The Ground Beneath Her Feet (59 page)

Ormus is tempted into unwariness. I’ve got an idea for a song, he offers.
At the frontier of the skin wild dogs patrol
.

You sure would’ve liked Toomer, Voight reiterates mildly. A light-skinned man like you. He disappeared, you know. The rumor was he’d crossed the color line. Arna Bontemps used to say that didn’t mean he got away from the racial problem. The invisible cloak didn’t get him out of the jam everyone else was in.

Excuse me, Ormus says, I don’t want to spoil your evening but I’m tired, my head hurts, good night.

Ouch, Amos says, watching Ormus’s back as it flounces off. Ooh, that hurt.

He’s cheerful now. He squeezes Vina’s arm. This was so good an idea, darling. This is so fun.

At the heart of Sam’s Pleasure Island is the court of the Yul King. Sit, if you’re so lucky, beside Yul Singh in his choice booth—blind Yul with his trademark Manhattan on the rocks and his thick Cohiba cigar—and sooner or later the whole world will pass by and pay homage. Nobody can out-dress, out-drink, out-smoke or out-cool the Yul. Vina slides in next to the man. Amos is on her left.

Everybody’s in tonight, Yul grins. Which check it out check it out.

Here are the Vampire Lesbians of Sodom. Darlin’, they say, we’re all born naked; the rest is just a drag.

Here is a giant fat man, naked except for the zippered bondage hood on his head. Look, he’s got his cock on backwards; it’s poking out between the soft billow of his ass.

Here are Angel Dust and Nutcracker Sweet, two of Voight’s own fabulous porno actresses, I call them all horses, he says, because every few weeks they get carried out to the glue factory, they end up on some brown envelope or ten-cent stamp or something. I guess at least they get to be licked again, one last time.

Here’s Lou, she’s finished her set. Isn’t she gorgeous? There’s her new squeeze, Laurie. What a hunk.

Here’s the guy to see if you just got into town and you want to know where the party is and who to fuck later.

Here’s the woman who was the last person on earth to see the guy who strangled himself with a noose, trying to get an erection for her, imagine how low her self-esteem must be, poor baby.

Here are the guys who set fire to money.

Here are penis-ironers, testicle-boilers, shit-eaters, penis-boilers, testicle-eaters. Over there is the world Spermathon Queen, who encountered one hundred and one men, four at a time, in a non-stop seven-and-a-half-hour megafuck. She’s still in touch with all one hundred and one partners and refers to them as her Dalmatians. Naturally, her personal icon is the fur-loving Cruella de Vil.

Here’s the earth mother who adopted nineteen babies from different international trouble spots. But when the trouble dies down she trades the babies in for needier kids from the new hot zones. (Every time I cover a war I wonder which orphaned tot will end up at her place, and who’ll be out on the street.)

Here’s Ifredis Wing. Her whole life is an act of worship, and she gives it all back to Jesus. Here’s a brother with a crown of thorns on his head; he should get together with that poor girl. Otto’s vamoosed already, he’s now into Buddhism, he’s flown to Dharmsala with a shaven-headed chick who’s recognized as some sort of actual saint but she’s also a martial arts maven so go carefully, Mr. Wing.

Here are more believers. They believe in the Divine Mother Goddess-Ma in her concrete high-rise in Düsseldorf. They believe in going for the burn. They believe in the name of God written in the seeds of a watermelon. They believe in the wise ones flying towards them in a comet’s tail. They believe in rock ’n’ roll. They believe reason and psychology are crutches you use until you find wisdom. Then, when you’ve found it, you throw away those crutches and dance. They believe they’re the sane ones and it’s everybody else that’s crazy. They believe in Pleasure and its island. They do not believe the rumor about this island: that if you stay long enough, it’ll make a donkey of you.

Hey, the space gods are in tonight. There’s the guitar hero who was born on an asteroid in the general vicinity of Mars. There’s Sun Ra, another alien. There’s the thin Limey who used to work as a UFO spotter after he fell to earth.

And there’s Neil. Neil from the Silver Spaceships. Neil, the living proof that there’s rock ’n’ roll on other planets.

Everybody. The whole Western world.

Voight is remorseless tonight. Isn’t Ormus Cama the boy that sings about frontiers, he asks Yul, about going to the edge and crossing over? Well, dear, dear. He hardly got across the welcome mat tonight.

It can’t be the edge as well as the center, says Vina, refusing to rise to the bait.

Sure it can, my pretty, says Yul Singh. Take a look around. Sure it can.

War-weary, divided, their belief in the mighty eagle’s global ascendancy damaged by the humiliating withdrawal of U.S. personnel from Indochina, Americans find they want what Ormus Cama has to say. The helicopters circle over the Saigon embassy like angels of judgement; the living cling to them and beg for salvation. The dead have already been judged, and found guilty, by defeat. Limb-shorn veterans retreat psychotically into forests and mountain fastnesses, to dream of rice paddies and King Cong rising out of the water right in front of their screaming faces, here comes a chopper to chop off your head. You can get the boys out of the war but you can’t get the war out of the boys. In this bereft moment, rudderless America is unusually open to the paradoxes of Ormus’s songs; open, in fact, to paradox itself, and its non-identical twin ambiguity too. The U.S. Army (and its rock songs) went into one East and came out with a bloody nose. Now Ormus’s music has arrived like an affirmation from another East to enter the musical heart of Americanness, to flow into the river of dreams; but it’s driven by the democratic conviction, retained by Ormus from the days when Gayomart sang the future into his ears, that the music is his as well, born not just in the U.S.A. but in his own heart, long ago and far away. Just as England can no longer lay exclusive claim to the English language, so America is no longer the sole owner of rock ’n’ roll: that is Ormus’s unstated sub-text (Vina, always the loudmouth, the thrower-down of gauntlets, will come out with it soon enough, and put a few patriotic noses out of joint).

The story of the ten-year engagement and of Ormus’s consequent oath of celibacy spreads quickly; and this, too, makes Ormus and Vina irresistible. The new band takes off almost at once, and the force of its ascending shakes the land. Starting as oddities, they grow quickly into giants. At once conqueror and celebrant, Ormus storms the citadels of rock, and Vina’s voice, as Yul Singh foresaw, is his weapon. Her voice is the servant of his melodies; his singing the servant of her voice. And while Vina’s is the exceptional instrument, capable of affecting the hairs on the back of your neck as it swoops and dives, Ormus’s lower, gentler
harmonies perfectly offset her pyrotechnics, and the two voices, when they blend, create a magical third, more Righteous than the Righteous Brothers, Everlier than the Everlys, Supremer than the Supremes. It’s a perfect marriage. Ormus and Vina, put asunder by vows, are joined together in song.
V-T-Ohh!
America, disoriented, seeking a new voice, succumbs to theirs. Young Americans, in search of new frontiers, board VTO’s Orient express.

That part of the American soul which is presently in retreat finds comfort in the new stars’ restatements of the great American musical truths, the foot-tapper tempi that start out walking and then find the dance hidden in the walk; the placing of the beats that tug at our bodies; the speak-to-me rhythm and blues. And that America which by losing certitude has newly opened itself to the external world responds to the un-American sounds Ormus adds to his tracks: the sexiness of the Cuban horns, the mind-bending patterns of the Brazilian drums, the Chilean woodwinds moaning like the winds of oppression, the African male voice choruses like trees swaying in freedom’s breeze, the grand old ladies of Algerian music with their yearning squawks and ululations, the holy passion of the Pakistani
qawwals
. Too much of the people’s music settles for too little, Ormus says on the occasion of the issue of the self-titled first album (the one with the burgundy-colored velvet eye patch on the sleeve). It offers the people crumbs when they should have banquets.

He wants to work with what he calls the full orchestra, meaning not stiffs in tuxes but the full range of musical emotional intellectual yes and moral possibility, he wants this music to be capable of saying anything to anyone, but above all meaning something to someone. He’s started to speak in this big new voice, and the someones out there are listening.

Angry America, too, is listening hard: the America of loss, the America that’s taken a beating and doesn’t fully understand how, or what it’s done to deserve this pain (this America is looking not at the Indochinese dead but only at its own). This raging America responds to Ormus’s wrath, because he’s a very angry man, angry with Vina, himself and the cruel destiny thanks to which the decade of his high triumph has been rendered meaningless by the emptiness of his bed.

It responds in two ways. Only one of these is appreciative. Beneath
the America that opens itself to VTO, there’s another country that turns against him, that sets its jaw and closes its mind.

Ormus and Vina begin to acquire powerful enemies.

Someone should shut those uppity bigmouths once ’n’ f’r all
.

Melancholy and chastity make sublimation possible, according to the fifteenth-century Florentine Marsilio Ficino, and it’s sublimation that sets free the
juror divinus
. First in the Peace Ballads of Ormus Cama, then in his legendary quake album,
Quakershaker
, fury is evident in every chord, every bar, every line, fury deep-drawn like black water from a poisoned well. Whether it be divine or earthly
furor
is a matter of some considerable dispute.

If Ficino believed that our music is composed by our lives, the contemporary Czech Milan Kundera thinks, contrariwise, that our lives are composed like music. “Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty, even in times of the greatest distress.” To stand the old principle of good design on its elegant head: in our functioning we follow the dictates of our need for form.

Bravo, Ormus. I’ve got to hand it to the guy. Bearing a satchel full of hard-won images of the fall of Saigon I come trudging home with a lifetime supply of nightmares to the sweet-dream needlework merchants and powdered-happiness pashas clustered on the stoops of the brownstones of St. Mark’s, and lo! there on the corner newsstand is our Ormie, already notoriously publicity shy, hitting a three-run homer, adorning the covers in the same week
of Rolling Stone
(with Vina),
Newsweek
(Vina’s reduced to an inset) and
Time
(not a trace of Vina to be seen). Not only has he pushed the war news on to the inside pages but he’s also marginalized one of the great beauties of the age, who is rapidly becoming one of the most famous women in the world. Some recluse! Some publicity! He must’ve really touched a nerve. Two quick albums,
VTO
and
Peace Ballads
—in those days before the omnipotence of videos and marketing, musicians put out records a whole lot more often—one, two!, and he’s sitting on top of the world.

They made peace in the other world too. (Baby I’ve got one of my own.) Ain’t no better than it is for you. (Good to know we’re not alone.) Well the war is over and the battle’s through. (But I can’t reach you on the phone.
)

I call your number but you ain’t home. I call your number but you ain’t home. Seems I made this long journey just to wait on my own. It’s been a long journey home. A long journey home
.

VTO’s
Peace Ballads
defies the injunctions of the post-ironical cinéaste Otto Wing. “Picking up the Pieces,” “(You Brought Me) Peace Without Love,” “Long Journey Home,” “Might As Well Live”: its easy enough to hear the bitter, disabused ironies in many of Ormus’s songs. But the music he’s come up with is jauntily, almost perversely uptempo. The overall effect is oddly affirmative, even anthemic, and for many young people these jaundiced, dystopic tracks become unlikely, adult anthems of relief, a new beginning, release. On my own block I can hear the young dope peddlers—Nicely-Nicely Johnson, Harry the Horse, Sky Masterson, Big Julie, Nathan Detroit—whistling Ormus Cama’s material. Peace without love: they are marketing this very product, the guaranteed top-grade genuine article, by the ounce. It’s the only racket; always was. And when you run out of peace juice, bliss pills or sweet treats for your veins, you are always welcome to return to Happy Valley here and get yourself another tasty helping, as long as you are in possession of the requisite spondulicks. Which, the dealers at least would argue, is more than can be said for love.

Americans buy the
Ballads
by the wagonload, but the album’s anti-war message causes a few subterranean rumbles. Agencies who see it as their rôle to protect the country from fifth columnists, from being
destabilized
, start taking a discreet interest. Yul Singh receives a polite phone call on his unlisted private line from a voice that calls itself Michael Baxter when it says hello and Baxter Michaels when it signs off. A warning shot across the bows. A word to the wise. We have some concern about certain lyrical content. There is naturally no question of infringing any individual’s First Amendment rights, but the songwriter if we understand it correctly is not a U.S. citizen. A guest who wishes to remain welcome is not well advised to piss on his host’s best rug.

Yul Singh summons Ormus and Vina to his suite of offices near Columbus Circle and then suggests a walk in the park. Ordinarily New Yorkers pride themselves on ignoring the fame of the famous but the exceptional success of
Peace Ballads
necessitates exceptional measures. For Ormus, an old hippie Afghan jacket, large round-lensed purple shades, a fright wig. Vina is harder to disguise. Her height, her Afro
shock, her attitude, defy concealment. After much haggling she agrees to wear a floppy wide-brimmed felt hat in bright scarlet, because it matches her long Italian leather coat. Yul Singh refuses as usual to use a white stick, leans, instead, on Will Singh’s iron forearm. Half a dozen more Singhs follow at a discreet distance, in case of crowd trouble. In the park, emboldened by foliage, Cool Yul passes on the content of the feds’ phone call. Vina snorts her disdain, declines to take the threat seriously—
Everybody’s got a fed on their tail right now, from Dr. Nina to Winston O’Boogie, it’s like a fashion statement?
—and goes off at one of her zany tangents. What do they know, nobody ever gets rock lyrics right, anyway. For years I thought Hendrix was a faggot. You know, scuse me while I kiss this guy. And what
was
that about my feet begin to crumble. I used to admire the surrealism of rock lyrics?, the wild non sequiturs. Then I realized it was just my fucking ears.