Blackman speaks with a shy taciturnity that makes me believe his declaration. He goes on to say that they live a pretty ordinary existence and spend most of their time with his two sons from a previous marriage, or…
And then there was the shot of us standing at the top of a knoll in Central Park: My arms were thrown around Loring's neck, and I was reaching up so far my T-shirt was rising, exposing my navel. Loring's arms were clasped at the small of my back. We looked happy. We looked like two people in love.
I remembered exactly when the photograph had been taken. Right before Loring left for the video shoot, Sean and Walker had wanted to go to the park, and while the boys stood in line for ice cream sandwiches, Loring and I waited on the grass. We'd been about to kiss when Loring covered my face, put his head down and said, “Someone just took our picture.”
I bought the magazine, exited the subway station, and ran ten blocks down Broadway, toward Doug's manager's office, where Loring was in the process of planning an upcoming Doug Blackman tribute concert that would coincide with the legendary singer's sixtieth birthday in October.
The reception area of the management company looked like a nursery school. Every piece of furniture was a different primary color, and there were framed chalkboards on the walls where visitors had signed their names and sketched drawings.
The receptionist, an exotic, attractive woman—Persian maybe—with dark skin, bright green eyes, and voluptuous lips, greeted me.
“I need to see Loring. Could you please tell him Eliza's here?”
The receptionist disappeared and I doodled on one of the chalkboards. I drew a banana, but then realized what I'd done and erased it with my palm. I was rubbing my hands together, trying to rid them of white dust, when a door to the right of the desk opened and Loring walked out.
I dragged Loring into the hallway, leaving chalky fingerprints on the arm of his navy blue shirt, and held the GQ in front of his face. Only then did I realize how heavily I was breathing. I must've sprinted the whole way there. “Have you seen this?”
He scratched his temple and looked at me sideways.
I opened the magazine and pointed to the parts where I was mentioned. “I never said you could make my life public knowledge!”
A blond, disheveled guy, who probably spent the majority of his workday fantasizing about the receptionist, stuck his head around the corner. Loring said, “Hey, Lou. How's it going?”
Lou apparently sensed something unpleasant going down. He waved and then ducked back into his office.
Loring glanced at the paragraph in the magazine. “I was just making conversation.” But then his focus became critical, his expression sullen. “Oh,” he said. “I get it. This is about him, isn't it? You don't want Paul to see this.”
It probably would have behooved me to utter loud, thrashing words of denial, but I didn't see the point.
Loring handed the magazine back to me. “I'm sorry, Eliza. Really.” He was already walking away. “I promise I'll never again tell anyone how happy you make me.”
I spent the next hour walking around the park, trying to figure out why I still cared what that bastard thought. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't formulate an explanation that fit into my life as I currently knew it.
When I got back to the apartment I waited for Loring on the couch. The minute he walked off the elevator he announced he was going for a run. He came back an hour later, took a three-minute-long shower, made tea, and went out to the terrace with a Taiwanese Oolong that smelled like lilacs.
Watching him from behind the glass, he looked like a suddenly sentient specimen in one of the dioramas at the Museum of Natural History across the street.
I slid open the door and tried to act like an oblivious housewife. “Want me to order some dinner?”
“No. Thanks, though.”
Few things were more aggravating to me than someone who was clearly mad as hell but still being polite. I wished Loring would scream at me or put his fist through the door or toss that cup of lilac-flavored tea in my face.
Loring scraped chipped paint from the iron railing. Then he turned around and said, “Eliza, do I have a birthmark?”
I stopped short of answering him.
“Yes or no?” he said. “It's not a trick question.”
“Um, yes?”
“Good guess. Where is it?”
I perused his body top to bottom and had a vague notion there might be something over his right shoulder, but I was terribly unsure, and I guessed that making an inconclusive statement would have been much worse than verbalizing nothing at all.
“You don't have a clue,” he said.
He lifted his left foot and pointed to a tan-colored, amoeba-shaped splotch at least an inch in diameter, right at the top of his ankle. He made sure I got a good look at it, and then he put his foot back down.
“You have one on your right wrist and one under your left arm,” he said. “And something tells me that if Paul Hudson has one, you not only know where it is, you'd probably be able to find it with your eyes closed.”
Paul's birthmark was on the left side of his forehead, right beyond his hair line. It was the size of a pea, the color of a weak latte, and I used to kiss it sometimes before we went to sleep. With my eyes closed.
“You were right,” I sighed. “About the article. About Paul.”
He stared at me for a long moment. “You're still in love with him, aren't you?”
“It's over between me and Paul. We're beyond repair. He's made that crystal clear.”
“See, why do you say it that way? As if it's all up to Paul? I thought you deemed him a fake and a bastard? Choice betrays character, isn't that what you said? So which is it? Do you or do you not still love the guy?”
“I just don't want to hurt him any more than I already have. I don't think he needs his nose rubbed in it.”
“Now that he's home, are you going to see him?”
“No.”
“Just tell me if you are. That's all I ask.”
“I'm not.”
Loring turned back around, leaned on the railing and mumbled, “Go back inside. Please. I want to be alone.”
The housekeeper had been there that afternoon. I could always tell because the sheets on the bed would be tucked in so tight, trying to get them out was like wrestling an alligator. I fought until every inch of Egyptian cotton had been freed from the mattress and then I collapsed, muffling my tears by feeding them to the pillow.
Why couldn't I just fall in love with Loring and be done with it?
When Loring finally came to bed he took off his shirt and got in behind me, but his chest felt cautious against my back.
“I'm sorry,” I whispered. And I was. For so many things. But I knew that no matter how remorseful I felt, my repentance would only toss a blanket over the truth, and all the contrition in the world wasn't going to change that.
“Eliza, how would you feel about maybe going away for a while?” Loring adjusted his pillow and put his arm above my head. “We could drive up to Vermont, just the two of us, forget about everyone else and see what happens.”
I wondered if he really wanted to get away, or if he just wanted to keep me from Paul. I also wondered how someone who could explain the chaos theory, identify every work of art painted between 1420–1600, and had four top-ten singles to his name could be so dippy when it came to love.
“I'm not clueless, Loring. I know what you want. I'm just not sure I can ever give it to you.”
“I know. But I'm not willing to throw in the towel yet.”
“A friend once told me that the last man standing in a battle is usually the biggest fool of all. Everyone has to know when to say when.”
“I'll take that under advisement when your friend does.”
An MD-80 was flying nearby. I didn't have to see the aircraft, I was able to identify it as an MD-80 by the noise it made. The engines on that particular plane had a specific tenor. They seemed quieter to me. I figured
the flight had probably just taken off, and I wondered how many of its passengers feared for their lives and how many were either too smart or too stupid to be scared. Then I wondered how many of them would curse fate if the plane started hurtling toward the ground at five hundred miles an hour.
“Okay,” I whispered.
“Okay, what?”
“Let's go to Vermont.”
Loring eased me onto my back, put his hand on my cheek, and I closed my eyes, but when I did that I saw Paul's face above me. And when Loring kissed me, I felt Paul's lips. And when Loring moved inside of me, I felt Paul moving inside of me. And when Loring called my name I heard Paul's voice call my name. And then Loring came and I came, and I didn't open my eyes again until the morning sun told me to.
Michael and Vera lived on the fringes of an area in Brooklyn known as Park Slope, though not the hip, gentrified section with the renovated, million-dollar brownstones. Their apartment was in the basement of an aluminum-siding duplex, with a tiny cement porch covered by a green plastic awning that made even the slightest sprinkle of rain sound like hail.
Before Loring and I left for Vermont, Vera invited us over for a barbeque. Burke and Queenie were there too, and everyone sat in front of the house listening to Michael and Burke tell stories from the road while I played with the dog Michael and Vera had just adopted, a fragile Italian greyhound they'd named Fender.
I wanted to go home as soon as we finished eating. I'd been uneasy about bringing Loring over and didn't want to be there any longer than necessary. Queenie made me sit back down, insisting that everyone play the board game she'd brought with her, a game which required its players to split into teams of two and do things like spell words backward, hum songs, make sculptures out of lemon-scented clay, and draw pictures with their eyes closed.
During the first round, it was clear that Michael's hostility toward Loring had waned, especially when the two of them unilaterally declared me the worst player the game had ever seen. This came after Loring picked a card, drew what looked to me like a striped cat and a bunch of trees, and expected me to guess what it was.
“Frosted Flakes,” I said, thinking the cat might be Tony the Tiger.
Laughing, Loring said, “Remember, it's a person.” “If it's a person, why did you draw a cat?” Loring just kept tapping the cat with his pencil and adding more trees.
“Forrest Whitaker,” I said.
“Come on,” Michael teased. “He can't make it any clearer.”
I tried to kick Michael but he grabbed my foot and cracked the knuckles in my toes.
Time was running out and Loring quickly drew what I thought looked like a golf club. He pointed at the cat again, drew an arrow from the cat's paw to the golf club, and another arrow from the golf club back to the cat's paw.
Certain I'd figured it out, I yelled, “Caddyshack!”
Everyone roared with laughter. And when the last grain of sand had emptied from the hourglass timer, they all chanted, “Tiger Woods!”
And then it happened. With everybody watching, Loring bent over and kissed the top of my head. And no one in the room batted an eye at the profanity of the action. It was as though an induction had taken place. Loring was now part of the landscape my friends saw when they looked at me. They accepted him, which meant they'd officially disassociated me from Paul, and as much as I wanted this to be a good thing, it felt like they'd taken a chisel to my heart and carved out all the sacred parts.
It was an awful moment, and if anyone thought I hadn't noticed that Paul's name hadn't been mentioned once all night, not even by accident, they were wrong. I'd been counting on a slip or two here and there, to feel his presence, no matter how vague. Apparently everyone else had made a conscious effort to leave him at the door, but I could hear him lingering like the footsteps of a ghost in a dark, empty attic. I learned later that week, through Vera, that Paul had indeed seen the article in GQ. Michael told his wife that on the plane ride back to New York, Paul had ripped the photograph of Loring and me out of the magazine, blackened our eyes, wrote Ain't love grand? above our heads, and taped it to the back of the seat in front of him with a piece of gum, where it remained until they started their decent into JFK, when Michael saw Paul staring at it and tore it down.
Dead.
That's what old caterpillar eyebrows said.
The conference room he had me and Feldman holed up in felt as big as a football field. If I'd been sitting at the other end of the table instead of two seats away from the guy I would have been too far to make out his face, let alone study the rotting cocoons above his eyes.
Feldman repeated the word. Dead. Then Winkle said it again. They were like two parrots vying for the next seed. But unlike Feldman, there was a pejorative echo in Winkle's voice. And an utter lack of sympathy. “As far as I'm concerned,” he said, “the record is D-E-A-D.”
It's almost comical, really. I said almost. Because debacles are nearly always funny, unless they happen to you.
Our record was released Tuesday, January 8, 2002. I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure almost everyone in the music industry would agree there isn't a worse time to release a record. Who in their right mind, right after the holidays? Especially by a band no one's ever heard of. And when there's something of a recession going on. And when the number one record in the country that week is by a band of musical heathens who pass themselves off as believers, but whose sole talent consists of being able to flex their biceps and plagiarize their infinitely more-talented contemporaries.
There's no way in hell I can compete with that.
As much as I hate to admit it, the gigs with Loring helped us. There had been a small but promising flux of album sales during those two weeks. After we started the Drones tour, a couple of fan sites popped up on the net, and a couple magazines even touted Bananafish as a band to watch, but neither radio nor video know where to put us, which has led to a kind of commercial oblivion that's only exacerbated our already shaky position with the record company.
I have a new theory on the situation. I call it “the Catch” and it goes like this: Had we signed with Underdog, we'd be considered “indie,” we'd be considered “cool,” we'd be considered superior to the mainstream simply because Underdog conjures up that kind of bullshit aura. Furthermore, our music would have been initially “marketed” toward, and/or stumbled upon by the proper audience—namely, the kind of people who might recognize and appreciate what we do. Pay attention, my obsolete little recording buddy, because here comes the actual “catch” part: I signed with Winkle and Co. in order to reach a larger audience, but Winkle's measly publicity plan was aimed at the soulless pop pagan crowd—the crowd that demands handsomeness, a nice wardrobe, or, at the very least, a certain amount of self-serving ego from their icons. I guess “barking up the wrong tree” is an appropriate cliché to insert here.
In continually trying to pass Bananafish off as part of the pagans and heathens, the Winkles are succeeding in ostracizing most of the true believers—that is, they're shunning the very audience our music is meant for—the fairly smart, predominantly liberal, dare I say misfits who probably take one look at the poseur shot of me on the cover of the record—the very shot Winkle and Clint and Meredith promised not to use— judge me to be nothing but a no-good wanker and put the disc back in the Bananafish bin.
Who am I kidding? We don't have our own goddamn bin. We're thrown in with the other random Bs.
I will now read a few lines from a review of our show in Austin:
“In a parallel universe,” wrote a guy named Daniel J. Pierson, “one in which talent counts for something, a band like Bananafish would have ignited an inferno of excitement in music. The song ‘Pale Blue Jeaner’ could have done for the new millennium what ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ did for the end of the last one.”
Yeah. And how does that saying go? The one Eliza said her dad used to use all the time?
If my aunt had balls she'd be my uncle.
You know what I am
? I'm just another guy with a guitar trying to make it. Nothing more, nothing less. And the statistics only serve to reinforce my theory. Our first single was promoted meagerly and received less-than-modest air play. No big surprise there. The second single was subsequently released without any promotion at all. Winkle claimed he couldn't justify spending the kind of money it would take on a record that wasn't generating any real heat, meanwhile the industry is such that it's categorically impossible to generate heat without heavy promotion.
It should also be pointed out that Winkle recently signed a nineteen year-old, ample-breasted, singing-and-dancing android from Indiana to a multi-million-dollar, multi-media contract.
There's no way in hell I can compete with that.
Winkle also made the mistake of assuming the Drones tour would do most of the publicity work for him, and sure, we gained a decent number of fans along the way. But the Drones's most recent release has been their least successful to date, and the tour was something of a flop.
There's more. Around the time our record came out, Winkle wasn't generating much heat either. He hadn't knocked out a hit in over a year, and in the record business, Winkles are one flop away from the unemployment line. All the eggs are now in the teen sensation's basket. Bananafish is completely ovumless. Adding to that pressure, the company's stock is down— maybe people aren't buying mayonnaise and cigarettes like they used to, and how many people still go out and buy new CDs when they can download them for free?
There you have it—the recipe for mincemeat á la Paul Hudson.
To paraphrase: Winkle can no longer afford to take a chance on an artist who could take years to turn a profit when the poor guy needs a sure thing right now.
A gold record is five hundred thousand units sold. Platinum is one million.
A year ago this kind of goddamn data was completely unknown to me. Then one day I woke up, knew it all by heart, and wondered where the hell I'd gone wrong.
Probably the biggest kicker of all is that Bananafish's record sales have, at this point, reportedly tapered off at around twenty-nine thousand.