Waking the Moon

almost unbearable, distance.

PART THREE Return

CHAPTER 10 Ignoreland

I DIDN’T REALLY CHANGE all that much. I didn’t turn grey. I didn’t get fat, I didn’t get married, I didn’t have children, I didn’t die. When I wasn’t at work I wore the same T-shirts and jeans and battered cowboy boots, although I drew the line at buying a black leather jacket at thirty-seven and pretending I was still twenty-two. I listened to the same music I always had, although Baby Joe did his best to educate me beyond the tastes I’d formed when I was still in college. It wasn’t exactly like I’d sold out on my life and dreams and all that other bullshit, because the truth was I’d never actually had anything to sell. It was more like I slowly froze in place, inside my little office at the museum; more like some part of me just fell asleep one day and never woke up. Everything that had happened to me all those years before gradually disintegrated into a kind of dream.

There was nothing to tether me to my memories of the Divine. Oliver was dead, Angelica might as well be. I had invested everything in two stocks that failed. Baby Joe remained my only real contact from that single semester. He had graduated summa cum laude, with a degree in English, and was now the beleagured Alternative Arts & Music critic for the beleagured New York Beacon, from whence he waged an ongoing war against his rivals and detractors in the Manhattan print media. Every few months he’d send me a compilation tape of music he thought I should be listening to. Baby Joe’s idea of must-hear stuff included the Ramayana Monkey Chant as well as the entire and surprisingly extensive catalog of a dreadful band called Boink. His scant free time he devoted to writing a novel, but he did a good job of keeping in touch. He called me every couple of months, telling me about people from the Divine I’d never had the chance to know— famous people, a lot of them, anthropologists and theologians and actresses and fledgling politicians—as well as Hasel Bright and Annie Harmon.

I thought of Annie often. Baby Joe gave me her number, but I never called. What do you say after nearly twenty years? But I was also embarrassed: like Baby Joe, Annie Harmon had gone out there and done something. Annie had become a cult figure.

She’d come out of the closet shortly after I left the Divine, spent a bunch of years knocking around the whole coffeehouse/nouveau folkie scene, and then, mirabilis! she’d become a star.

“‘Silver-tongued dyke with a gold-plated mike,’” said Baby Joe dryly, reading to me over the phone from an article in On Our Backs! “Huh. But she’s great, you should hear her.”

That spring it was impossible not to hear her. The video of her version of “She Is Still a Mystery,” with its Georgia O’Keeffe backgrounds and the waltzing figure of Annie herself in full George Sand drag, had been getting heavy rotation on MTV. Then there was the notorious cover for Our Magazine, Annie dressed as Nijinsky in “L’Apres-midi d’un Faun,” simulating orgasm with an Hermes scarf before an audience of captivated bluestockings. I couldn’t walk into a club or Galleria without Annie’s husky contralto seeping into my thoughts like fragrant oil. Baby Joe said she lived somewhere in the Berkshires with her lover, and although she had changed her name to Annie Harmony, that was the only cute thing about her.

“She looks dangerous, man. Shaved head and all these piercings. I hear she has a gold ring through her clit. I know she has one in her nipple.” He laughed. “Maybe you should try it, hija. Get you out on a date with something besides a lawyer.”

Baby Joe regarded my social life (or lack of it) with even more horror than my musical taste. About once a year he’d come to D.C. to visit old friends from the Divine and to see me. We’d go to small, pleasingly gritty clubs to hear bands with monosyllabic names that were easy to remember, though their music was hard to dance to.

Anyway, by then I wasn’t dancing much anymore. I’d kept up with the times: turning off, drying up, straightening out. I worked out three days at week. I lived in a rented carriage house on Capitol Hill and walked to work. I had a VCR, PC, and an aging VW Rabbit, though I resisted getting a CD player. It seemed an unnecessary expense, since I wasn’t buying much new music. And I didn’t care for CDs—they looked too much like the videodiscs I’d given my life to, they looked too much like what had happened to everything around me, people and things all getting sleeker, shinier, harder, bright reflective surfaces that put a spectral gloss on the world, but it was no longer the world I wanted to see.

That spring I learned that Hasel Bright had died.

“Bad juju, hija. I mean, real bad shit.”

Baby Joe called me at home one evening, his voice slurred. In the background I could hear distorted music and laughter, someone yelling for a Kamakazi shooter.

“You at Frankie’s?” That was the local dive where Baby Joe spent his few nights off.

“Yeah. Uh, Sweeney—something bad happened.”

I sucked my breath in. “You okay? What—”

“Not me, hija. Hasel. Very bad.” A pause. I heard ice clattering in a glass. “Shit. Listen, Sweeney—I gotta go. It’s bad. But tomorrow—”

“For god’s sake, what happened?”

Another pause. Finally, “I can’t now. I got a flight out of LaGuardia, I’m going to Charlottesville for the funeral. His wife called me. But I got a letter for you from him—”

“From Hasel? To me?”

“No. I mean, he wrote it to me, but I’m sending it to you. A copy. I have to go. I’ll call you when I get back. Be careful, okay, hija?”

The line went dead.

“Shit,” I said. I paced into the kitchen and pulled out the bottle of Jack Daniels. I did a shot for myself, and another one for Hasel.

Two days later I got the letter, a bulky envelope so swathed in packing tape I had to open it with a steak knife. When I turned it upside down, out slid a wad of paper, along with a note scrawled on a Frankie’s cocktail napkin.

Sweeney—

don’t tell anyone.

Joe

The Xeroxed pages that followed were on letterhead from Hasel’s law firm, neatly laser-printed and justified left and right, amended here and there with Hasel’s precise tiny printing.

June 25

Dear Joe,

Thanx for the Gibby Hayes interview, pretty funny. Sorry I couldn’t get into this on the phone the other night but I felt so weird talking about it I figured I’d be better off writing. Only chance I get to write these days anyway other than briefs and memos to Ron Scala. Forgive the typos and stuff, obviously I can’t have the paralegals do this for me.

Ok, so this is weird, but I think for obvious reasons you might make sense of it after you finish reading this. I didn’t tell Laurie, because she’s heard me talk about Angie and might take it the wrong way, so don’t mention it to her on the phone or something, ok?