Naomi and Ely's No Kiss List (17 page)

This song is for the sake of the song.

My dad wants to school me in the noble ways of the Manhattan doorman, but what I’ve learned from my dad that’s actually useful is that you can insert a Shuggie Otis song in any position on any random mix and the song will work. As beginning, as transition, as closure.

And if you have any information regarding inspiration, I’m all ears.

Track 11
Grandmaster Flash: “The Message”

This song is for you.

It’s a really depressing song with a great beat and an unforgettable hook. You’re kind of a depressing person with a great look and an unforgettable smile—when you choose to flash its grandmasterliness.

New York City—yeah, it’s a jungle just like the man says. I’ll be Tarzan if you want to be Jane. Hell, I’ll even be Jane if you want to be Tarzan. My mind is
open,
girl.

Yours could be, too—if you’d let it. You’ll let me text-message with you, you’ll appear at my band’s shows in the middle of the night, but live and in person in the building lobby? You barely have a word to say to me. Like there’s some line in the sand between the desk and the doormat that you’re too scared to cross.

RU4real?

Track 12
Nina Simone: “Ne Me Quitte Pas”

(
Merci,
Mr. McAllister, you bilingual freak. You fill up elevator space just like this song does.)

What’s the big deal with France? How come everyone wants to go there? Let me tell you about France. Their music sucks. Their movies suck. Their berets suck. Their croissants are pretty good, but the place overall still sucks. My family went there once on the way to visit Dad’s homeland family. EuroDisney. Need I say more?

Are you worried that if we have a real conversation, this is the kind of empty chatter that would fill it?

Let’s take the risk. Here’s a start: If I could choose a place to go, I’d choose . . . random spin of wheel of fortune . . . Madagascar. I feel like it might be one place in the world that’s about more than a Starbucks on every block. Want to come along?

Discuss.

Track 13
Jens Lekman: “F-Word”

Jag valde den här sången så at du skule bli förälskad i mej.
I chose this song to make you fall in love with me. (Thank you, Mr. Karlsson, the unexpected Swede in the penthouse apartment. Or should I say
“tahkk”
?)

Fuck it, here’s the stinkin’ truth: I’m just trying to be clever here. I hate myself for choosing a smart-ass song, like it’s not possible to make a mix for a beautiful girl without inserting some form of obvious ha-ha irony from the Smiths or the Magnetic Fields, etc. You have to admit it’s a cool song, though. I promise to balance it out with a pathetically sentimental song choice next.

Track 14
Buffy the Vampire Slayer: “Walk through the Fire”

This song is for you and your mom.

If you took a poll, I’m sorry to tell you that at least 80 percent of the residents in this building who know you or have come into contact with you would vote Yes, Naomi—she is a bitch.

Buffy could be a bitch, but cut the girl some slack—she once had to kill her true love in order to save the world. I get it, Naomi. You’re like Buffy. You have to make hard choices about people.

Speaking of hardness . . . would you be pleased or weirded out to know Buffy was the girl I used to dream about when, er, getting to know my high school self a little better? Never mind—consider the emission, I mean admission, rescinded.

When your mom noticed me watching a
Buffy
rerun on the little TV on the doorman desk one slow night on the job, she admitted that watching
Buffy
was her shared solace with you after your dad left. She told me how you cry and cry for Buffy. You cry when Angel shows up to be Buffy’s prom date even though they’d already recognized the futility of their true love and broken up. You cry when Buffy’s mom is taken away by natural instead of supernatural causes. You cry when seasons six and seven really don’t reflect the quality of seasons one through five except for the musical episode.

Those bitch-calling Naomi naysayers in the building wouldn’t know that at six in the morning, when my shift is ending, you rush out of the building and down the block to bring back coffee and bagels for your mom. That you hold her hand and walk her to Washington Square to see her off to work. To make sure she gets there.

Buffy
was my mother’s solace, too. I’d watch it with her on the good days. My brother would laugh at me and say how gay I was for getting all teary-eyed when Willow went mental after Tara died. Brother-man, love you, but who’s laughing now? Who’s the doorman / part-time band singer who inspires girls to throw their panties at him on the stage, and who’s the impoverished grad student making ends meet by go- go dancing at XXL, where boys slip dollar bills into his G-string?

Track 15
Kylie Minogue: “Come into My World”

This song is for the gays.

Track 16
Elliott Smith: “A Fond Farewell”

This song is for Bruce the Second.

You think he’s leaving you and takin gup with the enemy. But they really like each other, Naomi. Anyone can see it. They’re falling—and it should be a good thing. Let them have it. I volunteer to be the comfort of the in-between.

Track 17
Stevie Wonder: “As”

This song is for Ely.

Naomi,
did
you know that true love asks for nothing?

If you’ve made it this far on your personalized playlist, you surely now know that while Shuggie Otis works for any track position, Stevie Wonder—not really. Great music, the early stuff—but overpowering to the rest of the set. Do you agree?

But there’s a reason for the season. Stevie Wonder. The connection. He
played
piano. According to the tall tales of many longtime building residents, so did you and Ely. Your renditions of “Chopsticks” were legendary.

You offered me a glimmer of hope, so I’m sending some back your way.

I feel confident you and Ely will one day play “Chopsticks” again.

Track 18
Merle Haggard: “Blue Yodel”

This song is for the yodel.

My mom used to say nothing could cure blue moods like a good yodel. She taught me and my brother to yodel with the musical best: Jimmie Rodgers, Don Walser, Merle Haggard.

Go on, try it.
Yo-de-lay-eee-ho.

Track 19 and Hidden Track 19a
The Ramones: “I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend”

[and]

Prince: “If I Was Your Girlfriend”

This song is for both of us: the future?

The Ramones were greedy with their wannas. They wanna be sedated. They wanna live. They just wanna have something to do tonight. They wanna be your boyfriend.

I’d go for any of those wannas wit’ u.

Cuz
sometimes I trip on how happy we could be. Please!

BRUCE THE SECOND

OUT

“Why did you do that?” I ask him.

“What?”

He really doesn’t know.

“The kiss. Why did you kiss me like that? In front of everybody.”

It’s not that we haven’t kissed in public before. We’ve been kissing and making out a lot (to a degree), and sometimes other people are in the vicinity. If I had my way, I’d clear out Central Park for just the two of us, but I know that’s not about to happen, so I haven’t minded when he’s kissed me in places like that. Because I can’t wait, either. I’m always wanting to be close to him, in a way that scares me and occasionally makes me feel very, very happy.

But this time was different. He was kissing me to prove a point, and I felt beside the point.

We’re walking past the doorman station, and Gabriel’s nowhere to be found.

“I should call the super,” Ely says. “It’s not that I dislike the guy—he’s great. But it usually helps to have the doorman somewhere in the vicinity of the door.”

I’ve always wondered why there aren’t any female doormen (doorpeople? door attendants?) in New York City. It’s the last stronghold of Big Apple sexism, I guess. Nobody seems to mind it. Like it’s fine for a woman behind a reception desk to buzz you up or arrange a cab or call the police if you stagger in bleeding, but put her in a doorway and she’d presumably turn into a sobbing, helpless wreck. I want to ask Ely about this, but then I realize I’m sidetracking.

“Really,” I say, “why did you kiss me in front of everybody?”

Ely looks at me like I’m more than an idiot but less than a genius, and says, “Could you possibly believe it’s because at that moment I just wanted to kiss you, and I didn’t care who saw?”

Is that it? He’s certainly done it before—that spontaneous grab, that sharp detour into a dark doorway, that naughty (naughty!) ear-bite in the back of a cab. Just last night, he was kissing me at an ATM, delaying my transaction, hitting the button to translate it into Russian and Chinese (or was it Japanese?) so we would keep on speaking in tongues. I was so conscious of the cameras, of the thought that we were on some grainy videotape loop that a security guy monitoring the loop for two dollars an hour in India was going to post on the Web. It was a performance, but it was ultimately okay, because it was an anonymous performance. Not like at bingo, with everyone seeing.

But maybe it’s just me. Because I’ll admit it: Whenever he does it, whenever he so clearly wants me, there’s this undeniable part of me that’s thinking,
Why?
I am so much more Napoleon than dynamite, so much more Play-Doh than
Playguy.
He’s a twink and I’m a Twinkie, and I can never forget that. Never for one moment can I feel comfortable when he is so much more beautiful and so much more experienced than me. I wonder if this is why we’ve gone nowhere near having sex yet. Maybe the worst thing about me asking about the kiss is that I can’t believe that I alone am a good enough reason.

He doesn’t seem bothered by the question, though. Just a little bewildered. And since he’s always a little bewildered, it blends into the early evening. It’s not quite dark yet and we’re headed up to the Museum of Natural History, since it’s open late on Fridays and you can pay what you want without feeling like you’re cheating the mummies of their suggested retail price.

I haven’t gotten to talk to Ely all day, and I know I have to. It wasn’t the right time when I showed up at his apartment, since his moms were having a tense moment and Ely was excited to show me the model he was making for his architecture class. Then there was bingo, where I kept spacing, thinking about what happened this morning—I think I actually had bingo about four calls before I said I did, but I wasn’t paying enough attention to be sure. I was also hoping Mrs. Loy would say, “I’m knackered, you ponce!” which is something I’ve always wanted to work into conversations but never quite manage to. Like
bollocks.
Such a great word, no way to really use it. Not in my life, at least.

“Are you ready for ‘Smell!’?” Ely asks, since that’s where we’re going—this megapopular exhibit about smell that everybody’s been talking about.

“I gave myself a nostril enema just this morning,” I tell him.

He laughs. And I love when he laughs, because he’s not one of those people who laughs at just anything. You have to earn an Ely laugh, and when I’m with him, I actually find myself saying things that are laughworthy. I enjoy myself more.