Phantom Effect

by Michael Aronovitz

  Stiff.

  He urgently wanted her to take care of him, and they were kissing hard and it was sloppy because they were trying to do two things at once, and this wasn’t easy and fluid, but clumsy and disconnected, and she wondered if she was supposed to be breathing through her mouth as much as she was, and through the patchwork she knew he was wondering if his nose was running.

  His fingers explored up her thigh, and she moved her hand into a position where she could cup his bulge. She worked it, palmed all along it, and then found her way to the top where she knew he needed it the most, all fire and lightning even though she was technically just rubbing the outside of his jeans.

  They were cheek to cheek now, together in this and in it like thieves, her elbow working up a rhythm that was careful at first but soon to build into furious circles, and she knew he was focused on nothing in this world but the motion of her hand, the smell of her hair, and a favored memory of her curvy little ass in those tight black yoga pants, and his breath exploded suddenly into her ear.

  Afterward, they held each other up like castaways, and she wanted to kiss him. Her hands moved to his shoulders and she gently pushed off so they could be face to face. But he kept his head down, he wouldn’t look at her, and when he finally did with eyes milky and strange, she knew that he knew that she had read his desires like an open book, that she had lied about the patchwork, and finally that he considered this whole episode to be a massive failure, like the cafeteria all over again.

  “Thanks,” he said.

  He broke away and pushed out, letting in the cold for a moment before shutting the door too roughly. Then he bent into the wind, jogging up the walkway hunched over, a figure in the dark.

  Marissa watched him with her mouth ajar, finally making herself put the car in reverse and back slowly out of the driveway. Before taking off, she made sure he got in as if anyone on earth would care about gestures right now, and he closed the door behind him like a statement, like an ending.

  She drove off stunned.

  She had made Jerome betray himself. By reading what he wanted in the moment, she had ignored the fact that he had to live with himself when the smoke cleared. At this point in time Jerome Anthony Franklin had desperately needed to see himself as a grown-up, a lover, a man. What he was left with, however, was the image of an embarrassed clumsy teen who worried about his runny nose, and he had done nothing but come in his pants.

  It was over.

  And Marissa never forgave herself.

  CHAPTER

  EIGHT

  Jerome Anthony Franklin recorded his debut record, titled Signs of the Soul, at Sigma Studios in three weeks and a day, and by the time the April rains tapered off, his grandma was just about ready to put him out for good on account of his pride and his moodiness. She claimed his emotional decline was a sin before God, but she didn’t understand that the choreography for the upcoming shows was horribly sparse, more about being at this location in front of the drum kit and that position by the left riser at specific parts of particular songs so he could merely be picked up in the right spotlight or avoid getting a crotchshot from the pyrotechnics. When he’d asked the stage manager what he was supposed to do while standing on the given “X,” the guy laughed and said, “Show ’em your good side.”

  He was alone.

  He wanted to call Marissa, but he didn’t. For once, he was going to go into the unknown by himself and master something, as strange and tough as that seemed. His session keyboard player, Mickey Jennings, smiled in his face, but was rumored to have whispered back to his lawyer at Geffen that he was uncomfortable working in a supposedly professional environment with a “fellow musician” who couldn’t read sheet music. The bass player, Jayden Clemson, was this old-school black guy who never spoke except to ask where the coffee was, and their drummer, Hans Gorbensagen, was trouble from the get-go. Even though he had cut his hair short for this gig, he was a hardcore metal veteran who had done studio work for Dio and then toured with Ozzy in the late nineties. He saw Jerome as the ultimate plebe and put him through the ringer the old-fashioned way, coaxing him out after recording all day to hit the dance clubs and the strip clubs and the parties and the bars, always making sure to let him know that it was tradition for the rookie to show off his “phat stacks” and buy dinner for the group, drinks for the house, and lap dances for the boys, and this was before they even played their first show.

  Grandma was expressionless there on the step when Jerome finally threw his duffel bag and footlocker in the back of Gorbensagen’s rental, mumbling about picking up threads on the road once they flew out of Philly tonight and something else that sounded vaguely like a “goodbye.” For the past few weeks Jerome had been mumbling a lot, over his shoulder while shuffling through the living room when she asked him where he’d been, through the bathroom door when she asked where he might be going, from under the pillow he was hiding his head under when she tried to discuss the way he’d woken her up at all hours the night before, thumping through the foyer and banging stuff around in the kitchen.

  They opened for Macklemore on the eastern leg of his spring tour, starting at the Wachovia Center in South Philly, and Jerome knew that very night that they weren’t going to be optioned to accompany this superstar into the Midwest. They had no performance dynamics tune to tune, his show didn’t tell a story, and in trying so hard to duplicate the magic of “You Made Me a Memory” due to a rather Hitleresque industry pressure, they had written a bunch of copycat tunes, all with that feathery tempo, all with the same kind of climaxes. The oldschool veterans like Prince brought the house down with ballads like “Purple Rain,” but that was after a collection of tunes that ran everyone through a wide spectrum of emotions, hitting all their release points: joy, dance, sex, philosophy. All Jerome had was his broken heart, and though he sold it with everything he had, by the time they got to his number one single at the end of the set the crowd had been sitting and chilling too long.

  His hometown crowd gave him a mild ovation (half of them standing) when Mickey hit the first notes of “You Made Me a Memory,” but New York applauded only sparsely from their chairs. Boston didn’t call them back for an encore, and he actually got booed at the Georgia Dome.

  There were a lot of excuses. Mickey complained endlessly about the tech, both in terms of the lighting and the stage sound, and Hans went nuclear over dumb shit like the dressing room mini-fridge having fucking Bud Light instead of a good amber. Old Jayden didn’t bother reminding him that Bud Light was one of their sponsors. He just shook his head as if he’d seen this all before and went to find his Snark tuner.

  Florida was a disaster. At the Cruzan Amphitheater Hans tripped over a set of cables snaking along the floor by his left crash cymbal during the entrance walk. The crowd responded with a rousing cheer as he played it off as though it were part of the show to fall into his stuff, but the moment didn’t allow for much precision when he and the roadies shoved his equipment back into position. All the pedals and rubber tripod stops weren’t on their drop points indicated with the soft-glow electrical tape, and half the microphones had been knocked out of place. His beat coming through the house PA was almost nonexistent, and you only heard him thunder on in when he did a run with his floor toms.

  At the Citrus Bowl, Macklemore’s sound engineer got food poisoning, and his understudy had them at such a loud stage volume that Jerome couldn’t hear himself through the monitors. They adjusted manually, but since their opening was a medley, they didn’t have a chance to do anything substantial until the third song portion had been completed. Jerome’s hook wasn’t about smash, pound, and thump, and there was nothing to hide behind. He’d been forced to over-sing and he missed almost every note, some so badly you couldn’t even soften the blow by calling them “pitchy,” and in response the audience became a sea of cell phones. It was the second time Jerome Anthony Franklin went viral, and this one wasn’t pretty. By the time they hit the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel and Casino they were figh
ting about everything, and local papers were calling this tour the worst mismatch since Blondie tried opening for Rush back in the late seventies.

  Coming back up the coast for a couple of those “up close and feel-goods” that Macklemore typically built into the tour for the purpose of fine-tuning, Budweiser dropped them right before they hit the Black Cat in Washington, D.C., and KFC followed suit just after their show at the Warsaw in Brooklyn. The call from Geffen came on the plane back to Philly. No renewals, and they were exercising severance and termination. If by some miracle a company here or a franchise there wanted to play scavenger on a piece of “You Made Me a Memory” for commercial purposes, Jerome was still entitled to royalties just as he was from the record no one was currently buying. They called him a “brief yet mostly extinguished local sensation, yielding little gain and impressive liability.” They were drawing up all the forms and would have them in snail mail by Friday.

  Hans dropped him off at his grandma’s place, and Jerome dragged his duffel bag and his footlocker inside across the threshold, noticing immediately that the place smelled like medicine or cleaning solvent, something industrial. Grandma was working, and a lot of their stuff from upstairs was sitting in cardboard boxes by the flueless hearth. Of course, she’d had the exterminator come in. They had ants, and they had argued about his eating in his room, leaving the dishes lying around. He had promised to make it right, at least to help move everything so his grandmother wouldn’t have to strain her back or take an extra painkiller for her arthritic ankles after being on her feet all day. Another missed opportunity. Another failure. Of course.

  To Jerome’s horror, he thought he was going to cry.

  He was supposed to take over the world and had become nothing more than a parody of himself, a big public joke. Maybe he could join one of those kiddie concerts at this point, where you wore a smelly parade costume playing sing-along as Barney or a Muppet. He was supposed to have management solving all these problems before they occurred, but the brass had used this tour as an audition, leaving him out on his own, sink or swim. He was supposed to get the girl, but he wasn’t worth her time now.

  His shoulders sagged.

  Look what he’d done with Marissa’s vision. She’d been wrong about him. She’d backed the wrong horse. Read the tea leaves wrong. Moreover, Jerome was no longer a virgin, and that was another reason he’d never be able to see her again. What if she got this one right and “read it” in him? At the very least he could spare her that kind of painful, hideous face-time.

  He walked over the cardboard boxes, picked one at random, and sifted through the contents. There was the black-and-white picture of the grandfather he’d never met in military fatigues, a yarn spinner, and some Good Housekeeping magazines. Below that was the dull silver gleam of Grandma’s .32 Beretta.

  Another joke: she was no gunslinger. She had gotten it that summer when thugs were breaking in everywhere in the old neighborhood looking for copper, the year Jerome’s mother had gotten shot. It was a knee-jerk thing. To this day, she had never even loaded it.

  Things in boxes.

  Stuff that you didn’t need anymore, like Jerome Anthony Franklin the sob story, the stereotype. He’d blown most of his advance on parties he would have rather forgotten, piles of blow for people he didn’t even know, and clothes he wasn’t going to use, all of them currently warehoused in a POD by the airport that he wasn’t going to be able to afford very much longer. He had enough left in the account for a security deposit on an apartment, and it was time to start looking. He sure as hell wasn’t going to get that Buick GSX any time soon. If only all this hadn’t been such a whirlwind . . . if only there had been just one small window of opportunity where he could have slowed things down and taken the time to think things through.

  He wound up finding a place for rent in West Philly, on 46th Street above the check-cashing store. By June he had sold off everything including the Brioni Vanquish II suit he was partial to, but couldn’t move the one that really had drained him— the Alexander Amosu. It hung alone in his closet like a dead man on a rope. By July he was wearing a red and green smock, and working the register at the 7-Eleven convenience store under the elevated train down 69th Street. In effect, he had died, and there was a smoldering anger inside him that never seemed to cool off. And it wasn’t the cafeteria specifically, nor his inability to tell Marissa Madison how he really felt all along, or even his crushing miscarriage at the Citrus Bowl.

  It was that Geffen contract. Jerome knew it was peppered with incentives as opposed to fail-safes and guarantees, but he hadn’t had a clue they could ditch him so fast, leave him with nothing.

  It was all about the words, and thinking that you could sit with a ratty notebook, pumping out street rhymes that could truly interpret the world. That was the bait, and it was a fool’s game.

  In the end it was all about the fancy words, the real words, the slippery words, the nests and tunnels and dead ends and quarries, all of them filled with volumes upon volumes that were riddled with amendments, hidden stipulations, and clever vocabulary. It was a mammoth labyrinth that had all the road maps written in code. It was a massive language maze that rich folks used to keep poor folks living under elevated train platforms and working at convenience stores.

  Jerome had nothing left except a mattress, a blanket, a minifridge, a hot plate, and a designer suit he had no business wearing.

  And his library card.

  After work one Friday afternoon, he turned his collar to the rain and took the sub to the Free Library of Philadelphia. When he first walked in, he was more than intimidated. There were computers and thick wooden tables, balconies and columns, stained-glass murals and ritzy chandeliers. And books. Thousands of them staring down from the second and third floors, like stern old men with white bushy eyebrows.

  Like the lawyers at Geffen.

  Jerome took off his coat and slung it over a chair. He walked past the long curve of the circulation desk and made his way up the nearest stairway. It took him thirty-five minutes, but he found a meaningful set of racks on the east side by the bathrooms and a darkened storage area. It took another half hour, but he finally pulled down a book he felt he could start with.

  No one told him he wasn’t smart enough or experienced enough or worthy enough to take the book off the shelf, and he liked that. It had five hundred and ninety-three pages before you got to the bibliographic essays, but he had to start somewhere. He knew this wasn’t the last book he would have to read, but he had time. Lots of time. And no one judging him.

  He walked down the stairs, slightly conscious that his sneakers were squeaking because they were still damp. He sat at his table and opened the front cover of The Cambridge History of American Law.

  By June he had read four such books.

  By July, the librarians knew him by name.

  SHORT

  CIRCUIT

  Well, boo-fucking-hoo, asshole. Let’s all feel sorry for the little blackie who found out he had to hole up in a shitbox, work for a living, put product on the shelves, and ring up lottery tickets. Am I supposed to feel bad that his “talent” got wasted or something? The son of a bitch couldn’t write a song to save his life, and singing by itself just ain’t that special, fuck you, it just ain’t. There are fifty thousand chicks singing like Beyoncé in fifty thousand churches, but they ain’t got the tits and those thighs, that face and them eyes. Look! I made a rhyme, Jerome! I’m a genius! Let’s write it down in a notebook so some weird psychic can come along and make the scraps into something just as special as you are.

  Go fetch me a pack of Marlboros, how’s that?

  Wipe up this spill.

  Fill up the milk and creamers.

  And go to the library and read all your books. See, we ain’t too different when it comes to that part, you and me. I just have a better use for the diversion, so stop complaining. But before we even consider the extra-curriculars, understand right here and now that I work for a living too, I work lik
e a dog in a warehouse, where you sweat through your jumpsuit in the summer and the ends of your fingers go raw in the winter. A day’s work is a rack full of red plastic bins filled with grinders and screw guns and planers and roto-hammers, all of them needing brushes and armatures, switches and bearings, every nose cone or side handle accounted for with a manila tag and a twisty-tie, each tool matched with an invoice and a number. When I’m done with those, I can wipe my hands off with a dirty rag and walk over to the far side of the warehouse to tinker with the bigger machines that have gone down, over by the ancient shelving loaded with broken extension ladders, bent scaffolding, scrap metal, and rolls of old unused fiberglass insulation, all of it lurking in that darkened area I have to illuminate by bringing over one of those clip-on lanterns that brings up everything so bright the world becomes a relief map of dirt-hardened ridges, cracked paint, and grit. When that’s done, I can clean off the rental machinery with a Brillo and a hose. When that’s finished, I can go through the parts bin, counting bit tips and wire, o-rings and machine screws. Then I clock out. It’s a tan card with green lines on it, but it’s really an invoice with a number. See? I made a connection, or a parallel, or an analogy, or a metaphor, or whatever you smart bastards call it, and I didn’t have to go to the library to do it either.

  But that’s your escape, ain’t it? Makes you feel worth it, like you’re not just keeping careful tabs on shit people don’t notice in the end, all your life with your nose to the grindstone, scratching numbers into a log, hanging your clipboard in the dark receiver’s shack at the west edge of the abandoned factory with the broken windows and crumbling smoke-stacks.

  Reading keys you into something relevant.

  Every page you swallow is a page someone else didn’t. Every book you complete is a piece of precious scrap wood, a trophy that you can cling to, keeping your head an inch or two above the ebb and flow of the blur so it don’t hypnotize you, dragging you under.