We got busy. We called those old dinosaurs God for awhile. Then the Devil. Then cute little chorus girls with nice gams in plays about dreams. They didn’t go away. They just weren’t first on the guest list anymore. And still, Al couldn’t ever leave us be. Why should he? He’ll tell you for free. If you feed something long enough, you own it. He just keeps on shoveling music and dancing and death and blood and his best hooch onto our plates. He’d tell you he’s been pretty damn honest all along. Music is made out of death. Mammoths and horses and cats all in cairns and that’s how you get Mozart and Euripides and Fats Waller. Dancing is a funeral, too, waltzing down the elephants you killed so you and yours could have one more night when you could forget that the glaciers are still at the door, that there’s still nothing but eating and fucking and killing and trying not to get killed and berries that make you see stars and apples that make you see the difference between what’s good and what’s bad.
You always trade blood for joy. It’s always a deal struck in the wet and the dark. Al didn’t make the rules. He just dances to the s
ong that’s playing. He wants things, too. And I asked him once but he didn’t say, so I’m just going to tell you what I think. That’s cool, right?
I think Al just wants to feel like he did that first night he showed a caveman how to make a drum and thump the ground. Wants to be the whole world waiting to happen to somebody. Wants to look at a person and see civilization spin up in their eyes, but not just civilization, not just thousands of years of dancing, dancing on pyramids, dancing on galleons, dancing on rockets, dancing on Arcturus, not just that, but also love like pyramids and galleons and rockets. Love like being born. The kind of love you give a guy who taught you everything you know. Everything that matters.
Even if he’s a son of a bitch.
The Grand Ballroom
So Frankie Key, he walks into the Grand Ballroom. And people there are doing what they’ve always done. Slake rolled out fake grass over the floor last summer so folks could practice their putting. Thousands of strands of silk and wool and satin. Looks like the real thing. Even smells like it—some perfumer in the Financial District whipped up a batch of 9th Hole Ambrosia: good soil and sprinkler water and fresh, dewy blades of grass with a little hot hazard sand and moist pond water sliced in for good measure. Green as England. And everyone’s barefoot on this grass that isn’t grass, dancing quick and slow, quick and slow, quick, quick, slow, slow. A couple of old-timers are playing through some infinite eighteenth hole, sinking balls like pearls into black mouths in the floor. A bunch of girls with violets in their hair play croquet, whacking their mallets so hard the balls sail over the dancers, through their swinging, waving arms. A red one shatters a wall-lamp. Everyone laughs. Music plays through, too, mammoth music, cat music, horse music, from five pianos, ten guitars, about a hundred drums, a couple of horns and maybe a squeezebox, and they’re all playing different songs, different times, different everything, but somehow it’s not and they’re all together, the piano boys and the horn-girls and the drummers everywhere and the strummers, too, and the squeezebox orphan squeezing like she’s gonna die any minute and this is the last polka she’s got.
And Frankie walks through it all like somebody’s dad. Nobody meets his eye. Backs get turned one by one, bare and glittered and tuxed and tailed. Champagne conversation bubbles and foams and bubbles down to the floor and not one gulp of it goes hey buddy where’d you come from? Can I get you a canape? Sippa somethin’ nice? No girl dancing by her lonesome looks up with hope when Frankie’s shadow hits her shoes. No boy brushes up against him in that way that feels like a sweet, soft, uncertain question. He’s nothing. He’s no one. He’s invisible.
Frankie’s a fella who likes his books, so he thinks of Perseus. He thinks of the cap of darkness that slick got on his way to look at an ugly dame. Thinks of Andromeda, tied up to a rock waiting for a whale to show her into his guts. He walks by a tap-dancing boy with suspenders chippered up with sapphires and white bows and a chin you coulda ordered from a catalogue. The boy taps on Frankie’s big toe and just keeps on going. Frankie yelps. The boy doesn’t even glance. Three girls who work together selling cigarettes and candy at the cinema down on 44th pass a silver compact between them, each taking their turn looking in the glass before passing it on like a joint, like a flask, like a sacred, all-seeing, all-judging eye. He tips his hat. They don’t blink. Maybe it’s Al’s magic, making him scarce. Maybe it’s the swimming cap he’s got stuffed in his pocket like a showgirl’s panties.
Nah.
It’s a simpler magic. An older magic. Older than Perseus? You bet. Older than Father Time’s greatest hits. Rich man’s magic, and here it is:
Nobody minds the help.
Frankie’s in his bellhop glad rags, brass buttons and bombazine twill and a pillbox cap of green, green darkness with a chinstrap so it stays on even if he should happen to need to go on hands and knees in the dumpster out back for some four-year-old princess’s favorite blue ribbon. Nobody wants to lock eyes with the guy who’s gonna have to clean up their good time while they sleep it off. Nobody’s looking to go home with the staff at midnight—that action only starts around three in the a.m., when other choices have split. I’ll tell you what, Perseus never had it so good. Mr. P was a god’s son, which is just another way of saying old money. Everywhere that cat went people gave him their best goat. He had the shiniest hair and the best teeth. But he needed magic to get ignored by the world. Magic knitted in hell by a chick with three faces and a mean backhand.
Frankie can do that shit for free.
He just slips on by. It shakes him up at first. Even a bellhop, when he’s a nice-looking white boy with a degree in one pocket and his mother’s love in the other, wants to be seen. Likes to be seen. Hell, doesn’t everyone? But Frankie’s always been seen. He’s used to it. He likes it. Likes how folks ask the time on the street because they know a chap like him has a watch. Likes how he gets to say who he wants for President in a bar and everyone nods agreement. Likes how his name sits on a magazine cover, his own honest-born name, even if it’s in tiny yellow print at the bottom corner under an ad for detergent. Even in his Artemisia get-up, when he goes to somebody’s door, he’s expected. They shake his hand, tip him for his trouble. Call him a nice young man. But now, when the party’s sprawled over the fake grass, wine glasses sunk in the golf-green, bubbly holes-in-one, when he should be glowing like a dock light, he’s a ghost.
The writer in him, though, the writer in him likes it fine. He can listen like a mouse at a cat congress. It’s almost like manning the tubes. Coy never came to my show. Never wrote a word about it. We had to close inside a week. What can you do? Come on baby, the wife’s in Spain. I’ve got my money in rail, mostly, but I’m branching out into pharmaceuticals. Sounds grand, mister. Got anymore of that black-bottle stuff? Opium never got me so high…
And just like that he’s bored. It’s not like the tubes, it’s just the same. There’s no such thing as a secret, really. The only secret is: I want something I don’t have. I’m dying for it. Losing sleep. Give it, Christ, give it here or I don’t know what I’ll do. And sometimes it’s something they shouldn’t have and sometimes it’s something they’ll never have and sometimes it’s peace of mind and sometimes it’s the end to all wars but mostly it’s just money or love. Money or love. Money that looks like love and love that looks like money. And since Frankie’s dying for those, too, he’s bored by them, by everyone else panting after them just like him.
He tries talking.
Al sent me: to an elderly golfer with plaid pants and pound coins in his loafers. Have you seen Al tonight: to a dowager wearing three ivory black-backed cameos. Can you get into the basement from here: to the piano-player with marigolds braided in his black beard, who brought his music downtown even though it’s the only precious thing he’s got and these dumb white drunks just eat it without tasting.
Nobody answers. They look past him. They don’t see. They shift a glass from one hand to another, tap a ball like a bank safe and send it to its final resting place, shift the song into G Major and sing out: send this orphan boy home, home, home before he ain’t got nothing left but his bones, bones, bones. Frankie can’t figure it out. Al’s always been there with a pun and a paycheck whenever they’ve met. What’s he done wrong?
Okay, he tells himself, you’re a gumshoe. You’re Frankie K. Frankie the Ghost. Strong and silent. On the case. What are your assets? He pats his chest, his front pockets, his back pockets, the atheist’s genuflection. Billfold, skeleton key, notepad, pen. Safety pin. Hard cherry candy.
Swimming cap.
Frankie the Ghost yanks off his pillbox bellhop crown and stretches the black shiny latex over his hair, ripping out strands of his straw-colored mop-top. Silver stars pop into place over his ears. He fits the rubber chinstrap nice and tight.
And falls to the ground. To the fake grass. To the green.
Agony arcs through his skull, electric firework horror ticker tape flick-film. His eyes bulge, muscles lock up, spine turns to a pillar of sizzling salt. An heiress steps over him, losing her slingback as she goes, sticking its cream leather heel in his back pocket. She scuttles for the bar rather than go back for it and have to make little puppy noises like she cares. Frankie tries to get his hands up under the cap to get it off, get it off, but his elbows are frozen in pain like a stuck bomb, halfway blown. He’s making a scene, now. His invisibility won’t hold much longer. Poor lamb.
The cat in the plaid pants comes up behind him. Trying to play through, just like the rest of us. He winds back his putter like St. So-and-So’s lance and knocks Frankie in the rear. It’s not a tough shot. The old codger will make par in the ballroom, that’s for sure. And even though he doesn’t want to, doesn’t even seem like that knock should do a damn thing, Frankie rolls. He rolls toward the golf hole with a proud 18 flag and a broken champagne flute sticking out of it. It’s black in there, blacker than it should be, and bigger than it should be, and he’s teetering toward it, electric night still rutting his brain into obliteration, and it opens like a sinkhole, like quicksand, like the doors to the Artemisia, like money and love and Zelda in the bathtub, it opens like a book waiting to be written, and Frankie the Ghost is falling under grass.
B2
“Whatcha got that on for?”
It’s a voice he knows. A silly, laughing voice. A voice out of a schoolyard, teasing, coaxing, the kind of voice that invites you back behind the gymnasium for one glorious cigarette, shared like communion, transubstantiated into the holiest of nicotine-spirits by her hand.
It’s Zelda.