Dogrun Page 6

  Lightning-boltishly, I realized I had forgotten Numb. I dashed back through the audience of fashion casualties watching the live musical performance in the park and into the dogrun to find a goateed, pierced, tattooed slacker dude molesting my pup. Actually, the guy wasn’t bad looking. His face came together nicely. His body was long and lanky. But the dark green tattoos that lined his muscular arms and the coil of silver earrings on both ears turned me right off. Looking up at me slowly, he asked the dog while rubbing its head, “Who’s your mommy, huh?”

  “Its mommy taught it not to talk to strangers,” I replied with an unembarrassed smile.

  “Not allowed to leave your dog unattended.” He pointed to a billboard covered with rules.

  “Give me a break.” I took the dog from him. “I had to use the people run.”

  “Numb was playing solo for the past fifteen minutes,” the cretin shot back. “Doesn’t take that long to use the bathroom.”

  “You know its name?”

  “’Course. Where’s Primo?” His eyes searched about the teenage wasteland.

  “He died. Want a dog?”

  “No! Don’t say that!” He started groaning and looked right through me. Another person who made me feel emotionally superficial.

  “How well did you know Primo?” I asked.

  “I’d meet him here. We’d talk,” he recollected. “He was living history; the guy met everyone and did everything.” When he opened his mouth, I was relieved not to see a tongue stud.

  “We’re having a memorial,” I said to prove my humility. “I’m trying to round up as many people as I can.”

  “Well, he was no Merlin.” The tattooed man wiped a tear away.

  “Who the hell’s Merlin?”

  “The homeless cripple on Sixth and A a few years back. You don’t remember him? He used to sit in his sleeping bag reading for months on end.”

  “Sounds like a good boyfriend.”

  “Oh!” The guy spontaneously became inspired. “You should notify that blond girl, what’s her name … Josie! He had a fling with her. I’d see them together a lot.”

  I didn’t respond. We’d been dating for the past six months, which means he was cheating on me. I withheld my outrage and asked, “So where might I find Josie?”

  “Who knows, any bar or bistro probably.” Then, pausing a moment, he added, “Big dumb blond.”

  Glimpsing up at the billboard, I noticed one rule: “No Bitches in Heat.” I was about to leave when, as an afterthought, I asked, “Do you know if Numb is a boy or a girl?”

  He looked under it very carefully and declared, “Either your dog has a very small penis, or she’s a girl.” I thanked him and left with my girl dog.

  When I finally got home, I found a message from Mrs. Schultz: “Hey, whatever your name is, I got Primo’s ashes. I actually had them since Wednesday, but I just found your number. I was hoping that perhaps you could pick them up sometime.”

  Screw him, I thought, let Josie do it. I took a nap and had a strange dream: an attractive woman was standing completely dressed in a shower, but the shower turned into a form-fitting hole in the wet and wormy earth, and the water turned into a long black snake, maybe a python, and its long thick tail was whipping me in the face, whip, whip, whip. But it wasn’t a snake’s tail at all. Looking, I realized it was a man’s hand. The beefy hand was smacking me while I was softly telling the man-hand I loved him. Awaking, I realized it wasn’t entirely a dream. A strange voice was rambling on my machine, talking lovingly about Primo. I snatched up the phone.

  “Don’t hang up,” I said grouchily. “Who are you?”

  “This is Lydia,” she replied. “Minnie Belle called and said you were looking to give Primo’s ex-girlfriend a big inheritance.” I considered giving her Primo’s mother’s address. With the fortune came the curse: she could have Primo.

  “Minnie said you knew his Cambodian girlfriend.”

  “I’m kind of friends with Sue Wott, much as one could be. He used to call her Yoko Uh-oh, but I knew he was crazy for her. Her family made it out of Cambodia just before the Khmer Rouge killed everyone. I think he found that historical detail sexy.”

  “Sounds like him.” He always went for women who were historically down on their luck.

  “They had a real bad breakup.”

  “How did you know him?”

  “I was her friend, but I became his paramour.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “While he dated Sue Wott, I was a parallel lover.” A hippie’s way of saying he was cheating.

  “You’re not blond, are you?” I asked, wondering if this was Josie, the bitch in heat.

  “No” Lydia replied and added, “You have to understand—Primo was a real environmental lover.” I could hear that tie-dyed, self-righteous undertone in her wispy voice. “So what happened to him?”

  “The medical examiner said his heart failed but didn’t give a real reason.”

  “Alas poor Primo. All those free radicals. He was really something.”

  “A real asshole.” I felt foul.

  “You know what? I accept that,” she replied. “But he was also an incredibly intuitive artist.” One detail I noticed about flakes was how they hooked onto their own lexicon and were constantly using trigger words and abstract terms that sounded impressive but rarely meant anything.

  “Primo had about as much intuition as a pigeon,” I debunked. “And I never saw any of this bogus art.”

  “Not many people did.” She knew better than to disagree with me. “If you’re interested, I have some of his videos somewhere. I scored them with Philip Glass music and still watch them from time to time. They really are beautiful. Most were shot around sunset. The sky is incredible.”

  “I thought Sue Wott did all the films.”

  “Oh, she did,” she explained. “But Primo choreographed with me, if you want to call it that. Jane Knonot in Local Vocal magazine called him ‘the John Cage of dance,’ but he was hardly that.”

  “Did he dance?” It was impossible to visualize him in leotards, let alone leaping around.

  “If he did,” she replied, “I never saw him do it.”

  “So what exactly did he do with you?”

  “He got hold of an old camera and shot a series of videos in the summer and fall of ’eighty-five. He called them The Elements. He taped me with another dancer doing what he called Wave Dances. Then we did Storm Dances, Wind Dances, Sun Dances. He never got around to Snow Dances.” A striptease in nature.

  “Just imagine what he would have done in a hurricane,” I quipped.

  “Why did Primo’s heart stop?” she asked. “Was it a heroic death?”

  “If watching TV requires courage, it was.”

  “He talked about that, I think. Watching TV to death, maybe that was what he did.”

  “Not to sound—” I sputtered, and spurted, “How did you feel about cheating on your friend with him?”

  “If you’re trying to make me feel ashamed—” She finally started getting riled, but I didn’t give a damn if she hung up on me.

  “The infidelity doesn’t bother me,” I lied. “But while she was taking care of his child, you were—”

  “She didn’t have a kid back then. And for the record, I suspect Sue Wott knew that we were involved.” She paused. “You have to understand, the early eighties in many ways were more akin to the seventies. No one had heard of AIDS or STDs. We were all trying to discover ourselves through our sexuality.” She was using the generational “we,” fancying herself as part of some cosmic clique.

  “Do you know when Sue Wott dated him?”

  “Roughly through the end of the eighties.”

  “When did you date him?” If that was the right verb.

  “Around ’eighty-three. It was a June-October relationship. Whenever I see autumn leaves, I think of him. Would you like to know our song?”

  “Not right now. I’m just trying to get a general time line of events.” So there it
was: while I was going to junior high, Primo was cheating on his postadolescent wife with her spacey, love-in girlfriend.

  “Has there already been a funeral?” Lydia asked.

  “There’s going to be an ash blow.” It sounded like a piñata party. “Do you know anyone else he dated?”

  “Not really. I stopped bumping into him in the late eighties, when I moved to Williamsburg. I’d hear things about him from time to time, through the grapevine. The last time I remember seeing him was during his summer equinox celebration in ’eighty-nine.”

  “What’s this?”

  “He used to have equinox and solstice celebrations. Did he stop doing that?”

  “He never did one while I was with him,” I replied. My call-waiting beeped. I asked Lydia to excuse me a moment and switched on to Zoë. She and Cathy were in an ugly mood. They had just returned from seeing a spectacular big-budget turd. She assured me that I did the right thing by not going. Now they were going to see some crappy bands at Arlene’s Grocery. Did I care to join them?

  “When you’re single,” she explained, “you have nothing to lose.”

  “There was still sleep,” I replied, and clicked back to Lydia.

  “You wouldn’t know Sue Wott’s phone number, would you?” I asked, before I forgot the whole point of speaking with her.

  “Sure,” she said, flipping through her phone book, “but when she hears who you are, she’s going to flip.” She relinquished a number with a local prefix. She also took the liberty of announcing her own e-mail address, ninpoop.com, which I pretended to write down. She asked if she could have my address so that she could put me on her mailing list for the next time she had a dance performance. Sure, another postcard to throw out.

  She also gave me her phone number and summed up, “Even though I hadn’t really seen him in ten years, just knowing that he was out there somewhere, hustling up a buck, painting, or playing with some new rock-and-roll band, just putting his kaleidoscopic spin on things, well, for me, it’s a day-to-day struggle between life and death, and life is slowly losing, you know?”

  No, but yes.

  She paused a minute, doing mental math, and then added, “Maybe that’s how it’s supposed to be. Once all the cool people that make life worth living are gone, maybe then death ain’t so bad.”

  She hung up. I had never met the Primo these women described. It sounded as if he had run out of Primo-ness by the time he got to me. Why did I choose a man who gave so little of himself? As I dialed Sue Wott’s number, I couldn’t shake this awful feeling that there was something wrong with me.

  After five rings a machine picked up, and a blast of awful rock music exploded on her outgoing message, then a shrill but overly articulate voice yelled, “If you want Sue or Jane, leave a message at the beep, if it’s you Chett Mazur—fuck off! In case you’re lost, the audition is being held on the third floor of Context Studios.” The voice said that this audition would be tomorrow between one and three in the afternoon.

  I hung up before the beep. Context Studios was an old furniture warehouse that had been renovated into a recording studio/rehearsal space over on A between Second and Third Streets. Going to see her in person tomorrow seemed a lot wiser than leaving a message.

  I turned off the light to go to sleep, but felt Primo lying there in the darkness next to me. I could still smell him and feel him. I wanted to simply bury him with a few tears, but nothing came. I hated myself all the more for that. Soon the dog came over and curled around me. I pushed it off the bed.

  chapter 6

  Joey rang my doorbell early the next morning, waking me up. Hearing his voice on the intercom, I buzzed him in and jumped back in bed. I could hear him walking up the rickety stairs, down my hallway, opening my front door, and entering my bedroom. He planted a cup of coffee and croissant on my end table and sat on the edge of my mattress.

  “What time is it?” I mumbled, unable to focus. He was petting Numb.

  “Eight-thirty?” he said, looking over at my clock radio. “I’m here to inspire you.” He must have figured that I was still in my post-Primo depression.

  “You’re not going to tell me crisis is the same word as opportunity in Swahili, or some crap like that?”

  “Not unless dead loser boyfriend is the same phrase as good riddance.”

  I sat up and sniffed the coffee, grateful that he remembered I didn’t take sugar and just a touch of milk.

  “I never understood what you saw in him,” Joey said, rising in his boots and buttoning his blazer back up.

  “You just got here. Want to climb in bed?” I asked nonchalantly.

  “Love to, but I got a business appointment,” he said. “I just wanted to drop by.”

  “I should be hungry around seven, if you want to bring dinner by,” I said by way of thanks and good-bye.

  He smiled, and showed himself out. As if the entire occurrence were a dream, I went back to sleep.

  My inner alarm clock went off at one that afternoon, and I bounced up like a Pop Tart in an overwound toaster. I had to go to the band audition and confront the legendary Sue Wott. I pulled on my grungiest clothes, which were too tight and made me look bustier than I was, walked the dog, drank Joey’s now-cold coffee, and dashed back out to Context Studios. A handwritten note taped out front read, “Auditions for Bassist for Crazed Beaut.”

  I rang the bell and was told to come up to the third floor. In the elevator a mix of dancers, actors, and musicians were going to various studios. I got out on the third floor, which was loud with muffled music.

  “Hey,” squawked an early-middle-aged woman with a long neck and round peroxided-spotted head. She was standing in the doorway of a nearby room. “What time is your appointment?”

  “I’m here to see Sue Wott,” I explained.

  “What’s your name?”

  I told the ostrichlike lady and was informed that my name was not on the list.

  “What list is that?”

  “Aren’t you here for the audition?”

  “For what?”

  She gave me this fed-up look, and I just knew that if I nodded anything but yes, I’d be told to fuck off, so I said yes.

  “Weren’t you given an appointment?” As she held up her hands, I could see every finger was hooped with a huge silver ring.

  “No,” I said politely, playing ball with her.

  “Well, just have a seat, and if someone doesn’t come for their appointment, you can fill it.”

  She pointed to an old sofa and vanished back behind the door of the rehearsal space. Along the couch was a squad of about six unwashed denizens seated side by side, probably wishing they could all be elsewhere. I was the oldest in the group. I noticed that I was the only one who didn’t have a chewed-up bass case. I slouched against one of the worn arms of the sofa, the last place to perch.

  “I’m not here for the audition,” I said to the others in the group, hoping to give peace of mind to this competitive gaggle.

  Before I could get too uncomfortable, the door of the audition room cracked open, and we all could hear human screeching: “I don’t give a fuck how you want to play it! This is my audition! The day you start a band and I come for try-outs, you can tell me how to do it!”

  “Fuck off!” Another shrill female voice rebutted. A door flew open and a Joan Jettish lookalike stormed over to the elevator, toting her bass.

  Following her, a tall, slim Asian terror marched over, her hair swirling all around her like a small brunette typhoon. The anarchistic gang of bass players tightened into a unified chorus of petrified auditioners.

  The bandleader marched over to us and gave a razor-slashing smile: “Let’s get this straight. If any one of you can’t take orders, the elevator’s over there.” She thumbed behind her, which was actually the opposite direction from the elevator. “You’re here to do as I say. If you have any problems with that, don’t waste my time.”

  She then turned heel, threw open the beaten plywood door that she came f
rom, and vanished back inside.

  “Fuck this.” One of the girls rose. “I heard she was bonkers, but this is insane.”

  “You’re right,” another girl concurred. This one had a rainbow of dyes in the outer fringe of her volcano haircut. The two girls headed down the stairs. After a minute, a third, green-haired leaf fell from the withered tree of that autumnal sofa.

  “I guess that just leaves us,” I said, smiling to the two masochists seated next to me.

  Just as I was about to lose the last of my courage to speak to the tiny terror, the door flipped open and the spotted ostrich chirped at me, “Hey, Natalie Merchandize! You’re on.”

  “They’re ahead of me.” I pointed to the two girls seated next to me. I was hoping to catch Sue on the way out.

  “We’re waiting for someone in that studio,” one of the girls volunteered.

  “What? Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked one. She shrugged; the other looked utterly vegetated. The two were shiny examples of the pernicious effects of rock and roll.

  “Where’s your instrument?” the peroxide abuser asked before I stepped into the tightly insulated rehearsal space.

  “If I can just speak to Sue for a moment?”

  “Come on.” Peroxide beckoned me inside the claustrophobic chamber that was packed and coiled with cables like a satellite about to be launched into outer space. Sue and another girl were casually holding their weapons, chatting.