Pierrot was quiet for a moment.
“I also have to get high.”
“I’ll pay you up front so you don’t have to wait around for royalties or nothing like that.”
He said he’d love to make it into a record. He asked Pierrot to bring a photo of himself.
All that Pierrot had was the portrait of him and Rose, which hung from a nail on the wall. He did feel rather sad about unhooking it. But at the same time, he felt full of pride that morning, for the first time in months. Because he had been reminded of two things. That he had once been married to a very beautiful woman, and that he had written this tune that everybody in the world seemed to like.
? ? ?
THE STUDIO WAS IN A narrow building. It was squeezed in between a church and a department store, like some skinny man on a bus at rush hour. The man who had spoken to Pierrot on the phone met him in the lobby and they took the elevator to the ninth floor. In the studio there was a great big microphone hanging down on a pole over the top of the piano. The floors were wooden. He looked at technicians on the other side of the glass. There were so many levers and knobs, like a city seen from up above.
He began to play the tune. It had been a while since he’d played it. To his surprise, the tune was slightly different from before. While he had sunk into oblivion, the tune had continued to work on itself. It had to get up in the morning and get itself dressed and take care of business. And so Pierrot listened to the tune that he was playing, instead of performing it. A work of art when it is good and completed exists independently of its creator. It is indignant, even—it doesn’t want to have an author.
All children are really orphans. At heart, a child has nothing to do with its parents, its background, its last name, its gender, its family trade. It is a brand-new person, and it is born with the only legacy that all individuals inherit when they open their eyes in this world: the inalienable right to be free.
The tune was a thing of great wonder.
? ? ?
ONCE PIERROT HAD FINISHED RECORDING, he knew that he had captured it. He had finished the elusive tune. The simple little number was his life’s work. He didn’t have it in him to spend the next twelve years of his life working on another fifteen minutes. There were great musicians who were capable of producing great and fantastic bodies of work, but he didn’t have that sort of tenacity or intelligence. Unlike him, those musicians had been raised to have the constitution to do great things. Artists from poor backgrounds couldn’t bear their own genius for very long.
He signed the first contract they put before him, not bothering to negotiate. He knew that he had to do it quickly and impulsively or he wouldn’t be able to do it at all.
A squirrel holding an acorn as though it were a tiny bongo drum stood up on a branch outside the recording studio and worriedly looked around.
When he stepped out into the shining street, he was a completely different person. He was walking around, but he knew that his story was over. His life story was written, and he was living in the extra blank pages at the back of a book. There was a beginning, middle, end to his life.
On the corner of the street, Pierrot spotted a curious-looking boy. The child had folded a newspaper into a Napoleon hat and was wearing it on his head. He looked up at Pierrot with a deep frown. Pierrot knew what the newspaper said. It was becoming more and more likely that the world was going to war. The world didn’t need Pierrot’s type of sadness now. No, the world was a violent place, and it was gripped by a madness that Pierrot had no way of expressing. He didn’t want to read the newspaper or listen to the radio anymore. He didn’t want to be a grown-up. There are some people who are just no good at it.
69
UNKNOWN HEROIN ADDICT, NEW YORK CITY