"Great Jones Street" - читать интересную книгу автора (DeLillo Don)

11

In sleep I opened an unnumbered door and found the sea. It was wide and still, veneered in delirious silver. Someone I knew was walking along a road that went down a hill toward some houses. The heat was brilliant. Vindictive light burned into the stone of all the small houses chalked near the sea. I heard voices and thought I saw people at the door.

Opel toasted frankfurter buns for breakfast or whatever meal it was. She held the buns on a fork over the burner, toasting the insides of the buns intended for me, the outsides of those intended for her. Each of us thought the other strange for his/her preference. She spread strawberry jam on the buns and brought everything to bed with her.

"I wish we had real strawberries," she said. "Big whole strawberries to look at and eventually eat."

"Live strawberries instead of strawberries on tape."

"I remember traveling literally about six thousand miles in four consecutive flights and then getting to somebody's house I knew and they were eating strawberries and I just sat there and looked at these strawberries sitting in sugar in the middle of the table and it was inconceivable, it was like returning from the land of the dead. They lived, the strawberries lived. I could look right into them. I understood what strawberries really are, not that I could put it in words. They were inconceivably beautiful, so rich and plump and alive, actually glowing from within. Of course I was probably stoned on something."

"Who were you talking to at the door?"

"I thought you were asleep."

"I was asleep but I wasn't fast asleep. Somebody was at the door and the two of you talked about something. It wasn't Fenig because I know Fenig's voice. It wasn't the woman downstairs because it was a man. So I surmise one thing. It was the man you've been waiting for. The courier. Is that who it was?"

"It was the man," she said.

"Good news or bad?"

"Dr. Pepper is not where he's supposed to be. But they expect to reach him in forty-eight hours. I don't know why it's forty-eight hours. Why not forty-seven or fifty-three? Anyway I'm to be ready to leave at a moment's notice as of tomorrow night. I told him I've been ready for days. He expressed the hope we'd function well together."

"Glad it's finally under way?"

"Except one thing bothers me. He wasn't what I'd hoped to get. I thought he'd resemble some lower-echelon A-and-R type like from Motown. Bronzed glasses, wispy beard, that hunched-over funky walk. I expected pure funk, you know? Someone who's spent his whole life dealing merchandise of one kind or another."

"What did you get?"

"I got Hanes," she said.

"Goddamn, that voice I heard. Hanes. On one level I knew it was him. You didn't tell me Globke was involved in this."

"He's not, Bucky. Hanes is free-lancing. It's not surprising it's him really. There are so many people we know in common. If you put all the names on paper and draw lines back and forth, it would probably be very logical that Hanes would be the one to show up at my door. Anyway seeing him gave me an idea. It involves a surprise for you. Your birthday present in fact. Belated maybe but a stroke of true bitch genius."

"Can't wait."

"A gift that's rich with I don't know what."

"Hanes is a human blotter," I said. "I don't like it when people like that get involved in this kind of enterprise. He's very limp. You could pick him up, use him as a blotter and throw him away. Submissiveness and paradox. He'd just as soon do business with the police."

"I'm nice and settled," she said. "Go toast more bread."

It was getting dark. I left all four burners on. We finished the buns and Opel lay in bed eating jam off the blunt edge of the knife. The power of her immobility was beginning to fade. Departure was implicit in everything she did now. Until Hanes appeared at the door, Opel's presence had been immense; she'd reigned in that bed like a bloated Creole queen of the swampland, giddy with magic, wallowing in the sensual pre-eminence of her own stink. Opel had stolen my immobility. I had been motionless as salt. People had swirled around me and I had plotted changes in the weather, gradations of light and silence. I had centered myself, learning of the existence of an interior motion, a shift in levels from isolation to solitude to wordlessness to immobility. When Opel occupied that center I became the thing that swirled.

"Maybe I'll be going back out," I said.

"Out on tour? What with?"

"I'm not sure yet. In fact I've no idea at all. But I'm thinking of getting back out. That's the important thing. Time to stop looking at the wall. You were right. Time to get out."

"Why not work on new material and let it go at that? Why go on tour?"

"That's got to be part of it. I'm not sure why. Maybe I just want the contact. You can't reach extremes by working in. a studio. I want to reach extremes. It's like a passage from suicide to murder. I'd been all worked out and fucked over and grabbed at. Suicide was nearer to me than my own big toe. It was the natural ending. I mean it was right there. No one would have been surprised or shocked. I really think it was expected of me. If I hadn't left the tour, one way or another it would have happened. A soft papery collapse. Even after I left, the thing was right there looking me in the face. But now I think I'm out of that. I want to return but in a different way. New extremities. It's like a passage from suicide to murder."

"I'm not sure I get it, Bucky."

"It's too evil for a mere dealer like yourself."

"You want to return with a whole new thing. But what thing? You can scream ugly lyrics and throw rattlesnakes at the audience. Is that the general idea? You can sing love songs to the Pentagon."

"Nothing political," I said.

"There's nothing out there but a dull sort of horror. You can't just churn it up into your own fresh mixture. Hero, rogue and symbol that you are."

"Maybe I don't want to churn it up at all. Maybe I want to make it even duller and more horrible. I don't know. One thing's sure. I can't go out there and sing pretty lyrics or striking lyrics and I can't go out there and make new and louder and more controversial sounds. I've done all that. More of that would be just what it says – more of the same. Maybe what I want is less. To become the least of what I was."

"Sure, the beast is loose, least is best. But who's the beast in this case? Be careful you don't twist your own neat lyric. Of course that may be exactly your intention. In which case I look on with interest. Ready as a matter of fact to offer whatever aid and comfort you feel you need. Hell, man, we're old friends."

"Old and true," I said.

"Old, true and lasting."

"No doubt about it."

"Absolutely."

"Sure as shit."

I turned off the burners and stood near the window. Steam whistled distantly in the pipes. I wasn't unhappy being where I was. Tilings here were not deprived of their emanations. The distances were correct; noise was undisguised; air was allowed to flow without recirculation. But this completeness seemed less than enough to keep me now. I struck a wooden match and put the flame to one of the candles over the sink. Opel pretended to evade this shallow light, sinking deeper into the bed.

"People are getting to be all one thing," she said. "Look at me, for instance. I used to have shadings. Now I'm all one thing. Civilization by reflex. If we'd been alive in Pavlov's day he could have saved a whole lot of money on dog food. Now take you now. If you want to go back out as a Las Vegas version of what you were, fine with me except I hope you know what it is you're doing. You'll lose the perspective and the edge will crumble and you'll really become the other thing. Maybe it's a natural evolution. You were getting incoherent anyway, album to album, more so all the time. By the end you were making incredible amounts of noise and communicating absolutely nothing. The whole band was all curled up like a burning piece of paper. You know what you did? You embraced the insanity you were telling us about. So maybe it's a natural evolution. You were too much in love with the horror going on because it formed your sound for you and you were fascinated by it as subject matter. It could very well be the natural next step that you crawl out on the stage at the Sands and just sit there in a jockstrap grunting. Ever since I've known you, you've been surrounded by money-grubbing and talk of money and people dealing and operating but that's the last thing you'll ever be corrupted by, money, even if you were literally starving. It's yourself you have to watch out for, that little touch of the antichrist. It happens to be what I like most about you and of course it accounts for your fame and your glory so maybe I'm wrong to even bring it up. But evil is movement toward void and that's where we both agree you're heading. It's your trip. I'd help you get there if I was sure you wanted to go. In my own bitch-genius way I think I've already put a certain teasing idea into circulation, soon to end up on this very doorstep. You have been listening to a panel discussion on a subject yet to be agreed on. Our panelists will now disrobe and paint each other's bodies in colorful native pigments."

Opel's stillness was losing its essential tenor. It was infiltrated by heavy engines, becoming merely a vigil now, that of a lone woman standing in the off-hour calm of a fluorescent tunnel leading to a boarding gate. In candle-flame she seemed almost an after-image, little left of her ascendancy. Again she is reduced to a point in the middle of the sky. On paper one can find her with the aid of a compass and protractor. She is whisperingly civil, seated between an investment banker and a chummy transvestite, thinking ahead to baggage area and customs. Super-freaks are everywhere, smugglers and global dopers contaminating the air lanes, nitroglycerin concealed in their teeth, unripe opium pods surgically sewn under their eyeballs. Slums and revolution on the 747s. She was in rehearsal for departure now. Ever since Hanes. Hanes had stood in the doorway of my Mediterranean dream.

"Places are always what you expect," she said. "That's both the trouble with places and their redeeming feature. I'm certain it wasn't like that in the past. But it sure is that way now. A few places are still different from each other but nowhere do you find something different from your own expectations. Look at post card manufacturers. They take a sleazy tourist-trap lake and try to make it into the canoeing grounds of the gods. But they do such a slick glossy job that you glance at the post card and you know at once this is a shit-filled lake and all the tourists here are either war criminals or people who spit when they laugh. Not that there isn't beauty in such places. That's just it. The whole world is turning into Lafayette Street, the most ugly-beautiful street in New York City. In a way it's nice to get what you expect. It's as though places can be passive just like people. They just sprawl out with their cathedrals and deserts. Passivity is beautiful too. You take what they give you these days and if everything's getting ugly the only thing you can do is try to teach yourself it's beautiful, it's beautiful. Eventually maybe it is. But look at the passivity of Hanes. There's a sexed-out beauty there. Got to admit it, right? Timeless lands. Look at timeless lands. Why do I spend so much time in timeless lands? Because there's no time there, I guess. Because you stop evolving. Because the warm winds polish you like stone. Here where it's cold I develop and become angular and rapidly age. Great Jones, Bond Street, the Bowery. These places are deserts too, just as beautiful and scary as a matter of fact, except too cold for some people. The places where I get coldest are my eyes and my knees. Isn't that a weird number? Eye-muffs and knee-gloves are the obvious answers. Transparanoia might want to get into that. Talk to Globke first thing tomorrow."

I walked around the bed and ended up once more at the window. Opel covered herself to the chin. I had never known exactly what we needed from each other. Maybe it was enough to come and go; we were each other's motion and rest. The telephone sat on four phone books stacked on the floor. One candle burned, the other did not. I exhaled on the window. There was a loud sound in the pipes, the hollowing-out of dank iron. Opel's collection of pennies filled two ice trays in the refrigerator. The bathtub was full of used water. Citing these things to myself was probably an attempt to group the components of a return to order.

"Things evolve just like people and places," she said. "Or to put it another way, people and places are a lot more static than they'd like to believe. Look at me. What have I become in the scheme of human evolution? Luggage. I'm luggage. By choice, inclination and occupation. What am I if I'm not luggage? I open myself up, insert some very costly items and then close up again and get transported to a timeless land. Do you want to know who knows I'm a thing? Customs knows. Customs knows a lot more than we give him credit for. Customs understands the methodology. He knows the way things work. I'm luggage. No doubt about it. Girlskin luggage. But I don't like that word very much. Lug-gudge. Heavy brutish word for a delicate thing like me."

The knife stood in the empty jar, blade up. The unwound clock was on its back in the bottom of the closet, helpless as an insect, legs in the air, winding key partly dislodged. I watched snow come down now, confined in the precise light of streetlamps. There was no wind. The snow dropped straight down, very slowly, asserting itself with the dignity of a country snow, that language of credence and bare trees, milk on the hillsides, old men gigantic in their bootprints. The firehouse doors were closed. A little car went by, yellow, pink, orange and green, no plates visible. When I turned from the window, Opel was dead. The change in the room was unmistakable. I went to her side to touch her once. Her mouth was open slightly. The blanket had slipped to her neck. Very still. Never to be challenged in this particular stillness. There was no expression on her face. Here I am, dead. That was the only thing I could imagine she might be trying to say with her mouth open like that.

This is what I did. I went back to the window and crossed my arms over my chest, wedging my hands in my armpits. This for warmth. I had been brought up to regard death as an irrevocable state. I tried to reconsider this proposition now, to go over the steps one by one, and I wanted to be warm while I did this.

Eventually I unplugged the bathtub, draining it of gray water. I got the broom and swept in a careless manner for about ten minutes. This was panic of such depth it seemed lodged in being itself, my own, a dread of forgetting what I was called or what language I spoke. I put Opel's things away, the few items hanging from chairs or looped over this or that doorknob. I put these away in the closet. After this I spent some time in the bathroom scraping out the soap dish.

This is what else I did. I looked everywhere for change and then went out to find a telephone. Aloud I repeated three sounds: wun der lick. Walking south on Broadway (downtown, always down), I repeated these sounds over and over, trying to penetrate vapor, to reach beyond the sounds to whatever it was they designated, the dream guiding the body through the snow, wun-der-lick, object of the inquiry. The air was coarse, leaving a slight burn high in the nostrils. I stepped into a phone booth. Ten yards away a man was urinating against a wall, standing happily in his own cataract and mist.

I spoke to someone downtown, a bored municipal voice, downtown in the huddled buildings, the record sectors, death and taxes, requisition forms, police recruits taping every emergency, bored, bored, the facsimile of a voice, all walls green halfway up, agencies, bureaus, extensions, downtown where the records are kept, massive, passive, ever distending, the idea of a voice, no one in control.

I thought of calling Bellevue next but decided finally in favor of St. Vincent's, gentle, humane and dedicated, St. Vincent's, merciful and compassionate. I insisted on speaking to a nun. I wanted someone who believed in St. Vincent himself, in his ideals, in his sacrifices, whatever these may have been. They wanted address, phone number, sex of deceased. I insisted on a nun. I wanted a nun, a short round woman, perhaps of German descent, someone who believed in the sacredness of dying and the veneration of the dead. No nun, no deal. This is what I told them.

The man was standing outside the phone booth. He wore the plaid lining of someone's topcoat. In his hands was a half-pint bottle of rye, which he offered me. I put down the phone and took it. The snow fell perfectly. Burn marks were evident under the man's frozen stubble. I drank, thanked him and gave back the bottle. Then I called Globke, who said he'd take care of everything.

Superslick

Mind Contracting

Media Kit

"The Bucky Wunderlick Story"

Told in news items, lyrics

and dysfunctional interviews

Prepared by Esme Taylor Associates

A DIVISION OF TRANSPARANOIA

London, April 17 (UPI) – Bucky Wunderlick, the American rock music star, has been held for questioning by police here after allegedly setting fire to a stewardess aboard a TWA 747 just being cleared for takeoff at London Airport.

According to several eyewitnesses, Wunderlick, 24, had complained of being airsick, although the plane had not yet left the ground, and was purportedly acting in a loud and disruptive manner. When Patti Stepney, 22, of Falls Church, Va., one of twelve cabin attendants aboard the London to New York flight, attempted to calm the controversial entertainer, he reputedly set fire to her uniform with a cigarette lighter said by an associate to be a gift of an unidentified member of the British royal family.

The flight was delayed while passengers used blankets to smother the flames, allowing Miss Stepney to be escorted from the 355-ton jetliner by airport personnel. A TWA spokesman later said she was being rushed to a medical facility for observation and possible treatment. Simultaneously, London police released a statement saying they are holding Mr. Wunderlick, who was removed from the plane following a brief struggle, eyewitnesses said.

"Peace-loving men everywhere deplore the English penchant for violence," the internationally known figure was quoted by a companion as having remarked, following another brief altercation inside a police vehicle moments after he was led from the 22-million-dollar jetliner, reportedly bleeding from a gash over his left eye and said to be wearing a team jersey bearing the legend Tottenham Hotspur.

Two tracks from

Amebikan war sutha

Recorded on Beeswax Records

LP 7178342

Bzzz – exclusive trademark of Beeswax Records

Patent pending

VC Sweetheart

Nothing Turns

"VC Sweetheart"

Words-and-music Wunderlick-Azarian

Copyright © 1968 Stanwash Music

All rights administered Arkmaker Music

Used by permission

"Nothing Turns"

Words-and-music Bucky Wunderlick

(Copyright © 1968 Stanwash Music

All rights administered Arkmaker Music

Used by permission

•

Excerpts from seminar conducted jointly by the senior editorial board of Chance Mainway Publications and the Issues Committee of the Permanent Symposium for the Restoration of Democratic Options.

The Committee CM Publications

Robert Fielder Sam L. Bradley

Turner Bakey Ross Holroyd

Grace Hall Aline Olmstead

Lester E. B. Niles George Porter

Walter Jencks Olmstead

Clarence B. Washington

Special Guest

Bucky Wunderlick

Mr. Fielder: Turning now to our guest at this morning's round table, I'd like to begin by taking this opportunity to welcome him, if I may, to our Chula Vista complex.

BW: Yes, you may.

Mr. Fielder: We're not accustomed so much to this kind of discussion as we are to a different level or range, for example on the freedoms, or House and Senate priorities, or the emerging issue of pleadings and writs. But no phenomenon in recent years in perhaps the whole history of what we might call popular American culture has so brought about a massing of opinion one way or the other among the men and women, and I count myself among them, as do, I'm sure, most if not all the individuals at this morning's round table, about whether or not we can profitably undertake a dialogue with the kind of young people who are at the very center of all this noise, and I hope nobody objects to that word. Please feel free to address yourself to this question in your own words because we're not, although it may seem so to you, the kind of not-with-it people, not at all, the stuffed shirts we may seem so to you, and we've heard this kind of subfamily vernacular, and even the gracious ladies present at this morning's session, I might venture to guess.

BW: Noise, right. It's the sound. Hertz and megahertz. We mash their skulls with a whole lot of watts. Electricity, right. It's a natural force. We're processing a natural force. Electricity is nature every bit as much as sex is nature. By sex, I mean fucking and the like. Electric current is everywhere. We run it through a system of wires, cables, mikes, amps and so on. It's just nature. Sometimes we put words to it. Nobody can hear the words because they get drowned out by the noise, which is only natural. Our last album we recorded live to get the people's screams in and submerge the words even more and they were gibberish words anyway. Screaming's essential to our sound now. The whole thing is nature processed through instruments and sound controls. We process nature, which I personally regard as a hideous screeching bitch of a thing, being a city boy myself.

Miss Hall: Yes, noise. Extraordinary. How, precisely, one wonders, do you do with it what you do with it? I freely confess to a kind of global migraine every time I go anywhere near one of your records. I mean totally apart from the question of decibels, there's that intermixture of instruments or something that's so sort of shattering to one's composure, to put it mildly.

BW: That's why we're so great. We make noise. We make it louder than anybody else and also better. Any curly-haired boy can write windswept ballads. You have to crush people's heads. That's the only way to make those fuckers listen.

Mr. Porter: But what I'm really trying to get at, really, I think, is the more basic question of human values, human concerns.

Mr. Uolroyd: I think what George is really trying to get at is the effect of this type of thing…

Mr. Porter: No, no, no, no, no.

Mr. Bakey: Lunch.

Mrs. Olmstead: Do you consider yourself an artist? BW: The true artist makes people move. When people read a book or look at a painting, they just sit there or stand there. A long time ago that was okay, that was hip, that was art. Now it's different. I make people move. My sound lifts them right off their ass. I make it happen. Understand. I make it happen. What I'd like to do really is I'd like to injure people with my sound. Maybe actually kill some of them. They'd come there knowing full well. Then we'd play and sing and people in the audience would be frozen with pain or writhing with pain and some of them would actually die from the effects of our words and music. It isn't an easy thing to create, the right sound at the proper volume. People actually collapsing in pain. They'd come there knowing full well. People dying from the effects of all this beauty and power. That's art, sweetheart. I make it happen.

Mr. Niles: At this point I suspect you're only being half-serious.

BW: Which half?

Mr. Bakey: You're not saying, or are you, that the only thing you do is make loud noises and this is what explains the Wunderlick formulation or ethos. BW: My whole life is tinged with melancholy. The more I make people move, the closer I get to personal inertness. With everybody jumping the way they do and holding their heads in the manner they're inclined to hold their heads, I feel in kind of a mood of melancholy because I myself am kind of tired of all the movement and would like to flatten myself against a wall and become inert. Miss Hall: Quite so.

Mr. Bradley: I wonder if you'd like to discuss the origin and meaning of the phrase pee-pee-maw-maw. I know it's traceable to you and it seems to be sweeping the country at the moment. Everywhere I go, and I do extensive traveling, I see people wearing shirts and trousers with those little syllables on them, not to mention seeing pee-pee-maw-maw on shopping bags, buttons, decals, bumper stickers, and even hearing dolls say it over and over, five-dollar talking dolls that say that phrase over and over. I know it's all traceable to you and I just wonder what it all signifies, if anything. BW: Childhood incantation. Mr. Bakey: Ah.

Mrs. Olmstead: Perhaps you'd care to elaborate. BW: As a little kid in the street I used to hear older kids saying it. It's one of the earliest memories of my life. Older kids playing in the street at night. I'd be on the stoop or watching from a window. Too little to play with the older kids. Summer nights on the street in New York. Very early memory. These kids chanting to each other. Pee-pee-maw-maw. I don't think anybody knew what it meant or where it came from. Probably twelfth century England or the Vikings or the Moors. These kids chanting it on the street. Pee-pee-maw-maw. Pee-pee-maw-maw. Chants like that can be traced to the dawn of civilization. Like games kids play can be traced a thousand years back to kids in India. Same with incantations. It's an interesting subject. You should schedule it.

Mr. Fielder: For my closing remarks, which I promise you will be kept as brief as humanly possible, given the pronounced oratorical bias of your speaker and chairman, I'd like simply to say that this has been a most dynamic round table, surely for me a most instructive one as well, as it was I believe for all of us gathered here, although each no doubt has his or her own idea of levels of merit, remembering our own Turner Bakey and his oft-quoted rejoinder to Ed-dings' paraphrase of Larue during the Arts-Leadership Committee's brunch on genocide. At any rate, thanks one and all. And now for a dip in the pool.

•

Three tracks from

diamond stylus

Recorded on Anspar Records amp; Tapes

International copyright secured

Cold War Lover

Diamond Stylus

"Cold War Lover"

Words-and-music Bucky Wunderlick

Copyright © 1969 Teepee Music

All rights administered Transparanoia Inc.

"Protestant Work Ethic Blues"

Words-and-music Wunderlick-Azarian

Copyright © 1970 Teepee Music

All rights administered Transparanoia Inc.

"Diamond Stylus"

Words-and-music Bucky Wunderlick

Copyright © 1970 Teepee Music

All rights administered Transparanoia Inc.

Complete transcript of interview conducted by Steven Grey, editor-in-chief of Ibex, a Journal of Rock Art.

grey: Hey, man, glad you could make it over. Just like to start off the proceedings by asking a couple or three questions about the mountain tapes. Are you figuring to just sit on this material or is there a release date for this material or what? It's been a long time between releases and people are starting to wonder about that and in a business like our business you hear all kinds of things and I wanted to start off by asking straight out… wunderlick: (garbled)

grey: Could you try to aim your words right at the thing there? Where you going? Hey, man, where you going?

wunderlick: (garbled)

grey: Hey, man. Aw, hey. Aw, come on back, man. Aw, no. Aw, hey. We just got… we just… aw, man, no.

Feature story, reprinted in its entirety, from Celebrity Teen, volume 19, number 8, copyright © 1971 by Star System Inc., all rights reserved, reprinted by permission.

Rock stah reveals sweater fetish!!!

by Carmela Bevilacqua

After I'd interviewed hard-to-interview Bucky Wunderlick in his spectacular mountain retreat overlooking a shimmering lake in the rugged, scenic Adirondacks, I came away feeling just a mite dazed by his gentleness and quiet charm. After all, the supercharged world of rock 'n' roll isn't my usual beat, in addition to which everybody knows how difficult and temperamental Bucky is supposed to be, so imagine how delightfully surprised I was by his feather-soft nature. In fact it was a day full of surprises, including a strange and bizarre visit from an unexpected guest.

But to get back to the beginning, maybe "interview" is the wrong word. Bucky didn't actually answer any of my questions. Formal answers, no. But talk to me he certainly did! Nodding his head slowly at my queries about his personal and professional life, Bucky chatted slowly and with a kind of sleepy charm about his dreams and his fears, about music and love and poetry, about people, oceans, streets and trees. Such was the hypnotic quality of his voice that at times it was difficult to catch what he was saying. Sometimes his voice would drop away to a whisper and other times he just seemed to ramble on, stringing words together in an aimless pattern. As Bucky talked, his lady of the hour drifted in and out, occasionally joining the conversation. Since you're probably dying to know, I won't waste any time telling you that she's slim and dusty-blond, and she goes by the name of Mazola June. ("They named me after the corn oil," she said in a lil ole drawl of a voice.) After she drifted off thataway, I asked Bucky to fill in the details on this female friend of marriageable age.

"We're running death sprints," he said mysteriously, and although I tried to prod him on the subject of marriage in the near future and the possibility of children and a life far removed from the tawdry glitter, he never returned to the subject of his pretty (and private) companion.

It was about this time that one of Bucky's ever-present aides, flunkies or what-have-you came slouching in to report that "some creep" had breached security and was hanging around in the hall outside, hoping to be granted an audience with the star himself. Bucky replied with a shrug and the intruder was ushered in. He was a smallish, pale man and he looked directly into Bucky's eyes, spoke four sentences and then left without waiting for a reply.

"What you have to teach is greater than our capacity to learn. You must stop so we can understand what you've been doing. I've come a thousand miles to see you. Now begins the long wait until you come to me."

Later, Bucky and I watched the sun sink into the lake in a riotous blaze of color. I asked him about his obviously undeserved reputation for controversy and mayhem, and when he made no reply other than a clown's sad smile, I wondered aloud how difficult it must be for him to occupy the stormy heights of his profession, how hard to endure the constant stress of being number one in a business where the roadside is strewn with casualties.

"Wear sweaters," Bucky said softly in the fading glow of twilight, sitting just a yard away from me on the spacious patio behind the house in the gathering chill. "Sweaters absorb the major impact. I wear three and sometimes four sweaters everywhere I go, weather permitting. Not on stage. I'm not talking about on stage. On stage you've got to be naked at the moment of impact. That's the moment of ultimate truth and ultimate falsehood, and the only way to go is go naked. Off stage, I wear sweaters. One on top of the other. All kinds. Three and four and sometimes five sweaters."

Mazola June came out then, wrapped in the longest scarf I've ever seen in my life, and before too long they'd both nodded off to dreamy sleep, right there in front of me, a pair of babes in the northern wood.

Title track from

pee-pee-maw-maw

Recorded on Anspar Records amp; Tapes

International copyright secured

Pee-Pee-Maw-Maw

Words-and-music Bucky Wunderlick

Copyright © 1971 Teepee Music

All rights administered Transparanoia Inc.

Material not to be offered for resale.

None of the copyrighted material herein is to be published in any form whatsoever without written permission from Transparanoia Inc., 30 Rockefeller Plaza, New York 10020.

Copyright secured under the Port Moresby, Pan American, International, World and Universal copyright conventions.

Public performance rights for U.S. and Canada owned by Teepee Music, an affiliate of Transparanoia Inc. All other world rights owned by Chumley Productions, an affiliate of Transparanoia Inc.

Made in U.S.A.

All rights reserved.

Officially registered and legally restricted.