The Butterfly Kid

4

WASHINGTON SQUARE was an armed lamp. Two huge searchlights, one by the fountain and the other in the chess circle near MacDougal, reared fluttering cones of illuminated moths boiling toward the sky. Nervous, heat-gun-toting GI’s stood guard almost everywhere, swatting moths and cursing brilliantly. Moths. I was charmed by the kid’s adaptability.

Tourists and chastened teenyboppers, shielding their faces with outstretched hands and/or autographed straw hats, moved sluggishly through the park, herded by the sweaty soldiers. Photographers played fast and loose with flashbulbs, giving the whole area a strobe-lighted, discothèqueish feeling. Hardened Villagers openly gawked.

The shiny NYU library showed battle scars. One friendly old oak near the park pissoir had been truncated by somebody’s skitterish heat gun. Everyone who didn’t look confused looked terrified. I hadn’t seen anything like it since the famous beatnik riots in the sixties.

“Michael,” I shouted, the militia being rackety, “this could become rather serious.”

“Serious? I think it’s hilarious.”

“That’s what makes it so damn serious.” We had a private convention that summer: when in doubt, philosophize.

If the park was frantic, MacDougal Street was worse. Ancient Italians chanted clackety Rosaries. U.S. Army vehicles of strange shapes and even odder functions (known, only to Michael) swarmed up and down the street, making jaywalking hazardous. Fuzz stood puzzled on the corners and pointed uneasily at things. Panicky teenyboppers stampeded in tight circles, shrieking, “Dig it! Dig it! Dig it!” and knocking unwary tourists off their feet. Jittery reporters loudly interviewed jittery businessmen. Moths and untimely butterflies abounded.

Mike and I, habitually cool, cautiously pretended nothing much was happening, but we were both a bit stunned. At the corner of Third and MacDougal we bowed gravely to each other (one more private ritual), said “ciao” in unison, and parted, I to the left and workward, he to the right and The Garden of Eden.

I watched him bumble his way through the confusion, thinking sadly, Yonder goes what may well be my last link with reality, which was a hell of a thing to think about someone like Mike. By then, however, I was used to bidding my last link with reality farewell, so I squared my shoulders and loped off toward The Mess on MacDougal Street, flailing my briefcase before me to clear the path of lepidoptera and things that go boomp in the night.

Chaz Wainright’s Mess on MacDougal Street, actually on Third Street two blocks away, was already crowded, despite or because of the Army and the butterfly plague, but nothing was happening onstage yet.

“Good evening, Chester Anderson!” Charley trumpeted with false and boisterous formality. Thanks to the day’s events and incidental publicity, every head in the house turned its empty face toward me. Appalling, but that’s just what Chaz’d bellowed for. He was a native showman, and I was part of the show. Far, far be it from Charles J. Wainright to let free publicity go to waste.

“Howdy, Chaz,” I trumpeted back, because I was part of the show. “Read any good butterflies lately?”

One of the customers tittered hysterically, a terrifying sound, but Charley performed a saving belly laugh, and the whole house crashed into hilarity like surf on old rocks. All at once I felt great. Hurrah! The laughter of a hundred happy strangers was too strong a high for me to kick, and — butterflies be damned! — I knew it was going to be a swinging night.

Stu, Pat, Kevin and Sativa were waiting in the back room. Stewart Fiske (a chortly, mustachioed drummer from the distant wilds of outer Milwaukee), Patrick Gerstein (a perpetual Bucks County teen-ager who looked like a black-haired baseball hero but was really our lead guitarist), Kevin Anderson (a warmly chocolate-toned MIT dropout who preferred rhythm guitar and lead singing to the aesthetic rigors of quantum physics), Rosemary Schwartz (i.e., Sativa, a svelte, suede chick who did nothing but sing and practice sex appeal and Subud), and I, your friendly neighborhood harpsichordist, had banded together a few months before as Sativa and The Tripouts. We played a kind of music of our own invention that we called, when we had to call it something, either Baroque and Roll or Raga Rock, as the fancy took us. McLuhan music, as it were. It never really caught on, but it was more fun than working, and it paid better, too. Michael was our manager, so to speak.

“Wow,” said Pat as usual. “How ’bout them bugs?”

“Butterflies,” I answered, and Stu amended, “Moths.” Kevin seldom had anything to say. Now he just grinned. He and Sativa were holding hands, this being his week or something.

“Sure,” Pat veered. His conversation was generally erratic. “Let’s warm up.”

We retired to the alley behind The Mess and, dodging inquisitive moths et ah, smoked a few pipefuls of marijuana, which was still illegal in those days. We firmly believed it improved our playing, and perhaps it did.

When we were properly stoked, we wandered onstage and started tuning. We had among us some 120 strings (most of them mine) to put in order, and tuning could be a fairly poignant experience. To keep our audience happy, we made a more or less comedy routine out of tuning, an ad-lib blend of topical jokes and hip ambiguities, from which we broke without warning into our most popular song, “I’m in Love with a Girl Called Alice Dee,” carrying everyone within earshot along with us. What the hell is earshot?

That got the evening started, and for a long while I was too busy with keys, dials, and switches to notice anything else. It was during Patrick’s solo, while Stu and Kevin were scanning the house for new soft young round ones and Sativa was staging a private latihan, and I was counting noses (each nose representing one four-dollar cover charge, of which we Tripouts were entitled to one-third — which is sixty-six point six cents per nostril, if you like to think along such lines)… It was during this that I noticed our boy Sean, the Butterfly Kid himself, sitting in the front row at a table all alone.

Right.

Sean wasn’t making butterflies, thank God, just sitting with his hands in his pockets, which was something of an accomplishment, looking slightly hypnotized, like all the rest of our audience. I wondered what’d happen if he tried to applaud after the set, then decided not to worry about it.

I drew a yellow index card from my right cheek pocket, wrote on it in red, “butterfly boy here Grab Him!” and propped it up on my console. The Tripouts’ warm-up routine made it necessary for me to write down anything I wanted to remember.

Pat’s solo ended in a burst of ethnic gaudies, and before the house could gather itself to applaud, we segued into “Green Sleeves and Yellow Hair,” one of my tunes, ending the set with a proper bang. We liked to run a good tight show.

The kid clapped a total of two golden moths, and then resorted to tapping the tabletop hipply with his right index finger like the rest of the audience. Before the frantic clicking had a chance to fade, we were off stage and Al Mamlet, a very funny man, was on and running through his first riffs.

I grabbed the kid by a handy shoulder (inadvertently traumatizing him), whispered, “C’mon, baby,” and half-dragged him into the back room.

My colleagues had already split. Our schedule allowed for ninety minutes between sets, and they liked to spend the time hanging out on the Street. It’s fun to be even a little bit famous.

“Okay, Sean.” I was firm and comforting, like a pastor or slightly older uncle — somebody wholly unlikely to administer a spanking. “First question: where did you go?”

“Go?” Still scared.

“Yeah, go. I was talking to you in the park and then you disappeared. I saw you. Or rather, I didn’t see you. Where did you go?”

He looked slowly around at the back room, hunting for eavesdroppers maybe, but finding only cobwebs and poorly stacked old lumber. This gave him confidence. “Oh yeah,” he mumbled, “I went home.”

“Dallas?”

“Dallas? Hell no, man: Fort Worth!”

“That’s boss. How?”

“How?” Oi. If Sean was going to make a habit of repeating everything I said, I might easily go bald before I got any information out of him. “How?” he redoubled. “Well… To tell you the truth, man, I don’t rightly know.” He threatened to sniffle.

“Hey, baby, don’t cry! There’s nothing to… I mean, just… Oh shit.” I gave him my only clean handkerchief, red silk, and he noisily blew his nose. Emotional people embarrass me.

“Anything wrong back here?” That was Charley. Sometimes he worried. He was afraid somebody might break a law or something on his premises.

“All clear, Chaz,” I guaranteed. “Just talkin’ to an ol’ buddy of mine from Texas.” The whole truth seemed uncalled for.

Charley looked dubious — one of his better looks — but went peacefully away. Meanwhile the kid stopped sniffling.

He half smiled. “Hey, y’all play Good.”

“Thanks. Now what…”

“What do you call that thing?”

“What thing?” Interruptions!

“That piano thing you was playin’. What’d you call that?”

“That’s an amplified harpsichord.”

He opened his mouth to launch another question, but I beat him to it. “I’ll explain later,” I promised. “What were you thinkin’ about just before you went home?”

“Huh? Oh yeah. I dunno. I was just a tad bit homesick, like. You know.”

“Okay, I’ll buy that. You were homesick. Maybe you had butterflies in your stomach.” We winced. “But why did you come back?”

“Man, I hate Fort Worth!’

“Oh.”

We were silent long enough to hear Mamlet, out front, yell, “And then they told me what it was For!” while the audience broke up gloriously. Al is a very funny man.

I, meanwhile, was scheming as hard as I could under the circumstances, hunting for some way to open this kid up. Those butterflies of his were bugging me.

Then, “Where are you stayin’?” I remembered my own Village puppyhood.

“Me? Here ’n’ there. I dunno,” meaning the kid was up tight for a pad. Right. Now we were back where we’d started in the park, upward of too many hours ago.

“Need,” I insinuated, “a place to crash?” Playing it slow.

“Well…” Yes.

“You’re welcome to use my Guest Room for a while, if you want to, until you can find a place of your own.” I was hard pressed to keep a note of pride from marring the precisely nonchalant tone in which I performed this ritual incantation. Guest Rooms are scarcer in the Village than gold-plated diaphragms.

“Gee thanks!” Pause. “I mean, ah, if like you don’t mind… I mean…”

I explained that of course I didn’t mind and delivered a small but polished lecture on Village mores and the tribal custom of the pallet on the floor. Within, I exulted. There wasn’t much in the world that I wanted more than any old explanation for those damned butterflies.

Then, “You do look kind of beat,” I recited, strictly from memory.

“Um.”

Right. “When did you sleep last?”

“Oh man, sleep? I dunno. Thursday?”

“Oh yeah? C’mon.”

I still had half an hour before the next set, so I led Sean tenderly out through the dark auditorium, pausing to collect his guitar and put him on my tab, and on out to the street. There we encountered Mad John, the spherical pride of New Orleans, lewdly eyeing an anthology of tourists from Ohio.

“Greetings,” he offered. He was wearing gaudily-trimmed green lederhosen and an Alpine cap with a pigeon’s tail feather hanging from its band, his standard Village tour guide outfit, but he didn’t have his usual cash-and-carry following tagging along.

“Howdy, Swamprat,” I sang out. This was meant to make him sputteringly furious, a most engaging spectacle, and usually worked, but not tonight.

“Look around,” he said with word and gesture.

I looked. “So?”

“They’re gone.”

So they were. No moths! The only nearby reminder of the plague was a clutch of wibberly GI’s wearing uneasy expressions.

“You’re right!” I rejoiced. “Wow! Later.”

I hauled Sean away before Mad John could start rapping, and we practically ran down West Third Street. “What,” I panted, “happened to the,” gasping, “butterflies?”

“I came down.”

Oh.

At The Garden of Eden (“Hey, baby, like, ah, What Happened?”), we found Mike at the family table surrounded by Harriet, Gary the Frog, several people called David (that having been a big summer for Davids), and the usual three or four total strangers who knew all about us, so to speak: our admirers.

Whilst everyone talked at once, I explained the situation to Michael in my firmest sotto voce. “So take him home Now,” I finished. “Feed ’im, put ’im to bed, tuck ’im in, and for Christ’s sake, don’t let him get away.”

Mike, the kid, and I pushed through a swarm of questions to the street.

“How come you call him Michael the Theodore Bear?” the kid wondered as we wove a path back to The Mess. The Street was Saturday-packed, but we seemed to be the only moving bodies. Everyone else just stood there, still and gape-mouthed, staring at everyone else.

“Because he’s much too dignified for nicknames,” I explained, “and Pooh has already been used.”

We parted at The Mess’s door under Charley’s most paternal eye — the left one, possibly glass — they to feed and bed the Butterfly Kid and I somehow to work.

“Wow,” Sativa whispered in the alley as we warmed up for the second set. “What happened to the butterflies? Pretty?”

“The kid who invented ’em came down.” By then I didn’t care what I said.

Sativa took it calmly — being that kind of chick — but Stu choked and coughed, maybe because of the smoke. The explanation seemed to satisfy Patrick, though. But then, most things satisfied Patrick.

Sativa sighed. “I liked them,” exhaling clouds of solemn blue smoke. “Pretty.”

Chaz insists I gave the best performance of my life that night, but I didn’t notice. My head was busy.

The kid came down.

Sure.

Oh wow.