Doxology

by Nell Zink

  The women did the dance, not Joe. The director said it was great to be able to surround a singer with built fly girls who could move instead of models. He told Daniel to be happy, because Joe was going to get film offers.

  THE VIDEO WENT INTO ROTATION ON MTV AND VH1. STRANGERS NOW RECOGNIZED JOE in record stores, if the staff clued them in. They called him “Joe Harris” rather than “mongo collector scum.” He had been more notorious than popular.

  Maybe he would have stayed notorious, never becoming popular, if he’d been easier to recognize. But his social skills and conversational arts couldn’t discredit him in the eyes of the world. The disconnect between image and reality was total. Occasionally he was taken for someone who resembled Joe Harris, but only when something startled him into silence.

  There was one recurring situation where he would be recognized and draw a crowd: if the song was played in his hearing. He would sing along and do the dance, no matter where he was—at home listening to the radio, walking past a bar where it was on the jukebox, shopping in a grocery store where an easy-listening version was streaming over the paging system. It made him oh-so-happy to hear it.

  His mainstream career took off with an appearance on a morning talk show. Atlantic’s publicist had negotiated a one-minute promotional segment. Prior radio interviews had established that a minute could be a long time. Thus there was debate as to how to handle him, until a production intern’s boyfriend provided a timely eyewitness account of a performance in the dairy section of C-Town. The host of the show shook hands, said hi, and let the track roll. Seemingly a man of few words, Joe sang and did the dance. The camera zoomed to his face as the vision mixer cut to the shocked reactions of the host and other guests.

  After that, many talk shows invited him on, but not to talk. The song gave rise to a vulgar and widely satirized dance craze. No wedding was complete without it. It was the go-to anthem of drunken groomsmen. The album sold and sold and sold, and the single reached number four on the Billboard Hot 100. Joe in his lewdness was compared with Elvis Presley.

  As with Elvis, it was a lewdness only the unmediated had seen. The buzz around his first concert tour was accordingly significant.

  Daniel began to wish he’d asked for a songwriting credit for his coda.

  CURRENTLY BETWEEN JOBS, ELOISE STROLLED THE LOWER EAST SIDE IN SEARCH OF JOE. She looked out for Pam, Daniel, and Flora as well. But all of them were busier than they’d ever been. She didn’t know where they lived. Joe was walking and shopping less, swamped with work and free promo CDs. He never again played a small club, having gotten signed before he could even occupy a feature slot at CBGB. The label was rationing his presence in preparation for a big-budget tour.

  She watched cable in case his video came on. She bought magazines like People and Vogue so she could read short Q&As and capsule reviews. The scourge of commerce had driven the wedge of fame between them. She thought it was only natural, because he was a rock star and she was a speck.

  VII.

  Pam went to a party at Daktari’s apartment with Joe and Bethany, while Daniel stayed home with Flora. The party was full of industry bigwigs, TV journalists, and stars. Daktari introduced Joe as the next big thing. Joe flitted from new acquaintance to new acquaintance, lingering over the females like Pepé Le Pew. It was painful for Pam to watch. He was no longer profiting from the most basic social corrective—the boycott, when women walk away. By the end of the night, he was single. She wished it could have been because he saw some flaw in Bethany. But he couldn’t see flaws in women who were much, much worse.

  Around two in the morning, he kissed Bethany goodbye and told Pam to say hi to Daniel and Flora so he could go on fondling a creature in a white puffy coat with the hood up. She looked to Pam like a sofa standing upright, upholstered in shiny nylon over down batting. Why did she need a warm coat indoors? Was she a junkie? Pam’s thoughts were dire. She developed a sudden new appreciation of Bethany. Anything was better than this. Sofa Girl had a pinched face and horrible orange lipstick. Under the coat, she was tiny. Maybe she didn’t have enough body fat to maintain 98.6 without a coat? Even as Joe was feeling her up, she was screeching and waving a cigarette around. She reminded Pam of Edie Sedgwick, the famous vapid cocotte from Warhol’s Factory.

  Pam fled the party downhearted, but not alone. At the corner of Thompson and Spring, Bethany touched her arm and said, “Hey, Pam. Let’s share a cab.”

  “I’m walking,” she said. “I need air.” She crossed the street, but Bethany followed her.

  “Did you see that girl?” Bethany asked.

  “The anorexic dressed as a grub?”

  “She’s this bogus model who’s been fired from, like, everywhere. She’s on every drug in the book. She’s horrible, awful, like, God! Why her?”

  “Shut up, shut up. Just shut up,” Pam muttered, as though to herself. She had a bad feeling. Bethany was more keyed up than she’d ever seen her.

  “She’s going to fuck him right at the party,” Bethany went on. “How does Daktari even know her? She’s not a music person. She’s fashion!”

  “You’re an archaeologist,” Pam pointed out.

  “But I’m into music and dance. And she—you know what she’s known for?”

  “Bestiality shows in Tijuana?” Pam increased her pace, trying to walk too fast for Bethany to keep up.

  Bethany didn’t break into a run, but her heels pounded the sidewalk with a hastening, hollow pinging sound. From twenty feet behind Pam she called out, “Fucking backstage at fashion week!”

  Pam turned to face her and said, “If you think it’s all her fault, why don’t you get back up in there and defend him?”

  “Defend him? He’s the one making out with a tramp. I have to leave him.”

  “Well, defend her!”

  Bethany’s irate sadness gave way to incomprehension.

  “He’s an aggressor,” Pam said. “You are duty bound as a feminist to go back in there and stop her ass from getting nailed by a stud she can’t handle.”

  She snorted and scoffed. “Stud.”

  “I’m going back,” Pam said.

  She stalked past Bethany, angling across Thompson toward Daktari’s door. There she tried the doorbell.

  She tried it several times over the space of four or five minutes. She finally slipped inside when a pizza deliveryman slipped out. Up in the apartment, Joe was nowhere to be found. Nowhere—everybody told her so—absolutely nowhere—meaning in this case a walk-in closet in the master suite, where he was clutching at a strange woman’s hair with his pants down. He was yelping, but Pam couldn’t hear him because of all the noise. She assumed they must have left while Bethany was distracting her with their altercation.

  She emerged alone to the street. The jilted sponge was gone, but she could see five other women on the same block, on her side of the street alone, who were guaranteed to be better life-partner prospects for Joe than Sofa Girl. She walked home in a snit of foreboding, her thoughts mother-dark.

  DANIEL WENT TO JOE’S PLACE TO PICK HIM UP THE NEXT AFTERNOON FOR A LUNCH DATE, and Sofa Girl was there. She answered the door in her sofa coat and an iridescent yellow bra. She was obviously drunk. Joe was in the shower, singing “Good Morning Starshine.”

  Daniel yelled, “Hey, Joe! I can come back!”

  “You want a beer?” Sofa Girl asked. “Wait, we’re fresh out. You want to get us some beer?”

  “I’ll come back later.”

  Joe yelled, “Stay! I need food!”

  “And I need beer!” Sofa Girl yelled.

  “We can go somewhere that has beer,” Daniel said. “It’s not hard.”

  Joe came out of the bathroom naked, holding his wallet over his genitals. Daniel wondered why he had taken his wallet with him into the bathroom, but only until he remembered Sofa Girl. It was hard, but not impossible, to piece together a chain of events that would make even Joe protective of his wallet—say, if a person were to take every single bill out of it, in his pr
esence, to spend on something he didn’t want.

  Joe said, “Hey, Daniel. Could you possibly run downstairs and grab us some beer?”

  “You don’t need beer,” Daniel said. “You need food.”

  “Right,” Joe said.

  “Beer and food!” Sofa Girl called out, waving her cigarette.

  “This is Gwendolyn Charanoglu,” Joe said. “Gwen, meet my manager, Daniel Svoboda.” He put his wallet on the kitchen counter and returned to the bathroom.

  “Oh, my God, I am so honored to meet you!” she squealed. “I’ve heard so much about you! He talks about you all the time!” She offered him her hand to shake.

  The hand was sticky. The smell from under her coat was fetid. Daniel had a troubling vision of Joe’s providing a lyrical description of him while Gwen sucked him off. He dismissed it and said, “You can go ahead and get dressed, so we can go out. It’s warm outside. He’ll be fast.”

  She looked down and said, “Oh, yeah. Oh, my God. I’m naked. I’m wearing nothing!” She wandered around the room, looking at the floor, until she found her tunic, clutch, and sandals. She put on the tunic and dropped the coat on the floor in its place. She took Joe’s wallet from the counter and stuffed it into her clutch—it almost fit inside—and picked up her shoes. “I put on my clothes!” she called out.

  “That’s a crying shame!” Joe shouted.

  He returned in his bathrobe and asked her for a cigarette. With difficulty, she narrowly squeaked one out of her bag. Joe’s wallet almost blocked its egress.

  “Come on, Joe,” Daniel said. “You don’t smoke, and I’m hungry.”

  “There’s a time for everything,” Joe said. He lit up.

  “Seeing you with that cigarette makes me horny,” Gwen said.

  “I’m going now,” Daniel said.

  “No, stay!” she said.

  “Yeah, stay,” Joe said.

  Daniel didn’t know what to make of Joe’s condition. He seemed energetic enough, but vocally subdued. He wasn’t narrating. By his normal standards, he was a zombie. “No way, man,” he said. “I’ll call you later. We’ll get dinner.”

  He didn’t answer the phone. Daniel thought, If that girl ever sobers up, she’ll notice she’s with Joe, and we’ll be rid of her.

  As it turned out, that was a big “if.”

  SINCE PAM WAS “WORKING” FROM HOME A LOT, JOE CUT DOWN ON HIS BABYSITTING. HE and Gwen dated two or three times a week, mostly in the afternoon. Her evenings were busy. On weekends, she claimed to be visiting her father in Great Neck. She made it sound like a nice place, but she said that although their relationship was serious, she wasn’t ready for him to meet her family. He introduced her to Professor Harris, who took it philosophically. Of course he preferred Bethany, but he had never been able to imagine her sticking with Joe for long. He saw the attraction of a squalid, angular airhead for a fun-loving young man.

  Joe proudly titled her “my girlfriend.” Pam and Daniel were in agreement that he was not her boyfriend, as much as he might like to presume otherwise. There had to be someone else in her life. Drugs were surely involved. Her manner toward them alternated between petulant statue and raging ermine.

  With concern and sympathy for Joe alone, they analyzed the situation as follows: His life was a social life. He had never been alone. He was always in the company of people or recordings of them. It wouldn’t have taken any time for solitary confinement to drive him insane. The shift to conversing with inanimate objects and gauging their responses would have been instantaneous. Arguably it had taken place long before, when he first took up singing alone on the streets of New York. And unlike his other friends, Gwen was there for him. They had work and kindergarten, and she had nothing. She was as forbearing and tolerant as Joe. Her reasons happened to be different—she was high all the time—but wasn’t he high too, in his own way? She laughed at his jokes. She laughed at accidents. She laughed at the news. Her mood was consistently as good as his. To everyone but him, she was grating and repetitive, and that was the secret of their bond.

  GWEN’S ANALYSIS DIFFERED. AS SHE SAW IT, HER ALOOF AND INCONSISTENT ATTENTION to Joe was only natural, because, you see, this guy Blake, an actor in the process of failing to make it, was her old boyfriend. He had gotten a part in a TV pilot that never got made into a series and then transitioned, embarrassingly, to theater. Recently he had played the role of a bug, with no costume or makeup. Most of his lines were a high inhuman whine that the audience wasn’t supposed to understand, because he was a bug. It got a great write-up in the Voice but did not gain a mention in any of the dailies. So basically Blake was over, and Joe was her new boyfriend. His career was in ascendancy. Spending time with him was an investment that could pay off big. But obviously there was going to be some overlap, because an old boyfriend doesn’t dissolve into thin air when you tell him it’s over. Plus, a new boyfriend isn’t always prepared to assume all of an old boyfriend’s duties. Blake, for example, was a terrific, if not 100 percent reliable, source of speedballs. Some weekends they just binged straight through, at an apartment on the Upper West Side that this theater director friend was lending him while he got back on his feet after his acting fiasco. Joe had no drugs, no sources of drugs, and no interest in drugs. Supplying her with drugs was a boyfriend duty he couldn’t and wouldn’t ever properly fulfill. So the transition from Blake to Joe was going to take some time, obviously.

  She was proud of having chosen Joe before he became famous, when he was merely the next big thing. Not entirely coincidentally, he was on the cover of Spin that month, and his album was featured in Rolling Stone. His tour of venues with room for a thousand people, such as gutted 1930s ballrooms in large midwestern cities, would involve not buses and hardship but airplanes and room service. She couldn’t accompany him without losing Blake—that is, without leaving Blake alone for so long that he would find someone else and leave her—that is, for two to three weeknights in a row. She estimated the time Blake could spend alone on a weekend with his pockets full of drugs before meeting someone new at around twenty minutes. The length of time she could spend without drugs on a weekend in the presence of a man who had drugs without at least blowing him was likewise around twenty minutes. But it seemed to her that Joe’s specialness made a resolution effortless: he didn’t have drugs, and he wasn’t jealous. She and Blake would meet new people.

  Gwen wasn’t a victim of childhood trauma. She had tried drugs because she was an uninhibited, fun-loving person, and she was addicted because that’s what drugs will do. She submitted to lesser traumata of all kinds to get them, because she feared the greater trauma of doing without. She was a trauma avoider, not a trauma reenactor, as trauma victims are. There was no masochism in her rejection of effort and no egotism in her devotion to Joe. Selflessly she put the needs of drugs and men before her own, subordinating herself, as though they had picked her up after the modeling agency dropped her. And she was a lost soul, because she was having a great time. No one felt inspired to intervene. No one felt her destiny had ever been that of a productive member of society, not even her parents, sadly. Her mother had moved to L.A. when she was seventeen, and they partied together. Her father never remarried, and he also threw great parties. Her one talent was walking. She wasn’t creative, curious, or beautiful. If anything, that last was her trauma—the lack of a bankable face for print ad campaigns. She was skinny, though. That was good enough for drug dealers, and they did their part to keep her that way.

  She never came willingly to Chrystie Street. She couldn’t stand Pam and Daniel, long walks, or Flora. The adults were judgmental, the walks didn’t match her shoes, and she opposed on principle all special treatment for people who happened by luck to be ultra-petite and cute. She knew better than to say so. She had matured a lot since driving her modeling career into a ditch. She knew herself and what she wanted out of life—which was definitely not to be the kind of beauty has-been who marries a rich old man—and what kind of situations she could handle. She i
gnored the Svobodas. No one encouraged her not to. Joe was happy to have their undivided attention.

  DANIEL TRACED OUT THE TOUR ROUTE IN AN ATLAS. THE DISTANCES TO BE COVERED astonished Joe. He knew his way around the city, but he hadn’t known it was so tiny compared with the rest of the country.

  Not that there was anything unusual in that. Most of his inabilities were so common that the music industry had institutionalized ways to manage them. Disorganization was universal, so assistants told him where to go and when. Dowdiness was endemic, so stylists told him how to dress. Lateness and inarticulacy likewise, so publicists escorted him to interviews and told him what to say. No one had to tell him to put on his solemn Adonis face at photo shoots. After an hour of posing, it came on its own. Photo editors waited for it. They accepted nothing less. In this, they were typical. Most people who met him were in the business of selling him. They accentuated the positive.

  Given his aversion to vehicles, there was initially some concern about transportation, but his first chopper trip to Daktari’s place in the Hamptons from East Thirty-Fourth Street had made it apparent that he wasn’t afraid of flying. He had no issues with distant panoramas, whooshing, or steady roars.

  Only for one inability did an exception have to be made: drums. Daktari tried putting him in front of a trap set, but he flinched as if the kick drum were bombs and the snare were gunfire. He kept turning around to stare at it, even with earplugs in. It was agreed that there would be no drummer on his tour. Canned beats from a synthesizer would be mixed for the ears of the audience at the soundboard. The only percussion in the monitors would be the soft click of a metronome.

  A touring band was hired. This was accomplished via classified ads that included the time-honored condition “No big hair.” Appropriately collegiate-looking men were auditioned and inspected. Joe liked them all, so the decision was left to Daktari, with nonbinding input from Daniel. Since Daniel wanted to protect Joe, and Daktari wanted to protect his investment, their taste in companions for him turned out to be similar. They hired three placid, mature, competent men with forelocks—Sebastian the Chilean American rhythm guitarist, Kevin the Irish American rhythm bassist (Joe played lead bass), and John the Pakistani American keyboardist, all in their midthirties, darker than Joe, with boyish looks persuasive at a distance.