You Must Go and Win: Essays

by Alina Simone

  “Right. But get this: you are also a wolverine—”

  “This is some kind of horror movie?”

  “No. A classic coming-of-age story. Because, see, you’re also gay. Then one day you meet this German pinscher …”

  When I got home, I created a Word file and saved it as “Idea Poo.” Every time Konst said, “What if … ?” I double clicked on “Idea Poo” and wrote down whatever he said.

  “What if … a tailor discovered that some thread he bought at a flea market had magical properties? We could call it Fame Pants!”

  “What if … a ruthless stockbroker immersed in a prostitutionring scandal suddenly falls in love with a toy robot?”

  “What if … a woman born without any orifices overcomes hardship, while inspiring millions, to become a paratrooper?”

  Then one day, Konst said, “What if …” followed by something that I actually found interesting. So I said, “And then what if … ?” To which Konst replied, “Then we could …” This routine continued after Konst moved to L.A. We’d spend hours on the phone running our characters through an aggregate of four different screenwriting frameworks, performing ever more complicated feats of computer-enabled psychoanalysis, until one day Konst exclaimed, “You know what, bitch? I think we’re ready to stick it in and start pumping!”

  It had to be the single most disgusting call to action that I’d ever heard in my life.

  “Okay,” I said. “As long as I can do the soundtrack.”

  Maybe that would save me. I hadn’t been booking many shows lately. My manager was working on shopping my record and I was waiting for something to happen. That was my first mistake. Never wait for things to happen. When it became clear that nothing was going to happen, I knew exactly what to do. The answer was always the same: go DIY, take it to the people, jump in the van, tour, sing, tweet, blog. Announce yourself relentlessly to the world. My friend Roman summed it up best while visiting from Siberia a few years back. I remember it was morning and we were just mopping the last of the poached eggs from our plates when I started complaining about a show I had to play that night. I forget what my deal was. I bet it was a weekday, cold as shit outside, and I’d just have rather stayed home, curled up on the couch with Josh and some choice Netflix. Roman waited for me to finish and then looked me straight in the eye.

  “Alina. This is a wrong attitude,” he said. “You must go. And win.”

  You must go and win. Maybe it was the odd phrasing, the Russian accent with its lingering whiff of totalitarian decree. Or maybe it just suddenly hit me that I was complaining about taking a half-hour subway ride to play a club on the Lower East Side, to another musician, who had just traveled 5,694 miles, at great effort and expense, to do the same. Regardless, his words had the force of prophecy.

  “You know … you’re right, Roman.” What was I complaining about? Why was I not taking advantage of America and all its freedoms, being all that I could be, carpeing my diem? I must go and win! Feeling born again, I spent the day in a small cloud of euphoria and then floated off to play a show at the Bowery Poetry Club that night to an audience of exactly two people.

  Even so, all these years later, I knew Roman was still right. The only thing to do was plow on. Speak in the imperative. Go and win. But this time, I didn’t want to go. I wanted to stay. If I went, then who would take care of Etsa? I was certain that, left in someone else’s care, he would die. His medication was complicated. First there was the liver-flavored prednisolone chew tablet that he had to take twice a day, morning and night. Plus, after a recent spate of stomach trouble, the vet had me giving him 1 cc of liquid amoxicillin every twelve hours. There was a bag of nutrient-filled fluids in the closet to administer subcutaneously just in case he got too dehydrated, as he had that one night we had to take him to the animal hospital on Seventh Avenue. But worst of all was the Leukeran tablet. Etsa was a real thespian when it came to that Leukeran. He would hold it in his mouth for a good minute, staring me in the eye defiantly the whole time, only to spit it out as soon as I turned around. I finally succeeded in getting Etsa to swallow the pill through a combination of squeezing his little face, jamming a full syringe of water into the gap where his premolars used to be, and blowing on his nose, but I felt certain—and maybe this was excessive pride talking here—that no one else could ever master this delicate ballet. Yes, if I left, Etsa would surely die and then I would never forgive myself. So I canceled a show I had booked in San Francisco—only the second show I’d canceled since I started playing clubs six years before—and decided to stay in Brooklyn. Maybe, I figured, I could just stay and win.

  Life was small and getting smaller. In an effort to make the most of my newfound domesticity, I got myself a plant. Feeling intrepid after it failed to die within three weeks, I bought another one. All of a sudden, I was like Brangelina let loose in a Romanian orphanage with those houseplants—no sooner had I amassed six than I started wanting a seventh. So in addition to Etsa’s medication routine, I now had a plant watering and fertilization routine. I kept all the plants in the sunniest room, a room where the cats weren’t allowed because they enjoyed throwing up on the couch in there. But with Etsa so weak, Zhuang-zi no longer had anyone to play with, so I took to letting him trot along after me when I went to water the plants. It was during one of these visits, while perched on the forbidden couch, that Zhuang-zi challenged our new desert palm, Ziggy, to a duel. Though he aquitted himself admirably, Zhuang-zi was no match for the plant. With his dozens of long, scissored leaves, Ziggy made quick work of him. The next morning we discovered Zhuang-zi sitting on his red pillow in the kitchen, his eyes swollen shut and oozing pus. He had managed to scratch both of his corneas. That afternoon, the vet installed a large plastic cone around his head and prescribed an antibiotic ointment to be squeezed delicately onto the surface of each eyeball three times a day. This treatment was to be followed by a warm compress over each eye. When Josh and I arrived home, we set the cat carrier down, opened the door, and stared at each other numbly. There was a sound—shhlp-thuck, shhlp-thuck—and we looked down to find Zhuang-zi, his peripheral vision gone, banging into the table leg again and again.

  So now we had Zhuang-zi, miserable in his cone, eyes crusted over, unable to eat or drink without assistance, and Etsa, looking like some victim of cat Auschwitz. Friends would come over, survey the feline wreckage scattered across the living room, and gasp, “What happened?!?”

  “Nothing!” I’d pip, desperate to preserve some semblance of normalcy. “Some cheese and crackers?”

  Given that now I was almost completely tethered to my apartment and couldn’t travel very far, I dedicated whatever tiny crevices of time not spent at work or applying cat compresses to exploring the neighborhood. My neighborhood, I soon learned, is a great place to go if you want neon lights installed underneath your truck or need to do some laundry at three in the morning. It is also a great place to die. There were five funeral homes within six blocks of my apartment, and the Green-Wood Cemetery was just a ten-minute walk away. As a rule, cemeteries are great places to remind yourself that things could always be worse. Maybe this is why I found myself hanging out at the Green-Wood more and more. One morning, after feeding Etsa his Leukeran and prednisolone and treating each of Zhuang-zi’s eyeballs with a translucent dollop of oxytetracycline hydrochloride, I decided to head over there for a stroll. On my way, I passed a group of twelve-year-olds on the corner trying to light a cigar, and a man sitting outside a Laundromat yelling, “Tell your ma I ain’t gonna pay for it,” over and over into a cell phone. I loved my neighborhood. When I reached the Green-Wood gates, I just stood there for a moment, narcotized by the blasting sunshine and the endless fields of the dead, with their unspeakable, unsolvable problems. Then I skipped off to Battle Hill.

  The best tombs were up on Battle Hill, and whenever I spotted one I liked, I would try the doors. Then, if I could make out an inscription on the back wall—sad, timeless things like “Until the Day Breaks and the Shado
ws Flee Away”—I’d jot it down in a little notebook. After writing down inscriptions and thinking melancholy, poetical thoughts, I would drift around the graves feeling very Emily Dickinson–ish, and head off to the chapel, where, if no one else was around, I could enjoy the great acoustics and sing for a while. This was my routine. But today I skipped the chapel and stuck with the tombs. What would it be like, I wondered, to have a little patch of land here? My own marble-fronted mausoleum with a cushy stone bench, some framed photos, maybe an iPod on the windowsill for inspiration?

  On my way out, I approached the guard. “Excuse me,” I said, “but is your sales office open? My grandfather is terminally ill and I’m looking to buy a grave.” I couldn’t believe the terrible things winging out of my mouth. Both of my grandfathers were already dead.

  The guard told me that the sales office wasn’t open on weekends but we got into a conversation, and I quickly learned that buying real estate in the Green-Wood was no different from buying a condo in Manhattan. Battle Hill, it turned out, was the equivalent of Beverly Hills; you paid more for proximity to famous people, even in death. A hundred years ago, the guard told me, you could get a plot in the Green-Wood for just twenty-five dollars; today a prime spot could cost you well over quarter of a million. Wow, I thought, eyeing the graves with new and hungry eyes. Even at $300,000 for 756 square feet, a mausoleum was still a relative steal compared to most studios, especially considering the Green-Wood’s proximity to the R and N lines. Not to mention the view of Manhattan, twenty-four-hour concierge, and ample parking!

  I chatted pleasantly with the guard for a long time, but eventually had to pry myself away to go meet my friend Ben back at my apartment. He was making an experimental film about the Italian Futurists and had cast Etsa in the role of Franz Joseph I, ruler of Austria-Hungary from 1848 until 1916. I had worried about whether Etsa was really up to it, given his condition, but it turned out that all Franz Joseph was required to do was sit on a blanket while eating a piece of cheese and wearing a gold paper crown on his head. Ben would film Etsa eating the cheese and I would stand by with an ostrich feather just in case his attention started to drift off camera. For this, I was to earn a credit as “Special Assistant to Etsa the Cat.” I had no idea what any of this was supposed to mean, but since confusion was the bread and butter of the experimental film industry, I imagined that Ben must be doing quite well for himself. As I walked home, I couldn’t stop thinking about the dead—savvy real estate investors all of them—snug within their quietly appreciating assets. I was jealous. It must be nice not having to worry about things. There weren’t many upsides to being dead, but a sense of lasting stability was, perhaps, one of them. I think that might have been when the idea came to me. The idea of committing indie-rock suicide.

  On the one hand I knew that as soon as I stopped making that leap of faith, stopped believing (without much in the way of bill paying evidence) that if I just worked hard enough, wrote good songs, and toured endlessly, I could someday quit the day job that sent me—true, only occasionally, but still—to staff the company trade show booth in chilly, cavernous hangars, next to other exhibitors selling modular, climate-controlled mortuary facilities, or squishy, keychain-sized testicular self-evaluation models, it was never going to happen.

  On the other hand, it was never going to happen.

  And as soon as that thought settled in my mind, I knew the game was up. What if I didn’t go and win? What if I stayed and lost? For the first time, instead of filling me with dread, the idea filled me with a strange euphoria. No more traveling long distances to play half-empty clubs. No more worrying about what to do with this new album. I could opt out of all those tedious discussions about how to creatively package music so that people would actually pay for it again. (I will bake my CD into a stack of pancakes! I will embed MP3s in toilet paper! My next album will take the form of a nasal inhalant!)

  My own thirty-fifth birthday was only two weeks away. Too early for a midlife crisis, perhaps, but not too late to consider the trade-offs I’d made. For the past five years I’d worked as an assistant at a consulting firm, a job whose one shining virtue was it allowed me to arrange my schedule around touring. Though grateful for the flexibility, half the time I wasn’t even sure what exactly my job was. Whenever people asked, “What do you do?” my eyes would invariably drop to trace an incredibly interesting pattern on the floor I’d only just discovered. Eventually I gave up on even trying to answer the question, choosing to just parrot it back instead.

  “Yes …” I would echo hopelessly. “What do I do?”

  My friend Gabe tried to help me once. “Something with PowerPoint?” he’d suggested.

  Something with PowerPoint. This was actually a pretty good answer, I had thought with growing excitement. Most of my work days were so consumed with slide formatting that sometimes I regretted having studied international development when a master’s in Microsoft Office, with a concentration in PowerPoint, would have served me much better. Gabe was right. But now another voice whispered: Wait! A hundred years from now, did I want a girl to go skipping through the Green-Wood Cemetery, heart full of song, only to pause at my tricked-out mausoleum, try the door, and discover the words Something with PowerPoint inscribed on the back wall in peeling gothic letters?

  I recalled all the stories I’d heard about the artists who didn’t make it, whose fates didn’t turn on a dime one day, retroactively bronzing every early failure with the glow of inevitability. And after a glass of wine or three, I had to admit, there were some other things I might like to do in this life that weren’t compatible with spending months each year driving from bar to bar, frittering away the hours before soundcheck with some drunk guy insisting that a goblin was staring at his pants.

  And there was something else. Around this time, a music blogger included me in a top-ten list of his favorite female singers. He sent me the link, and when I looked at it, I immediately sensed that my name was out of place. The other singers on the list were all on well-established labels. Their songs were featured in movies, on television, in iPod commercials. They provided the background music for high-end hipster shopping. In some way, I realized, their success was defined by comparison with singers like me—if the list were reorganized in food-chain order, I would be the plankton. Then I noticed something else: of the other nine singers on the list, seven were older than I was and only one—a singer whose husband was also a musician, and who could tour as a family—had a child. Now, maybe the rest of these obviously successful, ambitious, and talented women just weren’t the maternal types, but I suspected something else might be at play here. My guess was that this, too, was a matter of trade-offs.

  It was true that I didn’t belong on that list, I thought to myself. I hoped in more ways than one.

  The problem was how to quit. After all, America does not like a quitter. In a broader sense, I knew that my exit from the music scene would cause not a ripple. At worst, my core fan base of depressed Jews might find themselves a little more depressed. But in this, I felt like I was practically doing them a favor. No, for my own sake I needed a way to explain the sudden change of heart, a beautiful, glass-half-full way to spin this, like, “Don’t think of me as a failed musician when really I’m a successful cat nurse!” After all, Etsa had turned a corner, hadn’t he? The closets were once again redolent of cat pee, and lately he’d begun standing outside our bedroom door in the mornings again, serenading us with his bloodless screams. All the gains I’d found so elusive in other spheres of life were now satisfyingly felt here, in pounds and ounces.

  Still, it would be good to have a non-cat-based explanation handy for quitting indie rock, and I actually figured this would be easy, for I’d long been in the habit of collecting quotes that made losing look like winning. It started back in high school, after a sadistic English teacher forced us to read Middlemarch and I found myself jotting down George Eliot’s last memorable description of the long-suffering heroine, Dorothea, on an index card an
d taping it to my closet door: “For the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.” At the time I had no idea why I felt the need to write this down. Perhaps, instinctively, I sensed a missed marketing opportunity, a spokeswoman for those of us who just wanted to be let down easy, the weak-hearted seeking a good excuse not to try. Where were our how-not-to books and unmotivational speakers? Then, a little while later when reading Franny and Zooey, I stumbled across another gem and automatically reached for a pen: “ … just because I like applause and people to rave about me, doesn’t make it right. I’m ashamed of it. I’m sick of it. I’m sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody. I’m sick of myself and everybody else that wants to make some kind of a splash.”

  A new vision was forming in my young, impressionable mind. It was a lofty goal, but with hard work and persistence, I might just get there. To be an absolute nobody and rest in an unvisited tomb. I could go live in this appealing alternative universe, a place with no SAT prep classes or varsity sports, where the heroes were the ones carrying out unhistoric acts in the welcome shade of obscurity, like contestants in some noble race to the bottom. But I didn’t turn up the best quote until college, when I read a short, heartbreaking essay by Tillie Olsen called “I Stand Here Ironing,” in which she writes of her oldest daughter: “She has much to her and probably little will come of it … Let her be. So all that is in her will not bloom—but in how many does it? There is still enough left to live by.”

  Was there ever such a beautiful ode to lost potential? It became the crown jewel in my canon of loser literature. And recalling it now, my heart soared. So all that is in me will not bloom! Let me be! There is still enough to live by! So true. I had to tell someone, but who to tell? I knew that Josh wouldn’t have much faith in my change of heart. He would remind me of the other times I’d cried wolf. Worse, he would tell me to “remember the rabbit.”