Triumph of the Spider Monkey Read online

  Danny Minx got out and broke parole to escape to the West, and the two of us drove out together. It took us a long time. I picked up a very fine, new, tight-handling Pontiac, that was parked on a residential street with the keys in the ignition, and in fact still swaying a little in the ignition, since the lady had just jumped out of the car to run into the house. She was sure on her way back again, so little Bobbie acted fast, and in an hour we were many miles to the west of that scene, laughing and treating ourselves to handfuls of chocolates. Danny Minx also known as Danny Blecher said that chocolate was the greatest potion and he had to eat a certain quantity of it every day for medical reasons, to keep his blood sugar level up. It was directly connected with male potency, he said, and I have always found this to be true.

  Somewhere just the other side of Wichita the trouble began with Danny, who was forty years old or more, when he stopped to give two college kids a ride. They were boys with short hair and smiles and a sign that said Going West? They got in the back seat and the four of us chatted for a while, then Danny giggled and said, “You two wouldn’t care to aid and abet a thief, would you?—in pursuit of his daily worship?” The kids laughed a little but didn’t catch on. I looked over at Danny where he was grinning. He didn’t glance at me. He offered a drink from a bottle of Muscatel and they took the bottle, but I could tell they didn’t drink from it, one of them made a swiping motion with his hand as if to wipe the top of the neck clean, and the other giggled, but Danny kept saying certain things to them that they didn’t catch onto, until finally I began to shout.

  “I’ll kill you! You know I can kill you! I can kill you!” I shouted.

  Danny began to laugh.

  “I can kill everybody! I don’t need you! I don’t need anybody!”

  I shouted and began to pound the seat between us. I was wearing just jeans and a T-shirt and my forearms were thick with curly black hairs that scared the kids in the back seat, I could tell, and Danny glanced down at my hands with that sly sideways look of his, but I wasn’t going to be silenced, and for the first time certain things broke free in my mind—shapes and thicknesses—like snarling dogs, bounding and jumping around—and Danny’s head jerked back as if he’d been bitten by one of them. He began to talk me down. He began to sing a little song only known to the two of us, in fact it was my own song that I told him was dedicated to him, you’re eatable…non-repeatable.…

  That song was stolen from me by a two-bit composer at Vanbrugh Studios. It is the background music to one of their movies. They stole everything from me and kicked me out and set their guard-dogs on me, but if Danny Minx could come forth to testify…to be a character witness…it would be made clear to the public how I was defrauded…my talents exploited.…“Eatable” is the background music to Walking Ragged but there are no credits attached to it, nowhere in the credits does it say “Bobbie Gotteson”.…

  Did I journey so far West, all the way across this country, only to be fucked on film?

  The boys got frightened and said, let us out, and Danny speeded up just for a laugh, and the boys—college boys!— began almost to cry and wheedle and I leaned over the seat to shout in their faces. I don’t remember what I shouted. I tore at them, lunged back and tried to get hold of their hair so as to bounce their heads together. Finally Danny was laughing so hard he had to stop, and the kids got out of the car and ran away, and left behind some books and a cardboard suitcase, and we sped off again with me yelling out the side window.

  Later on I woke up and Danny was parked in a gas station. The attendant was a kid my age. Danny and the kid were talking about something, I heard a funny whine— like a hillbilly accent—and realized we were out West. I got out of the car. My legs felt strange. My whole body was stiff, my shoulders and chest felt tight, like armor, and my leg-muscles felt all bunched up. I couldn’t remember what was going on. I think that was the newness of my powers, the fear of them I had then because I was just a kid, the way my mind could seize hold of reality and give a shape to it, to mold other people to my will; I wasn’t used to it yet. I felt very tentative. Danny and the boy stopped talking and looked at me. In those days my hair wasn’t as long and thick and curly as it was later, when I got into private films and private catering to parties, when the styles in male fashions had changed, but anyway my black curly hair was eye-catching and I knew it and except for a bluish rough haze around the lower part of my face and going up almost to my eyes, from not shaving often enough, I was very handsome. It made me self-conscious. I walked past Danny without giving him a sign…and around behind the garage where there was a Men’s Room…and when I came out I felt so good, so happy, I crossed a field adjacent to the garage and strolled up to someone’s back yard.…This was in Colorado, in the eastern part of the state. I don’t know how I know this. The sky was bright blue, the clouds were just at the horizon, there were three or four little one-storey houses along a dirt road, clap-board houses, like shanties, and in the back of one of them a little girl was playing…playing with, uh, I think it was a doll…a naked doll…holding onto the legs and fooling around with it in the dirt.…It was a little girl, I don’t know how old. Two years old? Three? Suddenly I thought of how my powers, if unleashed, could rush out into that child and destroy her. She didn’t see me. She had red hair, she was a little thing sitting in the dirt, fooling around. The day was very still. No, a dog was barking somewhere. Out on the highway a truck rumbled past. So powerful! So powerful! I felt the need to discharge my energies, I felt the building-up of powers that would make my skull go out of shape. I stared at the girl. Now she noticed me—she had felt my thought-waves! She left off hitting the doll against the ground and stared at me, and in that instant I felt my powers rise and flow over, like light if light could turn into water, fountains of water, rising and flowing over with love, because the little girl and I were looking at each other in that way, at that time. It happened at that time. Another moment, another heartbeat, and it would have been something else and maybe my powers would have killed her. But not at that time.

  Danny came to get me. He said, “Hey Bobbie, why are you crying?”

  I didn’t know I was crying, I said.

  “Bobbie, honey,” he said. “Why hell! Are you crying because I teased you back there? Because of those plain, pimply-faced boys?”

  I’m not crying, I said. I seemed to wake up. The back yard was empty, the sky was changed. Two dogs were barking.

  Danny stared at me.

  We drove on and stopped late in the afternoon for food, and pulled off the highway and down a farmer’s lane that led by a railroad track, the car bumping along, weeds scraping against the fenders. Danny made cheese-spread sandwiches for both of us. We sat out in the grass. I knew something was wrong but didn’t let on. Danny offered me some chocolates but I had no appetite. Then we both stopped eating and there was a noise somewhere like a train whistle or a coyote, and it made me shiver, because Danny was looking away from me and not directly at me, smiling dreamily at me, the way he always did this time of day. He cleared his throat. I remember exactly the words he said; he said, “Pretend you’re in a movie, pretend you’re a cowboy singing on the prairie.” So I got my guitar out of the back seat of the car. I strummed a few chords and walked along, and began to sing, humming a tune until the words came out of the air to me…or maybe they came out of Danny’s mind and into mine.…

  I heard him start the car. But I didn’t turn around.

  I had enough time to run back to the car, but I didn’t. I didn’t turn around. It was not the gun Danny carried that stopped me, either. That would not have stopped me. I don’t know. I just kept walking along by the railroad track, which was raised maybe three or four feet from the ground, strumming the guitar, singing under my breath.…I heard him start the car and back out. But I didn’t turn around.

  I got to the next town, then to a town after that. Then I got a ride all the way to Reno, where my luck gave out and I was arrested for vagrancy, because they were “cracking down” on drifters in that city. From there I got shipped to a mental hospital, where I made friends with a lady therapist who liked me, and it wasn’t until I was released from the Nevada State Hospital and got all the way to Los Angeles that I found out that the President had been assassinated while I was locked up—by a maniac named Oswald, a two-bit punk who I was glad had been gunned down. That punk! That cheap Commie coward! I got hold of a picture of Oswald being gunned down, his face screwed up into a yell, him doubled over with his hands pressed against his stomach, and a sheriff’s man starting forward to interfere with Jack Ruby—but finally I had to get rid of the picture because it made me so angry. It made me want to kill someone. I worked in Venice Beach for a while, just enough to finance my musical career, composing ballads in my head— “The Ballad of Jack Ruby” was one of them, but it wasn’t one of my best songs—and wondered if Danny Minx would ever show up. I would have forgiven him.

  He never came.

  Or if he did, he had changed. His face had gotten fatter, his chest had gotten wobbly as a woman’s. His legs thicker. His voice shrill and cute, saying “Bobbie-this, Bobbie-that,” and never letting me alone. Sometimes they followed me around, old guys, applauding when I finished a song and asking for a lock of my hair, asking for my autograph, pretending I was a star—and then kids followed me around also, mostly teenaged girls with long straight hair and big, moronic eyes, all in love with me. I saved money by sleeping on the beach at night. Sometimes in alleys or in doorways. I could sleep sitting up on a park bench and sometimes even with my eyes half-opened, in case a cop noticed me. Then one night in a bar in Venice there was a fight and somebody grabbed me, and the two of us fell and rolled over and over trying to smash each other’s head against the floor, a stranger, a maniac I had
never seen before, and when things got straightened out I was being booked for attempted homicide and my life caved in on me, and the Legal Aid man said to plead guilty because I had a record and what’s the use?—so I pleaded guilty and the judge put me down for 15 years, without looking at me except a quick darting look that made his face squinch up as if he were about to sneeze. I wanted to explain that I was a musician and a troubadour and that my life was meant to entertain, just to entertain people like him, that I had a strong original talent that must be set free…it must be set free.…

  “Next case! Get that man out of here!”

  “Your Honor—”

  “Next!”

  “Your Honor, please allow me to sing for you—”

  “Get that creature out of here!”

  11

  Are You in Love

  With Someone Who’s Not in Love with You…?

  About love they were never wrong, the old song-writers, the old commercial millionaire sons of bitches, most of them dead or dying off now in the Seventies and their mansions taken over by kids in their twenties.…But they knew. They knew how it was. You love someone and he will not love you. He will love someone else. But that someone else will not love him. That someone else might even love you—! Or someone who looks like you. Gotteson was an original so hot-dark in the face, smouldering sullen gleaming glittering dark brown eyes, sideburns of black tough curly hair that inched down, down, down his muscular cheeks as the years went by and the Outside styles approximated the Inside spirit…just a few inches too short, so that even his three-inch cork-heeled fancy Italian shoes didn’t help, during the brief time he wore them, clonking around town. Why was he born so short! But his legs were muscular, hard, they didn’t seem to be made of flesh like other men’s—Bobbie, you are so strong!—and his shoulder muscles were bulging on that trim, tight torso, though he did only fifteen-twenty minutes of vigorous American pushups every day. His secret was not in his body. In fact, he scorned the body. He scorned it. Gotteson made love to the spirit, he sang his melancholy-cheerful ballads to the spirit, and that was why inmates (during Amateur Nights) rolled their eyes and made sucking motions with their mouths, while he performed, those long-drawn-out years at Terminal Island. And when he was Outside, when he walked out with several ten-dollar bills and two changes of clothes, he saw with amazement that the world had caught up with him…all the dreams had caught up with him… maybe gone a little ahead of him, due to faulty development of conceptualizing abilities and disjointed motor coordination.…

  Twenty minutes after he had been released from prison, on the bus to Los Angeles, on that very bus, a small-boned lanky-haired knobby-kneed girl of about fourteen eased into the seat beside him, sighing, shaking her hair out of her eyes, glancing sideways at Bobbie with that half-startled half-cunning look they all gave him, and murmured something he could not quite hear. Gotteson, unused to the world, to the rattling of the bus and the rapid motion outside the windows, unused to so many people who were free, freely moving about the streets walking wherever they wished, and especially unused to the feverish smell of this young glittering creature, could not comprehend her words. He didn’t dare ask her to repeat them. Bobbie and the girl stared at each other. Finally the girl said, smiling: “…running away, it’s my first time. How about you? They tried to fuck my mind. Back there.”

  Bobbie cupped his hand to his ear. “Huh?”

  “Back there. Back home in Del Mar. Tried to fuck my mind. You know. What about you?”

  What about Bobbie?

  He feared her and could not believe her yet she pressed into his sweaty innocent palm something she called sweetheart-greenies, capsules she and Bobbie took together, to initiate a small friendship.

  Yes, they loved him. He was never to blame. They cringed and writhed for him, they squealed, pressed themselves against him accidentally in crowds at Venice Park or in big jumbled weekend streams of tourists and lower class suburban sightseers along the Strip, couldn’t get enough of him. Gotteson had to learn quickly to harden his heart against that horde, or his singing-potency would have been decimated years ago.…He hated them. Hate hate hate hate hate hated them. No not all of them, but most of them—sweetheart-greenies wouldn’t blur the image sufficiently because the terrible truth was that, inside the hate, like a tiny perfumy current making its way slyly up through an enormous gaseous poison, was something like pity. He knew them from the inside. He was crucified on the cross of his pity for females.…

  Had he not pitied Melva’s whimpering, had he not stuffed his muscular arms repeatedly into that monkey-jacket just for laughs, I, Bobbie Gotteson, of sound mind though broken body, would not be trying myself for my life, beyond all the reaches legal and extra-legal of the Law: my life would not be this disjointed confession, but a series of haunting melodies joined to lyric language. But no. The love of human beings does us in. We falter, stumble, stoop over, steal fire for them and are punished, mocked, picked to death by tiny painted nails, ooooh’d and aaaah’d over by tiny button-like lips. From the tiny green capsules Gotteson was drawn, by one creature after another, into excursions of the brain beyond all his ability to recall. Cranks, peps, cartwheels, coast-to-coasts, uppers, black beauties, turnabouts, bennies, dexies, footballs, purple hearts, double-entries, toads, icebergs…and more and more medicine; but such belongs to pathology and we are concerned with art.

  Love did him in, does us all in. This includes Doreen B. who never saw him before, was a total stranger to him and he to her, before those tangled shrieking five-and-a-half minutes of his hacking her “to death” (as the papers express it, not knowing that all deaths are suicide, especially newspaper deaths). Sorry sorry sorry sorry. This includes as well Sharleen M. who will not testify against Bobbie in spite of the Prosecution’s sly plans. Never. They gloat, whisper among themselves, prepare their useless strategies…the District Attorney visits her in hiding, strokes her baby-blank face and her long hair and woos her famous mama and papa and keeps telling them All is well, the State of California will triumph! Will it, eh? Will it? Mama and Papa M. are not exactly the parents of Baby Sharleen; Mama is the mother, but Papa the step-father, third in a series. The original Papa is in France making a movie, or at least that’s what Sharleen told everyone, though everyone told me, giggling, that this Papa was in a mental hospital right here in town. But Sharleen is not going to testify and it is useless for the Prosecution to gloat over her. She will not testify against her beloved Bobbie Gotteson.*

  At Terminal Island, Bobbie could have been an Old Man to any number of guidance-craving kids, but his spirit always yearned upward, he desired only men twenty or more years his senior, gentlemanly men but not too gentlemanly, tough-voiced men who were yet elegant, like that Judge who put him away for so many years. Exactly like that Judge! He composed songs for them, secretly. For them. For abrasive-eyed cynical-mouthed gentlemen with class, like Vanbrugh himself, though Bobbie only crept into the presence of Vanbrugh once…or into the presence of someone said to be the great Vanbrugh. Even now, melancholy-cunning, he is composing this jokey confession mainly to win the heart of the Judge who will sit above him, glancing at him or not glancing at him, smooth-shaven, cold, deathly, deathly-smiling when it is necessary to smile, a gentleman, a graduate of a Law School whose very name would be so foreign to the Maniac that it would send him into a trance.…Gotteson’s personal tragedy, in contrast with his professional-social-artistic tragedy, was that the gentlemen with class who glanced at him and then gazed at him with immense interest were never the gentlemen he, Gotteson, gave a damn about. It was the others he yearned for. Women, all women, any-age-women stared at Gotteson and in a matter of seconds sank into a kind of open-eyed trance, sometimes offensive to him (even a maniac has some moral values), but sometimes exciting, for despite his aesthetic distaste for females his body often acted on its own…perhaps cynically?…perhaps with a sense of humor…? But in his deepest clearest soul Gotteson could never never once not even once cajole his intellect into taking any of these females seriously. The one who died beside him and whom he did not abandon, she alone whom he did not abandon in her death, breathing bleeding herself out into the bedclothes, was not truly female at that moment…not female, not trapped in being a female…in that. She had been, like Gotteson himself, a creature of pure…pure.…