The Book of Other People (26 page)

But I’m confused in this account, surely. Can we have discussed so much the very first time? The
New Yorker
, at least. Giuliani’s auctioning 42nd Street to Disney. Mailer on NASA as a bureaucracy stifling dreams. J. Edgar Hoover in the Mafia’s thrall, hyping Reds, instilling self-patrolling fear in the American Mind. In the midst of these variations the theme was always ingeniously and excitingly retrieved. In short, some human freedom had been leveraged from view at the level of consciousness itself.

Liberty had been narrowed, winnowed,
amnesiacked
. Perkus Tooth used this word without explaining, and in the way that the Mafia itself would: to mean a whack, a rub-out. Everything that mattered most was a victim in this perceptual murder plot. Further: always to blame was everyone; when rounding up the suspects, begin with yourself. Complicity, including his own, was Perkus Tooth’s only doubtless conviction. The worst thing was to be sure you knew what you knew, the mistake the
New Yorker
’s font induced. The horizon of everyday life was a mass daydream - below it lay the crucial material, the crux. By now we’d paid for our burgers and returned to his apartment. At his dinette table we sat and he strained some pot for seeds, then rolled another joint. The dope came out of a little plastic box marked with a laser-printed label reading CHRONIC in rainbow colors, a kind of brand name. We smoked the new joint relentlessly to a nub and went on talking, Perkus now free to gesticulate as he hadn’t at Jackson Hole. Yet he never grew florid, never, in all his ferment, hyperventilated or, like some epileptic, bit his tongue. The feverish words were delivered with a merciless cool. Like the cut of his suit, wrinkled though it might be. And the obsessively neat lettering on the VHS tape and on his CDs. Perkus Tooth might have one crazy eye, but it served almost as a warning not to underestimate his scruples, how attentively he measured his listener’s skepticism, making those minute adjustments that were the signature of his or anyone’s sanity - the interpersonal realpolitik of persuasion. The eye was mad and the rest of him was almost steely.

Perkus rifled through his CDs to find a record he wished to play for me, a record I didn’t know - Peter Blegvad’s ‘(Something Else) Is Working Harder’. The song was an angry and incoherent blues, it sounded to me, gnarled with disgruntlement at those who ‘get away with murder’. Then, as if riled by the music, he turned and said, almost savagely, ‘So, I’m not a
rock critic
, you know.’

‘Okay.’ This was a point I found easy enough to grant.

‘People will say I am, because I wrote for
Rolling Stone
- but I hardly ever write about music.’ In fact, the broadsides hung in his rooms seemed to be full of references to pop songs, but I hesitated to point out the contradiction.

He seemed to read my mind. ‘Even when I do, I don’t use that
language
.’

‘Oh.’

‘Those people, the rock critics, I mean - do you want to know what they really are?’

‘Oh, sure - what are they?’

‘Super-high-functioning autistics. Oh, I don’t mean they’re diagnosed or anything. But
I
diagnose them that way. They’ve got Asperger’s Syndrome. I mean, in the same sense that, say, David Byrne or Al Gore has it. They’re brilliant, but they’re
social misfits
.’

‘Uh, how do you know?’ As far as I knew, I’d never met anyone with Asperger’s Syndrome, or, for that matter, a rock critic. (Although I had once seen David Byrne at a party.) Yet I knew enough already to find it odd hearing Perkus Tooth denouncing misfits.

‘It’s the way they talk.’ He leaned in close to me, and demonstrated his point as he spoke. ‘
They aspirate their vowels nearer to the front of their mouths
.’

‘Wow.’

‘And when you see them talking in groups they do it even more. It’s self-reinforcing. Rock critics gather for purposes of mutual consolation, though they’d never call it that. They believe they’re
experts
.’ Perkus, whether he knew it or not, continued to aspirate his vowels at the front of his mouth as he made his case. ‘They can’t see the forest for the trees.’

‘Thelf-reinforthing exthperts,’ I said, trying it on for size. ‘Can’t thee the foretht for the threes.’ I am by deepest instinct a mimic. Anyway, a VHS tape labeled ECHOLALIA lay on the table between us.

‘That’s right,’ said Perkus seriously. ‘Some of them even whistle when they speak.’

‘Whisthle?’

‘
Exactly
.’

‘Thank God we’re not rock critics.’

‘You can say that again.’ He tongued the gum on another joint he’d been assembling, then inspected it for smoke-worthiness, running it under his odd eye as if scanning for a barcode. Satisfied, he ignited it. ‘So, I’m self-medicating,’ he explained. ‘I smoke grass because of the headaches.’

‘Migraine headaches?’

‘
Cluster
headaches. It’s a variant of migraine. One side of the head.’ With two fingers he tapped his skull - of course it was his right side, the headaches gravitating toward the deviant eye. ‘They’re called cluster headaches because they come in runs, every day for a week or two at exactly the same time. Like a clock, like a rooster crowing.’

‘That’s crazy.’

‘I know. Also, there’s this visual effect . . . a blindspot on one side . . .’ Again, his right hand waved. ‘Like a blot in the center of my visual field.’

A riddle: what do you get when you cross a blindspot with a wandering eye? But we’d never once mentioned his eye, so I hung fire. ‘The pot helps?’ I asked instead.

‘The thing about a migraine-type experience is that it’s like being only half alive. You find yourself walking through this tomb-like world, everything gets far away and kind of dull and dead. Smoking pulls me back into the world, it restores my appetites for food and sex and conversation.’

Well, I had evidence of food and conversation - Perkus Tooth’s appetites in sex were to remain mysterious to me for the time being. This was still the first of the innumerable afternoons and evenings I surrendered to Perkus’s kitchen table, to his smoldering ashtray and pot of scorched coffee, to his ancient CD boombox, which audibly whined as it spun in the silent gap between tracks, to our booth around the corner at Jackson Hole when a fierce craving for burgers and cola came over us, as it often did. Soon enough those days all blurred happily together, for in the disconsolate year of Janice’s broken orbit Perkus Tooth was probably my best friend. I suppose Perkus was the curiosity, I the curiosity-seeker, but he surely added me to his collection as much as the reverse.

I did watch
Echolalia
. The way Brando tormented his would-be interviewer was funny, but the profundity of the whole thing was lost on me. I suppose I was unfamiliar with the required context. When I returned it I said so, and Perkus frowned.

‘Have you seen
The Nascent
?’

‘Nope.’

‘Have you seen
Anything That Hides
?’

‘Not that one either.’

‘Have you seen
any
of Morrison Roog’s films, Chase?’

‘Not knowingly.’

‘How do you survive?’ he said, not unkindly. ‘How do you even get along in the world, not understanding what goes on around you?’

‘That’s what I have you for. You’re my brain.’

‘Ah, with your looks and my brain, we could go far,’ he joked in a Bogart voice.

‘Exactly.’

Something lit up inside him, then, and he climbed on his chair in his bare feet and performed a small monkey-like dance, singing impromptu, ‘If I’m your brain you’re in a whole lot of trouble . . . you picked the wrong brain!’ Perkus had a kind of beauty in his tiny, wiry body and his almost feral, ax-blade skull, with its gracefully tapered widow’s peak and delicate features. ‘Your brain’s on drugs, your brain’s on fire . . .’

Despite this lunatic warning, Perkus took charge of what he considered my education, loading me up with tapes and DVDs, sitting me down for essential viewings. Perkus’s apartment was a place for consuming archival wonders, whether at his kitchen table or in the sagging chairs before his flatscreen television: bootlegged unreleased recordings by those in Tooth’s musical pantheon, like Chet Baker, Nina Simone or Neil Young, and grainy tapes of scarce
film noir
taped off late-night television broadcasts. Among these treasures was a videotape of a ninety-minute episode of the detective show
Columbo
, from 1981, directed by Paul Mazursky and starring John Cassavetes as a wife-murdering orchestra conductor, the foil to Peter Falk’s famously rumpled detective. It also featured, in roles as Cassavetes’s two spoiled children, Molly Ringwald and myself. The TV-movie was something Mazursky had tossed off around the time of the making of
Tempest
, a theatrical release featuring Cassavetes and Ringwald, though not, alas, me. That pretty well summed up my luck as an actor, the ceiling I’d always bumped against - television but never the big screen.

Cassavetes was among Perkus’s holy heroes, so he’d captured this broadcast, recorded it off some twilight-hour rerun. The tape was complete with vintage commercials from the middle eighties, O. J. Simpson sprinting through airports and so forth, all intact. I hadn’t seen the
Columbo
episode since it was first aired, and it gave me a feeling of seasick familiarity. Not that Mazursky, Falk, Cassevetes and Ringwald had been family to me - I’d barely known them - yet still it felt like watching a home movie. And it led to the odd sense that in some fashion I’d already been here in Perkus’s apartment for twenty-odd years before I’d met him. His knowledge of culture, and the weirdly synesthetic connections he traced inside it, made it seem as though this moment of our viewing the tape together was fated. Indeed, as if at twelve years old I’d acted in this forgettable and forgotten television show alongside John Cassevetes as a form of private communion with my future friend Perkus Tooth.

Of course Perkus paid scant attention to the sulky children tugging at Cassavetes’s sleeves - his interest was in the scenes between the great director and Peter Falk, as he scoured the TV-movie for any whiff of genius that recalled their great work together in Cassevetes’s own films, or in Elaine May’s
Mikey and Nicky
. He intoned reverently at the sort of details I never bothered to observe, either then, as a child actor on the set, or as a viewer now. Of course he also catalogued speculative connections among the galaxy of cultural things that interested him.

For instance: ‘This sorry little TV movie is one of Myrna Loy’s last-ever appearances. You know, Myrna Loy,
The Thin Man
? She was in dozens of silent movies in the twenties, too.’ My silence permitted him to assume I grasped these depth soundings. ‘Also in
Lonelyhearts
, in 1958, with Montgomery Clift and Robert Ryan.’

‘Ah.’

‘Based on the Nathanael West novel.’

‘Ah.’

‘Of course it isn’t really any good.’

‘Mmm.’ I gazed at the old lady in the scene with Falk, waiting to feel what Perkus felt.

‘Montgomery Clift is buried in the Quaker cemetery in Prospect Park, in Brooklyn. Very few people realize he’s there, or that there even
is
a cemetery in Prospect Park. When I was a teenager a girlfriend and I snuck in there at night, scaled the fence and looked around, but we couldn’t find his grave, just a whole bunch of voodoo chicken heads and other burnt offerings.’

‘Wow.’

Only half listening to Perkus, I went on staring at my childhood self, a ghost disguised as a twelve-year-old, haunting the corridors of the mansion owned by Cassavetes’s character, the villainous conductor. It seemed Perkus’s collection was a place where one might turn a corner and unexpectedly find oneself, a conspiracy that was also a mirror.

Perkus went on connecting dots: ‘Peter Falk was in
The Gnuppet Movie
, too, right around this time.’

‘Really.’

‘Yeah. So was Marlon Brando.’

Marijuana might have been constant, but coffee was Perkus Tooth’s muse. With his discombobulated eye Perkus seemed to be watching his precious cup always while he watched you. It might not be a defect so much as a security system, an evolutionary defense against having his java stolen. Once, left alone briefly in his place, among his scattered papers I found a shred of lyric, the only writing I ever saw from Perkus that wasn’t some type of critical exegesis. An incomplete, second-guessed ode, it read: ‘Oh caffeine! / you contemporary fiend screen /
/ through my face - ’ And yes, the sheet of paper was multiply imprinted with rings by his coffee mug.