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the Midwest, then over to California. Seth called from Wichita to tell me that the yellow terrain was so flat
you could see the rain coming from miles away. They called me from a pay phone on the grounds of Graceland and left a jovial message. I was sitting at home, staring at the answering machine, stoned, too paranoid to pickup the phone.
    The other record I favored in the ice cream truck was Elvis Costello’s My Aim Is True. I identified intensely with his vindictiveness. I read somewhere that the working title was Revenge and Guilt.
    My aim was not true. I fantasized about beating the shit out of Seth, though I had never thrown a punch. I fantasized that I’d go to the Port Authority bus terminal, pick them up in the ice cream truck, and as they fell asleep in the shotgun seat—she on his lap, his head lolling on her shoulder—I’d take them through the Lincoln Tunnel to New Jersey, push them from the moving vehicle, abandon them in the reeds of the Meadowlands.
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    I was supposed to meet somebody at the Knitting Factory. She stood me up, but the bartender knew me and said they needed somebody to bartend that night. I said I didn’t know how to make any drinks. She said if I didn’t know, I should ask, “What’s in it?” As it happened, the bartenders at the Knitting Factory had the least professional aptitude of those at any bar I’ve ever been to.
    The band that night was a trio: Joe Lovano, Bill Frisell, and Paul Motian. I strolled through the club in a trance, amazed by the music, though I didn’t know anything about jazz. The next night Bob Mould played acoustically; he let the audience sit Indian-style around him on stage. The night after that the Lyres played, with the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion opening—their first gig ever.
    The sound guy got me high every night. Then he’d complain for hours about how he wanted to be a recording engineer and nobody appreciated him. There was a tiny recording booth upstairs
from the stage that he’d go into, get baked, and twiddle with the knobs while the band played, leaving the mixing board unmanned. Feedback howled every night.
    The bartenders were mostly dope fiends, and the customers foreign tourists. Japanese jazz nerds would wander in, stunned that the legendary club was a dive, run by surly malcontents. Europeans would pretend they didn’t know they were supposed to tip in America; as they walked away, the bartenders hurled fistfuls of change at them, cursing.
    The Knit was a magnet for a certain type of dissatisfied upper-class Japanese girl—there was a steady stream of them showing up at the club, having moved to New York seeking gritty adventure. One by one, they were scooped up by one of three guys—an avant-garde saxophone player, a drummer, and a guy who worked at record companies, doing some kind of job I couldn’t fathom. “Oh, she’s with D———? I thought she was with T———.”
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    They took me off the bar and made me the doorman. I did two nights a week, then five, then the freaked-out dope-fiend rockabilly guy who did weekends quit, and suddenly I was working seven nights a week. Naturally, I began to hate the job, but in my half-cocked military-bred mind I didn’t think it was my place to tell the owner he had to get somebody else for Mondays and Tuesdays. So I started stealing.
    Nearly everybody in the place was stealing. The bartenders would put the dough for two beers in the register and the third in their tip jar. The beer was always running low before its time, but nobody got fired. The would-be recording-engineer sound guy would order Chinese food at the ticket desk and stare at me incredulously when I called him down to pay for it. He expected me to take the money from the till as a matter of course.

    I seethed with frustration—when applying the hand stamp that audience members got in lieu of a ticket, I’d bang the