Black Elvis (12 page)

"I'll suggest it. She says if something doesn't happen relatively soon, she's raising the rent."

"
Relatively
?"

"Her word."

"She was going to raise it anyway, right? I mean, eventually?"

"I guess." He flexed his hands, picked at a bit of callus that was flaking off.

"So let's not worry too much about her. We've got a lease." Something about the way he didn't look at me obviated the next question, but I asked anyway. "We do have a lease, right?"

"Not exactly. More like an understanding." For all his competence—as a musician, a world-class partier, a guy who had rebuilt a
TR
-6 when he was only sixteen—Ed still often displayed a certain inability to peer around the sides of things to see what else might be there.

"An
understanding
?"

"We shook hands and all."

"So she could put us out tomorrow?"

"Oh, I don't think so. There are laws about such things. Look at the guy downstairs."

"But she can take our front door off."

"It's her door." He got more of the skin. "Maybe the police will find those fucks."

"You think?" I'd asked the officer who responded to our 911 call what the likelihood of our getting our stuff back was, and he'd looked at me like I'd asked if I might borrow his gun for a day or two.

"Those amplifiers were heavy. It had to be more than one person. A team. Plus, what the hell went on? I mean, that took a couple of trips. I think this was a planned heist."

I stared at the spot where the television used to be. "There's really no lease?" I was going to miss watching Dan Rather do the evening news. Harry Chapin had just died. They'd found the guy who was killing all those people in Atlanta. England was gearing up for the royal wedding.

"Look at it this way. No lease is
way
more rock and roll."

Ed had found this place for us in anticipation of my arrival. For the past year, he'd been living in a rented room in Jamaica, Queens. Growing up in New Jersey, I'd visited Manhattan many times, but I'd never been across the river. The word
Brooklyn
itself seemed strung with high-tension cable to me—written down, it even looked a little like a bridge. I'd driven down from college in Maine the month before, smoking Old Golds the whole way, in a boxy Fiat 128 I'd bought off a guy with a sharpening business in Skowhegan for fifteen hundred dollars my parents had fronted me. It was more of a toy than a car, with cheap plastic stick controls coming out of the steering column and gasoline smell leaking from the cloth-covered engine hoses—but I pretended it was a Porsche, the windows rattling in the doors, reflections of the East Coast screening across my Ray-Bans: Portland, Providence, Hartford, New Haven. I had two thousand dollars my grandmother had given me for graduation, and a red Gibson
SG
Special that shone like a waxed apple. When I ran it through my Sunn amp with the two twelve-inch Celestions and hit the 20x switch on the front, I could deafen passing birds at a hundred yards, tree squirrels, and make the neighborhood Dobermans whimper.

Most of the brownstones on our block, like ours, were pretty decrepit. Cracks ran across them, and there were occasional missing hunks of lintel and broken steps. Many still had working gas lights out front, and at night the street probably looked a lot like it had a hundred years earlier. The wave of gentrification was coming this way—you could see it in the distrustful faces of the local residents, mostly older folks, Italian and Irish, as they watched us come and go, wondering what we were up to. They were right to wonder. Rehearsing a band was, apparently, legal, so long as we knocked off by 10:00
P.M.
I had never seen our downstairs neighbor, although there were things I'd noticed. He was a smoker, and often a late-night whiff of cigarette traveled up from his apartment and into ours. Also, he liked watching Johnny Carson—I could hear that, too, through the holes in the floor around my radiator.

We went to two pawnshops thinking that we might find our stuff there, but it was hopeless. So, we bought replacement equipment, used, on Forty-eighth Street, in the city. It took most of the rest of my savings. I got a battered Melody Maker and fifty-watt Music Man amp. Ed found an old Ampeg tube amp with a foldout top, and a Fender Precision with what looked like a bullet hole near the bridge. He stuck lit cigarettes in there while he played. Renata grudgingly agreed to pay for a locksmith, who came and installed a new dead-bolt on our apartment door. The building still had no front door, and from the sidewalk you could see right up the front stairs, but at least there was something for us to lock at night. Neighborhood cats came in and out freely. So did a number of pigeons.

We invited over Greeny Greenburg, a drummer I'd met down at the café who was in his thirties, and this Filipino guy named Jet that Ed knew from his work up in the Garment District. Jet was short, with medium-length hair, and a round, pleasant face. His big, tinted, aviator-style glasses made him seem more like he should have been assembling model airplanes than playing music, and his Gibson Explorer looked huge hanging off him—he wore it so low that one of the corners nearly brushed the tops of his sneakers. He sent his left hand on a nimble tour of the fretboard, low to high, then back low again, the distortion-coated notes coming fast and thick as bees. It was the fastest I'd ever heard anyone play anything.

"Damn," I said.

Ed grinned. "Do that again."

Jet did it again, more or less identically.

"He's a prodigy," said Ed. "His first instrument was clarinet."

Jet was expressionless. For all his obvious gifts, he looked more like what he was—an accounts receivable clerk—than a rock star. "You guys know Foghat?" he asked. "'Slow Ride'?" His voice was reedy and thin.

"Foghat?" I said. I looked at Ed, my partner, Lennon to my McCartney, the guy who'd tutored me in music appreciation all through high school, from showing me what was good about the Beach Boys and how to sing harmony, to introducing me to George Duke and Chick Corea. He might have been turning into a beatnik, but he still had taste when it came to rock. He knew the difference between quality music and the junk they turned out for teenagers to wave their lighters to.

But he just shrugged. "So long as it's loud."

Greeny's eyes went misty with anticipation. "I can be loud," he said.

"We can be loud and good at the same time," I pointed out.

It turned out to be a Foghat night. After "Slow Ride," we played "I Just Want to Make Love to You." That was pretty much it; we played each of them at concert length and then some. We played them loud enough that my ears began to feel they'd been stuffed with peanut butter and then blown at with a hair dryer. We played them in the same key, which was even more torturous, for the simple reason that "Slow Ride" and "I Just Want to Make Love to You" are almost exactly the same song. Jet soloed, I soloed, Ed soloed, Greeny soloed. We went around again. It was like bidding in a never-ending, ridiculously loud poker game. We played these songs and then, just to be sure we really had them down, we played them again. When it was all over and we were packing up, the silence that filled the apartment had a tactile quality, like cotton batting.

Ed and I took a couple of beers up the ladder to the roof and stood looking out toward the city. This was the great thing about our apartment—we could see the Statue of Liberty from up there, and the World Trade Center, floating in the distance above the solid but unremarkable brownstones and warehouses.

"The guy's probably deaf or something," I said. "He didn't even bang on the floor."

"Or something." Ed shook his head in sympathy.

"I'm not paying double for this apartment."

"How about we get some power tools up here and saw through a television?"

"We don't
have
a television anymore." I kicked at a loose piece of mortar that had fallen from our chimney. "But maybe that's it," I said, growing philosophical. "We have to pursue badness as a form of art. We need to expand the frontiers of ugly."

"Could be he's a Foghat fan." Ed stroked the newly sprouted hairs on his chin.

"Do you see what I'm saying?" I went on. "It's ironic. Here's this thing we want more than anything, to play music, and the only way we're going to be able to keep on doing it is if we do it really badly."

A motorcycle coughed and spat its way up the block, hesitated at the stop sign on the corner, then shot angrily onto the next street.

"Alice is pushing hard for me to move in with her," he said. "Her roommate is going to California."

"When?"

"Like yesterday."

"That's a terrible idea," I said. Ed and Alice—an actual cheerleader—had started dating our senior year of high school. I couldn't believe they were still together—Alice didn't even like music. She was living on the Upper East Side and working for Drexel Burnham. She came over on weekends, which I really hated—I didn't like how Ed changed when she was around, how he seemed always on stage and overanimated. "I mean, not that you asked."

"You know how she answers the phone at her office?" he said. "'Money desk.' It's like she's sitting there on top of some huge pile of coins."

"She is. She told me. She said she likes the way it feels."

"Coins, or bills?"

"Coins, I think. Krugerrands or something."

"Hell, man," he said. "I'm not moving anywhere."

"All I'm saying is you should think about what you're committing to."

I could see his features in the dim light, and they had hardened and become more adult. I thought I could imagine what he'd look like at forty. "I think you're missing the point anyway," he said. "Bad isn't the issue. Loud is. The guy isn't a music critic. To him loud
is
bad."

"You do what you have to do," I said. "We're not married or anything."

"I got us a gig," Greeny said to me over his plate of eggs, scrambled, soft, with rye toast. It was slow this morning, like every morning, so I hovered by his table while he ate. "Out in the Hamptons." Greeny had a job in the city selling off-brand personal computers. Every morning he came in for the same breakfast, dressed in a sport coat and slacks. He always tipped the same, too, a single dollar bill, which actually made him a big spender. I'd gone over to his place once to pick up forty dollars worth of pot—his other profession was small-time dealer—and I'd met his girlfriend, a bruised-looking brunette who'd come to the door to let me in wearing sweatpants and a man's shirt open in the front to reveal a lacy pink bra. She left the room while Greeny and I talked, and I wondered if after I left he was going to go back to beating her.

"Really?" I said.

"One of those beach houses full of yuppies. Five hundred. You in?"

"What did you tell them we play?"

"Everything, man. Fifties, sixties." He took a final bite of eggs. "You want to know what we're called?"

I did.

He held his hands up, framing the air in front of him. "'Brooklyn.' Like 'Boston,' right? I don't think anyone else is using it yet."

I looked out the window. Across the street, in front of the new Korean market that had just supplanted an Irish bar, two cars were engaged in a game of chicken over a parking place. The paired notes of their horns was, I noted, a perfect tritone.

He crunched some toast. He was really pleased with this. "I knew you'd like it," he said.

That afternoon, an old guy came into the café, sat down at a table by the window and ordered coffee. I brought it to him, along with a little pitcher of milk. I went back to reading the paper at the table nearest the counter. He was the only person in the place. The café did almost no business, and as a job, it was pretty much a joke, but I did get to eat a meal—anything I wanted on the menu. Olivia, the Greek woman who cooked, seemed to enjoy making me food. It gave her something to do.

After a while, I went over to check on him.

"Milk," he said, tapping the creamer, which I saw was empty. I took it away and got Olivia to refill it, then brought it back to him. I went back to my paper. I'd been going through the Help Wanted ads. There wasn't anything I felt qualified to do. I wondered what you had to have studied in school to get appointed to the Money Desk.

I went to check on him again. "More coffee?" I asked.

"More milk."

The creamer was empty. His coffee cup was just about empty too, other than a puddle of light brown at the bottom—if he filled it again he was going to be drinking straight milk. Which, it suddenly occurred to me, was the point. The guy was drinking as much milk as he could for the price of a cup of coffee. Still, I had Olivia give me another refill.

Another half hour went by. It was raining out, although lightly. No one else had come in. Our selection of Italian pastries—delivered on Tuesdays and not thrown away until the following Monday—glowed preternaturally in their glass case by the register. I went to bring him the check.

He studied it briefly, then tossed it to the table. "Sorry," he said. The bone structure of his face was evident under his skin, and I thought he probably had been a pretty good-looking man in his day. He had straight gray hair, a full head of it, even at his age, which had to be past seventy. His blue-green eyes looked murky, and I wondered if he saw very well out of them.

"You don't have seventy-nine cents?"

He shook his head.

On the one hand, I felt bad for him. This was a pretty pathetic way to fill up your stomach. But I represented the café right now, and the café was being wronged. "You can't do stuff like this," I said. "You can't just go into a place and order food that you don't have money to pay for."

"Sure, I can," he said. "I just did."

"Well, I mean, you
can
. But you're not supposed to."

"Why not?"

"Come on. You know why not. The social contract. The rules. The world doesn't work that way. Things cost money."

"Let me ask you something. That coffee I drank—it was already made, right? It was sitting in a pot, just cooking away on a burner." He gestured toward where our two Pyrex containers of coffee sat waiting. "After a while, it gets bitter and nasty tasting. What are you going to do with it? You're going to throw it out. That being the case, and business being what it is"—he gestured around at the empty room—"you can afford to give me a cup of coffee. In fact, maybe it's your duty to do it. If you've got something you don't want, and you throw it away rather than give it so someone who does want it, that's not just wrong, it's spiteful." He dug briefly in his nostril with his pinky. "You're one of them from the third floor."