Doxology

by Nell Zink

  “If you pile roadblocks on the creativity of Joe Harris, that’s exactly what you are. An ignorant, self-defeating piece of shit.”

  “I didn’t say he can’t record any album he wants,” Randy pointed out. “I just said we won’t release it.”

  “Fuck you, ass-wipe,” Daniel said, marveling at his own inarticulacy.

  Randy referred him to a senior executive producer, a blond surfer-snowboarder of fifty who called himself Daktari.

  DANIEL WENT WITH JOE AND FLORA THE FOLLOWING WEEK TO SEE DAKTARI, WHO TOLD them he’d be adding a rhythm track whether they liked it or not, and that from what he’d heard people saying around the office, Music for Deaf People would be an excellent working title.

  Daktari was handsome and regularly spent time in France. Many years before, someone in Paris had told him it was a mark of breeding to insult people to their faces without breaking eye contact.

  His skills were wasted on Joe, who replied in gratitude that he had resolved to call his opening track “Daktari.” He started writing it right there. Tapping his foot, he sang, “Daktaree-ee-ee, is Randy’s boss so maybe he can te-ell me, if we need drums on this so give the bass to me, I’ll show you drums are not the sole reason to be.”

  “A percussion jam is a big crowd-pleaser,” Daktari interrupted. “Don’t you want to be bigger than Jesus?”

  Switching back to normal conversation, Joe said, “Lots of Aretha Franklin songs don’t have drums!”

  “Afraid of the neighbors? We can find you rehearsal space.”

  “It’s not the noise,” Daniel interposed. “He has this inability.”

  “You mean disability?” Daktari looked closely at Joe’s body. A flicker of horror crossed his beauteous mien at the idea that the label might have signed a disabled person.

  “Inability,” Daniel said. “He can’t really listen to loud noises that sound like explosions all the time.”

  “Because of what, war trauma?”

  “He’s unable. It’s like when you say you’re unable to come to the phone or unable to forgive somebody. On the one hand, it’s an admission of weakness, because you’re saying you’re at the mercy of forces beyond your control, but to other people it sounds arrogant, since those forces might be you.” Flora was pushing a six-inch beanbag hippopotamus up his pants leg, and he leaned down to pet her head, the way he always did when speaking an eternal truth he hoped would accompany her on her way.

  “In other words, it resembles my inability to put out a hit record with no percussion,” Daktari countered.

  “I didn’t say ‘no percussion,’” Joe said. “I love congas and bongos. Can we get a studio with congas and bongos?”

  “Our studios have pro arrangers and session musicians and every goddamned instrument in the book,” Daktari said. “Bring me hit tunes, and I’ll record them any way you want.”

  RIDING HOME ON THE BUS, DANIEL LOUDLY MOURNED THEIR FAILURE TO SIGN WITH AN independent label. He was tortured by the illogic of their discussion with Daktari, who had bested him in negotiations without negotiating or even paying him any attention. Instead of gaining the label’s assent to songs without drums, he had committed Joe to earning congas and bongos with all-new material.

  They stood for a long time talking about it at the playground. Daniel set Flora down on the ground. Indoors she was a floor baby, but outdoors she was a baby rooting for acorns in mud. Sandboxes were rare in New York, considered dangerous because of pet feces. There was never an evening when she didn’t need a bath.

  “I screwed up,” Daniel said, turning over a succession of fallen leaves with his foot. He saw a shard of broken glass and picked it up so he could throw it in the trash. “We should have signed with Matador.”

  “That guy likes hit songs,” Joe said. “So I’ll write hit songs. He’s going to love my new songs. Everything’s completely fine, so stop worrying.”

  “My feeling was that he hated us. I mean all of us, even Flora.” He looked down. She had placed a cigarette filter in a bottle cap so that her hippo could eat it off a dish. When the hippo failed to react, she mimed eating the filter herself. “That’s a no-no!” he said. “Don’t eat litter!” She put it back. With her help, the hippo extended its prolapsed pink mouth like an amoeba over the bottle cap and its contents. “Hippos hate cigarette butts,” he said, picking it up so he could throw it away. “Even though they’re rich in minerals and fiber. They prefer grass. Why don’t you offer him some grass from your open hand?”

  “Where’s any grass?” she said. “I don’t see grass.”

  “I see dandelions,” Joe said. “That’s hippos’ favorite food. They call it hippo-pot.”

  “I see hippo-pot!” she said. She stood and approached a solitary dandelion that was standing by a fence. With the hippo clamped under one arm, she did her best to rip it out of the ground.

  “That was pedagogically questionable,” Daniel commented.

  “You’re so nugatory all the time!”

  “I hope you mean ‘negative all the time.’”

  “Even about Daktari. He hates indie rock music because he works for a major label. It makes total sense.”

  “So why the fuck did he sign an indie rock artist like you?”

  “Because he’s a prescient guy. He can tell I’m going to bring him big hits!”

  VI.

  Joe’s first girlfriend was the former singer of the defunct band Broad Spectrum, a slim, dark-haired classical archaeology major named Bethany. She was interning at Matador that summer because it was too hot in Asia Minor to go on digs. She wore hundred-dollar Laura Ashley dresses with Doc Martens, the look Eloise’s housecoats and Hush Puppies were supposed to suggest. Her features were delicate. Her teeth looked like Chiclets. She shared a two-bedroom summer sublet in the West Village with an absentee figure-skating instructor. She styled herself a “geek girl” because she wore glasses. In her spare time, she followed New Dance. She had read somewhere that attending dance performances can qualify a person to be a dance critic. Her father, a banking executive, occasionally met her for lunch at Delmonico’s, where he assured her that dance was another arrow in her quiver.

  She volunteered to sing harmonies on Joe’s record. It surprised her when he said no. She thought his trusting ways would make him a pushover. Instead they made him assume she wouldn’t mind rejection. She didn’t let on how mad she was, because she didn’t want to lose him. She believed that his surreal sense of humor made him a hard person to know.

  Her relationship specialty was evenings out. She liked plays and recitals. He didn’t care who paid. She led him to art museums and to restaurants with arty food. For several weeks that fall, they were regulars at American Ballet Theatre. She tapped his new American Express card for culture and comfort. In her own mind, she was educating him, so it seemed to her like a fair exchange.

  Joe worked diligently on his songwriting, as usual. He mastered his demos on sixty-minute cassettes. Every time a tape filled up, he delivered it to Daktari’s secretary. There was general consensus around the office that he was going to end up owing the label a lot of money. No one there believed in him but Bethany, who did it on principle because they were dating.

  PAM HATED HER WITH GREAT BITTERNESS. SHE SAW HER AS A MOOCH AND A LEECH WHO was using Joe as an auxiliary dad, one of those upper-class women who aspire to be children all their lives. As an excuse for poor eyesight, the “geek girl” tagline bugged her big time. But what bothered her most was how Bethany’s girlfriendly blandishments stained Joe’s pure soul with egotism. All his innocent self-regard and faith in his innate value metamorphosed into campy self-adoration in the light of her approval. She heightened his pleasure in life when he was already living a joyful dream. She reinforced playful impulses that didn’t need any encouragement. His behavior in her presence careened right past joie de vivre into something resembling hysteria. He called her “the orgasm factory” to her face, and she followed him around like a duckling. She constantly displayed to onl
ookers that she was with Joe—of all people—and this, Pam simply did not understand. How could some hot-looking, jet-setting, dance-theater-watching rich bitch be possessive about Joe? Had she reencountered him after the House of Candles show feeding hot dogs to squirrels, instead of walking the halls of Atlantic with a contract in his hand, would she have gone near him? (Hot dogs that spent too many hours in the slimy waters of the Abyssinian Coffee Shop burst and became unsalable, and then they were Joe’s.) Any child of six could have told you she was a deluded social climber who’d boarded the wrong train. Why couldn’t he see through it?

  Stupid question, she knew. He trusted everyone, even bitches. His former life hadn’t been long on the bitches. For a poignant half second, she wished she had kissed him, or even gone to bed with him, so that no star-fucker bitch could have been his first.

  WHEN FLORA WAS THREE, DANIEL TOOK HER TO THE TRIENNIAL SVOBODA FAMILY reunion. She came back raving about tricycles and wagons, wearing a tiny gold-plated cross on a chain around her neck. He was no longer an accredited family member, but the Svobodas seemed to feel there was hope for her. He let her wear the cross until they got home. Then he said it was too valuable to wear every day, took it off her, and threw it in the trash. A week later, she asked for the cross again. When she couldn’t have it, she cried.

  A week after that, her hippo ate dog shit and had to be put out of its misery. She saw a crucifix in the window of a Santeria store and asked Joe to buy it. It was as though she couldn’t get Jesus out of her mind and wanted him for her new stuffed animal.

  Fortunately it was a cash-only store. The crucifix had been blessed by a voodoo priest and was very expensive. Joe couldn’t help her out on the spot, but he told Daniel about her wish.

  “If she needs a shirtless guy with a beard, we can get her a G.I. Joe,” he replied.

  “We’ll make our own cross, and she can put him on it with rubber bands.”

  “If it’s a cross she wants, we can—no. There’s no way I’m making her a toy cross! What’s next? A toy cat-o’-nine-tails, so she can self-flagellate?”

  “Jesus is weird,” Joe remarked.

  “You can say that again!”

  “Why is he on the cross?”

  Daniel raised his eyes to heaven. “Oh, man, Joe. Well, historically, he wasn’t always on the cross. I think for something like twelve centuries, he was the risen Christ, fully dressed. Then there was Gothic art and, like, the black plague or something, so they switched to showing him on the cross. You know he died on the cross, right?”

  “Why?”

  “The weight of his own body, I guess. Makes it hard to breathe when you’re hanging by your arms.”

  “But he’s so skinny!”

  “Not in real life! He was always eating out with rich tax collectors, and he could make food appear by magic and turn water into wine, so he was a total land whale. That’s why he died so fast, like hours before the skinny dudes they crucified at the same time. The Romans didn’t even have to break his legs.”

  “That is so gross,” Joe said.

  “And he’s scared shitless up there, screaming out, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ But you know who God was, who could have helped him the whole time? His dad!”

  “My dad would not do that.”

  “My dad would.”

  THE REVERBERATING CHRISTIANITY DEBACLE AGGRAVATED PAM’S SENSE THAT HER daughter was growing up without her. Every moment she spent at the office was a moment when some stranger and/or family member of ill will and worse intentions could plant a fateful wrong idea in Flora’s head.

  Joe tried to console her by recording selected playtime. It didn’t help. The cassettes merely made audible how he kept Flora in stitches. He was giving her a solid grounding in verbal wit, preschool style. Her parents’ role was to drop by nightly and impose dour worries about nutrition and rest.

  After the fourth and final taping session, Pam’s path forward became clear. One dialogue passage was as follows:

  JOE: Never rub your nub where people can see.

  FLORA: But I want to!

  JOE: [singing] Got to rub my nub in the club, rub my nub in the club, got to rub my nub in the club—now dub—see my nub nub nub nub nub nub nub nub in the club club club club club club club, it’s like a sub sub sub sub sub sub sub—

  FLORA: Don’t make fun of me!

  JOE: Then stop rubbing your nub and do the dance! [singing] Rub my nub in the club, chugalug in the pub, rub-a-dub in the tub . . . [etc.]

  FLORA: [clapping along] Rub my nub I rub my nub I rub my nub I rub my nub I rub my nub [etc.]

  Flora’s improvisation of a contrapuntal rhythmic chant made her seem extraordinarily musically accomplished for her age. At the same time, Pam experienced a heretofore unsuspected and overpowering need to raise her child herself. Flora was getting old for a babysitter. She wasn’t a baby anymore. Her psyche needed to be molded in Pam’s image, or Daniel’s at least. Otherwise, what was the point?

  “I need to cut down on my hours,” Pam said to Yuval the next morning as they stood drinking coffee in the office kitchenette. “My kid doesn’t even know my name. She calls me ‘Mom.’”

  “So you want to spend time with Flora.”

  “Yes. The problem is maternity leave is unpaid, and it’s a little late.”

  He sneered, wrinkling his nose. “Who told you that? Your union rep?”

  “Very funny!”

  “You’re the funny one here, talking about part-time work when I bill for you by the day. Clients are always telling me how many hours you work most days, or should I say minutes?”

  “Express yourself clearly, Yuval.”

  “That maybe it’s almost better if you limit time offsite? Like, dress up like you’re in marketing, run intense interviews about client needs, drip your famous honey sweetness on them, estimate billable days with some generosity to me, and deliver on time? Stay home. Work as you need. Flextime.”

  “I’d do that.”

  “But only two years. Maternity leave. In two years is performance review. I’ll be counting your billable days.”

  She called Daniel at his temp job with the good news. He said, “Your boss has a Messiah complex.”

  DANIEL THOUGHT THE SONG WAS GREAT AND LACKED ONLY ONE LINE TO BE PERFECT: “IF my right hand should offend you, cut it off.”

  With Pam at the controls of a four-track and the vocal stylings of Flora and Daniel, Joe recorded a bass-and-foot-tapping demo of “Rub My Nub.” The interplay between the four/four repetitions of “rub my nub I” and the syncopation of “cut it off, cut it off” was strikingly infectious. When Daktari heard it over the phone the next day, he said, “Ç’est ça, mon ami!”

  Joe’s reasonable response was “Sad monogamy?”

  He was summoned to a studio in Chelsea to rerecord vocals and two bass parts. It took two days. Without consulting him, Daktari then laid the recording over a big-beat synth percussion track. He hired a contrabassist to shadow the bass and singers to imitate Flora, ran the results through a compressor with multiple bowls of reverb (reverb was measured in units of the kind bud), and cranked up the presence until the song could work as a ringtone on a Nokia.

  The album Sad Monogamy (that was the working title; in the end it was released as Coronation) came together quickly, because Joe wrote a song almost every day. Daktari didn’t care too much about the other tracks. He didn’t even ask for changes in “Rub My Nub,” except for the title, which became “Chugalug.”

  THE STILLS AND RUSHES FROM THE FIRST DAY OF FILMING THE “CHUGALUG” VIDEO astounded Daniel. Watching the shoot on monitors was even more disturbing.

  He was a show business novice. His experience of comparing images with reality had been acquired firsthand. For example, he saw himself as an okay-looking guy who was not photogenic. In pictures he looked like a small-eyed, hairy potato. Smiling widened his strong jaw into something photographs invariably depicted as a moon face, right on the edge of pug. By contrast,
he thought of Joe as not an okay-looking guy. He wondered how major-label-style publicity was supposed to work with a star like that. He imagined they would pose him far away, with contour makeup under dramatic lighting, or maybe on a beach, facing out to sea. Joe was short, five feet seven and a half at the outside with shoes on. He had a cute enough butt and square little shoulders, and if you issued him a smallish guitar—well, Dylan and Springsteen were little guys, right? Those were Daniel’s not uncharitable thoughts on the subject of Joe’s image. He was trying to be realistic.

  On screen, Joe became a rock god. His Muppet mouth became a twenty-tooth smile. His small head became enormous eyes; his girlish chin, an asset at last. His mousy bowl cut required only one sweep of the oiled brush to darken to a mass of chestnut waves under the lights. His short stature and neck made him fit neatly in the frame. His size made cheap props, such as the foam-and-cardboard wingback chairs the director had bought from IKEA (to be returned for credit the next day), look vast and luxurious. The effect of the camera on his skin was strangest of it all. Joe in real life had a yellowish cast. He was anemic-looking, sallow, not olive; not a beautiful look. On screen he looked vibrant, yet blotless—smooth as the piece of paper the cameraman held up to get a white balance score. Reduced to two dimensions, with a script to follow, he became someone else who was also himself. The transformation wasn’t instantaneous, because the two Joes were incommensurate and incompatible. It was like some strange proof of the existence of a parallel universe looming behind our own. Daniel could look up at the soundstage and see the frowns on the dancers straining to evoke eroticism in the presence of the goofiest man alive (they’d met him; he’d introduced himself and talked to them all before the shoot), lower his gaze to the monitors where similar women were writhing in a miasma of lust they felt for a handsome singer who was coolly delivering obscenities, look up again to see Joe gesticulating while the resentful troupers sweated their workout, look back down, look up again, see stars, see human beings, until his brain abandoned the effort of trying to reconcile them. The video was like a centrifuge, separating the world into a visual component that drained into the monitors propped on the floor and a bodily component that became more unsightly with every turn of the machinery.