Stone Arabia (19 page)

Lux said, “The music is fine. I really like the music the way it is. The music is perfect. But maybe you don’t need that cynical name …”

Nik laughed again. “Too cynical?” he said. “What name would you suggest?”

Lux gave up and finally popped two french fries in his mouth. “I don’t know. Maybe the Real? Or the True?”

Nik shook his head. “Nope.”

Lux shoved a few more french fries in his face. “Look, maybe not, but with the Real, say, you can be ironic to the new wave kids and sincere to the rest of the kids. You can have it both ways. If you want to be successful, you have to get things to work in many, many ways to many, many people.” Nik didn’t say anything, but I could tell he was considering it. We left that meeting, and I felt sure Nik wouldn’t bother with Lux. And he never changed the name of the band, it was true. But it didn’t go away. Lee Lux hovered around. He arranged opportunities for the Fakes without Nik asking for them. He was growing his indispensable qualities. Maybe Nik’s ambivalence was a form of consent. Maybe there was a more formal agreement between them. I don’t really know. But I do know Lux stuck around, fixated on the Fakes for a while. And he had a finger or two in the record deal that was offered to Nik in the summer of 1979.

Okay, the funny thing is I don’t really know what went
wrong. I wasn’t lying to Ada. I mean, Nik never explained it to me or anyone. More or less, a record deal with an actual major label, Sire, which was Blondie’s label, was in the offing. Then there was another label. And it all blew up. It was all on the verge, but another LA band, maybe the Dickies, their record had come out on a real label and it was a flop. Maybe that was part of it. But I also think—well, I know—that when it became clear he was not going with Lux, Lux helped blow things up. Lux was setting it up, and when Nik told Lux to fuck off, Lux may have sabotaged it. Then Nik was too tainted to get an independent label interested. So what Lux said was true—get with him or else. After that happened, Nik changed his life. Ada was right to an extent. That time, ’79–’80, was a kind of turning point.

He broke up the Fakes. He broke up the Demonics. He stopped going out. I didn’t see him for months. I was still living at home—I had just had Ada, and Mom was helping me. Nik had moved into his own apartment over the garage in Topanga Canyon. I didn’t hear from him. I called a couple of times and spoke with him. I just thought he was depressed. He was going through that stage when you realize your youthful dreams are not panning out. I was going through my own version of that, reconciling myself to my new responsibilities. That was all normal. And, yeah, I thought Nik would get over it.

Then one day I get a call. Nik wants me to come over to hear his new record. Which is news to me, that he has one. But he had been recording this solo record. He did it all by himself with his four-track. It is a great record, introspective and with these very simple, understated, overdubbed harmonies. When I
sat in his apartment and heard it, I was so moved. Then he said, “Do you want to read the reviews?”

I said, “Uh, yeah, sure.” He pulled out the Chronicles. The precursor to the Chronicles had begun years before. It was simply a scrapbook of Nik’s real life. His music life, which was his whole life. He pasted in flyers from gigs, photos, capsule mentions in the paper, that sort of thing. He put in pages announcing the records and detailed the track listings. He had been making his own records for years. But this was the first time Nik put a fake review in his Chronicles.

LA WEEKLY,
August 1, 1981

Nik Worth Goes Solo

by Stiv Stereo

Nik Worth’s brilliant post-punk band, the Fakes, made a huge splash this year with their debut album,
Here Come Your Fakes.
Nik Worth, their laconic lead singer, has come out with a self-produced solo album on the heels of that success, entitled
Meet Me at the Movies.
This album, made entirely by Worth in his home studio, is a completely different affair. Where the power pop effervescence of a single like “Gold Girls” on
Here Come Your Fakes
made it irresistible on the dance floor, Worth is after a darker, more experimental effect in this solo effort. He initiates acoustic fragments of songs, minor and even elegiac, and then segues into other, more complex songs like “Take Me Back” and “Sweep Song.” Toward the end of the record there is even a music-only reprise of the lovely “Sweep Song” titled “Singalong Sweep Song.” The sort-of song cycle seems to waiver from quiet to intense, and then builds to what
can only be described as an old-fashioned power ballad, “(I’ll Wait) All of My Life.” This song is an instant classic, the kind of song no one writes anymore. It features a slow build, a quiet intro on the in verse, and then a commanding rising riff, and at last a restrained but undeniable guitar solo, bringing the power home. Will the Fakes fans dig this throwback to the slower days of pop? With a great cover shot of a decidedly brooding Worth and a lyric sheet that steers well clear of the sentimental, I think they will. A–

I did not yet realize how elaborate this new phase would get. He recorded more music, and then he wrote in the Chronicles about the music. Sometimes they were good reviews. Sometimes they were pans. From this point on, his real life and his life as recorded in the Chronicles diverged.

After filming, I spent the afternoon at my mother’s. It was blessedly uneventful. As I was leaving, she told me that Nik had been to see her. Funny he went to see her without mentioning it to me.

I got into my car. I couldn’t wait to get home, get in my bathrobe, eat my dinner, watch something stupid on TV. It was good that he was stepping up without my arranging it. Usually I would have to push him to see her. He avoided it except on birthdays and holidays. He would say it was difficult for him to see her “like this.” Especially, somehow, for him. I know how he justified it: he thought his seeing Mom like this cost him more than it cost me. “You are better at taking care of people than I am, let’s face it,” he said. As if it were some kind of compliment. I muttered as I drove. Yeah, he is so fucking sensitive, and I am
so strong. Nothing is difficult for me, right? The really irritating part, of course, was that my mother adored Nik. She wouldn’t complain about his not visiting, because even in her diminished state she was protecting him. She loved me, truly, and let me look after her, but she adored Nik, and still looked out for him. I glanced in the rearview and caught a glimpse of something most unbecoming. I bared my teeth at myself and actually said, “Grrrr.” It didn’t make how I felt any more becoming. But it melted my self-pity into self-loathing, which was better somehow.

I got home exhausted and starving. I made a salad. I tore off a heel of bread and balanced it on the edge of the plate. I poured a glass of wine. It was dark and quiet. I clicked on the television to see what was happening in the real world.

All they showed was the one photo. The man standing on the box. That picture was it. It had the weird KKK silhouette of the pointy hat and the cloak. It had the imitation-of-Christ pose. Then you noticed the wires coming from the hands, the bare feet. I watched in a daze while vaguely hearing what the people were saying—they said the word
shocking,
they struggled to find a tone that worked. This time it was easy to ignore the stream of news that ran across the bottom of the screen. I ended up at my computer, at a magazine’s website. Eleven images had been posted.

At first, all I could see were the bodies against the cement and the plastic. Then the people in the bright blue rubber gloves and the khaki uniforms. I felt an animal fear, a queasy medical-experiment fear as familiar objects became dislocated and warped.

I looked at these naked bodies. With the plastic hoods, they all looked alike: ordinary human bodies, fragile at the knees and ankles and wrists. Their dusty bare feet struggled to hold their poses. The skin was pale under the Powershot—or maybe the Sureshot—flash. Their genitals were pixelated out by the magazine’s editors. But the faces of the soldiers were clearly
visible. They looked young. They looked casual and slightly bored. The corridors and cells were cement painted a high-gloss industrial beige or yellow. The flash bounced off the walls and made them glisten. The floor looked wet from seeped-in moisture. The naked men lay or were laid on it. What was I supposed to do with these images?

I kept looking. But although I felt the raw indecency of it, although I could feel my heart pounding and my mouth get dry—actual autonomic nerve reactions to panic, an effect felt at a basal level, related somehow to my self-protection—my reaction was merely that: revulsion. Otherwise my engagement was intellectual, not emotional. It hit my stomach and my head. I couldn’t make emotional sense out of it.

I kept on looking.

Something held me. It wasn’t the victims, the masked heap of naked men. I already knew about that. It was the young soldiers. I could see—I quickly came to understand—that the soldiers had posed and arranged these photos. They were not surreptitious shots but a little show created by them. One soldier in particular kept turning up, a tiny young woman who smiled as she posed for the camera. Her cheer among the faceless bodies broke through the noise, all right. The experience of seeing these photographs was overwhelming, but I could begin to locate it, feel it, in this girl’s face.

For the past week, I had watched the news whenever I was home. I hardly thought about my own life at all. The story did not disappear—it seemed to gather momentum, it seemed to be getting worse. I followed the coverage closely, what the major-general said, what the secretary of defense said. The president spoke about the “shameful and appalling acts.” I simultaneously searched around the web to the rest of the world. I went to sites based in Jordan and the United Arab Emirates, sites with Arabic writing I couldn’t read but lots of photos I could see. These photographs were everywhere.

When I went to bed, I was totally exhausted and not at all able to sleep. I turned the television back on. I clicked through to the late-night shows. People were making jokes about the young women in the photos, particularly the one smiling girl’s pointing and thumbs-up in front of the naked and hooded prisoners. She was everywhere.

I tried to imagine her growing up in West Virginia. Being a not very special girl and growing up in a trailer park. I could see the bad sex at an early age after drinking the bad beer. I could see the high school guidance counselor and the long drab future. Then the recruiter and a chance to leave. You either
joined up or stayed home and got pregnant. I would have joined up, too, I think. But then what? I didn’t want to think any more about this girl, but I wanted to know, after the bad sex and the shit school and the recruiter, then what happened to her?

The story of these photos and this girl was banner news for the moment. But I knew she and the whole story would be put aside, even though it was an election year. The president had already denounced her, significant people had drawn the line, and the soldiers would be charged as the sick aberrations we all knew they were. But even if that were true—and it was difficult for anyone to believe that this wasn’t a typical part of a much bigger picture—it still didn’t mean what they wanted it to mean.

I flipped through the channels. I stopped at an in-progress episode of a police drama. My eyes were stinging from lack of sleep, but my mind jig-jagged, and I knew the best I could hope for was that this show would bore me into a stupor on the couch and I could click off the TV and fall asleep.

No matter what I watched, I couldn’t be distracted from the young soldier. I couldn’t figure her out. She eluded any explanations. Was she trying to fit in and be tough? Was she told that she had to do this or else? Was she just stupid, a damaged antisocial product of fetal alcohol syndrome or malnourishment in infanthood? I could only come up with a cliché sense of her that was too general to mean anything. It wasn’t just the smile on her face that unnerved, it was the repetition and the need to photograph and the easy indifference. The porn aesthetic that people slipped into and what it meant about the kind of lives they had lived. Waiting, talking about nothing, waiting. Corn
slapped out of a can. Pimples and bruises on pale white skin. All the smells of close quarters and the inadequate solace of another cigarette. But still.

Then I read somewhere, on some blog or newspaper website, that this girl, this notorious United States Army soldier, longed to be a storm chaser. She dreamed of following cyclones and filming hurricanes when they make landfall. I was falling asleep, and I found some release in that phrase,
make landfall,
and I liked the sound and feel of those words,
hurricane
and
cyclone,
they made the world feel human-sized again, and I was nearly asleep at last—

And it hit me. I realized it, and the realization blew hurricanes and cyclones and horrible photographs and sleep right out of my mind. Of course: Nik’s health, Tommy’s death, visiting our mother. The hyperordered state of his apartment. And the last album in the twenty volumes of
The Ontology of Worth
being finished and released for his upcoming fiftieth birthday.
I’ve got it all under control.

I sat up. I knew what he was planning to do, and I knew it absolutely.

How could I be so thick? How could I be so careless? I looked at my watch: 3:58. I couldn’t call him now. The next morning, after a few hours of sleep on the couch, I drank coffee and thought of what I should do. I looked at my email. I called Nik and told him I wanted to come over after work. He said he had a shift that night and I could come see him at the bar.