Stone Arabia. Dana Spiotta
rockers. They wiped the Demonics off the stage. Nik knew it, Denise could tell by how he studied them.
From that moment on, he focused on his songwriting. He recruited Tommy Skate to play lead guitar for his shows. And the rest was history. He understood he wasn’t ever going to be one of those great live guitar players, no matter how hard he worked on it. He didn’t spend forever flogging his failures. He moved things along. Denise slowly began to realize how deeply serious he was.
The Demonics grew to be a pretty decent live band. But Nik preferred composing to performing. He never stopped writing new songs. As devoted as he had been to learning the guitar, his obsession with songwriting trumped everything. He wrote in notebooks, he wrote while he watched TV, and yes, he wrote even while someone was trying to talk to him.
“Yeah,” he said, nodding, but with that dazed noncommittal style the true nonlistener adopts. I’m agreeing with you—just a crapshoot, but why not? But Denise knew the songs were really good, so she couldn’t mind all that much. She figured that’s just how artists were.
The amazing thing was Nik didn’t seem to pay attention to anyone or anything around him and yet then he would write something that seemed entirely to depend on the closest attention. Like “Versions of Me,” his great early song about playing poseur and then wondering why no one knew the real you. He already let the ironic twist come in, the self-admonishment that made him such an appealing songwriter. When he first played this song for Denise, they were sitting in the kitchen of Casa Real. It was late, they had been out at a party. Denise followed Nik in, drunkenly shushing each other even though their mother was still out on a late shift and they were the only ones home. Denise walked straight to the pantry and took out a box of Wheat Thins. She stood with the pantry door open and gnashed a steady stream of salty squares between her teeth. This was her strategy to avoid room spins and subsequent hangovers. She always crammed as many starches in her stomach as she could before she made any attempts to go horizontal. And she always woke up sixteen and fresh-faced.
Nik held his guitar by the neck as he hoisted himself up on the old aquamarine tiled counter. He rested the guitar against his lap and attempted to reach in his jacket pocket for his cigarettes—he shifted his pick to teeth and tried again. He then replaced the pick with a cigarette and started to play. Denise didn’t stop eating her crackers as she walked over to the narrow transom window above the sink and pushed it open.
“I’m not gonna smoke it,” he said without looking up. She put her hand in the Wheat Thins box again and watched him strum. “You want to hear a new song?” he said, looking up. She nodded, leaning against the sink. He began to play “Versions of Me,” and all at once Denise’s very familiar but distant brother became someone else. This was truly the moment when she saw how different he was from everyone else she knew, including herself. He, just by singing his song, could change how she saw the world. He became a vivid human to her, someone who understood her as yet unnamed alienation. She had, all at once, a deep faith in his perception, as he pinpointed the way she often felt, angry at the world for misunderstanding her while playing at deliberately misrepresenting herself. He stopped and shrugged. He lit his cigarette and took a long, proud drag.
Brother is a rock star.
“I love it. It’s great!” she said, still chewing.
He smiled.
“Your first hit!”
“A chart-topper,” Nik said, with a sarcasm about his chances at success that would soon be replaced with something more, well, unusual.
The moment stood out to Denise for other reasons as well. She realized then that he was good at this, songwriting, in a way he never was at guitar playing. He had figured this out, while she was still nowhere.
Denise really should call someone.
She sat down at Nik’s worktable, a huge unfinished piece of wood set on two sawhorses and pushed against the wall. His razor-point black pens of various widths and sharpened General’s Cedar Pointe pencils were neatly lined up. Scissors, X-Acto blades, erasers, homemade wheat paste, double-sided photo tape, rubber cement, and Tombow Mono Adhesive were all within reach. A ream of acid-free pure white paper, and off to the side the white Royal manual typewriter with the lazy a that he used to type his formal entries in the Chronicles. Evidence of the Chronicles was everywhere around her. The earlier volumes were shelved in chronological order starting in the garage downstairs (1970s–2003). But he kept the volumes of the current year in a neat row on a shelf above his desk. On the walls near the desk she could see the framed album covers, posters, master images for label art, photos, and pasted-up fake news clippings. And under her hands and all in front of her was Nik’s clear, inviting wood desk. All set up for work.
His archive oppressed her. She needed a chronicle of her own, with her own opposite silly penchant for reality and memory and ordinary facts. Because that was all she could think to do with what had transpired. She must conclude it liberated her in some deep way, and maybe it even did.
THE COUNTERCHRONICLES
My disclaimer:
You can go back forever to grab a context for a brother and sister. And even then the backward glance is distorted by the lens of the present. The further back, the greater the distortion. It is not just that emotions distort memory. It is that memory distorts memory, if that makes any kind of sense. I must simply try to recall the events that led to our crisis (let’s call it that for now). Because there were contributing factors, things that speak to states of mind. There were signs and indications and decisions with consequences well before the events of the last few days. Can one make causal connections without manufacturing narratives? Or is all memory simply the application of narrative to past events, and is it only human and coherent to do that work? To begin, I must be quite clear with myself. I must do my best to stick to the fairly recent past, without the nostalgic digressions, to stick to exactly what happened this year, 2004, what actually happened to us, and, well, to me.
DECEMBER 31, 2003–JANUARY 1, 2004
I arrived at Nik’s bar shortly before midnight. I call it Nik’s bar, but it isn’t. It is Dave’s Bar. This marginal establishment—broken stools, gum-stuck linoleum floor tiles, dirty bathrooms, expensive speaker system, heavy pours—has been a functioning bar for three decades, with Nik working there, on and off, for most of those years. While the New Year announced itself in beer and blurry kisses, I sat, on my own, on the other side of the bar from Nik. (It is easy to recall the start of the year because of the holiday. A holiday helps to place you. Memory technique #1, use Dates as Placeholders in your brain. All calendars are simply ancient arbitrary mnemonic tools for the culture. We will take Pope Gregory’s version and move on.) Naturally 2004 was a leap year—already a bad sign, as far as I was concerned, and I was deeply concerned. New Year’s Eve is a rough holiday even in the best of years. 2004 whiffed bad from the get-go.
At midnight Nik would put on the Rolling Stones’ “Dead Flowers.” The song is easy to recall because he played it every year at midnight. Which also makes the actual night difficult to recall, as all the moments hearing that song run into one another, indistinct, uniformly soundtracked. He poured some drinks. He keyed up the song. He poured himself a drink. He let the bar crowd start counting down the seconds until midnight. He poured more drinks. It is just a sloggy old bar, so mostly it was beer and shots and not a lot of complicated cocktails, but this year I saw he struggled to get all the rounds done in time so he could attend to the music and the countdown. He did this and I watched him, sort of hoping to talk for a moment. Although I hadn’t had much to drink, I was feeling a little sentimental about my big brother. I had listened to his latest CD, a seasonal release called Caroles and Candles by his band the Pearl Poets. The Pearl Poets were a side project of Nik’s in which he used the one-name pseudonym Mason. They were a moody folk trio—Mason, Mark, and Chris—but actually all of the parts were voiced by Nik. They all lived together at Tottenham Cottage in North London. They sang pristine Celtic-style layered harmonies, Nik managing all of this with his old