Naomi and Ely's No Kiss List (16 page)

Look, it’s no secret that I’ve turned out to be a lousy doorman. Everyone in the building knows it. The benefit of working a graveyard shift is that very few residents are awake enough to be bothered by my incompetence. So I misplace packages, and I mispronounce residents’ names.
You
try saying, “Nope, there’s no DHL, UPS, or FedEx for you here, Mr. Dziechciowski,” at four in the morning. So I buzz the wrong apartments and send food-delivery guys upstairs to bring steak sandwiches to the Singhs or BLTs to the Lefkowitzes . . . before dawn on a Saturday morning. Sorry. And don’t forget the middle-of-the-night rotation of visitors dealing dope or adultery who I let slide by. Just don’t ask me to gossip about all the goings-on with the congregation of lobby insomniacs. Because I don’t care. I’m just gonna stand at the doorman station lookin’ cool. That, I do well.

I’m a nineteen-year-old guy with nothing better to do than moonlight as a doorman, and daydream about you.

You didn’t love me, but life goes on, just like the song says.

Sorry, that line refers to another girl, who’s not you. My life has gone on without her.

You couldn’t know the imprint you left on me that first night, how I’d arrived on the job feeling like it was the first day of the end of my life. You couldn’t know what had recently been buried, or left behind. You couldn’t know that the simple sight of your dimpled smile at me that night, and the sound of your laughter, gave me the smallest glimmer of hope when all I wanted to do was bolt—from the new job, from home—to go anywhere or nowhere, to disappear into nothing.

Even the smallest glimmer counts.

Track 2
Bettye Swann: “(My Heart Is) Closed for the Season”

This song is for Lisa.

Let’s get this out of the way now. Lisa was my first. I got piercings in private places for her. Combat boots and a nurse’s uniform, that was Lisa. A goth hospice nurse—go figure. Ah, figure. Voluptuous, a smart-ass with a smart ass. Who could resist?

Let’s also get this out of the way now. Slap any sexual or ethnic label on me that you want, but don’t—I repeat, don’t— label me on the basis of my musical tastes. My dad claims he learned to speak English from listening to country music; my mother believed music was how we should communicate as a family. My parents used to trap my brother and me into helping them with weekend home-improvement projects under the guise of our “musical education.” We were hostages to Dad’s love of vinyl honky-tonk and funk, and Mom’s fondness for sad soul singers and Clash-era Brits. Because of my parents’ alluring baits of grilled cheese sandwiches and endless air hockey games as rewards for time lost to tiling kitchens and bathrooms, I’m a sucker for Hank Williams (Sr.) and old-school girl soul singers from the non-Motown pack.

Okay, so admittedly I first heard this song on a Starbucks compilation, but it wouldn’t be right to hold that against the song. It’s not the song’s fault.

The Lisa-ness of this particular oldie girl’s timeless song message? Seasons change. Closure and transition. Whatever. We’ll address The Obviousness of Irony in later song selections.

Lisa was older. I guess you figured that by now. She wasn’t Mrs. Loy old, the kind of old that defies actual numbers. Lisa was of an age that she’d been around long enough to get married and divorced, to know where piercings should be situated for maximum effect.

My brother said I had displaced attachment. Like if I loved her nurse, then that love could somehow keep our mother alive.

Lisa left me a week after. She said she’d been meaning to break up with me for a month, but I was too vulnerable. So she waited until after the funeral.

Go to college, Lisa said. Join a band. Act your age. Enjoy it.

I joined a band just so I could call her and tell her I joined it. Do you even know who Abe Froman is? she asked me. I said no. She said that was exactly why we could no longer be together. Generation gap. Act your age, she repeated. Find someone your own age.

I’m in a band, I can hook the girls in if I want to. I’m like you. I’ve got the right looks, if you know what I mean. And I don’t mean that in a vain way. Just being honest.

Honestly, I’d rather do a lot of things than be a doorman or perform with a band that switches identities from screamo acid jazz to indie-breed melancholy merely to accommodate whatever dive club will let them play. I just haven’t figured out what those other things I’d like to do are yet.

Honestly or foolishly (is there a difference?), I can’t be bothered to hook up with girls girls girls. I’m a disgrace to my looks and to my age. Five girls asked me to my high school prom last year, and I chose to play cards that night with Lisa, on a bench outside Mom’s room. I’m like my dad. I can focus on only one woman at a time—and I want her to be forever and for always.

You’re the first since my first to make me feel something, anything. I don’t exactly know why—I hardly know you. Maybe I suspect you’re like me. If you ever gave the matter substantial thought (and I hope you have), I suspect you’d also recognize that the Temptations were bound to factory hit-songwriting, and that’s why they got it wrong. Beauty’s
not
only skin deep. Just because a person is beautiful doesn’t mean there’s no soul beneath. Doesn’t mean that person hasn’t suffered like everyone else, doesn’t mean they don’t hope to still be a good human being in an awful world.

Hope. That’s what you make me feel.

That smallest glimmer could expand.

Track 3
Belle & Sebastian: “Piazza, New York Catcher”

This song is for you and Ely.

You and Ely hummed this song to one another when you passed me by my first weeks on the job. You didn’t think I got it, but I understood the underlying message.
Gabriel, nighttime doorman, are you straight or are you gay?

Like it’s not enough that people look at me and wonder,
Is he brown or yellow or white or what?

As I mentioned, aside from my musical taste, I don’t care what anyone wants to label me, but for the record? Father from the lighter side of the dark continent, mother from the land of the midnight sun via the land of the rising sun. Straight.

Was I mean or kind or neither for letting Ely flirt with me those long summer weeks when you were in Kansas visiting your dying grandfather? Hanging out with Ely in the middle of the night was like a cheating way to get to know you before I was ready to do the work. When Ely talked about you, about the lives you’d shared growing up together, I pictured the two of you as some she-male Eloise at the Plaza, knowing every dark passageway, every nuance of every resident, every secret. I wanted to scavenge your heart through his memories.

While you were gone, Ely constantly sang the line about wishing you were here to pass away the dull weekend, when he would hover around the doorman station late at night after going out clubbing with his friends. He was singing about you, not me. That much was always clear.

Clearly he wanted to push the boundaries with me. A doorman doesn’t get drunkenly accidentally on purpose bumped up against the mailboxes, or called upon to replace a flickering hallway light at three in the morning, and not figure that out. But Ely didn’t push further. He never made a move. You should know that.

Do you know why a Scottish band wrote a song about a New York baseball player? I’m concerned. I feel like there’s a potential Scottish invasion of the U.S. in the works (England and Wales abstaining). Belle & Sebastian are part of the advance team.

Stay alert.

Track 4
The Jam: “The Bitterest Pill (I Ever Had to Swallow)”

This song is for you and Ely, me and Lisa.

You and I, we both know what it’s like to swallow the bitterest brand of pill that people like Ely and Lisa dole out. We understand how it feels to fall prey to the sickness of loving Elys and Lisas—those who won’t love you back the way you love them. The pill’s bittersweet chaser is not that they
can’t
love you back the same way. It’s that they
won’t.
They won’t open their minds to the possibility. They won’t expand their expectations of romantic love past their own predetermined boundaries—gender, age, [insert innumerable other unfair, random reasons here]. Sucks.

Track 5
Fiona Apple: “Criminal”

This song is for Bruce the First.

Naomi, you’ve been a bad, bad girl. You’ve been careless with a delicate man boy.

I don’t know you well at all, obviously, but I feel like I could possibly trust you. I have to believe that anyone who lies as much as you do will in the end do the right thing, if for no other reason than you’ve already stripped bare what’s real from what’s not. I know you know the difference.

I’m going to trust you not to break that boy just because you can.

Track 6
Nada Surf: “Blizzard of ’77”

This song is for my parents.

The first time my father saw snow he was five years old. He had just moved to this country. A blizzard had struck during the night, and when he awoke in the morning, he couldn’t see out his bedroom window. Only by sitting on his own father’s shoulders could he get a clear view to the vastness of the white outside the front door to their house. The snow was taller than him—my father thought it could swallow him whole if he ventured out into it. Then, as he tells the story, he saw an angel. She was wearing a pink snowsuit, and she sat in her father’s lap as they rode a tractor clearing a path from the street to his house. He recognized her from his school class, where no other kid would talk to him because he didn’t yet speak English. Once the angel and her father had finished clearing the path, they jumped off the tractor and shoveled the remaining snow leading to his front door. “Welcome, neighbor,” she said to him. In Swahili.

My father does not speak Swahili; the Neighborhood Welcome Committee had been misinformed. But he quickly dressed and ventured outside, following the angel’s tracks.

He grew up to marry that girl.

Track 7
Kirsty MacColl: “A New England”

This song is for my mother. She loved this singer, and particularly this singer’s cover of this Billy Bragg song.

When I dropped off the varsity basketball team in high school, when I neglected to apply to college, when I scorned my brother for his Causes and Ideals, my mother would sing this song, adjusting one lyric in particular because it reminded her of me.

Gabriel doesn’t want to change the world

At the end, when she wanted me to distract her, but really she wanted me to distract myself, Mom asked me to make mixes for her to listen to at the hospital. Just go to the music library on our computer at home, choose some songs, hit shuffle, then burn, she said.

I never made a mix for her that didn’t include a Kirsty MacColl song—it’s like a law for me now. Any Kirsty Mac-Coll song reminds me of my mom. Whimsical, soulful, funny. Missed.

Both Kirsty MacColl and my mom had two sons. They both died before their forty-fifth birthday.

At least my brother and I knew it was coming. We got to say good-bye.

Track 8
Bruce Springsteen: “It’s Hard to Be a Saint in the City”

This is my mother’s song for me. Jersey girl.

I was born blue and weathered, but I burst just like a supernova.

What you need is a muse, she used to tell me. A Mary or a Janie. Then she’d say, But be careful. Those Marys and Janies can be dangerous to a boy who could walk like Brando right into the sun and then dance just like a Casanova.

I don’t want to be a Brando or a Casanova. I don’t even want to be a rock star. Don’t know why I’m in a band other than a girl told me to do it. I only front the band because I’m the best-looking of the bunch. The other guys are way more talented.

I wouldn’t mind a muse. Or to be amused. That would be a refreshing change.

Track 9
Kurtis Blow: “Basketball”

This is my father’s song for me.

For six months after the funeral, Pops laid off me. Day after day, I could be found in the park or at the Y playing pickup b-ball with any team who’d let me hoop. Fine. Dad didn’t give me grief about grieving through sweat and dribble, through game.

But man, you never heard such swearing in a language you don’t understand as when another year’s college application deadlines had passed and I finally told Dad I didn’t plan on going back to school—not at all, not ever.

Fine, no more. You think you’re going to keep living in my house and spend your days playing basketball? You got no real plans, young man? Well then I got plans for you. You’ll be a doorman.

I have to admit that the alternate song choice here was the “Dentist!” song from
Little Shop of Horrors.
If I’d chosen that song, I would have told you to imagine the word
doorman
instead of
dentist
when the guy sings about how Son, you’ll be a dentist. I would have explained that the song is about the singer’s destiny to become a dentist, as determined by his proclivity for causing people pain, and as decided upon by his parents. The message was meant to be about parents and destiny and not about a desire to be a dentist or to cause pain, by the way.

My father’s destiny was to be a doorman. He likes that destiny. It’s a fine one, for him. He’s worked for decades at the same posh building on Park Avenue. He rakes in the tips at Christmastime. Seriously—our family once vacationed for a week at a four-star resort in Barbados courtesy of that income, before Mom got too sick to travel.

He’s a good man and it’s been a good life for my dad, being a doorman. I do feel like perhaps it’s not my destiny.

I ended up not using the dentist song on your mix, because including a show tune would be too gay even for a guy who doesn’t care about labels.

Side note: Do you have any idea what it means when someone says, “That’s so gay”? I suspect it has nothing to do with actual homosexuality anymore. I think it means nothing at this point. Really, just nothing. “That’s so gay.” Totally existential. Maybe I should have used the dentist song after all.

Track 10
Shuggie Otis: “Inspiration Information”