He had considered every possibility — and certainly the idea that he shouldn’t remove the vinyl from the wall but add to it instead. Some smart riposte to the ad. He’d seen others do it. The Gap Kids board by the freeway. The picture was of some beautiful Asian toddler in a pink corduroy hat. It just said “Gap Kids.” But someone, or some group, pasted under it, in exactly the same font,
made for kids, by kids
He admitted it was clever. Smart-aleck clever. But to Henry that kind of addition made it all just a joke, a way of showing off that you had the technology to match the font. And the wit to torque their intentions. That you could hijack their ad through your own savvy mastery of ad language and technology. Leave that to these ad-addicted kids. Didn’t it just pile onto the general noise and garbage? Besides, was that even true about the child labor? Well, probably it was.
After he finished cutting the top, Henry used the rope to slowly rappel down the front of the billboard, cutting the vinyl as he lowered himself.
The vinyl sheeting came down over him as he cut. At the very last cut he pulled himself off to the side and watched the whole sheet bend forward until the picture faced the building and the wall was clear. Henry was exhausted, his arms were shaking. There was no way he was climbing back up. He looked down at the vinyl sheet hanging below him. Its bottom edge was maybe five feet from the street. He loosened the hook from the rope and climbed down the vinyl. At the bottom he jumped the last five feet. He landed fine, actually, no pain at all. He stepped back from the building and looked at the gray brick.
At last, he didn’t have to look at it. Henry pulled off his face scarf and breathed in the night air. He started to shiver. He pulled his fingers out of the finger holes of his gloves and balled them together for warmth. He stared at the brick face one more time. It was only after he started to walk to his car that he realized his face was wet. Salty drops streamed down the creases by the corners of his eyes and into his mouth and dangled from his chin. His vision blurred. Henry sighed. Christ.
Safe as Milk
MIRANDA’S LIFE changed over the course of the summer. After years of static inertia throughout high school, everything at last came alive, fluctuated, became constantly inconstant. Miranda often tried to trace the whys and hows and ways of it: the way she met first Nash; then how she met Josh; how it could all be traced back to the Black House, to her friend Sissy; and also, or maybe particularly, to the long days of the Northwestern summer, when not only did the sun shine every day but it would stay light until nearly ten o’clock at night — ten o’clock — and it would feel as though the city spun extra hours just for serendipity, or even destiny, depending on how she looked at it.
That summer held a particular glow because it was the first time she left her mother’s house in the suburbs to live on her own in the city. It began when one of those things occurred that she thought only happened to other, more interesting people. She made a connection, walked into a score of a connection: a friend offered an available room in a house on Capitol Hill, the alternative, funky-even-for-this-funky-town neighborhood. And not just a room in any house but in the Black House. Miranda met her while she browsed in Shrink Wrap, a used-music store specializing in vinyl LPs.
Shrink Wrap was unbelievably located in a suburban colossus called the Bellevue Malclass="underline" a formerly upscale, ’80s mall-boom monstrosity with sponge-painted pink-and-gray cement pillars, now exclusively occupied by second-string retail stores. All of Miranda’s life she had watched the decline and tawdry aging of something designed to be extra new and perpetually now. Like the rapidly aging housing developments that surrounded it, the best Bellevue Mall ever looked was the day it was built. Time could add nothing to it. But here, somehow, in this now lower-rent environment sat Shrink Wrap, the sister store of a relentlessly obscure vinyl-and-CD store in the University District. Because of its remote location in the suburbs, Shrink Wrap developed a reputation for unpicked-through merchandise and became a magnet for hard-core obsessives and music geeks. In addition to their vast stockpile of vinyl, they also sold old cassette tapes, which were becoming trendy among adolescent boys again despite their inferior technology. Gradually that became the theme, the hook, of the place: outdated technology for young kids who already saw the vanguard in the past, the recent past, and not just in content but in format. Miranda liked that; she found it vaguely subversive, and besides it was the only place of interest in the whole suburb.
Her big break happened, or began, as she flipped through the LP bins one afternoon. LPs lent themselves to browsing. Unlike a CD’s, their substantial covers could be examined. Unknown music could catch your eye and force you to take a closer look. She picked up an old Captain Beefheart record, Safe as Milk. She thought she might buy it because she liked the title. They should name the record store Safe as Milk. They could name the whole suburb Safe as Milk. She always did that, thought of new names for things. If you discover the appropriate name, not only does the named thing change but your relationship to the named thing changes. It becomes within your grasp. While she held this LP, she thought, This is a Long-Playing record, which people play on high-fidelity stereo systems. She could see the outline of the record itself through the shiny cardboard sleeve. As she regarded it — it had weight — a girl with emphatically girlish Heidi braids approached her.
She had short, blunt bangs, cut well above her highly plucked brows, and two jet-black braids wound tight starting behind each ear, each with bright green yarn braided in and tied with knotted bows at the ends. And not the skinny yarn that you would use for knitting but that thick, fat yarn Miranda had only ever seen in kindergarten, yarn so fat kids with fat fingers were able to tie it. The girl’s braids evoked in Miranda a rush of disconcerting nostalgia: she thought of glitter in clumps, ashy blue construction paper and abstract dreamscapes of tissue paper, confetti and pasta shells. Miranda held her own long hair in one hand, pulling it straight, staring at the girl, who was now speed-talking (sniffling, jaw grinding, practically spark shooting). Miranda’s breath quickened, and she felt a general ache that made her want something from or with this girl.
She wanted to show Miranda a clip on her laptop computer. She had ripped the entire Captain Beefheart box set, obtained somehow at no expense, including a digital video encoded on one of the CDs. She opened the computer on the front counter, and they watched a tiny Captain Beefheart shimmy and jam his way through a song on a French beach in 1967, with his Magic Band, zany freaks with a tight monster-blues sound, but blues with a fractured acid filter. The girl introduced herself as Sissy Cakes. She quickly told Miranda how she had just broken up with her much older girlfriend, and she had been on a three-day binge of partying and all-nighters ever since, so don’t worry if she seemed to be hypered out. Miranda had heard of her, or read about her somewhere. Sissy described how she belonged to a performance/test group that had attempted and failed to shut down the Bumbershoot arts festival at the Space Needle each of the past three years. “They totally ghetto any local, noncorporate artists.” She also wrote a music column for a local free paper. She explained how she made no money, but it was okay because she lived very cheaply in an old Victorian house off Fifteenth Avenue in Capitol Hill. And then she said it, there was a room opening up — maybe Miranda wanted it.