Bogeywoman (7 page)

But this was before the menu, before Zuk, before I said a single word. Foofer musta thought he’d heard it all, but one year, seven months and seven days of nothing?—I have reason to think he was impressed.

A state hospital would have rolled me over in a week, but Thomas Hare Rohring and Eugenia O. Rohring Clinic could afford to ponder my case. After all, Merlin was forking over a hundred dollars a day. Merlin felt sick at heart for the mess I was in—he said—but he was having a good year. No way Merlin’s Puppets World Tour could come home from Haiphong, or Penang, or Surabaya, or wherever he was that week, just to nurse me. “And I’d
have
to nurse you,” he threatened, his voice all thready sizzles and crackles on the phone from the bamboo post office of some island campong, “because I sure wouldn’t have the dough to keep you in Rohring Rohring if I came home.”

I never quite got it how being the wizard of world peace
during the Vietnam War turned into money for the old man; there couldn’t have been any dough in those two-donkey village squares where Merlin’s Puppets was always mounting the same old show. But sumpm must have turned into sumpm because here I was. Only famous court cases like O and Emily got scholarships to this dump. Anyhow, the way I looked at it, after all those years of feeling left out of the fame part, here I was doing my bit for history by costing Merlin so many dollars a day that he had to stay in Asia and be the bane of Lyndon Bugbane Johnson himself. Now and then I did wonder just what unsavory republic might be putting up the bucks.

Still, that was a terrifying threat from Merlin:
I’d have to nurse you
 … It meant of course being nursed not by Merlin but by the cadaverous vice puppeteer Suzette, who’d be flown home from Hanoi or Samovarobad or somewhere for the purpose. Which, shudder, could mean that the theatrical vampiress might one day try to touch me with her creepy whisker-thin hands. And also the idea of home starched my will to stay where I was. I had said—in fact I had hollered, pretty inconveniently if I should ever change my mind—that if they threw me out of Camp Chunkagunk I would never go home. And I didn’t. Not that I had a home to go home to, in the usual sense of the word. But this way
they
wouldn’t slap one together for me, either, with some slave-driving twenty-one-star foster mom out in Harford County, in the pay of the state, with the girls’ dormitory set up in an old chicken house on the family farm and enough “chores” to exhaust an infantry battalion.

Anyway the social worker wouldn’t hear of me going back to Merlin’s house on Ploy Street all alone, to bounce around like the last beebee in a broken puzzle, the only one that hadn’t rolled out the hole yet. Merlin and Suzette were on tour and
sister Margaret was off somewhere with that racetrack bum and couldn’t be reached—yes I had given up on old Margaret, for the moment.

To save me from being
remanded to the juvenile authorities
, a phrase terrifying even to him, Merlin used his connections to get me into Rohring Rohring and sent the cadaverous vice puppeteer Suzette home from I think it was Fiji, for a week. She packed whatever looked like my stuff in spare packing crates from Merlin’s World Tour and was supposedly going to haul it up six floors to the Adolescent Wing of the bughouse all by herself. But as soon as Mr. Nurse’s Aide Reggie Blanchard spotted the skeletal but rich and trashy-looking redhead endangering her fake fingernails on those boxes, he saw fit to saunter out of the supply closet, where he was sneaking a smoke, and carried them for her. And come to think of it that was my first sight of the Regicide, once the crates and I were both upstairs—as he leaned against the supply room door, staring down his Egyptian nose at Suzette’s stony buttocks in a miniskirt, and sliding his hand out of the white pants pocket where he had just stuffed her enormous tip.

I had a private room—we all did. Likewise a private bath and, as I said, a private closet. These lodgings weren’t fancy but neither were they like your common everyday hospital room, nor even like the clean ugly compartments in a new motel. Instead they kinda reminded me of servants’ bedrooms in swanky old Central Park West apartments like Grandma Schapiro’s, or in Monument Street brownstones like Grandpa Koderer’s, square airy rooms, neither small nor large, high-ceilinged, white-walled, with oak woodwork. And one large window, barred in a discreetly ornamental fashion, just like at Grandma’s.

To return to my private closet, its oaken doorframe had been
blackened by a thousand coats of shellac, and the cracks in the plaster resembled the queen of spades in deep décolletage, looking at her icy self upside down in the playing card mirror. I had better sense of course than to tell
them
that. Bertie Stein, who lived next door to me, once whispered to a nurse’s aide that the tangled pipes and cracks and water stains on his ceiling were maps, drawn by trolls, of the royal palace. If Bertie said it, this was nothing but doper’s theater you may be sure, and even so there was sumpm in it: one floor up were the offices of all our dreambox mechanics, traceable by their rotten plumbing, if you left out about the trolls. Bertie got a little pill each morning for that indiscretion, Hollywood Bar blue, Stelazine it was called, which to me sounded just like the name of some babydoll-faced bride whining for a dope (meaning a Coca-Cola) in a Tennessee Williams play. Bertie even kinda looked like Stella Zeen, with his silky page boy, and soft co-cola eyes, and droopy little shoulders. So as usual Bertie got his dope, and took it too. Even if it made his head feel like a cabbage, to him any pill at all was better than no pill.

As for me, as long as I was here, I took my job to heart of being a bughead—for I saw right away that the others were better at it than me. I was a
Unbeknownst To Everybody, and I meant to keep it that way. It was like I’d pitched my one-woman igloo at the South Pole, where nobody’d ever see it, and now and then I wondered if I might not as well be dead as be bopping around with the penguins down here.

Course I knew I wasn’t the only
in the world. At Girls’ Classical I used to hear the rumors—what the hump, I spread some myself—about those two Popeye-jawed gym teachers Miss Swigart and Miss Dusterhof, in their size 14 lime-green gym-suits and pink eyeglasses, who had oversprung kneecaps bulging
out a bit at the back and raucous altos like military macaws. At least Swigart and Dusterhof had each other, or at least they had the same address in the Vineyard Villas Apartments on North Charles Street. I never asked em—lemme die first—but I looked em up in the phonebook. I knew I might grow into a bird like that myself someday. I didn’t want to be in the same club with those gnarled dollies even if it was the only one that would have me for a member.

When I got to Rohring Rohring, my cut-up arms said sumpm loud and clear to the management, but then there were three hours a week with Dr. Foofer left to kill. I treated my dreambox mechanic to the changeless silence of the ice shelf. With all that empty space for interpretation, the old gas bag thought the worst of me, I could tell, and I was pleased. Still, at pharmaceuticals that might seed the brainclouds in my dreambox and really change the weather, I had to draw the line. I mean I didn’t even know what my own real weather was yet. So I tongue-rolled every little green pill and stockpiled them in the hem of my overalls, just in case I might as well be dead.

Then I made it into the Bug Motels (the name of our rock group): which was Bertie, Dion, Emily, O and me. None of us heard voices. None of us thought we were the Virgin Mary or Jesus either. I got asked into the Bug Motels one day when I saw that one more green pill and the bottom of my overalls would sag. So I palmed over to Bertie an M&M’s bag full of the things. “Holy godzilla,” he said, “good stuff. How much?” “Nuttin,” I said, and next thing I knew I was sitting at the Bug Motels’ table in the dayroom, bidding zero at O Hell.

Everybody said that Bertie Stein had had a brilliant mind before it got flattened under the influence of various drugs like a chihuahua under a garbage truck. He had pawned his genius
sister’s viola, a Guarneri del Gesù, insured for $50,000, to buy a block of hashish the size of a small pound cake, and had smoked the whole thing himself, and so landed in Rohring Rohring.

Dion Dragoumis had been sent to the bughouse, so the story went, to save him from his old man. His file had come not from Juvenile Justice but from some anti-racketeering office in Washington, where he had begged an agent to hide him.

So how did being in Rohring Rohring hide him? Basil “The Blowfish” Dragoumis still had to pay his bills and knew just where the kid was. Even we could tell Dion wasn’t cut out to be a gangster, and at first we considered this a point in his favor. But soon we kinda wished The Blowfish would apply some muscle to the case.

Dion loved himself all day every day, until sumpm better came along. Then he would drop his old self just like that for his new self. No way he would love anybody else’s self—he could only suck it up and swallow it and make it his self. He took Bertie’s slinky walk for instance, and my skeptical snort. He was so handsome he was ugly, and his tailor would come by the Adolescent Wing with swatches of sharkskin and shantung rippling with silvery light, and ruffled shirts and pointy tasseled shoes. The rest of us dirtballs stared.

The bughouse is no democracy, but in a way the buggy majority rules. To us other Bug Motels Dion was a doomed and laughable sicko in his Liberace clothes: We never realized that he was on his way, we were the flops, until later. Dion was all but useless on mission for the Bug Motels, since he refused to carry anything in his pocket, not even a key or a dollar bill, for fear it would mess up the line of his trousers. But he wasn’t being bugged by the FBI, well maybe he was but he didn’t
think
he was, and we had to admit he looked like one of the Four Tops, so he qualified for the Bug Motels.

Emily Nix Peabody, refusal was her middle name, was eleven years old, weighed fifty-four pounds and losing, and wouldn’t eat for weeks, maybe months or years. Otherwise she was the pet of the place, Miss Dying Popularity we called her. So that was us on “the Adolescent Wing”—the east end of the sixth floor of Rohring Rohring—except for Mrs. Wilmot.

Why Mrs. Wilmot was still in the Teenage Ward after all these years, nobody knew. Wilmot was a skinny-shanked, potbellied old girl of around sixty, in a buttonless (or she’d have unbuttoned it) pink chemise, with skin like a wet brown bag sliding down her bones. Now
that
woman was crazy, which, come to think of it, did nothing for her prestige with us Bug Motels. Mostly what she did was sit on the bench just inside the entrance to the Adolescent Wing and pull up her dress and waggle the peapod, yes I mean her graypink coochie in its skimpy ring of grizzled whiskers, in full view of all of us.

Maybe
they
thought we teenage loonies needed some kinda callous on our sexual eyeballs and maybe it worked, anyhow it wasn’t sex we Bug Motels were conspiring on, at least not with each other, even though we had our beauty, O. And now I gotta tell you about O. Of all the girlgoyles I ever fell for, O was the most ridiculously urgent. She was a cross between Mary Hartline of
Super Circus
and the kind of drapette who would jump you at the bus stop and kick you in the shins and tear out your hairclips and throw your schoolbooks down the sewer. Her hair was like fiberglass snow in Hutzler’s window at Christmastime, mounds of ratted platinum, about fifteen pounds of it, frizzed on rollers, crackling with white electricity and a million shiny threads flying. She had on ballet slippers with little pink elastic bands over the arch like only a drapette would wear, and a sheath skirt that knocked her knees together so hard she had to scuff along pigeon-toed. Her eyes were big, dark, wet and
ringed with blacking. She couldn’t see without glasses, which she didn’t even own, and she could hardly walk in that skirt, but she beamed agile violence, so that somehow I always thought of her walking like Mary Hartline upside down on a pair of jeweled daggers in her hands.

Every man O had known had tried to oink her—anyway she said so, that was her problem, that and working the Pratt Street bars from the age of twelve, for they had all tried and a lot of them had succeeded. And somewhere along the way she started to charge for it. And then, sumpm else happened, sumpm with a knife. O was a police case too. Probably everything she said was true, certainly she was the belle of the bughouse, where the dreambox mechanics told her: she
had
to stop thinking of men that way. Anyhow no suitor was too lowly for her chill, calm, slightly cross-eyed smile. Not even me.