Imperfect Solo
Page 3
“ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME? PUT HER ON.”
“No. She is crying, and you are just going to rip her face off.”
There are tears rolling down my cheeks. I am as happy as I can ever remember.
“OK. OK. Fuck. Sorry for cussing. I just died a few deaths. Why is she upset?”
“She was cyberbullied.”
“Cyberbullied?”
“Yes.”
“Krystal, don’t move. I’m coming to pick her up. Don’t let her out of your sight.”
I call Bunny. She is more angry than relieved. I tell her to hang tight—I’ll drop Isobel off later.
Cyberbullying. Strangers are being nasty to my little girl, and I will find them and hurt them. I will beat them to the ground with hard objects and snap their vicious little spines, so that they spend the rest of their miserable lives eating through a straw and contemplating their cruelty to my baby.
Cyberbullying. What the fuck? Before all of this, before the stuff from which I earn my keep insinuated itself on the march of civilization. Before communication leapt from its primitive perch into a wild tumult of options. Before the Cambrian explosion of networks and devices and email and tweets and statuses and digital bulletin boards and texts and VoIP and video chats. Before that, you knew your bully. There he was standing in the schoolyard, in your face, his ugly eyelash-less pig eyes bulging as he roared with menace and spittle, “Fucking Jew, you want to go a round with me, momma’s boy, huh? Huh?”
Then it was simple. Reptilian brain decision, a binary option, fight or flight. And only three outcomes. If you fought, you won or lost. Worst-case scenario was the hospital for a stitch or two. If you didn’t, then you were toast. A wuss, coward, lower than sharkshit slime. You retreated into silent corners to congratulate yourself on your wisdom, your moral height, while trying hard to avoid the stares of contempt and disgust from your peers.
But you knew your bully.
Now Isobel has had her dignity stripped by faceless beasts, impugning her reputation, spreading lies and rumors, posting image-processed pictures of her head on porno stars’ spread-eagled bodies. They have savaged her, an innocent, with damage, possibly irretrievable, instantaneously spread to hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of cackling teenagers, their lust for victims and scapegoats insatiable.
“Honey, I’ll find out who did this. This is my business. There are technologies that can track—”
“I know who did it, Dad. It was Cheryl.”
“As in Cheryl, your best friend?”
“My ex-best friend.”
“How do you know?”
“She put a message on her Facebook status.”
“Saying what?
“Saying I’m a slut.”
Oops. The gray and angry masses of anonymous cyberbullies disintegrate. I love technology, such a boon to humanity. A slut. The queen of schoolgirl insults since the dawn of time. Call a girl fat, ugly, stupid, nerdy—they all sting. Call her a slut, and it is ruinous. Interesting thought, though. Could it be that some of these girls are having sex already? Surely not, says the dad. You’re naive, say the stats. Surely not my daughter. Surely not with enough frequency or recklessness to be called a slut. Surely not.
“Cheryl called her a slut?”
Bunny is fuming. I remember her outrage well. Usually directed at me. Usually with cause. Although sometimes not.
“So it seems.” I am treading lightly here. This is not my core competence, females accusing each other of sexual indiscretions, even if they are fourteen.
“Cheryl’s the damn slut, not Isobel.”
“Ah.”
“I’ve heard things.”
“Ah.”
“Bad things.”
“Ah.”
“Is that your total contribution?” Her tone is a warning. I know it well.
“Uh … what things?”
“Cheryl. Dark corners. Blow jobs.”
“I don’t think I want to hear this.”
“And drugs too, hard ones.”
“Aaaargh. I am covering my ears now.”
I sing for a while into the phone. Loudly.
“Bunny, you still there?”
“What are you, nine?”
“Who told you?”
“Isobel.”
“So Isobel tells you that her best friend is giving blow jobs and shooting crystal meth, and calls her a slut on Facebook. Sounds to me like we should stay out of this.”
“Meyer, you really don’t understand anything, do you?”
“No, not really.”
Not at all.
CHAPTER 6
“WHAT THE HELL do you know anyway?”
I am asking this important question of Farzad twenty-four hours after my daughter scared me to death, which is approximately how long it has taken for my heart rate to settle. We are sitting in a café on a Saturday morning on the Venice boardwalk. Which has, of late, become so upscale you would think you were in the middle of an ersatz film set, if it wasn’t for the fact that the hundreds of homeless people populating the grassy verges are not extras. The palm trees, rollerbladers, and sunny Pacific beach backdrop make me want to do something inappropriate, vulgar. But it’s just a thought.
Actually, Farzad knows a great deal. Although I don’t want him to know I know. An Iranian immigrant, fled from the grand idiocies and brutalities of the theocratic revolution in Iran decades ago. Only to reach the USA and face the daily indignities of a swarthy skin and accent and obvious Al Qaeda–bestowed American-hating name. Actually, Farzad and Innocent could swap notes about appellation and identity. He is a Harvard-trained psychologist, ministering to foreigners and immigrants who failed to find the American dream. I met him in a laundromat in Boston when I briefly attended Berklee, trying to kick-start my jazz career. He gave me a quarter for the dryer because I was skint. This endeared him to me for life.
“I know many things, Jew.”
Farzad is allowed to say that to me. I don’t know why.
“All you know is how to say ‘there, there’ to swarthy immigrants from medieval autocracies who still believe in beating their wives.”
“Perhaps, but if you think you have the lock on dread, my Semitic friend, you are wrong. It is the human condition du jour.”
“Yeah? Well fuck you, my dread is unique, and far more refined than that of your idiot patients.”
“Au contraire, my beloved Hebrew.”
“Stop with the French, you fucking towelhead. It doesn’t fool anyone.”
“You are an ignoramus, Lansky, I am a Persian, not an Arab. We do not wear headgear.”
“You are in the US now. All people east of Spain and south of Gibraltar are known as towelheads. This is taught to us by Fox News. Didn’t you learn anything at Harvard?”
“I was not studying Geography, Metro Goldwyn.”
“Wait. Have you read Joseph Heller?
“Who is he?”
“You’re kidding.”
“I never kid, Cohen.”
“That’s his gag.”
“What gag?”
“Calling a Jew by any old Jewish last name. Haven’t you read Heller’s Good as Gold?”
“I do not do that, I call everyone by their correct names. I am a doctor. And who is Heller?”
A particularly statuesque specimen of bikini-clad California womanhood drifts by on wheels, blonde hair trailing behind her, various tanned muscles peristaltically undulating for us. The tiny white hairs on her legs give her skin a glint sheen, like a seal. We maintain a respectful silence until she passes.
“That’s what I mean, Farzad.”
“What?”
“That girl. She will never, ever notice me.”
“Why should she? You are twenty years older than she is. She is also beautiful, while you are, how shall I say … ?”
“Exactly my point. This is what I mean by dread.”
“What exactly?”
“That’s the problem with dread. It coats everyt
hing. Especially her. Or rather the fact that she will never, ever notice me.”
Farzad is a deeply wise man—on rare occasions when I can get him to take me seriously. A sage really. He is also married to a woman who looks just like the rollerblader, a fact that has always left me uncharitably short on generosity toward his views on women. A deep racist strain rears its ugly head when I see them together. Swarthy ethnic heathens stealing our blonde women.
“Farzad, I want you to take me seriously.”
His head is swiveled around like Linda Blair in The Exorcist as he sucks in a last sight of her glowing buttocks as she disappears. I am looking at the back of his head. He turns around.
“You want me to take you seriously?
“Yes.”
“Seriously?”
“Yes.”
“OK, Meyer. What is troubling you?”
“Dread.”
“I would not take it too seriously. It is very fashionable now.”
“See? You don’t take me seriously.”
The waitress arrives to take our order. She has skin the color of a peach sunset. I want to lick her face, while simultaneously avoiding the metalwork in her nostril, lip, ear, eyebrow, and tongue.
“Good morning, young lady. This is my friend, Meyer. Would you say he is dreadful?”
She looks at me, and then back at Farzad, confused.
“Uh … no. I guess.”
Farzad slams his palm down on the table.
“There. I told you there wasn’t a problem.”
I glare at him, and order a burger. Studface retreats. I glare some more.
“OK. OK. Meyer. Stop being such a crank. Here is what it is, my little Christ-killer. My patients, many of them, have seen horrors that you cannot even imagine. The lucky ones have lost or left everything: money, home, culture, loved ones, hopes, ambitions. And have washed up on these fine democratic shores through good fortune or bribing or cheating or begging or desperation or the graces of our do-gooders in government. And most of them live sad lives of deep melancholia, depression, and ungoverned and undirected anger, asking themselves every day, why me? The unlucky ones have had their children tortured in front of them, been forced to rape their daughters on videotape, have had their extremities amputated. And for these people, melancholia is not enough. To this they must add guilt, the sort of guilt for which I can offer only platitudes as a poor substitute for healing. These people understand dread. It is not a subject for conversation at the beach. It is a living thing for them, weighted like lead. So that breathing and walking and eating and living is a task of onerous dimensions, requiring great courage and pain. They do not talk of dread; they are its living incarnations, walking ghosts of tragedy.
“And then there are other patients—people much like you—born in the land of the free, every waking moment since you were born awash with opportunities and rainbows and hope. And somehow, you conspire to summon up dread, to incarnate darkness and despair against all odds. Why is this, I ask? Why does my friend Meyer feel dread? The gods that dispense mental health and illness are fickle, smiting even the most unlikely of candidates. Like you. With delightful children and friends and a great job and some creative talent and relative youth and health and, it pains me to say, some intelligence. Why then, does my friend Meyer feel dread?”
“It’s because—”
“Shut up, I’m not finished.”
He does this a lot, Farzad. Shuts me up. I assume it is an Iranian thing. I find it endearing, in an irritating sort of way. He continues.
“It is because the world has changed. The opportunities for our undoing have proliferated explosively, even comically. Not too long ago we lived in a time when we feared cancer and car accidents and upset stomachs. Now every event on the planet is massively intertwined, chaotically bound by laws and relationships no one understands, conspiring to hurt us, kill us, rob us, diminish us. Nuclear-armed Iran and Korea, climate change, meteors, microbiological plagues, irradiated Japanese fish, Internet pedophiles, irrational dictators with chemical stores, deranged individuals with explosive belts filled with nails, irrevocably addictive drugs, metastasized financial systems gorging on hard-earned citizens’ money, ubiquitous and friendly technology that strips us of our privacy, religious fundamentalists from the Dark Ages armed with hate and bile.
“I could go on, Meyer, but here is my diagnosis. You are full of dread because it is the only mental condition that is appropriate to the educated, well-read person. It is, in fact, the only healthy response to the world around us. I congratulate you on your mental acuity and well-being.”
He pops a fry into his mouth.
I stare at him.
“Why do you never take me seriously?”
He calls for the waitress. We will down a few beers today.
At least.
CHAPTER 7
THE WEEK PASSES slowly. I avoid the CEO and all my coworkers and bury my head in the opiate of bug-fixing, a demented cousin of software development that has always appealed to me in the same way that Sudoku enslaves otherwise perfectly reasonable people. The weekend approaches with a rush of possibilities. Escape beckons.
I feel like Richard Gere as Dr. T. Too many women in my life. Isobel, a teenager who will soon be too embarrassed to hug me. Krystal, my tone-deaf, soon-to-be ex-girlfriend, who thinks I am not ambitious enough. Bunny, mother of my daughter, who wants to get remarried, procuring a new father for Isobel in the bargain. Grace, mother of my son, who was better than me at the important stuff.
“Van, there are too many women in my life. Let’s go away for the weekend.”
“We’re playing this weekend.”
“Fuck the gig. We can tell them we got sick. Simultaneously. Ate the same irradiated Japanese sushi. We were rushed to the hospital in the same ambulance. Out of ICU, both stable. Back on stage next week.”
I am at Van’s house on Thursday night going through a new song with him. Van studiously ignores the temptations of his trust fund. It is a modest little cottage from the ’20s near Silver Lake, the LA skyline clearly visible from his living room window. We don’t rehearse much, but occasionally Van or I hear something that we want in the repertoire. The others just sort of rehearse when we play live, so it takes a few weeks to get it right. Of course, the audience doesn’t know or care. This is a Piazzolla tango Van discovered. Soaked in tradition. Lots of minor flat 5ths and dominant flat 9ths. A melody of passion and loss.
“Nah.”
“What do you mean ‘nah?’ You and I haven’t been on a boys’ weekend for ten years, Van.”
“Wasn’t much fun then either, if I remember correctly.”
“You’re not adventurous anymore.”
“I never was.”
“C’mon, we’ll go to Vegas, cheat on our girlfriends.”
“You never cheat on your girlfriends, Meyer.”
“OK, you cheat on your girlfriend. I’ll watch.”
“Marion is my girlfriend, remember? She will have me followed. Then she will have me castrated. Broadcast the event on the Feminist Channel.”
Marion doesn’t like me. Thinks I am not politically motivated enough. Which I am not, of course. But then she clearly likes Van, who is even less politically motivated than me. Perhaps it had to do with the time I got into a drunken argument with her and called her a feminazi. Which wasn’t inappropriate given that she had just defaced my latest issue of The National Review, which I only get because the previous right-wing owner of the house failed to send a change of address when he moved. Her defacing technique was unique, I will grant her that. She found the magazine in the little rack in the bathroom. She pissed on it and gave it to me, soaked.
“Van, why are you still with her?”
“She likes to be tied up and spanked.”
“Really?”
“That’s all I am giving you.”
“So, no weekend romp then?”
“We have a gig.”
The gig is a disaster. The drummer, M
ike, a man of immense talent and immense drug intake, has taken it upon himself to lose his temper with the accordionist Tim, a man of immense talent and no drug intake. The reasons for his opprobrium are a bit opaque but, man, is he pissed off. He leaps off his kit on the last note of the last song of the set, and takes three long strides across the stage toward Tim, face red, upending his snare drum along the way.
“I WILL SHOVE THAT ACCORDION UP YOUR ASS.”
Tim smiles, expecting a joke.
Mike’s eyes bulge further. A couple of punters at the bar take notice.
“YOU DO NOT STAND UP IN FRONT OF MY BAND AND PLAY A PIECE OF SHIT SOLO LIKE THAT EVER AGAIN.”
It is not, and has never been, his band, but I split hairs here. Tim looks at me. I shrug. Tim looks back at Mike.
“Huh?”
Mike, breathing and perspiring heavily, decides that further explanation is redundant, and lunges at him with a drumstick, apparently trying to stab him. Tim steps deftly aside and Mike loses his center of gravity, falling heavily into the PA system, causing irreparable damage to both his hand (which snags on a music stand and gets sliced open), and to the electronics, which hiss and die.
After the set, Van had disappeared into the alleyway for a cigarette. Upon hearing the ruckus, he sticks his head in from the exit door, sees Mike on the ground holding his bleeding hand, the upended snare drum, the smashed PA speaker. He blinks, poker-faced, and returns to the alleyway to finish his cigarette.
I walk over to Mike, who is lying on the stage, on his back. He looks like a flipped turtle.
“What’s going on, Mike?”
“That little shit doesn’t take his music seriously. He fucks around. He fucks me off.”
“How fucked up are you, Mike?”
“Maybe a little bit.”
“What?”
“What what?”
“You know what I’m asking, Mike.”
“Crystal meth.”
“Oh, wonderful.”
“Shit. Shit. My hand is fucked. Can’t play any more tonight, Meyer.”
“Fuck you. I’m not paying you anything. Why can’t you get stoned or drunk like a normal fuck-up?”