Dana Spiotta - Stone Arabia

“I think I want to make a movie about Nik,” she said. “You know, he really is like a folk-art genius. Not just his music but the whole deal, the whole constructed lifelong thingy. He would totally be a great subject. Don’t you think?”

I thought about it. Nik might be a good subject. He was so eccentric, so hardworking, so unapologetic. But I didn’t think enough about it, or about what making a movie would do to the delicate balance of a secret life. I forgot, maybe because it was Ada, that I needed to look out for Nik.

“He would be a great subject, and he would love it. But then again, he might not be totally receptive. Nik, he seems like he’s hungry for attention, but I’m not sure he is. Not anymore. Besides, he is used to controlling the whole story.”

Ada glanced at me and nodded. She had short, shiny black bangs and long, straight black hair. Her eyes were heavily lined and the penciled-in arches of her brows precise. Her eyes looked enormous, even as (or because) her lids appeared halfway closed when she looked straight at you, sleepy kewpie-doll eyes.

I poured myself more champagne. “We might have to talk him into it. Nik has his world, and I don’t think he even sees himself …Let’s put it this way: I think his whole life is a private joke that he doesn’t want to explain to anyone.” I took a sip of champagne and felt the bubbles fizz on the sides of my tongue as I swallowed. “And I think part of his pleasure, or at least his freedom, is he doesn’t think anyone will see it or judge it.”

Ada nibbled at a cracker with a delicate sliver of cheddar on it. She had the eating habits of the relentlessly waifish.

“I don’t know. Of course, it’s up to him — he will know if he wants to do it.”

Ada nodded.

“But what if people think the music isn’t any good?” I said, something I never considered before because it just didn’t apply. I listened, I paid attention, I enjoyed.

Ada straightened up and leaned across the table toward me. “You think his music is, uh, not good?”

“I do not think his music is not good, or what we sometimes call bad. I think, with as much certainty as I can bring to these kind of judgments, that Nik’s music is really, really good.” I had never said that in quite that way before. It took on more certainty as I heard myself say the words.

“Me, too. It’s great. Totally great, c’mon,” Ada said.

“And we are so objective, aren’t we?” I said. I started to laugh, and then I felt sad about laughing. I didn’t need to throw up all these cynical equivocations any time I said something important. Not even equivocations, but little sarcastic tics. It didn’t feel good, or even particularly true. We sat there without talking for a few moments. The lights started to come up from all the houses in the surrounding hills. When I first moved to Santa Clarita, the hills behind my house were empty. I used to be able to hear coyotes howling at night. I wasn’t supposed to feel this way, but I didn’t entirely mind all the development — at night, seeing the lights of the houses reassured me.

“I think Rob is seeing someone else,” Ada said.

“No, seriously.”

“Of course he is. He’s married, ” I said. “No, I mean someone else, not his wife, not me.”

I sighed. (I actually made some of those mouth-clicking or sucking sounds, usually written as a tsk or a tut, but that doesn’t look right to me.) I liked Rob. I had never met him and probably never would meet him. But from what Ada had told me, he was very funny and smart. He didn’t lie to her. This was clearly another instance of my poor parental guidance. I know I should have disapproved, but she appeared to be so in love, so happy. Ada’s father, I was sure, had no idea of the existence of Rob. Only I got to be her trustworthy confidante.

Ada started to cry.

“Oh, honey, come on.”

Ada sniffed, then she smiled and wiped under her eyes with her knuckle, pushing back mascara and tears. “I’m okay,” she said. I put an arm across the back of her shoulders and squeezed her toward me a little. It was more of a buck-up gesture than an actual hug. She would be fine.

But I should have realized how the movie would complicate things.

Nik called to tell me his old bandmate Tommy Skate was dead. Congestive heart failure, which was expected.

Nik had made me come with him to visit Tommy a few months ago. I hadn’t seen Tommy in years. He was the original lead guitar player in the Demonics. He used to wear plaid pants and creeper shoes with a wifebeater T-shirt. Tommy smoked menthol Marlboros because they made his breath smell good. He asked me out about fifty times from 1977 to 1990. Tommy played in punk bands, new wave bands, power pop bands, grunge bands, and so on, then he stopped playing. Later he became a Buddhist (he still indulged his every desire, but he would lecture you about “letting things go”), he developed a leather fetish, he defended Ronald Reagan, and he knew everything about martial arts movies. He worked lots of bad jobs, but mostly I remember he worked at a hospital switchboard, because he would tell stories about the crazy calls he would get at three a.m. Oh, and I guess Tommy was married once to a woman I never met and then quickly divorced. He never had any kids.

Tommy moved back in with his mother when he got sick. They shared a two-bedroom house in the Valley. It was an aging 1950s ranch, with sunflower wallpaper in the kitchen and mossy wall-to-wall carpeting in the living room. We found Tommy encamped on the sectional couch near a large TV.

Nik hadn’t said a word the whole ride over. He drove, smoking and holding the wheel with one hand. The CD playing on his stereo was one of his own productions — I never understood how someone could listen to his own CDs. Isn’t that just unimaginable, or at least indicative of a malignant solipsism? But Nik, going back a long while, listened to his own music if he listened to anything. The older he got, the less he wanted to hear any music at all. It seemed to irk him or bore him, but less so when it was one of his albums. I can imagine no equivalence to this in my own life — again, we have veered so far from each other. Except I also listened to Nik’s music, so we had that in common.

An ancient air conditioner hummed overchilled but under-circulated air into Tommy’s house. A stale sweet smell barely covered the acrid and unmistakable yellow stink of a lifetime of cigarettes. I didn’t ever tell Nik how much it bothered me, that same sad undersmell in his apartment — he was used to it, after all. Tommy sat with his feet up on a pillow. His ankles and feet looked swollen to the point of formal uselessness. His wrists and fingers appeared puffy and immobile. He explained he could no longer play his guitar, but he still could play the keyboard. He explained further — just the sound of those words, pulmonary edema, whispered our future to us. Myopathy, necrosis, infarction —the serious words I would put into search engines late at night and then watch them multiply.

Tommy turned the knob on his old stereo until Richard Hell and the Voidoids poured out of the speakers in the high volume requirement of both 1978 punk rock and damaged old ears. Hell’s sneery vocal instantly grated on me. At first I thought Tommy chose it for the horrible ironic effect of punk vitality. But then, as I watched his hands weakly chug along to the contrary guitar, I could see that Tommy really loved the noise, the refusal and the stubborn assault of it. It wasn’t an ironic gesture, it was a sad and nostalgic gesture.

“I hate this album,” Nik said.

“Yeah, but the guitars,” Tommy said.