Perfectly Broken, Chapter 2

Sex & Dads & Rock n Roll

Hello, dear subscribers, paid and otherwise,

A free post entitled Sexagenarian Serenade is forthcoming. I’ve been off the grid for a few days, celebrating my 60th birthday in Savannah, Ga. Back on Catskill time tomorrow.

Meantime, please scroll down for Chapter 2 of my novel Perfectly Broken. If you’ve not yet read Chapter 1, you may do so by clicking here. Paid subscribers get the full chapter, unpaid get an enticing preview.

Here’s what Rosanne Cash had to say about Perfectly Broken:

“Robert Burke Warren's sensory acumen and keen eye for detail – emotional and physical – make Perfectly Broken a wonderful ride. Fantastic, sharp dialogue and vivid characters, all in a distinctive, captivating voice. A stunning debut novel."

Thanks, Rose!

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Thanks so much to all of you. I look forward to any comments and/or questions.

RBW

Chapter 2: Peppercorn

The lights of Spuyten Duyvil, the Bronx, shine across the Hudson as we head up the Palisades Parkway. Since we pulled away from East Seventh—Paul saluting us in the glare of the Pita Palace—no one has said much. I’m trying not to think about the chicken bomb, alternating between schoolboy shenanigans glee and anxiety. My thoughts turn to Trip and Christa.

Trip and Christa Lamont have been together almost as long as Beth and me—about thirteen years. They’ve always complemented each other—Trip the quiet dreamer, Christa the mercurial doer. Despite his unmet goals as a novelist and their fertility problems, they have a good life. Her trust fund helps. But still, I can’t help wondering how they’ll be as a family, a trio instead of a duo.

They’d only just settled in Mt. Marie when the call came from China that their baby girl was ready, and off they flew into the adoption labyrinth. After that, radio silence. We were so busy with our own trials—Billy, money woes, depression—that we fell out of touch. Rare emails brought us up to speed: Trip’s teaching fifth grade English at the local elementary school; Christa’s thrown herself into opening a café in an abandoned diner in Mt. Marie. Then that Diane Arbus-looking Christmas card. Better than nothing, but the epic letters of Trip’s and my early friendship, all pre-email, seem very far away indeed.

Nevertheless, those letters clearly helped build a sturdy friendship, because regardless of everything—distance, disappointment—the Lamonts enthusiastically offered us the just-vacated Shulz House. Trip said, “That’s what friends are for.” He said the vacancy happening just when we needed a refuge was kismet. It’ll be like old times, like when we were roommates on Avenue C in the late eighties and early nineties. Except I’ll be the only one paying rent.

Once I turn onto the New York State Thruway, the mixtape Beth’s ’90s Hits is in full swing, sidetracking my thoughts. The songs fill the overcast car with memory wormholes. Beth shuts her eyes, wedding ring tapping her empty Rolling Rock bottle. I hit cruise control, wondering where the music is taking her.

Is she reliving our early years, when, after I quit Stereoblind, we went out to see bands almost every night? When, after a few Absolut-cranberries, I routinely piggybacked her up the five flights to our place, where the next morning she would rise at 9:00, drown her hangover in coffee, and be at her job by 10:00? Or is she somewhere else? Is she just worrying about her little brother? I haven’t mentioned him showing up on the stoop. We don’t talk about Billy in front of Evan because I always rage, and Beth always breaks down. Maybe I’ll mention it later. Maybe not. Probably not.

Beth’s ’90s Hits unspools. Six Ray Star’s song “Kiss My Ring” is coming; first will be Nirvana’s “Come as You Are,” then the Breeders’ “Cannonball.” This mix gets so much play, when I hear one of these tunes somewhere else, I expect it to be followed by its Beth’s ’90s Hits track list companion.

Soon, the familiar distorted chords crackle in the speaker cones, and Paul Fairchild’s nasally talking croon, dripping with irony, meanders over a thumping bass drum. Evan, as usual, joins in from his car seat, mangling only a few words, his reedy voice following his godfather’s.

I am the pauper who became the king

You want what I got, well you gotta sing

It’s not really much, it’s everything

So kiss my ring, kiss my ring.

Prescient indeed. This is from 1993’s Peppercorn album. Beth was Six Ray Star’s publicist at Matador, before well-financed Electra magazine wooed her away in the nineties gravy train years. On Peppercorn’s release, Beth had scored Six Ray Star a splashy feature in Spin. Nirvana was on the cover, so massive sales of the issue would ensue. We’d attended a celebratory happy hour get-together at Christa’s Digital Café on Avenue A.

Digital Café was one of Christa’s short-lived East Village business ventures. Before Evan, I’d often nurse a double espresso there, Christa’s energy encircling me and everything else in a crackling aura. Hers was quite a routine; batting her green eyes at the deliverymen, corkscrew blond curls falling over her proud Bette Midler nose as she sang at the top of her lungs to a Madonna CD. I still smile at the image of her, sleek in Prada, sweeping the sidewalks, caterwauling “Like a Prayer” while the Ecuadorian kitchen staff watched in numb amazement.

Trip and I had struggled happily alongside each other in the late eighties, sharing a creaky, cluttered tenement on Avenue C and Thirteenth Street. I was fresh off a Greyhound from North Carolina, bussing tables, walking dogs, and playing in fledgling Stereoblind. Trip was a corn-fed Indiana kid-cum-teacher’s assistant at Hunter College, MFA-bound, and working on the first of several post-apocalyptic novels that would go unpublished. Around the time Beth and I got together and moved into East Seventh, Trip told us about “a crazy, pretty, rich girl with a sexy schnozz” he’d met backstage at a Soul Asylum show at Irving Plaza. This girl Christa, recent Brown grad, was opening a café with gourmet coffee and computers on the same block as a notoriously mildewy deli where drug addled homeless congregated. The prospect sounded insane, but cool.

Digital Café featured a full bar, plus banks of coffee-stained IBM desktops where you could check email or work from a floppy disc. As with her other ventures—a gallery, a clothing line—Christa got a start-up loan from her dad, jumped in with intense enthusiasm, but bailed as soon as the books went in the red. Turned out East Village gentrification had not yet reached the point where a high-end café could turn a profit, and Christa stocked her joint with only expensive coffees, pricey vintages, and top-shelf liquor. This was a decade before folks would nonchalantly hand over three bucks for a latte or eight bucks for a cocktail. And while the checking-personal-email-feature notion was novel, email was only just catching on in the early ’90s. Although it began with a bang, the ahead-of-its-time Digital Café was doomed. But it was a fun hang for a while.

During Digital Café’s brief heyday, Trip moved into Christa’s Gramercy Park co-op. The two of them were comically lust struck and inseparable; Christa’s megawatt attentions effectively distracted Trip from his mounting failures as a novelist. Although she offered to float him indefinitely, he returned to school at Hunter, acquired his teaching certificate, and assumed the mantle of Cool English Teacher, which he maintains to this day.

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As “Kiss My Ring” fades, I’m recalling the day Beth, Christa, Trip, and I met Paul and Melora at Digital Café, ten years ago:

“Can you see the zit on my forehead?” Beth asked, pulling at her hair.

“Nope,” I said. “You look great. Your ass looks amazing in that skirt.”

She lowered her head, shaking it slightly.

“Really,” I lean in and whisper, my teeth grazing her earlobe. “It should be bronzed, your ass. Put in the Smithsonian.”

“You and your ass fixation,” she said, annoyed and pleased.

“You and your compliment aversion.”