2.
Smile, Lads
Most of my friends from high school wound up in either Boston or Brooklyn, depending on whether their salient ambition was to be smart or to be cool. I was the only Wattsbury Regional student from the Class of ’96 who went to Los Angeles. I wish I could say that I chose L.A. out of a devotion to coolness or an indifference to smartness unmatched within either contingent. But how I came to L.A. was this.
At New York University, still bashful, still a virgin, I made a life philosophy of loneliness. I perused the thrift stores of Queens for silent hours. I spent afternoons before the mirror, trying to replicate outfits I’d seen on members of Elephant 6 bands, on Beck, on Jonathan Fire*Eater, the Yummy Fur, Smog. In these outfits, I played guitar and sang to myself, in dorm rooms only blocks from the Tribeca loft my father now shared with Allison.
I ate dinner with my father and Allison every couple of months. They gave me macrobiotic takeout and sushi and were kind to me, helped me phrase the occasional thank-you note to Bruce and Laura, who were paying my tuition. But I avoided them, insofar as politeness allowed, because they asked me who my friends were, and I had none.
My roommates went to places where they spoke with other people. They watched Knicks games at brew pubs, went dancing at Coney Island High. One was in the Muslim student organization, the other played racquetball and went to the computer lab. I was different.
In Wattsbury, where the only kids available to hang out with were Wattsburians, halfway mired in childhood, still trying to make positive impressions on teachers, still attending yoga classes with their mothers, I had no trouble cultivating a few friends among the others who played guitar and drums. First we formed inadvertently folkish ensembles that practiced in the conservatories of Victorian houses, one boy on the family piano, a girl from the school chorus singing, a boy on clarinet, myself, dressed in black Dockers and a mock turtleneck from JCPenney, with a red electric guitar in my lap. By senior year we were real bands, commandeering basements, rattling floorboards with trap kits and microphones. After practice we’d drink Coke and root beer on screened-in porches, and the singers, educated by Pearl Jam, would write lyrics from the perspectives of suicidal heroin-addicted grown-ups, homicidal sexually abused teenagers, and sad old people whose lives had passed them by.
But in New York, to make friends like the ones I’d had in Wattsbury seemed an excruciating waste. Somewhere in this city, there were people my age who had a better idea of how to be artists than I did. Somewhere in Manhattan or Brooklyn a future Patti Smith and a future Patti Smith Group were meeting in a bar or at an unsanitary party or in the apartment of a rich, pervy benefactor. My mission was to find them and make them accept me. I wanted to find and join the people who had a talent for disobedience. Disobedience was the core of songs and paintings and books, it was brushing aside the story you’d been given and telling an honest one. Was this not what Khadijah had started to accomplish when she’d called that first day after the Day of the Dads and asked to meet and talk? What were Jerry Lee Lewis or the Clash but Khadijah at the police station, beautifully clearing the air? I had nothing against my classmates or my roommates, but I knew that any big city had Khadijahs in it, and I hunted the Khadijahs of New York.
On Friday and Saturday nights, after elaborate preparations, I ventured out alone, to shows at the Cooler, Galapagos, shows at apartments advertised on flyers left at the L Cafe. I listened to the bands, and I sat on a stool with a seltzer and watched people talking. New York was a place to acquire a surface so rich with sophistication that the nutrients in my topsoil would leach down to my core and make me a real rock musician, and if that didn’t work, I hoped I could at least construct a shell so complex and subtle and bewitching that people more sure of themselves, people who had the right exterior and the right interior, would mistake me as one of their own and take me in, showing me by example how to be like them. In a dusty bookstore that smelled like fried fish and mold, I read a quotation in the front of a paperback: “Fame is the mask that eats the face.” A good deal, I thought, if you get the mask right.
Some days, I tired of this creed. I wanted friends and a girlfriend. But it was hard to descend at will from snobbery into the social life of the university. The students I detained after philosophy and art history classes sensed my affectation, my pettiness, my need. I went out to coffee with two of them, and both times, suddenly, in the middle of the conversation, I began to speak about bands or clothing and my voice became louder, lower, more impassioned than when I was speaking about anything else, because these were the subjects that had occupied my thoughts for many months. My mind would go into a palace I had built of loneliness, and no one could follow me in. I would monologue about the way reverb functioned in an Olivia Tremor Control song, or about the varieties of Sonic Youth T-shirts designed in North Carolina by Tannis Root, and when I came out from under my own spell, I could tell from their faces they thought I was a shallow and annoying person.
For hours at a time, I managed to be a shallow person. But in the hours I craved companionship, I could feel that I was softer, younger than I wanted to be. I would have preferred to be shallow. What frightened me most, in these hours, was how much I thought about Khadijah. I hadn’t seen or exchanged a word with her in four years. I didn’t know where she was. But the fact that I still remembered her, still turned over our moments together and studied them, still summoned to mind her great acts like verses from gospel, made me feel like an inmate clutching a battered photograph. To soothe myself I would put on CDs and look at myself in the mirror until I was distracted by my face, my hair, my body. Master the way you look and speak, I would tell myself, and Khadijah’s substitute will find you in the end. Get it right, and you will discover the friends with whom you will form a band.
Of course there were kids who shared my obsessions with music and clothing, slumped in the library, roaming Greenwich Village and Williamsburg. But I was too afraid of saying something wrong during my brief interactions with these strangers, smoking outside of Mondo Kim’s, sharing a small, round table at a show, to initiate an ongoing acquaintance. We would look at each other’s shoes and T-shirts, comment on the band, and turn away, each of us ashamed of being alone. I was blondish, boyish, striving to dress correctly, too anxious to find the right crowd to leap at the lower rungs, and therefore as common as grass—I saw my replica everywhere.
? ? ?
Winter break of my junior year, I took the F to a show at d.u.m.b.A, an artists’ collective in a postindustrial cave with one giant hall painted toothpaste white and closet-like bedrooms with bunk beds off to one side. It was tucked under the Manhattan Bridge, across a lightless, cobblestoned street from a men’s shelter. Out on the metal porch I leaned against the wall and smoked Camels in my rehearsed way, without inhaling, until three boys in their early twenties, skinny, long-haired, tramp-like, moving in unison, as if for body heat and safety, shuffled over and begged me for cigarettes. They were three quarters of a band called Shapeshifter, from Los Angeles, touring the Northeast to general indifference in a caravan of two station wagons. They bemoaned the imminent loss of their bass player, Gordon, whom they described as an energetic cigarette bummer and drink-ticket negotiator, and who had given notice that at tour’s end he was quitting music to start a CalArts master’s program in animation. Nobody asked me a question until Gordon himself strode over, shook my hand, and said, “You aren’t a bass player, are you? You have a kind of bass-player look about you. I hope you don’t find that insulting.”
I was mostly a guitarist then, but I’d picked up bass, when nobody else would, in a high school band that played covers for Pulp Fiction–obsessed theater kids to ironically twist to at cast parties. (The cast parties were where I’d gleaned a rudimentary understanding of flirting and, senior year, had my first kisses, first with a superaggressive boy I never saw again, second with a super-drunk, ordinarily supershy girl, who sat in my lap and rested her head on my shoulder until I worked up my nerve and lifted her chin the way I’d seen my father do with Nancy in Gaia Foods.) Something about Gordon, his extensive mustache, his pudginess, his eagerness, his ruddiness, his grin, the way he cocked his head to one side and touched his bald spot, made me want to make him happy. Besides, I was lonely and wanted a band. “Actually, yeah,” I said. “I am a bass player, ha.”
As the opening act interminably delayed sound check, Gordon led me by the elbow to d.u.m.b.A’s nonelevated performance area (d.u.m.b.A had a governing body ambivalent toward the concept of “stage”), hefted his bass guitar from its stand, placed it in my hands, and switched on the amplifier. The waiting audience, a roomful of bespectacled poker faces, turned to face me. The amp warmed up and began to buzz.
I looked at the four thick strings, empty-headed. Gordon slipped back into the crowd. In contrast to his bandmates, he was flush with vigor. I found him impressive. He looked like the alpha, the member of Shapeshifter best able to obtain sex and food, even though he was the bass player, and this represented a stunning inversion of natural law. Don’t leave me here, Gordon, I thought. The stage felt very empty. The room went very quiet. And then I remembered my father in my room in the period of post-Khadijah, post-divorce-meeting solitude: “Heartbreak Hotel.”
You could perform “Heartbreak Hotel,” I recalled, with only a bass line and minimal vocal ability. Moreover, it wasn’t cool. It was corny, it was old-fashioned. You shouted it. I looked out at the room of indifferent heads. Dads = hipsters, I thought. Hipsters = Dads. Here were people who, like Dads, didn’t like to emote. Maybe, like Dads, they would like it if I could do some emoting for them.
I gave it my all. Halfway through the first chorus somebody turned on a microphone. I hit two wrong notes, on dwell, and heartbreak, but I had been singing and playing for myself for so long that the spectacle of a crowd unbound something in me. I didn’t need to ham up my delivery, as I did in front of the mirror. There was a scratch in the way I sang that didn’t need to be exaggerated or monitored. The audience didn’t abandon affectation and tap its feet in unison and sing along, as might have happened in a movie, or in a location not New York City. I saw no actual smiling. But some of the kids uncrossed their arms. Some jiggled their left legs, Chihuahua-like.
When I struck the last note, the Dumbans were quiet. A flake of toothpaste white paint drifted down through the bright light. At once, they lifted their chins and clapped. After I put Gordon’s bass back on its stand, I made my way off the unstage and lit a cigarette as I weaved through the crowd, and this time I really inhaled, and the nicotine was like little sewing machines under my skin.
Shapeshifter greeted me in its dark corner with four boyish grins. Gordon applauded with real force, real happiness, cleared of guilt. “See?” he said, to the rest of his band. “You’re lucky I’m quitting.” They closed their mouths and looked at me shyly, the three lanky, slouching Californians. I slouched shyly back. Gordon placed one hand on the back of my neck, set me between singer and drummer, and found a disposable camera in his bag.
“Smile, lads,” he said. “Say ‘new bass player.’”
It was a story everybody liked. Gordon liked it, I liked it, my new bandmates liked it. That was why it happened: for the story. Granted, I listened to Shapeshifter’s demo on a Walkman that night. Granted, I watched Shapeshifter’s set. If they had been bad, I wouldn’t have packed the next morning. If I had played “Heartbreak Hotel” badly, or tried to play a cool song and been met with derision by the Dumbans, who would have rejected anybody trying too obviously to be cool, Gordon wouldn’t have pressed me on his band, and they wouldn’t have accepted me. But I didn’t pick Shapeshifter out of a hundred bands because I thought their music of all music was the music for me. Shapeshifter didn’t pick me out of a hundred bass players because of how I played. I was in the backseat of the rear station wagon, its crevices lined with Camel ash and Subway crumbs, the very next afternoon because we all liked the story of the boy who took the stage and had no fear and got in a car and drove off to California.
I liked how whorish it was, how fast. And when I arrived in Los Angeles, driving the lead wagon west, sun-dazzled, sweating in Gordon’s Cat Power T-shirt, the city lived up to a shocking number of clichés regarding whorishness and speed and commerce and art, because so many people, like me, had just arrived and were determined to make it live up to those clichés. I liked how Shapeshifter gave me an instant brotherhood. How, because of the fairy-tale circumstance in which we united, our brotherhood felt fated to be. But most of all, I liked the story because it was non-Dad.
To be specific, regarding its non-Dadness: I was not studying political science for ten years, organizing, parenting, and teaching for another fifteen, only to walk out on my family, in the name of a forsaken creative endeavor, at age forty-five. I was doing what my father should have done when he’d had the chance. I was going to settle myself in the right career path, and secure a wife I could stay married to before I had kids.
And, in L.A., the right career path seemed ready and willing to be claimed. If you’re somebody who spent much of your senior year of high school losing your voice trying to make yourself heard above a drummer in a basement, the moment you finally step into an acoustically perfect studio, sit on a hideous leather couch with the ink on a record contract drying in your messenger bag, and listen to an engineer adjust the timbre of your voice as it delivers a harmony line you wrote yourself, through evil-looking black speakers that hang from the ceiling and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, you are a lucky person. This happened to me at twenty-six, five years into my stay in L.A., when Capitol, flush with Coldplay money, offered us a deal. It was what happened afterward, the moment when the claiming of the career path was supposed to translate into actual cash, that proved problematic.
If advertisers had immediately licensed “This Is Just Wrong,” a vaguely suicidal dance anthem on Shapeshifter’s 2005 self-titled debut, our label would have kept faith, given us an advance to cut a second record. We would have kept faith in ourselves, and stuck together. But the consultants who advised the major advertising agencies on indie pop discovered us a year later, and by that time we were all sick of near homelessness and malnutrition and not having a job and not being students in order to be available for touring, and our drummer moved to Tucson for divinity school, and Deke, who had always been the heart of the band, our lead singer and our most graceful player, returned to being David, and rediscovered the ashram in Oakland where he’d been raised and taught to sing and play. I was the only one who chose to stay in Los Angeles, unless you counted Gordon, who hadn’t had anything to do with us for over five years and was now head animator on a long-running prime-time cartoon. There was no going back for me. I would find some other way to live in the corner of the country opposite Wattsbury, Massachusetts. Spiritually, geographically, non-Dadness, above all, had to prevail.
In 2006 Pepsi’s ad agency licensed “This Is Just Wrong” for a foreign-market TV commercial wherein ethnically indeterminate soccer players dribbled in an alley. The chorus went “We’re going down, down,” but everyone thought we were singing, “We’re going downtown,” and for over a year, this misconception provided all former members of Shapeshifter with a subsistence living. I paid off my debts with the first payment and used the credential to find work scoring a cable drama pilot called The Spirits of New Orleans, in which a white woman stopped a gang war by channeling the ghosts of the gang members whose deaths were being pointlessly avenged. Manufacturing limpid music with acquaintances for television was not as fun as manufacturing undistinguished music with friends whose every rhythmic tic I’d come to know and anticipate. But it was good enough for me. It was sufficiently non-Dad.
I wondered, on Shapeshifter’s frigid zigzags through the prairie, odorous homecomings in orange desert light, and later, hunched over a mixing board in Universal City, blades of sun cutting through venetian blinds, what kind of person Khadijah had become. But I never indulged in a Google search. I was determined not to be a sentimental fool. And if I was right about the degree of influence Nancy exerted over her daughter, it was unlikely indeed that Khadijah Silverglate-Dunn lived in Los Angeles.
It seemed almost not to matter, sometimes, because the Khadijah in my imagination remained my confidante and adviser. For all my whorishness in the realm of work, I was puritanical in matters of love and sex. I kept the vow Khadijah and I had signed against the rusting wheel; I never cheated on anyone. All of my six and a half years in Shapeshifter, I moved from one steady girlfriend to another, each relationship lasting three to nine months. I was on tour, for much of this time, sleeping on couches, and when I wasn’t, I shared a tiny room with Deke in Koreatown. Because I could have no sustained domestic life with anyone who wasn’t a dude in Shapeshifter, my dating pattern was a lush four-week romance followed by a gradual onset of frost once I boarded the two-station-wagon caravan for a slog across North America. If I had cheated, it would have surprised no one. But the bag of cookies bursting from the pocket of my father’s quilted barn jacket—the memory was a whip my sense of loyalty wielded to subjugate my disloyal imagination. Whenever I was in danger with a woman not my girlfriend, once in the silver, Bacardi-sponsored tour van of a more famous band, once late at night in the Oregon summer house of a friend who’d just told me about a fight with her mother, the crumbs in the corduroy always saved me, tamed my desire. That and the shock audible in Khadijah’s breathing beneath the table in Gaia Foods. And a little Khadijah I kept in my head, asking: Who are you, in the end, anyway? Will you grow into a man? Or ferment into a Dad?