Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist
Well, dudes, drink up, because when I get back from South Africa next year and take over managing this club as Uncle Lou has promised instead of reapplying to Brown as I promised my parents, there’s gonna be a new sheriff here on the Lower East Side, my friends. Have your lecherous, skanky fun now, because the clock is running out on you.
I may reconsider the future make-out ban, however. The making-out part is nice, it has possibilities, with the right pair of lips.
I don’t know why, but I do that thing Caroline does to her male victims, where instead of taking the hand of NoMo, I place my hand at the back of his neck and scratch the nape softly, possessively, while Tris watches. My fingers scan the buzz cut of his hair back there, and I feel goose bumps rising on his neck. I likee. There is some satisfaction in seeing Tris’s bottom lip nearly fall to her chin in shock. That’s the thing about Tris: She’s never subtle.
Whatever I’m doing, it works. She storms away, speechless. Phew. That was easier than I expected.
I look at my watch. I believe my new boyfriend and I have about two minutes forty-five before we break up. I close my eyes and do the slight head turn, angling for another visitation from his lips.
Caroline says I am frigid. Sometimes I think she’s teasing me to repeat the party line of my Evil Ex, so I clarify: You mean I’m not easy? She clarifies: No, bitch, I mean you intimidate guys with a look or a comment before they can even decide if they want a chance with you. You’re so judgmental. Along with frigid.
NoMo must know this about me, because he doesn’t come back in for more mouth-to-mouth contact. He says, “How the hell do you know Tris?”
Then I remember. Tris called him NICK. Noooooooooo. That’s him ! NICK! The Hoboken boy! The guy who wrote all the songs and poems about her, the best goddamn boyfriend the rest of us at Sacred Heart never had, the band-boy stud Tris hooked up with after meeting him on the PATH train at the beginning of the school year and has lied to and cheated on ever since. Does NICK not think it’s weird that he dated her that long and never once met any girls from her school? IDIOT!
But of course Tris wouldn’t introduce him to us. She wouldn’t be worried we’d rat out her indiscretions to her boyfriend – she’d be afraid he’d fall for Caroline. Tris can have Caroline’s rejects, but she’d never offer up one of her own to Caroline. Tris is so Single White Female, we like to joke that Caroline should get a restraining order against her, except Tris provides us too much amusement to completely let her out of our reach. It’s like a love-hate thing we have going with her. We don’t feel guilty about it because there’s only a month of school left and I can’t imagine we’ll ever see her again after our “have a great summer, good luck in college” phony sentiment yearbook finales. And karmically, I have repaid my mean-girl debt to Tris many times over. If she passed Chemistry and Calculus this year, it’s because of me. Fuck, if she graduates at all, it’s because of me.
I don’t bother answering Nick’s question about how the hell I know Tris. I’ve got to find Caroline.
I stand up on the barstool. That’s the only way I’ll find her with all these people and this loud music and this stink sweat and this beer energy and this never-ending day that feels like it’s only beginning in the middle of this night. I place my hand on Nick’s head to steady my balance as I scan the crowd, and my hand can’t help but rummage through his mess of hair, just a little.
There she is! I see Caroline huddling with Randy at a corner table by the brick wall just off the stage, to the right of Hunter from Hunter Does Hunter, who is now taking the mic. I don’t know what song his band had prepared but the lyrics Hunter sings are clearly being made up on the spot and have nothing to do with the fast and furious guitar chords: Dev, go home with me, Dev Dev Dev, I want you to fuck this man.
I jump down from the barstool and take off toward Caroline, but Nick’s hand clenches my wrist from behind me, pulling me back to him.
“Seriously,” Nick says, “how the hell do you know Tris?”
His grip pinches the watch on my wrist, and the ow of the pinch turns my eyes from looking for Caroline to looking straight at him. I notice how lost he looks, yet eager for me to stay with him, his eyes kind and angry at the same time, and the noticing makes me remember a lyric from some song he wrote for Tris that she passed around in Latin class because she thought it was so lame.
The way you’re singing in your sleep
The way you look before you leap
The strange illusions that you keep
You don’t know
But I’m noticing
Fuck Tris. I would give body parts to have a guy write something like that for me. My kidney? Oh, both of them? Here, Nick, they’re yours – just write more for me. I’ll give you a start: boy in punk club asks strange girl to be his girlfriend for five minutes, girl kisses boy, boy kisses back, boy then meets girl – what did you notice about this girl? Nick, let’s hear some lyrics. Please? Ready. Set. Go.
I want to stomp my foot in frustration – for him, and for me. Because I know that whatever Tris did or said to him, it’s what’s given him that haunted puppy-dog look of pathetic despair. She’s the reason he will probably become an embittered old fuck before he’s even of legal drinking age, distrusting women and writing rude songs about them, and basically from here into eternity thinking all chicks are lying cheating sluts because one of them broke his heart. He’s the type of guy that makes girls like me frigid. I’m the girl who knows he’s capable of poetry, because like I said, there are things I just know. I’m the one who could give him that old-fashioned song title of a thing called “Devotion and True Love (However Complicated)”, if he ever gave a girl like me a second glance. I’m the less-than-five-minute girlfriend who for one too-brief kiss fantasized about ditching this joint with him, going all the way punk with him at a fucking jazz club in the Village or something. Maybe I would have treated him to borscht at Veselka at five in the morning, maybe I would have walked along Battery Park with him at sunrise, holding his hand, knowing I would become the one who would believe in him. I would tell him, I heard you play, I’ve read your poetry, not that crap your band just performed, but those love letters and songs you wrote to Tris. I know what you’re capable of and it’s certainly more than being a bassist in an average queercore band – you’re better than that; and dude, having a drummer, it’s like key, you fucking need one. I would be equipment bitch for him every night, no complaints. But no, he’s the type with a complex for the Tris type: the big tits, the dumb giggle, the blowhard. Literally.
You wanted easy – well, you got it, pal.
I extract my wrist from his grip. But for some reason, instead of walking away, I pause for a moment and return my hand to his face, caressing his cheek, drawing light circles on his jaw with my index finger.
I tell him, “You poor schmuck.”
When Tris passes by me, it’s like the world is no longer three-dimensional. The third dimension falls away, then the second, and all I’m left with is one dimension, and that dimension is her.
But of course there’s another dimension, too, and that dimension is time, and it keeps going and Tris keeps walking and all the other dimensions come back, and even though there are now more, it feels like a whole lot less.
And I’m left with this girl, this Siren of Mixed Signals, this Norah. She’s a fuck-good kisser, but clearly has some massive consistency issues. I ask her how the fuck she knows Tris, because that is leaving me completely confused, and at first she’s looking at me like I’m this guy she didn’t just start kissing out of nowhere, but then she’s got her hand on my arm in a way that makes me really notice I have an arm, and then she’s making to run away, and at the same time looking at me like I’m some cancer child. Then I take hold of her arm and she resists without really resisting. Finally she pulls away, only to touch my face in this way that reminds me exactly of her kiss.
Then she calls me “you poor schmuck.”
And like some poor schmuck, I’m like, “Why?”
I can tell she knows something, but she’s not saying. Instead she tells me, “I’ve got to get my friend.”
“I’ll come with,” I volunteer. I know Tris is somewhere behind me, maybe watching. And it’s not like I have anything better to do than follow a fuck-good kisser wherever she wants to go. Dev is climbing onto the stage now to be Hunter’s dancer, and Thom and Scot are nowhere in my line of vision.
“I’ll tell you what,” Norah says. “You give us a ride, and I’ll give you two extra minutes on your original offer.”
“Seven’s my lucky number,” I tell her.
And she just looks at me. Y. p. s.
“But really,” I say. “How do you know Tris?”
“I fucked up her Barbies in fifth grade,” she tells me. “And that’s the way it’s been ever since.”
“You’re from Englewood ?”
“Englewood Cliffs. Englewood is the one with reasonable houses.”
She’s pushing through the crowd now, and I’m following.
“She was just here a second ago,” she says.
“Who?”
“No one. Caroline. I mean, just shut up for a second so I can think, okay?”
Like if I’m quiet, she’ll suddenly be able to hear every fucking footstep in the club.
While she’s peering around, I make the idiot move of looking behind me, and see Tris and the new model making out. She looks so hot in her Ramones shirt and the gold stockings I always asked her to wear because they make her look like something out of a Marvel comic. I remember taking that shirt off of her, those stockings off of her – her yelling careful, careful! as I started to get past her thighs. And now it’s some other guy’s hands that are thumbing their way over Joey’s face and down Dee Dee’s chin and – oh, fucking hell – dropping down between the A and the M, going right for the V under the H&M-meets-S&M miniskirt.
And she’s looking at me the whole time. I swear she’s looking at me.
I turn away and Norah isn’t there, but luckily she’s only a few feet away. And the girl she’s diving for looks kinda familiar. Not in a Didn’t We Go To Camp Walla Walla Together? way, but more like, Didn’t I Step Over You To Get To The Men’s Room Last Night? Right now she’s hanging on to the guy from Are You Randy? like she’s auditioning to be a pocket on his jacket. And I can tell he’s about ready to sew her on. Only my Seven-Minute Girlfriend stands in the way. She’s saying Caroline’s name like an older sister would say it, and from the resentment that flashes back in Caroline’s eyes I’d believe they were sisters if Norah hadn’t already called Caroline her friend. I also think for a millisecond that they might be a couple, but something in Norah’s expression makes it clear that they’re friends without benefits.
Caroline’s about to say something really harsh, but suddenly Hunter and Dev launch into a fucking Green Day cover, and we’re all seven years old again and dancing like we spit out the Ritalin while Mom wasn’t looking. We become this one flailing paramecium mass, fever-connected as the guitarist riffs electrons. Even Tris must be a part of this, and if we’re both a part of it, then that means we’re still in some way connected. Everyone in this room is connected, except Norah – she’s the kind of statue they don’t ever make, a statue of someone totally defeated. Caroline’s dancing against the guy from Are You Randy? like God or Billie Joe Armstrong meant her to do it. I try to obliterate myself in the song, but there’s something in me that just won’t combust. I think my seven-minute girlfriend is standing on the fuse.
“What’s up?” I shout. And she looks at me like she’s forgotten that I exist. This means she’s also forgotten to guard herself from me, so I have a moment when I see the sentences behind her eyes. I can’t do this. This is too fucking hard.
I change my question. I say, “What’s wrong?” And just like that, her sentences are shut behind a screen. But I’m curious. Yes, I’m damn curious.
“Not a fucking thing,” she says. “And I think maybe our time is up.”
“You don’t need a ride anymore?” I ask. I’m not above using my wheels to angle for some more time with a complicated girl.
“Fuck.” The song’s ended now and everyone is cheering. I barely hear her shout, “Wait right here.”
Dev and Hunter take their bows like they’re already spooning, Dev curved over Hunter’s back as they dip in unison. While the guy from Are You Randy? uses his hands to clap, Norah puts her hand on Caroline’s shoulder and leans in to shout in her ear. What follows is one of those ropeless tugs of war, measured in centimeters of pull and pull away. I can’t hear any of it until Caroline screams, “I am not trashed!” which of course means she is, because who the hell else would use such a completely wasted phrase? The guy from Are You Randy? is starting to catch on and is trying to catch up by catching hold. But his instinct totally defeats him, because his hand swerves somewhere near her breast, which isn’t really the terrain he needs to keep his ground. Norah’s yank trumps his hairy palm in this contest, and Caroline is soon stumbling in my direction.
Before I really know what’s happening, Caroline’s tilting into me and I’m catching her. Then she’s heaving down, and I’m sure she’s about to puke all over me, but instead she rises and looks at me and says, “You have really ugly shoes.”
Norah’s next to me now, saying, “Let’s go.” She leaves Caroline there for me to carry as she yells, “Get the fuck out of my way” to people, uncrowding them with her snarl. My heart understands the direction we’re going in, because it starts pounding like it’s got something really damn important to say, and by the time I’m out of my head enough to really use my eyes, there’s someone in our way, and that someone is the girl who took the key to my heart and swallowed it with a smile.
“I need your car,” she says.
And it’s like I’ve forgotten that the word for “What?” is “What?” because I just stand there and look at Tris and think she’s talking to me and somehow translate that into she’s giving me a chance.
“I need to go somewhere,” she tells me. “I promise I’ll bring it back.”
I’m reaching for the keys in my pocket. I’m thinking I’ll go with you. I’m thinking of passenger-seat conversations and making song dedications in my head. Her face lit by that nighttime driving light – two parts dashboard, one part headlight strobe from the opposite lane. I am remembering that so much.
Fuck, I loved her then. And then is blurring into now. I’m thinking why not? I’m thinking we’re still the same people. And a voice outside of me is saying, “I’m afraid the car’s already full. No room for you, Tris. Sorry.”
This Norah girl’s grinning now, all transparent sweetness and light.
“Excuse me?” Tris asks.
“I’m sorry. I wasn’t clear. Let me try again. FUCK OFF.”
“I think turning off to fucking is your department, Norah. Now why don’t you take Drunkzilla here and go find some nice Weezer fans to rock-tease. I’m talking to Nick, not you.”
And I’m thinking: She’s fighting over me. Tris is fighting over me.
But for some reason it’s Norah who’s putting her arm around me and putting her hand in my back pocket.
I’m about to shudder her off, but then Tris says, “Come on, Nick – we’re really late and need the car. I’ll pay you back for the gas.” And I know right away that I’m not a part of her “we.” I’ve been fucking exiled from her “we.”
“I’m going to find Randy,” Caroline decides.
“Hell, no, you’re not,” Norah says, taking her arm from my shoulder and linking it around Caroline’s elbow. Which leaves us in this weird we’re off to see the Wizard pose, with Tris blocking us like the Wicked Witch of the Past.
She could have me so easily. But instead she snorts and says, “You can take him. I only wanted his car.”
And with that, Tris leaves me for good. Every time I see her, from now until I die, she will leave me for good. Over and over and over again.
Norah takes her hand out of my back pocket and steadies Caroline with her full body. It’s my turn to lead now, and I can barely do it. It’s not that I’m drunk or stoned or spiraling high. It’s just that I’m defeated. And that’s impairing all of my senses.
There’s only one hopeful chord in this cacophony, and it’s this girl I’m following. I know I could tell her to get a cab – I have a feeling she can more than afford it – but I like the idea of leaving with her and staying with her. She says good-bye to the club manager as we reach the door and are released onto the street. The sidewalk is full of smokers, talking or posing their way to ash. I get the nod from a couple of people I vaguely know. Ordinarily if I left with two hot girls, there’d also be some looks of admiration. Maybe it’s because of the clear anger between Norah and Caroline, or maybe it’s because they all think I’m gay – whatever the case, I get no more congratulations than a cabdriver does for picking up a fare.
I know I should offer to help Norah propel Caroline forward, but the truth is that I don’t feel like I can carry anyone but myself right now. The streets are empty. I am empty. Or, no – I am full of pain. It’s my life that’s empty.
I stumble for my keys. Tris will not be waiting for me inside the car. Tris will not be waiting for me ever again.
I shouldn’t have come here. I shouldn’t have been anywhere that she could find.
We’re at my car.
“What the fuck is that ?” Norah asks.
I shrug and say, “It’s a Yugo.”
So this is what my promising life has been reduced to. The Jewish princess from Englewood Cliffs, fucking valedictorian who chose a Catholic girls’ high school to accompany her best friend through the experience, who chose to turn down Brown, the girl whose possibilities now that she’s about to be let loose upon the world should supposedly be infinite, is sitting through the middle of an April night in the passenger side of a Yugo that smells like Tris’s patchouli aromatherapy oil. Perhaps it’s only the vehicle that won’t start, but it feels like it’s my life that won’t start. Yes, this Yugo with the passenger-side seat metal coming through the torn seat fabric, scratching against the back of my thigh, this Cold War relic that won’t respond to Nick’s turn of the ignition key, is like a fucking metaphor for my sorry-ass life: STALLED.
Nick might be a bass god but he’s also a parking god because he scored a spot right in front of the club, the unfortunate consequence of which is that now my stalled ears are receiving the listening benefit of the band playing inside the club and they’re really fucking good and that’s really pissing me off. I’m not sure if I backed into my life by getting into this Yugo with my new almost-boyfriend, or if I backed out of it by leaving the club to save Caroline once again, but whichever end it is, I’m left wanting more music. It’s still Hunter on the stage but now I can hear that the Dev dude is singing some strange harmony with Hunter on another Green Day cover, “Time of Your Life.” Hunter Does Hunter have accelerated the lite-FM classic song (because how much more punk can you go than producing an elevator song staple – bless you, Billie Joe) up to Parliament tempo and I swear there’s a DJ mixing a sample of that Michael Jackson freak moaning about how Billie Jean is not my lover, the kid is not my son into the groove. How is that possible and why does it sound so damn good and if the Yugo doesn’t start within one second I am outta here, I don’t care how tempted I am to try for another seven minutes of being Nick’s girlfriend after we’ve got Caroline back to my place. For a poor schmuck, he’s temptatiously fucking cute.
“Do you hear that?” I ask Nick.
“What? Is the engine starting?” The poor schmuck is not only cute and a great head-bob thrash-dancer, he’s probably a good guy. At least he proved deft at maneuvering a drunken Caroline goddess into the backseat of a freakin’ Yugo and making her think it was her idea. Let’s not forget the part about him being a great kisser. He deserves better than a Tris – and a Yugo.
I tell him, “No. Dude. Listen up, that rhythmic banging inside the club? It’s called drumming. It’s, like, famous as an underlying staple of sound since primitive cultures.” I play drums on the glove compartment of the Yugo. The compartment pops open from my banging. A Polaroid of Tris is taped inside the compartment. I rip it out. Bloody hell! Caroline isn’t paranoid – Tris really did swipe Caroline’s vintage cut-off white T-shirt with Flea’s autograph over the left breast area. I toss the picture out the window and turn to face Nick. “Your fucking band needs a drummer. I saw you grinding to Hunter’s earlier Green Day cover of ‘Chump’ back in the club. I know you feel rhythm more than just your heart-attack-inducing bass skills. Think about it. What would ‘Chump’ have been without Tres Cool? Get a drummer for your band, guy. Really.”
Caroline has yet to reach her warm-cuddly drunk stage, post-heave and pre-slumber, which would put her in inquisitive stage about now, and right on schedule, from the backseat, she interjects, “Really,” because Caroline is always picking up sentences where I leave ’em off. “Driver person. Hey!” She taps Nick’s shoulder from behind him. Nick looks around to her but quickly turns back around to face me. Such a pretty girl, such rancid tequila breath. Caroline wants to know, “Why would you wear such ugly shoes? Answer me, driver person. Please?”
“The shoes go with the car, Caroline,” I tell her. “Yugo drivers are required to wear torn-and-graffitied hi-top Chucks shit on their feet. It’s like a rule. It’s in the manual.” I pull the Yugo car manual from the glove compartment. A chewed-up wad of gum extends from the manual back to the compartment. I take the McDonald’s napkin stuck inside the compartment and wipe the gum away from the manual. Fucking Tris and her Bubblicious. I throw the manual into the backseat for Caroline’s perusal.
She ignores the Good Book. “Are you Yugoslavian, driver person?” Caroline asks Nick. “Norah, is that why’s he’s driving us home? He’s the taxi driver, right?”
“Sure,” I tell her. He’ll be the taxi driver as soon as his Yugo-cab will fucking start. We’re operating on a limited window of opportunity here. It took ten minutes just to get Caroline into the backseat. I can see Randy now, loitering outside the club, smoking a cigarette, talking up Crazy Lou but glancing toward the Yugo, ready to pounce on Caroline again, I’m sure, if this Yugo doesn’t blow outta here soon.
“Is there such an ethnicity as Yugoslavian anymore?” Nick asks. “Now that the country’s all broken up? That was some bad shit that went down there in Serbia and Croatia, right? Damn shame.” He shakes his head and his hand idles on the ignition key, as if he’s given up. He knocks his head against the wheel, then slams his fist against the stick shift. He’s done. Can’t take it anymore. This car ain’t going nowhere. He looks so depressed and defeated, I don’t have the heart to slam him for acting like he’s grieving for Yugoslavia when it’s so obvious he’s really grieving for Tris.
Caroline informs us, “I’m part Yugoslavian, you know. On my great-grandpa’s side.”
I tell her, “You’re part Transylvanian, too, bitch. Be quiet. I need to think.” How the hell are we going to get home now? And why do I have to get Caroline home, anyway? There’s a hot guy sitting next to me, even if he is a Tris pass-along, but he’s got potential to be molded. Here I am in Manhattan, like Dad’s favorite Stevie Wonder song goes: New York, just like I pictured it – skyscrapers, and everythang. Shit is supposed to be happening here, not stalled Yugo shit. Through the car windshield, I can see the Empire State Building, lit up in pink and green for Easter. I am reminded that Jesus died for Caroline’s sins, not mine – I’m from a different tribe – so why am I saving her ass again when I could be outside this Yugo getting some life-living going on? I never properly used up those two add-on minutes of being Nick’s girlfriend.