Chronic City: A Novel

CHAPTER

One

I first met Perkus Tooth in an office. Not an office where he worked, though I was confused about this at the time. (Which is itself hardly an uncommon situation, for me.)

This was in the headquarters of the Criterion Collection, on Fifty-second Street and Third Avenue, on a weekday afternoon at the end of summer. I’d gone there to record a series of voice-overs for one of Criterion’s high-end DVD reissues, a lost 1950s film noir called The City Is a Maze. My role was to play the voice of that film’s director, the late émigré auteur Von Tropen Zollner. I would read a series of statements culled from Zollner’s interviews and articles, as part of a supplemental documentary being prepared by the curatorial geniuses at Criterion, a couple of whom I’d met at a dinner party. In drawing me into the project they’d supplied me with a batch of research materials, which I’d browsed unsystematically, as well as a working version of their reconstruction of the film, in order for me to glean what the excitement was about. It was the first I’d heard of Zollner, so this was hardly a labor of passion. But the enthusiasm of buffs is infectious, and I liked the movie. I no longer considered myself a working actor. This was the only sort of stuff I did anymore, riding the exhaust of my former and vanishing celebrity, the smoky half-life of a child star. An eccentric favor, really. And I was curious to see the inside of Criterion’s operation. This was the first week of September—the city’s back-to-school mood always inspired me to find something to do with my idle hands. In those days, with Janice far away, I lived too much on the surface of things, parties, gossip, assignations in which I was the go-between or vicarious friend. Workplaces fascinated me, the zones where Manhattan’s veneer gave way to the practical world.

I recorded Zollner’s words in a sound chamber in the technical wing of Criterion’s crowded, ramshackle offices. In the room outside the chamber, where the soundman sat giving me cues through a headset, a restorer also sat peering at a screen and guiding a cursor with a mouse, diligently erasing celluloid scratches and blots, frame by digital frame, from the bare bodies of hippies cavorting in a mud puddle. I was told he was restoring I Am Curious (Yellow). Afterward I was retrieved by the producer who’d enlisted me, Susan Eldred. It had been Susan and her colleague I’d met at the dinner party—unguarded, embracing people with a passion for a world of cinematic minutiae, for whom I’d felt an instantaneous affection. Susan led me to her office, a cavern with one paltry window and shelves stacked with VHS tapes, more lost films petitioning for Criterion’s rescue. Susan shared her office, it appeared. Not with the colleague from the party, but another person. He sat beneath the straining shelves, notebook in hand, gaze distant. It seemed too small an office to share. The glamour of Criterion’s brand wasn’t matched by these scenes of thrift and improvisation I’d gathered in my behind-the-scenes glimpse, but why should it have been? No sooner did Susan introduce me to Perkus Tooth and give me an invoice to sign than she was called away for some consultation elsewhere.

He was, that first time, lapsed into what I would soon learn to call one of his ellipsistic moods. Perkus Tooth himself later supplied that descriptive word: ellipsistic, derived from ellipsis. A species of blank interval, a nod or fugue in which he was neither depressed nor undepressed, not struggling to finish a thought nor to begin one. Merely between. Pause button pushed. I certainly stared. With Tooth’s turtle posture and the utter slackness of his being, his receding hairline and antique manner of dress—trim-tapered suit, ferociously wrinkled silk with the shine worn off, moldering tennis shoes—I could have taken him for elderly. When he stirred, his hand brushing the open notebook page as if taking dictation with an invisible pen, and I read his pale, adolescent features, I guessed he was in his fifties—still a decade wrong, though Perkus Tooth had been out of the sunlight for a while. He was in his early forties, barely older than me. I’d mistaken him for old because I’d taken him for important. He now looked up and I saw one undisciplined hazel eye wander, under its calf lid, toward his nose. That eye wanted to cross, to discredit Perkus Tooth’s whole sober aura with a comic jape. His other eye ignored the gambit, trained on me.

You’re the actor.

Yes, I said.

"So, I’m doing the liner notes. For The City Is a Maze, I mean."

Oh, good.

"I do a lot of them. Prelude to a Certain Midnight… Recalcitrant Women … The Unholy City… Echolalia …"

All film noir?

"Oh, gosh, no. You’ve never seen Herzog’s Echolalia?"

No.

Well, I wrote the liner notes, but it isn’t exactly released yet. I’m still trying to convince Eldred—

Perkus Tooth, I’d learn, called everyone by their last name. As though famous, or arrested. His mind’s landscape was epic, dotted with towering figures like Easter Island heads. At that moment Eldred—Susan—returned to the office.

So, he said to her, "have you got that tape of Echolalia around here somewhere? He cast his eyes, the good left and the meandering right, at her shelves, the cacophony of titles scribbled on labels there. I want him to see it."

Susan raised her eyebrows and he shrank. I don’t know where it is, she said.

Never mind.

Have you been harassing my guest, Perkus?

What do you mean?

Susan Eldred turned to me and collected the signed release, then we made our farewell. Then, as I got to the elevator, Perkus Tooth hurried through the sliding door to join me, crushing his antique felt hat onto his crown as he did. The elevator, like so many others behind midtown edifices, was tiny and rattletrap, little more than a glorified dumbwaiter—there was no margin for pretending we hadn’t just been in that office together. Bad eye migrating slightly, Perkus Tooth gave me a lunar look, neither unfriendly nor apologetic. Despite the vintage costume, he wasn’t some dapper retro-fetishist. His shirt collar was grubby and crumpled. The green-gray sneakers like mummified sponges glimpsed within a janitor’s bucket.

So, he said again. This so of Perkus’s—his habit of introducing any subject as if in resumption of earlier talk—wasn’t in any sense coercive. Rather, it was as if Perkus had startled himself from a daydream, heard an egging voice in his head and mistaken it for yours. "So, I’ll lend you my own copy of Echolalia, even though I never lend anything. Because I think you ought to see it."

Sure.

"It’s a sort of essay film. Herzog shot it on the set of Morrison Groom’s Nowhere Near. Groom’s movie was never finished, you know. Echolalia documents Herzog’s attempts to interview Marlon Brando on Groom’s set. Brando doesn’t want to give the interview, and whenever Herzog corners him Brando just parrots whatever Herzog’s said… you know, echolalia…"

Yes, I said, flummoxed, as I would so often later find myself, by Tooth’s torrential specifics.

"But it’s also the only way you can see any of Nowhere Near. Morrison Groom destroyed the footage, so the scenes reproduced in Echolalia are, ironically, all that remains of the film—"

Why ironically? I doubted my hopes of inserting the question. It sounds incredible, I said.

Of course you know Morrison Groom’s suicide was probably faked.

My nod was a lie. The doors opened, and we stumbled together out to the pavement, tangling at every threshold: You first— Oops— After you— Sorry. We faced each other, mid-Wednesday Manhattan throngs islanding us in their stream. Perkus grew formally clipped, perhaps belatedly eager to show he wasn’t harassing me.

So, I’m off.

Very good to see you. I’d quit using the word meet long ago, replacing it with this foggy equivocation, chastened after the thousandth time someone explained to me that we’d actually met before.

So— He ground to a halt, expectant.

Yes?

If you want to come by for the tape …

I might have been failing some test, I wasn’t sure. Perkus Tooth dealt in occult knowledge, and measured with secret calipers. I’d never know when I’d crossed an invisible frontier, visible to Perkus in the air between us.

Do you want to give me a card?

He scowled. Eldred knows where to find me. His pride intervened, and he was gone.

For a phone call so life-altering as mine to Susan Eldred, I ought to have had some fine reason. Yet here I was, dialing Criterion’s receptionist later that afternoon, asking first for Perkus Tooth and then, when she claimed no familiarity with that name, for Susan Eldred, spurred by nothing better than a cocktail of two parts whim and one part guilt. Manhattan’s volunteer, that’s me, I may as well admit it. Was I curious about Echolalia, or Morrison Groom’s faked suicide, or Perkus Tooth’s intensities and lulls, or the slippage in his right eye’s gaze? All of it and none of it, that’s the only answer. Perhaps I already adored Perkus Tooth, and already sensed that it was his friendship I required to usher me into the strange next phase of my being. To unmoor me from the curious eddy into which I’d drifted. How very soon after our first encounter I’d come to adore and need Perkus makes it awfully hard to know to what extent such feelings were inexplicably under way in Susan Eldred’s office or that elevator.

Your office mate, I said. They didn’t recognize his name at the front desk. Maybe I heard it wrong—

Perkus? Susan laughed. He doesn’t work here.

He said he wrote your liner notes.

"He’s written a couple, sure. But he doesn’t work here. He just comes up and occupies space sometimes. I’m sort of Perkus’s babysitter. I don’t even always notice him anymore—you saw how he can be. I hope he wasn’t bothering you."

No… no. I was hoping to get in touch with him, actually.

Susan Eldred gave me Perkus Tooth’s number, then paused. I guess you must have recognized his name …

No.

Well, in fact he’s really quite an amazing critic. When I was at NYU all my friends and I used to idolize him. When I first got the chance to hire him to do a liner note I was quite in awe. It was shocking how young he was, it seemed like I’d grown up seeing his posters and stuff.

Posters?

"He used to do this thing where he’d write these rants on posters and put them up all around Manhattan, these sort of brilliant critiques of things, current events, media rumors, public art. They were a kind of public art, I guess. Everyone thought it was very mysterious and important. Then he got hired by Rolling Stone. They gave him this big column, he was sort of, I don’t know, Hunter Thompson meets Pauline Kael, for about five minutes. If that makes any sense."

Sure.

"Anyway, the point is, he sort of used up a lot of people’s patience with certain kinds of … paranoid stuff. I didn’t really get it until I started working with him. I mean, I like Perkus a lot. I just don’t want you to feel I wasted your time, or got you enmeshed in any… schemes."

People could be absurdly protective, as if a retired actor’s hours were so precious. This was, I assume, secondhand affect, a leakage from Janice’s otherworldly agendas. I was famously in love with a woman who had no time to spare, not even a breath, for she dwelled in a place beyond time or the reach of anyone’s Rolodex, her every breath measured out of tanks of recycled air. If an astronaut made room for me on her schedule, my own prerogatives must be crucial as an astronaut’s. The opposite was true.

Thank you, I said. I’ll be sure not to get enmeshed.

Perkus Tooth was my neighbor, it turned out. His apartment was on East Eighty-fourth Street, six blocks from mine, in one of those anonymous warrens tucked behind innocuous storefronts, buildings without lobbies, let alone doormen. The shop downstairs, Brandy’s Piano Bar, was a corny-looking nightspot I could have passed a thousand times without once noticing. BRANDY’S CUSTOMERS, PLEASE RESPECT OUR NEIGHBORS! pleaded a small sign at the doorway, suggesting a whole tale of complaint calls to the police about noise and fumes. To live in Manhattan is to be persistently amazed at the worlds squirreled inside one another, the chaotic intricacy with which realms interleave, like those lines of television cable and fresh water and steam heat and outgoing sewage and telephone wire and whatever else which cohabit in the same intestinal holes that pavement-demolishing workmen periodically wrench open to the daylight and to our passing, disturbed glances. We only pretend to live on something as orderly as a grid. Waiting for Perkus Tooth’s door buzzer to sound and finding my way inside, I felt my interior map expand to allow for the reality of this place, the corridor floor’s lumpy checkerboard mosaic, the cloying citrus of the superintendent’s disinfectant oil, the bank of dented brass mailboxes, and the keening of a dog from behind an upstairs door, alerted to the buzzer and my scuffling bootheels. I have trouble believing anything exists until I know it bodily.

Perkus Tooth lived in 1R, a half-level up, the building’s rear. He widened his door just enough for me to slip inside, directly to what revealed itself to be his kitchen. Perkus, though barefoot, wore another antique-looking suit, green corduroy this time, the only formal thing my entry revealed. The place was a bohemian grotto, the kitchen a kitchen only in the sense of having a sink and stove built in, and a sticker-laden refrigerator wedged into an alcove beside the bathroom door. Books filled the open cabinet spaces above the sink. The countertop was occupied with a CD player and hundreds of disks, in and out of jewel cases, many hand labeled with a permanent marker. A hot-water pipe whined. Beyond, the other rooms of the apartment were dim at midday, the windows draped. They likely only looked onto ventilation shafts or a paved alley, anyway.

Then there were the broadsides Susan Eldred had described. Unframed, thumbtacked to every wall bare of bookshelves, in the kitchen and in the darkened rooms, were Perkus Tooth’s famous posters, their paper yellowing, the lettering veering between a stylish cartoonist’s or graffitist’s handmade font and the obsessive scrawl of an outsider artist, or a schizophrenic patient’s pages reproduced in his doctor’s monograph. I recognized them. Remembered them. They’d been ubiquitous downtown a decade before, on construction-site boards, over subway advertisements, element in the graphic cacophony of the city one gleans helplessly at the edges of vision.

Perkus retreated to give me clearance to shut the door. Stranded in the room’s center in his suit and bare feet, palms defensively wide as if expecting something unsavory to be tossed his way, Perkus reminded me of an Edvard Munch painting I’d once seen, a self-portrait showing the painter wide-eyed and whiskered, shrunken within his clothes. Which is to say, again, that Perkus Tooth seemed older than his age. (I’d never once see Perkus out of some part of a suit, even if it was only the pants, topped with a filthy white T-shirt. He never wore jeans.)

I’ll get you the videotape, he said, as if I’d challenged him.

Great.

Let me find it. You can sit down— He pulled out a chair at his small, linoleum-topped table like one you’d see in a diner. The chair matched the table—a dinette set, a collector’s item. Perkus Tooth was nothing if not a collector. Here. He took a perfect finished joint from where it waited in the lip of an ashtray, clamped it in his mouth and ignited the tip, then handed it to me unquestioningly. It takes one, I suppose, to know one. I drew on it while he went into the other room. When he returned—with a VHS cassette and his sneakers and a balled-up pair of white socks—he accepted the joint from me and smoked an inch of it himself, intently.

Do you want to get something to eat? I haven’t been out all day. He laced his high-tops.

Sure, I said.

Out, for Perkus Tooth, I’d now begun to learn, wasn’t usually far. He liked to feed at a glossy hamburger palace around the corner on Second Avenue, called Jackson Hole, a den of gleaming chrome and newer, faker versions of the linoleum table in his kitchen, lodged in chubby red-vinyl booths. At four in the afternoon we were pretty well alone there, the jukebox blaring hits to cover our bemused, befogged talk. It had been a while since I’d smoked pot; everything was dawning strange, signals received through an atmosphere eddied with hesitations, the whole universe drifting untethered like Perkus Tooth’s vagrant eyeball. The waitress seemed to know Perkus, but he didn’t greet her, or touch his menu. He asked for a cheeseburger deluxe and a Coca-Cola. Helpless, I dittoed his order. Perkus seemed to dwell in this place as he had at Criterion’s offices, indifferently, obliquely, as if he’d been born there yet still hadn’t taken notice of the place.

In the middle of our meal Perkus halted some rant about Werner Herzog or Marlon Brando or Morrison Groom to announce what he’d made of me so far. So, you’ve gotten by to this point by being cute, haven’t you, Chase? His spidery fingers, elbow-propped on the linoleum, kept the oozing, gory Jackson Hole burger aloft to mask his expression, and cantilevered far enough from his lap to protect those dapper threads. One eye fixed me while the other crawled, now seeming a scalpel in operation on my own face. You haven’t changed, you’re like a dreamy child, that’s the secret of your appeal. But they love you. They watch you like you’re still on television.

Who?

The rich people. The Manhattanites—you know who I mean.

Yes, I said.

You’re supposed to be the saddest man in Manhattan, he said. Because of the astronaut who can’t come home.

So, no surprise, Perkus was another one who knew me as Janice Trumbull’s fiancé. My heart’s distress was daily newspaper fodder. Yes, I loved Janice Trumbull, the American trapped in orbit with the Russians, the astronaut who couldn’t come home. This, beyond my childhood TV stardom, was what anyone knew about me, though some, like Susan Eldred, were too polite to mention it.

That’s what everyone adores about you.

I guess so.

But I know your secret.

I was startled. Did I have a secret? If I did, it was one of the things I’d misplaced in the last few years. I couldn’t remember how I’d gotten from there to here, made the decisions that led from my child stardom to harmlessly dissipated Manhattan celebrity, nor how it was that I deserved the brave astronaut’s love. I had trouble clearly recalling Janice, that was part of my sorrow. The day she launched for the space station I must have undertaken to quit thinking of Janice, even while promising to keep a vigil for her here on earth. I never dared tell anyone this fact. So if I had a secret, it was that I had conspired to forget my secret.

Perkus eyed me slyly. Perhaps it was his policy to make this announcement to any new acquaintance, to see what they’d blurt out. Keep your eyes and ears open, he told me now. You’re in a position to learn things.

What things? Before I could ask, we were off again. Perkus’s spiel encompassed Monte Hellman, Semina Culture, Greil Marcus’s Lipstick Traces, the Mafia’s blackmailing of J. Edgar Hoover over erotic secrets (resulting in the bogus amplification of Cold War fear and therefore the whole of our contemporary landscape), Vladimir Mayakovsky and the futurists, Chet Baker, Nothingism, the ruination Giuliani’s administration had brought to the sacred squalor of Times Square, the genius of The Gnuppet Show, Frederick Exley, Jacques Rivette’s impossible-to-see twelve-hour movie Out 1, corruption of the arts by commerce generally, Slavoj Zizek on Hitchcock, Franz Marplot on G. K. Chesterton, Norman Mailer on Muhammad Ali, Norman Mailer on graffiti and the space program, Brando as dissident icon, Brando as sexual saint, Brando as Napoleon in exile. Names I knew and didn’t. Others I’d heard once and never troubled to wonder about. Mailer, again and again, and Brando even more often—Perkus Tooth’s primary idols seemed to be this robust and treacherous pair, which only made Perkus seem frailer and more harmless by contrast, without ballast in his pencil-legged suit. Maybe he ate Jackson Hole burgers in an attempt to burgeon himself, seeking girth in hopes of attracting the attention of Norman and Marlon, his chosen peers.

He had the waitress refill his gallon-sized Coke, too, then, as our afternoon turned to evening, washed it all down with black coffee. In our talk marijuana confusion now gave way to caffeinated jags, like a cloud bank penetrated by buzzing Fokker airplanes. Did I read The New Yorker? This question had a dangerous urgency. It wasn’t any one writer or article he was worried about, but the font. The meaning embedded, at a preconscious level, by the look of the magazine; the seal, as he described it, that the typography and layout put on dialectical thought. According to Perkus, to read The New Yorker was to find that you always already agreed, not with The New Yorker but, much more dismayingly, with yourself. I tried hard to understand. Apparently here was the paranoia Susan Eldred had warned me of: The New Yorker’s font was controlling, perhaps assailing, Perkus Tooth’s mind. To defend himself he frequently retyped their articles and printed them out in simple Courier, an attempt to dissolve the magazine’s oppressive context. Once I’d enter his apartment to find him on his carpet with a pair of scissors, furiously slicing up and rearranging an issue of the magazine, trying to shatter its spell on his brain. So, how, he once asked me, apropos of nothing, "does a New Yorker writer become a New Yorker writer? The falsely casual so" masking a pure anxiety. It wasn’t a question with an answer.

But I’m confused in this account, surely. Can we have discussed so much the very first time? The New Yorker, at least. Giuliani’s auctioning of Forty-second Street to Disney. Mailer on NASA as a bureaucracy stifling dreams. J. Edgar Hoover in the Mafia’s thrall, hyping Reds, instilling self-patrolling fear in the American Mind. In the midst of these variations the theme was always ingeniously and excitingly retrieved. In short, some human freedom had been leveraged from view at the level of consciousness itself. Liberty had been narrowed, winnowed, amnesiacked. Perkus Tooth used this word without explaining—by it he meant something like the Mafia itself would do, a whack, a rubout. Everything that mattered most was a victim in this perceptual murder plot. Further: always to blame was everyone; when rounding up the suspects, begin with yourself. Complicity, including his own, was Perkus Tooth’s only doubtless conviction. The worst thing was to be sure you knew what you knew, the mistake The New Yorker’s font induced. The horizon of everyday life was a mass daydream—below it lay everything that mattered. By now we’d paid for our burgers and returned to his apartment. At his dinette table we sat and he strained some pot for seeds, then rolled another joint. The dope came out of a little plastic box marked with a laser-printed label reading CHRONIC in rainbow colors, a kind of brand name. We smoked the new joint relentlessly to a nub and went on talking, Perkus now free to gesticulate as he hadn’t at Jackson Hole. Yet he never grew florid, never, in all his ferment, hyperventilated or like some epileptic bit his tongue. The feverish words were delivered with a merciless cool. Like the cut of his suit, wrinkled though it might be. And the obsessively neat lettering on the VHS tape and on his CDs. Perkus Tooth might have one crazy eye, but it served almost as a warning not to underestimate his scruples, how attentively he stayed on the good side of his listener’s skepticism, making those minute adjustments that were sanity’s signature: the interpersonal realpolitik of persuasion. The eye was mad and the rest of him was almost steely.

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

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

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

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

Oh.

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

Oh, sure—what are they?

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

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

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

Wow.

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

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

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

Whisthle?

"Exactly."

Thank god we’re not rock critics.

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

Migraine headaches?

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

That’s crazy.

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

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

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

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

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

"Have you seen The Nascent?"

Nope.

"Have you seen Anything That Hides?"

Not that one either.

"Have you seen any of Morrison Groom’s films, Chase?"

Not knowingly.

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

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

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

Exactly.

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

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

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

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

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

Ah.

Based on the Nathanael West novel. Ah.

Of course it isn’t really any good.

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

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

Wow.

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

Perkus went on expounding: "Peter Falk was in The Gnuppet Movie, too, right around this time."

Really.

Yeah. So was Marlon Brando.

Zing! Another dot connected in the Perkusphere!

I was at first disconcerted, perhaps jealous, when I learned other beings could breach the sanctum on Eighty-fourth Street. First was Perkus’s dealer, he who provided the tiny Lucite boxes of Chronic. His name was Foster Watt. Watt, young and suspicious, hair brushed forward into spikes, wearing a red vinyl jacket and black jeans, carried a beeper, and only returned calls to established customers—to join his roster you’d have to meet in person, or he’d shun your number. Perkus assured him I was cool, explained that I only happened to be visiting, wasn’t a candidate to join Watt’s rolls. There, businesslike Watt’s interest in me died. Chronic was just one of his wares: Watt showed off a whole menu of marijuana brand names, each fertile sprig behind its Lucite pane labeled SILVER HAZE, FUNKY MONKEY, BLUEBERRY KUSH, MACK DADDY, or, eerily I thought, ICE. There might have been a dozen more. Perkus shopped among the brands with random eagerness, refreshing his supply of Chronic but adding several others. (These I’d go on to smoke with Perkus, and I could never tell the least difference: every one of Watt’s brands got me devastatingly high.) Deal done, Watt scrammed.

More important, though he never actually entered the apartment, was Biller. I learned of his existence by a rattling at Perkus’s window, the window onto the airshaft at the building’s rear. I heard the intruding sound first—I’d just come up, and Perkus was beginning to expound, to spread his wings—and ignored it. Then Perkus, without explaining, shifted his attention, became silent. He didn’t go to the window immediately, instead scooping together items from his linoleum table, items I now saw had been arrayed, made ready. A bagel, fixed with cream cheese and smoked salmon, in wax paper—an overlooked breakfast, I’d thought, wrongly. An antique Raymond Chandler paperback with a gorgeous cover, like those Perkus shelved in little glassine pockets, Farewell, My Lovely. A joint Perkus had rolled and set aside, and which he now ziplocked into a tiny baggie. And a wad of dollars, fives and ones, bunched as if withdrawn from a pocket and tossed aside. All went into a white paper sack, recycled, perhaps, from the original bagel purchase. Then Perkus opened his window and waved at someone standing below. The threshold’s height, from the bare cement courtyard, meant Biller must have tapped the window with a tossed pebble, or reached for it with a stick or wire coat hanger. Straining up, he was just able to accept the white sack as Perkus lowered it. Leaning from my seat to see, I first saw his fingers, brown and dusty-dry, groping for the gifts. Then I stood and saw the whole of him.

This was early October, six or seven in the evening, barely dusk, barely chill. Yet Biller was forested in jackets and coats. Some seemed turned inside out. Before I registered his dark face I saw a golem of cloth, all rumpled plaid linings and stained down-filled tubular sections. His large, crabbed hands thrust the white sack Perkus had given him under a layer, into a canvas shoulder bag, silk-screened BARNES & NOBLE, that swung beneath the outermost coat. Now I resolved Biller’s face in the gloom. Though his cheeks and neck were aggravated with ingrown beard hairs, impossible to shave, and his Afro looked both patchy and greasy, knitting into proto-dreadlocks, within that frame handsome eyes showed a gentle reluctance. I felt I’d betrayed them both, rubbernecking Perkus’s charity. I sat again and waited.

Who’s that? The man’s voice was soft and sane.

Don’t worry, said Perkus. He’s a friend.

I’ve seen him. I thought he might be from the building.

He’s not from the building. You might recognize him from somewhere else.

I fiddled with a small plate of Italian cookies Perkus had laid out, while they discussed me and I listened. Coffee percolated, an irregular gurgle—Perkus had just put it on before the window tap.

I didn’t mean to surprise you with a visitor, continued Perkus. I thought you’d be here earlier.

It was the tiger, said Biller. They practically had to close down Second Avenue. I couldn’t get across.

This was the first I’d heard of the gargantuan escaped tiger that was ravaging sections of the East Side. Or if I’d heard, I’d forgotten. Either way, I didn’t have any reason not to credit it as some fancy of Biller’s. A tiger could be a homeless man’s emblem, I thought, of the terrors that pursued him. No wonder he needed all those coats.

Perkus responded neutrally. It doesn’t matter. Can you get back?

I’m going downtown. For someone glomming bagels at a back window, Biller sounded peculiarly intent. Second Avenue, downtown—how broad was his orbit?

Okay. See you tomorrow.

I thought he’d be gone before you came, Perkus told me after he lowered his window and told me the apparition’s name. He prefers not to be seen. He used to wait for me in front, then some assholes from my building called the police three times in a row. So I showed him how to come around the back, where Brandy’s puts out their garbage.

Where does he live?

Perkus shrugged. "I don’t know that he particularly lives anywhere, Chase. He sometimes sleeps under a pool on Orchard Street, he says it’s a block run by Mafia, so no one would ever suspect or bother him. I believe he often simply sleeps on the subway trains when he goes down there."

But why… does he go … down there? Or come … up here?

I never asked. Perkus poured two cups of coffee. He rolled another joint out of the loose dope scattered on the linoleum, to replace what he’d added to Biller’s care package. The brand was Silver Haze. Sharing it with Biller seemed at once a kind of communion, lowered from above to those supplicant hands, and a gesture of egalitarian comradeship: I self-medicate, why shouldn’t you? And the Chandler novel with the vintage cover art—did Perkus have two copies of that, or was he gradually feeding his precious collection out onto the street to Biller? For Perkus, books were sandwiches, apparently, to be devoured.

Perkus was alert to my fascination. I’ll introduce you, he said. He’s just shy at first.

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

I pictured the fugue that resulted in this writing being interrupted by a seizure of migraine, the pen dropping from Perkus’s hand as he succumbed to one of his cluster headaches. It was impossible not to picture it this way because of the day I walked in on him in the grip of a fresh one. He’d called to invite my dropping by, then fell victim. The door was unlocked and he beckoned me inside from where he lay on his couch, in his suit pants and a yellowed T-shirt, with a cool cloth draped over his eyes. He told me to sit down, and not to worry, but his voice was withered, drawn down inside his skinny chest. I was persuaded at once that he spoke to me from within that half-life, that land of the dead he’d so precisely evoked with his first descriptions of cluster headache.

It’s a bad one, he said. The first day is always the worst. I can’t look at the light.

You never know when it’s coming?

There’s a kind of warning aura an hour or two before, he croaked out. The world begins shrinking…

I moved for his bathroom, and he said, Don’t go in there. I puked.

What I did I will admit is unlike me: I went in and cleaned up Perkus’s vomit. Further, seeking out a sponge in his kitchen sink I ran into a mess there, a cereal bowl half filled with floating Cheerios, cups with coffee evaporating to filmy stain rings. While Perkus lay on the couch breathing heavily through a washcloth, I quietly tinkered at his kitchen, putting things in a decent order, not wanting him to slip into derangement and unhealth on what it had suddenly occurred to me was my watch—he appeared so disabled I could imagine him not budging from that couch for days. Not counting Biller, who’d stayed outside the window, I’d never seen another soul in Perkus’s apartment except for his pot dealer. The dinette table was scattered with marijuana, half of it pushed through a metal strainer, the rest still bunchy with seeds. I swept it all back into a plastic box labeled FUNKY MONKEY and scooped the joints Perkus had completed into the Altoids tin he kept for that purpose. Then, growing compulsive (I do keep my own apartment neat, though I’d never before felt any anxiety at Perkus’s chaos), I started reorganizing his scattered CDs, matching the disks to their dislocated jewel cases. This kind of puttering may be how I set myself at ease, another type of self-medication. It was certainly the case that blundering in on Perkus’s headache had made me self-conscious and pensive, but I felt I couldn’t go. I made no attempt to conceal my actions, and Perkus offered no comment, apart from the slightest moan. But after I’d been clattering at his compact discs for a while he said, Find Sandy Bull.

What?

"Sandy Bull… he’s a guitarist …