Lit Riffs (6 page)

“I
do
, I
do
,” and damn if his hard-on don’t wilt outa guilt. The hooker stalks out in disgust while he grovels, begging forgiveness till it reminds her so much of the first time he ever pulled that act, way back in the beginning, she wants to puke. Instead she whips out a copy of Garner Ted Armstong’s
The Plain Truth
and begins to hector him at the top of her lungs, liberally peppering this gibberish spew with extensive quotes from said publication, the whole rant to effect that if only he would
see the light
of
Jesus Christ our lord
he’d forget about them wicked wimmin forever. By now he’s practically catatonic. Meanwhile she’s taking more swigs of Johnnie Walker Black, holy rolling and mouthing scatological rants all mixed up together at the top of her lungs, till it brings half the hospital staff down on them, who toss her off the premises immediately.

In fact, she is denied entrance to the hospital for the remainder of his stay. So every day by messenger she makes sure he’s sent copies of
The Plain Truth
, Gerald L. K. Smith’s
The Cross and the Flag, Communism, Hypnotism and the Beatles, The Watchtower
, and
The Journal of Krishna Consciousness
, as well as more hookers in nurses’ uniforms, drug dealers disguised as staff doctors, forcing every sort of street dope on him from acid to speed to Placidyls to methadone, slimy strangers who regale him with long, involved tales of all the sexual high jinks she’s supposedly been pulling with ’em while barred from his hospital ward.

By the time his broken bones are healed he’s ready for the nut ward, but she carts him home, and all he’ll say is “We gotta have a talk.” At last.

So they sit down in the kitchen. He leans forward over the table, looks her square in the eye, and says, “I realized one thing in the hospital: you’re right. I don’t know what you’re up to, but whatever it is, I haven’t felt this good in years, broken ribs and all. As Crowley said, ‘Nothing is true; everything is permitted.’ So, from here on out, we are libertines.”

This is more than she can take. The whole thing has backfired. There’s only one way out: find some way to make him a rock star, get him a hit record and out on tour, then maybe she’ll be free…. So she pulls out her ace in the hole: “Well, look, I’ve been reading
NME
a lot while you were laid up, especially the classifieds, and it says here the lead singer of this band is splitting, the band needs a new, dynamic-individual-type lead singer to break them in America. I think that might be you….

“Might. Trouble is, one of those Angels stepped on my Adam’s apple—my voice sounds like shit.”

“Well, hell, look—do yourself a favor, go on down and try out for it anyway. What’ve you got to lose?”

Answer, of course: nothing. What she’s got to lose is one king-size albatross, as he gets hired and the rest is history or what passes for it. He ends up one of the biggest superstars in the world, while she goes back to the bars and stays alive on the occasional check for not all that many bucks he sends along….

Now, you’d think after she went to all that trouble for him, practically made him what he is today, that he’d be more grateful, but he’s not. One day he shows up with an acetate, looking kinda sheepish, and says, “I thought it only fair you be one of the first persons to hear this….”

She takes the
St. Matthew Passion
off the box and slaps on this circle of black plastic without even a label. What is it? Whadda
you
think?

When it’s over, she very calmly takes it off, hands it back to him, pours another tumbler full of Johnnie Walker, and says, cool as you please, “Well, I certainly gotta hand it to you: you’ve come full circle: from SOB by minded nature to reeducated rather sweet fella, which I guess never really suited you inasmuch as your entire personality disappeared into mine and you became merely an adjunct of my apathy, clear through to your present status as SOB who knows just exactly how big a slime he is and is gonna clean up off it I have no doubt.”

“Yes, and I owe it all to you.”

“Well, not exactly. Though the thought is certainly touching. I’m not sure exactly who you owe it to, but please leave my name out of it. Just send a check every now and then….”

“Good as done …” He slides the acetate back in its sleeve and splits pronto, a little nervously methinks. But so what? You’d be nervous, too, if you had to go through life worrying that somebody might spill the beans on you at any moment. She’s not about to do so, of course, because she couldn’t care less as long as she never has to listen to it, and he keeps sending what after all is only her fair share of the royalties for, uh, “inspiring” his biggest hit. As long as he does and she keeps her mouth shut in public, he’s happy, she’s happy, the record industry’s happy, and all’s well with the world.

Of course, she still laughs about it: “Yeah, poor old guy … only man I ever knew with real potential. Trouble is, if he’d’ve told the truth in that stupid song, not only would nobody’ve bought it, but instead of World’s Foremost Casanova Tinseltown Division he would today be a mere drugstore clerk in South Kensington. His sex life would be more satisfying, as I’m sure he recalls it was for a while there. I guess in the end it all boils down to a matter of priorities: Would you rather be the ship or the cargo? He made his choice, I made mine, and I hope you’ve all made yours. Cheers.” And she raises her glass again.

From
Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung
by Lester Bangs, edited by Greil Marcus, copyright © 1987 by the Estate of Lester Bangs. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.

jonathan lethem

Dear M.,

Our long letters are pleasing to me, but they do come slowly. Lulled by the intrinsic properties of email, I’ve been willing to let most of my other correspondences slide down that slippery slope, into hectic witty ping-pong. But our deep connection, for twenty years or more now unrefreshed or diluted or whatever it
would
be by regular communications in person or on the phone, is precious to me, and demands more traditional letters. I suppose three-month breaks are not so much in a friendship once treated so casually that we let nearly a decade go by, eh?

You asked about A. We’ve finally broken it off, the end of a nearly three-year chapter in my life, and a secret chapter as well. For, apart from you, safely remote in Japan, I’ve confided in no one. Her horrible marriage survived us, a fact that would have seemed absurd to me at the beginning, if some time traveler had come back to whisper it in my ear. The break was mutual—mutual enough to give it that name—and I’d be helpless to guess who is the more scarred. We won’t be friends, but we were never going to be. Dissolving a secret affair is eerily simple: A. and I only had to quit lying that we didn’t exist.

Did I tell you about “The National Anthem”? I don’t think so. This was the first night we stole together from her husband, the first intentional rendezvous, at a bed-and-breakfast outside Portland, Maine. A. always traveled with a Walkman and a wallet of CDs, and that night, as we lay entwined in a twee canopy bed, she insisted on playing me a song, though there was no way for us to listen to it together. Instead she cued it up and watched me while it played, her ungroggy eyes inspecting me from below the horizon of my chest, mine a posture of submission: James Carr singing “The Dark End of the Street.” I recognized it, but I’d never listened closely before. It’s a song of infidelity and hopeless love, full of doomed certainty that the lovers, the love, will fail.

“I’ve got a friend who calls that The National Anthem,’” she said.

I gave her what was surely a weak-sickly smile, though likely I thought it was a cool and dispassionate one. She didn’t elaborate, just let it sink in. I didn’t ask who the friend might be—the unspecificity seemed as essential to the mood between us as the dual rental cars, the welcoming basket of cookies and fruit we’d ignored downstairs, or the silent fucking we’d enjoyed, our orgasms discrete, in turn. To press one another back into the world of names, of our real individual lives, would have seemed a rent in the shroud of worldly arbitrariness that enclosed our passion. Of course this was morbid, I see it now.

“There’s a Bob Dylan song,” I said then. “‘Ninety Miles an Hour Down a Dead End Street.’ I think it’s a cover, actually. Same thing: We’re on a bad motorcycle with a devil in the seat, going ninety miles an hour down a dead end street…’”

“Yes, but this is ‘The National Anthem.’”

By refusing the comparison, A. put me on notice that this wasn’t a dialogue, but a preemptive declaration. She’d be the one to manage our yearnings, by her foreknowledge of despair. Fair enough: her jadedness was what I’d been drawn to in the first place.

Of course you know, M., because I’ve told you stories, how we rode her jadedness—our bad motorcycle—down our own dead end street. It wasn’t kept anonymously cute, with baskets of cookies, for long. The perversity of the affair, it seems to me now, is that under cover of delivering her from the marriage she claimed to be so tired of, A. and I climbed inside the armature of that marriage instead. By skulking at its foundations, its skirts, we only proved its superiority. However aggrieved she and R. might be, however dubious their prospect, it wasn’t a secret affair, wasn’t nearly as contemptible as
us
. Certainly that can be the only explanation for why, in a world of motels and with my own apartment free, we so often met at her place—at theirs. And I think now that though I mimed indifference whenever she predicted immanent destruction, I’d
lusted
to destroy a marriage, that I was far more interested in R. than I allowed myself to know.

But I don’t want to make this letter about A. You’ve written at length about your uncertainties in your own marriage—written poignantly, then switched to a tone of flippancy, as though to reassure me not to be too concerned. Yet the flippancy is the most poignant of all—your joshing about your vagrant daily lusts in such an unguarded voice makes them real to me. Having never been to Japan, nor met your wife and child, I’ve been guilty of picturing it as some rosy, implacable surface, as though by moving from New York to Tokyo and entering a “traditional” Japanese marriage you’d migrated from the complicated world into an elegantly calm piece of eighteenth-century screen art. I’m probably not the first person guilty of finding it convenient to imagine my friends’ lives are simpler than my own. It’s also possible I began this letter by speaking of A. in order to discredit myself as any sort of reasonable counsel, to put you in mind of my abhorrent track record (or maybe I’m just obsessed).

Let me be more honest. I don’t spend all that much time imagining Japan. However much you and I speak of our contemporary lives, I picture you as I left you: eighteen years old. You and I were inseparable for the first three years at Music and Art, then distant in our senior year, then you vanished. Now you’re a digital wraith. When I try to think of your marriage, I instead tangle, helplessly, in the unexamined questions surrounding our first, lost friendship. I don’t mean to suggest
anyone
doesn’t find a muddle when they recall that year, launching from twelfth grade to the unknown. But it is usual to have you lucidly before me, daring me, by your good faith in these recent letters, to understand.

Do you remember my obsession with Bess Hersh? Do you remember how you played the go-between? That was junior year, just before the breach between us. Bess was a freshman, an eighth-grader. You and I were giddy dorks in rapidly enlarging bodies, hoping that being a year older could stand in, with the younger girls, for the cool we’d never attained. I’ll never forget the look on your face when you found me where I waited, at the little park beside the school, and said that Bess’s appointed friend, her “second,” had confirmed that she
liked me
, too.

Shortly after that, Bess Hersh saw through me. I hadn’t known what to do with this coup except bungle it when she and I had a moment alone, bungle it with my self-conscious tittering, my staring, my grin. I tried boy jokes on her, Steve Martin routines, and those don’t work on girls in high school. What’s required then is some stammering James Dean, with shy eyes cast to pavement. Those shy eyes are what gives a girl as young as that breathing room, I think. You, you mastered those poses in short order—I’d wait until college.

Soon, agonizingly soon, Bess was on Adam Reisner’s arm, and I felt that I’d only alerted the hipper Adam to her radiant presence among the new freshmen. But I still cling to that moment when I knew she’d mistaken me for cool, before I opened my mouth, while you were still ferrying messages between us so that she could project what she wished into the outline of me. I still picture her, too, as some sort of teenage sexual ideal, lost forever: her leggy, slouching stride, the cinch of worn jeans over that impossible curve from her narrow waist to the scallop of her hips, her slightly too big nose and fawny eyes. I wonder what kind of woman she grew into, whether I’d glance at her now. Once she gave me boners that nearly caused me to faint. Just typing her name is erotic to me still.

Funny, though, I don’t remember speaking to her more than once or twice. I remember speaking with you about her,
chortling
about her, I should say, and scheming, and pining, and once, when we were safely alone in the Sheep Meadow in Central Park, bellowing her name to the big, empty sky. I recall talking this way with you, too, about Liz Kessel, Margaret Anodyne, and others. I recall the dopey, sexed-up love lyrics we’d write together, never to show to the girls. You and I were just clever enough, and schooled enough in
Mad
magazine, Woody Allen, Talking Heads, Frank Zappa, and Devo, to ironize our sprung lusts, to find the chaos of our new-yearning hearts bitterly funny.

When, six months on, you first began combing your hair differently, and when you began listening to New Romantic bands, and when you began dating Tu-Lin, I was disenchanted with you, M. Violently disenchanted, it seems to me now. I felt all the music you listened to was wrong, a betrayal—you’d quit liking the inane, clever stuff and moved on to music that felt postured and sexy instead. I felt you’d forgotten yourself, and I tried to show you what you’d forgotten. When I’d third around with you and your new Vietnamese girlfriend, I’d seek to remind you of our secret languages, our jokes—if they hadn’t worked on Bess they should at least still mean something to you—but those japes now fell flat, and you’d rebuff me, embarrassed.

Of course the worse I fared, the harder I tried. For a while. Then that became our falling-out. I must have appeared so angry—this is painful speculation, now. Of course, what seemed so elaborately
cultural
or
aesthetic
to me at the time—I faulted you for hairstyle, music, Tu-Lin’s Asian-ness—all appears simply emotional in retrospect. I was threatened by the fact that you’d gone from pining for girls to
having
them, sure. But I’d also invested in you all my intimations of what I was about to surrender in myself, by growing up. By investing them in you I could make them something to loathe, rather than fear. Loathing was safer.

Oh, the simple pain of growing up at different speeds!

A page or two ago I supposed I was going to build back from this reminiscence, to some musings on your current quandary, your adult ambivalence about the commitments you entered when you married (I nearly wrote
entered precociously
, but that’s only the case by my retarded standard). But I find I’m reeling even deeper into the past. When I was seven or eight, years before you and I had met, my parents befriended a young couple, weirdly named August and Sincerely. I guess those were their hippie names—at least Sincerely’s must have been. August was a war resister. My parents had sort of adopted him during his trial, for he’d made the gesture of throwing himself an eighteenth birthday party in the office of his local draft board, a dippy bit of agitprop that got him singled out, two years later, for prosecution. Sincerely was a potter, with a muddy wheel and a redbrick kiln in the backyard of her apartment. She was blond and stolid and unpretentious, the kind of woman who’d impress me now as mannish, a lesbian perhaps, at least as a more plausible candidate for chumming around than for an attraction (I felt she was a woman, then, but she must have been barely twenty, if that).

We’d visit Sincerely often during the six or eight months while August served out his sentence, sit in the backyard sipping ice tea she’d poured with clay-stained hands, and in that time I very simply—and articulately, to myself—fell in love. I was still presexual enough to isolate my feelings for Sincerely as romantic and pure. In stories like this one, children are supposed to get mixed up, and to imagine that adults will stop and wait for them to grow up, but I wasn’t confused for a moment. I understood that my love for Sincerely pertained to the idea of what kind of woman I meant to love in my future life as a man. I promised myself she would be exactly like Sincerely, and that when I met her, I would love her perfectly and resolutely, that I would be better to her than I have in fact ever been to anyone—than
anyone’s
ever been to anyone else.

So my love wasn’t damaged by August’s return from jail (he’d never gone upstate, instead served his whole time in the Brooklyn House of Detention, on Atlantic Avenue). I didn’t even bother to resent his possession of Sincerely, which I saw as intrinsically flawed by grown-up sex and diffidence. August wasn’t a worthy rival, and so I just went on secretly loving Sincerely with my childish idealism. The moron-genius of my young self felt it knew better than any adult how to love, felt certain it wouldn’t blow the chance if it were given one. Not one day I’ve lived since has satisfied that standard. Of course, it is strange and sad for me now to see a shade of future triangulation in that emotional arrangement—I’d cast August as an early stand-in for R., a man I would pretend was irrelevant even as I fitted myself into his place in life.

What I’d promised to hold on to then, M., is the same thing I’d raged against losing when you began to grow away from me, when I failed the test presented by your sultry new self that senior year. How ashamed that promiser would be to learn—had some malicious time traveler drifted back to whisper it in his ear—about the pointless ruin of my years with A. Those promises we make to ourselves when we are younger, about how we mean to conduct our adult lives, can it be true we break every last one of them? All except for one, I suppose: the promise to judge ourselves by those standards, the promise to remember the child who would be so appalled by compromise, the child who would find jadedness wicked.

Yes, my childish self would read this letter and think me poisoned with knowledge, but the truth is that what I flung against A. so recklessly
was
my innocence, preserved in a useless form. The revving heart of my hopefulness, kicked into gear anew, is the most precious thing about me, I refuse to vilify it. I hope I fall in love again. But it’s a crude innocence that fails to make the distinctions that might have protected me from A., and A. from me. For by imagining I could save her from her marriage, by that blustery optimism by which I concealed from myself my own despair at the cul-de-sac lust had led us into, I forced her to compensate by playing the jaded one on both our behalfs. What I mean to say is that I forced her to play me that song, M., by grinning at her like a loon. Like the way I grinned at Bess Hersh. I gave A. no choice but to be the
dark lady
, by being the moron-child who thought love could repair what love had wrecked. A motorcycle that’s gone off a cliff isn’t repaired by another motorcycle.