Thrill-Bent (28 page)

L
eonardo DiCaprio’s best friend’s band may have been signed to a major label, but they haven’t started playing arenas quite yet. Pussy Posse is headlining at the Rock Shop, a small San Francisco club where anti-smoking laws are moot and obscenely cartoonish posters cover the walls like Maoist propaganda. In one, Lucy gives Charlie Brown a blowjob; in another, Nancy and Sluggo go at it doggy-style.

It is a Friday night and the club is already crowded. “I’m so fucking sick of fucking guitars,” we overhear a gaunt, pasty guy say to a gaunt, pasty girl as we enter and get our wrists stamped with little mushroom clouds. “I wanna see somebody get up there and play, like, a fucking fire extinguisher!”

There are three bands in the line-up, and one is onstage when we arrive: Pattycake consists of three girls in mini-skirts with varying shades of pink hair, playing bubblegum TV theme-song music on tiny strap-on keyboards while posing and pouting. “Taste me, taste me, come on and taste me!” they sing in unison. Betty and I order PBRs and take them out to the patio.

“There’s Jamie,” Betty says as we step out the back door. She nods toward the staircase leading to the “green room,” a tiny redwood cupola built on top of the patio balcony, basically the only place for band members to go in order to smoke pot or shoot heroin or eat a burrito outside of the radar of drunkish rabid fans. I see a lanky man in brown suede pants slip into the cupola, his large afro dipping slightly to clear the diminutive doorframe. His hair is the same color as his pants.

“Who’s Jamie?” I ask.

“Hey Jamie!” Betty shouts. His chestnut head bobs back out of the portal just as swiftly as it ducked in, and he quickly surveys the landscape of rock swine strewn across the patio. We are a motley assortment of sadsacks—mostly white nerd-hip boys in full beards and plaid fedoras wearing ’70s shirts bought at Christmastime visits to thrift stores in their hometowns—and their counterparts, skinny girls with Beatleoid mops of hair, stovepipe black jeans, and checkered Vans; a few neophytes in high heels and salon haircuts, probably hoping in vain that Leo will show up at some point in the evening; a white guy with silver dreads and a pierced chin; and one chubby pigtailed chick in a cowgirl outfit smoking a clove cigarette. Jamie spots Betty, turns and salutes. His face, straight-on, is too wide and two-dimensional; his jaw extends like a wingspan, making him look like some kind of comic-book hero. Betty turns to me and takes my hand, smiling furtively. “A little surprise for you,” she says. “I met Jamie on MySpace. He plays drums in this band called Staggering Genius.” She sees my blank expression. “He has Tourette’s,” she whispers.

Jamie grabs the handrail at the top of the stairs. Slowly and deliberately he leans forward to lever his body up. His shoulders thrust downward and his biceps bulge, hips slowly lifting behind him, at first almost imperceptibly, and then his feet are hovering off the ground like disembodied souls. I wonder if he is going to leapfrog the railing in slow-motion, hurling himself into midair just to prove that he is worthy, in spite of that disconcerting jaw. I almost yell, “No!” but what comes out is a brief, grunting “Nnn” as though I am constipated or deaf. I glance at Betty and she laughs, still watching Jamie intently. He has levitated now into a handstand position, and his legs wobble and kick delicately, like a swimmer trying not to make a splash. I think, this is it: “Tourettic Indie-Rocker Dies In Tragic Handstand Mishap”—but then his hips swivel and his feet come to rest on the top of the doorframe behind him. He smiles, like he’s done this a million times. He even lifts one hand and slaps at his mouth five or six times in frenzied succession, like a child approximating an Indian war cry. Somehow he manages to stay upside-down and vertical with just one arm supporting him. Finally, his hips gracefully descend back to the earthly plane, and he breaks into a drum roll, performed on the flat top of the railing, a little trill of fingered exuberance that finishes up his clown-alley act perfectly. He smiles and waves. I scrutinize his narrow back as it disappears into the doorway once more.

“Your mouth is open,” says Betty.

I look around at the crowd on the patio and it seems that no one has even noticed the performance that just took place above their heads. Three bearded guys next to us continue their conversation about Krispy Kreme donuts.

“They’re not crispy, and they’re not creamy, for fuck’s sake,” the one in the gold Flagstaff Pie Alley shirt says. “I mean, somebody should sue them for false advertising!” The other two nod their heads seriously like yeshiva students unraveling a Talmudic riddle. Behind them, the oblivious cowgirl smokes and waits, her deep dimples gouging her cheeks with every inhale.

“What’s his MySpace handle?” I ask Betty.

“Ticsaplenty,” she says, giving me a
what could I do?
shrug.

I am half-appalled that Betty has been trolling MySpace for dudes who might possibly have complex nervous system disorders in order to help me realize my lifelong dream of having sex with someone with Tourette’s (at least I think that’s her intention), but I’m half-flattered that she would use her cyber superpowers to arrange an intricately plotted surprise for
me.
She must have offered up Pussy Posse as a smoke screen when she realized that Jamie’s band would be here tonight too. Despite my ambivalence about Betty’s surprise attack, I am unequivocally delighted that the overrated Pussy Posse has managed to serve as an alibi for so many of her intentions. Thanks to Leo’s narcissistic friend Kevin (Betty pointed him out to me as he pushed past us toward the green room: he was wearing wrap-around sunglasses and literally snapping his fingers at his roadie), she got: an all-expenses-paid California vacation (and therefore a chance to see the Condor in [in]action); an opportunity to provide a cool but slightly creepy shock for me just when I am feeling extraordinarily weird and confused about all things Tourettic; and a brilliant digital snapshot for her column of someone wearing a T-shirt, obviously homemade, featuring the faces of Leonardo and Kevin and the words
Puthy Pothy.

“Malena!” Betty shouts. How does Betty know the bartender at a semi-obscure rock club in San Francisco? Through some alchemical combination of social media, her column in
BadMouth,
and sheer good looks, Betty tends to know more people intimately than I will probably meet in my lifetime.

Malena is one of those bartenders whose persona is so honed that you really don’t have to do more than glance at her to know all the important facts. She spends most of her tips on clothes and make-up; she knows everything about everyone; she used to be a man.

“Betty Crocker!” Malena loudly announces to the bored-looking short-banged girls at the bar, “Come make us a cake from scratch!” She is vaguely Asian and vaguely Latin; with her smooth skin and dark, full lips, she is strikingly gorgeous. She tosses her long black hair—a wig?—and leans all the way across the wide bar to plant a kiss on Betty’s mouth. I can hear the wet quack from three feet away.

As she refills our beers, her voice changes from a high-pitched feline squeak to a growly stage-whisper just loud enough for everyone on this side of the club to educe. “Are you going to hang around for the after-party?” she asks, “We’re having a little
private
party for Kevin on the patio later. Only the crème de la crème.”

“We’re very creme-y,” says Betty, handing me my beer. “No lumps at all.”

“We regularly rise to the surface,” I chime in.

Malena doesn’t seem amused, but she doesn’t withdraw her invitation either. “Sweet!” she says dismissively as she turns to trot on her high heels toward a cockrocker at the other end of the bar with a bleach-blond soulpatch inside a black goatee. I can’t tell if she’s being sarcastic.

“Sweet!” I repeat in a whisper to Betty, attempting to approximate Malena’s bitchy-yet-perky delivery.

She laughs. “As opposed to sour, I guess.”

Pattycake’s boyfriends are breaking down their gear when we approach the stage. The ’cakes linger offstage and receive compliments from male fans while three big punkabilly guys wind cords around their arms and tuck the sherbet-hued electric keyboards into tiny coffinlike cases. When one of the boyfriends picks up a pearly pink Casio with one hand and holds it above his head in order to disengage its cord, I picture King Kong holding a subway car in his giant mitt like it’s a piece of glittering jewelry. Meanwhile, Jamie and his bandmates filter in through the crowd with their equipment, hoisting big pieces of gear onto the stage and tripping up the beefy Pattycrew.

I always enjoy these transitional moments in rock clubs. No matter how glamorous or ultra-modern the act, this blue-collar downtime ruptures the image. Even in high-class yuppie-lounge venues, there is just no way to facilitate a totally smooth shift from one band to another, unless you have multiple stages. And even then, somebody is always dropping some part of a drum kit and causing a brief expository head-turning clang.

“Have you noticed that there seem to be an increasing number of band names out there that refer to cool literary wunderkind?” I ask Betty. “I mean, leafing through the music section of the
Voice
has become some kind of postmodern lit trivia quiz—Vonnegut, Pynchon, Henry Miller, Baudrillard.”

“Kilgore Trout, Gran Faloonbus, Buddhakowski ... uh ... The Crying of Lot 49,” Betty adds.

“Obscene Goo!” I chime in.

“Even Steely Dan was cribbed from
Naked Lunch.
Remember the milk-spewing dildo? And then there are the Beautiful Losers, after that Leonard Cohen novel.”

No one names their band after an Edna St.Vincent Millay poem or a Flannery O’Connor short story. That’s because rock and roll is like any other industry: it claims to be co-ed but is actually devoted to the truculent tactics of guys with tattoos on their triceps.

Jamie jumps down from the stage, where he’s been setting up his drums, and gives Betty a one-armed hug while he clutches his cymbals with the other. We each mumble a shy “hi” as Betty introduces us. I am tempted to say something about his earlier anti-gravity act on the railing, but before I can figure out how to word it, Malena appears and thrusts a pint of beer into Jamie’s free hand.

“On the house, loverboy,” she says in a sultry whisper, obviously her favorite flirtatious tone of voice. Then she pinches Betty’s ass before she slithers back behind the bar.

Staggering Genius is a good name for this band, whose black-suited lead singer’s lurching delivery resembles an auctioneer at a county fair. Twenty-five
thir
-ty, thirty-five
for
-ty, forty-five
fif
-ty ... The songs are not so much melodic as incessant, like a speeded-up church chime, the round syllables of vowely words repeating themselves in hurried, echoing rapture.

I am almost moved to shout out a bid, but I become distracted by Jamie behind the drumset. I peer at him between the heads and hats of my compatriots. He is watching the bass player intently, opening and closing the loop of his mouth like a fish. His playing is fiery and impetuous; he leaves open spaces unexpectedly, ducking out to create sudden silences where the singer presses forward into sharp relief, like a whisperer at a funeral. Between songs, Jamie slaps at his lips with the back of his hand, occasionally scrubbing at one side of his mouth as though it bears the traces of something that offends him—residual popcorn oiliness, or lipstick. The gesture is familiar; the repetition of it is clearly Tourettic. His tic storms are similar in intensity to my dad’s, or to my dad’s erstwhile tic storms, even if the specifics are different. I recognize the dedication to follow through with the compulsion, the blazing energy that infuses the moment.

“Did he say Gerry Rafferty?” Betty shouts in my ear.

“I thought he said Geriatric Rhapsody!”

Betty raises her eyebrows back at me. I’m not sure if she heard what I said.

I decide to move up closer to the band to get a better look at Jamie. The smell of boiling beef fat invades the air near the back of the club, oozing from the kitchen at the Rock Shop Grill, where spicy fries are the “special du jour” (every jour, I’m guessing). I turn sideways and attempt to butter-knife my body through the crowd, wedging between stolid onlookers and prying open cliques of ruffled and backcombed college girls holding plastic martini glasses. I accidentally kick a beer bottle that’s been dropped on the floor, and it skitters noisily until it hits someone’s biker boot, then ricochets over to the patio, out of range.

As I approach the center of the floor, it’s clear that a certain trance has taken hold in the trenches. Here in the inner sanctum, away from the burnt grill smell and the Pussy Posse rubberneckers chatting in the margins, true Staggering Genius fans allow themselves to be swayed and shaken by the brute force of the music. The gummy floor and various dubious stinks—musky body odor, hash-pipe tar, fresh hair dye, spilled beer—blend to create a kind of protective atmospheric condition, one that can’t be punctured by time and regret. My shoulders rock back and forth, and my hips are yanked in tight circles by the furious, erratic beating that Jamie is giving his drumset. I don’t look at him; instead, I close my eyes and surrender to the pleasure of joining a group—something I rarely do. I allow my arms to graze the limbs next to mine, and my ass unites with someone’s groin for a lengthy exploration of the possibilities of counterpoise. I can feel the loudness inside every muscle, vibrating in me like canned heat. I, like everyone around me, am a slave to the rhythm of the Genius, staggering along its rough and bumpy road. Self-consciousness is irrelevant. There is no way to steer off course in this hammering, prodigal journey. For some reason I am reminded of being stuck atop the Cyclone at Coney Island with Ralph—I am breathless and exhilarated and a little bit scared, buffeted by forces on all sides, obliged to adjust my own internal momentum to correspond with the world’s awe-inspiring plans. I’m locked in a caesura the size of a human lifetime, and that lifetime is my own. I open my eyes only once, just for a second, long enough to notice that absolutely no one is looking at me.