A Visit From the Goon Squad - Jennifer Egan [8]
Collette looked startled, then suspicious, then worried, a succession that would have amused Bennie if he hadn’t been so rattled. “Really?” she asked.
“Sure. I’ll do it today, after I see my kid.”
Bennie’s assistant, Sasha, brought him coffee: cream and two sugars. He shimmied a tiny red enameled box from his pocket, popped the tricky latch, pinched a few gold flakes between his trembling fingers, and released them into his cup. He’d begun this regimen two months ago, after reading in a book on Aztec medicine that gold and coffee together were believed to ensure sexual potency. Bennie’s goal was more basic than potency: sex drive, his own having mysteriously expired. He wasn’t sure quite when or quite why this had happened: The divorce from Stephanie? The battle over Christopher? Having recently turned forty-four? The tender, circular burns on his left forearm, sustained at “The Party,” a recent debacle engineered by none other than Stephanie’s former boss, who was now doing jail time?
The gold landed on the coffee’s milky surface and spun wildly. Bennie was mesmerized by this spinning, which he took as evidence of the explosive gold-coffee chemistry. A frenzy of activity that had mostly led him in circles: wasn’t that a fairly accurate description of lust? At times Bennie didn’t even mind its disappearance; it was sort of a relief not to be constantly wanting to fuck someone. The world was unquestionably a more peaceful place without the half hard-on that had been his constant companion since the age of thirteen, but did Bennie want to live in such a world? He sipped his gold-inflected coffee and glanced at Sasha’s breasts, which had become the litmus test he used to gauge his improvement. He’d lusted after her for most of the years she’d worked for him, first as an intern, then a receptionist, finally his assistant (where she’d remained, oddly reluctant to become an executive in her own right)—and she’d somehow managed to elude that lust without ever saying no, or hurting Bennie’s feelings, or pissing him off. And now: Sasha’s breasts in a thin yellow sweater, and Bennie felt nothing. Not a shiver of harmless excitement. Could he even get it up if he wanted to?
Driving to pick up his son, Bennie alternated between the Sleepers and the Dead Kennedys, San Francisco bands he’d grown up with. He listened for muddiness, the sense of actual musicians playing actual instruments in an actual room. Nowadays that quality (if it existed at all) was usually an effect of analogue signaling rather than bona fide tape—everything was an effect in the bloodless constructions Bennie and his peers were churning out. He worked tirelessly, feverishly, to get things right, stay on top, make songs that people would love and buy and download as ring tones (and steal, of course)—above all, to satisfy the multinational crude-oil extractors he’d sold his label to five years ago. But Bennie knew that what he was bringing into the world was shit. Too clear, too clean. The problem was precision, perfection; the problem was digitization, which sucked the life out of everything that got smeared through its microscopic mesh. Film, photography, music: dead. An aesthetic holocaust! Bennie knew better than to say this stuff aloud.
But the deep thrill of these old songs lay, for Bennie, in the rapturous surges of sixteen-year-old-ness they induced; Bennie and his high school gang—Scotty and Alice, Jocelyn and Rhea—none of whom he’d seen in decades (except for a disturbing encounter with Scotty in his office years ago), yet still half believed he’d find waiting in line outside the Mabuhay Gardens (long defunct), in San Francisco, green-haired and safety-pinned, if he happened to show up there one Saturday night.
And then, as Jello Biafra was thrashing his way through “Too Drunk to Fuck,” Bennie’s mind drifted to an awards ceremony a few years ago where he’d tried to introduce a jazz