in sleep I opened an unnumbered door and found the sea. It was wide and still, veneered in delirious silver. Someone I knew was walking along a road that went down a hill toward some houses. The heat was brilliant. Vindictive light burned into the stone of all the small houses chalked near the sea. I heard voices and thought I saw people at the door.

Opel toasted frankfurter buns for breakfast or whatever meal it was. She held the buns on a fork over the burner, toasting the insides of the buns intended for me, the outsides of those intended for her. Each of us thought the other strange for his/her preference. She spread strawberry jam on the buns and brought everything to bed with her.

"I wish we had real strawberries," she said. "Big whole strawberries to look at and eventually eat."

"Live strawberries instead of strawberries on tape."

"I remember traveling literally about six thousand miles in four consecutive flights and then getting to somebody's house I knew and they were eating strawberries and I just sat there and looked at these strawberries sitting in sugar in the middle of the table and it was inconceivable, it was like returning from the land of the dead. They lived, the strawberries lived. I could look right into them. I understood what strawberries really are, not that I could put it in words. They were inconceivably beautiful, so rich and plump and alive, actually glowing from within. Of course I was probably stoned on something."

"Who were you talking to at the door?"

"I thought you were asleep."

"I was asleep but I wasn't fast asleep. Somebody was at the door and the two of you talked about something. It wasn't Fenig because I know Fenig's voice. It wasn't the woman downstairs because it was a man. So I surmise one thing. It was the man you've been waiting for. The courier. Is that who it was?"

"It was the man," she said.

"Good news or bad?"

"Dr. Pepper is not where he's supposed to be. But they expect to reach him in forty-eight hours. I don't know why it's forty-eight hours. Why not forty-seven or fifty-three? Anyway I'm to be ready to leave at a moment's notice as of tomorrow night. I told him I've been ready for days. He expressed the hope we'd function well together."

"Glad it's finally under way?"

"Except one thing bothers me. He wasn't what I'd hoped to get. I thought he'd resemble some lower-echelon A-and-R type like from Motown. Bronzed glasses, wispy beard, that hunched-over funky walk. I expected pure funk, you know? Someone who's spent his whole life dealing merchandise of one kind or another."

"What did you get?"

"I got Hanes," she said.

"Goddamn, that voice I heard. Hanes. On one level I knew it was him. You didn't tell me Globke was involved in this."

"He's not, Bucky. Hanes is free-lancing. It's not surprising it's him really. There are so many people we know in common. If you put all the names on paper and draw lines back and forth, it would probably be very logical that Hanes would be the one to show up at my door. Anyway seeing him gave me an idea. It involves a surprise for you. Your birthday present in fact. Belated maybe but a stroke of true bitch genius."

"Can't wait."

"A gift that's rich with I don't know what."

"Hanes is a human blotter," I said. "I don't like it when people like that get involved in this kind of enterprise. He's very limp. You could pick him up, use him as a blotter and throw him away. Submissiveness and paradox. He'd just as soon do business with the police."

"I'm nice and settled," she said. "Go toast more bread."

It was getting dark. I left all four burners on. We finished the buns and Opel lay in bed eating jam off the blunt edge of the knife. The power of her immobility was beginning to fade. Departure was implicit in everything she did now. Until Hanes appeared at the door, Opel's presence had been immense; she'd reigned in that bed like a bloated Creole queen of the swampland, giddy with magic, wallowing in the sensual pre-eminence of her own stink. Opel had stolen my immobility. I had been motionless as salt. People had swirled around me and I had plotted changes in the weather, gradations of light and silence. I had centered myself, learning of the existence of an interior motion, a shift in levels from isolation to solitude to wordlessness to immobility. When Opel occupied that center I became the thing that swirled.

"Maybe I'll be going back out," I said.

"Out on tour? What with?"

"I'm not sure yet. In fact I've no idea at all. But I'm thinking of getting back out. That's the important thing. Time to stop looking at the wall. You were right. Time to get out."

"Why not work on new material and let it go at that? Why go on tour?"

"That's got to be part of it. I'm not sure why. Maybe I just want the contact. You can't reach extremes by working in. a studio. I want to reach extremes. It's like a passage from suicide to murder. I'd been all worked out and fucked over and grabbed at. Suicide was nearer to me than my own big toe. It was the natural ending. I mean it was right there. No one would have been surprised or shocked. I really think it was expected of me. If I hadn't left the tour, one way or another it would have happened. A soft papery collapse. Even after I left, the thing was right there looking me in the face. But now I think I'm out of that. I want to return but in a different way. New extremities. It's like a passage from suicide to murder."

"I'm not sure I get it, Bucky."

"It's too evil for a mere dealer like yourself."

"You want to return with a whole new thing. But what thing? You can scream ugly lyrics and throw rattlesnakes at the audience. Is that the general idea? You can sing love songs to the Pentagon."

"Nothing political," I said.

"There's nothing out there but a dull sort of horror. You can't just churn it up into your own fresh mixture. Hero, rogue and symbol that you are."

"Maybe I don't want to churn it up at all. Maybe I want to make it even duller and more horrible. I don't know. One thing's sure. I can't go out there and sing pretty lyrics or striking lyrics and I can't go out there and make new and louder and more controversial sounds. I've done all that. More of that would be just what it says — more of the same. Maybe what I want is less. To become the least of what I was."

"Sure, the beast is loose, least is best. But who's the beast in this case? Be careful you don't twist your own neat lyric. Of course that may be exactly your intention. In which case I look on with interest. Ready as a matter of fact to offer whatever aid and comfort you feel you need. Hell, man, we're old friends."

"Old and true," I said.

"Old, true and lasting."

"No doubt about it."

"Absolutely."

"Sure as shit."

I turned off the burners and stood near the window. Steam whistled distantly in the pipes. I wasn't unhappy being where I was. Tilings here were not deprived of their emanations. The distances were correct; noise was undisguised; air was allowed to flow without recirculation. But this completeness seemed less than enough to keep me now. I struck a wooden match and put the flame to one of the candles over the sink. Opel pretended to evade this shallow light, sinking deeper into the bed.

"People are getting to be all one thing," she said. "Look at me, for instance. I used to have shadings. Now I'm all one thing. Civilization by reflex. If we'd been alive in Pavlov's day he could have saved a whole lot of money on dog food. Now take you now. If you want to go back out as a Las Vegas version of what you were, fine with me except I hope you know what it is you're doing. You'll lose the perspective and the edge will crumble and you'll really become the other thing. Maybe it's a natural evolution. You were getting incoherent anyway, album to album, more so all the time. By the end you were making incredible amounts of noise and communicating absolutely nothing. The whole band was all curled up like a burning piece of paper. You know what you did? You embraced the insanity you were telling us about. So maybe it's a natural evolution. You were too much in love with the horror going on because it formed your sound for you and you were fascinated by it as subject matter. It could very well be the natural next step that you crawl out on the stage at the Sands and just sit there in a jockstrap grunting. Ever since I've known you, you've been surrounded by money-grubbing and talk of money and people dealing and operating but that's the last thing you'll ever be corrupted by, money, even if you were literally starving. It's yourself you have to watch out for, that little touch of the antichrist. It happens to be what I like most about you and of course it accounts for your fame and your glory so maybe I'm wrong to even bring it up. But evil is movement toward void and that's where we both agree you're heading. It's your trip. I'd help you get there if I was sure you wanted to go. In my own bitch-genius way I think I've already put a certain teasing idea into circulation, soon to end up on this very doorstep. You have been listening to a panel discussion on a subject yet to be agreed on. Our panelists will now disrobe and paint each other's bodies in colorful native pigments."

Opel's stillness was losing its essential tenor. It was infiltrated by heavy engines, becoming merely a vigil now, that of a lone woman standing in the off-hour calm of a fluorescent tunnel leading to a boarding gate. In candle-flame she seemed almost an after-image, little left of her ascendancy. Again she is reduced to a point in the middle of the sky. On paper one can find her with the aid of a compass and protractor. She is whisperingly civil, seated between an investment banker and a chummy transvestite, thinking ahead to baggage area and customs. Super-freaks are everywhere, smugglers and global dopers contaminating the air lanes, nitroglycerin concealed in their teeth, unripe opium pods surgically sewn under their eyeballs. Slums and revolution on the 747s. She was in rehearsal for departure now. Ever since Hanes. Hanes had stood in the doorway of my Mediterranean dream.

"Places are always what you expect," she said. "That's both the trouble with places and their redeeming feature. I'm certain it wasn't like that in the past. But it sure is that way now. A few places are still different from each other but nowhere do you find something different from your own expectations. Look at post card manufacturers. They take a sleazy tourist-trap lake and try to make it into the canoeing grounds of the gods. But they do such a slick glossy job that you glance at the post card and you know at once this is a shit-filled lake and all the tourists here are either war criminals or people who spit when they laugh. Not that there isn't beauty in such places. That's just it. The whole world is turning into Lafayette Street, the most ugly-beautiful street in New York City. In a way it's nice to get what you expect. It's as though places can be passive just like people. They just sprawl out with their cathedrals and deserts. Passivity is beautiful too. You take what they give you these days and if everything's getting ugly the only thing you can do is try to teach yourself it's beautiful, it's beautiful. Eventually maybe it is. But look at the passivity of Hanes. There's a sexed-out beauty there. Got to admit it, right? Timeless lands. Look at timeless lands. Why do I spend so much time in timeless lands? Because there's no time there, I guess. Because you stop evolving. Because the warm winds polish you like stone. Here where it's cold I develop and become angular and rapidly age. Great Jones, Bond Street, the Bowery. These places are deserts too, just as beautiful and scary as a matter of fact, except too cold for some people. The places where I get coldest are my eyes and my knees. Isn't that a weird number? Eye-muffs and knee-gloves are the obvious answers. Transparanoia might want to get into that. Talk to Globke first thing tomorrow."

I walked around the bed and ended up once more at the window. Opel covered herself to the chin. I had never known exactly what we needed from each other. Maybe it was enough to come and go; we were each other's motion and rest. The telephone sat on four phone books stacked on the floor. One candle burned, the other did not. I exhaled on the window. There was a loud sound in the pipes, the hollowing-out of dank iron. Opel's collection of pennies filled two ice trays in the refrigerator. The bathtub was full of used water. Citing these things to myself was probably an attempt to group the components of a return to order.

"Things evolve just like people and places," she said. "Or to put it another way, people and places are a lot more static than they'd like to believe. Look at me. What have I become in the scheme of human evolution? Luggage. I'm luggage. By choice, inclination and occupation. What am I if I'm not luggage? I open myself up, insert some very costly items and then close up again and get transported to a timeless land. Do you want to know who knows I'm a thing? Customs knows. Customs knows a lot more than we give him credit for. Customs understands the methodology. He knows the way things work. I'm luggage. No doubt about it. Girlskin luggage. But I don't like that word very much. Lug-gudge. Heavy brutish word for a delicate thing like me."

The knife stood in the empty jar, blade up. The unwound clock was on its back in the bottom of the closet, helpless as an insect, legs in the air, winding key partly dislodged. I watched snow come down now, confined in the precise light of streetlamps. There was no wind. The snow dropped straight down, very slowly, asserting itself with the dignity of a country snow, that language of credence and bare trees, milk on the hillsides, old men gigantic in their bootprints. The firehouse doors were closed. A little car went by, yellow, pink, orange and green, no plates visible. When I turned from the window, Opel was dead. The change in the room was unmistakable. I went to her side to touch her once. Her mouth was open slightly. The blanket had slipped to her neck. Very still. Never to be challenged in this particular stillness. There was no expression on her face. Here I am, dead. That was the only thing I could imagine she might be trying to say with her mouth open like that.

This is what I did. I went back to the window and crossed my arms over my chest, wedging my hands in my armpits. This for warmth. I had been brought up to regard death as an irrevocable state. I tried to reconsider this proposition now, to go over the steps one by one, and I wanted to be warm while I did this.

Eventually I unplugged the bathtub, draining it of gray water. I got the broom and swept in a careless manner for about ten minutes. This was panic of such depth it seemed lodged in being itself, my own, a dread of forgetting what I was called or what language I spoke. I put Opel's things away, the few items hanging from chairs or looped over this or that doorknob. I put these away in the closet. After this I spent some time in the bathroom scraping out the soap dish.

This is what else I did. I looked everywhere for change and then went out to find a telephone. Aloud I repeated three sounds: wun der lick. Walking south on Broadway (downtown, always down), I repeated these sounds over and over, trying to penetrate vapor, to reach beyond the sounds to whatever it was they designated, the dream guiding the body through the snow, wun-der-lick, object of the inquiry. The air was coarse, leaving a slight burn high in the nostrils. I stepped into a phone booth. Ten yards away a man was urinating against a wall, standing happily in his own cataract and mist.

I spoke to someone downtown, a bored municipal voice, downtown in the huddled buildings, the record sectors, death and taxes, requisition forms, police recruits taping every emergency, bored, bored, the facsimile of a voice, all walls green halfway up, agencies, bureaus, extensions, downtown where the records are kept, massive, passive, ever distending, the idea of a voice, no one in control.

I thought of calling Bellevue next but decided finally in favor of St. Vincent's, gentle, humane and dedicated, St. Vincent's, merciful and compassionate. I insisted on speaking to a nun. I wanted someone who believed in St. Vincent himself, in his ideals, in his sacrifices, whatever these may have been. They wanted address, phone number, sex of deceased. I insisted on a nun. I wanted a nun, a short round woman, perhaps of German descent, someone who believed in the sacredness of dying and the veneration of the dead. No nun, no deal. This is what I told them.

The man was standing outside the phone booth. He wore the plaid lining of someone's topcoat. In his hands was a half-pint bottle of rye, which he offered me. I put down the phone and took it. The snow fell perfectly. Burn marks were evident under the man's frozen stubble. I drank, thanked him and gave back the bottle. Then I called Globke, who said he'd take care of everything.

 
****
Superslick
Mind Contracting
Media Kit

 

"The   Bucky   Wunderlick   Story"

 

Told in news items, lyrics

and dysfunctional interviews

 

Prepared by Esme Taylor Associates

 

A DIVISION OF TRANSPARANOIA

 

 

 

london, April 17 (UPI) — Bucky Wunderlick, the American rock music star, has been held for questioning by police here after allegedly setting fire to a stewardess aboard a TWA 747 just being cleared for takeoff at London Airport.

According to several eyewitnesses, Wunderlick, 24, had complained of being airsick, although the plane had not yet left the ground, and was purportedly acting in a loud and disruptive manner. When Patti Stepney, 22, of Falls Church, Va., one of twelve cabin attendants aboard the London to New York flight, attempted to calm the controversial entertainer, he reputedly set fire to her uniform with a cigarette lighter said by an associate to be a gift of an unidentified member of the British royal family.

The flight was delayed while passengers used blankets to smother the flames, allowing Miss Stepney to be escorted from the 355-ton jetliner by airport personnel. A TWA spokesman later said she was being rushed to a medical facility for observation and possible treatment. Simultaneously, London police released a statement saying they are holding Mr. Wunderlick, who was removed from the plane following a brief struggle, eyewitnesses said.

"Peace-loving men everywhere deplore the English penchant for violence," the internationally known figure was quoted by a companion as having remarked, following another brief altercation inside a police vehicle moments after he was led from the 22-million-dollar jetliner, reportedly bleeding from a gash over his left eye and said to be wearing a team jersey bearing the legend Tottenham Hotspur.

 

Two tracks from

 

amebikan war sutha

 

Recorded on Beeswax Records

LP 7178342

 

Bzzz — exclusive trademark of Beeswax Records

Patent pending

 

VC Sweetheart

 

Born in a hearse

Left foot first

Nursed on a hand-me-down nipple

 

Got a murder degree

From I.T.T.

Shot three holes in a cripple

 

To the highlands I was sent

To the highlands

Flute music playing

They're counting up the dead

Flute music playing in the highlands

 

Who's that out there

Edging toward the banquet of my dumb fear

Slant eyes burning in this bible bush

 

VC honey

With her curls and tap shoes

VC sweetheart twirling her baton

 

She had superdog hearing

And eyes that scanned

I loved every way she made love

 

Twelve years old

Tiger soul

She knew what to do with a man

 

Across the highlands we did go

Across the highlands

Blues music playing

They're counting up the dead

Blues music playing in the highlands

 

She wore black pajamas

And a blade at her hip

So soft and cool and sweet

 

Twelve years old

Tiger soul

She knew how to cheat and repeat

 

I sang to her in my own true voice

A folk song of flowers and peace:

 

What do we have to live for

But each other

What do we have to die for

But our love

 

East the vanished mountains

West the barren fields

 

 

Soccer-playing bodhisattvas

Flowing through the grass

 

She sang to me in her own true voice

A folk song of people and land:

 

You are tall lean stranger

You are word

You are Christmas tree of Easter

Shining bird

 

You are hunter prophet

You are lion's paw

You are angel avenger

............