Chronic City (3 page)

Perkus rifled through his CDs to find a record he wished to play me, a record I didn’t know—Peter Blegvad’s “Something Else (Is Working Harder).” The song was an angry and incoherent blues, it sounded to me, gnarled with disgruntlement at those who “get away with murder.” Then, as if riled by the music, he turned and said, almost savagely, “So, I’m not a
rock critic
, you know.”

“Okay.” This was a point I found easy enough to grant.

“People will say I am, because I wrote for
Rolling Stone
—but I hardly ever write about music.” In fact, the broadsides hung in his rooms seemed to be full of references to pop songs, but I hesitated to point out the contradiction.

He seemed to read my mind. “Even when I do, I don’t use that
language.”

“Oh.”

“Those people, the rock critics, I mean—do you want to know what they really are?”

“Oh, sure—what are they?”

“Super-high-functioning autistics. Oh, I don’t mean they’re diagnosed or anything. But
I
diagnose them that way. They’ve got Asperger’s syndrome. I mean, in the same sense that, say, David Byrne or Al Gore has it. They’re brilliant, but they’re
social misfits.”

“Uh, how do you know?” As far as I knew I’d never met anyone with Asperger’s syndrome, or for that matter, a rock critic. (Although I had once seen David Byrne at a party.) Yet I had heard enough already to find it odd hearing Perkus Tooth denouncing misfits.

“It’s the way they talk.” He leaned in close to me, and demonstrated his point as he spoke. “
They aspirate their vowels nearer to the front of their mouths.”

“Wow.”

“And when you see them talking in groups they do it even more. It’s self-reinforcing. Rock critics gather for purposes of mutual consolation, though they’d never call it that. They believe they’re
experts.”
Perkus, whether he knew it or not, continued to aspirate his vowels at the front of his mouth as he made his case. “They can’t see the forest for the trees.”

“Thelf-reinforthing exthperts,” I said, trying it on for size. “Can’t thee the foretht for the threes.” I am by deepest instinct a mimic. Anyway, a VHS tape labeled
ECHOLALIA
lay on the table between us.

“That’s right,” said Perkus seriously. “Some of them even whistle when they speak.”

“Whisthle?”

“
Exactly.”

“Thank god we’re not rock critics.”

“You can say that again.” He tongued the gum on another joint he’d been assembling, then inspected it for smoke-worthiness, running
it under his funny eye as if scanning a bar code. Satisfied, he ignited it. “So, I’m self-medicating,” he explained. “I smoke grass because of the headaches.”

“Migraine headaches?”

“
Cluster
headaches. It’s a variant of migraine. One side of the head.” With two fingers he tapped his skull—of course it was his right side, the headaches gravitating toward the deviant eye. “They’re called cluster headaches because they come in runs, every day for a week or two at exactly the same time. Like a clock, like a rooster crowing.”

“That’s crazy.”

“I know. Also, there’s this visual effect … a blind spot on one side …” Again, his right hand waved. “Like a blot in the center of my visual field.”

A riddle: What do you get when you cross a blind spot with a wandering eye? But we’d never once mentioned his eye, so I hung fire. “The pot helps?” I asked instead.

“The thing about a migraine-type experience is that it’s like being only half alive. You find yourself walking through this tomb world, everything gets far away and kind of dull and dead. Smoking pulls me back into the world, it restores my appetites for food and sex and conversation.”

Well, I had evidence of food and conversation—Perkus Tooth’s appetites in sex were to remain mysterious to me for the time being. This was still the first of the innumerable afternoons and evenings I surrendered to Perkus’s kitchen table, to his smoldering ashtray and pot of scorched coffee, to his ancient CD boom box which audibly whined as it spun in the silent gap between tracks, to our booth around the corner at Jackson Hole when a fierce craving for burgers and cola came over us as it often did. Soon enough those days all blurred happily together, for in the disconsolate year of Janice’s broken
orbit Perkus Tooth was probably my best friend. I suppose Perkus was the curiosity, I the curiosity-seeker, but he surely added me to his collection as much as the reverse.

I did watch
Echolalia
. The way Brando tormented his would-be interviewer was funny, but the profundity of the whole thing was lost on me. I suppose I was unfamiliar with the required context. When I returned it I said so, and Perkus frowned.

“Have you seen
The Nascent?”

“Nope.”

“Have you seen
Anything That Hides?”

“Not that one either.”

“Have you seen
any
of Morrison Groom’s films, Chase?”

“Not knowingly.”

“How do you survive,” he said, not unkindly. “How do you even get along in the world, not understanding what goes on around you?”

“That’s what I have you for. You’re my brain.”

“Ah, with your looks and my brain, we could go far,” he joked in a Bogart voice.

“Exactly.”

Something lit up inside him, then, and he climbed on his chair in his bare feet and performed a small monkey-like dance, singing impromptu, “If I’m your brain you’re in a whole lot of trouble … you picked the wrong brain!” Perkus had a kind of beauty in his tiny, wiry body and his almost feral, ax-blade skull, with its gracefully tapered widow’s peak and delicate features. “Your brain’s on drugs, your brain’s on fire …”

Despite this lunatic warning, Perkus took charge of what he considered my education, loading me up with tapes and DVDs, sitting me down for essential viewings. Perkus’s apartment was a place for consuming archival wonders, whether at his kitchen table or in the sagging chairs before his flat-screen television: bootlegged unreleased
recordings by those in Tooth’s musical pantheon, like Chet Baker, Nina Simone, or Neil Young, and grainy tapes of scarce film noir taped off late-night television broadcasts. Among these treasures was a videotape of a ninety-minute episode of the detective show
Columbo
, from 1981, directed by Paul Mazursky, and starring John Cassavetes as a wife-murdering orchestra conductor, the foil to Peter Falk’s famously rumpled detective. It also featured, in roles as Cassavetes’s two spoiled teens, Molly Ringwald and myself. The TV movie was something Mazursky had tossed off around the time of the making of
Tempest
, the latter a theatrical release featuring Cassavetes and Ringwald, though not, alas, me. That pretty well summed up my luck as an actor, the ceiling I’d always bumped against—television, but never the big screen.

Cassavetes was among Perkus’s holy heroes, so he’d captured this broadcast, recorded it off some twilight-hour rerun. The tape was intact with vintage commercials from the middle eighties, O. J. Simpson still sprinting through airports and so forth. I hadn’t seen the
Columbo
episode since it was broadcast, and it gave me a feeling of seasick familiarity. Not that Mazursky, Falk, Cassavetes, and Ringwald had been family to me—I’d barely known them—yet still it felt like watching a home movie. It led to the curious sense that in some fashion I’d already been dwelling here in Perkus’s apartment, for twenty-odd years before I’d met him. His knowledge of culture, and the weirdly synesthetic connections he traced inside it, made it seem as though this moment of our viewing the tape together was fated. Indeed, as if at twelve years old I’d acted in this forgettable and forgotten television show alongside John Cassavetes as a form of private communion with my future friend Perkus Tooth.

Perkus paid scant attention to the sulky children tugging at Cassavetes’s sleeves—his interest was in the scenes between the great director and Peter Falk, as he scoured the TV movie for any
whiff of genius that recalled their great work together in Cassavetes’s own films, or in Elaine May’s
Mikey and Nicky
. He intoned reverently at details I could never have bothered to observe, either then, as a child actor on the set, or as a viewer now. He also catalogued speculative connections among the galaxy of cultural things that interested him.

For instance: “This sorry little TV movie is one of Myrna Loy’s last-ever appearances. You know, Myrna Loy,
The Thin Man?
She was in loads of silent movies in the twenties, too.” My silence permitted him to assume I followed these depth soundings. “Also in
Lonelyhearts
, in 1958, with Montgomery Clift and Robert Ryan.”

“Ah.”

“Based on the Nathanael West novel.” “Ah.”

“Of course it isn’t really any good.”

“Mmm.” I gazed at the old lady in the scene with Falk, waiting to feel what Perkus felt.

“Montgomery Clift is buried in the Quaker cemetery in Prospect Park, in Brooklyn. Very few people realize he’s there, or that there even
is
a cemetery in Prospect Park. When I was a teenager a friend and I snuck in there at night, scaled the fence, and looked around, but we couldn’t find his grave, just a whole bunch of voodoo chicken heads and other burnt offerings.”

“Wow.”

Only half listening to Perkus, I went on staring at my childhood self, a ghost disguised as a twelve-year-old, haunting the corridors of the mansion owned by Cassavetes’s character, the villainous conductor. It seemed Perkus’s collection was a place one might turn a corner and unexpectedly find oneself, a conspiracy that was also a mirror.

Perkus went on expounding: “Peter Falk was in
The Gnuppet Movie
, too, right around this time.”

“Really.”

“Yeah. So was Marlon Brando.”

Zing! Another dot connected in the Perkusphere!

I was at first disconcerted, perhaps jealous, when I learned other beings could breach the sanctum on Eighty-fourth Street. First was Perkus’s dealer, he who provided the tiny Lucite boxes of Chronic. His name was Foster Watt. Watt, young and suspicious, hair brushed forward into spikes, wearing a red vinyl jacket and black jeans, carried a beeper, and only returned calls to established customers—to join his roster you’d have to meet in person, or he’d shun your number. Perkus assured him I was “cool,” explained that I only happened to be visiting, wasn’t a candidate to join Watt’s rolls. There, businesslike Watt’s interest in me died. Chronic was just one of his wares: Watt showed off a whole menu of marijuana brand names, each fertile sprig behind its Lucite pane labeled
SILVER HAZE, FUNKY MONKEY, BLUEBERRY KUSH, MACK DADDY
, or, eerily I thought, ICE. There might have been a dozen more. Perkus shopped among the brands with random eagerness, refreshing his supply of Chronic but adding several others. (These I’d go on to smoke with Perkus, and I could never tell the least difference: every one of Watt’s brands got me devastatingly high.) Deal done, Watt scrammed.

More important, though he never actually entered the apartment, was Biller. I learned of his existence by a rattling at Perkus’s window, the window onto the airshaft at the building’s rear. I heard the intruding sound first—I’d just come up, and Perkus was beginning to expound, to spread his wings—and ignored it. Then Perkus, without explaining, shifted his attention, became silent. He didn’t go to the window immediately, instead scooping together items from his linoleum table, items I now saw had been arrayed, made ready. A
bagel, fixed with cream cheese and smoked salmon, in wax paper—an overlooked breakfast, I’d thought, wrongly. An antique Raymond Chandler paperback with a gorgeous cover, like those Perkus shelved in little glassine pockets,
Farewell, My Lovely
. A joint Perkus had rolled and set aside, and which he now ziplocked into a tiny baggie. And a wad of dollars, fives and ones, bunched as if withdrawn from a pocket and tossed aside. All went into a white paper sack, recycled, perhaps, from the original bagel purchase. Then Perkus opened his window and waved at someone standing below. The threshold’s height, from the bare cement courtyard, meant Biller must have tapped the window with a tossed pebble, or reached for it with a stick or wire coat hanger. Straining up, he was just able to accept the white sack as Perkus lowered it. Leaning from my seat to see, I first saw his fingers, brown and dusty-dry, groping for the gifts. Then I stood and saw the whole of him.

This was early October, six or seven in the evening, barely dusk, barely chill. Yet Biller was forested in jackets and coats. Some seemed turned inside out. Before I registered his dark face I saw a golem of cloth, all rumpled plaid linings and stained down-filled tubular sections. His large, crabbed hands thrust the white sack Perkus had given him under a layer, into a canvas shoulder bag, silk-screened BARNES & NOBLE, that swung beneath the outermost coat. Now I resolved Biller’s face in the gloom. Though his cheeks and neck were aggravated with ingrown beard hairs, impossible to shave, and his Afro looked both patchy and greasy, knitting into proto-dreadlocks, within that frame handsome eyes showed a gentle reluctance. I felt I’d betrayed them both, rubbernecking Perkus’s charity. I sat again and waited.

“Who’s that?” The man’s voice was soft and sane.

“Don’t worry,” said Perkus. “He’s a friend.”

“I’ve seen him. I thought he might be from the building.”

“He’s not from the building. You might recognize him from somewhere else.”

I fiddled with a small plate of Italian cookies Perkus had laid out, while they discussed me and I listened. Coffee percolated, an irregular gurgle—Perkus had just put it on before the window tap.

“I didn’t mean to surprise you with a visitor,” continued Perkus. “I thought you’d be here earlier.”

“It was the tiger,” said Biller. “They practically had to close down Second Avenue. I couldn’t get across.”

This was the first I’d heard of the gargantuan escaped tiger that was ravaging sections of the East Side. Or if I’d heard, I’d forgotten. Either way, I didn’t have any reason not to credit it as some fancy of Biller’s. A tiger could be a homeless man’s emblem, I thought, of the terrors that pursued him. No wonder he needed all those coats.