Book of Souls Read online

  There wasn't any room for an artist these days.

  Just guys like me.

  Copouts. Sellouts. Panderers.

  Adding insult to injury I'd managed a long-term relationship with a woman while Kenneth's own marriage had ended bitterly, explosively. Since then he'd been screwing a guy here, a lady there. Nothing that held. Nothing that worked. It didn't help the situation that my particular woman had no patience with him—with his monologues, his wild complicated stories and his artist posturings. She'd challenge him at every turn. I tried to mediate. It never worked. Not for a minute.

  I think he began to hate her long before he started hating me.

  I think it galled him that I hung on to such a bitch. Yet another bitch.

  ~ * ~

  So I was surprised to see him at my apartment that day.

  We sat down at the table over coffee. He was thinner—too thin I thought—nervous, and seemed to have trouble getting the words out. As though his lips or teeth were bothering him. Coke, I thought. Drugs again.

  He wasn't staying long, he told me.

  He'd only come to warn me about something.

  His own phone was tapped and he suspected that as a friend of his, so was mine. Otherwise he'd have phoned me.

  He had proof, finally.

  That his mother was a witch.

  He wasn't talking metaphor. According to Kenneth his mother had revealed herself to him as the genuine article—a bona fide minion of Satan.

  He'd gone to New Jersey to confront her with the knowledge that she'd been systematically poisoning his father and demanded to see him. His father was too ill to be disturbed, she said—he was dying of bone cancer. They argued. Kenneth insisted.

  She flew into a rage.

  And, he said, he watched, stunned, as her head did a three-hundred-sixty- degree turn on her shoulders. A la Linda Blair. A la The Exorcist.

  It might have been funny.

  It wasn't.

  In fact no horror movie has ever chilled me so completely.

  It was the solemnity, the openness—openness even to ridicule this time—the absolute conviction that he had seen what he had seen that was so scary. However impossible, however crazy this was, for the first time I saw that not only did he believe what he was telling me—just as he believed the conspiracies and the open line to Mother Teresa—but that somehow he had actually seen this thing. Observed it.

  It wasn't imagined reality. It was reality.

  And this time I didn't deny him. I listened carefully. Respectfully.

  I asked questions. I poured him a second cup of coffee.

  I wasn't humoring him. Whatever this construct he'd made for himself was, you simply had to respect it. That's how big it was. It had power, pure and simple. A power that to him was undeniable and irresistible. There was a sort of truth here, I realized—there was also genuine terror. The end result for me was humility. I listened.

  And it became clear that for some reason he needed to get this story out specifically to me. I didn't know why.

  We just sat and talked. About the impossible.

  At the end of it he actually seemed satisfied. Relaxed. The two of us oddly more at peace with one another than we'd been in a very long time.

  A few moments passed in silence I remember. Then I could see him tense again.

  And I finally understood why it was me he had to say this to.

  His mother, he told me, was capable of doing anything now. She was going to try to hurt him. Hurt him bad. He knew that. And he was preparing for it. I shouldn't worry--not about him.

  But he was seriously afraid she might try to get to him through his friends.

  Especially through me.

  He said he felt I was in danger.

  So he was not going to see me again. Not for a very long time. He was changing his phone number and he wasn't going to give me the new one. If she didn't think we were in touch anymore then maybe she'd leave me alone. It was worth trying. Other than that he was afraid he couldn't protect me.

  He was worried.

  He'd write once in a while. If that was okay. I said it was.

  There were tears in his eyes. Kenneth never cried. I reached over and took his hand.

  It was only much later, after a late-night phone call, that I realized where those tears were coming from and why—and what he was really saying to me.

  ~ * ~

  I walked him out of the apartment. I said I had some errand or other but what I really needed was a drink. That and to get him out of there.

  He'd shaken me.

  The day was bright and sunny—summer in the City. I remember that we didn't have much to say.

  Then just as we reached the subway station a rock came out of nowhere and landed right in front of me – not two steps away. It hit hard and I watched it bounce about fifteen feet into the air.

  It easily could have killed me.

  My nerves didn't need this. Not today.

  I looked up to see if there was some kind of construction going on in the highrise above us but couldn't see any. In my mood I was basically looking for someone to sue I think.

  I looked at Kenneth. He was smiling.

  "Watch your step," he said. "See?"

  For the second time that day I felt a chill along my spine.

  Because at that moment I shared his fear completely, I embraced it and it was mine. I felt her hand rech out to me and it was a cold hand and unyielding. For that single split-second he made me a believer. That it was possible. That anything was possible. I could almost grasp, almost feel, exactly how small a step it was from my reality to his.

  And his was terrifying.

  Then it was gone. I was back in my world again.

  Safe.

  ~ * ~

  From Pennsylvania he wrote, "eventually the manipulation of the environment around me began. I got images on my TV set that were pure nightmares.

  The stores I bought from had things on the shelves that were impossible to sell because of legality and utter rarity. I was surrounded by impersonators who would repeat my private telephone conversations loud enough for me to overhear. The effort to drive me crazy was so expensive I understood it could break the county budget. The local residents who have witnessed this spectacle have gone into revolt, scared by this high-tech invasion of rural nowhere."

  By the time I got the phone call, the Kenneth I knew was gone, sunk beneath the weight of a thousand fears and fancies.

  What was left was paranoia. And rage.

  Rage against Catholics, Jews, governments, friends and family. Employers, galleries—the entire world which could not see what he could see.

  I was not exempt.

  He called late one night and started shouting. That I had betrayed him. That Paula had betrayed him. And that anybody who betrayed him—everybody was going to pay. They were going to pay with blood and pain because he wasn't going to take this lying down anymore, he was done forgiving. Done forever. His voice was thick with meanness.

  He scared hell out of me.

  The following day I bought an answering machine.

  I left it on all day and all night. I described him to the doormen in my building and gave them his name and told them that we were never at home to this person, never, not under any circumstances whatsoever.

  On the machine he left a single message—a loud "fuck you!"

  Full of fury.

  The hang-up calls, the long empty silences, went on and on.

  ~ * ~

  I realize now that he'd warned me about this. That this day might come.

  He'd told me it was his mother I had to worry about. But it wasn't.

  It was him.

  And then, because he couldn't help it, he'd cried.

  ~ * ~

  When a friend of yours disappears into madness there's not really any time, any moment to mourn his passing. These things happen gradually. They creep up on you like a goddamn thief. You know that your friend is somewhere out there in th
e world. He's still alive. He's not himself but he's there. And maybe he haunts you the way Kenneth haunted me.

  Frustrating you. Pissing you off.

  Frightening you.

  There's anger and a sense of waste.

  But no love. Not really.

  You can't love insanity and that's what he is right now, that's who he is.

  It defines him.

  The man, the boy I was such good friends with has been gone from me for a very long time, in and out of a wrongheaded marriage and a botched career, in and out of mental hospitals, in and out of jails. I stopped answering his long, rambling, often accusatory but meticulously hand-written letters three years ago. Just a few months ago, he finally stopped writing.

  But I guess that because I knew he was still alive somewhere in Pennsylvania, because I was scared of him and frustrated by what he'd become and because I didn't want to see him—and maybe because I'd known him so long in so many incarnations it was damn near impossible to imagine a world without Kenneth in it—I'd never mourned him.

  I'm mourning now.

  "I feel sorry for you," Kenneth wrote bitterly in his last letter to me, "because you do not have one good story to tell."

  He was taking me to task for selling out again.

  Kenneth, I hope that this, at least, proves you wrong.

  I wish you could read it. The old you. Not the later you and certainly not the dying.

  Goodbye, old friend.

  I miss you.

  AFTERWORD

  In one way at least, Kenneth beat the rap.

  Shortly after Bruatrian published this piece I learned that some brand-new chemical cocktail had drummed his disease into full retreat. So he was not going to die after all. At least not imminently. And it occurred to me that he might have been amused to know that his departure had already been announced. But as of this writing I don't believe he does. I sure didn't tell him. I have, I think, good reasons why.

  ~ * ~

  In May of this year, three months ago, I received my first letter from Kenneth in a very long time. It was addressed to me, to both my real name and Jack Kersey (sic), to the woman I live with, to her sister, and to a mutual friend fromour college years who lives a few blocks away. The sister's and friend's names were also misspelled though Kenneteh knew both of them quite well. From the letter I learned that he now held stock in Citibank, Bell Atlantic and AT&T and that he was living with a woman. "She is beautiful," he said, "she is exquisite. She is not blunt and coarse." The woman would inherit all his earthly goods eventually. Not his son. "The parlor game of Colin and Helene is finished," he said.

  He went on to tell me that he'd received his transcripts from our high school just that day.

  "In my senior year," he said, "all my grades were censored. The blackmail from you, Kevin, Jack and Maryann explodes in my official transcript. I am censored at seventeen.

  "Pennsylvania did its very best to do me in, however Pennsylvania ran into:

  "American Express

  "CHRISTIES

  "MOMA

  "Nabisco

  "The Newark Museum

  "The Missionaries of Charity, Calcutta, Bronx, Newark

  "The Reformed Buddhist Church of TIBET "Tsuru Gallery

  "Japan Gallery

  "Ronin Gallery."

  I have no idea what kind of blackmail he might have been thinking of and my guess is that the other three people he mentions, all high school classmates, wouldn't either. The letter ends with one-line references to his garden, his house being warm and dry, his plans to go back to school and then teach, spring weather and various other bits of business. But he's not quite done with me yet.

  "Your paperback books are so tired. All the clichés of the macho flake."

  Ouch.

  "I have to get a White Pine now. Too hip gotta go."

  ~ * ~

  Then in June another letter. Stranger still, especially as it refers to me.

  "It seems to me that your little world rests on Colin...you have no son to work over. You have the shallow side of life. Sit and type and then go to a bar. Computers. I have Bears, Deer, cars to drive and I know every Policeman in the U.S.A...your answering machine plays police sirens. But I have police touch me to feel the flesh...you and Colin are connected. But you have no son.

  "My looks are coming back."

  My name is scrawled across the page along with that of William Jefferson Clinton, yet another old high school friend and Elvis Costello.

  I don't think I've had a real talk with Colin in my life.

  On the second page of the letter there's a typed communication from one John R. Thomas, Supervisory Special Agent for the Philadelphia Division of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. It's dated June 1st, on FBI letterhead shrunk down to fit the upper right-hand corner of the page. It says in part, "in reference to your telephone call and subsequent mail...this matter is not handled by the FBI. It is handled by your local telephone company...contact (them) and have a block placed on your telephone, so that your long distance carrier cannot be changed without your written consent. No Federal violation that is under jurisdiction of the FBI has occurred."

  There's no direct explanation as to what this is about. Instead he goes on to tell me to "fly to Greece at your age and prance about. I drive for ten and a half years now. My auto is famous. Colin is a nobody. You are a nobody now too." He quotes a few lines from The Bristol Stomp and then says, "you were a high school english teacher in Boston. I went to Yale. I went to JAIL. Of all the "Party Boys"...I am the only international one of the lot. You, Helene, Colin, Mom, Debby, Paula, Neil, are all buying and selling on my story. I know who I am seeing in the Allentown Office of the FBI. I know who is shadowing me in N.J. The cage door is open now.. .you are like a house cat. Now cats in P.A. are being dropped on the streets I drive."

  ~ * ~

  Writing this now I slip the letter back into its envelope and notice something. Something I'd missed when I received it. Inside the envelope is a two-inch square of paper. I guess I'd just overlooked it. But as I discover it now I see that it my own writing, my own hand, my last name and address snipped off the envelope of some letter I'd sent him god knows when. I turn over the square of paper and it says "FAKE Dallas writing—you write in script honey"

  I don't. I'm a lefty and script is painful for me. Once Kenneth would have known that.

  But even my handwriting's suspect now.

  ~ * ~

  The answering machine stays on twenty-four hours a day.

  Because Kenneth's right about one thing. You can hear a police siren in the background underneath the message on my machine. If you live in New York long enough you get so you barely even notice sirens of any sort no matter how long and loudly they wail away and the day I retaped it some cop was racing full-tilt to somewhere or other up Amsterdam Avenue.

  The letter arrived in June._

  That means he's called me lately. Or tried to.

  Friends, especially out-of-towners, usually get a kick out of the siren. It reminds them that they're calling the City.

  I think I'll let it stay.

  —August, 1998

  AUTHOR'S NOTE:

  I gave Bruatrian another chance in 1997 with this one and they did a much better job this time. They even left my title.

  A year or so later James Cahill came to me asking if I had something which hadn't been seen much for him to do as a chapbook. I suggested this piece and he produced a beautiful little hardcover limited with an introduction by Edward Lee. And by then I had the news that Kenneth had recovered so I asked i f I could do an epilogue to set the record straight.

  RISKY LIVING: A MEMOIR

  AUTHOR'S NOTE:

  This one bears some explanation up front.

  In 1984 Ballantine published their second novel of mine, Hide and Seek. When the woman I call Jen here read it, she phoned me and said, this is about me, isn't it?

  She was right of course. There is absolutely nothing in the novel—
not a single incident—that would tip that hand to anybody but her but she was right nevertheless. The entire book was a metaphor for our relationship.

  When Barry Hoffman at Gauntlet asked to reprint it in trade paper last year he requested an afterword. Barry likes his bells and whistles. I consented only grudgingly because I'd already written about the making of Hide and Seek in a couple of other contexts. Then I thought, wait a minute. Why not write about the woman who drove the book, the woman behind the character?

  The section headings presented here are lines from the novel and you perhaps have to read the thing to fully understand how they apply.

  Come to think of it, not a bad idea.

  ~ * ~

  1.

  THERE'S A WHEEL IN MY HAND

  BUT I CAN'T STEER

  The first real love of my life was hooked on speed. She mainlined crystal meth.

  1967 was a long time ago so I don't recall exactly how we met. She was a student at Emerson in Boston—a sophomore to my junior when she started shooting the stuff—so I'd hazed her the year before. I'm sure I met her then but the specific circumstances elude me.

  ~ * ~

  Remember hazing?

  The thinking was this. You put a new class of kids through a week of pure hell. You're a sophomore and they're lowly freshmen so they're at your bidding. You went through the same thing the year before but now it's your turn. They tote and fetch for you. They go down for pushups or sit-ups or run in place. You make them eat mysterious "desserts"—like mango chutney straight from the jar. You call them names. They call you sir or ma'am. You can do practically anything to these kids except physically push them around or make them late for class.

  Sooner or later they gather together. There's talk of rebellion. Hell, their parents are paying for this shit! Leaders emerge. Bonds form. Plans are made and discarded. Clear-headed "advisors" from the junior class, who are otherwise not involved in all this, urge them to keep the peace.