Black Elvis

by Geoffrey Becker

  He checks his watch. It's time. Bemidji? He doubts he'd go there under any circumstances. But this part, the dancing and dating, this part he can do. He's going to make them want him so bad they'll be sweating. The elevator doors hum and part. He's going to kill Bemidji.

  She charms a guard and gains access to the book fair, wanders the tables and booths, marveling at the profluence of printed material, the sheer overwhelming weight of all this paper, of all these thoughts people have had. Textbooks and monographs and shiny novels and literary and scholarly journals. She should cancel the appointment, she thinks. This is not life. She could force herself to have one, a real one. The life of the mind is a lie. She first began studying Latin in high school, back in Des Moines, not because she liked it particularly, but because it made sense to her in a way that other things did not, things like boys, her lack of popularity, her father's silences, her mother's moods. With Latin, if you learned the rules, you were all set. You knew what was what. But then one thing had led to another, and now here she was. Had she ever wanted any of it? Her dissertation? The two years of teaching at a private school in Connecticut and coaching field hockey, a sport she barely understood but had lied about having played in order to get hired?

  Another guard notices her lack of a convention badge and explains that she'll have to leave.

  "It's all right," she says, brightly. "I'm in the wrong place anyway. I thought this was Marshall Field's."

  Kate looks up at the thick snow sifting down out of the purple gray sky, visible through O'Hare's glass and steel exoskeleton. Joe's flight is delayed until at least 4:00 P.M. They are outside a coffee place, in between terminals. Already she can feel him slipping away. "I know about the interview," she says. "Just tell me how it went."

  He looks into his cold coffee, then back up at her. "It was no big deal. I didn't want to upset you."

  "Upset me? I told you about the job in the first place."

  "Not so well. There were four of them in the room. One woman had huge tits, and I overcompensated and talked to a spot about a foot above her head." He coughs. All this is true. What he doesn't add is that on the way out, the chair of the search committee, a red-bearded man who looked like the descendent of lumberjacks, had shaken his hand, given him a meaningful look, and said, "You'll be hearing from us soon."

  "Why would I want you not to interview? We need a real job, even if it does come with ice fishing."

  "I never thought of it as real," he says. "But still, I shouldn't have kept it a secret."

  Flights everywhere have been canceled, and people are hurrying past them in all directions, muttering, hauling their belongings, their tired children. Across from them, having beers at another table, is a couple who have obviously just returned from a cruise. They have tans, gold jewelry, hats. Kate understands that for some people, happiness is simply another commodity, that it absolutely can be purchased.

  "Next week," she says, "if it isn't warm in Tucson, let's get in the car and drive south until we get someplace that is. Someplace with palm trees, all right?"

  Joe sees on her face the hopeful, earnest expression he first fell in love with, the one that he's kept packed away in his mind and only taken out when he's thought that perhaps they should give up on this. Last week, she called him in tears to say that she'd made a fool of herself at a faculty party by leading everyone in a sing-along of "American Pie." "I don't know what I'm supposed to be doing here," she'd said.

  "Yes," he says. "That's exactly what we'll do."

  "They're not the boss of us."

  "No one is."

  After they have kissed and said goodbye—their gates are in different terminals, and the weather is starting to let up—she walks slowly past the shops and hot dog stands, once again alone, and tries to stay calm by reminding herself of who she is. There is nothing like an airport terminal for this, for cutting identity down to its essentials. Job, home, destination, significant others. All of these people, temporarily cut loose from their moorings, scrambling to get back to someplace safe. Tomorrow, if only for a few days, she'll be back in the snowdrifts. Modo fac! she liked to say to her class on the first day of the semester, attempting to prove the flexibility and relevance of a dead language. Just do it! And this, her furious hands clacking chalk: Hodie adsit, cras absit. Here today, gone tomorrow. For a moment, she almost thinks she can hear him coming up behind her to tell her no, he's not going back, he's coming with her, and the hell with all of these people. But it's only one of those carts ferrying the elderly and overweight, and she hurries to get out of their way.

  Man Under

  In mid-July, our landlady removed the front door to the house to get it repaired, and the next day, when I came back from my shift at Café D'Oro, the failing sandwiches-and-dessert place I'd managed to get hired at as a waiter, I discovered that we'd been robbed. The thieves had taken our black-and-white television and about two hundred dollars worth of stereo equipment. They'd also taken our instruments and amps.

  Ed called Renata to yell at her. "How are we supposed to live with no door?" he asked. I sat at our tiny kitchen table and stared out over the clothes wires strung across the back yards. The wind was picking up and shaking the leaves and my skin felt clammy; a storm was coming in.

  After a while, he came out of his bedroom and joined me. "What a bitch."

  "I think she owes us money here," I said. "You can't take the door off a house in the middle of the city and not expect it to get robbed."

  "She didn't want to talk about it. She says we have a door." This was true; the missing door was downstairs. The door to our apartment was still in place, though the wood in the frame around the strike plate was all busted out where the thieves had kicked their way through. Ed took out a Viceroy from his shirt pocket and went into the kitchen to light it off a burner. He'd recently cut his long hair and grown a goatee, hung up photos of Charles Mingus and Ron Carter on his bedroom wall. He'd been wearing the same suit jacket over a series of white T-shirts now for more than a month. "She said she was disappointed in us."

  "She's going to be a lot more disappointed now that we have no equipment." I looked around. Husks of dirty paint curled down from the ceiling near the windows. A narrow hall led to the front bedroom, which served as Ed's room and our rehearsal area. We'd hung up one of those Indian drug-curtain things on a clothesline to separate the entrance to my tiny room off his, in which I barely had space for a single bed, a dresser, and a chair. We had this place at a below-market rate because we'd promised to make a lot of noise. The landlady wanted the old man downstairs to move out of his rent-controlled unit, and she figured we might do the trick.

  "I'm reporting to you what she said."

  "Maybe she ought to just give us a couple of thousand to kill him," I said. "It's simpler."

  "I'll suggest it. She says if something doesn't happen relatively soon, she's raising the rent."

  "Relatively?"

  "Her word."

  "She was going to raise it anyway, right? I mean, eventually?"

  "I guess." He flexed his hands, picked at a bit of callus that was flaking off.

  "So let's not worry too much about her. We've got a lease." Something about the way he didn't look at me obviated the next question, but I asked anyway. "We do have a lease, right?"

  "Not exactly. More like an understanding." For all his competence—as a musician, a world-class partier, a guy who had rebuilt a TR-6 when he was only sixteen—Ed still often displayed a certain inability to peer around the sides of things to see what else might be there.

  "An understanding?"

  "We shook hands and all."

  "So she could put us out tomorrow?"

  "Oh, I don't think so. There are laws about such things. Look at the guy downstairs."

  "But she can take our front door off."

  "It's her door." He got more of the skin. "Maybe the police will find those fucks."

  "You think?" I'd asked the officer who responded to our 911 call wh
at the likelihood of our getting our stuff back was, and he'd looked at me like I'd asked if I might borrow his gun for a day or two.

  "Those amplifiers were heavy. It had to be more than one person. A team. Plus, what the hell went on? I mean, that took a couple of trips. I think this was a planned heist."

  I stared at the spot where the television used to be. "There's really no lease?" I was going to miss watching Dan Rather do the evening news. Harry Chapin had just died. They'd found the guy who was killing all those people in Atlanta. England was gearing up for the royal wedding.

  "Look at it this way. No lease is way more rock and roll."

  Ed had found this place for us in anticipation of my arrival. For the past year, he'd been living in a rented room in Jamaica, Queens. Growing up in New Jersey, I'd visited Manhattan many times, but I'd never been across the river. The word Brooklyn itself seemed strung with high-tension cable to me—written down, it even looked a little like a bridge. I'd driven down from college in Maine the month before, smoking Old Golds the whole way, in a boxy Fiat 128 I'd bought off a guy with a sharpening business in Skowhegan for fifteen hundred dollars my parents had fronted me. It was more of a toy than a car, with cheap plastic stick controls coming out of the steering column and gasoline smell leaking from the cloth-covered engine hoses—but I pretended it was a Porsche, the windows rattling in the doors, reflections of the East Coast screening across my Ray-Bans: Portland, Providence, Hartford, New Haven. I had two thousand dollars my grandmother had given me for graduation, and a red Gibson SG Special that shone like a waxed apple. When I ran it through my Sunn amp with the two twelve-inch Celestions and hit the 20x switch on the front, I could deafen passing birds at a hundred yards, tree squirrels, and make the neighborhood Dobermans whimper.

  Most of the brownstones on our block, like ours, were pretty decrepit. Cracks ran across them, and there were occasional missing hunks of lintel and broken steps. Many still had working gas lights out front, and at night the street probably looked a lot like it had a hundred years earlier. The wave of gentrification was coming this way—you could see it in the distrustful faces of the local residents, mostly older folks, Italian and Irish, as they watched us come and go, wondering what we were up to. They were right to wonder. Rehearsing a band was, apparently, legal, so long as we knocked off by 10:00 P.M. I had never seen our downstairs neighbor, although there were things I'd noticed. He was a smoker, and often a late-night whiff of cigarette traveled up from his apartment and into ours. Also, he liked watching Johnny Carson—I could hear that, too, through the holes in the floor around my radiator.

  We went to two pawnshops thinking that we might find our stuff there, but it was hopeless. So, we bought replacement equipment, used, on Forty-eighth Street, in the city. It took most of the rest of my savings. I got a battered Melody Maker and fifty-watt Music Man amp. Ed found an old Ampeg tube amp with a foldout top, and a Fender Precision with what looked like a bullet hole near the bridge. He stuck lit cigarettes in there while he played. Renata grudgingly agreed to pay for a locksmith, who came and installed a new dead-bolt on our apartment door. The building still had no front door, and from the sidewalk you could see right up the front stairs, but at least there was something for us to lock at night. Neighborhood cats came in and out freely. So did a number of pigeons.

  We invited over Greeny Greenburg, a drummer I'd met down at the café who was in his thirties, and this Filipino guy named Jet that Ed knew from his work up in the Garment District. Jet was short, with medium-length hair, and a round, pleasant face. His big, tinted, aviator-style glasses made him seem more like he should have been assembling model airplanes than playing music, and his Gibson Explorer looked huge hanging off him—he wore it so low that one of the corners nearly brushed the tops of his sneakers. He sent his left hand on a nimble tour of the fretboard, low to high, then back low again, the distortion-coated notes coming fast and thick as bees. It was the fastest I'd ever heard anyone play anything.

  "Damn," I said.

  Ed grinned. "Do that again."

  Jet did it again, more or less identically.

  "He's a prodigy," said Ed. "His first instrument was clarinet."

  Jet was expressionless. For all his obvious gifts, he looked more like what he was—an accounts receivable clerk—than a rock star. "You guys know Foghat?" he asked. "'Slow Ride'?" His voice was reedy and thin.

  "Foghat?" I said. I looked at Ed, my partner, Lennon to my McCartney, the guy who'd tutored me in music appreciation all through high school, from showing me what was good about the Beach Boys and how to sing harmony, to introducing me to George Duke and Chick Corea. He might have been turning into a beatnik, but he still had taste when it came to rock. He knew the difference between quality music and the junk they turned out for teenagers to wave their lighters to.

  But he just shrugged. "So long as it's loud."

  Greeny's eyes went misty with anticipation. "I can be loud," he said.

  "We can be loud and good at the same time," I pointed out.

  It turned out to be a Foghat night. After "Slow Ride," we played "I Just Want to Make Love to You." That was pretty much it; we played each of them at concert length and then some. We played them loud enough that my ears began to feel they'd been stuffed with peanut butter and then blown at with a hair dryer. We played them in the same key, which was even more torturous, for the simple reason that "Slow Ride" and "I Just Want to Make Love to You" are almost exactly the same song. Jet soloed, I soloed, Ed soloed, Greeny soloed. We went around again. It was like bidding in a never-ending, ridiculously loud poker game. We played these songs and then, just to be sure we really had them down, we played them again. When it was all over and we were packing up, the silence that filled the apartment had a tactile quality, like cotton batting.

  Ed and I took a couple of beers up the ladder to the roof and stood looking out toward the city. This was the great thing about our apartment—we could see the Statue of Liberty from up there, and the World Trade Center, floating in the distance above the solid but unremarkable brownstones and warehouses.

  "The guy's probably deaf or something," I said. "He didn't even bang on the floor."

  "Or something." Ed shook his head in sympathy.

  "I'm not paying double for this apartment."

  "How about we get some power tools up here and saw through a television?"

  "We don't have a television anymore." I kicked at a loose piece of mortar that had fallen from our chimney. "But maybe that's it," I said, growing philosophical. "We have to pursue badness as a form of art. We need to expand the frontiers of ugly."

  "Could be he's a Foghat fan." Ed stroked the newly sprouted hairs on his chin.

  "Do you see what I'm saying?" I went on. "It's ironic. Here's this thing we want more than anything, to play music, and the only way we're going to be able to keep on doing it is if we do it really badly."

  A motorcycle coughed and spat its way up the block, hesitated at the stop sign on the corner, then shot angrily onto the next street.

  "Alice is pushing hard for me to move in with her," he said. "Her roommate is going to California."

  "When?"

  "Like yesterday."

  "That's a terrible idea," I said. Ed and Alice—an actual cheerleader—had started dating our senior year of high school. I couldn't believe they were still together—Alice didn't even like music. She was living on the Upper East Side and working for Drexel Burnham. She came over on weekends, which I really hated—I didn't like how Ed changed when she was around, how he seemed always on stage and overanimated. "I mean, not that you asked."

  "You know how she answers the phone at her office?" he said. "'Money desk.' It's like she's sitting there on top of some huge pile of coins."

  "She is. She told me. She said she likes the way it feels."

  "Coins, or bills?"

  "Coins, I think. Krugerrands or something."

  "Hell, man," he said. "I'm not moving anywhere."

  "A
ll I'm saying is you should think about what you're committing to."

  I could see his features in the dim light, and they had hardened and become more adult. I thought I could imagine what he'd look like at forty. "I think you're missing the point anyway," he said. "Bad isn't the issue. Loud is. The guy isn't a music critic. To him loud is bad."

  "You do what you have to do," I said. "We're not married or anything."

  "I got us a gig," Greeny said to me over his plate of eggs, scrambled, soft, with rye toast. It was slow this morning, like every morning, so I hovered by his table while he ate. "Out in the Hamptons." Greeny had a job in the city selling off-brand personal computers. Every morning he came in for the same breakfast, dressed in a sport coat and slacks. He always tipped the same, too, a single dollar bill, which actually made him a big spender. I'd gone over to his place once to pick up forty dollars worth of pot—his other profession was small-time dealer—and I'd met his girlfriend, a bruised-looking brunette who'd come to the door to let me in wearing sweatpants and a man's shirt open in the front to reveal a lacy pink bra. She left the room while Greeny and I talked, and I wondered if after I left he was going to go back to beating her.

  "Really?" I said.

  "One of those beach houses full of yuppies. Five hundred. You in?"

  "What did you tell them we play?"

  "Everything, man. Fifties, sixties." He took a final bite of eggs. "You want to know what we're called?"

  I did.

  He held his hands up, framing the air in front of him. "'Brooklyn.' Like 'Boston,' right? I don't think anyone else is using it yet."

  I looked out the window. Across the street, in front of the new Korean market that had just supplanted an Irish bar, two cars were engaged in a game of chicken over a parking place. The paired notes of their horns was, I noted, a perfect tritone.