Zappa Zapata

Short Stories

Dear Friends,

I know that these short stories are very long and dense for laptop/cell phone reading. Appreciate your indulging me with them. I selected this one, from the collection Lives of the Artists, since it seemed to match the mood of late August.

Best,

Sam

ZAPPA ZAPATA

Spring in New York. A restaurant altercation. Really just a distraction, a break in the monotony to everybody else on the terrace. He’s in his long-haired mane, a sleek leather jacket, the kind of person who might cause alarm. A pair of waiters, and now the manager, are ringed around him, they’re very patient, they might well have anticipated this the moment he sat down, they’re following some kind of protocol. He’s now in the phase where he’s ripping apart his pockets, receipts, wrappers, bits of lint are flying. They’ve been quizzing him about pin numbers on his various cards, wire transfers between his accounts. At the time she intervenes, they’re deep in his finances, they want to know about some kind of payment, when that was posted, when that’s hitting his account.

She asks what he had, how much it is, they seem more incensed by the question than he does by any of their inquiries — this is the private business of an upscale restaurant, this is the shakedown moment of the meal, probably some rare art that they learn at the very end of, whatever, culinary, hospitality school. When she presents her card — it turns out he had very little, a large soup, a couple of coffees, a beer — she finds herself for some odd reason looking away while they perform the swipe, award the receipt, there’s something indecently frictionless about the exchange, all the banks and payroll departments and credit card companies working so tightly in tandem, and the brunchers on the terrace have already gone back to whatever it is they talk about, mostly TV shows and gossip-worthy mutual friends, the whole altercation having proven less interesting than was hoped-for, and now the two of them slinking away like confederates, the hot street, the incongruous jacket that has come to seem like some kind of a uniform, the hard, idle eyes of the diners bullseying their backs. What’s the basis for their alliance? He’s still babbling something incoherent, still lost in intricacies of bounced checks and miswired funds, as far as she knows he might easily be a street person — she wouldn’t be surprised if he suddenly gives her one of these straight-talk looks, asks her for a dollar. Something about the shape the wait staff took around him — this is the kind of direction her thoughts tend to go in — how evenly spaced they were, how cunningly servile. Like hounds baying, is the phrase that occurs to her. And he, so good-naturedly shabby, the big hair, the plaid shirt. He reminded her of a defender she’d seen on the Spanish World Cup team, this bearish guy blissfully, hilariously out-of-place among all the sleek top-tier athletes. She had the feeling that things were always just on the brink of crisis for him, there was always the risk of something really bad — who knows, frog-marched to the ATM, the heavy from the kitchen summoned to give him a going-over. She had no real grasp of what was plausible or not; that was the well-hidden peculiarity of her personality, fundamentally, that was her weak point.

They found their way, through some kind of mesmerism, back to her place, her grate railing, her trash cans, the neighbor with the dog puttering along on the other side of the street, and something about all of that functioned like a snap in a hypnotism and she held out her hand to him and he seemed to recall some distant ancestral memory of how a person behaved who shook hands and performed a decent mimicry of it and went loping off.

They messaged very often in the next few days. Most guys had some pretense of playing it cool, but he responded right away. His conversation wasn’t exactly amazing; he used more gifs and emojis than she would have liked, but he was amusing. “What is your full name?” she asked him under the pretext that she had to save him as something in her phone. And he wrote back “Cory Commodus de la Commode” and she knew right away that it was a non-starter to try to pry any kind of truth out of him. When they met for their next date, they were at a wine bar down the street from her, one of these awful tacky places that seemed like a Tinder tie-in, actually with candelighting from plastic candles, and he kept rotating his glass in sharp quarter-turns, but when they walked back to her apartment there was somehow no hypnotist’s snap at her grate railing and she found herself, like the innocent in a horror movie, fighting her drunken trembling hands to get the key in the downstairs lock and then again for her apartment, flipping on the light switch, surveying the apartment, which out of some kind of superstition, she had been careful not to clean at all before the date. He followed doggedly at her heels, and somewhere in the middle of apologizing and fetching water and futzing with the AC, he reached out his big calloused hand to her cheek and wrapped her into him and she found herself bending her back, found herself kicking her leg into the air, she had the sense that she was impersonating a completely different kind of person.

Sex with him was, as expected, kind of ragged, unkempt. He fell asleep before she did, of course, and she let him lie his head on her chest, ran her fingertips rhythmically through his hair. What she was trying to work out was if this person, who had come to her like a stray animal, had anything to do with her. When she was younger that had been a bad habit of hers, the way she might visit a tag sale or a shop in the neighborhood, the beachside town where her family spent the summer, and came away with a set of encyclopedias or a record player without a cord or, most memorably, once, a cageful of gerbils. And, always, the same bewildered conversation in the aftermath, for some reason everybody talked in hushed tones, Lucie with her elbows on her knees, her knobby wrists pushing her hair back from her temples. “I just don’t quite — “ her mother might say. “I just don’t quite understand what happened for you to think that was a good idea.”

They were very reasonable people, her parents, they had a gift for always seeing people in the best possible light, and she’d witnessed many conversations like that, one or the other of them returning in the evening from their daily defeats, hers at the school, his at the power authority, the dissection of the tantrum of a boss or middle schooler, the working-backwards, like some kind of benevolent detective, to what was underneath, what was driving them. And it was a very particular kind of humiliation for Lucie to be subject to the same scrutiny, the considerateness of it driving her, with a subtle shift in energy that she’d learned to carefully disguise, to really press her fingers throbbingly into her temples.

The process of his move-in to her apartment was very unobtrusive, matter-of-fact. There was the same kind of muttering pile-up of irrelevant details that there had been at the first meeting in the restaurant, a story she couldn’t come close to following about his roommate and his roommate’s girlfriend and a breakdown in the AC and then he was there, a guitar, some hard cases of sound gear, a nylon laundry bag that doubled as a suitcase. A kind of corridor was cleared for him between his side of the bed and a desk where he could do whatever it was he did on a computer. Her various work binders were pushed back to accommodate him. His sole contribution to the décor was a piece of laminated paper he put up over the desk. It was a string of unequal comparisons. “Information is not knowledge, knowledge is not wisdom, wisdom is not truth,” and so on, a kind of depressing pyramid of disappointments, she thought. “Beauty is not love,” it culminated. “Love is not music and music is THE BEST!”

She asked him about it, something had gone wrong with the paper, it looked like there was a bottom that had maybe torn off, and he got a dreamy look, said, “That’s Zappa!” The look, the smile, the connection of an object to the person, gave her, for the first time, some sense of solidity. To this point she still hadn’t pried a last name out of him. When she handed him her phone, he wrote, “Cory Cantilevered Canteloupe.” But the paper was a breakthrough, she knew it, and the weekend after that, when he went through the usual shambling motions of pulling on his jacket and gargling down a swallow of Listerine before disappearing for the evening, he asked her if she wanted to go out with him, and she found herself frenziedly hunting for a dress and applying makeup while he, suddenly time-aware and impatient, paced and coughed on the other side of the front door, and then they were in a club somewhere on the far extremities of the L train, one of these rooms that seemed to have no defined shape, a small curved stage that barely fit Cory and the rest of his band and then a rectangular dance hall sort of space with elfin hipster girls bobbing up and down and then, behind curtains, and around door jambs, some sort of vast warehouse that, as best as Lucie could guess, had a hip-hop concert and a political rally going on in different parts of it, and people drifted from there over the course of the evening and lined the back of the dance hall, smoking vapes and some of them even real cigarettes, and Cory and the band were perfectly oblivious to the gathering crowd, among themselves they had the look of a silent dance party, the way the drummer and the keyboardist had their headphones on, were each tuned in to their own little sound system, and Cory and the other guitarist, who seemed like the preppy inverse of Cory, cleanshaven where he was heavily maned, slim and delicate where he was bearish, but mirroring each other’s zigzagging shoulder movements, were pacing in their own arcs around the corners of the stage and then through some coordination opaque except to the two of them found each other and the necks of their guitars formed a perfect line. The music had been completely instrumental for a long time but suddenly Cory grabbed ahold of a microphone and sang:

There are many stars yet

There have to be

There are many moons to find

For me and thee

        

There are many roads to come

I know there are

And many turnings on the way

And home is very far

        

And all there is is you

And all I am is me

And what you think is not

And what love is – you’ll see

And she thought the lyrics were a bit stupid, but all song lyrics were, and the elfin hipster girls seemed to be moved by them, and the necks of the guitars kept their unison, and the voice was just as unexpected as the music, clear and clean and not a trace of the confused mumble, and the vapes and cigarettes looked like a kind of light show along the back wall and the smell of marijuana seemed somehow to mingle perfectly with the hipster sweat and Lucie had this oddly delicious feeling of perfect isolation, she was impersonating the elfin girls as best she could, shimmered the way they shimmered, but she had the feeling — a persistent fantasy since she was a kid — of being the sole conscious figure in a painting, as if she were a picknicker on the Island of La Grande Jatte, who was simultaneously both aware of having a picnic and of being in a picture on the wall at a museum. This was another quirk of her personality, it had somehow evaded detection by her considerate parents throughout her childhood, and it certainly wasn’t something she would ever share with Cory Cantilever, but that was the fantasy and it flared up from time to time, at the most unexpected moments, like a curtain ripped aside, and there it was now, the cramped band covered in sweat, and the cascade of instrumental music, the lyrics seemed to have been forgotten again, and Lucie, in her shy, ungainly dance, uniquely aware of being suspended between some array of different worlds and dimensions.

He was less grateful than he might have been both for her attendance and her praise. He was as dripping with sweat, as dazed as if he’d just been in a boxing ring, and he seemed to retreat to his corner after he’d finished the set, sitting on a cooler while a 40 of beer was produced from another cooler — there was no bar, but drinking seemed to be effectively provided for in this ad hoc way — and he tipped the bottle straight to the ceiling and hydrated himself as if he’d just escaped drowning. He and his bandmates were in the midst of an argument, which, she now gathered, had actually continued all the way through the set. The accusations were levied at Cory, and had something to do with levels, and he defended himself, much as he had at the restaurant, with a grab-bag of explanations connected to sound system technology and misunderstanding something the keyboardist had said, and a rock musician’s inalienable right to follow his feelings. During a pause in that explanation, he introduced Lucie, and she stuck out her hand in her businesslike way and everybody seemed to not quite understand what was being presented to them before they gathered themselves, shook hands, told her how thrilled they were to meet her and that they’d heard a lot from Cory.

She was conscious by the end of the night of having made a good impression. He danced in his shoulder-shaking way, completely different from how he was when he was up on stage, with about a half-dozen different girls, and she didn’t intervene, she had a shrewd sense of social contracts, knew that some reciprocity was to be expected between rock musicians and their fans, and then, with an equally shrewd sense, she found him looking a little fugue statal in one of the warehouse corridors and put her hand on his back and led him gently to his guitar and sound gear and through the mazy warehouse and out to an Uber driver who seemed insulted somehow at having to give the two of them a ride. As she was leaving, the musicians who saw her went for a bear hug or tousled her hair, the feeling was of having passed some test all the more impressive for the rules of it never having been made clear to her.

The spring passed in this easy way. She worked and her inner discretion, which was set to an unusually high level, kept her from asking how he spent the time. Sometimes he was at his room, which was available to him on some inscrutable schedule, and sometimes he was at her place, and then the room was given up and he showed up in a cab with a couple extra boxes dug out from the back of a closet, childhood memorabilia and tax papers, and now apparently he was all hers, and since she had a closer look at him, since there were effectively no secrets, she would have expected any kind of glamor he had to fade out — he strummed on his guitar through a good chunk of the day and he went for long walks and always came back looking a bit sunstroked — but that wasn’t the case. He announced that he had a gig and she went rifling through the closet for some cute halter top that, sadly, she didn’t actually have, and off they went, she lugging a box or two of sound equipment, and it was completely unclear how he had managed anything before, and the venues were all over the city, always a bit disgusting, she couldn’t begin to work out how the band had been connected to any one of them, and always the same kinds of people in the crowd, the pogo-sticking boys, the elfin girls, many of the same faces recurring at the different gigs.

The fights with the bandmates continued from gig to gig, they were conducted always in the same exasperated undertone, the subjects varying from sound levels to quality of equipment to stage placement to unplanned solos, other people came up to them with offers of parties or suggestions of new gigs, and those conversations took priority, with the arguments continuing like a background hum, like conversational filler. She had seen enough VH1 growing up to think of the backstage fights as part-and-parcel of the rock ‘n’ roll life, and Cory, in an unprecedented whim, had once asked her to watch a movie with him and, lying on the bed, had shown her a documentary about Anton Newcombe and the Brian Jonestown Massacre, actually pausing and rewinding for a section in which it was discussed how Newcombe had made a habit of kicking his bandmates’ shins onstage when they screwed up a note. He had roared with laughter as the bandmates complained about having their shins kicked, and the implication, as she took it, was that his band’s fights were sort of hipster and ticky-tacky but if he were a really great musician like Newcombe maybe he would be actually abusive.

If her inner danger-monitor had been picking up slightly, the documentary pacified things — he had seemed such a regular person lying on his side on a bed watching a movie on a laptop, shaking his head at Newcombe’s escalating insanities — but, for her, that was a rare lapse in intuition. He came back from a gig at 3 in the morning, sweating, trembling slightly, sat elbows-on-knees on the edge of the bed and refused for a while to speak. She asked him if he’d slept with somebody — she’d been steeling herself for that — but he shook his head and speaking with a voice that was both very clear and very far away, said, “I’m out. Kicked me out. No meeting, no discussion. Just met themselves, decided they wanted one guitarist, wanted the one that was easier to deal with.”

He was a different creature now from how she had ever seen him, he was sharp and cold and the way he talked now no longer seemed like it had been cribbed from skateparks or surf shops or tiki bars, it had a hard bite and the way he referred to himself — ‘they said I’m the reason they lost the booking’ — made it sound like his loathsomeness was some sort of achievement, like no one had ever quite done what he’d done, no one had ever antagonized a band like he had, no one had driven away fans like he had, no one had ever been so lazy or so narcissistic, no one had ever so thoroughly polluted the sound of a perfectly good band. She had always been a good listener, a good crying shoulder, this had been her primary role among her school friends, this was, in a sense, what she did for a living, but at this moment she again had that sensation of being in between worlds, she felt like she had stumbled across somebody else’s dream, was privy to something that she simply wasn’t supposed to see, she felt a need, that she didn’t normally have on her trips to the inter-dimensional, to stabilize, to return to the familiar. She wrapped herself shawl-like around his sweating body, she lifted up the thick hair to kiss the scruff of his neck. When none of that had the intended effect, she undressed him, unzipped him, she pulled back the sheet still tucked-in on his side of the bed, she played with herself to a point where she was reasonably wet, she guided him into her, his breath on her neck and face was thick with booze and with something else which went well beyond bad breath, something like the raspy smell of someone who has cried themselves out.

In the afternoon, when he was up, she made him coffee and eggs and they started together to plan his future. Money wasn’t really a problem. He actually made a surprising amount, even if the payments always came in a bit haphazardly. At the moment he was free of emergencies and her work was very steady — the crying-shoulder, ego-soothing business was always solvent — and she had no major expenses, she could cover both of them if it came to that. It was a blow to be kicked out of a band, to be kicked out of his own band, there was no question about that. On the other hand, they were twats, he said that with a vehemence that surprised her, but when he backed it up, told her a few things about the preppy guitarist Brad and the rich-kid keyboardist Tom, she found herself agreeing with him, realized it probably was for the best that he dissociate from them. He had always been meaning to play on his own, he said, band politics took away just about all of his creative energies. He was strumming on his guitar while they chatted. What kind of music would he play, she wanted to know. Would anything be different? He strummed a few quick chords. Pretty much the same thing, he told her, but more lyrics, more expressive. The guys in the old band were such poseurs that they were afraid of anything that wasn’t instrumental, that wasn’t basically just vibe, elevator music, he had to go through like committee approval every time he wanted to sing a song. That sounded good to her. And what would he call himself — his new band? He strummed a long chord and held it like a parody of somebody waiting for inspiration. When that didn’t work he tried again and looked at his fraying paper on the wall and said, “Something Zappa-related. Something Zappaish.”

“But isn’t that just Zappa?” she said. “Isn’t that just taking Zappa’s name?”

He was unperturbed. That was the best thing about him really — the whole time she’d known him, up until last night at least, he took everything in stride, never took anything too personally. “Zappa-related,” he said patiently. He strummed the guitar and he muttered and free-associated to himself, “Zappa Zapruder Zapatista Zapata.” And grimaced and tuned the guitar and tried again. “Zappa Zapata,” he concluded eventually in the quiet way he had for signing off on something. “That’s what I’ll be called. Zappa Zapata.” 

She sensed immediately that her role in his musical career would be very different than it had been before. Later that evening, after he’d had the chance to drink away some of his sorrows, she made a bath for him.

“I haven’t had one of these since I was about three years old,” he said, and Lucie just nodded and mixed the water, she was deep in her role now. When he was out she sat him on a chair near the front door and wrapped a towel around his neck and cut his hair off.

“You don’t think I look like Brad?” he said when she showed him to himself in the mirror.

“In a million years you wouldn’t look like Brad,” she said.

Her role had changed in other ways. The opaque relationships with location managers, which, as it turned out, had been discreetly managed by Tom the keyboardist now were in the very forefront of her consciousness. She felt like she had a perfectly double life. During the day she went to an office, everything was tidy right angles, the cleaning staff was incredibly diligent in a way that she had only started to appreciate, and contracts involving material shipments were constantly collapsing and, as a coordinator, she was supposed to soothe all the frayed egos involved, and then she logged out of her accounts and went to these defiantly grotty clubs and bars and event spaces to negotiate for new gigs or, more often, to ask about payment for ones that Cory had already played. The idea then was to be the musician’s manager and partner, to join the crowd incognito, as she had in the old band’s shows, and to dance along with a special secret possessiveness, but, more often than not, it was other bands playing, and, with managerial acumen, Lucie insisted on going so that Cory’s face would be visible in the music scene, so that he would get brownie points by supporting other groups, but he sat or slumped against a wall looking miserable. He had integrity, that was his great virtue; it was impossible for him to look like he was enjoying himself if he so deeply wasn’t.

That part of it was barely tolerable; what wasn’t really were the nights when he would suddenly get as obstinate as a child refusing to leave a playground or to get out of a bath. He would just shake his head when she told him it was a work night for her, she’d have to leave at some point. He was miserable, he was visibly, obviously miserable glaring at the band and the elfin dancers, but when she did what she had so successfully done the first night she saw him play, putting her hand on his back and steering him towards an Uber, he shook her off, there was a quality he had that insisted on a kind of perfect loneliness, he managed to have it sometimes when he has having sex with her, when he was on stage, it was like there was a force-field around him, she knew better than to try to force an issue.

She was good with psychology, good at knowing just how much slack to give people. Even in the pits of this phase, in mid-summer, she half-slept without too much concern, and he let himself back in, with his imitation of dexterity, pushing the door open and closed as quietly as he could, peeling back the sheet on his side of the bed that she always left tucked in for him. This mood turned out, surprisingly, to be very good for their sex life. He was very drunk, of course, but he moved with a certain rubbery fluidity, he breathed her name onto her neck and she murmured in her half-sleep and widened her legs for him. But at the beginning of August, one of the nights when New York was uninhabitable, she woke from the half-sleep, and, even before she’d checked the time, checked her devices, there was a kind of deep, settled silence about the night that meant she would be left alone with it. Back in the early days, he had done that, sometimes wandered back to his mysterious room without explanation, and she had been confident enough in the attachment to him to know that it was just a kind of whim of loneliness, but when he appeared towards mid-morning with a well-packaged string of excuses, she knew that she had lost him. She was worldly enough to know that it was a losing battle to try to keep a musician from having sex, just as she’d known that it would be a losing battle to keep them from dancing with anyone else, and that wasn’t really what bothered her. It was the squinting, cunning look he had in the morning, like he were a kid being summoned to the dean’s office, confident that he could talk his way out of it.

There were all the usual negotiations of this type of situation, the debates about what was an infraction versus what was a pattern, the vows to do better. Lucie had the dissociation that accompanied her so frequently, the portrait of the hangdog boyfriend, the remonstrating wife/manager. He was more fluent than what she was used to from him, the apologies and promises were swifter, more effusive. If she needed any more reason to be suspicious, that provided it, and, towards the middle of that week, she woke up in the August heat with the same lonely dread. With a kind of mad will, some desire to put off the inevitable, she resisted calling him, and when he did appear, at 5 in the morning, with a pocket of what looked like spittle but might have been vomit near the collar of his shirt, it wasn’t actually a relief, it meant that reality had hit, that the moment was at hand. He protested bitterly that he hadn’t been with anyone, there was enough vehemence to it, he proffered his phone to demonstrate the innocence of his text messages, that she felt suddenly that he actually might be telling the truth, but that didn’t matter, that wasn’t the point. The point was that he was a man-child, he was a falling-down drunk. Maybe it went with the music, that had been the spin on it in the early summer, but it had already stopped being cute, the coolers in the warehouse had been cute, the tipped-back 40 had been cute, not the middle-of-the-night waiting, like in some temperance parable, and it wasn’t even exotic heroin, like what Newcombe took, or designer drugs like the rest of his old band, it was just beer in state school quantities.

There was of course great relief from her support network. “I was just curious, just by way of argument,” her mother said, once again succeeding in putting things in exactly the most enervating terms possible, “what was it exactly that made you think it would work with him?” At the office, the people who were used to being supported by her threw an organic happy hour to celebrate getting rid of ‘the squatter.’ Cory reacted the same as everybody in his situation, he beat a dignified retreat for a couple of days, then he called her several days in a row, at midnight, at one in the morning, and she didn’t pick up but listened to the voicemails, the awful staticky pause before he lost his courage, realized he didn’t have anything to say. She saw him on the street not far from where she lived and it wasn’t clear if he was stalking her or if he was just the kind of person who hung out sometimes on the street. He was sitting at a bus station, eating a sandwich, and her office colleagues weren’t completely wrong about him of course, once she’d been on a subway platform and she’d heard a musician playing these very beautiful Neil Young songs and then a crazy homeless person shouting and that felt like such a New York juxtaposition to her and then she walked down the platform a bit and realized that the crazy homeless person was the same guy playing the Neil Young songs, or, who knows, maybe it was Neil Young himself, anything was possible, and she wouldn’t have put that past Cory, that might well turn out to be his fate, both terrific musician and street bum, that was the thing about New York, what nobody really got, what the people in her office definitely didn’t get or think about, that it was just this pile-up of talent, all these genius people who might well be living on the street unless they found somebody to crash with.

At the very end of the summer her route home shifted a bit. At first, it was inconspicuous, she wasn’t sure herself what she was doing. She got off the subway a stop or two early to run errands and then she noticed that the errands were a bit arbitrary and then she just started wandering around Greenwich Village for no reason. It wasn’t that she was expecting to run into Cory there — his haunts were way out in Bushwick and Bed-Stuy, but there were all the music venues there and she went by all the posters and it was some sort of verification, of double-checking, to see that Zappa Zapata was never listed.

What else shifted? She’d be in the apartment, doing her nails on the spot where she had cut his hair, Pandora playing its random shuffle, and she had that odd inter-dimensional shift. Nail-painting always had that quality a bit, the way it arrested and elongated time, how it was an event that wasn’t really an event, just a rhythm, like a cat licking itself. It was a brutally hot day, hallucinatorily hot, and so it somehow wasn’t at all a surprise to her when she finished her nails — doing so in good time, carefully replacing the brush and screwing the lid shut — and went downstairs, ostensibly to check the mail, to find him standing by the doorjamb of her building’s entrance. He was shorn now of a few items, down to a duffel bag and his guitar. He wasn’t some kind of genius, she had been disabused of that, she let him in, let him shower. When he’d finished she reestablished the barber’s chair and towel, cut his hair down to where she could see his long eyelashes, his thick lips. The fraying Zappa quote had been left over her desk space and he was reunited to his side of the room, no expectations now really at all, just to sit there sometimes when she was feeling low and to strum for her on his guitar.