Triumph of the Spider Monkey Read online

  But of that revelation Gotteson cannot speak.

  So his tragedy was that he loved people who did not love him. We call that irony. And, conversely, he was contemptuous of people who loved him, especially those who crowded and lunged and pawed.…In Gotteson’s heyday on the Strip, when he strummed his battered old guitar and sang wildly-ecstatically into the sweet dark smoke of Lucky Pierre’s, among his fans there were even intellectuals hungering for him.…Disguised in out-of-date hippie costumes, their prescription-lens aviator-sunglasses sliding down their perspiring noses, saliva oozing into their square-cut rakish beards, men of middle-age drove long distances to wonder at Gotteson’s talent, revealing themselves clumsily but charmingly, in as much privacy as Gotteson allowed, as professors…their interest in him only academic of course, of course…though one, quite at a disadvantage in the clutter of Lucky Pierre’s, wept and pawed at Gotteson, Why did I spend my years with Jane Austen, my God why, now it’s too late, passed out on the dancefloor, a pity. Good graying still-trim men from the great institutions up and down the Coast, Santa Barbara, Santa Cruz, Berkeley, Palo Alto, San Jose, Riverside, Stockton and Westwood alike.…But though they hungered for Gotteson he did not care for them; he disdained neurotics.

  Why is love so elusive, so hard-to-come-by? Melva often glared and pouted, a winsome grimace out of a 1946 movie of hers that (according to a woman-friend) had almost but not quite won her an Academy Award…in a novocaine-frigid lisp declaring: “Why anyone in her right senses should fall in love with a motherfucker like you is incomprehensible. Almost a joke. Sickening, actually. I don’t know what civilization is sliding into.” Propped up in bed, she sometimes read and reread old New Yorkers, kept in messy piles beneath the enormous gaily-canopied bed, as if she sought, there, in the decades-old cartoons and the chaste harmless smudgeless columns of print and advertisements for Tiffany knick-knacks, some coherent explanation for what went wrong. When most rattled, Melva sought coherence; and she wanted it gracefully worded. What went wrong with an entire culture!—a beautiful gracious sane sensible non-syphilitic subscribed-to invested-in way of life! But in the end as always she would giggle and toss the rumpled old magazines back beneath the bed and snap her fingers for her Bobbie, as always. O you beast!

  * * *

  At this point the courtroom lights are dimmed. The fifteen-foot-high windows are covered with canvases to shut out light. The Prosecution—the District Attorney himself and two youngish ambitious assistants—now cause to be shown to the cleared courtroom that notorious underground classic “17 Mannequins & a Guy,” said film purchased by the District Attorney’s office through a secret series of negotiations with the director who filmed it (at El Portal, though background shots that might identify El Portal have been carefully blurred or blacked out), a director of international fame whose works have won awards at film festivals everywhere—Nice, Rome, New York City—but whose name is strangely missing from the credits. In fact—there are no credits! Not even the star, Bobbie Gotteson himself, is given screen credit and was certainly cheated of payment for his exhaustive work in the film as its central character, its musical director (the guitar-playing in the background is entirely his), and its inventor (though no film script as such was ever committed to paper); but it is no coincidence that the film’s value sky-rocketed after the arrest of Gotteson, from a paltry $500-a-night rental fee to the undisclosed fee which the District Attorney obviously paid into the Liberated Arts Talent Agency that handled the film.…No coincidence, and yet Gotteson never got royalties, must sit stricken with shame and rage in the courtroom and witness his own public degradation, see there on the portable screen his handsome swarthy face and body going through its performance for an audience of people who can only gasp, snicker, wheeze, mutter “Oh my God—” or “Stop it!” but in no case, not in a single isolated case, give credit where credit is due and ease the Maniac’s frayed nerves with a round of applause! The film runs for only 18 minutes (one minute to each of the dressmaker’s dummies and a half-minute at start and finish for artistic zooming shots) yet by the conclusion the Maniac is weeping with exhaustion and despair. The Defense Counsel, sitting stonily beside him, inches his chair a little away from the Maniac. Gotteson weeps in his isolation, inside his vacuum, where he has always wept and where no one filmed him. And if he had been filmed, if his private spiritual life had been committed to film, it would have been his usual luck to be handed merely a cash payment of $700 and a few free meals and someone’s year-old car…!

  The District Attorney, flush-faced, strides before the jury and has no need to shout now, since everyone is hushed and palpitating and dare not look into anyone else’s face; he has only to go through his rehearsed phony-understated routine and call their attention to the inhuman monstrousness of that behavior, the inhuman energy of that behavior, the inhuman depravity recorded there…and especially to that sword wielded by the actor in the last half of the film, the very machete here in the courtroom, the murder weapon itself! “The accused seemed to go into a trance, seemed to swing into a…what shall we call it?…” (and here a phony eyebrow-twitching pause, during which the Maniac wants to scream but manages to sit rigid) “…a sword dance, a fertility-rite-mating-dance, so bizarre as to make us doubt our senses, and obscene beyond any human ability to fathom.…You saw, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, how viciously the accused hacked that last mannequin to death—I mean, to pieces? You saw? You could not fail to see?”

  One of the lady jurors is weeping into a handkerchief. The gentleman beside her, sweaty-faced, offers to lend her assistance, but is rebuffed, and blushes violently. The heaviest juror, a fairly young man with sideburns nearly as long and twiney as the Maniac’s used to be, before his arrest, is breathing so heavily, his fat chest rising and falling so laboriously, that it seems for a while he may have a seizure of some sort. He closes his eyes; droplets of perspiration run down his face.

  The District Attorney strides to the Exhibit Table, seizes the machete itself, and swings it around him with a violence that makes people gasp, though the Maniac is contemptuous of that machete, that piece of metal, knowing that it bears only the crudest resemblance to his magical weapon. He could never use it the way I did, the Maniac whispers into his attorney’s ear, and when his attorney edges away an inch or two, not looking at him, the Maniac says fiercely, and neither could you!—or anyone else!

  *Though Gotteson wrote these ominous words 18 days before the news of this tragic child’s suicide was released, he seems to have been absolutely certain she would not testify. Readers are not invited to speculate on the true identity of this child, though the “Mama” referred to has obviously made no effort to disguise her involvement with Bobbie Gotteson.

  12

  Gotteson on Film

  A legitimate film-test did take place. It took place at the Vanbrugh Studios. Gotteson was invited to play the guitar and to sing as many of his compositions as he chose, and everyone in the studio congratulated him afterward, everyone, though no witnesses can be assembled now to testify that this screen-test did take place and of course the film has been either destroyed or sold as a collector’s item to some wealthy Hollywood Hills connoisseur of the arts, name and address undisclosed…without a penny of the profits going to Gotteson.

  Ten or eleven or twelve films, no-rehearsal films, partying films, some of them made when I didn’t even know someone had a camera, one of them a joked-up version of that commercial for potato chips that has all the camels and the Rajah with a sword, and one of them a hit-off from a 1939 Dracula movie Sonya C. showed at a party at her house, and oh God it all came back to me in Hermosa Beach where my own bride bled to death beside me and couldn’t even say out loud how she loved me or forgave me, it flicked back to me like a playing-card, just the way Dracula what’s-his-name sobbed because his true bride died, and left him, that was how I sobbed too but nobody filmed that.

  But.…

  But there was a real screen-test. They swore it was real. They were very nice to me, asking after my health, they were very polite and thoughtful, and Vlad J. seemed to be impressed with my performance. He promised that he would personally screen it for Mr. Vanbrugh as soon as possible. That screen-test did take place. And now if only…if only someone would come forth with it, if only it could be located, if only a group of directors and movie producers and people in the industry would acknowledge, publicly, maybe even sign a petition to be published in the newspapers, that the boy did have talent and might have become a Star, yes, a Superstar, if moneyed interests and circumstances had only favored him! Otherwise Gotteson’s private hopes will go down in history as hallucinations.

  13

  Why I Hacked

  Nine Women to Death

  The “hacking” was only physical and incidental. Don’t ask me about the “hacking”!—my body took over, and when bodies take over the spirit sails over the horizon. Pounding, plunging, plummeting, fucking, hacking, what had it to do with Bobbie Gotteson, who existed in the realm of spirit? I didn’t kill them alone, either, but had disciples to help me, every blood-splattered exhausting moment. The stewardess who crawled under the sofa to observe me was not hallucinating when she said there were three or four or five of me, bounding everywhere around the room. She was correct. My disciples sprang out of my head when I willed them into birth, they sprang fully-formed though not all of them were my size or age (in age they ranged from nine or ten years old up to twenty-five or thereabouts), and not all of them were equipped with machetes. The smallest and puniest of my disciples, a boy who bore only a coarse resemblance to me as a child, had to tear into his victim with a dime-store jack knife. That accounts for the confusion about “weapons.” It explains why the witnesses who saw me depart from the bungalow saw one man (swarthy, about thirty years of age, 150 pounds, dressed in white trousers and a red-and-white polka dot shirt—an outfit belonging to one of the girls) while the surviving stewardess saw a number of men.

  But all that is bodily, messy, disgusting. I don’t care for that part of it myself. The various messes of the human body, though natural enough, have always caused me to cringe and reach for my guitar, in order to transcend physical distress. Atop a rumpled stained bed I have been known to compose an original ballad, swiftly, flicking my hair out of my eyes and strumming wildly in order to transcend the field of battle. Bobbie, you are so beautiful! some of them cried.

  So it wasn’t bodily. No. It was spiritual. The great moment was the one in which I felt my opponent’s ego collapse…I felt it, though each time was quite different from the others. In some it was the gentle sighing-out of a soul through the mouth…in others it was the popping of a tough, stubborn structure, like a plastic bubble…and though I did not inflict destructive harm to the actress Irma R. that night at El Portal, I felt the click! of her ego as it broke…it was no surprise to me when I learned, a few weeks later, that she had died in a sixteen-car smash-up on the Santa Monica Freeway, initiated by Irma herself when her car swayed a few inches to the left as she drove at eighty miles an hour. It wasn’t just women, either, though their egos were of course joyous things to smash, but men here and there throughout my life, who died in my arms or before my eyes without shedding blood, without the loss of a heartbeat, but who died nevertheless as Gotteson’s ego soared. They gathered themselves together, adjusted their clothing, wiped their foreheads—and walked away! Yet their souls had been smashed, smashed utterly. The way that cop smashed my guitar.

  Eye-to-eye Vanbrugh and I regarded each other, and he was the only man I couldn’t match. My gaze swerved and muddied, confronted with his. I failed. I loved him. Melva’s sixteen-year-old boy, Curly, had a pill-fevered glassy slack-jawed control that almost threw me—like staring into the eyes of a corpse—but I managed to burn him down, the little bastard. And at the Stauntons’ campaign party for Senator Rutland up in Wildrose Canyon I confronted a rival who tried to woo Melva from my side, a platinum-haired boy with twitchy jaw muscles but steelish eyes I somehow thought I had confronted before, maybe Inside, or maybe at one of the psychiatric units I did time in, and for several tense moments it looked as if the little bastard might win.…But he didn’t. He lost. He faltered and dipped and broke and was ground down to nothing by Gotteson’s will.

  When I die, it will be by a shutting-off of my energy valves from within. I will decompose while they stare at me, trying to pump life back into me so that I can be returned to Death Row, and what a commotion it will be, rushing me into the emergency ward to get my heart started again before my brain pops too many cells, what noise, what fury, what a clanging of bells and screaming of sirens! But since my energies arise entirely from my soul they are controlled from within; and no technological wonders from the Outside are going to juice me up again. Let the District Attorney (wired to react with rage) protest all he wishes, and even threaten to bring malpractice charges against the physicians who labored to save me but of course failed!— for though Gotteson slipped up a little in being born, he will not err in his dying. All death is of course suicide. So we have Gotteson in his triumph.…

  The Assumption of the Spider Monkey.

  14

  Soul-Programming

  Danny Minx sometimes known as Danny Blecher sometimes known as The Eye taught me to program my soul; but joked so much, tickled me so much, that the lessons never exactly sank in. Not until I was alone in California, hitch-hiking up and down the coast, sleeping on the shell-hardened sand, edging up to drive-in restaurants to see what I could find in trash-cans or to beg little short-skirted waitresses for hand-outs, and not really until I made my way along the Strip seeking a job, did the conscious utilization of Soul-Programming techniques come to fruition.

  Those big beautiful billboards on Sunset Boulevard helped me. I don’t know exactly how. Helped me tune into something, latch onto something, the way my guitar strummed on its own…receiving words for me as if words came from outer space to me alone, because I was worthy of receiving them. I could set my soul-program for Introspective-Shy or—Volatile. The entire world was open to be imagined in those days. Genius, Gentle. Or Genius, Mad. But the summer of my ascendancy, the four-nights-a-week gig at Lucky Pierre’s, I set myself to a style indefinable though some might call it Sloe-Eyed Gypsy, American.

  When Melva and her friends met me, though, they pinched and nuzzled and tongue-tickled me for The Outlaw, The Devil, Sheik, and other corny old-lady ideas maybe taken from the movies or TV, and it was just to shock them and maybe disgust them (Melva and her lady friends like being disgusted) that I told them I was in essence a Spider Monkey, in my soul, with a looping furry cunning tail scrunched up inside my trousers. Melva shrieked with laughter and said, Jesus, her boys had been right about me, they’d picked a winner this time—those devils! She was very fond of me. She was fond of me from the first. I completed her trio of boys, shorter by some inches than the kids themselves, and the three of us could go anywhere, publicly observed and unsuspicious, Melva herding us into dairy restaurants and into coffee shops and into Venice Park funhouses, tanned and glaring-beautiful in her leggy billowing pants, all of us set for Family Fun.

  But I was her chauffeur at the movie premiere where we chatted with Richard S., the talent scout who handled Fritzie D.B., that mascara-dripping mush-mouthed little singer whose fifty-foot face I had to stare at, across from Lucky Pierre’s all summer long: how I envied Fritzie D. B.! Like me he was over thirty but like me he looked about nineteen. But droopy-eyed, mushy-mouthed! The bastard! And with Richard S. in one corner of the gay-lit theater lobby I deftly switched to Substitute for Fritzie…? And it was uncanny, how Richard S. got that message. He really got it. He stared at me, blinking, while Melva chattered away, and even took out his eyeglasses and put them on, to stare at me all the more, while I gazed eye-to-eye with him sending message after message, all of which he received. I know it. But Fritzie D. B. is still living, still alive, still recording his songs and collecting gold records, a millionaire at the age of thirty-one; it was his agent who died, found dead of an overdose of something, at his boat-house in Malibu. By then it was too late for me anyway, I’d dropped out of that world, by then…I think, yes, by then I had already slipped into my destiny.…

  I had programmed for Revenger. And Hero-of-Headlines. And even Sex Maniac. And: Spider Monkey Triumphs.

  15

  Above the Sea

  —fifteen hundred feet. The air was wet. The sun came out a few times while we were there but in other parts of the sky everything was wet and heavy. Fog moved in like a wall but somewhere else, where I didn’t think there was a horizon, the sun was setting. The reflections of the sun jumped back and forth and made me dizzy.

  I said to them, I hate this place. I hate the wind up here. So I stayed for a while in the front seat of the Rolls-Royce, where I had sometimes slept anyway, just to be alone and away from their noise and their grinning. Melva came out to me, walking barefoot on the sharp-edged gravel, wincing and whimpering to get my attention. “Bobbie, there’s a rainbow. The sky is filled with a rainbow. Bobbie, don’t you care?” she said. I lay with my head down on the seat, not sleeping or trying to sleep, only blank, blanked-out. While she tapped at the window it began to rain again. She had a whining singsong voice not meant for me to hear: “…engagement or adoption?…Engagement or adoption?”

  Some of them said, Go on and get engaged to him!— marry him!

  Others said, Adopt him!

  One of her sons wanted me as a brother. He thought it would be fun. The other son, the zonked-out one, the one I sometimes feared, wanted me as a father. He tugged at Melva’s bracelets and whispered so that I could hear, “I want a father. I already got one brother and I hate him. Now I want a father. I don’t remember my father. I want a new father—I want Bobbie as a father. I want him. I want him.” Glassy-eyed, droop-mouthed, he grinned at me and seemed to be seeing things in the air between himself and me.