When they met he was still pre-med, she was about to become the editor of some kind of literary magazine. It was a strange inversion of hierarchy there, the campus was lousy with bros who were, within a year or two, going to be six-figure analysts at Wall Street firms, within ten years going to be masters of the universe, and they were held in very low regard, at least in his circles, they were seen as ‘louts,’ basically, ‘drunken deadbeats’ – these were all Aline’s words – who would dry themselves out in some wilderness expedition right after senior year and come back ‘ready to conquer.’ Although, in fairness, his social status was no higher. It was another irony that the future doctors, savers of lives, earners of at least $200,000, were considered to be even lower than the wizards of Wall Street. His classes, brutally, seemed always to be at 8:20 in the morning. They were always on the campus’ high hill, in the modernist, functional buildings that everybody loathed. He would be ravenously hungry afterwards, there was a little market of food carts that had become symbiotic with the hungry med students, this feels like a work camp, he thought to himself, the long line of future doctors in front of the burrito carts, trying to eat their sandwich out of its tin foil without spilling the sauce on their clothes.
He had decided to be a doctor when he was 14 or 15, idly, he was tired of being asked what he wanted to do for a living and what he wanted to concentrate on in school, he chose it sort of the way a parent might flip through a book of baby names. It felt right, he did have the right kind of brain for this, the math, music, languages brain, he did have a way of inhaling subjects in school, he just retained information, he figured out systems, he was always a little surprised to see the frenetic way people crammed for tests, for him it always felt like skiing or surfing, pay a moderate amount of attention in class, do a moderate amount of reading, and it was all there – no one was trying to trick you, what was on the tests was exactly what had been taught in the course.
But his doctoring wasn’t very deep, he knew that, it was based heavily on the premise that everybody would always think well of a doctor, practical, munificent, beneficent, but that premise was challenged when he sat down one summer trying to make a plan for his life, and discovered that he wouldn’t make any kind of money until he was well into his 30s, at which point he would still be crawling out of debt, and it was challenged on Science Hill, where he was openly referred to as ‘The Great White Hope’ and treated as a kind of mascot, museum piece from an earlier era of easygoing WASP doctors who would be part of the Rotary Club and play the cello at home, and it was challenged when he was out with Aline and her friends, they were always celebrating something or other, they had just ‘put a paper to bed’ or it was opening night for a play, or there was just an argument, with lots of booze and cigarettes, trying to figure out if the big banks should be nationalized, trying to decide whether Basquiat was totally full of it or not, and the arguments would take many hours and move in their tightening circles, figuring out the other person’s premises, trying to isolate and annihilate those, it seemed like some kind of mental martial arts, it seemed like they’d all learned it in their prep schools, they actually seemed to believe that they could convince one another, they used the drinks and the weed as a kind of lever in their arguments, trying to make themselves more lucid with just the right mix of drinks or else tip an opponent into gibbering incoherence. Jared always had to get to bed before the real grappling, before one side or another could be persuaded. He’d hear the arguments from Aline’s bedroom, where he was trying to sleep by putting the pillow right over his head, the sputtering, really angry arguments, and then the shout of laughter when someone conceded something or other.
Midway through junior year, he told his parents that he was switching directions. By pre-med standards, he had tried to be well-rounded, if he focused he could just graduate as an English major. “What will you do after that?” his mother said. She was a small, pinched woman, she had grown up in a Quakerist open-mindedness, was receptive to whatever people wanted to do with themselves, but there was something in the way she talked, it always felt like her corns were bothering her or she’d just stubbed her toe.
“I was thinking I’d be a music producer,” Jared told her, jamming basically, trying out phrases and seeing if they stuck. “It’s something I’d know how to do, and there’s not that much risk in it – I wouldn’t be a performer – and there’s more upside, I can make money right out of school and potentially I can make a lot more.”
His mother’s eyes narrowed in their practiced way. “It’s your funeral,” she said. She was very bad at humor and irony, she always missed the mark, she meant to be light about things but she always dug in way too hard.
***
He did an internship the next summer and the summer after that at a record label. It was much lighter work than what he would have been doing if he’d been in a lab on the pre-med track – he had to give it that. He was sometimes allowed to sort through executives’ e-mail. He sat in on meetings, there was a row of benches for the interns off to the side of the conference table, exactly like a peanut gallery. Musicians would troop through the offices en route to a meeting and it was a major sport for the interns to spot Estelle or Katy Perry – he had no idea who most of the people were whom they got excited about. Everybody was a little intimidated by him there, they made remarks about his education and what they assumed was his big brain – it reminded him of his mother’s sense of humor, trying to be comradely, but coming across heavy and biting. “Did I pronounce that right, Jared?” a producer might say if he called something blasé or déclassé, and look over to Jared on the intern benches for approval. The one time he felt like everybody else was when Amy Winehouse came by, this was at the point when ‘Rehab’ was never not on the radio and also when Amy kept punching fans. She was in a waiting room, sitting there with her legs spread open, exactly like a wino at a bus station, kind of muttering to herself, and Jared pretended to have some paper filing to deal with in the same room, which was pushing things, but also snapped a photo of her on his cell phone, which was a real no-no and could have led to, who knows, getting his internship revoked, getting black-balled from the music industry. He sent that to Aline, who was thrilled.
“Did she punch you out for taking that?” Aline wrote.
They were having their first real experience of long-distance. Aline had spent the summer on campus preparing her applications for prestigious graduate fellowships. Jared didn’t really understand it – she seemed to just proof-read the same application over and over again, but that was Aline, every paper was an ordeal for her, sometimes it meant that books went sailing across her room, sometimes it was spraying phone calls around to everybody she knew. It didn’t really make sense to him – even in his grindy Science Hill days it would never have occurred to him to make an opera out of each assignment the way Aline did, how she would be on the phone with somebody she really respected in her seminar, saying, “What can anybody possibly say about Bourdieu? It’s a chart, doesn’t it just speak for itself?” What was odder still was that nobody seemed to mind these outbursts, these frantic calls announcing that she was stuck. She was a bit of a campus personality, Aline, they all seemed to appreciate her being neurotic, they thought it was cute. And Jared had a weakness for the same type of thinking, he had been very taken with her friend group, how they actually read the copies of The New York Times that were left in the dining halls – the first people he had seen doing that – how she described each one of them by their attributes, like they were characters in comic books, so-and-so can recognize any piece of music, he just knows everything, so and so has a great eye, she sees the whole world as a photograph. If a few of them were reading the same book in seminar, they argued about which one of them was which character: who was most like Tess, who was most like Alec d’Urberville. When you got down to it, it was much nerdier than anything he’d ever seen with the Asians on Science Hill, which ultimately was just about people competing long-range for high-paying jobs. It was very sweet the way they treated themselves as if they were some sort of Left Bank mandarins, how their work and their play were pretty much the same thing, one of the first nights he’d met her, she and her friends showed up at a party, their interactions were very scattershot at this time, he went, hoping she’d turn up, the party was a bit desultory, nobody was really dancing, he was very worried he’d invited her to the wrong place and then she and her friends barged in, the men of ambiguous sexual orientation, who were supposed to be Alec d’Urberville and Angel Clare, the slightly mousy blond, who never said anything but had the great eye, ‘Rehab’ had just been released and everybody was losing their minds to it, no more Nu Ma Nu Ma Iei, thank god no more Günther and his Ding-Dong Song, which was still the anthem of Science Hill, and she really launched into it, she kind of broad jumped onto the dance floor, her dance was all shoulders, the quiet friend had found glitter from somewhere and rained it over the two of them, she was singing along with the words, she was kind of playacting the entire story of the song, Jared kept trying to dance with her – after all they’d been flirting, this was where they were meeting up – and every time he approached it was the part of the song where she says, ‘I won’t go go go,’ and Aline wagged her finger at him and kind of scampered across the dance floor to make her escape. She seemed to be very flushed and very drunk, and when she was ready to leave and tilted her head to invite him along he assumed that meant the walk to her door room, the couch, maybe making it as far as the bed, a kind of reversion to the mean. Instead, it was all of her friends exiting together and they made it to the basement of one of the colleges, which they had turned into their symposium, and produced champagne and put old standards on the jukebox, although eventually they all agreed to have ‘Rehab’ on repeat, and argued about something having to do with Judith Butler versus Camille Paglia and Jared tried manfully to participate even though none of that had been covered in any of his literature survey classes, and one of the metrosexuals actually read a couple of his poems out loud, and, while he did, Aline surreptitiously took Jared’s hand.
That had been early in the semester and it wasn’t truly representative of how they spent time – the dance parties dried up, as did the free-flowing symposia, there was still the lit mag and the ragged, desperate drinks after it was sent to the print shop, but more and more it was Aline on the phone trying to get herself unstuck from a paper, and Jared didn’t really mind that, it wasn’t the first time that a romantic partner’s reality didn’t entirely match up to the image they’d presented of themself, but he mourned it quietly, he really had been looking forward to more of the 4am symposia, had run through various roles that he might play in it, bringing his guitar and strumming along, cramming through The New York Review of Books and The Times Literary Supplement, speed-reading through Butler and Paglia and Baudrillard and anybody else who might come up.
Via long-distance, he could feel their paths diverging. The record label was very famous, everybody seemed to think it was a very cool internship, but he had nothing to do. In the evening or on lunch breaks when he called her, he played her the songs he had composed in his down-time, on a guitar if he had it handy, or just singing if he didn’t – to his eternal shame, he had been part of an a cappella group during school – and she listened in her quiet, critical mode, finally pronounced her judgment, “That’s really good,” “Those lyrics are really striking,” but always detached, always sort of in the 4am mode, that place of pure assessment, and he took that as a compliment, that she was treating his songs as if they were music on the radio or something assigned on a syllabus, not love songs from her nerdy, formerly pre-med boyfriend, but then, pretty much as soon as he’d finished, she complained again about the prompt questions for the fellowship application, asked for the hundredth time if she was right to talk about a charitable summer program she’d done which actually was meaningful to her or if that was just too tacky.
When the internship wrapped up, and all the other interns made a beeline for whichever executive was closest to beg for a job, Jared took a couple of weeks to reflect. He went home, he visited Aline on campus, she was hunkered down on her essay, not really interested in conversation let alone nostalgia, he spent a lot of time walking around the gorgeous buildings, thinking about all the opportunities wasted, the clubs not joined, the publications not written for, it had all been so perfect, everything available, everything opening up, opening up, and as far as he could tell it had no resemblance to anything in the adult world.
He called his mom and told her what he’d been hinting at when he was home and couldn’t bring himself to say to her face, that he’d go to L.A. and see if he could catch on with the music industry there, not so much as a producer, more as a singer/songwriter. He could just about see the pinched expression through the silence on the phone line, the inner conflict between her Quakerism, her acceptance of all paths, and her jaundiced practicality. “One brilliant decision after another,” she said at last.
***
More than any other place he’d ever been, more than any place in the world, L.A. had nothing at all to do with how it was imagined. He was basically a grounded, rational person, but even he couldn’t help but be a bit seduced by the vision, the pool parties and the hills and the jogging by the oceanfront – “everybody is vapid, the traffic is awful, there’s no center, but miracles happen,” an acquaintance, an actress, had said to him to explain, shruggingly, why she was moving there and he kept that like a mantra, repeated it to himself even when the room he found was very far from both mountains and ocean, a tight little cul-de-sac of a community, the names all modeled on English boarding schools, which was a clear sign that the developers were out of ideas, they’d just grabbed the first names available, and the neighborhood excepting himself entirely Persian.
When he’d arrived he’d gone straight from LAX to a Sam Ash store and bought a synthesizer and this was the center of his life now, the sole piece of furniture he had. He spent the day working on music and when he had to he drove haltingly to the Persian supermarket and in the long dead hours either tried to will himself to go for a run or chatted with the woman whose room he was subletting, she was actually very pretty although had a kid and seemed to only date these glowering, mafia-ish-looking Iranian men, and listened to music, the same songs on repeat.
His music tastes were obsessive, what happened to him was that some song got to him like a needle in a record groove, and he just couldn’t listen to anything else, couldn’t think about anything else actually, all other music sounded like pop and candy and the song he was currently obsessed with mainlined right to the soul. There was Neil Young’s ‘Hey Hey My My,’ there was Stevie Nicks’ ‘Gold Dust Woman.’ He usually had the music on fairly low, so the woman he lived with, whom he was still, somewhere in the back of his mind, trying to impress, wouldn’t overhear, think him a creep, he tended to create a playlist of one on Kazaa, so that it was Neil Young singing ‘Hey hey my my rock and roll can never die’ over and over and over again. Sometimes he got stuck on YouTube, and then it was the concert videos, even the silly little YouTube graphic overlays, that really got to him. In the clip of Gold Dust Woman that he must have watched a hundred or two hundred times, so much so that he tried to perform his own metrics on it, calculate what percentage of views he accounted for, it was a strange little cutaway that mesmerized him, these Japanese people doing martial arts on a desert landscape, who knows what was going on, whether it was 1970s editing or the person who had uploaded the video, but somehow that hit him every time – so much so that he made the mistake of showing it to the woman he lived with, who just kind of squinted towards the screen like it was a puzzle and she couldn’t figure out the solution – and then at the end of it, Stevie shouted, “They never let me sing Gold Dust Woman, never!” and that just killed him, how much she loved singing it, how she of all people – Stevie Nicks – could feel wronged, scorned, underappreciated, sidelined.
It was a bit hard for him to work out why he was so mesmerized by the particular songs that captivated him. By any discernible measure, ‘Gold Dust Woman’ didn’t have a lot to do with him – no one would mistake him for an ancient queen. Hard to work out too why it was precisely those songs and no others, why ‘Rhiannon’ just didn’t do it for him, why ‘Old Man’ and ‘Heart of Gold,’ which had faithfully accompanied him through many college papers, lacked the same bite, why all the other tracks on Rust Never Sleeps he found totally insipid. He had an analytic frame of mind, he liked to break systems apart, that had served him equally well in biology and with his English texts and in learning the guitar, but it was of no avail in helping him understand why the words ‘hey hey my my,’ repeated ten times in a row, according to Rap Genius, left him weak at the knees on every single listen.
The only successful method, he discovered, for finally pushing one song out of his head was to become equally, pathologically obsessed with something new. Just when he thought he was really becoming crazy, or at least very depressed, his whole inner system kind of bobbing along to ‘Hey Hey My My’ even when he wasn’t listening to it, the way dancers will keep swaying after the music stops, Amy Winehouse died and that was a relief in a strange sense because out of respect to her he listened to ‘Rehab’ on repeat and then the whole Back to Black album – it somehow hadn’t occurred to him she had other songs – and that finally gave him a respite from Neil Young and Crazy Horse and the story of the Johnny Rotten.
He had been sending his songs to Aline. They’d been broken up over a year by this time. She was on her scholarship at Oxford – apparently her process had worked, the tenth revision of her application had really made it flawless. She didn’t especially know anything about music, but he trusted her taste, if she could see through Donald Barthelme then maybe she could be trusted to give it to him straight about his music, in any case there was no one else he could really write to, the a cappella group were all musical theater types and airily enthusiastic about everything, but what she wrote back wasn’t exactly encouraging. ‘I see what you’re going for,’ she wrote of one track. ‘Gods, you’re in a melancholy mood,’ she wrote of another. He wrote a cri de coeur after Winehouse died, he compared her to David Foster Wallace – he thought Aline would appreciate that – he felt like ‘it was over before it began,’ he wrote, that the most dynamic, the best lights of their generation had gone out, he wondered if this was how everybody had felt in the ’90s when Kurt Cobain died or that moment in the early ’70s when everybody OD’d one right after the other. He stayed up late, pounding the keyboard as he composed, ‘Back to Black’ of course accompanying him, he was used to trim, efficient papers, it had been the same whether in his English or Science classes, he had a very orderly, crystalline mind, this kind of unfiltered expression caught him by surprise. She wrote back, ‘I’m not sure I would compare Amy Winehouse to David Foster Wallace, and, besides, Wallace was a lot older than us and had real mental health problems.’
***
He saw Aline’s point. Her taste, as always, was impeccable. Winehouse probably wasn’t a truly great musician, when he finally looked up the lyrics to her music he was a bit discomfited, the songs were actually almost totally incoherent, but that seemed not to matter, at least not to him in his obsessive phase, the album on its loop. She was born for this, that was obvious enough, everybody felt that. She’d been twelve years old (or whatever) and gone to an audition, this British Jewish girl singing for some reason like Ma Rainey, and everybody recognized it, everybody immediately started trying to steal her from each other – there was something so pure in her, she was a star. Jared worked away on his synthesizer. He’d made no contacts in the music industry. L.A. wasn’t the sort of place where you just ran into somebody on the street and chatted them up. He’d stopped sending his ballads to Aline. He just wrote and recorded, wrote and recorded. He’d always been on the outside of everything, it came to him honestly, through his mother, the white kid on Science Hill, the science kid in Aline’s literary circles, the literary kid at the record label, the random artist in the Persian enclave in Ladera Ranch. His music was pretty good actually, he was oddly sure of that – why wouldn’t it be, he had a good brain, good education, a very good ear. He was also somehow completely sure that he would never break through – everybody who did had a message, there was something pure about them, undivided, they weren’t born outsiders, their life experience wasn’t burrito carts outside math classes and then tagging along with the literary kids. Amy had it, that’s why he listened to Amy and wrote embarrassing, unhinged e-mails about her, and she’d squandered it, effectively suicided, it was unreal, she must have wanted it so bad, lived only for this, once when he was working at the record label he had seen the singer Pink being left waiting outside an office, she was preparing a comeback – that’s how it went, her last album hadn’t gone great so now it was time for the comeback – and she was squeezing her fists so hard he could see the veins popping, she was shaking her hand, muttering to herself, exactly like the crazies he saw gibbering at Venice Beach, and if Pink was that intense, and that was just candyish, hit-the-dance-floor Pink, he could only imagine what that hunger was like for Amy, and then whatever demon clawing around in her had been even more intense, which really told you something. He was a long way from where he thought he’d end up, a long way from med school, a long way from some executive track position at a label, by some measures he was young, 24, but he was already sure that by this point that there was no way out, whether he was good or bad, success or failure, he would sink into it deeper and deeper, no expectations, no regrets, fade into black.