Odditorium: A Novel (16 page)

She giggled, touched her lips, then felt the icicles of Christo’s glare upon her and beat it out to the car.

“You were really over there?” Tildy said, and a nasal voice from the middle recesses of her brain yelled: Sucker!

“Sure, sure. I was a real mudeater. Last of the doomsday grunts. I’d go days without sleep, get myself all smacked up and volunteer for night patrol, go for the big thrills. Maybe a little hand-to-hand combat, unzip some gook and lick the blood off my bayonet.”

“Sshhh.”

“Don’t be dense then. You know induction day was it for me. Ran around the halls dropping my shorts and spreading for anything in a uniform. Man, I had my 1-Y all signed, sealed and delivered inside two hours. It was a lot easier in those early days. Another year or two and they’d seen all kinds of dodges. You had to be a little more creative. Little brother of a guy I used to do street vending with went down with his pet St. Bernard, Rollo. Rollo used to drool all over himself after they spiked his Gravy Train with LSD. But the kid’s all smiles, very enthused, ready to ship out to the zone as soon as possible so he can start blowing Commies away. We’ve got to stop them before they reach Santa Barbara, all that. Just one thing, though. He’s got to take his dog along. ‘Can’t go anywhere without my dog, sir.’ Plants a kiss on those slimy chops. ‘Me and Rollo, we’re closer than brothers. Maybe you could teach him to sniff out landmines?’”

“Did they go for it?”

“Oh, yeah. The shrink was real impressed. Too bad it didn’t end there.”

“What happened?”

“It started to come down on him that summer. In buckets. His father died in a hotel fire. His girlfriend went out for ice cream one night and never came back. The band he was with threw him over for another bass player right before they signed a record contract. And somebody ran over his dog. So what the fuck, he went and enlisted in the marine corps. Got both his legs blown off in Cambodia.”

LANE ENDS 1000 FEET

This segment of the north-south artery was a memorial to our most recently murdered Chief of State. The rest area in which Christo and Tildy were parked had been named after the Hon. Elihu S. Robbinet, evidently a worthy Maryland jurisprude of days gone by. Such was immortality in the age of the disposable raincoat and the celebrity golf tournament; in a nation that communicated increasingly via T-shirt and bumper strip.

Christo dozed sporadically, a watch cap pulled down over his eyes, while Tildy chattered on inside the clammy, hermetic little isolation box the Fiat had become.

“… like the way you stuck it right into that woman back at the restaurant,” she was saying. “That’s what I’m talking about. I admire that kind of conviction because I don’t have it. There’s a lot of meanness in me but I don’t use it, and that makes me feel so harassed. I’d like to be a real bullet-nippled bitch but I always fall short. All I can get to are the gestures. Maybe it has something to do with the choices I made a long time ago.”

“Timing.” Christo scratched his nose, rested his cheek on the steering wheel. “S’all in the timing.”

“For God’s sake, it’s not strategy I’m talking about.”

“It’s all strategy. And that’s all.”

“Then why can’t I carry it off? Why do I feel like a whore sometimes?”

“Don’t bother yourself over nothing. Let’s climb in the back seat and get friendly.”

“Uh-uh. Crank this thing up and move. I want to get to New York and show you just how much of a bitch I can be.”

“Right on, kid. Right on.”

UNION CITY, NEW JERSEY

HOME OF THE AMERICAN EMBROIDERY INDUSTRY

Christo leaned on the horn. “Poor, itchy New Jersey, the sick love-slave of New York. And how she loves the pain.”

The joy ride was over now. Ten minutes away from the target and Christo was antsy, constantly checking his mirrors, jaw muscles pulsing as he clenched his teeth. There was a taste of brackish water in his mouth, against his hot cheeks the sensation of emery paper. Tildy frittered up and down the AM band; nothing but news and commercials.

“Enough.” He slapped her hand away.

They spilled onto the bending, descending ramp to the Lincoln Tunnel and there, beyond the wharves and the viscous gray river, was that notorious skyline depicted on a thousand beer trays, decals, pennants; intaglioed on coffee mugs, woven into beach towels and sweaters. It was the image pilgrims took to bed with them at night: I have been there, to the sizzling core of the Machine. Today, through a thick and striated haze, it seemed to be melting away for good.

“Tally ho,” said Tildy.

They had just enough to cover the toll.

Midtown, midafternoon. All manner of faultlessly turned out honeys bombing up and down the pavement; a career-girl carousel. Fueled by Lo-Cal lunches consumed at their desks, they emerged from their warrens carrying briefcases crammed with reports and market research printouts, considered their profiles in shop windows, hailed cabs imperiously, letting the wind whip their layered coifs since, after all, today’s woman doesn’t live by her looks.

Tildy wondered how she could possibly compete.

“There it is,” Christo said. “Hot enough for you?”

Five blocks south of Times Square he curbed the Fiat next to a pay phone, dug around for a dime. But the phone was inoperative: receiver clipped off, coin box disemboweled, and all over everything the felt marker glyphs of pubescent soul writers—

and

“Wait here for me. If you get bored, just circle the block. I’ll catch up with you.”

He dialed Looie from a Blarney Stone bar. A woman in rainbow knee socks was wishing herself happy birthday. Three old-timers were arguing with the bartender over program selection on the tube.

“What’s shakin’, Looie? You ready for a delivery? We’re just fifteen minutes north.”

“We? No, never mind. Surprise me.”

“She’s not your type, Looie. Trust me.”

“‘Trust me,’ he says. I didn’t even know they’d let you out until a couple days ago. You’re in defiance of science, my friend. You’ll teach them all humility before it’s over.”

L
OUIS “CHEMIKAZI” LEVITSKI CAME
from rugged Ashkenazic stock. His father was a muscular, taciturn individual who had learned, during a lengthy tour of Eastern Europe’s DP camps, that a keen sense of dread was a man’s best friend. He was not a family man, preferring to spend all his time behind the counter of his stationery store, sipping schav from a Mason jar, never removing his overcoat. He wanted his son to go into banking or real estate and become “a bigger thief than any of them.” Louis’s mother, a sickly woman with an erratic temper and a compulsive devotion to the films of John Garfield, wanted him to become a composer of Broadway melodies. “With the royalties, you can buy me a whole hospital,” she used to say. But Louis disappointed both of them. He was a genius.

In 1965 he became the youngest student ever to be graduated from the doctoral program of Rensselaer Polytechnic. A multinational corporation offered him a substantial bonus package to sign on and he went immediately to work on a shellfish toxin project funded, through a Liechtenstein holding company, by the CIA. While the project itself was a failure, Louis was not. He was, in fact, the talk of the boardroom. Skipping a few levels of the hierarchy did not endear him to his colleagues (that was fine; he didn’t want friends), but a year later he had his own lab, an unlimited budget, and was busily rearranging peptide chains in an effort to develop a neuromuscular blocking agent which, when released into an urban water system, could “neutralize” as many as half a million people in less than twelve hours. He was extremely happy in his work.

Then came the Summer of Love and Louis was ravaged, subverted.

Late one evening he was snuggled in his tiny apartment listening to Ezio Pinza and reading a chemical engineering journal—or trying to. The noise from above was making it very difficult: clangs, thumps, shrill laughter, and what sounded like someone roller-skating from one end of the hall to the other. He went upstairs to complain.

There, in a hot crush of thoroughly unhinged folk who seemed to be emitting smoke from every orifice, a large man inexplicably dressed in Bermuda shorts, a straw boater and the dress tunic of Her Majesty’s Coldstream Guards prevailed on him to have a cup of punch and then another and then … Yes, he’d been right about the roller-skating. Lovely girl, but her taffy face was, my God, drooping down around her waist. Hmmm, better lay off that punch. Tastes like glue anyway…. Getting chilly. Maybe ought to close those portholes, keep the storm at bay. At bay in the Bay, indeed. Louis with the large L, have we met before? Athens, perhaps. Look out for the cactus, look out…. Fingers numb. Tingling in scalp area. Blankets, more blankets. I must see the Captain…. I’m repelling electrons, buddy, don’t get smart with me…. You’re okay. Just some queasy thing’ll pass. I know what I’m doing. Ionization. I’m in solution … Wait a minute. Oowooo, there’s something in my belly made of jelly and it needs to get out! …

This first LSD experience was by no means his last but, in its aftermath at least, was certainly the most transforming. After riding up and down in an elevator with two gay poets and a beagle for an hour and a half; after scampering through soot-black tunnels of the IRT line with a teenage waitress from Babylon, L.I.; after a dawn confrontation with the Angel of Chemistry, a cheap dame wearing all kinds of bead necklaces who spilled maggots from her mouth whenever she opened it; after waking up fully clothed in three inches of bathtub water in the home of a kindly black postal worker who had scooped him off the shoulder of the Cross Bronx Expressway, Looie Levitski had no choice but to start all over again.

He entered his laboratory that afternoon, destroyed all his notes, poured acid over the desks of several vice-presidents, and with his bare hands smashed spectrometers, gas chromatographs and a scintillation counter worth upwards of four hundred thousand dollars.

A fugitive from justice, he fled to Oregon and built himself a cabin overlooking the Rogue River. There he passed the next four years, sturdy and contemplative, with his logger’s boots and brier pipe, hewing wood and drawing water, observing birds and wildflowers, casting for steelhead trout and making serene, Tantric love to a series of fragmentary women who came to sample the purest hallucinogenic drugs in the state, the product of Looie’s undiminished skills. To his amazement and delight, he discovered that women found him charming. By almost any standard, certainly, he cut a less than dashing figure, so what was it? Perhaps his newly discovered abilities as a chef? His cool acceptance of failure? His distaste for violence of any kind? Or perhaps it was nothing more than his avowed discovery of a vaginal enzyme that prevented tooth decay and his manifest intention never to darken again a dentist’s door.

But one day, Looie wandered into the forest to collect pine cones, having left a gas flame on near a beaker of formic ether. The cabin burned to the ground. Everything was lost, including eighty-nine chapters of automatic writing: “Cacaphonous Desperation Versus the Inherent Glide of Starched Mush.”

He returned to New York via bicycle. It took him five months.

Looie’s loft was on Pearl Street in a part of the city originally laid out with the horse-drawn vehicle in mind and Christo had to jog back and forth on one-way streets. The block was grimy and dismal, a line of vacancy; obsolete workshops of stale-cake brick held together with barbed wire and rusted sheet tin; street pocked with glass, sparkling seeds from which the weeds grew.

Tildy, with narrowed eyes: “Who’d want to live here?”

“You know what they say. Never judge a book by its jacket copy.” He made a modified K turn, nosed up to an enameled green steel door. “Actually, I think you’ll like this part. It has a certain cinematic tang.”

He got out, climbed on a standpipe to press a button high on the wall. The door lifted, revealing a caged freight elevator. Christo pulled the gate and drove them, Fiat and all, aboard, called “All in” up the shaft; they began very slowly to rise. The shakes and shudders gave Tildy the same and she reached for Christo’s hand.