Good Kids: A Novel (10 page)

“Do you think I should go out and guard Miles?” I whispered to Rachel. “Dad has to stay at the table and be social.”

Rachel assessed the dogs. Her face was diagnostic and calm the way it’d been a year ago, when she’d looked at our parents arranged in the stations of a family meeting and said
divorce.
There was an instinct for nature in her, a certainty. “Neither of those dogs,” she whispered, “wants to do to Miles what Dad thinks they want to do.”

Laura tinked her fork against her glass of water and said
ahem.
“Hear ye hear ye,” she said. “The Annual Mueller Swim Race to the Shore commences tomorrow morning at nine o’clock sharp. Raise your hand if you’re in.”

Everyone except Rachel and me raised their hands.

“You’re too young, Rachel,” said Laura. “It’s almost a mile. But why not you, Josh?” I knew, from experience with teachers, how relentless this kind of grown-up concern for my emotional development could be. I was being Challenged to step outside my Safety Zone.

“Oh no,” I said, “I’m no swimmer.”

“I bet you’re pretty strong,” said Laura, kindly and absurdly. “You impressed us all with that Aerobie out there.”

Allison laid down her knife. “No one cares, Josh. If you don’t feel like it, you don’t need to do it.”

I blushed. I had brought these two women into conflict simply by provoking incompatible forms of generosity. Allison, I thought, wants to be a mother.

After dinner, Laura brought in bowls and a pan of warm apple cobbler that must have materialized in the kitchen. She placed a hand on my father’s shoulder and tucked an envelope beneath his cobbler bowl.

“Ooh, a present! Open it!” I cried, shocking everyone with my sudden volume and enthusiasm. I hoped that this was the kind of spiritedly ironical tone rich people found endearing and natural.

My father’s eyebrows jumped. “All right, since my teenager is so breathlessly invested.” He pushed open a hole with his thumb and teased out the contents.

For a moment, every face at the table went blank—everyone had seen that one of the pieces of paper in my father’s hand was a check.

My father’s face was full of death. “Thank you very much, Bruce,” he got out. “Incredibly generous.” He began to hum, staring into space. I didn’t recognize the tune, but it was wide-ranging, fast, meandering.

Bruce stirred crust and ice cream with his fork. “It’s my pleasure.”

“Starting a business, or a nonprofit, sorry, you need a little help in the beginning, Linus, that’s all,” said Laura, nurturing, hungry to show herself a nurturer—a teacher.

Then there was an eruption of barking, a three-way debate. My father stopped humming and looked out the enormous windows, transfixed. I tried to parse what he was looking at. Paws and tails entangled, dancing, the hard wind off the sound combing the lawn.

“Excuse me,” said my father, folding the check and putting it in his pocket. “I’ll be only a moment.” He dropped his napkin on his chair, slid open a glass door, and slipped outside. We watched as he made his way to Miles and Gopher.

We heard him shouting: “No, Gopher, no.”

We watched through the glass as he threw his body between the two dogs, issuing prohibitions. “Stay away from Miles,” he grunted to Gopher. “Don’t even come close. That’s my son there, buddy.”

“I just don’t think,” said Laura, finally, to the table, “that Gopher would do something like that. Linus keeps bringing it up. I mean the idea he would rape another dog. A male dog raping another male dog.”

Bruce wiped his mouth with his napkin and stretched in his chair. He glanced at the torn envelope beside my father’s cobbler bowl. His mouth bent upward, perhaps to form a discreet smile. Who could tell? It might have been a suppressed belch.

M
ost 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.