Why Do Birds

by Rob Hoerburger

  It was undeniable that, more than a decade after they were signed, they were still the label’s all-time sales champs. All of their albums had turned a profit, even the more recent, lower-charting ones. Barely, those last few, but a profit just the same. All of them. All the ones that came out, that is.

  So yeah, she owned a piece of Manhattan real estate. Now she was going to claim it, if only for a few minutes.

  The elevator opened on a reception area with wavy, white, back-lit walls. It looked like her dermatologist’s office. It was all a little vertiginous, the walls, the elevator ride; in L.A. their label offices were on a lot, close to the ground, like everything else. It was a latitudinal place. But New York was all about longitude, the dizzying ups and downs. She looked around and saw posters and displays featuring those three blond boys, and another, homelier British band who had just released a follow-up to their breakthrough album from a few years ago (homelier in contrast of course; like children and animals, those three blond boys were people you never wanted to be hanging on a wall next to, or whatever it was that W.C. Fields said about animals and children). There was the sister of the Motown wunderkind, a teenager who had recently signed with the label. And the lanky R & B guy who had gone solo from his group. Gone solo. Imagine that.

  But the big installation in the room was of the five power-pop women who had taken the charts by storm that year. They were on water skis and looked sun-kissed. Their debut album the year before, punky and beaty and surfy, had been released right around the time her vaunted comeback album with the brother was starting to tank. One of the women played drums.

  Ah, well, she was always telling him they needed a little more zip.

  She craned her neck around looking for a picture, or at least a framed platinum record, of theirs. She couldn’t see one. But then this was just the reception area.

  There was a young woman, a slip of a thing with spiky upswirled white hair poked through with cobalt-blue crochet needles, behind the reception desk, on the phone. She didn’t have an appointment, but she figured the girl would realize who she was and key her in. “Yeah, so I’m probably going to have to start carrying Mace,” the receptionist was saying. “Pervs everywhere in this city.” The receptionist picked up her head, cupped the mouthpiece, raised her index finger and then mouthed to her, “I’ll be right with you, sweetie.” “So yeah, all five of them were here, and J. and C. were a little too cool for school, but B. came right up to me and told me she loved my Docs and asked where could she get a pair. I mean, just the fact that I was in the same room with them was, like, a heart attack. It was so rad. But when B. came over and started talking to me, it was the gravy. Or more like the gravy of the gravy.”

  When she heard the word “gravy,” a little bit of her breakfast — the usual slivers of banana, half an egg white, eight sips of tea — churned back up.

  The receptionist juggled a few incoming calls, punched a few hold buttons and then finally returned her attention. She asked to see Mr. _____ and gave her married name, figuring it was all just ceremony, a verbal wink, the usual dance. How could the receptionist, an employee of her record company, NOT know who she really was?

  Then she saw the look. The eyes widening, the face rounding and filling up with expectation, the spiked hair standing even more on edge, the limbs both tensile and slack, that look that she had seen thousands of times when people realize they’re in the presence of someone famous, and they think they’ve lost their own presence, when in fact what they’ve really done is create more of it.

  She was getting ready to say, “Yes, I am who you think I am, how are you, love the crochet needles, I do needlepoint myself,” and then have the girl usher her personally back to Mr. ______. The girl, after she gulped a few times, finally spoke.

  “How do you do it?” she asked.

  This wasn’t the line she was expecting, but O.K. How do I do what, she wondered? Win Grammy Awards? Sell 75 million records?

  The girl went on: “How do you get that body? I’ve been trying, for like, months, but I still feel so FAT.”

  She knew she should have worn that extra sweater, but it was especially warm that day, so she had just put on her satin baseball jacket when she was leaving the hotel, and had absent-mindedly unbuttoned it in the elevator up to the label offices, so that now her concave abdomen was right at eye level with the receptionist. And even if she had worn the sweater, her face, from under her baseball cap, had points so bony and sharp you could plot them on a graph and practically come up with something 3-D.

  From a foot behind the desk, though, the receptionist had no such added dimension. The girl was willowy to the point of being diaphanous. Wick-thin. She felt as if she could have knocked the girl over just by breathing on her. Blown her out.

  “I mean, I’ve tried every diet. Eating only red foods, green foods. NOT eating red foods, green foods. A coffee cleanse. A cucumber-juice cleanse. Avoiding carbohydrates after 6 o’clock. Half portions. Quarter portions. Eighth portions. . . . ”

  Keep going, she thought, 16, 32, 64, 128. She could play all of those notes. “. . . Walking up the five flights of my apartment building a few extra times a day. And still I can’t get rid of these” — the girl stood and pushed on her planar hips, so that her body almost formed a sideways V or a less-than sign across the desk. “I mean, they’re just so big.” She remembered saying more or less the same thing to P. when they were watching footage of her on some TV special. “They’re so big,” she’d said. And he’d replied, “Big where? In Auschwitz?”

  “If I could just lose a few more pounds,” the receptionist continued, now hushed, intimate, conspiratorial, as if they were two teenagers sharing secrets long into the night at some sleepaway camp or boarding school. “I might have to try, well, you know. . . .” She pretended to stick her finger down her throat. “I did it once, and I have to say, it wasn’t bad.”

  Suddenly a phrase popped into her head, then that last scene with the husband, which happened during a birthday celebration for the father the year before: You take back this bag of bones. I don’t want her.

  And then another: body dysmorphic disorder. She’d heard it said about her, of course, along with that other term, the one she’d so vehemently denied all these years. The Brits had a different name for it: “slimming disease,” which an interviewer confronted her with on their last tour.

  The girl took a sip from a glass cylinder of iced tea, or rather, a cylinder of lemon wedges floating in ice and tea. “Seriously, what’s your secret?” she said.

  She was usually quick to deflect any suggestion that she was too thin, always had a rejoinder for the admonishment. But she’d never had someone actually . . . praise her for being so skinny. For this she had no ready response. By the time she came up with “clean living,” the girl was already back slapping at the incoming calls. “Good afternoon, ____ Records, how may I direct your call? . . . Please hold.”

  Then she turned back and said: “I’ll see if Mr. _____ is in. What did you say your name was again, hon?”

  Someone will look at you across a reception desk and say, “Hey, fool.” And you will pick up your head and answer, “Present.”

  25. Queens, N.Y., Fall 1982

  “So what we’re trying to do here is write, what, the opposite of ‘What the World Needs Now Is Love’?” Larry asked. “What the World Has Now Is Too Much Love”? He picked up his guitar and started playing the melody to the Bacharach/David classic, with the new lyric idea. “What the world/has now/is too/much/love.”

  They were gathered, Sib and Timmy (who was home from Bates for the weekend) and Larry, in the apartment on the Lower East Side where Larry lived with his mother, who always seemed to be out working whenever Sib visited. The job always changed. She was a substitute math teacher (though Larry could never say what school she was at on any given day). She sold cosmetics for Elizabeth Arden (though Sib never saw a travel case or any samples). She was a stringer for The Staten Island Advance (though Sib ne
ver saw a byline). Larry hadn’t seen his father since he was 11 or 12. He was said to have a college degree in “statistical analysis,” but when he was still living at home he was always on the phone talking about lines and spreads and “vigs.” Later Larry would joke that he had a bona fide “by the book” childhood. Sib figured that Larry’s dad was knocked off by the mob, or a spy, or in the witness-protection program, or just a loser who left.

  Yet there was always money for rent and food and records — like Sib, Larry had been a precocious customer at Rose’s shop, though they never crossed paths there — and music lessons, in which Larry applied his inherited facility for numbers — and weed, and later, for Larry to go to college, where he and Sib met. The dark apartment in the run-down, almost modern-shtetl stretch of Avenue B had a piano and sturdy furniture, and a sizable kitchen with full cupboards. Larry had the bigger bedroom of the two, and a D.J. setup with two pro Technics turntables and Sennheiser cans and crates of records stacked against every free expanse of wall. Larry’s neighborhood may have been a bit of a danger zone for Sib — she always held her knapsack tight, stepped lively, kept her eyes in motion and “mug money” under the tongue of her running shoes, and she generally avoided the drugged-out Tompkins Square Park — but the musical bounty in Larry’s apartment always made her feel at home.

  “Something like that,” Sib said. “Maybe not so on the nose.” It had been a week since Sib found that picture of her mother and her family, her female family, and it had turned over in her head ever since, flicking and clacking like a baseball card attached to one of her bicycle wheels.

  “Or maybe the opposite of ‘All You Need Is Love,’” Larry offered, and again strummed the melody of the song while improvising the lyric. “What you need’s not love,” he sang. Sib knew that Larry had smoked a joint or two before she and Timmy arrived, not just because of his blissed-out, loosey-goosey frame of mind — that could be Larry without the weed — but because of the skunky odor that lingered like the smell of dead leaves after a November rain. And that it was leading to all these cheeky parodies.

  “Actually, it’s already been done,” Timmy chimed from the kitchen, where he was loading in peanut butter and squeeze cheese on celery and Ritz crackers, and filling up jiggers of vodka. “Joy Division, ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart.’ All about the evils of surplus, you know. I mean, the lead singer offed himself not long after writing that song. A love song/suicide note for Lady Thatcher and a farewell to Old Britannica.”

  Sib had heard of Joy Division but had never heard the song; she still got her music through mainstream channels, like radio and prime-time TV, and Joy Division hadn’t made an impression there, at least not in the States. They were underground, heard in the clubs and on the outlying frequencies, places like Area and the Crop, and Sib was still very much aboveground, an inlier. Or maybe, considering her age and what her peers were into, she was the ultimate outlier; most of her friends didn’t care when WABC went all-talk because they’d long abandoned it for other music portals, like MTV, which a year into its existence still wasn’t playing many black artists. She always refused when Larry offered her a joint; she had been drunk, stupid, silly drunk, only once in her life, after Aunt Maddy died, from stomach cancer a few years ago, and even then because she felt she was drinking the beer in tribute to her. It was Schaefer, of course, just like that day in the kitchen, the day that had bisected her life. Just smelling the foamy swill made Sib relive the pain of the day, hit her like a ferocious wave she hadn’t seen coming, but for a while she could surf it, when she remembered how happy she’d been at that lunch table, with Aunt Maddy and her Mom and the good deli and the sunbeams through the kitchen window and the crisp dollar bills floating through the air and Freda Payne pulsing in her head.

  Sib was able to get on a bike again eventually — necessity trumped trauma, in that case. But she never did get another copy of “Band of Gold.”

  She’d also never kissed anyone. She’d never been kissed. She never sought another pair of lips, and another pair of lips had never sought hers. She’d get around to it, she figured. Kissing, and sex. They just weren’t a priority for her yet. And anyway, she never imagined that the real thing could be better than the Crystals’ singing about it on “Then He Kissed Me.” But whenever Larry mentioned artsy types like Keith Haring or Arthur Russell, Sib went blank.

  “And there was ‘Love Hurts,’ too, which was kinda sorta the same thing.” Larry must have said “kinda sorta” 30 or more times in the course of any conversation, initially to Sib’s great annoyance. But she came to, if not like it, then not hear it. She was actually thankful sometimes for things she didn’t want to hear. And the phrase made the usually cocksure Larry seem a little uncertain, which Sib found almost sexy. Everybody had a tic. Larry’s were even more obvious when he was high.

  “And ‘Drowning in the Sea of Love.’ Luther’s ‘Never Too Much.’ But it really doesn’t matter,” Larry continued. “There have kinda sorta been only five pop songs ever written in the history of the world anyway. You just find a slightly new approach, or an old approach that’s due for a comeback.”

  Five songs. Sib had that very phrase, that very construct, on her mind since they came up with the title “Too Much Love.” Choose five of the greatest songs ever written, starting with “Stardust,” and break them down, figure them out. But after she found that picture of her female family, she realized that she had to refine her approach. There was something about the sheer, undiluted musicality of those women who shared her bloodline. Sib had always figured that she owed most of her love of music to Kieran and his oh-so-perfect record collection and the passion he shared with her. But now she realized that it was women who were the main music supply in her life. Singers like Aretha Franklin, the Supremes, Dusty Springfield, the Shangri-Las. There was Rose, whose store had been a literal musical portal, a different kind of music provider. And her mother, with her silky, unwavering voice and impeccable taste. It wasn’t just X chromosomes jumping out of that picture. There were a staff and notes and clefs and key signatures. Sib vaguely remembered her mother saying something about her grandmother writing a song, which would have been back in the Stephen Foster era. An original “Camptown Races.”

  So her new plan was to find five classic songs written by women and attack them from all angles, box them out the way she would an opponent on a basketball court, make them turn over the ball, yield their secrets.

  She’d gone to the library and started learning about women like Kay Swift and Dorothy Fields, who wrote hits in the ’30s; and she discovered that the Chad and Jeremy song from the ’60s, “Willow Weep for Me,” had actually been written in the ’30s by a woman named Ann Ronell. But when she unearthed recordings of these songs, they made no impact beyond the fact that Sib recognized they were well composed. Good songs that sounded like other good songs of their era but that didn’t especially move her. Sib had heard somewhere that your ears are shaped by your age; the fact that Sib had lost more than three years of hearing, during very impressionable years, made her wonder if her ears could be reset, if she could be receptive to anything new — or old — that she heard. But these songs still seemed from another time.

  It wasn’t until she got into the rock ’n’ roll era that something started clicking. In 1958, just two years before Sib was born, a young woman named Sharon Sheeley had stalked the teen idol Ricky Nelson — as popular and heartthrobby as anyone in those days except maybe Elvis, who was in the Army by then — and played him a song she had written, music and lyrics, called “Poor Little Fool.” It was about a recent breakup, and Nelson liked it enough to record it, and it went to No. 1. Her mother had the 45, and Sib fished it out and played it over and over. It was a simple tune, on the surface resigned and melancholic, a little lopey and folky, and yet Sib was sensing something underneath, not just a need to be heard but an insistence on it. The tune tugged at the listener the way Sheeley must have tugged at Nelson when she was trying to get him to listen to it.
It was a laconic demand. A woman giving voice to a man. And then a man giving it back.

  From there Sib came across a woman named Georgina Dobbins, who was a member of the Motown group the Marvelettes and, it turned out, a writer of the first Motown No. 1 hit, “Please Mr. Postman,” though she’d long gone uncredited. Sib had a love-hate relationship with “Please Mr. Postman.” The original was flawless, a template for all those dance records of the early ’60s. Sib didn’t know if Georgina Dobbins wrote part of the music or part of the words, but in that original Sib could hear the same chug, the same jab, the same sly in-your-faceness, the refusal to be denied, that she heard in “Poor Little Fool.” And of course there was the connection to her father, an actual mail carrier. Sib’s first day in the record store, Rose called him “Mr. Postman.”