in Queens. Yet their respect for the RIACD receptionist, an angel-faced Yemenite in oversized tops and long skirts, no older than Pam, was deep and unfeigned. Pam deduced that in the fantasy universe of a Mediterranean American man’s virgin/whore complex, it was best to come down on the side of the virgins. She told new colleagues she was gay. Sexists in those days were familiar with the work of Howard Stern. His sadomasochistic radio talk show invested the unapproachable lesbian with powerful taboos.
It didn’t cost her any dates, because she never met a suit she wanted to date. Sex was part of the leisure-time world where she made art. In her mind art was ideally commercial, feeding and housing its creator. She loved coding’s austere beauty, but she didn’t regard it as an art. It was too restrained. It made the suits too happy. It was how she made money. An artist needed money in great abundance. Without it, she would bounce off Manhattan like a bird off a plate-glass window.
IN 1989, WHEN SHE MET JOE, HER ART PROJECT WAS A BAND CALLED THE DIAPHRAGMS. Even the name embarrassed her. She thought it sounded early eighties. Simon, the singer and bass player, claimed that his masculinity made it ironic. He was a grad student from Yorkshire on a fellowship to study opera practice at NYU. He possessed a bulky, sticky gray keyboard that incorporated an analog drum machine. She played a Gibson SG guitar. The band was supposed to be a No Wave power duo. Everybody except Simon knew it was shitty Casio-core.
Of course the Diaphragms had played CBGB. Anybody could play there once. All it took was signing up for audition night. Their gig was at seven o’clock on a Wednesday. Their twenty dearest friends ordered beer by the pitcher, but the manager still said their set needed work. When Pam asked him what aspects in particular, he shrugged and said, “Your set. The songs. How you play them. The arrangements. You know. Everything.”
They rehearsed every weekend in a space in Hell’s Kitchen. It charged a reduced rate of ten dollars per hour between eight A.M. and noon on Sundays. They arrived at eight, because rehearsing their set took forever. The songs were hard to memorize or tell apart. She had slept with Simon eight times and heard him refer to her in public as his “ex” on at least ten occasions. To compound her embarrassment, he was still her roommate. They lived in an overpriced doorman building on Bleecker near the folk clubs and Italian bakeries, in the eastern part of the West Village known to gentrifiers farther east as “Little Jersey.” A flimsy drywall partition divided what had once been a one-bedroom apartment into a one-and-a-half. Simon had the half bedroom. It was too cheap. He would never, ever move out voluntarily. She was out of town a lot for work, and every time she got back, she could tell he’d been sleeping in her bed. They were not friends. She hated him. They were both on the lease.
JOE 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.
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