Never Mind the Pollacks Read online

  He was down before he could even get up.

  In the distance, Neal Pollack saw a man sitting on a stump in a field. The air was bright and the sky crisp. The man was wearing a porkpie hat and playing, on his guitar, some lost inchoate melody that seemed to emerge from the antediluvian swamp of American race memory. He was more than old; he was very old. His face reflected years of not exactly wisdom or experience, but at least hard living and then some.

  Pollack walked toward the man, feeling more buoyant and sane than he had for years. His molted synapses were clear for once. He was no longer angry or depressed, self-euphoric or self-loathing. In the back of what seemed to be his mind, Pollack remembered all the petty rivalries and rotgut-fueled midnight expeditions for carbon paper, the long body-slamming nights at CBGB and beyond, and a thousand precoital rejections. But he didn’t care anymore. He had found the man.

  “Ah’ve been waiting for you, Neal,” said the man. “Waiting a good long time now.”

  “Then it is you,” said Pollack. “I knew I’d find you someday. Where are we? Are we dead?”

  The man played his guitar, a song that hearkened back to every song Pollack had ever heard. He laughed and coughed and then he laughed again.

  “Haw, haw!” he said. “No, Neal, we ain’t dead. But we will be soon, if my calculations are correct. I reckon this is a dream!”

  “I’ve been looking for you, on and off, for forty-five years,” Pollack said. “Why are you here now?”

  “I have come because it’s time for you to understand the Message.”

  “What Message?”

  “The Message that is in all music for all eternity but is most easily found in obscure African-American singles of every genre that were released on small, now defunct labels.”

  The man coughed into a handkerchief that, Pollack somehow knew, he had borrowed from B. B. King.

  “Now listen to me very carefully, because our time is limited,” the man said.

  “OK.”

  “I want you to go to that record store on Bedford Avenue, the one that’s owned by the annoying guy who wears bowling shirts and thick-black-framed glasses, the one who’s married to that installation artist you hit on at a party a few months ago.”

  “Shit!” Pollack said. “I hate that guy!”

  “I don’t care. You have to buy a record from him. Specifically, you must purchase Eric B. and Rakim’s Follow the Leader. It contains the lyrics you will need to join me.”

  “Join you where?”

  “At the source of music, of the Message, and your quest will be complete.”

  “But I’m not on a quest!” Pollack said. “And that record costs eleven bucks! How am I gonna afford that and lunch today?”

  The old man sighed.

  “Cheap-ass rock critics,” he said. “Here, take twenty dollars and go buy yourself the damn record.”

  The man began to shimmer, and not naturally, either. The Tussin was wearing off. Pollack shouted after the man, but he was fading, fading into the mist of musical time.

  “Woke up this morning,” the man sang, “and my boots were full of blood…”

  Crap! The cats were making angry noise. They were hungry. It was noon.

  A six-pack of Pabst and half a bottle of bourbon later, followed by a line of Peruvian cut with drain cleaner, Pollack was ready to endure the day. He never left the house without making sure he looked cool. It didn’t take much: black jeans, black socks, black steel-toed boots, and a black T-shirt with red lettering: “MURDERER.” A little water in the hair, a pair of stolen sunglasses, and a mysterious twenty-dollar bill that he’d found by his bedside was all he needed to go out in Williamsburg.

  Pollack walked down the middle of Sixth Street. He hummed the melody to “Venus In Furs,” the coke and booze and weed and Tussin having filled the day with possibility. He had a mission, a quest, for the Message, and he wasn’t going to be stopped.

  Coming the other way down Sixth was the number 17 bus, driven by Eric “Little Picker” McGonigle, former substitute bassist for the Asbury Dukes. He’d requested this route specifically, because he knew Pollack lived on the street. The Picker had never forgiven Pollack for his review of Born in the U.S.A., in which Pollack dismissed Bruce Springsteen as “the phony savior from America’s bunghole.”

  Pollack’s review had never been published, but that didn’t deter the Little Picker, who got hold of it somehow. True Springsteen fans rarely let an obscure slight go unpunished.

  “If I ever see Pollack,” the Little Picker said in his frequent quiet, lonely moments, “I’m gonna run him down.”

  On this day, the Picker spotted Pollack swerving dreamily in the road. The opportunity was so easy that he almost honked. But the Picker saw an image of the Boss in his mind. Bruce was weeping, betrayed, on his guitar-shaped cross, and his eyes called for steely revenge. The Picker floored it and his bus hit Pollack square, the chassis smacking him flat in the ribs. Pollack spun sideways and the rearview caught him in the head. He felt something snap in his left arm, something ooze out of his right ear. He fell to the curb, hard.

  The Picker drove away.

  “You just ran over a man!” a rider shouted.

  “That was no man,” said the driver. “That was Neal Pollack.”

  The passengers applauded.

  Pollack squirmed in the gutter.

  “Fucking hippies!” he shouted, apropos of nothing.

  His hair was already matting. A pool of blood had gathered at his head. Everything was blurry, ethereal, beautiful, really. Was he awake or asleep?

  “Git up, Neal,” said a voice.

  Pollack turned his eyes up. On the sidewalk was the old man from his dream.

  “I got hit by a bus,” Pollack said.

  “Ah know,” said the man. “It’s all part of the plan.”

  “What plan?”

  “The plan that was written for you long ago, in the Message.”

  “What is the Message? I have to know.”

  “You cannot know, for the Message will be told in the telling. It will be known when it is known.”

  Pollack felt great waves of dread wash upon the shores of his soul. Williamsburg, land of lofts and auto-body, pierogi, calzone, and bodega, held the final secrets to a puzzle that he’d been trying to solve his whole life, a puzzle without pieces and without a name.

  “I think my legs are broken,” he said.

  “They ain’t broken,” said the man. “They’re just bruised.”

  “I can’t stand up.”

  “Don’t be a pussy, boy,” said the man. “Think to yourself, W.W.I.D.?”

  “Huh?”

  “Think, boy. What Would Iggy Do?”

  The man had a point. Iggy had endured far worse, daily, and he still had a recording career. Screw this, Pollack thought. I’m alive. In his unconscious consciousness, he raised himself on both forearms.

  “That’s it, boy,” said the man. “You’re on the way. The music waits for you.”

  The man shimmered. He was leaving again, singing his song.

  Woke up this morning, and my boots were full of blood…

  “Clambone…” Pollack said, cryptically. “Clambone…”

  As Pollack lurched down Sixth Street, the children and old people fled in fear from the gore-streaked monster he’d become. He wasn’t cute any longer, not like the olive cherub born Norbert Pollackovitz at Cook County Hospital in Chicago, Illinois, on May 24, 1941, the son of Gladys and Vernon Pollackovitz, themselves wanderers to the music of time.

  Vernon came from Ruten, Germany, the son of a son of a butcher. He was a hard man with hard hands and a square humorless face, and he didn’t love music. The only record he owned was the Army Marching Band playing “And the Caissons Go Rolling Along.” He spun it every night before dinner, and he sang along, over hill, over dale, we will hit the dusty trail…

  Neal Pollack’s first act as a rock critic was to throw that record out the window of their apartment buildi
ng on Lunt Avenue and gather the cracked vinyl in his pockets while Vernon chased him down the street, brandishing a belt, screaming, “Monster! Communist! No son of mine!” Gladys was secretly pleased. She’d hated that damn record, its tuneless clanging and mindless jingoism no match for the Strauss that her mother had played for her on the parlor piano in Hamburg, before the soldiers had come and taken the piano away. She was proud of her critic-in-the-making, even if he’d already developed, at eight, a fondness for drinking cough syrup. He had taste, and taste, she imagined, could get you through this impossible life.

  A few days later, Vernon Pollackovitz saw that his son’s welts had healed sufficiently. Vernon had to go down to Maxwell Street on a Saturday, to see a man about a rug. He took the boy with him.

  There, in three city blocks, Halsted from Roosevelt to Maxwell, on the West Side of Chicago, Neal Pollack first saw the true America. The street teemed with vegetable peddlers and half-wits selling ill-fitting contraband. An ancient Greek displayed a wall of watches while his one-armed wife coaxed sad songs of long-forgotten isles from a hand-painted accordion. For two cents, you could stick your head beneath a sheet and see a dancing chicken. A store sold nothing but electric-blue suits with flared collars, and at two hundred feet you could smell the cologne of the hosiery men. Fat Poles in baggy work shirts shoved steaming onion-slathered sausages between their elephantine cheeks, and their jowls quivered with joy. Mexicans and Italians shot dice on tenement stoops in the shadow of where the expressway would someday run. Old ladies padded in their bedroom slippers, little wheel carts full of wares in front. Vernon got into an argument about the authenticity of a leather wallet.

  Norbert wandered off. A sound called him.

  In a vacant lot on Maxwell, half a block west of Halsted, a few dozen black people were grooving hard next to a rusty Dumpster. There was a drummer, and a man played a guitar that was plugged into an amplifier. The boy had never seen a guitar or an amplifier, much less a black man singing, and he felt destiny in the tuneful air. The singer was about forty-five, but he looked much older. He wore a porkpie hat and a red velvet jacket. A harmonica hung around his neck, and he was sure to use it eventually. He sang:

  Woke up this morning

  And my boots were full of blood

  Yeah I woke up this morning

  All my boots were full of blood

  I shouldn’t have stayed

  Up all night

  Getting nasty in the mud.

  Well I went down from Chicago

  All the way to New Orleans

  Yes I went down from Chicago

  All the way to New Orleans

  I ate a lot of seafood

  But I also

  Ate some beans.

  I went down to Mississippi

  All the way from San Antone

  Yeah, I went down to Mississippi

  All the way from San Antone

  With a demon in my bloodstream

  And a devil

  In my bone…

  “Sing it, Clambone!” shouted an old woman.

  “You know ah will, you sexy bitch,” said the man.

  The boy thought, Clambone? Then he thought, Clambone! He knew even then that he’d heard something important, vital. At that moment on Maxwell Street, though he wouldn’t realize it for many years, Neal Pollack had been consumed by the essence of rock and roll, a hard twang from the bowels of the wormy earth. For the rest of his life, he would seek to write about a moment as pure, music as true.

  The boy felt his father’s stern Ashkenazi hand on his neck.

  “Get away from these schvartzers!” Vernon said. “They probably have tuberculosis!”

  There was no protesting the iron antimusic grip of Vernon Pollackovitz. The moment was over, and the future Neal Pollack never saw Maxwell Street again. On the trolley home, though, he heard the refrain, over and over again, until finally, at the Addison stop, he wept.

  Nearly a half century later, Neal Pollack, the ungrateful middle-aged son of Jewish immigrants, stumbled through the hippest neighborhood in America on a bright spring afternoon, singing the blues to himself. In the second gilded era of a fragile empire unaware of its inevitable historical destiny as unwitting destroyer of the world, Pollack was a penurious loser at the end of his line. He was missing a chunk of his scalp, and he was going to buy a record.

  Rock and roll is fucked, he thought. We were authentic all those years ago. We were just a bunch of damn hillbilly shitheels with guitars and bad hairstyles, going to see the niggers play the real thing on a Saturday night. We were hayseeds in borrowed cars. They ruined it, the critics did. I remember when it was pure, the music and the writing. Who put the Bomp in my Jew ass? I’d take the Sonics or the Godz over Pearl Jam for breakfast. We didn’t need a magazine to make us cool. Don’t they get it? We never wanted what they turned us into. I wrote, but I was never a critic. I was rock and roll. I don’t care what they claim.

  He said, loudly, “Goddamn Fillmore Ballroom Janis Joplin Paul Butterfield Blue Oyster Cult desert-island discs of the seventies Arista Records glitter glam motherfucking Fugazi X-Ray Spex Replacements let it be!”

  Oh, god, he thought. I’m not well. Ten years ago, I would never have spoken the words “Blue Oyster Cult” aloud.

  Can Records opened on Bedford Avenue in January 1993. Pollack, always watching for signs of gentrification, noticed its appearance. On its first day of business, he used his Swiss Army knife to scratch the word “INSECTICIDE” on the front window. This was the beginning of his friendship with Richard Alvin, the store’s owner, a former advertising rep for Minneapolis Rocker to whom Pollack referred in private conversation as “the primordial yuppie from the mother ooze.” Alvin was behind the counter when Pollack, unshaven and bloody, stumbled in on that desperate spring afternoon.

  “Hello, Neal,” he said.

  “I got twenty dollars!” Pollack said.

  “That’s nice.”

  “Gimme a record, you fuck!”

  “I’ve got a lot.”

  Pollack grabbed Alvin by his Misfits T-shirt.

  “Listen,” he said, “I got a lot of work to do, and I don’t have time. Give me a record.”

  “Well, I have a very nice copy of Second Annual Report.”

  “I HATE Throbbing Gristle,” Pollack said.

  Alvin reached behind the counter for his velvet-lined “special box,” which he only accessed for discriminating customers. Out came a 1980 Black Flag EP, Jealous Again, followed by Out of Step, the 1983 Minor Threat EP on Dischord Records that never failed to impress.

  “Mint condition,” he said.

  “I already got those,” Pollack said. “And who keeps punk rock records in mint condition, anyway? Show me something new.”

  “I’ve got new Archers of Loaf, Velocity Girl, Bunnygrunt, and Tuscadero.”

  “Pussy bands!” Pollack said.

  “Well, there’s always Whip-Smart.”

  “That sounds promising,” Pollack said.

  “It’s the new Liz Phair album. Came out yesterday.”

  Pollack’s jaw clenched, his fists tightened.

  “I’m getting very angry with you, Richard Alvin,” he said.

  He took a step toward the record-store owner, and he seemed to grow large and menacing; his shadow filled the room.

  “I’VE ALWAYS HATED LIZ PHAIR AND I ALWAYS WILL!” he said.

  Alvin shuddered and sighed simultaneously.

  “Then what do you want?” he said.

  “I want Follow the Leader,” Pollack said, as he seemed to shrink back to his normal size.

  “You want what?”

  “Eric B. and Rakim. Maybe you’ve heard of them?”

  Alvin looked indignant.

  “Naturally, I have all their albums here,” he said. “Including several bootlegs of which I own the only copies. But they never sell. The secret tragedy of music is that the races never come together, and Hootie doesn’t count. Neither does Clarence Clemons.”
r />   “Not in my world!” Pollack said. “I own three Parliament albums, Fear of a Black Planet, The Chronic, AND James Brown Live at the Apollo!”

  “Then you, Neal Pollack, are a better man than I.”

  “No shit, Phil Spector,” Pollack said.

  In a remote corner of the store labeled “Black Music” was Follow the Leader, alphabetically placed next to Funkaloop: Wynton Marsalis and the New York Philharmonic Play the Music of Herbie Hancock. It was a small victory, but Pollack needed one of those, and he wrote an epistle to himself in his head.

  “I am a record-store hero,” he said.

  On the way home, he stopped at a pay phone. He dialed directory assistance and got the number for Coney Island High, on St. Marks.

  “HELLO!” he shouted. “THIS IS NEAL POLLACK. CAN I PLEASE SPEAK TO JOEY RAMONE?”

  “Neal, you don’t have to shout,” Joey said.

  “Oh, OK,” Pollack said.

  A long pause.

  “So what do you want?” asked Joey.

  “Nothin’. Just called to see what was up.”

  “Well, I’m kind of busy right now. How about I call you later.”

  “Sure, Joey, sure,” Pollack said, “I’ll be right here at the pay phone at—”

  But Joey Ramone had already hung up on him.

  “Sellout,” Pollack said.

  Stiv Bators was dead, Danny Fields was unlisted, Lydia Lunch was in L.A. Pollack hadn’t had a girlfriend since 1986 and didn’t remember any of the numbers of his exes. Finally, he called the Village Voice. The receptionist answered.

  “This is Neal Pollack,” he said. “Could you put out a general page in the office to see if anyone wants to talk to me?”

  Five minutes passed. Ten minutes. Pollack inserted the rest of his quarters. But the Village Voice switchboard was closed to him.