Free Broken Sleep by Bruce Bauman Page A

finally done ’til Duckman grabs my arm. “How much you get?”
    “Hundred.”
    “That and the shit be mine for services rendered.” No way I’m hosing Duckman. “And, one mo’ thing, as I am sure you remember, anything you sell to the white boys in here, I gets seventy-five percent. And them other three corners, I
owns
’em.” He and Alchemy shake hands. I hand over the cash and the dope to the Duckman, and he quacks on back to his corner. Alchemy yells out to me, “You up for a ride?”
    “Where to?”
    “L.A. Going to start a band there.”
    Never been to L.A. and I ain’t got sweet nuthin’ to lose and no future in New York. “Let’s jam.”
    Alchemy drove like red lights, slow-moving cars, potholes is just hazards to be avoided. Or not. In minutes, we’re over the GW Bridge and jetting away from dumps like Bayonne, the “American Dream Developments,” and them putrid gas tanks of the “Garden State.” Yeah, a garden doused in weed kill. I’m thinking to myself,
So Looong Flushin’
, when he swivels his head so he’s looking backward and stares at the city, and I’m getting a tick nervous here about his driving skills, and he says, “Look at that skyline, and the acolyte cities, the lights, they’re like God’s dissonant drips merging across the sky on a Jackson Pollock canvas.” Uh, yeah, sure. I don’t know Jackson Pollock from Jack-in-the-fuckin’-Box, and if God created Hoboken in his image, then book me a ticket to Satanville.
    A coupla minutes later he turns and asks, “So, besides taking advantage of foolish college kids, what do you want to do?”
    “Pile up chicks and money,” I croon. We laugh and start riffing about L.A. and the music we want to play and all the movies we dig and all the shit we have in common. ’Cause I don’t know yet, but sense there’s plenty we don’t.
    We drive for a coupla hours and it’s like 4 A.M. when he pulls off the 80. Even at that hour it’s not like any Jersey that I seen. No gas and garbage smells.
    He announces, “I need to see my mom. There’s a motel where we can get some rest first.” In the room, in like one minute, the guy’s asleep. About two hours later, I hear him howling. I am freak-
ing
out, and I don’t freak easy, but I ain’t never heard such scarifying noises exiting out from no one except when Tommy Huston shot Davy Rathbone in the nuts. I’m thinking the guy is a psycho or he’s gonna die on me andthat’s all the bullshit I need, stuck with a “borrowed” car and a dead body in Nofuckingwhere, New Jersey. I leap out of bed, turn on the lights, and shake his ass awake. He sits up, he’s all sweaty, and his eyes—whew! They are a kaleidoscope of light and dark browns with dots of tans and whites, gonzo wild and like he has just seen God
and
Satan—only his voice and body are totally cool.
    “It’s part of my birthright,” he finally says. “You’ll see in the morning. Now go back to bed.”
    I’m more than a bit jittery, so I put on the cable TV, watch some porn, and jack off in the shower while Alchemy is once again fast asleep.

10
THE SONGS OF SALOME
    Civil Wars
    After the babydeath I struggled to keep my equilibrium, waiting for recovery and regeneration. I finished high school and Dad built me a light-filled studio. Against Mom’s “better judgment,” they even got me a used Thunderbird convertible. I painted the front yellow and red and flaming orange and called her Kyle. Years later, Alchemy took it. He and Mindswallow drove it off a cliff in Malibu, which appeals to my sense of rightness. Sometimes, but not too often, I’d go to the cemetery and wonder how my life would’ve changed had the baby lived. Dad found me there once and I bawled my eyes out and he just held me. I remember his cough echoing throughout the house. We had a huge blowout when I burned his carton of Winstons and he grabbed them out of the BBQ pit on the back lawn. He said calmly, “You are still my child and not the