How to Kill a Rock Star (3 page)

Vera was a cute, brainy girl with dark hair and bright green eyes speckled with amethyst, though when she had her glasses on, which was almost always, it was hard to notice this feature.

She threw her arms around me. I hadn’t seen her in months and her presence was a relief.

“Sorry I’m late,” I said. “Have you been waiting long?”
1She pul ed a set of keys from her tote and shook her head. “I just got out of work. I left a message for your new roommate to meet you in the West Fourth Street station, but he has a bizarre subway phobia and rarely ventures underground. He never cal ed me back.”

Vera hugged me again and I could tel something was off.

She’d squeezed too hard, and when she pul ed back her chest looked inflated, as if she’d taken a deep breath and forgot to let it out.

“What’s wrong?” I said.

“Long day.”

It was a typical Vera answer. She was a whiz whenever I was in trouble—she’d wasted a week of her vacation time to come home and stay with me after Adam left—but she didn’t like to burden anyone with her own problems.

“I don’t believe you.”

“You just got here, Eliza. Let’s enjoy the moment.” She nodded up at the building, which was narrow, made of dirty beige bricks, had a four-tiered fire escape running down its face, and housed a tattoo parlor cal ed Daredevil on its ground floor. “What do you think?”

“It looks like a tenement,” I said.

Unlocking the door, Vera led me up an endless number of stairs. I could hear a television blaring in one of the second-floor apartments, and the whole place reeked of fried fish.

The hal ways were dark and narrow, and al the doors were gray, except for the door of the corner apartment on the fourth floor, which was a deep scarlet color. “Paul painted ours,” Vera said. “He wanted it to stand out. He also lost our security deposit.”

It was an unusual paint job, as if someone had taken a bucket of color and, instead of brushing it on, had poured it and let it drip in thick lines from the top down. The door looked like it was bleeding.

Vera walked in first, turned on the light, and I fol owed.

I was sure that if I spit from the entryway I could hit the back wal . The kitchen was the size of the trunk of a smal car, and the bathroom had grimy tile that only went halfway up the wal and looked like it had been stolen from the subway.

“Nice, huh?” Vera said.

It was a dump. Possibly the worst apartment I’d ever seen.

But it was al I could afford, and it was New York. I wasn’t going to complain. Except to note that for two hundred dol ars a month less, Adam and I had lived in a place with a dishwasher and a walk-in closet.

There was a cubicle to the left of the bathroom. I peeked my head in and Vera said, “That’s Paul’s disaster zone.” A mattress rested on the floor, along with piles of books, tapes, and CDs stacked neatly in rows. But clothes were strewn al over, covering every inch of ground like a thick carpet of cotton and denim. An acoustic and an electric guitar sat on stands in the corner next to two milk crates. One crate had a smal four-track recorder on top of it; the other held a plant that had seen better days.

The room’s solitary window was smal , and the only view it afforded was a brick wal that prohibited daylight from ever dawning on the space. There was an electric fan, a pre-historic laptop computer, and a dirty ashtray next to the bed.

“Paul won’t bother you,” Vera said. “He works during the day and he’s at the rehearsal space most nights. Sometimes he sleeps there. You’l hardly ever see him.” Al I knew about Paul was what Vera had already told me:

“He’s talented as hel . But he can be pretty…um…err
atic
.”

“Is he cute?” I asked her.

“Cute? If you like the dysfunctional lunatic, male-slut vibe, sure.”

I’d missed Vera. She had a way of delivering lines with a perfect ratio of sarcasm, syl able-stressing, and pausing that How to Kil _internals.rev 2/22/08 4:59 PM Page 18

1made everything she said sound either important or funny.

And under different circumstances I’m sure I would have found Vera’s description of Paul Hudson intriguing. Instead I took it as a warning sign. I didn’t need to have my heart ripped out of my chest, pulverized, and then stepped on twice in one year.

The last room on the right was mine. It contained an old wooden bed, a lamp, a smal bookcase, the three large boxes I’d mailed there earlier in the week representing al I had in life, a roach motel in the corner that, to sustain my compo-sure I chose not to question, and, in what appeared to be a strange interior decorating choice, a large crucifix hanging on the wal across from the bed, complete with a bloody crown of thorns and bas-relief nails protruding from Christ’s palms.

“That was here when we moved in,” Vera said. “We thought it was weird and left it up. Feel free to toss it if you want.”

I took a closer look. Jesus had piercing blue eyes, dark hair that hung in a flawless mess, his body was emaciated and taut, his hands and feet dripped with blood, and nothing but a gauzy loincloth hid what looked like a nice package underneath.

“Sexy,” I said. “He looks like a rock star.”

“Mother-of-Pearl,” Vera sighed.

The room’s saving grace was its window, and the tiny bench in front of the window, which was covered with an afghan I recognized as one of my Aunt Karen’s creations.

After our parents died, Michael and I had moved in with our Aunt Karen—a history teacher with orange hair, skin that smel ed like baby powder, and a penchant for knitting.

She was a good-but-detached woman, more school marm than loved one. We stayed with her for two years—until Michael turned eighteen, and he and I relocated to an apartment with a dozen afghans in tow.

Aunt Karen stored her yarn in a cedar closet, and no matter how many times we cleaned the afghans they always smel ed like mothbal s. The smel of mothbal s reminds me of death.

Outside the window I could see the iron bars of the fire escape. Across the street there was a crowded lounge, a smal French restaurant, an organic market, and a thrift store cal ed Las Venus.

“This room gets the best light,” Vera said. She was showing me how to open the window when we heard what sounded like hammering on the stairs.

“Here comes Paul,” she said. “You’l always know when he’s on his way up because he never walks the steps, he
leaps
them.”

Paul came in yel ing, “Anyone home?”

“In here,” Vera said.

My back was to the door when I heard a voice say, “I
told
you not to get on that goddamn train.” I turned around. The guy in the green suit was standing in front of me.

“Have a nice trip to Harlem?” he said.

I had to summon al my determination to hold his gaze.

At the station, I’d been too far away to get a good look at his eyes. They were two crescent moons, smal and lucent, the color of soft, perfectly faded denim.

Vera said, “Eliza, this is Paul Hudson. Paul, Eliza.”

“We sort of met already,” Paul said. “After forcing myself underground, I tried to tel her she was going the wrong way —but she didn’t listen.”

Paul Hudson was grinning at me. The same combustible grin he’d flashed in the station. He wasn’t what I would cal handsome, at least not conventional y. His face, when he wasn’t smiling, had a pensive, ominous cast to it, but as soon as he grinned the severity melted into an airy radiance that
2made me want to touch his chest and feel his heartbeat.

“You guys eat yet?” he said. “I brought home one of those frozen pizza dough things.”

He took off his jacket and added it to his bedroom floor.

He had the most amazing tattoo I’d ever seen on the inside of his left forearm. It was a butterfly colored the deepest shades of autumn leaves, as if it were on fire. The insect’s legs were disproportionately long, and holding fast to one of them was the figure of a scantily clothed creature that bore a striking, if not somewhat cherubic resemblance to Paul himself.

“I have to go,” Vera said as Paul wandered into the kitchen. Then she turned to me. “Are you going to be al right?”

I nodded, but I felt dizzy when I thought about being alone with the strange stranger whistling “Kashmir” in the other room.

“What about you?” I asked Vera. “Everything okay?” She gave me a scarcely discernible nod. “I’m real y glad you’re here.”

Before Vera left the apartment, I heard her stop in front of Paul and say, “Remember what Michael said: Keep your hands to yourself.”

I was arranging my clothes in garment-specific piles on the bookshelves when, through the corner of my eye, I saw Paul peek his head into my room and watch me for a good thirty seconds before he asked me if I was hungry.

“No. Thanks, though.”

It was a lie. Al I’d eaten on the bus was a bag of trail mix and an apple, but the lewd twinkle in Paul’s eye made me nervous and I blurted it out.

He remained standing in the doorway. Another thirty seconds went by before he said, “Wel , wil you at least come and keep me company then?”

I had a notion he would have waited there al night had I not yielded to his request. I walked to the sofa, sat down, and felt one of its springs like a gun in my back.

“Weren’t you supposed to be here yesterday?” Paul asked, puttering around the kitchen.

“I missed my flight,” I said, picking at a smal burn in the sofa’s fabric. When I looked up, Paul was nodding slowly, like he knew the score, and he knew I knew, but he let it go.

He was smiling again. He had, I decided, a cocky-bastard smile.

“So,” I said. “You’re the singer, right?” It was a stupid question. I knew he was the singer.

Preposterous, I told myself, that I could spend three hours in a hotel room with Doug Blackman and eventual y How to Kil _internals.rev 2/22/08 4:59

PM Page 22

2manage to stop crying and act normal, yet here was this little rocker wanna-be making my palms sweat.

“Yeah,” Paul smirked. “I’m the singer.” He sprinkled a handful of black beans on the dough and then set about opening a can of tuna while I tried to sneak another look at his tattoo. He caught me and said, “You can even come over and touch it if you want.”

“Don’t be gay,” I mumbled, blushing.

“Don’t be
gay
?” He howled. “Uh, I’m assuming you mean that in the seventh grade, don’t-be-an-idiot kind of way, as opposed to cal ing me a homosexual, right?”

“Yes.”

“Al right. I won’t be gay if you promise not to be a lesbo.” Laughing, I turned to look out the window and felt Paul’s eyes trained on me like flashlights. I could have sworn he was looking at the scar on my wrist, and this made me feel self-conscious. It also made me want to kick him.

“Do you mind?” I final y huffed.

He slid the pizza into the oven and said, “Hey, don’t take this the wrong way, but suffice it to say that if I’d seen you in the subway station and not been there looking for you, I would’ve wished I was.”

I blushed again and wondered what the wrong way to take that could possibly be. I couldn’t tel if Paul was flirting, or he simply had no tact, but either way I was flattered, namely because I’d been on the bus al day and was certain I looked like a mess.

“
Oh
,” he said next, squirting dishwashing liquid over a pile of dirty dishes in the sink like he was practicing soap cal igraphy. “I read your Doug Blackman piece, the one in
Sonica
. It was incredible.”

“You like Doug Blackman?”

“
Like
him? He’s my hero. I wouldn’t be a musician if it hadn’t been for that man. He’s the greatest songwriter
ever
.

I mean, it’s Dylan, Lennon, and Blackman, right?” I immediately wondered why neither Michael nor Vera bothered to inform me that I had a hero in common with my new roommate.

“How the hel did you get him to talk to you like that?” Paul said. “Supposedly Doug Blackman never talks to reporters.”

I tucked my legs underneath my body, sat back down, and said, “It was his big farewel tour. He’s official y retired from the road now. I guess he was feeling nostalgic. And, wel , I think he felt sorry for me.”

“I loved his theory that the state of music is a metaphor for America. My favorite line was:
Tell me what you listen to
and I’ll tell you who you are
.”

Paul was nodding as if he’d never heard anything more bril iant. In my mind, this elevated Paul to the status of friend, although I was first to admit I didn’t have a lot of friends who made me dizzy and whose chests I longed to touch.

Adam, as irony would have it, hadn’t been a Doug Blackman fan. When he’d wanted to piss me off he would cal Doug pompous or overrated. Once he had even accused me of liking Doug more than I liked him, which was ridiculous. I had adored Adam. Everything he owned was blue: his car, his clothes, his drum set, his couch. At one point, even his hair. It sounds weird now, but at the time I found it endearing.

“So you sent the article to
Sonica,
” Paul went on, “and they not only printed it, they hired you?” I nodded.

Paul hopped over the back of the couch, sat down, and, with a gossipy zeal, said, “Just between you and me, did you fuck him?”

Paul said “fuck” the same way as Doug—as if it were equivalent to offering someone a piece of gum or asking How to Kil _internals.rev 2/22/08

4:59 PM Page 24

2them to pick a card. Maybe that was the key to getting rid of the loneliness, I thought. Treating love as entertainment, not as salvation.

“No.”

“
No
? Come on, he must’ve at least
tried
to fuck you.” The way I saw it, Doug had made no real effort. He’d simply, matter-of-factly offered up the idea. My response hadn’t seemed to matter to him either way.

“Actual y, Doug talked a lot about his family. He’s been married for thirty years, you know. And he has two sons. The youngest one’s in film school.The older one, Loring, he’s about your age. He just released his second record. His first one did pretty wel but Doug thinks this one’s going to be huge.”