The Big Rewind

by Libby Cudmore

  Today Egg School wasn’t turning anyone away. Those who didn’t have tables by lottery or connections hunched over friends, reading the spread over their shoulders. The room was thick with the smell of coffee and cigarettes and last night’s perfume. Mac and Natalie waved us over to their table, and we squeezed into the last free corner of the bench next to three people we didn’t know. I subtly leaned into Sid, hoping I wouldn’t faint or throw up from my own overwhelming anxiety.

  “He didn’t do this,” Mac said. “R-rated movies make him squeamish. He couldn’t have.”

  Natalie adjusted her cat-eye glasses and picked up one of the papers that everyone had already read. “‘A jealous, reefer-fueled rage’?” She read the headline in a voice dripping with disgust like grease off diner bacon. “What is this, 1936?”

  A skinny kid in a Dr. Who shirt started to say something, but the burly guy he was with shushed him. I didn’t recognize either of them from previous brunches, but they seemed ready enough to defend Bronco that they couldn’t have just been walk-by traffic. GPL, perhaps?

  “Who’s that?” I asked Natalie.

  “That’s Bronco’s friend Bryce,” she said. “He’s a bartender at the Inconvenience Lounge. The guy with him is the owner, Wally. They do drag nights. We should go.”

  “Yeah,” I said, even though the last thing I was interested in right now was making plans to go barhopping. I went back to reading the paper over Mac’s shoulder, hoping it might give me some clues as to what the hell was going on in my world.

  “This is just the pigs picking on another black man,” Mac chimed in. “I guess we should be grateful they didn’t shoot him on sight.”

  “He was a vegan, for fuck’s sake,” Natalie added. “He couldn’t eat cheese, but he could bash his girlfriend’s head in with a marble rolling pin? No fucking way.”

  Sid piped up. “You never know. Back in Oklahoma City, the scout leader of my cousin Sally’s troop just up and one day shot her husband. People snap.”

  I elbowed him in the ribs.

  “Fuck you, you fucking redneck faggot!” a porkpie-sporting neckbeard shouted from the back of the room.

  “Guys, chill!” Lovelle, the barista, hollered. She unwound the scrunchie from her dirty-blond dreadlocks before pulling them back again nervously. “Randy and I have already started up his defense fund and bail. We’ve got a jar on the counter, and if you’re on our Facebook or Twitter, we’ll let you know about upcoming events.”

  “We’ve got a jar at the record store!” Mac added.

  The guy next to Mac, in a Beastie Boys T-shirt, piped up. “And our band Chicken Puppet’s doing a benefit show—”

  “—at my gallery!” Natalie finished.

  “What’s important right now is letting him know we support him,” said Randy. “Lovelle’s got some sign-up sheets to visit him in jail; if you can, either sign up for a visit, send a letter, or donate to a care package.”

  I signed my name when the clipboard came to me and passed it on before picking up my menu. “Does anybody know anyone with the initials GPL?” I asked, trying to act casual.

  Natalie barely looked up from her menu. “No,” she said. “Why?”

  Well, that did me a whole lot of no good. “I got a package for her from someone with the initials GPL. A mix tape. There were a couple more tapes from the same person in a box her sister gave me. Does that sound like anything?”

  Natalie laughed and rolled her eyes. “God, KitKat and her mix tapes. She probably ordered it off Etsy. If KitKat had the space in her apartment, she would have kept all her VHS tapes too.” To the lumbersexual to her left, she said, “Order me the eggs Benedict with turkey bacon. Wheat toast. I need a smoke.”

  It wasn’t an Etsy find. No one wrote I listen to this song when I ache for you next to the Lightning Seeds’ “Pure” for a customer, even a repeat one. But no one else at the table offered up any other suggestion as to who GPL might be, leaving me right back where I started—nowhere.

  “I didn’t mean to offend anyone,” Sid murmured from behind his menu.

  “No worries,” I said. “You didn’t know.” If that’s the reaction Sid got with a theory, I sure as hell wasn’t going to offer up the evidence I had without vetting who I asked and in what order. If word of that tape got out and it fell into police hands, it might convict Bronco merely by what it implied, making me a pariah in the process. There had to be more to this story than a jealous boyfriend. That much, I had to believe, if for no other reason than to preserve my own illusion of security.

  GPL’S MYSTERY TAPE was still waiting for me when I got back around one. I checked Natalie’s Etsy theory just to be sure. There were a handful of mix tapes for sale, all customizable, none shipping from anywhere remotely close to Binghamton. So much for that.

  The detective’s card was still on my fridge. I looked at the tape on my table. I thought about Bronco and the headlines, the few things I knew and all that I didn’t. I wanted to believe in law and order, that good cops always caught the bad guys, but this was ugly math, wrongs making more wrongs. Sure he was there the day of the crime. Sure they had a fingerprint on what they declared to be the murder weapon. But my gut was telling me the cops had the wrong guy. If they were going to find him guilty, they didn’t need my help.

  I tore up the detective’s card and scattered the fragments across the junk mail and cereal boxes in my recycling. Bronco was a friend, and he needed me to prove his innocence. If he was guilty, I could face that later, but right now, I had to test out my intuition that GPL and his tapes were somehow linked into this—for good or for ill.

  But with no tape deck, I wasn’t going to find out what he was trying to say and whether or not that held any clues about KitKat’s death. Maybe he’d been stalking her and the tape would be nothing but his breathing hard and jerking off. Maybe he was in a terrible garage band and he was sending her a demo in hopes she’d pass it along to some cool indie producer.

  I wouldn’t know—and Bronco might stay in jail—unless I found that answer. And unless I had a time machine to take me back to a RadioShack in the nineties to purchase a boombox, I was going to have to make some Luddite friends.

  A few weeks ago while we were both on the second shift at Hartford, my friend Marty gave me a flyer for his Sunday afternoon Tom Waits show at Bosco’s Lounge on Purcell Street. I liked Marty; whenever we were on the same shift, we would talk about music in the spare moments between documents. We swapped playlists I wasn’t sure either of us ever really listened to—I know I didn’t—boasted of our vinyl finds, and played for each other whatever song we were obsessed with at the moment. The last time I saw him, he’d just finished restoring a reel-to-reel player he’d found in a pile of curbside junk on the Upper West Side.

  If anyone would have a tape player, it would be Marty.

  Chapter 10

  SUCKER FOR MYSTERY

  Bosco’s was one of those bars that tried too hard to look like a dive and charged nine bucks for a beer because hipsters in vests and faux-vintage concert tees would pay it. Marty was performing Blue Valentine, cigarettes he didn’t smoke rolled up in his T-shirt, cabbie cap pulled low over his eyes. He was growling “Red Shoes by the Drugstore” with all the record cracks and hisses in his voice. I had no idea how he did that.

  He met me at the bar when he’d finished the A-side. He got a drink and I gestured for two. The bartender rolled her eyes and slid me the glass so hard it soaked my coaster. I took a sip. Plain Coke. I stuffed two bucks in her tip jar and smiled ruefully. She didn’t smile back.

  “I can’t drink when I do these shows,” Marty said, clinking his plastic cup against mine. “Relaxes me too much. Have to get into that space, you know?”

  I nodded even though I hadn’t come here to hear his vocal diet. “Weird question, but I was wondering, do you have a tape deck?”

  He leaned back against the bar, took a drink, and shook his head. “My last one busted a couple of weeks ago, and I haven’t had a
chance to fix it,” he said. “But Josie, she’s got one. I used it to make her copies of Heart Attack and Vine and Foreign Affairs; she needed to learn the words to “I Never Talk to Strangers” for a show we’re doing next month. She said she learns music best when she’s driving from one catering venue to the other.” He pulled out his phone. “Want me to ask?”

  “Sure,” I said. I knew Josie peripherally—she ran a catering company that specialized in art openings and small-plate affairs like the ones Natalie had at her gallery—but if she had a tape deck, we were about to become really close friends.

  He massaged his screen without looking. “What do you need a tape deck for?” he asked. “Got some never-reissued rarity you’re trying to transfer?”

  “A mix tape, actually,” I answered. “I can’t remember what’s on it. Just curious, you know?” I didn’t feel like explaining my whole investigative process; I didn’t want anyone knowing what I was doing in case none of us liked the outcome.

  “She’s still got the setup.” He held up the brightly lit screen. “Here’s her number; give her a call and set up a time.” He took one last swig and clapped me on the back. “I’ve got to get back up there,” he said. “Good luck with your tape.”

  ONCE OUT OF Bosco’s, I called Josie and left a message. In the meantime, I had another mission to complete, this one with a charge card and a veil of secrecy. I hopped on the F train with a straight-arrow path to the Victoria’s Secret in Herald Square.

  With the Talking Heads playing “The Book I Read” in my ear, I watched a college-age couple in art school fashion snuggle in the seat diagonal from mine. He had his arm around her and she had her head on his shoulder, happiness radiating off them, filling the car with an effervescent light. It was the kind of love baby boomers told us we were too immature and slutty to feel. It was the kind of love I wanted to feel for someone, anyone, the kind of love that doesn’t hurt or ache or feel like you’re dying when he’s not there. The giddy kind of love David Byrne was singing about at that very moment, my only frame of reference for what that might feel like.

  They gathered themselves for some kind of lover’s adventure at Twenty-Eighth Street, and I was sad to see them go. That sadness stayed with me even when they were out of my line of sight.

  I was sick over what I’d said to Sid before brunch. I wasn’t his girlfriend; I had no right to dictate who he fell in love with. Besides, I had a This Is What a Feminist Looks Like pin on my bag; I knew better than to slut-shame his stripper sweetheart. But when I tried to text Sid, I couldn’t write I’m sorry in any language that felt sincere. I put my phone back in my bag. Maybe the words would come later.

  My self-pity psych-up was interrupted by the unmistakable sound of a dudebro on the prowl. I’d learned to block out the sound of catcallers, but this one was loud enough to hear even through my earbuds. “Where are you going?” he asked a girl in a thick wool peacoat, hat pulled down low over her heavy curls. “’Cause wherever it is, I can help you get off.”

  I rolled my eyes. A normal guy would have taken her disinterest as a sign to move on to other targets, but not the wild dudebro. He was on the hunt, and he wasn’t going home without his prey. “What, you think you’re too good to talk to me?” he snarled. “You’re a fucking lardass, you ugly skank. You should kill yourself, you fat bitch.”

  No other passenger looked up from their phones or their newspapers. He kept railing, and she made subtle shifts around the pole, like a stripper in slow motion, turning redder with each move. “Moo, you fat cow,” he continued. “Next stop, I’m going to push you in front of the fucking train, you dumb bitch.”

  Something in me snapped. All my anger at myself, at Sid, at Bronco’s headline and the porkpie hat at Egg School, came boiling to the surface. He wasn’t going to quit until either she gave him a fake number or his stop came up, and no one else seemed interested in looking up from Tinder or Grindr or Fruit Ninja to help. I stood and advanced toward him with a Terminator walk, as though the car wasn’t buckling or rocking beneath my feet. “Leave the innocent alone,” I said. “I am an angel of true justice, and I can see the evil in your heart. Leave her alone.”

  The girl looked freaked out, but not as freaked out as the dudebro. “What the fuck is your problem?” he asked.

  I shoved him just hard enough to rattle him. “The devil’s in your soul and you need to cast him out. I will bring hellfire and char the flesh from your bones. You will not take her innocence away. She is magical, but you are wicked.”

  Still, no one was paying attention but the girl and dudebro, who was trying hard to keep his cool. I was kind of having fun.

  “You bitches are crazy,” he said as the car lurched to a stop. He hustled off and ducked into the next car to try his Prince Charming routine again. I smiled at her, but for a moment, she didn’t look convinced I wasn’t going to turn on her.

  “I didn’t mean any of that,” I said.

  She let out a sigh of relief. “Thanks,” she said. “But what the hell were you doing?”

  I’d seen Natalie chase off a catcaller using the same routine, but with more screaming. Normally Natalie loved being hit on, but we’d been in Central Park one day and this acne-cratered broseph would not stop bugging us, so she’d launched into this tirade worthy of the craziest street-corner prophet. “New York crazy,” she’d explained. “No one will bother you if they think you’re crazier than they are.”

  “I’ll remember that,” my new pal said when I recounted this to her. “Back in Maine, the cold shoulder always did the trick, but I guess not here, huh?”

  “New York dudebro is a whole different species,” I said. The car slowed and I smiled at her. “Good luck,” I said.

  “Thanks again.”

  I felt a little better when I got aboveground. Maybe my good deed would karmically cancel out the bad ones. But the instant I stepped inside Victoria’s Secret, I was lightning-struck with paranoia that the other customers and clerks could sense what I was doing, that I was shopping for someone else because I was a lonely loser. A woman with too-pointy heels and caked-on eyeliner wafted over in a cloud of Very Sexy perfume and Virginia Slims. “Oh, honey,” she said, looking at my ass and the pair of blue satin bikinis I was checking the tag on. “Those will be way too big for you.”

  “They’re for a friend,” I said. “For her birthday.”

  “Then, honey, she’s not going to want plain panties,” she said insistently, putting her electric-green manicure between my shoulder blades and guiding me over to a selection of push-up bras with thick padded cups larger than my head. “Our Very Sexy is more in line with gift-giving.” She held up a black lace vagina noose with a rhinestone detail. “I bet she’d love these.”

  “It’s for my aunt,” I blurted. “For her fiftieth birthday.”

  “But you just said—”

  “I’ll let you know if I need anything,” I said. “Thanks.”

  She eyed me as I labored to pick out the requisite sizes and colors, likely making sure I didn’t stuff a floral-print thong or a mini Angel perfume into my jacket pockets. I’d almost forgotten that Philip said I could pick something out, but then a pair of polka-dot boxer pajamas caught my eye, and onto the pile they went. I even had them gift wrapped: pink box, black bow. Later, perhaps, I would pretend that my imaginary boyfriend, Adam Scott on Parks and Recreation, had sent them for our anniversary. Wow, I realized as I took my bag from the salesgirl. I am a dork.

  It was nearing four by the time I was done with my shopping. I put on my headphones and started for the subway. I hit shuffle and the first song to come up was “Say You’ll Be There.” For a moment I forgot how and why I’d even put the Spice Girls on my playlist. A wrongly labeled MP3 file? A goofy fit of nostalgia brought on by a Buzzfeed listicle?

  No. It was the block party KitKat had organized just after I’d arrived on Barter Street. There was a nineties theme, and afterward, she’d given everyone the playlist as a digital keepsake. I’d never listened
to it in full, but occasionally, the songs would find their way onto shuffle.

  I hesitated on the corner. I wasn’t far from Forty-Ninth Street and the Ambassador Theater, where Jeremy had surely just finished belting out “Mr. Cellophane” to an awestruck crowd. I quickened my pace. I just hoped that he would be able to recognize me, a decade later, through the throng of backstage admirers.

  Chapter 11

  SAY YOU’LL BE THERE

  Ah, sweet little musical-theater nerds. Overdressed teenage girls clutching Playbills and phones ready for a blurry picture they’d post on Instagram no matter how weird a face they were making. Their chaperones and most of the boys hung by the edge of the alley outside the theater, some scowling as they watched their girlfriends swoon over a song-and-dance man almost twice their age.

  Through the throng, Jeremy gave me a twice-over before recognition split a smile on his face. He wove through the group and swept me up in a big bear hug. A handful of girls glared at me like I’d just crashed their prom. He kissed me on the cheek.

  “Jett, Jett, how are you! I didn’t know you were down here!”

  “I would have looked you up sooner if I had known you were here too,” I said. “I’m really glad to see you make it like this.”

  “Isn’t it a trip?” he gushed. “When they called me up and told me I had the part, it took me three days to realize that it wasn’t just a dream. I all but walked into Times Square traffic trying to prove to myself it was real.” He quickly turned and smiled for a camera shoved in his face. “Let me just sign a few more and we’ll go get dinner.”