The Thousand - Kevin Guilfoile [91]
Burning Patrick stood very close to the microphone and in a barely intelligible but not entirely tuneless voice started shouting as much as singing:
Sex is money! Sex is bank!
Sex for dollars, pounds and francs!
Sex for savings, your college fund stash!
Fuck me thirty days same as cash!
Nada had to angle herself to a position from where she could watch his lips move above the notebook and mike—it was the only way she could understand what he was saying. The violinists seemed to be playing a tune of some sort, but the other musicians obscured those efforts with a dense wall of reverb and noise. This is Jameson’s genius?
Nada wasn’t a music snob like her father. In fact, classical music was too distracting for her. There was too much depth to it. Too many layers. Too many strings, too many valves. What was that famous line—“too many notes”? Too much to notice. Solomon Gold had always taught her that music was part of the Unity, one of the delicate strands that connect everyone to the One, her father’s uncaring God. He once told her that music—some perfect composition—could one day make those transparent bonds visible. Music was the common language of mankind and the One, the only thing man and God experienced exactly the same way, which was why he didn’t pray. Music was the only thing man could share directly with God, he said.
Whatever. When she listened to music for pleasure, which wasn’t often, she listened almost exclusively to three-chord rock and dumb pop songs—the dumber and catchier and more repetitive, the better. She liked music she could understand at first listen. Nothing that wouldn’t leave her head when she wanted it to go away. Nevertheless, she liked melody, which seemed to be an object of scorn for the Bat Wing Vortex. The whole enterprise seemed a cruel joke at melody’s expense.
She tuned out the stage and began walking the room, hoping to drop in on an informed conversation. Band girlfriends or maybe coconspirators. The computer geek who mapped out Burning Patrick’s mural and who spit out the template for each tile. The art dealer who conceived the fraud. She picked up little except gossip and odd theories concerning Patrick Blackburn’s alleged genius.
“The mental illness is an act. He has an M.B.A. from Northwestern.”
“He can start a Toyota car engine just by touching the hood.”
“Ronnie says he’s gay but that the gays won’t claim him ’cause he’s fat.”
There was something off about the crowd, she realized as she weaved through it. Next to the stairs was a cluster of unshaven, unshowered men in long, tattered coats—perhaps acquaintances of Blackburn from his days on the street. There was another bunch, this one of too many beautiful women huddled around too few ordinary men. Nada recognized one of the males as a modestly famous sitcom actor who seemed to have made it his goal to be seen at this show. She spotted an older man, black and built like a bowling pin on its head, with a barrel chest and skinny legs and these big ugly feet shoved into old sandals. The hundred or so closest to the stage seemed about right—between twenty-one and twenty-five, mostly male, mostly earringed, comprehensively tattooed. A handful of men and at least one woman, not apparently together, stood along the back wall, looking like they knew they were too old for the club. They had uncomfortable postures and their attempts at casual dress were undermined by tucks in their shirts, parts in their hair, and creases in their pants. Nada studied them, her back to the stage, for two entire songs. They did not sway or tap or nod or dance or spin. They seemed transfixed by Blackburn’s presence.
She wondered if these were Burning Patrick collectors, Jameson’s rivals for the precious tiles. Perhaps they were each here independently on the same mission as she was—to find out if Burning Patrick was for real.
They wouldn’t find out from the back of the room, and neither would Nada, who had been to enough rock shows and made out with