Freedom [188]
“I can’t believe you’re doing all these things for me,” Walter said at the Thai restaurant, near Dupont Circle, where they stopped for dinner along the way.
“No problem, man.” Katz picked up a skewer of satay, considered whether he could stomach it, and decided no. More tobacco was a very bad idea, but he took out his tin of it anyway.
“It’s like we’re finally getting around to doing the things we used to talk about in college,” Walter said. “It really means a lot to me.”
Katz’s eyes restlessly roved the restaurant, alighting on everything but his friend. He had the sense that he had run right off a cliff, was still pumping his legs, but would be crashing very soon.
“You OK?” Walter said. “You seem kind of jumpy.”
“No, I’m fine, fine.”
“You don’t seem fine. You’ve gone through a whole can of that shit today.”
“Just trying not to smoke around you.”
“Well, thank you for that.”
Walter consumed all of the satay while Katz dribbled spit into his water glass, feeling momentarily calmed, in nicotine’s false way.
“How are things with you and the girl?” he said. “I got kind of a weird vibe off you guys today.”
Walter blushed and didn’t answer.
“You sleeping with her yet?”
“Jesus, Richard! That is none of your business.”
“Whoa, is that a yes?”
“No, it’s a none-of-your-fucking-business.”
“You in love with her?”
“Jesus! Enough already.”
“See, I think that was a better name. Enough Already! With exclamation point. Free Space sounds like a Lynyrd Skynyrd song.”
“Why are you so interested in seeing me sleep with her? What’s that about?”
“I’m just going by what I see.”
“Well, we’re different, you and me. Do you get that? Do you understand that it’s possible to have values higher than getting laid?”
“Yeah, I get that. In the abstract.”
“Well, then, shut up about it, OK?”
Katz looked around impatiently for their waiter. He was in an evil mood, and everything Walter did or said was irritating him. If Walter was too pussy to make a play for Lalitha, if he wanted to keep being Mr. Righteous, it was nothing to Katz now. “Let’s get the fuck out of here,” he said.
“How about letting my entrée get here first? You may not be hungry, but I am.”
“No, sure. Of course. My mistake.”
His spirits began to crash an hour later, in the crush of young people at the doors of the 9:30 Club. Katz hadn’t gone to a show as an actual audience member in several years, he hadn’t gone to hear a kiddie idol since he’d been a kiddie himself, and he’d become so accustomed to the older crowd at Traumatics and Walnut Surprise events that he’d forgotten how very different a kiddie scene could be. How almost religious in its collective seriousness. Unlike Walter, who, in his culturally eager way, owned the entire Bright Eyes oeuvre and had tiresomely extolled it at the Thai restaurant, Katz knew the band only by osmotic repute. He and Walter were at least twice the age of everybody else at the club, the flat-haired boys and fashionably unskinny babes. He could feel himself being looked at and recognized, here and there, as they made their way onto the intermission-emptied floor, and he thought he could hardly have made a worse decision than to appear in public and to bestow, by his mere presence, approval on a band he knew next to nothing about. He didn’t know which would be worse under these circumstances, to be outed and fawned over or to stand there in middle-aged obscurity.
“Do you want to try to get backstage?” Walter said.
“Can’t do it, buddy. Not up to it.”
“Just to make the introduction. It’ll take one minute. I can follow up later with a proper pitch.”
“Not up to it. I don’t know these people.”
The intermission mix, the choice of which was the headliner’s prerogative, was impeccably quirky. (Katz, as a headliner, had always hated the posturing and gamesmanship and didacticism of choosing the mix, the pressure to prove himself groovy in his listening tastes, and had left it to his bandmates.) Roadies were setting out a great many mikes and instruments while Walter gushed