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"And now what?" said Doña Sebastiana, representative of Life/Death, as she showered the sexgoo off. She stepped out, dripping, dripping. "Good thing you didn't drift off to sleep, little Moshka mio, and take your chances." She wrapped a towel around her golden head. "Checkout time's noon. Your turn to shower."
"My blood will wash my sins away," said his other voice.
"Curb Pedro, you cretinous insect!"
"I'm trying."
"Think of him as a howlin' dog you gotta keep in the kennel." "He's my cross to bear." Mosca went into the shower. "Do you think all this cross-bearing and whipping will do me any good? Will penance and absolution transfer to me? Can mere flies be absolved of their sins and go to heaven?"
"I'll inquire when next I'm there."
"When next you're there?"
"I'm a Saint. Me! I have entrée."
"A Saint. Yes. A certified citizen of Paradise."
"I'm bareass, too. Go buy me some clothes so we can get out of here before your mompop perceives she took the wrong fly."
"Okay."
"They're still upstairs, in 201, two women, eavesdropping on us, and their boss is asleep next door, and another guy is waiting outside." She itched her twat. "We have to perform the evasion miracle, that of the oaves and the bitches." She sat at the desk, and using motel stationery wrote out a shopping list, garments and their sizes, makeup with the brands, and cetera.
Mosca read it. "This first outfit makes sense, jeans and a blouse and a jacket, but this other one? Looks like you're going to dress a French whore."
"Perhaps we are."
"I don't get it."
"Dear little Moshka, just do your job helping spend our grant from the Morada Foundation. Remember! We're Morada Fellows."
Out on the corner, he waved down a cab. The cabby suggested Macy's. Soon, he stepped out and into the show world of a downtown department store, people and dummies, dresses and blouses and skirts and sweaters and slacks and chemical compounds, all meant to make people look better than they really look and smell better than they really smell. Style! Chic! Vogue! Fashion! Seek magical/mythical transformation from ugly to perfect. Buy a new skin! Transmute through cloth-ing! Let magical/mythical rule your life! Believe! Buy! Behold the mannequin! Our idol! Showbiz stars of changing fashion, ever-new pledges of daydreams come true.
He cabbed back with two full shopping bags. Sebastiana emptied them onto the bed. She dressed quickly, and, telling him to wait, she left for the corner store. In a few minutes she came back with a bottle of 165-proof rum. She twisted off the cap and poured the rum into an
empty paper ice bucket. Setting it on the dresser, she took his hand, and, squeezing, said, "You want to have some fun?"
"Try me."
She drew him outside, to the door of 102.
"Look there," she said, pointing at a DO NOT DISTURB sign, "the call to adventure." She kissed him. "Don't you feel that as challenge?" She led him back inside. "That trash can in front of the office, well, I'm going to torch it. Why? So when the desk clerk comes running out you can activate a key-card for 102. And why will you be in the office in the first place? You're going there to tell him you'll have two people in your room tonight." She lifted the ice bucket. "Let's go."
They walked to the office. He went inside, and she went a few steps further, to the ice machine, and when he began talking with the clerk, she came back and poured the rum into the trash can.
She lit it.
A cold blue flame burst up and then hot orange flared and the clerk rushed out with a fire extinguisher and Mosca activated a key-card for 102 and walked back to their room. Sebastiana waited on the bed, nesting in her merchandise. She stood and brandished the aerosol at Mosca. "Look! Still half full! One man's trash is another man's treasure." She snatched up the key-card. "Now, baby Moshka, the fun begins. The card opened 102 and they slipped in. Thomas Spofford, fully clothed except for jacket, tie, and shoes, lay snoring on the bed. He'd pulled a blanket up and rolled in it. "Hold your breath." She directed a knockout cloud at his face, led back to their room. "We'll give the air ten minutes to clear." She stuffed clothing and makeup and more into a shopping bag. Then, taking both bags along, they snuck back into 102.
She gazed down at Thomas. "One man's trash is another man's truth." He answered with a snore. "Call me hideous, would you?" She pulled off the comforter and blanket and stuffed them under the bed.
"Boys, nowadays, are dressed by their mothers. In the days of old, they were dressed by tradition."
She unbuttoned his shirt.
"Doña Sebastiana, your magna mater, is about to clothe you in the high fashion of the twenty-first century." She turned to Mosca. "Help me strip the bastard." They sat him up and drew his arms out of his shirt sleeves. "Look, freckles!" She stuffed the shirt into a shopping bag. Then his jacket, tie and shoes. They pulled off his T-shirt and put it into a shopping bag. Then she unzipped his fly. They worked his pants down and off and bagged both them and his socks. He lay sprawled on the bed, bare except for black briefs. One on each side, they reached under his butt, and stripped them off. She bagged them. "Look at that ugly worm," said Mosca. Whooping gaily, she began to stroke it, and it rose and spit. "You think I'm hideous! You want to see hideous? Well, just wait!" She combed her fingers through his thick curly hair, then using his electric razor, shaved it away, leaving a Mohawk Flange in the middle. This, she dyed orange. "Some jewelry, Moshka?" She wound a chromed boot chain around his neck and secured it with a small padlock, too tight to remove. Then she punched his ears and screwed in dangling earrings. These, in bogus gold embellished with glass turquoises and rubies, proclaimed:
L H
O A
V T
E
She stood back from her creation.
"What should we add next to our performance sculpture?"
Mosca dyed the worm orange à la Easter egg.
She secured a garter belt around Thomas' waist and padlocked it in place.
He pulled on a pair of black lace stockings and gartered them to the belt.
She strapped on a pair of silver high-heeled shoes.
He rouged Thomas' cheeks, all four of them.
She embellished his mouth with dark lavender lipstick and his finger- and toenails with lavender polish
He plucked the eyebrows and shaved the face. Then came eye shadow, mascara, and false eyelashes.
She reached in the bag for a Swiss army knife and a tennis ball and she cut it in half then glued the halves over his nipples and embellished this with a sexy black bra.
"And what are the fancy panties of the twenty-first century?" "No panties?"
"No panties."
"Let's talk toilet training." She filled a plastic cup with water, dropped in some laxative pills, and put it on the bed-table beside the phone. "And now let's talk tattoo." On the small of his back, with an orange magic marker, she drew an arrow leading to his asshole and the legend: FUCKED BY THE CIA. They stood back to admire their art work. With a black magic marker she wrote on his biceps: CUPID FAVORS THE BOLD. "That ought to do it." She searched the room and found nothing but his briefcase. She laid a black miniskirt and halter neatly on the dresser, and then in black wrote on the wall:
Adam was created androgyne, and remained so until
God, also androgyne, removed the female principle gathered in his rib and from it created Eve. We strive
to regain the primal androgynous union, don't we, Tommy?
"If we all wore dresses, Mosca, who'd bow and who'd curtsey?"
They walked out past Peter D's to Broadway, then went around the corner of Van Ness by the newspaper racks to the city trash can. They stuffed in the shopping bags. "And now, Moshka mio, to make a phone call and check out."
"In Jesús' name we must do penance for our sinful lusts."
"Shut the fuck up Pedro!"
"Give him hell, Pedro." She opened their door. "We need more dialog and less trialog." She punched 911, and in the voice of a middle-aged man with a British accent she said, "I'm calling to tell you something simply awful has happened to a high CIA official in room 102 of the Broadway Manor Motel at Broadway and Van Ness. Best you send someone over to sort it out." She hung up. "Now to check out and run."
Mosca picked up his handbag.
"We'll leave the statue." Outside, on their way to the office, a maid asked if they were leaving. "Yes, miss, yes we are. Thanks." In the office, Mosca explained they'd been called away suddenly. The clerk made no extra charge even though it was now 2:15 pm. As they walked toward the street, the maid came shouting, carrying the statue. "You forgot this."
"Thanks. Give it to the lady. It's hers and she'll carry it."
"You'll carry it."
"The hell if I will."
"Do you want to ride around in Pedro forever?"
"Give it to me."
"Now for a cab," she said.
"Now for a bus. I want to leave it there."
They went to the nearby bus shelter and sat the crude wooden santa on the bench. From across the street a CIA man watched. Sirens sounded and a police car came speeding out of the Broadway Tunnel, through the red light, and turning sharply into the Manor, parked by the office. A sergeant and a rookie got out and went in to talk to the clerk. "Yes, we do have a government agent in 102."
"Let me have the key."
The clerk lifted a key-card. "I'll activate it for you.." He glanced up at the TV monitor of the basement parking area and back at the policemen. "Here you go."
When they got there, they stood beside the door as the sergeant reached across and unlocked it.
"Now!" He turned the knob and kicked and they sprang inside. Sunlight from the door shone on Thomas Spofford splayed out on his back in wanton glory, snoring.
"Now ain't that a sight for sore eyes," said the sergeant. "Awesome. Downright awesome."
"Sonny, when you see something like that, you know God's still in charge."
"That must be what they did in Gomorra."
"Fetch the camera."
The lad trotted away and back. The sergeant looked through the finder for the most interesting angles. "The captain'll love this." He made a longshot from the feet, then a portrait. "When he sees these pix he'll wet his pants." The sergeant stood on the dresser, made a photo from above. "He loves to get dirt on the feds, especially CIA." He rolled Thomas over on his face and photographed his butt from close-up. "Makes them more cooperative." He clambered back on the dresser and made another picture, then sprang down, and, rapidly moving about, exposed the rest of the film. He took it out of the camera, loaded another, and dropped it into his breast pocket. "So, hey, sonny, what do you think? No crime?"
"No crime."
They walked out and locked the door behind them.
At the bus stop, on a bench, Sebastiana, Mosca, and the statue were waiting for a bus with empty seats. Buses trimmed in green all passed by without stopping. Those trimmed in orange, stopped. They boarded a 42 DOWNTOWN LOOP, seated the wooden Saint in the back by the window and sat next to her. The CIA man took a cab to Geary and boarded the bus there. They passed through the civic center and got off at Market. "Hey, you forgot your statue," the driver called after them. "Odious!" said a fatfold passenger.
Mosca went back in to get it.
"Now what?" he asked, statue in his arms, as the bus drew away.
"Let's try to sell it."
A tan taxi took them to a gallery in North Beach. The proprietor, a heavy aged man, cropped beard, no hair, wrinkled and good natured, greeted them. The walls displayed paintings and prints of pastoral and maritime subjects. Free-standing sculptures filled much of the floor space. "What an ugly statue you have there. Positively hideous."
"Repent thy sins and through grievous penance gain salvation." "Shut up!" said Mosca."
"What?"
"I'm not talking to you, I'm talking to Pedro."
"And where may I ask is Pedro?"
"Don't mind him," said Sebastiana, "he's the artist who made this sculpture. We want to sell it to you for one hundred dollars."
She sat it on a chair by the desk. The proprietor walked around it, observing it from divers angles, studying detail through a magnifying glass. He looked back at them. "Crude and noisome."
"It's a rustic religious statue. Saint Sebastiana."
"Patron of mechanics? It's the first religious statue I ever saw with a gear protruding from its rump."
"Ugly! Hideous! Crude! Noisome! No way! Not when you apply the norms of the latest avant-garde trends in religiously inspired art, those expressing a profound yearning for return to the sensibilities of the cave painters, to a humanity immersed in nature, part of not- apart from all life, one still steeped in a sense of cosmic unity, of being a functioning component of the great universal machine. Homely. Primitive. Earthy. The times cry out for onflowing rapport with the preeminence of the World Mother, Gaea, the Life Giver, They quest for refuge in harmony with self and nature, for escape to remote eons precedent to the split into sexes when the curse of dualism first
manifested in hubristic strivings to stand apart and correct nature." "You're saying there's some real crapola running in this fucking world and that piece-of-shit sculpture raises the question of which way it flows."
"Technology is neutral."
"Science is magic that works."
"Our piece emphasizes energy, not form. Hence, you should see it as transcendent of the duality of the either/or, of ugly/beauty. She's yin and yang. Ugly beauty and more to be sensed but not said. You are gazing on the threshold guardian whom you must pass to enter the coming dream country."
"Redemption through penance! Seek thou, O! Sinner, the blood absolution of His Sacred Heart."
"Fifty bucks."
"Done!"
"Give me your bill of sale."
"We have no bill of sale. Pedro made it."
"Wrong."
"He . . . made . . . it."
"Not s0," the dealer said, lifting the image, and spinning its gear. "She's much too old."
"Forty bucks. "
"If I buy her, I'll need a document proving you have the right to transfer ownership to me." He seemed to be enchanted by whirling the gear. "I'll take it on consignment."
Two adolescent punkettes came in.
"My name's Ronda," announced she of the shaven head, "and I'll cut the stones off your earrings."
"My name's Rose," said the one with a spider web tattooed on her face. "And I'll cut off your ears."
* * *
Whilst this relic of Santa Sebastiana was fulfilling its destiny, the wake-up call rang in room 102. Thomas Spofford lifted the phone, replaced it, returned to his dreamland. Naked save for a studded belt, he was walking on ether toward stars rotating slowly dexter in the predawn firmament. One of the twins, William, rode on his shoulders, gently pounding his head, and the boy's bare calves felt soft and puffy to his grip. Something was grasping and pulling at his legs and shouting anxiety in the voice of Clint and brandishing a dead mouse freed from the pages of Steinbeck. Takes two to make a Gemini. Clint, clad in shiny green scales, fish and serpent, clutches desperately for attention, s0 kick him away! Leave me, boy! Out here every nobody can be somebody, as in California, where everybody is a star. Street noises began diffusing fortissimo from empyrean above the sky dome where Mithra was stabbing the bull and abruptly as the bull's life bled away the star pattern froze then began furiously rotating backward, counterclock, faster and faster and faster, sinister sinister sinister, and the stars became streaks then arcs then circles of light and as his memory hurtled down a ski slope he fell and skis twisted and he heard his bones snapping and Thomas Spofford sat up, blinking, his eyelids sticky.
There, as in a Li Po poem, were his feet and legs, his gartered lace stockings and his silver spike-heeled shoes. And, beyond, the message by the mirror. Sexy legs, pal. Sexy. Cupid favors the bold. I can go along with that. He stripped off the shoes, and stood before the mirror. "I've always wondered what this would be like." What would the twins think? Should have bigger tits. And hide that foolish pendulous object. He tucked it back and squeezed his thighs together and began flirting with himself, and he became a go-go dancer, and queen of a fashion show, and a chorus girl, and a sporting girl enticing clients. He was at the New York drag party, hoofing the Hoover, and
now he played punkette, flaunting his chains and Mohawk, trying to imagine the mental set, and how the twins could regard the cacophony emanating from their recordings of industrial and heavy-metal bands as music. And slam dancing? He tuned in MTV and whirled around to the music, bumping into walls and kicking furniture. Sure. A contact sport. And stage diving? Leap headfirst onto the dancers? Why why why? Anger and despair. Anger at what?
At the human race careening toward self destruction.
Where will the twins be in five years?
Will they revel in drag and break all the rules?
In what can they believe?
Will their highest ideal strive to prevent things from getting even worse? Is that all they can hope for? They can try to be fair-and-square to others and themselves, to be what I've always urged them to be: gentle-men.
He sat down by the bed table, and, musing, looked at the ashtray and the water glass and the phone. Sure! He lifts the phone and presses 201. "Spofford here. You can pack up your surveillance gear. While you're doing that, I want one of you to buy some things for me and deliver them to me in 102 at six pm exactly. What? You're going to buy me some clothes. Yes. Black Levis, size 36/34. A black T-shirt, large, and briefs. A large motorcycle jacket and a black adjustable baseball cap. Black shoes, size ten, and socks." . . . That would go along with the chromed chain. "Good. Thanks."
And now to try the skirt and halter.
He puts them on.
The face . . . ? Well . . . ? But some hot body!
Vanity, vanity, all is vanity, sayeth the preacher.
He posed and smirked and then stripped and stepped into the shower where he sang while he washed and scrubbed his adornments away.
All the dirty kids down on our block,
Calls theirselves a gang;
They all went to the copper's house,
And this is what they sang!
How the hell had all this happened?
Never take a bath 'til you need one,
You know what I mean;
Never take a bath 'til you need one,
It only makes you clean!
Question the manager and Pedro Gonzales.
Way out West on the prair-ie,
Out where men are men,
They never take a bath 'til they need one,
And they don't even take one then!
Give it more thought when the clothes come.
The dirty dogs.
He drew scissors and razor from the kit in his dispatch case and exorcised his Mohawk Flange.
Peering at the result made him whoop with laughter.
"Fucking skinhead!"
Making a fierce face, he stood back, raised a Roman salute, and shouted: "Ein Reich! Ein Volk! Ein Führer!" He slashed the garters off the belt and, taking a towel, he made a breech-clout by running it up and over the belt, under his jock and butt, up and over again, then tailing down behind. He went back into the main room, snuffed MTV, and sat down on the bed by the phone, the words and music of all-those-dirty-kids reeling through his mind. Memories of where he'd learned the song began bubbling up from his subconscious. Garrison, New York. Yes. And that wall message to Tommy? Well . . . , maybe s0. Clean it off anyway. And in the mirror, there he is, Tommy-of-the-message, slight, blond, nine-years-old, ragged sneakers, threadbare Levis, yellow T-shirt, walking down a steeply inclining road toward lower Garrison on the east bank of the Hudson River, a village
with a coal yard, two tenement houses, three stores, and, because the president of the railroad had once lived on top of the mountain near to Tommy's house and the Osbournes' Castle, a beautiful stone station. In Garrison, then, one's physical elevation was congruent with one's social position. It's hot and sunny and Tommy's feet carry him over the tracks on a bridge near the mouth of the tunnel to a street by the river, and along toward the old ferry house where before the railroad came to the west bank cadets and others waited to cross over to the grim pseudo-castle of the military academy at West Point. Remains of the ferry rot alongside a collapsing dock, but the house still stands, bare and gray, and that's where his friends live.
And this is the day he'll learn how to drive.
At the station, a stooped old man dressed in blue pushes back his uniform cap to itch his scalp. From his chair on the platform he watches Tommy approach. Walt is the baggage man. He lives in a room inside the station and is a charter member of the Lower Garrison Seamen's, Fishermen's, Boozehounds,' and Scatologists' Association, founded by the two merchant sailors, John and Dick, who rent the ferry house. He frequently attends Association meetings, as does the railroad worker who lives next door. In World War I, Walt was both an admiral and a general. An oil portrait of him in army uniform partially confirms this to those visiting his room, for a local painter has slowly promoted it through the ranks from lance corporal to brigadier. As a further distinction, Walt, as he himself says, is the man who operates the switch for the electric chair downriver at Sing Sing Penitentiary.
Tommy stops and says hello.
"Sonny, you better watch out. The truant officer's over there."
A smiling Tommy walks across the street, into the house. It's never locked. Flags, muskets, and swords hang on the walls of the big room. The furnishings all come from Hudson & Waters, the tidal flat extending to and under the back porch at low tide, as do the plates, cups, pans, and tableware. John and Dick are leaning against railings on the back porch drinking red wine with the truant officer, a septuagenarian with wisps of fine yellow hair crossing his scalp and a beautiful baritone voice which with the advent of Tommy bursts out with All-those-dirty-kids-down-on-our-block. They give Tommy a glass of wine, then muzzleload a Civil War musket with black powder and minnie ball and fbooooom, fire the round at West Point. Tommy visits whenever he can. He, too, is a card-carrying member of the Association. In the winter, his duty is gathering coal that falls off trains at the curve just before the tunnel, and bringing it to the clubhouse for the stove. They're all singing "Waltzing Matilda," when Big Bill, the Live Bait King of Upper Garrison, arrives, bearing a bottle of Sneaky Pete which they pour into a baby bottle and pass around, each, in turn, sucking nourishment from the nipple. Bill is on felony probation. Bernie, a soldier from West Point who lives in the tenements with his family, comes onto the porch with his guitar, an instrument which on occasion has served as a paddle for a rowboat liberated by Boozehounds from a dock at Housitanic Lake. Double-time . . . Huuuu drifts across still water from West Point. Imagining sweltering cadets, the club members drink and sing in harmony and during "Come Landlord Fill the Flowing Bowl" one of Bernie's children runs up with a note: Bernie! Come home at once! Bernie turns it over, prints FUCK YOU and hands it back to the messenger, who exits. All this, Thomas has long believed, supplemented his disciplined, formal, upper-class rearing with a third dimension, one much more suited to his true nature, and by so doing had built in him a sense of anything can happen, and when it does, let it be fun.
"Laissez les bons temps rouler!"
So how did he learn to drive?
Shortly after noon the wine's gone and it's time to take care of biz. The sailors, who are brothers, invite Tommy to join them on a scavenging expedition to the dump. They go out to a four-door 1934
Buick, first sold as "the doctor's car," maroon with black fenders, and drive up the mountain to Route 9D, then back down a steep dirt road to the water's edge where the locals supply a distribution depot for the downstream branches of Hudson & Waters. "Ah-ha!" says Dick, tugging his beret tight against a rising wind rippling through the roadside trees as they come to the river. "Perfect minus-low tide!" On some ships they call him Frenchy, on others, because of his big clumsy shoes, L'il Abner. Dump birds rise in alarm as John guides the Buick into a waterside clearing set among trash piles, and brakes it to a stop. They clamber out and begin their treasure hunt. Tommy finds a monogrammed dinner plate. John, spies . . . .
The phone! Ringing ringing ringing.
"Spofford here."
"Thomas, this is Dr Bruhn. "
"Yes?"
"The fly you sent me just arrived."
"Did David deliver him in good condition?"
"He's in perfect health."
"That's a relief. I'm glad Mosca's back and we can proceed with our project."
"This fly is not Mosca. It's a common, ordinary housefly." Thomas' thoughts separated from the conversation which soon gained a life of its own. Gonzales is the key. Call NAO and have him abducted. "Keep that fly there, Dr Bruhn." NAO sounds like a Viet name. "See what you can learn about him." We're still tailing Gonzales. "Dr Bruhn, tell David to make sure they keep the monitor covered day and night." Gonzales should be easy to trap. "I'll stay here for a few days." Did Gonzales cross-dress me? "Yes, Dr Bruhn, I'll keep you informed." Nothing can surprise me now. His inner eye
saw Dr Bruhn, standing in the lab before the big glass dipterary, looking like a senator, his face the image of perpetual skepticism, his spectacles pushed up on his forehead, the phone pressed to his ear, and as it babbles on, Bruhn breaks into a thin smile, exposing rough, sharp, snaggly weasel teeth.
"Doctor, I have complete confidence in you."
Now to sing a song and catch that truant.
Thomas hangs up and drinks deeply from the water glass.
And he begins singing.
It's the same the whole world over,
It's the poor what gets the blame,
Whilst the rich has all the pleas-ures,
Now ain't that a bleeding shame.
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