“Together they fit how we’re going to sound, which is free dub-rock fusion.”
“He could be right,” Pam said. “He did without an amp for so long, he’s the Charlie Haden of punk rock. I mean, relatively speaking.”
“Pam’s the worst lead guitar player in the universe,” Joe said. “Her fingers move like it’s freezing out and she lost her mittens. But in Marmalade Sky, she plays massive power chords she knows how to play, and I play the tunes.”
“I play like I’m wearing the mittens,” she corrected him. “It’s the evil influence of Simon. He wants everything to sound like it’s been dragged through candied heroin.”
“He’s your roommate and in your band?” Daniel asked. “You must be close friends.”
“We’re extremely intimate.” She rolled her eyes.
“It sounds to me like you should cut him off and never look back. I mean, as a disinterested third party.”
“I didn’t mean to imply that he’s on drugs. There are more things at the bottom of the barrel than drugs.”
“Can you please play keyboards?” Joe asked Daniel.
“You truly don’t want to hear me try.”
“You have to,” he insisted. “We can’t have a band unless we’re all in it!”
“I want to put out the band on my label, not play in it.”
“It will be absolutely no fun being rock stars and getting laid and everything like that if you aren’t in the band. You have to play something!”
“It’s better money,” Pam pointed out. “A manager gets twenty percent, but as a band member you’d get a third.”
“Twenty off the top plus a third puts me at forty-seven percent,” Daniel said.
“And we make it all back from record sales and touring!” Joe said.
“I have a day job already,” Pam said.
“Me too,” Joe said. “I mean touring in the city.”
“What I have is more like a night job,” Daniel said. “But fine, let’s talk about how I’m going to hang it up because I’m raking it in with art for art’s sake.”
“We’re going to be rolling in it,” Joe said, as though reminding him of an established fact, “because I’m writing the songs.”
Daniel and Pam exchanged a look that said the band would fail no matter what, if only because Joe was writing the songs. There was a shared bemused affection for him in the look already. “You’re going to be the next Neil Diamond,” Daniel said.
“Hasil Adkins,” Pam said.
“Roy Orbison!” Joe said.
WHEN THE KUNG FU MOVIE WAS OVER, THEY GOT TAKE-OUT PIZZAS AND WALKED TO Daniel’s place to eat and listen to records. The first track he put on was “Suspect Device” by Stiff Little Fingers. Joe danced, throwing his arms up to jerk his body from side to side. Daniel put on Hüsker Dü’s “Real World,” Gang of Four’s “Love Like Anthrax,” and Mission of Burma’s “Forget,” until Joe said he was tired of dancing. He volunteered to sing a song he had written earlier in the day. Daniel and Pam exchanged the look again. Joe took a deep breath, clapped his hands to indicate a rumba, and sang, with so many North-African-style adornments that every syllable was stretched into three or four:
This world is small
I see you all
Killing my head
With how you bled
And now you’re dead
Dead, dead, dead
He stretched the final “dead” into about ten syllables.
Pam said, “Joe, man! Are you emotionally troubled? Is there something I don’t know?”
“Seriously, I think the melody’s okay,” Daniel said. He went to the rear corner of the room, under one of the windows to the courtyard, and returned with a warped flea-market classical guitar, wrongly strung with steel instead of nylon. It wasn’t tuned. He gave it to Pam and said, “Here, play it on guitar.”
Twenty minutes later, they had an intro, verse, and guitar riff. Daniel drummed gently with spoons on a book. Pam sang the song, and Joe sang the bass line. Finally he said, “That was the A part of the song. Now comes the B part.”
The lyrics to the B part were about skateboarders. Daniel said, “Wait. Is this the chorus or the bridge? Does this have something to do with the A part?”
Joe said firmly, “It’s about skateboarders. They’re dead. There was gravel at the corner of Fifth and Fifteenth, and they were hanging on to the bumper of a cab, and poof !”
THE NEXT MORNING, PAM TOLD SIMON THAT SHE WAS GOING TO THE PRACTICE SPACE without him because she could afford it on her own. Ten dollars an hour isn’t much for a programmer. She said she was done with the Diaphragms. The band had never worked. She had a new project that might work. To forestall any hopes on his side, she said he wasn’t welcome in the new project.
The whole routine made her nervous. She stood by the door, guitar on her back and effects bag in her hand, making this insulting speech as if expecting immediate capitulation, knowing better than to expect it.
Simon said, “That’s my practice space, not yours. I already advertised for a new guitar player.”
“So why aren’t you going there now?”
“I don’t have one yet. But I will.”
She set her things down and said, “Simon, I know our love was beautiful, but we need to break up.”
“I’m not moving out. I can’t even afford to practice by myself. You’re the one who just said ten dollars isn’t a lot of money. You move out. You can afford a place of your own. Just go.” He turned sulkily toward the cereal box on the table and sprinkled a few more squares of Chex into his slowly warming milk.
DANIEL DIDN’T WANT TO REHEARSE ON SUNDAY MORNINGS. HE DIDN’T SEE ANY REASON to get up early, cross town, and pay money to do something they could do in his home if they didn’t get carried away with the volume. Over miso soup on Saint Mark’s Place—his first date with Pam—he said, “Why spend money when we can just turn down?”
“Tube amps don’t work like that,” she said. “They need to warm up to sound right, and they need to sound right to warm up. There’s no headphone jack.”
“Why don’t you get a transistor amp, so you can practice at home?”
“No way,” she said. “I’ve been down that road. We rehearse under realistic conditions.” She sketched her experience with the Slinkies, saying it was time to move forward, at least into the eighties, now that it was 1990. There was nothing embarrassing about being behind. The sixties had hit pop culture around 1972, just as punk was taking off. “You ever see Birth of the Beatles?” she added. “We need to work like busy bees to get to the tippy top.”
“Darby Crash died the day before John Lennon.”
“Todd is God,” she said. “But yeah, maybe Darby’s what put Chapman over the edge.”
Daniel suppressed a smile. He had nothing against John Lennon, and no sympathy for the man who shot him, but knowing that Todd Rundgren had composed “Rock and Roll Pussy” about Lennon, that Lennon had responded with an open letter to “Sodd Runtlestuntle” in Melody Maker, and that Mark David Chapman had cared enough to take the affair to its logical conclusion while wearing a promotional T-shirt for Todd’s latest album—it was a kind of knowledge he didn’t expect a woman to