Bogeywoman

in unison, if he could get anybody else to kick with him. His baritone was best bopping up and down the stave in round monosyllables like bum and boo. His song, composed by himself, went:

DION’S SONG

There was a bug lived in a zoo

It bugged him havin nuttin to do

bum bum bum di boo boo boo

Love will get you out of there

Reggie helped him with the second verse:

Fee fi fo fee fi fo fo

Hello? Say who? Don’t live here no mo.

Love has got him outahere

Outahere.

Rich bug poor bug buggerman thief

Bug mechanic Winnebuggo chief

Love will get you out of there

Only love will get you out

of

there.

The Regicide hung with us down in our surgical amphitheater as often as he could get off the mop. He fronted as our chaperone, as usual, but nowadays we prized his counsel, for his street corner doo-wop experience went deep. The refrain of course was from me, Bogeywoman.

You could see it in the scared respectful eyes of our dreambox mechanics: our music had made it beyond their usual categories, maybe even come bubbling up from someplace prior to them-the tar pits or the mysteries or sumpm. Anyhow they shoved over, the royals. Weren’t we getting better?

I liked Egbert myself, now that he was getting better. His skinny body looked good hunching over his bed- panioforte like a man overboard clambering onto a life buoy. As a Bug Motel, I admired him. After fifteen minutes fooling with the object, he could play anything, beef bones, bottle caps, orthodontic braces, PVC pipe with the plumbing code still on it. He sang the song I rustled up for him, although it was square as a barn door and old as the itch and he suspected it was filched from somewhere, which it was.

EGBERT’S SONG

And this will pass for music when nobuggy else is near,

The bug song for singing, the bug song to hear!

That only I remember, that only you admire,

Of the bughouse that screeches and the bughouse choir.

“Where you come up with them complexicated vocabules, Bogeywoman?” the Regicide, who was visiting, wished to know. “She has plagiarized Mother Goose and God and a few other bigwigs,” Egbert explained smoothly, “chops em up and conk-nects em all together. Don’t let it go to your conk,” he warned me.

I wondered where Egbert had gotten that love idea all of a sudden and it was easy to ask him because we two were the grinds among the Bug Motels. All the livelong summer’s day the two of us were plinking and strumming down the clubhouse when pretty soon the rest of em got sick of it and went back to playing O Hell for dimes and quarters at their old table in the dayroom. Egbert and me saw The Importance. Of course O didn’t see The Importance, but she saw us seeing it. She gazed and gazed at the pair of us out of the bottoms of her eyes.

Still, even O had to be alone sometimes; first thing every morning she had to make up her eyes to their usual mine disaster hugeness and scariness, and that took maybe an hour. At nine o’clock in the morning, Egbert and me were already plucking and twanging away in our clubhouse that had NO ROYALS ALLOWED taped over NEUROPATHOLOGY on the door. Our snack bar coffees were steaming, our Kools lay fuming on our armrests, and I asked Egbert: “Where’s this love stuff coming from? Used to be it was all D.O.A.P. with you, Egbert, and now it’s love.” Naturally I suspected that he, like me, had a Doctor Zuk behind it all, a secret passion moving everything it wasn’t crushing. Come to think of it-I narrowed my eyes at him-maybe he’d fallen for Zuk himself. Of course it had to be madame-too-beautiful-on-her-horse! I mean, who else in this fuddy bughouse was worth it?

“Naw, it was always love,” Egbert smiled up at me from tightening the endpin on some soundboard. “I just didn’t know back then what I was hungry for. I used to chase all day after D.O.A.P. and now I run after-better stuff. Higher stuff.” “Like-royal stuff?” I asked. “Royal stuff?” he echoed, looking at me conk- fusedly. He lifted the drain pan manjocello or gourdolin or whatever it was he was tuning, laid it on his desktop and stroked it sweetly. “See, when you track that D.O.A.P. all over the city it’s love, Ursie, but when you cop that D.O.A.P. and shoot that D.O.A.P., it’s nowhere, man, you’re right back where you started. But real love,” he turned his smiling face up at me and the fluorescent lighting starred all his very straight teeth, “love takes you up a level.” “Ya mean like-to the seventh floor?” That’s where the royals had their offices. “Hump no, Ursie. You don’t get it, do you?” I shook my head. Who cared what love was? Who do you love, that’s what I wanted to know, but I hadn’t figured out how to put the question.

“You know, I was a doper before I was even born and I still am and that’s how I wound up in the bughouse and got in the Bug Motels and met you,” Egbert said. “My Unkie Jerry told my old man and old lady to put me in this place and I cussed the hump out of all of em but now I see they were right. My Unkie Jerry’s an obstetrician. He’s the one who was always telling me, Bertie, get off that shit! Be a producer not a consumer! But you know, since he delivered me, he was the first one pumping it in.” “Um, er, uh, pumping what in? Whaddaya mean you were a doper before you were even born?” I inquired, half curious half squeamish to hear this story. “Pinky, that’s my mom, when she’s pregnant with me she has to be the hippest thing in motherdom, the most in the know, so she goes through La Mayonnaise or however you call that training, but when the day came, no matter how natural she breathed I wouldn’t come out until they put some D.O.A.P. in her. So there you are, that’s why I say I was a junkie before the Steins ever got hold of me.” “Aw quit bragging,” I laughed. “No, man, I mean it, this sounds funny but I swear I can sorta remember it. I’m squinting down the rabbit-hole and see Unkie Jerry standing there in the light at the end of the tunnel, in his white coat. Come on, son! he says, Be a producer. Not a consumer! He’s got this little blue starter pistol sticking straight up in the air, and it goes BANG! Sumpm about him got on my nerves, man. I wouldn’t budge.” “You remember all that?” I said doubtfully. “Sure! Then in comes this beautiful toasted-almond-color nurse carrying a little ampule and a big syringe. Hello junior, she says, I got sumpm here I bet you like, and shoots up Pinky, and bingo, I came, soon as the stuff was in her, see? So I figure if it was just me I didn’t even want to be born. Only the idea there was D.O.A.P. out there could move me.”

“I dig,” I said. I liked Egbert. I mean, we were in the bughouse, where they’re always tryna get you to rat on your parents. I had to admire him for stealing the blame for his own bughood, even if he had to sneak back into the womb to do it. “Say, are you rolling in dough, Egbert?” I asked. I remembered that the concert house across from the B &O was the Stein, the third floor where Emily got wedged in the laundry chute was the Stein Otolaryn- gological Institute, the Stein Cartography Collection on the high mezzanine of the downtown library was a hot contender in my search for the primo launching pad in the city for offing myself to a greasespot, all the most tubercular-looking blue period funambules were in the Stein Wing at the art museum-“You met Egbert and Pinky,” Egbert said, “if they ate their dough with a knife and fork it still wouldn’t run out. They’re so godzilla rich they don’t do anything. They run the foundation, that’s about it.” “The foundation?” “For draining off the family money… But I think I’m more like Unkie Jerry, I gotta do sumpm.

“You know, Ursie, some people-not you-” he waved his hand, breezily exempting me, “need sumpm to chase after, and I’m one of em. I need sumpm to do, some kinda thing outside of a person. D.O.A.P. takes care of all that. When you’re a junkie you know what you’re looking for all day long-you’re looking for stuff. That’s why love is the same as D.O.A.P., it gives you some kinda half a reason to get out of bed in the morning,” he added-where had I heard that before?

“Hey, that’s what O says about love,” I snuck in. “Does she?” Egbert yawned. Not that I was trying to sic her on him, I even kinda missed the life-or-death thrills and chills of her amorous persecution, but it came down to this: better him than me. “Speaking of O…” I said. “Back off, it’s hopeless, Ursie,” Bertie said gently, “I’m in love already.