The Weakness in Me
The Weakness in Me
The Strong even Zoe’s parents had tickets. I didn’t want to go, and I didn’t want to explain why not, so I decided to be out of town. It was time for my recruiting tour anyway—“tour” being my boss’s word, not mine, I swear, for my semiannual trendsetter scavenger hunt around the country—though I did bump it up a week. I made LA my first stop, booking a four-day stay at the Mondrian on Sunset starting the night of Joe’s show.
It seemed like a clever plan until Zoe pointed out, quite brightly, that I could still see Caroline—they were going to LA immediately after SF! They’d be playing two nights at the Troubadour while I was there! Joe Morrow was entirely inescapable! I kept my face neutral when she delivered the news, though of course she knew exactly what she was doing.
She called me the morning after the SF show. I was driving around Hollywood in my rental car, drinking spa water from the hotel lobby out of a thermos and shuffling LA music (Laurel Canyon, Rilo Kiley). My only experience driving as an adult had been in LA, and it always made me feel a mellow sort of alienation, almost pleasant.
“That was insane,” Zoe said, instead of hello.
I pinched the phone between my ear and shoulder and turned down the stereo.
“People were flipping out. I kept wanting to say chill out, you guys, it’s just Joey! But it wasn’t just Joey. He’s on another levelnow.”
Yet another level, I thought. “Who came?”
“My entire high school, for starters—some of them had pictures of their babies, so that was weird. Joey’s dad lurked in the back for a bit.”
“Really? Is he…”
“What, in AA?” She snorted. “He had a good year or so a while back, apparently, but no—I talked to him for five minutes and almost got drunk off the smell of him. Still, he was very proud, which was sweet.”
The idea that his dad showing up drunk for only a portion of Joe’s big show could be considered “sweet” was unbearably depressing to me—and “proud,” really? Did he get to be proud? But Zoe had moved on.
“Lots of Berkeley people, of course. Some of them said to say hi. Your old roommate was there!”
“What? Megan?”
“Yeah! I told her what you’ve been up to. She didn’t even know about your blog.”
This made me feel guilty, though I couldn’t say for sure that I was to blame for losing touch with her. She had disappeared without protest.
“I saw Joey before the show too,” she said, a bit cautiously. “He came out to my parents’ house for lunch. Melissa too. It was really—man, it was really special. My dad was so stoked to make Joey his tamales. My mom had two mimosas and got all tipsy. I wish you could’ve been there.”
I turned onto Santa Monica Boulevard, one of those blocks you see in movies, lined with towering palms. Mr. Gutierrez had cooked for the three of us once or twice, back in the fall of ’00. Melissa had probably sat in my chair, the one that was the cat’s favorite, warm and covered in tiny hairs.
“Are you still there?”
“Sorry. I’m driving.” I cleared my throat. “Did you go backstage after the show?”
“Yeah, but that was hella chaotic because he let in all our friends. It’ll be more chill tonight.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Percy,” she warned. “He knows you’re there.”
“Oh, does he? Thanks, Zoe.” I passed the Troubadour, rubbernecking as long as I could at the Caroline in black block letters on the marquee. “It’s sold out anyway.”
“Send him a text,” she said. “Seriously. I don’t care if you go backstage, but go to the show. I don’t know why you would deprive yourself of this.”
“Deprive myself! Hilarious!”
“?‘Bay Window’ was the highlight of the night. Everyone agreed. Just him and the piano, near the end of the set.”
I put on my turn signal so I could circle back again. “Fine.”
—
I waited until I was back at the hotel, comfortable on the massive bed. Zoe said you might have a ticket for me tonight in LA?
His response was instant: Great! Just give your name at the door, I’ll put you on the list for All Access.
K, I wrote back. Probably won’t stick around tho—I’m here on a work trip.
Noooo at least come back for a hug, came the reply.
This felt oddly friendly given our last conversation. Maybe I should go backstage, I thought. It did sound exciting. And then he wrote: My girlfriend will be there, if that’s what you’re worried about.
I dropped the phone into the bright white bedsheets. A minute later it lit up again: Her band is our opener.
And again: Just sayin there’s no danger of us accidentally sleeping together like the last time we saw each other hah.
My gut spun with nausea. I googled the opener—the Troubadour marquee had said The Curlers —and knew right away it was the bass player. I’d seen her in a photo with Joe a few months back on Last Night’s Party, while scouring the party blogs for pictures I could use in my trend report. They were just standing next to each other at a warehouse party, not touching, so I hadn’t thought much of it. But now here was her face again on the cover of the Curlers’ self-titled debut, pale flawless complexion in the camera’s flash, hair a fiery shag. I found the warehouse photo again, and this time I could see it: the intimate lean in their shoulders, which were almost the same height, and a matching sheen of sweat, like they’d just been dancing, or performing.
Joe was still texting. Bay Window is bringing the house down- have you seen the updates online? Lawyers made it happen fast, they’re sending you papers.
I pulled up the iTunes Store and there it was: “Bay Window (J. Morrow/P. Marks).”
Morrow/Marks!
Now I was smiling broadly and also still nauseated. God, it looked glorious. I took a screenshot on iTunes, and then Wikipedia, and everywhere else I could find it online. On the band’s Myspace wall, a recent post:
Due to a rather extreme example of human error, the song “Bay Window” was improperly credited on the first CD printing as being written by Joe Morrow. “Bay Window” was actually co-written by Joe Morrow and Percy Marks. Check out her blog Walgreens Songs . Thank you, Percy.
I picked my phone back up: Special your welcomes, Joe.
I sent the screenshot to my mom, ordered a plate of room service pasta, then sat at the desk and looked at myself in the round brass-rimmed mirror for the entire time it took the pasta to arrive, watching the emotions cross my features, then vanish the moment they were spotted. My face was beginning to change a bit in the latter half of my twenties: leaner, not so round. I didn’t mind it; my full cheeks had always been slightly embarrassing to me. In all the promotional photos I’d seen of Joe, and in the one with the redhead, he had looked the same. But Joe had never really looked young.
The pasta was tepid and chewy, and I couldn’t get much down. Briefly I tumbled into an internet hole about the bass player—Brooklyn born, then painted abstract canvases at Central Saint Martin’s; shared equal co-writing credit with the other Curlers on their songs, which were mostly unremarkable but featured tight, melodic bass work—before deciding I wanted no more information about this woman, ever, and jammed the back button on my browser repeatedly as if it would erase the pages from my memory.
Next I looked up Raj on Facebook. It occurred to me he may have moved back to his home city, that he might be all alone in some little bungalow not far from me, stirring a pot of sauce on a stove. I was right: he had moved back. And he was married.
Married! His bride was beautiful, in a strapless white gown on a boring-ass beach. I’d say it felt like a dream but I’ve never had a dream this good, Raj had captioned.
I slammed the laptop shut. “Who gets married?” I growled into the mirror. I was suddenly so sick of these rooms. I swore I’d seen this mirror in a hundred different hotels.
At nine-thirty I drove east to some terrible event DJed by Steve Aoki, recruited a single subpar trendsetter, and then, when the Caroline set was certain to be well under way, came back across town to the Troubadour. Parallel parked my rental car on the side of a hill after only twelve attempts. The doorman found my name on a list and handed me an all-access badge on a lanyard.
“I won’t need that,” I said. “I’m just here for one song. Have they done ‘Bay Window’ yet?”
He stamped my hand wordlessly.
I entered to “Funny Strange” sounding better than I’d ever heard it, Joe’s guitar line neither buried, as it was on the album, nor distractingly up front, as it usually was live. I couldn’t see him, just heads of the crowd silhouetted against a rainbow of stage lights, but his voice did what it always did to me. I ordered a shot of tequila and a dark beer from the bar and began working my way through the audience.
The band ripped into the next song, one of the power-pop yawns from the new album, just as I emerged into a clearing. He was scruffy, his curls too long to achieve their usual height, a half inch of beard growth softening the angles of his face. He stepped up to the mic and sang the opening line while chugging his electric: “I’m only a humannn…”
I was startled to hear a girl behind me singing along loudly. I turned to look: college age, at most, with the starry eyes of a superfan.
“Not even one of the good ones,” sang Joe and the girl in unison. She was really belting it, a direct line to my ear.
“Isn’t this song awesome?” she shouted to her friend during an instrumental break.
“I don’t know,” came the friend’s voice, dubious. “They shouldn’t have done ‘Britpop Night’ so early. It sets a high bar.”
I thought her friend was probably right, but I was relieved to hear I’d missed “Britpop Night.” I ordered a double vodka tonic from a miserable cocktail waitress prying her way through the crowd and checked out the ceilings of the place, the bar behind us, the ramshackle balcony. When I looked at Joe singing, I felt overwhelmed and tormented—the image of the last time I’d seen him, silhouetted in the fluorescent light of the rooftop stairwell, kept superimposing itself over the scene onstage—but when I looked away, I could feel a certain amount of peace about everything. I could be happy for him. He had done his best to right his wrongs against me. And he had moved on.
Raj had moved on, too.
The more I drank, the more I expected to be approached. Surely some guy would try; I wouldn’t have been choosy. But nobody so much as nodded at me—a woman alone at a show! All those nights in stealth mode at clubs seemed to have given me an invisibility superpower.
The waitress appeared with my vodka just as the stage darkened and the band walked off. A moment later, twin spotlights lit up on Joe at an electric Wurlitzer. I shoved a twenty at the waitress and waved her off. Joe was squinting out at the crowd, a hand shading his eyes. A tattoo on his inner forearm, or maybe it was his set list in Sharpie.
“Is Percy here?” he said.
I heard myself laugh with shock. People started looking around at each other, but nobody looked at me.
“I wrote this song for her, and also with her, which is exactly as complicated as it sounds,” he said, to some laughter. “Perce? Holler if you’re here.”
“I’m here.” I thought I’d shouted, but my voice came out sounding downright elderly. “Here!” I tried again, with a limp wave.
The superfan behind me and her friend started hopping up and down and bellowing, “She’s right here, Joe! Joe! Over here!”
Joe nodded in our direction, pleased, though I could tell he couldn’t see me in the glare of lights. Then he looked down at the keys and started to play. “It’s a movie,” he sang, which got a surprisingly loud round of recognition applause, even some whooping. He stayed focused, sang the next line right over them: “But it’s happening.” The girl behind me was quiet now; I could feel her keen awareness of my presence. “Eating black beans. Hours passing.”
I remembered feeling dissatisfied with that line when we wrote it, and now who cared? People were entranced. Was it not actually that hard to write a song?
“I said I know”—he winced on the high note—“that I want children. It makes me feel like a monster.”
A girl standing to my left brought her hand to her collarbone, overcome.
“From the woman I love’s ba-a-ay window…” He moved the melisma through his whole body. “I watch the world begin to end.” The place was pin-drop quiet now. “In the woman I love’s ba-a-ay window, I see the good give up again.”
He lingered there, his body slightly slumped, before straightening and returning to the chords of the verses. The girl in front of me still had her hand on her chest. Her boyfriend put his arm around her.
“The anchor’s stumbling. He thinks he’s dreaming.” Those were my lines. Joe’s eyes were closed, his forehead creased, shining. “The music doesn’t come. So I start cleaning.” Then the melodic shift: “The phone rings, but it’s always for her. Everything I do is for her.”
At least three women in my vicinity turned to look at me, quickly, snapping their heads back into place. I felt a warmth traveling up from my fingertips. When he’d sung that phrase at the piano store, it had just felt right—a nice repetition of the previous line while also being enough of a non sequitur to be interesting. The idea that it held any real truth had not occurred to me, not really, until that moment. But of course, somewhere backstage—maybe watching from the wings, out of my sight—was a bass-playing girlfriend who knew the truth: this was all ancient history; “the woman I love” just sounded good; Joe was hers.
He sang the chorus again, bigger and more building, then he pounded on the bridge chords. “She tries to kiss me as the sun goes down—I only give her my cheek.” His voice was bruised and bold, wailing, majestic. “I promise friendship and we face the screen again. What a day to be so weak.” He savored the last word, his voice dripping with despair. He hung his head for a beat of silence before singing the chorus again, quieter this time, and then he leaned back and lifted his hands.
The audience exploded into applause. “Thanks, guys,” Joe said humbly, shaking hair off his forehead, and the bandmates returned from the wings. “Can we do one more?”
I turned on my heel and pushed through the crowd for the door, desperate for air. It was warm outside for the hour and the sidewalk was bustling with men in tank tops. I walked fast without really knowing where I was or where I’d parked, though I seemed to be in no shape to drive anyway. I felt like I’d done two fat lines of coke. My cheeks hurt from what I realized was a massive, deranged smile; I massaged my cheeks as I walked, trying to calm them down, but they kept springing back up.
That audience had loved our song. Loved it. My bridge had been perfect. My bridge! Was it possible it could be a second single?
I turned toward Sunset, abandoning my car, scampering up the long hilly blocks in time with my racing heart. I was trying to walk to my hotel, but when the shops and clubs became dark mansion driveways I realized I’d turned west instead of east on Sunset and had to double back. As I passed through West Hollywood again, a voice called out to me from a side street.
“You’re the girl in the bridge!”
It was the superfan. She was about to get into a parked car with her friend, who was opening the driver’s-side door.
“I wrote the bridge,” I said.
She shook her head, a look of awe on her face. “Damn. ‘Bay Window’ is basically my favorite song ever. Did all that really happen?”
I nodded. “Down to the black beans.”
“Amazing. That is the best ‘fuck you’ in the history of ‘fuck yous.’ Like, okay, you don’t want to kiss me? I’m gonna make you sing about this mistake for the rest of your life, dude. You’re going to be singing about this at the fucking Troubadour in a fucking decade, dude.”
I laughed. “Well, September eleventh was, what, five years ago?”
“He’ll still be singing about it in five years. He’ll be singing about it when he’s forty.” She shook her head again. “Anyways. Honor to meet you.”
“You too,” I said lamely, and resumed my march down Sunset.
The interaction inflamed my adrenaline even further. At a fluorescent-lit shop called Pink Dot, which appeared to be Sunset Boulevard’s version of a bodega, I bought a tall bottle of water with electrolytes. My calves were tight and sore. I sat down on the curb in the store’s small parking lot and held the cool bottle to my throbbing hot face, but sitting seemed to be making my heart pound even harder. I got up and kept walking, faster now, trying to outrun the beating against my ribs. The famous Sunset billboards towered above me, bizarrely bright and awkwardly angled, not designed for pedestrian viewing.
In my hotel room the loneliness seemed to be there already, waiting for my arrival. I indulged an overwhelming desire to scratch my scalp and the skin of my arms, pacing the limited walkable area, semicircling the foot of the bed. When blood began to pool under my fingernails I grabbed my phone. I knew Zoe would be asleep at Melissa’s, so I called the Indiana house.
My mom answered groggily. “Are you okay? What’s wrong?”
“Sorry. I thought maybe you’d be up in the garden already.”
“What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know. I think I might be having a panic attack or something.”
I was still pacing. I heard her say something to my dad, switch on a light.
“I saw Joe perform the song we wrote and people loved it, like they lost their actual minds, and it made me so happy, Mom, I—is it possible to be too happy? I feel like I’m malfunctioning from happiness. My heart is beating so fast it’s kind of scaring me.”
“That doesn’t sound like happiness.”
“Thrilled, maybe? It was so incredibly thrilling.”
“Drink some water.”
“I tried. My throat is, like, sealed.”
“Where are you?”
“My hotel room, on Sunset Boulevard.”
She made a chuckling noise that meant my life was so glamorous, that I was taking it all for granted. “Honey,” she said. “You’re fine. Take a deep breath. Exhale longer than you inhale.”
I leaned my forehead against the thick glass of the full-wall window. LA was such an uninteresting city at night, the palm trees lost in the darkness, the boulevards reduced to spotty lines of light. I wondered where Caroline and the Curlers were staying. I forced a deep breath into my lungs, and the air seemed to bring with it a clear, piercing pain, like a long needle inserted into my core. On the exhale, I felt my shoulders relax.
Those intricate bass lines. The tall, lean body of a woman who could handle her instrument.
“I’m okay,” I said into the phone. “You can go back to bed.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah. It helped to hear your voice.”
“It’s just a boy,” she said tenderly. “It’s just a pop song. Now get some rest.”
An actual musician. They probably wrote songs together all the time, their guitars in bed with them like pets, harmonizing. And I had given up my chance to ever write with him again. I had handed it to that girl on a gleaming silver platter.
I pushed myself off the window and found my iPod. A pop song: that would help. I tugged off my jeans and slid my exhausted legs between the sheets, spinning through my music library. I needed serious medicine, that stuff they administer to stop an overdose. Then I saw it: Joan Armatrading, “The Weakness in Me.”
Her voice was like a rich, warm oil massaged into my muscles. Journalists always called it “throaty,” or “mannish,” or “guttural”—words that all struck me as horribly incorrect and probably homophobic. To me her voice was just right, completely pure, and that made it impossible to describe; words would always go too far in one direction or another.
And what she was saying, with that voice. What she was asking. Is this hold you have on me, Joan asked her lover, because of you—because of your power, your magnetism, the force of you? Or is it because of my own weakness?
We fell asleep together, me and Joan, curled up with our arms around a long pillow, and just before I drifted off, I had an idea.
—
Dawn woke me just an hour or two later. I hadn’t shut the curtains, and a bright slice of orange light had fallen directly on my bed. Then I remembered. I went to the desk, opened my laptop—Raj’s wedding picture had to be closed in a hurry—and searched my email inbox for Luke Skinner.
There were two emails from him, both unanswered: his initial request for feedback, almost a year old now, and another, more recent email. This one included a link to his mostly finished album on a password-protected FTP site. The tracks were unmixed, he warned in his email, and the last two might be dropped. The project was called Skinner—but it was a band, like Van Halen or Bon Jovi, he explained, as if either of these references was remotely culturally relevant. He was still on Caroline’s label, but had a different producer and was going for a darker, cooler sound. No presh, but it occurred to him maybe his first email went to spam.
I entered the password on the FTP, pressed play, and ordered room service.
He described it as post-punk, but I would’ve said dance rock because of all the staccato synth lines screaming over the guitar and bass, and because post-punk gave the entire project too much musical credit. His singing was monotonous through most of the verses, then he’d attempt some kind of melody in the chorus. The lyrics were barely intelligible, goth-lite, a few outer space/alien metaphors. All the songs had long, pretentious titles. The third track was obviously the single, with more polish on the vocals and a reasonably catchy synth riff.
On Myspace the band was heavily made up, sporting jet-black mullets and matching military jackets. I could just imagine the A it was one of the two on the chopping block. Its title, “Least Worst Night of the Century So Far,” at least had some charm. And the chorus contained a real hook, though it was buried in a squashed production.
I called the number in Luke Skinner’s email signature and left a voicemail. He called back a minute later.
“Am I too late to help with your album?” I asked.
“We’re mixing, so probably,” he said. “Why?” He sounded sharper than I’d expected, older; he was taking this seriously.
“I like ‘Least Worst Night of the Century So Far.’?”
“We cut that one.”
“That’s a mistake. It’s the best song on the album.”
He was quiet for a minute, then said, “We only have eleven tracks.”
I crossed the room to the window. LA was a pastel layer cake now, topped with a thick shmear of smog under pale blue sky. “Give me a crack at it. If it’s good, you’ve got your twelfth track.”
“I don’t want people to think we just eked this album out. Strong & Wrong had fourteen.”
“Well,” I said. “Half of them sucked.”
His grin was audible. “Okay,” he said. “Send me your ideas.”
In the city below, I spotted the angled line of Santa Monica Boulevard, followed it down toward the Troubadour. “I don’t send ideas without a contract,” I said. “Fifty percent of the writing credit. And I want to produce it.”