The eighties hipster practiced outward conformity in his dress and bearing. The mod, the glam rocker, the rockabilly, the punk, even the prep risked and defied the wrath of the homophobe, but the eighties hipster could get served a beer in the Ozarks.
The eighties hipster was the short-lived cap of spume on the dirty wave of working-class higher education, and it is right to mourn him, even if he did devote too much time to the search for authentic snuff videos and photos of nude Khoisan women.
ON A NOVEMBER SATURDAY IN 1990, PAM WENT OVER TO JOE’S PLACE TO LISTEN TO records. It was raining in sheets that whipped around the corners of buildings and blowing so hard that women in heels were taking men’s arms to cross the street. Cars were plowing bow waves through puddles of scum.
Joe had a visitor. As he was letting her in the apartment door, a man emerged from the bedroom with a square sheet of black plastic in his hand and said, “Hey, man, you have the Sassy Sonic Youth flexi!”
“I subscribed to that magazine the second I heard of it,” Joe said.
“It’s not long for this world,” Pam said, hanging up her coat. “What’s the demographic supposed to be—thirteen-year-old girls who fuck? Advertisers really go for that.”
“Nice to meet you,” the stranger said, stepping forward and holding out his hand. “Daniel Svoboda.”
“Pam Diaphragm,” she said. “Sassy is the dying gasp of straight mainstream pedophilia.”
“I read it for the political coverage,” Daniel said, satirizing the readers of Playboy.
“I first heard of it from a bald guy who does in-flight programming at Eastern,” Pam said. “So can we listen to this flexi?”
“I’m a Sonic Youth completist,” Joe said, taking the single from Daniel and arranging it on the turntable. “The only record I don’t have is the Forced Exposure subscribers-only single ‘I Killed Christgau with My Big Fucking Dick.’”
“That’s not a real record,” Daniel said. “Byron Coley made that up.”
Byron Coley was the editor of Forced Exposure and Robert Christgau was the chief music critic of the Village Voice, as Daniel did not feel called upon to explain to Pam. Nor did he find it necessary to tell her, one condescending beat later, that the record existed after all.
She found herself attracted to him. He had not asked her real name. His sophistication and knowledge seemed to resemble her own. She commenced phrasing a friendly remark. She put the brakes on. They say that you truly know a man only after you’ve seen him with his male friends, but this friend was Joe, who might not count. Furthermore, it had been demonstrated in empirical trials that a woman gravitates to the sexiest man in the room. Here, again, Joe was setting the bar low. She said instead, “It’s Christgau who’s a big fucking dick.”
“I wouldn’t go that far,” Daniel replied. “But you can’t grade music on a bell curve. Mediocrity is not the norm. Most records either rock or they suck.”
“I’m kind of over grades myself. Did you just get out of college?”
“Yeah. You should see my awesome transcript and GREs. That’s how I qualified to work as a proofreader.”
“I’m a programmer, but I never finished high school.”
“Silence, lovebirds,” Joe said, dropping the needle. “Prepare to rock.”
DANIEL LIVED IN AN ILLEGAL APARTMENT WHOSE EXISTENCE HE HAD DEDUCED THROUGH spatial reasoning. It was located above a shop on the edge of Chinatown, on Chrystie Street near Hester, facing a fenced-in, filthy park. Betwixt a dripping air conditioner and a sidewalk black with grime, Video Hit sold hot coffee, durian fruit, fermented tofu, one-hundred-film subscriptions to the latest Hong Kong action movies on VHS, lemon-scented animal crackers pressed from microscopic dust, fortune cat figurines, and introductions to local women whose photos blanketed the wall above the cash register.
It was his first inviolable space. Growing up, he had shared an upstairs room with two brothers. The three were close in age. One was a wrestler who wanted to be a doctor. The other was an adopted Somali epileptic with one leg. He couldn’t stand up to the wrestler, and with the Somali, he wasn’t allowed to try.
Technically it was a loft: high-ceilinged, unfinished storage above a retail space. It was accessible only through the store, which closed for five hours nightly via the lowering of an impenetrable steel gate to which he had no key. If he stayed out past one o’clock, he was sentenced to stay out past six. He was young. He dealt with it. The floor above his was connected to a jewelry factory next door through a hole in the intervening firewall. He heard footsteps in the factory at all hours of the day and night. Victor and Margie, his landlords, had tried putting inventory in the loft, but the floor sagged, and they didn’t want to clutter up their shop with a pillar. For storage they used the basement, accessible through a trapdoor in the sidewalk.
They were immigrants from Hong Kong. When he suggested they let him move in, they saw the offer as money for nothing. They didn’t want to rent to Chinese who would overpopulate the place. Daniel’s meek demeanor suggested to them that he wouldn’t cause trouble.
He’d been to rent parties in Soho, where a “loft” was a white-lacquered, vast-windowed domain of cleanliness and prosperity in a historic building framed in cast iron. His building was salmon brick, with wooden beams black from dry rot. You could drive a butter knife into his doorframe and turn it around. He guessed the structure was 150 years old.
His stairway was steep, and the door to it was narrow enough to be mistaken for a closet. On one occasion, soon after he moved in, a workman set down a new cooler and trapped him upstairs. It took serious yelling and pounding before Victor shifted it enough for him to go to work. He bought himself a fire safety ladder with hooks for the windowsill. When he was at home, he padlocked his door from the inside.
He assumed—romanticizing things a bit—that his trap-like secret lair had been set up for illicit activities and abandoned after a raid. From his first glimpse, he had taken away vague impressions of battered furniture and dusty slips of paper, which he looked forward to examining closely. By the time he moved in, the place had been swept and every portable object was gone, including the linoleum.
He installed a sink and a hot plate. He showered with a handheld, standing in a galvanized tub. He dumped the wash water down the toilet, which could always use a good hard drenching. On the street side, he observed blackout rules, with shades drawn during the day and opaque curtains at night. His rear windows opened on a small and sometimes sunny courtyard, miraculously free of garbage, cool and fresh, with no poisonous dry cleaners, no restaurants blowing rancid exhaust, and no living creatures but rats and pigeons. They squeaked and made coo-cooing sounds, but didn’t otherwise interfere with his life.
HE WORKED NIGHTS, PROOFREADING DOCUMENTS FOR A BIG LAW OFFICE IN MIDTOWN. The job required an eye for detail. He had trained his visual perspicuity for four years at taxpayer expense while acquiring a B.A. in art history from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. He knew there was such a thing as a job in his major, but unless he counted the college faculty, he’d never met anybody who had one. His superfluous college career could be traced to—or blamed on—a sexy substitute teacher who rambled on about art and revolution for two days in eleventh grade when their regular world history teacher had the flu. He never forgot her. At any moment, he could have improvised a touching essay about how he was first inspired by Mrs. Ellis to believe in a power higher than Jesus Christ.
But eleventh grade was too late to adopt the praxis of art and create a portfolio adequate to gain admission to some kind of secular humanist academy. He could play an instrument—the clarinet—but stiltedly, due to a lack of instruction and role models, and it had never seemed potentially useful to him for purposes of art music, which he naively understood to include progressive rock. He gave it up when he got to college, because