by Nell Zink
Later that night, Pam found one of Flora’s pictures of Joe on the dresser in the Temple of Ian, propped on a little toy easel. A spaniel puppy, extracted for purposes of photography from a box of dogs for sale in Tompkins Square Park, was peeking from his pouched T-shirt like a baby kangaroo. He looked about as happy as a person can look.
GWEN GAVE AN INTERVIEW TO THE ROCK & ROLL YEARBOOK EDITION OF ROLLING STONE. Daniel read the entire thing aloud to Pam in the café at the Borders bookstore in Friendship Heights, as a break from last-minute shopping on Christmas Eve. He couldn’t buy the magazine to take home. He felt he’d be damned if he bought it, and also that up until that moment he’d never truly understood the expression “I’ll be damned if I do X.”
Rock singer-songwriter Joe Harris revitalized fin-de-siècle music with unexpected genre explorations that ran the gamut from the funk-inflected 1996 breakout single “Chugalug” to 1998’s worldwide EDM hit “Secretariat.” He blended the manic energy of a hyperactive teen with the laser focus of a mature artist, prompting critic Greil Marcus to label his work “psychedelia for the age of speed.” The announcement of his untimely death stunned fans already numbed by the sorrow of one of America’s darkest days. We spoke with Gwendolyn Charanoglu, 27, inseparable partner of his rise from obscurity. It fell to her to find his body in her Manhattan apartment when she returned home on the evening of September 11—too late. Medical personnel could do nothing to reverse his death by heroin overdose. He was 33.
RS: First, let me express our deepest condolences from myself and all the staff at Rolling Stone. Did you ever suspect that Joe Harris was planning anything like this?
GC: Never, though it made sense to me afterward. He was so hypersensitive. All that destruction and death, he simply couldn’t face it. There were no signs that he planned it in advance. We were all helpless to do anything. I’m sorry.
RS: I know this is very recent to be talking about. But there have been reports of a suicide note. Can you confirm that?
GC: There was a notebook near his body that he’d been writing in. I’d like to share some of it with you. He said—this is so hard—“The world is past the sell-by date. On a backward planet, it’s always too late.”
“I know what that’s about,” Daniel commented. “In June, Victor took a two-hundred-thousand-dollar loss on the NASDAQ, and Margie tried to pin it on the retrograde motion of Mercury. He probably wrote a song for them.” He continued reading aloud.
RS: Were you aware that he suffered from depression?
GC: That’s an easy diagnosis to make in retrospect. But definitely no. He was always happy, no matter what.
RS: Perhaps that was his way of masking a deeper despair. To your knowledge, did he use heroin regularly?
GC: I wish I’d known. I’m ashamed now that I didn’t even know the warning signs. I know I shouldn’t blame myself. Self-harm is never anyone’s fault. But I should have realized he had moved on to hard drugs.
RS: There’s been speculation that the acoustic demo of “Bird in God’s Garden” that’s been making the rounds was recorded as his farewell, possibly on September 11.
GC: I really don’t know about that. He had a unique ability to touch people with his good nature and optimism. It seems so cruel that he was suffering so much inside and no one saw it.
RS: Did he lose someone he cared about in the attacks of that day?
GC: All our friends are accounted for, thank God. I think he lost what we all lost—a naive belief that America was strong enough to keep us safe. My heart breaks for everyone who lost someone that day, whether directly or indirectly. My suspicion is that we’re not done counting the dead. It’s going to be a long, hard road.
“How is this person Gwen?” Pam responded. “Can you hire a publicist to fake being you at an interview?”
“Does it say whether it was in person or on the phone?”
“No.”
“It was probably in writing. She doesn’t have the chops to play a grieving widow in real time. She’s not Meryl Streep.”
RS: In what sense?
GC: That day tore all our lives apart. It will be a struggle to put them together. There are going to be calls for revenge, to repay blood with blood. We need to work for peace. Everything negative that happens is a chance to learn. I’m grateful to be alive—even if my life with Joe is erased forever. We had beautiful plans.
RS: Were you married? Engaged? It’s been rumored that you’re expecting.
GC: I don’t want to say.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” Pam said. “He’s been dead almost four months. I mean, even if they did the interview a while ago, pregnancy tests now will tell you within, like, six minutes.”
“She has to pour it on, because she’s not going to see a dime from the estate. I’m glad he never thought to buy her a ring.”
“I bet he got her a monster diamond from Tiffany’s, and she’s kicking herself now for pawning it for drugs.”
“That thing they think is a baby is her liver.”
Making fun of her was a minor art form, a teapot tempest, a sandbox war game. They took no action to recall their existence to her mind.
IN THE NEW YEAR OF 2002, PAM WAS IN D.C. SO MUCH THAT SHE JOINED GINGER’S Saturday yoga course. Daniel went down every other weekend at most. He was busy catching up on the youth he hadn’t misspent—sleeping, mostly. He looked younger. He was constantly doing things Pam hated, such as watching free jazz sets from standing room in the back.
For years he had not been the protagonist of his own life. Of course it had been relaxing to ignore all pressure to achieve or excel, but it was also like being one of those stars orbited and swallowed by a black hole. Joe and Flora had absorbed him. He had led the vicarious life of a friend and parent. Down in Cleveland Park, he kept noticing how he followed his daughter around, staring at her in anticipation of her needs, as if he were her executive secretary. He became aware of neglecting something in himself. He didn’t know what it was, which is why he was spending time alone. He was grateful for Pam. She was a binary star, a partner, not a taker. He couldn’t think of how strong she was without getting sappy.
Nonetheless, by midsummer he and Flora had names for every animal in the zoo, including many reptiles and fish. Edgar would come home during the week to find the house empty, no supper on the table, Ginger and Flora away at some arboretum or community fair or recital, and he would call Pam or Daniel to chat. The family was happy. It was spread among cities and generations, spending less time together, and coming to life as a unit.
Why Flora was so serenely cheerful, nobody knew. Was it having happier parents, or four parents instead of three? Being richer, better educated, or better entertained? The orderliness of Cleveland Park life, the politeness of local strangers? She trusted them all, as if she really were Joe’s immortality. She adored things about Cleveland Park that none of them had ever noticed. Honeybees. Tree bark. Landscapers in kneepads. Weather-beaten chips of blue paint under U.S. mailboxes. Young sparrows vibrating with hunger. Things it would have been dangerous to crouch down and admire for long on Chrystie Street or even in Racine.
In those days New Yorkers were still flinching at every loud noise. Flora saved all her caution for crossing the street. The grown-ups didn’t want it to end. The idea of moving her back to Chrystie Street started to seem downright perverse.
They ended up sharing her even in summer. She went home with her parents, but she didn’t enjoy the Lower East Side so much anymore. She kept agitating for visits to the Battery, Central Park, Fort Tryon, Jones Beach. Daniel took a month off for her, but she missed her neighborhood, her grandparents, her playmates, her bike—that is, her accustomed access to beauty, mobility, comfort, and freedom.
Finally Ginger and Edgar rented a beach house in Delaware for two weeks in August, and they all went on vacation together. Edgar grilled bluefish bought fresh in the morning. Flora practiced violin outdoors. The moon flickered in the warm wind over their improvised dances
and songs. It was happier than happy.
In September, she went back to Cathedral School. Daniel had no comment. Pam said, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Unless somebody compared the situation to a fantasy vision of the perfect nuclear family, it was hard to find the disadvantages.
Victor and Margie tried the comparison a couple times in Pam’s presence, but they couldn’t get a rise out of her. She was firm on the virtue of elegant solutions, such as a blissfully happy child away at the perfect boarding school.
THE WAR CAME SUDDENLY. THE PUBLIC BUILDUP LASTED ONLY EIGHTEEN MONTHS. There were many hearings. Generals flogged forged evidence that Iraq’s great man was striving toward global terror through horrendous WMDs. The Scuds on Tel Aviv of a decade before were reframed as the heralds of atom bombs to come, even though Israel is so close to Palestine that they overlap. Some say more overlap, some say less, but for those who might contemplate detonating an atom bomb in Tel Aviv, the overlap is 100 percent, so their hands are tied.
Pam and Daniel went to several antiwar protests, mostly for the sake of swelling the crowds. The press got so carried away that they might as well have stayed home. A crowd of two hundred protesters and five hundred strays on their lunch hours would be described by both organizers and police as ten thousand committed activists—by the organizers to “uplift the cause,” by the police to justify overtime. On the one occasion when the count swelled to a truly substantial number, at the big march in February 2003, they were unable to get near the main rally and unable to leave. They marched up First Avenue nearly all the way to the United Nations because they had no choice, hemmed in by police on all sides.
They didn’t carry signs. The cleverness of some signs annoyed them, while the simplicity of others—for instance, rainbow flags saying PEACE—bored them. They considered clever signs symptomatic. All present were delighted with one another. It was the heyday of the SMS and profile-driven online dating, when people got a lot of practice formulating zingy ad copy.
Ginger and Edgar didn’t protest the war. They were too old to think they could influence the nation’s mood. As Baby Boomers they remembered fighting like terriers to repair the world after its near destruction by the Lost Generation. Edgar had played his part in the struggle to wrest power away from the military-industrial complex back to the military—and now this.
Pam and Daniel, by contrast, belonged to Generation X. Too disaffected to defend their own ideals, too idealistic to admit their mercantilism, their perspective hemmed in on every horizon by the almighty dollar, they were credible to no one. Doggedly, to no tangible effect, they shouted down an Orwellian, privatized war whose chief aim seemed to them the enrichment of Vice President Cheney—as if some other war would have been okay. They ignored the message of the evil rainbow at their peril. God never said there would be peace on earth. He said the war of all against all might be managed as a relatively bloodless stalemate, symbolized by the division of the visible spectrum into seven clearly differentiated bands. His politics were three thousand years out of date, but his feel for human nature could not be derided.
DANIEL WANTED PAM TO PLAY MUSIC WITH HIM AGAIN. HIS IDEA WAS THAT SHE SWITCH from electric to acoustic guitar, and he switch from drums to a microphone and a program running on his laptop. He would sample her guitar playing and loop it electronically, and she would sing. The new sound would be quiet enough to rehearse at home (they couldn’t rent cheap practice space on weekends and still spend them with Flora), plus rehearsing wouldn’t give them tinnitus anymore. To perform in public, they would need only a PA system and the laptop.
He called it “industrial pastoral,” describing it to her as “machine-generated folk, like trance, but with all-acoustic samples. Everything repeats. We don’t have songs with a beginning, a middle, and an end.”
She replied, “Isn’t that how folk music works everywhere but, like, Switzerland?”
Five days later, not having trimmed her bangs in the interim because it was clear that industrial pastoral had to involve hair, she had written a jam. She strummed it to him as quietly as she could (she didn’t have the acoustic guitar yet).
West Street at dawn, after a long night on my feet
I’m not that strong, this was never my beat
The market said “More!”
It offered me war
I gave it defeat
I had it all and was still incomplete
After the fall, out on West Street
He said it was great, but not perfect. “The whole thing interrelates, like some kind of poem,” he said. “You need to think more like Joe. He would have gotten distracted in the middle, and the chorus would be like, ‘There’s a puppy up my skirt!’”
She changed it to:
War for sale and I bought it
Invisible hand of the market up my skirt
I’m free, be with me [repeat]
He said that either it made no fucking sense, which was good, or it made sense in an admirably disturbing way.
They premiered it in the living room in Cleveland Park, quietly, with the laptop speakers and unamplified vocals. Daniel played samples of Pam’s plinking on guitar. There was never a high point. The song went on indefinitely and ended suddenly. Being mechanical, it couldn’t peter out from exhaustion. Ginger and Edgar found it inoffensive. Ginger tried flamenco-style clapping, and Flora got out her violin and played along.
The folkie hairdo for the new band grew out different from what Pam expected. In her youth, she had punished her hair with scissors for being strawberry blond and fine. The intervening years had turned it auburn and voluminous without her knowledge. She wrote new songs that went with her hair.
GWEN TOO WAS RECOVERING. SHE REALIZED SHE COULDN’T PLAY THE PART OF A HEARTBROKEN widow forever. Heartbroken widows hole up in their summer places year-round. You don’t see them becoming famous in their own right. Unless, of course, they’re the kind of people who deal with trauma by acting out.
She gave it a shot. She fucked Daktari on a bench in Union Square around six A.M. on a Sunday, sitting astride him with her skirt hiked up. No one minded. Neither had a famous face. To passersby, they were just an average couple whiling away a lonely dawn.
She did lines on the bar in the lounge at Le Bernardin. The staff seemed to disapprove, but no one took the trouble to throw her out. She left hurriedly, faking an eviction, when it seemed that no one would be paying for her drinks.
Her coup was to capitalize on her music scene fame. She went to the VIP room at Roseland before a show and sat down on a sofa among three members of an up-and-coming hard rock outfit from Staten Island (their press release said they were from Cupertino, California). She kissed one while holding on tight to the others’ legs. For this kind of band, big hair was obligatory, so you could barely see their faces. The men let her do it long enough for someone to take a picture. It didn’t take long, since they had sat down on the sofa for purposes of having their picture taken. It was a classic image of grief—the beauty so bereft as to make out with absolutely anybody, no longer placing value on her sexual favors—with the twist that these men were not, as their press release suggested, hot and horny new kids on the block, but twenty-year bar-band veterans coasting through a rebranding, unimaginably jaded, a low risk for the homosocial group sex Gwen hoped the images would suggest.
When the cameras flashed, she stood up and ran to the bathroom, partly to end the scene in a natural way—in the glamorous world of music, there was always a reason to run to the bathroom—and partly because the musician she’d chosen at random to kiss had bad breath. Something about him, or possibly something about snorting speed, made her want to throw up.
The story of how she had teased the heavy metal musicians and run away in distress appeared in a syndicated list of celebrity sightings. Grieving widowhood was hers at last. She attended the MTV Video Music Awards to sit in the audience. The camera cut to her briefly during a 9/11 tribute. She looked thin enough to worry the tabloids. She ag
reed to accept Joe’s lifetime achievement award on the 2004 Grammy Awards, in front of a montage of birds and flowers. She let Daktari thank the fans for their support. When he was done, she stepped to the mic and said, “War is not the answer.” It made the headlines because it was controversial.
Her impromptu screen tests were a success. She engaged a talent agent and obtained a supporting role in an independent movie about rock stars, scheduled for filming the following year.
Her fame was an anticlimax, a letdown, a release into security. Descent to a basis, the pedestal where she would be safe above the crowd. It didn’t mean achieving accomplishments or altering the course of history. It had nothing to do with art. It meant being pursued by strangers after she got out of her twenties. To be haggard from smoking, flabby from drinking, yet noticed from notoriety.
XIII.
The kids at Cathedral bragged a lot, mostly about their vacations. It was seventh grade before Flora let drop that she’d been babysat by a rock star.
Her audience, a girl named Spencer, tended to bring out people’s most antisocial qualities, such as the desire to be treated with respect. That night, Spencer asked her dad who Joe was. Before school started the next morning, she approached Flora and said, “Joe Harris was a dork. He killed himself because you suck.”
“He did not,” Flora said. “He died on September eleventh.”
“His girlfriend found his body. It was green and swollen up, with pus coming out his nose.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about, Spence.” The name sounded like an insult to her—the best kind, intonation-dependent.
“My daddy told me,” she replied, with consummate uncoolness. “Joe Harris was a drug addict, and on September eleventh he killed himself with drugs.”
Flora was quiet, entertaining the thought that she’d never been told what killed Joe. The date alone had satisfied her; he’d been killed by September 11. Although she suspected that the truth would not constitute ammunition against Spencer, she resolved to ask her parents the first chance she got.