Gianni Read online

  “Blood pressure rising fast,” Nella Brandon said softly, eyeing her wrist-monitors. “Adrenalin levels going up. Shall I cool him out?”

  I shook my head.

  “Slavery is unlawful,” I told him. “There is no king. These are ordinary citizens amusing themselves.”

  “Nudo! Assolutamente nudo!”

  “We long ago outgrew feeling ashamed of our bodies,” I said. “The laws allow us to go nude in places like this.”

  “Straordinario! Incredibile!” He gaped in total astonishment. Then he erupted with questions, a torrent of Italian first, his English returning only with an effort. Did husbands allow their wives to come here? Did fathers permit daughters? Were there rapes on the beach? Duels? If the body had lost its mystery, how did sexual desire survive? If a man somehow did become excited, was it shameful to let it show? And on and on and on, until I had to signal Nella to give him a mild needle. Calmer now, Gianni digested the notion of pass public nudity in a more reflective way, but it had amazed him more than Beethoven, that was plain.

  We let him stare for another ten minutes. As we started to return to the car, Gianni pointed to a lush brunette trudging along by the tide-pools and said, “I want her. Get her.”

  “Gianni, we can’t do that!”

  “You think I am eunuch? You think I can see these bodies and not remember breasts in my hands, tongue touching tongue?” He caught my wrist. “Get her for me.”

  “Not yet. You aren’t well enough yet. And we can’t just get her for you. Things aren’t done that way here.”

  “She goes naked. She belongs to anyone.”

  “No,” I said.. “You still don’t really understand, do you?” I nodded to Nella Brandon. She gave him another needle. We drove on, and he subsided. Soon we came to the barrier marking where the coast road had fallen into the sea, and we swung inland through the place where Santa Monica had been. I explained about the earthquake and the landslide. Gianni grinned.

  “Ah, il terremoto, you have it here too? A few years ago there was a great earthquake in Napoli. You have understood? And then they ask me to write a Mass of Thanksgiving afterward because not everything is destroyed. It is very famous mass for a time. You know it? No? You must hear it.” He turned and seized my wrist. With an intensity greater than the brunette had aroused in him, he said, “I will compose a new famous mass, yes? I will be very famous again. And I will be rich. Yes? I was famous and then I was forgotten and then I died and now I live again and now I will be famous again. And rich. Yes? Yes?”

  Sam Hoaglund looked over at him and said, “In another couple of weeks, Gianni, you’re going to be the most famous man in the world.”

  Casually Sam poked the button turning on the radio. The car was well equipped for overload and out of the many speakers came the familiar pulsing tingling sounds of Wilkes Booth John doing Membrane. The subsonics were terrific. Gianni sat up straight as the music hit him. “What is that?” he demanded.

  “Overload,” Sam said. “Wilkes Booth John.”

  “Overload? This means nothing to me. It is a music? Of when?”

  “The music of right now,” said Nella Brandon.

  As we zoomed along Wilshire Sam keyed in the colors and lights too, and the whole interior of the car began to throb and flash and sizzle. Wonderland for Gianni again. He blinked, he pressed his hands to his cheeks, he shook his head. “It is like the music of dreams,” he said. “The composer? Who is?”

  “Not a composer,” said Sam. “A group. Wilkes Booth John, it calls itself. This isn’t classical music, it’s pop. Popular. Pop doesn’t have a composer.”

  “It makes itself, this music?”

  “No,” I said. “The whole group composes it. And plays it.”

  “The orchestra. It is pop and the orchestra composes.” He looked lost, as bewildered as he had been since the moment of his awakening, naked and frail, in the scoop cage. “Pop. Such strange music. So simple. It goes over and over again, the same thing, loud, no shape. Yet I think I like it. Who listens to this music? Imbecili? Infanti?”

  “Everyone,” Sam said.

  That first outing in Los Angeles not only told us Gianni could handle exposure to the modern world but also transformed his life among us in several significant ways. For one thing, there was no keeping him chaste any longer after Topanga Beach. He was healthy, he was lusty, he was vigorously heterosexual—an old biography of him I had seem blamed his ill health and early demise on “his notorious profligacy”—and we could hardly go on treating him like a prisoner or a zoo animal. Sam fixed him up with one of his secretaries, Melissa Burke, a willing volunteer.

  Then, too, Gianni had been confronted for the first time with the split between classical and popular music, with the whole modernist cleavage between high art and lowbrow entertainment. That was new to him and baffling at first. “This pop,” he said, “it is the music of the peasants?” But gradually he grasped the idea of simple rhythmic music that everyone listened to, distinguished from “serious” music that belonged only to an elite and was played merely on formal occasions. “But my music,” he protested, “it had tunes, people could whistle it. It was everybody’s music.” It fascinated him that composers had abandoned melody and made themselves inaccessible to most of the people. We told him that something like that had happened in all of the arts. “You poor crazy futuruomini,” he said gently.

  Suddenly he began to turn himself into a connoisseur of overload groups. We rigged an imposing unit in his room, and he and Melissa spent hours plugged in, soaking up the waveforms let loose by Scissors and Ultrafoam and Wilkes Booth John and the other top bands. When I asked him how the new symphony was coming along, he gave me a peculiar look.

  He began to make other little inroads into modern life. Sam and Melissa took him shopping for clothing on Figueroa Street, and in the cholo boutiques he acquired a flashy new wardrobe of the latest Aztec gear to replace the lab clothes he had worn since his awakening. He had his prematurely gray hair dyed red. He acquired jewelry that went flash, clang, zzz, and pop when the mood-actuated sensoria came into play. In a few days he was utterly transformed: he became the perfect young Angeleno, slim, dapper, stylish, complete with the slight foreign accent and exotic grammar.

  “Tonight Melissa and I go to The Quonch,” Gianni announced.

  “The Quonch,” I murmured, mystified.

  “Overload palace,” Hoaglund explained. “In Pomona. All the big groups play there.”

  “We have Philharmonic tickets tonight,” I said feebly.

  Gianni’s eyes were implacable. “The Quonch,” he said.

  So we went to The Quonch. Gianni, Melissa, Sam, Sam’s slice-junkie livewith, Oreo, and I. Gianni and Melissa had wanted to go alone, but I wasn’t having that. I felt a little like an overprotective mother whose little boy wanted to try a bit of freebasing. No chaperones, no Quonch, I said. The Quonch was a gigantic geodesic dome in Pomona Downlevel, far underground. The stage whirled on antigrav gyros, the ceiling was a mist of floating speakers, the seats had pluggie intensifiers, and the audience, median age about fourteen, was sliced out of its mind. The groups performing that night were Thug, Holy Ghosts, Shining Orgasm Revival and Ultrafoam. For this I had spent untold multi-kilogelt to bring the composer of the Stabat Mater and La Serva Padrona back to life? The kids screamed, the great hall filled with dense, tangible, oppressive sound, colors and lights throbbed and pulsed, minds were blown. In the midst of the madness sat Giovanni Battista Pergolesi (1710-1736), graduate of the Conservatorio dei Poveri, organist of the royal chapel at Naples, maestro di capella to the Prince of Stigliano—plugged in, turned on, radiant, ecstatic, transcendent.

  Whatever else The Quonch may have been, it didn’t seem dangerous, so the next night I let Gianni go there just with Melissa. And the next. It was healthy for both of us to let him move out on his own a little. But I was starting to worry. It wouldn’t be long until we broke the news to the public that we had a genuine eighteenth-century geni
us among us. But where were the new symphonies? Where were the heaven-sent sonatas? He wasn’t producing anything visible. He was just doing a lot of overload. I hadn’t brought him back here to be a member of the audience, especially that audience.

  “Relax,” Sam Hoaglund said. “He’s going through a phase. He’s dazzled by the novelty of everything, and also he’s having fun for maybe the first time in his life. But sooner or later he’ll get back to composing. Nobody steps out of character forever. The real Pergolesi will take control.”

  Then Gianni disappeared.

  Came the frantic call at three in the afternoon on a crazy hot Saturday with Santa Anas blowing and a fire raging in Tujunga. Dr. Brandon had gone to Gianni’s room to give him his regular checkup, and no Gianni. I went whistling across town from my house near the beach. Hoaglund, who had come running in from Santa Barbara, was there already. “I phoned Melissa,” he said. “He’s not with her. But she’s got a theory.”

  “Tell.”

  “They’ve been going backstage the last few nights. He’s met some of the kids from Ultrafoam and one of the other groups. She figures he’s off jamming with them.”

  “If that’s all, then hallelujah. But how do we track him?”

  “She’s getting addresses. We’re making calls. Quit worrying, Dave.”

  Easy to say. I imagined him held for ransom in some East L.A. dive. I imagined swaggering machos sending me his fingers, one day, waiting for fifty megabucks’ payoff. I paced for half a dreadful hour, grabbing up phones as if they were magic wands, and then came word that they had found him working out with Shining Orgasm Revival in a studio in West Covina. We were there in half the legal time and to hell with the California Highway Patrol.

  The place was a miniature Quonch, electronic gear everywhere, the special apparatus of overload rigged up, and Gianni sitting in the midst of six practically naked young uglies whose bodies were draped with readout tape and sonic gadgetry. So was his. He looked blissful and sweaty. “It is so beautiful, this music,” he sighed when I collared him. “It is the music of my second birth. I love it beyond everything.”

  “Bach,” I said. “Beethoven. Mozart.”

  “This is other. This is miracle. The total effect—the surround, the engulf—”

  “Gianni, don’t ever go off again without telling someone.”

  “You were afraid?”

  “We have a major investment in you. We don’t want you getting hurt or into trouble or —”

  “Am I a child?”

  “There are dangers in this city that you couldn’t possibly understand yet. You want to jam with these musicians, jam with them, but don’t just disappear. Understood?”

  He nodded.

  Then he said, “We will not hold the press conference for a while, I am learning this music. I will make my debut next month, maybe. If we can get booking at The Quonch as main attraction.”

  “This is what you want to be? An overload star?”

  “Music is music.”

  “And you are Giovanni Battista Pergo—” An awful thought struck me. I looked sidewise at Shining Orgasm Revival. “Gianni, you didn’t tell them who you—”

  “No. I am still secret.”

  “Thank God.” I put my hand on his arm. “Look, if this stuff amuses you, listen to it, play it, do what you want. But the Lord gave you a genius for real music.”

  “This is real music.”

  “Complex music. Serious music.”

  “I starved to death composing that music.”

  “You were ahead of your time. You wouldn’t starve now. You will have a tremendous audience for your music.”

  “Because I am a freak, yes. And in two months I am forgotten again. Grazie, no, Dave. No more sonatas. No more cantatas. Is not the music of this world. I give myself to overload.”

  “I forbid it, Gianni.”

  He glared. I saw something steely behind his delicate and foppish exterior.

  “You do not own me, Dr. Leavis.”

  “I gave you life.”

  “So did my father and mother. They didn’t own me either.”

  “Please, Gianni. Let’s not fight. I’m only begging you not to turn your back on your genius, not to renounce the gift God gave you for—”

  “I renounce nothing. I merely transform.” He leaned up and put his nose almost against mine. “Let me free. I will not be a court composer for you. I will not give you masses and symphonies. No one wants such things today, not new ones, only a few people who want the old ones. Not good enough. I want to be famous, capisce? I want to be rich. Did you think I’d live the rest of my life as a curiosity, a museum piece? Or that I would learn to write the kind of noise they call modern music? Fame is what I want. I died poor and hungry, the books say. You die poor and hungry and find out what it is like, and then talk to me about writing cantatas. I will never be poor again.” He laughed. “Next year, after I am revealed to the world, I will start my own overload group. We will wear wigs, eighteenth-century clothes, everything. We will call ourselves Pergolesi. All right? All right, Dave?”

  He insisted on working out with Shining Orgasm Revival every afternoon. Okay. He went to overload concerts just about every night. Okay. He talked about going on stage next month. Even that was okay. He did no composing, stopped listening to any music but overload. Okay. He is going through a phase, Sam Hoaglund had said. Okay. You do not own me, Gianni had said.

  Okay. Okay.

  I let him have his way. I asked him who his overload playmates thought he was, why they had let him join the group so readily. “I say I am rich Italian playboy,” he replied. “I give them the old charm, you understand? Remember I am accustomed to winning the favors of kings, princes, cardinals. It is how we musicians earned our living. I charm them, they listen to me play, they see right away I am genius. The rest is simple. I will be very rich.”

  About three weeks into Gianni’s overload phase, Nella Brandon came to me and said, “Dave, he’s doing slice.”

  I don’t know why I was surprised. I was.

  “Are you sure?”

  She nodded. “It’s showing up in his blood, his urine, his metabolic charts. He probably does it every time he goes to play with that band. He’s losing weight, corpuscle formation dropping off, resistance weakening. You’ve got to talk to him.”

  I went to him and said, “Gianni, I’ve stopped giving a damn what kind of music you write, but when it comes to drugs, I draw the line. You’re still not completely sound physically. Remember, you were at the edge of death just a few months ago, body-time. I don’t want you killing yourself.”

  “You do not own me.” Again, sullenly.

  “I have some claim on you. I want you to go on living.”

  “Slice will not kill me.”

  “It’s killed plenty already.”

  “Not Pergolesi!” he snapped. Then he smiled, too my hand, gave me the full treatment. “Dave, Dave, you listen. I die once. I am not interested in an encore. But the slice, it is essential. Do you know? It divides one moment from the next. You have taken it? No? Then you cannot understand. It puts spaces in time. It allows me to comprehend the most intricate rhythms, because with slice there is time for everything, the world slows down, the mind accelerates. Capisce? I need it for my music.”

  “You managed to write the Stabat Mater without slice.”

  “Different music. For this, I need it.” He patted my hand. “You do not worry, eh? I look after myself.”

  What could I say? I grumbled, I muttered, I shrugged. I told Nella to keep a very close eye on his readouts. I told Melissa to spend as much time as possible with him and keep him off the drug if she could manage it.

  At the end of the month, Gianni announced he would make his debut at The Quonch on the following Saturday. A big bill—five overload bands, Shining Orgasm Revival playing fourth, with Wilkes Booth John, no less, as the big group of the night. The kids in the audience would skull out completely if they knew that one of the Orga
sms was three hundred years old, but of course they weren’t going to find that out, so they’d just figure he was a new side-man and pay no attention. Later on Gianni would declare himself to be Pergolesi. He and Sam were already working on the altered PR program. I felt left out, off on another track. But it was beyond my control. Gianni now was like a force of nature, a hurricane of a man, frail and wan though he might be.

  We all went to The Quonch for Gianni’s overload debut.

  There we sat, a dozen or more alleged adults, in that mob of screaming kids. Fumes, lights, colors, the buzzing of gadgetized clothes and jewels, people passing out, people coupling in the aisles, the whole crazy bit, like Babylon right before the end, and we sat through it. Kids selling slice, dope, coke, you name it, slipped among us. I wasn’t buying but I think some of my people were. I closed my eyes and let it all wash over me, the rhythms and subliminals and ultrasonics of one group after another, Toad Star, then Bubblemilk, then Holy Ghosts, though I couldn’t tell one from the next, and finally, after many hours, Shining Orgasm Revival was supposed to go on for its set.

  A long intermission dragged on and on. And on.

  The kids, zonked and crazed, didn’t mind at first. But after maybe half an hour they began to boo and throw things and pound on the walls. I looked at Sam, Sam looked at me, Nella Brandon murmured little worried things.

  Then Melissa appeared from somewhere, tugged at my arm and whispered, “Dr. Leavis, you’d better come backstage. Mr. Hoaglund. Dr. Brandon.”

  They say that if you fear the worst, you keep the worst at bay. As we made our way through the bowels of The Quonch to the performers’ territory, I imagined Gianni sprawled backstage, wired with full gear, eyes rigid, tongue sticking out—dead of a slice overdose. And all our fabulous project ruined in a crazy moment. So we went backstage and there were the members of Shining Orgasm Revival running in circles and a cluster of Quonch personnel conferring urgently, and kids in full war-paint peering in the back way and trying to get through the cordon. And there was Gianni, wired with full overload gear, sprawled on the floor, shirtless, skin shiny with sweat, mottled with dull purplish spots, eyes rigid, tongue sticking out. Nella Brandon pushed everyone away and dropped down beside him. One of the Orgasms said to no one in particular, “He was real nervous, man, he kept slicing off more and more, we couldn’t stop him, you know—”