Last Bender

10.2

I rehearsed and recorded three more times with Joseph and Judy. Our rehearsals always began in auspicious ways. Judy and I sitting on the couch, feet up on the table, watching TV while Joseph set up. And just as inevitably, after recording two songs they would start to drink and people would start to drop in. One night Lou came by with a couple of his Larchmont friends who were in a band and they played a song with us. Then this guy who looked like Fred Flintstone got Joseph high, and they started to drink Jack Daniels and the Fred Flintstone guy started to insult Joseph and everyone laughed.

I asked him at the end of July when we were going to be done recording, just out of curiosity. I did very little but sing back up harmony on choruses. Chee chee chi chuga etc…. “We’re playing at Pyramid in two weeks. You’re coming right?”

“You want me to go on the stage with you and sing?”

“Yeah.” He smiled sweetly and looked particularly feline while doing so. To be beguiled while one is being had, and knowing it, has its special pleasures. Or sensations anyway.

And so it was I found myself, through the fault of the cauldron of passion I had been boiling in, wearing a suit of clothes chosen by Judy and Joseph. It was at that fitting in the loft that I discovered that my rival for the attentions of Judy was Joseph whom, in my naiveté, I had never suspected. But it was not entirely clear whether she was actually interested in him. The fact that I was in a relationship, thus making our lust, or mine anyway, adulterous, added a frisson, at least I so theorized based upon her gaze resting frequently on mine. Furthermore, she always looked pleased to see me when I sat down next to her on the couch. She lit up and turned to me and asked me how I was and told me about her day. She was a waitress at Dojos. She knew Dean and Tammy and Matthew and Simon. She knew everyone who liked chicken cutlet sandwiches and big salads. People were obsessed with the orange dressing.

“Don’t ask about the dressing,” she said, early on in the summer, when we were just getting to know each other. “It gets on the cuff of your sleeve. You can’t get it off. After a while, you come to loath and detest the orange dressing as much as anyone loves it. The grossest thing I can think of right now is a quart of the orange dressing, and it’s dribbling out of the sides a little, and you wipe it off and hand it to one of them, a customer, who just has to have it.”

Another week she told me about the waitress who went mad. “I couldn’t believe it. We were in the middle of a shift. It was busy, but not, you know, and she was bringing food to her tables and busing them, and there was a lull. And the next thing I know I hear her yell, ‘Butter!’ out of nowhere, just like that. And then she let out this blood-curdling scream that lasts and lasts. And when she had stopped she looked at everyone, at where she was, and you could see it on her face that she knew what she had just done. She took off her apron, put her checkbook on the bar and walked out the door. It was something else. People started to clap.”

Afterwards we went out to Mie for sushi and then to Bar for beer. Six of us crowded into a booth and drank beer and did shots of slivovitz. I hadn’t laughed so hard since I was in high school. And the whole time I snuggled up to Judy, and she snuggled up to me. At four, when we staggered out of there and parted ways on Second Avenue she kissed my cheek and turned around and I went, out of habit, up to the loft with Joseph.

The big night came and I sat at the bar drinking seltzer, feeling somewhat chastened by the headache I had had for two days after drinking the slivovitz. But I was certain this would be the night I would go home with Judy. The foundations were laid and now I only had to contrive to stay sober, or relatively so, late enough to go downtown with her, while Joseph went up. He had no choice but to leave us.

I was to sit between them and bang a tambourine and sing back up on the choruses, as per usual. I looked around. There were a bunch of people I knew and they came up one by one to say hello. I didn’t ask Tammy or Simon so it was all Babel people. But even those legions were not broad enough to fill the club. And so our tiny audience huddled about the stage while back towards the bar sat the regulars. I wish I could actually remember one of his songs. They all come out in my head like this now:

Joseph’s Song

I refuse to say

What Althusser

On the Champs Elysee

Said, or what Gaston Bachelard

Thought of the Bard

When he chanced on the Milky Way

Or where Paul de Mann

Got his sun tan

Was it niece, Japan

Or Tierra del Fuego?

Oh ho ho ho

Maurice Blanchot

Derrida got caught in the rain

He kicked up his feet

And fell in the street

And was picked up

By Michel Foucault.

Bahn bahn bahn on the autobahn

With ol’ Jaques Lacan

Abducted by a flying Saussure

Monsieur!

Judy wore a white tuxedo shirt with a bow tie and sat behind the Yamaha with her mike. Joseph sat on his stool, in baggy pants with braces and sleeve garters. And I was dressed in a polyester white shirt with little fuchsia polka dots. They put goop in my hair and made these tufts and spikes and made me shave so I was bloodied and sore. My first la la las were strident and delivered in a state of terror. I only lost the beat once with the tambourine. That machine was relentless and for a while it was all I could hear, besides the ringing in my ear and the ten miles of distance between me and the world.

Lou shouted, “Go Alex!” when I shook the tambourine with a little more vigor during the chorus of I Bought These Balloons For You:

I bought these balloons for you

Now I’m popping them one by one

And you have until tomorrow

To fill them back again

Back again

We played for about 20 minutes, maybe a half hour. And I don’t think we played many songs. For the second time that summer I was standing in a bar dressed up by someone else and in make up. I went to the bar and got my free drink while Joseph yacked. Judy sat down on the stool next to me. A man who looked and acted a little like Gumby took our drink orders.

“Well, that was unbearable,” she said in a low voice.

“Yes. They were friends. But it was still like playing for a hostile audience.”

“Well, at least it doesn’t mean anything. And we get a drink out of it.”

“What are we doing after?”

“I think we’re going to The Park Inn.”

Joseph, trailed by many friends, made for the door. I left a dollar on the bar and we headed over to The Park Inn. It was raucous. Lou, Jayda, the guy Henry we saw on the stoop, the tall people, including the Marxist bartender and his friend the bartender Bix, and about ten others, shouting and drinking. Judy and I took a booth. She plunked down two Jameson’s on the rocks and two bottles of Rolling Rock. Lou sat. “That really wasn’t bad,” he said, rubbing his hands together. “No, I mean it. You two were good. And your make up is cute, Al-ex. Look here then, you like poetry. Do you know this one?” He started to declaim John Wilmot, the Second Earl of Rochester, slowly, theatrically, pushing the stresses, swallowing insignificant syllables and stretching out the rhymes, giving now passion, now cool analysis to each line, as if he had spent long years playing out the verse till he knew all of its moods and could modulate his voice to find the perfect fit between his and Rochester’s heart and voice:

 So a proud bitch does lead about

 Of humble curs the amorous rout,

 Who most obsequiously do hunt

 The savory scent of salt-swoln cunt.

 Some power more patient now relate

 The sense of this surprising fate.

 Gods! that a thing admired by me

 Should fall to so much infamy.

 Had she picked out, to rub her arse on,

 Some stiff-pricked clown or well-hung parson,

 Each job of whose spermatic sluice

 Had filled her cunt with wholesome juice,

 I the proceeding should have praised

 In hope sh’ had quenched a fire I raised.

 

He snickered and looked at me. “I learned it at Harrow when I was ten, for a poetry class. This guy Calvin bet I wouldn’t read it aloud to the class instead of the lines from Ode: To A Nightingale or Il Penseroso or whatever. He wasn’t even one of these donnish types, he was a forty five year old functionary. Bloody fucking hell. Ha. We thought it would be a scandal but he just he looked bored and marked me down. Heard from Sally? Dean said Sylvio was there. What an idiot. Did I tell you–”

“It’s time to go to dinner,” Joseph shouted. The herd instinct took over.

“Are you going?” I asked, Judy.

“I don’t know. Are you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Oh, don’t be depressing. Come on to dinner.”

We walked over to First and then down to 6th and over to this outpost on the block where Third Avenue ends, across from Cooper Union and down a little. It had black windows. It was late. We had gone on at 9. It had to be midnight. The entrance was lit by black lights. Inside was dark and sparse, walls of exposed brick and track lighting. The host sneered a little as we stumbled in and took us to a table in the back, behind a screen. We ordered sake and sushi and everyone was yelling at once. After about two hours, the table covered in fat jade bottles, our waitress came over and said, very pointedly, “Is there anything else I can get you before bringing the check?”

Joseph was telling a story about some artist at work. He had lost the thread of what he was saying but continued to speak loudly whatever it was that popped into his head. And it was funny. I know I was laughing. Judy was half off of her seat and onto mine, but I felt constrained by Joseph, who, after all, could not be trusted in the great enterprise, being both rival and brother-in-law. It was a relationship I’m sure he was unaware of. But he was obviously besotted as every time he spoke to Judy he became charming and flippant.

The waitress returned and placed the check on the table. “I need you to pay this check now.”

 Joseph toasted her and said, “Just as soon as we’re done with our drinks.”

“You don’t understand, sir. We’re closed. You have to pay up and leave.”

Joseph looked at her and smiled. He laughed slowly and stood up on his chair and turned his back on her and dropped his pants. The he wiggled his ass at her, as if it was waving hello, and wiped it with the check. The room was dead silent.

The waitress stared at him, her still face framed by Cleopatra hair. She said, “Go fuck yourself,” and walked away.

Now a commotion overtook us. People got up and threw 40 or 50 bucks down on the table. Bix said, “Count it out and give it to her.” The room was looking small all of the sudden so Judy and I walked out too, leaving Joseph to his reckoning. We met up with him on the Bowery. He had a bottle of vodka and all I remember of the night was staggering up and down the Bowery and then over to 103, a restaurant a few blocks away on Second Avenue, taking perhaps an hour or two, sharing the bottle with bums outside The Palace Hotel, waiting for Tammy to get off work at CBs.

It seemed as if Joseph would never give up and leave. We kept standing in circles of three and four, talking all at once and waltzing up and down sidewalks. But eventually Joseph wandered ahead and we held hands and slowed down walking. Our fingers curled together. We didn’t talk. I could barely breathe. This was it and I was drunk, totally unsure of putting one foot in front of another, and I was afraid if I leaned in the wrong direction I would throw up. But now we were holding hands. Joseph’s trudge grew quicker and quicker, his hands in fists turned outward from his body and head down. We paused between streetlights and looked at each other. Then we started to make out. If only we were in bed! That’s all we would have to do. It would go no further. Her tongue in my mouth felt as good as fucking. It was sex. It was the best sex. At the moment it was the only sex.

Soon we came into the light and entered the restaurant. We ordered eggs and toast and coffee and watched the sun rise. I looked at the yellow puddle of scrambled eggs and rye toast smeared with butter and wrinkled home fries. The light was coming through the window and lit up Judy’s chin. I stared at her chin, and at the light, and out the window and at Joseph, who was speaking. There were crumbs on his lips. I couldn’t follow what he was saying. I think I was asleep. I had to leave. I had to climb into bed or I would surely die.

So I gave them five dollars and left. My determination to get home was quite strong; I bared my face to the sun and pushed on, up the stairs, through the door and into my bed. I was breathing hard but I had made it. In the morning I awoke when my gut started to pitch and turn. Had I done anything? What had I done? What part was the dream?

I swore oaths of future fidelity. If I swore to myself it would never happen again, I didn’t have to tell her it had happened. I could pretend that it didn’t exist so it didn’t matter and I wasn’t lying then. And it didn’t of course. I just lay around more jealous than I had ever been before. I was giving it all over to her now. All my energy flowed in that direction. The circuit was complete. No one but I would ever have her. We were two bodies and one soul, as the poets of old said. I began to read Donne’s Elegies and his Songs and Sonnets. I began to understand my love as being a form of religious heresy. I had stumbled upon the old religion.

I spent the remaining weeks in penaunce. I had one desultory meal with Buddy and Simon in Chinatown. I was too ashamed of my stupidity to confess even to my closest friends. I began to await her arrival with weary happiness, having exhausted all of the other possible emotions. There really wasn’t a sensation I hadn’t milked of all its power. I had ridden for days on gusts of inconsequential air; it was mere convection that held us aloft through terrors of jealousie and possession. There may be acolytes who can sustayne the old religion in its purest form but I alas am a reprobate, backsliding pagan.