When the Nines Roll Over (2 page)

“Too late, man. They signed a six plus one with Sphere.”

“Right,” said Tabachnik, rattling the ice cubes in his glass. “And we're buying Sphere.”

The Australian opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again. “You're buying Sphere? I just saw Greenberg two nights ago at VelVet. He didn't say a word.”

“Who's Greenberg?”

The Australian laughed. “The president of Sphere.”

“Green
spon
. And he's required by law to keep silent about it. I'm breaking the law telling you, but”—Tabachnik indicated the empty room with his free hand—“I know I can trust you.”

The Australian nodded solemnly and took another deep hit. Tabachnik figured he would need forty-eight hours to get the girl. The last thing he wanted was for this pissant label to sniff out his interest and put the chains on her, rework her contracts. If that happened he would have to buy out Loving Cup, and Tabachnik hated paying off middlemen. In the grand scheme of things, the musicians made the music and the consumers bought the music, and anybody in the middle, including Tabachnik, was a middleman. But Tabachnik did not believe in the grand scheme of things. There were little schemes and there were big schemes but there was no grand scheme.

“I can introduce you to Heaney,” said the Australian, desperate for an angle. “He manages Postfunk Jemimah.”

“Yeah, we went out for dinner last night. But thanks.” Tabachnik gave another tight-lipped smile. All of his smiles were tight-lipped because Tabachnik had worn braces until a few months ago. He wore the braces for two years because his teeth had gotten so crooked that he would bloody the insides of his lips and cheeks every time he chewed dinner. The teeth were straight now, the braces gone, but he had trained himself to smile and laugh with a closed mouth.

He was supposed to get braces when he was twelve, like a normal American, but his mother and father, who had split up the year before, kept bitching about who ought to pay for it. “Your only son is going to look like an English bookie,” his mother would say into the telephone, smoking a cigarette and waving at Tabachnik when she saw that he was listening. “Excuse me,
excuse
me, I
would
have a job except you know why I don't? You know who's been raising our son for the last twelve years?”

So when the money for the orthodontia finally came, Tabachnik told his mother he didn't want it. “Sweetheart,” she said, “you want to be a snaggletooth all your life?”

Tabachnik found the negotiations over his teeth so humiliating that he refused to have them fixed. He never again wanted to depend on another man's money. He worked his way through college in New Hampshire, copying and filing in the Alumni Office, until he figured out better ways to get paid. He convinced the owner of the local Chinese restaurant to let him begin a delivery service in exchange for twenty percent of the proceeds; he hired other students to work for tips and free dinners and to distribute menus around town. Tabachnik made out well until the restaurant owner realized he no longer needed Tabachnik. That incident impressed Tabachnik with the importance of a good contract.

He managed a band called the Johns, a group of local kids who worked as custodians and security guards at the college. The Johns always sold out when they played the town bars, and Tabachnik took them to a Battle of the Bands in Burlington, Vermont, where they came in second to a group called Young Törless. Young Törless became Beating the Johns and had a hit single remaking an old Zombies song. Tabachnik was reading
Variety
by this point, and he saw how much money Beating the Johns made for their label, and he thought, Jesus, they're not even good. And he realized that good doesn't matter, and once you realize that, the world is yours.

When Postfunk Jemimah began to play, Tabachnik and the Australian went to listen, and afterward joined them, their manager Heaney, and the Taints for a postgig smoke session in the club owner's private room. The VVIP room. Tabachnik had been places with four progressively-more-exclusive areas, where the herds were thinned at each door by goons with clipboards, turning away the lame. Some of these rooms were so hard to get into that a full night would pass without anyone gaining entrance. People who had never been turned away before, people unused to rejection, seven-foot-tall basketball players and lingerie models with bosomy attitude, would snipe at the bouncer and declare their lifelong friendship with the owner, and the bouncer would nod and say, No. Tabachnik wasn't a VVVVIP, but he didn't care. He suspected that if you ever got into the fourth room you would find another closed door, leading to an even smaller room with even fewer people, and if you could somehow convince the bouncer to let you pass, you would enter a still-smaller room, on and on, until finally you would find yourself in a room so cramped only you could fit inside, and the last bouncer, the biggest, meanest one of all, would grin at you before slamming the pine door and lowering you into the ground.

Tabachnik asked Heaney to speak with him in the other room for a minute; they huddled in a corner of the single-V VIP room and ignored the wannabes who stared at them and wondered who they were.

“Congratulations,” said Tabachnik. “I hear you signed with Sphere.”

“Yeah, they own us forever, but we're good with it.”

“I need to ask you a favor . . .”

When they returned to the VVIP room, the Australian stared at them unhappily. Heaney gathered his band and they went off, in high spirits, to eat pierogi at Kiev. Tabachnik stayed, as did the Taints and the Australian, who slouched with the discontent of the small-time.

“Well,” said the Australian, passing a joint to SadJoe, “next year in Budokan.”

There were no chairs or sofas in the room, only giant pink pillows. Everyone sprawled in a loose circle and Tabachnik felt like an adult crashing a slumber party. Only Molly Minx sat with her back straight, very erect and proper. Her legs were propped up on a pillow and Tabachnik studied them: they were tapered like chicken drumsticks, thick with muscle at the thighs, slender at the ankles. She wore anklets strung with violet beads and black slippers like the ones Bruce Lee wore in his movies. Her hands were clasped together in the taut lap of her green dress; her face was broad and serene below her bleached, spiked hair. Thai or Filipino? She smiled at Tabachnik and he smiled back, thinking that a good photographer could make her look beautiful.

The guitarist began to snore. The bassist was crafting little soldiers from paper matches; he had a pile of Redrüm matchbooks beside him and he arrayed his army on the gray carpeting. They were very well made, with miniature spears and a general on a matchbook horse, and Tabachnik watched, wondering when the war would begin.

SadJoe was shirtless. His black mohawk was spotted with large flakes of dandruff. A rottweiler's head was crudely tattooed on his neck, the name
Candy
inked in green script below the dog's spiked collar. The air was rich with marijuana smoke and body odor. SadJoe puffed on the joint contentedly until Molly elbowed him.

“It's a communal thing, lover.”

He grunted and passed her the joint; she smoked and passed it to Tabachnik; Tabachnik took a hit, let the smoke sit in his mouth for a moment, and breathed out. He passed the joint to the bassist and asked the drummer, “How'd you get the name SadJoe?”

SadJoe made a gun with his thumb and index finger and shoved it into his mouth.

Molly said, “He's sick of telling the story.”

If you're going to call yourself SadJoe, thought Tabachnik, you ought to expect a little curiosity.

“I'll tell it,” said the Australian. The whites of his eyes were now mostly red. A strand of mucus was creeping out of one of his nostrils and Tabachnik started to say something but then decided not to.

“SadJoe grew up in New Jersey,” the Australian began. “What town?”

“Near Elizabeth,” said SadJoe.

“Near Elizabeth. And the street he lived on, I guess this was a quiet town, all the kiddies played together. Football and so forth.”

“Street hockey,” said SadJoe. “Street hockey was the big game. I was always goalie. Goalie's the best athlete on the team.” He nudged Molly Minx and she smiled at him.

“So they all played street hockey together. This was before SadJoe became SadJoe. He was just Joe.”

“Some people called me Joey.”

“All right. And along comes a new family, with a little boy. This boy, unfortunately, was born a little off. Special, you call it?”

“He was a mongoloid,” said SadJoe. Molly shot him a nasty look and SadJoe shrugged. “What's the nice word for mongoloid?”

Everyone looked at Tabachnik. There was something about his face that made people suspect he knew things that nobody else would bother to know.

He said, “A kid with Down's syndrome, I guess.”

“Mon-go-loid,” said SadJoe, chanting the syllables into Molly's ear. “Mon-go-loid.”

“But a sweet boy,” continued the Australian. “Always smiling, always laughing.”

“He used to kiss me on the lips sometimes,” said SadJoe, scratching his armpit. “But I don't think he was gay. Sometimes retards don't know the difference between right and wrong.”

“Jesus,” said Molly.

“Well,” said the Australian, “the boy's name was Joe. But the kids couldn't call him Joe, because our friend here already had the name. So they started calling him Happy Joe.”

“He was a good kid,” said SadJoe.

“And eventually,” concluded the Australian, “if there's one Joe called Happy Joe, then the other will become Sad Joe.”

“Ta-da,” said Molly, lighting a new joint.

“And they all lived happily ever after,” said the Australian, gazing hungrily at the fresh weed.

“Not really,” said SadJoe. “Happy Joe got run over by a UPS truck.”

Everybody stared at him. He sighed and rubbed the palm of his hand over the stiff ridge of his mohawk. “First dead body I ever saw.”

“You never told me that part,” said Molly, frowning.

“Death makes me glum, baby.”

The club closed down at four in the morning, but Tabachnik and the Taints stayed until five, when the manager came to say they were locking the doors. They shuffled outside and shivered on the street corner.

“You know what we should do,” said SadJoe. “The fish market opens up in a few minutes, down on Fulton Street. We should go down there.”

“Why?” asked Molly. She was wearing an old fur coat. One of the sleeves was torn, but it looked like real fur.

“That's when the fish is freshest,” SadJoe explained.

The Australian and the bassist and the guitarist murmured stoned good-byes, hailed a cab, and headed for Brooklyn. Finally, thought Tabachnik.

“If you two want to grab some coffee, there are things I'd like to talk about.”

“Nah, I guess I'll go home,” said SadJoe. “First train will be running pretty soon.”

Molly stared at Tabachnik and then at SadJoe. “Maybe we should get some coffee.”

“Not for me, pretty. It's fish or nothing.” He extended a hand for Tabachnik and they shook. The drummer had a firm grip. “Later, pilgrim.”

“Why don't you invite him to the party,” said Molly, still staring at SadJoe purposefully.

SadJoe looked at her, raised his eyebrows, and then shrugged. “I'm having a party tomorrow afternoon. In Jersey.”

“We can go together,” Molly told Tabachnik. “His place is hard to find.”

Tabachnik gave her a card from the hotel where he was staying, his room number already written on top in neat, square digits. “Give me a call. I'd love to go.”

SadJoe watched this exchange in silence, chewing his lip. Finally he said, “Tell me your name again, man.”

“Tabachnik.”

“Yeah, all right. We'll see you.”

SadJoe and Molly Minx walked away and Tabachnik watched them go, SadJoe's heavy black boots clomping on the pavement, the back of his old army jacket scrawled with faded words in black Magic Marker.

The next afternoon Tabachnik picked up Molly at the occult boutique in the East Village where she worked. They took the subway to Penn Station. Tabachnik had not ridden the subway in years. He longed to be back in Los Angeles, where there were supposedly millions of people but you never really saw them. He could walk two miles in his neighborhood, on broad sidewalks beneath tall palm trees, and encounter one old woman in yellow pants and one small boy on a skateboard. Everybody else was locked away somewhere safe.

Tabachnik and Molly Minx held on to a metal pole as the train shuddered and plunged through the tunnel. He wore black woolen pants, a black cashmere turtleneck sweater, and a full-length black peacoat. Molly wore a powder blue catsuit that zipped in the back. Winter wasn't over yet, and this is what she wore. She had what seemed to be a permanent wedgie. All the men within sight had noticed this condition. An old man chewing a potato knish stared at her ass, glanced at Tabachnik, and then resumed staring at her ass. The other men pretended not to stare at her ass, pretended to look up only at appropriate moments—as when the conductor announced something unintelligible—and then sneakily stared at her ass. When Tabachnik caught them they would quickly look away, but Tabachnik
wanted
people staring at her ass. He wanted the whole world horny for Molly Minx.