Chapter 5
September, 1999
Much of Hud’s life revolved in and around rock clubs. Down along The Bowery and Bleeker Street, the East Village, Tribeca. Sometimes he’d catch a platinum-artist at MSG, or a certified gold artist at The Beacon, but in the main his habitués were grungy clubs hosting indie acts and cult artists, bands on SubPop or Asylum labels, No Depression. He went to shows primarily because he loved to, and because he loved to so much he’d found a way to earn some coin and get comped tickets along the way: he averaged three or four concert write-ups a week.
On occasion his byline would appear in Rolling Stone, somewhat more frequently in The Village Voice; he was the on-staff rock critic for TimeOut New York and that position comprised the majority of his income. Income: Hud’s was meager, and showed little sign of rising anytime in the immediate future – in fact he’d read the tea leaves already and foresaw that the internet was set to take a serious bite out of the already small pie of the livelihood of music scribblers who plied their trade in print media, freelance or in-house – but he’d attained at least some degree of stability and exposure that prevented him from having to bartend or wait tables or work retail. In fact, by his way of thinking, Hud had never held a real job. It was a streak he was determined to continue for the rest of his days.
Anyway, his needs were small. Not exactly a minimalist – his vinyl collection was extensive, somewhere around four thousand records at this point, and he had a lot of books, a lot of them bought second-hand and with red-and-white-stickers from The Strand still on their spines, and he didn’t sleep on a futon but on a real bed, Queen-sized, with a comforter, headboard and everything, and he also found enough disposable income for a pretty solid collection of Hatch Show prints and lithographs – he was still relatively frugal, careful with money, good with money. He wasn’t a big drinker, especially by the standards of the majority of his acquaintanceship, and was a very sporadic drug user. He didn’t even eat out much, was the rare rock critic who could cook himself dinner, one that consisted of more than Hot Pockets at two am and the ever-ubiquitous Ramen noodles. Hud chose to inform himself on money just enough that he could safely ignore it.
In this and other ways he was as comfortable as any person he knew, in that he had a life that was almost entirely composed of elements he’d decided upon. He absented himself from things that didn’t interest him (and there was a great deal didn’t interest him), and dunked himself entirely into the few things which did (music, movies, books and girls, though not necessarily in that order). He went where he wanted to go, did what he wanted to do, had an almost preternatural genius for avoiding complication and obligation and distasteful tasks. This he found possible through a combination of tight focus, diligence at his desk – Hud didn’t procrastinate on assignments, he turned them out with machine-like consistency – and simple organizational methods. He got up in the mornings. He cleaned his place regularly. He filed his pieces. He paid his bills like clockwork, the same time every month. Finding comfort in clutter as much as the next pop culture nerd, he still successfully staved it off, kept paperwork tidy and put away, worked against his own inclinations to drown in a morass of album sleeves and dog-eared, soft-backed copies of Thomas Pynchon novels and kept his living space and work space clean and orderly. By these practices he found he garnered more nutrition from the things in life he enjoyed, could appreciate them with a clear head, low stress.
One thing he did not enjoy were dance clubs, and this was where he found himself tonight. The problem wasn’t the music; for a guy who’d listened to Astral Weeks in toto over one thousand times at this point, Hud had an above-average appreciation for DJ music, even house, even techno, even drum-and-bass. Not for him was the stilted, claustrophobic confines of so many of his contemporaries, who revered Rock with a capital R, and as such had done more than their part in keeping it a staid, strict enterprise, an art form encased in amber, a very conservative mode divorced from its original incarnations, when inventiveness and energy and novelty had held sway and powered it into a mammoth cultural influence. Whatever had been daring was now codified, safe in its lane, and most anything that sought to veer outside of the formula was sneered, shunned, and refused entry inside the cold, marble pantheon he and his ilk had indirectly served to erect. Metal Machine Music was given respect only when two decades had elapsed to blunt its dangers; My Bloody Valentine had a host of critical champions but always was lauded with the same possessiveness and nearly tender plaudits reserved for bands that the critical literati had foreordained destined-to-remain cult acts. In his own time, Chuck Berry had been no less revolutionary, was every bit as challenging, but then the landscape was ripe for spontaneity and iconoclasts could find greater purchase – the gray of the times had prepped the world for Technicolor, and there was no denying anymore Chuck’s or Little Richard’s or Bo Diddley’s particular hue. Now the irony was that there was more diversity than every before, between artists and in sounds, but it was increasingly marginalized, on display but neutered of the potential for real danger. Private passions and love, such as his own, for the music had robbed it of its thorns and thistles, venom and fangs. Believing this he’d always worked to listen with an open mind, and even though his neural pathways were laid to hear four chords and distorted guitar, over the years he’d come to appreciate and love the sounds of EDM and DJ music and rap. Not exactly a scenester himself, he still had quiet awe for the communities springing up in the clubs and rave joints and poetry slam open-mikes. Here is where things still happened, where drugs yet stamped a positive imprint (until they didn’t), where kids gathered, where individuals flaunted individuality and yet, for now anyway, the Me could still be a We. Question then, why didn’t he like dance clubs?
It had not been for a lack of trying. It was complicated – what kind of clubs? Because too often he found himself at the wrong kind, cheesy places pumping generic Billboard dance pop, watery contemporary R&B, hiphop-LITE. These plasticine palaces were adroit with hookup culture and specialty martinis. Hud wanted to find grittier, grungier places, the belly of what remained of any underground – and sure, he often did find them. Hardcore still had a foothold, EDM after-hours places still pumped in Alphabet City, Williamsburg had a nascent alternative scene fast-burgeoning. But for whatever reason Hud, even given all his talent for structuring life in a way as to access only what he wished and shunt out the rest, too frequently found himself at places like this one. OXIDIZE’D, near the corner of 12th and Union.
Why was he here? Good question, thought Hud, as he went past the doorman, and around a velvet rope (for Christ’s sake), and into the place, archway and vestibule and delivered into a dark expanse of partitioned area coated in cobalt-hued air-conditioning. The rooms became larger as you tunneled through them further, until letting out into a wide space with a thirty-foot ceiling, a dance floor the size of a parking lot, raised mezzanines with round top tables, royal blue track lighting glinting the circumference of it all, and a DJ booth perched above, elevated like on a parapet and inside the open aperture where a skinny guy with gargantuan headphones craned over double turntables, body in a shimmy to a counterpoint of a beat. The music was not exactly known to him – he couldn’t name the track or the artist – but at the same time was familiar. An insistent pulse, devoid of swing, the chilly inverse of R&B’s ball-and-socket beat, washes of synth, programmed choral mounting, a ballast of dub bass. Electron lighting, electron music, blue without the blues. Why was he here …
Birthday party. Amber Gillesh. Who Hud briefly had been entangled with, more than a few moons ago, but who now was with Faymeyer. That was his actual name, or at least his handle, whatever his momma had dubbed him. The derivation of it was a mystery to Hud but now he glimpsed Faymeyer through a mobile forest of bodies lathered in a plasmatic sheen of liquid nightshade. Taller than your average ex’s new boyfriend, tight curls almost like a Hassidim, sharp chin, eyes piqued with a self-satisfaction that was nearly as ambiguous in origin as his name; he looked like a Faymeyer somehow. Also, he looked monied, toney, expensive in raising and current habits, a bank account agog with at least a couple more zeros than Hud’s could sport. In that Hud had no jealousy; any discomfiture came from his, Hud’s, lack of expertise and experience in how situations like that even existed. How does a twenty-six year old native New Yorker contain a small fortune within himself? How do the zeros postulate a person? Where in the trap of this man’s mind does a mechanism regularly activate itself to foster more money, apply itself automatically to the reflexive practice of garnering? He knew enough about Faymeyer to know the guy regularly recreated, had hobbies (wind-surfing, of all things, semi-frequent clubbing, a penchant for good pot, season tickets for the Nets), to his credit did not boast overly about his material achievement – certainly not about the precociousness of it, because facts-be-faced, he was probably sheepish about them, being that he’d come from money, been born into an Upper East Side co-op, had parents (pediatrician, medical malpractice litigator) who’d birthed him onto third base. Not trust-fund circumstances but not so far from them, especially for one observing closer from ground level. Liberal guilt can moderate a goodly amount, at least in conversations over cocktails, at least in staying the hand to reach for the Amex black card and spring for everyone’s tab.
Amber waved his way. Hud nodded, worked himself through the slippery assemblage and towards his group of acquaintances. He had a peculiar kind of self-confidence, the slipshod kind that was a couple parts genuine fiber, and at least one part fragile vanity. Mostly it worked, and any fissures were only exposed in minor, harmless ways: like when as a white man with a vinyl collection he had to cross a dance floor under the watchful gaze of attractive girls. “Whattup,” she said, throwing her arm up and around him in a deep embrace, precariously balancing a Cosmo over his shoulder with her free hand. Her lithe form and frame was familiar as the music that he couldn’t find a name for. This, these tingled moments with a woman he’d had sex with numerous times, the physical flash of the past made manifest in a brief galvanic starburst of sense memory, this is what sets a certain mind to yearning again, a romantic’s angling of an imaginary dispensation. Some people either wouldn’t feel, or they wouldn’t indulge. He felt it, and he indulged, the luxurious wash of melancholy or some sharper thing, something with teeth, might even be something akin to jealousy. He could and did indulge this now, for at least a few minutes. Truth is, he enjoyed it. And couldn’t have helped himself even if he didn’t.
Within an hour an event would occur that, seen in retrospect from other eventualities that would follow later, would seem to alter everything, every moment, including this present one. These predilections of character and personality, his psychic responses to girls in his presence, not only his attitude but his beliefs. And who knows – maybe seeing her, the girl about to enter from offstage for the first time, maybe it did alter everything. But a retrospective is an inherently untrustworthy unreliable vantage point in which to witness anything. Because the past can’t really be witnessed, it can only be ascribed, laden with meanings and import assigned in arrears from present-tenses it will never have the pleasure or privilege to meet.