by Richard Bowes

Mr. Bowes has been working on an autobiographical novel currently titled Dust Devil: My Life in Speculative Fiction. His recent stories “If Angels Fight” and “I Needs Must Part, the Policeman Said,” are both slated for inclusion in this novel, as is this new tale of life and death in the East Village.

* * * *

On a morning last October, I was reminded of the Velvet Underground song “New Age,” in the live version, the one where Lou Reed sings about getting a funny call today.

In fact I got two funny calls. The first came before ten a.m., early by my standards. Since I’ve retired I sleep late. Marty Simonson said hello and asked how I was. My friendship with Marty goes back to college. He’s a director now, for the stage mostly. He got a Tony nomination a few years back for that play about Dorothy Parker.

Marty has, of course, an instinct for the dramatic tease. “An old friend of yours was talking about you last night,” he told me. “She’s known you almost as long as I have.” Then a slight pause while I tried to imagine what he was talking about and he said, “Judy Finch says hello.”

That was a surprise. It was long ago and very briefly that I’d thought of Judy Finch as a friend. We hadn’t spoken since about the time she became the girl in the ménage at the center of that legendary early ‘70s catastrophe, the band Lord of Light.

I’d seen her since, of course, like anybody might: in the famous scene in the Scorsese film where she shoots DeNiro, as Pirate Jenny when they did Three Penny Opera at Lincoln Center. And there was the period when she took the name Judy Icon: hipper than Madonna, more famous than Patty Smith. She did stage shows, collages of memory and songs, all improvisational, never done the same way twice.

But it was in the East Village in the great late 1960s that I’d actually known Judy Finch. Her father was a well-known sculptor, her mother was a critic. She was nineteen, studying theater and hanging around Max’s Kansas City.

My earliest memory of her is one afternoon when I was on a front stoop in the East Village with my close friend Joan Mata. This girl with long blonde hair walked by and said hello to Joan. Looking at Judy as we got introduced I first saw a nice schoolgirl, then a tough city kid, and then a young woman with a tinge of tragedy.

She sat and talked with us for a while. When she left, Joan told me the legend of Judy Finch and Ray Light. A few years before when Judy was fifteen, her boyfriend had been snatched off the street by private detectives who made a living returning runaways to the families that wanted to destroy them. They’d been apart ever since but she loved him still.

Forty-five years later, I asked Marty, “What’s she doing these days? And how the hell are you and she so intimate?

“She’s writing, composing, doing what we all do later in life—trying to make it all make sense. She’s got a stage work in mind and I’m helping her shape it. We wondered if you were free for lunch today.”

This promised to be kind of interesting. Then Marty made it more so by adding, “I told Judy about a piece you wrote a while back. You showed it to me just after Phillip Marcy died and that whole scene exploded. You know the one? Do you still have it?”

I told him I thought so.

“Could you bring it along? She was intrigued when I described it and I think this may be material she can use.”

This was one of those mornings—maybe you’ve had them—when pressing dental bills meant that a couple of thousand dollars would not have gone amiss. I agreed to meet them at noon at Taxi Stand over on the Bowery.

It took a little searching but the piece Marty had mentioned was in a storage box in my closet. Down among the scribbled rejection notes from long forgotten editors, the abandoned projects, old notebooks full of catty commentary, aborted play and novel ideas, sketches for board games I’d once designed, letters from old lovers, I found it.

Typewritten on cheap yellow paper, it was an artifact from the early 1970s with attitude and run-on sentences to spare. In part it was personal memory and in part an insight I’d gotten directly from the mind of Judy Finch’s old flame, Ray Light.

I sat on the stool in my kitchen, read the first couple of pages, and remembered how I’d taken my own experiences and woven into them Ray’s insight about what had happened to him a year or two before it happened to me.

* * * *

The Kid with the Sun in His Eyes

The Kid hasn’t even been given that name yet as he stands on the corner of East 4th Street and the Bowery and tries to blink away the late-afternoon light because he’s not used to it and because his eyes are a bit pinned.

Just a couple of weeks before, the Kid rode from Ohio to the city in several cars and a couple of trucks always with lone drivers, guys who sometimes just wanted to talk about themselves and their families and all he had to do was be there. Other times along the way things got done with his body and for that he managed not to be present, to take a mental walk and come back to himself when everything was over and he and the driver were once more rolling toward New York. That ability to go away was the thing about the Kid more even than his hair and his clothes, that his parents wanted to cut off of him.

In the city the Kid hit Times Square first and it was bright and confusing and scary and then some guy took him downtown to the East Village which was poor and rundown but easier to figure out and the cops were mean but not so thick on the ground as uptown and other runaways warned him about where not to go and who in the neighborhood got rewards or kicks turning in underage kids like him.

So the Kid sixteen years old stands on the corner leaning on a brick wall with one leg up behind him in classic pose and this mad boy who’s taken the name Rimbaud is there with him, talking, making flowery gestures, saying, “Another place, another dimension or something is where that stud thinks he’s going, man. That he thought I was the one who was going to take him there is what’s so fucking funny and freaky. Like he’s a cult leader but somehow he’s trying to learn from me.”

The Kid is coming to understand that it’s drugs and hustling that keep boys like him and Rimbaud alive and in contact with this world and he feels still in control of all that. Because he has a kind of skill sometimes with a mark or a john to know what they know as they know it and without them being able to tell he’s hip to them. But with all that he finds himself this afternoon out on the block early because he’s slipped over some line and woke up just after noon with a nasty need.

Rimbaud says, “The stud is important in art stuff. He owns a gallery or something. He told me he could get me a job and he wants to see me tonight. But, like, he’s the most weirded-out trick I’ve ever turned. One minute he’s telling me to read his mind, the next he’s ready to push me out a window and fly.”

When Rimbaud’s finished talking, the two of them pool their money to split a five-dollar bag of junk to hold themselves over until the night. Just as they’re about to set out for East Seventh Street where they’ll score, Rimbaud nudges the Kid and says, “There he is,” and the Kid sees the outline of a figure, a guy crossing the street silhouetted against the October sun streaming down the long blocks.

* * * *

Then it was getting late and I skimmed the rest of the story. Thinking about it as I brushed my teeth and showered I understood both how it had never sold and how it would be of great interest to Judy if the project was what I suspected it was going to be. As I finished shaving, the phone rang again.

“Hey, Daddy Mack,” said a slightly raspy, somewhat nasal voice, “You know where your string is this morning?”

I’m old and not so fast on the uptake these days. I’d almost hung up before I realized I knew the voice and even recognized the reference. I said, “Lizard?”

He hung up and the number was blocked on my caller I.D. But that voice could only have belonged to Lizard Pavane. Thirty years ago, he and I designed board games together. Some sold and a couple of those did okay.

The game the Lizard referred to was called Mack Daddy Mack, and, yes, each player was a pimp, sending a string of sex workers out onto the urban streets. The game pieces were garishly colored wide-brimmed hats. The board was a city street map. It owed more than a bit to Monopoly. Players rolled dice, drew cards that brought rewards or the unwelcome attention of the cops.

When we’d worked on it, we were still dumb enough to think of ourselves as mad and bad and dangerous. No one could be persuaded to buy and produce it, which now seemed to me just as well.

But the uncanny nature of the Lizard struck me. After my not having thought of it for years, that game was one of the aborted projects I’d just pawed through in my search for the story.

I left my apartment wondering why he called and thinking of the more amazing coincidence that he and Judy Finch would reappear on the same day. I’ve become so addled that I didn’t immediately realize this was no accident.

* * * *

Walking east on Bleecker Street, stopping at a copy shop to get some clear reproductions of my fading pages, I thought about Judy on stage at the Fillmore, singing with the group Lord of Light.

The Fillmore East in 1971 was in the last months of its brief and glittery career. Rock groups were playing in sports arenas by then; the neighborhood was going very bad. Heading the bill that night was a frazzled hippy band whose last hit had been a year or two before. A canny old bluesman had second billing with Lord of Light as the opening act.

Little Judy Finch was Judy Light now. Her abducted boyfriend had returned and Ray Light was his name. The Dark Lord crown was in the street waiting to be picked up and he was one of the contenders. Rumors of suicides and intricate kink washed around the band.

But the Fillmore audience was tough. It took more than that to impress us. Joplin and Hendrix and Morrison had come and gone and left us with exaggerated memories of their performances here. Everyone in the group I was with was ripped out of his or her head. The Fillmore was maybe two-thirds full.

Then the psychedelic amoebas of Joshua Light Show filled the back screen, the drummer and bassist laid down the beat, the group was on stage. Ray Light wore black from the neck on down. Judy had a blonde crewcut. The guy called BD wore long white robes.

Our world was all afire with Lord of Light stories. Ray, Judy, and BD were almost openly an off-stage three way. It didn’t come across on stage. Ray and Judy came together to harmonize then stepped apart. BD moved around the stage like a zombie while banging a tambourine.

Everyone in the East Village knew that BD had been one of the private cops who’d helped abduct Ray six or seven years before. Ray Light’s father paid money to have his son forcibly brought home, then had the boy hospitalized and given shock treatment.

It was said the doctor who treated Ray had killed himself while Ray was in that hospital. His father had committed suicide not long after Ray’s release.

“Revelation in a thousand volts,” Ray Light sang. “Blowing you to heaven,” sang Judy. The essential thing with a cult legend as opposed to a popular star is that in an audience of two thousand people, the star touches most of them but the cult legend can touch maybe a hundred. In Ray’s case it may not even have been that many. But the touch, I can testify, was searing.

Those in the audience who were like me got caught in Ray Light’s memory, passed with him through iron doors that were locked behind them, went down institutional hallways to a place where they were strapped to a table and had their brains blasted with electricity. When the song was over and I glanced around, I saw an audience just mildly grooving. But I noticed a couple of others besides me who looked more than a little disturbed.

After that, most of Lord of Light’s set passed without anything similar happening and I was about to write off what I’d felt as what happens when you spend many long nights doing too many strange drugs.

Then they sang “Just a Boy without Wings,” a song where Ray Light yelled, “REACH ME, REACH ME, REACH ME OR DIE” and I was naked and handcuffed on a window ledge trying not to look at the pavement eight floors below while trying desperately to meld my mind with that of the man who stood behind me. The nightmare lasted until the music stopped and I was shaking and wet with sweat.

I realized that Ray and I shared at least one very bad experience. And that he could do what that nightmare man had tried to force me to do.

As the reverb from the stage died down, Marty, who was sitting next to me, shrugged and said, “I give it a nine because you can die to it.” The rest of our party laughed but I was still trying to get myself to breathe normally. That window ledge was a memory I’d taken some care to avoid.

* * * *

Still thinking about that long-ago night at the Fillmore, I found myself on the Bowery in front of Taxi Stand. Maybe you remember the restaurant. It was briefly trendy a few years back just after it opened, up the street from CBGB’s which was still in business then. Completely remodeled in aluminum and glass, Taxi Stand occupied a spot that had for decades been a blowsy all-night cafeteria favored by cab drivers, cops, and prostitutes both TV and female.

Wall murals of black and white photographs from the 1940s and ‘50s caught the Bowery by night: neon signs, parties from uptown slumming, drunks with ruined faces singing, fat women flashing their garters as they danced on bars, drunken college louts trying to be hip.

When I arrived right at noon the place was still almost empty. I saw Marty before he saw me and was amazed that a white-haired old guy like that was still off on artistic adventures. He’s sixty-three. Six months younger than I am.

When Marty spotted my approach he said something to the woman with him. Judy Finch turned my way, smiled, and spoke my name. She looked good: mid-forties instead of very late fifties, ash blonde, no obvious work on her face. For an instant, I saw a flash of the honey-haired kid caught between boarding school and Max’s Kansas City. She stared at me and I wondered if she was remembering that first encounter or was just trying to remember me.

“I can’t believe it,” she said softly, saving her voice. “We precious few don’t die easily.” She took a sip of the mimosa with which she was bringing the morning to a close. “Marty tells me that you’ve got some amazing material.”

He had ordered iced tea, which meant he was keeping his head clear. I did the same and Marty told me about the show they were developing. “It will be a little bit like cabaret, a bit like those evenings Elaine Stritch did, and Bea Arthur. Great monster ladies of the American stage talk about breaking onto Broadway, sing a couple Sondheim songs, reminisce about Golden Girls on TV, then give you a few funny/painful glimpses of their lives.”

“Their stage careers are kind of impressive,” said Judy. “But I pretty much got those old ladies beat when it comes to the life story aspect. Living with the Lord of Light who turned out to be the God of Death and with the guy who killed him; they can’t top that.” She laughed at my startled expression and said, “Oh, yes, I’m going to talk about Ray and BD and the deaths.”

“We’re going to use a bunch of Ray Light songs that Judy did originally,” Marty told me. “There’s a band in the show.”

“Yeah, Ray’s music has slipped out of peoples’ memories,” Judy said. “This maybe will bring it back.”

“What she can’t get is permission to use any kind of reference to Phillip Marcy—nothing he wrote, not a photo, nothing,” Marty said. “His family threatens to sue if his name is even used.”

“They were afraid we were going to defile his memory. As if that would be possible,” said Judy. “We were kind of stuck. Then Marty asked if I remembered you. Like I ever forget anybody from back then in the East Village!”

Just the way she looked into my eyes and said that made me pretty certain that she had. The waiter came with my drink and took our orders.

“Can you show us what you have?” Marty asked. I brought out a copy of “The Kid with the Sun in His Eyes” and read aloud the opening section I’d looked over at home.

I finished and Judy said very quietly, “When I was fifteen, I used to walk Ray down to Fourth Street every night. He called the guy he lived with the Man. I never saw the Man. All I knew was that I hated him.” Then she asked me, “You have more?”

The waiter came with our food. I put the oyster po’boy I’d ordered aside and read:

* * * *

At night East 4th Street becomes the off-Broadway Rialto and the Kid mixes with boys and girls on the corner of Second Avenue, the glassy-eyed drag queens smoking in the alley next to the Club 82 where guys in dresses talk dirty and sing lewd songs in falsetto for the benefit of middle-aged drunks in New York on business.

He slips in and out of the intermission crowds at Truck and Warehouse and La Mama, pokes his head into Phoebe’s on the corner of the Bowery looking for a daddy for the night. And there in the smoke and amid the crowd of dealers and at-liberty actors and lead-poisoned painters and playwrights dying for a break, a guy comes up to him and says, “The Kid with the Sun in His Eyes.”

For a moment the Kid is in the man’s memory a thing that every once in a while happens with him, sees himself on the street that afternoon with Mad Rimbaud who has since disappeared and knows this is the guy Rimbaud was talking about. The guy starts buying him drinks, tells him his name, says that he has a gallery uptown and even seems like he thinks the Kid might be impressed. But the only things about this john that the Kid pays attention to are the money laid out on the bar and something he says. “You can read me, I felt you do it. I see you flying toward the rising sun with your eyes wide open and blind. And I’m tagging along.” The Kid understands what Rimbaud was saying about this being one crazy queen but he believes he can handle it.

Later with the crowd beginning to thin out the man says he knows the Kid is the one who is going to break through and he wants to find out tonight. By then the Kid’s snorted enough junk in the men’s room using the man’s money that he’s plucked off the bar and he isn’t afraid of anything.

The Kid with the Sun in His Eyes can’t remember the drinks and the junk, can’t remember the ride in the creaking freight elevator or what had happened to all his clothes or when his hands got cuffed behind his back. “Close your eyes and see into me,” says a voice behind him. The Kid’s bare feet are on a window sill. A huge window is open in front of him and eight floors down is the concrete sidewalk. The glimpse he briefly had into the mind of the one who’d brought him here is wavy and blurred. Reaching it now is like trying to see through a sun glare even though it’s night outside and cold air is hitting him.

“Look at me,” he hears the man who stands right behind him say, but the man has a grip of iron and holds the Kid’s head so the Kid can’t turn to see him. “Look into me,” the man says. “You did this once this afternoon when I first saw you and you did it for a moment in the bar. And you will do it again. You will look into me,” he says. “I can teach you how but I want you to be able to do it better than I can. Once I had this boy. I found him on the street and brought him here and he could see with his eyes shut and could look into me but not at will, only off and on. I taught him in the same way I’m teaching you. And when he had almost reached the point where he could lead me, they took him away.” He talks some more and the Kid realizes he’s going to be trapped here and tortured until he sees or dies.

* * * *

Judy paused with a bit of salad on a fork but didn’t put it in her mouth. “Let me read the whole manuscript,” she said. “This is fascinating. I feel like the boy he’s talking about having taught is Ray. Something like this happened to you?”

I shrugged. “A little bit. When Ray sang that last weekend at the Fillmore I saw what had happened to him and knew he was the one Marcy had talked about. So I put that in the story.”

“We both got a touch of Ray,” she said and looked at me like suddenly she did know who I was. “Was it after this you started writing science fiction?”

“I write fantasy,” I said, “and that began a lot later.”

“I want to use this material,” she told Marty.

“We need to ask the lawyer but I think it will be fine.” Marty looked my way and smiled. “We’ll work out a deal, and you’ll get a writing credit and some kind of small percentage.”

On my walk back home after lunch, I remembered that after the Lord of Light concert at the Fillmore, I hadn’t wanted to hang around for the other acts. Instead I gave my friends the slip and went back to the Avenue A apartment where I was staying.

The neighborhood was going bad. Some blocks you took a deep breath before you walked them. A big part of the story of those years was kids coming to the city, curious or desperate, and getting swallowed up. Cults were working the streets. That night I remember women members of the Children of God were doing what they called, “fishy flirting,” soliciting guys for sex and maybe conversion.

That night I got home after midnight and none of the people I shared the place with was there. On the kitchen table was a paper opened and folded to a story that had taken place in that very neighborhood. “Art Expert Dead in Eight-Story Plunge,” was the headline. I recognized the face in the accompanying photo. I read some sketchy details of Phillip Marcy’s death and a few facts about his career.

And I remembered the morning a couple of years before when I awoke and saw the big windows that still had “Haverford Business Forms,” a long-dead company, written on them in gold lettering.

The windows overlooked a neighborhood where almost nothing was more than eight stories tall. The morning sun flowed in and semi-blinded me. It created a halo around the figure that appeared. The night before, Phillip Marcy had picked me up at Phoebe’s Bar across the street. Upstairs I’d found he was bigger and stronger and far scarier than I’d guessed. Even fear of falling eight stories onto the cement wasn’t enough to make me able to link my mind with his.

The next morning when he approached, I tried to stand up and realized I was still handcuffed. He gestured and I rolled off the couch, walked in front of him to the door of his loft. On a stool were my clothes, nicely folded, and my boots lying on top of them. He pulled open the bar lock and the front door swung open. I cringed at the cold.

He picked up my clothes and tossed them into the hall, then he took a key out of his pocket and unlocked the cuffs. He put one hand on my shoulder and propelled me out the door. He tossed some wadded-up bills after me. Before I could even scramble into the clothes, the door slammed. And because I was very young and very stupid, I felt like a terrible failure.

I’d been a flop in Phillip Marcy’s horrible world. Not the kind of boy he was looking for—one who fulfilled what I thought was about the deepest kink I’d ever been near. But the night of his death I had just heard Ray Light sing: “You found me in the Meld and hid me in your cage.”

Remembering that and looking at the newspaper photo, I sat down at an ancient Underwood typewriter and wrote “The Kid with the Sun in His Eyes.” And forty years later, I was still kind of pleased with it.

* * * *

One reason that I may be the last person in Manhattan without a cell phone is that I cherish the excitement of coming home and finding a call light flashing. It happened on my return that afternoon. The Lizard had left a message. Without ever identifying himself he said, “I have news that will bring a faint ray of light into your dreary existence,” and gave me a telephone number.

It took a few calls. The first couple of times I got busy signals. Then the receiver at the other end was picked up but all I heard was a woman yelling. She was too far from the phone for me to tell what she was saying. I knew this was the right number, though. Women were always yelling at the Lizard. And, in this case, I recognized the voice.

A few minutes later he called back. “I’m coming into the city immediately,” he said. “We need to get together.” He also told me the good news.

“There’s an online site that wants to revive Biting the Apple, and is willing to pay for the privilege.” This was a board game he and I had produced almost thirty years ago for the brand-new humor magazine, Cheap Irony. That mag was supposed to meld the best parts of Saturday Night Live and The New Yorker. It had gone belly-up after a few issues.

“But we got paid,” the Lizard remarked. “We got a certain amount of attention that got us a few more game commissions. And they let the rights revert to us. No wonder the yutzes went broke. The people who are interested now think it’s quaint, an historic artifact. By the way, do you happen to have a copy of the damn thing?”

It so happened I did and even knew where it was. Biting the Apple was one of the things I’d clawed my way past that morning while searching for my story.

“Splendid,” he said when I told him. “Rumors of your senile dementia are clearly exaggerated.”

Then he gave me the address of a place where we’d meet in a few hours and hung up.

For the second time that day, I scrabbled in my storage bins, still marveling at the serendipity this day was showing.

When I found Biting the Apple I realized it had the same basic rules and design as Mack Daddy Mack but was about making it big in Manhattan circa 1980—finding a rent-controlled penthouse, producing a disco musical, making a fortune with a video game arcade, meeting Jackie Onassis, wearing a mullet, visiting Studio 54, The Saint, and Limelight. My head reeled.

Over the years the Lizard and I drifted in and out of each other’s lives, close at times, not even speaking at others. Somehow we’d fallen into the racket of designing games for toy companies, for ad agencies that thought games were nice promotional tools, for people who hired us because they believed that we were so weird we must be creative and maybe even wise.

I remember an account executive looking at my partner askance and asking him, “What kind of name is Lizard Pavane, anyway?”

“An invented one,” he had replied, seemingly amazed that anyone could ask a question so idiotic. We designed a game in which one player got to commit a series of famous murders and the other tried to stop him, a game for a giant insurance company in which the players were all brokers trying to sell as many insurance plans to corporations as possible, a game for a lobbyist to play with members of the U.S. Congress to convince them to deregulate the railroads.

Demand had been hot for a little while and had then disappeared in a puff of smoke. I’d had a few other projects with Lizard Pavane after that, but we hadn’t seen much of each other since he moved to New Jersey some years back.

My meeting with the Lizard took me across town to the East Village for the second time that day. It was the first neighborhood where I’d lived in the city and I’d seen it go from gritty, working-class Slavic, to mad hippy, to drug-raddled hellhole. Now the blocks I went down were tree-shaded and lined with gift shops, boutiques, small restaurants. The place I wanted was a little bar called Giga’s Guillotine on 10th Street and Avenue C.

On my way, I thought about Lizard Pavane calling me on the same day Judy had reappeared in my life. The Lizard’s connection with her had been a much more intimate and dramatic one than mine. We’d never talked about it but I’d heard plenty of stories, even seen it mentioned in a book or two. I debated telling him about what had happened that afternoon.

Only when I reached my destination did I understand there was little need to mention Judy and absolutely no chance that his reappearance in my life on the same day as hers was a coincidence.

Giga’s Guillotine was someone’s dream of a 1950s Paris bistro, all quirky and intimate with a parquet floor and Yves Montand playing on the sound system and not at all the Lizard’s kind of place.

Ambience, though, was not why we were there. Seeing it, I realized that the site had once been occupied by Sid’s, a place everyone called Ugly Sid’s, a low-life bar that always managed to stay open until dawn. And it was in Ugly Sid’s, the Sunday night after their Fillmore concert, that Ray Light had died with a knife in his gut.

The Lizard sat at a table sporting a crumpled yachting blazer, drinking an amber liquid that I assumed was Jack Daniels. A small suitcase and a grayish raincoat rested on the chair beside him. Long sleeves and a buttoned-up collar hid the iguana tattoos.

I hadn’t seen him in five or six years. But really, at five foot four with his black eyes gleaming and his head freshly shaved, he looked not very different than he had thirty-five years before when I met him for the first time.

Now he saw me and rasped, “You look kind of the same too, except old and confused.”

Since I don’t drink, I ordered a seltzer. “Was that Nina I heard in the background on the phone?” I asked.

“She does have a distinctive shrill scream,” he said. “Doubtless your life is as cold and lifeless as ever so you’re interested in mine. I’m in the midst of civil insurrection, domestic upheaval.”

“Nina tossed you out?” Nina is the long-suffering but not infinitely suffering type. She has a management job with William Morris that bought the house they live in.

“If only she had! What a thrill to be picked up by a strong woman and physically tossed out a door! I would die happy. But she knows that’s what I want so she never laid a hand on me: just screamed until I went away and no doubt is changing the locks even as I speak.”

He looked at a table full of kids in their twenties and his lip curled. “Girls these days just have gym muscles. In my time there were women who did actual physical labor. Did you bring the game? Nina was whining because she couldn’t win. She destroyed my copy after I won all three times we played.”

“Is that what the argument was about, you insisted on winning a game you’d designed?” I didn’t add, “Even at the risk of pissing off the woman who’s supporting you?”

He looked surprised that I asked. “Of course,” he said and without pause added, “I think we can get another couple of thousand for updating the game, making it relevant for right now. Any ideas about how you win the rat race these days?”

“Having a blog that gets fifty thousand hits a day,” I said. “The ability to speak Mandarin plus two Chinese dialects,” I added. He looked bored. The game was the excuse, not the reason for my being here. Wondering what angle the Lizard was playing, I glanced around the room, trying to catch some trace of Ugly Sid’s.

“Yes,” said the Lizard. “This tacky piece of faux whimsy sits on the very spot where very late one night Bruno Delmar, AKA BD, put a knife into Ray Light before going home and hanging himself.”

“I once heard that while those things were happening Judy was with you at your loft,” I said. I hadn’t known Lizard back then, but the story was part of his legend and gave him a bit of the aura of a great lover. The very fact that his looks made that so improbable was a sly twist to the tale.

Some of that must have been obvious on my face because the Lizard cackled and said, “You’re thinking to yourself that a gay guy who looked like me would live and die alone. You don’t understand. Girls may want to talk to pretty guys who make nice conversation. But they end up having to rely on guys who look like me.

“Judy came by my place. She seemed desperate and afraid, obviously wanting to stay with me. Who was I to refuse? The next day we found out what had happened. ‘She was with me all last night,’ was all I had to tell the cops when they came around. The guy and his girlfriend I shared the space with corroborated.

“At that point, the lawyers descended. Her parents both had money. All they were interested in was showing she had nothing to do with the murder, had no idea BD was going to do what he did. After a few weeks or so her family took her away somewhere to recover. That was practically the last I saw of Judy.”

“Had you and she been together for long before that night?”

“We’d just met a couple of weeks before the Fillmore gig—Lord of Light was laying down tracks at Electric Ladyland. Bruno Delmar got Judy and me together at a party. I was already doing okay at that point; I had that reviewing gig at Rolling Stone. She and I dug each other as the saying went. Until the fateful night, though, we’d done nothing more than talk and exchange glances.

“BD, though, told her that if anything happened I was the one she could turn to. Bruno and I went way back. He trusted me. Maybe I was the only one he trusted.”

“You knew BD?” This was a surprise.

“Bruno Delmar and I went all the way back to grade school together. We were the two smartest boys at Saint Martin de Tours in Carnasie. He liked to be called BD and when I first knew him was a really decent kid. Gallant, you know, stepping into fights and standing up for you if you were his friend.

“After that I went to Brooklyn Polytech, got a scholarship to Cornell. BD got caught in family problems. His mother was badly crazy and when his father died he had absolutely nowhere to live. He ended up in a halfway house and the army and we lost touch.

“A few years later I was back in the city after college, hanging around the East Village. And there was BD. He didn’t say what he was doing and I didn’t ask, that’s the way we’d been brought up. But he was still the Bruno Delmar I’d gone to school with. Then one day his picture was in the underground papers. It turned out BD was a private eye working undercover to send runaways back to their families. He disappeared before I could speak to him.”

“I first saw him back when he was working undercover,” I told Lizard. “A whole bunch of us including Judy Finch were at a loft party. She was dressed as a boy like she sometimes did back then. It was all very spacey: everyone ripped, incense burning, and the light was hundreds of candles. She pointed out this guy and told us he was the private cop that had once busted Ray. I remember that he was hot-looking and could easily have been one of us. I guess that was why his cover worked.

“Judy walked over and asked, ‘How’s it going, BD?’ He gave a tight little smile but otherwise stayed straight-faced and said that wasn’t his name. She just shook her head, took a matchbook out of her pocket, and said, ‘This is Ray Light’s number. He talks about how much he wants to see you again. Don’t be afraid. You need to call him.’

“As she turned in the flickering light and walked away, he stared after her like he was lost and in love. Not long after that he disappeared and almost immediately Judy was gone too. Later I found out they were part of a band.”

“You’re right about him being in love,” said Lizard. “Come on, I got to meet someone.” He threw money on the table, picked up his bag and coat, and headed out the door.

“The next time I saw Bruno Delmar he was with Lord of Light,” Lizard said. “He was in some kind of relationship with Ray Light and Judy. Right at that moment you couldn’t be wingy enough to satisfy the fans.

“But he and I could still talk. The gallantry was still there. He obviously loved Judy even though she didn’t much like him. It was what made him find a way of giving her protection, providing cover.”

“Why did she need cover? He killed Ray Light in front of a dozen witnesses.”

We went up gentrified Avenue C. Lizard Pavane now walked a bit slow and stiff-legged but something I remembered about him was still true. He hated to have anybody get in his way or walk faster than he did. Each time someone passed us, he’d kind of growl and make a move like he wanted to hit them with his bag.

“Idiot!” he said to me, “She knew Ray Light had killed people. And it’s my guess that she wanted BD to off him before Ray did the same to her. BD made sure she had the alibi. And the way he did the deed took all the attention off her.” He looked at me hard and gave his cackling laugh. “You don’t believe little Judy Finch could have arranged such a thing, do you? Boy, has she got you conned!”

We were on the corner of 14th Street when he stopped and said, “Thanks to Nina, I found out Judy’s doing a memoir show and your old boyfriend is directing it.”

“I only found out about that today,” I said.

The Lizard looked like he didn’t believe me. I had brought a copy of my story. On an impulse I handed it to him and said, “She’s interested in this thing I wrote years ago. On the same day that Marcy died and two days before BD and Ray did.”

“I’ll be in touch,” he said and stuffed it in his bag. Before he crossed the street and headed into the green lawns and neat brick apartment houses of Stuyvesant Town, the Lizard told me, “If Nina calls, you don’t know where I am or where I went.”

As I walked back to my place in the West Village, it seemed to me that I was always on the periphery of great events, never quite on the scene. I saw Ray Light and BD the evening of their last night alive, probably around the time Judy went to visit the Lizard.

They were getting into a van outside the house on the north side of Tompkins Park where the band was staying. BD had washed the makeup off his face and wore black coveralls. He looked like the guy I had seen at that party a couple years before. Ray had a red kepi cap pulled down over his face, his collar turned up and his hair in a ponytail. He didn’t want to be recognized. But the pale skin and the dark eyes were unmistakable.

He glanced my way and for a moment I saw what he saw: dim lights and shadows in the park, a darkening street, a guy in derelict leather jacket and Frye boots who was a bit past being a kid and a little too battered by the street to be hip.

It took me a moment to recognize myself in another’s eyes. I saw the wonder, lust, and envy that were on my face as I watched Ray Light. Then I felt his contempt. It lasted just a few seconds but in that moment I wanted to die.

BD put his hand on Light’s shoulder and broke the connection before I saw any more. BD shook his head and gestured for me to move on.

Remembering the encounter all these years later, I wondered if he’d saved my life.

Nina called me later that night. We exchanged tentative greetings and remarked at how long it had been since we’d seen each other. Then she said. “Where’s Lizard?”

“I don’t know.”

“He talked to you before he left. You agreed to meet at that idiotic Guillotine bar. There’s someone he sees who lives in Stuyvesant Town. I need to know if he’s staying with her.”

“I couldn’t tell you.”

“You just did,” she said and hung up.

* * * *

A few days later I sat in a small rehearsal space in the bowels of the Public Theater along with Marty listening to Judy talk about being a kid living on St. Mark’s Place with her father the artist and her mother the critic; about becoming a teenager the year Kennedy was shot. The guy who would be music director of the show played guitar and Judy sang a snatch of Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come.”

She stood leaning on the back of a chair and said, “I was fifteen in nineteen-sixty-five and going to the Quaker School. A few blocks away from me another tale played itself out. An old friend of mine, who knows a bit about these things, wrote this version.” She told the story of “The Kid with the Sun in His Eyes” and ended with this section:

* * * *

“The Man held the Kid’s fingers to a lighted candle and told him, ‘I’m teaching you as the one who taught me did. He brought me to the point where I could meld with certain other minds and I can do that with you. He would have taught me more but he was taken from me. I will not leave you until you can go into every mind and meld with anyone.’”

* * * *

Unless you’ve been writing for the theater for a long while and had it happen to you hundreds of times, I believe it’s hard to resist when someone reads your words aloud. Also Judy understood this material, had the attitude and stance down. I liked the dumb vulnerability she projected. This section was my guess as to what had happened to Ray Light. We had talked it over and agreed that it felt right.

* * * *

“At first the Man never let the Kid with the Sun in His Eyes out of his sight, kept him tethered and tied when he went out, got him off drugs cold turkey. The Kid could not just go away in his mind with the Man. The Man could go there and bring him back and Kid stopped fighting it because he was learning to get inside other peoples’ minds, not most of the time or with most people. But he could look down at the street below, look inside certain people and he wanted to learn how to do that with everyone.

“After the first night, the Man no longer suspended him in front of an open window to force him to communicate. After a couple of weeks, the Man trusted him enough that when he went off to work one morning, he gave the Kid a dollar, let him out on the street, and told him to be back at six o’clock. It was a test. And it worked. The Kid was fascinated enough that he did come back even though he hated the Man. Given how things were there was no hiding that.”

* * * *

Judy relaxed, lost the Kid’s stance and speech and said in her own voice, “I met him on one of the first days he was out. I saw him on St. Mark’s Place looking a little scared. He said his name was Ray, Ray Light. I found out later that it was actually Jonathan Duncan—too mundane for the life he wanted to lead in this city.

“Right then, out of nowhere and all in a rush, I knew just what he was feeling, I knew without our even talking that he was a runaway, that he was afraid of being spotted by someone who’d report him to the cops, that he lived with someone he thought of as the Man.

“At that same moment he knew everything about me. I thought that was what it was like to have a boyfriend. Raised by parents in the arts in this city in the 1960s and I was that naïve.

“We spent that afternoon together until he had to go back to the loft. After that he’d meet me when I got out of school; we’d get together on weekends when the Man let him out.

“We were like that for maybe two months. Then one day private detectives hired by his family snatched him off the street right in front of me. No other boyfriend was like him. I didn’t see him again for another few years. But I thought of him every day.”

Later she took a break and we all sat together drinking coffee. Marty had some notes that Judy glanced at and nodded. It was all kind of comfortable, reminding me of sitting on the front steps on St. Mark’s Place so long ago.

Then she looked at me and said thoughtfully, “After a while, even with someone as big and great and wonderful and scary as Ray, one’s memories become very set—like a series of old photos. Your piece gave him back to me in a strange way; let me see him from a new angle.”

“And gets us around the Marcy problem,” said Marty.

“You know,” she said, “a few years after Ray and BD had gone, a very creepy old Englishman, into Satanism, a friend of Aleister Crowley, talked to me about Phillip Marcy.

As she spoke, she fell into an imitation of the man’s speech. He sounded amused, sinister, a bit absurd, a bit chilling. “When young Phillip was in college, one of the professors was a man I knew with remarkable mind control and an ability to teach the skill to others, not always with the best intent, not always by the gentlest methods.

“Phillip Marcy fell completely under his spell. Then one day the teacher disappeared. He was never found. The police, of course, were useless. Dear Phillip had learned enough of the gift for it to obsess him but not enough to control it. He spent his days trying to learn, trying to teach. Again, it wasn’t always by the gentlest methods. No great surprise when he met his end.”

Then Marty asked, “So Ray Light really did have some kind of gift?”

“Yeah,” I told him. “I encountered Ray the last night he was alive. He looked at me and I saw myself through his eyes. It was like a knife going into me. I wanted to die but....”

I caught anger in Judy’s eyes and shut up. I’d told her about being in Ray’s head the night of the concert but hadn’t even remembered that last meeting until my talk with Lizard Pavane.

Maybe she was angry that I’d seen her lover alive after she had or because she was afraid I’d seen a little too much. Most likely I was a minor irritant and she’d decided she’d gotten everything useful out of me.

What I’d been going to say was that if Ray Light showed that kind of contempt to a harmless fan boy who’d blundered into his path, what must Phillip Marcy have been shown? One look at himself as Ray Light saw him and Marcy would willingly have gone out the window where he’d tortured God knew how many.

* * * *

“Thanks, buddy,” said the Lizard on the phone. “You gave the bloodhound just enough information so that she could track me down.” He said it sarcastically, but he was calling from home and really did sound like he was thanking me.

We talked a bit about updating the game. “Well, what do kids do when they come to the city, these days?” he wanted to know.

“Rent a thirty-five-hundred-dollar-a-month apartment with four other people and get a job in the Financial District,” I suggested. We were old and this particular spring of inspiration had run dry some while ago. “Obviously, if I ever had any idea of how to make it big in Manhattan I would have done so.”

Then the Lizard got down to the real point of his call. “How’s Judy’s show going?”

“Really well. They let me see it again a couple of days ago. There’s music. Judy can still sing. It’s taking shape as a kind of cabaret. Next week is a run-through for friends in the business to start a little buzz.” I didn’t mention that she no longer spoke to me.

He paused, then said. “I thought that story you wrote was a real acute guess about what Phillip Marcy did to Ray Light. Maybe a bit more than a guess?”

“Just a bit,” I said.

“You poor kid.” Lizard actually sounded sympathetic. “From what I remember BD telling me, Light had an obsession with the one he still called the Man. Whenever they were in New York, he’d try to approach Marcy because there was a lot he hadn’t been taught. But the guy didn’t want to see him.”

I said, “Maybe Phillip Marcy heard rumors about various of Ray’s enemies killing themselves and didn’t want to join them.”

“Ray wanted BD to get himself picked up by Marcy and then let Ray into the loft to join them. Bruno and Light were in some kind of deep, complicated relationship but Bruno didn’t want to do that.”

This reminded me of something I’d seen on East Fourth Street one night. I was cruising the block and noticed an androgynous kid. He was in the pose, one boot on the cement the other resting against the wall behind him, looking very familiar. I was half a block away before I realized it was Judy. Had Ray first made her try to hook the Man?

“Eventually BD did what Ray wanted,” I said to Lizard Pavane. “If he was as gallant as you say, seeing The Man go out the window must have bothered him a lot. Something I wonder is how could Light not read BD’s mind that last night and know what he had planned?”

“From what Bruno told me, Ray Light would pick up a vision of the future or something from his head. It was part of what Light found so fascinating about him. Mostly, though, he had no idea what BD was thinking.”

Lizard paused, then said, “Okay, I gave you all that, now tell me when the performance is.”

So I told him and was quite curious as to why he wanted to know.

* * * *

Judy sat on a low stage and spoke. “When Ray and I got together again it was five years after he was taken away from me. Nineteen-seventy was a much different world from 1965, dark and full of fear. If you don’t understand that change you didn’t live through that time in this place.”

“An informal workshop,” was what they called this. It was held on a Monday night in a rehearsal space at the Public Theater. “Nothing was absolutely clear in that world,” she said. “When Ray Light came back to me, he brought with him BD, Bruno Delmar, the one who had helped snatch Ray off the street. Everyone thought of him as a monster, a pig. We’d chased him out of the neighborhood. He and Ray now were lovers.

“I became part of that and we started playing together.” She sang the old Lord of Light song, “Just a Boy without Wings.” It was a quiet song now, not scary as much as a little lost and sad.

The quartet on the stage had worked with her before and was tight and a bit jazz inflected.

Marty was happy. The show had word-of-mouth to spare. Old theater friends of Judy’s, people from various production companies, someone from a foundation that did arts funding and a couple of documentary film producers, seventy or eighty in all, sat on folding chairs.

One chair with a Reserved William Morris sign was empty. I remembered that Nina worked there and kept my eye on it.

“Oh, there were rumors,” said Judy, “stories that various people who had given Ray trouble—a psychiatrist, his father—had died by their own hand. But that kind of legend surrounded a lot of bands and a lot of personalities in those days. And there were lots of moments when the three of us, Ray, and BD, and me, were one.”

She tuned the guitar and said, “This is something I started many years ago and finished just recently.” The song’s lyrics were all about the night of the murder/suicide. It had the lines:

* * * *

The one who loved me and the one I loved

Went out one night and never returned.

* * * *

When she finished, I looked over and Lizard was sitting in the empty chair I’d noticed earlier. He stared at Judy and, as the crowd applauded, he stood up and took a couple of steps toward the stage. She noticed him immediately and paused where she was.

“BD did more than love you. He saved your life and left you free to live it,” Lizard Pavane said.

People in the audience were giving each other, “Is this part of the show?” glances. Marty, who was sitting next to me, was on his feet. Judy’s guitarist looked like someone who’d handled a few drunken customers in his performing career. He started to get up.

Judy looked right at Lizard. She gestured for the others to sit down. “One night I guess BD decided to liberate himself and me and especially Ray from a trap we’d fallen into, a kind of magic that had gone very bad. But before he did that, he put me in the care of a friend of his, this wonderful man right here.”

She came down off the stage, reached out, touched Lizard’s cheek, and for a moment became the desperate twenty-one-year-old who’d come to his door begging for help.

Judy spoke to him quietly for a moment. Lizard seemed mesmerized. Then she sat him down, climbed back onstage and sang a hard, driving version of the Ray Light song “Revelation in a Thousand Volts.” It was a select audience but, even given that, the applause was intense.

The last part of the show dealing with the thirty-nine years of Judy’s life since that famous night seemed more than a little anticlimactic. The next time I looked his way, Lizard was gone.

“If we could just get him to stand up and do that every night,” Marty muttered at the finale.

After the performance was over and she’d thanked the audience and the band, Judy turned to Marty and said, “Get me contact information for Pavane.” She never looked my way at all.

* * * *

It was a few days later that I got a call from Marty. “Lots of interest in this show,” he said. “The immediate word is we’re doing weekend cabaret at Joe’s Pub for the month of February with the intention of moving maybe to the Public, maybe to Broadway. Everyone liked the first part and we’re going to make the whole piece just about the Ray Light years. You’ll get a contract sometime before we open. You have my personal guarantee that it won’t be generous.”

I thanked him. Later that same day, Lizard Pavane called me. “They still want Biting the Apple and they’ll pay, maybe, two grand for it. But they got a couple of kids to do the modern-day equivalent. I think they believe we’re a little stale.”

“No argument there,” I said.

There was a pause. “I’ve been talking a lot with Judy,” he told me. “About BD. She says I’ve given her access to him, made her think about him and remember him in ways she hadn’t. We’re getting together again this afternoon. It almost feels like old times.”

“Nina won’t be happy.”

“Nina will have to learn to get over it.”

I wanted to tell him that he had been right about Judy. She had wanted Ray killed and got BD to do it for love. How did she murder someone who could read her mind? Instinct requires no thought and an artist is quicker than a snake.

I could also have told Lizard that the minute she got what she needed from him for her show, he’d be dropped cold.

But Lizard was having fun and the past is magic at our point in life. I’d had my ration of magic and now he was getting his. So I said it all sounded good and to keep me informed.

Mostly, I’ve learned not to let people cross me up. And I sit waiting for the phone to ring.