The Flamethrowers (29 page)

“And there you were,” he said. “In your cotton-underweared splendor. Your leggy splendor.”

*  *  *

Helen Hellenberger called in the morning with the name of a lawyer for Sandro.

How does she already know what happened? I asked.

Sandro rubbed his head like he was overwhelmed by technicalities and the trauma of the incident and said, “I telephoned her when I got home. But what does it matter? The whole thing is a kind of blur. A fuckup and calamity. I’m really mad at myself.”

He put his head in his hands, and then I was busy comforting him and told myself not to be paranoid about Helen.

The lawyer informed Sandro he would have to choose, either go to the police and tell them exactly what happened, or decide not to go, to do nothing.

“But what happens to me if I turn myself in?” Sandro asked him.

The lawyer explained that Sandro had it all wrong. There was no reason to worry. They would want to make him a hero. Hero vigilante chases down mugger, takes back night.

Sandro relayed all this to me at the Ukrainian diner we liked to
go to on Second Avenue and Ninth Street. Then we drifted east down Ninth toward Tompkins Square Park. It was a beautiful fall day, a quiet morning, oak trees with their leaves going burgundy, the smell of woodsmoke from someone’s fireplace.

We were near the strange little storefront congregation that gave out free doses of DMT, communion for anyone hoping to get closer to God. Ronnie had pointed it out to me—a door with an ugly brown mandala painted on it, a place you had to already know about in order to find. He’d once gone in for the experience, not God, just DMT. He said the preacher was “fair,” meaning he gave everyone and himself the same amount. Ronnie had taken his hit, which was instant and hard. He floated up to the ceiling. He wanted to come down but it was too late and the preacher and his congregation were haranguing him from below, yelling something at him about Jesus and the true inner light. It was terrifying, he said, really unpleasant, and there was nothing he could do but wait it out up there on the ceiling. “If that’s God,” Ronnie said, “he’s deranged.”

Sandro and I passed the ugly mandala of the little DMT church. Beyond it, a group of hippies sat against the chain-link fence of an abandoned lot, drinking beer out of clear forty-ounce bottles.

The impulse to shoot someone in the hand. To hide a gun in your boot. What was it? I felt free of that. Like I could float up to the ceiling, unweighted by the burden of a male ego. I would float on up and not be afraid.

“So that’s what we’ll do, okay?” Sandro was talking, and I had not been listening.

“Call them as soon as we get back. Because they’re Italians and you have to plan things months in advance and deal with tons of bureaucracy.”

I should go ahead and schedule the publicity tour with the Valera team, and he would come along.

I was happy. I had never really considered not going, but Sandro supporting it made everything so much easier, even if his sudden support was about him, the mugging, and had little to do with me.

“You can protect me,” he joked, “from Italy. I’ll hide behind you. Cling to you in a way that will drive you nuts.”

*  *  *

Sandro had a show at Helen’s in February and wanted to leave right after. The tour with the Valera team was supposed to begin in March. We could use his mother’s country place as a base. I would go to Monza and then other racetracks in northern Italy, and possibly France and Germany. I would make a film about the tour, about my own encounter with speed.

“You can flirt with Didi Bombonato,” Sandro said teasingly, and did a play flip of his hair.

I tried broaching the subject with Marvin at work the next day. My hope was that he’d say I could take a leave and come back and be assured of a job. But Marvin heard “Italy” and started off on a story.

“In the summer of 1967,” he said, “a friend of mine was working for the company that was going to distribute
Contempt
. He spoke Italian and French, so he was assigned to prepare the subtitles. When the print was ready, this friend invited me to its first showing. There were some funny errors in the subtitles. The
Odyssey
kept coming up ‘odious.’ Later this same friend did other Godard films, and there were more typos in his subtitles. My favorite was from
La Chinoise
. Hegel came out ‘Helga.’ ”

“Marvin, I want to go to Italy,” I said. “For three or four months, probably, enough time to travel with the Valera team. I’m hoping to make a film.”

“It’s not unusual for subtitles to run off onto the leaders,” Marvin continued.

Had he heard me? Was he responding in some coded way?

“Just a few frames from the girl cut into the negative as a calibration tool. You, or some other, there with a bit of accidental subtitle. Helga.”

When Eric came back from lunch, I told him I was hoping to go to Italy in the spring. He said it was fine, that I could keep my job as long as I returned by midsummer.

To be in Italy with Sandro and with the Valera team—it would be the grand tour compared to my time as a student in Florence, when I had no money to travel and lived in the walk-in closet of a fruit seller. Marvin gave me sixteen-millimeter film stock at such a discount it was practically free. There would be a demonstration of the
Spirit of Italy
at Monza and they were going to have me drive the car. I had an idea for the film, of filming up close, in dilated view, the poster of Flip Farmer. Going close to his face, scanning his body, the flameproof suit, his arm over the helmet. A meditation on that stilled image, the monstrously white, pure smile. And then intermixing myself. The Valera team. My own driving gloves. My helmet.

*  *  *

“He likes me to beat his ass,” Giddle said when I asked how things were going between her and Burdmoore.

We were at Rudy’s for the usual experience, as well as a final goodbye before Sandro and I left. It was winter, and dirty snow scuffed the curbs.

“It’s hard to imagine,” I said. “You’re so petite.”

“Not beat him up. Literally beat it. With a Ping-Pong paddle.”

“Oh.”

“He calls me Mama,” she said.

“I’m sure.”

There was new graffiti in the women’s bathroom at Rudy’s:

“Whoever talks about love destroys love.”

Someone had crossed out “love” and written “Ronnie Fontaine.”

“Whoever talks about Ronnie Fontaine destroys Ronnie Fontaine.”

The women’s bathroom often became unisex late on a drunken night. I wondered if it was Ronnie who was writing this stuff. Messages to himself.

Ronnie showed up and slid into the booth as we were talking about Burdmoore. “Oh, yeah,” he said, “that’s still on?”

Giddle said she was flattered Ronnie was interested, and yes, it was still “on.”

“I’m not that interested,” Ronnie said. “I just want to know if you tug on his beard. Apparently Brancusi, when he slept with Peggy Guggenheim, which is more than once, as I understand it, he told her not to touch his beard. It was forbidden. Anything else she could touch. Any body part or tuft. Not the beard.”

But Burdmoore had lost the beard, I saw as he made his way toward us through the crowd at Rudy’s. He’d lost the stringy locks of red hair, too. He’d cut his hair short and was clean-shaven. I found it hard to understand what he looked like now, because in his smooth face, his cropped hair, I saw only an agreement with Giddle, hair removal in exchange for something, unlimited sex maybe, and not a man who had decided to look a particular way.

Giddle made a toast, and gushed about how fabulous it would be to think of me in a racer’s suit, on a track, how thrilling. Also, she said, how necessary it was to spend time in Italy, that it was part of a gamine’s coming-of-age, a sort of finishing school, and she became her older-sister self with me as young protégée, which was a role she often played, and she was, in fact, probably ten years older. I had spent almost an entire year in Italy as a student, but I didn’t point this out to Giddle. She knew it, or at least I’d told her. She said I should consider coloring my sandy-blond hair red, that Italian women hennaed their hair. Nothing else was fashionable there but dyed red hair. Dyed hair and palazzo pants, she said. We have to get you some palazzo pants.

At some point she mentioned she’d never actually been to Italy. “But I can imagine it,” she said. “A place where old women scrub stone steps with a stiff brush and a bucket of soapy water. Where someone is always scrubbing stone steps, a widow in mourning clothes. No one does that in America. Scrubs steps. Wears mourning clothes.”

It was late and dark and smoky at Rudy’s. The booth had broken into several conversations, Ronnie next to Saul Oppler, who had fully forgiven him for killing his rabbits. Ronnie was looking at Saul’s hands. “Saul,” he said, “you have no fingerprints.” Saul looked at his own hands, old and giant and strong, hands that looked like they could pulverize rocks. He examined his smooth fingerpads and shrugged. He
said he
used
his hands. To make paintings. Just worked the prints right off, he said.

Ronnie said he never knew it could be that easy.

“What do you mean,
easy
?” Saul said. “I’ve been in the studio for forty-eight years. You call that easy?”

“I meant getting rid of your—”

“I didn’t get my first solo show until I was thirty-seven years old! Easy. To hell with it,” Saul said.

Sandro was at the bar, ordering more drinks. Burdmoore was next to Giddle, mutely watching her with a kind of wonder as she and I spoke. He seemed to feel no need to win her, to make her smitten with him. He just watched her with a steady gaze, like he was already thinking about later, what he and she would do later. I looked up as Sandro appeared with more drinks. Behind him, in the middle of the room, a girl stood alone facing our booth. Young and pale and thin and straw-blond, with a large face, a large head like a child. She stared at Ronnie, who was talking to Saul Oppler and didn’t look up, didn’t notice her. It was the girl on layaway.

“I’m so excited for your trip,” Giddle continued. She gazed into the glass of slivovitz that Sandro passed to her, turning it in her hands.

“I see octogenarian transvestites who are devoutly Catholic and may invite you over for tea,” she said. “You’ll go, wearing your palazzo pants. We have to get you some at Goodwill.” She took a sip of her slivovitz, and then peered back into the glass. “The old trannies will have curious furniture stuffed with horsehair, lace doilies draped over everything to cover the black mold.”

She’d known an Italian transvestite, she said, a player of chess and turn-of-the-century German opera recordings who had once told Giddle that every night she dreamed about popes. Popes in pure dazzling white, floating on clouds. And Giddle had asked which pope,
the
pope? Was it Paul VI? And the transvestite became disgusted and said no, certainly not! Not the one in the Vatican. Just
popes
. All in white, she’d said to Giddle, restoring her dreamy reverie. Beautiful popes, floating on clouds. Giddle thought that was really great. “Her vision was
not molested by actual power,” she said. “It was just men floating on clouds.”

The girl on layaway was standing in the middle of the room, facing us.

I wondered if I should say something to Ronnie. I decided not to. If she were ready to alert him to her presence, she would do it herself. Instead, she stared at him with narrowed eyes, training her sadness on him.

Ronnie didn’t notice and kept entertaining Saul.

She turned to go. I watched her move toward the exit, taking her sadness with her.

said as much about what would happen, according to the Brazilian overseer Valera hired. The overseer said you could not predict. You would not know, by guessing, which of the tappers would come in at quota, which of them would come in under quota, and which of them would die.

Yellow fever, the
patrão
said, they die of yellow fever.

A rubber worker with a .22-caliber hole in his head:

Yellow fever,
it’s written in the booklet.

Another with a hole in his back:

Yellow fever.

A third with an ice pick pushed through his neck, because the patrão’s flimsy muzzle-loader, with its cheap wire-wound barrel, unraveled:

Y.f.

The Valera Company guns the patrão was given were good for fifty shots and then they fell apart. He wrote to the company’s contact in São Paulo about the faulty equipment but was told there was nothing to be done about it.

It was important to keep these Indians on edge, so the patrão had to find ways. The Indians needed threats. They needed to be afraid. They
might run away. Or sell the rubber to rubber pirates who roamed the edges of the encampment, and then the patrão would lose his profit share. You could hear these bandits, their cracks and rustlings in the jungle. The patrão’s job was to keep the Indians in line. His tools were the cheap muzzle-loaders, mock drownings with water poured over a facecloth, and various further entrenchments of the Indians’ peon status. They owed a fee for having been brought to the Amazon. They owed for their purchase on credit of goods at the company store. They were forbidden subsistence activities. No collecting Brazil nuts. No growing of crops (anyone caught farming:
y.f.
).

*  *  *

This life, the tapper’s, rushing, sweating, exhaustion, waiting. Rushing, sweating, exhaustion. You wait while the patrão inspects your taps to be sure they’re clean, inspects your trunk incisions to be sure they’re correct (not too shallow and not too deep, in order not to damage the tree’s soft part, the cambium, and not circular—rather, you make a half spiral in the trunk, from lower right to upper left, tracing with your gouge the latex tunnels inside the tree). If the patrão is busy, you set down the milk-loaded pails while you wait. If you run with pails full of latex and spill some, you are said to
skedaddle
it. If you carry the latex pails uphill and because of the
titubation of your gait,
you slop some from the pails, you are said to skedaddle it. Slop it from your pail and the day’s work, so unmatched to the scale of the body and its limits, is wasted. It isn’t just a loss down to zero but below it. You didn’t know how low a person could get below zero, down under the roots of it, until you found this life, or it found you.