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CHAPTER TWO: Spurt Expungement
New York City, NY
December 2 1973
“The artist normally exhibits in my Chelsea gallery, but for this particular work we obviously had to seek out a larger space. A disused parking garage seemed most appropriate.”
Indira Chantal Kumar led the visitors through the dead spaces between the assembled car wrecks. Elegant, stately, she indicated whenever they had to step over the runnels and small puddles of blood that were pooling on the rough concrete floor. There was a sharp iron tang in the air that mixed with black engine oil and scorched plastic.
Exhilarating scent, thought Rask. He was buzzing from the tang of blood in his nostrils and the crushed rudiments of catastrophe all around. The coke, of course, but more even than the coke, the presence of Tommy N, this scrawny kid from some trailerpark out in Montana who saw everything as so new and so excitingly fuckable.
The kid sparked life. Rask was catching a second-hand buzz of awestruck hick wonderment wherever he went with him. A sense of circularity like they might come to know one another forever, or had known each other forever; tangled up in each other’s destinies forwards and backwards and upside down.
Trailertrash Tommy N, the kid they’d picked up from that raw night in Buffalo, was now trying out the name Hexei Monstrance, or Hex. Rask had to keep reminding himself that the kid was actually twenty years old, what with this hayseed aspect, herky-jerky demeanor and wiry physique all giving him the air of a manic High School problem child on suicide watch.
The buzz was not just the scent of blood and the coke. These days, and whenever he was with Hex especially, lots of things exhilarated him. As for his wife Indira, well… not so much. She remained beautiful, of course, a wonder of poise and sensual suggestion clad in the finest haute couture money could buy. But there was some indifference, some lurking apathy that he put down to their bad habits and her weary knowingness, but also he felt obscurely connected to the wiry urchin who walked with them.
He’d helped set her up in her New York City gallery and eased her passage into the smart set of Chelsea and SoHo. Now she was becoming blasé, the thrill of the newness slumping under a coursing snowdrift of Manhattan days, slim lines grown into heaping mounds of disinterest. Of course this air of seen-everything-done-it-all was good for business on the New York art scene, but to Rask it was becoming a drag.
The exhibit, by up-and-coming Ghanaian artist Orson Bijayo, was a series of car wrecks artfully arranged, stacked up to create teetering monoliths of disaster thirty feet high. Industrial arclights were placed around these found sculptures, picking out gleaming details of exposed metal and crumpled engine blocks. The jagged folds and crumplings were somehow impossibly sensual, suggestive of involvement and release.
The gallery handout stated flatly that someone had died in each and every one of these wrecks. Rask knew this wasn’t true of all the cars, yet enough of them exuded that residue of sudden death to excite him in obscure ways. He fancied he could even see an aura of calamity, bluish and prismatic, emanating from some of the cars. It was a turn-on—the tingle, the haze—and he sensed the exhibition would be a big hit.
Blood dripped from the wrecks, purchased from a Brooklyn slaughterhouse, beginning to congeal in the crevices formed by crumplezones and in rivulets on the floor. A choice imposed by Indira the art impresario over the objections of artist Orson. Rask had silently agreed with him. The dim blue aura of calamity was thrill enough, the pools of gore and raw butchershop smell were a touch too tryhard for Manhattan.
They walked, these three, in an uneasy symmetry between the piled accumulations of disastrous fate, stepping smartly over the blood. Indira’s slender statuesque form led the way at their apex, with Rask behind to her right and Hexei trailing slightly to the left. An equilateral of mounting desire, the angles between unstable and taut.
They edged past an androgynous mannequin leaning precariously from a shattered windshield, mouth open in either a scream or an invitation, and then they rounded a corner of wreckage and were gone from sight.
December 1973
Rask and the Ruffians at #11 on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart with “Angular Conundrum”
The Monsters at #83 on the album chart with debut album “Hot n’ Heavy”
I was in the bathroom scrubbing blood from the thick platforms of my shoes when Indira knocked on the door ever so lightly, as though already disinterested with whatever words we were about to exchange.
She opened the door and watched me where I was perched on the edge of the bathtub in just a ratty pair of briefs barely holding onto my hips with the shoe held between my knees. Dirty pinkish water pooled in the porcelain basin around my bare feet and circled the drain. Her face was blank and empty, devoid of feeling, devoid of hate or rage.
In the less than two months since being wrangled like starved cattle into Rask’s world, I could not make heads or tails of Indira and struggled to imagine her making anything of me. The total disinterest she was capable of had a masculine edge to it–not quite like my daddy, as there was an inevitable violence beneath his indifference, but more like the boys I’d cruise at Grandview Park back in Billings, performing the act of disinterest as a facet of the necessary script, though I got the feeling that Indira had been playing the part for too long and could no longer scrounge up enough feeling for herself, never mind anyone else.
“Yes?” I chanced.
“Rask and I would like to see you,” she said, sort of tossing the words like marbles to scatter all over the tile floor. I’d never been in a bathroom this large before.
“Okay,” I said. She closed the door without a click.
I toweled myself off and stood hunched in front of the mirror. Checked my hair–still mangled as roadkill. Checked my teeth–still yellow. I mouthed my new name without speaking it. Hex. The shape of it like biting down. People were beginning to speak that name out loud. People were starting to chew on me. All the blood rushed to my dick at the thought of it.
I padded down a carpeted hallway the size of the trailer that had stunted my growth, if not a little larger. The smell of the garage, all the twisted metal, still clung to my skin. Blood seemed to shiver on the surface.
I got lost—when did hotel suites get this fucking big?—but was, in the end, guided by a sort of horny sixth sense, sniffing like a hungry bloodhound toward the smell of imminent carnal prey. I paused in the doorway of the bedroom to observe the scene.
It wasn’t so much that we’d been dancing around the inevitability of this moment. If it were up to Rask alone, I think we’d have worked each other out head to toe a dozen times over by now. If there was a test being conducted before I could be allowed in, that was all Indira.
The only way in which I felt tested by Rask was musically. He wanted more and more from me–and the band, too, but the sounds they made mattered less to him than the performance I put on, the sex I had with the stage–and this scene arrived as a final gig before the venue upgrade. A signature sealing the collaboration. My future opening wide–a million people chewing my name. Hex.
She sat at the foot of the bed, almost clerically, in just an open robe with her breasts in perfect order, the hair between her legs only just visible in the murky, cigarette smoke-drenched light. She had her back to Rask who was propped haphazardly against the king bed’s tacky headboard, haggard body laid out on tacky sheets at strange angles. He was nude to the bone. The scene was almost too posed from a tasteful erotic publication to be real, but there was also the scent that came up from Rask. That was real.
Indira, conductor of the whole project, directed me to kiss her first. I was as indifferent to women as she was toward me, but I found her lack of arousal shamelessly exciting. It was like a violation, but where you’re not sure who’s being violated. She tasted of raspberries and gin. My stubble against her smooth brown skin produced a delicious friction.
I watched Rask the whole time. He traced a finger delicately over his lips, teething occasionally on the worn fingernail. Spit on his digits. Leftover white on the rim of his nose. I had sex with the stage, a command performance, until Indira allowed me into his lap. I slid his face down my backside just like I’d tucked his Rolling Stone cover into my waistband years before.
Pressed between the two of them, held in the cradle of their own shared desire, I turned electric, writhing against Rask’s wild tongue, the tangle of all our hair. Him coarse and fluid on my back, her smooth and firm against my stomach, my shoulder she bit down on. The closer they pressed in, the freer I became. Held without restraint. Fucking toward an endless horizon. I opened, she opened, he opened, the world on whole parted open like a crowd to welcome me, then chewed me up. They moaned my name. Hex. Felt like flying.
“How about a collab?” said Rask into the air of the hotel suite as it choked with their cigarette smoke and their sex. All three were tangled on the bed, looking up into the darkness. The light of the half-moon poured into the room. Waxing or waning? Next night would tell.
“A what?” asked Hex.
“A collaboration. We can work on something together.”
“I thought we just did,” said Hex, and spluttered with abrupt laughter. The bed rocked with their giggles and coughing.
Indira was post-coitus pleasant, peachy cheeked and almost—almost—in love with her life, but as always threatening to wane back into her baseline displeasure.
Rask stood up and pulled on his spandex loonpants. “C’mon, both of you, we’re going down the studio. Got to capture this vibe before it goes away.”
The night watchman at Greene Street Studios had standing orders to let Rask in at any time of the day or night, whenever he got the urge to lay down a track. Clearly the urge was on him now. He, his wife and this new character, some scraggy kid with lanky mid-blond hair, as they burst through the door all howling with laughter. It was just after 3.00 AM.
They chucked the security man a half-gram then headed into studio two, where Rask had been working days with the Ruffians on their new album.
“This is a high that seems like it's gonna last forever,” said Hex. His puppy energy bounced all over that small room. Something might break.
“Plug that feeling into your playing, babe,” said Rask. “Indira, why don’t you get behind the desk and get ready to twiddle some knobs and slide some sliders. I’ll tell you what to do, yeah?”
“Tell me what to do—just for a change, right?” Now that Indira was at the studio, this whole thing was looking less and less of a delightful lark to her and more like a chore.
“C’mon, darlin’, this is gonna be great. Just get into the vibe of it, yeah?”
We did your art, now you can do our rock n’ roll. Unsaid.
For lack of any preparation, they settled on a well-loved standard: Elvis’s “Devil in Disguise”. Perfect for a call-response spontaneous stomp-n’-romp. Hexei took the lead vocal, Rask sang out the response and played guitar.
You look like an angel (look like an angel)
Walk like an angel (walk like an angel)
Talk like an angel (talk like an angel)
But I got wise…
You're the devil in disguise
Rask’s guitar solo was off the leash. Hexei nearly shattered his knees jumping up and kneeling down in time to the raw chords. He howled like a dog, wept in lust and joy.
It was done. Peaks pass, and sometimes you notice the slide down the other side and sometimes you don’t.
“How was that?” called out Rask to Indira on the other side of the glass. She roused herself out of a slumber and leaned in to the desk microphone. ”Sounds good.”
“Playback!” called out Hex.
“What’s that?” said Indira.
“Play back the tape, darlin’” said Rask.
“Oh… I, uh, didn’t... uh. Did you guys want to make a tape?”
She smiled wanly as if to say I dare you lover-boys to disbelieve in my sleepy-head mistake. As if she could not then see the consequence of this divergence, what it meant to those present, how it would alter the course of their individual lives, their teetering up-and-down careers, the finicky threads of their fates.
Indira Chantal Kumar chose at that hour to look neither forward nor backward. Only the difficult but momentary truth that was laid before her was visible to her in her mixing booth. Rask’s path was set, however, and it ran in parallel with that of Hexei Monstrance, the monster he himself created.
Nothing Indira ever could do in her cool chic desperation would ever stop that car from rolling on towards its destination. The wreckage was waiting.
Video Nine “Spunk Expurgement/Televisized Revolooshun”
by A.P. Murphy
Video extracts from Velvet Goldmine (1998) by Todd Haynes
(with Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, Ewan McGregor and Toni Collette)
Music - “America Eats Its Young” by George Clinton and Funkadelic
Indira - you direst fool! Tommy - should have stuck around that trailer park. The man is Troubled and Trouble.