Three white high schoolers cavort along West Fourth Street, returning from J &R’s Music World to an apartment on Hudson where a certain divorced mom’s not home, where they’ve got keys and the regular afternoon run of the place. All three are armored against late-fall weather in black motorcycle jackets, the Brando-Elvis-Ramones variety, leather skins studded with chrome stars and skulls, buckles dangling loose and fronts unzipped against the chill. The three grab-ass, swing incompetently from lampposts, talk in private tongues, nerd-punk argot.
November 1979: “Rapper’s Delight” has just cracked the top forty. It’s also cracked the attention spans of the white kids at Stuyvesant, including this bunch. The song is on the radio and on the street, leaking from stores and passing shoulder-hoisted boom boxes, a different sound, and impossible to miss.
But to really hear it for yourself someone’s got to lay down cash and bring the thing home.
The Sugar Hill Records twelve-inch in its generic sleeve is bagged with their other purchases, Eno, Tom Robinson, Voidoids, Quadrophenia soundtrack. “Rapper’s Delight”’s place on the pop charts is as a novelty single, late entry in the lineage of “The Streak,” “Convoy,” and “Kung Fu Fighting,” and it’s in this spirit these white boys have made their purchase: the record strikes them as inconceivably stupid and killingly funny, two concepts lately the opposite of mutually exclusive, Gabba Gabba Hey.
Self-loathing worn inside out as a punk’s moron pride.
If one of these three knows more, he’s not telling.
But put it this way: if one of those shops on St. Marks Place retailing punk fashion sold T-shirts reading PLEASE YOKE ME you’d buy one in a minute.
Then zip your jacket wearing it home from Manhattan.
Now, in the safety of the apartment, the other records are put aside while the twelve-inch is plopped on mom’s turntable for instant-gratification hilarity. The needle is stopped and shifted backward a dozen times for incredulous confirmation of some sequence of chanted rhymes, I don’t care what these people think, I’m just sittin’ here makin’ myself nauseous with this ugly food that stinks. The three white boys bust up, barely able to breathe for laughing.
“The-chicken-tastes-like-wood! ” one gasps.
Jackets are shed. Divorced mom’s boyfriend left a six of Heinekens in the fridge, the fool, and these are swiftly drained. A box of Nilla Wafers is demolished, down to the crumbs at the bottom of the wax liner, which are shaken out and inhaled. “Rapper’s Delight” is played again, the punks doing an antic dance, pogoing on the couch, playing at break dancing, striking poses.
The record includes among others a passage mocking Superman, the rapper calling himself Big Hank mock-wooing Lois Lane with boasting couplets. He may be able to fly all through the night, but can he rock a party ’til the early light? An excellent question for Superman or any other flying personage, really.
That’s if flying wasn’t the last thing on your mind.
Now the three begin quoting favorite lines, trying to mimic the rappers’ inflection while keeping straight faces. “I understand about the food,” says one, nearly weeping with pleasure. “hey, but bubba, we’re still friends! ”
Two of these harmless, pink-cheeked punks are Manhattan-born, were privately schooled until the year they switched to Stuyvesant to spare their parents the expense. For all they know this record might have been cut specifically for their private anthropological enjoyment, and they hear it with detachment suitable for an artifact fallen from the moon. They’ve never heard anyone rap before, anymore than they’ve met Fat Albert or Sanford & Son walking down the street. Consensus might be that what makes “Rapper’s Delight” and black people in general so criminally funny is their supreme lack of irony. Hey, it’s not racist to find blacks earnest as hippies, broad and embarrassing as a comic book. These boys is punks, and punks sneer. That’s what they do, deal with it.
Lack of irony’s scarcely a problem for the third in the room, the punk from Gowanus.
Tied in splendid baroque knots, that’s him. Ready to pass any and all litmus tests for self-partitioning. But hey, if standing in your Converse All Star high-tops on the couch cushions rotating hips in awkward parody you recall Marilla’s curbside hula-hoop instruction a million years ago, recall too your disappointment Marilla wasn’t a blond Solver, your guilt at this disappointment, your shame at your body’s inexpressiveness, its unfunky failings- so what? Laughing at “Rapper’s Delight”’s no revenge, and anyway it wasn’t your idea, and anyway it’s funny. Dean Street’s another story, a realm of knowledge inapplicable here.
You’ve just about finished leaving Dean Street, and Aeroman, behind.
If this means avoiding the one who protected your ass all through junior high, the one you once ached to emulate, the one whose orbit you were happy just to swing in-if it means leaving the million-dollar kid’s regular phone messages in Abraham’s precise handwriting unreturned-that’s a small price to pay for growing up, isn’t it?
This ain’t no party, this ain’t no disco, this ain’t no foolin’ around.
It’s the end, the end of the seventies.
chapter 16
Though Barrett Rude Junior had it in mind all along, grist for his own heart’s musing, the evening’s theme was kept a mystery to those in attendance. That hadn’t slowed them delving into the spread, the sliced meats and cheese and olives and egg bread and rye and cherry cheesecake he’d dialed in from Junior’s, the Seagram’s, the dope. This posse of freaks, Horatio, Crowell Desmond, the three girls, they never needed an excuse to party. When finally he made the announcement he got only a faint echo back, most of the crowd already too wasted by then to do more than nod sweetly and spacily, raise a glass with ice if they held one. Barry’s hyped about something, Whose birthday? Whatever, that’s cool. But the one girl, whose name he’d forgotten, said:
“How old?”
She’d given him a shy smile when she came in, one of three numbers on Horatio’s arm, all jingling earrings and Egyptian eyelashes, tan skintight slip-sheer dress to her pumps, nearly fifty buttons on one side, ankle to armpit, bottom dozen undone. Prime Horatio specimen, but new and unfamiliar. Picture her answering the phone, Horatio saying, Wanna meet Barrett Rude? Singer from the Distinctions? Wear something nice, baby. Standing at a mirror counting how many buttons up from the floor to undo, nothing’s accidental.
It talks without talking.
Brother, it sings if you listen.
Right through the door she’d started fussing, dimming the overheads digging in his drawers looking for candles, until he told her there weren’t any. Then she’d thrown her shawl on his lamp, made a web of shadow that stretched across the ceiling like a groaning mouth with tassel teeth.
“You down with some Fleetwood Mac gypsy type of thing there, girl?”
Again she’d smiled without speaking, then gone and sucked up a line Horatio had laid out on the kitchen counter.
All elegance, one nail-painted finger pressed aside a nostril.
Pinky high like she was sipping Earl Grey.
He ignored her, slipped something mellow on the turntable, Little Stevie Wonder’s Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants. Then got to sampling Horatio’s product himself, did a line while waiting for the base to get cooked for the pipe. One of the other girls asked him about the gold records on the mantel and he told her there ought to be four more up there, if the truth be known. He didn’t even get angry, it was just a story now. While he told it he kept half an eye on the quiet girl, as she watched and pretended not to, the usual game. No hurry, the quiet ones always came around. Like a timer going off. Now she showed some curiosity about his having a son, the procreational instinct.