Revenge of the Rocket Gang
As Told By Hess, The Big Human · part four
Monty had the idea of spray-painting the drone red and mounting it on a pole to be attached to the top of the Hollis. Boldest fuck you flag I’ve ever seen. Gunner liked it so much, he started calling us the Bottle Rocket Gang, later just the Rocket Gang.
one | two | three
four
I was right about George Golly. The drone attacks shook him up, and added a new dimension to what he saw as his responsibility towards the Hollis project, as he called it: a bureaucratic one. He left us for several days, and when he came back, he brought the governor with him. Governor Hutchinson was here! The idea was to show him the Hollis, have him meet the Rocket Gang, have a Michelin-level lunch, and show him why he should not only designate the property off limits to IMI raids, but create legislation for Scottsville as a whole, to be the first of a special type of rehabilitated urban economic zone. He told us we’d have legal standing, that we could file as an entity that operates for "social welfare" purposes, aiming to benefit the public good. He encouraged everyone to put their names to the association he was going to charter, but in the end, it was Knox, Mamadou, Tom, Robbie, Gunner and me, Big Hess, and we got in the local newspaper. Maisie and the restaurant were a separate joint because George said the association couldn’t be used to directly benefit its financial interests. Golly went over to the Carmens with the same proposal. Told her she could go legit, stop living off the only revenue-earning businesses in town besides the restaurant. They said they’d think about it.
As for the third floor, George got a call from a young architect who had finished his degree and was sick of working as an underpaid intern in a big Manhattan firm, sick of New York too, although he refused to talk about whatever had transpired there. That pressure must have been lethal grade if moving to the middle of a bombed out wasteland with zero culture cred was better than going to some other big city, or learning a second language to blast out of the country. I guess that’s how desperate he was to break free from the prison he’d put himself in. His name was Aaron Pierson.
Aaron was a the son of a bricklayer and a waitress, who was celebrating his thirty-first turn around the sun by burning everything in his life to the ground. I feel that. Brother wanted a new life. Having seen George’s advert, he made the trip out to Scottsville, gave the Hollis a good going over, and shook hands with George. The third floor now his, he fucked off back to New York to find investors.
As soon as Aaron got back with funds secured, he went into a blaze of activity, practically round the clock. The third floor was the first to have a really legit look to it, real pro, and once he’d got it all outfitted, he went to Tom’s floor and made it world-class-looking, too. He donated a lot of his books to the library, so now they had an art and architecture section. The Melting Pot got the same treatment. Nobody minded that he was encroaching on their spaces. Au contraire, the Hollis was hot as shit thanks to Aaron. It was getting more publicity every day. Even the fucking New York Times did a Sunday Magazine feature on it.
George was ecstatic. Knox thought it was cool, too. Knox Maddock was one of Aaron’s favorite artists. On the day he toured the Hollis, he asked Golly to take him up to the top floor and introduce him. Aaron and Knox hit it off right away. The whole place was rocking a vibe I’d never seen before.
Not that there weren’t problems.
The dancer and sculptor came, wild cards both of them. Carmen P., of all people, had a cousin who was more than just a dancer, she was like a feral cat come nosing around to catch rats. Merida. Soon as I saw her, my heart leapt into my throat. First time I talked to her gave me a semi. Through the haze of lust and embarrassment over blood going where it shouldn’t, I held onto the scraps of info like a guy hanging on to wreckage so as not to drown. I retained the biggest chunks. Juilliard. Principle dancer. Fascination for contemporary. Own company. Salsa.
I smiled like a halfwit and asked her when she was moving in. She said at the end of the season, her last with the company. I didn’t catch the name because I was staring so hard at her beauty. I managed to say welcome and let me know if you need anything. She was pleasant back, and then sailed off to find G. I melted into a puddle of infatuation. Gunner found me like that. He asked what was going on, and I told him The Dancer had come, and she was a hydrogen bomb—me, just a shadow on the wall. I described her, and he whistled. Once the smoke cleared, I realized Merida Pérez was perfect for us. It was like a medieval marriage between the Cracker House and the Hollis.
Then came the sculptor, also disruptive, but like, in a good way. He was a wiry little manic guy named Joe Agnelli, from New Mexico, an ace metal chaser.1 Bronze was his thing, but he liked trash too. Plastics, whatever. He worked with light and shadows. He was dirty as fuck, by which I mean unhygienic. His ears were green inside. I asked him why, and he said, matter-of-factly, it was on account of the bronze splinters that come off his polishing equipment. He had to spell it out for me: bronze is ninety percent copper, 10 percent tin. Joe was smiley and sufficiently alcoholic to fit in with everyone. Used to discomforts of every kind, he’d been sleeping in the flatbed of his truck instead of renting an apartment. He strung up a hammock on the grounds, and his studio went outside the Hollis too. His jam was too loud and messy to go on the sixth floor with the painter, under Knox on the seventh, or above the photography guy on the fourth.
He went up to meet Knox and now it was a trio: Knox, Aaron and Joe. We were waiting on Dix the cowboy poet, and the film person—still a question mark. Golly had the idea of finding a young film director or directors. He was putting out his announcements in social media.
Joe’s arrival was great. George thought it might solve the Carmen problem.
“Look Joe,” he said to him, “I have an idea. Why don’t you set up with Jilly on the sixth floor for gallery space. She’s got plenty for exhibitions. You put your stuff on display there too, but for your studio, I have something else in mind. Something much better.”
When George was interviewing Joe, the sculptor said his dream was to buy his own equipment so he could do casting, a fifteen watt induction furnace to begin with. He’d want to do that right away, he said. G. Golly told him in typical fashion to cool his turbos. That was going to cost at least ten thousand, used. Joe would have to sink some of his own capital into that, and it would take some permits and stuff, but he had just the right space for him at the Cracker House. Joe said yes to that, and boom, a foundry was born. The Carmens would have a real business on their hands. George took up Joe’s business with the Carmens on a Tuesday morning, a box of Maisie’s krullers in hand, like offerings to the queens of the realm. They listened to him while drinking coffee and stuffing their faces. Carmen P. smiled menacingly when George explained that the casting furnace temperature ranged between 1790-1900°F. The other Carmen seemed duly impressed. He explained about turning part of the Cracker House into a bronze foundry. Joe, who was late for the meeting, showed up to make the technical side of the pitch and talk numbers. Nobody knew exactly what that would mean, or what was going on between Carmen M. and Joe, but everyone saw the way they clocked each other. Carmen P. fell in love with the furnace. Golly left them to hammer out the details.
Soon the restaurant had its bronze showpiece. First thing you saw as you entered the space, a raucous cauldron bursting with wonky buildings and plants, animals and faces and shit, like a happy pandora’s box. It was nine feet high, mixed media, made of patinated bronze, chicken wire and welted rebar, there was weird shit hidden in it, so that it looked one way from far away, and like some kind of demented fairy tale up close. It was the coolest thing any of us had ever seen.
By now the Rocket Gang was seized by hero worship on multiple fronts. The Hollis thing came together so fast, and was so absorbing, that we all might as well have been living there. Knox, for one, was in the studio day and night. He had a couch pushed up against the windows to crash out on. He lived pretty much like cats do. He was awake and working 24/7 and would just take naps when he was tired. No wonder he got sick, man.
He took in Steve and Kevin. I never knew these guys could play anything or had any interest in sound engineering. I don’t even think they knew. Harley was learning the drums with Mamadou. Monty went big for Jilly’s painting and drawing classes. I don’t know about the other. Gunner followed Joe around like a goddamn puppy dog. Me, I got fascinated by Dix. but I stuck by George most of all.
The cowboy poet from El Paso, Texas finally arrived, driving a dusty, distressed-looking El Camino SS. V8 engine, 350 and a 4-speed manual transmission with a flat bed heaped with stuff under a faded blue bungeed tarp. Vintage vehicle—I asked. 1969. Him, too. I think he has to be at least seventy-five. I wanted to know where he was coming from that the El Camino looked like that. He said he had just driven up from Venezuela. WTF, I said. I asked him if he wanted a shower or a coffee. He said he’d take both, but in reverse order. We chose a table in the shade, one that didn’t wobble.
“How do you know George?” I got him set up with a black coffee he was stirring two packets of sugar into. He laughed.
“George was married to my sister’s best friend. They’re both dead now.”
“Sorry, Dix.”
“Time’s a bitch.”
He laughed again, and I sort of got lost in the blue of his eyes that sparkled with truth you don’t necessarily want to see but feel drawn to. His voice was deep and soothing in a way that reminded you of radio announcers and maybe your granddad when you were five. The thing that got me. He asked if I wanted to learn to write. Funny that. All this time, I had been witnessing all these changes all around me, and asking myself how I felt or how I fit into it. He pulled into the Hollis right when I was ready to answer that question.
“Yeah.”
Dix seemed pleased.
“Good.”
George came by and the two men bear-hugged for like three minutes.
“Look at you, you lucky piece of shit.” George had a grin on his face wider than heaven.
“How you been, George?”
I left them and to catch up and whatnot. I wanted to see what was going on at the Cracker House.
There, changes were huge, too. It’s not that George had any authority to tell the Carmens what they should or should not do, but as he’d surmised, they knew an opportunity when they saw one. It’s not that they hadn’t been making enough bank doing things their way, but George had infected them with a different kind of mind worm by telling them they could not only own a legitimate business, but do something he said was prestigious. That one word got in Carmen M.’s brain and did its work on her. Now she wanted prestige as much as she wanted money. National, international prestige. It wasn’t just what Golly told her. It was what Joe was saying too. Joe had been to university. Whacked out, maybe, but she quickly realized he knew what he was talking about. Whereas Golly understood the economics of all this, Joe understood something deeper, and right there, Carmen got, not just envious, but covetous, and not just of this golden future George and Joe were dangling in front of her, but of Joe himself. That’s why I didn’t bat an eye when I walked in on them fucking on Carmen’s desk. I’d seen that shit a mile away. Within a few weeks she was calling him Papi, and sending all her boys to help Joe set up the spanking-new bronze foundry. They hired mold-makers, and Carmen P.’s own Tita Rosa learned how to make wax trees for casting. Joe called all the old mates he knew from foundries all over the country and poached as many of them as he could win over.
The only one who wasn’t too pleased was Jaime, but Carmen P. threatened to throw him into the furnace, so that shut him up, at least temporarily.
The Rocket Gang was growing into something that surprised everyone. I was already wondering how long it would take for things to …okay, better not think about that.
❈
Part five drops July 9
