“I don’t know, you just don’t see that kind of thing in L.A. She may as well have been carrying a guitar on her shoulders. You know, we never had a female guitar player on any of our albums.” As usual, it was a half-truth, the answer she thought he wanted. While they had never had a female guitar player on any of their sessions, she’d certainly seen them around the studios. And not just folkies like Joni Mitchell. Real Stratocaster slingers.
She also didn’t bother to tell him that when she encountered the young woman in the record store, she had a brief exchange with her — she’d seen the record the girl was holding and asked her if she was going to buy it. When the girl turned away and said she’d rather burn it, it was time to go. Why would she say that? That record sold millions of copies. It was still being sung in subway stations in New York City! She had hurried out of the store but then waited a few doors down for the girl to leave and followed her for a few blocks. It wasn’t so much the fact that the girl had a backpack that amazed her now, but how freely the girl walked, the sidewalk panels rising up to greet her, it seemed, always a measure ahead of the other pedestrians, the traffic lights, the changes in the wind. Once or twice she thought her footfall was too heavy and the girl might know she was being tailed, but the girl didn’t seem to hear her. A native New Yorker, she figured. Why couldn’t she just go talk to the girl? Why was it always so hard for her to talk to other women?
“Still, what’s so unusual about that?” the doctor asked. “You played the drums for all those years. Why did you stop playing by the way?”
“That’s a cracker,” she said. “Cracker” to her meant joke, as in something that’s cracked. Most people usually asked her why she started. No one ever wanted to know why she stopped.
“I never stopped,” she said. “I just don’t play them on the records or in the shows anymore. The guys who play for us on the records now are much stronger.” Another self-deprecating answer she gave to throw him off, give her time to ruminate over the real reason. She thought of the team coming to her when they started to become successful and saying, it’s time for you to stop hiding behind the drums and to stand out front. In a magazine article one of their label bosses said her coming out from behind the drums coincided with her “becoming a woman.” For a while they kept a short spot in their shows where she’d run from drum to block to cowbell and do a lot of high-energy rudimentary stickwork, tongue-pressed-to-the-corner-of-her-mouth kind of stuff, but that got dropped, and then the shows stopped, too.
“So where do you play now?” “Oh, EV-ree-where,” she said. “That’s a great tie, by the way.” Deflecting. It was what she did best. She’d spend the next five to
eight minutes thinking about what to buy him for Christmas. She’d already purchased her cards and had spent that morning making out her Christmas-card list.
“What do you mean, everywhere?” he said, interrupting her as she was mentally browsing the tie section in Brooks Brothers.
“Oh, my knees, the handle on the shower door, the bedpost. Anything I can get my hands on.”
“Do you miss it?” he asked, making notes.
“I don’t have time to miss it. Today I made out my Christmas-card list.”
“But it’s only the middle of summer, why so soon?”
“Because I won’t have time when I get back. There will be sessions to do and plans to make for next year’s schedule. I WILL be home for Thanksgiving, won’t I?”
“That’s up to you. What’s the count this week?” The count, meaning, how many laxatives had she taken. She was up to four boxes when she first started seeing him, almost 40 a day. The plastic crackled when she opened them, just as she remembered it did on a sleeve of Oreos, and she would down them almost as quickly as she once did the cookies, not stopping long enough even to taste them. The faster she could bite and swallow, the faster she could have another.
“Three,” she said. “The same as last week.” “I know, I guess I’m being nostalgic. Next week two for sure.” She could tell that she wasn’t putting anything over on him; if she really was close to kicking the laxatives, it didn’t show. If anything, she looked gaunter and frailer, older than she had when she started therapy. One concerned fan had written after their last TV special, a couple of years ago, and said she looked about 55 years old. She had actually been 30. “I thought one of those awful dancers was going to snap you in half,” the fan wrote. “You are turning into human dissipate.”
Her therapist asked, “Did you talk to your mother this week?” “No. Where’s the best place in New York for lamps, I need . . .” “Not so fast. You were going to ask your mother if the family would come here for a group session.” She had in fact asked the mother, who replied simply that their family did not believe in such things and told her again that if she’d just come home for a few months for three squares a day, she’d be cured in no time.
“I kept missing her,” she said. “I’ll try again this week.”
She was changing the channels again in her mind, searching for something to get them away from the mother and through the last 10 minutes of the session. She looked up at the books and remembered a word she’d seen while thumbing through the leather-bound classics the mother had given her after she moved into her high-rise condo, with a guard at the gate and a baseball team of people to tip at Christmas. And a professional jumbo refrigerator that was always empty but looked nice anyway. She hadn’t had time to actually read one of the books cover to cover. She just liked having them around, like the laxatives she hid all over her hotel room, like the jumbo refrigerator.
“Do you know the word logy?” she asked. It wasn’t the kind of word she’d find in a song, though because it had a long vowel, it would be a hard word to sing flat. Not that she ever had a problem there.
He nodded, questioningly. “Do you know what it means?” she asked. “It describes a state of sluggishness, as from overeating. Why?” “Oh, never mind,” she said. “Same time tomorrow?”
9. Queens, N.Y., Summer 1982
Sib checked her watch as she tried to tiptoe up the stairs at the back of the house — 2:45. Even in her stocking feet, all five steps from the side door to the kitchen seemed thunderous, as if every one were being dropped inside an echo chamber. All these years later, even the smallest sounds could be amplified, rediscovered, celebrated, thanked-over-grace-at-the-dinner-table. Usually the feeling this elicited was residual elation from the first days and weeks that her hearing returned. Now, though, she could use a little silence.
She was trying not to wake her dad, whom she’d stood up for dinner and the Mets game. Just as she had been leaving Whelan’s, Larry, the D.J., called to say he was going to be late, and Dom asked if she wanted to spin for a couple of hours. With her funds and confidence running low after her long, smudged day of looking for a real job, she could use some time in the booth. Larry was going to be delayed only an hour anyway, so she’d probably get home by the seventh inning. She called her dad, who told her he’d keep the pizza warm. One Friday out of every month they still “splurged” for pizza from Morelli’s, a neighborhood joint that was holding steady even as so many of the stores and restaurants of Sib’s youth were shuttering their doors, because the pizza tasted exactly the same, just as good, as when all four of them ate there years ago. Owning a pizza parlor in New York City seemed to be the surest defense against a bad economy. Sib kept wanting to tell her father that it was O.K. if they maybe had it more than once a month, or on a different day of the week, or if he invited Mrs. Donovan over and told Sib to get lost altogether for the night. But routine was what had saved their minds, probably their lives, since the accident, and she was not going to begrudge him that.
But then Larry kept calling to say he’d be even later, was having car trouble, couldn’t find something or other — Sib figured it was more like girl trouble, or he was waiting to connect with his dope dealer — and so suddenly 7:30 became 9 became 11:30. The last call she made to her dad was that she didn’t know wh
en she’d be home. The Mets were in extra innings, which she knew already because the game was on at the bar. “Be careful, have someone walk you home, call if you want me to come get you,” he said. Sib could hear him tamping down the deflation in his voice. She hated to disappoint him, but she really needed the money, and a reason to not be in the house one more night, a good reason to be awake at all hours of the morning.
It had been a decent Friday night at the bar, packed but not overstuffed with the usual locals with full pockets and big thirsts from their week out on landscape crews, truck routes, nursing shifts. Saturday the bar wouldn’t get crowded till late as the regulars returned from date nights or some other event that involved better clothes, more money, more decorum, more hope of sex. But by 9:00 on Fridays, the bar was two or three deep, all the tables were filled and Patrick the owner had to jump behind the bar to help Dom. “Keep the blood flowing,” Patrick said as Sib headed to the D.J. booth.
Larry must have had some of his records with him because the booth, a plank-board tower between the bar and the bathroom, was roomy, not crammed with the crates that usually left just enough space between them and the turntables. The tables were cheap things that Patrick bought at Crazy Eddie, not the really good Technics models with the strong motors, more like something you’d find in the bedroom of the average music fan, and you couldn’t mix on them, because the belts weren’t powerful enough. But that didn’t really matter, because even though Whelan’s had a small dance floor and a strobe, it was rare for anyone to dance, and even then it would usually be just the girls, or occasionally the punkettes, or Sib and Timmy Sweeney when Larry took a break from the white-boy rock he usually played.
Still, Sib thought she had enough to keep things going until Larry showed up. She started with the Dazz Band’s “Let It Whip.” It was an “up” song (keep the blood flowing, Sib), and she knew she could go anywhere from there, rock, new wave, even, God forbid, something funkier. In the first hour, before the bar got really crowded, she played mostly Top 40 hits, Survivor and John Cougar, every fourth or fifth song mixing in something she really liked, like Cheri’s “Murphy’s Law.” And as the locals filed in, she picked it up with “Don’t You Want Me” and “Tainted Love.” She kept the hounds at bay with Judas Priest’s “You’ve Got Another Thing Comin’.”
The D.J. booth was next to the foosball table, with just enough room between them for someone to pass through. But when the bar was crowded and a game was being played, and there was a group around the table, it got dodgier, and any hard shot could make a record skip. And no one could get to her to make requests, so skinny Timmy Sweeney, who also decided to stay at the bar for a while, would have customers write them on little slips of paper, and he’d ferry them to Sib, threading his svelte self through the foosball players and their groupies. He’d look at the request first and say something like, “Ah, brilliant,” or “That would have been my choice, too.” And then when he reached inside the booth to give them to Sib, he’d flick the inside of her hand if he thought the choice was ridiculous, like King Crimson or some long Zebra track. Occasionally there’d be a dollar bill inside, and Timmy would nod twice when he gave those to Sib. The night was making her feel both giddy and focused, in her element, and she was only too happy to fulfill a request if she had it. But then she opened one of the slips — Timmy had given it to her with a shrug — and saw that someone had asked for “Are You Ready?” an oldie by a one- hit wonder called Pacific Gas & Electric. Sib blinked. It wasn’t so much that the song was so obscure now. It’s that it was another song from that awful summer. Sib thought about tossing the re- quest, but instead she dutifully dug through the few crates in the booth, which were all arranged alphabetically, not even expecting that Larry would have it. But then there it was, a 45 in decent shape, on the original Columbia label. She was holding it when a shot from the foosball table made the needle skip over the climax of the Who’s “Baba O’Riley.”
“Hell, yeah!”
Sib turned her head toward the table and groaned. It was that clod “Tuke” Tewksbury, still in his green oil-company uniform, stains on the knees from whatever basement he’d been in that afternoon, throwing off a vague smell of oil from the burner he’d cleaned or serviced, already half in the bag and talking twice as loudly as he should have been. He’d scored a goal with a hard shot that made his hand roll off the handle on the table. Sib took a few deep breaths. First “Are You Ready?” and now this jackass? Couldn’t just one part of the day not be spoiled with bad old memories or bad new ones?
But she was determined not to let them ruin her night. She dropped the record on the turntable and kept her eyes on the Plexiglas window in front of her, which looked out to the dance floor. Tuke would probably lose soon enough and have to give up the table and then disappear back into the crowd. And the record would be over in three minutes’ time.
But Tuke and his partner kept winning, and there would be exaggerated shots and whoops that kept making the records skip, to the point where people at the bar were looking over at the booth. Sib knew this was an occupational hazard considering the geography of the bar, but after the fifth or sixth time, she glared at Tuke, whose real name was Harold (but no one dared call him that). Sib took in the stupid grin, the leering, first at the foosball table, then at the player across from him, then at the girls who were watching the game. Suddenly he turned and they locked eyes; he nodded his head and said something into the ears of the guy he was playing with.
What Tuke didn’t know was that, because of her superhearing — and her ability to read lips — Sib knew what he said: “I hate that bitch, watch me make her records skip.” And so he kept making showboat shots, some raising the table off the floor and at one point causing the needle on the turntable to skip across the entire length of Haircut One Hundred’s “Love Plus One.”
There were five or six people between Sib and Tuke, including Timmy Sweeney, who’d arrived with another request but when he saw trouble brewing tried to get between it and Sib. Tuke took another wild twirl of the handle and the ball went in the goal, just as Sib was cuing up her new copy of “Forget Me Nots,” practically as a silent dare to him. The tremor made her drop the needle, and it skidded across the record. Sib had had it. “Hey, Harold, you know what they call it when you let go of the handle to make a shot?” Sib shouted across the heads between her and Tuke. “Dolly foos.”
The leer drained from Tuke’s face. He lifted up the table by two handles and let it slam back down on the bar’s floor. A full beer bottle in the nearest booth fell and shattered.
“Shut the fuck up, you stupid bull dyke,” Tuke yelled, starting to push through the people between him and the booth. Timmy was the last one standing between him and Sib, who, a step and a half above the floor, was still barely looking down on Tuke. “And play some goddamn decent music.”
“Now, now, sir,” Timmy said. “Let’s not be uncivil. Remember that we’re living in the year of our Lord, nineteen hundred and eighty-two.”
“Get out of my face, you three-dollar bill.”
“Sir, you overestimate my value,” Timmy said.
Sib had grabbed the nearest thing — her headphones — and was ready to clock Tuke if he got any closer. But just as Tuke’s arm started to swing behind him, it was caught by Patrick. Tuke was a brute, had always been a bully, a terrorizer, a rabid dog you didn’t want to cross, but he was no match for Patrick, who towered over him by a few inches and who, unlike Tuke, had seen the inside of a gym recently.
“That’s enough, Tuke. Calm down,” Patrick said, as he now had Tuke’s arm pinned behind him. “You’re cut off. Go home and sleep it off.”
“I’m not drunk,” he said, trying to wriggle free as Patrick nudged him around and toward the front door. “I spend half my fucking paycheck here every week. Isn’t that good enough?”
“You’ve spent enough for tonight,” Patrick said, letting Tuke go as they reached the door. “Go home.”
“All right, all righ
t, lemme go,” Tuke said, shaking himself free of Patrick’s grip. “I’ll take my money someplace else. Someplace that plays better music.” Under his breath, he muttered. “Stupid cunt. She should have died with her goody-two-shoes brother.” Sib was too far away to hear that.
Larry showed up a few minutes later, and by then the glass had been swept up and the beer mopped and the music was playing skip-free again, and it looked like another typical Friday night at Whelan’s.
“Dude, you always miss the drama,” Sib said as Larry, curly- haired, wiry, stoner-sanguine Larry, changed places with her in the booth.
“Ha, ha, and you always seem to not miss it,” Larry said. He had a crate with him that included a promo copy of a single called “Everybody,” by a singer Sib had never heard of called Madonna. Larry threw it on. Fake British accent, too canned, Sib thought, but still, it had a good beat and the semblance of a melody. The woman’s voice had no special resonance, no otherworldly vocalese, but there was something, a neediness, Sib thought. And it was a catchy thing.
Sib and Timmy stayed at the bar another hour or so. Suddenly she remembered the Mets game and her dad, and looked up at the screen, which was showing some Nascar rerun.
“Time to go,” Sib said, and Timmy followed, half bored and half concerned that maybe Tuke was waiting for them. Once or twice on the way home he thought someone might be trailing, thought he caught a shadow in a streetlight. But no one emerged. Timmy mentioned it to Sib, who brushed it off. “Tuke’s an idiot,” she said. “But he’s not that stupid.”
Sib was running all of this through her mind in the kitchen, and she considered going up to bed but was still too jazzed from the night’s events. No way she’d be falling asleep much before dawn. She pulled a cold slice of pizza from the refrigerator and was just starting to cut it into smaller pieces when she realized she had meant to tell Larry about the bizarre woman who seemed to be stalking her at Downstairs Records that day, who followed her out even, a woman who was both overdressed and underpresent. Then she heard the door handle jiggle at the bottom of the kitchen steps. She knew she’d locked it, but now the door was opening. Had Tuke followed her home after all? There was no time to scream for her dad. She grabbed the knife she had been using to cut the pizza and crouched behind her chair while she listened to the footfalls on the stairs, which even more than her own a few minutes before sounded like horse clomps.
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