The Best American Essays 2018

by Hilton Als

  The bass these days is often physically present, issuing from bars and passing cars and parked cars and pizzerias and record stores and clothing shops, but it is always in your head because it is indelible. On your rounds you are motored by Robbie Shakespeare on Junior Delgado’s “Fort Augustus,” and Bootsy Collins on Parliament’s “Flashlight,” and Lloyd Parks on Dennis Brown’s “Equal Rights,” and Jamaladeen Tacuma on Ornette Coleman’s “Voice Poetry,” and Jah Wobble on “Swan Lake” by Public Image Limited,10 and so many others you can’t name since you heard them in a club or on a twelve-inch single with the most minimal information rubber-stamped off-center and half-inked. It’s all about the body nowadays, and you fling yours to hell four to five nights a week. You are stepping and hot-dogging like a wizard, executing moves you amaze yourself with, sure that everybody around must be eyeballing you, master of the polyrhythms, freestyling to the lip of the world without ever falling off. You favor the clubs with the least number of people on the floor so you can truly strut, open out, work your arms, jack your footwork. You look over at your partner and you briefly sync on the chorus, and then you both spin off into separate waves again, honoring the high-hat or that guitar that sounds like a rubber band, clairvoyantly anticipating the next chord change or even the next item that segues in with a counterintuitive slow shimmer. You knew that would happen. You are omnipotent because you are so deep inside the groove you might have been born there. You are the one most like the music, and your inner being shines forth like a beacon slicing across the floor, illuminating the corners. Also you are high as fuck.

  You have arrived where you once wanted to be, in the dominion of music, the kingdom of the groove, the empire of rhythm. For better or worse you are living in youthville, where nine-tenths of the people you register in your field of vision are your age and more or less on your team, even though the scene long ago fragmented into affinity groups—this one eternally rocking, that one given to costume parties, others to champion-level drinking or filming themselves naked or experimenting with electronics or drafting militant screeds or following everything that is going on in London with painstaking fidelity to detail. One day everybody on the street is wearing horn-rimmed glasses and businessman raincoats buttoned up to the neck, the next they are all dyed blond and sporting cowboy neckerchiefs and big hats pushed back on their heads, and those go for all sexes. You go to clubs with polysyllabic names where all you can see is a strip of blue light at belt level. You find yourself in big-ass clubs with the ambiance of airports. You might be ushered into clubs with door policies so restrictive there are more people outside than in. You follow cryptic instructions to clubs on rooftops or in cellars or on the seventeenth floor of featureless office buildings, or to whoop-de-doos in public parks that might last an hour or five minutes depending on when the cops show up. You make your way to clubs that open at 4 a.m. and close their doors sometime around noon. There’s the one in the alley far downtown where you get yourself into a fistfight for reasons you can’t begin to fathom, the one in the ancient condemned theater on Fourteenth Street where jokers on line on the firetrap staircase start flicking lit matches at one another, the one in the decommissioned bar and grill where the personnel from all the other clubs go after closing, where you belly up to the counter and order not drinks but rails of uptown.

  You get your poetry in snatches now, because it shows up as croaked lines deep inside the groove or buried in the mix or mumbled through a sleeve. You might register them only subliminally, maybe pick them up in daylight sometime later and wonder where you caught that sentence. Mostly you recall single barked chorus phrases that rattle around your head while the rest of the number might as well consist of doos and dahs, “She’s lost control again” and “The cassette played pop tones” and “Tanz der Jesus-Christus.” But lately poetry has been filtering down from the Bronx on stray 12s you can sometimes buy in that place on Union Square where they seem to rotate the stock every other day. “I was spanking and a-freaking in a disco place,” says Spoonie Gee,11 who is the smooth talker, the midnight stalker, the image of the man they call the J. D. Walker, bouncing to the Patty Duke riddim as it shuffles from side to side, his voice track intermittently so flanged it hurts your ears, and that phrase takes on a power and significance you can’t account for except by reference to its reminiscent tense, somehow a harbinger of how all of this will one day fade into sepia, since golden lads and girls all must, as chimney sweepers come to dust. But that won’t come anytime soon, since you are young and have been young all your life and live in the land of the young and have made no arrangements to ever be anything but young.

  But as fate would have it, forces are even now making arrangements for you, since you and everybody else you know have been steadily increasing your consumption of substances, primarily powders. There was a time when these showed up rarely, then irregularly, in the pocket of some cosmopolitan friend, or in the pages of a book mailed from Thailand, or purchased from a dapper gent who also traded in vintage men’s shoes, or paid as commission by an acquaintance who wanted to use your kitchen table as a place to tap a vein. But lately you have surprised yourself outside a slot in a door in some ruin a couple of blocks over in the empty quarter and handing over cash in exchange for bags. You tell yourself you will never be one of those people who stand for hours in the rain being toyed with by the lookouts, shuffled from one side of the street to the other, made to show track marks at the base of the steps, suffered having the slot slap shut definitively just as you are finally stepping up to it. You like boy the best because it unties every knot in your nerves and fills you with a glow you can carry to every occasion, making you the nonpareil you think you are on the dance floor. But your friends all seem to have unaccountable piles of girl lying around, and you cannot in good conscience refuse hospitality, so you inhale line after line, even if it makes you kind of jangly and causes every cigarette to burn up in three seconds. “I’m a dyn-o-mite,” states Dillinger confidently. “I’ve got cocaine running around my brain.”

  He also cites the ancient rhyme: “A knife and a fork, / A bottle and a cork, / That’s the way / To spell New York,” and that sounds about right. All around us property is being carved up. The unlucky are being turned out of their homes on technicalities. Storefronts are being unboarded so people can sell trinkets to inquisitive tourists. Clubs are catering only to the slim and the rich, or have ballooned into funfair malls with three stages and eight dance floors and sixteen bars and VIP rooms inside VIP rooms. What was formerly given up to the street for common scavenging is now being put up for sale on flattened cardboard boxes on the sidewalk. People are flooding into the set just to gape. People are paying money to sleep in closets and backyard sheds and doctors’ examining rooms. People are selling T-shirts advertising the neighborhood, or bands that have already broken up, or telling one and all to go fuck themselves. Suddenly cops appear on foot patrol in select areas. Suddenly beggars are fighting for turf. Suddenly beggars have gimmicks. The weird are turning pro. The pros are moving to more discreet zip codes. We realize we are absolutely unprepared for any of this, which as far as we know was brought about by the music. We thought the music would change the world, and we were correct except in the matter of specifics.

  You check out the people on the street and note the year when they stopped: this one with the death’s-head rictus 1973, that one in the Perfecto jacket 1977, her friend in the vinyl T-shirt 1979, those people looking like drunken ballroom dancers on an ocean liner 1980—and that’s when you realize you have a year written on your own forehead and it’s not the one that tops the current calendar. You have aged out of the struggle just in time for the struggle to be done with you. You will never again inhabit the great Now, only a small and fragile instant that flips over every time you blink. Music will keep happening and you might like some of it or even a lot of it but it will no longer be yours. You will never be a star if you have failed to achieve that goal by now. All you can do is head to the
dance floor in the burning disco where Chic is playing on an endless loop. These, the singers assure you again and again, are the good times.

  Notes

  1. The band founded in 1974 by Tom Verlaine and Richard Hell, who built the club’s stage and effectively transformed Country Blue Grass & Blues into CBGB.

  2. Director of films including Rebel Without a Cause and Johnny Guitar.

  3. Post-bop drummer, most famous for his work with John Coltrane (1960–66).

  4. Television’s singer and lead guitarist.

  5. A wistfully crooned reggae ballad.

  6. Johnny Rotten in the Sex Pistols’ “God Save the Queen.”

  7. Leaders of the ultra-left guerrilla organization Red Army Faction, who with two other members were found dead, ostensible suicides, in their cells at Stammheim Prison in West Germany in 1976 and ’77.

  8. Max’s Kansas City, on Park Avenue South near Eighteenth Street, famous in the 1960s as the hangout of Andy Warhol, the Velvet Underground, and others of the Factory set, which enjoyed a second life during the punk ’70s.

  9. Jamaican British poet known for his published poems as well as his performances with musical backing, beginning around 1974. His first album, Dread Beat an’ Blood (1978), was based on his second book, of the same name, and chronicled black British life in terms both poetically rich and journalistically detailed.

  10. The genres represented are, in order: dub reggae, R&B, dub reggae, harmolodic jazz, and post-punk.

  11. Né Gabriel Jackson, Harlem-based rapper whose “Spoonin’ Rap” (1979) was one of the very earliest hip-hop recordings.

  Kathryn Schulz

  Losing Streak

  from The New Yorker

  A couple of years ago, I spent the summer in Portland, Oregon, losing things. I normally live on the East Coast, but that year, unable to face another sweltering August, I decided to temporarily decamp to the West. This turned out to be strangely easy. I’d lived in Portland for a while after college, and some acquaintances there needed a house sitter. Another friend was away for the summer and happy to loan me her pickup truck. Someone on Craigslist sold me a bike for next to nothing. In very short order, and with very little effort, everything fell into place.

  And then, mystifyingly, everything fell out of place. My first day in town, I left the keys to the truck on the counter of a coffee shop. The next day, I left the keys to the house in the front door. A few days after that, warming up in the midday sun at an outdoor café, I took off the long-sleeved shirt I’d been wearing, only to leave it hanging over the back of the chair when I headed home. When I returned to claim it, I discovered that I’d left my wallet behind as well. Prior to that summer, I should note, I had lost a wallet exactly once in my adult life: at gunpoint. Yet later that afternoon I stopped by a sporting-goods store to buy a lock for my new bike and left my wallet sitting next to the cash register.

  I got the wallet back, but the next day I lost the bike lock. I’d just arrived home and removed it from its packaging when my phone rang; I stepped away to take the call, and when I returned, some time later, the lock had vanished. This was annoying, because I was planning to bike downtown that evening, to attend an event at Powell’s, Portland’s famous bookstore. Eventually, having spent an absurd amount of time looking for the lock and failing to find it, I gave up and drove the truck downtown instead. I parked, went to the event, hung around talking for a while afterward, browsed the bookshelves, walked outside into a lovely summer evening, and could not find the truck anywhere.

  This was a serious feat, a real bar-raising of thing-losing, not only because in general it is difficult to lose a truck but also because the truck in question was enormous. The friend to whom it belonged once worked as an ambulance driver; oversized vehicles do not faze her. It had tires that came up to my midriff, an extended cab, and a bed big enough to haul cetaceans. Yet I’d somehow managed to misplace it in downtown Portland—a city, incidentally, that I know as well as any other on the planet. For the next forty-five minutes, as a cool blue night gradually lowered itself over downtown, I walked around looking for the truck, first on the street where I was sure I’d parked, then on the nearest cross streets, and then in a grid whose scale grew ever larger and more ludicrous.

  Finally, I returned to the street where I’d started and noticed a small sign: no parking anytime. Oh, shit. Feeling like the world’s biggest idiot, and wondering how much it was going to cost to extricate a truck the size of Nevada from a tow lot, I called the Portland Police Department. The man who answered was wonderfully affable. “No, ma’am,” he veritably sang into the phone, “no pickup trucks from downtown this evening. Must be your lucky day!” Officer, you have no idea. Channeling the kind of advice one is often given as a child, I returned to the bookstore, calmed myself down with a cup of tea, collected my thoughts amid the latest literary debuts, and then, to the best of my ability, retraced the entire course of my evening, in the hope that doing so would knock loose some memory of how I got there. It did not. Back outside on the streets of Portland, I spun around as uselessly as a dowsing rod.

  Seventy-five minutes later, I found the truck, in a perfectly legal parking space, on a block so unrelated to any reasonable route from my house to the bookstore that I seriously wondered if I’d driven there in some kind of fugue state. I climbed in, headed home, and, for reasons I’ll explain in a moment, decided that I needed to call my sister as soon as I walked in the door. But I did not. I could not. My cell phone was back at Powell’s, on a shelf with all the other New Arrivals.

  My sister is a cognitive scientist at MIT, more conversant than most people in the mental processes involved in tracking and misplacing objects. That is not, however, why I wanted to talk to her about my newly acquired propensity for losing things. I wanted to talk to her because, true to the stereotype of the absent-minded professor, she is the most scatterbrained person I’ve ever met.

  There is a runner-up: my father. My family members, otherwise a fairly similar bunch, are curiously divided down the middle in this respect. On the spectrum of obsessively orderly to sublimely unconcerned with the everyday physical world, my father and my sister are—actually, they are nowhere. They can’t even find the spectrum. My mother and I, meanwhile, are busy organizing it by size and color. I will never forget watching my mother try to adjust an ever so slightly askew picture frame—at the Cleveland Museum of Art. My father, by contrast, once spent an entire vacation wearing mismatched shoes, because he’d packed no others and discovered the mistake only when airport security asked him to remove them. My sister’s best TSA trick, meanwhile, involved borrowing her partner’s laptop, then accidentally leaving it at an Alaska Airlines gate one week after 9/11, thereby almost shutting down the Oakland airport.

  That’s why I called her when I started uncharacteristically misplacing stuff myself. For one thing, I thought she might commiserate. For another, I thought she might help; given her extensive experience with losing things, I figured she must have developed a compensatory capacity for finding them. Once I recovered my phone and reached her, however, both hopes vanished as completely as the bike lock. My sister was gratifyingly astonished that I’d never lost my wallet before, but, as someone who typically has to reconstruct the entire contents of her own several times a year, she was not exactly sympathetic. “Call me,” she said, “when they know your name at the DMV.”

  Nor did my sister have any good advice on how to find missing objects—although, in fairness, such advice is itself difficult to find. Plenty of parents, self-help gurus, and psychics will offer to assist you in finding lost stuff, but most of their suggestions are either obvious (calm down, clean up), suspect (the “eighteen-inch rule,” whereby the majority of missing items are supposedly lurking less than two feet from where you first thought they would be), or New Agey. (“Picture a silvery cord reaching from your chest all the way out to your lost object.”) Advice on how to find missing things also abounds online, but as a rule it is useful only
in proportion to the strangeness of whatever you’ve lost. Thus, the internet is middling on your lost credit card or Kindle, but edifying on your lost Roomba (look inside upholstered furniture), your lost marijuana (your high self probably hid it in a fit of paranoia; try your sock drawer), your lost drone (you’ll need a specially designed GPS), or your lost Bitcoins (good luck with that). The same basic dynamic applies to the countless websites devoted to recovering lost pets, which are largely useless when it comes to your missing Lab mix but surprisingly helpful when it comes to your missing ball python. Such websites can also be counted on for excellent anecdotes, like the one about the cat that vanished in Nottinghamshire, England, and was found, fourteen months later, in a pet-food warehouse, twice its original size.

  Perhaps the best thing that can be said about lost entities and the internet is that it has made many of them considerably easier to find: out-of-print books, elementary school classmates, decades-old damning quotes by politicians. More generally, modern technology can sometimes help us find misplaced objects, as you know if you’ve ever had your girlfriend call your lost cell phone, or used that little button on your keys to make your Toyota Camry honk at you. Lately, we’ve seen a boom in technologies specifically designed to compensate for our tendency to lose stuff: Apple’s Find My iPhone, for instance, and the proliferation of Bluetooth-enabled tracking devices that you can attach to everyday objects in order to summon them from the ether, like the Accio spell in the Harry Potter books.

  These tricks, while helpful, have their limitations. Your phone needs to be on and nondead; your car needs to be within range; you need to have the foresight to stick a tracking device onto the particular thing you’re going to lose before you’ve lost it. Moreover, as anyone who’s ever owned a remote control can tell you, new technologies themselves are often infuriatingly unfindable, a problem made worse by the trend toward ever smaller gadgets. It is difficult to lose an Apple IIe, easier to lose a laptop, a snap to lose a cell phone, and nearly impossible not to lose a flash drive. Then there is the issue of passwords, which are to computers what socks are to washing machines. The only thing in the real or the digital world harder to keep track of than a password is the information required to retrieve it, which is why it is possible, as a grown adult, to find yourself caring about your first-grade teacher’s pet iguana’s maiden name.