Deep Cuts

Everybody Needs Somebody to Love

Everybody Needs Somebody to Love

We were listening to The Best of Wilson Pickett on the kitchen iPod dock. It was 2006 now, late spring. Melissa was out of town so I had Zoe to myself on a Saturday night, an event so rare I had overplanned for it, ordering her favorite deep-dish and buying the ingredients to approximate a complicated martini I’d had once at a hotel bar. I’d even gotten the proper glasses, though they looked out of place in our kitchen, whose bizarre lack of cabinets had prompted us to buy a metal shelving unit that encroached on the floor space and attracted objects from all over the apartment: paperbacks leaning against stacks of mismatched plates, airplane-issued headphones slung around a mug. We were nearing the end of the album and our second round when I casually mentioned Soul Night.

“It’s every first Saturday, so it’s tonight,” I said. “At the Elbo Room?”

“Soul Night,” Zoe snickered. “You can dance to Black music, kids, but just for tonight.”

“Come on,” I said. “I’ve only been there when I’m working, and it looks so fun.”

“But we’re having fun here!” She gestured to our milky drinks.

I confessed: I needed blog fodder. It had been months since my breakthrough “Mis-Shapes” post and my readership, which had grown steadily for a while, was stagnating. I’d tried leaning further into my job, got a backstage pass through a client connection—but I was just your basic music journalist back there, and too nervous to be a good one. It wasn’t my beat anyway; the space I’d carved out, among all the Pitchfork wannabes, was as a personal music blogger. I used the music to write about real life, pulling from a half century of songs instead of fawning over every latest indie breakout.

The problem was, I told Zoe, the personal part was hard to maintain. My audience wanted stories from the dance floor, not my introspective musings on lyrics. They didn’t know I was just a mole in their scene. I needed to get out there, for real.

“Fine,” Zoe said, downing the last of her martini. “But I’m not dressing up.”

I was. I knew what the girls wore at Soul Night: vintage dresses, toe-cleavage flats, lipstick, and messy hair. I wanted to be one of them, for once. I quickly changed into a spring-green polyester number I’d picked up earlier that week on Haight Street.

Zoe maintained an air of doing me a favor throughout the cab ride, the line to get into Elbo Room, and the slow ascent up the creaking wooden staircase behind the bar to the guy collecting our ten-dollar covers. But when we emerged into the party, she smiled.

“Told you,” I said.

It was just another upstairs venue space, but there was something magical about that room on Soul Night—like an old secret dance hall, long and flat and so teeming with noisy bodies it seemed illegal.

Zoe laid her palm on the red wall. “The bass is tangible,” she said.

I pulled her through the crowd to the bar in the corner of the dance floor. It was hard to know where the dancing ended and the waiting for a drink began; some people appeared to be doing both. We positioned ourselves near the back of the mass and leaned in.

“Frank Wilson!” I shouted at her, as a new song began. “In the UK they used to do these crazy athletic dances to—”

“I don’t need every song live-blogged, thanks!” she called back.

The crowd around the bar was even louder than the music. There was a couple in front of us engaging in high-intensity flirting, screaming things like “I knew you would love that song!” and then stomping their heels on the floor, their hands flattened against each other’s like drunken mimes. Behind us were two dudes, clearly a wingman arrangement, who were inching closer to us as though they could move the line forward through force. One of their chins kept knocking the top of my head.

“Zo?” I pressed my hand to my chest to tamp down a swelling panic.

She looked at my face, then at the guys behind us. “Back the fuck up,” she shouted at them, and her buzz cut probably went a long way toward the fact that they obeyed.

“Zoe!” Her friend Carlos was on the dance floor, waving and hollering. “And what’s-your-face! Over here!”

I nodded at Zoe—I needed to get out of the horde more than I needed a drink.

He introduced us to his date, who pulled us both into a weirdly long three-way hug. I tolerated it only out of a bold hope that she, or Carlos, might lead me into blog-worthy territory.

“She’s huggy tonight,” Carlos said, chuckling. He hadn’t stopped dancing.

I extricated myself from the hug. “Hey Carlos, have you heard anything new about Caroline?” It had been over a year since Carlos had told me, at Joanna Newsom, the album was nearly finished.

He looked confused. “Who?”

“Caroline!”

“Caroline Harmon? She’s in jail, dude!”

Zoe gasped, and then they were shouting at each other about some cheerleader from their high school whose life had taken a dramatic turn. Carlos’s girlfriend and I were left to dance together, except I wasn’t really dancing, I was sort of just bobbing my upper half and thinking about the music, some obscure track that sounded like it had been recorded through sweat-drenched microphones. The girl was grooving hard and grinning at me like we’d just had sex.

“Are you on something?” I finally asked.

“E!” she shouted through her grin. “Twenty a pop if you want some!”

Instinctively I shook my head. Then I looked at Zoe, who had clearly overheard.

“Sidebar!” Zoe announced, holding up her finger like a director pausing a scene. We stood cheek to cheek, speaking directly into each other’s ears.

“I’ve never done it,” I said.

“It’s fun,” she said, her breath hot in my ear. “We wouldn’t have to wait for drinks. You feel terrible afterward, though.”

“I heard it wrecks your immune system.”

“It does. I can’t believe you’re considering it. Is it because you’re looking for something to write about?”

“Yes. I can’t believe you’re considering it either. Is it because you’re trying to support my writing so I’ll quit my job?”

“Yes.”

We pulled back, smiling.

The girl gave us two small pills and a half-empty bottle of water, and we handed her two twenties. I swallowed mine quickly before I had time to think.

“Dude!” Carlos bolted out of a dance move and grabbed my arm. “You meant Caroline the band! Sorry! All I know is it’s coming out very soon—and that they booked a freakin’ late-night talk show!”

“Oh my god.” A vision of Joe on a slick navy stage dropped into my brain like a premonition: skinny tie, professionally tousled curls, a sexy half smile as he opened his mouth to the microphone. “Which show?”

He didn’t answer. The DJ had dropped the original “Tainted Love,” and Carlos and the girl had levitated to a higher plane of consciousness.

I turned to Zoe, feeling uncertain about the drugs in my body. “Is Joe going to be famous?”

She shrugged in an earnest, hopeful way, excited for her old friend, and led me deeper into the dance floor, where the music was clear and loud and incredibly physical. Movement was the point: the swing of the drums and the messy hand claps and the smooth horn shots and what they all did to the body. After a few songs my body began shedding the baggage of my mind, becoming only the physical manifestation of happiness: warm and loose and shot through with perfect energy. Zoe’s enormous smile bobbed in front of me, such a pleasing sight.

“I love your face,” I shouted, hugging her.

“I love your body,” she shouted into my hair.

“I was just thinking how I love my body!”

She laughed. “That’s high-person talk.”

“Definitely,” I said: my mind was clear. “But make me remember this later, okay? Because my body is amazing. It’s healthy and it understands music and I’m lucky to be inside of it.”

“I promise!”

They played Pickett’s cover of Solomon Burke’s “Everybody Needs Somebody to Love,” which we’d heard earlier in our kitchen, and we danced so hard to it, so closely, that a bead of sweat flew off her nose and into my mouth. They played “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” and the crowd thickened instantly, impossibly, but the mood was so joyful I didn’t mind, and anyway I had Zoe. Carlos appeared at some point with the kindest two bottles of water I’d ever seen, and then we needed to pee.

In the bathroom line we stood face-to-face, petting each other’s forearms. “Even a twelve-thirty talk show would be a big deal,” I said to her.

She gave me a look. “You haven’t mentioned him lately,” she said. “I’ve been wondering if maybe you’re, you know, over it.”

I considered this. “I do go days without thinking of him now. Or a day, anyway.”

“I hate to say this, Percy, like I really hate to say this,” she said. “But you may need a boyfriend.”

I grimaced. “The fervor with which I’m expected to pursue this boyfriend goal is so alien to me. Sure, it’d be nice to have what you have with Melissa, but I’d be totally okay if it doesn’t happen. Is there some gene I’m missing?”

“No,” she said, but her tone was unconvincing. “Whatever happened with that client guy?”

I sighed and leaned against the wall. I’d slept with three men since my night with Joe: a trendsetter from our panel, an activist friend of Zoe’s, and a brand manager for one of our clients. The trendsetter had lost interest in me halfway through our third date, abruptly and observably, when he realized I would not be a boon to any of his fledgling creative careers. The activist had hung around a bit longer, but was insanely busy with his job as a political staffer—he was my first encounter with a smartphone, with dinner-date pings and emails whooshing from bed—and liked prog rock to a degree that slowly revealed itself to be a deal-breaker for me. The client had been the most recent, handsome and insecure, and I wasn’t sure what had happened.

“I think I hurt his feelings,” I said. My last communication from him had been an emailed link to some expensive jacket he was thinking of buying online, with the message time sensitive q: cool hipster or burningman fixie? I had not responded. “My job does make dating weird.”

“Quit!” She said it like it had just occurred to her, like she hadn’t said it a hundred times. “You’re a music writer, not a—whatever you are!”

“Trendsetter intelligence specialist. A job I quite like. And freelance writers work long hours for peanuts, Zo—I have seventy thousand dollars in student loans.” I started shivering. I felt suddenly stiff and lifeless, as if the drug’s curtain had been pulled back. My jaw ached.

Zoe pulled me closer, rubbing my back for warmth. “I just want the world for you.”

I nodded against her neck. “I’m fine,” I whispered.

“Do you still—?” She pulled back to face me and wiggled her eyebrows. “With Joey?”

Joe’s hand materialized on my shoulder. “Sometimes.”

“Really?” She wrinkled her nose. “When you’re solo, or when you’re actually doing it?”

I ran my finger down the length of her nose, ironing out the wrinkles, admiring her face. Her new look was so spare: no hair, no makeup, just her long thin nose and straight dark eyebrows and skin so clean you could eat off it. “Both,” I admitted. “Is that terrible? But I make the fantasy very abstract. It still works if I chop Joe’s head off his body.”

She laughed and hugged me again. “We all have our tricks.”

It was our turn for the bathroom, and we spun our way in, still hugging, laughing. The curtain was dropping back down; my muscles were relaxing again to that perfect warmth. We enjoyed our hard-won allotment of time, chatting and checking ourselves out in a grease-streaked mirror.

Later, as we filed downstairs to enter the fierce competition of hailing a cab, I felt a rush of love for Zoe so strong it almost knocked me down the steps. Her fuzzy scalp bobbed just below me. What would I do without her? Was it okay to love someone this much who was not actually your partner? Was this why she wanted a boyfriend for me, because she couldn’t bear the burden alone?

The chill returned, but I willed it away. I felt a strange ability to control my thoughts, to push them around the room of my brain like furniture. I was grateful for Zoe: that was the feeling to focus on. No: I was grateful for the love I felt for Zoe.

—

At home Zoe went to bed and I dove straight for my laptop. I could feel the chill nearing again and I wanted my post to be infused with the ecstasy, not the comedown, and definitely not the day after. Zoe was picking up Melissa at the airport first thing in the morning.

But then I wasted the next fifteen minutes of my dwindling high googling “Caroline band” and “Caroline band new album” and “Joe Morrow new album.” No reviews or release date, but Myspace was teasing a drop in summer. There were professional photos of the band I’d never seen, staged and airbrushed, a new guy in Luke Skinner’s place. Joe with his fists balled in his jeans pockets, leaning against an industrial building.

When I finally started writing I managed just two paragraphs before the chill took over. I blamed this on Joe, haunting me from across the country. I posted it with the MP3 and fell into a hard, headachy sleep.

Everybody Needs Somebody to Love

Everybody needs somebody to take dancing. Everybody needs somebody to hail a cab to Soul Night on a first Saturday in San Francisco. Everybody needs somebody to feel the bass in the walls with their palm, to let it shimmy through their limbs and into yours. Everybody needs somebody to tell a creeping bro to back off when you need some space, when music threatens to wield its power over our bodies too recklessly—to help you feel the beauty of what music can do, while protecting you from its danger.

Everybody needs somebody to take ecstasy with you, then allow you to pet their beautiful face in line for the bathroom while Wilson Pickett wails the simplest, truest truth: “everybody needs somebody to love.” Queen said it too: “find me somebody to love.” Who else? More have whined about being loved, but these dudes understood it’s the giving—the love you make—that matters more. Because where do you put the love you make, if you’re all alone? You don’t give it to yourself, in my experience. You take it out with the trash every day until it slowly stops regenerating inside you, and friends, let me tell you, that is no damn way to live.

The next day I woke with the sensation that all the moisture in my body had been vacuumed out, leaving my organs pressing up against each other, my skin shrink-wrapped on my bones, my brain crumpled into a dried-up ball, begging for serotonin. When I saw myself in the mirror looking relatively normal, it shocked me. I wasted the whole day in bed, chugging water, reading books and the internet on an alternating basis.

In the evening I got an interesting comment on my post from someone named Alma, in Germany: I like how this blog is about the way music inhabits and shapes every part of the life, not just emotional but physical too. This is not something that happens with other art forms, no? One does not typically read books or observe an abstract canvas while dancing or having sex—we can only think about them while doing these things, which is not the same because the art is not as present. You’re right it is a power both beautiful and scary but mostly beautiful.

I like you, Alma, I replied under her comment. I couldn’t find any more information about her, but I decided that from now on, I would think about Alma, not the scenesters, when I wrote.