Doxology

by Nell Zink

  He never got his dream job at his favorite record store in Madison, but he regularly met musicians through his shifts at a Subway sandwich shop. By neglecting his studies, he was able to soldier his way upward through the hierarchy of the university radio station until he had a two-hour show on Monday mornings, shocking people awake with the Residents and Halo of Flies.

  He had come to New York with $800 in savings expressly dedicated to the release of the seven-inch single that would put Daniel Svoboda on the map. Not as a musician. He wanted to found a record label.

  By dint of his radio experience and strategic mail-ordering from ads in Forced Exposure and Maximum Rocknroll, he knew his single didn’t have to be so great musically. What it needed was reverb on the vocals, chorus on the guitar, and compression on everything else. The sound would be “warm” and “punchy.” The au courant midwestern sound was grunge with vocals lowered by an octave. The band posters showed nitrogen funny cars shooting flames. What he had in mind was something different: breathy female vocals over propulsive guitar drones, like My Bloody Valentine, only faster. The key element was the breathless woman-girl-child singer—a delicate, tight-throated slip of a thing, aspirating her lines like Jane Birkin on “Je t’aime . . . moi non plus” but buried under a mass of guitar noise. In terms of artistic lineage, she was somewhere between Goethe’s Mignon and André Breton’s Nadia. He was eager to know whether Pam could sing.

  AT HIS SUGGESTION, PAM AND JOE MET HIM AT NOON ON A SATURDAY IN FRONT OF THE Music Palace, a large cinema on Bowery. It was getting close to Christmas. The streets were full of shoppers looking for bargains on the latest Chinese-manufactured goods, such as dish towels and those little plastic rakes and buckets kids take to the beach in summer. They bought a six of Michelob at the grocery store next door and hid it in Pam’s backpack. The theater was almost empty. A few men were sleeping toward the back and milling around the bathrooms behind the screen, recent Asian arrivals with nowhere else to go.

  The double feature paired an action movie set in Mexico with a kung fu fantasy about medieval China. It ran all day and night. The action movie had already started, so they didn’t get to talking until the intermission. Pam, hoping to arouse Daniel’s curiosity, said how much she was dreading practice.

  He said, “What kind of practice?”

  Joe said, “She’s in this hard-sucking power duo that has no songs.”

  “Like I always say, if you gotta suck, suck loud,” Pam said. “The Diaphragms have rehearsal space, a drum machine, and no pride. I’d make a speech tomorrow at practice and say it’s all over, but the bass player happens to be my roommate.”

  “Ooh,” Daniel said.

  “It’s hellish. And the worst part is we really do suck. I use so much distortion that all I have to do is look at the guitar and it feeds back. I loop it through a delay and play along with myself. Does it sound dumb yet?”

  “Potentially. Can you play bar chords?”

  “Are you asking can I play guitar? Yeah, sure. I can even sing. But there’s something about this band. I don’t want it to be good. I want it to suck, so Simon’s band will suck. It’s the most self-destructive thing I’ve ever done, and that’s saying a lot. I need to quit.”

  Daniel hesitated. “I don’t want to be in a band,” he ventured, not sure he would be believed. “I truly don’t. You could say I’m more the camp-follower type. I like a certain kind of music, and I want to get people listening to it. I had a radio show in college. I want to start a label.”

  “What kind of stuff?”

  Joe interrupted them, saying, “Let’s have a band! We’ll call it Marmalade Sky. It’s me on bass, Pam on guitar, and you on keyboards. We all sing. We have three-part harmonies. We practice at your house. I write the songs. Prepare to rock!”

  Daniel said, “You’re barking up the wrong tree, man. I can’t play keyboards. Maybe I could fake drums.”

  “There’s too much drums in songs all the time,” Joe said. “You play keyboards.”

  “I’m in,” Pam said. “Next stop Marmalade Sky.”

  “So what’s my label called?” Daniel asked Joe.

  “Lion’s Den, because of Daniel in the lion’s den.”

  “That sounds like reggae, when ‘Marmalade Sky’ sounds like bad British psychedelia.”

  “Together they fit how we’re going to sound, which is free dub-rock fusion.”

  “He could be right,” Pam said. “He did without an amp for so long, he’s the Charlie Haden of punk rock. I mean, relatively speaking.”

  “Pam’s the worst lead guitar player in the universe,” Joe said. “Her fingers move like it’s freezing out and she lost her mittens. But in Marmalade Sky, she plays massive power chords she knows how to play, and I play the tunes.”

  “I play like I’m wearing the mittens,” she corrected him. “It’s the evil influence of Simon. He wants everything to sound like it’s been dragged through candied heroin.”

  “He’s your roommate and in your band?” Daniel asked. “You must be close friends.”

  “We’re extremely intimate.” She rolled her eyes.

  “It sounds to me like you should cut him off and never look back. I mean, as a disinterested third party.”

  “I didn’t mean to imply that he’s on drugs. There are more things at the bottom of the barrel than drugs.”

  “Can you please play keyboards?” Joe asked Daniel.

  “You truly don’t want to hear me try.”

  “You have to,” he insisted. “We can’t have a band unless we’re all in it!”

  “I want to put out the band on my label, not play in it.”

  “It will be absolutely no fun being rock stars and getting laid and everything like that if you aren’t in the band. You have to play something!”

  “It’s better money,” Pam pointed out. “A manager gets twenty percent, but as a band member you’d get a third.”

  “Twenty off the top plus a third puts me at forty-seven percent,” Daniel said.

  “And we make it all back from record sales and touring!” Joe said.

  “I have a day job already,” Pam said.

  “Me too,” Joe said. “I mean touring in the city.”

  “What I have is more like a night job,” Daniel said. “But fine, let’s talk about how I’m going to hang it up because I’m raking it in with art for art’s sake.”

  “We’re going to be rolling in it,” Joe said, as though reminding him of an established fact, “because I’m writing the songs.”

  Daniel and Pam exchanged a look that said the band would fail no matter what, if only because Joe was writing the songs. There was a shared bemused affection for him in the look already. “You’re going to be the next Neil Diamond,” Daniel said.

  “Hasil Adkins,” Pam said.

  “Roy Orbison!” Joe said.

  WHEN THE KUNG FU MOVIE WAS OVER, THEY GOT TAKE-OUT PIZZAS AND WALKED TO Daniel’s place to eat and listen to records. The first track he put on was “Suspect Device” by Stiff Little Fingers. Joe danced, throwing his arms up to jerk his body from side to side. Daniel put on Hüsker Dü’s “Real World,” Gang of Four’s “Love Like Anthrax,” and Mission of Burma’s “Forget,” until Joe said he was tired of dancing. He volunteered to sing a song he had written earlier in the day. Daniel and Pam exchanged the look again. Joe took a deep breath, clapped his hands to indicate a rumba, and sang, with so many North-African-style adornments that every syllable was stretched into three or four:

  This world is small

  I see you all

  Killing my head

  With how you bled

  And now you’re dead

  Dead, dead, dead

  He stretched the final “dead” into about ten syllables.

  Pam said, “Joe, man! Are you emotionally troubled? Is there something I don’t know?”

  “Seriously, I think the melody’s okay,” Daniel said. He went to the rear corner of the room, under one of the windows to the courty
ard, and returned with a warped flea-market classical guitar, wrongly strung with steel instead of nylon. It wasn’t tuned. He gave it to Pam and said, “Here, play it on guitar.”

  Twenty minutes later, they had an intro, verse, and guitar riff. Daniel drummed gently with spoons on a book. Pam sang the song, and Joe sang the bass line. Finally he said, “That was the A part of the song. Now comes the B part.”

  The lyrics to the B part were about skateboarders. Daniel said, “Wait. Is this the chorus or the bridge? Does this have something to do with the A part?”

  Joe said firmly, “It’s about skateboarders. They’re dead. There was gravel at the corner of Fifth and Fifteenth, and they were hanging on to the bumper of a cab, and poof !”

  THE NEXT MORNING, PAM TOLD SIMON THAT SHE WAS GOING TO THE PRACTICE SPACE without him because she could afford it on her own. Ten dollars an hour isn’t much for a programmer. She said she was done with the Diaphragms. The band had never worked. She had a new project that might work. To forestall any hopes on his side, she said he wasn’t welcome in the new project.

  The whole routine made her nervous. She stood by the door, guitar on her back and effects bag in her hand, making this insulting speech as if expecting immediate capitulation, knowing better than to expect it.

  Simon said, “That’s my practice space, not yours. I already advertised for a new guitar player.”

  “So why aren’t you going there now?”

  “I don’t have one yet. But I will.”

  She set her things down and said, “Simon, I know our love was beautiful, but we need to break up.”

  “I’m not moving out. I can’t even afford to practice by myself. You’re the one who just said ten dollars isn’t a lot of money. You move out. You can afford a place of your own. Just go.” He turned sulkily toward the cereal box on the table and sprinkled a few more squares of Chex into his slowly warming milk.

  DANIEL DIDN’T WANT TO REHEARSE ON SUNDAY MORNINGS. HE DIDN’T SEE ANY REASON to get up early, cross town, and pay money to do something they could do in his home if they didn’t get carried away with the volume. Over miso soup on Saint Mark’s Place—his first date with Pam—he said, “Why spend money when we can just turn down?”

  “Tube amps don’t work like that,” she said. “They need to warm up to sound right, and they need to sound right to warm up. There’s no headphone jack.”

  “Why don’t you get a transistor amp, so you can practice at home?”

  “No way,” she said. “I’ve been down that road. We rehearse under realistic conditions.” She sketched her experience with the Slinkies, saying it was time to move forward, at least into the eighties, now that it was 1990. There was nothing embarrassing about being behind. The sixties had hit pop culture around 1972, just as punk was taking off. “You ever see Birth of the Beatles?” she added. “We need to work like busy bees to get to the tippy top.”

  “Darby Crash died the day before John Lennon.”

  “Todd is God,” she said. “But yeah, maybe Darby’s what put Chapman over the edge.”

  Daniel suppressed a smile. He had nothing against John Lennon, and no sympathy for the man who shot him, but knowing that Todd Rundgren had composed “Rock and Roll Pussy” about Lennon, that Lennon had responded with an open letter to “Sodd Runtlestuntle” in Melody Maker, and that Mark David Chapman had cared enough to take the affair to its logical conclusion while wearing a promotional T-shirt for Todd’s latest album—it was a kind of knowledge he didn’t expect a woman to have, much less care enough to say something post-sensitive about. He was starting to get a serious crush on her. He personally had first heard of John Lennon the day he died. His family was more into Up with People.

  LATE WEDNESDAY NIGHT, PAM WAS AMONG THE FIRST TO BUY THE VILLAGE VOICE AND turn to the real estate classifieds. She strode to a streetlamp to read. What she saw made her guts clench. Since her last move, her budgeted residential zone had shifted far away from Manhattan, past Brooklyn Heights. The studios she could afford were in places like Greenpoint and Astoria. Even Park Slope had apparently turned into a bourgeois hell of first-time homebuyers bent on pretending their stucco townhomes were brownstones on the Upper East Side.

  She regarded Brooklyn as a cultural wasteland. A summertime stroll up Flatbush with the devoted Brooklyn fan Joe hadn’t changed her mind. In a shop window she’d seen a dead branch spray-painted gold in a silver-painted vase for eighty dollars. She had attended an art opening in Williamsburg once, down near the water, and it still stuck with her as though it might recur as a final image of vacuity before she died. She had narrowly missed the era when Alphabet City was controlled by Latino crime syndicates and inhabited by the living dead—honest-to-goodness cannibals—but Williamsburg was creepier, because there was nobody around. No buildings standing open with dim-eyed figures guarding holes leading to cellars; just walls and chain-link on all sides, and she and Joe the only pedestrians for miles. Cannibals could have eaten them right there on the street, without taking the trouble to drag them inside a building. When they got to the opening, it turned out to be site-specific installations made of found objects. None of the so-called artists could afford supplies or a studio. It was literal arte povera. Then she sliced open the top of her right ear on a splinter of broken mirror some wannabe had hung from the ceiling with twine.

  She read the ads for lower Manhattan again. Her hands and feet turned cold from the adrenaline, as if she’d been caught in a trap. To all appearances she was not leaving her lease on Bleecker Street. If Simon wasn’t either, she would have to put up with him.

  III.

  Operation Desert Shield marched inexorably toward war. The USA was ranging its armaments against Saddam Hussein and preparing to lay waste to his country. Pam often wished aloud that the Selective Service System would draft Simon into the battle for Kuwait.

  Daniel had talked about the draft so much that she didn’t realize there was no draft. He was in touch with the American Friends Service Committee, on Joe’s behalf as well as his own, preparing for them to become conscientious objectors. He even took Joe to a Quaker meeting, but only once.

  There was officially a recession on. Corporate executives were moaning that double-digit annual profit growth was a thing of the past. Even RIACD’s Wall Street clients were strapped for cash. They had installed networked PCs before firing the staff the PCs would make redundant. Two years earlier, when Pam parachuted into an office, she could be sure of seeing secretaries in motion, walking briskly in and out of their supervisors’ offices, running files from room to room, controlling the speed of Dictaphone tapes with foot pedals, typing letters on IBM Selectrics. Now those same secretaries sat at bare desks half asleep, while their bosses answered correspondence privately on Lotus cc:mail. Occasionally one would stand up to take a print job off the printer in the printer room. At a big reinsurer, Pam saw a woman typing a chapter from the Book of Ezekiel. She learned that the company’s desktop publishing pool had resolved, as a devotional exercise, to enter God’s Word into WordPerfect documents. Not because anybody needed a printout; they all had the book at home. It was a means of communion with the Divine. It could not end well.

  The winter settled in like a poisonous fog around the redundant American people. The war ramped up. Yellow ribbons appeared. The streets were dark at four o’clock. The wind whistled and rattled the signage. Pam and her coworkers sat idle in the conference room, watching a lot of TV.

  In mid-January 1991, things got interesting. A CNN correspondent was trapped in Baghdad. He described his fear in great detail, conveying a sense that war was ultra-scary. The battlefields looked like barbecue grills—not arrangements of discrete wrecks and craters, but greasy charcoal melted to the pavement. America the Beautiful was taking no prisoners.

  Pam went to visit Daniel after work and found him downstairs in the store, huddled up in his coat, watching CBS with Victor. He pointed at the TV and said, “They’re landing Scuds on Tel Aviv. It’s Armageddon.”
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  Daniel was not remotely Jewish, and he didn’t know any Israelis, but he had been raised in the kind of Christian household that promotes respect for the defense capabilities of Israel and belief in the apocalyptic consequences of putting its back against the wall. Not that Israel couldn’t defend itself. Plucky little Israel had fended off repeated Arab invasions, and not through the power of prayer. It had fought valiantly and developed—with French assistance, though Daniel couldn’t imagine why that was—a nuclear deterrent. Those who aided the enemies of Israel died. That’s what they did.

  For example, the British engineer who decided to help Saddam build a cannon big enough to put two tons into orbit. He just up and died of gunshot wounds in Brussels.

  The respect was possibly overgenerous and the eschatological expectations overblown, but it was hard for Daniel to imagine Tel Aviv taking a Scud missile lying down. To make sure Pam knew what he meant, he added, “This is World War Three!”

  “Are they with nerve gas?”

  “They don’t know yet. Nobody wants to be first to take off the gas mask and find out. But it can’t be nerve gas, right? Israel would so totally nuke Baghdad. They want to draw Israel into the war, but they don’t want to die. If Israel sends even one plane into Iraqi airspace, it could draw the whole Arab world into the war.”

  “What do you think, Victor?” she asked.

  “Americans supply Israel with many things. Israel won’t interfere in our war.”

  “I think Israel goes its own way,” Daniel said. “They play off all sides against each other. They get less American support than you think.”

  “Israel and Iraq are nothing,” Victor said. “If they nuke each other, it’s not World War Three. It’s jackals fighting over a desert.”

  “Whoa,” Pam said, unused to hearing anything that could possibly have been construed as anti-Semitic.

  “Any war that goes nuclear is World War Three,” Daniel said. “And nuclear war involving Israel is Armageddon, any way you cut it up. So this is potential nuclear Armageddon. Babylon the great is fallen—is fallen . . . for all the nations have drunk of the wine of the wrath of her fornication!” He shouted the last bit because it was part of a Tragic Mulatto song.