Doxology

There they had sex for the first time. His doubts, hesitations, and regrets were as nothing in the face of the coming apocalypse. She felt none of the above. She wished she’d had the idea of sleeping with him long before.

SEX CAME AND WENT IN PAM’S LIFE. SHE HAD PICKED UP ENOUGH OF THE TAIL END OF seventies culture to call it “love.” She never had sex unless she was “in love.” She could fall in love in the space of fifteen minutes. She had offered many appealing strangers tender kisses, some of which became hand jobs in short order, while others quickly progressed to “making love.”

As a result, all her boyfriends had been approximately as charming as Simon. She fell in love as a prelude to sex. Then she had ethical qualms about unloading people in the morning, because she was in love. Her ideal of sex was intimate and gentle, and she kept having it with strangers.

She knew all about bad sex. Not rough sex; she would have called that “assault.” She knew that gay men pick up rough trade at the risk of being beaten to death, that submissive men role-play excuses for penetration, and that straight women take both behaviors to extremes. She understood herself to be a hedonist. She never sought out unpleasant consequences. They just kept happening.

Sex for Daniel was the opposite—consistently too much fun. His earliest sexual experiences had involved fondling the genitals of Christian schoolgirls he never once kissed. He’d even gotten a blow job from one of them once, and he wouldn’t have kissed her for a million dollars after that. Her feelings were hurt, but what could he do? How were his sexual preferences his fault?

In college he’d gotten a crush on an eccentric and lonely black women’s-studies major who slept around but never had intercourse with anyone. She never said why not, and she never touched him, so he never felt he had standing to find out. At times he thought they were two virgins, born to be together, and at other times he thought she was recovering from a rape trauma and subsequent promiscuous phase; he never asked. In her senior year she came out as lesbian, and he felt he’d missed his one chance. He had two years of college left to go, and nobody he knew of liked him that way.

At an art opening the fall of junior year, he met a Thai woman on an exchange program to the veterinary school. They corresponded for months. That was sexually rewarding (not). He’d never known Buddhists were so strict about premarital sex.

His senior year, he hooked up with a scraggly-haired anthropologist. She had sour armpits and annoying mannerisms such as picking her nose and relating everything to cybernetics, but she said she liked to get fucked. Once, early in their liaison, she diverted his member into her anus with her hand, and he didn’t immediately notice. When he did, she explained that she had vaginal discomfort from a yeast infection. He suspected that she felt no sexual pleasure, of any kind, ever, and that it was a matter of indifference to her how he did what.

On one occasion, he was unfaithful to her with a pretty townie he met at a heavy metal show. When they were done, the townie said, “Did you know I’m fifteen?” He was terrified. She promised to keep quiet for a hundred dollars. But his friends at Subway knew that she was nineteen and an amateur, so it was okay.

In short, his previous experiences of sex had less than nothing to do with love. Pam opened a new chapter in his life. Where the other consummated affairs seemed to have emerged from the sewers of his mind like roaches swarming out of a toilet, Pam descended from above, bringing all he held most dear: beauty, art, music, cyberpunk, the Lower East Side. Kissing her was the most important thing.

Band practice was interesting after that. Joe sang his songs while playing counterpoint melodies on the bass. Pam looked straight down at her left hand, and Daniel focused on the brushes with which he played warped floor tom and broken snare. Every so often, the couple raised their eyes and nodded almost imperceptibly in greeting.

IN HIS FUNCTION AS MANAGER AND LABEL EXECUTIVE, DANIEL BOUGHT THE SELF-HELP manual Book Your Own Fucking Life. It was a punk rock venue guide to the USA and Canada, produced by an anarchist collective in Minneapolis. He observed that meaningful implementation of the book was predicated on possession of a vehicle. He was financially committed to Marmalade Sky to the tune of the $800 the first single was going to cost him. There was nothing in his plans about thousands of dollars for transportation. The thought of trying to store a van in lower Manhattan made his insides droop. Whether or not the street sweeping machines came, you had to move your car every day. Official car theft rates were kept low by the inconvenience of reporting crimes, but a car parked on the street still had annual insurance premiums roughly equal to its value. A worthless car could be relied on to stay put if you removed some vital part such as the alternator every night and took it upstairs.

He broached the necessity of renting a van some weekend to play Trenton or Philly, traditional springboards for ambitious and creative bands that had trouble cracking the mercantile culture of NYC rock.

Pam said, “What’s next, Passaic? This city not big enough for you?”

Joe elucidated his view that New York City was the industry’s one and only mecca. Bands from other places dreamed all their lives of playing there, paying serious money—like fifty bucks—for the privilege of presenting short sets in exploitative clubs such as Downtown Beirut. Marmalade Sky, an endemic growth, could play New York any time it wanted, by setting up out on the sidewalk or next to the fountain in Washington Square. He had seen a rig with a Peavey and a car battery. They could play wearing fun costumes. He had seen a girl dressed as broccoli.

“No, no, no,” Daniel said. “I’m not busking for quarters! I have a job!”

He noted inwardly that Marmalade Sky’s need for a label and a manager was not urgent, and possibly not even real. The band itself might not be real. He felt it might be helpful to know relevant people who could confirm the band’s reality. If, say, he were on speaking terms with someone who booked clubs or a music journalist—he didn’t know how or where to start, but he did have the idea. He resolved to acquire a kick drum and hi-hat cymbals.

He wasn’t thinking straight. Pam worked days, and he worked nights. On weekdays they saw each other in the evenings, when she got home from RIACD and he hadn’t left yet—generally from about seven to ten—which was enough time to cook or get takeout, fool around, get cleaned up, and go home to sleep and uptown to work, respectively. On weekends they went to shows. He was losing sleep.

When he finally asked her, Pam proffered her habitual disinterested analysis. Of all the factors in their success, she said, there was only one under his control: the debut single, which he should urgently bring to fruition. After it came out, other bands would hound him with demo tapes. For the sake of buttering up a label owner, they would offer Marmalade Sky choice opening gigs.

He replied, “I have the money to put out a single, but no band to put on it. Maybe you can tell me when Marmalade Sky is going to start being non-heinous.”

“Put up a flyer at Kim’s,” she said. “Or an ad in the Voice. Find some band that has a decent cassette and offer them a seven-inch. Or record Joe as a solo project and let him sell it to his three hundred best friends.”

A STRANGE PHENOMENON HAD TAKEN HOLD OF PAM’S CHECKING ACCOUNT SINCE SHE had met Daniel. It was growing. While single, she had not skimped on cover charges, restaurant meals, instruments, electronics, or liquor by the drink, and whenever she couldn’t find her wallet—a regular occurrence—she had bought a new one to fill with new cash. Since meeting him, she had been spending money rather than hemorrhaging it, and she was saving hundreds of dollars a month.

But she didn’t offer to contribute money to Lion’s Den. It was his label, not hers. She had enough business experience to know that it wasn’t a business. It was an art project. Investing in it would contravene the project goal, which was to be Daniel’s art. He wanted autonomy more than he wanted success. He wanted to design record covers, compose press releases, and gain a reputation—among the handful of people who mattered to him—as a man of wit and taste. It had nothing to do with turning $800 into $2,000 in the fullness of time and paying her back.

She didn’t try to explain herself. It was hard to explain. As an art form, rock’s medium was commercial success. The tippy top was its guiding light. Having a band was about being a rock star, a fantasy of ultimate autonomy in which you got paid megabucks to be your worst self.

Meanwhile she was slogging away as a programmer, and he was sitting up all night setting Latin abbreviations in italics. Marmalade Sky might be art for art’s sake, but if it didn’t offer them at least a chance of rock stardom, it wasn’t worth doing.

DANIEL TURNED HER SUGGESTION OVER AND OVER IN HIS MIND. JOE COULD PLAY MORE instruments, and play them better, than all three of them put together. He had no shortage of material. The missing element was the multitrack studio to produce the master tape.

He thought briefly of buying microphones and a four-track and learning to use them—or, more realistically, letting Pam figure them out—but the equipment would cost almost as much as pressing the single, and he’d still have to rent a soundproofed room, free of garbage trucks, car stereos, car alarms, and honking, to record it in, and hire a real producer to oversee the recording and mix it down. Inadvertent technical errors might commit to vinyl the excruciating sound of tape hiss or sixty-cycle hum, making the single too lame to distribute.

He said to himself, “Fuck it,” as people often do when deciding to spend money they don’t have. Joe instantly agreed to record a seven-inch with two three-minute songs in a single afternoon. Daniel booked a studio with an engineer in Hoboken, about three months into the future, and paid a deposit of $200.

PAM’S PERIOD WAS LATE. SHE DIDN’T WANT TO TELL ANYONE JUST HOW LATE. SHE AND Daniel had had unsafe sex more than once. It didn’t feel like it counted, because it was such a small fraction of the total sex they’d had. Okay, she admitted to herself: five weeks late. If her period skipped another week, it would be an open-and-shut case. She would need an abortion.

She knew that if she told Daniel, he’d offer to pay, and there would go Lion’s Den records. She had plenty of money. The only way to get an abortion and keep the single was to tell Daniel nothing. He was already in over his head, buying studio time for a friend when he could have pressed a clean master provided for free by strangers. In any case it might already be too late for a black-market poison-pill-style abortion with smuggled RU-486. It would make her sick all weekend, cramping and bleeding until she swore off sex for life, but at least she wouldn’t have to make time for a clinic. She needed to hurry. She’d have to explain being sick to Daniel. Food poisoning, maybe? She would have to come up with what she ate and where. She didn’t feel like rushing into being sick. Besides, the pregnancy might resolve itself unobtrusively. If she skipped the poison pill and stuck to old-fashioned abortion clinics, she had months left until the third trimester.

All she needed was to keep the information away from Daniel until she got organized and found out where they do second-trimester abortions.

She was a programmer and a punk, versed in the mortification of the flesh, accustomed to treating her body as a sink and a tool. She was young and inexperienced, not in tune with her own biology and nature. She was not thinking straight. She was not thinking at all to speak of. In the corner of D.C. where she grew up, abortions came from Mom. You told your mom you’d been stupid, and she made the relevant appointments. You handed off the thinking to someone else, like a user, not a programmer. Pam didn’t make the appointments.

Right around week ten, she grabbed herself by the scruff of the neck, set herself on her feet, and confronted Daniel. She said, “Daniel, I do not feel good.”

“Is something wrong?”

“I’m pregnant.”

“From me? Hey, I don’t know what you get up to after I go to work! Maybe you turn tricks under the viaduct.”

“It has your eyes.”

“When did you find out?”

“I haven’t found out yet. I keep putting it off. I need to get on the stick and do something about it.”

“Do you not want a baby?” Seeing her shake her head, he asked, “Is it because of the Art Strike?”

“A baby is not creative work!”

“Are you sure you don’t want a baby ever in your life? Most people want one sooner or later. Like me. I always assumed I’d have kids someday.”

“What are you saying?”

“I know we never talked about it, but right now I’m thinking, ‘If not now, when?’ You’d be a total bottom-shelf mother.” (“Bottom-shelf” was positive, since in midwestern refrigerators the top shelf was where you put the cheap beer for guests to notice when they were making themselves at home.)

“And ‘If not me, then whom?’” Pam said.

“Random unwed parenting is standard practice back where I come from! We Christians welcome every new Christian soul.”

“It’s standard everywhere,” she said, “but not for me. And the reason we never talked about it is that we’ve been dating for maybe four months.”

“Obviously,” he said firmly, “abortion makes sense on paper. But I don’t live my life on paper. I would have been happy to know you were pregnant with my child the first time I saw you.”

“You’re just weird,” she said.

“If we have a kid now, we can be out of the woods at forty. I implore you!” He clasped his hands together pleadingly. “Besides, scheduling an abortion is work, but if you just let it ride, you don’t have to do anything. Which I guess is what you’ve been doing. How far along are you?”