Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life (20 page)

This is how it goes when the DF is falling in love, especially when he doesn’t know, or won’t admit, he’s falling in love. It’s not the lightning bolt or the sunset embrace. It’s the way she infiltrates your most sacred LPs, quietly erases the
y
from your collection. And so, while it’s true that Erin and I were never officially “together,” and while I insisted to all who would listen that Erin was not “the one” because I was looking for a wife (dammit), one powerful enough to compensate for the many inadequacies I would bring to the marriage—by which I mean some kind of magical mommy/whore/nurse figure who would ravage me then bear my children and mother them with effortless expertise, all while subsidizing my writing career and keeping my blue moods at bay—while all this was true, pathetically, inexorably, it was also true that, by the spring of 2004, most of the albums I loved made me think of Erin.

Then Chuck Prophet came to town (at last) and I got two tickets and gave them both to Erin, which I saw as an act of generosity because I’m just that stupid. We were really and truly broken up. And Erin was enough of a Fanatic, God bless her, to take those tickets and push her way to the front of the crowd, because Chuck, it turned out, could
shred
. She called to tell me about it that same night and we both imagined each other naked and agreed how it was great we could still be friends.

Then Erin mentioned something else: she’d been accepted into an MFA program in Southern California, one of the most prestigious in the country. I was happy for her, overjoyed really because now that she was leaving, I mean, what was the harm in getting in a few last licks?

That was the summer of Cee-Lo Green and The Sleepy Jackson and Princess Superstar, whose song “Bad Babysitter” captured the moral depths to which we aspired. This was just another idyll,
because I didn’t believe in long-distance relationships, and that was fine with Erin, she wasn’t looking for a husband. So there was no big scene when she left that fall. I sent her off in her little Honda with enough mixed CDs to survive the big square states.

We missed each other more than we let on. Speaking for myself, I learned to avoid certain records in certain moods, though often I listened to them anyway. If I found a new record that I knew was going to be special, I would sometimes try to guess which songs Erin would like. Later, around bedtime, I’d call her and play them over the phone.

I continued to go on dates. That winter, I took out a doctor. Smart, attractive—Jewish even! We got back to her apartment and I began rooting around for her record collection. “Where’s your music?” I said casually.

“Oh,” she said. “My schedule is pretty hectic.”

“But right now,” I said. “We could listen to something right now.”

She smiled, a little indulgently, as if to say,
I don’t know how it is with you writers, but this is how it is with us doctors
, though what she said was maybe worse: “I think I’ve got a Sade disc in my car.”

And so I found myself at home again, in the familiar rooms, and though I knew it was a mistake I put on one of Erin’s favorites,
Postcards from Downtown
by Dayna Kurtz, a collection of songs so full of romantic woe it might as well have come with a bottle of whiskey. And I was doing okay, really, until the moment, four and a half minutes into her rueful epic “Paterson,” when the song seems to be drawing to an end, and instead, the time signature slows and we hear the trill of an accordion and violins and plucked guitar and Dayna begins singing in Italian of all things—
Oh mio coure!
—over and over, and listening to this voice echo about my bedroom, its unending dejection, made me realize that keeping Erin at bay was no longer an option, that my loneliness was not some precious artistic prerogative
or exalted state but simply an ongoing regret. I needed her in close now, where we could hear the music together.
¹⁴

Erin and I were lying in bed, stoned, when she started in again about her “single days,” which is a special code phrase she uses when she wants to remind me about the time Kip Winger nearly propositioned her.

This took place during Erin’s first year in grad school. She’d been invited by an old friend to a VH1-sponsored event, which combined the channel’s parasitic passion for aging celebrities with its ongoing campaign to resuscitate the music of the eighties. Many of Erin’s hair metal heroes were on hand to support the guest of honor, Jani Lane, the former lead singer of Warrant, who was struggling to mount a comeback.

It is fair to suppose Erin was lonely. It is fair to suppose she had a few drinks, and that these drinks helped steer her into the seat next to Kip Winger at the table where the musicians were signing merchandise for fans. Many of these fans were (and I quote) “slutty girls with their tits hanging out” whose sexual availability was understood. But to hear Erin tell it, Kip hadn’t been interested in them.

To hear Erin tell it, Kip had been interested in Erin. It pleased Erin a great deal to be the object of Kip Winger’s lewd banter, and it pleased
her to be able to report to me the next day, on the phone, that she had been the object of Kip Winger’s lewd banter and that he had discussed oral sex and implied his expertise and stopped just short of inviting her back to his hotel room to prove his claim. Or maybe he had invited her. It was impossible to know what happened, and she enjoyed this ambiguity also.

So this was her Kip Winger Story and she was telling it to me once again, now that we were old married farts with a kid sacked out across the hall. The pot had made her nostalgic. Then she started in with certain Facts About Kip mentioned in previous tellings, such as the fact that Kip had studied ballet and could kick his foot over his head while wearing leather trousers. Kip had studied classical music and composition. Kip was not a tall man, but he had aged superbly. Then she got online and showed me a YouTube video of Kip playing classical guitar in leather trousers.

This was, technically, our date night.

“I guess I didn’t realize that Kip Winger was such a Renaissance man,” I said. “There’s probably a whole genre of literature devoted to Kip.”

“That’s right,” Erin said. “There is. It’s called Kip Lit.”

“Wow,” I said.

“Kip Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest,”
she said. “Just for instance.”

“How’s that one go?”

“Kip’s ballet moves are ruled so insane he’s put in an asylum. He seduces the head nurse, who’s hot, but not in a slutty-fake-titted way, and she helps him escape so he can fulfill his dream of becoming a sex-positive therapist specializing in cunnilingus.”

Now another sort of couple—a couple composed of at least one person who isn’t a Drooling Fanatic—would have probably dropped Kip Winger as a thematic element at this point and proceeded to the evening’s intended highlight: essentially comic sexual toil.

But my wife’s reverie demanded a response. I reminded her that I
was the one in the marriage who had spoken to Kip way back in 1989, when he was at the height of his powers, grand-jetéing his way through “Seventeen” and scheduling his groupies in fifteen-minute intervals. As my wife had probably forgotten, and I was now going to remind her, I had been a
professional music critic
once who possessed Kip Winger’s personal phone number and who, what’s more, had
covered the Grammys
. Once this was on the table, it hardly seemed fair not to provide a full account. My wife was lightly snoring now.

“Very funny,” I said.

In the end, we compromised. Rather than mocking each other’s Drooling Fanaticism, we spent the next hour fleshing out the Kip Canon:

Kip has a dilemma. Does he bang the totally hot Russian peasant babe, or does he go fight in the totally killer war? In the end, Kip decides to bang the hot Russian peasant babe,
then
fight in the totally killer war.

Kip decides to head to New York City, where he inadvertently ends up at a Moby show. Backstage, he asks Moby about a possible collaboration. Moby responds by biting Kip’s leg off.

Kip journeys to California as a migrant heavy metal bassist, enduring the prejudice of rich studio owners. Then his record goes gold and he hires Pamela Anderson as a wet nurse.

To reiterate: we were stoned.

I should add that Kip Winger continues to be a source of marital tension because my wife, in classic DF fashion, is convinced Kip will eventually read this and be offended. “I don’t want you fucking up any future encounters,” she told me recently.

“So it’s still on with Kip?” I said.

“It was never off,” she said. “I’m serious, honey. Don’t fuck this up for me. Kip still looks good.”
¹⁵

Burying the Dead with Ike Reilly

I first heard Ike Reilly in the late summer of 2001. My career was in free fall. I had a literary agent, but she hated my guts, and just to show her who was boss I stopped writing prose altogether. All I did in those days was crank tunes and poop out wretched poetry. The Fanatic itch was thick upon me. And so, when a friend mentioned that the Tufts University radio station needed community DJs, I signed right up. I was summer staff at WMFO, 91.5 FM (aka The Mofo), taking my shifts in the great yawning midweek hours when the listenership dipped to seventeen.
¹⁶

WMFO was where I found Ike Reilly’s debut,
Salesmen and Racists
. Reilly sounded like—well, what did he sound like? He sounded like Dylan, if Dylan had been Irish instead of Jewish and never left the Midwest and grown up listening to the Clash rather than Woody
Guthrie. He sounded like Lou Reed and Gil Scott-Heron fucking each other, then fucking the Pogues.

It was inevitable that I would introduce The Close to Ike Reilly, because The Close kept a close eye on my fetishes. I had met him down South, at one of those literary conferences where midlist authors go to feel like rock stars. He had arrived with a trunk full of literary magazines where his stories had appeared, which he spent the week pressing upon us, popping up out of nowhere, yammering in urgent Jerseyese, his mouth very
close
to our ears. He fixated on me, having decided that I was the big brother he’d never had, a delusion that both flattered and alarmed me, as did the revelation that he lived around the corner from me in Somerville. Nonetheless, The Close and I became friends, in part because I felt a moral obligation to rescue him from his staggeringly banal taste in music, by which I mean the many hours he spent trying to get me to listen to “these killer bootlegs of Dave Matthews in Atlanta.” One dose of Ike Reilly and I heard no more.