Two Hundred and Twenty-One Baker Streets (4 page)

“It’s called Drum. It comes to me from the Netherlands—from someone who owes me a favour.”

He smiled at me, a crooked smile that turned my guts to water. I’d have a talk with him, and find out more about this observant, smoking man who’d just walked in to my life; for more than just a conversation, as it turned out.

We talked for a while, about what he liked. Up, but with a twist. Some psychedelic effect was useful, but nothing debilitating. I had just the thing, but back at the Chelsea Hotel. Blue beauties, I called them, stealing the name from the common black beauties, but they were as different as night and day. The chemical was amphedoxamine, but they wouldn’t just take you up, they’d make you feel good, too. I made my rounds and sold a little to those I knew would be talking to me later, and came back to this Sherlock Holmes.

“I think I may have something right up your alley. It’s in my more... private stash. There’s just one thing, though. I need you to distract the landlady. We have a disagreement about the rent.”

“You don’t have it, yet she insists you pay it anyway?”

“Exactly.”

“W
HICH WAY DO
you live, John?”

I don’t know why I let him call me John. Everyone else calls me Doc, and I was qualified, though I hadn’t lifted a scalpel, a stethoscope or so much as a band-aid since the year before, since I came home with shrapnel in my shoulder. My extensive experience in treating syphilis, jungle rot, and sucking chest wounds was of no use even at Bellevue. My hands weren’t steady enough to practise any more. My license and my knowledge of pharmacology kept me in high demand, however.

Grass was everywhere. Cannabis, mushrooms, and chemicals cooked up by burned out long hairs, as likely to contain strychnine as not.

The people who came to me weren’t looking to turn on or tune in; they had more specialised tastes. They craved knowledge, the power to be creators, to be active participants in life, rejecting every custom, from money to their own sexuality and even gender. They who could only fit in here in New York.

I was a doctor, but it was good that the American Medical Society never saw my shaking hands, or the patients for whom I prescribed an increasingly esoteric variety of chemicals. Chemicals used for creativity, to give an edge, to support the frenzied, creative mind. Make something. Do something. Start something.

The news showed college kids burning their draft cards, dropping LSD, eating mushrooms, smoking marihuana, growing their hair long and burning bras on farms, trying to get away from everything, like that was going to change anything. Not so much in our little corner of New York. Downtown, making a living in empty warehouses. Staying up all night. Creating art out of anything, from cardboard to bodies, inventing superstars out of nothing. This was our buzz, our vibe. Sex. Drugs. Experiment and creation. Create something. Anything. Lots of things. Some of it would stick. We’d change the world, or at least our little corner of it.

“Which way, John?” Sherlock’s voice shocked me out of my reverie.

“I live at the Chelsea, like everyone else,” I sighed.

T
HE
C
HELSEA
H
OTEL
. Heiresses desperately seeking disgrace with artistes. Writers and artists praying for a muse. Even in New York in 1968, you would be hard-pressed to find a more miserable hive of the desperate and demented.

The landlady was used to people making disturbances to get guests up to the rooms against the house rules. Someone would fake a fight, or try to sell drugs, or tip over an ashtray, and the rest of the people would run past the barricade. At two-fifty a night or fifteen dollars a week, the Chelsea was cheap, collecting youthful hope, grey enterprise, madness and decrepitude, along with any kind of bottom-feeding scamster. It also had an infamously liberal attitude towards rent, which meant that nearly every resident was constantly in arrears, and could be extorted for any money, valuables, or drugs they had while no complaints could be lodged against the owners about leaking roofs, flickering electricity, or the constantly failing boiler.

It was an arrangement that worked for most of us, particularly considering the heiresses and young men with rich fathers who came to spend time in this bohemian palace, tasting our lifestyle, but back up to Park Avenue for Sunday brunch. They kept the place running, paying their rent for the few rooms in good shape on the second and third floors in the front. The only part of the hotel that ever saw the super’s hands.

Sherlock walked into the Chelsea Hotel and demonstrated his useful observation trick. He walked straight up to the desk.

“I’d like to enquire about a room, please. I’d prefer monthly rates over weekly, if that’s all right? I can pay in advance.”

The hotel manager looked up through bleary eyes, and turned to get a resident’s form, a cigarette dangling from his lip.

“Ah. I see that you only have rooms on the top floors available, and that it’s been over a year since you’ve had your boiler inspected, and your exterminator certificate...”

I slipped past the doorway and up the stairs, listening to his sharp, deep voice tallying everything wrong with the building. It made me smile.

I checked the hair I pasted across the lock, and it was still in place. I opened the door and went straight to the loose floorboard under the mattress and pulled out my stash box, extracting a dozen of the blue tablets from the envelope. I didn’t know how many he wanted, but ten, I thought, should do it. Plus a couple for myself, just in case. I didn’t know what he was about, but the blues had helped my lonely existence for a night or two.

The room was dingy, the sheets dirty, my few belongings in the place making it look bigger than the closet it was.

S
HERLOCK BROUGHT ME
downtown from the Chelsea to Washington Square Park, a pale blue tablet dissolving in each of our stomachs after he interrogated me about its effects.

“ Explain to me, John, what this is exactly, and why you think it’s my sort of trip.”

Even then, he called me
John
, and he was Sherlock to me, though Holmes, or even Mr. Holmes to everyone else.

“It’s been around a while, tested by everyone. Big pharmaceutical houses. The army. Someone died after an enormous dose, twenty times or more what we’ve just taken. It’s been tested as a truth serum, a psychiatric aid, a cough suppressant, and a diet pill. It’s mildly psychedelic, but more sensual and controlled than the tabs passing for LSD you can find cooked up all around the country.”

“Groovy.”

The word hung off the edge of his lip and I looked at him.

“What? I wanted to see what it felt like to say it.”

“And?”

“It made me feel dirty. I suspect I may have lost some brain cells.”

I stopped and stared at him, until he looked over at me, just with his eyes, a smirk breaking out on his face. We both dissolved into laughter there in the street.

Sherlock put his arm around my shoulders and breathed in. “This is good, John. Very good. Tell me something. The Chelsea. You like it there?”

“To be honest? Not really. It’s not that cheap, but I can’t afford better. It’s good for me to be there for my clients. There are quite a few hangers-on with family money there, always interested in what I have. Prescriptions for amphetamines pay my way, and allow me to indulge in my experiments.”

He put up a finger, asking me to pause, and walked past the chess players, observing their games.

“Would you bet on one of these, John?”

“I’m not a gambling man. I feel I’ve used up all my luck coming back from Charlie and malaria.”

“It wouldn’t be gambling, though. Some of the best chess players in the world are here, and it is a game of pure skill. I haven’t the concentration for it, though I imagine I could do well if I put my mind to it. It’s a fascinating blend of wit and strategy. The rules are simple, and it is good training for the structure of the mind. Look here. This man will lose, despite current appearances. He’s playing well, but his opponent has the measure of him, playing a longer game with his lesser pieces. Ten moves, if I am correct, and I’m sure I am.”

“You’re a man of great power, aren’t you, Mr. Holmes?”

“Not so much. I see what I see, and I am compelled by a sense of logic, a desire to unscramble puzzles. I need constant stimulation. Experiences.”

“Hey.
S.C.U.M. Manifesto
? Only two dollars. Might change your life.”

A short, dirty woman, obviously in and out of shelters, with short hair and a broken flat cap, but there was a sparkle of intelligence in her eyes.

Sherlock looked at her, with that look I would come to know so well. He was studying her, taking in details and making a judgement about whether or not to engage. Whether she was worth his breath, his attention.

“What about a proposition?”

“Oh, sure. I’ve had plenty of those. What do you want to do? Where? Under the pier? East or Hudson? Hudson’s extra. It’s dirtier, but if that’s your thing...”

“Not that. Not at all. It’s not your body I’m interested in, it’s your mind.”

“Conversation? Okay. Four bucks for thirty minutes, six bucks for an hour. We can talk about anything you want.”

Sherlock glanced at me, a twinkle in his eye. “We’re not what you think. Here’s my proposition. Come have a coffee with us. No strings. If we like what you have to say, we’ll both buy your manifesto. If not, I’ll pay for the coffee and give you a dollar for your time. Thirty minutes.”

She looks at him, and at me. “Make it breakfast and it’s a deal. You get as long as it takes for me to eat. Thirty minutes guaranteed.”

“It’s better and easier than getting a man to pay you for sex, is it?”

“Look, you want me to talk to you or not? Sure. I’ve turned tricks, gotten men to pay me to watch, to talk, whatever. It’s no business of yours.”

“Sorry, it’s just that I don’t want you to feel like you need to hide anything from me. I can see that you’re occasionally homeless, but not always. That you’re a lesbian, even though you seek the attention of men—that for money, you’ll go with them, but that it’s less attractive, miserable, middle-aged men that you end up spending time with. You’ve got moustache hairs and macassar on your fur-collared coat from at least seven different men, one black, three Italians—or Southern European descents, anyway—a blonde and two brown-haired professional men in polyester suits, and though I can see smudges of dirt from both the Hudson and East rivers, suggesting that you’ve slept under piers—though more often the Hudson—you’re clean enough that you must shower regularly. At, if I’m not mistaken, the Chelsea Hotel, which is where my friend lodges. Shall we walk? There’s an all-day breakfast place around the corner, Ms...?”

“Solanas. Valerie Solanas. Author of the
S.C.U.M. Manifesto
. I’m going to change the world.”

“You don’t say?”

“D
ON
’
T GET ME
wrong. You guys seem all right. A girl’s got to make a living, though. There’s some real scumsters around.”

Sherlock looked at me, an ice-blue sparkle in his eyes. He was feeling the blue beauty.

“Some real scumsters.”

“Yeah. Like that guy, Andy, down at the Factory? My friend Irene brought me down there. She’s this real Hot Girl. One of his so called Superstars. She said that I ‘just had to meet Andy.’ When he met me, he asked me to do a screen test. Put me in one of his movies. Then I showed him a script I wrote. Brilliant play.
Up Your Ass
. He read it, said it was well-typed. Well fucking typed. Can you imagine that? Then he asked me if I was working with the vice squad to entrap him, it was so dirty. I told him, ‘Andy, Irene told me you liked it dirty. I told you it was called
Up Your Ass
, didn’t I?’ He didn’t have much to say to that, but told me that he couldn’t produce it because the cops would be all over him. They were just looking for a reason to come in and shut him down. He’s really paranoid.

“ Then this guy Maurice had me out for dinner the next day. French guy, he says, talks with an English accent, though. Says he’s published Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller. I was explaining the
S.C.U.M. Manifesto
to him and he said he wanted to publish it. Bought the rights. Wrote me a cheque right there and then for five hundred dollars and put it there with a contract. Said he could sell it and sell some more of my work, too. I could write some adult books, maybe. So I signed. Paid my bill at the Chelsea. Paid back some friends. Made some more copies of
S.C.U.M.
to sell. Got my typewriter out of the pawn shop. I had to get up onto the roof and get typing. Maurice wanted an expanded version of the
S.C.U.M. Manifesto
, a novel based on it, so I got typing. Working on it. Trying to make it into a novel. I made characters who got screwed over for each fucked-up thing that men did to women. Each grievance a character, like Greek Furies.

“ I was all wound up, telling this Maurice Girodias about Andy and how he was stealing my script. He said to me ‘That’s your next novel, after
S.C.U.M. Up Your Ass
. Just what you need to get into the big time. Maybe I should publish
S.C.U.M.
as it is. He wanted me to call it
The Manifesto for the Society for Cutting Up Men
. Said to get ready with
Up Your Ass
right after.’ But I don’t have the script anymore. I was worried. I wanted another five hundred bucks. Maybe more. You should get paid more for a second script, right? But he disappeared. Later on I look at the contract, and it says it’s not just for the two books, but for future writings, too. I think it must be all my future writings. Now he’s split, back off to France or L.A. or somewhere. I don’t know. I can’t get any answers.”

“ Have you got a copy of the contract? I could look at it if you like. I know a thing or two about the law. About a few things.”

“Yeah. Hey. That’d be good. I just... I get all excited when people are nice to me. Hey. You two. What are you after?”

“Us? We’ve just had a... what was it, John? A blue funk? It’s anything but. A blue buzz, maybe.”

I found myself grinning like an idiot, pushing my hash browns around on my plate, watching pale yellow egg yolk run over them in the harsh fluorescent light. “We’ve just... had a couple of pills. They’re a bit...” I pointed to my plate. “Strong.”