Good Kids: A Novel (11 page)

When I struck the last note, the Dumbans were quiet. A flake of toothpaste white paint drifted down through the bright light. At once, they lifted their chins and clapped. After I put Gordon’s bass back on its stand, I made my way off the unstage and lit a cigarette as I weaved through the crowd, and this time I really inhaled, and the nicotine was like little sewing machines under my skin.

Shapeshifter greeted me in its dark corner with four boyish grins. Gordon applauded with real force, real happiness, cleared of guilt. “See?” he said, to the rest of his band. “You’re lucky I’m quitting.” They closed their mouths and looked at me shyly, the three lanky, slouching Californians. I slouched shyly back. Gordon placed one hand on the back of my neck, set me between singer and drummer, and found a disposable camera in his bag.

“Smile, lads,” he said. “Say ‘new bass player.’”

It was a story everybody liked. Gordon liked it, I liked it, my new bandmates liked it. That was why it happened: for the story. Granted, I listened to Shapeshifter’s demo on a Walkman that night. Granted, I watched Shapeshifter’s set. If they had been bad, I wouldn’t have packed the next morning. If I had played “Heartbreak Hotel” badly, or tried to play a cool song and been
met with derision by the Dumbans, who would have rejected anybody trying too obviously to be cool, Gordon wouldn’t have pressed me on his band, and they wouldn’t have accepted me. But I didn’t pick Shapeshifter out of a hundred bands because I thought their music of all music was the music for me. Shapeshifter didn’t pick me out of a hundred bass players because of how I played. I was in the backseat of the rear station wagon, its crevices lined with Camel ash and Subway crumbs, the very next afternoon because we all liked the story of the boy who took the stage and had no fear and got in a car and drove off to California.

I liked how whorish it was, how fast. And when I arrived in Los Angeles, driving the lead wagon west, sun-dazzled, sweating in Gordon’s Cat Power T-shirt, the city lived up to a shocking number of clichés regarding whorishness and speed and commerce and art, because so many people, like me, had just arrived and were determined to make it live up to those clichés. I liked how Shapeshifter gave me an instant brotherhood. How, because of the fairy-tale circumstance in which we united, our brotherhood felt fated to be. But most of all, I liked the story because it was non-Dad.

To be specific, regarding its non-Dadness: I was not studying political science for ten years, organizing, parenting, and teaching for another fifteen, only to walk out on my family, in the name of a forsaken creative endeavor, at age forty-five. I was doing what my father should have done when he’d had the chance. I was going to settle myself in the right career path, and secure a wife I could stay married to before I had kids.

And, in L.A., the right career path seemed ready and willing to be claimed. If you’re somebody who spent much of your senior year of high school losing your voice trying to make yourself heard above a drummer in a basement, the moment you finally step into an acoustically perfect studio, sit on a hideous leather couch with the ink on a record contract drying in your messenger bag, and listen to an engineer adjust the timbre of your voice as it delivers a harmony line you wrote yourself, through evil-looking black speakers that hang from the ceiling and cost hundreds of
thousands of dollars, you are a lucky person. This happened to me at twenty-six, five years into my stay in L.A., when Capitol, flush with Coldplay money, offered us a deal. It was what happened afterward, the moment when the claiming of the career path was supposed to translate into actual cash, that proved problematic.

If advertisers had immediately licensed “This Is Just Wrong,” a vaguely suicidal dance anthem on Shapeshifter’s 2005 self-titled debut, our label would have kept faith, given us an advance to cut a second record. We would have kept faith in ourselves, and stuck together. But the consultants who advised the major advertising agencies on indie pop discovered us a year later, and by that time we were all sick of near homelessness and malnutrition and not having a job and not being students in order to be available for touring, and our drummer moved to Tucson for divinity school, and Deke, who had always been the heart of the band, our lead singer and our most graceful player, returned to being David, and rediscovered the ashram in Oakland where he’d been raised and taught to sing and play. I was the only one who chose to stay in Los Angeles, unless you counted Gordon, who hadn’t had anything to do with us for over five years and was now head animator on a long-running prime-time cartoon. There was no going back for me. I would find some other way to live in the corner of the country opposite Wattsbury, Massachusetts. Spiritually, geographically, non-Dadness, above all, had to prevail.

In 2006 Pepsi’s ad agency licensed “This Is Just Wrong” for a foreign-market TV commercial wherein ethnically indeterminate soccer players dribbled in an alley. The chorus went “We’re going down, down,” but everyone thought we were singing, “We’re going downtown,” and for over a year, this misconception provided all former members of Shapeshifter with a subsistence living. I paid off my debts with the first payment and used the credential to find work scoring a cable drama pilot called
The Spirits of New Orleans,
in which a white woman stopped a gang war by channeling the ghosts of the gang members whose deaths were being pointlessly avenged. Manufacturing limpid music with acquaintances for television was not as fun as manufacturing
undistinguished music with friends whose every rhythmic tic I’d come to know and anticipate. But it was good enough for me. It was sufficiently non-Dad.

I wondered, on Shapeshifter’s frigid zigzags through the prairie, odorous homecomings in orange desert light, and later, hunched over a mixing board in Universal City, blades of sun cutting through venetian blinds, what kind of person Khadijah had become. But I never indulged in a Google search. I was determined not to be a sentimental fool. And if I was right about the degree of influence Nancy exerted over her daughter, it was unlikely indeed that Khadijah Silverglate-Dunn lived in Los Angeles.

It seemed almost not to matter, sometimes, because the Khadijah in my imagination remained my confidante and adviser. For all my whorishness in the realm of work, I was puritanical in matters of love and sex. I kept the vow Khadijah and I had signed against the rusting wheel; I never cheated on anyone. All of my six and a half years in Shapeshifter, I moved from one steady girlfriend to another, each relationship lasting three to nine months. I was on tour, for much of this time, sleeping on couches, and when I wasn’t, I shared a tiny room with Deke in Koreatown. Because I could have no sustained domestic life with anyone who wasn’t a dude in Shapeshifter, my dating pattern was a lush four-week romance followed by a gradual onset of frost once I boarded the two-station-wagon caravan for a slog across North America. If I had cheated, it would have surprised no one. But the bag of cookies bursting from the pocket of my father’s quilted barn jacket—the memory was a whip my sense of loyalty wielded to subjugate my disloyal imagination. Whenever I was in danger with a woman not my girlfriend, once in the silver, Bacardi-sponsored tour van of a more famous band, once late at night in the Oregon summer house of a friend who’d just told me about a fight with her mother, the crumbs in the corduroy always saved me, tamed my desire. That and the shock audible in Khadijah’s breathing beneath the table in Gaia Foods. And a little Khadijah I kept in my head, asking: Who are you, in the end, anyway? Will you grow into a man? Or ferment into a Dad?

I
met Julie Oenervian on a blind date, insofar as it’s possible to go on a blind date with a person you’ve watched on TV at the Laundromat explaining to a wildlife biologist why she should be allowed to craft a Komodo dragon into a hat. For Julie the date really was blind. If she’d had the inclination to Google Shapeshifter, to see what I looked like, she hadn’t had the time. I could see her eyes pass over me as they scanned the bistro, in which an angry, talkative couple and a masticating, living-dead couple sat parallel in black wooden booths in the back, and a waiter in an apron stood by a Swiss resort poster from the twenties swaddling silverware in napkins. I was surprised at how tall Julie was, because I’d thought people who worked on camera were short. I stood and introduced myself.

Julie teased off thin green gloves. She looked at our fingers as we shook, avoiding my eyes. I sensed trepidation. I’d been drinking a glass of wine at the bar because I thought this was what people always did when they were waiting at restaurants. She would tell me later that something about my posture as I held the glass to my lips, slumped forward on the barstool, made me look old and bedraggled. It wasn’t until we faced each other across the dark, shiny table, with a dim beam of light falling between us, that she found out I had only a year on her. I was twenty-seven then. She was twenty-six. She’d been the host of an animal show on cable television for about six months.

“So you play music? When Gordon was like, ‘I have a guy for
you,’ which is such a Gordon way of saying it, I was like, ‘As long as he’s not just someone you think I should date because we’re both darkish people.’ He said you were a white guy who played white music.”

I quaffed the rest of my wine, hoping it made me look haunted. “My band’s barely functional anymore. We’re just going to be playing in the background of junk food ads from now on, if we’re lucky. Fostering childhood obesity is our legacy.”

“Well, Gordon says you’re indie rock. You should know: I’m not into that. Everybody’s like, ‘Neutral Milk Hotel. Fuckin’ Wilco.’ Ich. I like Jennifer Lopez and Destiny’s Child.” She lowered her chin, issuing this challenge, as if she might head-butt me.

“Which Destiny’s Child album do you like the best?”

She hesitated. “I couldn’t tell you which one. But in general, I’m more, grab your girls and get out on the dance floor. Hoist a feminine-coded drink. Say ‘woo.’ Pop R and B is my favorite genre.”

“What pop R and B albums do you like?”

She was silent. It occurred to me she didn’t actually know any. She was putting on a show to amuse me and/or herself.

Her short, rounded fingers played with each other around the base of her wineglass. “You’re laughing at me,” she said.

“I was laughing at myself for thinking something dumb,” I muttered, shaking my head. Saying it aloud would have been a questionable dating tack. But I couldn’t think of anything else to say, so I decided to be honest. “I was thinking, you look like a moon goddess in that silvery dress.” I sensed, from the way a muscle in her neck twitched, that I was becoming, to Julie, a person who was too nauseously cheesy to be in the same room with again. I repeated the words, “You look like a moon goddess in that silvery dress” in a bovine, phony-artiste voice. In this way, each playing a caricature of the person we feared the other would view us as, we became slightly vulnerable to each other.

Julie’s professional innovation was to be the TV safari guide
who responded to animals with comic detachment, rather than the infantile enthusiasm of the industry leader, Steve Irwin. The
Times
had called her “a real former wildlife biology grad student who occasionally speaks like Jon Stewart on the savannah,” and the analogy was apt. Julie was nowhere near as famous as Jon Stewart—
Julie vs. Animals
appeared on a science channel—but there was Stewart/Colbert in the gaze she trained on the natural world. (“This tree sloth hasn’t moved from his branch for forty-eight hours, and it’s like in college, when I dated theater majors who struggled with depression: You can hit him with a frying pan and you still won’t be able to make him get up and fight with you.”)
Julie vs. Animals
had begun as a serious, if youth-targeted, wildlife program, but since securing her place as a reasonably popular host, Julie had worked in more and more jokes, as if her ambition all along had been to transcend the demimonde of nature shows. This much the Internet had taught me.

“Do you want kids?” she asked. This was fifteen minutes later, as her fork approached the escargot. The snails bubbled in a metal plate that resembled a painter’s palette, each creature a pigment in a hole. “I want an infinite number of girls,” she continued, “and for them all to stay in my house when they grow up and spend my money.”

“I want to adopt two Ethiopians or something,” I improvised. I hadn’t really thought about it.

We ate steaks and sorbet and drained the bottle, and I paid, pretending I could afford to, and we strolled a block from Vermont Avenue to Hillhurst. She paused before a boutique.

The boutiques here in Los Feliz, east of Hollywood, weren’t like the designer-brand flagships on the west side. There, an air of secrecy prevailed, with chrome racks dispersed across concrete floors. The clerks nodded gravely at you, like you were a CIA agent summoned to their hangar to train with new weaponry. This was just a crowded storefront with white wooden floors, and the dress in the window was no extravaganza of Parisian silk. It was high-waisted, white, with red tulips climbing from the hem, hanging close beside a bare-breasted mannequin in a blue and green hippie skirt.

“What do you think of these?” Julie asked. “This is a test. You’ll find I’m very into tests.”

I was so pleased she’d implied there was a future between us that I was able to persuade myself I had a substantive comment to make.

“I’m absolutely pro this dress,” I said. “The tulips say, ‘If you water and nurture me, I’ll be bright and sweet-smelling.’”

“Acceptable answer. How about the one on the right?”

“It’s a little Pre-Raphaelite,” I said, digging in my past for a critical vocabulary. “It’s, ‘I’m that girl on the cover of
Reviving Ophelia,
’ but that’s cool.”

“Again, acceptable.”

On the next block of Hillhurst, we passed another midpriced boutique. “How about this one?” she asked.

It was a cerulean dress I intuited you could call a jumper if you wanted to, though I had only a foggy notion of what a jumper was. “It’s good,” I said. “It would make you look like a hot bluebird.”