How to Kill a Rock Star (8 page)

“I hate my boss,” I vented to Vera over lunch in Bryant Park the day Paul left me the note. “Because of her, al my coworkers think I’m a groupie.”

We were sitting on a bench, and Vera scooted a few inches away so she could turn and face me. She split the cookie she was eating in half and gave me a piece. “Why do your coworkers think you’re a groupie?”

“My boss told them I slept with Doug to get the job.” The tragedy of the situation escaped Vera. Al she said was, How to Kil _internals.rev 2/22/08

4:59 PM Page 60

6“I love how you’re on a first-name basis with Doug Blackman.” I let it go. The November deadline was of supreme importance and I only had thirty minutes before I had to go back to work. “Don’t make Michael quit the band.” Vera’s breath blew a piece of hair off her face. “That’s not fair, Eliza.

I’m twenty-seven. If I don’t start school soon, I’l be forty by the time I graduate.”

“Marriage is about compromise,” I said stupidly.

“Right. Except notice I’m the only one compromising,” she sighed. “Do you know that almost every cent Michael makes at the restaurant goes into the band? We’re living paycheck to paycheck.
My
paycheck. I can’t do it anymore.” I couldn’t argue with her. The situation was unfortunate for al involved. But someone had to feign hope and I decided that someone would be me. “I have a feeling things are going to start happening for Bananafish.” I crushed up my piece of cookie, tossed the crumbs onto the ground, and half a dozen pigeons swarmed the bench.

“E
li
za,” Vera said. “If a rat scurried up to you right now, would you feed it?”

“No.”

“Pigeons are rats with wings.”

I wished she wouldn’t have said that. I had enough to worry about and didn’t need to add flying rats to the list.

Vera gazed over her shoulder at the New York Public Library. “I applied to Columbia,” she said. “If I get in, I’l start in January. If the band isn’t signed by then, Michael understands he has to quit.” She looked directly at me. “This is what I want.”

I had to laugh. The phrase
what I want
struck me. It contains so much entitlement, so many complications, but encompasses only what a person doesn’t have.

It made me ponder what I wanted. I fingered the note in my pocket and felt emptiness in the pit of my stomach— like I hadn’t eaten for three years. Then I thought about Adam. I thought about al the things I’d wanted from him, things I knew he never could’ve given me, and I whittled al of them down to one juvenile, esoteric wish.

“A song,” I said aloud.

“What?”

“The whole time Adam and I were together, he never wrote one song for me.”

Vera looked like she was trying to think of an appropriate response to such a stupid desire. “He was a drummer. You hate it when drummers sing.”

This is true. I say, down with the Romantics, Don Henley, Phil Col ins! Down with songs like “Yel ow Submarine” and “Love Stinks.” Drummers have enough to do behind their equipment. Half the time nobody can see them. And fans should be able to make eye contact with singers. It’s sexier that way. But Vera was missing the point.

“I’d be a sucker for a guy who wrote me a song,” I said.

“Like Beth or Rosanna or Sara. Or Sharona. Is that too much to ask? To be somebody’s Sharona?”

“Aim high,” Vera said.

I hadn’t left the office before eight al week, but my conversation with Vera had left me feeling heavy, and I didn’t want to spend al evening alone in the apartment, stuck under the burden that was my thousand-pound heart.

I snuck out of work early, went home, and had just gotten dressed when I heard Paul bounding up the stairs. A second later he was in my doorway.

“You’re here.” He grinned. “
Finally
.”

“
I’m
here? That’s funny considering your bed hasn’t been slept in for days.”

Paul let out a laugh. “Oh, Eliza. Sweet Eliza. You do like me, don’t you?”

6Maybe I’m weak for music men. Maybe I’m weak, period. But I couldn’t deny I was charmed by his arrogant, fool-ish guise. And since I hadn’t been charmed by anyone in a long time, I couldn’t just write that off.

Paul looked weird, col egiate. It took me a few seconds to figure out why. He was dressed, head to toe, in Gap clothes.

“I know,” he said. “Let me change and then we’l go.” He reappeared in the hal a minute later, bright as a sun-beam, wearing the pants to his green suit and a yel ow Tshirt that said:
My Jive Limo ~ A ride you’ll never forget
.

“We match,” he said, pointing first at his shirt and then at my chest.

“Excuse me?”

“Your bra,” he said, which he could see through my dress.

“Yel ow. Nice.”

I cal ed him a bastard and he laughed with a sense of accomplishment, as if he’d been trying to get me to insult him. “Do you like to gamble?” he asked, furiously opening and closing drawers in the kitchen, a guitar pick sticking out the side of his mouth.

“Why?”

“Don’t be so suspicious. Just answer the goddamn question.”

“I’ve never real y—”

“Score!” he said, discovering a five-dol ar bil under a mess of pens, rubber bands, and plastic cutlery.

As soon as we were on the street, Paul prodded me to walk faster. “Kick it in the ass or we’l miss the first game.”

“Why don’t we take the subway?”

He came to a smashing halt in the middle of the sidewalk. “
Subway
?” he said, as if I’d invited him to walk through the gates of hel . “I don’t ride anything that goes underground. I’l be subterranean enough when I’m dead.”

Witnessing Paul exhibit vulnerability, even superciliously,
also made me want to touch his chest. I’d never had the urge to touch anybody’s chest, but Paul was so animated and energetic, I imagined a metrical, pumping drum pounding in place of a heartbeat, and I wanted to feel the rhythm. I wanted to merge with it. I wanted to
be
it.

“That’s the gayest thing I’ve ever heard,” I said.

He laughed. “Warning: if you insult my heterosexual eminence one more time, I’m going to have to throw you down in the middle of the street and prove myself.” I almost said it again, just to test him.

Six months is a long time.

It was a thousand degrees outside.

“A-ha,” Paul said. “Now I know how to shut you up.” In silence, we continued west halfway across town, eventual y arriving at the door of a nondescript building with a green awning that said St. Vrain Senior Center.

“You said we were gambling.”

“We are.”

“This looks like a home for old people.”

“What, old people can’t gamble?”

“They better have air-conditioning.”

Paul took me by the elbow and dragged me through the door, down a long hal way, and into a sad, spacious rec room with a low ceiling, a drab linoleum floor, and—thank the Lord—air-conditioning. The sour smel of urine and powdered mashed potatoes hung in the air.

A fleshy, middle-aged woman named Mary Lou waved at Paul. She cal ed him Wil ie and told him to sit at table five. “Patty asked if you were coming,” Mary Lou said. “She claims she never wins when you’re not here.”

“Patty is the most competitive player in this place,” Mary Lou told me, her nose scrunching into a snout. “And she has a little crush on Wil ie.”

Must be an infectious disease, I mused, fol owing Paul to
6a desk where another overweight woman sat with a box of
Hello, My Name Is
tags.

Paul picked up a black marker, wrote WILLIE in big, robotic letters, and stuck it on his shirt.

“What’s with the name?”

“My alias,” he whispered. “Don’t blow my cover. I have a reputation to uphold. These people think I’m a goddamn kindergarten teacher.”

I laughed. “Right. Because you look so much like a kindergarten teacher.”

He fil ed out another tag and placed it above my heart, ostensibly trying to avoid making contact with anywhere I might construe as out-of-bounds. I kept my eyes locked on his as he pressed the paper into my chest, at which point I experienced a rush of blood to the inguinal region of my body.

“What?” he said, smirking.

“Nothing.”

There were at least a dozen people at al ten tables. Paul and I approached number five and a frail woman with white hair, a ghoulish smile, and lines that ran down her face like the Manhattan bus map said, “Roger, move over. Wil ie likes to sit by me.”

Roger, a toothless man who looked as old as a dinosaur, offered up his chair. “There’s my girl,” Paul said, giving Patty a big smooch on the cheek.

I looked around the room and noticed a number of people under the age of thirty. Some, I guessed, were family members. Others were obviously volunteers.

“Do you come here a lot?” I asked Paul.

“Once a month or so. I started coming after I moved to the city because someone told me volunteers got free meals.” Patty had four cards going at one time and never missed a beat. During the first game she was a B-17 away from BINGO and cursed out loud when an African American How to Kil _internals.rev 2/22/08 5:00 PM Page 65

woman at table eight beat her.

“Betty has Alzheimer’s. And she cheats,” Patty said.

“Wil ie, check her card.”

A few minutes into the third game, Patty tugged on Paul’s arm and yel ed, “Tel Luka to pay attention.” Paul cleared his throat, prompting me to look at my name tag. “Very funny,” I said. Then I inspected my card, stood up and shouted “BINGO!” as if I’d just hit the mil ion-dol ar jackpot at Caesar’s.

Initial y, I interpreted my win as a fortuitous event, but when I tried to claim my prize, Paul informed me that volunteers were not al owed to profit from the game. Not eco-nomical y, anyway. Mary Lou did give me a keychain, and a calendar fil ed with photos of Weimaraner dogs al dressed up in sil y outfits.

We left Bingo a little before dusk. Paul hustled me back to the Lower East Side where, if we hurried, he promised a spectacular urban sunset on the roof of the Pack-It-Away Mini Storage building that housed Bananafish’s rehearsal space.

By the time we got there it was nearly dark, but the night was warm and clear, and we could see the East River, the Brooklyn Bridge, and the Manhattan Bridge. Paul quizzed me on what I was looking at and I scored a dismal one out of three. I got the Statue of Liberty right, but thought Brooklyn was Queens, and mistook Staten Island for New Jersey.

“I’m not very good with directions,” I said.

“Not good?” Paul laughed hysterical y. “You’re geograph-ical y retarded.”

I walked to the edge of the building and Paul fol owed.

Although he could have stepped left to avoid touching me, he let our shoulders meet.

“I’ve been meaning to thank you,” I said, shivering even though it was stil so warm out.

“For what?”

“For not signing that deal. For not leaving Michael in the dust.”

Paul shrugged, but his face softened and I could tel my words meant something to him. A while passed before he nodded toward my wrist.

“Why did you do it?” he said.

It wasn’t a topic I was particularly keen on discussing, especial y with someone I hardly knew. But the way Paul was watching me, with the utmost level of attention, and no trace of judgment, made me wil ing to offer him a response.

“I was depressed,” I said, shrugging. “I was a stupid kid.

I didn’t mean it.”

Paul stared at me like he wanted more.

“I couldn’t feel anything,” I final y told him. “I couldn’t feel the truth. Does that make sense? Do you know what the truth feels like?”

“I know what it sounds like.”

We both smiled, and a moment of complete understanding passed between us before I had to turn away.

Looking out over the city, I was certain there was nowhere else in the world I wanted to be than right there, with the blue-black sky above me, the aromas of Chinatown and Little Italy mingling below me, and the man beside me who, when standing on a dirty rooftop with a mil ion twinkling lights behind him, looked a lot more like a lonely orphan than a cocky bastard.

I shifted to face uptown and tried to find Ludlow Street.

Al I saw were water tanks. I’d never noticed them before, these big wooden works of rustic, industrial art perched atop almost every building in the city like phal ic offerings to the patron saint of metropolitan life.

“Do you think I’m a coward?” I said.

Paul lit a cigarette and backed up against the railing.

There was a peculiar glint in his eyes as he watched me, and I swear he didn’t blink for a ful minute. Then he put his cigarette between his teeth and held it there while he reached down and flicked a chunk of tar off his shoe. After he took the cigarette from his mouth he said, “Why would you say that?”

6“I know you know I was supposed to fly here, and that I chickened out. Now you know I’ve tried to chicken out of a lot of things.”

Pointing at me, he said, “First of al , there’s nothing cowardly about a person who has the guts to take a knife to their wrist. And there’s also nothing noble about being fear-less. How much do you wanna bet the last man standing in a battle is usual y the biggest fool of al ?” Absorbing his words was like taking a drink of hot tea.

They burned on the way down, but soothed my insides once they had time to cool off.

We were quiet for a while. Then Paul said, “I almost did it once.”

“Did what?”

“Kil ed myself.”

The confession alone was shocking enough. It was the stark, unapologetic fierceness of his tone that frightened me.

“
Why
?”

“I was depressed,” he said with a smirk.

“Did you real y want to die?”

“No one commits suicide because they want to die.”

“Then why do they do it?”

“Because they want to stop the pain.” Once again, his lack of guile was unsettling. But his words resonated somewhere inside of me.

He took a drag off the cigarette, raised his mouth, and sent three smoke rings into the air. Watching them dissipate, he asked me if I was happy.

But before I had a chance to respond, he said, “Don’t answer that. It’s a stupid question. I don’t believe in the myth of happiness any more than you do.” This is where Paul had it wrong. I did believe in the myth. I had to. Otherwise I don’t think I would have been there. Happiness is elusive, for sure. But like love, and music, I believed in it because I could
feel
it.