FSF, March-April 2010 (19 page)

A few minutes later he called back. “I'm coming into the city immediately,” he said. “We need to get together.” He also told me the good news.

"There's an online site that wants to revive
Biting the Apple,
and is willing to pay for the privilege.” This was a board game he and I had produced almost thirty years ago for the brand-new humor magazine,
Cheap Irony
. That mag was supposed to meld the best parts of
Saturday Night Live
and
The New Yorker
. It had gone belly-up after a few issues.

"But we got paid,” the Lizard remarked. “We got a certain amount of attention that got us a few more game commissions. And they let the rights revert to us. No wonder the yutzes went broke. The people who are interested now think it's quaint, an historic artifact. By the way, do you happen to have a copy of the damn thing?"

It so happened I did and even knew where it was.
Biting the Apple
was one of the things I'd clawed my way past that morning while searching for my story.

"Splendid,” he said when I told him. “Rumors of your senile dementia are clearly exaggerated."

Then he gave me the address of a place where we'd meet in a few hours and hung up.

For the second time that day, I scrabbled in my storage bins, still marveling at the serendipity this day was showing.

When I found
Biting the Apple
I realized it had the same basic rules and design as
Mack Daddy Mack
but was about making it big in Manhattan circa 1980—finding a rent-controlled penthouse, producing a disco musical, making a fortune with a video game arcade, meeting Jackie Onassis, wearing a mullet, visiting Studio 54, The Saint, and Limelight. My head reeled.

Over the years the Lizard and I drifted in and out of each other's lives, close at times, not even speaking at others. Somehow we'd fallen into the racket of designing games for toy companies, for ad agencies that thought games were nice promotional tools, for people who hired us because they believed that we were so weird we must be creative and maybe even wise.

I remember an account executive looking at my partner askance and asking him, “What kind of name is Lizard Pavane, anyway?"

"An invented one,” he had replied, seemingly amazed that anyone could ask a question so idiotic. We designed a game in which one player got to commit a series of famous murders and the other tried to stop him, a game for a giant insurance company in which the players were all brokers trying to sell as many insurance plans to corporations as possible, a game for a lobbyist to play with members of the U.S. Congress to convince them to deregulate the railroads.

Demand had been hot for a little while and had then disappeared in a puff of smoke. I'd had a few other projects with Lizard Pavane after that, but we hadn't seen much of each other since he moved to New Jersey some years back.

My meeting with the Lizard took me across town to the East Village for the second time that day. It was the first neighborhood where I'd lived in the city and I'd seen it go from gritty, working-class Slavic, to mad hippy, to drug-raddled hellhole. Now the blocks I went down were tree-shaded and lined with gift shops, boutiques, small restaurants. The place I wanted was a little bar called Giga's Guillotine on 10th Street and Avenue C.

On my way, I thought about Lizard Pavane calling me on the same day Judy had reappeared in my life. The Lizard's connection with her had been a much more intimate and dramatic one than mine. We'd never talked about it but I'd heard plenty of stories, even seen it mentioned in a book or two. I debated telling him about what had happened that afternoon.

Only when I reached my destination did I understand there was little need to mention Judy and absolutely no chance that his reappearance in my life on the same day as hers was a coincidence.

Giga's Guillotine was someone's dream of a 1950s Paris bistro, all quirky and intimate with a parquet floor and Yves Montand playing on the sound system and not at all the Lizard's kind of place.

Ambience, though, was not why we were there. Seeing it, I realized that the site had once been occupied by Sid's, a place everyone called Ugly Sid's, a low-life bar that always managed to stay open until dawn. And it was in Ugly Sid's, the Sunday night after their Fillmore concert, that Ray Light had died with a knife in his gut.

The Lizard sat at a table sporting a crumpled yachting blazer, drinking an amber liquid that I assumed was Jack Daniels. A small suitcase and a grayish raincoat rested on the chair beside him. Long sleeves and a buttoned-up collar hid the iguana tattoos.

I hadn't seen him in five or six years. But really, at five foot four with his black eyes gleaming and his head freshly shaved, he looked not very different than he had thirty-five years before when I met him for the first time.

Now he saw me and rasped, “You look kind of the same too, except old and confused."

Since I don't drink, I ordered a seltzer. “Was that Nina I heard in the background on the phone?” I asked.

"She does have a distinctive shrill scream,” he said. “Doubtless your life is as cold and lifeless as ever so you're interested in mine. I'm in the midst of civil insurrection, domestic upheaval."

"Nina tossed you out?” Nina is the long-suffering but not infinitely suffering type. She has a management job with William Morris that bought the house they live in.

"If only she had! What a thrill to be picked up by a strong woman and physically tossed out a door! I would die happy. But she knows that's what I want so she never laid a hand on me: just screamed until I went away and no doubt is changing the locks even as I speak."

He looked at a table full of kids in their twenties and his lip curled. “Girls these days just have gym muscles. In my time there were women who did actual physical labor. Did you bring the game? Nina was whining because she couldn't win. She destroyed my copy after I won all three times we played."

"Is that what the argument was about, you insisted on winning a game you'd designed?” I didn't add, “Even at the risk of pissing off the woman who's supporting you?"

He looked surprised that I asked. “Of course,” he said and without pause added, “I think we can get another couple of thousand for updating the game, making it relevant for right now. Any ideas about how you win the rat race these days?"

"Having a blog that gets fifty thousand hits a day,” I said. “The ability to speak Mandarin plus two Chinese dialects,” I added. He looked bored. The game was the excuse, not the reason for my being here. Wondering what angle the Lizard was playing, I glanced around the room, trying to catch some trace of Ugly Sid's.

"Yes,” said the Lizard. “This tacky piece of faux whimsy sits on the very spot where very late one night Bruno Delmar, AKA BD, put a knife into Ray Light before going home and hanging himself."

"I once heard that while those things were happening Judy was with you at your loft,” I said. I hadn't known Lizard back then, but the story was part of his legend and gave him a bit of the aura of a great lover. The very fact that his looks made that so improbable was a sly twist to the tale.

Some of that must have been obvious on my face because the Lizard cackled and said, “You're thinking to yourself that a gay guy who looked like me would live and die alone. You don't understand. Girls may want to talk to pretty guys who make nice conversation. But they end up having to rely on guys who look like me.

"Judy came by my place. She seemed desperate and afraid, obviously wanting to stay with me. Who was I to refuse? The next day we found out what had happened. ‘She was with me all last night,’ was all I had to tell the cops when they came around. The guy and his girlfriend I shared the space with corroborated.

"At that point, the lawyers descended. Her parents both had money. All they were interested in was showing she had nothing to do with the murder, had no idea BD was going to do what he did. After a few weeks or so her family took her away somewhere to recover. That was practically the last I saw of Judy."

"Had you and she been together for long before that night?"

"We'd just met a couple of weeks before the Fillmore gig—Lord of Light was laying down tracks at Electric Ladyland. Bruno Delmar got Judy and me together at a party. I was already doing okay at that point; I had that reviewing gig at
Rolling Stone.
She and I dug each other as the saying went. Until the fateful night, though, we'd done nothing more than talk and exchange glances.

"BD, though, told her that if anything happened I was the one she could turn to. Bruno and I went way back. He trusted me. Maybe I was the only one he trusted."

"You knew BD?” This was a surprise.

"Bruno Delmar and I went all the way back to grade school together. We were the two smartest boys at Saint Martin de Tours in Carnasie. He liked to be called BD and when I first knew him was a really decent kid. Gallant, you know, stepping into fights and standing up for you if you were his friend.

"After that I went to Brooklyn Polytech, got a scholarship to Cornell. BD got caught in family problems. His mother was badly crazy and when his father died he had absolutely nowhere to live. He ended up in a halfway house and the army and we lost touch.

"A few years later I was back in the city after college, hanging around the East Village. And there was BD. He didn't say what he was doing and I didn't ask, that's the way we'd been brought up. But he was still the Bruno Delmar I'd gone to school with. Then one day his picture was in the underground papers. It turned out BD was a private eye working undercover to send runaways back to their families. He disappeared before I could speak to him."

"I first saw him back when he was working undercover,” I told Lizard. “A whole bunch of us including Judy Finch were at a loft party. She was dressed as a boy like she sometimes did back then. It was all very spacey: everyone ripped, incense burning, and the light was hundreds of candles. She pointed out this guy and told us he was the private cop that had once busted Ray. I remember that he was hot-looking and could easily have been one of us. I guess that was why his cover worked.

"Judy walked over and asked, ‘How's it going, BD?’ He gave a tight little smile but otherwise stayed straight-faced and said that wasn't his name. She just shook her head, took a matchbook out of her pocket, and said, ‘This is Ray Light's number. He talks about how much he wants to see you again. Don't be afraid. You need to call him.'

"As she turned in the flickering light and walked away, he stared after her like he was lost and in love. Not long after that he disappeared and almost immediately Judy was gone too. Later I found out they were part of a band."

"You're right about him being in love,” said Lizard. “Come on, I got to meet someone.” He threw money on the table, picked up his bag and coat, and headed out the door.

"The next time I saw Bruno Delmar he was with Lord of Light,” Lizard said. “He was in some kind of relationship with Ray Light and Judy. Right at that moment you couldn't be wingy enough to satisfy the fans.

"But he and I could still talk. The gallantry was still there. He obviously loved Judy even though she didn't much like him. It was what made him find a way of giving her protection, providing cover."

"Why did she need cover? He killed Ray Light in front of a dozen witnesses."

We went up gentrified Avenue C. Lizard Pavane now walked a bit slow and stiff-legged but something I remembered about him was still true. He hated to have anybody get in his way or walk faster than he did. Each time someone passed us, he'd kind of growl and make a move like he wanted to hit them with his bag.

"Idiot!” he said to me, “She knew Ray Light had killed people. And it's my guess that she wanted BD to off him before Ray did the same to her. BD made sure she had the alibi. And the way he did the deed took all the attention off her.” He looked at me hard and gave his cackling laugh. “You don't believe little Judy Finch could have arranged such a thing, do you? Boy, has she got you conned!"

We were on the corner of 14th Street when he stopped and said, “Thanks to Nina, I found out Judy's doing a memoir show and your old boyfriend is directing it."

"I only found out about that today,” I said.

The Lizard looked like he didn't believe me. I had brought a copy of my story. On an impulse I handed it to him and said, “She's interested in this thing I wrote years ago. On the same day that Marcy died and two days before BD and Ray did."

"I'll be in touch,” he said and stuffed it in his bag. Before he crossed the street and headed into the green lawns and neat brick apartment houses of Stuyvesant Town, the Lizard told me, “If Nina calls, you don't know where I am or where I went."

As I walked back to my place in the West Village, it seemed to me that I was always on the periphery of great events, never quite on the scene. I saw Ray Light and BD the evening of their last night alive, probably around the time Judy went to visit the Lizard.

They were getting into a van outside the house on the north side of Tompkins Park where the band was staying. BD had washed the makeup off his face and wore black coveralls. He looked like the guy I had seen at that party a couple years before. Ray had a red kepi cap pulled down over his face, his collar turned up and his hair in a ponytail. He didn't want to be recognized. But the pale skin and the dark eyes were unmistakable.

He glanced my way and for a moment I saw what he saw: dim lights and shadows in the park, a darkening street, a guy in derelict leather jacket and Frye boots who was a bit past being a kid and a little too battered by the street to be hip.

It took me a moment to recognize myself in another's eyes. I saw the wonder, lust, and envy that were on my face as I watched Ray Light. Then I felt his contempt. It lasted just a few seconds but in that moment I wanted to die.

BD put his hand on Light's shoulder and broke the connection before I saw any more. BD shook his head and gestured for me to move on.

Remembering the encounter all these years later, I wondered if he'd saved my life.

Nina called me later that night. We exchanged tentative greetings and remarked at how long it had been since we'd seen each other. Then she said. “Where's Lizard?"