How to Kill a Rock Star (12 page)

When Paul final y came, his back arched like a bow about to launch an arrow, and he exhaled a loud, melodious sound identical to one he’d made during the show, at the end of an intense, seven-minute-long song cal ed “Never Prayed for Rain.”

For me, the release was a spot in time with no past and
no future. Just the extraordinary simplicity of a moment—

the kind of moment that has a funny way of making a person believe that life and love can last forever.

The light coming through the window and the sounds of the delivery trucks outside told me it was almost time to get up, but I’d barely slept. Paul, on the other hand, looked cataleptic. His hands were buried under his pil ow, and his face was so colorless that if it hadn’t been for his nearly con-cave ribcage moving up and down with his breath, I would’ve thought he was dead.

I pushed his hair off his face and tried to wil his eyes to open. When that didn’t work I kicked him in the foot and pretended it was an accident. “You look like a corpse when you sleep.”

“You’re weird,” he said groggily.

“Tel me your real name.”

He checked the clock and then rol ed his eyes.

“Come on. We had sex. You have to.”

He chuckled. “Eliza, if
that
were my only criteria, do you know how many girls would know my real name?”

“Bastard.”

That made him laugh even harder, which immediately set off an alarm in my head. Maybe I was no different than Avril or Beth or Alicia. Maybe Paul would turn his back to me the next time he saw me in Rings of Saturn.

“Oh, God,” I said in a panic. “Let’s just lay this on the table right now. Because I don’t want to think this is one thing and have it turn out to be the other. Is this real or is it crap?”

“Jesus,” he said. “The sun isn’t even up yet.”

“I mean it. I need proof. Tel me your real name.”

“Proof?” He huffed. “You want proof? Give me your goddamn hand.”

9Skeptical y, I did as he asked, and he proceeded to sing the chorus to one of 66’s meaningless songs, mimicking Amanda Strunk’s whiskey-flavored voice, pointing to my arm. Nothing had changed. Then he sang the last verse of “The Day I Became a Ghost” and every one of my hairs stood on end.

“See that?” Paul said. “Ten goddamn seconds.”

“I don’t get it.”

“You didn’t even have to hear the whole song, just a few lines, and you stil got chil s and that swirly, happy-sad feeling in your gut, didn’t you?”

“So?”

“
So
?” he huffed. “That’s the difference between the real stuff and the crap. I know which one you are and you know which one I am.” He flipped over and buried his head in his pil ow. “That’s al the proof you need. Wake me up in an hour.”
Lucy sounded like a mad donkey when she laughed, which is what she was doing as she browsed the makeshift press kit Michael had put together for me to show
Sonica
during the magazine’s weekly pitch meeting.

There was a fact sheet inside the folder, containing information on each band member—their musical histories, what instruments they played; there were excerpts from two smal local papers hyping Bananafish’s live shows as “electric” and “intense”; and what Lucy seemed to find so hilarious, the group photo, which had been taken on Spring Street in SoHo by a friend of Michael’s, a photographer who sets up shop on the sidewalk outside of Balthazar making washed out, vintage-looking Polaroid image transfers for tourists.

In front of the whole staff of associate editors seated around the oblong table, Lucy said, “Eliza, which one of these guys are you screwing?”

I felt my fingers tighten around my pen. I wanted to stab Lucy’s eye with it.

Lucy made the donkey noise again. “I’m assuming that’s the reason you’re pushing so hard to get them mentioned in the magazine, no?”

After stabbing Lucy blind, I decided I would put my hands around her neck and shake until there was no air left in her lungs. Then I would write
Kick
Me
on her forehead and leave her on the sidewalk in Times Square.

9“Actual y, the guitarist is my brother,” I said, evading half the truth—half the truth being that I’d been sleeping with Paul for two weeks and hadn’t told anyone yet, namely Michael and Vera. I wasn’t ready for the lectures. The you-should-know-better lecture.The he’s-going-to-break-your-heart lecture.The Mother-of-Pearl-are-you-out-of-your-mind lecture. Probably because on some level I thought Michael and Vera might be right, and I was in that highly romantic stage of denial.

Lucy scanned the fact sheet. Once she located Michael, she said, “I suppose it never occurred to you that having the same last name as the guitarist poses a major credibility problem.”

“I don’t have to be the one who writes it. The point is to get their name out there. One mention, that’s al I ask.” And then I expunged any headway I might have made in the respect department by begging. “If things don’t start rol ing for Bananafish, my brother is going to have to quit. Can we just do him this smal favor?
Please
?” Lucy stood up, poised herself behind her chair, and savored the moment. My weaknesses made her stronger.

She took pleasure in zapping my energy and sucking on my life.

“They’re an unsigned band, Eliza. How many people outside of New York have ever heard of them? We aren’t the
Village Voice
, we’re a national magazine. Our job is to cover the artists people want to read about, not fil the pages with nobodies, even if you happen to be related to them.” I wished a long, painful death for Lucy. In the meantime, I suggested that perhaps she might like to come to a show and judge for herself, my thinking being that if Lucy saw Bananafish live, it would become less about my brother and more about the music. Then again, even if I did convince her to come to Rings of Saturn—a venue she considered beneath her—there was a good chance she would abominate the band out of spite.

September 18, 2000

Listen up, little tape recorder buddy. Things are final y starting to happen. Good things. Potential y great things. Exhibit A: Guess who cal ed me this morning? Jack Stone.

Who is Jack Stone, you ask? Only the president and founder of Underdog records—a smal but highly successful independent label known for quality over quantity. No kidding, there isn’t a band on their roster that doesn’t sing the truth and garner the respect of their peers.

I almost dropped the phone when he said his name. Then I covered the mouthpiece with my hand, grabbed Eliza before she ran off to work, and told her Jack Stone was on the phone. It was a curious thing. She didn’t look surprised. But I’l come back to that.

Unbeknownst to me, Jack was at Rings of Saturn last Thursday. He raved about the show and wanted to know why he’d never heard of us, and I told him—because Feldman thinks I belong on a major label. Jack said that explained why he’d put in two cal s to Feldman and hadn’t heard back yet.

Note to self: Have a talk with Feldman regarding cal -return etiquette.

Jack asked me if there were any Bananafish demos in existence, and let me say this on record: I’m highly opposed to passing out demos. They don’t do our live shows justice. But I real y wanted a shot with Underdog so I told Jack I could probably scrounge something up.

10Jack said, “Drop off a tape sometime today, I’l run it by a couple of trusted ears, and you and I wil get together next week.” Then, before we say goodbye, he goes, “Oh, tel that roommate of yours I said hi.”

Eliza denied any involvement until I threatened to cal her brother and say, “Eliza sucks good dick,” at which point she fessed up.

Turns out Jack is a good friend of Terry North’s, and Eliza’s been hounding
Sonica
about Bananafish—she wants to write an article, a little blurb, anything to help us out. But Lucy keeps shooting her down so Eliza had to go above Lucy’s head.

Unfortunately, Terry North agreed with Lucy that an unknown band wasn’t going to sel magazines. But Terry also thinks Eliza looks like his dead sister so he let her tag along on a lunch meeting with Jack. A week later Jack showed up at Rings of Saturn.

Eliza and I cal ed in sick for work and headed to Underdog, which is on Broadway, right between Washington and Waverly.

Confession: I’d been to Underdog before. I stopped by once with my guitar, asking if I could play a song for Jack. Back then the girl behind the desk told me they didn’t accept solicitors.

Otherwise, she said, could I imagine how much “crapola” they’d have to listen to. That’s what she cal ed me. Crapola.

Today the same receptionist, the one with the Bettie Page bangs and polka-dot thrift-store dress, acted like she was expecting me, and she put my demo in a metal basket that had Jack’s name on it.

After we left Underdog, I suggested we go chil out under a tree somewhere. Eliza wanted to go to Central Park, but I was sure a subway ride uptown would’ve kil ed me, and neither of us had money to waste on a cab so we stopped at some cheap NYU hangout for coffee and then walked to Washington Square.

In the middle of the park, near the old fountain, this guy was sitting with a guitar, singing that old Dobie Gray song “Drift How to Kil _internals.rev 2/22/08 5:00 PM Page 101

Away.” A crowd had congregated around him. His pants were too tight and his shirt was only buttoned halfway up his chest—he was from Jersey, I suspected—but he had a pretty decent voice, and Eliza said he reminded her of her dad, so we walked over.

Eliza closed her eyes, swayed to the music, and I could tel she meant it when she sang, “Give me the beat, boys, and free my soul, I wanna get lost in your rock ’n’ rol and drift away…” I can say this because she’s my girlfriend, even if, at the moment, she’s only my girlfriend in secret—Eliza has one of the worst voices known to man. Swear to God, for someone so obsessed with music, she’s borderline tone deaf. But trying to describe how I felt watching her dance around and sing would be like trying to build a skyscraper with my bare hands. It made me want to marry her. Made me want to buy her a magic airplane and fly her away to a place where nothing bad could ever happen. Made me want to pour rubber cement al over my chest and then lay down on top of her so that we’d be stuck together, and so it would hurt like hel if we ever tried to tear ourselves apart.

We sat under a tree with leaves that were beginning to turn the color of fire. Eliza picked one off the ground, examined it like a botanist, and said, “Isn’t it funny to think that this magnificent piece of matter is in a state of decay? Real y, can you think of any other living thing that looks this glorious as it’s dying?”

This is what I mean. The shit that comes out of her mouth sends me to the goddamn moon.

Next I asked her if she wanted to hear something weird.

When she gave me the go-ahead, I asked her if she knew her brother wasn’t the original guitarist in Bananafish.

She said no, and her tone implied she was awaiting a good plot twist. So I told her how we had this other guy, Mike Barnes, and she stopped me right there. She didn’t believe the guy’s name was Mike.

10A zil ion times I swore over my life. Then I told her the whole story, how Barnes was very Mol y Hatchet, and final y, when I couldn’t take his goddamn “Flirtin’ with Disaster” riffs a minute longer, I canned him, five days before our first gig.

We had to replace him fast, so I hung flyers on every goddamn telephone pole and brick wal from the FDR to the Westside Highway. “But here’s the weird part,” I said, trying to real y grip her. I told her how we’d scheduled auditions at the rehearsal space, and at the time, Michael was working as a peon for some advertising firm that had a storage unit across from ours, and he stopped by that day to pick something up.

He had no idea we were having auditions, but he came in, played us a song, and got the job.

Eliza seemed to be grasping the significance of the story, but I spel ed it out for her anyway: F-A-T-E. Michael and I meeting.

She and I meeting. Our Doug Blackman connection.

“That’s not fate,” she said.

Wel , if it wasn’t fate, I asked her, what the hel did she cal it?

She studied the scar on her wrist for a long time. Eventual y she glanced up, but the sun was in my eyes and I couldn’t tel if she was looking at me or the sky.

“Let me tel you a little something about fate,” she said.

“Fate is just another word for people’s choices coming to a head. Destiny, coincidence, whatever you name it. It inevitably lies in our own hands.”

This has been a presentation of Paul Hudson’s diary.

Over and out.

It was true love. In the truest sense of the word. I was in love with Paul and, more importantly, I believed he was in love with me. It was in the way he had of cal ing me at work and saying things like, “Did you know nondairy creamer is flam-mable?” or “The dial tone of this phone is in the key of F,”

and for the rest of the day even Lucy Enfield would seem tolerable; it was in the way he had of ordering the spinach and ricotta pizza from Rosario’s because it was my favorite, even though he would’ve rather had the pepperoni; it was in the way he set one of my favorite poems, “The Stil Time,”

to music, and sang it to me when a plane would crash somewhere in the world or I would hear “Born to Run” on the radio or life would just feel heavy and I couldn’t sleep with al that weight on top of me.

Sometimes I would open my eyes when we were kissing, I would watch him and I could see it. I could actual y
see
LOVE—not words, not an emotion, not an abstract concept or a subjective state of mind, but a living, breathing thing. I’d known for a long time that LOVE had a sound, but after Adam left, I wasn’t sure it had a face and body, too. Especial y one that would show itself to me for the first time on a subway platform, fidgeting nervously, with pale, luminescent eyes, dark, limp hair, and a cocky-bastard smile that could boil water.

But I knew.

I could tel .

10And I would’ve done anything for him.

I broke the news to Vera first, knowing she would then do my dirty work for me—that is, tel Michael. Her reaction left much to be desired. Mostly, it was the depth of my feelings for Paul that concerned her.