It took a while for me and Absurda to stop doing the tiptoe two-step and become two dudes playin’ in the band, able to party like the messy breakup never happened—and for me to feel like I wasn’t gonna get tossed on my ass, outta the band and back in the deep end of the shitpool. Mostly them years was like one never-ending recording-touring session interrupted by some notorious incidents. We made five new records between ’93 and 2000 and played more than a thousand shows. Some critics who loved us at first dissed us later, saying we was lucky to make it before the music biz fragmented and we only popped so big as a reaction to the synth-mope blandness of the ’80s. Big yawn to them. Alchy was a constant geyser of songs, semen, and ideas. I used to think he must’ve been cranking up. Meth, ’roids, something. Nope. He’d often go three, four nights, gettin’ maybe two hours of sleep a night before his eyes were protruding like burnt popcorn kernels and you couldn’t mumble hello without him being disputatious. That’s when he’d pop some tranqs.
Alchy’s relaxation is sex games, and I can only partake after me and Absurda have uncoupled. I ain’t usually a group sex guy, and I’ve stayed away from the porniest details of his sexcapades, but after a show in Dallas, this “mom” who Alchemy sexed before and three very hot and very young cowgirls want to entertain me, Lux, and Alchemy. We check what we call the Miranda Wrights of the young ones. For you who won’t admit they watch cartoons, Miranda Wright was a female cop on Disney’s show Bonkers. We use that as code when we think a potential may be too young or just plain trouble. The mom swears for them. Marty delivers a couple of grams. We get high and then Alchy says to the mom, “Come hither,” so she strips and sits on the edge of the bed. He reaches into his suitcase and pulls out a rare Thomas Green beauty from the 1700s. For a lefty, Alchy sure loved his guns—for lots of uses. He points it at his head. “Savant roulette, anyone?” I freeze. Lux, who seen the sex stuff before, still gets twitchy. Alchy pulls the trigger. Zip. Mom slips the smooth barrel, which is like six inches long, into her mouth and starts gumming it. “ ’Happiness is a warm gun,” he croons. Mom falls back on the bed and grabs the gun. Alchy kneels down and his tongue goes into overdrive and she’s still suckin’ ’til she starts coming. Fuckin’ freaky.
Turns into one dead-dick-in-the-morning night. I ask him, the next day, “What the hell was that?”
“My mom told me to always please a woman before you please yourself. So, I do.”
“Not that, I mean the gun thing.”
He just smiles all mysterious. “Tonguing and gunning …” I always wondered if Salome told him about that, too.
Despite drugs being everywhere, Alchy only indulges if he needs it to close a sex deal. Me? You name it, I tried it. How else you play the road like that? Especially when we were traveling donkey class the first few years. Absurda was the only one in the band who got hooked, although, at first, none of us seen it that way. Not even Mr. Savant.
We all finally got hip to her problem being so destructive in spring of ’98 during a six-month Euro tour. We’d already recorded most of Blues for the Common Man. Alchemy likes to try the songs on the road and come back and redub, remix, clean up, and maybe even redo or dump some entirely. It’s going great ’til Absurda misses a gig in Naples. She hired a driver to take her and some Italian smoothie who latched on to her to Pompeii. She says some fresh iced tea made her sick. None of us buy it. Lux is so furious and worried his biceps is Nadling at warp speed. He insists we do a intervention and get her in rehab ASAP. Alchemy has a sit-down with her. She agrees to Sue, who is tour manager, rooming with her. Absurda don’t miss none of the last six shows and plays great.
Back in L.A. we’re working on the intervention. As an excuse we’re gonna have a dinner to discuss the video for The Ruling Class, which is about half the world’s population being under twenty-five.
I was crashing at Alchy’s newest digs, a four-bedroom place in the Hollywood Hills. Salome and Nathaniel had moved into the guest house. Alchemy never finished furnishing any of his houses. He got closest after he met Laluna and had Persephone. This place was half empty and half filled with Dumpster-worthy shit that Salome used in what she called her art. Sometimes there was lots of crap I was scared to sit on, eat off, or even touch. He and Salome used to go on spending sprees, piling up art, books, and old records, and she drags home some weird shit like old clocks or rat skeletons. Alchemy is also beginning his life as the rock ’n’ roll Bruce Wayne: money maven by day, politico by evening, and rock god by night. He starts Winsum Realty and we’re his partners. He scopes condos and houses and land parcels so they meet his “aesthetic criteria.” He dumped lots of ’em before the crash in ’08 and we made plenty of dough. We donated some of the money and buildings to fix up in New Orleans after Katrina and New York after Sandy and an urgent care center in east L.A. Later, he starts Audition Enterprizes. We ain’t partners in that but can invest on a case-by-case basis. I admire his good-guy shit, but I don’t get involved.
I’m still carousing, and one night I got into a fistfight at Little Joy, the dive, and then did the Howard Stern show—me and him get each other, being two dudes from Queens who got out—live like 6 A.M. I get back “home” and Alchy is awake. He says, “Let’s go see some stuff for Winsum. Or maybe for you.” I don’t like nothing he shows me, and we land at the House of Pies over on Vermont. I’m still sorta drunk—I snuck in my own bottle a scotch and poured it into my coffee cup, and he don’t know I popped a coupla midnight runners as well. While I’m eating a pile of onion rings and fries, I notice Alchemy is consternated so I get all applesauce brained and admit, “I’m embarrassed to be so lame, I feel like all of this is a fake-out and I am a fraud and one day you’re gonna ice me for something I don’t even know I done, toss me out just like you found me, and it will all disappear.”
He gives me a face like I gutted him with a knife and sits his elbow on the table and leans his chin against his fist. He don’t say nuthin’ for a few minutes. “We need to have this conversation, especially in light of Absurda’s problems. There is no crisis that can bring you and me down. That is not going to happen with us.”
“How the fuck you know that?” I say again, because I’m thinking of what I seen outside a Madam Rosa’s and how, even though I’m cool with Absurda, I’m still pissed off. “What if I do something stoopit like Marty?” Truth was, Marty still worked for us.
“What could you say that would be so horrible? I know we could always work it out.” He said that in his Alchemy-controls-all voice.
I’m still feeling like his looking for a place for me is some kind of warning, or maybe some Alchemy trap. That maybe he knows I seen him and Absurda, and he wants me to say something. But I never forget if it comes down to it, I’m the one who goes, so I say nothing and change the subject.
“Why’d ya pick me up in the first place?” All those years, I never done asked him. I didn’t worry about not having shit ’til I had it.
“Coincidence is also opportunity. It’s up to each of us to read the signs and make good or bad decisions.” That was the hookie-dookie Alchemy in a nutshell. “Remember when I had that nightmare in the motel that first night?”
“Fuck yes.” He had them after that, but I never got so spooked again. He later told me they was love and hate notes from his unconscious and he’d be lost without them.
“The way you reacted, I trusted you. I still trust you. My mom, contrary to the grief she gave you that day—”
“She blessed you with the Salome seal of approval. Said that you were no phony.”
“No kidding?” I was flabbergasted. “I thought Salome always sized me up as some smelly sock you toss to the dog as a chew toy.”
“Nope. One more thing you have to be sure about. Ambitious, you’ve made it to the big leagues, the toughest league of all. And no one, not I, your mother or father, or anyone can take that away from you except you. Besides, no lie, you are my street brother.”
I swear to fucking God I was almost crying. That was the forthrighteous reason I ain’t bought a place, at that time I love being with the band on the road and living with him, and even Salome and Brockton. They was my family.