The Best American Short Stories 2014 (36 page)

Typical night: We would come home to find him planted on the couch, finishing off our last bottle of beer; he had swiped a key, and getting the locks changed was an enormous hassle.

“Hey,” he'd say. “You're all out of beer.”

Or this: “One of your neighbors gave me the stink eye. What have they got against white people?”

Or this: “You've got to let me jam with you sometime. Come on, I'm just messing with you. I know you wouldn't want me upstaging you. See, I'm still messing with you.”

Another time, his clients canceled dinner. He'd taken them to a day game at Wrigley and they'd had too much Old Style, too much sun. Kat was going out to see a new band at Medusa's, and Gerry volunteered to come with.

“But you have to stop doing that ‘Gerry with a G' thing,” Kat told him. “Every time you meet somebody, it's ‘Hi, Gerry with a G, Gerry with a G.'”

“Force of habit.” He was examining the innards of the refrigerator, the augury of boredom.

“So kick the habit,” she said. “You're not selling anything here.”

He looked at her like he was disappointed, like she was too stupid to get it. “Kitty, I'm selling Gerry with a G.”

He spent the rest of the night with a big grin on his face, telling stories about Kat when she was in grade school and clearing up any misconceptions about the band he had once led—how they specialized not only in Led Zeppelin, but in Rush, Black Sabbath, and Deep Purple. Whenever there was a change of venue, Gerry with a G would launch into the same material with a new crowd of band dudes, hangers on, and the eyelinered riffraff who we called friends.

 

Interior. Empty Bottle. Western Avenue.

 

She hit the stage in an English Beat T-shirt and black jeans cropped just below the knee. Capris, you could have called them, if that didn't seem such a kicky, genteel name for pants that had
SAVE ME
painted in white on one thigh and
FUCK YOU
on the other. The crowd loved it, but by then she really didn't need to try so hard to get their attention. After every show, guys came up to her, their fanboy hearts aflutter, and told her about a new band that she should check out or asked what she thought about this or that album. They always talked too loud and their eyes were bright and unblinking, like cultists inviting her to spend the weekend at their compound. It was just music geeks showing off, she knew that, but she also knew that as they talked about mail-order import B-sides, they hoped that she would be so impressed that she'd drag one of them back to her place for a wild night of indie-rock sex. Kat had a lot of reasons why that would never happen, and high on that list was the conviction that these were guys who knew exactly what song they'd want on the stereo through the whole sordid episode. Most of them probably carried a mix tape—“Jason's Sex Mix '92”—for just that purpose.

Later, after her first album dropped,
Spin
ran a short, front-of-the-book Q&A with her. When they asked about some of the dirtier, angstier breakup songs, Kat played coy and said that she was, at twenty-five, still a virgin. A complete lie, but you should have seen the music nerds. I told her that she had to stop messing with the heads of her core demographic, but during the first show after the article ran she added a revved-up cover of “Like a Virgin” to the set list. Chaos ensued.

 

Exterior. Night. Café Voltaire. Clark Street. Hand-painted sign reads
ART TONIGHT
.

 

There was a guy named Giles, who we used to call J. Geils whenever we thought he couldn't hear us. He wasn't an artist and he wasn't in a band, but he was always around and he had the kind of dark energy that singers and guitarists try hard to project, and this made him both attractive and repellent, depending on your own particular polarity. I, for one, was negatively inclined, but Kat got very, very into him—so into him that she stopped calling him by our nickname and started to give me a
really?-you're-still-doing-that?
look whenever I used his alias, this thing we had made together.

Giles and his friends had money, but they didn't have jobs. They exchanged elaborate handshakes, and they had already been places—Thailand, Prague, Chile, Morocco—that marked them as secret agents or trust-fund kids or time-traveling citizens of some future world. None of this seemed to bother Kat. Soon I began to notice that when Kat said “we,” more often than not she was referring to her and Giles, and not to her and me.

I was forced to cultivate other interests. I got an idea about making sound collages and let a reel-to-reel run in the loft, picking up doors slamming and the toilet flushing and stray bits of conversation. I thought about studying for some kind of professional-school exam. I started writing a play based entirely on personal ads in the
Reader
, but never got much further than the title:
Men Seeking Women
.

One night I attended an opening for the work of former rivals from the Art Institute, in a basement coffee shop where canvases covered in chewed paper and dental floss were mercilessly lit by thrift-store lamps. I smiled and cheek-kissed and appeared to ponder, but it was the lamps that demanded my attention: chipped urns of pale blue that cast jug-eared shadows, a nightmare-faced ceramic monkey in a gold-buttoned waistcoat, a rooster whose comb rose like a blood-soaked hat. I had something like a revelation: why did we keep making new art, and so much of it so bad, when we were surrounded by work that needed only the proper context to shine? So that was me: epiphanic from looking at bad arts and better crafts.

I came home and found the television on, the loft awash in noise and blue light. Kat, Giles-less, pulled the sleeve of her T-shirt tight to dab at her eyes.

I asked her if she was crying.

Kat sniffled. “It's the TV. Something on the stupid TV made me cry, OK?”

I looked at the screen:
Cheers
. “What, did Norm die?”

“Just forget it, OK?” She took a deep breath and loudly exhaled. “Giles and I had a—a fight.” She rolled her eyes. Stupid. Like something from high school, if she had dated anyone in high school.

“A big one?”

“Pretty big.” She turned her face to me, straight on, and I saw the red welt blazing beneath her eye. My hand went to the body of my camera, as if by instinct, before I pulled it back.

“Can we start calling him J. Geils again?”

I thought she was going to tell me to get lost or to go fuck myself. It was fifty-fifty on that one; that's how into him she had been. Instead I got that lopsided smile of hers, the one I could never catch on film, the one I'd pay a million dollars to see again.

 

Still life. Evergreen Avenue loft.

 

Call this one “a study in misguided affection”: A table with a Formica top. An ashtray logjammed with cigarettes. Three mismatched glasses containing various liquids—clear, pale yellow, dark brown—in varying amounts. A pile of scattered coins: nine quarters, two nickels, one dime. A CTA fare card. A spray of keys. A stack of bills—utility, credit card, student loan—unpaid, unopened. A large manila envelope, jagged-mouthed along one edge, addressed in cursive to Miss Katherine Conboy. A folded page from the
Tribune
classifieds: circled in red is an ad for a music teacher/band director at Northfield High School; next to the ad, also in red, Kat's mother has written “Think about it!!!! XOXO Mom.”

 

Color mockup. Cover of the band's debut album, Chica-go-go. Kat and the others slouch against a wall, à la the Ramones.

 

I dated this guy Milo for longer than I should have. He was thin without being too bony. His hair was neither too shaggy nor too expensively cut. His whole wardrobe was short-sleeved button-downs—thrift-store issue, though he had a good eye for it. The patterns were neither too dorky nor too Euro. He wasn't too bright, but he wasn't an idiot, either. That was Milo. He was neither too this nor too that. He was, for a time, just right. We called him Baby Bear.

He did something with computers during the day, and at night he played trumpet in a ska-Krautrock outfit called Rudie Kant Fail that had yet to land any of the big bookings that he believed were its due. He bemoaned “the tyranny of verse-chorus-verse” to anyone who would listen, even though it was a swipe at the music Kat was playing. Milo was the first person I knew who had an e-mail address, but since no one else had one it was pretty useless. He probably works in an office now and every time some entry-level programmer gets the grand tour of the cubicles, someone will elbow the new guy and say,
You ever heard of Kat Conboy? That singer who died? Milo over there used to date her roommate
. And the new guy will be like,
No way
, because he'll look at Milo and he'll picture Kat and he'll go,
Does. Not. Compute
. But back then, when we were young, before 99 percent of the people we knew moved on to Life Plan B, it did make some kind of sense.

Milo was in the loft on the night Kat told me that she'd met the guy from Matador, the one who would eventually sign the band and release their first album. The Matador guy had gotten hold of one of her cassettes—she had given them to two people, in other bands, and within a month they'd multiplied like rabbits. She was viral before there was viral. She had run up the stairs and her eyes were glowing when she told me, but the light went out when she saw Milo was in the loft. He'd heard everything. “Dat's da bomb!” he said.

Kat told him to pipe down. That's just what she said—
pipe down
—which was something her father used to say. Milo was loud, it was late, and Kat had grown tired of his penchant for saying things like “da bomb” or “word” or “fly” or “fresh.” She thought it made him sound foolish, like the joke was on him. She told him it was a question of authenticity.

“But you're talking M to the A to the T to the Dor. That's dope.”

Matador
was
dope. If they were interested in Kat, then it was a sign of good things to come.

Kat shrugged, and I could tell that she wished she hadn't said anything. Not in front of him. She looked at me like I'd tricked her, letting her share this good news when Milo was right around the corner, waiting to ruin it.

 

Exterior. Daylight. Rock Island Centennial Bridge. Kat leans over the guardrail, spitting into the Mississippi.

 

This is how she explained it to me: There just aren't enough hours in the day. But then you figure out that if you take the right pills, there still aren't enough hours but there are more, and you need all the time you can get. You don't take the pills to feel good, you take them because if you don't, you'll be miserable about all of the things you don't have the time or the energy or let's face it, the
strength
, to do. Because working a job to pay for bad food and a lousy apartment and banged-up equipment and posters for every show takes time, and rehearsing takes time, and touring takes time. Oh, does touring take time. Do you know how long the drive to the Quad Cities is? Hours in the van to be the third act at an all-ages show in a broken-down roller rink, followed by an immediate and equally long return trip because half the band will get shitcanned from their nametag jobs if they miss one more shift. And if this is an honest-to-God tour, a go-out-on-the-road-and-don't-come-back-for-a-week-or-two tour, then you will be sapped in other ways: sleeping on one couch after another, or on a series of floors, getting acquainted with the many verminous regional varieties of upholstery and shag carpet. Figuring out if there's anyone at the show worth fucking in exchange for a night in an actual bed. Remembering where the van is parked so you don't get marooned in Carbondale or Macomb or Terre Haute.

And to bring this back around to the pills, and their utility: how else does anyone stay awake at the wheel for a drive like that, a superhuman effort necessary to keep the members of Pope Joan from going the way of Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper, albeit in a flightless, much-less-famous, not-inspiring-the-next-“Miss American Pie” sort of way?

So yes, pharmaceutical intervention is necessary for the drive across the murderous midwestern prairie, and when you start to think about it, you realize that every day asks for a kind of heroism—and even, at times, for the kind of effort that would grind lesser mortals to chalk. How else do you start a day on three hours of sleep and then endure a double shift at your copy-shop job and then a few hours at a sparsely peopled backroom club showing support for a friend's latest band (and inking with your presence an unspoken contract that he will do the same for you)—and only then, after seventeen or eighteen misspent waking hours, will you finally be able to get to the part of the day that matters? Because if you don't do it—if you don't sit your ass on the busted springs of the couch with your guitar cradled in your lap and a spiral notebook in front of you bristling with gibberish that you need to wrestle into lyrics; if you don't fit words to the tune that has been ticking in your head all day long before it evaporates, leaving only a crust of failure around the bathtub rim that is your skull; if you don't do
this
, then you will go to bed—a collapse, a surrender, call it what you will—filled with the knowledge, now more apparent than ever, that you are a fraud, a faker, a failure. So if taking a handful of red or yellow or green or blue pills, administered daily, can keep that gnawing thought at bay
and
make it possible to get those sounds out of your head and into the world, you really have to ask, What's the harm in that?

 

Box 7, spool 2.

 

KAT: Hello? Hel—Dad, is that? Dad? Dad, it's Kat—I mean, it's Kitty. Kitty. Kit-ty. Your daughter, Kitty. Yes, like kitty cat. No, a person. I'm a person. Remember, from Christmas? I gave you . . . Uh, huh. Uh huh. Uh. Huh. Dad, is Mom there? Is she there with you? Mom. You know, the woman. The woman who lives in the house. Yes, the lady with short hair. From dinnertime, yes. No, it's not dinnertime. Not yet. No, it's not. Not yet. Is the woman—is—hello? Hello? Mom? What the hell, Mom? When did Dad start answering the phone? I didn't—I—I'm not
accusing
you of anything—