Freedom
He was lucky with his first two clients, a couple of private-equity boys who were into the Chili Peppers and didn’t know Richard Katz from Ludwig van Beethoven. He sawed and nail-gunned on their roofs in relative peace. Not until his third job, begun in February, did he have the misfortune of working for people who thought they knew who he was. The building was on White Street between Church and Broadway, and the client, an independently rich publisher of art books, owned the entire Traumatics oeuvre in vinyl and seemed hurt that Katz didn’t remember seeing his face in various sparse crowds at Maxwell’s, in Hoboken, over the years.
“There are so many faces,” Katz said. “I’m bad with faces.”
“That night when Molly fell off the stage, we all had drinks afterward. I still have her bloody napkin somewhere. You don’t remember?”
“Drawing a blank. Sorry.”
“Well, anyway, it’s been great to see you getting some of the recognition you deserve.”
“I’d rather not talk about that,” Katz said. “Let’s talk about your roof instead.”
“Basically, I want you to be creative and bill me,” the client said. “I want to have a deck built by Richard Katz. I can’t imagine you’re going to be doing this for long. I couldn’t believe it when I heard you were in business.”
“Some rough idea of square footage and preference in materials would nevertheless be useful.”
“Really anything. Just be creative. It doesn’t even matter.”
“Bear with me, though, and pretend it does,” Katz said. “Because if it really doesn’t matter, I’m not sure I—”
“Cover the roof. OK? Make it vast.” The client seemed annoyed with him. “Lucy wants to have parties up here. That’s one reason we bought this place.”
The client had a son, Zachary, a Stuy High senior and hipster-in-training and apparently something of a guitarist, who came up to the roof after school on Katz’s first day of work and, from a safe distance, as if Katz were a lion on a chain, peppered him with questions calculated to demonstrate his own knowledge of vintage guitars, which Katz considered a particularly tiresome commodity fetish. He said as much, and the kid went away annoyed with him.
On Katz’s second day of work, while he was transporting lumber and Trex boards roofward, Zachary’s mother, Lucy, waylaid him on the third-floor landing and offered, unsolicited, her opinion that the Traumatics had been the kind of adolescently posturing, angst-mongering boy group that never interested her. Then she waited, with parted lips and a saucy challenge in her eyes, to see how her presence—the drama of being her—was registering. In the way of such chicks, she seemed convinced of the originality of her provocation. Katz had encountered, practically verbatim, the same provocation a hundred times before, which put him in the ridiculous position now of feeling bad for being unable to pretend to be provoked: of pitying Lucy’s doughty little ego, its flotation on a sea of aging-female insecurity. He doubted he could get anywhere with her even if he felt like trying, but he knew that her pride would be hurt if he didn’t make at least a token effort to be disagreeable.
“I know,” he said, propping Trex against a wall. “That’s why it was such a breakthrough for me to produce a record of authentic adult feeling which women, too, could appreciate.”
“What makes you think I liked Nameless Lake?” Lucy said.
“What makes you think I care?” Katz gamely rejoined. He’d been up and down the stairs all morning, but what really exhausted him was having to perform himself.
“I liked it OK,” she said. “It was maybe just a teeny bit overpraised.”
“I’m at a loss to disagree with you,” Katz said.
She went away annoyed with him.
In the eighties and nineties, to avoid undercutting his best selling point as a contractor—the fact that he was making unpopular music deserving of financial support—Katz had been all but required to behave unprofessionally. His bread-and-butter clientele had been Tribeca artists and movie people who’d given him food and sometimes drugs and would have questioned his artistic commitment if he’d shown up for work before midafternoon, refrained from hitting on unavailable females, or finished on schedule and within budget. Now, with Tribeca fully annexed by the financial industry, and with Lucy lingering on her DUX bed all morning, sitting cross-legged in a tank top and sheer bikini underpants while she read the Times or talked on the phone, waving up at him through the skylight whenever he passed it, her barely clothed bush and impressive thighs sustainedly observable, he became a demon of professionalism and Protestant virtue, arriving promptly at nine and working several hours past nightfall, trying to shave a day or two off the project and get the hell out of there.
He’d returned from Florida feeling equally averse to sex and to music. This sort of aversion was new to him, and he was rational enough to recognize that it had everything to do with his mental state and little or nothing to do with reality. Just as the fundamental sameness of female bodies in no way precluded unending variety, there was no rational reason to despair about the sameness of popular music’s building blocks, the major and minor power chords, the 2/4 and the 4/4, the A-B-A-B-C. Every hour of the day, somewhere in greater New York, some energetic young person was working on a song that would sound, at least for a few listenings—maybe for as many as twenty or thirty listenings—as fresh as the morning of Creation. Since receiving his walking papers from Florida Probations and taking leave of his large-titted Parks Department supervisor, Marta Molina, Katz had been unable to turn on his stereo or touch an instrument or imagine letting anybody else into his bed, ever again. Hardly a day went by without his hearing an arresting new sound leaking from somebody’s basement practice room or even (it could happen) from the street doors of a Banana Republic or a Gap, and without his seeing, on the streets of Lower Manhattan, a young chick who was going to change somebody’s life; but he’d stopped believing this somebody could be him.
Then came a freezing Thursday afternoon, a sky of uniform grayness, a light snow that made the downtown skyline’s negative space less negative, blurring the Woolworth Building and its fairy-tale turrets, gently slanting in the weather’s tensors down the Hudson and out into the dark Atlantic, and distancing Katz from the scrum of pedestrians and traffic four stories below. The melty wetness of the streets nicely raised the treble of the traffic’s hiss and negated most of his tinnitus. He felt doubly enwombed, by the snow and by his manual labor, as he cut and fitted Trex into the intricate spaces between three chimneys. Midday turned to twilight without his thinking once of cigarettes, and since the interval between cigarettes was how he was currently sectioning his days into swallowable bites, he had the feeling that no more than fifteen minutes had passed between his eating of his lunchtime sandwich and the sudden, unwelcome looming-up of Zachary.
The kid was wearing a hoodie and the sort of low-cut skinny pants that Katz had first observed in London. “What do you think of Tutsi Picnic?” he said. “You into them?”
“Don’t know ’em,” Katz said.
“No way! I can’t believe that.”
“And yet it’s the truth,” Katz said.
“What about the Flagrants? Aren’t they awesome? That thirty-seven-minute song of theirs?”
“Haven’t had the pleasure.”
“Hey,” Zachary said, undiscouraged, “what do you think about those psychedelic Houston bands that were recording on Pink Pillow in the late sixties? Some of their sound really reminds me of your early stuff.”
“I need the piece of material you’re standing on,” Katz said.
“I thought some of those guys might be influences. Especially Peshawar Rickshaw.”
“If you could just raise your left foot for a second.”
“Hey, can I ask you another question?”
“And this saw will be making some noise now.”
“Just one other question.”
“All right.”
“Is this part of your musical process? Going back to work at yo
ur old day job?”
“I hadn’t really thought about it.”
“See, because my friends at school are asking. I told them I thought this was part of your process. Like, maybe you were reconnecting with the working man to gather material for your next record.”
“Do me a favor,” Katz said, “and tell your friends to have their parents call me if they want a deck built. I’ll work anywhere below Fourteenth and west of Broadway.”
“Seriously, is that why you’re doing this?”
“The saw is very loud.”
“OK, but one more question? I swear this is my last question. Can I do an interview with you?”
Katz revved the saw.
“Please?” Zachary said. “There’s this girl in my class that’s totally into Nameless Lake. It would be really helpful, in terms of getting her to talk to me, if I could digitally record one short interview and put it up online.”
Katz set down the saw and regarded Zachary gravely. “You play guitar and you’re telling me you have trouble interesting girls in you?”
“Well, this particular one, yeah. She’s got more mainstream taste. It’s been a real uphill battle.”
“And she’s the one you’ve got to have, can’t live without.”
“Pretty much.”
“And she’s a senior,” Katz said by old calculating reflex, before he could tell himself not to. “Didn’t skip any grades or anything.”
“Not that I know of.”
“Her name?”
“Caitlyn.”
“Bring her over after school tomorrow.”
“But she’s not going to believe you’re here. That’s why I want to do the interview, to prove you’re here. Then she’ll want to come over and meet you.”
Katz was two days short of eight weeks of celibacy. For the previous seven weeks, abjuring sex had seemed like the natural complement to staying clean of drugs and alcohol—one form of virtue buttressing the other. Not five hours ago, glancing down through the skylight at Zachary’s exhibitionist mother, he’d felt uninterested to the point of mild nausea. But now, all at once, with divinatory clarity, he saw that he would be falling one day short of the eight-week mark: would be giving himself over to the meticulous acquisition of Caitlyn, obliterating the numberless moments of consciousness between now and tomorrow night by imagining the million subtly different faces and bodies that she might turn out to possess, and then exercising his mastery and enjoying the fruits of such exercise, all in the arguably worthy service of squishing Zachary and disillusioning an eighteen-year-old fan with “mainstream” taste. He saw that he’d simply made a virtue of being uninterested in vice.
“Here’s the deal,” he said. “You set it up, think up your little questions, and I’ll be down in a couple of hours. But I need to see results tomorrow. I need to see this isn’t just some bullshit of yours.”
“Awesome,” Zachary said.
“You hear what I’m saying, though, right? I’m done interviewing. If I make an exception, we need results.”
“I swear she’s going to want to come over. She’s definitely going to want to meet you.”
“Good, then go contemplate what a large favor I’m doing you. I’ll be down around seven.”
Darkness had fallen. The snow had dwindled to a flurry, and the nightly nightmare of Holland Tunnel traffic had commenced. All but two of the city’s subway lines, as well as the indispensable PATH train, converged within three hundred yards of where Katz stood. This was still the pinch point of the world, this neighborhood. Here was the World Trade Center’s floodlit cicatrix, here the gold hoard of the Federal Reserve, here the Tombs and the Stock Exchange and City Hall, here Morgan Stanley and American Express and the windowless monoliths of Verizon, here stirring views across the harbor toward distant Liberty in her skin of green oxide. The stout female and wiry male bureaucrats who made the city function were crowding Chambers Street with brightly colored small umbrellas, heading home to Queens and Brooklyn. For a moment, before he turned his work lights on, Katz felt almost happy, almost familiar to himself again; but by the time he was packing up his tools, two hours later, he was aware of all the ways in which he already hated Caitlyn, and what a strange, cruel universe it was that made him want to fuck a chick because he hated her, and how badly this episode, like so many others before it, was going to end, and what a waste it would make of his accumulated clean time. He hated Caitlyn additionally for this waste.
And yet it was important that Zachary be squished. The kid had been given his own practice room, a cubical space lined with eggshell foam and scattered with more guitars than Katz had owned in thirty years. Already, for pure technique, to judge from what Katz had overheard in his comings and goings, the kid was a more hotdog soloist than Katz had ever been or ever would be. But so were a hundred thousand other American high-school boys. So what? Rather than thwarting his father’s vicarious rock ambitions by pursuing entomology or interesting himself in financial derivatives, Zachary dutifully aped Jimi Hendrix. Somewhere there had been a failure of imagination.
The kid was waiting in his practice room with an Apple laptop and a printed list of questions when Katz came in, his nose running and his frozen hands aching in the indoor warmth. Zachary indicated the folding chair he was to sit in. “I was wondering,” he said, “if you could start by playing a song and then maybe play another when we’re done.”
“No, I won’t do that,” Katz said.
“One song. It would be really cool if you would.”
“Just ask me your questions, all right? This is fairly humiliating already.”
Q: So, Richard Katz, it’s been three years since Nameless Lake, and exactly two years since Walnut Surprise was up for a Grammy. Can you tell me a little bit about how your life has changed since then?
A: I can’t answer that question. You have to ask me better questions.
Q: Well, maybe you can tell me a little about your decision to go back to work as a manual laborer. Do you feel blocked artistically?
A: Really need to take a different tack here.
Q: OK. What do you think of the MP3 revolution?
A: Ah, revolution, wow. It’s great to hear the word “revolution” again. It’s great that a song now costs exactly the same as a pack of gum and lasts exactly the same amount of time before it loses its flavor and you have to spend another buck. That era which finally ended whenever, yesterday—you know, that era when we pretended rock was the scourge of conformity and consumerism, instead of its anointed handmaid—that era was really irritating to me. I think it’s good for the honesty of rock and roll and good for the country in general that we can finally see Bob Dylan and Iggy Pop for what they really were: as manufacturers of wintergreen Chiclets.
Q: So you’re saying rock has lost its subversive edge?
A: I’m saying it never had any subversive edge. It was always wintergreen Chiclets, we just enjoyed pretending otherwise.
Q: What about when Dylan went electric?
A: If you’re going to talk about ancient history, let’s go back to the French Revolution. Remember when, I forget his name, but that rocker who wrote the “Marseillaise,” Jean Jacques Whoever—remember when his song started getting all that airplay in 1792, and suddenly the peasantry rose up and overthrew the aristocracy? There was a song that changed the world. Attitude was what the peasants were missing. They already had everything else—humiliating servitude, grinding poverty, unpayable debts, horrific working conditions. But without a song, man, it added up to nothing. The sansculotte style was what really changed the world.
Q: So what’s the next step for Richard Katz?
A: I’m getting involved in Republican politics.
Q: Ha ha.
A: Seriously. Getting nominated for a Grammy was such an unexpected honor, I feel duty bound to make the most of it in this critical election year. I’ve been given the opportunity to participate in the pop-music mainstream, and manufacture Chiclets, and help try to persuade fou
rteen-year-olds that the look and feel of Apple Computer products is an indication of Apple Computer’s commitment to making the world a better place. Because making the world a better place is cool, right? And Apple Computer must be way more committed to a better world, because iPods are so much cooler-looking than other MP3 players, which is why they’re so much more expensive and incompatible with other companies’ software, because—well, actually, it’s a little unclear why, in a better world, the very coolest products have to bring the very most obscene profits to a tiny number of residents of the better world. This may be a case where you have to step back and take the long view and see that getting to have your own iPod is itself the very thing that makes the world a better place. And that’s what I find so refreshing about the Republican Party. They leave it up to the individual to decide what a better world might be. It’s the party of liberty, right? That’s why I can’t understand why those intolerant Christian moralists have so much influence on the party. Those people are very antichoice. Some of them are even opposed to the worship of money and material goods. I think the iPod is the true face of Republican politics, and I’m in favor of the music industry really getting out in front on this one, and becoming more active politically, and standing up proud and saying it out loud: We in the Chiclet-manufacturing business are not about social justice, we’re not about accurate or objectively verifiable information, we’re not about meaningful labor, we’re not about a coherent set of national ideals, we’re not about wisdom. We’re about choosing what WE want to listen to and ignoring everything else. We’re about ridiculing people who have the bad manners not to want to be cool like us. We’re about giving ourselves a mindless feel-good treat every five minutes. We’re about the relentless enforcement and exploitation of our intellectual-property rights. We’re about persuading ten-year-old children to spend twenty-five dollars on a cool little silicone iPod case that it costs a licensed Apple Computer subsidiary thirty-nine cents to manufacture.