Doxology. Nell Zink

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СКАЧАТЬ ADDRESSED HER HAIR ISSUES FIRST THING WHEN THEY MET. “YOU’RE GREAT-LOOKING, except for your hair!” he said. “I love your body. It’s so elongated. You have an incredible-looking mouth. Your eyebrows are moody, like you have a romantic soul. You should wear liquid eyeliner and have long hair all the way down to your butt!”

      This was after he’d known her for not even ten seconds, or five. He’d tapped her on the shoulder while she was standing in line for fifty-cent coffee from a cart.

      “That would take forever,” Pam said. “Hair grows, like, an inch every three months.”

      “I don’t do math,” Joe said.

      “Me neither, but if we call it a foot every three years, and it’s three feet from my head to my butt, we’re looking at nine years.”

      “Nine years!” He patted his own hair thoughtfully. It was mousy brown and wavy, cut in an inverted bowl shape. “How old do you think my hair is?”

      “You are quite the mutant,” she said, making so as to leave. She had ordered but neither paid for nor gotten her coffee. Before she could abandon him, Joe took hold of her arm.

      She was in a mood to put up with it. She was at a cart on lower Broadway, buying weak coffee at four P.M., because she had been escorted out of Merrill Lynch for calling this one dickhead “fuckwad” in the presence of his subordinates. He had responded that he’d have her fired from RIACD. Immediately she had called Yuval, who observed that the term “fuckwad” is considered denigrating by members of certain ethnic groups, as in all of them everywhere, and she had yelled into Merrill Lynch’s house phone that if he ever invested a dime in marketing RIACD’s platform-independent programming language (her side project for slow days in the office), none of them would have to deal with dickheads like this fuckwad ever again. Then she had felt a strong hand gripping her arm. That had been half an hour ago.

      Joe’s touch was a pleasant contrast. He was beaming as though he’d been looking for her all his life and finally found her, but in a somewhat disinterested manner, as though she were not the woman of his dreams but something less essential, like the perfect grapefruit. He appeared to be contemplating her.

      “You shouldn’t be touching me,” she said. “You dig?”

      He let go of her arm and took a step backward. To her dismay, he started chanting. “Yo! Mutant MC, keep off the lady, hot like coffee, she got the beauty—”

      “Don’t be a goober,” she said, giving the coffee man a quick fifty cents and moving away from the cart with the hot liquid that would arm her against Joe. “Stop the rapping. Never rap. Or, should you feel compelled to rap against your own better judgment, don’t try to sound black.”

      “But that’s what rap sounds like.” Saddened, he looked down at the sidewalk.

      She almost felt guilty. She said, “I didn’t mean it that way. Rap if you want. Just not where anybody can hear you.”

      “I’m actually a singer,” Joe said. “You want to hear a song? I write one almost every day.”

      “Sure,” she said.

      They walked north together, and he sang his tune du jour, loudly, with hand motions.

      BEING AROUND JOE WAS RELAXING FOR PAM. THEY COULD TALK AND TALK, AND NOTHING she said ever offended him. Nobody picked on her once they saw him, and nobody could pick on him for long. If she got nervous walking without him, she would stop off and buy a cup of coffee. Hot coffee in a guy’s face will stop him deader than a bullet, long enough for a skinny girl in jump boots to get away.

II.

      Daniel Svoboda lived in a state of persistent ecstasy. He had no lease. His rent was a hundred a week in cash.

      He was an eighties hipster. But that can be forgiven, because he was the child of born-again Christian dairy-farm workers from Racine, Wisconsin.

      The eighties hipster bore no resemblance to the bearded and effeminate cottage industrialist who came to prominence as the “hipster” in the new century. He wasn’t a fifties hipster either. He knew nothing of heroin or the willful appropriation of black culture. He was a by-product of the brief, shining moment in American history when the working class went to liberal arts college for free. Having spent four years at the foot of the ivory tower, picking up crumbs of obsolete theory, he descended to face once again the world of open-wheel motorsports and Jell-O salads from whence he sprang. Eyes schooled on Raphael and Mapplethorpe zoomed in on Holly Hobbie–themed needlepoint projects and xeroxed Polaroids of do-it-yourself gender reassignment surgery. Reflexively they sought the sublime beauty and violence they had learned from Foucault and Bataille to see as their birthright, and they were not disappointed.

      An eighties hipster couldn’t gentrify a neighborhood. He wasn’t gentry. His presence drove rents down. His apartments were overpopulated and dirty. Landlords were lucky if he paid rent. He wasn’t about to seize vacant lots for community gardens or demand better public schools. All he wanted was to avoid retiring from the same plant as his dad.

      The eighties hipster was post-sensitive. Having risen from poverty to intimate acquaintanceship with political rectitude (for collegiate women, it was the era of lesbian feminism), he knew what sensitivity was. He internalized it. He put a fine point on it. His speech acts reflected his awareness that its possession made him part of a vanishingly small minority. He drew attention to everyday prejudice and injustice through overemphasis. Witness his habitual attention to the crimes of Hitler and Stalin or the ill-fated band name “Rapeman,” borrowed from a hero of Japanese comic books.

      The eighties hipster practiced outward conformity in his dress and bearing. The mod, the glam rocker, the rockabilly, the punk, even the prep risked and defied the wrath of the homophobe, but the eighties hipster could get served a beer in the Ozarks.

      The eighties hipster was the short-lived cap of spume on the dirty wave of working-class higher education, and it is right to mourn him, even if he did devote too much time to the search for authentic snuff videos and photos of nude Khoisan women.

      ON A NOVEMBER SATURDAY IN 1990, PAM WENT OVER TO JOE’S PLACE TO LISTEN TO records. It was raining in sheets that whipped around the corners of buildings and blowing so hard that women in heels were taking men’s arms to cross the street. Cars were plowing bow waves through puddles of scum.

      Joe had a visitor. As he was letting her in the apartment door, a man emerged from the bedroom with a square sheet of black plastic in his hand and said, “Hey, man, you have the Sassy Sonic Youth flexi!”

      “I subscribed to that magazine the second I heard of it,” Joe said.

      “It’s not long for this world,” Pam said, hanging up her coat. “What’s the demographic supposed to be—thirteen-year-old girls who fuck? Advertisers really go for that.”

      “Nice to meet you,” the stranger said, stepping forward and holding out his hand. “Daniel Svoboda.”

      “Pam Diaphragm,” she said. “Sassy is the dying gasp of straight mainstream pedophilia.”

      “I read it for the political coverage,” Daniel said, satirizing the readers of Playboy.

      “I СКАЧАТЬ