He let go of her arm and took a step backward. To her dismay, he started chanting. “Yo! Mutant MC, keep off the lady, hot like coffee, she got the beauty—”
“Don’t be a goober,” she said, giving the coffee man a quick fifty cents and moving away from the cart with the hot liquid that would arm her against Joe. “Stop the rapping. Never rap. Or, should you feel compelled to rap against your own better judgment, don’t try to sound black.”
“But that’s what rap sounds like.” Saddened, he looked down at the sidewalk.
She almost felt guilty. She said, “I didn’t mean it that way. Rap if you want. Just not where anybody can hear you.”
“I’m actually a singer,” Joe said. “You want to hear a song? I write one almost every day.”
“Sure,” she said.
They walked north together, and he sang his tune du jour, loudly, with hand motions.
BEING AROUND JOE WAS RELAXING FOR PAM. THEY COULD TALK AND TALK, AND NOTHING she said ever offended him. Nobody picked on her once they saw him, and nobody could pick on him for long. If she got nervous walking without him, she would stop off and buy a cup of coffee. Hot coffee in a guy’s face will stop him deader than a bullet, long enough for a skinny girl in jump boots to get away.
Daniel Svoboda lived in a state of persistent ecstasy. He had no lease. His rent was a hundred a week in cash.
He was an eighties hipster. But that can be forgiven, because he was the child of born-again Christian dairy-farm workers from Racine, Wisconsin.
The eighties hipster bore no resemblance to the bearded and effeminate cottage industrialist who came to prominence as the “hipster” in the new century. He wasn’t a fifties hipster either. He knew nothing of heroin or the willful appropriation of black culture. He was a by-product of the brief, shining moment in American history when the working class went to liberal arts college for free. Having spent four years at the foot of the ivory tower, picking up crumbs of obsolete theory, he descended to face once again the world of open-wheel motorsports and Jell-O salads from whence he sprang. Eyes schooled on Raphael and Mapplethorpe zoomed in on Holly Hobbie–themed needlepoint projects and xeroxed Polaroids of do-it-yourself gender reassignment surgery. Reflexively they sought the sublime beauty and violence they had learned from Foucault and Bataille to see as their birthright, and they were not disappointed.
An eighties hipster couldn’t gentrify a neighborhood. He wasn’t gentry. His presence drove rents down. His apartments were overpopulated and dirty. Landlords were lucky if he paid rent. He wasn’t about to seize vacant lots for community gardens or demand better public schools. All he wanted was to avoid retiring from the same plant as his dad.
The eighties hipster was post-sensitive. Having risen from poverty to intimate acquaintanceship with political rectitude (for collegiate women, it was the era of lesbian feminism), he knew what sensitivity was. He internalized it. He put a fine point on it. His speech acts reflected his awareness that its possession made him part of a vanishingly small minority. He drew attention to everyday prejudice and injustice through overemphasis. Witness his habitual attention to the crimes of Hitler and Stalin or the ill-fated band name “Rapeman,” borrowed from a hero of Japanese comic books.
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