NYC
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The fiction writer at my left had been replaced by a guy from my workshop.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.
I followed Joe’s tour through his mass email updates, which read like an enthusiastic travelogue—he was always falling in love with some small American city, encouraging everyone to pack up and move to Austin one day, Missoula the next—and through his phone calls, which struck a different tone. He called when he was lonely, once every week or two, late at night. He’d begin with gripes about sleeping arrangements and other realities of their underfunded tour, and then we’d transition into talking about the new Walkmen, the new Flaming Lips, the new Cat Power. We talked until we were murmuring sleepily, and then we fell asleep. He had started to feel almost like an imaginary friend; in the morning I couldn’t remember how much of our conversation I’d dreamed. The idea of seeing him in person at a loud, raw rock show seemed exciting, like it would reactivate some portion of me I was starting to miss.
The night before the Interpol show I bought a pair of scissors at Duane Reade and cut bangs at my bathroom mirror, which sounds like the beginning of a cautionary tale, but was actually one of the most subtly powerful decisions of my life. For the first time since puberty, I felt like my face looked correct. A tentative happiness clicked into place as I inspected myself from every angle. I liked New York, I remember deciding in that moment. I liked working at home, then slipping out anonymously into a loud, churning world. It was just two different flavors of aloneness, but they complemented each other: when I had maxed out on solitude, the city made me feel observed and alive. I nodded firmly at my face in the mirror and went to bed.
In a prolonged trickle of communications, it had become clear that most of the classmates who’d said they’d gotten tickets had just meant to get tickets, and that the only ones attending the show would be me, Nomi, and Harrison. We met after lecture and walked to the subway as if we made perfect sense together. I was wearing clompy boots with black tights and no jacket because I didn’t want to carry it throughout the show, a California logic that rendered me dangerously cold.
Harrison was from the Pacific Northwest and claimed to be friends with Modest Mouse. He had ’90s heartthrob hair, floppy and sand colored, a prominent Adam’s apple, and a pale blue handkerchief always hanging out his back pocket. I knew girls liked him, but he wasn’t my type—or more accurately, I found his nervous tic of constantly pulling his shirt away from his neck to be uniquely repellent—and Nomi was out of his league, which gave an air of pointlessness to our trio. They were both older than me, like almost everyone in the program, hovering somewhere just under thirty. Nobody had told me you were supposed to go to grad school at thirty.
“My friend Joe is opening at Webster Hall tonight,” I said. We were holding the same center pole, Nomi’s elegant hand on top, my stubby one on the bottom, Harrison’s tattooed knuckles in between (a punctuation mark on each finger). “He’ll get to the Bowery as soon as he can.”
“Is this the guy you write songs with?” Nomi asked.
I was hoping she’d forgotten. “I mean, yeah, I help him out,” I said, which sounded crushingly lame. “Sometimes.” As if that made it better.
“Don’t you want to see his show?”
“He’s playing in Brooklyn tomorrow, I can catch that one.”
I thought Harrison was ignoring us until he said, stooping to look me in the eye, “Is he any good?”
“Extremely,” I said, and looked up at him. “Is your fiction any good?”
Nomi laughed.
“Seriously though. You seem like the king of the fiction boys, but I’m just basing that on, like, the Lion’s Head. Our view from the cheap seats in nonfiction isn’t great.”
Nomi nodded vigorously. “What’s your vibe? Bukowski? Denis Johnson?”
He smiled and stuck two fingers in his T-shirt neckhole, gave it a quick tug.
“The Beats,” I guessed. “Not Kerouac, too obvious, but—”
“Richard Brautigan,” Nomi finished.
“Sure,” I said. “Yes. Never actually read Richard Brautigan but I can tell by your confidence, Nomi, you have nailed it.”
The train stopped and a big group shuffled out, creating room for Harrison to move off our pole. He leaned near the doors, folding his arms, watching us. When we didn’t say anything else, he feigned surprise. “Are you done?”
Nomi groaned. “Oh no. He’s about to tell us he writes true crime or something.”
His eyebrows did a little dance. The train stopped again and he flattened to let more people off. Then he leaned toward us. “Love stories.”
Nomi looked at me. “Bukowski,” she said.
—
It was my first time at the Bowery Ballroom. We used the opening act to drink Jack and Cokes and find the bathroom, then Interpol took the stage and it was perfect. Almost disappointingly perfect, in that it was everything I’d expected it to be: the lights, the deafening volume, extended but otherwise note-for-note renditions of almost every song on the album. We lost Nomi a couple songs in; she liked standing near the back because her height blocked the view for other people, even though she wasn’t much taller than Harrison. Joe did not appear in the crowd, nor on my cell phone screen.
“Don’t opening acts usually end at the same time as each other?” I shouted at Harrison between songs, halfway into the set. We were so close to the stage now I could see sweat dripping from the guitarist’s chin.
“What?”
“Just wondering where my friend is. Don’t shows tend to have like, the same schedule?”
He shook his hair out of his eyes. “As soon as you told me this plan I thought no way that dude is coming.”
The opening guitar chords of “NYC” started, quietly at first, then momentarily drowned out by cheers. Disappointment descended on me—I had so wanted to share this with Joe—but I forced it away. Maybe it made more sense to experience this song with a fellow New Yorker. I threw a look of anticipation Harrison’s way and he caught it, returned it. And in that moment, I got what the girls saw in Harrison. I still couldn’t have articulated it; I understood it only with my body. My shoulder seemed to move magnetically toward his arm as we swayed to the music, until finally it stuck there, my sweater against his leather jacket. A thick cloud of pot smoke wafted by and we both inhaled it.
The final crescendo built longer and louder than on the album, until it felt like we were endlessly suspended inside the song. Everyone onstage was singing. Everyone in the audience was singing. Our bodies were all touching by now, one giant organism, surging toward the stage. I closed my eyes.
One of the singing voices was quiet, a murmur in my ear: Harrison. He was behind me now. My eyes flew open as I realized the pressure I’d felt at the small of my back for the past few seconds was him, and now it wasn’t just pressure but a repeated jabbing, in time with the song. An arm snaked around my collarbones. I tried to jerk away, but another arm braced across my pelvis, locking me in like one of those metal bars in a roller coaster car.
The singer sang the same line over and over, the album title line, “turn on the bright lights.” The thrust moved lower, under my skirt. It was clear that he had removed himself entirely from his jeans. His kneecaps bent into the backs of my legs. A bright spotlight swept over us and I looked around wildly as if someone would see what was happening, but of course nobody was looking at us—they were looking at the band. I grabbed the waistband of my tights in case he tried to pull them down, but he didn’t. He just went at it over the Lycra, faster now, no longer keeping time with the song. I widened my stance to create space and then I thought maybe I shouldn’t, friction would make this over faster, but then he put two hands on the sides of my thighs and jammed my legs together so I didn’t have to make that decision and then it stopped.
The song was over, a home chord sustained. He bit my ear lightly, licked the lobe. “You are amazing,” he said. “Seriously, I fucking love you.” Something like that. And then: “The way you were moving, I was like, okay, wow, why not.” A chuckle.
The band started playing the lead single and the people around us freaked out, but he just kept hugging me from behind like a boyfriend at the big game. How had I been moving, exactly? At the reading, Nomi had said I was dancing when I thought I was standing still.
“Where’s the…stuff?” I shouted. I couldn’t think of what to call it, of the current parlance. I kept thinking of a Neutral Milk Hotel line about semen-capped mountaintops.
“Oh, babe, I wouldn’t do that to you,” he said.
I twisted around to see him, and felt a strange recognition upon seeing his face, like it had been someone else back there before. I looked at our feet, but it was too dark, and wet with spilled drinks anyway. I felt my inner thighs: my tights were dry.
His eyes flashed. “Don’t worry about it.” He extended the arm, an invitation. I remembered the handkerchief in his back pocket and thought I might throw up.
“Bathroom,” I said, and began fighting my way through the bodies, prying apart tangled limbs. Finally the density loosened and I saw Nomi’s head above the others.
“There you are,” she said with a relieved smile. “It’s a sausage fest up in here.”
A lanky dude standing next to her slunk away. I took his place and faced the show, waiting for it to be over.
—
Afterward Nomi got on a train to Brooklyn and I had just started walking across town to the 1/9 line when Joe called.
“So sorry,” he said. “We were the second opener, it turned out, and everything started late. Is Interpol done?”
“Yeah.” I was walking fast, keeping warm. He was just a couple dozen blocks away but his voice sounded far.
“Sorry. I caught them in Philly anyway. Awesome, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, so where are you?”
“I’m walking to the subway. I decided I’d rather do a long walk than transfer at Union Square but I’m kind of regretting it now.”
“What? How do I meet you? I’m in the Village.”
I sighed. “This isn’t Berkeley, Joe. It’ll take some time for you to get down here and I’m not sitting in a bar waiting for you. I dressed like a damn teenager tonight.”
I heard a long honk on his end, street noise. “Are you saying you don’t want to meet up?”
“I can see you tomorrow, right?”
“Percy, I—I had planned on staying with you. Should I not have done that? Just for one night—we drive to Boston after the show tomorrow. I have music to show you, and hotels are crazy expensive here.”
My head hurt. The final chord of “NYC” was like a razor blade embedded in my frontal cortex.
“I mean, whatever,” he was saying. “The guys are staying in Brooklyn with someone I sorta know, I could crash there—”
“Joe, it’s fine. I’m going to give you my address, okay? Just meet me there. Take the one or nine uptown to 116th.”
By the time I got home my feet were numb from cold. I changed into pajamas and was soaking my feet in a shallow, scalding bath when the buzzer rang. I answered with my sweats rolled up above my knees.
The sight of him was an instant salve. “Perce,” he said. He leaned down to hug me. Same old peacoat and worn-soft Levi’s, same strong, warm arms. But his face looked stubbled and tired, and he smelled like showers were hard to come by.
He pulled back. “Wow, you look good,” he said. “What’s different?”
“Gee, thanks,” I said. “Bangs. My room’s this way.”
His eyes widened when he saw the room. “Efficient.”
“Fully furnished by Columbia. I use the kitchen to make coffee and sandwiches, otherwise I am right there, all the time.” I pointed at the wooden desk where my laptop waited.
“There’s a couch somewhere, though, right?”
I shook my head. “The living room has a door, so we sublet it to a med student. She’s probably asleep.”
He started to laugh. “Oh man, I’m sorry. I’ll sleep on the floor.”
I nodded. “Okay. Thanks. It’s hard to explain but I feel this very strong need tonight for, like, space around my body.” I tried to laugh, but that was taking the performance too far—it came out sounding comically fake.
He dropped his bag and stood quietly for a minute, shifting his weight onto one leg. “Did something happen, or something?”
I shook my head, but I felt my chin wobble. I knew I couldn’t tell him. I hated it too much. I hated the way it made me look, and I hated what I knew he would say.
“Percy,” he said. “What happened.”
My face got hot. I was close to crying, and the only way out was anger. “I’m sorry, is this another promise you forced out of me? Am I required to tell you everything about my life?”
He took a step backward, stumbling over his backpack. “No—sorry.”
I took a breath, then another, steering myself back to an equilibrium. “It’s okay.”
He nudged the backpack out of his way and looked at me. “That whole promise thing, I know it was only—what, two years ago?—but it’s like remembering the thought process of a child.”
I pressed my fingers against the razor blade inside my forehead. For fuck’s sake, I thought—tonight? “I’m over it,” I said. The dismissiveness in my voice surprised me, as if his rejection had been some minor blip in my life, and I could tell it surprised him too, because he was standing there with a frozen expression, like he wasn’t sure whether to say the next thing he’d planned to say. “Let me get something to put down so you’re not just sleeping on a hardwood floor,” I said briskly, and left.
In the bathroom I locked the door and allowed myself to cry. It made me feel better. It was no big deal, I realized. I was lucky. Nothing had actually happened, really, nothing with ramifications, nothing like other stories I’d heard. Just me and my tendency to incite terrible sexual experiences. At least I felt confident I would not be inciting another one here, tonight, in my depressing apartment. I swallowed four Advil and two melatonin, washed my face, and returned with two towels. Joe was looking through my CD piles.
“Your music is like an old friend,” he said, opening up a jewel box.
“You have a Discman, right?” I shuffled down in bed and hugged a pillow. “Will you be okay? I’m sorry, I’m happy to see you, I’ve just got a headache. Catch up tomorrow?”
I rolled over without waiting for a response. I heard him leave the room, wander around the apartment. Some muffled talking from the kitchen, meeting one of the roommates. I wasn’t sure which roommate. It didn’t matter. They were strangers to me. I couldn’t seem to relax the muscles in my face, around my brow and my mouth. I tried to picture my whole face melting which worked temporarily, but minutes later I could feel the muscles migrating into fighting position again, taut and aching.
I must’ve dozed off eventually because I awoke suddenly to the sound of “Let Down.” It was so loud I sat up in bed, ready to yell at someone. But there was no music. Joe was asleep, fully clothed, splayed out like a crime-scene outline on my white bath towels. I was glad to see him and hated him for being there in absolutely equal measure.