The Privileges (21 page)

A few minutes later he was asleep, his cheek sunk against his shoulder, his lower lip drooping. Not a flattering look, Adam thought, and closed his eyes.

There was a template for everything somewhere, an overgrown headwater of the original and unprecedented, and you might hack away in search of it your whole life long and never find it. Or, on the other hand, you might. Jonas hated having his ignorance exposed. On the M79 bus coming home from school some fat guy wearing board shorts even though it was about forty degrees out tried to peek over his shoulder to see what he was listening to on his iPod. Jonas showed him the screen. The guy made a condescending face:
“Reheated Joy Division,” he said, and Jonas nodded in agreement, like what-can-you-do, but then he couldn’t wait to get home and get on the computer and find out who Joy Division was. And a couple of hours later he had to conclude that the fat guy was right. Mostly just by virtue of being older, but still. The more you learned about something you thought was good, the more holes like this you fell into. His own obsessions tended to bear Jonas backward in time, and eventually they led him to the sad but empirical conclusion that the popular music of his own day and age sucked ass.

In tenth grade this was not a mainstream view. If you wanted to be a music snob, fine, but you were expected to do so by raving obnoxiously about some band no one else had ever heard of because they’d only formed three weeks ago and played one gig. Jonas knew guys like that, older guys who ran the high-school radio station nobody listened to and who were flunking English because they spent so much time commenting on one another’s blogs, and even though he wanted nothing to do with them he had to cop to their being kindred spirits, because really they were jonesing for the same thing he was: the unspoiled, the uncorrupted, the pure of intent. They were just looking for it in the wrong place. Then of course there were all the kids in the happy mainstream, the kids whose moms drove them out to Nassau Coliseum to see some dancing boy-band lip-synch songs of longing vetted by a focus group of ten-year-old girls. That shit was beyond the pale. It was too hard to believe that there was such a thing as not even caring, not bothering to distinguish in terms of value between the simulated and the real.

There was something sort of priestly about him when it came to music, and as with most priests, some people respected his outlook and some people just found the whole attitude a bit much. Certainly it put him outside the realm of anything girls might be interested in. And there was another big downside to having such an exacting ear, which was that it tortured Jonas to know how mediocre and ordinary his own band sounded, himself not excepted. They were never going to be good. Still, he practiced and practiced. The others were blissfully optimistic, which was, he thought, a lovely thing to be able to be. They did a decent “Sweet Jane,” because really if you
couldn’t get that down what hope was there for you? They played together once or twice a week in an old boathouse near the FDR Drive, a property that their lead singer’s father had bought up but hadn’t yet gotten a zoning abeyance to convert. It was hard to find places in the city to rehearse—probably easier to find places to perform, which was unfortunately where the fantasies of Jonas’s band-mates tended to drift anyway.

Girls did sometimes come to their rehearsals, though. Even senior girls like the completely unattainable Tori Barbosa. It proved once and for all the tremendous magical properties of rock and roll, Jonas thought, that even a band that sucked as bad as they did still attracted girls. He was the youngest among them and had the reputation of being the best musician as well, but that was because he was the only one who bothered to practice outside of rehearsal. One of the most depressing manifestations of their lameness was how much time they spent naming themselves. Haskell, their singer, thought some preemptive irony was in order and wanted them to call themselves The Privileged, or The Privileges. The notion of preemptive irony made Jonas want to kill himself; since he was always trying to interest them in a more rootsy direction anyway, he kept suggesting The Headwaters, like a kind of quest for the source rather than just some bar band-style aping of that month’s Top 40. But every time they wrote it down and looked at it, somebody would say, “The Headwaiters?” Every time. Then Alex, the drummer, had a revelation while watching a film in 20th Century U.S. History and so their name, at least until the next time they decided to argue about it, was Run Bobby Run.

With the cars roaring by on the FDR outside the boathouse door, they summoned the attention span for a passable version of “People Who Died.” Everyone was impressed with Jonas’s solo, and a couple of the spectators even came over afterward to tell him so, but at the end of the evening of course all the girls went off with the older guys and Jonas called the car service to come take him home. He needed to study, and he needed to sleep, but surplus adrenaline wouldn’t really permit him to do either; instead he turned on the record player and put on his headphones. Lately he was on a serious
bluegrass kick. There was no end to that stuff—you were always stumbling on these amazing old 78s or field recordings that, the first time you played them, went off in your head like little bombs. He’d think so-and-so was a discovery of his and then learn later that, to real aficionados of the music, so-and-so was like Shakespeare or Tolstoy. His ignorance, he sometimes felt, was boundless.

He saw a shadow fall across the line of light that came in from the hallway, under his bedroom door. It was his mom, he knew, just checking to make sure he was back home. He didn’t even need to take the headphones off; he shifted around in his chair so it squeaked a little, and the foot shadows moved off again. Someone was always awake in that apartment. He opened up his cell and checked the time: 1:52. Then he turned back toward the blue lights of the planetarium outside his window.

What the hell ever happened to country music, anyway? It used to be so fucking dark it took your breath away. Just a few more weary days and then I’ll fly away. Now it was a museum of itself, a pander-factory full of Vegas-style reactionaries in thousand-dollar hats. What was good about it was never coming back. Jonas slid the volume up and put his feet on the windowsill and listened until he saw the sun starting to brighten the planets below him.

In the morning he came upstairs to breakfast feeling temporarily okay after a shower and drank the remnants of some kind of smoothie April had left in the fridge the night before. She passed him on her way
out the door. She was part of that universe at school, the Tori Barbosa universe, and friends of his—total strangers, for that matter, kids from other schools sometimes—would come up to him and ask about her in ways that were pathetic and stalkerish. His sister was sort of a stranger to him but not enough of one that he could see her in the way everybody else apparently saw her.

“You look like shit,” she said, and patted him on the head.

Adam came in through the front door drenched in sweat from a run. Jonas liked running too—he hated sports in general but there was something ascetic about running, something monkish—but there was no way he could hang with his father, who kept a chart of his own split times and was talking about entering next year’s marathon. Adam sat down across from him and asked him how everything was going, and by the time that conversation was over Jonas had gotten permission to go down to Sam Ash and buy himself a banjo. Cynthia was still asleep and would be until after everyone else was out of the house.

It sounded hypocritical, he knew, to be so hung up on originality and authenticity when he was playing in a cover band; but that choice had been dictated less by aesthetics than by the discovery that songwriting was brutally hard. They all gave it a try at some point and the results were uniformly atrocious, with hurt feelings to contend with on top of that. So they went back to covers, but Jonas kept thinking that they could at least aspire to cover some material their audience didn’t already know by heart. That way at least you could argue you were maybe doing the music a service. He came to rehearsal one night with the banjo and a CD he’d burned of Jimmy Martin’s “You Don’t Know My Mind,” which was one of the scariest songs he’d ever heard in his life. He’d even found sheet music for it online, though only he and Alex knew how to read music anyway. He played the CD for them and was pierced by the looks on their faces even though on some level it was exactly the reaction he’d expected.

“It’s interesting,” Haskell said, “but I don’t think we can pull off that whole blues thing. You least of all, actually.”

“It’s not blues,” Jonas said. He felt exposed now, in the way one
does when one confesses to a crush, and he didn’t want to make things worse by getting into an argument. Still, he couldn’t help it. “At least know what you’re talking about before you dismiss it. This guy was a poor drunk from the Tennessee mountains. He wasn’t trying to get on MTV or get his shit in a Verizon commercial. He had nothing but what came out of him. And you guys get all excited about The Strokes or whatever when it’s all just prepackaged bullshit.”

They looked at each other in a way that reminded him horribly of how young he was. “Look,” Haskell said gently, “you want to talk authentic, how authentic would it look for me to be singing about being a Tennessee dirt farmer or whatever? That’s not who I am.”

“Who are you?” Jonas said.

There must have been some expression on his face he wasn’t aware of, because Alex said, “Who needs a beer?” But it was past that point already. “I can tell you who I’m not,” Haskell said. “I’m not some self-hating son of a zillionaire. I’m not some condescending hypocrite poser. So you and your banjo fuck off. Grab your fucking Gibson and back me up on some songs about getting drunk and laid because when we are through here I am going to get both of those things. Authentic enough for you?”

Tori Barbosa was right there listening to the whole thing. It seemed too humiliating to walk out. Red-faced, he strapped on his guitar and looked at Alex, who tapped his fist to his heart a couple of times and then counted off “Sweet Emotion.”

For Christmas, as usual, Jonas’s parents asked him what he wanted; he said he wanted all twelve volumes of the Alan Lomax Library of Congress recordings, on vinyl, and since they didn’t have the first idea how to acquire such a thing, he bought it himself online and put it on their credit card. Over the winter he got the flu and had to miss a few rehearsals, and when he found out they’d had some kid from Collegiate sitting in for him, he texted Haskell and said he was out of the band. He spent evenings in his room with the headphones on, reading liner notes about Lomax and how he literally tromped through fields with a microphone in his hand and a
huge reel-to-reel slung over his shoulder, recording things no one had ever recorded before. The guitars and the banjo sat on their stands in the corner. The forties, the thirties, the twenties: that, he kept thinking, was the time to be alive.

In May, just a week before the end of the school year, Ruth’s husband Warren died. He’d had a lung removed two weeks earlier but never made it home from the hospital. Even though his cancer had been diagnosed two years ago, Cynthia was almost as surprised as if the news had come out of nowhere; her mother’s peerless flair for pessimism had her convinced, right up until the final hysterical phone call, that Ruth was probably making too big a deal out of it.

The four of them flew to Pittsburgh the next morning. Adam asked Cynthia if she planned to stay on for a few days after the funeral to “help out” and Cynthia said she didn’t know, it hadn’t occurred to her. Indeed there was a whole barrage of quotidian death-consequences that somehow had never occurred to her. Ruth came to the door to greet them in what for her might have passed as high spirits; she exclaimed, as well she might have, over the changes in her tall and comely grandchildren, who had not seen her in years and who were not entirely sure how to act but instinctively determined to err on the side of restraint. “It’ll be so nice for you to see your cousins,” Ruth said to them, and at the word “cousins” Cynthia saw them indiscreetly catch each other’s startled eyes.

The funeral was still three days away. Ruth kept stressing how much she would require Cynthia’s help with various decisions but then it would turn out that she had already made those decisions anyway, some of them so far in advance as to border on the ghoulish. Cynthia had little advice to offer in any case. She had no experience with funerals but beyond that she could bring only a generic approach to the question of how Warren’s life ought to be celebrated. He was a sort of machine of dependability. He was also a former managing partner at Reed Smith and a surprising amount of ceremony was dictated by that, which was helpful if also a little perverse, as if the law firm were a branch of the armed services with attendant
arcane, unquestioned rituals. Ruth wanted a closed casket because toward the end he’d looked too little like himself. They could put a lot of makeup on him but they couldn’t put the weight back on. She went instead for a large framed photo to be placed on top of the casket itself, a formal portrait commissioned when he’d been made managing partner: round-faced, smiling appropriately, projecting, with his glasses and his silver hair, a kind of well-fed competence.

The house was too small for all of them to sleep in; they spent the day there, battling their own restlessness as an assortment of Tupperware-bearing geriatric strangers consoled them on their loss, and then at night they escaped to the Hilton downtown, where they splurged on every silly, expensive amenity as a way of getting the hours of toxic solemnity out of their systems. The tips Adam doled out had the bell staff literally fighting for his attention. He’d never really liked Ruth: he didn’t do well with negative people. This time was different, obviously, and he was more than willing to make allowances; still, he wasn’t sure how to take it whenever she acted as if she and Adam were as close as mother and son, not just when others were around but even in the rare minutes when the two of them were alone together. She didn’t seem to be performing, either, as she often did. When he smiled and stood aside in her kitchen doorway just to let her pass, she put her forehead on his shoulder and closed her eyes, and Adam felt as he might have if a woman in a strange city had mistaken him for someone else.