Deep Cuts

Total Hate ’95

The first time I heard Zoe’s loud, lispy voice was on my answering machine, when she invited me to a Ring Finger meeting. I went to her apartment at the appointed time, the night before everyone left for Thanksgiving. She lived in one of those boxy ’70s buildings with sliding-glass doors and bikes on the balcony. The idea was to use the long weekend to work on our contributions for the next issue, but I’d come prepared with my No Doubt piece, the printout still warm in my Dickies bag. I wore my thick-soled Mary Janes because they were the closest thing I had to platforms.

Zoe greeted me warmly. “Joey loves you!” she said in that voice. If there was any complexity behind this statement, any resentment, it didn’t show. We hugged, and I smelled the astringent hair product keeping two tangled mounds of hair high on her head.

She sat on a black tufted couch and two girls alighted besideher. Each wore a heavy studded belt on low-slung pants. Another girl and I found spots on scattered pieces of IKEA furniture. Joe wasn’t there; it was later revealed he’d gone to San Francisco to see a friend’s band. Everyone discussed their travel plans for the long weekend, their one- or two- or six- or seven-hour drives. When I said I’d be staying in town, there was an awkward silence, like they were trying to figure out how to express sympathy without sounding condescending. It occurred to me in this moment that the printout in my bag might actually be quite terrible.

When it was my turn, I handed it to Zoe, hoping nobody noticed my shaking hand. The two girls next to her on the futon bent their heads next to hers, and the third scrambled to the arm of the couch, peering over their shoulders.

No Doubt Is Fucking Good

Oh shut up. I’m tired of being impressed by how much you hate No Doubt. Because before she was a red-carpet gazillionaire Gwen Stefani was fucking rad, with a voice like an ambulance siren and the stage presence of a prehistoric beast. Take “,” from the self-released album The Beacon Street Collection, whose cover appears to feature a black-and-white photo of Phil Collins swallowing a bright yellow canary and should thereby prove my point that this band is magnificent, no? PHIL COLLINS SWALLOWING A CANARY. Think of the implications. (There are probably no implications.) (I am also not positive it’s Phil Collins.)

“” features a classic ska breakdown sung by Bradley Nowell, pre–heroin overdose, ofthe band Sublime. I KNOW I KNOW YOU HATE SUBLIME EVEN MORE THAN YOU HATE NO DOUBT. And his part does include the line “Sublime rockin’ No Doubt stylie,” which is indefensible. (Doesn’t it seem impossible that someone with a heroin addiction could say “stylie”?) But listen to those horns. Listen to Gwen fucking owning this whole giant mess of musicians, the control in her voice, the rich contempt. Listen to all the guitars in the chorus, a descending seesaw of the crunchiest chords that make even me want to mosh, and I am not a mosher, never been a mosher, my boobs are too big.

Listen to something unexpected for once, something uncool, far from the college playlists. Listen just for yourself.

Listen to the great big beautiful FUN of it all. Ska was the fun side of punk, the reverse image of grunge, and of course MTV chewed it up until it was a big shiny wad of flavorless gum on the underside of a picnic table, but let us not forget the fresh stick it once was. Please. Get your hands on this song somehow and play it loud, pogoing on your childhood bed until your hair is filled with popcorn ceiling, please.

The girl on the arm of the couch looked up. “Uh, okay. Aren’t we more, like, underground than No Doubt?”

Zoe considered this. “I think she addressed that in the first sentence.”

The girl glanced down and rolled her eyes. “Fine. Still. The whole tone just feels weirdly…corporate?”

“I said fucking three times,” I said, trying to keep my voice light.

She gave me a side-eye. “Okay, I’m not trying to be a cunt here, but just the fact that you said that. Like who cares how many times you said fucking?” She looked down the length of the couch for agreement.

But Zoe’s eyes were on the page. “She’s calling us out, though. I like the flippant attitude, the all-caps freakouts, the energy of it. It’s different for us.”

The consensus aligned with Zoe, as I sensed it often did. She nodded and stuck the paper into a folder.

“Any notes, going forward?” I said. “Longer, shorter?”

She looked at the girls, then back at me. “It’s a little slight. Silly, even. Fine for now, but you can go meatier next time.”

“I would love to go meatier,” I said, and our eyes locked for a minute. My obsession with your boyfriend is largely platonic, I said telepathically. I swear she nodded slightly.

—

It was my first time skipping my family’s Thanksgiving, having finally achieved a level of stability at school that revealed flying home to be the waste of time and money it had always been. I had told my parents that Megan had invited me to her house in Sacramento, leaving out the minor detail that I’d turned the offer down.

It wasn’t a terrible Thanksgiving. I blasted music and ate cereal out of unwashed bowls. I made my way through Megan’s collection of magazines and Sex and the City DVDs, consuming them simultaneously with the tiny portion of my brain required for each. And I worked on my next column for Ring Finger . In order to go “meatier” without sliding into the navel-gazing attempts I’d hidden in my Archives folder, I was trying to layer in more sociopolitical commentary—not my specialty, but I’d absorbed enough from two years at Berkeley to push out a subtly pro-Nader piece on Sonic Youth that did not, looking back, age well.

My mom called me on speakerphone in the lull between dinner and pie. She and my dad ranked the turkey against the turkeys of years past, apparently for my benefit, and my brother detailed the various affronts that had been made to the house in our absence: A sewing table in the living room! A duck-shaped throw pillow on the couch! I feigned indignance, playing our long-standing game of uniting against our parents on inconsequential matters just to have something to talk about. He and my dad were being good, sitting at the table instead of the couch, but they were clearly listening to some big game because I was in the middle of describing the incongruously warm weather in Berkeley when they gasped in unison and scraped their chairs away. Mom took me off speakerphone.

“Get any gossip?” I asked, referring to my brother, who was a serial monogamist at the southern college where he played football.

“The Victoria’s Secret salesgirl has gone past tense, but I didn’t ask for details,” she said. “How’s school? Did you get that Hamlet paper back?”

“Yeah. A.”

“Ah.” She was always miffed when I didn’t get an A-plus, disappointed not in me but in the professor’s inability to recognize her daughter’s genius. “Should you put Megan’s mother on the phone, maybe? So I can thank her?”

I knew this wasn’t a real offer—she was just waiting for me to say no, that’s not necessary—but it made me feel caught anyway. “I didn’t go, in the end.”

“Honey!”

“It sounded more awkward than staying here sounded lonely.”

She paused, then said, “I understand that.” I knew she would.

—

The day after Thanksgiving, Joe and Zoe called with orders to come visit their suburb. “Not optional,” Zoe piped into the receiver Joe was holding.

I wrote down the name of the train stop and began ping-ponging around the apartment, getting halfway dressed before remembering I needed to shower, applying makeup and then wiping it off. On the way there I listened to “” on my Discman to psych myself up, and it worked: I felt an amount of excitement that bordered on the absurd.

From the platform at the station I could see them in the parking lot, sitting on the hood of an old sedan, smoking. The lot was framed by blue glass walls of office parks, low purple mountains in the distance. I imagined growing up with such easy access to Oakland and San Francisco and felt both jealous and disdainful. It seemed too easy.

I clattered down the cement steps so fast I tripped, but nobody saw. My black jeans absorbed the blood from my knee politely.

They drove me around to chain restaurants and donut shops and the 7-Eleven where they had spent their Saturdays pouring vodka into partially consumed Snapples. The streets were so wide they felt like freeways. The conversation kept returning to whether Joe should do a set at some open mic (Zoe was anti, not wanting to see the crowd of high school friends that would be there; I was pro, with the motive of seeing Joe sing “Somebody Said” for an audience). In a booth at Macaroni Grill, Zoe told Joe about my column.

“My favorite part was when you said you can’t mosh because your boobs are too big,” she said, spooling spaghetti around a fork. “I’m hoping you do more of that stuff—that’s what zine culture is all about.” She had a way of going concave when she talked, her shoulders leaning into her words to give them more force, her sternum receding. “Telling our own stories. Things people can’t know unless they’re in your life, in your body.”

Joe nodded. “I definitely have never thought about how it would feel to mosh with boobs.”

“Me neither!” Zoe said, laughing.

“Boobs hurt,” I said. We were all talking loudly over the noise in the place, which was packed with a mix of families and middle-aged couples in their date-night finest. “Why does nobody ever talk about this? I have been made aware of the pain a man feels when he’s kicked in the nuts since I was probably seven.”

A teenage-boy waiter arrived to deliver our second round of specialty cocktails, which were startlingly bright, each a different primary color (mine was red and tasted like Robitussin).

“Exactly!” Zoe said. She felt herself up, causing the waiter, who was clearing our first round, to blush into his acne. “Even mine hurt right now, but that’s because of where I am in my cycle.”

“Fat week?” I said, and Zoe nodded. “I’m in skinny week.”

“?‘Fat week’?” Joe said.

The waiter paused as if waiting for an answer, then scampered off.

“We get all bloated and our boobs swell,” she explained, then turned back to me. “Although I’m increasingly taking issue with the way we refer to the miracle of ovulation through a male gaze. You know every time you talk about your body like that, you’re playing into the capitalist patriarchy’s hands, right?”

My brain reeled. This kind of question would become standard a couple decades later, when the world caught up to Zoe Gutierrez, but it was brand-new to me then. Even the “fat week/skinny week” terminology had been new to me, picked up from Megan just days earlier; I was showing off my college-girl talk. The truth was I rarely thought about my body at all, let alone spoke about it. I saw Joe’s eyes flick up from his plate to my chest, so quickly he thought he got away with it.

“To be fair,” I said, straightening, “why do you think our boobs swell while we’re ovulating? All of human physiology is built for the male gaze.”

Zoe pretended to choke on her pasta. “Jesus, what are you saying?”

“I’m saying I like to argue when I drink,” I said.

“Are you a constitutional originalist too?”

“I’m a constitutional McCartneyist.”

Joe leaned in. “As in, Paul over John?”

I made a face. “I hate being asked to choose, like they’re New Kids on the Block or something. Talk about playing into capitalism. That attitude sells merch, but it has nothing to do with music. They’re both geniuses who made each other better in ways we’ll never know—”

“But you just said McCartney’s in your constitution, ” he said.

“I think I said I would interpret the constitution through the lens of McCartney.”

We watched each other enjoy the absurdity of this idea.

“If we’re back on music,” Zoe said, pushing aside her plate, “I have to say, No Doubt still sucks. I’m sorry, but I listened to that ‘Total Hate’ song and it made me throw up in my mouth.”

“That’s cool,” I said. “Do you think that’s because you have no taste, or…?”

Joe whooped.

“Or maybe because that song is fun, and you take yourself too seriously?” I said. “Just spitballing here.”

Zoe sat back, her eyes narrowing under her painted black lids. “You are truly annoying, Percy.”

“I know,” I said. I took a slurp of my cocktail. “Don’t worry, I hate myself.”

“I don’t hate you,” she said.

“Me neither,” Joe said. “I love you, actually.”

“I’m just annoyed by you sometimes,” Zoe finished, shooting Joe a look I couldn’t decipher. “There’s a difference.”

“I’m mostly annoying when I talk about music,” I said, shrugging. I was drunker than the two of them, who’d been trading off driving duties. “But that’s also when I’m at my best, so.”

Zoe tilted her head at this, then surprised me with a considered nod. “Bit of a dilemma,” she said. She held my gaze for a long second and then laughed.

I thought about saying I love you too Joe—the words were ready and waiting, banging on the roof of my mouth to get out; I would say them in a jokey tone, just like he had, no big deal—but I was too scared of ruining what was happening. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t ruined it already, that they were both still smiling at me, their faces warm, open, wanting more.

—

We ended up at the open mic. It was a sprawling bar pretending to bea dive, wood-framed velvet paintings tacked on the wall at intentionally disheveled angles. There seemed to be an informal reunion of old friends in town for the holiday. Joe was swallowed by tall-people arms, and Zoe pulled me into an alcove by the bathroom with one round table and a lone chair.

She sat on the table and pointed at the chair. “Sit with me.”

“Why?” I peered out at the crowd. He seemed more comfortable around these people than he did at Berkeley. I wanted to be out there, observing him in his habitat. But I sat in the chair.

“Everyone loves him, but he doesn’t love them back. He just pretends to. Lately I can’t stomach it.”

“He was popular in high school, huh?” I said. “It’s actually impossible for me to imagine what that would be like.”

She swung her feet a few times, boots kicking the wall behind us, then looked down the length of her nose at me. “You can have him if you want.”

I swallowed. A hot clang in my groin.

“I’m serious,” she said. “Not now, but when we break up.”

I didn’t know where to start. What? Why? When? “How do you know he wants me?” I finally asked.

She rolled her eyes. “Come on,” she said. “You’re his musical soulmate, and you’re cute. Dudes aren’t that complicated.”

I peered into the main room, where someone’s set was ending to distracted applause. Joe was standing against the back wall with his acoustic strapped on, waiting. I felt the urge to run to him, to seize my chance—like it would be too late once all these people had seen him sing.

Zoe was watching me with a knowing look. “Don’t be intimidated,” she said. “His bar is pretty low after five years dating a dyke.”

I stood. What had she said?

“Sit down,” she said. “This is why I hate telling girls, they always think I want to make out. Do you want to make out with every guy you know?”

I became unbearably thirsty, my mouth gluey with the residue of suburban drinks. Joe was stepping up to the mic. “Why haven’t you told him?”

She sighed. “I promised him I’d never leave him. I know what that sounds like, but…you’ll see, if you stick around long enough. You’ll get to know him.”

“I’m sure he doesn’t appreciate being lied to, though?”

“I’m not lying,” she said hotly. “I’ve been on my own journey too, dude. Last year I told him I was bi, to which he was like, ‘Cool, whatever.’ Then in the summer I basically told him his dick makes my skin crawl, and he was like, ‘Okay, let’s snuggle.’?”

A weird burp of a laugh escaped my mouth.

“Recently, finally, the Ring Finger girls started talking and it got back to him, which was…clarifying, I guess.”

Somebody said you said it was over. “So he does know,” I said, understanding.

“It’s just a matter of sawing off the limb. I said we’d wait until he was ready—first it was going to be after Thanksgiving, now we’re saying after winter break. You know his dad is a shit show, right? Real classic alcoholic. Joey spends holidays at my house, most weekends too. I can’t keep doing that once we break up. I’ve been very clear about that. But it’s hard.” She leaned back against the wall, looking suddenly tired. “It’s like I’m orphaning him.”

All this information was making me claustrophobic. “I’m gettingwater,” I said, and left the alcove.

Joe was on a small stage in the corner of the main room, midway through a gorgeous song that I thought for a staggering moment was an original, until I overheard someone identify it for a friend as “Strangers” by the Kinks. I stood by the water station and watched. His voice sounded a bit timid, but still managed to rain all over the place, clean and cool. He had given up trying to extend the mic higher and resorted to stooping. People were listening more than they’d listened to the last singer, although that wasn’t saying much.

Zoe came up beside me and tucked my hair behind my ear so she could speak directly into it: “You’ve been good for him,” she said, as he transitioned into the opening to “Somebody Said.” “Thank you.”

This bothered me, like I was a stuffed animal handed to a child in crisis. “I mean, I also helped him write this song,” I said. “Maybe thank me for that.”

“Oh fuck off, Percy,” she said, and refilled my water glass for me.

We went back to Zoe’s parents’ garage with a six-pack and Luke Skinner, a long-haired dude in a Metallica shirt. He seemed to be a vague acquaintance, judging by the fact that they called him only by his full name, but he’d made an impression on Joe that night when he’d bragged about spending eight hours a day practicing guitar while Joe wasted his life at college. Zoe and I played ping-pong while Joe sat on an old blanket-covered couch and watched Luke Skinner perform what I realized was an audition, strumming capably on an unplugged Telecaster. When he ripped into the lead riff from the Pixies’ “Here Comes Your Man” and maintained it for a full song length without rushing or fumbling, Joe turned to look at me over the back of the couch. I nodded.

Luke Skinner tried to turn the night into an inaugural jam with his new bandmate, but Zoe wasn’t having it and sent him home on Joe’s old skateboard. We watched him from the open garage as he sailed down the hill, wind lifting his hair above the guitar on his back. Joe’s eyes were bright.

By this point I had missed the last train, so we all slept together in Zoe’s childhood bedroom. Without much discussion I took the floor and the two of them shared the bed. But when I woke up, I found I had been moved to the bed with Zoe, and Joe was in my spot on the floor, apparently attacked by chivalry in the middle of the night. He was stretched out on his back in a holey undershirt and boxers, his mouth partly open. The boxers had tiny Christmas trees on them.

I made my way to the bathroom and rummaged through a medicine cabinet for Advil. Through the thin wood-paneled door I could hear CNN—hanging chads, Broward County—and Zoe’s parents making coffee. Her mom was Jewish, but her dad was Mexican, and I had spotted a decorative crucifix in the living room. The whole house teemed with layered, nonsensical clutter; in a basket on the bathroom counter, for example, I could see a pamphlet about state parks, a small bag of safety pins, and an old five-by-seven photograph, unframed and creased in the middle. It comforted me, this mess. It made the house feel like a proper family lived here, one with better things to do than clean.

“Joey likes it black now,” I heard Zoe’s dad say through the bathroom door.

“Since when?” came the mom’s reply. “He used half-and-half last time. I’ll run to the store.”

I plucked the photo out of the basket. A younger Joe and Zoe stood in front of the mantel holding up their Christmas stockings, still full—lottery scratchers stuck out of the tops of each, a rolled-up poster in Joe’s. Zoe was wearing a Nevermind T-shirt and plaid pajama bottoms, and hadn’t yet come into her punk look; her hair hung straight and black to her collarbones. Joe was smiling with a teenager’s self-awareness, eyes mid-blink, a zit on his chin so big I could feel the ache of it. I was starting to piece together the timeline: after his mom’s death, Joe had survived for a year while his dad spiraled; then he’d gotten together with Zoe and become, effectively, a Gutierrez. An uninformed observer of the photograph would’ve thought they were siblings.

I slid the picture back into the basket and washed my face, then stared at myself in the mirror. I was cute, Zoe had said. Was it true? I wasn’t completely oblivious, like that girl you see in movies who inexplicably perceives herself to be a bridge-dwelling troll when actually she’s Molly Ringwald—I knew I was neither, and probably closer to Molly than the troll. But I had factors working against me when it came to guys: I was obnoxious, I was inexperienced, I didn’t play the game. And I’d never zeroed in on any one style, as Zoe had done so well in the years since this photograph, which made me feel recessive in the context of my peers, a vague smear of a girl. But maybe Joe saw me clearly, the way some people can look at an abstract painting and instantly discern the figure. Maybe it was actually going to happen for me. I shuddered with happiness and a splitting headache.