The Road Narrows As You Go (24 page)

After one whiff, the owner's head kicked back, he stamped and whinnied and had to pull the goggles off, they'd steamed up. That is powerful stuff, he said. He bought ten bottles, cash.

Take in those heart notes, Jonjay said. You catch hints of sambac and ylang ylang as they pitterpatter across the waves of the fragrance. I'm showing this product to you
first
, was all Jonjay had to say to Isola delle Femmine, the swooning Sicilian mother who owned Dahlinks, the chic men's and women's boutique south of Market catering to the opera crowd.

Put a drop from the tester bottle on a wrist, and say no more, sales were final. No consignment. Fifty per.

What was it about Ruthvah? Definitely not the first eye-watering impression of cat litter and a man's armpit, cherry cola and dirty snow. It was the headrush from the after-effect of those heavy base notes that knocked you out, this vapour hit like a brick in the back of the head. Followed often by immediate and singular arousal. The smell of having sex mixed with the smell of wanting sex. Inhaling Ruthvah gave men the appetite, like a bull growing his first horns, it made his chest puff up, his legs bow in stride, his chin shoot up, jaw thrust forward, eyes flickering like bonfires. On women the effect was biological: you caught
a good lungful of Ruthvah and it made the mouth water, nostrils and pupils dilate, nipples harden, thighs open, toes curl, the brain swooned, the tongue purred. You couldn't slap yourself out of it, the fragrance lasted on your conscience or libido long after it had evaporated from the air and your skin.

Justine Witlaw wanted twenty-five bottles but didn't have the money, and his policy of no consignments vexed her, but she relented, dug deep and bought three. She swore she would have the rest,
and
what she owed for those old sales to Frank Fleecen, which she still hadn't paid him, by end of day. Not doubting her desire one bit, Jonjay ignored her vow anyway, and we never rode back to Chinatown to collect. If she wants art, she needs to pay what she owes, was Jonjay's idea of gallery representation. He wondered if she owed O'Connell money for blue squares, or Ferzetti for his pedestals and plinths, or was he the only one she stiffed?

Instead we ended the day riding to Little Russia where we visited Anton LaVey at his Black House commune. The Black House was on California Street down from the Rumble Fish diner, on a hill that could see, on a clear day, the Transamerica Pyramid downtown, like looking at a dollar bill on the horizon. The Church of Satan's home base was a hundred-year-old Victorian house painted matte black including the windows, with high-gloss purple accents. It stood in an otherwise altogether bright, friendly family neighbourhood near Golden Gate Bridge. LaVey was another Californian like Hick Elmdales who collected an enormous and vast library of old 78 rpm shellac records. This wall of fast-spinning, crackly good ditties, and prehistoric organs and synthesizers, was the focus of an entire room dedicated to listening parties. LaVey was also nuts for Hammer horror films and liked to dress himself after Bela Lugosi or maybe a character played by Christopher Plummer. He plucked his eyebrows into angry circumflexes and wore a Vandyke beard. He wanted us to come in, hang out in his
home theatre
and watch the lost reels from Hammer's incomplete 1976 adaptation of
Vampirella
, featuring Valerie Leon.

I need to
meet
this chick, LaVey said with his inverted grin, a trademark expression he honed back in his days pumping out musical oddities at the Wurlitzer in a Los Angeles tiki bar.

Jonjay told him about Ruthvah—Crowley's own recipe, Jonjay said, and LaVey was clearly intrigued when Jonjay told him the story of meeting the man. LaVey wanted to know where in the Bhutan, and Jonjay described a trek he took across seventeen days (all in astral projection, a nine-hour meditation), climbing the giant steps of broken rock in the cliffs of the Paro region. While he listened to the story, LaVey uncorked the tester and tipped a drop onto the underside of his wrist. He bought three bottles.

Hey, man, I haven't seen you for at least thirteen months, LaVey said. Hey I heard a while back. I'm sorry about your friend Hick. He dropped a lot of Thelemic subliminals in his comic. I liked him. A great talent. A force for libertinism. I've had a few friends die recently. Terrible deaths. It's these cancer sores. They get them on their face, everywhere. One friend of mine, we called him the Turk, he turned blue before he died. Have you seen how overcrowded the hospital is? And you see how many gays it's hitting? Strange shit, wouldn't you say? Is that how Hick died?

Yeah, it is.

It's a modern-day plague I heard the CIA invented.

No one is trying to stop it, that's for sure, said Jonjay.

Give Crowley my regards, LaVey said at the door to the Black House, giving us the devil's horns and bidding us a day of total fulfillment.

And on we rode to yet another prospective buyer, and another, until he was sold out of his tiny bottles and we were all swooning, aroused to the ears from inhaling those intense fumes all day, halfway to an orgasm. It was at least as lucrative as the weed in the laundry basket. Jonjay earned five thousand plus tips from a pot on the stove. From this, he broke off twenty-five hundred and gave it to Wendy.

That's to cover the rent I owe you, he said as he hung his bicycle back
up on the ceiling, then stripped naked in the hallway on the walk to the shower. I'm not rich like you think. But I am entrepreneurial.

Thanks, but that's okay, she said, and chasing after his bare ass tried to return the cash but he wouldn't let her into the bathroom. He turned on the shower. She shouted, I needed to borrow this back in
May
when I was broke and none of my cheques were here yet but I scraped it together, so don't worry. Keep it. Money is a-rolling now.

Well, gee, Jonjay shouted over the water running, I wish you'd keep some money from my profits anyway. After all, I made this scent to pay you back, Wendy.

I don't need money. I need—

Hey, is that you pounding on the door?

Yes! Let me in!

I'm in the shower, leave me alone!

Sliding to the floor in a crumpled ball. No, no, no, not again.

STRAYS

17

One warm blue-sky day in the mid-eighties—we want to say it was in eighty-four but it might have been as early as eighty-three—Wendy took a bicycle off the ceiling and rode down Stoneman Street to take in some fresh air, clear her head, get some exercise, and be away from the constant crushing pain of seeing Jonjay in the room. Some afternoons he was out selling batches of Ruthvah. Other times he would draw or read. In no hurry to manifest himself. He was going to spend days on end indoors in front of a television or three televisions recording shows onto VHS tapes and drawing the odd picture or two, a monk or an artist, stage actress or bodhisattva in his signature style. Then Wendy would reach a hormonal breaking point and need for him to be out of her sightline for a while. She would say, I'm losing my mind, I need to get out of here. If it was a weekend she might ride down the hill to The Farm under the freeway and dance to live folk music or hear a poetry reading by young men who wanted to exude whatever it was they thought made Leonard Cohen so charismatic. If nothing was happening at The Farm then she'd go see the opening night of an art show at Justine Witlaw's—Jonjay would never go
there, in case she pinned him to a date for a solo show. In fact it took three years for Justine to pay back what she owed him from the sales in eighty-one to Frank Fleecen. Or she would go to the museum and sit on a chair and sketch the reactions visitors had to the perplexing features of modern art. She agreed to autograph signings at bookstores and comic shops for something to get her out of the manor. She took a bike and rode it as far as Broadway and then pushed on west to the public library where she sometimes liked to draw for a change, especially if she was in the mood to look at boys. When she got back from the library that evening, boy she had a story to tell us.

She came busting into the manor in a cold sweat, shivering and huffing for air, pale as cucumber flesh and belching. She flopped down at the table and with her face in her arms said, I just got approached by a
spy
.

Her routine when she visited the library was to browse the Fine Arts section for comics treasuries and random art history volumes, then go sit in a carrel with a good view of the other visitors, read her books, and sketch gag ideas to develop later back at the longtable. On this day, however, the Fine Arts section reeked to high hell of soiled pants and something more pungent than any body odour, coming from two bearded men hunched over across from each other at a table, flipping through the latest issues of
Art Monthly
and
Creative Review
. Others did the same about-face at the top of the stairs that she did and hooted at the stink. One level down on Business and Science the air was fresh, the floor unstained, and the tables were neat and tidy. The carrels were occupied by gentlemen with textbooks and notepapers, and handsome men were scanning the card catalogues on the search for esoteric subjects. She caught the eye of one man in a brown corduroy suit who looked familiar, but he didn't smile back as he went and found a carrel. He opened a slim Stefan Zweig novel, oddly not a library copy. Maybe it wasn't so odd. She decided to sit near him in case she could get him to flirt. Now she planned to always sit on this floor instead of Fine Arts where the homeless were indistinguishable
from the art students and art teachers. On Business and Science there were real prospects for her to goggle. There were professionals here, or at least men inclined towards a career. A slim six-foot man with bright red hair cut in the military style walked by her carrying a leatherbound copy of
The Complete History of Plastic Surgery
. He went up to the librarian at the front desk.

Can you pull for me all the material you have on Mentor Worldwide LLC, the breast implant manufacturer?

Certainly, said the librarian, making a note on a piece of paper. I'll have that brought to your carrel.

Wendy had no idea it was possible to ask a librarian to complete such a task. As she sat in her carrel admiring the men and women for how they comported themselves and studying their clothes, she toyed with ideas of Buck as mad-dog scientist in a junkyard lab, made a sketch of Francis as a trigonometry professor at a blackboard in front of hundreds of rabbit ears; another doodle showed a patient on the operating table with her cat Murphy as head surgeon. She had never read Stefan Zweig but even the name was familiar for some reason.

She went to the librarian and asked for any information they had on the company Lupercal.

Lupercal Plastics? Give me ten minutes. Why don't I find you in your carrel, the librarian said and stood from her chair without a hint of being hard done by.

Remarkable service. She sat in a carrel with a view of city hall's domed roof and read through what the librarian brought her. Lupercal Plastics LLC was a private holding company with plastic products across several industries. Originally a manufacturer based in Long Island specializing in plastic and rubber synthetics, eventually their factories ran up and down the Eastern Seaboard. Then, at the behest of toy manufacturers in California, the company moved their head office to El Segundo. With Frank Fleecen's help, they were stripping down their East Coast operations. The most
recent newspaper clipping in the pile the librarian provided noted their expansion into El Salvador and Nicaragua to meet the demands of contracts for the military-industrial complex, from bootsoles to flak jackets to weather balloons. And for the civilian population, Lupercal provided the fabric for hot-air balloons and, what interested Wendy the most, Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade balloons. The
Pennsylvania Senator
wrote about how Lupercal designed and fabricated the big Superman, Peter Pan, and Mickey Mouse balloons, and all the other floating ambassadors of commerce ringing in the Christmas season every November. It mentioned Lupercal's announcement of a sale of bonds to finance the expansion of their fabric factories, to make bigger, more elaborate balloons.

She read the name Frank Fleecen as the chief negotiator in deal after deal, including the debt financing for Lupercal's expansion into Central America—worth twenty-five million dollars in 1980.

She went back to the librarian and asked what they had on Frank Fleecen.

The financier? Now let me see, the librarian said and stretched in her chair.

It took the librarian about half an hour, during which Wendy sketched the man in the corduroy suit and a woman with a phrasebook whispering English to herself. Then the librarian brought Wendy a file folder full of newspaper and magazine clippings and two textbooks that had Fleecen's name in the acknowledgments.

Want me to get started on another subject or are you okay? the librarian asked.

Thank you, said Wendy. What an amazing service librarians provide.

Yeah well, beats the coal mines.