For You, The Stars
Chapter Eleven: Installment 5
Cecilia and I went to see the Dead at the Greek, probably my favorite venue in the Bay Area because it was small and intimate. There wasn’t a bad sightline in the place. Normally we’d go early, stand in line most of the day if it was the weekend or join up with one person who had come early to get a good place in line if it was Friday, and then run in when the gates opened and put some blankets down across one of the broad steps, ideally next to the soundboard on the Phil side. Holding onto the stone seats and dealing with the ushers who wouldn’t let you lean back was kind of a pain but it was worth it by the time the show finally got started.
This time, though, we set up our blanket on the tiny sloped lawn at the top of the bowl. It was still closer in than the lawn at the Frost or the Shoreline though it wasn’t quite as cozy as the actual seats. On the other hand it gave us more freedom to wander over to the beer garden or to stand around and dance when the music got playing.
In the middle of the second set, before the new age drum duet, the broke into “Crazy Fingers.” Cecilia knew all about how I had sung that to Maura back when I was courting her in my clumsy way in school and failing to close the deal. She knew the mixed tape I had made for Maura too because I always dubbed a copy for myself. She saw me with starting off with a faraway look in my eyes and said, “You’re thinking about her, aren’t you?” I didn’t deny it.
In fact, Maura was coming out to San Francisco, or actually to Berkeley. She was nearly done with her MFA in Ithaca and her teacher slash mentor slash lover was finishing up his writer-in-residence gig and she was running out of reasons to spend another frozen winter in upstate New York. She was sharing an apartment with a platonic male friend and she told me they were quoting R.E.M. lyrics to each other obliquely about her impending move, stuff like “Well I know it might sound strange, but I believe / You’ll be coming back before too long.”
So it’s not like she was coming out to visit me. It’s not like she was coming out for me. But still the way she talked about it in her letters it was obvious that she expected something to happen when she did show up. She was back in the mode of apologizing for being so maddeningly evasive all throughout our last two years at school.
Still, I was wary of reading too much into her signals. I remember when she gave me her senior thesis to read. It was a meta-novel about a writer whose characters come to life and start appearing in her room. It also had an ambiguous incest scene in it. The second page of the manuscript was a dedication: “To DD, who was always there for me.” D.D., Daniel Dermott. It was obvious, right?
I thought wow, all that time she was avoiding me she was drawing on my loyalty to her for inspiration in finishing her novel. Fortunately, before I said anything stupid, she gave the game away by making some remark about her older sister Dierdre, whom she called Dee Dee, or at least that’s how I would have spelled it, based on how she had pronounced her name when she was an infant.
Then again she was always sending me books to read, either stuff she thought I’d like, like The Sportswriter or things that were somewhat like my own experimental style, like Carpenter’s Gothic, collections of short stories like In the Miro District, or overt references to our long chain of letter like A Literate Romance. I tried not to read too much into any of those, not even the one about the epistolary love affair. I did like The Sportswriter a lot, but even then I seemed to have missed a major subtext because when Maura asked me if I had noticed that the entire story takes place over an Easter weekend and models itself on the Passion of Christ I had to admit that the parallel had escaped me entirely. Maybe I wasn’t cut out to be a literary writer after all.
When I wasn’t writing much, Maura told me that I shouldn’t force it. “It will come when you’re ready.” Then I thought cynically that she just didn’t want to encourage any competition. She was interested when I started painting but didn’t really respond whne I dropped the painting class. I thought I’d keep it up on my own but without studio space it wasn’t really possible. I was never really sure how she felt about anything. The letters kept piling up and the folder labeled Maura kept getting fatter but I wasn’t really sure who she was or how I felt about her impending arrival in the fall.
I was really starting to enjoy my new job at least. There was a sort of bohemian refugee feel at the office. People dressed fairly neat. It wasn’t punky or anything, except for one of the typesetters, who always had his hair waxed straight up, but a couple of my new friends were in a band together and they were introducing me to the post-punk and hardcore music that I had overlooked as I had progressed down the stoner preppie retro memory lane from the Doors to the Beatles to Dylan and the Dead.
The chief proofreader, Roger Brown, took me under his wing musically and started dubbing tapes for me. He made me the Minutemen’s “Double Nickels on the Dime” and put two of Pere Ubu’s first records, “The Modern Dance” and “Dub Housing” back to back on another cassette. He also turned me on to the Meat Puppets, the Grateful Dead of the SST scene, and of course Hüaut;sker Düaut;’s “Flip Your Wig.” This stuff was a revelation to me. Liberated from the instrumental jam concept of the hippie psychedelic bands, these short sharp blasts of chaos were like a breath of fresh air. I also got into fIREHOUSE but I had to admit I was envious the Roger had seen the Minutemen live before D. Boon died.
It was like any of my other obsessions, musical or otherwise, going back though baseball all the way back to the D’Aulaire book of Greek myths I devoured in grade school. As soon as I caught onto a new scene I got hungry about it and started studying up on it, devouring everything I could listen to, hear, read about, and study. Roger was happy to school me and he kept making me tapes and regaling me with stories of the postpunk scene in LA in the mid-’80s.
He told me about the time he went to see Pere Ubu, not knowing what anyone in the band looked like. He saw this big fat guy wearing a black suit and a skinny tie and he wondered who the total square was and what he was doing at a punk show. When the band took the stage her realized the big fat guy was David Thomas, not to be confused with the Wendy’s guy or the guy from Second City, and that he was a thousand times more punk than Roger. He learned not to judge a freak by its cover that day.
I also realized that I wasn’t alone in this job in the sense that we all had creative or artistic ambitions, or at least most of the young people did, and none of us had planed on working in the dirty book business. Most of the proofreaders and a few of the copyeditors were straight out of Berkeley, English majors with limited job prospects. Climex tended to work them hard for minimal wages and then when they asked for more encouraged them to take a hike because there was always a new crop of English, or in my case philosophy, degrees graduating every spring.
The commute was still a pain. I got a little reading done on the way and sometimes I’d just spend the whole trip listening to tapes on my walkman, but having to transfer first from Muni the BART and then from BART to the AC Transit bus that took me to the office in Emeryville meant I had to stay alert and that the trip was broken up into these legs that made it harder to settle into a book or some good music. Also, on a good day the commute was an hour and a quarter. If I was late for my Muni or missed the BART connection the delays would spiral and the whole trip in to the office in the morning would take an hour and forty five minutes. I’d try to slip in unnoticed but it seemed that the hideous office manager would always notice me coming in late and then say something annoying about it to Judith in the break room later in the day.
I wasn’t totally secure there yet and I was starting to think it really was time to get a car when one day after our copyediting class Giselle told me that her other outside boyfriend was trying to sell his 1969 Mercedes 250 for $1900 and getting nowhere and would I be interested in buying it? I said, “If he’ll take $900, he’s got a deal.”