You Must Go and Win: Essays

by Alina Simone

  “So what would your ideal job be?” I hear myself ask in a strained voice.

  “I’d like to make my money putting out CDs and touring,” Amanda replies in the same even tone. “The ultimate goal is to become an icon … I don’t really even have to be famous famous. I wouldn’t even mind being a small-time icon, as long as I was a little icon somewhere. I would like ‘Amanda Palmer’ to be indicative of something.” She stares up at the sky for a moment, then adds, “That would be nice.”

  “Why do you want that?” I sputter. “I mean, it just seems so … so … outwardly focused.”

  “Well you asked me how I wanted to make my living,” says Amanda, still nonplussed. “I mean, that’s not all I want out of life. I’d just rather make my living that way than doing street theater.”

  “But … okay, let’s talk about the icon thing … It seems like you want to capitalize on this narcissistic aspect of yourself—”

  “Yes, but I think it’s possible to be an icon and not just be an attention-grabbing fuck. The way I’ve noticed things work, even on a small scale, is there’s just certain people that like having that … that experience. Just experiencing someone who is singing and dancing. And there are no hidden agendas in that if you get it right. I have my own very, very small little core of fans who like what I do. They just like to watch me. Even when I’m not playing the piano—they think that my life is neat and exciting, and even if they have their own neat and exciting lives, they like to follow mine, they get off on it. And I get off on them getting off on it. It’s not a situation where I’m demanding their attention, I just know they like to watch me and I like to perform and there’s a nice little synchronicity there. And I think that could work on a larger scale for everybody’s benefit, not just mine.” And with that Amanda calmly excuses herself to go put on some more sunscreen and I start fidgeting angrily with the camera controls, turning her into a pastel cartoon.

  What was extraordinary to me about this scene, nine years later, was not how bitter and lost and full of schadenfreude I was—I already knew this about myself, perhaps even then—but how perfectly Amanda predicted her own future. Our conversation on the beach took place years before she started her band, the Dresden Dolls, before they signed to a major label and toured with Nine Inch Nails, before she sold a couple hundred thousand albums and played sold-out solo shows from Sydney to Japan to London, before she created an original play for the American Repertory Theater, performed with the Boston Pops, published two books, or amassed so many fans that she could earn $19,000 in ten hours by sitting on her sofa and auctioning off her stockings, her glass dildo, her ukulele, and her empty wine bottles online. And yet, even back then, before any of that, she still knew. Regardless of whatever else was going on, in a tutu or a torn wedding gown, from the balcony of a tinfoil palace or deep in the forests of Hell, she already had the answer to those three fundamental questions, the ones some nameless man in some placeless place is always there to ask: Who are you? Where are you going? And why are you here?

  I don’t have the tape from the last time I filmed Amanda, because there is no tape. A heavy hand on my shoulder stopped me before I could even start filming. I was living in Hoboken then and the Dresden Dolls were playing their first show on the main stage of the Knitting Factory in Manhattan. The show was starting in just a few minutes and I was in the middle of adjusting my tripod when the bouncer interrupted me.

  “Sorry, you can’t film in here,” he said, putting a hand in front of the lens.

  “Oh, don’t worry—she’s a friend of mine.” I smiled. “I have Amanda’s permission.” I had to stare up at the man as I said this—he was mountainous.

  “I don’t think you understand,” the bouncer continued without removing his hand. “You don’t have prior authorization to shoot in here.”

  “Look”—I turned around and started motioning frantically to Amanda up onstage—“we can clear this up in a minute. I’ll just get Amanda and she’ll tell you—”

  “I’m afraid I can’t have you hassling the artist with the show about to start. Now I’m gonna ask you one last time: put that camera away or you’ll have to leave.”

  That night I went home, drew a hot bath for myself, got in it, and cried. I knew it was time to quit. Amanda belonged to the world now and there would be many other people on hand to document the rest of her story, the famous part. But that’s not what made me cry. What made me cry was that even though I had all the tapes, I was no closer to the answer. And I still wanted what she had.

  Our last road trip ended in Key West, where Amanda wanted to spend a few days sucking money from the heavy foot traffic in Mallory Square. There is the Eight Foot Bride, aloft on a milk crate that is carefully swathed in white gauze and fake lace. She is standing tall with her arms frozen, extended upward toward the night sky. But something about the picture seemed wrong. I looked closer and realized what it was: beneath the veil, the black wig, and the white face paint, it’s not Amanda’s face. It’s mine. I remember now: she’d talked me into it, into dressing up as the Eight Foot Bride on our last night in Key West. We decided it would be good for me, after all these years of filming, to see what it was like to be Amanda from the inside. Now I’m staring at my younger self and yet the face I see remains inscrutable. It’s not me and it’s not Amanda—it’s just the Eight Foot Bride. She is wearing a mysterious smile and gazing out at some indefinite point, pinned against an unfamiliar backdrop of swaying palms. And I can’t help but wonder what it is she sees out there. And what she can possibly be thinking as she stands frozen, waiting for a passerby to finally break the spell that brings her back to life by throwing a dollar at her feet.

  I WANTED UNICORNS

  A few years ago, I was baptized by a renegade priest into an unrecognized offshoot of the Russian Orthodox Church. did not tell anyone and started off the morning of my baptism with a lie to my cousin’s girlfriend regarding exactly where I was going and why it was that no, I couldn’t have any kasha or even a cup of tea first. I left her concrete high-rise in St. Petersburg, the same as any other in Russia, at an early hour with nothing but a hair dryer, a pair of clean underwear, and a white cotton dress in a black plastic bag.

  The Punk Monk met me outside. He was dressed in his usual outfit of black jeans and a sweater. Taken together with his long, tangled beard and sunken blue eyes, he could have been mistaken for an extra from the cast of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. We went around to the back of the building, to a dirty footpath that cut through a series of gray towers. I was dying of thirst. The Punk Monk had told me that I had to fast for my baptism—no food or water after midnight—but he had forgotten to warn me against imbibing vast quantities of wasabi and soy sauce right up until 11:59. All night I had lain awake on Tanya’s sofa, dreaming of a cool glass of St. Petersburg tap water with its sweet, bowel-melting parasites. Now, as we walked, I greedily considered the snowmelt—grimy from the soles of hundreds of feet and the gray fog of exhaust, true, but cold and refreshing nonetheless.

  We reached a thoroughfare and picked our way along the side of a road that had no sidewalk. Did I have the dress? the Punk Monk asked. Yes, I replied. I’d bought it yesterday after giving my great-uncle Oleg the slip in downtown St. Petersburg. I pulled out the dress, a thing so sexless it could have been mistaken for a laundry bag, and showed it to the Punk Monk, who nodded his approval. Did I manage to find an English translation of the Nicene Creed? Yes, and here was the printout I’d made from the internet while Tanya was in the bathroom. No food or water, right? Right, I said, though I had to confess, I was considering lying down in the gutter and interrupting the rushing sludge with my face at that very moment. The Punk Monk did his best to console me with the thought that a few hours from now I would enjoy a tiny sip of wine as part of the ceremony. One last thing, he asked: How was my Church Slavonic? Would I be able to read the prayers by myself? We were marooned on a traffic island, on a street that seemed to lack any signals or signs, buffeted by t
he vacuuming sound of passing traffic. I squinted up at him.

  “My Church Slavonic is … bad,” I said. In all truth, my Church Slavonic did not exist.

  “It’s okay,” said the Punk Monk, sensing my anxiety. “We’ll figure something out.”

  I grasped for the proper etiquette, the right thing to say as you walk to church with a monk, on the way to your own baptism. Had it been a glorious day, I suppose I could have praised God for it and pointed out a blooming field of lilacs nearby, or a duck giving birth. As it was, the weather was foul and the setting an ugly, congested strip on the northern outskirts of St. Petersburg, just past the point where the subway gives up and dies. So I was grateful when the Punk Monk interrupted the silence to ask what I did last night, and I could tell him all about the Auktyon concert I’d gone to with my cousin Kolya at a place called The Place. Auktyon was a legendary St. Petersburg band, one that got its start in the glory days of the Soviet rock underground.

  “Yeah, they’re too ‘artistic’ for me,” the Punk Monk said. He held me back with one arm as a dirty bus skimmed the curb. “Since the Silver Age, poets in Russia have been considered almost like secular priests, teachers of life. And Russian rock, as a descendant of Russian poetry, resumed in this tradition. But not Auktyon—I am afraid they are simply too intellectual.”

  I didn’t understand what the Silver Age had to do with anything, or why Auktyon had to be “secular priests.” Couldn’t they just be a good band?

  “I don’t think you’re being fair,” I said. Now we were crossing the street, forging our way through an unplowed parking lot.

  “I do respect them,” said the Punk Monk.

  “Have you even seen them live? I’ve never seen a better live show in my life. Maybe you’re the one who’s too intellectual.” Dimly I realized that I was yelling, that I had stopped in a puddle and icy water was sinking into my boots.

  The Punk Monk had stopped too, but he merely looked past me and raised his hand. A car glided to a stop some feet in front of us.

  “I’m afraid it’s going to take us too long to walk,” he said. “And I have to do a funeral at eleven. We’d better hurry.”

  Mine, I must admit, was a weak-ass conversion. I was an amateur, my conviction nothing more than the accrual of semisober revelations that struck late at night, in the back booths of bars in faraway cities. When the Punk Monk found me, it was two years into my experiment of ditching any real career prospects for a life of crooning sad songs in the clubs, watering holes, and DIY venues that made up the indie-rock circuit. I toured my way through an endless blur of record stores, house shows, vegetarian cafés, radio stations, strip malls, bookstores, and cavernous, echoingly empty clubs, drinking gas-station coffee, sleeping on couches, and singing the same songs in a different city every night. The pay was fifty dollars, or a compliment from the sound guy, or nothing at all. The thing that drove me to do this was impossible to resist, the closest I’d ever come to any kind of “calling,” but day-to-day, it was a rootless and repetitive grind. Mostly, I drove and I begged: begged clubs to let me play, begged people to buy a CD, begged newspapers for a listing. Rinse, wash, repeat. The highs from any given success wore off after half an hour, but the lows would level me for weeks. There were no guarantees—you could throw years into the slot machine of life this way and still come up with nothing—and I was full of what-ifs, always second-guessing. It was only a matter of time before I fell victim to the clichéd consequences of prolonged introspection. I mean, when you are sucking a gin and tonic through a stirrer straw at three in the afternoon in a saloon in Battle Creek, Michigan, waiting for your sound check, and listening to a man at the bar beg a woman to have a peek at her breast cancer surgery scar, the questions “Why am I here?” and “What does this all mean?” are very good questions indeed.

  My friend Konst once told me that the acoustics in the baptismal font were the most amazing thing he’d ever heard and that’s what started it.

  “Everything sounded so strange, so beautiful,” he’d said.

  “Were you in some kind of pond?” I’d asked. Konst was not a small man.

  “No, a big tub. Nothing I could really swim around in. More like a vat.”

  He had converted to Russian Orthodoxy after college, feeling rudderless, trying to avoid a quarter-life crisis.

  “It was fucking great under there. I didn’t want to get out.”

  “And then what happened?”

  “Well, I got out, eventually.”

  “And … ?”

  “And I felt great.”

  I was jealous. An image formed right then in the back of my mind, of me floating in that warm and blissful dark, hair billowing upward, a sacred jellyfish, quietly humming. I knew it was wrong to eye the baptismal font like a kid eyeing the ball pit at Chuck E. Cheese, but the urge wouldn’t go away. When I encountered the Punk Monk, years later, it was my first thought. That he must have one of those giant vats stored away somewhere, that he could do this for me.

  We met through music, because we were both fans of the Soviet punk singer Yanka Dyagileva. Obsessed, actually. Yanka’s albums were the soundtrack for all my ceaseless travel. I drove through America alone, listening to her albums for hours, singing along without really understanding the words. The songs were beaten out quickly on out-of-tune guitars, her voice so raw and unadorned it felt like a claw hammer tunneling its way directly into my heart. It was the sound of pain and sorrow and it had a way of fusing with the landscape, lending everything its dark, passion-filled hue. When Yanka sang “On a parallel track, a black satellite flies. It will calm us and save us and bring us peace,” the world outside my windshield reverberated with symbolic significance. The Waffle Hut. The suspension tower. The odd, lunglike pieces of car littering the road. I would sing myself hoarse driving west on I-80, tears streaming down my face, ginning up my sorrow, wallowing in it.

  For a long time, I knew only two things about Yanka’s life: that she was from Siberia and that she drowned when she was twenty-four years old. Then I started to do some research. Her career began in 1987; it ended four short years later. Mostly, she recorded her songs live, no overdubs, no effects. She did not wear makeup. She did not dance. She refused to give interviews. In the Soviet Union, Yanka’s career had no precedent. Soviet women all worked at some boring institute. They married young and had kids right away. They did not wear combat boots. They did not listen to the Velvet Underground and crisscross the country by train to give living-room concerts in the apartments of strangers. I wondered how it was that Yanka avoided whatever mysterious initiation process must occur sometime during high school, when Russian women are taught to tweeze their eyebrows to the width of a quark. I had grown up Russian American, five thousand miles away, in much easier circumstances, and hadn’t even been able to avoid summer math camp. Everything about Yanka flung a fat middle finger into the face of propriety. The more I learned, the more I wanted to know. I asked a friend in Siberia to order a book about her life for me, a 607-page collection of essays, photographs, and interviews. It took two months to arrive and two more to actually read, but by the time I was finished, I’d made up my mind: my next record would be an album covering the music of Yanka Dyagileva.

  That’s how the Punk Monk found me, through the blog of a Russian rock critic who posted a couple of demos of the Yanka covers I’d recorded in my bedroom. He wrote to tell me that he liked my versions. He was a huge Yanka fan too and had even contributed an article to the Yanka anthology I had read. Are you really a monk? I’d asked. Yes, came the reply, and a priest as well. Are there more of you? No, he admitted, we punk monks are still pretty rare birds.

  I asked the Punk Monk for help decoding Yanka’s lyrics for the liner notes of my album and we struck up a regular correspondence. At first, I tried to ignore the fact that he was a monk and stay focused on Russian idiomatic expressions and Soviet pop-cultural references, but soon found myself slipping into a confessional mode. One night after playing a bar in
Omaha, Nebraska, I propped my laptop on a scabbed table and began tapping out questions for the Punk Monk. Am I doing the right thing? I wrote. Does this make any sense to you? I explained how “this” changed every day. Today “this” could be the fact that I’d gone to the trouble of getting a Canadian work permit only to arrive at a taqueria in Toronto and learn that five bands had been booked for the three available slots. Tomorrow “this” might be forgetting my wallet in a bakery in Eugene, Oregon, and realizing it six hours later when stopping for gas in a rural town near Mount Shasta.

  “It makes perfect sense,” the Punk Monk replied. “Any job contains such small and a bit foolish details. Even that of priest. In fact, if our job will contain only serious things we are interested in, it will be not useful to our souls. This is exactly what you are supposed to be doing. This is your path.”

  This didn’t feel like a path, I thought to myself. Rather, it felt like the deliberate avoidance of some other definite and more sensible path that had suggested itself to me many times in the past. But this little bit of encouragement, which I found myself enjoying immensely, also had the unintended consequence of tapping into a wellspring of self-indulgence, my endless appetite for enumerating the problems I compulsively—almost cheerfully!—kept inserting into an otherwise problem-free life. “Everything feels very unstable,” I began, “and I am considering just dropping all this and going back to living a life of quiet desperation …” Lately, the issue was that whenever I worked my day job, I felt paralyzed by guilt for neglecting music. Yet whenever I switched my attention to music, I found myself overcome by self-loathing, undone by the sheer impracticality of noodling entire days away on the guitar. The real problem here was that I lacked both the discipline to embrace the hedonistic lifestyle art-making required and the pragmatism to undertake one of those careers that deliver you to your future as predictably as a Japanese bullet train. Because these thoughts were so troubling, much of my time was spent ensuring I had no time to spend. The successful artists I knew always made the most of any spare hour. Given a day off, they might print up some stickers featuring their website and likeness, and spend the afternoon blithely affixing them to public property. For me, days off turned catastrophic. Oh, they might get off to a banging start, with the brave intention of writing a new song or two. But ten minutes into the project, I would notice that this new song sounded troublingly like my old songs. More intrusive thoughts would quickly squirm through this first chink in my self-confidence. You do realize that no one is waiting for this new song? No one cares whether it is in the key of A or G, or how long the bridge is. No one cares whether you manage to rhyme Tanqueray with Le Carré, or, for that matter, whether this song ever gets written at all. But go on—write it! Stick it on top of the pile with all the other old-sounding new songs … After these thoughts spent some time crashing about in my head, I’d decide it was time for a break. Better still, a bath! And while reflecting in the bath, it would occur to me that no matter how hard I work, I will never grow up to be an old black woman like the singers I most admire. My angst would thicken, first into a stew, then a gumbo, as the hours slipped by unnoticed, until suddenly it was time for dinner, then bed. Before I knew it, I was back at my day job, lamenting the time I didn’t have to write new songs.