If you didn’t know, a Bomb Pop is a red, white, and blue Popsicle shaped like a torpedo. Each color is a different flavor. Red is cherry, white is lime, and blue is raspberry for some strange reason. The colors are three separate sections but after a few minutes of sucking, they all blend into a purpley-blueish blur. This of course leaves you with bright blue lips, tongue, teeth, and hands. Which is exactly what happened to Veronica as we rode the M100 down Broadway.
With each stop the bus made, the purpler Veronica became. By the time she finished her pop, the stains were so deep I feared they would be permanent. I had seen this before though. She never failed to make a mess of it. And she didn’t care what she looked like or what anybody else thought about it. I loved her for that. It was something that always made me very happy to see. But today was different. Today it was the saddest thing in the world.
We both got off near Union Square. Veronica went into a diner to use the restroom. When she came out she was clean again, all traces of blue washed away. I escorted her as far as Astor Place, where she told me it was best we parted ways. And making no future plans, we said goodbye. No kiss.
I watched her walk down St. Mark’s Place until she disappeared into the wilds of Alphabet City.
I headed north on Third Avenue. It was about a three-mile walk to my house and I don’t recall any of it. The next thing I remember is knocking on Lou’s door.
thirty-four
I heard the music before I got to his door. It was open just a sliver so I pushed it a little wider. He was on the rug playing an acoustic guitar. I had never seen him with anything but an electric. He played a very simple riff over and over again. Two chords. It was hypnotic—concentrated and sad.
And so was he.
He didn’t notice me for about thirty seconds because his head was bent and cocked at an odd angle down toward the gaping orifice of the instrument. There was a photograph and a red tank top at his feet. He may have been staring at either one of them. Or both. A bottle of Johnnie Walker Black sat a little to his right.
He looked up and saw me in the doorway. He didn’t stop what he was doing but gave enough of a nod to say I was welcome to come in. I didn’t want to interrupt him but I didn’t want to leave. I wanted to stay inside of that moment with him . . . inside the quiet. It felt right. It almost felt good. I sat on the floor across from him. I didn’t feel like a guest. I belonged there. It was mine as much as his that day.
“I’m composing a symphony, Tim. It’s something I think I will be very proud of.”
He kept on strumming the two chords of his song. It was sparse, stark, and bare, but I’m sure he was hearing much, much more than what was coming out of his guitar.
“It’s a symphonic suite. Very formal and structured with scrupulous discipline. I’m putting everything I have into this one. Everything I have and everything I can get . . . The New York Philharmonic strings, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir—no, fuck the Mormons . . . I’d rather the Vienna Boys.” He glanced at me. “I want the middle part to sound like the last day of heaven . . . celestial voices, violins, and cellos. I love cellos. The cello is the musical instrument that resembles the human voice more than any other.”
He stared at the photo. As my eyes got used to the room’s dim light, I could see it was a picture of him and Rachel. He was sitting on her lap and her arms were wrapped around him in a very protective way. She was wearing the same red tank top that was on the floor in front of him.
“Tim me boy, this will be the first rock song to change water into wine, feed the multitudes, and raise the dead from their tombs.”
This last statement made him chuckle.
“And as the middle part hits its coda, God reaches down with His purple and His finger and grabs Adam right by the apple. Then the words start coming. And now I’m the coldest motherfucker who ever walked a block in Harlem mid-December. Bobby Sledge, a.k.a. Bobby Rikers, carried a straight razor in his boot. Every time he went to the toilet he’d dip the blade into the bowl before he flushed whatever it was that came out of him. So the blade was constantly contaminated with all kinds of breeding bacteria, amoebas, parasites, and boogeymen. Woe unto she who got a bit of Bobby’s blade.”
Lou stopped playing the guitar, took a big swig of Scotch, and lit a cigarette. He coughed five or six times after the first long drag and hacked up something nasty into a tissue. Then he stuck the smoking ciggy back into his mouth and resumed his riff.
“And Bobby’s gonna just tell the truth, man, right in the middle of the fuckin’ church. He’s gonna lay out all of the cold, heartless, pitiless reality of this gutter we call life on earth.”
Another pause in the music as he took a long pull on his cigarette.
“And then, just as sudden as it started, it changes; bang! And now it’s 1957 and we’re on a street corner in the Bronx in the middle of the night and Dion and
