You Must Go and Win: Essays

by Alina Simone

  “It depends. There’s a range.” Then Lea mentioned a few of my favorite indie bands and told me their labels had kept Shellac on retainer for as long as eighteen months, easily spending tens of thousands of dollars to promote a single release.

  “Well, can you … would you mind giving me the low end?” I asked.

  Then Lea leaned forward and gave me her number. And I couldn’t help it—I giggled.

  I walked out of Shellac’s offices that day feeling as though I’d just disembarked from the mothership onto a planet that looked very much like Earth, but was subject to completely different laws of gravity. I had always assumed that there was only one way to “make it” and that was to keep grinding your way through the club circuit until one day the right person happened to be in the room. I had really never considered that money could help lubricate the process.

  Once I started keeping my ear to the ground, I found no shortage of stories. I heard about bands renting out venues themselves and booking nationally known acts just to guarantee themselves an opening slot, bands who bought up all the tickets to their own shows, then slapped “sold out” posters all over the city, bands who spent a small fortune branding themselves as the next big thing with videos and merch and tricked-out tour vans, bands who hired Shellac before they even released their first EP. All the bands I’d ever played in had done everything themselves—silkscreening posters, booking tours, writing press releases. But Shellac’s roster included the kinds of bands I’d always assumed were totally DIY as well: punk bands, garage bands, Riot Grrrls, metalheads. Thus enlightened, I found it hard to go back to my old ways. The Wednesday-night gig at Bar B on the Lower East Side and the featured-performer slot at the Ristra Lounge Open Mic Night in Hoboken lost whatever luster they once had. And living with Sarah only made things worse. By week two we’d settled into a routine. She would come home from something fabulous—a sold-out show at the Bowery Ballroom, a private party sponsored by Ray-Ban, a meet-and-greet with some Rolling Stone journalist—breathless with the day’s successes. Her client had just gotten selected for an Urban Outfitters compilation, her client was performing live on Conan next week, her client had just landed a profile in the L.A. Times … and on it went. I would listen to the flood of good news with a growing sense of unease. Sufficiently recovered from my trauma with the children, I had started looking for a new label again. Only this time it was considerably less easy. My leads had long since dried up. The A list had given way to the B list, and now the names of labels I was contacting read like an exotic-heirloom-seed catalogue.

  “So did you reach out to anyone new today?” Sarah would ask on her way to the fridge.

  “A few …”

  “Cool. What ones?”

  “Um. Thistle Heart, Unyielding Crotch, and … um … Shoot the Muffin, I think. There may have been one more.”

  “Oh,” Sarah would say, crinkling her cute nose in confusion. Her clients were on Interscope or Matador, or some other undeniably cool and fashiony label. “I haven’t heard of any of those … but I’m sure they’re all really great! I hope one of them says yes, right?”

  Then she would dash over to the CD player, yelling, “By the way, we just got this in today. It’s an amazing new band from Bristol you’re going to love love love!” and I would grimace as the room grew loud with bright, happy sounds.

  The only way to get internet access in the apartment was to cadge it from the restaurant next door. And the only way to cadge it was by sitting on the very edge of Sarah’s bed, balancing on one quarter of a butt cheek while resting a laptop on a partial slip of window ledge. I often chose to go to the coffee shop down the street instead. The music in the coffee shop was so loud that it was impossible to work, and yet every seat was always reliably full of people working. I would sit there composing sad queries to labels or following up on sad queries to labels. After two weeks of near constant effort, I’d turned up only one possibility, a small label in Acme, Michigan. They asked for a copy of the album, and as I wrote their address on a CD mailer, I wondered whether Acme was a real place. Hadn’t Acme been the name of the company that manufactured the flawed contraptions in those old Road Runner cartoons? The Dehydrated Boulders and Harpoon Guns and Super Leg Vitamins that always reduced Wile E. Coyote to a tiny, smoking turd? Free association wasn’t helping lift my spirits any. Especially now that it was truly winter, and Brooklyn’s color-saturation knob had been dialed down to zero. One evening as I returned home after another afternoon of fruitless searching, a skinny man with an expensive haircut jogged up to me.

  “Excuse me,” he said. “Would you go out with my drummer?”

  I stared at him. He looked sober.

  “Um,” I said, reshouldering my bag. “No.”

  “We rehearse right there,” he said, pointing to a building on the corner of Roebling, as if the drummer’s sheer proximity might sway me.

  “Uh huh,” I replied tetchily and resumed walking, picking up the pace.

  “Listen. He, like, really, really needs to get laid,” the skinny man continued sotto voce, trotting alongside me.

  “Sorry to hear that.” You, my friend, I thought to myself, are what make people hate Williamsburg.

  “He’s a totally nice guy—”

  “Dude?”

  “—and, to be honest? It’s kind of an emergency.”

  I wheeled around to look him in the eye.

  “I? … am married.”

  I’d said it and now it was very quiet. I had gotten married at twenty-five, an age by which no small number of women already have kids and mortgages as well, but here in Williamsburg, on those blocks populated mainly by rootless twenty somethings, saying “I’m married” was like announcing you were poisonous. It was like saying “I just swallowed a radioactive spider and if you stare at me for one more second, you will die too.” Being married was a secret I’d kept for weeks from the first band I joined in Brooklyn, living in well-justified fear of the inevitable condemnation. A girl singer for a Brooklyn band was not supposed to be married; she was supposed to be cute and available, living a carefree life that involved drinking endless beers without ever gaining weight.

  “Oh my God!” Sarah had whispered when I’d broken the news. “What’s that like, being married?”

  “Well, it’s like … dating someone …” I’d replied slowly, careful not to scare her, “ … only you have to, like, date that same person every day. Forever.”

  The man with the haircut looked at me as though a cockroach had just crawled out of my mouth.

  “Oh,” he said. “Shit.”

  And then he ran up Hope Street, in search of someone hotter and more fuckable. I made sure he had fully faded from view before turning into our doorway. Then I unlocked the metal gate and stepped onto an echoey landing full of trash bins and debris. There was a bright bar of light beneath our door and I could already hear the music blasting before I turned the knob. When I walked into the living room I found Sarah, hair tied back with a sparkly wrap, broom in hand.

  “Great news,” she beamed. “I found us a third roommate!”

  A third roommate? But the apartment only had two bedrooms and weren’t they both full of Sarah and me? I remember Sarah mentioning that she and Becca had once rented out the ledge on top of the bathroom cube. It was a shelf of space maybe three feet high with just enough room for a futon—ideal for vampires or people who happened to lack a torso. The girl lasted for three months before vanishing one day without a word to anyone.

  “You mean for up there?” I asked, gesturing toward the bathroom.

  “No, silly! Here.” Sarah waved her hands vaguely at the air around us.

  I scanned the room—the kitchen table? the counter? the windowsill?—and gave Sarah an uncomprehending look.

  “Duh? They’re going to build a room.”

  “They’re going to build a room inside the living room? But … where?”

  She walked over to the space right by the front door, the place where we
flipped through the mail, the few feet we cut right across without even thinking on our way to go pee. Sarah whirled around.

  “Right … here!” she announced.

  “But that’s hardly any room!”

  “Well, she’s only paying five hundred a month,” Sarah said, shrugging a little.

  “She’s paying five hundred a month to live in the spot we leave our umbrellas?” I could feel the hysteria edging into my voice.

  “I know, bargain, right? That girl who lived on top of the bathroom paid nine hundred. But remember, this girl has to, like, build the whole room too. And have you been to Lowe’s lately? Sheetrock’s ex-peeeen-sive.”

  Sarah went off in search of a dustpan and I continued to stare at the scuffed piece of floor where she’d stood, not understanding how anyone could possibly envision a home for herself in a carpet-sized space whose only amenity was an electrical outlet. Or, for that matter, on top of a bathroom, where someone might very well be pooing right beneath her sweet ear. Yet who was I to judge? I, who slept on an air mattress in a ridiculously expensive room? I, who had only recently rid myself of fleas? Hope Street, I realized, was nothing more than a refugee camp, a tent city for the young, the poor, and the restless, the former residents of flyover states yearning to breathe free; for unwashed, muddled masses in search of opportunity, and dubious men in search of drummer concubines. The sunset gates of the Bedford Street L marked the beginning of our Camino Francés, our Santa Fe Trail, our Yellow Brick Road, and like the first settlers, we would stake our flags in dumpsters and basements, in closets big enough for a bedroll; we would float from room to room holding our laptops aloft like divining rods, in search of free signal. We would squat here until our acorns took root, until our internships bloomed into production assistantships and our air mattresses filled with down.

  Like it or not: I was one of them.

  The holidays were upon us and while I was fairly certain that I could handle Christmas, the approach of New Year’s Eve had me considering seppuku. The day had always been an exquisite torment. I mean, was it humanly possible to have enough fun to fulfill the potential of New Year’s? There would be a man in a parka on TV reporting from Times Square. In reality, he couldn’t be colder if someone slipped a frozen can of Diet Coke between his balls, yet he would be smiling with all forty teeth. And he would be surrounded by a million people, all screaming ecstatically as though each and every one of them were giving birth to the Messiah right there at Forty-second Street and Broadway. I could never be this happy, and that is why I decided long ago to deliberately suck all the joy out of this holiday. I adopted a rigid routine. First there is the review of last year’s resolutions, the results of which are then tabulated and ranked using an exacting scoring system. This is followed by the christening of a New Year’s motto—a couplet that has to rhyme with the last digit of the forthcoming year. And finally there is the drafting of the coming year’s resolutions, that delicate dance between Benjamin Franklin moral perfectionism and snarky Simon Cowell reality check. These activities leave no time for fun and require enough concentration to rule out heavy drinking, all of which is fine by me. And normally the reassuringly bureaucratic nature of these tasks is enough to blunt my New Year’s anxieties. But this year was different. My only resolution had been to find a label to release my first full-length album, and there was no way around it: I’d failed. Not only that, but I was haunted by the failed resolutions and unfulfilled mottos of years past. Like how 2004 had been “The Year to Score,” but I hadn’t scored. And 2005 had been “The Year to Arrive,” when clearly the only thing to arrive was 2006. In a last-ditch effort to salvage my year, I sent a note to the label in Acme, Michigan, to check on whether they’d had a chance to listen to my album yet. A man named Steve wrote back right away. Unfortunately, he said, the CD-R I’d burned for him had gotten stuck in his truck stereo, which now required an expensive repair. So no, he hadn’t gotten around to listening yet. Happy holidays.

  At least there was one thing to look forward to, and that was Josh’s arrival in Brooklyn. We had been apart for only three weeks, but I had already ginned myself up to high school levels of nostalgia. And I knew Josh was anxious to see me too, mostly because my distressing little text messages (apt fell thru! i have fleas! girl 2 live in box in lvg rm!) had him concerned. Miraculously, just as he was set to arrive, we were granted a last-minute reprieve from Hope Street—our friend Eugene was going out of town with his girlfriend and offered us his cozy apartment in Park Slope. So that’s where we found ourselves on New Year’s Eve: planted on Eugene’s couch with a romantic candle, half a bottle of wine, and a spreadsheet labeled “Resolutions2006.xls” open before us.

  “You go first,” I said.

  “Okay. Let’s see,” said Josh. “I had ‘The Concept of Intentional Action: A Case Study in the Uses of Folk Psychology’ published in Philosophical Studies, and Arudra and I got ‘Intention and Intentional Action: A Cross-Cultural Study’ published in Journal of Culture and Cognition, and then that paper I wrote with your dad and Ken, ‘Philosophical Implications of Inflationary Cosmology,’ got accepted in the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science. Oh, wait, do forthcoming articles count?”

  “Forthcoming is okay,” I muttered.

  “What about ‘revise and resubmit’?”

  “Fine.”

  In a way, I hoped that Josh’s list would never end, but eventually it was my turn.

  “Well,” I said, in my most businesslike voice. “We all know what we know, right? I think I should just put a big double frowny face next to my New Year’s resolution. And then we should make it bold. And also highlight it in red so that it really stands out.” I was determined to be a man about this.

  “Whoa, whoa,” Josh said, clearly taken aback. “Don’t you think that’s a little drastic?”

  “Not really.”

  “Well, I think you did a lot this year, you have plenty to be proud of … What do you say we just leave that one blank for now?”

  “We can’t leave it blank. This is it. The end of double oh six. The day of reckoning.” My voice skipped up a register.

  “How about this, let’s just make it … let’s make it a rollover resolution!”

  “A rollover resolution?”

  “Yeah. Like, we’ll just put it on hold for now. Revisit it next year.”

  “A resolution is not like a fucking cell-phone minute, you know.”

  “Hey—”

  “Or some kind of Twinkie with a thirty-year shelf life. You know what my motto for 2007 is?”

  “Remember your promise—”

  “Ready? Okay, here it is: 2007—Fuck it.”

  “Maybe we should take a break—”

  “I don’t want to take a break! Why is it that you always want to take a break? Right when things are finally getting interesting? Right w-wh—” But that’s when the world started spinning and I lost my train of thought.

  It was the end of New Year’s Eve. The next morning I woke up, aching and feverish. Weeks of camping out on the air mattress on the floor of my drafty room had finally caught up to me. But Eugene was returning home that night, so my convalescence would have to take place back on Hope Street. When we arrived, the place was empty save for the giant plywood box that stood planted in the middle of the living room. The box had only three walls and no ceiling, which meant that any box-based activities would instantly be broadcast throughout the apartment. Out of necessity, I felt that Sarah and I would have to ban the box girl from ever having sex or talking on the phone. But this conversation could wait. She wasn’t moving in for another week and Sarah wouldn’t be back from visiting her family on Staten Island until the next day. For now we were alone. Josh swaddled me in the two sleeping bags we used to insulate ourselves from the cold air trapped in the mattress and I spent the day in bed. The next morning I woke up, stiff and cold and snot-encrusted. Josh was already awake, peering at me anxiously.

  “How are you feeling?” he asked.r />
  “Uh, biddle bedder, I tink,” I said, standing up to stretch a little. I blew my nose. Then I sniffed. From far away, I could sense a sneeze coming. I sniffed again. The sneeze blew through me, and in that moment something very bad happened. I felt eerily numb. Something—I couldn’t say what—in my lower back had torqued and crumpled. A high-pitched whine erupted in both ears, like a hive of cicadas encircling my head, and blood pulsed loudly in my temples. Then, all at once, the world came crashing back in vivid Technicolor and a chasm of pain bigger than the entire state of North Carolina opened before me. In one instant, my resolutions for this year and every year thereafter were atomized and realigned. Now I had only one goal, which was to return to the pain-free existence I had blissfully enjoyed not one minute ago.

  I collapsed onto the air mattress and bounced horribly on the spongy surface before coming to rest. When I hadn’t moved an inch six hours later, Josh announced that he was taking me to the hospital.

  “Nope.”

  “What do you mean ‘nope’? You can’t even move.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “We’re going back to North Carolina.”

  “I’m not going.”

  “You can’t stay here. This stupid air mattress is killing you—”

  “It’s nice. I like it.”

  “Look, I think—”

  “Do you want to know what I think?” I interrupted.

  “What?”

  “You are not being nice.”

  “I just spoon-fed you yogurt—”

  “You don’t respect my autonomy.”

  “How can I respect your autonomy if you can’t get up?”

  “That’s exactly what I mean.”

  By then Sarah had returned and she had brought her dad back to Hope Street for a visit. Josh opened the door a crack so that I could wave to him from my prone position.

  “Hi, Dad!” I yelled as Josh slipped out the door to go buy me a bedpan.

  But the next morning, when I hadn’t moved for twenty-four hours, all resistance was gone.