Deep Cuts

Hey Ya!

Hey Ya!

The summer of 2003 in New York was dripping-wet hot, I guess like always, though I swear people said it was especially bad that year. I was waitressing and trying to write, when I wasn’t camping out for Shakespeare in the Park tickets or sitting at outdoor tables of restaurants drinking well margaritas with Raj. He had a job key-wording New Yorker cartoons for a searchable database. I don’t think either of us got any real writing done all summer.

I remember it as the first great summer of my life, like an urban version of a Beach Boys song, although I recently found a journal we’d kept together that evidenced a more realistic story. I’d forgotten the thing until I saw its worn red cover: we’d started it as a jokey little diary of what we seemed to know would be a summer worth remembering, but it quickly became an all-purpose notebook, filled with phone numbers, doodles, inside jokes, and notes left for each other that we would not tear out but just leave sitting there in the book, splayed open.

June 19: Today we went to 125th for a street fair but it was already over, so Raj got a shirt at Old Navy. I said, “Should this lame day go in the journal?” Raj said we do not keep things from the journal.

1. Cancel NY Times subscription

2. Get a job

Things Percy thinks I’m bad at: wearing shorts, cooking without making a mess, covering my toes in public, talking about music, owning my word choices, eating for satiety, communicating plans with sufficient advance notice, reading subway maps, telephone etiquette. Things Percy thinks I’m good at: lighting.

My job search has ended in success; for more details see “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now” by the Smiths.

July 16 or 17 or 18: Today was like every day in that we worked our respective jobs but then Percy had the idea to take the subway down to Chumley’s for a nightcap, around the corner from which we heard a man on drums “makin’ omelets,” as he called it, and singing “Who’ll Stop the Rain.” He had perfect posture and a rear-to-front comb-over.

Rajie! I know I said I’d stay home and write but my talents appear to have waned. I went for a walk or something. Meet at Nacho Mama’s at 6:00?

July 17: Despite now having a job, I woke up this morning feeling terrified of money and I couldn’t shake the feeling. All day I spent like this, terrorized by the money I’m borrowing from my future to attend this ridiculous writing program. But then on my way home from work, on the bus, I met a woman who had just had a brain tumor removed. They tipped her head on its side and drained all the fluid out, so her brain fell smack against the side of her cranium, then they filled it back up again. Only half of her face could tell me this. The other half was just a stone-cold badass staring at me.

Presently Percy is reading Didion in bed with her shirt off (hot). While I am looking forward to my roommate returning so he can contribute to the rent, the ramifications in the area of shirtlessness concern me.

I like Raj’s face the way I like the feel of his barely capable AC blowing on my sweaty skin: elementally.

Percy! Gone campus-ward (hot in here). Call my cell if you want to have coffee or a drink or just company. Sorry I called you dramatic. You are, but so is life.

August 10: Today we talked about how we have no friends here this summer except each other and what that means for each of us. I had good friends in LA and I miss them, I miss them desperately, and I miss my family, whereas Percy does not miss anyone except Joe who is a loser so whatever. But then we got some food from the grocery store and I cooked it up and we ate in bed whilst reading. Then we drank a very dry rosé and assembled a playlist of summery songs. We have a very pleasant time together, that’s the thing about this.

He made me feel so good. He went down on me after dinner as a matter of routine. One time he got under the kitchen table, crawling up between my legs while I finished my glass of wine. I learned what he liked too, and did my best. Occasionally he asked if I wanted him inside me, and I always told the truth: I did not. I wore a backpack of guilt about this, but he never said anything. We gave each other a lot of space, emotionally.

The blackout in August is absent from our notebook, but a highlight in my memory. I had just gotten back to Raj’s apartment after working a lunch shift and was sitting in front of the AC window unit, drying my sweat, when the unit stopped working. Slowly I realized everything had stopped working. People were spilling out into the street. Ten minutes later, the landline rang: Raj would make his way uptown from his key-wording job and we would meet on Broadway and 113th. I waited there for hours, just talking to strangers, watching the spectacle, eating a pint of ice cream that had been thrust into my hand by a bodega worker along with a plastic spoon. An older man I recognized from campus, maybe a professor, was directing traffic in the middle of the intersection, laughing at himself. People were standing on the backs of delivery trucks, hitching rides like garbagemen. Raj finally arrived and we embraced ecstatically. At a small grocery on Broadway, we were allowed to take anything frozen, along with sweating bottles of cold water. We loaded up and walked back to campus, where we sat on the steps of Low Library in the pitch-dark eating melting Choco Tacos and deli meats. I heard a woman say to a friend, passing by on College Walk, “It’s like September eleventh but fun,” which seemed like something that would never, ever be said again. It made me want to write a song, an inverse of “Bay Window,” about the specific camaraderie of New Yorkers in moments of anarchy.

Cell towers became functional again as we sat on campus, and our parents called with all the stories they’d seen on the national news: commuters trapped in the subway, overheating grandmas from here to Pittsburgh. There had been no way for us to get that information at the time. I felt retroactively scared. “It was caused by drooping foliage,” my dad reported through the phone. “They think,” my mom added, on the extension. “Also maybe a bug in the alarm system.”

I looked at Raj, my eyes wide. I didn’t have speakerphone on, but it was clear Raj could hear my parents; everything sounded louder in the complete darkness. “There but for the grace of drooping foliage and a buggy alarm system,” Raj whispered. My mom said who was that, and I said nobody.

I liked a lot of popular R I wanted an excuse to dance to “Hey Ya!” on a loop. He agreed, because summer was ending and people were coming back into town, and he wanted to make appetizers.

—

The morning of the party I got my first-ever text from Joe: some hipsters in bklyn r paying us 5k to play their wedding!! labor day wknd- be my date? I miss u.

I hadn’t spoken to him since he’d left for Europe. I was copied on his mass email updates, according to which he was both physically and mentally exhausted but having fun, meeting people, grateful for the opportunity, blah blah. In every email he seemed to be restraining himself from whining about why Caroline’s popularity overseas wasn’t translating back home. There were fewer photos and travel narratives than his domestic tour.

He’d been on my mind lately, in the context of the collaboration between the two members of OutKast on the new album Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, which fascinated me to the point that I read every magazine that featured them—often standing in the subway station newsstand, missing my train so I could get to the end. Best friends and partners since middle school, André 3000 and Big Boi were growing apart musically, and this latest release was the most striking illustration of the rift: a double album that was basically two solo albums, each with its own title and lead single. André and Big Boi weren’t in the studio at the same time; they didn’t even sing on each other’s tracks. But the label insisted both albums be credited to OutKast. And in interviews, no matter how much they griped about each other, it was clear they still saw themselves as a team. A maddening, dialectical union. They needed each other, if only as listeners to their own solo work—that crucial first ear.

I loved this idea. I’d been blabbing about it to poor Raj for days. How many more Beatles albums could we have gotten if they’d taken this approach—if they’d set each other free but kept lending their ears? John would’ve forced Paul to step up his game on his first solo album; Paul would’ve tempered John’s self-seriousness in the mid-’70s. Speakerboxxx/The Love Below seemed quietly revolutionary to me, in this way, a new solution to the age-old problem of the ego in artistic collaboration.

I’d been thinking of Joe in this context only abstractly, the way I always thought about him when I thought about songwriting. But when that text came in, the connection sharpened instantly in my mind: I had never responded to the CD of fragments Joe had left me. I’d listened once, and had plenty to say about it, but then I’d met Raj and shoved the CD into a low drawer. I had refused to give Joe my ear.

I decided to deal with the text and this revelation later. I was busy buying booze and putting toothpicks into tiny stacks of food.

We invited only nonfiction writers and a few poets to the party. This was not just an effort to exclude Harrison, whom Raj hated even without knowing our history, but a genuine desire to pack the place with our nonfiction family. I’d developed more of a liking for them as I’d realized that nonfiction was for people who felt about something, anything, the way I felt about music. But the fiction writers came anyway, waiting until the party was in full swing and then trickling in two by two, Harrison among the last of them. By then he was easy to avoid, a dance I’d perfected by this point, even though he always pretended—or believed—that nothing even slightly inappropriate had happened between us.

“Hey Ya!” was requested anew with each arrival, so we must’ve played it a dozen times. What a jam that was. Within weeks it would be so overplayed it would sound like nothing, but that summer, whenever it started I felt like someone had tapped my spine with a hammer and activated an entirely new sensory system in my body. I loved how it started at ten out of ten, no time to waste. I loved that the lyrics, for those who listened, were about the impossibility of love, the inevitability of heartbreak—but just fucking dancing in the face of it. I loved the extra 2/4 measure that kept you on your toes. “Hey Ya!” was the first time I learned that I liked to dance; I wasn’t sure if I was any good, but I liked how it felt. Raj’s one move was a glorified walk, small steps taken on the beat, hands raised to fighting position. I found it indescribably cute that night. He weaved between the sweaty bodies of our classmates, filling drinks, sharing bites.

People were starting to leave when Joe called my cell phone, which I’d put in my jeans pocket in case anyone had trouble with our building’s buzzer system. I went into the bathroom and answered on what must’ve been the last ring.

“Joe! Hi! I’m hosting a party!” I saw myself in the mirror, flush with flavored vodka and OutKast.

“Oh, sorry,” he said. The connection was bad. “Is that why you didn’t respond to my text?”

“What?”

“I texted you.”

“Right, sorry, I meant to respond. I hate texting!”

“I can’t believe it’s been so long that—entirely new method of communication.”

“Hah, right.”

“—in a week.”

“Sorry? You’re going to be here in a week?”

“Yeah—come?”

“Yes, I can come to the wedding.”

“—you?”

“I can’t really hear you.”

“Can I stay with you?”

I watched my mouth open and close in the bathroom mirror. “The Way You Move” was starting outside the door. The connection cleared up.

“Percy?”

There he was. Now he sounded almost too close. “I have to tell you something,” I said. I thought of how a woman would phrase it in a movie, a real woman with a career and high heels. “I’m seeing someone.”

“Oh,” he said. Long pause. “I wondered, when you didn’t text back. Is it serious?”

“No,” I said. I glared at myself in the mirror. “Maybe.”

“So you’ll come to the wedding but I shouldn’t stay with you, is that what you’re saying?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I guess that’s what I’m saying.”

“Okay,” he said. “The wedding is at a hotel, and they’re comping our rooms, so I can just stay there for the first night anyway. Not sure how long I’ll stick around in New York, but I can figure somethingout.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Percy, I miss you,” he said, suddenly sounding intense. “I’ll see you in a week, okay?”

I went back out to the living room and sat next to Nomi on the couch. Raj was in the kitchen with the fiction writers, including Harrison. I told her about the phone call.

“Ooh, city wedding!” she said. “Do you have anything to wear?”

“No,” I said. “I gave my dresses to Goodwill. But I’m just the plus-one of the wedding singer, does it really matter what I wear?”

“Yes it matters what you wear,” she said, offended. “Dressing for weddings is one of the great joys of life. Lucky for you, my apartment is basically a giant closet with a bed in the middle. Stand up?”

I stood.

She put a hand on my hip, lightly turned me. “I have just the thing. Black Prada, too short for me.”

“Can I wear a bra with it?”

“Yes, actually.”

“I don’t know what Prada means, other than fancy. What if I spill on it?”

“I don’t care if you throw it in the East River. It’s a gift that doesn’t fit.”

I sat back down and got comfy on the couch. I miss you, he had said. Twice. “Raj will be weird about me going.”

“I mean, don’t throw it in the East River,” she amended. “It’s Prada.”

“He won’t make a big deal about it, but he’ll be subtly weird.”

She sighed. “You couples are so boring. You were supposed to be my single friend—remember Erykah Badu?”

“Yeah, sorry about that,” I said.

She looked over at Raj, who had emerged from the kitchen and was handing out cans of sparkling water. “It’s like people who dress for comfort,” she said. “I don’t understand it, but I can respect it.”

“You’re too beautiful to understand,” I said. Raj proffered water to a drunk poet, then threw his head back with laughter when it was rejected. “Us mortals, we need someone else around to verify our existence. Make us feel worthy of being here.”

Nomi slouched down into the couch so the back of her head was next to mine. “One could argue models feel this even more, having been validated only for our appearance our entire lives.”

“Bullshit,” I said, and she laughed.

I took her hand. Instantly I was unsure about it—Zoe and I used to hold hands like this all the time, especially in these late-party moments, but maybe that wasn’t normal.

Nomi looked at our hands, let them sit there together a minute, and then she slipped hers out and folded it between her legs. I felt a small wave of embarrassment.

“Prada means intellectual,” Nomi said, and the wave washed away. “Clean, intellectual simplicity. It makes you feel feminine and powerful at once—a perfect fit with your bangs. I would advise a bold lipstick.”

“I’ll need to borrow that too.”