Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life (11 page)

Nil was our soundtrack, after all. His music expressed the hopes we felt as we churned reluctantly toward adulthood. I was growing into an intrepid journalist. Every six weeks, my name appeared on the cover of our paper and I strutted around like that meant something. Floodie and me became best friends. We’d get stoned and hit the grimy juice bar on Washington Avenue and head down to the beach and thrash out to the buoy and do pull-ups until our tits ached. Floodie taught me how to run, too, on the boardwalk that began at Seventeenth, dodging Hassids and leathery vagrants, Floodie moving like a gazelle while I staggered behind cursing. We were in love, though we wouldn’t have seen it that way. And just to make sure, I went goony for Paloma, the ad rat in the next cubicle. She was a Miami native, gorgeous, Cuban, with a clever violent family and complicated underwear. One night, after months of awkward courting, after tequila and Nil, she let me walk her to her car. I was a stuttering wreck.

“Relax,” she said, “I’m coming back to your place.”

Which she did and (by the way) bedded me with a nonchalance I found terrifying. I woke up a few hours later with the absolute conviction that my life had arrived. On weekends, we repaired to her house
in Westchester and ate cheap Chinese and frozen yogurt and rented videos. Weeknights, I returned to my place on South Beach and worked on short stories. Nil was a part of all this. Watching him made me impatient for the change I could feel within myself. My imagination was puny and obvious, but I was reaching toward the feelings that would turn out to matter.

For the sake of proper plotting, I managed to convince myself that Paloma and Nil were sneaking around behind my back. This was a fantasy mostly about Nil, I suspect. And there was of course that one night when I came upon the two of them huddled at the bar. I spent the rest of the weekend fuming. But I never confronted Paloma. And the next week I was back at the Talkhouse, dancing in my ugly boots.

The scene always falls apart, though never how you think it will. We kept expecting Nil to get whisked away on a magic carpet of fame. Instead, the Talkhouse shut down. South Beach had become the sort of terrain where foam parties
⁹
drew more paying customers than Richard Thompson.

Nil’s last gig there was April 16, 1995, a Sunday. I kept a flyer tucked away for years, though I don’t remember the show itself, only the ringing after-moments, our sore feet, our raw throats, the purple hint of dawn. The music was over. It didn’t take long for us to kill our own happiness.

Paloma and I began to drift into the brainless grievances that signal erotic demise. We decided drugs might help and one night resorted to a candyflip—half acid and half Ecstasy. The pills sickened
us. She lay down on my bed and moaned while I stumbled outside and tried to walk it off. Before long, I stood amid the hordes of Ocean Drive, lobster-colored tourists, models and muscle boys and pimps and playgirls, all frolicking in puddles of neon, reeking of suntan lotion and clove cigarettes and puke. They sent shots gurgling down their throats and plucked buttery morsels from oversize plates, everyone on the make for pleasures they didn’t quite deserve. This was Bosch by way of the tropics. And it was perhaps at this moment that I fell out of love with Miami Beach itself and came to see the place as a monument to self-regard, though probably it was half an hour later, having staggered naked into the rancid Atlantic and emerged to find nothing changed.

Then Floodie lost his mind. He was a supremely gentle soul—a loyal Deadhead even—but the chemicals inside him had their own agenda. He threatened to assault his boss, took up with cocaine, and disappeared for days at a time, returning with the fervent assurances of the mad. I went to visit him one night and walked straight into a
NO PARKING
sign, the edge of which caught my brow and opened a bloody gash. That’s how I seemed to be doing.

Paloma never took up with Nil, so far as I discovered. Instead, she succumbed to the entreaties of her girlfriend Bella, with whom she necked passionately in a bar, either on top of or near a pool table depending on whom you believed. Within a few months, she’d left town and I’d taken up with a histrionic intern, an act of loneliness I mistook for revenge. Nil wasn’t to blame for any of this. But we couldn’t help feeling that the end of his run at the Talkhouse was the end of us, too, of that peculiar era in which our dreams cancel out all our mistakes.

Nil released his debut on Capitol Records in March of 1996. Jon Pareles of
The New York Times
hailed the album as a masterpiece and Nil launched his long-awaited national tour. I kept waiting to see him on TV, serenading Rachel from
Friends
. But when I saw Nil again it
was at a tiny club in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. He looked thin and drawn and had a cast on his foot.

I saw him only once more, in Miami, where I’d returned from grad school, hoping to recapture those fruity vapors of youth. Floodie came with me, though he was married now, a skittish adult with a kid and a mortgage. The crowd was young, club kids mostly, waiting for the DJ to show up and christen their drug trips. They didn’t seem to know who Nil was, or why he mattered, and when I tried to revive the Spoon they looked at me like I was an old dog performing a sad trick. Then I dropped my beer and everything got fucked up beyond repair. After the set I hugged Nil and he hugged me back, though I didn’t understand what was happening exactly; that we were saying farewell. Nil didn’t release another album for eight years.

I figured this would be a sad story, because my own head is stuffed with foolish notions about what it means to succeed as an artist. But that’s not how this story ends. Nor does it end with some squalid meeting in South Beach—Nil guzzling yage tea and babbling about how he could have been a contender. It ends with a brief, polite phone conversation.

I asked Nil what he was up to these days. He gets that question a lot. His website message board is full of DFs like me, still waiting for him to conquer the world. “I’ll play out maybe once a month,” he said, “make it an event. I get a lot of younger musicians. Every few shows, some kid’ll come up to me with all these questions about the music industry and the next thing I know he’s selling a million records.” Nil laughed. “I did the major-label thing. I put my two cents out there for people to discover and now I’m traveling below the radar. I don’t mind. It’s kind of cool actually.”

He sounded astonishingly unbitter about his relationship with
Capitol. “It was the ride of a lifetime,” Nil said. “How could it not be awesome? I got to travel around the whole country, twice. I got over to Europe. I met a ton of cool people. I was bringing the Talkhouse to the rest of the world.”

But didn’t he have
any
regrets? Nil paused for a second. “I wish I would have had a better sense of myself, and stopped touring after a year. But, you know, the label said, ‘Keep touring, keep touring,’ and I figured they must know something I don’t. Two years of sleeping in a van, getting up at five a.m., doing the radio, the in-stores, then a show, you know, my body just crashed.”

By the time Nil brought Capitol a follow-up, the folks who had signed him were long gone. He and the label agreed to part ways. In 2004, Nil put out two records on his own, which you can still find online if you hunt. These days, he sticks with the live shows. “You sell fifteen, twenty records. No middleman, just cash in your pocket.”

I told Nil about the night he’d given me a KRU record, so long ago.

“I don’t remember that, but I remember you at the Talkhouse, man. Dancing and dancing and dancing. Bouncing Steve. You’d come up to me after a show and hug me and you were covered with sweat. That I remember.”

I apologized, retrospectively.

“That’s cool,” he said. “That’s what it’s all about, man. Barbaric expressions of the soul.”

I was struck by the precision of the term, by Nil’s lyrical talents in general, something I’ve neglected to emphasize. The guy had a sick sense of rhythm, a melodic knack to rival McCartney, a voice of uncommon range and clarity. But he also wrote beautifully in two languages, three if you include the Afro-Cuban scat he did when the spirit took him. It made me suddenly furious again on Nil’s behalf. “Doesn’t it even bug you, though,” I said, “to know you never got what you deserved?”

There was another pause. I hoped I’d maybe knocked some of the poise out of Nil.

“That’s okay,” he said softly. “Be selfish. Keep it to yourself.” His voice was full of tenderness; I felt a lump in my throat. Was I going to weep? Was Nil Lara going to make me weep after all these years? “What does ‘big’ mean, anyway?” he said. “That I get to go play in a mall? Or some giant arena where everything’s lit up and you can’t see anyone? I’ve played in those places, Steve. It’s like you’re in a vacuum. No, I like bars. You order a beer and there’s a band and that’s it. You can see the faces, the bodies dancing. What else could I want?”

Nil was saying, in essence: those nights of song at the Talkhouse—they
were
the dream. The rest was just the ambition we’d gathered on his behalf, which he was returning to me now, gently, without a hint of anger. I wanted to tell Nil that he was my hero, that he’d inspired me to become more than I thought I could. But I knew that would sound hokey, so I told him I should let him go and hung up and ran down to the basement and found his first record and blasted the thing and tried to remember the last time I’d felt so full of hope.

1. Serving as an X-Rated DJ to 200 Small Jewish Children
The summer after my freshman year in college, I was hired as a counselor at Camp Tova. This was a very bad decision for all involved. I lacked certain counseling essentials, such as a fondness for six-year-olds and any sense of the activities they might enjoy. “Let’s do some weight training!” I might say. Or, “Who wants to visit the cemetery?”

The crucial thing was this: the arts and crafts counselor was
hot
. She was five years older than me and she went to arts school in New York City and knew actual junkies. To impress her, I volunteered to DJ the first (and only) camp dance party and spent the next three weeks
fretting over the playlist. The big day arrived. The children filed into the multipurpose room. Overweening Jewish mothers assembled to chaperone. The Camp Director gestured for the music to begin.

Was it wise for me to open with “Psycho Killer” by Talking Heads? I will say no. Nor was “Shout” by Tears for Fears especially apt. Then I played “Add It Up” by the Violent Femmes, which begins with Gordon Gano wailing,
Why can’t I get just one kiss?
It’s an energetic anthem of lust, which I spent energetically lusting after the arts and crafts babe, who was dancing with a bunch of kids (lustily if you must know the truth). Did the ethical concerns of playing such a song for six-year-olds occur to me? Not really. I was more occupied by its effects on the arts and crafts babe and how she might be induced to grant me
just one fuck
. And why did this phrase leap to mind? Because, come to think of it, Gordon Gano was just about to wail it to an auditorium full of six-year-olds and their Jewish mothers and the Camp Director.

I turned from the dance floor and began a slow-motion dash toward my record player, because this was still a situation I could rescue, I could break the kids into two groups for a quick game of Sharks and Minnows, or Who Wants to Not Report the DJ to Child Protective Services? But Gano was singing too fast and I was too far away and the Camp Director was staring at me with her mouth open. Then I plowed into one of my campers, a lethargic little turd named Corey who continually farted during story hour. It was this collision that doomed me, because you can’t run over a six-year-old and keep going, though believe me I considered it, and thus, as I pulled him upright and brushed him off, I heard Gano’s anguished contralto ask the assembled,

Actually, it’s not.

2. Agreeing to Buy James Cotton Medicine
This dates back to my days as a rock critic in El Paso, though the show in question took place 350 miles away, in Lubbock. I had managed to convince my editor that James Cotton was one of the most important musicians on earth and close to dying. The former was possibly true, if you consider harmonica the most important instrument on earth. The latter I made up. The reason I wanted to interview Cotton was that my pal Holden had just been shipped off to Lubbock.

I showed up early for the concert and found his road manager, who led me backstage. As a younger man, Cotton had fronted Howlin’ Wolf’s band and toured with Janis Joplin and done backflips on stage. He was well past his acrobatic days. He moved slowly; his hands trembled.

“You gonna be all right?” his manager said.

Cotton nodded.