that’s cool,” I said. “Neat.”
Suddenly serious, the man said, “Hey, you take care of yourself, Joey.” He hugged me and leaned his head on my shoulder. His spit slid from his mouth onto my skin, and some of the drool stretched out as he pulled back, breaking off and trailing as thin as floss onto my sweater.
On the train east, I thought about what he had written, and first decided it was nonsense. He had no idea what he meant, either. What I understood was that he’d been hurt by a few women. I could tell by the pleasure he got from calling women cunts. The two times he wrote the word, this tremendous smile came across his face and he laughed as though there was nothing funnier in the world than calling women cunts—the kind of funny where you laugh from deep within your belly because you believe it’s true.
But later, when I got off at Floyd Harbor in the rain, I realized something else. Unwittingly, he had told me to be a woman.
Dexter’s Laboratory broke to commercial. A green lollipop floated in the foreground of a white screen. The first note on a xylophone popped and then flattened into a buzz as the proceeding notes tumbled out, the melody following a toddler taking a first step forward, swaying back, lurching forward again.
“Who wants to sucka sucka Chubba Chuck Pop?” sang a boy off screen.
A girl answered: “I wanna sucka sucka Chubba Chuck Pop.”
The green lollipop turned red.
The boy sang: “Tell me, do you really want a Chubba Chuck Pop?”
The red lollipop morphed into blue, darkened to purple. “Yes, I really really want a Chubba Chuck Pop.”
Then they both sang: “’Cause no one can resist a yummy yummy Chubba Chuck / Just look for the Chubba Chuck branda brand name!” And the brand name, in its trademark rainbow cursive, appeared on the white screen above the now yellow lollipop as the last notes sounded out.
The first time John heard the Chubba Chuck melody, he knew it would take up residence in a dark corner of his brain, ready to creep out in a hum in the shower, in traffic, while waiting for the ATM. The jingle worked its way into his warm-up, a little riff he’d bang out on the keys while Louis tuned his guitar, Lon checked his mic, Isaac rattled a cymbal, and Tommy walked his fingers down the neck of the bass. The melody was sticky. It had come out of John complete in a home recording one pot-infused winter afternoon. He shelved it, not knowing what to do with thirty seconds of a hook that didn’t want to attach to anything resembling a full-grown song. He tried, though. The whole band tried, but finally Lon said to just leave it alone.
“It’s a gem,” Lon said, after devoting an hour of precious studio time to John’s obsession. “It’s a little masterpiece. I get you, man. Sometimes a lyric comes to me, you know, and it just lands in me, and it’s a hummingbird. It’s a perfect little hummingbird. It’s beautiful. But you let it go. You don’t cage it. Get me? Love it. Acknowledge it. And then you let it go. You get me?”
“So, you don’t think we can use it somehow?” John said. “Because I think there’s something to it. I think it’s worth teasing it out.”
Tommy, ever helpful, suggested they turn the ditty, just as it was, into a hidden track tacked onto the end of the album. Easy. Louis, though, said five rock songs followed by thirty seconds of synthesized xylophone was not really an album but a demo with thirty seconds of synthesized xylophone at the end, which was not only unprofessional, but weird. Isaac agreed with Louis, adding that they’d be lucky if anyone listening to the demo would ever make it that far into the CD. Isaac was in five bands. He knew what he was talking about. Plus, this session was costing them out of pocket, and they should stop fucking around on utter nonsense.
“He’s got a point,” Lon’s girlfriend Alicia said. “Let it fly.”
“No, yeah,” John said, “I’m just throwing ideas around. Let’s just shelve it for now. I agree.”
Kimberly left John about a week before the commercial debuted. John came home one afternoon and saw that all Kim’s things were gone: her plastic bags of modeling clay cleaned off the kitchen counter, the small plaques she’d won in community college art competitions plucked off the walls, her clothes gathered from the floor, her hairclips and bottles of nail polish collected from the top of the TV, from the windowsills, and from the bookshelf in the living room. A vaguely citrus scent lingered in sticky rings on the bathroom sink where her toiletries had been.
John shaved. He went to open mic at the Pond Street Beanery, always on hand to accompany other musicians as they struggled or soared through three-minute sets. He went to the studio to lay down tracks for a chain of ice cream shops spreading across the eastern seaboard. They’d been impressed with Chubba Chuck. They wanted something the same, but different, for radio, and to play from the speakers of their trucks as they prowled backstreets, shopping centers, and beach parking lots for children with pocket change.
He kept a photo of Kimberly on the dresser: her hair tied back, chin up, eyes squinting, offering something between a kiss and a smirk to the camera. When she was little, a rooster she’d been chasing at a petting zoo split her upper lip. The scar from that wound, combined with a crooked front tooth, made her look as though she’d been punched in the mouth. During one of those long bedroom afternoons at the start of their relationship, John told Kimberly how much her mouth turned him on.
“Because you look so happy,” he’d said, “but through all this beautiful damage.” She was a community college freshman and he was doing his best to impress her. It was a line he later wrote in his song journal, thinking it would make a good lyric—all that beautiful damage—but one, two, three years later, when she’d bring up those early days and ask him to remind her of the line of that song he was going to write about her, he’d pretend to not remember the words. He’d come to hate them. They were stupid lyrics, no matter how he tried to sing them.
“Come on,” she’d say, “you didn’t forget. It’s that song about my mouth.”
“It’s more than about that. You can’t take everything literally.” Her naïveté was her charm. He could teach her things, watch her discover herself—get her into the bars where he knew the staff.
And when they reached that point in their relationship where they’d talked about everything, where in their sleep, lumped on each other, they might have dreamed they were connected at the hip, or that they were spoons, or that they were an itch on the other’s back, they developed the habit of recycling old conversations. Just to hear each other’s voice.
“How many earrings did you used to have?” she’d say.
“You know this,” he’d answer. This was in the morning, waking up.
She was half-dreaming. “But how many earrings did you used to have?”
“Five. Three in the left, two in the right.”
“When did you take them out?”
“Come here,” he said. But he was holding her already, the weight of her head on his chest.
