The Adventures of Anderson Modrion & THE ORIGINAL HIP

The Adventures of Anderson Modrion & THE ORIGINAL HIP

by William Kowinski

“A disspassionate interpretation of new fossil evidence is usually obtainable only when one awaits the reworking of the material by persons not emotionally identified with the specimen.”

E. A. Hooton

Apes, Men and Morons

Lying perfectly furniture blossomed over the expanse of wounded carpet as the door opened and any visitor could see. The room, the first room, was never used. The middle room, the next room, with nothing but two orange crates and a Boston bean brown upright piano and matching stool was where it all happened on weekdays, and nights. On weekends it happened in the kitchen, alternate weekends, when Trish had people in. During all of this time Andersoh Modrion could be found lost in paper and piano, in notes and notations, on top of, under, inside or usually at, thfe Boston bean brown upright.

“Come in,” Trish would say to any visitor, and most particularly to me, Ford Evers Chance, her best friend. I used to be Anderson’s best friend before somebody bought one of his songs. Ever since then he has been totally engrossed in getting someone else to buy another of his songs: Happily enough, about every other week somebody does. Which conveniently accounts for the alternate weekend parties Trish throws.

Trish is the name of Anderson’s cat. Trish is also the name of his woman. Anderson cannot be exactly held accountable for this coincidence, since he named neither car nor woman'. They both came equipped with names. As it happened, the same one. He can’t exactly be held accountable, but he can’t exactly not be held for something.

After I passed through the front room into the middle room on this particular rainy Saturday morning I noticed something had been added to its simple furnishings. It was a large yellow thing, like an old bone.

“How nice to see you on this wet Saturday morning,” Trish, said to me with only a trace of wistful surprise in her voice. I had been coming over on rainy Saturday mornings for three years, still dully searching for a satisfactory substitute for eighteen cartoon shows and old western movies. “Thank you,” I said, “What is that thing?”

“That,” Trish replied, “is an old bone.”

“That?” Anderson looked at me, only his eyes moved, those gold-green gems we hardly saw any more. “That is the original hip.”

I looked at it again.

“Fan sent it to me,” was Anderson’s explanation, crushing an innocent mass of confused brown hair and turning back to work. Obviously that’s what he thought was important about it. But it still didn’t explain what the original hip was. I waited.

But Anderson’s eyes, gold-green like Trish’s (the cat), were once again lost to human contact.

“It’s supposed to be the relic of the first human being unearthed, you know, the first ape they think was human,” Trish (the woman) offered. “Some nut who dug it up when they thought it was just another ape hip sent it to us. He also digs country and western music.”

“He said ‘Driving Down the Left Lane of Your Love’ was his all time fave rave country hit,” Anderson interjected.

“Anyway; he said that some scientist came around with something like a geiger counter and told him it was the oldest humanoid bone he knew of,” Trish said, looking at it doubtfully. “I don’t know whether he made that up or not, I mean, so we’d think he just wasn’t sending us some awful .old bone, like he was giving us something valuable.”

I looked at it with the steady appraising gaze of a man standing beside a mechanic at a service station, looking at his car engine for the first time in his life.

“Well, it’s possible,” I said.

“Don’t bother me now,” Anderson suddenly growled, “can’t you see I’m busy?” Anderson was talking to the cat, who had climbed on top of the piano and stared him in the face. He didn’t use the cat’s name because he didn’t want Trish the woman to think he was talking to her. The result was that both Trish the woman and I thought he was talking to us and left the room while the cat, not hearing her name, assumed the same and stayed.

We moved into the front room, Trish the woman and I.

“Why don’t you ever use this room,” I said. “All this furniture.”

“A decorator did it,” she said absently. “The rug is ours, though.”

Anderson began to sing. We could hear scattered phrases and tune coming from the middle room, but we didn’t listen very hard. Nobody had ever listened to Anderson.

The original hip

just under the slip

where only the very best people go

(he sang)

on a Saturday night

like flying a kite

on the good days when the business is slow

The front room was the only decently lit room in the apartment, the only place I could get a normal kind of idea of how Trish was looking these days. The middle room was fantastically overlit just by the piano and dim everywhere else. The kitchen was dim everywhere. Except when Trish forgot to close the refrigerator door, or when Trish somehow managed to get it open. She looked melancholy, but the color had come back to her cheeks. Her hair, which she had cut very short and lately decided to grow very long, was now in the inbetween stage she used to wear it when I first knew her, when Anderson was first taking her out. Her hair was dark, she was thin and pale, except for that bit of color in her fact, almost a tanned look, that she used to have and that seemed to be coming back. Knowing her, of course, I realized she was a mirror of her experiences, but almost anyone could notice that she was the type who went through an intense and exhausting spiritual crisis before resolving to take up housekeeping with this quietly insane green-gold eyed former art student who had touched piano keys for the first time at the tender age of twenty, on the same day he wrote his first song.

Two years later he sold that song and became a songwriter. He played and sang well, though he never performed. For some unknown reason, it was impossible for people to pay attention to him. Trish had spent fourteen of her nineteen years taking classical piano and could barely play as well as Anderson. Still, whenever he played she could hardly avoid ignoring him. In the end, she avoided it the same way everyone else did. She stopped trying not to.

I touched her arm as we talked about the weather. In the winding course of a conversation it was understood that I would touch her arm twice, only once if it was bare (it was), her shoulder three times — that is, once each shoulder with one hand, then both with two hands simultaneously. Then quietly play with her hair for a maximum of thirty seconds. In this way she avoided being unfaithful while still not feeling, completely like a Boston bean brown upright widow.

Just as I was getting into the simultaneous shoulder thing, Anderson shot past me and out the door.

I was taken aback.

“What’s the matter?” Trish and I said simultaneously in different tones, the result being something like a major seventh chord.

“He’s just gone hunting,” she explained. “He does it every day.”

“Hunting?” I said, still a bit aback.

“That’s what he calls it. He just goes out every day and buys things if he has money, or steals them if he doesn’t or sometimes the other way round. He says he’s always done it instinctively and never known why, but one day on his way home he realized that it was his substitute for going to the city everyday and working or going into the jungle and killing animals.”

“Oh, I understand,” I said incredulously. “But do you think he — — ah saw . . . . mmm . . . anything* * * * * *that

is,,,,,,he might have ((( wondered // . . . at what we-ahh . . .

were doing??????

“No,” she said, smoothing her hair. “He doesn’t suspect a thing.”

“Oh.”

“He doesn’t know about us at all.”

“I see.”

“He’s completely oblivious. He wouldn’t notice if we made love right in the middle of the middle room.”

‘Hmmmmm.”

“Let’s go in the kitchen.” ,

Besides the proximity of food and beer and certain exotic spices, the kitchen as a gathering place afforded the advantage of a huge old hand carved standup radio, known as The Magna Vox, which rested in the corner opposite the refrigerator. The Magna Vox emitted a constant panoply of noise and interference, broken only by the transmission of occasional fragments of decipherable sound. These patches of clarity were as unpredictable as a hearing aid with the batteries about gone. On one long forgotten and mythical night, a gathering of people in various royal states of highnesses began asking the ancient radio various questions which it seemed to, in cue time, answer. The questions began more and more to relate to the petitioners’ fate and the answer was often taken as some eternal wisdom wheezed and gurgled from some ultimate distillation of meaningful static.

However it began, the kitchen Magna Vox became an oracle to the alternate weekend partygoers. Legends, of course, encouraged it. One young entrepreneur was said to have been urged from useless dabbling in art to phenomenal success in high finance by the enthusiastic utterance of the single word, “spear-a-mint.” The Magna Vox expounded no further, but the young man interpreted it as Go after the Money.

So the Magna Vox grew in stature, symbolically speaking. To everyone, that is, but Trish, who culled its wisdom only to figure out what not to buy.

At this moment, Trish was bent over a shopping list, the gold-green eyes of Trish fixed on her. The cat dug anybody who was in the process of writing something.

“The cat,” I pointed out, “is lionizing you.”

“Very funny,” the listwriter mumbled, “now did I forget anything?”

“Toothpaste,” rasped Magna.

“Toothpaste?” I suggested.

“Toothpaste,” Trish wrote, and smiled. Both of them smiled. Even Magna Vox gurgled with satisfaction.

I didn’t smile.

Because I was1 the first to hear the ominous knock on the door.

“There’s an urgent knock on the door,” I said.

“You mean ominous,” Trish replied. “Go answer it. It’s probably Anderson. He forgot his key again.” I turned to obey, and Trish’s comforting complaints escorted me to the door. “ I remind him every time. Don’t forget your key. And every time I do he just looks at the piano with an expression of absolute panic.”

S6 it was in this frame of mind that I opened the door. Standing in the frame of the door was the most opened faced, ruddy cheeked, blue eyed smiling country boy I’d ever seen under five feet three.

“Hi, I bet you’re Mr. Anderson Modrion,” he said, sticking up his hand. I didn’t use to think being five feet ten was much, and before I could cooly reconsider, my cinematic self-image took over.

“Howdy,” I said huskily. “Name’s Chance.” I stuck down my hand. He grabbed it like it was the hose of his favorite gas pump. Really, it was the smoothest, surest handshake since Muhammad Ali shook off the grip of Cassius Clay. '*

“Anderson’s not here at the moment,” I said with a shy smile, still feeling five ten but also very skinny. “What can I do for you?”

“Come in,” Trish said from behind me, true to form.

“Thank you,” he said, and came in. We stood briefly iri the front room but the conversation really got rolling in the middle room, he and Trish sitting on the orange crates and me on the floor next to —

“The hipbone,” he said. “I’m the one who sent it.”

His name was Cotton Bother, and he was the country music fan who had sent the hipbone, who had done spadework for an archeological team for two weeks until their grant was cancelled because their university was on fire, who had spontaneously sent it to Anderson because he liked his current country song so much (no,, he didn’t know that Anderson wrote rock songs too, wasn’t that somethin’?), who had written the flattering letter saying it was the original hipbone, and who had now come to Anderson’s apartment, to talk him into giving it back.

“But why do you want it back?”

“Because,” he shrugged and grinned. “It’s the original hip.”

“But you knew that when you sent it,” I reasoned.

“Welllll, no,” he smiled again. “Not exactly.”

“In exactly what way was your assumption inexact?” I cross-examined. Trish gave me a funny look, but I just smiled. She just wasn’t old enough to remember The Law and Mr. Jones.

“Well, fact is, nobody really thought it was the original hip. Fact is, the people at the Institute that I worked for thought it was maybe one of a number of similar hips, roughly equivalent in originalness,” he said, obviously quoting.

“I see,” I said. Though I had further questions, there was an objection coming through the door. It was Anderson.

“Come in,” Trish greeted him. “All finished hunting?”

“You hunt?” cried our bucolic Damon Runyan in the rough.

“No,” Anderson said, flushed and out of breath. “I was just seeing my agent. Sold my new song.”

“This is Mr. Cotton Bother,” I said, “the donator of one of a number of similar original hips.”

“The original hip,” Cotton corrected, nodding and smiling like a wrench.

“Pleased to meet you,” Anderson said, and sat down at the piano. It was a little sad, really. Anderson was a fast rising young song writer and now, even in the presence of surely one of his greatest fans, still no one listened to him play.

“So what makes you so sure about the hip now,” I resumed in a tougher vein.

“Well, a few days after I sent it to Mr. Modrion—”

“Call him Anderson,” Trish said.

Cotton glanced towards the piano for a moment and shrugged. “After I sent it to Anderson, I got this call from one of the fellas I worked for at the diggings. He was real excited, real excited, and told me that I was in luck, that a research team had developed a new system and that as far as he knew, the hip I had in my possession was the only one to pass this test.”

Continued on page 76.

Continued from page 45.

“What was the test?” I asked brightly. I was a big Watch Mr. Wizard fan, too. (Remember FCMB&B?)

“Well, this new 'classification classified bones on the basis of what minerals it contained. When they tested the other bones that were considered to possibly be humanoid they found that none of them had the complete set of minerals. All of them were missing one vital mineral — zinc.”

“Zinc,” Trish repeated.

“Yes,” Cotton said happily, glad to have an attentive pupil. “So this guy told me that he was almost sure that the hip I had was the only one in the world ever found or ever likely to be found with the missing zinc.”

“Wow,” I said appropriately.

“Yeah,” he beamed and giggled. “But see, I didn’t know that when I sent it. All that I knew then was that this wierd looking man came from the government one day and tested itwith something that looked like a geiger counter, and I asked him if it was an old hip and he said yes, maybe the original.” He giggled again, “See? I wasn’t really sure then. But now the Institute will pay me a lot of money for it. And we can all use a little of that, can’t we?” Then he winked at Trish and nudged her almost off her orange crate. That, I must confess, got my ire.

“No,” I said.

“No?” he said, his smile slowly sinking into the west. “No what?”

“No, you cannot have the hip back,” I said firmly.

His mouth fell open like a garage door closing. Then his eyes shifted to the piano and he smiled.

“But it. isn’t yours,” he said slyly, “it’s Mr. — it’s Anderson’s.”

I remained calm, turned to the piano and through intense concentration was able to listen just enough to catch an ending. I knew from past experience that Anderson was eternally grateful to anyone who would wait until he finished his song before interrupting with some trivial request.

“Anderson,” I said softly. “This man can’t have your hipbone back, can he?”

Anderson smiled seraphically. “No indeed,” he said, “that — that is the original hip.”

Cotton was astounded. He stood up and shook his fist, ranted and fave raved all about the room, but to no avail. Anderson had begun playing again, and since everyone always ignored him, he had long since gotten into the habit of ignoring everyone else.

After a half hour of futile and solitary argument, Cotton Bother left.

“Goodbye,” Trish said to him at the door as she would say to any departing guest, “come again soon.”

“But . . . but — but***the /// the (( )) the missing zinc!!! he sputtered down the hall and away on his motorbike.

Anderson really dug having the original hip around, sitting on his piano. He was writing even more songs than usual under its influence. Sometimes I think Anderson really believed that old hip was listening to him play, bashing along with him on rock riffs, shivering and swaying with deep drunken authenticity to blues chords and wails, smiling along with him on the tangled sincerity of country tunes.

He was spending all of his time in that room, the middle room, except for the couple of hours each day he spent hunting — for leather hats, Percy Sledge records, yoga manuals, black patent city sandals, Joe Cocker posters, strawberry pancake mix, bottles of mead, simplicity patterns, cue chalk, carrot cake, peanuts and moxie — bringing it all back home, munching on the edibles, drinking the potables while smoking that which is to be smoked, playing guitar, finger cymbals or mouth harp when he got tired of the piano. Occasionally he would just sing along to the metronome. Once in awhile he would run his tired and blistery fingers over the smooth dark hair of his cat or his woman, with nothing in his demeanor to indicate he knew or cared which was which.

Yet Anderson would never admit to any partiality toward the hip, or show possessiveness about it. In fact, he would never admit anything about it. All he would say when anyone mentioned it was, “That? That — is the original hip.” He really just seemed pleased to have it around.

It went on this blissful way for just a week before we found that the swift departure of our rustic Indian giver, our bone find transactor, did not mean an end to this contention.

On a dark and lonely Saturday morning, just as Anderson sat down at the piano and I was going into my twenty-second second of stroking Trish, there was a small knock-knock at the door, preceeding by a second and a half the entrance of a large impeccably bedecked joke.

The large tray of tall colors blurred through the front room, leaving a few words hanging like smoke behind him. He was almost all the way through the middle room and into the kitchen when he spotted Anderson at the piano and stopped cold, frozen in a posture that looked like a panel of Keep on Truckin fallen out of an old Zap. “Solid,” he said. “Anderson, I gotta talk to ya.”

Trish and I were curious enough to get off the kitchen table and gawk, though we didn’t listen to their conversation. We both assumed this supercharged giant with platformate was a business associate of Anderson’s. He was certainly something to look at: apricot frock coat in velvet and leather, a mandarin orange nehru shirt, organdy suede pantaloons, succotash blue alpaca boots with lemon denim fringe, and a silk scarf of alizarin crimson. The brightest color of his person was not in his wardrobe however. It was his face, an impeccable, exemplary pistachio red.

It wasn’t long before the two of them came into the kitchen, Anderson first, his gold greens sweeping the scene, his poignant fingers opening the refrigerator door and pulling out a left over hard boiled chicken wing.

“This is Edsell Nikson Farouts the First,” Anderson munched. “He’s here about the hip.”

Nobody else said anything. The dim light of the kitchen suddenly revealed a new mysterious feature about the incredible slinky man: his age. Not that he wasn’t hip, but it was entirely within reason that the sterling silver rimmed granny glasses nesting on his nose were the real thing, purchased in 1929 slightly used at a suicide sale.

The silence was becoming impervious. I knew it was up to me to make the next move.

“So you’re here about the hip,” I said.

Edsell smiled. “Dig it,” he said.

“He wants it back,” Anderson said.

“What?” I asked, but quickly anticipating the answer, added: “but you’re not the one who sent it.”

The jolly red etc. gigantis just smiled all the more, nodding in a slow glowing rhythm. “Dig it,” he said. “I dug it.”

Before I could ask the next logical question (“You dug it?”) he went on.

“Out of the ground, man ... I dug it with this dude that layed it on ya, I was the chief of the operation man, in fact I was the chief of the reservation,” and then he laughed. I began to despair of ever getting the story, but fortunately he settled down to discoursing in the inverted pryamid form well known to all journalists, actual and aspiring.

“This whole expedition started in my head man, I was the one that thought it up, wow, wouldn’t it be far out, you know, and I packaged it and sold it to the university cause that’s my thing see, I’m like an entrepreneur you understand, it’s my thing, and I ran the field expedition too, out in the southwest, I ain’t exactly at liberty to say exactly where you understand, and we got a lot of diggers and man we dug it, but iike the army was hassling us, so we all like — this is far out — we all dressed up like Indians, man, to fool the army so they wouldn’t hassle us. But like we didn’t fool the real Indians, so we had to split. Then he smiled again, smiley smile. “But not before we got the hip.” He smiled just one more time. “Dig it.”

“And now you want it back? But it was given to Anderson, it is a gift,” Trish told him.

“I dig it,” Edsell said, “but it’s not my trip. I’m like representing the university. They like own it. It’s very valuable, man. It’s the original hip.”

“Who told you that?” I spat, no unhip cat am I.

“Nobody had to tell me,” he said, his face losing some of its fracturous color. “I knew it. I made the tests.”

“You made the tests?” I perservered. “What do you know about fossils?”

His face was rapidly rivaling the refrigerator for the kitchen’s whitest white. “I know, I know,” he said softly. “I’m a rock critic. It’s my thing.”

I had him just about where I wanted him, but somehow I couldn’t think of how to get him any farther. But I knew I had to press on, the questions didn’t matter, only asking them.

“How old are you anyway,” I snatched.

“Sixty-eight,” he said, but he was really fifty-four. Then he pulled out his secret weapon, an index finger. “Dig it, I’m with you, I got all Anderson’s records, they’re really far out, but I gotta get that bone back, man, we need that bone. We know what to do with it see and we can do the most good with it, man, we’re equipped for it, we gotta have it, can you get behind what I’m saying? We know what we’re doing and what we’re doing is really far fucking out.”

It was obvious none of us knew how to deal with this star spangled refugee of the plus white future. There was but a moment of indecisive silence before the Magna Vox crackled in a creative heat and socked us to the middle room with a tremendous thumping blast. Hear! -Comes the judgment!

“GIVE THE OLD DOG HIS BONE,” Magna commanded, sounding a good deal like Burl Ives.

So that was settled. The tall tantric taxidermist from the university said he would send a man around in the morning to pick up the original hip and take it back to the institution from whence it fell.

Everybody seemed happy with that solution, or relieved since nothing really changed. Anderson washed his hair and sat down at the piano with Trish perched happily on his knee. Meanwhile in the front room, Trish’s hand was inside my pocket, touching the world’s touchiest hip. “So soft,” she sibilated. “So warm.” Somehow I felt that our ritual had been escalated.

Happy as we were then, the man who was supposed to pick up our famous bone on contention the next morning didn’t come. He didn’t come the day after either. Rather than bore you with further gestures of consecutive sequence, I’ll just say that it was nearly several months later that we found out why.

Trish and I were in the kitchen again, having escalated twice already that morning, when who should burst in but Cotton Bother, the country music fan of ill repute? I don’t know, but it was he, all pistachio with excitement and sunburn.

“Hey, you folks don’t still have that smelly old bone around here now do ya?” he asked with profound hope of a negative answer written all over his ruddy puss.

“It’s on the piano,” Trish said. “They never came to pick it up. How come?”

“Holy pencils,” he said, stamping his forehead with a forepaw. His language understandably alarmed us.

“What’s wrong?” I said, the steel in my voice going from ingots to frazzled wool.

Bother summoned up all the courage and articulation fried chicken and apple tarts had permitted him.

“Do you remember me telling you about a man who came to check the hip with something like a geiger counter?”

“Yes,” I said, hoping my clairvoyance was nothing but mistaken static. “You said it looked like a geiger counter.”

“A simile,” Trish added helpfully.

“Well,” he giggled and gagged. “Turns out it was a geiger counter." He heh hehed some more. “Seems we was digging in the vicinity of some underground atomic tests. Probably why the army was buzzin around most of the time, only they didn’t bother us cause we were dressed up like Indians.” He turned to Anderson. “I still got the feather I wore and I’d be much obliged if you’d accept it as a gift from a true blue fan of yours, I swear it. Why that new song of yours—”

“The hip,” I said, a bland insistence. “Why haven’t they come back for the hip?”

He looked at me, looked at Anderson at the piano, couldn’t quite make himself look Trish in the eye, possibly because she was naked from the cigarette in her mouth to the ashes on the floor. He looked back at Anderson, squared his head and spoke in a decisive whine.

“Mr. Modrion, I’m awfully sorry to have to tell you this, but you are in possession of the oldest surviving radioactive hip in captivity.”

Anderson didn’t say anything. Anderson wasn’t there. He had just left to go out hunting. Instead, we heard the Magna Vox resonate with its longest speech on record, backed by a bass guitar and a country piano and a lot of crackling.

The original hip

just gave me the slip . . .

So out of the whole messy matrix Anderson Modrion and his friends had acquired a radioactive hipbone which continued to sit around his apartment being lethal, and the author’s share of a hit record. Tit for tat. Naturally, Trish had a party to celebrate and nearly everyone came.