S.M. storms around lower Manhattan remembering the trees at dusk, how they once looked caramel-dipped, during those months of light and merry, and how brightly the taffy clouds of morning glowed after he and his friends determined that nothing like parents or family mattered anymore; nothing; just candy. From that, what–frenzy? addiction? liberation? a decade earlier, he and Spiral Stairs, this guy, a friend from school, had begun the rock group Pavement.
He’s very familiar with this part of town, where the sugarhouse stalls are now. The neighborhood was torn up ten years before by riots; he was thoroughly kind on candy that night, and he saw the coppers on spooked steeds galloping down Saint Mark’s and the Argentine who owned the big sugarhouses ordering his muscle boys to drive a truckful of candimonium packs over to the squatters (just like in some Damon Runyon story) so they had bottles to throw at the helicopters.
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S.M. lived right near here back then, with percussionist Bob, who had this hellish job with the transit authority at the time, driving a bus. Bob’d come home in a vulgar mood, sink into the couch and glare like an abused monkey. They’d unwrap a few candies and gratefully watch hockey players beat one another on the television set. By then the first few Pavement things had appeared to zero sales. Still, a baffling number of folks began to hear of Pavement. Nobody knew how or why. They crept into the dialogue like a good piece of vandalism, exactly as S.M. had hoped–suddenly, anonymously, full of challenging implications. For a couple reasons–mainly ignorance and poverty–Pavement had left the studio with only recordings of accidents, first takes, wan distortions, scratch vocals. To distract reporters from the bad mikings, S.M. talked as though by intention these were anti-songs, said they were committed to releasing the things that rock bands were supposed to record over. A brilliant strategy: Pavement became just as difficult to listen to as they were difficult to discuss.
Other conveniences and coincidences that followed helped to blur the precise meaning, point, sincerity of their music-making endeavor. For example, as someone had pointed out to S.M., Pavement’s first full-length work arrived in stores the same week that Argentina captured its most-wanted assassin. The quotes attributed to the so-called “Candy Killer” and the leaked details of the Argentinian operation segued seamlessly with statements attributed to the band on its press release. The impression was that, with Slanted and Enchanted, elusive figures were coming aboveground, emerging from the fog as a hard frost lay upon the fields like spun sugar.
A light drizzle begins to fall and S.M. realizes, with an anguished pang, that for these last ten years he’s only been able to hear the music of others as competition.
S.M. is aware that he hasn’t any surprises left. Hundreds of interviews each year will leave pretty much no internal stone unturned. All Pavement can do is to keep making records. But at the very least S.M. wishes they didn’t sound so spent as they settled into being rock stars. It’s like, onstage, he’s suddenly surrounded by old farts. The face of his bassist carries so many wrinkles he’s begun to resemble the father on The Waltons. Spiral, that guy from before, is married, losing his hair, becoming withdrawn.
Music from childhood plays on a turntable across the room. S.M. can’t keep from dreaming about the past, the better long-ago times when he possessed Bingo’s insane lusts, when S.M. and his friends would lie on piles of dirty laundry dreaming big lucid futures, utterly candied, thoroughly kind, as they dribbled their brains like basketballs and bounced ideas on trampolines…
