by Steve Almond
It was soon apparent that the bottle we’d drained at dinner was not going to see us through to the main event. We needed help. And so I led Erin into the sunroom and put on the sexiest record I could think of, Joe Henry’s Fuse, and waited to see how Erin would react to its narcotic drum loops. We wound up slow dancing.
“What is this music?” Erin whispered, which you must know by now is the question every Fanatic yearns to be asked.
So I told her about Joe Henry, about how Fuse was his finest record, how I’d nearly wept when I found six copies in the ninety-nine-cent bin at Disc Diggers, how I’d bought every one and sent them to friends with a note reading Please allow me to save your life, how Fuse had convinced Ornette Coleman to work with Joe on his next album. Then I played her Coleman’s solo, which lasts just over a minute and transforms the blues scale into something more like a dream state. It was like having someone brush their fingertips along the pleasure center of our brains. Erin showed her lovely crooked smile. Her body unclenched, then swayed.
But there was this other matter to attend to, so Erin marched into my bedroom and shut the door. The king-sized bed. The dark wainscoting. The chocolates scattered about. What must she have thought? It was all quite dismal. To her eternal credit, she undressed anyway and slipped under the covers and I walked in and her pale shoulders were blazing. She read me a story about a repressed nun who lusts after her star pupil. Then I stripped and read her a story about a vegetarian woman who lusts after a steak. Then it was time for the hot blood to do its work.
Act III: A Summertime Thing
Why did I sit Erin down a mere two weeks later and announce that we had to stop seeing each other? Because my superego had decided I needed to find a wife, and while my superego had not bothered to inform my slobbering id, it had made a pretty convincing case against Erin who, for all her charms, was twenty-seven and just a few years out of college. I looked at her life—the damp apartment, the corporate job, the quotes from famous writers taped above her desk—and saw a prettier version of myself a decade earlier. It felt tawdry and maybe even a little ruthless to lead her on.
And so I bid her farewell, convinced I’d behaved with noble restraint, and returned to my alleged quest for a bride. It turned out there was a whole army of us out there, men and women in our mid-thirties, zooming around our big cities in bright cars with lousy suspension. We met online and through friends and at parties and grinned desperately and poured our life stories out over artichoke dip. We waited for Cupid to hurry up already and shoot us in the ass so we could start having all those kids we were supposed to want.
I drove an hour through the snow to meet one woman. We’d made sexy talk on the phone and swapped photos. It was going to be tremendous. (It was always going to be tremendous.) Then she opened the door and her face was that of an ostrich, pinched and belligerent, and mine was that of a weasel, beady and mean, and our hearts staggered through the rest of it, the hope punched out of us.
It was on such nights, a little later than was appropriate, that I dialed Erin’s number. “I’ve got something you need to hear,” I’d say, which was deplorable but at least true because when I wasn’t off turning dates into Bergman films, all I did was hunt for new dope. And so Erin appeared and we retreated into my cave and did what was required, all the sweaty investigations, though best of all was lying in the dark afterward and listening to the songs that were—unbeknownst to either of us, I think—slowly twining our fates.
I played her Lovers Knot by Jeb Loy Nichols and Living with Ghosts by Patty Griffin and Rabbit Songs by Hem and The Sons of Intemperance Offering by Phil Cody and Everybody’s Got Their Something by Nikka Costa. We ate French toast in great abundance and slept as if dead. After a few weeks, I’d break up with her, though sometimes she broke up with me, coming to her senses with a soft reluctance while I nodded soberly.
But then the new Chuck Prophet album came out, No Other Love it was called, and I knew Erin would want to hear it. She was as nuts about Chuck as I was, as gaga for his Southern California drawl and the sticky-sweet sorrow of his melodies, as aroused by his languid arrangements. “I know we’re broken up,” I said. “But you’re not going to believe this record.”
This was the summer of 2003 as I recall and we spent the next week doing nothing but listening in bed, until we knew all the words and the tempos had been absorbed by our muscles and every song seemed to be trying to tell us something new about our dire arrangement. It was the perfect record for us, gorgeous and doomed, like a kiss that tastes of blood, and the song we took as our anthem was “Summertime Thing,” which we sang to each other and to ourselves, dancing across the dirty floors of my apartment naked and bracing ourselves against the relevant countertops. Erin knew she shouldn’t have allowed herself to get sucked back into my orbit, and I couldn’t tell her otherwise. So there were some fresh tears, and when it was all over, well, to quote Chuck, “We snuck off like thieves, with our backs to each other.”
Act IV: Bad Babysitter
This is how it goes when the DF is falling in love, especially when he doesn’t know, or won’t admit, he’s falling in love. It’s not the lightning bolt or the sunset embrace. It’s the way she infiltrates your most sacred LPs, quietly erases the y from your collection. And so, while it’s true that Erin and I were never officially “together,” and while I insisted to all who would listen that Erin was not “the one” because I was looking for a wife (dammit), one powerful enough to compensate for the many inadequacies I would bring to the marriage—by which I mean some kind of magical mommy/whore/nurse figure who would ravage me then bear my children and mother them with effortless expertise, all while subsidizing my writing career and keeping my blue moods at bay—while all this was true, pathetically, inexorably, it was also true that, by the spring of 2004, most of the albums I loved made me think of Erin.
Then Chuck Prophet came to town (at last) and I got two tickets and gave them both to Erin, which I saw as an act of generosity because I’m just that stupid. We were really and truly broken up. And Erin was enough of a Fanatic, God bless her, to take those tickets and push her way to the front of the crowd, because Chuck, it turned out, could shred. She called to tell me about it that same night and we both imagined each other naked and agreed how it was great we could still be friends.
Then Erin mentioned something else: she’d been accepted into an MFA program in Southern California, one of the most prestigious in the country. I was happy for her, overjoyed really because now that she was leaving, I mean, what was the harm in getting in a few last licks?
That was the summer of Cee-Lo Green and The Sleepy Jackson and Princess Superstar, whose song “Bad Babysitter” captured the moral depths to which we aspired. This was just another idyll, because I didn’t believe in long-distance relationships, and that was fine with Erin, she wasn’t looking for a husband. So there was no big scene when she left that fall. I sent her off in her little Honda with enough mixed CDs to survive the big square states.
We missed each other more than we let on. Speaking for myself, I learned to avoid certain records in certain moods, though often I listened to them anyway. If I found a new record that I knew was going to be special, I would sometimes try to guess which songs Erin would like. Later, around bedtime, I’d call her and play them over the phone.
I continued to go on dates. That winter, I took out a doctor. Smart, attractive—Jewish even! We got back to her apartment and I began rooting around for her record collection. “Where’s your music?” I said casually.
“Oh,” she said. “My schedule is pretty hectic.”
“But right now,” I said. “We could listen to something right now.”
She smiled, a little indulgently, as if to say, I don’t know how it is with you writers, but this is how it is with us doctors, though what she said was maybe worse: “I think I’ve got a Sade disc in my car.”
And so I found myself at home again, in the familiar rooms, and though I knew it was a mistake
I put on one of Erin’s favorites, Postcards from Downtown by Dayna Kurtz, a collection of songs so full of romantic woe it might as well have come with a bottle of whiskey. And I was doing okay, really, until the moment, four and a half minutes into her rueful epic “Paterson,” when the song seems to be drawing to an end, and instead, the time signature slows and we hear the trill of an accordion and violins and plucked guitar and Dayna begins singing in Italian of all things—Oh mio coure!—over and over, and listening to this voice echo about my bedroom, its unending dejection, made me realize that keeping Erin at bay was no longer an option, that my loneliness was not some precious artistic prerogative or exalted state but simply an ongoing regret. I needed her in close now, where we could hear the music together.14
Interlude:
The Kip Winger Canon
Erin and I were lying in bed, stoned, when she started in again about her “single days,” which is a special code phrase she uses when she wants to remind me about the time Kip Winger nearly propositioned her.
This took place during Erin’s first year in grad school. She’d been invited by an old friend to a VH1-sponsored event, which combined the channel’s parasitic passion for aging celebrities with its ongoing campaign to resuscitate the music of the eighties. Many of Erin’s hair metal heroes were on hand to support the guest of honor, Jani Lane, the former lead singer of Warrant, who was struggling to mount a comeback.
It is fair to suppose Erin was lonely. It is fair to suppose she had a few drinks, and that these drinks helped steer her into the seat next to Kip Winger at the table where the musicians were signing merchandise for fans. Many of these fans were (and I quote) “slutty girls with their tits hanging out” whose sexual availability was understood. But to hear Erin tell it, Kip hadn’t been interested in them.
To hear Erin tell it, Kip had been interested in Erin. It pleased Erin a great deal to be the object of Kip Winger’s lewd banter, and it pleased her to be able to report to me the next day, on the phone, that she had been the object of Kip Winger’s lewd banter and that he had discussed oral sex and implied his expertise and stopped just short of inviting her back to his hotel room to prove his claim. Or maybe he had invited her. It was impossible to know what happened, and she enjoyed this ambiguity also.
So this was her Kip Winger Story and she was telling it to me once again, now that we were old married farts with a kid sacked out across the hall. The pot had made her nostalgic. Then she started in with certain Facts About Kip mentioned in previous tellings, such as the fact that Kip had studied ballet and could kick his foot over his head while wearing leather trousers. Kip had studied classical music and composition. Kip was not a tall man, but he had aged superbly. Then she got online and showed me a YouTube video of Kip playing classical guitar in leather trousers.
This was, technically, our date night.
“I guess I didn’t realize that Kip Winger was such a Renaissance man,” I said. “There’s probably a whole genre of literature devoted to Kip.”
“That’s right,” Erin said. “There is. It’s called Kip Lit.”
“Wow,” I said.
“Kip Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” she said. “Just for instance.”
“How’s that one go?”
“Kip’s ballet moves are ruled so insane he’s put in an asylum. He seduces the head nurse, who’s hot, but not in a slutty-fake-titted way, and she helps him escape so he can fulfill his dream of becoming a sex-positive therapist specializing in cunnilingus.”
Now another sort of couple—a couple composed of at least one person who isn’t a Drooling Fanatic—would have probably dropped Kip Winger as a thematic element at this point and proceeded to the evening’s intended highlight: essentially comic sexual toil.
But my wife’s reverie demanded a response. I reminded her that I was the one in the marriage who had spoken to Kip way back in 1989, when he was at the height of his powers, grand-jetéing his way through “Seventeen” and scheduling his groupies in fifteen-minute intervals. As my wife had probably forgotten, and I was now going to remind her, I had been a professional music critic once who possessed Kip Winger’s personal phone number and who, what’s more, had covered the Grammys. Once this was on the table, it hardly seemed fair not to provide a full account. My wife was lightly snoring now.
“Very funny,” I said.
In the end, we compromised. Rather than mocking each other’s Drooling Fanaticism, we spent the next hour fleshing out the Kip Canon:
Kip Karenina
Kip has a dilemma. Does he bang the totally hot Russian peasant babe, or does he go fight in the totally killer war? In the end, Kip decides to bang the hot Russian peasant babe, then fight in the totally killer war.
Moby Kip
Kip decides to head to New York City, where he inadvertently ends up at a Moby show. Backstage, he asks Moby about a possible collaboration. Moby responds by biting Kip’s leg off.
The Grapes of Kip
Kip journeys to California as a migrant heavy metal bassist, enduring the prejudice of rich studio owners. Then his record goes gold and he hires Pamela Anderson as a wet nurse.
To reiterate: we were stoned.
I should add that Kip Winger continues to be a source of marital tension because my wife, in classic DF fashion, is convinced Kip will eventually read this and be offended. “I don’t want you fucking up any future encounters,” she told me recently.
“So it’s still on with Kip?” I said.
“It was never off,” she said. “I’m serious, honey. Don’t fuck this up for me. Kip still looks good.”15
14. Did I therefore propose to my beloved on some windswept piazza? Not exactly. Instead, I knocked her up over winter break and we eloped three months later, as she was finishing grad school. I announced all this good news to her parents, grinning idiotically as her mother spiraled into an aria of silent rage. It was pure opera, that moment, raw and woeful, and Erin’s mother had every right to kill me, particularly after I made the inexplicable decision to show her the “unofficial” wedding photos, in which Erin is half-naked and I am brandishing a bottle of Jack Daniel’s.
Yes, I realize I’m a dipshit.
15. In fact, my wife recently informed me, in a manner simultaneously abashed and ragingly proud, that she actually was the cause of Kip Winger getting an erection during their VH1 sponsored tête-à-tête, meaning that they had the equivalent of, I guess you could say, “terrestrial, close-range phone sex” is what I’m getting at, though she didn’t want this vital elaboration printed in my book, lest it adversely affect her future chances with Kip, and, when pressed on the topic, suggested that Kip might one day in our future, our possible near future—wait, let me try to remember how she put this—oh yes, here it is: “come pirouetting into our bedroom in his leather pants,” and was therefore, at this point in our story, suggesting that she wanted Kip Winger in our sexual lives, as a third in our threesome, and what’s more, with that established, she went on to mention, with a sort of casualness that drives us doubt-choked Jews crazy, that Kip’s wife was supposedly “smoking hot” and a swinger to boot, which it seemed to me (as a doubt-choked Jew) was the moment when she was actually envisioning a threesome consisting of:
Kip Winger
His smoking hot wife
Not me
This conversation took place on the eve of this book’s publication, and therefore robbed me of the honor of titling this interlude “How My Wife Gave Kip Winger a Boner” or perhaps, more poetically, “Kip Winger’s Boner.”
Burying the Dead with Ike Reilly
I first heard Ike Reilly in the late summer of 2001. My career was in free fall. I had a literary agent, but she hated my guts, and just to show her who was boss I stopped writing prose altogether. All I did in those days was crank tunes and poop out wretched poetry. The Fanatic itch was thick upon me. And so, when a friend mentioned that the Tufts University radio station needed community DJs, I signed right up. I was summer staff at WMFO, 91.5 F
M (aka The Mofo), taking my shifts in the great yawning midweek hours when the listenership dipped to seventeen.16
WMFO was where I found Ike Reilly’s debut, Salesmen and Racists. Reilly sounded like—well, what did he sound like? He sounded like Dylan, if Dylan had been Irish instead of Jewish and never left the Midwest and grown up listening to the Clash rather than Woody Guthrie. He sounded like Lou Reed and Gil Scott-Heron fucking each other, then fucking the Pogues.
It was inevitable that I would introduce The Close to Ike Reilly, because The Close kept a close eye on my fetishes. I had met him down South, at one of those literary conferences where midlist authors go to feel like rock stars. He had arrived with a trunk full of literary magazines where his stories had appeared, which he spent the week pressing upon us, popping up out of nowhere, yammering in urgent Jerseyese, his mouth very close to our ears. He fixated on me, having decided that I was the big brother he’d never had, a delusion that both flattered and alarmed me, as did the revelation that he lived around the corner from me in Somerville. Nonetheless, The Close and I became friends, in part because I felt a moral obligation to rescue him from his staggeringly banal taste in music, by which I mean the many hours he spent trying to get me to listen to “these killer bootlegs of Dave Matthews in Atlanta.” One dose of Ike Reilly and I heard no more.
Soon, our phone conversations consisted of little more than Ike lyrics. The Close would say, “Well, if I go down in a plane I’ll go to hell, but I’ll leave all my shit to my friends in a will.” And I’d respond, “You can have my Crown Vic and you can have my debt, you can have my weakness and my regret.” And he’d say, “A beautiful girl once said to me, some men’ll rob you with poetry and stay to watch you while you sleep and kiss your ears and make you weep.” And I’d respond, “She’s all whacked out, she don’t back down, I threw my back out whacking that ass now.” And he’d say, “Drink to the party, drink to the host, fuck this party, let’s hit the coast.” And we’d agree that we needed to hit the coast, ideally in a Crown Vic, with Ike and a staggering drug stash.