I checked the directory, saw that Sow’s Ear Records was on forty-five, took the elevator up there, and breezed through a pair of beige glass doors into a waiting room, which was very swank. The decor reminded me of a seventies bachelor pad: black leather couches, thick shag rug, heavy glass-and-chrome tables covered with
Vibe
and
Rolling Stone
and the like. Carefully dim lighting. This last was a must, I knew, so musicians could wait there without putting their bloodshot eyes and track marks on display.
I slapped my fish on the marble reception desk. It made a good hard wet
thwack—I
swear to God, it sounded like nothing so much as a fish.
She
(reddish hair, green eyes, flower petal mouth, the sort of chick who makes you want to lean over and say to her oh so sweetly,
You must be
really
intelligent; how else would you have gotten this job?)
looked up and said, “Hi there.”
“I’m here to see Bennie,” I said. “Bennie Salazar.”
“Is he expecting you?”
“Not at this moment.”
“Your name?”
“Scotty.”
She wore a headset that I realized, when she spoke into a tiny extension over her mouth, was actually a telephone. After she said my name, I caught a curl to her lips, like she was hiding a smile. “He’s in a meeting,” she told me. “But I can take a mess—”
“I’ll wait.”
I deposited my fish on the glass coffee table next to the magazines and settled into a black leather couch. Its cushions sighed out the most delicious smell of leather. A deep comfort seeped through me. I began to feel sleepy. I wanted to stay there forever, abandon my East Sixth Street apartment and live out the remainder of my life in Bennie’s waiting room.
True: it had been a while since I’d spent much time in public. But was such a fact even relevant in our “information age,” when you could scour planet Earth and the universe without ever leaving the green velvet couch you’d pulled from a garbage dump and made the focal point of your East Sixth Street apartment? I began each night by ordering Hunan string beans and washing them down with Jägermeister. It was amazing how many string beans I could eat: four orders, five orders, more sometimes. I could tell by the number of plastic packets of soy sauce and chopsticks included with my delivery that Fong Yu believed I was serving string beans to a party of eight or nine vegetarians. Does the chemical composition of Jägermeister cause a craving for string beans? Is there some property of string beans that becomes addictive on those rare occasions when they’re consumed with Jägermeister? I asked myself these questions as I shoveled string beans into my mouth, huge crunchy forkfuls, and watched TV—weird cable shows, most of which I couldn’t identify and didn’t watch much of. You might say I created my own show out of all those other shows, which I suspected was actually better than the shows themselves. In fact, I was sure of it.
Here was the bottom line: if we human beings are
information processing machines
, reading X’s and O’s and translating that information into what people oh so breathlessly call “experience,” and if I had access to all that same information via cable TV and any number of magazines that I browsed through at Hudson News for four-and five-hour stretches on my free days (my record was eight hours, including the half hour I spent manning the register during the lunch break of one of the younger employees, who thought I worked there)—if I had not only the information but the artistry to
shape
that information using the computer inside my brain (real computers scared me; if you can find Them, then They can find you, and I didn’t want to be found), then, technically speaking, was I not having all the same experiences those other people were having?
I tested my theory by standing outside the public library at Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street during a gala benefit for heart disease. I made this choice randomly: at closing time, as I was leaving the Periodicals Room, I noticed well-dressed individuals tossing white cloths over tables and carrying large orchid bouquets into the library’s grand entrance hall, and when I asked a blond gal with a notepad what was going on, she told me about the gala benefit for heart disease. I went home and ate my string beans, but instead of turning on the TV that night, I took the subway back to the library, where the heart disease gala was now in full swing. I heard “Satin Doll” playing inside, I heard giggles and yelps and big scoops of laughter, I saw approximately one hundred long black limousines and shorter black town cars idling alongside the curb, and I considered the fact that nothing more than a series of atoms and molecules combined in a particular way to form something known as a
stone wall
stood between me and those people inside the public library, dancing to a horn section that was awfully weak in the tenor sax department. But a strange thing happened as I listened: I felt pain. Not in my head, not in my arm, not in my leg; everywhere at once. I told myself there was no difference between being “inside” and being “outside,” that it all came down to X’s and O’s that could be acquired in any number of different ways, but the pain increased to a point where I thought I might collapse, and I limped away.
Like all failed experiments, that one taught me something I didn’t expect: one key ingredient of so-called experience is the delusional faith that it is unique and special, that those included in it are privileged and those excluded from it are missing out. And I, like a scientist unwittingly inhaling toxic fumes from the beaker I was boiling in my lab, had, through
sheer physical proximity
, been infected by that same delusion and in my drugged state had come to believe I was Excluded: condemned to stand shivering outside the public library at Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street forever and always, imagining the splendors within.
I went to the russet-haired receptionist’s desk, balancing my fish on two hands. Juice was starting to leak through the paper. “This is a fish,” I told her.
She cocked her head, a look on her face like all of a sudden she’d recognized me. “Ah,” she said.
“Tell Bennie pretty soon it’s gonna stink.”
I sat back down. My “neighbors” in the waiting room were a male and a female, both of the corporate persuasion. I sensed them edging away from me. “I’m a musician,” I said, by way of introduction. “Slide guitar.”
They did not reply.
Finally Bennie came out. He looked trim. He looked fit. He wore black trousers and a white shirt buttoned at the neck but no tie. I understood something for the very first time when I looked at that shirt: I understood that expensive shirts looked better than cheap shirts. The fabric wasn’t shiny, no—shiny would be cheap. But it glowed, like there was light coming through from the inside. It was a fucking beautiful shirt, is what I’m saying.
“Scotty, man, how goes it?” Bennie said, patting me warmly on the back as we shook hands. “Sorry to keep you waiting. Hope Sasha took good care of you.” He gestured at the girl I’d been dealing with, whose carefree smile could be roughly translated as:
He’s officially not my problem anymore
. I gave her a wink whose exact translation was:
Don’t be so sure, darling
.
“Here, c’mon back to my office,” Bennie said. He had his arm around my shoulders and was steering me toward a hallway.
“Hey wait—I forgot!” I cried, and ran back to get the fish. As I slung the bag from the coffee table into my hands a little fish juice flew from one corner, and the corporate types both jumped to their feet as if it were nuclear runoff. I looked over at “Sasha,” expecting to find her cowering, but she was watching it all with a look I would have to call amused.
Bennie waited for me by the hall. I noticed, with satisfaction, that his skin had gotten more brown since high school. I’d read about this: your skin gradually darkens from all those cumulative years of sunlight, and Bennie’s had done so to a point where calling him Caucasian was a stretch.
“Shopping?” he asked, eyeing my bundle.
“Fishing,” I told him.
Bennie’s office was awesome, and I don’t mean that in the male teenage skateboarding sense—I mean it in the old-fashioned literal sense. The desk was a giant jet black oval with a wet-looking surface like the most expensive pianos have. It reminded me of a black ice-skating rink. Behind the desk was nothing but view—the whole city flung out in front of us the way street vendors fling out their towels packed with cheap, glittery watches and belts. That’s how New York looked: like a gorgeous, easy thing to have, even for me. I stood just inside the door, holding my fish. Bennie went around to the other side of the wet black oval of his desk. It looked frictionless, like you could slide a coin over the surface and it would float to the edge and drop to the floor. “Have a seat, Scotty,” he said.
“Wait,” I said. “This is for you.” I came forward and gently set the fish on his desk. I felt like I was leaving an offering at a Shinto shrine on top of the tallest mountain in Japan. The view was tripping me out.
“You’re giving me a fish?” Bennie said. “That’s a fish?”
“Striped bass. I caught it in the East River this morning.”
Bennie looked at me like he was waiting for a cue to laugh.
“It’s not as polluted as people think,” I said, sitting down on a small black chair, one of two facing Bennie’s desk.
He stood, picked up the fish, came around his desk, and handed it back to me. “Thanks, Scotty,” he said. “I appreciate the thought, I really do. But a fish is bound to go to waste, here at my office.”
“Take it home and eat it!” I said.
Bennie smiled his peaceful smile, but he made no move to retrieve the fish. Fine, I thought, I’ll eat it myself.
My black chair had looked uncomfortable—I’d thought, lowering myself onto it, This is going to be one of those hellish chairs that makes your ass ache and then go numb. But it was without question the most comfortable chair I had ever sat in, even more comfortable than the leather couch in the waiting room. The couch had put me to sleep—this chair was making me levitate.
“Talk to me, Scotty,” Bennie said. “You have a demo tape you want me to hear? You’ve got an album, a band? Songs you’re looking to have produced? What’s on your mind.”
He was leaning against the front of the black lozenge, ankles crossed—one of those poses that appears to be very relaxed but is actually very tense. As I looked up at him, I experienced several realizations, all in a sort of cascade: (1) Bennie and I weren’t friends anymore, and we never would be. (2) He was looking to get rid of me as quickly as possible with the least amount of hassle. (3) I already knew that would happen. I’d known it before I arrived. (4) It was the reason I had come to see him.
“Scotty? You still there?”
“So,” I said. “You’re a big shot now, and everyone wants something from you.”
Bennie went back around to his desk chair and sat there facing me with arms folded in a pose that looked less relaxed than the first one, but was actually more so. “Come on, Scotty,” he said. “You write me a letter out of nowhere, now you show up at my office—I’m guessing you didn’t come here just to bring me a fish.”
“No, that was a gift,” I said. “I came for this reason: I want to know what happened between A and B.”
Bennie seemed to be waiting for more.
“A is when we were both in the band, chasing the same girl.
B
is now.”
I knew instantly that it had been the right move to bring up Alice. I’d said something literally, yes, but underneath that I’d said something else: we were both a couple of asswipes, and now only I’m an asswipe; why? And underneath that, something else: once an asswipe, always an asswipe. And deepest of all: You were the one chasing. But she picked me.
“I’ve busted my balls,” Bennie said. “That’s what happened.”
“Ditto.”
We looked at each other across the black desk, the seat of Bennie’s power. There was a long, strange pause, and in that pause I felt myself pulling Bennie back—or maybe it was him pulling me—back to San Francisco, where we were two out of four Flaming Dildos, Bennie one of the lousier bass players you were likely to hear, a kid with brownish skin and hair on his hands, and my best friend. I felt a kick of anger so violent it made me dizzy. I closed my eyes and imagined coming at Bennie across that desk and ripping off his head, yanking it from the neck of that beautiful white shirt like a knobby weed with long tangled roots. I pictured carrying it into his swank waiting room by his bushy hair and dropping it on Sasha’s desk.
I rose from my chair, but at that same moment, Bennie got up, too—sprang up, I should say, because when I looked at him, he was already standing.
“Mind if I look out your window?” I asked.
“Not at all.” He didn’t sound afraid, but I smelled that he was. Vinegar: that’s what fear smells like.
I went to the window. I pretended to look at the view, but my eyes were closed.
After a while, I sensed that Bennie had moved closer to me. “You still doing any music, Scotty?” he asked gently.
“I try,” I said. “Mostly by myself, just to keep loose.” I was able to open my eyes, but not to look at him.
“You were amazing on that guitar,” he said. Then he asked, “Are you married?”
“Divorced. From Alice.”
“I know,” he said. “I meant
re
married.”
“It lasted four years.”
“I’m sorry, buddy.”
“All for the best,” I said. Then I turned to look at Bennie. He was standing with his back to the window, and I wondered if he ever bothered to look out, if having so much beauty at close range meant anything at all to him. “What about you?” I asked.
“Married. Three-month-old son.” He smiled, then—a waffly, embarrassed smile at the thought of his baby boy, like he knew he didn’t deserve that much. And behind Bennie’s smile the fear was still there: that I’d tracked him down to snatch away these gifts life had shoveled upon him, wipe them out in a few emphatic seconds. This made me want to scream with laughter:
Hey “buddy,” don’t you get it? There’s nothing you have that I don’t have! It’s all just X’s and O’s, and you can come by those a million different ways
. But two thoughts distracted me as I stood there, smelling Bennie’s fear: (1) I didn’t have what Bennie had. (2) He was right.