Read Online Count Geiger's Blues by Michael Bishop - Free Book Online

blackness. A harder blackness. And the smell of fresh paint. The Mick had painted the walls black. Then he’d disguised his misdeed by hanging black sheets over the proof of his contempt for Xavier’s rules. A closer look showed Xavier that two of the room’s four walls were no longer draped in black at all. The Mick had put these sheets on his bed and rigged a swag-bellied black canopy from the ceiling with the remaining dyed linen. The Mick had played him for a sucker. Had lied. Had laughed him to scorn.
    “Why?” Xavier raged when The Mick got home from Ephebus. “Why would you go to so much trouble to deceive me?”
    “No trouble at all,” The Mick said. “Had me a blast.”
    “You’ve mocked me. Stabbed me in the back. Why?”
    “This is my room, I live in it, not you. And I wanted black walls, okay? Issat a fucking crime?”
    “If I say so, it’s—”
    “If you say so, unc, it’s gigo: garbage in, garbage out. Relax. It’ll grow on you. That’s why I did it this way. So you wouldn’t have nine heart attacks getting over your fuddy-duddyism and cadging how to skate the nool.” Nool , Xavier had learned, was a slangy collocation of new and cool. Fearful of a firecrackerish sequence of heart attacks, Xavier backed out of The Mick’s room, slammed the door, and stalked to the kitchen for a double shot of scotch.
    *
    The Mick made few friends at Ephebus Academy. He talked about school only if Xavier pumped him. When he did talk, he offered few details and seemed indifferent about the school. If pressed, he’d say “It’s boring,” or “The kids’re all nerds, and the teachers’re tofu-eating yuppies.”
    Mikhail’s inability, or refusal, to make friends did not seem to bother him. Once home, he put on his funky duds and diddled with the graphics on his computer. Or he flopped down to read his Decimator and Scarab comics, admitting that although most retropunks despised superheroes, he thought they were “’lutely nool.” Sometimes he plugged into his CD player to listen to hoodluminati bands like Mace, Rectal Exam, Cold Grease on Cary, and Smite Them Hip & Thigh. He never seemed to do homework, but he somehow passed his classes. Every essay and test paper he brought home had earned him at least a C-.
    About six weeks along, The Mick sauntered up to Xavier, then relaxing in a wing chair, and handed over a note from his English teacher. The note said Mikhail adamantly refused to do certain assignments, an attitude that wanted correction.
    “What assignments?”
    “Anything that bores me. If it bores me, I can’t do it.”
    “What’s the latest thing you haven’t been able to do?”
    “Read Moby-Dick .”
    “ Moby-Dick , the great American novel, bores you?”
    “It drags, Uncle Xave. No juice, no jazz, no pizzazz.”
    “Mikhail, you’re just missing it.”
    “It ain’t there.”
    “From the teeming wisdom of your years, you’re saying Moby-Dick ’s a bore?”
    “It and Nostromo and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and The Sound and The Fury and Women in Love . Yawnsville, all of ’em.”
    “Who do you like, Mikhail?”
    “Jim Thompson. Philip K. Dick. Stephen King. Frank Miller. Elmore Leonard. John Shirley. Those guys.”
    “Nobody else?”
    “Stuff they won’t let in the door at Ephebus. Private-eye stories. Sci-fi. Horror. Comic-book superheroes.”
    Xavier stared at The Mick as if at some incomprehensible sci-fi alien. Mahler, Melville, and Monet bored him. His idols were punk rockers, horror novelists, comic-book artists. Xavier’s heroes were elitist stiffs who’d lasted as long as they had only because nerdy academic types had taken up their overclever crap as the best route to gassier egos and longer careers.
    What could Xavier say? That he loved what The Mick loathed? That he found in the strivings of even the most difficult artists a heroic affirmation of intellect as well as heart? That symmetrical complexity can be as beautiful as stark simplicity? Sure,