Doxology. Nell Zink

She knew that gay men pick up rough trade at the risk of being beaten to death, that submissive men role-play excuses for penetration, and that straight women take both behaviors to extremes. She understood herself to be a hedonist. She never sought out unpleasant consequences. They just kept happening.

      Sex for Daniel was the opposite—consistently too much fun. His earliest sexual experiences had involved fondling the genitals of Christian schoolgirls he never once kissed. He’d even gotten a blow job from one of them once, and he wouldn’t have kissed her for a million dollars after that. Her feelings were hurt, but what could he do? How were his sexual preferences his fault?

      In college he’d gotten a crush on an eccentric and lonely black women’s-studies major who slept around but never had intercourse with anyone. She never said why not, and she never touched him, so he never felt he had standing to find out. At times he thought they were two virgins, born to be together, and at other times he thought she was recovering from a rape trauma and subsequent promiscuous phase; he never asked. In her senior year she came out as lesbian, and he felt he’d missed his one chance. He had two years of college left to go, and nobody he knew of liked him that way.

      At an art opening the fall of junior year, he met a Thai woman on an exchange program to the veterinary school. They corresponded for months. That was sexually rewarding (not). He’d never known Buddhists were so strict about premarital sex.

      His senior year, he hooked up with a scraggly-haired anthropologist. She had sour armpits and annoying mannerisms such as picking her nose and relating everything to cybernetics, but she said she liked to get fucked. Once, early in their liaison, she diverted his member into her anus with her hand, and he didn’t immediately notice. When he did, she explained that she had vaginal discomfort from a yeast infection. He suspected that she felt no sexual pleasure, of any kind, ever, and that it was a matter of indifference to her how he did what.

      On one occasion, he was unfaithful to her with a pretty townie he met at a heavy metal show. When they were done, the townie said, “Did you know I’m fifteen?” He was terrified. She promised to keep quiet for a hundred dollars. But his friends at Subway knew that she was nineteen and an amateur, so it was okay.

      In short, his previous experiences of sex had less than nothing to do with love. Pam opened a new chapter in his life. Where the other consummated affairs seemed to have emerged from the sewers of his mind like roaches swarming out of a toilet, Pam descended from above, bringing all he held most dear: beauty, art, music, cyberpunk, the Lower East Side. Kissing her was the most important thing.

      Band practice was interesting after that. Joe sang his songs while playing counterpoint melodies on the bass. Pam looked straight down at her left hand, and Daniel focused on the brushes with which he played warped floor tom and broken snare. Every so often, the couple raised their eyes and nodded almost imperceptibly in greeting.

      IN HIS FUNCTION AS MANAGER AND LABEL EXECUTIVE, DANIEL BOUGHT THE SELF-HELP manual Book Your Own Fucking Life. It was a punk rock venue guide to the USA and Canada, produced by an anarchist collective in Minneapolis. He observed that meaningful implementation of the book was predicated on possession of a vehicle. He was financially committed to Marmalade Sky to the tune of the $800 the first single was going to cost him. There was nothing in his plans about thousands of dollars for transportation. The thought of trying to store a van in lower Manhattan made his insides droop. Whether or not the street sweeping machines came, you had to move your car every day. Official car theft rates were kept low by the inconvenience of reporting crimes, but a car parked on the street still had annual insurance premiums roughly equal to its value. A worthless car could be relied on to stay put if you removed some vital part such as the alternator every night and took it upstairs.

      He broached the necessity of renting a van some weekend to play Trenton or Philly, traditional springboards for ambitious and creative bands that had trouble cracking the mercantile culture of NYC rock.

      Pam said, “What’s next, Passaic? This city not big enough for you?”

      Joe elucidated his view that New York City was the industry’s one and only mecca. Bands from other places dreamed all their lives of playing there, paying serious money—like fifty bucks—for the privilege of presenting short sets in exploitative clubs such as Downtown Beirut. Marmalade Sky, an endemic growth, could play New York any time it wanted, by setting up out on the sidewalk or next to the fountain in Washington Square. He had seen a rig with a Peavey and a car battery. They could play wearing fun costumes. He had seen a girl dressed as broccoli.

      “No, no, no,” Daniel said. “I’m not busking for quarters! I have a job!”

      He noted inwardly that Marmalade Sky’s need for a label and a manager was not urgent, and possibly not even real. The band itself might not be real. He felt it might be helpful to know relevant people who could confirm the band’s reality. If, say, he were on speaking terms with someone who booked clubs or a music journalist—he didn’t know how or where to start, but he did have the idea. He resolved to acquire a kick drum and hi-hat cymbals.

      He wasn’t thinking straight. Pam worked days, and he worked nights. On weekdays they saw each other in the evenings, when she got home from RIACD and he hadn’t left yet—generally from about seven to ten—which was enough time to cook or get takeout, fool around, get cleaned up, and go home to sleep and uptown to work, respectively. On weekends they went to shows. He was losing sleep.

      When he finally asked her, Pam proffered her habitual disinterested analysis. Of all the factors in their success, she said, there was only one under his control: the debut single, which he should urgently bring to fruition. After it came out, other bands would hound him with demo tapes. For the sake of buttering up a label owner, they would offer Marmalade Sky choice opening gigs.

      He replied, “I have the money to put out a single, but no band to put on it. Maybe you can tell me when Marmalade Sky is going to start being non-heinous.”

      “Put up a flyer at Kim’s,” she said. “Or an ad in the Voice. Find some band that has a decent cassette and offer them a seven-inch. Or record Joe as a solo project and let him sell it to his three hundred best friends.”

      A STRANGE PHENOMENON HAD TAKEN HOLD OF PAM’S CHECKING ACCOUNT SINCE SHE had met Daniel. It was growing. While single, she had not skimped on cover charges, restaurant meals, instruments, electronics, or liquor by the drink, and whenever she couldn’t find her wallet—a regular occurrence—she had bought a new one to fill with new cash. Since meeting him, she had been spending money rather than hemorrhaging it, and she was saving hundreds of dollars a month.

      But she didn’t offer to contribute money to Lion’s Den. It was his label, not hers. She had enough business experience to know that it wasn’t a business. It was an art project. Investing in it would contravene the project goal, which was to be Daniel’s art. He wanted autonomy more than he wanted success. He wanted to design record covers, compose press releases, and gain a reputation—among the handful of people who mattered to him—as a man of wit and taste. It had nothing to do with turning $800 into $2,000 in the fullness of time and paying her back.

      She didn’t try to explain herself. It was hard to explain. As an art form, rock’s medium was commercial success. The tippy top was its guiding light. Having a band was about being a rock star, a fantasy of ultimate autonomy in which you got paid megabucks to be your worst self.

      Meanwhile she was slogging away as a programmer, and he was sitting up all night setting Latin abbreviations in italics. Marmalade Sky might be art for art’s sake, but if it didn’t offer them at least a chance of rock stardom, it wasn’t worth doing.

      DANIEL TURNED HER SUGGESTION OVER AND OVER IN HIS MIND. JOE COULD PLAY MORE instruments, and play them better, than all three of them put together. He had no shortage of material. The missing element was the multitrack studio to produce the master tape.

      He thought briefly of buying microphones and a four-track and learning to use them—or, more realistically, letting Pam figure them out—but the equipment would cost almost as much as pressing the single, and he’d still have to rent a soundproofed room, free of garbage trucks, car stereos,