I was once a dedicated fan—the only dedicated fan, really—of a New York City band called Rude and Raw, and my love for them ended up killing me. I first saw them in January of 1979. They had come up to Vermont in the dead of winter to play at a tiny college in the Green Mountains where I was midway through my senior year. The school was the best road booking they could get, and they were the only act outside of the 802 area code the school could afford. The weather was bone-chillingly cold, and the sun hadn’t shone for what felt like weeks. Everyone but me seemed to have well-laid postgraduation plans, following brightly lit paths into the future, while all I could make out ahead of me was a thick gray haze.
From the moment I first saw Rude amble out onstage, struggling to strap on her red Flying V guitar and wrestling with the mic stand to make it match her height—she was five foot one at most—I sensed I was about to experience something incredible. When she started singing in that raspy, wrecked voice of hers, her long black hair blowing all around her and turning different shades of red in the glow of the lights, I was certain. After the show I tried to get her attention as she and the other band members walked back to their van, but the drummer told me to fuck off, waving his sticks at me for emphasis, and that was that.
A few months later, after the interim college president handed me my degree, I took the first bus down to Boston, then a train to Penn Station, and from there I rode the subway out to Queens to crash with my sister, Betsy, in Astoria, just so I could be closer to the band’s home turf. They were from Washington Heights, I’d learned, but they played all over Brooklyn and Queens and bits of Long Island at whatever places would let them onstage. I faithfully trailed them from one decrepit club to another, from shitty to shittier to the shittiest venue you’ve ever seen. Meanwhile I worked odd jobs, but even living with my sister rent-free—my idea, not hers—I was constantly broke. I wasn’t above rummaging through the dumpsters behind the Greek restaurant on 30th Avenue for still-warm clumps of spanakopita and crazy-sweet shards of kataifi and phyllo tarts. I once sold my sneakers—true story—to get the five-buck cover to see the band play in the Bowery in Manhattan, then spent the next few scorching summer days walking around New York City in my bare, blackened feet, making a few bucks an hour filling newspaper boxes with free copies of an alternative weekly. I even became a minor club-circuit celebrity: Hey, aren’t you the guy who hawked his sneakers to see some band and stepped on a dirty syringe and got gangrene and almost had his foot amputated? Holy shit, man, that was you? I never denied it, even though the “syringe” was actually a rusty nail and the “gangrene” was a harmless fungal infection that temporarily turned my foot greenish-black. It was my small measure of local fame.
If you were around then, you probably blinked and missed Rude and Raw. Not many people noticed when they came on the scene, and even fewer paid attention when they left. They weren’t easily categorized. They weren’t hard rock or power pop, and veered off several exits short of punk. They probably had people telling them they should be more of this or less of that, but if so, they didn’t heed any of it. They seemed caught in this never-ending state of becoming, trying to figure things out as they went, as strange and undefinable to themselves as they were to others.
Maybe that’s what drew me to them. They were up there flailing away in search of something they might not even recognize once they found it, and I related to that. Plus I didn’t see any other devotees at their shows; no one else was as consumed with them as I was. They were my private stash. I couldn’t even have told you why I liked their music. I guess they had some crude form of talent, but I was too infatuated with the idea of them being my band to say whether they were actually worth listening to or even taking seriously, much less giving up your stupid life for.
I saw them twenty-two times that summer and fall, sniffing out even the last-minute billings where some other, cooler, act canceled, and they were the fill-in band. With each gig it was becoming apparent even to me that Rude was spinning out of control, falling apart in plain sight since she was always front and center, completely exposed behind her guitar. In a rooftop bar in Sheepshead Bay she stumbled off a raised platform—it didn’t even qualify as a stage—and nearly flipped over the guardrail. Another time, in a grimy lounge on Rockaway Boulevard, she wobbled off after the first song, and her bandmates had to retrieve her from a back alley where she’d gone to puke. Twice she stripped down to her underwear. Word of this got around and provoked a brief uptick in their popularity.
The week before Halloween I took Betsy to see them play in an abandoned warehouse on the Lower East Side, somewhere off Grand Street. She couldn’t believe the city would allow people to set foot inside the place, which she declared unfit for human assembly. There was a hole in the roof, and blown-out windows were covered with tattered plastic sheeting. The cracked concrete floor was littered with rodent droppings, and Betsy rued wearing her best platform shoes. She was cold but also nauseated by the noxious fumes spewing from the giant space heaters set up on either side of the stage like fire-breathing demons. Rude was off-kilter in an entirely new way, starting songs then just stopping in the middle, like she’d suddenly had enough, letting the band play on while she turned in circles in some weird private dance. Less than halfway through, my sister insisted we leave, and all the way home on the train she told me she didn’t get it.
“That’s them? That’s why you came to New York? Seriously? Because they totally suck. You do know that, right? And she’s a fucking mess. That’s your dream girl? Jesus, Joel, you’re as fucked up as she is. Or maybe you’re only attracted to people who are even more fucked up than you are. Which is, you know, pretty fucked up.”
“She’s just going through some shit right now.”
“She needs help. Like, yesterday. And you need to find a normal girl.”
“You just want me to end up with someone like Richard, someone boring and mature I can bring home to Mom.”
“Mom loves Richard. He’s getting his master’s. He has a plan.”
“Good for fucking Richard.”
The harangue continued as we got off the train and climbed the steps to the street. I tried walking faster to distance myself, but Betsy kept pace. “So you’re just going to fixate on that crazy, messed-up singer until—what? She takes you home with her one night? Shares a needle with you? Writes a song about this loser fan she knew for one night and now can’t even remember his face?”
I stopped to stare her down. “You figured it out! That’s my plan!”
“This isn’t funny, Joel. I’m serious. What are you afraid of?”
“That I’ll end up listening to your advice.”
“Is it Dad? You’re freaked out you’ll spend your life behind a desk and end up having a heart attack in an elevator?”
“Dying on an elevator is just fine with me.”
“God, you’re such an asshole.”
She didn’t say anything else until we reached our block. Then she grabbed me and held me at arm’s length the way our mother would do when she scolded us as kids. “Joel, I love you. It’s just sometimes I can’t breathe when I think of what might happen to you.”
A few days later I came into the apartment and found stuff scattered everywhere: throw pillows tossed across the room; a beer bottle tipped over on the coffee table lying in a pool of brown foam; a shattered picture frame lying face up in a corner, the image of Richard and Betsy with their heads tipped together smiling through the cracked glass. My sister was sitting cross-legged on the couch, staring at a dark television screen, a box of Cap’n Crunch in her lap, the contents of which she was excavating with a serving spoon.
I didn’t have to ask what had happened, but she told me anyway in one long, teary, snotty gush punctuated by sobs: She’d found strands of long hair on Richard’s herringbone winter coat. Red hair. Hair so fresh you could still smell the woman’s shampoo. Betsy confronted him. He told her she was crazy. He did the thing where he said he must have accidentally brushed against someone, and when she pointed out there were hairs on the front, back, and both sides of the collar, he said he must have grazed the same stranger several times. You know, he said, those people you keep passing in the hallway or squeeze next to on the subway every day, the ones who have no sense of personal space? But she kept up her relentless interrogation, she said, until he finally broke down—“because that’s what men do when they run out of energy to keep spouting their fucking lies.” He admitted it was a temp in his office but swore he’d only slept with her once. Once! And she was “only a temp,” which he kept pointing out was, by definition, a temporary, fleeting arrangement, of no lasting importance.
Betsy never wanted to think of Richard again. She never wanted to see his face or hear his name. He was dead to her. Deader than dead. He’d never even existed.
I started putting things back in their rightful place, except the fractured picture frame, which I left right where it was. Then I swept the floor, vacuumed the rug, and made her a cup of tea the way she liked it—with enough milk and sugar that the spoon could almost stand up. She looked amazed that I would actually do all that for her. That I was capable of such a simple, selfless act.
It was either right before or after Thanksgiving, because all over the city raucous reunions of friends (none of them mine) were occurring. I’d gone to see Rude and Raw in a dive bar on Amsterdam Avenue, and the fire alarm went off. I was surprised that run-down, ill-lit pisshole even had an alarm. The band rushed offstage, and the audience herded itself into the street. It was a cold, damp night, and people were milling around, blowing on their frozen hands and asking the firemen if they could go back inside to get their coats—a resounding no. Rude was off by herself, smoking a cigarette and leaning against a graffiti-covered wall. Seeing an opportunity, I walked toward her, not in a straight line but circuitously, weaving in and out of the crowd so that my destination wouldn’t be too obvious. At some point she seemed to notice me, to sense my advancement, and I thought I detected a glimmer of recognition on her part. I always wondered if she was ever straight enough to pick out faces in the audience, and if mine was the only face she saw at every show.
I was within ten feet of her when the all clear came, and everyone went back inside.
The last gig I saw them play was in a Hell’s Kitchen basement club called Lizard Skin. The entrance was down a flight of stairs so steep I had a mild case of vertigo by the time I reached the bottom. There were mean-spirited black lights and hideous lime-green walls. Faulty wiring. Shoddy ventilation. The whole place smelled like wet wool. It was also the biggest crowd I’d ever seen at one of their gigs. They did three songs in quick succession that were the other side of awful. Rude was slurring words, tripping over cords, barely staying upright. It was like they played the same song three times, separated by ten-second pauses and the loud buzz of the audience, who kept shouting over the music. Then Rude put down her guitar, took off her jean jacket, and stood before the microphone in a shower of awful purple light, wearing a white ribbed tank top you could basically see through. A few people called for her to take it off, but she held up her middle finger and started mumbling into the mic. The words were incoherent, but if you listened for it, there was a melody in there somewhere. She was speak-singing. People were doing everything but paying attention. I wanted to grab the asshole in front of me and twist his head until it faced forward. A short, fat dude in a black ski hat, he was telling what I think was a joke to a coterie of friends. Finally I broke into their circle and pointed to the stage.
“You might want to try shutting up and listening.”
“What the fuck did you say, man?” he replied, getting in my face.
“Listen to the girl talk. Man.”
“Who are you, her pimp?”
Pleased with his put-down, he turned to grin at his buddies, and that’s when I put my hand on his shoulder and tried to physically turn him in the direction of the stage. He whirled around and shoved me. I shoved him back. Suddenly his right hand flashed at me, quick and insidious, like the flick of a serpent’s tongue, and when it pulled away, I felt a searing pain. I looked down and saw a red stain slowly spreading on my shirt.
Someone yelled, “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!”
I fell to the floor and then felt nothing. Everything was wiped clean. I remember hearing Rude’s voice droning on and thinking to myself that, if I wasn’t already dead, I was passing through that dimly lit conduit where the things you love best follow you from this world into the world to come.
I was taken by ambulance to Roosevelt Hospital, the same place they would take John Lennon less than a year later. I don’t remember any of it. More bad news for me: Apparently the knife tip had snapped off inside me, the consequence of a flimsily manufactured weapon, which mandated tricky surgical removal. My blood pressure plunged during the procedure, and at some point my heart stopped. They revived me almost instantly, but I was, for however short a span, not among the living.
I woke up to find my sister sitting by my hospital bed, reading Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, a novel I’d recommended to her months ago.
“What part are you at?” I asked.
She stood up and screamed; the book fell out of her lap. “Jesus, Joel. Oh my God. Oh Jesus.”
A nurse came rushing in. Then more nurses. A doctor was paged over the intercom. I was back.
After they’d checked me out a hundred different ways and we were alone again, Betsy and I gazed at each other for a long time without speaking. She looked terrible. Her face was blotchy, her eyes swollen. Bits of eyeliner dribbled along her cheekbones. Her hair, which she’d assiduously brushed with one hundred strokes a day since she was a little girl, looked like it hadn’t been tended to in years.
“What day is it?” I asked.
She squinted at me like she didn’t understand the question, then told me the date and explained how I’d gotten there and the fact that I’d died on the operating table. She was crying by the end of it. “They said you’d be dead if the puncture had been an inch lower.” She held her thumb and forefinger close together. “An inch.”
“I know what an inch is.”
“No you don’t!” she screamed. “You don’t know anything!”
“Keep your voice down. They’re going to ask you to leave.”
“Your heart stopped. You were dead!”
“You can’t yell here. This is a hospital.”
“I know it’s a hospital! I had to call around to every hospital in New York to find you. I’ve been sitting here counting every minute, every hour since I found you. I’m supposed to be looking out for you.”
“You are.”
“I’m not. I wasn’t.” She sat up. “What am I going to tell Mom?”
“Don’t tell her anything.”
Later I heard her out in the hallway, hectoring one of the doctors. “Please don’t let him die again. Whatever you do, don’t let him die twice.”
I think it was the next morning when I opened my eyes to an unfamiliar voice.
“We heard what happened.”
I struggled to place the face looming over me, one of those out-of-context sights that slowly become identifiable. It was the drummer of Rude and Raw. The one who’d waved his sticks at me and told me to fuck off. The biggest asshole in the band. He’s the one who showed up.
Then I heard a second voice: “Hey, I’m Fiona. Billy’s girlfriend. These are for you.” She had a small blue vase with a bright tangle of yellow flowers, which she placed on the radiator, where they’d broil to death. My sister moved them to a shelf.
The drummer held up his offering—a Rolling Stone magazine with Blondie on the cover.
“Where’s Rude?” I asked.
“Well, she’s sort of in the hospital too,” the drummer said. He was at the window, fiddling with the blinds, checking out the view. “Not this kind of hospital, exactly. She flipped out big-time. She’s at Bellevue. Or is it Lincoln? Actually I’m not completely sure. But we’re looking for a new lead singer, if you know anyone.”
“Cut the shit, Billy,” Fiona said.
“It’s no secret,” the drummer said.
“Stop being a dick for one minute, OK?”
“Is it true,” the drummer asked me, “that some jerk wouldn’t pay attention to Rude, so you pushed him, and he knifed you?”
“Don’t make him remember that,” Fiona said, bending over me and brushing my wrist with her fingers.
I looked over at my sister, who appeared so disgusted with these people she might scream. But she just sat there, refusing to acknowledge they were even in the room.
“They’re what put you here?” she hissed at me the moment they left. “You were defending that girl—that fantasy? What is wrong with you? She doesn’t care what happened to you. She barely knows you exist.”
I was released after five days. Betsy walked beside me like a bodyguard ready to ward off another attacker. She and the attendant helped me into a waiting taxi.
When we pulled up in front of her building, Richard was sitting on the steps.
“What’s he doing here?” I asked before we got out of the cab.
“We’re back together,” Betsy said.
“You said he was dead to you.”
“He was there for me when you were almost dead to me. Remember?”
Richard insisted on lifting me out of the back seat and carrying me up the four flights to her apartment, maneuvering around the series of hard right turns on the landings like a mover carrying a precious antique.
“Don’t drop him,” my sister said.
“I’m not going to drop him,” Richard snapped back, then he winked at me. “He’s light as a feather.”
“Hey, Richard,” I said when I was sure she couldn’t hear me.
“Yeah, man?”
“If you hurt my sister again, I’ll fucking kill you.”
He just flexed his amply muscled arms and raised me up and down a couple of times as if confirming my lightness. His laughter boomed up and down the stairwell.
“What is it?” Betsy said from a flight below. “What’s so funny?”
“It’s just Joel being Joel,” Richard said.
“I mean it,” I said, trying to look him in the eye. “Don’t mess with her.”
I moved into my sister’s bedroom, which she yielded to me on one condition: that I let her sleep right next to me on a borrowed cot. I could sense her constant surveillance in the dark, listening for any alarming sounds, bending over me to monitor my breathing. More than anything I think she wanted to make sure this terrible ordeal had shaken me up, jarring me out of my complacency and leading me to question what I was doing—or, rather, not doing—with my life. She expected me to have this full-on realization that I’d been given a second chance, and to that end she bought several books and not-so-discreetly left them next to my bed, books with titles like The Rest of Your Life Starts Now and Practicing the Art of Appreciation.
When I was ready for the next phase of my recovery, they told me the best thing was walking, so that’s what I did every day, all over the city. With each step I was figuring things out, not in some wild rush but incrementally, as in: Today I should stop worrying about what’s already behind me. Today I will stop procrastinating and get serious. Today it’s time to look for a real job. Every time I’d pass through midtown Manhattan and catch my reflection in a glass building facade, it was like I was seeing a stranger looking back at me. Maybe I didn’t feel fundamentally different or smarter or closer to some realization about my true destiny—if I even had one—but I knew enough to accept that my sister wasn’t wrong when she called me her “born-again little brother.”
I still thought about Rude and Raw, though not with anything like the same conviction. I asked around and heard they were now known simply as the Raw. They had a few gigs here and there and a new singer, who was supposed to be pretty cool. I even went to see them play and worked my way to the front—my usual spot, left of center with an unobstructed view of the singer’s microphon—but it wasn’t the same. The singer was pitch-perfect, and the band was tight. It was like all the danger, all the mystery was gone. I left soon after they took the stage.
One morning I was heading south from West 160th on my way to a job interview near Columbia, which was forty-odd blocks away, but I figured the walk would do me good. It was almost spring, though you wouldn’t have known it. The sky was ashen, the temperature barely above freezing. Of course I knew Washington Heights used to be Rude’s neighborhood, and although I’d walked just about every block in the city more than once, I might have made it a point to pass through here a little more often.
I saw a woman coming toward me, pulling up the collar of her oversize army jacket to ward off the wind. I related to her struggle; I was wearing a windbreaker so thin you could see through it. As she got closer, her face came into focus. Just a few feet apart we both stopped, and she flicked away a strand of hair, either to get a better look at me or so I could get a better look at her.
I’d never seen her outside the context of the band. Her skin was somewhere between brown and white, like it couldn’t decide. Her gray eyes had flecks of green. She’d lost weight, and her hair was dyed a terrible reddish brown, but it was her. It was definitely her.
“Hey,” I said. “Not sure if you remember me. I’m the guy who got stabbed at one of your shows.”
She nodded in acknowledgment and then covered her mouth and took a step backward. I couldn’t tell whether she was impressed or scared.
“It’s OK,” I said. “Seriously. I’m fine. Look.” I spread my arms to show her I was still in one piece. “They told me I died, but it was only for a minute. I don’t even think about it anymore. And it wasn’t your—I mean, it wasn’t anyone’s fault except the dick who stabbed me.”
I was searching for something else to say when she lurched forward, threw her arms around me, and began crying in my ear in this strange, screechy, wounded-animal way. Her body heaved and shook like she was having a seizure. People on the sidewalk veered around us. A few stared as they went by. I didn’t know what to do, so I held her tight and told her the same thing everyone was telling me: that the worst was over, she was alive, she had her whole beautiful life ahead of her.
