Art entices because whatever it depicts is suspended in time and space, granted a wholeness and deathlessness the world outside its parameters can’t ever aspire to.
The pain of life for most people is that it happens outside the frame of art.
For about nine months there my life was art. I was inside the frame. The frame of the proscenium, the magazine cover, the TV screen, the stereo speaker. I was limitless in this boundedness. I marked the site of another world’s intrusion into this one. I was already in every room I entered, recognized myself in every stranger I met. With my leather racing jacket and fuck-you hair, I was what the rest of humanity looks at and sighs -- in envy, in love, in disgust. Whatever.
Then came the morning Xavier woke up dead. It seemed so unfair. The Devils were so much an imitation of a rock ’n’ roll band that the realness of the deadness seemed absurdly harsh punishment for a little too much fun. It was clear someone had very badly misunderstood us.
Just like that, my bandmates and I faced the grim prospect of a return to life outside the frame. Of spending fifty or sixty more years in lives that had already peaked, in which all the best stuff had already happened.
The day after Xavier’s funeral, a kid in a SPAM sweatshirt skateboarded up to me in Tompkins Square. “You poor bastard,” he said.
Clearly I had to leave New York. Expulsion from the Garden would be easier to take if I didn’t have to look at it every day. Plus I harbored a dubious notion that if I’d stumbled into so perfect a self once (I don’t mean a moral one, or an articulate one, but an eternal and unruptured one), it could possibly happen again somewhere else. But not where it had happened before. That self was dead -- dead as Xavier. Trying to resuscitate it would be a joke.
I had to leave not only New York but everyone in it. Everyone who knew me and could drag me back to that dead, expelled self. Everyone who could revel at my being cast out and made to join them in the line to the cemetery.
I flew to Palm Springs, California. I couldn’t really say why, except the name appeared in my brain during the bus ride to LaGuardia. Maybe I’d heard it recently on a TV show, seen it in a Travel+Leisure article.
I arrived there on a January afternoon, 27 days after Xavier’s demise. It was disorientingly sunny and warm. The airport was essentially outdoors, great canvases stretched over bone-white concrete walkways. Out front of the main terminal the mountains jutted up, rocky, Martian, dotted with 1950s movie stars’ retreats. The desert beyond the airport’s manicured lawn was sunbaked and white. A guileless landscape. A place to strip away layers, get back to elementals. I felt enthused. The air was totally odorless.
I took a furnished apartment above a Thai restaurant on Palm Canyon Drive, the main commercial drag. I gave Mrs. Aung, the restaurateur, four months’ rent in cash, and there were no questions asked. The apartment had dusty matchstick blinds, dusty hardwood floors, dusty paper lanterns. Mornings I sat on the concrete balcony outside smoking Camels in the cool air, sipping a Heineken, watching leather-clad gay guys trod home from their boyfriends’ places. Afternoons I walked the flat mile and a half to the low-slung public library, read Henry Miller, read emails from my stockbroker informing me of my money’s expansions and contractions. Almost exclusively the former.
Three times I went to see the bungalow where Marilyn Monroe’s body was found.
Four times I slept with a young novelist who had an apartment across the parking lot from mine, refuge from her husband and child.
Seven times I test-drove cars with six-figure price tags.
Months went by. It was easy to forget in Palm Springs that it wasn’t summer already -- hence my mild surprise when it became insanely, stultifyingly hot. Too hot even for the walk to the library. I sank into an expansive ennui, almost never knowing the day of the week. I spent afternoons on the couch, studying patterns of sunlight on the hardwood floor, hearing horseflies knock against the windows, listening to the throb of the window-unit air conditioner. I sat for hours with my thumb on the TV remote, waiting to see if I’d press the power button. (In eight months I never did.) I had no particular confidence that some revelation lay on the other side of a brain-baking boredom, but I thought I’d better make sure.
Is there any such thing as an ironic mathematics?
At our fourth rendezvous the young novelist, perturbed at my failure to slash her husband’s tires or kidnap her daughter or make some equally obsessive gesture, inquired, sitting fetal on her bed, smoking in the dark, “Is there anything that would make you feel something as a human being?”
“You’ve made,” I said from my chair by the door, “a fundamental category mistake.”
One night Trent showed up. He just walked into my apartment without knocking while I was sitting on the couch, blowing my nose. “Trent,” I said as he cocked a hip, “I want you to tell me something, and I want it straight and true. Is it possible to catch a cold through your dick?”
His pose as he regarded my place, moving only his eyes, informed me he was still clinging to the last vestiges of life inside the frame, still trying hard to feel the camera’s gaze.
“Here’s the wise man,” he finally said. “The wise man in the desert.”
“Oh now Trent.”
“People work together for months. It could be construed as commitment. Maybe friendship even.”
“Oh now Trent.”
“A certain right to privileged information.”
“I have learned much here in the desert. Sadly all of it ineffable.”
“Do you have any idea how wrecked your family is?”
“I keep meaning to send a postcard.”
We rode to a classic Googie-style lounge once frequented by the Sinatra-Martin-Davis coterie. At the boomerang bar, Trent informed me that he and Vince had been practicing with Jack Hatter and Billy Quill from the Panties, a Minneapolis band recently kerplewied when their lead guitarist held up an Exxon. They were no fucking around, those guys. Trent told me, flicking ashes at me, that there were calls from club owners, agents, prospective managers. There were rumors of
