Bogeywoman

BUG MOTELS IN CONCERT

Pipette, test-tube & beaker glockenspiel,

bed-panioforte…

Egbert Stein

(President)

Vocals,

catgut puke basin & leg brace ukulele…

Ursie “The Bogeywoman” Koderer

(Secretary)

Vocals,

speculum castanets,

breathometer pings,

sterilizer-top steel drum,

toilet-bowl float mariachis,

other assorted noise…

O

(Treasurer)

Vocals,

scrub tub bass…

Dion

(Sergeant-at-Arms)

Vocals,

PVC pipe kazoo,

penny whistle…

Emily Nix Peabody

(Vice President in absentia)

Screeches,

mumbles,

falsetto,

sirens,

miscellaneous industrial sound effects…

Mrs. Wilmot

(Member ad libitum)

HOW LOVE GOT US OUT OF THERE

Though behind ourselves in every other way, as rockers we Bug Motels were ahead of ourselves, or our time, or at least far out in front of the sagging royals, and we intended to stay there, up around the bend where they had found us, or sent us. We were getting better, every one of us, at least there were signs. Long ago on his druggie’s endless wanderings, when he used to pace the corridors beaming every deadend wall and locked door with his x-ray eyeballs, Bertie had found the Bug Motels a clubhouse, NO ROYALS ALLOWED it said on the door-we had taped that over the old sign that said NEUROPATHOLOGY. Bertie, now happily reunited to his legal moniker Egbert since (he thought) it had a certain musical ton, had turned up this weensy surgical amphitheater on the second floor, locked up tight so no mental patient of our day would even think of the kind of procedure that probably went on there once upon a time. But we liked it exactly because of that, because of the sick dream of skull tops sawed off like the ends of hairy coconuts and ice-cream scoop brains glistening wetly under their lids. Center stage down front was a dusty American flag and, in front of it, no lie-down table but a sit-up chair like a barber chair; here the poor wretch must have sat with the top of her head flipped open; here (we shuddered) must have clicked the doctors’ knives, forks and spoons to put an end to that mental peon’s troubles for good. And so after Bertie organized us a key we sneaked downstairs and took turns sitting in the barber chair, playing medical experiment, tongues hanging out, x’s in our eyes. We sat in the student desks around the barber chair and rested our medical instruments on the stomach-shaped desktops and played bughouse music. We were trying to fool around as much as we could before the royals threw us out. But they never did throw us out.

“Keeps yall off the street,” Reggie Blanchard joked and that was more or less the line the royals took on the Bug Motels and their “funny-farmyard noises,” which were, in fact, to the surprise of everyone, us as much as them, eerily beautiful and as light-fingered and sparsely knotted one to the other as audible cobwebs.

Then everybody got into it. By now hardly a day passed without somebody’s nurse escort or dreambox mechanic smuggling us a peculiarly melodious surgical instrument or scrap of hospital plumbing. But we Bug Motels didn’t take just anything. Love will get us out of here, we sang, but how to know it was love when we heard it tinkle or hiss? We had to listen hard. O had charge of a fleet of noisemakers not one of which percussed above a violent whisper.

O in song had a slow gluey quaver to her spooky-flute, a faintly wobbling vibrato deep in the gut of it like near- boiling gumbo, and, maybe to go along with the speculum castanets, she dug up a mantilla you could have sung Carmen in, webbed herself in red and black fishnet, stuck sequin beauty spots on her face and, not exactly flounced, more like lurked, lurked darkly around in this getup, staring at all of us unforgivingly out of the bottoms of her eyes. Her song, written by me, Bogeywoman, went:

O’S SONG

Doobee doobee dubio

Doowop welladay

Hugga bugga yumma yum

How do you like your buggers done

Boiled in bug juice, boiled in rum

Says the Queen of the Cannibal Islands

Love love

Love will get you out of here.

Who were we Bug Motels now? Come to find out inside our old confusion was fusion, anyway Egbert said so- fusion and conk. “They drop the k cause it reminds every mental patient that he is king, king of his own conk. Conk ya see is an old American negro word for the dreambox or a hairdo on top of it,” Egbert explained. This was the missionary Egbert at the peak of his conk-version. “You probably noticed, Bug Motels, how we are getting our heads together playing this music? We are conk-neck-ting our conks to our bodies like yesterday we connected our gut strings to our instruments and, whaddaya know, come to find out Love will get you outa here. Like it says in the weird kinda tunes the Bogeywoman writes for us.” (Egbert gave my shoulder a fond little punch, and I saw that O saw. I smiled weakly at her.)

Out of the bottoms of her eyes O peered at Egbert when he talked of love, to find out if he meant her. He didn’t, but still he was the one she looked at whenever she sang. She was off into labyrinths of twisted love for this bughouse Orpheus and his sawed-off-sneaker sandals and the sweaty prongs of dark hair sticking out around his ears and his round little-boy tortoiseshell eyeglasses that bounced on his nose whenever he dabbed at the keys with his hammers. She was staring out of the bottoms of her eyes at Egbert’s skinny, shiny, piecrust-crimper spine where it curled out of his tee shirt. He didn’t know she was there. That’s what she liked in a fuddy, he should be so absorbed in The Importance of what he was doing he didn’t know she was there. When a fuddy started tryna please a girl it got repulsive fast, well that’s what O said anyhow.

I was wondering if she still loved me, loved me at the same time she loved Egbert, and was I any better off if she did. He hunched in that miserly way over his homemade keyboards, plinking out tiny unearthly bug trails of notes, microscopic music-box rolls, jerky tunes, spastic countertunes, faint and far far away. Dion nodded to the beat. He went for all that love stuff and moreover couldn’t wait to love himself in a baby-blue spangled tux and kick