5. New York City, Summer 1982
She didn’t really miss food. At least not the way she did when she was a teenager or in the early years of their career when she was on a forever diet. Back then it seemed as if she were surveilled by it. She’d have her Tabs and salads with low-fat dressing and dry turkey sandwiches on “lite” bread but could still always feel the presence of pepperoni pizza or cheeseburgers lurking around the corner. Every comma and quotation mark she saw in a book or magazine curled into a pop-top from a Coke can. She couldn’t even look at the stars without thinking of food — the Big Dipper was the name of a sundae at an ice-cream shoppe when she was a kid back east. But now it — eating — was just another phase she had passed through, and that was why relearning it was so hard. She couldn’t, she figured, be the eater she had been any more than she could be the teenager she had been or the amateur musician she had been, or the married woman that she would stop being very soon. It was only when her doctors in L.A. told her she’d be dead by the time she was 40 that she finally agreed to seek treatment. And even then she only half believed them. Six months of therapy had passed, and while she had mostly kicked the laxatives — she’d gotten up to 40 a day at one point — she could still only nibble and pick at meals. Food was still as far behind her as jumpers and bangs and acne and training bras and the Best New Artist award and white lace and promises. But she’d try to relearn. She always was a good team player. While her nose was still the best early warning for the proximity of food, the canary in the canary’s coal mine, there were some smells of the city that she loved, especially the unexpected ones. Once while she was wandering the theater district, she discovered a lumberyard and was shocked to find the same piney scent of wood shavings and freshly cut 2-by-4s and feel, smack in the urban canyon, that same edge-of-town thrill of the lumberyards of her youth. In Greenwich Village she discovered a barbershop with a bench and small garden out front, but it wasn’t the scent of the blooming hyacinths in cement planters that held her; it was the limey, musky aroma of lathers and tonics and pomades, the bracing, uncomplicated power of maleness, so unlike the prissy, sudsy smell of beauty parlors. It was the smell of the bathroom early in the morning after the father had finished — he was always the first in, before the women and the late-rising brother. It was the smell that often welcomed the day for her when she was young. Once or twice she got into Carnegie Hall off-hours, late morning or early afternoon, and there it was: the smell of emptiness that she liked best as she sat in one of the upper boxes, the direct path of the blunt varnish to her nose, that took her back to the couple of times she was actually on that stage, about a decade ago, at the peak of her and the brother’s career. Their manager had advised against the booking, suggesting that they stick to venues in the suburbs, that New York City had no use for them and they had no use for New York City. But they voted him down — hadn’t they had five Top 5 singles in a row on WABC, New York’s big Top 40 radio station? Didn’t New York have a Republican mayor, even if he was a turncoat? (She often thought of the brother and herself as rock ’n’ roll wolves in easy-listening clothing anyway.) They sold out two nights.
But the smell she loved most came from record stores. Not the Disc-o-mats and Record Explosions whose inventory and clerks’ knowledge were only a few months’ deep, redolent of shrink-wrap and fluorescence. She preferred the oldies shops, like Golden Disc on Bleecker or Downstairs Records on 43rd, dim and deep wood- lined hulks. These stores sold mostly used records, and so their stock was smoked with the cedar of countless closets, infused with the fumes of countless garages, soaked with the mildew of countless basements, just like her own, where they kept the suitcases that they’d unzip once a year and then become revived by the fresh mustiness of the shore, the smelling salts of imminent vacation.
She usually went at lunchtime, which took her mind off the fact that she was supposed to be eating, and in fact she’d arrange her visits like a meal. For an appetizer she’d have a plateful of Manny, the muscular Puerto Rican dance-music expert at Downstairs, who was always stationed at his turntables in front of the store, like a carny barker in a tight black T and tattoos and a large, loud gold crucifix, trying to entice her into a calliope of rap or electronica. She never paid him much mind, until one day he caught her tapping on her leg the rhythm of Afrika Bambaataa’s “Planet Rock” — bop bop ba-da-da dop — which he was spinning at the time, and locked his eyes on hers.
“Hey, Slim,” he said, all 20-year-old brio, “turn that cap around and scuff up those shoes and you can come to one of my house parties.”
She smiled, but offered no reply. Sure, she had mastered the rhythm. But she missed the melody.
She would next step down into the main room, as big as a small banquet hall, with records filling the carrels and bins on the floor and crates piled up in columns. Her next course was always the current-45s wall, where she admired the orderly, alphabetical slots, labeled and dated, like bread wrappers or milk cartons, showing when a record entered the store and suggesting when it might expire into oldies status. Then she would move to the bins on the floor, also partitioned into neat, farmlike rows by artist. That was the real status in this store: dated, vintage.
She didn’t really recognize many of the new songs; most of her life she usually just liked whatever the brother did. Now she was trying to cultivate her own taste, and so she pulled out records by people she knew — the latest of her friend L., which was ending its Top 10 run and continuing her recent sexy makeover, and then something called “Tainted Love,” because it had been on the charts for months. She took the latter song over to the public turntable in the corner and put it on; more bleepy piddling, another dronish vocal. She had a particular distaste for the programmed drums.
But the new songs, too, were a pre-course. It was the oldies bins she was interested in, one section in particular. But just as she would have to clean her plate before she could get to dessert when she was a kid, she flipped through hundreds of 45s before she got to the section she wanted, rubbing shoulders with the suited men, usually in their late 20s and early 30s, who were there for 45s to fill their basement jukeboxes with songs from their glory days, before marriage and kids and commuter tickets, Beach Boys and Stones and the occasional Motown reissue; gawky older men in severe specs who looked like Steve Allen and forlornly pawed the pre-rock vocalist section, the Bing Crosbys and June Christys and Louis Primas, from the era before everything went “off the cliff”; the tubby savants with hairless faces and stained T-shirts and instant recall of every Lesley Gore and Orlons B-side, down to the playing times and the catalog numbers and musicians and recording-session dates and catering menus. (“Brenda of the Exciters ate jerk chicken before the session for ‘Tell Him.’ That’s why it sizzles so.”) And then there were the ponytailed, cowboy-booted customers with tobacco-stained fingernails and short stacks of Merle Haggard and Ernest Tubb and the Statler Brothers records at their sides.
But she always kept one eye on the ’70s-groups section, to see if anybody else lingered to finger the green sleeves whose heavyweight paper seemed to convey status on the records they encased, offering a layer of protection that the flimsy sleeves on the new re- leases couldn’t provide, much as her bulky sweaters did for her. The few times she’d been in the store before, she’d never seen anybody spending much time in that section and made her way to it unimpeded. Even before she got there, she could tell generally from a distance if the section she always checked looked smaller, and when it didn’t, she still flipped through one by one, like an accountant poring over rows of numbers. The tallies in her head — someone must have bought one — and the tallies that the section yielded just never did reconcile.
There weren’t many rarities in that section: an odd side effect of all the group’s records being hits, or at least big enough to get through one or two pressings. And enough time hadn’t passed for them to be nostalgia or camp. Still, she counted them hopefully each time, slowing down when she got into the 20s, hopi
ng her fingers would surprise her and there’d be one less than 27, the total she counted the last time. She’d even rearrange them, like rotating stock or crops anywhere else: first chronologically, then in order of their peak chart positions, and then in order of her own preference, which meant that the huskier vocals on the earlier songs (which were also the group’s biggest hits) were shunted to the back (“they just sound so lumpy,” she once told the brother), while the more recent, lighter vocals, eminently preferable to her ears (but also their smallest hits), were pushed up front. No matter how she arranged them, the count was always the same: 27.
Today the store was crowded, so much so that, as she feigned her usual interest in the new 45s and stared at that week’s Billboard chart, posted on the wall, as if it were hieroglyphics, she didn’t notice that someone else was at her station. As she made her way around the island on the floor and toward the section, she finally saw the young woman in the sneakers and the denim skirt and figured she must be looking for something else: Canned Heat, maybe? The Captain & Tennille? Eric Carmen? But with each pass the young woman hadn’t budged, and so she became a little bolder, and looked a little closer, and realized that the woman was stalled in her very own section. Who was she? She took inventory: The girl’s shoulders were as broad and solid as a harness, with that backpack slung over her almost as big as a guitar. Her calves popped through her pantyhose, and one time around, she saw the thick fingers flipping through every one of the 45s, lingering, considering, holding them up to the light of her standards. From the opposite side of the table she stole quick glances at the girl’s face, but with the girl’s eyes suddenly downcast and set on the records, she could see only the smudged daubs of rouge and the runny mascara. Her third time around she noticed the girl was clutching one 45, massaging it almost, and when she craned her neck to see which one it was she didn’t notice her charm bracelet getting caught on the woman’s backpack.
6. Queens, N.Y., Summer, 1982
“Chiffon Kelly!” Sib was sitting at the end of the bar at Whelan’s, cradling a Michelob, her change from her dad’s $20 sitting on the bar, still in her interview get-up, a bit wrinkled and wilted from a long day on subways and city streets, a stressed wall in need of shoring up, “Forget Me Nots” in her backpack, when she heard the voice emerging from the glare of the open door at the front of the bar and, as the door closed, the silhouette filling in as it moved closer and the bar got dark again.
“Timmy Sweeney, where’d you slither in from?” He was a year younger than Sib, home from Bates, working in a bank for the summer but knowing that he still had another year to delay real life, maybe more if he went to grad school. Though they’d grown apart a bit since Timmy went away to college, Sib never minded hanging with him or the fact that he always called her “Chiffon.” It was one of the few intentional manglings of her name that she could stand, unlike “Chevron,” “Chevy Van,” “Shiver,” “Sit On.” And that was because she loved the old ’60s group the Chiffons. Their big No. 1 hit “He’s So Fine” was one of the first 45s she could remember being downstairs in the rec room, Kieran’s record, signified by his perfectly stenciled “KK” on the back label. The song’s “doo-lang” refrain was an essential part of her early language, among her second tier of learned words, once she got past “Daddy” and “Mommy” and “Keen,” her toddlerhood name for Kieran.
But three years had transfigured Timmy: Once the neighborhood’s chubby, nerdy outcast, he was thin and scythelike now, the pointy ears no longer a deformity but the final touch on a budding artist’s tableau that also included vintage sport coats and fuchsia Chuck Taylors, the occasional beret with a well-placed sine wave of red flowing out from the front. He had figured something out after all, had stopped trying to define himself by what he wasn’t. Whelan’s for him was usually just a way station for him to the Crop, a club that played Romeo Void and Yaz and other cool-kid music. Timmy Sweeney, a cool kid. Go figure. Every now and then one of the meatheads at Whelan’s, a few beers into the night, would mutter, “Look at this freak,” whenever Timmy came in on his way to or from the Crop, older versions of the taunters from the school hallways and playgrounds. But those kinds of comments just rolled off cool Timmy, who moved now with a wiry-springy grace. And best of all, Sib thought, he did it without turning his back on where he came from, without becoming a dick.
Another thing Sib liked about Timmy was that after the accident, he was one of her few friends not to ladle on the pity, not to treat her like the girl with the dead brother and mother. He seemed to realize that the sad smiles and the hands-off treatment and the awkward avoidances in the halls were really just a more polite, and therefore crueler, kind of ostracism, just a different way of rendering you the ultimate freak. He even signed with her a few times, though, during the years when she couldn’t hear, Sib “functioned as a hearing person,” as her doctors called it, because she could read lips and imagine, from the years before the accident, what voices sounded like and so she never signed that much.
“Please, today I am Duncan,” Timmy said as he pulled up the stool next to Sib’s.
“Diva, doomed king or yo-yo?” Sib said.
“Buyer’s choice,” Timmy replied, eyeing the three fives and two singles sitting next to Sib’s coaster. “I’ll be whoever you want me to be for a quaff.”
“Forget it, Sweeney,” Sib said, clamping her hand on the cash and drawing it closer to her. “That’s gotta last me all week. You’re the one with the job. You should be buying me another round.”
“Fair enough,” Timmy said. “Barkeep, another round for the lady and your finest mead for me.”
“Yes, sire,” said the bartender, Dom, a short, handsome Italian in his early 20s, who had good hands and an officious smile, and was quick over the bar when anyone got a little too friendly. He’d been the regular Friday-night bartender since before he got out of college, had his eye on the Fire Department test but wasn’t in any hurry. The money, the hours, the girls were just too good for now. A lot of the other guys he graduated with, regular patrons of Whelan’s, already had jobs driving for UPS or Frito-Lay or hauling something or other with their fathers’ construction companies, but they weren’t married yet, so they had plenty of beer money and the beginnings of spare tires, foreshadowings of the next 50 years. But Dom ran and lifted and played flag football on Sunday nights in Queens and Long Island, had held onto his senior-year body. The seed could wait. Sib sometimes went to see him play. He, too, still had time to figure real life out. “Another one, Sib?”
“What, oh, no, Dom, I’m good,” she said. Sib had barely drunk half of her beer, and a lot of what was left was backwash. She didn’t really like beer; it was one of the few guy things she didn’t take to, or maybe she was just remembering all the glasses of Schaefer her mother and her aunts used to down at the kitchen tables. So she would order one and then nurse it most of the night. She knew Dom would let her sit there as long as she wanted; it was in between happy hour and the night crowd anyway, and she was just killing time before going home to catch the Mets game with her dad.
“When are you gonna let me play flag football with your team?” Sib said.
“Ha, you’d be better than a lot of those All-Stars,” he said and moved down toward one of them waving a bill around at the other end of the bar. “Come on out some Sunday and we’ll see if we can get you in.”
“I’d like to pull out one of your flags,” Timmy said, not quite so out of Dom’s earshot.
“Shh,” Sib warned Timmy, though she knew Dom, decent guy that he was, didn’t mind. It was just a general warning for Timmy to remember where he was, to not drive through Bethpage. Yet Sib also couldn’t help admiring him for having figured that out, too.
“So, Chiff, what’s the sitch?” Timmy said.
“I was pretending to be an adult finally, in the city looking for a job,” Sib said, recalling the crowded airless employment offices she’d been in and out of all day, being reviewed by corpulent, emphysemic wome
n in pastel-colored pantsuits whose main qualification seemed to be the ability to make people wait, fill out forms, take tests. One woman told her she was a good proofreader but a poor typist, another told her she was a good typist but a poor proofreader.
“Any luck?” Timmy asked. “Any prospects for the next great mu- sic critic, sportswriter, muse?”
Sib laughed. “Nah, not much out there. Thank you, Ronnie R. One woman even said to me, ‘Oh, and before I can even consider forwarding your résumé to a potential employer, you’ve got to do something about your attire. Sneakers’” — Sib had forgotten to put on the flats in her backpack and so still had on her running shoes — “ ‘and a denim skirt? That will never fly in an office.’ ” A small window had been open next to the woman’s cluttered desk, and Sib could hear some salsa music floating up through the heat. She had felt like saying, “Is that Carmen Miranda?” but instead she just thanked the woman and moved on to the next employment office, with an occasional assurance that she’d get a call if something opened up. Finally, after three or four of these agencies, she headed to Downstairs.
“Well, I, for one, love the look,” Timmy said, drawing a cigarette from a pack of Salems with two tinelike fingers, almost beckoning it toward him. “Celery and chocolate” — he waved toward Sib’s top and hair, now out of its ponytail and falling over her shoulder. “There’s a lot of summer in that look.”
Summer. Here it was, the first summer of her official adult life, and she’d been trying to draw a bead on it all day: Would it be like 1969, the last summer they were all together on vacation and man was on the moon and the Mets were practically as ascendant and they got caught in the Woodstock traffic on their way back from the mountain resort they went to every year; or would it be like 1974, the first summer after her hearing had come back but after all the hoopla of her recovery had died down, when she and her father could finally try to start their lives over again; or worse, would it be like that summer of the accident, or any of the silent summers that followed? “Geez,” Sib thought. “I’ve turned into a nostalgist. I shouldn’t live like I’m an oldies station.” The state of music, so often a barometer of her emotions, wasn’t helping matters. And the Mets, rebuilding now for the fifth or sixth year in a row after the disaster of letting Seaver go right before the brutal summer of ’77, weren’t, either.
Why Do Birds Page 4