Kitabı oku: «Doxology», sayfa 6

VI.

Joe’s first girlfriend was the former singer of the defunct band Broad Spectrum, a slim, dark-haired classical archaeology major named Bethany. She was interning at Matador that summer because it was too hot in Asia Minor to go on digs. She wore hundred-dollar Laura Ashley dresses with Doc Martens, the look Eloise’s housecoats and Hush Puppies were supposed to suggest. Her features were delicate. Her teeth looked like Chiclets. She shared a two-bedroom summer sublet in the West Village with an absentee figure-skating instructor. She styled herself a “geek girl” because she wore glasses. In her spare time, she followed New Dance. She had read somewhere that attending dance performances can qualify a person to be a dance critic. Her father, a banking executive, occasionally met her for lunch at Delmonico’s, where he assured her that dance was another arrow in her quiver.

She volunteered to sing harmonies on Joe’s record. It surprised her when he said no. She thought his trusting ways would make him a pushover. Instead they made him assume she wouldn’t mind rejection. She didn’t let on how mad she was, because she didn’t want to lose him. She believed that his surreal sense of humor made him a hard person to know.

Her relationship specialty was evenings out. She liked plays and recitals. He didn’t care who paid. She led him to art museums and to restaurants with arty food. For several weeks that fall, they were regulars at American Ballet Theatre. She tapped his new American Express card for culture and comfort. In her own mind, she was educating him, so it seemed to her like a fair exchange.

Joe worked diligently on his songwriting, as usual. He mastered his demos on sixty-minute cassettes. Every time a tape filled up, he delivered it to Daktari’s secretary. There was general consensus around the office that he was going to end up owing the label a lot of money. No one there believed in him but Bethany, who did it on principle because they were dating.

PAM HATED HER WITH GREAT BITTERNESS. SHE SAW HER AS A MOOCH AND A LEECH WHO was using Joe as an auxiliary dad, one of those upper-class women who aspire to be children all their lives. As an excuse for poor eyesight, the “geek girl” tagline bugged her big time. But what bothered her most was how Bethany’s girlfriendly blandishments stained Joe’s pure soul with egotism. All his innocent self-regard and faith in his innate value metamorphosed into campy self-adoration in the light of her approval. She heightened his pleasure in life when he was already living a joyful dream. She reinforced playful impulses that didn’t need any encouragement. His behavior in her presence careened right past joie de vivre into something resembling hysteria. He called her “the orgasm factory” to her face, and she followed him around like a duckling. She constantly displayed to onlookers that she was with Joe—of all people—and this, Pam simply did not understand. How could some hot-looking, jet-setting, dance-theater-watching rich bitch be possessive about Joe? Had she reencountered him after the House of Candles show feeding hot dogs to squirrels, instead of walking the halls of Atlantic with a contract in his hand, would she have gone near him? (Hot dogs that spent too many hours in the slimy waters of the Abyssinian Coffee Shop burst and became unsalable, and then they were Joe’s.) Any child of six could have told you she was a deluded social climber who’d boarded the wrong train. Why couldn’t he see through it?

Stupid question, she knew. He trusted everyone, even bitches. His former life hadn’t been long on the bitches. For a poignant half second, she wished she had kissed him, or even gone to bed with him, so that no star-fucker bitch could have been his first.

WHEN FLORA WAS THREE, DANIEL TOOK HER TO THE TRIENNIAL SVOBODA FAMILY reunion. She came back raving about tricycles and wagons, wearing a tiny gold-plated cross on a chain around her neck. He was no longer an accredited family member, but the Svobodas seemed to feel there was hope for her. He let her wear the cross until they got home. Then he said it was too valuable to wear every day, took it off her, and threw it in the trash. A week later, she asked for the cross again. When she couldn’t have it, she cried.

A week after that, her hippo ate dog shit and had to be put out of its misery. She saw a crucifix in the window of a Santeria store and asked Joe to buy it. It was as though she couldn’t get Jesus out of her mind and wanted him for her new stuffed animal.

Fortunately it was a cash-only store. The crucifix had been blessed by a voodoo priest and was very expensive. Joe couldn’t help her out on the spot, but he told Daniel about her wish.

“If she needs a shirtless guy with a beard, we can get her a G.I. Joe,” he replied.

“We’ll make our own cross, and she can put him on it with rubber bands.”

“If it’s a cross she wants, we can—no. There’s no way I’m making her a toy cross! What’s next? A toy cat-o’-nine-tails, so she can self-flagellate?”

“Jesus is weird,” Joe remarked.

“You can say that again!”

“Why is he on the cross?”

Daniel raised his eyes to heaven. “Oh, man, Joe. Well, historically, he wasn’t always on the cross. I think for something like twelve centuries, he was the risen Christ, fully dressed. Then there was Gothic art and, like, the black plague or something, so they switched to showing him on the cross. You know he died on the cross, right?”

“Why?”

“The weight of his own body, I guess. Makes it hard to breathe when you’re hanging by your arms.”

“But he’s so skinny!”

“Not in real life! He was always eating out with rich tax collectors, and he could make food appear by magic and turn water into wine, so he was a total land whale. That’s why he died so fast, like hours before the skinny dudes they crucified at the same time. The Romans didn’t even have to break his legs.”

“That is so gross,” Joe said.

“And he’s scared shitless up there, screaming out, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ But you know who God was, who could have helped him the whole time? His dad!”

“My dad would not do that.”

“My dad would.”

THE REVERBERATING CHRISTIANITY DEBACLE AGGRAVATED PAM’S SENSE THAT HER daughter was growing up without her. Every moment she spent at the office was a moment when some stranger and/or family member of ill will and worse intentions could plant a fateful wrong idea in Flora’s head.

Joe tried to console her by recording selected playtime. It didn’t help. The cassettes merely made audible how he kept Flora in stitches. He was giving her a solid grounding in verbal wit, preschool style. Her parents’ role was to drop by nightly and impose dour worries about nutrition and rest.

After the fourth and final taping session, Pam’s path forward became clear. One dialogue passage was as follows:

JOE: Never rub your nub where people can see.

FLORA: But I want to!

JOE: [singing] Got to rub my nub in the club, rub my nub in the club, got to rub my nub in the club—now dub—see my nub nub nub nub nub nub nub nub in the club club club club club club club, it’s like a sub sub sub sub sub sub sub—

FLORA: Don’t make fun of me!

JOE: Then stop rubbing your nub and do the dance! [singing] Rub my nub in the club, chugalug in the pub, rub-a-dub in the tub … [etc.]

FLORA: [clapping along] Rub my nub I rub my nub I rub my nub I rub my nub I rub my nub [etc.]

Flora’s improvisation of a contrapuntal rhythmic chant made her seem extraordinarily musically accomplished for her age. At the same time, Pam experienced a heretofore unsuspected and overpowering need to raise her child herself. Flora was getting old for a babysitter. She wasn’t a baby anymore. Her psyche needed to be molded in Pam’s image, or Daniel’s at least. Otherwise, what was the point?

“I need to cut down on my hours,” Pam said to Yuval the next morning as they stood drinking coffee in the office kitchenette. “My kid doesn’t even know my name. She calls me ‘Mom.’”

“So you want to spend time with Flora.”

“Yes. The problem is maternity leave is unpaid, and it’s a little late.”

He sneered, wrinkling his nose. “Who told you that? Your union rep?”

“Very funny!”

“You’re the funny one here, talking about part-time work when I bill for you by the day. Clients are always telling me how many hours you work most days, or should I say minutes?”

“Express yourself clearly, Yuval.”

“That maybe it’s almost better if you limit time offsite? Like, dress up like you’re in marketing, run intense interviews about client needs, drip your famous honey sweetness on them, estimate billable days with some generosity to me, and deliver on time? Stay home. Work as you need. Flextime.”

“I’d do that.”

“But only two years. Maternity leave. In two years is performance review. I’ll be counting your billable days.”

She called Daniel at his temp job with the good news. He said, “Your boss has a Messiah complex.”

DANIEL THOUGHT THE SONG WAS GREAT AND LACKED ONLY ONE LINE TO BE PERFECT: “IF my right hand should offend you, cut it off.”

With Pam at the controls of a four-track and the vocal stylings of Flora and Daniel, Joe recorded a bass-and-foot-tapping demo of “Rub My Nub.” The interplay between the four/four repetitions of “rub my nub I” and the syncopation of “cut it off, cut it off” was strikingly infectious. When Daktari heard it over the phone the next day, he said, “Ç’est ça, mon ami!”

Joe’s reasonable response was “Sad monogamy?”

He was summoned to a studio in Chelsea to rerecord vocals and two bass parts. It took two days. Without consulting him, Daktari then laid the recording over a big-beat synth percussion track. He hired a contrabassist to shadow the bass and singers to imitate Flora, ran the results through a compressor with multiple bowls of reverb (reverb was measured in units of the kind bud), and cranked up the presence until the song could work as a ringtone on a Nokia.

The album Sad Monogamy (that was the working title; in the end it was released as Coronation) came together quickly, because Joe wrote a song almost every day. Daktari didn’t care too much about the other tracks. He didn’t even ask for changes in “Rub My Nub,” except for the title, which became “Chugalug.”

THE STILLS AND RUSHES FROM THE FIRST DAY OF FILMING THE “CHUGALUG” VIDEO astounded Daniel. Watching the shoot on monitors was even more disturbing.

He was a show business novice. His experience of comparing images with reality had been acquired firsthand. For example, he saw himself as an okay-looking guy who was not photogenic. In pictures he looked like a small-eyed, hairy potato. Smiling widened his strong jaw into something photographs invariably depicted as a moon face, right on the edge of pug. By contrast, he thought of Joe as not an okay-looking guy. He wondered how major-label-style publicity was supposed to work with a star like that. He imagined they would pose him far away, with contour makeup under dramatic lighting, or maybe on a beach, facing out to sea. Joe was short, five feet seven and a half at the outside with shoes on. He had a cute enough butt and square little shoulders, and if you issued him a smallish guitar—well, Dylan and Springsteen were little guys, right? Those were Daniel’s not uncharitable thoughts on the subject of Joe’s image. He was trying to be realistic.

On screen, Joe became a rock god. His Muppet mouth became a twenty-tooth smile. His small head became enormous eyes; his girlish chin, an asset at last. His mousy bowl cut required only one sweep of the oiled brush to darken to a mass of chestnut waves under the lights. His short stature and neck made him fit neatly in the frame. His size made cheap props, such as the foam-and-cardboard wingback chairs the director had bought from IKEA (to be returned for credit the next day), look vast and luxurious. The effect of the camera on his skin was strangest of it all. Joe in real life had a yellowish cast. He was anemic-looking, sallow, not olive; not a beautiful look. On screen he looked vibrant, yet blotless—smooth as the piece of paper the cameraman held up to get a white balance score. Reduced to two dimensions, with a script to follow, he became someone else who was also himself. The transformation wasn’t instantaneous, because the two Joes were incommensurate and incompatible. It was like some strange proof of the existence of a parallel universe looming behind our own. Daniel could look up at the soundstage and see the frowns on the dancers straining to evoke eroticism in the presence of the goofiest man alive (they’d met him; he’d introduced himself and talked to them all before the shoot), lower his gaze to the monitors where similar women were writhing in a miasma of lust they felt for a handsome singer who was coolly delivering obscenities, look up again to see Joe gesticulating while the resentful troupers sweated their workout, look back down, look up again, see stars, see human beings, until his brain abandoned the effort of trying to reconcile them. The video was like a centrifuge, separating the world into a visual component that drained into the monitors propped on the floor and a bodily component that became more unsightly with every turn of the machinery.

The women did the dance, not Joe. The director said it was great to be able to surround a singer with built fly girls who could move instead of models. He told Daniel to be happy, because Joe was going to get film offers.

THE VIDEO WENT INTO ROTATION ON MTV AND VH1. STRANGERS NOW RECOGNIZED JOE in record stores, if the staff clued them in. They called him “Joe Harris” rather than “mongo collector scum.” He had been more notorious than popular.

Maybe he would have stayed notorious, never becoming popular, if he’d been easier to recognize. But his social skills and conversational arts couldn’t discredit him in the eyes of the world. The disconnect between image and reality was total. Occasionally he was taken for someone who resembled Joe Harris, but only when something startled him into silence.

There was one recurring situation where he would be recognized and draw a crowd: if the song was played in his hearing. He would sing along and do the dance, no matter where he was—at home listening to the radio, walking past a bar where it was on the jukebox, shopping in a grocery store where an easy-listening version was streaming over the paging system. It made him oh-so-happy to hear it.

His mainstream career took off with an appearance on a morning talk show. Atlantic’s publicist had negotiated a one-minute promotional segment. Prior radio interviews had established that a minute could be a long time. Thus there was debate as to how to handle him, until a production intern’s boyfriend provided a timely eyewitness account of a performance in the dairy section of C-Town. The host of the show shook hands, said hi, and let the track roll. Seemingly a man of few words, Joe sang and did the dance. The camera zoomed to his face as the vision mixer cut to the shocked reactions of the host and other guests.

After that, many talk shows invited him on, but not to talk. The song gave rise to a vulgar and widely satirized dance craze. No wedding was complete without it. It was the go-to anthem of drunken groomsmen. The album sold and sold and sold, and the single reached number four on the Billboard Hot 100. Joe in his lewdness was compared with Elvis Presley.

As with Elvis, it was a lewdness only the unmediated had seen. The buzz around his first concert tour was accordingly significant.

Daniel began to wish he’d asked for a songwriting credit for his coda.

CURRENTLY BETWEEN JOBS, ELOISE STROLLED THE LOWER EAST SIDE IN SEARCH OF JOE. She looked out for Pam, Daniel, and Flora as well. But all of them were busier than they’d ever been. She didn’t know where they lived. Joe was walking and shopping less, swamped with work and free promo CDs. He never again played a small club, having gotten signed before he could even occupy a feature slot at CBGB. The label was rationing his presence in preparation for a big-budget tour.

She watched cable in case his video came on. She bought magazines like People and Vogue so she could read short Q&As and capsule reviews. The scourge of commerce had driven the wedge of fame between them. She thought it was only natural, because he was a rock star and she was a speck.

VII.

Pam went to a party at Daktari’s apartment with Joe and Bethany, while Daniel stayed home with Flora. The party was full of industry bigwigs, TV journalists, and stars. Daktari introduced Joe as the next big thing. Joe flitted from new acquaintance to new acquaintance, lingering over the females like Pepé Le Pew. It was painful for Pam to watch. He was no longer profiting from the most basic social corrective—the boycott, when women walk away. By the end of the night, he was single. She wished it could have been because he saw some flaw in Bethany. But he couldn’t see flaws in women who were much, much worse.

Around two in the morning, he kissed Bethany goodbye and told Pam to say hi to Daniel and Flora so he could go on fondling a creature in a white puffy coat with the hood up. She looked to Pam like a sofa standing upright, upholstered in shiny nylon over down batting. Why did she need a warm coat indoors? Was she a junkie? Pam’s thoughts were dire. She developed a sudden new appreciation of Bethany. Anything was better than this. Sofa Girl had a pinched face and horrible orange lipstick. Under the coat, she was tiny. Maybe she didn’t have enough body fat to maintain 98.6 without a coat? Even as Joe was feeling her up, she was screeching and waving a cigarette around. She reminded Pam of Edie Sedgwick, the famous vapid cocotte from Warhol’s Factory.

Pam fled the party downhearted, but not alone. At the corner of Thompson and Spring, Bethany touched her arm and said, “Hey, Pam. Let’s share a cab.”

“I’m walking,” she said. “I need air.” She crossed the street, but Bethany followed her.

“Did you see that girl?” Bethany asked.

“The anorexic dressed as a grub?”

“She’s this bogus model who’s been fired from, like, everywhere. She’s on every drug in the book. She’s horrible, awful, like, God! Why her?”

“Shut up, shut up. Just shut up,” Pam muttered, as though to herself. She had a bad feeling. Bethany was more keyed up than she’d ever seen her.

“She’s going to fuck him right at the party,” Bethany went on. “How does Daktari even know her? She’s not a music person. She’s fashion!”

“You’re an archaeologist,” Pam pointed out.

“But I’m into music and dance. And she—you know what she’s known for?”

“Bestiality shows in Tijuana?” Pam increased her pace, trying to walk too fast for Bethany to keep up.

Bethany didn’t break into a run, but her heels pounded the sidewalk with a hastening, hollow pinging sound. From twenty feet behind Pam she called out, “Fucking backstage at fashion week!”

Pam turned to face her and said, “If you think it’s all her fault, why don’t you get back up in there and defend him?”

“Defend him? He’s the one making out with a tramp. I have to leave him.”

“Well, defend her!”

Bethany’s irate sadness gave way to incomprehension.

“He’s an aggressor,” Pam said. “You are duty bound as a feminist to go back in there and stop her ass from getting nailed by a stud she can’t handle.”

She snorted and scoffed. “Stud.”

“I’m going back,” Pam said.

She stalked past Bethany, angling across Thompson toward Daktari’s door. There she tried the doorbell.

She tried it several times over the space of four or five minutes. She finally slipped inside when a pizza deliveryman slipped out. Up in the apartment, Joe was nowhere to be found. Nowhere—everybody told her so—absolutely nowhere—meaning in this case a walk-in closet in the master suite, where he was clutching at a strange woman’s hair with his pants down. He was yelping, but Pam couldn’t hear him because of all the noise. She assumed they must have left while Bethany was distracting her with their altercation.

She emerged alone to the street. The jilted sponge was gone, but she could see five other women on the same block, on her side of the street alone, who were guaranteed to be better life-partner prospects for Joe than Sofa Girl. She walked home in a snit of foreboding, her thoughts mother-dark.

DANIEL WENT TO JOE’S PLACE TO PICK HIM UP THE NEXT AFTERNOON FOR A LUNCH DATE, and Sofa Girl was there. She answered the door in her sofa coat and an iridescent yellow bra. She was obviously drunk. Joe was in the shower, singing “Good Morning Starshine.”

Daniel yelled, “Hey, Joe! I can come back!”

“You want a beer?” Sofa Girl asked. “Wait, we’re fresh out. You want to get us some beer?”

“I’ll come back later.”

Joe yelled, “Stay! I need food!”

“And I need beer!” Sofa Girl yelled.

“We can go somewhere that has beer,” Daniel said. “It’s not hard.”

Joe came out of the bathroom naked, holding his wallet over his genitals. Daniel wondered why he had taken his wallet with him into the bathroom, but only until he remembered Sofa Girl. It was hard, but not impossible, to piece together a chain of events that would make even Joe protective of his wallet—say, if a person were to take every single bill out of it, in his presence, to spend on something he didn’t want.

Joe said, “Hey, Daniel. Could you possibly run downstairs and grab us some beer?”

“You don’t need beer,” Daniel said. “You need food.”

“Right,” Joe said.

“Beer and food!” Sofa Girl called out, waving her cigarette.

“This is Gwendolyn Charanoglu,” Joe said. “Gwen, meet my manager, Daniel Svoboda.” He put his wallet on the kitchen counter and returned to the bathroom.

“Oh, my God, I am so honored to meet you!” she squealed. “I’ve heard so much about you! He talks about you all the time!” She offered him her hand to shake.

The hand was sticky. The smell from under her coat was fetid. Daniel had a troubling vision of Joe’s providing a lyrical description of him while Gwen sucked him off. He dismissed it and said, “You can go ahead and get dressed, so we can go out. It’s warm outside. He’ll be fast.”

She looked down and said, “Oh, yeah. Oh, my God. I’m naked. I’m wearing nothing!” She wandered around the room, looking at the floor, until she found her tunic, clutch, and sandals. She put on the tunic and dropped the coat on the floor in its place. She took Joe’s wallet from the counter and stuffed it into her clutch—it almost fit inside—and picked up her shoes. “I put on my clothes!” she called out.

“That’s a crying shame!” Joe shouted.

He returned in his bathrobe and asked her for a cigarette. With difficulty, she narrowly squeaked one out of her bag. Joe’s wallet almost blocked its egress.

“Come on, Joe,” Daniel said. “You don’t smoke, and I’m hungry.”

“There’s a time for everything,” Joe said. He lit up.

“Seeing you with that cigarette makes me horny,” Gwen said.

“I’m going now,” Daniel said.

“No, stay!” she said.

“Yeah, stay,” Joe said.

Daniel didn’t know what to make of Joe’s condition. He seemed energetic enough, but vocally subdued. He wasn’t narrating. By his normal standards, he was a zombie. “No way, man,” he said. “I’ll call you later. We’ll get dinner.”

He didn’t answer the phone. Daniel thought, If that girl ever sobers up, she’ll notice she’s with Joe, and we’ll be rid of her.

As it turned out, that was a big “if.”

SINCE PAM WAS “WORKING” FROM HOME A LOT, JOE CUT DOWN ON HIS BABYSITTING. HE and Gwen dated two or three times a week, mostly in the afternoon. Her evenings were busy. On weekends, she claimed to be visiting her father in Great Neck. She made it sound like a nice place, but she said that although their relationship was serious, she wasn’t ready for him to meet her family. He introduced her to Professor Harris, who took it philosophically. Of course he preferred Bethany, but he had never been able to imagine her sticking with Joe for long. He saw the attraction of a squalid, angular airhead for a fun-loving young man.

Joe proudly titled her “my girlfriend.” Pam and Daniel were in agreement that he was not her boyfriend, as much as he might like to presume otherwise. There had to be someone else in her life. Drugs were surely involved. Her manner toward them alternated between petulant statue and raging ermine.

With concern and sympathy for Joe alone, they analyzed the situation as follows: His life was a social life. He had never been alone. He was always in the company of people or recordings of them. It wouldn’t have taken any time for solitary confinement to drive him insane. The shift to conversing with inanimate objects and gauging their responses would have been instantaneous. Arguably it had taken place long before, when he first took up singing alone on the streets of New York. And unlike his other friends, Gwen was there for him. They had work and kindergarten, and she had nothing. She was as forbearing and tolerant as Joe. Her reasons happened to be different—she was high all the time—but wasn’t he high too, in his own way? She laughed at his jokes. She laughed at accidents. She laughed at the news. Her mood was consistently as good as his. To everyone but him, she was grating and repetitive, and that was the secret of their bond.

GWEN’S ANALYSIS DIFFERED. AS SHE SAW IT, HER ALOOF AND INCONSISTENT ATTENTION to Joe was only natural, because, you see, this guy Blake, an actor in the process of failing to make it, was her old boyfriend. He had gotten a part in a TV pilot that never got made into a series and then transitioned, embarrassingly, to theater. Recently he had played the role of a bug, with no costume or makeup. Most of his lines were a high inhuman whine that the audience wasn’t supposed to understand, because he was a bug. It got a great write-up in the Voice but did not gain a mention in any of the dailies. So basically Blake was over, and Joe was her new boyfriend. His career was in ascendancy. Spending time with him was an investment that could pay off big. But obviously there was going to be some overlap, because an old boyfriend doesn’t dissolve into thin air when you tell him it’s over. Plus, a new boyfriend isn’t always prepared to assume all of an old boyfriend’s duties. Blake, for example, was a terrific, if not 100 percent reliable, source of speedballs. Some weekends they just binged straight through, at an apartment on the Upper West Side that this theater director friend was lending him while he got back on his feet after his acting fiasco. Joe had no drugs, no sources of drugs, and no interest in drugs. Supplying her with drugs was a boyfriend duty he couldn’t and wouldn’t ever properly fulfill. So the transition from Blake to Joe was going to take some time, obviously.

She was proud of having chosen Joe before he became famous, when he was merely the next big thing. Not entirely coincidentally, he was on the cover of Spin that month, and his album was featured in Rolling Stone. His tour of venues with room for a thousand people, such as gutted 1930s ballrooms in large midwestern cities, would involve not buses and hardship but airplanes and room service. She couldn’t accompany him without losing Blake—that is, without leaving Blake alone for so long that he would find someone else and leave her—that is, for two to three weeknights in a row. She estimated the time Blake could spend alone on a weekend with his pockets full of drugs before meeting someone new at around twenty minutes. The length of time she could spend without drugs on a weekend in the presence of a man who had drugs without at least blowing him was likewise around twenty minutes. But it seemed to her that Joe’s specialness made a resolution effortless: he didn’t have drugs, and he wasn’t jealous. She and Blake would meet new people.

Gwen wasn’t a victim of childhood trauma. She had tried drugs because she was an uninhibited, fun-loving person, and she was addicted because that’s what drugs will do. She submitted to lesser traumata of all kinds to get them, because she feared the greater trauma of doing without. She was a trauma avoider, not a trauma reenactor, as trauma victims are. There was no masochism in her rejection of effort and no egotism in her devotion to Joe. Selflessly she put the needs of drugs and men before her own, subordinating herself, as though they had picked her up after the modeling agency dropped her. And she was a lost soul, because she was having a great time. No one felt inspired to intervene. No one felt her destiny had ever been that of a productive member of society, not even her parents, sadly. Her mother had moved to L.A. when she was seventeen, and they partied together. Her father never remarried, and he also threw great parties. Her one talent was walking. She wasn’t creative, curious, or beautiful. If anything, that last was her trauma—the lack of a bankable face for print ad campaigns. She was skinny, though. That was good enough for drug dealers, and they did their part to keep her that way.

She never came willingly to Chrystie Street. She couldn’t stand Pam and Daniel, long walks, or Flora. The adults were judgmental, the walks didn’t match her shoes, and she opposed on principle all special treatment for people who happened by luck to be ultra-petite and cute. She knew better than to say so. She had matured a lot since driving her modeling career into a ditch. She knew herself and what she wanted out of life—which was definitely not to be the kind of beauty has-been who marries a rich old man—and what kind of situations she could handle. She ignored the Svobodas. No one encouraged her not to. Joe was happy to have their undivided attention.