by Rob Spillman
I stewed about this all the way back to St. Paul Street and our house, which felt cryptlike as usual. My mother and David never had any friends over to visit. NPR was the default radio station, but only for All Things Considered while making dinner and on Saturdays for the opera broadcasts from the Met (“Busman’s holiday,” my mother would joke). But we rarely listened to other recorded music, and the house was noiseless except for when David warmed up for his nightly gig at the symphony, or when my mother sang or had a student over for a lesson.
To be with David, my mother had left behind a tenure-track position in Lynchburg. In Baltimore she picked up teaching work at various colleges, but there was nothing on the level she had given up in Lynchburg. She continued to sing, performing with the Baltimore Symphony and giving recitals at the Baltimore Museum of Art, at the Peabody Conservatory of Music, and at various other places around town. But Baltimore wasn’t Berlin or New York.
She met the lack of opportunities with her usual steely practicality. She went back to grad school, this time for a degree in business management. On top of giving private voice lessons, she went into music management with a pianist friend of hers. The two worked with a handful of other musicians and also did volunteer work at nursing homes, where they sang tunes from the turn of the century, like “Meet Me in St. Louis,” the old-timers loving every minute of it. This was what she had to do to express herself, but as I was judgmental and didactic, I didn’t really get what it had to do with art. She also expressed herself by managing artists and by assembling performances. She was so adept a manager that she was hired to run the Baltimore Children’s Museum, a deft career swerve I didn’t see coming. Somehow she had reinvented herself and was now one of the city’s cultural leaders.
No one was home, which was a relief. I couldn’t remember if it was my night to “carry my own weight.” On those days, my mother gave me a recipe and then it was my “job” to make the meal. And it wasn’t a collaborative effort—it was me, alone in the pristine kitchen, wondering what I was supposed to do. Sometimes I would save my allowance and buy pizza. But even then I had to make sure to be neat and orderly. I was allowed two cookies for dessert; no crumbs. I was expected to clean up after dinner twice a week. I cleaned the dishes by hand, then my mother inspected my work. With the seriousness of an assembly-line foreman, she held the dishes up to the light, one at a time, and looked closely for any specks of soap or food, then stacked the “unclean” dishes back in the sink, although for the life of me I could rarely see where I had failed.
I guessed that she was overcompensating for what she thought was my father’s slack parenting—not that she would know, as they didn’t talk to each other. Away from the house we got along better. I went with her to shop for fabric, which was kind of interesting, observing the clothes-making process from the huge bolts of cloth to the finished product, but while I was impressed with her ability to sew anything, how exciting was it to pick out beige corduroy and complementary brown leather for elbow patches for what would become a school blazer?
She also took me to classical-music performances and arty movies, once accidentally taking me to the uncensored version of The Man Who Fell to Earth with David Bowie, both of us squirming through a scene where a handgun became a sex toy. David, on the other hand, was less concerned with the highbrow, and happily escorted me to an early Woody Allen triple feature.
Even though cross-country season had ended the week before and I had no reason to keep running, I quickly changed into shorts and ran out the back door, then past the bricks and ivy of the stereotypically East Coast college campus of Johns Hopkins to the trail by Roland Creek, a secret green passageway through suburbia where, if I stared off into the middle ground and didn’t focus, I could imagine that I was running through the Colorado mountains. I hurled myself up and down the slippery, muddy hills, falling, rolling my ankle, but not stopping, not slowing, pushing myself until my lungs felt like they were going to explode out of my chest. I was muddy, sweaty, angry—everything that I was not at home.
My mother didn’t understand why I had suddenly gotten so into running, this messy physicality so far from her own experience. She didn’t get why anyone would run, though we were in the middle of a running boom. The Complete Book of Running was on top of the best-seller lists, and the area around the college was lousy with joggers. I loathed joggers, half-assed fatsos in velour suits, creeps who were roller-discoing the year before, the kind of self-indulgent trend followers Hunter S. Thompson savagely mocked in The Curse of Lono, in which he hurls insults and beer cans at the mid-pack joggers in the Honolulu Marathon. To me, the difference between a jogger and a runner was everything. It was the difference between a poseur and an authentic soul. Discomfort versus pain. Donovan versus Dylan. Endurance versus self-inflicted suffering in order to attain a higher level of consciousness.
Though I was maddened by the whole craze, I had just read and loved Jim Fixx’s bestseller. When I banged in through the back door, drenched with sweat, my mother was sitting at the dining room table, reading The New Yorker with a cup of tea. She gave me the usual puzzled look. I took off my shoes and ran quietly up the stairs, thinking that Fixx was able to articulate what I was feeling but couldn’t put words to. Fixx nailed how you could lose yourself running, when the “runner’s high,” that rush of endorphins, kicks in after thirty minutes. And he captured the crash that follows that euphoria, the exhaustion and yet at the same time the overwhelming urge to run more, longer, harder. As I scampered back down the stairs with the book in hand, I thought, This will explain me to her; she’ll finally understand.
“Mom, you’ve got to read this!” I said, and dropped the bright red book in front of her.
My mother looked at the lean, disembodied legs caught mid-stride on the cover, then up at me, her face souring. It was as if I’d presented her with a plate of worms. Or maybe she was simply confused, as I was. But I was more than confused—I was flustered, my cheeks burning. “Uh, well, it kind of explains why people run and you’ve, you know, asked me why I like . . .” I couldn’t read her puzzled expression. It either was saying, “Go on, help me make sense of this” or she wasn’t getting it, wasn’t forgiving me for crashing her peaceful New Yorker time. I decided on the latter and slid the book off the table and slunk upstairs.
37
“If you’re writing anything decent, it’s in you, it’s your spirit coming out. If it’s not an expression of how a person genuinely feels, then it’s not a good song done with any conviction.”
—Alex Chilton
Soundtrack: Big Star, “September Gurls,” 1974
AFTER MY FAILED SEARCH for the music store, my knee was sore but I could bend it without too much pain. On our landing, I thought that I really should write up my East Berlin dérive. But who in New York would want this? Why not write it for the new Berlin? Start a magazine here. Of course, this would need capital, something we didn’t have.
“How was it?” Elissa asked, not looking up from her yellow notepad.
“Fun. Below the Kollwitzplatz park, there was a pothole so big it took up the entire street, and it was filled with five Wartburgs.”
“Hilarious,” Elissa said, still focused on her notepad.
“They looked like . . .” I waited, but she said nothing. “How goes it?” I asked. She shrugged. “What’re you working on?” Elissa shrugged again.
“Food?”
“Sure, Big Chief Hotwater,” Elissa said, finally looking up.
I went down the hall to fill Sparky, our dubious Soviet Mr. Coffee. I had found the contraption on one of our foraging expeditions, and had a hunch that we could pair it with the oblong metal tub I had found a few days before. Sparky was a bulbous glass pot affixed to a primitive machine that looked like a hot plate, and we guessed that it was a Soviet version of a Mr. Coffee, and for the most part, despite odd pings and blinking lights, it worked. For bathing, I heated up
pots of our icy tap water that I then poured over myself as I stood in the tub. For this, Hank had given me a name promotion from “Chief” to “Big Chief Hotwater.”
After cleaning up, we searched for food, and stumbled upon yet another phoenix-like drinking space, two blocks from the now firmly established wine bar. The funky new bar was a gutted floor-through with exposed bricks, wires, and piping. The tables were made out of industrial-sized saw blades, some four feet across, that were riveted onto the tops of old cable spools. The well-worn steel surfaces had an oily, purplish sheen. Although the curved tips were dull, they were still menacing, and I was careful not to pull my rickety chair too close.
“I miss it,” Elissa said as she put down her bitter beer.
“What?” I asked, although I knew what she meant.
“Home. I miss home. Back there. Home.”
“Really?”
“I do. I miss bagels and pizza, the Sunday Times and movies, I miss Film Forum, and I miss my friends. Remember those?” she said. “Don’t you?”
“Sure, sort of,” I said. “But friends are fluid, you know? And anyway, they should join us. We’ve invited them. They could come, you know. Anyone who says they want to be an artist . . .”
“They have jobs,” Elissa said, exasperated.
“So did we. But this is the place to be. This whole neighborhood is going to be amazing. This is ground zero in the battle between commodification and artistic utopia. We can be on the winning side of history, or, if we lose, we’ll be like the heroes of the Spanish Civil War, having fought the fascists way ahead of those who fought them in World War II. We’re part of the international intellectual and artistic army, the true avant-garde. . . .”
Elissa smiled at me, her “This is why I fell in love with you smile,” but it was fleeting. “I’m tired,” she said.
“Maybe we’re drinking too much,” I said. It was possible she was. I was fine. Fatter than I’d like to have been, but that wasn’t drinking, that was not running. “Maybe it’s time to cut back. Not altogether, but, a little.”
“No,” she said irritably. “It’s not that. It’s not the drinking. The drinking is fine. I have no problem with how much I’m drinking. Drinking is the thing I do best here. Drinking is just ducky. All I said was, I’m tired. I’m fucking tired and my stomach hurts.”
“Like return of ulcer hurts?”
“Like tired hurts,” she snapped. I drained my pint, not realizing how thirsty I was. Slouched in the sheet-metal chair, she looked small, and she looked exhausted.
“Maybe you should take a break from your work,” I said. “Take a few days off . . .”
“No way,” Elissa said, her eyes angry.
“A day—”
“You don’t get it.”
“Whoa, sorry,” I said, holding up my hands. I did get it. She was tired of being deprived of her bullshit creature comforts—her comfy bed, knowing what she was going to eat for breakfast; she was tired of . . . blah, blah, blah. “How about we go over to the West and get a decent meal.”
“And what? Get another cash advance?” Elissa asked, sitting up straight, now fully charged.
I had miscalculated her mood. “We’re okay,” I said.
“Are we?” Elissa said, smiling brightly, tilting her head—bad signs. Threat display. “Did you call Sports Illustrated?”
I hesitated, thought about lying, but she’d know; she always did. “I forgot,” I said.
Mistake. I could sense a strike coming. “Like you forgot the name of the first girl you slept with?” Elissa asked.
“Whoa,” I said, stung by the perfect low blow, one simple fact encapsulating all of my failings as a human being. “Where’d that come from?” I asked.
Elissa leaned back, and said nothing as she glowered at me, drilling me with her stare as she drained her beer.
“At least I remember the experience,” I said.
“You remember the experience but not the person you had it with?” Elissa asked, and waited for me to further incriminate myself. She should have been a lawyer.
“Let me get you another beer,” I said, and grabbed her glass before she could assent. At the bar, which was made of cleverly interlocking industrial gears, I got two fresh pints and asked the bartender, a young woman wearing dangling black screws for earrings, who had put this new place together. There were a dozen East Germans ordering drinks, and she held up a finger to indicate that she would get to me when she could, and so I had to weave back through the saw blades to our table, where Elissa still smoldered.
“Give it just a little longer,” I pleaded. Elissa sipped her new beer, not saying anything. Her fire was dying down. She looked tired again. “Okay? Just give it a little bit longer,” I said. I didn’t want to sound like I was pleading, but I was. I needed her to believe. She had to believe; she’d always believed. She knew, much more than I did, what this “it” was—my romantic need to be in the cultural moment and my need to feel like I had my own home, which was also tied to my early history in Berlin. If I could get “it” right, I would return to being a Berliner, which would define me and make me real, not some nebulous amalgam of other people’s histories and creations. She sighed. She was now fully cooled, resigning herself.
“It’s a party,” she said, running her fingers along the edges of our saw-blade table.
I took her hand. “We’re going to be great,” I said. Relief mixed with nausea. She was relenting, but she didn’t believe in me. She didn’t think that I was meant to be in Berlin. Or rather, she didn’t think that “we” were meant to be in Berlin. But I was certain that everything was still going to work out for both “me” and “we.”
38
“I try never to wear my own clothes, I pretend I’m someone else.”
—David Byrne
Soundtrack: Velvet Underground, “Rock and Roll,” 1970
NONE OF THE BOOKS WERE WORKING. I tried hiding out in the tree house with The Prince of Central Park, where the teenage-runaway hero lives, but that felt too real, as did Hunter S. Thompson’s Hell’s Angels, so I switched to sailing across the Narnian sea, but that was too familiar and childish, so I tried to float down Ken Kesey’s Oregon logging river, but instead of a gentle current under my back, I felt like I was on a raft rushing through whitewater toward a waterfall. Warm springtime air came through my open windows and I could smell the mix of cherry and magnolia blossoms that were exploding pink and white all the way up the broad avenue that led to Boys’ Latin. I should’ve been asleep, but I switched on my Tandy all-in-one stereo, hoping to find a radio play from the forties or fifties coming from a station that seemed to materialize after midnight. I liked the anachronisms—trolleys and milk left on the front steps—and got into the hokey stories, which were suspenseful, but not so scary that they weren’t easy enough to drift off to. Sometimes I was awakened by David’s turning off the radio, then pulling the blankets over me.
Now, tuning in, I found one. The story about the blind woman alone in her house and the bank robber at her door. I had heard it a bunch of times. It was good, like the one about the snowstorm-stranded couple with the mysterious noises on top of their car, but I had heard it once too often. I was curious about what was over on the left side of the dial. I’d moved it right a few times to listen to 98 Rock, which played everything my classmates loved—Springsteen, Aerosmith, Led Zeppelin. I’d listen to it quietly, so my mother couldn’t hear the lowbrow noise. I rarely moved the dial left, into the classical music and religious-nut zone. My ear against the black fabric covering the speaker, I inched the dial slowly through the static. Whoa. What’s this? An eerie, simple guitar with a lone male voice, high-pitched and pinched, singing about being tense and nervous and that he can’t relax.
I didn’t get it. What is this? The singer was uncomfortable and the delivery awkward, which made me feel awkward and uncomfortable, made me w
ant to turn it off, but I also kind of identified with the singer’s awkwardness so I also wanted to keep listening. I pressed my ear to the speaker and listened and listened and listened, the song staying weird and true, the words about someone not fitting in, but the music making me want to dance. I was excited but confused, wanted it to keep going until it made sense, but then the DJ came on. “Hey folks out there in B-more. It’s one o’clock and you are listening to the mighty ten watts of WJHU, pumping out furious sounds from the basement of the AMR numero dos dorms. That was Talking Heads doing ‘Psycho Killer.’ K-Rock we are not, my friends! And I’m going to shut up now and play some Clash.”
Clash? “I’m so bored with U.S.A.,” a pissed-off Brit snarled. My mind exploded and kept exploding—the Sex Pistols, Joy Division, the Ramones, Blondie, Television, one after the other they poured into my brain, and then the Velvet Underground were singing about all tomorrow’s parties and then about how Ginny was saved by rock ’n’ roll and it was like they weren’t singing about Ginny, the Velvet Underground were singing about me—no, they were talking to me, in my own house, and I couldn’t believe that there were people out there who knew what I was thinking and feeling and that they knew that I was up in the middle of the night and that I was freaked out and alone and wanted to escape but was worried that everyplace that wasn’t a fantasy like Aspen was going to be like wasteland Baltimore, and I didn’t think I could ever be like these truth-tellers, so brave and cool and weird.
This music was my Narnian wardrobe, my portal to an alternative universe.
If this music exists I am not alone. There were others like me. Other kids listening. But it also meant that these people making the music—these seers, these freaks, these prophets, these fuckups—they’d survived whatever messed-up childhood they’d had, and had grown up and now were creating art, and they were living the artist’s life.