The Butterfly Kid

5

I WOKE up at seven-thirty and instantly repented. The sun was blaring in my face and a so-help-me monarch butterfly was clinging to the outside, praise God, of my window screen. These were clearly Bad Omens, and if I’d had as much faith in omens as I thought I did, I’d’ve stood the day in bed, missing out on everything and looking like a total ass.

I couldn’t remember why yet, being still two-thirds asleep, but the sight of that innocent, battered monarch languidly pulsing its wings outside my sunrise window bothered me. I threw a critical slipper at the screen and fell, exhausted, back against the pillow. The butterfly was unimpressed.

By eight o’clock I was reconciled to being up, and I’d recalled what happened to my lifelong fondness for butterflies, too, all of which left me with no decent reason to stay in bed. Ah well. I pulled on a light bathrobe and pattered into the living room.

No one else was up yet. The pad felt crowded and empty at the same time, like a well-stocked haunted house. Then one of Mike’s more ambitious snores pushed through his door, and in that broken hush of a moment I was thoroughly at home in the present again after all night’s dreaming, irrevocably awake. Michael’s snores are nothing if not real.

Obviously Mike was still asleep. The guest-room door was open,, and I could see that Sean was sleeping, too. He was bent and twisted into an improbable position he couldn’t’ve held for a minute wide awake.

Spurred by a pint of orange juice and some of the muddiest thinking on the Upper East Coast, I set out for church fully and properly dressed and in plenty of time for the ten o’clock Mass.

The ten o’clock turned out to be a supersolemn High Mass of sorts, somebody’s daring new liturgical experiment horribly sung to the accompaniment of nothing but percussion instruments: a real piety tester. Therefore I didn’t get home with my nineteen pounds of Sunday Times until quarter of twelve, almost.

They were still sleeping, and Sean had developed an even more elaborate and unlikely position. I wondered idly if yoga were popular in Texas and shed a little surplus pity for the poor girl Sean’d someday marry, wondering how she was going to react the first time she saw her brand-new husband turn into a topological whimsy in his sleep. But maybe Sean’s luck’d mate him to a young female contortionist.

The Times was full of yesterday. So was I. Things had certainly happened. The butterflies’d been so thick they’d stopped traffic. Charming. Not a wheel had turned between Fourteenth Street and Canal after three P.M. They’d even stopped the subways for a while, until the City sent four guys down with Army surplus flamethrowers to clear out the West Fourth Street station.

It’d been a funny day, in its own quaint way. An old wino was smothered under a pile of burgundy butterflies. Plate-glass windows were shattered by the things. Governor Kennedy had declared the Village an official New York State Disaster Area, Class III, and called out the whole National Guard. Forty-seven tons of government surplus DDT was scattered over the neighborhood. The coffee would doubtless taste foul for a week.

And it wasn’t just the butterflies. There was a coyly retouched photo of some vaguely familiar little blonde teenybopper from Long Island who’d walked all the way from West Eighth to MacDougal and Bleecker mother-naked and twelve feet up in the air. Yes, quaint.

A grove of gaudy orange palm trees popped up right in the middle of Sixth Avenue and then, poof, vanished just before the men with the flamethrowers got there.

It’d been a very busy day. No wonder I was tired. A bright spot was that Andy’s halo wasn’t even mentioned. I’d been worried about that.

Three cups of maté and The Times kept me happy till one or so, when, “Enough will do,” I quipped and sat down at the harpsichord. Naturally, the phone chose that time to whistle at me.

“Yes?” I don’t like phones, with or without color screens.

“Chester?” A strange, thin, possibly strained through cheesecloth and certainly unhappy voice. Vision squelched.

“Speaking.”

“Help me! Please!” Absolutely tragic, and not a quiver of it faked. Nevertheless:

“Who’s this?”

“It’s me, Andy! Andrew Blake. You’ve got to help me, Chester. I haven’t slept all night!”

Now that he’d identified himself and set the mood he wanted, he let his voice resume its basic double-reeded plaintiveness, like an orphaned English horn. In the background something possibly giggled.

“Andy?” I said. “What seems to be the trouble?”

“I can’t sleep.”

“It’s Sunday afternoon.”

“I couldn’t sleep last night, either.”

“Why on earth not?”

“The light gets in my eyes.”

“So turn if off or pull the shades down or something.”

“I can’t turn it off, it’s my… that is… ah, it’s…”

“Oh! Your halo?”

“Please don’t call it that.” Pause. “Yes,” most dejectedly.

Now here was a thing or two. Somehow I’d tacitly expected the aura to go away when the butterflies did. I said this.

“Well, it didn’t.” Petulance. “It didn’t go away at all. It’s been getting brighter!” Again that giggle in the background. “And this Girl…”

“Yes? What gir… Oh, that girl!”

“She’s sitting in the dinette laughing at me.”

This went on for some time, because, no matter how he happens to be feeling, Andy dearly loves the vidiphone. It proves that he’s in touch, that people actually like him, that he might even be real. It’s his only true addiction, and he takes the same kind of pride in a $400 phone bill that a shopworn junky takes in a $50 habit.

Finally, when I’d established that no real information was currently available from Andy or to be had from That Girl, I suggested that he might try blindfolding himself. This he hadn’t thought of, he confessed, but it sounded good and he promised to try it and let me know. Hurrah. We said goodbye for several minutes and hung up.

The chat had lasted more than half an hour, and I still didn’t like the phone. It made me feel vaguely like property. Pfui.

I poured myself another slug of maté and returned to the harpsichord. After making the electronic and mechanical adjustments needed for a really impressive racket, I plunged massively into The Carman’s Whistle, an Elizabethan treasure I hope to live to master.

It worked. By the last chord they were both sitting in the living room, looking all bushy and bemused and mightily put upon.

“Good morning,” I announced. “We have a lot to do this lovely morning, don’t we?” Michael groaned.

During brunch we milked young Sean.

“My name, it ain’t really Sean, you dig? But don’t tell nobody! My real name, it’s Johnny — John. But I really dig Sean. I Mean it. Sounds kind of special, know what I mean? I figure, man, if I’m fixin’ to play rock’n’roll, I ought to have me a good Stage Name. You know? I dig Sean.”

I allowed as how I thought Sean was a much better stage name than Johnny, and this made him happy. Michael growled gently.

Little Sean/Johnny was born and reared in Fort Worth, a town I remembered well enough from visiting it in the sixties that I could understand his wanting to escape.

He wasn’t seventeen, as we’d imagined, at all, but eighteen, which made a difference, and, like almost everyone else in the Village that summer, he’d been to college for not quite a year. His family didn’t understand him, which was neither unusual nor important, though he believed otherwise.

“They wanted I should sell insurance like my dad, man. What a drag!”

He was evolving a more detailed autobiography than I really wanted to hear, but I didn’t interfere. After all, I’d seen this puppy making butterflies.

Between crises of poached egg, he explained how he’d become a rock-n-rolly, and I threatened to introduce him to some of his heroes. Two eggs later he gave me the indelible details of his stark-by-our-standards love life: an Oklahoma girl called Mary-Bob with whom he’d once gone All the Way in the back of an abandoned pickup truck while his folks were out of town. I silently envied him the surprises Greenwich Village had for him.

Michael, all the while, seemed to be dozing lightly through this wash of random data, a trick he’d copped from Nero Wolfe. At least, that’s what I hoped he was doing.

Another cup of maté, more toast, and my assurances that he’d done nothing unforgivable with Mary-Bob (though who can say?) brought Sean at last to his arrival in New York.

“I was kind of scared right off, on account of everything’s so Big an’ all, an’ I don’t — didn’t hardly know anybody, know what I mean?

“First two, three days I was kinda lost, you know? When I got off the bus, I asked this taxicab driver take me out to Greenwich Village, an’ it costed me two-fifty an’ I didn’t find out for two, three days I was really in some place called Bronnix.”

“The Bronx.”

“Right. What’s a Bronk?”

“Forget it. What happened then?”

“Oh yeah. Well, I just set in some big ol’ park out there an’ played my geetar till some of these kids with the long hair got to talkin’ to me, an’ one of ’em was a pretty good geetar player hisself. So they said they’d take me on down to Greenwich Village, an’ they did, too.” He was going to have to learn to control that accent of his, but I didn’t intend to muddle things by mentioning it just then.

He’d also hung around the Village two, three days, sitting in Washington Square or in some nameless basement coffeehouse, looking very brave. That’s all interpretation, not what he actually said. It was a familiar scene. After a while he was befriended by a roaming tribe of teenyboppers, “an’ they give me these ol’ pills to stay awake, an’ they taken me off to this party somewheres near some river.

“This was at some real fancy-lookin’ pad, you dig? But they was all rollin’ their own cigarettes, an’ I thought that was kind of funny.”

It must have lasted several days. Village parties often do. They take on a life of their own, if you’re not careful. People kept rolling cigarettes for Sean and showing him how to smoke them.

“They tasted kinda weird at first, you know? But I sort of got used to ’em after a while. Besides, I was plumb outta smokes myself.”

Then, two days ago, “This cat — I think his name was Lizard, somethin’ like that — he shows up an’ he’s got this bottle of like little blue pills.”

Michael’s eyes snapped open.

“Lizard?” I doubted.

“Like that. With an L an’ a L. I dunno.”

“Laszlo,” Michael droned, closing his eyes again.

“Laszlo?” I verified.

“Somethin’ like that.”

Anyhow, this L-and-Z person called his little goodies Reality Pills. Wasn’t that sweet?”

“Yeah, man, Reality Pills. Well, everybody else taken one, so I figure what The Hell? an’ I taken one, too. He was givin’ ’em away for Free.

“Then I got to feelin’ kind of dizzy like, so I went away, an’ all of a sudden I had me them goddamn Butterflies.”

That’s where I stopped him. Reality Pills indeed. I felt a mystical need to sit down and think about it all.

We removed to the living room. Michael sipped glum maté and stared through the wall. I fumbled through some easy sonatinas on the harpsichord. Sean watched the harpsichord’s mechanism as though paralyzed. None of us said a word for a long time.

Reality Pills?