Coming Through Slaughter - Michael Ondaatje [21]
So he leaves me Tom Pickett. Goes to tell my friends I have gone mad. Nora walking to me slowly to tell me I am mad. I put the chair down and I sit in it. Tired. The rain coming into my head. Nora into my head. Tom Pickett at the end of Liberty shouts at me shaking his arms, waving at me, my wife’s ex-lover, ex-pimp, sit facing Tom Pickett who was beautiful. Nora strokes my arm, don’t tell her I can’t feel her fingers. Her anger or her pity. The rain like so many little windows going down around us.
Brock Mumford
‘He was impossible during that time, before he went. I had a room on the fourth floor. Room 119A, where we were yesterday. I was avoiding people. A lot of fuss about Buddy at this time. Band was breaking up and I was being used as the go-between, made to decide who was being unfair this time that time. So I just stopped going out during the day cos I’d be sure to run into one of them. Buddy was always shouting. In any argument he’d try to overpower you with yelling.
The last time I saw him … The door downstairs was locked. Bell rang, I didn’t want to answer and I just lay on the mattress smoking. Then minutes later he is tapping on the window, he had walked along the roof. In fact it was quite easy to do though he seemed so proud of himself I didn’t tell him that. You took anything away from him in those days and he’d either start shouting or would go into a silent temper. He was a child really—though most of the time, and this is important, he was right. A lot of people wanted to knock him down at that time. The Pickett incident had made him unpopular. Buddy didn’t leave at the peak of his glory you know. No one does. Whatever they say no one does. If you are at the peak you don’t have time to think about stopping you just build up and up and up. It’s only a few months later when it wears off—usually before anyone else realises it has worn off—that you start to go, if you are the kind that goes. But he was still playing fine.…
He came in through the window and sat down on the foot of the bed I was lying on, and started talking right away. Just like you. He sat down and he talked, god he talked, just complaining. It was about Frank Lewis or something. Someone had passed him on the street and not spoken, probably hadn’t seen him. He went on and on. Then I started in saying how I was fed up too, that I didn’t want to be judge any more to all these fights. I had my own problems. This was the first time I’d said this you know and I thought he might be interested but within a minute he started to show how bored he was of it. You know, just irritated, looking around the room, sniffing, clucking, as if he’d heard too much of this sort of thing. So I shut up and he went on. Then left about an hour later. By this time even I wasn’t listening. Went out of the window saying they were probably watching the door.’
If Nora had been with Pickett. Had really been with Pickett as he said. Had jumped off Bolden’s cock and sat down half an hour later on Tom Pickett’s mouth on Canal Street. Then the certainties he loathed and needed were liquid at the root.
Nora and others had needed the beautiful Pickett that much. To see her throwing bottles at Pickett in the rain to brush him away gave her a life all her own which he, Bolden, had nothing