A Visit From the Goon Squad (3 page)

“And did you? Put it back?” Coz asked.

“I didn’t have a chance. He came out of the bathroom.”

“And what about later? After the bath. Or the next time you saw him.”

“After the bath he put on his pants and left. I haven’t talked to him since.”

There was a pause, during which Sasha was keenly aware of Coz behind her, waiting. She wanted badly to please him, to say something like
It was a turning point; everything feels different now
, or
I called Lizzie and we made up finally
, or
I’ve picked up the harp again
, or just
I’m changing I’m changing I’m changing: I’ve changed!
Redemption, transformation—God how she wanted these things. Every day, every minute. Didn’t everyone?

“Please,” she told Coz. “Don’t ask me how I feel.”

“All right,” he said quietly.

They sat in silence, the longest silence that ever had passed between them. Sasha looked at the windowpane, rinsed continually with rain, smearing lights in the falling dark. She lay with her body tensed, claiming the couch, her spot in this room, her view of the window and the walls, the faint hum that was always there when she listened, and these minutes of Coz’s time: another, then another, then one more.

The Gold Cure

The shame memories began early that day for Bennie, during the morning meeting, while he listened to one of his senior executives make a case for pulling the plug on Stop/Go, a sister band Bennie had signed to a three-record deal a couple of years back. Then, Stop/Go had seemed like an excellent bet; the sisters were young and adorable, their sound was gritty and simple and catchy (“Cyndi Lauper meets Chrissie Hynde” had been Bennie’s line early on), with a big gulping bass and some fun percussion—he recalled a cowbell. Plus they’d written decent songs; hell, they’d sold twelve thousand CDs off the stage before Bennie ever heard them play. A little time to develop potential singles, some clever marketing, and a decent video could put them over the top.

But the sisters were pushing thirty, his executive producer, Collette, informed Bennie now, and no longer credible as recent high school grads, especially since one of them had a nine-year-old daughter. Their band members were in law school. They’d fired two producers, and a third had quit. Still no album.

“Who’s managing them?” Bennie asked.

“Their father. I’ve got their new rough mix,” Collette said. “The vocals are buried under seven layers of guitar.”

It was then that the memory overcame Bennie (had the word “sisters” brought it on?): himself, squatting behind a nunnery in Westchester at sunrise after a night of partying—twenty years ago was it? More? Hearing waves of pure, ringing, spooky-sweet sound waft into the paling sky: cloistered nuns who saw no one but one another, who’d taken vows of silence, singing the Mass. Wet grass under his knees, its iridescence pulsing against his exhausted eyeballs. Even now, Bennie could hear the unearthly sweetness of those nuns’ voices echoing deep in his ears.

He’d set up a meeting with their Mother Superior—the only nun you could talk to—brought along a couple of girls from the office for camouflage, and waited in a kind of anteroom until the Mother Superior appeared behind a square opening in the wall like a window without glass. She wore all white, a cloth tightly encircling her face. Bennie remembered her laughing a lot, rosy cheeks lifting into swags, maybe from joy at the thought of bringing God into millions of homes, maybe at the novelty of an A and R guy in purple corduroy making his pitch. The deal was done in a matter of minutes.

He’d approached the cutout square to say good-bye (here Bennie thrashed in his conference room chair, anticipating the moment it was all leading up to). The Mother Superior leaned forward slightly, tilting her head in a way that must have triggered something in Bennie, because he lurched across the sill and kissed her on the mouth: velvety skin-fuzz, an intimate, baby powder smell in the half second before the nun cried out and jerked away. Then pulling back, grinning through his dread, seeing her appalled, injured face.

“Bennie?” Collette was standing in front of a console, holding the Stop/Go CD. Everyone seemed to be waiting. “You want to hear this?”

But Bennie was caught in a loop from twenty years ago: lunging over the sill toward the Mother Superior like some haywire figure on a clock, again. Again. Again.

“No,” he groaned. He turned his sweating face into the rivery breeze that gusted through the windows of the old Tribeca coffee factory where Sow’s Ear Records had moved six years ago and now occupied two floors. He’d never recorded the nuns. By the time he’d returned from the convent, a message had been waiting.

“I don’t,” he told Collette. “I don’t want to hear the mix.” He felt shaken, soiled. Bennie dropped artists all the time, sometimes three in a week, but now his own shame tinged the Stop/Go sisters’ failure, as if
he
were to blame. And that feeling was followed by a restless, opposing need to recall what had first excited him about the sisters—to feel that excitement again. “Why don’t I visit them?” he said suddenly.

Collette looked startled, then suspicious, then worried, a succession that would have amused Bennie if he hadn’t been so rattled. “Really?” she asked.

“Sure. I’ll do it today, after I see my kid.”

Bennie’s assistant, Sasha, brought him coffee: cream and two sugars. He shimmied a tiny red enameled box from his pocket, popped the tricky latch, pinched a few gold flakes between his trembling fingers, and released them into his cup. He’d begun this regimen two months ago, after reading in a book on Aztec medicine that gold and coffee together were believed to ensure sexual potency. Bennie’s goal was more basic than potency: sex
drive
, his own having mysteriously expired. He wasn’t sure quite when or quite why this had happened: The divorce from Stephanie? The battle over Christopher? Having recently turned forty-four? The tender, circular burns on his left forearm, sustained at “The Party,” a recent debacle engineered by none other than Stephanie’s former boss, who was now doing jail time?

The gold landed on the coffee’s milky surface and spun wildly. Bennie was mesmerized by this spinning, which he took as evidence of the explosive gold-coffee chemistry. A frenzy of activity that had mostly led him in circles: wasn’t that a fairly accurate description of lust? At times Bennie didn’t even mind its disappearance; it was sort of a relief not to be constantly wanting to fuck someone. The world was unquestionably a more peaceful place without the half hard-on that had been his constant companion since the age of thirteen, but did Bennie want to live in such a world? He sipped his gold-inflected coffee and glanced at Sasha’s breasts, which had become the litmus test he used to gauge his improvement. He’d lusted after her for most of the years she’d worked for him, first as an intern, then a receptionist, finally his assistant (where she’d remained, oddly reluctant to become an executive in her own right)—and she’d somehow managed to elude that lust without ever saying no, or hurting Bennie’s feelings, or pissing him off. And now: Sasha’s breasts in a thin yellow sweater, and Bennie felt nothing. Not a shiver of harmless excitement. Could he even get it up if he wanted to?

Driving to pick up his son, Bennie alternated between the Sleepers and the Dead Kennedys, San Francisco bands he’d grown up with. He listened for muddiness, the sense of actual musicians playing actual instruments in an actual room. Nowadays that quality (if it existed at all) was usually an effect of analogue signaling rather than bona fide tape—everything was an effect in the bloodless constructions Bennie and his peers were churning out. He worked tirelessly, feverishly, to get things right, stay on top, make songs that people would love and buy and download as ring tones (and steal, of course)—above all, to satisfy the multinational crude-oil extractors he’d sold his label to five years ago. But Bennie knew that what he was bringing into the world was shit. Too clear, too clean. The problem was precision, perfection; the problem was
digitization
, which sucked the life out of everything that got smeared through its microscopic mesh. Film, photography, music: dead.
An aesthetic holocaust!
Bennie knew better than to say this stuff aloud.

But the deep thrill of these old songs lay, for Bennie, in the rapturous surges of sixteen-year-old-ness they induced; Bennie and his high school gang—Scotty and Alice, Jocelyn and Rhea—none of whom he’d seen in decades (except for a disturbing encounter with Scotty in his office years ago), yet still half believed he’d find waiting in line outside the Mabuhay Gardens (long defunct), in San Francisco, green-haired and safety-pinned, if he happened to show up there one Saturday night.

And then, as Jello Biafra was thrashing his way through “Too Drunk to Fuck,” Bennie’s mind drifted to an awards ceremony a few years ago where he’d tried to introduce a jazz pianist as “incomparable” and ended up calling her “incompetent” before an audience of twenty-five hundred. He should never have tried for “incomparable”—wasn’t his word, too fancy; it stuck in his mouth every time he’d practiced his speech for Stephanie. But it suited the pianist, who had miles of shiny gold hair and had also (she’d let slip) graduated from Harvard. Bennie had cherished a rash dream of getting her into bed, feeling that hair sliding over his shoulders and chest.

He idled now in front of Christopher’s school, waiting for the memory spasm to pass. Driving in, he’d glimpsed his son crossing the athletic field with his friends. Chris had been skipping a little—actually skipping—tossing a ball in the air, but by the time he slumped into Bennie’s yellow Porsche, any inkling of lightness was gone. Why? Did Chris somehow know about the botched awards ceremony? Bennie told himself this was nuts, yet was moved by an urge to confess the malapropism to his fourth grader. The Will to Divulge, Dr. Beet called this impulse, and had exhorted Bennie to write down the things he wanted to confide, rather than burden his son with them. Bennie did this now, scribbling
incompetent
on the back of a parking ticket he’d received the day before. Then, recalling the earlier humiliation, he added to the list
kissing Mother Superior
.

“So, boss,” he said. “Whatcha feel like doing?”

“Don’t know.”

“Any particular wishes?”

“Not really.”

Bennie looked helplessly out the window. A couple of months ago, Chris had asked if they could skip their weekly appointment with Dr. Beet and spend the afternoon “doing whatever” instead. They hadn’t gone back, a decision that Bennie now regretted; “doing whatever” had led to desultory afternoons, often cut short by Chris’s announcement that he had homework.

“How about some coffee?” Bennie suggested.

A spark of smile. “Can I get a Frappuccino?”

“Don’t tell your mother.”

Stephanie didn’t approve of Chris drinking coffee—reasonable, given that the kid was nine—but Bennie couldn’t resist the exquisite connection that came of defying his ex-wife in unison. Betrayal Bonding, Dr. Beet called this, and like the Will to Divulge, it was on the list of no-no’s.

They got their coffees and returned to the Porsche to drink them. Chris sucked greedily at his Frappuccino. Bennie took out his red enameled box, pinched a few gold flakes, and slipped them under the plastic lid of his cup.

“What’s that?” Chris asked.

Bennie started. The gold was becoming so routine that he’d stopped being clandestine about it. “Medicine,” he said, after a moment.

“For what?”

“Some symptoms I’ve been having.”
Or not having
, he added mentally.

“What symptoms?”

Was this the Frappuccino kicking in? Chris had shifted out of his slump and now sat upright, regarding Bennie with his wide, dark, frankly beautiful eyes. “Headaches,” Bennie said.

“Can I see it?” Chris asked. “The medicine? In that red thing?”

Bennie handed over the tiny box. Within a couple of seconds, the kid had figured out the tricky latch and popped it open. “Whoa, Dad,” he said. “What is this stuff?”

“I told you.”

“It looks like gold. Flakes of gold.”

“It has a flaky consistency.”

“Can I taste one?”

“Son. You don’t—”

“Just one?”

Bennie sighed. “One.”

The boy carefully removed a gold flake and placed it on his tongue. “What does it taste like?” Bennie couldn’t help asking. He’d only consumed the gold in his coffee, where it had no discernible flavor.

“Like metal,” Chris said. “It’s awesome. Can I have another one?”

Bennie started the car. Was there something obviously sham about the medicine story? Clearly the kid wasn’t buying it. “One more,” he said. “And that’s it.”

His son took a fat pinch of gold flakes and put them on his tongue. Bennie tried not to think of the money. The truth was, he’d spent eight thousand dollars on gold in the past two months. A coke habit would have cost him less.

Chris sucked on the gold and closed his eyes. “Dad,” he said. “It’s, like, waking me up from the inside.”

“Interesting,” Bennie mused. “That’s exactly what it’s supposed to do.”

“Is it working?”

“Sounds like it is.”

“But on you,” Chris said.

Bennie was fairly certain his son had asked him more questions in the past ten minutes than in the prior year and a half since he and Stephanie had split. Could this be a side effect of the gold: curiosity?

“I’ve still got the headaches,” he said.

He was driving aimlessly among the Crandale mansions (“doing whatever” involved a lot of aimless driving), every one of which seemed to have four or five blond children in Ralph Lauren playing out front. Seeing these kids, it was clearer than ever to Bennie that he hadn’t had a chance of lasting in this place, swarthy and unkempt-looking as he was even when freshly showered and shaved. Stephanie, meanwhile, had ascended to the club’s number one doubles team.

“Chris,” Bennie said. “There’s a musical group I need to visit—a pair of young sisters. Well, youngish sisters. I was planning to go later on, but if you’re interested, we could—”