Deep Cuts, page 9
I spent the afternoon grooming and plucking, as I’d done the first time, then assembled an outfit I now remember as try-hard and culturally appropriative, hoop earrings and all—I never knew what the hell I was doing with clothes. He picked me up from my apartment in his same old maroon Honda Civic. I wedged into the back seat between two friendly dudes, and we drove over the bridge to a dark, clubby venue across the street from a floodlit grocery store.
The show was good, a trio of young, energetic rappers stalking a small area of concrete just a few feet from us. They would later add a female vocalist with a six-pack and climb the Top 40 with some of the worst songs ever written, but that was years away. Neil brought me a Long Island iced tea, a whole pint glass of liquor that I assumed was beer until I took a gulp and nearly choked.
“Isn’t that your drink?” Neil shouted in my ear.
I’d forgotten: for a brief time, when I was first learning to socialize, I had appreciated the efficiency of the Long Island iced tea. One and done, I used to say. “I’ve grown up,” I shouted back. The next two drinks he brought me were clear and short, but strong.
On the drive home, it was just us, so it seemed I had sent the signals I had wanted to send. He put on a Pavement tape, remembering it correctly as our only musical common ground. He went too fast over the Bay Bridge and excitement mingled with my nerves.
“You know the last time we spoke?” I said, grabbing the handle above the door. “I think it was some awkward exchange about a condom.”
Streetlights through the window lit his face in bursts, one after the other. He changed lanes without a turn signal. “No, I think it was me yelling down my stairwell after you—‘Come back! What the hell?’ ”
“Oh god. I’m so sorry.”
He shrugged. “I didn’t sweat it. You were a freshman.”
“Sophomore.”
“Still. You’re a senior now?”
“Yeah.”
He made a gesture like this proved his point, and we didn’t say anything else. That he didn’t seem to want any more information about that night seemed odd to me, but Neil had always been odd. He merged onto the 80 and the car sailed north toward Berkeley. An IKEA sign visible from the highway teetered and spun; I was drunk, which I noted with satisfaction.
Both our roommates had people over so we did it in his car. He had a condom in the glove compartment, wedged between tiny tubs of old-school Blistex, which explained a lot about the way he always smelled, cool and medicinal. He cranked the driver’s seat backward and I got on top of him. It hurt just as bad as the first time we’d tried, but I forced myself to get through it. I imagined the pain obliterating my past, each thrust sending a black ink splotch over another memory, another childhood fantasy. When this is over, I thought, I’ll be wiser. When this is over I’ll be harder.
But it kept hurting afterward, after he pulled up at my house and said, “Maybe I’ll see you next global catastrophe!” and I stumbled up the stairs into my house, where I immediately decided I did not want to be. I tried to take my Discman for a bowlegged walk, but made it only two blocks before I lay down on the sloping lawn of a fraternity house, sore and nauseated. I rolled onto my side and hugged my knees.
OK Computer was the CD in my Discman, a time capsule from a year earlier. I had been in a Radiohead phase under the influence of the Rasputin staff, a portion of which was so obsessed with the band as to be incapable of discussing anything without steering the conversation back to their albums. Had I really not played OK Computer, or even used my Discman, all year? I realized it was true: I almost always listened to music with Joe now, or on my boom box while I studied, letting it fill all my space. It felt good to hear songs so privately again. I let myself be cocooned in OK Computer. Nobody paid me any mind when I threw up a little, sending a stream of Long Island iced tea trickling down to the sidewalk. Briefly I dozed off and had an insanely unsubtle dream in which my vagina split open as I walked, causing a whole bloody spectacle on Telegraph Avenue, children screaming, men fleeing.
I awoke to the album’s fifth track, “Let Down,” which sounded so perfect I played it again. Louder this time, so loud it hurt. I had a sensation of the song coming from inside me, the wailing weirdly my own. With complete certainty I decided the song was a retelling of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, which I had just read for class—all that imagery of transformation, bugs on the ground, hysterical and useless, growing wings. Wings are typically a coming-of-age metaphor, I knew—they signified freedom, the ability to finally explore beyond yourself. But wings could also be useless. Wings could make you a grotesque.
I played the song again and it gave me the strength to stand and start walking home. I felt the pain subsiding the deeper I went into the song, the more dark layers I heard. I thought about how it must feel to be Thom Yorke, to have created such a perfect exorcism of one’s own misery, to be able to perform it whenever he wanted. Of course, Kafka had done it too, with mere words on a page, and even though that made the work less powerful—I’m sorry but it did, it just did—it was still something. I turned the volume down. I could put words on a page. Maybe I could learn to do it better. Maybe now that I’d been split open, made wiser, my words on a page could get closer to music.
New York
Bag Lady
I fell in love with Erykah Badu’s “Bag Lady” in the fall of 2002 at a Columbia University literary reading, where someone had chosen an assortment of neo-soul to accompany the cheese and crackers and wine in plastic cups. It was a Wednesday night, twenty minutes past the stated start time, and nobody was reading yet. We were supposed to be mingling but I didn’t come to these things to be social; the lights were too bright. I came to get out of my apartment and maybe hear an idea, some nugget or way of turning a phrase, that I could bring back home and fold into my own work.
When I heard Badu’s voice, I brought my wine to the window and looked out at another stately building like the one we were in. Even from a foot away I could feel the coolness of the windowpane, refreshing in the overheated room. My hair, reflected in the glass, looked messy. I took a sip of wine and let it lie on my tongue as the background vocals advised me to “pack light”—to let go of anger, resentment, all the emotional junk we drag around.
Had I packed light, coming to New York? I believed I had. I was fresh out of undergrad and starting over, alone again; there were days I didn’t use my vocal cords. But now I could see the beauty in that.
The song’s sinewy guitar sample rose above the small talk. I finished my wine and grabbed another. When I returned to my window a girl from my nonfiction workshop was there, waiting for me, it seemed: the former model who wrote about fashion.
“Oh, hi, Nomi.”
She smiled warmly. “I love how you’re just standing here dancing in the corner of this stuffy-ass reading.”
I felt my cheeks go hot. “No. Was I?”
“There was discernible swaying.”
I grimaced, but she was still smiling. Nomi wrote well-researched pieces about clothes that I found a little boring. She seemed friendly and good-natured—odd for a writer, not to mention a model—but her comments in my margins bordered on cruel: “Why are you so obsessed with this sentence structure?” “This made me laugh, not in a good way.” I liked her.
“I was just marveling at how light this song is,” I said. “The sound of it. Weighed down by nothing, you know?”
Nomi listened for a minute and nodded. “The song makes you feel the way she wishes you’d make yourself feel.”
“Yes!”
She leaned a hip against the window frame. By her own description, in a piece she’d submitted to workshop, she was “Black with a Chinese grandma”; she’d been discovered as a child in a mall while buying back-to-school clothes with her mom, a scene so classically ’80s it would sound made up if it weren’t for her body. Nomi’s body was like the guitar sample in “Bag Lady”: a clean, elegant line that went on and on. I attempted to smooth my hair in the window.
“You hear about those two?” she said, nodding at two poets laughing conspiratorially.
“Yeah.”
“I wasn’t expecting it to be such a meat market here,” she said. “So not what I signed up for.”
“Me neither,” I said forcefully, surprising myself.
“Oh yeah? Why not? You’re young. You got someone?”
“Nope,” I said. “Just, you know. Packing light.”
She clinked her plastic cup against mine. Her fingernails were free of polish but had clearly been groomed and shaped by a professional. Mine were chewed and sprouting hangnails.
My cell phone vibrated in my bag and I reacted swiftly, holding it up to the light to see the name in green-gray pixels: Joe. I answered in a whisper and told him I’d call him back in an hour.
Nomi wore a smug look on her face.
I shook my head and laughed, though it sounded forced, and pressed the end button repeatedly. “No, he’s just my best friend. My songwriting partner, actually.”
She raised her eyebrows.
“I mean, collaborator,” I amended. What was I saying? Words were running out of my mouth.
“That’s cool,” she said, and looked out at our classmates. “Writers are not natural collaborators. Which makes writers’ workshops an odd experiment, don’t you think? Maybe that’s why everyone’s making out. We don’t know how else to help each other.”
I laughed nervously. The song had ended, but I was still thinking about it. “Sometimes I wish writing had more opportunity for collaboration,” I said.
“Not me. The solitude is my favorite part about writing.”
“Actually…”
“What?”
I was thinking that my attempts at collaboration were all tied up with my baggage. Funny Strange had been picked up by a respectable indie label and I’d bought it eagerly at the Virgin Megastore, but its songs came loaded with so many memories, I could hardly listen to it. And my old Ring Finger writings just made me think of Zoe, of the times I’d seen her on campus senior year and the awkward nods we’d exchanged. When the zine went defunct after graduation, I’d packed all my issues into an accordion folder and sent them to Indiana.
“I was just thinking about the Erykah Badu song,” I said. “It could be about being a solo artist, in a way. Shedding that baggage of needing other people.”
“I love that idea. But doesn’t she make it all about finding a guy, in the end?”
I had to confirm this later, finding the song online that night in my sparsely furnished room. Nomi was right. The problem with your baggage, the song seemed to say, is that no man will want you. It wasn’t Erykah’s fault—this was normal for the time, the clear undercurrent of every empowerment message in the mainstream. I found it deeply disappointing even as I related to an awful seed of truth inside it: that all my attempts to grow, to find creative independence and purpose, were at least partly in service of becoming more lovable.
Screw that, I thought, closing my laptop. I was a New Yorker now.
NYC
Turn On the Bright Lights by Interpol was the official album of the Lion’s Head Tavern on 109th and Amsterdam. By the midpoint of that first semester, I was spending several nights a week there, and had identified the fiction writers as my preferred pool of casual acquaintances. My nonfiction brethren were a tougher bunch—the memoirists no fun, the journalists too busy—and only a couple ever came to the Lion’s Head: Nomi, though she always left early to get back to Brooklyn, and a food writer who brought lime wedges to the bar to make the PBR more palatable. We liked the Lion’s Head because PBRs were a buck fifty, two with tip. Most of us had taken out federal loans to get our MFAs, and the idea of ever having money for nice things was as irretrievably lost to us as our innocence.
One of the fiction writers, a guy named Harrison who had dozens of small, unrelated tattoos on his arms, had somehow gotten Turn On the Bright Lights on the Lion’s Head jukebox. He was rumored to have purchased this favor by going down on a bearded bar manager in the stock room, but you couldn’t believe everything those fiction kids said. God I loved that album. Everyone did that year. Either you’d never heard of it or you loved it. We’d all bought tickets to the show and set list predictions were a legitimate topic of conversation.
One night just after the weather turned from cool to heinous cold, I sat at a long table full of a dozen or so fiction writers, listening to the whole album track by track. When “NYC” came on, I muttered something about it being the least derivative song of theirs, the most unique to our own time and place, which was met with agreement, even though it seems insane to me now that anything on that album could evoke any time or place but 2002 New York.
“You’re the music writer,” someone said, just as the outro was peaking.
The fiction writer at my left had been replaced by a guy from my workshop. I waited until the song ended, then nodded. “You’re the food writer.”
He took his baggie of lime wedges out of his pocket. “Guilty as charged.”
I shifted my body slightly away from him. But the people on my right had started talking about Faulkner.
Now he was shaking out a red powder onto the rim of his beer. “Chili,” he said, noticing me watching. “It’s meant to be done with Mexican beer. But the way beer is mass-produced these days, there’s very little difference between a Pabst and a Tecate, other than branding. Even a Singha is pretty similar.”
“Doesn’t the branding matter, though, a little?” I asked. “I bet that would taste better if it were a Tecate and you were in a Mexican restaurant.”
“Probably,” he said. “But it’s better than drinking straight Pabst.” He handed me the can, pushing up his glasses while he waited.
I took a swig. “Yeah, that’s delicious.”
“Sorry I said ‘guilty as charged,’ ” he said as he took the beer back. “I’ve never said that before, and I shan’t be doing it again.”
I laughed. He’d said “shan’t” ironically, I was pretty sure. His affect was such that it was hard to tell.
“Tell me,” he said. “Why does everyone love this band so much? I’d never heard of them until I got here.”
“Nobody had,” I said. “This is their debut, and it came out right when we all arrived.”
“Ah. Does that make it particularly meaningful to you?”
“Meaningful”: what a word. The truth was, New York and Turn On the Bright Lights were so deeply connected to me that I could not form an opinion about one without forcing it to be true of the other. The album’s sound was dark but shiny, like Times Square. Living in New York made you feel heavy and lonely but full of promise, like listening to those songs. You get the idea. There were times I felt fully inside of both the city and the album, peering out at the world through gorgeous layers of light and sound; and there were times that I felt outside of both, an audience to two great spectacles. Did I really relate to the tortured drama of these songs, so affected, so male? When I walked these famous streets did I really belong, or was I an accidental extra in someone’s short film? 9/11 was still fresh enough that people talked about where they’d been that day, their hundred-block walks; I felt almost ashamed of my cozy day in Berkeley with Joe.
“Yeah, it makes it super meaningful,” I said.
“So should I buy the CD, then?” the food writer asked.
I looked at him. He always had the same frank, relaxed expression on his face. I felt a refreshing sense of not needing to impress him. “Viraj, right?”
“Raj.” He shrugged. “Or Viraj. I tried to go back to that for a while, but there’s an element of laziness, of not actually caring very much what people call me, so I just—Raj. Sorry.”
“What kind of music do you like, Raj?”
“Mostly old stuff, if I’m being honest,” he said. “Sam Cooke, Carole King. My parents assimilated me and my sister by shopping the dollar bin at the record store.”
I laughed. “Carole King’s Tapestry is the best record that is always in the dollar bin.”
“We had three copies. My mom kept forgetting she’d already bought it.”
“When I worked at record stores we kept dozens in stock, and they’d always sell. Maybe it was all immigrant moms thinking, ‘Oh, look at this nice white lady, she will teach us America.’ ”
He leaned back in his chair. I realized first that there would be no in-depth analysis of Carole King songs, and then, after a moment, that I had been glib and rude about something quite profound: a mother using music to help her son belong.
“Did it work?” I said. “Did Tapestry assimilate you?”
He laughed. “What do you think?”
“I think she should’ve sprung for a Run-DMC cassingle.”
“Probably. But then I wouldn’t have become who I am, which is a grown man who sings ‘So Far Away’ in the shower.”
“Well, I’ve heard enough,” I said. “Don’t buy Interpol. You might like the new Neko Case?”
He retrieved a Moleskine from his pocket and made a note. He had a Band-Aid on one forefinger. “Thank you,” he said, and used the Band-Aid finger to scratch his closely trimmed beard.
I missed Joe. It always came like this, a hard stab, dissipating slowly. I checked my phone.
* * *
—
Caroline, it turned out, was scheduled to be in town the night of the Interpol show. It would be the first time I’d seen Joe since they’d driven their swollen van out of Berkeley back in early June, halfway through finals week, nine credits short of his degree. Zoe had left shortly after for some save-the-world job in Africa without saying goodbye; I wouldn’t even have known if I hadn’t run into one of the Ring Finger girls while selling clothes at Buffalo Exchange, days before my own departure.
