Half-Smiths

I'm on yet another date, laughing too loudly at his jokes, and he's bored with me too, or he's sensing defeat, and conversation reaches the desperate and critical moment of every bad date and he asks me: "What music do you like?"

"I don't like music," I say, and he shuts up and I go home.

I used to pause, go "Ummmmm, I like blues I guess" (which is the new jazz, the new right answer) and then I'd mumble about seeing Taj Mahal in New Orleans. But at this point I figure, why lie?

So I tell him:

1. I find loud noise unbearable.

2. I'm hypersensitive to infrasound, and the low frequencies from stereo systems are destroying my eardrums.

3. I don't like new things.

But then I'll be at my friend Karyn's house and she'll put on the Kinks, or the Pixies, and I'm singing along and so is she and by the time the chorus kicks in we're dancing around and it's a perfect moment. I'm in love with music all over again. It's like I'm in high school, feeling trapped in my parents' house and then sneaking out to smoke cigarettes in Adam's car and kiss him and listen to T-Rex. Ten years old and hiding out from my mother in the basement with Fiddler on the Roof, 13 and taking a bus to ABC No Rio to hear girls scream and play guitar. 15, Lara and Gayle and I in the backseat while my father's driving, with all the windows open and the Smiths blaring. I love anything maudlin, everything pop and sentimental. Anything I heard more than ten times before the age of 16. My tastes are formed by nostalgia and the repeat button.

So Lara suggested that we go see the Smiths cover band (at least that's what she told me) at Don Hill's. When we get there a skinny man in black leggings has penciled "WHY" in block letters on his left hand. He's crooning about sex. "This is about losing your virginity," he says by way of intro, "and trying to find it again." Then he launches into the song: "A full day of statutoooooory/Your sister's 10 feet away." He swishes his hips and the microphone for the crowd, mainly men with their eyes closed, gently mouthing the lyrics. I look around. Where are the men? Because these aren't men. These gentle people with their glasses and their chinlessness and their sloping backs and their arms around their chests aren't men. These are the pallid, gentle, grotesquely unsexual men of Brooklyn; my henpecked neighbors with unstable girlfriends. Is Susan Faludi wrong? Anyone who's attacked Stiffed hasn't spent a Sunday watching the Daddies of Park Slope.

I sidle up to the bar for a drink. The bartender and I dated a couple of months ago, and the more I'm around these men the better he looks.

"You're all Cocktail," I coo. "I keep imagining you mixing a drink behind your back. I don't know what it is. Bartenders, I mean. Like a man in a uniform. Just does something for me."

He pauses and looks me over. "I can see down your shirt right now."

Lara says women like it when men are "mildly inappropriate." And they do! I do! What's with the troubadour routine, gentlemen? You used to have to marry a woman to sleep with her, but no longer. Women are much too pragmatic for all this fake romance.

The band's over, and I go up to the DJ to ask him when the Smiths cover band is coming on. "There's no cover band," he tells me. "The next band is made up of two original members from the Smiths, but they won't do any of their old songs." These would be the members who aren't Morrissey or Johnny Marr, the ones who got shafted during the court case when Morrissey claimed that they hadn't contributed anything to the band and shouldn't get any money. And here they were, booked with a Smiths tribute band. I felt bad for them. But it was a big crowd. Chloe Sevigny, with a weird doily on her shoulder, was smoking near the stage. I listened to a song or two, which were pretty good, kind of grungy, and then told Lara I was going home. Outside, it was Fleet Week, and a blonde and a brunette had linked arms with a sailor, and the brunette was wearing his cap, and everything was momentarily right again.