Great Jones Street by Don DeLillo
“Nobody knows me from shit,” he said. “But I’m a two-time Laszlo Piatakoff Murder Mystery Award nominee. My one-acters get produced without exception at a very hip agricultural college in Arkansas. I’m in my middle years but I’m going stronger than ever. I’ve been anthologized in hard cover, paperback and goddamn vellum. I know the writer’s market like few people know it. The market is a strange thing, almost a living organism. It changes, it palpitates, it grows, it excretes. It sucks things in and then spews them up. It’s a living wheel that turns and crackles. The market accepts and rejects. It loves and kills.”
Light entered mildly, the only wage a northern winter pays to moderation. A corner of the room began to shimmer, the sun raising dust in uncertain columns, and I realized I was still wearing Opel’s coat. Fenig in his cotton-acrylic hood. Wunderlick tucked in at the waist, baring his bony wrists.
“There’s a woman lives downstairs,” he said. “First floor. Micklewhite. She’s got a kid about twenty, deformed and retarded. He was born with something wrong with his skull. It’s soft for some reason. His head is full of dents and funny little configurations. His family was ashamed and they never did anything. They just kept him in the room. Now the father’s dead and the mother’s nutty and the kid is still in the room with his pliable head. He can’t talk or dress himself or anything. I don’t know if he can even crawl. I’ve never seen him myself. She doesn’t exhibit him around. But she told me everything. Micklewhite and her all-American boy. I’ve put him in four stories, sight unseen.”
The radiator was similar to the one in the room below, a tall stooped object standing in a corner, wholly reconcilable with its surroundings or lack of them, nice to look at and even listen to, the kind of radiator that has a metal receptacle hooked to its back for the purpose of holding water and moistening the air. Our matching radiators. Something to water once in a while.
“Fame,” he said. “It won’t happen. But if it does happen. But it won’t happen. But if it does. But it won’t.”
The building was pounded by shock waves from an explosion at a construction site nearby. I watched Fenig’s jowls quiver a bit, all the loose skin on his face agitated by the tremor, a disquiet at the center of his neatness and calm. There was no sign of a radio, telephone or television set.
“I met Laszlo Piatakoff at a Baskerville Society dinner thing at the Hilton.”
“Who is he?” I said.
“Laszlo Piatakoff is the Marjorie Pace Kimball of murder mystery. That’s no exaggeration.”
Down on the street someone was using a hammer. The sound was vibrant, accompanied by liquid echoes, and soon it was joined by the sound of another hammer, maybe a block away, a thick ripple to each granulating blow, probably Bond Street. The heavier of the two sounds was the more distant, and together they formed a slowly spreading wake, one of time, silence and reverberation, each of these flowing through the others, softening the petrified air, until finally one hammer was rested, and the other grew brutal.
“Everybody knows the thing about an infinite number of monkeys,” Fenig said. “An infinite number of monkeys is put to work at an infinite number of typewriters and eventually one of them reproduces a great work of literature. In what language I don’t know. But what about an infinite number of writers in an infinite number of cages? Would they make one monkey sound? One genuine chimp noise? Would they eventually swing by their toes from an infinite number of monkey bars? Would they shit monkey shit? It’s academic, you say. You may be right. I don’t know. One thing I do know. It’s all a question of being in the right place at the right time. Knowing the market. Spotting its fluctuations. Measuring its temperament. I’ve written millions of words. Every one of them is in that trunk.”
When I went downstairs I had to content myself with fashioning an impersonation of sleep, eyes closed, body lax, a studied evenness to my breathing. This, in the end, became tiring, and I ate some food and then sat by the window. The air carried a dismal stench, some kind of earth gas released by the detonations. I closed my eyes again. When I opened them it was well into evening. The room behind me was dark. I thought of opening the window and shouting:
“Fire! Hey, fire!”
The great doors of the firehouse would slowly come open. I’d get a glimpse of the big machine, fire-engine red, rigged with shiny appliances. Then tiny men in black booties would appear, edging out onto the sidewalk, lifting their beady eyes to my window.
“Fire!” I’d shout. “Hey, fire, fire!”
One small man would take several steps forward, moving into the light shed by a streetlamp. He’d tug at his booties for a second. Then he’d look back up at my window.
“Water,” he would say, barely above a whisper.
A moment would pass and then his little comrades, standing all around him now, would commence whispering, as if by prearranged signal:
“Water, water, water, water, water.”
Finally all the tiny men would return to the firehouse and the vaulted doors would slowly close behind them.
6
A TELEPHONE that’s disconnected, deprived of its sources, becomes in time an intriguing piece of sculpture. The business normally transacted is more than numbed within the phone’s limp ganglia; it is made eternally irrelevant. Beyond the reach of shrill necessities the dead phone disinters another source of power. The fact that it will not speak (although made to speak, made for no other reason) enables us to see it in a new way, as an object rather than an instrument, an object possessing a kind of historical mystery. The phone has made a descent to total dumbness, and so becomes beautiful.
Opel’s phone was out of order and Azarian came down without calling and was waiting for me in the hall, numbed by cold, when I got back from Thirteenth Street, where I’d gone to buy some clothes. He stood against the mailboxes, arms strait-jacketed in crushed velvet. Somehow he managed to invest the simple act of sniffling with an element of gravest accusation. I led him upstairs. Without uncrossing his arms from his chest, he dropped into a chair.
“The apocalyptic crotch himself.”
“Don’t be funny,” he said. “Do that one thing for me Bucky. Avoid all funny stuff. I’m cold and tired. I neec to be talked to seriously. Jet lag, fear, anxiety, depres sion. You know my history.”
“Want some cocoa? Good and hot.”
“Sure, yeah, okay.”
“I don’t have any.”
“I thought you were with Opel Hampson in Morocco.’
“Is she in Morocco?” I said.
“Globke finally told me you were here.”
“How about hot tea? Steaming hot Lipton’s tea. Fresl from the grocer’s shelf.”
“Do you have any?”
“No.”
“Frankly I wasn’t knocked out by grief when you left, Bucky. But I was wrong. We kind of need you. The last year or so I’ve been in a state of deep fear nearly one hundred per cent of the time. All kinds of fears of this and that. Mostly unexplained fears. When you left the group I frankly expected the anxieties to lift like a fog. But I was wrong. I’m more afraid than ever. All the tremendous tensions you created with your presence have gotten even worse now that you’re gone. I’m afraid all the time.”
“Afraid of what?”
“You know my history,” Azarian said. “Fears, anxieties, apprehensions, dreads, terrors, cowerings and panics. Don’t ask me afraid of what. Afraid of everything, I guess. Everything, nothing, something, anything. I came east for a reason. Really two reasons. Both pretty scary.”
“Tell me.”
“First I want to know your intentions. I feel I have a right to that. The band’s in flux. Before I can take any definite action and relieve my mind of some of the fear, I have to know whether or not you’re thinking about returning. Some idea of your state of mind would be a great help to me at this point. They thought you’d been murdered. Dodge actually thought that. I told him he was crazy. So we talked to Globke to get some kind of idea. We talked to him together.
“Any luck?”
“She got your brother, she said. Did you ever have a brother?”
“No.”
“That’s what Dodge told her. Weird fucking woman.”
“I’m kind of busy,” I said. “If you could tell me what you want.”
“Busy doing what? What could you be doing in a place like this that you could call busy?”
“Tell me what you want,” I said.
“I want to know your intentions. I want to know if you’re coming back, and when, and in what exact role. In what capacity. Let’s face it, you haven’t done anything new in a long time and pressure’s been building up over that fact and in the meantime I’m ready to go into a studio with material I’ve been working on for about the last two years that we’ve never recorded. I’m ready for a whole lot of things. But I can’t just go ahead. I’m tied down by prearrangements, by clauses, by small print, by multiple deals and counterdeals. Everything’s locked up tight. So this is the necessary first step. Finding out your intentions.”
“I have no intentions.”
“You do so have intentions. Everybody has intentions, Looks like I was right about you.”
“In what way?”
“I told them you cracked up,” he said. “Dodge was running around with the murder story. They all believed him. I told them you just ran off to hide. You cracked up. You couldn’t take it anymore and you went off to Morocco to hide. I told them that.”
“You were mistaken.”
“Dodge said Bucky’s not the type. Last man to crack’ll be Bucky. We’ll all fall apart but not him. Well, bullshit, they were wrong. I saw what happened in the lounge in that airport, wherever we were, Denver, just before the Astrodome riot.”
“What happened?” I said.
“I saw what happened.”
“What happened?”
“I didn’t tell anybody because I figured it was your own private business. I didn’t even tell them after you disappeared and they were going around believing you’d been murdered. You cracked up pure and simple. I told them that much but nothing else.”
“What happened?” I said.
“It caught my eye in all that crush just before we boarded. You were on your knees making faces at some old woman in a wheelchair. I knew it wasn’t a joke. It was too unreal for that. You were sweating and babbling and making incredible unreal faces at the old woman. I’ve never seen anyone sweating the way you were. Laughing and babbling and down on your knees. Laughing-crying. I’ll never forget it. A few other people saw it too but nobody knew how to react. It was too unreal. And besides you were in tears. So nobody knew what was what. There was no reality. There was no way to know what to do. Then somebody wheeled the old lady away and you got up and it was over.”
“Strange.”
“You hadn’t said more than five words in about a week and a half, Bucky. I mean the whole grinding insanity of the tour. I mean the incredible sick aspects of it. I mean the whole morbid fantasy. This could smash anybody into little pieces. And being who you were, of course. That whole other myth. Who you were and what you represented. That particular inhuman pressure. When I first saw you on the floor like that, it didn’t really seem that unusual. I knew it wasn’t a joke but I didn’t think it was serious either. I mean that’s the tour. That’s what happens on the tour.”
“Strange,” I said.
Azarian’s sadness filled the space between us. He leaned forward in the chair now, exploring my eyes, trying in his intensity to make me remember, to make me see my own face, as if this remembering could be a clean breeze through his sadness. He clenched both fists, lined them up against his lips and blew heat and energy into the resulting tunnel.
“That brings us to reason number two why I’m here,” he said. “Happy Valley Farm Commune is holding something I’m -willing to lay out money for. I represent certain interests. These interests happen to know you’re in touch with Happy Valley. So they’re making the offer to you through me.”
“Make your offers to the people directly involved. I don’t want to know anything about it.”
“They’re an armed camp. I wouldn’t go anywhere near them.”
“Your problem, not mine.”
“Look, Bucky, you and I know each other a long time. That’s why these certain interests want me representing them. It makes sense for you and me to do the business in this particular situation. I don’t want to go anywhere near Happy Valley. I just want to bid on the product they’re holding. I’ll make the offer. You take it from there.”
“I don’t know the first thing about these people.”
“Your people or my people?” he said.
“My so-called people. I don’t know anything about them.”
“Okay, the group was a rural group that merged with other groups or splinter groups and got hassled everywhere they went and so they kept moving and eventually over the years they ended up in the city, this city, right here, within walking distance, Bucky, walking distance of right here. In other words they’re a rural group that came to the city to find peace and contentment.”
“What’s the thing they’re holding?”
“The point is we’ve got the money to make a strong offer,” he said. “People on the Coast. Friends of mine I met in Detroit time before last. They have roots in Detroit, they have roots in Cleveland. Now they’re on the Coast. I’m in a state of fear every minute I’m with them. But these people represent an important part of my development. Fear or no fear, I’m in this thing to the end.”
“You don’t know what the product is, do you?”
“It’s a simple enough guess,” he said. “The point is we’ve got backing. We’ve got resources.”
“Tell your people I don’t know anything. That’s more or less the truth. I’m just a tired old figure of the entertainment world. You know that. Music industry wore me down.”
“Ill tell them, Bucky, but they won’t listen. In the meantime what’s in that bag that you could put on the stove and heat up to get this chill out of my body?”
“A lumber jacket,” I said.
“One of those old things with red and black checks?”
“I got it at an army-navy store.”
“I wouldn’t mind running out to buy one of those. Except I have to be uptown in about half an hour to talk to some record people. Heavy names. Monsters of the industry. Then get my ass out to the airport. But back to what we were talking about originally. I’d like to get some kind of answer before I leave here. What happens next, Bucky? Are you coming back soon? Or do I book studio space and take the band inside?”
“Submit all questions in writing to my personal manager, care of Transparanoia Inc., Rockefeller Center, New York, New York, New York, New York.”
7
OPEL’S BELONGINGS were everywhere, objects of an earlier life spent in real places, her past on lonely soil. Hers were possessions resonant with time, a sense of years collected, crystal beads, guitar straps, rosewood stash boxes, hardware catalogues, Mexican candlesticks, simplest of things, every one endowed with the power of her absence, electric yogurt maker, ten-foot hand-knitted scarf. I moved the bed to the center of the room. Sleep seemed more possible here.
Fenig came to visit, saying he was in a coffee-drinking mood. I looked around the room for coffee. I looked everywhere without results. Then I looked for cups. There were no clean cups. All the cups were in the sink, sitting inside each other. I looked around for sugar. I tried to find a clean spoon in the drawer of the small cabinet. The drawer was full of string, buttons and penny postage stamps. I began to sweat, a mean animal odor soaking my clothes. I hunted around for a saucer but th
“Foreign armless vets of the Second War. A three-dollar sum of money guarantees you selected brushes made by handicapped ex-fighting men. Brushes for home, industry, the car, the toilet. Are you self-employed? Brushes for the self-employed. Ill listen to bids, anybody in the building, two-fifty to start it off and you couldn’t believe what that sum of money is capable of buying in the way of a pre-selected industrial brush. Armless in the European and Jap theaters of World War number two. They went and they fought. Their names were Ryan, Bandini, Hogan, Ryan. They stepped ashore in strange lands where they didn’t know a soul. This is not stolen merchandise. This is merchandise made and guaranteed by the living maimed of our nation. Iwo Jima, Corregidor, Salerno, Tobruk, Belleau Wood, Bataan, back to Bataan, Iwo Jima, Paris, Norway.”
“How many wars are you selling?” Fenig said.
“Dollar seventy-five I’ll take. A selected car broom. Keeps your dashboard free of foreign matter. Fits any. glove compartment, big or little or money back. Jumping; out of troop planes. Hand to hand in the trenches. Loose lips sink ships. Graduating from tail-gunner school. Armless and legless. Can’t even salute the flag they died for. Ninety-five cents, I’ll come up and get it; a quarter, just roll it down the stairs. Guadalcanal, Burma, espionage, ack-ack. They fought on the sea, in planes and trains, on motorcycles with sidecars, under the water in submarine warfare. A three-dollar brush made by a vet for fifty cents even, plus tax. Seven patriotic colors. I am not a hustler. This is not a brush hustle. They came from places like Pittsburgh, Grand Rapids, San Diego, Alabama. They went and they fought and they got hurt, some of them, pretty bad. Kansas City, Kansas. Kansas City, Missouri. It was war, it was war.”