The Flamethrowers Part 13

We lay on the bed in the entrance room. It was five in the morning and the streets were silent, nothing but the sound of one basketball bouncing in the courts across the street, occasionally bonking the backboard. It was my habit to picture a lone person playing with the single ball, dribbling, bringing it to the netless hoop, retrieving it. Someone unable to sleep who had gone out with his ball to pensively shoot baskets. There could have been two or three or even a whole team of people shuffling around in the dark, dribbling, pa.s.sing, shooting, and yet whenever I heard a ball echoing on the little court I thought it was the sound of a single player.

Sandro stared at me as if to confirm we were in the same register. I stared back, unsure what the register was. It seemed important to convey that I understood. Isn't that what intimacy so often is? Supposing you understand, conveying that you do, because you feel in theory that you could understand, and you want to, and yet secretly you don't? Then he was pulling my underwear off and I didn't need to understand. In that large open room, my thoughts wandered as Sandro descended, his breath against my thighs, a sensation that always embarra.s.sed me a little, as if I were a frigid teenager. I had the vague feeling that consenting meant approving of his act of violence and I did not approve, but then again this was simply s.e.x, not approval or forgiveness, and I'd already decided I wasn't going to reciprocate. Too tired, too late, I didn't feel like it. Sandro never cared about reciprocity. s.e.x is not about exchange values, he said. It's a gift economy. I relaxed and let my mind wander. I was thinking about the woman in the movie, her snowy face. Daintily sipping her beer in its short gla.s.s. I was half-removed from what was happening, from Sandro's mouth, an asymmetry that was meant to be read as connection, a man's face, tongue, and focus, between a woman's legs, and her focus on fruition. Not grat.i.tude, not intimacy, just fruition.

The woman in curler time, sipping her beer, was readying to lose herself. She would do it. She was not afraid.

The sky lightened through the loft windows, the trucks on Grand Street beginning their daylong stream of bangs and rumbles as they hit the large steel plates that lay over the street.

Sandro had waited with the mugger, he told me, a fourteen-year-old kid with a shattered hand. I was quiet. He took my silence as an accusation. A guy with a knife was threatening us, he said. How could we have known he wouldn't harm us? There was no way to know. The only sure thing was the revolver, which, because of Sandro's demonstration for Didier, was loaded.

When the ambulance wailed toward them, Sandro left the scene. He went walking down Houston to Allen. Down the Allen Mall, as we called the pedestrian walkway between north and south traffic, to Delancey. Past Ratner's, which was filled with late-night diners. He climbed the steps of the Williamsburg Bridge and began to cross. He could see the yellow neon of the sugar refinery across the East River, the halogen safety lights of the Navy Yard, the electrical substation to the south of the Navy Yard, its dark smokestacks blinking red. He'd forgotten how magnificent that view could be. But pa.s.sing along the graffiti-pasted walkway he felt the gun in his pocket and began to wonder if he was going to be mugged again. Surely it couldn't happen twice in one night. The odds were totally against it. It should have been impossible, given that it had already happened. He saw a clump of dark figures lurking on the walkway at the next concrete anchorage and decided that being mugged had nothing to do with odds. Nothing to do with what had already taken place. He had no desire to use that gun again. He turned around, descended the steps of the bridge, and wandered into Chinatown, over the hose-sprayed sidewalks in front of closed fish and produce markets. He found a bakery on Hester Street that had its interior lights on, the windows slicked with a veil of white steam, so much steam it was collecting in rivulets that ran down the interior of the gla.s.s. Inside, workers were filling display cases from large bakery pans. He rapped on the window and talked them into selling him a lotus paste bun. It was just out of the oven and its warmth and aroma, he said, transported him to me. Nothing mattered except coming home to see me.

"And there you were," he said. "In your cotton-underweared splendor. Your leggy splendor."

Helen h.e.l.lenberger called in the morning with the name of a lawyer for Sandro.

How does she already know what happened? I asked.

Sandro rubbed his head like he was overwhelmed by technicalities and the trauma of the incident and said, "I telephoned her when I got home. But what does it matter? The whole thing is a kind of blur. A f.u.c.kup and calamity. I'm really mad at myself."

He put his head in his hands, and then I was busy comforting him and told myself not to be paranoid about Helen.

The lawyer informed Sandro he would have to choose, either go to the police and tell them exactly what happened, or decide not to go, to do nothing.

"But what happens to me if I turn myself in?" Sandro asked him.

The lawyer explained that Sandro had it all wrong. There was no reason to worry. They would want to make him a hero. Hero vigilante chases down mugger, takes back night.

Sandro relayed all this to me at the Ukrainian diner we liked to go to on Second Avenue and Ninth Street. Then we drifted east down Ninth toward Tompkins Square Park. It was a beautiful fall day, a quiet morning, oak trees with their leaves going burgundy, the smell of woodsmoke from someone's fireplace.

We were near the strange little storefront congregation that gave out free doses of DMT, communion for anyone hoping to get closer to G.o.d. Ronnie had pointed it out to me-a door with an ugly brown mandala painted on it, a place you had to already know about in order to find. He'd once gone in for the experience, not G.o.d, just DMT. He said the preacher was "fair," meaning he gave everyone and himself the same amount. Ronnie had taken his. .h.i.t, which was instant and hard. He floated up to the ceiling. He wanted to come down but it was too late and the preacher and his congregation were haranguing him from below, yelling something at him about Jesus and the true inner light. It was terrifying, he said, really unpleasant, and there was nothing he could do but wait it out up there on the ceiling. "If that's G.o.d," Ronnie said, "he's deranged."

Sandro and I pa.s.sed the ugly mandala of the little DMT church. Beyond it, a group of hippies sat against the chain-link fence of an abandoned lot, drinking beer out of clear forty-ounce bottles.

The impulse to shoot someone in the hand. To hide a gun in your boot. What was it? I felt free of that. Like I could float up to the ceiling, unweighted by the burden of a male ego. I would float on up and not be afraid.

"So that's what we'll do, okay?" Sandro was talking, and I had not been listening.

"Call them as soon as we get back. Because they're Italians and you have to plan things months in advance and deal with tons of bureaucracy."

I should go ahead and schedule the publicity tour with the Valera team, and he would come along.

I was happy. I had never really considered not going, but Sandro supporting it made everything so much easier, even if his sudden support was about him, the mugging, and had little to do with me.

"You can protect me," he joked, "from Italy. I'll hide behind you. Cling to you in a way that will drive you nuts."

Sandro had a show at Helen's in February and wanted to leave right after. The tour with the Valera team was supposed to begin in March. We could use his mother's country place as a base. I would go to Monza and then other racetracks in northern Italy, and possibly France and Germany. I would make a film about the tour, about my own encounter with speed.

"You can flirt with Didi Bombonato," Sandro said teasingly, and did a play flip of his hair.

I tried broaching the subject with Marvin at work the next day. My hope was that he'd say I could take a leave and come back and be a.s.sured of a job. But Marvin heard "Italy" and started off on a story.

"In the summer of 1967," he said, "a friend of mine was working for the company that was going to distribute Contempt. He spoke Italian and French, so he was a.s.signed to prepare the subt.i.tles. When the print was ready, this friend invited me to its first showing. There were some funny errors in the subt.i.tles. The Odyssey kept coming up 'odious.' Later this same friend did other G.o.dard films, and there were more typos in his subt.i.tles. My favorite was from La Chinoise. Hegel came out 'Helga.' "

"Marvin, I want to go to Italy," I said. "For three or four months, probably, enough time to travel with the Valera team. I'm hoping to make a film."

"It's not unusual for subt.i.tles to run off onto the leaders," Marvin continued.

Had he heard me? Was he responding in some coded way?

"Just a few frames from the girl cut into the negative as a calibration tool. You, or some other, there with a bit of accidental subt.i.tle. Helga."

When Eric came back from lunch, I told him I was hoping to go to Italy in the spring. He said it was fine, that I could keep my job as long as I returned by midsummer.

To be in Italy with Sandro and with the Valera team-it would be the grand tour compared to my time as a student in Florence, when I had no money to travel and lived in the walk-in closet of a fruit seller. Marvin gave me sixteen-millimeter film stock at such a discount it was practically free. There would be a demonstration of the Spirit of Italy at Monza and they were going to have me drive the car. I had an idea for the film, of filming up close, in dilated view, the poster of Flip Farmer. Going close to his face, scanning his body, the flameproof suit, his arm over the helmet. A meditation on that stilled image, the monstrously white, pure smile. And then intermixing myself. The Valera team. My own driving gloves. My helmet.

"He likes me to beat his a.s.s," Giddle said when I asked how things were going between her and Burdmoore.

We were at Rudy's for the usual experience, as well as a final goodbye before Sandro and I left. It was winter, and dirty snow scuffed the curbs.

"It's hard to imagine," I said. "You're so pet.i.te."

"Not beat him up. Literally beat it. With a Ping-Pong paddle."

"Oh."

"He calls me Mama," she said.

"I'm sure."

There was new graffiti in the women's bathroom at Rudy's: "Whoever talks about love destroys love."

Someone had crossed out "love" and written "Ronnie Fontaine."

"Whoever talks about Ronnie Fontaine destroys Ronnie Fontaine."

The women's bathroom often became unis.e.x late on a drunken night. I wondered if it was Ronnie who was writing this stuff. Messages to himself.

Ronnie showed up and slid into the booth as we were talking about Burdmoore. "Oh, yeah," he said, "that's still on?"

Giddle said she was flattered Ronnie was interested, and yes, it was still "on."

"I'm not that interested," Ronnie said. "I just want to know if you tug on his beard. Apparently Brancusi, when he slept with Peggy Guggenheim, which is more than once, as I understand it, he told her not to touch his beard. It was forbidden. Anything else she could touch. Any body part or tuft. Not the beard."

But Burdmoore had lost the beard, I saw as he made his way toward us through the crowd at Rudy's. He'd lost the stringy locks of red hair, too. He'd cut his hair short and was clean-shaven. I found it hard to understand what he looked like now, because in his smooth face, his cropped hair, I saw only an agreement with Giddle, hair removal in exchange for something, unlimited s.e.x maybe, and not a man who had decided to look a particular way.

Giddle made a toast, and gushed about how fabulous it would be to think of me in a racer's suit, on a track, how thrilling. Also, she said, how necessary it was to spend time in Italy, that it was part of a gamine's coming-of-age, a sort of finishing school, and she became her older-sister self with me as young protegee, which was a role she often played, and she was, in fact, probably ten years older. I had spent almost an entire year in Italy as a student, but I didn't point this out to Giddle. She knew it, or at least I'd told her. She said I should consider coloring my sandy-blond hair red, that Italian women hennaed their hair. Nothing else was fashionable there but dyed red hair. Dyed hair and palazzo pants, she said. We have to get you some palazzo pants.

At some point she mentioned she'd never actually been to Italy. "But I can imagine it," she said. "A place where old women scrub stone steps with a stiff brush and a bucket of soapy water. Where someone is always scrubbing stone steps, a widow in mourning clothes. No one does that in America. Scrubs steps. Wears mourning clothes."

It was late and dark and smoky at Rudy's. The booth had broken into several conversations, Ronnie next to Saul Oppler, who had fully forgiven him for killing his rabbits. Ronnie was looking at Saul's hands. "Saul," he said, "you have no fingerprints." Saul looked at his own hands, old and giant and strong, hands that looked like they could pulverize rocks. He examined his smooth fingerpads and shrugged. He said he used his hands. To make paintings. Just worked the prints right off, he said.

Ronnie said he never knew it could be that easy.

"What do you mean, easy?" Saul said. "I've been in the studio for forty-eight years. You call that easy?"

"I meant getting rid of your-"

"I didn't get my first solo show until I was thirty-seven years old! Easy. To h.e.l.l with it," Saul said.

Sandro was at the bar, ordering more drinks. Burdmoore was next to Giddle, mutely watching her with a kind of wonder as she and I spoke. He seemed to feel no need to win her, to make her smitten with him. He just watched her with a steady gaze, like he was already thinking about later, what he and she would do later. I looked up as Sandro appeared with more drinks. Behind him, in the middle of the room, a girl stood alone facing our booth. Young and pale and thin and straw-blond, with a large face, a large head like a child. She stared at Ronnie, who was talking to Saul Oppler and didn't look up, didn't notice her. It was the girl on layaway.

"I'm so excited for your trip," Giddle continued. She gazed into the gla.s.s of slivovitz that Sandro pa.s.sed to her, turning it in her hands.

"I see octogenarian transvest.i.tes who are devoutly Catholic and may invite you over for tea," she said. "You'll go, wearing your palazzo pants. We have to get you some at Goodwill." She took a sip of her slivovitz, and then peered back into the gla.s.s. "The old trannies will have curious furniture stuffed with horsehair, lace doilies draped over everything to cover the black mold."

She'd known an Italian transvest.i.te, she said, a player of chess and turn-of-the-century German opera recordings who had once told Giddle that every night she dreamed about popes. Popes in pure dazzling white, floating on clouds. And Giddle had asked which pope, the pope? Was it Paul VI? And the transvest.i.te became disgusted and said no, certainly not! Not the one in the Vatican. Just popes. All in white, she'd said to Giddle, restoring her dreamy reverie. Beautiful popes, floating on clouds. Giddle thought that was really great. "Her vision was not molested by actual power," she said. "It was just men floating on clouds."

The girl on layaway was standing in the middle of the room, facing us.

I wondered if I should say something to Ronnie. I decided not to. If she were ready to alert him to her presence, she would do it herself. Instead, she stared at him with narrowed eyes, training her sadness on him.

Ronnie didn't notice and kept entertaining Saul.

She turned to go. I watched her move toward the exit, taking her sadness with her.

13. THE TREMBLING OF THE LEAVES.

said as much about what would happen, according to the Brazilian overseer Valera hired. The overseer said you could not predict. You would not know, by guessing, which of the tappers would come in at quota, which of them would come in under quota, and which of them would die.

Yellow fever, the patro said, they die of yellow fever.

A rubber worker with a .22-caliber hole in his head: Yellow fever, it's written in the booklet.

Another with a hole in his back: Yellow fever.

A third with an ice pick pushed through his neck, because the patro's flimsy muzzle-loader, with its cheap wire-wound barrel, unraveled: Y.f.

The Valera Company guns the patro was given were good for fifty shots and then they fell apart. He wrote to the company's contact in So Paulo about the faulty equipment but was told there was nothing to be done about it.

It was important to keep these Indians on edge, so the patro had to find ways. The Indians needed threats. They needed to be afraid. They might run away. Or sell the rubber to rubber pirates who roamed the edges of the encampment, and then the patro would lose his profit share. You could hear these bandits, their cracks and rustlings in the jungle. The patro's job was to keep the Indians in line. His tools were the cheap muzzle-loaders, mock drownings with water poured over a facecloth, and various further entrenchments of the Indians' peon status. They owed a fee for having been brought to the Amazon. They owed for their purchase on credit of goods at the company store. They were forbidden subsistence activities. No collecting Brazil nuts. No growing of crops (anyone caught farming: y.f.).

This life, the tapper's, rushing, sweating, exhaustion, waiting. Rushing, sweating, exhaustion. You wait while the patro inspects your taps to be sure they're clean, inspects your trunk incisions to be sure they're correct (not too shallow and not too deep, in order not to damage the tree's soft part, the cambium, and not circular-rather, you make a half spiral in the trunk, from lower right to upper left, tracing with your gouge the latex tunnels inside the tree). If the patro is busy, you set down the milk-loaded pails while you wait. If you run with pails full of latex and spill some, you are said to skedaddle it. If you carry the latex pails uphill and because of the t.i.tubation of your gait, you slop some from the pails, you are said to skedaddle it. Slop it from your pail and the day's work, so unmatched to the scale of the body and its limits, is wasted. It isn't just a loss down to zero but below it. You didn't know how low a person could get below zero, down under the roots of it, until you found this life, or it found you.

It is one hour's walk with the heavy slop-promising pails, sloppossible, back to the man with the scale. Twice a day you go to the scale, at noon and then again at sunset. At noon, a whole day, a day's life, a reality, has already been lived. Waking at dark, deep down under daylight, hurriedly preparing lunch to eat in the jungle, running to the taps, opening them as quickly as you can. The closer to daybreak the more likely you'll make quota because the trees flow better at dawn. You have to know which trees to return to (you can't tap the same tree two days in a row), running from tree to tree to get the taps open and by the time every one of them is flowing you race back to the first tap of the morning, the one you opened in total darkness, by feel alone, and you return to get your yield, pour it from the cup at the bottom of the tree into your pail, clean the tap, and get to the next tree. That's how it goes, this zigzagging from tree to tree, coated in sweat and jungle damp, zigzagging until noon, when you are ready to collapse, feeling like your head is in a cloud of ammonia, dizzy, confused, pain shooting up your spine, your muscles twisted into torn rags.

The man who puts your pails on the scale is against you like he was born to hate you in a natural way that won't be corrected with fuller pails, less slopped on their way to the scales. He was lured by good money, easy money. He'd been told proper housing, electricity, hot meals. You carry his water-sloppossible but not measured like the latex is, just eyeballed, and so less calamitous if slopped. He isn't so bad off, not at all, in fact, compared to your life, heat and pain and exhaustion, little sleep on dirt floors under canvas tarps, eating cold food when it rains, because the cooking is all outdoor. He is there to mind you. That is his job, and it is your fault. He frowns with hate, weighs the pails of latex, and puts down a number in the booklet. You don't get paid for the pails. You get a number in his booklet. If the number is under quota you get no credit. If your pail is at quota they say you're breaking even, and you get another number, for the credit, the amount owed against the amount collected, resulting in a handful of stale manioc flour, for which you must have your own bag, or the flour goes straight in your pockets, or, if you have no bag and no pockets, you run toward camp with your fingers sealed together in a bowl, like a hungry, desperate fool, leaving a trail of powdered manioc behind you. If your pail is over quota, you get the flour, and they say you'll get something when the job is finished. Rumor has spread that the booklet is a lie. The job is not going to finish in the sense of an accounting and a payment. Someone says, Let's burn it. But then you really won't get paid.

You and the others had made a four-month journey to a living h.e.l.l and the patros knew it. All the way from Belem, where you enlisted. They kept their guns pointed so you would not escape. But you tried. The patro who stood with the man working the scale was distracted, drinking from his canteen and trying not to look at the long line of men holding their pails, waiting. He sat on a cut log. His muzzle-loader hung from a strap on his shoulder. He closed his eyes and rubbed them. The man who weighed the pails was writing in the booklet. Because the jungle made the pages damp, he had to draw out each pencil line slowly. The pencil didn't like damp. Or the page didn't like it. You, almost at the end of the line, set down your pails and dove into the brush, off the path that led to the scales. Not sticking to your line, off the page like a pencil that would not write.

And then you were running and looking up through the green fringe of tree ferns. Panting and huffing and feeling your throat go cold with shortness of breath, the green fringe pounding above you as you ran.

How was it, the thought entered your mind as you ran, that G.o.d could love you and the patro and the man who weighed the pails, at one time? How was that possible? Your bare feet had gone numb with running. It was important to try to run lightly to keep quiet, but you could not feel your feet, like you were bobbing on two rubber bounce b.a.l.l.s instead of feet, deep in a jungle four months' journey from your village. Running on feet you could not feel. Bounce b.a.l.l.s. And working with the numbness, pulling your legs up to step lightly, because small cracks and rustlings echo in the jungle. Sound travels cleanly, is made louder as it relays through the s.p.a.ces among the trees, like through those bullhorns they put on the trucks on Sundays to get everyone herded into church, back in your village, which seems not so bad a life now, drought and G.o.d and stomachaches from unripe fruit. There was nothing to do but at least there was time. Now you are short on time and running. Weaving among the trees. The trees, thick and strong and st.u.r.dy, blocking out the sunlight, but themselves reaching up to it. If you step on a branch by accident the trees give away your secrets. Crack-crack, the sound of you sent back through the jungle to the patro. The trees, reaching up to the light they blocked, were not part of G.o.d's matrix. They went from their roots to the sky without any part in heavens and h.e.l.ls. The trees just were, and they relayed your secrets if you stepped on a dry branch while trying to escape. Not because they wanted you caught, but because of sound, and the way it traveled. They were no part in G.o.d's matrix. They were the wood His Son was nailed to. That was all. They would not suffer like you did, wondering if G.o.d loved you and the patro at one time. You and the man who weighed the pails. Wondering if G.o.d could hate. If He could love. If He could not hate, like the priest said, well, then. He couldn't love, either. And what help could He offer now? He was as good as the trees (no help at all).

Runaway logic: if you run in the night and sleep by day, you might make it to the river and build yourself a raft. Or you run with no plan but the slim moment, the patro's back turned.

Most runaways were caught. The ones who weren't died alone, among animals, watched by those huge trees that weren't in G.o.d's matrix. If the Earth is something whole, its wholeness is of no comfort. Some suffer. Others don't. What is G.o.d's harmony? That you have a gun pointed at you, and the patro is aiming it. By the laws of harmony, you cannot both have guns.

The green tree ferns pound into and out of view, branches sc.r.a.pe you, your feet are numb. You trip, you fall, you get up, you keep running.

14. THE RULES OF VIOLENCE.

We were in low chairs around an outdoor fireplace as dusk settled over the villa, the light tinted pink and made hazy with woodsmoke. Lake Como, far down below us, was a spill of silver. The men were elegantly dressed, in crisply tailored suits and b.u.t.tery-looking Italian loafers, probably just the kind that Ronnie had coveted when he was driving Saul Oppler's E-type Jaguar down to Texas with a load of dead rabbits.

There was the gravelly throated Count of Bolzano, a little man whose round belly pressed against his mint-green shirt, which was monogrammed on the lower left, over his spleen. He was an old friend of Sandro's mother's. On my other side was a man named Luigi, an industrial designer who peered at me through large, square eyegla.s.ses, looking like a character from a Fellini film. And lastly Sandro's brother, Roberto, who was as unfriendly as Sandro had warned he would be. Roberto lived down the road from the family villa in a recently built gla.s.s-and-steel house. Sandro and I had visited him there two days earlier, on the afternoon we'd arrived in Bellagio. We'd walked down the little road, cicadas surging from the green underbrush that banked the narrow lane. Sandro held my hand, and I'd felt light and strange, partly from jet lag, but the feeling opened me to this soft, lush place, where everything was so carefully tended.

Roberto had greeted us in his weekend clothes, new designer jeans and a double-breasted blazer, his manner as stiff and guarded as his clothes. I tried to thank him in the awkward moments of our introduction for the Moto Valera I'd gotten from the Reno dealership. At first he seemed to have no idea what I was referring to. Then he remembered and said, "But you crashed it," and turned to address Sandro about something else before I could respond. Sandro had tried to apologize for him afterward, explaining that Roberto was in a tough position. There was ma.s.sive upheaval at the Valera plants and though Roberto had worked out deals with the trade union, the workers were now rejecting their own union and striking anyway. Good for them, I thought, and anyway it didn't excuse his brother from being rude.

Tiny orange lights were beginning to twinkle on the lake's darkening sh.o.r.e, the lights mirrored in the water, the hills above them spreading out in reverse. The villa was at the top of a steep incline, just a fifteen-minute drive from the lakeside promenade of Bellagio proper, with its double-parked Lamborghinis and its women in furs. Its regal-looking car ferries, which arrived from Varenna, across the sparkling water. And along the waterfront, its white tablecloths, cold prosecco, rich and subdued families gazing off. But in that fifteen minutes traveling uphill from the lakefront to the Villa Valera, one left that world behind, pa.s.sed horses and cows grazing lazily, handwritten signs advertising farm-made honey and yogurt, and roads choked with blackberry and young chestnut trees.

This was a different Italy from what I had experienced during my two semesters in Florence, hanging out with Italian bikers in a bar near the train station. The Valera villa was of such a grand scale it suggested a life that was more like I'd seen depicted in paintings at the Uffizi than on the narrow and chaotic streets of Florence. The villa was nestled in the high wilds above Bellagio, but its grounds, on a broad, flat promontory overlooking the lake, were landscaped and formal, all geometric lines and cla.s.sical motifs. The iron entrance gates were ab.u.t.ted on either side by tall cypress trees, their tips ending in perfect points like obelisks. The long private drive up to the villa was lined with more cypress, and cla.s.sical statues, nymphs and satyrs, pieces of roman ruins or what looked like them, and huge urns engraved with cryptic Latin phrases. On the flat expanse at the top was a vast carpet of green gra.s.s bordered by color-shifting beds of rhododendrons. Various patios and arbors were covered by trellises of grape and climbing roses, and underneath, marble furniture and patio swings with striped seat cushions. Sandro said his mother had done all this landscaping, brought in the cla.s.sical statues and ruins and urns after his father died, that old Valera had loathed this sort of thing.

A warm wind rustled through the pines that bordered our view of the lake, their tender green pinecones bouncing up and down as the limbs moved. Above the hearth around which these men and I gathered was a statue of Pan playing his flute. Something about his posture, the way he lifted the pipes to his mouth, made him look as if he were wetting the glue on a Zig-Zag in order to seal a joint.

"Of course you should recognize Luigi's name," Roberto said as he introduced me to the others, "he's the most famous industrial designer in Italy."

"Yes, I should-"

"If you haven't heard of him, you might wonder what they taught you in art school," Roberto said.

"So you're from the West," Luigi said to me, the firelight bouncing from his eyegla.s.ses. His tone was kinder than Roberto's, although I didn't sense in it that he was offering himself as an ally. "I have a few friends out in Hollywood," he said. "I try to make it there once a year or so. A strange place, but magical in its way. I take a mud bath at the Bel-Air Hotel."

All I knew of Hollywood was Marvin mutilating Paramount films with meat cleavers, Nadine inhaling Freon from old refrigerators. Having been to a fake McDonald's in the City of Industry didn't seem like it would count. I said I was from Reno, Nevada.