Sy said “son”. Sy did manage to unhinge himself from the peeling gray stoop just quick enough to see Levi’s gangly legs go out from under him as soon as he entered the little florescent yellow shop. A hideous vision flashed through Sy’s sun-slowed mind of having to tell the boy’s overzealous mother that her son spent the last moments of his life wallowing, broken necked in the juice of a swine’s groin muscle. “You know how dem’ Jews can get over Pork.” Sy would always say.
Before Sy could finish this grisly scene, he watch as L.L. quickly dropped back his arms, posted them firmly on the stores wet pavement, flare his legs out to either side, an then crouch into a half headstand only to pop out of it to land squarely on his feet. “Holy shit!” Cried Ramon, Sy’s grandson that sometimes worked behind the counter, “How did you do that, it was like you meant to, damn!” “I don’t know.” L.L. said sheepishly “I guess all the practice I’ve had falling.” “Like hell boy, you sho’ know some fancy-free fallin’ fo’ a knock-kneed pollywog like yo’ self.” Sy exclaimed from behind the boy. “I dun know, I guess I picked that junk up from the Russian kids that live in the basement, they are always tumbling around like circus chimps.” L.L. explained with a kind of chin to chest elbow grabbing embarrassment. “Well, I s’pose it’s a good thing to be so damn quick on yo’ feet, still you need to heed my warnins’ you coulda’ killed yo’self at the speed you was going.” Sy said, still with more than a touch of amazement hanging in the hollows of his voice. Shaking it off he said, “Well then, why don’t ya’ gome in back an’ Ol’ Sy’ll set cha upright since ya’ in such a fantastic hurry.” Turning to his grandson, he spat “Ray, what da’ Holy Ghost I pay you fo’, da boy ain’t dead. So pick yo’ jaw up off da’ floor and get a damn pale an’ mop ta’ sop up dis’ puddle o’ pig blood.”
The two went into the back portion of the store where the records were stacked oi polio. Raymond stood at the counter shaking his head, replaying in his head the combination he had just witnessed. Later on that night he would spend the whole evening trying to reproduce it using a piece of cardboard instead of pig’s blood. Years down the road, that mastered combination would win Raymond the first ever breakdance competition and lead people to call him the Godfather of breakdance.
“Now I know you’s short on time,” Sy said with a smile to L.L. over his hunched plaid shoulder, “so I make dis’ as quick as possible. Here is those two record playas’ that you was lookin’ ta’ barrow. I ain’t gonna charge ya’ nothin’ since yous’ an’ Herc is some of my best costumea’s.” “Well thank you Sy, I’ll take real good care of ‘em, honest. You’ll have ‘em back tomorrow.” L.L. said with gratitude. “I ain’t worried ’bout that, son.” Sy remarked as he dug through a pile of fresh LP’s, “I gottcha’ somethin’ else, too. It bein’ yo’ first Disc Jockey performance an’ all.” He handed three records to L.L.; the first was the Hava Nagiela 45 that was mandatory playing for Herc’s mother, the second was the recently released Bitches Brew by Miles Davis, and the third was something that L.L. had never seen before. “Dat there is sothin’ special, it’s from Japan,” Sy whispered and looked around the corners of his eyes, making sure no one was listening. L.L. was astonished, “I thought that I owned everything that Screaming Jay (Hawkins) ever did, I’ve never even heard of Constipation Blues before!” He said with muffled excitement, “Thanks a bunch Sy, I’d be up a creek without you, how much do I owe ya’ for the records?” “Nothin’. The first two I’ll put on yo mother’s monthly bill, she never look at it any how. And that second one is my Bar-whatevea’-ya’-call-it present. Now go on an’ get fo’ I change my min’ on ya’.” Sy said through a Samaritan grin, “An’ I don’t want no’ mo’ of that neck-breakin’ dance on the flo’ to my sto’, ya here?” “Yessir! Thank you!” L.L. called over his shoulder as he haphazardly leapt down the front steps, hugging two record players and three records under his chin, and sprinted to the subway.
By the time that L.L. reached the synagogue the services was then half-over. He snuck around the outer perimeter, behind the podium to where the folding table sat, out of sight until the reception started. On the table sat his father’s old phonograph and on top of the fold-down lid was a note from his mother’s hand that simply said: “Where are you!(?)”
L.L. set the three record players side by side and each of the three records on a platter. First he tossed the Hava Nageila 45 on the ancient phono, whose warped wheel distorted every groove the heavy iron needle touched. The Mile’s went onto the second and set the Hawkins’ record on the third and newer of the three. L.L. was still trying to decide whether he’d actually hand such a rare find over.
Looking up through the curtains, he could see Herc sweating and stammering from behind the podium. Herc was stuttering through the final vows of manhood. The neighborhood families, including L.L.’s mother shook their covered heads in shame. “All summer he had to learn this, all summer, no school, no anything, and he can’t remember the most important passages in his short life?” someone was muttering to other’s agreement. The fact was this was the first time that Herc had looked at them, and was currently trying to read them with blood-shot eyes off his sweaty hands. He had meant to practice them today but ended up huffing Scotch-Guard with a few other kids all afternoon out in front of the Five and Dime. “His parents let him run wild like a thistle.” L.L. could hear his mother exclaim.
L.L. was getting nervous for Herc, whom he thought would get booed off the stage at any moment like a Vaudevillian hack. L.L.’s hands started to shake as he tied a connecting string to the arms of each record player so that as one went off the next one would start. As Herc began to stammer through the leading of the prayer, for which most of those still there would not stand up for, L.L. bent down and plugged in the record players. On his way back up to his feet, the synagogue custodian, Arnold Balata entered the door, startling L.L. Jumping, L.L. knocked the string that he had so delicately set which sent all three arms of the record players down at the same time.
The first one to start was warped version of Hava Nageila that startled the audience back to life. Before the panic stricken L.L. could hit the off switch, the first drum loop on the title track to Bitches Brew started over the thumping bass rumble and symbol crashing of the other record. L.L. quickly struck blindly at the first record, he grabbed the vinyl since the phonograph didn’t have an on/off switch, only a plug. The result was the iron needle scratching back and forth causing the chweet-chweet sound as the drum loops from the second record just kept right on rolling. Then the third record clicked on, pierced the stunned audience with Hawkins’ spear scream. Jumping for the Hawkins record, L.L. let go of the first and it picked up tempo right where the crashing symbols left off.
The whole ordeal went on for about fifteen minutes, L.L. letting one record go and grabbing and scratching another until he rotated again. It went on up to the point when Arnold the janitor was ordered to go unplug the cables. While he did this, Arnold Balata, who later go on to be known world-wide as Afrika Bambata, looked at the names on each record. The next day he picked out a copy of each record as well as stopping by the pawn shop and picking out two more turntables.
28:
Speaker Tweakers are by far the strangest sub community in the rave crowds. They are more often than not males between the ages of 16-24, though I have seen exceptions to this in every set. Regardless of the age or sex they are always thin (which is not to say I’ve ever seen any of their waistlines) and they are ever decked in enough cloth to smuggle in a caravan of gypsies. Unlike other attendants, the Tweaker’s clothing is devoid of the typical garish colors, are without pacifiers, and never have excess amounts of hard candy.
The Speaker Tweakers–for as anti-social as their public disposition is–are found traveling in packs, never speaking, but usually just passing the indispensable hollowed out compact and straw. Their poison is almost always K (Ketamine, an anesthetic for animals) whose reverie effect without euphoria allows them to keep their heads in the floor to ceiling 1200-watt speakers all night. The effect is called being in a K hole. Imagine what it feels like to be a Praying Mantis having an indifferent dream about not possessing a sense of equilibrium on a floor made out of oatmeal and getting the slight recollection that you’ve been there before–that’s being in a K hole. Like I said, K is only the staple and it’s a downer. Most Tweakers have to mix in an upper into the K so that they can keep up. The archetypal cut is glass (the purest form of crystal meth, refined more times than most vodkas) with a dash of coke if available, for a mix called CK1.
Of the Tweakers that I’ve known and talked with (which is a rarity since most are without any outer audio perception other than the hard house bass hits) the fix is always the same. They’ve always got two bottles of K on them at all times. They could be butt naked on the shiter of the funeral home at their Grandmothers wake and the little bastards have two “vials of juice” stashed in the tank. Either way, one of vials is for personal use and the second is for sale or barter, which is always a valuable commodity. See, the problem with Ketamine is that it is not produced in rogue labs like most other “club drugs”, no that’s way too costly. Instead, the only way to procure the shit is to steal it from a veterinarian, or from the lab that it is supplied in. This is great business: a hundred percent profit margin no matter how you cut it. While I have never met anyone who has jumped a lab, I met one guy who had broken into a vet before, though I don’t think it counts because he just took the key off his mother’s key ring. Anyway the bottles are the same size as insulin so getting through customs is a breeze. Cooking it down to powder is the pain in the ass; no one will shoot it and there is never a stovetop at “rave” venues. Another heat source must be found.
One time a few years back, when I had just started to become acquainted with the hierarchy of the rave scene, I used to catch a ride with a few Speaker Tweakers to raves. At the time most of us were under legal driving age, so the one who was lucky enough to have access to the family car was lucky enough to cart several under age suburban kids to the worst sections of Chicago. For the record, I was never a Speaker Tweaker, never a big fan of K (not to say that I wouldn’t use it if offered, but I only paid for drugs that made me happy; I didn’t need any help feeling weird) and in general was never hard into the party circuit, though I would find my niche later. These little car pools were always a “pleasant” exchange, since there were not enough of us to form any kind of rally for a particular set. Plus there was always the matter as to who was holding what, when were they going to share, and how much they would knock the price down “for a friend.”
The particular evening I am referring to was one of those plague of Moses style heat waves in ‘94 that was dropping the elderly like a sack of potatoes. We, the party hoppers, were unfazed. At about twelve in the evening we gathered in the driveway of our rides’ house, waiting with baited breath as he snuck his mother’s Honda Civic CX out of the garage. Once successfully out of the parental radar we made the final pick up at one of the Tweaker’s houses. He hopped into the already critically massed car holding his perpetually packed backpack, a Pyrex casserole pan, and the canonized two vials between his teeth. He had all the fixins’; he just needed a place to cook. The car was going to have to do; few people know this about the heating unit in a Honda, but the damn things could put a glaze on a honey-baked ham. With all of the other passengers faced with the dilemma of sobriety or the sweltering heat of this Honda deep fryer, the decision was quickly reached to start cooking. With the windows rolled up and the tepidity of the interior rising, the Pyrex pan was placed at the feet of the front passenger with the liquid K contained within. This was not a quick process, and I began to fear that our own blood would turn to powder before the narcotic.
The party that we undertook our hellfire travel to was being held in some burned out warehouse on that industrial tumbleweed temporal void that blurs the Deep South side and Gary Indiana. Along the gambit run through Beverly, where it is probable cause for being white, we were pulled over for being just that. For once the only key to the kingdom of jail was the translucent crust forming in the basin of a cooking pan, and it was difficult to conceal. The officer tried hiding his shocK upon pulling over a Kar full white Kids with no signs of intoxiKation, perspiring profusely and looKing liKe the Kat that just swallowed the Kanary. I think it was this disbelief that led him to inform us what neighborhood we were in and to flee quickly in any direction rather than toss the car, as was normal procedure.
The other oddity with Speaker Tweakers is that they get to the venue the earliest, without fail. If the flyer says that the event begins at eleven, the Tweakers will pull up in borrowed mothers’ minivans at around ten. This just to stake out their meccaed speaker of worship for the evening. Most party kids think that the Tweakers just materialize, or come with the speaker. This is because most kids don’t get to the parties until two hours after the event begins. I, however, always arrive two hours before the event gets started. And now I bring my own chemistry set.
I truly can’t say what actually brought me to sign on to Dancesafe’s ideals. It may be that I’ve been burned on more deals than I care to admit; I’ve also had a few phenomenally bad trips, even on ecstasy. This is just the rule, if you stay in the game long enough, your going to get burned; nothing that good comes free. Maybe I am concerned for the young ones who now eat up this new sense of party culture freedom and I want to keep them as safe as I can. Catcher in the rye syndrome I guess. I could be trying to preserve the community ideal before a law enforcement agency becomes a serious presence. I’m just trying to give something back to the drug culture that I’ve taken so very much from.
The Chicago chapter of Dancesafe was set up by a group of five kids last year, right after a girl in Naperville ODed on what she thought was X but turned out to be PMA and PCP. Now when I say kids set this up, I mean between the ages of seventeen (Heather the youngest) and twenty (Tom a reformed Speaker Tweaker). I was the first non-founding member to join, and quickly I became the whipping boy.
Unlike the rest of the DS kids, I have a real job and with it comes the liberty to certain office supplies. I can’t recall how many hours and pints of toner I wasted at the photocopier, but for all the wasted time I better have saved at least one wasted kid. Then I’d drag these boxes upon crates of promotional material to a party on the weekend and hand it all out. This was my least favorite part of enlightenment.
When I strolled around these warehouse parties, certain epiphanies began to walk with me. Like the fact that at the chronological juncture of twenty, I am far too old to be participating in a scene that is made up children. For men in the party scene, after you turn eighteen you are one of two things, if not both: a promoter or a pedophile. I am not so eager to grasp onto a youth that I am still not certain validates its cumbersome grasp on my present; and I have no urge to try and land a candy flipper girl who just turned seventeen and dresses as though she just turned this many fingers (ed. note: she’s holding up three).
Candy flippers are the ones I speak most often to when working the table and the chemistry set. Candy flipping by definition is the result of taking X with acid. This is the most complimentary mix in my mind. The X adds the much needed euphoric feeling and the acid adds the mind alteration that X lacks. Well, all fine and good for the user but they are an eye sore for the rest of us. Candy flippers are the stereotype A raver: baggy pants with absurdly flared cuffs, little ringer baby-T’s with cartoon characters on them, face painted like a bubble-gum geisha, bulging pockets like a marathon runner’s on Halloween, and a backpack containing every toy you ever thought you lost from the early eighties.
The flippers are safer by nature and almost always test their pill before eating; most everybody else doesn’t want to hear that they just paid twenty bucks for Sudafed non-drowsy formula. Flippers are the physical manifestation of what none of us want to acknowledge; we are recreating and extending childhoods that were cheated from us. Talk to any kid in a party long enough on the rush and they’ll lead on to it, but not glorify it. The Gen-X wave before this one wallowed in their problems, sought pity for things wrought unto them that they felt they didn’t deserve. This generation is just trying to forget and get back what little they had. The flippers still posses that key note idealism that founded the scene, “everything is alright”. I guess this is the kind of ideal that keeps me sober while walking through mine fields of intoxication, trying to help those who are just boarding that self discovery Titanic every weekend night. I liken it to the first time the parent who is so caught up in the holiday spirit when they’re reading The Polar Express to their kid that they themselves start to believe it. I guess I want others to feel it now, which allows me to not let go of that ideal myself.
28:
There are little nooks of backwater retention ponds in every major religion. In the east, Hindu’s had their Buddhists, Buddhists then in turn had their Vedicts (extreme reformers) and then their anglo Steven Seagal infusion. Confusionists had their Taoists, who then had their Shintoists into Capitalists. Jews had their Christians who then had the Muslims and Mormons. I used to think that Alchemy was such a place, a surreal little forgotten offshoot from mystical and scholarly Christians. I thought that it had long been the science of God, a way for those of us who have difficulty comprehending the concept of faith to access the Christian deity with rational actions that prove the might of the creation. This independent knowledge on the subject came to from hearing my Grandfather (who is actually a Free Mason, which was birthed from Alchemy) from the “old country” (the Netherlands) telling me about his Grandfather who was one of the last practicing the alchemist in my long family history of alchemists. Then I procured various bound galleries of alchemy chart work that had little explanation with its great works of symbolic text (making for great wallhangings that I could not quite explain), most ascribed to practitioners of mystical Kabbalisim or Christianity. Also feeding my finite understanding (which I took to be infinite) were numerous novels that incorporate the subject as fictional pretext, i.e. Diaries of a Drug Fiend or The Alchemist, both of whom’s authors pretty much made it up as they went. All of these things misled me until I found out through personal investigation that there is a distinct possibility that Alchemy may have in turn led to Christianity, instead of the other way around.
To assess what alchemy is in relation to Christianity, first we must look at what alchemy is. When corresponding with someone whom I hope was serious alchemy historian (he at least knew more than I did), he told me that alchemy was a “clever parable wrapped in a fable and cloaked as an allegory”. I responded by telling him that so were most of the major religious movements. However trite the correspondence on the surface may seem, it is closer to the truth than expected. Alchemy is not so much an object to look at, but more a series of objective mind frames to look through.
One can see by the myriad of cultural wrappings that the plurality of its name is the start of a metaphor omelet. The base word is chemia, the art practiced based on the collected secret teachings from fallen celestial beings (we’ll get to that in a moment) recorded in a book called Chema by the first alchemist, a woman named Chemes. When the word hit Greece it was translated into chemia, here is when the Christians first applied it. From there it traveled to the Arab world during the early days of Mohammed and picked up the “al” in the front, which merely means the, translating to “the black” or substance of mystery. Once unwrapped of all its cultural hearsay, it still does nothing to clearly define it.
To most, myself included, the idea of alchemy conjures up thoughts of a self-righteous slacker with a head full of half-right ideas sitting in a room full of intoxicating mercury smoke trying, ideally, to turn lead to gold so he doesn’t have to shepherd anymore. The theory is often best defined by its practice, in this case, the Alchemical Method: revelation, demonstration, and transmutation. In the more explicit text Vincent Bridge’s essay A Moment to the End of Time in Alchemy and Mystisim on alchemy in Alexandria to Black Death he says: “(1.) The inner transmutation involves the conscious refining of effect psycho-sexual energies and fluids (don’t worry I am getting to that. (2.) The outer is the ability to use those energies to effect transmutation of physical states, including the elements. (3.) The third transmutation is that of time itself, from the darkness of the Iron age to the splendor of the Golden age Only Nature can overcome Nature.” This is a broad view of the process, but it allows us to see the kind of philosophy that encompasses the alchemy Christian, not one separate view, but all views at once.
Lofty ideals, but from where to they spring, and what does it have to do with Christianity? For that answer we have to start at the creation of the Judeo-Christian world, and like all things good, it begins with a little hanky-panky. Back when the world and the Heavens where getting used to their new digs, a few of God’s helpers got restless and went to rustle up some action. Genesis, chapter six reads “When men began to multiply on earth and the daughters were born to them, the sons of heaven (a.k.a. fathers of the Nephilim) saw how beautiful the daughters of man were, and so they took for their wives as many as they chose.” There was once a movie by the title of ‘Earth Girls are Easy’, I doubt that they were referring to our original ladies here, since they weren’t just handing it out. No, they started trading it for information, and started the oldest profession. In the oldest surviving alchemist manuscript to date is the story of “Isis the Prophetess to Her Son Horus” in Codex Marcianu. It describes the details of the bargain. Each time an angel came back for sex, they had to hand over a little more information on the nature of God’s elements: Earth, fire, air, and water. Later on this search for knowledge will be condemned and drive the movement that becomes synonymous with Gnosticism underground, but up until this point the pursuit of knowledge has only gotten humanity thrown out of the Garden of Eden.
For most of the Old Testament, alchemy stays in the Near and Middle East, with its main hotbed of activity in Egypt. From Egypt it spreads along the trade routes to Greece where it then influences Roman science as well. All of which are picked up by the various Jewish tribes, now referred to as Kabbalistic and pagan Romans alike to utilize as a way of looking deeper into themselves, their world, and their faith. With it being widely taught through out Egypt, the chances of a little boy escaping Herod’s wrath might just pick up a thing or two are great.
In Matthew’s Gospel, the first of the Gospels, we see a focus on the teachings and miracles of Christ. More openly teaching in this gospel than any other, Christ is found openly proclaiming “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near.” Afterward Matthew points out in a quote from 2nd Isaiah that “the people living in darkness have seen a great light, on those living in the land of the shadow of death a light has dawned.” The context can be seen as either the fulfillment of Christian prophecy or the influence of Egyptian alchemy text saying that immortality can be gained from inhaling light. This is also echoed in Matthew 5:14 when Christ declares “You are the light of the world”, and this is further reiterated in the Lord’s Prayer. In his parables, which are layered in the same way that alchemy is, we can see yet another meaning in the mustard seed teaching. What he may have been talking about was that the nature of God, which is always referred to as magic, will soon spread through out the entire world and choke everything else out. This has been charted several different ways in various alchemy circles. While it is not an attempt to single out Christ as a magician, it is important to note the influences around the parallel time. The alchemy train of thought was far more ingrained and expected in scholarly circles by both pagans and Jews. But everything in the world changed after Christ’s brief and explosive appearance.
Shortly after Christ’s death and resurrection, many groups of followers spotted the landscape. Much to the dismay of the conservative Orthodoxy, the Gnostic following was growing in strength and followers who believed that Jesus not only taught ’secret’ lessons to his disciples, but to Mary Magdalene as well. These Gnostics bought into the alchemy system and history which led them to believe that Christ was the “divine messenger, an angelic being disguised as a man, sent to reveal secret knowledge of the path of return” as listed in a side note to a chart of the cross. They also believed resurrection was not literal, but the spiritual conquering of death, the light of the soul would join again to the divine light that it had been split from in the fall of man.
This all-encompassing inclusion is one of the main fractures in doctrine that led to the split, and Gnosticism’s being forced underground. This idea that knowledge was power angered many of those in the orthodoxy that felt only the apostles had any kind of spiritual authority. They were not big fans of women in teaching positions, which in this case almost all the women were. Mary Magdalene was a key Gnostic theorist and hailed as the first practicing alchemist, which spread her secret learning. This claim led to larger comparisons to the thought that Mary and Jesus had been married. This drew parallels to the creation story of the Sons of God trading information for sex, and understandably the orthodoxy, still on fire for the Lord at the beginning of the second century, was not going to listen anymore. The Orthodoxy claimed that the Gnostics were all heretics and had them banished. The persecutions lasted for centuries, and slowly as the groups Gnostics got further spread apart by the influx of Orthodoxy and the in turn began to die out, and with them there texts, charts and celestial secrets. Only until another sweeping religious movement uncovered these texts while conquering much of the land in the Seventh century, it was then that Muslim scholars made use of these texts and gave birth to the Sufi’s movement.
The cycle from there continues until the Church of England starts up and ties gather as many documents that it possibly can, including the Gnostic alchemy texts. Later still, these documents are sold and become property of the Free Masons and other organizations that still carry on the alchemy traditions today, for the most part in Northern Europe. While this report is merely a general overview, and light at that, it highlights the possibility that alchemy and the pursuit of knowledge over submission have been influencing today’s Western religions far deeper than we can imagine.
While coincident is one of the mother’s of invention, I think that it is obvious that these two movements courting one another had to have had influenced one another. These practices have influenced every worship text from the Laws of Moses to the modern day Koran. In this case we see that alchemy was prior to Christianity, chicken before the egg. Even today with the world being as wired as it is, we are starting to see these Gnostic texts circulating through out the world. The gaps that the original church used to kill off these chapters are being bridged by disillusioned church goers trying to find the magic that was sucked out of Christianity thousands of years ago. Trying to remember what it was that drew them in rather than the guilt and the children and the extended coffee hour. Looking for that spark that went out a long time ago, looking for kindling, looking for the chemistry.
WORKS CITED
Web Sources:
www.levity.com/alchemy
www.secularhumanism.org
Bound Sources:
Meyer, M. The Gospel of Thomas San Fransisco: Haper, 1992
Meyer, M. The Secret Teachings of Jesus. New York: Random House, 1984.
Miller, R. The Complete Gospels. San Fransisco: Haper, 1994.
Roob, A. Alchemy and Mystism: Hermtetic Museum. Lisboa: Taschen, 1996.
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