AREA 47

SECTION 89:

COURTNEY, Chapter 25

The stairs going up to the third floor of The Warehouse topped out directly into the edge of a large socializing room.  Abstract neon strips blazed all around the windowless walls.  Perhaps eighty people were here, many standing, doing the schmegeggy shuffle, although there were groups of furniture all over, and several tables with edible goodies on them.  Immediately, Courtney’s eyes caught sight of the star of the event: Beauregard.

Thickset muscle-man in his early fifties, standing near the center of the vast, high-ceiling room, dressed in a red jumpsuit, white tennis shoes, shaved and painted bald head.  His bald head was an ever-changing canvas for the newest Beauregard artwork.  Occasionally, he painted his face as well; and tonight his face was a wreck of wild colors, huge bug eyes, computer keyboard lips, his nose a painted OFF SWITCH.  People were clustered about him, bickering for his attention.  Curiously, groups of people around the edges of the room seemed to be openly disdainful of Beauregard and the people trying to socialize with him; and a lot of them kept glancing more or less at Courty, apparently watching the stairway to see who would arrive next.  Some of the people in the room, Courty could recognize on sight as being famous people, many others were familiar in a way that told her that they were famous also, just that she couldn’t place them exactly with the images in her memory.  Mom would flip.

Peach had clicked at first hit with Phil, so Courtney had drifted along with things at first.  But Eric was impossible.  He was so phony she doubted there was anything of value behind the act——the few glimpses she had been able to see of the Real Him revolted her.  And she saw no reason to stay with someone who treated her like a whore; braving the party solo was infinitely preferable.

Courtney paused at the top of the stairs.  Too late, she realized that it was a tactical mistake.  She should have just walked confidently into the room as if she owned the catering service, the building, and ten autographed Beauregards.  Instead of thinking about how to fit into the party scene, she had been thinking about pretty-face Eric, and hoping that he would get lost like a nice little dipzip.  A big guy who had been arranging the food on one of the near tables, looked at her, and started to walk directly toward her in a way that told her that she had goofed.

But the big guy stopped abruptly and made a U-turn back to the table, where he continued taking food off the tray and putting empty plates off the table, back onto the tray.  His behavior was so odd that Courtney again just stood there, instead of confidently moving into the room.

“Gee,” a voice softly said from beside and behind her, to her left, “don’t say anything.  Please.  Don’t say anything, ever.”

Courty turned her body and looked at the man who had spoken.  The voice had sounded like an innocent child speaking, but it was a large man standing there.  He was wearing a funny old drab suit; it didn’t seem to fit him too well.  On his head was a terrible short wig; it was obvious to Courtney that it was a wig because it wasn’t fitted quite right to his head.  He looked at her with a strange kind of wonderment.  A man that massive, looking at her that intensely would ordinarily have made her uneasy, but she felt perfectly relaxed.  Behind him, almost completely obscured by his bulk was a young blond woman with a man’s haircut.  No make-up, $300 blue-jeans, a stylish, distressed black leather jacket.  Courtney had not noticed the woman, at first.

“Oh!” the man said, quietly.  “Oh!  Move some more.  But don’t talk.  Just move.  Anything.”

Courtney tilted her head sideways, and regarded him quizzically.

“Oh, Good!” he said, clapping his hands silently like a little girl.  “I was SO worried.  I felt so small, so tiny.  Like a midget.  Oooooh.  I was an ant!  But you moved your head and made me human again.  Thank you.  Oh, but don’t talk.  I’ll talk for you.  And then you can stay the most lovely person I’ve seen all week.  Why——”

“Shhhhhhh,” Courtney said, her index finger over her mouth.  She saw that he was delighted with her gesture, and she took a chance.  “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Beauregard.  I won’t give away your secret.”

Again, he was visibly delighted, which told her that she had guessed correctly.  She had read that once he had hired a Chuck Beauregard impersonator to give lectures on the college circuit instead of himself.  A lot of subtle little clues added up to the same possibility here: the way the employee had reversed himself so quickly (he must have received a signal from the guy she was now talking to), the attitude of the hipper partiers in this room who were perhaps laughing at the clutch of bodies around the painted man in the center of the room, and the awesomely out-of-the-ordinary viewpoint of the man talking to her.

“My mistake,” he said.  “I thought you were a Looker.  But you’re a Talker.  That’s much better.  Beauties can just BE.  But Talkers can DO things, and that’s much more fun.”

Courtney said, “You were supposed to ask me what I thought of Beauregard, point to that man over there, say a disparaging remark and wait for me to make a fool of myself.”

“Gee, I guess I just forgot.”

They both smiled warmly at each other.  The woman behind him completely ignored them both, and lit up a joint which she felt no inclination to share.

Courty said, “I’m a minor poet, Mr. Beauregard.  I’m here on the hope that you still have poetry readings, and on the hope that you will let me read my new poem.”

Beauregard just silently looked at her, so she added: “It’s very new.  I just wrote it today.  It’s called THE GREAT GOD PAN IS DEAD.”

“You wrote one poem today?  Why didn’t you write TEN poems?  Work is everything!  Work is all there is!” Beauregard’s sudden burst of emotion was startling; it wasn’t anger, it was excitement, and it seemed out of place.

“I disagree.  Wasting time is an important part of living.”

“I AM a waste of time,” the blond woman behind Beauregard said, exhaling the fragrant smoke.

“No,” Beauregard said.  He turned to the blond and said, “No.”  Then he turned back to Courtney.  “No.”  Now he was somber.  “Wasting time is work.  Living is work.  The hardest work I ever did was go to court and sit there while a lawyer insulted me.  I hardly moved.  But That Was Work.  If you write ten more poems, here, I’ll let you read tonight.”

Courtney didn’t exactly understand his reasoning, but was not inclined to argue.

It developed that the poetry reading was on, but deferred for a couple of hours so that Beauregard could have fun watching people make fools of themselves fawning over the phony Mr. B.  He liked to watch.  Beauregard personally supplied Courtney with paper and ball-point, and left her to her own muse.

Courtney tried to hide in the corner of the socializing room, and do some words, but the guests were unrelenting.  Somehow by simply associating with the real Beauregard for a few minutes, she became the new darling to dump on: They ganged up on her in pairs, singly, and in groups.

Several professorial-types impinged on her writing-time to argue Beauregardism with her: as if she were conferred expertise by ten minutes of association!  It was so bizarre she went along with the gag and improvisationally answered their questions with specious cow confetti.  “But isn’t it obvious?  The Meaning is the Mirage because the Message creates its own space-time continuum.”

A pair of poets lingered on her couch——(I need a NO TRESPASSING sign!)——and behaved like intellectually damaged wordsmith wimps.  It was going to be an experience to discover how they composed poetry out of their five word vocabulary of shit, fuck, suck, shit & shit.  She offered them some professional advice: “Go take a flying-read at a Roget’s Thesaurus.”

An instantly identifiable TV-star cozied up to Courtney as if she were an equal, and Courtney was so amazed by the woman that she could hardly speak.  The lady had just undressed for success all over the pages of Sportsman magazine, and Courty recalled that there was some scandal about her past life as a pornstar minor in a 3-D flick.  The TV-Star was sufficiently energetic and hyper to power the entire East Coast, and so blatantly sex-crazed that a Peach next to her would appear like a meek, wussy librarian.  For a moment there, Courtney thought that the star was making some sort of a pass at her!

But after the TV-star had sexually slunk off the couch in search of more responsive playmates, Courty found words of reply forming themselves on paper.  And they seemed right for this crowd: words chiseled by the sharp bite of her wit.  Heck with GREAT GOD PAN.  This crowd wanted the abusive hard-core.  She could sense the beating of a different drum, and was beginning to pick up on its rhythm.  Gentle, flowing & metered PAN would be rhymed social suicide.  Survival here meant that she would have to be harsh to make her ideas stick with these Teflon-brained zombies!

She wrote.

Good God, here come the playboys . . .

She fought off a series of would-be boyfriends, hopeful lovers, flummoxed friends, wing-nut conversationalists, self-stoked sexual partners, and unzipped one night stands.

Wallenstein, the world-renowned literary genius, who managed to be both drunk and stuffy, expounded a monolithic monologue on the decline of the West (We Know, Thank You) while chain-smoking a factory worth of carbon monoxide and carcinogens in Courtney’s direction.  Courtney fought back on paper, narrowing in on his nastiest habit, since he really was a world-renowned literary genius, and she was somewhat in awe of him.

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It wasn’t a poetry reading.

With the lights down low, and flickering candles moodily casting gentle shadows throughout Beauregard’s up-elevator living room, a select group of the interested retired for the temporary reading.  It was an absolutely amazing living room, undeniably Beauregard’s abode.

But what should have been a display of emotional textures, hypnotic and spine tingling, somehow became a performance event completely unrelated to poetry.  About forty crowded into his living room, and as Courtney psyched out the audience, she noticed that half the people she had written about were present.  The place was stuffy with over-sized egos, larger-than-life personalities, famous-nameous media-people crowded seven autographs to the square inch.  She started to get the standard attack of stage fright.  Her heart was a NASA rocket blasting away.  All circulation stopped to her hands and feet; they were Eskimo appendages.

It opened with a request from Beauregard for THE RULES ARE CLEAR.  Gentle applause from the anticipatory crowd told Courtney that it was a piece that had been read several times before to many in this crowd.  They wanted to hear it again.

The piece was done from memory.  The guy who spoke it was an anemic-looking angry young man.  The piece, itself, had little substance; a series of disconnected aphorisms, many so vague as to be meaningless; parts of the piece would suddenly threaten to approach connected meaning and relevance, only to quickly mystify in a haze of hopeless ambiguity.  But the delivery was truly poetic: he cajoled those in front, he walked with huge strides back and forth, he shouted to those in the back corners, his hands waved in wild gestures, his face displayed the complete catalog of emotions; he insulted individuals in the audience merely by his delivery, by his tone of voice, by pointedly speaking only to that person for minutes at a time: the actual words used meant less than how he said them.  By emphasis, he fashioned a stunning, glorious raiment on a skinny stick-figure of prose.  It was a triumph of style over substance, and Courtney found herself impressed by the length he was willing to go to clothe the audience in the Emperor’s Newest.

The audience loved it.

When in Rome etc.  Courtney considered how she would handle this (assuming she really was allowed to read something).

As different ‘poets’ did their thing, Courtney become more relaxed.  The event was such a joke, so completely divorced from actual poetry, that finally she could care less what happened.  It gave her a kind of freedom, and it greatly expanded the range of her possibilities.  It was when things didn’t matter, when it was all an act, that the extrovert in her became dominant.  If they didn’t open a space for her to read, she would just create her own space!

A series of zip-speakers went through the motions, none anywhere near as good as the first performer; some of them drove the audience to boredom, and were halted before they could finish.

Beauregard told a long story that had no moral, no punch-line, that didn’t even end; but that was quite funny and enjoyable due to the extreme silliness of it.  He seemed to make it up as he went along.  He refused to stand up as all the others had; he just spoke from where he was sitting.

Somehow the god Pan got into his story.  Then it was the great god Pan.  It took Beauregard a long time, much finagling, but finally the great god Pan was dead.  Courty had to admire him, even as he destroyed any possibility of her reading the Pan poem.

“Gee, I don’t know your name.”  Beauregard was looking right at her.  The sentence so naturally followed from context that it took her two seconds to realize that he was talking to her and that the story was finished (unfinished).

“C. Foulke Ryan,” Courtney said, springing to her feet.  Then she chilled, looked so slowly over the living room that the pause was a preamble, serving to quiet somewhat the guests, many of whom had grown restless at the long drone of Beauregard’s voice.

Her eyes alighted on the TV-celebrity who had quite candidly done a graphic verbal inventory of her French tricks, back downstairs on the couch with Courtney.  She was whispering and giving a free show of her cleavage now to Eric Des Barres!  Hiding there.  Actually hiding behind James Dean retro shades.

Courtney hadn’t noticed his presence somehow.

“The Great God Pan is Dead?” Beauregard asked, with seeming innocence.  “Was that what you planned to read?”

“No,” Courtney said.  She enunciated precisely, lingering over the syllables.  “Adjustable Vagina Breath.”

Eye contact achieved.  She was definitely speaking their language.

Courtney spoke savagely, a crisp, cruel delivery, with no need to glance at the pages in her hip pocket; everything she had written tonight was fresh and clear in her mind.

“Underdeveloped egos

Legs open for your programming

Publicity

Abusing your anonymity

Got that traffic stopping look

Toilet trained

And weaned

With automatic pet control

Manual male-ego massage tongues

Adjustable vagina breath

We Echo your clichés

In competition to please

Tune-up your dreams

Lend credence to your seem”

The audience reaction was a wary refusal to commit itself to a value judgment; a silent pause, now utterly attentive, waiting for more evidence to arrive before rendering judgment.

They didn’t get it.  None of them.  It angered her.

Their brains were bullet-proof!

“Couch back,” Courty sneered at them all, and boldly walked fast through the people to stand in front of Eric and the TV-dinner media-whore.  She focused exclusively on the woman, pointed boldly & broadly, brought her to everyone’s attention.  Courty whined the words, then spit them, swooned, then savagely slapped the words out.  They wanted tacky?  She gave them sub-literate.

Acid rain hit that bitch like a cow pissing on a flat rock.

“Don’t take me seriously,

she says,

from the pin-up

Promiscuity is high market value,

and popularity is a sport

After all the hours

you spent

holding her up

with your left hand

I’m redeemed at will,

she says,

as you fold her out

Naive, childish quotations

cancel vamp postures:

basically home-loving beaver

But you’ve engendered only jealousy

I’m a nice girl after all,

she moans,

while rating an X

So astute

to exhibit in the market,

swallowing genitals innocently

& her full-color

3-D

menage-a-trois

is only

apparently promiscuous

’Cause she’s a good,

not a good girl;

and you ought to agree

that good possession

don’t mean a thing

without market penetration”

Wallenstein thundered into a one-man drunken standing ovation.

Courtney felt a wild rush of excitement, loving every second of feral hate on the woman’s face, loving the approval emanating from those present.

Wallenstein refused to shut up.  The hopeless drunkard was whistling!

Courtney went straight over to him.

He stood there, leering, a burning cigarette hanging from his mouth at a jaunty angle.

Courty grabbed the cigarette from his mouth, and stomped it to death on Beauregard’s off-the-wall carpeting (a gigantic advertisement for a famous sugar water).  She shouted straight into his face, an angry sneer:

“Suicide

came to where the flavor is

Rode a lusty mare,

bronco busted cows in Montana snow

Sucked on tits Red

or Longhorn 100

Took a long pull on his fast gun

and killed the left lung

Then rode off into the sunset cancer ward”

Courty shoved Wallenstein hard, and his startled bulk sprawled back onto the couch behind him, his hand knocking his drink over, drenching the sofa and the pretty pregnant woman next to him.

At that point the New Yorkers really started to get into it.  Poetry as a contact sport!  Authentic eclogue nutrition, citified, a rad departure from their antiphonal designer monosodium glutamate brain-food diet.

They liked her.

Even Wallenstein, who had spilled his drink all over the gal next to him, and was awkwardly slouched there half-on, half-off the couch, was laughing and already reaching for another ciggy.

The flock of would-be poets could use some dumping on.  She picked on the worst of the lot.  She was surfing now on a wave of extroversion; a white-hot, thundering, literary kamikaze dive.

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Beauregard demanded the text to all of her poetry that evening, saying she owed him something for the burn on his Coca-Cola logo carpeting.  He wanted to publish it in his Mass-Art magazine.  Courtney said yes, giving him the scratched and messy drafts, without thinking.  (She had not glanced at them once.)  That was in the afterglow of successful performance, and the belated realization that she had actually stomped out a burning cigarette on one of Beauregard’s works of art!

But she began to have post-cognitive dissonance.  She had written precisely to be spoken aloud, here, at this New York scene.  She wasn’t sure if the poems would work in print.  It was a departure from her style, one she didn’t particularly care to pursue and develop.  Too much Angst & aggression; quick flash, first-draft stuff.

But Beauregard had escaped down-elevator, the instant he had her pages.  She lingered in his living room, as did many others; it was an amazing room, actually a gallery of divergent artworks.

It was strange how a type of success that she would not have dreamed of, left her feeling uneasy.  Three poetic successes in a single week: a forthcoming book, an outstandingly enjoyable reading of her work, and now her work would appear in a popular art magazine.

Eric had lost the TV-star, or vice versa, and approached Courty again, holding two full drinks, one drink for her, one for him.  He was shadeless.

Something about him truly frightened her.  She noticed now that his pupils were twin black enormous holes, crowding out the blue iris; the whites weren’t, they were roadmapped-red on faded yellow.  His lower right eyelid had a gigantic facial tick like a warning flasher.  He was Hollywood handsome, but he was either burning the candle at five ends and both middles, or he was a Devil’s disciple.

His voice sounded shredded: “This drink’s for you, Courty.”

“I don’t drink,” she white-lied.  “Go away.”

He started to speak.

“Don’t talk,” she said, “just go away.”

“Do you do drugs?” he asked quietly.  “I can obtain anything you desire.  Free.”

“Some people do not respond to words.  I will now move to the object level.”  She accepted the drink in Eric’s right hand——which he had physically offered to her seconds earlier——and she coldly splashed it in his face.  The ice cubes made an audible “doop” bouncing off his forehead.  She tossed the empty glass onto the nearby settee (Beauregard’s furnishings were taking a beating tonight).

Eric Des Barres gave Courtney a long, wet stare inflamed with anger, and then he about-faced and left the apartment.

For the first time since she had come to New York City, Courtney felt an urgent desire to have Byron Reed physically next to her.  It was one thing to take on a high-flying social event by herself, it was quite another to deal with unreliable taxicabs and the vast unknown of New York at night.  The thought of leaving alone into the New York City night was a cold chill, a shiver, then an actual terror.  Where was Peach?——Long gone with Phil, no doubt.  Just getting home, safe, seemed a vast problem in logistics.

Wallenstein swaggered up to Courtney next, dragging along the very-pregnant woman Courtney now recognized from a photo-article in Citizen magazine.  His mistress.  She was angry and petulant, absolutely stunning in her leather maternity dress.  Spiked licorice in seduced circumstances.

She was quite clearly trying to get him to leave the party, and failing miserably at the attempt.

“I LIKE YOU!” Wallenstein boomed at Courtney, and then lowered his voice to a mere room-scalding level.  “Ya wanna fuck?”

COURTNEY, Chapter 26
 

Copyright 2005 Area 47