The Butterfly Kid

13

BY THEN it was eight o’clock, and my disappearance was beginning to attract some belated attention.

Sean and Charley Wainright noticed it first, which was to be expected. “Where’s Chester?” Chaz bellowed when Sean wandered into The Mess. “He’s late.”

“He ain’t here? I’m lookin’ for him; figured he’d be here. Where’s he at?”

“He’s late. Do you know where he is?”

“No, man. I thought he was Here.” And so on for a few minutes. Communication tends to be a bit problematical in the Village.

Sean checked the back room, where he found the rest of The Tripouts pleasantly stoned but no trace of me at all. “Where’s Chester?” everyone asked everyone else. Sean split to seek me in The Garden.

Where I was was being fiendishly tortured by the inhuman devices of a dozen large blue lobsters bent on conquering the Earth, but that was neither here nor there. At The Garden of Eden, Sean found Mike and Andrew Blake. Help, so to speak, was on the way.

“Hey, Michael the Theodore Bear, you know where Chester’s at?”

Mike said, “At The Mess, no?” and Andrew said, “That’s an interesting question. Do you mean it? I mean, all of it?”

“No, man, he ain’t there,” Sean said. “I figured he was Here.”

“In a manner of speaking, he is,” Andrew Blake explained, but Mike said, “Oh shit,” very softly, and I was as good as saved, in a manner of speaking.

“Pardon me,” said Mike, rising abruptly to his feet. “I seem to have forgotten something. Pardon me.”

He rushed out of The Garden, closely followed by Sean, while Andy said, “It’s hard to tell about Chester. Sometimes he’s…” then noticed that he’d lost his audience and quit.

Mike and Sean took a taxi home — $1.37 plus tip, cash, Mike having forgotten his General Credit Card. They had to pool their resources to make it, and the driver was eloquently displeased with his tip.

“What’s happening?” Sean begged as they ran up the stairs.

“I may have goofed,” Mike explained.

They reached the pad, dashed to Mike’s room, and, after a bit of confused scrabbling, found the radio on the floor where it’d somehow fallen when Yvonne called.

“Chester?” Michael asked the radio. “Chester? Do you read me? Come in, Chester.”

“You don’t gotta yell like that,” Sean winced.

“Sorry,” yelling. “Chester? Can you hear me?”

It took him awhile to admit that I probably couldn’t hear him. Then, “Oh shit,” he dropped the radio and ran out of the pad, closely followed by Sean.

“What’s happening, man? You gotta tell me what’s happening!” Sean was getting excited.

“I did goof.” Mike seldom made such damaging admissions, but Sean didn’t know him well enough yet to appreciate this.

Ever since the St. Mark’s Place disturbances of a few years back, cabs had carefully avoided our neighborhood, so Mike and Sean rushed back to The Garden on foot, more healthy exercise than Mike’d had in years. En route, gasping, Mike explained the situation.

“We better call the cops,” was Sean’s suggestion.

“You kidding? You don’t know much about New York cops, my lad. They wouldn’t do a thing, not in a case like this. Missing rock-n-roll musician. Right. They’d only laugh. That I can do for myself Listen. Hah. Hah-hah. See? Nothing to it.” Michael was upset.

Rescue Operation, Step One: they stopped off at The Mess, roused my fellow Tripouts, explained the situation, and sent the group out scouring the Village for me in a random manner that would have worked, ordinarily.

Chaz demanded wergild for the scattering Tripouts, so Sean remained to play guest sets at The Mess, his Village and professional premiere. Mike returned to The Garden.

Step two: “Chester’s missing!” he announced.

“Define your terms,” said Andrew.

“Where?” asked Gary the Frog and Harriet.

“We’ve got to find him, don’t we?” Karen Greenbaum wondered.

“What,” it dawned on Andrew, “do you mean, missing?

Mike explained at length. Then Andy said, “In other words…” and counteracted Michael’s explanation. Gary the fatuous Frog asked foolish questions. Mike explained it all again, loudly with dramatic gestures.

“Oh,” said Andrew Blake. “We’ve got to find him, then. At once. He may be in some trouble.”

“That’s what I said,” said Mike. “Now look, I’ve got this all planned out. Everybody… Hey, wait! Come back!”

Too late. Everybody was dashing off to find me — Andrew Blake, Gary and Harriet, little Karen, even a few strangers (probably named David) swept up by the excitement — leaving Mike and his plan all alone in The Garden of Eden.

“And it was such a lovely plan,” he grieved much later. “It wouldn’t’ve worked, of course, but it was very pretty. Very professional, you might say.”

That was just past nine, and I’d been suffering roughly calibrated agonies for something like ninety minutes. As tortures go, these were very, let us call it, Subtle, and I wondered a lot about Ktch’s last victims.

To begin the program, I experienced a deep, perverted yearning to refrain from sexual intercourse with three of the most improbable creatures I’ve ever been forced to imagine. As a torment, this was fairly easy to take.

Then Ktch wandered in, read a few dials, said, “Tch tch,” quite convincingly, turned a knob or three and wandered out again, leaving me to suffer through act two in solitude.

Act two, which they must have picked up from Laszlo somehow, was an extraordinarily vivid hallucination of myself reciting my own poetry. I took note of a few stagecraft errors to be avoided next time I read, but was otherwise fairly unagonized. My admiration for the subtlety of these blue lobster deepened.

Then Ktch returned, Laszlo in tow and looking most uneasy, to check the readings again. It’s hard to tell with lobsters, but he seemed a bit surprised. One stalked eye examined the dials intently, the other, extended full length — four feet — examined me. Laszlo shuffled his feet and tried to be inconspicuous.

“Tch tch,” Ktch repeated. “Your fortitude is most impressive, Spy. Indeed, quite admirable. Not at all what I’d been led to expect.”

Laszlo cleared his throat and tried, without moving, to hide.

Ktch flipped a switch and the torture stopped right in the middle of one of my favorite poems.

“You must realize by now that we cannot be defeated,” he said. “There is no resistance you can offer, no strategy by which you may hope even to delay our victory. You, after-all — or rather, your people — will do our fighting for us, and you cannot think to defeat yourselves. We will merely restore order. You can’t fight that. In fact, there’s nothing to fight. Surely you understand this?”

I kept mum. Laszlo, for reasons of his own, looked enraged, embarrassed, and humiliated — an intriguing combination.

“You simply can’t win,” Ktch continued. “Why then, Spy, do you not cast your lot with us? Your people have a folk saying: ‘If you can’t run your tongue across them, merge with them.’ I ask you to give this quaint wisdom your serious consideration. If you join us…”

Oh, that’s what he wanted. I whistled him another chorus of “Love Sold in Doses.”

“Admirable,” he said, “and wholly unexpected. Such a waste.” He devoted himself for a few minutes to the torture devices — refining the settings, I supposed — while Laszlo stared at me with the most illegible expression I’ve ever seen.

“That should do it,” Ktch finally said. “Now I must leave you to our own devices for a few hours, while Laszlo Scott and I are fed and otherwise refreshed. But remember, surrender under torture is no disgrace. Farewell.”

He flipped a switch and floods of odd sensation burst upon me before I had a chance to mention that I was overdue for feeding myself. But I hadn’t been going to mention that anyway, I guess.

“Farewell, Mister Spy,” the lobster said, and he and Laszlo split, leaving me to act three of my torment: the complete adventures of Donald Duck, 3V, wide screen, with full sensory participation. Fine. I’ve always enjoyed the classics.

A tiny corner of my mind wondered what it was these lobsters imagined they were doing to me. Another corner wondered where Mike was. Donald Duck defied the universe.

There being nothing better he could do, Mike stayed in The Garden. “If you were going to show up at all, that’s where you’d go,” he explained later. He drank lots of coffee and worried a bit, mostly about what I was likely to say about all this.

Laszlo arrived at half-past ten with his last consignment of Reality Pills and, being Laszlo, made a warped beeline for Michael, sneering, “Hallo, Michael the Bare-assed Theodore. How’s about a little taste of ol’ Reality on Laszlo, huh, baby? Wanna get High?”

So Mike grabbed him by one padded shoulder, yelling, “What’ve you done to Chester!? C’mon, talk, you goddamn freak! Where is he!?” — sweet music for the Laszlo ears.

“Anderson?” a nasty purr. “How do I know where your buddy’s at, man? He’s your buddy, ain’t he? Hey, man, turn me loose!” It was his moment of glory, and I hope he made the most of it.

But Mike was too worried to be cool. He shook Laszlo briskly, ripping his jacket, and said, “I’m going to beat the living Shit out of you, man,” loudly enough to be clearly heard on the sidewalk outside.

“Lemme go!” screamed Laszlo, grinning. “Halp! Call the fuzz, somebody. Halp!” enjoying every second of it.

Nobody rallied to Laszlo’s defense, but Joe came over and said, “Take ’im outside, will ya, Mike? I don’ wan’ no trouble inna Club, y’unnerstan’?”

“Forget it.” Mike released the Bard. “It couldn’t possibly be worth it.”

Laszlo backed a prudent four feet off and extended an unkempt hand, saying, “No hard feelings, Mike, okay?” — a line he must’ve copped from The Hardy Boys a hundred years ago and never found a use for until then.

Mike winced nobly and turned away. “Oh, go paint yourself purple and moo,” he ordered. “Go away.”

Laszlo didn’t get it, but he went — with Michael hot and hidden on his trail. The game was afoot, or vice versa.

I, meanwhile, had troubles of my own. The Magnificent Duck had abandoned his biography to play endless Brahms sonatas on a do-it-yourself-kit homemade harpsichord, which came closer to what I’d call torture than I really liked and prompted intermittent second thoughts about what the lobsters could possibly do to me with all those alien gadgets of theirs. I like Brahms, you understand — but played by a paranoid duck?

Ktch himself remained offstage for a while yet, and Laszlo — had I but known — was already getting his arcane jollies on MacDougal Street.

I was hungry. Highly entertained, after a fashion, but mainly hungry. Hunger is a notorious drag.

And everybody else was having good times, too.

Acting on the principle that that’s where he usually went when he was lost, Andy took the E train to Forty-second Street and sought me out in every semidirty-book emporium between Forty-first and Forty-seventh Streets, where he was well-known and respected as the pseudonymous author of classics beyond counting. It hardly mattered that I wasn’t there.

“I wasn’t really worried,” he explained. “I knew you could take care of yourself, and I supposed that if nobody knew where you were, it was mainly because you didn’t want them to. I mean, Every man has a Need to get away from People Who Know Him once in a while. It’s perfectly natural. You see, I understand these things, and that’s what I thought you were doing. Right? Now, if Michael had only bothered to explain…”

And Sean, taking my place at The Mess on MacDougal Street, was discovering, to his lasting surprise, just how well he played and how much fun an audience could be.

“He was Great!” Chaz reported. “Fabulous! I mean, he really grabbed them. Understand? They wouldn’t let him off the stage. Really. Encores for hours, honest to God, and a standing ovation and all that. I’ve never seen anything like it before. Never. I mean to tell you, son,” slower and more serious, “I was sorely tempted to hire him on the spot, get it?”

And, “Yeah, the kid’s pretty good,” Al Mamlet seconded. Al’s a very funny man whose taste I trust implicitly.

“Shucks. All I done was play a few old songs I learned in Fort Worth,” was all Sean had to say about it, but he was hooked, all right. Utterly hooked and instantly addicted, and it showed. He was sporadically insufferable for weeks afterward.

Gary the Frog and Harriet combed the Village streets and parks, saying alternately, “Hey! Have you seen Chester?” and, “Hey, mister, got an extra dime you can spare?” more or less depending on whether they were bracing friends or strangers.

They made $1.37 in coins plus a Boston subway token in this manner, and gradually evolved their line on me through, “Hey, have you heard about Chester? He’s been Kidnapped!” to, finally, “Hey, what happened to Chester? I mean, somebody told me he was Dead or something” — all the market would bear — which took a lot of explaining to clear up afterward.

Sativa and the boys, with impeccable logic, hunted for me in every high-class teapad in the Village and still don’t know whether they found me or not; and Karen, for a wonder, spent the whole night in the front pew of Our Lady of Pompeii Catholic Church praying for my safety.

All told, it was quite a night, and I’m still kind of sorry I missed it.

Ktch came back at twelve or so, read the dials, looked very grave, made further adjustments, and said, “You are very brave, Spy. Very brave.”

No comment but a tight-lipped grin of indomitable courage.

“Please,” haltingly, “believe me when I tell you how sorry I am about having to do this to you. I assure you, sir, I have no personal motive in doing this to you, none whatsoever. It is the Rules, you understand. The Rules say I must put you to the torture if you will not talk. The Rules Must Be Obeyed. But if I had my way…” He made a percussive noise roughly equal to a sob. I was touched.

“You are very brave,” he repeated after a solemn brief pause. “But now I must leave you alone here for some time. It is my shift to sleep — The Rules. I have programmed you for eight hours of increasing intensity, as prescribed, but I trust, Sir, that your courage will not fail you. Spy, adieu!” He extended his upper three left limbs and feeler in a crustacean salute, then stiffly marched away.

And that’s when all the fun began.