Chapter Eight
Joe awoke to the sound of music and feet pounding the floor, some sort of energetic exercise. His head didn't do well with it, not exactly painful, a soft throb for each impact. He didn't think he drank that much, but he never did well with wine, even expensive champagne apparently, and maybe somehow the expensiveness added to it like the expensive Thai Stick he'd smoked. Getting up, he put on just enough to cover him, a t shirt and jeans, and passed through the storage space where the boxes of movie equipment remained ready to be opened and into the hallway where gendered toilets, remnants of the hope for a performance venue, awaited his choice. The men's had a couple urinals and a couple toilet stalls and a couple sinks, making Joe wonder who cleaned them. Though not spotless, they looked to have someone looking after them. A door at the back, Joe being curious about his new abode, led to toilet supplies and cleaning supplies and an industrial sink. That made him more curious because he thought the door between the toilets and his new office/apartment had been for utilities, so once done with his evacuations and hand cleaning, he tried that door and found shower stalls like dorms would have along with a long table that ran along the opposite wall from the stalls, and beyond that, a luxury for Joe in Manhattan, a washer and drier! Above them a cabinet held laundry soap and bleach and a stack of white towels. And behind the last stall, some sort of drying line had been hung from the ceiling, empty at the moment.
It all made Joe wonder why they'd bothered the upstairs neighbors, even if the bathroom there had definitely been much nicer, perhaps Carol's privileged childhood showing through.
The answer came from his continued curiosity, when he turned on the water for one of the showers and all he got was cold, even after a couple minutes. He'd noticed, washing his hands, that had also been the case.
Finally settling into the desk chair, eating the bagel and cream cheese Carol must have brought down for them and the cold coffee in the Styrofoam cup (with an apologetic note from Jenny telling him she didn't want to wake him up), Joe realized the problem with the apartment hinted at the evening before when he felt like he couldn't crank the stereo high. It was actually worse in the morning, and more to do with his typewriter than music (he could always get some headphones). He had to be careful about loudness affecting Carol's work. He solved it for the moment by pulling out his writing book and his notes. He tended to write longhand anyway, able to make corrections, and typing only when ready. An easy solution, except he had wanted to type, finally able to again, and it was such a great typewriter. He wanted to return to his epic apocalyptic sci-fi novel, finishing transcribing the first chapter which the theft had prevented.
Jenny didn't disturb him in the least when she walked into their apartment for her break. "How'd it go?" he asked.
"Good," she smiled prettily. "You?"
"Good," he smiled back. "I wanted to talk to Carol."
Carol burst in at the same moment. "Don't mind me." And she knelt in front of the file cabinet, opening the bottom drawer.
"I wanted to talk to you," Joe said to her.
"Give me a minute," she replied distractedly before pulling out a file. "Mind if I sit there?"
"Of course not," Joe said, giving the seat to her.
"Thanks."
"Can we get you something to eat?" Jenny asked.
"Antipasto."
Jenny and Joe looked at each other and shrugged. "Italian it is," Joe said and they left.
Little Italy wasn't far, so they found a restaurant. Joe ordered two antipasti and a meatball sandwich, one of the salads for him and Jenny to share, and some sliced garlic bread. He bought a two liter bottle of Coke and a large bag of potato chips at a convenience store on the way back.
Carol remained at the desk studying the papers and photos in the file. Once Joe set down the food he grabbed a couple folding chairs from the neighboring room. Jenny used the desk for her table and Joe the top of the file cabinet. Jenny poured the soda into Styrofoam cups Joe had also bought. As a sort of joke, Joe put on Carla Bley's Dinner Music, the eccentric pianist/composer's odd version of Muzak which she played at Bard when she visited, getting angry that no one was talking just like Carol had insisted for her piece.
Finally Carol closed the file and set it aside. "Sorry. What were you wanting to ask me?"
Joe chuckled. "You heard me."
"Of course, but sometimes I get struck by something that just needs to get done. In this case I needed to look at an old piece for some choreography for the new one. By the way, Lindy was in it if you want to see."
"Can I?" Jenny asked.
"Of course," said Joe. He pointed the blonde out to Jenny. Though looking still beautiful to Joe, there were times looking at her she seemed to shimmer, an incandescent glow, especially when she called things off and all he could do was gaze from afar, rudely staring most likely. Her images restored her to a much more mundane realm.
"She definitely has presence," Jenny judged.
"Another reason to be jealous," Carol chuckled, "pulling focus from me." Despite the amusement, Joe realized the truth of it. He wondered if Carol would feel the same about Jenny and her expressive face. "So what did you want to ask?"
"A couple things. I found the showers."
"Cold showers only. The washer/drier I just use for cold washes."
"Why's that?"
"The water heater went down and we didn't bother replacing it. Its capacity was pretty small anyway."
"Why not replace it with something bigger? It's not like Mark is hurting."
"Too expensive to make all the adjustments," Carol shrugged. "It was an extravagance anyway, showers for some resident company. Remember this isn't zoned for private residency."
"And the couple upstairs?" Jenny asked.
"Some bullshit about hydrotherapy. The kitchen was expensed as part of a catering service that never took off. If anyone asks, Leroy has residency at his folks place in Jersey, Tom also living there, and they bunk here for convenience, but I don't think anyone asks."
"And they probably wouldn't ask about us living here," Joe pointed out.
"Talk to Mark."
"Except I've asked a lot of him already. Guilt can only go so far. I suppose I could offer to replace the small capacity heater. At least we could shower when we wanted."
"I suppose. What else?"
"Loudness. I doubt you'd appreciate the sound of a typewriter while rehearsing."
"The walls and even the floors are designed for keeping things separate. Remember, this was built as a performance complex so that events could happen simultaneously, no bleeding of sound, and even the backstage here couldn't be heard in the performance space so that the performers could chat away while preparing and the audience wouldn't hear them. Let's test it."
"Okay."
Both Jenny and Carol went into the rehearsal space, closing the door behind them, and returned after Joe typed. "Nope," they both said.
"Very cool," said Joe. "But I heard you guys thumping away earlier."
"What, you think we're elephants?" Carol muttered. Jenny tittered.
"What?" Joe asked.
"It was an exercise called Elephant Walk," Jenny confessed.
"Perhaps the low frequency," Carol suggested. "We could test that too."
"Okay," Joe agreed and put on his Motorhead album, definitely bass oriented. He cranked it up while they were in the other space and then added a great deal more bass so that it actually shook the floor. He turned both the bass and volume down.
"Yep," Carol told him. "The bass seeps through, though so does the music when it's that loud."
"Got it," Joe nodded.
The troupe trickled in and once discarding their jackets or sweaters began improvising to the raucous fast paced metal rather energetically. Enjoying their enjoyment, Joe turned it up louder.
No one seemed to like it when Carol turned it down. "No more fun. Back to work," she announced.
.
The troupe laughed.
Putting on the bootleg Suicide tape, Joe returned to work as well on his poem. Then realization stopped him. Yes, the poem was about escaping home, but he had never understood the relevance really vis a vis the dance piece. It spoke about resonances, about how places around his home, the woods, the highway, the street that led to downtown Minneapolis but also led the other way to his old high school and his friend's home reminded him of events of his youth, luring him back against his need for escape; nostalgia holding him back. But everything had been personal, specific to him, to the point that he wondered, even though he worked for some clarity of these resonant images, how anyone could actually understand the poem. But it had been accepted for publication and Carol had been inspired by it, and the reading of it had at least felt appreciated by the audience, so it must have been understood at some level. He had a knack for language, for the musicality of words in juxtaposition, in phrases and lines, subtle interior rhymes and alliterations, flow. That's why he preferred poetry rather than prose, the pieces structured, composed in a physical manifestation of the rhythms. And they were composed, not just written, musical compositions without musical notation in the key of speech. He ultimately preferred his poems to be sounded out, no speed reading thank you very much, but recited within for the inner ear or even better heard. He started reading his poetry without emphasis, without emotion, thinking the words would do what they did on their own, but soon, realizing for one it was a boring way to be heard and secondly it held back his own expressive voice becoming all the more expressive by the words themselves, he became far more performative in his readings.
