The Words of Every Song

by Liz Moore

  All of this before Lenore has sung a note or said a word. She has walked onstage, kissed Siobhan (Cynthia now hates Siobhan), waved to the crowd. She looks like herself, but she has cut her hair shorter. She is wearing some kind of dark eyeliner that makes her look like Chrissie Hynde. She is wearing a short skirt, and her legs are pale and lovely. She picks up the guitar that the tech has propped on a stand for her, plugs in, and slings it about herself so it falls at her hips.

  “Hello, New York,” she says. Her voice is like a twelve-year-old’s. Nothing has changed.

  Theo is saying something to Cynthia but she cannot hear; she leaves him and walks to the stairs, sprinting down them, taking them two at a time, walking toward the stage, toward Lenore. She stops far enough back so that she is certain Lenore cannot see her. Lenore and the Burn have chosen to play one of Lenore’s songs that Cynthia helped her write, and Cynthia allows herself to believe that Lenore had guessed she might be there. It is easy, sometimes, to convince herself that Lenore has forgotten her completely, has moved on so thoroughly that if they ran into each other on the street Lenore’s look would be one of utter confusion.

  We spent four years together, thinks Cynthia. I am worth something to her. She must know me. She is playing a song that I helped her write. Right now, she must be thinking of me.

  But Lenore, as she looks out at the crowd, shows nothing but a sort of affected passion for the music: her brow furrowed the right way, her right foot pounding the floor in time to the music—the right way. Cynthia wonders if she ever knew her at all; she tries to remember the name of Lenore’s hometown in Minnesota, and she can’t. She takes this as a sign.

  You were mine, you were mine, she thinks. Once you were only mine. Now Lenore is everyone’s, and Cynthia is no one’s. Don’t let me live my life behind a desk, she says to anyone who is listening.

  She turns and leaves.

  Outside, the intersection is empty but for a few solitary pedestrians. The man with the list is smoking a cigarette and looking depressed.

  Cynthia decides to walk home and starts up the Bowery. She looks up suddenly and is confronted with a full moon. How could anyone call that moon a man? she thinks. The features in her broad, wise face, the pity in her eyes. She is a weakening woman. She is old, cold, and weary.

  What happened to you? thinks Cynthia. Compassion overwhelms her. She closes her eyes and feels that she is being orbited by a great and glorious weight. Beyond her is the city. Beyond that, the sea, steadily reflecting what it is not, slowly being pulled toward daylight.

  5.

  CHE’S BIG BREAK

  Who in their right mind thinks they could put

  a stop to hip-hop

  If it don’t stop till I stop and I don’t stop till

  it stop?

  —J-LIVE, “Longevity”

  I.

  “It’s in the drums. The bass hits you, the guitar hits you, but the drums come in and you’re fuckin’ hooked. Bakka, b-bakka, b-bow bow bow bow slam. Feels good. Damn, that’s good.”

  “Fuck yeah.”

  “I mean, just, b-bow bow bow! And you don’t even know what’s happening. You’re like, ‘Whoa, whoa, what’s goin’ on?’ ’Cuz this is like nothing you’ve heard before. B-bow bow bow!”

  I know, man. It’s like, it’s like.”

  “You know?”

  “Totally.”

  “Yeeeow. Good shit. Ka-pow pow tisssh.”

  Che is examining himself in the mirror of the bathroom down the hall of his dorm. His hair is alarmingly large. His eyes are alarmingly small. He hasn’t slept in a few days. Or showered. He lifts his arm tentatively and then lowers it to his side, fast. He’s run out of deodorant.

  It is his twentieth birthday, and he has an exam at nine A.M. The class is called Psychology of Drug Use and Abuse—a name that is always good for a laugh among Che and his friends. They like blowing lines of Adderall off the big green textbook. The irony.

  Che is trying to get a comb through his hair but it just gets stuck and kind of hangs there. Che laughs. He considers wearing it out like that, like an Afro pick.

  “You wanna piece uh this? Do you? Do you?”

  Che’s reflection: “No, I was just, I mean…”

  “I will kick your ass, son. Not even playin’.”

  Che pounds a fist into his palm and checks out his bicep. Not as big as it could be. Nonexistent, kind of.

  Back in his room, Che decides to take a break before his exam. He packs a bowl and lights it. His roommate, Ty, mumbles something from the top bunk across the room and reaches a sleepy hand toward the smoke.

  “Dude,” says Che. “Dude, you wanna get high in your sleep?”

  Ty opens his eyes and rubs his face and Che cracks up.

  At 9:10 A.M., Che is asleep on his bed. Somewhere else on campus, a professor of psychology is passing out exams.

  II.

  “Again.”

  “If you wasn’t runnin’ games then it could have been the same—”

  “Shit. Hold on.” Che gets up from his place at the computer and trips across the dorm room toward the kid at the mic. The kid’s name is Lewis but he goes by L-Money.

  Che checks the connection between two cords on the floor and makes frustrated noises.

  “What’s up?” asks L-Money. He takes off his headphones. He’s getting annoyed. Che has been promising him a demo for two months, ever since L-Money gave him an eighth on credit.

  “I don’t know, man—the thing’s not showing.”

  “What thing?” L-Money checks the time on the little clock he wears around his neck just like Flavor Flav.

  “You know, like on the computer. The, um, the volume thingy. The input.”

  Che goes back to the computer and looks to see if everything’s in place. “Okay, again.”

  “If you wasn’t runnin’—”

  Down the hall, a door slams. This always happens. Che gets up and opens the door to his room. “SHUT THE HELL UP, ASSHOLES!” He closes the door again, sits back down. “Go ahead.”

  “If you wasn’t runnin’ games, then it could have been the same. But you caused me much hurt and you caused me much pain. You and me, ma, and a bottle of champagne—”

  “Oh, man.” Che starts laughing. “You’re not, like…”

  “What? What?” L-Money rips off the headphones and stands up. He’s considerably taller than Che, and a whole lot wider.

  “I mean, no offense. I mean.”

  “You don’t like that? Just say it. You don’t like that?”

  Che thinks for a moment. He opens a drawer in his desk and pulls out a joint. He lights it and extends it to L-Money. A peace offering.

  L-Money kicks over the mic and walks out.

  III.

  Che likes thick girls, girls who can fill out their jeans. In his psych class there is a girl named Kendra who walks like a truck. Her lips are glossy. Her nails are pink. She smells like tea, sometimes like vanilla.

  Che tries to sit near her, but he gets to class late most days. Today he has made a special effort to be there on time, and he overshoots—Kendra’s not there yet. He stops in the doorway, walks to the bathroom. When he gets back she’s sitting there with her glossy lips and her thick self. Che starts sweating.

  He walks over to where she’s sitting and she glances at him, kind of, but she’s talking to her friend. Che is stumped as to whether to sit right next to her or one seat over—if there’s a space between them, there’s a chance someone might sit there, so he does it. He sits right next to her.

  Kendra gives him a weird look and kind of scoots over in her chair. Who is this guy? There’s like fifty other chairs in the large lecture hall. She turns back to Renee.

  “Anyway, she was like, ‘I don’t like him like that,’ and then he goes, ‘Yes, you do, you know you do.’”

  “NO he didn’t.”

  Che clears his throat. This is his chance. Class is going to start in five minutes.

  “Excuse me, ladies.
” He leans in. Real smooth.

  Kendra and Renee look at him.

  “I was wondering if one of you girls might have a pen?”

  Kendra looks at Renee, who reaches into her backpack and produces a pink pen. She gives it to Kendra. Kendra gives it to Che.

  Che takes it and says, “Thank you.” He pauses. He hasn’t really thought through what comes next. He opens his mouth.

  Then Renee asks, “So are they still together, or what?” Kendra turns back to her. Class starts.

  And Che’s notes that day are pink.

  IV.

  “Here’s what’s sweet about it.”

  “About what?”

  “I’m gonna tell you. Okay, right here. You hear that? The…the…bam, right there.”

  “You’re talking about the cello loop thing?”

  “The, yeah, the bwow bwow baaaooo, that part there.”

  “Could we do that?”

  “We could totally do that. Yo, you know that kid Mitch? Looks like John Cusack? Glasses?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He plays cello. Oh, shit, man. We could totally…we’re gonna get him to do a keyboard with cello sounds. Like three octaves of cello notes. Then we’re gonna add it to our beats, dude.”

  “Fuck yeah.”

  Pause. “Ty, you know that girl Kendra in my psych class?”

  “Thick one?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I talked to her today.”

  V.

  Jumping through puddles after a heavy rain has stopped, Che is reminded suddenly of being young enough not to know better. This is more of a conscious choice for him. His sneakers are falling apart anyway. Public Enemy is pulsing through the little white wires of his iPod. “Fight the power…you’ve got to FIGHT the powers that be.”

  He is thinking hard. Trying to make a list in his head of ways that he and Ty can get the music they’ve been working on out there. He and Ty had a serious talk once about whether going corporate was worth it, and the answer they came upon was yes. “Because once you’re famous,” Che had said, “you can just do whatever the fuck you want. You’ve gotta sell records before you can change shit, you know?”

  Che knows. For this reason, his list includes the following options:

  1. Build a fan base for acts they work with from the ground up, starting with small clubs. (Too time consuming, thinks Che. We’d be forty by the time anyone got noticed.)

  2. Send demos of said acts to major labels and hope to be noticed. (Too unrealistic. Also, a lot of labels won’t even listen to unsolicited demos. No good.)

  3. Make friends with that girl Sara in his philosophy class. Isn’t she the daughter of someone at Sony? (Isn’t she also really annoying? Che doesn’t know whether he can handle sucking up to her.)

  4. Get internship at major label. Work way up. Get demos to right people. (But who are the right people anyway? And Che isn’t sure he could make himself get up for an unpaid internship on the weekends.)

  5. Get internship at indie label. Def Jux? (Same problem.)

  Che is stumped. “FIGHT the power,” says Chuck D. Che tries to jump over a puddle and lands directly in the middle of it.

  6. Send demos abroad. Isn’t Italy an up-and-comer on the hip-hop scene? (Maybe for Italian hip-hop.)

  7. Focus on own record label. (Possible…)

  The sky opens again suddenly. Che ducks down the stairs into the subway. Water is running down them in a slow drain toward the tracks. He puts the minimum amount onto his MetroCard. He hears the train approaching and bolts toward the turnstiles, rushing down the second set of stairs. The doors start to close behind him and then he sees a woman through them. She looks miserable and wet. Not thinking, Che sticks his hand between the subway doors. They open enough to let him wedge himself farther between them, and the woman squeezes past him. Then the doors clamp indignantly closed.

  “Thank you,” says Jax Powers-Kline. She is abrupt about the words. On her lips they sound foreign to Che, though she has no accent.

  “No problem,” says Che.

  VI.

  When Che and Ty started doing demos for the kids in their college, they just wanted practice. They did it for free from their dorm room. Sometimes the kids would buy them weed in return. Che almost failed out of college his first semester—he got obsessed with making everything sound just right. He used his computer almost exclusively for ProTools and porn. In that order. Later he learned how to do just enough schoolwork to never be noticed in his classes.

  The first demo they produced was for a kid named Ezekiel who rapped like Slick Rick. He was from London. Ezekiel used the demo to get gigs at the Village Underground and at CB’s Gallery, and then he dropped out of school and moved back to England.

  The second was for a whole band, consisting of a drummer, a lead guitarist, a bassist, three rappers, two female backup singers, and a girl who worked the turntables. That was a little more difficult. Che and Ty spent all spring working on five tracks for them, never asking for payment. When they finished one afternoon just before finals, they delivered nine burned copies of the tracks to the drummer, extending the disks to him as if they might crumble. “Hey, thanks a lot,” said the drummer, and shut the door. They never heard from the band again except once—an e-mail telling them to come to a show they were doing at the Knitting Factory.

  After that, Che and Ty drew up some contracts.

  VII.

  Jax Powers-Kline has never been more soaked. Her mascara is running down her cheeks and her hair—which she pays someone to blow straight every two days—has lapsed into a state of damp curliness. Despite her high heels, the cuffs of her pants have absorbed so much water that the wetness is creeping slowly toward her knees. The newspaper in her bag has become one mass, and its ink has smeared against the inner wall of the white purse.

  And the kid sitting next to her won’t stop talking.

  “You want a napkin? I think I got one here,” says Che, rooting around in his pocket. He produces a paper napkin with a large ketchup stain in its center. “Oh,” he says. “Never mind.”

  Jax is looking for a mirror in her bag, bent away from Che.

  “Yo, it’s nasty out there, right? It’s supposed to stop tonight, I think. That’s what I heard, at least.” Che drums the yellow plastic seat with his fingers. He’s talking too loud. He still has the earpieces from his iPod in place. “You like Public Enemy?”

  Jax has found a mirror and is examining her reflection in horror. She’s not sure where to begin. She swipes under her eyes fruitlessly and then shuts the mirror.

  “You want one of the headphone things?” Che removes one tiny—slightly waxy—speaker from his right ear and extends it.

  “No.”

  Jax tells herself, as she does each time she is forced to ride the subway, that this subway ride will be the last.

  “Elvis,” raps Che, “was a hero to most, but he never meant shit to me.”

  VIII.

  In New York, some nights are just great. Usually by accident. Che and Ty went to the Village Underground to see some band once, just an unknown hip-hop act that a friend told them about. They were eyeing the scene, drinking on the house because they knew the bartender. The band was weak and there weren’t many girls. They wanted to leave. They were going to.

  Then, across the room, there was a little stir. A man was walking from the entrance up to the stage. The band onstage quieted, consulted. Then one of the rappers walked up to the mic.

  “Listen up,” he said. He pointed in the direction of the man across the room. “Murs is in the house and he’s gonna come on up here and entertain.”

  The room broke into noise. Che’s jaw dropped. Murs was his hero. Ty nudged him. Onstage, Murs was greeting the band and checking the mic, and then he started rapping. Che and Ty pushed right to the front, right next to the stage.

  They were there. So close. Last year, Che had seen Murs in a big room, packed to the walls with young men and
the girls they’d brought along. The sound system had been shit; Che hadn’t been able to hear a word. But tonight, every word seemed to be directed at him.

  Che threw his fist in the air and jumped up and down with the crowd. He wanted it, wanted to be it, wanted to own it, wanted to make it. This was hip-hop. This was real.

  IX.

  The brakes of the train sing: one sustained high note, and then suddenly they aren’t moving. Silence. The faces of fellow passengers turn up collectively toward the ceiling speakers, which crackle to life. A voice comes through them: “Ladies and gentlemen, we are being held by the train’s dispatcher. We should be moving again shortly. We apologize for the unavoidable delay.”

  “No,” says Jax Powers-Kline. She checks her watch. “No, no, no, no, no. No.”

  Che watches her out of the corner of his eye. “You late for something?” he asks.

  “Oh, no, no, no,” Jax is still saying. She rummages in her purse and pulls out a cell phone. She flips it open. No service. “Shit.”

  After half an hour, the seated passengers are leaning their heads into their hands or against the wall. Some of the passengers who had been standing are sitting on the floor. It’s strange to be in a subway car without the noise of the motor and the wheels against the tracks. A man across from Che coughs, breaking the silence, and everyone looks at him. “Sorry,” he says.

  Che has given up talking to Jax, who has buried her head in her hands and is rocking slightly in her seat. He is listening instead to a J-Live track through his headphones. He doesn’t realize that everyone else in the unusually quiet car is listening to it also.

  The speakers sound and thirty heads jerk upward. “Ladies and gentleman,” says a female voice, “there is a stalled train ahead of us.” A collective groan. “The MTA is working to fix it. We will do our best to keep you updated.”