fourteen

The dictation session never happened.

I didn’t make it to Lou’s apartment for several weeks after that first delivery. He had gone to Europe to play some concerts, I was told by Kenny the doorman:

“Mr. _____ is quite the character, isn’t he?”

Mr. _____. He wasn’t Jones. Now I put it all together and I realized who he was. I did not know much about his music, except for the chorus of the one song, but I knew his name.

I ran into him in the lobby a few days after he returned. He was happy to see me and brought up the dictation again and I agreed to stop by the next afternoon.

I arrived about four o’clock. The door was open a crack so I knocked on the jamb.

“Come on in!” he shouted from inside.

There was a window wide open and it was cold in the apartment. The place looked like I had never left it except Rachel wasn’t there and Lou was talking quietly into a red telephone on the kitchen counter. He held up a finger signaling he’d be right with me. I stood awkwardly in the living area until he finished his call.

When Lou hung up, he invited me to sit on the floor and then offered me a Hershey’s bar. “If you don’t want it, save it for later.”

I put it in my jacket pocket. He dropped a yellow legal pad and a pen onto the floor next to me. He explained that Rachel had gone up to the Bronx to visit her mother: “A mother and her daughter, you know . . . they can’t be apart for too long. It’s a deep bond.”

I gripped the pen and was waiting for him to start dictating. He explained that he was working on a biography of one of the saints, I don’t remember which one, though it was not a factual, historical biography but more like an imagined interpretation of this holy man’s life. He explained further that it was to be the book or libretto of an opera that he was also writing the music for.

“Okay, okay, okay . . . do you have a cigarette? . . . No, you don’t smoke . . . Good, don’t . . . it’s a filthy habit.” He found his pack under a leather jacket that was tossed over a cardboard RCA-marked box. “So we were just in Amsterdam, don’t write this down . . . and you know in Amsterdam—” The phone’s ringer interrupted him. “Be right with you, pal.”

He stayed on the phone for over an hour. I couldn’t hear what he was saying because he was speaking in hushed, low tones. In the meantime, I ate the Hershey’s bar and read from a book of short stories on one of his stacks. It was about an Englishman who gets captured by some North African tribespeople who cut out his tongue and keep him chained up. They force him to be the jester in the court of the bedouin king. It was a horrifying story and the image of the man dressed in cut-up cans of Coca-Cola stayed in my mind for weeks.

When Lou finally got off the phone he acted as if the call had taken no more than a minute. “Okay, okay, okay . . . you got the pad? Good . . . Oh, wait, you know what’s funny? Don’t write this down . . . I was walking by my old house on the Bowery and I see this old man sitting against a wall—” The phone rang again and he dashed to the kitchen. This time he spoke for only about forty minutes or so.

I picked up another book, this one about a man who was in love with a beautiful Mexican woman with a serious addiction to heroin. This story was not nearly as disturbing as the first one I’d read. I got through about twenty-five pages when Lou came back.

“You can borrow any of those, by the way . . . Okay, okay, okay . . . Act one, scene one . . . Wait, I didn’t finish my story . . . don’t write this down . . . So I’m down the Bowery and I see this old guy sitting against a wall near my old house, he looks kind of familiar but he’s a bum, you know, a piss-in-the-pants drunk, but I know I’ve seen his face before . . . and he’s looking at me and he goes, What are you looking at, faggot? I’m about to go step on the fucking guy and I realize—”

Ring ring ring.

“Shit. Hold my place.”

The call lasted less than a minute.

“I gotta split. Can I borrow you for a few minutes?”

I never found out what was realized on the Bowery or who the old man was. Lou was on to something else. I agreed to let him borrow me for a few minutes. What I would eventually realize was that he was very afraid of being alone and needed someone by his side at all times. I had suddenly become one of those trusted few.