FSF, March-April 2010 (20 page)

"I don't know."

"He talked to you before he left. You agreed to meet at that idiotic Guillotine bar. There's someone he sees who lives in Stuyvesant Town. I need to know if he's staying with her."

"I couldn't tell you."

"You just did,” she said and hung up.

A few days later I sat in a small rehearsal space in the bowels of the Public Theater along with Marty listening to Judy talk about being a kid living on St. Mark's Place with her father the artist and her mother the critic; about becoming a teenager the year Kennedy was shot. The guy who would be music director of the show played guitar and Judy sang a snatch of Sam Cooke's “A Change Is Gonna Come."

She stood leaning on the back of a chair and said, “I was fifteen in nineteen-sixty-five and going to the Quaker School. A few blocks away from me another tale played itself out. An old friend of mine, who knows a bit about these things, wrote this version.” She told the story of “The Kid with the Sun in His Eyes” and ended with this section:

"
The Man held the Kid's fingers to a lighted candle and told him,
‘
I
'
m teaching you as the one who taught me did. He brought me to the point where I could meld with certain other minds and I can do that with you. He would have taught me more but he was taken from me. I will not leave you until you can go into every mind and meld with anyone
.’”

Unless you've been writing for the theater for a long while and had it happen to you hundreds of times, I believe it's hard to resist when someone reads your words aloud. Also Judy understood this material, had the attitude and stance down. I liked the dumb vulnerability she projected. This section was my guess as to what had happened to Ray Light. We had talked it over and agreed that it felt right.

"
At first the Man never let the Kid with the Sun in His Eyes out of his sight, kept him tethered and tied when he went out, got him off drugs cold turkey. The Kid could not just go away in his mind with the Man. The Man could go there and bring him back and Kid stopped fighting it because he was learning to get inside other peoples’ minds, not most of the time or with most people. But he could look down at the street below, look inside certain people and he wanted to learn how to do that with everyone.

"
After the first night, the Man no longer suspended him in front of an open window to force him to communicate. After a couple of weeks, the Man trusted him enough that when he went off to work one morning, he gave the Kid a dollar, let him out on the street, and told him to be back at six o'clock. It was a test. And it worked. The Kid was fascinated enough that he did come back even though he hated the Man. Given how things were there was no hiding that.
"

Judy relaxed, lost the Kid's stance and speech and said in her own voice, “I met him on one of the first days he was out. I saw him on St. Mark's Place looking a little scared. He said his name was Ray, Ray Light. I found out later that it was actually Jonathan Duncan—too mundane for the life he wanted to lead in this city.

"Right then, out of nowhere and all in a rush, I knew just what he was feeling, I knew without our even talking that he was a runaway, that he was afraid of being spotted by someone who'd report him to the cops, that he lived with someone he thought of as the Man.

"At that same moment he knew everything about me. I thought that was what it was like to have a boyfriend. Raised by parents in the arts in this city in the 1960s and I was that naïve.

"We spent that afternoon together until he had to go back to the loft. After that he'd meet me when I got out of school; we'd get together on weekends when the Man let him out.

"We were like that for maybe two months. Then one day private detectives hired by his family snatched him off the street right in front of me. No other boyfriend was like him. I didn't see him again for another few years. But I thought of him every day."

Later she took a break and we all sat together drinking coffee. Marty had some notes that Judy glanced at and nodded. It was all kind of comfortable, reminding me of sitting on the front steps on St. Mark's Place so long ago.

Then she looked at me and said thoughtfully, “After a while, even with someone as big and great and wonderful and scary as Ray, one's memories become very set—like a series of old photos. Your piece gave him back to me in a strange way; let me see him from a new angle."

"And gets us around the Marcy problem,” said Marty.

"You know,” she said, “a few years after Ray and BD had gone, a very creepy old Englishman, into Satanism, a friend of Aleister Crowley, talked to me about Phillip Marcy.

As she spoke, she fell into an imitation of the man's speech. He sounded amused, sinister, a bit absurd, a bit chilling. “When young Phillip was in college, one of the professors was a man I knew with remarkable mind control and an ability to teach the skill to others, not always with the best intent, not always by the gentlest methods.

"Phillip Marcy fell completely under his spell. Then one day the teacher disappeared. He was never found. The police, of course, were useless. Dear Phillip had learned enough of the gift for it to obsess him but not enough to control it. He spent his days trying to learn, trying to teach. Again, it wasn't always by the gentlest methods. No great surprise when he met his end."

Then Marty asked, “So Ray Light really did have some kind of gift?"

"Yeah,” I told him. “I encountered Ray the last night he was alive. He looked at me and I saw myself through his eyes. It was like a knife going into me. I wanted to die but...."

I caught anger in Judy's eyes and shut up. I'd told her about being in Ray's head the night of the concert but hadn't even remembered that last meeting until my talk with Lizard Pavane.

Maybe she was angry that I'd seen her lover alive after she had or because she was afraid I'd seen a little too much. Most likely I was a minor irritant and she'd decided she'd gotten everything useful out of me.

What I'd been going to say was that if Ray Light showed that kind of contempt to a harmless fan boy who'd blundered into his path, what must Phillip Marcy have been shown? One look at himself as Ray Light saw him and Marcy would willingly have gone out the window where he'd tortured God knew how many.

"Thanks, buddy,” said the Lizard on the phone. “You gave the bloodhound just enough information so that she could track me down.” He said it sarcastically, but he was calling from home and really did sound like he was thanking me.

We talked a bit about updating the game. “Well, what do kids do when they come to the city, these days?” he wanted to know.

"Rent a thirty-five-hundred-dollar-a-month apartment with four other people and get a job in the Financial District,” I suggested. We were old and this particular spring of inspiration had run dry some while ago. “Obviously, if I ever had any idea of how to make it big in Manhattan I would have done so."

Then the Lizard got down to the real point of his call. “How's Judy's show going?"

"Really well. They let me see it again a couple of days ago. There's music. Judy can still sing. It's taking shape as a kind of cabaret. Next week is a run-through for friends in the business to start a little buzz.” I didn't mention that she no longer spoke to me.

He paused, then said. “I thought that story you wrote was a real acute guess about what Phillip Marcy did to Ray Light. Maybe a bit more than a guess?"

"Just a bit,” I said.

"You poor kid.” Lizard actually sounded sympathetic. “From what I remember BD telling me, Light had an obsession with the one he still called the Man. Whenever they were in New York, he'd try to approach Marcy because there was a lot he hadn't been taught. But the guy didn't want to see him."

I said, “Maybe Phillip Marcy heard rumors about various of Ray's enemies killing themselves and didn't want to join them."

"Ray wanted BD to get himself picked up by Marcy and then let Ray into the loft to join them. Bruno and Light were in some kind of deep, complicated relationship but Bruno didn't want to do that."

This reminded me of something I'd seen on East Fourth Street one night. I was cruising the block and noticed an androgynous kid. He was in the pose, one boot on the cement the other resting against the wall behind him, looking very familiar. I was half a block away before I realized it was Judy. Had Ray first made her try to hook the Man?

"Eventually BD did what Ray wanted,” I said to Lizard Pavane. “If he was as gallant as you say, seeing The Man go out the window must have bothered him a lot. Something I wonder is how could Light not read BD's mind that last night and know what he had planned?"

"From what Bruno told me, Ray Light would pick up a vision of the future or something from his head. It was part of what Light found so fascinating about him. Mostly, though, he had no idea what BD was thinking."

Lizard paused, then said, “Okay, I gave you all that, now tell me when the performance is."

So I told him and was quite curious as to why he wanted to know.

Judy sat on a low stage and spoke. “When Ray and I got together again it was five years after he was taken away from me. Nineteen-seventy was a much different world from 1965, dark and full of fear. If you don't understand that change you didn't live through that time in this place."

"An informal workshop,” was what they called this. It was held on a Monday night in a rehearsal space at the Public Theater. “Nothing was absolutely clear in that world,” she said. “When Ray Light came back to me, he brought with him BD, Bruno Delmar, the one who had helped snatch Ray off the street. Everyone thought of him as a monster, a pig. We'd chased him out of the neighborhood. He and Ray now were lovers.

"I became part of that and we started playing together.” She sang the old Lord of Light song, “Just a Boy without Wings.” It was a quiet song now, not scary as much as a little lost and sad.

The quartet on the stage had worked with her before and was tight and a bit jazz inflected.

Marty was happy. The show had word-of-mouth to spare. Old theater friends of Judy's, people from various production companies, someone from a foundation that did arts funding and a couple of documentary film producers, seventy or eighty in all, sat on folding chairs.

One chair with a Reserved William Morris sign was empty. I remembered that Nina worked there and kept my eye on it.

"Oh, there were rumors,” said Judy, “stories that various people who had given Ray trouble—a psychiatrist, his father—had died by their own hand. But that kind of legend surrounded a lot of bands and a lot of personalities in those days. And there were lots of moments when the three of us, Ray, and BD, and me, were one."

She tuned the guitar and said, “This is something I started many years ago and finished just recently.” The song's lyrics were all about the night of the murder/suicide. It had the lines:

The one who loved me and the one I loved

Went out one night and never returned.

When she finished, I looked over and Lizard was sitting in the empty chair I'd noticed earlier. He stared at Judy and, as the crowd applauded, he stood up and took a couple of steps toward the stage. She noticed him immediately and paused where she was.

"BD did more than love you. He saved your life and left you free to live it,” Lizard Pavane said.

People in the audience were giving each other, “Is this part of the show?” glances. Marty, who was sitting next to me, was on his feet. Judy's guitarist looked like someone who'd handled a few drunken customers in his performing career. He started to get up.

Judy looked right at Lizard. She gestured for the others to sit down. “One night I guess BD decided to liberate himself and me and especially Ray from a trap we'd fallen into, a kind of magic that had gone very bad. But before he did that, he put me in the care of a friend of his, this wonderful man right here."

She came down off the stage, reached out, touched Lizard's cheek, and for a moment became the desperate twenty-one-year-old who'd come to his door begging for help.

Judy spoke to him quietly for a moment. Lizard seemed mesmerized. Then she sat him down, climbed back onstage and sang a hard, driving version of the Ray Light song “Revelation in a Thousand Volts.” It was a select audience but, even given that, the applause was intense.

The last part of the show dealing with the thirty-nine years of Judy's life since that famous night seemed more than a little anticlimactic. The next time I looked his way, Lizard was gone.

"If we could just get him to stand up and do that every night,” Marty muttered at the finale.

After the performance was over and she'd thanked the audience and the band, Judy turned to Marty and said, “Get me contact information for Pavane.” She never looked my way at all.

It was a few days later that I got a call from Marty. “Lots of interest in this show,” he said. “The immediate word is we're doing weekend cabaret at Joe's Pub for the month of February with the intention of moving maybe to the Public, maybe to Broadway. Everyone liked the first part and we're going to make the whole piece just about the Ray Light years. You'll get a contract sometime before we open. You have my personal guarantee that it won't be generous."

I thanked him. Later that same day, Lizard Pavane called me. “They still want
Biting the Apple
and they'll pay, maybe, two grand for it. But they got a couple of kids to do the modern-day equivalent. I think they believe we're a little stale."

"No argument there,” I said.

There was a pause. “I've been talking a lot with Judy,” he told me. “About BD. She says I've given her access to him, made her think about him and remember him in ways she hadn't. We're getting together again this afternoon. It almost feels like old times."

"Nina won't be happy."