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For Erin, Generation X; and Abigail and Delia, giving hope for whatever’s next
It is reported that Caesar, when he first heard Brutus speak in public, said to his friends, “I know not what this young man intends, but, whatever he intends, he intends it vehemently.”
—PLUTARCH’S Lives
He was one of those ideal Russian beings who can suddenly be so struck by some strong idea that it seems to crush them then and there, sometimes even forever.
—DOSTOEVSKY, Demons
Let the age and wars of other nations be chanted and their eras and characters be illustrated and that finish the verse. Not so the great psalm of the republic. Here the theme is creative and has vista. Here comes one among the wellbeloved stonecutters and plans with decision and science and sees the solid and beautiful forms of the future where there are now no solid forms.
—WALT WHITMAN, 1855 PREFACE TO Leaves of Grass
PART ONE
CASSIE
CHAPTER ONE
CLAIRE STANKOWITCZ CHANGED HER NAME to Cassie Black at the beginning of her first year of college. It was the best decision she’d ever made. The most decisive she’d ever been, too. It wasn’t that she didn’t love her mom and dad—they’d been models of parental exceptionalism since she was a kid, allowing her all the freedoms a child, a teenager, could hope for. But upon her arrival at the Wellesley campus after a two-hour flight from central Ohio, what Cassie needed was a clear-cut, empirically observable change. Her parents didn’t object. They got a hotel room in Back Bay, a couple blocks from Comm Ave., and the Wednesday before the first day of classes her freshman year they dropped her off at a Boston courthouse, where she legally changed her name. It seemed perfect to Cassie that she would share a last name with the lead singer of the Pixies in the town where the Pixies had grown their legend two decades earlier.
By the time she was a sophomore, Cassie’s response to her new name had grown reflexive. She’d picked up the bass and joined a punk band—well, a post-punk band. Though she’d played violin in school bands since she was six, and though some part of her musical mind would always love playing bluegrass and old-time fiddle, holding a big black Epiphone bass down somewhere below her waist, thumping it with a .50mm black pick while glaring into the middle distance behind the crowd, was the look and the sound she wanted now. By the time she was a senior, the U.S. had been in Afghanistan for three years, and her bandmates made a plan to move to Greenpoint, Brooklyn. A group of alums from the class of 2002 had rented a two-story row house on Eagle Street, and rooms were renting there for six hundred dollars a month, about half of what Cassie had heard it might cost to live in Brooklyn. They’d named themselves the Pollys (their lead singer Natalia’s early desire to have them be called either the Rape Me’s or the Box-Shaped Hearts was slammed shut the moment she spoke them into her P-58) and within their first month in the city they had a gig at a house party in Williamsburg. It wasn’t the Williamsburg they’d pictured—every block closer to the Bedford L was more perfectly renovated, chrome-and-glass façades and Mercedes GLK SUVs double-parked outside of Planet Thailand—but their part of the mega-neighborhood Greenpoint and Williamsburg and Bushwick combined to make was ugly enough in winter, devoid of trees, children, and available parking. Cassie watched old Polish women in their babushkas push their black wire carts home from the Pathmark and felt she’d arrived.
That first gig was on the eleventh floor of an iconic building on Kent Ave. The place was pre-cancerous with artists’ lofts. It was owned by a group of Hasids who rented the basement to a matzoh company that baked the cracker tar-black to be sold for Seders around the city. A couple years after the Pollys’ first gig the building would catch fire from those Orthodox bakers and burn, only to be rebuilt to spec within a year. Now it was still standing. Cassie and her bandmates plugged in at the back of a wide-open loft, 1,200 square feet of mostly unfurnished urban mixed-use space, at its back a wall made of windows. Out across the bottom of the East River stood the buildings of the financial district like some static play being eternally staged. Maybe fifty bespectacled recent college grads milled around drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon from the can and Miller High Life from the bottle.
The Pollys played their set loud, closed with their blazing-fast punk version of Ralph Stanley’s “Pretty Polly”—if Kurt Cobain could cover Lead Belly, they could cover the Clinch Mountain Boys—and then a traditional bluegrass band set up to play next. How would anyone even hear them with the instant tinnitus in their ears? Cassie wondered. By the time the second band got their radio mic set up and huddled around it, bass far to the back and guitar, mandolin, banjo, and fiddle crouched near the mic, her ears had stopped ringing. The band was good. Unlike the banjo-fronted Ralph Stanley setup, now the mandolin player functioned as the lead instrument—he picked out sloppy lines, but he sang high and hard like a girl, and Cassie found herself paying more attention than she’d expected. There was a certain poetry to the fact that they did their own version of “Pretty Polly” themselves, a wink right back at the Pollys, making the old sound new sound old. After the gig ended the mandolin player came over to her while she was packing up her bass.
“You guys slayed tonight,” he said. He was probably five or six years older than she was. Cassie could see where his hair was thinning around his widow’s peak, light trickling its way through to his white scalp, though what hair he had still was longish. He was wearing a kelly green T-shirt that said GETTIN’ LUCKY IN KENTUCKY. Part of Cassie couldn’t help but wonder if he was making fun of her own home in the Midwest wearing it. “Probably should’ve opened for you instead of the other way around. I doubt anyone could even hear us after your amps.”
“They’re not our amps,” Cassie said. Then she went over to find the rest of the Pollys. She’d been sleeping with Natalia for a month now, and the last thing that relationship needed—that the band needed—was for their lead singer to think she was flirting with a bluegrass-mandolin-playing, ironic-thrift-shop-T-shirted twenty-something-year-old boy.
The best thing that came of that first Williamsburg gig was that the younger sister of the guy who booked shows for CBGB was there. She e-mailed Natalia, who did all the booking for the band, to tell her that she thought her brother would like them. Did they have a CD? They didn’t, but they’d made a MySpace page where you could stream two tracks they’d recorded on Cassie’s iMac back at Wellesley. Natalia sent a link. Before they knew it, they had a gig in Manhattan. It was three months away, but it was a gig. It didn’t make Cassie’s day job feel a whole lot better. Really it was a night job, working as a cocktail waitress at the bar in the basement of the Chelsea Hotel. She only had to work three nights a week and she made more than enough to pay rent—bottle service meant sometimes a group of Russian oligarchs’ kids might drop two grand in a night, three even, might leave a half-full bottle on the table on their way to Scores. The tip, if they were drunk enough on Grey Goose shots, could be two, three hundre
d bucks. It was exhausting work. It took Cassie a day to sleep off the nights. That left her the equivalent of a long weekend every week to rehearse, read, just walk around Manhattan and Brooklyn.
The night of their CBGB show Cassie was nervous, but not as nervous as she suspected. This was CBGB! Television had played here, Talking Heads and Big Star and Patti Smith. It was like she was walking between the silent ghosts of still-living Alex Chilton and David Byrne as she made her way to the space backstage. Sure, there was an ATM up front now, and next door they’d opened CB’s Gallery, where keening acoustic guitarists could sit on stools and whisper-sing Elliott Smith covers into a mic like they’d been booked at the Living Room. But this was at least a version of living out her dreams. There were four bands on that night. The Pollys were second. They stood in front of the stage and watched as a six-foot-eight bundle of gangly limbs flailed around and screamed into the mic like he was the embodied ghost of Ian Curtis. They were just about to head backstage when someone pushed her shoulder.
“You’re gonna kill tonight,” the guy said. She knew him but it took her a second to place how. Her brain just began to formulate an image of a mandolin before her when he said, “Mandolinist. From the Willow Gardens.” Cassie did remember him, but she continued just to kind of scowl at him. “The bluegrass band from that Billyburg loft party this summer.”
“Right,” Cassie said. She gave a look around her—she was still with Natalia, though outside of band practice they hadn’t seen each other much the past month, and she didn’t want this to look bad. But the rest of the band had already headed backstage. “Right, the Willow Gardens. Terrible fucking name.”
“That’s the hardest thing,” he said. “Coming up with a good name. My name’s Mark, by the way. Which would also be a terrible band name: The Mark.”
“The Mark By the Way would be worse,” Cassie said.
“Yeah. Sucks trying to come up with a band name. We had friends who performed for a year as Hard Raisin’ before they realized it sounded like they were named after a hard raisin.” She didn’t say anything. “Yours is damn good, though. Name. Your band name. That was always one of my favorite Nirvana songs.”
Cassie was surprised to learn that this bluegrasser even knew about Kurt Cobain, but she supposed being a bit older, they must have been big when he was in high school. She couldn’t keep eye contact, so she looked down to where she could see he was clasping his hands together. They were very nice hands. She could see where they had a light covering of blond hairs. They looked soft, but she could see as his left hand worked its fingertips over his right that they were calloused from fretting his mandolin. Cassie had always been attracted to hands. She looked up. She asked Mark what he was doing here.
“The Willow Gardens are playing next door at CB’s Gallery in like an hour.”
“Oh, right, next door,” Cassie said. “Of course.”
“You know the ‘BG’ in CBGB does mean ‘bluegrass,’” Mark said. “It’s not that weird we’re playing here.” Cassie figured he must have noted the sour look on her face, which come to think of it she wasn’t doing much to hide.
“Anyway,” he said. “Saw your guys’ name up on the ad in The Village Voice and thought I’d drop by to say hi. So. Hi.” He turned to leave. For a second she felt bad for having given him a hard time about the band name. She hadn’t slept with a man in a couple years, more, so maybe Natalia wouldn’t assume anything even if she saw them.
“You know, I used to play fiddle,” she said. All at once she could see something brand new in this guy’s face, a dimple that appeared in the lower right corner of his mouth and a tautness that developed at the corners of his eyes—he started to ask all kinds of questions about where she was from, what brought her here, telling her that fiddlers could make good money in bluegrass bands in the city playing weddings and brunches, and it was feeling comfortable, less like he was trying to pick her up than that he was trying to be her friend, when she saw Natalia was standing next to the stage watching them talk.
“Shit,” Cassie said. “Shit shit fuck. Shit.” She walked away without saying good-bye.
The Pollys played their gig and they were good, the best they’d ever been, but they were second billing at CBGB, so maybe forty people were there, bobbing heads a bit in the beer-rimed room. Even Mark turned tail and headed out before they finished, whether because he needed to get next door for his show or because he’d grown bored of the music, she couldn’t tell. They didn’t get another invite to play, but more problematic, what Cassie thought was a good gig, full of energy, Natalia thought was something different.
“The fuck were you talking to before we played,” Natalia said. She was five foot four, with a thin, tight black faux-hawk and a smattering of freckles on her Cremona-colored cheeks. Cassie told her that it was the mandolin player from the band that they opened for in Williamsburg.
“The Pussy Willows?” Natalia said.
“Willow Gardens,” Cassie said. “C’mon, they were—” Before she started to defend them only a couple hours after telling their lead singer and mandolin player to his face how bad she thought the name was, she stopped herself. But she didn’t stop the inevitable. Natalia felt the show had been a debacle. She grew convinced it was Cassie’s fault. In the coming months a sense that something was off grew among the Pollys. Natalia kept stopping mid-song at band practices. Cassie was dropping the beat, she said. She stopped so many times their drummer stopped one time herself—“Someone’s dropping the beat,” she said, “and I’m not saying who it is. But. It’s not me. I don’t think the Yeah Yeah Yeahs got to where they are because someone couldn’t keep time.”
So one afternoon the day after she made almost six hundred bucks on bottle service, Cassie came to band practice to find that no one else was taking their instruments out. No mics were plugged in. They were just sitting.
“Listen,” Natalia said. “This one’s a little tough, but we met this chick after a show at Mercury Lounge. This—this bassist. From another band. But now the band’s breaking up.”
“She used to sit in with Liz Phair,” their drummer said.
“You met another fucking bassist?” Cassie said. “What does that even mean. We were in Early Modernist Poetry together freshman year. Who cares you met a bassist?”
“Liz fucking Phair,” the drummer said. “She has Kim Gordon’s cell number,” she said. “They text.”
So Cassie was out of the band she’d founded. Not only that—all at once she wasn’t sleeping with Natalia anymore. The house on Eagle Street seemed newly an impossibility. She found a room posted on Craigslist just a couple blocks away and sent an e-mail. It was a room in a house with a bunch of dudes, but Cassie wanted out yesterday. She was gone within a week. Not one member of the Pollys was home the afternoon she moved. She made twelve trips from Eagle Street a block south to her new apartment, hunched over as she lugged her books in one of those black wire carts the old Polish women used to lug groceries around the neighborhood. She passed twelve old Polish women in their babushkas on her way. Suddenly they didn’t look so much like what she wanted to be as they looked like, well, what she was becoming.
Had become.
CHAPTER TWO
THE FIRST WEEKEND in her new place Cassie found she’d lost a shift at the Chelsea Hotel—there was a private party, the people were bringing their own catering service. She asked Curtis, her new housemate, what was happening in the apartment that night. “We’re having kind of a big party,” he said. “There’s a band playing.” Cassie considered just holing up in her new room and reading the Jeanette Winterson she’d found earlier that week at Housing Works, but she couldn’t concentrate. By ten there must have been fifty people in the apartment. She heard someone picking a banjo. She came out into the main space. She didn’t recognize one face. Where for the past seven years at every party she went to there were, like cairns appearing on a long hike, the faces of Natalia and Svetlana and all the friends who’d come to every Pollys sho
w, now she was on a barren granite rock with no sign to confirm she was headed any direction but lost. She needed something to drink.
She was about to return to her room when she looked up and there, standing by the refrigerator with a Pabst Blue Ribbon trucker’s cap and a Miller High Life bottle in his hand, was Mark. The mandolin player from the Pussy Willows. The Willow Gardens.
“What on earth are you doing?” he said when she walked up.
“I live here,” she said. “What the fuck are you doing here?”
“My buddies from Colgate are your roommates, I guess,” he said. “And the Willow Gardens are playing here tonight.” So Cassie settled in and listened while Mark’s band played. They were better than last time. Without a radio mic to huddle around—the room was small enough they needed no amplification, they sang loud and played their instruments as loud as they could be played—they were far more natural. The three-part harmonies they sang were balanced, sharp, like one big chord projecting out into the room on each chorus. Cassie had always liked the idea of a chord, three notes struck together to make a single sound. Mark’s mandolin playing was far more refined than the last time she saw them, tight and loud and precise, jumping the one like Bill Monroe.
As the Willow Gardens came to the end of their set, Mark said, yelling as loud as he sang, “We’re gonna get a special friend to come up and play one with us here tonight.” He let his mandolin fall by his side. He grabbed the fiddle and bow out of his fiddler’s hand. “The killer bassist from one of my favorite new bands, the Pollys, is here tonight.” Mark was looking right at Cassie. It felt as if he’d just asked her to marry him in front of the whole party. “Well, come on up, friend!” he said, in an Appalachian accent he’d never before used. Cassie tried not to, but now everyone around her had taken a step back, and it was as if a whole bucket of pig’s blood might be dropped on her head if she didn’t move from where she was standing. Or it was weirdly like being called out by her father—knowing she didn’t want to do what he said, but knowing she would have to. By the time she got to the front of the room, the guitarist was capoing his guitar to the second fret.
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