Waking Beauty (6 page)

I smiled and moved on, thinking about how I would tell it to Nathan on my break. Nathan was the one who clued me in about the Hazel business. I couldn’t figure out why Andrew kept calling me Hazel. Then Nathan told me that Hazel was a maid on a TV sitcom in the early sixties, and that it was probably another lame attempt on Andrew’s part to be amusingly ironic.

Nathan despised
WUT Up
magazine. He hated the hipper-than-thou attitude, the vomitous fluorescent color scheme, the headache-inducing practice of rendering text unreadable by torturing it into groovy swirls of graphic cacophony (not that there was much text, mind you;
WUT Up
was primarily images). Most of all, Nathan detested the film reviews, which he found muddled, witless, and phlegmatic. He also took umbrage with the quarter-page glamour pic of
WUT Up’s
regular film columnist—a cute twenty-something blonde who called herself Shelly D. The glossy photo showed her seated naked in a red velvet theater chair, her private parts obscured by a giant pink-and-white-striped box of popcorn, a come-hither expression on her face.

“Jeez, why didn’t
The New Yorker
think of that?” he said during one of our rant sessions on Andrew and
WUT Up
. “They could have ditched Pauline Kael and hired Pamela Anderson. You know, a nice shot of her with thirty-five-millimeter film frames over her nipples like pasties. Hell, it’s not too late, they could fire David Denby and hire Ben Affleck or Antonio Sabato, Jr. I mean, who gives a damn about the review?”

Nathan deeply admired Pauline Kael. He told me that she was the reason he’d decided to become a film critic (her and somebody named Jay Scott). I was surprised. I figured that Nathan, with all his movie blab, wanted to be a director or a writer or, at the very least, a producer. But no, apparently he didn’t want to make movies, he simply wanted to review them—and, he hoped, scratch out a living at it. Unfortunately,
he hadn’t had much success. He did contribute reviews to a small bimonthly newspaper, but it was a low-circulation freebie, and he made only forty bucks a pop. He told me that, a while back, he almost got a gig reviewing film on cable TV, à la Roger Ebert. He had noticed an ad in several film mags and one of the daily papers soliciting three sample reviews from burgeoning cinephiles who wanted to try out for the plum position. Nathan sent off three fine ones in short order. He got a call from an enthusiastic associate producer asking for three more. He sent those off. Then he was summoned for an interview, which he felt he had handled with verve and panache, wowing the producers by doing an impromptu review of Woody Allen’s
Small Time Crooks
(there was poster for it up on the wall), comparing it beat for beat to the film on which it was apparently based: the superior
Larceny, Inc
., a 1942 production written by Laura and S. J. Perelman, starring Edward G. Robinson, Jane Wyman, Broderick Crawford, Jack Carson, and Anthony Quinn.
Go, Nathan, go
. Next, the producers asked him to do a videotaped audition. He felt no fear in front of the camera and was certain that he had aced it. Soon after, the producers called to inform him that an actor had been hired to host the show. According to Nathan: “Some pretty boy in a vintage motorcycle jacket who knew fuck all about film.”

I was surprised. Nathan wasn’t exactly a poster boy—put him in a tank top and the effect would be more Appalachian than Calvin Klein—but he was hardly a beast. He had a David-Letterman-meets-Howdy-Doody-on-the-way-to-Woody-Allen sort of look. Thin reddish hair receding from a curiously bulbous forehead, pale skin blanketed in barely noticeable freckles, intelligent brown eyes behind wire-rim glasses, and a goofy, gap-toothed smile. He was about five foot ten, of average weight. He wasn’t pumped up, but he appeared moderately muscled. I thought he was rather adorable.

“It’s their loss,” I told him.

“Thanks,” he said. “But when I hear about this clown getting free industry passes to every film fest in the country, it feels more like my loss.” He laughed. “I think it’s more accurately my loss.”

As usual, I zipped through the third floor so I would have a few minutes to spare before I took my official break. I ducked into the ladies’ washroom and ate my falafels and Snickers bar. It was an unpleasant place to dine, even right inside the entrance door facing away from the stalls, but I didn’t want to be seen. Occasionally I would run into Nathan in the hallways while he was bringing water to the plants at the growing stations, and I didn’t want him to catch me with cheeks full of pita and a chin dripping with tahini rivulets. Not that he would have said anything, but the idea of it made me uncomfortable. When thin people eat, it looks like humans taking nourishment. When fat people eat, it looks like gluttons self-destructing. I finished quickly, rinsed my mouth in the bathroom sink, and then proceeded to the fourth-floor roof garden.

Nathan wasn’t there yet. I sat down to wait. Something about the place—the up-aboveness of it, the isolation, the leafy oasis quality—always made me feel slightly melancholy. It made me feel like singing.

I had been singing the first time I encountered Nathan. It was a few weeks after I had started with the DeSouzas, September of last year. I was out on the roof, taking my break. I had finished my food—there was no reason not to eat out there back then—and I had about five minutes to kill. I remember sitting there in the city dark, the not-quite dark, feeling a bit bummed out. The night was cool and there was a trace of wood smoke in the air. For the first time that year it smelled like autumn. I felt like singing, so I did. I remember the song, too. It was one that I had written, an embarrassingly mopey ballad called “One Man’s Trash,” a sort of Vic-Chesnutt-meets-Eleni-Mandel-type dirge. Anyway, when I
came to the end of my scowl-howl, I heard clapping and nearly soiled my pants. I turned and saw Nathan, standing at the entrance to the patio, smiling, looking like a balding, bespectacled Alfred E. Neuman.

“That was beautiful,” he said, “really beautiful.” I was too shocked to speak. And my heart was going about a million beats per minute.

Ten-fifteen and no Nathan. Just when I thought he wasn’t going to show, just when I started to feel a sick constriction in my chest, he appeared on the patio, sweating and out of breath.

“Hey.”

“Hey.”

“What time is it?” he said, dropping his knapsack on the ground and wiping the sweat from his forehead.

I checked my watch as if I didn’t know perfectly well.

“A quarter after ten.”

“Shit,” he said. “Can you believe I just got here?”

“Why? What happened?”

“I left my fucking knapsack on the subway. What a schmuck.”

“Yikes. But you got it back, though.”

“Yeah, three hours later, minus the cash in my wallet, my Criterion
Grey Gardens
DVD, and my
Video Hound
.”

“Oh, no.”

“Oh, yes,” said Nathan, sitting down beside me. “Oh, well, at least they returned my credit cards and ID. That would’ve been a nightmare. And it seems the thief had good taste. He took
Grey Gardens
but left a VHS copy of
The Mexican
.” Nathan laughed.

“He probably checked the
Video Hound
.”

“Yeah, really,” said Nathan, smiling at the idea.

“Did you lose a lot of cash?”

“A whopping twenty-five bucks.”

“Still…”

“Yeah, it’s unfortunate. Oh, well. No great tragedy. How are you doing?”

I told him about my latest encounter with Andrew McKay.

“What a wanker,” said Nathan. “God, I can’t stand that jerk.”

The words warmed me. Someone on my side. “Well, I guess I’d better get back at it,” I said, checking my watch. It was five minutes past my allotted break time.

“Yeah, me, too,” said Nathan. “Unless you want to sing me something first?”

He always asked me this. And I always refused. It was a little game. A friendly joke.

I went inside and retrieved my cart. “See you Monday,” I said.

“See you,” he said, moving in the opposite direction down the hallway.

Little did I know that Nathan would never see me again. Not that version of me, anyway.

4    

As I cleaned my way through the fourth and final
floor, I found myself thinking about Nathan. One thing I liked about him was that he never tried to feed me any bullshit line about quitting my scrub job to pursue a singing career. He knew I had a good voice, good enough and then some, but he also knew what was what in the modern-day music world, a world where the Visual had completely, astonishingly, overtaken the Audio. Okay, you’re thinking: Big deal, so Nathan knew that the business of selling music had become absurdly shallow. So what? We all know that it’s not about how you sound; it’s about how you look in the video. Thanks to the miracle of audio technology, everybody and their grandma can sound good. But not everyone can look good. Not everyone
can make a teenybopper swoon, or give a million guys a million hard-ons. Of course, there were always pretty people in the music biz, but I think there used to be more room for the less-than-gorgeous. There used to be room for Geddy Lee’s schnoz and Joey Ramone’s teeth. No one cared if the “Velvet Fog” was short and pudgy or if Janis Joplin had bags under her squinty eyes. The ratio was more sane. For every Jim Morrison, there was a Van Morrison. For every shimmying Tom Jones, there was a simian Tom Waits. For every perky Olivia Newton-John, there was a paunchy Dr. John or a pug-nosed Elton John. For every extraordinarily enhanced Janet Jackson, there was an average and ordinary Joe Jackson. Now it’s *NSYNC and Shania Twain, Lil’ Kim and Christina Aguilera. Now it’s All Saints and Britney Spears and Destiny’s Child and the Backstreet Boys. And it’s not just MTV. Check out the CD covers of up-and-coming classical musicians. You’ll find dewy-eyed young women with flowing backlit tresses and their tits bulging out of their satin gowns. You’ll find “babes” who sing medieval songs. So what? So everyone knows this. Fine. I agree that it wasn’t such a big deal that Nathan knew what was what. But most people would’ve played dumb and fed me a line. “Ooh, with a voice like that, you should be filling stadiums, not emptying trash cans, Allison. You should go try out for
American Idol
.” Nathan was too honest and respectful to feed me any ostensibly well-meaning horseshit. He never encouraged me to go be the token ugly girl who makes it almost all the way through
Popstars
.

Unfortunately, I had learned my lesson the pathetic way, trying out for every band imaginable when I dropped out of school. I remember regularly buying all the daily newspapers, as well as picking up the weekly alternative mags to check the “Musicians Wanted” classifieds. Vocalist Needed for Blues/Rock Group, Vocalist Wanted for Heavy Melodic Band, Retro 80s Electro Seeks Vocals, Female Singer for All-Original Progressive Moody, Voc. Required for Country-Flavored
Folk Band, Singer for Funk/Post-Pop, All Girl Metal Band Seeks Front Vocals, Carnival Cruise Line Now Auditioning Singers, Dancers, Performers. I contacted them all indiscriminately. If I sang over the phone or mailed my demo cassette (recorded a cappella in my bathroom), they always wanted to see me. Of course, once they saw me, I was finished. Suddenly my voice wasn’t “quite right” and it was:
Thanks for coming, we’ll keep you in mind, best of luck to you
.

The only singing gig I was able to score was as a KJ, a karaoke host, in the sleazy lounge at the Gladwell Hotel—a faded-glory, Victorian behemoth where rooms went for twenty-five dollars a night; sheets changed weekly. Aside from operating the karaoke equipment and announcing the ten-cent chicken wing specials, my job was to warm up the crowd by belting out a song or three early on in the evening while people lubricated themselves sufficiently with plastic-pitcher draught, or whenever there was a lull. There was rarely a lull. The Gladwell attracted a band of regulars who needed little prompting to emblazon the stage. Most of them were over the age of fifty, and hailed from the subsidized housing slum southwest of the Gladwell. All of them seemed beaten down and broken by life. Until they started singing. Then they were magic. Each of the hardcores had their own signature song. There was Doreen, a Shirley MacLaine look-alike, who pranced perky around the stage, in Stetson and fringed cowgirl outfit, trilling “Back in Baby’s Arms.” There was Little Kate, a six-footer on a motorized scooter, her withered legs held vertical by soiled white go-go boots, doing “To Sir, with Love.” And my personal favorite: Edgar Whittle, a tattooed octogenarian with a nicotine-stained ducktail, and the biggest, most dazzling dentures I’d ever laid eyes on. He would move himself (and me) to tears every time he crooned “Stand by Your Man” in a voice that, at one time, must have rivaled Tammy Wynette’s. It was beautiful. And tragic. I adored the whole scene.

Unfortunately, I had no choice but to turn in my mic. I just could not handle the smoke. There wasn’t one Gladwell regular who didn’t suck up a pack per night, and by last call, I was barely able to breathe, let alone send the folks off with a wheeze-free rendition of “Goodnight My Someone.”