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They rehearsed every weekend in a space in Hell’s Kitchen. It charged a reduced rate of ten dollars per hour between eight A.M. and noon on Sundays. They arrived at eight, because rehearsing their set took forever. The songs were hard to memorize or tell apart. She had slept with Simon eight times and heard him refer to her in public as his “ex” on at least ten occasions. To compound her embarrassment, he was still her roommate. They lived in an overpriced doorman building on Bleecker near the folk clubs and Italian bakeries, in the eastern part of the West Village known to gentrifiers farther east as “Little Jersey.” A flimsy drywall partition divided what had once been a one-bedroom apartment into a one-and-a-half. Simon had the half bedroom. It was too cheap. He would never, ever move out voluntarily. She was out of town a lot for work, and every time she got back, she could tell he’d been sleeping in her bed. They were not friends. She hated him. They were both on the lease.
JOE ADDRESSED HER HAIR ISSUES FIRST THING WHEN THEY MET. “YOU’RE GREAT-LOOKING, except for your hair!” he said. “I love your body. It’s so elongated. You have an incredible-looking mouth. Your eyebrows are moody, like you have a romantic soul. You should wear liquid eyeliner and have long hair all the way down to your butt!”
This was after he’d known her for not even ten seconds, or five. He’d tapped her on the shoulder while she was standing in line for fifty-cent coffee from a cart.
“That would take forever,” Pam said. “Hair grows, like, an inch every three months.”
“I don’t do math,” Joe said.
“Me neither, but if we call it a foot every three years, and it’s three feet from my head to my butt, we’re looking at nine years.”
“Nine years!” He patted his own hair thoughtfully. It was mousy brown and wavy, cut in an inverted bowl shape. “How old do you think my hair is?”
“You are quite the mutant,” she said, making so as to leave. She had ordered but neither paid for nor gotten her coffee. Before she could abandon him, Joe took hold of her arm.
She was in a mood to put up with it. She was at a cart on lower Broadway, buying weak coffee at four P.M., because she had been escorted out of Merrill Lynch for calling this one dickhead “fuckwad” in the presence of his subordinates. He had responded that he’d have her fired from RIACD. Immediately she had called Yuval, who observed that the term “fuckwad” is considered denigrating by members of certain ethnic groups, as in all of them everywhere, and she had yelled into Merrill Lynch’s house phone that if he ever invested a dime in marketing RIACD’s platform-independent programming language (her side project for slow days in the office), none of them would have to deal with dickheads like this fuckwad ever again. Then she had felt a strong hand gripping her arm. That had been half an hour ago.
Joe’s touch was a pleasant contrast. He was beaming as though he’d been looking for her all his life and finally found her, but in a somewhat disinterested manner, as though she were not the woman of his dreams but something less essential, like the perfect grapefruit. He appeared to be contemplating her.
“You shouldn’t be touching me,” she said. “You dig?”
He let go of her arm and took a step backward. To her dismay, he started chanting. “Yo! Mutant MC, keep off the lady, hot like coffee, she got the beauty—”
“Don’t be a goober,” she said, giving the coffee man a quick fifty cents and moving away from the cart with the hot liquid that would arm her against Joe. “Stop the rapping. Never rap. Or, should you feel compelled to rap against your own better judgment, don’t try to sound black.”
“But that’s what rap sounds like.” Saddened, he looked down at the sidewalk.
She almost felt guilty. She said, “I didn’t mean it that way. Rap if you want. Just not where anybody can hear you.”
“I’m actually a singer,” Joe said. “You want to hear a song? I write one almost every day.”
“Sure,” she said.
They walked north together, and he sang his tune du jour, loudly, with hand motions.
BEING AROUND JOE WAS RELAXING FOR PAM. THEY COULD TALK AND TALK, AND NOTHING she said ever offended him. Nobody picked on her once they saw him, and nobody could pick on him for long. If she got nervous walking without him, she would stop off and buy a cup of coffee. Hot coffee in a guy’s face will stop him deader than a bullet, long enough for a skinny girl in jump boots to get away.
II. (#ulink_df48d5db-e6c4-5025-9979-81fa8837f2c5)
Daniel Svoboda lived in a state of persistent ecstasy. He had no lease. His rent was a hundred a week in cash.
He was an eighties hipster. But that can be forgiven, because he was the child of born-again Christian dairy-farm workers from Racine, Wisconsin.
The eighties hipster bore no resemblance to the bearded and effeminate cottage industrialist who came to prominence as the “hipster” in the new century. He wasn’t a fifties hipster either. He knew nothing of heroin or the willful appropriation of black culture. He was a by-product of the brief, shining moment in American history when the working class went to liberal arts college for free. Having spent four years at the foot of the ivory tower, picking up crumbs of obsolete theory, he descended to face once again the world of open-wheel motorsports and Jell-O salads from whence he sprang. Eyes schooled on Raphael and Mapplethorpe zoomed in on Holly Hobbie–themed needlepoint projects and xeroxed Polaroids of do-it-yourself gender reassignment surgery. Reflexively they sought the sublime beauty and violence they had learned from Foucault and Bataille to see as their birthright, and they were not disappointed.
An eighties hipster couldn’t gentrify a neighborhood. He wasn’t gentry. His presence drove rents down. His apartments were overpopulated and dirty. Landlords were lucky if he paid rent. He wasn’t about to seize vacant lots for community gardens or demand better public schools. All he wanted was to avoid retiring from the same plant as his dad.
The eighties hipster was post-sensitive. Having risen from poverty to intimate acquaintanceship with political rectitude (for collegiate women, it was the era of lesbian feminism), he knew what sensitivity was. He internalized it. He put a fine point on it. His speech acts reflected his awareness that its possession made him part of a vanishingly small minority. He drew attention to everyday prejudice and injustice through overemphasis. Witness his habitual attention to the crimes of Hitler and Stalin or the ill-fated band name “Rapeman,” borrowed from a hero of Japanese comic books.
The eighties hipster practiced outward conformity in his dress and bearing. The mod, the glam rocker, the rockabilly, the punk, even the prep risked and defied the wrath of the homophobe, but the eighties hipster could get served a beer in the Ozarks.
The eighties hipster was the short-lived cap of spume on the dirty wave of working-class higher education, and it is right to mourn him, even if he did devote too much time to the search for authentic snuff videos and photos of nude Khoisan women.
ON A NOVEMBER SATURDAY IN 1990, PAM WENT OVER TO JOE’S PLACE TO LISTEN TO records. It was raining in sheets that whipped around the corners of buildings and blowing so hard that women in heels were taking men’s arms to cross the street. Cars were plowing bow waves through puddles of scum.
Joe had a visitor. As he was letting her in the apartment door, a man emerged from the bedroom with a square sheet of black plastic in his hand and said, “Hey, man, you have the Sassy Sonic Youth flexi!”
“I subscribed to that magazine the second I heard of it,” Joe said.
“It’s not long for this world,” Pam said, hanging up her coat. “What’s the demographic supposed to be—thirteen-year-old girls who fuck? Advertisers really go for that.”
“Nice to meet you,” the stranger said, stepping forward and holding out his hand. “Daniel Svoboda.”
“Pam Diaphragm,” she said. “Sassy is the dying gasp of straight mainstream pedophilia.”
“I read it for the political coverage,” Daniel said, satirizing the readers of Playboy.
“I first heard of it from a bald guy who does in-flight programming at Eastern,” Pam said. “So can we listen to this flexi?”
“I’m a Sonic Youth completist,” Joe said, taking the single from Daniel and arranging it on the turntable. “The only record I don’t have is the Forced Exposure subscribers-only single ‘I Killed Christgau with My Big Fucking Dick.’”
“That’s not a real record,” Daniel said. “Byron Coley made that up.”
Byron Coley was the editor of Forced Exposure and Robert Christgau was the chief music critic of the Village Voice, as Daniel did not feel called upon to explain to Pam. Nor did he find it necessary to tell her, one condescending beat later, that the record existed after all.
She found herself attracted to him. He had not asked her real name. His sophistication and knowledge seemed to resemble her own. She commenced phrasing a friendly remark. She put the brakes on. They say that you truly know a man only after you’ve seen him with his male friends, but this friend was Joe, who might not count. Furthermore, it had been demonstrated in empirical trials that a woman gravitates to the sexiest man in the room. Here, again, Joe was setting the bar low. She said instead, “It’s Christgau who’s a big fucking dick.”
“I wouldn’t go that far,” Daniel replied. “But you can’t grade music on a bell curve. Mediocrity is not the norm. Most records either rock or they suck.”
“I’m kind of over grades myself. Did you just get out of college?”
“Yeah. You should see my awesome transcript and GREs. That’s how I qualified to work as a proofreader.”
“I’m a programmer, but I never finished high school.”
“Silence, lovebirds,” Joe said, dropping the needle. “Prepare to rock.”
DANIEL LIVED IN AN ILLEGAL APARTMENT WHOSE EXISTENCE HE HAD DEDUCED THROUGH spatial reasoning. It was located above a shop on the edge of Chinatown, on Chrystie Street near Hester, facing a fenced-in, filthy park. Betwixt a dripping air conditioner and a sidewalk black with grime, Video Hit sold hot coffee, durian fruit, fermented tofu, one-hundred-film subscriptions to the latest Hong Kong action movies on VHS, lemon-scented animal crackers pressed from microscopic dust, fortune cat figurines, and introductions to local women whose photos blanketed the wall above the cash register.
It was his first inviolable space. Growing up, he had shared an upstairs room with two brothers. The three were close in age. One was a wrestler who wanted to be a doctor. The other was an adopted Somali epileptic with one leg. He couldn’t stand up to the wrestler, and with the Somali, he wasn’t allowed to try.
Technically it was a loft: high-ceilinged, unfinished storage above a retail space. It was accessible only through the store, which closed for five hours nightly via the lowering of an impenetrable steel gate to which he had no key. If he stayed out past one o’clock, he was sentenced to stay out past six. He was young. He dealt with it. The floor above his was connected to a jewelry factory next door through a hole in the intervening firewall. He heard footsteps in the factory at all hours of the day and night. Victor and Margie, his landlords, had tried putting inventory in the loft, but the floor sagged, and they didn’t want to clutter up their shop with a pillar. For storage they used the basement, accessible through a trapdoor in the sidewalk.
They were immigrants from Hong Kong. When he suggested they let him move in, they saw the offer as money for nothing. They didn’t want to rent to Chinese who would overpopulate the place. Daniel’s meek demeanor suggested to them that he wouldn’t cause trouble.
He’d been to rent parties in Soho, where a “loft” was a white-lacquered, vast-windowed domain of cleanliness and prosperity in a historic building framed in cast iron. His building was salmon brick, with wooden beams black from dry rot. You could drive a butter knife into his doorframe and turn it around. He guessed the structure was 150 years old.
His stairway was steep, and the door to it was narrow enough to be mistaken for a closet. On one occasion, soon after he moved in, a workman set down a new cooler and trapped him upstairs. It took serious yelling and pounding before Victor shifted it enough for him to go to work. He bought himself a fire safety ladder with hooks for the windowsill. When he was at home, he padlocked his door from the inside.
He assumed—romanticizing things a bit—that his trap-like secret lair had been set up for illicit activities and abandoned after a raid. From his first glimpse, he had taken away vague impressions of battered furniture and dusty slips of paper, which he looked forward to examining closely. By the time he moved in, the place had been swept and every portable object was gone, including the linoleum.
He installed a sink and a hot plate. He showered with a handheld, standing in a galvanized tub. He dumped the wash water down the toilet, which could always use a good hard drenching. On the street side, he observed blackout rules, with shades drawn during the day and opaque curtains at night. His rear windows opened on a small and sometimes sunny courtyard, miraculously free of garbage, cool and fresh, with no poisonous dry cleaners, no restaurants blowing rancid exhaust, and no living creatures but rats and pigeons. They squeaked and made coo-cooing sounds, but didn’t otherwise interfere with his life.
HE WORKED NIGHTS, PROOFREADING DOCUMENTS FOR A BIG LAW OFFICE IN MIDTOWN. The job required an eye for detail. He had trained his visual perspicuity for four years at taxpayer expense while acquiring a B.A. in art history from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. He knew there was such a thing as a job in his major, but unless he counted the college faculty, he’d never met anybody who had one. His superfluous college career could be traced to—or blamed on—a sexy substitute teacher who rambled on about art and revolution for two days in eleventh grade when their regular world history teacher had the flu. He never forgot her. At any moment, he could have improvised a touching essay about how he was first inspired by Mrs. Ellis to believe in a power higher than Jesus Christ.
But eleventh grade was too late to adopt the praxis of art and create a portfolio adequate to gain admission to some kind of secular humanist academy. He could play an instrument—the clarinet—but stiltedly, due to a lack of instruction and role models, and it had never seemed potentially useful to him for purposes of art music, which he naively understood to include progressive rock. He gave it up when he got to college, because he loathed spending his free time at parades and football games. Also he feared it was giving him buckteeth. He wasn’t vain, but—here, again, inspired by Mrs. Ellis—he sensed that he should hang on to what little beauty he had.
His good physical features were, in order of scarcity in the general population: broad shoulders and narrow hips; an attractive mouth (full lips, straight teeth, odorless); thick curly hair (dark brown). Not-so-good features: moderate acne scarring; incipient jowls; hairy feet; hairy back; hairy face (he had to shave all the way up to his eyes). Ambiguous feature: five feet eleven inches tall, a towering and uncomfortable giant among Asian immigrants and their furnishings, inconspicuous by the standards of Midtown or the financial district.
He never got his dream job at his favorite record store in Madison, but he regularly met musicians through his shifts at a Subway sandwich shop. By neglecting his studies, he was able to soldier his way upward through the hierarchy of the university radio station until he had a two-hour show on Monday mornings, shocking people awake with the Residents and Halo of Flies.
He had come to New York with $800 in savings expressly dedicated to the release of the seven-inch single that would put Daniel Svoboda on the map. Not as a musician. He wanted to found a record label.
By dint of his radio experience and strategic mail-ordering from ads in Forced Exposure and Maximum Rocknroll, he knew his single didn’t have to be so great musically. What it needed was reverb on the vocals, chorus on the guitar, and compression on everything else. The sound would be “warm” and “punchy.” The au courant midwestern sound was grunge with vocals lowered by an octave. The band posters showed nitrogen funny cars shooting flames. What he had in mind was something different: breathy female vocals over propulsive guitar drones, like My Bloody Valentine, only faster. The key element was the breathless woman-girl-child singer—a delicate, tight-throated slip of a thing, aspirating her lines like Jane Birkin on “Je t’aime … moi non plus” but buried under a mass of guitar noise. In terms of artistic lineage, she was somewhere between Goethe’s Mignon and André Breton’s Nadia. He was eager to know whether Pam could sing.
AT HIS SUGGESTION, PAM AND JOE MET HIM AT NOON ON A SATURDAY IN FRONT OF THE Music Palace, a large cinema on Bowery. It was getting close to Christmas. The streets were full of shoppers looking for bargains on the latest Chinese-manufactured goods, such as dish towels and those little plastic rakes and buckets kids take to the beach in summer. They bought a six of Michelob at the grocery store next door and hid it in Pam’s backpack. The theater was almost empty. A few men were sleeping toward the back and milling around the bathrooms behind the screen, recent Asian arrivals with nowhere else to go.
The double feature paired an action movie set in Mexico with a kung fu fantasy about medieval China. It ran all day and night. The action movie had already started, so they didn’t get to talking until the intermission. Pam, hoping to arouse Daniel’s curiosity, said how much she was dreading practice.
He said, “What kind of practice?”
Joe said, “She’s in this hard-sucking power duo that has no songs.”
“Like I always say, if you gotta suck, suck loud,” Pam said. “The Diaphragms have rehearsal space, a drum machine, and no pride. I’d make a speech tomorrow at practice and say it’s all over, but the bass player happens to be my roommate.”
“Ooh,” Daniel said.
“It’s hellish. And the worst part is we really do suck. I use so much distortion that all I have to do is look at the guitar and it feeds back. I loop it through a delay and play along with myself. Does it sound dumb yet?”
“Potentially. Can you play bar chords?”
“Are you asking can I play guitar? Yeah, sure. I can even sing. But there’s something about this band. I don’t want it to be good. I want it to suck, so Simon’s band will suck. It’s the most self-destructive thing I’ve ever done, and that’s saying a lot. I need to quit.”
Daniel hesitated. “I don’t want to be in a band,” he ventured, not sure he would be believed. “I truly don’t. You could say I’m more the camp-follower type. I like a certain kind of music, and I want to get people listening to it. I had a radio show in college. I want to start a label.”
“What kind of stuff?”
Joe interrupted them, saying, “Let’s have a band! We’ll call it Marmalade Sky. It’s me on bass, Pam on guitar, and you on keyboards. We all sing. We have three-part harmonies. We practice at your house. I write the songs. Prepare to rock!”
Daniel said, “You’re barking up the wrong tree, man. I can’t play keyboards. Maybe I could fake drums.”
“There’s too much drums in songs all the time,” Joe said. “You play keyboards.”
“I’m in,” Pam said. “Next stop Marmalade Sky.”
“So what’s my label called?” Daniel asked Joe.
“Lion’s Den, because of Daniel in the lion’s den.”
“That sounds like reggae, when ‘Marmalade Sky’ sounds like bad British psychedelia.”
“Together they fit how we’re going to sound, which is free dub-rock fusion.”
“He could be right,” Pam said. “He did without an amp for so long, he’s the Charlie Haden of punk rock. I mean, relatively speaking.”
“Pam’s the worst lead guitar player in the universe,” Joe said. “Her fingers move like it’s freezing out and she lost her mittens. But in Marmalade Sky, she plays massive power chords she knows how to play, and I play the tunes.”
“I play like I’m wearing the mittens,” she corrected him. “It’s the evil influence of Simon. He wants everything to sound like it’s been dragged through candied heroin.”
“He’s your roommate and in your band?” Daniel asked. “You must be close friends.”
“We’re extremely intimate.” She rolled her eyes.
“It sounds to me like you should cut him off and never look back. I mean, as a disinterested third party.”
“I didn’t mean to imply that he’s on drugs. There are more things at the bottom of the barrel than drugs.”
“Can you please play keyboards?” Joe asked Daniel.
“You truly don’t want to hear me try.”
“You have to,” he insisted. “We can’t have a band unless we’re all in it!”
“I want to put out the band on my label, not play in it.”
“It will be absolutely no fun being rock stars and getting laid and everything like that if you aren’t in the band. You have to play something!”
“It’s better money,” Pam pointed out. “A manager gets twenty percent, but as a band member you’d get a third.”
“Twenty off the top plus a third puts me at forty-seven percent,” Daniel said.
“And we make it all back from record sales and touring!” Joe said.
“I have a day job already,” Pam said.
“Me too,” Joe said. “I mean touring in the city.”
“What I have is more like a night job,” Daniel said. “But fine, let’s talk about how I’m going to hang it up because I’m raking it in with art for art’s sake.”
“We’re going to be rolling in it,” Joe said, as though reminding him of an established fact, “because I’m writing the songs.”
Daniel and Pam exchanged a look that said the band would fail no matter what, if only because Joe was writing the songs. There was a shared bemused affection for him in the look already. “You’re going to be the next Neil Diamond,” Daniel said.
“Hasil Adkins,” Pam said.
“Roy Orbison!” Joe said.
WHEN THE KUNG FU MOVIE WAS OVER, THEY GOT TAKE-OUT PIZZAS AND WALKED TO Daniel’s place to eat and listen to records. The first track he put on was “Suspect Device” by Stiff Little Fingers. Joe danced, throwing his arms up to jerk his body from side to side. Daniel put on Hüsker Dü’s “Real World,” Gang of Four’s “Love Like Anthrax,” and Mission of Burma’s “Forget,” until Joe said he was tired of dancing. He volunteered to sing a song he had written earlier in the day. Daniel and Pam exchanged the look again. Joe took a deep breath, clapped his hands to indicate a rumba, and sang, with so many North-African-style adornments that every syllable was stretched into three or four:
