You Must Go and Win: Essays

by Alina Simone

  What I thought was that Russians really loved that word: idiot. It was like an honorary pronoun. Then I did whatever one does in these situations: shook my head, did my best impression of a sympathetic look. I wondered how far things could actually go before I overcame the constraints of politeness, picked myself up, and walked out the door. As if in response to this internal question, Georgi sat back down heavily, knees thrust out, and checked his watch.

  “Shit, it’s already three thirty,” he said, taking out another cigarette and tapping it on the inside of his wrist. “Play me something.”

  I stood there uncertainly, staring down into the furry crack between the wall and the bed.

  “What? Do you need a water or something?”

  It occurred to me that the fastest way to get out of there was just to do as Georgi asked. Even though he’d never explained what it was, exactly, that I was auditioning for, I had a feeling it was best not to know and stood up to get my guitar. While I set up, Georgi sat there in his stained pants atop a tangle of wires on the bed, waving the smoke away from his face. Though poignant and memorable in its own way, it was the kind of little scene that somehow never gets immortalized in a snow globe. I took a breath and sang a song that I’d written a long time ago, about a girl in a bad situation.

  This time I didn’t wait around to hear a verdict when I was done; I just bent down to unplug my tuning pedal and began stuffing my guitar back into its case. Georgi watched me pack my things wordlessly. It was suddenly very quiet, except for the radiator making wet, dying noises.

  “It seems to me,” he said slowly, “that you have your own thing going on.”

  “I guess,” I said.

  “So do you need me or not?”

  It was an oddly dramatic thing to say and implied a level of intimacy that I hoped we’d never attain. Nonetheless, I decided to make the most of my Katharine Hepburn moment. I took the handle of my guitar case, straightened up, and raised my chin. I looked Georgi in the eyes.

  “Um … maybe?” I said.

  “Then let’s go,” said Georgi, tossing his cigarette butt into the dirty mug. “I have another girl to meet at the train.”

  Waiting for the F on the elevated platform, I pulled out my cell phone and called Ben, a friend of mine from back home who had just finished his MFA and moved to Brooklyn to make it as a video artist. We had a habit of calling each other to complain whenever things went badly, which is another way of saying that we were always in touch.

  “Ben, I’m such a loser,” I said as soon as he picked up the phone. I’d felt ready to yammer on for hours, but found myself running out of things to say after fifteen seconds. Apparently nothing had actually happened.

  “Whatever, dude,” Ben began—because everyone who grows up in Massachusetts tries to mask their lack of familiarity with the sun by adopting the vocabulary of a surfer—“sounds like that guy’s just a douchebag. Another douchebag in a sea of douchebags.” Then Ben excused himself to go finish up a video starring a toy pony head on a stick. He’d shown the toy to me the last time I’d come over. When you pulled the pony’s ear it whinnied, “I like it when you brush me!” in a creepy electronic voice. I let Ben go. I understood; he was busy and had parents of his own to disappoint. The F train arrived and I settled into a window seat, pressing my cheek against the scratchiti as it pulled away from Kings Highway. Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds. Swinging out over Brooklyn, above miles of brick and concrete and soapstone-faced buildings rolling out to the horizon, I had to admit: the odds were against me.

  Maybe my fatal flaw had been that I’d set the bar too high, measuring myself against the expectations of people born with dictator-defying superpowers. The mailmen would make for more appropriate role models. The mailmen weren’t facing a hail of bullets or trying to feed a family on one potato a day. Theirs were ordinary problems—crotchety old ladies, July thunderstorms, hungry dogs. A bag of mail and one day to distribute it; this was the kind of challenge even someone like me could cope with, given the proper footwear. As the train passed Ditmas Avenue I noticed that I should have been feeling terrible, but somehow, felt okay. I was a directionless twenty-seven-year-old facing a dwindling probability of success, but hey, at least I didn’t share the final bottom-feeding rung of the Craigslist ladder with someone like Georgi. There is a certain peace that comes with the realization you aren’t ruining anyone else’s life but your own. I pondered this strange new calm and wondered: Had I just limboed below that final humiliation threshold, beyond which nothing else could hurt me? Had my resolve finally hardened, like the feet of some fire-walking swami? Was my luck about to change? There was no answer to these questions or to the question of what to do next. Nothing left to do now but enjoy the view until the train dipped back underground and carried me on toward Manhattan, where even with the weight of the whole city over my head, I wouldn’t feel a thing.

  DOWN AND OUT ON HOPE STREET

  I should have known better. For one thing, they were very, very young, these people with the new record label. They had the blond, healthful look of the kids I never spoke to in high school, and after meeting them for the first time I referred to them forevermore as “the children.” I had no idea how they found me. They just appeared one day at the Carrboro Music Festival, to catch a show I was playing in the back of a coffee shop. This show is what convinced them that I should be the first artist they signed. And wasn’t that flattering? Wasn’t that exciting? I had to admit … maybe it was.

  I was getting tired. It had been a long, hard year full of near misses. A year is a long time to sit on an album, especially your first. Recording it hadn’t been easy. I’d had to go back to New York, where my producer, Steve, let me crash for six weeks in his studio while I rehearsed with my band. The studio was housed in an abandoned storefront, its doors covered in graffiti, its windows cased in iron bars. The building faced a church—the Universal Outreach Ministries of Deliverance—and a sign that read, “Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy laden and I will give thee rest.” Outside men patrolled the street, hawking car stereo parts, often with the wires still trailing from the back. The place was little more than a cavernous squat and it had no heat. When I arrived, in mid-October, it was already cold. By the time I left it was freezing. I often practiced and recorded wearing a coat and scarf, warming my hands on a mug filled with boiled water between takes. There was no one to complain to—Steve had already been living this way for five years.

  But at least while I was recording I was driven by a sense of purpose. Once we were done, I had no idea what to do. I had no manager, no label, no booking agent, no anyone. Knowing that it wasn’t bound to do much good, I tried contacting labels myself, sending polite, to-whom-it-may-concern notes to “info@” email addresses. At the same time, a few supportive journalists reached out to industry people on my behalf. After a few months of this, with the relatively vague, or in some cases quite explicit, encouragement of a handful of label owners and manager types, I set off on tour, hoping to impress one of them with a live show. But invariably the bigwigs never showed. Or if they did, they slipped off without a word while the lights were still dim. The hot leads grew cold. Rejections poured in. Not knowing what else to do, I got in touch with Lea, a well-respected publicist in New York who liked my work, for advice. She told me that a good music lawyer should be able to help shop my record and gave me a list of lawyers to contact who didn’t charge hefty up front retainers.

  Of the five lawyers I contacted, two expressed interest in working with me but not before seeing me perform live. I hastily booked a show at Sin-é on the Lower East Side, and a few weeks later got in the car for the now-familiar drive from Carrboro to New York City. That night, it began to snow. By the following day the storm had exceeded all expectations, dumping more than two feet of snow in Central Park within the span of twenty-four hours and metastasizing into the biggest nor’easter
in the city’s history. One of the lawyers wrote to tell me he couldn’t make it to the show—his flight from Seattle had been canceled. The mood at Sin-é was grim when I arrived that night, the bartender polishing an empty bar, the stage manager busy stage managing nothing but a depopulated void of joy. Aside from a few fearless friends, the club was deserted, and so I sang into the blinding lights, knowing only darkness lay behind them. When I was done, I made my way to the back of the club, where the other lawyer was waiting. He watched me approach, unsmiling.

  “Let me ask you something,” the lawyer began, without introduction. “What kind of label are you looking to sign to?”

  I thought about it for a moment and then named a decent midsized indie, one I liked a lot but whose bands most people had probably never heard of.

  The lawyer snorted into his drink. “I hate to be the one to tell you this, but you have a long way to go before a label like that would consider signing you.”

  As the lawyer enumerated all the reasons he couldn’t represent me—my songs all sounded the same, I had no stage presence, my lack of hit singles—it dawned on me that he didn’t hate being the one to tell me all this. That he was, quite visibly, delighted to be the one to tell me. And as he wound down, I considered the awfulness of getting back to Brooklyn with all my gear and wondered whether I should just cab it straight to the Universal Outreach Ministries of Deliverance. I was certainly heavy laden and badly in need of rest.

  Finally noticing I was looking the slightest bit shattered, the lawyer’s tone softened.

  “Listen, I know how it is. I used to be a musician myself,” he said. “I love music. I even named my daughter after a Kinks song.”

  Reassured that the lawyer loved music—just not mine—I stumbled outside, where I promptly slipped on the ice and dropped my prized tube amp into a snowbank.

  So by the time the children “discovered” me, my capacity for trust was much depleted and I’d all but given up on the music industry. Yet I couldn’t help but find their enthusiasm infectious. Flock Records, they called themselves. “Come join the Flock!” they cried out happily. But no one knew who the Flock was. The Flock had never flown anywhere before, not even a lazy circle around the perimeter of Greensboro, where they’d apparently hatched. Still, they didn’t blink at the cost when I insisted on high-quality packaging, on full radio and print promotion, on tour support. The children had money, and that was good, right? But they didn’t have jobs and had only just graduated from college, so where did they get that money? I couldn’t ask them where the money came from. You can never ask anyone where the money comes from. You want to, but you can’t. So I would drive out to Greensboro and meet up with the children at the Green Bean on South Elm Street and we would talk about promo and printers and distribution and every other sweet thing under the sun, except for where the fuck all their money was coming from.

  The night before leaving for a three-week tour in Europe, the children came to meet me at the Cat’s Cradle in Carrboro, where my band was opening for a faded nineties alt-rocker. I gave them the masters for my album and the original artwork for the cover. We went over all of the contents of the envelope together and then they each gave me a warm hug. By the time I returned to North Carolina, they assured me, the manufactured copies of my album would be ready. They told me that I rocked. I told them they flocked. We said goodbye.

  Two weeks later, twenty minutes before I was set to go on stage at a club in Reims, France, I received a message from one of the children that began “I don’t quite know how to put this” and went on to explain that all of their capital, $43,000—an amount they kept in cash for “obvious reasons”—had just been stolen by their partner, leaving them without enough money to cover this month’s rent, let alone put out my album. I reread the message again and again, wondering if I had missed something. I mean—hello?—was there anything “obvious” about why someone would keep $43,000 in cash hidden in, like, a peanut butter jar under the bed, and not a bank like everybody else? I was devastated. I had told everyone I knew that my album was coming out and now all of those people would have to be untold. They would ask me what had happened, and I would have to repeat this story again and again until it became some kind of cautionary fable. “The Indie Rocker and the Hare.” Or, “The Boy Who Cried Flock.”

  Even worse, I was back to square one with the album—the album no one wanted. My thoughts turned black. Wanting something and having nothing: these two ordinary conditions have a terrible binding energy, like matter and antimatter, that under pressure will accelerate and collide. I was a bomb in a briefcase, a terribly violent, ticking thing housed in an ordinary shell that somehow managed to smile, eat food, and carry on conversations as though nothing had happened. On some level, I understood that now was not the time to make hasty decisions; it was the time to stop, think, reassess, chant Om Shanti, look at the bigger picture, assert this was just a minor ripple in the whirlpool of life and that no one had died, remember? Yet some irreversible process had been set into motion.

  By the time I got back to the States I’d made up my mind: I was leaving North Carolina. True, I was the one guilty of letting hope and naïveté cloud my better judgment. True, the children were incompetent at best, the doe-eyed masterminds of an international crime syndicate at worst. But the real villain here, I’d decided, was North Carolina, where nothing good had ever happened for me and nothing good ever would. My resentment was already long simmering. Josh and I had moved down south only so that he could take a job at the university, and though I’d managed to keep freelancing for my old job back in New York, I found telecommuting isolating and lonely. Without any friends or family within nine hours’ driving distance, I spent my first year in Carrboro utterly homesick. Everything felt foreign: the sweet humid air, the breathing carpets of kudzu strewn across the rolling hills, the families of deer that traipsed through our backyard each day, grazing the past owner’s abandoned vegetable garden to the ground. One night, not long after we’d arrived, Josh took me out to a nice restaurant in town. It was warm outside, so we had dinner on the back patio, under the stars. When I returned home, I discovered a deer tick stuck to my bare leg. Now, coming from New York City, I was no stranger to vermin. The sight of a mouse or cockroach skirting the wall of a restaurant was hardly enough to merit interrupting a meal. And once, stepping out of some dive in Chinatown, a rat had run over my foot. But as urban encounters with wildlife go, this somehow felt worse. As I pulled the tick’s pincers out of my leg, I thought to myself: I miss that rat.

  The thing I didn’t expect, though, was how much I missed water. Oceans, rivers, lakes. I had lived near water all my life and suddenly felt as though I’d simply been folded into an endless tube of tree wallpaper. Green is a beautiful color until it stabs you relentlessly in the eye all day long, closing in with all the monotony of a cucumber-only diet. I’d heard that there was an artificial lake about a half-hour drive south from our place in Carrboro, but “artificial lake” had a scary, Ray Bradbury-ish ring to it. Stubbornly, I held out for a real lake with actual water. Then I discovered there was a real river nearby, the Neuse, but a quick browse on the internet turned up a very unfortunate piece of news: in 1999, Hurricane Floyd flooded the lagoons of the state’s numerous hog farms, dumping 120 million gallons of pig shit into six of North Carolina’s major rivers, including the Neuse. This led to the spawning of something called Pfiesteria piscicida, a microbe that gnaws giant holes through fish and which The New York Times once described as “something out of a horror movie.” What did Pfiesteria piscicida have to do with the children or my album or anything, really? Nothing. But suddenly, after my record deal fell apart, I decided that I could not stand to live another minute in the microbe’s vicinity. I was sick of it all: the trees, the humidity, the Bible school advertisements informing me that God Doesn’t Have a Computer but He Can Still Answer Knee-Mail. I was tired of the awesome independent record stores, the club owners who always went out of their way to help me, th
e supportive local media, and nice Southern people in general. I was a seething ball of hate and all I wanted was to get back to the Northeast, where this quality would be most appreciated. Not forever, just for six weeks.

  But what about leaving Josh? Poor Josh. He had been so excited when the children offered to put out my album—perhaps even more excited than I was—and had such great hopes that this would finally give me a feeling of belonging that I had lacked since we moved down to Carrboro. When he read the message from the children, he put his head in his hands and stayed that way for a very long time. He knew it was only a matter of time until my inevitable meltdown. So Josh gave me his blessing—I could leave and we would reunite in New York for the holidays, only three weeks away—but with one caveat.

  “Since you’re clearly freaking out, I just think it’s very important that whatever happens, we remember to be nice to each other.”

  “I’m not freaking out!” I said shrilly.

  “You are,” he continued. “So just remember: be nice.”

  I decided I would rent an apartment in Brooklyn. I didn’t know Brooklyn all that well, but I had two good friends, Ben and Eugene, who lived in Park Slope. Sitting at my desk in Carrboro, I found a nice apartment in Park Slope on Craigslist. It was a one bedroom, and in the photos the place looked good—maybe a little girly for my taste, but tidy and well furnished. I exchanged two emails with a woman named Priscilla before sending her a check. Once the deal was done, I forwarded Ben and Eugene a note with my new address. A few hours later, my phone rang.

  “Did you even bother to look at a map?” It was Ben.