How to Kill a Rock Star (2 page)

I remember thinking it was the second time in a decade that Doug Blackman would change my life.

The day I got the job with
Sonica
—three months after Doug had granted me an interview, and the day I was certain I would be moving to Manhattan —I decided I was going to fly, not drive, to New York. When my brother, Michael, heard the news, he booked me a one-way ticket going non-stop from Hopkins International Airport to JFK. He also sent me a col ection of audio tapes he’d found at a sidewalk sale entitled
Discover Your Wings
:
Overcoming the Fear of
Flying
, which advocated the use of breathing techniques while visualizing run-of-the-mil takeoffs, uneventful in-air experiences, and smooth landings.

The meditations were painless enough when I practiced them on the couch, but I couldn’t foresee them being any help during a hijacking, a wind shear, or a catastrophic engine failure.

“If I can fly, you can fly,” Michael lectured me over the phone.

My sister-in-law, Vera, who was also on the phone, added: “It’s the safest form of transportation in the world.” The day of my departure I awoke feeling like an inmate being paroled. I hadn’t set foot in an airport in twelve years and I was afraid to look around, afraid I’d see something that would remind me.

Walking through the terminal, focusing on the ground
beneath my feet, I made it al the way to the gate, but then accidental y glanced out the window. As soon as I caught sight of the plane, my whole body began to shake, and the agony of memory bubbled and fizzed in my stomach like a box of antacid tablets in a glass of water—I was fourteen again, standing between Michael and our Aunt Karen, al of us waving goodbye to my parents, who were going to Daytona Beach for their seventeenth wedding anniversary.

I remember wanting to see their faces one more time, but not being able to find them in the tiny portals of the plane.

I remember being afraid I might never see them again.

The accident, we learned months later, was due to pilot error. A fan blade on the plane’s number one engine had detached, causing the compressor to stal . According to the National Transportation Safety Board, shutting down that engine and descending immediately would have, in al probability, resulted in a safe landing. But the pilot had accidental y shut down the working number two engine instead of the failing number one.

By the time he realized his mistake it was too late. The plane dove toward the ground and crashed into a field northeast of Akron.

There were no survivors.

The aircraft carrying me to JFK was supposed to have been a 777—a plane that, as of June 2000, had yet to be involved in a fatal accident. But there was a last-minute, unexplained equipment change, and the 777’s understudy turned out to be a 737 that looked so old it probably made its inaugural flight when Jim Morrison was alive.

FYI: Jim Morrison died on July 3, 1971.

The plane also had filthy windows and needed a new paint job, and if the airline couldn’t manage to clean the windows or update the paint, I figured there was no way they kept the hydraulics in working order.

More than anything, I wanted to get on the plane—if for no other reason than to prove I had at least infinitesimal courage—but I convinced myself there was a thin, fragile line between courage and stupidity, and no one in their right mind would trust the aeronautical competency of complete strangers when the future they’d been waiting so long for was a mere four-hundred and sixty-seven miles away.

I ripped my boarding pass in half and ran, stopping only to throw up on the feet of a dapper skycap standing near the curb.

“Mother-of-Pearl,” Vera said when I cal ed and broke the news. “You were
so
close.”

“I’m taking the bus,” I said. “I’l be there tomorrow night.”

The bus left the station at 7:02 a.m. and stopped in half a dozen towns between Cleveland and New York City. I kept my forehead pressed to the window and felt like I was watching a slide show, one in which the projector was broken and the same two or three photos kept clicking onto the screen. Al the places looked the same: the same fast-food restaurants, the same strip mal s, the same Wal-Marts at every turn.

I imagined the towns were fil ed with people like me—

lonely people who wanted to fly away, who wanted more from life than a dreary existence of one-stop shopping, but either didn’t know what that meant, or didn’t have the guts to go out and find it.

Doug Blackman had blamed my malaise, in part, on the homogenization of America.

“It’s destroying our culture, it’s destroying our individuality, and it makes us feel dead inside,” he told me that night in Cleveland. “But we just keep letting it happen. And we don’t think about it because thinking hurts too much.”
1I asked Doug if we could talk about music and he got even more wound up.

“I
am
talking about music,” he said. “Popular music is a microcosm of the culture, Eliza. It reflects the mentality of the population. Tel me, when was the last time you heard a truly extraordinary new artist on the radio?” Doug’s impassioned sermon meant one of two things to me—either the mentality of the population was soul ess, or its level of consciousness was on par with your average thirteen-year-old Wal-Mart rat.

I never did relax on the bus, and when it pul ed in to Port Authority in Manhattan, an intimidating thought occurred to me: in a city of roughly eight mil ion people, I real y only knew two—Michael and Vera, who had moved to Manhattan two and a half years earlier, after Michael decided to give up his nascent career as a graphic artist to pursue his lifelong dream of becoming a rock star.

It had taken a lot of urging to get Michael to go. He’d been hesitant to leave me. But even Susan Cohen, the ther-apist I’d been seeing since my paltry suicide attempt at sixteen, thought it was a good idea for Michael to loosen the reigns. And I was okay when Michael left. I was okay until Adam ran off to Oregon with the girl who made us caramel macchiatos, and my head began to unravel like a bal of yarn tumbling down a staircase.

Despite struggling financial y, Michael seemed happy in New York. He was playing guitar for a fledgling band cal ed Bananafish and working part time as a waiter in a famous SoHo restaurant cal ed Balthazar. He and Vera had been living on the Lower East Side, in a smal two-bedroom apartment with a guy named Paul Hudson, Bananafish’s lead singer and songwriter, but they had just relocated to a place of their own in a more affordable Brooklyn neighborhood,
which al owed me to become the new tenant in their old room.

I exited the bus, lugging my overstuffed backpack across my shoulder, and the muggy July heat felt like a plastic bag wrapped around my head. I fol owed the signs to the subway, where everything was covered in a thin layer of grime and the pungent odor of pee and garbage permeated the air.

New York was not altogether foreign to me. Michael, Vera, and I had visited the city dozens of times as teenagers, when Michael would tel our Aunt Karen we were going on field trips with our school and we’d drive to Manhattan instead. At night we’d sleep in the car; during the day Michael would browse guitar shops and record stores while Vera—my friend before she became Michael’s girlfriend— and I trudged around downtown looking for rock stars to stalk.

It was on those trips that I learned to respect and love the shortcomings of the city as one might respect and love a scar on the body of a loved one, especial y the dingy East Vil age and Lower East Side neighborhoods where Vera and I used to loiter outside CBGB, wel past the club’s heyday, affecting British accents and claiming we were related to Joe Strummer so that al the punk rock boys would think we were cool.

“
This
is what I want to do with my life,” I had decided back then.

“What?” Vera asked. “Sit on a dirty sidewalk and make out with juvenile delinquents?”

“No. Be a part of this. This
city
. This
life
. This
music
.”

“Aim high,” Vera said.

I’d squandered countless hours of my youth daydream-ing about how happy I’d be if only I lived in Manhattan, but the realization that the dream of
someday
had just become
1
now
felt like crossing a bridge and then watching the bridge burn behind me. I could never go back. This was change and change was supposed to be good. But in my past, change and heartbreak were analogous, and as I made my way to the train I wasn’t sure which one I was feeling.

One thing I never got a grip on during any prior visit to New York was how to navigate the subway. Michael is two years older than me. This made him the self-proclaimed leader. And I have what he cal s an “inadequate sense of direction,” which is why he’d given me explicit directions from the bus to the subway to the apartment on Ludlow, making me repeat them three times over the phone the day before.

“Michael, I’m twenty-six. Stop treating me like a child.” I made it from Port Authority to the A train without complication, which took me downtown to the West Fourth station. I was then supposed to transfer to the F and get off at Second Avenue. Michael had to work until midnight, and Vera was going to try to meet me at West Fourth, but to support herself and her husband’s musical aspirations, she worked for a nonprofit cancer research organization that was having a fund-raising event at the Waldorf-Astoria and wasn’t sure she’d get out in time.

“If you don’t see me in the subway,” she said, “I’l meet you at the apartment.”

In the West Fourth Street station, Vera was nowhere in sight, and I had an anxious, fizzy feeling in my stomach while I waited for the train. But I could feel the energy of the city in the vibrations coming off the tracks, and the diversity of the faces I saw around me made me feel so alive, so much a part of something kinetic, I swore I could taste it like metal ic electricity on my tongue.

The two most interesting people I noticed were waiting on the opposite side of the platform—an old man with a How to Kil _internals.rev 2/22/08

4:59 PM Page 13

shaker of salt and a tomato he was eating like an apple, and another guy I guessed to be in his late twenties, fidgeting near the steps.

I watched the guy’s head bob up and down while his leg bounced along with it, keeping the beat to a song only he could hear. His dark, stringy hair hung limp in his face, he had a strong Roman nose, and he was overdressed in an il -fitted secondhand suit the color of split-pea soup.

I instantly thought the guy was cute, in that gaunt, never-sees-the-light-of-day, New York street urchin kind of way.

And he never stood stil for a second. From across the tracks I read his expression as
I have everything on my side except destiny
, only his expression clearly hadn’t informed his head or heart yet.

The guy looked over and caught me staring, and once his eyes met mine they never deviated. He took several cautious steps forward, stopping abruptly at the thick yel ow line you weren’t supposed to cross. His arms dangled like a puppet and he seemed to skim the ground when he walked, as if sus-pended over the edge of the world by a hundred invisible strings.

I heard the train approaching, and the air that blew through the passageway was a fleeting reprieve from the heat. The guy in the green suit looked down into the tunnel, and then back at me with his head tipped to the left.

He eyed my backpack suspiciously and, in a low shout, said, “What’s your name?”

His voice caught me by surprise. It was a confident voice pretending to be shy.

“What’s your name?” he said again.

I remained mute, figuring it was dangerous to give personal information to a stranger in the subway. But even if he was a mugger, he was too far away to attack me. And let’s not forget, he was cute. This was a new life. A new me. The
1chance to at least pretend to be the person I wanted to be.

And I was never going to get over Adam if I didn’t start paying attention to cute strangers.

“Come on,” the guy said. “
Hurry
.”

“Eliza,” I final y replied.

The guy smiled, and his face lit up radiantly, as if someone had poured gasoline on a pilot light inside his mind.

Then he looked me up and down in a way that made me feel naked.

The train was seconds away from untying the curious knot that joined the two of us. “Eliza,” the guy said, pointing at the approaching headlights, raising his voice. “Do
not
get on that train.”

Then the train pul ed in and I couldn’t see him anymore.

The new me was begging my legs not to move, but apparently the old me was stil in charge of my motor functions because I stepped through the doors of the subway car, and the electricity that had been on my tongue surged down into my chest like a shot of adrenaline to the heart as the train began to pul me away.

Crossing the car, I looked out the window, hoping to catch one last glimpse of the guy in the green suit. He was stil looking at me, smiling, and shaking his head.

I ended up on the wrong train. Turns out I’d been standing on the wrong side of the station and had been on my way uptown until I deciphered the word
Harlem
coming through the train’s distorted loudspeaker.

It was after eight when I final y found my way to Second Avenue, walked the last few blocks down Houston Street, and then spotted the landmark tel ing me I had almost arrived at my destination—the
Wheel of Fortune
-like letterbox sign of Katz’s deli on the corner of Houston and Ludlow.

From Katz’s, I could see Vera standing halfway down the block. Vera had a cel phone to her ear, her lips were moving like mad, there was a tote bag over her shoulder, and she was wearing a plaid, below-the-knee wool skirt with socks and sneakers. Vera was the voice of reason in my life, but she dressed like a crazy Russian librarian, even when it was ninety degrees outside.

“
Yay
. You’re
here
,” she said when she saw me coming down the sidewalk.